The Tartan Touch

by Isobel Chace

  “My dear, we’re all so delighted that Andy’s got himself hitched at last! And so like him to do it on the spur of the moment. We all think it’s frightfully romantic! Are you very happy?”

  I blushed and swallowed. “V-very,” I said miserably. She gave me a thoughtful look, but she said nothing more. Nothing to me at least. I heard her talking to Mr. Fraser though later, in a fierce undertone that I was sure boded me no good. Mr. Fraser would not like to know that I had been talking about his affairs,

  “Andy, how could you?” she was saying. “She’s no match for Margaret and you know it!”

  Mr. Fraser looked distant, as he often does when someone is treading on his toes. “Don’t underrate the tenacity of the Scots,” he advised her bleakly. “We’re bonny haters, as Kirsty would say.”

  “And bonny lovers too?” Miss Rowlatt answered, not caring if the blow fell below the belt.

  “Right,” said Mr. Fraser.

  Miss Rowlatt sighed, “Margaret says she is planning to visit Mirrabooka as soon as you are home.”

  Mr. Fraser started. “Thanks,” he muttered.

  Miss Rowlatt put her hand on his arm. “Look after Kirsty, Andrew. She’s sweet! I don’t care how you induced her to come back with you, she’s exactly right for you and a darling, and Margaret could hurt her very badly.”

  Mr. Fraser looked straight ahead, a set expression on his face. “Kirsty is my wife,” he said at last. He looked up and saw me approaching them, his grey eyes as cold as slate. “I know how to look after my own.”

  I smiled diffidently at them both, sitting down on the nearest chair, the picture of misery.

  “It’s odd to think it’s springtime here,” I remarked for something to say. “It’s the time of the heather back home.”

  Mr. Fraser gave me a very gentle look, “Feeling homesick, mo ghaoil?”

  The Gaelic endearment brought tears to my eyes. I shook my head. “It’s only looking back over my shoulder,” I explained pathetically. “It’s the waiting, you see.”

  “You know what happened to Lot’s wife!” he shot at me.

  Miss Rowlatt made a sound of protest, but I thought he was entitled to a more cheerful face than the one I had been presenting to him for the last hour or more.

  “I doubt the glen will be flattered to be compared to Sodom and Gomorrah,” I smiled at him, with wry humour.

  “Or that the Murchison is a land of wheat and honey,” he drawled sardonically.

  “I’d say not!” Miss Rowlatt exclaimed with a relieved laugh.

  Our plane to Perth was called soon after that. I mounted the steps up into the cabin of the aircraft that final time with a feeling of repugnance for the whole business of travel. It wasn’t a natural way of life, to be cooped up in space, with no chance to stretch one’s legs as one could on the earth where one was meant to be. To walk a league or so would have done me more good than to travel across the largest island in the world in a matter of a few hours, I had thought that travel would broaden the mind, but it does little more than cramp the body.

  “I’ll never walk again after this!” Miss Rowlatt wailed, once we had climbed to our cruising height. She surveyed her swollen ankles with a face full of comic dismay.

  “You must exercise them,” I told her seriously. “Bend them back and forth, like that!”

  She glanced down at my own feet. “Perhaps it’s a matter of age,” she said sadly.

  “Indeed, it is not!” I denied. “It’s a matter of exercise. The stewardess told me so herself.”

  In fact I slept most of the way to Perth, despite it being daytime all the way. My body no longer knew which were the hours of light and which the hours of darkness, with the result that meals came only when I was not hungry, and night arrived just when I was waking up.

  Then, a bare six hours after we had left Sydney, the plane began to come down. It being an internal flight, we had no Customs to contend with, though this was Western Australia and Sydney lies in New South Wales. What we had instead was an army of people wanting to speak to Mr. Fraser, to welcome him home, and all of them had been friends of his since he was a bairn, calling him Andrew, or Andy, or even Drew, just as their fancy took them.

  They cared nothing for the fact that we were both exhausted. I was kissed more times than I can tell, by both men and women, all of them smiling and laughing at Mr. Fraser for having such a strong romantic streak as to carry me off on no more than a day’s acquaintance.

