Harry and Sara: The Final Story

fiction

Chapter One

Harry

When I ended the last portion of this memoir I think I was speeding to my wife, Sara, who was home at Grayson Farm in Elmsford while I’d spent a rather sentimental day in Monaldo, my hometown, about 40 miles away. We’re talking here about two small towns in rural Queensland, Australia

Sara and I, while deeply in love for nearly 30 years, had been having some rough patches lately in our marriage. The thing was that Sara had been unaware of this, but others in our family were conscious of it. My Sara was an outstandingly beautiful woman, vibrant and outgoing and great fun to be married to. But some years ago she’d suffered a badly fractured skull and brain damage when a horse had thrown her onto a boulder at Grayson Farm, her mother’s horse property at Elmsford.

After two demanding years of surgery and recuperation, shared by me on constant watch outside her hospital room in Brisbane, she’d recovered, and we all had our old Sara back. Having been away from her little girls—Samantha and Ruth—for so long, she re-entered our lives with great energy and happiness and we all revelled in the sight of Sara back and in charge.

I know I did.

That was a few years ago now and in the intervening years the kids had grown up and gone their separate ways. Samantha was a well-known actress in London, Ruth was a science teacher married to Evan McKenzie who managed the Harrigan Cattle Company property just across the road from Grayson Farm. Peter, our son, was a trainee with an American financial investigation company, Balfour G—embezzlement, fraud and the like. I’d been their top investigator, slated to become the chief executive, based in New York. But I’d turned the job down for Sara’s and the children’s sakes. I came home to Brisbane with Sara and took over the management of Pattersons Industries, my family’s company, founded by my grandfather. I owned a third of it with my two aunts the other owners.

Pattersons Industries was one of the biggest conglomerates in Australia—it owned a huge number of other companies, industrial, commercial, rural, you name it. We were very wealthy, but Sara and I were trying to give away a lot of our wealth through the charitable Pattersons Foundation. Among many other things, we’d built retirement villages in Monaldo, Elmsford and a nearby town, Aranda.

But as Sara--- my beautiful, bright, vibrant, outgoing Sara, had grown stronger on her return to full health, she’d gradually assumed more and more control of the family. It had happened gradually. The children turned to Sara when once they turned to me. Well, they’d missed their mother! Soon Sara began to make decisions without any reference to me, with the best of intentions, I was sure. Sara’s mother, June, and others in the family waited for me to do something about it but I’d nearly lost this girl a number of times during her fight to recovery. I simply couldn’t bring myself to cloud her happiness. At the time it seemed a small thing, although eventually, becoming concerned, I did try to discuss it with Sara from time to time. But she never listened.

Then it all came to a head, very quickly.

I wanted to buy a cattle property that her mother had inherited. It was just over the road from Grayson Farm, where we spent a lot of our time, and I knew, from inspection and inquiries that it was an excellent business proposition. I proposed to Sara that we form a family company to operate the property. I was a businessman and knew what I was about in this matter.

But things went wrong. Sara got the idea that I was asking her. Actually, I’d thought I was telling her. Then she brushed off my idea. In effect, she was saying, I didn’t know what I was getting into, being a townie and not a bushie---the ultimate insult as far as I was concerned. So, to me, Sara had not only been making all the decisions for the family, and not listening to me, her arrogance and control now extended to me. I was saddened, but realized I could take no more.

The discussion continued that night and the next morning but there was no need. I’d had enough—of the proposal and my marriage.

I told Sara that I loved her but couldn’t live with her any more, picked up my bag and drove to Brisbane, to our house at Hamilton. A few people, including Sara, tried to talk to me in the next few weeks but I was steaming. That is, when I wasn’t drunk, which was most of the time.

I’d actually begun to think of divorce. The perfect marriage of the perfect couple had hit the rocks.

