The Tender Winds of Spring

by Joyce Dingwell

  ‘Mark and I are travelling in Mark’s small plane. It wouldn’t have been convenient to make a detour to pick up the children. Nor, my dear Jo, under our romantic circumstances, did we particularly want them.’ A few ecstatic dashes.

  Approximate times had followed, also Gee’s: ‘As Mark’s craft is only a Cherokee we will be able to land on the small plateau strip and bypass the town airfield. No need for you to come out and fetch us, Mark as usual has everything under control. The kids will be taking the Coast Express—recall, Jo? it gets in around noon—and Mark has arranged for a hire car to fetch them out there. However, I’ll tell you more in the few minutes we have together between our arrival at Tender Winds and theirs. But if you can, do have the flags waving, the bunting flapping. You know I don’t mean literally that, but I do want them to come to a welcoming house.’

  Which they will, determined Jo, beginning mashing the large sun-ripened banana she had picked from outside the back door, they will come to the irresistible smell of home cooking, and most of all hot gingerbread men. She began creaming the banana cake’s butter and sugar.

  The tree from which the banana had been plucked was an ‘escaped convict’. That was what she and Gee had called the trees that grew in a wild state away from the disciplined plantations. Because they were not controlled, which meant ripening first in blue plastic and later in large ovens, they waxed golden in the sun and achieved scatterings of brown freckles. They were, everyone knew, the sweetest and best of all.

  Jo informed the banana cake of this as she whacked it up, told it what she expected of it, then put it in the oven. The cut-and-come-again brownie promptly followed. Then the gingerbread men took shape, found currant eyes, split nuts for mouth, maraschino buttons. They, too, went in.

  The kettle Jo had placed at the top of the stove was now making soft music. The gingerbread men were doing beautifully, not spreading too much and giving out a mouth-watering smell.

  ‘No. No! I can’t stand it any longer!’ The voice boomed so loudly and so protestingly and so unexpectedly across the kitchen that Jo positively jumped. She turned.

  A man stood on the other side of the flyscreen, a very large man with red-tan hair, red-tan skin to match, but very blue eyes. He grinned at her, then pressed his nose against the wire, just like a child gazing into a candy shop. He would have a pattern across his nose, Jo thought, finding she had to grin back.

  ‘Let me in,’ he said. ‘People like you who do things like that’... he pointed to the stove ... ‘shouldn’t be let loose. For heaven’s sake, for my sake, for your own sake, Miss Millett—open up!’

  Miss Millett. He knew her name, then. Well, I, said Jo to herself, not making a move, don’t know his. Nor, after a long look at his red and tan, do I know him. Up here in Big Banana Country men were most often brown but never red-brown. They were outdoor, but not his variety of outdoor. He looked, she decided, more like a westerner.

  ‘Seen enough, Miss Millett?’ The nose was withdrawn from the wire, and yes, there was a pattern.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Jo said. ‘I was just deciding I didn’t know you.’

  ‘True.’

  ‘I was deciding you weren’t a banana man.’

  ‘Not true. Well—not now.’

  ‘But before?’

  ‘Cattle,’ he told her.

  ‘I see.’ Jo spoke sympathetically. Everyone in the outdoor game knew that cattle wasn’t on top any more.

  He must have read her thoughts. He said: ‘No, I didn’t quit for that reason.’ But he did not tell her the reason.

  Instead he said: ‘I’ve come down from the hill. I was told a Miss Millett would be stopping here. You?’

  ‘Me,’ Jo said. She asked what he was doing up on the hill.

  ‘We’ve made camp up there while we size up the place for a future house for the new banana boss. You knew there was a new boss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can’t have him roughing it in a tent the way he does now,’ the red-tan man smiled. He said again: ‘Let me in.’

  ‘I don’t know if I should,’ Jo demurred. ‘We were always told as children not to, but after all’ ... reasonably ... ‘that’s many years ago.’

  ‘Not so many, I’d say.’ The man was regarding her through the screen with amused appraisal. However, any idea she might have gathered of his remaining amused and outside the screen was stopped by an impatient: ‘Look, if you don’t unlatch this thing I’ll break it down.’

