The Coral Tree

by Joyce Dingwell

  “I’m on time.”

  He consulted his watch. “Just.”

  The engine of the craft was still warm from the up-trip.

  He helped her in, then joined her. In a few minutes they were taxiing down the paddock in preparation to taking off. There was a quiver of expectancy, and then that breathless suspended moment that, for Cary, always came as a craft took wings.

  She looked through the windows at Currabong becoming small as a doll’s house. At a gesture from Richard she turned her attention to the sunrise into which they were travelling, great billows of color topped with burnished turrets of shining gold.

  The fields beneath her now looked the same as the fields of Clairhill, the same yellow grass and green thistle, the same wide space.

  Soon they were crossing the Blue Mountains, deep azure from this height, and then the city of Sydney was lying beneath them like a child’s model town. It seemed no time before they were preparing to land.

  “It’s said,” remarked Stormer, helping her out, “that it takes as long to travel into the metropolis as it takes to travel down to it. However, I hope we can make an improvement on that.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Several places. A convalescent home, a private house, a hospital, an outpatients’ department. There you will meet your future guests.”

  “If you were expecting me to select them,” said Cary desperately, “I must tell you now I shan’t do it. I could not turn my back on any child.”

  “You really mean,” he said harshly, “you would leave that distasteful but necessary part of the business to someone else.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “Come, Miss Porter, what other interpretation, then? The children must be limited and someone must limit them if not you.” When she did not answer he resumed dryly: “Have no fears, however. I rather anticipated squeamishness like this. There are only twelve children to be interviewed, as it happens. I have spared you the pains of elimination.”

  If he expected thanks for this service she did not offer them. All she did was echo, “Twelve—”

  “That is the extent of your accommodation, I believe.”

  “Yes, but—”

  He waited, one eyebrow raised.

  Nervously she rushed in with her appeal. She babbled without rhyme or reason. She did not pause to consider whether it made sense.

  “His name is Jimmy. His father—at least his guardian—wrote to me. Lots of fathers wrote after they saw my—my photograph in the paper.” She flushed.

  “That must have been rather a waste of time for you,” he interrupted sarcastically. “Male parents—or guardians—are bad stock in hand when one has one’s weather eye on the matrimonial market. Couldn’t you lure any fan mail from any unattached male? An already married state usually comprises a formidable obstacle to romance, whether one’s views are modern or not.”

  She continued as evenly as she could: “Mr. Ansley wrote, as other parents wrote, concerning his child. I mean, of course, this child. Jim is seven and he is suffering from hemiplegia following encephalitis. He lives in a remote part of the outback and has no companions. He has paralysis of an arm, a leg, and some of his face, and he has freckles, merry eyes and—and I want him.”

  Richard Stormer did not comment in any way. “Wait here,” he said briefly, and went into one of the hangars dotted like gargantuan mushrooms round the drome.

  Presently he called her. He was standing on the avenue that rimmed the airbase. Beside him was a large grey car.

  At a nod she got in. He got in beside her and the car moved off. “Pray proceed,” he said dryly, turning out of the aerodrome gate and beginning to weave his way through the teeming traffic. “We were, discussing the case of young Mr. Ansley.”

  “Leslie.”

  “I am corrected. Leslie. But please go on.”

  “I’ve said all there is to say,” she answered, staring rather bleakly at the passing cars. “I just want him, Mr. Stormer.”

  “At the expense of another child.”

  “I didn’t look at it that way.”

  He shot her a quick sidelong glance, an enigmatical glance. “How did you look at it, Miss Porter? Tell me, how does a beautiful modern young woman look at these things?”

  Angrily, she turned on him. “I looked at it with love,” she flung. “Don’t you think I possess that commodity?”

  His eyes were narrowed now. Perhaps it was the strain of driving. They were almost in the city and the traffic was dense.

  “I wouldn’t know,” he said laconically. He added, swerving to avoid an oncoming lorry: “I have no desire to find out.”

  After that they mutually dropped the subject of Jim. He drove her first to a home in a superior suburb, well-appointed, showing every evidence of comfortable living. The child he introduced, a girl of nine, displayed undeniably all the advantages of wealth and the consequent extra care it affords. “This is Janet,” he said.

  Janet had braces on both legs and walked with difficulty.

  When they left he told Cary: “Janet would benefit at Clairhill.”

  The next house was in a dingy suburb. Little Robert was six and his club foot entailed all his small effort to keep it in pace with his sound foot, but he managed surprisingly well.

  They went to a hospital, a convalescent home, an outpatients’ department, a special school for incapacitated children.

  “Well?” he said at last.

  She did not answer. Her heart seemed so full it reached up to her throat.

  “Did you want to see Mr. Farrell while you were in Sydney?”

  She shook her head dumbly.

  “No feminine shopping?”

  “No.”

  What she did want was a cup of strong tea, but she could not trust her own voice to ask for it. He did not suggest refreshment. He drove her back to Bankstown, parked the car again, and within the hour they were on the Skyfarer winging home.

  Slowly the depression that had borne down on Cary as she had shaken hand after hand of each child—(not Frederick’s, she recalled with a pang, his small hands had lain useless by his sides)—lifted with the lift of the little craft.

