Tim (14 page)

Most of all, Mary missed Tim. There was no way to send him a letter, and the radio telephone was restricted to business and emergency calls. Sitting in her dripping tent trying to scrape some of the gluey black mud from her legs and clothes, with a dense cloud of insects flocking around the solitary kerosene lamp and her face swollen from dozens of mosquito bites, Mary longed for home and Tim. Archie's exuberance at the results of the ore assay was hard to bear, and it took all her customary composure to seem even civilly enthusiastic.

"There were twelve of us in the party," Archie told Tricia when they were safely back in Sydney again.

"Only twelve?" Mary asked incredulously, winking at Archie's wife. "There were times when I'd have sworn there were at least fifty!"

"Listen, you bloody awful old bag, shut up and let me tell the story! Here we are just back from the worst month I've ever spent, and you're stealing my thunder already! I didn't have to ask you to spend your first night back in civilization under my roof, but I did, so the least you can do is sit there nice and quiet and prim the way you used to be, while I tell my wife what happened!"

"Give him another whisky, Tricia, before he has an apoplectic seizure. I swear that's the reason he's so crotchety on his first night back. For the last two weeks, ever since he licked the last drop off the last bottle of scotch we had with us, he's been unbearable."

"Well, how would you be, love?" Archie appealed to his wife. "Permanently soaked to the skin, bitten alive by a complete spectrum of the insect world, plastered with mud, and with nothing female closer than a thousand miles except for this awful old bag? And how would you like it having nothing to eat but canned stew and then the booze running out? Sweet Bartlett pears, what a bog of a place! I would have given half the flaming ore content we found for one single big steak and a Glen Grant to wash it down!"

"You don't need to tell me," Mary laughed, turning to Tricia impulsively. "He nearly drove me mad! You know what he's like when he can't have his rich foods and his twelve-year scotch and his Havana cigars."

"No, I don't know what he's like when he can't have his little comforts, dear, but thirty years of being married to him makes me shudder at the very thought of what you must have had to put up with."

"I assure you I didn't put up with it for long," Mary answered, sipping her sherry luxuriously. "I took myself off for a walk after a couple of days of listening to him moaning, and shot some birds I found wallowing in a swamp so we'd at least have a change from that eternal stew."

"What happened to the supplies, Archie?" Tricia asked curiously. "It's most unlike you not to pop in a few little tidbits in case of emergencies."

"Blame our glamorous outback guide. Roughly half of us were from headquarters here in Sydney, but the surveyors I picked up in Wyndham along with said guide, Mr. Jim Bloody Barton. He thought he'd show us what sterling stuff bushmen are made of, so after assuring me that he'd take care of the supplies, he stocked up with what he usually eats himself-stew, stew, and more stew!"

"Don't be too hard on the poor man, Archie," Mary remonstrated. "After all, we were outsiders and he was in his element. If he came to the city, wouldn't you make it your business to dazzle him with all our urban frivolities?"

"What utter codswallop, Mary! It was you took all the starch out of him, not me!" He turned to his wife. "I just wish you could have seen her walking back into camp, love! There she was, strolling along in that ghastly British old maid uniform of hers, covered up to her belly button in stinking black mud and lumping about a dozen bloody great dead birds behind her. She'd tied their necks together with a bit of string and she was dragging them on the ground behind her, using the string like a tow-rope. I thought our glamorous Jim Barton was going to have a stroke, he was so mad!"

"He was, wasn't he?" Mary agreed complacently.

"Well, he hadn't wanted to bring Mary along in the first place, being a confirmed misogynist; reckoned she'd slow us down, be nothing but a dead weight and a bloody nuisance and a few other things. And there she was bringing us culinary salvation, just when he was sure he'd begun to show us what soft stuff we city slickers were made of. Hah! Leave it to my Mary to put him in his place! What a doughty old bird you are, love!"

"What sort of birds were they?" Tricia asked, trying to keep a straight face.

"Lord, I don't know!" Mary answered. "Just birds, big gangly tropical ones. They were fat, which was all I was interested in."

"But they might have been poisonous!"

