by Amanda Doyle
Rennie felt, firstly, an element of pure surprise as she recognised Keith’s writing, and secondly, a sensation of genuine puzzlement. How had he known that she was here? How had he known where to find her?
Many times since her arrival at Barrindilloo she had stifled the impulse to write to him and let him know where she was, sorely tempted though she had been, for she felt bad about the way she and Magda had simply disappeared that morning without so much as a word. Rennie had at that stage been so convinced that she would have to return to Sydney, and eventually to England, with Magda, and retain her guardianship of the child, that Keith’s unexpected re-entry into her life—so heaven-sent, so unbelievable!—had suddenly become a fresh complication. Chad Sandasen himself, the debonair, suave, sunburnt, outback tyrant, had been a severe shock to Rennie’s innocent preconceptions of what lay in store for little Magda.
So had this whole set-up at remote Barrindilloo, come to that! Far better to forget that tantalising pang of promise, that deliciously piquant emotion that Keith Stamford had re-awakened in her! Better, at least, to forget it until she could be sure that she would be free to go to him this time, on the terms he had previously laid down—terms which Rennie knew she just had to accept as being a part of Keith himself, because of the overwhelming nature of her love for him.
Just lately she had allowed herself to acknowledge with more than her former caution the validity of Chad’s claims upon the child. All evidence pointed to the fact that Barrindilloo could provide a suitable upbringing for Magda—indeed, a far more promising one than she herself could ever expect to provide. It now appeared, too, that Chad Sandasen was about to remedy the only part of the arrangement which left anything to be desired by way of proxy parenthood, and that was his state of bachelordom. And who better to alter that status than the lovely Leith Mindon? Beautiful, accomplished, a native of the area by birth and inclination, she would make an excellent mistress of Barrindilloo homestead. As a wife for Chad—well—Unaccountably, Rennie’s mind veered away from that line of thought.
Her fingers shook with pure excitement as she slit the envelope and extracted the sheets which Keith had covered with his familiar curly writing.
‘My darling, naughty Rennie’—he had written—‘how dared you disappear like that! And without even leaving a note or a message! It was too bad of you, and I went through agonies wondering why you did such a thing. I can only suppose it was to pay me back, in kind, for the time I walked out on you after our stupid quarrel. If revenge was your object, then you were certainly successful! Oh, my darling!—if only you knew what fresh tortures you put me through, and just when I thought we had found each other again. I can’t tell you what overwhelming relief I felt when I got Sandasen’s letter and learned where you were. I must say it’s decent of him to have invited me up for the Barrindilloo race meeting. I’ve heard of it, of course, but had no idea he had any connection with it. I couldn’t even remember the name of the company that fellow gave when he met you at Mascot, although I went back and asked at the information desk. I guess I was so delighted to see you again that I just didn’t take it in! At the Eucalypt Grove they would only say that they weren’t permitted to discuss clients, but that you’d left no forwarding address. From what Sandasen said, the brat has settled down well with him, so it looks as if that’s our little obstacle out of the way at last. She never took to me, nor I to her, so things just wouldn’t have panned out so long as she was tagging after you. But now—well, that’s a different story! I’ve got loads of plans for us—strictly honourable ones, this time!—plans that I know you’ll find as exciting as I do.
‘Just think, in only a week I’ll be seeing you again. The mere thought is a sweet torment, because each hour I’m away from you seems like a year, and a week is eternity. But I’ll be there, my sweet. I’ve rearranged my flight ops. so that leave coincides, and I understand there’s a charter plane going up with all the Sydney lovelies aboard as well, which should be fun. But none so fair as you, my adored one! Till tomorrow week, then, think of me, my precious as I shall be, constantly, of you. Keith.’
Rennie’s eyes were glowing, her cheeks suffused with colour, as she replaced the letter in its envelope. Impulsively, she rose to her feet and, still with the letter in her hand, walked along the veranda and knocked at the door of Chad’s office.
‘Come in, please.’
