by Margaret Way
HARRIET SERVED the food, a tori shisomaki, which she translated for them as chicken wrapped in shiso leaves with a dash of lemon juice and soya sauce. She brought the dishes to the table, and the three of them began to eat.
“What you should do, Harriet, is open a restaurant,” Kyall suggested some time later as they all relaxed under the influence of the delicious food. “All we have is Bronwyn’s café.” He didn’t sound as though he was joking or merely offering flattery.
“And who would teach school?” Harriet didn’t sound as if she was rejecting the idea, either.
“When you retire is your decision, Harriet.” Kyall looked up. “This town owes you a great deal, as it does Joe, but I wonder if you’re not thinking of expanding your horizons. You’d be a great success in the restaurant business.”
“Are you serious, Kyall?” Sarah stopped eating, her fork midway to her mouth.
“Just thought of it this very moment.” Kyall chuckled. “I’d like Harriet to be able to enjoy her retirement.”
“With a restaurant?” Sarah asked. “Is that the answer? Wouldn’t that be a lot of work?”
“It would,” Harriet intervened, “but fun. Fancy your thinking of that, Kyall. You’re always coming up with something new.”
“The town needs a good restaurant. You know a lot about food. You’ve won over me.” He grinned. “And our fastidious Sarah. You wouldn’t have to do it all yourself. There are plenty of women—good cooks—in the town who’d love to be in on such a venture. You’d be boss, of course.”
“Of course,” seconded Harriet.
“The whole thing would be based on your ideas. I know you’d have a lot of customers clamoring to get in. It just seems like a good change of pace. A rest from school. Life should be full of new ventures.”
Harriet, although she was smiling broadly, had a faraway look in her eyes. “I’ve found wonderful satisfaction in my teaching career, but it’s true—I’ve been battling with feelings of wanting a change. A restaurant! My goodness!” she exclaimed.
“Let Mum find someone to take over at the school,” Kyall advised, turning to her with his usual authority.
“You speak like it’s already happening.” Harriet gestured with her free hand.
“Say the word and I’ll make it happen,” Kyall promised.
“And you just came up with this, Kyall?” Sarah marveled, touched by Harriet’s excitement.
“I’m not the only one who thinks Harriet is a great cook.” He shrugged. “If Harriet can get some pleasure and satisfaction out of it, I’m happy to help set things in motion. After all, a good restaurant could only be an advantage to the town.”
“And where would it be located?” Sarah asked, thinking the main street had full tenancy.
“We’ll build the place from scratch,” Kyall said, moving his hand to close over Sarah’s, caressing her fingers.
“That’s just one of the things I love about you, Kyall,” Harriet enthused. “You’re a real dynamo.”
“I haven’t been up-to-date in my love life.” Kyall caught Sarah’s beautiful brown eyes, such a contrast to the bright gold of her hair, and held them. “But that’s going to change.”
“Is it?” Sarah asked softly.
“And it’s about time!” Harriet hit the table forcefully with the palm of her hand, making the plates jump. “This is quite extraordinary,” she murmured. “A restaurant? Now I won’t be able to get the idea out of my head.”
“What’s life without a bit of excitement?” Kyall said, his gaze moving over Sarah so intimately she felt the familiar jolt of electricity.
“Goodness, you’re even making me feel young.” Harriet leaped up from the table. “Now, I’ve got a lime-and-ginger mousse I’ve put together. I’m great at impromptu desserts, if I do say so. It’s light and refreshing. Any takers?”
“Two,” Kyall answered for both of them.
Harriet turned to beam at him. “Think of it, a restaurant!”
“Well you’d better hurry up, Harriet, and make your decision,” urged Kyall. “If we’re going to do it, we should get started.”
AN HOUR LATER Sarah and Kyall stepped out into the glittering metallic sunlight, the narrow pathway sizzling beneath Sarah’s thin-soled shoes. The whole town had closed down for Joe Randall’s funeral, but for once, the children who attended the town school didn’t delight in the holiday. Dr. Randall had delivered most of them. He’d been much loved.
