Guardian Nurse

by Joyce Dingwell

  ‘Jason!’

  ‘I’m here, France! On the little island.’—So the island was not inundated, even though the stables were finished.

  ‘I came to look for Candy,’ Jason called pathetically. ‘I thought they might have put Candy here for safety, because it’s higher, like they put us at Seven Fields. But’ ... forlornly ... ‘Candy wasn’t here.’ The little voice broke mournfully across the water.

  ‘Jason, how did you get there?’

  In the little red boat. Only the boat sailed away when I got out. Do you think Burn will rouse?’

  ‘No. But stay there, darling, I’m coming as well.’

  Even as she said it, Frances fell over. Over and over. The wave, as sudden a wave as had claimed the stables, toppled her along with it. How far it would have borne her she did not know, nor care, for instantly she was beyond knowing or caring in that frenzied whirling. All thoughts of striking out to Jason were gone. Everything was gone. And when she opened her eyes again, that emptiness was Frances’ first frightening impression. Everything and everybody gone. The house and the outhouses gone. Even the little island gone.—Which meant that Jason, too, had gone. Everything and everybody ... except herself. And Burn West, she suddenly saw. Looking down on her.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘HE’S all right.’ Burn West had seen the apprehension in Frances’ eyes and he reassured her at once. ‘Jason is safe.’

  ‘And the others?’ she whispered.

  ‘Safe, too.’

  ‘The horses ... the stock?’

  ‘Safe.’

  ‘What about the house?’ She could not see it, had it—

  He gave a shrug. ‘Still standing, still there. Though it won’t be for long. No, France, you haven’t returned to an empty world, I’ve simply put you down where you can’t see out.’

  ‘You said the house won’t be there for long,’ she asked him. ‘Do you mean—’

  ‘No, I don’t mean the flood will take it, for the flood has almost gone. Oh, we might have a swollen river for a while, but the old storage tank I always frowned upon has dismantled ... thank heaven ... so we’ll never have this little episode again.’ He glanced around.

  ‘Was that what happened? The storage tank burst?’

  ‘Yes. Actually the two freak waves were nothing to do with our river, the weir was handling the water quite efficiently. But the storage gave up, and by some odd whim the outpour deviated from the river course, where one would have expected it to empty, and found a new course of its own. We’ve lost our gold-sluicing beach, I’m afraid, our little equipment lean-to, our stables, and’ ... a pause ... ‘we nearly lost you. Except that I happened to come along—’

  ‘Yet the island wasn’t inundated?’ she asked.

  ‘The waves didn’t touch the island at all, but our sonno could have gone. No, don’t try to get up yet, France, I told you he was safe.’

  ‘Tell me everything,’ she appealed.

  ‘The storage collapsed, as I had always anticipated. The contents should have been released in controlled stages years ago. Now ... and thank heaven again ... it won’t bug me any more.’

  ‘Tell me about the house. Burn. You just said it was there but wouldn’t be for long.’

  ‘No, but it will be gone from my efforts, not from those of the water. You might recall, France, that I was never pleased with the location of the house. This has finally decided me. We’re going up the hill. We’ll dismantle West of the River, transplant it and put this riverside section under rice. After all, what more suitable a position for rice? Then after all shouldn’t our particular sample of the Riverina include rice? Our basket have another egg? Well, do you like the scheme?’

  He was speaking in the plural, she noted rather dazedly. We’ll dismantle.—Our sample.—Who was he coupling with himself?

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ she replied.

  ‘Dammit, it’s everything to do with you,’ he said almost harshly, ‘and though I know this isn’t the time to drive that home to you, half-drowned as you are, you have to know some time, France.’

  ‘Know?’ she echoed him bitterly. ‘I know nothing. I’ve never known anything. Mrs. Campbell was going to tell me, then the storm broke and—and—Burn, you’re sure about Jason? Where is he?’

  ‘The men have him. Oh, yes, I’m sure all right. And they must be sure, too.’ He gave a short proud laugh. ‘Jason’s going to dine out on that swim of his for months.’