He was seated, as she had guessed he would be, at his roll-topped desk, sorting through his own newly-received mail. As she entered, he got up out of his swivel-chair, his brows lifting in surprise.
‘It’s you, Renata! What brings you? Would you like to sit down?’
Today, simply because it was mail-day and he was staying in the vicinity of the homestead, Chad was wearing a white shirt whose sleeves were neatly rolled up, a multi-striped tie, and pale cord trousers instead of his customary khakis. Even in his shabbiest and most faded clothing he looked indisputably what he was—the Boss of Barrindilloo Station. Like this, he still retained that distinctive air of quiet authority about him, of course, but there was an added quality as well, that one of which Rennie had been so suffocatingly aware the very first time she had ever met him. It was an indefinable ‘something’ compounded of casual strength and careless elegance, of a sunburnt ruggedness and an easy, animal grace in the way he held his head and carried those broadly powerful shoulders. The whole effect was of a debonair and rather lazily handsome villain. The laziness, as she knew now, was deceptive, an illusion. With the swarthy tan and curiously glinting green eyes and almost menacingly authoritative manner, he could have been a pirate captain about to order her to walk the plank.
Instead, he ordered her, politely and impersonally, to be seated.
So much for her temerity in invading his private sanctum like this, although she was sure his expression would have been more yielding and inviting if it had been Leith Mindon who had entered just now, instead of herself!
‘And what can I do for you?’
‘It’s—just—er—this.’ Rennie took the chair he had brought forward and tapped the envelope. ‘It’s from Keith.’
‘Yes?’ The green eyes were narrowed, attentive, unrevealing.
Rennie blushed. She wished now that she hadn’t been so impulsive as to come here, after all.
‘I—he tells me that you have invited him to the—er—race meeting. I was so surprised and p-pleased that I wanted to thank you, that’s all,’ she stammered uncomfortably. It sounded silly, somehow.
‘Don’t mention it.’ His voice was dry. Cool.
‘What I can’t understand is why you did it?’
‘Why I did what?’
‘Why you invited Keith. How you invited him.’
A shrug of the wide shoulders. Chad searched his pockets for tobacco, papers, began to rub the tobacco carefully between his palms. He took his time before replying at all.
‘It wasn’t hard to contact him. There was only one Captain Stamford flying with that particular airline. The chances against there being two were understandably remote. As for why—’ he raised his eyes and gave her a level, inscrutable look—‘he is a friend of yours, is he not, Renata?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘A special friend?’ Chad was insistent. His eyes were oddly hard now, and again she was aware of his dominant personality, his masculine authority which almost dared her to negate that statement.
‘Yes, a—a dear friend,’ she admitted, half defiantly, unable to determine the trend of his thoughts.
‘Exactly. A dear friend.’ Chad appeared to be satisfied with the cigarette which he had finished. He licked the edge of the paper, stuck it down with a single deft stroke, and tapped the finished article on his thumb-nail. ‘That was the precise reason for my inviting him, Renata, the fact that he’s a special friend. People are apt to pair off a little bit these days at social functions, and the race meeting is no exception. I didn’t want you to feel out of it.’
‘Oh, I see.’
So t
hat was the way! Rennie swallowed. She could see the sense of his reasoning, of course, so why should she feel this little niggle of dissatisfaction, as if, somehow, Chad had actually evaded answering her question. He had answered it, hadn’t he, though? And what he had said did make sense. Indeed, she would even go so far as to say it had been extraordinarily thoughtful of him, to go to all that bother tracking down Keith, writing, everything, just so that she would not find herself alone. Naturally, he himself would be squiring Leith Mindon. She and Chad would be amongst those who’d be ‘pairing off a little bit’, as he had rather vaguely expressed it. There was nothing vague about Chad’s intentions, though, even if that phrase—‘pairing off a little bit’—sounded that way! After all, Leith herself had made that perfectly plain, in a way that had not been vague at all. ‘Chad and I,’ she’d said, and, ‘I came because one of us had to.’
