Stone Country

by Nicole Alexander

  ‘I want you to have what was left to you, Darcey. That was my father’s wish. However I would like Waybell and the stipend. I’m living on that at the moment.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Her voice was tentative, wary.

  ‘Yes.’ Ross thought of how comfortable the hammock looked. It was nestled in a corner, free of the worst of the day’s heat but angled so that there would be a fine view of the night sky through the branches. ‘Were you upset about Alastair? My father declaring him dead?’

  ‘I imagine you found it difficult to hear,’ replied Darcey.

  Ross was aware that she hadn’t answered the question. ‘And did you find it difficult?’ he asked again.

  ‘I was sad, of course. But his disappearance was so long ago. Alastair is dead to me in so many ways and he has been for years.’ There was a catch in Darcey’s voice, as if she was struggling with something unsaid. ‘You’ve always been judgemental of me, Ross, as if I were the cause of many of your problems. And yet, in the beginning it was Alastair who betrayed us both and still you let his ghost hover about you. This man who changed our lives forever. Let him go.’

  Once, when he was young, three older children had chased Ross home. Alastair and he had been calling out names to some troublemaking town boys who’d taken offence and given chase. The brothers had become separated as they ran away, and the boys caught up with Ross. They’d circled him and prodded him, until, growing braver, they began to shove him back and forth. Ross had been terrified. At that moment, Alastair had charged into the group, yelling and screaming. One of the boys had been knocked over in the attack and Alastair managed a punch that stunned another. He told Ross to run and he did, sprinting the rest of the way home. Alastair returned a little later, nose bloody and clothes torn. Ross was six years of age. Alastair ten. A boy rarely forgot something like that. A brother, never.

  ‘Are you all right, Ross?’

  ‘Yes.’ There was another question that needed to be asked. One that had been with Ross since Darcey’s visit to the hospital. If she answered the way Ross believed that she would, he wasn’t at all sure what it would mean to him or for them.

  ‘Did you stay here all these years because you loved me?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ She hadn’t even paused.

  What had he expected? He was a fool.

  Darcey came to his side. ‘You never let me. You might have come back, Ross, but I don’t think you intended to.’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ he admitted.

  ‘After you left, I decided not to go back to Adelaide. I couldn’t, really, after everything that had happened, and there were opportunities here. I have a good life. I work at an orphanage during the week and in the maternity section of the hospital on the weekends.’

  ‘Oh.’ What had he expected? That she’d be unable to go on with her life in any meaningful way after he’d deserted her? He was embarrassed by his assumptions and it struck him that he’d not known her at all. How could he have, until this moment?

  ‘I’m sorry if you thought otherwise,’ she said.

  ‘I’m pleased for you,’ he replied, not knowing what else to say.

  Darcey bent over to tuck a straggly branch of a potted plant within its clumpy interior. This wasn’t a woman who waited and pined. Darcey Grant expected a partner to be equal in intelligence and ability and wasn’t prepared to settle for second-best. This was a woman who set her mind to a problem like chisel to wood and worked at the challenge until the result was fashioned in her favour. He should have seen that. Why hadn’t he seen that? Especially knowing what she was like when they first met.

  Her rejection stung, and Ross wanted to leave but he was incapable of sitting on the horse for the return journey and he refused to ask for help. A message to Connor, and the Scotsman would have appeared with a dray to cart him away like the invalid he was, but the idea of needing assistance and Darcey witnessing his utter uselessness was not something he could bear. Not now. So he stayed on, hoping that with rest he might be able to leave of his own accord.

  The clouds finally cleared, and they spent the remainder of the day sitting in the garden. Ross read the newspaper as Darcey painted. He fell asleep often and woke to see her framed by the vibrant mauve of a flowering turkey bush. She’d set up her easel in the shade and was trying to capture the waterlilies on the Waybell billabong, a piece she’d apparently been working on for some time. There was something about the light that she couldn’t capture, Darcey told him, and the work had become something of a preoccupation in a life that revolved around homeless children and the birthing of babies. Ross dared not to tell her to leave the painting alone, that every time she added another hue she took a little majesty out of a scene that to him seemed already perfect.

