by Lily Malone
Ella bounced again. ‘I’m going to call him now. I can go straight round if he’s home so I can present it to him.’
‘Do you need me to hang around and come with you?’
‘Harvey, thank you. I think I’ve got it, though, and I feel a bit more comfortable with Jake. If I have to call you while I’m with him, I think that will be fine. I just didn’t want to stuff anything up with my first possible buyer and I get the feeling Henry Graham’s done this kind of thing before.’
Harvey’s gaze followed the route Henry had taken out the door. ‘He has. It’s interesting that he’d consider a place like Irma’s. It’s not his usual thing.’
Ella wasn’t about to question Henry’s motives. She really didn’t care what he did with the property. All she wanted to do was sell it.
‘Are you good to lock the office then, Ella?’ Harvey asked, and when she nodded, he picked up the hat he’d left on the table. ‘I’ll leave you to it. Good luck with Jake.’
‘Thanks. See you tomorrow,’ Ella called as Harvey shut the door.
Ella counted to ten to wait for Harvey to get beyond earshot. Then she let out a squeal and hunted for her phone. The display indicated she’d missed a few calls while she’d been with Henry Graham. They could wait another minute or two.
She hunted out Jake’s name in her contacts and put the call through, drumming the boardroom table with her fingertip.
‘Come on, Jake. Answer the bloody phone.’
She scanned the walls while she waited. Begg & Robertson’s office registration and credentials were displayed in simple A4 frames. Nearer the window a low table housed more accolades and awards, usually with Bob’s name on them. Begg & Robertson Top Sales Consultant. Great Southern’s Top Selling Agent.
That could be her name in three years. Ella Davenport, Top Sales Consultant. Cop that, Bob.
‘You’ve reached Jake. Leave a message.’
‘Jake, this is Ella Davenport. I have an offer on your nanna’s place. Would you call me, please, as soon as you get this message?’
Ella ended the call and spun her phone on the table. What should she do now? If Erik and Sam had been at home she would have gone straight there to share the news, but Erik was on his way back to Perth, and she wasn’t sure Sam would celebrate.
What was she going to do with her boy? Thank goodness Erik had been there to keep him in line this morning. Sam was pushing all her buttons lately and Ella wasn’t sure what else she could do. She’d tried taking away privileges. She’d tried rewards. She’d tried threats. She’d grounded him. Nothing made much difference.
Ella’s mobile phone vibrated, and when she snatched it up Jake’s name lit the screen. She swiped to accept the call.
‘That was quick,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry if my message worried you,’ Jake’s deep voice answered.
Ella blinked. ‘What message? Sorry, I called you about your nanna’s house.’
‘What’s happened to Irma’s house? I called you about Sam.’
The missed calls. Ella was on her feet in a beat, adrenalin surging through her stomach in a sickening swing. ‘What’s happened to Sam?’
‘He’s here with me. Didn’t you get my message?’
Ella swallowed past the lump that was doing its best to block her throat. ‘Is Sam okay?’
‘Sam is fine, Ella. I didn’t mean to frighten you. Now what’s this about the house? It hasn’t burned down or been burgled or anything?’
Burned down? Burgled? ‘The house is fine, Jake. What’s going on?’
‘Right. Let’s start again then, now we know everyone is fine and my house hasn’t burned down. I rang to let you know I have Sam here and I’ll tell you all about that in two seconds. First, what’s this about the house?’
Ella’s spleen, lungs and kidneys all settled in their rightful places, and she was able to speak again. ‘I’ve got an offer for you.’
‘On the house?’
‘Of course on the house. What other sort of offer did you think I was making?’ Why wouldn’t any of this conversation make sense?
Ella walked the width of the room towards the wall where there was a big blown-up picture of Harvey in the Chalk Hill & Districts Courier, taken on the anniversary of his twentieth year with Begg & Robertson Real Estate, shaking hands with the Shire President.
‘Someone made an offer on the house?’ Jake repeated, doubt threading through his voice.
‘Yes. Henry Graham. We saw him at the Home Open on Friday. If you’re not busy this afternoon, I’d like to come out and present it to you.’
