The Post at Gundoee

by Amanda Doyle

  The interview only took a few minutes. Just a few, measly minutes, Lindsay told herself as she reeled down the passage and out on to the veranda. A few measly minutes to condemn you out of hand and shred your hopes into little pieces.

  ‘I have no intention of discussing in detail the unsavoury scene I witnessed earlier, Miss Dutten. It did not come as any great surprise to me, however.’ A jaded sigh. ‘Like women in the shearing-sheds, I knew you added up to a packet of trouble the minute you stepped off that plane. And yet I hoped—I thought—’ He was pacing angrily, visibly put out.

  ‘What did you think, hope, Mr. Bennett?’ Lindsay had asked humbly. There was something faintly encouraging in that slight hesitation in a man who was obviously not given to hesitations of any sort.

  ‘Never mind what I thought,’ he growled deeply. ‘It seems I was wrong, anyway. But’—a disgusted glance—‘on your second day—so short a time—’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Mr. Bennett, truly it wasn’t!’ How awful to have to suffer like this, not even to be able to say, to have to go on letting him think—oh!

  ‘I saw with my own eyes how it was, thank you, Miss Dutten. Explanations would be futile, in the circumstances.’ How cold those grey eyes, how chilly that disdainful mouth! It seemed an effort for him even to speak to her, as though the sight of her was unbearably distasteful. He forced himself to proceed. ‘Obviously, there is one thing, and one thing only, which as an employer I must ascertain. You were an agreeable party, Miss Dutten? A willing and agreeable party?’

  Lindsay could only stare, mesmerised. Inside, she was hollow, unable to think.

  ‘Come now, Miss Dutten, you can surely see that this is something I have to know? If you were coerced, compromised in any way, then it’s up to me to discipline my men.’

  ‘I was willing, Mr. Bennett.’ Lindsay heard her own voice dully, echoing in a vacuum of despair.

  ‘Yes, I thought so. That’s how it appeared to me, too.’ For some reason, his broad shoulders appeared to slump. Just for a moment, his eyes were a different sort of grey—wounded, vulnerable almost. And then the chill, the self-discipline, were back.

  He doesn’t like being wrong, thought Lindsay shrewdly to herself. He doesn’t like to be wrong about anything, and his pride is hurt, and that’s why he looked sort of defeated a moment ago.

  ‘In that case I shall of course leave the matter where it is. But as for you—I shall have to have your categoric assurance that such a thing will not occur again. If it does, you’ll go!’

  ‘Oh, it won’t, it won’t, Mr. Bennett, honestly. It was only once—I mean—I wish I could explain—’

  ‘Useless, in any case, when I have the evidence of my own eyes,’ he reminded her quellingly. ‘You may go, Miss Dutten.’

  ‘Yes, Mr. Bennett. I’d just like to say—’

  ‘You may go, Miss Dutten,’ he repeated impatiently. ‘I don’t intend to waste more time talking about it. Just see that you keep out of the men’s way as much as possible—and mine, too,’ he added forcibly. ‘It’s as bad as having women in the sheds, damn it!’ He was still muttering gruffly to himself as she scuttled for the door.

  Lindsay saw little of him, indeed, after that. Certainly he was courteous when he came in for meals, but there was that way he had of being distantly polite that told Lindsay she was stateless, unaccepted, still very much of an intruder, who had brought with her nothing but unwelcome complications in his eyes.

  Rod Bennett always made breakfast as brief an affair as possible. Hair still wet from his morning swim, brown throat exposed in his open-necked khaki shirt, he would favour Mannie with his warm, grey, affectionate regard, help her into her chair with a tanned, capable hand that could be curiously gentle, and give her that slow, endearing smile. Then he would turn to Lindsay, and the warm light would fade from his eyes, leaving them cold and, somehow, careful.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Dutten,’ was what she always got, accompanied by the merest curl of the mouth, a grimace that couldn’t even be called a half smile.

  With, the other men, things were different. They were instantly and openly friendly, beguiling in their rough, outspoken way. She liked them for their cheerful, casual grins that lit their weathered faces whenever she appeared; their teasing, and their fun.

