The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance)

by Lucy Walker

  Cindie sat quite still and stared at what lay before her.

  ‘I have a feeling we are full of surprises for one another,’ Nick said with that rare fugitive smile of his. He opened his own door and stepped out.

  There ‒ embraced on three sides by the walls of this gap in the hillside ‒ was a glorious pool. In its still waters shone the brilliant reflection of the coloured cliffs that reached, glistening with seeping water, sheer to the top of the open hill above. Nick had driven between two rocks ‒ a vertical slit in the wall of the hill ‒ then this! So hidden, and so secret. So beautiful!

  Nick took the Esky and lunch-hamper from the back of the Rover and now came round to Cindie’s side.

  ‘Well?’ he asked, as he opened the door.

  ‘I don’t believe it!’ she said. ‘It’s not a gorge. One doesn’t descend, or climb. It’s just there ‒ in a great cave with no top to it. Hidden, sort of, in a mountainous rock: in a spinifex desert ‒’

  He smiled.

  ‘I’ll make the camp fire, if you’ll set out the lunch on one of those flat rocks by the water. Preferably one in the shade.’

  Cindie put out the lunch on the plastic plates. Then slipping off her sandals, and rolling up the legs of her slacks, she paddled in the pool while the billy came to the boil.

  When the tea was ready, Nick poured it. They sat on the rocks ‒ silent but strangely happy ‒ while they ate the cold meats and salad provided by the hotel chef. Cindie wondered why she had doubted Nick’s reason for bringing her here. The pool spoke for itself. It was so peace-making.

  Her knees were hunched up, and she wrapped her arms around them while she gazed dreamily at the reflections in the water. Nothing stirred, not a leaf, not a blade of grass, nor a lizard, in the midday hush. The brilliant colours in the water were for ever still: immortalised in their dream of millions of years long past.

  ‘I would like to say something to you, Cindie,’ Nick said, interrupting her reverie. He paused, his face thoughtful, holding himself apart now. With a pang of anticipation Cindie realised there had been something deliberate about the visit after all. She had been right. She felt the old knock-knock of anxiety: like conscience tapping at her door.

  ‘Yes?’ She looked at him, but he in his turn was contemplating the mirror lake with its brilliant red and its viridian twilight of shadow where the sun could not reach it.

  ‘I hope this is the right moment,’ he said. ‘Shall I go on, Cindie?’

  ‘Yes ‒ of course!’

  ‘While we were at Mulga Gorges I kept in touch with Dicey George, and the foremen on the road. That was natural, of course. Dicey informed me there had been a call over the air from Carnarvon Outpost. A man ‒ his name was David James ‒ was making inquiries about a girl Cynthia Davenport ‒’

  Shock and anger brought unguarded words tumbling from Cindie’s lips.

  ‘He has no right to do that!’ she cried bitterly. ‘All that’s over. Ages ago. Finished ‒ forgotten. He has no claim. He’s just being self-important ‒’ She broke off.

  Her face flushed the crimson of the weeping, glistening rock-wall, so silent and still as if it had heard all earth’s sorrows long, long ago ‒ a million years ago ‒ and nothing would stir its motionless silence ever again.

  Found out! She had given herself away.

  She buried her face in her hands.

  Nick, like the cliffs and the water, the trailing bush leaves beside it, did not move. Nothing in all the land moved.

  The colour died slowly away from Cindie’s face, leaving it very pale as she dropped her hands, and lifted her head.

  ‘Do you think you could tell me, Cindie?’ Nick asked. He spoke simply, even gently.

  ‘I’m sorry about it, Nick. David broadcasting for me is of no personal importance whatever. Please believe that. It’s not worth telling.’ She spoke with a sad kind of dignity. ‘You knew my real name was Cynthia Davenport?’

  He took out his cigarettes and lit one slowly.

  ‘I’ve lived in the outback a long time, Cindie. One always seems to know things about people intuitively. This one wasn’t hard ‒ for very good reasons.’

  He blew a long shaft of smoke towards the water. It drifted away, then like Echo, was gone.

  Cindie felt the desolation of one who has betrayed needlessly. It was only herself she had deceived. Deep down it hadn’t been fun being someone else. The pretence had spoilt it. She had known it all the time.

