A Waltz for Matilda (46 page)

‘Us?’

He nodded. ‘I’ll take the mortgage on Moura. But in return you’ll buy sheep for me before it rains next winter too.’ He smiled, almost the man she had first met, nearly eight years ago. ‘I’m not too old to make another fortune, girl. Not yet.’

JUNE 1903

It was cold in the solicitor’s office; the room’s tiny windows didn’t let in much sun. Matilda signed her name, then handed over the bank draft.

‘Congratulations, Miss O’Halloran. Another farm to add to your … collection.’

He doesn’t sound very congratulatory, she thought. This was the fifth parcel of land she had bought in the last year, and each time he had looked gloomier, as though he could see one of his best clients going bankrupt.

She stood up. ‘Will you remind them that they are welcome to stay in the house, as we agreed? I’ll guarantee all jobs as long as they want it.’

Mr Reynolds shook his head. ‘The family is glad to be free of the place, Miss O’Halloran. I can’t blame them.’ He opened the door for her. The wind gusted in, bringing dust and the scent of dried horse droppings and hard paddocks.

And you think I’ve lost my mind, thought Matilda, beginning to walk down the wooden footpath in front of the shops, her hat doing its best to escape down the road despite her hand and hat pins. She had been offered more places than she was able to buy, the last few months.

It had been the hottest, driest summer anyone could remember. Even the river stopped flowing, the pools between the sandbanks edged with algae. She had been buying hay for Drinkwater and Moura and her other properties since Christmas, then when there was no more hay to buy, corn, then even wheat.

And she was buying more land, when any sane person wanted to sell. Even Mr Sampson had shaken his head when she’d suggested he might buy land now, using his savings and part of Mr Drinkwater’s loan. Not even the assurance that Auntie Love had said it would rain had changed his mind.

She’d felt guilty with the first purchase. But not now. The owners were too glad to get their money. And even she was beginning to doubt.

She bent down and turned the crank handle of the motorcar then, when the engine caught, ran quickly around to the driver’s seat and let out the clutch. She’d taught herself to drive this summer, as a distraction from the drought. The problem with drought, she thought, turning the lever to edge the motorcar out into the road, was that there was so little to do. You fed and you watered and you waited.

The engine purred under the bonnet. Ginger Murphy had soon learned what a motor needed to keep it happy. Matilda still preferred a horse, but going to town meant wearing a dress, with stays and pantaloons and shoes with heels, and that meant a sidesaddle on a horse. The car was easier.

It was good to get out of town. Too many stares and curious looks. She hadn’t gone to the ladies’ sewing circle since James’s death. What did she have in common with those women with their children and kitchens anyway? Let them gossip about her. Patricia needed to fit in. Matilda didn’t. She’d wear her difference with pride.

A cloud of dust hung about the car. Half the trees on the Moura hill looked dead, the wattles already turning back to bark and dirt, the gums like ringbarked ghosts. But weather had killed these, not men. Even the trees still living were thin topped, as though they had cast off their leaves like unwanted petticoats.

The ground was bare; the tussocks had been nibbled to the ground. The sheep droppings, the leavings of roo and wombat and wallaby, had shrivelled into small pellets too, covering the ground instead of grass.

It’s going to rain, she thought. It has to.

The days followed each other, the sun rising and setting in a haze of red dust, each so much the same it was as though the land had forgotten how to change.

There was no one to talk to, not about what mattered most. Mr Drinkwater too was watching the horizon, waiting for the strings of cotton in the sky that would say that rain was near.

She wrote another letter to Tommy. She had nowhere to send them to, but she wrote them anyway. She told him about the land, cracking as the last moisture was sucked into the sky. She told him about the sheep, sitting under the trees all day, waiting for the few hours of cool to eat. She told him she missed him. Then she burned the letter in the fire in the drawing room when no one was looking.

Stupid, writing to someone who could never read her letter. But somehow it filled a need she couldn’t quite describe.

She had never heard from him since that last stupid quarrel on the road. When the shock of James’s death had eased, she’d begun to hope that he might at least write her a letter of condolence. He must have read about the court-martial, like the rest of Australia. But even then there’d been no word.

When she read the newspaper sometimes she hoped she might see his name, and an article about the inventor of a moving picture camera, maybe, or a racing driver. But she had never seen him mentioned. He had vanished as surely as all the others that she had loved: more surely, perhaps, for she knew roughly where the others now rested.

Her only comfort was that it was unlikely that he had died. His mother would surely have written to her about that. None of her letters to Tommy care of his mother had been returned. Which meant that she — and Tommy — had received them, read them and chosen not to answer.

It hurt that he had never answered. It hurt even more to realise that she must have caused the pain that meant he wouldn’t answer.

Hey You died. He had slept beside her bed at Drinkwater, despite Mr Drinkwater’s insistence that sheep dogs stay outside. His body was cold and already stiff when she woke. He had died at her side, guarding her, she thought, just like Auntie Love.

She sat on the mat and held his furry body on her lap and cried. She hugged him as she never had when he was alive. He wasn’t a dog for hugging.

Then she carried him downstairs.

July came, with frost that put white whiskers on the sheep droppings and dewdrop icicles on the new barbed-wire fences. The icicles melted at midday, the only moisture the land had seen for almost a year. Sheep, rabbits, wallabies and roos all clustered around the drinking troughs and river pools of Drinkwater and Moura. She even saw a black snake share a pool with a wombat and a dozen sheep, each carefully ignoring the other species. The wind blew hard and cold.

It didn’t rain.

By August she knew she was going to have to sell some stock. She had borrowed another hundred pounds from Mr Drinkwater to pay for her share of feed. She couldn’t borrow more. Even Mr Drinkwater, she thought, must be running low on funds. Had he had to borrow himself? She managed the property. His other investments were his own.

If she sold stock she’d need to let some of the men go too, and there were no jobs for them to go to. The land was running empty, dying for lack of rain.

I could offer to put them on board only, she thought. At least that way they wouldn’t starve. A day’s work a week in return for rations. They could pick up a few shillings maybe selling rabbit skins or koala fur …

She looked at the sky, the bare hard sky. I’ll wait till September, she thought. On 1 September I’ll have to tell the men.