‘No,’ she said, ‘it is not what I want but I know nothing about sheep or mining or money. Tell me, what would you do?’
‘If it was mine? I’d fight him for it.’
She took his hands in hers, looked searchingly into his eyes. ‘And will you help me if I fight him?’
‘I can’t. No-one can. What you don’t know doesn’t matter, you can always learn that. But standing up to Ian Matlock … No-one can help you there. You have to do that alone.’
A spark, a stream of sparks, ran between them. ‘You are right,’ she said slowly. ‘Of course you are. How do you know these things at your age?’
He laughed awkwardly and withdrew his hands from hers. ‘I don’t know a lot,’ he said, ‘but I know that much.’
‘I will do it,’ she said. ‘And I shall never forget it was you who helped me to see what must be done.’
‘Ian Matlock told me to go out to the north of the run, give Sinbad a hand with the flocks. You want me to do that?’
‘You stay here. Go and find Mr Laubsch, tell him I want a memorial service conducted outside the door here in, let me see, twenty minutes’ time. Make sure everyone is here for it.’
‘You want me to tell Ian Matlock or ask him? He’s likely to throw a fit, I start giving him orders—’
She smiled grimly. ‘Tell him,’ she said.
Standing in the yard with the rest of the group, the sun beating down on her head, Asta listened with impatient half-attention to the missionary’s heavily accented voice braying of memory and memorials. Trepidation, excitement, resolve sent the blood coursing through her body. She thought, the only memorial that Gavin needs is this run and he won’t have that if I don’t take a firm grip of it now and run it the way it must be run. Jason was right. It is now that matters. No-one, least of all Ian, must have time to draw breath, to think about what is happening.
She stepped forward, hand raised. Laubsch hesitated, broke off what he was saying.
‘Thank you, Mr Laubsch.’
She faced the rest of them. ‘Mr Laubsch has spoken well. I thank him on behalf of all of us. More than anyone, my husband carved this run out of the wilderness. There is a lot still to be done. The best way we can honour his memory is to build on his work. Let us get on with it.’ She turned away. ‘Mr Gallagher!’
Hector hurried to her side. ‘Yes?’
‘Let the men get to work. The sledge we used for the timber when we were erecting the buildings, I want it harnessed and brought around to the front of the house.’
She loaded it, first with wood from the log pile, then with Gavin’s possessions: clothes, boots, saddle, papers. She did it herself, allowing no-one else to touch anything. The only items she retained were the government deeds to Whitby Downs, a handful of sovereigns in a leather wallet, Gavin’s correspondence with Walter Lang and his rifle. She hefted this last, left it in its habitual place against the wall beside Gavin’s side of the bed. It was a fine piece, the stock inlaid with ivory, the hammerlock mechanism chased with silver. Too heavy for her but she would not get rid of it. It was not its intrinsic value that mattered; more important even than the legal documents, her husband’s rifle was like a sceptre, representing her title to the land.
‘What you going to do with that lot?’ Hector asked.
She gave him her coldest look. ‘Why?’
Hector Gallagher was not easily cowed. ‘There’s an English saddle there. Good leather. If you’re thinking of getting rid of it I’ll take it myself. A good saddle always comes in handy.’
‘No-one is taking anything, Mr Gallagher.’
Even then he wouldn’t give up.
‘A waste, that’s what—’
Asta was climbing up behind the sledge. She paused, looked down at the importunate supervisor.
‘Do you have no work to do?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘Then do it. If you would be so kind. As to what is waste and what is not, I shall decide that. Is that clear?’
Gallagher flushed angrily, rubbed his jaw with his hand, said nothing.
She drove the sledge down to the cliffs, the pile of Gavin’s possessions swaying as she crossed the rough grass. She reined in and unloaded the sledge, piling everything on the edge of the drop. Beyond the cliffs and extending to an horizon shot with black and scarlet cloud, the sea spread wings as peaceful as a blessing.