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” I protested more than once.

  “Too right it was!” Andrew’s strong voice gave me the lie. “ ‘But to see her was to love her. Love but her, and love for ever!’ ”

  “Is that a fact?” they cheered.

  How dare he quote from Robbie Burns? I wondered indignantly. Had he never been told that the lines of Burns were the next best thing to sacred? And to use them to mask a lie! Well, my indignation knew no bounds!

  “It was my father dying when he did,” I explained helplessly.

  They looked suitably grave and the women clucked over me, full of comforting remarks.

  “It was one in the eye for Margaret, right enough!” one of the men said with a raucous laugh. He opened his throat and poured down a schooner of beer before my fascinated eyes.

  “Hold your tongue, mate!” a friend of his advised him, with a telling look at Mr. Fraser.

  But he was too late, for at the same moment another woman came towards our group, smiling and as cool as a refrigerator.

  “One in the eye indeed,” she drawled. She had a hoarse voice that she could use as well as any of the actresses I had seen in London. I had never seen such smart clothes as hers! Nature had blessed her with little, but she had seen to it that she never felt the lack. She looked no more than thirty, but she must have been a few years more, maybe ten more than my own twenty-four, I couldn’t tell. All I knew in that instant was that I’d have given my right arm to have had half her presence when talking to Mr. Fraser.

  “Hullo, Margaret,” he said.

  “Hullo, yourself!” she answered, mocking him.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked ungraciously.

  Her smile grew deeper. “What everyone else is doing. I’ve come to meet the blushing bride. I have an interest in her arrival, as you may remember? Besides, I believe she comes from my part of the world!”

  I swallowed nervously. To think that anything so sophisticated had come from just away over the glen! My, but she had come a long way since Donald Fraser from Perth, Australia, had married her!

  ‘You flatter yourself,” Mr. Fraser ground out. “You have no interest in my marriage.”

  “That’s what you think, darling,” she assured him. “Even if you do have the courts on your side and think you can deprive me of bringing up my own daughter, I am allowed access to her. I think we’re all interested in the woman you’ve brought in to take my place—”

  I was deeply shocked that she should think such a thing. “Oh no, Mrs. Fraser!” I exclaimed. “I’d never do that!”

  She turned and looked at me. I held my head high, remembering with some difficulty that she was nought but Margaret Cameron, that was, from across the glen. She had the black hair that some Scots have, and her eyes were a clear blue.

  “I hope you brought your plaid to keep you warm!” she said softly.

  I was ashamed for her that she should be so rude, so vulgar, to a stranger in public.

  “I think you must have been unlucky in your pick of the Frasers,” I said, as quietly as she. “Andrew would not see his woman go cold in the world.”

  Her calm shrivelled before my eyes. “Andrew!” she demanded. “Are you going to let her say such things to me?”

  “You asked for every word of it, Margaret,” Miss Rowlatt grinned naughtily.

  Margaret Fraser turned on her heel, the end of her nose pinched with temper. “I won’t lightly forgive you!” she threatened me as she went. “I’ll get even with you somehow!”


  I winced away from her rage, for I had ever disliked quarrelling with anyone, creeping closer to Mr. Fraser, I was afraid to look at him, for I was afraid of what he was thinking, for the fact of the matter was that I was not his woman nor ever likely to be. But he didn’t seem to mind. He put his hand on my arm and his hat on the back of his head.

  “My word,” he said. I thought I detected a note of admiration in his voice which was balm to my soul. “Oh, my word! You deserve a fine cold drink for that! Oh, my word, you do!”

  “No, I don’t,” I said flatly. “I shouldn’t have said it, and I’ll apologise to her, if you say I must. She has a right to care for her daughter.”

  There was a breathless hush amongst Mr. Fraser’s friends and I could feel myself going scarlet in the face. Andrew Fraser caressed my cheek with his finger.

  “If anyone does any apologising, it won’t be you!” he promised in a dangerous voice. “So you can put your puritan conscience away and have a beer on me.”

  I tried to like the ice-cold beverage he handed me, but I found it hard to swallow, not at all like his friends who poured it down their throats like water down a drain.

