Bruce’s manner here at his own table was interesting too. He could easily have rebuked Ross, Rudie was sure under normal circumstances he did, but at times it was almost as if he was egging Ross on to be rude. Was his hope that Rudie wouldn’t feel sorry for Ross if he made himself unpleasant enough? Or did he want Dulcie to see her husband in his worst light?
But it was Dulcie Rudie’s eyes were drawn to most of all. Her face was very pink, a combination of being by the hot stove earlier, and embarrassment. She had her hair up in a pony-tail and was wearing a pink checked shirt and jeans. Each time she got up to fill the gravy boat or help someone to more vegetables, he noted her tiny waist and pert bottom and wished he could help the way he felt about her.
Yet for all Ross’s arrogance and loutish bad manners, Rudie could sense that under normal circumstances this was a harmonious group of people who cared deeply about one another. He noted how often John and Bob went to help Dulcie, the way all the younger members looked up to Bruce. He was touched too how every one of them, including Ross, was so warm towards Noël. They clearly liked having a child in their midst.
But above all the things he observed, the one thing which struck him was the lack of anything physical between Ross and Dulcie. Most men, he thought, if they felt they had a rival in their midst, would touch their wife. A familiar pat on the bottom as she poured him gravy, perhaps a tweak of her cheek when she gave him more potatoes. That was a standard way of saying, This woman is mine. Rudie had seen it played out in every kind of social circle. A woman too would put her hand on her husband’s shoulder, serve him first, get him to tell a story which showed him in a good light. There was none of that.
Rudie felt sure now that there was no intimacy between them whatsoever.
As Ross began to tell a story about a kangaroo hunt, which it appeared would also illustrate he was a crack shot, Rudie’s mind turned back to what Bruce had said about the women in Kalgoorlie, and he wondered if it was possible for a man to be impotent with his wife and yet function perfectly normally with a whore. Although it struck him as bizarre, he wished he was in a position to stay far longer in Esperance, to get to know this man better.
Yet however fascinating Ross would be to study, his constant jibes were wearing and it was something of a relief to see Noël’s eyes drooping after he’d eaten his pudding. ‘I hope you won’t think me rude if I take him home now,’ he said to Bruce.
Bruce’s eyes met his and a spark of understanding flitted between them. ‘No, of course not, but drive carefully and watch out for roos.’
Dulcie got up from the table, went to Noël, wiped his mouth and lifted him into her arms. His head went down on her shoulder almost immediately. ‘May I have him for the day tomorrow?’ she asked.
‘If you’d like to. I had a mind to go to Albany and look around,’ Rudie said.
‘Shall I keep him overnight, then you won’t have to rush back?’ she said eagerly.
‘Watch out, she’s trying to steal him from you,’ Ross crowed.
Rudie ignored him. ‘That’s a nice idea if you really don’t mind. I’ll bring all his stuff in the morning.’
Rudie took the child from Dulcie’s arms and laid him up over his shoulder. He thanked them for the supper, said goodbye and Bruce said he would walk out with him to the car.
‘Watch out for snakes,’ Ross yelled out as they got to the door.
‘Sorry about Ross,’ Bruce said as they walked across to the car. ‘He isn’t normally like that.’
‘It was understandable,’ Rudie said. ‘I’m English, from a city, I can’t ride a horse or shoot a gun.’
Bruce chuckled. ‘You’re a tolerant man, Rudie. I would have wanted to whack him.’
Rudie smiled. ‘I think I’d have come off worst!’
It was six o’clock the following evening when Rudie drove into Kalgoorlie and parked outside the Old Australia. He got out of the car and stood for a moment looking up at the veranda, remembering the night he first met May and danced with her up there.
She had looked so beautiful in that pink costume. He’d barely noticed the bride or the groom. What a shame he hadn’t got to know the rest of the group that night, he might have saved himself so much pain. And now he was back here again, this time looking for information which might hurt all of them.
Was it right to do that?
He sighed. He had to know, Bruce needed to know too.
