The River is Down: (An Australian Outback Romance) Read online

  ‘And you don’t mind?’

  ‘So long as they do their regulation eight hours on site ‒ occasionally nine with one of the hours overtime pay ‒ I have to be satisfied. It’s still a free country up here, and this site is not a concentration camp. It’s a construction camp. A boss who tries to make the men invariably eat in the canteen at six is a fool.’ He paused. Then added slowly ‒ ‘Take a man’s freedom from him and you take his immortal soul.’

  Cindie was silent.

  What he had said was so true. It was the kind of truth one knew in one’s innermost being, without ever having it taught or explained.

  Minute by minute her feelings for Nick Brent were indeed undergoing a subtle change; and it worried her.

  She remembered again, with a stab of unhappiness, the possible connection between Nick and Bindaroo. It had to be wrong, of course. As far as doubtful dealing with the Stevenses, anyway. Yet how subtly he had manipulated her departure with him from the site! Her mood, too! Or had he?

  Nick drove Cindie back to the camp after a quick run to the upland. From there the road had been one long streak, slashing the landscape from horizon to horizon. It had no beginning and no end. It touched one horizon and went on and on, in a straight line, to the other. The wonder of it had left Cindie without words. Nick in his own silence did not seem to have noticed this.

  Back at the camp, Mary Deacon greeted Cindie with some surprise.

  ‘Oh, so you’re back?’ Her eyebrows were raised. ‘You’re a right one, you are! Off with one man and back with another. Not to mention talking over the air with a third. How many men in your life when you’re not up in the north, Cindie Brown?’

  ‘There aren’t any secrets up here, that’s for sure,’ Cindie replied with a laugh. They were in the living-room of Mary’s house and Mary had just finished dressing and making up her face. Going to the tea-party too!

  ‘Well …’ Mary looked at Cindie with pretended severity. ‘This place is so quiet in the day-time, when the men are out on the site, you can’t help hear when a motor car goes by. Yours first, dust-cloud and all ‒ Next a Land-Rover goes, and then comes back much later with the visiting celebrity on board. As for the third man? Well, there’s always the air ‒’

  ‘Don’t tell me you were listening in when I called Baanya, Mary? I thought the care-all was too busy ‒’

  ‘How right you are. But if I don’t have those two children doing their school work up there where I can keep an eye on them, they just don’t work at all. They happen to have a radio for the School of the Air. They take care to turn it on early.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Cindie philosophically. ‘So, while waiting for the school session, they, and everyone in the canteen, including their mother, heard a private conversation?’

  ‘You take your clothes off and get yourself a shower before you make any more rash or ignorant statements, Cindie. There’s nothing private on the air in this place. You might as well live cheek by jowl with your neighbours in a suburb.’ Cindie was pulling her blouse over her head in haste.

  ‘Am I late? Nick told me about the tea-party ‒’

  ‘You’re not late, but you will be if you stand there talking.’

  ‘I’m forgiven for running out on the camp, then?’ Cindie’s face, eager yet anxious, appeared below the hem of her blouse as she hoisted that garment in the air high above her head.

  Mary glanced in the living-room mirror to see what next she would do about her face or her hair, before declaring herself dressed, ready and waiting.

  She shook her head from side to side as she met the girl’s eyes in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t kid yourself about Dicey George, Cindie Brown. He has a girl in Carnarvon who wouldn’t let him go short of a battle-axe act. He probably put all that blarney over you just to get a loan of your car. He wanted to drive out to that site in luxury style. That was to put one over the boys.’

  Cindie had her blouse under her arm and was unbuckling the belt of her slacks. She was amazed that Mary had thought she had even remembered Dicey existed, after seeing the thousand-miler.

  ‘For your information, Dicey didn’t put any blarney over me. I wanted to talk to Jim Vernon at Baanya. Besides, I wanted to see the road. Furthermore, in addition, and altogether, I’m glad he has a girl in Carnarvon. If she carries a battle-axe, I don’t; nor a pennant for Dicey George either.’

