“They sound ungrateful and horrid,” Jane said with conviction, “can’t you go to the police or something?”
Steve laughed again. “Sergeant Collins has enough to do covering his territory without looking for poddy-dodgers,” he answered equably, and slid his long body under the wheel, giving her an odd sideways glance, “and I don’t expect any gratitude from the Blackmores. There’s an old Scottish saying that the best way to make an enemy of a man is to put him under an obligation to you.”
Jane flushed. According to bits of information that Nubby had dropped, talking about the Forrests, Steve and his parents had had little gratitude, from the Finches, either, in spite of giving Alison and Stewart a home and all that money. Did he expect as little from her...? By now he must be pretty cynical about people’s ulterior motives and money in particular.
But as he drove past the racecourse and the stockmen’s camps strung out along the bank of the Oonga River, where each station had a paddock for its horses under their watchful eyes, he told Jamie good-naturedly that he would bring him out to Joel’s camp immediately after tea.
“It’s really supper, and Mrs. Cooper likes to dish up at half-past six, racedays or no racedays,” he added to Lisa, who was staring interestedly up the long, wide street with its shade trees down the middle and wide grass verges; the houses were mostly one-storey buildings painted in gay colours and most of them had red corrugated-iron roofs. The higher buildings began with the stores and offices, the bank and the police station, the big garage where Nick Verrans was shutting up for the night and waved to Steve as he drove by.
“It looks such a prosperous little town down here,” Lisa said thoughtfully, “it’s hard to realise all those acres of ghost suburbs behind us.”
“They won’t be ghost suburbs much longer, if Macy gets his way,” Steve said cheerfully. “Oonga’s got to grow again—not into a mushroom boom-town, but into a place big enough and bright enough to stop the youngsters drifting into the big cities.”
“We have that problem in the country in England, too,” Jane contributed. “It’s difficult to get enough labour for remote farms.
“Remote by our standards!” she added hastily, aware of the glint in his eye. “We’re not air-minded yet on the Moor, except when helicopters drop food for humans and animals during a freeze-up!”
Lisa shuddered realistically, “Don’t talk about freeze-ups, darling! I’m just beginning to thaw out in this lovely, lovely heat.”
A minute later she cried joyfully, “Look, Jane—there’s a drive-in cinema and a coffee bar! Steve, can we go while we’re in town? I haven’t been to the movies or a theatre for so long.”
“Tomorrow. This evening we’ll be expected to do the round—I want to have a word with Joel when I take Jamie along, then Paul wants to give us coffee in his place, and they’ll be waiting for us at the hospital—” his amused grey glance flicked to Jane, “by now they’ll know about you being a nurse, Paul will have sung your praises. Sister Mollie and Sister Moira will want to meet you both and it’s as good a chance as any. It’s nice to know the owners of the voices on the transceiver.”
“The pedal-wireless, you mean,” Lisa grinned and settled herself more snugly in her seat beside Steve. “Do we have to spend all day at the races? You’re not riding until the last day, are you?”
“The last day is the Nursery Gymkhana on Saturday. I’m riding on Friday. All the big races are in the early morning, it’s too hot by three in the afternoon. Afternoon is siesta time. Evenings for visiting, social calls. We have to do the full programme, Lisa, like everyone else. We watch every event. I hope you’re not shy—about the wheel chair, I mean—you’ll be stared at a bit. Not because of the chair, but because you’re a new...”
“Pommie?” Lisa chuckled. “No, Steve, I’m used to the chair now.” She added candidly, with laughter in her enormous blue eyes, flicking her lashes at him, “I like being stared at! It was my job, remember?”
Steve’s eyes were laughing too. “They’ll make a meal of you,” he promised, “you’re worth staring at Lisa.”
“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s said to me in nearly two years,” Lisa answered contentedly.
Not for the first time Jane envied her aplomb. She herself was rather dreading the ordeal of being introduced to all Steve’s friends during the races. By now she had a fair idea what they would think about her coming twelve thousand miles to visit him at the Blue River, and she hated being there on false pretences.
