The Unforgiving Shore Read online

  Every night in the early days however, she waited in the hope of receiving a telephone call. Once, her contemplation in the dining room was interrupted by Jim Farrell. He came unannounced, swaying in the doorway, a bulging gut, with purple hands like joints of meat.

  “Anything I can do, my dear…” he said, moving across the room and putting a hand on her shoulder.

  She could smell the beery breath. For a moment she thought she might confide in him. As general manager he was the most powerful person on the station, but she knew almost as quickly what it would have to lead to.

  “Don’t come into this part of the house again Jim, unless I invite you.”

  “I was only trying to help.” He raised his voice.

  “What would your wife say?”

  He backed away and left the room.

  Later she studied herself in the bedroom mirror. There could be another and different life for her in one of the bright new Australian cities, in Perth or Brisbane or Adelaide. One thing she vowed: she wasn’t going back to England, to the rain and wind and mean stares and the shame.

  She felt she had lived more than one lifetime. The imperfections in the old pier glass mirror rendered a mysterious reflection. She was twenty-two, five feet four inches tall. Her legs could have been those of a dancer; her delicate ankles gave her a graceful look. The body wasn’t quite that of a dancer, too full in the breasts and hips, but it was sensual. Her complexion was pallid and drawn from the recent troubles, but nothing could diminish the lustre of her eyes and hair. It was a face made for fun and love and perhaps lust. There was a whole new lifetime ahead of her if she could put the ache of losing John behind her.

  2

  John Marchmont returned to Mirabilly after four years. Ellen saw his plane, a white, twin-engined Beechcraft, circle low over the Hill before it landed. Jim Farrell had made up a small delegation from the Hill to meet the plane which Ellen did not join.

  In the past few weeks a certain tension had developed amongst the staff in anticipation of the visit. Although John was known personally by some on the Hill, he wasn’t known in the character of the owner. A seismic change in the perspective of the station people had occurred when the news filtered back to them that the light-hearted Englishman who had departed on an unspecified errand, leaving his girlfriend behind, was now the most senior person in all the Marchmont enterprises. The gossips were left to consider the girl he had left behind.

  Ellen had followed John’s life at a distance. The newspapers from England were delivered once a month and Maureen Farrell passed them to her; they were often many weeks old but that didn’t matter. She read the thin diet of news about him with sickly interest. John had rallied the company and dropped ‘Colonial’ from its name; it was Marchmont Commercial Mining or MCM now; but she was more interested in the fleeting mention of John in the gossip columns. He was apparently a fashionable figure in London and in New York which was now the headquarters of MCM. He was usually squiring a new beauty.

  On the day that John arrived, Ted Travis, Ellen’s husband, came home at lunchtime. “Marchmont wants to meet all the top fellers and their wives up at the house tonight, Ellen.”

  “I can’t go, Ted.”

  Ted was easy with her about most issues. He had a quizzical look. “Think a bit. If you don’t go, it looks as though somethin’s eatin’ you.”

  He was right, but later, when the time came to dress, she said she had a migraine. Ted shrugged his hefty shoulders and said nothing. He put on his pale blue twill trousers with razor creases and a white cotton shirt crisply ironed by Ellen. He refused a necktie. This wasn’t the way she’d have preferred him to dress, with his sleeves rolled to the biceps; but he earned a second look as a masculine creature with his burned, sunlined face, dry sandy hair and slender muscular physique. He was the head stockman; a hard drinker, a man who settled disputes with his fists. Ted lacked words; he could hardly write and could only read with difficulty. His skill lay in his leadership of tough men and his experience with cattle. He had seldom been beyond cattle stations and small towns. He was ten years older than Ellen.

  Ted’s life was limited, but curiously full. Before he was married, he would stay in the bush for days on end with a gang of men, working the cattle or repairing roads and stockyards. Work was followed by wild drinking, gambling and whoring in one of the towns. Men like him tended to marry by accident or not at all. But there was a soft side to Ted. He had a gentleness and a feel for the wilderness that was touching. Ellen had never heard a man talk so sensitively of nature, of birds, snakes and grasses and clouds; to him they were important signs of how the land was faring.

