She was still in a daze when at last Burn pushed on again. He had to prompt her to get out and open the gate. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I’m too tuckered out to do it today. That last occasion was only a treat, don’t think you get handed one twice.’
She said ‘Yes’ dully, and performed the duty. When she came back after closing the gate again she wondered what her treat would be if she told Burn she had met his friend before.
Only he had not been this man, so he could not have been Trent.
Who had he been, then? Why had he come? Why hadn’t she reported the meeting to Burn as she had intended to?
Why ... because nervously she knew that she wouldn’t... wasn’t she preparing to tell him now?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Frances prattled brightly with Jason as she bathed him that night ... over-brightly, as that bright young button soon informed her.
‘You’re talking and talking, France.’ A long disconcerting look at her. ‘Why?’
‘I suppose because it’s been such a lovely day. It was a lovely day, wasn’t it, Jason? You enjoyed it, didn’t you?’
‘All except that part where Burn went over the fence on Bruce. I didn’t want the horse to get hurt.’
‘And Burn?’
‘Burn wouldn’t get hurt,’ dismissed Jason confidently. He looked at her shrewdly. ‘Is that why you’re talking and talking, France, because you were thinking Burn might fall down?’
She looked back at him, almost wishing she could confide in him about Trev Trent. He was such a wise small boy, it seemed almost incredible that one so young could comprehend that sometimes a deep worry is hidden in light talk. But she couldn’t speak of it, of course. She remembered how Jason had disliked that man right from the start. If only she had taken notice of the child, of a child’s intuition, not scolded him. That set her wondering rather disturbingly if Jason’s tale of waking up that day in the hammock to see the fellow watching from the hill could have been true after all. But, she thought soberly, there must be no questioning the boy again. Fortunately Jason seemed to have forgotten the affair, so she would, too. She would put her guilt over her own part in the episode in not reporting it to Burn right out of her mind. As she towelled Jason briskly she planned their lessons tomorrow, for the department’s next bundle had not yet arrived, and the morning class would depend on her.
Right from the beginning of the tuition she had found she enjoyed the process just as much as Jason. After all, teaching had been her first choice, nursing more a convenience ... even though later she had come to love it, too. The years away from teaching instead of dulling had whetted her appetite for it. Especially with a pupil like Jason West.
She declined an invitation from the boys and went to her room very early, taking out the teaching manuals long put away but brought out again when she had been assigned West of the River. She pored over them. She was absorbed in a chapter on learning to relate information to behaviour when there was a tap on the door. A second and third tap did not reach her ... nor did the quietly opened door, then the man’s steps to her side.
But this ‘France’ did penetrate. She gave a little start and looked up from the printed page.
‘It must be very intriguing,’ Burn West said. Without being asked he drew up a chair to the desk and sat down as well.
‘I’m sorry,’ Frances offered, ‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘I shouldn’t have come in like this, I suppose, but the dead silence had to be investigated.’ He smiled slightly. ‘I expect that sounds like more cloak and dagger stuff.’
She smiled back at him, but it was a distinct effort. Instinctively at his words her mind had run back to that man who was not Trevor Trent.
‘Are you annoyed at my barging in, France?’ Burn was saying with concern, a little disconcerted, if Burn West could be disconcerted, because of her silence.
‘Of course not.’ She tried to put something into the denial. ‘I’m sorry I gave you that impression.’
‘You didn’t, really, I was actually self-absorbed. It’s something I’ve been thinking over for some time. France, I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve been overdoing my doubts, subtleties—’
She inserted, ‘Innuendoes.’
He said almost delightedly ... delighted? Burn West? ... ‘You listen to me!’
She did not reply.
‘I’ve come to the conclusion,’ he repeated, ‘that I can relax here at West of the River. Especially with you. I’m referring, of course, to the child. I hereby cancel that previous injunction that you never go out unattended with the young fellow.’
