Guardian Nurse

by Joyce Dingwell

  Then he returned and he was actually smiling. He handed Jason a perfect little dog on a tuckerbox which not only nodded a head but half-barked, half-sang a tuckerbox song when you wound him up. Jason was enchanted. The novelty of the toy absorbed him to Wagga Wagga, and later to the turn-off to Mirramunna, some forty miles out.

  Now they were in the true Riverina, the rich and varied Riverina, sometimes long, low green hills, sometimes flat, open, golden country, homesteads in the far distances but their front gates opening to the level, sealed road, different crops in different stages of growth. Trees, trees, trees. All eucalypts.

  Windmills, dams, ponds, creeks, dried streams with beds of rounded pebbles, but no glimpse of any river until, after skirting an old stone house that Burn West called out was Seven Fields, their original and his childhood homestead, after passing, some time later, a more recent structure of red brick that he called to them was Great Rock, another West possession ... he said property ... a sudden curve in the road revealed the meandering Murrumbidgee, or rather, Frances was informed, an offshoot, and on the distant westerly bank of this offshoot a very beautiful if sprawling modern home of cream-washed timber, set in terraced gardens, a long row of young pines as opposed to the inevitable peppercorns that invariably comprised country drives leading from the imposing front gates to the house, an orchard, a gravelled courtyard, green and white striped canvas awnings shading wide windows and deep encircling verandahs.

  ‘Why, it’s lovely!’ Frances gasped.

  Burn West had stopped the car. He took the opportunity to roll and light a cigarette. He finished the ritual of whispering tobacco and paper before he spoke.

  ‘Too close to the river,’ he scowled.

  Bill Furness had got out of the car to open the gate and Mrs. Campbell had followed to check the mailbox.

  ‘But it’s your house, surely you directed it,’ Frances said.

  ‘I did direct it, but it was built ... built hurriedly ... in my absence. I had a piece of builder Glen Ellery, believe me.’

  I would believe that, thought Frances.

  ‘But Glen had a comeback,’ half-grinned the big man. ‘He said, “You always possessed the river, so I never thought of putting the house anywhere else but beside it.” Well’ ... a shrug ... ‘it was done. But if the river rises—’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘So far never enough to cause alarm, but trouble could come. Not from the dam miles up. That’s modern and controlled. However, there’s an ancient high-level storage tank further down that evidently has slipped the authority’s notice, but not’ ... grimly ... ‘mine. It was on its last legs years ago. With a rush of wet weather ...’ He shrugged. ‘I tell you I was furious with Ellery.’

  ‘For knowing your possessive qualities?’ she baited, borrowing the builder’s words.

  ‘For not complying.’ His eyes flicked remindingly at her.

  A little uncomfortably she said, ‘It’s still beautiful.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said infuriatingly. It sounded to Frances like: ‘What else, when it’s mine?’

  Mrs. Campbell came back with some mail which she told Frances would be deposited by some obliging neighbour who had been into Mirramunna. Bill Furness signalled for the car to pass through the gates. He closed the gates again and got in, and they swept up through the avenue of young pines to the homestead.

  There was a curved flight of shallow stairs to the wide verandah, a verandah already lavishly hung with a flowering vine for all the house’s apparent youth. The front door was open, and Frances noted that the interior was designed in the old colonial manner of a wide gracious hall with rooms on either side. It was thickly carpeted. Beside her now, for he had left the wheel and come to the back to lift out the boy, who now slept, Burn West said, ‘I like the style I grew up in, a hat brim of wide verandah, big rooms cheek by jowl to each other, everything four-square.’

  ‘I like it, too.’

  ‘What? We agree?’ He lifted Jason and carried him up the steps.

  Frances followed him to the child’s quarters, bedroom, playroom and bathroom, the whole connected with a room, sitting-room and bath of her own.

  ‘You’d almost think,’ she said impulsively, ‘that when you had the house built you knew that ...’ Her glance fell on the little boy.

  ‘I did.’ He said no more. He put the child down on the bed, nodded for her to take over, went out.

