by Jessica Hart
Oddly, she alone seemed to be immune to Guy’s charm. ‘He’s just a trust fund baby,’ she said dismissively when she and Meredith were on their own in the kitchen. ‘He’s not a real man like Kevin.’
Real man or not, it seemed to Meredith that Guy was brighter, better-looking and a lot more fun than Kevin. There was no accounting for taste. Personally, she approved of Guy, who was a lot more practical than one would guess from a first impression. It was Guy who got things organised and who sorted the flights while Lucy was saying an emotional farewell to Kevin.
Meredith woke late that morning with the sick feeling that she had left something vitally important undone. Scrambling out of bed, she rushed along to try and book Lucy on to the London flight from Darwin and was pleasantly surprised to discover that Guy had already done it all. For someone used to dealing with everything herself, it was a huge treat to find that she could relax for once.
Now she stood on the dusty airstrip next to Hal and waved as the little plane that Guy had chartered sped down the runway. Looking like a toy, it lifted up into a sky so blue and so enormous that it made Meredith’s eyes ache behind her sunglasses.
Beside her, Hal wore a hat, his eyes narrowed against the glare as he watched the plane disappear into the blueness. The red dust churned up by the take-off was drifting back to earth and the silence once they had gone seemed to settle around them like an immense weight.
The sheer size of the horizon and the stillness of the landscape was overwhelming. Meredith felt tiny in comparison and she thought that if Hal hadn’t been standing beside her she would have been almost frightened by the uncanny sensation that the land was waiting for something.
As it was, Hal’s solid, self-contained presence was immensely reassuring. Outlined against the dusty backdrop of spindly gum-trees and scrub, his profile was extraordinarily distinct in the crystalline light. Meredith was sure that she could see every pore in his skin, every quirk in the battered felt hat. He wore a pair of faded jeans and scuffed boots, his sleeves were rolled up above his wrists, and his hands were brown and steady. He looked completely at home in this strange, alien place and Meredith was suddenly conscious of a childish urge to hold on to him and feel safe.
‘We’d better get on,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Meredith briskly. Enough of this. She was a sensible woman. Of course she didn’t need Hal to feel safe. Whatever next? This was Australia, not the end of the world.
It just felt like it.
She put her shoulders back as Hal turned to the truck parked in the meagre shade. Beside it, Meredith had been chagrined to notice earlier, stood a small plane with a propeller on its nose.
‘Why didn’t you fly into Whyman’s Creek yesterday?’ she had asked when Hal admitted that it was his. ‘It would have been a lot more comfortable than two hours in that truck!’
‘I want Jed to have a look at the tail rudder,’ Hal said. ‘He’s the mechanic, but he hasn’t got time at the moment. He’s been checking the water pumps, which is more important than being comfortable on a trip into town.’
That, thought, Meredith, was a matter of opinion.
The plane looked awfully small, she decided, eyeing it askance as she followed Hal to the truck. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have set foot in it, but she couldn’t help hoping that Jed got round to fixing it before Lucy came back. A flight would be much more comfortable, and a lot less dirty, than another bone-shaking trip into Whyman’s Creek before she caught the plane home.
Home…Meredith looked around her at the eerily silent scrub and sighed. Her cosy house in Tooting seemed very far away.
‘You can get in the cab this time,’ Hal pointed out as he opened his door.
‘Big of you,’ muttered Meredith. The airstrip was about half a mile from the homestead and there hadn’t been room for more than three in the front seat. Meredith had wanted to say goodbye to Lucy at the plane, and as Hal had to drive and Guy and Lucy had a long trip ahead of them, it had made sense that she’d been the one who had sat in the back with the suitcases. By the time they had jolted down to the end of the track, she had been wishing that she’d said goodbye at the homestead as Hal had suggested.
He must have known that she would end up covered in dust-again!
‘I’m not sure that sitting inside is going to make much difference to this outfit now,’ she said, grimacing down at her pale trousers and sleeveless white top. Well, it had been white when she had put it on that morning.
