“Patricia?” she queried.
“Our last cyclone. The next one, I believe, is Roslyn.”
She ignored that, but she did question: “The next one?”
“There’ll be more. Actually she’s to be Roberta.”
“But the cyclone season is in the summer,” she said, “and it’s winter now.” Not, she thought, that you would ever know up here, it remained eternally goldenly warm.
“That’s true,” he nodded, “but it’s an established fact that our weather pattern is changing. No longer can we pencil a mark on the calendar indicating days TO BEWARE. Lennox Walker, our weather wizard, has even prophesied a winter series this year—he didn’t put it like that, of course, but the wind and rain he forecasts could be in the cyclone class if not down on the list of cyclone names.”
“Not Roslyn, then?”
“Nor Roslyn Nesta,” he said drily. “However, a cyclone by any other name remains as formidable.” He drew her attention to the men working down the rows of the manually cut field. Some of them were bare-chested, for coming from the south they would feel the heat, but most of them wore black singlets for very obvious reasons, for it was dirty, black work. “The sooty look comes from the charcoal left from the burning off,” Marcus said. “Note how the cutters leave the cane lying crosswise to the direction of the cut. That’s rule one from the man who does the loading, his is a very exhausting job, so he demands everything to be in apple pie order. Well, seen enough cane?”
“No,” admitted Roslyn, rather to her own surprise. “I mean” ... flushing ... “it is interesting, isn’t it? However, I must get back.”
“No worry, I had a look at Marco before I came down, and Connie has everything in control.”
“You didn’t have much sleep,” she reproved.
“Enough. I’ll grab more later. You said you were not tired of cane, then perhaps you won’t mind seeing more. Seeing it from our hill.” He nodded to a distant rise.
“I’ve already seen it from a hill.”
“Not this hill.”
“What’s special about it?”
“It overlooks the Great Barrier Reef. Yes, that’s true. Although you can see nothing but cane here, from that vantage point you can soar above the range between Clementine and the coast, and there the Pacific Ocean awaits!”
Roslyn thought about it and could not hide her eagerness to see it. “Yes, I would like that,” she told him.
“And like to go there one day?”
“Very much, but you’re forgetting I’m here on duty, not to play.”
“All work and no play makes Jill a dull girl.”
“I’m not Jill,” she pointed out.
“No, you’re Roslyn Nesta. Up, kid.” He hauled Belinda, whom he had put down while they watched the cutters, shoulder high again. “We’ll hitch a tram to the foot of the rise,” he proposed, “this kid gets heavy. Hi there, Tim!”
It was pure enchantment for Belinda to climb into the tiny train called a tram, and Roslyn was equally enraptured. The three of them, Belinda on Marcus’s knee, Roslyn between Marcus and Tim, who was coal black from the burnt-off grass, only his eyes and mouth their customary colour, found room to squash in. Tim set the laden tram in motion, and they went clattering over the tiny gauge between the rows of cane, sometimes the plumy tops actually meeting above their heads so that they travelled in a shining green world.
When it came to an end, Belinda wanted to do it all over again, but Marcus said not, but promised that they would return on the tram if Tim would accept them after they had come back from the hummock.
“Hummocks rock,” corrected Belinda. Roslyn could not help noticing how Belinda was coming out lately with pertinent phrases.
“That’s a hammock, honey, this is a hummock, and we climb it, not rock in it. Now up we march, and no peeping, Sister Young, until we reach the top.”
“I’ve looked on a cane scene before,” reminded Roslyn again.
“But not on this one,” he said, and presently without warning, he impelled her round.
For a moment she stood breathless, breathless at beauty she had not expected. The green world through which they had travelled on Tim’s tram still stretched in all directions, but to the east and to the north the horizon did not stop with the shining grasses, it stopped instead with a distant larkspur sea, a sea gemmed with dreamlike islands rising like something in a fairytale out of lilac blue unreality.
