Reaching for the Stars Page 14

  ‘I was thinking, not looking,’ he said slowly, ‘of duplicity. What do you know about duplicity, Ann?’

  She was taken aback. ‘I would have to have a dictionary meaning of the word. At the moment I think it has something to do with double-dealing; being a dual personality, or something.’

  Lang was talking in conundrums; or she was hearing wrong.

  He reached for the Oxford Dictionary from a shelf behind his desk. There was a painful silence in the room, except for the sound of his turning pages.

  ‘Here we have it,’ he said. ‘Are you listening?’ He glanced up at her again.

  She nodded her head. She expected her face was as puzzled as she felt.

  ‘Quote ‒ “double-dealing; doubleness”. You were pretty near the mark, Ann, though it doesn’t mention anything about personality. Not in this dictionary size. Of course we could go to the public library and look at the mammoth edition. It is bound to say more ‒ considering the price of it.’

  What was he talking about?

  Ann felt a slow anger rising. He was too serious to be making a joke of some kind. Somewhere, somehow, he was getting at her. He was trying to expose some inner thing in her. Was it her pride? Was it something to do with her working back and not having told him this morning she would do it? Was that duplicity?

  The tension in her eased.

  If you looked at it a certain way, she thought, she supposed that was just what it was ‒ double-dealing. She had taken from him a request to Miss Devine for two girls to work back. He had inferred neither of them would be herself because she would be doing extra work during the day for Ross: and tomorrow was sale-day.

  She felt deflated. She hadn’t wanted her extra work to be known or noticed by him. She hadn’t wanted to be thanked or praised ‒ or anything. All the same it was a let down to be pilloried for doing something that wasn’t wrong, even if it wasn’t quite right.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ he asked over the top of the opened dictionary. He watched the changing expressions in her face. ‘You look distressed.’

  Distressed? Let down?

  His phrase and her own one rang a bell. That was what she had felt when she landed in Australia. She had thought that that was how Mrs. Franklin had viewed her. Mrs. Franklin had been distressed because she, Ann, had been a let down. Not again, surely.

  It had everything to do with Claire’s arrival. Ann felt it in her bones. Claire was the wonder-girl. She, Ann, was an anticlimax. It was the old story. The old, old story. Claire and Ann! They should never be seen together, of course.

  The fingers of Ann’s right hand rested on the table. Slowly she began to trace the grooving on the table edge with her fingernail. She was near tears, but that was only because now she was crying tired. The race to the airport at eight in the morning, Aunt Cassie’s arrival, the tear back to work, and Ross’s typing in the afternoon at top speed. There had been a quick dinner with darling Aunt Cassie and then three and a half hours of lovely pace-making with the typewriter since. Now this.

  She would die rather than let even one tear at the back of one eye glisten so that he knew what was wrong with her.

  She would hate him now, and for evermore. Because he was cruel.

  She did not even notice the long silence between them because her thoughts, so sore, absorbed her.

  ‘In advance of what I am going to say, Ann, I will tell you it is because I am a little tired of duplicity. It seems to be the second personality-role of bachelorhood. I’d like to put an end to it.’

  Then came a question like the crack of a stockwhip.

  ‘Will you marry me, Ann?’

  It took ten seconds before Ann realised what he had said. She didn’t lift her head, or cease tracing the groove of the table-edge with her finger.

  ‘No!’ she said. There wasn’t even any thank-you, any suggestion of being overwhelmed by the honour. Plain no, and that was all.

  Pride wouldn’t let her apologise for the abruptness of that answer. He was taunting her again, in some strange inexplicable way, and for that she would not thank him. At the same time she wasn’t sure that this conversation was taking place at all. She was in a daze, or a little mad. She had fallen asleep over her typewriter and dreamed all this.

  Her finger did not pause in its industrious pursuit of the groove. Backwards and forwards it went as if somewhere in the innermost part of that groove she would find whatever it was her finger sought.

  ‘No!’ she said again, trance-like but quite firmly.

  ‘In that case …’ Lang pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘If you get your belongings now I’ll drive you back to the hotel. I hope Mrs. Boyd won’t have stayed awake waiting for you.’

