The Coral Tree

by Joyce Dingwell

  She was aware of three faces with three different expressions turned in her direction; Sorrel’s sympathetic, even sentimental, Jan’s full of pleased delight, Richard’s cold and fraught with unconcealed dislike.

  “It will not be for long, my dear,” assured Jan eagerly.

  Cary bit her lip. Why had she spoken like that?

  She heard them reassuring her that Jan would soon be back.

  “You’ve done without him so long, Cary; you shouldn’t mind a little longer,” said Sorrel fatuously.

  “It’s not that, it’s—”

  How could she say it? she wondered. How could she ever say it, even without Sorrel and Richard to listen to every unhappy word? He had come all these miles with one thought in his heart, how could she disillusion him without inflicting a hurt?

  She half-closed her lids in utter weariness, and at once, as light as a leaf in the wind, a kiss brushed her temple. “Not long, Cary,” reminded Jan’s voice, and she felt the hot color rising in her neck and throat, suffusing her cheeks, her whole face. She felt but would not open her eyes to Richard’s derisive stare.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CARY got up the next day. The lethargy had not left her, but she knew that so long as she stayed in her room it would never leave her. Only work would shift it, or at least lighten the load. The children needed her, and she flung herself with almost feverish eagerness into their activities. Sorrel watched her doubtfully. “There’s no rule I know of,” she stated dryly, “to make a person go from one extreme to the other. Must you expend all that effort?”

  “I want to be busy, Sorrel; I have to.” Cary paused a moment, looking into Sorrel’s dark eyes.

  “I’m in trouble, Solly. No doubt you sensed that.”

  Sorrel did not answer. She simply waited for Cary to go on.

  Cary did. She told her story—and Jan’s—as best she could, but as she told it she realized how piteously trite it must sound. There was so little to tell, from her angle. She tried to be honest and leave out nothing. She tried to remember and relate little things that must have passed between them, herself and Jan, to have given Jan that encouragement to travel half-way round the world as he had. But she could not recall many and she still felt honestly entitled to deny that they had ever existed. Her story ended lamely, unconvincingly. She looked appealingly at the nurse.

  For a while there was a contemplative silence, then;

  “I wish I could be on your side, Cary; but quite frankly I can’t. The things you’ve told me—the extent of your friendship with Jan, your personal gift to him, your evasion of a farewell, all add up to one thing, I’m afraid. Unwittingly, I’m sure, but actually, none the less, you encouraged Jan.” Sorrel spread her palms. “And with this result,” she said.

  Cary stood confused and downcast. She had not expected a verdict like that.

  Sorrel went on more gently. She found excuses for Cary, she judged Jan for being too vulnerable, but her words were unheeded.

  Cary pretended concern over William, who had come to hot words with Robert out in the garden, and fled.

  The whooping cough had almost vanished. There was only a slight croak from Marilyn now and then and a sniffle from the others to remind her of the recent attacks.

  The curtailed pony drill had not put the children back at all. They had returned to their walks around the arena with all their previous enthusiasm. Garry, as well as Janet, was now managing a little trot. Only Jim seemed not to have advanced from his last stage of progress. Did this mean he had reached his peak of improvement? Cary spoke to Matt about the little boy.

  Went right off his riding when you were in bed, Miss Cary.” He looked at Jim critically. “And he’s not picking up now.”

  Cary saddled Candy and trotted after Jim. He smiled as she caught up with him and they went round together.

  “Happy, Jim?”

  He hesitated, then: “Not unless you are Aunty Cary.”

  So that was it, she thought. There was a bond between them. She had not been daydreaming when she had known she could help this child. He was as sensitive to her as she was to him. He had thrived when she was happy; in some odd way he had gone back when she was not.

  “Funny little man,” she said aloud, trying to bite back a sob in her throat, “of course I’m happy. Come on, twice around the arena, Jim. Am I happy? Of all the silly things!”

  But she was not, and she knew he sensed it, and although he did his best, there are things not cured by remedial measures, only by the knowledge and the communication of happiness and love.

  Jan rang through that night to say he would not return till the end of the week. Now was her moment to tell him, she knew—now, when she did not have his hurt face before her, his reproachful blue eyes. But she could not do it. It was too cold, too unkind like this over the wires. Besides, he had just told her he was staying with Richard. “The good doctor has been most hospitable,” he said. “He is my friend.”

  Everyone is your friend, she thought desperately. That’s your trouble, Jan.

  She rang off without anything achieved. She avoided Sorrel’s curious glance as she sank herself more and more into the children’s affairs.

  Fortunately for her occupation of mind, the “guests” just now seemed to be demanding a great deal of attention. Not physically, she thought with relief, for the whooping cough had left no aftermath—indeed, the extra vitamins that Doctor Stormer had prescribed had rather achieved the opposite effect. Their behaviour, however, whether due to accelerated health or plain naughtiness, left much to be desired. Children were like that the World over, she supposed ruefully, either angels or fiends, never anything in between, and the period at present was the fiend variety. “Sometimes,” Cary told Sorrel, “all I seem to be at Clairhill for is a referee.”

