A Waltz for Matilda Read online

  How long had he known about it? she wondered. Had he felt the same pain as she had when first hearing it?

  She sang another ballad instead, softly, almost under her breath, held his hand in hers, watched his face relax until he slept.

  No, this wasn’t sleep. His breathing was too hoarse. He began to pant, like a dog, his failing lungs straining to get air. She was glad he was unconscious, didn’t know of his body’s last desperate attempts to live.

  His hand was limp, but still she held it. She watched as his breathing changed again, and then the sudden slackness as it faded, and life finally drained away.

  She had been closer to this man than any person in her life, perhaps. So many kinds of love, she thought.

  She bent down to kiss his cheek. ‘Sleep well, old biscuit,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll tend your land. I promise.’

  Mrs Murphy was polishing the side table in the hall as she came out. Waiting, thought Matilda. ‘He’s gone.’

  The housekeeper reached over and hugged her. ‘We’ll miss him,’ was all she said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Matilda. Her tears had been shed while she watched him die. Now, strangely, she just felt the peace she had seen on the old man’s face at the end.

  Mrs Murphy straightened. ‘I’ll get Murphy to tell the funeral parlour then.’

  ‘Tell them to bring the coffin here. They can hold the service in the church, but he’s to stay here till he’s buried.’

  She would need to send a telegram to Bertram, but she knew the funeral instructions in the old man’s will. Mr Drinkwater would lie next to his wife — his second wife — and the tiny daughter he’d never known. But James rested elsewhere, as did Auntie Love.

  It was funny, she thought, but she never felt James’s ghost about the place, as she did sometimes with her father. James’s heart was with his friends, in a far-off land under another hot sun. Not here, despite his letters. Not with her.

  Mr Drinkwater’s ghost might roam here, though. She smiled at the thought. She hoped it would be content. She thought it would. If I ever smell whisky on the verandah, old biscuit, she thought, I’ll think of you.

  And Auntie Love … Matilda’s smile grew deeper. There was no ghost of Auntie Love. Just the land.

  She walked out onto the wide verandah and sat on one of the cane chairs. She missed the cockatoo, but was glad that it was free.

  The afternoon sun was setting red behind the hills. Suddenly a longing came to see the cave again, to place her handprint again on the wall among the others. She’d ride up to the valley tomorrow, see her father’s house, walk up the path again …

  ‘He gone?’

  It was Mr Sampson. She nodded. He took off his hat and sat in the chair next to hers. ‘What now?’

  She looked at him, surprised. ‘The same as always. Why should it change?’

  ‘Things always change.’ He gazed out across the paddocks too. ‘The boys are enlistin’ in the army. Says they are goin’ to fight the Hun.’

  ‘What?’ She’d never have expected this. Two of the younger stockmen had joined up when war was declared, but she had never thought that the Sampson boys might go. ‘But will they …?’

  ‘Will they take natives in the army? I reckon. Maybe if we fight with the whiteys long enough they’ll forget the colour of our skin.’ He shrugged. ‘I reckon the boys want to see something of the world too.’

  ‘Mr Sampson …’ So much to say. No way to say it either. ‘This place is their home. No matter how long they’re away, this place is here for them.’

  ‘Good-oh.’ He was silent a while and then said, ‘There’s things you need to know, now the old man’s gone. Things I reckon he never told you. Things no one can tell you now, but me.’

  She stared. It wasn’t like Mr Sampson to say things. He did things. He didn’t talk. Or if he did, it wasn’t to her.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Auntie Love, for starters.’

  ‘Mr Drinkwater told me they’d been married.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not that. You never guess why she stayed with you?’

  She looked at him, surprised. ‘She wanted to look after me, to show me what to do. Women’s business. I was the only girl around.’

  ‘That weren’t it. Your dad …’ He took a breath. ‘Your dad were her grandson. And that makes you her great-granddaughter.’

  ‘What? No! Dad was a white man.’

  But even as she said it she thought of the brown eyes, the shape of his face. Her eyes. Her face. The colour of his skin, which she had thought came from the sun.