Yet as Steve pointed out the long, low buildings of the hospital set in a very pretty garden with plenty of shade trees, and Dr. Banjo’s small house beyond it, Jane was finding it more and more difficult to keep remembering the real reason they were here. A few yards farther down the main street Steve pulled up in front of the Royal Hotel, and the wide front veranda was full of women and children in lounging chairs and men sitting on the rail and twined round the veranda posts. The friendly, welcoming staring had begun.
Willing hands took the wheel chair from Steve and set it up on the sidewalk, and he lifted Lisa into it as naturally as if they were in the privacy of his home.
Mrs. Cooper, a tall, well-covered woman, came bustling out to welcome them personally, and gave Jamie a great hug when he ran up to her.
“My! How you’ve grown this winter, Jamie! I hear you’re going to ride in the Gymkhana this year—good on you, boy. Now introduce me to your visitors, please.” So it was Jamie in the end who broke the ice, if there was any ice, for the girls from England.
“Their name is Lesley,” he said simply. “This is Jane an’ the one in the chair is Lisa. She can ride ’n swim, Mrs. Cooper, but she can’t walk.”
“Well, isn’t that dandy! How do you do, Jane—Lisa—I hope you’ll enjoy the races. Hullo, Mrs. Newberry—hullo, Steve. Joel says Ranger is a good bet for the Pastoralist Stakes, is that dinkum? I don’t make so much money I can afford to lose any.”
“Looks like you’re going to make enough for the next four days, though,” Steve grinned return greetings to some of the group on the veranda, “it’s dinkum about Ranger. He’s in good form.”
“Good-oh. Give Steve a hand with the chair, boys—I’ve put Miss Lesley in room fourteen, it’s quieter round the side.”
In a matter of seconds willing hands had carried Lisa, chair and all, up to the veranda and she thanked them laughingly. Steve took over pushing the chair then with complete naturalness and Mrs. Cooper led the way through the wide, cool hallway to a passage at the end that turned left, followed by Mrs. Newbery and Jamie and Jane carrying a light suitcase.
“I hope you don’t mind doubling up,” Mrs. Cooper threw open several bedroom doors, “Mrs. Newbery with Jamie, and Jane and Lisa together. I’ve put you in the annexe, Steve, with a couple of Yanks, film men.”
“Film men?” Lisa lifted her head alertly.
Mrs. Cooper nodded. “They’re O.K. Been filming the Great Barrier Reef for a sort of documentary, and thought they might as well take in the Oonga races.” She pulled a cheerful grimace. “It won’t be Like Alice, but I guess we’ll add a bit of local colour. D’you think this’ll do, Jane?” She went to the wide windows and pulled up the shades, revealing a pleasant garden in the last glow of sunset and a graceful pepper tree just beyond the windows.
“It’s lovely,” Jane said truthfully, and Lisa chuckled. “If you’ve got film people staying here, you could sleep me in the laundry and I’ll be happy!”
Mrs. Cooper looked puzzled until Steve explained. “Lisa was an actress before her accident.”
“Is that dinkum?” She smiled down at the girl with new interest.
“Almost an actress. I’d just got my first big part,” Lisa said, but she said it quite cheerfully. “Tell me more about these film people.”
“They’re nice boys, you’ll meet them at tea. I’ll put them at your table, Steve. You and Jamie are next door, Mrs. Newbery—you’ve just got time for a wash and brush-up. Mrs. N. will show you where the
bathroom is, and the water in these basins is real hot,” her rich Queensland drawl rolled about them as she gave a quick glance round the room to see that the beds had been turned down and clean towels put out. The room was scented from a bowl of freesias standing on a tallboy. She whisked her big bulk to the doorway and smiled back at the two strangers reassuringly. “Just yell if the girl has forgotten anything. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you single rooms, but I’m packed to the ceiling for four days. Then we’ll be pretty near empty during the wet. That’s how it goes,” she shrugged her massive shoulders contentedly, “I got to make hay while the sun shines, as you’d say. There’ll be fellers sleeping all along the back veranda tonight in their swags, packed like a can of sardines, so I wouldn’t go out that way after dark.”
“We won’t!” Lisa promised laughingly. Steve said “I’ll fetch you in ten minutes,” and closed the door on them.
