The Thorn Birds

19

Sitting at his Bonn desk with an early-morning cup of coffee, Rainer learned of Cardinal de Bricassart’s death from his newspaper. The political storm of the past few weeks was diminishing at last, so he had settled to enjoy his reading with the prospect of soon seeing Justine to color his mood, and unperturbed by her recent silence. That he deemed typical; she was far from ready yet to admit the extent of her commitment to him.

But the news of the Cardinal’s death drove all thought of Justine away. Ten minutes later he was behind the wheel of a Mercedes 280 SL, heading for the autobahn. The poor old man Vittorio would be so alone, and his burden was heavy at the best of times. Quicker to drive; by the time he fiddled around waiting for a flight, got to and from airports, he could be at the Vatican. And it was something positive to do, something he could control himself, always an important consideration to a man like him.

From Cardinal Vittorio he learned the whole story, too shocked at first to wonder why Justine hadn’t thought to contact him.

“He came to me and asked me, did I know Dane was his son?” the gentle voice said, while the gentle hands smoothed the blue-grey back of Natasha.

“And you said?”

“I said I had guessed. I could not tell him more. But oh, his face! His face! I wept.”

“It killed him, of course. The last time I saw him I thought he wasn’t well, but he laughed at my suggestion that he see a doctor.”

“It is as God wills. I think Ralph de Bricassart was one of the most tormented men I have ever known. In death he will find the peace he could not find here in this life.”

“The boy, Vittorio! A tragedy.”

“Do you think so? I like rather to think of it as beautiful. I cannot believe Dane found death anything but welcome, and it is not surprising that Our Dear Lord could not wait a moment longer to gather Dane unto Himself. I mourn, yes, not for the boy. For his mother, who must suffer so much! And for his sister, his uncles, his grandmother. No, I do not mourn for him. Father O’Neill lived in almost total purity of mind and spirit. What could death be for him but the entrance into everlasting life? For the rest of us, the passage is not so easy.”

From his hotel Rainer dispatched a cable to London which he couldn’t allow to convey his anger, hurt or disappointment. It merely said: MUST RETURN BONN BUT WILL BE IN LONDON WEEKEND STOP WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL ME QUERY ALL MY LOVE RAIN

On his desk in the office at Bonn were an express delivery letter from Justine, and a registered packet which his secretary informed him had come from Cardinal de Bricassart’s lawyers in Rome. He opened this first, to learn that under the terms of Ralph de Bricassart’s will he was to add another company to his already formidable list of directorships. Michar Limited. And Drogheda. Exasperated yet curiously touched, he understood that this was the Cardinal’s way of telling him that in the final weighing he had not been found wanting, that those prayers during the war years had borne fruit. Into Rainer’s hands he had delivered the future welfare of Meggie O’Neill and her people. Or so Rainer interpreted it, for the wording of the Cardinal’s will was quite impersonal. It could not dare be otherwise.

He threw the packet into the basket for general non-secret correspondence, immediate reply, and opened the letter from Justine. It began badly, without any kind of salutation.

She had signed it with the usual bold, black “Justine,” and it was written with the new felt-tipped pen she had hailed so gleefully when he gave it to her, as an instrument thick and dark and positive enough to satisfy her.

He didn’t fold the note and put it in his wallet, or burn it; he did what he did with all mail not requiring an answer—ran it through the electric shredder fixed to his wastebasket the minute he had finished reading it. Thinking to himself that Dane’s death had effectively put an end to Justine’s emotional awakening, and bitterly unhappy. It wasn’t fair. He had waited so long.

At the weekend he flew to London anyway but not to see her, though he did see her. On the stage, as the Moor’s beloved wife, Desdemona. Formidable. There was nothing he could do for her the stage couldn’t, not for a while. That’s my good girl! Pour it all out on the stage.

Only she couldn’t pour it all out on the stage, for she was too young to play Hecuba. The stage was simply the one place offering peace and forgetfulness. She could only tell herself: Time heals all wounds—while not believing it. Asking herself why it should go on hurting so. When Dane was alive she hadn’t really thought very much about him except when she was with him, and after they were grown up their time together had been limited, their vocations almost opposed. But his going had created a gap so huge she despaired of ever filling it.

The shock of having to pull herself up in the midst of a spontaneous reaction—I must remember to tell Dane about this, he’ll get such a kick out of it—that was what hurt the most. And because it kept on occurring so often, it prolonged the grief. Had the circumstances surrounding his death been less horrifying she might have recovered more quickly, but the nightmare events of those few days remained vivid. She missed him unbearably; her mind would return again and again to the incredible fact of Dane dead, Dane who would never come back.

Then there was the conviction that she hadn’t helped him enough. Everyone save her seemed to think he was perfect, didn’t experience the troubles other men did, but Justine knew he had been plagued by doubts, had tormented himself with his own unworthiness, had wondered what people could see in him beyond the face and the body. Poor Dane, who never seemed to understand that people loved his goodness. Terrible to remember it was too late to help him now.

She also grieved for her mother. If his dying could do this to her, what must it have done to Mum? The thought made her want to run screaming and crying from memory, consciousness. The picture of the Unks in Rome for his ordination, puffing out their proud chests like pouter pigeons. That was the worst of all, visualizing the empty desolation of her mother and the other Drogheda people.

Be honest, Justine. Was this honestly the worst? Wasn’t there something far more disturbing? She couldn’t push the thought of Rain away, or what she felt as her betrayal of Dane. To gratify her own desires she had sent Dane to Greece alone, when to have gone with him might have meant life for him. There was no other way to see it. Dane had died because of her selfish absorption in Rain. Too late now to bring her brother back, but if in never seeing Rain again she could somehow atone, the hunger and the loneliness would be well worth it.