“Let’s go for a drive.”
Staring up into Kyall’s taut, tanned face, Sarah could see he wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
“If you like, but we shouldn’t be long. Sue Reed’s very good to do standby duty at the hospital.”
Kyall gazed off. “We’ve already started the search for a locum to help you. Joe carried too big a burden on his shoulders.”
“I agree. But not too many doctors are drawn to remote places.”
“We’ll find somebody,” Kyall said with certainty. “The scouts are out looking as we speak.”
“You don’t think I’ll fill Joe’s shoes?”
“First of all, I do.” Kyall opened the passenger door of the Range Rover for her. “Secondly, I don’t want you under too much pressure. You have to have time for yourself. And needless to say, for me.”
A situation Sarah might have found blissful except for all the deceptions that got in the way.
As they drove past the small general store, Sarah saw the curtains move. “I’m glad Ruby isn’t taking over from Mum.” She sighed. “I’m fairly certain that’s Ruby behind the curtain.”
“I’m sure it is,” Kyall agreed offhandedly. “Marjorie Preston was by far the best candidate. Ruby can stay on as shop assistant. I don’t know that she actually needs a job. Her chief interest is minding everyone else’s business. So, where are you going to live? I know you don’t want Joe’s place.”
“Would your grandmother be willing to lease me the Sinclair house?” Sarah turned to look at his strong profile.
Kyall shook his head. “Don’t be ridiculous, Sarah.”
“She wouldn’t consider it?”
“Listen, Sarah.” He shot her a burning glance. “You must be aware that my wishes carry a lot of weight. You could have the Sinclair house if you wanted it, but I don’t want you there. For one thing, it’s too isolated. For another it’s got such a desolate, abandoned air. I don’t believe in ghosts, but…”
“You don’t believe in the infinite?” she asked in a ruminative sort of way. “I had a little patient, a cancer victim, who related his near-death experience to me. He wasn’t making anything up—he’d gone far beyond telling stories in his short, painful life—just describing it the way it was. It shook me. Another thing that shakes me is that there’s no vestige of the living person, absolutely nothing of the spirit, after death. The soul has left the body. It’s not the heart stopping. It’s the soul departing. Sometimes I’ve tried not to believe it. But…I have to.”
Kyall nodded seriously. “Well, I believe there has to be a system whereby the good are rewarded and the bad are punished. All the wrongs righted. I guess that means a kind of heaven and hell, but I don’t accept the traditional version of either. In any event, that doesn’t help us with this issue of the Sinclair house. That woman, Molly Fairweather—you never met her—died there. As you may have heard, a desert taipan got into the house. A bit out of the ordinary, but not impossible.”
“Why did your grandmother create the impression that she sold the house to Molly Fairweather? What was the woman doing there, anyway? She knew no one. She had no family here. No connection of any kind.”
“Hell, Sarah. Have you been checking up?” Kyall’s voice cracked discordantly. “People find their way to the outback. Take Evan Thompson, a real mystery man if ever there was one. It doesn’t seem to me that he’s just a normal dropout from the rat race. I’ve had a number of conversations with him. He’s a brilliant man.”
“Maybe he’s brokenhearted,”
Sarah said.
“Maybe he is. He has a damned look behind his eyes. You’ll have to meet him.”
“As he’s part of Harriet’s string quartet, I’m sure I will. But don’t change the subject.”
“I wasn’t, actually. I was simply talking about Evan. He’s a wonderful musician—cello—but that wasn’t his previous life. He’s like a man who’s…who’s been in a lot of dangerous places.” Kyall shrugged. “What about the old Fielding place? It’s been vacant since Miss Fielding had to go into a nursing home. It’s cool and spacious and it’s close to Harriet’s.”
“I’m set on the Sinclair house.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Sarah, unless the house has some significance to you. But what? You’ve become far too enigmatic.” He shook his head. “I, on the other hand, know exactly what I want for the future. I want you. I want us to get married as soon as possible. It’s our destiny. You said you loved me.”