Suddenly, almost burningly, where she had resented the injunction, now she desired it. It was ridiculous, she thought. There had only been that instance of a man who had not been the person he said he was. Said ... or had she believed he had said it? Had she jumped to that conclusion herself? Just now she found she could not clearly remember; all she knew was that she had tagged him Trev Trent, but he wasn’t, he was someone else.
‘Well, France?’ she heard the man beside her asking. ‘Thank you. Yes, of course,’ she said almost mechanically.
‘Take him where you please, when you please. I know he’s in safe hands.’
His eyes glowed down on her, and for a heady moment she warmed herself in the glow. Burn trusted her. She would never have credited that this man’s approval could mean so much. Then she was losing her pleasure and becoming apprehensive again. Now was her time to say: ‘Thank you, but there’s something you should know and I should have told you before. While you were away..
She did not tell. She found that warm glow too hard to relinquish. What’s wrong with me, she tried to ask herself, why am I like this with this man, this—married man?
‘You know by now,’ Burn West was saying in a low voice, ‘why I’ve guarded Jason.’
‘No, not at all.’ She added just as quietly, ‘I haven’t probed.’
He was looking steadily at her. ‘I believe that. You would be that sort of girl. Do you want me to tell you now?’
‘No.’
‘And I don’t want to say it.’ She saw his whitened knucklebones and knew that he was thinking of something and not liking his thoughts. With a quick gesture she picked up the book she was studying and drew his attention to the chapter she had reached on ‘trying’.
‘Always encourage a child to try, make him feel that failure is not a crime,’ she read at random.
Fortunately he was diverted. ‘One thing,’ he said proudly, ‘the sonno was ready to try the back of a horse, wasn’t he?’
‘But isn’t that in the blood?’ She could not resist that as she remembered Burn West’s former acclamation.
‘Not all the time.’ He grinned an acknowledgment of her quick back thrust, and she felt a little ashamed of her repartee.
‘You see there was a small boy once,’ he related, then glanced at her for permission to go on.
She nodded.
‘A roan tossed him, with the result that the rider was three months in a body cast, but more important still, scared to death.’
‘No wonder,’ Frances put in.
‘And that’s exactly what my mother said, but not my father. He had this aboriginal expert working for him, there’s no horseman like the first Australian, and he asked old Collie to choose another mount for the boy. The grey that Collie indicated sent my mother into hysterics, he was a wild thing, but my father believed in old Collie.’
‘And the grey turned out good?’
‘Not so quick a happy ending as that.’ The man asked Frances’ permission, then began his whisper of tobacco and paper.
‘The pony wouldn’t let anyone near him, even halter breaking was out, and when he got caught after a fright in fencing wire he was much worse. Then’ ... Burn West lit up ... ‘it all began. Two getting better together, the sliced-up, bleeding grey and the body-cast boy. It took a lot of time, but it came out all right.’ He exhaled. ‘That story is just to soft-pedal the West saga you
must feel you’re hearing too loud and too often. The Wests were no gods.’ A sudden shadow at his own words made Burn’s face much too dark and much too angry for the simple story of a boy who had allowed himself to scare, Frances puzzled.
She broke in quickly with, ‘I can see now why you understand what Jason is going through with his cast.’
‘Oh no, France’ ... the voice was grim ... ‘I can never understand that.’
Not knowing how to reply, Frances looked down on the reference book again. They talked of mental stimulus, the encouragement of creativity, pressures to ‘conform’ that curb instead of inspire. Suddenly Frances was remembering her lectures again, enjoying the quick exchange of views with someone who felt as she did towards a child.—His child.
Only when she brought up the emotional climate did Burn West become silent. She had to speak to him twice over her proposed lesson to Jason the next day before he answered.
‘Yes, that will be fine,’ he said mechanically, and she had a feeling he had not heard what she proposed to do.