Lisa looked at her sister mischievously. “Film men, and men packed like sardines along the back veranda—All This And Heaven Too! We’re going to enjoy this party, Jane. Oh, am I glad you had the courage to sell Lilac Cottage and take the plunge!”
CHAPTER NINE
JANE’S misgivings about Lisa meeting up with film people in this unlikely place were soon dispelled when the two Americans rose from the round table in the dining-room and Steve introduced them.
They were not in any case boys caught up in the glamour of the Hollywood legend, but experienced young men with technical skill and a passionate dedication to their work concealed by a laconic manner. Jake Warner, producer and director of a series of documentaries, was about thirty; by Australian standards he was pale, but his location-work on the Great Barrier Reef had given him a superficial tan that went well with his slanting green eyes and dark red thatch of hair. He wore his American-cut casual clothes with a grace that belied his native toughness.
“Warner ...?” Lisa asked the implied question lightly.
“Jake, not Jack. As long as we skip that crack about my being one of the Warner Brothers, we’ll get along fine,” he grinned to soften the warning, showing very white teeth, “my friends call me Copper.”
“One of the Leicestershire Coppers?” Lisa asked with a dead-pan face, and Pete Lanagan roared with laughter. Pete was Jake’s cameraman and general off-sider. It transpired as Steve drew them out to talk about the work—for Lisa’s pleasure, Jane guessed—that they had been working in the same team for three years, making documentaries in odd comers of the world. They preferred it to the routine studio programmes of Hollywood.
“Fact is stranger than fiction, that ought to be our title,” Pete was Irish-American, gay and relaxed when he wasn’t using a camera. He looked at Lisa with professional interest that deepened when Steve alluded casually to her career before the accident.
“That so? Tough on you, honey. I’d say you’re photogenic, and not a dumb synthetic blonde.”
“Thanks.” Lisa was slightly satirical. “I was quite good as a dancer, too.”
Copper said nothing, but every now and then Jane saw him glancing at Lisa in a thoughtful, critical sort of way as if her story interested him. The meal passed very pleasantly as the Americans described their filming of the Great Barrier Reef and asked Steve casual questions about his station.
“You must go to Cairns before the monsoon starts,” Copper told the girls, “The Barrier is something worth seeing. The different corals and the tropical fish. There’s an island you can stay on, and they take you out to the Reef in glass-bottomed boats.”
“It’d be a grand place for a honeymoon, that island, if you go for romance,” Pete added dreamily.
“I’m not likely to need a honeymoon until I get out of this thing,” Lisa tapped the arms of her chair but she was smiling. “I’ll settle for the synthetic version until then. By the way, we’re going to the movies tomorrow evening—do you know they’re actually showing Fiddler on the Roof.
“And do you know, you’ve got Copper to thank for that?” Pete grinned. “He fixed it up with the distributing agent in Cairns.”
Lisa smiled at Copper. “If that’s true, you have one big Thank You from me, anyway!”
His smile was cryptic. “Maybe not from the other citizens of Oonga. But we missed it at home—we were filming pearl divers and trepang-fishers in the Coral Sea. So getting the film shown here this week was purely selfish.”
“You do get around, don’t you?” Mrs. Newbery, sitting at the next table with Mrs. Cooper, smiled at the Americans. “It must be very exciting and sometimes, nae doot, dangerous.”
“It’s going to be dangerous, I guess, this time.” Pete explained that they were waiting in Cairns for the beginning of the tropical rains. “We’re going to try and film the monsoon hitting the Great Barrier Reef. If local legend is to be believed, that’ll be quite something.” He turned to Lisa and Jane, “Why don’t you pay us a visit in Cairns and see the show? It’s a swell town, bigger than this.”
“We’ll go to Cairns, but not in the wet,” Steve answered shortly, before Lisa could say anything.
Jamie created a diversion by asking what a trepang was, and while Lisa and Copper got engrossed in lighting techniques Pete told the boy that it was a sea-cucumber, not a fish. “They’re cured and sent to China, where they’re a great delicacy for making soup,” Pete explained patiently. When Jamie mentioned they were soon going down to the stockmen’s camps to see the horses from the Blue River station, the Americans asked if they could come along.
