Colleen McCullough
-:-
1954 - 1965
DANE
6.2
Hai tháng sau khi Dane đi La Mã, Justine cũng đi Anh. Mùa kịch ở Culloden kết thúc, Justine rời chung cư Bothwell Gardens không luyến tiếc. Meggie chỉ đến Sydney hai lần. Lần đầu để đưa Dane và lần này tiễn Justine. Đến giấy phút cuối cùng chia tay, Meggie vẫn nhìn thấy có quá nhiều khác biệt giữa bản thân mình với con gái. Tánh tình Justine ngổ ngáo. Nếu bị trách phiền, Justine trêu chọc mẹ: “Như mẹ vẫn nói, con giống ba chớ đâu giống mẹ”. Trên boong tàu nhìn xuống, Justine không nghĩ rằng mẹ mình đã năm mươi tuổi.
Do có tiền bạc dư dả, Justine cảm thấy Luân Đôn trở thành một nơi đặc biệt hấp dẫn. Nhất định cô không chọn một cuộc sống nghèo nàn ở khu Earl's Court - mệnh danh “Kangaroo Valley” - nơi có rất nhiều người Úc.
Justine mướn một căn hộ tiện nghi ở Kensington, gần Knightsbridge và ký hợp đồng với đoàn kịch Clyde Daltinham - Roberts.
Mùa hè đến, Justine đi tàu hỏa sang La Mã. Con tàu đi xuyên qua Pháp và Ý nhưng Justine không nhớ mình đã nhìn thấy những gì vì đầu óc của cô chủ yếu tập trung ôn lại những chuyện sẽ kể cho Dane nghe. Và đúng là có quá nhiều điều để nói.
Có phải Dane đó không? Chàng thanh niên cao lớn, tóc vàng đứng ở sân ga chính là Dane? Dane không khác xưa bao nhiêu, nhưng cũng không còn là đứa em trai bé nhỏ. Cuộc sống của Dane tạo ra một khoảng cách với Justine, nhìn xa cứ như là hiện giờ Justine đang ở Drogheda.
Khi về đến khách sạn, cậu em trai nói với chị:
- Chị có cảm thấy phiền hà không nếu em mời chị chiều nay uống trà với vài người bạn của em? Em hơi vội vàng lỡ nhận lời trước rồi. Họ rất muốn được biết mặt chị...
- Đồ ngu! Tại sao lại phiền hà? Nếu hai đứa mình ở Luân Đôn, chị cũng sẽ nhận chìm em qua giữa bạn bè của chị thôi. Chị rất vui được biết bạn bè của em ở tu viện ra sao, dù có thể sẽ chẳng có thú vị lắm. Chắc chắn là không mê được một chàng trai nào đâu.
Trong phòng ngủ khách sạn, đứng gần cửa sổ, nhìn qua bên kia trong cảnh lặng im và buồn, xa xa là bước tường bao quanh một nhà thờ, Justine gọi khẽ.
- Dane?
- Chuyện gì?
- Chị thông cảm em. Chị thông cảm em thật sự.
- Vâng, em biết. Em rất mong mẹ cũng hiểu em, Justine ạ.
- Với mẹ thì khác. Mẹ có cảm tưởng là chúng ta đã bở rơi mẹ, nhưng em đừng âu lo vì mẹ, trước sau gì mẹ cũng chấp nhận thôi.
- Em hy vọng như thế - cậu ta cười - Thật ra chiều nay những người chị gặp không phải là bạn em ở tu viện. Không bao giờ em đẩy chị và các bạn em vào một thứ bẫy cám dỗ như thế. Chị sẽ gặp Hồng Y De Bricassart. Em biết chị không có cảm tình với ông ấy nhưng chị hãy hứa với em là chị sẽ tỏ ra dễ thương.
Trong mắt của Justine thoáng một ánh tinh nghịch.
- Chị hứa với em. Chị sẽ hôn lên tất cả những chiếc nhẫn mà ông ấy chìa ra.
- Cả Hồng Y Di Contini Verchese cũng có mặt.
° ° °
... Trong phòng, những người đàn ông mặc toàn áo đỏ! Chưa bao giờ trong cuộc đời của Justine, cô ta lại ý thức rõ ràng sự thừa thãi của những người phụ nữ trong cuộc sống của một số đàn ông khi bước vào thế giới này. Justine vẫn mặc bộ đồ màu ôliu khi vừa đến La Mã. Dane thúc hối khiến Justine không kịp thay quần áo.
Trong cuộc gặp gỡ, Justine có dịp biết mặt Hồng Y Di Contini Verchese mà trước đây cô chỉ nghe nhắc đến tên. Khi cô quỳ gối xuống hôn chiếc nhẫn trên bàn tay nhăn nheo, ánh mắt Justine bất chợp gặp đôi mắt u buồn của Hồng Y và lạ lùng thay cô đọc thấy trong đó một thứ tình thương ở một người mà Justine chưa từng gặp. Từ năm mười lăm tuổi đến nay, Justine không có cảm tình với các Hồng Y qua hình ảnh một De Bricassart vậy mà mới nhìn ông già này lần đầu, lòng cô đã cảm thấy được sưởi ấm.
Cũng trong buổi uống trà, Justine quen một nhân vật ngoài Giáo hội do Hồng Y Di Contini Verchese giới thiệu là người bạn rất tốt của ông, Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Khi buổi uống trà tan, chính Rainer đề nghị đưa Justine về khách sạn sau khi xin phép Dane. Sau đó, anh ta lại tự nguyện làm người hộ tống cho Justine trong buổi tối đầu tiên Justine ở La Mã với lý do Dane bận không đưa chị đi chơi.
Rainer dáng người vạm vỡ, vai rộng và to, hai cánh tay dài như tay của thợ cắt lông cừu, trông anh ta hơi giống con vượn nhưng thông minh và nhanh nhẹn. Nước da Rainer sậm, tóc dày và dợn sóng.
Biết bao biến cố đã xảy ra trong cuộc đời của Rainer Moerling Hartheim từ sau lần gặp Ralph tháng bảy năm bốn mươi ba. Một tuần sau, đơn vị của anh bị đưa ra mặt trận phía Đông, nơi mà anh trải qua suốt thời gian còn lại trong chiến tranh. Đau khổ, lạc lõng, chân đứng trong tuyết, không còn đạn ở một chiến tuyến tan tác đến đỗi cách nhau cả trăm mét mới có một người lính, anh có đủ thời giờ để nghiền ngẫm các hậu quả của chế độ Hitler. Trước chiến tranh bùng nổ, anh còn quá trẻ để bị tuyển vào tổ chức thanh niên của Quốc xã.
Chiến tranh chỉ để lại cho anh hai kỷ niệm: một cuộc hành quân khốc liệt trong giá lạnh cũng khốc liệt không kém và gương mặt của Ralph. Sự ghê tởm và cái đẹp; ác quỉ và Chúa.
Nửa điên nửa khùng, nửa bị cóng rét, hoàn toàn không còn khả năng tự vệ, anh run sợ chờ đợi các du kích Nga xuất hiện. Anh đấm tay vào ngực, miệng lâm râm đọc kinh, nhưng anh không biết anh cầu nguyện gì.
Mùa xuân năm 1945, anh tháo chạy xuyên qua Ba Lan, với mục đích duy nhất đến được vùng lính Anh và lính Pháp chiếm đóng. Anh xé và đốt giấy tờ tùy thân, chôn hai huy chương chữ thập sắt, đánh cắp vài bộ quần áo và ra trình diện với giới chức trách Anh tại biên giới Đan Mạch. Người ta đẩy anh và một trại di dân ở Bỉ. Tại đó, suốt một năm, anh sống bằng bánh mì với cháo bột, đó là tất cả những gì mà nước Anh kiệt quệ có thể cung cấp nuôi hàng chục ngàn con người họ có trách nhiệm gánh vác.
Rainer căm thù Hitler nhưng không căm thù nước Đức và anh không hề thấy nhục vì mình là người Đức. Dưới mắt anh, nước Đức vẫn là quê hương. Đầu năm 1947, anh rảo bước trên các con đường ở Aachen không một xu dính túi. Thân xác và cả tâm hồn anh đều sống sót nhưng nhất định không phải để trở lại sự nghèo đói và tối tăm. Vì rằng Rainer không chỉ là một con người đầy tham vọng mà còn là một loại thiên tài. Anh làm việc cho Grundig và nghiên cứu một thứ đã làm anh say mê từ những ngày đầu tiếp xúc với rada, đó là điện tử. Đầu của anh ngùn ngụt sáng kiến, nhưng anh từ chối bán những sáng kiến đó cho Grundig. Thay vào đó, anh đánh giá kỹ thị trường, rồi cưới một góa phụ trước đây có chồng làm chủ hai xưởng nhỏ về radio, từ đó anh lao vào làm ăn cho riêng mình. Nước Đức sau chiến tranh dành vô số cơ hội cho những người trẻ dám nghĩ dám làm.
Năm năm mươi mốt, anh ly dị vợ, bồi thường cho bà Annelise Hartheim số tiền gấp đôi trị giá các xưởng của ông chồng thứ nhất để lại.
Bốn năm sau anh trở thành một trong những người giàu và có thể lực nhất ở Tây Đức. Vừa được bầu vào Quốc hội Bonn, anh trở lại La Mã, tìm gặp lại Hồng Y Bricassart và cho ông biết kết quả cuối cùng của những lời cầu nguyện năm xưa.
Nhưng sau cuộc gặp gỡ, anh chỉ nhớ lại một điều duy nhất là anh đã làm Ralph thất vọng. Câu nói của Ralph với Rainer khi chia tay:
- Cha đã cầu nguyện để con trở thành người tốt hơn cha, vì lúc đó con còn trẻ. Không có một cứu cánh nào có thể biện minh cho phương tiện. Nhưng cha cho rằng tất cả những nguyên nhân đưa đến sự hủy diệt của chúng ta đã được gieo từ trước khi chúng ta chào đời.
Về đến phòng khách sạn, anh đã khóc nhưng rồi dịu xuống với suy nghĩ: quá khứ coi như đã đi qua, từ nay về sau mình sẽ trở thành con người mà ông ấy muốn. Và có khi anh làm được, có khi không thành, nhưng anh luôn nỗ lực. Tình cảm của anh với các vị chức sắc ở Vatican trở thành một trong những điều quí giá nhất trên đời và mỗi khi cần chống chọi lại sự chán nản là anh bay sang La Mã.
Trong buổi tối nóng nực của La Mã, đi bộ một mình sau khi đã đưa Justine về khách sạn, đầu óc Rainer lảng vảng ý nghĩ biết ơn người thiếu nữ. Vì rằng, trong lúc quan sát thái độ chịu đựng của Justine trong cuộc gặp gỡ các chức sắc cao nhất trong giáo hội, anh đã nghe trong lòng dâng lên một tình cảm hướng về cô gái này.
Con quái vật nhỏ bé đáng yêu ấy, dù bị thương, đầu vẫn giữ bình tĩnh. Người con gái ấy đủ sức đối đầu với các vị chức sắc mà không hề nhường bước.
Trong một lần đi dạo ở La Mã, đứng trước đài nước Trevi, Justine hỏi Rainer:
- Rain, anh có đến Úc lần nào chưa?
Một cảm giác lạnh chạy dài xuống xương sống của Rainer:
- Sau chiến tranh, ở trong trại người Anh quản lý có hai lần tôi suýt bị đưa đi Úc, nhưng cả hai lần tôi đều tránh được. Nhưng tại sao Justine lại gọi tôi là Raine?
- Nếu anh đã đến Úc anh sẽ hiểu rằng anh có một cái tên kỳ diệu và người ta sẽ gọi anh theo cách của tôi. Rain chứ không phải Rainer. Anh biết rõ tiếng Anh Rain có nghĩa là mưa. Đó là sự sống giữa sa mạc.
Sững sờ, anh buông rơi điếu thuốc.
- Justine, có phải cô yêu tôi?
- Đàn ông bọn anh thật là kiêu ngạo. Rất tiếc phải làm anh thất vọng, nhưng chuyện ấy không có.
Như để làm dịu lại những điều đã lỡ nói ra, nàng nắm tay Rainer siết mạnh và nói: dường như giữa chúng ta có điều gì đó hay hơn.
- Điều gì lại hay hơn là yêu?
- Theo tôi, có nhiều thứ. Tôi cần một người như thế và không bao giờ yêu.
- Rất có thể cô có lý. Rõ ràng đó là thứ xiềng xích nếu nó đến quá sớm. Vậy thì cái gì hay hơn?
- Tìm một người bạn (nàng vuốt nhẹ tay Rainer). Anh là một người bạn của tôi phải không?
° ° °
Lần này, không phải Dane chờ Justine ở nhà ga như những lần trước. Anh rút lui, để cho Rainer thay mình. Rainer không đón mừng Justine bằng một cái hôn - Anh không thích cái trò biểu diễn kiểu ấy - mà vòng tay qua vai Justine và siết mạnh.
- Anh giống hệt con gấu, Justine nhận xét.
- Con gấu?
- Lúc đầu khi mới biết anh, em thấy anh giống con khỉ Gorilla hơn là con gấu. So sánh con khỉ Gorilla xem ra không được dễ thương phải không anh?
- Vậy là con gấu dễ thương hơn?
- Thật ra loài gấu cũng kết liễu cuộc đời nạn nhân của nó rất mạnh, nhưng chúng siết... , dịu dàng hơn (Justine nắm tay Rainer). Dane thế nào?
- Dane vẫn thế.
- Em ăn mặc theo thời trang kiểu ba mươi mốt của em. Em đã phải lùng sục tất cả các hiệu may ở Luân Đôn mới có được cái vỏ thế này. Anh có thích chiếc váy này không? Người ta gọi nó là mini.
- Em đi nhanh tới trước rồi anh sẽ trả lời.
Chiếc váy dài không quá nửa đùi. Đi trở ngược lại về phía Rainer, nàng hỏi.
- Anh thấy thế nào? Có quá đáng không? Em nhận thấy ở Paris các cô không mặc ngắn như thế này.
- Với đôi chân đẹp như chân em, mặc một chiếc váy dài hơn một li nữa là gây ra xì-căng- đan ngay. Anh tin chắc rằng thanh niên ở đây đều đồng ý với anh.
- Anh chọc ghẹo em phải không? - nàng vừa nói lí nhí, chân bước lên chiếc Mercedes có cắm lá cờ ở phía trước đầu xe. Cờ gì thế?
- Anh vừa được bổ nhiệm vào thành phần chính phủ mới.
Do đó không còn đáng ngạc nhiên về việc tên em được nhắc đến trong một bài báo trên tờ News of the World. Anh có đọc bài báo đó chứ?
- Em dư biết anh không bao giờ đọc loại báo lá cải.
- Em cũng vậy. Nhưng một người nào đó đã đưa cho em xem. Tờ báo đặt câu hỏi: “Cô đào nước Úc ăn khách tóc màu carot có những quan hệ mật thiết với một thành viên của chính phủ Tây Đức là ai?”
