by Various
“And screw you!” Bella had tossed at her crudely, landing a stinging slap on her twin’s cheek.
The silence thereafter had positively roared. Bella had never struck her, but the incident was now indelibly printed on their memories, possibly for a lifetime. Such a serious breach of etiquette was rarer than rare. Betrayal of family was not to be condoned. The only mitigating circumstance was both she and Bella had meant well. Their argument was all about the fate and future of their much-loved sibling Zoe.
Poor Zoe!
So there they were on that night of nights, all dressed to the nines, beautiful formal gowns and magnificent family heirloom jewellery, except for Bella, who always liked to be different, more daring, setting trends with avant-garde labels and loads of costume glitter. She, Olivia, the sensible, practical—might as well say it—sanctimonious one, the eldest of the “Beautiful Balfour Girls,” pitted against the highly volatile, sparkling Bella, who in retrospect could be judged as the one having the most heart. She could no longer blind herself to that telling fact.
Having laid all her cards on the table she recognised that, as much as she loved and cherished her twin, she had always been inclined to patronise Bella, regarding her sister as someone who, though very beautiful, perhaps lacked intellectual depth. Bella didn’t read books or ponder issues as she did. Bella had not completed her university degree as she had to some distinction. Bella had no great interest in the arts generally.
Their tastes weren’t the same. In fact, they were opposites. Bella played up her stunning beauty. Olivia deliberately played hers down. They weren’t identical twins, but fraternal. Bella closely resembled their dead mother, the exquisite Alexandra. Bella was more the Balfour, with the Balfour blue eyes.
Olivia was far more responsible than her twin. Bella was the first to admit that. She didn’t have Bella’s kind of freedom. Bella’s sole interest was to have a good time, leaving her, the elder by a few minutes, to toe the line. It was Olivia who often acted as her father’s hostess, kept up the Balfour charity work, supervised and instructed when necessary her younger siblings—her half-sisters—coped with their dependency on her, while Bella led her glamorous, very hectic social life always pursued by a conga line of admirers.
Be that as it may, their calamitous fight had been their only real argument.
“As twins we stick together! One for all and all for one!” This was their childhood swashbuckling mantra when they were heavily into Alexandre Dumas. She and Bella loved each other. They loved Zoe, who as it turned out was not their father’s child, but their late mother’s indiscretion. Their mother of all people! She, who they had regarded as being right up there with Mother Teresa.
“Mother must have been a saint. They say only the good die young.” She had actually said that once to Bella in an effort to curb her sister’s wildness, which went far beyond high spirits. Both of them at the time had believed it to be entirely true.
Now she had to pinch herself hard to remind herself that darling Zoe was therefore illegitimate. She and Bella had argued over whether to tell Zoe or conceal the fact from her. Their fiery debate had had devastating consequences for the entire family.
“If only I could go back in time!” She often found herself breaking the silence to lament. They hadn’t been foolish enough to conduct their argument in public. They had had the sense to retire to a private room to hurl insults at each other, but not the continuing good sense to shut the door firmly. Their heated discussion over Zoe’s legitimacy, a matter that consumed them, had been overheard by an unscrupulous member of the press.
The press and the paparazzi were forever hot on the trail of the Beautiful Balfour Girls, Bella in particular. The journalist must have thought all his coups had come at once. He got off a starkly telling photo of the two of them in the heat of their fury—hers self-righteous, Bella’s impassioned—plus all he had overheard of their argument which was practically verbatim. Next morning, story and photograph had been splashed across the front page of a national newspaper.
Another Illegitimacy Scandal Rocks Balfour Family
Even as she thought of it Olivia cringed in mind and body. When would the soul-searching stop? When would her disgust with herself begin to abate? She had to face the fact she could be left with eternal regret or, as Bella had said lying limply across her twin’s bed,
“Sooner or later, Olivia, we have to pay for our sins. When it comes down to it we’re no different from anyone else.”
