Midwife in a Million

by Fiona McArthur

  He raised his brows and looked her up and down. ‘So you’re not just decorative.’

  She narrowed her eyes at him with the comparison to Sybil. ‘You feel like living dangerously, McIver? Don’t start me. And I’ll have the stretcher in the back tonight in case it rains.’ She raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You can have it tomorrow night.’

  He opened his eyes wide. ‘Gee. Thanks. We’ll be back in Jabiru by then.’ She shrugged, unsympathetic, so he pretended to sigh. ‘I’ll guess I’ll shake my swag out, then.’

  She nodded and began to scoop up kindling and he watched her for a moment as she bent to pick up another twig. She seemed more settled since her mini-tantrum when they’d stopped. More relaxed and he didn’t know why. But there was no doubt he was pleased to see it.

  He glanced up at the sky; the clouds were breaking up a little for the moment. Hopefully, it wouldn’t rain tonight.

  Half an hour later they had the campfire set like a crackling little tepee in the middle of a clearing. Kate sat on the ground on top of Rory’s swag with her knees drawn up and rested her back up against a blanket-covered log. Rory surveyed their campsite from where he leaned on a tree. They munched thick-cut cold beef sandwiches with homemade horseradish from Rainbow’s End Station against a big fat boab tree.

  ‘Mmm, mmm.’ Kate couldn’t remember when she’d last enjoyed food so much. The night air was cool, the fire crackled with orange flames and a few early stars twinkled in the gaps between the cloud cover now that it was dark. They were alone, the sky was enormous, and it brought back her deep love of the top end.

  She glanced across at Rory; flashes of light from the fire illuminated the dark planes of his face. He was watching her. She realised he had been for a while and suddenly it wasn’t so good they were alone.

  She didn’t want to talk about today and especially not about what had upset her. ‘So tell me about your rapid rise to fame, Mr McIver. How does a country man like you make it so big in the cut-throat world of the city?’

  Rory didn’t say anything immediately and for a moment she thought he was going to demand they talk about her. The seconds stretched and the crickets and frogs seemed to turn up the volume of the night while she waited.

  When he spoke she realised how tensely she’d waited and forced herself to relax.

  ‘I decided early on that if I stayed in the Ambulance I’d have a big say in how things were run in the service.’ He looked at her. ‘So when I got your letter—’ He paused, and Kate watched him look away from her and she had the first inklings of how deeply she’d wounded him.

  He went on, ‘I was gutted, couldn’t get back to Jabiru to talk to you, couldn’t get you on the phone, was trapped without holidays for another year and no money. I wrote letter after letter and when you didn’t write back I pushed myself to succeed and didn’t stop until I got there.’

  So her father hadn’t forwarded them on. She wasn’t astonished, just sorry that she couldn’t have made it easier for Rory. ‘I didn’t get any letters.’

  ‘If you weren’t there it’s not surprising your father didn’t forward them on.’

  Kate remembered the day before he’d left and the demoralising ridicule her father had heaped on him. She’d forgotten about that too, with all that had happened after Rory had left. Would it have made a difference in her choices if she’d remembered earlier—and more of the reasons why Rory had left?

  ‘I’m sorry you were hurt. Go on.’

  Rory brushed that away. ‘Not much to tell. I worked non-stop, applied for every course. I took every overtime shift, every relief senior position offered, even if they were way out in the bush, while I did other correspondence courses.’ He shrugged.

  That amount of work wouldn’t have left much time for play. In fact, it sounded a lot like her. She’d taken little time to enjoy her life as well. She looked away. ‘As I said before, it sounds driven.’

  ‘Guess I was.’

  She looked up at him and shaded her eyes from the brightness of the fire so she could see his face. ‘So why are you here now?’

  His voice dropped. ‘Because I’ve come to a point where I need to clear what was between us before I can go any further.’

  Kate balled the paper she’d unwrapped from her sandwiches and threw it in the fire. The silence between them stretched and she watched the flames curl around and blacken it until suddenly the paper burst into flame and was consumed. That was what would happen to her if she allowed Rory to expose her emotions.