  She’d arrived in Darwin three months after Ross left her at Waybell. Connor helped select the house and found a young girl to help with chores, but the garden Darcey tended to herself, and her interest in plants was evident. There were myriad sketches of the kapok bush in the folio she showed Ross, the delicate flowers patched with vibrant yellow, and other specimens familiar to Ross that Darcey had labelled with great detail. She was happy to do the talking while she painted and Ross was thankful that not much conversation was expected of him. If she’d wanted to know of his travels Ross wasn’t sure he would have been able to explain the years of absence. He guessed that Darcey, as a female, would be interested in a pretty description or witty tale. However there was nothing remotely appropriate he could think of sharing. His self-imposed exile was a plodding, unnavigable course almost leading to extinction.

  As the afternoon lengthened, the trip back to Mrs Guild’s was not mentioned. Ross knew the impossibility that riding presented. It would be daylight before his body could be forced into movement again. The hammock was the only bed he considered. Darcey left to buy some food, and his gaze fell upon Mr Maitland’s nubby binder left on the table. Carrying the contents of the folder to the light, he slanted the pages and then reached for the spectacles stored safely in his buttoned shirt pocket. His eyes strained through the magnification as letters and then words began to take shape. The full extent of his father’s life was summed up in neat rows and columns, a series of holdings represented by names and acreage and current values. Nowhere did the document mention the personal cost exerted on the man and his family from the accumulation of his fortune. Nor could the tally of assets ever reveal the father Ross knew. But Morgan Grant had accomplished far more than he. Ross had built nothing, created no empire from the dirt, governed no family home, or a family, for that matter. He’d not even managed an heir.

  He’d been on few outings with his father as a child. Trips included a day’s fishing and horserides when he and his brother still wore short pants, but there was no significant time spent together that Ross could recall. No experience that bonded them. That made them separate but whole. Possibly there wasn’t meant to be that type of connection between a father and son, or if there was, perhaps the complex start to his early life ruined any chance of a relationship like that. Ross believed, though, that Alastair had enjoyed what had been unobtainable to him, and a niggling theory made him explore the chance that he and his father were rather alike and that was the reason they’d never got on.

  Ross stretched out his fingers and then, manipulating each stiffened knuckle, formed a series of fists. The pen felt unfamiliar in his grasp, and the length of time since he’d last written anything was beyond remembering. The ink left a blot as Ross pressed the nib to the document and scratched out his initials. Leaving the greater part of the fortune to Darcey lessened the wrongdoing on his part. Then he closed the folder on a better man’s life.

  Darcey returned with bread and fresh oysters, which she insisted she was quite capable of shucking. She prised the lip of the mollusc open by inserting a pearl-handled knife at the hinge between the two valves, twisted the blade and then slid the knife upwards. The oyster revealed its fleshy insides. Ross tried to do the same, but nicked his palm in
the process.

  ‘Too hard,’ chastised Darcey. ‘You must be gentle and firm,’ she explained. Moving the kerosene lamp closer, she demonstrated the process. The shell parted and she shook Worcestershire sauce onto the oyster and then, lifting her chin, tipped the soft shellfish into her mouth, licking her fingers free of the juice.

  ‘What?’ she asked, noticing his interest.

  ‘It seems years since I’ve seen a woman eat,’ he replied. ‘A woman like you.’

  Darcey selected another oyster, opened it and passed it across the table to him. ‘I never thought you’d be without admirers, Ross.’

  He swallowed the shellfish. ‘And you, have there been others in your life, Darcey?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t look so shocked. Why is it that the things men consider to be their right are frowned on when a woman partakes?’

  Unsure how to reply, Ross began pulling the bread apart.

  ‘Let me.’ Darcey reached across, cutting the loaf into slices. ‘And there is a napkin. For when you finish eating.’