  And suddenly it all made sense, like shards of light coming together to make a single beam.

  ‘He were three-quarter white. His grandpa was the man in there.’

  The long-ago words came flooding back to her. I’ll never let you marry him.

  Was it the native blood the old man didn’t want in his family? No, she thought. Not that at all. James was my … my half-great-uncle? Could you marry your half-great-uncle?

  It didn’t matter. Hadn’t now for many years. Whatever reasons he’d had for forbidding her marriage, he had loved her at the end. Closer than a daughter, than a great-granddaughter too. A partner in what they both held dearest in life.

  And yes, you old biscuit, you were right, she thought. She and James had been too alike ever to have married happily, quite aside from the family connection. There was too much of Mr Drinkwater in them both. She had got on with the old man because he was old, and had learned his wisdom by the time their friendship grew. But she and James … within a year they’d have been yelling about some decision on the farm. Two years later she’d have been left with the housekeeping and the children while he rode about his acres — and beyond.

  She shook her head. The past had suddenly become another country, not the one she’d thought she knew.

  ‘Who were Dad’s parents?’

  ‘The old man’s first daughter, Rachel. She died when your pa was born. His father,’ Mr Sampson shrugged. ‘His name were O’Halloran. A white man. Worked on a place downriver from here. She moved there when they married. Then when she died the old man brought your dad back here.’

  She looked at the skin on her wrist, trying to work it out. She was one-sixteenth native. Enough to give her brown eyes and a slightly darker skin easy to mistake for a touch of sun, especially with her blonde hair making her look white.

  How many knew she was part native? There must have been some men who had known her father when he was young. Had they never mentioned it out of respect for him? Or her?

  So this is who I am, she thought. Why did I never guess?

  ‘What happened to Dad’s father?’ she asked at last.

  ‘Don’t know. He stuck around Drinkwater for a few years, then lit out somewhere. Ain’t heard from him since. My ma and pa brought up your dad, mostly.’

  ‘Not Mr Drinkwater?’

  ‘He paid for his schoolin’, stuff like that.’

  But not boarding school, she thought. Not like his white sons. Was that the real reason her father had founded the union here? To show his grandfather that he couldn’t always be the boss?

  The old biscuit would have made me a maid, she thought, because I was part native. But he looked out for me. He loved my father, even when they quarrelled, just as he loved James.

  Exactly what had been happening between those two at that billabong, that final day? What undercurrents had she been too young, too ignorant to decipher?

  They had told her the truth, her father and her greatgrandfather. But never the whole truth. No whole truth till now.

  A breeze gusted past the house. The sun had vanished now, but the red haze still lingered in the sky. ‘So I’m … I’m really a Drinkwater.’

  Did it even matter?

  She looked at the man next to her, so carefully gazing away.

  It mattered.

  ‘You’re my … cousin?’

  ‘I reckon. More or less.’

  She’d had f
amily all along then, just without knowing it. Family who knew she belonged to them. She belonged on this land too. She wanted to hug him, but he had never been a man for hugs.

  I had them from Auntie Love though, she thought. But she wasn’t my auntie. She was my great-grandma.

  Mr Sampson stood up. ‘I’d best be goin’. Elsie will wonder where I am.’

  ‘Does Elsie know?’

  ‘She knows.’ He held out his hand.

  Matilda shook it. ‘Thank you,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t know what to say, except I’m glad. Glad you’re my cousin. Glad the boys are family too.’

  ‘Always were,’ said Mr Sampson, and she realised he didn’t mean by blood. He and Mr Gotobed, Bluey, Curry and Rice: they had been her family for years, had stood by her to let her become who she was now.

  Suddenly she came to a decision. ‘Mr Sampson … could you ask the boys to wait a bit before they join up? Please?’

  He looked at her questioningly.

  ‘I want to sell the sheep. Just keep the rams, a few of the best ewes.’ She tried to find words to explain the feeling that had been growing the last few months.

