Bittersweet (12 page)

For the moment marriage wasn’t on her agenda, and it was never on his; a good reason not to start anything — anythings could wind up in pregnancies. So perhaps, he thought exultantly as he turned off the bridle path in the direction of his home, his acceptance of Edda’s invitation was the best way to reduce the girl to ordinariness: an unimpregnated sister with a pregnant sister, part and parcel of the Corunda he hated most.

When old Tom Burdum had given him
Corundoobar
for his own, deeded it outright, Jack Thurlow’s world had completed itself, and he was happy. The son of old Tom’s daughter, he had endured a stormy childhood of financial and social ups and downs that still bewildered him, they had been so many and so different. Its chief result, in Jack’s mind anyway, was his ongoing horror of the Evil Twins — Money and Power. A horror that had led him to refuse to be old Tom’s principal heir, and set the old man off in search of a new heir, the Pommy doctor. Well, good luck to old Tom!

At 5000 acres,
Corundoobar
wasn’t the largest of the Burdum properties; this was rich country, a man didn’t need
many thousands of acres to do well as a pastoralist or as a farmer. The soil was deep and nutritious, the rainfall higher and more reliable than in most Australian places, and the district’s plateau elevation gave it a kinder climate, at least during the six months of summer.

Jack had worked
Corundoobar
since returning from boarding school in Sydney at eighteen; his education had been excellent as far as it went, but he chose not to advertise the fact, preferring the image of inarticulate pastoralist engaged in producing fat lambs and, more recently, the breeding of Arab saddle horses. Arabs were too small for many male riders, but ideal lady’s mounts, and everybody knew women were the horse-mad sex. Old Tom had derided the venture, but had to swallow his scorn when Jack’s Arabs did amazingly well right from the start. Nowadays Jack was entering his Arabs in the big rural shows across the state; his ambition was to exhibit them at the Royal Easter Show in Sydney, the biggest and most important venue for livestock in the whole of Australia.

Corundoobar
homestead sat athwart a cone-shaped hill, rolling down all its flanks to an enviable three-quarter-circle frontage on the Corunda River where it never dried up into a string of water-holes; windpower gave him enough pressure to pump to his paddock troughs, while the home gardens were so enclosed by the stream that watering them was a tank tower and gravity feed. For drinking water, there were underground storage tanks to hold rain runoff from roofs.

The original Burdum house, it was built of limestone blocks on a square pattern with a hip-roof of corrugated iron and a
wide verandah all the way around it. The gardens were lush, green, and a mosaic of flowers from September to April; at the present moment, high spring, everything producing bloom was in luxuriant flower. Each time he rounded the hill on the Doobar Road and saw the homestead come into sight Jack felt his breath catch, his heart leap in his chest as it never had for a woman. The loveliest place in the world, and legally, irrevocably his!

Though it lacked a woman’s touch, this bachelor’s house was neat and clean. Like many another man, Jack Thurlow could cook, sew on buttons, take up a hem, darn socks, scrub a floor and produce whiter-than-white washing; as a child there had often been no one else to do these things, so they had fallen to him and he was proud of his domestic skills. Like the education, they were part of his secret: he was a man to whom duty called more powerfully than any other human condition, for he was a man who had done what he did out of duty, not out of love, and he knew duty for a cruel mistress. To Jack Thurlow, nothing was worse than to be exploited as a duty, and never to see a scrap of love in return. So he hid his secrets, praying he could live like this for the rest of his days, responsible to no one, owing no one a duty of any kind. That was what appealed about Edda Latimer; she would never be his duty, no matter what her life might do to her. Whereas her twin, he shrewdly suspected, was a duty to everybody she knew. He laughed. “Edda’s duty, never mine,” he said.

When Jack pulled up outside the Corunda Town Hall at the wheel of a Daimler, Edda blinked in astonishment.

“Nice,” she said, allowing him to open her door.

“Tom lends it to me when I need it.”

“We could have walked, it’s not far.”

He grimaced. “Ungentlemanly, Edda. Why wouldn’t you let me pick you up outside the hospital?”

“And set all the tongues wagging? No, thank you!”

He was dressed, she noted, in the obligatory three-piece suit, and looked strangely unapproachable. Of course she had been regretting her invitation ever since tendering it; now the sight of him in his suit threw her completely off-balance, so she said nothing at all until they turned into Trelawney Way, which ran uphill from George Street in a fairly good part of town. The West End was two miles away.

