31
Five days later, Kitty and Sarah left Adelaide with Ralph at the break of dawn to travel to Port Augusta, where they boarded the Ghan train, their luggage neatly stowed in their sleepers by the porters. Over the three-day journey, they settled into a calm routine, accompanied by the rhythmic chug of the train as it pulled them through the increasingly rugged and empty red desert. Kitty was happy to have Sarah with her, not only for her practical nature, but also for her enthusiasm – her constant delight at every turn of the journey helped Kitty to see the landscape through fresh eyes.
They spent the long afternoons in the observation car, Sarah’s face glued to the window as she announced each new sight and sound to her mistress.
‘Camels!’ she gasped, pointing to a line of them snaking through the landscape.
‘Yes, the steward mentioned they’re most likely travelling to meet the train at the next station,’ said Ralph without glancing up from his papers. And sure enough, when they stopped at Oodnadatta, Sarah watched with rapt attention as the Afghan cameleers, dressed in their white turbans and flowing robes, collected supplies from the train and packed them onto their own stalwart and elegant chauffeurs of the desert.
With Sarah by her side, Kitty too watched the changing scenery of red mountains, shining white salt flats and azure blue rivers, marvelling that, after all these decades in Australia, its interior had passed her by.
They arrived in Alice Springs onto a packed platform, where it seemed as if the entire town had arrived to greet the train. They squeezed through the clamouring crowd and Ralph organised a pony and cart to take them to the main street of the town.
They were deposited in front of what proudly named itself the Springs Hotel. With their driver bringing up the rear carrying their cases, they stepped into a dark and dusty reception area.
‘Not quite what you’re used to, is it, Missus M?’ Sarah whispered into her ear as Ralph asked if the proprietor, Mrs Randall – a grizzled woman who looked as though she bathed in gin regularly – had any spare rooms. She did, and they were each given a key.
‘Privy’s out the back, an’ there’s a water barrel for washing in.’
‘Thank you,’ Kitty said, nodding at the woman as Sarah pulled a face to show what she thought of the sanitary arrangements.
‘Blimey, even the orphanage ’ad an inside privy,’ she whispered.
‘I’m sure we’ll survive,’ said Kitty as they made their way up the wooden stairs.
All three of them were exhausted that night and ate dinner early in the tiny downstairs parlour.
‘Mrs Randall says that Kilgarra cattle station is two days’ ride away. So I’ll set about finding someone to take me there. Will you be accompanying me?’ asked Ralph.
‘No,’ Kitty said firmly. ‘We only have ten days here and I wish to see Ayers Rock. I’m sure you’ll be able to report back to me on the situation, Ralph. Now, I think I will retire for the night. The journey here has quite exhausted me.’
Upstairs in her basic room, she lay on the hard horsehair mattress and gazed through the pane of glass that wore its outer dust as a second skin. She knew Drummond wouldn’t be at the cattle station – he couldn’t have risked being recognised. Yet however much logic told her he could be anywhere in this vast landscape, being here in the Outback made him feel close, somehow.
This is his place, his land . . .
‘Kitty,’ she spoke fiercely to herself, ‘you have just officially had him declared dead. Besides, he is almost certainly no more than bones by now . . .’
With this stern talking-to administered, Kitty rolled over and fell asleep.
* * *
Outside the hotel the following morning Ralph looked more than a little nervous as he sat on a cart next to his Aboriginal driver.
‘This’ll be an adventure to tell Ruth and Eddie about, won’t it?’ he said, giving Kitty and Sarah a strained smile. ‘God willing, I’ll see you both at the end of the week. Right, let’s be on our way.’
The driver gave the pony a tap and the cart rumbled off down the dusty street.
‘Rather ’im than me, Missus M. Blimey, it’s ’ot!’ Sarah fanned herself. ‘I were thinking I should go to the draper’s across the road and see if I can buy some material to make us a couple o’ sun bonnets, with netting across ’em to keep these blinkin’ flies out o’ me face.’ Sarah swatted one that had landed on her cheek.
‘Good idea,’ Kitty agreed. ‘I suggest we spend the day here in town and travel to Ayers Rock tomorrow.’
‘Right you are, Missus M. When I come back, I’ll do me best to wash your smalls in that barrel outside.’
Having given Sarah some coins from her purse, she watched the girl disappear into the crowded street. It was bustling with a mixture of white and Aboriginal people, the road busy with men on horseback, ponies and carts and the odd car. The scene took her back to her early days in Broome – a multicultural mix of humanity, determined to make its way in a harsh, unforgiving environment.