Rainer không trả lời chỉ mỉm cười. Đi chơi bằng xe hơi với Rainer là một trong những phút êm đềm đối với Justine ở La Mã. Sau đó họ đi thăm Hồng Y De Bricassart và Hồng Y Di Contini Verchese. Vài ngày sau đến phiên đoàn người từ Drogheda đến. Rainer mướn một xe nhỏ sang trọng đón họ về khách sạn. Justine kín đáo theo dõi phản ứng của Rainer khi đối diện với gia đình nàng gồm chủ yếu các người cậu. Cho đến phút cuối cùng Justine vẫn còn hy vọng mẹ nàng sẽ thay đổi ý kiến đến La Mã. Meggie vắng mặt gây cho Justine sự khó chịu. Tuy không phân tích được chính xác tâm trạng của mình: đau buồn cho Dane hay sự vắng mặt của mẹ gây buồn khổ cho chính nàng. Nhưng dù thế nào, những người cậu đã đến và nàng có trách nhiệm tiếp họ.
Ồ! Họ rụt rè làm sao! Khó mà phân biệt bởi càng già họ lại càng giống nhau. Tại La Mã, họ hoàn toàn khác với xung quanh, đúng là những nhà chăn nuôi Úc đi nghỉ hè ở La Mã. Cuối cùng Rainer đã có mặt. Anh ấy tỏ ra rất tốt đối với họ. Mình chưa từng thấy ai có thể gợi chuyện được với Patsy, thế mà anh ấy làm được. Anh quả là một ẩn số đối với em, Rainer, bạn của Hồng Y và cũng là bạn của Justine Ó Neill. Phải chi anh ấy bớt xấu trai một tí, mình sẽ hôn anh ấy cho đúng với lòng biết ơn của mình. Chúa ơi, bây giờ mới thấy nếu ở La Mã một mình với các ông cậu mà không có Rain thì sẽ vơ vơ biết chừng nào. Rainer ơi... đúng là anh mang đến sự tốt lành như cơn mưa.
Nhà thờ có thể chứa đến hai ngàn con chiên, do đó vẫn còn chỗ trống. Không một nơi nào trên thế giới người ta lại dành nhiều thì giờ, suy nghĩ và sáng tạo như thế cho việc xây dựng một thánh đường. Các công trình ngoài tôn giáo thời thượng cổ đều trở thành vô nghĩa. Đại giáo đường của Bramante, nóc tròn của Michelangelo, hàng cột của Bernini. Đó không chỉ là công trình cung hiến cho Chúa mà còn để ngợi ca con người.
Trong lễ thụ phong linh mục Dane nằm dài trên các bậc, mặt úp xuống, như người chết. Anh đang nghĩ gì? Ẩn giấu trong một niềm đau sâu kín vì mẹ anh đã không đến? Hồng Y De Bricassart nhìn anh qua hàng nước mắt và hiểu rằng không có nỗi đau nào giày xéo anh hơn. Thân xác anh lúc này như hòa nhập trong phép lạ. Không còn một chỗ nào dành cho bất cứ điều gì và ai khác hơn là Chúa. Một ngày như mọi ngày, không có gì quan trọng hơn là nhiệm vụ phải hoàn thành, đó là hiến dâng cuộc sống và linh hồn cho Chúa. Rất có thể anh sẽ đạt mục đích nhưng liệu rằng mấy người thật sự đạt mục đích này? Hồng Y De Bricassart thì không rồi dù ông nhớ rất rõ ngày thụ phong ông như ngập tràn trong một sự lo nghĩ thần thánh. Ông đã thử vận dụng tất cả những gì có thể rung động ở trong ông lúc ấy, những ông vẫn không thể hóa thân một cách trọn vẹn.
Lễ tấn chức linh mục của mình không long trọng bằng hôm nay nhưng qua người bạn trẻ này mình thấy lại cái ngày đó. Mình phải tự hỏi đích thật anh ta là ai, bất kể những lo âu của mình, anh ta đã trải qua bao nhiêu năm dài ở đây mà không gây ra một mối ác cảm nào, đừng nói chi là một kẻ thù thật sự. Anh được mọi người thương và anh thương mọi người. Vậy mà không bao giờ anh ta nghĩ đó là một điều phi thường.
Khi anh mới đến đây, Dane thiếu tự tin; chính chúng mình đã mang đến cho anh cái ân sủng ấy, rất có thể điều đó chứng minh sự hiện hữu cần thiết của chúng mình. Có rất nhiều linh mục được phong chức ở đây, có hàng ngàn, hàng ngàn. Tuy nhiên với Ralph, buổi lễ này thật đặc biệt. Meggie ơi! Tại sao em không đến đây để ngắm nhìn tặng vật em đã hiến dâng cho Chúa? Tặng vật mà anh không thể hiến dâng cho Người khi bản thân anh đã hiến dâng.
... Một lúc sau, ông quay đầu lại, nhìn thấy hàng ghế dành cho những người ở Drogheda đến trong những bộ quần áo khác thường: Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims, Patsy. Một ghế trống của Meggie, rồi đến Frank. Justine với mái tóc rực rỡ che khuất dưới cái khăn vuông đăng ten đen là người phụ nữ duy nhất trong dòng họ Cleary đến đây. Rainer ngồi kế bên nàng.
Ngày hôm nay, hoàn toàn khác; ngày hôm nay, một ngày đặc biệt đối với ông. Hôm nay, gần như ông có cảm giác là chính ông đã cho ra đời một đứa con trai. Ông mỉm cười và thở dài. Hồng Y Di Contini Verchese đã cảm nhận gì khi phong chức linh mục cho Dane?
Dane rất đau khổ vì mẹ anh không đến La Mã nhưng anh không buồn giận mẹ vì anh tin rằng có một nguyên nhân nào đó mà anh chưa rõ, anh sẽ về Drogheda hỏi cho biết. Dane có đúng hai tháng để tự do suy nghĩ sẽ làm gì. Anh có ý định về Drogheda, trong những lúc phi ngựa qua các bãi chăn cừu, anh sẽ suy nghĩ thật chín chắn vấn đề ấy. Anh cảm thấy rằng không thể lấy quyết định trước khi trao đổi với mẹ. Nhưng trước đó, khi gặp mẹ anh sẽ nói thế nào? Anh cần tập trung can đảm trước khi trở về. Dane rủ Justine cùng đi Hy Lạp nghỉ ngơi trong mười lăm ngày, hy vọng Justine sẽ có cách làm cho Dane thêm can đảm để lên máy bay về Drogheda gặp mẹ.
Lúc đầu Justine đồng ý với Dane và thỏa thuận với Rainer là trong khi nàng đi Hy Lạp thì Rainer trở về với công việc của anh ta ở Bonn. Nhưng cuộc chia tay giữa Rainer và Justine không suôn sẻ. Rainer chờ đến bảy năm quen nhau để tỏ tình với Justine nhưng vẫn bị Justine từ chối. Rainer chờ lâu đến như thế vì anh không tự tin, biết mình xấu trai và dư biết người mình yêu bất cần tiền bạc lẫn địa vị. Justine từ chối vì trước hết đối với nàng, tình yêu là sự tước đoạt, gia đình là sự chấm dứt tự do. Vả lại nàng chưa tin chắc là nàng yêu Rainer.
Nhưng khi Rainer đi rồi, còn lại một mình trong phòng khách sạn, nàng mới nhận ra sự trống vắng khủng khiếp trong lòng.
Quái quỉ nữa là chạm mặt ông cậu nào họ cũng hỏi Rainer đâu.
- Rainer là một tay tuyệt lắm, Hughie nói, đôi mắt sáng lên.
Kinh ngạc, bỗng chốc Justine hiểu rằng tại sao trong những ngày qua nàng được các ông cậu quan tâm đến thế. Trước kia giữa các ông cậu và nàng gần như không có một dính dấp nào. Dưới mắt các ông, nàng trở nên quan trọng chỉ vì nàng đã gắn với một người đàn ông mà các ông đón nhận làm thành viên của gia đình.
Trở lên phòng, đầu óc nàng quay cuồng. Đúng là Rainer yêu mình.
Nhưng khi nàng muốn gặp Rainer qua điện thoại thì cô phụ trách tổng đài cho biết Rainer đã rời khách sạn đi Bonn. Justine quyết định không đi Hy Lạp với Dane và tin rằng Dane sẽ hiểu nàng. Dane vẫn muốn nàng lấy Rainer làm chồng.
Rainer thân mến của em (bức thư ngắn bắt đầu như thế), em rất ân hận tối hôm đó đã trốn chạy anh như một con dê cái hốt hoảng; em không hiểu em đã mắc chứng gì. Có lẽ do một ngày mệt mỏi và bao nhiêu chuyện tiếp đó. Em mong anh tha lỗi cho cách xử sự rất thiếu tế nhị của em. Em thấy mắc cỡ vì một chuyện không đáng gì. Vì em nghĩ rằng buổi lễ và những việc tiếp đó cũng làm cho chính anh mỏi mệt, từ đó mà có lời tỏ tình của anh. Cho nên, em đề nghị: xin lỗi anh và về phía em, em cũng tha thứ cho anh. Chúng ta vẫn là bạn với nhau, em mong như thế. Em không thể nào chịu đựng sự lạnh nhạt với anh. Lần sau anh đến Luân Đôn, em chờ anh cùng ăn tối tại nhà em và chúng ta sẽ lập lại hiệp ước hòa bình theo nghi thức hẳn hoi.
Như mọi khi, dưới bức thư ký Justine. Nhận được thư, Rainer nhíu mày suy nghĩ, cố tìm hiểu ý nghĩa thật của những dòng chữ tầm thường được viết vội vàng. Không thể chối cãi, đó là lời kêu gọi thân thiện, nhưng ngoài ra còn gì nữa? Tại sao Justine không đi Hy Lạp với Dane mà lại quay trở về Luân Đôn? Rainer không dám tin rằng Justine thay đổi quyết định vì anh, nhưng anh vẫn để hy vọng len vào trong tâm tư.
Chiều thứ bảy, Rainer từ Bonn đến La Mã và trình diện với Justine tại nhà nàng. Cuộc gặp gỡ lần này kết thúc trên giường.
Sáng hôm sau, Justine thú nhận:
- Em trở về Luân Đôn để nhận vai Desdemona nhưng mặt khác cũng vì anh. Em không thể nào sống bình thường được từ khi anh hôn em ở La Mã, anh dư biết điều ấy. Anh là một con người rất thông minh, Rainer Moerling Hertheim.
- Vừa đủ thông minh để rằng anh muốn em làm vợ ngay từ khi anh mới gặp em.
- Làm vợ? Nàng bật dậy hỏi.
- Vâng, làm vợ. Nếu anh có ý định lấy em làm tình nhân thì anh đã chiếm đoạt em từ nhiều năm. Anh hoàn toàn có khả năng làm việc đó. Anh biết bộ óc của em vận hành như thế nào; cũng tương đối dễ thôi. Chỉ có một lý do duy nhất ngăn chặn anh, đó là vì anh muốn lấy em làm vợ, mặc dù lúc đó anh vẫn biết em chưa có ý định lấy chồng.
- Bây giờ em vẫn không chắc có ý định ấy.
- Justine, không phải một trò đùa đâu và anh không phải là một người đàn ông để người khác đùa giỡn. Chúng ta có thời giờ để suy nghĩ. Hơn ai hết em biết anh kiên nhẫn như thế nào. Riêng về phía em, phải thấy rằng đám cưới là giải pháp duy nhất mà em có thể chọn lựa. Hãy loại ra khỏi đầu em bất cứ ý tưởng nào khác. Anh không chấp nhận giữ vai trò nào khác bên cạnh em ngoài vai trò làm chồng.
- Em sẽ không bao giờ chịu rời bỏ sân khấu! Justine hét to lên, như sẵn sàng gây chuyện.
- Anh đòi hỏi chuyện đó bao giờ? Đã đến lúc em phải khôn lớn lên chớ Justine? Mới thoạt nghe em, người ta tưởng anh định kết án chung thân em trong vai nội trợ và bếp núc. Chúng ta không nghèo khó đến thế đâu. Em có thể sử dụng bao nhiều người phục vụ tùy ý em, những vú em cho các con và tất cả những gì em muốn.
- Không đâu! Justine kêu lên. Nàng chưa nghĩ đến chuyện con cái.
Rainer cười ngất.
- Ồ! Đây đúng là cái mà người ta gọi là sự phục thù của sáng ngày hôm sau! Anh lại hành động như một thằng ngốc đặt em quá đột ngột trước những thực tế. Nhưng lúc này đây anh chỉ yêu cầu em hãy nghĩ đến chuyện đó. Tuy nhiên, anh báo trước với em... Khi quyết định, em đừng quên rằng nếu anh không làm chồng em, thì anh cũng không là gì hết.
Nàng choàng hai tay lên cổ Rainer, bám chặt người anh như không muốn buông ra.
- Ồ! Rainer! Anh đừng gây cho em nhiều khó khăn như thế!
° ° °
➖➖➖
Phần tiếng Anh
The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
---
SIX
1954-1965 Dane
6.2
There was no possibility of Justine transferring herself and her belongings from the southern to the northern hemisphere as quickly as Dane had; by the time she worked out the season at the Culloden and bade a not unregretful farewell to Bothwell Gardens, her brother had been in Rome two months. “How on earth did I manage to accumulate so much junk?” she asked, surrounded by clothes, papers, boxes.
Meggie looked up from where she was crouched, a box of steel wool soap pads in her hand.
“What were these doing under your bed?”
A look of profound relief swept across her daughter's flushed face. “Oh, thank God! Is that where they were? I thought Mrs. D's precious poodle ate them; he's been off color for a week and I wasn't game to mention my missing soap pads. But I knew the wretched animal ate them; he'll eat anything that doesn't eat him first. Not,” continued Justine thoughtfully, “that I wouldn't be glad to see the last of him.”
Meggie sat back on her heels, laughing. “Oh, Jus! Do you know how funny you are?” She threw the box onto the bed among a mountain of things already there. “You're no credit to Drogheda, are you? After all the care we took pushing neatness and tidiness into your head, too.”
“I could have told you it was a lost cause. Do you want to take the soap pads back to Drogheda? I know I'm sailing and my luggage is unlimited, but I daresay there are tons of soap pads in London.”
Meggie transferred the box into a large carton marked MRS. D. “I think we'd better donate them to Mrs. Devine; she has to render this flat habitable for the next tenant.” An unsteady tower of unwashed dishes stood on the end of the table, sprouting gruesome whiskers of mold. “Do you ever wash your dishes?”
Justine chuckled unrepentantly. “Dane says I don't wash them at all, I shave them instead.”
“You'd have to give this lot a haircut first. Why don't you wash them as you use them?”
