words, no more questions. He was adroit at concealing more of himself than he revealed, and even more adroit at getting her to reveal far too much, she acknowledged as she went over to the oven.
The pie was almost ready. There were fresh vegetables to go with it, and rhubarb fool for pudding.
‘We ought to be toasting our new-found cousin-ship,’ Val remarked as he asked Sorrel where he could find the cutlery. ‘Is there anything to drink?’
Her mother had packed a couple of bottles of her home-made wine, and Sorrel produced one of them. She saw his eyebrows lift in a way that was becoming familiar as he studied the label, and she explained to him what elderberry wine was.
‘A resourceful woman, your mother.’
‘She’s a home-maker,’ Sorrel told him, ‘and she thrives on hard work. She’s spent her life doing all the things we’re told turn the female sex into drudges, and yet I’ve never met a more fulfilled woman than my mother. She’s interested in everything and everyone … and she knows so much about the history of the wife’s role in the running of a farm like ours. She sometimes gives talks on it to local WI meetings. She loves it … standing up on the stage, talking to them … and they love her. I asked her a few years ago if she had ever thought what she might have done if she’d had a career. She laughed at me. She said that being married to my father gave her the best of everything: a man whom she loved, his children, the pleasure of running her own home, and the business aspects of keeping the farm accounts, of being free to order her own day, to enjoy the countryside. I know what she means … I don’t think I could ever work for a large organisation with regimented rules and regulations after being my own boss.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Val told her, surprising her. ‘When I started off in mineral exploration, it was very much a free and easy life. You got a job working for a newly formed company. They bought the mineral right to a certain tract of land and sent you out to discover what, if any, value it might have. You lived in the outback … often for weeks at a time, turning in a report when you’d finished the job. But once the boom came, the pleasure went out of it.’
‘Was that why you build boats instead?’
‘Sort of. This wine smells good … Not quite up to our better Australian vineyards’ products, of course.’
‘It’s very potent,’ Sorrel warned him, dishing up their meal and putting a plateful of food in front of him.
It had surprised her a little that he had so readily and naturally helped her with the preparation of the meal, but perhaps if he had lived alone in the outback he was used to fending for himself. She had always thought that Australian men were very chauvinistic, and considered women to be little more than chattels.
Fair-mindedly, she acknowledged that she did not really know enough about the continent or its inhabitants to separate truth from myth, and it was probable that Australian men, like any men, were a mixed and varied bunch of human beings who should not be typecast.
‘This is good,’ Val told her appreciatively, tucking into his food. ‘Your mother’s an excellent cook.’
Sorrel bent her head over her own plate, not telling him that she had made the pie. She enjoyed cooking, and firmly believed that any form of creative achievement could be satisfying when one was well-taught. Although her mother was what was normally referred to as a plain cook, she took a pride in the meals she placed before her family, and she had passed on that pride to Sorrel.
Val had poured them both a glass of wine, and now he put down his knife and fork and picked up his glass, motioning to Sorrel to do the same.
‘To you, Sorrel Llewellyn,’ he toasted her softly. ‘I’m delighted to make your acquaintance … Drink it,’ he urged her when she barely touched her lips to the glass. ‘Otherwise I’m going to think it’s poisoned. You certainly looked at me as though you’d have loved to slip me a glass of hemlock when I first arrived.’
‘It was a shock to discover you were a man,’ Sorrel protested, letting the warming wine slide down her throat. It tasted delicious but, as she well remembered from past occasions, she really did not have a strong enough head to cope with her mother’s potent home-made brews.
Over their meal they talked, or rather Val talked and she listened, so that by the time they were ready for their pudding she was beginning to feel almost lazily content.
She started to get up to take their plates to the sink, but Val forestalled her, announcing that it was his turn to do some work.
As he walked past her chair he refilled her glass and she stared at it owlishly. Was that the third or fourth time he had filled it? She felt too pleasantly hazy to worry … too interested in the stories Val was telling her about his research into the family.
He had already explained to her that his name was Russian in origin, and that his mother had Russian blood. He had three sisters, he had informed her, all of them older than him and all of them married with families.
‘It’s a wonder I didn’t grow up in terror of the female sex,’ he told her with a grin as he handed her a generous helping of rhubarb fool. ‘You wouldn’t believe how much they bullied me.’
‘No, I wouldn’t,’ Sorrel agreed darkly. ‘They probably spoiled you to death.’
‘Not a bit of it,’ he assured her with a grin.
‘What did they think of you coming over here to meet your English relatives?’
‘Oh, they were all for it,’ he told her promptly. ‘In fact, they bet me that I’d probably go back with a …’
‘With a what?’ Sorrel asked him, curious not so much to know what he had been going to say, but the reason he had stopped so abruptly, giving her a look that was almost wary.
‘An English wife,’ he told her smoothly. So smoothly that she felt sure, for some reason, there was something he wasn’t telling her.
But the wine had made her feel so woozy and relaxed that it was too much of an effort to hold on to the thought, and so she let it slip away, asking instead, ‘Why should they think that?’
‘Because that’s what our original Llewellyn ancestor did. He was shipped over as a convict. He stole a loaf of bread. He was lucky it was only one loaf, otherwise he’d have been hanged and not transported, and that would have been the end. He was lucky in being chosen as an overseer by one of the colonists, mainly because he had some knowledge of farming methods—and after he’d served his seven years, he came back to England.’
‘To find a wife?’ Sorrel asked him, fascinated, but for some reason Val seemed reluctant to tell her any more.
‘This is delicious,’ he told her. ‘Is there any more?’
‘Yes. I’ll get you some.’ She stood up and then sat down again abruptly as her legs turned weak and wobbly and the room spun dizzyingly around her.
‘Something wrong?’
‘The wine. I’ve drunk too much of it … It’s so strong.’ And yet it didn’t seem to have affected him, Sorrel noticed.
What she needed now was a couple of cups of strong coffee to sober her up, but when she tried to say as much the words became hopelessly tangled.
