by Amanda Doyle
“No, never, although it can be very sluggish in a dry season. Our worst problem in the homestead block is erosion, as you’ve probably gathered. The land is so steep in places, and in heavy rains the water gushes down and takes a lot of the top soil with it.
“Yes, it’s steep. There must be a considerable drop in levels by the time it reaches the Cockatoo Plains area. One would have to survey it to ascertain the precise margin.” Gib looked thoughtful. “It’s interesting country, full of contrast. I’ve seen dams sited on similar locations in the States.”
Mattie’s fingers stopped crumbling her bread.
Dams? What could this man know of dams? Had he heard about the proposed water conservation scheme here? No, he couldn’t have, because it was at present confidential, and likely to remain so, until the survey was carried out. There would be no hiding it then, but meanwhile Lex had kept quiet, because it was possible that if the men had an inkling of the probable fate of Twin Rivers, they would lose heart. They might even leave. No, Gib couldn’t have heard, even in spells of yarning along the road. He couldn’t know, unless—unless—? No. If he had been an advance member of the survey party, he’d have said. Wouldn’t he?
Mattie had a surreptitious peep at him. His expression was innocent enough, but that didn’t mean much. Suppose he had been sent to—to snoop, perhaps to find out how strong was Lex Bennett’s bargaining power, and what kind of compensation he had in mind. She did not know much about such things, but she had read of the legal battles that could ensue when the parties concerned could not reach agreement. Did they ever send someone to sound the situation out first? she wondered. She wouldn’t risk telling him, just in case.
“Why were you looking at dams in the States?” Mattie now inquired with what she hoped seemed like artless interest.
Gib raised a sardonic eyebrow.
“I once took a degree—believe it or not—in engineering. The construction angle has always interested me ever since, and the water angle even more, particularly as an inhabitant of this rain-hungry continent.”
Mattie said, “Oh, I see,” very discreetly, but her thoughts were racing ahead.
A degree? Well, that didn’t really surprise here. He had obviously been well educated. What could have happened, then? Had he been “sent down” in disgrace? No, for he’d said he took his degree as though it were an accomplished fact. Had he had brainstorms from overwork, so, that he threw in his lot and “went bush?” No, definitely not that. He wasn’t the type to have brainstorms—too cool and level-headed and confident.
Aunt Allie was saying brightly,
“Rain-hungry is the word, Gib! And right now we’re hungry for it. The one thing is that, when it rains in these hills, it really knows how. And then they can get on with the ploughing—if the tractors don’t bog. Why, I’ve seen the mailman have to wait three weeks to get out past Moxton’s through the mud!”
Mattie scarcely listened. She was thinking that the field was narrowing, although there were still a good few possibilities left. Crime, for instance. Fraud. Debts. Women. And they could mean anything from a broken engagement, a jilting, a sordid love affair, an unhappy marriage, to bigamy, even. And that made the field as long and broad as ever, all over again.
Mattie looked at Gib speculatively.
Why, she wondered, had her father made that remark about women in relation to Gib? Had he actually said something to her father, made some jaded comment? Did he look jaded?
Mattie studied his face with interest.
No, she couldn’t honestly say he did look jaded. He looked the teeniest bit cynical, perhaps—and sort of experienced, but by the time a man reached his thirties he was bound to be experienced, so one could expect it to show in his face to some extent. And right now he looked tired but polite, and attentive to Aunt Allie, and a bit pale because his leg must be hurting, and—“Is it a smut on my nose, or has my beard grown again?”
“What? Oh—er—I do beg your pardon,” Mattie mumbled. “Did you speak?”
Gib shook his head.
“No, I didn’t, and neither did you. You stared, I was beginning to wonder if I’d sprouted horns or two heads, or was I breathing out tongues of flame.” There was a humorous quirk to his mouth, but his eyes were strangely gentle.
“I’m sorry,” Mattie said again, inadequately. “I was miles away.”
Her face was plum-coloured. Why hadn’t Miss Mottram’s curriculum included a preventative for blushing?
She rose and began to gather the plates feverishly.
Gib stood up, too, and Aunt Allie went off to bring Lex’s tray.
At the sink Mattie remembered what her father had said about clothes for Gib. She would have to offer, however unwilling she was, but she would have to get him alone first. There was the possibility that the man might be offended, and she did not want to be tactless in front of Aunt Allie.
She could hear Aunt Allie’s steps coming back again.
“May I see you later for a moment?” she asked Gib softly. “Alone? It’s something personal.”
The mobile brow lifted again.
“Of course,” he agreed. “Come to the office when you’re ready. I’ll wait there.”
He was studying the maps on the wall when Mattie entered, but when he saw her standing there, he rolled them up, and held a chair for her—just as though he were the host, and it was his office, reflected Mattie helplessly.
He was that sort of man. Wherever he went, he would take the initiative.
He now took a seat opposite her, and produced tobacco and papers from his pocket.
“You wanted—?”
