‘They were great kids,’ Abel said seriously.
‘Wonderful. When we needed their co-operation they came forward with it.’
‘And what co-operation! Tell me about it in detail, Josephine.’
Jo did. She told him about Dicky’s march into the forest for help, Amanda’s quite uncanny sizing up of the nursing requirements of the episode, Sukey’s general good behaviour. She told him about Pennies dropping and how it had accompanied them into the jaws of death—well, nearly the jaws.
‘A very handy song,’ nodded Abel. ‘You’ve used it before.’ He looked shrewdly at Jo. ‘Did any of this get you any further with the kids?’
‘Oh, we got on tremendously.’
‘But any further, Josephine? Further into the mystery of the old banana storehouse and who, or who not, Amanda believed she saw? Did it throw any light on a mine? Did it establish anything about their lives before your sister wrote to you and said she was to be the mother of three? Did it help you with your one out of three?’
“No.’
‘But good heavens, you had an opportunity you might never get again, an opportunity to pump these kids.’
‘They didn’t want to be pumped,’ said Jo.
‘Naturally. I’ve no doubt that Dicky doesn’t want to take a bath every day, Amanda and Sukey to do things that they are obliged to do, but that doesn’t mean—’
‘It did mean in this situation, Abel. They shrank from it, and I decided it was not the time and place.’
‘Then good lord, what will be the time and place?’
‘I don’t know. Abel, don’t rush me. After all, it’s only a couple of weeks still since—’
‘Time runs out,’ he reminded her sourly. ‘I think you’d better go now. I’m tired.’
Jo went.
There were several such deadlock visits, but Jo still had to come to the sick bay, the camp manager and the nurse expected it.
But they did not always argue. Sometimes the talk did not even touch on the children. Abel was naturally upset about his Cessna, and said so.
‘Oh, yes, I’m insured, but insurance doesn’t cover inconvenience and—well, personal loss.’
‘Personal loss?’ queried Jo.
‘It was a really good experience flying up there with you and the kids.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Jo said, touched, but trying not to show it, ‘you were on cloud nine?’
‘Bang on,’ he grinned, ‘and blown there by the tender winds of spring.’ A pause. ‘All four of them.’
There was a moment of silence that Jo did not want to break but knew she had to. ‘Can the Cessna be brought out?’ she asked.
‘Never.’
‘Vines growing over it,’ said Jo, thinking of Sukey.
‘Yes, but let’s not look back,’ Abel shrugged, ‘there will be other kites, other days, other clouds in skies.’
‘Cloud nines?’
‘Could be.’
‘Other children?’
‘Could be again, though I will say this, Josephine, I’ve become rather accustomed to our particular brand of young horrors.’
‘You’ll find other horrors,’ Jo assured him. A pause. ‘Also another superintending adult who doesn’t superintend, or question, as much as she should.’
‘Oh, no,’ Abel came in at once, ‘there’s only one Josephine Millet.’ He added: ‘Thank heaven.’
About to become indignant, Jo laughed instead.
On the Thursday a four-wheel-drive utility large enough to carry the five of them (Abel lying full length) arrived from the plantation, and the doctor having given his consent, the patient and his party were waved off by the lumber camp back to the world of bananas. Before they left, the doctor had taken Jo aside. ‘If I were really worried,’ he’d said, ‘I’d have kept you here longer or insisted on your being accompanied by a trained nurse. But Abel has a superb constitution, and all he will need is a short rest to get over the journey. Young Amanda is perfectly capable of coping with that. So you just relax. He’ll be as good as new in a few days.’
It took longer by truck than by air, but being a four-wheel drive it could take the bush short cuts that an ordinary car dared not attempt, and by dusk the same day they were back at Tender Winds.
Jo noticed that although the children were more subdued than at the camp, they were not the same nervous souls as before. New courage? New confidence? Or was it because they were going strictly to the house and not to the bush surrounding the house? For Jo could not get it out of her mind now that somewhere in that bush was the answer to their uneasiness.
