Home at Sundown: An Australian Outback Romance

by Lucy Walker

  But still John did not come.

  Eventually Kim could stay in the dining-room no longer.

  She stood up, pushed back her chair, tilted her chin as she imagined proud people did, and walked the length of the dining-room to the door.

  There ‒ all the time ‒ out in the main hall, leaning on the office counter talking to the manager, was John.

  Kim allowed her chin to lower and her smile to wither. She didn’t care for him any more. He didn’t have to do this to her.

  However, it was bad manners to show feelings in public, specially as John turned round and said ‒ in a very pleasant voice ‒

  ‘Good morning, Kim.’

  Had he been off-beam yesterday? A sort of delayed bushwhackiness?

  She knew the manager was watching her very curiously. Had she some butter on her chin or marmalade on one eyebrow? Or something! She felt almost desperate, but had to hide it.

  ‘Good morning, John,’ she said in a steady voice. ‘Did you breakfast early, or not at all?’

  ‘Early,’ he said politely. ‘The radio calls come through between seven and eight, and I was expecting at least one message. Hoping for two.’

  ‘Did you get them?’ Her eyes flew to his shirt pocket: the one over his heart. He seemed, standing there, so tall, so sun-browned in a neat way, and so good to look at. Her bravado cracked and her heart dropped. There was a folded paper in that pocket. More messages from Myree?

  Something inside Kim toughened.

  Myree wasn’t going to have everything. Wonderful looks, wonderful figure, well-to-do parents who cared! Nice furniture, a luxury home, a University education, brains ‒ and a crackerjack job as a botanist when her Honours Degree was confirmed!

  No, not at all! Not everything! Not absolutely everything without even a crumb left over!

  She stood quite still and looked at John, meeting his eyes, smiling ever so determined a smile.

  He watched her face with its grey eyes a little clouded, the mobile mouth with its controlled quiver. Also the little wisp of hair that fell across her forehead.

  ‘Shall we go for a walk, Kim?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘Yes, rather. I’d like that very much. Morning’s the time for walking, isn’t it? It gets too hot later.’

  The manager went on looking at her curiously. Too curiously! Then his gaze shifted to John. He tapped his front teeth with the nail of one forefinger. But he said nothing.

  John straightened up. He put his hand under Kim’s arm.

  ‘Let’s go then,’ he said.

  He turned at the door, lifted his hand to the manager, who nodded back.

  Once they were outside John asked her where she would like to go. His hand, very firm and not to be withdrawn, was still under her arm.

  ‘Round to the courtyard,’ she said promptly. ‘There’s a clump of mulga trees there. Even at this hour of the morning a little shade would be nice.’

  ‘The courtyard? Are there some mulgas there? My impression of the place was that it was as empty as the plain.’

  Kim stole a glance at him. He looked slightly puzzled, that was all. Not in the least like a man who was about to tamper with destiny. Or even one who remembered decision making by the mulgas yesterday.

  He hadn’t even noticed he stood under trees ‒ if such lean wispy things could be called trees, anyway.

  They arrived at the shady spot. There was an old wire fence nearby with the top wire slack from long use by people who preferred to go over a fence than walk round the front exit.

  John dropped Kim’s arm. He sat on this top wire, and treated it as a swing. Kim sat herself down on a stump. They looked across three yards of brown gravel at one another.

  ‘Why the mulgas?’ John asked, looking at her quizzically.

  ‘Well, you see, these trees must have a certain type of magic. A something, if you understand what I mean?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Well, they do things to people. Cast spells. At least, I guess they do ‒’

  John shook his head so slightly Kim wasn’t sure he really did it at all. He reached in his pocket ‒ the right hand one ‒ for his cigarettes. Kim wished he hadn’t done that. It reminded her of what was probably folded neatly away in his left hand pocket. This made her waver in her decision. Then she remembered that Myree couldn’t have everything. Not the world, and the cream in her coffee too!

  John was lighting up, his head bent over his cupped hand so that Kim could see the thick black mat of his shining much-washed hair. No more red dust in it now. That hair did things to her ‒ like stir her heart.

  ‘You might have forgotten you asked me a question yesterday,’ she said summoning Wentworth courage.

