Home at Sundown: An Australian Outback Romance

by Lucy Walker

  They had a wonderful feast that night. Stores from Bim’s Stopover almost made Christmas of it.

  ‘No more spoiling those artistic fingers peeling yams, Kim,’ George said with a grin. ‘Those drawings you’ve done, and the sections too, are superb. You wouldn’t marry me, by any chance, so I can have a scribe like that by my side all my days?’

  John lifted his eyes ‒ but not his head ‒ to see Kim’s response. She laughed, almost gaily. ‘My first proposal of marriage!’ She clapped her hands with delight. ‘I could ‒ yes I could. I do have witnesses, you know. Oh! It would be lovely!’

  Stephen had been leafing through some sections in Kim’s own personal note-book. He had picked it up from amongst her materials. For the first time since his arrival he was silent and seemed not to hear the others’ conversation.

  Not even George’s proposal, Kim thought, a little disappointed. It was only a joke, but a lovely one!

  A minute later she had forgotten Stephen’s inattention to listen to George Crossman’s praise of her ‘gift’. He was really letting himself go! Someone in all the wide world appreciated her abilities!

  Dear George!

  In the morning they packed, ready for departure.

  John had to take the jeep back to the Stopover because the engine part George had brought had been a temporary one, lent by the local garage. The permanent part was being flown up to the Stopover three days later. Stephen’s Land-Rover would have to be left there, at the garage, indefinitely.

  The first rule of the Expedition came into operation again. The members must travel in pairs.

  Out in front of the old house they were deep in conference.

  ‘I’ll take Kim, the specimens and the records, in the Rover,’ Stephen offered, volunteering a shade too quickly. ‘We could get back to Base in no time ‒’

  ‘Sorry. No!’ John interrupted bluntly. ‘George and I are the senior members of the Expedition. Therefore responsible. You and Kim are juniors, Stephen. We divide our forces.’

  ‘I guess I’ll be the one to take Kim, eh?’ George said grinning with pleasure as he looked at her. ‘You’re mighty popular, Kim. We’re arguing over you.’

  John is not ‒ Kim thought irrelevantly.

  ‘Excuse me!’ she said aloud, having a sudden and daring thought. ‘If John agrees I would like to go to the Stopover. You see ‒’

  They all stared at her ‒ waiting.

  ‘I don’t see at all,’ John said quite briefly. His eyes were narrowed against the burning light of the sun and he looked as if he might call her ‘that school girl’ all over again.

  ‘Well ‒ You see ‒’ Kim went on with a careful mixture of gladness and sadness in her voice. ‘Nobody asked me what I used for sweat rags on that very long walk through the sand dunes. Nor what happened to the two shirts I threw by the wayside because my hands were full of a compass and a water-bag and things like that. You see ‒ in that heat ‒ even an extra shirt was heavy. Not to mention ‒ Well, I’ll spare you details.’ She shook her head. ‘And nobody asked me where I found clean cloths to do the dish-washing in this fine old pioneering homestead‒’ She paused to watch the looks of perplexity that came into the men’s faces. This perplexity was tinctured with a foreboding of what she might say next. She could go into details about underclothes!

  Kim, each knew, was capable of saying anything.

  She lifted the leg-hem of her work shorts.

  ‘Nothing underneath!’ she said regretfully. ‘Absolutely nothing at all. You do understand, John? I need to do some shopping.’

  She tilted her hat forward over her brow, tucked the thumbs of her hands in the braces of her khaki work suit, and looked at John Andrews. Her eyes wore that faintly unfocused expression that made them so unconsciously beguiling.

  The thought of Kim with nothing under those khaki working clothes caused Stephen to give a yelp of laughter. He cut this short when he saw the expression in John Andrews’ face. At the same time he felt the back-kick of George’s heel.

  ‘You do see what I mean?’ Kim was asking earnestly. ‘It’s sad. It’s too bad! I have to say it again ‒ I need to do a little shopping.’

  John swung round on his heel.

  ‘Stephen,’ he said in his ‘ordering’ voice. ‘Put whatever might be left of Kim’s gear in my jeep, including her work bag. In between looking over the Harrods of Bim’s Stopover she might feel inclined to draw some sturt pea, or even spiked feather flower.’

