by Barbara Wood
Beth frowned. It didn't seem right.
"Children," Joanna said, as she and Sarah came up. "We've been looking all over for you."
They went along to the Hall of Art and Architecture, and as they neared the American exhibit, Sarah was surprised to feel her heart begin to race. Then, suddenly, she saw him. Although Philip McNeal was conservatively dressed in a green frock coat and gray trousers, he was exactly as she remembered him, tall and slender, and gracefully handsome.
"There is Mr. McNeal!" Joanna said.
"Mrs. Westbrook," he said, coming up and taking her hand. "How wonderful. I was hoping we might meet."
"Yes, we received your letter last week. How nice it is to see you, Mr. McNeal!"
"I'm Beth!" the six-year-old said.
Philip laughed and shook her tiny hand. "How do you do, Beth?"
"She was born the day we said good-by," Sarah said.
He turned and looked at her. "Sarah?" he said, a look of surprise on his face.
"It's nice to see you again," she said.
After a moment, Sarah put her arm around Adam's shoulders and said, "This is Adam. You remember him."
"I remember. You've certainly grown, Adam," Philip said, as they shook hands
"How did the new house turn out, Mrs. Westbrook?" he asked, turning to Joanna.
"I'm afraid it didn't, but it's a long story. We're still building it. You said in your letter that you would be able to come to Merinda for a visit. Hugh would be thrilled to see you again."
"As a matter of fact, I very much plan on coming to Merinda. I am writing a book, Mrs. Westbrook, on Australian architecture. There are certain unique qualities to be found here that are found nowhere else, and I thought I would take advantage of my being here to learn some more. I've studied the city architecture both in Melbourne and in Sydney, and now I would like to take a look at some things in the country."
"You couldn't do better than the Western District, Mr. McNeal. And you're welcome to stay at Merinda if you like. We can even show you around the countryside. When may we expect you?"
He glanced at Sarah—again, a look of surprise and interest, showed briefly on his face. "I have to stay for the duration of the exhibition, but after that my wife and I have no immediate plans to return to America."
"Just let us know, Mr. McNeal," Joanna said. "Until then, good-by."
They left the hall by way of another arched doorway that was flanked by leafy palm trees. Because of the trees, none of them saw the booths on the other side, with signs that read: "St. Mary's Children's Home," "Jewish Relief Fund," and "Karra Karra Aboriginal Mission."
By the time they left the exhibition grounds, the sun was making its way toward the west and the March sky was growing dark. Joanna paused to look up and down the busy street. How Melbourne had changed in the years since her arrival! And how rapidly it was continuing to change even now, making her almost believe that if she were to close her eyes and then open them, she would see a new building before her, or a house torn down, or fifty more carriages rattling down the street. It was not at all like Cameron Town, where the buildings were still only one or two stories tall, and horses clip-clopped in a leisurely fashion down the peaceful streets, and where cowboys and station hands and shepherds all met in the rustic pubs for a beer and a yarn.
Joanna felt herself swept up by Melbourne's pulse. There was so much life here, so much going on, and so much beauty in the new city gardens and bright green horse-trams and statues commemorating anyone who had ever done anything of significance. It was almost impossible to believe that this very spot had once been that "Primitive Village" of only fifty years ago!
"Let's see if we can get a cab," Joanna said.
She stopped and stared down the street, as she saw Pauline MacGregor emerge from a shop.
Joanna stared for a moment at the woman, whom she barely knew. Although Hugh had never been able to prove it, he still blamed Colin MacGregor for the downed fence and the subsequent loss of so many sheep in the river, and as a result, the Westbrooks and the MacGregors, though neighbors, were not friends. When affairs were held at Kilmarnock and Western District society attended, Hugh and Joanna did not. And when Merinda was the site of a social event and the gentry came, the MacGregors were conspicuous by their absence. When the Graziers' Wives Association met in Cameron Town, to discuss philanthropic projects and distribute their special charities, Pauline and Joanna very politely exchanged neither a word nor a glance.
