Anna of Strathallan (19 page)

'And she's such a sport. She didn't mind a bit when she fell in the creek when she was hanging over trying to see into the kingfisher's tunnel. We wouldn't keep asking her to come if we thought she was only doing it to please us. And you know Bill and Mac don't take too much notice of other people as a rule, but they really
mind
what
she
says. Because she isn't frightened to spank their bottoms when they do dangerous things.'

Betty burst out laughing. 'Well, that's the best recommendation of all. Maggie, I cry peace. I know I sounded mean but all mothers are scared their offspring make nuisances of themselves, but I think you're right. Anna seems to really enjoy your company.'

Anna looked almost apologetic. 'You see, they know I'm on my own. I mean you've got Ian and Calum's got Victoria, and nobody else has first claim on my time. And I love it. I could ramble for hours. You see, I never had anyone in the family to play with. I used to bring children home after school, but they always went home again, and it's marvellous to know that all the hills we explore belong to us.'

'Okay, but tell those devils that when you've had enough, they're not to persuade you to keep going. They just regard you as their very own personal property.'

Anna laughed and departed with them. She just loved Betty. It was probably true what Grandmother had said, Betty wouldn't suit the homestead. She loved everything up- to-the-minute, brand-new furnishings, strong colourings, a clinical-looking kitchen. When she picked up a pair of butter-pats she didn't see, with her mind's eye, Kirsty Drummond dexterously turning out grooved curls of homemade butter still with ice-cold drops of water on them; she merely said, 'Thank goodness we get ours straight from the dairy company these days.'

When she saw Anna flinging the rose-and-thistle rag mat outside for shaking, she didn't see it as a replica of Kirsty's, and generations of Strathallan Drummonds as small children squirming their cold toes in its warmth and softness as they dressed before the old range, glowing red, on mornings of snow or hoar-frost. She just said, 'Real dust-traps, aren't they? Give me something you can vacuum.'

Nevertheless, Betty was fun. She mightn't be one for reading poetry or dreaming over the gold-miners' robust past, but she looked well to the ways of her household, and had a sort of wholesome prettiness and commonsense that was restful. All your friends couldn't be kindred spirits, and Anna had soon realized that as far as Strathallan was concerned, Betty didn't resent her appearance at all. There wasn't an atom of jealousy in her. Anna's last suspicions about the way the Doigs had dug themselves in here, dissolved. She needed to gang warily no longer!

It was only as far as her feelings for Calum were concerned that that still applied. Often she'd find her eyes lingering on him as he stretched out in one of the big wing chairs after dinner, reading or watching TV. She liked his comments on the documentaries, on the world scene, the country calendar series, the political issues of the day at home and abroad, and, closer at hand, his tolerant yet at times strong views on local affairs.

She liked it best when, rarely, perhaps after a harder day than usual on horseback, or the tractor, he'd drop asleep. Then she could watch him unobserved. It was strange how that rather granite-like face would soften then, look a little defenceless.

One night when Kitty was upstairs and Gilbert was busy in the farm office, she indulged herself in this study of his face. Perhaps he'd been working too hard of late. Those grooves in his bronzed cheeks were deeper, surely, than when she'd first come to Strathallan? Certainly he was leaner. The curved lines each side of his lips were emphasized when he laughed, but tonight they suggested weariness and patience to her.

She thought he'd driven himself too hard during October, and though she had chided herself for being fanciful, she'd thought at times he only just held leashed some impatience, as if he disciplined himself, checked something in him that wanted to be uncurbed. Oh, well, some said a long engagement was a strain. There was something immensely appealing about Victoria. She was five years older than Anna, she'd found out, but Anna often felt protective towards her. Odd that, but the make-up of a person could affect one's maturity. Calum had said he was leaving it to Victoria to name the wedding-day. Anna had a strange feeling that Victoria was perfectly happy to be just engaged, not to advance another step.

Anna wondered what it meant. There were women, of course, who because they suspected they were sexually frigid, preferred a long engagement, not wanting to totally commit themselves to anyone, instead of looking on marriage as entry into a new and delightful world, where romance and passion and deep need of each other could be blended into one. Anna checked her thoughts. How did
she
know all this? Then she conceded the answer. Because she so loved Calum. Because that was how she would have looked on marriage with him.

