A Thousand Candles

by Joyce Dingwell

  ‘A thousand candles?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘That’s reserved for something else. But I tell you this: it’s morning’s at seven, all’s right with the world, isn’t it, and that, I believe, is how you’re still feeling, and what you want to share. Right, girl?’

  It was unbelievable. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t possibly understand this elation she had. But he did.

  ‘Yes, Crag,’ she said.

  They sat down on the cool piney ground. Although even the tallest trees were still comparatively small to the height they would eventually reach they made a sound like the sea.

  ‘I love it.’ Crag sat back and sighed contentedly. ‘It’s the one thing Falling Star never has—pine song. The only time at Yantumara when the wind can gossip like this is after the floods when the tall grasses have sprung up. But here in the planting the breeze and the trees can always talk away the hours, and when the wind changes direction it’s like bells. Why are you looking at me like that?’

  ‘You could be my father talking.’ She thought of Davy who had inherited her father’s gift, and her eyes began to water.

  The deep leaves seemed to draw a veil around them, the air was softly dim. He put out his big hand and placed it across hers. He left it there and she did not withdraw her own fingers. Presently, warmed, the shadow gone, she began telling him about the day’s events. The satisfaction she had known. The thrill—

  ‘If only—’ she finished.

  ‘If only?’

  ‘If only Rena wasn’t angry,’ she said unhappily.

  ‘That figures,’ he said.

  ‘But she told me it wasn’t because of Doctor Burt and—and any “upstaging”, and somehow I don’t think it was.’

  ‘No?’ he encouraged. ‘What, then?’

  ‘Somehow I think she was annoyed because I— well, I helped Dom.’

  ‘That figures, too,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You don’t have to, Pippa. Also you don’t need to do anything about it ... until Rena starts restricting me.’

  She looked at him in surprise. ‘You’re never restricted by Rena.’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Crag, what do you mean?’

  ‘Leave it at that,’ he advised. He got up and pulled her after him. ‘Coming up to Ku?’

  ‘I came for Davy and you said he’d stopped at the shed.’

  ‘Does it have to be Davy before you come to the house?’

  ‘Yes.’ She was still confused at what he had said, that restriction he anticipated, and her answer was curt.

  'Well, you’re direct enough,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s enough to set me packing my bags again for Yantumara.’

  ‘Why are you stopping this long? Dom had wondered that. You said you only ever stayed briefly.’

  ‘That’s right’ In spite of the shade he had pulled the brim of his ten-gallon over his eyes. He seemed about to say something, then he seemed to change his mind. ‘Put it down to the scrubber and what goes with him,’ he smiled.

  ‘What can go with Davy?’ Pippa cried brokenly; the comfort she had known a little while ago when he had put his big hand silently over hers was not there now. She turned blindly away, avoiding him, darting back through the planting before he could stop her. By the time she had reached the fields she was composed again. Never must Davy see tears.

  Not that Davy would have seen anything except the two little calves. He was down at the calving pen as Crag had said, and he was enchanted.

  He walked back to Uplands with Pippa, his little hand warm in hers. He was full of talk about Crag’s Daisy up at Falling Star, and how Daisy must have two calves, too. ‘At least,’ he added. He skipped in his pleasure.

  Dom had informed Pippa when she had collected Davy that the vet was expected from Tombonda, having returned from his conference and having been informed of the double birth. Dom then passed on Doctor Burt’s congratulations to Pippa for a good job done.

  It would have made for complete satisfaction, Pippa thought, had she not dreaded a second scene with Rena. However, when she and Davy entered the house Rena was sweetness itself. She even found an opportunity to explain her behaviour to Pippa. ‘I was worried over Father,’ she said, and had Pippa not been so anxious to accept this, she could have thought that it was the first time that Rena had ever shown such concern.

  But when later she was permitted to visit Uncle Preston, she was ashamed of any doubts. He looked ill, more ill than she had anticipated by that ‘minor turn’ of his daughter.

  She sat by his bedside and told him all about Velvet, and as she had thought he was very pleased.

