Meggie could hardly believe it, and didn't know if she wanted to be with him or not, now that the opportunity presented itself. Though the pain of her mind had taken a lot longer to heal than the pain of her body, the memory of her honeymoon ordeal in the Dunny pub had been pushed from thought so long it had lost the power to terrify her, and from her reading she understood better now that much of it had been due to ignorance, her own and Luke's. Oh, dear Lord, pray this holiday would mean a child! If she could only have a baby to love it would be so much easier. Anne wouldn't mind a baby around, she'd love it. So would Luddie. They had told her so a hundred times, hoping Luke would come once for long enough to rectify his wife's barren loveless existence.
When she told them what the letter said they were delighted, but privately skeptical.
"Sure as eggs is eggs that wretch will find some excuse to be off without her," said Anne to Luddie.
Luke had borrowed a car from somewhere, and picked Meggie up early in the morning. He looked thin, wrinkled and yellow, as if he had been pickled. Shocked, Meggie gave him her case and climbed in beside him. "What is Weil's disease, Luke? You said you weren't in any danger, but it looks to me as if you've been very sick indeed."
"Oh, it's just some sort of jaundice most cutters get sooner or later. The cane rats carry it, we pick it up through a cut or sore. I'm in good health, so I wasn't too sick compared to some who get it. The quacks say I'll be fit as a fiddle in no time."
Climbing up through a great gorge filled with jungle, the road led inland, a river in full spate roaring and tumbling below, and at one spot a magnificent waterfall spilling to join it from somewhere up above, right athwart the road. They drove between the cliff and the angling water in a wet, glittering archway of fantastic light and shadow. And as they climbed the air grew cool, exquisitely fresh; Meggie had forgotten how good cool air made her feel. The jungle leaned across them, so impenetrable no one ever dared to enter it. The bulk of it was quite invisible under the weight of leafy vines lying sagging from treetop to treetop, continuous and endless, like a vast sheet of green velvet flung across the forest. Under the eaves Meggie caught glimpses of wonderful flowers and butterflies, cartwheeling webs with great elegant speckled spiders motionless at their hubs, fabulous fungi chewing at mossy trunks, birds with long trailing red or blond tails. Lake Eacham lay on top of the tableland, idyllic in its unspoiled setting. Before night fell they strolled out onto the veranda of their boardinghouse to look across the still water. Meggie wanted to watch the enormous fruit bats called flying foxes wheel like precursors of doom in thousands down toward the places where they found their food. They were monstrous and repulsive, but singularly timid, entirely benign. To see them come across a molten sky in dark, pulsating sheets was awesome; Meggie never missed watching for them from the Himmelhoch veranda.
And it was heaven to sink into a soft cool bed, not have to lie still until one spot was sweat-saturated and then move carefully to a new spot, knowing the old one wouldn't dry out anyway. Luke took a flat brown packet out of his case, picked a handful of small round objects out of it and laid them in a row on the bedside table.
Meggie reached out to take one, inspect it. "What on earth is it?" she asked curiously.
"A French letter." He had forgotten his decision of two years ago, not to tell her he practiced contraception. "I put it on myself before I go inside you. Otherwise I might start a baby, and we can't afford to do that until we get our place." He was sitting naked on the side of the bed, and he was thin, ribs and hips protruding. But his blue eyes shone, he reached out to clasp her hand as it held the French letter. "Nearly there,
Meg, nearly there! I reckon another five thousand pounds will buy us the best property to be had west of Charters Towers."
"Then you've got it," she said, her voice quite calm. "I can write to Bishop de Bricassart and ask him for a loan of the money. He won't charge us interest."
"You most certainly won't!" he snapped. "Damn it, Meg, where's your pride? We'll work for what we have, not borrow! I've never owed anyone a penny in all my life, and I'm not going to start now."
She scarcely heard him, glaring at him through a haze of brilliant red. In all her life she had never been so angry! Cheat, liar, egotist! How dared he do it to her, trick her out of a baby, try to make her believe he ever had any intention of becoming a grazier! He'd found his niche, with Arne Swenson and the sugar.
Concealing her rage so well it surprised her, she turned her attention back to the little rubber wheel in her hand. "Tell me about these French letter things. How do they stop me having a baby?"
He came to stand behind her, and contact of their bodies made her shiver; from excitement he thought, from disgust she knew. "Don't you know anything, Meg?"
"No," she lied. Which was true about French letters, at any rate; she could not remember ever seeing a mention of them.
His hands played with her breasts, tickling. "Look, when I come I make this-I don't know-stuff, and if I'm up inside you with nothing on, it stays there. When it stays there long enough or often enough, it makes a baby." So that was it! He wore the thing, like a skin on a sausage! Cheat! Turning off the light, he drew her down onto the bed, and it wasn't long before he was groping for his antibaby device; she heard him making the same sounds he had made in the Dunny pub bedroom, knowing now they meant he was pulling on the French letter. The cheat! But how to get around it?
Trying not to let him see how much he hurt her, she endured him. Why did it have to hurt so, if this was a natural thing?
