The Girl for Gillgong

by Amanda Doyle

‘Hilary’s mother?’ Andy put back his head, screwed up his eyes and directed them at the ceiling. Kerry realized, too late, that the question had shaken him, and that this was Andy’s way of covering up his uneasiness.

  ‘Hilary’s mother?’ he repeated, and the words were hushed. They seemed to Kerry almost reverent. ‘I guess,’ he said at last, ‘she was beautiful, Kerry girl. Yes, Hilary’s mother was really beautiful.’

  There was complete quiet in the stuffy, sun-filled store.

  Andy went on writing in his notebook, and Kerry’s hands wandered over the shelves, lifting this article, then that one, but not really seeing them, not really looking.

  I knew she’d be beautiful, she told herself wistfully. I knew she’d be pretty, didn’t I, because I can’t imagine Tad Brewster ever being satisfied with any girl but a very pretty one. He would like his wife to be the most beautiful woman in any gathering and that’s the kind of wife he had got—a really beautiful one, whose photo now he couldn’t even bring himself to have around, whose likeness he couldn’t bear to look upon.

  Yes, it added up.

  Kerry’s slender brown fingers had alighted on some small packets. Turning them now, she saw bright flower illustrations on the front.

  ‘Oh! How pretty!’ she exclaimed involuntarily. ‘What are they, Andy?’

  Andy looked up from his store-book.

  ‘Those? Just some samples, Kerry, that the firms keep sending with other orders. Flower-seeds, see. Annuals. They’re no use out here, though. They don’t grow at Gillgong, that kind.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to even plant them?’ She looked again at the gay, pretty colours on the packets.

  ‘No use,’ Andy repeated patiently. ‘They don’t like our water, see. So long as it’s the tank, fair enough, but often by midsummer we’re on the bore, and the water’s too brackish. They just curl up and die.’

  ‘But aren’t you even going to plant them?’ Kerry asked again, scandalized. ‘Aren’t you even going to try?’

  ‘Not again, Kerry, not with that kind, anyway. Jackie tried ’em once, and it was no use. He’s got plenty to do, with the killing, and the fences, without trying flowers that don’t want to grow!’

  Kerry made up her mind.

  ‘Could I have them, Andy?’ she asked politely.

  ‘Sure, Kerry, you have them if you want.’ He looked at her, grinned resignedly. ‘Reckon you won’t take no for an answer, eh! Have them now, if you like, for free. They’re not even listed in the store stock, seeing that they’re just samples.’

  ‘Oh, thank you, Andy.’ Kerry took the packets, and carried them away with her. She was sure she could make them grow! She had always loved flowers, gardens. She could imagine the brilliant display they would make all along the front of the shrub border, with the cool green lawn carpeting the foreground. She would need to dig right along the bed, and root up all the weeds first, and then she would sow the seeds, and keep them watered, and thin them as she had seen the orphanage caretaker do. She was sure Jackie wouldn’t mind. As Andy said, he had plenty to do what with fencing and keeping the station supplied with meat. Beyond attending to the vegetables, seeing that the grass was mown short, and turning the irrigating sprays on the lawns regularly, Jackie didn’t pay much attention to the garden. Once the soreness went out of her burnt cheeks, she would begin her digging. In the meantime, she would find things to occupy her in the house—and there was also the dread ordeal of those driving lessons hanging over her head!

  Actually, the first session with Andy wasn’t the ordeal she had anticipated, after all. He was much more patient with her than she had thought possible, and once she had mastered her initial fit of nervousness, Kerry began to enjoy manoeuvring the big, glossy estate car, and finding that it did very much as she willed it to, providing she obeyed Andy’s detailed instructions.

  After several days, she was able to let the clutch in and engage the gears without jerking and stalling, and Andy made her reverse in and out among the buildings while he guided her from the passenger seat.

  ‘Hard down on your left. Straighten her up now. O.K., Kerry, that’s not too bad. You’re improving!’ he would tell her encouragingly, and Kerry would feel a mounting sense of triumph.

  She was not able to practise hill stops and starts—‘Cos we don’t have any hills here, I reckon, Kerry girl’—and she had no way of assessing her prowess in moving traffic, since there wasn’t any of that around, either. There was only a flat, deserted plain fringed with green-hazed scrub, scored by tracks in all directions—but flat, indeterminate tracks. They led out to the Three-miler, to the Belah bore, to each of the outstations, and to the tarmac public highway to Bindi-eye. At least that’s where Andy said they went to. Kerry herself didn’t try out any of those tracks with Tad’s big Holden—she didn’t dare! She kept to the vicinity of the homestead, where she could summon Andy if anything went wrong, and as her experience increased, so did her confidence.