There was a fatalistic note in her voice. “Why wouldn’t I love you?”
“Why can’t you prove it, then?” His eyes glittered with sudden fierce emotion. “Or make that sound a little happier?”
“I can’t at the moment.” She grew quiet.
“Which makes me very curious. Why so cryptic? What are you hiding?” He threw a quick glance at her profile, hoping to find something. Some clue as to what was going on in her head.
“My path through life hasn’t been as easy as yours, Kyall.”
That wrenched him. “How could you call mine easy?” His retort was almost curt. “God, Sarah, you know better than anyone what a dysfunctional family I’ve got. My grandmother has a genius for alienating people. She riles everyone in sight. Most people who meet her for the first time think they’ve bumped smack into Lucretia Borgia at her worst. She’s the same with her own daughter and her son-in-law—my father—who I’m sure is secretly waiting for her to die. As far as Gran’s concerned, there are only two people in the world worth a damn. Her and me, and she’s starting to have second thoughts about me. You call that an easy, civilized existence? I’ve had a hard ride since I was a kid.”
“Poor little rich kid.” Sarah’s tone changed to teasing and her expression of quiet solemnity broke up.
Her smile was a radiance that lit up her face, he thought, heartened by it. He sent her a droll look. “Which just goes to prove that life isn’t any easier for the rich.”
“Well, I suppose that’s true in some ways,” Sarah said. “The worst of it is, you want to marry me and make me part of all that.”
“Not only want to, I’m going to.” Kyall reached out to cover one of her hands with his own.
Instantly she sobered again. What happened when he discovered her tragic secret? He might find that impossible to live with. For all her success in school and later as a doctor, losing their child was the central, defining event of her life. Even now, it dominated both past and future.
“Why the poignant expression?” Kyall was dismayed by the abrupt change in her. “You’re acting like marrying me might be some sort of tragedy. Why? Surely you know I’ll protect you with my life.”
She hesitated, uncertain what to say. Finally she spoke. “We got way ahead of ourselves, Kyall. That first time we made love.”
“Oh, Lord, Sarah, will you ever let me forget? It was wonderful for me.”
“And me.” She touched his arm, linked her fingers like a bracelet. “But it separated us for years and years.”
“I’ve got to ask why. Why did you act like you hated me when you didn’t hate me at all?”
“For the reasons I told you. Your family didn’t want me in your life, Kyall.”
“Ah, the hell with that!” The roughness of his tone reflected his frustration and anger. “I’d have married you, no matter what. It’s not that unusual, you know. Plenty of people marry without family approval. It happens every day.”
“I know that, only, for years your family—your grandmother—was simply too much for me.”
“Surely she isn’t now, Sarah? You’re your own woman, with your own well-respected identity. People love you. You’re beautiful, but there’s nothing threatening about you. Only an aura of goodness and integrity, which must serve you well in your profession.”
“I’m nowhere near as good as you think.”
“Yes, you are. You’ve just been lonely and filled with grief. There’s a tremendous kinship between us, Sarah. I haven’t found it with any other woman, and I’ll admit there have been a few. I did try to forget you, but it didn’t work.”
“Not for me, either,” she admitted without any trace of embarrassment.
“So we’re kindred souls?”
“We seem to be.” She smiled.
“In the old days, I knew everything about you,” he mused. “I could read you like a book, as you read me. But you’ve returned a mystery. Or is it just that you’re a woman?” His mouth twisted wryly.
She thought a moment. “I guess you could say I’ve come to realize that unsolvable problems exist.”
“Well, if they do, Sarah, you don’t have to face them alone. I have this idea that your very sick patients, especially little children—I know how much you love them—drain you emotionally. You need me, Sarah. You need my love.”
