I stared down at my foot. Cow pat. No!
I’m an obstetrician, I reminded myself, feeling hysterics closing in. I can cope with the mess around birth. There’s no reason to whimper because of a bit of cow dung.
Except that I wanted to.
I looked around wildly and found Christabelle looking at me.
Salami?
The rest of the herd seemed restless, clearly uneasy as they waited their turn on the platform. Their udders were swollen with milk. The whole herd suddenly seemed to be weighed down by years.
Seabirds were wheeling above the jacarandas behind the dairy. Behind the yard was the sea—a brilliant sapphire sheet, waves rolling in to break on a wide ribbon of golden sand.
It looked like paradise.
Turtles with broken shells. Ageing cows. Salami.
I felt as if I’d landed on another planet.
I’d destroyed my shoe and I hadn’t even noticed. Was a ruined shoe a reason to cut and run?
Yes.
‘It’s okay,’ Jack said. ‘If you think I’d be leaving your girls to your tender mercy—well, I’m not that cruel. Off you go and change your shoes.’ His tone was that of kindly adult to irresponsible kid. ‘Maybe there’ll be some real shoes in the suitcase from the seaplane. It arrived—via Jed’s taxi—as I was bringing in the cows. I told him not to wake you and I signed for it.’
Here was yet another reason to be grateful to Jack McLachlan.
So why did I want to kick him?
The man seriously unnerved me. He looked like a tramp, tattered and unshaven, but his blue eyes were acute and searching. There was intelligence there—somewhere behind his lazy grin.
I hated it, but I needed him. If he abandoned my cows I was in deep trouble.
But he’d already replaced his wetsuit on the hook and was turning back to the cows. He’d been speaking the truth. He had no real intention of abandoning them.
Maybe he was as fond of them as Grandpa had been.
‘How’s the turtle?’ I asked, stiffly, and he smiled.
‘Tootsie? She’s splendid. She’s in dry dock for a few days while her new shell’s built but we think she’ll live to lay more eggs for years to come.’
‘That’s great. Thank you for … everything.’
He smiled. ‘You’re more than welcome, ma’am, but there’s no need to thank me on Tootsie’s behalf. She’s a free spirit. Now what about finding yourself some sensible shoes?’
‘These are sensible shoes.’
‘No, they’re not. You need gumboots.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Gumboots. Wellingtons. Whatever you call them in your part of the world.’
‘I don’t think they exist in my part of the world.’ I did own boots, but the thought of the soft Italian leather in this dairy was revolting.
‘Then do something else,’ Jack said flatly.
‘You want me to go away?’
‘Yes. You’re spooking the cows.’
‘They’re settling,’ I whispered. ‘I’d like to watch.’
He ushered another cow onto the platform, adjusted the cups and looked again at my decorated foot. ‘You don’t want to be doing something about your shoe?’
‘I should.’ Though I knew what I’d be doing. They’d never be the same, and every time I looked at them I’d think of cow dung.
I should wake Muriel, I thought, and now I had shoes to buy. I bet I couldn’t buy Jimmy Choos on the island, but there must be shoes somewhere.
But something was nagging at me. This was Grandpa’s life. Henry’s life. Somehow that fact overrode my concern for shoes— and gave me pause.
I’d lost the chance to know Henry, so maybe it wouldn’t hurt to ignore my destroyed shoe. Maybe I could be still for a while and watch.
Maybe I could learn … a little of Henry’s life? My grandfather’s life.
‘I’ll be quiet,’ I told Jack and he hiked up his eyebrows in mock shock.
‘You really want to watch?’
‘Yes.’ I tried to sound humble. ‘I’ll try not to spook the cows.’
‘And your foot?’
‘I’ll clean it later.’
‘It’ll be hard to get the dung off after it dries.’ His blue eyes flashed with laughter again. What was it with this man? His smile was contagious, as if the whole world was his personal joke. ‘I can help.’
‘How?’
