Always a Rainbow

by Gloria Bevan

  “Forget them!” he told her happily. “This is our day!” Easy advice to follow as his lips sought hers and once again the heady rapture took over.

  Afterwards, a long time afterwards, he turned the car back towards the driveway. Angela glancing down at the scintillating diamond on her finger marvelled at the perfect fit of the ring, but then, she mused out of a deep sense of utter happiness, today everything was perfect. As her gaze moved to Mark’s bronzed profile she felt as though somewhere during the day she had missed a turning and strayed into heaven by mistake.

  His arm was thrown around her shoulders as they took the curving pathway. All at once there were endless exciting matters to discuss, for weren’t they about to share a whole new life together?

  “Just wait,” exulted Mark with that new look of pride in his eyes, “until Doris hears the news!”

  “Doris?” A shadow fell over Angela’s shining happiness. “My being here,” she asked anxiously, “it won’t mean her having to leave Waikare, will it?”

  “Leave, Doris? Lord, no! Not unless she wants to. She’s a sort of fixture around the place. She can always make her home here for as long as she likes, she knows that!”

  For answer she gave his arm a quick squeeze. Even when she was married to Mark—married to Mark—delight surged over her anew at the thought, there would be work a-plenty to keep both her and Doris occupied on the station where each passing season brought its own duties to the men and women who worked there. Besides, the fugitive thought sneaked in from nowhere, there was that drawer up at the house filled with mini-garments in varying tonings of pink. Who knows, Doris might yet attain her wish to make use of them, and right here at Waikare too!

  “That’s odd!” Mark’s deep tones jerked her back to the present, “A strange car in the drive! Let’s hope it’s someone we know. I can’t wait to tell the world our big news!”

  The moment they entered the lounge a man and a girl sprang to their feet, hands linked and faces brimming with excitement. It was Jill who greeted them. “At last! We thought you two were never coming back!”

  Mark’s tone as he faced his younger brother was scarcely welcoming. “Where the devil have you been all this time?”

  “That’s what I’m here to tell you about—”

  “Tell him the other news first,” Jill broke in excitedly, “the important bit!”

  The thought passed through Angela’s mind that Jill without the customary resentful, sulky expression she had always worn at the homestead, was really awfully pretty.

  “No, I’ll tell them myself! We’re engaged!” she cried happily. “Look, Angela—” There was no hesitation now in the way she said the name. She was thrusting forward a small brown paw where a sapphire gleamed on a third finger. “Brian said it had to be a blue stone to match the colour of my eyes!”

  “Congratulations, Jill! I’m so glad for you!” Angela’s happy tone rang with good wishes.

  Mark was silent.

  “Don’t be like that,” Brian pleaded in his light diffident tones. “Maybe you’ll feel differently about things when I tell you what happened. That day at the rodeo—”

  Mark’s voice was relentless. “When you met up with Martha?”

  “That’s right. And boy, did I learn a few things that day! She had to meet me there. She knew it would be no use coming to see me at the house, not after the way she’d let me down before, and especially after the mean trick she’d played on you, Angela. Would you believe it? She actually boasted about sending you here after the job you wanted, letting Mark pick you up as arranged and thinking you were Martha! When she let on how she’d let you in for all the blame, that really did it! I thought before that things went wrong when Martha arrived here from the Ocean Monarch.”

  “Now I know it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he went on. “For years I’d idealized that girl. I needed shock treatment to make me wake up and see the things that were right under my nose all along. She didn’t care a thing for me. She was looking for a husband, any husband, so long as he had property or cash. Sounds rugged, doesn’t it, but that’s the truth! Oh, she put it over very well, but what it amounted to was that her boy-friend in Whangarei, the food-chain guy she met on the voyage out from England, had let her down, taken up with someone else and she’d come running back to me as second choice. She actually put it to me that we could pick up where we’d left off, start making arrangements for getting married. Just like that! That’s when it hit me out of the blue. I had a girl already, someone I was in love with and hadn’t realised because I’d known her all my life, and I had a fair idea that she was pretty fond of me.

  “I got wise to something else that day too. I took a good long look at myself and I said, ‘See here, man, if you’re ever going to make anything of your life now is the time to start, today.’ So instead of going back to Waikare with the others after the rodeo I headed south for Wellington—”

  “You might have let me into your plans,” Mark’s voice was grim.

  “I know, I know, but I had to be sure. If I had to come crawling back home like last time—well, that would be it, but at least I’d have given it a go! And then it happened! The first day I arrived in the city I landed a job, not just any old job but the type of work I’ve always wanted, a reporter on the daily paper there. The only snag was I had to agree to a trial period. I told myself that if I made the grade the first thing I’d do would be to look up Jill and ask her to be my wife, and the next thing I’d do would be to come back here and explain, right? The prospects are terrific and that’s what matters. Meanwhile Jill wants to see her nursing training through to the finish and I’m going to work like mad to get ahead. We plan to marry in a year’s time. You know something Mark,” he turned towards his brother, “I never was interested in sheep-farming, but I kept trying. I told myself that with a family history like mine and a brother who’s dead keen on the game I must take to it too.” There was an unfamiliar purposeful ring in his tones and for the first time she saw Brian standing straight and confident, looking Mark squarely in the eye. “Now I know it’s not for me!”

  Mark nodded, a quizzical gleam in his blue eyes. “I get it. Looks like I’ll have to start looking around for a new farm hand. Is that right?”

  “That’s the story. Say,” all at once Brian appeared to become aware of Angela’s shining eyes and Mark’s expression of barely suppressed excitement, “we weren’t interrupting anything, were we?” He glanced enquiringly from Mark to Angela. “There’s something about you two today—”

  “We may as well put you and Jill in the picture.” Although Mark spoke laconically he was unable to conceal his air of pride and elation. “We’ve got marriage plans too, but we don’t believe in waiting, do we, Twenty?” His eyes sought her smiling face and he read the answer in her warm glance. Somehow she didn’t mind his calling her “Twenty” any more, not when he said the name in a way that made the word a caress. To be with Mark each day, every day ... nights too ... Her heart seemed to skip a beat with pure joy.

  The next moment everyone was talking at once, offering congratulations, smiling and laughing, asking questions. Mark was moving towards a cocktail cabinet in a corner of the room. “This calls for a toast!”

  Angela, scarcely aware of the voices echoing around her, gazed out of the window where a helicopter hovered low over a hillside. Through a cloud of drifting spray let loose by the pilot to kill patches of thistle on the sun-dried slopes, shimmered the muted colours of a rainbow, the tremulous arch lost in the depths of a punga-filled gully below.

  Mark, handing her a goblet of red wine, paused to follow her gaze. “Just a rainbow. Twenty. We often get them when the choppers are spraying. Quite a sight.”

  She nodded, something plucking at the back of her mind. She had found her rainbow at last, even if it were on a lonely sheep station away in the never-never. Only it wasn’t lonely at all, it was heaven, it was home, it was Mark!

  r />   Gloria Bevan, Always a Rainbow