“But it did,” he persisted seriously, discarding his smug cheerfulness a moment. “It did, but of course it had to be nudged.”
“Then you did manoeuvre it.”
“I did nothing, except fetch back, as I’ve always fetched, orders from the mainland to the island.”
“And this was an order for fireworks?”
“Exactly, my child.”
“From whom?”
Barry examined his nails.
“Benjamin,” he said.
“Benjamin! But Benjamin went beach with Keefi.”
“Only as far as the point, after which they veered inland and—well, you’ve just witnessed the result yourself.”
Jessa was staring at Barry. “But Benjamin was always frightened of Lopi,” she remembered. “He would never leave the station wagon and climb to the top.”
“Probably he was more frightened that somebody might grab his place at the wheel. He adores cars, don’t forget. Besides, a man loses his fear when there are vital issues at stake, and to Benjamin the position of general usefulness at the Jessamine Inn was the most vital issue in the world.”
“It’s a very dreadful thing all the same,” said Jessa, not very convincingly since she was not very convinced of the dreadfulness herself. “Do you know what will happen?”
“Of course I do. The Tourist Bureau will withdraw their patronage. They’ll have to. News spreads fast. You can tell people for hours on end that Lopi never erupted, that it was all a hoax, that it never will erupt in the future, but they won’t believe it. They’ll refuse point-blank to come here again, my child. In time the Palm at Haven will wean over the trade... I believe Gascoyne would like that sort of hotel ... and the Jessamine be back where it started. Just as well the old pub wasn’t completed, eh, pet?”
“It’s completed enough to be an unwarranted expense,” said Jessa bluntly, thinking of her father and all he would lose.
“Don’t you believe it. The delegates weren’t alarmed, were they? The conventions will still come, and the way the hotel stands that should suit your dad fine—and suit me as well.”
“You?”
“Well, you don’t think the Bureau will keep up a twice-weekly run for practically next to nothing, do you? A run entailing two pilots, a navigator and an air hostess, my pet. No, they’ll retire hurriedly and more or less gracefully to allow B. Burns with his Matthew Flinders to take over again. And believe me I mean to do the thing handsomely,” declared Ba.
Jessa nodded gravely, remembering what he had told her on the journey out.
“I know, blue seats, blue carpet down the gangway.” Barry finished sublimely, “And Margaret in a blue suit.”
“Who? ...Who, Barry?”
“Meggy—don’t tell me you didn’t know it was like that with us?” Barry looked at her, incredulously at first and then a little uneasily. “Look, kiddy, you haven’t—I mean you didn’t think that—well, that we, you and I—”
Jessa reminded him with mock gravity, “You gave me that impression once.”
“Of course I did, and I believed I meant it, too at the time. But just as well you didn’t think that way in return, because I tell you now, Jess, that if we’d gone ahead with things I couldn’t have stuck it out with you, not after I met Meg.”
“It’s not very complimentary,” admitted Jessa, but without any rancour. She asked breathlessly, “Does—does Margaret feel the same about you?”
“Jessamine, you astound me. You were at Biggabilla. You must have seen that shining face.”
“I did, but I thought—”
“Yes?”
“Well, you see, I’d always planned Meg for the Professor—”
Barry stared back at Jessa as though she was quite stupid.
“Margaret for the Professor! Margaret, when it’s—when everyone can see it’s—Oh, Jessa—my Jess,” he said.
There was a lot she wanted to find out... how wicked Benjamin had manoeuvred the fireworks business, and who had put it into rather unimaginative head in the first... how Mummy was reacting to their demotion... and, of course, Dad.
There was no time, however. They had to get going at once to return by schedule.
She could not discover about Benjamin as he was wisely keeping under cover, temporary cover, anyway, but Mother and Father did not seem at all let down.
Jessa suspected that Mummy was already planning a quick return to her old room, seaward the reef, the mission through the other window, and she knew Dad was thinking of the island traders in the bay again, a leisurely evening with his pipe while travellers talked the island talk he understood and loved, tide, element, coral, copra, conchi shell, all that.
Not so much money, she thought, but one didn’t need much money at Crescent. Life would be on the old pleasant basis again.
The journey home was interspersed with laughter over the supposed eruption. Far from alarming the delegates they had considered it a fine farewell. When they reached Rose Bay they transferred to the boats and were taken ashore.
The Professor found Tom, who proudly brought out the Duchess more highly polished than ever, and the four of them got in.