“Because it would mean trekking down to the kitchen again, and since I usually eat after midnight, no one appreciates the patter of my little feet.” “Give me one of the empty boxes. I'll take them down and dispose of them now,” said her mother, resigned; she had known before volunteering to come what was bound to be in store for her, and had been rather looking forward to it. It wasn't very often anyone had the chance to help Justine do anything; whenever Meggie had tried to help her she had ended feeling an utter fool. But in domestic matters the situation was reversed for once; she could help to her heart's content without feeling a fool.
Somehow it got done, and Justine and Meggie set out in the station wagon Meggie had driven down from Gilly, bound for the Hotel Australia, where Meggie had a suite.
“I wish you Drogheda people would buy a house at Palm Beach or Avalon,” Justine said, depositing her case in the suite's second bedroom. “This is terrible, right above Martin Place. Just imagine being a hop, skip and jump from the surf! Wouldn't that induce you to hustle yourselves on a plane from Gilly more often?”
“Why should I come to Sydney? I've been down twice in the last seven years-to see Dane off, and now to see you off. If we had a house it would never be used.”
“Codswallop.”
“Why?
“Why? Because there's more to the world than bloody Drogheda, dammit! That place, it drives me batty!”
Meggie sighed. “Believe me, Justine, there'll come a time when you'll yearn to come home to Drogheda.”
“Does that go for Dane, too?”
Silence. Without looking at her daughter, Meggie took her bag from the table. “We'll be late. Madame Rocher said two o'clock. If you want your dresses before you sail, we'd better hurry.”
“I am put in my place,” Justine said, and grinned. “Why is it?
Justine, that you didn't introduce me to any of your friends? I didn't see a sign of anyone at Bothwell Gardens except Mrs. Devine,” Meggie said as they sat in Germaine Rocher's salon watching the languid mannequins preen and simper.
“Oh, they're a bit shy .... I like that orange thing, don't you?” “Not with your hair. Settle for the grey.”
“Pooh! I think orange goes perfectly with my hair. In grey I look like something the cat dragged in, sort of muddy and half rotten. Move with the times, Mum. Redheads don't have to be seen in white, grey, black, emerald green or that horrible color- you're so addicted to-what is it, ashes of roses? Victorian!”
“You have the name of the color right,” Meggie said. She turned to look at her daughter. “You're a monster,” she said wryly, but with affection. Justine didn't pay any attention; it was not the first time she had heard it. “I'll take the orange, the scarlet, the purple print, the moss green, the burgundy suit. . . .”
Meggie sat torn between laughter and rage. What could one do with a daughter like Justine?
The Himalaya sailed from Darling Harbor three days later. She was a lovely old ship, flat-hulled and very seaworthy, built in the days when no one was in a tearing hurry and everyone accepted the fact England was four weeks away via Suez or five weeks away via the Cape of Good Hope. Nowadays even the ocean liners were streamlined, hulls shaped like destroyers to get there faster. But what they did to a sensitive stomach made seasoned sailors quail. “What fun!” Justine laughed. “We've got a whole lovely footie team in first class, so it won't be as dull as I thought. Some of them are gorgeous.”
“Now aren't you glad I insisted on first class?” “I suppose so.”
“Justine, you bring out the worst in me, you always have,” Meggie snapped, losing her temper at what she took for ingratitude. Just this once couldn't the little wretch at least pretend she was sorry to be going? “Stubborn, pig-headed, self-willed! You exasperate me.”
For a moment Justine didn't answer, but turned her head away as if she was more interested in the fact that the all-ashore gong was ringing than in what her mother was saying. She bit the tremor from her lips, put a bright smile on them. “I know I exasperate you,” she said cheerfully as she faced her mother. “Never mind, we are what we are. As you always say, I take after my dad.”
They embraced self-consciously before Meggie slipped thankfully into the crowds converging on gangways and was lost to sight. Justine made her way up to the sun deck and stood by the rail with rolls of colored streamers in her hands. Far below on the wharf she saw the figure in the pinkish-grey dress and hat walk to the appointed spot, stand shading her eyes. Funny, at this distance one could see Mum was getting up toward fifty. Some way to go yet, but it was there in her stance. They waved in the same moment, then Justine threw the first of her streamers and Meggie caught its end deftly. A red, a blue, a yellow, a pink, a green, an orange; spiraling round and round, tugging in the breeze.
A pipe band had come to bid the football team farewell and stood with pennons flying, plaids billowing, skirling a quaint version of “Now Is the Hour.” The ship's rails were thick with people hanging over, holding desperately to their ends of the thin paper streamers; on the wharf hundreds of people craned their necks upward, lingering hungrily on the faces going so far away, young faces mostly, off to see what the hub of civilization on the other side of the world was really like. They would live there, work there, perhaps come back in two years, perhaps not come back at all. And everyone knew it, wondered.
The blue sky was plumped with silver-white clouds and there was a tearing Sydney wind. Sun warmed the upturned heads and the shoulder blades of those leaning down; a great multicolored swath of vibrating ribbons joined ship and shore. Then suddenly a gap appeared between the old boat's side and the wooden struts of the wharf; the air filled with cries and sobs; and one by one in their thousands the streamers broke, fluttered wildly, sagged limply and crisscrossed the surface of the water like a mangled loom, joined the orange peels and the jellyfish to float away.
Justine kept doggedly to her place at the rail until the wharf was a few hard lines and little pink pinheads in the distance; the Himalaya's tugs turned her, towed her helplessly under the booming decks of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, out into the mainstream of that exquisite stretch of sunny water. It wasn't like going to Manly on the ferry at all, though they followed the same path past Neutral Bay and Rose Bay and Cremorne and Vaucluse; no. For this time it was out through the Heads, beyond the cruel cliffs and the high lace fans of foam, into the ocean. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.
Money, Justine discovered, made London a most alluring place. Not for her a penniless existence clinging to the fringes of Earl's Court-”Kangaroo Valley” they called it because so many Australians made it their headquarters. Not for her the typical fate of Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring, working for a pittance in some office or school or hospital, shivering thin-blooded over a tiny radiator in a cold, damp room. Instead, for Justine a mews flat in Kensington close to Knightsbridge, centrally heated; and a place in the company of Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, The Elizabethan Group. When the summer came she caught a train to Rome. In afteryears she would smile, remembering how little she saw of that long journey across France, down Italy; her whole mind was occupied with the things she had to tell Dane, memorizing those she simply mustn't forget. There were so many she was bound to leave some out.
Was that Dane? The tall, fair man on the platform, was that Dane? He didn't look any different, and yet he was a stranger. Not of her world anymore. The cry she was going to give to attract his attention died unuttered; she drew back a little in her seat to watch him, for the train had halted only a few feet beyond where he stood, blue eyes scanning the windows without anxiety. It was going to be a pretty one-sided conversation when she told him about life since he had gone away, for she knew now there was no thirst in him to share what he experienced with her. Damn him! He wasn't her baby brother anymore; the life he was living had as little to do with her as it did with Drogheda. Oh, Dane! What's it like to live something twenty-four hours of every day?
“Hah! Thought I'd dragged you down here on a wild-goose chase, didn't you?” she said, creeping up behind him unseen.
He turned, squeezed her hands and stared down at her, smiling. “Prawn,” he said lovingly, taking her bigger suitcase and tucking her free arm in his. “It's good to see you,” he added as he handed her into the red Lagonda he drove everywhere; Dane had always been a sports car fanatic, and had owned one since he was old enough to hold a license.
“Good to see you, too. I hope you found me a nice pub, because I meant what I wrote. I refuse to be stuck in a Vatican cell among a heap of celibates.” She laughed.
“They wouldn't have you, not with the Devil's hair. I've booked you into a little pension not far from me, but they speak English so you needn't worry if I'm not with you. And in Rome it's no problem getting around on English; there's usually someone who can speak it.”
“Times like this I wish I had your gift for foreign languages. But I'll manage; I'm very good at mimes and charades.”
“I have two months, Jussy, isn't it super? So we can take a look at France and Spain and still have a month on Drogheda. I miss the old place.” “Do you?” She turned to look at him, at the beautiful hands guiding the car expertly through the crazy Roman traffic. “I don't miss it at all; London's too interesting.”
“You don't fool me,” he said. “I know what Drogheda and Mum mean to you.” Justine clenched her hands in her lap but didn't answer him. “Do you mind having tea with some friends of mine this afternoon?” he asked when they had arrived. “I rather anticipated things by accepting for you already. They're so anxious to meet you, and as I'm not a free man until tomorrow, I didn't like to say no.”
“Prawn! Why should I mind? If this was London I'd be inundating you with my friends, so why shouldn't you? I'm glad you're giving me a look-see at the blokes in the seminary, though it's a bit unfair to me, isn't it? Hands off the lot of them.”
She walked to the window, looked down at a shabby little square with two tired plane trees in its paved quadrangle, three tables strewn with them, and to one side a church of no particular architectural grace or beauty, covered in peeling stucco.
“Dane
“Yes?”
“I do understand, really I do.”
“Yes, I know.” His face lost its smile. “I wish Mum did, Jus.” “Mum's different. She feels you deserted her; she doesn't realize you haven't. Never mind about her. She'll come round in time.”
“I hope so.” He laughed. “By the way, it isn't the blokes from the seminary you're going to meet today. I wouldn't subject them or you to such temptation. It's Cardinal de Bricassart. I know you don't like him, but promise you'll be good.”
Her eyes lit with peculiar witchery. “I promise! I'll even kiss every ring that's offered to me.”
“Oh, you remember! I was so mad at you that day, shaming me in front of him.”
“Well, since then I've kissed a lot of things less hygienic than a ring. There's one horrible pimply youth in acting class with halitosis and decayed tonsils and a rotten stomach I had to kiss a total of twenty- nine times, and I can assure you, mate, that after him nothing's impossible.” She patted her hair, turned from the mirror. “Have I got time to change?” “Oh, don't worry about that. You look fine.”
“Who else is going to be there?”
The sun was too low to warm the ancient square, and the leprous patches on the plane tree trunks looked worn, sick. Justine shivered. “Cardinal di Contini-Verchese will be there.”
She had heard that name, and opened her eyes wider. “Phew! You move in pretty exalted circles, don't you?”
“Yes. I try to deserve it.”
“Does it mean some people make it hard on you in other areas of your life here, Dane?” she asked, shrewdly.
“No, not really. Who one knows isn't important. I never think of it, so nor does anyone else.”
° ° °
The room, the red men! Never in all her life had Justine been so conscious of the redundancy of women in the lives of some men as at that moment, walking into a world where women simply had no place except as humble nun servants. She was still in the olive-green linen suit she had put on outside Turin, rather crumpled from the train, and she advanced across the soft crimson carpet cursing Dane's eagerness to be there, wishing she had insisted on donning something less travel-marked.
Cardinal de Bricassart was on his feet, smiling; what a handsome old man he was.
“My dear Justine,” he said, extending his ring with a wicked look which indicated he well remembered the last time, and searching her face for something she didn't understand. “You don't look at all like your mother.” Down on one knee, kiss the ring, smile humbly, get up, smile less humbly. “No, I don't, do I? I could have done with her beauty in my chosen profession, but on a stage I manage. Because it has nothing to do with what the face actually is, you know. It's what you and your art can convince people the face is.”
A dry chuckle came from a chair; once more she trod to salute a ring on an aging wormy hand, but this time she looked up into dark eyes, and strangely in them saw love. Love for her, for someone he had never seen, could scarcely have heard mentioned. But it was there. She didn't like Cardinal de Bricassart any more now than she had at fifteen, but she warmed to this old man.
“Sit down, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, his hand indicating the chair next to him.
“Hello, pusskins,” said Justine, tickling the blue-grey cat in his scarlet lap. “She's nice, isn't she?”
“Indeed she is.”
“What's her name?”
“Natasha.”
The door opened, but not to admit the tea trolley. A man, mercifully clad as a layman; one more red soutane, thought Justine, and I'll bellow like a bull.
But he was no ordinary man, even if he was a layman. They probably had a little house rule in the Vatican, continued Justine's unruly mind, which specifically barred ordinary men. Not exactly short, he was so powerfully built he seemed more stocky than he was, with massive shoulders and a huge chest, a big leonine head, long arms like a shearer. Ape-mannish, except that he exuded intelligence and moved with the gait of someone who would grasp whatever he wanted too quickly for the mind to follow. Grasp it and maybe crush it, but never aimlessly, thoughtlessly; with exquisite deliberation. He was dark, but his thick mane of hair was exactly the color of steel wool and of much the same consistency, could steel wool have been crimped into tiny, regular waves.
“Rainer, you come in good time,” said Cardinal Vittorio, indicating the chair on his other side, still speaking in English. “My dear,” he said, turning to Justine as the man finished kissing his ring and rose, “I would like you to meet a very good friend. Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Rainer, this is Dane's sister, Justine.
He bowed, clicking his heels punctiliously, gave her a brief smile without warmth and sat down, just too far off to one side to see. Justine breathed a sigh of relief, especially when she saw that Dane had draped himself with the ease of habit on the floor beside Cardinal Ralph's chair, right in her central vision. While she could see someone she knew and loved well, she would be all right. But the room and the red men and now this dark man were beginning to irritate her more than Dane's presence calmed; she resented the way they shut her out. So she leaned to one side and tickled the cat again, aware that Cardinal Vittorio sensed and was amused by her reactions.
“Is she spayed?” asked Justine.
“Of course.”
“Of course! Though why you needed to bother I don't know. Just being a permanent inhabitant of this place would be enough to neuter anyone's ovaries.” “On the contrary, my dear,” said Cardinal Vittorio, enjoying her hugely. “It is we men who have psychologically neutered ourselves.”
“I beg to differ, Your Eminence.”
“So our little world antagonizes you?”
“Well, let's just say I feel a bit superfluous, Your Eminence. A nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live here.”
“I cannot blame you. I also doubt that you like to visit. But you will get used to us, for you must visit us often, please.”
Justine grinned. “I hate being on my best behavior,” she confided.
“It brings out the absolute worst in me. I can feel Dane's horrors from here without even looking at him.”
“I was wondering how long it was going to last,” said Dane, not at all put out. “Scratch Justine's surface and you find a rebel. That's why she's such a nice sister for me to have. I'm not a rebel, but I do admire them.” Herr Hartheim shifted his chair so that he could continue to keep her in his line of vision even when she straightened, stopped playing with the cat. At that moment the beautiful animal grew tired of the hand with an alien female scent, and without getting to its feet crawled delicately from red lap to grey, curling itself under Herr Hartheim's strong square stroking hands, purring so loudly that everyone laughed.
“Excuse me for living,” said Justine, not proof against a good joke even when she was its victim.
“Her motor is as good as ever,” said Herr Hartheim, the amusement working fascinating changes in his face.
His English was so good he hardly had an accent, but it had an American inflection; he rolled his rather's.
The tea came before everyone settled down again, and oddly enough it was Herr Hartheim who poured, handing Justine her cup with a much friendlier look than he had given her at introduction.
