Chapter 61

Moira Clancy

Raffles Hospital

Singapore

16 January 1946

My dearest Nancy,

I have asked the nurse to give you this when my ship sails: to England, not Australia.

I hope you can forgive me, both for my desertion and for not having the courage to tell you myself. But I didn’t want our last words together to be tears and goodbyes, but of looking towards the future.

Yours is at Overflow. I don’t know where mine is yet. But I do know that before I find it I need to see my home, my real home, green fields and brown streams and leaves turning yellow in autumn. I need to hear English voices. One day, I promise, we will meet again. Perhaps I will even come to stay at Overflow, if you will have me.

Overflow is your home. It is not mine. Please believe me that this is not because of anything in your heritage. I admire whatever ancestors made Nancy of the Overflow, and the man who I will always love, and my son, whose face I will see every day, for as long as I may live. If either of them had lived, I would have gone with them to their home and made it mine. But they’re gone and somehow I must live with that. I do not think I can do so at Overflow, or not yet.

Goodbye, my dear, until we meet again. You have been closer to me than a sister, another mother to my son. Please do not ever blame yourself for his loss, as I try not to blame myself either. One day, perhaps, we might succeed.

Give my love to your river and to your family, who are still mine, even if I can’t bear to meet them yet.

With all my love, always,

Moira

MOURA, 26 JANUARY 1946

MICHAEL

Michael sat in the Moura kitchen, looked at the woman opposite him, knowing she was trying to help. Knowing too that she could never understand.

Blue held up the teapot. ‘Tea? It’s stewed, not fresh, I’m afraid.’

‘Don’t think I’d recognise fresh tea if it bit me.’ He accepted a cup and a biscuit.

‘A new one of Mah’s. No sugar, and beef tallow instead of butter. The tallow makes them better keepers too. We’re hoping to get the factory back to domestic production by the end of the month.’

He bit into the soft pillow of the biscuit, trying to guess its flavour.

Blue grinned. ‘Prunes. But don’t tell anyone. We’re calling them “Luxury Fruit Rolls: a pudding in a biscuit”.’

‘You wanted to talk to me about Nancy?’

Everyone wanted to talk to him about Nancy. His mother, her mother, her father, all trying to say without actually using the words that five years was a long time for two young people whose lives had diverged so much. That while of course everyone would be delighted if the girl who was now the sole heir to Overflow married the man who would inherit Drinkwater, he should not expect Nancy to feel the same, should not pressure her, should give her time to adjust, to know what she might want. Time to recover.

Only Nancy’s grandmother had not tried to take him aside for a quick word, though she’d given him a hug and a kiss at the Christmas party. And now Blue had invited him over and he suspected it was not for a trial taste of Luxury Fruit Rolls.

‘Yes.’ Blue seemed to hunt for words already rehearsed. ‘You know she’s been very sick. Much, much sicker than Joseph. And the child …’

He nodded to stop her talking more about the little boy. He didn’t have any way of even thinking about that.

Nancy had been sent from Singapore to recuperate further in Darwin, where Kirsty had visited her. Kirsty had written to the assorted families. Nancy’s hands were still unable to hold a pen, she’d said. But she’d sent her love to everyone, naming them one by one, including Michael. But then she had sent love to a couple of school friends too, and the dogs, and her horse. She had also asked that no one meet her in Brisbane, or even Sydney.

Michael knew that her mother, at least, wondered whether this meant she wanted to be home before she told them things they might not want to hear: that she had met a doctor, perhaps, in the hospital in Darwin, and was going to marry him and live far from Overflow. Perhaps even that she felt she could never marry now, after what she had seen or perhaps had had done to her in the prison camp.

‘Joseph has nightmares,’ Blue said flatly. ‘They’re easing a bit now. He’s going to be fine. But … it might be worse for a woman. Joseph says many of the men will never recover. Others will bury it so deep they won’t know what frightens them.’

‘You want me to go gently with Nancy?’

‘I … we … want you to understand that she may never get over what has happened to her. Even once her body has recovered, her mind …’

‘She won’t be Nancy of the Overflow?’

Blue said nothing.

‘How is Joseph? Really?’

‘He is home. Really home now. Not just in his own house. I … I’m not very good with words.’

And the bush has friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him,

In the murmur of the river and the whisper of the stars.

‘Banjo had the words, didn’t he? Though I think some of those are yours, not his. I suspect,’ Blue’s smile was a true one now, ‘every second, sleeping or waking, every step he takes, Joseph knows he’s home.’

‘It will be like that for Nancy too.’

‘Maybe. She … she did choose to leave, you know, for Charters Towers, then Malaya. Maybe for her …’ Again she floundered.

‘The roots of home don’t hold her close, like Joseph? They do. I’ve seen it. Felt it. Nancy will be all right, Blue. Thank you. But once she’s home again, she will be fine.’

And she would be. She would belong to Overflow. The swans still nested down on the river, more and more of them each year. But would the girl who returned from war still want him? The swans and pelicans couldn’t tell him that.

Blue nodded, her face still uncertain, and poured him another cup of tea. Michael took it.

The beginning of the old poem came back to him. I had written him a letter …

It was time he wrote a letter too.

He looked at the paper on the desk in front of him, bare of words, then out the window. Cicadas yelled. Sheepdogs panted in the shade. Sheep clustered under the gum trees.

Somewhere out there his parents were by the river with a picnic basket and an elephant, in what he suspected was their first day off since the war began, except when they’d gone down with food poisoning, and he’d seen the swan, and known Nancy was alive.

Jim was at the factory, interviewing new employees, his uniform mothballed in a chest up in the attic with Michael’s.

Their parents had accepted with what might even have been relief that neither of their sons planned to go to university or college. As Jim had said, it was time for real life now, old men and weary women, paddocks tired from war, welcoming back the young.

Michael gazed at the paper again, as if words might have grown there by themselves. He knew no etiquette for what he had to write. Just put down the bedrock, he thought, like the stones of the land under its fuzz of green. Just tell the truth.

Dear Nancy,

It is strange to have an address at which to write to you after so long. I have been sitting here wondering how to say things, some words to hide behind in case you don’t feel as I do. But there should be no hiding now.

There has never been anyone for me except you. I know that you will not be the girl who left here five years ago. I am not the same boy either. I feel guilty that my war has been an easy one and yours unimaginable. You have endured so much more than me. I don’t think the last five years have changed me, just made me more of who I was back then.

The morning you left Overflow you told me: ‘We are birds, both of us, but we are rock too. I want to soar with you, and know the land below is us as well.’ I did not know how to reply to those words then. Now, if I ever get the chance, I do. I think, I hope, that you still are the person who said them, and who will want my answer.

But if you are not — or if you are, but do not want to be that person with me — then please do not feel bound to me either by memory, or by my helping to manage Overflow as well as Drinkwater now.

Both of us will survive and thrive if you decide your life is not with me as a husband or as a farm manager. It made sense to combine the shearing this year, especially now Jim is back. He is putting the factories into post-war production. Between the two of us we’re able to take much of the load from our parents and yours. He is well and happy, and engaged to a WAAF he met on the ship coming back.

Joseph McAlpine is back too, and hoping to begin practising again soon.

I have no words enough to tell you how sorry I am about the loss of Ben and Gavin, and what you have been through, but glad that you are coming home to us, no matter what you choose after that.

If I send you all my love, please don’t think I expect you to do the same. But still:

All my love,

Michael