The Railwayman's Wife by Ashley Hay

Author:Ashley Hay
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: FIC000000, book
ISBN: 9781743432815
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2013-01-03T16:00:00+00:00

24

Ani has been walking a good quarter of an hour before she realises she has looked at nothing but her own feet, one stepping in front of the other in the stoutest shoes she could find—the muddy boots she uses for gardening, their familiar dark-soil mud now brightened by the orange clay of the track that winds up from Austinmer to the top of the escarpment, hundreds of feet above.

There’s a group of them, a dozen or so from the church: the new minister—Reverend Robinson, young, enthusiastic, and known to own his own compass—has organised the outing, or ‘the hike’, as he refers to it, and Ani has pretended to be merely acceding to Isabel’s pleas in agreeing that they will go. It’s a Saturday. It’s gloriously warm. And it feels good to stride out, her legs stretching and climbing, and to know that she will lie down tonight properly exhausted.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come, Mrs Lachlan,’ the minister says, catching up to her as she climbs beyond tree ferns, sandstone boulders, a little marsh of reeds and bulrushes such as Isabel might hope holds fairies. ‘I mean, I wasn’t sure,’ he corrects himself, ‘if the library kept you busy on the weekends.’

Ani steps carefully over a fallen bough. ‘No, not all the weekends—they leave me something.’ She makes a show of indicating the view so she can catch her breath. ‘There’s just more and more of it, the higher you go.’ She points out towards the sea, makes her breathing deep and slow.

‘Have you ever travelled over the ocean, Mrs Lachlan?’ Reverend Robinson asks, following her gaze.

‘No, no.’ She shakes her head. ‘My father came from Europe, and my husband of course. But I’ve always had the ground beneath me—apart from a little boat, here and there, a day’s sail.’ She hears Isabel behind her, laughing with someone from school. It’s lovely to hear that laugh. ‘Should we . . .’ And she clambers over a scatter of rocks, pressing on.

The path tacks and weaves, straight up with ladders here, running along the cliff’s face there, out in the sun on some stretches and tucked into dankly fecund pockets of rainforest in others where the air is thick with the rich smell of the leaves, the vines, the growth all around. Below is Austinmer, the neat rectangles of its rock pools pushing out, constrained, into the ocean. Just south, Thirroul, with its busy space of railyards, and the straight streets of houses running east to the coast, west to the base of this scarp. Further south, beyond Wollongong, sit the steelworks, belching and sprawling—she had been so scared of their heat, their power, the ferocity of their furnaces and ovens when she first came to the coast. And then, during the war, her dreams had rearranged them to mirror its heat and ferocity. She was always grateful it was the trains, not the steelworks, that paid her husband—even now, she thinks, I guess, even now.

A plume of white steam pushes up from one of the stacks.

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