He went soon after that, but for a long while Frances still sat at the desk. He had become a different person the moment she had brought up emotional climate, she thought; no doubt he had been thinking of Jason’s earlier emotional climate, which apparently left everything to be desired, yet a child’s climate is determined by both parents, and he, Burn West, was as responsible as Jason’s mother. She wished now she had listened when he had offered her an explanation. I’ll just have to probe after all, she thought a little wearily, I’m getting nowhere.
But she got a long way with Jason the next morning. Formerly, he had shown a lack of interest in numbers, much preferring the creative side, but, remembering her student days, she found him responding quite eagerly to the bingo game she introduced. ‘Forty-seven ... that’s four, seven,’ he said, putting a raisin on his card to block the number out.
‘What’s this?’ asked Burn West, coming in with the elevenses instead of Mrs. Campbell. ‘Games when it should be school?’
‘It is school, Burn,’ Jason informed him. ‘I like numbers this way. Call some more out, France.’
‘He really does understand the figures.’ Frances excused herself and her method later over tea while Jason, still fascinated, kept on counting and covering his sheet with more raisins.
‘You think I’m criticizing you? Perish the thought!’ He smiled at her. ‘I’m just open-mouthed at a child to whom creativity should be second nature, and, I believe, will be, understanding the opposite side as well. You’re a wonder, Miss Peters.’
The praise did not stir her as much as it should. When, she thought, irritated, is Burnley West going to leave himself out of the picture? A natural creativity indeed!
‘I thought you might like a run this afternoon,’ Burn went on.
‘Thank you. Where did you think of taking us?’
‘You’re on your own now. Remember? I told you last night.’
She remembered, remembered, too, her guilt, her unenthusiasm. However, looking out on the bright day, it would be nice to be behind a wheel.
‘Any restrictions?’ she asked Burn.
‘None at all. I have complete confidence in you. I said so.’
‘I don’t want to go anywhere you don’t wish me to.’
‘Do you always quibble at gifts like this?’ he asked. ‘Remind me never to hand over a string of pearls!’
‘Did you intend to?’
‘No. But I did have this in view.’ He put down a small nugget of gold impressed in a rough but delicately angled stone, the whole affixed artistically to a fine chain.
‘Oh, it’s lovely!’ she exclaimed.
‘It was a boyhood first find,’ he shrugged, ‘so naturally it had to be retained. I didn’t intend giving the dentist that.’
‘The dentist?’ she queried.
‘He used to buy our gold,’ he smiled. ‘Now, are you going to take this, or argue?’
‘Is it valuable?’
‘No.’
‘It would be useful for Jason,’ she said speculatively, ‘in geology class it would—’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ he came in, ‘don’t bring Jason into everything!’
‘I thought that was the idea. After all, it’s why I’m here.’
Across the table and over the little pendant their eyes met ... stormily at first, then a smile creeping in.
‘Accept it, France,’ he urged softly.
‘I accept.’
The look between them was so long that even Jason glanced up from his raisins.
‘First of all I thought you were fighting,’ he said surprised.
‘Grown-ups don’t fight,’ said Burn.
‘Yes, they do. They—’ All at once Jason pushed the card and the raisins to the floor. ‘They do,’ he said, ‘They do!’ There was something in his voice that tore at Frances’ heart.
She glanced sensitively up at Burn, but Burn was gone. All she saw was the abrupt dosing of the door. She picked up the raisins and started calling numbers again. Jason forgot his outburst and played keenly. As usual when she closed the desk at noon he grumbled. ‘We’re going out, darling. I’m going to drive you.’
‘Can you?’
‘I think I drive quite well.’
‘I know ladies drive. She did.’
‘Who did? What was her name?’
For answer Jason brought out something she believed she had cured him of.
‘Nothing,’ he said, and tipped up the card and raisins again.
They had a nice afternoon, though. Jason grudgingly admitted that France as a driver wasn’t so bad. They took some of the meandering roads that had attracted Frances on her first day here, sometimes wide and dusty, sometimes narrow and shaded, sometimes weaving with the curve of the river.