  Inside the homestead, too, her self-assurance grew. She and Hilary became closer to each other with every day that passed, and when the little girl withdrew for spells of quiet reading which she so loved to do, Kerry would dust and polish and mend, or have a “galah session” of her own with Bluebell, whose pidgin-black-fellow language she had come to understand and respond to with ease.

  Kerry had forgotten all about Tad’s order not to interfere in Bluebell’s department, and she and Bluebell were by now such good friends that Kerry’s assistance, her gradual, almost subconscious assumption of authority as the “missus” which Bluebell kept calling her, crept up on the two of them without either being aware, so slowly and easily did the change in their relationship take place.

  Never at any stage did Bluebell contemplate going walkabout. From referring to Kerry as ‘that young missus name belonga Kerry,’ she came to call her simply “Missus,” and the wide white grin would split her merry face in two, and her gay, flashing eyes would laugh into Kerry’s as she asked her what she should cook for dinner each evening—and ‘what puddin’ Missus reckon thatfella Tad eatun up tonight?’

  Kerry thought whimsically to herself that ‘thatfella Tad’ would eat almost anything without even noticing what it was! However, she couldn’t miss a chance to spare the diners more of those unappetising “puddin’s” than was necessary to save Bluebell’s feelings, and soon it was Kerry herself who began to make the desserts. She hadn’t much experience of cooking, but applied herself intelligently to the ample supply of recipe books in the station kitchen, launching out cautiously at first on cold and simple fare. Once she had conquered lemon fluff and coffee soufflé, she advanced to mousses and Bavarian moulds made with sieved, bottled apricots and peaches, and when these had been received without a single lift of Tad’s expressive brow, without a solitary expression of either rejection or praise, without so much as one remark to show that he had even noticed, she involved herself in the complications of flans and pies and prettily decorated glazed pastries, served with whipped, tinned cream.

  The dressers were full of pretty china, handsome silver, a formal patterned dinner-service, and an enchanting everyday one with a blue glazed willow-pattern design. Kerry often lifted them out and dusted them, admiring the ample vegetable dishes with their fluted lids and china knobs, and the large oval meat plates. Sometimes, too, she cleaned and polished the lovely silver, laying it out on the long cedar table. Against the rich veneer the silver shimmered and shone with a pleasing, mellow lustre that did things to Kerry’s woman heart. It seemed a shame to have to hide it all away again, back in the baize-lined drawers of the sideboard where nobody could see it. Kerry could almost swear it winked its gratitude at her every time she set it out on the table, and then, when she returned it to its prison in the sideboard, away from the light, its lustre drained almost visibly, and it got a dull, listless forlorn, deserted look.

  Hilary, too, would take the pieces carefully in her little hands, and appraise them solemnly.

  ‘Aren’t they beauti
ful, Kerry?’ she would whisper admiringly.

  Today, she said, ‘Imagine having your pudding off a spoon like that, all shiny-silvery! And having your dinner on a lovely blue plate with those funny little pointed houses and trees all over it! Just imagine!’

  Kerry thought of the dull, thick white kitchen plates which were, it seemed, to be Hilary’s lot for ever and ever—the only thing she was ever to know.

  But Hilary was the daughter of the house, wasn’t she, and one day she would be mistress of her own. As Tad Brewster’s child, the daughter of Gillgong Station, Hilary would probably marry, some day, and have a beautiful pastoral homestead of her own to run. It wasn’t right that she should have to grow up looking at solid white kitchen plates, when there were pretty ones in her very own cupboards, plates and silver that gave the little girl a typically feminine thrill of delight.

  Why, Kerry asked herself, should Hilary not experience the pleasure of using the delightful, gracious things with which she was surrounded?

  For no reason at all, Kerry supposed, except the obvious one, that Tad Brewster and Andy Matherson simply didn’t notice these things. They didn’t notice what they ate, or what they ate off, and therefore they wouldn’t notice if Hilary did use the pretty things.

  ‘Why imagine it any longer, darling?’ suggested Kerry now, impulsively.

  Hilary’s gum-leaf green eyes, so like those other eyes, widened appreciably.