Joanna continued to watch as Pauline came out of the shop and stood hesitantly on the sidewalk, as if undecided which way to turn. At thirty-three, Pauline MacGregor was still slender and attractive, and caught many a male eye in her tight-fitting dress of dark-blue silk.
As Joanna was beginning to wonder why Pauline, who was so careful about doing the right thing and making a respectable appearance, should be all alone on a public street, an elegant carriage drawn by two horses pulled up and stopped. Joanna saw Pauline smile and walk forward, and then a man stepped down from the carriage, his hands held out.
Joanna caught a glimpse of his profile.
It was Hugh!
And then—
She frowned. The gentleman, in taking Pauline's hand, turned his back and Joanna could no longer see his face.
Had it been Hugh?
"Look, Mum," Adam said. "Here's a cab."
But Joanna didn't say anything.
"Mother?"
Joanna looked down the street in time to see the train of Pauline's gown disappear inside the carriage.
It bad been Hugh, Joanna would swear to it.
"Sarah, did you see—"
Joanna shook her head. Of course it wasn't Hugh! For one thing, that man hadn't been as tall as Hugh, and for another, what on earth would Hugh be doing here in Melbourne?
"Never mind," she said, watching the carriage pull into the street. "I must be tired." That was it. She was tired. It had been a stressful week—and filled with nightmares. She was imagining things.
"All right, everyone," she said. "Let's get into the cab."
When the door closed and the cabman climbed back up to his seat, everyone sighed with relief. It felt good to be sitting down and heading home.
Adam couldn't stop talking about all the marvelous things he had seen: explorers and balloonists and adventurers, men who discovered rivers and named mountains, who took exciting journeys and visited all the exotic places in the world. But most especially, he spoke of the dinosaur exhibit with the relics of the Cro-Magnon man. "I'm going to do that someday!" he said. "I'm going to discover the bones of an ancient race, or an extinct animal. Perhaps I shall find a new plant that no one has ever seen before."
"Name something for me, Adam," Beth said.
"I'll name a flower for you, how would that be? I'll go to New Guinea and I'll come across a rare orchid that no one's ever named. And I'll call it the Elizabethus officinale. Would you like that?"
"Adam," Joanna said. "What do you have there?"
He held out the fistful of pamphlets and fliers that he had collected at the exhibition. "They were free," he said. "It was okay to take them. Look," he said, and handed them to her.
Joanna glanced through the brochures Adam had gathered, and found them to be quite a mixture, from advertisements for "Wilson's Electric Belt," and "Black-Boy Chewing Tobacco"; and an invitation to come to "Dr. Snow's Office on Swanson Street and Obtain a Free Treatment of His Genuine Mesmer-Hypnosis Cures"; to a coupon worth sixpence off any hat in "McMahon's Haberdashery for Gentlemen" on Collins Street.
"It was all right to take them, wasn't it?" he said.
"Of course, darling. But I rather suspect that they hoped their advertisements would be picked up by someone who intended to spend money in their establishments!" As Joanna started to hand the papers back, she glimpsed a flyer sticking out from the bottom of the pile. At the top was printed the word "Karra." She took it out, and she saw that it was a pamphlet asking for help to save the Karra Karra Abor
iginal Mission in New South Wales.
NINETEEN
W
HEN THE BABY STARTED TO CRY, MERCY CAMERON SAID, holding out her arms, "I'd better take her. She wants her mother." Pauline said, "Yes, of course," and with reluctance handed the baby over.
"Jane might be only two months old, but she knows who her mother is. Don't you, Janie-dumpling?"
Pauline watched the baby grow quiet in Mercy's arms, then she turned away. There were children lined up at the archery booth waiting to take a turn, but Pauline had left her post to look at Mercy Cameron's new baby. Now she went back to what she had been doing—helping youngsters to shoot at a target and win a prize. As she walked away from Mercy, Pauline glimpsed once again the sign over the tent across the way, and, as always, it gave her a chill: see this show while you live because you'll be dead a long time. It reminded her that her birthday lay just days away. She was going to be thirty-three.
