“It will be all right?” he asked offhandedly.
“Of course,” she said.
Then all at once she laughed.
It was high, nervous laughter, hysterical laughter, laughter brought about by her encounter with Jasper, the things he had inferred.
Nor clapped a firm hand down over hers.
She sobered at once, her lip trembling a little.
“It just seemed funny,” she said dully, “It just seemed such a farce. I mean, all the people who have been in this house since—since we were married. First Nathalie, now the Fuccillis. If they had come earlier, if they had come before—before the marriage, we need not have gone through with it, need we? After all, it was only because of social obligation, because of what people might think, because of the standard society sets, that it happened at all.”
She started to laugh again, and the hand that was clapped a second time over hers was not just firm, it was deliberately hard.
“Control yourself if you can,” Nor snapped brutally. “The Fuccillis will be arriving any moment. Then keep in mind, Laurel—”
“Yes?”
“Keep in mind that I lose by that too-early ceremony as well. We’re in this together. You’re no more unfortunate than I am: I’m as bedevilled as you.”
There was the sound of the jeep coming down the track.
For a long moment they stared across the room at each other ... then they moved to the window to look out.
The truck was piled with what pitiful belongings the Italian family had been able to salvage. The parents and the baby sat in with Luke, the children perched among the belongings in the back.
Nor went out to help the unloading. Laurel wrapped up the pearl, packed it in the tin with the other bundle and the letters, put the tin back among the shells.
CHAPTER TWELVE
THE Fuccillis and the Larsens merged instantly and warmly together as if they were one family. Laurel said often to Nor that had the world consisted of Humpback Island there would have been international peace for ever more.
“You forget Jasper.” Nor shot her a quick sharp look. “Have you seen him?”
“No.” It was only half a lie, Laurel guiltily assured herself. She hadn’t seen Jasper for a week.
Laurel had handed over the cooking to Mama Fuccilli. She had felt that the children, accustomed to Italian meals, might not like her own plainer dishes, and she did not consider herself sufficiently skilled to try her hand at minestrones or raviolis.
Also the domestic intimacy that seemed somehow attendant on cooking for a man for the first time utterly frightened her. When plump little Mama, overcome with gratefulness that all her family were safe under the one roof, begged to be allowed to prepare for all, Laurel said hopefully, “I’ll ask Nor.”
Nor, referred to, gave his characteristic shrug. “Can’t you cook?”
“I can, but—”
“But what? Not nervous, surely?” He gave her his bantering look. “I didn’t marry you for what I could eat,” he teased.
“I’m well aware of your reasons,” said Laurel coldly. “Do you object to Mrs. Fuccilli taking over that part of the arrangement or not?”
She was sorry at once that she had spoken in such a strain. He had only been laughing at her and she had thrown cold water on his laughter. It did not take much to make Nor pull in his horns. He was like a mollusk, she thought, one touch and he retreated into a shell.
“I don’t object,” he said flatly, “so long as I’m fed.” He was fed royally.
Mama, always a believer in good food, aware of the physical strength necessary to work day after day on a whaler, aware of the strength she had needed herself to look after five bambinos, a pumpkin patch, bean rows, fowls, now not only supplied but supplied in a manner that Laurel, anyway, had never before encountered. Laurel guessed that this was the Italian’s way of saying, “Thank you for taking us all to you, thank you very much.”
There was plenty of room in the house for them all ... to spare, Laurel thought.
The Fuccillis were brave people, she kept on telling Nor, they had lost, but they only smiled and prepared to start off again.
“Even though the house did not belong to them but the Island, how many weeks must it have taken for Louisa and Nino to tend their ground, keep it cultivated,” she pointed out. “Then the things inside the house, Nor, they were humble, perhaps, but they were theirs.”
“I realize all that,” agreed Nor soberly, “and when I rebuild it will be a far better place, Laurel, and I’ll have put back what was destroyed, and it will be better stuff than before.”
“I suppose,” Laurel said, “that with all that rebuilding, this house and the storage tank will be delayed longer still.”
He nodded, then unexpectedly he grinned.
“Still concerned over them, aren’t you?”
“You admitted yourself they’d outlasted their usefulness.”
“Yes,” Nor nodded, “they have, but don’t plague me for all that, there’s a good girl.” He smiled again as he said it, and she saw that this time he was not annoyed.
While Louisa Fuccilli worked over zuppas and tortas and brewed delicious coffee, Nor and Laurel went up to the fires and looked around.
The devastation in so short a time was shattering. The chimneys of the gutted houses stood out from heaps of twisted roofing iron. Smoke still rose from shapeless smouldering masses which last week might have been chairs, sofas, pictures, books.
Men and women were poking around their houses. One came out triumphantly with a bowl of goldfish, which, through a whim of the fire, was still intact, the fish swimming merrily round and round. There was still a smell of burning in every breath Laurel took, and the bare earth was hot even through her shoes.
She saw a woman staring disconsolately at where her little cottage had stood. Impulsively she went across to her. “It will go up again. Mr. Larsen has promised you that.” As the woman still gazed unhappily, Laurel encouraged, “You can put new timber up again, splash on new paint.”