‘Haven’t you got anything more practical to wear?’ Hal asked as she climbed into the cab anyway.
‘No,’ said Meredith, who thought she had done well to find these trousers.
He switched on the engine and the truck juddered into life. ‘I’d have thought you could have packed something a bit more sensible,’ he said disapprovingly.
‘My wardrobe is perfectly sensible for what I thought I’d be doing,’ Meredith objected. ‘I didn’t realise I would be put in the back of an open truck and driven through a dust bowl! So far I’ve ruined two outfits,’ she remembered glumly. ‘At this rate, I won’t have anything to wear at all next week! I’ll be cooking in my underwear.’
Hal raised his eyebrows. ‘That sounds interesting,’ he said.
His voice was dry but when he glanced at her Meredith realised with a tiny shock of recognition that the cool eyes held a distinct gleam of amusement and a shiver of something that was perilously close to excitement skittered down her spine.
More worryingly, her palm was actually tingling with the memory of how it had felt to touch his hand last night. ‘Deal,’ they had said, and his fingers had closed around hers. She shouldn’t be able to remember exactly how that had felt, Meredith chided herself. She shouldn’t be wondering what it would be like to feel the warmth and sureness of his hands on her again.
Her mouth dried at the very idea, but luckily Hal was changing the subject without waiting for her to think of a suitably pithy answer.
‘Did Lucy have time to show you round?’ he asked, sounding so prosaic that Meredith wondered if she had imagined the awareness that had sparked in that brief glance a moment ago.
Embarrassed by what felt like a betraying flush in her cheeks, she clutched the dashboard and looked out of the window. ‘No. She was busy cooking the meal last night and I’m afraid it was all a bit of a rush this morning. She had her own stuff to pack, and I’d slept late.’
‘You were tired.’
‘Yes, I’m sorry about last night,’ said Meredith a little stiffly. ‘One minute I was eating beef and the next my head was in the gravy. I was completely zonked.’
‘Are you going to be OK to do lunch today?’
‘Of course,’ she said quickly, reading criticism in his tone. ‘I said I could do Lucy’s job, and I will.’
Hal glanced at her. ‘I’d better show you where everything is, in that case. It’ll save you a bit of time.’
Emma and Mickey were still in bed, in spite of strict instructions to be up and dressed by the time Hal and Meredith got back from the airstrip. Hal hauled them up and sent them grumbling along to the kitchen to find their own breakfast while he gave Meredith a brisk tour of the homestead.
Some of it she remembered from the night before. There was the austere dining area that opened out from the kitchen. A long, rectangular table sat on the painted concrete floor, dominating the room, but for Meredith the most noticeable feature was the way an entire wall had been left open to the air, but screened off to keep the insects out.
Another screened veranda led from the other side of the kitchen. It was more comfortable-looking, with a number of old wicker chairs ranged in a rough semicircle facing the screen. Lucy had told her that they all gathered there for a cold beer before supper but, having watched her sister at work, Meredith couldn’t imagine ever having the time to sit down herself.
Hal pointed out the store rooms, the laundry room and a whole wall of stainless steel fridges and freezers of varying temp
eratures.
‘And this is the cold store,’ he said, opening a door.
‘Ugh!’ Meredith recoiled at the sight of the carcass hanging from a butcher’s hook. ‘What’s that?’
‘It was a cow and now it’s food,’ said Hal.
‘I hope you’re not expecting me to chop it up!’
‘No.’ Hal gritted his teeth and hung on to his patience. ‘One of the men will butcher it for you when you need more meat. There’s still a couple of joints left,’ he went on, indicating some smaller cuts hanging at the side. ‘Those are for roasting or steaks. There’s a mincing machine as well, if you want it, and I think Lucy should have some diced meat for stewing in the freezer.’
Meredith grimaced. She was used to her meat wrapped in nice sanitised packets at the supermarket, where you never had to think about where it had come from or what it had once been.
‘What happens when that one’s finished?’ she asked, averting her eyes from the carcass.
Hal looked at her. ‘What do you think?’
