Wedding at Blue River

by Dorothy Quentin

  Jane liked the feeling of Jamie’s small, strong hand holding hers so firmly. During tea, when he had done full justice to his grandmother’s scones and freshly baked sponge cake, he had been watching the newcomers critically-—only asking a question now and then about England.

  “Mummy’s in England,” he told them, grinning, “she’s gone home to look after Gran’s mummy for a bit. D’you know, my great-granny is awful old? She’s nearly a hundred!”

  “That she’s not,” Mrs. Newbery laughed, “she’s only eighty-two, Jamie. And Lochiemuir is not in England, it’s in Scotland.”

  “Och! It’s all the same in such a small country!” Jamie argued, and everyone was laughing.

  “It’s not at a’ the same, as ye’d know if ye paid a mite more attention to your lessons,” Nubby admonished him with mock severity.

  “D’you have horses at Melcoombe—can you ride?” he asked Jane.

  It was Lisa who answered. “Indeed we can, Jamie. Jane can ride as well as anyone in Australia, I bet.” She told him about the moorland ponies, and the October Drift, smiling at Steve. “That’s what you came to see, wasn’t it? I suppose it was very small change after—all this.”

  Jane’s heart had done a dive into her stomach. Her first letters to Lisa about her young Australian visitor had been describing his pleasure in the October Drift ... but the real Steve Forrest had been in England for a short time during August, as Mrs. Newbery would remember.

  She said quickly, “Steve really came to Melcoombe for the Barton Manor stock sale.” She turned to Steve, “You never told me how you found their Herefords compared with yours.”

  With a flicker of amusement in his grey eyes Steve had picked up the ball, and for the moment the danger was averted as he drawled, “Fifty years ago, I guess they’d have made my father green with envy, but not now. We’ve built up a pretty fine dairy herd on the Blue River now. The beef stock, grazing wild over hundreds of miles, can’t be compared, of course!” Listening to Steve and Lisa talking away as if they had known each other for years, as they walked slowly round the hill track towards the quarters, with the dogs loping ahead and running back every now and then impatiently, tails wagging and tongues lolling, not understanding that the procession must go the pace of the wheel chair, Jane wondered if they would be able to keep up their deception. Any chance question from Jamie or the housekeeper or Lisa herself could blow it sky-high.

  After tea, when Steve had suggested this walk, Jane had made an excuse and gone with Lisa to her sister’s room, shutting the door carefully behind her. Lisa, who was wide awake now and eager to go for their walk, had looked up at her mischievously.

  “I’m glad you and Steve have made it up—but he needn’t have worried about Mrs. Newbery. She’s a sweetie, and I don’t think she’d mind him getting married at all. She likes us, Jan. And I’m sure she’s not the sort of person to open other people’s letters.”

  Jane had flushed miserably. She and Lisa had never been very close as some sisters are—their chosen careers had kept them apart for some years—but they had always been open and frank with each other. It was going to be difficult, lying to Lisa; only, as Steve had said, it would be more cruel to tell her the truth just now, when a brave new world was unfolding for the crippled girl. She could imagine how the animation | would fade from Lisa’s face if she said, It’s all a mistake, darling. We’ll have to go home soon, and make new plans.

  She could imagine, too, how furious Lisa would be with Stewart Finch—in loyalty to her sister and in the first bitter impact of her own disappointment. And that sort of anger and disappointment would be very bad for Lisa...

  She’d managed a shaky laugh, “Oh, that was just a fairy-tale to amuse me, I think. Of course Mrs. Newbery isn’t the nosey sort—but she has been in his mother’s place for twenty-five years, Lisa. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t feel a bit possessive. So Steve and I thought it would be best not to announce our engagement yet. After all, it is a big step—we’d better wait and see how we fit into the life here.”

  “Oh, Jane, you cautious old idiot! If I was in your shoes I’d shout it from the housetops!” Lisa had stared at her, half laughing, half exasperated. “All the way over you were in a twitch in case he’d changed his mind—now you seem to have changed yours! I can’t understand you. This is a heavenly place and your Steve is a dreamboat. But I wouldn’t have thought him the type to make mysteries or to—he seems pretty straightforward to me. I’d call him blunt, honey.”

