by Dorothy Cork
Farrell’s cheeks felt pinched, and she knew they were white. ‘You’re made of iron like your mountains, aren’t you?’
‘Do you think so? ... Now write your letter, Miss Fitzgerald, and when it’s done, I’ll check it—and I’ll post it.’
‘All right.’ Farrell rose and crossed to the desk and took the chair there. There was a wall mirror in front of her and she could see him in it—lighting another cigarette, his head lowered, the light flaring warmly on the strong planes of his face. She began to write quickly, intent of getting it over, ‘Dear Daddy, I thought I’d better let you know I’m in Ansell. I couldn’t find anything to do in Port Hedland so decided to take a look at the mountains. The money has been holding out and I hate to ask you for more, but I’d appreciate it if you could let me have a cheque, just as a standby. Do you remember Mr. Sandfort who was staying at the hotel a while ago? I’ve run into him. It appears he practically owns Ansell, and he’s kindly said I could—’ She stopped writing and raised her eyes to the mirror to meet Larry’s blue gaze. ‘What did you say I was to tell my father about Quindalup?’
‘What have you written so far?’
Without asking her permission he moved forward and took up the page she had been writing on. When he had read it he looked at her quizzically.
‘That’s very convincing—all milk and water. Your stepmother may find it amusing, but for her own sake I don’t think she’ll communicate her amusement to your father.’
‘She just might,’ Farrell retorted. She already knew Cecile’s opinion of Larry, and didn’t imagine she would consider Farrell in safe hands. ‘Anyhow, my father will be furious if he finds out you’ve as good as kidnapped me.’
‘He might be even angrier if he knows what else you’ve been up to.’ He tossed the sheet of paper down. ‘Carry on. Mr. Sandfort kindly said you could have the use of his—let’s see, holiday home might sound better than hideout. Have you got that?’ He looked over her shoulder. ‘Then you’d better indicate that you mean to take the opportunity to think seriously about your future plans.’
‘I’ve come to a sort of standstill,’ Farrell wrote after a little thought, ‘and I need a few days to think about my next move. Don’t worry about me, Daddy. I’ll keep in touch and I shan’t do anything silly. Goodbye for now, lots of love from Farrell.’
Larry read that through too, as she had known he would, and she saw his lips twist in a slight smile.
‘That’s a lie I’ve told on your account, Mr. Sandfort,’ she told him. ‘I know I’m doing a very silly thing in letting you push me around, but I don’t seem to have a great deal of choice at the moment. I don’t know what my father will think.’
‘You’d better add a postscript,’ he said dryly. ‘Mr. Sandfort is going to keep an eye on you—a strict eye,’ he amended.
Farrell dispensed with the ‘strict’, then sealed and addressed the envelope and handed it over with a grimace.
‘You don’t trust me, do you? Yet you expect me to trust you.’
‘I haven’t given you any reason not to, have I?’
‘Not yet,’ she said, and added emphatically, ‘But I don’t want to go to Quindalup. Why should I?—particularly as I don’t know a thing about it.’
‘You’ll have plenty of time to find out all you want—starting from tomorrow.’ He narrowed his eyes and moved towards the cocktail cabinet. ‘You look like you could do with a drink. Will gin and tonic do?’
Farrell stood up nervously. ‘I don’t want a drink, thank you.’
His eyes were mocking. ‘I don’t mean to get you senseless and seduce you. You’re perfectly safe, Farrell, so sit down and stop acting like a frightened virgin.
She coloured furiously and perched on the edge of an armchair. It appeared that when Larry insisted on something, there was no escape. He was certainly accustomed to having his orders obeyed. She watched him nervily as he poured her drink, and a whisky for himself.
‘Cheers,’ he said when he had passed her glass across. ‘We’ll leave tomorrow afternoon, by the way, so see you’re packed up.’
Farrell chewed her lower lip. So he was coming too. The fact didn’t reassure her.
‘Is there—is there anyone else at Quindalup?’
‘Don’t worry. My housekeeper’s there, and she’s a very efficient woman.’
Farrell swallowed down half her drink. ‘I’d much rather leave on the plane tomorrow.’