The Cameron Town fairgrounds were crowded on this warm April morning as everyone in the whole Western District, it seemed, had turned out to see such peculiar and exciting sights as the man who swallowed a sword, or the Aborigine who boxed with a kangaroo. There were wood-chopping contests and horse races; men walking on stilts, and clowns riding donkeys; a fortuneteller named Magda, and a magician named Presto. Pauline and Louisa Hamilton were working at a booth where children shot miniature bows and arrows at a target on a hay bale. It was a popular booth, costing a penny for three shots, and the proceeds were going to go to the new Cameron Town Orphan Asylum. But Pauline couldn't keep her mind on her work; she was preoccupied with two subjects: babies, and a man she had met in Melbourne last month—John Prior, a businessman from Sydney. A man who bore a strong resemblance to Hugh Westbrook.
"Jane is having trouble with colic," Mercy said, as she watched Pauline assist a little boy with the bow and arrow. "Maude Reed told me to put peppermint in her milk, but it hasn't seemed to help."
Pauline had been reading a book on how to care for infants, written by a prominent Melbourne nanny. She also read articles in ladies' magazines that related to the care of babies, and she always listened when mothers exchanged advice. She wanted to tell Mercy that peppermint was too volatile for infants, that the milder spearmint was preferred. But Pauline knew better than to say anything to Mercy. She had learned long ago that when it came to children no one would take the advice of someone who didn't have any.
It was unfair, Pauline thought as she felt the small, narrow shoulders of the little boy she was helping. She had a lot to offer when it came to the care of children. She couldn't help it that she had yet to have a child of her own. Having a baby, she knew, didn't automatically make one an expert on the subject. But it was a special badge of honor, to have given birth, and women who were childless were somehow considered failures, second-rate. And certainly without anything worthwhile to contribute.
Pauline sometimes so longed for a child that she awoke in the middle of the night to find that she had been crying in her sleep. In the early years of her marriage to Colin, she had waited anxiously for a child that never came. She visited experts in Melbourne, but they had offered no help; she had consulted with local midwives, who had suggested she drink various teas and sleep with certain herbs under her pillow. But nothing had worked.
"It is God's judgment, my dear," Pastor Moorehead had said, when she had confessed her anxiety to him. "There is nothing you can do to change it. For His reasons, God does not wish you to have children."
But it wasn't fair, Pauline wanted to say. Louisa Hamilton had six children. Couldn't God have distributed His bounty a little more equitably?
Finally, Maude Reed had suggested another reason for the barrenness, and Pauline was beginning to wonder now if perhaps she was right. "There must be love present for a child to be conceived," Maude had said bluntly. "I sense coldness between you and Colin. No child will be conceived under such conditions."
Is that it? Pauline wondered. Is it our lack of tenderness that is the root of the problem? Was that, in effect, what Pastor Moorehead had been trying to say? That God did not allow children into loveless lives? If that were the case, then it seemed there was only one solution—to somehow get Colin to love her.
After seven years of marriage, Colin was still more of a stranger than a husband to Pauline. Their lives were like two circles, spinning independently of each other, coming together only when the circles touched, at a ball or a hunt held at Kilmarnock. At such times Pauline and Colin would act the perfect husband and wife, solicitous of each other, laughing at each other's jokes and complementing each other—Colin with his arrogance, Pauline with her beauty. Victoria's rural gentry would pay homage to the pseudo-royalty at Kilmarnock, and then they would go away, envious and admiring and full of expensive champagne.
Then the two circles would spin away from each other again, and Colin would go to his sheep paddocks and men's club in town and shire council politics, Pauline to her charity works, her tennis club, her archery. They addressed each other as Mr. and Mrs. MacGregor. They dined together in the evenings, slept apart at night, and once a week Colin came to her bed and dominated her. Sex was calculated, a rite.
Out of such a union, Pauline decided, no child could ever come.
But there had been a time ...
As she helped the little boy notch his arrow and take aim at the target, Pauline thought of those early days with Colin. Especially their wedding night aboard the ship bound for Scotland. How he had taken her into his arms, his body hard and electric. She had tried to speak, but he had put his hand over her mouth. "Don't talk," he had said.
