Anna of Strathallan (20 page)

Anna thought her grandparents looked a little excited. But that was absurd. Why would they? No, they had more the look of people about to spring a birthday surprise on a dear child. Equally absurd, because nothing eventuated and they retired fairly early.

She woke to a tap on her door, not an urgent one, a discreet one. Someone evidently didn't want to disturb the rest of the family. She said 'Coming,' and went quietly to the door. Enough light to show her a fully-dressed Calum, but not in farming gear, more like sporting garb.

Her eyes, above purple pyjamas, were enormous. 'What is it?'

'Surprise, surprise! I cooked it up with Kit and Gilbert last night. I'm taking you down to the sea today, to "the flung spray and the blown spume, and the seagulls crying". Throw a dressing-gown on and come downstairs. I've got breakfast all ready. But not being the world's best cook, I started the bacon too early and don't want it frizzled. Don't even stop to wash your face or brush your hair. You can shower after.'

She blinked sleepily at him, hooked the white towelling robe that was on the back of the door down, tied it round her, and crept downstairs in his wake. She looked like a child in the short jacket, rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. He laughed at her indulgently.

'Good girl! You didn't stop to reason why, you just obeyed. Can't stand girls who'd rather die than appear without their faces on and their hair slicked up. But you're one of the lucky ones I'd say. Your hair is hardly ruffled.'

She laughed. 'It's so thick the layers just lie on top of each other.' She looked at the table and all sleepiness left her. 'How odd, I'm starving, yet it must be still about the middle of the night.' She swung round to look at the old schoolroom- type clock on the wall. 'Just four o'clock, why, Calum, do we have to be so early? And what sea do you mean?'

'The Pacific, of course. Your sea.
The
one that washes the beaches of your beloved Suva, but a good many degrees colder. Not that it will matter today, we won't be swimming. We're going out in a launch belonging to a good friend of mine. It's a hundred miles to Dunedin and about another twenty-five to Karitane. That's why we had to rise so early. This chap's only there at weekends. I've spent many with him, so I know how to handle the boat Can't promise you a coral reef, but there's a quite tricky bar.'

All of a sudden the bright, warm kitchen wavered before Anna's eyes. She blinked rapidly, realized Calum had seen the tears, said, 'Oh, this is stupid of me. Only it's - it's so kind. I-'

He said, deftly sliding rashers of bacon on to the warmed plates, 'Why not kind? Don't I regard you as the sister I've never had? You live in the same house, like the same things.'

It steadied her, cooled her emotions down. Of course. It was a
brotherly
thing to do. That was all it was to him.

He pulled out a chair for her. 'I didn't say you were homesick, just that you suddenly had a yen for the sea. Kit and Gilbert immediately suggested I take you to Bull Creek, out on the coast from Milton, a glorious spot, but I thought if we went to Karitane, you could actually go out on the sea in Doug's boat. I rang round while you were upstairs last night. Didn't want to say anything till I was sure we could have the launch.'

Ring round. Oh, yes, he'd been talking to Victoria too. She reached out for the marmalade. She must be quite candid. 'Calum, you did mention it to Victoria when you were talking to her?'

'Yes, of course. That was why I rang her.'

Anna was busy cutting her toast into strips so didn't look up.

'You asked her if it would be all right, I hope?'

He said softly, 'I get it. You feel you disturbed Sophy over Philip - you don't want Victoria to get wrong ideas too!'

She looked up then. 'Yes, of course. I appreciate the brotherly concern, Calum, as long as Victoria recognizes it for that You see, if I was engaged to you -1 mean if I was engaged to a man - and he took a girl out for a whole day, I have an idea that I'd get jealous. But if she really does understand, then—'

'She does. Not to worry. Nothing upsets Victoria. She sent you her love.'

'Nothing upsets her?'

'Well,
nothing now. Things used to. But she was educated in the University of Hard Knocks, so she's got a fair idea of the fitness and relevance of things and doesn't read ulterior motives into everything I do '

Anna felt slightly put in her place.

His voice crisped, 'Now, if you don't want another cup of tea, off for that shower. Kit said she'd slit my throat if I allowed you to as much as wash a cup, and you're to leave your bed too. We want as many hours of daylight as possible and by the time you're ready the sun will be up. Nice if we'd been able to see it rise, but we won't make it.'

