by Margaret Way
“You’re not sleeping with him, are you?” Cecile asked.
“If l thought it would stop you marrying him, I would do it in a split second,” Tara said with some force.
“Ah, Tara!” Cecile shook her head. In the space of a few hours, her oldest, closest friend was saying one thing, her mother the very opposite. She picked up the menu, ashamed of the fact she had to make a real effort to dredge up a few words in Stuart’s defense. “It’s as well I’m used to your straight shooting, sweetie. In fact, I love you for it——most of the time—but let me assure you, Stuart’s libido is in good working order. I can see why Mother has always considered you an unsuitable companion for me.”
“Ah, yes, Mother,” Tara replied gleefully. “Gee, you know, if she were only twenty years younger she could marry Stuart. They always seem to have such a lot in common.”
“They do.” Cecile’s tone was dry.
“He’s not the man for you, Ceci,” Tara mourned, shaking her lovely blond helmet of hair. “You’re angelic on top, but you’re hot and spicy underneath. You can’t fool me. We’ve been friends since we fell into Joel’s pond.”
“You pushed me in, you mean,” Cecile said, recalling the hot afternoon when the two of them had first met at one of her grandmother’s garden parties. Six going on seven, complete opposites.
“I was jealous of your party dress,” Tara admitted, a nostalgic smile on her pert face. “And you. You looked like a little princess and you spoke oh so prim and proper, but you tumed out to be ai lot of fun. You never told on me, either. But to get back to the delicious Señor Montalvan. I bet he’d be a wonderful lover! Did he say anything about me?”
Cecile took her time to answer, not knowing what to say or in what direction she should steer her friend. “Actually he didn’t,” she said after a while, “which doesn’t mean he didn’t find you a very attractive dinner companion.”
“Oh I hope, I hope!” Tara clasped her hands together in an attitude of prayer. “He’s gorgeous!” she raved, “and the bloody voice! Mel Gibson with a bit of Antonio Banderas thrown in. He doesn’t actually look South American, though, does he? Not like South Americans look South American, if you know what l mean. You know, the raven hair and the flashing dark eyes. He could be a very sophisticated Englishman, Australian, American, only for the fascinating trace of accent and I suppose, the manner. Now that’s South American. What’s he here for, anyway? I tried to question him very discreetly.”
“You, discreet?” Cecile cocked an eyebrow.
“You don’t think I can be discreet?”
“Frankly, no!” Cecile shook her head.
Tara didn’t take offense. Her mother told her that all the time, and her young brother, Harry, called her motormouth. “Anyway, he was charming but very astute at not answering my questions. Joel’s taken quite a fancy to him.”
“Yes, he has,” Cecile agreed, lifting a hand to a waiter. Tara was one of the few people, certainly of her age group, who called her grandfather Joel. But then, Tara was a great flirt and it amused her grandfather, who had always found Tara as engaging as her mother found her “vulgar.” Not true and rather cruel. Impetuous, impulsive maybe, but very loyal.
“I overheard Joel inviting him to Malagari,” Tara went on excitedly.
“Puh-leeze, you were listening,” Cecile chided her.
“So I was!” Tara gave her infectious gurgle of laughter. “I might as well confess it, you know me so well. Are you going? I got the feeling it was quite soon.”
“I don’t know.” She would need serious counseling herself if she did.
“Come off it!” Tara scoffed. “No woman in her right mind would tum down the opportunity of spending a little time with Señor Montalvan.”
“There is the fact I’m an engaged woman,” Cecile suggested. “The accent is on the second last syllable, by the way. Mon-tal-van. I think there are a few Spanish marks thrown in the spelling, like the French acutes and graves and cedillas and what not.”
“What’s a cedilla?” Tara asked with interest.
“Didn’t you take French?”
Tara put a finger to her cheek, turning her large blue eyes upward. “Let me think. Henri Quatre est sur la Pant Neuf. I know, it’s the little comma thing.”
“Right. It’s under c to show it’s sibilant.”
“Okay, do you have to keep reminding me you’ve more brains than I have? So it’s Montalvan? I see. I call him Raul. What does Raul mean, smarty-pants?”