Pauline had been stunned by the force of Colin's lovemaking, the roughness of it. He had been voracious, as if he would devour her. She had tried to be a partner, but he had overcome her, dominated her with such violence that it had at first startled her, but soon it had swept her away, as he possessed her completely. Pauline had never known what submission could feel like, never been so totally in another's power. For the first time in her life, she was not the one in control.
And she had loved it.
They had made love this way in the early years of their marriage, and Pauline had thought that surely a child must come of such passion. But the years had passed, no child had come, and their lovemaking had grown mechanical.
Now she was desperate. She was in the last decade of her childbearing years. She dreaded the thought of the future that might lie before her, the lonely, empty years in which she would be reduced to being the "auntie" of other people's children.
Of course there was Judd, who was now nearly sixteen and a very independent-minded young man. He had resisted Pauline's efforts to mother him; and if she really thought about it, she would have to admit that she hadn't tried very hard. He was another woman's child. Being Judd's stepmother was not the same as having a baby from her own body.
She knew what everyone thought, how surprised they had been when, after a few years of marriage, she hadn't produced a baby. Pauline's friends regarded her as someone who won all the competitions, who succeeded in everything she tried. And yet it seemed that she could not accomplish what the most ordinary woman could, what in fact women were created for.
Pauline couldn't bear their pity. She wanted to be able to do what Mercy Cameron had just done—take a baby from another woman's arms and say, "He wants me, he wants his mother."
"This is how you hold the bow," Pauline said to the little boy. She had her arms around him, one hand steadying his bow, the other helping him to draw back the arrow. "You aim below your target in order to hit it. Point the tip of the arrow into the ground in front of the target, bring the arrow back so that the feathers touch your ear—yes, like this ... now let go."
The arrow flew wildly, hit the canvas wall of the booth, and broke.
"That's better," Pauline said gently. "Keep trying—here's another."
It was supposed to be three tries for a penny, but she allowed him five, and still he couldn't hit the haystac
k. When his turn was over and tears were brimming in his eyes, Pauline gave him a pick of the prizes anyway, for trying.
"Really, Pauline," Louisa said when the boy ran off to show his prize to his parents, "you can't go giving prizes to every child. How will they learn anything, if they're rewarded for failure?"
"There's no harm in it, Louisa."
"I find that surprising coming from you, Pauline, considering how much you love to compete for trophies yourself."
Pauline regarded her friend, who was so plump that she could hardly maneuver in the small booth. How had Louisa managed to bear six children? Pauline wondered. Were she and her husband so warm and loving to each other? Or was Maude Reed possibly in error when she said that love had to be present in order to conceive a child? It was for this reason that Pauline could not get John Prior, the Sydney businessman, out of her mind.
She had been browsing through Wallach's, Melbourne's largest emporium, which boasted that it sold everything from ribbons to gas stoves, when she had seen, in the menswear department, Hugh Westbrook handing money over for a purchase he had just made. Startled to see him in Melbourne, and feeling the old thrill, the old yearning, Pauline had been unable to turn and walk out as she should have done. Hugh was her husband's rival, but her old love for him had never quite died. And so instead of leaving the emporium, she had gone boldly up to him, laid her hand on his arm and said in her most mocking tone, "How on earth are all those sheep getting along without you, darling?"
He had turned around with an astonished look and said, "I beg your pardon?" And Pauline, too late aware of her mistake, had stared in horror. "Oh! I do apologize!" she had said. "I thought you were someone else!"
But the stranger, who bore an amazing resemblance to Hugh, looked amused and said, "His gain and my loss, madam." And before she could retreat, he had tipped his hat and said, "John Prior, at your service."
What had held her to the spot Pauline never knew. When propriety demanded that she walk away quickly, and with dignity—not even those wretched factory girls had the effrontery to accost a stranger in a public place!—something had kept her there. Perhaps it was his resemblance to Hugh, although the voice wasn't the same and he wasn't quite as tall as Hugh; or perhaps it was the way he was smiling down at her, or the expensive cut of his clothes and the self-confident way he held himself. Whatever it was, Pauline was immobilized long enough to find herself suddenly introduced to a man she had not known a moment before, and, worse, to hear herself continuing to speak to him.