‘Happy birthday, Kate,’ Stan said as he handed her the keys.
When hugs had been exchanged and the general delirium had died down, the staff departed and Bartholomew wended his way back up the stairs, independently this time, at his customary snail’s pace. It was then that Stan, with a glance at his wife, attempted to put a proviso on the gift.
‘We thought it might perhaps be best if the car stayed here at Elianne –’ he started to say, but he didn’t get any further.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad.’ Kate laughed out loud, as if he’d actually been joking. ‘You can’t give me a car and then tell me not to drive it.’
Yes, Stan supposed, that did sound a bit silly – it had been Hilda’s idea and Hilda was often unrealistic. Kate was an experienced driver, after all. She’d been driving on the estate since she was fourteen years old, as had all three of his children – indeed Alan had been driving since he was twelve. But a sense of trepidation remained nonetheless. The traffic in Sydney was horrendous. On the numerous trips he’d made himself over the years, he’d always hired a chauffeur-driven limousine. Never once had he chosen to drive the city streets himself.
Kate was aware of her father’s misgivings, and also of the reasons for them. Of course Stan Durham would find Sydney traffic daunting. He was the product of a time that had moved more slowly than the sixties, and he was accustomed to wide, open spaces.
‘I’ll be careful, Dad, I promise.’ She gave him another hug. Then she added cheekily, ‘It’s only a city you know, like Brisbane but bigger,’ and Stan felt thoroughly patronised.
Kate turned to her brothers. ‘Do you want to come for a drive?’
‘Rhetorical question,’ Neil said with a grin. ‘Where’ll we go?’
‘Where do you
want
to go?’ She looked from one to the other.
‘Bargara,’ Alan replied boldly, knowing it was probably further than she’d intended. ‘We could go for a swim.’
‘Rightio. Grab your togs.’ Then the thought occurred that it might be a courtesy to check with her parents. ‘Is that all right?’ she asked.
‘Of course, dear,’ her mother replied, ‘just so long as you make sure that you drive very, very carefully.’ Hilda herself had never driven a vehicle in the whole of her life. She didn’t know how, and had no desire to learn. ‘If you’re going to loll around on the beach,’ she added, ‘you might want to take along a picnic lunch. I shall ask Cook; I’m sure she’ll be happy to prepare some sandwiches.’ She started towards the stairs. ‘Now I really must go inside, Stanley, it’s becoming altogether too hot out here in the driveway.’
‘Make sure you’re back by late afternoon,’ Stan called over his shoulder as he joined his wife. ‘Cook’s planned a special birthday dinner.’ Even Stan the Man deferred to Cook.
As her parents left, another thought occurred to Kate.
‘Hey, Alan,’ she said, ‘why don’t you ask Paola to come along?’
‘All right,’ he replied, doing his best to sound casual, ‘good idea.’
‘Better ask Georgio too.’
‘Yep,’ Alan said regretfully.
But as fortune would have it, Georgio was playing football that afternoon, so Alan and Paola had the back seat all to themselves.
They drove the fifteen miles to Bundaberg, crossing over the old bridge that forded the Burnett River and into the centre of town. Solid, grand and ornately designed, the old Burnett Bridge had served Bundaberg’s traffic since the birth of the century.
A number of heads turned as they drove up and down the main road; Neil waved through the open passenger window to the people he knew. ‘You can feel the envy from here,’ he said.
‘Yes, she’s a bit conspicuously new, isn’t she,’ Kate smiled and gave the steering wheel an affectionate caress, ‘I might have to muddy her up a bit.’
They paraded up and down the entire length of Bourbong Street, Bundaberg’s massively broad main thoroughfare, where vehicles were parked down the centre of the road and on both curbsides, and where bustling shops and businesses did a roaring trade. They passed pretty Buss Park and the elegant stone building that was the School of Arts, and they passed the imposing clock-faced tower of the post office. Rising above the general cityscape like a giant exclamation mark carved out of stone, the post office clock tower was the unmistakeable symbol of Bundy.
Then in only a matter of minutes they were out of town and on the road to Bargara, the coastal settlement that lay nine miles to the east.
The day was hot and they drove with the windows down, the warm wind whipping their hair. None of them minded – they loved the heat. The landscape they passed through was the familiar flat, open plains of cane country. Here and there some fields lay fallow, rich and red-brown, but mostly they were surrounded by a waving green mass of sugar cane in various stages of maturity.