Having eaten lunch and unused these days to the sweltering heat, Kitty went back inside the hotel and took refuge under the ceiling fan above her bed. As dusk fell and the heat of the day abated, she decided she would take a walk outside or she would never sleep tonight. Arriving downstairs in the tiny reception, Mrs Randall looked up from a man she was talking to over the counter.
‘Good evening, Mrs Mercer. Marshall says he’ll be here bright and early to take you out ta the Rock. Best if you travel before the sun’s up, so he suggests four o’clock tomorrow morning. That all right with you?’
‘Thank you. That will be perfect.’
Kitty had just turned the door handle when Mrs Randall added, ‘Just the two of you for supper tonight, is it? Maybe Mr D here can join you.’
‘I . . .’
The man had turned round and was now staring straight at her, his blue eyes wide in his nut-brown skin above a fuzz of grey beard.
Kitty clutched the front door for support, her gaze unable to leave his.
‘O’ course, if you would prefer to eat separately, I can arrange it.’ Mrs Randall looked bemused as her two guests continued to stare at each other.
‘It’s up to the lady,’ he said eventually.
Kitty tried to form a reply, but her brain was simply scrambled.
‘Are you all right, Mrs Mercer, love? You’ve gone ever such a funny colour, you have.’
‘Yes . . .’ She tried hard to release her hand from the doorknob, but knew she may well fall over if she did. With an almighty effort, she turned it to pull the door open. ‘I’m going out.’
In the street, Kitty turned blindly and began to walk briskly away from the hotel.
It cannot be . . . it just cannot be . . .
‘Kitty!’
At the sound of his voice behind her, her legs broke into a run. She turned down a narrow lane, not caring where she was going as long as he couldn’t catch her.
‘For God’s sake! I could outrun you by hopping!’
‘Damn you! Damn you to hell!’ she swore as her chest tightened. She slowed as purple patches began to appear in front of her eyes and a firm hand gripped her arm. On the verge of fainting, she bent over, panting like an asthmatic dog and having no choice but to let him take her weight.
‘Sit down. I’ll go and get you some water.’ He gently eased her down onto a doorstep. ‘Wait there, I’ll be back.’
‘I don’t want you back . . . Go away, go away . . .’ Kitty moaned as she bent her head between her knees and tried to hold on to consciousness.
‘Here, drink this.’
With her eyes closed, she smelt the whisky before she saw it.
‘NO!’ She swiped at the tin mug, which went sailing through the air, then bounced and rolled across the ground, spilling its contents. ‘How dare you!’
‘How dare I what?’
‘Bring me liquor! I need water!’
‘I have that here too.’
Kitty grabbed the flask he offered her and gulped the water down. Taking some deep breaths while fanning herself with her bonnet, her senses slowly returned to her.
‘What are you doing here?’ she gasped.
‘I’ve been coming here for almost forty years. I rather think it’s me that should ask you that question.’
‘I hardly think it’s any of your business . . .’
‘You are right as always, but I will warn you that our theatrics along the main street of Alice Springs will soon be everyone else’s business. Could I suggest that we continue this conversation somewhere more private?’
‘You will escort me back to the hotel,’ she said, allowing him to pull her to standing and feeling a number of eyes upon them. ‘And then you will leave.’
‘Hah! You’ve arrived on my patch. You’re the one who should leave.’
‘We’ll see about that,’ she retorted.
They said no more until they reached the hotel. He paused on the doorstep and turned to her.
‘I suggest that for the sake of form, we take dinner together tonight. We happen to be sharing a roof under the watchful eye of the town gossip.’ He indicated Mrs Randall, standing behind her reception desk and peering at them through the dust-coated pane of glass in the front door. ‘And later, when she is asleep, which is usually around nine thirty after a few bottles of grog, we will talk.’
‘Agreed,’ Kitty said as he moved to open the door.
‘Everything all right, ducky?’ Mrs Randall asked her as they walked into reception.
‘Yes, thank you. It must have been the heat of the day affecting me.’
‘For sure, dearie, it gets to all of us, don’t it, Mr D?’ Mrs Randall winked at him.
‘It certainly does, Mrs R.’
‘So have we decided if we’re eating together?’ Mrs Randall queried.
‘Of course,’ he answered. ‘Mrs Mercer and I met many years ago. Her husband was a . . . close friend of mine. It will be a pleasure to catch up on old times, won’t it, Mrs Mercer?’
