by Alison Booth
‘There’s only one of those. Don’t you want to paddle too?’
‘No, or only coming back.’
He laughed. ‘Oh yes, with the current.’ But she could tell he was pleased. She certainly wasn’t going to reveal that her decision was based on the thought that he should keep both of his hands busy. She felt even more pleased when Hairy Harry refrained from patting her bottom as he normally did at the launching of the canoes.
Jim and Sally turned up some time later; you wouldn’t think carrying two books to the Cadwallader house could take them so long. Zidra was already sitting in the front of one of the canoes. Eric, standing knee-deep in the water, had tight hold of both boats. Without any discussion, Jim waded into the lagoon and stepped into the canoe in which Zidra was perched. It rocked as he sat down. Though his bared teeth might have been a grin or a grimace, she couldn’t conceal her pleasure, and smiled. Sally was now eyeing Eric in that way she had that made people feel so special. Sally could look after herself; that was one of the things Zidra most admired about her; that toughness that you didn’t always see because it was so well camouflaged by the laughter and the smiles.
A gentle wind had sprung up and light sparkled off the flickering surface of the lagoon. Zidra and Jim started paddling. Seated facing forward, Zidra watched the water flow past and listened to the regular splash of the paddle slicing into the water. The distant laughter of Sally and Eric faded as their canoe lagged behind and Eric struggled with the double-sided paddle. Jim didn’t say a word and Zidra didn’t feel like talking either. She guessed that Jim wanted to wear himself out. She often felt like that too, when angry or upset; only physical exertion could distance you from the misery. Perhaps Sally had said she wanted to travel with Eric and that had distressed Jim. It would have to be that, rather than the other way around. Sally was much too pretty for anyone to want to dump her.
‘Are you all right, Zidra?’
In surprise, she turned. ‘Of course I am.’
‘You seem unusually quiet. Do you mind that I kidnapped you?’
‘Is that what it was? I thought you might have been sacked.’
He laughed. ‘No, it was by mutual consent. Anyway, we weren’t really going out together.’
‘No? You could have fooled me. You don’t think Sally needs protection from Eric?’
‘She can fend for herself. You know that, Zidra. Anyway, I wanted to talk to you. We’ve had hardly any time together these holidays.’
‘We’ve had about what we usually have.’ Glancing around at him again, she caught her breath. His face was set. That she couldn’t bear to look at him for more than a split second was only because she was afraid her expression might give her away. She stopped paddling. The new emotion that she was feeling confused her and at first she couldn’t put a name to it. Trailing a hand in the water, she pondered what it was. More than affection, she decided, it was closer to tenderness.
Jim paddled the canoe towards the edge of the river where the water was still and shaded by the long shadows of the she-oaks. After a moment, when Zidra felt calmer, she turned around to sit facing him, rocking the canoe as she did so.
‘Sure you wouldn’t rather be in Eric’s canoe?’
‘Not really,’ she said. She wasn’t going to make things too easy for him. ‘You didn’t need to warn me off him, you know. I’m quite able to work things out for myself.’
‘You have to watch out for some boys.’
‘You think I don’t know that? You’re as bad as Mama. Boys and men. They’re always ogling. Their eyes drill right into you.’ She noticed that Jim at once changed his focus from her face to the river beyond. ‘Not you, though,’ she said, smiling. ‘Or anyway, only at Sally.’
After he’d restored eye contact, she said, ‘I can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing to be suspicious. Perhaps it’s good. I’m quite a guarded sort of person.’
‘Well, that didn’t stop you trusting Eric. Not that Eric isn’t trustworthy, it’s just that . . .’ He paused. ‘It’s just that he’s rather inclined to make passes.’
She laughed. ‘How old-fashioned you sound! Are you jealous, Jim, just because I rubbed his back with oil?’
‘No, I just want to make sure you don’t make a fool of yourself.’
After she’d flicked him with water, he added, ‘And to protect you.’