‘Easy.’ And he lifted the huge black hose snaking across the dairy floor, aimed and pulled the trigger. Cold water hit me square on my foot, blasting away the cow dung and soaking me from the knees down. I yelped and jumped about a foot in the air.
‘There you go.’ Jack patted Christabelle on the rump. ‘Job complete, Christabelle, lass. Your new owner’s all clean.’
‘Are you…’ I was having trouble getting my words out. ‘Are you mad?’
‘Didn’t you want your foot washed?’
‘You … You … Of all the … I could sue …’
‘Go ahead, then. I was just doing you a service.’
‘You toe rag.’ I stared in disbelief at the ruins of my gorgeous shoes. ‘Do you know how much these shoes cost?’ I took a step forward. To smack him? Maybe not, but I was feeling beyond anger. Jack, however, just grinned and his grip on the hose tightened.
‘Never threaten an armed man. Now, are you heading back to the house so I can get on with my milking?’
I should. I should stomp off in my squelchy shoes without a backward glance.
But returning to the house seemed to spell defeat, and my anger was mixed with something else—an emotion I found hard to define. I’d come on a journey halfway around the world and I still wasn’t sure why, but if that reason was anywhere it was here, with a herd of ancient dairy cows being milked on the bluff overlooking one of the most beautiful coastlines in the world.
Henry had milked these cows in this dairy. He’d gazed out over the headland to the sea beyond. He’d belonged here. His vegetable garden. His cows. His surfboards.
This life.
I’d never had roots, but it seemed here was the ghost of a grandfather I’d never known, who had red hair just like me.
The urge to belong was suddenly so great it threatened to overwhelm me.
But why?
I did belong, I told myself fiercely. I belonged in New York. With Richard. This place had nothing to do with me.
But there was no way I was giving in to this man’s summary dismissal.
Jack was watching me. His laughter had faded and there was a strangely speculative expression on his face.
‘I’ll stay out of the way,’ I muttered and squelched across to a corner and hauled myself up onto the fence. ‘But I’m watching.’
‘It’s your dairy.’
‘That’s right. It’s my dairy.’
‘So why have you come?’
Jack’s voice tugged me back from my scattered thoughts. I’d hitched myself up onto a rail to gaze over the cows to the sea beyond. Now my attention jerked back to Jack, calmly washing teats and placing rubber suction cups on an elderly cow. He and the cows seemed a team. I wasn’t part of this. I had no role here.
Wasn’t I supposed to be silent?
‘Can I talk?’
‘You’ve been still long enough,’ he said. ‘The girls are settling. Don’t use any exclamation marks and you can talk all you wish. Why did you come all the way out here? New York to Nautilus is a long way. Muriel hasn’t been near the place for over fifty years. What makes it different now your grandpa’s dead?’
He knew Muriel’s name? ‘Maybe it’s because Grandpa is dead.’
‘You could have put the place on the market from the US.’ He patted the cow on the rump and moved to the next. ‘Your grandma never showed much interest in this place fifty years back.’
‘Like you’d know. How old are you?’
‘Thirty-six.’
‘Then we’re talking years before you were born.’
‘Ancient hi
story,’ he agreed. ‘Still, there must be some reason why the pair of you hot-footed it over here now rather than just sell and take the profits.’
‘How do you know about Grandma?’
‘Henry talked about her.’
‘You really did know him?’ Try as I might to conceal it, I couldn’t stop myself sounding wistful. ‘I wish I had.’
‘He was a grumpy old bastard.’
Bang. There went my vision of a kind and gentle old dairy farmer, pottering around amongst his cows while his frivolous wife played the field on the other side of the world. Why couldn’t I have normal relatives?
‘Maybe he was grumpy because Muriel left him,’ I ventured.
‘Maybe. But pain has a habit of making people grumpy.’
‘Pain? You mean when he was dying?’
‘No.’ Jack rose again. He’d finished putting the cups on the next cow, but I had the feeling he’d rise anyway. It was as if this point was too important to be made crouched down behind four legs and an udder. ‘He didn’t have pain at the end. He died in his sleep of a heart attack and it was a blessing. Because ever since he was shot down, Henry’s life was filled with the constant, inexorable pain that comes from dreadful damage. The sort of damage a man is lucky or unlucky to live through, depending on which way you look at it. Often Henry regarded life as something he’d rather not endure, and sometimes I had to agree with him.’