Cecile laughed. “I imagine it’s the Spanish form of Ralph.” She broke off as the waiter came to take their order.
“So like Raul, you haven’t answered my question. Will you go, too?” Tara asked.
Cecile sighed. “Tara, I can’t go running off with devilishly handsome Argentinians.”
“Force yourself. Or look on it as a kind of escape from Stuart. You’ve got nothing in common with him. It’s all that pressure your mother puts on you! God, does she ever stop? I know mothers nag, but your mother takes the cake. I’ve worried about it for. years. Why does she think Stuart is so great, anyway?”
Cecile rested her chin on the upturned palm of her hand. “God knows.”
“There you go!” Tara crowed. “That wasn’t the response of a woman.in love. Wake up to yourself, girl. There must be at least two or three billion men left in the world for you to choose from. Me, I’d just like to take a shot at Señor Montalvan. I’ve never ever seen anything quite like him. He’s got-wonderful shoulders, don’t you think? A wide back too. He looks great in his clothes. I’m just stopping myself from contemplating him without them. The thing is, if you, go, Ceci, you can ask me. Well? Why are you staring at me like that?”
“Don’t you have a job to go to?” Cecile asked, giving herself time to mull over Tara’s proposal.
“Sure, only I work for my dad,” Tara gloated, “which means I can easily persuade him to give me some time off. Especially if I’m going with you. Unlike your mother with me, my mother holds you in very high regard. You’re my friend. I would never wish to steal your fiance, but I sure would like to steal Señor Montalvan away.”
“Be my guest,” Cecile offered in a wry voice.
Tara took her literally. “Bloody hell, you mean it?” Zesty as always, Tara jumped up from her chair to give Cecile a big hug. “I can come?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Cecile said gently. “I can ask, Tara, but it’s up to Granddad.”
Tara resumed her chair, waving a nonchalant hand. “Then we don’t have a worry in the world. Whatever you ask, Joel gives. Anyway, Joel’s got a soft spot for me.”
“Because you give him heaps of blarney.” Cecile smiled.
“Would you mind! I love him. Joel is a beautiful man, everyone’s image of a distinguished gentleman. Anyway, I’ve been asked to Malagari plenty of times before. Raul is going to love it!” Tara’s blue eyes grew dreamy. “I can see myself sitting across the campfire from him. Dingoes are howling in the hills. I shiver. Immediately he gets up to comfort me. The night is full of stars!” She exhaled blissfully. “Romance with a capital R, wouldn’t you say?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“Next day we go exploring our great desert monuments, Uluru and Kata Tjuta. We pick wildflowers in the canyons. We go horse riding—not far, I’m not much good on horses as you know. Swim in a billabong—who needs suits? Make love on the warm sand. It turns into an orgy. Hey, all I need is a chance!”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE LANDSCAPE BELOW them put Raul in mind of the pictures coming back to Earth from Mars. It was also the fantastic fiery-red landscape he inhabited in his dreams. Now he was regarding it afresh. His mother had escaped the country of her birth, in truth still too heartsick to ever wish to return. He had never escaped, no matter how far away they had settled. From the moment his mother had arrived in Argentina all those years ago, she had made herself fit in by sheer force of will. She had escaped them all: the people who had thrown the maiming
sticks and stones, blaming her simply because of who she was. He and his dad, who had never given a tuppenny damn for what anyone said, had never made a successful transition, not that his dad was given much time to fit in anywhere.
Later on, after that terrible grief had been sprung on his mother and him, Ramon with his money and his beautiful estancia had made himself their deliverer. The fact that his mother was meltingly lovely and courageous had a lot to do with it. Still, Ramon had been good to him even when he’d been a hurting, hotheaded, wildly rebellious boy—practically a savage without the controlling hand of his father—but he had never learned to think of Argentina as his home or his future. He had always been determined that one day he would go back. One day he would make the Morelands pay. He would chase down all the people who had hurt his family. He would solve the puzzle and fulfill his ambition to once more walk his desert home.