“I just wanted to ask you if—if you need anything in the way of clothes?” Mattie kept her eyes on the now familiar routine of cigarette-rolling that was going on. “Now that you aren’t—er—waltzing Matilda any more, you might discover yourself short on that count, and I think I could find some things lying around that would do a turn, just to work in, you know.” She tried hard to sound casual.
“Some of your brother’s things?”
Mattie nodded, surprised.
“Thank you, Mattie. Your father did mention it, but it won’t be necessary.” Gib licked down his cigarette with care before lifting his head to look directly into her eyes. “I was sorry to hear about your brother Nick,” he told her quietly. “Men like him aren’t easily spared in this young country, with so much left to pioneer and develop.” He sighed. “It’s often the good ones that go, Mattie—the worthwhile ones—in peacetime as well as in war.”
Mattie felt a hot pricking behind her eyes. That was a generous remark, considering the station of the man who had made it. She wished she knew just what had turned him into a wanderer, a tramp, when there were qualities about him that she had already discerned and was beginning, reluctantly, to admire. If he had made the effort, this man could have been one of the kind the country couldn’t spare, too, like Nick. He had the intelligence, the drive and dynamism, and the way he had handled that situation this morning out at the yards showed that he had judgment as well. The men had staged that setup with Suvio, not only to gratify their love of a gamble, but because they had wanted to put Gib through a sort of test. They had wanted to see what sort of man they were dealing with, and now they knew. Unwilling admiration had crept into their eyes, just as it had into Mattie’s. Yet here was the undeniable fact that he was content with the open skies as the only roof over his head, the shifting backdrop of mountain and plain as the only walls that confided him.
Mattie found herself wishing wistfully that he could be different. She wasn’t sure why she felt like that. Perhaps it was because of this magnetism between them, a pull that she found frightening and whose existence she was almost scared to acknowledge even to herself. Perhaps it was because, just now, she had found comfort in the quiet sincerity of his bluntly spoken words when he had referred to Nick. You had the feeling that he really meant and believed what he had said. His unassuming statement demanded that one accept it as
a fact, not merely as a polite attempt at shallow consolation for the loss of a man he had not known.
Smoke wafted past her, and Mattie blinked again.
“You don’t need anything, then, Gib? A jacket, maybe?”
“I’ll do, thanks, Mattie. Actually, I intend to send off for a few things of my own. I do have a base camp, you know,” he added, grinning at her a little teasingly.
Mattie smiled at him. In that moment, she liked him and, oddly, felt grateful to him.
Gib gave her a swift, shrewd glance. Then he took the cigarette from his lips and held it up in front of him, turning it in his fingers, studying it.
“Mattie,” he said carefully, “you mustn’t mind your father doing what he did. It doesn’t mean that he feels any less deeply about Nick than you do, or that he’s pushed his memory into a little drawer marked “past history”, or anything like that. Men view things from a different angle from women sometimes, you know. They see matters objectively, and that means they can divorce emotion and sentiment from the practical demands of day-to-day necessities. Their feelings on these matters are just as sincere, but they somehow manage to keep them separate, while they get on with the business of earning the daily bread for those who depend on them. That’s the way men’s minds function—especially men like your father. He’s down-to-earth and forward-looking, not prepared to be beaten even when the blows come heavy and the knocks get nasty. If he wasn’t like that, he wouldn’t have got where he is today in the pastoral industry. As far as he was concerned, in this instance, it was merely a case of supplying an essential need in a practical way, and it would never occur to him that you—a woman—might arrive at a wrong interpretation for his action somewhere along the way. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Mattie?”
Gib’s eyes held hers, steady and insistent.
Mattie nodded.
“Yes, thank you, Gib. I think I do understand a bit better now that you’ve explained it.” Her lips trembled. “It—it’s just that he’s never said anything, never spoken to me about Nick. He’s never mentioned him to me since the day he died.”
Gib’s cigarette went on burning away between his fingers.
“Well, there it is again, Mattie, this business of the male of the species and his queer ways. A lot of men do what your father has done. They’re inarticulate. They tuck the hurt away where it can’t be seen, and they take comfort in action. They get back into harness, and they go at things like they never did before. In pursuing their material ambitions they ease their physical hurt, and they drive themselves relentlessly for just that reason. That’s what your father did, but he drove himself just that little bit too hard. He over did it. Do you see?”
Mattie’s eyes were wide and thoughtful. In fact, she thought about it all for quite a while before she replied while Gib smoked in silence.
At last she spoke. “Yes, I do see now, Gib, much better that I did. I’ve wondered about it all so often, but I never thought about it from that angle. It’s funny, but until you put it into words, I couldn’t see it. Poor father! I’ve been living with him all these months since we lost Nick, and I didn’t understand him at all.” She sighed. “I didn’t realize before that men take such a different view, but I can see that you’re right. They’re tough, aren’t they—and hard, and self-sufficient? They don’t need anybody.”
Gib gave her a sharp glance.
“Of course they need someone, Mattie,” he contradicted her with a touch of asperity. “You’re far too young to be cynical. Maybe you’ve had an overdose of adulation down there in Sydney, from the type of men who plough in and out of shallow relationships so often that their need of a woman means only one thing. Men—strong men of your father’s calibre—depend more upon their womenfolk than you may guess. They draw on them for courage and inspiration and moral support. Your father will have been a lonely man for a good number of years, and that first time, when he needed help, you were too little to give it. This time, you did right to remain at home here. You can take it from me, your very presence will have been a comfort to your father, whether he would admit that or not.”