  He wasn’t being funny, so neither George Crossman nor Stephen laughed. He was angry because Kim had won a point with an indisputable piece of feminine strategy. The girl had no underclothes ‒ so to Bim’s Stopover she must go!

  Stephen, who had not planned for this, felt defeated, but after a minute’s thought he cheered up. He’d particularly wanted Kim with him. Those records. However, with luck, he might arrange another line of contact. At Bim’s Stopover he’d managed to get in touch with his boss in the Eastern States by the radio. Something was bound to come of that!

  George Crossman took the view that Kim had made a gallant showing for herself. She hadn’t asked John, himself, Stephen, or those cranky old prospectors they’d talked of, for their spare clothes. She’d used herself up on that long, heroic walk; then used her talent for drawing, and her underclothes for cleaning ‒ all in the line of active service. The least John could do was to take her to the Stopover to buy herself a few returns.

  George was one hundred per cent on Kim’s side. Later, when John had cooled down, he would agree too.

  With the jeep recently tuned-up at the Stopover, and John angrily bent on getting there, the pace was packed on and it took only two days, at top speed, to make the trip. In the whole of that time, night and day, John had not slept, even when Kim had taken her stint of driving. They had not talked very much either. Kim thought this could be like travelling with a thunderbolt, temporarily resting. Then she smiled at her own successful ruse, and accepted John’s reaction.

  Found in the desert with a girl who wore no underclothes! She was a little sorry for him, after all. During some moments in the long drive she guessed he felt like thrashing this particular girl!

  Nearing Bim’s Stopover, wuzzy with no sleep for forty-eight hours, John Andrews himself wondered why he felt so angry.

  Why the hell hadn’t he noticed she was using her own things to provide a bit of cleanliness, and a few comforts at the old homestead? As for those shirts thrown away on the long walk! How did a man like himself say ‘Thank you’ adequately to someone like this girl? She always seemed to steal the ‘punch line’ in the end herself!

  Kim herself suspected that John knew she had manoeuvred him into taking her to the Stopover. She didn’t blame him for being angry. Not really.

  They began in silence and that was the way they ended up ‒ bowling down the track, in a cloud of red dust, into the Stopover.

  The town consisted of one store, one garage, one pub, and a red-brown claypan for an airstrip. The only trees in sight were in a clump behind the pub. Then nothing but spinifex grass for hundreds of miles around!

  ‘Over there,’ said John as they slammed past a timber and galvanised-iron building with wide verandas under which a number of men sat drowsing in the shade, ‘there is your Harrods. I’ll take you to the pub first. I dare say they have plenty of water. There’ll be enough for a bath anyway. This is artesian-basin country. It all comes up from underground. Like in the trough at the old homestead.’

  Kim’s skin was thick with dust and caked with perspiration all over. She felt that pub had better have plenty of water! But, willy nilly, first she would go to the store. She hadn’t forgotten that crack about her yam-peeling hands from George. She was going to do what she knew Myree would have done. Have a beauty-cure, even if she gave it to herself. That would rock Dr John Andrews out of his black temper and his wicked silence!

  She sighed, for she knew no beauty-cure could ever make her look like Myree. It couldn’t make her an inch o
r two taller, for instance!

  John parked the jeep behind the pub and went inside to book two rooms. Kim rounded the outer walls of the baked and peeling building, then went back along the dusty street to the store.

  She fished in the bib of her work suit for her wallet; pulled out one of the five-dollar notes her brother Jeff had given her, and said ‒

  ‘Two large pots of face cream please. One cleansing cream and one tonic cream.’

  ‘Dearie! You sure do look as if you need them!’ the stout woman behind the counter said. ‘Your poor face! Oh dear ‒ and those poor arms too! Anything else while you’re about it?’

  ‘Yes, lots,’ Kim said brightly. ‘For the moment a bra, and a shirt. Inexpensive please. Oh and a pair of shortie pyjamas. I’ll come back for other things later when my skin ‒ the part underneath these togs ‒ is fit to try things on.’

  Back in the pub, a two-storey affair with a wide veranda and dusty wooden-lace trimmings round the balcony, Kim was shown by the manager’s daughter to her room.

