He raised a hand in acknowledgement, then set off along the dusty track, Gypsy breaking into a trot. Kath stood and watched them until they were out of sight, then returned to her room. She began to prepare for the day ahead. Royce was right of course; he usually was. If the boy was determined to go then all they could do was wish him well and pray for his safety. If he came back, then all they could do was welcome him and show him they cared. It was odd, though. Bill had been a hero, and his son had accordingly hero-worshipped him, but it had become apparent, in Bill’s later years, that he was no longer particularly interested in Mal. Towards the end all he cared about was the drink; without it he was mean-mouthed, mumbling. With it he was dangerous. Kath stripped off her coat and nightgown and poured water from the tall jug into the basin. I bet Royce was glad he had no time to wash, she thought, smiling to herself as she dunked her flannel in the water. Men! They’re all boys at heart – any excuse not to come into contact with water, except when bathing, fishing, or simply mucking about with the stuff! But water and the way men feel about it brought other thoughts thronging; the fact that neither Mal nor Bill had ever wanted to go to the shore after Petey’s death, the awful nightmares which Mal had suffered from for years after that dreadful event . . . for all she knew, she realised, he might suffer from them still. He was too old, now, to admit to such a childish affliction.
And, fool that the boy was, he had almost thrown away the most precious things in the world – his mother’s love, his stepfather’s concern, and his home. As she started carefully to soap herself all over, she began to think about those last, dreadful days before Bill’s death.
They’d been in Melbourne the first time Bill got what the doc called dts. He told her it was short for
delirium tremens,
which meant Bill saw things, and the things he saw were so real that he attacked them with fists, feet, a knife, anything. By that time they were miserably poor; they rented a small room over a hardware store and because Bill was no longer able to hold down a job, Kath had taken in washing, scrubbed offices, walked miles across the city to buy stale bread from a particular baker who sold the stuff off cheap at the end of the week.
Mal had worked, too. Selling newspapers, running errands, carrying shopping . . . you name it, he did it. The day Bill, under the impression that Kath was a member of the government come to harass him, attacked her with a kitchen knife, Mal had got the knife off his father and chucked it out of the window.
‘Leave her alone, you bastard,’ he had ground between clenched teeth. ‘Or I’ll bloody swing for you!’
It was language Bill understood. He tried to menace his son but he didn’t really have the strength, not without the knife. He swayed, glaring at them both with red-eyed hatred, mumbled something, lurched out through the doorway – and fell down the flight of stairs, breaking his arm and temporarily incapacitating himself.
Then came the long struggle to drink until oblivion no matter what the cost. It had ended in liver failure, hospitalisation, and eventually, death. By then he had been a monster, Kath thought with a shudder, a far cry from the blue-eyed, swaggering young man she’d married so eagerly fifteen years before.
And his death had freed them. After the funeral, Kath applied for a job as cook general to a station owner just outside Cooktown and though she didn’t keep the first job long – she was too young and too pretty for the boss’s wife to stomach – it got them away from the cities and into the Northern Territories.
The second job came because the boss of the Magellan had lost his wife to tuberculosis.
‘She couldn’t take the climate, or the work, or his long absences,’ friends told Kath later. ‘She was a dear, dainty little thing from Sydney – she never should have left the city.’
But Kath was different. Older, tougher. And when she heard the station boss had twin sons not yet two, her heart had been touched.
‘They need a woman’s hand,’ Royce had explained. ‘My wife was ill from the moment they was born, jest about. There’s an aboriginal girl – Annie – lookin’ after ’em, but she’s too soft with ’em sometimes an’ she don’t understand our ways. Will you come back to the Magellan with me?’
‘I’ve got a boy of my own,’ Kath had warned him. ‘I’ll come willingly, but whether I’ll be able to bring ’em up like you want . . .’
