by Sonya Heaney
‘Good afternoon,’ she said distractedly. There were still the next week’s menus to worry over.
She bit her lip and waited for her husband’s footsteps to fade.
How many beans would be eaten? Did anybody even like beans? Alice shuddered; she sure didn’t.
‘Mrow.’
All right, that sound didn’t come from a man. She had to look now.
‘That’s a cat,’ she said when she turned. And not just any cat, but a speckled one of an indecipherable colour, somewhere between brown and grey, and one that—to Alice’s untrained opinion—looked rather large.
Robert looked at the animal in question as it flopped in his hands, and then bent to put it down on the ground. After a pause, the creature moved off to a corner to investigate a scent Alice couldn’t detect.
‘It is,’ he said, straightening and brushing fur from his hands.
‘Whose is it?’ She didn’t recall seeing it before, but maybe it was from the stables.
‘Um, I thought she might be yours? That is, would you like her? She belonged to an acquaintance in town, but he has a couple of small children who were too fond of prodding at her, and she wasn’t overly fond of it. I thought, maybe …’
Alice watched the cat stretch halfway up the table leg and reach a paw out to investigate something or another.
‘It’s a she?’ She hadn’t a clue how to tell girl cats from boys.
‘So I’m told.’
It really was an ugly cat, poor thing. Alice wanted to tell Robert to take the creature back where he’d got it from, that she didn’t need romancing with second-rate animals, but then an image formed in her mind of naughty little children with prodding fingers, driving the creature mad, and her words died before she got them out.
‘I don’t know anythin’ about cats, Robert.’
‘We can all muddle it out together.’ He came up beside her and they watched the cat lose interest in the table leg and move on to the woodpile in the corner. Maybe she’d be good at catching spiders, and mice …
It wasn’t like Miss Martha Wright’s dog, and Alice was glad of it for a number of childish reasons. In fact, there was nothing special about the cat, a most average creature and not fancy enough for a lady’s lap.
Alice decided she liked that about her. Yes, she thought, she’d keep her.
‘What do I call her?’
‘Whatever you want.’
‘Do you reckon cats ever answer when they’re called, like dogs?’
‘I doubt it. I think cats do whatever they wish, whenever they wish it. So choose a name as ridiculous as you please.’
‘Gertrude,’ she decided.
‘Gertrude?’
‘Yes.’ The cat edged a little closer to them. ‘I’d have picked Emma, but I’m—’
Oh, she’d not meant to say that aloud.
‘You’re what?’
Alice felt herself go red; she shook her head.
‘Oh no you don’t. Tell me what you’d planned to say.’
‘Can’t remember.’
He laughed. ‘That is absolutely the worst lie I have ever heard from you!’
‘Oh, fine. I was only going to say that I’d rather save the name Emma.’
The cat found a patch of sunlight and settled down in it.
‘Save it for what?’
She gave him an incredulous look. ‘You know what for, Robert. For if we ever have a daughter. If you like it, that is.’
He went silent long enough that she began to worry. When he eventually spoke, his tone had changed.
‘You’re right. It’d be odd to name our daughter after a cat.’
***
‘Well,’ Alice told Gertrude when Robert was gone, called away to some important thing or another, ‘we’d better learn to get on.’
She was going to befriend this large, scruffy mess of a pet whether it wanted her or not. She’d not fail with her gift of a cat. It felt like a test.
She regarded the animal pensively from across the room. Gertrude seemed disinterested in friendship right then, or—worse—disinclined. Alice had never had a pet before, and suspected they required a different sort of approach to a chicken or a cow.
‘Hello?’ she began uncertainly, edging closer. The animal was very focused on the cleaning of a paw. ‘Cat? Gertrude?’
When that achieved nothing, she knelt slowly, in increments so as not to startle her from the room before they’d even greeted each other.
Muttering quietly about the hindrance of her new skirts, she finally reached her knees.
Gertrude paused and took a good look at her through round, yellow eyes.
‘Hello there,’ Alice tried again. She extended a hand, holding it there, hovering between the two of them long enough her arm began to ache. She tried a smile.
The cat studied her a long time before lowering the freshly cleaned paw, rising, and approaching.
When they were within inches of each other Alice closed the distance, her fingertips coming to rest upon Gertrude’s head. The fur was a good deal softer than she’d been expecting.
She received a bored look for her efforts, but just as she was about to pull away in defeat the cat butted her head against her fingers, once, and then again, and Alice patted her some more.
It was all over in moments, with Gertrude retreating to her spot in the sun to resume her bath, but it was progress.
Before she left the room, Alice turned back once.
‘We’ll do, Gertrude. We’ll be a fine pair.’
***
The days of rain had momentarily transformed the landscape of the valley. For a little while everything grew at an almost alarming rate, and everybody on the station found themselves very busy dealing with the changes. For a couple of days there was even the occasional patch of green in amongst the dusty browns in the paddocks.
Weeds shot up alongside everything else, and Alice donned her gloves and worked until her hands ached. She tried to be done by midday each day, tried to be inside at the height of the afternoon when even the winter sun became blinding and tanned her skin.
