"We ? But you're manoeuvrable. I mean, you could get out," she pointed out.
"So were you before I came behind you."
"But I felt I couldn't reverse. That car might still have been on the road."
"Well, madam, I am not reversing, not in this dark of evening along a track full of saplings, ruts and holes. The Holden is considerably bigger than your car, and I had enough trouble coming down."
"Then what do we do ?"
"Do ? We sit here, of course."
"Sit here ?" she gasped.
"Sit here all night, unless you like to try to find your way on foot. Just listen to that dingo."
Selina did not listen. She was too much of an old hand to be frightened of dingoes who, anyway, would be frightened of her, but she also did not attempt to step out of the car.
"It's going to be a long night," she said again, but this time to both of them.
"Ten hours of dark at least."
"You're quite sure you couldn't—"
"I'm quite sure I couldn't."
"Then—then can I have another cup of coffee, please ?"
"Half only. It's not a bottomless flask and I intend having my share." He poured her share into the flask
top and handed it to her, waited till she finished, then drank his own.
"What do we do now ?" he asked idly. "Play I
SPY ?"
"Don't be silly !"
"Well, it's a long night, as you said, Selina Lockwood, so best to keep the mind occupied, otherwise—" His voice trailed off.
A little drowsily, for the few stars she could see between the trees were starting to run into one star, Selina asked : "Otherwise ?"
"You don't know ?"
"What, Mr. Grant ?" Very drowsily now.
"Just sleep on it, little one," he said.
Selina slept. When she woke she was folded very close to Iron Grant. She had both the pillow, the rug and his coat as well.
"You shouldn't have," she protested of the extra covering. She was still half limp with sleep.
"I wasn't cold," he told her.
"But you still shouldn't have." She glanced down at his protective arms still tight around her.
"It was no punishment " He said it a little indistinctly.
"You slept yourself ?" she asked hurriedly. "I was afraid to in case I dreamed."
"Dreamed ?"
He did not answer that, instead he said : "Look it's dawn."
She blinked through the shadowy trees and saw a pale buttering in the sky. Almost at once the buttering deepened to primrose, then the first bird called.
Abruptly, with the morning, a hardness came to
the man. He was the Ridge boss, the sleeper cutter again.
"We'll get moving," he said crisply. "I'll do the reversing and you'll do the guiding. Tell me if I'm running into any trees."
"And my Mini ?"
"I'll send one of the boys down for it. Now get cracking. The earlier we return the less likelihood we'll be noticed."
"Noticed ?" she asked stupidly.
"That's what I said. People are the same the world over, whether the location is Paris, New York ... or a lumber camp in the middle of nowhere."
"I don't understand you," she said.
"Then understand this," harshly. "I'm male. You're
female. We are now returning at five in the morning
after a night's absence. Do you see, Miss Lockwood ?" "Not really. I mean, it's so absurd."
"That's what you think?"
"Yes "
"It would be absurd with Peters ?"
"Roger doesn't come into this," she said coldly. "The man you propose to marry doesn't come into an all-night caper ?"
"It was not a caper !"
"Try telling him that. Anyway, all is not lost yet, not if we get cracking as I said." To prompt her, he got out of the car and crossed back to his Holden. When he had sparked the engine, Selina sighed and got out of the Mini, then crossed to do as he said.
It did not take long to get back to the Tallow Wood road. Last night it had seemed hours and the track full of hazards. Now Iron breezed out, waited
for Selina to join the car, then without speaking he ' drove the rest of the way to Tall Tops.
They were fortunate. No one was around. The chalets were not yet astir and the mess hut's doors were closed.
"Uncompromised by the favour of several minutes, I'd say," Joel Grant laughed. "First shift is at six, so Cooky must stoke up quite soon."
Selina did not comment on that. She got out of the car and said correctly : "Thank you."