  Ross glanced at the neatly folded triangle. ‘You place it on your lap, Ross. Remember?’ she asked.

  He fingered the material. ‘I should apologise to you.’

  ‘Not if you don’t mean it.’ She poured herself some water, then tipped a dash of something from a small bottle into the glass.

  ‘What is that?’ asked Ross. ‘I remember you took a powder when you first came to Waybell.’

  ‘Laudanum, to calm my nerves. You don’t really believe that a woman could do what I did without some assistance, do you? I’m not that brazen.’

  ‘And you still take it?’ questioned Ross.

  ‘Why not?’ she said. ‘None of us is perfect.’

  When the meal was over, Darcey gathered the dishes. Ross listened to her footsteps as she padded through the house overhead. In the garden he relieved himself in the bushes and then, placing his backside in the hammock, lifted one leg followed by the other until he could lay down.

  ‘I wondered where you’d gone,’ said Darcey, coming to him. ‘Can I get you anything?’

  ‘Nothing. Do you mind?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not. I could bring a mattress down if you prefer,’ she offered.

  ‘This will be fine. I suppose Connor told you that my progress has been steady.’

  ‘I knew when you arrived at the hospital that if you did survive it would be a long recovery.’

  ‘You were there that day?’ asked Ross.

  ‘No. Connor told me he’d brought you back and that the doctor wasn’t hopeful. I only visited that one time, in the garden. You sent me away, if you recall, and told the nursing staff you didn’t want any visitors.’

  ‘I wasn’t ready,’ conceded Ross.

  ‘Neither was I. I came out of curiosity and for the simple fact that, after all these years, we are still married.’

  ‘Yes, there’s that,’ said Ross.

  ‘I also went for your family’s sake. They were and continue to be, through their legacy, very kind to me. Your mother’s nurse writes to me occasionally. If you visited her now, Ross, it would be doubtful she would recognise you. Her mind has slipped.’

  ‘That happened a long time ago.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she told him.

  ‘I know.’

  Darcey touched his arm. ‘No, really. It’s not your fault. Any of that.’

  There was no moon, and the deep blackness made the stars distinct. Once, on a strip of sand near a river he’d sat and talked to two old blackfellas. They told Ross that the celestial bodies he knew as the Magellan Clouds were the campfires of the dead. He’d lifted a finger, pointing out the galaxies that appeared to have broken away from the band of light that was the Milky Way, and they in turn roused at Ross for his whitefella stupidity. Everyone knew that if you raised a finger in their direction, the dead would curse you and bring down all manner of troubles. Ross thought of his family, saw them sitting around one of those campfires, shifting through the ashes of his life. He would always wonder what they thought of their younger son. They’d been far kinder to Darcey than he ever had.

  ‘What will happen now?’ asked Darcey. ‘What will you do?’

  She deserved an ending and a new beginning, and the Grant money offered his wife many options. Ross hoped she understood that.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘But I’d like to come back here to visit you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I want to. I didn’t expect to say that,’ he confessed.

  ‘And I didn’t expect to hear it.’

  ‘Is that a yes?’ he asked.

  The darkness hid her hesitation but it was there in the growing silence. ‘As you’ve just given me the larger part of your fortune, yes.’

  Chapter 55

  Ross visited Darcey regularly. As his body grew sturdier and the return trip to the widow’s house became less of a struggle, he stopped staying the night. It was not for the want of enjoying Darcey’s company but rather concern at his own expectation of what might be possible in the future, when he could only live by the hour and the day. It was impossible to know if Darcey was pleased or disappointed by these impromptu visits, for she never varied in her welcome. There was always good food to share and she seemed to understand when he wanted to speak or was content to listen. She talked about art and plants or a book recently read and, as the topics unwound, the tightness linking them slowly unravelled and Ross gradually re-entered the world. It was this easing back into normal life that he most appreciated, and one of the reasons he kept returning. His general health was also improving, and he found himself thinking more and more about Waybell and the possibility of a life there.