And then, one morning some weeks later, Sara appeared at our house. She’d slept in her car in the driveway after driving down from Monaldo. She was very poised and cool, no tears, but was showing a spirit that surprised me. She said she wasn’t giving me up... get that clear, Harrigan! She talked at length of her regret over the way she’d acted. She begged my forgiveness. There were no tears. At times there was even something close to anger. But there was also love which, even in my current resentful state, I could see and feel.

So I thought for a long time about us. In fact I’d been doing a lot of thinking about us, anyway, once I was sober. It was as if a whole film of our life together rolled past. I’d thought it and rethought it. You know how it goes. No whisky to help me sleep. Thoughts tumbling over and over.

I knew there was just too much at stake for all of us-- Sara and me and our family.

I turned to her and took her in my arms She covered me with kisses. Suddenly we were one again.

We spent a beautiful few days alone. She was hugely repentant, unaware of her gradual command of the family and hugely sorrowful for the cattle company incident and the way she’d treated me. She’d driven back and forth to Brisbane having a contract drawn up for the company that I’d wanted to form, and presented it to me as a gesture of love and apology.

We went back to Elmsford for Christmas, two very, very happy people.

But then Sara went a bit too far the other way and became too anxious to please. She’d told me, in our reconciliation, that she’d never ever thought we’d be parted and that she was never going to that dark place again. I tried to relax her but she wasn’t the Sara of old. I felt great compassion for her, watching her unhappiness and loving her deeply.

So why was I now speeding to Sara from Monaldo? Good question!

Two answers—as I went to farewell Sara this morning, standing on the steps at Grayson Farm, she took hold of me and gave me a monster of all kisses, her mouth working on mine for a long time. Then she pulled back, looked at me long and hard with her beautiful blue eyes and said, That’s for the journey to Monaldo, buddy! First answer. Then she pulled me in hard against her beautiful body and gave me another kiss, even hotter, her arms firmly around me, looked at me again and said, And that’s for the journey home, Jack! Second answer.

Suddenly this was the old confident Sara! As I departed she stood on the steps and gave me a challenging smile and a small wave of her hand, just as she used to do. A somewhat shaken and stirred Harrigan drove off. I wanted to stay but business called.

In Monaldo, with my business quickly over and some time to spare, I went on an overdue and sentimental inspection of my old hometown, among many memories. I eventually got to where Sara and I had met, first embraced and first kissed, all within an hour or so. I thought hard about our life together since that kiss. I had to tell Sara what I was feeling. I’d always loved her, no question, but this day I fell in love with her again, deeply.

So I went to the public telephone and rang her. She was puzzled at first, but then we started to talk of things that had happened in our courtship, and our feelings then and our feelings now, mine now revived. She told me that she’d been doing this type of thinking for quite a while, aware that she’d been an anxious wife. And gradually, on that old public telephone, that afternoon, we began to recapture each other and our love. Now she’d cast all her fears aside. Her old feelings had returned. Those parting kisses were what I could expect in the future and especially when I arrived home soon.

Put your foot down, Speedy, she’d said and that was exactly what my cheeky, beautiful, spirited Sara of old would have said. She was back.

So here I was, putting my foot down.

Chapter Two

Sara

When I discovered that Harry was writing his memoirs or journal, or whatever it’s called, of course I asked him if I could read it. He said no, not until it was all finished, probably in a year or two. I’d found the journal, or part of it, in an exercise book he’d left on our bed when he departed hurriedly last year after I’d been such a doofus about his plan to buy Mum’s cattle property and the bigger question of my unwitting control of our family and even of Harry.

That was a horrible time and I don’t really want to go there again, not even to write about. I was an unfeeling idiot who’d done her best to lose the most gorgeous man on earth. Let’s leave it at that!

As soon as I realized what was in the exercise book I closed it without reading more than a few words and put the book away. I brought it out and gave it to him when he returned to Grayson Farm with me—one of the happiest days of my life. If he’d wanted me to know about his book he’d have told me about it.

