The Outback Engagement

It had always seemed to her her colouring looked startlingly out of place beside Jock’s benchmark of beauty, the enchanting gold and blue of her mother and sister. From family photographs she knew she resembled her long dead paternal grandmother who had been famous for her stoic resilience and everyday heroisms in a vast lonely harsh environment. She even bore her grandmother’s maiden name, D’Arcy.

“You were always the serious one.” Her father gave a muffled groan, the marks of suffering all over him. “Look at you there. Poker faced. Beside your mother and sister you look damned nearly plain. But you were always as smart as a tack and you’ve been good. So good. I haven’t appreciated you enough. You were the one I could always trust.”

Sometimes the things her father said Darcy found horribly wounding. Anything but vain, she knew she was far from plain but her father had never wanted to accept her attractiveness or femininity. Perhaps as Curt continually pointed out her father saw great danger in allowing her to realise her womanly potential.

Father and daughter continued to stare at the portrait, one feeling a sense of attachment, the other, God knows what! “Why have you always kept the portrait in your room?” Darcy felt driven to ask. Her father’s harsh views were entrenched in her consciousness. Jock had always claimed he despised Darcy’s mother for leaving him, yet he opened his eyes on her first thing in the morning and closed his eyes on her at night.

“It’s the way it’s got to be!” A grim smile lifted the corner of Jock McIvor’s mouth. “I keep it, Darcy, to remind me what Marian did to me. She sucked all the love from my system. She should never have left me. It was cruel and it was wrong.”

“You didn’t try hard enough to get her back, Dad. You let them go.” The words were torn from Darcy like a bandage from a wound.

“It was your mother’s duty to return to me.” The gaunt face worked, the talons on the white sheet tensed. “When she refused I was finished with her. No woman makes a fool of Jock McIvor. A wife should follow her husband everywhere. She knew what she was getting into when she married me, what she had to accept. She was a bad wife.” His expression was at once bitter and bereft.

“Why didn’t she want to take me?” Darcy’s plaintive eyes were fixed upon her mother’s painted face. How many million times had she asked herself the question?

Her father shot her a peculiar glance. One she missed. “She wanted Courtney, the pretty one made in her own image. That was the deal. You were the changeling with your dark hair and those slanty eyes. Your mother and your sister subjected us to a massive betrayal, girl. Then she had the hide to punish me with an outrageous divorce settlement when she was the one to move out. Remarried, the faithless bitch. You know she wanted you to go to the wedding?”

For a minute Darcy looked at him blankly. “Oh…Dad, you’ve never mentioned this before.” The admission devastated her. She was left with the sick hollow feeling there might be many things her father had never told her when she had given him all her loyalty and trust.

“For God’s sake, be your age!” he said, anger seething behind his eyes. “There are lots of things I never told you. Because you didn’t need to know. The two of us had to cast your mother and sister aside to survive. Your mother was the enemy. We had to resist her with all our strength. Fact is, Courtney still remains my child. Your mother destroyed our relationship but now I’m dying I’ve had to confront certain issues. Because you’ve been the one to stay with me doesn’t mean I’m going to leave you Murraree, girl. It would take more than a woman to run it.”

Darcy took a deep breath, feeling like she had been plunged headfirst into a powerful disbelief. “What are you saying? Murraree is my home. My heritage. I know you’ve always wanted a son but haven’t I demonstrated my love for the land? I’ve worked long and hard. I carry my weight. If I can’t handle the station all on my own, there’s always a good overseer.” The idea of losing her birthright was absolutely intolerable.

“Overseer!” Jock McIvor rallied to spit out the word. “Damn it all, girl. When I’m gone men will try to take advantage of you. Don’t you realise that? How are you supposed to protect yourself? They’ll be after you like vultures, not for you, but the station.”

Darcy studied her father with the shutters all but fallen from her eyes. “I’m confident I can manage my own life, Dad. Murraree might be a top station but I haven’t been short of marriage proposals these past years. For me alone. You were supposed to live forever.”

