by Lucy Walker
‘It’s missing on one cylinder. That’s how I know. And it’s Jard driving. Don’t ask me how I know that, Mardie. I don’t have second sight or second hearing. Jard went out to see Mister Falldown, and not to see his menagerie. It’s about that water seepage below the north mesa range. Old Mister is Jard’s guide, philosopher and friend when it comes to the ancient tribal water-holes. Below the mesa those water-holes form a link which means there’s a pattern to the underground lake out there. Artesian well, if you prefer to call it that.’
Joanna had become the geologist again.
‘I suppose that underground lake could be as big as the sea?’ Mardie asked tentatively. Anything rather than be concerned that it was now Jard Hunter had come … not tomorrow or next week. Now, Joanna was here so the name of the game would never be ‘competition’ as far as she, Mardie, was concerned.
Why worry? What with Joanna’s presence, those truckies in the store, and possibly Mister Falldown, there’d be no formal proposal of marriage this early evening. Nor … alas … any formal rejection of that chivalrous gesture.
What she wanted of life was companionship and love. Not a way of life that was only a status symbol.
‘As big as the Caspian by Jard’s mapping so far,’ Joanna was saying crisply. ‘But there’s more. The information needed is ‒ does it all link up? Is it moving water? In other words an underground river! If so, it would give mining in this area as big a fillip as a major nickel strike.’
She had pushed her empty cup and saucer aside. She stood up, stretched as if taking in strength and air for important sorties about to take place.
‘I think I’ll go and see what they want,’ she said, moving towards the door. ‘Thanks for the tea, Mardie.’ This last sounded like a dismissal … which was odd because it was Joanna who was leaving the room. Not Mardie.
Mardie turned to her accounts with only half her heart on the job.
The ute with a miss in one cylinder had come to a stop under the trees along the side boundary. Mardie tried not to glance up through the window but Will Power wasn’t with her this evening. She saw the drive door swing open and his lean shadowy figure emerge from the car. Mister Falldown must have left the far side of the car at the same time, because they came together across the gravel to the cement walk, then past the trellis. The luminous purple shades of evening were darkening the western sky but his figure was unmistakable. And the way he walked. That quiet yet determined tread. Mister Falldown was a darker, sturdier figure. He walked less quickly, so followed Jard on to the cement path.
Mardie bent her head over the table and put her hands over her eyes.
Why did this have to happen to her?
What else could she have done that night? Deep in her heart she knew it was a glad thing to do. Not just a duty. She had fallen for him long-time before that ’copter ride. Let alone that ’copter crash.
Mrs Richie came across from the store to Mardie’s office.
‘Aren’t you going to change for dinner, dear?’ she asked. ‘We’ve visitors. The best kind.’
‘I know. Joanna came in to see me before she went along to the store.’
‘But Jard’s here too. He asked where you were, and were you too busy to be interrupted, even for dinner.’ She looked at Mardie with an odd yet kindly expression on her face. ‘Even for him?’ she added gently.
You too! Mardie thought. So this is what gossip does even to one’s best friends.
Mardie added a little sauce to Will Power this time. ‘Not for dinner because I’m not hungry. And not specially for Jard. But there’s Mister Falldown too. I’m not too busy for Mr Falldown ‒ ever.’
Mrs Richie thought hard, and decided the least said the better. ‘Well, we’ll be ready as soon as you like, dear.’
By the time Mardie, polished up but not overdoing it, arrived in the sitting-room, Joanna was on the point of departure. She didn’t look exactly pleased but wore her most professional scientific front.
‘Sometimes one wishes the Company could manage without a Board of Directors bent on interfering with what we are doing,’ she was saying to Jard, who was walking with her to the door. ‘After all, we are the professionals and there’s hardly one of them will understand the assays or what they mean.’
‘But they do pay our salaries,’ Jard said with his usual half-smile. ‘Yours is a whopper, Jo. For that alone you have to go back, never mind whether they can read your maps or interpret your assays, or not.’