  ‘You mean—use them?’ she enquired, in awed tones.

  ‘Yes, why not? They’re too beautiful to keep them shut away, and they would look so pretty on the table!’ Kerry’s enthusiasm bubbled. ‘We’ll use them every night, Hilary,’ she went on gaily, ‘and we’ll serve the meal from the sideboard, from those lovely meat and vegetable dishes. They’ll keep everything nice and hot, too, and you can carry the plates to the men, and learn which side to put them down. It will be very good for us, Hilary, a good upbringing,’ Kerry stated judiciously. ‘At the—at my—er—home, we all had to take turns at serving out the dinner, and waiting at table.’

  ‘Did you, Kerry? How many were there in your family?’

  ‘Oh, lots and lots,’ replied Kerry evasively, ‘but our turns came round quite quickly, all the same. It was fun, Hilary. We liked doing it.’

  ‘So’ll I like it, too!’ The child’s face glowed. ‘Ooh, Kerry! Just think! Having all those pretty things on our dinner table, and me carrying those blue house-and-tree plates to Daddy and Andy! I’ll be terrible careful. Terribly careful!’ she hastened to correct herself earnestly.

  That evening Kerry set the table herself. Bluebell watched her with dubious eyes.

  ‘I dunno what boss’ll say, missus,’ she remarked doubtfully, as Kerry polished each piece of silver carefully before laying it down on the cedar dining-table. ‘Thatfella Tad kin git plenty mad. When thatfella boss git angry, he sing-out plenty onetime!’

  ‘Nonsense, Bluebell! Don’t worry,’ Kerry soothed, brushing aside her protestations blithely. ‘It’s not as though we’re using the best china and silver, and he won’t even notice. He and Andy are always so busy talking, they never see a thing. It’s for Hilary we’re doing it. Look! Aren’t they pretty?’

  ‘Them t’ings is real, dinkum pretty, I reckon, missus—sure t’ing—but I’m tellun youse, if that bigfella Tad don’t like it, youse’ll git the hide walloped off of youse allasame youse was one of them rakin’ mickeys, plurry quick. Them bulls got sense now—they clear out quick alonga that scrub, ’cos Tad’ll belt ’em plenty hard allasame he catch up on ’em!’

  Kerry smiled pacifically.

  ‘Well, I’m sure he won’t notice a thing, Bluebell, and even if he did, where’s the harm in it? Anyway, I’m sure he’s much too civilized to treat us the same way as he treats his rogue cattle.’

  Bluebell’s wide black expressive eyes clearly said, ‘Don’t you be too sure about that!’ and her mobile mouth didn’t grin for once, as she scuttled back to the kitchen in a furtive flurry of gaudy cotton.

  When Kerry had put the finishing touches to the table, she set serving-spoons and heatproof mats on the sideboard, and counted out four of each kind of the lovely deep-blue glazed plates. The pudding ones she left in the dining-room, and the meat ones she carried through to the kitchen to warm up along with the vegetable dishes.

  Then she went to shower and change, slipping into her pretty pink cotton. Her face had stopped peeling, except for a tiny rough patch near the tip of her nose. Her skin was fresh and young and supple once more, but now it was an even deeper shade of apricot-tan colour, so that her eyes seemed darker and deeper too, her teeth even more pearly-white, and her hair when she brushed it out had the pale gleam of spun gold thread.

  When the dinner-bell rang, Kerry had already carried in the pot-roasted beef and the dishes of vegetables. Hilary waited at her side with suppressed excitement, bobbing from one foot to the other impatiently, waiting for the men to come so that she could carry the blue plates to them.

  ‘Ooh, golly, Kerry! Doesn’t it all look beaut?’ she breathed joyfully. ‘Sh-sh! Here they come, here’s Daddy now!’

  Kerry, too, could hear the two sets of heavy footsteps approaching through the hall.

  Andy came in first, Tad a second or two behind him.

  When Tad waited to push in Hilary’s chair for her, excitement got the better of his little daughter.

  ‘You’ve got to sit down first, tonight, Daddy—you an’ Andy!’ she crowed. ‘Kerry an’ me’s got a surprise for you!’

  ‘Oh?’ The familiar, caressing softness was in Tad’s gum-tip eyes as they rested indulgently on Hilary’s sparkling face.

  Obediently he sat, and there was a small smile of amusement lifting one corner of his stern mouth as he did so. Then his attention was arrested by the sight of Kerry’s slender figure, waiting at the side-table, half turned to begin serving.