“Never got one out of Berenger.” There was deliberate cruelty in the taunt.

Darcy came perilously close to cutting her father down. But it could have the profound and damaging effect of snuffing the life out of him. All too often he’d been wrong. Then again it was typical of him to try to catch her out, to goad her into revealing what he was too fearful to face.

“Curt and I would never have worked,” she said, holding in the anger she had controlled for years. Outwardly calm, inwardly she was dealing with the old desolation. It was essential she keep a lock on her tongue. She had survived. Her father was dying.

Jock spluttered cruelly. “What the hell do you take me for, girl? You’ve been hooked on Berenger since you were a kid. Any other woman would have taken him into her bed. I counted on you to resist him.” He treated her to a searching stare.

“Don’t let’s get into this, Dad,” she said deciding he hadn’t earned the right to her most private thoughts. “It causes too much upset and you can’t be upset.” Always the placator she feared the onset of another bad turn. “Besides.” She gave him what he needed to hear. “I gave my heart to you. You’re all I’ve had.” She said it with an enigmatic smile, finally forced to consider all the loving had been on her side.

“Exactly.” Jock McIvor nodded, convinced her wholehearted devotion was his due. “As for me, I have no son to take over from me.” His breathing hissed with impotent rage. “Just girls. Can you believe it? With my incredible strength. My virility. The women I’ve had! I want you to get Berenger over here,” he announced with a sudden vigour.

Darcy shook her head in utter confusion. “You want Curt?” Considering the role her father had played in breaking them up this came as a revelation.

“Oh I know we’ve always had our differences,” he grunted, catching sight of her shocked expression. “I know he hasn’t any regard for me—glimpses of his old man there—but I’ve never known a Berenger not to show integrity. Despite all this infernal suffering and pain Doc Robertson tells me I have a little time to go. I want to discuss something with Berenger. Barely thirty and he’s building a name for himself,” he said grudgingly.

“He’s got a name, Dad,” Darcy bluntly corrected. “He was born with it. Berenger. A proud name. It’s on the record. A name he lives up to. What can you possibly discuss with Curt of all people you can’t discuss with me?”

“Important business, that’s what!” There was a momentary flash in McIvor’s eyes. “I know you’ve got a good head on your shoulders but I need to speak to a man, that man being Curt Berenger.”

Darcy’s saddened eyes looked steadily into her father’s. “Do you love me, Dad?” Please God let him say it just once. “You’ve never told me. You’ve said a few times you were proud of me, especially when I won that big endurance race, but love has never been mentioned.”

Incredibly a tear trickled from Jock McIvor’s eyes. “My fault, Darcy girl. I sometimes think I’ve never known what real love is. Apart from my mother. I’m convinced I loved her. Named you after her, didn’t I? I was passionately in love with Marian for a while or at least I thought I was. She was so pretty and amenable. It’s possible I loved you girls, I don’t know. Maybe loving isn’t in my nature. Fidelity either. Now that was beyond me. All I know is I care about you, Darcy. You’ll be a remarkable woman in later life. By and large you’re pretty remarkable now. Your interests will be well protected. You don’t have to worry your head about that.”

“You’re changing your will?” Shock upon shock ground her down.

“Just let’s say I’m moving away from the original. I’m on the brink of meeting my Maker. Curiously I’ve rarely given Him a second thought but now I have a pressing need to straighten things out.”

Attonement it seemed was a powerful factor when it came time to die. “You want to include Courtney? I understand that.” Courtney who had gone with her mother. Courtney who had abandoned her only sister among other things. Did Courtney deserve to be rewarded? Darcy began to wonder what she had done with her life.

“You’re too understanding for your own good,” her father gave a rasping cough. “But you’ve got guts and you got them from me. Get Berenger over here. I’m not that dumb I don’t know he’ll still do what you ask.”

