The Call of the Pines Read online

  The Call of the Pines

  Lucy Walker

  Copyright © The Estate of Lucy Walker 2019

  This edition first published 2019 by Wyndham Books

  (Wyndham Media Ltd)

  27, Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX

  First published 1963

  www.wyndhambooks.com/lucy-walker

  The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, organisations and events are a product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, organisations and events is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  Cover artwork images © Billion Photos / totajla (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Books by Lucy Walker

  from Wyndham Books

  The Call of the Pines

  Also coming in 2019

  Girl Alone

  The One Who Kisses

  The River is Down

  Reaching for the Stars

  Heaven is Here

  and more

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  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Books by Lucy Walker

  Chapter One

  Cherry lay in her bed in the bright early morning of her nineteenth birthday and watched the light filtering through the muslin curtains of her bedroom.

  It was a lovely bedroom, a lovely summer morning, and Cherry, without knowing it, was a delightful girl. No one could say she had any claims to real beauty yet her dark hair, now spread on the white pillow, her smooth sun-tanned skin, her dark blue eyes and mobile mouth were very attractive. More than this there was a touch of ingenuous charm of which she was quite unconscious. She was a mixture of the old world and the modern and at the moment hadn’t discovered for herself to which world she belonged.

  To-day was even more momentous than being a birthday. It was the end of a long road, for Cherry had a week ago received her certificate at the Kindergarten Training College.

  It was like being at the top of a hill. It all looked so simple, that clear view of her future life. Already she had been offered a post in her old school. Cherry’s parents had wondered if it was wise to take this post. Wouldn’t it be better, they had suggested, to try something different at first? After all, Cherry’s life had been very limited up to date.

  There were reasons for this deep thoughtfulness on the part of the Landins.

  Cherry was not their own child, in the sense that she had not been born to them. She had come to them, a treasure eagerly sought, as a newborn child, at the time of her own mother’s death. Her father had been killed in the Korean war.

  Mrs. Landin had taken the child with almost frightened eagerness and brought her up as her own.

  In plain fact the Landins had so eagerly wanted a child and Cherry coming to them was such a joy, they had, they now feared, perhaps overlavished care and guardianship. Cherry was so quiet and shy in company they now feared for her.

  The walls of her room had been painted a soft grey and the ceiling a gay pink. There was a modern bed with an inner spring mattress and cupboards and a table that matched the bed’s honey-coloured woodwork. Curtains and cushions consorted across the room with one another in a gay floral pattern, and there was a little chair with curved legs, and her own books and pictures. On the mantelshelf, polished and shining, was her collection of china ornaments and figurines.

  Cherry had woken so early she had lain in bed in this delightful room listening to the murmuring sound of the sea which lay at the foot of the Street of the Pines, not two hundred yards away. She didn’t have to go to the window to know what the sea would look like this early summer morning. It would be a brilliant blue and beyond it on the horizon would be the islands. The water would be placid and the early swimmers would already be dotting the curved edges of the shining yellow beach.

  For three week-ends now, after Cherry had run down the Street of the Pines to the beach for her early morning dip, she had been aware of a tall man, bronzed not only by the seaside but only too obviously by a life in the outback, sitting on the sands near the water’s edge.

  He wore black bathing trunks and his rubber sandals lay with his towel on the sand beside him. He always sat the same way, his knees drawn up, his elbows resting on them. He sat and smoked a cigarette, watching the other swimmers.

  Evidently he liked to swim early and thereafter liked to sun-bake.

  Cherry had a curious feeling that he watched her, but not more than he watched others. She had a feeling she would like to see him stand up, run across that sand, and dive into the water as everyone else did. She was always either too late or too early for this activity. He did swim, of that she was assured, for his hair, dark and tousled, was sometimes wet, and if she passed near enough she could see the salt and wet sand glistening on his powerful brown arms.

  It had been some time after Cherry had first noticed this tall man sun-baking on the sands that she realised he was living in the house on the other side of the Street of the Pines. This house, a broad-fronted bungalow, had had a For Sale notice nailed to the fence for some time. Then the notice disappeared and in its place came painters with their ladders and general paraphernalia. The house must have been bought and now it was being done up.

  Mr. and Mrs. Landin did not evince very much interest in the goings-on at the house across the street. In the first place it was a very wide street with verges on either side. The pines, tall and old, musical in the wind, grew right down the centre of the street as well as a chain and a half away on each side. It wasn’t one street, it was two streets lying side by side and what went on beyond the centre pines was quite a long way away. Moreover, the Landins, being politely brought up and ‘old-fashioned’, would not dream of inquiring into other people’s business.

