The Call of the Pines Read online

  Cherry laughed.

  ‘I don’t know, Mother,’ she said as she threw aside the bedcovers and sprang out of bed. Her pretty sprigged muslin pyjamas were lovely but she had never had the heart to tell her mother they should have been ‘shortie’ pyjamas. Long ones were ‘out’ as far as the young people of to-day were concerned. Anyhow she liked her pyjamas. She was glad she was not as bullying as her friends who just wouldn’t wear what their mothers bought for them, if they weren’t the very last thing in teenager wear.

  ‘Heaven only knows what people want their children taught these days. Manners change and get out of date so quickly,’ Cherry said.

  ‘Never!’ said Mrs. Landin, rising from the foot of the bed. ‘A well-bred woman is the end result of a well-bred child. I’m sure you learned that much in your Kindergarten College.’

  ‘We learned about freedom and the “play way” of learning. I think everyone’s a bit bewildered about the end result nowadays.’

  Mrs. Landin went to the door.

  ‘I expect you want to go down for your swim after breakfast, dear,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget to let Dad be awfully surprised it’s your birthday, will you? We mustn’t spoil his fun.’

  ‘I won’t,’ promised Cherry to this last request.

  Chapter Two

  True to form Dad looked astounded that another birthday had come around. As he had done since Cherry was fifteen, he rooted round in his pocket for something new and something blue. The blue five-pound note could not be found. Instead there was a beautiful, crinkly, brown ten-pound note.

  ‘Must have forgotten to change it yesterday,’ he said. ‘Ah well, you’re grown up now, Cherry. I guess a ten-pound note is more appropriate. At least it’s new. What a piece of luck I had it with me.’

  It was then he dropped a millstone into the domestic pond.

  ‘There’s a gentleman residing in the house over the street. He’s calling to see you at noon to-day. Did Mother tell you all about it? Believe it or not, he wants to take you up north to live on his station for a year. There’s a small girl wants some teaching. And up there, on that station, they’ve actually heard of you. How’s that, Cherry girl, for a start out in life?’

  ‘Oh, Dad!’

  Cherry wanted to laugh and cry at the naivete of this grey-haired man with the twinkling eyes at the foot of the table.

  ‘As if he’d heard of me without you and Mother having something to say about it.’

  She stopped short.

  A man living in a house across the street.

  She put down the spoon with which she had been dipping into the iced grapefruit.

  ‘Which house do you mean, Dad?’ she asked, trying to make her voice sound natural.

  ‘The one that was for sale. You might have noticed it has been renovated. Some people called Denton from Yulinga Station have bought it as their town house. Mr. Stephen Denton is down from the north to set it in order and have something of a holiday, too, I think.’ Mr. Landin now looked as near mischievous as a man of his age could do. ‘He is the member of the family who is to interview the new governess.’

  Cherry returned his smile weakly. She picked up her spoon and dipped it into the grapefruit again.

  ‘What is he like?’ she asked without looking up. ‘I mean what does he look like?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t met him. All our negotiations have been through the pastoral company.’

  Cherry had a fleeting mental picture of the tall man sitting on the sand with his knees drawn up under him.

  Could it be? Could it be?

  But of course it was. There was only one man living in that house. Cherry was sure of it. Now she knew he was married, and had a little girl of eight as well as a young baby. That was why he sat alone and did not make himself friendly with other people on the beach. His heart was in the north-west with his wife and children.

  Cherry’s heart sank, not because she was disappointed that a dream had vanished like the mirage that so often lay around the islands out to sea, but because she would now have to go through the ordeal of being interviewed by someone she had seen almost daily and with whom she had never spoken.

  Did one confess to having seen him or did one pass everything off as if he were an absolute stranger?

  Oh, this was too difficult! How could Mother and Dad be so other-wordly they didn’t know that girls of nineteen were adult and had minds of their own, and ambitions of their own.

  Cherry raised hurt eyes.

  ‘Dad,’ she said out of her hurt, ‘I believe you want me to go away. I don’t think you want me any more.’