  ‘My road construction company ‒ a family affair ‒ has its headquarters in Perth,’ Nick said slowly, not looking at her. ‘The office there informed me quite a long time ago that a lawyer was making inquiries on behalf of a Mrs. Davenport. I had been aware of the troubles of a station along whose western boundary I would have to build part of my road. Bindaroo.’

  ‘Ah yes,’ Cindie said painfully, ‘Bindaroo …’

  ‘I was told that Mrs. Davenport’s daughter Cynthia was likely to come north to make contact with Neil Stevens and his brother. I imagined this was probably in connection with the road strip along Bindaroo’s boundary.’

  Cindie did not understand this last. She hardly heard it. She was thinking of Nick having known all along, or having guessed, who she was.

  ‘Cynthia was coming, and Cindie arrived! It was as simple as that?’ she asked.

  ‘Quite.’

  There was a long pause. Cindie thought of her mother, and that share, lost or otherwise, in Bindaroo. Her own excursion to save it had been no more than an exercise in the tragi-comic!

  ‘I changed my name first by accident,’ she said. ‘It was just a nickname Jim gave me. It fitted. I liked it. It was rather endearing. Then, I minded that you called me Cindie Something.’

  ‘Did I? When?’ He looked surprised.

  ‘When you called me through the megaphone across the river.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I apologise. I didn’t realise ‒’

  Cindie felt she couldn’t take it if Nick began to be nice about it all now. This was a side of him that was always her undoing.

  ‘I kept the name Jim gave me because I didn’t want Neil Stevens and his brother to know I was coming. That air-talk! I had heard they were trucking out sheep. I wanted to surprise them.’

  Nick’s face was turned to the water again. She could only see his profile. It put a finger on her heart ‒ his head turned away like that.

  ‘Now that everything is known,’ Cindie went on, ‘what do you intend to do with Bindaroo? I suppose it is too late to stop a take-over?’

  Nick stared at her in surprise. ‘What do you think I intend to do with Bindaroo? Other than give Neil Stevens a life-saving lump of money for that boundary strip? I need it for the road. I build right along it. It’s a bare hundred chains wide, and is otherwise worthless country. Salt-pan mostly. Nothing grows on it. Not even spinifex. If anything, my road will service his station, and add to its value.’

  ‘The boundary strip?’ Cindie asked, dazed.

  ‘I’ve bought the lease from him; also given him some solid advice about not eating out his pasture land in the good seasons. I told him to call in the experts from the agricultural department in the bad seasons: or when in doubt.’

  ‘The boundary strip?’ Cindie repeated, puzzled. ‘But you and Erica ‒’

  ‘The only thing the boundary strip had to do with Erica is that she didn’t want me to buy it. The same as she’d rather the rains hadn’t come out of season and given Bindaroo some fresh life. She came over to the construction camp to talk me into re-aligning my road away from Bindaroo’s boundary. She never loses without first giving battle ‒’

  ‘You mean that you and Erica weren’t together trying ‒’

  ‘Just a minute, Cindie,’ Nick interrupted. He was cold, even angry. ‘Erica and I together, were not trying to do anything. We were on opposite sides of the counter. The rains and my purchase money for that otherwise useless boundary strip could save the Stevenses. Erica would have liked to buy Bindaroo. A fair bargain f
or her, if it had come off.’

  Cindie closed her eyes. Then Erica hadn’t been twisting Nick round her little finger! The perfume hadn’t worked. It had been the other way round.

  ‘I flew out of Mulga Gorges to Bindaroo the other night to pay up and sign up,’ Nick went on. ‘I dropped Erica off at Marana. That’s all there is to it.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to buy into station property, Nick ‒’ Cindie began in a flat voice.

  ‘My dear child, I am a construction engineer. I like to work in station country because I have a feel for it. But I’m an engineer first, last and all the time.’

  He was really angry. He picked up a pebble and sent it shying across the water, skimming its surface, and leaving a wake like diamonds fanning jet-wise over a polished mirror.

  Cindie put her head in her hands again.

  So everything she had heard had been wrong! Why hadn’t she, Cindie, taken Mary’s repeated advice to the children ‒ Don’t listen to gossip.

