Stillwater Creek Read online

  PRAISE FOR STILLWATER CREEK

  ‘Who could not be charmed by Stillwater Creek? … I loved the characters, the scenery, the dramas, the gentle humour, and the sense of Australia as it once was. Enjoy a feel-good beach read this summer!’

  Good Reading

  ‘Jingera may be a fictional creation but one that is firmly anchored in the smell of eucalyptus, the yellow, bruised light of a summer storm and the ever-present ocean. Stillwater Creek is an enchanting place to spend a few hours.’

  Notebook, ‘Pick of the Month’

  ‘A great summer read … fans of Di Morrissey will enjoy discovering a new talent.’

  Herald Sun

  ‘A story that lingers long in the imagination.’ Debra Adelaide, bestselling author of

  The Household Guide to Dying

  ‘A mythical town and its people are brought beautifully to life … a really lovely book.’

  The Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A finely observed historical drama set in small-town Australia in the 1950s … Booth’s novel is evocative and eminently readable.’

  The Age

  ‘An evocative romantic drama set in a sleepy Australian country town.’

  Australian Women’s Weekly

  ‘Stillwater Creek is written with a great sense of place and Booth’s powers are such that this small town forms vividly in the mind’s eye … a heart-warming story.’

  The Sunday Territorian

  ‘A powerful tale.’

  The Sunday Tasmanian

  ‘This book is a great summer read.’

  The Sunday Times (Perth)

  ‘This gentle, heartfelt story is rich with small-town secrets.’

  Australian InStyle

  ‘A great holiday novel, lending itself to relaxed reading … It reads as many novellas threaded into one novel and I look forward to the sequel.’

  Australian Women Online, ‘Book of the Month’

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including printing, photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Stillwater Creek

  ePub ISBN 9781864715774

  Kindle ISBN 9781864717914

  Permission to reproduce words from The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene courtesy of David Higham Associates and Random House UK.

  Permission to reproduce words from Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  A Bantam book

  Published by Random House Australia Pty Ltd

  Level 3, 100 Pacific Highway, North Sydney NSW 2060

  www.randomhouse.com.au

  First published by Bantam in 2010

  This edition published in 2011

  Copyright © Alison Booth 2010

  Map copyright © Shane Nagle 2010

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity, including internet search engines or retailers, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying (except under the statutory exceptions provisions of the Australian Copyright Act 1968), recording, scanning or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of Random House Australia.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Addresses for companies within the Random House Group can be found at www.randomhouse.com.au/offices

  National Library of Australia

  Cataloguing-in-Publication Entry

  Booth, Alison

  Stillwater Creek

  ISBN 978 1 86471 125 7 (pbk)

  A823.4

  Cover photography by Corbis & Getty Images

  Cover design by Natalie Winter

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Praise for Stillwater Creek

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Imprint Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map: JINGERA TOWNSHIP, 1957

  1957

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Q&A WITH ALISON BOOTH

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  Sample: THE INDIGO SKY By Alison Booth

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  RANDOM HOUSE

  To my family

  ‘There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.’

  GRAHAM GREENE, The Power and the Glory (1940)

  JINGERA TOWNSHIP, 1957

  Ilona’s first impression was of light. Light glancing off the water, light sluicing the valley, light shaping the folds of the green hills that tumbled down to meet the sea. A golden light, for the sun was sinking fast. Surely the bus must soon arrive at Jingera. She and Zidra were the only passengers left after a sun-dried woman, wearing a floral dress and a miscellany of string bags, had alighted several miles back. Before long it would be dark but not before they saw the cottage, pray God not before then, for Ilona couldn’t bear to reach a new place after night had fallen.

  There had been too many arrivals after dark. The first was in that cold Latvian winter at the concentration camp near Riga. And after the liberation, a series of displaced persons’ camps, and ultimately her arrival in England. Only in Sydney had she disembarked in daylight, this time with her husband Oleksii and small daughter Zidra, the three of them walking down the ship’s gangway, in the harsh morning light of a summer’s day.

  But she would not dwell on the past when today’s journey was looking so promising; when the light was streaming down the valley and illuminating Zidra’s face, so that her sallow skin assumed an unusual radiance. Ilona examined her daughter: only nine years old but already she was striking with that combination of upturned nose, short upper l
ip and disproportionately high forehead. And the pretty dark curls that were just like those of poor dead Oleksii.

