The Call of the Pines

by Lucy Walker

  ‘I rather thought so …’ said Mrs. Denton.

  Chapter Six

  The pilot who came in with the plane on Sunday night was a stranger because he was flying for a different airline from the one that had flown Cherry and Stephen out of Dampier. His name was Alan Donnelly and the plane was a small twin-engined monoplane.

  Cherry was so busy on Sunday, packing for both Peter and herself and at the same time leaving Sandra’s clothes in order, that she had hardly time to look at the pilot.

  He was above medium height and very nice-looking in his tropical airline uniform.

  Tracy was delighted to have some extra male company. Cherry had a vague idea that Tracy was paying overmuch attention to the pilot in the hopes, perhaps, of arousing Stephen’s natural possessive feelings. Cherry knew, mostly from her reading and from other girls’ College gossip, that some girls made quite an art of this business of pretending an interest in one man in order to impress another.

  Foolish, thought Cherry. Tracy is so devastatingly attractive, and original, she doesn’t have to work hard to impress anyone, anyway. Not Stephen, specially.

  If it was me, now ‒

  Even her new haircut, which by this time was badly in need of a trim, her casual modern clothes and the experiments with the cosmetic case, hadn’t quite dispelled from Cherry the conviction that she would never stand out and be noticed in any room.

  ‘Perhaps the prissy miss was my gimmick and I should have stuck to it,’ she thought ruefully. ‘A witchery ballerina is certainly Tracy’s and she doesn’t have to do a single thing about being looked at. One just can’t help looking at her.’

  Thinking of the much-needed hair trim Cherry was glad there would be several days’ stop-over in Timor Bay. She hoped there was a good modern hairdresser in that very good modern hotel she had been told about.

  Timor Bay was an airport for trans-continental aircraft and catered in the most magnificent tropical way for the great international V.I.P.s flying in and out of Australia. Cherry was hourly becoming more and more thrilled by the prospects of her trip.

  Early on Monday morning, the station waggon transported the travelling party, together with the pilot, down the long sloping road to the airstrip which had to be miles away from the homestead because of the falling nature of the ground and the broken, stony surface of the paddocks nearer Yulinga.

  Tracy was travelling casually, in slacks and a white sleeveless blouse with the prettiest touch of broderie anglaise at the neck. On her feet she wore a neat pair of black suede flatties as soft-soled and delicate as chamois leather. Her long, sleek, burnished red hair hung down to her shoulders, and in spite of the movement of air because of the travelling car there wasn’t a hair out of place. Tracy looked almost ‘carved’ in her outline.

  Cherry didn’t know what she herself looked like except she wore her new green cotton slacks and a white blouse and had taken time and care over that hair which needed a trim. She was too absorbed with Peter, but she hoped she looked her own best, considering the hour of the morning.

  Peter was, she decided, the perfect travelling companion. He had burbled with delight when put into his best blue knickers and white sleeveless shirt. He had sparkled when his white linen hat had been put on his head. He knew he was in for an outing and that a day’s adventure lay ahead. Nobody, at that moment, dreamed what an adventure and that it would last more than a day.

  Stephen, except for his own personality, looked the prototype of all station owners travelling in the tropical north. He wore well-fitting tan-coloured trousers of fine cloth, a lighter tan-coloured tailored shirt with the same kind of black tie that the pilot wore. In fact the pilot, Hugh Denton who had driven the station waggon down to the airstrip, and Stephen Denton might have been, until you looked into their faces, triplets grown to the mature age of thirtyish. When they reached the plane, which was sitting alone like a large bird with spread wings, on the ground, the pilot unconsciously disassociated himself from the social likeness to the two brothers by producing out of the plane a pilot’s cocked hat. Stephen and Hugh wore their wide-brimmed pastoralists’ hats.

  They all three looked very distinguished in this informal dress, Cherry thought, sparing a minute from Peter’s bubble-blowing, crowing delight. She had a feeling of pride in her countrymen of the north.

