Absolution Creek (11 page)

They walked back through the grass to where their vehicles were parked. ‘So, how’s business? I didn’t think you had the time for it any more.’

James patted his bag. ‘Just keeping my eye in: all those years of study and then half the family clears off to the big smoke and the rest are pushing daisies.’

‘You’re lucky. At least you’ve got something to fall back on if things go pear-shaped. So, how are things going over in squatterdom?’ James’s property was six miles away as the crow flies and a good thirty by road.

‘Not bad. The clip will be patchy though. The season hasn’t been too kind to date. And you?’

Cora pinched the bridge of her nose. A headache loomed. ‘Staff problems. There are always staff problems.’

‘I’m hearing you.’ James dropped his bag through the passenger door of his utility.

‘This accident will just about pull Jarrod up at Absolution. I’ve been thinking of getting rid of him – he’s just too unreliable.’

James glanced over his shoulder at the wrecked float. ‘Well, I can’t blame you. Anyway, miss me?’ He was leaning against his ute, arms and legs crossed, hat tipped back on his forehead.

‘Nope,’ Cora replied quickly as an image of a billowing white sheet came to mind. ‘I mean –’

James lifted his hand. ‘Don’t worry, I know how you like your space. You forget we’ve got a history, Cora, and neither of us are selling out any time soon.’ He gave her a lopsided grin and opened his car door. ‘I’ll be seeing you, kiddo.’

Cora waited for him to look back, for their eyes to meet, and was surprised when disappointment swelled inside her as road dust smothered his departure.

‘You can’t fire the kid while he’s still in hospital.’

They were sitting outside beneath the kitchen window. Some years ago Harold had helped her dig out a few feet of dirt in a sizable square, and now the second-hand pavers they’d laid supported a peeling wooden table and three chairs. Cora sipped her tea, a diary and paddock book beneath her elbow. ‘I guess you’re right.’ One night’s observation had turned into a week. Jarrod’s arm was broken in three places, his collarbone too. ‘At least he’ll be dried out by the end of it.’

Harold added another teaspoon of sugar to his tea. ‘I feel sorry for him.’

‘What’s to feel sorry for?’ Cora asked. Tripod followed Curly in a limping gait through the flower bed adjoining the chicken wire fence.

‘Well, he’s only got his mother and they reckon she’s a tough master. Anyway, he’s out for the count now by the sounds of it.’

‘Would you keep him?’ She set her cup down on the table.

Selecting a pre-rolled cigarette from his leather hat-band, Harold lit it and coughed thickly. ‘He’s a good worker.’

‘Too unreliable. I just don’t know why we have to put up with people like that. Either they want work or they don’t.’ Cora called the dogs over, affectionately pulling each of their ears. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Jarrod’s great, when it suits him.’

Harold drained his cup and flicked ash onto the patchy lawn. ‘Well, I can’t make staff out of a broom and a bucket.’

‘Some of the ones we’ve employed on Absolution have been about as handy as that.’ Cora sighed. ‘No, I think Jarrod’s days here are over.’

‘How about I tell him?’ Harold suggested. ‘He’s still pretty fired up about you putting his horse down.’

‘Like his hide.’ Cora stacked the cups and empty cake plate noisily.

After Harold left, Cora stayed out in the weak autumn sun. Jarrod’s accident disrupted everything. Now they were down one jackeroo, jobs were postponed – including the corn delivery date – to be rearranged accordingly between visits from the police, the dealings with the insurance company and an irate mother. Close to informing Mrs Michaels of what she really thought about her beloved boy, Cora managed to listen for all of five minutes before putting the receiver down.

Cora scribbled some stock movements in the diary and wondered about her staff conundrum. Absolution Creek was a middle-sized holding of 8000 acres. Not massive by any means, but large enough for a single woman to need the assistance of Harold and a jackeroo to oversee. As Absolution’s seventh jackeroo in seventeen years, Jarrod followed a line of bush-bred greenhides who needed to be broken in. Stupidity was fast becoming an employee characteristic she could do without. It seemed best to employ a qualified station hand; not only would that alleviate the hair-tearing rigmarole of the past seventeen years, it would relieve some of the strain.

