Silence. Merryn looked at him long and hard. It may have been the heat that caused his face to flush, but she doubted it. Talk of what? Had it not all been said? In his letters. On the phone. She moved to her suitcase and with a small key undid the lock. ‘Till six then,’ she finally said, without turning.
He waited for her to continue, but she didn’t, merely playing absently with the key in her hand. He moved to the door. ‘We’ll have a drink on the veranda—and then dinner in the dining room. Okay?’ He didn’t open the door. He just stood there, one hand on the knob. Another tense silence wove its way between them. It was as though he wasn’t sure whether to leave or not.
When Merryn didn’t say anything, he opened the door and walked through.
After he had gone, feeling surprisingly cold, Merryn turned the fan off, stepped to the window, and fiddled with the louvres. A light breeze came up from the water, billowing the curtains into the room. She imagined Jake driving back to Karu Barracks. Would he be talking to Phillip? What of? Her? Maybe they would be laughing.
Unable to get this image out of her mind, she went to her bag and took out a few clothes, laying them on the back of the chair. Then she decided she’d like a shower. A tattered information sheet by her bed told her the bathroom was off the veranda. She edged out the door to where a few dead pot plants clung defiantly to pock-marked veranda posts and a skinny tabby cat lay spread eagled in a circle of shade. About halfway along, she found the bathroom built out over a modern extension. A little while later, after locking the bathroom door, she decided against a shower after all. Instead she ran the cold tap into the chipped bath. Immersed in the cool water, she relished the calmness it brought to her body.
The late afternoon shadows had shifted, and the cat moved to another slither of shade when she walked back along the veranda to her room. From her suitcase, Merryn took out the Casuarina Tree, Somerset Maugham’s book of short stories. She plumped up the pillows and lay on the bed, but finding it difficult to concentrate, she placed the book on the cane bedside table. A few minutes later, she closed her eyes and soon she was drifting in and out of sleep, her mind taking her back to the orchard at Koonya, and the first time she had met Jake. Was it seeing him again in his uniform, the one Prue had hated so much? What it stood for?
It had been the end of a long week, and the pickers were in the apple sheds with a blustery wind rattling the corrugated iron roof. Flames from a makeshift fire in a disused kero drum cast shadowy feathers on the timber apple boxes lined up on the far side. In a corner, another drum made a good sausage sizzle with the aroma of burnt sausages and caramelized onions filling the air. In the middle of the floor, hay bales were haphazardly thrown in a square.
With her face to the darting flames and sitting on one of the bales, Merryn nursed a cold beer in her hand. Not used to drinking, she’d taken only two sips in the last half hour; however, to appear sociable, she had accepted a bottle earlier on from Prue. Wearing a red skirt, a white cotton blouse, and with her long auburn hair tied back in a ponytail, she was sitting next to two apple pickers from Western Australia.
Elvis, alternated with Slim Dusty, blared from a small transistor radio on a shelf above the apple grader in the corner. A few of the group were bopping in the centre of the shed. Huddled in the corner in deep conversation with Prue Hawkins was Jean Paul, an apple picker on a working holiday from France. Over on the far side, where during the day the apples were pushed along a mechanical conveyor belt, graded, and then packed into wooden boxes, Jake Hawkins and Sid Browne stood summing up the scene.
Merryn had been up in the orchard picking late Gravensteins when they arrived in Sid’s old Chevrolet earlier in the week. From the moment she met him, it was obvious to Merryn that Jake and Prue were out of a different pod. For where Jake was tall and blond, Prue, with her deep suntan and long jet black hair, free from the dreadlocks of a few days ago now tied back with a piece of twine, looked almost as though she had what Merryn’s mother would call ‘a touch of the tar brush’ in there somewhere.
Merryn wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting Prue’s brother to be like, but Jake wasn’t it. For a second, she thought Sid must have been her brother, with the same dark hair and smoldering grey eyes and the way Prue jumped down from her ladder and enfolded him in a huge bear hug when they arrived up the orchard.
Jake had stood back a bit before stepping forward and brushing his sister’s cheek with a half kiss. Straightaway Merryn felt the tension in the air.
‘How are you, Jake?’ Prue asked, standing back and looking him in the eye. ‘Congrats on joining up. Big brother in the army, eh? How about that for the boys!’
The way she had said it had an edge; Merryn could see Jake flush. Feeling sorry for him and trying to diffuse the situation, she moved forward introducing herself. When he took the hand she held out, it was obvious Jake was grateful, for he gave her a beaming smile, a smile like no other she had seen in her life. Tan skin dimpling, blue eyes creasing in the corners. It was as if his whole face was hit by a shaft of bright light. The only smile she had seen come close to it was her father’s.
Unwittingly, Merryn found that she was blushing. She hated the way she blushed, often at the most inappropriate times. Standing up in class stumbling over an answer to a question she knew well. Telling the priest she had sinned since her last confession, when she hadn’t. Well, a few bad thoughts never hurt anyone. She’d even blushed bright red when the yummy fellow in their local butcher at Muswellbrook, ten miles along the dirt road from Wattle Creek, had asked her what she wanted to buy. Sausages or steak? After that she had to go to a different butcher miles out of her way.
‘Welcome to Koonya,’ she said a little too loudly, putting on a bright smile. ‘Prue’s told me about you.’
Jake gave his sister a quizzical glance. ‘Has she now? Well, I hope it wasn’t all bad?’
A beat of silence followed. Merryn’s eyes were on his, and then she dropped his hand, stepped back, and looked away, leaning down to pick a rotten apple off the ground. Throwing it across the way to a row of Cox’s Orange Pippins, she shook her head.
‘No. Of course not. Just that you were coming.’
Sitting on the hay bale in the packing shed that night with the wind still howling outside, she watched one of the apple pickers from Western Australia grab a sausage off the sizzle and place it in a bread roll. Thinking of getting something to eat herself, she turned around and found herself looking up into Sid’s slightly bloodshot eyes. Without her realizing, he’d crossed the floor and was standing before her, hand outstretched.
He gave a lopsided grin and bent down to where she sat. ‘How about a dance?’ he asked. ‘I’m no Fred Astair, but we could give it a try.’
Merryn threw her head back and laughed out loud. ‘Well, luckily for you I’m no Ginger Rogers. But I’d love to.’
Fortunately, it was Elvis that blared forth from the transistor— easier to dance to than Slim Dusty.
Five minutes later, they were slowly moving to ‘Wooden Heart’ when she saw Jake Hawkins tap Sid on the shoulder. Merryn’s heart threw a little wobbly, and on cue her face began to burn.
‘May I?’ Jake asked.
‘Do you mind?’ said Sid, trying to brush him off jovially. ‘We’ve only just got into the swing of things.’
‘I know,’ Jake said with a grin, and then gestured across the room, ‘but Prue’s on her own. We can’t have a wallflower in our midst, can we now? And I don’t reckon her wayward brother’s the sort of dance partner she has in mind.’
Sid followed Jake’s gaze and realised he was right. Sitting by herself, no sign of the Frenchman in sight, her hair gleaming in the soft glow of the hurricane lanterns hanging from the rafters, Prue was perched on a pile of apple pallets on the far side of the shed. Lifting her eyes beneath thick lashes, she saw Sid looking in her direction. She