  There was a painful silence round the breakfast table as Mr. and Mrs. Landin looked at their daughter and saw the scarcely veiled anxiety, even accusation, in her eyes. This was something for which they had not bargained.

  Mr. Landin put down the napkin with which he was at that moment wiping his mouth.

  ‘Cherry,’ he said, ‘don’t ever say that again. Not as long as you live. You belong to us and what is much more important we belong to you.’

  ‘I’m sorry I said that, Dad. It was just the embarrassment of meeting that man. I suppose it is always easier to run away from an awkward situation.’

  ‘Darling,’ said Mrs. Landin hurriedly, ‘you don’t have to go. I mean, it was only an idea. You see …’

  ‘It’s all right, Mother,’ said Cherry. ‘Of course I’d like to go. That is if they will have me. It’s only that I’ve never been away before; and I’m ‒ well, I’m nervous about being interviewed. I said the first thing that came into my head.’

  ‘Next time have a second thought before you speak, Cherry,’ Mr. Landin said, rising from his seat. He turned away and went to the door, then he looked back. ‘You are nineteen and adult,’ he said slowly. ‘You have to find out how the world ticks while you’re young and resilient. I think you should go away for a year, but if the idea of Yulinga does not appeal then we must think of something else.’

  He stood framed in the doorway as he felt in his pocket for his pipe. Slowly he filled it and packed it. During this process neither Mrs. Landin nor Cherry stirred.

  He lifted his head and looked at Cherry across the room.

  ‘One year will be a long time for us, Cherry. We’ll live through it. However, if you promise to come back to us then …’

  ‘Oh, Dad …’ cried Cherry, pushing back her chair and rising. She ran across the room and caught his sleeve as he turned to go through the door.

  He patted her hand but went on through the door and down the passage without saying anything more.

  Cherry followed his spare figure with her eyes. She knew that she had hurt him in some unforgivable way but she knew too that she would make it up to him. She would come back to him. Wherever she was in the world she would come home again.

  As she turned round to face her mother she determined that she would meet the man from across the street, and in some intangible way it would be a different Cherry from the inexperienced young girl who had run down to the beach each morning with her head full of vapid dreams about a man whose very name she did not know.

  It would be Cherry Landin, the governess-elect, who would meet Mr. Stephen Denton at noon on this bright summer day.

  It was three minutes after noon when Stephen Denton strolled across the double way of the Street of the Pines. Cherry had not gone for her swim this morning. It would be too much to bear, she thought, to see him without being acknowledged, or for that matter acknowledging him, and then meet him as a prospective employer an hour or two later.

  She had lightly made the excuse of wanting to be at home on her birthday morning.

  ‘Besides,’ she added as she helped in the kitchen with the dishes, ‘I don’t want to be all fussed up when that man from Yulinga Station comes.’

  Subtly the tall mystery man of the beach had become now ‘that man from Yulinga’.

  Cherry didn’t like him any more though she hadn’t the faintest idea why there had been
this change of heart. It had something to do with a soap-bubble that had burst, but Cherry told herself he was just an aloof rich man who had taken no interest in his neighbours. She quite ignored the fact that his neighbours had taken no interest in him.

  None of this was quite logical but then Cherry was far from being in a logical mood this morning. A soap-bubble had burst so she was disappointed and missed the iridescent radiance upon which she had been dreaming.

  He came across the street, dressed in a dark-blue reefer jacket, his deep-grey trousers impeccably pressed and a spotted stock tucked in the open neck of his white shirt. His hair was combed down flat across his head. Cherry could look directly into his face now, as Mrs. Landin brought him into the sitting-room and made the introductions.

  He had a square brow and a straight nose. His eyebrows were very dark and strongly marked and under them his eyes, a dark grey, looked at Cherry keenly, and then politely looked away to Mrs. Landin.

  Yes, he was very tall. Six feet two, at least, Cherry thought. His shoulders were broad and he moved with the ease and precision of an athlete. At close quarters he had the unmistakable look of the northwest pastoralist, the type that was sunburnt, had good strong hands, a slow deliberate way of speaking, yet somehow managed to convey a capacity for speed in movement if necessary. Above everything else he looked like a man with a will of his own and one who made up his own mind quickly and silently and went his own way.

