by Lucy Walker
It was useless to call to Hal. The noise of the horses crashing through the thick forest would have prevented her voice from carrying. In any event Hal was half the time outside eyeshot and earshot.
Kate’s hands took firm mastery of the reins. What experience of riding she had told her that brainwork and her mount’s confidence in herself would get her through this. She had a fleeting mental vision of the civilised limes and chestnuts with its sedate horse track in Hyde Park. How did an intimate memory of a girlhood amongst them help her in this primeval forest?
She tried to pull Becca up. At that moment the mare did a half twist around a large jarrah. Thirty yards away, in the only path between the trees, a great dead tree lay sprawled. The trees stood locked together. Kate eased the rein and gave Becca her head. She shut her eyes. She felt herself go through the air, the firm feel of the earth again and the gathering of the horse’s legs, and she galloped on madly through the jungle of growth.
The whole incident was only a matter of six or seven minutes.
When Kate opened her eyes the mare was racing, but steadily, along a wheel track. They were out of the densest part of the forest.
Presently Becca, with one or two last frisks of independence, slowed to a controlled pace. Kate eased herself in the saddle and tightened the reins. She made no attempt to pull up, however. Whither the track led her she would go. She was frightened and shocked and didn’t want to see Hal until something very angry in her had subsided.
The coat of her habit had a rent and her leggings were badly scratched, the leather hanging in short strips from the surface.
The track lay alongside a wire fence.
‘It must take me somewhere,’ Kate thought. ‘At least I’m on the boundary of a property and not out in the forest.’
Becca was walking now. Five minutes later Kate saw a horse tethered to the wire fence. It was the big bay gelding she had seen Bellew the boundary rider on in the morning. When she came up she saw that Bellew was crouching down by the fence, wire-pliers at work, mending a cut wire.
‘Hullo!’ Kate said.
Bellew stood up and took his wide shabby hat off. He said nothing.
‘I thought I was lost, but seeing you makes me think this is an Appleton fence.’
He nodded.
‘I saw you riding by the homestead this morning,’ Kate said. ‘You ride magnificently.’
A faint smile hovered a minute round his mouth. His eyes were a pale grey and seemed as if turned inward in their expression. He said something, but Kate could not understand it. It was a mumble and made her think that perhaps he was so unused to speech he had forgotten how to use the muscles of his mouth.
Kate brought Becca right up to the fence.
‘Will you hold Becca, please? I want to get off and she’s bolted with me once already. I don’t want to lose her again.’
Bellew put his hat back on his head and held Becca. Kate slid off. She groaned and bent double with the pain. Bellew was looking at her in a bewildered way.
‘I’m sore all over,’ Kate said. She smiled up at him. ‘Can you help me, please? I don’t know the way home.’
He looked all the more worried. Kate noticed the hand holding the horse’s head was trembling. His eyes looked away from her.
‘Perhaps I’ve upset him. Perhaps I shouldn’t have got off,’ Kate thought.
A horse came pounding up the track. It was Hal.
‘Where’d you get to?’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you follow me?’
‘I couldn’t. I don’t ride as well … or as crazily … as all that.’ Out of the corner of her eye Kate noticed that the trembling of Bellew’s hands had almost become an ague. She looked at Hal steadily.
‘I’ve had a tearing time,’ she said, showing the rent in her coat.
‘Count it as the cost of experience,’ he said lightly. ‘Do you want a hand up?’ He was leaning down towards her. ‘Don’t waste your time on Bellew,’ he added. ‘He probably loathes it. He never talks to anyone.’
Bellew held Becca’s head and Kate crawled up into the saddle. She hadn’t accepted Hal’s hand and her pain was too great to give her spring in mounting.
She leaned forward and smiled into Bellew’s eyes.
‘It was such a relief finding you …’ she said. ‘Two English people in the jungle … like Stanley and Livingstone …’
The merest smile flitted across his mouth. He turned away and began to tighten wire knots in the fence. His hand on the pliers was no longer trembling.
