Guardian Nurse

by Joyce Dingwell

  No. No!

  ‘Jason,’ she shouted, ‘Jason!’

  There was, of course, no answer, there had been no answer all along. About to go away again, look elsewhere, she heard something that was not even the beginning of a whimper, so soft it was, so smothered, but her trained ears caught it; she had not served in a children’s ward not to hear even the catch of a child’s breath. She knew she was not mistaking that tiny, half-swallowed sob.

  She found him in the lean-to in the copse of river oaks. Evidently it had banged tight from the inside so that no one would have dreamed of looking there.

  ‘It shutted on me,’ Jason sobbed.

  ‘Why didn’t you scream out, darling?’

  ‘I was tired. After a while I went to sleep.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘I wasn’t asleep before, I was just waiting to come back to find gold to go on that rocket ship. I knew you would all be having lunch and not see me. But’ ... a trembling lip ... ‘it was a long way back here.’

  A long way! Frances’ own lip trembled as she pictured the little boy’s arduous argosy.

  ‘Oh, Jason!’ she cried, and had she not been shaking with relief she would have noticed that Jason was not drawing back from her now.

  She drew him out of the lean-to, called a loud cooee, then started back with him in her arms.

  Halfway there Burn West relieved her silently, and they returned as they had earlier in the day, only this time Jason did not pretend sleep. He was looking at his father rather nervously and Frances did not wonder. It was a very solemn face.

  ‘You can feed him and put him to bed, Miss Peters’ .... West did not speak to Jason ... ‘then feed yourself. A wash won’t do any harm.’ He was looking at her bedraggled clothes. ‘Then’... a pause... ‘come to my study.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said bleakly. She knew what was coming.

  ...‘You mean he must begin lessons,’ this man had said to her. Lessons, she had thought, and thought again now, that were not taught by her.

  ‘I have a few things to say to you,’ Burn West went on. Then, almost wearily, defeatedly, ‘I expect they have to be said.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  But when he said the ‘few things’ later in the study they were very brief, very bare.—And not what she had expected.

  Seeing her surprise, he lifted his chin up from where he had slumped it in the cupped palm of his big hand and burst out... if a man like Burn West could speak impetuously ... ‘I can’t tell you any more, there are too many gaps, too many half-truths—doubts, subtleties, innuendoes.’

  But Frances’ surprise, at first, had not been the economy of his words, not what he said, though the impact of that came soon after; it had been the fact that she was not receiving the dismissal she had come for.

  Then, close on the heels of the first surprise, his strange words re-echoed starkly.

  ‘Jason,’ he had said, ‘is in danger of—well, being carried off.’

  ‘Could you mean-—kidnapped?’

  ‘That would be putting it in the cloak and dagger manner,’ he half-shrugged, ‘less dramatic and more honestly would be: Jason could be taken away.’

  ‘But how ... why?’

  It was then he had hunched his big shoulders and admitted wretchedly that he had no right and little basis to go any further.

  “Too many gaps, too many half-truths—doubts, subtleties, innuendoes.’

  ‘But, Mr. West—’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t even intend to say that much, I haven’t any foundation, but after what has happened today, after the flat spin I put on, I knew I must make some sort of explanation to you.’

  She looked at him steadily. ‘Can I ask at least taken by whom?’

  ‘His—mother’s side,’ he said baldly. The bitterness of his mouth explained fully why he had not answered ‘Jason’s mother’ or ‘My wife’.

  A few minutes went past in silence. Then Frances asked quietly, ‘That’s all I can have?’

  ‘That’s all I can give you. I just wanted you to understand why I was so upset today. It wasn’t just accident, mishap, it was...’ He lapsed into silence again.

  There were numbers of things that Frances wanted to say. Like, it not being very satisfactory for her. Like, how did he expect her to take up from the few poor shreds he had tossed her? Instead she heard herself telling him a little childishly, ‘I came prepared for dismissal.’

  ‘Dismissal? You?’ He stared incredulously at her.

  ‘You’ve made no bones about my being unsatisfactory.’