‘And shoot another arrow into the air? No, don’t argue, you’ll do as I say.’
Her hand was shaking, and it was as much from anger as from anything else. ‘Why can’t you just let me go?’
‘Oh, quit acting like a butterfly that’s being threatened with a pin! I’ve told you why. I don’t want to see you ruin your life.’
‘I imagined you thought I’d done that already,’ she retorted swiftly.
Larry smiled crookedly. ‘Not altogether. It’s just that I’m a little old-fashioned.’
‘I don’t need your patronage anyhow!’
‘Nevertheless you’ve got it—if you choose to call it patronage.’
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed in sudden frustration. She jumped up and banged down the glass on the cabinet top so forcefully that it shattered. She drew her hand up quickly, aware that she had cut her finger, and stared at the drops of blood beginning to form, then at the fragments of glass on the shining cabinet top. ‘I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to do that.’
Larry moved as she spoke, and before she was aware of it he had taken hold of her hand and carried it to his mouth. She felt the warmth of his tongue as he sucked the blood from her finger. Somehow shocked, she pulled her hand away as if he had done something unforgivable, only to have her wrist captured and to find herself jerked almost off balance as he drew her against him.
She raised her head and stared straight into the blue of his eyes, then his gaze moved slowly to her mouth and her senses spun. The next moment, without being aware of what she was doing, she was fighting him like a wild creature.
He uttered an exclamation and released her so suddenly and so completely that she fell into the chair behind her. While she sat there trying to control her breathing, he turned away and, somehow infuriatingly, poured himself another drink and tossed it down his throat. Farrell, her breast rising and falling, was asking herself wretchedly, ‘Why on earth did I do that?’ She had no real idea except that she was frightened at the thought of having him kiss her.
He turned to her and asked abruptly, ‘Is that other man still on your mind?’
‘Yes,’ she breathed out, simply because she didn’t know what else to say. She was blinking back tears now, and she refused to look at him. The thought of going to Quindalup with him the next day drove her close to panic. There had to be some way of getting out of it...
There was no way, of course. Or was it simply a matter of knowing that getting the better of Larry Sandfort was well beyond her capabilities? At all events, they left for Quindalup the following afternoon just as he had ordained, following a narrow gravel road that ran into the ranges and became more and more lonely with every mile. The lower slopes of the ranges were covered with spinifex and the soft mauve of mullamullas, the wildflower that, north of Capricorn, replaced the everlasting daisy of the south.
There was not another vehicle on the road, and the silence and emptiness were intense when finally they reached a sheltered valley into which a narrow gorge opened. Soon, a house came into view, well off the road, its soft colours merging unobtrusively with the surrounding garden and tall eucalypts.
‘This is it,’ said Larry. ‘Quindalup—a happy place, in our language. You’ll be able to meditate here.’
‘On my sins?’ she asked quickly.
‘On your future,’ he corrected her with a darkly level look.
He pulled up in the shade of some trees some yards from the house, and Farrell looked curiously ahead at the bungalow with its pinkish asbestos roofing and wide verandahs. The garden was crowded with flowering shrubs and n
ative plants, and a well kept lawn swept down to an unexpected stretch of water at the back.
‘Don’t tell me that’s a river!’ Farrell exclaimed as she got out of the car and stood staring about her.
‘It’s not,’ said Larry. ‘To put it briefly, it’s water released from an artesian basin by a fault in the rock formation. You can swim there with perfect safety.’ He turned away to get the luggage out of the vehicle, and Farrell saw her two bags appear and nothing else. She felt a small shock of incredulity. Wasn’t he staying? She had dreaded the thought of coming here with him, but now—she had a resentful feeling that she was being dumped here—got rid of—left to repent her sins in solitary confinement, while he went back to his life and forgot her.
He motioned to her to go through the garden ahead of him and she hesitated. She felt extraordinarily like throwing a tantrum—a thing she hadn’t done since she was a small child. She wanted to stamp her foot and scream and refuse to move—to demand that he take her back to Ansell. She wasn’t quite sure why she didn’t follow her impulse—whether it was because she knew she’d be ashamed, or for some other reason. At the very back of her mind floated a vague and feathery idea that to reject Quindalup would be to refuse an invitation from fate. Though heaven knew she had no particular reason to trust the invitations fate had been tossing around so open-handedly lately. She’d already landed herself in a whole lot of trouble by taking what had seemed a heaven-sent opportunity to extract herself from her stepmother’s life...