  ‘Get showered, child, and argue afterwards. There won’t be one of those women up in D’D row who doesn’t know you had a sob-talk with Jim Vernon, drove out to the site with Dicey George, and back from it with the boss. So get your arguments ready, to convince them. You might succeed with them ‒ they’re that hay-wire ‒ but you won’t fool me. You can tell me about them all when we come home. Incidentally ‒’

  Cindie, who had almost exited, put her head back in the door-way. Mary turned away from the mirror to look squarely at the girl.

  ‘No Nick-talk up there,’ she cautioned. ‘Remember he’s the boss, so they’re full of him. He’s royalty on this job. They won’t stop talking about him, but if you’re a wise girl you’ll listen and stay dumb. You know what I mean?’

  ‘I do,’ Cindie said quickly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be wise.’

  She suddenly gave Mary one of those accidental rainbow smiles. ‘Anyway I’d be scared stiff of you, Mary. And that glowering eye of yours.’

  ‘Me glowering?’

  Cindie missed the indignation because she was heading for the shower-room at the back of the house at top speed. She could hear the children’s voices as they went about building a cubby-house under the white gums.

  Chapter Six

  There were three wives in number two caravan in D’D row. In the first five minutes of meeting them Cindie gathered only their Christian names. Hazel, Betty and Evie. Hazel was fairish and the other two dark. They were all probably in their middle thirties. The dark ones were plumpish. Hazel was thin and over-eager about being the hostess for this occasion. Instinctively Cindie felt she would be, as a type, probably over-eager about everything.

  They were welcoming, and because they had preceded Cindie as visitors to the construction camp, they gave the impression of long establishment. By implication they were old hands at the game of knowing everything about what went on, how, when and why, on the site. Cindie was the newcomer, therefore not quite ‘with it’ yet.

  They treated Mary Deacon with a subtle distance which indicated they might be superior because they were ‘wives’ and she was staff.

  It could, Cindie thought, mean they were a little afraid of Mary: or of her power over their own men ‒ via Nick Brent.

  ‘Come in,’ Hazel had greeted them brightly. ‘Three steps up. It’s the same as every other house in this village.’ She laughed on, a key a shade too high. ‘Just too funny calling these things on wheels “houses”, and this camp a “village”! How uppity the company can get!’

  ‘The company,’ Mary said, blunt as ever, ‘invites you down here to visit. All for free, too. So I guess it’s good policy to let the company call this, that, or the other just what it pleases.’

  They were all sitting down in the living-room of the caravan now. To Cindie it looked very much like the lounge car of a railway carriage, and quite comfortable.

  ‘Including calling this lot up here D’D row?’ one of the plump dark women asked with a glint in her eyes that was half a smile, half a sly question. Cindie decided that this one’s dark eyes were a little wicked; but she could have more fun in her than the other two.

  Hazel was at the tiny stove at the end of the narrow room, pouring hot water into a teapot. ‘Oh, the company gave us that name all right. Typical Nick Brent, I’d say.’

  Mary Deacon’s eye caught Cindie’s blue ones. ‘By “company”,’ she said, ‘they mean Nick Brent.’

  All three wives looked at Mary. Their expressions could have been baleful, if they hadn’t been trying to hide it.

  ‘Who else? It’s a proprietary company, isn’t it?
’ Hazel asked. ‘One family owns it. Nicholas Brent Proprietary Limited.’

  She brought the teapot to the table in the middle, and began to pour out.

  ‘You didn’t let it stand three minutes,’ the dark-eyed one remarked critically of this exercise. ‘Personally I prefer coffee. The instant variety.’

  ‘Then darling we’ll have that when it’s your turn to entertain.’ Hazel went on pouring unperturbed. ‘You take milk, Cindie?’

  ‘Yes please.’ She thought she would say something peace-making, and added ‒ ‘It was kind of you to ask me up here, on my first day.’

  ‘The one thing you don’t know,’ one of the others put in, ‘is when it’ll be your last day. They say over the air that water’s up everywhere. All over the claypan country north of the site.’

  ‘Except there’s always one special person who can get through,’ Hazel put in meaningly, bringing Cindie’s tea to her. ‘Sugar too?’

  Cindie shook her head. ‘Somebody told me when I was twelve sugar would be bad for my figure when I was twenty,’ she laughed. Anything to make this tea-party pleasant. Who did Hazel mean by ‘one special person’?

