Bittersweet (43 page)

June arrived, official winter. On its first cloudlessly sunny day Kitty took a car (why did Dorcas have her own, but Kitty had to hope for a spare?) and drove down to the river out Doobar way, where the land was at its lushest and fat lambs were still finding a market. Not everybody was starving — just the lower classes, which undoubtedly suited Sir Otto Niemeyer down to the ground.

Kitty left the car to walk along the river, suddenly free of everything Burdum, from House to Row to Charlie. So bitter a wind, yet such sweet air! Fascinating, the contradictions. This was where Edda used to ride, have her trysts with Jack Thurlow.

Since Grace had publicly spurned him, Jack had rather faded from sight in Corunda; gossip said he stuck to his property. He continued to do very well with his Arab horses, despite the hard times; in fact, he was more visible in Dubbo and Toowoomba, exhibiting his spectacularly pretty horses.

But here he was, riding down the bridle path toward her on a huge grey charger whose Roman nose said it had no Arab blood. Kitty scuttled off the path and stood well away, hoping he would canter past her without slowing down, let alone stopping.

Fat chance! He stopped, slid off the beast immediately.

“Well, starve the lizards, Kitty Latimer!” he said, smiling.

Immensely tall; she had forgotten that, though Edda would have qualified it as “moderately” thanks to her own height. He was exactly six feet. What age was he now? Forty-odd sounded a little excessive. It was hard to tell the age of men on the land; they looked older when they were young and younger when they were old. His hair was still the corn-gold waves of a Burdum thatch, his skin richly tanned, his eyes very blue. Absolutely nothing of the two-faced Janus here! Handsome in a masculine way, and a beautiful smile.

He led her to a log, first checking that there was no bull-ant nest nearby, then sat her down and loomed over her.

“All bundled up in woollies like that, you look ten years old. Sensible, but,” he said. “How is Lady Schiller?”

“Thriving, to the best of my knowledge. Studying Medicine in Melbourne. I like her husband.”

“I was just going home. Fancy a cuppa and a scone?”

“Please! I can tell you lots about Edda. I’ll drive, but where do I go?”

“First cattle-guard on the Doobar road. The homestead’s on top of a hill, you can’t miss it — too many horses.” He swung himself onto the grey gelding and trotted off. Someone different in my life! Not a new face, but it may as well be, for it was never a face filled my eyes before.

Corundoobar
was a magnificent homestead, its house of stone, Georgian in simplicity, verandahs held up by Doric pillars all the way around. His flower garden must be a veritable chocolate box in spring and summer, she thought. The view was superb from its vantage point atop the hill and on the river. There was snow on the distant ranges.

It smelled wonderful inside, as a home should smell, Kitty thought: beeswax polish, dried herbs and flowers, clean linen, cologne water, fresh air. Its windows were floor-to-ceiling and could be used as doors, and one was open a crack to allow crosscurrents, while pot-bellied stoves and open fires kept the rooms warm.

The interior was scrupulously cared for, yet had no woman’s touch. Subtle lacks, rather than blatant ones.

“Who keeps house?” she asked, sitting at the kitchen table and watching him work cold butter through salted self-raising flour — he was making the scones himself, from scratch! An amazing man.

“I keep house,” he said, adding cold milk. “It’s a poor sort of creature can’t keep a house clean and tidy.”

“Or make a scone.”

“My hands are always cold, so I don’t melt the butter — the vital requirement for working butter through flour. After I add the milk, I mix with two knife blades — see?”

“I can’t boil water,” she said lightly.

“You’d soon learn if you had to.” He pressed his dough gently on a floured board, took a block of sweaty cheddar cheese and grated some over the top, then cut the slab into two-inch squares. These he transferred to a baking tray, and slid the tray into his wood-fired stove oven. Twenty minutes from starting, the scones were done — risen high, cheese melted, tops browned.

Kitty’s mouth was already watering as he piled the steaming scones onto a plate, set out cut-glass dishes of butter and jam, and gave her a knife. Somewhere in the midst of this, he had made a pot of tea and produced two Aynsley cups, saucers and plates.

“You have nice things,” she said, splitting her scone and buttering both sides. “Feather light!” she pronounced through a full mouth. “Fine food on fine china — you’re a treasure.”

