The Grazier's Wife

by Barbara Hannay

  Tipping his head back, he took a long draught of icy lager. Talking to Alice had stirred him, but he had some serious thinking to do.

  Once this party was over, he and Alice would be finished, once and for all.

  After that, he really needed to get a life, start seeing people again. Seeing other women. Hell, yeah. The world was full of other women. Women who didn’t run a mile at the first sight of an adorable toddler.

  Twenty minutes later Seth’s phone rang again and he was tempted to ignore it. He’d left it on the kitchen bench, and he was comfortable where he was on the back step. But then came the guilt trip. It was probably someone from his family, so at the last gasp he reluctantly relented and raced inside to answer it.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Seth, sorry to disturb you again.’

  Alice. The hitch in Seth’s breathing was not caused by the rush to the phone.

  ‘I’m feeling bad that you can’t ask me for help with Charlie.’

  ‘But you –’

  ‘I know what I told you, but I can’t go on living like this. I know it’s – it’s irrational.’

  Phobias usually are, he nearly said.

  ‘What kind of help were you looking for?’ she asked.

  As yet, Seth didn’t have a clear plan for handling Charlie while his family had their meeting. Now he weighed up the pros and cons of getting Alice involved.

  The cons were obvious, Alice had outlined them in vivid detail, but there were plenty of reasons why he should grab this chance. Emotions would probably be rife during the family confab and it was hardly a suitable place for Charlie.

  Even more importantly, Seth knew how much courage Alice’s offer had taken. He wasn’t sure if it was possible for people to change, but Alice sounded like she was willing to try, and the last thing he wanted was to belittle her efforts.

  He told her about the meeting. ‘It’s scheduled for Thursday evening,’ he said. ‘The night before the party.’

  ‘I could be there.’

  ‘Well, thanks. That would be great. I’ll be close by in the homestead if there are any dramas.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘With luck, Charlie might already be asleep. But he’s been going to bed later and later.’

  ‘I’ve seen how you handle his bedtime.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Seth stopped himself from asking Alice if she was sure about this. He knew she wouldn’t have made the offer lightly and he could hear the determination in her voice.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said again, injecting as much sincerity into his response as he could. ‘That would be very helpful.’

  ‘Good.’ It was hard to tell if she was scared or excited. ‘I’ll be there, Seth.’

  ‘Fantastic. I’ll text you a time before Thursday.’

  ‘That sounds like a plan.’

  Seth was smiling as he downed the rest of his beer. Maybe, just maybe, there was still a slim chance with Alice. But as he went back into the house, he found himself thinking about the potential drama that might erupt on Thursday night. He thought about his sweet, gentle grandmother again, and wondered what on earth had possessed her to hide those documents in the first place.

  31

  Call us foolish, but Tom and I continued to write to each other. It was an important way of keeping in touch, and Tom’s letters became my lifeline. Of course, I was clinging foolishly to a lost hope.

  The signs of Magnus’s deterioration were subtle at first. During the years when his children were young he seemed fine, and he showed every outward sign of being perfectly content with his home life and his work as a cattleman on Ruthven Downs. He enjoyed the changing rhythms of the seasons, and he rose to the challenges of a grazier’s lifestyle, coping with impressive equilibrium with the weather extremes of droughts and cyclones. He even rode the market fluctuations calmly when other farmers around him were quite desperate with worry.

  Their children, Deb and Hugh, were a huge source of pride for Magnus. Hugh seemed to thrive on the outdoor lifestyle. At a very young age he became an expert horse rider, swam like a fish, and was a keen observer of nature. When he was old enough, he was happy to help Magnus with mustering and yarding the cattle, or any other work around the property. Deb had a more artistic temperament, preferring to paint the outback landscape than to ride around in it, but that didn’t bother her father. She was a girl, after all.

  It was when the children grew older and travelled away to boarding school that Magnus began to deteriorate. His nightmares from the war years returned with increasing frequency.

  As Deb and Hugh progressed through high school and then moved to Brisbane to go to art school and university respectively, Magnus seemed to be more and more on edge. He began to have increasing problems with sleeplessness and then he returned to drinking whisky in copious quantities several evenings a week. To Stella, it seemed he’d lost interest in almost all of the things he normally enjoyed.