Meredith’s mouth turned down even further. She didn’t like to think of some poor cow being slaughtered on her say-so. ‘What do you give vegetarians?’
‘We don’t get a lot of those on a cattle station,’ he said, closing the door. ‘We eat beef. Beef, beef and more beef.’
‘I do a very nice spinach quiche, you know,’ she said provocatively.
‘I’m sure you do, but I wouldn’t waste my time making it here, if I were you. The men don’t like anything fancy, so keep meals plain. They do like their puddings, though, the more old-fashioned the better.’
‘Right.’ Meredith sighed inwardly. She had the feeling that she was going to get awfully tired of cooking beef and fruit crumble.
‘There’s a vegetable plot over there,’ Hal went on, pointing through the window, ‘but when anyone gets the chance to go to Townsville they’ll bring back fruit and vegetables that we can’t grow here, so we do get some variety.’
But Meredith wasn’t listening. She had looked obediently in the direction Hal was pointing, but her gaze was snagged by something much more incredible than a vegetable patch. ‘Is that a lemon tree?’ she asked in delight.
‘Yes,’ said Hal cautiously, wondering what all the excitement was about.
‘Wow!’ Meredith’s face was alight with pleasure. ‘I’ve never seen one of those before. I can’t wait to go and pick my own lemon!’
Hal regarded her with surprise. He hadn’t expected her to be pleased by something so simple. She looked suddenly vivid and her eyes were bright with interest. They really were an extraordinary colour, he found himself thinking. A deep, dark blue, almost purple, they were eyes you could lose yourself in if you weren’t careful.
‘I’ll show you the rest of the homestead,’ he said brusquely, wrenching his gaze away.
Meredith hadn’t taken in much the day before, but in daylight it was clear that the kitchen area was a relatively modern extension, while the main part of the homestead seemed to date back to the beginning of the twentieth century. It was something of a surprise to Meredith, who had been expecting everything to be as functional as the kitchen and the bedroom wing where she had slept the night before. Here, the ceilings were high, the doors solidly made and the rooms had the fine proportions of a more gracious era. How on earth had they managed to build a house like this in the middle of nowhere, without any of the benefits of modern technology?
‘We don’t use these rooms much,’ Hal said, opening a door into an old-fashioned dining room with a beautiful antique dining table, and then into an elegant sitting room. Long windows looked out past the deep veranda to the garden and the tree-lined creek in the distance.
‘Oh, this is a lovely room!’ exclaimed Meredith, walking in and looking around with pleasure. ‘At least, it could be if it had a good clean.’ She wiped a finger along the top of a rosewood cabinet and wrinkled her nose. ‘That and a fresh lick of paint and it could be wonderful.’
‘It doesn’t need painting,’ said Hal bluntly. ‘I never sit in here.’
‘What a shame.’ Meredith wandered over to the windows and fingered the faded curtains. ‘No wonder it feels unloved. Someone must have loved this room once, though, someone with a lot of taste, by the look of it. Your mother?’
‘I don’t remember,’ said Hal, his voice curt to the point of rudeness.
‘Oh?’ She hesitated, not wanting to pry, but it was odd that he didn’t remember at all. ‘Did you lose your mother quite young?’
‘I was twelve,’ he said after the tiniest of pauses.
‘I was five when my mother died,’ Meredith offered. ‘My father remarried, though, a couple of years later.’
She looked around the tranquil room. If Hal was in his thirties now, and his mother had died when he was fourteen, this room probably hadn’t been used for nearly a quarter of a century. How sad, she thought. And how strange that he didn’t remember his mother sitting here.
‘It doesn’t look as if your father married again,’ she said.
‘No.’
‘You can tell,’ said Meredith. ‘The whole house needs a woman’s touch.’
‘None of the housekeepers stay long, but they generally keep the place clean,’ said Hal stiffly.
‘It’s not about dusting,’ she said. ‘A room like this needs someone to love it and live in it. A quick run round with a vacuum cleaner isn’t going to bring it back to life!’ She glanced at him curiously. ‘You’ve never thought of getting married?’