What nonsense! Of course they were different. They lived in a stately home for one thing. The family was mentioned in Debrett’s and Who’s Who. To top it off their father was a billionaire. This time they were all paying, from her illustrious father down, when it was she and Bella who had finally toppled the grand Balfour edifice. How shocking was that?
Was it any wonder their father had reinstituted the Balfour Family Rules, a code of conduct that had been passed down from generation to generation within the Balfour family? All eight of Oscar’s daughters through their father’s three marriages, and both their mother’s and their father’s misalliances—had accepted his decision to send them away from the scene of the family humiliation.
“You need to face your limitations, my daughters, and hopefully find your strengths,” he had exhorted with as much gravitas as a hanging judge.
They could have refused. She had certainly considered it. But they didn’t.
“A point very much in your favour,” Oscar Balfour conceded.
Bella had been handed rule one. Dignity.
She had been given her own rule. Rule eight. Humility.
When their father had first handed her rule eight, she had looked back at him in blank astonishment.
“Humility, Daddy? What can you mean?” She felt enormously hurt.
He had taken up valuable time to explain.
Now in a moment of self-clarity she saw she just might have a need to develop that overrated virtue. She knew what people thought of her: aloof, cool to the point of glacial, supremely self-confident, self-assured, really a snob and a bit of a prude, the least approachable of the Balfour girls. Not true. At least, not entirely. The cool bit was in order. She was a private person. Indeed she had a passion for privacy. But at the heart of it she couldn’t do without her defence mechanisms any more than Bella, both of them cruelly robbed of a mother and a mother’s love and guidance when they had barely mastered the trick of abseiling down their cots.
“Doesn’t anyone realise what losing a mother does to a child? The effects are felt forever.”
“God, tell me something I don’t know!” Bella, clad in a gorgeous imperial-yellow silk kimono decorated with richly embroidered chrysanthemums and mystical birds, had cried. In many ways Bella was a bit of a drama queen.
So in the end she and Bella, who really didn’t have a personality disorder as she had so wrongly accused her, accepted their banishments.
“Both of us have to master the rule, Olivia.” Bella, for once, showed meekness.
It was certainly their father’s directive. A cue for obedience if ever there was one. “It will get you safely through life so you never again bring shame on the family name.” He had spoken as if he was throwing them all a lifeline. For herself, she had to confess she ever so slightly resented the fact he had omitted to mention his own part in the debacle. It was his “girls” who had to take the direct hit.
“We have to work out our punishment,” Bella had said, apparently not feeling the same degree of betrayal. “Take it on the chin.”
“Punishment? I prefer to look on it as a challenge.”
A challenge—far, far away from their comfort zone.
“Good grief, Daddy, not Australia!” She had a vision of that very large island continent not all that far off the South Pole. Surely they had sent convicts there?
“Australia, it is!” Her father had fixed her with the piercing Balfour eyes. “You’re to work in whatever capacity is required of you, Olivia. At least you have t
he Balfour good business head on your shoulders.”
She should have reminded him that had already been established. But to be obliged to work for a man she had only met briefly and had cause to intensely dislike? Could she even do it, much as she was made of stern stuff?
Clint McAlpine, Australian cattle baron, had been the only person in her life outside Bella who had had the temerity to tell her to her face—she had only been showing him her normal demeanour at the time—that she badly needed taking down a peg.
“Come down from your high ivory tower, ice princess,” he’d advised, a satirical twist to his handsome mouth. “Mix with mere mortals. I promise it will do you a power of good.”
She winced at the memory! Just because he was a billionaire like their father didn’t give him the right to tick her off. Maybe for that very reason his image, incredibly vivid, had stuck in her head. It had never diminished. Something she didn’t understand.