  They reorganised the store for her; showed her how to work the transceiver; how to make a fly-veil with bobbing corks to keep those buzzing little pests at bay while she worked; how to tell when it might rain because the birds were flying low, or what the morrow would be like by the sunset. They taught her about the wild life around her, the bush mice, the marsupials, the eagles nesting in the mulga, the rabbits in their sandy, many-holed burrows, the honey-eaters seeking out the scrub blossoms, the path of the wild bees.

  She learned that Sibbie and Bella had husbands, down there at the creek. They were the two aboriginal stockmen who had been at the plane the day she arrived, and their names were Jimmy and Tommo. Down at the gunyahs, she befriended the merry little children who ran about, fat-tummied and skinny-limbed, laughing widely whenever she appeared. They wore wispy rags, sometimes not even those, and the smell of dogs and goanna fat hung about them as they played down by the creek baiting yabbies, or dug for grubs under the bark of the trees, or simply ran about, pelting each other with quandongs, skipping with an old rope in the shade of a spotted gum, or throwing their home-made bubberas, warming the boomerangs first with all the earnestness and concentration of their forebears.

  When their parents yelled ‘All-about, quickfella, youse lot!’ they would drop their playthings and run to get their tucker—civilised, station tucker, with plentiful meat and damper and johnny-cakes made with the white man’s flour, now an accepted part of their life, just as were the fragments of white man’s clothing which they wore, and the much-prized cheap ornamental combs which they stuck in their oiled hair.

  Lindsay discovered that perfume of any sort was a very quick way to these simple people’s hearts, and that their spending money—or ‘finger’ money as they sometimes called it—was often spent on hair-oil, highly scented shaving lotions (which Lindsay suspected found its way to their heads also!), and the ubiquitous combs and beads. Josie, one of the young teenage girls who sometimes came to help her mother in the house, had shown Lindsay a whole dillybag full of such treasures and trinkets. Laying them reverently on the ground between them, she had uncorked the stoppers on the small bottles of oils and lotions, sniffing with a properly ceremonial dignity, and explaining to Lindsay that this was the way to keep him ‘smellum plenty strongfella, eh!’, whereas the scent would soon ‘go walkabout’ if used in the traditional manner. Reeling from the heady, concentrated reek that assailed her nostrils, Lindsay conceded the point, and could only conclude that the cheap perfume had undergone some sort of horrid chemical metamorphosis through Josie’s frequent exposures to the air and heat—or perhaps through sheer old age!

  As stockmen, Jimmy and Tommo were a valued part of the Gundooee work-out, and their superb native horsemanship was evident even to Lindsay’s unknowledgeable eye as they cut out steers at the dusty yards to which Mickie had obligingly driven her in the station jeep, expressly to watch the show. She marvelled at the control they displayed, both of the cattle and of their own mounts, because they made such exceedingly careless pictures in the saddle. Their bodies seemed to sag nervelessly in their faded shirts and felted trousers, battered hats crammed down on black glistening foreheads, Jimmy’s broad nose and grizzled beard jutting beneath the brim, Tommo, with his filthy but ever-present pipe clenched unlit in his teeth. Even when the stock-horses whirled without warning in the wake of a scrubber, their bodies remained limp and uncaring, but tenaciously glued to that saddle, as though they and the horses were acting through the medium of a single mind.

  ‘They make it look so easy’ breathed Lindsay, who had not ridden a horse since the podgy Taffy of her tender years.

  ‘Well, it’s not,’ Mickie assured her laughingly. ‘This i
s my third year here as a jackaroo—Shorty’s, too—and they can still run rings around us, and most of the other men. Rod’s the only one on the place who can rival them at that game—not surprising, really, since Jimmy’s own father taught him all his horsemanship almost as soon as he could walk.’

  ‘Jimmy’s father? I hadn’t realised that Jimmy had been here all his life. I thought, from what Mannie has told me, that the aborigines came and went on walkabouts, and never stayed as long as a whole generation in one place.’

