‘True,’ he conceded. He leant back against the desk and picked up the picture once more, holding it as if he were fascinated and yet hated it at the same time. ‘Well, it was too much for my mother.’
He studied his mother’s face. He had forgotten how young and pretty she had been. ‘She should never have married my father in the first place. She was from Brisbane. They met at some outback ball and she fell in love with the idea of living on a cattle station, but year after year of the reality of it wore her down. Some years can be hard,’ he told Meredith. ‘She missed having friends and complained that my father and the men only talked about cattle and horses, which they probably did.’
‘But what about you? Her children?’ Meredith was still struggling with the idea that anyone could walk away from their children. ‘Didn’t she want you to go with her?’
Hal glanced up at her then, his grey eyes hard with the memory. ‘We would have cramped her style,’ he said. ‘She’d been going on longer and longer visits to her family, which turned out to be just a cover for meeting up with an old boyfriend. They moved to Sydney together-got married eventually-and they wouldn’t have wanted three half-wild kids around. Besides,’ he said, ‘we wouldn’t have gone. We couldn’t imagine living in a city. Wirrindago was all we knew.’
Meredith was silent. It was easier to understand now why Hal was so determined not to get married. He wasn’t prepared to take the risk of being abandoned again, the way he had been as a boy.
‘It must have been very hard for you all,’ she said after a while. ‘How did your father cope?’
‘Badly.’
‘And you?’ she asked gently.
Hal’s eyes went back to the picture, but this time he wasn’t looking at his mother. He was looking at the children with their bright, confident faces, unclouded by any suspicion that the world they knew could ever end.
‘We thought we were OK,’ he said. ‘After Mum left, Dad let things slip, and we were allowed to do what we wanted. For a while it was almost like a holiday.’
He remembered those days so clearly. The freedom they had once longed for had been terrifying now, but they’d stayed out as long as they could, finding more and more dangerous things to do because they hadn’t wanted to go home. They hadn’t wanted to see the expression in their father’s eyes, or think about the empty place at the table where their mother had sat. She had been away often, as he had told Meredith, but this time her absence had been like a cold, heavy stone in his stomach.
‘You must have missed her,’ said Meredith. Children were programmed to adore their mothers, however little they might deserve it.
‘I suppose we did,’ Hal said slowly. ‘Jack certainly did. He’d been her favourite. He never talked about it, but I don’t think he ever got over the way Mum left without saying goodbye to him. He thought that if he could just go and find her, he could make her come back and everything would be all right again.’ Hal’s face twisted. ‘He was only a kid. He didn’t know.’
At the look on Hal’s face, dread began to pool in Meredith’s stomach. ‘What happened?’ she whispered.
‘One day he ran away to try and find her. He had a plan, he said. He left a note and everything.’ Hal’s voice was very bleak, very controlled. ‘He sneaked on to a road train. The driver didn’t have a clue until they unloaded and found his body in with the cattle. They think he suffocated.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THERE was a long, terrible silence. ‘Oh…Hal…’ Meredith didn’t know what to say.
Hal acknowledged her sympathy with a hunch of his shoulders. ‘You see why Dad didn’t want any reminders of her around? After Jack…I’ll never forget the way he tore up every picture, anything that might remind us of her. He wouldn’t have her name mentioned, and we all pretended that she was dead. Like Jack.’
‘Did your mother know?’
‘She must have done. I don’t know if she ever tried to contact Lydia or me-if she did, Dad wouldn’t have told us. Lydia’s seen her once or twice in Sydney, but I’ve never wanted to, not after Jack, and not after what she did to my father.’
He shook his head. ‘Dad was never the same after she left. I think there was part of him that knew it had been inevitable from the start, and that they should probably never have got married in the first place, but still, he couldn’t break himself of her spell. After she left, he just…gave up. He lost interest. It was only when he died that I realised how far he had let Wirrindago run down. It’s taken a long time to build things up again.’
Meredith’s throat was tight as she watched Hal, trying to imagine life in the homestead over twenty years ago, when his mother had gone and Jack was dead and his father had turned in on himself. Her heart ached for him, for the boy he had been, and she wanted to take him in her arms and hold him tightly.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said instead, desperately conscious of how inadequate that sounded.
Hal looked into her warm, dark eyes and felt something tight around his heart loosen. ‘That’s what I said to you when you told me about boarding school, and you told me that you got used to it,’ he reminded her. ‘It was the same for me.’
‘Who looked after you and Lydia?’
‘We ran pretty wild for a time, then my father’s sister got wind of the situation and came to sort us out. She’d grown up at Wirrindago but met Guy’s father when she was in England and stayed there. She and my father were always close, and I think she hated seeing how broken he was by what had happened, but she’s a very practical person too. In fact, you remind me of her a lot,’ Hal said with a half smile.
‘She arranged for a housekeeper and tried to get us back to our schooling. I went to boarding school and she took Lydia to live with her in England until she was old enough to go to boarding school as well.’
Meredith hated the thought of Hal, losing his mother and his brother, and then his little sister too before being sent off to school on his own. Poor boy.
‘Going to boarding school must have been horrible for you,’ she said compassionately.
‘No worse than for you,’ said Hal, ‘and I was nearly thirteen, not nine.’
‘I had Lucy,’ she pointed out. He hadn’t had Jack or Lydia.
But Hal refused to be pitied. ‘It was the right decision. I missed Wirrindago, but at least I got some education, and it was easier for Dad not to have to worry about who was looking after Lydia and me. I’d come back in the holidays and once a year my aunt would come out, bringing Lydia and Guy with her.’
‘So that’s why you’re so close to Guy?’
He nodded. ‘Guy was like another brother for me and Lydia. It wasn’t that he replaced Jack, but we didn’t miss Jack so badly when he was there. He was always fun.’
Meredith’s memory of the evening she had arrived was somewhat hazy, but she still had a clear impression of Guy’s dancing eyes and the way Hal had laughed with him. Guy must have been very good for Hal and his sister.
‘What about Lydia?’ she asked. ‘Are you still close to her?’
‘I’d say so. I suppose I feel responsible for her, and Lydia’s quite capable of taking advantage of that. You see,’ he added, ‘I’m in no position to criticise you and Lucy!’
‘Is that why you agreed to look after Emma and Mickey?’
‘It’s certainly why I feel guilty about not giving them a better time.’ Hal rubbed his face. ‘I think you’re right. I should take them out and show them what we used to do when we were kids.’ His eyes took on a faraway expression as he remembered. ‘We had some good times.’
‘You should remember those.’ Meredith got up and picked up the photo from the desk. ‘Maybe your father remembered them too,’ she said. ‘Maybe that’s why he kept this.
‘You all look so happy,’ she said, looking down at the picture. ‘Jack’s there, and your mother. He must have wanted something to remind him that it hadn’t all been bad. You have to believe that however terrible things are, there have been times when it was all worth it; otherwise it would be too hard to bear.’
She hesitated and then held out the photo. ‘You should keep this picture, Hal,’ she said. ‘Don’t tear it up. Keep it and remember what you had, not what you lost.’
There was such a long pause while Hal just looked at the picture that Meredith lost her nerve. ‘I’m sorry,’ she
