Always a Rainbow Page 3

  Soon they were running downhill, taking a track through thickly growing native bush where giant forest trees towered far above and the air was fresh and fragrant with the damp smell of moss and undergrowth. Then once more they were out in the open, sweeping along a track where tall cabbage trees tossed green streamers in the breeze and dust-coated flax and punga ferns brushed the vehicle as they passed by. All at once Angela became aware of another smell, the pungent odour of burning timber. Forgetting the Trappist monk vow-of-silence attitude of her companion, she cried, “Look—up there on the hills, a bush fire! Is it all right?”

  He nodded. “They’re burning off manukau,” he explained briefly. “It’s under control.”

  Angela’s soft lips tightened. Piqued and annoyed by his deliberate lack of response, she shrank back in her seat as far away from him as possible. If he insisted on playing the strong silent male, if he wouldn’t even accord her the common courtesy due to a stranger, let him! She stared resentfully out of the window.

  As if in sympathy with her mood at that moment the sun passed behind a heavy bank of cloud, a grey pall spread over the sky and heavy raindrops spattered in the dust of the track. The bush on the hillsides that in the sunshine had seemed green and sparkling was all at once heavy and sombre, a dark curtain enclosing them in a twilight world of swirling mist.

  He switched on the headlamps and the beams threw into relief the rough metal of the road ahead. Beside them half concealed in the trees a timber building loomed up out of the gloom. Once again forgetting her own vow of silence, Angela said in her soft eager tones, “That place we just passed. Who lives there away up here in the bush?”

  “No one. It’s a hut where trampers can put up when they’re up this way. Hunters use it too.” His eyes were fixed on the fragment of roadway ahead.

  Angela’s attention, however, had been caught by something else she couldn’t understand. The metal bands running around telegraph posts. She couldn’t imagine any reason for them, she mused, turning her head over her shoulder to look again. Mark Hillyer must have read the question in her eyes. “Keeps the possums from climbing up to the wires.”

  The rain was becoming heavier now, streaming down over the windows and blotting out everything except the vaporous outlines of range after range ahead. She realised with a stab of apprehension that the narrow winding track was slippery with mud. Great mounds of earth were piled at intervals along the route where roadworkers had apparently been making recent repairs. Angela told herself that there was no danger whatever. She reminded herself that the mud-grip tyres of the Land Rover could cope with even these greasy slopes on twisting roads where each corner was a hazard with its sharp hairpin bend.

  All at once he appeared to recollect her presence. “Not nervous, are you?”

  “Of course not,” she lied bravely.

  “You wouldn’t say these roads were much like smooth English highways, would you?”

  “No”

  “But then,” he pursued, “you wouldn’t have expected them to be?”

  “No.”

  At that moment there loomed up through the gloom of the narrow pathway the shape of a bulldozer. Its appearance was so unexpected that Angela drew in her breath sharply. They were travelling at speed, there was no time to stop and there surely wasn’t room to pass. If only the Land Rover hadn’t been on the outside of the track with a sheer drop at the side! She was unaware that she was clutching Mark Hillyer’s sinewy brown arm in a convulsive grip. She only knew they were scraping past the earth-moving machine. At the same time she caught the sound of rocks and rubble tumbling hundreds of feet through fern and tea-tree to the gully far below.

  Swiftly, guiltily her hand dropped from his arm.

  “I thought you weren’t nervous!” It wasn’t so much the words as his maddening triumphant tone that was making her feel so infuriated.

  “Anyone would feel nervous in a spot like that,” she retorted with spirit.

  “Just one of those things you have to get used to if you think of settling in this part of the world. Shall we say a preview? Something to help you to make up your mind?”

  Neither the chill inflection of his tone nor the words made any sense to her. It he was referring to her accepting the job on the station she had already made up her mind. No one but a dumb cluck like herself would have let herself in for a drive to an unknown destination with this ill-natured stranger in the first place.

