It never occurred to her that he might have thought she had died in the explosion, rather than discovering it the next morning, as she had, when she drove the Cabriolet back from the coastal beach where they had first gone, and where—after Keith told her he was dead—she, undone with grief, had driven to think of Dorrigo and ended up sleeping the night.
In recent years she sometimes had the fancy of seeking Dorrigo out. She had been on the edge of it several times—even finding his number and writing it down—but she had not really been on the edge of anything. Every time she thought about contacting him she felt overwhelmed. What did she want of him? What would he want of her, if anything? Sometimes she wondered if he would even have a strong memory of her. And, in any case, what would she say? That she had thought him dead?
How to tell him of the inheritance, comfortable, in the wake of Keith’s death; of the second marriage, long after the war, pleasant, fun, to a bookmaker better at losing money than keeping it, who blew the lot then disappeared, it was said, to America. And that was about it. One or two others, brief encounters, more or less. Mostly less. How to tell him it had not been love, not even with the bookmaker? Something lighter—a hat or a dress or a cloud. But who remembers a cloud?
And whenever she came close to writing a letter, making a phone call, she saw before her the huge obstacle of his rejection of her in never having sought her out, in not having come back for her after the war, as he had promised. Now their positions were changed utterly: he was the famous Dorrigo Evans, forever rising, and she nobody, sinking. And then had come the diagnosis. How to tell him that?
Her sister called a second time.
Yes, she said, one minute more.
She was so weary. She had forgotten so much about him. But it had been him. He was not dead and nor yet was she. It was enough. She took her necklace off and rolled the pearl in her fingers. She felt many things. Then she put it down. He had become someone, or more than someone—she could see that he was passing into something not a person.
She, on the other hand, would soon be nothing. There were treatments—extreme and, her oncologist had told her, essentially futile. She’d had two cleaning jobs, and between them battled to get by, but had now thrown them in, after her sister agreed to nurse her. Her dreams were long ago spent.
Now she sought pleasure in sunsets, in her friends, few but loved by her, in the charms of her city—the warmth of early morning, the smell of bitumen and buildings after wild rain, the daily summer carnival of its beaches, the view of it from the bridge of a sunny afternoon, the strangers she sometimes met, spoiling her nieces, the pleasant solitude of memory that the evening of a summer’s day allowed. Sometimes she felt happy.
Occasionally, she remembered a room by the sea and the moon and him, the green hand of a clock floating in the darkness and the sound of waves crashing, and a feeling unlike anything she had known before or ever knew again.
She would not contact him. He had his life, she had hers: the merge was impossible to dream. And what we cannot dream we can never do.
In eighteen months—six more than she had been given—she would be buried in a suburban cemetery, an unremarkable lot amidst acres of similarly unremarkable graves. No one would ever see her again, and after a time even her nieces’ memories would fade and then, like them also, finally be no more. All that would remain, luminous in the long night of the earth, would be a pearl necklace with which she had asked to be buried.
11
THAT NIGHT DORRIGO Evans flew to Melbourne, from there the next day he got the morning flight to Hobart; in the overwhelming drone of the 707’s engines and the strange oblivion they invited he found a restful limbo. His flight’s descent into Hobart was marred by violent winds and heavy smoke coming from bushfires in the island’s south; the plane dropped, pitched and tumbled like a pea in a violently boiling pot. They disembarked into the odour of ash and the slap of wind-gusted heat.
He was welcomed by old Freddy Seymour, a surgeon of disputed years who ran the Tasmanian chapter of the College of Surgeons, and who, somewhat eccentrically, drove an old green 1948 Ford Mercury, kept, like Freddy, in a state of immaculate grace in denial of its age. The College of Surgeons was hosting a luncheon in Dorrigo’s honour in a Hobart hotel that day. After that, Dorrigo was heading to Fern Tree—the village just out of Hobart, located in picturesque mountain forest, where Ella’s sister lived—and his family. He rang Ella from the airport’s public phone; her sister was gone till mid-afternoon with her car. In any case, it was too hot to do anything other than stay put with the kids. She said it was pleasantly cool in the shade of the vast eucalypts and she couldn’t think of a better place to be.