It also meant, with Robert riding off most days, and Elizabeth off somewhere with her paints and canvases and making the most of the countryside’s transformation, she could claim the library as her own for an hour or so each day.
And that was where she found herself one Wednesday afternoon, along with her cat.
The rattling and clattering of a wagon on the drive took Alice by surprise. It made her jump and lose concentration on the instructional book of … Lord, she wasn’t even sure what she was reading. There was only so much time in a day a person could spend bettering themselves before it became deathly boring.
Marking her page in case inspiration took hold again later, she set the book aside and rose from the chair, wandering the length of the shelves, searching, searching … As long as whatever she chose next had no passages on food budgets, stain removal—or the Bible—then she’d be happy to read it.
More clattering came from outside. They’d received a delivery of some sort, judging by the snippets of conversation that floated to her through the cracked-open window. The library was perfectly located so that it was warm even on most winter afternoons, and Alice planned to take a couple more private minutes before she headed off to the kitchen to discuss a thing or two with Mrs Adamson and find some scraps to throw to her chickens.
There. She found a couple of books with fanciful words and patterns on the spines, and lit up like a child at the sight of them. Perhaps not everything in the library was designed to be instructional.
It took a few dozen seconds of grunting and fiddling to manoeuvre the first one, Black Beauty, out of its place.
‘Horses!’ she said once it was done and she had the green and gilt cover in her hands. Maybe not … Setting it on top of her sombre housewives’ manual, she reached up for the next thing with an elegant cover, and it was then that gravity took over. She had only just closed her hand around something with a bright red
spine when a second and then a third book came tumbling quickly after.
Alice cried out and sent up a quick prayer that nothing in the avalanche would bop her on the head. It didn’t, but because she had rotten luck, it wasn’t only a handful of books that dropped, but all the other bits and pieces that’d been stacked there on the shelf with them.
Having caught books in each hand, and a third with her knee pressed against the cabinet, she slowly manoeuvred until everything was either back on the shelf or safely—undamaged—on the rug.
‘You could help, you know,’ she told Gertrude, who’d stirred at the onslaught of bumps and thuds and shifted positions on the chair, ‘instead of just watchin’ me do it.’
Were those yellow eyes laughing at her? Alice rather thought they were.
Pulling a face at the cat, she put the books she’d been after on the desk and then knelt to pick up the rest. There was something that looked painfully religious, and beneath it a couple of well-worn pieces Alice bet were from Robert’s student days.
A picture addressed to Elizabeth had drifted under one of the table’s feet. She retrieved it and peered at it closely, smiling at the image. It was of Robert, who sat alongside a handful of other fellows in a photographer’s studio in London. He was by far the handsomest of the lot, she decided.
After studying it for a long time, she set it aside to show her sister-in-law later.
She thought she was done cleaning up her mess, and was ready to lift the cat into her lap and settle in her husband’s chair to read, when she stepped on something.
‘Oh no,’ she said when she lifted her foot again and realised she’d trod on a collection of letters, tied in a bundle with a bow. She picked them up and inspected them for damage, hoping they weren’t anything too important.
‘Oh no,’ she said again, and swore quietly when she noted the distinct imprint of her shoe on the top one, and hoped that the little tear in the corner had been there before she’d got at it. If she’d had slippers on instead of sturdier shoes from outside, it wouldn’t have happened.
These weren’t new letters, she realised once she’d finished worrying. They were a little bit worn, and had collected a bit of dust in their time on top of the shelf.
Curious now, she shifted the bow aside enough to make out an address written in a lovely, curly hand, as neatly done as though it had been printed. It looked like a feminine hand.
Gripped with the exciting notion it might be correspondence between the older Farrers back in England and their children in Australia, Alice lifted the top envelope a little, squinting into the gap between it and the next letter, hoping to discover if she was right.
So far neither Robert nor Elizabeth had said much about how their parents reacted to the marriage. Maybe they were sparing her the outrage, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was better not to know. And yet sometimes she couldn’t help being inquisitive.
Doubly curious now, she removed the ribbon entirely, and turned the top missive over.
‘Oh,’ she said as her vision narrowed to a point.
‘Oh,’ she said again when she checked the next envelope beneath the first, and found the same name, written again in the same elegant hand.
Plop. Alice jumped when Gertrude dropped heavily off the chair and onto the wooden floor, making a beeline for the open door. The cat might have left her alone then, but she was waylaid by a scent of some sort behind the door.
The clock on the mantle seemed to increase in volume, the ticking enough to drive her to distraction. The sounds of Gertrude’s claws on the floor were a reminder Alice could be discovered any moment. She wasn’t doing anything wrong—not exactly—but she was quite sure she was on the verge of snooping.
She went to the door, closing it almost to, waiting a moment with her ear at the space, waiting until she was certain there was nobody close by.
With a peek out the window that showed her plenty of sheep but no Farrers in sight, she finally took the seat the cat had vacated, and took the first letter between two trembling hands, hesitating only a moment before opening it and unfolding the paper with dread.
