by Amanda Doyle
THIS WISH I HAVE
Amanda Doyle
He claimed to be a swagman, and he certainly looked like one—but Mattie had not known him long before she realized that her feelings towards him were rather deeper than mere curiosity. But just what kind of man had she chosen to fall in love with?
“Look what is best, that best I wish in thee;
This wish I have; then ten times happy me!”
SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER ONE
MATTIE BENNETT sat on a log beside the river, and pondered over her problem. There were lots of problems in Mattie’s life at the moment, but this one was certainly more immediate and pressing than the rest. It was one that needed to be dealt with positively and swiftly.
From where she sat, Mattie could look right up the valley. She could see the basket-willows that fringed the sludge-green water until it wound out of sight up there at Art’s Crossing, and if she turned her head the other way, it was the same—a slow-running snake of a river, angling its way past the jackeroos’ quarters and the shearing-shed until it met the shallows at Wagtail Point, where it broke up into myriads of narrow, rushing channels that tumbled and frothed over the slippery, rounded stones.
That was where she and her brother had played as children. Their favourite sport had been to race boats—usually bits of dead wood or hollow bark—which they would start off in the still water in the pool this side of the Point, experiencing a gathering excitement with the increasing momentum of their little craft, which edged gradually into the midstream current, and suddenly swept along towards the shallows. There they were tossed and turned, sometimes dragged under, sometimes cast aside into still water again, but more often than not were borne triumphantly along into the big pool on the other side.
The two children had to scramble and slip over the stony banks to keep up, not daring to take their eyes off their own particular boat in case it got becalmed and needed a helping prod, or worse still, became waterlogged and sank. If that happened, you had to race back to the start again to launch another one. Quite often, though, it would not have sunk at all, and if you watched hard enough, and knew where to look, you might see it bobbing up a good bit farther down the stream. If you were really lucky, it might even have gained on its competitor, and then you would win the race.
Mattie didn’t often win. Nick nearly always beat her at that particular game, just like he did at everything else. Two years older than she was, taller, athletic, and fleet of foot, he was almost always the victor in anything they did together. Mattie, at nine years old and for a long time afterwards, resented his masculine superiority.
She puzzled and puzzled as to why he should be superior even in this matter of racing flotsam down a river, where his physical strength and added years counted for nothing once the craft were launched.
It never occurred to her, at that age, that Nick chose his sticks or pieces of bark with far more care than she, picking ones that weren’t porous and therefore doomed to sink in passage, and making sure they had sufficient weight to stay the course without being hurled to the side of the stream where the froth from the eddies would hold a light piece fast.
Mattie hadn’t cottoned on to that for a good many years, by which time she attributed it, quite rightly, to sheer masculine cunning, and the desire of the male to dominate in all things.
It had taken her some years, and several rather shattering romantic entanglements, to realize that it was a man’s world, and the only way to attain superiority over men was to fight them on their own ground, and strike where the armour was weakest. And the chink in that otherwise impregnable armour was—women. Women like Mattie herself. Not as she used to be, when she had to bow to Nick’s childish will and power, and experience the humiliation of constant defeat. But as she was now. Mattie could scarcely remember her mother, but neighbours who had known her often remarked how like her mother Mattie had turned out to be. “That same ethereal delicacy and feminine grace,” they would say. “Just like her mother, except for her eyes. She’s got her father’s eyes all right.”
When Nick went away to school, Mattie’s father decided that she had better go, too, since it might be lonely for her out there on a remote Australian property without even her brother for company. Mattie acquiesced happily enough. Her father was a fairly remote sort of parent, as remote as the place he lived in. Since his wife’s death, he had been inclined to shut himself away from his children, and Mattie had long been aware of an instinctive suspicion that he wished she had been born a boy. There it was again, so early in her life. Boys, men. The importance of being one, and growing into the other. No wonder she resented them!
They always made her feel inadequate and inferior physically, and there was no place for inferiority of any description out here in the west. You had to be positive and tough and indestructible, because if you weren’t, the human struggle against the elements soon destroyed you.
Lex Bennett was all of these things—or had been, up till a month ago, when he had been struck down quite suddenly by a severe and unprecedented heart attack, from which he was barely beginning to recover, even now. At first they had got two nurses, a day and a night one, to come and attend him, but now that he was beginning to show signs of progress, the young nurses had been dispensed with, and a middle-aged, retired bush-nurse from over at Baradoo had come instead. She was a homely person, who had known the Bennett family all her life, and although her real name was Miss Alison Marchant, they accorded her the familiarity of addressing her simply as “Aunt Allie.”
From the onset of his illness, Lex Bennett had consistently refused to leave his homestead at Twin Rivers, and go to hospital. That, again, was in character. He was stubborn about some things—often they were unexpected things—and when he dug his toes in, it wasn’t much use trying to reason with him. Once he got ideas it was hopeless to argue, and more often than not he was right, and you were glad you hadn’t questioned his decisions after all. He was an extremely efficient pastoralist, and although he was recognized as being proud and unapproachable, he was also respected for his wisdom and integrity, and there wasn’t a person in the district who had not been sorry to hear that he was laid up indefinitely.