She turned to Hal.
‘I’ll never like Becca. She’s a female cad. Next time I go riding I’d like to pick something myself.’
‘If she played up you should have thrashed her.’
Kate almost pulled up in her astonishment.
‘Do people really do that to horses?’
He did not answer. Instead, he gave his own horse a jab with his boot and galloped ahead down the track.
Kate rode with greater confidence now. When she looked at Hal his handsomeness smote her in the place where she was most susceptible. But it had its price. To marry Hal … to have all that great manhood for her own, she had also to take the other things: the little humiliations in public such as his desertion of her this morning; the arrogance that made him treat people such as Bellew, and the horses, with a cruelty that Kate didn’t think he really had by nature. And Peg! That girl came into the same category as Bellew, the horses and other defenceless things; somebody who had to knuckle down.
Kate knew now that Hal’s visit to the Castillon property that morning had been no more than a high-handed gesture. That was why Rick Benallen had looked a little perturbed. Rick Benallen had lived all his life with the Westons. He knew there had been something between Peg and Hal. Even if it had only been on Peg’s side.
‘I’ll have to hold my head high and crack hardy,’ Kate thought, and was suddenly pleased with herself that she could think in the Australian idiom. ‘They’re not going to get a pommy down!’
She would ask Rick Benallen why the Australians always called the English ‘pommies’.
She turned Becca and began to canter down the track.
At the door on to the veranda Beatrix met her.
‘Whacko, Kate!’ she said. ‘You certainly look as if you’ve been out with Hal. I’m glad you’re all in one piece because the telephone wires have been buzzing all the afternoon. We’re going to have a sumptuous wool-shed dance and party over at Arundel, the de Berhans’ place. The whole district’s coming.’
‘How lovely!’ Kate groaned. ‘How absolutely beautiful! But how do I get mended in time? Thirty-three and a third per cent of the bones in my body are broken.’
‘Did you come off?’
‘Don’t sound so fatalistic, Beatrix. It is a foregone conclusion that those who go out with Hal will either come back groaning or be carried back on the saddle? Don’t the police do anything to stop you landowners from murder?’
‘Why should they? We pay them, don’t we? The whole country rides on the sheep’s back.’
Kate, on her way across the veranda, stopped and looked at Beatrix.
‘I believe you mean that.’
‘I do,’ Beatrix said.
Chapter Four
‘Kate! it’s for you!’
It was Wednesday and Kate had been at Appleton two days. She was standing at the mail table in the home post-office rigged up on the veranda kitchen of the homestead. She had just slipped into the mail box her first letter to her mother.
Beatrix was leaning cross-legged against the telephone switchboard. She held out the receiver as Kate came across the veranda.
‘Who could be ringing me?’
‘Peg!’ said Beatrix. ‘She just wants to say hullo!’
Peg’s voice was soft and hesitant.
‘I just rang you, Kate, to ask how you feel and say I’m glad you’ve come to Blackwood. It looks as if we’ll have some dances and picnics. The whole district’s humming.’
> ‘Why, that’s nice. But the parties wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I don’t know anyone.’
‘But they all know you, Kate. You’re Hal’s fiancée and that calls for any amount of partying. Generally speaking, anything will be a good excuse for a wool-shed dance, Kate, but this time it’s a special excuse.’
‘Thank you, Peg, for being so nice to me. Still, I can’t help thinking …’
‘Don’t you think too much, Kate. It’s out of fashion in Blackwood. You just enjoy yourself. And you’ve made a real hit already.’
‘But Peg, how could I? I haven’t seen anybody.’
‘But lots have seen you. Everyone knows who gets off the early morning train and what they’re wearing and how they talk. In the first ten minutes of arrival you are made … or you are settled … in Blackwood. Anyhow, you’ve made the grade, Kate. I expect it was that lovely pink suit you wore.’
‘I feel rather overwhelmed …’
‘Don’t. Just have a good time. Will you tell Beatrix I might be coming out to-day on the Benallens’ station waggon. I have to find out if anyone’s going through to Blackwood in the evening to take me back.’