‘I know and I’m glad of it. That’s what you said just before you went off to start at Stambroke. I’ll never forget the morning you left here for the first time.’
Zidra stared into the water, dark green at this point. She would never forget either that night before Jim had first left Jingera. She’d spent it tossing and turning and occasionally checking the clock with her torch; it had seemed that morning would never come. Eventually she’d slept for a few hours and, at precisely six o’clock, had awoken with a start. So anxious was she to say goodbye to Jim that she’d dashed out of the house without even having a drink of water or telling Mama. Hidden in her favourite place under the hedge, she’d waited for him. Once he’d arrived, they’d walked down to the lagoon and back, watched by Mr Cadwallader who was waiting at the bus stop with Jim’s suitcases.
‘That’s when you told me your mother was going to marry Mr Vincent,’ Jim continued. ‘And that he was going to adopt you. You were so excited. And for a moment I had a mental image of you in flowing white christening robes with a bonnet on your head. I don’t know why I was confusing adoption with christening. Maybe it was just because I’d seen newspaper photos of babies being adopted and they were all so small.’
‘That was when you asked me to write to you,’ Zidra said.
‘No, you asked me to write to you.’
‘No, it was the other way around. But while we’re on the subject of writing, can you do me a favour, Jim?’
‘What?’
‘Leave the sport out of your letters, all except the rowing.’
‘Okay, but can you do me a favour too?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Cut out the descriptions of Star. Everything else you write is beaut. But no horses.’
She laughed. Horses would continue to appear in her letters but she’d make the telling briefer, and all to be written with the new fountain pen he’d given her. ‘Surely you realise that horses are very interesting,’ she said. ‘Do you know that the name Philip means lover of horses?’
‘Well, I’m sure that’s not something he’ll be telling the boys at school.’
‘Lover of music would suit him better. You will look out for him, won’t you, at Stambroke?’
‘I promise.’
‘Funny that children don’t have any rights. Lorna was taken to Gudgiegalah against her will. Philip was sent to Stambroke against his will. How do you decide who should have rights and who shouldn’t?’
‘That’s what my essay for the Law Society was about. What are you grinning about, Zidra?’
‘Have you any idea how funny that sounds? Makes you sound thirty instead of sixteen. You’ll be an old man before you’re twenty.’ When he looked startled, she flicked him with water again to show she was only teasing. ‘Anyway, what did your essay have to say about who should have rights?’
‘One approach is to say that incompetent people shouldn’t have rights. Children are incompetent at many things and so shouldn’t have rights.’
‘But plenty of adults are too, and they don’t have the right to choose taken away from them. Philip’s clearly not looking forward to going back to Stambroke and I think he should have the right to choose not to.’ She paused for a moment, thinking of how she’d grown fond of Philip in the few days he’d stayed at Ferndale. ‘You know, I was really annoyed with Mama at first for inviting him to stay,’ she continued. ‘I thought he’d be a drag. But he wasn’t, and he’s a terrific listener.’
Jim said nothing, as if to illustrate his own listening credentials, and Zidra flushed as she realised that Philip appeared to pay such close attention because he could barely talk. She continued. ‘Mama got out a whole lot of music when Philip was visiting that I didn’t know she had. Handwritten stuff. She showed it to Philip.’ Zidra hesitated; while she wanted to tell Jim about this she knew it would be painful. ‘It was written by my father, my real father, Oleksii. Philip played it, and do you know what? She’d never showed it to me before. Never. Yet it was my father’s.’ So distressed had she felt at this concealment that she’d barely been able to talk to her mother for several days.
‘Maybe it was too upsetting for her.’
‘I don’t know. I was never really close to him anyway, not like I am to Peter. My real father wasn’t like Peter. He was miserable. I hated him coming home from work. The atmosphere in the flat changed the minute he walked in the front door. I’ve never felt guilty about not missing him. He’s the one who should have felt guilty. He was so grumpy all the time.’
‘I expect the war made him like that. Try to think about it from his perspective.’
