Bird of Paradise. Rosemary Esmonde Peterswald
Till you came home from Vietnam. Worried myself sick, farewelled two of your slaughtered mates in flag-draped coffins at the Anzac chapel at Duntroon. Held their distraught wives in my arms. Wrote every day. Spoke up at a rally, saying how proud I was to have a boyfriend serving in Vietnam. Even had an egg thrown in my face. And for what? This?
‘Maybe we left it too long before we got engaged,’ Jake said, as if reading her thoughts.
Merryn fingered the lemon in her glass and brought it to her mouth, the bitterness of the fruit suiting her frame of mind. ‘Does Amanda know I’m here?’ she asked.
Jake played with his thumbnail and looked away. ‘Yes, she does,’ he eventually said, turning around. His eyes had difficulty holding hers, and he gave a nervous cough. ‘Well, not exactly,’ he stammered, ‘I told her I was meeting a mate of my sister. A childhood friend.’
Merryn looked aghast. ‘Come on, Jake, you can’t be serious. A childhood friend? And I haven’t seen Prue in years. You don’t even talk to her.’ She shook her head in amazement. ‘You mean to say you didn’t tell Amanda we were engaged?’
A pause. He squirmed in his chair. ‘It just never came up.’
Merryn glared at him, forgetting her intention to keep calm. ‘Didn’t come up. Crikey, Jake, shouldn’t you have made it come up?’
Silence. Finally he said, ‘I was going to tell her. Then she got pregnant and things kind of changed...’
‘Surely someone at Karu Barracks would have known of our engagement?’
‘There’s no one there who I’ve served with before.’
‘How convenient!’
Now she wished she’d insisted on putting the engagement notice in the army newspaper. At the time, it seemed an unnecessary expense. She remembered the moment he produced the ring. Although it was taken for granted they would marry one day, they didn’t actually get engaged until last year. For straight after graduation, Jake’s mother had died suddenly after suffering a stroke. Not long afterward, his father passed away too, although he had been sick for some time. Everyone thought the shock of his wife’s death sent him into a downhill spiral. Jake had been devastated for months, and although Merryn didn’t know his parents all that well, as they had moved to Far North Queensland ten years previously, she was extremely sad for him. Later that year, Merryn had gone overseas. After that, Jake got posted to New Guinea for the first time, followed by Vietnam. For his R&R leave, they’d taken a tiny log cabin, with a jetty and a small rowboat, hidden away at Wangi on the shores of Lake Macquarie. Later, in his letters, he told her that’s what kept him going as he crouched in the jungle stalking the dreaded Vietcong.
‘Dreaming of that cottage and you,’ he had written.
With their feet dangling in the warm waters of the lake, he produced the ring from his pocket. He’d bought it in Singapore on his way home. Absently, Merryn rubbed the spot on her finger where he had placed the diamond that evening. She thought of the succulent blue swimmer crab they caught in the lake and how they cooked it over a campfire and how they sat at the small table under the weeping willow tree, eating the crab and sipping champagne. How they took the rowboat out to the small island in front of the cabin and made love in the moonlight. And how when he finished his tour of duty, they did it all again. Same cottage. Same island.
‘How old is she?’ Merryn asked.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Nineteen?’
‘Yes. Nearly twenty.’
She pushed her empty glass at him for a refill.
‘Sure you want another? We’ll have wine with dinner.’
‘I’ve never been more sure in my life, thank you very much.’ She was surprised at the fervour of her own voice. ‘And make it a big one please.’
She watched his retreating frame. One day, lazing on a deserted beach, she had drawn a line about his naked body on the sand. ‘How tall are you?’ she asked.
‘Six foot one,’ he told her. ‘Well, six foot and a half to be precise, but why worry about half an inch?’
She drifted with the memory, and then came back again when she found herself staring absently at her reflection in the mirror. None of this is happening, she told herself. I’ll wake up soon and still be engaged. Jake still loving me!
‘Here,’ he said, his voice gently brining her back. He handed her a brandy.
For some time she fondled the cool glass between her fingers before taking a sip. ‘Will you come back here after the baby?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Jake said. ‘It depends. Amanda’s not all that happy here...feels she’s missing out on things back home. Maybe when she’s had the baby she’ll like it more. In any case I’m only here for another year or so, then I’m hoping for a posting as General Robertson’s aide de campe in Sydney.’
Merryn raised an eyebrow. ‘Robertson? How d’you know you’ll get that? I thought you’d have to be recommended.’
‘Amanda’s father, Colonel James, said he’d put in a good word for me. His father was one of Robertson’s groomsmen... and then...well...there’s Vietnam and here.’
He’s got it all worked out, Merryn thought. Right down to the last detail. Lifting her head, she gazed along the veranda, now noisy with couples and a rowdy group of sweaty men in khaki shorts and open-necked shirts, no doubt in the midst of a lengthy session of after work drinks. In the dining room, candles burned on the tables. She suddenly decided getting drunk in a strange place with a man who no longer loved her wasn’t such a good idea after all.
‘I’d like to eat now, if that’s okay,’ she said, looking towards the dining room. ‘I feel a bit faint. Maybe it’s the long flight... the brandy...or possibly the heat! In any case, I’d better have something solid.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Jake said, scraping his chair back on the wooden boards. After helping Merryn to her feet, he picked up their drinks, carrying them along the veranda to the dining room.
Covered in a bright oilcloth, with a red candle burning in the centre, the table Jo showed them to a few minutes later had a view of the street below and beyond that to the water.
For some time after Jo left, they sat in stranded silence before Jake waved a hand for the waitress.
‘How about a wine? Chianti perhaps?’
‘No thanks,’ Merryn said. ‘The brandy will do.’
‘The roasted spatchcock’s good,’ the young blond waitress, dressed in a pale yellow pinafore, informed them cheerfully, passing out the menu handwritten on blue paper. She stood back, biro poised over notepad. ‘They’re just new on the menu.’ She pointed to the top of the page. ‘Number three.’
For some time, Merryn sat staring at the words in front of her. By studying them, she was able to avoid talking.
‘It comes with sweet potato chips,’ the waitress added, urging her to make a decision.
‘Fine,’ Merryn said with little enthusiasm. ‘I’ll have that then.’
She noticed Jake ordered his favourite—steak, medium rare with chips.
Jake eyed Merryn uneasily. He did feel guilty, and for a moment at the airport he had a slight regret, but all in all he was happy with the decision he had made, despite knowing how much that had hurt Merryn. Occasionally he’d allowed himself to wonder: what if there hadn’t been a baby on the way? What if Amanda wasn’t the colonel’s daughter? Would it have made any difference? In a way, he was lucky. For a mate of his, Simon, got kicked out of the army for getting a senior officer’s daughter pregnant. At least the colonel hadn’t done that. Mind you, if he knew Jake had been engaged at the time—well, that could be a different kettle of fish. ‘Look,’ he wanted