‘Yes, I’ll tell her. I do hope you come, Peg. I’d love to have a good talk with you.’
‘When?’ said Beatrix laconically.
‘This afternoon if she can,’ Kate said as she hung up.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Mrs. Weston sharply as she came through the wire door into the kitchen and let it bang noisily behind her. ‘Who’s coming this afternoon?’
Beatrix was plugging in another telephone call that had come through the exchange.
‘Peg … maybe.’
A look of grim glee, if there is such a thing, creased Mrs. Weston’s face.
‘Ha!’ she said. ‘That will be just right for my arrangements. Peg can mind the children and Annabel can take me over to Mrs. Willy’s.’
Kate looked at Mrs. Weston. Beatrix winked at her.
‘Good old Peg!’ Beatrix said. ‘Always the useful horse that happens to be willing too.’
Mrs. Weston had gone to the mail table and was writing on the back of a telegraph form. She ignored Beatrix.
There was another buzzing on the switchboard and Beatrix plugged the call in.
‘Why do you have a switchboard on Appleton?’ Kate asked.
‘We get our own telephone services free. Besides, we can always hear what’s going on round the district.’
There was a sardonic gleam of mischief in Beatrix’s eyes. She held the plug down with her little finger and lifted the house receiver. She listened a minute.
‘Ordering the groceries,’ she said dryly.
Kate looked at her in astonishment. Beatrix laughed.
‘They don’t say anything private. Would you?’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Kate said with fervour.
There was some more buzzing and Beatrix plugged the call through. Mrs. Weston hobbled on her stick towards the switchboard. She lifted the receiver and listened. Presently she began to smile and nod her head. Beatrix winked at Kate.
‘That’s Mrs. Railton … Mother’s pet aversion. Probably planning to go to Albany for the races. Mother will tell us all about it in a minute.’
Sure enough, Mrs. Weston put down the receiver and hobbled back to the mail table.
‘That woman,’ she said. ‘Always gadding about. The ruination of her husband. And always ringing up the Benallens. Can’t see why Mrs. Benallen hasn’t woken up to that kind of toadying.’
Beatrix shrugged.
‘She’s not toadying to Mrs. Benallen. It’s Rick she’s casting for!’
Annabel hurried through the kitchen door.
‘Really, Beatrix, you do say some scandalous things!’
She hastened on her way.
‘Rick’s just the same as any other man,’ Beatrix said. ‘When it comes down to the fundamentals of life.’
Kate felt bewildered. Nobody was turning out to be the way she thought them to be. Mrs. Railton? Ah, yes … the brassy-haired woman with the high nasal voice and the good-natured face in the tea-shop.
So there were depths to Rick Benallen too!
Beatrix looked with sardonic humour at Kate’s face.
‘You wait, Kate,’ she said. ‘Wait till you really know Blackwood. You’ll find such things you never dreamed of in your philosophy!’
‘I’m finding out a lot about you, Beatrix. Are you all as wicked as you make out?’
‘No. Only Mother.’
Dreadful noises were coming from the radio in the card-room.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ This was Mrs. Weston again as she turned into the card-room. ‘Annabel, why can’t you get that station without that din?’
Kate and Beatrix followed Mrs. Weston. Annabel looked up, her pretty face flushed. She had on the floral overall. ‘Badge of bondage’ Beatrix called it.
‘It’s only a minute or two to half-past ten Mother. It’s the radio that takes warming up.’
‘Why don’t we buy a new one?’ Beatrix asked.
‘That’s a perfectly good radio,’ Mrs. Weston said, sitting down and resting her hands on her stick. ‘In my day we didn’t throw out everything of value to rush in buying new things just to keep in the fashion. Besides, we’ve got the “pick-up” in the billiard-room. Isn’t that enough?’
The station came through with the sounds of a signature tune dying away. The little girl Sugar came to the door. Annabel looked appealingly at Beatrix.