  ‘It’s difficult to generalise, Lindsay, because there are so many different types among them, and a great many these days are of mixed blood, and adopt varying genetic attributes of both sides of such assimilations. Jimmy’s great-grandfather was supposed to be an Afghan, one of the camel-drivers from further out, in the days before the Bitumen and the railway. He married a full-blooded aboriginal girl, and Jimmy’s father, in his turn, married the half-caste daughter of a local storeman, so there was a bit of a mix-up all round.’

  ‘And so they put down roots? No more wanderlust?’

  Mickie nodded. ‘You could say that I suppose. As development spread, and the seasonal ebb and flow of nature’s bounty is counteracted by regular supplies of food and clothing from the stations’ stores, there isn’t the same need to go chasing off on a survival course from time to time, either.’

  ‘No, I see what you mean. Which reminds me, talking of stores, tomorrow must be mail-day again, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Mickie slid off the tail-board of the jeep where he had been perching to drink a pannikin of tea, threw the dregs in the dust, and tucked his own mug, along with Lindsay’s, into a corner among the assortment of junk that littered the back of the vehicle. He grinned, hitched his trousers, and jerked a thumb in the direction of the drafting-out operations. ‘Smoko is over, then, Lindsay. Shorty will take you back, the lucky blighter. Rod said I was to take his place, and send him home with you. O.K.?’

  ‘Yes, of course. And thanks for arranging it, Mickie. I have enjoyed watching!’

  ‘Don’t thank me, thank Rod. It was his idea, after all,’ returned her escort surprisingly. ‘Said he didn’t suppose you’d had much chance to see cattle being cut out, where you came from.’

  Yes, she could her him saying that, all right, thought Lindsay. She could imagine the ironic look in his eye, the sarcastic lift to his mouth. Batlow, he’d been thinking. Batlow!

  Remembering the derision with which he’d referred to her beloved Utopian childhood home, Lindsay felt her first instinctive flame of gratitude to Rod for his thoughtfulness flicker, and then snuff out. It hadn’t really been for her that he’d arranged this outing. He had merely wanted Mickie to change places with Shorty, that was all.

  ‘Don’t look so gloomy, Lindsay. What’s there to be gloomy about in a mail-day? Unless, of course, you’ve been expecting a letter that didn’t come? A love-letter, maybe?’

  ‘Don’t be a dope, Mickie,’ Lindsay laughed, dragging her thoughts back unwillingly to what her young escort was saying.

  ‘No love-letter, then?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘No bloke down there in the Big Smoke, wilting away for lack of his Lindsay?’ Mickie’s blue eyes were teasing.

  ‘No. No bloke.’

  ‘No bloke anywhere?’

  ‘Not anywhere.’ She jumped down from the jeep, bare brown limbs flying as she leapt, a girlish figure in the white shirt, faded blue skirt and sandshoes which had seen her through her final schooldays.

  ‘There’s hope for me yet, then, eh!’ Mickie gave her a playful chuck under the chin. ‘I’m glad you aren’t expecting a letter on that mail-plane, Lindsay girl.’

  He gave her a two-fingered salute, jammed his hat down more firmly on his perspiring brow, and sauntered off in the direction of the dust-cloud of pounding hooves and wheeling horses.

  Lindsay settled the fly-veil down over her own hat again. Then she took a sugar-bag from the back of the jeep and sat down in the small patch of shade on its off-side to await the appearance of Shorty.

  No bloke anywhere. Not anywhere. That’s what she’d said to Mickie, and of course it was true. There was no man in Lindsay’s life, there never had been, and there wasn’t likely to be. No man whose letters she breathlessly awaited off that mail-plane with a fond yearning of the heart; no man to put his arms around her and tell her not to worry about all the things she didn’t know; no man to kiss away the confused doubts that tortured her about her future here and all its uncertainties; no man whose broad frame she could lean on, whose shoulder she could cry on, whose love could make a little ‘ugly duckling’ believe herself, almost, to be a beautiful, sophisticated, needed, wanted swan.

  No, there was no bloke in her life, no one at all.

  But sitting there on that dusty sugar-bag in the small square of shade with the flies buzzing in a small, persistent cloud, and the grunts and shouts of stockmen and beasts undulating towards her on the swimming waves of heat, Lindsay knew that, if there had been such a bloke, she could picture almost exactly how she would like that bloke to be.