When they arrived at Lady Belinda, Jessa went first to Matron and handed her the typewritten notes, then she sought out Meg.
“Darling, I was absolutely astonished when Ba told me ...You see, I had never guessed ... I always thought of you as dedicated, Meggy—”
“There are many dedications, Jessa,” reminded Margaret with a gentle smile.
Just as on the island there were lots of things Jessa wanted to ask ... When first Margaret had known about Ba ... if it was not for her, then for whom had the Professor bought Barry’s opal to make into a ring?
But Meg was in a hurry, and Jessa could not blame her. Her day’s work was over and Barry’s plane was in.
She watched her go, then went down to consult the roster to see when she started, and found that she resumed this evening. Trust Matron to drive home the fact that she was still at work.
She put on her pinafore early, pulled on her cap. She intended to visit the Perfesser before she signed on. She knew he was still here because she had peeped round his corner of the verandah to make sure. How long more will I have him? she thought achingly, recalling that his time at Belinda must almost be over.
As she came to the long corridor she looked upward as usual ... something inside her knew a little drearily that she would always look as a matter of course.
But today she did not look vainly, for there it was again, the tall lanky shadow, the daddy-long-legs legs, the gangling arms, all traced unmistakably on the wall. Dear, dear Professor, she thought.
They rounded the corner together, the tall man, the small girl.
“Good evening, Nurse Jess.”
“Good evening, sir,” she said.
“You’re starting early.”
She was, but how did he know unless he, too, had consulted her roster?
“Yes, sir,” she said.
“And why, may I ask?”
“I wanted to visit Barry.”
“And why, may I ask again”—he was in an enquiring mood, it seemed—“do you insist on that unsuitable name? Especially now.”
“How do you mean, now?”
“Now that it’s scarcely your right to give it; now when it is surely Margaret’s prerogative.”
“Margaret’s... How—how do you mean, sir?”
“Isn’t Margaret engaged, officially engaged to Barry at last?”
“But—but I never called the Perfesser after that Ba, I called him after you.”
“After me? But—”
“Oh, yes, I know it was impertinence on my part, but somehow I always associated him with you, so, of course, when I knew what that B stood for, I gave him your name. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Stop that absurd ‘sir’ at once.” His tone was sharp.
“Yes, Professor.”
“And don’t call me that either. Call me by my name.”
“I’m not Barry.”
“But the quadruplet, he was Barry.”
“That was after his father. There was also a Peter. I’m that young chap—or at least, that young chap is me.”
“But your letter when I mended the spectacles—”
“One pair only,” put in the Professor succinctly.
“—Was signed B. Gink.”
“Yes, Bartholomew. Mr. Winthrop baulked at that, and I can’t say I blame him. He quite cheered up when I assured him I had a second name, Peter. He closed the deal on that.”
“Bartholomew Peter Gink.”
“Yes, it’s dreadful, isn’t it?”
Jessa said dreamily, “It’s the loveliest name I’ve ever heard.”
He was looking at her sharply.
“No one could say that, Nurse, no one, unless they were grossly prejudiced.”
“Well, your parents chose the names, they must have been grossly prejudiced.”
“There were no parents that I know of. I was an orphan and named from a book of names with the aid of a pin.”
“But Gink—”
“Out of the telephone directory. If I had arrived at the shelter an hour before I would have been Gillet, and if I had arrived an hour after I would have been Girton. It was my misfortune, you see, to get Gink.”
“But it wasn’t really, was it? It made no difference, did it?”
“No,” he admitted honestly. “I had good foster parents, they helped me to the full extent of their capability.”
“That was in the peppercorn town you grew up in,” she said gently.
“Yes,” he said. Then shyly, sensitively, “Do you want to know more?”
“Yes, please—” She could not say Bartholomew, or Peter, so she left it at that.
“I always wanted to be a doctor,” he told her, “but when Ruthie, my foster sister, broke her heart when she lost her first baby by its coming too early and everyone being unprepared, I knew that that was the special study I wanted most of all.”
“So you made it your goal and you got right to the top.”
“Am I?” he said boyishly, and rumpled his shaggy hair. “I don’t know, really. All I know is I want to keep learning, and learning, and then imparting my learning. But in between it all I want something else.”
“Something else?”
“I want to be loving someone, loved by someone. I want it badly, urgently, with all my heart. I guess every foundling feels that. That need to love and be loved for himself.”
Jessa said, a little indistinctly, “I planned Margaret for you.”