“I know. And I know we’re alive. And I know it was an old house. But Stevie’s first teddy bear went in the fire ... and the Bible my mother gave to me, it had Stevie’s birth written in it. I think after all it’s not walls and ceiling but the things inside that make a house, and they’re all gone.”
“Where is Stevie?”—Laurel knew, of course. All the children except the Fuccillis’ were in hostels or boarding schools on the coast.
“He’s with my sister in Sydney, but he’s not going to be any more.” The woman said it with new conviction. “I want him here, Mrs. Larsen, I’m going to have him here with me. He can take correspondence lessons.”
“He can go to school, our school,” Laurel said.
“Out of bad comes good,” marvelled Nor, who had been watching the scene. His eyes, on Laurel, were very bright.
Some of the older Fuccilli children had come up in the jeep with them. Laurel saw that Maria had tears in her eyes, that Ruggiero’s little mouth was set. How could you explain fire to a child? she thought achingly. You can show them their house burned down, but can you make them understand that with it is everything they knew, played with, loved? The things the Italians had salvaged were pitifully few.
Maria found a scorched wool rabbit. “This is Paul’s. Mama told me to look for it and bring it back. She said that Father Christmas will be very poor this year and that Bunny will have to last.”
A woman gazing at her black ruins sighed, “If only I hadn’t sent to the coast for my Christmas shopping. I’d made my cake, too.”
Another called excitedly, “Look, everything is gone, but my Christmas lily is alive.”
She kept on marvelling at it ... but Laurel kept on marvelling at what the two women had said. Christmas shopping. A Christmas lily. It was December, and she had not realized it. This would be her first Christmas away from home. No—at home. She was married now. This was her home.
Because home, and Christmas,
meant one’s own people, she thought achingly again of David. Why hadn’t he written? What had Nor done about him—if he had done anything at all?
She turned to demand it of the man, but he was raking over a ruin for something for another fire victim to remember.
“An old tray ... a picture ... anything,” the woman begged.
So they are not as impermanent as they wished, Laurel thought, observing the woman’s desperate wistfulness. “Like the nucleus for my school, I have here the nucleus for a new community.” She told Nor on the way back, her animosity forgotten, and he nodded eagerly.
“Out of bad comes good,” he said again. “We’ll rebuild at once. The whaling can continue with half staff. This is the important thing, Laurel, to get the people established again.”
“I didn’t realize Christmas was upon us,” she said. She remembered that she had intended to question him about David, but somehow now was not the time.
“But it’s Christmas weather,” he said back, surprised, and then he laughed.
“All right, call me an insular Islander, but Christmas to me is hot days, long afternoons, cicadas kicking up a row, the look-out man in the barrel drowsing off to sleep instead of yelling ‘HVAL-BLAST!’ ”
“I hope he won’t yell it that day. Whales should have a Yule-tide as well as us.”
“You have a tender heart, Laurel. You don’t like whales being killed.”
“Do you?”
“No,” he said, “but there you are.”
“What happens to the Island children at Christmas?”
“They come back here from the coast for the school holidays; the Island is a vastly different place.”
“This time they must come but not return,” declared Laurel. “You must get in touch with the Educational Department, Nor.”
“I would have to assure a class.”
“There will be a class.”
“You sound confident.”
“I am. The fire did something. It made the mothers determine to have their children with them. That’s odd, I know. They were safer over there on the mainland. But all the same, now they want them near so that they can protect them. Sometimes love doesn’t make sense.”
“No,” said Nor. There was a little silence.
The children at the back of the jeep began singing. Their voices accompanied clearly the bumping of the wheels over the rough track. They sang a little Italian folk-song Laurel had heard Mama Fuccilli croon, and the wind that Laurel loved so much picked up the childish notes and tossed them round the leaves of the apple gums that dappled their narrow way.
Laurel said a little sadly to Nor. “Children always see rainbows don’t they? I’m quite sure, in spite of that scorched wool rabbit that has to last, that they still believe in Christmas.”
Without warning he stopped the jeep and looked down at her. The voices still kept singing.
“I’ve wanted you to grow up quite a few times, Laurel,” he said seriously, “but if growing up means you don’t believe implicitly in Christmas, as they do”—he nodded to the Children—“then I’ll make a sacrifice and want you to remain a child instead.”
“What kind of sacrifice?” she laughed.
“Is that the child or the woman asking?”
She was getting out of her depth, so she was silent, and he went on as though she had not interrupted.
“Christmas lies in the eyes of a child, blue like Nath’s girls, brown pools like our own little brood here. Blue, grey, hazel, brown, there is trust and hope there, even though there is a fire, there is the reflection of all simple things. There is faith too, Laurel, a faith that takes tides of years to sweep out to sea.” Nor stopped, a little embarrassed at himself, then put his hands towards the controls again.
But before he could take them Laurel asked curiously, “Has your hope been swept out, Nor?”
He was briefly silent. “I thought so,” he said at length. “Now I don’t know.” He stared at her soberly. “I only know I have a lot of weeds of dreams forgotten, but I don’t believe the sands have run out—not yet.”
