“I have obligations to no man. I did not want him as my friend. I did not want him as my neighbor. I don’t want you as my neighbor and I certainly don’t want you as my friend.” Years as police spokesman had taught Angus how to use words to maximum effect, and his precise Highland accent turned them into bullets. He watched them strike home with satisfaction.
“Like it or not, we’re neighbors, and neighbors carry obligations.” Red stuck doggedly to the beliefs that had been shaped in Burma and had enabled men to survive.
“I don’t want neighbors. Can’t you get that through your thick skull? I don’t need you. Now, would you kindly get off my land and take that mangy animal with you.”
Red took a deep breath to calm himself. He couldn’t leave without raising the matter he’d come to discuss. Angus glowered at him, and he glowered back. Finally Red turned away. He looked at Archie and Bonnie, one purring and the other wagging his tail. How could natural enemies like a cat and dog get along so well while their respective masters were at each other’s throats? “I didn’t come here to discuss Bernie,” he said softly. “I came to tell you about the woman he left his bach to.”
“What!” Angus nearly tripped off his veranda.
“Bernie wrote a will and left his bach to a woman.”
“To a woman!” Angus could hardly conceive of a greater blasphemy. “How do you know about this will?”
“He asked me to witness it.”
“Then you’re a bloody fool, man! A bloody fool!”
“What would you have had me do, Angus? Deny a dying man? Lose his letter overboard? Is that what you would have had me do?”
“Don’t you mock me!” Angus wrung his hands in frustration. “Bonnie, get inside!” Bonnie took no notice. “A woman, you say? Here? At Wreck Bay? Was the old man mad?”
“She sent me a letter. She wants me to pick her up from Fitzroy next Saturday.”
“You’re not going!”
“No choice!”
“Of course you’ve choice, man! Have you lost your senses altogether?”
“Angus, if I don’t fetch her she’ll just pay someone else to bring her. The question isn’t whether I pick her up, it’s what do we do when she gets here.”
“Dear God, a woman here at Wreck Bay!” A thought occurred and gave cause for hope. “She’s not young, this woman? Perhaps she’s one of Bernie’s old flames?”
“From what Bernie told me I’d say she’d be in her mid-thirties.”
“Oh dear God … Married, perhaps, is she?”
“She’s coming alone.”
“Dear God in heaven.”
“Angus, think about it. There’s nothing here for her. We’ve got to stick together and make sure she understands that.”
“Aye, we’d better talk. You’d better come up here. I suppose I should offer you a drop of tea. Make sure your dog stays down there, mind.”
“Archie goes where I go.”
“Ah, suit yourself!” The dog was the least of his worries. Angus walked slowly back into his kitchen to put another hakea stick on the flames and the kettle back on the hob. “Dear God, a woman here! A young woman, at that!” He’d found paradise and peace, a hiding place from the dream that he’d finally accepted could never be. But it seemed the dream had sought him out once more and brought with it all the pain of despair and abandoned hopes that he thought he’d left behind forever. His brain struggled to comprehend the scale of the disaster. He couldn’t allow it to happen. They couldn’t allow it to happen. Whatever it took, they couldn’t allow the woman to come to Wreck Bay.
The two men sat together on the veranda, uncomfortable with their closeness, plotting and concocting schemes neither man was capable of executing. They discussed wrecking Bernie’s bach, but neither man was a vandal. They thought of draining his water tank, but abandoned that idea for the same reason. They thought of laying baits to encourage the native rats to move into the bach, but they didn’t like the idea of encouraging the kiore, either. They decided they could do nothing but allow the isolation and deprivations of Wreck Bay to speak for themselves, confident that they would not so much speak as shriek. Let her face the prospect of hauling four-gallon tins of diesel all the way up the hill from the beach. Let her face the prospect of carrying bucketfuls of soil for her garden over the hills from Whangapoua. Let her face the prospect of taking a boat single-handed around Aiguilles Island in hostile weather to fetch supplies. Let her learn the vagaries of cooking on the decrepit Shacklock Orion slow-combustion stove. Let her suffer the deprivations of life without shops, cinemas, bright lights or a friendly voice. Let her fend for herself. Wreck Bay was wildly beautiful but promised a hard life to anyone who chose to occupy its shores. The two men resolved not to make it easier for her.
They parted not as friends but as reluctant allies, each committed from self-interest to a common cause. Red took the track down to the beach to prepare his boat and set off with Archie for the rise beyond Aiguilles Island to honor his dead mate’s wishes. Angus had declined Red’s invitation to join him and help in the scattering of Bernie’s ashes. Instead he sat unmoving, head in hands, trying to find the strength to confront and dismiss his fears. If any prayers had passed his lips they would’ve been reserved for his own salvation, not Bernie’s.
Angus was not one to admit failure, yet he had failed to accomplish the one thing he believed made sense of his existence. He’d never wanted riches, fame, possessions, nor particularly a wife. He’d learned to expect nothing and to be given less. But it had never seemed an unreasonable expectation to one day have a boy child in his image. A son to indulge as he had never been indulged, to love as he had never been loved, to shape and mold and make beneficiary of his experiences and wisdoms. A son who would love and look up to him. If marriage had been the price, he would have paid it stoically, but there would never have been the slightest doubt as to whom the boy belonged. The boy would have been his, and he felt the lad’s absence from his life as keenly as a blade. This was Angus’s second secret.
Angus had come to terms with his disappointment, and the woman threatened his acceptance. Her presence would remind him of his failure and, worse, perhaps rekindle his hopes. He could not allow it, not allow it! Waves of anguish washed over him so bitterly that he groaned in despair, startling Bonnie, who’d settled on his lap. He looked up at the dense wild bush surrounding him, his home by choice and hiding place from necessity. What would happen when he could no longer hide?
Little Barrier passed away beneath the port wing, but Rosie hardly gave it a second glance. She was too busy concentrating on the pilot’s description of her new, antisocial neighbors.
“They’re a funny pair,” said Captain Ladd. “Particularly Red. You can be sitting talking to him and suddenly get the feeling that you’re talking to yourself.”
“Bit rude.”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s just that his mind goes off on leave without notice. You can see it in his eyes. One minute he’s home, next he’s off somewhere. Heard he got a hard time from the Japs during the war.”
“What’s he like, I mean physically?”
“Red? Mid-forties, wiry as a whippet, quite good-looking, according to the girls in the office. Red hair, beard, regular features, and eyes that make them want to drop their knickers—so they say, anyway.” He laughed. “They’ve all had a go at chatting him up and got nowhere. He just gives them his thousand-yard stare.”