Cyclone Season Page 6

  And yet, she cried out as he left her, cried in a silent scream from the very core of her existence, a scream that denied the logic, the orders of her conscious mind. Her mind sought sanctuary even as he slipped from the room, but her body was vapid, listless, lolling in the fleeing memories of new and wonderful sensation. She heard his voice, ragged and uneven, as he answered the telephone. Heard him say with quite undisguised frustration, ‘Damn it, Ramona, but you’ve got a deplorable sense of timing.’

  And she heard him say something about being pulled from the shower, but that, she heard over her shoulder as she fled, spurred into movement by the blonde woman’s name as if she’d been struck by a stockwhip.

  Moments later and she was reeling with shock as her body was ravaged by the icy blast of her shower, and Holly sucked in her breath and refused to reach out for the moderating hot tap, choosing instead the punishment that would perhaps erase the longing, wipe away the memory of ecstasy, wash off the scent and the taste and the feel of him.

  She stayed in the shower, secure in the chill and the knowledge that the door between them was locked; she was safe. Until she heard a knock and his voice: ‘You’d better hurry now, unless you want to miss your flight.’

  No sign of ragged passion in the voice now. Even above the roar of the shower it registered a calm, an acceptance. The moment, for what it had been worth, was over. And maybe, she thought, he would even forget it. But would she?

  Holly hurried through the process of dressing and packing, hurried with a body that seemed only half to belong to her and only half able to function. She walked as if knee-deep in water, unable to create or maintain momentum from legs that so recently had trembled with the rising passion of Wade’s touch.

  But at least, she thought with some semblance of relief, luck — or Ramona’s good management — or both, had caused that timely phone call. Without it, her response to Wade Bannister would have been so complete, so abandoned, so wanton, that any respect he might have for her would have gone like thistledown in the wind.

  And she wanted him to respect her, to believe in her. Wanted it more than anything else in the world — excepting perhaps the man himself. But had their lovemaking been consummated, here, this morning, on his bed, it would have been with such enthusiasm on her part that he couldn’t possibly ever believe her to be the inexperienced lover she really was.

  Looking at herself during a final check in the bathroom mirror, Holly saw wide, bright eyes, eyes alive now with the knowledge — the hellish knowledge — that she was falling in love with a man who had reason to believe her a wanton, and whose effect upon her physically was just that — but for him alone. Only how could she expect him to believe that?

  It simply wasn’t fair. The effect of his eavesdropping at the airport, the untruth of it so unprovable, seemed to loom like a spectre over their entire relationship. She couldn’t, Holly thought, have competed successfully against someone with Ramona Mason’s experience at the best of times, but with this singular handicap she had no chance at all.

  But probably she wouldn’t have stood a chance anyway, Holly thought as she emerged from the bedroom to meet Wade’s impatient glance. Even if he hadn’t thought she was the kind of girl she wasn’t. Holly simply didn’t have the kind of cool sophistication and poise that Ramona possessed, could never provide the type of social function to a marriage that Ramona could.

  Wade, thankfully, said virtually nothing during their drive to the airport. Holly didn’t know what she might have done if he’d decided to discuss what the phone call had so shockingly interrupted. She didn’t, somewhat to her own surprise, feel any great guilt about it. But she certainly didn’t want to talk about it! And, she realised, if there had only been some indication that Wade’s feelings matched the ones she knew were growing within her, there’d have been no guilt at all except for having been stopped.

  As it was, she regretted having allowed her body to betray her into giving herself to him without a word of love, without even the remote suggestion of it. Certainly not from him, she thought, watching sideways to see what might be revealed by his expression.

  Nothing! Their interlude was over and Holly reached the airport convinced she had returned to being nothing but a problem to the man she knew she loved beyond redemption.

  Upon their arrival at the airport, he assisted in checking her luggage, saw her to the appropriate departure lounge, but made no attempt to lighten her mood with idle conversation. It was as if the morning’s lovemaking hadn’t even happened, there wasn’t a hint of apology in his voice or attitude, probably. Holly thought, because he wasn’t the slightest bit sorry for anything but having been interrupted.

