Reaching for the Stars Read online

  Reaching for the Stars

  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 1964

  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 © Yuri Shevtsov / totajla (Shutterstock)

  Cover artwork design © Wyndham Media Ltd

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  Books by Lucy Walker

  from Wyndham Books

  The Call of the Pines

  Reaching for the Stars

  Also coming in 2019

  Girl Alone

  The One Who Kisses

  The River is Down

  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

  Ann Boyd leaned on the deck railing of the ship and looked out across the straits to where the Rock of Gibraltar was a dark shadow.

  It was a fine clear night for it was late summer. The ship had turned east into the Mediterranean from the Atlantic. It was warm. The sea was ink-black and the sky a dark blue, faintly prinked with tiny stars.

  Why does one reach for the stars, Ann wondered.

  She did have that burgeoning feeling inside her on nights like this. Somewhere ‒ perhaps up there in the sky ‒ there was some answer. When she arrived in this new sunshine country towards which she was now sailing she might find it.

  Perhaps this indefinable sense of longing was because she had no parents. Perhaps she had wanted something particular she had missed out in life and couldn’t quite identify what that particular thing was. Her Great-Aunt Cassie ‒ Mrs. Boyd ‒ had given her a home when her parents died of a rare fever while they were in the Far East. She hadn’t been homeless or neglected. Aunt Cassie, though a little elderly, was a darling. If it hadn’t been for her, Ann wouldn’t be engaging in this wonderful adventure now.

  Yet, she wondered, would it be wonderful when she arrived in Australia? Would she be lonely? Afraid? She was going so far from her cousin Claire who lived across the park from Aunt Cassie’s house and with whom Ann had shared nearly all her childhood experiences and adventures. Even her one boy-friend, alas! Claire, of course, had won him, as Claire always would.

  This strange longing with which Ann was sometimes obsessed had something to do with her cousin Claire, she knew.

  She couldn’t bear to think it was envy. Indeed, it couldn’t be that, because Ann was sure she had been happier with darling Aunt Cassie than Claire was with her parents. Claire had everything, even two young men ‒ both admirers whom she played off against one another with great finesse. She had a nice home, striking appearance, and the loveliest clothes in the world. Ann had nice clothes too, though a little old-fashioned. That was because Aunt Cassie’s greatest pleasure was to go shopping with Ann when a new dress was to be bought, and Aunt Cassie ‒ being a great-aunt ‒ had old-fashioned ideas. In a happy, unselfconscious way she dominated Ann’s choice, though not her taste. When Ann would have preferred something different she could not bear to disappoint her great-aunt, whom she adored.

  ‘Aunt Cassie’s getting old,’ Claire had said on several occasions. ‘You ought to skip what she thinks and go for things yourself ‒ your own way.’

  Claire in a roundabout way took her own advice for when Mrs. Boyd occasionally felt she must do something for Claire, instead of Ann, Claire went shopping with her great-aunt, submitted to her elderly relative’s choice in a matter of a fur stole or a new suit, then quietly went back later to the store and had the goods changed for something nearer her own taste. These purchases were inevitably much more expensive but were still put down to Mrs. Boyd’s account.

  Her great-aunt was sufficiently elderly to do no more than sigh when her bills came in.

  ‘That child always picks the wrong fittings and every time has to change the things for something much dearer. Oh well … poor Claire!’

  Mrs. Boyd regarded Claire as ‘poor’ because she was spoiled, bedecked and adored by an over-indulgent mother. The child was to be pitied, her great-aunt thought. She herself felt impelled to be indulgent to Claire to make up for the fact she loved the dark-haired, gentle, sweet-tempered and kind-hearted Ann so much more. Occasionally buying Claire something expensive was a kind of penitence for loving one child more than the other. Mrs. Boyd always referred to the girls as ‘children’ though they were nineteen now. Both within a month of one another. Their fathers were brothers and were the nephews of her long-dead husband.

  Ann, as she leaned on the deck rails of the liner carrying her to Australia, gave up thinking of ‘reaching for that intangible something in the stars’ in favour of remembering Aunt Cassie’s last words when the liner was about to leave Tilbury.

  ‘Darling child, mind you find a nice hotel for me when you get to that place called Kalla something … Ann, what is the name of that place?’

  ‘Kalamunda. Mrs. Franklin said in her letters it is a native name. I think it is such a pretty one. Darling Aunt, do please like it before you come out. Then you’ll be used to it and not offend anyone.’

  ‘Well, I’ll try. I never can understand why places have to have strange names. What was I saying, dear? Oh yes. I’ve quite made up my mind I could never stand another winter like last one. I was house-bound. I couldn’t even go to the club. I shall travel to Australia, or keep on going round the world in a liner so as to be somewhere warm all the time. I’ll only come home for the summer.’