  When they’d first installed a television, he’d been thrilled, watching endless cricket matches, documentaries and old movies. But as he grew more and more depressed, none of these shows pleased him. Instead they made him angry. He found the news stories about the Vietnam War especially upsetting.

  When Stella tried to talk him into seeing a doctor, he snapped at her.

  ‘I’m perfectly fit and well.’

  ‘Physically, yes, you’re fine, Magnus, but I think you might be depressed, or suffering from anxiety.’

  ‘And why would I see a doctor about that?’

  It was a losing battle. Like many men of the bush, he was fiercely independent, couldn’t bear to show any hint of weakness to the outside world.

  Then came a night when Magnus woke from a nightmare, sobbing helplessly, and he couldn’t continue with the bluff and bluster any longer. Stella brought him a hot drink and a sedative that her own GP had prescribed.

  ‘You can’t go on like this,’ she said gently, as she plumped his pillows and sat on the bed beside him in her dressing-gown. ‘You need help. You need to speak to someone. The war keeps coming back to haunt you, doesn’t it?’

  He couldn’t look her in the eye, but his face was drained and tortured as he sank back against the pillows.

  Stella knew he was ashamed of the weeping. She understood that it was incredibly painful for this once-tough soldier to be revealed as a broken man.

  ‘It must have been terrible in New Guinea,’ she suggested gently. ‘Having to fight the enemy in that jungle with all the mud and the mosquitoes and those dreadfully steep mountains.’

  Magnus’s chest rose and fell as he drew a ragged breath.

  ‘I’m sure the rest of us have no idea what it was like,’ Stella went on.

  ‘The terrain wasn’t the problem,’ he said suddenly.

  Stella sat very still, holding her breath as she waited for her husband to continue. He was half-sitting, supported by the pillows, looking out into the darkness beyond the pool of lamplight, his eyes wild with horror.

  She tried to imagine what it must have been like for him in the jungle, with the threat of an unseen enemy lurking behind every tree. How many men had he seen die? How many men had he killed?

  ‘The fighting must have been terrible,’ she suggested. ‘Watching your own men die. Having to kill Japs.’

  Magnus gave an agitated shake of his head. ‘But it wasn’t only Japs I killed.’

  It took a moment for the implications of his words to sink in. When they did, Stella pressed a hand to her mouth to hold back a shocked gasp. Tears stung her eyes and she could feel a pulse begin to pound in her neck. What on earth had he done?

  Staring bleakly ahead, Magnus said, ‘You should have seen what those bastards did to our wounded. We always tried to get the wounded men down the line to safety. The native bearers, the Fuzzy Wuzzy Angels, were amazing. But if the Japs got to them first, they’d hack off their arms and legs and just leave them there to bleed to death. We’d do anything not to leave a wounded mate behi
nd.’

  ‘Oh, dear God.’

  Magnus closed his eyes. ‘We were on a forward patrol. Six men. And our sergeant copped it. He was a mate of mine, Jim Gregory from Half Moon Station over in the Gulf. He was shot in the spine. He couldn’t move.’

  Her husband’s Adam’s apple jerked in his throat as he swallowed. ‘We were outflanked by a large Jap force, and we had to fight our way out of there.’

  ‘You couldn’t fight and carry a man at the same time.’ Battling tears, Stella slipped an arm around his bowed shoulders. ‘Not in that terrain.’

  ‘No.’

  She gave his shoulders a comforting squeeze.

  ‘I had to think of what was best for the rest of my men. I needed to get them back alive.’ Again, Magnus shook his head as he stared into the darkness. ‘Jim knew he was a goner. He pleaded with me not to leave him there for the Japs. We all knew what they would do to him.’

  Magnus’s lips trembled, pulled out of shape. ‘Jim begged me to shoot him. Said he would have done it himself if he could have used his arms, but he was paralysed.’

  ‘Oh, Magnus.’

  ‘I tried to carry him . . .’

  Tears streamed down Stella’s face, and Magnus was so distraught he couldn’t finish his story, but he didn’t need to. She knew what he’d done. He’d had little choice. But oh, what a terrible burden for the poor man to live with.

