An image formed in Merryn’s mind of naked bodies on the sand. The matter of factness of his tone annoyed her more than anything else.
‘How nice,’ she said.
‘I’ve organised an army driver to collect you from here. I also told him you’re my sister’s friend.’
‘Is that what you told Phillip?’
‘No, Phillip’s different. He wouldn’t tell anyone. He’s been my batman and driver since I first arrived...last posting that is.’
Instantly Merryn’s eyes shaded over, and she glanced away. Jake had told her Phillip had once saved his life. Up until now she hadn’t put two and two together. She was to have joined him on that posting. Then he got hepatitis slogging it up the twelve thousand odd feet of the Hindenburg Wall near the West Irian border and was sent home to Sydney. On recovering, rather than being posted back to New Guinea, he was seconded to Vietnam.
Merryn could remember the letters he wrote to her at that time in New Guinea, when he was on another patrol in the Southern Highlands at Lake Kutubu. Army patrols, he’d said, were all to do with showing the flag and a bit of nation building, at the same time discovering new routes, drawing up maps, and gathering vital information on tribal customs and numbers in remote villages. He told her how they plodded through the green hills of the Tari Valley, a fresh red scar leading from one village to the next. How a crowd of villagers would follow them for some miles, yodelling and chanting until they reached the edge of their land, where gradually the people of the next village would take up the chant. What had fascinated Merryn most were his vivid descriptions. He seemed to love what he was doing so much. The land, he told her, was rich and mostly cleared, interspersed with vegetable gardens and copses of trees that had been harvested for firewood for more generations than any could remember. The villages were mostly only a few thatched huts built around a patch of hard trodden earth. The smell of unwashed bodies and the smoke of cooking fires permeated the air.
When he and Merryn discovered New Guinea was the only place that would give Merryn a chance to get her flying hours up, he’d applied for a posting to the Pacific Island Regiment again. When the official notification had finally come through, they’d both been so over the moon that they went out to celebrate at a their favourite seafood restaurant. It was then that they decided to get married at Karu Barracks and have their honeymoon in the Trobriand Islands.
‘Yes, I thought Phillip knew,’ she said, glancing sideways at Jake.
‘He’ll tell no-one.’
Merryn narrowed him in her sight. ‘Actually I don’t give a stuff who he tells. As a matter of fact I might just tell everyone myself.’
She spoke loudly enough for heads to turn at the other tables. Jake was worried and lowered his voice.
‘Please, Merryn...’
Why should she keep quiet? Merryn wondered. What was in it for her? Yet if she was going to start a new life here on her own, what was the point of telling anyone? Having them feeling sorry for her. Wondering what went wrong? Wanting to know what happened? The gory details. As it was she would have enough on her mind already, starting a new job in this strange country, without adding any further complications.
Her expression softened a fraction. ‘What will you pay me to keep quiet?’ she asked, half jokingly.
A pause. He studied her for a long moment. When he spoke, there was a hard edge to his voice. A man cornered. ‘There’s always the baby.’
‘Meaning?’
‘I could tell...your mother...and...your sister...’
Merryn could feel the night air suddenly chill her skin, and she shivered. For a second, she drew in a breath as though she was drowning. She wrestled with astonishment and serious rage. How had it come to this? This was a new Jake—a Jake she knew nothing about. She looked at him, and in his eyes she could read he meant what he said. A bitterness rose in her throat, and she swallowed hard, yet the taste remained. He had her over a barrel and he knew it.
After a timeless minute or so, she pushed her chair back and stood up, moving from the dining room to the edge of the veranda—where across the road a small group of Papuans sat in a circle around a youth playing a guitar. She placed her elbows on the railing and leant her chin on her clenched knuckles. For some time this is how she stood, her back to Jake. Around her the dank night thickened. In the distance, the sound of the sea lapping on the shore got louder. Perhaps the tide was on the turn.
She never wanted to give the baby away. Yet Jake convinced her it was the best thing to do. Being a Catholic, there was no way Merryn could entertain the idea of an abortion. And yet, as she knew, if the powers that be had found out about the baby, Jake would have been kicked out of Duntroon, cruelling any chances of a career in the Australian army, and that career was what he wanted more than anything else. More than a baby.
Changing careers was not an option, he told her. And if he did, where would they get the money to live on? he asked not unreasonably, with Merryn pregnant and unable to work for long and then a baby to feed. Unless he became a builder’s labourer or something—or applied for a job in the public service, which he would hate.
‘Do you know what it is?’ he had said, holding her in his arms and running a finger along her chin. ‘It’s just bad timing. That’s what it is. Another few years and it would be wonderful, darling. Then we’ll have hordes of the little buggers...a rugby team at least.’
So in the end, Merryn told her mother and Amy she was going on a working holiday to Perth. And that’s where their son was born seven months later. The working holiday was not a complete lie, for during that time she kept the wolf from the door by landing a job as a receptionist in a small hotel in Subiaco belonging to the parents of one of the apple pickers Merryn had worked with in Tassie. And as she was positioned behind a large reception desk, they let her keep working right up until near the time she was due. In return, they gave her board and meals with a little money left over for the essentials. Jake came to visit when he could, which wasn’t often, as cadets didn’t get much leave from Duntroon. Each time he came, Merryn tried to talk him into keeping the baby. She would stay in Perth and wait until he graduated. They could get married then.
However, in the end, worn down by his gentle persuasion and conscious of her total love for him, she gave in and signed the adoption papers, convinced she was doing the right thing for the baby’s prospects. And theirs. For Jake kept assuring her they would have plenty of time for more babies in the future.
And of course there was time, for Jake. But not with her.
Merryn, too numb to think, had held the tiny bundle cocooned in a bunny rug in her arms for just a few hours after he was born. I can’t do this. It’s as simple as that, she had thought, playing with his little fingers and toes. But then when the time came for him to go, she had gazed into his beseeching little eyes as if in a trance. Vaguely she remembered handing him over to a kindly nun from the convent orphanage, with the most incredible eyes, the colour of a sea before a storm, who she later discovered was Sister Bernadette.
It was a month later when Jake, seeing how much Merryn was suffering, admitted he may have been wrong. Perhaps they should have held on to the baby, got married, and kept it a secret from the army. However, the time in which Merryn had to change her mind was up. It was too late then. There was no turning back.
Despite her pleadings to the convent, which ran the orphanage and organised the adoption, no one would tell Merryn where her baby was. Had he been adopted out? Or was he still in the orphanage waiting to go to new parents? Once she had even flown to Perth and gone to the convent. And as she waited for the door to open, she had seen a file of tiny boys, dressed all in grey, come out of the orphanage next door and enter the intricately carved