  Jane had laughed again, more naturally. “It’s a big thing, marriage,” she said gently, “and we’ve only known each other such a short time. Please, darling, don’t talk about it to anyone as if it’s all signed and sealed.”

  “O.K., if you and Steve want it that way. It’s your life. But it makes me feel as if we’re here on a sort of sale or return!” Lisa had grinned at her suddenly, and reached out her hand. “I only hope you don’t take too long to make up your minds. I’d simply hats to find myself flying back for Christmas in England, Jan!”

  So would she, Jane realised suddenly as they went down towards the long rows of buildings that were the stockmen’s quarters. She had woken from her dream with a feeling of extraordinary happiness' that could only have been a carryover from her dream, a sort of relief from the excitement and doubts and fears of the past month now that the real Steve Forrest had taken charge, even temporarily, of her affairs.

  It had lasted for a few minutes, that extraordinary relief, until the still unsolved aspects of her problem came crowding back into her mind and she had realised that it would not be easy to fool Lisa. She had got up and taken another shower, dressed, and followed the sound of Jamie’s high-pitched voice chattering to Lisa on the front veranda.

  They had obviously made friends, and Lisa introduced the boy to her. In his turn, Jamie had whistled up Rufus, the red setter, and Rob the collie, to be introduced.

  “Gran’s setting tea on the back veranda, we were waiting for you to wake up. Didn’t you sleep in the Comet? Are you prop’ly awake now? Uncle Steve said I could show you the horses after tea, if you’d like that.”

  Jane had assured him she would like it very much and he had offered, politely, to push Lisa’s chair.

  “I can manage, thanks, on flat ground or in the house—but when we get out, you can push me,” Lisa had smiled at the small boy, looking enchantingly pretty. Jamie had fallen under her spell, as men of any age did. When she had looked a little daunted by the size of the tea Nubby had spread on the table Jamie told her sternly, “You didn’t eat your lunch, did you? Gran says folks must eat to stay strong—don’t you want your legs to get better, Lisa?”

  “Whist, lad! Ye must not make personal remarks, dear.”

  “I don’t mind.” Lisa had grinned at Jamie comfortingly, “Indeed I do, Jamie—and do you know, I have a feeling they are going to get better? It’s so nice here at Blue River.”

  Steve had joined them in time to hear that, and smilingly told Lisa that miracles were two a penny at the Blue River station.

  The setting sun was flooding the western sky with colour; a riot of rose and gold and jade and lilac. The buildings and the shade trees surrounding them threw elongated shadows across the dry track, and over the men grouped round a cleared space where a couple of ringers, sitting back on one heel, were throwing horseshoes. Other men were perched on the stout fence rails around the stockyards farther down the track, smoking and gossiping. From the quarters came a cheerful clatter of crockery and radio music and the appetising smell of cooking.

  Jamie had not been allowed to push the wheel chair ' because the slope from the homestead was steep in places. Steve had taken charge of Lisa as naturally as if she had lived all her life on the Blue River. And now they were on level ground Jamie didn’t want to push the chair, he wanted to show Jane the horses, especially his own pony in the home paddock. He was tugging at her hand as the men began, with seemingly slow casualness, to leave whatever they were doing to
cluster round Steve and the girls. Some of them shook hands, some just tipped their hats farther back and said “Hi—as Lisa did. Children, white and coloured, began to join the group laughing and chatting about the wheel chair.

  “Come on and show me you can ride, Jane,” Jamie said impatiently.

  “Not in a frock, Jamie! I’ll wear slacks tomorrow,” she smiled down at the small eager face.

  Steve said authoritatively, “People want to meet our guests, Jamie. You can take Jane to the paddocks afterwards,” and the boy let go of her hand at once.

  Joel, by virtue of having driven the Lesleys in from Oonga, introduced some of the men to them. Jane felt a horrible fraud as she faced those frankly curious, smiling faces of the stockmen and their wives and children. She was grateful for Lisa’s easy and friendly manner—Lisa had never been shy in her life, and even from a wheel chair she could command the little social occasion without the slightest embarrassment. Jane wished she had some of her sister’s self-confidence ... but then Lisa didn’t know that they were there on false pretences. Jane hoped she would never suffer the humiliation of knowing that.