'Like to bet on it? I had a bath last night, I'll skip the shower. I'd rather have the dawn.' She was off like a lintie.

He had the Avenger at the door by the time she came down in white trews and sweater with a high roll collar and a turquoise-and-white spotted kerchief knotted triangular- wise round it, turquoise and white sneakers, and an Alice band in black to confine her hair a little.

How glorious to be off the chain after the close devotion to farm chores of the past weeks. Anna thought that to watch the dawn come up with the man you loved - even if he didn't love you in return - was surely something.

It came up with sudden splendour, as if aware it had an audience, just before they reached Roxburgh. Calum drew the car into the side of the hill-road to watch it. Just two of them in all that glory of light and colour ... as if the world was being made new for them alone.

A silver streak split the sky ahead of them to the east horizontally, then, before sixty seconds had passed, great ochre rays seemed to shoot up out of the slit, and the darkness above it rolled back as the rays widened. It paled from the centre rapidly through shades of inkiness to a pearly grey that was more an absence of light than any hue at all, all depth of shade emptying and ebbing before the onslaught of the mighty sun.

Then nature rushed in to fill that vacuum with banners and billows of pulsing, changing opalescent colours, the night retreating hastily in the bowl of the sky, to its furthermost edges, and disappearing over the horizon from north to south.

It was just as if some stage lighting expert had turned on rainbow beams to bloom and fade to delight the two people who had time to watch. Clouds were outlined in fiery light, blues infused the grey of the dawn sky, and those mysterious lights switched and rayed from copper-rose to amethyst, to baby-pink and deepest fuchsia ... another switch and the clouds were purple and then turned to coral above a stretch of sea-green sky.

'The world put that on specially for us,' exulted Calum, as he let in the clutch and drove off. 'I ordered something extra good in the way of sunrises, but that exceeded all I hoped for.'

They turned a corner and there below them lay immense sheets of colour, the pink and apricot drifts of acres of fruit orchards, and heavy on the air was perfume from an old gnarled pear-tree close to the road, surely the very essence of spring itself.

The orchards patched the whole hillsides. They looked to the left below them and there was the aquamarine of the dammed-up Clutha River at the Roxburgh Hydro, with its colour turned to silver as it cascaded down the spillway. 'I'll take you across to the works soon,' said Calum. 'Dad mentioned it the other night. He'd like to show you through. He's so proud of it you'd think he'd conceived and carried the whole thing through himself. We'll all have to visit him more frequently soon, anyway, because he'll be on his own for a couple of months. Mother's off to Britain to visit Blair.'

Anna was delighted. 'How lovely for her. She's not seen him for many years, has she? Has Yvette written and asked her to come to see the grandchildren? Won't Blair be excited?'

Calum said quietly, 'Blair doesn't even know she's coming. She wants to give him a surprise. I'm a bit uneasy about it. I'd hate her to get rebuffed. She's off as soon as she's finished with her immunizations. Evidently she'd been thinking of it for some time. She's got her passport and visas and what-have-you. She and Dad will still take an overseas trip when he retires, but she feels she must go now. That something impels her. I can't imagine what's stirred her up so suddenly. She's just going to arrive in London, give herself a couple of days to recover from the trip, and then give Blair a ring.

'I can't make it out. He's been writing more frequently than he's ever done Just nice chatty letters, especially for Blair. Ian and I, now, when away from home, write screeds. Blair never did. I said this to Mother the other night. She just looked at me strangely and said, "Yes, he's writing very newsy letters. It's what he doesn't say that bothers me." I expect she means because he never mentions Yvette.

'I said to her that it could be in case she passed them over to us to read, as she does, and he doesn't quite know how Victoria would react to much mention of his wife. Mother looked quite angry and said, "Oh, surely not.. now she's been engaged to you so long. That ought to be water under the mill." Which I suppose is fair enough. But she's got the bit between her teeth.'

'How does your father feel about it?'

'Oh, Dad's a great scout and has always understood Mother. He'd only have to say, "Oh, Judith, I can't bear you to go without me, do wait," and she'd stay, but not Dad. I said to him couldn't he stop her, that I was afraid she might find a situation she didn't like, that Yvette might make her feel unwelcome. Dad said: "Son, I feel it's been laid upon your mother to go. She'd bide here till I retire, I know, but something bids her go and go she must. I'd rather feel lost without her than have her fretting."' Calum was silent momentarily, then said, 'I rather envied him his complete confidence in her doing the right thing.'