If he noticed Mardie come in, he gave no sign yet. He was busy holding Joanna’s arm, calling her ‘Jo’ and placating her with a more than kindly firmness. ‘Sorry to have brought such a stinker message,’ he added. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to go. Remember the shareholders are sitting on the Directors’ backs too, and the Stock Market is poised at the ready.’
He took Joanna out to her runabout. He was not away so markedly long. Mardie surmised that that short farewell could be because Joanna’s presence at the Dig-in was required urgently. Why had she herself looked at her watch? Because she couldn’t help it, of course!
Jard came just as Mardie was trying to persuade Mister Falldown to stay the night with them at The Breakaway.
‘You have no chance of winning that plea, Mardie,’ Jard said quietly. ‘Mister never sleeps anywhere but on his own patch. Or in the bush.’
Mardie’s eyes caught his, and suddenly she felt panic.
There was something more than kindly in his expression. There was a sort of message. She wasn’t imagining it. It was a you-and-me one.
‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Perhaps getting a bump on the head does you good.’
‘Giving my brains a shake up undoubtedly did me good,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’m sorry I involved you too, Mardie.’
Damn that smile, Mardie thought wildly. If only he’d go back to being the mystery man. A shadow and no more!
‘Life is a chain of adventures, isn’t it?’ she said with a smile. ‘That was one more adventure for me to chalk up and think about in my old age.’
‘Old age!’ Mrs Richie interrupted indignantly. ‘A young girl like you thinking about such a thing!’ she said. ‘Now if you will please let Mr Richie pour you both a drink, then come and eat my dinner before it’s ruined. And talk about “young age”. That’s all Mr Richie and I think about. We get younger every day.’
Mardie loved the way the Richies always referred to one another as Mr and Mrs. It gave them a sort of old-fashioned dignity. Some of it spilled off on other people, particularly the customers who were not always so easy to handle.
They had their drinks and later dinner. They talked of incidental things like the fact that one could grow bananas along the Gascoyne River because this river flowed underground during the Dry, at a time when the surface riverbed was as barren as a bone. And why a sunset at Bali, more than a thousand miles northward, could produce a sunset as far south as the Swan River, the glory of which was indescribable.
Later, when Mrs Richie had insisted she would take the dishes out and attend to them whether Mardie liked it or not, and when Mr Richie had departed to close up the store for the evening, Mardie was left with only Mister Falldown and Jard. She said a little prayer that Mister would, for once, stay put. But this was not to be so. He was going back to his solitary home in the bush ‒ walking. And now.
‘But you can’t do that.’ Mardie pleaded. ‘Not tonight. I’m sure Jard will drive you back.’
‘Mister Falldown always walks,’ he said of himself in his soft, rather thick voice. ‘This fella only ride when Jard say “Mister you come, I need you”. But he never say “Mister you go”. So I go my way, Miss Mardie, if you’ll ’scuse me. Jard knows. I always go my way.’
‘He does, Mardie,’ Jard said quietly. ‘But first I want him to tell you why I did say “Mister you come, I need you” today. Go ahead, Mister.’
The old bushman looked at Mardie with his dark, gentle eyes. A silly thing to think ‒ but they were almost loving eyes.
>
‘Jard tell me to come because I found you when that sky ’copter fell down in the bush like one time I fall down on my head and forget who I am.’
Mardie’s heart kept missing a beat now because she knew this was the Big Moment, and what this conversation would be about.
‘Yes. You did indeed,’ she said. ‘Thank God for that, Mister Falldown. Do you believe in God?’
‘I believe in some Fella must be Boss out there in Dreamtime country ‒ maybe. But I forget what my father told me. So I just believe. No more talk about this one thing.’
‘Well … it must be some Fella out there in Dreamtime country who sent you to find us,’ Mardie said gently. ‘So I thank Him for that as well as you.’
She did not look at Jard. She didn’t want to know what he was thinking. Specially she didn’t want to know what he was looking like just now. She wanted him to be the mystery-man-stranger all over again. Nothing more.