  The introductions were very formal. Jane, her hand aching from the bone-cracking brief handshakes, thought she would never remember their names. Cal, Rory, Dan, Jim, Barry, Tom ... surnames, apparently, were at a discount here, no one bothered with them. It was refreshing to be accepted immediately as Jane and Lisa, to hear the men calling Steve by his name without any prefix. Only Mrs. Mulga, the Aborigine who cooked for the men, was given her full title. She was a vast smiling mountain of a woman who came down from her kitchen adjoining the men’s big dining room with its long trestle tables set for tea, wearing a spotless white nylon overall. Mrs. Mulga was the only person who seemed a little shy as she shook hands, and Steve introduced her husband Pete as one of his best stockmen.

  “Guess you know Moonie,” Pete drawled, pushing his daughter towards them.

  Moonie was a coffee-coloured girl dressed in a shapeless cotton shift, the toes of her bare feet wriggling in the dry dust of the track. She was the only one not smiling down at Lisa. She said sulkily, “I done washed yor clo’es whiles you bin sleeping, tha’s all.”

  “Now you hush up!” her mother admonished her. “You know you like laundry work. You don’ wan’ Miss Lesley ter think you min’ a lil bitty extry laundry, do you?”

  Moonie’s father said without malice, “That girl’s so bone-lazy, Ma, she minds a little bitty extra work whatever.” He smiled at Jane, “Don’t you go payin’ no attention to her, Missus. Her wants hotel job in big town, ar right, Mrs. Newbery tryin’ ter train her.” Amidst the general laughter Jane murmured something about liking laundry work, too, and being perfectly willing to do her own and her sister’s ... but Moonie shrugged and slouched off back to her house in the second block of buildings. As Steve began pushing Lisa’s chair on towards the paddocks he answered her question about the girl’s name, telling Lisa that Pete’s daughter had been named for the place where she had been born. “That was before they struck oil in Moonie.”

  They came to the home paddocks, where the grass was still green though the plains stretching out below them for miles, as far as the eye could see, were burned to the colour of sand. “Is that all desert?” Lisa asked.

  “My goodness, no!” Joel answered. “That’s good pasture. You have to go north-west over those hills to find real desert—you flew over a bit of it this morning, but I suppose it was too dark to see anything.” Steve pointed out to them the flat cleared space where the weekly mail plane could land. “If I’d known a bit earlier when you were due in,” he added drily, “Jack Hennessy could have flown you all the way here—but he’d been booked already to pick up some freight from Townsville for Darwin to catch the afternoon Quantas flight, and he was cutting it a bit fine.” He smiled at Lisa, who had her hands on the middle bar of the fence as she stared longingly at the horses grazing in the paddock. “I’m sorry you had that bumpy ride for the last seventy miles. They’ve been promising us a road through to Oonga for the past five years. One of these days the gang will arrive, and we’ll get it.”

  “One fine day,” Joel agreed, rolling himself a cigarette with one hand, “when the kookaburras stop squawking.”

  Lisa said wistfully, “Those lovely horses!” she beat her hands impatiently on the arms of her wheel chair. “It makes me green with envy—I’d love to ride again.”

  “Why don’t you?” Steve asked casually, rolling a cigarette in his turn. “We can ask Doc over the morning session to have a look at you when he’s calling round this way, and if he says O.K. you can ride Peg,” he pointed out the mare grazing with her foal in the next paddock.

  “Peg’s gentle,” Joel concurred, scratching his head. “If you can ride, Lisa—hold the rein properly—I guess you could walk old Peg around a bit. We ride with a long stirrup here, not gripping with the knees like you pommies do.”

  Lisa lifted her flushed excited face to Steve. “Could I? It would be lovely—even if it was only an amble. If poor Peg wouldn’t mind just walking.”

  “Peg won’t mind. She’s a good-natured beast.” Steve pushed her chair a bit farther along the track and pulled a couple of apples from his pocket and gave them to Lisa, whistling a series of short trills. “Give her those and she’ll be your friend for life.”