  Jason was sleeping quite heavily; he must be exhausted, so she decided not to disturb him with either food or bath. She removed as many clothes as she could without altering his relaxed position, then she drew over the rugs, stood looking down a while, then crossed to her adjacent suite. It was tastefully furnished in tawny golds, her favourite range of colours. Gold curtains, gold carpet, gold spread. Only the chair, white leather, abandoned the autumn hues. It was a beautiful apartment.

  But lovely as it was it did not matter when she crossed to the window to look out. The view almost accosted her with its sheer radiance. From this angle every curve of West’s portion of the river offshoot was captured, the distant, faintly-silver bend, the small stretch of yellow sand, the weaving willows, a backwash of quiet, entrapped water with lily pads on it, jutting into the moving stream a tiny jetty and actually a small scarlet boat. Behind it all gums. Far away beyond the gums the gentle rise of hills.

  Glorious, Frances thought.

  She took out her things and hung them up. She decided to leave Jason’s until tomorrow. She combed her hair and went out. She went down the hall, her eyes darting from left to right, finding more to delight her in the gracious yet comfortable layout with every step.

  One door was half-closed, and curiosity got the better of her and she peered through the open space. To her embarrassment it was a study, and Burn West was already seated at the desk.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she stammered, ‘I didn’t intend ... I mean...’

  ‘Come in,’ he cut short. ‘I was coming after you, anyway. I thought you might care to look at these.’ He handed across some familiar forms, familiar because they were X-rays.

  ‘The sonno’s leg,’ he said briefly. ‘Make sense to you?’

  ‘A little,’ she affirmed, ‘though, of course, being only a nurse...’ Her voice stumbled away. She found she had nothing to say, nothing, because if she spoke it might be everything, for frankly the X-ray shocked her; the child had suffered several extremely severe breaks. How had it happened?

  She did not know she said ‘What happened?’ till she saw his tightened lips, tightened, she concluded, because she was doing that forbidden thing, probing.

  ‘It appears to be a severe injury,’ she amended at once, hoping to hide what she had asked him. She went to hand the forms back again.

  ‘No, keep them and study them, then when Doctor Muir comes...’

  ‘You’re sending for him?’

  ‘Yes. Jason doesn’t need him immediately, but he will in time, so I’d like the pair to become acquainted now. How are you getting on with the boy?’

  ‘It’s early,’ she admitted, ‘but we’ve met over noughts and crosses.’

  ‘Great oaks from little acorns,’ he half-sighed. ‘I’m not even up to that.’

  There was silence for a while. He asked, ‘Are you comfortable?’

  ‘Completely. And the view from the window..

  ‘Not bad,’ he agreed, ‘but then it’s not a bad river. Some sing of Old Man Murray, or the Lachlan, but the Murrumbidgee is my idea of a stream, even though I’ve only snared a small and insignificant bend.’ Suddenly boyish, and Frances had the feeling she was seeing a different man, he said, ‘Come and meet it face to face.’ He swung out of the room, and after a moment’s hesitation she followed him.

  The growth of everything surprised her in the terraced gardens, terraced right to the water’s edge; the Riverina, though fertile, could not have the fast growth rate of the tropics, or so she believed, but these shrubs and ornamental trees were already half-matured. She spoke wonderingly
of this.

  ‘I put them in that way,’ he answered, ‘or nearly so. So it’s me, not the Riverina. You see everything had to be ready for when ...’ The boyishness had left him, his lips were thin again.

  But he changed by the river. He was indeed that West of the River he had named himself, and named the house. Frances knew about sea fever, or hearts pledged to the outback, but this man loved ... and lived for? ... this river. She could see that although he did not move or betray himself he almost hugged it to him, claimed it as his. And, by the rippling water, she suddenly felt the same. The sun, though fast going down behind the furthest green rise, still shone brilliantly, catching the wings of river swallows who had come out to hunt and play, making their curved flight into a gleaming necklace. There was a spicy breath of thyme and resin, a tang of eucalypt, but most of all that smell that could be only the smell of a river, a kind of sweet-sour, cool-warm, reed-redolent, broken stems and old logs smell. It only needed the little bitten-in beach and the grassy slopes for Frances to feel herself embracing it as well.