  The wives, the men on the road ‒ even Marana’s stockmen ‒ had all of them had to have something about which to talk, conjecture, and lay bets. They had had to have something by which to pass the time ‒ when they weren’t at work.

  ‘You thought I was misleading Neil Stevens and his brother in this deal?’ Nick asked, surprised.

  ‘I didn’t know, Nick. That was the trouble.’ She lifted her head again and met his eyes ‒ her own full of regret. ‘I thought you and Erica ‒ having so much in common otherwise ‒ I mean being together: attached ‒’

  Unexpectedly, Nick laughed. It was as if he’d suddenly seen daylight. He really laughed, enjoying now what had formerly been an obtuse joke. Cindie was startled at his amusement. The wrinkles creased round his eyes. The white of his even teeth in his brown handsome face unnerved her. He was alive ‒ under that wary quietness of his. He was a man who was in control of all his worlds ‒ those of the road, his relationships with people, his capacity to buy long strips of station boundary and help save a station ‒

  Nick saw the conflict in her eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cindie. I apologise for laughing at you. You thought there was some personal connection between Erica and me. There is: but not what you surmise. We’ve known one another for a long time. We’re friends for some of that time ‒ according to what business trick Erica is up to next. That is all. Except to say in all fairness, she is a very capable person. There the relationship ends.’

  Cindie felt as if whole walls around her heart were tumbling down ‒ because music was sounding.

  He wasn’t trying to help take over Bindaroo. He didn’t love Erica!

  She had been in a sea of despair because of her mistakes; now she was spun to a hilltop. For one dizzy moment she didn’t know where she was, so great was her relief.

  Nick watched her.

  ‘Cindie,’ he said gently, repenting. He leaned a little forward. ‘You have a face so full of changing thoughts, some sad, some glad. You are like an open book. You could never have got away with that change of name, you know. Those dark blue eyes of yours tell all.’

  ‘I played such a silly game of duplicity.’

  He laughed.

  ‘Well, don’t regret it. We all like to do that occasionally. We all like a little change of personality from time to time. What do you think I was doing at that conference, Cindie?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t care a two-by-four bit of ironstone about the railways and roads those tycoons are planning to build westwards from my road to their deep-sea harbours. I only cared about my part of it. The thousand-miler. For the rest of it I liked puffing up like Swell and talking in millions. Don’t you think I was masquerading? Of course I was. I enjoyed every minute of it; and I haven’t a twinge of conscience.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘Are you really so many persons rolled in one?’

  ‘I suppose I am. But as you’ve just proved, Cindie ‒ aren’t we all? So what? So long as one is honest, and straight-from-the-shoulder when it comes to matters of principle, what does it matter if now and again we do a little play-acting with ourselves?’

  ‘You don’t mind my being Cynthia Davenport ‒ when I said I was Cindie Brown?’

  There was a moment’s silence. Nick’s face lost its smile, and the twilight mask came over his eyes again; but kinder this time.

  ‘Cindie-brown-all-over,’ he said slowly, softly. ‘Jim gave you that name, didn’t he?’

  ‘I was so covered with dust when he first saw me.’

  ‘You’re very attached to Jim, Cindie?’

  ‘Yes ‒ in my own way. I needed him so badly. He could advise me. He was such a pet about it all!’

  A new thought flashed into her mind and she looked up quickly.

  ‘Flan thought I was in love with him,’ she said clearly. ‘Just in case you too make that mistake, Nick ‒ I love him. But I’m not in love with him. There’s a difference ‒’

  He was watching her eyes: dark violet blue and very earnest.

  ‘You think it is important I should know that?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Yes. Very important. Because of Mary. I didn’t realise how Mary felt about Jim, and I was a bit open about my affection for him. Now I do know. So I’m making it quite, quite clear ‒’

  ‘Because of Mary?’ he asked again quietly.

  ‘Because of Mary. And because it’s true.’

  ‘I see.’ He was still looking into her eyes as if reading something there that interested, perhaps even touched him. ‘Cindie,’ he went on irrelevantly; not taking his eyes from her; his thoughts unrelated to his words. ‘Would you like to gather up the lunch things while I fill the petrol tanks from the storage cans?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said, jumping up. ‘It must be getting late. I suppose we won’t arrive at the camp till the small hours?’