  Cherry might have cast surreptitious glances at the new house emerging from the old one as a result of some considerable face-lifting, but like her parents, she wouldn’t have presumed to be overtly curious.

  She could not help noticing the fluttering of life in that house when the painters and renovators had gone. There had been a big overlanding car with a country number turning in at the drive gates. The middle-aged woman who arrived daily at eight in the morning and left at five in the evening was quite evidently a d
omestic help of some kind.

  Except that Cherry knew that someone quite different from the former owners lived there now she had not continued to probe.

  One morning she had been walking up the sloping street from the beach when one of her College friends offered her a lift home. It was only two hundred yards to her home but Cherry accepted the offer because she liked her friend and it was pleasant to be with her for a few minutes. The car passed along the left-hand side of the centre pines, on what was called the ‘down road’ and it pulled up opposite Cherry’s home and right outside the newly painted house.

  It was then that Cherry saw the tall man of the beach. He was emerging through the gate, wearing black swimming trunks and with a towel slung round his shoulders.

  Cherry flushed because she hadn’t known herself she was so curious about this man.

  Yes, was her immediate thought, he is tall! Taller than Dad … taller than anyone I know. And he lives there. How strange I didn’t know!

  Cherry was much too shy to glance again in the direction of the tall man. She looked quickly away, embarrassed at her own interest.

  Not so her friend, who whistled.

  ‘Phew, phew! Nice neighbours you have round here, Cherry. What’s his name?’

  ‘I haven’t any idea. I didn’t even know he lived there.’

  Her friend looked at her pityingly.

  ‘You do miss some fun, don’t you, Cherry? If I lived where you live and he lived where he lives I’d not only know his name but I’d know what he does and if he’s married.’

  ‘But I’m not you,’ said Cherry lamely; though for a minute she wished she were.

  Now she knew four things about him. He went swimming more than once a day so it didn’t look as if he worked at anything, unless he was just living in that house on holiday. The big car she had seen going into the driveway carried a country number. Probably he was someone down from the outback on holiday. It accounted for that deeply bronzed skin, the small lines around his dark grey eyes.

  Yes, she had garnered four things about him and it was like a little secret treasure heap. He was tall, really tall, and he went swimming more than once a day. He came from the country and he lived in the house across the street.

  Cherry, lying in her bed in the early morning of her nineteenth birthday, thought about the beach and the ocean lying out there at the foot of the street. Thinking about it she saw it in her imagination, not as it really was at this early hour, but as it would be three hours hence with the tall man sitting on the sands, his knees drawn up under him. He would be holding a cigarette in his hand and his black hair would be tousled and wet and the salt and sand would be shining on his arms and shoulders.

  All the time Cherry, lying in her bed, had been thinking this dream she had heard in the background the sound of the rattle of teacups, the throb of the hot water jug coming to the boil, the soft movements of her mother in the kitchen. In a minute there would be a tap on the door and the early morning birthday cup of tea. It would be on a small round tray and beside the teacup would be a plate with wafer-thin bread and butter on it. Beside the plate would be the birthday present.

  True to tradition there came, presently, that tap on the door and Mrs. Landin came in.

  She was a small quiet woman with her greying hair drawn back in an old-fashioned bun at the back of her head. She wore rimless glasses which never hid the kindly expression in her long-sighted eyes.

  This morning her smile was tinged with anxiousness for she had something more to offer Cherry than morning tea in bed and a small square parcel which at the moment concealed a charming marquisite bracelet. To go with your watch, dear, as she later explained.

  She kissed Cherry and said what a lovely day it was and after the present had been opened and examined and exclaimed over, she sat on the foot of her daughter’s bed.

  Now the anxiety came more clearly to the surface for Mrs. Landin had something to say and she was very anxious to say it all the right way.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘Dad and I’ve been talking about you ‒ now you’ve finished College. We’ve been plotting, I’m afraid. We’ve been making plans.’

  Her voice faltered and Cherry felt a faint constriction of the heart as she sipped her tea and watched her mother. Intuitively she knew something momentous was coming. Mrs. Landin, who never fidgeted as a principle, was now toying with the pattern on Cherry’s pretty candlewick bedcover. Gradually the story of the plotting and planning came out.

  Cherry’s own natural father had been head stockman on a cattle station in the far north before he had gone to the Korean war and been killed. Vaguely, Mr. and Mrs. Landin, who were anxious for Cherry to go out into the world and try her own feet, had guessed Cherry’s unspoken interest in the things of the far north. She should go there, they thought. She should go and visit the place where she had been born. Everyone, Mrs. Landin explained, had a feeling for the place from which they came. That was their own piece of earth.