  ‘But I haven’t forgotten ‒’

  Then she rushed her yard ‒ rails, fence, muster paddock, and all. ‘The answer is yes,’ she said.

  After that she could have died. She didn’t know why she stayed sitting perfectly still, and still breathed.

  John flicked out the match, threw it on the ground and put his boot on it. He looked up, quite slowly, and met her eyes. He saw a queer mixture of sadness and gravity, and courage in Kim’s face. The set of her chin, the stillness and stubbornness of her soft and generous mouth put a finger of remorse on his heart.

  ‘Thank you, Kim,’ he said gravely.

  For the first time since she was roughly seven years old she was at a loss for words and for the quick answer; the challenging retort.

  Her eyes misted over. Her hands were in her lap so she gripped them together. This was a help.

  ‘I’m sorry I said that,’ she said carefully. ‘Perhaps you had forgotten you asked me. Or didn’t mean it ‒’

  His cigarette was burning itself away to ash. He had to shutter his eyes a little from the spiralling smoke.

  ‘I had not forgotten. And I did mean it.’

  Kim smiled with relief. Her hands lay still again in her lap.

  ‘Oh, that’s good!’ she said cheerfully. ‘I thought I was making one more of my way-out gaffes again!’

  ‘Getting married is not a gaffe. It’s a serious business.’ He dropped the half-smoked cigarette on the ground, and put his foot on it. He stood up and held out one hand.

  Kim stood up too, and gave him her hand.

  ‘I suppose it’s a little early for kissing?’ he asked gravely.

  ‘Well ‒ we could try a simple one.’ She put two fingers of her free hand on her forehead. ‘Just there, for instance ‒ as a sort of start.’

  He leaned forward, cupped the back of her head with his right hand, and planted a kiss on her forehead.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘Very nice, thank you. What do we do now, John?’

  ‘We go down to that crazy store in this one-horse, one-pub, one-garage town, and get a temporary engagement ring. It will probably be brass, or nickel. It will have to do for the time being. I want the small world of Bim’s Stopover to know that we are engaged to be married. A ring always helps. An outward sign, you might say.’

  How quaint he was, Kim thought, puzzled, but somehow touched. He might want her only for usefulness but he was doing all the right things. Maybe, some time in the long distant future ‒

  Well, not to daydream now! In her own good time she’d oust that Myree! Or would she?

  ‘It’s a very nice store,’ she said defensively, trying to hide a sudden shyness. ‘You’ll be surprised. It’s peeling paint outside, and has iron sheeting for a roof. It’s not much better inside, but it does stock everything ‒’

  John held her hand all the way down the dusty red road to the store. He didn’t seem to mind that the two or three people about, mostly lounging outside the hotel or the store, watched them. This, Kim thought, was very odd for a man who was coldly dignified, aloof and sometimes angry ‒ as a general way of deporting himself.

  When they passed the window of the hotel’s office, the manager looked up, and gave a wave of his hand.

  ‘Do you have a special
personal friendship with the manager?’ Kim asked puzzled.

  ‘Everyone has that relationship with the Keeper-of-the-Pub in the outback. A matter of diplomacy when in distant parts. Next place to doss down is two hundred miles away. As a matter of self-preservation you make the pub’s manager your best friend.’

  ‘I see,’ Kim nodded thoughtfully. Actually, she didn’t see at all.

  They found a gold ring ‒ not brass or nickel ‒ in Stopover’s all-purpose store. True, it was only fifteen carat gold and the stone in it was a local gemstone. This flecked stone shone like an opal, and Kim loved it.

  ‘We’ll buy you a proper one when we get back to Perth,’ John said. Kim shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you. Well, not for an engagement ring. I love this one. It’s mine ‒’

  She broke off. Now was the wrong time to be sentimental. It was much too early!

  ‘When do you think we’ll get to Perth?’ she asked. ‘Will you mind faded curtains, wear-holes in the carpet and the stuffing coming out of the sofa at our wedding?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind them in the least. However, we’re going to have our wedding right here in the Stopover. We’ll ask the whole town. That would account for about twenty people. So to make it a merry one we’ll ask the station people from around. Stockmen, rouseabouts, yarders, ringers, and the whole shearing team ‒ if there happens to be a shearing team in the district.’