I shook my head, bewildered. ‘I don’t understand.’
His eyes narrowed. His humour had disappeared completely now and his gaze was intent. ‘What’s your grandmother told you about his injuries?’
‘Exactly nothing. Muriel is … to say the least, uncommunicative about her past. All I know is what I’ve figured out myself. I’m guessing they met in the States during the Vietnam War. They married and came here to live and then Grandma decided to go home. I saw his picture for the first time last night. As far as I was concerned, my grandfather was as anonymous as my father.’
‘So you don’t think she felt guilty?’
‘Why should she feel guilty?’
‘He needed her.’
‘I don’t understand,’ I said again. I was seated high on the railed fence. My feet were dripping, but the sun was already starting to make its presence felt. It’d be hot later, I thought. It’d been grey sleet in New York when I’d left, and the sun on my face felt good.
‘Henry was horribly injured during the Vietnam War,’ Jack said and I forgot about feeling good.
‘Tell me.’ Though I was no longer sure I wanted to hear.
‘He was an ace fighter pilot with the Australian air force.’ He bent again to attend udders. ‘You know our countries were allies? He was flying reconnaissance missions, gaining himself one hell of a reputation, and he was sent to the US to help with some sort of training. Or information sharing. Who knows? But that’s when he met and married your grandmother. I gather he had three or four leaves with her before his luck ran out. He was shot down. The rest of the crew parachuted out, but he flew on until he knew they were clear. He got out—just—as the plane fire-balled on the way down.’
The morning sun didn’t seem so warm now. I was starting to feel cold. ‘He … he was burned?’
‘Over most of his body,’ Jack said grimly. ‘He spent time as a prisoner of war, and didn’t get immediate care for the burns. When he was released your grandmother had him taken to the US. He went through operation after operation, the best medical treatment money could buy, but some wounds can never be healed. Finally your grandmother brought him here.’
‘She did that?’
‘Aye, but it didn’t last,’ Jack said. ‘How could it? In less than a year she walked out and left him to his suffering. He never heard from her again.’
‘Oh, no.’
‘Don’t think he didn’t know what happened to her, though. He followed every move she made. Every man she hooked up with.’
‘How … how do you know?
‘He used a private investigator. For the last few months I’ve been handling his accounts and I queried this one. He said he’s been paying one for years.’
A private investigator … What the … It didn’t make sense.
And what would Henry have found out? There would have been many men. I’d only known Muriel since her middle age, but I’d seen enough to guess what a younger, bolder Muriel would have been like. If Henry was watching … If he’d loved her …
‘And your grandpa was in Nepal when your mother died.’
I nearly fell off the fence. ‘He what?’
‘You heard me.’ Jack was concentrating on the cows, but his anger vibrated all through the dairy. ‘My grandfather and Henry were friends. He said Henry arrived at our place one night in a hell of a state, asking for my grandfather’s help to run the farm because his kid was dying of some unknown cause in Nepal. Heaven knows what it was, but I can guess.’
‘I was seven years old at the time,’ I said, carefully, still balancing precariously on my perch and trying to take in what I was hearing. I was getting too much information too fast. ‘Maybe I can understand your anger.’ But then I thought again. ‘No, maybe I can’t understand. Not towards me. I never knew my grandfather. I was in Nepal when my mother died and I can’t remember my grandfather ever coming near me.’
But maybe he had been there. My memories of that time were so sketchy it was no wonder I couldn’t remember individual people. But in the end—when things got totally desperate and someone found me—there’d been people around. The man with a scarred face who’d fed me soup …
Surely a grandfather would have stood out. Surely a grandfather would have hugged me. Told me who he was.
‘He sent you home to your grandmother.’
‘He told you that?’
‘Yes.’