  ‘At the price of calves,’ he said, ‘that makes...’ He stopped his calculations to ask: ‘Not identical twins, I hope?’

  ‘No, Uncle, a cow and a bull calf. Why do you hope against identicals?’

  ‘They’re taken automatically by the Scientific Breeding Group for further study. The fee for unidenticals by private sale is much more to my liking.’

  ‘You and your money!’ she teased him.

  ‘It’s all too true, Pippa.’ He pleated the top of the sheet with thin fingers; he had lost a lot of weight. ‘That last investment of mine was a wrong ’un, the first you could say in all my life. What a time to pick to mess things up! But then I’ve messed things all through. A man doesn’t see that when he’s doing it, only when it’s done, and it all lies there behind him like a book with its pages upturned. I messed up Rena. She’s spoiled. She’ll never be able to take what’s coming now.’

  ‘Uncle Preston, I’m sure you exaggerate.’

  ‘Then that makes you and my girl too. The trouble was I lost my touch, I took my finger off the button, you might say, when I let Rena persuade me to leave the city and settle down here. Things ... my things haven’t gone well since.’

  ‘This place is thriving.’

  He shrugged irritably. ‘That’s Hardy’s kingdom, not mine. Did you know, Pippa, that it was because of Hardy that we initially came to Uplands?’

  Pippa had not known. Having only met with these relations so recently she had taken it for granted that Uplands had always been their home. Or one of their homes.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Uncle Preston, ‘it was only after my girl met Dom Hardy in England a few years ago that it became top of her list. I had the idea for a while ... I really thought... I hoped ... ’ His voice trailed off and he was silent a moment.

  ‘But Dom Hardy isn’t English, Uncle.’ Pippa broke into his thoughts.

  ‘He was taking a trip, a “gen” trip he called it. You must have noticed how English-like are these Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Hardy noticed and was taking farming tips.’

  ‘And you met him?’

  ‘Rena and I met him.’ A pause. ‘Straightway that girl had a new theme.’

  ‘A farm.’

  ‘That’s it.’ Uncle Preston laughed indulgently, but he cut the laugh short. ‘There I go again, always spoiling her. I shouldn’t laugh over my own mistakes.’

  ‘So you chose one that Dom recommended?’ asked Pippa.

  Uncle Preston nodded. ‘It quite suited me apart from Rena insisting on it. Not so far from Sydney so that I couldn’t keep my finger on the button ... or so I thought. But a business man needs to keep the button right there beside him, not three hours away. I found that out. Either I slipped in my judgment or—’

  ‘Does it matter, Uncle Preston?’ Pippa asked gently. ‘Does a little less money matter?’

  ‘That wasn’t all the judgment I lost,’ he said bluntly. ‘You see, I thought ... I was sure ... But I was wrong.’ Pippa herself thought that never until she had come to Tombonda had she heard so many conundrums. Dom uttered them. Crag did. Now Uncle Preston was saying them. And they were all to do with Rena. What was it about Rena?

  To divert the old man she began telling him about her riding episode earlier in the week, and how she had foolishly taken the horse down to the gully.

 
; He nodded, but she could see he was not attending ... that is until she finished ruefully with her tumble, and, for conversation, how Rena had advised her afterwards that sometimes it was not just the ground that was hard.

  ‘She said that?’ he came in quite sharply, and the sharpness surprised Pippa.

  ‘Yes, Uncle Preston.’ She looked wonderingly at him.

  ‘What else did that girl of mine say?’

  ‘That was all. She just said that it was not always the ground that was hard.’

  He was quiet for a while, then he mused: ‘She fell herself once, you know.’

  ‘Yes, you told me. You said that after that she was—’

  ‘She was more Rena than before,’ he finished for Pippa. ‘More capricious. More self-willed. Less what I was hoping, hoping for her and—’ He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. ‘She even got an urge to leave here, leave Uplands. But for once I didn’t indulge her. I felt I had moved enough, that I was too old to begin again. Pippa’ ... abruptly ... ‘what do you think of Hardy?’

  Your overseer?’

  ‘Yes. What do you think of him, girl?’