  They were on their way back to the hotel. John wasn’t holding her hand any more.

  Kim stopped and stood quite still, looking at him, puzzled.

  ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ he asked, a very succinct note in his voice.

  ‘Everything. I’m under twenty-one. I can’t get married without my parents’ permission. We’d have to go home to get it, wouldn’t we? I know in advance they’ll be ‒ well, they might be difficult. You see, I’m the youngest and Celia and Diane aren’t married yet. Jeff, of course ‒’

  ‘Jeff?’

  ‘He won’t mind. He’ll love it ‒ my getting married first ‒’

  ‘I’m glad to hear that.’ John seemed to have an odd cold note in his voice. Now that they were ‘engaged’ he appeared in danger of changing back to his old aloof self. He was being firm about what he wanted.

  ‘We’ll fly Jeff up on the freight plane that brings the spare part for my jeep. I’ll send an urgent radio message.’ He added ‒ ‘He can tuck in with the cold storage goods in the plane’s tail.’

  Kim smiled scornfully at that.

  ‘You don’t know Jeff,’ she warned. ‘He has a will of his own ‒’

  ‘I expect I’ll know him very well shortly. If he can’t give you permission we’ll get a local magistrate to do just that. There’s always one around somewhere. Generally one or two of the station owners are J.P.s. Barker the pub manager will know.’

  ‘A special licence?’ Kim was dubious. Also painfully aware she wanted John to be right about all the rush. It didn’t leave time for a change of mind. Or for Myree to appear on the scene.

  ‘The marriage laws have been modernised, my child,’ John said as if explaining simple arithmetic. ‘The officiating clergyman, or magistrate, has to give notice ‒ on the certificate, after the event ‒ that he had known the couple for nine days. Yesterday was one day and to-day is another. That leaves seven. With a little pressure or persuasion, I guess we can get Barker to push the calendar dates about to the tune of another three or four days.’

  ‘Isn’t that unscrupulous?’ Kim was thrilled to see this man ‒ Dr John Andrews, taking the law into his own hands without batting an eyelid. It made her marriage more sure than ever. In spite of the ring on her left hand, she still hadn’t believed it would come off.

  ‘Am I unscrupulous, or merely determined?’ he asked surprised.

  ‘A little of both, maybe ‒’ she said. ‘But I don’t understand. I mean, why … Well, why so soon ‒?’

  ‘You didn’t go to the School of Hard Knocks, that’s why. You’re not really worldly, Kim. Not for the outback. Out here the law is a thing for man’s convenience. Often it has to be the instrument of his survival. It’s adjustable ‒ north of the Twenty-sixth parallel.’

  She couldn’t think of anything quick enough or wise enough to say to that!

  They walked to the hotel, John’s hands in his pockets now: Kim’s hanging, a little lost, by her side.

  Half her mind took in the fact that Mr Barker was leaning on the sill of his open window, watching them. Across the track two stockmen, in dusty pants, high-heeled stock boots, and wide dusty stetson hats ‒ obviously in town on station business ‒ glanced at them. They said something to one another, then grinned ‒ a little too knowingly: and John saw them.

  They reached the shade of the pub’s veranda-shelter.

  ‘Do you think we might practise that art of kissing once more?’ John asked suddenly. His expression was studied, very matter of fact. Then it changed. His eyes softened and there was a kindness ‒ almost like regret ‒ in them.

  ‘It’s a little public,’ Kim said doubtfully. She was quite bewildered by this new change in John. Also uncertain ‒

  ‘The more public the better,’ John’s voice was extra firm. ‘I quite liked it the first time. How about you, Kim?’

  He wanted to kiss her in public, yet he wasn’t anything now but sort of impersonal about it.

  ‘Yes. I think I did,’ she said judicially, but wary.

  ‘Then, here goes.’

  He put one hand under her chin and tilted it up. His other hand slipped round her shoulders. This time ‒ right out for people to see ‒ he really kissed her, full on the lips. It was a kiss that made Kim blush. It was so full of promise. And yet ‒ was it? She hadn’t known that kissing would be quite like this. There’d been the young man down the street at the garage. And Ralph Sinclair had kissed her in an absent-minded way at the end-of-the-year parties. Stephen Cole had kissed her in a messy way on the lips. She had been very much put off by that!

