The Climate of Courage. Jon Cleary
they saw the dancing tops of the pine trees that identified Manly.
“Don’t let’s talk about losing,” he said. “There are more important things to think about to-night.”
“Spoken like a true man,” she said, and kissed him lightly.
THIS TRIP to Katoomba looked as if it was going to be a waste of time. Greg lay on his back staring up at the ceiling and tried to remember what he’d imagined his homecoming would be like. Not the public homecoming, the photographers and the reporters and everyone congratulating him. That had been just as he’d expected it and there had been no disappointment there. But though he’d enjoyed it all, that wasn’t what he had come home for. He had come home to be with Sarah again, to revive the past and all he had remembered in the lonely nights overseas but the past hadn’t caught up with him and sometimes, like now, he felt as lonely as he had ever felt in the Middle East.
He lay beside her now and said, “What’s the matter, hon?”
“How do you mean?”
“You know how I mean. Have I got repulsive or something while I’ve been away?”
“No.”
“You used to like it once. What’s got into you?”
It was bright moonlight outside. A swathe of it, slanting through the window lay across the bed. Sarah too was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, unmoving as if asleep, and he had the feeling she was hardly listening to him. The side of her face towards him was in deep shadow and all he could see was the silhouette of her profile. She had a good face, especially in profile: there was character in the nose and chin, a hint that she could be depended upon.
“I’ve been wondering how to tell you,” she said at last. “Greg, I don’t love you any more.”
He heard her say the words quite distinctly and he knew what they meant: it wasn’t as if she had gabbled something in a foreign language. But he was so totally unprepared for what she had said, she might just as well have not spoken at all. He just lay looking at her, listening with the back of his mind to a woman laughing somewhere in the hotel.
Sarah turned her head on her pillow. “I suppose that’s a shock to you?”
He sat up, leaning on one elbow. “Don’t joke like that, Sarah!”
“I’m not joking, Greg.” Her voice was calm but definite: she had always known what she wanted to say. “I’m not in love with you any more.”
He reached up quickly and switched on the bed lamp. “When did this happen, for God’s sake? It’s bloody sudden. You didn’t say anything in your letters——”
“I didn’t think I should tell you while you were away. Somehow it wouldn’t have been fair.”
“Why didn’t you tell me when I first got back?”
“It would have spoiled the other business, wouldn’t it? The fanfare, the publicity——”
“Are you narked about that? Is that the cause of the trouble?”
“I was out of love with you before you won the V.C.,” she said. “I stopped loving you six months after you sailed for the Middle East.”
He dropped back on the pillow. He felt words bubbling up inside him, but he suddenly felt too weak to say them. Somehow they wouldn’t have meant anything. He just lay in silence, aware of his own heartbeats, till she spoke again.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” Her face was turned towards him, but he didn’t look at her. “Say something, Greg. Don’t just lie there.”
“What is there to say? You’ve said about everything there is. I could start swearing at you—that would come pretty easy. But what good would that do?”
He got up and walked across the room to the dressing-table. He picked up a cigarette packet but it was empty. He could feel his hand shaking as he dropped the packet back on the dressing-table.
“Have you any cigarettes?” Even now he had to depend on her. He wished he could have done without a cigarette, but he knew he must have it. “I’m right out.”
She took one for herself from the packet on the bedside table, lit it, then threw him the packet and the box of matches. He lit a cigarette, his hand still shaking, then walked across to the window. From here he could look down one of the many gorges of the Blue Mountains. The gaunt ridges were folded into a pattern of deep shadow and bright moonlight, and across the gorge a steep cliff-face shone like a wall of green ice. Down in the far valley the long beam of a car’s headlights came and went, tentatively, like a blind man’s tapping stick. The distant white beam only made the countryside more lonely.
“Hadn’t you better put on your gown?” said Sarah. “There’s no point in getting pneumonia.”
He had been so used to her looking after him, he picked up the gown now and put it on almost automatically. “Is there someone else? How long’s it been going on?”
“There’s no one else.” She was sitting up in bed now, propped against the pillow. One arm was folded across her breast, the hand holding the elbow of the other arm. She was smoking, much more calmly than he was, not attacking the cigarette as he was but almost enjoying it. “I’ve been faithful to you that way. Which was more than you were to me.”
He didn’t answer that.
“I’m sorry, Greg. Really. This hasn’t been much of a homecoming for you.”
“Yeah, that’s the bit that worries me, the spoiled homecoming.” There was sarcasm, but little edge of anger to his voice. He was still too let-down to feel anything but shock. His voice was carrying on automatically for him: it seemed to know the words for the part: “Do you want a divorce?”
“That would be the best thing, wouldn’t it? Though I don’t know what grounds we can have. Unless I leave you and you sue for restitution of conjugal rights, or whatever it is. Then the next step is desertion, I think. You can get a divorce on those grounds.”
“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?”
“I’ve had plenty of time to think about it,” she said. “Eighteen months.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and went back and sat on the bed beside her. “Look, hon, are you sure you’re right about this? What makes you so sure you don’t love me? Maybe once you get used to having me around again, you’ll find you’re wrong.”
She drew on the cigarette slowly. The action suddenly made him angry, the one small thing needed to root him out of his shock, and he snatched the cigarette from her. He dropped it in the ashtray on the table beside the bed, grinding it savagely with the ball of his thumb. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes and lips narrowing, and he waited for one of her cutting remarks, one of the few things about her that had sometimes annoyed him. Then she seemed to make an effort and the tenseness went out of her face.
“This is going to surprise you, Greg,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking back and I wonder if I ever loved you. Really loved you, that is.”
He wanted to hit her, all at once hating her, but he knew dimly this was one time when he had to control himself. He was on his own here in this, the biggest crisis their marriage had ever had, and she wouldn’t help him as she had in the past. This was all his burden, and giving way to anger wouldn’t help at all. “You’re just making things up now. Why can’t you be honest? Are you trying to hurt me or something?”
“I’ve already done that. I can see that. Why should I try and rub it in? I told you I didn’t write and tell you while you were away because I wanted to hurt you the least I could.”
“Well, what do you mean, you wonder if you ever