So the weeks went by, and then the months. A year, two years. Desdemona, Ophelia, Portia, Cleopatra. From the very beginning she flattered herself she behaved outwardly as if nothing had happened to ruin her world; she took exquisite care in speaking, laughing, relating to people quite normally. If there was a change, it was in that she was kinder than of yore, for people’s griefs tended to affect her as if they were her own. But, all told, she was the same outward Justine—flippant, exuberant, brash, detached, acerbic.

Twice she tried to go home to Drogheda on a visit, the second time even going so far as to pay for her plane ticket. Each time an enormously important last-minute reason why she couldn’t go cropped up, but she knew the real reason to be a combination of guilt and cowardice. She just wasn’t able to nerve herself to confront her mother; to do so meant the whole sorry tale would come out, probably in the midst of a noisy storm of grief she had so far managed to avoid. The Drogheda people, especially her mother, must continue to go about secure in their conviction that Justine at any rate was all right, that Justine had survived it relatively unscathed. So, better to stay away from Drogheda. Much better.

Meggie caught herself on a sigh, suppressed it. If her bones didn’t ache so much she might have saddled a horse and ridden, but today the mere thought of it was painful. Some other time, when her arthritis didn’t make its presence felt so cruelly.

She heard a car, the thump of the brass ram’s head on the front door, heard voices murmuring, her mother’s tones, footsteps. Not Justine, so what did it matter?

“Meggie,” said Fee from the veranda entrance, “we have a visitor. Could you come inside, please?”

The visitor was a distinguished-looking fellow in early middle age, though he might have been younger than he appeared. Very different from any man she had ever seen, except that he possessed the same sort of power and self-confidence Ralph used to have. Used to have. That most final of tenses, now truly final.

“Meggie, this is Mr. Rainer Hartheim,” said Fee, standing beside her chair.

“Oh!” exclaimed Meggie involuntarily, very surprised at the look of the Rain who had figured so largely in Justine’s letters from the old days. Then, remembering her manners, “Do sit down, Mr. Hartheim.”

He too was staring, startled. “You’re not a bit like Justine!” he said rather blankly.

“No, I’m not.” She sat down facing him.

“I’ll leave you alone with Mr. Hartheim, Meggie, as he says he wants to see you privately. When you’re ready for tea you might ring,” Fee commanded, and departed.

“You’re Justine’s German friend, of course,” said Meggie, at a loss.

He pulled out his cigarette case. “May I?”

“Please do.”

“Would you care for one, Mrs. O’Neill?”

“Thank you, no. I don’t smoke.” She smoothed her dress. “You’re a long way from home, Mr. Hartheim. Have you business in Australia?”

He smiled, wondering what she would say if she knew that he was, in effect, the master of Drogheda. But he had no intention of telling her, for he preferred all the Drogheda people to think their welfare lay in the completely impersonal hands of the gentleman he employed to act as his go-between.

“Please, Mrs. O’Neill, my name is Rainer,” he said, giving it the same pronunciation Justine did, while thinking wryly that this woman wouldn’t use it spontaneously for some time to come; she was not one to relax with strangers. “No, I don’t have any official business in Australia, but I do have a good reason for coming. I wanted to see you.”

“To see me?” she asked in surprise. As if to cover sudden confusion, she went immediately to a safer subject: “My brothers speak of you often. You were very kind to them while they were in Rome for Dane’s ordination.” She said Dane’s name without distress, as if she used it frequently. “I hope you can stay a few days, and see them.”

“I can, Mrs. O’Neill,” he answered easily.

For Meggie the interview was proving unexpectedly awkward; he was a stranger, he had announced that he had come twelve thousand miles simply to see her, and apparently he was in no hurry to enlighten her as to why. She thought she would end in liking him, but she found him slightly intimidating. Perhaps his kind of man had never come within her ken before, and this was why he threw her off-balance. A very novel conception of Justine entered her mind at that moment: her daughter could actually relate easily to men like Rainer Moerling Hartheim! She thought of Justine as a fellow woman at last.

Though aging and white-haired she was still very beautiful, he was thinking while she sat gazing at him politely; he was still surprised that she looked not at all like Justine, as Dane had so strongly resembled the Cardinal. How terribly lonely she must be! Yet he couldn’t feel sorry for her in the way he did for Justine; clearly, she had come to terms with herself.

“How is Justine?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t know. I haven’t seen her since before Dane died.”

She didn’t display astonishment. “I haven’t seen her myself since Dane’s funeral,” she said, and sighed. “I’d hoped she would come home, but it begins to look as if she never will.”

He made a soothing noise which she didn’t seem to hear, for she went on speaking, but in a different voice, more to herself than to him.

“Drogheda is like a home for the aged these days,” she said. “We need young blood, and Justine’s is the only young blood left.”

Pity deserted him; he leaned forward quickly, eyes glittering. “You speak of her as if she is a chattel of Drogheda,” he said, his voice now harsh. “I serve you notice, Mrs. O’Neill, she is not!”

“What right have you to judge what Justine is or isn’t?” she asked angrily. “After all, you said yourself that you haven’t seen her since before Dane died, and that’s two years ago!”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s all of two years ago.” He spoke more gently, realizing afresh what her life must be like. “You bear it very well, Mrs. O’Neill.”

“Do I?” she asked, tightly trying to smile, her eyes never leaving his.

Suddenly he began to understand what the Cardinal must have seen in her to have loved her so much. It wasn’t in Justine, but then he himself was no Cardinal Ralph; he looked for different things.

“Yes, you bear it very well,” he repeated.

She caught the undertone at once, and flinched. “How do you know about Dane and Ralph?” she asked unsteadily.

“I guessed. Don’t worry, Mrs. O’Neill, nobody else did. I guessed because I knew the Cardinal long before I met Dane. In Rome everyone thought the Cardinal was your brother, Dane’s uncle, but Justine disillusioned me about that the first time I ever met her.”

