Outback Doctors/Outback Engagement/Outback Marriage/Outback Encounter

by Meredith Webber

  Anna nodded, seeing in her imagination the dust kicked up by moving cattle, the drover thrown from a horse or gored by an errant bull—even bitten by a snake—dying in his mate’s arms. It was sobering, yet special in so many ways, not least because it gave her another glimpse into the heart of this place they called the outback.

  She walked across to the surgery to tackle the morning’s patients, and was pleased when, for once, there were no interruptions. A sleepless night and Philip’s early arrival had left her feeling washed out, and, with the last patient seen, she headed home, pleased it was Saturday and there was no afternoon surgery. She’d have lunch, then a sleep…

  A doomed idea, she realised as she approached the house and saw she had another visitor. Penny was sitting at her front door.

  ‘I thought you should be home soon,’ she announced cheerfully. ‘Did you know your boyfriend took both Grace and Carrie when he left? They wouldn’t all fit in the helicopter so some of his friends drove to Three Gorges. Carrie’s going to travel with him and do a story on the life of a jet-setting tycoon. She says it’s far more interesting than outback bachelors. And he’s offered Grace a job in one of his overseas companies. She says a top executive position is what she’s always wanted, which made Tom mad as a hornet because he realised her excuse of not being able to live in the country on account of her allergies wasn’t true.’

  Anna found she wasn’t altogether surprised about the first of these revelations. Philip tended to pick up people wherever he went.

  Though in this case she sensed he may have had an ulterior motive. With the two women gone, Tom would no longer need a fiancée. And having met so many of the locals, Philip would have no difficulty contacting someone to check on the status of the ‘engagement’.

  A shiver of unease raced up Anna’s spine—it was like the clipping service.

  She really had to think about her relationship with Philip.

  But whatever happened between her and Philip, she should break off the other engagement for Tom’s sake.

  Unless? foolish hope whispered.

  There is no unless, she told it.

  ‘Come in,’ she said to Penny, then, finding Philip had left the remaining food in the refrigerator, she invited her to share it for lunch.

  ‘Will Tom be home this evening?’ she asked, when the meal was done and Penny had declared her intention of walking uptown.

  ‘Actually, he will. I know he’s often out on Saturday nights, but I checked before I wrote to Annabel and I think he said he’d be home. I had to tell her what days were best for her to phone.’

  Anna found herself contemplating strangling a complete stranger with a phone cord and decided she must be even more tired—if that was possible—than she’d thought.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to interrupt an important phone call, but I need to see him. We have to break off this stupid engagement. Would you tell him I’ll call over at about seven-thirty?’

  Maybe her murderous tendencies would abate once she’d spoken to Tom.

  Maybe!

  Though even thinking about speaking to Tom made her heart race.

  But it was impossible. Even if she was free, which she wasn’t, she’d be all wrong for an outback wife. For a start, there was the sponge cake…

  ‘You’ll tell Tom?’ she said, suspecting it was more for the pleasure of saying his name than pressing home the message.

  Penny nodded. She was picking gravel out of the ripples in the sole of her sneaker and Anna wondered if she’d even heard, but she repeated the time and added, ‘I’ll tell him,’ leaving Anna to assume the teenager would remember.

  Penny not only remembered but she’d made herself scarce.

  ‘She’s gone to Mainyard with Jim and the horses,’ Tom explained, coming down from the veranda as Anna got out of her car. ‘The Boltons, who own the property, have offered to have her for a few nights, so I’ve gone from having a houseful of women to being on my own again.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you wanted? Isn’t that good?’ Anna asked, trying to still the stupid hammering of her heart against her ribs—telling herself she couldn’t be nervous about breaking off a pretend engagement.

  ‘I suppose so,’ Tom said, obviously more concerned over his reply than her presence at his house because he’d already signed her out of his life with the goodbye he’d said the previous evening. ‘Though I’ve got used to Penny being here. It’s such a big house. When I first saw it, I imagined it full of Grace’s and my children—I was an only child for long enough to realise a big family can be fun.’