  Incredibly they were still climbing up among the peaks. Was there no end to the misty wetness of the bush, the fern-encrusted banks? For a long time now there had been no sound but the clickety-click of the windscreen wipers and the occasional thud of a loose rock flung upwards against the undercarriage. The silence was getting on her nerves, in fact it was becoming downright unendurable! Suddenly she decided that she would crack that stony calm of his, and she knew just how she’d do it too! Glancing towards him, she said, “Look, I’m sorry, but I’ve changed my mind. So please, if you don’t mind. I’d like to go back to town.”

  No answer. But for the frown creasing his bronzed forehead she might have imagined he hadn’t caught her soft tones above the drumming of rain on the roof. She raised her voice. “I said I’ve changed my mind about the job. I mean, it’s just wasting your time taking me any further, isn’t it? I’ll go back—”

  “You won’t you know!” He was staring directly ahead, his eyes fixed on the fragment of wet pathway vanishing into wet bush. “I’m taking you with me to Waikare today.”

  “Won’t!” she cried. “But of course you can take me back to town!” His darkened face wasn’t conducive to any hope. She tried for lightness. “What is this? A kidnap or something?”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t come to any harm with us.”

  “But I don’t want to go there! I’ve changed my mind!”

  “Too bad, because you’ll be there,” he consulted a silver watch strapped to a tanned wrist, “in just about thirty minutes, I’d say.”

  Angela subsided in her seat. He didn’t look crazy. One read of such things happening, but not to ordinary girls like herself. One thing was for sure, there was no sense in arguing with him, not with that dark expression in his face. She would simply have to push away the terrifying thoughts and hope that matters weren’t as frightening as they seemed.

  His voice seemed to echo her vague apprehensions. Did she imagine the note of sardonic amusement in his deep tones? “There’s no need to look like that. Nothing’s going to happen to you, you know. I’ll take you back as soon as you’re ready,” his tone deepened, “but you did want to give your explanation to Brian, remember?”

  Oddly in spite of herself the fears died away, leaving only the resentment. What was the matter with him? Well, she would soon see.

  The next moment she was flung roughly forward as the Land Rover jerked to an unexpected stop, and watching the reason for the sudden braking she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry as a large bird with iridescent blue-green plumage strolled nonchalantly on long red legs across the rough metal of the roadway, followed by four small editions of the mother bird.

  “Pukekos,” Mark Hillyer remarked briefly, and put a hand to the gear lever. As they plunged on over long shadows of tree ferns lying across the pathway he added, “They come from the swamp down there.” Angela followed the jerk of his dark head towards a raupo-choked stream in the hollow of the hills.

  So he could be tender and thoughtful with forest birds, she thought, but not with a strange girl. There was just no understanding him, and thank heaven once she reached her destination, she wouldn’t need to worry about him. The odd part of the situation was that she felt no real fear about the journey. Tight-lipped and antagonistic though he was, one thing got through to her, and that was that he was interested in her for reasons connected with his brother. Why, she couldn’t even begin to imagine. She realised he had condescended to toss her a sideways glance. “You’ll be all right,” he said again.

  She was too annoyed to a
nswer. Edging herself as far away from him as possible, she rubbed a clear space and looked out of the window. Not that there was anything to see outside but the misted shapes of wet bush. Up and up, bend after bend. He said out of the silence, “You can take off first thing tomorrow ... if you want to.”

  For answer she flung him an exasperated glance. If she wanted to!

  “I thought,” he said smugly, “that you’d see it my way in the end.”

  Angela didn’t even trouble to argue further with him. What was the use?

  But it doesn’t matter how beastly he is to me, she comforted herself. Anyone can put up with a difficult person for a short while. After tomorrow, lovely thought, I need never see him again. In an effort to relieve her pent-up feelings she raised her hand to the window and with her finger marked out letters on the misted glass: HATE YOU.