  ‘Swim?’ she said, aghast.

  ‘Yes. You see I brought the men with me when I came looking for you and the boy. When the wave caught you, Jason struck out to save you. It wasn’t necessary, I already had you ... but by the same token it wasn’t necessary for anyone to go after him. France, I’ve never been so bucked in all my life. He swam like an old-timer, and you made the miracle. It was wonderful to see him. Wonderful of you.’

  ‘Don’t say things like that to me,’ she appealed, ‘don’t say wonderful. I’ve a lot to tell you, Burn. I should have told you before.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be coming to that,’ he warned grimly, ‘don’t think you’ve escaped. But until you feel up to getting what you’re getting ... oh yes, you are ... how do you like my idea for our house?’

  Our again! She felt it was time to sit up.

  He carried her and propped her against a tree, and from the other side of the tree she could see the homestead standing as firm as ever. It had just been out of sight before.

  ‘Rice,’ he was planning, ‘more suitable for these river flats than bricks and mortar.’

  ‘What about the new swimming pool?’ she put in.

  ‘It can be dismantled and taken up and reassembled. Or’ ... a direct look at Frances ... ‘given to Jenny until we need one ourselves.’

  She put aside that ‘we’, and murmured, ‘Jenny?’

  ‘She never liked the pool, did she? She found it permanent, and any permanency ... with Jason ... she wanted for herself.’ He paused, gave Frances a long look, then said firmly, ‘Well, who talks first?’

  ‘I will.’ Frances felt she had to get it over, spill all she had not said when she should have said it.

  Quietly she began.

  He heard her out—every word, every admission. The man she had taken for Trevor Trent, the time he had come here, Jason’s resentment of him.

  ‘That figures,’ he nodded, but he did not explain. Then Susan McKinney’s account of Jenny’s frequent attendances at Great Rock. How Susan had pointed out the new lessee to her and how he had been—

  ‘But,’ she defended herself, ‘I couldn’t have told you that even though I had decided to, because you were away at the wheat.’ She thought suddenly of the importance of the wheat and asked him anxiously if it had been harvested in time.

  ‘To the last grain. Quite the little countrywoman, aren’t you?’ he grinned at her. ‘And that will figure, too.’

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘You will.’ He took out his makings, found that they were wet and threw them away in disgust. ‘Any more to tell me, France?’

  ‘No ... oh yes.’ She told him about the fair young woman who had seemed to be looking and watching and waiting. How it had puzzled her.

  He interrupted quite harshly, ‘First let me know about you and Muir.’

  ‘What, Burn?’

  ‘Were you ... was Scott...’

  ‘I—I believe so, if you mean—’

  “Yes, I mean that.’

  ‘Then—yes. In a kind of way.’ She added, ‘Then.’

  ‘I see.’ A sharp look. ‘And now?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Frances said.

  ‘Right then, we’ll go ahead. While I was in town I saw our good doctor. He’s a happy man, France. In fact I’d describe it as radiant.’

  ‘Scott?’

  ‘Yes. A girl called Pamela. She had come forward at last. I even met her.’ He waited for it all to sink in.

  ‘Fair. Young. Watching. Waiting,’ Frances said slowly and with
understanding. ‘So all the time that part of my mystery was Scott and not Jason.’ She was recalling a recurring blue car.

  ‘Exactly. Pamela had been looking for Scott. Then she found him. But when she did it seemed to her that she had as much right to go to him as he had felt he had right to go to her. Incomprehensible to an insensitive extrovert like West, but that was what I learned.’

  ‘It’s true,’ nodded Frances. ‘Scott said there was nothing actual between them, just a knowledge on his part and a feeling that it could exist for Pam as well.’

  ‘It did. Scott will finish his term and then join up with the Meldrum Clinic. He should have joined it before, not given me all the trouble he did by being so self-righteous. Oh yes, France, I’ve heard all about the necessity to find you first.’

  ‘Scott gave you trouble?’ she took him up.

  ‘Just a trifling matter of hell every time he looked at you,’ Burn said.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘As I said previously, you will. Well, all your confessions over?’

