In the short-cropped house paddock at Rutherglen, beneath the wintry elms, Felicity aimed her showjumper at the red and white striped rails. Her horse, Calvin, threw his head a little against the pressure of the bit, but cleared the poles with the slightest nick of his neatly shod hind hooves. Felicity, with her gloved hand, slapped him heartily on his glossy bay neck. She urged him forward towards the next jump with a click of her tongue and the flex of her thigh muscles beneath beige jodhpurs.
In the machinery shed nearby, Nick swore at the tractor. He swiped his hands over his threadbare jeans and again took up a shifter, wishing the shearing at Bronty had gone on for longer. Beside him his dog, Tuff, lay licking his balls and eyeing a lone, unseasonal blowfly.
‘Good boy,’ Felicity cooed. Nick didn’t glance up. He knew she wasn’t talking to him. It was the voice she reserved exclusively for her horses.
The tractor’s innards were spread across the concrete floor. From the glass-box cab, the radio played quietly to itself. As Nick bent towards the engine, he caught the familiar tune. Using his boot, he gently nudged aside the tools, bolts and bits on the tractor’s step. He lifted himself up into the cab and listened. It was that song. From that night. ‘Blister in the Sun’, by the Violent Femmes. With grease-stained fingers he reached over to turn the volume up. An involuntary smile came to his face. The sound of electric guitar and drums filled the shed and filled his body. His memory of Kate Webster was now fresh in his mind. This time she wasn’t wearing a red dress. Now, he pictured her rouseabouting in the Bronty shearing shed, wisps of black hair falling around her heart-shaped face, her smooth strong arms scooping up fleeces. The buzz he felt when she looked his way.
Nick leapt down from the tractor and lifted Tuff by his front paws. Tuff looked up at him with a resigned and embarrassed expression as Nick danced him round the shed. When Nick let go of Tuff’s tan paws, the black dog bounded around his master’s legs, barking as Nick moved like a Bruce Springsteen clone in his blue sleeveless flannelette shirt and denim jeans. Singing into the silver shifter he clutched in his hands, Nick imagined dancing with Kate down the Bronty board. The muscles on Nick’s arms flexed as he thrusted the shifter in his back pocket and picked up his oxy-welder, strumming wildly like an air-guitarist with attitude. How long had it been since he’d felt like this? For a moment he shut out his father’s sickness, his mother’s unhappiness and the shadow of his absent impossible brother. He forgot the pressure of Felicity’s high expectations … and Nick was back there, in his youth. Dancing without the weight of them all. Simply dancing with Kate.
Hearing the throb of music coming from the shed, Felicity slid from the towering back of her thoroughbred. The smooth soles of her knee-high boots landed solidly on the ground. She led Calvin into the yard, slipped the bridle from his long bony brown face and patted him again on his white star for good measure. Then she walked towards the shed.
Nick didn’t hear her come in, but Tuff did. He bounded to her and sideswiped his body against her legs in an expression of canine joy.
‘Get out, dog!’ Felicity growled. She stood and watched Nick with her head tipped to one side, her blue velvet riding helmet sitting in the crook of her arm as she put both hands to her slim hips.
‘Nick?’
Caught, Nick immediately stopped dancing. A look of embarrassment swept across his face. He leapt up into the cab and turned the music down.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
‘Breakdown,’ he said, picking up a greasy spare part from a box and waving it at her.
‘Oh,’ she said. Then she turned and walked from the shed, still simmering that Nick had chosen to cast aside a week of his own farm work to help out on Kate Webster’s property.
‘I can see you’d rather dance with your dog than me,’ she muttered as she went to hose her horse down.
The clatter of cutlery and the chink of china plates filled the Rutherglen kitchen as Felicity and Alice, Nick’s mother, set the table for lunch. Lance winced as he sat down at the head of the table. He began to straighten the floral placemat with his large fingers and watched as the women worked. Alice sliced quiche while Felicity set a salad bowl on the table.
‘Ah! Here he is,’ Felicity said brightly as Nick entered the room. ‘Just in time.’
Nick gave her a half-hearted smile and almost threw himself into his seat at the table.
‘Tractor’s still buggered,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to bloody well feed out by hand.’
Lance made a humphing noise. Nick glanced at his father’s downturned mouth and pasty jowls, which were covered in black and silver stubble. Nick knew he’d taken his comment as an insult. His father twisted everything Nick said into an accusation that he wasn’t helping on the farm – that he wasn’t getting better. More useless than a crippled sheepdog. Ought to be shot, his dad would sometimes say.
‘I’m not hungry,’ Lance grumbled as Alice set a slice of quiche down in front of him.
‘Eat just a little, dear,’ Alice coached.
