In The Company Of Strangers Part 9

'Yes?'

'There's something I need to . . .' But she just can't make herself say it. She needs more time, time to think about how to say it.

'What is it, Alice?'

'Nothing,' she says, 'just thanks for sticking up for me.'

Ruby nods. 'I'm off to get into the tough stuff in Catherine's room. See you later.'

In Catherine's room Ruby's heart sinks at the prospect of what needs to be done. A few days earlier she had surveyed the mess: no curtains of cobwebs yet, no rats or bats, but the clock has stopped, dust has settled and the room reeks of Catherine's attempts to hold on to the threads of a disintegrating life. Todd had been right, the overall mess was very personal: dirty clothes, old newspapers, unwashed crockery, dead flowers, the unmade bed. For a woman brought up as both she and Catherine had been Ruby recognised the effect of this. She understood how Catherine must have hated knowing that someone would have to deal with what she no longer had the time or energy to manage herself. Ruby had sunk down into the big chair and studied the painful evidence of those last weeks. 'I wish you'd told me, Cat,' she'd said aloud. 'I could have come.' But as soon as the words were out she wondered if it was true; she might have come but she would have resisted it, fought it. The last thing she ever wanted had been to be here, in this house with Catherine, either healthy or dying.

She had got to her feet rapidly, gone to the shed and returned with boxes and plastic sacks and had cleared away the embarra.s.sing surface of the mess. The scattered, unwashed clothes, the newspapers, empty envelopes, dead flowers and other rubbish she bagged and put into the outside bins. Then she stripped the linen from the bed and took it, along with the towels and a couple of crumpled tea towels, to the laundry and loaded the lot into one of the washing machines in which Paula did the laundry for the cottages and the house. She stacked the crockery and vases into the kitchen dishwasher, and carried a couple of almost dead plants out to the deck, soaked them with water and left them to recover in the sheltered sunlight. It didn't take her long and she was rewarded by the dramatic improvement in the appearance of the room. But the bed still had to go.

She remembered this bed all too clearly; a Benson family heirloom, a wooden frame with a slatted base and carved head and footboards. It was always an ugly bed and Ruby wondered why Catherine had chosen to use it at the end. Memories, perhaps. The mattress looked almost new. She had been on the point of going outside to find Declan to ask him if he had feelings about what should be done with it when she stopped. Declan was having trouble keeping up with everything, particularly with his feelings about Catherine. The last thing he needed now was to have to make a decision about the bed. Instead she asked the two young men he'd taken on to help with some repairs to the barn to dismantle it and carry it out to the storeroom. Its fate was something to be decided another day. She dusted, vacuumed and sat back and admired her own handiwork. The room was respectable now although the odd smell was still there.

'Come with me, Todd,' she had said later that day, 'there's something I want you to do for me.'

Relief shone like sunlight across his face when he saw what she'd done but he was clearly too choked up with emotion to speak at first.

'This is better, isn't it, but there's still a lot to do in here in terms of sorting out Catherine's things. Would you feel okay helping me with some of it?' Ruby asked.

Todd nodded, getting himself back together. 'Yeah, course, if you think she'd think it was all right.'

Ruby turned to face him. 'I think that you're absolutely the best person for this. And the first thing I'd like you to do is to take this thumb drive and download all the files from her laptop onto it, and then delete them from the machine.'

'Cool,' he'd said. 'That's easy,' and within minutes he was working silently at the long table under the window.

Ruby perches now on the edge of that table, looking out of the window to where she can see Lesley Craddock heading up the path to the cottages where Paula is just about to emerge from number four, from which the guests checked out this morning. So now Lesley will start pumping Paula for information, but that too will be a wasted effort. Paula has no information to pa.s.s on. Late yesterday Declan had got a call telling him that a cancellation meant that the minor surgery he'd been waiting for could be scheduled for tomorrow if he could get to the hospital by four o'clock today. It was nothing too serious, but being Declan and embarra.s.sed, he'd mumbled something which she couldn't quite hear, but she did catch 'pretty routine' and he obviously wasn't worried about it. Right now he is probably checking into his ward and if there is a delay, or if, as he suggested, he decides to take an extra day or two in Perth, Lesley will have left before he gets back. Ruby feels a touch of sympathy for her; the cloud of anger, frustration and general unhappiness that travels with her is almost tangible. Whether it's mid-life angst, relationship problems or something else entirely, Ruby doesn't know, but she can see that Lesley is battling with something, and it makes her a difficult person to like. She slips off the edge of the table as Lesley nabs Paula and starts to interrogate her.

