The Post at Gundoee

by Amanda Doyle

  ‘Well? What’s going on?’ Rod Bennett sounded stem. ‘Mail-day’s as good as over, didn’t you know? Bluey, I thought you had a fence to ride?’

  ‘Most certainly, boss,’ mumbled a gaunt individual with an unruly thatch of bright red hair spiking from beneath his slouch hat. ‘I just reckoned these stones could do with a bit of a shift, see. You know, they was kind of untidy, see.’

  ‘I see more than you think! Barney? The number five bore?’

  ‘Sure thing, Rod. I’ve got the casin’ in the jeep. We just thought, I mean, these weeds ’ere are gettin’ downright cheeky, they’re comin’ up that quick.’

  ‘—just spotted this tin on me way to the quarters, Rod, Thought one of them blinkin’ ’orses might shy at it if I didn’t pick it up.’

  ‘Collectin’ up a bit of wire, I was—’

  ‘Prickly little bastards, these burrs, eh, Rod?’

  ‘We got the supplies up in the Blitz, Rod. I mean, you couldn’t expect for a sheila ter be carryin’ all them heavy packin’ cases, could yer, now?’

  ‘Quite, Herb,’ agreed the man at Lindsay’s side equably. ‘From now on that can be your own job on mail-days. Part of the drill.’

  Herb, a thickset man with a four-day stubble and a singular lack of teeth, received this news with some evidence of bewilderment.

  ‘Yer don’t mean every time, do yer, Rod?’ he enquired in dismay.

  ‘That’s just what I do mean, Herb. Every time.’ Rod Bennett smiled plea sandy at Herb’s toothless gape. ‘And you, Artie, can get a hoe, and cut burrs the proper way for the rest of the day. The horse paddock’s getting pretty thick with them.’

  ‘Aw, cripes, boss! Yer mean, all them burrs in the ’orse paddock? Stone the crows! There’s acres of ’em!’

  ‘That’s right, Art It’s time they were done.’ He turned his attention to the men kneeling beside the motor-tyres. ‘You might as well weed all those beds, while you’re at it Even if the cottage is to remain empty in the meantime, it’s as well to keep the place tidy, I reckon.’

  ‘Empty?’ The wail was a chorused protest, unanimous, heartfelt To a man, they all stopped what they had been doing again, and blinked at Rod.

  ‘Yes, that’s right—empty. I was simply showing Miss Dutten the layout, the whereabouts of the store, and the place where the book-keeper used to stay.’ His voice was deeply calm, utterly convincing—so convincing that for a moment Lindsay could almost have believed him to be serious. But hadn’t he just said that she could have a cottage of her very own? That the book-keeper always slept and worked in his own cottage near the store? And it was such a dear little cottage, too!

  Lindsay peeped at his set face. He appeared to be in deadly earnest. Very hesitantly, she plucked at his khaki shirt-sleeve.

  ‘Excuse me, Mr. Bennett, but you just said a moment ago that—’

  ‘Never mind what I said a moment ago.’ Rod Bennett scowled down at her, as if her fingers on his arm were an unwelcome reminder of a presence that irritated almost beyond endurance. ‘You can come with me,’ he added, in the same sort of voice he had used at the airstrip, and which seemed to Lindsay to be loaded with forbearance. Then he picked up her case again and swung on his heel.

  ‘But I thought—’ gasped Lindsay, catching up with, him around the corner of the store.

  ‘Then don’t. Don’t think,’ he rasped out briefly.

  ‘But my cottage?’ she panted. ‘That dear little cottage? Aren’t I going to have it, like the book-keeper always does?’

  ‘No, Miss Dutten, you are not!’

  ‘Why not? The other book-keeepers always did, so why not me?’

  ‘Because you are not like the other book-keepers,’ he told her curtly, opening the wicket gate and almost pushing her through in front of him.

  ‘But you haven’t tried me out yet,’ protested Lindsay hotly, ‘so how can you possibly know that I’m not like the others?’

  Rod Bennett seized her elbow in a grasp that hurt, and practically lifted her up the steps and through the gauze door. Inside, he let her go, dumped her case down on the wooden veranda boards, pushed back his hat, and looked at her.