  Did she even want an apology? Not really; she didn’t want any man, especially Wade, to feel sorry for having tried to make love to her.

  But his silence bothered her slightly, along with the way he kept looking at her when he thought she mightn’t notice. They weren’t sly or cunning glances, but introspective, as if he might finally be reassessing her. Yet that, Holly decided, was most unlikely.

  It was also distressing and annoying, especially when he only touched her forehead with his lips in farewell, although his voice was gentle. ‘You have a good flight,’ he smiled, ‘and tell Jessica I’ll see you both in two or three days. Four at the very most.’

  Damn the man! Did he not realise what he was doing to her? Or did he realise it only too well, she wondered?

  The flight north wasn’t really the one Holly might have chosen for herself. It was the ‘milk run’ that stopped briefly in a series of strangely named little communities, all of them much of a muchness since she saw only their airports and the countryside as the aircraft took off and landed. It was a landscape that grew increasingly drier and more barren looking, a wild, untamed landscape that seemed scarcely fit for humans.

  ‘From some points of view, it’s like the backside of the moon,’ Wade had said during one of their discussions. She had to agree.

  And from the names on the airline magazine’s route map, it might well have been the moon, especially for somebody fresh from England and unused to the unique Australianisms.

  Holly’s route included Geraldton, Carnarvon, Learmonth and Karratha, but a different choice of flights could have shown her airports at Tom Price or Newman or — and she quite regretted missing this one — Paraburdoo. There was little to choose from between the smaller of the airports, but the passengers were a living kaleidoscope in themselves.

  Asians, Blacks, Europeans and dinkum Australians were mingled in a situation far less formal than the seating of her international flight. Oil workers, many of them American, spent the entire journey guzzling tins of beer as if they’d die of thirst without it.

  There was certainly no shortage of money, judging from a poker game that kept half-a-dozen workers busy, and everyone on the aircraft bar one or two Aboriginals was expensively if casually dressed. Some of the Asians, in particular, seemed veritable peacocks in their over-bright, flamboyant clothing, although their voices were liquid and soft.

  It came as something of a surprise when the captain announced on their arrival to Port Hedland that the ground temperature was forty-four degrees. A hundred and ten on the Fahrenheit scale! Even mention of such temperatures in Jessica’s letters hadn’t prepared Holly for the blandness with which the simple announcement was made. At each of the preceding stops, the outdoor temperature had seemed warm, but not severe enough to be upsetting on the short dash from air-conditioned plane to air-conditioned terminal.

  Of course Jessica’s — Wade’s — house was also air- conditioned, Holly realised, but how on earth did people survive such incredible temperatures out in the open?

  As the aircraft began its circling approach she looked out of the tiny window and was surprised again. There was nothing, or almost nothing, to see. Only vast expanses of reddish, ochre-tinged ground. And then enormous, obviously man-made layouts of dazzling whiteness. Salt pans? And finally she saw what appeare
d to be a settlement, nearly lost in the heat-haze and camouflaged by the coating of dust that seemed to make every roof the same colour as the landscape. Only the blue-green waters of the adjoining sea provided any contrast.

  And then they were down, taxiing up to a low, spreading terminal building that sat almost alone in the forbidding emptiness. Vaguely human shapes could be seen behind glass doors, but apart from the essential airport crew, there was no one waiting outside for the aircraft to come to a halt.

  Once outside, Holly realised why. It was like walking into some enormous furnace. There was a breeze, but it was hot! No cooling effect, but she could feel the perspiration lifted from her skin as if by a sponge. Like everyone else, she made the journey to the terminal at a half-trot, her body instinctively seeking the shade of the entry-way.

  Would Wade have moved thus, she wondered, or would he be immune to the intense heat, strolling along in his larger-than-life strides without even noticing it. A hundred and ten! She felt desiccated, like a dried-up prune, by the time she reached the terminal. But inside it was cool, and busy, alive with people coming and going, meeting friends and relatives with loud cries in myriad languages, children everywhere.