Mary burst out laughing. "What rot! To the best of my knowledge, very little out of what we call living matter is actually poisonous, and if you run the odds through a big computer, you'll find chance is on your side most of the time."

"Barton the Bushman tried that one, too, come to think of it," Archie grinned reminiscently. "Mary chopped the birds up with some of the gravy out of a few cans of stew, and some sort of leaves she'd picked off a bush because she thought they smelled good. Barton the Bushman took off straight up in the air, reckoned they could be poisonous, but Mary just looked at him with that nerve-rattling stare of hers and told him that in her opinion our noses were originally designed to tell us whether things were edible or not, and her nose told her the leaves were perfectly all right. Of course they were, that goes without saying. She then proceeded to give him a long lecture on
Clostridium botulinum,
whatever that might be, which apparently grows in canned stew and is ten times as toxic as anything you can pick off a bush. Lord, did I laugh!"

"Were they happy with your cooking, Mary?" Tricia asked.

"It tasted like nectar and ambrosia rolled in one," Archie enthused before Mary could speak. "Holy galloping stingrays, what a meal! We gorged ourselves, while Mary sat there picking daintily at a wing with not a hair out of place and nary a smile. I tell you, Mary, you must be a local legend in Wyndham about now, with all those surveyors talking about you. You sure took the wind out of Barton the Bushman's sails!"

Tricia was helpless with laughter. "Mary, I ought to be madly jealous of you, but thank God I don't have to be! What other wife not only doesn't need to experience the slightest twinge of jealousy because of her husband's secretary, but can also rely on her bringing him safely home from whatever mess he's landed himself in?"

"It's easier to bring him home in the long run, Tricia," Mary said solemnly. "If there's one thing I hate, it's the thought of breaking in a new boss."

Tricia jumped up quickly, reaching for the sherry. "Have another glass, Mary, please do! I never thought I'd hear myself say I was thoroughly enjoying your company, but I don't know when I've had so much fun!" She stopped, her hand going to her mouth ruefully. "Oh, Lord! That sounded awful, didn't it? I didn't mean it that way, I meant that you've changed, come out of yourself, that's all!"

"You're only making things worse, love," Archie said gleefully. "Poor Mary!"

"Don't 'Poor Mary!' me, Archie Johnson! I know quite well what Tricia means, and I couldn't agree with her more."

Fifteen

When Tim knocked on the back door the first Saturday after Mary arrived back in Sydney, she went a little reluctantly to let him in. How would it be, seeing him again after this first separation? She pulled the door open in a hurry, words springing to her lips, but they never found voice; a great lump had blocked her throat, and she could not seem to clear it away to speak. He was standing on the doorstep smiling at her, love and welcome shining in his beautiful blue eyes. She reached out and took his hands in hers speechlessly, her fingers closing around them hard, the tears running down her face. This time it was he who put his arms around her and pressed her head against his chest, one hand stroking her hair.

"Don't cry, Mary," he crooned, rubbing his palm clumsily across her head. "I'm comforting you so you don't have to cry. There there, there there!"

But in a moment she drew away, groping for her handkerchief. "I'll be all right, Tim, don't be upset," she whispered, finding it and drying her eyes. She smiled at him and touched his cheek caressingly, unable to resist the temptation. "I missed you so much that I cried from happiness at seeing you again, that's all."

"I'm awfully glad to see you, too, but I didn't cry. Cripes, Mary, I missed you! Mum says I've been naughty ever since you went away."

"Have you had your breakfast?" she asked, fighting to regain her composure.

"Not yet."

"Then come and sit down while I make you something." She looked at him hungrily, hardly able to believe that he was really there, that he had not forgotten her. "Oh, Tim, it's so good to see you!"

He sat down at the table, his eyes never leaving her for a second as she moved about the kitchen. "I felt sort of sick all the time you were away, Mary. It was real funny! I didn't feel like eating much, and the TV made my head ache. Even the Seaside wasn't much good, the beer didn't taste the same. Pop said I was a bloody nuisance because I wouldn't keep still or stay in one place."

"Well, you're missing Dawnie too, you know. It must have been very lonely for you, not having Dawnie and not having me either."

