Love Thy Neighbour

by Victoria Gordon

  Fiona couldn’t help it. She stamped her foot, slamming the sharp heel into the carpet in confirmation of her long-held belief that this was among the most stupid, futile gestures a woman could ever make.

  Now she was not only insulted, but humiliated into the bargain. And she’d done most of it herself! For an instant, she thought of reaching up — far up! — and smacking this insufferable person across the face.

  But no, it just wasn’t her style. And she definitely would not condescend to his level, much as she wanted to force her way into this insane conversation, to assert her rights as a person, as a woman, dammit! Instead, Fiona took a deep breath, glared once around the suddenly crowded foyer. There was another woman there, and Fiona found herself quite astonished at not having noticed her before, because she was amazingly beautiful, elegant in dress and demeanour. Then Fiona thrust away that impression to turn away from this infuriating Fraser person and march towards the door.

  Flinging it open, she was halfway through when something plucked at her collar and she was lifted bodily back into the room with a small squeal of alarm.

  ‘I’m not through with you yet.’ Fraser’s voice was still soft, but now it held a trickle of amusement that only served to inflame Fiona’s temper further.

  ‘I don’t personally give a damn what you’re through with,’ she flared, shaking herself as if simple movement could erase the feel of his hand against her neck.

  ‘Of course you do. This is business, after all,’ he said with an infuriating calm. ‘Or do your Women’s Lib tendencies always stand between you and a profit?’

  But before she could answer he’d turned again to Rob Barron, who still stood there in the doorway to his private office, his pallid face revealing an almost funny mixture of astonishment and shame.

  ‘Make it six thousand,’ said Fraser.

  Fiona blew up. How dared this man treat her this way? It was simply intolerable!

  ‘Why don’t you make it twenty-six thousand?’ she cried. ‘Make it a hundred and twenty-six thousand, for all the difference it makes!’

  The estate agent just stood there with his mouth open. The smaller man Fraser had been abusing also looked stunned by the proceedings, and even the elegant woman seemed impressed, if one could judge anything by an infinitesimal flicker of one perfect eyebrow. But Fraser only turned to glower down at Fiona; clearly he didn’t find anything amusing here.

  ‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ he snorted, for the first time in direct speech to her actually raising his voice beyond that strangely gentle whisper.

  ‘Me ridiculous?’ Fiona retorted. ‘It wasn’t me who started this. If anybody’s being ridiculous, it’s you.’

  And for the second time she turned away from him, afraid that if she didn’t she might give way to that earlier temptation and smack him one.

  And just let him put one finger on me again, and I will, too, she thought as she marched towards the door. With every step, she could feel his eyes boring into her back, but then, almost incredulously,’ that feeling changed as she reached the door and opened it. Now his eyes were blatantly caressing her. reaching out by some magic to touch at the nape of her neck, flutter down the nubbly ribbon of her spine, stroke possessively at the curve of hip ... she couldn’t see it, but she knew it!

  Fiona shook her head vigorously, her long hair slashing behind her as if that, alone, could dislodge his mental touch. Damn the man, anyway. He was quite mad; he must be!

  Suddenly supersensitive, she heard the door swing to behind her, would have known if he’d followed, but he didn’t. She turned on to the footpath, a blind left turn that was followed, too late!, by the realisation that her car was to the right. She didn’t look back, didn’t hesitate, but marched all the way around the block to reach it. .

  She was late back to work, which nobody noticed, and the pressure of work was such that she got through the remainder of the afternoon with hardly a thought for the arrogant Dare Fraser. It was only when she faced the cameras to do her early evening weather report that he returned to her mind — with a vengeance.

  It had always been her practice, when working on camera, to do more than just stare into the coldness of the lens. Like many good presenters, she tended to imagine the audience behind the lens, to give herself and her performance a humanity, a proper link with that invisible audience. Sometimes she visualised one of her dog classes, sometimes a class of schoolchildren, or a theatre audience.

