Facing the Flame Read online

  Jed breathed in hugs as they walked together down the aisle. Hugs that smelled of Chanel No. 5, Je Reviens, lanolin or mothballs; sticky hugs from the kids from River View, where she still volunteered at the Therapy Centre; bearded hugs from the blokes from the factory; firm hugs from Leafsong and Carol, in her best overalls embroidered with flowers.

  She was married.

  Chapter 2

  SCARLETT

  Scarlett Kelly-O’Hara could feel Alex staring at Drinkwater homestead from the back seat as Hannah drove her old Volkswagen down the drive.

  Jed had let her ask some of her student friends to the wedding. Hannah’s parents were comfortably off, and Alex Romanov was reputed to be a genuine prince, or at least descended from royalty, even if he did choose to live in a squat near uni. Alex was even more gorgeous than Jack Thompson, with a voice that was going to convince his future patients they were well before he’d taken their pulse. She’d even imagined Alex in a naked Cleo centrefold like Jack Thompson had done, sprawled out on her sofa, though she would die if anyone ever guessed.

  But Scarlett bet neither Alex nor Hannah had ever seen anything like Drinkwater, the big old house in its lush European garden, surveying its empire of paddocks and sheep.

  ‘Wow,’ said Alex.

  Scarlett grinned proudly. Drinkwater looked magnificent.

  Defeated in their desire for a white meringue wedding dress and groom in a dinner jacket, the mother and aunts of the groom and great-aunt of the bride had taken charge of the reception.

  Blue, Nancy, Flinty, Scarlett and assorted helpers had scrubbed Drinkwater homestead from veranda to attic, cleaned windows, polished all that could possibly be burnished in a mansion that had been empty, apart from Jim’s infrequent visits to the farm, since Matilda’s death almost two years earlier.

  The house was vacuumed and dusted once a week, but that was not ‘cleaning’ as the women of Gibber’s Creek understood the term. Drinkwater now looked smug, as though to say, ‘This is how a house of my standing should be treated.’

  Each woman shared an unspoken belief that they cleaned the place for Matilda too. As Matilda had once said, ‘We owe it to the dead to cherish what they loved.’

  Matilda had loved her land, her family, her community and her nation. But Scarlett knew that Matilda had also loved her house. It wouldn’t have pleased her to see it empty, but what could you do with a mansion that was still the heart of a major farm but whose owners already had their own beloved homes, and where the farm manager (retired) had no wish to move from his house of more than fifty years?

  Once more the trestles, clad in white damask, lined the verandas; tubs of ice held beer and champagne, with further trestles of fruit punch, decoratively sparkling in cut-glass bowls, trimmed with mint leaves and slices of lemon from the tree at the back door. Two canvas bags filled with dry ice held ice creams. The CWA marquee had been erected, and each chair had been decorated with a white bow and a bunch of baby’s breath . . .

  Scarlett grinned as Hannah parked the Volkswagen between a dusty Holden ute and Jim’s Mercedes. Because when it came to the wedding feast and wedding cake, the older generation had retreated, outdone by her friend Leafsong’s determination that the centrepiece would not be three layers of white icing and dry fruitcake with the bride and groom on top, but the world’s tallest croquembouche, with each profiterole rising under waterfalls of both chocolate and caramel sauce.

  There were vast bowls of the Blue Belle Café’s Coronation Chicken, the birds raised organically at Halfway to Eternity, beheaded and plucked by Carol and poached by Leafsong while Mark made the curry and apricot-flavoured mayonnaise under her direction. Purple-fleshed potato salad with peanut sauce; multi-coloured lettuce salad; and pumpkin and ghee risotto for the vegetarians — last season’s pumpkins were just starting to go off, but Leafsong had secured enough to feed the hundred guests.

  The traditionalists’ only victory on the food front were the savouries created by the mother of the groom: Blue McAlpine believed a Gibber’s Creek wedding breakfast was not complete without green and red pickled onions on toothpicks, and prunes with bacon.

  Scarlett slid into her wheelchair — Hannah knew enough now not to try to help her, and Alex wouldn’t know how — just as Sam’s ute drew up, now resplendent with a shaving-cream Just Married and a tail of tin cans on strings.