"Dawnie?" He said the name slowly, as if pondering its significance. "Gee, I dunno! I think I sort of forgot Dawnie. It was you I didn't forget. I thought of you all the time, all the time!"

"Well, I'm back now, so it's all over and done with," she said cheerfully. "What shall we do this weekend? How about going up to the cottage, even though it's too cold to swim?"

His face lit up with joy. "Oh, Mary, that sounds just great! Let's go to Gosford right now!"

She turned to look at him, smiling at him so very tenderly that Archie Johnson would not have known her. "Not until you've had some breakfast, my young friend. You've got thin since I've been away, so we have to feed you up again."

Chewing the last morsel of his second chop, Tim stared at her in frowning wonder.

"What's the matter?" she asked, watching him closely.

"I dunno. ... I felt funny just now, when I was comforting you. . . ."He was finding it difficult to express himself, seeking words beyond his vocabulary. "It was real funny," he concluded lamely, unable to think of another way to put it, and aware that he had not succeeded in transmitting what he meant.

"Perhaps you felt all grown-up like your Pop, do you think? It's really a very grown-up sort of thing to do, comforting."

The frown of frustration cleared away immediately, and he smiled. "That's it, Mary! I felt all grown-up."

"Have you finished? Then let's get our things together and start, because it gets dark very early these days and we want to get as much work done in the garden as we can."

Winter in the area around Sydney hardly deserved the name, except to its thin-blooded residents. The eucalyptus forest retained its leaves, the sun shone warmly all the daylight hours, things continued to bud and blossom, life did not enter into the curiously stilled, sleeping suspension that it did in colder climes.

Mary's cottage garden was a mass of flowers: stocks and dahlias and wallflowers; the perfume saturated the air for the hundred yards around. Her lawn was much improved, and greener in the winter than at any other time. She had had the cottage painted white with a black trim, and the iron roof had been resilvered.

Driving into the little clearing, where it lay, she could not help but admire it. Such a difference between how it looked now and how it looked six months ago! She turned to Tim.

"Do you know, Tim, you're an excellent critic? See how much prettier it is, all because you said you didn't like it brown, and because you made me go to work on the garden? You were quite right, and it all looks so much nicer than it used to. It's a real pleasure to arrive these days. We must think of more things to do to keep the improvement going."

He glowed at the unexpected praise. "I like helping you, Mary, because you always make me feel as though I'm the full quid. You take notice of what I say. It sort of makes me think I'm just like Pop, all grown up into a man."

She turned off the engine and looked at him gently. "But you are all grown up into a man, Tim. I can't think of you any other way. Why shouldn't I take notice of what you say? Your suggestions and criticisms have been quite right, and so very helpful. It doesn't matter what anyone says about you, Tim, I will always think of you as being absolutely the full quid."

He threw back his head and laughed, then twisted to show her eyes sparkling with unshed tears. "Oh, Mary, I'm so happy I almost cried! See? I almost cried!"

She sprang out of the car. "Come on, lazy-bones, get cracking now, no displays of maudlin sentimentality! We've had far too much of that sort of thing this morning! Off with your good clothes and into your gardening gear, we've got a lot of work to do before lunchtime."

Sixteen

One evening not long after she returned from Archie Johnson's expedition, Mary read an article in the
Sydney Morning Herald
entitled "Teacher of the Year." It dealt with the remarkable success of a young schoolteacher in working with mentally retarded children, and it stimulated her to read more widely on the subject than she had. As she had seen things on the local library's shelves about mental retardation she had taken them out and pored over them, but until reading the newspaper article it had not occurred to her to delve more deeply.

The going was hard; she was forced to read with a medical dictionary at her elbow, though to a layman it was singularly unhelpful in elucidating the meaning of long, technical terms like
Porencephaly
and
Lipidosis
and
Phenylketonuria
and
Hepatolenticular Degeneration.
Indeed, many of the terms were so specialized even the medical dictionary did not list them. She waded miserably through a morass of such words, growing less and less sure of her ground, and less and less informed. In the end she went and saw the young teacher of the newspaper article, one John Martinson.