Kimberley Breen
THERANGEShad withheld many things from Kimberley Breen, but they had lavishly bestowed upon her their colours. All that Bony had been told about her hair was fact. Her eyes were large and grey, flecked with blue. Her face was oval and vital with health.
Three naked babies lay on their backs on a blanket spread in the sunlight. They were tiny babies and jet-black. Bead-black eyes were bright, and the soles of the little feet kicking at the sun were almost pink. One gurgled when Kimberley lightly pressed her finger on his tummy. Another industriously sucked her thumb, and the third yawned and resolutely strove to keep his eyes open.
Around Kimberley and the babies stood several lubras, and twice their number of children and dogs. The women were vastly amused at Kimberley’s interest in their babies, and some of the younger children were solemnly jealous. They were as free of clothes as the babies; the older children and the women wearing shapeless dresses of coloured cotton.
TheBreens ’ homestead waspise -built and iron-roofed. The walls were a yard thick, and such was its rambling shape it was not easy to estimate the number of rooms. High veranda roofing gave shade from the hot sun and shelter from the torrential summer rain, and upon the bare earth floor stood painted tubs in which grew vigorous ferns. A covered way connected the main house with the kitchen and other buildings, and beyond this covered way a garden extended to a low precipitous cliff of weathered limestone. On the cliff three wind-litescharged batteries to provide light and power. Two windmills beside the near-by creek raised water from an almost fathomless hole, and tubular piping built the masts for the wireless aerial. It was a picture of permanency and solidity.
Over by the creek a man snouted, and instantly the lubras and the children were tensed and silent. They were like hens made abruptly immobile by the arrival of a noiseless hawk. Then the women sighed, and one cried:
“Car bin come, Missus.”
Kimberley rose from the blanket on which she had been kneeling beside the babies, and listened. She could hear nothing beyond the windmills. Then one of the dogs barked, and a score of others were quickly roused to frenzy, and the flock of some two hundred goats grazing on a distant ‘bump’ abruptly lifted their heads. The aborigine over by the creek had heard the oncoming vehicle seconds before the dogs heard it.
The truck came on. The dogs barked louder. The lubras and the children faded into obscurity, and with them went the babies and the blanket.
Constable Irwin stopped the utility, and slid from it to meet Kimberley, who had walked to the shelter of the front veranda. He slicked his fingers through his fair hair, hitched up his trousers, and laughed into Kimberley’s large grey-blue eyes.
“Day-ee, Kim! How’s things?”
“So-so, Mr Irwin. What are you doing over this way?”
She saw the second man who remained by the truck, and noted the absence of trackers on the back of it. She smiled up at Irwin and Irwin realized it was indeed a beautiful day and a wonderful country.
“Just touring around, Kim,” he said. “You hear about ConstableStenhouse?”
“Yes. On the air last night and this morning. A dreadful thing to have happened. Are you going to stay a bit?”
“Yes… like to. I’ve Inspector Bonaparte with me.”
“Inspector Bonaparte!”Kimberleyechoed, emphasis on the rank. “Oh! Just look at me! Could he wait… while I change?”
“He could, but why change?” Irwin chuckled. “You look good to me, Kim.”
She was wearing a faded blue blouse belted into old blue trousers having a darker blue patch on the seat. She backed away to the house entrance, her face flushing, her eyes troubled, and saying:
“Oh, I couldn’t meet an Inspector, Mr Irwin, not like this. You take him into the living-room and I’ll change and get the girls to make tea. I’ll not be long.”
Continuing to back to the door and in through the doorway, she disappeared. Irwin heard her calling for Mary and Joan and Martha, and, smiling, he returned to the utility.
“We’re invited in for afternoon tea,” he said to Bony.
“We shall certainly appreciate that.”
Irwin conducted Bony into the house and to a large room which might have been furnished by people now dead two hundred years, that is if one could shut out the modern radio transceiver and the two electrics suspended from the beamed ceiling.
Bony sat on a carved mahogany chair stuffed with horsehair and weighing a hundredweight. In the centre of the room stood a teakwood table capable of seating twenty. On the bare earth floor, composed of termite hills packed to the hardness of cement, were dyed goat-skin rugs. The yawning mouth of a great open fireplace was filled with silver grass, and upon the three-inch-thick mantelshelf stood a Swiss cuckoo clock, several cracked ornaments, and racks of pipes. There were oleographs of Queen Victoria, a cardinal, a child in a tub reaching for a cake of soap, and another of an abbey, as well as two coloured portraits, of abewhiskered man, appearing uncomfortable in a choker collar and massive cravat, and a woman still beautiful, whom Bony guessed were the originalBreens.
