Joel pushed his hat so far on the back of his head that it looked like falling off, but by some miracle it didn’t.
“They don’t scare so easy, not this sort,” he said, and even Lisa coloured a little at what was obviously a compliment. She said humorously, touching her knees, “I’m not in the market for romance at the moment, Joel.”
His smile was oddly tender in his weathered, monkey face. “It’s the fresh faces, Lisa. And I mean fresh ... you pommies got skins like the petals of a rose, ain’t you? That, an’ new company—it’ll keep ’em happy till the races.”
The evening hush, broken only by the slow contented movements of the grazing horses and the incessant background orchestra of the cicadas, was suddenly banished by the loud beating of an iron bar in a triangle outside the dining-room of the quarters.
“Call to prayer. Tea time. See you.” Joel gave them a nod and began walking back up the track with his bowlegged stockman’s stride. Steve came and pushed Lisa’s chair down to the third and largest paddock where a great mob of horses grazed. A weirdly assorted collection of horses from magnificent groomed beasts to rough-coated, half-wild brumbies.
“Good lord! Do all these belong to you, Steve?” Lisa was fascinated by the spectacle. “There must be hundreds of them!”
“They’re the station horses, yes. Perhaps a couple of hundred—every man on the place has two or three mounts he chooses himself, and breaks and trains them to his own particular needs. Then we need plenty of packhorses for the mustering, when we camp out for weeks at a time.” Steve pointed out several of the finest specimens, grinning lopsidedly. “Those are being groomed for the races. Twice a year we go to town, literally—it’s a great occasion. A lot of money changes hands and a lot of beer gets drunk, and some of the boys will come back with wives.” He took the rail of Lisa’s chair again and began pushing it up the slope leading to the quarters, calling to Jamie to come for his tea. “I’ve never heard Joel handing out bouquets before,” he added whimsically, “he cultivates a reputation as a woman-hater, generally.”
Lisa laughed softly. “He’s only being kind, Steve, because a woman in a wheel chair is no danger. They’re all—terribly kind—aren’t they? Where I’ve been for the past eighteen months, in and out of hospitals, we’re very commonplace. So many road accidents,” she sighed, and caught up the sigh quickly, smiling again. “It’s nice, being given V.I.P. treatment. Thank you for having me, Steve.”
Jane stumbled over a stone on the track and Steve reached out a hand quickly to steady her. He gave her arm a small comforting pressure and said gently, “Thank you for coming, Lisa. Every man, woman, and child on the place will be glad to have you. Now we’d better get moving, Mrs. Newbery will have tea waiting for us.”
“I thought we’d had tea,” Jane said faintly, glad when Jamie ran swiftly to her side and repossessed himself of her hand. The gentleness of Steve and all the men, and Mrs. Newbery and Mrs. Mulga as well, towards Lisa made her feel both grateful and guilty. She didn’t know how she would cope with the situation if her sister really settled down happily at Blue River ... one day Steve would want to get married, they couldn’t sponge on him for long, however much money he had. A fresh wave of anger against Stewart Finch surged through her suddenly so that she gripped Jamie’s hand tighter than she realised.
“Are you scared of snakes or somethin’?” the little boy demanded, freeing his hand. He added comfortingly, “You don’t have to be. We only get the bad snakes in the mangrove swamp and the bush sometimes. ’Course, we get crocs in the wet, but not in the Blue River.”
Steve said equably, “Don’t let Jamie’s crocs keep you awake tonight, Lisa. They don’t come up the creeks until the lowlands get flooded in the wet. That’s not until after Christmas. And we have tea all day long—for the morning and afternoon smokos—any old time at all. But we call the main meal of the day supper—‘tea’.”
“Mrs. Newbery called it dinner,” Lisa said.
Steve laughed softly. “She’s gone all grand in your honour, I expect. It’ll be lace mats and the full V.I.P. treatment tonight, I’m afraid.”
“We—we’re giving her an awful lot of extra work,” Jane sounded rather unhappy. “I hope she lets me help. I’m used to doing all my own housework—and looking after guests.”
“She will. Everyone lends a hand with any chore here.” He sounded reassuring. “But wait until after the races before you get yourself a full working schedule, Jane. This week and next is a sort of general holiday, isn’t it, Jamie?”