“Tough on the girl Mattie, though, don’t you reckon?” they asked each other, yarning over their evening beer in the only pub that Baradoo had. Mattie knew they were thinking that. The only time she had been to town since her father’s illness, she had read the pity in their eyes, and shrunk away from it. Mattie didn’t want pity. In her way, she was as proud and stubborn as Lex himself. Only Mattie knew that her pride was a veneer, a skin-deep protection against that ingrained feeling of not measuring up, somehow, in her father’s eyes.
She sighed now, and stirred the dead leaves at the base of the log with the toe of one beautiful slim shoe.
It wasn’t a country shoe, really, she thought, regarding it with critical amusement. Rather was it the city person’s conception of what a correct country walking-shoe should be, the sort that went with the quiet elegance of good tweeds and sporty felt hats and a setter at one’s heels. That sort of country could easily be reached from Sydney for a week-end of leisure—and for that purpose nine out of ten of Sydney’s wealthiest women would have chosen just that sort of shoe, expensively plain, beautifully stitched, impeccably designed. It would have done things for almost any leg, and on Mattie’s it had graced the pages of the glossy magazines and adorned the hoardings at the city railway stations. Sales had soared for those shoes since Mattie had modelled them, just as they had soared also for the cute sports hat pulled down over one eye so jauntily, and the string-backed leather gloves that held the red setter’s lead, and the leaf-green suede jerkin that almost hid the young curves of Mattie’s slender body—
almost hid them, but not quite.
They were eminently suitable shoes for the type of country walks for which they were intended, but no doubt their wearers would have found it difficult to envisage the landscape that ranged above and around Mattie where she sat just now—rugged folds of hills, seared and scored by falls of shale and stone, with tufts of sparse brown grass in the gullies, and ironbarks and weary silver gums on the spurs. Up on the heights rose knots of pine in a brave thrust of darker splendour, and down in the lower slopes the giant boles of white and yellow box reached well-fed branches over the banks of the river, standing guard above their squat, verdant brothers, the basket-willows.
The homestead consisted of a number of buildings, besides the sprawling house with its flyscreen doors and gauzed verandas, brick-red iron roof, and galvanized water-tanks nestling discreetly in its angles.
There were cattle-yards and feed-stores, grain silos and a whitewashed hay-shed, and an open-ended machinery shed with rakes, tines and harrows scattered about outside it, and an impressive array of implements within. Lex Bennett was always first in the field with modern equipment. His river-valley was as fertile as the outflanking hills were barren, and Twin Rivers could grow lucerne on its lush flats, and clover, and grain too.
It wasn’t a big valley, though. The major portion of the run consisted of the steep layers of hills and scrubby outrun beyond them, where ran impressive numbers of cattle—and also sheep, now that Lex Bennett had waged a successful war on the marauding dingoes that had once been rife.
Seen from the air, the valley was like a lovely green frilly skirt around the homestead—or so Mattie had thought the only time she had flown in. Her father had had an air-strip made for the benefit of grazier friends who preferred to drop down from the heavens to see him rather than negotiate the tortuous, dusty road through the ranges. He didn’t use it much himself, since he didn’t wish to drop either in or out, but was content to drive a battered jeep about his domain, or ride his own thoroughbred over the more inaccessible places, casting a critical eye over crops and stock and windmills and fencing as he went. In any case, the landing of a plane was a tricky business in those hills, and the wind had to be in one’s favour, too.
Nick had had a plane, of course, but now that he was gone, her father hadn’t been able to bear the sight of it, and had got rid of it.
Not that it was the plane that had killed Nick, though—he had been too good a pilot for that. It had been something completely unforeseen, an insidious and utterly lethal virus pneumonia that simply failed to respond to any of the wonderful modern drugs.
Mattie clasped her hands together in a forlorn little gesture of anguish at the irony of life.
Nick, her brother—handsome, tough, a perfect physical specimen of manhood, who had survived so many daredevil exploits of youth—hadn’t had a chance against a virus so small that you didn’t know it was there. Nick had fought a brief, fierce battle against his intangible enemy—and lost.
What her father felt at his passing, Mattie could only begin to guess, for Lex maintained an outward calm and a ramrod-straight carriage throughout. He wasn’t given to the indignity of exposing his innermost feelings, but there were outward signs, all the same. His face became drawn and curiously unyielding; his iron-grey hair turned almost white; his step became slower, but somehow even more purposeful, if that could be possible in an already determined man such as he. To Mattie he had uttered not a word of consolation or commiseration. Perhaps he remembered her childhood rantings against a brother she labelled bossy, masterful and conceited by turns, and perhaps he didn’t know the true depth of her love for Nick. Unhappily, Mattie had to admit that it had taken his death to show even herself just how strong a bond there had been between brother and sister. She’d have let him boss her about, and win at everything, all over again, gladly, gladly, if only she could have had him back.
Mattie didn’t say much, not openly. She took her cue from her father, whose grief remained inarticulate. They couldn’t seem to offer each other one shred of comfort, and here again Mattie knew that somehow she had failed him. Just once, when they’d been told about Nick, she had run to Lex and put an impulsive arm about his bowed shoulders, but he had straightened immediately, shaking her off. His eyes had held a look of stunned acceptance, but they had also rejected her sympathy. She might have been a stranger whom he had never seen, rather than his daughter, his own flesh and blood.