  ‘I expect you’d like a bath first?’

  ‘You expect very right,’ said Kim with a wry grimace. ‘Where is it please?’

  ‘Down the passage, turn right and you’ll see it.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Call me down the staircase if you want anything more. I’m always willing.’

  ‘Oh thank you very much,’ Kim said again.

  ‘I’ll send you up a cup of tea in half an hour. How’s that?’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ Kim said all over again. She guessed she sounded like a record player. She could hardly explain her dire need to bath and be clean, clean! And not have horny, dust-ingrained hands. Or a sunburnt face!

  Chapter Eleven

  An hour later, John Andrews, bathed and shaved, went downstairs to exchange the usual necessary totems of goodwill with the hotel manager. In any one-pub town in the outback the hotel manager was the most important inhabitant. John knew one always paid one’s respects as if to the Lord Mayor of a City to that particular father-figure first.

  ‘Quite a big place you have here,’ he said easily, after they’d exchanged the usual pleasantries and were sampling their first friendly drink; one on the house, as per custom. ‘Many station people outback here?’

  ‘More’n you’d think. We’re right in the district where the station-owners can get the Wet when the cyclones cut a swathe over the north-west. Sometimes a blow-across from the sou’wester later. It’s pick country for grazing north of the breakaway. But terrible in the drought ‒’

  ‘Rain in summer and a chance of it in winter! That’s why it’s such good wild-flower country I suppose.’

  ‘Ah. You‘re the bontanist feller who’s been parked back on Skelton’s old station? Pity about that place.’ The manager shook his head regretfully. ‘The salt came through, you know. Seepage. Spoilt the pasture. Too near the sand-plain for safety ‒’

  The man glanced up from his drink and looked at John from under hooded eyelids. He was a big slim-jim of a man, with a friendly face, but wise and knowing eyes that were deep-set.

  ‘You had a girl back there with you for a couple of weeks? She’s booked in Number Five. My daughter took her up!’ he said.

  There was something hidden in the tone of his voice. Not unfriendly, but full of portent. John sensed it.

  ‘My co-worker. A technical assistant,’ he said briefly, taking out a cigarette. ‘We occasionally have to take members of both sexes in a scientific expedition, you know. Women’s rights in a world of equality ‒ and all that!’

  The manager accepted one of John’s cigarettes, also the lighted match to the tip of it.

  ‘She a botanist too?’

  John’s eyes went silver cold as he watched the other.

  ‘Not precisely,’ he said. ‘As I said, she’s what we call a technical assistant. A necessary adjunct.’

  ‘Don’t mistake me, Dr Andrews,’ the other remarked in an easier voice. ‘I don’t mean anything oblique. But you’d better know those fellers in there ‒’ he nodded his head towards the wooden partition that divided the main bar from the manager’s private saloon where they now talked. ‘They like something to yarn about now’n again. Livens things up for them. They don’t care a hang what any other man does, and mostly they mind their own business.’ He paused. ‘But ‒’

  ‘Yes? But what?’ John’s voice was studied. Studded with ice-chips too.

  ‘Well … You have to go back to civilisation sooner or later. Well, you’d better know what went on. And goes on. It’s not my business, and I don’t care a darn. I’m being friendly about this. If you want to know I’ll tell you.’

  ‘I want to know. Go ahead.’

  ‘There was a road-train ‒ all wool ‒ passed through here on its way to the main link-road out west day before yesterday. Twelve bale-laden trucks hooked on to a diesel header. You seen those wool road-trains? This one had aboard two drivers, four lookouts, a maintenance man ‒ and a couple of prospectors known round these areas as Peck and Bill.’ He paused, then went on. ‘These last two were conning a free ride. They’d already hitched one from a station-owner to the road-head. You receiving your end, Dr Andrews?’

  Dr Andrews’ eyes were wary ‒ and dead cold at the same time.

  ‘Go on,’ John said, very clear.

  ‘Everyone was in town on the way to a woolshed dance out at Binnie-Carra Station. That bar in there was crammed full. Everybody from anywhere was passing through. That happens when there’s a woolshed dance on. It only comes once a year. Peck and Bill squeezed their way in and old Peck had to live up to his reputation as a yarn-spinner. He yarned all right. One tale after another. One about a girl and a chap picking a sand dune and a broken-down homestead for a honeymoon. Some honeymoon, was the general consensus of opinion in that bar. Do I go on?’