Abel was taken to one of the many .bedrooms, but not before Amanda had duly inspected it.
‘Light but not too much light,’ she said importantly. ‘Quiet. Something to look at through the window. Cheerful colours but nothing disturbing. The carpet, of course, must come up. I need a bare scrubbed floor.’
‘The heck you do!’ protested Abel. ‘I’ll hear every footstep. The carpet stops.’
‘It’s unhygienic. Have you ever heard of a carpeted hospital ward?’
‘I’ll not put up with plink-plonk, plink-plonk every time you come in to plump a bloke’s pillow,’ Abel protested, for from her hospital course kit which she guarded jealously Amanda had unearthed plain black rubberless oxfords. ‘No, Sister,’ he refused, ‘I’ll not put up with that.’
Alas for Abel. He had not even started to put up with things.
The next day he did start.
At first everything was charming. A young girl, and Amanda was a pretty young girl, no wonder Gavin rather had leaned to her for the one out of three, tending a patient in a manner that would have pleased the nursing manual, was quite a delightful sight. Especially wearing the veil, not a handkerchief, that Jo had made, and even, to Amanda’s supreme joy, sewn on a red cross.
‘Oh!’ Amanda had gasped incredulously at the veil and insignia, and that had been all the thanks that Jo had needed.
But soon the patient’s pleasure diminished somewhat at the amount of rules that Amanda seemed to have absorbed from her course and was determined now to impose on Abel.
No smoking. Abel didn’t, not very much, but he did like to suck on a pipe now and then. No nips, definitely no nips unless they were barley water.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ Abel said to Jo, ‘but there are several things I prefer to barley water.’
Temperatures. Abel had his taken so often he said he was beginning to prefer the flavour of the thermometer to tobacco.
Most of all Baths.
The first time he only smiled indulgently as Amanda tripped in and out of the sickroom, laden with towels, washers, soap, flannels and what-have-you. But the second time when evidently she wore a more intentional face than just the sponging of brow and cleansing of hands, he shouted:
‘Sling me the necessaries, Sister, I’ll do it.’
‘You’re too weak,’ objected Amanda, ‘or’ ... accusingly ... ‘you should be.’
‘The towel and soap, please, Amanda.’ No Sister now. Amanda came out to Jo in high dudgeon.
‘Baths,’ she said to Jo, no doubt repeating her lesson in home nursing, ‘act mainly on the skin, but through the skin they can influence the blood and circulation.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, dear, and I’m sure Abel realises this.’
‘Then why is he being so silly?’ Amanda’s lovely red-crossed veil had come awry and it slanted over one indignant eye, taking away from her ‘Sister’ status, making her just a very cross little girl.
‘Amanda,’ said Jo carefully, ‘Abel is a man, not merely a child like Dicky.’
‘Oh, I know all that, but to a good nurse’ ... what lesson is this going to be? inwardly groaned Jo ... ‘everyone, be they young, old, male or female, is just a patient.’
‘Yes, I know that’s how the nursing fraternity looks at it, but what about Abel?’
‘Well, what about him?’ demanded Sister Grant.
‘Mightn’t he feel—w
ell, mightn’t he—’
‘He’s sick and he has to be attended to,’ said Amanda flatly.
‘But is a bath so essential in sickness, I mean the thorough kind of bath I think you were intending?’
‘Of course I intended a thorough bath. The action of water aided by soap and vigorous scrubbing helps sweat glands to function actively.’
‘But couldn’t Abel do it himself, Amanda? Oh’... hurriedly ... ‘I know he’s just a patient in your eyes, but what about from his eyes?’ ‘Are they worrying him?’ asked Amanda, immediately diverted. ‘Perhaps I should draw the blind. Weak boracic solution is good. Have you any boracic?’
She went fussing off into the bathroom, and Jo took the opportunity to race into the sick bay.
‘Well,’ grinned Abel from his bed, ‘am I to be scoured or not?’
‘You could have put it in a kinder way than shouting,’ Jo reproved.
‘Oh, come off it, Josephine, what do you think I am?’