  ‘The new boss wouldn’t like that,’ warned Jo. ‘The house is old, and ready to be scrapped, but it is, after all, his property.’

  He ignored that. ‘Unlatch, Miss Millett,’ he demanded. ‘Have you ever eaten project cake?’

  ‘Project what?’

  ‘Project slab. It’s yellow, made of sawdust and it contains precisely one currant. It’s baked for camps where they haven’t time, or the touch, for creations like that.’ He nodded towards Jo’s baking. ‘What’s that I smell now? Not ginger?’

  ‘Gingerbread men. I’m expecting small fry.’

  ‘It has been known for big fry to like them, too,’ he told her. ‘Please open up, Miss Millett, before I start pulling my weight.’

  ‘On the door?’

  ‘On you.’

  ‘Only the boss can do that.’ But even as she said it, Jo knew.

  ‘That’s you,’ she accused.

  He didn’t admit it at once. ‘It needn’t be,’ he pointed out, ‘I could be an itinerant picker, a flying fox operator.’

  ‘But,’ said Jo, unlatching the door, ‘I don’t think you are.’

  ‘An air of importance? An air of a man on top?’ He was stepping up to the table.

  ‘Just say an air.’

  ‘Then you’re right, Miss Millett. I am the new boss. The future house on the hill is for me.’

  ‘And you’ve come down to tell me it’s no longer convenient for me to stop here, that you’d prefer it yourself to your tent? Well’... she tried not to bite her lip ... ‘it’s your right, of course.’

  ‘No, I have come down to tell you to stay on, that I quite like the tent. Also’—he glanced obliquely at her—‘I’ve come down a track provocatively marked To The Tender Winds of Spring, and if that doesn’t deserve a cup of tea and a gingerbread man, then—’

  ‘It deserves it,’ broke in Jo. She got out the cups. ‘Anyway,’ she told the man as she slid off some gingerbread men on to a plate, ‘I always like to taste first. This time it’s particularly important.’

  ‘Because of those small fry?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Children generally are important,’ he agreed.

  ‘These ones, anyway. They’re to be my nieces and nephew.’

  ‘Are to be?’

  ‘My sister is marrying their father. Milk?’

  ‘Yes. And some banana cake, too. When in Rome do as the Romans do.’

  Jo cut a piece. ‘Westerners are good cooks,’ she defended.

  ‘And good interferers. Matrimonial-wise. That was the real reason, and not the drop in cattle, that brought me to the coast.’

  ‘It sounds intriguing,’ she commented.

  ‘It was annoying.’

  ‘Yet still interesting. It’s generally the girl who is aggravated and generally the girl who does the escaping.’

  ‘Well, I haven’t escaped yet, and I feel I won’t, not completely, until I have a wife of my own. They say it’s the only sure cure.’ He looked at her directly. ‘Would you marry me?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I asked would you marry me.’

  ‘I thought I heard that. Is it the cake?’

  ‘And the gingerbread, plus the fact that my marriage would settle everything for all time. I’m moderately rich. Also as you know, I’m the new boss.’

  ‘Mr.—?’

  ‘Passant is the name.’

  ‘Mr. Passant, did you come down here to propose?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I told you what I came for. I came to tell
you to stay on as long as you please. When the men spoke of you, when they told me how knowledgeable you were about banana-growing, having been reared here, I thought, as a banana greenhorn, it mightn’t be a bad idea for us to meet.’

  ‘With view to matrimony?’ Jo laughed.

  ‘I didn’t think of it at the moment, but I am thinking now.’

  ‘Too late.’ She held out her hand with its ring.

  ‘There’s many a slip,’ he suggested.

  ‘Not with Gavin and me.’

  ‘All the same, mark me down in your little black book in case.’

  ‘My aunt used to say that. “In case.” ’

  ‘A wise aunt.’

  ‘But an absurd man. You are absurd, you know.’ Still Jo found she had to laugh. ‘Thank you all the same for the loan of Tender Winds ... I mean the house,’ she said. ‘The children are coming by train. The adults, my sister and her fiancé, are flying.’