The rugged character of those two people was infused into this room. They dominated it and, through it, those who entered. The long horsehair sofa with the curling arms, the remaining chairs, the huge dining-table, belonged to them and to their era, and the setting made incongruous the sleek black radio panel and the shelf above it supporting a dozen or more expensive volumes.
Irwin was nonchalantly rolling a cigarette when Bony stood up and crossed to look more closely at the transceiver.
“Wonderful invention, Irwin,” he said. “No more isolation. No longer the feeling of being banished from the world. An accident, and you contact the base doctor, who tells you what to do, or will fly to attend the patient and, if necessary, fly the patient to hospital.”
Among the books about the transceiver wasChemotherapy by R. M. Mallory: two volumes ofAcross Australia by Spencer and Gillen: and Harrison’sChemical Methods in Clinical Medicine. Bony was astonished by such books in a house like this, occupied by people two of whom had had no education, one a State School education and the fourth member a State Educational Correspondence Course. He took down the volume of chemotherapy. Opening it to see how much it had been read, he found that a ragged hole had been gouged in the centre of the four hundred odd pages. When the covers were closed the hole was large enough to take a pound of rice.
Bony glanced at Irwin, who had picked up a magazine which had lost its covers. He took down another volume, Vol. 1 by Spencer and Gillen, and found, too, a great hole gouged in its pages. The companion volume, and four others, had been similarly desecrated. Bony doubted that the books he opened had ever been studied. They were comparatively new.
Hearing voices beyond the room he replaced the books and resumed his seat. Then, the books forgotten, he was on his feet again making his inimitablebow to Kimberley Breen. Impressions flowed over him like waves of colour; the loveliness of her hair; the sun-ruined complexion; the limpid grey eyes; the roughness of the hand he accepted. He heard her say she seldom received visitors and was glad to receive him and Constable Irwin.
A lubra came in carrying a large tin tray supporting a chipped enamel teapot, an enamel milk jug, and a beaten silver sugar bowl. Placing the tray on the table she withdrew. Kimberley fell upon her knees and dragged two elaborate pigskin hat boxes from beneath the sofa. Saying nothing, she carried one box to the table, raised the lid and took from it the loveliest tea-set Bony had ever beheld. Eggshell-blue and lined with gold, each piece was wrapped in a square of silk, and, like a very proud little girl, Kimberley Breen set cups to saucers and arranged the plates on the table before her guests.
Bony was fascinated by his hostess. It was mid-afternoon, and Kimberley Breen was wearing a bronze velvet ballerina dress, and high-heeled satin shoes encrusted with rhinestones. About her throat was a fine gold chain from which was suspended a huge black opal, a great red flame flickering within a black shadow.
“Two of your brothers, I understand, are taking cattle to Wyndham,” Bony remarked, and all she said was:
“Yes, that’s right.”
She almost ran, such was her nervousness, to a vase on the mantelpiece, from which she took a key. Holding the key between her teeth she carried to the table the second hat box and unlocked it. From the box she lifted a fruit cake still within its baking papers, and snatched up a carving knife having a broken bone handle. From the exquisite china, Bony passed his gaze to the carving knife and the old enamel teapot, and shuddered.
“Have to keep my best cake safe from the girls,” Kimberley said, and laughed so bewitchingly that Bony forgot about the teapot. She cut the cake, great slabs of it, and loaded the fragile plates, and, returning the cake to the box, she closed the lid and locked it.
Fantasy! Expensive medical and anthropological books with their innards gouged out! A superb tea-set and a chipped enamel teapot! Velvet and jewels and slabs of cake! A sleek black transceiver and a vast dining-table built with teakwood.
She smiled at them, and was so obviously trying to do the correct thing in entertaining guests. Served by aboriginal women and controlled by men, Kimberley loved beautiful things, bought beautiful things, and knew but little how to use them.
“Who took your place?” gently persisted Bony.