There was some distant family connection on her father’s side; that’s how they had met up. Functions, a family wedding. The McAlpines often visited London on business or pleasure or a mix of both. A few years back, her father had bought a large block of shares in the McAlpine Pastoral Company which must have prompted his decision to send her into the McAlpine stronghold. Evidently her father trusted McAlpine as he had trusted McAlpine’s late father, a man of good British stock. He must have been a much nicer man altogether. So now, a scant two days after the Balfour disaster she was on the threshold of taking up her challenge.
At the end of the earth.
Australia.
Chapter One
Darwin, capital of the Northern Territory, gateway to Australia
NEVER a good traveller—her privileged lifestyle had ensured a great deal of international jet-setting—Olivia had come to the conclusion this had to be the epic journey of all time. First there was the flight from London to Singapore. Horrendous! Well over fourteen hours of claustrophobia. She had tried, largely in vain, to gather her resources with a one-night stopover at Raffles. Lovely hotel with a unique charm. She fully intended to revisit it at some future date, but for now on to Darwin, the tropical capital of the Northern Territory of Australia, yet another four and more hours away.
She couldn’t read. She couldn’t sleep. All she could do was dwell on her disastrous fall from grace. She knew she had no alternative but to fight back. And not take an age about it either. She and her siblings were due back in London five months hence to celebrate their father’s birthday on October 2. Nothing for it but to pull up her socks! Re-establish her aristocratic credentials.
Could be hard going in Australia.
Looking wanly out the aircraft porthole she could see the glitter of the Timor Sea. It was a genuine turquoise. That aroused her interest sufficiently to make her sit up and take notice. They continued their descent, and Darwin City’s skyline rose up.
Skyline! Good grief!
She craned her neck nearer the porthole. After London, New York and the great cities of Europe, all of which she had visited, it looked more like something out of a Somerset Maugham novel—a tropical outpost, as it were. It was bound to be sweltering. She knew the heat of the Caribbean where her father owned a beautiful private island, but she had a premonition the heat of Darwin was going to be something else again. And she the one who had often been described as the “quintessential English rose”! Anyone who knew the slightest thing about gardening would know roses hated extreme heat.
Yet her father had sent her here and she had obeyed his decision. But then hadn’t she obeyed him all of her life? Struggling to always be what he wanted, while Bella was out enjoying herself, men falling around her like ninepins.
“Only flings, sweetie! Something to get me through a desperately dull life.”
She had thanked Bella for sharing that with her. Far from being the quintessential English rose she was starting to think of herself as the quintessential old maid who, far from bedding lovers, burnt gallons of midnight oil reading profound and often obscure literature. She even dressed like a woman ten years her senior. Or so Bella said. How had that developed? Her father’s fault for expecting way too much of her, especially from an early age. Bella’s taunt aside, she thought she always looked impeccably groomed—that was her duty—but she saw now with her perfect up-do, her whole style could be too much on the conservative side for a woman of twenty-eight.
Twenty-eight! My God, when was she going to start the breeding process? Time was running out. Bella had had dozens of affairs and countless proposals. She’d had exactly two. Both perfect disasters. Geoffrey, then Justin. They had only wanted her because she was her father’s daughter. Bella’s men wanted just Bella. Wasn’t that a bit of a sore point? But could she blame them? Bella was everything she was not: sexy, exciting, daring, adventurous, not afraid to show lots of creamy cleavage, whereas she was as modest as a novice nun. She could see herself now as being as dull as ditch water. That image bruised her ego. Or what was left of it.
What would she make of Australia? The Northern Territory she understood was pretty much one sprawling wilderness area. She hadn’t wanted Australia. Too hot and primitive. But in the end she had accepted the commitment. She was a Balfour, British to the bone.
Darwin City. City? She could see a township built on a bluff at the edge of a peninsula surrounded on three sides by sparkling blue-green water. It overlooked what appeared to be a very large harbour. Being her, she had made it her business to read up on the place so she knew the city had been destroyed and rebuilt twice. Once after the massive Japanese air raid in February 1942 during World War II, when more bombs were dropped on an unprepared Darwin than had been dropped on Pearl Harbor. Then again after the city was destroyed by a terrifying natural disaster, Cyclone Tracy, in 1974. She rather thought after something as cataclysmic as that she would pack up her things and move to the Snowy Mountains, but apparently the people of the Top End were a lot tougher than she.