  ‘Goodness me! You twenty? Why, you look only a child. Then on the other hand ‒ the things you do …’ Hazel shook her head as she went back to the table for Mary’s tea. She had her back turned as she went on. ‘Drive by yourself across the north; get yourself marooned, then rescued by the Lord High Panjandrum himself; take a run out to the site with the smartest of the gallivants round the place ‒’

  ‘All in twenty-four hours,’ Cindie added agreeably, still smiling. ‘You left out the most important part. Having a tea-party in this lovely caravan ‒’

  Mary Deacon looked at Cindie thoughtfully. The girl was coming through all right, she told herself. She was showing good manners. Maybe ‒ well maybe, there could be an extra job or two to give her around the place. If she could handle the men as tactfully ‒

  She let the thought hang in air.

  Meanwhile, since these three women were obviously trying out Cindie in their own devious ways, she’d take a hand in the game herself.

  She knew very well who the words ‘the one special person who could get through the bogged country’ referred to. She’d known about it since midday. One of the men was bringing Erica Alexander down from fifty miles back up the road. Dicey George’s two-way from the Euclid had passed that on.

  ‘If one could get through the claypan country, coming west ‒ then why not another, going east?’ Mary took her tea from Hazel without looking up. ‘Thank you. No sugar. Like Cindie, I have figure trouble. If one could get through by noon to-day,’ she added, ‘it doesn’t say a different one could not get through ‒ going the opposite way. But of course, she, or he, would need a lot of nerve. And know the route. Do you know the by-tracks through to Marana and Bindaroo, Cindie?’

  Cindie, not knowing what all this double-talk was about, shook her head.

  ‘My map showed only the main track leading due east along the river banks. Nick said it’s impassable now. The more northerly route is a maze of rarely-used station tracks, isn’t it?’

  ‘And you wouldn’t want to try them?’ Mary asked idly.

  ‘I’d need to ask ‒’ Cindie began dubiously. ‘Nick Brent would know ‒’

  ‘Erica Alexander didn’t ask,’ the dark-eyed one said with a laugh. ‘The Queen of the Spinifex just came when she wanted. An hour ago. Guess she knows the way from the outcamp on Marana across to the road up north, from experience. Must visit the boss pretty often.’

  There was a tiny silence.

  Hazel carried two cups of tea, one in each hand, to her fellow wives.

  ‘Well, she has a reason for coming,’ she said so meaningly that no one in the room, not even Cindie, misunderstood her meaning. ‘And how does anyone know the boss didn’t ask her to come, even through the flood-land? Lots of people living up here use a kind of code language with one another over the air. They know how to get personal messages through and make them sound like business. Long experience in the north, I expect.’

  ‘Goodness me. How that “Air” does talk ‒ even in codes,’ Cindie said with a laugh. ‘It’s a wonderful country. Not a human being in sight, not even a kangaroo or an emu, yet everyone knows when someone is coming to the site.’

  Mary Deacon at the back of her mind gave her protégée another good mark. Cindie was deliberately and painlessly turning what was meant to be a pin-prick about her own talk with Jim Vernon, also the starting point for gossip, into something that sounded more interesting ‒ the wonders of the country.

  Mary herself was not having too much ‘Nice-talk’ while she herself was around, so she changed the subject smartly.

  ‘Cindie’s not interested in Marana. She’s heading for ‒’

  She didn’t have time to finish.

  ‘She’s heading for far places unknown, and my bet is the next stop’ll be back to Baanya,’ the one called Evie interrupted. ‘Come on, Cindie, tell us the story. Are you and Jim Vernon old friends from far away? And how come you left him lamenting at Baanya and came on to the billabong crossing? Were you just sightseeing, or heading for the construction camp?’

  ‘Do you want my life story?’ Cindie asked surprised. ‘It would take such a long time. I’d rather hear yours. I’m sure it would be more interesting. You’ve come down from Port Hedland, haven’t you? They say it’s like the roaring nineties up there ‒ with the mining boom inland.’ Mary Deacon gave Cindie her third good mark for the day.