  ‘You actually thought that? No ... no, it was the other. It coloured everything. Oh no, Frances—’ He stopped short at his spontaneous use of her name. ‘Miss Peters,’ he corrected.

  ‘I would prefer Frances,’ she proffered. ‘It’s less formal in front of the boy. Too much formality is a disadvantage.’

  ‘Only if you retaliate,’ he bargained.

  ‘Bern for Bernard?’

  ‘As a matter of fact it’s the more painful form—Burn. B-u-r-n. Short for Burnley.’

  ‘Burn,’ she agreed.

  ‘I’ll address you as the sonno does,’ he said in his turn. ‘France.’ He had recovered himself now and was performing his ritual of paper and tobacco. ‘So you thought I was giving you the bullet?’

  ‘You did say,’ she reminded him, ‘that Jason must start lessons, but made no mention of my teaching him.’

  ‘You, Jason and lessons are in the same breath. I think you’re keen to begin. Would you like to talk about it?’

  She sensed that he needed her to talk, that he was still unnerved by the raw statement he had made to her. She could scarcely believe it herself. Had she heard aright? Had Burn, not Bern, West said: ‘Jason is in danger of being taken away’?

  With a mental shake of herself Frances changed the subject, as she knew he wanted her to, to the safer channel of education.

  ‘My training entailed a course dealing with the child of higher intelligence,’ she began. ‘I feel strongly that Jason is one of these brighter little buttons.’

  ‘Can you tell that, with the lack of formal lessons he has suffered?’ he put in.

  ‘I believe so. There are lots of little things I’ve noticed in him that promise a quick catching up, even a passing, of the standard he should be in. Also he has a vivid imagination.’ She was thinking of France and Berne.

  ‘No poets in the family,’ Burn West dismissed of the latter, ‘but the grey matter should be there, I think. How do you intend to start the boy? Do you want me to send for the correspondence lessons?’

  ‘I think they can wait a while until Jason is literally looking around for them. I know he’s seven and a half, but I feel’ ... sensitively, sensitive for the man on the other side of the desk ... ‘that a lot of the things a young child has experienced, Jason has not.’

  He was ashing the cigarette. He nodded briefly.

  ‘Then we’ll do the more baby things first,’ she suggested, ‘things he may have missed out on.’ She flashed him an apologetic look. ‘I thought I could begin Jason while he’s still slow in moving, though’ ... a little half-smile ... ‘he certainly must have moved today—’

  ‘I think,’ cut in Burn West, half smiling, too, ‘his progress was more dogged than inspired. He was certainly resolved to get back to the panning.’

  ‘Yes, he has a determined spirit. But while he’s more or less immobile he could begin painting. From there we could move to the actual objects he paints, the how and the why.’ She looked a little anxiously at Burn West.

  He smiled back at her. ‘It all makes sense, good sense. Do you want me to send in for some equipment?’

  ‘I have some on hand. A teacher carries it like a nurse her thermometer.’

  ‘And you are both teacher and nurse.’ He looked at her for so long she found herself turning her own glance away in embarrassment.

  The interview broke up soon afterwards, a very different interview from what Frances had anticipated
. She went back to Jason’s bedroom, saw there was no pretence this time, that he was dead to the world, declined the jackeroos’ invitation to listen to more records and spent the evening until she went to bed checking her equipment.

  The next morning it seemed she was starting all over again with the little boy, after her instinctive arms around him that had not been pushed away following his ordeal in the lean-to yesterday she had optimistically hoped for something different from the inevitable ‘Nothing’.

  It was going to be a hard road, she sighed, after he had said of her bright, ‘Would you like to paint today, Jason?’ a discouraging, ‘Don’t care.’

  But when he saw the big white poster sheets, the gay colours, he lost his apathy. Soon he was sitting like any child, blissfully daubing.

  Burn West came in and watched him silently. When it became apparent that talk would not divert Jason, probably not even reach him, Burn said, ‘Like Joseph, Jason is fond of many colours—rather psychedelic colours at that. Tell me, France, why do the young see rivers in bright orange and trees in purple?’