  ‘Then they’ll all arrive together from the town? And the gingerbread men will greet them?’

  ‘That was the idea,’ Jo nodded, ‘but Mark and Gee will come separately from the children. Mark is flying his own Cherokee and bypassing the town field. He’s landing on the plateau strip.’

  There was a silence in the room; there were always silences in conversations, but suddenly and inescapably this silence was with them, shutting them in, closing a door on them. They were imprisoned .in it. There was no way out. Jo felt she could have even touched the silence, it was so real, so tangible. It was there.

  ‘Flying a Cherokee,’ the man said presently, and his voice was dead level.

  ‘Yes. Quite a small craft. No room for passengers. Anyway, being newly engaged the two of them would want it like that, wouldn’t they?’—Heavens, Jo thought, I’m babbling. Why am I talking like this? Why suddenly am I ... why am I ... why ...?

  There was no clock in the room, so there was no tick, but if there had been a clock Jo knew in that moment she would not have heard it. She knew that if the banana trees outside the door had rustled their palms she would not have known. All she was aware of was quiet. A stifling kind of quiet. You could not know a quiet, yet at once, clearly ... terribly ... Jo did.

  ‘Mr. Passant,’ she almost whimpered.

  ‘My name is Abel.’

  ‘Mr. Passant ... Abel...’

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  She looked at him. She wet her lips. She looked at him again. ‘I—I don’t know,’ she blurted.

  ‘Know?’ he asked.

  ‘There is something, isn’t there, that I don’t know.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘unhappily there is something, and unhappily I do know.’ He spoke very quietly.

  ‘You know what?’ she managed.

  ‘Know what I believe you’re starting to think.’

  ‘But you can’t know because I’m not thinking ... I mean ... that is ...’

  ‘I think,’ he said, still quiet, ‘you heard a crash some time ago, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘a loud one. In the forest. It would be one of the mahoganies. There’s a lot of those big fellows in there. They would be clearing. Mountains have to be cleared for plantations. Life has to go on.’ Oh heavens, why was she rambling on like this?

  ‘Only it wasn’t,’ he said calmly, gently. ‘It wasn’t a tree, it was a small plane. A Cherokee. In it was the pilot—and a girl.’

  ‘It was a tree.’

  ‘A plane,’ he repeated. ‘Two people—a man, a girl.’

  ‘Then it was two others.’

  ‘The report that came through said there was nothing to be done, the mountain had seen to that, but there were some papers intact. His—the pilot’s—name was Grant. A Mark Grant. Could he be—?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jo. She got up and she stood very still. ‘You came down here to tell me?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I hadn’t connected you with them then. But I am telling you now.’

  ‘It’s not true,’ she insisted.

  ‘It is.’

  ‘There could still be a mistake.’

  ‘There isn’t.’

  She whispered, ‘I’m dreaming this.’

  ‘Then wake up,’ he said, and he crossed over and shook her. It was a quiet shake, but it did what he intended it to do. It brought her out of her unreality.

  ‘Her name was Geraldine,’ Jo told him tonelessly, ‘Gee for short. I am Josephine and Jo. Gee was always the leader. You see, we are—I mean—’

  ‘You mean you were—’

  ‘Were—twins. She was prettier, brighter and she did wonderful things, thought of wonderful things. Always before I did.’

  ‘And now,’ he said softly, ‘she has done the biggest thing of all.’

  With the two hands that had gently shaken her he now gently drew her in. Enclosed her in big strong arms. ‘Cry,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Still try.’

  ‘It needn’t be true,’ she persisted.

  ‘It is. There’s no mistake. This isn’t a dream. Cry.’

  For a long while Jo stood there, unbelieving, rebelling. Not Gee. Never Gee. Never gold and sapphire Geraldine. Not. Never.

  ‘Cry,’ he said again.

  At last she did. She cried like a child into a blue denim shirt and he held and rocked her there until there were no tears left.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Just before the tears dried up Jo was conscious of a gentle disengaging of the big encircling arms. The man called Abel, the new banana boss, steadied her for a moment, then went quickly out of the room and out of the house.