  Janet, usually the sweetest and most generous of souls, had taken to rationing her belongings, which before she had spread among the others like so much largesse.

  William, the baby, whose only faults usually were to say things back to front and scribble on walls if anyone was misguided enough to leave behind a pencil, overnight took to being perversely argumentative.

  William, why are you so contrary?”

  “I are not. Naries are yellow with fur.”

  “Feathers,” said Cary.

  “Fur,” William said.

  Cary sighed and went upstairs and took out a book on child guidance.

  As she sat turning over the pages and wondering how she could apply their texts, dealing with physically normal children, to these little ones who made her heart a paper heart every time she looked at them, the phone rang.

  She heard Sorrel answer it, then call her name. For some obstinate reason of her own, she did not reply. When she heard Sorrel speaking again and saying: “You will be returning on tomorrow’s tram Jan—” she felt glad she had not run along to the nurse’s call. She sat very still with the volume open in her hands.

  Could she summon up her resources sufficiently to meet Jan and have a showdown tomorrow? Could she?

  Cary knew she could not.

  Taking up the book with the intention of getting in before Sorrel could, she ran down the stairs calling: “I give up, Solly; these children present problems not even mentioned in The Modern Minor. I shall just have to take time off and go to the city and buy something more comprehensive.”

  Whether Sorrel suspected her motive or not, she suddenly did not care. All she was aware of was that she could not meet Jan. Not yet...

  When the nurse asked briefly: “When?” she answered equally briefly: “Tonight’s train from Sunset.”

  “Jan will be returning on tonight’s train from Sydney,” said Sorrel. “He just rang, Cary. He will arrive tomorrow.”

  “He will still be here when I come back,” dismissed Cary with a casualness she did not feel.

  Knowing she was deserting, and knowing that Sorrel knew that too, Cary drove the car into the O’Flynns, garaged it there, and caught the night ex
press.

  She did not book in at the hotel. She decided to visit the reference libraries, then take the night train back. Although she was paying for this trip herself, her conscience pricked her. Because I am an utter coward, she thought, I am wasting money that could be used to better purposes elsewhere. For that reason I will not stop over.

  She did not even buy a restaurant lunch. Armed with books and a bag of buns, she went into a park and found a deserted bench. Glancing up, she saw that the seat she had chosen faced Macquarie Street—and the rooms to which she had gone unknowing that day to be interviewed by the great Richard Stormer.

  How much had happened since then! Little memories flashed through her mind like the colored facets of a kaleidoscope. She recalled Clairhill as it was and what it was now; Richard as he had been, what he had changed to, how he was again since the arrival of Jan.

  She thought of Jan...

  “If you are gazing with lovelorn eyes,” said a voice behind her, “you are wasting your time, Miss Porter, Jan Luknit never stayed in my consulting-rooms; he stayed in my home. In any case, he is not there now. He has returned to Clairhill.”

  Richard Stormer sat down by Cary’s side.

  Although he should have been amazed to see her when presumably she was several hundred miles away, it was Cary who was taken by surprise. She half-rose, sank down again, tried awkwardly to shift the books and buns.

  The attempt was not successful. He had taken up the volumes and was leafing through them idly. In her nervousness the paper bag fell to the grass and scattered its contents, much to the satisfaction of the sparrows, who pounced down with noisy glee.

  Stormer, glancing up from Suasion, Pro and Con, looked with inquiry at the buns now being rapidly reduced to crumbs.

  “Your dinner, I presume.”

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t the Clairhill exchequer run to something more substantial than replenishment in a paper bag?”

  “I was not particularly hungry, and”—flushing—“I am paying for this myself.”

  “Your city excursion as well?”

  “I fail to see how that concerns you.”

  His brows met in a dark, stubborn line. “Your city excursion as well, Miss Porter?”

  “ ... Yes.”

  His attention was on the book again.

  “In all fairness,” he stated, “I believe Clairhill should pay. That is, if your errand was solely to purchase these.”

  She did not answer.

  “Was it?” he probed.

  Hopelessly she began telling him that the children had been difficult lately; that methods to deal with physically normal children did not seem to pay dividends with afflicted ones. His eyes did not waver as she babbled on.

  “So you came down exclusively to educate yourself?”

  She turned her own eyes away. What was there about this man that ruled out all evasion?

  “Among other things,” she replied.

  “What things?”

  “Doctor Stormer, I—”

  “What things, Miss Porter?”

  In a rush she answered: “I came because I was not ready for—Jan.”

  “Ah,” he said. It was unrevealing, as his eyes were unrevealing. Presently, he commented: “So Luknit is still on the scales, I gather.”

  “He is not, he—” She stopped at a sharp signal of his hand. “You deny you are weighing him up to discover whether he is worth retention or not?”

  “I do deny it.” Her answer was fierce. “The idea never occurred to me. I only ran away because I was—afraid.”

  “Afraid?”

  “Of telling him.” She blurted the admission. “Of telling him,” she continued in agitation, “that he has made a dreadful mistake; that any encouragement he had imagined —imagined, I say—on my part has not been intentional, that I like him very much, but not—not like that.”