  Lindsay gazed back, aware of the exasperation lurking in the grey depths of his eyes, the small white strip near his hairline where the suntan stopped, the glint of a couple of grey strands among the dark, clipped hairs at his temple, the brown strength of his throat in the open-necked shirt, the grim set of his mouth as he closed his lips upon whatever words he had been about to utter.

  Lindsay’s stare was limpid, green, and clear, and tinged with uncontrolled curiosity. She had never met a man of this type before—she hadn’t, for that matter, met many men of any type!—and she found him both interesting and—well—fascinating, in a rather frightening sort of way. No wonder all those other men down there had positively jumped to do his bidding! He wasn’t the sort of person to brook an argument when he issued orders, of that much one could be sure.

  Rod Bennett’s own stare was grey, candid, and uncomfortably penetrating. It seemed to search right into her own brain, to where her puzzlement and weariness and curiosity were mingling bewilderingly.

  Lindsay watched the exasperation giving way to a tiny glimmer of some other, warmer emotion that she was unable to identify. Although he now looked slightly less dangerous, his mouth was still unyielding, however, as he stated positively,

  ‘The others were different.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  The others were men.’

  ‘Oh-h-h!’ Lindsay’s own lips pursed soundlessly. ‘Does it m-matter?’ she added after a moment, wishing that he didn’t have to be quite so grim about it.

  ‘It matters, yes.’ He sent his broad-brimmed hat spinning into a deckchair impatiently. ‘For two pins, I’d send you back. I ought to send you back.’

  ‘But why?’

  Brown fingers raked through his hair in a gesture of pure indecision. ‘Those men—’ he muttered.

  ‘I thought they were being perfectly sweet,’ Lindsay felt bound to defend them. ‘After all, they were only trying to make things nice for me, weren’t they? They meant to be friendly. My new bush friends.’ She gazed out through the gauze at the sun-drenched lawn and shrubs, shimmering in a haze of heat, then brought her eyes back to his. ‘They were the friends, the kindly voices—like in the poem.’

  ‘The poem?’

  ‘I told you. Like in Clancy.’

  ‘Of the Overflow,’ she felt bound to tack on, seeing his blank look.

  ‘Ah yes. Clancy.’ Rod Bennett’s grey eyes flickered with amused irony. He fingered his chin. ‘I don’t suppose I could send you back, after that, could I? Not without a trial.’

  ‘You promised, Mr. Bennett.’

  He straightened up, sighed.

  ‘That’s right, I promised.’ He picked up the case, for what seemed to Lindsay the hundredth time since her arrival. ‘I’ll show you to your room, and you can have a wash and join us for lunch. The dining-room is around that corner of the veranda. Mannie will get you some sheets and stuff afterwards, and you can make up a bed.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Bennett I really do mean that!’

  He indicated a doorway, placed her luggage in what she hoped would now be its final resting-place, on the foot of the bed.

  ‘I must be mad,’ he grumbled deeply.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Lunch will be in a quarter of an hour.’ Rod Bennett spoke abruptly. ‘Please be punctual. Unpunctuality fouls up the cogs in a station’s efficiency machine quicker than almost anything else.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Bennett,’ she assured the broad, retreating back, sinking down weakly on to the bed beside her case, and listening to the beat of his heavy boots fading out along the veranda.

  Phew! It looked as though she had made it, Lindsay reflected with relief. But only just!

  For a while it had been touch and go out there, but now she felt that the first ditch had been safely negotiated. She was here, and
she could stay, even if it was only on trial. She had bought herself a little time in which to prove to that strange, tough man that one’s sex had no relevance whatever when it came to book-keeping. Once Rod Bennett saw what a neat, methodical set of books she could turn out, he would forget all about that one little drawback—the fact that she happened to be a girl.

  Having become acquainted with the layout of the homestead precincts, Lindsay could not see that being a girl mattered even the tiniest little bit. She could soon learn to do all those other things too, the general factotum things that he had reeled off so blightingly.