  ‘So,’ he said very slowly, reading her enchantment, ‘you, too.’

  She looked up and he was smiling at her. She was glad that he did not choose this moment to remind her that never, never, was she to take Jason along the river unless someone else came with them.

  She launched a bark boat, slithered in a pebble ducks and drakes style, which he promptly beat by skithering in a much longer travelling stone, then, the sun slipping away and the swallows breaking up their necklace, she turned back with him to the house.

  ‘About meals,’ he said. ‘Until the sonno gets the feel of things I think you two should eat together.’

  ‘Should I eat anywhere else at any time?’ she asked correctly.

  ‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ he answered irritably, his river mood so completely gone it might never have been there at all, ‘where do you think you are, a baronial mansion?’

  ‘Not all the places I worked at did I eat with the family.’

  ‘Here we all eat at the one table. Not the stockmen, they like their own mess, and of course the shearers when they arrive are catered for, but Mrs. Campbell, Bill, Dick my bookkeeper, Jim the fencer, the jackeroos, anyone who comes in. It’s seldom it’s not a big board, and that’s why I thought it would be better for the boy not to face up to too much too soon.’

  ‘I agree, but I think—’

  ‘Yes, Miss Peters?’

  She wanted to say, ‘I think that you, as his father, should begin to have a closer association with your son than you do now.’ But he had told her, and shown her, that it was none of her business, so she said instead, ‘I think he won’t be eating with anyone tonight.’

  ‘Tuckered out, eh? Well then, we can expect you.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to say it for that. I mean I’m quite content to eat by myself.’

  ‘You’ll be a deal more trouble,’ he said abruptly. ‘Dinner is at seven. You’ll hear the bell.’

  One could have heard it, she thought later, getting up from the window seat where she had been gazing out watching the night shadows fold over the river until it looked like dark plush, half a mile away. But perhaps that was the purpose. She had noticed some small buildings near a copse of trees some distance from the house and been told by Burn West it was the bookkeeper’s stronghold as well as the fencer’s quarters. Probably the loud clangour was to bring them, too, to the dining board.

  She had changed into a cool dull gold linen. Her colouring was golden and she knew it suited her. She took another look at the sleeping Jason, then went down the hall to where the clatter of plates and ring of cutlery told her the evening meal was being served.

  On her exploration earlier she had not seen this room. It proved ample; it led from an adjoining kitchen and it led again on to one of the wide verandahs. Handy, she thought, for spillovers when the company was large. There was no furniture at all in the room itself except the huge table, the chairs and several large, rather old-fashioned sideboards.

  The food was stacked on the sideboards and the diners were helping themselves. Bill Furness saw Frances and came forward with a welcoming smile.

  ‘Join the hungry locusts,’ he greeted her. ‘This lean and ravishing one is Dick our bookie, this is Jim our fencer and carpenter, these two pink-faced juveniles—’

  ‘Nix on that,’ came in one of the ‘pink juveniles’, ‘you’re only out of coll yourself a few months.’

  ‘Terry, Toby, jackeroos.’ Bill ignored him. ‘You know Mrs. Campbell. Also, smiling at the kitchen door is our most valued member, good old Cook. Those two minis beside her are Dawn and Sandra, and they’re the reason why Bookie here is always complaining about the potato bill—they peel them too thick.’

  ‘Surely you would grow your own,’ protested Frances.

  ‘Caught you out there, Bill,’ grinned the bookkeeper. ‘Yes, we do. Practically everything we eat is home-raised.’ He plopped carrot on the plate that Bill was filling for Frances and the two jackeroos helped her to the dishes that they were dealing with.

  ‘It’s a case of everyone look after everyone,’ explained Bill.

  ‘Then let me fix your plate,’ she offered.

  ‘That’s the style, only I’ve fixed it already. Here’s Burn. Fix his.’

  Frances took up a plate and began piling it with everything she came to. Burn West stood beside her as she did so, holding her plate, then together they went to the big table and sat down.

