Secrets of the Springs Page 24

  ‘Actually it’s this property Belfair’s interested in at the moment, Orla,’ Ben broke in, and nodded encouragingly at Graham.

  ‘Really?’ I said blankly. ‘A stock and station agency? Why? And who, by the way, are Belfair?’

  ‘Belfair Mining Co. I represent them in this matter. And no, not the agency as such. It’s your shed we’d like to hire – for storage. We’ll have a lot of equipment to secure.’ His gaze roved over the large building with its huge roll-up doors. ‘This wouldn’t be a bad venue if it were fenced. It’s lockable and Ben tells me you’d be willing to lease – same sort of arrangement as with the house?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ I said faintly. Both places taken off my hands in the one day – it seemed too good to be true. ‘I’d be pleased to, but Ben handles all our contracts so I’ll leave the details to him.’

  ‘That’s good then.’ He looked pleased. ‘It’s nice to deal with people who don’t haver.’

  ‘So you’re really going to work the old field?’ I asked. ‘I have to say it’s very sudden. You’ve taken us all by surprise.’

  He smiled. ‘We’ve been discreet, that’s all. The council’s known of the likelihood for some months. We’ve had geologists on the ground for a while now, and a drilling rig working there. Nobody ever seems to visit the old field, which is why it’s not generally known. It all takes time though, even setting up a temporary camp, but in six months we’ll have a better idea of the deposit’s size. Then, if the quantity proves out you’ll really see a change.’

  ‘So you do know there’s a deposit? Well, of course you do or you wouldn’t be spending the money. But the old miners all said it was worked out.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ his teeth were very white against his reddened face, ‘can’t blame ’em, Miss Macrae. It was picks and shovels back then. Times have moved on.’

  ‘Yes, and so must I.’ I glanced at Ben. ‘I came to ask about Palmer’s papers. They all seem to be old business records, paid accounts – that sort of thing. Not current or they’d have been in the office. Can I burn them or must they be kept?’

  ‘Some probably need hanging onto. I’ll take a look.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I could pick them up tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Thanks, that would be great.’ I made my goodbyes and departed.

  Alec had been out of the office when I rang about the aborted auction so I had left a message for him, and that evening during dinner he called back. Marty, nearest the door when the phone rang, answered it. She returned within a few moments looking pleased with herself. ‘For you,’ she said. ‘It’s Alec.’

  ‘Okay.’ I had been telling Joe and Mark of Belfair’s decision to lease Palmer’s business establishment, adding Ben’s suggestion of mounting a well-advertised closing sale one Saturday to clear out the agency stock, when the interruption occurred. The cooler air of the hall touched my bare ankles as I picked up the phone.

  ‘Hello, Alec. It’s Orla. How are you?’

  ‘Very well, thank you. You sound pretty perky too. Sorry, I was out on a job when you rang.’

  ‘No matter, looks like you got the message anyway. Something’s come up, Alec – rather exciting actually. We’ve got a mining company moving into town. They’re going to do some exploratory work on the original Emu Springs mine and they want to lease my uncle’s house – fully furnished.’

  ‘I see. So – no auction?’

  ‘Well, yes and no. No furniture obviously, but there’s still the wine and the cupboards’ contents. I have to clear the place by Friday, but not the wine – they’ll let us use the cellar for as long as we want. Some of the stuff I’ve already passed on to the op shops – linen and clothes – but there’s still that bronze lamp, you know, from the hall table? And the long case clock, and the better china, though I’ve brought what you said was the best out to the Park. And there’s heaps of good kitchen gear and other stuff like books, a big stack of records – mostly opera, I’m afraid – and knick-knacky stuff like clocks and pictures. Is it still worth your while without the furniture?’

  ‘Of course it is. Why the wine alone . . . Look, if it’s a smallish load and Friday’s your deadline, could you store it somewhere until I can get up next Wednesday to collect it? Would that be possible?’