  He looked around, waited for her to mount the steps to the veranda, then added as he followed, ‘I guess if I want to fulfil that dream, I’ll have to get started soon.’

  Anna’s heart stopped its frantic beating and crunched itself into a small, hard ball in her chest. He was thinking of Annabel—waiting in for her to phone him.

  Which meant Anna should say what she’d come to say and go—preferably somewhere far away. The word ‘Perth’ fluttered again in her head, though she knew putting a great physical distance between herself and Tom at the moment was impossible. She squared her shoulders, tilted her chin and wondered how to begin.

  But he was talking again—about children and the Fleming genes being strong, as both his sisters had the same black hair and blue eyes as he did.

  An image of a chubby three-month-old baby with a cap of shiny black hair and huge blue eyes appeared obligingly in Anna’s head, making her wince with pain as she considered this child belonging to someone else. Somewhere along the line, she’d acknowledged she might actually love Tom Fleming, but nothing had prepared her for this agony!

  ‘I’d like to have them while I’m still young enough to play with them and enjoy them,’ Tom was saying when Anna calmed down enough to catch the conversation. ‘The children, I mean,’ he added, as if she might have missed the bit that was upsetting her so much.

  Anna took a deep breath, which didn’t do much more than hurt her chest even more, then she took another, told herself she was a professional, trained to act as if calm and composed in the most horrendous situation.

  ‘I guess you should be getting on with it, then.’ She faltered over the words, trying to sound offhand and casual, while only too aware she didn’t want him having children with Annabel. If you came right down to it, the fact of the matter was she didn’t want him having children with anyone but herself. Hence the pain she was feeling.

  The thought was so startling it affected her breathing, so the words, ‘Have you someone in mind?’ came out like a hoarse whisper.

  He walked to the edge of the veranda and kicked a fallen blossom out into the darkness.

  ‘Not really. Though Penny’s found someone—one of the women who wrote to me. Pen keeps telling me she’s perfect.’

  If I don’t strangle her first…

  But if Tom met the paragon, he’d fall in love with her for sure—or at least like her too much to say no if she proposed to him, which was on the cards with Penny masterminding things.

  Which would be good for Tom, surely?

  A great wail of denial welled up inside Anna’s head while desperation hammered in her heart. Without conscious consideration, she put her hands behind her back and wrenched off her engagement ring, shoving it deep into the back pocket of her denim skirt.

  She took yet another deep breath, although she knew damn well they weren’t helping, then stepped towards Tom and held out her shaking but unadorned hands, palms downward so he couldn’t help but see their ringless state.

  ‘I’m not perfect, like Penny’s paragon. In fact, I know I wouldn’t be up to scratch as an outback wife. I can’t fence and I’m a bit squeamish about branding, but as an only child I always wanted a big family, so I’d fit that part of your requirements.’ She paused because she knew it was coming out all wrong—far too much information—but now she’d started, she knew she had to finish, even if it meant Tom thinking her an utter fool. She blurted
out the final offer. ‘What I’m saying is, I’m available if you want me.’

  The silence was so complete Anna wondered if perhaps the world had ended, then an owl hooted in the distance, and closer to the house a frog began its croaky song.

  ‘If I want you?’ Tom said, his voice as croaky as the frog’s.

  He took her hands, squeezed her fingers tightly in his grasp, then leant forward and kissed her on the cheek, his lips lingering long enough for her to register the earthy scent of him.

  ‘No,’ he said, straightening up but retaining his grip on her hands.

  ‘No?’ Anna echoed, more in puzzlement than disbelief. Then disbelief kicked in. ‘You don’t want me?’

  He sighed.

  ‘Of course I want you. You’re beautiful, kind, caring and totally wonderful. But no to your offer, Anna.’ He gave a huff of totally humourless laughter. ‘What a time to learn to say no to a woman, eh?’ he added, dropping her hands to turn away from her, then leaning against the railing and looking out towards the shadowed fields beyond his garden.