  He would be tall and sunburnt, with lean, tanned cheeks, and an endearing sort of groove that ran from nose to mouth. The mouth would be firm, a strong but flexible sort of mouth that kept you guessing between tenderness and severity. His hair would be a crisp, blacky-brown, springing away from a wide, intelligent forehead with a tiny white sun-strip at the top where his wide hat protected it, and maybe there would be one or two little grey hairs glinting just near the ear, because this bloke wasn’t exactly a youth, like Mickie and Shorty, he was experienced and responsible, inclined very often to be grave and serious and—sometimes-—censorious But he wouldn’t be like that to Lindsay, of course. For Lindsay, he would smile, with the slow, careful smile that showed the uneven whiteness of his teeth against the brownness of his face; a sweet, reluctant sort of smile that lit his keen grey eyes with a warmth and kindness that came right into his deep, stern voice, too, whenever he said things like, ‘Good morning, Mannie,’ and ‘Thank you, Mannie.’

  Oh, Lindsay! Whatever are you thinking? Lindsay, shaking with the horror of self-discovery, got tremblingly to her feet, and walked slowly around to the passenger side of the jeep as Shorty approached.

  Rod Bennett’s image, exquisite, painful, torturing in its proximity and reality, receded, resolved itself into a shimmering, tree-dotted plain, a shouting, whirling mob of men, horses, and cattle, and a clean-shaven square-built young jackaroo, who scrambled into the jeep beside her, slapped her bare knee in a matey fashion and said, ‘O.K., Lindsay, let’s go!’

  ‘Oh yes, Shorty. Yes!’

  Lindsay would have gone anywhere, just then, to escape from the pain and wonder of that dream!

  CHAPTER 6

  A letter on mail-day?

  Lindsay had not been expecting one, but she received one all the same. From Carleen. She recognised the slanted, forceful capitals just as soon as she saw them.

  It was Lindsay’s task to sort out the letters, taking Rod’s to his desk, and collecting the outgoing ones he had left there to be put in the returning mail-bag. This she could do at leisure, since the pilot usually spent the best part of an hour drinking his tea and chatting to Mannie about ‘local’ happenings that took place maybe a hundred miles away. While she was dealing with the post, Herb and Artie carried her supplies up to the store for her.

  Today Lindsay put her own letter carefully to one side, and took it to her bedroom. What on earth had caused Carleen to write?

  She was soon to find out!

  ‘Mummy was pleased to hear that you had arrived safely at Gundooee, and that you have settled in. It sounds a terribly out-of-the-way place, but my dear, you must surely have realised by now just who Rod Bennett is? It’s incredible, Lindsay, it really is, that you haven’t heard of him. I mean, he’s one of the Bennetts, you silly child, not just a manager on a property. As well as Gundooee, they own a whole string of other places, and h
e’s an international swimmer, into the bargain. I can forgive you for not knowing that, as you’d have been too young when he represented Australia, but the rest! Poor sweet, it’s that dull little life you’ve always persisted in carving out for yourself that’s responsible for your sublime ignorance, no doubt, but he’s the toast of Brisbane society, that man, and as yet he seems to have eluded marriage, don’t ask me how! Actually, I’m not working at the moment. John has just finished the promised series with Sarino, and a great success, very exhausting, though, and I’ve said I’ll only consider some more later if he agrees to do things my way. He’s beginning to bore me, actually—I think we’ve got to know each other too well, no mystery left, that sort of thing, and it occurs to me that you might invite me up to stay at Gundooee for a while. I’ve missed you, Lindsay, I truly have, and I’ve felt awful about some of the things I said. I didn’t mean them, pet—you know me. Fix it with your employer, will you? Just say that you’ve a cousin who is worried about you away out there, and who wants to come and see for herself that you’re all right. I know he has oodles of Queensland girls to stay at Races time, and anyway, when he sees me he won’t mind a bit that you did it. Write by return, will you, and let me know when to come. Yours ever, Carleen.’