‘Henry Graham made an offer on Irma’s house?’ His voice hardened.
‘Yes.’
‘Will I like it?’
‘I couldn’t say, Jake,’ Ella said.
‘Okay. Come on out. We’re here. Do you know where I live?’
Everyone knew the Honeychurch farm. ‘On Quarry Road, about eight kilometres past the pit.’
‘Yep. See you soon.’
Ella hesitated. ‘Jake? About Sam?’
‘Sam is fine, Ella, I promise.’
‘He’s not in trouble? He didn’t break anything?’
‘Let’s talk when you get here. Drive carefully. Nothing’s happened to Sam that setting a land-speed record on your way out here will fix. The grader was out this week and the gravel’s a bit slippery. I’m not sure you’re used to driving on gravel.’
‘I’ll be careful. I’m on my way. You promise me Sam is okay?’
‘He’s fine. He’s up in my top paddock, picking up sticks.’
‘Then you have an imposter. That doesn’t sound like my boy.’
‘Do him good to do some real work.’ A chuckle behind the words.
For the first time, Ella relaxed. Sam was really okay. Jake wouldn’t laugh if he wasn’t.
She turned off the lights and locked the office, and she was in her car and a hundred metres down the road before she realised she’d left the paperwork and the manila listing file on the boardroom table. Cursing softly, she turned the car around, parked outside the office and retraced her steps. She was very glad Bob Begg wasn’t there to see her. He would have laughed his head off if he knew she’d left her first ever Offer and Acceptance form decorating the company’s boardroom table.
CHAPTER
12
Quarry Road was slippery as Ella negotiated the newly graded surface in her Mazda. Her handbag had already wedged itself in the gap between the passenger seat and passenger door, and the precious listing folder and offer papers had hit the floor shortly after Ella rounded the first corner.
At least the grader had knocked out some of the corrugations, but the Mazda still felt every rock and pebble. Not like the four-wheel-drives that flashed past her going the other way, not a care in the world.
What with concentrating on driving, planning what she’d say to Jake and worrying about Sam, Ella’s fingers ached on the steering wheel by the time she neared the green post with 3701 painted in white on the marker: the famous Honeychurch family farm.
It wasn’t just relief that she’d got this far that made her relax as she turned into the driveway. How could you visit a property like this and not relax? Driving into Jake’s place felt like pulling on your favourite pair of jeans.
Ella slowed to a crawl, then to a stop. She’d been to quite a few properties now with Harvey and Bob, and some of those were worth a million dollars or more. They were stunning. Jake’s place stepped stunning up a notch.
Winding from the high point of the road, facing north-west, the farm occupied pretty much all the undulating paddocks Ella could see. Shelter-belt trees ran through the paddocks in scattered grey-green ribbons, and to the north, state forestry took up the horizon and turned it a misted purple-blue.
It must be amazing in the winter when everything is green.
Even now the muted shades of golden brown grass and stubble in the paddocks had its own kind of dry-blown beauty.
There was one start
lingly clear huge blue dam near the base of a creek line, and several smaller dams dotted across hills that were divided by a train track of post and wire fencing into large and smaller paddocks. The sheep grazing near the driveway were the largest darn sheep Ella had ever seen. Huge rolls of fleece turned them into grey Velcro blankets as head after head bobbed up, staring at her as if the Mazda was a rover vehicle and she’d just launched it onto their moon.
Halfway up the first of the rolling hills, bordered by limestone retaining walls and gardens, Jake’s house stood sentinel over the valley. Only ‘house’ wasn’t quite the right word. As Ella pressed the accelerator to start her car rolling forward, headlines came unbidden into her head.
‘Country Manor Born.’
‘Live In Your Own Country Manor.’
‘Golden Sweet as Honeychurch.’
She tried those three on her tongue and eventually muttered, ‘One Powerball, and I’d buy it.’
Ella drove into the parking area near the house where she slotted the little Mazda beside Jake’s much larger Landcruiser.