“In a British community,” he said to her, “afternoon tea is the most important refreshment of the day. Things happen over teacups, don't they? I suppose because by its very nature it can be demanded and taken at almost any time between two and five-thirty, and talking is thirsty work.” The next half hour seemed to prove his point, though Justine took no part in the congress. Talk veered from the Holy Father's precarious health to the cold war and then the economic recession, all four men speaking and listening with an alertness Justine found absorbing, beginning to grope for the qualities they shared, even Dane, who was so strange, so much an unknown. He contributed actively; and it wasn't lost upon her that the three older men listened to him with a curious humility, almost as if he awed them. His comments were neither uninformed nor naive, but they were different, original, holy. Was it for his holiness they paid such serious attention to him? That he possessed it, and they didn't? Was it truly a virtue they admired, yearned for themselves? Was it so rare? Three men so vastly different one from the other, yet far closer bound together than any of them were to Dane. How difficult it was to take Dane as seriously as they did! Not that in many ways he hadn't acted as an older brother rather than a younger; not that she wasn't aware of his wisdom, his intellect or his holiness. But until now he had been a part of her world. She had to get used to the fact that he wasn't anymore.
“If you wish to go straight to your devotions, Dane, I'll see your sister back to her hotel,” commanded Herr Rainer Moerling Hartheim without consulting anyone's wishes on the subject. And so she found herself walking tongue-tied down the marble stairs in the company of that squat, powerful man. Outside in the yellow sheen of a Roman sunset he took her elbow and guided her into a black Mercedes limousine, its chauffeur standing to attention.
“Come, you don't want to spend your first evening in Rome alone, and Dane is otherwise occupied,” he said, following her into the car. “You're tired and bewildered, so it's better you have company.”
“You don't seem to be leaving me any choice, Herr Hartheim.” “I would rather you called me Rainer.”
“You must be important, having a posh car and your own chauffeur.” “I'll be more important still when I'm chancellor of West Germany.” Justine snorted. “I'm surprised you're not already.”
“Impudent! I'm too young.”
“Are you?” She turned sideways to look at him more closely, discovering that his dark skin was unlined, youthful, that the deeply set eyes weren't embedded in the fleshy surrounds of age.
“I'm heavy and I'm grey, but I've been grey since I was sixteen and heavy since I've had enough to eat. At the present moment I'm a mere thirty-one.” “I'll take your word for it,” she said, kicking her shoes off. “That's still old to me-I'm sweet twenty-one.”
“You're a monster,” he said, smiling.
“I suppose I must be. My mother says the same thing. Only I'm not sure what either of you means by monster, so you can give me your version, please.” “Have you already got your mother's version?” “I'd embarrass the hell out of her if I asked.”
“Don't you think you embarrass me?”
“I strongly suspect, Herr Hartheim, that you're a monster, too, so I doubt if anything embarrasses you.”
“A monster,” he said again under his breath. “All right then, Miss O'neill, I'll try to define the term for you. Someone who terrifies others; rolls over the top of people; feels so strong only God can defeat; has no scruples and few morals.”
She chuckled. “It sounds like you, to me. And I have so too got morals and scruples. I'm Dane's sister.”
“You don't look a bit like him.”
“More's the pity.”
“His face wouldn't suit your personality.”
“You're undoubtedly right, but with his face I might have developed a different personality.”
“Depending on which comes first, eh, the chicken or the egg? Put your shoes on; we're going to walk.”
It was warm, and growing dark; but the lights were brilliant, there were crowds it seemed no matter where they walked, and the roads were jammed with shrieking motor scooters, tiny aggressive Fiats, Goggomobils looking like hordes of panicked frogs. Finally he halted in a small square, its cobbles worn to smoothness by the feet of many centuries, and guided Justine into a restaurant.
“Unless you'd prefer alfresco?” he asked.
“Provided you feed me, I don't much care whether it's inside, outside, or halfway between.”
“May I order for you?”
The pale eyes blinked a little wearily perhaps, but there was still fight in Justine. “I don't know that I go for all that high-handed masterful-male business,” she said. “After all, how do you know what I fancy?” “Sister Anna carries her banner,” he murmured. “Tell me what sort of food you like, then, and I'll guarantee to please you. Fish? Veal?” “A compromise? All right, I'll meet you halfway, why not? I'll have pate, some scampi and a huge plate of saltimbocca, and after that I'll have a cassata and a cappuccino coffee. Fiddle around with that if you can.”
“I ought to slap you,” he said, his good humor quite unruffled. He gave her order to the waiter exactly as she had stipulated it, but in rapid Italian. “You said I don't look a bit like Dane. Aren't I like him in any way at all?” she asked a little pathetically over coffee, too hungry to have wasted time talking while there was food on the table. He lit her cigarette, then his own, and leaned into the shadows to watch her quietly, thinking back to his first meeting with the boy months ago. Cardinal de Bricassart minus forty years of life; he had seen it immediately, and then had learned they were uncle and nephew, that the mother of the boy and the girl was Ralph de Bricassart's sister.
“There is a likeness, yes,” he said. “Sometimes even of the face. Expressions far more than features. Around the eyes and the mouth, in the way you hold your eyes open and your mouths closed. Oddly enough, not likenesses you share with your uncle the Cardinal.”
“Uncle the Cardinal?” she repeated blankly.
“Cardinal de Bricassart. Isn't he your uncle? Now, I'm sure I was told he was.”
“That old vulture? He's no relation of ours, thank heavens. He used to be our parish priest years ago, a long time before I was born.”
She was very intelligent; but she was also very tired. Poor little girl- for that was what she was, a little girl. The ten years between them yawned like a hundred. To suspect would bring her world to ruins, and she was so valiant in defense of it. Probably she would refuse to see it, even if she were told outright. How to make it seem unimportant? Not labor the point, definitely not, but not drop it immediately, either.
“That accounts for it, then,” he said lightly. “Accounts for what?”
“The fact that Dane's likeness to the Cardinal is in general things- height, coloring, build.”
“Oh! My grandmother told me our father was rather like the Cardinal to look at,” said Justine comfortably.
“Haven't you ever seen your father?”
“Not even a picture of him. He and Mum separated for good before Dane was born.” She beckoned the waiter. “I'd like another cappuccino, please.” “Justine, you're a savage! Let me order for you!” “No, dammit, I won't! I'm perfectly capable of thinking for myself, and I don't need some bloody man always to tell me what I want and when I want it, do you hear?”
“Scratch the surface and one finds a rebel; that was what Dane said.” “He's right. Oh, if you knew how I hate being petted and cosseted and fussed over! I like to act for myself, and I won't be told what to do! I don't ask for quarter, but I don't give any, either.”
“I can see that,” he said dryly. “What made you so, Herzchen? Does it run in the family?”
“Does it? I honestly don't know. There aren't enough women to tell, I suppose. Only one per generation. Nanna, and Mum, and me. Heaps of men, though.”
“Except in your generation there are not heaps of men. Only Dane.” “Due to the fact Mum left my father, I expect. She never seemed to get interested in anyone else. Pity, I think. Mum's a real homebody; she would have liked a husband to fuss over.”
“Is she like you?”
“I don't think so.”
“More importantly, do you like each other?”
“Mum and I?” She smiled without rancor, much as her mother would have done had someone asked her whether she liked her daughter. “I'm not sure if we like each other, but there is something there. Maybe it's a simple biological bond; I don't know.” Her eyes kindled. “I've always wanted her to talk to me the way she does to Dane, and wanted to get along with her the way Dane does. But either there's something lacking in her, or something lacking in me. Me, I'd reckon. She's a much finer person than I am.”
“I haven't met her, so I can't agree or disagree with your judgment.
If it's of any conceivable comfort to you, Herzchen, I like you exactly the way you are. No, I wouldn't change a thing about you, even your ridiculous pugnacity.”
“Isn't that nice of you? And after I insulted you, too. I'm not really like Dane, am I?”
“Dane isn't like anyone else in the world.”
“You mean because he's so not of this world?” “I suppose so.” He leaned forward, out of the shadows into the weak light of the little candle in its Chianti bottle. “I am a Catholic, and my religion has been the one thing in my life which has never failed me, though I have failed it many times. I dislike speaking of Dane, because my heart tells me some things are better left undiscussed. Certainly you aren't like him in your attitude to life, or God. Let's leave it, all right?” She looked at him curiously. “All right, Rainer, if you want. I'll make a pact with you-no matter what we discuss, it won't be the nature of Dane, or religion.”
Much had happened to Rainer Moerling Hartheim since that meeting with Ralph de Bricassart in July 1943. A week afterward his regiment had been dispatched to the Eastern Front, where he spent the remainder of the war. Torn and rudderless, too young to have been indoctrinated into the Hitler Youth in its leisurely prewar days, he had faced the consequences of Hitler in feet of snow, without ammunition, the front line stretched so thin there was only one soldier for every hundred yards of it. And out of the war he carried two memories: that bitter campaign in bitter cold, and the face of Ralph de Bricassart. Horror and beauty, the Devil and God. Half crazed, half frozen, waiting defenseless for Khrushchev's guerrillas to drop from low-flying planes parachuteless into the snowdrifts, he beat his breast and muttered prayers. But he didn't know what he prayed for: bullets for his gun, escape from the Russians, his immortal soul, the man in the basilica, Germany, a lessening of grief. In the spring of 1945 he had retreated back across Poland before the Russians, like his fellow soldiers with only one objective-to make it into British- or American-occupied Germany. For if the Russians caught him, he would be shot. He tore his papers into shreds and burned them, buried his two Iron Crosses, stole some clothes and presented himself to the British authorities on the Danish border. They shipped him to a camp for displaced persons in Belgium. There for a year he lived on the bread and gruel, which was all the exhausted British could afford to feed the thousands upon thousands of people in their charge, waiting until the British realized their only course was release.
Twice officials of the camp had summoned him to present him with an ultimatum. There was a boat waiting in Ostend harbor loading immigrants for Australia. He would be given new papers and shipped to his new land free of charge, in return for which he would work for the Australian government for two years in whatever capacity they chose, after which his life would become entirely his own. Not slave labor; he would be paid the standard wage, of course. But on both occasions he managed to talk himself out of summary emigration. He had hated Hitler, not Germany, and he was not ashamed of being a German. Home meant Germany; it had occupied his dreams for over three years. The very thought of yet again being stranded in a country where no one spoke his language nor he theirs was anathema. So at the beginning of 1947 he found himself penniless on the streets of Aachen, ready to pick up the pieces of an existence he knew he wanted very badly. He and his soul had survived, but not to go back to poverty and obscurity. For Rainer was more than a very ambitious man; he was also something of a genius. He went to work for Grundig, and studied the field which had fascinated him since he first got acquainted with radar: electronics. Ideas teemed in his brain, but he refused to sell them to Grundig for a millionth part of their value. Instead he gauged the market carefully, then married the widow of a man who had managed to keep a couple of small radio factories, and went into business for himself. That he was barely into his twenties didn't matter. His mind was characteristic of a far older man, and the chaos of postwar Germany created opportunities for young men. Since his wedding had been a civil one, the Church permitted him to divorce his wife; in 1951 he paid Annelise Hartheim exactly twice the current value of her first husband's two factories, and did just that, divorced her. However, he didn't remarry.
What had happened to the boy in the frozen terror of Russia did not produce a soulless caricature of a man; rather it arrested the growth of softness and sweetness in him, and threw into high relief other qualities he possessed-intelligence, ruthlessness, determination. A man who has nothing to lose has everything to gain, and a man without feelings cannot be hurt. Or so he told himself. In actual fact, he was curiously similar to the man he had met in Rome in 1943; like Ralph de Bricassart he understood he did wrong even as he did it. Not that his awareness of the evil in him stopped him for a second; only that he paid for his material advancement in pain and self-torment. To many people it might not have seemed worth the price he paid, but to him it was worth twice the suffering. One day he was going to run Germany and make it what he had dreamed, he was going to scotch the Aryan Lutheran ethic, shape a broader one. Because he couldn't promise to cease sinning he had been refused absolution in the confessional several times, but somehow he and his religion muddled through in one piece, until accumulated money and power removed him so many layers beyond guilt he could present himself repentant, and be shriven.
In 1955, one of the richest and most powerful men in the new West Germany and a fresh face in its Bonn parliament, he went back to Rome. To seek out Cardinal de Bricassart, and show him the end result of his prayers. What he had imagined that meeting might be he could not afterward remember, for from beginning to end of it he was conscious of only one thing: that Ralph de Bricassart was disappointed in him. He had known why, he hadn't needed to ask. But he hadn't expected the Cardinal's parting remark: “I had prayed you would do better than I, for you were so young. No end is worth any means. But I suppose the seeds of our ruin are sown before our births.”
Back in his hotel room he had wept, but calmed after a while and thought: What's past is done with; for the future I will be as he hoped. And sometimes he succeeded, sometimes he failed. But he tried. His friendship with the men in the Vatican became the most precious earthly thing in his life, and Rome became the place to which he fled when only their comfort seemed to stand between himself and despair. Comfort. Theirs was a strange kind. Not the laying on of hands, or soft words. Rather a balm from the soul, as if they understood his pain.
And he thought, as he walked the warm Roman night after depositing Justine in her pension, that he would never cease to be grateful to her. For as he had watched her cope with the ordeal of that afternoon interview, he had felt a stirring of tenderness. Bloody but unbowed, the little monster. She could match them every inch of the way; did they realize it? He felt, he decided, what he might have felt on behalf of a daughter he was proud of, only he had no daughter. So he had stolen her from Dane, carried her off to watch her aftermath reaction to that overpowering ecclesiasticism, and to the Dane she had never seen before; the Dane who was not and could not ever be a full-hearted part of her life.
The nicest thing about his personal God, he went on, was that He could forgive anything; He could forgive Justine her innate godlessness and himself the shutting down of his emotional powerhouse until such time as it was convenient to reopen it. Only for a while he had panicked, thinking he had lost the key forever.
He smiled, threw away her cigarette. The key. . . . Well, sometimes keys had strange shapes. Perhaps it needed every kink in every curl of that red head to trip the tumblers; perhaps in a room of scarlet his God had handed him a scarlet key.
A fleeting day, over in a second. But on looking at his watch he saw it was still early, and knew the man who had so much power now that His Holiness lay near death would still be wakeful, sharing the nocturnal habits of his cat. Those dreadful hiccups filling the small room at Castel Gandolfo, twisting the thin, pale, ascetic face which had watched beneath the white crown for so many years; he was dying, and he was a great Pope. No matter what they said, he was a great Pope. If he had loved his Germans, if he still liked to hear German spoken around him, did it alter anything? Not for Rainer to judge that.
But for what Rainer needed to know at the moment, Castel Gandolfo was not the source. Up the marble stairs to the scarlet-and- crimson room, to talk to Vittorio Scarbanza, Cardinal di Contini- Verchese. Who might be the next Pope, or might not. For almost three years now he had watched those wise, loving dark eyes rest where they most liked to rest; yes, better to seek the answers from him than from Cardinal de Bricassart.