“Justine? Not Justine!” Meggie cried.

He reached out to take her hand, beating frantically against her knee. “No, no, no, Mrs. O’Neill! Justine has absolutely no idea of it, and I pray she never will! Her slip was quite unintentional, believe me.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes, I swear it.”

“Then in God’s Name why doesn’t she come home? Why won’t she come to see me? Why can’t she bring herself to look at my face?”

Not only her words but the agony in her voice told him what had tormented Justine’s mother about her absence these last two years. His own mission’s importance dwindled; now he had a new one, to allay Meggie’s fears.

“For that I am to blame,” he said firmly.

“You?” asked Meggie, bewildered.

“Justine had planned to go to Greece with Dane, and she’s convinced that had she, he’d still be alive.”

“Nonsense!” said Meggie.

“Quite. But though we know it’s nonsense, Justine doesn’t. It’s up to you to make her see it.”

“Up to me? You don’t understand, Mr. Hartheim. Justine has never listened to me in all her life, and at this stage any influence I might once have had is completely gone. She doesn’t even want to see my face.”

Her tone was defeated but not abject. “I fell into the same trap my mother did,” she went on matter-of-factly. “Drogheda is my life… the house, the books… Here I’m needed, there’s still some purpose in living. Here are people who rely on me. My children never did, you know. Never did.”

“That’s not true, Mrs. O’Neill. If it was, Justine could come home to you without a qualm. You underestimate the quality of the love she bears you. When I say I am to blame for what Justine is going through, I mean that she remained in London because of me, to be with me. But it is for you she suffers, not for me.”

Meggie stiffened. “She has no right to suffer for me! Let her suffer for herself if she must, but not for me. Never for me!”

“Then you believe me when I say she has no idea of Dane and the Cardinal?”

Her manner changed, as if he had reminded her there were other things at stake, and she was losing sight of them. “Yes,” she said, “I believe you.”

“I came to see you because Justine needs your help and cannot ask for it,” he announced. “You must convince her she needs to take up the threads of her life again—not a Drogheda life, but her own life, which has nothing to do with Drogheda.”

He leaned back in his chair, crossed his legs and lit another cigarette. “Justine has donned some kind of hair shirt, but for all the wrong reasons. If anyone can make her see it, you can. Yet I warn you that if you choose to do so she will never come home, whereas if she goes on the way she is, she may well end up returning here permanently.

“The stage isn’t enough for someone like Justine,” he went on, “and the day is coming when she’s going to realize that. Then she’s going to opt for people—either her family and Drogheda, or me.” He smiled at her with deep understanding. “But people are not enough for Justine either, Mrs. O’Neill. If Justine chooses me, she can have the stage as well, and that bonus Drogheda cannot offer her.” Now he was gazing at her sternly, as if at an adversary. “I came to ask you to make sure she chooses me. It may seem cruel to say this, but I need her more than you possibly could.”

The starch was back in Meggie. “Drogheda isn’t such a bad choice,” she countered. “You speak as if it would be the end of her life, but it doesn’t mean that at all, you know. She could have the stage. This is a true community. Even if she married Boy King, as his grandfather and I have hoped for years, her children would be as well cared for in her absences as they would be were she married to you. This is her home! She knows and understands this kind of life. If she chose it, she’d certainly be very well aware what was involved. Can you say the same for the sort of life you’d offer her?”

“No,” he said stolidly. “But Justine thrives on surprises. On Drogheda she’d stagnate.”

“What you mean is, she’d be unhappy here.”

“No, not exactly. I have no doubt that if she elected to return here, married this Boy King—who is this Boy King, by the way?”

“The heir to a neighboring property, Bugela, and an old childhood friend who would like to be more than a friend. His grandfather wants the marriage for dynastic reasons; I want it because I think it’s what Justine needs.”

“I see. Well, if she returned here and married Boy King, she’d learn to be happy. But happiness is a relative state. I don’t think she would ever know the kind of satisfaction she would find with me. Because, Mrs. O’Neill, Justine loves me, not Boy King.”

“Then she’s got a very strange way of showing it,” said Meggie, pulling the bell rope for tea. “Besides, Mr. Hartheim, as I said earlier, I think you overestimate my influence with her. Justine has never taken a scrap of notice of anything I say, let alone want.”

“You’re nobody’s fool,” he answered. “You know you can do it if you want to. I can ask no more than that you think about what I’ve said. Take your time, there’s no hurry. I’m a patient man.”

Meggie smiled. “Then you’re a rarity,” she said.

He didn’t broach the subject again, nor did she. During the week of his stay he behaved like any other guest, though Meggie had a feeling he was trying to show her what kind of man he was. How much her brothers liked him was clear; from the moment word reached the paddocks of his arrival, they all came in and stayed in until he left for Germany.

Fee liked him, too; her eyes had deteriorated to the point where she could no longer keep the books, but she was far from senile. Mrs. Smith had died in her sleep the previous winter, not before her due time, and rather than inflict a new housekeeper on Minnie and Cat, both old but still hale, Fee had passed the books completely to Meggie and more or less filled Mrs. Smith’s place herself. It was Fee who first realized Rainer was a direct link with that part of Dane’s life no one on Drogheda had ever had opportunity to share, so she asked him to speak of it. He obliged gladly, having quickly noticed that none of the Drogheda people were at all reluctant to talk of Dane, and derived great pleasure from listening to new tales about him.

Behind her mask of politeness Meggie couldn’t get away from what Rain had told her, couldn’t stop dwelling on the choice he had offered her. She had long since given up hope of Justine’s return, only to have him almost guarantee it, admit too that Justine would be happy if she did return. Also, for one other thing she had to be intensely grateful to him: he had laid the ghost of her fear that somehow Justine had discovered the link between Dane and Ralph.