  Now when the whole of Drinkwater was finally hers she understood that the land was never hers; it wasn’t Mr Sampson’s either. The land belonged to itself; theirs to live with, to work, to cherish. But when we are gone, she thought, the land will still be here, changed perhaps, but here as it was before we came.

  How long had it been since she had seen the yam daisies flowering after rain? The sheep had eaten both blooms and roots, like they ate the young trees too. How long since a mob of roos had bounded in a tide toward the hills?

  ‘It’s not just the boys going. Not the old man’s death, either, though that’s part of it. The land needs rest. A rest from sheep, from grazing. It’s tired.’

  And I’m tired too, she thought. We both need time.

  The old biscuit would never have done this. Nor, she thought, would her father. But Auntie Love would have understood, maybe Aunt Ann too. Perhaps the folk were right who said a woman couldn’t run a station. Men wanted profit from the land. A woman wanted to tend it.

  No, she thought. That’s not right either. I wanted success all right. Maybe I will again. But not just now.

  ‘There’s plenty in the bank to keep the place going. When the boys come back,’ she added, ‘well, we’ll work out what to do then. Split the properties up, maybe, if you or the boys want farms of your own.’

  Her heart beat like the soldier’s recruiting drum at the thought. Could she let control of part of Moura and Drinkwater go? She didn’t know. She’d have to try.

  He gazed at her, his brown eyes so like her father’s. Like hers. ‘I didn’t tell you for that.’

  ‘I know.’

  He was silent a while, and then he nodded.

  She stayed in the chair long after he had gone. What battles had happened on these acres? Whatever they were, she was descended from both sides.

  The land was silent now, apart from the far-off baa of a sheep, a bleating lamb strayed from its mother, the chortle of a kookaburra down by the river.

  She was alone, but at last, she thought, not lonely. Was this what Auntie Love had felt, walking with her land? She would never be lonely now, not with the hills, the whispers of the trees.

  She sat until the light had faded from the sky, and the stars were shining like pinholes in the velvet. She sat till the cross turned over. And then she went inside.

  Chapter 59

  NOVEMBER 1915

  Dear Peter,

  It was good to get your postcard, and to know that despite all the losses at Gallipoli you and the Drinkwater boys are still safe and well. We all pray that you remain so. I hope the cake reaches you safely. Mrs Murphy made it, not me, so it will be good. She sends her best wishes and regards too.

  Things are fine here. Too many rabbits — I’ve had Mr Gotobed and Bluey setting traps. Curry and Rice wants to get ferrets, but I do not know. We might end up with too many ferrets as well as rabbits. We had rain last week, nearly half an inch, so everything is green, despite the bunnies.

  May the war soon be over, and you all home safe. My love and all my best wishes to you and the other men from Gibber’s Creek and Drinkwater,

  Matilda O’Halloran

  The sunlight on her face woke her, streaming between the curtains. She’d been out by moonlight the night before, checking on the lambing ewes. One of them was straining. It had been nearly dawn when she’d finally got the first of the lambs out — a big male, followed quickly by a smaller female.

  She dressed quickly — she was back to trousers now, the dresses hung up in her wardrobe for her rare days in town — splashed water on her face from the china bowl, then hurried out to the kitchen. Elsie was lifting the kettle from the stove. Matilda could tell the news from her face. Elsie’s eyes were red from crying, but she was smiling too.

  ‘He’s all right?’

  Elsie nodded. ‘Mrs Murphy saw the latest casualty lists at the post office, and sent a note out with old Jack. None of the boys on it.’ She pointed to a postcard on the table. ‘A new card from Michael. Just says he’s well, that’s all. But …’

  But at least we know he was alive when he wrote it, thought Matilda, as Elsie poured water into the pot, then slipped the cosy on. She and Mr Sampson had moved into the homestead when their sons pretended to be part Indian so they could join up, and Ginger and Mrs Murphy shifted into town the year before.

