by Amanda Doyle
“There’s really nothing to tell, Gib.” Mattie laughed lamely. “I was just being silly. I suppose even when one is expecting something, the actuality can be a shock. It-it’s worse for Father than it is for me.”
“You’ve told him?”
“Yes. I’ve just come from his room.”
“I see. Well, don’t torture yourself about him, Mattie. He’s made of tough material, and he’ll weather the present storm successfully, just as he has the others in his life. Every day, now, he’ll be getting a bit stronger, and more fit to cope, and meanwhile you bring any problems to me. Understand?”
Mattie nodded dumbly.
“Good girl,” said Gib. He took her hand in a firm hold.
“Come with me, will you, and hold some things for me while I fix the new draught-control in your range. I’ve just been welding an arm for it, but it’s a bit more complicated to put back when the stove is going. At one point, I’ll need three hands—I was actually looking for you when you came bolting round there.”
Mattie went with him obediently. He still held her hand, and his own felt rough and hard and warm, and very big. It covered hers completely.
Mattie thought that there was a nice, homely feeling about this business of holding hands with Gib. It felt right and natural that her slender hand should be lost in his big one, just as though that were really its proper place. It didn’t make him seem like the outsider he had said he was—someone who had come from nowhere and meant nothing to her.
She suddenly knew that she didn’t want him to go away again. She didn’t even want him to let go her hand.
Mattie must have tightened her fingers in his.
Gib looked down at her, kind and quizzical.
He gave a slight answering pressure of his own fingers before he let her go and lay full length in front of the range.
“Right.” He passed her a cotter-pin. “Here’s what I want you to do. Come down here beside me so I can show you properly.”
Mattie knelt down obligingly.
“See these two arms? When I bring them together, and get those two holes coinciding, I want you to slip that pin right through, and hole it there till I take over. You’ll have to lean right over me to do it. Do you think you can manage?”
“Of course,” Mattie replied scornfully. “I’m not helpless.”
Gib grinned.
“We’ll see,” he said wickedly.
It took him quite a while to manoeuvre the pieces into place, because the arm that had remained in the range was very hot, and had to be held with pliers.
When he said “Now” Mattie leaned right over to slide in the pin. She was very close to Gib, and she found she had to come even closer. In fact, their arms were touching the whole way along, and she tried to ignore the tickling of the springy black hairs on his sun browned forearms as they rubbed against the bare smoothness of her own.
For some odd reason, Mattie’s heart began to beat in suffocating, shallow little leaps. What a good thing he couldn’t see her face! They were turned the same way, and he was right behind her. If he hadn’t been making such a noise juggling with the metal arms, he’d have heard the bumps her heart was giving too. Mattie could hear them herself, beating right into her own eardrums.
Her hands were trembling. She wished they would stop, because the trembling made it difficult to get the pin through that tiny double hole.
“Got it?” That was Gib, somewhere behind her head.
“No. A minute.” Mattie fumbled.
“Now?”
“Yes. Now.” She drew back hastily, relieved, and watched him splay the pin out on the other side.
Then she stood up and brushed her bare knees. They didn’t really need brushing, but Gib was standing up now, and it was a way of avoiding his eyes. She felt weak and shaken. No man had ever had this particular effect on Mattie before.
She stole a surreptitious glance at the cause of it all. He was sliding the tools back into place in a leather folder with careful, calm, competent brown hands.
When he spoke, his voice was so calm and careful, too, that Mattie knew the experience had been confined to herself alone.
“Thank you, Mattie,” he was saying gravely. “That was a tremendous help. I’m sorry you’ve got dust on your knees, though. I dare say it will wash off?”
“Yes, yes. It’s nothing. It will wash off quite easily,” she assured him, still recovering from her confusion.
“And so will that carefully-cultivated sophistication, it seems,” observed Gib shrewdly.
“Wh—what do you mean?” asked Mattie suspiciously. She didn’t care for that teasing glint in his eye. She didn’t care for it at all.