As for marriage to Rain, Meggie didn’t see what she could do to push Justine where apparently she had no desire to go. Or was it that she didn’t want to see? She had ended in liking Rain very much, but his happiness couldn’t possibly matter as much to her as the welfare of her daughter, of the Drogheda people, and of Drogheda itself. The crucial question was, how vital to Justine’s future happiness was Rain? In spite of his contention that Justine loved him, Meggie couldn’t remember her daughter ever saying anything which might indicate that Rain held the same sort of importance for her as Ralph had done for Meggie.

“I presume you will see Justine sooner or later,” Meggie said to Rain when she drove him to the airport. “When you do, I’d rather you didn’t mention this visit to Drogheda.”

“If you prefer,” he said. “I would only ask you to think about what I’ve said, and take your time.” But even as he made his request, he couldn’t help feeling that Meggie had reaped far more benefit from his visit than he had.

When the mid-April came that was two and a half years after Dane’s death, Justine experienced an overwhelming desire to see something that wasn’t rows of houses, too many sullen people. Suddenly on this beautiful day of soft spring air and chilly sun, urban London was intolerable. So she took a District Line train to Kew Gardens, pleased that it was a Tuesday and she would have the place almost to herself. Nor was she working that night, so it didn’t matter if she exhausted herself tramping the by-ways.

She knew the park well, of course. London was a joy to any Drogheda person, with its masses of formal flower beds, but Kew was in a class all its own. In the old days she used to haunt it from April to the end of October, for every month had a different floral display to offer.

Mid-April was her favorite time, the period of daffodils and azaleas and flowering trees. There was one spot she thought could lay some claim to being one of the world’s loveliest sights on a small, intimate scale, so she sat down on the damp ground, an audience of one, to drink it in. As far as the eye could see stretched a sheet of daffodils; in mid-distance the nodding yellow horde of bells flowed around a great flowering almond, its branches so heavy with white blooms they dipped downward in arching falls as perfect and still as a Japanese painting. Peace. It was so hard to come by.

And then, her head far back to memorize the absolute beauty of the laden almond amid its rippling golden sea, something far less beautiful intruded. Rainer Moerling Hartheim, of all people, threading his careful way through clumps of daffodils, his bulk shielded from the chilly breeze by the inevitable German leather coat, the sun glittering in his silvery hair.

“You’ll get a cold in your kidneys,” he said, taking off his coat and spreading it lining side up on the ground so they could sit on it.

“How did you find me here?” she asked, wriggling onto a brown satin corner.

“Mrs. Kelly told me you had gone to Kew. The rest was easy. I just walked until I found you.”

“I suppose you think I ought to be falling all over you in gladness, tra-la?”

“Are you?”

“Same old Rain, answering a question with a question. No, I’m not glad to see you. I thought I’d managed to make you crawl up a hollow log permanently.”

“It’s hard to keep a good man up a hollow log permanently. How are you?”

“I’m all right.”

“Have you licked your wounds enough?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s to be expected, I suppose. But I began to realize that once you had dismissed me you’d never again humble your pride to make the first move toward reconciliation. Whereas I, Herzchen, am wise enough to know that pride makes a very lonely bedfellow.”

“Don’t go getting any ideas about kicking it out to make room for yourself, Rain, because I’m warning you, I am not taking you on in that capacity.”

“I don’t want you in that capacity anymore.”

The promptness of his answer irritated her, but she adopted a relieved air and said, “Honestly?”

“If I did, do you think I could have borne to keep away from you so long? You were a passing fancy in that way, but I still think of you as a dear friend, and miss you as a dear friend.”

“Oh, Rain, so do I!”

“That’s good. Am I admitted as a friend, then?”

“Of course.”

He lay back on the coat and put his arms behind his head, smiling at her lazily. “How old are you, thirty? In those disgraceful clothes you look more like a scrubby schoolgirl. If you don’t need me in your life for any other reason, Justine, you certainly do as your personal arbiter of elegance.”

She laughed. “I admit when I thought you might pop up out of the woodwork I did take more interest in my appearance. If I’m thirty, though, you’re no spring chook yourself. You must be forty at least. Doesn’t seem like such a huge difference anymore, does it? You’ve lost weight. Are you all right, Rain?”

“I was never fat, only big, so sitting at a desk all the time has shrunk me, not made me expand.”

Sliding down and turning onto her stomach, she put her face close to his, smiling. “Oh, Rain, it’s so good to see you! No one else gives me a run for my money.”

“Poor Justine! And you have so much of it these days, don’t you?”

“Money?” She nodded. “Odd, that the Cardinal should have left all of his to me. Well, half to me and half to Dane, but of course I was Dane’s sole legatee.” Her face twisted in spite of herself. She ducked her head away and pretended to look at one daffodil in a sea of them until she could control her voice enough to say, “You know, Rain, I’d give my eyeteeth to learn just what the Cardinal was to my family. A friend, only that? More than that, in some mysterious way. But just what, I don’t know. I wish I did.”

“No, you don’t.” He got to his feet and extended his hand.

“Come, Herzchen, I’ll buy you dinner anywhere you think there will be eyes to see that the breach between the carrot-topped Australian actress and the certain member of the German cabinet is healed. My reputation as a playboy has deteriorated since you threw me out.”

“You’ll have to watch it, my friend. They don’t call me a carrot-topped Australian actress any more—these days I’m that lush, gorgeous, titian-haired British actress, thanks to my immortal interpretation of Cleopatra. Don’t tell me you didn’t know the critics are calling me the most exotic Cleo in years?” She cocked her arms and hands into the pose of an Egyptian hieroglyph.

His eyes twinkled. “Exotic?” he asked doubtfully.

