daughter,’ she said steadily, ‘and she needs her father.’
There was an intense silence. ‘What?’ said Gray, dangerously quiet.
‘Alice is Jack’s daughter.’
His gaze narrowed, and he looked from Clare to Alice, who stared back at him with serious, uncannily similar eyes. One little hand held her toy to her mouth so that she could suck it, the other twiddled her ear as if to show off how versatile she was.
‘Jack said nothing about this to me,’ he said harshly at last.
‘He doesn’t know about Alice.’
‘Then isn’t it a little late to claim him as her father now?’
Clare pushed her hair behind her ears in an unconsciously nervous gesture. ‘I think he’d want to know.’
‘I think he’d have wanted to know a whole lot sooner than now if he had a child,’ said Gray in a hard voice. ‘If you say Alice is six months old, that means you’ve had a good fifteen months to decide on a father. Why wait until now to pick on Jack?’
Clare flushed. ‘I haven’t picked on him!’
‘That’s what it sounds like to me.’ He looked her up and down almost insultingly, taking in her slightness, her tired face and the eyes that were at once surprisingly vivid and desperately sad. ‘I wouldn’t even have said you were Jack’s type.’
‘I’m not,’ she admitted, smiling faintly in spite of herself. From all she had heard about Jack, she couldn’t imagine that she would ever have appealed to him. She was too calm, too sensible, too different from Pippa. ‘But my sister was.’
‘Then Alice isn’t your baby?’ said Gray slowly.
‘No, she’s my niece.’ Clare looked directly into his eyes. ‘She’s your niece, too.’
‘And her mother?’ he asked after a moment.
‘My sister. Pippa.’ She turned away to stare at the heat wavering above the empty road. ‘She died six weeks ago,’ she told Gray in a light, brittle voice, almost as if it didn’t matter, almost as if her world hadn’t fallen in.
There was a long silence. Beyond the shade, the sun bounced off the tin roofs and beat down on the road. A four-wheel drive, red with dust, drove past the hotel and parked a little further down, outside the general store, but that seemed to be the sum of the town’s activity. To Clare, used to busy city streets, the stillness was uncanny. She could smell the dryness of the air, feel the hard bench beneath her thighs, hear her pulse booming in her ears, and she was suddenly very conscious of the man sitting quietly beside her.
‘I think you’d better tell me everything,’ he said.
There was something peculiarly steadying about his voice. Clare drew a long breath. She had passed the first hurdle. He would listen to her. She couldn’t ask any more of him yet.
Digging in her bag, she drew out the photograph that Pippa had kept by her bed until the last. It was creased and dog-eared with handling, and Clare smoothed it out on her knee before passing it over to Gray. ‘That’s Pippa,’ she said. ‘And that’s your brother with her, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, that’s Jack,’ he admitted.
He studied the picture, frowning slightly. Jack had his arm around a vibrant, lovely girl who seemed to be zinging with happiness, and they were smiling at each other as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist. ‘Jack never mentioned your sister to me,’ he told Clare bluntly, ‘and it’s not like him to be secretive.’ He handed back the photograph. ‘How did they meet?’
‘Pippa got a job as a cook at Bushman’s Creek. I’m not sure how.’
‘Probably through the agency,’ he said, in spite of himself. ‘The station is so isolated that nobody ever stays very long, and in the dry season we always need people to help.’
If the station was anything like Mathison, Clare could imagine that no one would want to stay. ‘I know she was thrilled to get the job,’ she went on, unable to prevent her own mystification from creeping into her voice. ‘Pippa had always dreamed about working on a real outback cattle station.’
She sighed, remembering her sister’s face as she’d talked about the outback. ‘Even before she left school she was talking about Australia, and as soon as she could afford the fare she got herself a working visa and came out to find a job. She started in Sydney first of all, but after a while she moved to somewhere on the Queensland coast, and then, about eighteen months ago, she wrote and said that she’d got a job on a station called Bushman’s Creek.’
Clare turned to Gray as if struck for the first time. ‘You can’t have been there, or you would remember Pippa. She wasn’t the kind of person you could forget.’
‘I spent three months in South East Asia meeting buyers about eighteen months ago,’ Gray admitted reluctantly. ‘She could have been at Bushman’s Creek then.’
‘That would be about right.’ She nodded. ‘She was there nearly three months, and she said it was the happiest time of her life. She told me about the station, about how isolated it was and how hard everyone had to work.’ Clare shook her head, remembering. ‘I thought it sounded awful,’ she confessed, ‘but Pippa loved it.’
She paused, holding the photograph between her hands. ‘And then there was Jack,’ she said. ‘You can see how happy they were together. Pippa said that it was love at first sight. They spent all their time together, and were talking about getting married when a row blew up one day about something quite trivial. I don’t know what it was, or what was said, but I think they must have hurt each other very badly.
‘Pippa was incredibly volatile. She was either ecstatic or miserable.’ Clare smiled a little tiredly. ‘I don’t think she ever understood the meaning of moderation or balance, and she was never any good at compromising either.’
Clare glanced at Gray again. He didn’t look like a man who did much compromising either, but in a quite different way from Pippa. How could she explain Pippa’s intense, ebullient personality to someone like Gray?
‘You have to understand what Pippa was like,’ she said with an edge of desperation. ‘She was passionate about everything she did. She could be the kindest, funniest, most wonderful person, and she could also be the most difficult. There was no middle way with Pippa. It was typical of her to react so dramatically when she and Jack had that argument. She thought that it meant the end of everything, and she just threw her things in a bag and came home.’
Clare sighed a little, remembering how Pippa had collapsed messily back into her own calm, ordered life. ‘She didn’t discover that she was pregnant until a couple of months later.’
Gray had been listening in silence, leaning forward, holding his hat loosely between his knees, but he glanced up at that. ‘Why didn’t she contact Jack then?’
‘I tried to persuade her to write to him at least, but she wouldn’t.’ Clare’s gaze rested on Alice, who was still happily chewing her toy and dribbling down her chin. Reaching into her bag for a tissue, Clare wiped her face as she continued.
‘Pippa was still simmering after the argument.
