‘What are Eve’s friends like?’
‘Nice.’
This led by degrees to a discussion of their own late teens: the heartaches, rituals, mating and courting indiscretions, and, above all, the waiting.
‘Weeks would go by and nobody would ask me out.’
Challis laughed. ‘Weeks would go by when I didn’t have the nerve to ask anyone out.’
Meg said slyly, ‘Except Lisa Acres. You didn’t have to wait long for her.’
Challis shifted ruefully in his chair. ‘No one did.’
He was being unfair. Lisa Acres-Acres’ because the first thing she asked you was how many acres you owned-hadn’t really been free with her affections. But she was the daughter of the local publican and had ambitions to settle down with a rich man. Challis hadn’t been rich, so she must have seen something else in him. It had been heady fun while it lasted and had broken his heart.
‘Do you ever see her?’ he asked.
‘Oh, she’s around. Still stunning to look at, in a brittle kind of way. The husband’s an alcoholic. She virtually runs the place. They’d go bankrupt if it wasn’t for her.’
She’d married a man named Rex Joyce, who came from old money in the district. Rex had been sent away to boarding school, Prince Alfred College in Adelaide, at the age of five. He’d suddenly reappeared one day, in a red Jaguar given to him by his father when he turned eighteen. Rex, that car, and the acres that came with them, had offered Lisa more than Challis ever could.
‘Any kids?’
Meg shook her head. ‘Some unkind people say she didn’t want to ruin her figure, others that she’s been too busy keeping the property intact. A lot of farms have gone under in the past few years.’
Meg toyed with her knife, turning it to catch the light. ‘Are you seeing anyone, Hal?’
Was he? At once he was visualising Ellen Destry, the way her fair hair would swing as she walked, her intensity when she was working, her sly humour, above all her beauty. She wasn’t straightforwardly beautiful. You had to know her for a while to see it. She’d once said her looks were ‘average’, ‘girl next door’, but they were more complicated and alluring than that.
He wanted her, but was he seeing her? ‘Not really.’
Meg sighed. ‘Nor am I.’ She paused. ‘The kids go out as groups of friends these days, rather than as couples, like we did. It’s healthier, I think.’
‘Do you think Eve’s, you know…’
Meg cocked her head. ‘Sexually active? I don’t know about active. We’ve talked about it. She’s not a virgin. She knows she can have a boy stay overnight if she really cares about him and he’s nice to her.’
‘Not like our day.’
Meg shook her head vehemently. ‘God, no.’
They glanced at their father again; how terrifying he’d seemed when they were young. He’d wanted Challis to go out into the world rather than marry a local girl-which he’d said would lead to stunted opportunities, bawling babies and debt. On the other hand, he hadn’t wanted Meg to leave, or get an education, but marry locally and raise a family. She’d mostly obliged, marrying Gavin Hurst and producing a daughter with him.
Challis brooded down the years. He remembered the country-dances of his youth, often in far-flung town halls or football clubrooms. It hadn’t been unusual for him to drive his father’s Falcon station wagon two hundred kilometres on a Saturday night, Lisa Acres at his elbow, her hand on his thigh. He’d take her home, pull into the shadows behind her father’s pub, but not get further than that before the light went on above the back door and she’d say in a rush, ‘Dad’s awake, I’d better go in.’ It went beyond birth control: it was desire control.
He could see now that it wouldn’t have worked with her anyway. He had a history of choosing the wrong woman. In fact, Angie, the woman he’d married, had conspired with her lover-a police colleague of Challis’s-to murder him. She’d gone to jail for that. She’d killed herself there.
As if reading his mind, Meg said, ‘We both made mistakes, didn’t we?’
They glanced at their father again, wondering if he was to blame, not wanting to believe that they might shoulder some of it, or that many marriages simply ran their course and ended.
‘Gavin has stopped messing with your head?’ Challis asked.
Meg nodded. ‘Nothing in the past couple of years.’
‘Where do you think he is?’
She shrugged. ‘Sydney?’
‘Why would he want to hurt you like that?’
It was a rhetorical question. Meg shrugged again, then leaned forward, dropping her voice. ‘You won’t tell Dad about the letters?’
He shook his head. He’d promised years ago that he wouldn’t. Their father being such a difficult person, one simply knew not to tell him everything. But now Challis was curious about Meg’s motives. ‘Is there a reason why you told Mum but not him?’
‘You know what he’s like. He wanted me to stick around and marry and have kids, but didn’t want me to marry Gavin. It gave him a sense of satisfaction to believe Gavin had committed suicide. Confirmed what he thought of Gavin. But if he’d known Gavin was still alive, and taunting me, I’d never have heard the end of it.’
Challis gave a hollow laugh of recognition. They were silent for a while. Meg said, ‘Rob Minchin is still sweet on me, you know.’
Rob Minchin was the local doctor, and one of Challis’s boyhood friends. ‘And?’
‘And nothing. He calls in to check on Dad, and that’s about it.’
‘I remember he was pretty jealous of Gavin.’
‘Rob in the grip of passion,’ said Meg, shaking her head.
They stared at the tabletop, too settled to move. Their father snored gently. Soon they would put him to bed, Meg would go home, and Challis would toss sleeplessly on his childhood mattress.
14
Bucketing rains came through overnight, preceded by thunder and lightning that seemed to mutter around the fringes of the horizon, then approach and encircle the house where Ellen Destry slept, and retreat again. Dawn broke still and balmy, the skies clear, as though nothing had happened. Spring in southeastern Australia, Ellen thought, glancing out of Challis’s bedroom window. The bedside clock was flashing, indicating that the power had gone off during the night. She glanced at her watch-6 am-and went around the house, resetting the digital clocks on the microwave, the oven, the DVD player. Then, pulling on a tracksuit and old pair of Reeboks, she set out for her morning walk.
And immediately returned. Rainwater had come storming down the dirt road and roadside ditches outside Challis’s front gate, carrying pine needles, bark, gravel and sand, which had formed a plug in the concrete stormwater pipe that ran under his gateway. The ditch had overflowed, scoring a ragged channel across the entrance. She should do something about it before the channel got too deep.
Hal had told her the grass would need mowing regularly. He hadn’t told her what a storm could do.
In his garden shed she found a fork, a five-metre length of stiff, black poly agricultural pipe, and a long- handled shovel. She hoisted them over one shoulder and returned to the front gate. There were signs of the overnight storm all about her: twigs, branches, ribbons of bark and birds’ nests littered the road; water-laden foliage bent to the ground; the air seemed to zing with promise.
Ellen forked and poked at the blocked pipe, shovelled and prodded. Suddenly, with a great, gurgling rush, the stopper of matted leaves and mud washed free and drain water flowed unchecked toward the…
Toward the sea? Ellen realised that she knew very little about life out here on the back roads.
Finally she walked. She passed a little apple orchard, the trees heavy with blossom despite the storm. Onion weed, limp and yellowing at the end of its short life, lay densely on both sides of the road, and choking the fences was chest-high grass, going to seed. Sometimes her feet slipped treacherously where the dusty road had turned to