‘But my grandmother’s told me nothing.’ It was hard to keep my voice from becoming a wail. ‘If I’d known…’
He shook his head, disbelieving. ‘Yet you appear on the scene oh so fast when there’s money to be had. When you can sell the farm.’
‘Oh, please—’
‘What else should I think?’ He was suddenly sounding intensely weary of the conversation. ‘No one’s come near the old man for years, yet within weeks of his death here comes the family.’
‘So judge me.’ I jumped down from the fence so fast I startled his blasted cows. My blasted cows. Not that I cared. I didn’t. They could line up at the knackery, Jack McLachlan included, and I bet the salami he made would be as tough as his boots. ‘Look, I don’t know who you are but—’
‘You want me to quit?’
‘No, I don’t want you to quit.’ Cows or not I was practically yelling. ‘I don’t know what I want. How can I when I don’t have a clue what’s going on? Keep milking the cows, Mr McLachlan. Just do what you have to do but leave me alone. I’ve got jet lag like you wouldn’t believe, a soaking foot that stinks of cow dung, ruined shoes and a guilty conscience over things that happened fifty years ago to a man I wasn’t allowed to know existed—things that I had absolutely nothing to do with. I’m going back to the house to find a nice quiet room where I can drum my heels without upsetting these stupid cows. Satisfied?’
He was giving me a very strange look. The cows, too, were giving me strange looks.
‘Aye, I’m satisfied,’ he said at last.
‘Well, bully for you,’ I snapped and attempted a dignified exit, stage left.
Not easy when every step I took squelched with wet cow dung.
4
burning house n. the rolling wave closes in around you, trapping you in the ‘green room’.
I vented my spleen scrubbing my shoe with a bristle brush I found in the sad excuse for a laundry. It wasn’t a success. I looked at it from all angles, then hurled the wretched thing into the living room. It hit a cushion. The sun-faded cover promptly burst, oozing feathers.
The living room was a time warp. It looked expensively furnished, but years ago, I guesse
d by Muriel. The armchair by the fire was really worn. It must have been where Henry sat. I could see the outline of his body. The other furnishings were disintegrating with age, but they looked essentially unused.
‘So you didn’t party much, Gramps?’ I muttered as I cleared the mess. Jack was right: it had been stupid to bring gorgeous shoes here. Where could a girl buy gumboots?
Henry’s chair wasn’t giving any answers.
I stared into the photograph of my grandparents on their wedding day, trying to get some sense of who they were. Muriel was dressed in a fabulous coat. Tweed fabric, velvet collar, tiny cinched waist. She had a velvet beret on her curls. It might have been the seventies, age of flares and hot pants, but Muriel had obviously been what she was now—her own fashion statement. She looked elegant, vibrant and joyously happy, gazing up at the tall, strongly built guy by her side. She looked as if she couldn’t believe her luck.
And Henry?
He looked like a man who’d been given the world. Absurdly handsome in his flight lieutenant’s uniform, he was looking down at Muriel with all the love and pride a man could hold. One of his hands was resting—not so much possessively as protectively—on Muriel’s hip.
They were both visibly in love, in a way I could scarcely imagine.
Did Richard ever look at me like that? I shook the question off as irrelevant—I had enough to think about—and focused on the two in the picture.
How had things gone so horribly wrong?
‘Did she desert you because you lost that beautiful face?’ I asked him.
What business was it of mine? Ask no questions, I told myself fiercely. That was Muriel’s mantra. The past was a closed book.
I needed to pack up here. Do what had to be done. If Muriel needed to face the ghosts of her past, she could do that on her own. I needed to get back to the US where I belonged. Back to Richard.
‘And get yourself half a world away from Jack McLachlan,’ I muttered. For some reason the man had me unnerved. His mocking eyes, the way he’d made me feel guilty for things I had nothing to do with, had left me disoriented. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t need to put up with it. I needed to be in control.
Clive, whoever he was, would be back milking my cows tonight, I told myself. Jack McLachlan could go back to surfing or loafing in the sun or whatever he did when he wasn’t sticking his nose where it didn’t concern him.
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