  It would actually put his arrival slap in the middle of the PGs’ visits, I realised, but that couldn’t be helped, and surely I could leave them to their own devices for an hour or so. ‘That would be great, Alec. I’m afraid I can’t ask you to stay though – all my rooms are booked out for the first half of the week. But I’ve just had an idea. I’ll drop the cartons off at my uncle’s business premises in town. Ben’ll have a key; that way you’re saved the trouble of driving out to the Park to load them.’

  ‘Okay. But I’m not coming just for business, Orla. I want to see you too. I’ll book into the hotel for the night and take you to dinner there. What do you say?’

  ‘Oh, Alec, I can’t. I told you, I’ll have guests, and I have to be here for them. But,’ I added swiftly as he started to speak, ‘what if you come to dinner here instead? You can fascinate the guests for me; it’ll be their last night and they might appreciate a new face by then.’

  ‘Done,’ he said. ‘Now that’s settled, tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself?’

  ‘Just the usual – garden, house, guests. We’re in the middle of dinner, Alec – what say I tell you all about it when you get here?’

  I heard his sigh. ‘I’ll hold you to that, Orla. You’re the most elusive woman I’ve ever met, you know that? Still, I’m determined as well as clumsy, so you’ve been warned.’

  ‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ I said lightly, and returned smiling to my neglected meal.

  The following day I drove back into town where, reinforced with further empty cardboard boxes, I attacked the upper rooms, clearing drawers and cupboards with ruthless efficiency. Photographs and other memorabilia I set aside in cartons I’d labelled Junk – shorthand for ‘unsaleable, needs further sorting’. Palmer had been something of a rock-hound; there was a cupboard full of labelled specimens, some of them polished, all wearing the dust of long neglect. Hesitating over them – would the school find them acceptable? – I consigned them to Junk too, then turned my attention to moving the paper contents of the office into several cartons, before breaking for a late morning tea that I carried out into the sad excuse for a garden. The days were definitely getting warmer. I pulled off my jacket and drank my tea, watched by a pair of magpies perched in the branches of the athel pines.

  Afterwards, returning through the laundry, I collected the pegs to take home, thrust the cracked plastic washing basket into the rubbish bin and wheeled its trolley out to join my pushbike and the hoe, rake, shovel and hoses in the garage. ‘Lot number 20,’ I said aloud, then returned indoors to tackle the bookcase.

  When I had lived here Palmer’s study had been out of bounds. I doubt that even Marty had ever entered it to clean. I cleared a space on the floor for several cartons and began hauling down the fairly weighty tomes from the top shelf of the bookcase that half filled one wall, wondering if I should just consign the lot to the incinerator. Practical Accounting was the title of the first book and right next to it was Mechanics For Everyman. Further down my eye landed on Diseases of Livestock. All the volumes, and I used the word advisedly, seemed to be of a how-to educational bent, the library of a self-made man. It was laudable, I supposed, but I very much doubted its re-sale value, particularly as it must all be out of date. To check, I reached for Practical Accounting, which I saw had a publishing date in the late forties. Had Palmer bought it then when he acquired the agency, recognising a lack in himself and moving immediately to redress it? It would be like him, I thought, as he couldn’t have had much formal schooling. But a more determined man was hard to imagine. It was this very determination, his inflexible will that had driven me to rebellion as a child.

  Unsure what, if any, value they held, I packed them into the boxes. They were too d
ense to burn anyway. And even if they wound up on the Malvern Park dump they still needed to be moved. Dust tickled my nose as I stacked them one atop the other along my arm, and when I suddenly caught my breath before a gigantic sneeze the whole lot crashed around my feet. Crossly I bent to snatch them up and found that a massive dictionary, possibly the only truly useful book among them, had landed face down, cracking its spine.

  Only it wasn’t, I saw, a book – or at least not one meant for perusal. Abandoning the others, I knelt on the rug and gathered it up. The weight of its fall had broken a hinge, scattering its contents. The thick wodge of pages weren’t pages at all but a solid block. The book was a mini-safe, a hiding place, and what it had contained was a dried flower, now in a thousand desiccated pieces, a knot of pink ribbon and a sheet of folded paper. Wonderingly I opened it. It was a letter, penned in a once-familiar hand, and I didn’t need to run my eye down to the signature to know that my mother had written it.

