The happy couple were in love with the sea so their choice for the honeymoon caused no surprises. Sir Stoddart, determined to demonstrate his generosity while at the same time creating an obligation, supplied the funds for a new yacht, which he kindly permitted them to choose for themselves. Windflower was a thirty-two-foot ketch and in her Hal and Shannon headed out on what some waggishly called their maiden voyage while others, more cynical or realistic, doubted that title was appropriate. Alan Watkins licked lascivious lips as he made up stories of Shannon’s past exploits.
A barmaid, after all…
They had talked about honeymooning on Charles Green island. Shannon had always said they’d go back there once they were married but she’d had second thoughts. Luckily it was too late for the mystical idea she’d once had of surrendering her virginity on the island; instead she had replaced it with another one, connected in part to the vision that had come to her when she had first seen the undeveloped distances of the south coast beaches. There lay the foundations of their future. Of her future. The vision that had come to her then had excited her by its sheer audacity: that she, a woman, might be able to forge the independence she had always craved but never truly believed might be possible, that she might be the arbiter of her destiny and not the plaything of men. Charles Green island was somehow tied up with that vision. It had become a symbol of everything good that had happened to her since her visit all those years before, all the good things she was determined would come to her in the future. She would set foot on the island only when she was in the position to buy it for herself. Knowing that opportunity might never arise, it nevertheless pleased her to be imperious.
When it’s mine I shall go back. Until then, I shall wait.
‘Not Charles Green,’ she said, without explaining why.
Instead they sailed north, the breeze clean and sweet after the intricate snobberies of the reception. They retraced the earlier voyage they had made up this coast but pushed on further into unknown seas.
On their third day out they dropped anchor in an inlet with high cliffs protecting them to the north and east. There were wooden huts at one end of what the chart called Waterfall Bay but no sign of human presence.
‘I don’t see any waterfalls, either,’ Shannon said.
It was evening when they arrived, the twilight settling like moths about them, and later the glow of lantern light cast golden ripples across the quiet waters of the bay.
They ate, they made love, they slept, while the ketch Windflower rocked herself to sleep around them.
Shannon woke early and edged herself out of the bunk to make coffee for her husband and herself.
Her husband. So hard to believe it had happened, yet happen it had, and her happiness was as intense and passionate as music, while the conductor’s raised baton encompassed the world.
In the morning, eager to get ashore, they ate a snack breakfast and launched the dinghy. The beach was yellow, the undergrowth beyond the beach an intense green, the leaves of the plants, twenty feet high in some places, as broad and sharp as spears.
‘You’d need axes to get inland from here,’ Hal said.
‘And strong boots,’ barefoot Shannon said.
They walked along the sand until they reached the huts. There were two of them, closed up but looking in good shape, and a narrow track running inland showed tyre marks in the dried mud.
‘A fishing hang-out for weekends,’ Hal guessed.
They followed the track, crossing a small creek crowded on both banks by mangroves, and round a bend came to the feature for which the bay had been named.
Off to the landwards side of the track the ground climbed steeply to a ridge. Through a wide cleft a strong stream fell vertically a hundred feet or so on to a rock shelf before continuing down the slope in a series of cascades and disappearing at last into a stand of tall trees. The waterfall gleamed like diamonds in the sunlight and its sound drowned the murmur of the waves along the shore.
Shannon stared, as at a place set apart by God, complete and miraculous in its beauty, and once again perfection was like music in her ears.
Her fingers tightened on Hal’s hand. ‘Here,’ she said.
He looked at her.
‘I want our first child to be conceived here,’ she said.
‘In the open?’
‘Here,’ she said again. ‘In the open, on the sand, under the sun. Because this place, surely, is as close as we shall ever get to heaven in this life.’
They took off their clothes and lay down on the sand in a ritual as old as creation yet always new. Shannon was in a hurry yet not, wanting the magic to continue in what she had read somewhere the Japanese people, their so-recent enemies, called the clouds and the rain.
She held back, prolonging the moment, prolonging it further and again further, transported by the sense of impending fulfilment, while the sun shone on them both and the voice of the diamond-bright fall filled her being with the coolness of its sound.
Afterwards, there was perfection, too, in the stillness in which it seemed even her heart had stopped beating.
Fingers locked, they wandered along the shore and the waves ran up, washing their feet in suds of foam. And the foam, too, shone like diamonds in the sun.
They stayed a week in paradise, as Shannon called it, then, with the cyclone season approaching, sailed southwards to re-enter the real world.
They bought a two-bedroom house on the Conway Beach road, a side turning between Airlie Beach and Proserpine. There was a patch of land at the back of the house with a pomelo tree that had seen better days but that Shannon fertilised and watered religiously in the hope of restoring it to something like its former life.
A short distance from the house, a rocky outcrop contained several caves where a colony of fork-tailed swifts nested. In the light of the summer mornings, woken by the kookaburra’s first cackle from its perch on the branch of a nearby tree, Shannon lay and listened to the swifts’ shrill cries as they swirled around the house in pursuit of insects.