Poor Lex! And poor Mattie! Perhaps, in a way, it was understandable that, as she came to womanhood, her very femininity irritated him, reminding him of the wife he had lost; and in that time of bereavement, it probably made the loss of his only son even more poignant and tragic.
For no one could pretend, thought Mattie, that she could ever hope to replace Nick. Just as he had been the essence of all that was strong and male, so she had grown up to be fragile and feminine, even though the fragility cloaked wiry good health and an indomitable spirit. In her tomboy days, it might have been conceivable for Lex to regard her almost as another—if much weaker—son. Now, nobody could ever suffer such a delusion.
When Mattie left Angel Hall, that peculiarly misnamed but elite place of education for girls, she was fast losing the tomboy look, and two years at Miss Mottram’s equally exclusive school of deportment and modelling had banished it for good. At that time, of course, Nick was still there, and she had made the decision to become a model in a crazy moment when she first discovered that she actually had an indefinable power over some of his impressionable friends. Yes—feeble, ethereal, hopeless Mattie could actually impose her will and wishes on the superior young masculine fraternity, and they literally bumped into each other in their attempts to please her.
It was a novel, and not unexciting, discovery, and it gave her a weapon with which to tease Nick. It didn’t really go to her head, however. She kept it up her sleeve as an ace card, only to be played in defence.
Probably Mattie had no idea of how devastating she was, or what Lex Bennett saw every time he looked at her. She possibly merely thought of herself as a reasonably satisfactory product of all that expensive education and training; the result of endless hours of ballet, fencing, practised movement and rhythm that went into her “finishing” course. What Lex really saw was a tall, impossibly slender young girl with straight, silky hair like ripened wheat; brown, smooth skin; and enormous eyes the colour of damp peat—a girl with fine bones and slim shapely limbs that reminded one of the controlled beauty of a racehorse when she walked, and the elusive grace of some weird nymph in flight when she ran, which she could do with surprising and delightful lightness. He saw in her a mystic beauty and sophistication that he could not understand, and he didn’t know how to begin to do that.
What place could there possibly be for such a daughter in his harsh, independent, manly household? They might fall over themselves down there in the city to proclaim her the most appealing and photogenic discovery for many a year, but he’d like to see what good she would be now back at Twin Rivers. She looked as though a puff of wind would blow her away, and a day in the station kitchen at 106° would finish her altogether.
As the days and months wore on, their two worlds seemed to drift farther and farther apart—hers, and Lex’s and Nick’s.
And then Nick had died. Mattie had abandoned everything to rush home to him, but he had slipped away without even recognizing her. By tacit agreement, she had remained at Twin Rivers with her father, and her flat-mate in Sydney had packed up all her beautiful dresses Mid hats and gloves and shoes and handbags, and sent them to her, at the same time putting a ‘girl to share advertisement in the Herald. And that was that.
A week later Lex had revealed to Mattie that he had been dealt another crushing blow by relentless fate—one of which he had been aware for some time, and which he would soon be forced to think about seriously.
Mattie, listening as he explained, was secretly hurt that neither he nor Nick had taken her into their confidence. After all, it was he
r home, too, where she had been born and brought up, and that surely gave her a right to know. Perhaps Nick had wanted to spare her as long as possible, but Lex probably regarded the matter as being beneath her interest now that she had carved out a successful career for herself in the city.
It appeared that Twin Rivers had come under an act of requisition as the site of a vast water-conservation scheme. From every aspect it was an inarguable choice, and Lex Bennett, intelligent and realistic as he was, recognized that while it meant literally the end of all he had striven for and built up through personal effort in his lifetime, it also meant prosperity and expansion for the water-hungry graziers farther down the reaches of the river and out on the plains beyond. One man’s benefit against hundreds. You couldn’t argue over that.
At the time, although it had been a bitter blow, Lex had squared his broad shoulders, and determined to go out with all flags flying. After all, he had Nick at his side, young and keen and promising to be as efficient as his father. There was his future to consider, too. The property was in excellent order—fencing adequate, netting in good repair, stock healthy and being carried to capacity, rabbits under control. They would get the arable land in the valley sown again before the valuation and when the time came they would go out grinning—hard though that would be!—and start somewhere else. It was a challenge, to be met as Lex Bennett had always met a challenge, whether God-made or man-made.
Only then he had had Nick. And now he hadn’t.
There was no doubt in Mattie’s mind that these two shattering blows, one after the other, had contributed to the onset of her father’s illness. Sometimes things got to be too much, even for warriors like Lex.
Watching him as he lay there, desperately ill and oblivious of her presence, she had felt an inexplicable longing to help this parent whom she scarcely knew. As he began his slow recuperation, it was obvious that the illness had taken its toll. Lex Bennett had become an old man, old and, somehow, beaten. It had needed his previous strapping physical power to call the bluff of an unkind fate. Without his health, he’d have to give in. Without Nick, too.