‘Why should I try to see it from his perspective?’
‘It might help you understand him better.’
‘But Mama survived the war and Peter survived the war. I’m not going to feel guilty about what the war did to Our Papa Who Art in Heaven. I’m fed up with the war and with hearing about it.’
‘You’re angry.’
‘Angry?’ Only after she’d spewed out the word did she realise that Jim was right. She was angry with her father, and now with Jim for pointing it out.
Yet how futile resentment was when there was nothing she could do about it. Perhaps she should concentrate on her luck in having a new father and Ferndale. Anyway you could love people as if they were your father, even when they weren’t. And to be honest, she hadn’t even liked her father’s music when Philip had played it. It was too harsh, too dissonant. Maybe that was why Mama hadn’t shown it to her. Zidra knew she lacked musical discernment. She’d never felt the slightest interest in music, and although she’d reluctantly continued practising the piano, right up until she was ten, she’d insisted on giving it up after that. Yet Philip had understood her father’s music, that had been obvious, and that had pleased her mother. Even if Zidra couldn’t appreciate Papa’s music, at least she could be glad that others did. It took away from his grumpiness.
‘When are you going to Jervis Bay?’ Jim asked.
‘In two weeks.’
‘It seems like an odd time of the year to take the Gudgiegalah girls on a trip.’
‘That’s what I thought too, but Peter says they won’t be missing any school because that’s when the Gudgiegalah Show is on, and Mama says that the guesthouses offer cheap rates when the holiday season’s over. I’m getting really anxious about it.’
‘Why?’
‘We still haven’t located the Hunters. Imagine Lorna’s disappointment if we can’t find them in time. Mama’s getting really worried about it too. She doesn’t say so, but I can tell. She’s got another lead though. She’s heard they’re living at Numbugga Flats, up on the plateau. She and Peter are going to drive up there next week.’
At this point Eric and Sally caught up, and soon after they turned the canoes around and began to paddle back. Past the she-oaks stands they glided, and the dead eucalyptus tree on whose bleached branches cormorants perched, with their wings spread to dry. Then the craft caught the faster-flowing current in the middle of the river, and they used the paddles only to steer the canoes.
How curious it was that a few words here and a few words there could make you feel so connected, Zidra thought, to people and to the past. Just a few words could do it, could give you a sense of continuity and allow you to take as well as to give. Jim was her past and her present, and that thought brought her some peace.
Afterwards, when Jim and Eric had seen Zidra onto the bus north and escorted Sally home, Jim took Eric up to the headland and through the cemetery. Beyond the gravestones and the white-painted fence, they sat on the narrow strip of recently mown grass. Below them stretched Jingera Beach, that long sweep of white sand rising into high sand dunes backed by dense bush.
I won’t see my family and Zidra for another term, Jim thought. He was growing away from his family though. Moving away, growing away. He realised for the first time that he’d miss Zidra more than his family. But that was natural. She had similar interests to his. That was all there was to it.
Yet he knew he was kidding himself.
In the late afternoon light, the flickering ocean was iridescent. To the south a bank of indigo-bottomed white clouds became faintly tinged with gold from the sinking sun. That Zidra had become beautiful was neither here nor there. She was one of his best friends, and would stay that way. Or would she? Today she had become more than that. Maybe she’d been more than that for a long time.
Yet perhaps he would be growing away from her too, as his adulthood beckoned, and this thought saddened him.
‘It’s been terrific staying with your family,’ Eric said.
So long had they been sitting in silence that Jim had forgotten he wasn’t alone. He didn’t really want to talk but knew what was expected of him. That’s what Stambroke taught you, if you didn’t know already. ‘Great to have you,’ he mumbled.
‘Being away from home and school has helped me decide,’ Eric said.
‘Decide what?’
‘I don’t want to go to university. I just want to go on the land.’
‘Why?’
‘I miss it. I’m homesick.’
‘Even here?’