The boxes are her next task. Catherine's personal things private papers, letters, journals, photographs, news clippings, email printouts, certificates going back to childhood, jewellery, and mementoes. What else? And where to begin? The task seems enormous and Ruby knows that each box she opens has the potential to strip bare her own emotions, and start the unravelling of her own past. A process that's certain to open up old wounds and splash acid into them.

Once Todd had cleared the files from the laptop she had told him to disconnect it and gather all the leads together and put the whole thing away in its case. That was several days ago, and since then she and Declan have done some serious talking about Benson's Reach, about Todd and Alice, and about themselves. This business partnership that has been thrust upon them is working amicably, better than either of them had expected, but it's still early days. Some things, though, need to be sorted out now.

Through the window Ruby sees Todd heading back from the cafe towards the house. Leaning forward she throws open the window.

'Have you got a minute, please, Todd?' she calls, and he nods and changes direction slightly to come in through the kitchen door. Declan had planned to talk to Todd today but as he hurried to pack his bag she had volunteered to do it. Todd taps on the half-open door and comes in, perching on the arm of the sofa.

'Good,' Ruby says, walking over to close to the door. 'We need to have a chat.' And she sees a flash of fear cross his face. Surely he can't think he's in trouble?

'Don't look so worried,' she says. 'There's nothing wrong. Have you heard from your mum recently?'

He shrugs. 'When Declan took me up to the caravan the last time there were a couple more postcards. She's still in Kuta . . .'

'We can try to find her if you like, but if she's okay there and you're okay here well, we can leave things as they are for the time being.'

'Yeah,' he says. 'That'll be good, no need to get her back.'

'Okay.' She takes the laptop and hands it to him. 'So, Todd, this is yours now. Declan and I think you should have it. You'll use it, won't you? I know it's not the latest version but it's pretty good and all the software's there.'

It's clear that he's over the moon but before he can start fumbling for words she begins again, handing him a roll of red dot labels. 'We'd also like you to go through the bookshelves and stick a red dot on all the books you'd like to have for yourself. When Declan gets back he's going to get the books down from the top shelves so you can go through them too, on the table. He was going to do it today but of course he had to go to the hospital. So don't get up onto the steps, okay? You can take as many as you like but the one rule is that you don't try getting onto the ladder with that plaster.'

'Wow,' Todd says, his face flushing. 'Really? The laptop and books . . . that's so . . . that's so totally cool, thanks, Ruby.'

'Thank Catherine, it's what she would have wanted.'

He nods again. 'Thing is though, I won't have anywhere to keep them.'

'There's plenty of shelves and cupboards in your room,' she says.

'But . . . well . . . after that, when I have to go . . .'

'You mean to the caravan?'

He nods.

'Do you want to go back? I don't think you can manage yet.'

'No, 'course not, I want to stay. I told Fleur just now, break my other ankle so I don't have to go back.' He laughs nervously.

'Well you don't need to go to those lengths,' Ruby says, sitting down beside him now. 'We should have sorted this out with you earlier. I guess you've been worrying about it, and we've been busy so we didn't notice. This whole thing came as a surprise to both Declan and me, you know, and we haven't decided yet what will happen to this place it's too soon for that. It'll take a few months, maybe more, but one thing we are both clear about is that we will look after you. I don't mean "look after", like you look after a little kid we will look after your interests. You can stay here with us until that decision's made, if you want to. You're earning your keep in all sorts of ways and when you're back on both feet again there will be more for you to do. When we do make a decision we'll talk to you about what that means, for you, for all of us. By that time you'll be sixteen and you may have had enough of Benson's Reach who knows? Meanwhile, you can line up your books on the shelves and your laptop on the desk, and I'll drive you up to the caravan so you can collect anything else you want from there and we can get the mail redirected so you'll get your mum's cards here instead of having to collect them. Is that okay?'