  Mrs. Landin introduced Cherry to him and there was a sudden flashing puckish smile that lit up his whole face, and made Cherry’s heart quiver a little.

  ‘How do you do?’ he said. His voice was quiet and firm.

  Very nice, Cherry thought sadly, and wondered why she was sad.

  It was a curious feeling, standing there acknowledging the greeting of a man who was about to add, subtract, divide and multiply the facets of her own personality in order to decide whether he would have her to guide and teach his own child. Specially as, after that one illuminating smile, he turned and paid attention to Mrs. Landin, and not herself.

  Mrs. Landin asked him to sit down and then they all three sat in something like a semicircle round the small room. Cherry, her hands in her lap, her feet neatly crossed at the ankles, was opposite Stephen Denton but she saw only his profile as he listened to Mrs. Landin politely, without interruption, as she eagerly and with some over-emphasis set about praising Cherry. It was a very good profile.

  ‘How dear and quaint Mother is,’ Cherry thought a little ruefully. ‘As if he could possibly be interested in what I looked like as a child, and how many people had said I was a very nice girl. In a minute ‒ oh, awful thought ‒ Mummy will bring out photographs.’

  She also thought how desperately embarrassed she would have been if somehow everything had not changed since the morning and she had learned he was a married man. Why hadn’t she guessed before? She would have spared herself all that foolish daydreaming.

  She also felt a certain wry amusement at the picture of early Victorian girlhood she must look in reality, as well as in the legend that her mother was now developing breathlessly.

  She was sitting straight-backed in her upright chair as befitted an applicant for the post of governess. She was unaware that her pale primrose summer dress set off her oval face and the dark hair that didn’t quite do as it was told, her long sun-tanned arms and her slender youthful figure.

  But then, Mr. Denton of Yulinga Station was not inclined to look at her anyway.

  ‘Cherry loves children and she would like to go to the north-west because, you see, she was born there. But of course she doesn’t remember it. She was only two weeks old when she was brought down here ‒’

  Stephen Denton turned his head and glanced at Cherry. There must have been something that amused him for Cherry distinctly saw a fleeting smile in his eyes, and the corners of his mouth drew in. There was nothing amusing about herself, Cherry thought, so he must be laughing at Mummy.

  Of course he would laugh at Mummy. He should understand that though Mummy was old-fashioned and was doing all the talking, when Cherry as the applicant should have been doing it, she had a heart of pure gold and no one, but no one, was permitted to laugh at her.

  Cherry was torn between giving Mr. Denton a haughty look, and remaining demure, as befitted an applicant for a post. She decided on demureness for her mother’s sake, and not that of the tall handsome prospective employer.

  Her mother was going on and on about Cherry as a girl, Cherry as a student, Cherry as a daughter about the house. Mrs. Landin thought she was drawing a lovely picture of her beloved daughter but Cherry knew it was a silly one. In a minute Stephen Denton would ask why she, Cherry, didn’t speak up for herself.

  ‘So you see, your little girl will be in the safest hands …’ Mrs. Landin was saying triumphantly. ‘What do you call your daughter, Mr. Denton?’

  ‘The little girl in question is called Sandra, Mrs. Landin. But she’s not my daughter. She is my brother’s daughter. They have a twelve-months-old baby too. A boy ‒’

  ‘Then you’re not married?’ asked Mrs. Landin. She looked perplexed. Cherry knew just what had sprung into her mother’s mind now. If he wasn’t married then what sort of a judge could he be as to who was fit to undertake the teaching of a child? Mother did not believe in bachelors, any more than young spinsters, knowing anything about the facts of life at all. Inside herself, suddenly and foolishly, there was a new moonrise for a daydream.

  ‘I’m afraid not,’ said Stephen Denton. Once again he glanced round but turned his face quickly back to Mrs. Landin. ‘I could rectify that state of affairs any moment, you know, if you think it’s necessary to qualify me to take your daughter back to Yulinga with me.’

