A Distant Journey Read online

  After Mrs Flowers had departed with the dishes, Murray finally turned to Cindy and suggested they leave, as he had an early start. They rose from the table and made their way into the hall, where Lawrence shook his son’s hand and, without a backwards glance at Cindy, stalked off to his study. Cindy repressed the urge to yell after him and instead meekly followed Murray to the car.

  She watched Murray’s face as he drove back to their place. Passing the fields between the two houses, she could see his mind turning over the work to be done. She’d learned

  that, whatever his interests might have been as a child, Murray’s future had always been linked to Kingsley Downs. He would never join the navy and see the world, become a banker or a geologist. Cindy couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to know your destiny from day one. As far as she knew, Murray had not entertained any ambition other than running Kingsley Downs. It seemed so different from her life, which had taken some unexpected twists and turns. When she was young, she would never have expected she would one day live in a place like Palm Springs with two aunts who had given her two very different perspectives on life. Or that she’d go to college at Santa Barbara, where she’d met girls intent on pursuing a variety of ambitions, from travelling the world to getting a job, but above all, finding a husband. And she’d never once entertained the idea that she would find herself married and living in Australia.

  It had been so different for Murray, who’d lost his mother when he was so young and had only had Lawrence as a mentor, parent, guide and friend. Apart from his years at boarding school and his one trip abroad, her husband seemed to have had a very narrow existence. Perhaps, when he had fallen for Cindy, it was because she was such an exotic flower, so different from the girls he and his friends were expected to marry. Had marrying Cindy been an act of rebellion on Murray’s part, and it was that which had made Lawrence resentful of her?

  Arriving at their house, Murray retired to bed almost immediately, with Cindy following soon after. Folding down the thick flannel sheets, Cindy climbed into their bed and leaned over to smooth the hair off her husband’s sun-beaten face. No matter what, Murray had chosen her. He loved her. He was doing his best to support her. She wouldn’t let him down. And, while she didn’t like Lawrence’s behaviour, or condone it, Cindy decided Murray’s father was a deeply wounded man, a bitter man, but there was nothing she could do to change him. As she lay down and felt sleep creep over her, she thought of what Alice would advise: ‘If you can’t change it, lump it or live with it, girl,’ and she smiled. The least she could do was give her husband all the love and tenderness she could. That would be enough.

  *

  As the weeks passed, Cindy found, rather to her surprise, that she was beginning to accept the unpalatable and look forward to the things in her new life that she enjoyed. She relished her weekly drive into the little township of Yamboola. She had become a more than competent driver, the gears no longer crunching when she changed them and the days of kangaroo jump-starts gone. The roads were generally empty, which gave her the feeling that she had the world to herself. Sometimes, she sang as she drove, recalling some of the songs of the Palm Springs stars which Babs so liked. Slowly she found herself apprec­iating her surroundings. The different greens and browns of the bush, the ever-changing sky and the contrast of starkness and stillness gave the landscape its own kind of beauty.

  Besides Lawrence, Cindy found her isolation the hardest thing to deal with, and she disliked being left alone for most of the day. After a few weeks, determined to do something about it, she asked Murray if he could vary his routine and come home for lunch.

  Murray said he’d do his best. He still left at the crack of dawn, but now he returned a couple of hours later for breakfast, and if he could get back for lunch, he would. Sometimes Cindy would take his lunch and a thermos of tea out to where he was working and they’d sit and share the sandwiches he liked. But mostly he was busy with dogs, horses and sheep and she got the feeling he was anxious to get back to work and check that the jackaroo wasn’t slacking off or having a sly cigarette while Murray was occupied by lunch with Cindy.

  ‘It’s lovely of you to take the trouble to drive out this way and bring me some lunch, Cin. Mrs F could have made some and Tom could have brought it out, you know.’

  ‘I’m your wife, not Mrs Flowers. It’s my job to look after you.’

  ‘And you do a great job,’ said Murray cheerfully.