"Of course," he continued, ignoring her courtesy, "you still have Madeleine to cope with, but I hardly think she'll make any comments. If she does there's always tit for tat."
Selina looked at him curiously, then furiously, but he stopped the look at that, at just a look.
"Next time you're in Tallow," he said firmly, evidently finished with the other subject, "please don't gather any more middle-aged pixies."
"He wasn't, and I didn't. I simply told you I saw a man .. I mean, a man looked at me, and he was shabby and had wistful eyes."
"Then leave it at that. Good night—I mean good morning, Miss Lockwood. You slept last night. I didn't. Someone had to keep the dingoes at bay." Without another word he started the Holden and was well on his private road to the Ridge by the time Selina climbed the front steps.
Madeleine came out drinking coffee. "Yes, I'm up early, Sellie. I didn't hear you come in last night." "I was at Tallow Wood, buying dresses."
"All night ?"
"There was a—an incident."
"I suppose so." Madeleine yawned. "Show me the dresses."
"They're in the Mini down in the forest."
"Oh." Madeleine looked at Selina, and Selina recalled her moment of curiosity and anger when Iron had said :
". . if she comments, there's always tit for tat." Tit for tat?
But Madeleine did not comment. She just laughed. In another minute Selina was laughing back. They laughed . . . and laughed.
It was the nearest Selina had felt to Madeleine in her life.
CHAPTER TEN
MADELEINE did not comment, either, in the days that followed. Sometimes Selina wished at least that she would ask questions, then she could ask a few back.
Tit for tat. What had Iron Grant meant by that?
Tall Tops was beginning a big planting project the following week. A valley had been cleared and tilled, and truckloads of boxes of tree seedlings brought up from Tallow Wood. Every worker had been assigned to the job, and men from Redgum were coming down to lend a hand.
Cooky was baking literally yards of Cut and Come Again. It really was yards, because the cake tins he put in the large range must have extended twenty-four inches at least, and as soon as one cake came out, another went in. But cake was the only prior preparation. From the very first planting years ago, the dinner had been barbecued steak, damper cooked in ashes, billy tea. Uncle would not have dreamed of changing it, and Selina was glad to find that both Roger and Joel approved. But then so had an American timber project that had started several mountains to the north. The Washington Company had been aghast at first at the wastage of time for cooking steaks and kneading dampers, until they had realised that you can't fight tradition, that it was more time-wasting again filling flasks and slicing bread ...
most important of all that this way men worked better.
Everyone in Tall Tops and Redgum went to the planting and everyone planted. The smallest children brought their own little spades. Mindful of her own childhood, Selina provided pretty lengths of ribbon to tie to the littlies' seedlings, so they could recognise them later and remark on their growth.
"Was this your own ribbon once, Selina ?" Ignace asked. Ignace could say almost anything now, he had learned very fast.
"Yes, Ignace."
"For your hair ?"
"Well—yes."
"My mother wore ribbons in her hair," the little
boy said.
But that was the only cloud on a perfect day, and just a small cloud that soon passed. It was perfect down in the planting valley. The children planted the smaller trees, mostly cypress, but the men attended to the bigger seedlings for large trees, inserting the root ball with assiduous care so as to set the young tree in the same depth as it had been in its pot. A depression was put around the tree to collect moisture, it was wel watered, then on to the next future forest giant.
The men, of course, did not bother about identification, they had long since grown out of that, but the little ones carefully tied on their ribbons and tags, and even Ignace soon forgot to look back.
Lunch was a wonderful party. T-bones for the adults, sausages for the small fry, black billy tea and a bottle of cordial to be broken down at the waterfall only a few yards away, for the children. And damper. Dampers emerging from the ashes and being cleaned
of their charcoal, then sliced and served with a slab of icy butter. Nothing else.
"There's nothing," said Iron, "nothing in all the world like damper."
Even the ants were beaten to the crumbs. After that it was backs-down for half an hour. Everyone stretched out, and in the heat of high noon, with the tang of the dying gum fire, the mountain sweet air, they slept.