  He was up there amongst the shadows again.

  Ann dropped her hand to her lap and looked up at him.

  The mystery of what he had said was somewhere up there in his face but she could not read it. She could not even see the pool of light on the table reflecting into his eyes. He seemed a sombre, tired figure. Only his hand on the table, pale in the bright light, was symbol of his strength.

  ‘Yes ‒ it’s time we went home,’ she said slowly as she too stood up. She did not afterwards remember that she had used those words ‒ It’s time we went home ‒ as if going home with Lang was a matter of course.

  Actually, it meant going to Aunt Cassie’s hotel ‒ and Lang going back to The Orchard, and Claire.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was so simply and smoothly done. Ann continued to stay with Aunt Cassie in the riverside hotel and Claire became Mrs. Franklin’s guest at The Orchard.

  The whole scene was changed.

  Aunt Cassie insisted on resting on Thursday. On Friday she hired a chauffeur-driven car and went to see the sights that the banks of the Swan River could offer her. She went alone.

  ‘I meant to see for myself,’ she told Ann that evening as they waited for dinner. ‘Of course, everything is wonderful but I didn’t have time to enjoy the scenery because I was enjoying the sun. I told the chauffeur to put me out at the top of King’s Park and wait for me. I sat on a seat on the lawn and watched the children playing on the see-saws and swings. Of course, he thought I was mad ‒ an old woman like me watching children and ticking up a huge bill on the car at the same time. I didn’t tell him I was barely watching the children. I was soaking up the sun.’

  Aunt Cassie sipped tonic water while they waited. She opened her voluminous bag, took out a little gold pill-box that had once been her husband’s snuff-box and took a vitamin tablet.

  ‘In case the sun doesn’t do everything it is supposed to do,’ she said. ‘How did you get on today, dear?’

  ‘It was so hot in the sale-room I nearly boiled.’

  Ann also sipped tonic water, and not because she liked it. Aunt Cassie thought it was best for her complexion so Ann complied in order to make the elderly lady happy.

  ‘Don’t complain, child. And be accurate. You can’t possibly boil in the heat unless you are inside a volcano or in one of those hot lakes in New Zealand. You can, however, freeze in Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, Greenland, and North America ‒ if you expose yourself enough. I prefer the sun. Ann, why did you agree to Claire changing places with you? Claire there ‒ with that delightful nephew ‒ and you here with me an old woman like me! It’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Don’t you like seeing me again, Aunt? I thought you would have missed me.’

  ‘Claire is the one I am missing at the moment ‒ and not because I like her very much, poor child. Why is she there and you here?’

  ‘Claire likes being there. It’s a change, of course. It’s a beautiful place, Aunt Cassie. Wait till you see it. And I like being here with you. Everybody is happy this way.’

  ‘You are inaccurate again. By “everybody” you appear to mean you and Claire. I am not happy.’

  ‘Darling Aunt, you will be. Mrs. Franklin has asked us to join them for a bush picnic on Sunday, then when you’ve rested and settled in you are t
o spend the whole week-end there. She is asking everyone far and wide to meet you. You mustn’t disappoint her, Aunt Cassie.’

  ‘I shan’t, because I would be disappointed myself. It is as simple as that. Mrs. Franklin is a very nice woman but a little stupid. I don’t know why I didn’t discover that when I met her in England. I must have been thinking of something else at the time.’

  Aunt Cassie wore a décolleté dinner dress, with all the strings of beads and another immense lace collar that reached almost to her waist. Everyone, as each came into the drawing-room, looked at the distinguished old lady sitting bolt upright in a chintz-covered chair by the window.

  Aunt Cassie was pleased to see she was commanding attention here, as in London, and from time to time she bowed graciously as she caught the edge of someone’s smile. Only Ann knew that smile was one of amusement at the figure Aunt Cassie cut, but she was delighted almost to tears when she saw that Aunt Cassie’s proud bow of the head widened the smiles into ones of real kindness and friendliness.

  These people weren’t thinking Aunt Cassie was a spectacle, after all. They thought she was unusual and interesting. It was a heart-warming relief to Ann.