  She looked through the window at the city growing narrower and smaller beneath them. Soon it was left behind. There were the knottings of mountains now, gorges dotting the blue faces of them. Their plane’s shadow sped down the valleys and gorges, ran up heights, then, leaving the hills behind, raced towards the plains.

  A few minutes later Cary detected a change in the tremor of the engine. She saw that they were circling intending to land. “Anything wrong?”

  “That depends on you, Miss Porter. Would you see anything wrong in joining me at tea?”

  “Tea?” She glanced around at the immense green paddock on which they had come to a standstill, and he laughed.

  “If you’re looking for an arty little alcove, all carpets, soft light and music, I’ll have to disappoint you. There’ll be tea all right, but the light will be sunlight, the carpet grass and the music crickets and birds. Also the brew will be the billy variety, strong, probably smoked, and stirred with a stick.”

  “No spiders?” In spite of herself she had caught his mood.

  “I could oblige you.” He glanced around.

  “It doesn’t matter, it sounds quite interesting without.” She let him swing her out of the craft. “Can I help?”

  “Yes—sticks, Miss Porter, plenty of kindling. I’ll build a fireplace.”

  He did it expertly with stones. In no time he had the billy he had taken out of the plane filled with water from a stream in a nearby gully.

  “There might be no cosy little alcove,” Cary said, puzzled, looking at the water, “but there does seem to be everything laid on.”

  “Of course,” he nodded, “why otherwise would I have chosen this place?”

  He had been here before. She thought this as she unpacked a hamper he deposited beside her. She wondered with whom. Then, woman-like, s
he wondered if it was because of that someone he had once brought here and perhaps not brought again that he was—as he was. Hard, embittered, sarcastic, unforgiving, judging before he tried.

  Yet this was not his mood now. He seemed happier, more tolerant, relaxed.

  “I love this place,” he told her. “I call it Pan’s Meadow. Listen, you can almost hear his pipes.”

  Cary, sitting on the flat green grass with its rings of white billybuttons and yellow buttercups, listened obediently. She could hear the whirr of crickets, the drowsy complaint of a baby bird calling to its mother; she could almost hear the pipes, as he had just said, in her own heart.

  They drank the tea. They ate the contents of the picnic basket. He lay back, a stem of bitter grass in his mouth, and looked at the sky. Presently Cary lay back, too.

  It was pleasant. It was more pleasant than she could have dreamed about. They were enemies, they instinctively disliked, even hated each other, and yet, in this moment, they needed no words.

  Presently he said quietly, almost dreamily: “This place pleases you, little one?”

  “Oh, yes, yes,” she answered. She said it with her heart. She did not think to question that small endearment. It was all part of this lovely, lovely place.

  Another full golden silence, then, leaning on one elbow: “You are satisfied with your first guests, child?”

  “Yes, only—”

  “I know. Only Jimmy. Is that it?”

  Again she said, “Yes.”

  Frowning a little he asked: “You would eliminate one from my list to find room for Jim?”

  “No. I want them all and Jim. If we can take twelve surely we can take thirteen.”

  “And after thirteen, fourteen, I expect.”

  “I never said so, Mr. Stormer.”

  “No,” he said mildly, even gently, “you didn’t.” Again there was that quiet.

  It was getting late. Reluctantly Richard got up and helped Cary to her feet. Together they packed the things. He made sure that the fire was out, then got into the plane.

  “You will be tired,” she said as they took their seats. “Can’t you stop at Currabong tonight and go back to Sydney in the morning?”

  “I have a conference this evening. It can’t be sidetracked. Anyway, I shall make better time going back.” He smiled suddenly and warmly. “No tea at Pan’s Meadow,” he said.

  “Pan’s Meadow,” she echoed, looking down at the pretty enchanted place.

  A sudden urge encompassed her. It was enchanted, she felt sure of it. Here she could ask for something and it would happen. She could make a wish and it would come true.

  “Mr. Stormer—”

  “Miss Porter?”

  “Jimmy—”

  “I’ll think about him later.”

  “No, now, now, before we leave.”

  “Why?” He was looking at her curiously, almost oddly, she thought.

  “Because it must be now, it must be here,” she appealed.

  For a moment there was a curious quiet between them. His hands poised over the starter, his eyes were on hers.

  “You, too, feel its magic,” he said, “you, too, sense the enchantment.”

  “I don’t know,” she stammered, unable to keep meeting that dark deep gaze. “I only know I must find out about Jim.”

  “Before you leave here?”

  “Before I leave here.”

  A silence, a long silence, then: “Very well, little one, you—or is it Pan’s Meadow?—win. We are thirteen not twelve. Your first intake will include young Master James.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  A WEEK LATER the children started to arrive at Clairhill.

  Richard Stormer brought two in his plane. One was Robert from the dingy suburb. He looked around the paddock with wide surprised eyes. “It ought to be in Sydney,” he decided, “then people could fill it up. Where are the shops? And where does the bus pull in?”

  “No shops, no buses, Robert, but lots and lots of ponies. Do you think you will like that?”

  “I haven’t any money.”