  His sideways glance flickered towards her and she knew by the sardonic twitch of his lips that he had noticed the words. She was glad that he had got the message. If this was the way he treated prospective employees it would be a miracle if he ever got any of his staff to stay. Probably they all had to be practically abducted as she had been to even get them to the place: But she would get away from it. She would come back to town tomorrow even if it meant walking all the way on the bush track or begging a lift from those burly knights of the road who it seemed were to come to her rescue by clearing away the slip of earth from the road in the morning.

  The rain eased at last, but there was still the roar of the wind in the trees, drops clinging to the beaded windscreen and the sombre curtains of bush closing them in. Ahead a curve of road swept up to meet a slate-grey sky with billowing clouds. It was like a journey in a dream, Angela mused, one that seemed as though it would go on for ever. She couldn’t decide which was the more oppressive and nerve-racking, her companion’s savage cracks of which half the time she could make no sense, or the long silences that seemed so unnatural.

  They were dropping down into a valley and all at once she caught sight of a tiny school, a few scattered houses, then they swept once again up a slope.

  A rough signpost nailed to a tree loomed up at the fork of the roads. Waikare Station. So at last, she thought with relief, they were nearing their destination.

  “This is the eastern boundary of Waikare,” he volunteered and she glanced around her seeking some sign of habitation. But there were only the cleared hills with their seven-barbed sheep fences running up to meet the sky and on either side of the track, a sea of densely growing tea-tree.

  “Only a few miles to go now.” Even without looking at him Angela was aware that he was throwing her one of his derisive looks. “Feeling excited?”

  “Not really.”

  “I didn’t think you would be.”

  Now what in the world did he mean by that? What could he possibly know of her feelings? She turned puzzled hazel eyes towards him. “How do you mean?”

  “Can’t you guess? It takes guts, a special brand of girl to come straight out from a city like London and be enthusiastic over taking on living on a sheep station in the heart of the New Zealand hill country.”

  Stung by the note of censure in his voice, she came back swiftly, “And you don’t think I qualify?”

  Again that bitter inflection she couldn’t understand. “We’ll see later, shall we?”

  Once again she reflected that she had never met a man who was so thoroughly deliberately disagreeable. Or one so good-looking, whispered a tiny traitorous voice in her mind, but she thrust it aside. Had she known he was to treat her in this offhand fashion she would never have come here.

  They sped up a rise and as they reached the summit she gazed down towards the foot of the incline where at the side of a small timber bridge, the tangled wreckage of a late-model car lay on the grass. She leaned forward, “My goodness, that must have been a bad smash! It couldn’t have happened long ago either, by the look of it.”

  “Last Saturday, actually.” The inflection of his low voice was more intimidating than ever, but she decided to ignore his discouraging tone.

  “The driver of the car, was he killed?”

  “No.”

  “He was lucky.”

  He made no answer and she did not pursue the subject. She would have liked to have known whether the injured driver had been a local man, but in her companion’s present dark mood she very much doubted if he would tell her. Clearly he had no intention of telling her anything! So instead she watched the seabirds wheeling and soaring overhead. Probably, she mused, they came from the blue-grey sea she could glimpse between a gap in the hills.

  “This is the start of the drive to the homestead,” he told her as they swept over a rise and came in sight of a sprawling white timber house, green-roofed, in the shelter of tall trees. To Angela the carefully tended homestead and grounds below appeared a peaceful haven in an empty wilderness and for a moment she forgot her forbidding companion. “Is that it?” she cried with interest.

  He nodded carelessly. “That’s Waikare.”

  They turned beside a big shed at the roadside and rattled over a cattle-stop. This time he anticipated the question that rose to her lips. “The shed is handy for deliveries. It takes the milk supply for the week, all the stores.”

  “I can imagine it must be awfully useful.” They were taking a curving driveway lined with dust-coated flax and tattered toa-toa, white-starred tea-tree, all blowing in the wind. Presently they passed a cluster of modern timber bungalows. Probably, Angela mused, they belonged to married men working on the station. They swept by shearing sheds and timber stockyards. Then a second cattle-stop rattled beneath the wheels and they continued on the long curve of the winding driveway. When the Land Rover came to a stop at a wide timber gate Angela glanced enquiringly towards the driver. “Shall I—?”