  ‘Yes. I know I should have told you, I know my orders were to tell you, but I was blind. Burn, why did I have to be blindfold like that?’

  ‘Because I suppose I was blind myself with rage,’ he admitted. ‘When I went over to Europe to collect the boy and I saw what they’d done to him I ... I ...’ He was quiet a moment.

  ‘I’m still blindfold,’ Frances appealed.

  ‘Yes, but you won’t be. This is the story.’ He waited a moment, then began. ‘There were two of us young Wests.’

  ‘Gareth and Burnley,’ she put it.

  ‘Yes. But Gareth was never a West really. I mean not one of us land Wests. I don’t believe he belonged in spirit to my mother’s side, either. Gareth was ... well...’ Another pause. ‘Gareth was clever—too clever. Everything came easy to Gareth. Too easy. He was clever. He was creative. But he had no sticking power, no reliability. He soon got tired of things.’ A pause. ‘The only thing he never wearied of finally was good living ... his definition of good.’

  ‘La dolce vita,’ Frances murmured quietly. ‘He lived for the sweet things of life.’

  ‘Yes, that was Gareth. A throwback somewhere, I suppose. It happens.—But, by heaven, he was still a West for all that.’

  ‘So you supported him?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. So much so that I, not his wife’s sister, for all her determination, all her warning, got the child away.’

  ‘Child?’ she echoed.

  ‘Jason.’

  ‘But Jason is ... Jason is...' She paused. ‘He’s your son.’

  He looked at her in amazement, then, slowly, in comprehension. But he did not comment on that comprehension.

  ‘Sonno,’ he said. ‘Sonno isn’t son, France. Sonno is just a love name, it’s never, never son. Son means my son, mine and—’

  Frances said, dazed, only half believing, ‘Go on.’

  ‘Gareth married Lesley. They had Jason at Great Rock.’

  ‘Was that why you wanted him to love the place?’

  ‘It’s his, isn’t it?’ fiercely. ‘Then they went away. They went to Europe.’

  ‘So Jason wasn’t imagining when he said he’d lived in France and Berne.’

  ‘Not that sonno.’ Burn’s smile showed pride in his nephew. ‘It was not the right life for a young child,’ he resumed, ‘dragged from city to city, exposed to their perpetual spats. He should have been home at Great Rock, growing up with horses and crops—and love.’

  ‘But he would have had love.’

  Burn said bitterly, ‘Only a kind of love.’

  ‘I sometimes think,’ he went on, ‘that that killed my parents, they were the old home type, the family stalwarts. It was no good appealing to Gareth, though, even after they had gone, so when he asked me to buy Great Rock from him, buy out his share in Seven Fields, I did so. After all if I hadn’t, someone else would.

  ‘Finally, I got this awful cable that Gareth and Lesley had been killed in a motor accident, Jason severely injured. I flew out straight away.’

  ‘For Jason?’

  ‘Perhaps. I wasn’t sure of that then, even though I directed the house to be built, but I was sure when I saw the boy.’

  ‘Because of his condition?’

  ‘Yes. That wretched pair had taken him with them on their mad caper.’

  ‘Surely parents’ right?’ she questioned.

  ‘Not a right when they were even less responsible than their baby, or little more than a baby, son. I can see it all still, France—Gareth’s sudden mad urge to get going, Lesley’s equal irresponsibility. I don’t know why they ever had a child. You’ve seen for yourself that no attempt has been made to educate him, teach him even the preliminaries. Yes, it was la dolce vita all right for that selfish pair,’ bitterly.

  ‘But still you took your brother’s part. Why?’

  ‘I was a West, and Jason was a West, and would remain a West. With a West.’

  ‘But the security you directed?’ she asked, confused.

  ‘From Jason’s aunt, his mother’s young sister. She had the same determination and the same right as I had. Possibly she blamed Gareth as I blamed Lesley. We’re’ ... a shrug ... ‘both of us similar types. She wrote to me that she would take him. I didn’t wait to write back, I simply took him there and then. I brought him to Sydney, started the treatment, called for a teacher-nurse.’