  “You don’t like it?” Andrew said in total disbelief.

  I felt I had disappointed him. “I’ll come to like it,” I assured him.

  “But you’d rather have something else?”

  I looked up at him guiltily through my eyelashes. “A wee dram of whisky?” I said, biting my lip. And I wondered why they all laughed, though I thought it was with relief because Margaret had gone away.

  It seemed we were to spend the night at a motel on the edge of Perth and drive out to the Murchison the next day. I thought the party would break up when we began to move, but most of them came with us to the motel, one of them bringing Mr. Fraser’s car back to him, all ready for the morning: I began to think they would never go.

  Miss Rowlatt was catching the train to Geraldton because she didn’t like driving long distances by herself. It was she, catching sight of my face, bruised with fatigue, who took them all away with the ease of a Pied Piper.

  “Who is seeing me on to my train?” she asked brightly. There was a mad rush for the door, and they were gone. Miss Rowlatt kissed me warmly and departed at a more leisurely pace, issuing loud instructions as to how we were to meet and when, and winking at Mr. Fraser as she went.

  I slept well that night. It was as well that I did, for Mr. Fraser was ready and raring to go before the sun had announced the coming of another day. He was dressed in shorts and a shirt and that hat of his to which he is wedded. He looked a stranger in his bush clothes and I was as tongue-tied as ever.

  He referred to his car as the ‘old ute’, which I supposed was short for utility. It was designed to carry a weight of five hundredweight and had the battered air of a veteran from a desert army. The dirt had won the battle long since as far as the body was concerned, but the engine was the sweetest thing in the Murchison and seldom gave trouble.

  I sat up beside Mr. Fraser, enjoying the novelty of a new form of transport, Perth, in winter, was wet and windy, but Andrew said I had looked my last on rain for a while. In the Murchison I could expect constant blue skies and an atmosphere so clear one could see for a hundred miles. I took it all with a pinch of salt. I would see for myself what the Outback was like, now that I had some idea of distance to measure the miles of nowhere against, I felt like a veteran traveller indeed!

  We went north along the main route to Geraldton, a bitumen road that stretched straight on into the distance, producing a curious mirage of water hovering always on the horizon. I was disappointed in the scenery, though. To my eyes it was fearfully dull.

  We were in the wheat country for a great deal of the morning, with one town much like another, though we didn’t stop at any of them. Our first halt was at New Norcia, a Spanish Benedictine monastery, founded in 1846 by Father Rosenda Salvado, who became the first bishop of Western Australia, and who some say was a saint. The monastery stood amongst white gum trees, beside an attractive lagoon, and we shared its shade while we ate our lunch, making the most of the few minutes of being still.

  By mid-afternoon the roads were in a woeful state. Mr. Fraser still referred to them as being of bitumen construction, but I thought it mostly a figment of his imagination. The potholes broke up the surface, often stretching from one side of the road to the other. It was as well that Mr. Fraser had driven on such roads all his life, or we would still be on the road, creeping towards our destination.

  By tea-time, we had reached a place called Wubin, which guards the border between the wheatlands and the bush. We stopped off to refuel the ‘old ute’. There was a map on the front of the bar where Mr. Fraser went to refresh himself. I could see more or less where we were and that from here on we would be leaving the Geraldton road on to the ‘Northern Highway’ as the map called it. Mr. Fraser called it simply ‘Mad Man’s Track’, and not without reason. It runs for eight hundred miles in a dead straight line of corrugated dirt.

  There is an art in driving along such roads. If you go too slowly, the ride is a rough one indeed as the tyres fall into the ruts and climb out again. But if you take the road at speed, you bounce from height to height with a minimum of discomfort. It was an art Mr. Fraser happily knew all about, and we drove on into the approaching darkness in high good spirits, leaving the last of civilisation behind us.

  Night had fallen before I began to worry about where we were to sleep. I knew from the map that the nearest town, or village as I should have called it, was Paynes Find, and that was all of ninety miles on from Wubin.

  “Will we get to Mirrabooka tonight?” I asked Mr. Fraser sleepily.