  Ann’s blue eyes were faintly sad because Aunt Cassie had said this so often in the last few weeks and so often had forgotten she had said it before. She had patted the elderly lady’s hand.

  ‘It shall be the best hotel in the land, darling Aunt,’ she said. ‘And won’t it be wonderful! I’ll be there to meet you.’

  Aunt Cassie laughed. ‘You might be married to Mrs. Franklin’s nephew by then, my
dear. I do hope he is handsome and has a lot of money.’

  ‘In which case it should have been Claire sailing now, and not me. She is the one who wants to marry a handsome man with a lot of money. And knows how to attract that kind of man too!’

  ‘Don’t be silly, my child. We all want to do that. Marry a handsome rich man. Everyone does ‒ until they fall in love with someone else. Quite wrong-headedly, of course.’

  Ann had laughed, then hugged and kissed her great-aunt, for the warning gong was being sounded all over the ship, sending visitors ashore.

  The shadow of Gibraltar faded away to the west as Ann thought about these things and about how quaint darling Aunt Cassie was getting in her great age. Ann also thought of Mrs. Franklin’s legendary nephew in Australia. A burble of laughter escaped her lips.

  Well, it might be fun meeting him, anyway. Claire, of course, had been absolutely scornful.

  ‘I expect you’ll find he has wool growing out of his ears, and keeps sheep in his back yard instead of dogs. Dear Ann ‒ you are welcome to him.’

  This was, in fact, the only thing to which Claire had ever made Ann welcome.

  Mrs. Franklin, a lady who had lived for more than forty years in Australia, had made a visit home to England last summer. She had met the elderly Mrs. Boyd at the club in Mayfair and had fallen under the spell of the other woman’s grande dame manner, her strikingly eccentric clothes, her expansive kindness and her zany manner of half-forgetting what she was saying even while she was still saying it. When Mrs. Franklin had returned to Australia she had corresponded with Mrs. Boyd. She had been entranced by Mrs. Boyd’s return letters which were charming, illogical and full of good will to someone unfortunate enough to live so far away from Mrs. Boyd’s known world.

  Then came the worst winter in eighty years. After that Mrs. Boyd thought there were some advantages in living so far away, specially as Mrs. Franklin’s letters always mentioned the sunshine, and her nephew who ‘really controlled all the property now’. He was strictly eligible, it appeared, because there weren’t quite enough girls to go round in the place where the Franklins lived ‒ the place with the funny name. Oh yes, Kalamunda!

  Mrs. Boyd, at the time these later letters came, was marooned in her Victorian house in London by snow and a long attack of rheumatism. She began, in her state of doldrums, to give some thought to Mrs. Franklin’s talk of sunshine to spare.

  The nephew will be just right for Ann, she thought. And I’ll have somewhere to go and live during the English winter. Besides, Ann will never have an admirer while Claire is around. Claire is too selfish by far. Every nice young man those children meet is immediately captured by Claire.

  She was too shrewd and too good a plotter to tell Ann of any of these ideas. There were some things Aunt Cassie did not forget ‒ if they were important enough to remember. Most times she couldn’t be bothered remembering …

  There was, however, one point about Mrs. Franklin’s visit to London she chose to forget. That was that her niece Claire had been in the club the day she had last had afternoon tea with Mrs. Franklin. That was the day Claire was to be bought the fur stole.

  Mrs. Franklin, newly from Australia, had already fallen in love with the great-aunt, and she now fell in love with the tall honey-haired niece with the lovely speaking voice and the air of becoming a grand lady some day herself. Mrs. Franklin was also impressed by the fact that Mrs. Boyd could casually mention taking Claire out to buy a fur stole as if it were a mere matter of buying a pack of cards.

  Claire’s beautiful appearance, her expensive clothes and her air of making certain that the fur stole would be mink, gave Mrs. Franklin further food for thought.

  What a wonderful match for Lang this girl would be! The longer she looked at the tall, expensive-looking girl talking with some younger people at the end of the drawing-room, the more this new-born thought entranced her.

  Thus when the worst winter in eighty years provoked Mrs. Boyd into mentioning the fact that she might come to Australia for the following winter Mrs. Franklin, way out there in Kalamunda, grasped at the idea.

  ‘You must come and stay with us and bring your delightful niece too. Better still, send your niece out first so that we can get to know her. She’ll be able to tell us how best to make you comfortable.’

  Mrs. Boyd, for her part, had her own ideas about Mrs. Franklin’s nephew, and so she was delighted to accept the invitation on behalf of Ann.

  ‘I can’t have you inviting us both to stay with you,’ she wrote. ‘I shall put up at a hotel. I’m much too difficult a person to encumber a home; but I do think my niece should have a chance to live for a little while with younger people. You are being so very gracious about asking her.’