“’Course it is!” Jamie ran up the track with one of the dogs and back, because it was difficult for him to do anything at a dawdling pace. Ahead of them the lights from the quarters twinkled through the belt of gums. “It’s always a holiday when the boys get back from taking the last mob to the railhead at the Curry,” he explained patiently, in a grown-up way, “that’s why they have the races now. Will Jane and Lisa come with us, Uncle Steve?”
“I hope so. It’s a chance to meet our neighbours, and people from all over,” Steve sounded perfectly normal as if he was looking forward to introducing his future bride and her sister to all and sundry. Jane was glad of the darkness that surely hid the irony in his eyes. “It’s a social occasion and we don’t get so many of those. A real holiday. The boys deserve a break, they’ve been mustering three big mobs this season.”
“I should’ve thought you’d had your holiday, in England and the Argentine, Steve?” Lisa said mischievously, and Jane felt nervous and miserable again.
Luckily Jamie had run far enough to be out of earshot, playing a game in the light from the buildings with the red setter, Rufus. Rob the collie had done his day’s work and paced sedately beside his master.
“Do you know,” Steve answered, and this time there was definitely laughter in his deep voice, “all that already seems a long time ago? I feel ready for another holiday.”
CHAPTER SIX
JANE woke while it was still dark and lay for some time in the warm, dusky, scented stillness, thinking over the fantastic situation in which she found herself.
She had been badly bitten by mosquitoes when she’d been sitting in the bush yesterday, and now she reached her hand under the mosquito-netting for the bottle of lotion Nubby had given her last night, and sat up in bed dabbing her neck and arms. It was funny, considering Lisa’s fairness and delicate skin, but her younger sister had not been bitten at all.
“’Skeeters usually go for new chums,” Joel had grinned when he came up to the homestead for supper, stopping to have a word with Mrs. Newbery and the girls before disappearing into the office with Steve for an hour.
Steve had apologised for his absence, explaining that there was a good deal of bookkeeping and office work to be got through after the final muster.
“The boys want their wages to blow at the races,” Joel added. “We have to work out what’s owin’ to them—less goods they’ve chalked up at the store, and mail-order stuff we’ve sent cheques for.”
When the girls were helping Nubby with the washing-up, in spite of her protests—and she was surprised and pleased to see how mobile Lisa was in her small, light wheel chair—Lisa had admired the bright, airy yellow-and-white kitchen with its fume-extractor and all the other electrical gadgets. She had laughed at the size of the refrigerators and Nubby had shown her the huge deep-freeze in the cave-like larder built into the hillside behind the house, and above the trickling stream that went down to join the Blue River.
“In the old days, before we had the electric plant, that was the only way we could keep food from going bad overnight,” Mrs. Newbery explained. “That’s an underground stream and it never runs dry, and the rocks above keep the cool in.” She patted the gleaming white flank of the deep-freeze, smiling at Lisa’s wide eyed interest. “Whin ye’ve a whole sheep and a couple of sides of beef tae keep guid for two or three days, ye need big freezers.”
“Do they eat that much meat in two or three days?” Lisa laughingly de
manded.
“Aye. Times, I wonder how Mrs. Forrest managed without the electricity. Those days, we used to cook up here for all the hands, and one of the gins would carry it doon tae the dining-room. We’ve only had the electricity for twenty years or so.”
Lisa laughed again. “You’re way ahead of us at that! In Lilac Cottage we still have—we had only oil lamps! Imagine Jane cooking for about eight people in a smoky old kitchen with oak beams, on a Rayburn that doesn’t work properly in a south-west wind. We’ve only had the mains water for about two years,” she grimaced, looking down at her slender hands. “When I was home for the holidays I used to have to pump up the water for the kitchen tank—a little hand-pump from the well. And the Lucy down the bottom of the garden—lovely on freezing winter mornings!”