  ‘When you leave Port Hedland you just plain forget about it,’ Evie said flatly. ‘It’s that kind of place. Down here’s better, with all the bird-watching that goes on.

  ‘Bird-watching?’ Cindie wrinkled her brow in perplexity.

  ‘Birds! Male and female. Miss Erica Alexander ‒ and the company boss. Dicey George beating the other gallivants to the newcomer!’ Evie laughed almost gleefully, but not unkindly. ‘The newcomer with a sob in her voice talking to the overseer at Baanya. Yes, Cindie, bird-watching is quite a hobby on the construction camp.’

  There was a burst of laughter at Evie’s forthright way of putting things.

  Cindie joined in, though Mary Deacon drank tea assiduously as if these last remarks had little interest for her. Yet her sharp ear and sharper mind caught the meaning of all that was said.

  ‘Well, Dicey’s a one for going straight through the ranks to the bait,’ Hazel remarked as she passed around the cakes. ‘Witness his good turn ‒ opening up the radio unit ‒ for a certain young lady this morning.’

  ‘For speed he’s not a patch on Miss E. from Marana via the spinifex-neck between the claypans,’ persisted Evie.

  ‘Watch her go straight through the ranks to you-know-who.’

  ‘That’s more or less been said already.’ The third wife, Betty, also plump and dark-haired, had hardly spoken, but now she did, quite firmly. ‘You two do sometimes talk rot,’ she went on. ‘Miss Alexander’s interest in the boss is also an interest in Bindaroo, that station on the upper tableland. My husband said it’s the last before the Never desert. Everyone, even as far as Port Hedland, knows there’s a take-over being tried out there. Nick Brent is the cash behind the take-over and Miss Erica Alexander is the know-how. So it’s said. She lives on the next-door station.’

  ‘They ought to hurry up and marry and put the partnership in double-harness, and be done with it,’ Hazel said, sitting down with her own tea.

  Cindie sat perfectly still. Not even the tea cup in her hand rattled. The tea in it didn’t sway, and the unused teaspoon didn’t clatter to the floor.

  She knew her face was still and expressionless ‒ but her heart raced. The pulse beating in her ears hurt. Yet she had to say nothing, and appear to feel nothing.

  The first relevant thought that flashed through her mind seemed to be toneless and unimportant.

  Thank God I didn’t tell Nick that my name was Cynthia Davenport, not Cindie Brown. This morning, on that drive,
he seemed … I nearly liked him. I nearly told him ‒

  It was at least three minutes, and some desultory but unheard talk about the station on the tableland, before the girl felt the real clang. Something seemed to hit her.

  Nick, Erica and Bindaroo! The signature tune sang in her ears.

  Now she thought she saw him in his true colours. The landed man, turned engineer, who wanted to buy back on to the land using the take-over as his means. Fair and square enough ‒ if an important shareholder, namely Cindie’s mother ‒ had been informed about it! And agreed.

  Her thoughts couldn’t go on with the details of this iniquity. Something warned her loudly that she had now, this moment, to begin keeping up an appearance of complete innocence of these things. Now, here in this caravan living-room, drinking tea with strangers, she had to begin to play Nick’s game. And Erica Alexander’s game. The silent game. The dead-pan way: illuminated now and again by a false smile.

  This was big business, this was. And she, no matter how reluctantly, was in it too.

  Cindie’s heart sank. She didn’t want to carry on deceiving people this way. She, unlike Erica, did not have the know-how. But she did have a duty. When she had left home in that Holden to come north she had assumed that mantle. Now she had to stay with it.

  Her mother? Her gentle, spineless mother, with barely enough money left to live on! Yes. She had to stay with it. She had no choice.

  At least ‒ and this thought came with a sudden weariness of heart ‒ at least she supposed she had to play some sort of game, for the time being. Until she could contact the Stevens brothers anyway.

  Then, a ray of hope!

  She thought of Jim Vernon over there at Baanya. He was her friend and had helped her out of one predicament. Now around the total horizon that encompassed her new acquaintances, he alone was the one who could and might help her again. He would tell her what to do. He knew the country. He knew the station business. He knew Nick Brent.