“Yes, exotic,” she said firmly.

Cardinal Vittorio was dead, so Rain didn’t go to Rome very much anymore. He came to London instead. At first Justine was so delighted she didn’t look any further than the friendship he offered, but as the months passed and he failed by word or look to mention their previous relationship, her mild indignation became something more disturbing. Not that she wanted a resumption of that other relationship, she told herself constantly; she had finished completely with that sort of thing, didn’t need or desire it anymore. Nor did she permit her mind to dwell on an image of Rain so successfully buried she remembered it only in traitorous dreams.

Those first few months after Dane died had been dreadful, resisting the longing to go to Rain, feel him with her in body and spirit, knowing full well he would be if she let him. But she could not allow this with his face overshadowed by Dane’s. It was right to dismiss him, right to battle to obliterate every last flicker of desire for him. And as time went on and it seemed he was going to stay out of her life permanently, her body settled into unaroused torpor, and her mind disciplined itself to forget.

But now Rain was back it was growing much harder. She itched to ask him whether he remembered that other relationship—how could he have forgotten it? Certainly for herself she had quite finished with such things, but it would have been gratifying to learn he hadn’t; that is, provided of course such things for him spelled Justine, and only Justine.

Pipe dreams. Rain didn’t have the mien of a man who was wasting away of unrequited love, mental or physical, and he never displayed the slightest wish to reopen that phase of their lives. He wanted her for a friend, enjoyed her as a friend. Excellent! It was what she wanted, too. Only… could he have forgotten? No, it wasn’t possible—but God damn him if he had!

The night Justine’s thought processes reached so far, her season’s role of Lady Macbeth had an interesting savagery quite alien to her usual interpretation. She didn’t sleep very well afterward, and the following morning brought a letter from her mother which filled her with vague unease.

Mum didn’t write often anymore, a symptom of the long separation which affected them both, and what letters there were were stilted, anemic. This was different, it contained a distant mutter of old age, an underlying weariness which poked up a word or two above the surface inanities like an iceberg. Justine didn’t like it. Old. Mum, old!

What was happening on Drogheda? Was Mum trying to conceal some serious trouble? Was Nanna ill? One of the Unks? God forbid, Mum herself? It was three years since she had seen any of them, and a lot could happen in three years, even if it wasn’t happening to Justine O’Neill. Because her own life was stagnant and dull, she ought not to assume everyone else’s was, too.

That night was Justine’s “off” night, with only one more performance of Macbeth to go. The daylight hours had dragged unbearably, and even the thought of dinner with Rain didn’t carry its usual anticipatory pleasure. Their friendship was useless, futile, static, she told herself as she scrambled into a dress exactly the orange he hated most. Conservative old fuddy-duddy! If Rain didn’t like her the way she was, he could lump her. Then, fluffing up the low bodice’s frills around her meager chest, she caught her own eyes in the mirror and laughed ruefully. Oh, what a tempest in a teacup! She was acting exactly like the kind of female she most despised. It was probably very simple. She was stale, she needed a rest. Thank God for the end of Lady M! But what was the matter with Mum?

Lately Rain was spending more and more time in London, and Justine marveled at the ease with which he commuted between Bonn and England. No doubt having a private plane helped, but it had to be exhausting.

“Why do you come to see me so often?” she asked out of the blue. “Every gossip columnist in Europe thinks it’s great, but I confess I sometimes wonder if you don’t simply use me as an excuse to visit London.”

“It’s true that I use you as a blind from time to time,” he admitted calmly. “As a matter of fact, you’ve been dust in certain eyes quite a lot. But it’s no hardship being with you, because I like being with you.” His dark eyes dwelled on her face thoughtfully. “You’re very quiet tonight, Herzchen. Is anything worrying you?”

“No, not really.” She toyed with her dessert and pushed it aside uneaten. “At least, only a silly little thing. Mum and I don’t write every week anymore—it’s so long since we’ve seen each other there’s nothing much to say—but today I had such a strange letter from her. Not typical at all.”

His heart sank; Meggie had indeed taken her time thinking about it, but instinct told him this was the commencement of her move, and that it was not in his favor. She was beginning her play to get her daughter back for Drogheda, perpetuate the dynasty.

He reached across the table to take Justine’s hand; she was looking, he thought, more beautiful with maturity, in spite of that ghastly dress. Tiny lines were beginning to give her ragamuffin face dignity, which it badly needed, and character, which the person behind had always owned in huge quantities. But how deep did her surface maturity go? That was the whole trouble with Justine; she didn’t even want to look.

“Herzchen, your mother is lonely,” he said, burning his boats. If this was what Meggie wanted, how could he continue to think himself right and her wrong? Justine was her daughter; she must know her far better than he.

“Yes, perhaps,” said Justine with a frown, “but I can’t help feeling there’s something more at base of it. I mean, she must have been lonely for years, so why this sudden whatever it is? I can’t put my finger on it, Rain, and maybe that’s what worries me the most.”

“She’s growing older, which I think you tend to forget. It’s very possible things are beginning to prey upon her which she found easier to contend with in the past.” His eyes looked suddenly remote, as if the brain behind was concentrating very hard on something at variance with what he was saying. “Justine, three years ago she lost her only son. Do you think that pain grows less as time passes? I think it must grow worse. He is gone, and she must surely feel by now that you are gone, too. After all, you haven’t even been home to visit her.”

She shut her eyes. “I will, Rain, I will! I promise I will, and soon! You’re right, of course, but then you always are. I never thought I’d come to miss Drogheda, but lately I seem to be developing quite an affection for it. As if I am a part of it after all.”

He looked suddenly at his watch, smiled ruefully. “I’m very much afraid tonight is one of those occasions when I’ve used you, Herzchen. I hate to ask you to find your own way home, but in less than an hour I have to meet some very important gentlemen in a top-secret place, to which I must go in my own car, driven by the triple-A-security-clearanced Fritz.”