  ‘It’s impossible, Anna. Perhaps if I’d never met your Philip… But I did. I talked to him. I even, against all odds, quite liked him. I knew then he was right for you. I said goodbye if you remember.’

  Anna did remember, but before she could puzzle out the rest of what Tom had said he was speaking again.

  ‘You’d said yourself it was an engagement you couldn’t break, and, talking to him, I understood. I know he’d not only look after you, but your family as well. He can offer security to all the people you love. He can give you the world and probably the moon and stars as well, should you ask for them, which is no more than you deserve.’

  Anna knew this was a kind of compliment, but she wasn’t looking for compliments. She was looking for commitment and Tom was saying no…

  ‘You have a couple of beers in the pub with this man, and suddenly you’re the expert on my future,’ she raged, crossing the veranda to stand behind him and glare ineffectually at his strong, broad back. ‘What do you know anyway?’ she continued, clasping her hands together so they didn’t reach out to touch him. ‘You’re hardly living proof of a successful relationship!’

  Tom turned and took her hands again, easing the tightness out of them with a gentle caress of his thumb across the backs of her fingers.

  ‘I know you belong in Philip’s world, not out here in the bush,’ he said quietly, ignoring her jibe about relationships. ‘I can picture you in an apartment in Paris, jet-setting from there to a ski-lodge in Arizona. Out here, you’re like an orchid in a turnip field. At the moment, it’s all new and different, and you’re excited by the outback, but for ever? The romance of the bush can soon fade, Anna, when the heat and dust of a prolonged drought squeezes the colour from the landscape and hope from even the most optimistic of farmers. And when times are tough, it affects the town, not only financially—who’s going to call in the vet, or buy a new car when the cattle are dying of hunger—but emotionally as well. Everyone suffers.’

  Anna heard the sadness in his voice, but the anger still burning in her wouldn’t allow her to acknowledge he might be feeling pain.

  ‘You might as well add that I can’t cook—no, bake’s the right word—a sponge cake,’ she muttered, wrenching her hands away from his and walking back towards the steps. ‘Add that to the litany of reasons why I wouldn’t make you a suitable wife!’

  Tom watched her go, wondering, as she slammed the car door, if he should stop her driving when she was so uptight.

  But it wasn’t far back to the hospital and there was virtually no traffic on the roads at night.

  He stayed on the veranda until he could no longer see the glow of her taillights, then, with a sigh, he turned and went back inside the big—and lonely—house. He was sure that, for probably the first time where a woman was concerned, he’d made the right decision.

  So why was he feeling as if he’d been flattened by the council grader?

  And where the hell did sponge cakes fit into the conversation?

  Anna worked through the next few weeks in a cloud of misery which lifted only slightly when she forced herself to explore her surroundings. She camped out at the dam one night, and was rewarded by the sight of five kangaroos coming down to the water as dawn spread a soft pink glow across the sky. Sitting motionless in her sleeping bag, she saw the finely moulded heads with their huge brown eyes turn enquiringly towards her, then, perhaps sensing she meant them no harm, the family bent to drink.

  She learnt, from Mr Jenks, that the little brown bird with the pink bonnet on the back of his head was a bower-bird, and the straggly arrangement of twigs he’d made under a shrub in her back yard was his bower, built and decorated with shiny white bones and glass to entice a female into mating with him.

  Good luck to him!

  The town, no doubt after her first ringless foray to the supermarket, seemed to know she was no longer engaged to Tom, so on the rare occasions she managed to make it to a social event she wasn’t expected to spend time with him. Though seeing him, and not spending time with him, made the occasions so agonising she began to avoid parties where he might be present.

  This restricted her to morning tea at the kindergarten where she talked about germs and hand-washing, and lunch with the senior citizens where she presented awards for community service.

  ‘So much excitement might be bad for me,’ she said wryly to Philip, who still phoned regularly, the first time to protest over her returning his ring, but more recently, she felt, because he was in the habit of talking to her. Her father, he’d assured her, was a valued employee and her parents could remain on in their house for as long as they wished, even after her father retired.