  ‘He’s great,’ Pippa said warmly, if a little surprised at the sudden turn in the conversation.

  ‘Apart from that would you say he was—well, a stubborn kind of fool?’

  ‘Never a fool, Uncle Preston.’

  ‘But stubborn? Proud? Determined?’

  ‘Yes, all of those,’ Pippa nodded. ‘Very stubborn, proud, determined.’

  Another silence crept into the room. It was so long that Pippa suspected the old man had fallen asleep. She sat on for a while, wondering whether to tiptoe out or wait for him to wake up again.

  He settled it for her.

  ‘I’m awake, girl, but don’t stay on.’

  No, Uncle Preston.’ She got up. ‘Anything you want?’

  Uncle Preston said an odd thing, and Pippa was to remember it afterwards.

  He said: ‘You’ve given it to me. Close the door after you. Thanks.’

  The next day Pippa met Glen Burt. Already Davy had become friends with him, telling his sister that he was a pretty good vet ... Pippa told herself she must have a word with Crag Crag about that ... and that he intended to do what the doctor told him, because Crag’s Manager had done that and look what Crag’s Manager had won. —Always Crag came into it, Pippa sighed.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she nodded, ‘but please not vet.’

  ‘I told Doctor Glen and he didn’t seem to mind.’

  No one seemed to be minding, not even Rena when she presented her doctor to Pippa. She was all sweet concern, tender solicitude. Almost Pippa could have convinced herself that that warning that Rena had issued to her regarding the young medico was imagination.

  The meeting was in Davy’s room, Rena sitting at the window with the little boy, and looking lovely enough, Pippa thought, to stir anyone’s heart. But Doctor Burt’s . attention was only on Davy, a fact that Rena should have appreciated as a point against Pippa even though at the same time it would have to be considered as something against herself. When, after a quick check of the child, the doctor gave Rena a meaning look, Rena rose at once, the perfect intuitive nurse, and took Davy outside. That she stopped in the garden where she could be seen as she lovingly and very winningly tended the little boy dimmed none of her touching devotion.

  Glen Burt said, ‘I haven’t had an opportunity to commend you on your handling of that cow, Miss Bromley. You seemed to know what you were about.’

  ‘I was a country girl.’

  ‘Still, not all country people ... You weren’t working for an English veterinarian, by any chance?’ He smiled, and added, ‘I know from your cousin that you’re not a nurse.’

  Pippa supposed that that would be one of the things that Rena would take care to tell him. ‘No, I wasn’t,’ she said, ‘I was a clerk.’

  ‘I was hoping from your coolness that you might have been one of our brigade.’

  ‘Either animal, vegetable, mineral,’ she laughed, and he laughed with her, but his good-looking face soon becoming serious again.

  ‘I really meant,’ he explained, ‘that you might be able to give me some data on Davy.’

  ‘But I can do that, of course.’

  His smile was polite now. ‘Of course ... though what I wanted—’

  She understood that he did not mean the usual surface details but deeper personal medical points, and who knew Davy better than Davy’s sister? In a quiet, concise manner she tabulated everything she had learned from Doctor Harries about Davy. Doctor Burt listened intently, nodding his dark head now and then.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said when she had finished. ‘That’s what I wanted but scarcely expected.’

  ‘Davy is all I have,’ she said, ‘so I had to know.’

  There was a silence as Glen Burt made notes in a small book.

  Pippa steeled herself to say, ‘I know already that for Davy it’s prognosis nil, Doctor.’

  He looked up from the book and answered, ‘I wish I could deny that.’

  ‘But you can’t.’

  ‘Instead of saying No I’ll say that sometimes in spite of facts, in spite of all a doctor knows, it doesn’t always happen as a doctor believes.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Her smile was bleak. With an effort she said conversationally, ‘Rena has told me that your ambition is research.’

  He closed the book, then nodded to Pippa. ‘Being a G.P., particularly a country one, will be something that will always be immensely valuable to me, but I have to admit that research is the only thing I really want.’

  ‘Then you’ll be leaving the district at some time?’

  He smiled faintly. ‘It takes money for that kind of dream.’