  ‘Somewhere along the line the true colours come in,’ Frances soothed. ‘Just now Jason is positively splurging in this.’

  ‘That I can believe,’ Burn said with feeling, taking out a handkerchief and removing some splashes that had reached him. ‘While he’s making a bright pink hill would you like to come and learn the general idiosyncrasies of your car?’

  ‘I would be glad.’ She put another sheet out for Jason and followed Burn to the garage.

  He gave a short resume of the particular make and Frances listened keenly. When he stood back for her to reverse the car out, drive around the gravelled ways, she did so confidently, and was rather pleased at his praise.

  ‘I used to drive Scott’s,’ she said unthinking, and at once sensed the closing of a door that had opened between them.

  ‘In that case there was really no need for me to show you,’ he said abruptly. He added, ‘Keep the keys,’ and turned back to the house. At the front steps, though, he must have had another thought, for he returned to her side.

  ‘You must have the afternoon off.’

  ‘I haven’t been here long enough,’ she protested.

  ‘Perhaps not in time, but certainly in happenings: I’ll make arrangements for one of the girls to keep an eye on the boy this afternoon.’

  ‘That should be easy,’ she nodded, ‘he’s fascinated with the painting. Thank you for the afternoon off, Mr.—I mean Burn. I’ll go into Mirramunna.’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘To buy Cook’s pattern,’ she finished determinedly, and went neatly past him into the house.

  She enjoyed every moment of that drive into town. The road, though not sealed, was smooth and safe so that she could give some of her attention to the scenery unfolding on either side of her, flat gold country but always with a distant scallop of green hills, varying crops, the dozens of different sorts of eucalypts that the Riverina produced, red, silver, umbrella, paper, scribbly.

  But, as the little town of Mirramunna loomed up, or at least as the inevitable wheat silos loomed, the old faithful peppercorns banked each side of the track instead of gums, spilling their red berries that gave out that warm, spicy tang. What country town, thought Frances, is that without its peppercorns?

  Mirramunna, as well as its silos, comprised a small street of shops, a shire council building, a church with a steeple and a one-level cottage hospital. Frances supposed Scott’s offices would be in or near the hospital. But it was the shops that she went to ... if a little defiantly, defiant because of Burn West and that ‘Naturally’ he had flung at her ... and after ‘doing’ the saddlers, the bakers, an ice-cream parlour with coloured cottonwool ice-cream in the window, she turned into the Western Store, quite a large emporium with an old aerial money change system.

  She enjoyed herself looking around. As in most Australian country towns fashion was never far behind, in fact avid representatives frequently saw to it that the country girl was more up to date than her city sister.

  She bought Cook’s pattern and some accessories she had been asked to choose, then came out and went into the ice-cream parlour, weighed up Riverina Special or Mirramunna Sundae, then asked instead for squash. While she was sipping it she saw a car pulling up at an annexe to the hospital and Scott Muir got out. Stubbornly she had determined not to seek him out, but now that he had descended upon her...

  She finished her drink, paid and came out. There were so few people on the sleepy street that it was no wonder Scott turned at the resounding click of her heels.

  ‘Fran!’ he exclaimed, and fairly ran across to her. She ran the last few steps to him.

  It was very satisfactory. In no time they were back in the ice-cream parlour again, only it was coffee this time, coffee that they let grow cold as they chattered eagerly together instead, coffee which they eventually forgot.

  But for all their excited interchange it all came back to Frances’: ‘I didn’t know you were here’ and to Scott’s: ‘I had no idea you were coming.’

  He did not talk about his future, how long he intended to remain in this small Riverina town and Frances did not speak about what she thought of doing once Jason’s plaster was off and he was fit to be placed in boarding school. The present was enough ... especially with Scott’s firm warm fingers enfolding hers.

  ‘I’m looking at the country with new eyes, Fran,’ Scott said. Fran—so different after Bill’s and the jackeroos’ Frances, Jason’s ... and now by agreement Burn’s ... France. Then he said once again, ‘I had no idea you were coming.’