  Ellen had made a home with Ted. Jim Farrell had assigned them one of the spacious wooden houses on the Hill, with a verandah and an acre of trees and garden. This was Ted’s right, to live in the same style as the engineers, master butchers, cattle dealers and pilots. They were very comfortable.

  Ellen lay on the bed in her pants and bra, playing with the baby. She had a jumble of fears and uncertainties turning in her mind. As soon as she heard the screen door bang on Ted’s departure, she put the boy to bed. She had already showered and she slipped on a frock with apprehension about what might happen if she had the nerve to go to the party. Actually, nothing would happen except in her head and other people’s heads. If she really wanted to go, she could still get the daughter of the woman next door to baby-sit.

  The house was silent. At times, she could hear a shout or laugh as people walked up the drive to the Big House. She sat before the dresser mirror and turned on the lamp. She seemed to be more of a woman than a girl now; an interesting woman, she hoped. Every minute that went by made her possible entry to the party more awkward. As Ted said, people knew something might be eating her.

  She sat in a chair in the lounge and switched off the air-conditioning. The heat began to swell in the room. She tried to imagine what John was like now. She had changed; he must have changed. She tried to visualise the party, the overdressed wives, plastered with powder and lipstick, looking like parrots and the men skulking at the bar telling dirty jokes. Time seemed to pass quickly, maliciously reducing her opportunity to make an entrance.

  The child stirred in the next room. She went in and soothed him. Footfalls crunched the gravel on the front path. She could hear steps crossing the verandah to the screen door. It wasn’t Ted. He didn’t move like that. She went back into the front room, not frightened because Mirabilly was a place where people left their doors open and went to each other’s homes without formality. Her gut told her it would be him. He was in shadow in the doorway, dressed in a bright shirt and white slacks, his fair hair longer, serious-faced.

  “Ellen, you’re more beautiful than I remember.” The room filled with his soft, precise voice. And then he said flippantly, “Were you expecting me?”

  Her nerves exploded in a kind of laugh. “That’s quite a question!”

  He stepped close to her and reached out. She could smell cologne and the sweetness of gin and lime on his breath.

  “John, you’re in my home,” she said, stepping back.

  “Don’t you feel…?”

  “How can you ask that?”

  “Excuse me,” a quiet voice said from the doorway. “I came back to see how you were, Ellen.”

  John turned. “Please forgive me.” He walked out without looking at Ted.

  Ellen cried and Ted carried her to bed and made violent love to her; it was painful because she half-imagined it was John.

  *

  In the next few days, John made a number of attempts to see her. He telephoned the house and called when he apparently knew Ted was away. She hung up the telephone on him and locked the door. Two days later he intercepted her outside the Village store. She had Paul with her. He was a big boy, over three years old, with brown eyes and a coppery glint in his hair like hers. She smiled and encouraged the child to greet him, but under her breath she said, “Leave me alone! People know about us and if they see u
s talking…”

  John distractedly tried to chat to the child. “How like you he is, Ellen.”

  “Go away.”

  He whispered, “I don’t want to make a scene, but can’t you give me a few moments?”

  She walked with John, towing Paul, down toward the deep course of the Juduba River which threaded through the Village and was nearly dry. A solitary grey heron sat on a rock. The fat barramundi had fled with the waters.

  She looked from under the wide brim of her straw hat, over her shoulder, back towards the company store. “I don’t want any more to do with you, John. It’ll do me no good when the old bags in the Village hear that you and I have been seen walking together.”

  “I’ve missed you, Ellen.”

  “Good, I’m glad you appreciate that, only you haven’t done much about it, have you?”