“Cloak and dagger!” she said gaily, concealing her hurt. “Now I know why those sudden taxis! I am to be entrusted to a cabby, but not the future of the Common Market, eh? Well, just to show you how little I need a taxi or your security-clearanced Fritz, I’m going to catch the tube home. It’s quite early.” His fingers lay rather limply around hers; she lifted his hand and held it against her cheek, then kissed it. “Oh, Rain, I don’t know what I’d do without you!”

He put the hand in his pocket, got to his feet, came round and pulled out her chair with his other hand. “I’m your friend,” he said. “That’s what friends are for, not to be done without.”

But once she parted from him, Justine went home in a very thoughtful mood, which turned rapidly into a depressed one. Tonight was the closest he had come to any kind of personal discussion, and the gist of it had been that he felt her mother was terribly lonely, growing old, and that she ought to go home. Visit, he had said; but she couldn’t help wondering if he had actually meant stay. Which rather indicated that whatever he felt for her in the past was well and truly of the past, and he had no wish to resurrect it.

It had never occurred to her before to wonder if he might regard her as a nuisance, a part of his past he would like to see buried in decent obscurity on some place like Drogheda; but maybe he did. In which case, why had he re-entered her life nine months ago? Because he felt sorry for her? Because he felt he owed her some kind of debt? Because he felt she needed some sort of push toward her mother, for Dane’s sake? He had been very fond of Dane, and who knew what they had talked about during those long visits to Rome when she hadn’t been present? Maybe Dane had asked him to keep an eye on her, and he was doing just that. Waited a decent interval to make sure she wouldn’t show him the door, then marched back into her life to fulfill some promise made to Dane. Yes, that was very likely the answer. Certainly he was no longer in love with her. Whatever attraction she had once possessed for him must have died long since; after all, she had treated him abominably. She had only herself to blame.

Upon the heels of which thought she wept miserably, succeeded in getting enough hold upon herself to tell herself not to be so stupid, twisted about and thumped her pillow in a fruitless quest after sleep, then lay defeated trying to read a script. After a few pages the words began traitorously to blur and swim together, and try as she would to use her old trick of bulldozing despair into some back corner of her mind, it ended in overwhelming her. Finally as the slovenly light of a late London dawn seeped through the windows she sat down at her desk, feeling the cold, hearing the distant growl of traffic, smelling the damp, tasting the sourness. Suddenly the idea of Drogheda seemed wonderful. Sweet pure air, a naturally broken silence. Peace.

She picked up one of her black felt-tipped pens and began a letter to her mother, her tears drying as she wrote.

She signed her name without its usual flourish, more like the “Justine” which used to appear on the bottom of dutiful letters written from boarding school under the eagle eye of a censoring nun. Then she folded the sheets, put them in an airmail envelope and addressed it. On the way to the theater for the final performance of Macbeth she posted it.

She went straight ahead with her plans to quit England. Clyde was upset to the extent of a screaming temper tantrum which left her shaking, then overnight he turned completely about and gave in with huffy good grace. There was no difficulty at all in disposing of the lease to the mews flat for it was in a high-demand category; in fact, once the word leaked out people rang every five minutes until she took the phone off the hook. Mrs. Kelly, who had “done” for her since those far-off days when she had first come to London, plodded dolefully around amid a jungle of wood shavings and crates, bemoaning her fate and surreptitiously putting the phone back on its cradle in the hope someone would ring with the power to persuade Justine to change her mind. In the midst of the turmoil, someone with that power did ring, only not to persuade her to change her mind; Rain didn’t even know she was going. He merely asked her to act as his hostess for a dinner party he was giving at his house on Park Lane.

“What do you mean, house on Park Lane?” Justine squeaked, astonished.

“Well, with growing British participation in the European Economic Community, I’m spending so much time in England that it’s become more practical for me to have some sort of local pied-à-terre, so I’ve leased a house on Park Lane,” he explained.

“Ye gods, Rain, you flaming secretive bastard! How long have you had it?”

“About a month.”

“And you let me go through that idiotic charade the other night and said nothing? God damn you!” She was so angry she couldn’t speak properly.

“I was going to tell you, but I got such a kick out of your thinking I was flying over all the time that I couldn’t resist pretending a bit longer,” he said with a laugh in his voice.

“I could kill you!” she ground from between her teeth, blinking away tears.

“No, Herzchen, please! Don’t be angry! Come and be my hostess, then you can inspect the premises to your heart’s content.”

“Suitably chaperoned by five million other guests, of course! What’s the matter, Rain, don’t you trust yourself alone with me? Or is it me you don’t trust?”

“You won’t be a guest,” he said, answering the first part of her tirade. “You’ll be my hostess, which is quite different. Will you do it?”

She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and said gruffly, “Yes.”

It turned out to be more enjoyable than she had dared hope, for Rain’s house was truly beautiful and he himself in such a good mood Justine couldn’t help but become infected by it. She arrived properly though a little too flamboyantly gowned for his taste, but after an involuntary grimace at first sight of her shocking-pink slipper satin, he tucked her arm through his and conducted her around the premises before the guests arrived. Then during the evening he behaved perfectly, treating her in front of the others with an offhand intimacy which made her feel both useful and wanted. His guests were so politically important her brain didn’t want to think about the sort of decisions they must have to make. Such ordinary people, too. That made it worse.

“I wouldn’t have minded so much if even one of them had displayed symptoms of the Chosen Few,” she said to him after they had gone, glad of the chance to be alone with him and wondering how quickly he was going to send her home. “You know, like Napoleon or Churchill. There’s a lot to be said for being convinced one is a man of destiny, if one is a statesman. Do you regard yourself as a man of destiny?”