A few minutes later she watches as he heads out towards the workroom. What a delight it had been to see the relief on his face, the sparkle in his eyes. Unable to find words he had lurched forward to hug her and she had hung on to him. He was a slight boy at the gangly age, long bony arms and legs, his feet seeming too large for his body. It was his eyes that revealed that he was so much wiser than his years. 'He's just as you described him, Cat,' Ruby murmurs, 'and I know just what you were trying to do and why.'

here is a plate of sandwiches, tiny triangles of white bread with the crusts removed, lined up in three neat rows, four in each row and each with a little paper flag: egg and mayonnaise, cheese and tomato, ham and lettuce. Declan tries to multiply three by four but it seems awfully difficult, the numbers keep slipping away. He hopes it's just the anaesthetic from which he is still quite dopey.

'Now, you should eat something,' says the nurse who has just taken his pulse, 'and there's a nice cup of tea as well. You'll feel a lot better when you've got something inside you.'

Declan hauls himself up in the bed and she props him up with more pillows and smooths the sheet. He thinks he would like to stay here for about four weeks, being fussed over and having someone cut the crusts off his bread. How long is it since he had sandwiches like these? Decades. They remind him of birthday parties when he was a child: tiny sandwiches, tinned mandarins trapped and glistening in orange jelly, cupcakes scattered with hundreds and thousands, homemade lamingtons and birthday cake round and white with jam in the middle, or later, when he was a little older, a possum shaped mound covered in chocolate b.u.t.ter icing roughed up with a fork to look like fur, Smarties for eyes and a line of candles in a ridge down the middle of its back.

His tongue feels sludgy and swollen; he flexes it, and tries speaking. 'Was everything okay?' he asks the nurse.

She pats his arm. 'You're fine, Mr Benson. Mr Tran will be along in about half an hour to tell you all about it.'

He knows that this is the procedure that the nurse can't tell him anything, and there's not likely to be a problem, but still it makes him anxious. It was only a small prostate problem but he'd like to know if they fixed it, and he'd like to know now because he is, he thinks, too young to have a prostate problem. He nods and leans back and the nurse takes one of each of the sandwiches, puts them on a smaller plate and hands it to him with a paper serviette.

'See what you can do with these,' she says. 'I'll be back shortly.'

Cheese and tomato is delicious, he thinks. Why would anyone ever eat anything other than cheese and tomato? It's the best flavour in the world. But then the first thing you eat after an anaesthetic always tastes wonderful, probably because of the dead feeling in your mouth, plus the relief of recovering from being rendered unconscious. His mother had made sandwiches like these, and organised a birthday party every year until he was twelve, but by his thirteenth birthday she had been dead for seven months and his father, who hadn't a clue about birthdays, had taken him to Benson's Reach for the weekend. Catherine was there with his Uncle Harry and she had made a square cake with green icing marked out with white lines like a football pitch and scattered with tiny plastic footballers. It was totally amazing and he'd felt horribly disloyal to his mum when he'd told Catherine that it was the best birthday cake he'd ever had. Recently Ruby had reminded him that he had also spent his eighth birthday at Benson's Reach, she was there then, and for some reason Catherine wasn't, but it was when he'd made up his mind to be a pilot and he had been practising. He thinks he remembers it but that might be just because he wants to please Ruby.

Declan likes Ruby his concern about how they would get on in this strange alliance which Catherine has set up had dissipated within a few days of her arrival. She is, he thinks, very straightforward and fair, and she says exactly what she thinks. Similar in some ways to Catherine, but Catherine could be manipulative and, as an adult, her intensity wore him down. She needed attention of a sort he could not give. Sometimes he felt she kept him on the edge of a sort of emotional black hole into which he could be sucked at any moment. He liked her, loved her, was frequently very grateful to and appreciative of her, but he struggled to escape from her need to know everything about him, and to control him. He knew it had been hard for her when Harry left, and died soon after that. She was still in her thirties then and he thinks back now, trying to remember whether there had been anyone else of significance in her life since then. Not another partner, certainly, and her aloneness strikes him now in a way it has never done before. Catherine seemed always to know everyone but be close to no one. How little he really knew about her. He feels shamed now by his own lack of curiosity, of even considerate enquiry. So caught up in personal disasters of his own making, he had never paused to look at her life, to wonder what she might need or want from him.

