She walked quicker and quicker, like one trying to escape a nightmare. He went along with her, keeping pace, not attempting to hold her back. He was aware that this was unwise, this was terrorist country; he was supposed to be a soldier, a guardsman. He was aware that his rife was back by the transmitter — but army training was a veneer quickly bloomed by the present needs of this young lady, this girl, he found so disturbing.
If she had been a fellow student back at college, he admitted to himself that he would have pursued her, wooed her without mercy, never have taken no for an answer. But those had been mad days — free days after the war, when the lights had gone up and the lid had come off all the pent-up joyous emotions of the young. Then came conscription, his father dying and this new campaign.
‘It’s my father,’ she sobbed, as if the word had been plucked from his mind. ‘It is my father — that’s who they’re digging for ... who they’ll find.’ She caught her shoulder on protruding branches and her dress tore but she paid no heed, hurrying on until finally she could go no farther as they came to where waterfalls edged the rubber trees.
The unexpected change of terrain as well as the sheer beauty of the spot made him momentarily forget his charge until he saw she was running full tilt across to the edge of the rocks and the falls. He leaped after her, his heart pounding, convinced she intended to throw herself over.
‘My God!’ he panted, his forbearance banished now by fear, as he caught first her arm, then her shoulders, securing her, half holding, half shaking. She was limp under his hands, passive, a willing victim. ‘No, no,’ he told himself, ‘this is not right.’ He folded her close, one hand cupping and holding her head, gently trying to stay the shaking and the sobbing. All he could offer was a kind of paternal shushing, he could think of no comforting words. Nothing would alter the truth.
As she stood shuddering in his arms with her head pressed to his chest, she could hear and feel the great thudding of his heart. She realised how she must have frightened him, just as Wendy had frightened her parents so long ago in the past. She gave herself up to crying, for Wendy, for her mother, for herself — for the loss of her father.
This was the full time of mourning. She knew beyond any doubt the outcome of the search. Clinging desperately to this young man, she saw her tears make the jungle green of his shirt even darker. She remembered the clean-shirt smell of her father on Sunday mornings when she sat next to him in church. She remembered how white his handkerchiefs looked against his brown hands. She remembered him twirling her and Wendy round and round, one on each arm. She remembered how she and her father had mourned the passing of an old dog who on his last day had dug himself ever deeper into a hole under a japonica bush, waiting to die. He had known — as she knew now.
She thought how strange it was that the young man she had drawn as a figure symbolic of mourning held her now at this time.
He remembered he had held his mother like this when finally she had cried. His brother had been at home, but when she had seen him coming unexpectedly through the door on special leave, only then she had given way — sobbing as this girl was sobbing, realising the depths of loss.
He had to tighten his jaw and grind his teeth to stem his own emotions. He felt she sensed his emotion for she suddenly slackened the grip on his shirt, then spread her hands and pushed them flat on his chest as if trying to reassure herself, break herself of the habit of such clinging.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said between sobs, ‘hanging on your neck … ’
‘Don’t worry about it.’ In a less tense situation he might have quipped that he was enjoying it anyway. ‘You just hang on as long as you like.’
She lowered her face and leaned the top of her head against him, trying unsuccessfully to bring the crying under control.
He yearned to be able really to comfort her, to find the lotus and make her forget, then perhaps the amaranth and make her remember him for ever. He felt stirrings in his groin that he felt very uncalled for and ashamed of at that particular moment. He held her away a little. ‘Ssh!’ he breathed. ‘You’ll make yourself ill. That’s enough now.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she repeated, as if his movement away confirmed she had taken too many liberties, and would have stepped away from him altogether had he not held her.
‘No, I’m sorry, I found you too disturbing to hold close any longer.’
She wiped her hands across her cheeks. ‘What, looking like this?’ Then she endeared herself to him more by offering him her hand. He reached for it and she drew him again to the edge and pointed out where her father’s car was. When he spotted it, he told her he had overheard the police inspector saying it would not be practical to raise it and there was nothing more to be learned from it anyway.
‘I suppose there’s so many Jap tanks lying about from the war, one more wrecked vehicle doesn’t matter much,’ he added.
‘No,’ she replied, so resignedly it made him feel heartsick. Holding her hand tight, he looked around with a deep sense of wonder at the jungle-clad hills, the steep ravine, the exotic birds and extravagant butterflies. ‘War in paradise,’ he said.
‘Love, too. Well, years ago,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know until yesterday that my parents used to come to these falls when they first came to live here. My mother showed the police a path down and under the falls — right down … ’
‘You must show me some time.’ He looked eagerly out over the expanse of jungle and waterfalls.
‘Why not now?’ she said and suddenly it seemed like something she should do — a kind of pilgrimage to a time when her parents were happy together, just the two of them, without children to distract their enjoyment, or war to tear them apart. The tears fell again, just flooding from her eyes, and she began to walk in front of him across the rock table so he could not see. ‘I’d be glad of some way to pass more time.’
He saw the sudden spring of grief again, but these tears fell more easily, and he wondered if she might have plumbed that awful first depth of mourning for her father — even without the final confirmation. He hoped so.
He allowed himself to be led until they came to the steep rocky flood-water course, then he went first, supporting her down.
She had been surprised how easy it was to remember the way, almost as if she had walked it many times over years instead of just once the day before. In front of her Alan slipped and for a moment, instead of supporting, nearly dragged her over into the final steep descent.
They both laughed with that topsy-turvy reaction to possible disaster people often have — then in the same instant both felt guilty and averted their eyes to the track.
The moment was quickly forgotten for Alan as he realised he could no longer see an obvious way. He was astonished when, taking the front again, she led him under the falls.
Liz noticed other things on this second visit, saw rocks set like a dry shelf where they could sit. She touched his arm and pointed rather than shout in his ear over the echoing roar of the water.
Rather like two people in a fantasy they sat down and stared at the endless sheet of living water before them.
‘My father sat here,’ she said quietly, knowing no one could hear, ‘and my mother. I feel him here now — I know he’s dead, and I feel his ... concern for us.’ She let the feeling run over her mind, unhindered by concepts of belief or unbelief, just knowing them as every rock and every bordering fern knew the rush of the waters.
After a time she turned to Alan and saw he had his head leaning back on the rock, looking up to the very apex above them where water leaped from rock at the top of the fall. His lips were moving too as if noise gave freedom to talk aloud to oneself, like ladies under hair dryers, she thought. After a few seconds he sensed her scrutiny and looked down at her.