  ‘I’ll ask again.’ Rory’s voice drifted from across the fire. ‘Why aren’t you married, Kate?’

  She looked away and said the first thing that came into her mind. ‘I never found the right man.’

  She heard Rory suck his breath in. ‘I was there.’ He stood up and shifted until he loomed above her, staring down; she could feel his gaze without looking. Then he edged in beside her and moved along until his hip nudged hers. The heat from Rory’s thigh against hers was even more flammable than the paper she’d just burned.

  She reached forward for another stick and when she sat back she made sure there was a small gap between them; suddenly she could breathe again.

  He frowned at her and moved his hip deliberately back against hers with a little bump, as if to say—this is where I’m staying. ‘How can you say you never found him? I was there,’ he said again.

  ‘You left.’ She didn’t look at him but she felt his gaze boring into her. There was no escaping from this Rory. He was onto her and she’d the feeling he wouldn’t be shut down like most people were when she put up her defences.

  Rory sighed. ‘I left for both of us. If only it were that simple.’

  She shot him a glance and then her eyes skittered away. ‘It was that simple.’

  The walls, the walls, Rory thought, but at least she was talking. They needed to thrash this out and clear the air so he could see the future. ‘You wrote and said you didn’t love me. Sent my ring back. Why was that?’

  She turned her face. ‘Things happened. I changed.’

  What things? She was driving him insane. He shifted so he could more easily see her face. ‘Do you have any idea what that letter did to me? I was studying my butt off, we’d been writing every week, then out of the blue you threw away our dreams.’ He pulled his wallet from his shirt and opened the leather. ‘This letter.’

  He dug into the back section and eased it out. Faded and dog-eared, the yellowed paper lay in his hand accusingly, looking up at her.

  He watched her put her hand out and touch it gingerly, and then she pulled her hand away. This was what he’d come back for. This answer. These reasons.

  Rory sat back and tilted to face her again. His voice lowered until it was barely audible over the crackle of the fire. ‘What happened, Kate? Tell me.’

  She looked at him then and the same agony that had scared him at Rainbow’s End Station was back in her eyes.

  Rory ached to know what had affected her so deeply but he knew he had to go gently.

  ‘I don’t want to,’ she said.

  ‘Please, Kate.’

  She dragged her hands through her hair and looked around with a tinge of desperation. He wanted to pull her into his arms and hold her tight to ease her pain, only he wasn’t game to touch her in case he caused more damage or she jumped up and ran into the night.

  Finally she began. ‘Do you remember the night before you left, Rory?’

  Rory nodded. He’d never forget it. He and Kate under the old tree near the Pentecost after that horrific day. He’d had to drive somewhere off her father’s property to talk. Couldn’t say the things he had to under Lyle Onslow’s starry roof. He’d been so young then.

  He hardened his heart against the desolation in her face and dug the knife into the tree to finish ‘4 ever’.

  ‘I’ll come back.’ He meant it with every breath because their love was as grand and magnificent as the vast Outback they’d both grown up in, but just as steeped in the traged
ies of a harsh environment.

  He loved his Kate so much it hurt and he’d die for her but at what cost to his future and that of his own family? He thought they had a chance if he went away.

  ‘He fired me.’ Rory shook his head at the sympathy he could see in her face. ‘We knew he would.’ He didn’t want her pity, just to get away and make a life for them, away from the poison of her father, so that one day he’d show him what Rory McIver was made of.

  ‘Both our fathers told me never to speak to you again,’ he said, ‘but that’s no surprise. Give me three years. I’ll be back on my twenty-first birthday for you. After the first year I can finish the degree on the road so I’ll save every cent for you. Wait for me. I’ll be back. I promise.’

  That was when he saw her realise he wouldn’t change his mind and he jammed his hands against his sides to stop himself from reaching for her.

  ‘Money isn’t everything,’ and she looked at him as if he’d stabbed her. ‘Take me with you.’