  Pippa remembered Rena’s: ‘Glen wants to do research. That costs money, and you’d think he’d be aware that I could help him.’ Instinctively her glance flicked outward to the golden girl on the lawn, now kneeling beside Davy to adjust the strap of his sandal.

  The doctor saw the glance. Quietly, so quietly she could almost have imagined it, he said, ‘No.’

  ‘What, Doctor Burt?’

  ‘Thank you for your concise information on your brother. I receive new reading every day, and I shall be on the alert especially now for anything pertaining to Davy.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but knowing, as he knew, that he had not answered her question.

  They joined the others on the lawn.

  When the doctor had gone, Rena changed her role of nurse to Davy to that of examiner of Pippa. She demanded what, where, how.

  ‘It was all medical talk, Rena.’

  ‘I expected it to be.’ Rena’s mouth thinned. She added, ‘But tell me all the same.’

  ‘He just said that Davy...’ Pippa had to turn away.

  Rena at least had the grace not to press her, but she still waited, so Pippa repeated Glen Burt’s remark on wanting research but not having the money.

  ‘You see,’ triumphed Rena.

  Pippa did not proceed to that odd ‘No’ from the doctor when his glance had followed her glance, she let Rena bask in the assurance of her money and what it could do. But most of all her cousin seemed to find delight in the fact that research would take Glen ... and his wife as a matter of course ... right away.

  ‘Right away,’ Rena repeated, almost hugging the words.

  ‘But, Rena, you go away often. You could go now.’

  ‘But I’d be expected back. This is my home. This is where I live with my father. When you’re married, you belong to the one you’re married to, so you don’t come back, you’re not expected. It would have been no good with Crag, for he returns regularly to Ku, and always will. I have to be away. Away.’

  ‘But why?’ Pippa looked at her, confused. ‘You can’t dislike the place, for you chose it.’

  Rena had gone quite white. ‘Yes, I chose it, but now I hate it. I hate it!’ Almost choking on that last ‘hate’, Rena turned and left.

  Gl
en Burt attended Uncle Preston several times during the following week, and on each occasion had a look at Davy. He had an idea to try him on remedial exercises, but was very anxious to select the right ones, for he be believed that wrong movements could deter the boy.

  Rena offered sweetly to supervise these exercises, and who more able, Pippa thought; she had had the most expensive ballet tuition.

  ‘No, Davy s sister, I think. The way she reported Davy to me I knew she understood even Davy’s smallest muscle. This is what I’m after, Miss Bromley.’ He had drawn a stick figure to demonstrate, and beckoned Pippa over. With a sinking heart, for she had glimpsed the quick look in Rena’s face, Pippa tried to follow the text.

  As far as she could see it ran the same gamut as the things that Crag often recommended. Crag wanted Davy to step out of himself, be more the boy and less the small ornament, or so he expressed it, only there to be touched gently, dusted and replaced. He had said, Pippa recalled, that little scrubbers had nothing in the past to regret and nothing in the future to fear, meaning, she interpreted, that Davy should live more ordinarily, and that was what Glen Burt, in medical terms, was saying now.

  Part of the exercises involved walking while practising deep breathing. Pippa selected this one and took Davy across to Ku. Or at least they started in that direction. As they passed through the planting she assured herself that it was because Davy was so eager for this particular exercise and so lacklustre as regarded the arm flinging and toe touching, which, after all, was only childlike, that she had chosen it, but when Davy acclaimed delightedly, ‘You’re skippety-hoppity, too,’ of her twinkling progress, she could not deny it.

  ‘It’s the pine needles,’ she told him.

  ‘No, it’s Crag,’ he said. ‘You’re wanting to see him like I am. I love the pine needles, though, and I’ll miss them up at Falling Star.’

  About to argue that it was not Crag, Pippa said urgently instead: ‘Darling, we’re not going to Falling Star.’

  Her brother answered, unconsciously adopting Crag’s slow, deliberate drawl, ‘I reckon we might, though, because that’s what my best friend is waiting back for.’

  Pippa halted, and halted Davy with her.