“Then you went away, and then you came back. Then you went away again and you came back again. When you were away you were still here for me. Over the years I've been living with you even though you’re not here. I don’t mean that in a sexual sense. I didn’t appreciate what it really is until the last few years. I think the blackfellas would call it the spirit. Old Walter the gardener knows what’s going on. He often ask me how you are and when I reply he just chuckles and walks off shaking his head.”
Rachael was crying. Big tears rolled down her cheeks. Her nose started to run down over her top lip. He gave her a handkerchief and she wiped her eyes and blew her nose.
“You’ve never really asked me why I keep on going away. Why is that, Ali?”
“That’s the way we’ve always been, Princess. You went off to boarding school at about twelve and left me behind. Then I went off to High School in Geraldton and you went back to Perth. Then we all came back to Bangalore for holidays. Then we went away again. Then when I left school and went to Ag College, down to Northam, you went to university. Even though you were only a few hours away I didn’t drive down to see you because that was the way we were. Then I came back here and you stayed away for longer and longer periods…that’s the way it is. Then you went to Sydney and you stayed away. Then Alice told me the other day you were going to India to work; didn’t know what to think then.”
He unscrewed the tops off another two stubbies and pushed one over the table to her. Rachael was crying again.
“Ali…why have we been so stupid?”
“Don’t know.”
“Why have we never talked like this before?”
“Don’t know. I have thought about it. As the years have passed it’s always seemed to me that you were holding something back. I put it down to your ambition to succeed. You’re a driven person; I didn’t want to interfere with that. I didn’t want to come between you and your work.”
“I think I’m some kind of weird masochist.”
“Masochist – why?”
“That day that we lay on the li-lo, what was I sixteen, and you just seventeen? And afterwards when you carved this heart in the table, that day is seared, branded into my brain, I can re-live it at any time I want.”
“Do you?”
“More often than I've always wanted to admit. On so many days you are the last person that I think of before going to sleep and the first person that I think of when I wake. On that first day and every time since, whenever we have been together, even today out riding, a peace, I don’t know, a glow maybe. Something happens to me…I know I am doing the most natural thing in the world and that is just being with you. Then…when we make love…we become one person…there is this fusion…that has always filled me with an ecstatic happiness…yet it frightens me with its power – it’s that power the two of us have – I can’t believe I have been so stupid to only just realise it. It’s the power we have when we are together that has made me run away; it’s been too big for me. I’ve always thought of running away as irrational, but I've been helpless in trying to fight it.
“Having seen the way that Dad was today and when you said you thought he was lonely…that hit me between the eyes…it knocked the breath out of me. I realised, in spite of everything I am doing…I’m lonely too…and the reason you are lonely is because I’m not here with you.”
Ali was quietly rolling a cigarette. When he’d finished he lit it with the Zippo lighter that Rachael had given to him one Christmas. He drew on it and offered it to Rachael. She took it, took a puff and handed it back. “I remember the first time we did this too – share a cigarette – it was that day when we finished mustering that last mob of stragglers – it might have been the same summer. Do you remember? It was as hot as hell and we’d been out in that breakaway country all day, big wethers that refused to move in the heat and we were into the last couple of days of shearing.”
“We had a couple of hundred by the time we’d finished and it was getting dark so we moved them down to that goat trap so that we wouldn’t lose them again. We lit a fire and drank tea and ate everything that was in our saddle packs.” Ali handed her the cigarette again.
“Then we lay on backs and gazed at the stars all night.”
Rachael blew smoke in his face across the table. “Not all night, Ali,” she said in a tone pretending to mock him because he’d forgotten something.
He looked her in the eyes and she felt herself being drawn towards him. “No, Princess, not all night. Then before dawn we moved them out and had the mob at the shearing shed by smoke-o. The cook gave us breakfast. Angus came out to see shearing finished at that shed and all he did was thank us for getting them in. If he knew we’d been out all night he didn’t say anything.”
“He’s always known about us, hasn’t he, Ali?”
“I’m sure he has, Rach. He never mentions it to me. He tells me when you’ve been on the phone. I tell him if you ring me. Alice asks me about you sometimes.”
“She knows too, of course.”
“There is nothing Alice doesn’t know; she never talks about it either. You and Ewen are her children really, but she keeps it all to herself. She’s a very private person is Alice.”
“When we got back to Bangalore, Mother was there on one of her rare visits. I think I had said that the only reason that she was there was so that she could count the wool bales. Someone must have told her or she had deduced somehow that we had been out all night and she went ballistic. Said she was going to take me back to Perth. I remember being very cool about it. I told her that she would have to put me in chains, but if I had to stay with her at least I would meet her boyfriends. She never mentioned it again. She left for Perth the next day.”
As they’d been reminiscing they’d found each other’s hands across the table. “Ali.”
He lifted his eyes from their hands and looked at her. “Ali…can I come back and can we get married? I’m thirty now and I want a child with you. I don’t want this place to end with just Dad and you – two lonely men. I want to be with you, and with Dad. I want to be in this place.”
“Of course you can, Princess.”
“Can we get married?”
“Of course. We’ve been man and wife since we were kids, we know that, maybe everyone else knows that. It’s just taken us a long time to get round to accepting it.”
“That’s been my fault.”
“I don’t want you to ever say that again. What has happened has happened. I could have followed you everywhere but I didn’t. I stayed here.”
“And I could have come back at any time and I didn’t, except when the thoughts of you consumed me – when I needed you.”
“That’s past now, Rach.”
“Ali.”
Again he looked at her. “Ali, there is something else that I want to tell you.” He waited. “There has never been another man in my life. You are the only man that I have ever made love to. There has never been anyone else. I have had boyfriends but if it ever got to where they were looking at going to bed, then I finished it. I always thought of you and I couldn’t – I don’t know – defile myself with another man.”
He just sat there looking at her. She began to feel a little nervous. Then he smiled at her. “We are a couple of bloody fools, you and me, Princess. Here we are thirty years of age. We’ve been lovers since we were sixteen and neither of us has had another lover in all that time. It’s unbelievable.”
“You too?”
“Never saw the need. If I saw a pretty girl or a good-looking woman, especially if they came on to me, then I’d just think of you and have another