Women and War (11 page)

Red does not need me, she thought with a touch of bitterness. He almost ignores me when we are at the club – I'm nothing but an adornment to him. But Maggie …

Maggie was always so pathetically pleased to see her. Her face was drawn and grey all the time now, the circles and hollows so pronounced they made Tara shrink inwardly just to look at them, and the lines of pain were clearly defined around her mouth. But when Tara came around the door her eyes always brightened, tiny twin orbs that no amount of suffering could extinguish. Tara did not stay long, she dared not if Red was not to become suspicious.

They never talked now of Maggie's illness or the fact that she was failing fast, but when Tara left Jack always walked to the end of the road with her so that he could tell her how the day had been.

‘It's been terrible today,' he said one night. ‘Maggie won't give in – and she won't let on to you how bad it is, either. But I don't think Mac's stuff is working properly any more.'

Tara went cold. She had forced herself to come to terms with the fact that she was going to lose Maggie, but she could not face the thought of her suffering.

‘Oh Jack, what can we do?' she groaned. ‘Isn't there something stronger he can give her?'

‘If she has anything stronger it will hasten her death.'

Tara's eyes filled with tears. ‘God knows I don't want that, but I don't want her suffering either. She must have whatever it takes, Jack.'

He nodded, a big man bewildered by the situation he found himself in – and by his own emotions.

‘Yes. I just didn't feel it was my place to say so, Tara. After all I've only known her a matter of months while you …'

‘Jack!' Tara caught his hands, looking up into his rugged, agonized face. ‘You have every right. You have been marvellous – not many would have done what you have done for their own wife. And you've made her happy in her last weeks. That's worth a great deal too.'

He bowed his head. ‘ I suppose I love her.'

‘You do.' She stood on tiptoe and kissed his cheek, rough and unshaven. ‘ I'll come again as soon as I can, Jack.'

The next time was three days later and Maggie was worse. She lay seemingly not even aware that Tara had come, sunk into a world of pain and drugs. Tara sat beside her bed holding her hand, thin, veined, with traces of scarlet nail varnish still growing off the tips of her fingernails from the last time she had felt like prettying herself up.

‘Next time I come I'll bring some stuff to get that red off your nails.' Tara told her friend and Maggie seemed to rouse a little.

‘Still determined to make a beauty of me, eh, Tara? It will be an uphill task now!'

‘That's rubbish and you know it. You're as lovely as you ever were,' Tara lied. ‘I'm going now but I'll see you soon. Right?'

‘Right.' And Maggie drifted off again.

Tara's eyes were full of tears as she left the apartment. Dimly she was aware of Jack following her down the stairs and out into the street.

‘I don't think it will be long now,' he said when they reached the street.

She shook her head, looking at him through blurred eyes.

‘I don't think it will. Oh Jack, I'll miss her so!'

He shuffled awkwardly. ‘How would I let you know, Tara, if …'

‘Ring me. The minute anything happens.'

‘But I thought …'

‘It won't matter any more then, will it? He can't prevent me coming to see her when she's … And I have to know. I couldn't bear it if I thought something had happened and I didn't know.'

‘All right. I won't stay talking tonight. I don't want to leave her.'

‘No, you get back, Jack.'

She pressed his hand and turned to walk away up the steep valley.

There was a car parked opposite the apartment but she was too upset even to wonder what it was doing there. Cars, people – what did they matter when Maggie lay in that miserable room dying? She walked on, head low.

And suddenly the quiet of the night erupted. Gunfire, sharp and cracking, seeming to go on forever. Roosting birds rising, flapping into the reverberating air. The roar of a revving engine, a car speeding past her, screaming around the corner on two wheels …

Shocked, bewildered, she swung round.

And then she saw him lying crumpled halfway up the stone steps.

‘Jack!' she screamed.

Her trembling legs carried her back down the alley, then she drew up short, cold through and through as she looked down at him.

He was clutching his chest, his eyes, wide and surprised, staring back at her. Blood was pumping between his fingers. Then as she watched his body convulsed violently, his legs threshing out, head jerking back. And he was still.