  ‘Look at the sign!’ Zidra pointed to a white sign at the side of the road. Welcome to Wilba Wilba Shire, and underneath, in smaller letters, Drive Carefully. This was ignored by the driver, who swerved the bus into the next bend in the road.

  Ilona peered through the front windscreen, at the road snaking down in front of them. There at last was the town of Jingera, a haphazard collection of weatherboard cottages clinging to the hillside. It was smaller than she’d expected, although the McIntyres, her friends in Sydney whose Jingera cottage she had arranged to rent, had warned her that the place was a bit of a backwater. But full of such friendly people, they’d said, who are crying out for a piano teacher.

  ‘Just look at the sea, Mama!’

  Below the town lay the river, widening into a lagoon that seemed to be connected by the thinnest thread of water to the ocean beyond. Ilona put an arm around Zidra’s shoulders. Her face was starting to acquire that pinched look it took on when she was tired.

  ‘Pickin’ up the key from the butcher’s shop?’ The bus driver twisted his head round to look at them and grinned. ‘Not a bad place, luv. Could be worse, there could be more people!’ He restored his glance to the road just in time to negotiate another of the hairpin bends. ‘Cadwallader shuts up at five sharp, so it’s lucky we’re on time, or youse might’ve bin campin’ under ‘is awning!’

  Opening the bus window slightly, Ilona inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and salty and she felt her spirits lift. She had left Sydney behind, she had left Europe behind. Maybe it would be possible to forget the past and start a new life in Jingera, this sanctuary by the sea. Unclasping her handbag, she felt inside it for the reassuring shape of the Latvian–English dictionary. While it hadn’t been needed so far today, she did not know what linguistic challenges the evening would bring.

  The bus turned sharply off the main road and into Jingera township. Past a white-painted hotel and a corrugated iron hall, around a war memorial in the centre of an open space ringed by buildings, and at last shuddering to a halt in front of a few shops sheltered by wide awnings. On the fascia of the middle shop was the name she was looking for: ‘Cadwallader’s Quality Meats’. They had arrived.

  Only after alighting from the bus did she notice the middle-aged man standing on the pavement outside Cadwallader’s Quality Meats. Above his head, a large black and white cow, painted on the shopfront window, seemed to hover like a cloud over his thinning dark hair. When he stepped forward to shake her hand, she noticed his slight limp and the newspaper-wrapped package he was holding.

  ‘Welcome to Jingera,’ he said. ‘George Cadwallader’s the name.’ He clasped her long-fingered hand in his own – a butcher’s hand. His fingers were scrubbed and clean. ‘Let me take your suitcases. It’s just a short walk from here to the McIntyres.’ They asked me to show you how the stove works and the fuse box. And this must be your daughter,’ he added, smiling at Zidra. ‘I hope you had a good trip. Bus not too bumpy for you?’

  ‘It was terrible, especially from Burford,’ said Zidra, who was rarely at a loss for words. ‘The bus went really fast round all those zigzag bends. Poor Mama was so frightened!’

  Cadwallader laughed.

  Taking Zidra’s hand, Ilona followed the butcher across the open area in front of the row of shops. Past the war memorial they went, an obelisk covered with a surprising number of names and elevated on a square plinth several steps high; past the post office at the lower corner of the square and into an unkerbed street leading down the hill to the lagoon. Zidra had now become quiet and was gripping Ilona’s hand tightly.

  Weatherboard cottages lined each side of the road, some of them semi-concealed by hedges, others with no gardens at all so that it was possible to see into the front room without even trying. Please make it a house with a hedge, Ilona thought, for privacy.

  The butcher stopped when he reached a gate several hundred yards down the hill. On each side of the gate was a dense glossy-leafed hedge and Ilona sighed with relief. The salty air was overlaid with a scent of something unknown, sweet but not sickly, that might have been from the small white flowers growing on the vine entangled in the hedge.

  ‘Such delectable flowers, Mr Cadwallader!’ But from his grin, she knew that delectable was not quite the word she was looking for. Later, she would look up its precise meaning. Perhaps she should have used that all-purpose word, nice.

  ‘Call me George,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what those flowers are. They grow like weeds around here.’ After struggling for a moment with the gate, he ushered them through the opening.