When everything was ready Asta faced the sea. This was her place, now. To assist her to consolidate her grasp upon it she summoned to her aid the gods that she also thought of as her own. She said, ‘Lords of Fire and Air, take my husband. Let me never forget him or what he tried to do. Let me build a memorial to him in this place.’
She lit a brand and thrust it into the heart of the pile. The flames flickered, spread. She stood unmoving until the gods had taken everything. She stamped out the embers and went home.
*
When Asta got back Ian was waiting for her with a storm-dark face.
He said, ‘I think it’s time we had a word.’
‘What about?’
‘The run. Who is going to operate it?’
‘I am going to operate it.’
He gestured impatiently: don’t let’s waste each other’s time. ‘Impossible.’
‘Oh? And why is that, please?’
‘No woman alive can operate a sheep run.’
‘No other woman, perhaps.’
They stared at each other: no love lost.
‘We don’t want to fall out over this,’ he said.
She inclined her head, acknowledging his words. ‘I am glad of that. Living in this country, on the frontiers of civilisation,’ she waved her hand at the rolling landscape, ‘we have to rely on each other. But I’ll do a deal with you. I won’t tell you how to run your property if you don’t tell me how to run mine.’
He flushed brick-red beneath the yellow hair, tipped back the drink she had given him. ‘I don’t know how you think you’re going to manage—’
‘I shall manage, don’t worry about that.’
She stood at the door and watched him ride away, shoulders stiff with outrage, his family following obediently behind him.
Pray to the gods, she thought.
‘I ain’t goin’ to do it!’ Blake stared furiously at his father. ‘Go to school? What kind of game is that?’
Hector Gallagher thrust his face threateningly into Blake’s. ‘You want to end up owning this place or don’t you?’ Hector’s voice dropped. ‘Gavin’s dead and there ain’t no son, right?’
‘Right.’ Uncertainly.
‘Ian’s got just the one daughter. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Ever hear of a woman running a place like this?’
‘Asta Matlock sounded like she was planning to run it …’
‘Never!’ Hector shook his head. ‘Marry the daughter and this will all be yours. But you got to be educated, see? You’ll never manage the way you are now.’
Blake turned and looked about him at the fold of hillside, the creek with its line of trees, the rolling acres of pasture that his mind’s eye could see beyond the hill’s crest, the dust-brown mobs of sheep feeding on the land.
The land. His land?
It had never occurred to him but now Hector had planted the idea it began to take root. My land, he thought.
Hector said, ‘Won’t be easy, mind. That Jason: I don’t trust him.’
‘What can he do?’ Sneering.
Hector cautioned him, ‘Don’t muck up your chances by taking anything for granted.’
Blake was puzzled. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I want you to be mates.’
‘Mates?’ Blake stared. ‘With Jason?’
‘Know your enemy, see? Get him to trust you, he won’t care when you take charge. He’ll help you! Why not? What does he know about sheep?’
SEVENTEEN
Jason stood on the cliff top with Alison beside him.
Ever since Gavin’s dea
th, almost three years ago now, they had grown steadily closer to each other. In that time there had been changes, both in their world and in themselves.
Asta had taken a firm grip on Whitby Downs and ruled it with an iron hand. The wool price had stayed high and she was now a wealthy woman. In the changed circumstances Jason had never been able to return to Kapunda after all but Asta received regular reports from Walter Lang and it seemed the mine was prospering as well. Blake and Jason had become what passed for friends. In particular, Alison—sixteen now to Jason’s nineteen—was a very different person from the child she had once been.
Now she tossed a pebble over the cliff edge and watched it fall.
‘I hate him,’ she said. ‘He frightens me.’
Jason mooched at her side, hands in his pockets. He was embarrassed having to defend Blake to Alison now that Blake had become his friend. ‘He’s not so bad. Besides, what can he do to you?’
‘He watches me.’