Mattie’s mouth had a small, bitter twist to it. How she would have liked to believe Gib!
“I’m glad I stayed, in that case,” she heard herself saying shakily. “And I’m glad, too, to think Father will have Aunt Allie from now on. They’re going to get married, you know, once Father’s better.”
Mattie met Gib’s surprised gaze with outward calm. “Are they indeed. How long have you known that, Mattie?”
“Aunt Allie told me last night.”
“I see.” Gib sounded as if he saw a whole lot more than she would like him to. She was glad for her father, really she was, and she hoped that was how she had sounded.
“And what will you do then, Mattie?”
She gave a stiff, gay little smile, and her brittle voice answered him.
“I’ll go back to the city, of course, for some more adulation and shallow relationships—very gratifying to one’s vanity, even if they don’t mean a thing. They’re fun and they’re superficial and they’re undemanding. After all, men don’t take out lovely young models because they want to depend on them, do they? They don’t regard them as a helpmeet, to draw their courage and inspiration and moral support from. They don’t stay more than a week or two, anyway, but when they go, there’s always another one—fatter and older, and much, much richer—all wanting to take out the lovely young Roselle.” She giggled, on a high false note. “That’s me, Gib. That’s my professional name—Roselle. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of her, but she’s the toast of Sydney, really. And all because she has long legs and yellow hair and high cheekbones that catch the camera. The men all come running, one after the other, old and young and fair and forty—all with lots and lots of money and yachts and beach-houses and racing cars. And do you know this, Gib? They all of them want Roselle—but nobody needs her. They just want her because—”
“Shut up, Mattie!” Gib’s thundered command took her in mid-sentence.
“Because—”
Her wrists were grasped in a painful hold and she was jerked out of her chair. Still Gib held her. They stood there, face to face, inches apart, and his grey eyes blazed down at her furiously.
“Stop it, Mattie, do you hear? I won’t have you talking like that!” he rapped out sternly.
“They want her, but they don’t need her,” whispered Mattie forlornly.
“I said shut up.” Gib drew her gently against him, and suddenly Mattie was crying, right there into his shirt. She cried as she hadn’t cried since she was a small child with skinned knees, and while she cried Gib’s hands came up and pressed her head against him, and his deep voice murmured little soothing phrases that were kind and reassuring. And when she had finished crying, he put a big clean handkerchief into her hand, and she stepped back and saw that there was a large, wet patch on his white shirt.
Mattie blew her nose and wiped her eyes, and then she said something that would have made Miss Mottram proud of her training.
“I do beg your pardon,” she said politely. “I’ve cried all over you, and I don’t even know your other name.”
And then she realized how ridiculous that sounded, and she started to laugh and Gib joined in, and the tension went out of the air.
“What is it, anyway?”
“What is what?”
“Your name?”
“Fortune.”
“Fortune?” Mattie echoed suspiciously. “Is that your real surname?”
“No it’s not my real surname, Miss Curious,” he admitted mildly, “but one may adopt any name one chooses, provided that there’s no fraudulent intent The choice is symbolic—a stroke of good fortune that I happened to be passing this way at the right time to help your father out of a fix.”
Mattie had to be content with that. Good manners prevented her from questioning him about it, and in any case, his face now had a closed, unreadable expression, and his voice w
as impersonal.
As she climbed into bed, Mattie was somehow relieved that his name had been changed without fraudulent intent. That meant he wasn’t a criminal. Sleepily, Mattie realized that she was very glad he wasn’t a criminal. Without crime, the field was narrowed down to women again. Hazily, Mattie admitted that that possibility hurt even more than crime. It really did! She was still trying to puzzle out the reason why it should, when she fell asleep.
Mattie woke early. She had slept well, and today she felt different, somehow. It was as if last night’s tears had washed away some of her loneliness and doubt and eased the grief she had been nursing in silence for so many months. She did not even harbour a pang of embarrassment when she remembered Gib, today, as she had thought she might. He had been so kind, yet so impersonal, as if he were used to dealing with situations like that. Perhaps it was because she knew he was a sundowner—here today and gone tomorrow—that she had not minded him seeing through her defences in the uncanny way he had. He would never tell anyone about her moment of weakness, because he didn’t know anyone that she knew, and he wouldn’t be going anywhere that she went. He would be going away before long, down the dusty road and over the hill, and he would forget all about it.
Mattie got out of bed, and padded along in mules to have, her shower. Then she put on an emerald cotton sun-dress and thrust her bare brown feet into rope-soled sandals. She slung a white cardigan over her shoulders because it was late in the summer now, and this morning it was pleasantly cool, although by noon it would probably be as hot as ever. Today there was a breeze that stirred the leaves on the apple-gums near the house, and blew wheaten strands of hair across her cheeks as she walked over to the power-house to start the engine that provided electricity.