“My dear Mattie, true, hard-boiled sophisticates don’t get the jitters at the wrong moment, like you do,” she was told smoothly, with a hint of laughter beneath the smoothness. “There are times when their poise deserts them, certainly, but they know better than to tremble when a man’s lying beside them with a screwdriver between his teeth, a pair of pliers in one hand, and a fizzing hot arm of metal in the other. It’s hardly a situation fraught with danger. Not like this, for instance.”
In two quick movements, Gib had put down the toolkit and ensnared her in his arms. She could feel the hard toughness of his body against her, and smell the pine and tobacco smell of his lean cheek. His breath was on her forehead, and for the merest moment, his lips brushed her hair.
“That’s much more dangerous,” he murmured softly into her ear, before he released her, “or didn’t you know?”
Mattie’s face was aflame. The trembling had returned.
“Oh, you—oh—!” she spluttered wildly. “You—you’re unspeakable!”
“Yes, I know,” agreed Gib blandly. “It’s a weakness I have, this compulsion to pass on knowledge to the ignorant. That’s two things you’ve learned in the last five minutes, Mattie, but the second lesson will probably stand you in better stead than the mechanics of a cotterpin.”
As she slipped through the door, Mattie swore she heard him chuckle, but she hoped that she was mistaken.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR most of the following week, Gib was working near the homestead, maintenancing the machinery.
That meant that, instead of providing him with a cut lunch, she had to include him with herself and Aunt Allie at the midday meal. Mattie found her ingenuity taxed to its limits. She and Aunt Allie had been getting themselves simple snacks for lunch, and Lex was still on the lightest of diets, but Mattie felt bound to present something more substantial to the grease-blackened man who came promptly at the summons of Charlie’s bell, which that worthy agreed to sound on Mattie’s behalf at a stipulated hour, even though his own men were out on the run for their own lunch. Sometimes Mattie’s experiments turned out to be dismal failures, like the pizza she attempted, whose tomatoes soaked through and whose cheese went stringy. Gib was unfailingly polite and appreciative through all her culinary ups and downs, and Mattie was grateful for his tact—so grateful, in fact, that she took him tea and scones each morning and afternoon when he was having his “smoke-o”.
Sometimes all she could see was a pair of long legs protruding from beneath the machinery, and Gib’s deep voice would sound, muffled and gruff.
“Pass me those grease-nipples there, will you, Mattie—the bigger ones, on the canvas.”
Imperious dirty fingers would click and point at what he wanted, and Mattie would obligingly pass them through to him. She was never as near again as she had been that time in the kitchen, though, for which she was glad. He was so impersonal and so preoccupied with the job in hand that it was obvious he had never given Mattie another thought, whereas she found herself thinking about him a great deal.
Evening being near him gave her an odd sort of comfort and satisfaction, and when he came rolling out from beneath the machinery, his face blackened and streaked beyond recognition, she felt an unaccountable glow spread through her. She tried for a time to pretend that the glow wasn’t
there at all. Mattie was terribly afraid of what it might mean. She tried to pretend that it meant absolutely nothing, but in the end she could not pretend any longer.
She knew it for what it was, and she couldn’t ignore it, but she had to conceal it. That was most important.
The knowledge that she had come to love a man of whom she knew absolutely nothing beyond the fact that he was kind and good and patient and understanding and exciting and disturbing brought her very near to despair. She felt an even greater degree of despair when she forced herself to face the fact that Gib regarded her as nothing more than a bringer of tea and scones, a passer of grease-nipples, a concocter of pizzas that flopped and went stringy.
When he came sliding out from beneath the machines, with his hair on end and grease on his cheeks, his teeth would glint as a pleasant smile lit his begrimed face, and he would take the mug of tea she handed him and munch a scone appreciatively, and he would say, politely.
“Thank you for bringing that, Mattie, it was just what I needed.”