  And Aunt Jessica!

  Even Wade Bannister was forgotten momentarily in the joy of seeing her diminutive aunt again. The tiny, bird-like woman still looked as she had when Holly had last seen her, years and years, almost a lifetime before.

  Tidy, spry, and so quick-moving she seemed always to be sprinting, she flung herself forward to wrap unexpectedly strong arms around Holly and clasp her tightly.

  Both had tears in their eyes when the embrace was over, but they were joyful tears, freely shed. ‘You look marvellous,’ Jessica said. ‘Even better than your pictures.’

  ‘And so do you,’ Holly replied. But she was lying. Because Jessica didn’t really look well at all, not up close.

  Beneath the deep, tropical tan, her face was pale with the paleness of strain, and her lips held a slightly bluish caste. The hair that Holly remembered as a shining black cap now looked as if Jessica had been standing in a snowstorm, and there were lines of suffering in her face beyond her years.

  Only the eyes remained unchanged from memory; black, snapping eyes that observed the world through lenses of both compassion and cynicism. Darker, older versions of Holly’s own grey eyes.

  They headed for ‘home’ once Holly’s luggage was unloaded, driving in a large, air-conditioned station sedan. Wade’s, of course. The route led straight into the flat vastness of the Northwest scrub country, where spinifex and saltbush did an apparently inefficient job of covering the red-yellow soil and there wasn’t a hill to be seen. Past a huge elevator that stockpiled salt like a mountain of snow, incongruous in the blistering heat, past a turnoff that Jessica said went to the dormitory community of South Hedland.

  ‘And iron ore is the reason for just about all of it,’ Jessica explained as they drove on towards Port Hedland itself. ‘There were only about twelve hundred people here in 1965, when the development programme started. Now there would be more than ten times that many, and the place is still growing. South Hedland was built because Port Hedland is really located on an island, and they simply ran out of building space. Of course, with road and rail construction it isn’t an island anymore, but that didn’t change the space limitations.

  ‘But Finucane Island — that’s the headquarters for Goldsworthy Mining — is still really an island as far as we’re concerned here,’ she continued. ‘Oh, there’s a road to it, and the railway, of course. But the place is twenty-seven kilometres away by road, despite being just over there across the harbour.’

  She volunteered to give Holly the ‘two-bob’ tour, and after pointing to where they would normally have turned off for ‘home’, carried on along a bitumen road that was paralleled by a railroad on their left.

  Ahead was a veritable mountain of red-gray material that seemed to go on forever beside the railway track, and Jessica waved casually at it. ‘Iron ore stockpile; Mountain Newman Mining,’ she said. ‘That’s what all this is about — everything! If it wasn’t for the iron ore, I think the whole town might close down, although that’s certainly not fair to say, since the town was here long before the mining companies.’

  The downtown area, such as it was, seemed overshadowed by the mountainous iron-ore stockpile and the vastness of the port facilities that seemed to grow right out of the main street.

  The town was almost a hundred years old. Holly was told, and yet even the older sections had a rawness, a sense of newness despite the overall blanket of ore dust. There seemed to be no sense of plan; a few shops on one street, a few more on the next, with vacant allotments or elderly houses scattered between. Not, Holly decided, very much of a town at all. She wondered if South Hedland, being so much newer, was much different.

  ‘Oh, it’s that much more modern, of course,’ Jessica said. ‘And it’s got a big, air-conditioned shopping centre and a tavern, and most of the government offices and such. I expcct that eventually this will become the satellite town in reality, but not quite yet.’

  Holly noticed that her aunt seemed preoccupied, and though she was free enough with trivial tourist information, it was clear she had other, presumably more important things on her mind. When Holly suggested they postpone the rest of the tour, Jessica hastily agreed, appearing somewhat relieved to do so.