  *

  As much as she loved Murray, and even though she was feeling more positive about things, Cindy yearned for more companionship. As luck would have it, one Friday afternoon as she was leaving the general store in Yamboola, she heard a voice call out, ‘Hi there, Cindy!’

  Cindy turned around to see who it was who knew her, and saw Joanna, the schoolteacher she’d met on her first day in town when she’d been ushered into the Ladies Lounge at the hotel.

  ‘Why hello, it’s nice to see you again,’ she said, walking over to Joanna.

  ‘How are you settling in? Been shopping?’

  Cindy smiled broadly. ‘I always seem to forget something on the shopping list. Still getting used to not having a grocery store around the corner. But I enjoy the drive here. Gets me out of the house.’

  ‘Do you have to hurry back? We could stop and have something to drink, if you like,’ Joanna suggested.

  Cindy nodded. ‘Lovely.’ She could think of nothing better than to spend some time with another woman close to her own age.

  They settled at a table in the Ladies Lounge and ordered shandies. In no time, they’d shared brief histories and also found a lot of common interests, especially books and music.

  ‘I really miss the TV shows I used to watch in the States,’ said Cindy.

  Jo nodded. ‘I don’t have TV where I live, either. But I like to listen to the radio. It can be good company and you learn a lot about what goes on around here, as well as in the rest of the country. Do you like the movies?’

  ‘I sure do,’ exclaimed Cindy. ‘My young cousin and I went all the time back in Palm Springs. I haven’t had the chance to go since I’ve been here.’

  ‘Then maybe we could drive into Deni when there’s a good film on.’

  Cindy grinned. ‘What a great idea. I’d love to. Maybe Murray could come as well, although I think he only likes action movies,’ she added.

  As they finished their drinks, they agreed to meet regularly on Friday afternoons after Joanna finished at the school. Suddenly having a friend made Cindy’s life seem a lot more interesting.

  *

  After a while, the moments when Cindy felt overwhelmed, sad and homesick became fewer and fewer. She still felt lonely sometimes and looked forward more than anything to letters from home. Babs wrote regularly, but Cindy also enjoyed the less frequent letters from her father and her college friend Chrissie, as well as notes and funny cards from Joey and the very occasional letter from Alice, who only seemed to write when she had something to boast about. It was often Babs’s latest news that engendered in Cindy a bittersweet longing for Palm Springs, and sometimes made her giggle, especially when there was a drama involving Alice. Most recently, it seemed that Alice had declared war against a developer who wanted to build ‘yet another gross resort complex’ near to her new home.

  Babs always asked for photos of Kingsley Downs and the surrounding district, so that she and Joey could visualise where Cindy lived. So Cindy decided to put to use the camera Alice and Spencer had given her for her birthday, hoping that her photos might show what she meant when she wrote about the sweeping vistas and the creek, or their funny old house and its surrounds, as well as Yamboola and Deniliquin. She wondered if they’d see these scenes as she had come to: as beautiful and interesting, pretty and magical.

  So Cindy spent a lot of time in the first six months of her marriage staring through the lens of her camera, taking photographs for her aunt, showin
g Babs what she was doing in the garden to make the house look more welcoming. And, even though she suspected Babs and Joey might be a bit nauseated by the idea, she’d snapped pictures of the little gauzed meat house where Tom butchered their fresh meat. To Cindy, the odour of the slaughterhouse always hung about the worn surface of the butcher’s wooden block outlined through the flyscreen. It had taken Cindy time to adjust to the tub of butchered lamb that was delivered to her regularly, and while Murray saw nothing wrong with eating lamb three times a day, Cindy found it heavy going. Alice would have been appalled. Cindy began to think she should raise some chickens and put in a vegetable patch to vary their diet.

  As much as she hated going over to the big house, in case she ran into Lawrence, Cindy knew that Babs and Joey should see photos of the big house too, not just because it was the house where Murray had grown up, but also because it was the hub of the Kingsley Downs operations.

  When Lawrence and Murray had gone off to a sheep sale one day, Cindy drove over to take some photos.