  No wonder he was still so troubled.

  For some time after that midnight confession, Magnus seemed calmer. He never referred to the breakdown again and Stella respected his need for silence, but she was pleased that he was less irritable. And the drinking eased.

  Any progress that Magnus had made fell to pieces, however, on the day he arrived back from town, seething with a dark and dangerous fury.

  His eyes were blazing, his jaw granite hard as he dumped a box of groceries on the kitchen table and turned on Stella.

  ‘Who’s Mary Davison?’ he demanded.

  Stella froze. For long, heart-thumping seconds, she stared at him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  A cruel, menacing smile titled his thin mouth. ‘I went into the post office to pay a bill and the new post master was very friendly and helpful. He was also rather curious about a post office box being held for someone called Mary Davison. He seemed to think I was responsible for it, but he’d made a mistake. The account has always been paid for by S J Drummond, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Oh?’ Magnus roared. ‘Is that all you can bloody say?’ He pulled an envelope from his shirt pocket. It was torn open and empty, but as the thin airline paper edged with red and blue fluttered helplessly onto the table, she could see all too clearly the address in Tom’s handwriting.

  ‘The poor, deluded new guy wasn’t clued up. He thought I might want this.’ He waved the letter in her face. ‘You’ve been signing off as Mary Davison and exchanging letters with an Englishman for twenty fucking years!’

  ‘There’s no need to swear.’ Stella was thinking of the man she’d hired to help in the garden, who was working just outside, but as the words left her lips, she knew how foolish she sounded.

  ‘Don’t you dare lecture me about swearing after what you’ve been up to.’ Magnus had gone very red in the face. ‘My sweet little wife wouldn’t say “shit” for sixpence, but she can quite happily commit adultery.’ He yelled this so loudly the gardener, who was pruning the acalyphas, must have heard him.

  ‘Magnus, for heaven’s sake.’

  A cold, bitter laugh escaped him. ‘ “Magnus, for heaven’s sake,” ’ he mimicked in a tinny voice. Then he roared again, ‘Will you get off your fucking high horse?’ Stabbing the tell-tale envelope with a solid brown forefinger, he glared at Stella. ‘Who’s Tom Kearney?’

  ‘He’s a soldier I met in Singapore during the war.’ Lifting her chin, Stella refused to be cowed. ‘But writing letters is hardly adultery.’

  ‘What about stealing away to Cairns to stay with a man in a seedy hotel?’

  Stella was so shocked she couldn’t answer at first. How on earth could Magnus know about that? After all this time? Twenty years . . .

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she lied.

  ‘Don’t try to deny it, whore.’ He was shaking with anger now, and for the first time Stella felt frightened of him. ‘I didn’t listen to Derek Briggs all those years ago when he tried to tell me that he saw you down in Cairns with your fancy man. Not my Stella, I told him, even though I knew I’d been out bush on a muster at the time. Like a fool I trusted you, and I sent him off with a flea in his ear.’

  Magnus lifted a hand as if he wanted to strike her. His fingers curled into a fist, which he shook in her face, but before he connected, he drew his hand back and kept it tight against his chest. ‘I’ve always been honest with you. I’ve even shared my darkest secret, but all this time, you’ve been cheating behind my back. You’ve probably cheated on me dozens of times.’

  ‘No, Magnus, no.’

  ‘For all I know, my son’s not even my own kid.’

  ‘No!’ Stella cried. ‘That’s not true.’

  He wouldn’t listen. With a snarl of disgust, he whirled on his heel and stormed off to collect the case of whisky he’d bought in town. Taking it to his study, he slammed the door behind him.

  Several times, Stella knocked at the door to the study and pleaded with him to listen to her, but he wouldn’t answer. She didn’t see him again until evening and by then he’d also written a letter – to his lawyer.

  32

  On the day before the party, Deborah and Xavier arrived at Ruthven Downs just before lunch. Jackie was in the dining room, arranging long stems of red flowering ginger in a tall vase. Hugh was in an armchair in the adjoining lounge room. He was reading the paper somewhat restlessly, having been obliged to hang about the house, instead of taking off for far-flung corners of the property to inspect his cattle, his pasture, or the water levels in his dams.