  A brick path led up to the cottage, or what Ilona supposed was the cottage. It looked more like a support for the vines that tumbled over the verandah roof and fell like swags from the guttering; brilliant orange, trumpet-like flowers growing in bunches. Zidra jumped onto the verandah and bounced up and down on the splintered grey boards that squeaked under her weight. George now had the front door unlocked. Inside, the hallway reeked of stale air and dust and Ilona could hardly bear the smell after the loveliness of the garden.

  ‘No one’s lived here since the end of last summer,’ George explained, as if the neglect were his fault. ‘We don’t get too many holiday lets this time of the year, even though September’s a mild month here.’

  The initial reservations she had melted away when Ilona looked up and saw the wooden fretwork forming an arch halfway down the hall, and the carved shelving running along each side at about picture-rail height. The floorboards, though scuffed and in need of polish, were warm red and of some timber that she had never seen before. She knew then that she could make this place into a home.

  At the far end of the hall was the kitchen. A fuel stove occupied most of one wall, and an ice chest and pine dresser stood opposite. On the kitchen table, covered in red-and-white checked oilcloth, sat a black bakelite wireless set. She touched it lightly.

  Catching sight of the view from the window next to the stove, she held her breath. There was so much space in front of her, so much space. George was saying something about the ice chest but she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t listen. Beyond the lagoon, now the colour of pewter, lay a strip of olive-green bushland and beyond that again was the dark blue of the ocean smudging into the paler washed-out blue of the late afternoon sky. It was this view of ocean and bush that lent the McIntyres’ cottage a sense of openness. Although the cottage wasn’t big, it didn’t seem cramped; she couldn’t abide confined rooms although that’s what she’d lived in for years. Even in Homebush, space had felt restricted. And right outside the kitchen door was another little verandah that overlooked a garden that would be perfect for Zidra to play in. Seated in that rickety-looking cane chair, Ilona would be able to watch the lagoon and the sky, and she and Zidra would be safe.

  Collecting herself, she mumbled some response about the ice chest, and tried to concentrate very hard on what George was explaining; the workings of the wood stove in the kitchen and the location of the septic tank, and the fuse box and the kerosene lamp in case of emergencies, and the days on which the ice man came.

  ‘My piano will be arriving tomorrow,’ she said, once George had finished his instruction. ‘I shall need to find a piano tuner.’

  ‘There’s one in Burford. He fishes here sometimes. He’s a reasonable cove.’

  ‘I want to give piano lessons. I must advertise somehow.’

  ‘Cherry Bates might be interested. She said only the other day that she wanted to learn the piano.’ He bent down in front of the stove and made a slight adjustment to the kindling.

  Ilona wondered who Cherry was. It was an unusual name and she knew of no Latvian equivalent. She was about to ask George about her when he continued, ‘She works in the pub. Married to the publican. You could put a notice in the post office window about the lessons. The town isn’t as small as it looks. There are more houses along North Road – that’s the r
oad next to the pub – and there are some behind the headland. There are farms too, mainly dairy.’ At this point he became quite animated, talking at some length about cows and milking and cheese, and even the local abattoir. It would have been better not to hear about that, although she knew that meat was his job, if not his vocation.

  Before leaving, he handed her the newspaper-wrapped parcel. ‘Just a few things you might need tonight. Nothing much really.’ As if embarrassed by his kindness, he avoided meeting her eye.

  After he’d gone, Ilona opened all the windows of the cottage and unwrapped the parcel. It contained half a loaf of bread, butter, a twist of tea, and half-a-dozen sausages. How considerate he was; she hadn’t bought any meat when she purchased a few groceries in Bomaderry and she would cook the sausages for their supper.

  Opening the door in the front of the stove, Ilona put a match to the kindling. The flames flared and soon the wood was blazing. Mesmerised by the flickering flames, she forgot for a moment where she was. Four months had passed since she’d last lit a fire. That was in the incinerator at the back of the flats where they’d lived in Sydney and several weeks after poor Oleksii’s death. She’d decided to burn the shabbiest of his old clothes, the ones that the opportunity shop wouldn’t take. For several days she’d agonised about whether or not she should enlist Zidra’s assistance with this. It might help her come to terms with her father’s death. She had seemed almost unaffected by it, so much so that Ilona had wondered if the girl might be finding it a relief to be without his oppressive presence in the evenings. She no longer withdrew to her little bedroom, as she used to when Oleksii came home from work, but stayed with Ilona in the kitchen, chattering as much to herself as her mother.