by Amanda Doyle
She had taken on this chore herself since Lex became ill, pleased to be able to assure him that she could manage at least one job in the masculine realms. Nick had taught her how to work the plant, and she was reasonably efficient at it, although secretly a little bit afraid at the flashes that sometimes emanated from the control-board when she rotated knobs and moved switches. She had never really understood the things Nick had explained to her about the electricity and how it was generated, but he had assured her that an understanding of the main principles was all she needed.
“Do exactly as I show you, Mattie,” he had said,” and you can’t go wrong.”
She had done just that meticulously, and his words had proved true. So far, at least, nothing had gone wrong, and Mattie had found that she only needed to run the engine every second day to charge up the plant. It was housed in a small, square building with a cement floor and rows of batteries standing in tiers on wooden platforms along one wall.
Mattie’s first task was always to check those batteries, and top up any which required it with distilled water. She did that now, humming softly to herself as she went along the rows, replacing the rubber stopper on each battery after she had filled it. Then she went over to the big green engine on the other side of the room, checked the oil, and took down the starting-handle from its hook on the wall.
It was a friendly engine, and Mattie wasn’t frightened of it like she was of the control-board. When she fitted the handle on to the wheel and rotated it fast and flicked the lever down, it always started obligingly for her, hiccupping uncertainly at first, and then working up to a steady and deafening roar.
Mattie let it roar for a while, and then throttled it back a bit. Then she walked to the board and braced herself to perform the business of setting the voltage and amp controls. She was just about to do so when Gib’s voice startled her by yelling into her ear from directly behind her.
Mattie nearly jumped out of her skin. She had not been able to hear his steps above the din of the engine, and now he had to shout to make himself heard. His face was close to hers, and he was telling her that he would take over.
Mattie nodded, secretly relieved, and watched him cut in the switch and flick the charge-knob across the points until the indicator was set to his satisfaction. He did it so quickly that there were really no flashes at all, only little hissing noises at each point as the know went round. Mattie envied him his decisiveness. It appeared to pay dividends at the switchboard. She made a mental note to do it as quickly herself the next time.
Gib checked the ammeter and studied the board a moment longer, and then he took her elbow and marched her out the door.
He was frowning.
“That’s no job for a girl, Mattie,” he said sternly. Why in the world didn’t you get Dan Pirrett to do that for you—or did Bryn undertake the running of it, perhaps?”
“No, he didn’t. I’ve been doing it all the time since Father went to bed,” Mattie told him proudly.
“Well, you’ll leave it to me from now on, if you don’t mind.” Gib didn’t sound pleased. “I don’t like to see a woman tackling things like that when there are able-bodied men about the place.”
Mattie bristled.
“No, thank you,” she said stubbornly. “You won’t take it over, Gib. Just because I’m a girl, it doesn’t mean I’m helpless altogether. I may have limbs like a grasshopper—Nick always said I had—but I can manage that engine myself. You’ve just seen that I can.”
Gib grinned down at her, making no secret of the fact that his eyes ran over her critically.
“A very graceful grasshopper,” he told her. “All the same, you’ll let me handle it from now on.”
“I won’t.” Mattie was suddenly as determined as he was. “I’m going on running it myself, Gib. It’s—sort of important to me that I can do it. It’s about the only thing I can do properly, the only worthwhile thing, that is.”
Gib watched her, puzzled.
“I don’t follow you, Mattie. It strikes me there are a lot of things you can do, very well indeed. Why insist on adding this unpleasant one to your list of achievements?
“Because—” Mattie hesitated. It was difficult to explain. “Well, because for once I can do something to help Father, just as though I was a—a boy. I—I think he’d really have liked me to be one, you see, Gib,” she confided. “I don’t think he’s ever been very pleased with me the way I am.”
Gib ran a perplexed hand through his dark hair, leaving it ruffled and on end.
“Mattie,” he said firmly, “the trouble with you is you’ve too good an imagination. The fact that you were a girl has been an irreversible one since the day you were born. A man like Lex Bennett isn’t the type to waste all these years in wishful thinking about something he’s powerless to change.”