  Again she had that overwhelming thought, like a nostalgic dream out of former times, that this was what her father must have looked like. Immediately afterwards came the reflection that in this grieving memory she was being disloyal to Dad … the dear man who had brought her up as his own child.

  As Cherry settled herself in her seat in the plane, she touched the top of Peter’s head but at the same time she made to herself the promise not to let Peter so win her heart she did not want to go home to Dad at the end of the year.

  Already she could see she was in for heart burning. This, she thought, is the fate of all good nannies. You learn to love other people’s children then you have to give them up. It was strange too that she should turn out to be a greater success with Peter than with Sandra. This was a success that Mrs. Denton connived at, for she was so relieved to have the burden of Peter’s daily routine taken from her that she already had developed a sanguine attitude that the minimum of Cherry’s time would have to be enough for Sandra.

  ‘She doesn’t know,’ thought Cherry with a touch of compunction, ‘that not only is Peter stealing my heart but I’m very much afraid I am stealing his.’

  While Cherry was thinking this way she was sitting in the plane, Tracy was over the aisle from her, and Stephen was once again up near the cockpit so he could keep the pilot company.

  Perhaps, when Cherry had that thought about stealing Peter’s heart, her arms gave him an unconscious squeeze for at that moment Peter turned his head and looked up into her face. He smiled, the guileless smile of a child, that said he had a secret and it was a lovely one.

  It was a smile so overwhelming in its trust and charm that Cherry felt as if she had suddenly had a vision of heaven.

  Her eyes were a little misty.

  ‘Oh, Peter,’ she said. She cradled his head against her shoulder and rested her cheek on the top of his small white linen hat. She lifted her eyes and they met Stephen’s as, lowering his head to emerge from the cockpit, he glanced her way.

  He looked at Cherry. Cherry, too embarrassed at being caught in her little act of endearment to Peter, was unable to take her eyes away from Stephen. Then with a terrible effort she blinked to break the spell, and looked down at the top of Peter’s head. Stephen took a step forward and one minute later was asking Tracy if she wanted some magazines.

  Cherry had had a thought that had come like an unbidden visitation. She expelled it from her heart and mind at once and tried madly to think of something else … anything … the whirring of the propellers as they were about to take off ‒ the skidding of the tyres as the plane moved down the runway ‒ the red earth with the grey hummocks of spinifex.

  The thought had something to do with that old daydreaming she used to have when she saw Stephen, an unknown magical figure, sitting on the ocean beach near the Street of the Pines. She had never then dreamed that one day she would be flying in a plane with him across the north of Australia.

  Cherry felt so guilty at this unexpected audacity on her part she could have cried. Instead she closed her eyes as she now rested her chin on Peter’s head and tried to guess the distances from the ground as the plane rose, and the miles per hour they were now travelling.

  It was futile guessing, for she knew nothing of heights or speeds, but a concentration on numbers could always send her to sleep when examination-worry had tended to keep her awake in her College days.

  How dared she think that way of Stephen Denton! Oh dear, how had such a thought ever come to her?

  But what had he been thinking as he came through that gangway? His eyes had looked straight into hers as if he had seen something and recognised something. What? ‘Oh dear ‒
we must be a thousand feet up now. Perhaps two. How fast do we go to get so high in the sky? Let me see. Somewhere I read that this sort of plane is doing a hundred and fifty miles per hour for the first five minutes after the take-off ‒’

  The thrumming of the plane made Peter sleepy for he leaned his head back against Cherry and she could see his lids drooping over his eyes.

  ‘Me too, Peter,’ she said under her breath. ‘If I sleep I can’t think and I’ll stop hating myself for such stupidity.’

  Cherry, with Peter on her lap, leaned her head back against the seat rest and thought of counting clouds since it was silly to count sheep in a part of the country where there were no sheep, only cattle. Since the sky had been cloudless when they’d got into the plane she decided to count cattle.

  Whatever it was that Cherry counted it was effective for like Peter, cradled in her arms, she dozed off.

  She imagined Tracy, in the midst of her magazines, doing the same thing. She heard Stephen’s footsteps come down the aisle of the plane and go back again. She supposed it was Stephen for the pilot, surely, would be flying the plane, wouldn’t he?