No one living at Strathallan could possibly be cynical about marriage. Kitty still turned eagerly at Gilbert's step as he came in from the fields, lifted her face for his kiss as if, like a man working in the city, she'd not seen him all day. Once, when her grandparents hadn't known she was inside, she had seen Gilbert catch his Kit to him with an abandon Anna thought she'd witnessed hitherto only on television. She had realized, with a lift of the heart, and a little envy, that the passion of true love could last right into old age.

She could have found that with Calum, she knew, but long before she had come here, Calum had asked Victoria to be his wife, and these moments of tenderness when she could watch him unaware, were all she'd ever have of him.

At that moment Calum opened his eyes, fully. It wasn't the look of a man just struggling up from the haziness of slumber, it was the alert look of someone who'd been awake some time but hadn't raised his lids.

There was a long shared moment of eyes looking into eyes across the distance between Calum's chair and the couch on which Anna sat.

Calum said swiftly, 'Anna, what is it? You look wistful and lost. Like that old tag, Anna-where-art-thou? Where were you, Anna? Back in Fiji? What's biting into you?'

The spell broke with his words. She blinked, pretended to be surprised, said, 'I think I must have been far, far away. Just dreaming.'

He sounded abrupt. 'That's what I mean. Dreaming of what? I've never seen you look like that before. You've been so happy-hearted, we take it for granted you're glad to be here. Content with this life. Are you homesick tonight? You looked lost, wistful. It's all right for us, we've been born and bred in this district. But for you it amounts to a foreign land. Tell me, Anna, don't bottle it up ... are you homesick?'

(Oh, no, she wasn't homesick, because home was where the heart was, it was said, but she must go along with that. Because he must never guess. She couldn't stay on if he knew.)

So she said, 'I am, just a little, sometimes. But my grandparents must never know.'

He came to sit by her, took her hand. 'Oh, Anna, no one would have guessed. Tell me what you're most homesick for? Is it the heat, the colour, the palm fronds against the night sky? Soft Fijian voices, coral reefs ... oh, yes, I've been there. How odd I didn't know about you then. If only, like Elizabeth and Ross, I'd picked your guest-house, we'd have met sooner. I'd have recognized you for Gilbert's granddaughter for sure, especially as you bore the name of Drummond.'

She didn't know why she had to ask that first, but she said, 'Was Victoria with you? Were you on a cruise?'

'No. It was long before we were engaged. I was on my own. I flew. I'd had my appendix out and they didn't want me hanging round the farm trying to do things I wasn't fit for. I loved Fiji. You haven't said what you miss most, Anna.'

That was easy, 'Oh, the sound and sight of the sea, Calum. The feel of a boat under me.'

He nodded. 'I can understand that. Living away inland like this must make you feel cut off from an element that's second nature to you. We must get you up to the lakes sometime. They're immense, their beds gouged out by glaciers in the ice-age, sheets of water as blue as the seas because snow-fed. I've heard people who live by the sea say it's the only place that could ever live, if they had to go inland.

'It's been all work and no play for you, lambing's like that. But even the tailing's behind us now. We'll have a day off soon - that's a promise. We'll go down to the sea.'

He heard Kitty coming downstairs singing softly, as she so often did these days. She had a lilt in her voice again now, because her son's daughter filled that emptiness in her heart.

He returned to his seat, picked up his book. Anna said, 'I must go up to my room and sort out some stuff for Maggie. They're doing a project on Polynesian arts and crafts. She came home all starry-eyed about it, knowing I'd be bound to have something. They're having a display, and are each doing a strip, cut from magazines, for a wall decoration.' She slipped away.

By now the trunks she'd stored at Auntie Ed's had been sent down here. Since Mother and Magnus would be in the South Island next year, they were better in safe keeping at Strathallan.

She sorted through tapa-cloth, wood-carvings, coconut shell curios, strings of shell beads. The brochures were at the bottom of this trunk, she thought. Maggie would cut them up and paste them on cardboard tomorrow night under Betty's supervision.

Oddly enough, though she'd used homesickness only as a cover-up for her real feelings, these things did give her nostalgic pangs tonight. Oh, she knew that had Calum been free, and if he had loved her, she'd have known no nostalgia at all - but they lived closely here, in the same house, so that she had grown highly tensed about it, always on guard.