“Oh,” Roslyn said.
“Something from which magic is made?”
“Yes,” she said, a little surprised at such words from him.
Belinda was patently unimpressed. Her idea of water was much closer water, preferably with a beach to it, and most certainly a bucket and spade.
“Tim!” she clamoured, and with a shrug of resignation Marcus shouldered her again, and they went down the track.
“We’re lucky,” he said as they descended, “the range is a comparatively steep one, and ordinarily we wouldn’t see the coast. But nature very conveniently provided us a gap, and now we have the sea as well as the cane and the hills.”
“That’s fortunate,” nodded Roslyn. As they neared the tall grasses again, she asked: “Do you crush here?”
“No longer. Once, years ago, everyone crushed in their own backyard, however small, but it was wasteful, so now, even at sugaropolis, we truck our spoil to the nearest central mill. I’ll take you one day.”
“There are more things to do up here than there’s time.” Roslyn tried not to sigh.
Marcus hitched Belinda higher. “You mean the call of the south is no longer so loud and clear?” he interpreted.
“You know I’m only here for a stipulated time,” she reminded him a little sharply.
“Yes, until Marco leaves us but Belinda does not,” he agreed.
“So seeing things is scarcely my privilege,” she said more sharply again. His answer had incensed her.
They had reached the bottom by this time, and Tim was waiting for them, so there was no opportunity for Marcus to reply. They went again through the canyon of cane plumes, Belinda clapping her hands with pleasure.
“I really must get back to the sickroom.” Roslyn, on the ground now, was looking at her watch and frowning.
He nodded and released Belinda and the two girls set off to the house.
“Fath-er cutting,” indicated Belinda, who, when she could, abbreviated everything in quite a businesslike way.
Roslyn turned and saw Marcus among the other men, a little taller, broader ... no doubt quicker. After all, she thought coolly, he can cut twelve tons a day.
When they got to Clementine, Connie reported that all was well and got eagerly out of the bedside chair. “I’ll take the little girl for a walk,” she planned.
“She’s already walked,” Roslyn said, but it did not worry her that Belinda might be over-exercised, for she guessed that Connie’s walk would not be far afield, especially since Filippo, or so she had learned, did not work on the cuttings, but was useful round the garden and closer house environs. She watched the pair go out.
She turned her attention to old Marco. He was keeping up his brighter look, so Roslyn took the opportunity to coax some food into him. He did not eat much, in fact it was infinitesimal, but then he did not need much. She wondered if later in the course of his illness he would require intravenous feeding. She frowned over the prospect. He would have been so much better in hospital.
As though to refute this, the old man’s eyes sought and held Roslyn’s. She saw that he wanted something, and bent her head close to his. Only his lips moved, no sound came, but the pull of his mouth was unmistakable.
“You want Marcus?” she asked gently.
Now the lips did not move, but the eyes spoke his message. “No,” they said.
“Not Marcus? Then tell me, dear.”
The dark gaze flicked sideways, stopped at the photograph on the bedside table. So he did want Marcus after all, only not the older Marcus in the flesh
but the younger Marcus in the photograph, taken in the days when old Marco himself was younger, which would account for his wanting it now. Indulgently she picked it up, then held it up, since he was too weak to hold it himself, noting, as she had noted before, the less-than-ruggedness in it compared to what Marcus Moreno had now.
It seemed that the close proximity of the photograph soothed the old man. He kept looking at it and Roslyn saw his lids growing heavy. Presently he slept, and it was a calm sleep.
She put back the photograph, removed the used dishes to the kitchen, tidied the room and checked through the medicines. She was working on the bedside cupboard when unexpectedly Doctor Carlton came in. She had not heard any plane, and looked up, surprised.
“I drove over from the Petersons’,” he explained, “which is a cane farm to the north. I’d been taken there by air ambulance. One of the Peterson hands decided to inflict upon himself a rather ugly cut. He was doing a manual job, of course.” A shrug and a grimace. “After dealing with him, I decided to grab the opportunity to look in on the patriarch. How is he, Sister?”