He winced. “You might choose your questions better when you’re quizzing a German, Justine. No, I don’t, and it isn’t good for politicians to deem themselves men of destiny. It might work for a very few, though I doubt it, but the vast bulk of such men cause themselves and their countries endless trouble.”

She had no desire to argue the point. It had served its purpose in getting a certain line of conversation started; she could change the subject without looking too obvious. “The wives were a pretty mixed bunch, weren’t they?” she asked artlessly. “Most of them were far less presentable than I was, even if you don’t approve of hot pink. Mrs. Whatsit wasn’t too bad, and Mrs. Hoojar simply disappeared into the matching wallpaper, but Mrs. Gumfoozler was abominable. How does her husband manage to put up with her? Oh, men are such fools about choosing their wives!”

“Justine! When will you learn to remember names? It’s as well you turned me down, a fine politician’s wife you would have made. I heard you er-umming when you couldn’t remember who they were. Many men with abominable wives have succeeded very well, and just as many with quite perfect wives haven’t succeeded at all. In the long run it doesn’t matter, because it’s the caliber of the man which is put to the test. There are few men who marry for reasons purely politic.”

That old ability to put her in her place could still shock; she made him a mock salaam to hide her face, then sat down on the rug.

“Oh, do get up, Justine!”

Instead she defiantly curled her feet under her and leaned against the wall to one side of the fireplace, stroking Natasha. She had discovered on her arrival that after Cardinal Vittorio’s death Rain had taken his cat; he seemed very fond of it, though it was old and rather crotchety.

“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.

He didn’t seem to; at least he didn’t comment upon weariness or possible illness, even made no reference to the exigencies of packing. Which wasn’t a bit like him. And after a while she began to experience a sensation that the world must be ending, so different was he from his usual self.

He wouldn’t help her make the dinner a success, the sort of affair they could refer to in letters with reminiscent pleasure and amusement. If she could only have persuaded herself that he was simply upset at her going, it might have been all right. But she couldn’t. His mood just wasn’t that sort. Rather, he was so distant she felt as if she were sitting with a paper effigy, one-dimensional and anxious to be off floating in the breeze, far from her ken. As if he had said goodbye to her already, and this meeting was a superfluity.

“Have you had a letter from your mother yet?” he asked politely.

“No, but I don’t honestly expect one. She’s probably bereft of words.”

“Would you like Fritz to take you to the airport tomorrow?”

“Thanks, I can catch a cab,” she answered ungraciously. “I wouldn’t want you to be deprived of his services.”

“I have meetings all day, so I assure you it won’t inconvenience me in the slightest.”

“I said I’d take a cab!”

He raised his eyebrows. “There’s no need to shout, Justine. Whatever you want is all right with me.”

He wasn’t calling her Herzchen any more; of late she had noticed its frequency declining, and tonight he had not used the old endearment once. Oh, what a dismal, depressing dinner this was! Let it be over soon! She found she was looking at his hands and trying to remember what they felt like, but she couldn’t. Why wasn’t life neat and well organized, why did things like Dane have to happen? Perhaps because she thought of Dane, her mood suddenly plummeted to a point where she couldn’t bear to sit still a moment longer, and put her hands on the arms of her chair.

“Do you mind if we go?” she asked. “I’m developing a splitting headache.”

At the junction of the High Road and Justine’s little mews Rain helped her from the car, told Fritz to drive around the block, and put his hand beneath her elbow courteously to guide her, his touch quite impersonal. In the freezing damp of a London drizzle they walked slowly across the cobbles, dripping echoes of their footsteps all around them. Mournful, lonely footsteps.

“So, Justine, we say goodbye,” he said.

“Well, for the time being, at any rate,” she answered brightly, “but it’s not forever, you know. I’ll be across from time to time, and I hope you’ll find the time to come down to Drogheda.”

He shook his head. “No. This is goodbye, Justine. I don’t think we have any further use for each other.”

“You mean you haven’t any further use for me,” she said, and managed a fairly creditable laugh. “It’s all right, Rain! Don’t spare me, I can take it!”

He took her hand, bent to kiss it, straightened, smiled into her eyes and walked away.

There was a letter from her mother on the mat. Justine stooped to pick it up, dropped her bag and wrap where it had lain, her shoes nearby, and went into the living room. She sat down heavily on a packing crate, chewing at her lip, her eyes resting for a moment in wondering, bewildered pity on a magnificent head-and-shoulders study of Dane taken to commemorate his ordination. Then she caught her bare toes in the act of caressing the rolled-up kangaroo-fur rug, grimaced in distaste and got up quickly.

A short walk to the kitchen, that was what she needed. So she took a short walk to the kitchen, where she opened the refrigerator, reached for the cream jug, opened the freezer door and withdrew a can of filter coffee. With one hand on the cold-water tap to run water for her coffee, she looked around wide-eyed, as it she had never seen the room before. Looked at the flaws in the wallpaper, at the smug philodendron in its basket hung from the ceiling, at the black pussy-cat clock wagging its tail and rolling its eyes at the spectacle of time being so frivolously frittered away. PACK HAIR-BRUSH, said the blackboard in large capitals. On the table lay a pencil sketch of Rain she had done some weeks ago. And a packet of cigarettes. She took one and lit it, put the kettle on the stove and remembered her mother’s letter, which was still screwed up in one hand. May as well read it while the water heated. She sat down at the kitchen table, flipped the drawing of Rain onto the floor and planted her feet on top of it. Up yours, too, Rainer Moerling Hartheim! See if I care, you great dogmatic leather-coated Kraut twit. Got no further use for me, eh? Well, nor have I for you!

The pain. It was like those first few days after Dane died. The same sort of futile, wasted, unavoidable pain. The same anguished impotence. No, of course there was nothing she could do. No way of making up, no way.