Dearest Robert,
You have no idea how much I have missed you.
Maybe she should have expected it. Perhaps she should have suspected it when they sat in the drawing room only days earlier, everybody acting painfully formal and polite … and yet somehow it still came as a surprise. Maybe if she hadn’t been so bloody worried about getting crumbs on her skirts she might have noticed there was more tension in the room that day than there should have been.
She finished the first letter, and then hesitated only a moment before moving onto the next, wholly unable to stop.
The second letter was much the same as the first. Miss Wright told Robert about all the things that had been happening in town since she’d last written. Alice remembered that dreadful day the river flooded, the one that was written about on the paper in her hands. She’d been there for it, worrying just like everyone else that the water would come all the way up Monaro Street and engulf everything around them.
Once she was done with the second letter she forced herself to replace it—and the first one—in the pile, and fumbled with retying the bow. It was dreadful of her to have read any of them at all, but she could at least try refraining from reading the rest. Besides, she didn’t want any more news. It’d not do her any good to continue.
Why hadn’t she known? Somehow Alice hadn’t guessed that Miss Martha Wright had once been a good deal more to Robert Farrer than a business partner’s daughter.
‘No wonder …’ she said aloud to the now empty room. Something more interesting than old letters had drawn Gertrude away, through the crack in the door. She couldn’t even hear the clicks and clacks of the cat’s claws anymore.
Rising, she did her best to restack the shelf as it’d been before, and then she turned to inspect the rest of the room, eyeing the shelves opposite her for any other piles of secret correspondence. The clock wouldn’t stop ticking.
‘No wonder,’ she said again, ‘he got me the bloody cat.’
***
Alice was unsurprised but disappointed when Robert reached for her that night. The newfound tension between them, the uneasiness she hadn’t completely been able to disguise at dinner, had broken for a few happy moments when he’d come to the bedroom and caught her checking for spiders under the covers.
‘My goodness, Alice. I hadn’t any idea you still did that.’
She’d arched a brow at him. ‘You’ll be regrettin’ it the day I don’t check and it’s you who gets bitten.’
‘Spiders wouldn’t dare come in here, I promise,’ he’d declared, and she’d rolled her eyes at the arrogance of it.
‘I might stop that one day,’ she’d told him once she was satisfied they were the only two in the bed. ‘But not yet.’
He’d shaken his head with a smile and then extended a hand to her when she climbed in, his arm going right around her waist.
‘Hmm,’ she said, not sure how she felt about it. Oh, sure, she didn’t not want to do what he had planned; once she’d overcome the weirdness of the act, she’d learnt Robert wasn’t at all bad at it. Only … now she’d always be wondering who he had in his head when he was doing such things. No, there might not be any spiders in the bed that night, but it sure felt like there was more than one woman.
‘Robert?’ she asked mid-kiss, grappling for a distraction. ‘Are those paintings in the bedrooms of England?’
Her husband paused briefly, looking up from where his hand traced a pattern up the side of her, and answered with barely disguised impatience.
‘They are. In fact, they’re of Cumberland, where my family still lives.’
‘And sheep in England have black faces?’
‘Some of them do.’
His hand continued on its exploration. Alice kept her eyes on the ceiling and thought about green grass and English villages and odd-looking creatures—anything better than worrying about
whose mouth her husband imagined he was kissing, or whose breast he pictured taking in his hand.
She’d not let herself forget that neither of them married for love.
‘Keep going,’ Robert encouraged a few minutes later, and she realised she’d come to a stop.
He rolled so that she lost her view of the ceiling, taking her with him until she was atop him, one knee on either side of his hips, and she decided she’d better focus on what they were about. And not on his first betrothed.
Time passed, but the man didn’t seem interested in rushing things.
Alice’s legs began to strain with all the effort the position required. ‘Robert, this is bloody hard work!’
He cracked a laugh but didn’t relent, and so Alice dug up the reserves of her strength and bent to kiss him, alternating delicate kisses with more urgent ones as he moved inside her.
She’d make the most of the situation. He wasn’t the only one with an imagination, she thought as heat roiled inside her.
‘Golly,’ she said up into his face when he rolled them again without breaking the connection, ‘how’d you manage that?’
‘I do have some talents,’ he whispered, and she closed her eyes against a sudden wave of melancholy. It struck so fast she’d no chance to disguise it.
***
Robert stopped suddenly, and Alice snapped her eyes back open.
‘What’s wrong?’ he demanded.
‘Nothin’.’ She arched up to him, but he’d have none of that. Withdrawing from her, he rolled them so that they faced each other. The mood had changed so fast it felt like a terrible case of whiplash.
‘Nothin’,’ she said again, and tried to pull him back for another kiss.
He might have let the lie stand then, might have let the whole thing continue to its natural conclusion, had he not seen the grim determination on her face.
It wasn’t the type of look a man wanted to see, as though the entire act was something to be endured.
He steadied her with a hand on her hip and injected sternness into his tone.
‘Alice, tell me the truth.’
She sighed. Bit her lip. And looked away.
‘Robert …’
‘Yes?’