“He seems well.” Roslyn hesitated. “Too well?”
The doctor did not answer that, and she had not really expected him to. He just gave her a quick perceptive look and she knew that what she had felt about this sudden upward surge of life in the old man was recognized, too, by the doctor. He crossed over, held the pulse, looked at the face so less grey than yesterday, then nodded.
“Was the accident a bad one?” she inquired.
“Bad enough for me to be flown there, and later returned. Yes, Sister, a fraction more and it would have been a fatal one. Thank heaven for mechanism is what I say. If only the weather would leave us alone and cut out the cane-knife, we medicos would be a happier breed. But I believe Cyclone Roberta now is on her way. If she becomes very imminent, I’ll try to get here again before such a thing is possible no longer, for I feel—” He looked gravely down on the old man.
“Yes,” nodded Roslyn, understanding what he had left unsaid. “I wish you would. However, not to worry, not, I really mean, if you have another fraction away from fatality on your plate.”
“I won’t worry. Not with you in command.” He said it sincerely. His glance fell on Marcus’s photograph which she must have replaced in a more prominent position. He picked it up, then put it down again.
“It seemed to comfort him,” Roslyn proffered.
“Yes, it would.”
The doctor crossed to the French windows. “I suppose I’d better get going,” he said reluctantly. “The A.A. will be waiting to take me back.” He looked out on the lovely setting. “What a day to talk about near-fatalities and cyclones and coping if things happen. Did you ever know such golden weather?”
“No,” Roslyn admitted, “it’s perfect.”
“And the cane music? Did you listen last night?”
“As well as this morning. Marcus ... Mr. Moreno took Belinda and me up to the hummock.”
Doctor Carlton grimaced at that. “I only asked you about last night, Sister,” he said reproachfully. “I can do without that extra information. But never mind” ... a determined grin ... “the cut won’t last for ever, so I should catch up soon, be able to snitch some time for myself.” A pause. “The burning question, burning for me, is: Can that ‘myself’ be changed to ‘ourselves’?”
“Ourselves?” Roslyn asked, puzzled.
“You. Me,” he said a little diffidently.
Roslyn liked him and answered at once: “Of course. If I’m still here.”
“If you’re not still here, you could be still—there.”
“There?” she queried.
“That’s what I said.”
“Where is there?”
“Well, I do have a headquarters,” he grinned. “In fact I have a surgery with a house on the coast.”
“Nice for you.”
“But could it be nice,” he dared, “for—us?” He did not wait for an answer, he gave her a quick smile and was gone before she could smile back.
She heard the car in the drive, the sound of it growing fainter as it retreated down the track between the cane.
Roslyn found a magazine and sat beside the sleeping old man. The house was silent, so quiet she could hear even this far away the stir of the plumes of the tall grasses. Cane music, she mused once again, letting the magazine fall to her lap.
Then into the peace came a series of small noises, human noises, first Marcus Moreno’s voice in controlled but very certain exasperation, then Connie’s in tearful defence, then Belinda in outrage.
“Was not so a snake!” Belinda exclaimed. “Was not so, Fath-er.”
Roslyn, expecting the worse, went to the door. From there she was appalled to see Marcus Moreno holding up, of all things, a crocodile. A very small one, but still unmistakably a croc.
“It can’t be!” She was not aware she was saying it aloud until he heard and looked coldly up the passage at her to assure her:
“It is.”
“But—but where?”
“Down the creek, to where this fool of a girl ... yes, I mean that, Connie ... actually went with Belinda.”
“I thought it would be all right,” wept Connie, “there’s been a burn-off, so there was no fear of snakes.”
“Only crocodiles.”
“Mr. Marcus, you know we don’t have full-size crocs here, that they moved out years ago when people moved in.”