  ‘Met everyone?’ He was taking up his knife and fork.

  ‘Yes. Oh dear—!’

  ‘What is it?’

  She was looking dismayed at her own plate. ‘It’s such a lot.’

  ‘You’ll find you need it here,’ he advised. ‘Try and see how far you can get, anyway. I think you’ll surprise yourself. Mrs. Fanning is an excellent cook, one of the best.’

  Frances said, ‘And you insist on the best, don’t you?’

  ‘Angling for a compliment, Miss Peters?’

  ‘No, of course not, I mean ... well, I meant that when I was given this job Miss Clegg said that you—well—’

  ‘Miss Clegg was right.’ He was busy eating.

  ‘But sometimes surely you don’t get what you hope you’re getting.’

  ‘I never waste time hoping.’

  ‘Then what you intended to get.’

  ‘It can happen, but it doesn’t happen long. Pass the bread, please.’

  ‘What do you do, then?’

  ‘You’re persistent, aren’t you? I direct “out”. Butter, Miss Peters.’

  Frances turned her attention to her meal. This man obviously chose when and where for discussions, and now was neither the when or where. She accepted a large dessert from Toby ... or was it Terry? ... and when she turned from thanking him found that the boss had skipped sweets and gone.

  The meal over, she accepted an invitation from the jackeroos to listen to some records. She sat till she found her eyes growing heavy, said she would not wait till coffee and went to her own room. She checked on Jason, who was still out to it, bathed, stood once more at the window a while but seeing nothing now, only sensing the moving water, hearing the faint wash and ripple, breathing the river smell, then went to bed.

  She was awakened by one of the girls with an early cup of tea, and she and Sandra chatted together until Jason gave a little out-of-sleep whimper and she went in to greet him.

  He looked at her without recognition, but that was to be expected, much had happened since the last time he had seen her. His bewildered gaze said clearly: ‘Who are you? Where is this place?’

  She took her time with him, explaining how he had fallen asleep after the Dog on the Tuckerbox yesterday ... remember that, Jason? ... and not seen West of the River as they had.

  ‘Don’t want to,’ he scowled.

  ‘It’s beautiful, Jason.’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  The mechanical dog diverted him, however, and she took the opportunity of his
fresh absorption with the toy to get him up on his poor little feet and into a gown. While he still wound up the dog she manoeuvred him to the window.

  ‘Look, Jason,’ she said.

  He wouldn’t at first, then surreptitiously he peeped at it. As it had won her, immediately it won him.

  ‘Is there fish in it? Can I go in that little red boat? Can I make a dam? Can I build a bridge? Can I—’

  ‘Yes. Everything you can, my pet. But bath first, and then clothes.’

  He was so eager for the river, he agreed. It took a long time, but eventually he was ready for breakfast. Mrs. Campbell brought in a tray and set a table by the window so he could still watch the river. He watched it, smiled Frances fondly, almost as though it might run away from him. He was, as regarded the Murrumbidgee anyway, his father’s own son.

  The meal was almost over when Burn West came in.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Peters. Hullo there, sonno.’ He touched the boy’s head.

  Jason did not respond, but at least he did not say ‘Don’t care’ or ‘Nothing’ as Frances half expected.

  Also, his attention was on the river, so his father should not be too affronted seeing he himself held the same thrall.

  ‘Can he go down there?’ Frances asked the man quietly.

  ‘We’ll take him later. First of all I’d like the doc to look him over. I rang last night for him to call this morning and have a talk with you, see the plates, get acquainted with the lad.’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘but until the doctor comes can Jason—’

  ‘He’s here now. He has surgery today, so got West of the River over first. Come in, please, Doctor Muir.’

  Frances was buttering toast for Jason, cutting it in mouthfuls so she could pop them in as he still gazed riverwards, so she didn’t look up at once. But when she did the piece of toast she had just buttered remained aloft. She stared incredulously.

  Scott was in Sydney with the Meldrum practice. He was taking out expensive appendixes. Treating expensive nerves. He was married to Pam.

  Only he wasn’t ... at least, anyway, he wasn’t in Sydney.