‘Jack – for God's sake …! What …? Why …?'

But she knew. Even in that shocked moment when her body, cold and trembling violently, refused to obey her, even as her conscious mind ran in wild frightened circles, deep within she knew.

This was Red's doing. He had threatened her once that he would kill any man she tangled with. Now Jack was dead, gunned down by Red's hired killers. Not for anything he had done but because of Red's insane jealousy. She must have been seen with Jack. Red had had her followed and he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. And Jack, innocent of any crime but that of loving Maggie, had paid the price.

‘Oh my God, my God!' she whispered, twisting this way and that, hands pressed to her mouth. What to do? What to
do?
Jack was beyond help. Any moment people would come – the police – and …

Maggie. She must go to Maggie.

She ran past the sprawled body, up the stairs, into the apartment. Maggie lay as she had left her, inert, sunk once more into coma. She had heard nothing. Well, thank God for that at least.

Tara's trembling legs would support her no longer. She sank down beside the bed, fumbling for her rosary. Maggie's hand lay on the sheet. Tara took it and began to gabble the words that from her childhood had been comfort, refuge, salvation.

‘Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with Thee …'

When the police came blundering into the apartment she was still there. They stopped in the doorway, shocked by the scene before them.

‘Oh Christ – what …'

Tara got up slowly, stiffly.

‘It's all right. She's dead.'

‘Sorry, Miss, there's been a shooting …'

‘I know,' she said. Her voice was steady with conviction and with the determination which had grown during the last long minutes when she had sat here beside Maggie and known what it was she had to do. ‘I know all about it and I can tell you who was responsible. I can tell you everything.'

When it was all over she knew she had to run. Throughout the trial they had afforded her ‘protection' – keeping her at a ‘safe' address with a police guard twenty-four hours a day. But they could not protect her forever.

At night lying sleepless in her bed Tara lived and relived the scene in the court room on the last day of the trial and trembled.

The trial had lasted for two weeks. Each day she had gone to the court because afraid though she was she could not stay away – she had to keep this last vigil for Maggie.

She had thought that giving her evidence would be the worst part. She was wrong. That was relatively easy – a little like being on stage. Even answering the fierce and searching cross examination by Red's counsel had not caused her any great distress. Trying to read the meaning behind his sharply phrased questions and staying one move ahead of him became a game and his inferences as to her morals and lifestyle failed to worry or embarrass Tara. No, it was afterwards when she took her place in the court room to listen to the remainder of the trial that the torment began.

To sit in full view of Red and see his eyes burning hatred and the threat of revenge, to look away from him and feel his presence, his command, his power over her; she hated him for what he had done to Maggie's man, despised the jealousy that had driven him to it and yet still was aware of the hypnotic attraction that had kept her with him for more than five years, even when he had made it clear, he would no longer allow her to sing in his clubs. More than once she was almost torn apart by the overwhelming desire to run to him even now, to throw her arms around his powerful frame, to beg him to forgive her. She longed to touch his face, so expressionless it might have been carved in stone, run her fingers over the hard bunched muscles in his back and shoulders that rippled through the silk of his handmade shirt. And then she would remember Jack, whose only crime was to love Maggie, the lifeblood pouring out of him as he lay dying in a Sydney gutter, and the hatred would return, so fierce it took her breath away, so searing that her body burned with the agony of it. Jack had died because of her, Tara, because she had deceived this monster. She did not think she would ever forgive either of them.

Yet even at the end Red had held in his hands the power to draw one more emotion from her – total blind terror. It had come when the judge had passed sentence with the stern words: ‘For the sake of this whole community I feel it is my duty to make certain you are removed to a place of detention for a very long time.'

Tears had blurred her eyes suddenly so that she did not see the guards moving in to take Red away, did not see him move forward. Then his voice had filled the court room and she had raised her eyes to see him looking directly at her, fists clenched threateningly.

‘Watch out for yourself, Tara. I'll get you for this. Don't think there is anywhere you can hide away from me. If it takes the rest of my life I'll make you sorry for the day you did this to Red Maloney!'