Declan shakes his head, sighing, and studies the remaining sandwiches. Ruby is, he thinks, less complicated than Catherine and not dependent on anyone else to affirm her. He knows little of their friendship except for their childhood as migrants, the h.e.l.lish treatment they endured in the convent, and that when they left they were both sent as domestic helps to the Perth Bensons, who owned the hotel. Those were Harry's parents, of course, while Declan's father Robert, Harry's cousin, was from the less well-heeled side of the family. What could it have been like, he wonders now, for those two girls leaving the convent and moving into the hotel? His Aunt Freda was lovely but she would have been tough with the staff, and then there were the guests. Had they escaped the tyranny of the nuns for the tyranny of demanding and inconsiderate hotel guests?

He's not thought about this before, but sitting here now, peacefully filling himself with delicious little sandwiches and tea, it does all seem rather intriguing and strange. Ruby had told him the other day that she had left Australia in 1969 and had gone back to England, to try to find her family. She, like so many of the child migrants, had been told that her parents were dead, but she had never allowed herself to believe it. And if she and Catherine were such great friends, why hadn't they been in touch again for more than twenty-five years?

'So why didn't you and Catherine see each other for so long?' he'd heard Paula ask recently.

Ruby, unsurprisingly, had turned to her, given her a very long look and said. 'I don't think that's any of your business, Paula.'

But what she did tell him and Alice one evening was that early in '69, back in England, she had shared a flat in Earls Court and later that year she'd gone with her flatmates to see Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight festival. The following year they'd gone there again and to Glas...o...b..ry, where she'd met the man she later married. It's hard for Declan to imagine this plump, grey-haired, serious looking woman sleeping under canvas, smoking dope and going crazy for Dylan, Marc Bolan and Leonard Cohen. The thought of it actually made him want to chuckle.

'Jackson Crow would've been there that year, I'll bet,' Declan had said when she'd told them that. 'He probably played there. You two might have more in common that you imagine, Ruby.'

He wants to know more, but Ruby will talk about the past only when it suits her, and if he's ever to find out what happened between the two women it will be because she wants to tell him. For the time being, however, Declan is very happy with the way things are going at Benson's Reach. Alice, by her mere presence, makes him feel safe in a way he hasn't felt with anyone since his mother died. It wouldn't matter to him if Alice sat up there in her cottage on the hill and didn't do any work, just being there would be enough. As it was she had been determined to set up a proper business arrangement between them and that was probably a good thing for both of them. Alice, he thinks, is tough as steel and tender as a small child. Declan knows he would not have got sober without her.

When she had been in crisis he had done what he could. In court on that last day he had been incandescent with rage when the sentence was handed down. Couldn't the judge see what sort of person she was? Couldn't she see that the consequences were already a more devastating punishment than prison could ever be? Alice had been hard to talk to in prison guarded, always on the edge, but obviously pleased to see him. The letters they'd eventually exchanged were better, and he felt they'd grown to know each other through those letters in a way they might never have done through occasional conversations on visiting days.

Declan eats his third small sandwich and sips his tea delicious so simple. Who needs anything more complicated than crustless sandwiches and tea and the sense of childhood they invoke? Is there a part of him that has never grown up? Catherine used to say men never really grew up, and he'd resented it because it was said, he'd felt, with bitterness. Surely there was a child in both men and women that never really gave way to adulthood and that, he thinks, is not necessarily a bad thing. When he reflects now on the boyish comfort he draws from the presence of Alice and Ruby, the pleasure of their company, he knows that he has found something precious and unexpected. And Todd, what a b.l.o.o.d.y excellent kid he is despite his h.e.l.lish background. There is a marvellous sort of chemistry when the four of them, although each very private, each to some extent holding back, are together. It's almost like having a family, Declan imagines, although family is not something he's ever known much of. He feels he would be quite happy for things to go on as they are forever except, of course, for the spanner that he himself has thrown into the works.

