Colleen McCullough - The Thorn Birds

“Did I tell you I was going home to Drogheda for good?” she asked suddenly.

He was taking a cigarette out of his case; the big hands didn’t falter or tremble, but proceeded smoothly with their task. “You know very well you didn’t tell me,” he said.

“Then I’m telling you now.”

“When did you come to this decision?”

“Five days ago. I’m leaving at the end of this week, I hope. It can’t come soon enough.”

“I see.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say about it?”

“What else is there to say, except that I wish you happiness in whatever you do?” He spoke with such complete composure she winced.

“Why, thank you!” she said airily. “Aren’t you glad I won’t be in your hair much longer?”

“You’re not in my hair, Justine,” he answered.

She abandoned Natasha, picked up the poker and began rather savagely nudging the crumbling logs, which had burned away to hollow shells; they collapsed inward in a brief flurry of sparks, and the heat of the fire abruptly decreased. “It must be the demon of destructiveness in us, the impulse to poke the guts out of a fire. It only hastens the end. But what a beautiful end, isn’t it, Rain?”

Apparently he wasn’t interested in what happened to fires when they were poked, for he merely asked, “By the end of the week, eh? You’re not wasting much time.”

“What’s the point in delaying?”

“And your career?”

“I’m sick of my career. Anyway, after Lady Macbeth what is there left to do?”

“Oh, grow up, Justine! I could shake you when you come out with such sophomoric rot! Why not simply say you’re not sure the theater has any challenge for you anymore, and that you’re home-sick?”

“All right, all right, all right! Have it any way you bloody well want! I was being my usual flippant self. Sorry I offended!” She jumped to her feet. “Dammit, where are my shoes? What’s happened to my coat?”

Fritz appeared with both articles of clothing, and drove her home. Rain excused himself from accompanying her, saying he had things to do, but as she left he was sitting by the freshly built up fire, Natasha on his lap, looking anything but busy.

“Well,” said Meggie to her mother, “I hope we’ve done the right thing.”

Fee peered at her, nodded. “Oh, yes, I’m sure of it. The trouble with Justine is that she isn’t capable of making a decision like this, so we don’t have any choice. We must make it for her.”

“I’m not sure I like playing God. I think I know what she really wants to do, but even if I could tax her with it face to face, she’d prevaricate.”

“The Cleary pride,” said Fee, smiling faintly. “It does crop up in the most unexpected people.”

“Go on, it’s not all Cleary pride! I’ve always fancied there was a little dash of Armstrong in it as well.”

But Fee shook her head. “No. Whyever I did what I did, pride hardly entered into it. That’s the purpose of old age, Meggie. To give us a breathing space before we die, in which to see why we did what we did.”

“Provided senility doesn’t render us incapable first,” said Meggie dryly. “Not that there’s any danger of that in you. Nor in me, I suppose.”

“Maybe senility’s a mercy shown to those who couldn’t face retrospection. Anyway, you’re not old enough yet to say you’ve avoided senility. Give it another twenty years.”

“Another twenty years! ” Meggie echoed, dismayed. “Oh, it sounds so long!”

“Well, you could have made those twenty years less lonely, couldn’t you?” Fee asked, knitting industriously.

“Yes, I could. But it wouldn’t have been worth it, Mum. Would it?” She tapped Justine’s letter with the knob of one ancient knitting needle, the slightest trace of doubt in her tone. “I’ve dithered long enough. Sitting here ever since Rainer came, hoping I wouldn’t need to do anything at all, hoping the decision wouldn’t rest with me. Yet he was right. In the end, it’s been for me to do.”

“Well, you might concede I did a bit too,” Fee protested, injured. “That is, once you surrendered enough of your pride to tell me all about it.”

“Yes, you helped,” said Meggie gently.

The old clock ticked; both pairs of hands continued to flash about the tortoise-shell stems of their needles.

“Tell me something, Mum,” said Meggie suddenly. “Why did you break over Dane when you didn’t over Daddy or Frank or Stu?”

“Break?” Fee’s hands paused, laid down the needles: she could still knit as well as in the days when she could see perfectly. “How do you mean, break?”

“As though it killed you.”

“They all killed me, Meggie. But I was younger for the first three, so I had the energy to conceal it better. More reason, too. Just like you now. But Ralph knew how I felt when Daddy and Stu died. You were too young to have seen it.” She smiled. “I adored Ralph, you know. He was… someone special. Awfully like Dane.”

“Yes, he was. I never realized you’d seen that, Mum—I mean their natures. Funny. You’re a Darkest Africa to me. There are so many things about you I don’t know.”

“I should hope so!” said Fee with a snort of laughter. Her hands remained quiet. “Getting back to the original subject—if you can do this now for Justine, Meggie, I’d say you’ve gained more from your troubles than I did from mine. I wasn’t willing to do as Ralph asked and look out for you. I wanted my memories… nothing but my memories. Whereas you’ve no choice. Memories are all you’ve got.”

“Well, they’re a comfort, once the pain dies down. Don’t you think so? I had twenty-six whole years of Dane, and I’ve learned to tell myself that what happened must be for the best, that he must have been spared some awful ordeal he might not have been strong enough to endure. Like Frank, perhaps, only not the same. There are worse things than dying, we both know that.”

“Aren’t you bitter at all?” asked Fee.

“Oh, at first I was, but for their sakes I’ve taught myself not to be.”

Fee resumed her knitting. “So when we go, there will be no one,” she said softly. “Drogheda will be no more. Oh, they’ll give it a line in the history books, and some earnest young man will come to Gilly to interview anyone he can find who remembers, for the book he’s going to write about Drogheda. Last of the mighty New South Wales stations. But none of his readers will ever know what it was really like, because they couldn’t. They’d have to have been a part of it.”

“Yes,” said Meggie, who hadn’t stopped knitting. “They’d have to have been a part of it.”

Saying goodbye to Rain in a letter, devastated by grief and shock, had been easy; in fact enjoyable in a cruel way, for she had lashed back then—I’m in agony, so ought you to be. But this time Rain hadn’t put himself in a position where a Dear John letter was possible. It had to be dinner at their favorite restaurant. He hadn’t suggested his Park Lane house, which disappointed but didn’t surprise her. No doubt he intended saying even his final goodbyes under the benign gaze of Fritz. Certainly he wasn’t taking any chances.

For once in her life she took care that her appearance should please him; the imp which usually prodded her into orange frills seemed to have retired cursing. Since Rain liked unadorned styles, she put on a floor-length silk jersey dress of dull burgundy red, high to the neck, long tight sleeves. She added a big flat collar of tortuous gold studded with garnets and pearls, and matching bracelets on each wrist. What horrible, horrible hair. It was never disciplined enough to suit him. More makeup than normal, to conceal the evidence of her depression. There. She would do if he didn’t look too closely.