Cora knew eventually her injuries would make full-time work on Absolution difficult. The fall that occurred forty years earlier damaged her eye, leg and hip. If such an accident happened today she would have been treated for breaks, fractures and muscle tears, and perhaps something could have been done for her wounded eye. She did what she could, of course. Long walks, hot-water bottles and hanging from the door to stretch out her spine. Old wounds, however, were hard to heal and increasingly she relied on Harold for the more labour-intensive jobs. Over the last three years she’d stopped drenching the sheep, fencing, carting hessian sacks of chaff, lifting small bales of hay; separately they were small tasks, but combined they took away a great part of her work day, relegating her to the office or her daily rides about the property. These rides were Cora’s salvation, for at night the land spoke to her, reminding her of another time and place. Like her injuries, there were some things a person could not be free of.

Having acknowledged she could never forgive those who had made much of her life difficult, Cora nonetheless tried to keep past hurts firmly in the past. It took some time for her to discover that she was incapable of setting memories aside or compartmentalising her anger. Everything from her earlier life continued to directly affect her present and future, including her failed love affair with James Campbell.

It was time, Cora decided, to repay her sister Jane Hamilton. There was the very real possibility that her future at Absolution Creek could be cut short by management agreements put in place decades ago, and it was important to Cora that she still be on the property when the injuries done to her and her family so long ago were finally brought to light. She wanted to be on the land she loved.

Her plan involved employing someone under the guise of a paid female companion. ‘A malleable female companion.’ Cora looked at the tea leaves in the now cold cup. Why bring a perfect stranger into her home when one could nab a relative? Jane’s daughter, Meg. The great pity of life was that one couldn’t choose their own relations. Still, she satisfied herself with the belief that surely Meg couldn’t be as troublesome as her mother. Meg’s birth had been announced somewhat triumphantly in the ‘hatches’ section of the
Sydney Morning Herald
in the early forties, and although the silence between Cora and Meg’s mother extended over forty-two years, a quick search courtesy of the Sydney telephone exchange had located her sister.

I’ll just have to try and see, Cora thought. She attempted to list the benefits of the arrangement from the girl’s viewpoint. She could dangle the prospect of some form of inheritance. It didn’t matter really. Her aim was to take from Jane her only child and show the woman that Cora had not forgiven her or forgotten. Cora put pen to paper.

Cora briefly thought of Jane Hamilton and when she finished writing the letter – addressing the envelope to Meg – a grim smile of satisfaction settled on her face.

Later in the afternoon Cora walked around the corner of the enclosed veranda to the room where she intended Meg to sleep. The bedroom was musty. Crossing the dusty floorboards she opened the faded curtains and casement window. The breeze encircled her, lifting dust from a leather chair, narrow wardrobe, hardwood dresser and four-poster bed. Cora ran her fingers across the polished brass bedknobs, her eyes drawn to the bunched mosquito netting hanging from the ceiling. The netting was shadowy with dust; fragile with memories.

The bedroom needed to be painted before her niece’s arrival. She could probably even find a picture or two to tart up the walls. A scattering of leaves on the corrugated-iron roof startled her. For a moment Cora imagined it to be the heavy step of a man and she closed her eyes, constructing his image. He was with her still, breathing life into every new day. The man who saved her and deserted her.

Jack Manning.

Sneezing, she sat at the writing desk and ran a finger across the cracked surface. It was purchased from Anthony Horden’s mail-order catalogue in the summer of 1924, and remained unused. Inside one of the drawers sat a tub of unopened furniture wax, a stubby pencil and . . . the coin was cool beneath the pad of her fingers. Fishing it out, Cora rubbed the metal on her moleskins. There he was, Waverly No. 4, Mr Purcell’s prize merino stud ram rendered for posterity in metal in a swirl of horn and woolly growth.

Flicking the shilling coin high in the air, Cora caught it with a determined swipe. In spite of everything, there were some good parts in the weather-beaten chronicle that was her life. Some.

Chapter 8

O
live and her mother were already seated in the dining room of the Queen’s Club when Henrietta appeared in a waistless crepe chiffon gown of palest blue. The waiter escorted her with the minimum of fuss to their corner table overlooking Hyde Park.