  By ‘younger people’ she meant the nephew, of course.

  Ann, outward-bound for Australia, leaning on the rails of the liner’s deck, laughed again when she thought of the nephew. Aunt Cassie hadn’t said very much … that was true … but she had held him out as a paragon of virtues. Enough for Claire to be interested, until she thought at length about it. Then finally she declared against him.

  ‘I wouldn’t go, even if Aunt Cassie took me instead of you,’ she said. ‘I’ve my hands full with Anthony and David now. If I marry either it will be the one who can provide the better. I don’t believe in love in a cottage. Or love surrounded by sheep either. Ugh! How impossible!’

  Claire talked this way because she loved clothes, and clothes needed money. Her parents were not well-off at all, and her clothes looked and were expensive because she spent every penny she earned on them, wheedled some more from her mother, and occasionally cashed in on Aunt Cassie’s generosity. Ann, on the contrary, had to build up something of a savings bank account because in spite of Aunt Cassie’s grande dame manner, and her generosity, she was not so very well off at all. She had an adequate income and was now able to realise some capital to make this venture in search of the sun; but though she would never be poor enough to be in want, she was not rich enough to do the things Claire would have liked ‒ such as buy Claire a fur coat instead of a fur stole. A mink coat at that.

  Ann turned away from the railings, and as she did so she caught the eyes of a good-looking man a little above average height who had been quietly smoking a cigarette and watching her in an amused way as her thoughts, some sad, some glad, and some even funny, flitted across her face.

  He smiled at her. Being a fellow passenger constituted an introduction on any far-travelling liner. He knew that from experience.

  ‘It’s a wonderful night,’ he said pleasantly.

  ‘Oh, lovely!’ Ann replied eagerly. ‘They say it is even more beautiful in the tropics.’

  ‘Once through the Red Sea and across the Arabian Sea ‒ yes. Nights on the Indian Ocean are nights in heaven.’

  ‘You travel often?’

  ‘Yes. Mostly by air but every now and again I make the trip by sea. This is partly to get a holiday and partly because I’m partial to shipboard life and I enjoy the Eastern ports. Good shopping, too, you know.’

  Ann supposed he was a businessman if he made frequent trips but her manners were too good to permit her to ask him.

  ‘This is my first trip,’ she said simply.

  ‘I know. You have the air of delightful curiosity that every first traveller has. Would you like to come into the lounge and have some coffee? Perhaps you like dancing.’

  Ann was delighted to do both, and said so with such naïve candour that he suddenly and unexpectedly warmed to the girl. She was very sweet, he thought, standing there with the lights through the windows of the ship’s lounge playing over her face and her simple blue chiffon dress.

  He tucked her hand under his arm and said: ‘There’s quite a lot I can tell you about the world you’ll sail into after we pass through Suez. It is another world altogether, you know ‒ Suez is a gate and once you have passed through it into the Canal everything you have ever known in the way of colours and trees and the way of life drops
behind you. Suez is the real gateway to the East.’

  Ann, as they went into the drawing-room, sat down at a table and he ordered coffee, listened to him entranced. For his part, he told her his name was Ross Dawson. He found this attractive dark-haired shining-eyed girl a delightful listening companion. Out on the deck she had realised he was good-looking, now she could see he had attractive hazel eyes with an amused twinkle in them. He seemed a very worldly person, yet in quite a pleasant way.

  This chance acquaintanceship was a wonderful thing to happen to Ann because thereafter she had a companion who played deck sports with her, danced with her at nights, then, when they arrived at the ports in the new world of the East, took her ashore to see the sights.

  ‘You’re being wonderfully good to me,’ she said one evening. ‘You’ve shown me so much ‒ Old Aden, Bombay, Singapore ‒ how can I thank you?’

  ‘The best thing that can happen to someone like myself who has travelled this route often is to have another, absolutely fresh to the scene, to show around. All the exciting newness of it comes back again. I have something to thank you for.’

  He seemed to know so much about everything. She asked him rather shyly about Australia.

  ‘I know Western Australia well,’ he said. ‘I’m a wool-buyer by profession and that is why I go backwards and forwards to Australia so often. It is the biggest wool-producing country in the world and I buy several million pounds’ worth of it for British and Continental buyers.’

  Ann was staggered.

  ‘You spend several million pounds?’

  He threw back his head and laughed.

  ‘No. I buy the wool, on paper only. My company spends the money. I merely choose it and say, at the auctions, how much my company will buy of it, and at what price.’

  ‘They have lots of wool in Western Australia?’

  ‘More than you dream of, Ann,’ he said. The sparkle in his hazel eyes was very evident now. ‘They have a saying out there ‒ The roads from the outback-in are rivers of wool. You’ll have to see the place to know how much.’