Margaret Way - Six Australian Heroes

‘But why would you think that? Everyone is capable of love.’

‘I know that now. But till I met you I refused to let it into my life.’

‘You have to tell me why, Ryan. You have to make me understand.

I do love you, more than I ever thought possible. But I can’t marry you unless I know why you felt like that.’

He sighed, then nodded. ‘You’re right; I know you’re right. It’s just so damned hard to talk about it, that’s all.’

‘If you truly love me, Ryan, then you have to trust me with your past. I promise I will never tell another living soul. Not Alison. Not anyone.’

Laura could see the difficulty he was still having, opening up to her. What terrible trauma had he endured as a child, she wondered, that would make him retreat from emotion as he had? She hated to think he might have been abused in some way, but what else could it be?

‘I love you,’ she repeated. ‘I will always love you, no matter what you tell me.’

He still didn’t speak so she just sat there and said nothing further. The long line of cars was making slow progress on their way back to the house, giving him enough time to decide whether to confide in her or not.

‘My mother didn’t die of cancer,’ he said at last. ‘She was murdered.’

Laura only just managed not to gasp in shock, for it was the last thing she was expecting.

‘But not by any stranger,’ he added in a rough, emotion-charged voice. ‘By my father. Her de facto husband. The man she said she loved. The man who claimed he loved her , even as she lay battered to death at his feet.’

‘Oh, Ryan …’

‘I found her, you know, when I came home from school. Lying next to the kitchen table in a pool of blood.’

‘Oh my God …’

‘She’d cooked me a cake. It was still on the table. It was my twelfth birthday.’

Laura closed her eyes. Lord in heaven, no child should have to endure that. She’d thought she’d had it bad when her parents had been killed. But it had been an accident. They hadn’t been murdered.

‘He was sitting on the floor next to her, crying. I … I …’

When it was obvious he could not go on, Laura reached over and placed her hand gently over his, which was suddenly gripping the wheel like a drowning man holding on to a piece of flotsam. ‘You don’t have to tell me any more right now. I can see you had good reasons to reject love and marriage and fatherhood. We’ll talk about it later.’ Much later.

Ryan shook his head. ‘No, I want to tell you now. I want you to understand. It had been going on for years—the violence. The beatings. Not me, just Mum. The only times he hit me were when I tried to protect her. Even then he would just push me aside. He was insanely jealous of her. Wouldn’t let her go to work, wouldn’t let her leave the house or have any more babies. When she became pregnant once—I think I was about seven—he accused her of having an affair, then he punched her in the stomach over and over till she miscarried.’

‘Oh my God! That’s appalling, Ryan. But didn’t people know what was going on? Your neighbours? Your grandparents?’

‘Domestic violence was very common where we lived. A lot of the men were unemployed. My father did work occasionally, but he was unreliable. He was a drunk, you see. We mostly lived on welfare, in a housing-commission place which should have been condemned.

‘As for relatives, Dad refused to have anything to do with any relatives, especially Mum’s. Though I knew my Mum’s mother was alive. Mum told me her name and where she lived and said if anything ever happened to her that I was to go to my grandmother’s place. She even hid some money in a secret place which she called my escape money. Many times I thought about taking it and just going, but how could I leave her to him? I begged her to come with me but she wouldn’t. She said she loved him. I could never understand that. It made no sense to me.’

‘I don’t think she loved him at all by then, Ryan. She was simply scared to death of him. I had a battered wife as a client once. She stabbed her husband in the end.’

‘I thought about killing my father several times. I wish I had.’

‘I can imagine. So what happened to him? I presume he was arrested for murder?’

‘He pleaded guilty and got twenty years. But he was bashed to death a few months later in jail. It seems the other prisoners don’t take kindly to wife killers.’

‘I can understand that. And I can understand you now, Ryan.’ Very much so, the poor darling. It was no wonder he never wanted to talk about the past, and no wonder he’d rejected love for so long. ‘I really appreciate your confiding in me, but you know what? I think we’ve done enough talking about the past for today. I would much prefer to talk about the future.’

He glanced over at her and smiled. ‘A woman after my own heart.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said, smiling back at him. ‘I am after your heart.’

‘You already have it, my love.’

Her own heart turned over. ‘I’m still coming to terms with that.’

‘You’re not the only one. When I realised I loved you, I wasn’t sure what to do because I thought you would never love me back. I mean, how could you possibly love such a selfish, self-centred, screwed-up individual like me?’

Laura groaned. ‘I hated myself afterwards for saying that, because I don’t think that at all. I think you’re a fine man, decent and kind, with a warm, loving soul. Look at the way you talked about grandmothers at the service just now. It was beautiful, the words you said.’

Ryan’s heart squeezed tight at her sweet compliments. ‘Can I take it, then, that you will marry me?’

Her eyes shone as she looked over at him. ‘Whenever and wherever you would like.’

‘How about first thing in the New Year, up here in Jane’s favourite chapel?’

Laura smiled. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me.’

‘I CHRISTEN you Marisa Jane Alison Armstrong,’ the minister said, the same minister who’d pronounced Ryan and Laura man and wife eleven months earlier in the same church.

‘She was so good,’ Alison complimented Laura when she handed the baby back after the ceremony. ‘Not a peep out of her, not even when the holy water was poured over her forehead.’

‘She loves water,’ Ryan said proudly. ‘I’ve got her booked in for swimming lessons when she turns six months.’

Alison and Laura exchanged amused glances.

‘And when is she going to start playing soccer?’ Alison’s husband asked with a twinkle in his eye.

‘Never too soon, Pete,’ Ryan replied. ‘Four or five is a good age. That way she can be a striker and not a boring old goalkeeper.’

‘A striker,’ Laura murmured, rolling her eyes and shaking her head. She still found it hard to believe just what a besotted father Ryan had become. As soon as he had found out she was pregnant, he’d turned into a real mother hen. When she’d suffered from morning sickness during her early weeks, he’d insisted she stop applying for new jobs and take it easy at home, a move which hadn’t entirely displeased her; her own priorities had changed by then. But she’d insisted she at least remain his lawyer, to keep her hand in. She loved coming to his office every Friday afternoon at three p.m., though nowadays she was dressed a little more stylishly. Sometimes they didn’t get much work done.

‘Everyone back to the house for drinks,’ Cynthia chimed in.

‘Everyone’ was not a large group, the only guests at the christening being Alison and Peter, along with Lisa and Shane, Bill and Cynthia. Their wedding had been a much larger affair with lots of Ryan’s old friends and clients attending, followed by a slap-up reception at a local five-star resort.