But Selina did not sleep. She could not remember feeling so happy. Planting day was always joyous, but this was the most joyous of all, she thought with wonder. She half-closed her eyes to the burning sun and watched the few white clouds etched like fretwork through the leaves of the trees.
She was resting a little apart from the others, and she did not see Joel stroll idly over and over the ground to her until he said softly :
"One cent."
"If that's for my thoughts, there's inflation." "A dollar," he enticed.
"I was thinking of Unk, whether he's enjoyed the planting as we have today."
"If he's had time, yes," Iron said.
"Time ?"
"Selina, if you could push over that tree and scatter that cloud I've no doubt you'd see old Claud driving a team of heavenly bullocks up from a felling, flattening the track with the jinker's grinding wheels, and using the usual curses."
"Curses up there ?"
"Curses would be forgiven," Joel assured her, "in the lumber forests of heaven "
She loved it when he talked like that, and her eyes
must have said so. His own eyes looked back into hers, no banter, no narrowed estimation, just a man's eyes looking into a woman's.
At the end of the day Joel reported fifteen thousand seedlings accounted for, not adding the children's. It had been a most successful planting.
Madeleine drove down to Tallow Wood through the week. She was up to drapes in her decoration, and once again Joel let her have a free hand. She knew what she wanted, so it would be no advantage to have Selina accompany her, she told her sister. When she returned, though, she was not so certain. A man had followed her in Tallow Wood, she was sure of it, whichever store she had gone into, whenever she had turned, he had been there.
"Oldish middle-aged. Shabby. Kind of wistful." It was Selina.
"Well—yes. But that wistfulness could be a front." "He didn't follow you here, though."
"A person like that would obviously not have transport, and certainly couldn't afford to pay for it. I wonder what he wanted."
"Your answer is easy. He would want to follow you just to admire you. But I encountered him, too, and I'm sure he wouldn't want to admire me."
Typical of Madeleine, who only ever considered herself, she did not argue this. She forgot the episode in her triumphant showing to Selina of the lengths she had tracked down in the different stores.
"I couldn't have done better in Sydney."
Selina often felt tempted to try her own hand on redecoration at Tall Tops. Only two things stopped her. One : it was not her place. Two : Tall Tops was
definitely brown and marigold as to colour, chintz and cottage weave as to curtain and cushion. For that was Tall Tops. So she left it alone.
But she had to do something with her time, and, seeing the children only worked till noon, she decided to spend her unfilled hours on them. She took them to the pool that Iron Grant had built. It was a modern pool, looking rather like a big blue bathtub belonging to some cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness believing giant. The children loved it. They were not afraid of its clear, dancing blue water, made bluer again by its blue tile lining. There was not one of them who had not responded to the gift by not learning to swim. Even the smallest could manage a few strokes. Even Ignace, who had only been introduced to the pool a short time ago, could keep himself afloat.
There were other excursions A trip up to the distillery to see how the precious eucalyptus oil was coaxed from the gum leaves, though the best part of that trip, Selina suspected, was the journey in Puffing Billy. It was a case of dust the seat first now in Billy.
"He's spoiled," mourned Phyllida, "he's all sawdusty and splintery, not pretty like he was before."
But they still enjoyed the trip, and Ignace remembered, and practised again, his : "Fezplis."
Then Selina took the children to the old mill. No one knew much about the old mill. Even Unk had had no tales to tell about it. It had been here even when he had arrived, and that had been very early in the piece; Uncle Claud always had boasted that he had been one, if not the first, of the beginners. But somewhere back in the nineteen-hundreds someone must have come and built a millhouse and created a
mill-race. The old house had tumbled years ago, only a hearth stone remained, but the mill-race still raced. Selina explained the purpose of a race to her children, how a body of water suddenly found it could only escape through a pipe. She showed them the pool, then the pipe.