Tugging her handbag across the seat, Ella climbed out. It was tricky maintaining a posture of elegant saleslady efficiency on the loose gravel in her heels. She was glad when she put her foot on the first limestone step and stepped up, through a planting of low-lying everlastings and paper daisies, and the type of grevillea that hugged the terraced ground like a woolly carpet.
There was no sign of Jake or Sam. No sign of anyone. No one to watch her being so very efficient and poised except the ghost of Bob Begg, and he didn’t count.
Ella wiped her shoes on the mat, sucked in a breath for luck and raised her knuckles to knock on Jake’s front door.
‘There you are.’
Jake strolled around the verandah, hands deep in the pockets of a pair of steel grey shorts, dark hair mussed and messy as if he’d let the wind dry it after a swim in that big blue dam. His t-shirt had a white RM Williams logo stamped on the chest and a nicer line of muscle stamped under it.
The pure impact of Jake in that moment made Ella touch her fingertips to the solid front door and leave them there like a lifeline, spread across the wood.
He stopped a metre or so from her and she had to look up to meet his eyes.
‘Hi,’ she said, praying her make-up would cover any blush in her cheeks. She desperately wanted to appear confident, and it was ridiculous that the sight of Jake Honeychurch in his homegrown casual could make her ankles wobble.
He lifted his chin to indicate the papers. ‘That them?’
Ella pulled on a bright smile and pushed herself gently away from the door. ‘Sure is. Shall we talk about the offer first, or do you want to tell me what’s going on with Sam?’
‘Sam first. He’s more important than the house.’
‘You said he was fine.’ Ella tried not to sound defensive. Of course Sam was more important than selling a house.
‘He is fine. Don’t worry.’ Jake raised his arm, indicating the direction from which he’d just come. ‘Shall we?’
‘Thank you.’
Jake led her around the corner of the homestead to an area paved in lovely grey-slate flagstones with a solid old limestone-look table and a host of comfortable cushioned chairs all nestled around it.
She slung her handbag over the back of the chair to her left and put the listing file on the table in front of her before she sat. She wasn’t sure what to do with the sale papers. Tuck them inside the file or put them on top of it? What would Bob do?
Bob would conduct this negotiation in the comfort of his air-conditioned office while Gina made his client a coffee, because Bob had an office and all Ella had was a space.
Ella tucked the offer under the top flap of the listing file, hiding it from view so she could bring it out with a flourish. That was something Bob would do.
‘Can I get you anything, Ella? Water? Tea?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ Ella said, pulling out a chair.
Jake chose a seat on the same side of the table, nearer the corner, which meant they could both admire the view of the dam and creek line framed by the grey-brown trunks of two magnificent gums.
‘You have a beautiful place here,’ Ella said because it felt impolite not to acknowledge the property, and because it was the truth. ‘That view is incredible.’
Far to the west, the shadowy outline of the Porongurups met the sky, jagged domes smoothed by distance, as if humpback whales breached on the horizon.
‘Thank you. It’ll do.’ He smiled in a slow-sunrise way that seemed to wake the rest of his face. ‘So, take a stab at what I caught that son of yours doing today.’
Ella’s thoughts about sunrises, whales and distant horizons vanished. ‘He didn’t get in a fight, did he?’
‘No fists. I think he’s fighting with himself, though. I think he’s bored. That’s his biggest problem.’
Ella had to rein in the snap that said she didn’t need his parenting advice, thanks all the same. ‘How about if you tell me what happened and then I can take it from there?’
So Jake gave her the story of the morning, not leaving anything out, including every mention Sam had made about her ‘dumb job and how much he hated it’. Ella went from wanting to find Sam and hug him to wanting to throttle him. How could he possibly think ruining the town’s bowling green was a good idea? She’d raised him better than that, hadn’t she? Where had she gone so wrong?
‘So I told him I had a job for him,’ Jake said. ‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing him out here. I was playing things a bit by ear at that point.’
‘So you’ve got him picking up sticks,’ Ella said stiffly.
‘He was. I think I can hear him coming back, though. Can’t you?’ Jake tilted his head, listening.