He checked in, had a chat with Sadie the landlady who greeted him like a long-lost son, washed and put on a clean shirt. It was so hot compared with down at Esperance, the ceiling fan merely stirred the warm air around and the room looked even seedier than he remembered it.
Going out on to the veranda later, he looked down towards the room Dulcie and Ross had been in. He recalled now that at breakfast the morning after the wedding Sadie had been making jokes about the newlyweds. She had said the groom was up early, having a smoke outside. She wondered if he’d left the bride smoking from passion in bed.
He had laughed with everyone else that morning, but now he knew the truth it wasn’t funny any more. He wondered how Dulcie felt that morning, and on all the subsequent ones. He expected she thought she was to blame. He took out his wallet and removed the newspaper clipping inside it. It was of Dulcie and Ross, taken at their wedding. He’d gone into the newspaper office this morning to look at the old papers from that time, and when he found what he was looking for, he’d asked for a copy. He carefully tore off Dulcie’s face – he only needed a picture of Ross to prompt the girls’ memories.
Rudie waited until nine before going down to Hay Street. He’d had a few scotches to make him feel less conspicuous, but not enough to dull his mind. Yet he did still feel conspicuous as he turned into the street – the girls were all out in force as it was a warm night, and as it was a Thursday, there weren’t the crowds of men milling around as there would be at the weekend.
He picked on a young blonde girl first, thinking Ross was likely to make for someone similar to Dulcie.
‘Do you know this man?’ he asked, showing her the photograph.
‘Whatcha want to know that for, mate?’ she asked.
She looked tired and worn, even if she was only about seventeen. ‘He’s an old friend of mine and I’ve lost touch with him,’ Rudie said. ‘Someone told me they saw him up here one weekend. I hoped one of you girls might have met him.’
She looked at the picture again. ‘No, mate, I ain’t seen him. He’s young, ain’t he, they mostly go for the older girls.’
Rudie tried a blonde woman of about thirty-five next. She looked raddled, her hair like a bird’s nest, and makeup so thick it could have been put on with a trowel.
‘I might’ve seen him,’ she said, squinting up at Rudie speculatively. ‘But it’ll cost yer.’
Rudie pulled out a ten-shilling note. She looked at it, and back at him as if weighing up whether it was worth trying for more.
Rudie grinned at her, not letting go of the note. ‘I’ll be fair if you’ve got some real information,’ he said.
‘I’ve seen ‘im,’ she said. ‘But never done no business wif ‘im.’
‘You get this if you tell me who’s done business with him,’ he said.
‘I’ll need more than that to remember,’ she said, but the sly way she looked at him suggested she really knew nothing.
Rudie put the note away, wished her a good evening and moved on. He spoke to many other women, a few were like the first girl and said they didn’t know him, some were like the second one and tried to get the money for nothing. Many more of them tried to persuade him into trying their services.
He was beginning to feel dispirited, for he’d had this same problem with the girls around King’s Cross and Darlinghurst while he was looking for May. He knew those who really knew something often needed quite a bit of persuasion to talk, and it wasn’t always purely money which loosened their tongues.
By the time he’d got almost to the end of the street, over an hour
later, he knew the girls would have whispered to one another what he was asking about. This was the point when someone might come forward of their own volition. By now they would have agreed he couldn’t be a cop, or a private detective. The fact he was looking for a man, not a girl, would help too.
A striking-looking redhead in a very short, low-cut dress broke away from talking to another girl and came up to him. ‘Let’s have a look at that picture,’ she said.
Rudie showed her, and she took it under a street light to see better. ‘Yeah, I reckon it’s the bloke I know,’ she said, looking up at Rudie. ‘But this ain’t a good photo of him.’
Rudie knew then this one really was on the ball. ‘No, it’s an old one taken three years ago,’ he agreed. ‘I expect his hair’s longer than that now, it’s a dark auburn and curly. Does that fit the bloke you know?’
She nodded, and Rudie gave her the ten shillings. ‘There’ll be more if you can tell me anything useful.’