Several miles before reaching the coast, however, they passed an anomaly in the landscape. There it was to their right: the Hummock, rising incongruously two hundred feet above the sea of cane, the only hill in the entire district.
‘Dad and I took a bloke from Sydney on a sightseeing tour a month or so back,’ Neil said, ‘and he reckoned it looked like a pimple.’
‘A pimple,’ Alan piped up from the back seat, ‘you’re joking.’
‘No, I’m not. “A pimple on the face of an otherwise unblemished landscape”, those were his exact words. He was a journalist,’ Neil added as if that explained everything, ‘doing a story on the sugar industry. He was just trying to sound smart, that’s all.’
‘I hope you set him straight. Did you tell him it was once an active volcano?’
‘No, I was a bit more precise. I told him it was a cinder cone and the reason these lands were so fertile. He ended up putting that in the article, but he couldn’t resist adding the pimple on the landscape quote as well, trying to be smart like I said – thinks he’s Ernest Hemingway.’
‘Well it’s our pimple,’ Alan replied tersely. ‘It’s our hill, the only one we’ve got, and we like it.’
‘I think it’s pretty,’ Paola said, turning to catch a last glimpse of the Hummock through the rear windscreen.
Bargara, fronting the Coral Sea, had been a popular seaside resort for decades, a holiday-maker’s haven where grassy slopes fringed long, sandy beaches and swaying coconut palms and pandanus trees gave a flavour of the tropics.
‘Where to?’ Kate asked. ‘Neilson Park?’ Neilson Park was the surf beach particularly favoured by the young bloods. It boasted a long-established Lifesaving Club of which the locals were justifiably proud.
‘Yep,’ her brothers chorused; both were keen body surfers.
Immediately upon arrival, they stripped down to their bathing costumes and headed for the water, or rather Kate and her brothers did. Paola chose to sit on the beach and watch. Unlike the Durham siblings, she was not confident in the surf.
After ten minutes or so, Alan jogged up from the water’s edge.
‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked, plonking himself down on the sand beside her, inadvertently spraying her with water as he flicked back his wet hair.
‘It’s a bit rough for me,’ she said apologetically.
He looked at the waves. ‘Really? You’ve got to be joking.’ The surf was extremely mild.
‘I’m not a very good swimmer,’ she admitted, shamefaced.
‘Oh. I didn’t know that.’ Alan was surprised. They’d been to the beach together on family picnics a number of times over the years and he’d never noticed Paola was a poor swimmer. But then, he thought, there was probably a lot he hadn’t noticed about Paola.
‘I usually avoid the surf. That way people don’t find out.’ She gave a rueful shrug. ‘I look Italian enough as it is,’ she added, ‘and being a lousy swimmer’s so terribly un-Australian.’
He didn’t get the connection. ‘What’s wrong with looking Italian?’
‘Nothing I suppose.’ She shrugged again, carelessly this time. Then with a sudden change of heart, and much to her own surprise, she found herself confessing. ‘Well yes, there is actually. I was born here. I’m Australian. I get sick of people calling me a dago and thinking I’m a foreigner just because of the way I look.’
There was a pause before Alan’s response, which strangely enough popped out with the greatest of ease. He didn’t feel in the least self-conscious.
‘I love the way you look.’
‘Do you?’ She flushed with pleasure. ‘Do you really?’
‘Yep. You look just like Natalie Wood.’
Paola burst out laughing. ‘Natalie Wood’s not Italian.’
‘She looks Italian.’
‘Natalie Wood’s about as American as you can get.’
‘She’s not actually.’ Alan’s tone held an air of superiority. ‘She’s Russian-American – I read that in a magazine somewhere.’ Then he added with a ring of triumph, ‘So what about that? Natalie Wood’s Russian-American and you’re Italian-Australian. You should be proud of your ancestry, Paola. I’ll bet
she
is.’
‘I am.’ Paolo flushed again. She was very prone to flushing, but this time it was with guilt. She felt she’d betrayed her family in admitting her private secret to Alan Durham, and she wished now that she hadn’t. ‘I am proud,’ she said, staring down at the sand.
‘Of course you are.’ Alan cursed himself. He’d been clumsy and hurtful. His intention had been to offer encouragement, not criticism. He reached out and took her hand, unsure of what he should say to make amends.
She looked up from the sand and met his gaze.
‘I meant it as a compliment, you know. When I said that you look like Natalie Wood?’ He thought how terribly lame and pathetic he sounded.
Paola could see the desperation in his eyes. ‘I know you did.’ She smiled. ‘And I’m flattered. Thank you.’