Steve agreed with a polite lack of enthusiasm and as they went out to the utility—leaving Mrs. Newbery behind as she wanted to stay and talk with Mrs. Cooper—Jane realised she had hardly spoken a word during the meal. She liked the Americans but she was acutely aware that Steve was jealous of them. Of their attention to Lisa, of course.
During the visit to the river paddocks in the star-dusted velvet of the night, Copper showed himself knowledgeable about horses and cattle-raising generally.
“Some of these seem a bit heavy in the hock for racing,” he commented, “but you’ve got yourself a horse there, mister! Come here, you beauty! Come, Ranger!”
Steve explained that most of the entrants were stockmen’s ordinary working horses and by no means thoroughbred. “They like a heavier horse for hard work over rough country, and there’s a strain of Clydesdale and Percheron among these.”
He had emptied one of Mrs. Cooper’s sugar-basins into his pocket and he gave Copper some lumps for Ranger. The great black stallion accepted them disdainfully, but he came to Jane and nuzzled her.
“Please, Steve.”
He gave her the remainder of the sugar, smiling a little in the starlit enclosure. It was bright enough to see the expression on her face as she fed Ranger, and talked to him softly, telling him he was going to win on Friday.
Cooper said to his cameraman thoughtfully, “I’d like to shoot an Australian muster. Pity it’s too late this year.”
“Yeah. It’d be the real thing, for a change.” While Steve talked with Joel about the preparations that had been made for the first races tomorrow Pete explained to the girls, “We’ve got ranches, and wide open spaces, and cattle. But maybe we’ve made so many Westerns they’ve become synthetic. Now this is different. No studio stuff. We’d film a genuine muster, where horses smell of horse and men of sweat.”
“You’d better come to the Blue River in April,” Steve said drily as he rejoined them and they took a protesting Jamie back to his bed in the hotel.
Perhaps Jane enjoyed the visit to the little hospital most of all. Like Lisa with the film people, she became immediately alert when she smelled antiseptics and ether, saw the glass cabinets filled with shining instruments, and talked shop with Mollie Bassett and Moira Hennessy, the two Sisters who ran the hospital with a staff of eight nurses, some of them coloured, an orderly and two wardmaids. She was impressed by the equipment in the theatres and the Out-Patient’s Department.
“You expected a toy hospital, no?” Dr. Banjo t
eased her a little.
“After St. Joseph’s I guess twelve beds sounds like a toy hospital,” Sister Mollie said kindly, “but believe me, we are kept busy. Mostly surgery and accident cases, genetics and child-ailments are nursed at home.” She told Jane they were pleased to know there was a trained nurse at the Blue River now. “Steve has quite a colony to look after; though Mrs. Newbery’s good at taking directions over the air, it’ll be a grand help to her—having you there.”
Mollie was cool and brisk and capable, like she had sounded over the transceiver.
“It must be nice to know all your patients personally, through the transceiver—even the ones you’ve never met,” Lisa said frankly, “you’re just as I imagined you, from your voice.”
“The same to you, Lisa. I’m glad to see you looking so well, my dear,” she touched the back of the wheel chair, “and I hope we’ll soon be getting rid of this for you.”
“I think maybe the cure has already begun, for Lisa,” Dr. Banjo said later when they were alone in the Transceiver Room. He had told the nurse on duty there she could go off for a cup of tea while he and Miss Lesley minded the set.
Beside the transceiver she saw an exact replica of the Standard Medicine Chest that was supplied to every station covered by this Flying Doctor Base, and he explained how the doctor on call could instruct the person calling for help exactly how to use the contents of the chest. Every article on every tray, and the trays themselves were numbered.
“It is simple, but effective. An intelligent child can take down these numbers, and how often a drug must be administered.”
Jane thought of the hours it had taken her father to reach some of his outlying patients, though the call had come by telephone. She could find no words to express her admiration for the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and for the simple, commonsense, courageous people who were carrying out its work, but Dr. Banjo seemed to understand. “We are on call twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year,’ he said gently, “and the personnel of the State Sections and the Federal Council are entirely voluntary. Do you not agree that it is more exciting to help make a great man’s dream come ‘true than to get fat on specialist’s fees in Brisbane or Sydney?”
Wedding at Blue River Page 14