  ‘I shall do something about Mistress Claire,’ Aunt Cassie said out of a silence. ‘I brought her because I thought it would be good for her to be in a land where people worked very hard pioneering. Instead I find her being the star visitor in the Franklins’ home and you, Ann, being the pioneer.’

  ‘One is hardly pioneering in an office near the coast, Aunt Cassie dear. It’s outback that all that kind of work goes on.’

  ‘Have you been there to see?’

  ‘Not yet ‒’

  ‘Then I shall speak to Mr. Lang Franklin about it. You must go with him, and as soon as possible. You must get him away from that wretched Claire.’

  ‘Darling Aunt, no one can get a man away from Claire if he wants to stand around and look at her.’

  ‘One could in my day.’

  ‘It was such a long time ago, Aunt Cassie. Times and manners and people have changed. In any event I don’t want to get him away from Claire except for Luie Condon’s sake. You see, there is another girl ‒ an Australian girl ‒ Luie ‒’

  Aunt Cassie tossed her head and straightened her figure.

  ‘In my day we would know how to deal with her too. Now shall we go in to dinner, Ann? After all that work you should eat every course. I can’t have you wilting from overwork and starvation.’

  Ann made no comment on this. Instinctively she knew the occasions when it was safer to leave Aunt Cassie to her own reflections.

  A long silence ensued after they took their seats in the dining-room. Mrs. Boyd did justice to a beautiful cut of sirloin beef. Over the dessert she delivered herself of her new turn of thought.

  ‘The poor child!’ she said. ‘I feel I am continually unfair to Claire. I’ll have to make up for it. I might buy her a fur coat. She has always been hankering for one ‒ ever since I whetted her appetite with that stole.’

  ‘You’d better wait till you go home,’ Ann suggested. ‘I don’t think Claire will need a fur coat here.’

  ‘No, of course not. A sunshade is the thing. Remind me when I go into Perth. I shall look for a particularly elegant sunshade. Something really special.’

  Aunt Cassie glanced up, caught Ann’s eyes and laughed merrily.

  ‘Of course she will change it for a much more expensive one. She always does. But then, that is Claire, and after all I don’t love her enough. I ought. Her father was my dear husband’s nephew. Ann, don’t you suppose there is a preponderance of aunts, nieces and nephews in this modern age? Do you think parents are entirely out of fashion? I’ve heard that those who have them don’t live with them any more. What on earth is happening to the world? It’s all gone wrong, like the weather. It’s the atom bomb, of course.’

  Ann laughed. Dear Aunt Cassie! She was back to her old form ‒ buying off her conscience because, try as she would, she did not love Claire enough. Or thought she did not love her enough.

  Sunday was the picnic day in the Darling Ranges. Aunt Cassie had to rise early and be taken to church first.

  ‘The dear Lord doesn’t mind pleasure on Sunday,’ she said. ‘But only after penitence. I always say twice as many prayers if I happen to be going out gallivanting on Sunday. Just in case ‒’

  It had been arranged that Ross Dawson, who now had his own car, should pick up Ann and her aunt and transport them to The Orchard.

  For two days Ann, in her thoughts, had lived in an ambivalent world. Half the time she was enjoying her great-aunt after a long absence. Half the time she lived and re-lived over and over again that strange scene in the shadowed fight of Lang’s office.

  She caught her breath every time she thought of that flattening ‘No’ she had given Lang. It didn’t seem possible that any girl could answer that question that way to any man. Yet she had done it. Just so.

  It hadn’t been any man either. It had been Lang.

  Why did he ask it?

  What would have happened next if she had said yes?

  He had been joking, of course!

  But he hadn’t. He had been tired, angry and serious. What did it mean?

  In the middle of her breakfast grapefruit, half-way to work, three-quarters of the way down a foolscap page of typing, she thought of it. She forgot to eat the sandwiches she had ordered in the canteen at lunch-time because she was thinking about it. She thought in questions because she had no answers.

  Only at night in the privacy of her bedroom and the comfort of her bed did she really live it all over again, moment by moment and word by word.