Scream! The kettle was whistling already. Hush, kettle, hush! Hush for Mummy! How does it feel to be Mummy’s only child, kettle? Ask Justine, she knows. Yes, Justine knows all about being the only child. But I’m not the child she wants, that poor fading old woman back on the ranch. Oh, Mum! Oh, Mum… Do you think if I humanly could, I wouldn’t? New lamps for old, my life for his! It isn’t fair, that Dane was the one to die… She’s right. My going back to Drogheda can’t alter the fact that he never can. Though he lies there forever, he never can. A light has gone out, and I can’t rekindle it. But I see what she means. My light still burns in her. Only not on Drogheda.

Fritz answered the door, not clad in his smart navy chauffeur’s uniform, clad in his smart butler’s morning suit instead. But as he smiled, bowed stiffly and clicked his heels in good old-fashioned German manner, a thought occurred to Justine; did he do double duty in Bonn, too?

“Are you simply Herr Hartheim’s humble servant, Fritz, or are you really his watchdog?” she asked, handing him her coat.

Fritz remained impassive. “Herr Hartheim is in his study, Miss O’Neill.”

He was sitting looking at the fire, leaning a little forward, Natasha curled sleeping on the hearth. When the door opened he looked up, but didn’t speak, didn’t seem glad to see her.

So Justine crossed the room, knelt, and laid her forehead on his lap. “Rain, I’m so sorry for all the years, and I can’t atone,” she whispered.

He didn’t rise to his feet, draw her up with him; he knelt beside her on the floor.

“A miracle,” he said.

She smiled at him. “You never did stop loving me, did you?”

“No, Herzchen, never.”

“I must have hurt you very much.”

“Not in the way you think. I knew you loved me, and I could wait. I’ve always believed a patient man must win in the end.”

“So you decided to let me work it out for myself. You weren’t a bit worried when I announced I was going home to Drogheda, were you?”

“Oh, yes. Had it been another man I would not have been perturbed, but Drogheda? A formidable opponent. Yes, I worried.”

“You knew I was going before I told you, didn’t you?”

“Clyde let the cat out of the bag. He rang Bonn to ask me if there was any way I could stop you, so I told him to play along with you for a week or two at any rate, and I’d see what I could do. Not for his sake, Herzchen. For my own. I’m no altruist.”

“That’s what Mum said. But this house! Did you have it a month ago?”

“No, nor is it mine. However, since we will need a London house if you’re to continue with your career, I’d better see what I can do to acquire it. That is, provided you like it. I’ll even let you have the redecorating of it, if you promise faithfully not to deck it out in pink and orange.”

“I’ve never realized quite how devious you are. Why didn’t you just say you still loved me? I wanted you to!”

“No. The evidence was there for you to see it for yourself, and you had to see if for yourself.”

“I’m afraid I’m chronically blind. I didn’t really see for myself, I had to have some help. My mother finally forced me to open my eyes. I had a letter from her tonight, telling me not to come home.”

“She’s a marvelous person, your mother.”

“I know you’ve met her, Rain—when?”

“I went to see her about a year ago. Drogheda is magnificent, but it isn’t you, Herzchen. At the time I went to try to make your mother see that. You’ve no idea how glad I am she has, though I don’t think anything I said was very enlightening.”

She put her fingers up to touch his mouth. “I doubted myself, Rain. I always have. Maybe I always will.”

“Oh, Herzchen, I hope not! For me there can never be anyone else. Only you. The whole world has known it for years. But words of love mean nothing. I could have screamed them at you a thousand times a day without affecting your doubts in the slightest. So I haven’t spoken my love, Justine, I’ve lived it. How could you doubt the feelings of your most faithful gallant?” He sighed. “Well, at least it hasn’t come from me. Perhaps you’ll continue to find your mother’s word good enough.”

“Please don’t say it like that! Poor Rain, I think I’ve worn even your patience to a thread. Don’t be hurt that it came from Mum. It doesn’t matter! I’ve knelt in abasement at your feet!”

“Thank God the abasement will only last for tonight,” he said more cheerfully. “You’ll bounce back tomorrow.”

The tension began to leave her; the worst of it was over. “What I like—no, love—about you the most is that you give me such a good run for my money I never do quite catch up.”

His shoulders shook. “Then look at the future this way, Herzchen. Living in the same house with me might afford you the opportunity to see how it can be done.” He kissed her brows, her cheeks, her eyelids. “I would have you no other way than the way you are, Justine. Not a freckle of your face or a cell of your brain.”

She slid her arms around his neck, sank her fingers into that satisfying hair. “Oh, if you knew how I’ve longed to do this!” she said. “I’ve never been able to forget.”

The cable said: HAVE JUST BECOME MRS RAINER MOERLING HARTHEIM STOP PRIVATE CEREMONY THE VATICAN STOP PAPAL BLESSINGS ALL OVER THE PLACE STOP THAT IS DEFINITELY BEING MARRIED EXCLAMATION WE WILL BE DOWN ON A DELAYED HONEYMOON AS SOON AS POSSIBLE BUT EUROPE IS GOING TO BE HOME STOP LOVE TO ALL AND FROM RAIN TOO STOP JUSTINE

Meggie put the form down on the table and stared wide-eyed through the window at the wealth of autumn roses in the garden. Perfume of roses, bees of roses. And the hibiscus, the bottlebrush, the ghost gums, the bougainvillaea up above the world so high, the pepper trees. How beautiful the garden was, how alive. To see its small things grow big, change, and wither; and new little things come again in the same endless, unceasing cycle.

Time for Drogheda to stop. Yes, more than time. Let the cycle renew itself with unknown people. I did it all to myself, I have no one else to blame. And I cannot regret one single moment of it.

The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follow an immunatable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thron enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it.