Rennie put her hands to her burning cheeks as she recalled the other girl’s meaningful, rather spiteful, words. They had been discussing her, Leith and Chad. They’d put their heads together, discussing their future, talking about Rennie and how they could get her out of that future as soon as possible, because she had been too stupidly blind to see just how little she was wanted around here now.
Rennie was almost sure that they had talked about this, too. Between them, they had decided to invite Keith up, not so much so that Rennie wouldn’t feel out of it, as so that Rennie would not be in the way. It had been a combined decision—Leith’s and Chad’s.
That new realization somehow took a little of the gladness from the prospect of seeing Keith. It had managed to spoil things just the tiniest bit, although she was still looking forward madly to seeing him—of course she was!
‘Something wrong?’ Chad’s deep voice broke into her thoughts. He was watching her quietly as he drew on his cigarette.
‘What? Oh—er—no. I—I was just th-thinking.’ Rennie ' dropped her hands from her scarlet face.
‘Well, don’t get too excited too early, will you?’ advised Chad drawlingly. ‘You’ve a whole week to go yet, Renata, before you’ll be seeing him, I’m afraid.’
‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ Her thoughts were more confused than ever. She got up. ‘I must go and help Elspeth,’ she said abruptly, and without attempting to delay her, he too rose to his feet and gravely held open the door.
The week that followed passed more quickly than Rennie would have thought possible. In her sudden awareness that her time at Barrindilloo Station was soon coming to a close, it was as if the minutes had decided obligingly to speed their progress until the moment when Keith would be here. Even Chad himself appeared to be making an extra effort—a personal effort—to fill those hours for Rennie so that they would soon pass, and when he somewhat surprisingly invited her to accompany himself and Magda upon one of their frequent swimming expeditions, she accepted with a pleasure she did not try to conceal.
What fun to be included! She had so often seen those two walking off in the direction of the creek. Chad’s long lean frame, khaki-clad. Magda’s tiny, fair-haired figure bobbing along beside him, with her bathers and towel wrapped in a bundle under her arm. Rennie had wondered where they went, where they swam, and what they did. And now, almost on the eve of her departure from this place, she was about to find out. She had been invited!
Rennie hesitated over her bikini, replaced it in her drawer and put on a buttercup-yellow swimsuit. It was a demure, stretch-towelling affair that somehow accentuated her beautifully proportioned body and slender, tanned limbs just as successfully, but much more subtly, than the bikini would have done. Recalling Chad’s sarcastic mouth, his biting reference to the bareness of her backless evening gown, she told herself that he could hardly find much fault with the modesty of this particular garment.
Apparently he liked what he saw. Rennie knew it, instinctively, by the kindling gleam in his narrowing green eyes as they appraised her coolly, although he said not a word. Instead, he pulled off his shirt and trousers to reveal plain black bathing trunks with a white side-stripe, and dived cleanly into the clear green pool in a graceful arc that left almost no splash as he disappeared beneath the water. He surfaced some yards away, shaking his wetly dark hair from his eyes like a terrier.
‘Coming in?’
‘Is it cold?’
‘Come and see.’
It was an idyllic afternoon. After the swim they lay on towels in the hot sun, drying almost immediately. Presently Chad rolled over on to his back, reached for his hat, and put it over his face.
‘I believe you really enjoyed that, Renata.’ The brim of the hat muffled his voice.
‘Yes, I did.’ Her own voice was eager—so eager that Chad pushed back the hat and looked at her.
‘I think you enjoy quite a lot of things about the life here, Renata, when you allow yourself to—do you know that? It’s just that sometimes—not sometimes, but mostly—you seem to be on the defensive about something. I wonder why?’
She shifted uncomfortably beneath the keenness of his gaze, dropped her eyes to where a few drops of water still glistened amongst the tangle of hair on his teak-brown chest.
‘I wouldn’t say that.’ Rennie made herself sound calmly amused.