Jason smiled. ‘I watch you myself.’
‘That’s different.’
She did not know how to say that she welcomed Jason’s attentions while Blake’s made her blood run cold.
‘Not so different.’
She glanced up at him, smiling. The light breeze of late summer flattened the front of her dress, reminding Jason—if he had needed reminding—that Alison was a child no longer.
‘When are you going to Kapunda?’
‘In two months’ time. Mr Laubsch thinks I should be good enough at reading and writing by then.’
Discontentedly Alison kicked at a pebble. ‘I wish I could go to Mr Laubsch’s classes.’ There had been a time when she had wanted nothing like that but those days, like so much else, were past.
‘Asta did ask your father.’
‘My father doesn’t think a woman needs an education.’
‘Well,’ Jason said, ‘why does she?’
‘Because I feel so stupid, knowing nothing!’
He teased her. ‘If you came to the classes you’d see even more of Blake than you do at the moment.’
‘That’s the only reason I’m glad I don’t go!’
‘He’s not so bad,’ he told her again.
‘Never turn your back on him,’ she said.
Mura had said much the same. ‘He’s putting on an act. He’ll turn on you soon enough when it suits him.’
At the beginning Jason, too, had been suspicious of Blake’s motives but in a world without friends he had been willing to take friendship where he found it and ever since Gavin’s death Blake had been friendly enough.
‘It’s up to us now, eh?’
He had said it the day after Jason and Asta got back from Kapunda. Laubsch had preached his sermon, Asta had burnt Gavin’s things down at the cliff, Blake had seemed as truculent and unfriendly as ever. The following day he had changed.
‘Time for the next generation to take over, I reckon.’
‘I doubt Ian Matlock will agree to that!’
‘Ain’t nuthin to do wi’ him! He does what he likes at Bungaree but here at Whitby Downs …’ His voice sank to a whisper. ‘You reckon yon woman will be able to run things?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, I do! No woman’s goin’ to run me: nor you, neither, if I be any judge, and without us how can she operate, eh?’
Initially Jason had been on his guard, expecting this new friendship to go as swiftly as it had come, but it had not. Little by little, without being aware of it, he had come to accept Blake’s attitude as genuine. Over the years since he had come to accept it unquestioningly.
Time had proved Blake wrong about Asta, certainly, but only in one area did they remain opposed: what needed to be done about the blacks who lived in the bush around them. Asta had continued to honour the arrangements that Jason had made with the clan, permitted the taking of the occasional sheep. Blake was bitterly opposed to it.
‘Makes no sense. Here we be workin’ our guts out to grow a decent crop o’ wool and we let these bastards butcher ’em as they likes!’
And of Mura: ‘I knows ’e’s your mate, Jason lad, but I can’t abide to see a black man treated like a Christian. No offence, like, but I reckons he should be off wi’ the rest o’ his kind, like in the old days. We all knows where we be, that way.’
Translated: they’re our enemies, let them behave like enemies, give us the excuse we need.
Blake added: ‘They won’t never be civilised an’ there ain’t no sense pretendin’ they will.’
So long as Blake did nothing Jason was content to let things be. Talk hurt neither Mura nor the rest of the clan.
As for Alison …
She had grown up out of nowhere, one day a child, the next entirely different. The transformation had astounded Jason. He knew nothing about women. The shapes both of their temperaments and their bodies were strangers to him. At the time he had not been sure he wanted to know them, forming as they did part of the unfamiliar adult world which he, too, had been beginning to enter. All the same, he had begun to watch her, despising himself for doing so but unable to help himself, drawn by the differences he sensed in her: different from what she had been in the past, different from what he himself was becoming.
Now, at nineteen, he saw things very differently. When he could get away he tramped along the cliffs, sometimes with Mura, sometimes alone, carrying with him not only the reality of the wind in his hair, the noise of the sea on the rocks below him but an image that was becoming increasingly important to him: of a young woman, presumably Alison, walking ahead of him along the cliff, dress as white as the slender body it contained, his own body filled by conflicting tensions of tenderness and a fierce and implacable desire.