  “I should say not!” he answered. “We’ll make a camp when the moon comes up.” He gave me one of his rare smiles. “It will be your first taste of life in the Australian bush!”

  “Do you usually come this way?” I asked.

  “I reckon to fly more often than not,” he admitted. “But not this time! It’ll be a week before I look on an aeroplane with favour!”

  I found myself laughing and I was too tired to stop. Mr. Fraser gave me a steely look. “Isn’t there a hotel to stay at?” I asked him.

  He grunted, I thought perhaps he resented my questioning him, but he only muttered about the hotel being a bit primitive and that he had thought to spare me that. “We’ll be okay,” he added.

  I nodded. I trusted him despite our peculiar circumstances, though I couldn’t say why. He would not molest me while I was in his care, of that I was sure.

  He had put a couple of sleeping bags in the back of the ‘old ute’, and, almost before I could turn round he had a fire going and had begun to cook us a meal.

  “It isn’t proper for you to cook for me,” I told him fiercely, and took the pan from his hands.

  “In the Outback we all fend for ourselves,” he answered me gravely.

  But I would not allow it. I put the pan on the fire and heated the stew of kangaroo meat that came out of a tin. Mr. Fraser watched me, lying on his back in the moonlight.

  “You’ll find some damper in the bag,” he murmured. I was at a loss to know what he meant, but there was a hard kind of bread in the bag which served well enough to mop up the gravy of the stew. I thought he might have seen to a vegetable, or some fruit, but there was nothing like that amongst our meagre stores, only the chops and eggs he intended for breakfast. It’s no wonder that Australians in the Outback are so prone to scurvy, or barcue rot, as they call it, though we never had any of it on Mirrabooka, but the old-timers had all gone down with it at one time or another, and they often had to be taken into hospital to put them back on their feet again.

  When we had eaten, I cleaned the plates as best I could, for we had very little water with us.

  “How about tea?” Mr. Fraser suggested. As he had waited until I had crawled into my sleeping-bag, I hardly knew how to answer him. He had the jaunty air of a man who had won a victory and, truth to tell, he
had, for I could no more have pulled myself out of that windproof bag than fly, So it was he who made the tea, boiling the water in a billy-can, and pouring in the tea as it boiled until it was black and bitter.

  He handed me a mug full of the steaming liquid. “If you look up now you can see Mirrabooka in the sky,” he said.

  There was no mistaking the Southern Cross. It was odd to think it meant as much in this new country as St. Andrew’s Cross meant in the old. It was like a glittering omen of good fortune to me. I lay back and stared up at the stars. I was asleep long before I had finished the tea.

  Mr. Fraser didn’t argue with me when I fried the chops and the eggs for our breakfast. “It makes a pleasant change to be waited on,” he said.

  I frowned, the smoke from the fire in my eyes. “I’d be ashamed not to do my own work!” I told him.

  I tried to make the tea the way he had made it the night before, but he complained that my brew lacked body. The result, when he had poured in the rest of the tea we had with us, was not to my liking, but Mr. Fraser’s insides could apparently accommodate anything and when he had finished his own share, he happily drank mine as well.

  He gathered up the sleeping-bags and threw them in the back of the ute, while I doused the fire and covered the remains with soil in case an ember should spark into life after we had gone, I took a last look round our camp of the night and felt a certain sadness. I had enjoyed my first taste of the Australian bush, It had been a brave interlude before the reality of being Mrs. Fraser on Mirrabooka.

  The names of the places had a weird sound, not that there were many places in fact. We went through Mount Magnet, which Mr. Fraser said was nearly home, and a place called Cue, followed by Big Bell, the old mining centre, and we still drove on and on. Then quite suddenly, in the middle of nowhere in particular, Mr. Fraser pushed his hat further down over his eyes and said in exultant tones, “This is Mirrabooka! From now on every inch of land belongs to us.”

  I looked about eagerly, but there were only the grey-green mulga trees to look at, just as there had been for mile upon mile behind us. Only the dazzling gypsum flats of Lake Austin had been any different. Lake Austin only held water if the rains had been exceptionally good, which was rare on the Murchison, and so the railway and the road both run slap through the middle of it.