  Mrs Guild commented that he was like a push-me-pull-you, a reference to a character that was in a children’s story book. ‘It’s like you have two heads, Ross. You have no idea in which direction you should go. Indecisive. That’s what you are. You’ll spend four days in a row with that poor woman and then you won’t go back for a week. If I was your wife, I’d clout you in the ear.’

  ‘Maybe it’s because I’ve made some bad decisions,’ he replied.

  ‘Now that’s a confession I wasn’t expecting to hear. So when are you planning to leave?’ the widow said one night after the plates were cleared and the tea and biscuits were set before him.

  ‘Did I say I was going anywhere?’ Ross poured and handed her the teacup with the blue and white pattern she so liked.

  ‘You can walk. Not very well. And you can ride. How far I’ve no idea but I’m thinking you’d get further than the rest of us, even if your body complained.’ She tipped the tea from the cup into the saucer and blew on the steaming liquid. ‘And you’ve worn a track down to the headland with your continual walking. A young man’s greatest enemy is boredom.’

  Ross was perched on the veranda railing, trying to improve his balance. ‘I was thinking of heading back to my property.’

  ‘Ah, the famed Waybell Station.’ She took a sip of the tea, nodding in appreciation.

  In the final glow of sunset, Ross saw the woman she’d been. Handsome, with a narrow chin and once prominent cheekbones now curtained by lined skin. ‘You knew all along who I was, didn’t you?’

  Mrs Guild’s mouth lifted in one corner as she picked up some darning work she’d started earlier that day. ‘Yes. Age doesn’t make a person dim, Ross. I said nothing and I asked nothing. I figured you’d get yourself out of the black spot you’d found yourself in if you wanted to. Either way, my opinion wouldn’t make one bit of difference in the end.’

  Ross thought of his family. If ever there was a group of people willing to give their view, wanted or not, it was them. ‘That must have been difficult, not telling me what you thought.’

  Mrs Guild took another mouthful of tea. ‘Considering the state you were in, yes, it was. But then, I’ve reared two boys and buried three men, so I’ve grown used to keeping my counsel. No one listens anyway.’

  ‘I�
��ll miss you, Mrs Guild.’

  ‘But not my biscuits,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ admitted Ross. ‘Not those. You’re not a very good baker.’

  ‘And you, my boy, have a long way to go if you’re ever thinking of setting foot in a fancy drawing room in Adelaide again.’

  ‘I didn’t go to war, Mrs Guild,’ Ross told her.

  ‘I know,’ she replied. ‘You were saved. I’m glad for it. Now, there’s nothing else that needs to be said on the matter.’ She returned to her darning. Ross had not expected her to be so forgiving. ‘And what about that wife of yours? Is she following you out to the middle of nowhere as well?’

  Resolving to return to Waybell had not come without great consideration. Ross knew the difficulties ahead. Every time he pictured the station and the part he might play in its future, he only saw the limitations of his own doing. Running the property with the injuries he’d sustained worried him, as did the reception that he knew would await him. A whole mass of people were meant to be under his care. They may well have managed without Ross prior to his arrival but he’d thrust himself into their lives, turfed Sowden out of the house, and in the early months of his stay done very little to befriend any of them. Then he’d disappeared, slinking off without a word. Not for a few weeks or months, but years. Far from going back as the proud owner, Ross would have to start again. Intentions would have to be laid out and explained. Friendships reforged. Belief somehow restored. Ross had no idea how he could show remorse without chipping away any more dignity. There was so little faith left in him that the miniscule shred of self-respect he still retained barely clung on.

  And yet, another reason preventing his swift return to Waybell was that he knew he would miss Darcey. But how could he presume that she would be interested in accompanying him, particularly after revealing that she’d never loved him? So why would he even consider approaching her with such an offer, knowing of her feelings and the full life she enjoyed in Darwin? Darcey would decline any proposal he put to her. For his own part Ross couldn’t promise a long life or a happy marriage, and he feared the lure of the bush would hit him afresh. It was seared into him, the need to keep moving.