It was Nubby’s turn to laugh. “In Lochiemuir when I was a bairn we had only a hut and ben. Twa rooms, ye ken. And what ye call the Lucy was a bucket-stool my dad had to empty and dig in the ground.” She sighed, helping to push Lisa back to the kitchen. “Och, aye, we moan about all that now, but we managed.” She glanced round and gathered up the tea-towels they had been using, while the girls put the crockery away in the glass-fronted cupboards. “Mrs. Forrest managed fine. She was a grand wee body and a guid manager. We had no radio, of course, but she was always singing about the place. We made our own fun in those days, I suppose. I’m only sorry she died before she could see all this.” She washed out the tea-towels briskly, rinsed them and hung them on the rack above the sink. “They’ll be dry in time for late tea.”
Lisa pulled a face at Jane behind the housekeeper’s back, “Oh, Nubby—not another tea?”
“We have a cup before we turn in,” Nubby was amused by the dismay in Lisa’s voice, “I guess we’ve built Australia on tea! The billabong—the water hole where everyone stops to make camp—isn’t only a joke in a funny song.” She glanced out of the side window as they returned to the living-room, into the velvet darkness that stretched away into the vast Blue River Plain. “Mains water!” she said, half-laughing. “If you knew how important water is when you might have to go fifty or a hundred miles for it, my dear, you wouldna think it a hardship tae pump it up frae a well in your back garden!”
“Anyway, I’m jolly glad to be out of it all,” Lisa said frankly, “the oil-lamps, the smoky old Rayburn, the picture-postcard thatched cottages. Sixteenth century relics for the summer tourists to photograph—you can have the lot, Nubby!”
It hurt Jane to hear Lisa talk about their home like that. True, she had not spent much time at home since she left school, but they had had a happy childhood in Lilac Cottage.
She said defensively, “It’s a good Rayburn, and the cottage has stood up to four hundred winters—rain and gales and snow—it’s more than something for the tourists to photograph, Lisa,” and there had been a gleam of sympathy in Nubby’s eyes.
“We get tourists here, too—sometimes. Newspaper men, mostly. Sometimes Americans looking for oil. They spend three or four weeks going from station to station—all the big showplaces like the Blue River, ye ken—then they fly home and write a book about the Outback—with a lot of photographs. Sometimes it’s a piece in the newspapers or magazines, or bits for the Government Tourist Bureau booklets.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Lisa looked up from her crochet—she was making herself a tabard—her well shaped eyebrows lifting. “Don’t you like a bit of free publicity?”
Nubby, who was showing Jane a hand-drawn map of the property, shook her head tolerantly. “Steve doesna like pictures of himself and the Blue River in the papers, and the books are fu’ of mistakes. Ye canna know a place like this in a few weeks, my dear. It takes a lifetime—and then ye only know a wee bit aboot your own territory.”
Lisa grinned. “If I had a private plane, I’d fly from place to place. I’d see everything! Joel says you either love this country or hate it. That sounds like the moor to me—Dartmoor—I was born there, Nubby, but I hate it.”
The housekeeper threw another speculative glance at the girl making her sky-blue tabard that matched her eyes. “Mebbe it’s a mite slow for a girl interested in acting and dancing and all that,” she said deliberately, “but when ye get older ye’ll want tae return. No one hates their homeplace, Lisa.”
“I do.” Lisa flicked her cigarette-lighter and puffed a smoke ring towards the white-painted wooden ceiling. “Even now, when there’s no question of working in the studios,” she added with her first hint of bitterness, “more than ever, now. I escaped once, you see.”
There was a small awkward silence. Jane thought of the sacrifices her parents had made to send Lisa to London to the drama school, the hours her mother had spent playing the piano in the cottage for Lisa to practise during her vacations, the warm encouragement as her talent became apparent. For a moment she felt impatient with Lisa’s enormous preoccupation with herself. Then the girl’s wool rolled across the floor and she could not retrieve it.
As Jane picked it up, quickly, almost automatically, her brief impatience vanished. Sick people, crippled people, were inevitably engrossed in themselves; and Lisa had been on the very verge of success when the accident had snatched it and their mother’s loving encouragement from her.
“Do you ever feel homesick, Mrs. Newbery?” she asked.
“Oh, call her Nubby. It’s nice and warm and cuddly, and she doesn’t mind—do you, Nubby?” Lisa was smiling again, and the brief awkwardness was like a small cloud passing across the summer landscape.