  He couldn’t not touch her and cupped her chin so their eyes met and he could hold her gaze. Try to make her understand. ‘I have to do this. You can’t come with me until I have something I can offer. Something more than this.’

  Hepulled a ring from his pocket, a tiny pink diamond from the mines behind Jabiru, and slid it on her finger. No matter that her father had refused permission.

  It had come in on the mail plane yesterday, cheap by her standards, and nothing like what he wanted to buy her, but he wanted that ring on her finger so at least it could be with her when he couldn’t. ‘Will you wear this until I come back?’

  She was so young and he was sure that leaving was the right thing. ‘It’s because I love you I have to leave.’ Kate Onslow had been the one person he could dream with and that dream included both of them.

  Then she lifted her face and kissed him, and her sweetness and ardour and the thought of the months away from her helped drag him down under the tree and when she kissed him with a desperation he hadn’t been prepared for things had got a little out of control. Actually, a lot out of control. ‘Take me with you,’ she said again.

  In retrospect, he should have.

  ‘I remember everything,’ he said.

  Kate lifted her head. Her beautiful eyes, filled with the darkest shadows from the past, stared into his. ‘All right, Rory. Maybe it is time. But you asked for it.’

  She stared at him for a long moment and then she said it, so quietly he almost didn’t hear her, ‘Seven months later I lost our baby.’

  Rory blinked. ‘What baby?’

  She chewed her lip. ‘Ours!’ She glanced at him briefly to see if he understood and then away. ‘Yours and mine. The one we made after our last night.’

  He stared at her, unable to take it in. He’d taken precautions, or thought he had, but it had been his first time too.

  ‘The son I didn’t tell anyone about, just like Lucy, until it was too late and I was too sick.’

  Rory felt the shock hit him like a hammer in the gut. Kate had had a baby? First he was cold, then hot and then he stopped thinking about himself and the fruitless dreams that it would be too painful to think of right now, and thought of Kate.

  His Kate had been pregnant at sixteen and he’d left her to face it on her own. With Lyle Onslow. Cold sweat beaded as he thought of how her father would have treated her. ‘You should have told me.’

  Her voice was flat. ‘Father flew me out to Perth to a private convalescent hospital. I didn’t know anyone and our baby was born by Caesarean section. Alone.’

  The bastard. He dreaded the next question.

  ‘The baby?’

  She sighed. ‘As I said before, I was very sick for a week and when I woke up it was too late. My baby was gone.’ She turned stricken eyes to him. ‘If I’d told my father earlier, maybe things would have been different but I was too much of a coward. My baby might have lived.’

  Kate was the young girl she’d talked about. Not an unconnected case at all, but herself. Poor young, defenceless Kate and he hadn’t been there. He tried to imagine the scenario. ‘Who told you he’d died?’

  ‘Some nurse. I’ll never forget when that awful woman came in. She said it was just as well as I was so young. Earlier there’d been another, younger and kinder midwife, who’d said I could hold him but she didn’t come back.’ Her voice dropped even lower. ‘She said she’d take a photo, a lock of hair and a handprint, but I think they stopped her.’

  She drew a breath and went on more strongly, ‘The awful one said he’d died from complications of prematurity and the separated placenta. I never even saw him.’

  She looked at Rory with pure agony in her eyes. A devastation she’d carried bottled up for ten years. Rory wanted to kill someone for doing this to his Kate.

  ‘I never saw who our baby looked like. What colour his hair was. The shape of his ears or hands—nothing.’ She gazed into the fire. ‘I think I could have borne it better if I’d said goodbye.’

  Rory struggled with the monsterlike actions of a man who should have looked after her. ‘Your father had no right to leave you to face that alone.’

  She shrugged and rolled her shoulders to loosen the tension in her neck. ‘For a long time I pleaded for information on what had happened. He kept saying, “Nothing happened. Forget it. There never was a baby.’” She shook her head at the concept.

  ‘By the time I’d left boarding school I was strong enough to stand up to him and I demanded the address of the funeral home. I even hoped faintly that the baby hadn’t died, maybe he’d adopted him out, but I searched Perth, found Fairmont Gardens and there was a plaque. I’d found him. Baby of Kate Onslow. Lived for a day, and the date.’