  Jed got out, stared at the damask tablecloths, the CWA marquee, then glared at Sam and Scarlett. ‘Did you know about this? The reception was supposed to be just bring a plate and we’d all sit around the garden!’

  ‘Well, people have brought plates,’ pointed out Scarlett reasonably. ‘And we will be sitting in the garden.’

  ‘Under a marquee. With ribbons! Just promise me there’s no bridal waltz,’ Jed demanded.

  ‘Of course there’s a bridal waltz.’ Sam held up his hand as Jed began to expostulate. ‘Not you and me. The River View kids have been practising a wheelchair waltz for weeks. With a flying monkey.’

  Jed laughed. ‘Any more surprises?’

  ‘A few,’ said Scarlett casually. She began to push her wheelchair along the path to the marquee.

  It was a wonderful wedding. Laughter and excellent food and Sam’s mum, Blue, and Mah McAlpine did a belly dance, just like they’d done when they were with the circus years ago, and Carol and the Beards from the factory performed a song they’d written for the occasion, which was only slightly rude, because of all the kids here.

  She watched the River View kids as their wheelchairs weaved in and out in a synchronised dance to ‘The Blue Danube’, concluding with George’s flying somersault out of his wheelchair then back into it.

  ‘That kid’s got guts,’ whispered Alex beside her.

  Scarlett nodded. She would not cry. That had been her a few years ago, living in an institution, with dreams and determination.

  The music swept into something faster. One of the Sampson girls, gorgeous brown eyes and hair, came up to them. ‘Like to dance?’ she asked Alex.

  ‘Sure.’ He moved onto the dance floor with her. A Beard from the Whole Australia Factory held out his hand to Hannah.

  It didn’t really hurt, thought Scarlett, watching the dancers. Of course her friends would want to dance. It didn’t even hurt (much) when Alex danced with Hannah and then with a few of the Sampson cousins. Everyone wanted to dance with Alex, except the girl with the scarred face and white cane, sitting with a blank look of distaste at the River View table.

  Scarlett looked at her curiously. She was older than the River View kids, but River View did sometimes take older rehab patients.

  ‘Who is she?’ asked Scarlett as Nancy came to sit with her during the next dance.

  ‘Oof, I’m out of breath.’ Nancy fanned herself. ‘These modern dances . . . That’s Lu Borgino. Car accident.’ River View had been started to help kids crippled by polio and then thalidomide. These days far fewer young people needed the kind of help they could give.

  ‘She doesn’t look like she wants to be here,’ observed Scarlett.

  ‘She doesn’t.’ Nancy sighed. ‘But she couldn’t stay at River View by herself with all the staff here. The poor girl was planning to be a jockey and horse trainer before the accident. We can help her get mobility, but we can’t give her life back.’

  ‘Mmm,’ said Scarlett. She had fought all her life for what she wanted, from being able to sit up in a wheelchair and then to be able to wheel herself. She was even living in the flat Jed had bought near uni now, and coping brilliantly. In her opinion, if life took away your chances, you grabbed other ones. Forget about following your dream, she thought. Grab it by the scruff of the neck and drag it with you.

  Except . . .

  She stared at Alex on the dance floor. He was with Carol now. Alex was the most interesting person she had ever met, ever since that first time in the refectory when they’d argued for hours about Agent Orange in Vietnam, and was it just teratogenic, causing birth deformities, or mutagenic, changing
genes so that future generations might be affected by a dose their great-great-grandfather got. Alex was the only person she knew who’d discuss why humans had evolved something as dispensable as an appendix.

  But Alex could only ever be a mate. Because no matter how hard she tried, Scarlett would never be able to dance like that, could never have children . . .

  Nancy looked at her closely. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Scarlett quickly. ‘The place is looking gorgeous. I’ve never seen so many wildflowers. It’s all so green.’

  ‘Too green,’ said Nancy quietly.

  When Nancy of the Overflow said something like that, you listened. ‘How can it be too green?’

  ‘Because if we have a hot dry summer, it’s going to brown off,’ said Nancy grimly. ‘Did you see the way the indigofera bloomed? It does that before a bushfire year.’

  ‘Maybe it’ll keep raining.’

  ‘It won’t,’ said Nancy.