Royce’s first wife, Lily, had been a promising pianist, a delicate, pretty creature who had spent her entire life in Sydney city centre. She fell in love with Royce’s tanned independence and jaunty spirits but never with his life-style, which she didn’t begin to understand. She could not come to terms with the harshness of Queensland, and the weather conditions, the animals and insects, brought her to her knees. Unhappy, and ill at ease, she longed for home yet did not want to face the folk there with the failure of her marriage. The twins, Kath guessed, had been the final straw. Bringing up children when you were ailing yourself was no sinecure, and it had proved too much for the first Mrs Malone. She had died of tuberculosis in her twenty-third year despite everything Royce could do to help her.
It was different for Kath. She was thirty-four years old and a tough and self-reliant woman. She’d brought up her son alone, with more hindrance than help from Bill, and had kept them both alive under the assault of an embittered and drunken husband. She had been making good, wholesome meals out of almost nothing and patching and mending every stitch they wore for years. The things which had brought Lily Malone to her deathbed didn’t faze Kath one bit. In the wet she used citronella to keep the ’skeeters off before she went outside and slung a towel around her neck to soak up the sweat. In the dry she and Mal carted water from the nearest creek to ‘fresh up’ her precious garden and planted, tended and harvested huge fruit and vegetable crops. She cooked, cleaned and coped without complaint. She did most of the work in her jealously hoarded garden and orchard, fished from the old punt which the aboriginals used as a means of crossing the great river, cooked in the open in the dry and fed her household on the verandah, because she said it was healthier. She loved the twins but disciplined them too, and kept the wives and children of the homestead workers in their place, whilst seeing that they got a fair deal. The climate was terribly hard on a white woman born and reared on the East coast, but Kath was used to hardship. And there was plenty of food, and plenty of money for material and the luxury of a treadle sewing machine instead of needle and thread. Without thinking twice about it she made all the clothing for herself, the kids and the workers and she preserved, bottled and dried everything she could harvest. When she arrived at the Magellan she had been a good plain cook; by the time she had been there twelve months she had taught herself how to make all manner of fancy dishes, and enjoyed her new expertise.
Some folk might think it a harsh, hard life, she reflected sometimes, but it was a bed of roses compared to her life with Bill. And she, who had never grown so much as mustard and cress on a flannel before, discovered that she had green fingers; seeds and cuttings planted by her flourished. She very quickly came to love gardening, enjoyed watering because the plants seemed so grateful, vigorously hoed the weeds which would have smothered her darlings, and very soon, little by little, she fell in love with Queensland and knew she would never willingly live elsewhere.
Aware, now, of the brightening daylight beyond the screens and shutters, she reminded herself that she wasn’t the only one to love their home. Mal loved it too, and he was carelessly fond of the twins and had seemed, until she and Roy had announced that they meant to get married, to be fond of Royce, as well. Why oh why couldn’t he simply accept that marriage had made no difference to her relationship with him? Why couldn’t he see that it wasn’t a disloyalty to Bill, either? She guessed that, in time, she might remember Bill more gently because of her happy and contented life with Royce.
She wasn’t marrying Roy to get herself a place for life, either, the way Mal had seemed to think, and Roy wasn’t marrying her to get a free housekeeper, as Mal had insultingly suggested. Roy, she knew, had fallen in love with her, not for her efficiency, her effortless running of his house, but for her sense of humour, her placid acceptance of the hard work and harsh conditions at the homestead, and for her long mane of chestnut-brown hair, her white skin with the band of freckles across her nose, her long, pale body with its deep breasts and slim hips.
And for her part, Kath loved Royce with a depth and passion she had never felt before. He was a good man, hard-working, uncomplaining. He fed and clothed his workers well, paid his staff more than most, took anxious care of his two small sons – and appreciated everything she did for him. So far as Kath was concerned, she had been in hell with Bill and now she was in heaven with Royce. So Mal, she decided, would have to paddle his own canoe; she had found her happiness and she did not intend to let her grown son spoil it.
Royce trotted Gypsy for a bit to get the itches out of her legs, but then he slowed her to a walk. The boy would have taken Sandy, he knew it, and Sandy, though a spunky gelding, didn’t have Gypsy’s long stride. He would catch the boy up, with a bit of luck, when the sun was beginning to make itself felt, when Mal would be wishing he’d stopped by the kitchen for some tucker before running out on them.