During the week they were both busy, Shannon at the Regency in Airlie Beach and Hal at the Maitland local head office in Proserpine. They had only one car so he would drop her off first thing and come back for her in the evening.
As it grew dark the mosquitoes made sitting outside impossible so they drove the short distance to Conway Beach and walked along the wide stretch of sand.
Wherever there were rocks there were oysters. They picked a feast off the rocks and Hal opened them with his oyster knife and they ate them as they walked. The oysters smelt of freshness and brine and the flavour lingered in Shannon’s mouth long after she had swallowed them.
The tide went out a long way and they laid weighted lines along the sand below the high-water mark. They attached baited hooks on leaders at intervals along the line. The water came in and covered the lines and when it went out again they would come back and see what they had caught. Sometimes they had no luck but usually there were two or three fish that they took home, with more oysters, for tea.
The hot weather had arrived and Hal had been right; it was too hot to cuddle in comfort. They still made love most nights under the steadily creaking ceiling fan.
By the beginning of November, she knew she was with child and was determined to believe that her wish had been granted and that it had happened at Waterfall Bay, with the sound of the fall cool and lovely in her ears.
Awaiting their first child should have been the best of times and in many ways it was, but not entirely, because in February 1947, eighteen months after the fighting had stopped, the horrors of those terrible years returned.
Shannon came to one night to find she was alone in the bed and that the screams that had woken her were not part of some nightmare but reality. She was running before she was properly awake, finding Hal, body knotted in a frenzy of denial, thrusting himself violently into the angle of the living room’s walls as he tried to hide from the terrors she could see with such painful clarity in h
is wildly-glaring eyes.
She tried to take him in her arms. As soon as she touched him he convulsed; for a moment she even thought he might turn on her, but almost immediately he collapsed, raving and weeping.
‘I could hear them. Hear them calling to us.’
For what seemed a long time she held him. At last he grew calm and she was able to ease him away from the wall and back, stumbling, to bed.
She lay beside him, her arms about him as she tried to protect him from terror. He lay board-stiff and she guessed he was fighting to stay awake, scared that sleep might bring back the torments of the past.
‘Hush now. It’s all over now.’
Except that, clearly, it was not, and for the first time she realised the war had not ended with the Japanese surrender but was an ongoing presence that might bedevil them for months or even years to come.
Later she tried to get him to talk about those terrible days, thinking it might ease him to do so.
‘You said something about calling out?’
‘It was what they did. Every night. Those high-pitched voices. That laughter. “Digger, we come for you. Digger, we coming now…”
‘It got you down in the end. Fighting the Japs; fighting the terrors we all felt but could never admit to having. I reckon we were all half-mad by the time it was over.’
He’d been an officer, he said. A leader by example. He’d been forced to bury his terror where it could not be seen by the men he commanded, while his viscera writhed in endless torment.
Now it had forced itself into the light.
‘You survived,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s the important thing. You came back to me.’
One by one she went through their memories of past times. Such precious memories…
How he had watched the girl he had later called the watermelon bandit as she escaped over the barbed-wire fence from the righteous wrath of the outraged Charlie Hong.
‘I’ve still got the scars. You should know. You’ve seen them often enough.’
How they had sailed side by side across seas both rough and smooth, between islands that shone with the lustre of emeralds in an indigo sea.
How they had found paradise together in the high country of the tableland.
Softly, peacefully, she spoke of these things. Until, at last, he slept. But Shannon remained awake, watching over the man she loved.
The demons revisited Hal twice in the weeks that followed but never with the intensity of that first occasion, and Shannon, all her fingers and toes crossed, dared hope the worst might be behind them.
The challenge of the south coast development helped dispel the darkness, as did working his way up through his father’s company, knowing he was making it through merit and not favour, but he told Shannon later that it was she and his love for her that had restored him to sanity, giving him a vision of a salvation set high upon the hill up which he had been endlessly labouring.
Even as late as early April, when the worst of the hot weather was past, she was hardly showing at all, but from then on that changed. By the second half of May both sleeping and walking had become a problem but she still went to work every day, because as the baby grew Arthur Nimrod began to fail.
The doctors could not diagnose the problem; there were no obvious symptoms and, although old, he was not that old. Perhaps, with both his sons dead and his hotel now in safe hands, he had lost the will to live.
By the beginning of June Shannon, beginning to struggle herself now, expected every day to come to work and find that Arthur had died in the night, but somehow, he still survived. Now it was a race to find out whether Arthur or Shannon’s baby would reach the finishing line first.
The baby won, but only just. Lydia, seven and a half pounds of her, fought Shannon all the way but after a nine-hour battle was born in the Proserpine hospital on 21 June, the day with the fewest daylight hours in the year.