“That cream and green cottage there,” she said. Silence fell again; she let him extricate her from the car, horribly aware that curtains were furtively being drawn back in every window of every house in the vicinity. Oh, neighbours! Then Jack opened the gate in the picket fence and escorted her up the path to the front door, set in a verandah. Someone, she noticed, had been working in the garden, which wasn’t up to Corunda standards; the roses weren’t blooming as they should, had red spider as well as black spot. But then, Grace had never been a gardener. I am selfish, Edda thought, I should donate an occasional day off to helping her. Bear isn’t a gardener either, even when he’s home. Where are the azaleas and rhododendrons? The pansies and lobelias?

Then Grace was at the open door, ushering them inside, her surprise written clearly on her face. “Edda did explain she
was bringing someone, but I confess I never expected you, dear Mr. Thurlow,” Grace gushed in best Maude mode. “Sit down, please.”

Oh, poor young woman! Jack Thurlow was thinking as he sat rather awkwardly in the wrong sort of chair. So like Edda, yet so unlike her! Very attractive, especially with her pregnant bloom suffusing her skin, yet no vitality, no zest for life. “Call me Jack,” he said, smiling at her.

The ice was broken; soon Grace and Jack were laughing, her big grey eyes shining as he put her at her ease, carefully hiding his pity as she, no doubt terribly lonely stuck here all day, expanded under his very ordinary brand of attention.

While the pair talked, Edda was free to assess the house as she never had before, always too immersed in Grace to spare a moment.
But the house had changed!
How long since her last visit here? A month? No, Edda, it’s at least three months. I always buy her lunch at the Parthenon to free her from her domestic jail, I hate coming to the Trelawneys. Now look at this! Oh, God, why haven’t I kept a more vigilant eye on Grace and her house?

The place was furnished like a rich man’s mansion! That huge Persian rug on the floor in her lounge room. That gorgeous coromandel screen. Genuine tapestry seats on the dining chairs. Grace, Grace, what have you done?

“Jack, content yourself with your own company,” she said as soon as seemed natural, “while Grace and I fetch tea.”

The moment the kitchen door was closed Edda grasped her twin by the shoulder a little cruelly and shook her. “Grace, when did you buy all this furniture?”

Grace glowed. “Isn’t it lovely, Eds? I ran into Maude and Mrs. Enid Treadby about four months ago, and they took me to this wonderful shop way out on the Melbourne road — such stunning bits and pieces! People come from Canberra to shop there.”

The rage died; Edda gazed at her sister in despair. “Oh, Grace, you — you
idiot
! Well, there’s nothing else for it, you have to return the lot. You can’t live without
some
money in the bank, and you spent more than your own five hundred pounds, didn’t you? Don’t say Bear let you spend all his money too!”

“Of course he let me, I’m his wife,” said Grace in wounded tones. “This is
real
furniture, it appreciates with time!”

“There’s an old proverb, twin, that you have to cut your coat to suit your cloth,” Edda said tiredly. “You’re imitating Mrs. Enid Treadby, who’s rich enough to buy furniture that will appreciate. Oh, you fool! Stepmama led you into this, I know she did, the bitch! It wasn’t Mrs. Treadby, it was Maude.”

By this, Grace was weeping. “I can’t return it, Edda, I
bought
it!” she wailed. “I love it, and Bear loves it too. He says I have the best taste in the world.”

“Put the kettle on your fancy new gas stove, Grace, or we’ll look as if we’re neglecting our guest,” Edda said on a sigh. “In future, Grace, you come to me before you spend a single penny on anything that doesn’t belong in a pantry or ice chest, hear me?”

Somehow the visit got itself over and done with; Edda sat in the Daimler’s front passenger seat and said not a word.

“Something’s up,” Jack said.

“Indeed it is.”

“I’m a good listener.”

“I know, but it’s family trouble, Jack. Let’s just say that I forgot how absolutely stupid Grace can be, all right?”

“Ah, poor little Grace! I daresay she is stupid, Edda. It’s her nature, don’t you agree? The trouble with being smart and clever and efficient is that so many people aren’t smart and clever and efficient — or even one of those. But she’s a loving little thing just the same. I bet she gives her husband a lot of headaches, but he probably thinks the love she gives him is worth every pang. That’s the difficulty women like you always have, Edda. For every ounce of cleverness in your brain, you’ve had to give up at least an ounce of love.”