Kitty could see that at least part of him was finding this charade funny. Before she put her hands around his neck, she managed a strangled ‘Yes’, then walked as calmly as she could up the stairs to her room.
‘Good God!’ she exhaled as she slammed the door, then locked it behind her for good measure. She lay down on her bed to try and still her banging heart.
You loved him once . . .
Kitty rose a few minutes later, and prowled the room like a trapped animal. She studied her face in the small looking glass, which had bevelled black lines that criss-crossed it and marred her reflection.
She gave a small chuckle that fate should bring her here to a place where there was barely a feminine comfort to make herself smell nice or to look better for him. Even though, of course, she didn’t want to and it shouldn’t matter . . . Deriding herself for her vanity, but nevertheless, fetching Sarah from the room next door, she asked her to take out her favourite cornflower-blue muslin blouse, and do something with her mane of greying auburn hair that had become as unruly as a spoilt child and was hanging in an unwashed mass of curls about her face.
‘I think it suits you down, Missus M,’ commented Sarah as she attempted to twist it into combs. ‘Makes you look years younger.’
‘We’re eating with a very old friend of my husband’s,’ announced Kitty as she added a little lipstick to make her mouth seem fuller. Then, as it began to bleed into the lines that led from her lips, she rubbed it off harshly.
‘Missus Randall mentioned there was a gentleman who’d be eating with us tonight. Didn’t realise ’e was an old friend of yours. What’s ’is name?’
Kitty swallowed hard. ‘Everyone here calls him Mr D.’
He was waiting for them in the parlour, and Kitty could tell from his clean skin and freshly shaved face that he too had made an effort to smarten himself up.
‘Mrs Mercer.’ He stood, then bent to kiss her hand. ‘What a coincidence this is.’
‘Indeed.’
‘And who is this?’ His attention turned to Sarah.
‘This is Sarah. I met her aboard ship on my journey back to Australia a few months ago. She is my lady’s maid.’
‘’Ow do you do, sir?’ Sarah dipped an unnecessary curtsey. ‘Very well indeed, thank you. Shall we sit down?’ he suggested.
As they did so, he reached to whisper in Kitty’s ear. ‘You really do excel at collecting waifs and strays.’
Over the rather good stew, which they were informed by ‘Mr D’ was kangaroo, Kitty sat back and watched as Drummond charmed Sarah. She herself was happy for another person to be present, which removed the attention from her. Her stomach was so tight that every swallow made her feel as though she would burst.
‘So, where do you go from here?’ he asked Sarah.
‘We’re off to see some big rock in the centre of the desert tomorrow,’ Sarah informed him blithely, taking another slug of the ale Drummond had insisted she try. ‘Missus M wants to see it for some reason. It seems a long way to go to see a bit o’ stone, if yer know wot I mean.’
‘I do, but trust me, once you get there, you’ll understand. It’s special.’
‘Well, if we’re up at four, I’m off to me bed. What about you, Missus M?’
‘She’ll be up after a coffee, won’t you, Mrs Mercer?’ Drummond eyed her.
‘All right.’ Sarah gave one of her enormous yawns, and rose from the table. ‘See you bright and early tomorrow morning.’
Kitty watched as she tottered unsteadily out of the parlour.
‘Is it a habit of yours to get young women tipsy? Sarah is not yet sixteen!’ she whispered.
Drummond raised his glass of ale. ‘To you, Kitty. I swear you haven’t changed one jot since the first moment I laid eyes on you. What is it, I’ve often wondered, that makes you quite so angry?’
Kitty shook her head, hating how, after all these years, Drummond could reduce her to a mass of seething insecurity and fury. Again, she had a desperate urge to slap him.
‘How dare you speak to me like that!’
‘Like what? You mean, not like the rest of your lackeys who bow and scrape at the feet of the famous Kitty Mercer, who suffered such a huge family tragedy, but against all odds rose to be the most powerful pearling mistress in Broome? Respected and revered by all, despite the fact that her success has stripped any form of love from her life?’
‘Enough!’ Kitty rose instinctively from her chair, not wishing to give Mrs Randall further gossip to spread about town and knowing she was about to explode. ‘I will say goodnight.’ She walked towards the door.
‘I’m impressed at your self-control. I was expecting a punch at any second.’
Kitty sighed deeply, too weary and confused to fight any longer. ‘Goodnight, Drummond.’ She walked up the stairs to her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Stripping off her cornflower-blue blouse, and berating herself for ever thinking to wear it in the first place, she climbed into bed. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she cried.