“No, I know that,” Mattie agreed. “But he did want another son, Gib—I know he did. I always seem to irritate him. It might have helped if I’d been sort of well—sturdier, and—tougher.”
Gib laughed outright at that. His teeth flashed in the brown leanness of his face, and his eyes teased her.
“You think he’d have liked you better if you’d been six feet tall, with hairs on your chin and biceps like watermelons? Never, Mattie! You do have the most cock-eyed notions, don’t you?”
Mattie laughed with him.
“Maybe I do,” she admitted, feeling momentarily lighthearted about the whole thing. “Only—Gib, I do want to run the plant myself, if you don’t mind? It would be like giving in not to do it now, just because you’re here. If Father heard you’d taken it on, he’d be sure to tick me off and say you had plenty to do without that, and that I shouldn’t have let you. Please?”
Gib had stopped laughing. There was a kind of thoughtful intentness in his grey eyes that made Mattie feel like squirming at her own stupidity, but she held her ground.
Eventually he nodded.
“All right, Mattie. You keep it up. But ask me if anything worries you, will you, there’s a good girl?”
He moved away in the direction of the machinery-shop, and Mattie turned back towards the house. She hadn’t gone far when she heard his voice again.
“And—Mattie?”
“Yes, Gib?”
“Don’t worry that you happen to look so feminine. If it’s any consolation—if I had a daughter, I wouldn’t mind a bit if she looked like you!”
He disappeared, whistling, leaving Mattie standing on the path. Consolation, indeed! He sounded like an aged uncle, the way he talked. Mattie felt suddenly too young and too helpless, and not a bit consoled by his remarks.
She decided she would make herself busy about the house and try to forget them. During the morning she cleaned nearly all the silver, and Aunt Allie came and joined her half-way through, taking up a cloth and polishing with gusto. Aunt Allie was a dear, really, the way she turned her hand to anything. She couldn’t bear to be idle even for a minute, and if there was nothing more important needing to be done, she would then sit in Lex’s room, during the most exquisite embroidery over by the window. She was a restful person at the same time as an industrious one, and she would be good for her father, Mattie thought, remembering Gib’s words last night. She would always be there in the background, quietly loving him as she had loved him all these years, not interfering unless she was asked. She was the kind of person he could discuss things with, too, country-bred as he was himself, sound and practical and cheerful.
Mattie wondered if her father had discussed his future moves with Aunt Allie, for he certainly had not with Mattie. She wondered now if he would retire, or if he would re-invest in another property. The latter was the more likely, she thought—she couldn’t imagine him leading an inactive and aimless existence. He was the type to die in harness.
But whatever he did, they would be together, he and Aunt Allie.
“Did Ben bring the sheep up, Mattie?”
Aunt Allie’s question interrupted her thoughts.
“Yes
, it’s hanging in the meat-house now. I thought Father might like some liver for tonight, and we could have a side of chops, baked. I’ll get some sweet potatoes to put round the meat. You like them, don’t you, Aunt Allie?”
“Adore them!” confirmed Aunt Allie with relish. “And I really mean adore. I could never get tired of them the way we did of the apricots. I’m glad it was plums this morning. What a relief!”
Mattie giggled.
“I gave the apricots to Charlie,” she confessed. “I won’t open another jar for ages and ages, if ever, so don’t worry that you’ll be confronted with them again. I think I’ll make some pear and lemon marmalade this afternoon—I’ll go down to the orchard after lunch and see what they’re like.”
“Yum!” quoth Aunt Allie inelegantly, and smiled at Mattie.
She could look very young and mischievous when she said things like that, and you simply couldn’t help liking her, Mattie found.
