Bilgarra Springs (4 page)

‘This is my grand-daughter-in-law Trudy, and my great-grand-daughters Kate and Harriet.’

Trudy spoke first, very quietly.

‘Hello. Glad you had a safe trip.’

Trudy gently elbowed both of the younger girls who chorused hello in unison.

Aurora wasn’t too sure whether to extend her hand to Trudy or not, and Trudy’s hands were behind her back, so she did the only thing that she could do and plastered a big smile on her face and addressed Trudy and the girls in the most friendly way she was capable of.

‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’

Kate’s and Harriet’s eyes were the size of saucers and they looked like they would have bolted, but for the dressing down that they would no doubt receive from their great-grandmother if they behaved in such a rude manner.

Fiona turned to face Aurora again.

‘Come into the kitchen and I will make us a cuppa. You can tell me how your journey went.’

She then moved past Trudy, Kate and Harriet as she disappeared down the hallway. Trudy started to follow Fiona, and Kate and Harriet flattened themselves along the hall wall as Aurora made her way through the doorway to follow the other women. Fiona spoke without turning around.

‘Kate, Harriet, Aurora isn’t going to bite. And even if she was inclined to, you’re not babies anymore. Deal with it. ‘

Trudy didn’t say anything as both girls scurried out the front door and took off down the steps, disappearing from sight very rapidly. The puppies had been sprawled on their stomachs out on the verandah, but quickly scrambled to their feet and bolted after the girls.

Aurora had no idea what to make of the girls’ behaviour. Her experience with children was incredibly limited. By the time the students got to her at university they were practically grown up, and being the only child of both an only child and an orphan meant there were no cousins either. She had nothing to gauge the girls’ behaviour against. She quickly decided to put it in the too hard basket. She figured at the moment she had enough to worry about without stressing over two little girls.

She couldn’t help but glance into the rooms she passed as they made their way along the hallway. The house was well built with beautiful leadlight panels above the stained, oak doors and the rooms seemed to be full of late nineteenth or early twentieth century timber furniture. Everywhere that she looked there was timber. Tongue and groove walls stained a light golden colour, door architraves and skirting boards in a dark honey stain and timber floors where the colours varied from almost white, through the brown hues to nearly black. Aurora thought that it all worked surprisingly well for so much timber. In her own unit everything, absolutely everything, was white, which also worked in its own minimalist way.

At the very end of the hallway she walked into a kitchen that spread right across the back of the house. She paused in the doorway and looked around. There was a very large, old fashioned dresser painted white with glass panels and plate racks against one wall. The other wall held a large wood stove with a bench on either side with heavily scarred wooden tops. The pots and pans hung over the stove from hooks dangling from a large brass circle. At a right angle to one of the benches and following the side wall was another bench with a sink set in the middle, right under the windows that looked out onto acres and acres of long, yellow grass and trees. To Aurora who was used to a built-up city environment, the view from the window was amazing.

There was a huge, timber table with lovely turned legs and matching chairs in the middle of the room that would easily sit ten. A somewhat faded rug sat under the table. The colours were quite muted now, but it would have been stunning when it was new. The room was welcoming in a very homely way. The absence of curtains at the openings or the usual security screens on the doors and windows caught her attention. She felt a little foolish for even thinking about them — the closest neighbours were probably at least ten kilometres away. Chances of getting robbed or mugged out here she guessed were pretty slim.

Trudy had gone over and sat down on the farthest corner of the table. Fiona was in front of the stove lifting off a kettle and pouring the water into the teapot.

‘Aurora, would you mind getting three cups and saucers from the dresser and three bread and butter plates too please. Trudy would you mind grabbing the fruit cake, butter and the milk out of the fridge.’

Fiona quickly flicked a tablecloth over one end of the table. Trudy quietly got out of the chair and retrieved the fruit cake, butter and milk, gently placing them before sitting again and beginning to slice the cake.

Aurora did two trips to get the crockery. She hovered nervously after setting them down on the cloth, peering closely at them. She was nearly certain that she recognised the design as Royal Doulton, but she couldn’t be one hundred percent sure and it would be incredibly rude to turn a piece of it over to check after only being here for five minutes. She was already as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof without worrying about not breaking the crockery too.

Fiona placed the teapot and sugar bowl in the centre of the table cloth. She sat herself down in one of the end chairs, motioning for Aurora to take a seat. Aurora pulled out the closest chair and sat. Fiona then flashed Aurora a smile to set her at ease flicked her hand towards everything laid out on the table.

‘Help yourself.’

Trudy smiled as she passed the plate full of sliced cake over to Aurora, who flashed her a smile back before speaking.

‘Thank you.’

She took a bite. It was good. It was really, really good.

‘Wow,’ was about the best that she could get out, and that came out unexpectedly with a mouth full of cake.

Fiona had a quiet chuckle.

‘That recipe has been handed down from generation to generation on my mother’s side. Nobody actually knows how old the recipe is, or where it originally came from, but it came out from Scotland with great-great-great grandma McNaughton in the mid eighteen hundreds. Pretty good, huh?’

There was a genuine warmth in the older woman’s eyes. She was the sort of person that you couldn’t help but like — the sort who put you at ease without really trying to do so. Fiona organised herself a cup of tea, took a slice of cake and settled back against the chair.

‘So, tell us about your trip.’

Aurora finished stirring her tea and placed the teaspoon on the side of the saucer before looking up at the other women.