‘Male. Something I suspect Sister Grant believes would have been better not included in creation.’
‘A Women’s Libber, eh?’ Abel looked down at the sponge. ‘What about you, Josephine?’ he asked. ‘Feel like taking over Amanda’s job for her?’
‘Why should I?’
‘Too few years in Amanda yet for Baths, Giving of, I mean when the about-to-be-bathed is beyond babyhood. But you, my good woman—’ As he was speaking he was taking the sponge from the bowl of water and throwing it at Jo.
She promptly hurled it back, only it landed in the bowl of water and splashed everywhere.
Amanda, her veil straightened now, came in with the boracic lotion and stood and stared.
‘Just what’s going on?’ she said, aghast. ‘Really, Abel, you are a bad patient! My assistant comes to help you and you behave like this. For that you can bath yourself. Come on’... to Jo ... ‘and we’ll roll bandages.’
The last Jo saw of Abel was a rather nonplussed man holding gingerly to a sponge. He had won the fight, but the laurels, his expression clearly said, were not his.
They were not Amanda’s, either. ‘I do hope,’ she fretted, ‘he cleans in the creases. Germs lurk in corners.’
‘Yes,’ said Jo faintly, and she grabbed at a tea-towel, but the laughter tears from her eyes made it more damp than the dishes would have. Then in the middle of her surreptitious mirth something happened.
Sister Grant looked up from her bandages, stared—then grinned, too. The walls between them were not down yet, perhaps they never would be fully down, but this, thought Jo, almost hysterically happy, was the biggest break so far.
She put down the tea-towel and Amanda put down the bandage. They stared solemnly at each other for a moment, then Amanda, too, laughed out loud.
It was a wonderful progress from a few weeks ago, Jo thought gratefully, remembering the tight little girl who had come up the Tender Winds stairs. A tight young brother and a tight small sister, too, but they were still tight, not like Amanda at this unguarded moment. Dicky had been different during the crash, different at the lumber camp afterwards, he had been relaxed then, so it must be this valley that caused the tension in him. Probably it would do it to Amanda, too, once away from the house, but a nurse’s place was by the side of her patient, and Amanda was holding anxiously to that. Anxious for another reason? Jo shivered a little when she thought of Abel out of bed again and the children in that huddle in the garden once more, shut up with each other, shutting everyone else out. It was something to do with the valley ... something away from the safety of Tender Winds. But what?
She thought of cornering Sukey; small children were reputedly the easiest to pump (Abel’s word). But whoever had said that had not met a Sukey. Sukey, Jo thought, would be the last hurdle of all to fall.
It seemed incredible that so many days had passed since the tragedy. It all seemed such a long way off. Jo supposed that that was because of the many things that had happened, because of her absorption with the children and her necessity to come to some final decision, not only for them, for herself, for Gavin, but for the welfare authorities who should be around again any time now to give their approval.
Approval. Approval as to the fate of three minors. One out of three to herself and Gavin or all three to the Government.
‘Whom have you chosen, Jo?’ Jo asked herself solemnly. ‘Which one is your choice?’
She went out of the house by the back door to escape the trio and to avoid Abel’s sick-bed window. This time, she thought desperately, you must help me, Gee. You did once, you laughed with me, but I haven’t heard from you since.
It looks like Amanda, she continued to Gee. Amanda and I have been getting on really well, and Gavin did say she was attractive. Yes, Gavin would be flattered to have a pretty daughter, especially if later I provided him with a son.
On the other hand Dicky is a fine boy and men like boys, and girl twins being in our family I might run only to daughters.
Finally Sukey.
But Jo did not get up to Sukey. She had just discovered a sole mark in a squelchy patch, and it was the same rubber pattern she had seen that day she had walked to the flying fox with Gavin.
It could be one of Abel’s plantation men. It could also be a fruit thief, though no one up here worried much over that. If cases from the honesty sheds disappeared, yes, but not a hand of bananas here and there.