And then he would sit with his back against the wheel of the tractor, and start the old, familiar routine of fashioning himself a cigarette. And Mattie would feel , herself dismissed, and would gather up the things she had brought and walk back to the house, leaving him there having a quiet smoke before he crawled back to the spot where he had been working. And the glow she felt because she had been with him for those few impersonal minutes would warm a place right around her heart, the whole way back to the homestead.
By the time mail-day came round again, the rains had come too. Stan’s lorry slithered in the black mud along the track, and skidded as it circled round the heaven-tree. There was no shade there this time, just the steady drip from the leaves on the little group that waited. The men did not mind standing in the rain. They still wore their shirts with the necks open, and the sleeves rolled up, and ignored the drips that came down through the heaven-tree’s branches. Everywhere there was a smell of wet earth, and the parched ground soaked in the rain as fast as it felt. It was gentle rain, but everything and everyone welcomed it.
When Mattie opened the mail-bag, she withdrew the usual bundle of business letters and two big oblong boxes addressed to Gib. They were covered in brown paper, and in one corner a round, curly handwriting directed that they be sent to Mr. Gib Fortune, c/o Bennett, Twin Rivers, Baradoo.
Mattie guessed that they must contain the clothes Gib had sent for—from his base camp, he had said—and when she handed them to him, he confirmed her thoughts.
“Thanks, Mattie,” he said easily. “Some spare duds at last! I’m doubtful if that sump oil will ever wash out of these ones. I must have rolled in a patch of the stuff without knowing it!”
“I’ll wash them for you, Gib, if you’ll let me. There are ways and means of getting that oil out, and I’m really quite good at it.”
Mattie received a smile that turned her knees to pulp, even though it was casual. Slow and spreading and warm—but casual.
“Thanks, Mattie. That’s just what I was hoping you would say, but I couldn’t put out a hint until I had got this parcel of spares.”
It rained right through the afternoon, and the evening air was damp and cool and fresh. It gave one the feeling that the rain had washed away the remains of the summer for good. There was a tangy perfume wafting from the orange and grapefruit trees at the side of the house. They always smelt like that after rain—it seemed to bring the refreshing sweet-sour oils to the surface of their broad, glossy leaves, and Mattie always recognized the scent, and loved it.
She put on her pretty sludge-green dress, for the first time not feeling uncomfortably warm, then she slipped into a raincoat and hood and went out to the citrus grove. When she came back, she had an armful of dark, glossy foliage and some rainwashed late blooms to go with it. She arranged the flowers and stems in a big brass urn, and set them on the window table in the dining-room, delighting in their fragrance.
When Gib came in that evening, he wore pale gabardine trousers and a tropic-weight jacket over his crisp white shirt. They were not new by any means, and he wore them with an unselfconsciousness that told one they were old friends of his, and that he was used to the feel of them. He also wore a tie tonight. It had a dark blue background and sets of fine diagonal stripes in two colours, and it looked like some sort of club tie—conservative but distinctive. Mattie racked her brains, but the colour combination did not mean anything to her. Perhaps it wasn’t a club at all, but it was nice, all the same, and Mattie’s eyes kept going back to it in spite of herself. There was a careless elegance about Gib this evening that was quite heart-stopping.
Mattie went on mashing pumpkin, and tried not to look.
Gib strolled through the kitchen doorway to the room beyond, and sniffed at the bowl of leaves.
“Nice,” he remarked appreciatively. “Is it the rain that brings out that perfume?”
“Yes, they always smell like that in the wet,” Mattie informed him. “Don’t you have citrus trees at—at your base camp?” she asked curiously.
Gib shook his head.
“No, Mattie. No citrus trees. But I thought I recognized that oily, orange smell. My grandmother’s clothes used to smell like that, I remember. She used to make little balls steeped in that oil, and hang them in her wardrobe to keep away the moths and silverfish.”