‘Tell us both what you saw when you found us, Mister,’ Jard said. Very quiet. Very firm.
‘I saw you all-about dead fella, Jard. And Missy looking after you like a good wife looks after her right man.’
‘Did she mind looking after me like a …’ He paused, then added with a whimsical smile … ‘a good wife?’
‘No. No. She was all cut-up sad because you were hurt. She wanted you better quick but she didn’t know for sure she’d bin doing right thing okay.’
‘And had she?’
‘Everything right way all the time. She had sense, this one. That other one, Jo ‒ she got granite in her head. Plenty rich granite. Hard stuff that rock. Maybe lots of nickel too, and that other stuff ‒ all stone.’
‘Thank you both for this cross examination of the case of the crashed ’copter …’ Mardie said as lightly as she could. She, too, had to make it a case. Put, and defended. After all, the bush telegraph had been the same thing as the prosecution. She wished she could think of a joke or a witty crack … the way David Ashton would have done. It could have turned this discussion into entertainment only. Then finish.
The thought of David Ashton, his jokes and his wisecracks, his kindness and his gentle flattery over the air, softened the lump that was becoming unbearably hard in her breast. Perhaps if David liked her, the way Joanna insisted he did, she could marry him and live happy ever after. That is ‒ if he ever asked her.
But alas! All that was a day-dream too!
Mister Falldown had gone. And gone his way. Walking.
‘Come outside and look at the night sky, Mardie,’ Jard said. ‘I feel like walking. Mrs Richie’s cooking is too good. It needs to be digested slowly to be appreciated.’
He stood up and held out his hand ‒ more as an invitation than possibly expecting Mardie to put her hand in his.
Better get it all over and done with, she thought. The Richies always withdrew to their own private section after they closed down The Breakaway. They probably would not notice the fact that she and Jard had gone to spend half an hour under the blue-black sky, the so-brilliant stars, and the first gold haze of a moon that was already rising in the east.
She put her hand lightly in his, then as lightly withdrew it as they moved away.
‘It would be rather pleasant,’ she said. ‘Where shall we walk? Round The Breakaway or along the bitumen?’
‘Neither. The gravel track out westwards could be a change. Willing?’
‘Yes, of course.’
Chapter Fourteen
Jard was looking at her; she could feel his eyes on her. The moonlight would be lighting her face as it lit his.
It was no good dreaming dreams. He only had to look at her like that and she was like snow fallen on warm ground, and was melting. All this only in the name of chivalry! Grand but sad.
‘Why didn’t you bring David Ashton with you, Jard?’ she said at last. It was something to say to break the silence.
‘Why should I bring him? In any case he’s bogged down with a visiting team of Directors about to appear at the Dig-in. They’re arriving by plane.’
‘Perhaps he couldn’t come. But if he had come, he would help me. That’s why. You see, Jard, I know what this is all about. This talk now, and why you brought Mister Falldown in. You wanted to prove to me that you trusted me and that you knew that all that happened that night was the right thing to have happened. Then you wanted to make some recompense for any ‒ well ‒ sort of complications I might have suffered. If David had come I would have someone to help me just as you have brought Mister Falldown to help you ‒ I mean in this attempt at, well, reparation for crashing me down in the bush in that ’copter of yours.’
‘Mardie …’
She lifted her head and mustered dignity as her help-all this time. And forgot about Will Power.
‘Why don’t you offer me fifty dollars for my nursing services ‒ amateurish though they were ‒ and settle the account that way? That is what you want to do, isn’t it, Jard? Settle an account?’
She smiled, so as to turn this matter into an affair of inconsequential chit-chat. Something of no importance. If David had been here he would have triggered off her own minor ability to make funnies with childish jokes and riddles. That was David’s talent. He could turn anything into a laugh. And she could and would have responded.
Jard was being thoughtful. He was seeing Mardie’s plea for David in a different light.
‘You and he ‒ that is David ‒ are good friends, aren’t you, Mardie?’ he asked quietly.
‘Yes. We do our courting over the air so it’s not very private, I’m afraid.’