By evening, the smell of Mattie’s marmalade was wafting tantalizingly over from the kitchen block to the main part of the house. She could smell it there herself, when she went for her shower, even through the gauze that enclosed the verandas—a lovely smell of pears and ginger and lots of lemons. Mattie felt tired but happy, and flushed with success. The cookery book had told her to steep the cut lemons overnight, but Mattie couldn’t wait to do that. She hadn’t the patience for that sort of thing, and anyway, by tomorrow, the urge to make marmalade at all might have deserted her. It appeared to have turned out quite well, anyway, if the smell was anything to go by. It had been a straightforward procedure, following the recipe step by step, and the only minor disaster had been the discovery of ants in a bag of sugar in the store. Mattie had rather been counting on that sugar, and spent quite a while picking out the ants, but in the end their numbers had defeated her. It meant she had had to use a bit less sugar than the quantity suggested, but such things couldn’t be helped. Out here, you had to take them in your stride, and she would replenish the stocks when the mail lorry came on Saturday. That was only two days away now, but she had had to keep enough on hand for normal household requirements, and that was how she’d had to use less in the marmalade.
Mattie completed her make-up with her usual skill, brushed and polished her hair, and returned to the kitchen.
She had lifted out the roasting dish and was turning the sweet potatoes when she heard steps along the veranda. By now those steps had taken on a certain familiarity. They were Gib’s. This was the very time that he had come in last night, or only a very little earlier. He knew her routine sufficiently well by now to be sure that she would be in the kitchen at this time—and probably alone. Mattie’s heart gave a funny little jerk, and to cover up the fact that her pulse had somehow gone offbeat too, she said,
“The damper is working perfectly, thanks, Gib. I expect you’ve come to check like you did last night.”
“No, I didn’t come for that reason, Mattie.” Gib’s voice was even, but somehow cold—not like the warm, kind voice of this morning. And when Mattie turned in surprise and met his eyes, they were cold, too. Their grey was winter-frost. Hoar-frost.
“What for, then, Gib?”
Gib stood with his feet a little apart, and his hands on his belt, and looked down at her. He was relaxed and springy, like a tiger preparing to pounce on its prey.
He caught—and held—her gaze.
“I’ve been speaking to your father,” he said casually. “He happened to mention the fact that Twin Rivers is very probably to be acquired as the site of a dam. He told me all about it. It appears that he’s awaiting a notification of the date of arrival of a survey party any day now. That I found particularly interesting, since it was the subject of our conversation barely twenty-four hours ago. Odd that you didn’t enlighten me, since we were on the topic, don’t you think?”
Mattie dropped her eyes, right down to his nice, clean, shiny boots. She didn’t reply, so Gib answered for her.
“Well, I think it was odd, Mattie. I’ve discovered something, and I don’t particularly like what I’ve discovered.”
He took a quick step forward and put his hand beneath her chin, forcing her to look at him. His voice was slow and smooth and hard.
“You don’t trust me, do you?”
The grey eyes were narrowed on her, keen as steel.
Mattie gazed into them like a mesmerized rabbit.
“Why not, Mattie?”
Mattie couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“I’ll tell you why,” Gib said tersely, as he dropped his hand away from her chin. “It’s your imagination again, isn’t it? It really does get you places, doesn’t it?”
There was a bite to his voice now.
Mattie suddenly found that she didn’t want Gib to look like that, and speak like that. She wanted the warmth and kindness that had been there before—the caressing, sympathetic grey, not the winter-frost. She cared. She cared, really quite terrifyingly, what Gib thought of her, and the way he spoke to her.
Mattie’s eyes widened to pleading peat-mist pools at the sudden discovery she had made about herself.
“Gib—please”—she murmured unsteadily.