  She passed the paddocks near the house, then stopped to take a picture or two of Stan and Simpson, two old stockhorses quietly grazing in their yard. She parked the car and started to take some pictures of the outside of

  the big house as well as the beautifully kept gardens, then she headed over to where the great woolshed squatted on its stumps, surrounded by holding pens. Dotted in the sheepyards were a couple of peppercorn trees, their trailing leaves casting a tracery of shade on the hard earth beneath them.

  The woolshed loomed large, its massive iron hat of

  a roof stained red with rust. Decades of heat, rain and frost had weathered the building. She looked at the chutes, down which indignant shorn sheep had been shunted

  a few weeks before, their pink skin barely covered with a baby fuzz of white wool, their valuable fleece left splayed on the wool-classing table.

  Inside the building it was dim and cool, with sunshine slanting in from the high louvred windows over the sheep stands. Cindy looked up at the shearing machinery sitting silent in each stand. The wooden floorboards were solid, stained shiny, the tables greased from generations of oily wool. Log pillars, which held up the roof, were so big you couldn’t wrap your arms around them. And everywhere Cindy inhaled the gentle smell of lanoline, softening the lost echoes of rough and tumble, shouting, sweating men, bleating animals and the buzz of the shears. Her footsteps reverberated, dust motes rose and flickered in the rays of sunlight. Details leaped out at her; proud numbers shorn in a day, initials and a date scratched here and there into the old wooden walls.

  From the woolshed she walked over to the shearers’ quarters. Ten basic rooms stood in a long row. Through a dusty window she could see an iron bedstead, rolled mattress, a cupboard with a sticky door and several rattling hangers dangling from a wire. There was a small fly-spotted mirror on a wall, a peeling picture, a poster and an old calendar. A naked light bulb hung from the ceiling.

  The amenities block was a shadowy cement box of showerheads and lavatories.

  Near the shearers’ quarters was a small tin shed that served as the kitchen, beside a roughly built mess hall. Inside, a faded oilcloth was tacked to the long table. Mesh screens on the cupboards shielded food, plates and cutlery from the dust and flies. An old refrigerator leaned tiredly against a wall, its door ajar. Outside, a tin awning sheltered a forty-four-gallon drum cut in half lengthways, which stood on small brick footings so that it served as a barbecue. And in the dirt, a ring of blackened stones and ash was testimony of cheerful evenings around the campfire.

  It was a masculine space; even Mrs Flowers rarely ventured here. The camp cooks tended to be obsessive rulers of their domain, and the best shearers’ cooks, mostly men, were in great demand. It was stressed to Cindy more than once that if the food was good and plentiful, it kept the men happy.

  Cindy passed the old machinery shed, home to hay bales, a tractor and farm equipment, spare parts and diesel drums, where Mrs Flowers took warm biscuits and a billycan of tea to Murray and Tom for their smoko when they were repairing some kind of mechanical disaster.

  Later, after she’d had the photos developed and was carefully placing them in an envelope for postage, Cindy wondered what Babs, Joey and Alice would make of the pictures. For Cindy found it was almost impossible to capture what she had slowly come to love about Kingsley Downs: the space, the beauty of the changing sky, and the creek with its lovely trees. Now that she had put the episode of the wild pig behind her, she found it an enchanting place. She loved the birdlife that surrounded her; the loping flocks of emus, heads stretched forward, legs a blur when they ran, the darting finches, the clouds of brilliant emerald-green budgerigars rising from bare trees like exploding flowers, and the bird she’d first glimpsed when she had just arrived, the glorious superb parrot.

  She loved waking to the chortle and songs of the birds that lived close to the house, the currawongs and magpies, kookaburras and butcher birds, and during the night she would hear the screech of the owls, and occasionally other strange cries she was yet to identify.

  At first the night noises had made her afraid, but now even the distant calls of wild dogs and foxes didn’t worry her. And lying in bed with Murray’s steady breathing beside her, she loved the sounds of their house – the creaks of the aged timber, the rattle of loose tin on the roof – all of which had now become comfortingly familiar.