Strangely enough, she shoved the note back into his pocket. ‘I only did business with him once. He always makes for Mary, so offer her the money.’
‘Which one’s Mary?’ he asked.
‘She’s got someone with her right now, but she’ll be out soon,’ the girl said. ‘You a mate of this bloke?’
There was something about the way she asked that which made Rudie sense she hoped he wasn’t.
‘Not exactly. I just need to know a bit of stuff about him. Does that change your mind about introducing me to Mary?’
She grinned mischievously. ‘Whatcha want to know, a bit of dirt on him?’
‘Do you know some?’ Rudie couldn’t help but like this woman, her eyes sparkled, she radiated warmth and she was very attractive.
‘You tell me why you want to know and Mary and me might help you,’ she said, putting her head to one side like a cockatoo. ‘It’s a slow night tonight, you’re better-looking than most of the blokes that come down here, you’ve got class and all. Bloody Nora, I’m just being a sticky beak.’
Rudie laughed. She had leapt up in his estimation by being so honest. ‘How does a fiver between you both and a few drinks sound?’ he asked. ‘But I want straight talking, no making up fairy stories!’
She looked him up and down for a second. ‘We don’t want no fairy stories from you neither!’
‘Done,’ he said, holding out his hand to shake hers.
While they waited for Mary to appear, the woman introduced herself as Dolly, and told him that Mary was half Aboriginal. ‘She was one of them kids taken away from her folks by the Holy Rollers,’ she said. ‘She tells me about the mission they took her to, run by nuns it were, cruel bitches. They had this idea, see, that if they took the kids that weren’t full blacks they could make them like whites. Bloody silly idea, but they did it to thousands of kids. Mary got raped at her first job as a maid, only fourteen she was, she told the woman she worked for, but all she did was kick her out. That’s how she ended up here.’
Rudie wondered if the similarity in backgrounds was what attracted Ross to Mary. ‘How about you, Dolly, how did you end up here?’
She just shrugged. ‘Wrong choices of men, short of money, nowhere much else to go. Same as most of us here.’
Dolly shot off back up the road suddenly, and Rudie saw her talking animatedly to a dark woman who had just come out of one of the houses. She had all the Aboriginal features – the squat nose, the thick lips – but coffee-coloured skin and lovely long black curly hair worn loose on her shoulders. She looked round at Rudie, then turned back to Dolly. It looked to him as if she needed some persuasion.
But then just as he was beginning to think she was going to refuse, the two women came towards him. He guessed they were both in their late twenties, they still had good figures and skin, but the first flush of youth had gone.
‘Thank you for agreeing to talk to me,’ he said. ‘Can we go to a bar to talk?’
It was apparent even before the girls took him to a bar just around the corner that the two women were very close friends, and had been for some years. Mary wasn’t attractive, or striking like Dolly, she was also far less talkative, but he got the impression she was sharp-witted and kind.
Once in the bar, three glasses of scotch in front of them, the women lit up cigarettes and sat back waiting for him to explain himself.
‘I want to know about this man because he is married to my sister-in-law,’ he began. Calling Dulcie that wasn’t so much a lie as needing to make the story simpler. ‘I already knew they weren’t really happy, but when I came over from Sydney with my son to visit her, I was told he comes up here regularly.’
He explained as briefly as he could about Ross and Dulcie’s background. ‘I am very fond of my sister-in-law, and I think she’s got a real raw deal,’ he went on. ‘But she is so caring and loving that she’ll put up with almost anything rather than leave her husband.’
‘You want me to tell you something that will persuade her?’ Mary said. Her voice was very unusual, for though she had a strong Australian accent, the sound of it was soft and melodic.
‘I guess that’s about the size of it.’
‘Where’s your wife?’ Mary asked.
‘She’s dead, it happened a year ago in Sydney. My sister-in-law came over then to help me with my son. He was only a baby.’
‘You want her to leave this man, then, for you?’ she said, looking at him hard.