“That was very obvious. In time it became a nuisance. Meg and I considered it at length one day.”
“Yes,” said Jess huskily, “at this very spot.”
“Why,” he asked curiously, did you want it to be Margaret?”
“Because Margaret always seemed so suitable, so dedicated, just as you are, she seemed the right one for someone called Professor Gink.”
“And how would you describe the right one, Nurse?”
“Someone calm, sweet, efficient, someone who is not a hoyden.”
“In other words, not like Nurse Jess—”
He did not wait for her to answer, he went swiftly, urgently on.
“Listen, you scatterbrain, you darling stupid madcap, listen closely, and never any more put an interfering finger in anyone’s romance.
“I have never wanted calmness, sweetness, efficiency. Without boasting I believe I can supply two of those attributes myself. But I wanted sunshine, laughter, high spirits, a little craziness. I might be old and stodgy—”
“Oh, no, dear Professor,” said Jessa impulsively. “You’re never that.”
He looked at her sharply again.
“Like draws like, or opposites draw opposites, which do you believe, Miss Barlow?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” stammered Jessa. “I only know—I only know—”
“Yes, Nurse Jess?”
“That I like you very much.”
The sharp look was lancet-sharp now. You would not have thought he could look so keenly without his big glasses. Suddenly he must have remembered the glasses.
“Why didn’t you mend the second pair of spectacles?” he demanded indignantly.
“Because I didn’t think it was wise, not after I had decided on Meggy.”
“You had decided. What impudence is this? But then I have done an impudence myself, so I must forgive you, I expect. I’ve signed up our baby.”
“Barry—”
“Not Barry.”
“Then Bartholomew, Peter—”
“Take your choice, Nurse, please yourself.”
“How do you mean, signed?”
“I am to be his father. But to be his father there has to be a mother. It is a rule of the Child Welfare. They insist on two parents, Nurse Jess.”
“Yes?”
“You are answering before I give you the question. Will you be the other parent?”
“Me—you mean—oh, you mean—”
The Professor said simply, “Yes.”
She could not believe it. Even when he took the milky opal with its pin-fire of colours out of his pocket she still could not believe it.
“But you must have known it was for you,” he said.
“I didn’t know. How could I know? I can’t realize it now. The Great Professor Gink and Nurse Jess. And it’s not that I’m a very good nurse, either. Oh, I know my name came on the result list above Margaret’s, but that was alphabetical, wasn’t it?” She looked at him hopefully, but he dashed her hopes at once with a candid, “Frankly, yes.”
“Actually,” he continued a little mischievously, “you just made it, darling.”
Was that true, was he really saying “darling” to her? To Average Only Nurse Jess?
“But it didn’t, and it doesn’t, matter,” he continued blandly, “because by the end of this week you’re finishing your career. You won’t have to leave your babies”—he had seen her lip drop slightly—“the flat is handy—sometimes far too handy.” He gave a wry shrug. “I don’t expect the nurses will object if you pop down at times, though I wouldn’t choose the duty hours of Nurse Gwen.”
“I’ll never be a Sister,” Jessa was saying slowly, rather dazedly. “I always longed to wear a brave red cape.”
“It wouldn’t have suited you, anyway,” he grinned. “My eyes are not the best, but they can see that much. Not red, my dear, and red.”
“I’ll be Nurse Jess forever. Never any higher.”
“Does that matter so much?”
The long corridor was generally lonely at this time of night. He was taking the risk and drawing her to him. As he kissed her he noticed that the button to which her head reached was missing, that there was a thread hanging from the next, that as well as dust, a cobweb and a dead leaf, there was a frayed rent on his lapel.
“‘I loved you from that first moment you knocked me over,” he was saying awkwardly. “You are the balance I need, you dear mad head strong imp. Do you think you could ever love me in return?”
There were stars and rainbows and sunbeams dancing on the immaculate hygienic sterilized hospital wall that now traced both their shadows as one, the whole world was a bubble of happiness just about to be pricked.
“Do you think you could?” His eyes, those beloved short sighted eyes, were dark with worry and anxiety. He was not sure, even yet...
Not caring who came, not caring that all this was happening in the long corridor of the Lady Belinda Hospital for Specialized Nursing of Premature Babies, Jessa looked back at him.
Could she love him in return?
“Professor—that is, Bartholomew—I mean Peter—Mr. Gink—sir—it’ll be a piece of cake,” she said.
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Nurse Jess Page 21