  She tried to recall having had any interest in any of the wildlife around Palm Springs. Except for the distant howl of a coyote, she’d never had a sense of sharing space with other creatures; not in the way she did at Kingsley Downs. The first time she had seen black swans, she was captivated, and the wild ducks, wallabies and a bumbling wombat had enthralled her. So, although Cindy was more conscious than she’d ever been of sharing the land with nature’s creatures, she felt they had all come to a kind of understanding. Each had its place and attendant right to be there, even the deadly snakes. She’d come to accept the country around her as it had accepted her.

  She was very pleased to discover that the locals had embraced her wholeheartedly as well. As time went on, she became less of a novelty to her neighbours and more of a friend; she was simply Mrs Parnell from Kingsley Downs. She felt increasingly at ease in the shops and the pub, though she sometimes liked to idly compare enjoying a shandy in the Ladies Lounge of the Majestic with Jo on a Friday afternoon with the fancy cocktails in the smart surrounds of the Thunderbird and Racquet Clubs.

  She had also to dispel more than one of the daydreams she’d had about her new life before she had any idea what it was really like. Her romantic notions of life on a sheep station, for one, turned out to be very different from the reality. Although the stud’s fortunes rested on the wool from thousands of sheep, Cindy found she had little interest in them and almost no contact with them except when they were rounded up at shearing time. Murray had brought a baby lamb to her to be bottle-fed as its mother had been killed by wild dogs, but the novelty had soon worn off with the endless feedings and the fact that, wherever she went, the gangly little animal seemed always to be underfoot, plaintively bleating. She was pleased when Murray found a ewe willing to take it.

  She had also pictured herself riding the range with Murray, checking fences and moving stock, but in actuality this had never been possible, as the gentle trail rides around Palm Springs had ill equipped her for the serious horsemanship needed on a sheep station. She also learned that the station’s working dogs were not household pets and were kept at a distance. Even the haughty old cat at the big house earned its keep hunting mice and rats and disdained her overtures of friendship.

  But she loved to stop and occasionally watch Murray when he worked. This was not the suave well-dressed man she’d met and fallen in love with in Palm Springs. Now he had a different demeanour: strong, sure of himself, his skin bronzed, and beneath the battered felt hat pulled low over his face, his blue eyes were like sapphir
es, and the sleeves of his work shirt were rolled high up his tanned arms, which strained as he lifted a sheep into the back of his ute. Yet there was a tender and gentle side to him which showed when he stopped to fondle the ears of his favourite dog or lift an injured lamb, or fondly rubbed his hand along his horse’s neck. Sometimes Cindy felt herself overwhelmed by the love and admiration she had for her husband. He was her protector and guide in the strange new land of marriage.

  *

  It was a morning that promised rain. Clouds were scudding and there was a sense of electricity in the air; the horses were kicking their heels and feisty, and an invisible oppressiveness that suggested a change in the weather made eyes turn skyward.

  The previous evening, Murray and Lawrence had been studying the accounts. Now, with rain imminent, there was a flurry of preparations and Murray wanted to meet his father at one of the dams to check its pipes and pumps, so he asked Cindy to take an envelope of documents to the big house for his father.

  When Cindy drove up to the main house and wandered in, she found Mrs Flowers up to her elbows in flour, baking bread.

  ‘Oh, Cindy, would you mind putting that envelope on Mr Parnell’s desk in his study? I’m covered in dough. This weather isn’t helping the bread rise,’ the housekeeper muttered.

  Cindy dropped the envelope on Lawrence’s tidy desk and glanced around the room. It had as much personality as Lawrence: it was austere, formal and lacked anything personal. There were leather-bound books on the shelves, a carriage clock on the mantelpiece, and a gold pen set on the desk. She returned to the kitchen, her curiosity piqued.

  ‘Mrs Flowers, are there any personal things in Mr Lawrence’s bedroom?’ she asked cautiously.