It was a moment of pure melodrama. The next day the newspapers were full of it. ‘Gangland boss threatens former Moll' read one banner headline. If Tara had not been so shocked and afraid she might have laughed. As it was she had no energy left for anything but fear.

‘An idle threat,' the police told her. ‘He's safely behind bars. He can't harm you now.'

Tara knew better. Red would not make idle threats and Red would not forgive. In prison or out he would find a way. And if he was set upon revenge, one way or another he would have it.

Where could she go where Red would not find her? He had friends everywhere; his power was enormous.

Mentally Tara drew a map of the continent, picturing the wild and desolate outbacks and deserts where no clubs and sly grog shops were to be found and no racketeer or gangster could live a life of luxury on the strength of his ill-gotten gains. A possibility. But sure, I could never survive in the wilds, Tara thought in panic. I'm a city person. I need people and buildings around me.

Darwin. It came to her in a flash of inspiration. Darwin – frontier town of the wild and untamed Northern Territory. Darwin – outpost of Australia. Perhaps she would be safe there.

With no thought in her head beyond escaping Red's vengeance, no thought of what she would do when she got there, Tara fled.

Alys Peterson zipped up her Red Cross uniform skirt, neatened her tailored blouse and went out onto the louvred veranda of the spacious clifftop house where James and Sylvia Crawford were at breakfast.

It was a beautiful February morning. Later, the heat haze would close in and the rain begin to fall in a steamy suffocating cloud as it did each day in this season of the year, but as yet the sky was clear and the sea was an unbroken band of broad blue below the scarlet-leaved crotons and banana palms, vibrant bougainvillaea and fragrant frangipani that rioted along the edge of the clifftop.

Alys breathed in the perfumed air and felt she breathed contentment with it. She loved this place and it had repaid her by working a miracle in her life. When she had arrived here three years ago she had believed she had been sent to the last place on God's earth and she had not cared. Race was dead. Her child was dead. It no longer mattered to her where she was or even whether she herself lived or died. She had woken each morning to a well of misery so deep that not even the miseries of the steamy hot Darwin climate or the fact that a continent separated her from everything and everyone she had ever loved could make things worse.

And then slowly, subtly, things had begun to change. Sylvia had had much to do with it, she knew. Sylvia who, although she never probed or asked awkward questions, seemed to understand so well. In her brisk no-nonsense way she had set about encouraging Alys to take an interest in life again and she had unerringly selected as a starting point the very thing which Alys found irresistible.

‘You're a very good driver – if you were to learn vehicle maintenance you could be very useful to us,' Sylvia had said and there was no hint of either sympathy or reproof in her voice, only that enthusiasm and energy which she had brought to everything she did.

‘What do you mean?' Alys had asked. In all her life no one had ever before suggested she might be useful.

‘There is a war coming. Heaven knows it may be soon. And when it does come we shall need every able pair of hands we can get. You can drive an ambulance for us Alys.'

‘Oh!' Alys had been too surprised to say anything else. She knew, of course, that Sylvia was one of the mainstays of the Red Cross here in Darwin – in fact her whole life seemed to revolve around it. But it had never occurred to her that she might become involved herself. ‘ I don't know anything about First Aid,' she said lamely.

‘You can soon learn,' Sylvia said briskly. ‘That will be a damn sight easier than me trying to teach one of my nurses to drive. And it will do you good. No sense moping around here by yourself all day.'

Alys had taken the bait unenthusiastically at first then with growing interest. For so long she had been aware of a lack of purpose in her life, now suddenly she had found one. As Sylvia bullied and chivvied her into shape she found herself marvelling that this busy little woman could ever have been a friend of her mother's – in attitude and lifestyle they were light years apart. Where Frances had expected ladylike decorum, Sylvia demanded devotion to duty and a willingness to roll up her sleeves, literally as well as metaphorically; where Frances had tried to rein her into a tight narrow well-ordered world, Sylvia opened new horizons.