He considered her through narrowed eyes. “I suspect you’re a treasure too,” he said, “but your trouble is that no one wants your sort of gold. Everyone assumes it’s just tissue-thin plating.”

Her breath caught; she had to cough not to choke. “How very perceptive you are! People usually dismiss me as a gold-digger, though I imagine Edda saw to it that didn’t happen.”

A slow smile lit his eyes. “Oh, Edda! Yes, thanks to her I do know a lot about the Latimer sisters. Especially you and your face. I wonder why so many people can’t seem to get past how other people look? Charlie Burdum wanted a showcase wife to flaunt and prove that very small men can walk off with the best women,
then to cap it he fell for you like a ton of bricks. Oh, it was honest on his part, never think it wasn’t. He
had
to have you.”

“Edda really talked to you, didn’t she? I wish she had to me half so frankly. I might have decided differently.”

“She said as much as a sister dared. I was on the outside, it didn’t matter what I thought or how I reacted.”

“You’ve been around a long time, one way or another,” Kitty said, smiling at him. “I’m very glad your plans for Grace fell through, however. You had a lucky escape.”

His head went back, he laughed heartily. “Don’t think I don’t know it! But
Corundoobar
needs a wife and family as much as its owner does. I’ll be forty before I know it,” he said seriously.

“Someone will turn up, Jack,” she comforted.

“I know, everything in its due time.”

She gazed around. “I love this place. It’s a
home
.”

“That’s because at heart you’re a farm missus,” he said, his voice quite impersonal, “though you don’t know what a farm missus is. Well, she’s got half a dozen kiddies underfoot, her legs are bare in summer and she wears gumboots in winter, she doesn’t own a decent dress, her darning basket overflows with socks — I could go on, but that’s enough to give you the idea.”

The tears were threatening, but Kitty knew better than to shed them; Jack wasn’t saying these things to
her
, but to her kind of person. “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said brightly, with a smile. “Isn’t it odd, how our loves aren’t given where our natures dictate they should be?”

“The older I get, the odder it seems,” he said with an answering smile.

“Are you surviving the Depression?” she asked when he began to clear the morning tea away, wondering if this was his signal for her to take her leave.

But no. Table cleared, he pulled his Windsor chair out from it to sit, turned toward her, and leaned back at leisure.

“I’ve been lucky,” he said, smiling. “My fat lambs barely make a profit, whereas the Arab horses sell as fast as I can breed them. What money there is has risen to form a crust on top, so the wealthy are the only ones buying.”

As he spoke a grey animal streaked across the kitchen from what she guessed was the back door, rose effortlessly into the air and landed in Jack’s lap, not merely filling it, but overflowing it. An enormous cat! Jack finished speaking without paying any attention to it beyond shifting to enable the cat to lie with its head against his heart.

“Meet Bert,” Jack said then. “The minute I finish eating, he’s on my knee.”

“I didn’t think cats came that big,” she said, watching his hand cup the cat’s face and stroke it back to its ears; the sound of purring filled the room.

“He weighs twenty-one pounds,” Jack said proudly, “and he rules the roost — don’t you, Bert?”

Kitty reached out a tentative hand. “Hello, Bert.”

A pair of bright green eyes surveyed her shrewdly; this was no dumb beast!

“You’re in,” said Jack, grinning.

“How do you know?”

“He’s still here, hasn’t budged. If you were Edda, now — poof! He’d have gone.”

“Getting back to the Arab horses, I assume you mean that private school princesses still have daddies who gift them with whatever they want. Including mounts for the horse-mad.”

“Well, you were a private school princess.”

“But Edda was the horse-mad one. Horses frighten me.”

“I noticed, but cheer up. Nowadays cars are handier.”

It was a long morning tea; they seemed to yarn about everything from Edda through Maude’s dementia all the way to the progress of the new hospital; Kitty felt as if they were two old friends meeting again after a decade spent far apart. Jack took her on a tour of the house and introduced her to his two blue cattle dogs, Alf and Daisy, who weren’t allowed indoors. He refused to let her wash the dishes.

“Come and have tea and scones again?” he asked, walking her to her car. “I won’t stink of horse if I know you’re coming, that’s a promise.”

“Is the same time next week too soon?”

“No, it’s good. Best stock up while we can — sometimes I’m away selling horses.”