‘Do take her away, Beatrix. You know Mother and I love the Woman’s Hour.’
Beatrix shook her head firmly.
‘Not with five servants in the house,’ she said.
Kate walked over to the little girl and took her hand.
‘Coming with me?’ she asked. For a moment the child looked stubborn, then after considering Kate she nodded her head.
‘This is where I record one success … at any rate,’ Kate thought.
She went out on to the veranda. At that moment a very young girl came from the kitchen. She looked a thin pasty-faced fifteen.
‘That you, Sugar? My, you’re a naughty girl!’
Her manner belied her words. She bent down and tickled Sugar under the ribs.
‘Ho, ho, ho! So you run away from Mary Cricks, do you? You run away from poor old Mary, Mary quite contrary!’
Sugar was shrieking with delight.
Mrs. Weston came to the door.
‘For goodness’ sake take that child away.’ She turned back to the card-room.
‘Annabel,’ she called sharply. ‘Mary Cricks will give that child hysteria. She can’t be allowed to handle Sugar!’
Annabel came out on to the veranda, her pretty face puckered and fretful.
She followed Sugar and her escort into the kitchen.
‘I should have put her to bed earlier …’
Beatrix, who had followed Kate, shrugged her shoulders.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. ‘You haven’t seen half the place yet.’
‘I’d love to … but first … Can’t I help Annabel?’
‘No you can’t. I’m expending more efforts than you deserve, Kate, in saving you from just such a fate. It isn’t Annabel … she would never make use of you. But Mother would.’
She threw a straw hat to Kate. They went through the wire door and along the garden path.
‘Who pulls out the plugs on the switchboard, Beatrix?’
‘Judity or Riley … or anyone in the kitchen. That’s why the thing was set up there. There’s always someone in the kitchen.’
‘Who’s Mary Cricks … I haven’t seen her before.’
‘There are two families of Cricks … down by the river. Cocky farmers. They’re a poor lot … though they’ve been making money switching wool lately. An odd one comes over now and again to help in the kitchen. Mary probably got bored at home and came over to make a few shillings at Appleton.’
They passed a little shack-like house
smothered in creeper.
‘That’s the tool house,’ Beatrix said. ‘It’s probably locked now, so I’ll leave it till the men are around. I want to show you the wool-shed.’
On their right a forest paddock was being denuded of trees. Great white leafless skeletons lay sprawled all over the ground.
‘Ring-bark?’ Kate asked.
‘That’s going to be Hal’s landing ground.’
‘Landing ground?’
‘Well, he hasn’t said so yet, and it’s dangerously near the house. But I know what he’s up to …’
‘Will Hal get a ’plane?’
‘Of course he will. They’re all getting them now. John, that’s my fiancé, went to England and bought his own kite … an Air Force discard … and flew it out. Didn’t you hear of the “flying pastoralists”? Well, one of them was John. He wants to go back with Angus Campbell and fly one out for him. Then he’ll want to go with Hal and fly one out for the Westons.’
This Beatrix said with considerable bitterness. Kate looked at her unhappy face.
‘Then he’ll want a new model for himself and go back again,’ Beatrix added.
‘Beatrix, you look almost unhappy,’ Kate said.
‘Of course I am. Who wants to marry someone who’s never on the ground? I sometimes think they just had that war to put all the boys in the air.’
‘I suppose everyone in love has a problem,’ Kate said at length.
Beatrix stopped and looked at Kate. ‘I’m sorry, Kate,’ she said. ‘It’s not much fun being in love with Hal either. I know that.’
‘How do you know? Has he had so many love affairs, and are they always disastrous?’
She began to walk on.
‘We all think you’re the right girl this time, Kate. He’s crazy about you. He was when he wrote to us from Sydney, anyway. There have been others, of course … but nothing serious. You’re the only one he’s got engaged to, anyway. He’s so damned attractive. Poor Hal!’
‘Why “poor Hal”?’
‘He doesn’t get much chance …’