  Tonight, like the devil himself, Dare Fraser insinuated himself into the vision, and for the first time in more than a year Fiona blew her lines badly.

  Which, of course, everybody noticed! Including, she just knew, the man himself. He’d have been watching, for sure!

  ‘I don’t know what came over me,’ she lied once the damage was done, the programme over and done with. ‘It must have been just the tension, what with the auction this afternoon and everything.’

  ‘Must have been some auction,’ the producer replied with a shake of his head. ‘I’ve never seen you blow up like that, even under, well, duress.’

  To which Fiona had laughed with delight. Despite whatever the public noticed in famous or infamous television ‘bloopers’, it was seldom realised how often presenters were deliberately put off their stride by their own colleagues seeking to relieve boredom or stress. Like everyone else, she’d been a victim often enough; unlike everyone else, she had proved herself to be virtually bomb-proof because of an innate ability to improvise. Not that it had helped one bit tonight, she thought angrily.

  ‘Just my luck to be rostered on following an afternoon like that,’ she muttered to herself, wondering for the first time if the change to doing weather only on occasional nights instead of regularly five nights a week mightn’t be a source of potential problems.

  It had better not be, she thought, since the only alternative would be to give up her dog-training school, and that she wouldn’t even think about. Since starting the school just over a year before, she had found demand to expand from one evening a week to two, and her dream — still almost too nebulous to dare believe in — was to manage four!

  Fiona had done the figures so often she could virtually recite them. Four nights a week, two classes a night, ten students a class and six eight-week terms a year and she might never have to look into a camera lens again!

  But it wouldn’t be this year, nor probably next year either, not with this mortgage hanging over her head. No, for the time being she’d need to juggle both job and potential career for as long as she could.

  She found herself reciting the figures as she drove home, and after greeting and feeding her dogs she curled up with a glass of white wine and her calculator to confirm what she already knew.

  ‘You lot are sending me broke,’ she declared, causing the usual differing reactions from each member of the trio that sprawled throughout her lounge-room.

  Molly, the oldest, the black foundation bitch of Fiona’s current strain, used a subsonic whine to express any and all concerns. It was her worst fault, among several. Being elderly and spoiled was second.

  Her daughter Lala, a yellow bitch so pale in colour as to be almost white, became increasingly subservient under pressure or excitement. Her timidity only faded during retrieving trials, when she put on a competitor’s facade, and her super-soft, almost Jersey-cow eyes hardened with the joy of competition.

  And then there was Trader, the chocolate frog, the bane of Fiona’s existence on his best days, which were few!

  Molly’s grandson, and with the same father as Lala, he was impossible to relate to either of them. His mother, also chocolate, had become a private guide-dog for a blind friend and heredity had given her a perfect temperament, intelligence beyond imagining. To her new owner. Magic was quite appropriately named, but while Trader had the family temperament the rest was all his own. Fiona often wondered how she could have bred such a nutcase.

  As if she’d spoken to him, the young Labrador bounced to his feet and yodell
ed as he did his best to wash her face with his tongue. The impetuous action, for whatever reason, served only to remind her of Dare Fraser and his arrogant, thrusting masculinity. There had been one instant that morning when she hadn’t been sure if the man had intended to strike her or kiss her. and in retrospect she had to admit she wasn’t sure which she’d have preferred.

  His sheer physical attraction was beyond question, and although that alone — especially in her working situation — was commonplace enough, Fraser’s masculinity had something beyond the usual. It was, she thought to herself, a sort of hard-edged competence. Fraser was a man in touch with himself; he needed none of the vanity and constant reassurance that seemed so much a part of her co-workers in the television industry, where reality itself was little more than just another sort of illusion.

  No, Dare Fraser was clearly a case of ‘what you see is what you get’. And he didn’t care much, Fiona thought, what anyone might think of that.