  ‘Not until dawn, unless we pack at speed and get going.’

  They were soon in the Land-Rover again.

  Cindie felt a different person. No more subterfuge. No more worry. Her mother’s share in Bindaroo would be safe, and she hoped from Nick’s manner, he would keep her on at her job permanently. It was hard to really believe it all: yet it was true. Wonderfully, incredibly true! She looked into the future and saw long vistas of working for Nick as his secretary.

  Perhaps he might sometimes, just once in a while, call her Cindie-brown-all-over the way he had said it back there by the coloured lake hidden in the hill. As if he too liked it very much.

  They drove the many miles back to the turn-off, then over a worn station track towards the open plain over which Nick had yet to cross before he reached his own road.

  The colours blazed in the sky as the sun declined. The land shaded from the colour of burnt straw to flamingo pink, then minutes later, a soft blue shadow lay over all the world. Creatures of the half-light and the dark were moving everywhere. Out of the end-of-day’s silence came the emus ‒ one of their flock racing beside the car. Kangaroos, hundreds of them, bumped up and down across the spinifex. Once Nick swerved sharply so as not to run over a huge goanna.

  ‘Thank you for not running over it,’ Cindie said gratefully. She felt so companionable with him now.

  ‘Why aren’t you asleep, Cindie? Driving up to Mulga Gorges from the camp you went off like a top.’

  ‘I have too much to think about. Besides ‒’

  ‘Besides what?’

  ‘I was afraid I might droop on your shoulder again, like a wilted flower. Then you wouldn’t be able to drive safely. You’re going very fast. If I was certain which way I’d lean ‒ that is ‒ if I accidentally fell asleep … It’s embarrassing, you know ‒’

  He put out his arm.

  ‘Lean this way and be done with it,’ he said, letting her come into the curve of his arm. ‘Now I know where you are, and I won’t have to wait for a bump on my shoulder. Not to worry, Cindie ‒ the car won’t turn over.’

  It was wonderful, glory-be; and icing-on-the-cak
e!

  Cindie’s defences fell away from her. This was like being carried up the gorge path. It was how she had felt when he stood by her bed ‒ and just looked down ‒ as if heaven were near but would not fall. She had longed for him to bend ‒

  His body was warm and his arm was strong. It enfolded her, and held her, and comforted her. She dreamed off on the edge of another fantasy ‒ away into a world where she had no defences against herself. It was almost wanton, yet was only a day-dream.

  She stirred, turned a little: her face in his neck. Her mouth touched his skin.

  Nick slammed down his foot, and braked the car to a stop. He sat unmoving, looking straight ahead of him, the warm soft bundle of girl in his arm.

  ‘Cindie! Why did you do that?’ His voice had a break in it.

  She wanted to say ‘Because I love you.’ But she couldn’t, of course. She couldn’t give him any answer, because the truth was too painful. Not Erica’s perfume ‒ this.

  He loosened her from his arm, turned and took her by the shoulders ‒ holding her back from him so the starlight and the risen arc of the moon could shine on her face. He looked right into her eyes.

  ‘Cindie? Cindie-brown-all-over? Why did you do that?’

  A star fell from heaven. She knew. It was the sound of his voice.

  ‘Because … because …’ The words muffled in her throat. Her eyes with a moon-bow in them, looking back into his, gave away her secret.

  His hands held her shoulders tightly, himself just that near-arm’s length away from her.

  ‘Cindie, I love you. Beautiful, sweet, deceitful, blue-eyed Cindie. I love you! From the day those violet eyes challenged me with such disdain across the doorframe of your car, on the rise over the river ‒ I loved you. I loved you, my dear captivating wilful two-name Cindie ‒ ever since the river came down. And I found you.’

  Sunrays and moonrays seemed to burst in a wild splendour across Cindie’s heaven.

  ‘Nick … I love you too … That is why I did it. I didn’t mean to, but I put my lips against your neck ‒ just there ‒’ She touched the place gently, with the tips of two fingers. ‘It was because I couldn’t help it. I was driven ‒’