He shifts restlessly in the bed and puts his plate down on the tray as he thinks about Lesley Craddock. Why did he do it? It would be nice to be able to say that the drink was to blame; in the past it had frequently been both excuse and reason. But he couldn't blame it on that this time, he hadn't succ.u.mbed to her attempts to get him to drink, but of course she hadn't held back. She'd had a skinful by the time they'd left the restaurant, which was all the more reason why he shouldn't have responded when she kissed him. He should have steered her back to the car, dropped her at her cottage and made a swift exit. But no, he was a cliche the man who couldn't say no when s.e.x was a possibility. But there he was creeping out next morning with her car keys and his own, waiting for one of the maintenance guys to arrive to drive him into town, pick up her car and drive it back for her and so avoid having to make that journey with her later in the day. The car was back and parked outside her cottage by eight in the morning, and Declan had studiously managed to avoid her ever since. He had, however, felt her. He'd felt her reaching out for him, her clinginess, he thinks now, like Catherine's greedy as quicksand. He should have spotted it that day when she bowled up to his table at the pub, should have backed off, not agreed to coffee nor organised a second lunch, and as for dinner well how stupid was that? But he hadn't realised she'd get so full on. If he let her get close again he would be up to his neck in an instant.

It wasn't all her fault, of course, he'd always been attracted to slightly domineering women but attraction was different from compatibility. What a stroke of luck the hospital called at just the right time. All being well they will discharge him the day after tomorrow and he's promised himself a day, perhaps two, in Perth before driving back. As he drives south Lesley will already be home, hopefully making up with her husband and kissing her grandchildren. And the disastrous, although certainly not unpleasant, incident will be history.

Alice has tried many times to write this letter, but almost six months ago she gave up. Why torture yourself with it, she had asked herself, when they don't want to hear from you, they will never forgive you and you shouldn't expect it? All you're doing is setting yourself up for disappointment. They never answered the earlier letters, why would this one be different? But since she's been at Benson's Reach some of her self-esteem has returned. Guilt and shame, for so long inextricably linked, are starting to separate out. She can see herself and what happened rather more clearly, even a little more dispa.s.sionately, than she has in the past. While she still feels the overbearing burden of guilt she can now claim her own grief and loss, as well as the rightness of having served her sentence. And so she has decided to try again, just one more time.

My Dear Jacinta, she begins, and then stops immediately. Should she drop the 'my'? Is this just a red rag? Will the 'my' only further alienate a daughter who hates her and cannot forgive her? But 'Dear Jacinta' sounds almost impersonal for a daughter whom she loves as she has loved her since the day she first held her in her arms. Be yourself, Alice murmurs, what have you got to lose? This will not run aground on the strength of a blasted p.r.o.noun it's already aground. What you have to do now is haul it off the rocks.

My Dear Jacinta It is more than a year since I last wrote to you, and perhaps you have been glad of my silence since then. Believe me I do understand how you must feel. I know you can't forgive me, and that you and I will never be able to recapture what we had before that terrible night . . .

She stops again. It's a glorious still evening and she is sitting at the table on her balcony writing by the light of two candle lamps. It's April now, and soon the weather will start to change; the mornings will grow cooler, the evenings are already closing in. On Wednesday she will open the cafe for the first time and test her newly acquired cookery skills as well as her ability to manage the staff and mix with customers. Perhaps it's this that has given her the courage to try again. She doesn't expect to be forgiven or accepted but she needs to reclaim the few things from the past that matter to her.

Alice leans back for a moment, taking in the stillness. Down at the main house the lights are low; Declan is in Perth and Ruby has driven Todd to a friend's house where he will stay overnight. He's been getting out a bit recently, since Johno and Bundy, two of his old school mates, turned up to volunteer to help at the festival. It's good for him, Alice thinks, he needs to be spending more time with people his own age. Most of the guests are probably eating out in town. The lights are on in cottage six but there is no sign of the occupant on the balcony outside. Out on the road she sees the lights of a car, which slows and turns into the drive. Ruby probably. Ruby she must, she absolutely must, find the right time to come clean about the Google search. Alice reads through what she has written and thinks it trite. It is so unnatural, so careful, so reasonable, and so unlike how she feels.

Ruby pulls up outside the house, turns off the lights, locks the car door and instead of going inside she walks around it to the back and up the path towards Alice's cottage.