‘Yes, even here. It’s beautiful but too hilly and too green. And Sydney’s too crowded. I belong to the black plains.’
‘How do you know where you belong when you were sent away to school so young?’
‘I just know. When I go home to all that space I feel my soul spread out and when I go back to Sydney I feel it being squeezed into a tight mould again. I’m going to help Dad run the property. Eventually I’ll marry some nice girl I’ll meet at a polo match.’ He laughed, as he always did when talking about life up north. ‘She’ll have blue eyes and brown hair and a sense of humour.’
‘Sounds like Sally.’
‘Yes, or someone like her. There’ll be lots of Sallys before then though.’
Chapter 24
At the Ferndale stop, Zidra struggled off the bus with the beach bag and the parcel Mrs Blunkett had given her, inwardly cursed her luck in being caught by the postmistress in Jingera. Now she was going to have to walk all the way along the drive, from the entrance-gate to the homestead, juggling the package as well as her bag. Mrs Blunkett had appeared at the door of the post office when she and the others had been hanging about at the Jingera bus stop, and had beckoned her over. ‘Something for your mother,’ she’d said, nodding her head so vigorously that her white curls shook. ‘Another box from David Jones, I wonder what this time. She’s a great one for the mail order, but that’s what you’ve got to do when you’re on the land like, and I suppose she thinks twice before venturing far in the car. Back to school tomorrow, eh? Bet you’re looking forward to it, the school holidays seem to go on forever when you’re young.’ Only Jim’s shouting that the bus was coming had given Zidra an excuse to get away, and she’d dashed across the square with barely a minute to spare, while Mrs Blunkett called after her, ‘Mind you’re careful with that package! It’s fragile.’
So intent was Zidra now on not dropping the parcel – how stupid of her to agree to take it when her mother could easily have collected it in the car – that she didn’t see her mother standing at the entrance-gate until she was almost upon her. ‘What’s the occasion?’ she said. ‘Or have you come to help carry?’
‘Yes. Mrs Blunkett telephoned,
so I thought I’d meet the bus.’ Her mother took the parcel from her.
‘What’s inside?’ Zidra said. ‘Mrs Blunkett was so consumed with curiosity I’m surprised she didn’t open it.’ She mimicked the postmistress: ‘Another one from David Jones, I wonder what this time. Your mother’s a great one for the mail order, but that’s what you’ve got to do when you’re on the land like.’
‘Some books and records. Anyway, Mrs Blunkett now knows what’s inside because I told her on the phone. Thanks for collecting them.’
Looking at her mother’s smiling face, Zidra realised she’d forgiven her for not telling her about Papa’s music. That’s what talking to Jim had done; it had allowed her to see what had happened in a new light. And she’d also begun to wonder if Papa wasn’t far more than just a grumpy man who’d never had two words for her. Although she’d felt she had only one good memory of him, that time he’d taken her to the circus and they’d eaten fairy floss, there must be other good stuff too.
In time, she’d ask her mother to tell her more about him but not yet. What she wanted to do instead, as soon as she got into the haven of her attic room, was to replay in her mind the events of the afternoon. Especially that moment on the river when she’d realised what she was starting to feel for Jim.
Ilona, waiting at the front gate when Zidra got off the bus, had noticed with a start how lovely her daughter had become, with those dark curls framing her oval face, and the tawny brown eyes and golden skin. Yet it wasn’t only the pleasing proportions of her face, it was a sort of inner glow that she’d recently acquired. Ilona wouldn’t be making any remarks about this though. She’d nearly had her head bitten off after her thoughtless comment about Zidra’s plucked eyebrows.
It was to be hoped that Zidra’s radiance, that was the word that best described it, had nothing to do with Eric Hall, the boy from Walgett. Ever since meeting him at that barbecue on the beach Ilona had suspected that his interest in Zidra was not platonic. ‘Did you enjoy your canoeing?’ she now enquired, as they strolled back along the drive towards the homestead, nestled in its semicircle of pine trees.