‘Not too much to tell really. It was quite uneventful. I left Sydney yesterday afternoon. Flew from there to Townsville, collected the car from the airport after I landed, stayed there overnight at a nice little motel on Bowen Road and left this morning, had an early lunch in Charters Towers and here I am.’

She sipped her tea. She would have liked to close her eyes and savour the moment. There was nothing that could beat leaf tea served in good china cups. Fiona reached her hand over and briefly patted Aurora’s free hand.

‘We’re pleased to have you here. You make yourself at home and if you need anything at all, you let me know. We’ll get your stuff out of the car and I’ll show you to your room when we’ve finished here.’

Trudy looked up at Aurora and spoke kindly.

‘I’ve made your bed and left towels for you already. I hope you’ll like your room.’

Trudy smiled a genuine smile that lit up her whole face, making her appear much younger than Aurora had first guessed and Aurora couldn’t help but smile back at her, her gaze taking in both women as she spoke.

‘I appreciate the trouble that you have both gone to. I’m sure it will all be fine. I’m sorry that you will be stuck with me for the next month.’

Aurora’s last statement was delivered with a tiny shrug of helplessness at a situation beyond her control. Fiona replied in what appeared to be her customary straight to the point manner, her hands pushing a few stray, wispy, grey hairs back into place.

‘Nonsense. We really are pleased to have you and it will be wonderful to get to know you. Your grandmother always spoke so highly of you. To be honest, in what she said, I could detect a fair amount of her in you, so it will be interesting to see just how much you take after her. You don’t look a whole lot like her, but in personality I think there are going to be a lot of similarities.’

She motioned towards, Aurora’s empty cup and plate.

‘If you have had enough tea and cake, we might get your stuff now and that will give you an opportunity to have a rest if you feel you need one, or at least give you some time to yourself. Let you get the feel of the place. You have picked a good day to arrive in one respect. Everybody bar us and the two little girls are right out in the back corner of the property. It takes quite a while to get out there, so they are staying overnight. They’ll be back tomorrow. Hopefully you will have found your feet before you get mobbed by them all when they get back.’

Fiona gave a short chuckle and rolled her eyes and despite only having known Fiona for about a half an hour, Aurora felt comfortable with her.

‘The cake as you know, was lovely, and the tea as well, but I’ve had enough thanks. Even though I have just spent a heap of time in the car, a chance to just do nothing would be great. Speaking of the car, if you don’t mind, I’ll get you to show me while we’re out there where you want me to leave it.’

Fiona rose from her seat, gathered the cups, saucers and plates and carried them over to the sink. She returned for the teapot. Trudy rose and replaced the remainder of the fruitcake, the butter and the milk in the fridge. Fiona walked past Aurora, touching her on the shoulder again as she went past.

‘Come on. We’ll get your stuff, I’ll show you to your room and then I’ll show you where everything is in the house.’

Aurora followed her back along the hallway, her eyes darting around the rooms they passed, taking it all in. She could imagine each generation passing everything down to the next and it made for a real feeling of continuity, a shared past.

After they had retrieved her bags from the car and she had moved it into the large shed out the back, it was a bit of a relief to flop down on the bed and mentally regroup. She was lying on her back across the bed, her feet hanging over the side. She couldn’t help but admire the décor of the room that they had given her. It was really lovely. The queen size bed had a heavy timber frame with a square for a mosquito net on top of the head end and there was in fact, a net draped and fastened to the sides of the bed head. The bed covering was a log cabin quilt done in shades of blue and purple.

Another very old, but still lovely looking rug was on the floor between the bed and the door. There was a blanket box at the foot of the bed. A giant tapestry of roses in shades of pink and red hung between a timber chest of drawers with an ornate mirror and miniature drawers on top and a three door wardrobe with a large oval mirror in the centre door on the wall across from the foot of the bed. On the exterior side wall in the middle there were timber French doors with leadlight done in burgundy and green, with crinkly looking clear glass. Another antique looking rug sat on the floor between the side of the bed and the French doors. Fiona had told her when they brought her bags in that the French doors led to the side verandah. The timber all matched, appearing to Aurora’s limited timber knowledge, to be oak. The furnishings in the room created a feeling of old-world elegance.

Aurora was impressed, not only with her room, but with the layout of the house in general. All the rooms, except the kitchen, fed off the central hallway: two corner bedrooms, another bedroom on either side of the hallway beside them, the formal lounge next door along, with the formal dining room across from it, two large children’s bedrooms next along, with the hallway terminating at the doorway to the kitchen. The kitchen spread across the rear of the house. A new extension came out from the kitchen with two toilets, two bathrooms and a laundry with two washing machines.

Fiona had told her a brief history of the place when she had showed her through the house. Her husband’s grandparents had bought the land and built the original house. The grandparents had taken the bedroom on the left hand, front corner as their own. When her father-in-law, George, who had been the eldest child, had married, he and his wife, Sophie, had taken the front, right hand bedroom. These two corner bedrooms had two sets of French doors onto both the front and side verandah. When she and her husband, Arthur, had married, they had taken the room that mirrored this one on the other side of the house. Originally, Fiona had supposed that this room had been meant for Will, Arthur’s older brother, to take when he married, but he had unfortunately never married, so this one had always been the guest room. All the children while they were growing up had slept in one of the two children’s bedrooms back towards the kitchen.