  It was dated the fifth of June, 1963, and had been written with a fountain pen, the upward strokes of the letters finer than the broader, downward ones. I felt a faintness stealing over me as I read, the shock of the words draining the blood from my head.

  My Dear,

  I know you are only thinking of my happiness and wellbeing but I cannot do it. As much as I want to, I cannot leave Harry. To do so would ruin two lives – three, if we are to count mine. I know life is hard enough for you now, fighting daily the prejudice of the narrow minded, and I cannot bear to add to your problems. As I would. If we were to live together you would be disgraced, the business you have fought so hard to establish, ruined. And Palmer, I am sorry, but I could not do it to Orla. You know how she adores Harry. I know in my heart that he will always be unfaithful, but she is the most precious thing I have and her happiness must take precedence over ours. I say must, because that is a mother’s only true task – to protect her children and always to put their needs before her own.

  My love, I am so sorry. I could cry a river for us both, but what good would it do? Never doubt my feelings for you. If it were otherwise – if I had met you first . . . But I didn’t and my sorrow is unending. I am glad now of the stupid mix-up with Harry’s surname. It means that yours is untainted with betrayal and will forever stand for me as a true and noble love that I will cherish to the last breath I draw.

  That I promise you.

  All my love, always.

  Clare

  Chapter Twenty-six

  I don’t remember getting down the stairs but I found myself in the kitchen filling a cup at the sink, moving blindly about as I tried to calm my chaotic thoughts. The words of the letter seemed impressed into my brain in fiery print, every letter a scorching betrayal. A true and noble love she had called it. And this a month before he had murdered them both! There had been, it seemed, betrayal on both sides of my parents’ marriage. My father’s I had, to a degree, already accepted, time having by now eroded the initial shock, but that my mother had looked beyond her vows as well . . . I plumped down onto a chair holding my head in my hands as I thought it out.

  Mum had plainly believed in the army story, which meant that Palmer hadn’t told her of the bigamy. And her death had been unforeseen, a hideous accident. She had refused to leave the marriage, to live in sin, as Palmer himself would have phrased it, so he had taken steps to remove the problem. Then, presumably, her scruples overcome by fate, he and Mum would have married. I wondered how Emu Springs would have liked that. The squatter’s wife and the part Aboriginal who had dared to marry into her inheritance – not something, I imagined, that would have gone down well back in 1963.

  For a moment I almost felt pity for Palmer. He had striven so hard to make a success of his life, to build a business and acquire the home and smattering of culture that would make him worthy in my mother’s eyes. The wine cellar, the expensive fitting-up of the house, the dinners for his clients, served on the best china, even his opera recordings . . . She had been musical, so he would develop his own interest. She had known about gracious living – the right fork, what wines to serve at a meal – so he had made himself similarly aware of those aspects of her upbringing. None of it had been, as both Marty and I had assumed, a flaunting of the position he had fought to attain, but rather tributes of love to lay at my mother’s feet. To overcome, in his own mind at least, the disgrace of his birth.

  My pity lasted only a moment, then the rage roared back – at her, at him, at my philandering father, but mostly at her. In the light of that letter it was painful to recall that I had ever thought my mother happy. It seemed I had not known her at all, any more than I had my father whose lechery had apparently been as natural to him as his charm.

  How, I wondered, had she managed to pretend so well that our lives were happy? I had been, I supposed, as self-centred as most children but I remembered my parents talking and laughing together. Had the note of their laughter been forced? Had they ever held hands when they stood together? Either I had never noticed or simply couldn’t remember. If they had lived until I was older would I have discerned the papered-over cracks in the marriage? And yet, I recalled, nobody had guessed about me and Mark, and love, of the blazing kind we had shared, was surely harder to conceal than unhappiness, which might, after all, be blamed on a headache or bad news or even, at a pinch, the weather.