He hadn’t thought of it that way, and he certainly hadn’t meant it to sound like that. ‘They’ve got a marriage in name only,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing between us, we’re just friends. We became close when May died. But yes, I suppose if I was really honest, I do want her myself. That isn’t the issue, though, I only want to get to the bottom of what is wrong with her husband.’
The two women exchanged glances, they seemed faintly amused and he hoped to God they weren’t playing him along for some kind of sport.
‘What d’you mean by a marriage in name only?’ Dolly asked. ‘That he can’t get it up with her?’
Rudie blushed. ‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘He can’t or he doesn’t want to fuck her?’ Dolly said crudely, her eyes glinting as if she was enjoying his discomfort.
‘He couldn’t when they got married, right up till he had a sort of breakdown back earlier this year. She hasn’t said if there has been any improvement since then, but I doubt it somehow. That was why I was so surprised when I heard he was coming up here.’
‘Lots of blokes who come to us can’t get it on with their wives,’ Mary said. ‘To us there’s nothing weird about that.’
‘Why do you think that is?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘Sometimes they’ve married women they just don’t fancy. Now and again the bloody fools have put their wife on such a pedestal they can’t give her one. But most of the married men who come here either don’t get enough at home, or they just get turned on by sex with a whore.’
‘What do you think this man’s problem is then?’ he asked, pushing the newspaper picture over to her, so she would be absolutely clear who they were talking about.
She picked up the picture and looked at it for a few moments without speaking. ‘He’s a strange one all right,’ she said eventually. ‘I didn’t know he was married, I got the idea he was a stockman way out in the bush somewhere.’
‘He came to me the first time, I couldn’t do anything with him,’ Dolly said. ‘We don’t like that, they usually get nasty, but he cried and I felt sorry for him.’
Rudie saw that her face had softened. ‘I knew something bad had happened to him,’ she went on. ‘He kept muttering something about his brother. I thought maybe he’d died, stuff like that does affect men and they often come to girls like us because they haven’t got to sweet-talk us into sex. So I didn’t chuck him out, I gave him a drink and just held him for a while.’
‘I think he was talking about the Brothers, you know, the Christian Brothers,’ Rudie said. ‘He had a very bad time with them
as a kid.’
‘That’s what I said when she told me,’ Mary butted in. ‘I know what some of them are capable of.’
‘So what happened after that first night?’ Rudie asked. ‘How long was it before he came back, and why did he go for Mary.’
‘It was exactly four weeks later in May when he came back,’ Dolly said. ‘I remember because I never expected to see him again. He wasn’t drunk either, they usually are on a Saturday night. He came right up to me and asked if I could recommend a girl for him. I got the idea he meant someone who would be kind to him if he failed again. So I suggested Mary.’
‘You’d better tell him what the bloke said when he saw me,’ Mary suggested.
‘I don’t want to tell him that,’ Dolly said sharply, and for the first time in their conversation she looked embarrassed.
‘Well I will then, ‘cos I reckon it’s important,’ Mary said. ‘He took one look at me and said, “I don’t want a bloody Abo.” Well I’ve heard that about a million times in my life, and it’s like a challenge to me now. So I said he’d find it easier to get it on with me if he thought I was way beneath him, and I pointed out that I had more regulars on the street than anyone.’
‘She does too,’ Dolly chipped in. ‘Anyway, he stood there wavering. I reckon he couldn’t face going up to anyone else. Then suddenly he agreed. He went off with Mary and they were gone a long time.’
Rudie looked to Mary. ‘Did he make it with you?’
She grinned. ‘Oh yes. It was a matter of pride with me to make sure he did. Twice in fact. Since then he’s been back every four weeks like clockwork.’
‘Would you say it was his first time with a woman?’ Rudie asked.
‘Yeah, I’d say so, he was so thrilled and excited afterwards. Like a young boy.’
‘Was he like any other man?’ Rudie asked curiously. ‘I mean, did he get straight into it, or what?’
‘You’re a bloody sticky beak, aren’t you?’ Mary said, but she laughed. ‘No, he didn’t get straight into it. I had to bully him. He seemed to respond to that. Still needs it now, or wants it, whichever way you want to look at it.’