Meanwhile, she had about-faced and was walking meekly ahead of Larry to the house, and she was aware of a faint sense of enchantment. Beautiful trees cast purple and red shadows on the green of the grass, mullamullas and some of the flowering peas glowed gold and white, pink and mauve and crimson in the bush beyond the paths. Birds called, and against the sky in the background, the red walls of the gorge glowed in the late afternoon sunlight. Quindalup, she thought involuntarily, could be a paradise for—lovers. A romantic and improbable haven, hidden away in a brutal land.
A little shaken by her thoughts, she glanced back over her shoulder and waited for Larry to come abreast of her, reflecting that he looked very much a part of this place—a man completely different from the one in the yellow helmet and concealing glasses, with his healthily tanned skin, his blue eyes, his thick glossy hair.
‘Are you—staying?’ she heard herself ask, although in her heart she already knew he was not.
Larry gave her a veiled look. ‘I’m not in the mood for a holiday.’
‘Neither am I,’ she retorted, quick colour staining her cheeks.
‘Well then, you’ll be able to give your whole mind to devising some sensible plans, won’t you? You won’t be disturbed here.’
‘I can see that,’ she flashed, and added, with a deliberate rejection of the beauty of Quindalup, ‘I’m going to be bored to tears.’
‘I hope not,’ he said, definitely displeased. ‘I’ll drive out and see how you’re progressing, of course.’
Was she to be grateful for that? Farrell wondered mutinously.
A woman had appeared on the verandah to welcome them. She was fiftyish, tall and thin with a weatherbeaten face and short-cut greying hair, and she was neatly dressed in navy cotton slacks and a matching short-sleeved shirt.
‘This is Mrs. Adams, my housekeeper,’ Larry told Farrell. ‘Mrs. Adams—Miss Farrell Fitzgerald. I want to leave her in your care for a little while. She’s in need of—peace and quiet.’
The two women murmured greetings and Farrell wondered what interpretation Mrs. Adams put on what Larry said. He had given the impression that she hadn’t been well, or had been in some sort of trouble perhaps, and Farrell hoped she wouldn’t be fussed over, but as she discovered she need not have worried about that.
‘You won’t be staying, Mr. Sandfort?’ the housekeeper asked, turning to her employer.
‘Regrettably, no. I have a dinner appointment in Ansell tonight, and tomorrow Steve Porter has some papers for me to sign. I’ll see Miss Fitzgerald settled in and then I must go.’
‘You’ll have a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you. Make a pot for Miss Fitzgerald by all means, but I shan’t wait. Now where would you like this luggage?’
‘Oh, I’ll see to that, Mr. Sandfort. There’s a bed ready made up in the second room.’ She hastened away with the suitcases and Farrell stood silently feeling like a schoolgirl helpless to resist the plans being made for her.
‘Well, Farrell,’ said Larry, ‘I’m leaving you in good hands, so I’ll say goodbye for the time being.’
She sent him a smouldering look. ‘I don’t want to stay here, you know.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘What’s your alternative, then? If you have one, let’s hear it. I’m ready to listen.’
‘Oh!’ she exclaimed, exasperated. ‘You have no right to treat me like this. I can—I can do as I please—’
‘I’ve let your father know I’ll be responsible for you,’ he said imperturbably. ‘I’m not leaving you here indefinitely—I shall be back.’
‘When?’ she asked furiously.
‘When I’ve discharged a few of my responsibilities,’ he said briefly, and turned away. ‘Goodbye, Farrell.’
Farrell had never felt so helpless or so baffled in her life. She watched him turn his car, watched him drive back along the gravel road without so much as a glance in her direction, and then, when the sound of the motor had faded away, the silence came back.
Presently Mrs. Adams walked briskly on to the verandah with a tray of tea.