Just as she was calming down and thinking that she might actually doze off, there was a timid knock on her door. She sat up, fully awake.
‘Who is it?’
‘Me,’ a whisper came through the wood.
Kitty darted out of bed, not sure whether she had locked the door behind her when she had come in. The answer stood in front of her as Drummond entered, looking as wretched as she felt.
‘Forgive me, Kitty.’ He closed the door behind him and locked it firmly. ‘I came to apologise. I don’t behave like such a pig around anyone else. It was a shock to see you. I . . . didn’t – don’t,’ he corrected himself, ‘know how to handle this.’
‘That makes two of us. And you’re right, this is your patch. It is I that should leave. I shall go to Ayers Rock tomorrow, then make plans to return to Adelaide as soon as possible.’
‘Really, there is no need to do that.’
‘I’m afraid there is. Good Lord, if anyone recognises me, or us together . . . I just received Andrew’s death certificate before I left.’
‘So, you have finally killed me off. Well now, there’s a thing.’ Eventually he roused himself, looked at her and gave her a weak smile. ‘No matter, Kitty. Round here I’m simply known as Mr D: a drover who never stays in one place for longer than a few weeks. I’ve heard it whispered that I’m an ex-convict, escaped from Fremantle Jail.’
‘You could certainly be taken for one.’ Kitty eyed his still thick mass of dark hair, turned grey in parts, the rugged face lined more by the sun than age, and the broadness of his chest complemented by thick, muscled arms.
‘Now, now, let’s not start trading insults again.’ He gave her a half-smile. ‘I shall begin our new detente by telling you that you look hardly a day older than you did. You are still beautiful.’
Kitty touched her greying hair self-consciously. ‘I know you’re being kind, but I appreciate the gesture.’
A silence hung between them as a lifetime of memories flashed before their eyes.
‘So here we are,’ Drummond said eventually.
‘Yes, here we are,’ she echoed.
‘And I must tell you, in case I don’t get another chance, that there has not been a day in almost forty years when I have not thought about you.’
‘In anger, probably.’ Kitty gave him a wry smile.
‘Yes,’ he chuckled, ‘but only in connection with my own impetuous behaviour, which has rendered my life since nothing but a hollow sham.’
‘You look very well on it, I must say. I can hardly believe that you are over sixty.’
‘My body knows it,’ he sighed. ‘These days I am beset with the vagaries of age. My back aches like the dickens after a night out on the ground, and my knees creak every time I climb onto my nag. This is a life for a young man, Kitty, and I’m not that any longer.’
‘What will you do?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. What do clapped-out drovers do in their old age? Come to think of it, I hardly know a single one. We’ve normally all copped it by fifty. Been bitten by a snake, died of dysentery or ended up on the end of a black man’s spear. I’ve had the luck of the nine blind, in that regard anyway. Perhaps it’s because I gave up caring if I lived or died after I last saw you, so the old bugger upstairs has kept me alive to punish me. Well.’ He slapped his thighs. ‘There we go. How about you?’
‘I’m leaving Australia for good after I return to Adelaide.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Home, or at least, to Europe. I’ve bought an apartment in Italy. Like you, I feel Australia is a young man’s – or woman’s – game.’
‘Ah, Kitty, how did we grow so old?’ Drummond shook his head. ‘I still remember you at eighteen, singing at the top of your voice in The Edinburgh Castle Hotel, as drunk as you like.’
‘And whose fault was that?’ She eyed him.
‘Mine, of course. How is Charlie? I know a fellow from the mission at Hermannsburg who said he’d been to school with him and hoped he’d come to visit him one day.’
‘You must be talking about Ted Strehlow.’
‘I am. The fella is mad as a cobra with a migraine, but I meet him occasionally on his travels in the Outback. He’s a self-fashioned anthropologist, studying Aboriginal culture.’
‘Yes, I met him once in Adelaide. Sadly, you cannot have seen Mr Strehlow recently. Charlie died seven years ago in the Japanese attack on Roebuck Bay.’
‘Kitty, I didn’t know!’ Drummond walked towards her and sat down on the bed next to her. ‘Good God, I didn’t know. Forgive me for my insensitivity.’
‘So’ – Kitty was determined not to cry – ‘I have nothing to keep me here in Australia, which is why I’m going home.’ After a pause, she looked at him. ‘It’s so very wrong, isn’t it?’
‘What is?’