Mattie nodded.
“I know. Pomanders, they were called. They’re old-fashioned things now.”
“They were old-fashioned things even then,” Gib said humorously. “My grandmother was an old-fashioned person.”
Mattie put a knob of butter and some pepper in amongst the pumpkin, and went on mashing. So he had a grandmother, had he? Stupid, Mattie. Everyone has a grandmother. And a mother, too, come to that. But a wardrobe—that meant a house. And a house meant a home. Not a base camp, but a home. Mattie longed to know why he had left that home, to wander over the inland routes the way he had. And—those clothes. What sort of base camp was it where one wore beautifully cut tropical jackets and narrow, tailored gabardine trousers? Mattie longed to know. She longed to ask, but she couldn’t, because she didn’t want Gib’s face to close up on her the way it could. She didn’t want his eyes to become remote and winter-frost. She’d rather they remained warm and friendly, so she finished mashing the pumpkin, and took the crumbed cutlets from the oven without saying another word.
That, as it turned out, was the last evening that Gib changed his clothes and joined them for dinner for the best part of the next ten days.
He spent the whole of the next day working on the implements, only taking time to snatch a quick meal by himself. He didn’t even bother to sit down, but ate in the kitchen, holding his plate in his hand, and talking to Mattie at intervals.
“I want to finish tonight,” he confided. “And we’ll start ploughing tomorrow. With a man short, we’ll have to get a move on. Your father tackled a lot of the arable himself, I gather, Mattie?”
“He and Bryn did it between them,” she told him. “Young Percy is interested, too, but Dan Pirrett came here specifically to learn about stock. He’s sheep-mad. Father says he’s only interested in anything that has four legs and some wool on its back.”
“For someone who considered himself an indispensable machinery man, your fellow Bryn left things in pretty shocking disrepair after the harvest,” Gib now observed.
“He knew about machinery, but he was careless too. He knocked things about a lot, and wouldn’t have bothered to fix them if Father wasn’t there to keep him up to it. He rather neglected things outside lately, I think. He—he spent more time than he need have done around the homestead.”
“Yes, I had realized that.” Gib’s firm gaze met hers, and even though there was no censure in it, she found her colour rising.
“I’ll rope in Percy, and see what stuff he’s made of, I think. Your father agrees that he might breach the gap, and he’ll be better than no one.” He filled the awkward moment quickly and tactfully
. “Thank you for the lunch, Mattie. Don’t worry about tea at smoke-o today, but I’ll be in for a quick bite in the evening, if that’s all right?”
“Of course, Gib.”
The rain had ceased next morning, and the steady, drone of the tractors could be heard up and down the valley all through the week. The strips of newly-turned earth spread from paddock to paddock—fine, silty and chocolate-coloured on the river flats, grading to a warm red-brown on the slopes. Gib didn’t spare himself, and he did not spare Percy either. Even in the darkness the steady drone of the tractor engines continued, their headlights cutting paths of light as they ploughed across and back, up there on the slopes.
By the end of the week, rain fell again. This time it was nothing short of torrential. Thunder rolled around the hills as though an unseen giant boomed on his enormous drum, and lightning forked through the lowering skies. The roar of raindrops thudding on the iron roof was deafening. It was a sound that Mattie normally enjoyed as she lay there in bed, but tonight she couldn’t, and she did not sleep until she heard slow, heavy steps going towards Gib’s room. He was in at last!
Next morning, the creek came rushing down, running a “banker”. It joined the main river in a swirl of mud and froth. Mattie could hear the noise of the swollen stream from her window, and knew—without actually having to go down and look at the rushing current with its burden of tumbling logs and the odd, pathetic carcase of a drowned sheep—that the mail-lorry would not come today. Stan would never be able to cross the low-level ford beyond the Moxtons’. She would have to manage without further supplies for another week, and next time she would have to take in a good store, because the surveyors would be here by then, and it would not do to nm short.