That was the absolute truth. Sarah couldn’t get away from it. She turned her head, staring out the window at the scenery flying by. Kyall wasn’t following the line of billabongs, she realized, but heading toward what they all quaintly called “the Hill Country.” In the flattest continent on earth, the Hill Country was a series of low, eroded mesas colored a magnificent orange-red, relics of an ancient past. The narrow gorges and canyons were a world apart from the surrounding arid spinifex plains. Here there were permanent pools, even when the creeks had dried out, and species of oasislike tropical palms and plants that managed to survive in the enclosed damp environment. Here, too, located beside the permanent water holes, were fascinating Aboriginal rock paintings, executed on the multicolored horizontal bands of the cliff walls and the interiors of small caves. The Hill country’s raw-earth ochres were turning to pinks and rose and violets as the sun went down.
For Kyall and Sarah, wild as it was, with its brooding aura of great antiquity, this was the most beautiful environment on earth. It was a shared love that had suffused their relationship and strengthened the unbreakable bond between them. It also illustrated the fact that the great pioneering families and the white settlers of the outback had, over time, absorbed something of the Aboriginal Dreaming with its belief that this ancient land was sacred, created by the Great Spirit Beings.
Eventually they stopped and climbed out of the Range Rover. “You won’t be able to walk far in those shoes,” Kyall observed, looking down at her stylish black dress shoes. “You might ruin them. I should’ve thought of that before.”
“I’m not worried about it.” Sarah tugged with irritation at the few pins that held her hair in a neat upturned roll. Free of restraint, her golden mane tumbled around her face and floated over her shoulders in the way Kyall loved best. She moved on, walking carefully across the sea of smoothly rounded rocks and pebbles while streams of birds rose in formation on the desert wind. In the distance, a whirlwind was dancing across the sweeping plain. A mirage of shimmering blue lakes that simply didn’t exist taunted the eye. This was the fascination of the desert country, the savage beauty and the frightening specter of death. At least at the water hole, they could drink deeply of the pure, surprisingly cold, life-giving water.
Kyall caught up with her easily, taking her hand for the sheer pleasure of holding it, not just to lend support. Clumps of the ubiquitous spinifex speckled the slope, splashes of gold against the orange-red sand. They avoided coming into contact with their spikes, continuing fairly cautiously because of Sarah’s shoes, until they came to the first level of caves.
“I’ll go in first,” Kyall told her briefly. “Make sure there’s nothing around. You stay off to one side.”
Sarah
did what she was told. Little rock wallabies often took shelter in the caves to avoid the heat. The desert’s fearsome-looking but harmless lizards sought the shade of the rocks, although the reptiles had perfected the technique of basking out under the powerful sun.
“All clear.” Kyall came back out, his tall body almost doubled over to clear the height of the entrance. “You’ll have to take off your shoes here or your heels will sink. It’s quite extraordinary. Some of the rock paintings are as vivid as if they were painted in our lifetime, instead of thousands of years ago.”
They entered the cave and stood hand in hand, the old familiarity returning to them. This was one of the favorite haunts of their childhood. They stared upward, thrilled by what they saw.
The ceiling of the cave soared to some twenty feet, a veritable treasure trove of drawings. There were many circles and spirals incised on the ceiling and walls that they took to signify rock pools and water holes. There were meandering designs that could mean trails of various kinds, billabongs, creeks, even the travels of ancestral beings. Many of the drawings, executed in ochres, were immediately identifiable. They represented hunters with spears about to throw them, with totemic beings and creatures around them, looking on. There were innumerable drawings of animals, trees, plants, what appeared to be showers of rain and most incredible of all, the unmistakable outline of a giant crocodile. It was so accurate in every detail that when they were children they used to jump with excitement every time they saw it.
Imagine crocodiles living in the large inland sea of prehistory! The sea that was now the Dead Heart. Vertical yellow lines flanked the crocodile’s body like the sandy banks of a tidal creek. Scarcely an inch wasn’t decorated, some drawings faint, others in vivid tones of yellow, red, white and black. There were no drawings of women. These caves, apparently, had only been available to men. Other symbols appeared, ones impossible to understand as any ancient hieroglyphics.
“The fascination doesn’t go away, does it?” Sarah whispered, brushing at the curling tendrils that clung to her temples and cheeks.