“I never thought I'd hear myself say it, but thank God we're leaving for Drogheda,” said Justine, refusing to throw a coin in the Trevi Fountain. “We were supposed to take a look at France and Spain; instead we're still in Rome and I'm as unnecessary as a navel. Brothers!”
“Hmmm, so you deem navels unnecessary? Socrates was of the same opinion, I remember,” said Rainer.
“Socrates was? I don't recollect that! Funny, I thought I'd read most of Plato, too.” She twisted to stare at him, thinking the casual clothes of a holidaymaker in Rome suited him far better than the sober attire he wore for Vatican audiences.
“He was absolutely convinced navels were unnecessary, as a matter of fact. So much so that to prove his point he unscrewed his own navel and threw it away.”
Her lips twitched. “And what happened?”
“His toga fell off.”
“Hook! Hook!” She giggled. “Anyway, they didn't wear togas in Athens then. But I have a horrible feeling there's a moral in your story.” Her face sobered. “Why do you bother with me, Rain?”
“Stubborn! I've told you before, my name is pronounced Ryner, not Rayner.” “Ah, but you don't understand,” she said, looking thoughtfully at the twinkling streams of water, the dirty pool loaded with dirty coins. “Have you ever been to Australia?”
His shoulders shook, but he made no sound. “Twice I almost went, Herzchen, but I managed to avoid it.”
“Well, if you had gone you'd understand. You have a magical name to an Australian, when it's pronounced my way. Rainer. Rain. Life in the desert.” Startled, he dropped his cigarette. “Justine, you aren't falling in love with me, are you?”
“What egotists men are! I hate to disappoint you, but no.” Then, as if to soften any unkindness in her words, she slipped her hand into his, squeezed. “It's something much nicer.” “What could be nicer than falling in love?”
“Almost anything, I think. I don't want to need anyone like that, ever.” “Perhaps you're right. It's certainly a crippling handicap, taken on too early. So what is much nicer?”
“Finding a friend.” Her hand rubbed his. “You are my friend, aren't you?” “Yes.” Smiling, he threw a coin in the fountain. “There! I must have given it a thousand D-marks over the years, just for reassurance that I would continue to feel the warmth of the south. Sometimes in my nightmares I'm cold again.”
“You ought to feel the warmth of the real south,” said Justine. “A hundred and fifteen in the shade, if you can find any.”
“No wonder you don't feel the heat.” He laughed the soundless laugh, as always; a hangover from the old days, when to laugh aloud might have tempted fate. “And the heat would account for the fact that you're hard-boiled.” “Your English is colloquial, but American. I would have thought you'd have learned English in some posh British university.”
“No. I began to learn it from Cockney or Scottish or Midlands tommies in a Belgian camp, and didn't understand a word of it except when I spoke to the man who had taught it tome. One said “abaht,” one said “aboot,” one said “about,” but they all meant “about.” So when I got back to Germany I saw every motion picture I could, and bought the only records available in English, records made by American comedians. But I played them over and over again at home, until I spoke enough English to learn more.”
Her shoes were off, as usual; awed, he had watched her walk barefooted on pavements hot enough to fry an egg, and over stony places.
“Urchin! Put your shoes on.”
“I'm an Aussie; our feet are too broad to be comfortable in shoes. Comes of no really cold weather; we go barefoot whenever we can.
I can walk across a paddock of bindy-eye burns and pick them out of my feet without feeling them,” she said proudly. “I could probably walk on hot coals.” Then abruptly she changed the subject. “Did you love your wife, Rain?” “No.”
“Did she love you?”
“Yes. She had no other reason to marry me.”
“Poor thing! You used her, and you dropped her.”
“Does it disappoint you?”
“No, I don't think so. I rather admire you for it, actually. But I do feel very sorry for her, and it makes me more determined than ever not to land in the same soup she did.”
“Admire me?” His tone was blank, astonished.
“Why not? I'm not looking for the things in you she undoubtedly did, now am I? I like you, you're my friend. She loved you, you were her husband.” “I think, Herzchen,” he said a little sadly, “that ambitious men are not very kind to their women.”
“That's because they usually fall for utter doormats of women, the “Yes, dear, no, dear, three bags full, dear, and where would you like it put?”' sort. Hard cheese all round, I say. If I'd been your wife, I'd have told you to go pee up a rope, but I'll bet she never did, did she?” His lips quivered. “No, poor Annelise. She was the martyred kind, so her weapons were not nearly so direct or so deliciously expressed. I wish they made Australian films, so I knew your vernacular. The “Yes, dear' bit I got, but I have no idea what hard cheese is.”
“Tough luck, sort of, but it's more unsympathetic.” Her broad toes clung like strong fingers to the inside of the fountain wall, she teetered precariously backward and righted herself easily. “Well, you were kind to her in the end. You got rid of her. She's far better off without you, though she probably doesn't think so. Whereas I can keep you, because I'll never let you get under my skin.”
“Hard-boiled. You really are, Justine. And how did you find out these things about me?”
“I asked Dane. Naturally, being Dane he just gave me the bare facts, but I deduced the rest.”
“From your enormous store of past experience, no doubt. What a fraud you are! They say you're a very good actress, but I find that incredible. How do you manage to counterfeit emotions you can never have experienced? As a person you're more emotionally backward than most fifteen-year-olds.” She jumped down, sat on the wall and leaned to put her shoes on, wriggling her toes ruefully.
“My feet are swollen, dammit.” There was no indication by a reaction of rage or indignation that she had even heard the last part of what he said. As if when aspersions or criticisms were leveled at her she simply switched off an internal hearing aid. How many there must have been. The miracle was that she didn't hate Dane.
“That's a hard question to answer,” she said. “I must be able to do it or I wouldn't be so good, isn't that right? But it's like ... a waiting. My life off the stage, I mean. I conserve myself, I can't spend it offstage. We only have so much to give, don't we? And up there I'm not myself, or perhaps more correctly I'm a succession of selves.
We must all be a profound mixture of selves, don't you think? To me, acting is first and foremost intellect, and only after that, emotion. The one liberates the other, and polishes it. There's so much more to it than simply crying or screaming or producing a convincing laugh. It's wonderful, you know. Thinking myself into another self, someone I might have been, had the circumstances been there. That's the secret. Not becoming someone else, but incorporating the role into me as if she was myself. And so she becomes me.” As though her excitement was too great to bear in stillness, she jumped to her feet. “Imagine, Rain! In twenty years' time I'll be able to say to myself, I've committed murders, I've suicided, I've gone mad, I've saved men or ruined them. Oh! The possibilities are endless!” “And they will all be you.” He rose, took her hand again. “Yes, you're quite right, Justine. You can't spend it offstage. In anyone else, I'd say you would in spite of that, but being you, I'm not so sure.”
If they applied themselves to it, the Drogheda people could imagine that Rome and London were no farther away than Sydney, and that the grown-up Dane and Justine were still children going to boarding school. Admittedly they couldn't come home for all the shorter vacations of other days, but once a year they turned up for a month at least. Usually in August or September, and looking much as always. Very young. Did it matter whether they were fifteen and sixteen or twenty two and twenty-three? And if the Drogheda people lived for that month in early spring, they most definitely never went round saying things like, Well, only a few weeks to go! or, Dear heaven, it's not a month since they left! But around July everyone's step became brisker, and permanent smiles settled on every face. From the cookhouse to the paddocks to the drawing room, treats and gifts were planned. In the meantime there were letters. Mostly these reflected the personalities of their authors, but sometimes they contradicted. One would have thought, for instance, that Dane would be a meticulously regular correspondent and Justine a scrappy one. That Fee would never write at all. That the Cleary men would write twice a year. That Meggie would enrich the postal service with letters every day, at least to Dane. That Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat would send birthday and Christmas cards. That Anne Mueller would write often to Justine, never to Dane.
Dane's intentions were good, and he did indeed write regularly. The only trouble was he forgot to post his efforts, with the result that two or three months would go by without a word, and then Drogheda would receive dozens on the same mail run. The loquacious Justine wrote lengthy missives which were pure stream of-consciousness, rude enough to evoke blushes and clucks of alarm, and entirely fascinating. Meggie wrote once every two weeks only, to both her children. Though Justine never received letters from her grandmother, Dane did quite often. He also got word regularly from all his uncles, about the land and the sheep and the health of the Drogheda women, for they seemed to think it was their duty to assure him all was truly well at home. However, they didn't extend this to Justine, who would have been flabbergasted by it anyway. For the rest, Mrs. Smith, Minnie, Cat and Anne Mueller, correspondence went as might be expected. It was lovely reading letters, and a burden writing them. That is, for all save Justine, who experienced twinges of exasperation because no one ever sent her the kind she desired-fat, wordy and frank. It was from Justine the Drogheda people got most of their information about Dane, for his letters never plunged his readers right into the middle of a scene. Whereas Justine's did.
Rain flew into London today [she wrote once], and he was telling me he saw Dane in Rome last week. Well, he sees a lot more of Dane than of me, since Rome is at the top of his travel agenda and London is rock bottom. So I must confess Rain is one of the prime reasons why I meet Dane in Rome every year before we come home. Dane likes coming to London, only I won't let him if Rain is in Rome. Selfish. But you've no idea how I enjoy Rain. He's one of the few people I know who gives me a run for my money, and I wish we met more often. In one respect Rain's luckier than I am. He gets to meet Dane's fellow students where I don't. I think Dane thinks I'm going to rape them on the spot. Or maybe he thinks they'll rape me. Hah. Only happen if they saw me in my Charmian costume. It's a stunner, people, it really is. Sort of up-to-date Theda Bara. Two little round bronze shields for the old tits, lots and lots of chains and what I reckon is a cha/y belt you'd need a pair of tin- cutters to get inside it, anyway. In a long black wig, tan body paint and my few scraps of metal I look a smasher .
. . . Where was I??? Oh, yes, Rain in Rome last week meeting Dane and his pals. They all went out on the tiles. Rain insists on paying, saves Dane embarrassment. It was some night. No women, natch, but everything else. Can you imagine Dane down on his knees in some seedy Roman bar saying “Fair daffodils, we haste to see thee weep so soon away” to a vase of daffodils? He tried for ten minutes to get the words of the quotation in their right order and couldn't, then he gave up, put one of the daffodils between his teeth instead and did a dance. Can you ever imagine Dane doing that? Rain says it's harmless and necessary, all work and no play, etc. Women being out, the next best thing is a skinful of grog. Or so Rain insists. Don't get the idea it happens often, it doesn't, and I gather when it does Rain is the ringleader, so he's along to watch out for them, the naive lot of raw prawns. But I did laugh to think of Dane's halo slipping during the course of a flamenco dance with a daffodil.
It took Dane eight years in Rome to attain his priesthood, and at their beginning no one thought they could ever end. Yet those eight years used themselves up faster than any of the Drogheda people had imagined. Just what they thought he was going to do after he was ordained they didn't know, except that they did assume he would return to Australia. Only Meggie and Justine suspected he would want to remain in Italy, and Meggie at any rate could lull her doubts with memories of his content when he came back each year to his home. He was an Australian, he would want to come home. With Justine it was different. No one dreamed she would come home for good. She was an actress; her career would founder in Australia. Where Dane's career could be pursued with equal zeal anywhere at all. Thus in the eighth year there were no plans as to what the children would do when they came for their annual holiday; instead the Drogheda people were planning their trip to Rome, to see Dane ordained a priest.
“We fizzled out,” said Meggie.
“I beg your pardon, dear?” asked Anne.
They were sitting in a warm corner of the veranda reading, but Meggie's book had fallen neglected into her lap, and she was absently watching the antics of two willy-wagtails on the lawn. It had been a wet year; there were worms everywhere and the fattest, happiest birds anyone ever remembered. Bird songs filled the air from dawn to the last of dusk. “I said we fizzled out,” repeated Meggie, crowlike. “A damp squib. All that promise! Whoever would have guessed it in 1921, when we arrived on Drogheda?” “How do you mean?”
“A total of six sons, plus me. And a year later, two more sons. What would you think? Dozens of children, half a hundred grandchildren? So look at us now. Hal and Stu are dead, none of the ones left alive seem to have any intention of ever getting married, and I, the only one not entitled to pass on the name, have been the only one to give Drogheda its heirs. And even then the gods weren't happy, were they? A son and a daughter. Several grandchildren at least, you might think. But what happens? My son embraces the priesthood and my daughter's an old maid career woman. Another dead end for Drogheda.”
“I don't see what's so strange about it,” said Anne. “After all, what could you expect from the men? Stuck out here as shy as kangas, never meeting the girls they might have married. And with Jims and Patsy, the war to boot. Could you see Jims marrying when he knows Patsy can't? They're far too fond of each other for that. And besides, the land's demanding in a neutered way. It takes just about all they've got to give, because I don't think they have a great deal. In a physical sense, I mean. Hasn't it ever struck you, Meggie? Yours isn't a very highly sexed family, to put it bluntly. And that goes for Dane and Justine, too. I mean, there are some people who compulsively hunt it like tomcats, but not your lot. Though perhaps Justine will marry. There's this German chap Rainer; she seems terribly fond of him.”
“You've hit the nail on the head,” said Meggie, in no mood to be comforted. “She seems terribly fond of him. Just that. After all, she's known him for seven years. If she wanted to marry him, it would have happened ages ago.” “Would it? I know Justine pretty well,” answered Anne truthfully, for she did; better than anyone else on Drogheda, including Meggie and Fee. “I think she's terrified of committing herself to the kind of love marriage would entail, and I must say I admire Rainer. He seems to understand her very well.
Oh, I don't say he's in love with her for sure, but if he is, at least he's got the sense to wait until she's ready to take the plunge.” She leaned forward, her book falling forgotten to the tiles. “Oh, will you listen to that bird? I'm sure even a nightingale couldn't match it.” Then she said what she had been wanting to say for weeks.
“Meggie, why won't you go to Rome to see Dane ordained? Isn't that peculiar? Dane-ordain.”
“I'm not going to Rome!” said Meggie between clenched teeth. “I shall never leave Drogheda again.”
“Meggie, don't! You can't disappoint him so! Go, please! If you don't, Drogheda won't have a single woman there, because you're the only woman young enough to take the flight. But I tell you, if I thought for one minute my body would survive I'd be right on that plane.”
“Go to Rome and see Ralph de Bricassart smirking? I'd rather be dead!” “Oh, Meggie, Meggie! Why must you take out your frustrations on him, and on your son? You said it once yourself-it's your own fault. So beggar your pride, and go to Rome. Please!”
“It isn't a question of pride.” She shivered. “Oh, Anne, I'm frightened to go! Because I don't believe it, I just don't! My flesh creeps when I think about it.”