  Anyway Cherry was not going to open her eyes to look at Stephen. In fact she would never look at him again.

  How many cattle had she counted? Well, none at all, come to think of it.

  Nevertheless Cherry was in a light sleep an hour and a half later when the plane ran into a rainstorm. It wasn’t much of a rainstorm and there was very little wind and all the plane did was bucket about somewhat. It didn’t wake Peter and it only partially stirred Cherry.

  Then the curious unpredictable element that inhabits the upper world above the Australian jungle lands had a striking mood. One minute the plane was flying through still clear air, then it entered the vapour area of a small black cloud which was sailing high and alone like a blue-black ball of cotton-wool in the sky. In its heart was a bolt of electricity waiting for release.

  In the somnolent silence of the interior of the plane the sound of the lightning striking the main electrical system of the fuselage was a bolt from the gods.

  The plane staggered, then wobbled badly.

  Cherry sat upright and Peter in her arms sat upright too.

  Nobody uttered a sound for a split second. Then Stephen, who was sitting in the front seat, turned his head.

  ‘Fasten your belts,’ he said rapidly. ‘At once.’

  No flash sign to fasten belts came from the pilot’s cabin because the electrical system was out of action, but neither Tracy nor Cherry noticed this. Stephen’s command was enough.

  Cherry wondered, somewhat wildly, why her hands didn’t tremble. It took quite a time to loosen the buckle of her strap so that it would encompass both herself and Peter.

  ‘We’re in this together, darling Peter,’ she said. ‘If we’re for it ‒ well ‒ you’ll be with me.’

  Even in this momentary emergency she could see Peter’s eyes wide open, trying to absorb the fact that something outside his experience was going on that was quite astonishing.

  It was astonishing, thought Cherry, who was very nearly crying for the future Peter might not have.

  Stephen had gone into the pilot’s cockpit. The plane wobbled, side-slipped, righted itself, but wobbled again.

  All the time Cherry knew by the pressure in her ears they were losing height. She held Peter tightly.

  ‘Five thousand feet, three thousand feet, two thousand feet. Of course I don’t really know but thinking of numbers does stop one thinking of something else.’

  She turned her head and looked across the aisle at Tracy. Tracy caught her glance, shrugged her shoulders, then looked bored.

  ‘How funny,’ Cherry thought. ‘We really do die in funny ways, we humans. Tracy bored, and me ‒ well, I could cry for the life Peter might not have. And those two men up there in the cockpit ‒’

  Cherry could not even guess what they were doing or saying.

  A map of dark blue-grey caught the edge of her vision and she looked out the window.

  Heavens, the earth thick with trees was flying past like a carpet stretched a few feet below them.

  ‘I didn’t know there were trees up here,’ thought Cherry. ‘It’s like a forest, or a jungle or something.’

  They went over a river and over trees again. The plane wobbled badly as it nosed a little upwards into the wind. The engines were off.

  ‘I know,’ thought Cherry brightly. ‘He’s trying to glide down. A pancake landing, they call it. But oh dear! In these trees too. Funny, but for once nobody, absolutely nobody, wants trees.’

  Then she thought how funny and clever she was to be thinking that way just now.

  ‘It will be anytime now, Peter,’ she said softly and resting her cheek on top of his head she closed her eyes. Anytime, and anything, of course.

  Stephen, head bent, came through from the cockpit. He had to keep his balance by holding the rack with one hand. Against slope and wobble he fought his way down the small plane.

  ‘Give me Peter,’ he said, standing over Cherry, his voice controlled but urgent.

  Cherry shook her head.

  ‘He goes with me,’ she said.

  To safety or eternity?

  Stephen bent over her.

  ‘You little fool,’ he said between closed teeth as he lurched over them, then saved himself by catching the back of the seat.

  He seemed to loom over Cherry and the child.

  ‘Strap yourself in, Stephen,’ Cherry said furiously. ‘What will become of us if we live and you’re killed.’

  There was an awful second when Stephen’s eyes met hers and it looked as if they’d spend their last precious seconds of life defying one another.