“Jasper. Silas said I was to come home because he had to muster cattle from the Swamp.” She smiled again. “That’s not a swamp really. It’s a long lagoon in a river which overflows into the sea, and the crocodiles there are big and they take the calves and often big cows and steers, too. The black sent word about it, and Silas took some of our boys out to shoot the crocs.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Miss Kimberley. I rather wanted to meet Mr Silas Breen. Will he be away long?”
“I don’t know. He left home before I got back.”
“Whend’you expect your brothers Jasper and Ezra back?”
“In about ten days. Must be back in time to get ready for The Annual.”
“The Annual,” explainedIrwin, “is the yearly picnic races. They’re held on a little plain right at the foot of McDonald’s Stand. Everyone comes for miles. The Annual lasts a full week. Sam Laidlaw brings ten tons of beer from Wyndham, and then lays the odds on the races… horses, donkeys, abos, goannas, dogs and flies.”
“And we have a baby show, and the ugliest man competition and fights and target-shooting and everything, Inspector,” Kimberley added. “You must come. Will you be there, Mr Irwin? Ezra says we have a steer that’ll knock anything.”
“H’m! Quite a busy time. I suppose your neighbours help you with the mustering and you help them with theirs?”
“Not often, Inspector. We’re able to manage.”
“Neighbours! Who are your nearest neighbours?”
“Oh! TheWallaces are our nearest. They live on the east side of Black Range. Poor Mr Wallace is an invalid, you know.”
“Yes. We called there yesterday, Miss Breen, and met them all. Jack Wallace, does he often visit you and your brothers?”
“No. Oh, no. We haven’t seen Jack Wallace for weeks,” replied the girl, her eyes directed to the task of rolling a cigarette.
“I suppose youBreens own a large number of cattle?” questioned Bony, and was informed that they really didn’t know how many they owned, as hundreds roamed on the ranges and were very difficult to muster. They generally managed to send four hundred fats to Wyndham Meat Works every year.
“Have you many boys working for you?” pressed Bony.
“About forty, I suppose.”
“I’d like to talk with some of the men. Would you mind?”
Kimberley frowned, saying that nearly all the men were away, what with the cattle on the hoof, and the trip to the Swamp. The subject was disturbing her, and Bony wondered. Her cake was something to be remembered, and he drank three cups of tea, the last really for the caress of the delicate china against his lips. Kimberley clapped her hands and there entered the room a young lubra carrying a tin dish of hot water and a drying cloth. She took away the tea ‘equipage’ and Kimberley removed her platinum wrist-watch and proceeded to wash her blue-gold tea-set.
Bony offered to dry for her but she declined his assistance. Having washed the tea-set, she replaced it in the hat box, and both boxes she pushed beneath the sofa. Finally she swabbed the table and clapped her hands for a lubra to remove the dish.
Then Kimberley sat down and rolled a cigarette, lit it and posed like a little girl consenting to be bored for the sake of convention. So far she had asked only one question, and that, if Irwin would be at The Annual.
“Did you hear on the air that the tracker with MrStenhouse is missing?” Bony asked, and again the frown darkened the grey eyes.
She nodded, and when Bony asked if Jacky Musgrave had been seen by the station blacks, vigorously shook her head. Bony was beginning to feel baffled, for he could not decide if this girl was purposely evasive or was mentally dulled by the advent of her unexpected visitors. He asked several innocuous questions and received ready answers, and then rose and thanked his hostess for her hospitality.
“Well, we must get along, Miss Breen. By the way, is that your father and mother?”
“Oh yes, Mr Bonaparte. They’re dead now. I never knew my father, and I can only just remember my mother.”
“You have, I see, a transceiver, and your mother must have had little compared with what you have. Ah! New books. You read a lot?” Crossing to the shelf he reached out a hand to take one, then Kimberley was at his side, her hand upon his arm, her voice soft and almost pleading.
“Please don’t touch, Inspector,” she said. “They belong to Ezra, and he wouldn’t like anyone to touch his books.”
“That being so, Miss Kimberley, I won’t,” Bony told her, smilingly.” I can quite understand your brother’s love for books. I’ve many of my own and I do hate anyone interfering with them. Well, we really must go. Thank you very much.”
She shook hands with them, and accompanied them to the utility, and all about them gathered the station aborigines: men, women and children. Bony counted the men and the youths old enough for stock work. He totalled thirty-eight.