"It's remarkable," she told them, "that the pipe is still intact."
"In tacks?" asked Michael. "I can't see any tacks."
"I meant, dear, that it's still the same as when it was put down Now shall we have our party ?"
Anything out in the open accompanied by a cordial was a party. They all sat down happily. Selina had no fear that they would venture in the water. After the glimmering blue of Iron's bathtub pool how could she have fears of that ? For the old millpool was, if anything, unattractive. It had a green scum, and it was enveloped with throngs of gauzy gnats. It also, though slightly, stank.
But children ... or so Selina thought at first when the thing happened . . . don't see such things. Later, but too late, she discovered that children did, that they are as fastidious as grown-ups.
It all began with 'gnace's cap. Because it was cool, if sunny, Anton Wolhar had put on his stepson's head a little astrakhan cap. It was a beautiful cap. Selina herself had often cast an envious eye on it, and every little girl ... and boy ... would have done a swap at once.
But Ignace did not see it like that. He saw himself very distastefully in a foreign cap when everyone else was either bareheaded or wearing a local footie beanie. He hated his cap. He left it in numerous places, but every time Selina saw it and said : "Ignace, your lovely cap."
On the last occasion Ignace had complained : "It is not lovely. I hate it !" But he had still taken it up.
Now that the 'party' was over, the cake and cordial consumed and drunk, the children bickering and arguing amicably among themselves, Selina lay back and thought. She thought a lot of late. She shut her eyes for a moment . . . she was sure afterwards it was only a moment.. then she opened them to no children, no children at all. But in the middle of the millpond a cap. An astrakhan cap. Ignace's cap.
Selina acted instinctively . . . and foolishly. Without even calling the expected Cooee . . . 'come here' .. . without even shouting out for an explanation from Ignace wherever he was . . . without even looking around, she jumped into the pond and swam towards the cap. It was a reckless move, if only she had waited even one second she would have realised this. What child, especially a child who hated his cap and would be glad to see the end of it, would jum
p into a green, rather slimy, gnat-infested, frog-loud, smelly pool? Particularly a pool with at one end of it an evil-looking race ? But Selina leapt.
At first the slime, the gnats and the frog chorus enclosed her, then, coming gradually but inevitably to the pipe, where the water activity showed more ripples, it was a different story. All that Selina could relate afterwards was that one minute she was there, the next—
She saw the cap as she travelled past it. It caught up to her again in a sudden eddy from the left, then it, with Selina, disappeared from sight.
Selina seemed to be coming to a bright shore. Then she seemed to be withdrawing from the shore. To. Fro To. Fro. Full of wellbeing as she thrust forward and upward one moment, feeling herself a dead leaf falling from a tree as she withdrew the next moment. Brightness. Darkness. Sweet air in her lungs. Choking in foulness. Then out of the chaos a clear pattern emerging. A face pattern. Someone's face against hers. Someone breathing into her mouth.
The withdrawal stopped. The darkness stopped. The choking topped. She opened her eyes and looked at Joel Grant and he said : "Thank God !"
That was all he said for almost ten minutes. He had banished the curious children, who must have been exploring somewhere when it happened and returned to see what was going on, to a strict fifteen yards away. There they stood in a gossipy huddle. Selina heard clearly from Phyllida :
"He was kissing her when we came up. Now they'll be married !"
"With bridesmaids and things ?" Janet.
"Yes. There'll be a feast."
Harriet put in importantly : "Then there'll be a baby. My cousin had a marriage feast and then there was a baby."
Little horrors ! Selina tried to raise herself on one elbow to tell them so, to shame them for thinking about feasts when she had been near death. But as she did so, a swirling and a rushing caught her up again, and she lay back.
"Steady," Joel said.
But eventually she came right out of it, was able to be sat up and propped against a tree. And be
bawled out by him.
"What in tarnation are you and the kids doing here ?"
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