'Is it okay to come up, Alice?' she calls from the bottom of the steps. 'I'm sorry to disturb you but I need to talk to you.'

'Of course,' Alice says. 'I was about to make a cup of tea. Will you have some?' There is a copy of the local paper on the table and Alice pulls it across to cover her writing pad.

'Thanks, that would be lovely,' Ruby says as she joins her on the balcony and follows her into the cottage. 'These cottages are rather cosy, aren't they? I hope you don't feel excluded up here, though. You're welcome to stay in the house, you know.'

Alice switches on the kettle and turns to her with a smile. 'Thanks but I really love having this s.p.a.ce to myself, after . . . well, for the last few years . . . um . . . green tea or English Breakfast?'

'Oh green, please,' Ruby says, and when the tea is made they take the pot and two cups and saucers out onto the balcony.

'Look, there's something I really want to discuss with you,' Ruby says as she settles into her chair.

The knot of anxiety in Alice's stomach rises through her chest to her throat where it seems to choke her.

'I'd quite like to say something first,' she cuts in, and continues without waiting for a response. 'I feel very bad about this, Ruby, but I need to come clean and tell you that I used the office computer to Google you.' Saying it is a relief that brings its own new terror. The doors are open now, and Ruby will, Alice is sure, admit to also having Googled her and will want to talk about what she discovered. It had to happen sometime but despite the fact that she's been thinking of little else for days, speaking it out loud seems sudden and shocking.

Ruby's eyebrows shoot up and a smile crosses her face. 'Oh dear, my cover is blown. One of the joys of being here has been being able to be myself with no one else's expectations or a.s.sumptions attached.'

Alice smiles. 'Well that doesn't have to change, but of course what I learned is pretty impressive and there is so much I want to ask you.' She is dizzy, shaking with anxiety, her head spinning with questions. Has Ruby come to tell her she must leave? Is she concerned that guests might recognise her and it will be bad for business? Does she think her unworthy of trust? She closes her eyes and takes a deep breath.

'Alice? Are you all right?' Ruby asks. 'You've gone awfully pale.'

'I'm fine,' she lies. 'I know you Googled me too. I know you found my record with the Prisoners Review Board. I should have told you . . .'

Ruby's forehead creases into a frown and she leans across the table. 'Hang on, Alice,' she says. 'I haven't done anything of the sort. I know nothing about you except what you and Declan have told me, which is really very little.'

The silence seems endless and Alice is blinded by confusion. 'Well someone Googled me because I saw it in the search history,' she says.

'Well, not me. Declan perhaps?'

Alice shakes her head. 'Declan has known everything from the start,' she says. 'He was in court the day I was sentenced. He wouldn't need to look for anything on the internet.'

'Well then I don't know,' Ruby says, 'but it certainly wasn't me.'

Alice stares at her in confusion. 'But who . . .'

'Alice, I've said, I don't know,' Ruby says, firmly now. 'But I can see you're very upset about it do you want to tell me why?'

The air seems heavy with threat and the light of the lamps, which only minutes ago were barely sufficient for her to see her own writing, now seem to glare in her face. She can duck and hide but what's the point? 'Yes,' she says, taking a deep breath, 'I do have something I need to tell you.'

So now there is no going back, only forward to the truth and wherever that might take her. 'I arrived here a few days before you, Ruby, and ten days before that I was released from prison where I'd served a five year sentence for dangerous driving causing death.' The words seem to fall out and circle her, tightening in an iron grip around her chest as she waits for the look on Ruby's face to change. But Ruby's expression remains impa.s.sive.

'I see,' she says eventually. 'And is that it? Do you want to tell me more? You don't have to, it's entirely up to you.'

Alice is confused. Where is the shock, the dismay, the disapproval, the anger? 'Well first I should apologise,' she says cautiously. 'You're my employer, or half of my employer. I should have told you sooner. I could have told you any time since you got here but I didn't, despite your kindness to me, despite your trust and the fact that you have treated me more like a friend than an employee.'

'I'm sure you talked this through with Declan before I arrived,' Ruby says, 'so if I had a problem about it, it would be with him, as my business partner. But it's not a problem. I'm going on what I see, and what I see is an intelligent, responsible woman who's working hard to get her life together.'