  The music stopped. Someone clinked a spoon against a glass. Up at the table Sam stood up. ‘Hi, everyone. I’ve been ordered by someone not to make a speech.’ Sam grinned down at Jed. ‘So I just want to thank all of you for being here, for making this the most incredible day of my life, and to Jed for marrying me even after she discovered how hairy my toes are. I’d also like to say . . .’ He gazed around the tent. His grin grew wider. ‘. . . that Jed is pregnant!’ The tent erupted in cheers as Sam added, ‘Sometime next February there’s going to be a small McAlpine-Kelly addition to the world . . .’

  ‘Oh!’ Blue ran over to hug her daughter-in-law, wiping away tears of joy.

  ‘Oh, how wonderful,’ said Nancy, sniffing. ‘Where’s my handkerchief?’ She too knew of Jed’s nightmare past. And Jed was family, deeply loved.

  Scarlett tried not to look at Alex standing next to the Sampson girl again. It was wonderful, she thought. She would be the best aunt in the universe, even if she would never be a mother. And she was going to top her year in the exams, and the studies to come would be even more fascinating. Life was incredibly good.

  And the year to come would be perfect.

  Chapter 3

  DRIBBLE, WEDNESDAY, 1 FEBRUARY 1978

  JED

  Life was not quite perfect, thought Jed as she tried to find a comfortable spot on the sofa for her nine months’ pregnant bulk as the fan ineffectually stirred air hot enough to dry a tree full of apricots. Happy, fulfilling, but definitely not perfect.

  Outside, smoke tried to seep past the Dribble window frames into the living room. Sam and Michael had just finished burning a wide firebreak from the road to the river that half circled the house and its paddocks. They’d headed down to Drinkwater after lunch.

  Over by the fan, Maxi slept with the virtuous exhaustion of a dog who has successfully supervised the morning’s work and almost caught a rabbit that had escaped the flames.

  Beyond, the hills rose hazy in the heat, more tree trunks than leaves, as the gums abandoned their foliage in the dry soil, leaves crackling like cornflakes on the hard baked ground, the sky a too-clear blue, as if it had forgotten even the idea of rain. Cicadas yelled, triumphant.

  Only idiots would burn firebreaks in this heat, thought Jed, regretting the afternoon swim she would now not get, unless she wanted to breathe smoke.

  Yet Sam and Michael were not idiots, and nor were Nancy and Blue. If they said there needed to be firebreaks around Overflow, Drinkwater, Dribble and Moura this year, then their reasons would be valid.

  But it was just so hot! The heat sat on her, making even standing up an effort. The burning off had made it worse. If only it would rain. Deep, soaking rain that filled the sky and then the soil.

  Spring’s green grass had dried to long brown hair, wisping against fences, trodden by sheep looking for green pick below — though not in the Overflow–Drinkwater paddocks, where Nancy and Michael kept the groundcover short with mixed mobs of sheep and cattle.

  Summer always meant bushfire somewhere. The fire trucks raced out, the blokes collecting their tools and as much soft drink as they could carry. Jed had even gone out with the crews a few times the year before, despite some muttering and a few rude jokes by the blokes. Sam, Michael and Andy showed her how to rake grass and tussocks to extinguish flame, how to use the fire rakes to scrape burning bark from trees so others could bash out the fire with green wattle branches.

  Most of the fires she’d attended had been lit by someone burning off on a total fire-ban day of high wind, or a trail bike’s spark catching dead leaves on a bush track. Only one had been caused by a lightning strike, soon put out by the following southerly change and rain.

  There’d only been one bushfire so far this season, back before Christmas, a ‘controlled burn’ by the Forestry Commission that had been left unchecked over the weekend and had spread. No matter what the local Forestry workers wanted, rules said they needed to finish work at a set time — and budgets did not allow for overtime.

  Local bushfire brigades couldn’t go onto Commission-controlled lands unless invited. But the mountain men — distantly related to her husband — had ridden in on horseback and kept the boundaries of the fire from spreading till the wind turned, letting the fire die out as it tried to feed on the black ground it had already eaten.

  Husband. It was a . . . comfortable . . . word. Like pregnant. Except pregnancy itself was not comfortable, at least not in the last three months when every stranger seemed to feel free to pat her belly or ask, ‘When is it due?’