“And what about the fact he mightn't come home after he's a priest? Did that ever occur to you? He won't be given huge chunks of leave the way he was in the seminary, so if he decides to remain in Rome you may well have to take yourself there if you ever want to see him at all. Go to Rome, Meggie!” “I can't. If you knew how frightened I am! It's not pride, or Ralph scoring one over on me, or any of the things I say it is to stop people asking me questions. Lord knows, I miss both my men so much I'd crawl on my knees to see them if I thought for a minute they wanted me. Oh, Dane would be glad to see me, but Ralph? He's forgotten I ever existed. I'm frightened, I tell you. I know in my bones that if I go to Rome something will happen. So I'm not going.”
“What could happen, for pity's sake?”
“I don't know .... If I did, I'd have something to battle. A feeling, how can I battle a feeling? Because that's all it is. A premonition. As if the gods are gathering.
Anne laughed. “You're becoming a real old woman, Meggie. Stop!” “I can't, I can't! And I am an old woman.”
“Nonsense, you're just in brisk middle age. Well and truly young enough to hop on that plane.”
“Oh, leave me alone!” said Meggie savagely, and picked up her book.
Occasionally a crowd with a purpose converges upon Rome. Not tourism, the voyeuristic sampling of past glories in present relics; not the filling in of a little slice of time between A and B, with Rome a point on the line between those two places. This is a crowd with a single uniting emotion; it bursts with pride, for it is coming to see its son, nephew, cousin, friend ordained a priest in the great basilica which is the most venerated church in the world. Its members put up in humble pensiones, luxury hotels, the homes of friends or relatives. But they are totally united, at peace with each other and with the world. They do the rounds dutifully; the Vatican Museum with the Sistine Chapel at its end like a prize for endurance; the Forum, the Colosseum, the Appian Way, the Spanish Steps, the greedy Trevi Fountain, the son et lumiere. Waiting for the day, filling in time. They will be accorded the special privilege of a private audience with the Holy Father, and for them Rome will find nothing too good.
° ° °
This time it wasn't Dane waiting on the platform to meet Justine, as it had been every other time; he was in retreat. Instead, Rainer Moerling Hartheim prowled the dirty paving like some great animal. He didn't greet her with a kiss, he never did; he just put an arm about her shoulders and squeezed. “Rather like a bear,” said Justine.
“A bear?”
“I used to think when I first met you that you were some sort of missing link, but I've finally decided you're more of a bear than a gorilla. It was an unkind comparison, the gorilla.”
“And bears are kind?”
“Well, perhaps they do one to death just as quickly, but they're more cuddly.” She linked her arm through his and matched his stride, for she was almost as tall as he. “How's Dane? Did you see him before he went into retreat? I could kill Clyde, not letting me go sooner.”
“Dane is as always.”
“You haven't been leading him astray?”
“Me? Certainly not. You look very nice, Herzchen.”
“I'm on my very best behavior, and I bought out every couturier in London. Do you like my new short skirt? They call it the mini.”
“Walk ahead of me, and I'll tell you.”
The hem of the full silk skirt was about midthigh; it swirled as she turned and came back to him. “What do you think, Rain? Is it scandalous? I noticed no one in Paris is wearing this length yet.”
“It proves a point, Herzchen-that with legs as good as yours, to wear a skirt one millimeter longer is scandalous. I'm sure the Romans will agree with me.”
“Which means my arse will be black and blue in an hour instead of a day. Damn them! Though do you know something, Rain?” “What?”
“I've never been pinched by a priest. All these years I've been flipping in and out of the Vatican with nary a pinch to my credit. So I thought maybe if I wore a miniskirt, I might be the undoing of some poor prelate yet.” “You might be my undoing.” He smiled.
“No, really? In orange? I thought you hated me in orange, when I've got orange hair.”
“It inflames the senses, such a busy color.”
“You're teasing me,” she said, disgusted, climbing into his Mercedes limousine, which had a German pennant fluttering from its bonnet talisman. “When did you get the little flag?”
“When I got my new post in the government.”
“No wonder I rated a mention in the News of the World! Did you see it?” “You know I never read rags, Justine.”
“Well, nor do I; someone showed it to me,” she said, then pitched her voice higher and endowed it with a shabby-genteel, fraightfully naice accent. “What up-and-coming carrot-topped Australian actress is cementing very cordial relations with what member of the West German cabinet?” “They can't be aware how long we've known each other,” he said tranquilly, stretching out his legs and making himself comfortable. Justine ran her eyes over his clothes with approval; very casual, very Italian. He was rather in the European fashion swim himself, daring to wear one of the fishing-net shirts which enabled Italian males to demonstrate the hairiness of their chests.
“You should never wear a suit and collar and tie,” she said suddenly. “No? Why not?”
“Machismo is definitely your style-you know, what you've got on now, the gold medallion and chain on the hairy chest. A suit makes you look as if your waistline is bulging, when it really isn't at all.”
For a moment he gazed at her in surprise, then the expression in his eyes became alert, in what she called his “concentrated thinking look.” “A first,” he said.
“What's a first?”
“In the seven years I've known you, you've never before commented upon my appearance except perhaps to disparage it.”
“Oh, dear, haven't I?” she asked, looking a little ashamed. “Heavens, I've thought of it often enough, and never disparagingly.” For some reason she added hastily, “I mean, about things like the way you look in a suit.”
He didn't answer, but he was smiling, as at a very pleasant thought. That ride with Rainer seemed to be the last quiet thing to happen for days. Shortly after they returned from visiting Cardinal de Bricassart and Cardinal di Contini-Verchese, the limousine Rainer had hired deposited the Drogheda contingent at their hotel. Out of the corner of her eye Justine watched Rain's reaction to her family, entirely uncles. Right until the moment her eyes didn't find her mother's face, Justine had been convinced she would change her mind and come to Rome. That she hadn't was a cruel blow; Justine didn't know whether she ached more on Dane's behalf or on her own. But in the meantime here were the Unks, and she was undoubtedly their hostess. Oh, they were so shy! Which one of them was which? The older they got, the more alike they looked. And in Rome they stuck out like-well, like Australian graziers on holiday in Rome. Each one was clad in the city going uniform of affluent squatters: tan elastic-sided riding boots, neutral trousers, tan sports jackets of very heavy, fuzzy wool with side vents and plenty of leather patches, white shirts, knitted wool ties, flat-crowned grey hats with broad brims. No novelty on the streets of Sydney during Royal Easter Show time, but in a late Roman summer, extraordinary. And I can say with double sincerity, thank God for Rain! How good he is with them. I wouldn't have believed anyone could stimulate Patsy into speech, but he's doing it, bless him.
They're talking away like old hens, and where did he get Australian beer for them? He likes them, and he's interested, I suppose. Everything is grist to the mill of a German industrialist-politician, isn't it? How can he stick to his faith, being what he is? An enigma, that's what you are, Rainer Moerling Hartheim. Friend of popes and cardinals, friend of Justine O'neill. Oh, if you weren't so ugly I'd kiss you, I'm so terribly grateful. Lord, fancy being stuck in Rome with the Unks and no Rain! You are well named.
He was sitting back in his chair, listening while Bob told him about shearing, and having nothing better to do because he had so completely taken charge, Justine watched him curiously. Mostly she noticed everything physical about people immediately, but just occasionally that vigilance slipped and people stole up on her, carved a niche in her life without her having made that vital initial assessment. For if it wasn't made, sometimes years would go by before they intruded into her thoughts again as strangers. Like now, watching Rain. That first meeting had been responsible, of course; surrounded by churchmen, awed, frightened, brazening it out. She had noticed only the obvious things: his powerful build, his hair, how dark he was. Then when he had taken her off to dinner the chance to rectify things had been lost, for he had forced an awareness of himself on her far beyond his physical attributes; she had been too interested in what the mouth was saying to look at the mouth.
He wasn't really ugly at all, she decided now. He looked what he was, perhaps, a mixture of the best and the worst. Like a Roman emperor. No wonder he loved the city. It was his spiritual home. A broad face with high, wide cheekbones and a small yet aquiline nose. Thick black brows, straight instead of following the curve of the orbits. Very long, feminine black lashes and quite lovely dark eyes, mostly hooded to hide his thoughts. By far his most beautiful possession was his mouth, neither full nor thin-lipped, neither small nor large, but very well shaped, with a distinct cut to the boundaries of its lips and a peculiar firmness in the way he held it; as if perhaps were he to relax his hold upon it, it might give away secrets about what he was really like. Interesting, to take a face apart which was already so well known, yet not known at all.
She came out of her reverie to find him watching her watch him, which was like being stripped naked in front of a crowd armed with stones. For a moment his eyes held hers, wide open and alert, not exactly startled, rather arrested. Then he transferred his gaze calmly to Bob, and asked a pertinent question about boggis. Justine gave herself a mental shake, told herself not to go imagining things. But it was fascinating, suddenly to see a man who had been a friend for years as a possible lover. And not finding the thought at all repulsive.
There had been a number of successors to Arthur Lestrange, and she hadn't wanted to laugh. Oh, I've come a long way since that memorable night. But I wonder have I actually progressed at all? It's very nice to have a man, and the hell with what Dane said about it being the one man. I'm not going to make it one man, so I'm not going to sleep with Rain; oh, no. It would change too many things, and I'd lose my friend. I need my friend, I can't afford to be without my friend. I shall keep him as I keep Dane, a male human being without any physical significance for me.
The church could hold twenty thousand people, so it wasn't crowded. Nowhere in the world had so much time and thought and genius been put into the creation of a temple of God; it paled the pagan works of antiquity to insignificance. It did. So much love, so much sweat. Bramante's basilica, Michelangelo's dome, Bernini's colonnade. A monument not only to God, but to Man. Deep under the confession in a little stone room Saint Peter himself was buried; here the Emperor Charlemagne had been crowned. The echoes of old voices seemed to whisper among the pouring slivers of light, dead fingers polished the bronze rays behind the high altar and caressed the twisted bronze columns of the baldacchino.
He was lying on the steps, face down, as though dead. What was he thinking? Was there a pain in him that had no right to be there, because his mother had not come? Cardinal Ralph looked through his tears, and knew there was no pain. Beforehand, yes; afterward, certainly. But now, no pain. Everything in him was projected into the moment, the miracle. No room in him for anything which was not God. It was his day of days, and nothing mattered save the task at hand, the vowing of his life and soul to God. He could probably do it, but how many others actually had? Not Cardinal Ralph, though he still remembered his own ordination as filled with holy wonder. With every part of him he had tried, yet something he had withheld.
Not so august as this, my ordination, but I live it again through him. And wonder what he truly is, that in spite of our fears for him he could have passed among us so many years and not made an unfriend, let alone a real enemy. He is loved by all, and he loves all. It never crosses his mind for an instant that this state of affairs is extraordinary. And yet, when he came to us first he was not so sure of himself; we have given him that, for which perhaps our existences are vindicated. There have been many priests made here, thousands upon thousands, yet for him there is something special. Oh, Meggie! Why wouldn't you come to see the gift you've given Our Lord-the gift I could not, having given Him myself? And I suppose that's it, how he can be here today free of pain. Because for today I've been empowered to take his pain to myself, free him from it. I weep his tears, I mourn in his place. And that is how it should be.
Later he turned his head, looked at the row of-Drogheda people in alien dark suits. Bob, Jack, Hughie, Jims, Patsy. A vacant chair for Meggie, then Frank. Justine's fiery hair dimmed under a black lace veil, the only female Cleary present. Rainer next to her. And then a lot of people he didn't know, but who shared in today as fully as the Drogheda people did. Only today it was different, today it was special for him. Today he felt almost as if he, too, had had a son to give. He smiled, and sighed. How must Vittorio feel, bestowing Dane's priesthood upon him?
Perhaps because he missed his mother's presence so acutely, Justine was the first person Dane managed to take aside at the reception Cardinal Vittorio and Cardinal Ralph gave for him. In his black soutane with the high white collar he looked magnificent, she thought; only not like a priest at all. Like an actor playing a priest, until one looked into the eyes. And there it was, the inner light, that something which transformed him from a very good-looking man into one unique.
“Father O'neill,” she said.
“I haven't assimilated it yet, Jus.”
“That isn't hard to understand. I've never felt quite the way I did in Saint Peter's, so what it must have been like for you I can't imagine.” “Oh, I think you can, somewhere inside. If you truly couldn't, you wouldn't be such a fine actress. But with you, Jus, it comes from the unconscious; it doesn't erupt into thought until you need to use it.”
They were sitting on a small couch in a far corner of the room, and no one came to disturb them.
After a while he said, “I'm so pleased Frank came,” looking to where Frank was talking with Rainer, more animation in his face than his niece and nephew had ever seen. “There's an old Rumanian refugee priest I know,” Dane went on, “who has a way of saying, “Oh, the poor one!” with such compassion in his voice .... I don't know, somehow that's what I always find myself saying about our Frank. And yet, Jus, why?”
But Justine ignored the gambit, went straight to the crux. “I could kill Mum!” she said through her teeth. “She had no right to do this to you!” “Oh, Jus! I understand. You've got to try, too. If it had been done in malice or to get back at me I might be hurt, but you know her as well as I do, you know it's neither of those. I'm going down to Drogheda soon. I'll talk to her then, find out what's the matter.” “I suppose daughters are never as patient with their mothers as sons are.” She drew down the corners of her mouth ruefully, shrugged. “Maybe it's just as well I'm too much of a loner ever to inflict myself on anyone in the mother role.”
The blue eyes were very kind, tender; Justine felt her hackles rising, thinking Dane pitied her.
“Why don't you marry Rainer?” he asked suddenly. Her jaw dropped, she gasped. “He's never asked me,” she said feebly. “Only because he thinks you'd say no. But it might be arranged.” Without thinking, she grabbed him by the ear, as she used to do when they were children. “Don't you dare, you dog-collared prawn! Not one word, do you hear? I don't love Rain. He's just a friend, and I want to keep it that way. If you so much as light a candle for it, I swear I'll sit down, cross my eyes and put a curse on you, and you remember how that used to scare the living daylights out of you, don't you?”
He threw back his head and laughed. “It wouldn't work, Justine! My magic is stronger than yours these days. But there's no need to get so worked up about it, you twit. I was wrong, that's all. I assumed there was a case between you and Rain.”
“No, there isn't. After seven years? Break it down, pigs might fly.” Pausing, she seemed to seek for words, then looked at him almost shyly. “Dane, I'm so happy for you. I think if Mum was here she'd feel the same. That's all it needs, for her to see you now, like this. You wait, she'll come around.”
Very gently he took her pointed face between his hands, smiling down at her with so much love that her own hands came up to clutch at his wrists, soak it in through every pore. As if all those childhood years were remembered, treasured.
Yet behind what she saw in his eyes on her behalf she sensed a shadowy doubt, only perhaps doubt was too strong a word; more like anxiety. Mostly he was sure Mum would understand eventually, but he was human, though all save he tended to forget the fact.
“Jus, will you do something for me?” he asked as he let her go. “Anything,” she said, meaning it.