  The house owned by Wade Bannister wasn’t outwardly that much more impressive than any of the others in the subdivision of Cooke Point, but the established gardens gave it a vaguely more permanent look. It was large and low, constructed of dark brick, and so cool inside because of the ducted air-conditioning that Holly found herself shivering slightly.

  Jessica threw a blistering look at the thermostat and said, ‘Perhaps I’d best turn that thing down. We hardly ever use it, as a general rule, except on really hot days like this. I don’t mind the heat, and of course Wade is so much out-of-doors that he feels he must stay used to it regardless.’

  It was, Holly realised with surprise, the first time Wade’s name had been mentioned, and for whatever reason, she felt a cold shiver of a quite different type slither down her spine.

  She had only the briefest of respites while Jessica poured them both a tall glass of lemonade; then the expected inquisition began in earnest.

  ‘You didn’t like Wade.’ It was neither question, not entirely a statement all on its own. Jessica hadn’t reached her time of life as a world traveller without considerable intuition.

  ‘We ... could have got along better, I suppose,’ Holly replied carefully. ‘But I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I didn’t, don’t like him. He’s just a ... very dominant type.’

  ‘What everybody calls a man’s man,’ Jessica retorted. ‘Just a pity so few people recognise that a woman’s man is usually just exactly the same. What happened … did he make love to you?’

  Holly gasped at the uncanny accuracy of the question, then covered up as best she could by faking a sneeze. Probably in vain, but she wasn’t at all prepared for such direct and accurate questioning.

  ‘It was more of a personality clash than anything,’ Holly replied, choosing her words carefully. ‘We weren’t together long enough to, well, to get all that close.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ Jessica belied her ageing spinster status with a broad-mindedness that most girls Holly’s age might have envied, although Holly didn’t, especially not right now. ‘You spent, by my count, something like two days and two nights together; that’s more than enough time.’

  Holly was astonished at Jessica’s candour, but determined not to allow the discussion to proceed much longer without some definite clarifications.

  ‘Most of that time, I was asleep,’ she countered. ‘And we certainly didn’t spend last night together; I think that pleasure belongs to one Ramona Mason, who’s very lovely, blonde …’

  ‘And a first rate pain in the ... neck,’ Jessica snorted. ‘The only reason I could see for
Wade spending the night with her is if the air-conditioner broke down. Especially after seeing you. You’re lovelier than any of your pictures, Holly.’

  ‘Which means nothing at all and you know it,’ Holly laughed. ‘I’m sure Ramona Mason is much more his type, and personally I wish her well of him.’

  Jessica regarded her soberly. ‘My, my,’ she said. ‘You two really didn’t hit it off well at all, did you? Which is quite probably all my fault. I have to admit that I did rather...’

  ‘It’s called matchmaking,’ Holly interrupted in her most severe voice. ‘And yes, I rather think you did. Which,’ she added, ‘pleaseth me not at all.’

  Then she laughed, hoping to ease the look of strain that flowed like a shadow across Jessica’s face. ‘But don’t worry about it. I’m sure your Mr Bannister and I can get along well enough to last my visit.’

  And she laughed again. ‘Besides, you’ve said in your letters he’s hardly ever here, and it’s you I’ve come to see, anyway.’

  ‘Yes, well.’ And the worried look was more than a shadow now. ‘Did he say when he’d be back, specifically?’

  ‘Just in a day or two or three. Four at the most. But why?’

  ‘Because I’m not going to be here,’ Jessica said, shaking her head as the significance of the remark became evident on Holly’s startled face. ‘I must fly to Perth, you see. Tomorrow!’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Holly was stunned!

  ‘Tomorrow. But .. . but . . She stammered in her confusion. Further words were captured on her tongue as if it were glue.

  ‘Yes, tomorrow. Oh, Holly, I wouldn’t, didn’t intend to leave you alone. I didn’t even intend you to know about my tests. Or Wade. Until this cropped up. I just got word from my own doctor this morning. No, it isn’t really serious,’ she added, ‘so stop looking at me like that. It’s bad enough Wade fussing over me all the time without you doing it too.’