  He nodded unsmilingly. “It’s the custom around here that the passenger pays for the honour and glory of being in the front seat by opening the gates.”

  Angela leaped down to the sheep-nibbled grass, chasing away two fat woolly Perendale sheep who had made for themselves a comfortable hollow in the dust beside the gatepost. She waited until the vehicle had passed through the opening, then closed the gate. By the time she had gone through the procedure for the fourth time she was becoming accustomed to jumping up and down, though it was difficult to be sufficiently quick to get rid of the sheep and close the gate before a few determined stragglers could make their escape. As she climbed back into the Land Rover she told herself that at least he couldn’t now regard her as completely useless. Not that his opinion of her mattered, of course.

  As they swept around another curve of the driveway they came in sight of barns and implement sheds, the wet roofs gleaming in the pale sunshine, then they were approaching the homestead. Angela couldn’t seem to tear her gaze from the white timber house where flowering shrubs and long flower borders broke the wide expanse of sweeping green lawns. The property was long established—you could tell by the massive Moreton Bay fig trees growing by the house. A sun porch running the length of the dwelling was filled with long benches of cascading plants. Surely there must be a woman who tended them with loving care. Her gaze moved to a swimming pool near the house, a blue rectangle whose surface was thickly strewn with pink hibiscus blossoms fallen from the bushes growing on the bank above.

  She had little time to dwell on the scene, however, for they were skirting a line of garages, passing a tractor and a farm motor bike. The next minute, to a wild barking set up by a line of sheepdogs confined in their kennels, they drew up at the steps at the back of the dwelling.

  Mark Hillyer turned to face her. “Welcome to Waikare.” Angela thought she had never in all her life known anything quite as chilling as the blue of his eyes—unless it was the ice tinkling in his tone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Leaving the Land Rover standing in the driveway, he led the way through a porch cluttered with men’s outdoor clothing, tattered sunhats and stockwhips, and they moved into
a long passage with rooms opening off from either side. There seemed to be no one about, though Angela could hear a radiogram playing softly from somewhere in the house.

  At length he paused outside a closed door. “He’s in there. You can go in.”

  “In there?” She was baffled by his cold hard look. “Is your brother too busy, or something, to come out to see me?”

  “Why don’t you go right in there and find out for yourself? You came here to see him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, of course, but—”

  “Well then...”

  There was nothing for it but to do as he suggested. Suggested? It was more in the nature of an order! Nevertheless ... She turned the handle of the door and found herself in a sunny bedroom. A fresh breeze stirred the crisp floral curtains at the window. On the bed lay a young man with a pale strained face. His tightly-curling brown hair was almost concealed by a bandage fastened around his head. His vague troubled gaze moved towards her. “Martha ... thought it was Martha ...” The words slurred away into silence.

  “Hold his hand,” commanded the inexorable voice from the open doorway.

  Angela moved to the bed and clasped the man’s hand, calloused with physical toil. Already, however, the sick man’s eyelids had fallen over his eyes and the hand in hers was limp. Either he has fallen asleep or he had lapsed into unconsciousness, she couldn’t tell which. Very gently she withdrew her fingers and tiptoed away from the bed.

  “He’s under sedation,” Mark Hillyer told her. “In a few days he should be well on the mend.”

  Angela’s thoughts were still with the boyish face. “He looks terribly ill. He didn’t know ... he called me Martha.”

  His quick glance raked her face. “What’s so funny about that? You are, aren’t you?”

  “No, no, I’m not—”

  “You’re saying you’re not Martha Stanaway? He was staring at her incredulously. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” They were speaking in lowered tones because of the man just through the wall. Now as he led the way along the passage Angela cried desperately, “It’s your own fault! I tried and tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen! You brushed me off every, time!”