It was on their exploration that Frances glimpsed the blue car. It was in a copse of trees, and had she not drawn Jason’s attention to it (one must always draw attention, the manual said, find and exhaust a reason), saying how wise it was to shelter a car otherwise the sun would fade it, she might have paid little interest herself. It was quite usual out here in the country to see a car that apparently belonged nowhere.
Then something about the car niggled at her. She had seen it before. That was likely, too; everyone in the country had cars, they depended on cars. Then she remembered where. It could belong to someone else, of course, but it was the same make and colour as the car that had taken off so abruptly when she had cantered up from the rice planting for help for Jason. There had been a blonde young woman behind the wheel. There was no one now.
She did not know she spoke her thoughts aloud until Jason corrected, ‘There is so! She’s sitting right down.’
‘What, Jason?’ They were a quarter of a mile away now, but Frances asked it tightly. Why, she thought, am I feeling taut like this? But Jason was keen on a new game Frances had introduced. One of them would call perhaps ‘Clouds’ or ‘Woods’ and the other had to answer immediately what thought had come into their mind.
‘River!’ he called now.
‘Jason?... Oh—oh, green, darling.’
‘That’s not very good, France,’ judged Jason, ‘everyone knows it’s green. Your turn.’
‘Jason, do you remember your mother?’ The forbidden, self-forbidden, words were out at last.
‘Nope.’
‘Don’t say nope.’
‘Sandra says it.’
‘Jason, do you?’
‘No. Mountain, France.’
‘Was she dark or fair?’ Frances persisted.
‘Dark. Mountain, France.’
‘Burn,’ said Frances, and this time won the little boy’s praise.
‘He is a mountain, isn’t he?’ said Jason, pleased with her.
The next day Burn told Frances that she was to drive Jason to Mirramunna for a medical check-up.
‘Nothing to do with the leg, just the general health, how he will stand a trip to Sydney next week.’
; Jason received the news without enthusiasm, but brightened a little when Frances tacked on the promise of a soda in the ice-cream parlour.
The examination was a detailed one, but Scott helped it out by breaking it halfway through by the parlour interlude. He even attended himself, and the three sat happily sucking vanilla through straws and seeing who made the most musical noise. The laughter rang out ... only Frances’ died when she noticed the blue car parked further up the street.
‘What is it, Frances?’ asked Scott.
She returned with an effort to the two of them. How foolish she was being! ‘I think I win. Mine was a very singing gurgle.’
‘But the prize,’ objected Jason, ‘was for the biggest suck, so I won.’
‘So you did,’ awarded Scott. ‘Here’s your trophy.’ He gave Jason ten cents to squander, and while the little boy pored over the lolly selection he asked, ‘Are you all right, Fran?’
‘Of course.’
‘Nothing walked over your grave?’
‘Oh, don’t be foolish, Scott!’
“You looked like that. Fran, when are we going to talk? Really talk. Always there’s either West or young West. There are things to be said and you know it.’
‘There’ll be a time,’ she answered. She was still watching the car. Definitely there was no one in it now, not even sitting down as Jason had described.
‘I suppose so. I can get away next week—to Sydney, I mean. But I expect West told you that.’
‘I knew he wanted you to come as well.’
‘And you, Fran?’
‘Scott, I—’
‘We must talk,’ he said again. “You know that.’
‘Yes,’ she said a little dazedly, dazed at herself, for she had simply not given the subject any thought, and suddenly she was realizing that.
They went back to the hospital to more tests and trials. Towards the end Frances looked out on the country main street again. The car was still there, and all at once she knew she could not, and would not, return while it remained where it was. Several times she checked up again, came back to the surgery. When Scott said at last, ‘Much as I hate to see you go, Fran, it will soon be dark,’ and Jason said, ‘Yes, we’ll be late, and Burn will be mad,’ she knew she could delay no longer.
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