  He looked abject. “I can’t understand how you can say that, my dear. You married within a few months of my departure… Married…”

  “You wouldn’t even have known. You never wrote. You never called. Years could have gone by.”

  He wiped his face with his hand as though to remove the look of incomprehension as well as the sweat. “Ellen, of course I knew you married. I was shocked when Farrell told me on the telephone. And the next time I spoke to Farrell he told me you were pregnant. I was distraught…”

  They were on the bank of the river in fierce heat. There was no rational reason for two people to stand there talking. John gestured to a row of gums for shade but Ellen turned away to retrace her steps.

  “You were distraught? Think how hurt I was when you left me. What did you expect me to do? Sit around for four years and wait?”

  “There’s been a complete misunderstanding here, Ellen.”

  She swung back toward him, sweat trickling down her cheeks. “If you think I’m going to have a dirty little affair with you every time you come to Mirabilly, like a sort of resident whore, you’re mistaken!”

  He put his hand on her arm. “I care for you deeply. I always have. Look at what we’ve done together…”

  She looked toward the store to see if they were being watched. Two women were standing under the awning looking toward them. She moved out of John’s reach.

  “Yes, we’ve shared a lot, but in the end I’m not good enough for you, am I? I’m great for drinks, dinner tête-à-tête and bed, but when it comes to your family and friends, you don’t know me! And marriage, you never ever got around to thinking about that!”

  “It’s not true.” He spoke feebly, raising his panama hat and running his hand across his damp hair.

  “All right, John. Tell me what you’re proposing now, apart from occasional sex and a few presents? What? Tell me, what?”

  The heat on her neck and shoulders was making her head ache. The light was blinding. Flies were beginning to crawl on her shoulders, prickling as though their legs contained electric charges. John didn’t speak, didn’t seem to have thought it through. The stifling air was a barrier between them. The Juduba reeked of decay. Paul began to moan. She lifted and balanced him on her hip, brushing away the flies.

  “You can’t answer the question, can you, John? You know what I am to you? I’m an ignorant servant woman from your family kitchen. I may have been a lot of other things too, but I never ceased to be an inferior. You’re imprisoned by your snobbery.”

  “Ellen, my dearest, you’ve got it all wrong…”

  She set the boy down and hurried up the slope, jerking him along. It had hurt her to speak so to the man she once loved and in the right circumstances could probably love again, but the weight of his rejection of her was crushing; it wasn’t inconstancy or carelessness on his part; she felt it was a rejection of everything that she was. She climbed to the level of Piccadilly, as the main street was called. She turned round before she went into the shade of the store.

  John was standing forlornly where she had left him, hands in pockets, shoulders bent, hat askew, yellow hair plastered across his pink forehead. A sliver of still water in the Juduba, directly behind him, caught the sun and glowed like molten metal. She had to look away.

  3

  The outback seemed unchanged for long periods, months on end, glaring sky and hard, golden landscape; it was as though time wasn’t passing; and then in the spring or early summer, in October or November, a fury would be unleashed.

  Paul Travis heard the rain on the roof all day; it fell in determined squalls and then faded, seeming to be exhausted, only to redouble its pounding. He was eighteen and if the day had been clear he would have been flying a stock-check for the station either as an observer or a pilot with his new licence; instead, he was at home, worrying about his mother worrying.

  Ellen Travis was standing in the gray light of the lounge window. At times she went into the kitchen to listen to the short-wave radio. She bent her head, narrowing her eyes at what she heard, anticipating trouble. The station had mustered two hundred head of steers in the afternoon and the beasts were now trapped on a flat in a bend of the Juduba River, with the water rising from a cloudburst.

  The Mirabilly station’s general manager, Dick Mather and the men at the Juduba crossing on the west range, fifty miles away, were talking on the radio. The Juduba River was like a sick artery of the body of Mirabilly, niggardly in its nourishment of the pastures at one time and at another, flooding destructively. Paul could hear his father on the radio speaking to Dick Mather; clipped, unemotional work-talk about the condition of the herd and their progress.