  How come everyone said pregnancy lasted nine months when it was really forty weeks, which was really ten months, not nine? Was it part of a vast conspiracy to keep women having babies?

  Jed had a feeling Nature was really a male chauvinist. Why else make the last weeks of pregnancy so impossible?

  No swimming in the river in the last month of pregnancy — though she had ignored that one. How could you survive a Gibber’s Creek summer without a swim in the river?

  Not even any ice cream because suddenly it gave her heartburn. Getting up three times a night because there was no room for a decent-sized bladder when you were carrying a kid who was probably six foot four already.

  Her belly was now officially known as The Bulge in the McAlpine–Thompson–Kelly households, and it was too large for her to bend down and tie her bootlaces. Which meant either sweating in gumboots, or risking snakes in bare feet or sandals.

  Not that snakes were much of a risk. Nancy and Matilda had taught her how to recognise the small birds’ snake alarm calls, and she now automatically avoided stepping over logs or rocks where one might be basking.

  Jed stuffed a cushion under her knees and lay on her side. Ah, that was better.

  The firebreak and the river bend should protect Dribble, and Sam and the Beards of the Whole Australia Factory had even installed an automatic pump on the roof, to keep the house safe behind a curtain of water from underground cisterns if flames approached. Dribble also had the solid hardwood cladding and shutters that had protected the Drinkwater and Overflow homesteads from fires in the past, along with their owners’ knowledge of not just fire’s ferocity but where it might be vulnerable.

  Safe. That was a good word too. The houses that she loved were safe. The extended Thompson–McAlpine clan was safe. Scarlett was safe, gone back to Sydney for a month’s reading before uni began again, about to enter her third year of medicine and deeply happy.

  All her earlier fears had gone. This baby would be loved and cherished in the bedroom Sam had painted white and where Scarlett and Leafsong had stencilled dancing purple wombats along the tops of the walls, bright and playful for the baby to stare at. Clancy’s cot had been repainted, the old stroller fetched from the Drinkwater attic, and a drawer filled with small white garments knitted by Sam’s mum, Blue, and Nancy, who would be Other Grandma to this baby, rather than great-great-aunt-by-marriage.

  Another baby, still and cold in her arms, surfaced in her memory. She had wanted that baby so badly, even
if it had been the child of rape. But would she have glimpsed Merv when she gazed into its face? Jed closed her mind abruptly.

  She should write a nice long chatty letter to Julieanne, who was complaining about London’s cold, wet slush. She might even pull her courage up from her ankles and send her friend the revised manuscript waiting in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Except her book was nowhere near as good as Swords and Crowns and Rings, for which Ruth Park had got the Miles Franklin, and which was so good she felt it was nonsense she should even think of sending her pages to a publisher.

  Yet.

  She could give Sam a shock and actually cook something for dinner. Or even better, gather a picnic of leftover salmon quiche, olives, the cider-vinegar pickled onions Sam adored, plus homegrown lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes — even if it did mean venturing out in the heat and smoke to find a lettuce stubborn enough to survive mid-summer . . .

  The doorbell rang. Jed frowned. No one she knew rang doorbells or even used the front door. They called out, ‘Cooee!’ or ‘Are you decent, love?’ or ‘Hi! It’s me,’ then stepped into the kitchen.

  ‘Fat lot of good you are as a watch dog,’ she said to the still-sleeping Maxi.

  Maxi stirred, said ‘woof’ briefly and then rested back on her paws, her duty done. Jed heaved her bulk off the sofa, patted The Bulge affectionately, lumbered down the corridor and opened the door.

  ‘Sorry about the smoke —’ She stopped, her hand frozen to the doorknob.

  The man on her veranda was short — why had she remembered him as tall? Balding, a tracksuit sagging at the knees and belly, a stink of rum she remembered suffocating her when he’d held her down, when he’d —

  He smiled, and she was fifteen and friendless all over again. ‘Hello, Janet,’ said Merv.

  Halfway up the mountain the fire glowed deep within a log, the only sign a small shimmer of hot air between the trees. The mountain men thought they had extinguished it, but one small ember burned.