  ‘You do.’

  ‘Skelton’s place?’

  ‘Okay,’ John said levelly. ‘So what? In scientific circles, even mission circles, our sort of community-living has to be accepted.’

  The manager nodded his head thoughtfully.

  ‘So there’s field work? So girls have to go too?’ He shrugged. ‘It’s all okay by me. Like I said ‒ I don’t care a darn. But people up here are conservative. Landed people always are. It’s a patriarchal land anywhere north of the Twenty-sixth parallel. You try and convince ’em it’s okay for girls to be stuck out alone with a man on a science jaunt ‒ in amongst the sand dunes!’

  ‘Why should I?’ John Andrews was too civil.

  The atmosphere between the two men was getting stickier, yet each was trying to communicate.

  There was a long silence while the manager filled John’s glass again, and then his own. They’d both stubbed out dying cigarettes, then lit up again.

  ‘Well, that ought to settle that little matter,’ John added briefly. ‘What’ll we talk about now? The weather?’

  The pub manager wiped his chin with one hand and stared at John.

  ‘Guess I’d better let you have the lot,’ he said.

  ‘There’s more?’

  ‘There’s more.’

  ‘Okay. Go on.’

  ‘First ‒ up hereabouts ‒ and farther north, there’s an unwritten law against talking about women in the bar. Not done. You understand that?’

  John nodded.

  ‘When it does happen it doesn’t mean anything particularly pleasant for the young lady concerned,’ the manager said. ‘Second. One car load going through to that woolshed dance took exception to Peck’s yarn ‒ on the principle I’ve just mentioned. There was a bit of a fight. Oh, no heads broken! The reason this feller took exception was he’d worked for another feller down south, and kinda liked him. A forester. You know, one of those types grows trees for the retimbering of the forests down south? This forester feller’s name is Jeff Wentworth and he was given to taking his kid sister down in the forests with him. This feller in the bar had seen her more’n once. I go on?’r />
  ‘You do.’

  Written in red ochre on the wall out at Skelton’s old homestead is a bit of a legend, it seems. How’m I going?’ John’s stony silence was a form of comment.

  ‘According to Peck, and his mate the legend written on that wall reads ‒ Kim Wentworth Was Here. And some more too. The name’s the same. Have I said enough?’

  John’s hand was cold steady as he tipped the ash from his cigarette into the tray.

  ‘So this feller?’ he asked evenly, half Antarctica in his voice. ‘This worker-friend of Jeff Wentworth’s had a fight in a public bar in an outback town over Jeff Wentworth’s sister? Is that what you’re telling me?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Andrews. I’m downright sorry. I thought about it hard and long, after you came in an hour or so back with Miss Wentworth. You see ‒ her name went down on the register along with yours. I couldn’t help but know who you two were. So will the rest of this span of the outback. And the story too. I reckoned ‒ after I thought hard and long ‒ I ought to tell you. Some day ‒ maybe ten years hence ‒ someone’s going to tell that forester Wentworth about that bar fight. I reckoned-up you ought to know. The girl looks too nice to have her name chucked about the outback by Peck or anyone else. Yarns grow, you know. More gets tacked on ‒’

  ‘Thank you. I take your information as part of the service,’ John said. ‘Will you have another drink? Two’s enough for me.’

  ‘For me too, this time of the day. But I’d like you to know I take it as an honour to have one of you scientific chaps come in here and pass the time of day with me.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure!’ John said turning away from the counter. He added ‒ ‘Thank you for telling me. You were quite right. It is something I should know. As leader of this particular Expedition I’m responsible for Miss Wentworth.’

  ‘I thought so. I’m glad you’re not taking offence. By the way, the cook’s preparing a fine brush turkey for dinner to-night. We keep a good table here. Hope you enjoy your stay.’

  ‘Thank you.’ John’s dignity was impeccable. ‘It’ll be a matter of a few days, I think. I’m waiting for a spare part for the jeep. It’s being flown up from the south.’