  “You won’t need money.”

  “Then what do you bet with?”

  Cary, studiously avoiding Richard’s bantering glance, said: “These are riding horses, not betting.”

  Robert was unimpressed.

  Marilyn, who had a curvature but, like Robert with the club foot, could move fairly well, announced: “On merry-go-rounds I ride in the carriage.”

  “Wouldn’t you sooner ride the horse with flowing mane, Marilyn?”

  “In a carriage you’re a queen, and besides, all the horses have bad red eyes.”

  Cary remembered the horses in her merry-go-round days and how their eyes had been just as terrifyingly crimson, and patted Marilyn’s head.

  “You’ll love our ponies. There’s not one red eye, but there is a white nose.”

  “Is there?”

  “Come along, darling, and see.”

  The children stood at the stalls gazing at White Nose, then at Molly, Candy, Toby and the rest.

  “What did you plan to have these nippers call you?” discreetly inquired Richard, who had crossed from Currabong into Clairhill by her side.

  Cary looked puzzled.

  “Miss Porter is a little formidable for all-day use,” he explained. “Quite in order for a teacher superintending reading and sums, perhaps, but not over breakfast, dinner, tea and that inevitable glass of water as soon as they’re in bed.”

  “You sound experienced,” she laughed.

  “Well, I did the usual hospital training, junior variety. I also happen to possess two nephews and a niece.”

  “Your brother’s children?” She remembered he had mentioned a brother—the poet. And there was reference to him when Sorrel had admired that opal cigarette-lighter. It had given the conversation a twist to allow him to send the usual barb home to her, she recalled. But he seemed different now. He had been different ever since that afternoon in Pan’s Meadow.

  Very quietly, almost somberly, he answered: “No, not my—brother, my sister. Annette’s children are Gregory, John and Phyllida.”

  “And from them you learned that children in bed invariably require glasses of water?”

  There was a pause, then he said briefly, quite expressionlessly: “The girl Phyllida is a spinal case. She has no prognosis, Miss Porter.”

  “You mean she—”

  “I mean she can never reach womanhood.” His voice was the level voice of the surgeon.

  “Oh—I’m sorry!”

  He answered levelly, again: “Yes.”

  A moment went past, Robert and Marilyn arguing over whether ponies ate shirts and tin cans as goats did or only grass and chaff and apples.

  “Perhaps,” suggested Richard, coming back to the name question, “you could be Matron.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Then Housemother. That’s apt, really. Mother Cary and here are the chickens.”

  “I think,” decided Cary, “I’ll be simply Aunt.”

  “I think so, too. Aunty Cary will be handier for me as well, Miss Porter.” His eyes were twinkling.

  So Aunty Cary, Cary became.

  Three more arrived by cars that afternoon. Janet was one, and she came in the biggest car of all.

  “We’ve brought all Janet’s clothes, books and playthings,” said Janet’s mother. “I hope you won’t forbid them. We feel what she can’t use, the others might be able to. We’d like everything shared around.”

  Garry, who had been an accident victim, drove up with his father, mother and twin sisters. Robert had never seen twins and he stared at the girls curiously.

  “Why did y’ Mum get two?” he asked Garry, then, brightly: “I suppose it was in case one got runned over and killed.”

  “I was runned over,” informed Garry importantly.

  “Did you get killed?”

  “No.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  “Sometimes I get lemonade in my legs.”
r />   Sorrel, hurrying past, caught the surprised look in Cary’s face and said: “Pins and needles. You must admit kids are apt.”

  Margaret, a rheumatic case, was even more new to the country than Robert. When the Currabong herd was moved that evening she said: “Jinks, listen to those bulls meowing.”

  By the night the family was seven, two having arrived by train. Sorrel suggested putting them all in together until they had time to sort them out, so into the bigger dormitory the boys and girls were bedded, then lights out, Cary waiting for the inevitable “Glass of water, please.”

  But it did not come. Only Robert’s scared little voice issued with a plaintive plea for someone to switch off the dark.

  Cary sat with him for a while to give him courage. He calmed down and told her he liked her better than Sister because Sister smelt like hospital and she smelt like cement.

  “You mean scent, Robert.”

  Robert answered drowsily that he had said that. The next moment he, too, was asleep.

  Five more came in the morning, and in the afternoon, last of all, Jim.

  What had she expected? Cary could not have said. She only knew that the little fellow moving stalwartly up the path made her heart feel as though it was being drawn out of its socket. She looked down at him and felt a largeness in her, an immense tenderness. She saw, too, that he was differently afflicted from the others, that Richard and Sorrel had not acted lightly when they had been dubious about accepting a case like Jim.

  Then all at once something was startlingly clear in her mind—had it been that way with Jan Bokker? It was only a fitful glimmer yet, but she knew it would grow bigger. She knew as she looked at the eager little boy, at the slightly trembling lips, at his left mouth corner pulled upwards towards one of those “merry” eyes, that she could help this child. She did not know how or why she knew it, or how long it might take; she only knew.

  “Hullo, Jim,” she said. She saw that his hair was bronze gold and that the merry eyes matched.

  “Why has he a brown-check face?” inquired Robert.