  Lindsay gave an involuntary shiver as she remembered the manager’s eyes, how cold they had gone, when he said that bit about deceiving him. His eyes, indeed, had almost disappeared into cold, nasty, grey slits, and you’d have said there was a real hint of threat in his voice—

  ‘If I thought for one moment that you had intentionally deceived me—’

  Lindsay gulped. It was better not to recall how he had looked when he had said that. It made her feel apprehensive and uncomfortable, all over again, just when she was beginning to recover her equilibrium. She thrust the recollection from her, and surveyed her surroundings with returning interest

  The room was pleasant—not as nice as the dear little cottage would have been, but gracious and spacious and homely-looking, with high, cool white ceilings and heavy Victorian furniture, a brass bedstead, floral curtains. The quilt she was sitting on was of white cotton, heavily fringed, and the mattress felt soft and springy. Lindsay would have liked to lie down on it right now, and drift off to sleep. She would like to forget all about Gundooee Station and its manager, just for the present, but Rod Bennett had said she must come for lunch, so she had better get ready.

  She found the bathroom, washed her face and hands, came back to the bedroom and took off her pretty olive suit, hanging it up with care in the big wardrobe. Her mouth curled at the sight of its cavernous interior, and the rows of empty coat-hangers. Her suit and denim skirt and cotton sun-dress would not take up much of that room. Alas for all the pretty things which Carleen had snatched back so spitefully at the last moment! They would have gone some way, at least, towards filling up this generous space.

  Lindsay put on the denim skirt now, buttoned her white cotton shirt, brushed her hair. Then she walked somewhat hesitantly across the hall to the dining-room.

  Rod Bennett was there waiting for her. He made the fact that he was waiting obvious by looking pointedly at the watch strapped to one hairy brown wrist, and then he introduced her to the woman she knew must be Mannie, before putting her into her chair.

  Mannie was already seated. She was thin and elderly, with wispy white hair and a complexion that was parched and drawn by the sun into a criss-cross pattern of wrinkles. They scored her cheeks, fanned about her eyes, corrugated her brow, lined her mouth. When she smiled they all changed direction, like miniature railway lines whose points had been changed. She smiled at Lindsay just now, and her beady brown eyes were alert, but also welcoming and kind.

  Rod Bennett waved a hand between the woman and the girl.

  ‘This is Miss Dutten, Mannie,’ he told the old woman on his right. Then, to Lindsay, ‘Mrs. Manning, or Mannie, as she prefers to be called.’ He took his place at the head of the table. ‘I have already prepared Mannie to expect a Miss Dutten instead of a Mister—isn’t that so, Mannie?’

  ‘Please just call me Lindsay. I’m not used to being called Miss.’

  ‘Perhaps that is why you omitted it from your correspondence?’ came the quick, sarcastic reply, and Lindsay felt quick colour tinting her cheeks.

  ‘Now, Rod my dear, don’t go on about it any more,’ begged the old lady, unexpectedly coming to the girl’s defence. ‘As Miss Dutten—as Lindsay—is here, it’s a fait accompli, isn’t it, however vexed you may feel, so let’s just make the best of it In any case’—she twinkled deliberately—‘it will be nice for me to have some feminine company apart from Sibbie and Bella, with all their skylarks.’

  ‘Sibbie and Bella?’ Lindsay was loth to speak at all in the face of Rod Bennett’s own preoccupied silence as he got on with his meal, but as Mannie appeared to be in a more friendly and talkative mood, it seemed churlish not to join in.

  ‘Yes, my dear. The lubras.’

  ‘Do—do they work in the house?’

  Lindsay had wondered about that. While she had been sitting on her bed, she had heard shrieks and giggles coming from somewhere at the back of the veranda, and the accompanying clatter and clash of cutlery and crockery told her that the sounds probably emanated from the kitchen.

  ‘They do help—and hinder too,’ smiled the old woman. ‘I don’t let them handle the food, and so I do all the cooking myself, but they do wash the dishes and peel the vegetables, and they turn the housework into a sort of fun session that can become quite riotous at times. You’ll hear them soon, if you haven’t already. They’re apt to regard everything as a joke, which makes them the pleasantest possible people to have around one—when they are around.’

  ‘Aren’t they always?’ Lindsay was moved to enquire politely, stealing another furtive glance at the stern figure on her right He was eating with an abstracted expression on his face. Obviously his thoughts were engaged elsewhere, and he was quite oblivious of the women’s conversational exchange.