As to what she felt for him, if she felt anything … He had no instinct for that at all.
Two years earlier Mura had disappeared without a word. He had been gone for three weeks. When he came back he had changed. He would not talk about it but Jason knew that he had returned to the clan to undergo the final ceremonies for which they had trained together, ceremonies from which Jason was now permanently shut out.
Hector had wanted to get rid of him for going off in such a way.
‘’Ow can I plan the work if I never know from one day to the next whether ’e’s goin’ to be ’ere or not?’
‘It is their way,’ Asta told him.
‘Damn stupid way, you ask me.’
‘I did not ask you.’
She disliked her supervisor. More stiff-necked than ever, she saw no reason to conceal it but needed his expertise. She felt no conflict between disliking him and respecting his competence.
‘I see us using increasing numbers of the aborigines,’ she said, ‘as we all become used to each other. It will be good for them and for us. This is as much their country as ours, after all.’
It was a sentiment with which Hector Gallagher would never agree.
‘Their country?’ he said to Blake and Jason. ‘That’ll be the day!’
Cato Brown shared Hector’s views.
‘God-rottin’ savages lay a finger on my flocks I’ll sort ’em out double damn quick, you see if I don’t.’
A week later he came on a raiding party with a sheep they had butchered. True to his word he fired on them, killing one. The next day two things happened: Mura disappeared and Jason and Alison broke through into the adult world.
*
Jason had ridden over to Bungaree with some supplies. When he had off-loaded them he strolled down to the cliffs. He met Alison, it could have been by chance, and they walked together.
‘Your dad had better not catch us like this,’ Jason said.
Alison regarded him gravely. ‘What is wrong with it?’
‘I’m sure he would find plenty wrong with it.’
‘He is on the far side of the run.’
Which Jason already knew.
They walked further; at one point in their conversation Alison placed her hand on his bare arm. The shock of her touch
jarred him. He turned, placed his hands on her shoulders. She made no attempt to avoid him or draw away but looked gravely up at him. Waiting. He leant forward. She did not move. He kissed her.
She kissed him back, clinging to him while his hands moved over her in a kind of ecstatic wonderment: yes and yes and so this is what it is like.
At length she rested her forehead against his chest. She was breathing deeply. She pulled her head back and looked up at him and he saw a halo of light around the darkness of her eyes. Gently he caressed her.
She said, ‘You mustn’t do that.’
Instinct made him say, ‘You don’t want me to?’
‘I want you to very much. That’s why you mustn’t do it.’
‘Why mustn’t I?’
‘Because we have no future, you and I.’
‘You don’t know that.’
She smiled ruefully at him. ‘I doubt there’s many places will hold you. This one never will. Kiss me like that, touch me, I shall lose my heart to you. If that happens I won’t be able to bear it when you leave.’
‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘You’re going to Kapunda.’
‘Only for a time. She’ll want me back at Whitby Downs later. You’ll see,’ he boasted, ‘I’ll be running things there before I’m through.’
Alison shook her head. ‘Asta will never let you do that. All the things that matter to her are at Whitby Downs. What she wants out of life, her memories—Edward, Gavin—they’re all there. She’ll never share them. Not with you, not with anyone. They’re too important for that.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’
‘The run is everything to her. It’s her justification for living. She cares for you but her dream is more important to her than you are.’
A dark flicker fell between them; a breath of air touched their cheeks. They turned, staring. A thin spear quivered in the dust at their feet.
Jason spun round, grabbing Alison’s hand. Thirty yards away three warriors stood, spears bristling, white paint stark against the glossy black skins. As Jason watched the arms of the men went back in unison.
‘Run!’
They took off without looking back, plunging down the slope towards the cliff edge.
A Far Country Page 24