  Had she looked up she would have seen a quick light in the, doctor’s eyes. It smouldered, lit brightly, then almost as quickly died.

  “Women,” he said. His voice was almost expressionless, yet somehow it was sufficient to turn Cary’s puzzled eyes to him.

  “Why are you so full of hate?” she wondered aloud. “Why are you so hard, so bitter? Why is love locked out?”

  “Locked out—” He echoed the two words a little hollowly. Suddenly unable to meet his glance, she turned her own glance away.

  Presently he said levelly: “It has not been entirely locked out. You should realize—and recall—that.”

  Cary flushed vividly.

  “It is one of the fundamental laws of nature,” he continued; “it affects all. I”—briefly—“appear to have been no exception to the rule.”

  “But you would not permit a continuance?”

  Sharply he twisted her question to a question of his own. “Would you have wanted a continuance?”

  Cary bit her lip and did not reply.

  The buns were a mere scattering of saffron yellow now on the green sward. The sparrows were not even sparing these.

  “Come,” he said tersely, “and we will have a decent meal.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  He paid no heed to her refusal. He put his fingers under her elbow and prompted her up.

  “We will go to the park tea-house. I always go there. I was on my way when I saw you here, Miss Porter. It’s quiet and we can talk.”

  A little bitterly she flung: “Is there anything to talk about?”

  “I believe you have several things. I have something of my own.”

  “Like?”

  “A reason for the locking out of love, as you put it.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.

  “But you will, none the less.” The fingers, light almost to imperceptibility, seemed to force her up the path.

  They found a secluded table by the window. Outside, an artificial lake reflected leaves and flowers and little scudding clouds. Cary let Richard order and sat staring moodily at the books.

  “Been having trouble with the nips,” he said conversationally as the waitress hovered around the table. “I wouldn’t let that worry you. It’s a natural function. All humans are occasionally perverse and ‘agin’.”

  “These are ‘agin’ at the same time,” sighed Cary. “All” —softly— “except Jim.”

  “You love that one, don’t you?”

  “I love them all.”

  “But one especially.”

  She still looked at the books. “Is that forbidden?”

  He shrugged. “I doubt if love can be forbidden. That”—as the waitress receded—“is what I wanted to tell you. Oh, no”—as she looked up quickly— “not as regards anyone you know. As regards—my brother.”

  “Your brother—but how—?”

  “How can that concern you?” The eyes had darkened now; they were cold and deliberate.

  “I want to tell you,” he said, because it might do you good to know.”

  “Do me good?”

  “Or someone else good. Jan Luknit, perhaps. It might even”—he paused, then continued harshly—“it might even save a life.”

  “Doctor Stormer, I don’t understand you.”

  “Then perhaps this will explain.”

  He put his, elbows on the table and spoke lightly and casually, so that anyone watching would have believed it was a trivial conversation.

  But it was not trivial, and Cary knew it. She knew it by the whitened knuckle-bones of his hand’s, the throb of his left temple, the occasional twitch to his mouth. It was important; it was vital; he counted every word.

  She heard him out in silence. She listened to his story of Gerard, of Julia, of Gerard’s letters to him—of a letter in Gerard’s hand from Julia when they had picked him up in the street—dead.

  “Did you ever speak to Julia?” These were the first words Cary uttered.

  “Why should I? She had done enough, hadn’t she?”

  “There might have been an explanation.”

  “
An explanation!”

  “Richard, you could have been wrong in your findings. You were blinded, you are still blinded, with brotherly love, you might not have read what else could have been said in that letter. Things unsaid are often as clearly defined as the written word.”

  He was looking at her oddly. “You mean—you mean my brother could have thought, could have imagined that Julia—”

  Quickly, passionately, she answered: “Yes, I mean that. And I know I’m right, Richard. I know it—because of Jan.”

  “Could that be true?” he asked. “Could Gerard have built up that impression of love? Could it happen?”

  “It could.” Cary answered it firmly. She added firmly for herself: “It does happen.”

  They finished the meal and rose. The doctor paid the bill and joined Cary on the lawn outside. They moved in silence towards the city that lay beyond the park’s confines.

  “You are catching the evening train?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You are afraid no longer.”

  “No, Richard, I’m not afraid.”

  “You will say—what has to be said?”

  “Yes.” Suddenly she was too shy to meet his eyes. She was aware, too, that even if she could have turned her glance to him, his eyes, also, would not have been ready.

  This searching thing that had just happened between them was too fragile yet for close examination. Although it contained all the warmth of Pan’s Meadow, of a kiss taken in silence beside the plane in his field of Currabong, there were also fleeting doubts, too lately dissolved to be absent altogether, to delay the moment of complete understanding. And perhaps it was better like this, she thought a little deliriously. Perhaps it was better to move slowly forward. It would make the final coming together a more precious, perfect thing.

  They parted at the end of the path. He did not say goodbye, he did not tell her when he would see her, he merely touched her arm briefly—and was gone.