“I've got a sort of respite, to think about what I'm going to do. Two months. And I'm going to do the heavy thinking on a Drogheda horse after I've talked to Mum-somehow I feel I can't sort anything out until after I've talked to her. But first, well. . . I've got to get up my courage to go home. So if you could manage it, come down to the Peloponnese with me for a couple of weeks, tick me off good and proper about being a coward until I get so sick of your voice I put myself on a plane to get away from it.” He smiled at her. “Besides, Jussy, I don't want you to think I'm going to exclude you from my life absolutely, any more than I will Mum. You need your old conscience around occasionally.”
“Oh, Dane, of course I'll go!”
“Good,” he said, then grinned, eyed her mischievously. “I really do need you, Jus. Having you bitching in my ear will be just like old times.” “Uh-uh-uh! No obscenities, Father O'neill!”
His arms went behind his head, he leaned back on the couch contentedly. “I am! Isn't it marvelous? And maybe after I've seen Mum, I can concentrate on Our Lord. I think that's where my inclinations lie, you know. Simply thinking about Our Lord.”
“You ought to have espoused an order, Dane.”
“I still can, and I probably will. I have a whole lifetime; there's no hurry.”
Justine left the party with Rainer, and after she talked of going to Greece with Dane, he talked of going to his office in Bonn. “About bloody time,” she said. “For a cabinet minister you don't seem to do much work, do you? All the papers call you a playboy, fooling around with carrot-topped Australian actresses, you old dog, you.”
He shook his big fist at her. “I pay for my few pleasures in more ways than you'll ever know.”
“Do you mind if we walk, Rain?”
“Not if you keep your shoes on.”
“I have to these days. Miniskirts have their disadvantages; the days of stockings one could peel off easily are over. They've invented a sheer version of theatrical tights, and one can't shed those in public without causing the biggest furor since Lady Godiva. So unless I want to ruin a five-guinea pair of tights, I'm imprisoned in my shoes.”
“At least you improve my education in feminine garb, under as well as over,” he said mildly.
“Go on! I'll bet you've got a dozen mistresses, and undress them all.” “Only one, and like all good mistresses she waits for me in her negligee.” “Do you know, I believe we've never discussed your sex life before? Fascinating! What's she like?”
“Fair, fat, forty and flatulent.”
She stopped dead. “Oh, you're kidding me,” she said slowly. “I can't see you with a woman like that.”
“Why not?”
“You've got too much taste.”
“Chacun a son gout, my dear. I'm nothing much to look at, myself- why should you assume I could charm a young and beautiful woman into being my mistress?” “Because you could!” she said indignantly. “Oh, of course you could!” “My money, you mean?”
“Not, not your money! You're teasing me, you always do! Rainer Moerling Hartheim, you're very well aware how attractive you are, otherwise you wouldn't wear gold medallions and netting shirts. Looks aren't everything-if they were, I'd still be wondering.”
“Your concern for me is touching, Herzchen.”
“Why is it that when I'm with you I feel as if I'm forever running to catch up with you, and I never do?” Her spurt of temper died; she stood looking at him uncertainly. “You're not serious, are you?” “Do you think I am?”
“No! You're not conceited, but you do know how very attractive you are.” “Whether I do or not isn't important. The important thing is that you think I'm attractive.”
She was going to say: Of course I do; I was mentally trying you on as a lover not long ago, but then I decided it wouldn't work, I'd rather keep on having you for my friend. Had he let her say it, he might have concluded his time hadn't come, and acted differently.
As it was, before she could shape the words he had her in his arms, and was kissing her. For at least sixty seconds she stood, dying, split open, smashed, the power in her screaming in wild elation to find a matching power. His mouth-it was beautiful! And his hair, incredibly thick, vital, something to seize in her fingers fiercely. Then he took her face between his hands and looked at her, smiling. “I love you,” he said.
Her hands had gone up to his wrists, but not to enclose them gently, as with Dane; the nails bit in, scored down to meat savagely. She stepped back two paces and stood rubbing her arm across her mouth, eyes huge with fright, breasts heaving.
“It couldn't work,” she panted. “It could never work, Rain!” Off came the shoes; she bent to pick them up, then turned and ran, and within three seconds the soft quick pad of her feet had vanished.
Not that he had any intention of following her, though apparently she had thought he might. Both his wrists were bleeding, and they hurt. He pressed his handkerchief first to one and then to the other, shrugged, put the stained cloth away, and stood concentrating on the pain. After a while he unearthed his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, lit it, and began to walk slowly. No one passing by could have told from his face what he felt. Everything he wanted within his grasp, reached for, lost. Idiot girl. When would she grow up? To feel it, respond to it, and deny it. But he was a gambler, of the win-a- few, lose-a-few kind. He had waited seven long years before trying his luck, feeling the change in her at this ordination time. Yet apparently he had moved too soon. Ah, well. There was always tomorrow-or knowing Justine, next year, the year after that.
Certainly he wasn't about to give up. If he watched her carefully, one day he'd get lucky.
The soundless laugh quivered in him; fair, fat, forty and flatulent. What had brought it to his lips he didn't know, except that a long time ago his ex-wife had said it to him. The four F's, describing the typical victim of gallstones. She had been a martyr to them, poor Annelise, even though she was dark, skinny, fifty and as well corked as a genie in a bottle. What am I thinking of Annelise for, now? My patient campaign of years turned into a rout, and I can do no better than poor Annelise. So, Fraulein Justine O'neill! We shall see.
There were lights in the palace windows; he would go up for a few minutes, talk to Cardinal Ralph, who was looking old. Not well. Perhaps he ought to be persuaded into a medical examination. Rainer ached, but not for Justine; she was young, there was time. For Cardinal Ralph, who had seen his own son ordained, and not known it.
It was still early, so the hotel foyer was crowded. Shoes on, Justine crossed quickly to the stairs and ran up them, head bent. Then for some time her trembling hands couldn't find the room key in her bag and she thought she would have to go down again, brave the crowd about the desk. But it was there; she must have passed her fingers over it a dozen times.
Inside at last, she groped her way to the bed; sat down on its edge and let coherent thought gradually return. Telling herself she was revolted, horrified, disillusioned; all the while staring drearily at the wide rectangle of pale light which was the night sky through the window, wanting to curse, wanting to weep. It could never be the same again, and that was a tragedy. The loss of the dearest friend. Betrayal. Empty words, untrue; suddenly she knew very well what had frightened her so, made her flee from Rain as if he had attempted murder, not a kiss. The rightness of it! The feeling of coming home, when she didn't want to come home any more than she wanted the liability of love. Home was frustration, so was love. Not only that, even if the admission was humiliating; she wasn't sure she could love. If she was capable of it, surely once or twice her guard would have slipped; surely once or twice she would have experienced a pang of something more than tolerant affection for her infrequent lovers. It didn't occur to her that she deliberately chose lovers who would never threaten her self-imposed detachment, so much a part of herself by now that she regarded it as completely natural. For the first time in her life she had no reference point to assist her. There was no time in the past she could take comfort from, no once-deep involvement, either for herself or for those shadowy lovers. Nor could the Drogheda people help, because she had always withheld herself from them, too.
She had had to run from Rain. To say yes, commit herself to him, and then have to watch him recoil when he found out the extent of her inadequacy? Unbearable! He would learn what she was really like, and the knowledge would kill his love for her. Unbearable to say yes, and end in being rebuffed for all time. Far better to do any rebuffing herself. That way at least pride would be satisfied, and Justine owned all her mother's pride. Rain must never discover what she was like beneath all that brick flippancy.
He had fallen in love with the Justine he saw; she had not allowed him any opportunity to suspect the sea of doubts beneath. Those only Dane suspected-no, knew. She bent forward to put her forehead against the cool bedside table, tears running down her face. That was why she loved. Dane so, of course. Knowing what the real Justine was like, and still loving her. Blood helped, so did a lifetime of shared memories, problems, pains, joys. Whereas Rain was a stranger, not committed to her the way Dane was, or even the other members of her family. Nothing obliged him to love her.
She sniffled, wiped her palm around her face, shrugged her shoulders and began the difficult business of pushing her trouble back into some corner of her mind where it could lie peacefully, unremembered. She knew she could do it; she had spent all her life perfecting the technique. Only it meant ceaseless activity, continuous absorption in things outside herself. She reached over and switched on the bedside lamp.
One of the Unks must have delivered the letter to her room, for it was lying on the bedside table, a pale-blue air letter with Queen Elizabeth in its upper corner.
“Darling Justine,” wrote Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, “Come back to the fold, you're needed! At once! There's a part going begging in the new season's repertoire, and a tiny little dicky-bird told me you just might want it. Desdemona, darling? With Marc Simpson as your Othello? Rehearsals for the principals start neat week, if you're interested” If she was interested! Desdemona! Desdemona in London! And with Marc Simpson as Othello! The opportunity of a lifetime. Her mood skyrocketed to a point where the scene with Rain lost significance, or rather assumed a different significance. Perhaps if she was very, very careful she might be able to keep Rain's love; a highly acclaimed, successful actress was too busy to share much of her life with her lovers. It was worth a try. If he looked as if he were getting too close to the truth, she could always back off again. To keep Rain in her life, but especially this new Rain, she would be prepared to do anything save strip off the mask. In the meantime, news like this deserved some sort of celebration. She didn't feel up to facing Rain yet, but there were other people on hand to share her triumph. So she put on her shoes, walked down the corridor to the Unks' communal sitting room, and when Patsy let her in she stood with arms spread wide, beaming.
“Break out the beer, I'm going to be Desdemona!” she announced in ringing tones.
For a moment no one answered, then Bob said warmly, “That's nice, Justine.” Her pleasure didn't evaporate; instead it built up to an uncontrollable elation. Laughing, she flopped into a chair and stared at her uncles. What truly lovely men they were! Of course her news meant nothing to them! They didn't have a clue who Desdemona was. If she had come to tell them she was getting married, Bob's answer would have been much the same. Since the beginning of memory they had been a part of her life, and sadly she had dismissed them as contemptuously as she did everything about Drogheda. The Unks, a plurality having nothing to do with Justine O'neill. Simply members of a conglomerate who drifted in and out of the homestead, smiled at her shyly, avoided her if it meant conversation. Not that they didn't like her, she realized now; only that they sensed how foreign she was, and it made them uncomfortable. But in this Roman world which was alien to them and familiar to her, she was beginning to understand them better. Feeling a glow of something for them which might have been called love, Justine stared from one creased, smiling face to the next. Bob, who was the life force of the unit, the Boss of Drogheda, but in such an unobtrusive way; Jack, who merely seemed to follow Bob around, or maybe it was just that they got along so well together; Hughie, who had a streak of mischief the other two did not, and yet so very like them; Jims and Patsy, the positive and negative sides of a self-sufficient whole; and poor quenched Frank, the only one who seemed plagued by fear and insecurity. All of them save Jims and Patsy, were grizzled now, indeed Bob and Frank were white-haired, but they didn't really look very different from the way she remembered them as a little girl.
“I don't know whether I ought to give you a beer,” Bob said doubtfully, standing with a cold bottle of Swan in his hand. The remark would have annoyed her intensely even half a day ago, but at the moment she was too happy to take offense.
“Look, love, I know it's never occurred to you to offer me one through the course of our sessions with Rain, but honestly I'm a big girl now, and I can handle a beer. I promise it isn't a sin.” She smiled. “Where's Rainer?” Jims asked, taking a full glass from Bob and handing it to her.
“I had a fight with him.”
“With Rainer?”
“Well, yes. But it was all my fault. I'm going to see him later and tell him I'm sorry.” None of the Unks smoked. Though she had never asked for a beer before, on earlier occasions she had sat smoking defiantly while they talked with Rain; now it took more courage than she could command to produce her cigarettes, so she contented herself with the minor victory of the beer, dying to gulp it down thirstily but mindful of their dubious regard. Ladylike sips, Justine, even if you are dryer than a secondhand sermon.
“Rain's a bonzer bloke,” said Hughie, eyes twinkling. Startled, Justine suddenly realized why she had grown so much in importance in their thoughts: she had caught herself a man they'd like to have in the family. “Yes, he is rather,” she said shortly, and changed the subject. “It was a lovely day, wasn't it?”
All the heads bobbed in unison, even Frank's, but they didn't seem to want to discuss it. She could see how tired they were, yet she didn't regret her impulse to visit them. It took a little while for near- atrophied senses and feelings to learn what their proper functions were, and the Unks were a good practice target. That was the trouble with being an island; one forgot there was anything going on beyond its shores.
“What's Desdemona?” Frank asked from the shadows where he hid. Justine launched into a vivid description, charmed by their horror when they learned she would be strangled once a night, and only remembered how tired they must be half an hour later when Patsy yawned. “I must go,” she said, putting down her empty glass. She had not been offered a second beer; one was apparently the limit for ladies. “Thanks for listening to me blather.”
Much to Bob's surprise and confusion, she kissed him good night; Jack edged away but was easily caught, while Hughie accepted the farewell with alacrity. Jims turned bright red, endured it dumbly.
For Patsy, a hug as well as a kiss, because he was a little bit of an island himself. And for Frank no kiss at all, he averted his head; yet when she put her arms around him she could sense a faint echo of some intensity quite missing in the others. Poor Frank. Why was he like that?
Outside their door, she leaned for a moment against the wall. Rain loved her. But when she tried to phone his room the operator informed her he had checked out, returned to Bonn.
No matter. It might be better to wait until London to see him, anyway. A contrite apology via the mail, and an invitation to dinner next time he was in England. There were many things she didn't know about Rain, but of one characteristic she had no doubt at all; he would come, because he hadn't a grudging bone in his body. Since foreign affairs had become his forte, England was one of his most regular ports of call. “You wait and see, my lad,” she said, staring into her mirror and seeing his face instead of her own. “I'm going to make England your most important foreign affair, or my name isn't Justine O'neill.”
It had not occurred to her that perhaps as far as Rain was concerned, her name was indeed the crux of the matter. Her patterns of behavior were set, and marriage was no part of them. That Rain might want to make her over into Justine Hartheim never even crossed her mind. She was too busy remembering the quality of his kiss, and dreaming of more.
There remained only the task of telling Dane she couldn't go to Greece with him, but about this she was untroubled. Dane would understand, he always did. Only somehow she didn't think she'd tell him all the reasons why she wasn't able to go. Much as she loved her brother, she didn't feel like listening to what would be one of his sternest homilies ever. He wanted her to marry Rain, so if she told him what her plans for Rain were, he'd cart her off to Greece with him if it meant forcible abduction. What Dane's ears didn't hear, his heart couldn't grieve about.
“Dear Rain,” the note said. “Sorry I ran like a hairy goat the other night, can't think what got into me. The hectic day and everything, I suppose. Please forgive me for behaving like an utter prawn. I'm ashamed of myself for making so much fuss about a trifle. And I daresay the day had got to you, too, words of love and all, I mean.
So I tell you what-you forgive me, and I'll forgive you. Let's be friends, please. I can't bear to be at outs with you. Next time you're in London, come to dinner at my place and we'll formally draft out a peace treaty.”