“Haven’t you learned your bush code yet, Mattie?” Gib continued inexorably. “You trust someone until he gives you reason to do otherwise. A man’s a cobber until he proves himself an enemy. He’s true-blue until he shows himself to be yellow. He’s a stayer until he does something that makes him a quitter. You don’t pre-judge him, Mattie. No one has that right over another human being. Didn’t you know that Australians as a race have a worldwide reputation for judging others on their merits, taking them as they find them? They’re not swayed by fine feathers or hereditary titles or bulging wallets or any of the other trappings. They take a man as he is, and they measure him in the end by the yardstick of true worth—and it’s a good thing they do. If you believe the best, that’s more often than not what you get. The starters, the immigrants, the New Australians, get the same opportunity to prove themselves as the next one, and that’s why they come here. They know they start off fair and square. You don’t judge them first, by what or who they were, and where they came from. You give them a chance.” Gib fingered his chin a moment, watching her. He added softly, “The only one that doesn’t get that chance with me, Mattie, is a dingo. He’s the only one I won’t wait for, to see how he’s going to turn out.”
Mattie tried to find her voice. When she finally did, it was thick and husky.
“Gib, I’m sorry, truly I am. How could I know? I—I wanted to believe, to think the nice things, like you said. Not just at first, I didn’t, I’ll admit, but even last night, I nearly told you about the dam, when you said you were interested, that you’d been an engineer. I didn’t tell you in the end, but I wanted to, down inside me. I wanted to trust you. It wasn’t easy, but I was trying to.”
“Were you, Mattie?” Gib’s eyes bored into her. His face was stern, and somehow tired. “Well, if I were you, from now on, I’d try just a little bit harder,” he advised her somewhat grimly, before he turned and strode out of the kitchen.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SATURDAY was mail day, and the whole place buzzed with expectancy, as it always did. From noon, when the men knocked off, until three o’clock, when the big lorry came rumbling over the nearest hill and rolled down the white road into the valley, the tension increased, and became almost a tangible thing.
Mattie had become so accustomed to twice-daily, impersonal deliveries through the letter-box of the flat that she had almost forgotten what mail-days were like in the country.
Now she found herself gripped by the same pleasant excitement as everyone else. If you reached up into the air and grabbed, you might almost expect to open your fingers and find that you had captured some of that excitement, right there in your grasp.
It was silly, really, to feel like this, when all she had to look forward to were some ant-free bags of sugar, and dried yeast, and fresh flour with no weevils in i
t, and a box of exceedingly ordinary tinned groceries. And maybe there would be a letter from her fiat-mate, telling her how the girl who had replaced Mattie was shaping, and how gay they had been just lately, with parties and nightclubs, and going to the races at Randwick on Saturday, and lunching at the Golf Club on Sunday. That life had taken on such a sense of the unreal to Mattie lately that she began to wonder if she had ever been personally involved in it after all.
Only her mirror told her that she had. The reflection she saw was always so beautifully groomed and chic and up-to-the-minute that it positively shrieked the words “city” and “boutique” back at her, and there was not a doubt that it was simply a case of Roselle in the country, instead of Roselle in the city, as far as her reflection went. But what about the girl inside the beautiful clothes? Not Roselle, but Mattie? What about her?
Mattie’s eyes sought reassurance from their solemn, peat-brown image in the mirror. She sighed. She sighed because she did not know the answer. She only knew that at present she was wandering in a sort of no-man’s-land, where she felt bewildered and uncertain.
Mattie pushed that thought aside, and let the happy mail-day ones come crowding back in again. It was nearly three o’clock. Very soon the lorry would be here.
For almost an hour now there had been a small knot of people gathered under the shade of the big heaven-tree where the lorry always pulled up. Lucy’s and Nellie’s brightest and boldest cottons moved about in the dappled light beneath the branches, and Charlie had taken off his chef’s cap and replaced it with a wide-brimmed slouch felt that looked incongruous with his striped apron. It was hard to depict the identity of the other figures from this distance—their sombre khaki garb merged with the shadows. But one could be sure they were all there, waiting. They were listening for the grind of gears and the roar of the engine as the mailman double-declutched to get up the last, steep hill. When they heard that, all eyes would search the brow of the hill, and soon they would see the lorry come racing down, in top gear now. Stan, the mailman, always employed the same tactics over the last quarter-mile of distance, so that you didn’t really have to be watching to know exactly what the lorry was doing.