Now Moreland’s granddaughter and heiress with her silver-rain eyes and her beautiful face had literally fallen into his arms. That rocked him to the core even as an ungentle voice inside his head, cried out triumphantly, Yes! Yes! He didn’t have to work on any other plan beyond her. He could, however, with his inside influence and knowledge, throw a considerable spoke in Joel Moreland’s plans for doing business with Argentinian polo pony breeders and front-line players. A word here, a word there, and it was done. He was as trusted within the Argentinian industry as was his stepfather, Ramon.
Raul continued to look earthward, averting his head to conceal his expression from watching eyes. Had he known it, it was darkly brooding with a turbulent edginess. Yet he had to be careful not to alarm anyone. No one was to see he was plotting anything, but the urge for revenge had become almost meat and drink. Now it was laced with a perverse sense of misgiving. A woman, almost a stranger to him, was at the center of his changing heart. Old scores had to be settled surely? He had to keep remembering that. The slur on his family’s name had to be lifted.
Beneath them the great inland desert captivated him. It was an endless world of fiery colors: blood red, bright rust, strong yellow, burnt umber, dusty pink and glaring white. Land always had filled him with a fierce exhilaration. He worshiped the land like some early pagan, the roar of the winds, the fantastic electric storms that rolled back and forth without delivering life-giving rain; canyons that in severe drought opened up unexpectedly right at one’s feet. Floods that concealed these undulating red dunes and the isolated mesas, set down as they were in the great emptiness. It was unlike any other part of the world. He realized he had never experienced quite this level of nature worship riding the gorse-covered pampas that stretched out to the majestic snow-capped Andes, though their isolated splendor and the wonderful horses had consoled him greatly. He would be forever grateful to Ramon and Ramon’s beloved Argentina, but his heart, his wild heart, belonged to only one place.
It was the Timeless Land that truly called to his heart.
To the south the endless plains, parched by the blazing sun, met up with eroded ranges that in the distance glowed an extraordinary purplish-blue like the heart of a black opal. Infinite stretches of the living desert lay to either side. It took monsoonal rain from the tropical north or winter rains from the south to carry here to transform the barren Inland into a world of flowers of immense numbers and incomparable perfume. He still remembered as a small boy waking up to a wonderland, jumping out of bed and Without bothering to dress, racing out into the horse paddocks to be one of the first to witness the desert flora burst into ecstatic life.
The exhilaration he felt was not unmixed with a deep melancholia that had begun the moment they flew out of the tropical Top End with its crocodiles and magnificent lily-covered lagoons and into the arid Red Heart with its all-pervading atmosphere of deep time. The Northern Territory was bigger than France, Italy and Spain put together, but within its borders lay two vastly different climatic zones: rain forest and desert.
On no account could he allow his melancholia to grow to the point it would swamp him. There would be plenty of ghosts down there on Malagari. Ghosts on the other side of the purple ranges where lay hidden the small operation his family had worked for five generations. Through thick and thin, through drought and a terrible bush fire that had claimed the life of his great-uncle Harry, they had held on to it. He wondered what had happened to it after his grandfather had been forced off. His granddad, a man of tremendous strength and energy, had died of a massive heart attack exactly six months later. That terrible event had drained all the life out of his grandmother. She had survived, eventually falling back on the loving kindness of her married sister who lived far away in the South Island of New Zealand.
So much that had gone catastrophically wrong, and all in a lamentably short time. What had his grandmother called the family suffering? All the afflictions of Job. His uncle Benjie had been only fifteen going on sixteen when his life had changed within the space of a few minutes. Benjie,was more a big brother than an uncle. He had been killed in a bar fight at the age of twenty-two. What had been his assailant’s intention? Murder? Of course the man had denied it strenuously, but he had been charged with manslaughter and given a ten-year jail sentence with parole after six. He’d be long out by now. Probably had his old job back on Malagari. Joel Moreland wasn’t just a very rich man. He was an Outback icon. So many people, through his vast interests, relied on him for their livelihood. He had then, as he had now, a veritable army of henchmen to do his bidding.