And then I’ll ride up beside him . . . Royce planned busily, and we’ll have a talk, and I’ll make a suggestion or two.
He liked Mal, liked him very much. He was a hard worker, and Royce had always admired hard workers, but more than that, he’d taken to the life. He was a natural, appreciating the country, the harshness of the life, the sheer impossibility of successfully living out here without complete dedication.
And, in a way, Royce could even understand the boy’s leaving. Jealousy was a potent emotion, as he knew well. He could still remember the agonies he had suffered when, six months after he’d first employed Kath, she’d had a friend call round, a feller she’d met whilst working in Cooktown.
‘This is Bruce, Royce,’ she had said sunnily. ‘He’s on his way to the coast, thought he’d pop in to see how me and Mal are doin’.’
Still. Understanding the boy’s jealousy didn’t mean he could go along with it. I’m not stealing Kath from him, any more than he could steal her from me, because mother and son and husband and wife are quite different relationships, he told himself. But mebbe – just mebbe – he’s better away from us for a while. Until we’ve settled, like. He had never voiced aloud his secret hope that Kath might bear him a child. He’d got the twins and Mal, but to have a little daughter would be something else, something which would bind him and Kath even closer, if that were possible.
They hadn’t been married two minutes but he knew they were going to be happy because they’d been happy just sharing a house, so sharing a bed as well . . . he felt the little hairs on the back of his neck stand up at the remembered pleasures of their honeymoon. A whole week to themselves whilst Mal and Jim ran the station between them and he and Kath got to know one another! They had stayed at the Imperial Hotel in Cairns for three days after the wedding itself, enjoying a theatrical performance, a cinema show, and all the pleasures of the pleasant coastal town. Then, for the remainder of their short holiday, they had gone on to Karunda by train.
It had been a marvellous honeymoon, but there was always something a mite unnatural about a honeymoon, even when the two people involved knew one another as well as he and Kath did. Because of course she was right, they’d not slept together nor made love until after their wedding, and for both of them, he guessed, it had been a pretty memorable experience. He had been used to Lily’s passive response to his love-making and now to find a tigress in his arms was both enjoyable and a trifle alarming. Everything he did brought a response – and Kath was not like Lily. She did not lie beneath him, quiet and good, waiting until he moved away. She raked his back with her fingernails, kissed any bits of him she could reach and used her body to maximum effect. Kath believed in participation and revelled in their loving . . . and of course she made Royce realise what he’d been missing all these years, until he was as eager as any other bridegroom to get his new wife to bed.
But now, riding along savouring the cool morning air, Royce told himself that you had to pay for everything in this life; perhaps Mal’s attitude was what he had to pay for Kath’s warm and exciting loving. And if so, it was worth it, worth every scowl and every black look. You couldn’t say ‘every disobeyed order’, because so far Mal had done his job with his usual efficiency, but Royce was realistic enough to see that, sooner or later, because of his attitude Mal’s work would suffer.
So this meeting was important and must not under any circumstances become a wrangle or even an argument. There must be a right way of tackling a jealous boy in his late teens, Royce told himself, and I’ve gotta find it.
And rode slower, planning his strategy. And with every passing mile he felt more sure of himself, with firmer ground beneath his feet.
Kath, preparing for the day ahead, was also remembering their honeymoon, from the moment they had arrived in Cairns to the moment they had left it, on the little train which would take them up to Karunda, and the quiet aloneness of their borrowed bungalow.
That train! Chugging up the incredible gradients, with incredible views, Kath had enjoyed every minute of the journey. She worried a little because of the rocking motion as the train slogged on and on, up increasingly steep stretches of line, or carried them into dark and echoing tunnels, but it was worth it. On one particular curve they crossed a great gorge and could see the Barron River Falls, set amidst the brilliant greenery of the bush, as the river hurried from the high mountains to the sea far below. And in Karunda they had spent a further three days in the luxuriously furnished bungalow. Royce had told her the names of the trees and plants, shown her the wildlife of the bush, stalked birds with her, did all the things which, as a busy station owner, he hadn’t had time to do since he was a kid.