As usual it was signed plain “Justine.” No words even of affection; she never used them. Frowning, he studied the artlessly casual phrases as if he could see through them to what was really in her mind as she wrote. It was certainly an overture of friendship, but what else? Sighing, he was forced to admit probably very little. He had frightened her badly; that she wanted to retain his friendship spoke of how much he meant to her, but he very much doubted whether she understood exactly what she felt for him. After all, now she knew he loved her; if she had sorted herself out sufficiently to realize she loved him too, she would have come straight out with it in her letter. Yet why had she returned to London instead of going to Greece with Dane? He knew he shouldn't hope it was because of him, but despite his misgivings, hope began to color his thoughts so cheerfully he buzzed his secretary. It was 10 A.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the best hour to find her at home. “Get me Miss O'neill's London flat,” he instructed, and waited the intervening seconds with a frown pulling at the inner corners of his brows. “Rain!” Justine said, apparently delighted. “Did you get my letter?” “This minute.”
After a delicate pause she said. “And will you come to dinner soon?” “I'm going to be in England this coming Friday and Saturday. Is the notice too short?”
“Not if Saturday evening is all right with you. I'm in rehearsal for Desdemona, so Friday's out.”
“Desdemona?”
“That's right, you don't know! Clyde wrote to me in Rome and offered me the part. Marc Simpson as Othello, Clyde directing personally. Isn't it wonderful? I came back to London on the first plane.”
He shielded his eyes with his hand, thankful his secretary was safely in her outer office, not sitting where she could see his face. “Justine, Herzchen, that's marvelous news!” he managed to say enthusiastically. “I was wondering what brought you back to London.”
“Oh, Dane understood,” she said lightly, “and in a way I think he was quite glad to be alone. He had concocted a story about needing me to bitch at him to go home, but I think it was all more for his second reason, that he doesn't want me to feel excluded from his life now he's a priest.” “Probably,” he agreed politely.
“Saturday evening, then,” she-said. “Around six, then we can have a leisurely peace treaty session with the aid of a bottle or two, and I'll feed you after we've reached a satisfactory compromise. All right?” “Yes, of course. Goodbye, Herzchen.”
Contact was cut off abruptly by the sound of her receiver going down; he sat for a moment with his still in his hand, then shrugged and replaced it on its cradle. Damn Justine! She was beginning to come between him and his work. She continued to come between him and his work during the succeeding days, though it was doubtful if anyone suspected. And on Saturday evening a little after six he presented himself at her apartment, empty-handed as usual because she was a difficult person to bring gifts. She was indifferent to flowers, never ate candy and would have thrown a more expensive offering carelessly in some corner, then forgotten it. The only gifts Justine seemed to prize were those Dane had given her.
“Champagne before dinner?” he asked, looking at her in surprise. “Well, I think the occasion calls for it, don't you? It was our first-ever breaking of relations, and this is our first-ever reconciliation,” she answered plausibly, indicating a comfortable chair for him and settling herself on the tawny kangaroo-fur rug, lips parted as if she had already rehearsed replies to anything he might say next. But conversation was beyond him, at least until he was better able to assess her mood, so he watched her in silence. Until he had kissed her it had been easy to keep himself partially aloof, but now, seeing her again for the first time since, he admitted that it was going to be a great deal harder in the future.
Probably even when she was a very old woman she would still retain something not quite fully mature about face and bearing; as though essential womanliness would always pass her by. That cool, self-centered, logical brain seemed to dominate her completely, yet for him she owned a fascination so potent he doubted if he would ever be able to replace her with any other woman. Never once had he questioned whether she was worth the long struggle. Possibly from a philosophical standpoint she wasn't. Did it matter? She was a goal, an aspiration.
“You're looking very nice tonight; Herzchen,” he said at last, tipping his champagne glass to her in a gesture half toast, half acknowledgment of an adversary.
A coal fire simmered unshielded in the small Victorian grate, but Justine didn't seem to mind the heat, huddled close to it with her eyes fixed on him. Then she put her glass on the hearth with a ringing snap and sat forward, her arms linked about her knees, bare feet hidden by folds of densely black gown. “I can't stand beating around the bush,” she said. “Did you mean it, Rain?” Suddenly relaxing deeply, he lay back in his chair. “Mean what?” “What you said in Rome . . . That you loved me.”
“Is that what this is all about, Herzchen?”
She looked away, shrugged, looked back at him and nodded. “Well, of course.”
“But why bring it up again? You told me what you thought, and I had gathered tonight's invitation wasn't extended to bring up the past, only plan a future.”
“Oh, Rain! You're acting as if I'm making a fuss! Even if I was, surely you can see why.”
“No, I can't.” He put his glass down and bent forward to watch her more closely. “You gave me to understand most emphatically that you wanted no part of my love, and I had hoped you'd at least have the decency to refrain from discussing it.”
It had not occurred to her that this meeting, no matter what its outcome, would be so uncomfortable; after all, he had put himself in the position of a suppliant, and ought to be waiting humbly for her to reverse her decision. Instead he seemed to have turned the tables neatly. Here she was feeling like a naughty schoolgirl called upon to answer for some idiotic prank. “Look, sport, you're the one who changed the status quo, not me! I didn't ask you to come tonight so I could beg forgiveness for having wounded the great Hartheim ego!”
“On the defensive, Justine?”
She wriggled impatiently. “Yes, dammit! How do you manage to do that to me, Rain? Oh, I wish just once you'd let me enjoy having the upper hand!” “If I did, you'd throw me out like a smelly old rag,” he said, smiling. “I can do that yet, mate!”
“Nonsense! If you haven't done it by now you never will. You'll go on seeing me because I keep you on the hop-you never know what to expect from me.”
“Is that why you said you loved me?” she asked painfully. “Was it only a ploy to keep me on the hop?”
“What do you think?”
“I think you're a prize bastard!” she said through her teeth, and marched across the rug on her knees until she was close enough to give him the full benefit of her anger. “Say you love me again, you big Kraut prawn, and watch me spit in your eye!” He was angry, too. “No, I'm not going to say it again! That isn't why you asked me to come, is it? My feelings don't concern you one bit, Justine. You asked me to come so you could experiment with your own feelings, and it didn't enter your mind to consider whether that was being fair to me.” Before she could move away he leaned forward, gripped her arms near the shoulders and clamped her body between his legs, holding her firmly. Her rage vanished at once; she flattened her palms on his thighs and lifted her face. But he didn't kiss her. He let go of her arms and twisted to switch off the lamp behind him, then relaxed his hold on her and laid his head back against the chair, so that she wasn't sure if he had dimmed the room down to glowing coals as the first move in his love-making, or simply to conceal his expression. Uncertain, afraid of outright rejection, she waited to be told what to do. She should have realized earlier that one didn't tamper with people like Rain. They were as invincible as death.
Why couldn't she put her head on his lap and say: Rain, love me, I need you so much and I'm so sorry? Oh, surely if she could get him to make love to her some emotional key would turn and it would all come tumbling out, released .... Still withdrawn, remote, he let her take off his jacket and tie, but by the time she began to unbutton his shirt she knew it wasn't going to work. The kind of instinctive erotic skills which could make the most mundane operation exciting were not in her repertoire. This was so important, and she was making an absolute mess of it. Her fingers faltered, her mouth puckered. She burst into tears.
“Oh, no! Herzchen, liebchen, don't cry!” He pulled her onto his lap and turned her head into his shoulder, his arms around her. “I'm sorry, Herzchen, I didn't mean to make you cry.” “Now you know,” she said between sobs. “I'm a miserable failure; I told you it wouldn't work! Rain, I wanted so badly to keep you, but I knew it wouldn't work if I let you see how awful I am!”
“No, of course it wouldn't work. How could it? I wasn't helping you, Herzchen.” He tugged at her hair to bring her face up to his, kissed her eyelids, her wet cheeks, the corners of her mouth. “It's my fault, Herzchen, not yours. I was paying you back; I wanted to see how far you could go without encouragement. But I think I have mistaken your motives, nicht wahr?” His voice had grown thicker, more German. “And I say, if this is what you want you shall have it, but it shall be together.”
“Please, Rain, let's call it off! I haven't got what it takes. I'll only disappoint you!”
“Oh, you've got it, Herzchen, I've seen it on the stage. How can you doubt yourself when you're with me?”
Which was so right her tears dried.
“Kiss me the way you did in Rome,” she whispered. Only it wasn't like the kiss in Rome at all. That had been something raw, startled, explosive; this was very languorous and deep, an opportunity to taste and smell and feel, settle by layers into voluptuous ease. Her fingers returned to the buttons, his went to the zipper of her dress, then he covered her hand with his and thrust it inside his shirt, across skin matted with fine soft hair. The sudden hardening of his mouth against her throat brought a helpless response so acute she felt faint, thought she was falling and found she had, flat on the silky rug with Rain looming above her. His shirt had come off, perhaps more, she couldn't see, only the fire glancing off his shoulders spread over her, and the beautiful stern mouth. Determined to destroy its discipline for all time, she locked her fingers in his hair and made him kiss her again, harder, harder!
And the feel of him! Like coming home, recognizing every part of him with her lips and hands and body, yet fabulous and strange. While the world sank down to the minute width of the firelight lapping against darkness, she opened herself to what he wanted, and learned something he had kept entirely concealed for as long as she had known him; that he must have made love to her in imagination a thousand times. Her own experience and newborn intuition told her so. She was completely disarmed. With any other man the intimacy and astonishing sensuality would have appalled her, but he forced her to see that these were things only she had the right to command. And command them she did. Until finally she cried for him to finish it, her arms about him so strongly she could feel the contours of his very bones. The minutes wore away, wrapped in a sated peace. They had fallen into an identical rhythm of breathing, slow and easy, his head against her shoulder, her leg thrown across him. Gradually her rigid clasp on his back relaxed, became a dreamy, circular caress. He sighed, turned over and reversed the way they were lying, quite unconsciously inviting her to slide still deeper into the pleasure of being with him. She put her palm on his flank to feel the texture of his skin, slid her hand across warm muscle and cupped it around the soft, heavy mass in his groin. To feel the curiously alive, independent movements within it was a sensation quite new to her; her past lovers had never interested her sufficiently to want to prolong her sexual curiosity to this languid and undemanding aftermath. Yet suddenly it wasn't languid and undemanding at all, but so enormously exciting she wanted him all over again. Still she was taken unaware, knew a suffocated surprise when he slipped his arms across her back, took her head in his hands and held her close enough to see there was nothing controlled about his mouth, shaped now solely because of her, and for her. Tenderness and humility were literally born in her in that moment.
It must have shown in her face, for he was gazing at her with eyes grown so bright she couldn't bear them, and bent over to take his upper lip between her own. Thoughts and senses merged at last, but her cry was smothered soundless, an unuttered wail of gladness which shook her so deeply she lost awareness of everything beyond impulse, the mindless guidance of each urgent minute. The world achieved its ultimate contraction, turned in upon itself, and totally disappeared.
Rainer must have kept the fire going, for when gentle London daylight soaked through the folds of the curtains the room was still warm. This time when he moved Justine became conscious of it, and clutched his arm fearfully. “Don't go!”
“I'm not, Herzchen.” He twitched another pillow from the sofa, pushed it behind his head and shifted her closer in to his side, sighing softly. “All right?”
“Yes.”
“Are you cold?”
“No, but if you are we could go to bed.”
“After making love to you for hours on a fur rug? What a comedown! Even if your sheets are black silk.”
“They're ordinary old white ones, cotton. This bit of Drogheda is all right, isn't it?”
“Bit of Drogheda?”
“The rug! It's made of Drogheda kangaroos,” she explained. “Not nearly exotic or erotic enough. I'll order you a tiger skin from India.”
“Reminds me of a poem I heard once:
Would you like to sin With Elinor Glyn On a tiger skin ?
Or would you prefer
To err with her On some other fur?
“Well, Herzchen, I must say it's high time you bounced back! Between the demands of Eros and Morpheus, you haven't been flippant in half a day.” He smiled.
“I don't feel the need at the moment,” she said with an answering smile, settling his hand comfortably between her legs. “The tiger skin doggerel just popped out because it was too good to resist, but I haven't got a single skeleton left to hide from you, so there's not much point in flippancy, is there?” She sniffed, suddenly aware of a faint odor of stale fish drifting on the air. “Heavens, you didn't get any dinner and now it's time for breakfast! I can't expect you to live on love!”
“Not if you expect such strenuous demonstrations of it, anyway.” “Go on, you enjoyed every moment of it.”
“Indeed I did.” He sighed, stretched, yawned. “I wonder if you have any idea how happy I am.”
“Oh, I think so,” she said quietly:
He raised himself on one elbow to look at her. “Tell me, was Desdemona the only reason you came back to London?”
Grabbing his ear, she tweaked it painfully. “Now it's my turn to pay you back for all those headmasterish questions! What do you think?” He prized her fingers away easily, grinning. “If you don't answer me, Herzchen, I'll strangle you far more permanently than Marc does.” “I came back to London to do Desdemona, but because of you. I haven't been able to call my life my own since you kissed me in Rome, and well you know it. You're a very intelligent man, Rainer Moerling Hartheim.”
“Intelligent enough to have known I wanted you for my wife almost the first moment I saw you,” he said.
She sat up quickly. “Wife?”
“Wife. If I'd wanted you for my mistress I'd have taken you years ago, and I could have. I know how your mind works; it would have been relatively easy. The only reason I didn't was because I wanted you for my wife and I knew you weren't ready to accept the idea of a husband.”
“I don't know that I am now,” she said, digesting it. He got to his feet, pulling her up to stand against him. “Well, you can put in a little practice by getting me some breakfast. If this was my house I'd do the honors, but in your kitchen you're the cook.”
“I don't mind getting your breakfast this morning, but theoretically to commit myself until the day I die?” She shook her head. “I don't think that's my cup of tea, Rain.”
It was the same Roman emperor's face, and imperially unperturbed by threats of insurrection. “Justine, this is not something to play with, nor am I someone to play with. There's plenty of time. You have every reason to know I can be patient. But get it out of your head entirely that this can be settled in any way but marriage. I have no wish to be known as anyone less important to you than a husband.”
“I'm not giving up acting!” she said aggressively. “Verfluchte Kiste, did I ask you to? Grow up, Justine! Anyone would think I was condemning you to a life sentence over a sink and stove! We're not exactly on the breadline, you know. You can have as many servants as you want, nannies for the children, whatever else is necessary.”
“Erk!” said Justine, who hadn't thought of children. He threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, Herzchen, this is what's known as the morning after with a vengeance! I'm a fool to bring up realities, so soon, I know, but all you have to do at this stage is think about them. Though I give you fair warning-while you're making your decision, remember that if I can't have you for my wife, I don't want you at all.”
She threw her arms around him, clinging fiercely. “Oh, Rain, don't make it so hard!” she cried.
° ° °
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