‘No, she’s my niece.’ Clare looked directly into his eyes. ‘She’s your niece, too.’
‘And her mother?’ he asked after a moment.
‘My sister. Pippa.’ She turned away to stare at the heat wavering above the empty road. ‘She died six weeks ago,’ she told Gray in a light, brittle voice, almost as if it didn’t matter, almost as if her world hadn’t fallen in.
There was a long silence. Beyond the shade, the sun bounced off the tin roofs and beat down on the road. A four-wheel drive, red with dust, drove past the hotel and parked a little further down, outside the general store, but that seemed to be the sum of the town’s activity. To Clare, used to busy city streets, the stillness was uncanny. She could smell the dryness of the air, feel the hard bench beneath her thighs, hear her pulse booming in her ears, and she was suddenly very conscious of the man sitting quietly beside her.
‘I think you’d better tell me everything,’ he said.
There was something peculiarly steadying about his voice. Clare drew a long breath. She had passed the first hurdle. He would listen to her. She couldn’t ask any more of him yet.
Digging in her bag, she drew out the photograph that Pippa had kept by her bed until the last. It was creased and dog-eared with handling, and Clare smoothed it out on her knee before passing it over to Gray. ‘That’s Pippa,’ she said. ‘And that’s your brother with her, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s Jack,’ he admitted.
He studied the picture, frowning slightly. Jack had his arm around a vibrant, lovely girl who seemed to be zinging with happiness, and they were smiling at each other as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. ‘Jack never mentioned your sister to me,’ he told Clare bluntly, ‘and it’s not like him to be secretive.’ He handed back the photograph. ‘How did they meet?’
‘Pippa got a job as a cook at Bushman’s Creek. I’m not sure how.’
‘Probably through the agency,’ he said, in spite of himself. ‘The station is so isolated that nobody ever stays very long, and in the dry season we always need people to help.’
If the station was anything like Mathison, Clare could imagine that no one would want to stay. ‘I know she was thrilled to get the job,’ she went on, unable to prevent her own mystification from creeping into her voice. ‘Pippa had always dreamed about working on a real outback cattle station.’
She sighed, remembering her sister’s face as she’d talked about the outback. ‘Even before she left school she was talking about Australia, and as soon as she could afford the fare she got herself a working visa and came out to find a job. She started in Sydney first of all, but after a while she moved to somewhere on the Queensland coast, and then, about eighteen months ago, she wrote and said that she’d got a job on a station called Bushman’s Creek.’
Clare turned to Gray as if struck for the first time. ‘You can’t have been there, or you would remember Pippa. She wasn’t the kind of person you could forget.’
‘I spent three months in South East Asia meeting buyers about eighteen months ago,’ Gray admitted reluctantly. ‘She could have been at Bushman’s Creek then.’
‘That would be about right.’ She nodded. ‘She was there nearly three months, and she said it was the happiest time of her life. She told me about the station, about how isolated it was and how hard everyone had to work.’ Clare shook her head, remembering. ‘I thought it sounded awful,’ she confessed, ‘but Pippa loved it.’
She paused, holding the photograph between her hands. ‘And then there was Jack,’ she said. ‘You can see how happy they were together. Pippa said that it was love at first sight. They spent all their time together, and were talking about getting married when a row blew up one day about something quite trivial. I don’t know what it was, or what was said, but I think they must have hurt each other very badly.
‘Pippa was incredibly volatile. She was either ecstatic or miserable.’ Clare smiled a little tiredly. ‘I don’t think she ever understood the meaning of moderation or balance, and she was never any good at compromising either.’
Clare glanced at Gray again. He didn’t look like a man who did much compromising either, but in a quite different way from Pippa. How could she explain Pippa’s intense, ebullient personality to someone like Gray?
‘You have to understand what Pippa was like,’ she said with an edge of desperation. ‘She was passionate about everything she did. She could be the kindest, funniest, most wonderful person, and she could also be the most difficult. There was no middle way with Pippa. It was typical of her to react so dramatically when she and Jack had that argument. She thought that it meant the end of everything, and she just threw her things in a bag and came home.’
Clare sighed a little, remembering how Pippa had collapsed messily back into her own calm, ordered life. ‘She didn’t discover that she was pregnant until a couple of months later.’
Gray had been listening in silence, leaning forward, holding his hat loosely between his knees, but he glanced up at that. ‘Why didn’t she contact Jack then?’
‘I tried to persuade her to write to him at least, but she wouldn’t.’ Clare’s gaze rested on Alice, who was still happily chewing her toy and dribbling down her chin. Reaching into her bag for a tissue, Clare wiped her face as she continued.
‘Pippa was still simmering after the argument. It had been over two months, and she hadn’t heard from Jack, so she assumed that he wasn’t interested any more, and she was too proud to ask him for help. She thought if he knew about the baby, he’d feel pressurised into a relationship he didn’t really want. I think Alice’s birth made her realise just how much she still loved him, though,’ Clare went on slowly. ‘That was something they should have shared, and she made up her mind to come back to Australia with Alice and see if she and Jack could sort something out, but…’
Her voice wavered, and she took a deep, steadying breath. ‘But a couple of months after Alice was born Pippa found a lump. She was diagnosed with cancer, and…well, she was one of the unlucky ones. There was nothing they could do for her. It was very quick.’ Clare’s eyes darkened with pain. ‘Three months later she was dead.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Gray quietly, and she sighed.
‘So am I. She was such a special person. Those last terrible weeks, all she thought about was Jack and Alice. She made me promise to tell Jack how much she had loved him, and to ask him to bring their daughter up. She wanted Alice to grow up with her father in the place she had been so happy.’
‘So you promised?’
Clare lifted her hands slightly and let them fall in a gesture of acceptance. ‘I promised,’ she said in a low voice. ‘And here I am.’
Gray got to his feet and walked over to lean on the verandah rail, looking out. ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you,’ he said at last, ‘but can you prove that Alice is Jack’s daughter?’
‘Why would I make it up?’ she asked, bemused.
He turned to face her, folding his arms and leaning back against the rail. ‘Money?’ he suggested with a cynical look.
‘What money? From all Pippa ever told me, you don’t exactly live in the lap of luxury at Bushman’s Creek!’
‘We don’t, but between us Jack and I own a fair chunk of land. As Jack’s daughter, Alice would have a claim on that.’
Clare could hardly believe what she was hearing. ‘I’m not interested in your land!’ she said furiously, eyes blazing. ‘What do you think I am?’
‘I don’t know. That’s the whole point,’ he said with infuriating calm. ‘Until last night I’d never heard of you, or your sister, and now you expect me to believe that my brother is father to a child he knows