  The time signal from a radio at the back of the counter brought Frances up abruptly. She had better leave at once, she told Scott; it was thirty miles to West of the River and she was not familiar with the road yet.

  He nodded but looked disappointed. He would like to show her the hospital, quite well equipped for a small infirmary, and the district map on the wall of his surgery marking his large territory. Then Matron would like to see her, and Sister... He said all this, but his eyes told her that he wanted to see her, wanted to talk...

  ‘Yes, but not now,’ she declined regretfully. ‘I’ve really stopped longer than I should. I have other days off.’

  ‘And each liberty must be spent in Mirramunna,’ he insisted.

  She smiled a little at that, recalling how she had answered Burn West’s taunt as to her destination with a quick ‘It mightn’t be town’ as she had thought of the attractive offshoots of road to be explored.

  She must have said this now, for Scott agreed eagerly, ‘We’ll explore together. So far I haven’t taken much notice of this place. Suddenly ... well, suddenly, Fran, it’s rosy.’

  ‘Let’s close on that pink note,’ she laughed, squeezed his hand and hurried out to the car. He stood waving until she turned at the Memorial and took the left road out to West of the River.

  It was still light, thank goodness, so with steady progress she should make the homestead before dusk. Something warned her that although it was her afternoon off Burn West would not be pleased if she did not arrive until nightfall. Besides, as she had told Scott, the road was unfamiliar.

  This was the hour of enchantment, she thought, putting her foot down on the accelerator and enjoying the gentler light now on her eyes. From the trees at the side of the track she could hear the slowing tempo of the nest-going birds; once, some distance away and apparently in some soggy spot, a curlew cried out. The bramble and sloe on the verge already stirred with night things ... frogs, field-mice, crickets. She put her foot down again.

  She did not know how far she had gone or how near she was to home when, rounding a bend, she saw a car coming out of a property. The homestead could not be seen, but that was to be expected, as most of the homesteads here stood miles back from their gates. She would have driven on with no more than the usual country wave had the man behind the wheel, evidently not seeing her, blocked her route. She stopped abruptly, a little annoyed. Eve
n though it was an empty road and he was accustomed to coming and going without checking, he still should have checked.

  Her annoyance disappeared, however, at the man’s genuine distress. He got out of the car at once and hurried over to Frances. He was tall, slim and thirtyish, fair, blue-eyed. He had a sincere smile.

  ‘All right, say it,’ he invited ruefully, ‘say some people want all the road to themselves.’

  ‘I was going to,’ she admitted with a laugh back at him, ‘but now you’ve said it for me I won’t.’

  ‘And you’ll forgive me?’

  ‘Only if you promise not to do it again.’

  ‘I promise. I’m afraid it’s a failing in this very exclusive stretch of road. There’s so few of us on it we come to think we possess it, think of it as our own. But I say’ ... eagerly ... ‘you would be the charming young nurse from West of the River?’

  Frances demurred at that ‘charming’, but admitted she was the person he meant.

  ‘And where is our young fellow?’ The man peered into the car.

  ‘He’s not here now. I left him at home. You would be ?’

  The man nodded backwards to the homestead gate. Frances saw that the property was called Uplands and concluded that he owned it.

  ‘I can’t say how pleased I am to meet you,’ the man smiled, ‘and I’m certainly anxious to see young Jason. Perhaps we can meet up, all three, one day. Say we make it by the river, it’s always a delightful spot.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t do that,’ Frances declined.

  ‘Not now, naturally, the boy isn’t well enough yet, but eventually...’

  ‘I couldn’t do it, anyway,’ Frances declined again. ‘Mr. West has given me strict instructions that Jason—’

  ‘I understand perfectly.’ The courteous voice that cut in did understand. Frances felt sure of it. She felt churlish, especially so when he did not argue with her. She said that she was very sorry.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he assured her, ‘I told you I understood. But I’m keeping you, aren’t I, and you can’t be familiar with the road as yet. Look, I’ll go ahead as far as the homestead gate, you just follow my tail-light.’