  Rory felt sick with self disgust. ‘What date, Kate?’

  She stared into the fire. ‘The third of August. He’d been eight weeks premature and I’d never had a chance to name him.’

  Rory looked at Kate and didn’t know what to do—or say. She’d never forgive him for this. No wonder she hated him. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’ But her voice was flat and broken with memories and his heart ached for this woman who’d meant the world to him—still meant the world to him.

  He tried to imagine what a young girl without a mother, or anyone to hug her, could do in the beginning to ease that pain. He guessed there wasn’t much she could do without support except brick it up and try not to think about it. ‘Did you go home at all?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head vehemently. ‘Why would I? I boarded in Perth and studied every minute to give myself choices. That’s when I decided I’d stay for uni and do my midwifery. I’d be there for young mums.’ She looked at him. ‘This is the first time I’ve been back to Jabiru and you had to turn up.’

  Rory couldn’t grasp that she’d shut him out when she’d most needed him. ‘It’s been ten years. What about later? You never told me.’

  She looked at him but there was no expression on her face. After what she’d just said. No expression. That scared him most of all.

  ‘What was I supposed to do? Write to you and say—by the way, guess what happened? Ruin your life too?’

  He needed to reach her. ‘My life was ruined when you wrote to me and told me never to come back.’

  She shook her head. Not wanting to hear that. ‘I was scared. Scared what my father would do to you. He warned me he’d ruin you if I contacted you. Ruin your family, who still worked for him. And I was scared that, if I told you, you’d never do the things you wanted to do. I know how important moving up in life was for you, Rory. I didn’t want your bitterness and disappointment to be my fault if you’d come back to look after me.’ She looked away. ‘Then it was too late. I didn’t want to talk about it. I still don’t.’

  ‘You were more important than my career.’ It was his turn to deny. But, in all honesty, would he have had that clarity in his youth? ‘I would never have blamed you. We would have made it somehow.’ He reached out his hand to her. �
��Kate, I would have been there for you. I’m here now.’

  She ignored it. ‘It’s too late for us, Rory. I don’t want a husband. When my father dies I’ll sell Jabiru Station and go back to Perth. It’s time to go back. I’ll open a refuge for pregnant women, plaster its availability everywhere, give young women options that they might not otherwise get.’

  It couldn’t end this way. ‘You can do that and still see me.’

  She shook her head at him like he was a child. Like the child he was beginning to feel against her implacable wisdom. ‘You’re still in love with someone who doesn’t exist, Rory. The sixteen-year-old girl you left. I’m not that girl. I never will be again.’

  This couldn’t be it. After the glimmer of hope when he’d found out she’d never married. After the rapport they’d shared in flashes only today. There could be more of those. ‘I could love the woman she’s become.’

  One decisive shake of her head. ‘I don’t think so.’ Then she lifted her chin and said the saddest thing yet. ‘Because if I can’t love myself how can you?’

  Oh, Kate. What had he done? ‘You were too young to cope with that on your own. I was careless and unprepared for what happened that afternoon but I should have come back to check you were all right. I’m sorry I let you down, Kate.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it any more, Rory. Just know…’ here she paused, and Rory knew he wasn’t going to like what was coming ‘…I’ve been powerless. I’ve been excluded in consultation on what affects me and, worst of all, unable to keep myself or my child safe, and I won’t ever be like that again. I am in charge of my own destiny.’ She turned her face to look into the fire. ‘I’m going to run my own life and nothing or no one is going to change that.’

  That finality struck into his heart like a shard of ice.

  But it pricked his anger as well. That wasn’t fair. Rory frowned. ‘I’m not trying to change you, Kate, but I’m not a nobody, harassing you. I’m your friend, the man who wanted to marry you, someone who knows you inside and out—or did—ten years ago. I loved you, Kate, as you were, and I could love you as you are now. I’m just trying to be here for you.’