The Victory Garden(4)

“Mummy!” Emily rolled her eyes. “Aubrey Warren-Smythe must be almost thirty and is as dull as ditchwater. And there really must be something wrong with him if he hasn’t been called up yet.”

“I gather he has weak ankles,” Mrs Bryce said seriously.

Emily swallowed back a giggle, then she said, “I really don’t want a party made up of people to whom Daddy owes a favour.”

“You must still be in touch with old school friends who are available to attend,” Mrs Bryce said. “What about that girl whose cousin was a viscount?”

“Daphne Armstrong? Now married to another viscount,” Emily said.

“Splendid. We’ll invite them then. That will certainly make the Warren-Smythes sit up and take notice, won’t it?”

“Mother! She was never a close friend, and I haven’t spoken to her since we left school. Can we just forget about the party?”

“Absolutely not. My mind is made up. I had always planned to have my daughter come out properly into society. I had expected her to be a debutante. And since that option has been denied you, the very least I can do is to give you a twenty-first party.”

Emily could see there was no point in fighting. “I’ll go and see if any more strawberries are ripe before the birds find them,” she said, and set off with a basket across the lawn, through the shrubbery to the kitchen garden. She had just bent down to pick strawberries when she heard noises amid the rhododendron bushes that separated the Bryces’ property from the convalescent home next door. She looked around, expecting it to be Josh, but he was weeding the borders beside the drive. She backed away. There were sounds of blundering and undergrowth being trampled. It sounded like some kind of large animal. Then she glimpsed a figure—a man was pushing his way through the hedge that separated the Bryces’ home, the Larches, from the adjoining property. A tramp, she thought, come to steal our fruit. She waited as the man eased his way between rhododendron bushes and then she demanded, in a loud voice, “What do you think you are doing, trespassing on private property?”

The man spun around at the sound of her voice and almost lost his footing as he stepped into a newly turned bed. He had to grab on to a nearby branch to steady himself.

“Aw, stone the crows. You nearly gave me a heart attack,” he said. He emerged from the shadows, and Emily recognized him as the Australian who had winked at her.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, his face lighting up with a beaming smile. “My little vision from the other day. So you are real. I thought the morphine was making me hallucinate. And to think you live so close by.”

“Yes,” Emily said, no longer able to be indignant as he was smiling at her. “And you are trespassing,” she added. She was conscious that she was perspiring, and that she was dressed in a simple cotton frock that revealed too much shoulder.

“I didn’t mean any harm, and I didn’t think anyone would mind,” he said. “They had us parked outside in bath chairs like a lot of old fogeys and I couldn’t stand it a moment longer. When there were no nurses around, I got up and sneaked off. I’ve been dying to take a closer look at this place. I can see a bit of the grounds from my window, and it all looked so perfect, so unreal . . . that green, green grass and all those roses. My word, if my mother saw this, she’d think she’d died and gone to heaven.”

“You like roses, do you, Flight Lieutenant?” Emily asked.

“I was thinking of my mother. She tries to grow flowers, especially roses, but she never quite succeeds. Where we live, there’s only about six inches of rain a year. Not enough for a proper garden, but she keeps on trying. If she could only see this, I bet she’d just break down and cry.”

“Where do you live exactly?” Emily asked.

“What we’d call Back of Burke,” he said, “meaning the outback. Middle of nowhere. The far western part of New South Wales. The closest town is Tibooburra, and that’s not much of a place.”

“And what does your family do out there?” She realized she was sounding like her mother.

“We’re farmers.”

“Farmers? How can you farm with so little rain?”

He grinned. “We run sheep.”

“Sheep? Sheep can exist with no grass?”

“There’s a little grass. Not green like this around here, but enough to keep a sheep alive. We can only run about one sheep per acre though.”

“One sheep per acre?” Emily tried to grasp this. “Then how many sheep do you have?”

He frowned, thinking. “I’m not quite sure. Maybe twenty thousand or so.”

“Twenty thousand? Then you have twenty thousand acres?”

“More than that. We have land that’s not much good for anything as well.”

“You must be miles from your nearest neighbour then.”

“About fifty.”

“Fifty miles?”

He nodded, grinning at her incredulous face.

“Isn’t it terribly lonely? What happens if you have a medical emergency?”

“We take care of it, or we die. You have to be pretty self-sufficient if you live like us. We do our own blacksmithing, sheep shearing, you name it.”

“Golly,” was all Emily could find to say.

“And in answer to your other question, yes, I guess it is a bit lonely for my mother. It was all right when we nippers were at home. I’ve got two sisters. Then we all were sent off to school and my sisters stayed on in the city—one is a teacher and the other got married and has a kid of her own. My mother didn’t want me sent off to school. I was her youngest, you see. Her baby. But Dad insisted. He needed his son to be properly educated to take over the station one day.”