“Next week it is, Jack. And — thank you.”

The moment she drove off he turned back into the house, Kitty noticed, and she felt a twinge of regret. Blighted she might
be, but it would have done her heart good had he watched her disappear. Well, he hadn’t, and why should he?

Many new ideas had come to Kitty as she talked with Jack, who had been on the periphery of Rectory life since the days of Thumbelina, with a big sign pinned on his back:
RESERVED FOR EDDA
. But Edda hadn’t wanted him, she had simply needed him. At first because he gave her Fatima; then because he gave her physical satisfaction. What a fuss that had led to, when Grace wriggled into the situation! Grace hadn’t wanted him either. Like Edda, she had needed him. Not for carnal pleasure, but to repair the chook run door or dig the potatoes. Oh, poor Jack! Mauled and mangled by the elder Latimer twins, neither of whom had any notion what they were doing to him.

We weren’t brought up to assume that men would fall in love with us, and that was especially true of Edda, who thought herself cold and would have been incredulous if told a man could love her. But Jack Thurlow had loved her — of course he had loved her! A Burdum, but of opposite sort from my Charlie. A man of the land, content with his lot, whereas Charlie will never be content.

Remembering, she heard Edda’s distant voice deploring Jack’s lack of ambition — an unavaricious person, how rare! Not knowing Jack loved her, Edda had gone elsewhere, burned for Medicine. What Kitty saw, coming away from two hours in Jack Thurlow’s company, was a man who communed with the spirits of wind, water, earth, even fire. Afraid of nothing, but asking for nothing either.

How strange! All my life, thought Kitty, I have been surrounded by people who wanted what they couldn’t have and
struggled desperately to grab at it. Struck down, they hauled themselves up and started to struggle all over again. Whereas Jack Thurlow would never so demean himself.

Edda would say he was thick, meaning not very clever. Tufts would say he was a sterling character, meaning he had a sense of honour and of duty. Grace would say he was the essence of kindness, meaning he had offered himself on her altar. Daddy would say he was a fine man who didn’t go to church, meaning he was a candidate for a lesser heaven. And what would Charlie say of a cousin? At first he would look utterly blank, for he would genuinely have to cogitate before Jack’s face emerged from his morass. Then he’d say Jack was a sterling character, meaning he had not seen the politico-commercial light because he was content with life’s dreary backwaters, and therefore of no account.

I am feeling pain for him, Kitty thought, the kind of wringing, juiceless pangs that only come out of blind failure; for, like Edda and Grace, I too have passed by Jack Thurlow’s sorrows as if they didn’t exist. How he must have hoped as he waited out the long years from Edda’s seventeenth birthday to her marriage. And when he realised he’d probably never get Edda, he tried for her twin. But he didn’t complain, and his reaction to Grace’s public refusal looked to the world like stung pride. There are different varieties of pity; Jack chose one that Corunda saw as exactly right.

Today he filled my eyes, I seemed to be gifted with a sudden and utterly unexpected insight. Is it that my own troubles were shown up as something less than I imagined? He’s cured of Edda now, yet he hasn’t emerged from those nine years diminished,
or soured, or emasculated. He’s what he always was, and always will be — a man wedded to the earth and its creatures.

Whenever he is in Corunda, I will have tea and scones in his kitchen on Wednesday mornings, say hello to Alf and Daisy on the back verandah, and propitiate Bert on its master’s knees. He’s an island of granite in a quicksand sea.

She stopped the car to gaze across the sullen, rounded mountains, whitewashed by snow against a bruised sky that hung heavy as a sheet of lead. Flakes of snow, fat and wet, idled by her in a random, carefree dance into the arms of an invisible oblivion. Beautiful!

When Charlie came in with Dorcas that evening, he behaved as he always did: gave her a little kiss on the cheek and asked her what she had done with her day. Tonight, unaware what she did, Kitty moved so that his kiss fell short, and did not answer him.

While he went to the sideboard to prepare their drinks, and after Dorcas had settled herself in “her” chair, Kitty spoke — to Dorcas alone. Those keen yet watery eyes had noticed everything, but the body hadn’t betrayed this; Dorcas was terrified of offending Charlie, who didn’t like her making deductions from Kitty’s behaviour.

“You look lovely this evening, Dorcas,” Kitty said, pitying her.