  But this kiss!

  ‘There goes my heart!’ Kim thought soberly. ‘I can’t pretend any more, even to myself.’

  If only it was night: and he could kiss her like that again! And again, and again!

  Maybe she could ... Well what? Help him really to love her ‒ as a person and not as a pen-hand and housekeeper? Could she?

  Jeff came on the freight plane together with the jeep’s wanted part. Kim was so overjoyed to see her brother she all but forgot her queries and doubts for quite an hour, while she recounted all that had happened since she left home.

  Jeff’s brown face was creased with his usual easy-going why-worry grin as he listened to his young sister.

  ‘Well Bratto!’ he said when he too finished his own news. ‘I stirred the old shanks and went finding out all I could about this Dr John Andrews as soon as I received his radio message. I sent him one back bang-on; just to let him know I was coming. But with a divided mind. You understand?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Phew!’ Jeff was saying. ‘A handle to his name and all! You can guess what Celia and Diane had to say ‒’

  ‘I can guess, but don’t tell me. It might make me runaway mad all over again.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Well, you guess wrong. And it won’t be the first time, Bratto. They started ringing up all their pals, saying ‒ “My sister Kimberley is, of course, engaged to Dr John Andrews. You do know who he is? Tops in his field. Leading botanist in the state. Yes, of course. Everyone has heard of him!” ’

  Kim stared at her brother.

  ‘Not really!’ she asked, incredulous.

  Jeff rumpled her hair where she sat in a wobbly cane chair beside him on the pub veranda.

  ‘Absolutely! Basking in reflected glory! Nothing like a bit of snobbery for that pair of pure beauties. It’s the handle to the name, that’s done it. Same with Mum and Dad too! They sent their love: but didn’t have any spare cash. They’ll write, and all that. We’ll have a wedding present f
or you when you get home!’

  They both laughed. Then Kim sobered. It was funny, but she didn’t want to get her own back on Celia and Diane any more. She didn’t even want to laugh at them. She really did love her parents ‒

  ‘What did you discover about John?’ she asked, suddenly serious. ‘Everything good!’

  ‘I couldn’t find anything wrong, that’s for sure! I tried you know. Darn’ hard. Just to be certain. Everybody gives him top marks all along the line. I’m still waiting to discover the reason for wanting to marry, so very pronto-wise, a bratto like you.’

  ‘It couldn’t be that I’m attractive?’ Kim asked cautiously, expecting a roar of laughter from her sceptical brother.

  For the first time Jeff looked at his sister with serious intent.

  ‘I can’t sort of think of you as grown up ‒’

  ‘That’s been the trouble,’ Kim was stubborn once again. ‘I’ve always been the kid sister. The infant. The babe in arms. All because I was born ever so much later than the rest of you. Not really wanted either, you know!’

  ‘Rats to that!’ Jeff stroked his chin reflectively. Then he shook his head. He straightened his shoulders. ‘Well,’ he declared. ‘On with the game anyway! That is until ‒’ This time he looked at Kim with severity. ‘That is ‒ until I find out something I don’t like about him. I’ll still keep trying, just in case. Meantime, I guess I’d better do the brotherly act and have a talk with him. Where the heck is he anyway? What’s he like? Short, squat, cross-eyed? Why’s he keeping out of my way?’

  ‘He’s tall and he’s handsome ‒ very. He’s not keeping out of your way. He’s giving me a chance to see you alone. Actually he went down to the garage to work on his jeep with the mechanic. Your plane brought a needed part for him. The crown wheel in the differential had lost a tooth. Dust and oil had seized up something crucial.’

  ‘So he was out at the plane when I arrived?’

  ‘No. He stayed away on purpose. He wanted you and me to meet each other alone.’

  Jeff nodded his head. He was again puzzled but nevertheless he approved of this piece of tact on the part of his future brother-in-law.

  ‘Dr Andrews? Phew!’ he said again, wondering how his young sister had pulled this one off. He still found it hard to believe she was really grown up. He looked at her furtively.