Hal had been barred from attending the birth, chased away by a ferocious dragon wearing the uniform of a nursing sister, but barged in as soon as it was permitted. Shannon, decently covered, tangled hair sweaty and body sore, was at that moment the most radiant woman on the face of the planet. Hal held the baby in his arms and told the proud mother that, after the years of war, of terror, filth, degradation and bloodshed so recently revisited, it was like a personal benediction from God to hold this precious new life, as though holiness had been restored to the world.
Such joy…
At nine o’clock the following morning the nurse came to tell Shannon that Arthur Nimrod had died six hours before.
A time of fulfilment, a time of sadness. And, as always, the earth went on turning, minute by minute, day by day.
Shannon was determined to go to the funeral and went, with Hal at her side. It was a quiet affair, only a handful present to commemorate the life of a good but unlucky man.
Arthur had never talked about his family. There was that cousin somewhere, but otherwise she’d known only that he’d been born in England of German parentage. His long-dead father, an admirer of the music of Edward Elgar, had changed the family name from Neumann to Nimrod and in the first war Arthur had fought for the Allies against his ancestral kin. Arthur was dead but his spirit was everywhere in what for many years had been his spiritual home, now in the process of being restored to something like its former glory.
Shannon and Hal, with baby Lydia, were not the only mourners. Most of the hotel staff put in an appearance, as did – to Shannon’s surprise – Hal’s father, who appeared in his chauffeur-driven Bentley.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Shannon whispered to her husband, but Hal said the two men had been associates for years.
‘Associates,’ Hal said. ‘Not friends.’
Unsurprising: despite his vocation, Arthur had not been a sociable man and neither was her father-in-law, who paid his respects and vanished almost as soon as he’d arrived.
Apart from small bequests to members of the hotel staff and a larger one to Mrs Myles, a widow who over the years had been the old man’s closest friend, Arthur Nimrod had left everything he possessed to Shannon Harcourt.
Shannon was gob-smacked. ‘Surely not the hotel?’
‘Everything,’ the lawyer said. ‘Everything.’
She hadn’t been sure whether Arthur would leave her anything or not. But to inherit the hotel itself…
It struck her at once that wealth, deserved or otherwise, was a lonely business. She was glad, of course she was, but scared too. She was afraid the enormity of the challenge might break her back, if she didn’t look out.
‘I shall need a nanny,’ Shannon said. ‘Someone will have to look after Lydia during the day. I can’t do it if I’m going to make a good job of running the Regency.’
‘Which you are determined to do,’ Hal said.
‘I certainly am.’
She made enquiries and discovered that Lucy Spindle, her fatherin-law’s cook, had a niece called Nancy Gooding who would be happy to help out. Shannon made discreet enquiries. The feedback was favourable, so Nancy got the job. Shannon kept a watchful eye but the teenager and the baby seemed made for each other and soon the mother, who might have detected the seeds of jealousy in herself, was happy to let them get on with it.
‘That’s one problem solved,’ Shannon said.
The second one was where Nancy and baby Lydia should stay while Shannon was working. The Regency seemed the obvious answer, with mother and baby under one roof, but Shannon’s father-in-law decided that would not do, and he was a man in the habit of getting his own way.
‘I’ve always believed in keeping my domestic life separate from business affairs,’ he said.
‘The ongoing renovations at the hotel will create a constant state of turmoil. I do not wish my granddaughter to be brought up in such an environment,’ he said.
‘That Conway Beach shack of yours is too far away should there be an emergency,’ he said.
In Sir Stoddart’s mind the solution was obvious. Lydia
and Nanny would be installed in the Stoddart mansion, where Grandfather could keep an eye on things.
‘That way we can be quite sure nothing will go wrong,’ he said.
There had been a noticeable improvement in her father-inlaw’s attitude to Shannon now that Lydia’s arrival meant the next generation of the Maitland family was secured. Being a man of his generation, it was likely that a son would have pleased him more but there was plenty of time for his daughter-in-law to put that right. In the meantime, he intended to take Lydia under his roof and under his personal care, leaving Shannon free to get on with running the hotel. The obvious solution, as he had said.
Except that Shannon was not having a bar of it.
‘She’ll be staying in the Regency,’ she told Hal. ‘I’ll set aside a couple of rooms on the top floor for her and Nancy. That way I can pop up and see her during the day. Feed her, too, until it’s time to switch her over to a bottle.’
‘He won’t like that,’ Hal said.
‘He’ll have to put up with it,’ Shannon said. ‘She’s my child, not his. If he wants to see her he’ll be welcome, whenever he wants. But seeing her is very different from taking her over, and I won’t have that.’
Possessive as any lioness. What was more, she didn’t care who knew it, Stoddart Maitland included.
Problem two out of the way.
The next one was bigger and from a business point of view much more important. Shannon had her first look at the hotel’s balance sheet and couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
She talked to Hal about it when they were driving home that night. ‘You remember I told you the costs of the hotel upgrade were coming from what Arthur called private resources. Now I find the hotel’s up to its ears in debt. And to your father, of all people.’
White Sands of Summer Page 24