  ‘No, not always,’ replied Mannie with a sigh. ‘That’s the one drawback. They can be somewhat irresponsible about turning up. One just has to be thankful when they do. They are a people of superstition, the aborigines, and a certain amount of religious rite and ceremony interferes with the living of their lives as the white man lives it Things are changing gradually, of course, and not before time. I’m afraid we’ve done very badly by the people from whom the white settlers took Australia, and have, as a nation, realised our culpability rather late. Up till now, their fortunes have depended to a great extent on the sympathy or otherwise of the individuals who employ them, although recently the Government has taken a hand, and of course there are the Missions, which do an enormous amount of helpful work. Out here they still have cultural sessions of one sort or another, singing ceremonies, corroborees to celebrate spiritual events, and all kinds of ritual to do with their Dreamtime beliefs. Sometimes, too’—she laughed—‘they just go walkabout for no apparent reason.’

  ‘Walkabout?’

  ‘They just move away, Lindsay—into the night, you might say. After being apparently quite settled and happy, they suddenly get the urge to wander, and they leave their gunyahs or humpies, the bark huts they make, and they just seem to disappear into nowhere. It’s part of their inherent tendency to nomadism. But of course you’ll know all this, anyway’—Mannie waved a deprecating hand apologetically—‘I was forgetting that you have had previous experience of Outback ways.’

  ‘Miss Dutten’s previous experience has unfortunately been confined to the Batlow area,’ put in Rod Bennett cuttingly. (So he had been listening, after all!)

  ‘Batlow?’ Mannie blinked. ‘Goodness, isn’t that the place where those lovely apples come from? Pears, too, I think.’

  'Quite’ The manager succeeded in bringing a wealth of derision to that word.

  ‘Yes, well’—the old woman glanced tactfully away from Lindsay’s scarlet cheeks—‘you’ll have to tell me all about it some time, dear. Such pretty country, so I’ve heard. Will you be in for tea, Rod, or shall I pack you something? We’re usually not so late as this on mail-days, you see, Lindsay. The men are almost always out for lunch, but with a new book-keeper coming—well, that’s different.’

  ‘It was certainly different today, anyway,’ agreed the big man at the head of the table, holding Lindsay’s eye as if delighting in her agonised expression. ‘A few scones in my saddle-bag would be welcome, Mannie, thank you. I left it on the dresser in the kitchen.’

  Rod Bennett got to his feet, smiled down and laid a kindly hand tinder Mannie’s arm, helping her from her chair—not that Mannie was decre
pit or in real need of such help. It was more a gesture of true affection and gallantry, Lindsay perceived with amazement, and the man’s eyes were soft, considerate and fond, not remote and cool and disapproving like they were when they rested on her. Lindsay thought wistfully that it must be pleasant to have a difficult man like that on your side instead of against you, and to be the recipient of such a gentle, respectful look from those wide-set, expressive grey eyes.

  It wasn’t very likely to happen to her, though! She cleared her throat.

  ‘Er—thank you for meeting me at the plane, Mr. Bennett,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted your day.’

  ‘Not at all, Miss Dutten. It is usual, as Mannie has already said, for me to be on hand to meet a new employee, I assure you,’ he returned formally.

  ‘Don’t you think it would be more friendly to say Lindsay, Rod?’ interpolated Mannie with what seemed to Lindsay an awesome show of courage. 'I’m going to—and you just call me Mannie, my dear. We all use Christian names out here.’

  ‘I find the name Lindsay too equivocal in the circumstances, thank you, Mannie, to wish to use it,’ stated Rod Bennett coldly. Scowling brows descended, turned the grey eyes into those nasty slits again. The slits were narrowed accusingly upon the girl who hesitantly started to collect plates, as the housekeeper was already doing. ‘In any case, repeated use of her proper status might remind Miss Dutten that there are certain occasions when it is unforgivably remiss to omit the use of it with accuracy.’

  Upon which quelling statement he strode from the room. ‘Now what did he mean by that?’ asked Mannie good-humouredly. ‘It’s not as if you did it on purpose.’

  She continued her task with every impression of unruffled calm. Obviously Rod Bennett did not present the fearsome figure to her that he did to Lindsay, who now licked her dry lips tremulously and carried a pile of plates to the trolley with hands that trembled a tiny bit.

  ‘I—I think perhaps he’s still very angry, all the same. It’s because I’m a girl, he’s made that quite clear. Doesn’t he like women?’ She gazed apprehensively at the tall, retreating, slouch-hatted figure that crossed the yard outside the window with long, purposeful strides.