  Why hadn’t Palmer destroyed the letter? At the very least it provided a motive for murder – except that nobody had ever thought the deaths more than another rural tragedy brought about by speed and poor roads. So either he had forgotten about it, or as the cancer spread through his body, it had ceased to matter. He had written out his confession although, I now recalled, it had contained only his feelings for his sister-in-law and nothing about hers for him. Why? To leave her reputation unsullied? In which case why risk keeping her letter – unless he had hoped that I would find it?

  You could think yourself into knots, I thought wearily, and this wasn’t getting the work done. I glanced automatically at the bare space on the kitchen wall where the clock had hung before remembering it was packed away, then down at my watch now showing noon. Time for a lunch break then and a fresh assessment of the tasks to complete. Cleaning the house was going to take the most time; it had cost me an hour yesterday just to get all the curtains down and so far I’d only managed to put half of them through the wash. Marty wasn’t free to assist but I wondered if the girl from the agency – Amy, that was her name – could be hired for a day to help out? She seemed to have little enough to do and if the business was closing down anyway . . . I’d ring Ben tonight and ask.

  The afternoon sped by, the bookcases yielding only one further discovery: a framed photograph of my mother concealed behind a row of hardbacks on a lower shelf. It was a studio shot I had never seen before, possibly taken before her marriage for it had that soft, hand-tinted look of pre-colour photography. She might have been twenty, I thought, and what I had so often heard was true – hair colour apart it could have been me at the same age. All modesty aside, hers was a striking beauty. The wide blue-grey eyes stared, unshadowed, into mine, the line of her cheeks sweeping sweetly down to the slightly pointed chin. Her short upper lip complemented the perfect teeth that showed in her smile and the tumble of dark hair curled seductively onto her shoulders. Tracing a finger over the dusty glass I felt my anger dissipate; she looked so young and vulnerable and my father, damn him, had taken that innocence with a sham marriage and a string of affairs. No wonder she had turned to Palmer as he must have been then, rock solid in his allegiance, dependable, kind even (though that seemed a stretch). Certainly not the man he had later become – the one I had known – soured by grief and guilt.

  Sitting on my heels in the quiet house, studying her face I was suddenly glad that, physically at least, I resembled her and not my father. Given what I now knew of his character it seemed a good thing. She was wearing pink, a soft ruched neckline that concealed her body and upper arms while highlighting the delicate skin of her
face. I favoured blue myself, pale and clear, like the skies above the Barrier on days such as this.

  At five o’clock, carrying the last carton, I banged the front door shut behind me and transported the day’s packing to the agency where I was lucky to find Ben finishing up a quick inventory of the stock.

  ‘Just getting an idea of what there is for the sale,’ he explained. He helped carry the cartons inside and agreed without a blink to my request for a day of Amy’s time. ‘Certainly, if she’s willing.’ He nodded at the stack of boxes in the corner of the display room. ‘Is there much more to come?’

  ‘A bit. I hope to have the last of it sorted and packed by tomorrow lunch. There’s still the awkward stuff I can’t get into a box, but it’s in the garage. It shouldn’t bother anyone there. Are you coming out to the Park tonight?’

  ‘Yep.’ He grinned, happy as a sand boy.

  ‘I’ll see you then.’ I said, and waved as I drove off.

  The following morning I packed the now-laundered curtains, a mop, broom, bucket and other cleaning aids into the Nissan, resolving to make a start on the house once the last carton was removed. Amy and I could spend tomorrow finishing the job, but it wouldn’t hurt to get a head start. The first of the PGs would arrive at the Park on Monday. I had rung Les Wingate to ask if he could come out on Tuesday and he had agreed, offering to bring his swag and stay overnight if Wednesday better suited the customers.

  ‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘Maybe we should just play it by ear for now because at this point I don’t know what will suit them. Time enough to lay down a timetable when I have regular bookings.’

  I had no sooner replaced the hand-piece than the phone rang again. I dithered a moment – I was already late – then sighed and picked it up to find Alec on the line.

  ‘Morning Orla. It’s a lovely one here. I just wanted to say hello, and see how you are?’