‘It’ll do you good,’ chipped in Felicity. Both women turned their backs and went to the bench where the other plates were set out.
‘It looks warm out there,’ Alice said as she peered through the kitchen window onto the garden. ‘Be nice to think we’re getting a short winter. I don’t think I could face a long one.’
‘Be nicer if it rained,’ Lance added as he reluctantly picked up his fork.
‘The Websters got a shower didn’t you say?’ Alice asked, setting a plate down in front of Nick. He reached for the tomato sauce.
‘Twelve mil,’ Nick said. ‘Not enough to hold the shearing up. We had a day’s worth shedded.’
‘At least the rain’s something,’ Alice said. ‘After what’s happened to them.’
‘They were lucky to get you for the week,’ Felicity said, ‘seeing as the season’s just as tough here and you can never get away from the place.’
Felicity’s words hung in the air. Everyone felt the weight of them.
‘Will was the first to help us,’ Nick said, thinking back a year to their own family misfortunes when Will had set time aside, unasked, to help get the ploughing done. Nick glanced at Felicity, who busily set out cups and flicked the kettle on. She was the only bright spark in this house for his mother and father, Nick realised. They were well used to his own withdrawn ways. Was he only including Felicity in his life because it somehow made his mum and dad’s lives easier? Nick sighed loudly. Felicity cast him a glance.
‘What will happen to that beautiful farm now that Will’s gone?’ Alice asked. ‘Henry can’t manage alone. Do you think Kate will take it on?’
Nick knew his mother was only trying to stir some conversation along between her husband and her son, but he wished she would stop mentioning Kate in front of Felicity. He chewed quickly, in a hurry to get away. He could sense Felicity had stiffened. Her movement about the kitchen was less fluid, less happy.
‘She seemed more interested in pub crawling than farming, the night we met her,’ Felicity said, smiling at Alice. ‘Of course, you’d know more now, Nick, since you’ve just spent the week with her. Does she fit the stereotype of the run-around-town single mother like she did that night in the pub?’
‘I think she’s a very brave person,’ Nick said, annoyed. ‘She’s had it tough.’
Felicity turned her back.
‘Makes you think about your own situation,’ Alice said. ‘About what would happen to your own place. If there was …’
‘An accident?’ Lance spat. He threw down his fork with a clatter.
‘You know what I mean,’ Alice said. ‘We need to discuss these things. About the business and the future. Since Felicity will formally be part of our family in a few months.’
Felicity sat down next to Nick and slid her hand across to his as a peace offering.
‘Alice is right,’ she said gently. ‘We really ought to talk about the future.’
Nick shot her a glance, but she continued talking in her cool confident way.
‘I love nursing, but perhaps, if we were to have children, I could work at something from home. Perhaps with the horses.’
Nick glanced warily at his father.
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here,’ he said.
‘Well, we have to talk about it,’ Felicity said with a smile, but Nick saw the emotions that lay behind it. ‘Don’t we?’ She looked at Lance, who looked at his plate.
Alice sighed and stood up from the table. She pulled a clipping down from a pile of documents on the fridge.
‘I saw this the other day. I think we should ring.’
Alice slid the paper across the surface of the table so it lay between Lance and Nick. The ad had a Tasmanian tiger logo on the top left corner. Bold print read: ‘Is your farm business ready for a makeover? Rural Consultancy Solutions is offering a partially government funded service to farmers needing assistance with environmental conservation, drought-proofing, succession planning, re-financing, business restructuring and any other areas of concern. Phone now to meet with your new local RCS facilitator.’ Alice had circled the phone number in red biro.
‘Apparently they’ve appointed an advisor for this district. He can help us with the business structure now you’re getting married.’ She turned to Lance and leant over him, her flushed cheeks looking redder against her pale blonde hair. ‘They can even help draft a will for us all, which I know is something we’ve never really considered, now the boys are grown up. And especially before the wedding. Felicity needs to know where she stands in all this.’
‘She’s got me dead and buried already,’ Lance grumbled as he hauled himself up from his chair and skulked from the room. Nick watched his father lurch away. A farm advisor? Wasn’t that the job Kate had said she was starting in a fortnight’s time? No matter what the situation, his thoughts always seemed to lead back to her. Annoyed, he stood up abruptly.
‘I’ll be in the shed,’ he said.
The two women were left with the half-eaten lunch on the table as they watched Nick’s head duck down beneath the window as he stooped to drag on his boots.
‘So,’ said Alice wearily, wiping her hands on a tea-towel, ‘that little suggestion about succession planning went down well.’
Felicity laid a comforting hand on Alice’s forearm.
‘Don’t worry, Alice, I’ll talk to both of them.’