She couldn’t hear anything except the sound of a distant car on a highway, and said so.
‘That’s not a car. That’s the quad bike. Sam’ll be riding it back,’ Jake told her.
Her chair scraped the pavers and Ella was on her feet in a flash. ‘Sam’s riding a quad bike? Aren’t those things dangerous? Aren’t those things, like, the most dangerous item of farm equipment going around? Kids get killed on quad bikes.’
‘I gave him a lesson on how to ride it safely first. I was riding our quad bike around here when I was ten. We all were. And we were driving Dad’s tractor, putting out hay, chasing sheep, all that sort of thing. It’s not the quad bike that’s particularly dangerous … it’s the person doing the riding, especially if they’re silly about it.’
‘But Sam’s never ridden one before,’ Ella protested. And Sam might be silly about it.
‘Bet he’s never picked up sticks before either. Sticks are dangerous things too. Bet your mum always told you not to play with sticks because you could poke another kid’s eye out.’
‘It’s not the same and you know it.’ She would have marched straight off the flagstones like a mother bear on the search for her cub, but the sound of the quad bike engine was all over the place and she couldn’t get her bearings. She had no idea which way to strike out.
‘He’s got his bike helmet. He was already dressed for riding. He’ll be fine. Can I give you a piece of advice?’
‘No,’ Ella snapped, turning to face him. ‘You can take me to wherever Sam is, thanks very much.’
Jake unfurled his body from the outdoor chair, straightening to his full height. ‘There’s no point taking you anywhere, Ella, he’s almost here.’
The whine grew to a thrum, then a roar, and it came from the back of the house. Ella started a skipping run across the flagstones.
‘Ella?’ Jake called above the noise from the engine.
She swung around. ‘What?’
‘Don’t make a big deal of the bike, okay? Take it as a word of advice from a bloke who was a boy once.’
Don’t make it a big deal? This man had let her baby ride a roaring monster of a machine, a farm machine that killed people!
‘Trust me on this one,’ Jake
said.
She nodded once, and resumed a far more leisurely skip-run to where the engine noise was. Big deal, or no big deal, she was still Sam’s mother and she was going to check he’d come back to her in one piece with no blood.
It took Ella a few moments to navigate through the gardens that hemmed the rear of Jake’s house, until she found a narrow-bricked path that led out to a wider gravelled area and a host of big machinery sheds beyond, eventually feeding into the central laneway of the farm.
There, the quad bike idled and Sam was in the process of pulling off his helmet.
He got the helmet off, turned off the engine and swung his leg over the bike—doing it every bit as smooth as the trademark move of every biker hero in every biker movie she’d ever seen—and he looked so very proud. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen such a sense of achievement in Sam’s eyes. He walked taller towards her.
‘Hi, Mum.’ His smile showed a muddle of two big front adult teeth, plus the baby teeth that reminded her he really was just a boy.
Ella remembered Jake’s advice, bit down on her fear and smiled too. ‘Since when did you know how to ride one of those?’
‘Jake showed me. He let me do it all by myself.’
‘He took to it like a natural.’ Jake’s voice rumbled from above Ella’s right shoulder and she shifted her stance to meet his eyes. He stood straight and tall beside her, and she caught his outdoors scent, all shearing sheds and summer grass.
Jake tousled Sam’s mop of bright blond hair. ‘Did you pick up all those sticks like I asked you? And put them on the burn pile?’
‘I did.’
‘Good on ya. Thanks for doing that, mate. Saved me a job. Now your mum and I are just talking for a bit longer and, if your mum says it’s okay, do you want to visit Percy while we do that?’ Jake turned slightly to Ella, the only hint he was asking permission. ‘You can let him out for a fly if you want.’
Ella nodded. ‘That’s fine. Sam would love that. Make sure all the doors and windows are locked when you fly him, Sammy.’
‘I will,’ Sam shouted, running for the house, and it struck Ella as strange that Sam had made himself so at home at Jake’s place, when he felt like a fish out of water everywhere else in Chalk Hill.