  Seeing the silent surprise on Cherry’s face when Mrs. Landin got this far, the story was nervously hurried on.

  ‘You don’t have to go if you don’t want to, darling. Not for the world would we insist. But we think it a good thing. So we got a job for you up there. Now, it’s all out! Yes, a job. On a station. You don’t have to go, and of course the people haven’t seen you yet so they might change their minds too. But if you’d like to go we’d like you to go. Just for a year. After that you can come back and … and … well, kindergarten teach at your old school, if there’s a vacancy.’

  Cherry was so surprised she couldn’t say anything for a moment. She didn’t know whether or not this surprise was so big it was a shock. It was nearly a minute before she could find her voice and in any event she had to swallow a piece of bread and butter first.

  ‘But, Mother, what kind of a job?’

  She couldn’t say she didn’t want to go away ‒ that suddenly a dream of a beach with a tall man sitting on it for ever and ever had been shattered ‒ that suddenly the security and foundation of her home had moved an inch under her as if warning her that nothing stays the same for ever.

  Perhaps they wanted … perhaps they thought … No, no! It couldn’t be that. They couldn’t possibly feel they had finished with her and that they had done everything they could do for this child who was not born their own and that they were now ejecting her gently and kindly but remorselessly from the nest.

  Cherry swallowed the thought with her bread and butter.

  It couldn’t be!

  ‘What … what sort of a job?’ she asked helplessly.

  ‘A governess, dear. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It’s the same as teaching. It’s a little girl on Yulinga Station in the north. There’s a small baby too only you wouldn’t have to teach him. Only the little girl. They want someone to break her in for school next year.’

  Mrs. Landin looked at her daughter with all her anxiety shining from behind the spectacles. Her hand had stopped tracing the pattern on the candlewick bedcover.

  Cherry leaned back against her pillow and closed her eyes momentarily.

  Now she had to be careful. How often in the daily round did the adopted child have to be careful ‒ and the adopting parents be doubly careful? Always everybody was trying to do what true daughters and true parents would do, but never quite succeeding.

  A real daughter would say … ‘Oh, Mummy, you do talk rot. Besides, I want to find my own jobs.’

  Cherry couldn’t say that. She had to know first why Dad and Mum had made all these plans without telling her. She mustn’t hurt their feelings. In the last analysis she might have to do as they asked, rather than have them think she was anything but a loving and real daughter. To go north? Yes, that was an adventure. A month ago it would have seemed wonderful.

  She opened her eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Governessing would be nice. What sort of a station is it, Mummy?’

  ‘Yulinga Station. A beautiful one, I believe. Of c
ourse I know there are some wretched ones and there are also some very grand ones. This one is very good, they say. Very, very good. They have everything modern. You know, hot water systems and refrigeration and a garden. They even have the cinema there for their stockmen. I saw some photographs of it.’

  ‘How did you find out about it?’ Cherry asked, trying desperately to sound eager.

  ‘At the pastoral agency. We saw the advertisement in the paper and Dad went in. They said a member of the family would be down in town for a few weeks at Christmas and would interview you. And darling, he’s here. No, we haven’t seen him yet. We’re to make an appointment ‒’

  Cherry tried to think and look interested at the same time.

  What was behind this? Were the darlings just being old-fashioned again, thinking they must do everything, but everything, for their helpless daughter? Was this merely misguided kindness, or had her days of home and security really ended? Was this what being adopted meant? Two nice people took in a baby and brought her up, then, hey presto! Their job was done. Out into the world!

  Cherry, whose eyes had closed again, opened them and looked down the length of the bed at her mother’s face. There she read so much kindness as well as nervous anxiety she could not bring herself to believe this.

  ‘Mother,’ she said, ‘that was wonderful of you and Dad to go to so much trouble. I think perhaps I ought to see this person who has come down from the station. But what … what …’ she faltered.

  She had been going to say, ‘What if I don’t like this person? What if I don’t like the job they offer me?’ Instead she finished her sentence somewhat lamely ‒ ‘What if they don’t like me? And I don’t suit?’

  ‘Oh, you will, dear. I’m certain of it. They haven’t anyone else applying and you’ve got such a good report from school, as well as your College certificate.’

  Mrs. Landin suddenly looked a little prim.

  ‘And you come from a nice home and have been correctly brought up. That counts, you know. It’s very important their little daughter should be taught good manners.’