The pain! It lanced through her like a needle of cold fire, but Edda Latimer would have died rather than show this Lord of Creation that his words hurt. “That is utter nonsense,” she said crushingly. “You sound like a women’s magazine.”

“I’d rather call it an exercise in accounting. The debits have to equal the credits, it’s a law of nature. Grace’s credits are measured in love, whereas yours are measured in intellect. Oh, not entirely,” he added, his own eyes twinkling at the anger in hers, “but love would never be enough for you. Its rewards are far too ephemeral, like trying to see water evaporate.”

“And would love be enough for you?” she asked icily.

“No, unfortunately it wouldn’t. However, today has solved one puzzle I’ve always wrestled about twins.”

For a moment Edda contemplated not rising to his bait, then admitted that if she didn’t, he wouldn’t tell her. Ever. “And what puzzle has been so baffling?”

“Why twins at all?” he said. “There’s too much to pack inside one person, but spread over two, the mixture’s thin and lumpy.”

“So a twin is a lesser kind of human being?”

“More different than lesser.”

“You think Grace got all the love and I the brains?”

“Not exactly. Just that she needs some of your good sense and you need some of her compassion.”

“I’m not sorry I got the brain. Grace is going to suffer.”

“Not if she has a good husband.”

Bear’s frost-fair face rose before Edda’s internal gaze; she smiled, squeezed Jack’s hand as it lay on the steering wheel. “Then she’ll be all right. Bear Olsen is a very good man who will always look after her.” Doubt crept into her voice. “If, that is, he can stop her spending money. How odd! I never realised that she’s a spendthrift until now, when I saw all that expensive furniture. She left not a penny in the bank.”

“I don’t suppose she’s ever had the freedom to spend.”

“With our stepmother in control, true words. Yet it was our stepmother encouraged her to buy the furniture.” The Town Hall loomed, the car stopped. “Let me drop you at the hospital,” he pleaded. But Edda was already out of the car, and smiling brilliantly.

“No, thank you. I’ll see you on a ride, no doubt?”

His laughter sounded exciting. “No more rides for a while, Edda. You and I are going to spend our spare time at Grace’s, doing things in the garden. Grace is getting too swollen to tend it, and Bear’s on the road. It’s the least we can do. When are you off duty?”

“Tomorrow,” she said numbly.

“Then I’ll see you here at eleven tomorrow morning. I’d be earlier, except that I have to beg, borrow or steal cuttings and plants from Hannah, Enid and whoever else to fill those vacant beds. A house in Corunda without rhododendrons and azaleas? A prunus or two? Daffodils under the grass?”

He was still talking as he drove away, leaving Edda standing to stare after him as at a vanishing genie.

Finally she turned and began to plod toward the hospital side gate, mind whirling. Looking back over the events, she had no idea what she had expected might happen beyond a friendly cup of tea with her twin, about whom Jack had indeed wondered from time to time. If Edda had fretted over an introduction, it was in the belief that Jack might fall for the softer sister. Instead he seemed to pity Grace — why was that more annoying?

Then Edda grasped her unruly emotions firmly, brought them under control, and conjured up an image of Grace as she had been this afternoon. Remarkably pretty, as pregnant women tended to be, showing a seven-months tummy but not yet unwieldy, her big grey eyes filled with love for — oh, everybody! How extraordinary, that a man as unversed as Jack Thurlow had felt it too, Grace’s voracious appetite for love. She hadn’t tried in the least to captivate him, but he wasn’t proof against Grace’s brand of charm, against her air of helpless incompetence. Owning no incompetence herself, Edda despised it, and had assumed Jack would too. To find that he didn’t came as an unpleasant shock.

Tufts was sitting in the common room surrounded by books, but of Kitty there was no sign — yes, on duty in Children’s, as
per usual. Odd, that. Kitty thirsted for duty on Children’s, and Matron, it seemed, was prepared to indulge her.

“Tufts!” Edda rapped, lighting the gas under the kettle. “Do you ever get tired of being the capable and intelligent twin?”

“A cuppa? Oh, yes, please!” Tufts looked up, her sherry-coloured eyes brightening. “The strong twin, I think you really mean,” she said.