  Now he did smile and even Mrs. Landin knew he was making mild fun at her expense.

  ‘Oh, it isn’t that,’ Mrs. Landin said hastily. ‘I was thinking your brother, and his wife, must have great faith in your judgment. And Cherry ‒ you see, well, Cherry will not have met them.’

  ‘In that case she will have to take the same chance on them as they will take on her,’ he said firmly. Cherry wasn’t sure whether he was making fun this time or not. Neither was Mrs. Landin. In fact he was not making fun.

  Yet his words implied that Cherry would have the job. How could he tell what she was like? Except for saying ‘How do you do’ when he came in Cherry had not uttered a word.

  ‘May I smoke?’ he asked Mrs. Landin politely. He reached in his pocket for his cigarettes and his matches.

  ‘Oh, of course. Please do.’ Mrs. Landin hastily took an ash-tray, never before used as anything but an ornament, from the top of the television set. Cherry knew she should have performed that small service instead of her mother. Somehow she was glued to her chair by the fact she did not want to do anything for Stephen Denton; she was certain he had been quietly laughing at her mother.

  Instead it was he who stood up. He took several steps across the room, offered the opened cigarette case first to Mrs. Landin and then to Cherry.

  ‘Oh, thank you. I wouldn’t know how to smoke a cigarette,’ Mrs. Landin said, flustered.

  ‘I would,’ said Cherry, speaking for the first time. ‘But I won’t have one just now, thank you.’

  Mrs. Landin’s eyes nearly fell out of her head. She remembered just in time that Cherry was seeking to be employed by this man who was so nonchalantly offering cigarettes around. She closed her mouth in a line that was half sad, half determined.

  ‘You also swim very well, Miss Landin,’ Stephen Denton said, resuming his chair. As he lit his cigarette he looked up at her suddenly. ‘I have seen you down at the beach.’

  ‘I have seen you too, Mr. Denton,’ Cherry said, surprised at her own composure. ‘I am sorry we have not met before.’

  He bowed his head in recognition of her small politeness.

  ‘We’ve wasted rather a lot of time, haven’t we?’ he said. His eyes, quick and shaft-like, looked across the room at her. Cherry w
as certain there was a smile in the depths of those eyes. She was sure he was laughing at both of them now. There was nothing that Stephen Denton actually said or did that made Cherry feel that he was amused. Yet intuitively she knew that if it hadn’t been for the amusement he found in this ménage he would have been frankly bored.

  Well, if he took her up on that station she would show him she really was a modern girl, in spite of the adverse appearances now. Dad had given her ten pounds. And she had fifty pounds in her savings bank account. She would buy slacks and pullovers, and coloured flatties for her feet, like the other girls!

  With a sudden extraordinary sense of release Cherry wondered why she had never done that before. Maybe she could have educated her parents. Maybe she was the one who should have shown them how life had changed since they were young.

  Moreover, Cherry was already wondering why she felt the ice thaw from her heart when he had said the little girl Sandra was not his child, and that he was not married. Nevertheless he had said he could rectify his state of single blessedness at any moment. That meant he was engaged, or at least had a girl friend.

  Girl? Would she be a girl, Cherry wondered. He would be more than thirty, wouldn’t he? This girl, this nebulous person he could leg-rope into matrimony just when it pleased him, would probably be older than herself. To nineteen anything older than herself was very hoary indeed ‒ if female.

  ‘You would like to come to Yulinga?’ Stephen Denton was asking, his eyes once again swiftly but imperceptibly appraising her. ‘We have a swimming tank, and a water-hole in the creek. Is that inducement enough?’

  There was no smile but something in his eyes told Cherry he was laughing again. Why didn’t he ask was she good at teaching? Was she prepared to go so far away? Could she stand up to the harsh climate of the outback?

  He was asking none of these things. Instead he was referring obliquely and personally to the fact that he had seen her swimming often, that he had noticed she was a good swimmer. He had not forgotten this was the girl he saw, quite often, down there on the golden sands at the foot of the street …