‘That you and I should still be sitting here on the earth, while my boy – and so many others we loved – are no longer with us.’
‘Yes.’ His hand reached to cover hers.
Kitty felt its warmth travelling through her skin and realised his was the last male hand that had touched her in such a gesture for almost forty years. She wound her own hand around it.
‘You never remarried?’ he probed.
‘No.’
‘Surely there were plenty of suitors?’
‘Some, yes, but as you can imagine, they were all fortune hunters. You?’
‘Good God, no! Who would have me?’
Another long silence hung between them as they sat there, hands clasped, each contemplating the secrets they kept from each other, but cherishing the moment they were sharing.
‘I really must retire, or I’ll be good for nothing in the morning,’ Kitty said eventually. Yet her body made no move to release his hand from hers. ‘Do you remember Alkina?’ she asked into the silence.
‘I do.’
‘She disappeared the night before Charlie’s twenty-first birthday. And then Camira did the same a few months later when I was away in Europe.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Fred left too after that. He went walkabout and never returned. And I haven’t had sight nor sound of any of them since. I must have done something very bad in my life. Everyone I love leaves me.’
‘I didn’t. You sent me away, remember?’
‘Drummond, you know that I had no choice. I—’
‘Yes, and I will regret my actions until my dying day. Rest assured I’ve had long enough to do that already.’
‘We were both culpable, Drummond, make no mistake.’
‘It was good to feel alive, though, wasn’t it?’
‘It was, yes.’
‘Those memories have kept me going on many a long, cold night out in the Never Never. Kitty . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I have to ask this.’ Drummond ran a hand through his hair, uncharacteristically nervous. ‘I . . . heard rumours that you were with child after I left.’
‘I . . . How did you know?’
‘You know how news travels in the Outback. Kitty, was the baby mine?’
‘Yes.’ The word came out in an enormous bubble of released tension, as Kitty finally voiced the secret she’d kept for all these years.
‘There is no doubt?’
‘None. I had . . . bled after Andrew left.’ A faint blush rose to Kitty’s cheeks. ‘Before you and I were—’
‘Yes. So.’ Drummond swallowed hard. ‘What happened to our baby?’
‘I lost him. For seven months, I felt him inside me, a part of you, a part of us, but I went into labour early and he was stillborn.’
‘It was a boy?’
‘Yes. I called him Stefan, after your father. I felt that was right under the circumstances. He’s buried in Broome cemetery.’
Kitty sobbed then. Huge, gulping, ugly tears as her body expressed all that she’d held inside her for so long. To the only other person on the earth who could possibly understand. ‘Our baby son and Charlie, both gone to ashes. Good grief! Sometimes the days have seemed so dark I’ve wondered what the point of it all is.’ Kitty used the bed sheet to wipe her eyes. ‘There now, I’m being self-indulgent and I have no right to be living when my two sons are dead.’
‘My God, Kitty . . .’ Drummond put his arm around her trembling shoulder. ‘What havoc love can wreak on us sad humans.’
‘A little love,’ Kitty murmured, her head lying against his chest, ‘and it destroyed us both.’
‘You must take comfort from the fact that nothing in life is quite that simple. If Andrew had not sent me to collect the Roseate Pearl, it would be him that had returned to you alive, and me lying at the bottom of the ocean. We must try to be responsible for our own actions, but we cannot be responsible for the actions of others. They have an insidious way of wrapping like bindweed around our own destinies. Nothing on earth is separate from the other.’
‘That’s awfully profound,’ whispered Kitty with the ghost of a smile.
‘And thankfully, I believe it to be true. It is all that has kept me from throwing myself off the top of Ayers Rock.’
‘But where has it left us? Neither of us have family to pass any of our wisdom on to. For the Mercers, it is the end of the line.’
There was a long pause before he replied. ‘Kitty, I beg you to trust me one last time. There is somewhere I should take you before you leave. You must come with me tomorrow.’
‘No, Drummond, I have spent the last forty years of my life wishing to go to Ayers Rock and I will do so in a few hours’ time. Nothing can dissuade me.’
‘What if I swear I’ll take you there the day after? Besides, it will mean you don’t have to rise until eight, given it is already past one in the morning. I beseech you, Kitty. You must come.’
‘Please, Drummond, swear to me it is not simply a wild goose chase?’
‘It is not, but equally, we must go as soon as we can. Before it’s too late.’
Kitty looked at his grave expression. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Hermannsburg. There is someone you need to see.’