  He must have come down from the camp in his jeep, and he must have taken something from the jeep, for he returned almost at once. She heard him taking a glass from the old-fashioned sideboard, she heard him pouring something. Then he crossed back to her.

  ‘Drink, little one,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Just drink it. It will do you good.’

  ‘What is it?’ Jo started to ask again, but she never finished the question. Abel Passant had lifted the glass to her lips and ostensibly he was encouraging but actually he was forcing her to swallow.

  ‘Ugh!’ she spluttered.

  ‘A Scot would be horrified at such a description of his best Highland dew.’

  ‘Dew?’ she queried.

  ‘I believe it’s brandy that should be administered, but it was whisky that was in my flask.’

  ‘It’s very strong.’

  ‘No water. I wanted you to have it neat, Josephine, for I want you to lie down.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All the same, I believe you will in a moment.’

  ‘There’s a lot to be done, a lot to be considered.’

  ‘That’s why you must rest first.’

  ‘I can’t. I can’t, I tell you. I—I don’t think I ever will again.’ But the last words came a little fuzzily, the strong neat spirits were having their way with Jo at once. The moment she swayed, he had her in his arms, and within seconds she was lying on a bed ... Mark’s? Dicky’s? The girls’? Gavin’s? she did not know or care ... and he was pulling over a rug, drawing a blind and shutting a door.

  The bed was rocking and Jo was rocking with it. It could have been a soothing process except that she fought against it, fought desperately.

  ‘Not,’ she said piteously, ‘not Gee and Mark at all. Someone else. Not a plane but a tree. A big mahogany. Not. Not. Not!’

  Then the mesmeric motion began taking over. The furniture instead of moving in front of her was misting. The pain was being blurred by memories.

  She and Gee waiting at the end of Tender Winds for the school bus to take them to lessons on the coast.

  She and Gee going down to the creek on school holidays with a stick against snakes and a hamper against hungry stomachs.

  She and Gee riding with the bananas on the flying fox, that strange but highly practical means of transport, for some of the slopes were so steep a picker could not carry his hand
of bananas to the top. When the Queen had come, one hand had been taller than the Queen, and over a hundredweight.

  She and Gee lying in the clover and reaching up for a banana whenever they felt like it, an escaped banana of course, golden and sun-ripened and undisciplined.

  She and Gee going backwards and forwards on the swing Uncle Mitchell had put up, all carefree summer and all uncaring childhood in the hollows of their hands.

  She and Gee growing up eventually and starting beauty diets, only to be stopped by a toppling helping of Aunt’s banana cake.

  She and Gee ... she and Gee ...

  The mist was breaking. The pain was coming back. Jo got up. She went outside and found Abel Passant sitting at the table.

  ‘It’s no good,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘I didn’t think it would be, but I just wanted you to have a moment before—’

  ‘Before?’

  ‘You faced up to it.’

  She nodded, and took the chair that he indicated, also drawn up at the table, and opposite to him.

  ‘First of all—’ she said with difficulty.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Is it certain?’

  ‘It is certain,’ he said.

  ‘Quite certain?’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘What do I do, then? I mean—’

  ‘Your sister?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You leave it to me.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  There was a pause, a long one, then he said gently but deliberately:

  ‘But you also have to do something else.’

  ‘What, Mr. Passant?’

  ‘Not that now, please. Not Mr. Passant. Afterwards, when I’m the banana boss again, that is if you prefer to, but not at this moment.’

  ‘What are you at this moment, then?’ she asked dully.

  ‘A friend, I hope.’

  ‘I mean what’s your name?’ As she said it, Jo rubbed at her forehead as though to rub back awareness. He had told her, she recalled, but she seemed to have forgotten. She still felt cut off, remote, detached. Not present.

  ‘Abel Passant,’ he prompted quietly. ‘You’ll remember again soon. Abel.’

  ‘A man called Abel.’

  ‘Yes, a man called Abel. Call me Abel.’

  ‘I’ve never known anyone called Abel before.’