  ‘And keeper.’

  ‘And keeper,’ he nodded. ‘You.’

  ‘If you’d explained all this—’ she began.

  “You would have turned around and said as she said in her letter that a child should belong, if no longer to his mother, then to the mother’s side of the family.’

  ‘Perhaps I would, but you wouldn’t have listened to me. Burn’ ... curiously ... ‘why have you listened to argument now? For you have, haven’t you, or you wouldn’t be mentioning a mother’s side, an aunt’s right?’

  ‘Because,’ he admitted quietly, ‘you have to listen to—Jenny.’

  ‘Jenny?’

  ‘Jenny is Lesley’s sister. I never knew Lesley. I was away in the Territory when they were here. But I know now they could never have been alike.’

  ‘No,’ Frances agreed. ‘And that’s why,’ she said, more to herself, ‘Jason went instinctively to her. Perhaps before the accident blurred his little memory he loved her. But’ ... a little frown ... ‘where does your new tenant come in?’

  ‘He comes in as Jenny’s husband. They applied for and received a lease to Great Rock to be near Jason.’

  ‘But Jason took a dislike to the man.’

  ‘That has been explained ... oh yes, I was over at Great Rock while you staged your near-drowning episode ... and I learned it all. It was Grant ... that’s his name ... who actually disentangled the boy on the night of the crash. He and Jenny were honeymooning in Europe. She had been completing a physiotherapy course there, and Grant an agricultural degree. They met, loved, married. Jenny soon became alarmed at her sister’s behaviour, and she and her husband followed the car that evening, hoping to persuade the parents to leave Jason with them. The boy, though shockingly hurt, was still conscious, and undoubtedly associated everything painful with Grant in his subconscious later on. But it will fade. It will have to with a fine man like Grant.’

  A few moments went past in silence, then Frances disbelieved, ‘How can a man who has been so self-certain, so family-certain as you have now turn right round like this?’

  ‘Jenny, I expect,’ he said. ‘She’s good. She’s sweet. I don’t wonder she managed to get Mr. Gildthorpe to recommend her to me!’ A little laugh. ‘But there was someone else before Jenny to make me see sweetness. Prepare for the end of drought. You, France. You gave me new eyes. I was always pigheaded, forceful—’

  ‘Arrogant,’ she put in.

  He accepted that, then went on.

  ‘I believe it first hit home when you allowed the sonno to paint bright orange water. My river orange!’ He
smiled at his thoughts. ‘I believe I knew then there was not just my side, there were other sides as well.’

  ‘Tell me,’ she said.

  ‘Afterwards. Afterwards and afterwards. Because there’s going to be all that long, didn’t you know? First things first, France, and our first is: We’ll share the sonno. Fair enough?’

  ‘With Jenny?’

  ‘With Jenny and Grant. After all, they worked hard for it, didn’t they?’

  ‘You’ll actually share him?’

  ‘I said we, France.’

  ‘You said we before. You said our. You said us.’

  ‘You’re a teacher, aren’t you? You should deduce something from that.’

  ‘All I know is that we means more than one.’

  ‘Wrong. It means one. For that’s what two makes the way I want things, the way they’d have to be.’

  ‘You and—’

  ‘Oh, you fool of a girl!’ he said. ‘I love you. I loved you from the moment you sat across the desk in Sydney and disliked me more than anyone you had met.—Oh yes, I knew. But’ ... tentatively ... ‘I think that’s all changed, France.’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘there’s time to find out. The new house has to go up on the hill. The shrubs. The trees. A hundred things to do.’

  But Frances wanted only one thing done, and she waited. When he did not move to do it she asked wistfully, ‘Will it still be called West of the River up there, Burn?’

  ‘It will still be the same latitude and longitude, still the same river, still west.’ And then at last he knelt down, looked at her, then kissed her. Kissed her. The thing she had wanted done.

  ‘Besides, it will be your name, too,’ he reminded her. ‘Won’t it ... Frances West?’

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