“Yes, but I also know that big crocodiles from little crocodiles grow. There always has to be an exception. Good lord, why did you go there? No, don’t tell me. It was Giuseppe.”
“Filippo,” corrected Connie miserably, “and I won’t ever again, I won’t, Mr. Marcus. Though he wouldn’t have done any harm, I’m sure, not at his size.”
“Presumably he has had parents. Where are they, do you think? Lurking in some wallow a few yards up waiting for a tasty young meal? You? Belinda?”
“Oh, no, Mr. Marcus, the croc is Filippo’s, he bought it from a pet shop for a lark and put it in the creek.”
“Some lark! Well, Filippo will now have some explaining to do.”
“He didn’t mean anything,” Connie said anxiously, “you wouldn’t send him away?”
“Just see if I wouldn’t! And you” ... to Belinda ... “stop those snuffles before I give you a cause to snuffle like I did once before.”
“No doubt you have already,” called Roslyn from down the hall. “How was she to know?”
“I haven’t touched the child,” he called back, “much as I’d like to touch, and touch very hard, all the women around this place. How a little girl can react like that to these things is quite beyond me, and yet—All right, Connie, get going, and take the kid with you. Scrub her up before lunch.”
“Yes, sir,” said Connie, vastly relieved, but she had to raise her voice, for already he was halfway up the hall to the sickroom.
Roslyn followed him to the bedside. “You should make certain sections out of bounds,” she said with asperity.
“I suppose so,” he sighed, “but good lord, I never expected that. And yet” ... his glance had fallen on the photograph beside the bed ... “I should in a way. It’s in the blood. Always in the blood.”
“So other Morenos at an early age likewise cared about frogs and reptiles.”
“Beetles, roaches, what-have-you,” he nodded. He had taken the photograph up to look more closely at it, and now he put it down again.
“Then you can’t wonder—” she began to point out, but he stopped her quite rudely.
“I can wonder and I do wonder, but I get no further.” He looked at the photograph of himself again, looked a long time.
Then he turned without another word and left the room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Later that afternoon, without any preliminaries, without any advice from the Radar Cyclone Warning Station who were taken by surprise as well, “Roberta” howled in.
Usually “mare’s tails”, which we
re streaks of high cirrus cloud like the long tails of wild horses galloping across the sky, ushered in these North Australian cyclones. But Roberta, perhaps because she was an out-of-season visitor, simply struck.
One moment the sky was that bright flag blue so typical of Queensland, then within minutes ... seconds ... cloud filled its entirety. It was only a sullen grey at first, but from the east rose a bank of formidable black that spilled like ink from a giant bottle to cover the heavens as far as the eye could see. It grew dark as night.
All lights had to be switched on, and Roslyn, checking on Marco, was thankful that Clementine had installed its own electric plant, for the old man was not looking as well as he had earlier, and it would be a worry to have to cope by candlelight. Because, she thought, with an estimating glance to the obscure scene beyond the window, with everyone switching on from a main at the same time, restrictions would be a first emergency, but with one’s own source it was a different proposition.
“Our lights will be switched off.” It was almost as if Marcus Moreno had read her thoughts. He had entered the bedroom and was standing looking down at the patient.
“Why?” Roslyn asked. “I mean” ... a quick glance to old Marco ... “I’ll need them.”
“We have ample lamps, good lamps left over from the days when we had to rely on paraffin. But it was why? you asked. The answer is that it will be the elements depriving us, nature’s not man’s, something that even our expensive and efficient machinery has to bow to. In other words, Sister, we’ll not ask for trouble by staying on.” A pause as he looked again at the patient. “He’s not so bright, is he?” Marcus had lowered his voice even though the old man had drifted off and could not hear them.
“No,” Roslyn admitted. She ran the tip of her tongue round her lips preparatory to asking him something. She wanted him to arrange for Doctor Carlton to return. She had a feeling that the old patriarch—
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