  Now, because the fantasy world of near-dreamland was permissible to a young girl who had not yet turned twenty, she ceased to ask questions and went on in her mind with the story that had, on the real occasion, stopped at that devastating ‘no’. In a dream, even a waking one, it could have another ending.

  Supposing she had said yes?

  Ann’s only escape from these dreams was to fall asleep and forget she had ever had them.

  Yet she was troubled ‒ not because of the temptation to wishful thinking but because of what had really happened. The familiar questions haunted her. Why had it happened? How had it happened? What had he meant?

  She caught a glimpse of Lang at the wool-sale on Thursday. He was sitting there at the end of the row of seats where the brokers sat. Luie was up in the gallery again, and again she and Ross exchanged those friendly, flirtatious signals. This time Lang was too busy checking his catalogues to notice. The calling waxed fast and fierce on this particular day.

  Ann did not see him all day on Friday.

  ‘He’s gone to the sales down at Albany,’ Greta Borral said. ‘Two hundred and fifty-seven miles there and two hundred and fifty-seven miles back. Doesn’t mean a thing to Mr. Lang. He often does it.’

  Saturday was spent driving with Aunt Cassie around the beauty spots of the river and to the koala and kangaroo park at Yanchep.

  Sunday brought Ross Dawson and his car to take them up to The Orchard. They drove across the sandplains to the foothills of the range, now a glory of wildflowers that sent Aunt Cassie into ecstasies. They went into the slow climb up the hillside to Kalamunda and finally wound up then down and around the valleys to The Orchard.

  Ann sat in the front with Ross because Aunt Cassie preferred to sit majestic and chauffeur-driven in the middle of the back seat, alone.

  ‘Beautiful! Beautiful!’ Aunt Cassie kept ejaculating.

  ‘She ought to see it in high summer,’ Ross murmured in Ann’s ear. ‘All her adjectives would be in reverse.’

  ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘Not really if you love the bush. In summer you respect it for what it is enduring, and has endured for centuries. Also, it is so still, almost eerie in the shimmering heat. It gets some people in.’

  ‘I have a feeling it will get me in.’

  ‘Wait and see. Now is the best time of the year. Wi
nter rains have brought out the wildflowers, scented the gums and moistened the undergrowth. After this comes seven months of dry weather. We might get an odd shower or two from thunderstorms, but otherwise no rain to speak of till June or July.’

  Ann found Ross easy and friendly to talk with, now that she wasn’t being his typist or sharing the hospitality of the Franklins at The Orchard. She wondered if she dared ask him about Luie.

  Meantime she was burning to know how Luie and Heather had taken to Claire and vice versa. Heather, Ann thought wryly, would be the one who would most likely see through Claire. Heather was so much like Claire herself, except that she was preoccupied with the glamour of TV life instead of the eligibility of Lang.

  A veranda party was waiting for them when they reached The Orchard. Mrs. Franklin came eagerly down the flight of steps to greet Mrs. Boyd. Lang came round the side of the house with Jacko and stood talking easily with Ross while Mrs. Franklin and Aunt Cassie out-enthused one another over the glory of the morning, the beauty of the spring-time bush and the adorableness ‒ Aunt Cassie’s word ‒ of the orchard and the old colonial-style homestead.

  Mrs. Franklin, so absorbed, even obsessed, with Aunt Cassie, failed to say good-morning to Ann.

  Luie, hanging over the veranda railings, called to her.

  ‘Saw you yesterday at the sale, Ann. Golly, how do you get all that stuff down so quickly? It gave me a headache just to sit and listen.’

  Ann laughed. She stood in the pathway below the veranda and looked up at the other girl, who somehow seemed younger still with her hair done in a French roll which had miraculously replaced the pony-tail. Luie looked like a schoolgirl playing at being grown-up.

  She was happy this morning; excited. Was it because of the picnic or because now Ross had come? Or because of Lang?

  ‘It’s easy when you know how and have some practice,’ Ann called over the garden-bed and up four feet of house-foundation and veranda-railing. ‘There’s a trick to it and all you have to do is know the trick.’