‘Once.’ Hal was wishing that he hadn’t brought Meredith in here. The room brought back too many memories at the best of times. Now it seemed dingier and sadder than ever in contrast to Meredith’s vibrancy. ‘It didn’t work out.’
Now, to his dismay, she perched on the arm of a sofa, frankly interested. ‘Why not?’
Hal shrugged. ‘I met Jill through mutual friends in Darwin. We got on well and had a good time when we were together. I used to go up to Darwin to stay with her and she came down here a couple of times, but after we got engaged she decided to come and spend more time here.
‘She only lasted a couple of weeks,’ he remembered grimly. ‘It made her realise how isolated her life would be if she married me, and she decided she couldn’t go through with it.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Meredith, wondering what Jill had been like. Was she sweet? Was she pretty? There must have been something special about her to capture a heart as hard as Hal Granger’s. What did a woman have to have to get him to let down that guard and smile and laugh and love?
Not that she was interested personally. It was just intriguing to see what made people fall in love.
‘Don’t be.’ Hal leant against the back of an armchair and crossed his long legs at the ankle. Meredith was struck anew by his physical presence. He looked strong and solid and incredibly male in this faded, feminine room. No wonder he never sat in here.
‘At least Jill was honest,’ he said. ‘It was much better for her to decide that it wasn’t going to work then than after we were married and might have had children to complicate matters.’
‘It must have hurt, though. Rejection’s never any fun,’ said Meredith with feeling, but Hal only shrugged.
‘It was a mutual decision. We’re still friends,’ he said. ‘She’s in Melbourne now. She married a doctor and they’re very happy as far as I can tell.’
‘And you haven’t met anyone since?’
‘No one who could deal with the isolation. No one I could face being isolated with either, come to that.’
‘Don’t you ever get lonely?’
‘Do you?’ he countered.
‘Me?’
‘You told me that you live on your own,’ he reminded her. ‘I don’t. There are usually at least seven other men here and you’d be surprised how often we have other people passing through. Government inspectors, scientists, journalists, visitors, road train drivers, helicopter pilots…Sometimes there are twenty people sitting round th
e table in the evening. I don’t get much chance to be lonely.’
‘Yes, but that’s not the same as having someone special,’ said Meredith.
Hal cocked a brow at her. ‘Are you by any chance asking what I do for sex?’ he asked.
The colour rushed into Meredith’s cheeks. ‘Of course not!’ she said, aghast.
‘Because that’s what it sounded like,’ Hal finished, but Meredith was too embarrassed to hear the amusement threading his voice at first.
‘I wouldn’t dream of asking you that! God, of course not! I just meant whether you ever wanted someone…well, someone close, someone to talk to and laugh with and-’
‘Sleep with?’ he suggested, and this time she did hear the undercurrent of mockery.
She tilted her chin at him, refusing to rise. ‘Well, don’t you want someone like that?’ she challenged him.
‘Sometimes I do, but not for long,’ Hal told her frankly. ‘I never get involved with a woman who’s looking for “commitment”.’ He made hooks with his fingers to emphasise his distaste for the word.
Meredith hoped she looked as if she took attitudes like that in her stride. ‘And where do you find women who aren’t looking for that?’ she asked.
‘We do have a social life in the outback, you know. Balls, races, rodeos, weddings and parties…You might have to travel a couple of hundred miles to get there, but you still go and you’d be surprised how many people you meet.’ His eyes rested on Meredith’s face, still pink with embarrassment. ‘And then, of course, there are girls like you.’
‘Like me?’ Meredith’s voice went up a notch. ‘What do you mean, like me?’
‘Like you in that they’re cooks and housekeepers,’ Hal explained. ‘We get a very high turnover out here. Girls usually only stay two or three months, which is why I had to tie Lucy to that contract to make sure she was still here when the kids came. Often, the girls who come out want to experience outback life for a while, but they don’t want to live here for ever. Sometimes we have a nice time together for a while, and then they leave with no regrets on either side.’