After a long sleepless night battling fresh demons, Darcy drove down to the airstrip midmorning to pick up Curt and deliver him to the homestead. She realized he was putting himself out for her. Curt was a very busy man with many calls on his time and attention. She counted her blessings he remained her friend.

In front of her and to either side, the vast ancient plains spread out as far as the eye could see. Horizon to horizon. The indomitable land under whose influence she had fallen, glowed molten red. She knew without the protection of her sunglasses the fiery sands, ridged like old washboards, would have been blinding to the naked eye. Studded here and there were white boled ghost gums, the pretty little minareechies with their light green leaves and feathery acacias with swarms of little birds, finches and red throats hopping around the branches. Clumps of spinifex, like giant pincushions glinted gold as wheat. Mile after mile of them. A never ending supply of stockfood.

Spinifex and sand. Space, freedom, a million acres to roam. Why wouldn’t she love her desert home? In times of severe drought it was like taking a walk on Mars, but all that was forgotten when the heartland blazed into the Garden of Eden after the rains. Today the mirage was working its cruel magic. The desert phenomenon had bedevilled many a past explorer and lost traveller luring them towards what they believed was pure fresh water. Water that shone like a polished mirror. This was the land of mirage. It gave the illusion there was no horizon. Land and sky merged into one.

As she gazed across some of the most starkly beautiful and forbidding land on the planet the speck in the cloudless blue sky swiftly transformed itself into a light aircraft. Darcy swept it with the binoculars that hung around her neck. The Berenger twin-engined Beech Baron. He was right on time.

A few minutes later she watched in admiration as Curt made a perfect touch-down in a brisk cross wind. He taxied up to Murraree’s silver hangar, made his after checks then disembarked covering the short distance between them in long loping strides.

One hell of a man was Curt Berenger. Darcy watched his progress with the tense, foolish, feverish, fascination she could never kill off. He was at once daunting and dazzling. Aware of his own power but rarely pressing it. He didn’t have to of course. Today, like all other days, she put herself on guard.

“Hi!” He bestowed his beautiful white smile on her. Next best, his dark timbred voice. It had a very attractive edge to it. Sexy was what women called it.

“Hello yourself!” She gave him a light ironic salute. Both of them had perfected the art of taking the mickey out of the other.

At close range he was even more stunning. Emphatically the cattle baron, a powerful and influential community leader, a target for women. She could never forget. They threw themselves at him. Worshipped at his booted feet. Around Curt Berenger adulation was the order of the day. His classic features were hard planed, damn nearly godlike. He had a firm but full lipped mouth, crystal clear green eyes that positively scintillated in his darkly tanned face. They stared at each other as they always did, way beyond the comfort zone.

She broke first, as ever, tossing her head which meant: Not me, Curt. Never again.

“Thanks so much for coming,” she said briskly, conscious she was breathing him in.

He started to walk with her to the jeep, adjusting his broad brimmed akubra over his eyes. “Given the brutal fact your dad and I have never got on—and we both know why—this is downright weird.”

Forbidden topic. “I agree but he trusts you.”

“Does he really?” Curt treated her to a sarcastic stare.

“It’s something to do with a new will,” she explained.

“Wha-a-t!” Curt did a double take.

“You heard me.” Tall as she was she had to tilt her head to look up at him. Something she found very satisfying.

“Hell, Darcy.” He registered his disgust. “Even now he’s playing with your emotions. What prompted this I wonder? And why me? It’s not making a lot of sense.” He didn’t wait to be invited, he slid behind the wheel of the jeep.

“People see things in a different way when they’re dying.” Darcy settled herself in the passenger side without comment. She was long used to Curt’s ways. “Whatever our history, underneath he respects you as a Berenger.”

“Does he, the old…so and so,” Curt swallowed on what he really wanted to call Jock McIvor. “Does he mean to include Courtney?” He put the jeep into gear, heading for the long unsealed track that led to the main compound.