  Jamie had climbed the high fence rails and jumped lightly down into the other paddock. He ran to a grey pony that was grazing under a clump of gums, and seizing a handful of the pony’s mane he vaulted, cowboy-fashion, on to its back and cantered back to the fence.

  “Showing off a bit,” Joel commented lazily, “but he don’t ride so bad for a four-year-old. Ought to do well at the Nursery Gymkhana at the races next week.” The pony was pulled up short by his mane inside the fence, and stood there shivering. It was about the size of a small Dartmoor pony and between the fence bars Jane rubbed its velvety nose.

  “His name’s Shiver, because he shivers when he wants sugar,” Jamie explained importantly, pulling some rather grubby-looking lumps of sugar from the pocket of his diminutive shorts. “Here—you can feed him, Jane,” he said generously.

  Steve leaned his tall body against the fence rails, lazily watching the two girls feeding the horses in the long shadows thrown from the blue gums by the setting sun. Jane was smiling a little as the velvet lips of the pony found the sugar in her outstretched palm. It seemed as if they had been at Blue River much longer than a single day.

  The sun dropped suddenly out of sight, throwing into relief the hills many miles distant that had been flattened before by the bright sunset glare. Immediately it was dusky, in the shadows of the blue gums.

  “By the time you get back to the homestead it’ll be dark,” Joel vouchsafed, stamping out his cigarette butt carefully on the dusty track. “You can see your way by the stars, it’s clear, the air hereabouts. Later the moon’ll be up—she’s near full tonight. Bright as daytime, it’ll be by ten o’clock—but cooler. The cool comes with the dark here, quick.”

  “It’s dramatic—theatrical—isn’t it? And beautiful,” Lisa stared dreamily down towards the distant hills, already blurring in the quickening dusk. “What tremendous distances you can see in this country!”

  “Yeah. Too far, sometimes,” Joel said laconically. These pommies always enthused about the wide open spaces until they got bushed or got bored. He pointed to some spirals of smoke rising straight into the clear atmosphere from behind a clump of tea tree scrub. “That’s the blacks’ camp. They prefer to cook, eat an’ sleep in the open. Don’t like bein’ shut up in buildings too much.”

  Lisa lifted wide eyes to the stockman. “Don’t they mind being called blacks?” she asked innocently. “I thought one called them—coloureds—nowadays.”

  Joel laughed shortly, a sound as harsh and rusty as the cry of a kookaburra or the screech of the brightly coloured parrakeets that darted among the trees down by the river.

  “They don’t mind. There ain’t no colo
ur bar here, so they don’t get no fancy ideas about freedom and such,” he explained drily. “I told you—they prefer living in their own camp with their gins and piccaninnies. That way they get the best of both worlds. They prefer it to living in their Abo. Reserves under the kindly eye of the Administrator—” he grinned at Steve, who was feeding sugar to his tall black stallion, Ranger. Ranger whinnied and nuzzled him for more. “They’re good stockmen, the Abos, and the Blue River’s always had a good name with them, even in Old Man Forrest’s time. By all accounts they didn’t love the white man much in them pioneering times—can’t blame ’em—but the Old Man never had his throat slit or his homestead burned down.”

  Jane shivered, though the cool was not sharp yet. She had a sudden vision of what it must have been like out here in the wilderness in Steve’s grandfather’s time. One day, she thought, I’d like to hear about the history of Blue River.

  “It must have been awful, without any cars or aeroplanes or anything,” Lisa said, pulling a little grimace. “It’s different when you know you can get away sometimes.”

  Joel grinned again. “Sure. Funny thing is, the country either gets you or you hate it. If you hate it, you leave pretty damn quick. If you like it, you don’t want to go away much. Just to the races twice a year, maybe to the city if you’re married and the wife wants to go on a spending-spree. Me, I can’t get away from the city fast enough.”

  Lisa laughed up at him. “I gather you’re not married.”

  “Nope. Most of us ain’t married yet.” Joel looked at both the girls with a twinkle in his eyes. “The right kind of female to stand life in the Outback ain’t easy to find, these days. I guess that’s why the boys are excited at your comin’. It’ll keep ’em going until the races next week.”

  Steve said lazily, “Watch it, Joel, or you’ll be scaring them to death.”