  For the first time, she thought of taking up his autocratic, if ridiculous, offer. Six thousand dollars profit! Ridiculous? It was that and more, but suppose ... just suppose ... that he might actually be serious?

  She had a mental picture of herself dealing with him from a position of power, herself at her most calm and the formerly arrogant Fraser forced to deal on her terms...

  Eight thousand? Ten? Twenty? If he was truly rich, and if he truly wanted the place ... who could imagine the limits? Fiona spent a whimsical moment exploring ludicrous possibilities along that line, but soon found her thoughts more inclined to her new property and the potential she’d seen for her future there.

  She had found the place during one of her ‘dog days’, times which she often said normal people called ‘days off. These were the days supposedly devoted to laundry, housework, a day at the beach, whatever. Not to Fiona! In her mind, an entire day off was far too valuable to waste on simple domestic pursuits, much less lazing about in the sun. She could always find time to wash and iron and dust and shop, especially working the unusual hours she did. But a whole day? That could only mean dogs into the back of the vehicle and off to find a place where they could properly exercise and get some training.

  And they knew it! It never mattered how her roster was changed, how little warning might be involved, those dogs knew if it was their day or not. She almost believed they could read other people’s minds, because on the rare occasion when she’d been telephoned about a roster change on that very day the dogs had already told her it was going to happen.

  The problem with her ‘dog days’ wasn’t the dogs or even their uncanny psychic abilities, but the problem of actually finding a place she could train them without hassles.

  First with one dog, then two, and finally the current three, she had driven endless miles, it seemed, fairly covering most of southern Tasmania in search of safe places to run the dogs.

  It was a constant exercise in frustration. Problems with stray dogs had made most Tasmanian farmers absolutely paranoid about dogs of any kind. The entire island seemed to be papered with signs proclaiming ‘All Dogs Shot’.

  Fiona couldn’t blame the farmers. All of her own dealings with dogs — and she’d been a professional breeder since she was sixteen and had lived with dogs all her life — put her in total sympathy and agreement with their sentiments.

  She knew only too well the problems created by roving packs of strays, usually well-fed city or town dogs knowingly allowed to run at large. She’d seen the slaughtered sheep and other farm animals and had once been saved from possible attack by a feral dog pack only by the intervention of her own companion dogs.

  In her dog-training classes, she dwelt heavily on the issues, as did all obedience clubs she knew, but stressing in class the need for responsible dog ownership was of no great benefit in her efforts to find varied but safe places to train, especially for retrieving water work.

  The day she’d first noticed the ‘Boyd’ homestead had been a blustery, drizzly day in late winter. A day sensible, dogless people curled up in front of the fire with a good book.

  But of course such people didn’t have her trio of emotional blackmailers to stare with soulful eyes, to whinge in either yodels or subsonic whines, to drag out collars, leads, her boots.

  ‘Oh, all right ... we’ll go,’ she’d said, and been almost trampled in the rush for the back porch. Minutes later the dogs had been smearing moist noses against the rear windows of Fiona’s battered old station-wagon as she crossed the picturesque Tasman Bridge and headed vaguely north.

  With hindsight, she realised that she’d passed this particular property without ever noticing it before. Only the ‘For Sale’ sign with its colourful ‘Auction’ banner had made the difference this time.

  The sign and the open gate had been a magnet to Fiona’s curiosity throughout the rest of the morning. She had stood in icy drizzle, freezing while the better-insulated dogs cavorted like mad things, and had absent-mindedly thrown dummies for them over and over again. Then, at the first sign of waning enthusiasm, she had bundled them back into the car and headed homeward, driving carefully in the still poor visibility and keeping an eye out for the signs without being consciously aware she was doing so.

  The vehicle, it almost seemed, had turned in of its own accord, steering through the broad avenue of trees — mostly natives — which protected the homestead from the highway. Without the signs and gate, a casual passer-by would hardly have known the house existed.

  The house itself was obviously old, low and sprawling in typical Australian country style. But the traditional weatherboards had been painted regularly, from the look of it, and overall it seemed in fair condition.