  It was a curiously empty land now: most of the sheep were gone, most of the men as well. But the roos were building up again, now the sheep no longer ate all the grass. She wondered as she ate her scrambled eggs whether the koalas would reclaim the trees as well. Elsie sat at the table opposite, sipping her tea, nibbling toast to keep her company, her eyes straying to her new postcard.

  How could a war so far away be so close to them as well? Damn the Turks and Germans, Matilda thought, and damn the British too. They had killed James and now they were killing others. But she had never spoken the words aloud. Tell the truth, she thought, but not the whole truth. Sometimes it’s wisest not to let the whole truth show.

  The sound of a car woke her from her thoughts. The dogs began to bark in the courtyard. She glanced at Elsie. ‘Mr Sampson take the car to town?’

  Elsie shook her head. ‘Mr Murphy’s got to come out and look at it, remember? Wouldn’t start last week.’

  Shows how long since I have been anywhere, thought Matilda.

  She took her plate to the sink, scraped the leftover eggs into the hens’ bucket, then strode out down the hallway to the verandah just as the car came to the end of the driveway.

  It was a bigger car than any in Gibber’s Creek, long and blue, a carriage for passengers and a big leather-covered area for luggage behind. A well-dressed man held the steering wheel, with a girl in white and blue next to him. A uniformed chauffeur sat in the back seat, looking embarrassed.

  She walked down the steps and waited for the car to stop. Who would drive themselves, and put their chauffeur in the back seat?

  The car braked silently almost at her feet. The driver looked out.

  It was Tommy.

  Her breath seemed to leave her.

  He looked the same. He might just have bicycled up from town, instead of driving in the shiny car.

  He should look older, she thought. Where is his grey hair? We are both so much older now.

  And then she realised: he was only thirty-six. It was she who felt old at thirty-three, so much of her life spent as an adult instead of a child, bearing the responsibilities of others.

  She forced herself to walk toward the car. No, he wasn’t quite the same. His face looked stronger, quieter, somehow more himself. The scar had faded, though it still pulled slightly at his mouth. But the smile was the same, the smile for her, another smile for the young girl who sat by his side.

  Half her life had passed since she had last seen this man, but somehow she could feel the fr
iendship was still there, the trust between them.

  Where was his wife?

  I don’t care, she thought. I will be friends with his wife too. But I won’t lose a friend again now.

  The girl put her head out the window. She was about ten years old, red curls spilling out under her hat. ‘Is that Matilda? Really truly? The girl in the song?’

  Tommy nodded at the girl. ‘That’s Matilda. Really truly. Say hello politely now.’

  The girl scrambled out of the car, blue boots under a practical blue skirt. She curtseyed neatly, then beamed up at Matilda. This is a girl who is used to being loved, thought Matilda wistfully.

  ‘Good afternoon, Miss O’Halloran,’ she said, then added quickly, ‘We learned the song about your father at school. But I was the only one who knew about you!’

  ‘How did you know it was about me?’

  ‘Dad told me, of course. We stayed at the hotel in town last night. They know all about you too. I asked.’

  Tommy was out of the car now. He looked at Matilda warily. ‘Matilda, this is Anna. My daughter.’

  ‘I’m glad to meet you, Anna.’

  ‘I’m glad to meet you too! I can play “Waltzing Matilda” on the piano, you know. With both hands!’

  ‘Can you really?’

  ‘Ahem.’ The chauffeur cleared his throat politely. ‘Shall I unload the luggage, sir?’

  The girl looked at Matilda hopefully. ‘Can we stay? Dad wasn’t sure. Please? He said you have horses and dogs and lots of sheep, and I’ll see kangaroos.’

  Her heart seemed to have stopped. She nodded in a daze to the chauffeur. ‘Please, take the suitcases inside. No, don’t go round the back.’ She smiled slightly. ‘Everyone uses the front door here.’

  The chauffeur looked shocked. This was worse, it seemed, than riding in the back seat. He pulled open the hatch and carried up the first two cases, his back stiff with disapproval.

  She looked at Tommy over Anna’s head. ‘There is a piano inside if you’d like to play it. It’s the first room on the right. Your father and I can hear it out here.’