But he did mention it again, once he knew that I knew of it and said that, eventually, he’d appreciate my typing it up on a computer we’d acquired—it was all handwritten. His handwriting was good so there’d be no problem there. And as a gesture of thanks, he invited me to contribute a chapter occasionally when he’d reached a stage where he thought it appropriate. Like today, for example, when he’d gone off to Monaldo alone, despite our steadfast agreement that we’d never be parted again unless it was unavoidable. But he had his reasons and I respected them.

But, just to give him something to think about, I’d given him two kisses of farewell and hello, that poured out all the love and emotion that had been building in me since I’d decided to stop being the anxious wife, as jumpy as a flea, and go back to being myself-- but taking more care to remember that Harry was the head of the family. Once I’d made that decision I felt marvellous.

And then Harry rang me from Monaldo and we talked of our feelings in our courtship and that strange conversation, with him on a public phone, brought all those feelings to the surface in me. The public phone in Elmsford was the only way I’d had of communicating with Harry at his office in Monaldo during our early courting, when he didn’t have a car and had to come to me by train. When I rang he sometimes had a client with him and so I’d put on a deep, male voice as if he were talking business. It didn’t fool anyone but it became a standard joke when either of us was at a public phone, and it was something I treasured.

Just his using that phone today had stirred a lot of emotions and memories in me and now I was waiting for my beautiful, beautiful husband to return to me. I needed to make beautiful, beautiful love to him as soon as possible.

At least his absence has given me the chance to write this first tentative contribution to his own writings. He’ll read it, of course. After all it’s going in his journal. But then, you never know with Harry. He might respect my privacy as I’d respected his.

But the big question was, where on earth had he found the time to write what was, in effect, his life story? I asked him that when he issued his invitation to contribute. It had all started when he was office boy at Harrigan and Co., in Monaldo, with plenty of time on his hands; had been later discontinued many, many times; and then had resumed during his many hours flying the world between assignments as a Balfour investigator and then during many hours alone in hotel rooms. He had a good memory and had gradually caught up. He didn’t explain how he wrote it while under my scrutiny but I left that as one of life’s mysteries.

He must be due home at any minute and I’d promised that I’d be on the steps waiting for him, exactly where I’d farewelled him.

Please hurry, my darling!

Chapter Three

Harry

As I drove down Schultz Road and got closer to Grayson Farm, I could see Sara standing on the steps, just as she’d promised. She’d opened the gate and she gave me a little wave and a very big smile as I turned in and stopped. I took my time stopping the engine and checking that I had nothing in the car to remove, opening the door, getting out, closing the door and then walking to the gate to close it. I did all these things very deliberately, partly to savour the moments but also to tease her. It worked.

As I slowly turned from the gate to smile at her she had her arms spread and then gave an irritated little stamping of her feet as if to say, ‘hurry up!’

I then speeded up, walked to her with big strides, picked her up and kept walking up the steps. She said ooh! and began kissing me. I slammed the front door closed with my foot—a bit too forcibly and the walls shook and some pictures fell off the wall. I couldn’t see exactly where I was going and, as I swung her around to enter our bedroom, her foot caught a table lamp and sent it crashing to the floor. We kept on kissing, these sensational kisses that had suddenly emerged, until I lowered her to the bed. We undressed each other and not a word had been said.

Our lovemaking was passionate—the old Sara was back—and the old Harry did his best to match her. I must have done ok because after a while she gently pushed me aside, lay beside me, breathing deeply, and said, Hello, Lover. Welcome home.

I said, Hello, darling. Welcome home yourself, Sara. It’s good to have you back.

Sara flung herself on top of me and said, I am back, Harry, and it’s so good to be with you again, just as we were. Please don’t let anything like that happen to us again? I worship you and I must know if I ever hurt you. You’re such a nice man that I suspect you might still stay quiet but we must make a pact, here and now, that you’ll speak up. Promise?

"Alright, Sara, I promise. But we really must do something about unlocked front doors, smashed pictures and lamps, both lying naked in bed and our daughter living just over the road