  The gardens were now neglected, but only recently so, from their appearance, and at their best must have been truly marvellous. Otherwise, well ... there were various outbuildings in equally various states of disrepair. A weary but solid old barn, a couple of questionable dog runs and a chicken run with movable fencing to give the chickens an occasional change of scratch, and the remains of a substantial kitchen garden.

  Fiona had looked through the steamy car window for several moments, then stepped out into the streaming rain for a closer look. The house, logically enough, was locked, but the shelter of the spreading verandas gave her time to peer into every window and get a remarkably accurate picture of the layout.

  It was smaller than she’d originally thought, or else it just appeared that way because the rooms were fairly large, she ultimately decided. But surely there were only two bedrooms — each with its own fireplace, no less! — a huge, empty lounge-room with a built-in, modern wood-heater inside the fireplace, and an equally enormous and apparently well-appointed kitchen that looked workable if not exactly ultra-modern.

  The kennels, by comparison, were dreadful.

  Sagging wire partitions and very questionable gates made the chicken run a safer proposition from a security point of view. Fiona hadn’t dared to examine the barn; that could wait for a proper, legal visit with the estate agent.

  She’d been forced to guess direction, and later found that the house had been positioned —as she’d guessed — just right to catch the maximum winter sun in the living areas. But even in the rain, with low cloud scudding the distant hills, the place had something. Before she’d properly seen the inside, before she’d even heard of that unknown, earlier Miss Boyd, Fiona had been smitten.

  What was more, she’d stayed that way, albeit with many reservations, during the visits she’d later made with the estate agent. The more she’d seen of it, the more she’d seen of problems that wanted fixing, of things that needed paint or paint removing or repairs, the more she’d loved it all.

  She had attended each of the pre-auction open days, growing increasingly restive as hordes of Nosy Parkers had tramped through the house, voices raised in criticism of this aspect or that, their attitudes so boorish they had made her froth with anger.

  ‘They’re animals, most of them,’ she’d complained to Rob Barr
on; they were becoming almost conspirators at this stage, she had felt.

  He’d merely laughed. Although in sympathy with Fiona’s feelings, he’d seen this all before. Still, he had offered some slight consoling.

  ‘You won’t see any of them at the auction, or at least not with money in their pockets,’ he’d said. ‘Sure, some will come for a look, but I haven’t seen a fair-dinkum buyer yet, bar you.’

  ‘And this Fraser person,’ she had replied, even then feeling that inexplicable hostility which the very name of Fraser seemed to produce. Now, of course, she knew why!

  It was ridiculous, but she knew she had been, if only subconsciously, watching everyone who prowled through the house — Her house, she couldn’t help thinking — and wondering which of these intruders might be that man Fraser, but he had never come.

  ‘You might get lucky. He might be land poor just at the moment, or have other places to put his money,’ Barron had said, seeming mildly amused by her unspoken concern. ‘But don’t get your hopes too high, just in case. Fraser knows this place; it used to be part of what’s now his property. And if he decides he wants it, he can afford to outbid you or anybody else who might be interested, I reckon.’

  So during the final weeks, weeks that were a constant merry-go-round of banks and lawyers and more banks, all of it had been tinged with the unseen shadow of a man she’d never met and wouldn’t know if she did meet him. But now, she had!

  Fiona stopped her pacing with a sudden, exultant laugh. She rushed to refill her wine glass and raised it triumphantly.

  ‘And to hell with you. Dare Fraser,’ she cried! ‘Too late!’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘You really should have taken the money and run while you had the chance, but then I suppose you know that.’

  ‘Oh, yes, but of course I didn’t think of that at the time, did I?’ Fiona replied with a cheeky grin. She quite liked her lawyer, who’d been a friend almost since her arrival in Hobart. He was a tall, almost cadaverously lanky individual with the driest sense of humour she had ever encountered.