Alice hesitates. What is supposed to happen now? she wonders. What will change? Will this always stand between them to her disadvantage? 'It's hard to believe we're having this conversation,' she says eventually.

Ruby picks up the teapot and pours them both some tea. 'Here,' she says, pushing a cup towards Alice. 'Drink some.'

Alice picks up the cup and inhales the sweet jasmine tones of the tea but doesn't drink, just puts it down on the table so sharply that it spills onto the newspaper and soaks through to the writing pad beneath it. She both wants and doesn't want to tell Ruby what happened. It would be the first time she's told anyone outside the prison.

'You don't have to tell me,' Ruby says again, sipping her own tea. 'But you might find it helps.'

Alice nods. 'I think so too,' she says. She turns the teacup around in her hand, staring down into the green gold tea. 'I'm an alcoholic,' she says, 'just like my father. He was a beautiful man when he was sober and a monster drunk. It was like living with two different people. He died of liver cancer when I was thirteen. My mother was a shy, quiet woman, always worried about what the neighbours might think. Her life was a battle for safety and respectability, and the need to protect both of us from the effects of his drinking.' She pauses. 'This is a very long, confused and self-indulgent story when I tell it to myself. I'll try to keep it free of excuses and justifications, but I think that to understand it you do need a bit of background.'

'Of course,' Ruby says. 'Take your time.'

'You'll have heard stories like this a million times in the years you've been working with women. I don't suppose mine is so different. I got pregnant when I was seventeen. My mother was devastated. She thought it was her fault for not bringing me up properly. Anyway, I wanted to keep the baby and I moved in with Mike, the baby's father. He was nearly ten years older than me and he'd been working in the north west Wittenoom but the mine had closed in '66, the previous year, because the workers were found to be inhaling dangerous levels of asbestos fibres. It was a big issue here . . .'

'I remember it,' Ruby says. 'I was still here in those days.'

Alice nods. 'Okay.' She takes a first sip of tea and then gulps it. 'Mike had moved back to Perth to look for work. His father was an alcoholic too. I suppose we thought we could look after each other and for a while we did. He was a very sweet natured man. Our son, Gary, was born early the next year, and we had a daughter, Jacinta. Several years later it slowly became clear that Mike was sick. He couldn't work, he had no energy, there were problems with his lungs, and he was diagnosed with mesothelioma. I was working full time, to keep us all, and he started drinking, and I began drinking with him. I suppose we'd both thought that because of our backgrounds we could drink quite a bit but we would know when to stop. Only of course we didn't.

'Mike went down that track faster than I did. The prescription drugs he was on made it worse. He became very moody and was always angry. It was a big change from how he'd been when we first got together. He was angry with the company, with the government and he couldn't seem to see or hear anything else. I was scared for him, but particularly for the kids, and it was that which drove me to AA. I had to stop drinking and I hoped that Mike would eventually come along. He was drinking every day. He wasn't well but he would wear himself out going on protests, and meeting with other former asbestos workers and come home incandescent with rage and incapable of doing anything.

'In the end I couldn't bear it any longer. I told him he must either go to AA or get out. He chose to get out. He was still around, he saw the kids from time to time, and that was usually okay. In the mid-eighties we got a divorce. He'd met a woman and they wanted to get married and move to Queensland. The kids had a few holidays up there with them. He'd cut back the drinking, and we were in touch from time to time when it was necessary.

'Well, to cut a long story short, Gary took off for a job in New Zealand when he was twenty-five, and Jacinta married Alan, and then she got pregnant. They had a girl, Jodie, and then, a couple of years later, they had Ella. I was so thrilled two beautiful granddaughters. I had a decent job managing a bookshop and was just about keeping my head above water financially, and then one day, right out of the blue, Mike turned up. His wife had left him some months earlier. I hadn't seen him for years and I couldn't believe the change in him. He was very sick in fact he was dying and that's why his wife had left. She was much younger than him and she just couldn't cope.'

Alice stops and finishes her tea. 'You see I am making it very long after all,' she says, looking at Ruby. 'Sorry, but it all seems so important. It matters to me that you understand how it all happened. Of course this is just my version. I'm sure others would tell it differently . . .'