I love the way you look too
, she thought,
so solemn and serious, and yet when you smile so like a little boy
.
Alan breathed a sigh of relief and then stood abruptly, pulling her to her feet. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘let’s go to The Basin and I’ll give you a swimming lesson.’ A mile and a half around the point, past the holiday bungalows and the golf course and the rocky outcrops of basalt that typified the area, another long sandy beach boasted a still-water tidal swimming pool. Many years previously, Kanaka workers had erected the low-slung wall of black boulders that encircled the pool and ‘The Basin’ had been a favourite choice for families with small children ever since. ‘Come on,’ he said, releasing her hand and picking up his towel.
‘No, no,’ she insisted, ‘I’m perfectly happy here. Really I am.’
‘Well I’m not. I want to go to The Basin.’
‘That’s absolute rubbish, Alan,’ she said, calling his bluff. ‘You don’t want to swim with a bunch of little kids.’
‘Of course I don’t. I want to swim with you.’ He dumped his towel back on the sand. ‘Won’t be a tick, I’ll just tell the others.’ And Paola watched as he jogged off.
Alan swam out to where Kate and Neil were standing chest-deep waiting eagle-eyed for the next wave.
‘Paola and I want to go to The Basin,’ he said.
‘Oh, all right,’ Neil was puzzled, obviously wondering why, but good-natured as always, he was happy to oblige. ‘One more wave in and we’ll join you.’
‘No we won’t.’ Kate’s look to him was so laced with meaning that Neil was baffled and suitably silenced. ‘We’ll meet up with you at The Basin in a couple of hours, Al, say about one o’clock. I’ll bring the car around and we’ll have lunch there.’
‘Right you are then.’ Alan swam off, catching a small wave that took him halfway to shore.
‘What was that all about?’ Neil asked.
‘I think they want to be alone.’
‘
What?
’
Her brother’s expression was comically incredulous. ‘You mean
Alan and Paola
. . .’ The rest was left unsaid.
Kate nodded. ‘I can’t answer for her, but
he’s
keen, I know that much.’
‘Well, well, little brother’s growing up, eh?’ Neil grinned. ‘I must say he shows good taste. Paola’s become quite a looker.’
‘Don’t you dare tease him,’ she warned.
‘As if I’d do such a dastardly thing,’ he replied with mock innocence. Then he noticed the waves looming out to sea. ‘Hey, there’s a good run coming up.’
The conversation stopped right there as the bigger waves started to roll in. But Kate knew there’d been no real need to sound a warning: Neil was always sensitive to the feelings of others.
They joined up for lunch, the four of them devouring Cook’s ham and pickle sandwiches, and, after a dip in The Basin to wash off the yellow stain from the ripe mangoes that had followed, they packed the car and set off on the drive home.
Neil was at the wheel this time. Kate had promised Alan a drive too, although they’d need to wait until they were back on the estate as he was under-age, but Alan, oddly enough, hadn’t appeared all that interested.
During the drive, Alan and Paola were quiet in the back seat, but Kate had noticed as she’d climbed into the passenger side that they were holding hands. Of course, she told herself, he doesn’t need to show off any more. How completely together they are in each other’s company, she thought, how content and at one. Is it possible, she wondered briefly, for fifteen-year-olds to be in love?
Beside her, Neil glanced in the rear-vision mirror. Well, well, he thought, little brother has a girlfriend.
The Krantzes’ move to Bundaberg was slow and methodical, but also highly efficient, in keeping with Ivan’s approach to both business and life. The offices of Krantz & Son had been well set up in advance and the home he’d bought on the outskirts of town was well-appointed with new furnishings, the plan being that once he and his wife and son had made the move, they could take their time picking through those of their possessions that remained at old Elianne House. Stan had assured them there was no rush as the house was to be demolished, and Hilda had been only too grateful that the old home was to be spared that little bit longer, perhaps in the naive hope that there might be some last-minute reprieve.
It was early February before the house was finally deserted and plans were set in motion for its demolition.
‘How fortunate you are not to be here for that saddest of days,’ Hilda said as Kate pulled the Holden up in the driveway of old Elianne House. Kate was leaving for Sydney in two days. She’d decided to go back several weeks early in order to find a place of her own. She’d given ample notice before the holidays that she would not be returning to the flat she’d shared with three fellow students, although she’d not told them why. She’d had her reasons at the time and she still did. Now more than ever Jeremy was beckoning.