  ‘We’ll lose the beasts unless we move ‘em across the river to higher ground,’ Ted said to Dick Mather.

  Paul couldn’t identify all the voices crackling over the air, but Ted was unmistakable, as were the tones of Dick Mather who was only a few hundred yards away in the radio shack adjoining the Big House; they discussed options. The weather was wild but the voices were dry, calm, hesitant as they explored the possibilities. Eventually, it came to abandoning the cattle, or trying to drive them across the river. In the reluctant way the stockmen and the general manager exchanged views Paul knew and his mother knew too, that there were risks they were thinking about but not mentioning.

  ‘The horses are in good shape and I can do it with three men,’ Ted said.

  ‘It’s up to you, Ted,’ Mather replied cautiously, sounding worried about his men, but also worried about the possible loss of prime stock.

  The voices were silent for a while and Paul stayed with his mother in the kitchen, looking out as the wattles and acacias thrashed in the garden. Daylight was darkened by the thick clouds. The only light in the kitchen was the red pilot bulb of the radio receiver on the table. After quarter of an hour Mather began to call the Juduba team. He called every few minutes but got no answer. Ellen sat quietly, staring ahead. She didn’t seem to notice that Paul was there.

  Then one of the Juduba hands called the station, tense tones coming through the distortions of the signal. ‘We’re moving them… It’s deeper than we thought…’

  ‘Everybody OK?’ Mather asked.

  ‘I guess so,’ the Juduba hand said. ‘Can’t see Billy Kimball or Ted… the herd’s moving… twenty or thirty have made it across already.’

  The whining note in his voice suggested to Paul that he was thinking that they shouldn’t have started this. Mather called back every few minutes asking if Billy or Ted had been sighted. For a while there was no answer.

  Then another call from a stockman. ‘I see Billy on the other side. Lofty Mandarik’s pulled back here. We’re on the ledge above the flat… the current’s too strong. We got maybe a hundred head across, the rest, hell, they’ve gone… we lost ’em!’

  In the gloom of the kitchen, Ellen’s eyes were on the red point of light on the receiver. The radio hissed again and Paul picked out the words; it was the station operator this time. He said, ‘Dick’s on his way. Still too rough for the chopper. Two and a half hours if he can get the Land Rover through.’

  Mather’s decision to go
himself confirmed the seriousness of the trouble to Paul.

  “I can’t listen any more. Your father hates the water,” Ellen said, switching off the power.

  It wasn’t so much hate, Paul thought, as the fact that water was an alien element to Ted Travis; vital to the land, yet rare and on the occasions when it was plentiful, cruel. He put an arm around his mother’s shoulders as she was shaken by a sob, but she shook herself free and went to the bedroom. Paul never believed any harm would come to Ted Travis because he knew him as the best horseman and one of the toughest and fittest men on Mirabilly.

  *

  The inquest had returned a verdict of accidental drowning on Ted Travis. The funeral was to be held at Tennant’s Creek. Dick Mather piloted the Cessna 235 from Mirabilly, with his wife, Gus Lorio the station engineer, Ellen Travis and Paul as passengers. The plane landed at the Creek before lunch, in time for the men to go to the pub and for Ellen and Paul to see Arthur Lucas. Lucas was a solicitor who kept a room in the ANZ Bank building on Barlinnie Street. He visited there from his other offices at Mt Isa and Katherine, a day a week. He had telephoned Ellen, saying that he was the executor of Ted’s will and he asked her to see him.

  Paul had been at home when his mother received the call from Lucas. Afterwards, she had said to him, “Lucas was one of Ted’s boozing mates. Why does a lawyer mix with jackaroos?” She always classed Ted as that, although he was a boss. “Buffalo Lodge Number 42, that shed down by the stockyards at the Creek, that’s where they go. What do they do there, except drink? ‘Men together talkin’, Elly’,” she mimicked Ted, but not in a humorous way.