Could he mean he wasn't so sure about Victoria? She said slowly, 'I find that most endearing, Calum. But perhaps that sort of confidence only comes after half a lifetime of marriage-He may not have been so sure of her judgment in, say, their engagement days.'

'Why do you say that, Anna? As if reassuring me?'

She turned away as if something had just caught her eye.

'Oh, did you see that profusion of clematis? ... Look, absolutely smothering that old stone hut. It's just a galaxy of pink stars.'

He didn't repeat his question He must have thought better of it.

Roxburgh was hardly stirring yet, except for the milkmen. Anna's eyes swept the rounded shoulders of Mount Benger, with, on its lower slopes, winding ribbons of rows and rows of lombardy poplars in full green leaf. By midday it would be lying in a blaze of sunshine with its bright- roofed houses, vari-coloured, set in gardens so vivid they almost hurt the eye. Private orchards decked the houses with pink and white, grapevines trailed on supports.

'Calum, this is such a dear little town. It blends the new and the old so beautifully. The old gold-mining haunts aren't so derelict here as in others. They're restored and treasured and it seems to have such a happy, neighbourly atmosphere. It has a personality all its own. I call it the marigold town, because it's all golden now, in spring, and from that painting of Grandy's over our mantelpiece, it's burnished gold and burnt orange in the autumn. It's more gentle and dreaming than some of the other more rugged parts of Central.'

They drove into the sun as the miles rolled by. Anna wound down her window so they could hear the birdsong resounding in the glad chorus of early morning. They went over the Beaumont bridge with its really vivid green-blue waters swirling around the pattern of rocks islanded in it. As Calum went on recounting the history of every landmark, Anna marvelled that ever there should have been pioneers to cross these waters on horseback, or on frail punts.... Lawrence was stirring to life, beautifully circled by its hills, with old inns, restored, that could have told many a lawless tale, many a tragedy ... a place that could remember the first discovery of gold, a road that could remember Anthony Trollope's plunging coach-horses on a night of smothering snowdrifts, a place of silver birch avenues, of poplar avenues where beneath the trees, shortly, there would be drifts of lupins as colourful as if rainbows had fallen from the sky.

'Remind me to take you to Gorge Creek on the way to Alexandra to see the wild lupins there next month. There's one patch entirely composed of shadings from palest lilac to deepest purple. Then in other places are the whites, the golds, the blues, the rose-pinks, all mixed like the ones here.'

The hills became lower, and there were deep-red ornamental apple-trees in the gardens, early rhododendrons from pearly pink to purple and a deep flourescent red; wistaria hanging royal plumes round verandah posts, old- fashioned cottages with white-painted Victorian iron lace- work between the posts, prosperous-looking farms with flocks as dazzlingly white as if they'd been bleached, sleek cattle herds, geese waddling down to the little steams.

They wound through the Manuka Gorge, a small one by New Zealand standards, with just a tiny willow-choked rivulet threading through it, but this was an ice-trap in winter, Calum said.

Every quivering leaf added its music to the day. Oh, yes, it would be a day to remember all her life, a glad, rainbow- hued day. Something she would remember when she was eighty. At the thought she laughed aloud.

'Yes?' asked Calum.

She chuckled again 'I found myself thinking I'd remember the beauty of this day when I'm eighty and tried to imagine myself at that. It's almost impossible. Even Grandmother's nowhere near that yet, so I've nothing to pattern myself on.'

Calum agreed. 'Very hard to do. I've heard quite old people say they can't imagine they
are
old. Till they meet their contemporaries! That they feel much the same inside and don't know where the years have gone to.' He paused. 'Now me, I'll have a most severe look. I'll be more beaky than ever. Do you know what Maggie told me the other day? That my side-face was just like those schist rocks near Alexandra! You remember those eroded ones, all scarred by the weather into sharp angles? She's dead right. I could see it myself. But you, Anna—' he paused, 'you'll still look like your grandfather. Your hair may be white too, but it'll always be streaky, I warrant, with that bit of dark-gold showing underneath. And your eyes will still be this purply- brown of pansies.'