“No, I don’t mind. Steve gave me the name when he was a bairn.” Nubby’s smile was for Jane this time. She understood very well the moods of children, and in her eyes Lisa was a child still, whatever her birth certificate said. “No, Jane, I don’t feel homesick, though I’ve been home several times—I’m one of the lucky ones. This is my real home now.”
“Tum-te-tumpy-tum-tum.” The familiar little tune brought Jane out of bed and away from her thoughts of yesterday. It came from the buzzer over the door, which Lisa could sound by pressing a button near her bed. Denny, the station electrician, had fixed it up while they went for their walk yesterday afternoon.
“Nothin’,” he said modestly, when Lisa and Jane found him stapling up the connecting wire and praised his ingenuity. “Steve thought it’d save Lisa yellin’ her head off when she needs a bit of help.”
It had been a kind thought, Jane realised as she hurried to her sister’s room. She hoped all the excitement had not brought on one of Lisa’s depressions, when she was moody and irritable and not able to see any hope for her own future. But Lisa was sitting up in bed riffling through one of the magazines they had bought at the airport, and looking quite cheerful still.
“Sorry if I woke you, sweetie, but I have a feeling we’ll be offered a cup of tea any moment now—and I’d like to have my massage and a bath. Can do?”
“Of course. How did you sleep?” Jane folded the mosquito-net back on its hooks and began the familiar passive exercise movements that prevented the leg muscles atrophying from disuse. She was pleased to see Lisa’s legs looking in good condition in spite of the heat, which was evident though the sun was not yet risen.
“I love it!” Lisa stretched her arms wide, yawning. “I think maybe I belong to the tropics, Jan. I used to love the heat from the studio lights when everyone else was flopping. And all those lovely men! I’m a vain shallow little beast, but do you know it’s one of the things I’ve missed terribly in hospital?”
“What is?” Jane was preoccupied with her massaging movements. “Men? You were surrounded by doctors and students whenever I visited you.”
“That look of admiration was missing,” Lisa said drily, “the sort of lighting-up torchy look, Jan. The doctors were only interested in me as a case. Even though I’m in a wheel chair these men look at me as if I’m a person.”
Jane laughed involuntarily. “Don’t raise their hopes too high. Some of them are starved for female company, I gather.”
“An
d I gather they’ll get a feast at the races, don’t worry. Don’t be such a sobersides, Janie. It’s just a nice kind of feeling, with no strings attached.”
Mrs. Newbery knocked and came in with a tray of tea. “I saw the light under your door—I hope nothing’s amiss? I was making myself a cup of tea, so—”
“Darling Nubby! I think I must have heard the teacups rattling or something. Gosh! This tea is nice.”
“We get it direct from Ceylon. Mr. Forrest was friendly with a planter there. They still send us a chest twice a year from the Nilgari estate.”
“Mm—it tastes like golden velvet. Lord! What on earth’s that noise?” Lisa listened to the distant booming sound that had a rhythm like a conch-shell held close to the ear and a minor key. Her hand beat in time to the rhythm. “It’s odd but rather lovely,” she waved Jane towards her cup of tea on the bedside table and humped herself up in bed, staring crossly at her bare shapely legs. “I could dance to that if you weren’t so damned useless!”
Nubby smiled involuntarily. “Your legs look healthy enough, my dear. Mebbe one day you will dance again. Yon’s the Abos playing the didgeridoo ... it’s a long hollow sort of wooden pipe. They’re celebrating your arrival.”
Lisa’s eyes were dreamy as she listened intently. “It’s marvellous! Do they dance to it?”
“Aye, they dance. When they have a corroborree—that’s a kind of party, ye ken. But it’s no the sort of dancing ye would be used to, Lisa. And they don’t take kindly to us coming to watch ... Steve reckons they’re entitled to their privacy in the camp, same as ourselves in the homestead.”
“Do you always do exactly as your lord and master decrees?” the girl demanded laughingly, glancing at Jane mischievously. “I think you spoil him, Nubby.” The housekeeper shook her head and answered quietly, “Mr. Forrest—David Forrest, Steve’s father—had a way with the natives. So did his father, Andrew. Steve’s a good grazier, and bad times or good times, this property is trouble-free. A big property in the Outback needs a master, Lisa—one who knows what he is doing, with whites or blacks, and with the animals too. It would be foolish to go against Steve in anything to do with the running of the Blue River.”
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