  ‘Here they are,’ Jackie called as the unhealthy rattle of a vehicle on the track signalled the approach of Deborah’s ancient Kombi van.

  The only response from her husband was the rustle of his news­paper.

  ‘Hugh,’ Jackie called again. ‘Deborah’s here.’

  Deborah was his sister, after all, and although Jackie had never achieved the bond with the woman that she might have hoped for, she knew that Hugh was very fond of her.

  Today, however, Hugh was also extremely tense about the possible outcome of his sister’s visit. Jackie wondered if he’d finally realised how impetuous he’d been to instantly share his father’s preposterous letter with Deborah.

  Now it was too late to change his mind. The rattling van had come to a standstill. A door slammed. Deborah Drummond was here.

  Jackie hurried along the verandah and down the front steps, and at last, Hugh’s footsteps sounded behind her.

  ‘Ahoy!’ Deborah called as she rounded the side of her van, and she looked, as always, like an ageing hippie in a blue and green kaftan, with her long grey hair falling from a centre part to hang limply past her shoulders. Her face was completely free of make-up.

  Over the years, Jackie had played with the idea of styling Deborah’s hair – a jaunty bob cut in at the nape, or something layered and wispy, but of course she’d never dared to suggest it.

  ‘Lovely to see you,’ she said now as she reached Deborah.

  ‘You too.’ Deborah kissed her, European style, on both cheeks. ‘And don’t look so worried, Jackie. I come in peace.’

  Jackie laughed nervously, and stepped back to let Hugh and Deborah hug. Then Xavier emerged from the van, long and lean, bearded and scruffy in holey jeans and a faded grey T-shirt, smiling sleepily from beneath a full head of dreadlocks.

  Dreadlocks, goodness. He’d had long hair his whole life, but this was a new statement of non-conformity.

  Another round of greetings ensued and Jackie caught a whiff of whatever Xavier had been smoking.

  ‘Charl
ie’s not with you?’ Deborah asked, as she looked around, frowning at the sweep of newly mowed lawns, the carefully weeded beds and pruned shrubbery.

  ‘Seth’s gone down to Cairns to collect Flora from the airport,’ Jackie explained. ‘And he’s taken Charlie with him. Flora’s desperate for a cuddle.’

  ‘Aren’t we all? I’m sure Charlie’s grown heaps. It feels like ages since we’ve seen him.’ Deborah slid open the door on the side of the van. ‘Xavier, be a darling and grab our bags, will you?’

  Inside the van, there was a jumble of art easels and boxes with tubes of paint, but Xavier dutifully unearthed a scuffed navy duffle bag and a drawstring patchwork affair that Deborah had almost certainly made with her own clever, crafty hands.

  ‘I’ll bring the esky,’ Deborah said.

  ‘Esky?’ Jackie was so surprised she forgot to hide her reaction and her eyebrows shot high. In all the years she’d known Hugh’s sister, Deborah had never contributed food or drink to any party. Not that Jackie had ever expected her to, but why the sudden change?

  ‘Just a few bits and pieces,’ Deborah said as she slid the van door shut with a slam. She beamed triumphantly. ‘I thought we’d better bring a few supplies seeing that we’re vegans now.’

  Vegans? Jackie caught Hugh’s eye. He looked as helpless as she felt.

  ‘I know what carnivores you two are,’ Deborah added airily.

  Jackie thought of the party food she and her friends had planned so carefully – Maria’s lasagne and Kate’s pork ribs, her own Greek Cypriot lamb, not to mention the chicken casserole she’d cooked for this evening’s family gathering.

  And lunch? What about lunch? She’d been thinking of salmon and salad. She wasn’t even sure what vegans ate. ‘Can you have fish?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no fish. No animal products whatsoever.’ At least Deborah looked matter of fact rather than smug as she announced this. ‘No eggs, butter, honey or cheese. But don’t worry. We love our salads and fruit and I’ve brought plenty of tofu and quinoa.’

  As they entered the homestead, Jackie clung to a rather comforting thought. A vegan was hardly likely to want to take over the running of a beef cattle property.