‘I’ve put your things in your bedroom, Miss Fitzgerald—the second door along. You’ll find a bathroom across the hallway, and if there’s anything at all you want, be sure to tell me. Dinner will be at seven, breakfast at eight-thirty, and lunch at one. Of course if you want to walk up the gorge and take a picnic lunch at any time, you have only to say so and I’ll pack a basket for you. You’re welcome in the kitchen any time to get yourself a snack or a drink, so don’t be shy.’
‘Thank you, Mrs. Adams,’ Farrell said wryly. She was beginning to gain the impression—later proved to be correct—that Larry’s housekeeper was highly organised.
Her bedroom, she presently discovered, was spacious and airy, attractively furnished, and equipped, like all the other rooms in the bungalow, with a big; ceiling fan, which would be essential once the weather really warmed up. There was ample space for her clothes, and for want of something better to do, she unpacked her suitcases and arranged the things in the drawers and wardrobe, in which, on a pretty padded hanger, hung a silky, very feminine yellow and white striped bathrobe. Who owned that, she wondered, or was it provided for the use of guests? She learned at least part of the answer to her question the following day.
She ate alone that night—in fact she ate all her meals alone, for Mrs. Adams didn’t mix with guests and kept strictly to her role of housekeeper, and to her own part of the house, which was completely separate. After dinner, Farrell wandered into the big living room in search of some way of entertaining herself, for she didn’t intend to spend her time moping or reflecting on her future. There was a radio, and a whole stack of cassette tapes with something to suit every taste. Farrell selected some Chopin waltzes, then wandered over to inspect the row of books on a long shelf that ran half way along one wall. Somewhat to her surprise, among the fiction, history and mineralogy, there were several volumes of poetry—Blake, Hopkins, some Chinese translations, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Larry’s name was inscribed in all of them, she discovered to her surprise, for she hadn’t expected him to be a man who enjoyed verse. At least, she was sure he wouldn’t subscribe to Aunt Jean’s views, and claim that a Shakespearean sonnet gave him more pleasure than sex!
She shied away from her own thoughts and opened the sonnets and read, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate—’ and into her mind, uncalled for, came something he had said to her recently, remembered now with unex
pected vividness. ‘Eyes like dreaming waters where ferns grow—the lips and bosom of a houri’... Farrell bit her lip and closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Larry Sandfort was an enigma, and she knew a fleeting and instantly banished regret that she was not staying at Quindalup under different circumstances.
The next morning, some time after breakfast, she decided to take a swim. The sun was hot and the water sparkled invitingly down beyond the trees. Farrell slipped into her bikini, and, on the point of donning her towelling beach coat, reached down instead the silky scrap of robe she had come upon the previous day. It felt cool and caressing against her half-naked body, and she tied the narrow belt, put on her thongs, and headed for the pool.
Beyond the garden as she approached the water, which was overhung by the white branches of snappy gums, she encountered Mrs. Adams returning to the house.
‘I thought you’d probably take a swim this morning, Miss Fitzgerald. I’ve put some fresh fruit drink in the little fridge in the sun shelter, and a couple of bottles of soft drink. Help yourself, won’t you?’
Farrell thanked her and continued on her way. The sun shelter was a rustic, half open construction, roofed with big sheets of pale papery bark from the cadjeput trees, several of which grew nearby. There were li-los and folding chairs stacked against one of its rough wooden walls, and as well as a small kerosene refrigerator, Farrell noticed a table and a small cabinet of oiled timber. The floor was covered with seagrass matting.
She took one of the li-los outside and set it up close to the water, then absentmindedly thrust her hands into the pockets of her robe. Her right hand encountered something and she drew it out. It was a card—a birthday card—with a design of wildflowers, red and green kangaroo paws, on the front. Inside was a printed greeting under which was scrawled in a strong masculine hand, ‘The happiest of birthdays, to my lovely Helen.’ It was signed ‘Larry’. Farrell felt a curious tingling run along her nerves. ‘My lovely Helen’. She looked at the card again, but there was no date, nothing to show when it had been written. Well, what did she care if he had a girl-friend called Helen, who apparently visited Quindalup? She didn’t care in the least. She put the card back in her pocket, slipped out of the robe and tossed it down on the li-lo.