Yet how could a man who looked and acted as straight as a die in deed and word be so cruel? How could a seemingly delightful man like Joel Moreland, so kind, and distinguished, go to such remorseless lengths to punish a boy who had been unfortunate enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time? Not only the boy, his entire family, as though they had all connived to cause Jared Moreland’s death. It hadn’t been Benjie who had triggered Jared Moreland’s violent end. Jared Moreland, who had been the instrument of Johanna Muir’s catastrophic fall from grace, had by his callous behavior contributed to his own death. Innocent high-spirited Benjie had been used as a pawn in a murderous game.
Beware those of you who are left. The exile is back!
MORELAND’S PILOT BANKED into a right turn lining up the private jet for Malagari’s runway. At the far end he could see the roof of a massive hangar far bigger than the one on the Montalvan estancia. The silver roof glittered in the hot sun, the surface giving off shimmering wavesof heat. On the roof was emblazoned the name of the station, Malagari, in royal blue, the edges picked out in red. On the ground to the right of the hangar was a towering flagpole from which the red, white and blue of the Australian flag fluttered. Beneath it flew a pennant carrying the colors of the station with the addition of a white circle of stars. He knew that was a Moreland logo.
The tires thumped and bounced hard on contact with the first-grade all-weather strip, sending a cloud of red dust over the Wings.~He could have managed the landing better, though it was okay. He could see from the flags there was a brisk cross wind. The brakes made their usual high-pitched squeal, then the pilot cut the engines back to idle, taxiing toward the hangar.
They had arrived.
He looked across at Cecile, who was looking out the porthole. Her friend, Tara, was chattering ninety to the dozen in her ear. Cecile’s wondrous femininity that put him in mind of a white lily was strangely enhanced by the almost masculine severity of today’s outfit, tailored black linen slacks, a silk camisole showing beneath a deeper cream linen safari-style jacket. A wide embossed leather belt with an ornate silver buckle was slung around her narrow waist. Her friend, on the other hand, wore a short, bright blue dress that exactly matched her pretty eyes. While Cecile had greeted him at Moreland’s private airstrip with deliberate formality, her friend had stood on tiptoe to kiss him on the cheek. No chance of a kiss or embrace from the woman who barely a week before had swooned in his arms.
There were intense moments in life, Raul mused. Some were more intense than others, but he had
never for all his traumas experienced anything approaching the power and complexity of the feelings he was trying to master now. A few feet away from him she sat, a gold clasp gathering back her long hair, totally unaware of what was in his heart. She had that inviolable self-assurance that came with being a beautiful woman of class and money. It would be so easy to hurt her. He would hate to hurt her for a thousand and one reasons. He wasn’t a cruel man by nature. But he had been shown a way, perhaps the most symbolic way, to avenge Benjie and his family. Benjie might have turned out the great loser, but Raul reminded himself Benjie was a better man than the scoundrel who had been Moreland’s only son.
Pain twisted in his stomach. The bitter irony was he’d had no way of knowing the powerful effect a woman of a hated family would have on him. This was a woman who inspired love, not hate.
ON THE GROUND the heat was like a dry oven. He reveled in it; felt it soak into his skin, already darkly tanned. Off in the distance the mirage was playing its remembered tricks, creating inviting vistas of phantom lakes. Chains of them shimmered in the distance, their shores surrounded by tall waving desert palms.
“My man will be here shortly to drive us to the homestead, Raul,” Moreland told him, gripped by his own pleasure at being back on Malagari. “Ah, here he is now.”
Raul turned slightly. A dusty Land Rover was roaring cross-country, eventually driving up onto the huge concrete platform that surrounded the hangar on all sides and met up with the runway. The engine cut and a big bearded man in his early fifties stood out of the vehicle waving a hand.
“Afternoon, all! Good flight I hope, sir?”
“Couldn’t have been smoother, Jack,” Moreland said cheerfully, turning to his guest, while Cecile and Tara stood smilingly to one side. “Raul, I’d like you to meet Jack Doyle, my chief steward on Malagari; Jack has worked for me in one capacity or the other for close on thirty years. His wife, Alison, is our resident chef and housekeeper. Ally’s in charge of the domestic staff all of them our own aboriginal girls, born on the station. It’s a large house. Needs a lot of maintenance. I’m lucky to have such loyal employees.”