‘Courting? Are you serious?’
‘Of course.’
‘You mean there is something serious between you and David? Are you in love with him, Mardie?’
‘If friendship is love, then I suppose you could say I love him.’ Mardie was being light and airy about the whole thing. ‘Don’t you think laughter is a wonderful thing, Jard? If you love laughter you love the person who makes it. Do I sound a bit screwy, or is my logic real logic to you?’
Jard did not answer at once.
‘It’s more than logic,’ he said at length. ‘I think it’s telling me something. But not all.’
Mardie laughed … again it was the tiniest bit forced but she was not aware of this.
‘It’s all you need to know,’ she said. ‘Please don’t ask me any more.’ She was getting herself tangled up in this game of words and was beginning not to understand what she was saying … or even wanting to say it. She just didn’t know how to prevent Jard making that chivalrous declaration that Mr Lawson had warned her about. She would have to say ‘No’, and that might ruin any friendship she would like, and wanted, to have with Jard.
‘Such a pity!’ he said unexpectedly.
‘A pity?’ Mardie asked in surprise.
‘Yes. You see I’d like to be a little in love with you myself. But I’m not quite sure which kind of love is specifically allocated to one’s ability to make laughter.’
‘You mean like some people love to make a pudding?’
‘No. I mean like Making Love. Capital letters.’
Here we are all tangled up in words again, Mardie thought. Neither of us can say what we really mean.
The only thing she could do was keep it up, till it was time to turn about and go indoors.
‘I’ve been in love with laughter all my life,’ she said lightly. ‘Though it was in short supply ‒ a bit ‒ before I came up here. Then David made me laugh again. You see … I lost my mother …’
‘Yes, I know. Mrs Richie told me about it before you came to The Breakaway.’
‘And you sympathize? Yes … well … thank you very much. Jard. Have you ever loved someone very much? Oh dear! I didn’t mean to put it that way. But you are probably in love with someone already. I mean ‒ it’s only natural …’
He glanced at her but she did not see it and did not see the expression in his eyes.
‘Of course …’ she went on hurriedly. By now s
he was beyond extricating herself from this silly word-game. ‘It would have to be someone with the same interests that you have, wouldn’t it?’ she went on, afraid her voice was getting scratchy. ‘I mean sort of scientific. Exploration. All those things …’
‘That was what I used to think myself. But then I saw a vision. Have you ever seen a vision, Mardie? Or don’t you believe in such things?’
‘What sort of a vision? A wonderful stream of underground water that would make a mine possible?’
‘True in a way. If they ‒ the Company ‒ decide a mine is possible out at the Dig-in their greatest asset would be access to permanent water. But that wasn’t the vision I was talking about.’
‘Am I allowed to ask?’
‘It was a face. A girl’s face. Lovely, soft, luminous. Dark eyes that had a light in them. And kindness. I only saw that face for so short a while. Then it was gone.’
‘You mean you fell in love with a face?’ Mardie asked, incredulous. ‘The rest of it might have been hump-backed and bow-legged.’
‘But it wasn’t,’ he said ever so gently.
‘How do you know if you only saw the face?’ She was quite bewildered. Jard, the strong, silent mystery man turning out to be a dreamer of dreams? She thought only girls were like that.
‘I do know. The big trouble is, I don’t quite know how to go about courting the owner of that face. I’m not exactly accustomed to … well … to making advances to young ladies. Can you give me some advice?’
‘If it were me I would make her laugh,’ Mardie suggested. ‘Everybody loves a smiler …’ She broke off. A new thought struck her. It was like the beat of that spread-eagled wing one moment before the ’copter was hit. Then it couldn’t be Joanna, after all! Joanna had her brilliance and her efficiency. But real laughter? Well, some. A smiler anyway ‒ when it suited her. And she made no bones about being ready and waiting for Jard. She didn’t need courting. Jard must surely know that.
‘I’ve been too busy and too serious about my work too long,’ he was saying. ‘I often have a good laugh myself but I’m not David. I don’t have the gift of making other people laugh.’