She well remembered McAlpine as projecting a powerful image: tough, aggressive, a man’s man, but women seemed to adore him. It was a wonder his body didn’t glow with the force of that exuberant energy. Not that he wasn’t a cultured man in his way. Rather he projected a dual image. The rough, tough cattle baron with an abrasive tongue, and the highly regarded chairman and CEO of M.A.P.C., the McAlpine Pastoral Company. Her billionaire businessman father wouldn’t have bought into the company otherwise.
Much as she loved and respected her father she realised there was some ambivalence in her towards him. He hadn’t been what she and Bella had wanted. A doting, hands-on dad. Their father, always in pursuit of even more power and money—throw in women—hadn’t been around for his daughters most of the time. In a sense that had left her and Bella, in particular, orphans, mere babes in the woods. She had detected the same kind of brilliance and that certain ruthlessness in McAlpine.
Her father had worked his way through three wives, a catastrophic one-night stand and more than likely a number of affairs they didn’t know about. She chose to ignore the fact that her and Bella’s mother, Alexandra, had cheated on him—who knows for what reason? Might have been a good one. Their mother was their mother after all. They had wanted their memory of her to remain sacred. Ah, well! Sooner or later one had to face the realities of life.
She knew of McAlpine’s marriage to an Australian heiress with an unusual name. It had ended in an acrimonious divorce. She wasn’t in the least surprised. He was that kind of man. Probably he had treated his ex-wife badly, had affairs. There was a young daughter, she seemed to recall, who no doubt would have been swiftly dispatched to her mother to look after. One couldn’t expect a tycoon to work out a little girl’s problems. She and Bella hadn’t enjoyed much of their father’s attention or problem solving.
With an effort she shook herself out of what Bella liked to call “Your martyr mode, darling! There it is again!” She didn’t recognise it herself. She was no martyr even if she was practically a saint with the we
ight of the world on her shoulders.
She had noted the cattle baron was big on sex appeal. Something women drooled over. He was devilishly handsome. In her view in an overtly sexy way. But she had to concede real sexual presence. She was prepared to grant him that but she, for one, had had no trouble combating it. Such men shrieked a warning to a discerning woman like herself. She preferred far more subtle English good looks and style—like Justin’s, even if he had turned out to be an appalling cad. Bella had called him a “love rat.” She couldn’t see McAlpine as a rat. But then what did she know? She, who appeared to be incapable of one lasting relationship with a man.
What she did know was, she neither trusted nor liked McAlpine. She didn’t doubt her ability to keep him in his place. She was a Balfour after all. A sensible, stable person who had never required being kept an eye on. Maybe she had blotted her near-perfect copybook, but she’d had the grace to accuse herself of her failures. Her task now was to regain her self-esteem and emerge as a more nurturing, more compassionate, more liberal-minded person willing and able to accept advice.
But not from McAlpine.
Inside Darwin International Airport she looked around her in disbelief. Was Darwin a beach resort? The atmosphere was torrid even for May when it surely should have been cooling down. The hot humid air was fitfully swept by cooling breezes off the harbour. Overhead domed a burning blue sky. Northern Hemisphere skies didn’t have that intensity of colour. Soaring coconut palms and spreading flamboyant trees were everywhere. She had to wonder if ever a stray coconut fell on some unfortunate head. She supposed one could always sue.
The vegetation was rampantly tropical, full of strong primary colours that assaulted the eye, the air saturated with strange fragrances. Sunlight streamed down in bars of molten gold. As for the quality of the light! Even with her sunglasses on her eyes were dazzled. So much so in the middle of her ruminations she nearly collided with someone.
