Page 172 of The Pearl Sister
‘Ah, Kitty, how did we grow so old?’ Drummond shook his head. ‘I still remember you at eighteen, singing at the top of your voice in The Edinburgh Castle Hotel, as drunk as you like.’
‘And whose fault was that?’ She eyed him.
‘Mine, of course. How is Charlie? I know a fellow from the mission at Hermannsburg who said he’d been to school with him and hoped he’d come to visit him one day.’
‘You must be talking about Ted Strehlow.’
‘I am. The fella is mad as a cobra with a migraine, but I meet him occasionally on his travels in the Outback. He’s a self-fashioned anthropologist, studying Aboriginal culture.’
‘Yes, I met him once in Adelaide. Sadly, you cannot have seen Mr Strehlow recently. Charlie died seven years ago in the Japanese attack on Roebuck Bay.’
‘Kitty, I didn’t know!’ Drummond walked towards her and sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Good God, I didn’t know. Forgive me for my insensitivity.’
‘So’ – Kitty was determined not to cry – ‘I have nothing to keep me here in Australia, which is why I’m going home.’ After a pause, she looked at him. ‘It’s so very wrong, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘That you and I should still be sitting here on the earth, while my boy – and so many others we loved – are no longer with us.’
‘Yes.’ His hand reached to cover hers.
Kitty felt its warmth travelling through her skin and realised his was the last male hand that had touched her in such a gesture for almost forty years. She wound her own hand around it.
‘You never remarried?’ he probed.
‘No.’
‘Surely there were plenty of suitors?’
‘Some, yes, but as you can imagine, they were all fortune hunters. You?’
‘Good God, no! Who would have me?’
Another long silence hung between them as they sat there, hands clasped, each contemplating the secrets they kept from each other, but cherishing the moment they were sharing.
‘I really must retire, or I’ll be good for nothing in the morning,’ Kitty said eventually. Yet her body made no move to release his hand from hers. ‘Do you remember Alkina?’ she asked into the silence.
‘I do.’
‘She disappeared the night before Charlie’s twenty-first birthday. And then Camira did the same a few months later when I was away in Europe.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Fred left too after that. He went walkabout and never returned. And I haven’t had sight nor sound of any of them since. I must have done something very bad in my life. Everyone I love leaves me.’
‘I didn’t. You sentmeaway, remember?’
‘Drummond, you know that I had no choice. I—’
‘Yes, and I will regret my actions until my dying day. Rest assured I’ve had long enough to do that already.’
‘We were both culpable, Drummond, make no mistake.’
‘It was good to feel alive, though, wasn’t it?’
‘It was, yes.’
‘Those memories have kept me going on many a long, cold night out in the Never Never. Kitty . . .’