‘Well, I would. You’re doing it right now, in fact.’ Chad frowned, gave her another level look, and then lapsed into silence once more, lying back and covering his eyes with the hat again. His muscles rippled like brown satin with each movement he made, and Rennie reproached herself as she found herself staring. She was as bad as a gawping schoolgirl!
Presently he said, ‘I hope you won’t consider it’s been a waste of time, coming to Barrindilloo, Renata? I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself—are enjoying yourself—just a little bit more than you’ll admit?’
Rennie glanced away, to where Magda was sitting on a rock, throwing pebbles into the water.
‘I won’t regret having come, Chad, if that’s what you mean,’ she told him with honesty. ‘I’d do it again if I had to—and perhaps much more willingly, knowing it as I do now.’ She smiled. ‘I think I must have captured Murtie’s own philosophy—“I should live the same life over, if I had to live again”.’
Beneath the felt brim, Chad’s mouth lifted at one corner.
‘Adam Lindsay Gordon. The Sick Stockrider,’ he informed her lazily. ‘It ends up like this—
“Let me slumber in the hollow where the wattle blossoms wave,
With never stone or rail to fence my bed;
Should the sturdy station children pull the bush flowers on my grave,
I may chance to hear them romping overhead.” ’
‘It’s nice,’ Rennie said shyly.
‘Mm. He was our first bush poet. He had a feeling for the Australian scene, even though he wasn’t a native. As a matter of fact, he came out from the Mother Country, just like you did yourself.’ Chad flicked at the small cloud of flies that were never far away in this heat. ‘Not a bad way to end one’s life,’ he murmured comfortably. ‘Especially if the sturdy station children happened to be one’s own grandchildren, on one’s own station. There’s a permanence, a timelessness, about these far-out places, that makes such things quite possible, mere poetry aside.’
His grandchildren. His—and Leith’s. There was an odd constriction in Rennie’s throat. She got up suddenly.
‘I—I think I’ll go and see what Magda’s doing,’ she announced quickly, and then—urgently—‘Chad! She isn’t there!’
‘Eh?’ He was on his feet in an instant. ‘Where was she?’
‘Just down there, throwing stones from that rock. No, to the left.’
He was already running in the direction Rennie had indicated.
She saw his lean brown frame silhouetted for a moment upon the rock where Magda herself had so recently stood. He seemed to be peering down intently, with immense concentration. Then he lowered himself swiftly into the water, swam several strokes, and duck-dived, disappearing with scarcely a ripple into the cool green depths where a will
ow drooped its fronds.
When he surfaced he had Magda with him. Rennie watched him bring her up the bank, lay her on the grass face-down, and press his hands firmly on her back.
She found that she was shaking—with relief that the little girl had been found so quickly—with dread, that she might—might—
A whimper sent her speeding down the slope to kneel beside the two figures.
‘Oh, Chad! She’s—’
‘She’s O.K.’ His deep drawl brought reassurance. Blessed reassurance! ‘She’s also disobedient,’ he added grimly, taking Magda into his arms. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to dive in that particular pool, Magda? Not ever? Because of the snags under the water?’
Chad sounded as if he expected an answer. He sounded inexorable.
The little girl’s face puckered as she nodded, still spluttering and catching her breath in sobs.
‘Chad, don’t. Please.’ Rennie’s face was ashen, her eyes still huge with fright. ‘Here, darling, come to me!’
She tried to reach beyond the muscular brown arms that encircled that childish, shivering body; tried to wrench her precious little Magda from the man who had spoken so harshly. Just for a tiny while, back there lying on the grass, Chad had seemed different, somehow. Companionable, kind. There had been a lingering, indefinable expression in his green eyes that had held some unspoken message that Rennie had been unable to grasp.
Now those same eyes were hard. Implacable. Telling her not to interfere. He was Chad, the tyrant, again. ‘Leave her, Renata.’
And as if to echo his command, Magda suddenly wound her arms around his neck and buried her face in his bare chest.
‘Oh, Chad, I’m s-sorry.’
‘It’s all right, pet, you’re safe now.’
‘I w-won’t do it ever again.’
‘You’d better not!’