He was looking straight at her now. It was a long strange look.
A little uncomfortably Laurel said, “What has all this to do with Christmas?”
“It’s just a reminder that this is the time of Miracles Made and Dreams Come True, even in the eyes of a hardbitten whaleman. It’s just an announcement that we’re not going to let a scorched wool rabbit suffice. Are you with me, mate?”
“Yes, mate,” Laurel said.
Mama Fuccilli, told of the plans, was rapturous.
The Island women who had been planning to join their children on the coast for Christmas changed their plans. The children would come to them.
“The first thing,” said Nor, “is a tree. A gum with plenty of cicadas in it would be quite acceptable to any Australian child, but we have an English girl among us, we must find something more apt.”
“Is there anything more apt?”
“What about our own Norfolk pines?” He nodded up the slope.
“It seems a pity to cut them.”
“I agree, in which case we must go further afield. There is a plantation of Norfolks beneath Tweedledee. It would mean we wouldn’t have to rob our own trees. We’ll go tomorrow,” Nor said.
They set out in the early morning to escape the heat, which was not felt so much here on the coast, but, Nor said, would make itself apparent further in.
“But not in the forest,” he anticipated. “It’s cool there.” They climbed the rolling hill, then stood on its forehead looking down.
There was a sound like the ocean. It was the trees, all Norfolk pines, swinging in the wind and sending up that curious sea sound.
“The breeze and the trees talking away the hours,” Nor said. “When the wind direction changes it’s like bells. Shall we descend?”
It was lovely in the forest. The air was dark and cool and the ocean sound was only a sibilant murmur.
The deep leaves drew a veil around, the forest was dim and secret, it seemed all at once to Laurel that there was only the two of them, Nor and herself, in all the world.
Nor was opening a hamper ... she had not noticed before that he carried supplies ... and now he passed substantial sandwiches and poured from a large bottle of cordial.
“I keep a fire restriction on this part of Humpback,” he explained of the cordial. “Sorry we can’t make tea.”
“This is good,” she smiled back.
It was relaxing sitting there against the large trunk of a tree, pointing out special trees to Nor, Nor pointing out special trees to her. Laurel’s favourite was a young, elastic fellow with a faintly tarry tang, Nor’s an alert giant with its crown in the sun.
Laurel did not know how or when it happened that she was in Nor’s arms ... gentle arms this time, not as they had been before. She sat very still in them ... Was it the stillness of the pine forest affecting her or was it—?
She simply stopped still like one bemused.
Nor’s arms slipped away presently.
“One thing, Laurel,” he said philosophically. “Whatever else you are, you’re not a cheat”
“A cheat?”
“You don’t pretend, do you, what isn’t there?”
“Do you?” she asked a little breathlessly.
He said, “I don’t cheat, either. Now let’s get going, mate, and find that tree.”
Nor did not uproot a young one, he cut off a large and suitable branch of an established fellow, then hitched it over his big shoulders.
“Isn’t it very heavy?”
“I have it balanced. You walk ahead and pick a clear path back. It has a wide beam.”
When they approached the house, they concealed the branch in a small gully. Decorating, Laurel declared, should be done when the children were in bed.
A lot of the Islanders’ families arrived the next day. At once they made the Island an entirely different place. Laurel had to change her mind after all about the
tree.
A tree might be kept secret in some corners, but never on an island like this.
The children swarmed everywhere like little ants. In five minutes they had discovered the Norfolk branch and begun to decorate it in their own fashion.
Laurel hastily took over, showing them how to silver cones, make lanterns of coloured paper, bells out of old chocolate foil.
“I’m glad you weren’t a rich child,” commended Nor, looking at the results. “Where would we be now if we had to depend on baubles from a shop?”
By the time all the Island presents were hung, the tree was weighted almost to the ground. Mr. Fuccilli had been persuaded to be Santa Claus, and Louisa had put him into her red flannel dressing gown and teased rope for his beard.
The Fuccilli children looked knowing, but, well primed, did not breathe a word. Only once did one of them make a wrong step. When Maria was handed a doll’s pram she had long coveted and which had been one of the few things her mother had grabbed before the fire ate everything up, she breathed ecstatically, “Oh, ta, Pop!”
A number of the whalemen had had trinkets made of the pearls they had raised, formed into brooches and bedded in cottonwool and a small box, and they handed them proudly to their wives.
Laurel found herself thinking of Nor’s pearl, and she waited eagerly. Had Nor, like these men, had it polished and put into a brooch and packed into a little box?
Santa Claus handed a package to Laurel. She opened it eagerly. It was a lovely cameo she had seen Louisa Fuccilli often fasten on her dress.
“You shouldn’t give me this,” she protested. “I’ve seen you look at it and you love it.”
“It is since I love it I give it to you, of course,” the Italian said.
The tree was emptied. Laurel was so disappointed she could scarcely conceal her feelings. She evaded Nor during the party that followed, she evaded him at the sing-song afterwards that finished up with tired parents calling Happy Christmas to each other as they carried sleepy children home to bed.
The Wind and the Spray Page 12