  For a second they held each other’s eyes, before Tad’s left hers to rove around the room. They took in the pretty silver, the linen napkins, the bowl of mixed shrub-flowers in the centre of the table, the gleaming cruets, the winking glass. They roved over Hilary’s flushed, captivated little face, and then they moved back again to the side-table, and inspected in turn the delft-blue dinner service, the great oval meat plate, the fluted-edged vegetable dishes, the slender young figure of the girl who stood there with her hands poised on the knobs of those dishes, ready to raise the lids, release the steam, and serve the contents.

  Kerry had seen bewilderment, astonishment, and finally a sort of grim control take possession of Tad Brewster in turn. The control, the grimness remained. His eyes were hard, penetrating, as they narrowed at last upon her blushing, apprehensive face. They were emerald-coloured orbs, but their glitter was the cold, tough, repulsing glitter of diamonds, entirely without warmth, as they raked her.

  Just for a second, Kerry felt her own self-possession quiver. Just for a moment, she remembered Bluebell’s prediction—‘youse’ll git the hide walloped off of youse.’ Kerry shuddered. Right now, Tad looked as if he would be capable of doing just that. He looked as though he would actually relish the act, take pleasure in belting her like Bluebell said he did those rogue cattle who were foolish enough to dispute his authority by diving off into the scrub.

  What had she done? What would she do now? Where to go from here?

  The confused questions plunged in and out of her mind.

  Play it cool, Kerry, she told herself, recovering that slipping poise with a mighty effort of will. For Hilary’s sake—poor little Hilary, standing there so eagerly, so proudly, waiting to begin handing the blue-patterned plates. For Andy’s sake—dear, worried Andy, sitting there steeped in embarrassment, ill at ease, gloomy almost. And for her own sake, too—because it was the only way out of this situation which had so suddenly become fraught with tension, charged with danger. If she played her cards wrongly now, pity help her, because Tad Brewster, for all his grim control, looked as though he could be capable of almost anything
if she did or said the wrong thing now!

  ‘Shall I begin, Tad?’ How calm, how efficient, she had managed to make the question sound!

  ‘Yes, Daddy, are you ready?’ Hilary’s echo was enthusiastic.

  Tad’s smile seemed something of an effort.

  ‘Yes, poppet, I’m ready,’ he assured his, child with gruff affection. ‘You may begin, Kerry,’ he added coolly.

  Hilary carried his plate to him carefully.

  ‘That’s it!’ she announced triumphantly. ‘Aren’t they lovely plates, Daddy? I put it down on the proper side, too, didn’t I, Kerry? The side with my bracelet on?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ Kerry’s murmur came indistinctly from the side-table.

  ‘There’s yours, Andy,’ Hilary proclaimed once more ‘I bet you’ve never seen such pretty china, have you, Andy? When you eat some of your dinner up, you’ll see there’s little houses an’ trees underneath, an’ funny little women with slanty eyes an’ long dresses, an’ they’re all blue too.’

  ‘I don’t believe it, kitten!’ Andy made a brave attempt at jocularity in an effort to cap Hilary s pleasure.

  ‘You’ll see, then.’ The little girl chattered on, right through the meal. Kerry was glad that she did, because for once Tad and Andy didn’t converse about the station doings, as they usually did.

  There was an odd sense of strain about Tad’s eyes, a tension about his mouth, but he played up to his daughter gallantly, although Kerry saw that it was an effort. She was filled with bewilderment, compunction, and the strangest feeling of tenderness as she watched Tad gather his control so that Hilary, at least, was unaware that he was having some sort of struggle with his emotions, fighting some sort of battle with himself.

  ‘That was fun, wasn’t it, Kerry?’ The child beamed at her fellow-conspirator at the end of the pudding course. ‘I’m awfully glad we thought of it, aren’t you? Do you know, Daddy—’ Hilary addressed her father—‘Kerry an’ her family always did that, every night an’ day, an’ we’re going to, too, from now on—use all the pretty things, I mean. I’ll bet you thought the dinner tasted extra special tonight, didn’t you, Dad? Kerry says it does, with nice china and silver. Kerry had a great big family where she came from, an’ they took turns waiting at the table, but here there’s only me an’ Kerry, so she’ll serve an’ I’ll take the plates. In Kerry’s family they always ate off pretty plates—’