Suddenly an almost unbearable longing for her mother swept her. They'd been such pals, so close, and they'd had such fun. Mother had been her whole world when she was a child. And, here were the brochures. How gloriously coloured they were! Small Maggie would be delighted. How she loved Maggie, with her Highland colouring so like Calum's. The small daughter she might have had herself one day if - oh, stop it, Anna. Then at the bottom she saw her mother's scrapbook. She took it out and went across to the chintz-petticoated chair that an early Anna Drummond had fashioned out of a cheese crate and goose-feather filling long, long ago. She'd curved the back and buttoned it and Anna loved to use it.

She could faintly hear Calum's voice downstairs. He must be phoning. She began leafing through the pages. It was full of clippings of poems, things about Fiji, the occasional bit of publicity about the guest-house from the
Suva Times,
a few cartoons that had taken Lois's fancy. At times, infrequently, she had used it as a journal to enter up some milestone in her daughter's life, or something interesting about some guest, famous for something.

Anna wondered if she ought to be dipping into it. Lois might have used it as a wailing wall. But if it had been very private, Lois would have taken it with her, surely. Tonight, swept with longing for her mother, this brought her near. The first entries were full of her joy in her small daughter. Anna wondered, as she read on, absorbed, how Lois had managed to keep from writing out her anguish, her disillusionment. Was it in case Alex had come across it, and his image of himself be damaged? No, she found the answer to that when she turned a page and found a note that recorded the inscription of an old sundial. 'I record only the sunny hours.' Beside that Lois had written, 'And so do I, in this dear book, record all I find of compensation and inspiration'

Then Anna found a poem that had a whole page to itself and carried a comment that revealed a lot. It was called
Message
and had been cut from a
Good Housekeeping
magazine. It read:

'From this ploughed field the young sweet corn shall spring,

These frozen clods yield to the tender seed,

And pulsing Earth, with all her myriad gifts,

From Winter's paralysing grip be freed.

This rotting mould shall bring forth loveliness,

These leafless branches bloom in bridal white,

And where the moon now gleams on frost and snow,

The briar rose shall scent the summer night.

Then down these sombre walks where you have kept

Your foolish trysts with bitterness and pain,

New joys shall spring; and all old sorrows yield

Before the healing tide of time again.'

Under it were two comments, one in faded ink, one in recent ball-point. The first said, 'I wonder?' The second said, 'New joys
did
spring. Thank you, God.' And the date under it was the eve of her marriage to Magnus Randal. That poem had meant as much to Lois as that.

Anna felt strengthened, happed about with her mother's love and understanding She wished her mother could have known that she too had received comfort from that poem, and by the knowledge that her mother had indeed found that healing tide, the young green corn springing. Perhaps for her too, new happinesses would lie ahead in the years to come. She must put all thoughts of Calum away from her. He was betrothed to Victoria whose first love, long ago, his own brother, had jilted her.

Victoria, then, had felt as Anna did now. But worse, because she had known Blair's love. Could one miss what one had never had? Anna turned swiftly from the thought. She would fight this attraction and never, never betray herself or Victoria.

Victoria was so right for the mistress of Strathallan. Unlike Betty she loved the old, the historical, had exquisite taste in antiques. Naturally, when she was the Otago representative of that top-class firm of interior decorators. She was so knowledgeable about every kind of Colonial antique.

Nothing in Strathallan of sentimental value would be thrown out. She would gather choice pieces of her own about her, and the homestead would be loved and cherished as it had always been. Anna felt there was great comfort in that. And she would be part of it, still, living in the annexe with Kitty and Gilbert.

Anna went downstairs walking tall, secure again in her own resolve not to betray herself. When they were having supper Calum said, 'I was talking to Victoria on the phone, down at Te Anau. She's found an old homestead full of treasures down there. It overlooks the lake, some distance out. She was scouting for items, but got overcome with the enormity of ever removing a thing from this place. So she's talked them into restoring it and running it as a showplace for tourists. She'd landed the job, so her firm will forgive her for not securing the stuff. They're three sisters, who felt it was getting too much for them to keep up on a reduced income - as they'd sold a lot of the land. It wouldn't take much to restore, and they'd make a packet out of tours. That's just Victoria. She'd never bulldoze people into parting with things she feels ought to be retained in their own surroundings. I said to her it's just as well she's so valuable to her firm that she can get away with these things. She laughed, said she'd been in touch with them and they'd said it would be the best possible advert for them. What a girl! She'd never do a mean or wrong thing.'