  This comforted Anna, but apparently didn’t please her mother, who forthrightly said she’d be glad to get away from Philip’s stifling influence. ‘In fact,’ she told Anna, not long after the engagement was broken off, ‘now we’re not going to be related, your father can take early retirement. We’re far too young to be cooped up on Philip’s estate. We want to see the world and we might as well start with Australia.’

  So they’d be coming while Anna was still at Merriwee, and would arrive in time to spend Christmas with her. But though she longed for their company, and the security of their unconditional love, it didn’t fill the empty, aching place in her heart.

  The place where Tom should be…

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THEN Bertha Spragg was admitted to the hospital with a badly ulcerated leg.

  A big-boned, cheerful, youthful eighty-eight, Bertha must have been ‘auntie’ to half the town, so many visitors gathered in her room, bringing flowers, fruit, chocolates and gossip.

  Plenty of gossip!

  Anna learnt that Tom’s stepmother and his other sister had arrived to stay, which might have explained why she herself hadn’t seen anything of Penny lately, though for the week after that final goodbye to Tom—or, to put it correctly, Tom’s final goodbye to her—Penny had continued to pop in, full of news of Annabel whose list of virtues had grown daily.

  Anna also learnt that Bertha had, for close on sixty years, been the best sponge-cake maker not only in Merriwee but in the entire district. Using her parents’ arrival as an excuse—though she suspected it was prompted by a mix of her niggly jealousy of Annabel and the need to find something to do with her spare time—Anna asked Bertha for a recipe.

  ‘I’ll actually need more than a recipe,’ she told her bedridden patient. ‘I’ll need any tip you can give me, and possibly a couple of minor miracles. I can cook to feed myself, and once, when I was at school, I made a batch of biscuits, but the oven to me is just the bit of the stove that brings my hot-plates up to bench level.’

  Bertha assured her that, under her tutelage, even if it was from a hospital bed, Anna would soon become an expert.

  So, the great sponge-cake baking exercise began, consuming more and more of free Anna’s time—and more eggs, sugar and flour than she wa
nted to think about—as she strove to produce a perfect cake.

  ‘Forget perfect!’ she muttered to herself, scowling at her latest effort which resembled nothing more than a lopsided-looking frisbee. ‘Edible would do!’

  Frustration needed an outlet and she was hurling this burnt offering across her back yard when Tom’s big four-wheel-drive came around the corner of the hospital and pulled up outside her house.

  ‘What’s that you’re throwing?’ he asked, climbing down and peering suspiciously at her.

  ‘A sponge cake,’ Anna snapped, furious at her reaction to seeing him, and with him for causing it.

  ‘A sponge cake?’ he echoed in total disbelief, then he shook his head as if to clear it of such extraneous information and added, ‘Not that it matters. I didn’t come to talk to you about sponge cakes—’

  He broke off and peered uncertainly towards the final resting place of the failure.

  ‘Well, what did you come to talk about?’ Anna demanded, planting her hands on her hips in case he didn’t pick up on her attitude from her tone.

  ‘You!’

  The one-word answer echoed around in her head, as if her brain had departed, leaving an empty cavern.

  ‘Me?’

  Her fists slid from her hips as uncertainty and hope jostled for supremacy in her heart.

  ‘Yes, you—breaking off your engagement. Penny told me. I’d have come sooner but I’ve been busy preg-testing a herd of cows on a property a couple of hundred k’s north of here. I stayed up there and inseminated the ones who’d failed the first time.’

  Anna nodded. It was the kind of information Tom had often imparted to her in the course of far more normal conversations.

  ‘Anyway, it was stupid. Philip’s exactly right for you. You’ve got to get your act together and tell him you made a mistake.’

  ‘Philip is not exactly right for me!’ Anna said, firing the words at him with the snap and velocity of bullets. ‘For a start, I don’t love him.’