  The thought must have occurred to Stephen for suddenly he righted himself, spun round in a half circle to sit in the empty seat behind Cherry.

  He had just buckled his belt when the plane hit the top of the trees and swooped along them, cutting the leaf twigs and sapling branches in a swathe.

  The plane lurched sideways, bumping badly as it made several minor hits on the branch tops. There were trees around and below them.

  There was a dreadful moment of quivering silence, then the plane righted itself on top of a tree. A minute later, with a tearing breaking sound of tree-wood below them, it rolled over sideways, tipping its nose downwards.

  Inside the plane there was now silence. Nearly a minute of time was lost before anyone realised they had stopped completely and the plane, hanging sideways, nose down, was balancing on a brace of trees.

  Chapter Seven

  Stephen pressed the safety button and flung off his belt, at the same moment the pilot came out of the cockpit.

  Cherry didn’t know what happened in the next few minutes. The pilot was struggling with her belt and Stephen with Tracy’s belt. They were all on top of one another because of the tilted angle of the plane. Cherry when she stood up had to balance one foot on the side arm of a seat, then climb her way out of the plane like a monkey.

  Someone; Stephen, she thought; had wrung Peter from her arms.

  A branch of the tree helped Cherry to climb out of the plane and she crawled along the branch to the fork of the main trunk. It was the biggest tree-trunk she had ever seen, slippery and green, with some kind of fungus growing over it. She slid down the trunk to the ground.

  She was cut and badly bruised from the tree fall but she did not have time to think about it. Picking her way over and through enormous bushes, entangled with creeper, she came under the open door of the plane which was now above her like a manhole in the plane which was sideways down.

  Stephen, lying down, was dangling Peter by the arms.

  ‘You’ll have to catch him,’ he said peremptorily.

  ‘I will,’ said Cherry.

  And she knew she would. It was a long drop, but Cherry would catch him.

  ‘Coming.’

  ‘Ready.’

  Stephen let his hands slide from under Peter’s armpits and held th
e child a minute by the hands. Then he let go.

  The judgment of drop and catch was a fraction of an inch out so Cherry had to lean backwards, a trifle off balance, for Peter to fall safely into her arms. He came like a thud of ton weight on to her chest and she fell backwards into the undergrowth of dry stick bush and creeper, but holding Peter above her.

  Peter, for the first time, let out a passionate shriek of pain and rage. The cause was, however, no more than a sharp stick that had glanced down his cheek.

  Cherry, by her backward fall, had added cuts and perforations to scratches but she was too occupied with what she had now to do even to notice them.

  Tracy was crawling along the tree-trunk as she herself had done and then Stephen and the pilot swung themselves out of the plane, landing far below them in the bushes. As Cherry picked her way, with Peter in her arms, through the bushes, over fallen tree-trunks, green and mossed with age, round huge creeper-infested trees, she had no time to see if the men had broken anything and were lying there incapacitated below a plane that might any moment blow up. Petrol, she knew by the smell, was pouring everywhere.

  She had one clear duty, and that was to see that Peter was safe.

  She struggled on through the almost impenetrable bush, not once looking behind to see how anyone fared. She was at least six hundred yards away when she stumbled into a small clearing. By this time she was aware of Peter’s weight; reaction from her own scramble to safety took control of her. She sank on the ground, still holding the child, exhausted and very near tears.

  Peter, vigorously protesting against the grasp she had on him, brought her back to reality. She set the little boy down on the ground and stood up and turned round. She could see the top of Tracy’s head coming in her direction through the jungle undergrowth.

  ‘Heavens, did I come through that?’ thought Cherry.

  The bush around the clearing was like an impenetrable wall. Only the madness of desperation could have brought anyone through it. Peter, except for some scratches on his arms and legs, was safe in wind and limb. She herself was torn, scarred and smeared with green stains and black streaks from twigs and bark that had once seen and felt bushfire. Her hair would, of course, be all over the place but she had no interest in it. She was anxiously watching for signs that Stephen and Alan Donnelly were getting a safe distance away from the plane.