She walked slowly on, listening again for Gee, hearing nothing from her. It can’t go on for ever like this, she told herself, I have to make up my mind some time. These days institutions are homes, and families are kept together, so in a way it would be kinder to let the three of them go. Yet if one of them can have a personal future, shouldn’t I—shouldn’t Gavin and I—
Strange that Gavin had not rung, she thought. Surely he had heard about the crash. But then it was a busy time now at the office; they had always tried to fit in all the necessary advance work before Gavin’s firm took its annual holidays. Because of the extra hours entailed, she and Gavin had booked for a cruise to recuperate from the rush.
A cruise would have been a change, Jo sighed. She almost felt herself in a deck chair beside Gavin, sun-soaked, sea-soothed, perfectly relaxed, an explosion of blue all around them instead of green ... then suddenly Jo wasn’t thinking of cruises or Gavin or anything.
She had reached a particularly deep channel of trees, and in it she found that it was hard to separate light from shade, fantasy from reality ... something, or someone, from that mass of matted vines directly ahead.
A pheasant, she thought sensibly, though it would have to be a large one. A kangaroo. But it hadn’t bounded. Then—what?
Deciding that she was being ridiculous, Jo turned and started up the hill.
On an impulse she turned off first to the old banana storehouse, the Noah’s Ark that Uncle-Mitchell had built.
She reached it and looked inside. Everything as usual. She was leaving again when she saw the footprint on the earth floor. Abel’s? Abel had been here on the day of Amanda’s fright. No, the print was not from Abel’s boot. Why, it was the same as the one she had seen on the valley track, the same as the one on the path to the fox.
Meaning exactly nothing. Just some passer-through helping himself to a banana, when if he only came to the house he would get a large hand of them. Sheltering here if it rained suddenly, as it often did in this banana country.
No one would refuse shelter. Yes, the footprint meant exactly nothing, but...
But all at once Jo was racing through the trees, rushing madly up to the house again. Running desperately as Amanda had run.
She saw Dicky and Sukey looking up at her sharply from their huddle in the garden. She saw Amanda looking down at her sharply from the top of the verandah steps.
Looking, but none of them saying anything.
Jo said nothing herself.
CHAPTER TWELVE
An uneasiness had crept into Jo. She tried to push it away, but it still persisted. It would not le
ave her alone. There had been nothing in the valley, nothing in the banana storehouse. She told herself this a dozen times but still knew a disquiet and a foreboding. It made her guarded, so that instead of spilling things out to Amanda, which might have started a confidence in return, she avoided the little girl. She also kept away from the other two. When Abel called out from his sick-room that he would like to have a word with her, and when she went along and was asked outright why she had come up from the valley like a scared rabbit, Jo looked blankly back at Abel and said she had come like any sane adult.
‘Not when you flashed past this window, Josephine.’
‘You’re imagining things,’ she insisted. ‘Sick people do.’
‘I am not imagining things. Also I’m not sick. Not any longer. As a matter of fact I’m getting up tomorrow.’
‘Did the doctor say so?’
‘Sister Grant said so.’
‘How did you bribe her to do that?’
‘Strange though it may seem, the child actually grudgingly likes me, male though I am.’
‘In which case I would have thought she would have wanted to keep you invalided,’ retorted Jo.
‘To preserve my life or to stop me from escaping?’ Abel drawled. ‘Amanda’s a shrewd button, I believe she has caught on that I’m not a case of life and death. Also, I think she knows I’ll never escape.’
‘Never is a long word.’
‘I’m hoping it’s going to be a long, long sentence,’ he said quietly.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’ demanded Jo.
‘I’m never leaving this plantation. That’s the answer. I’m shackled here.’
‘I see. Well, I’m glad for you. It’s very lovely.’ A pause. ‘I shall be leaving, of course, as will the children.’
‘You first,’ he tabulated. ‘When?’
‘When? Well, when I marry Gavin.’
‘Of course. And the wonderful day has been put forward, hasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘To what date?’
‘I don’t know. How can I know? First of all I’ve got to make my decision.’
The Tender Winds of Spring Page 14