Guardian Nurse (8 page)

But for all her conscientious precaution she still
did
not
play the part properly; she fell asleep. She was angry with herself when she woke up. Why, the child could have tripped, tumbled in, rolled down into the moving stream.

The first thing she was aware of coming out of her doze was Jason’s shrill indignation, for Jason never kept a check on that. ‘You made me lose a lump of gold, proper gold, not fool’s,’ he stormed. ‘I don’t like you one bit!’

‘I’m sorry, little man, but it seemed to me you were too near the edge. You are now.’ The intruder lifted Jason, kicking as far as a plastered leg could kick, further up the bank. ‘Again we meet,’ he greeted Frances.

‘Mr. Uplands,’ she responded with a smile, ‘or I should say Trent—Trevor Trent.’

He smiled back and did not correct her. He also obviously waited for her name.

‘I’m Frances,’ she complied.

‘I was just strolling by the river,’ he proffered pleasan
tl
y. ‘Oh yes, I saw your fencer.’ He gave a reassuring and understanding nod. ‘All’s well.’ He looked appreciatively around him. ‘How lovely it is down here.’

“You
s
hould know,’ she laughed meaningly, remembering what both
Burn
and Jim had said about boyhood days.

‘I should,’ he agreed. Then he asked, ‘Boss away, I hear.’

‘In Sydney. You haven’t been down to see him?’

‘Not yet. Perhaps later
... But meanwhile I wanted to look at the lit
tl
e fellow. So’ ... smiling down at
Burn
’s sonno... ‘you’re Jason
.’

‘Nothing,’ said Jason.

‘Panning, were you? Let me show you how to really get gold.’

‘I don’t like you, not a bit. You lost my big nugget
!’

‘Jason
!
’ intervened Frances sternly.

‘He did
so
,
France! And I know about gold already.
I’ll
know a lot more because he’s bringing m
e
back a gold book.’

‘So you can read
!’
admired Trent.

This time that remark did nothing to Jason. There was no elated exchange of glances with Frances. Jason simply stuck out his lip and repeated, ‘Nothing.’

‘I’m afraid when he’s like that, he’s like that,’ said Frances apologetically. ‘I think we’d better go back to the house.’

Trevor Trent ran his hand up the back of his hair and said regretfully, ‘I’d carry him for you, but I hardly think
—
’

Frances, looking at Jason’s enraged small face, ‘hardly thought’ as well.

‘
You must excuse us,’ she sighed, ‘but that’s how it is. We’ll take it in easy stages. Don’t be concerned about us. But you could tell Jim if you run into him that we went on.’

‘I’ll
do that,’ he smiled back. ‘Goodbye, old fellow.’

Jason did not even say ‘Nothing.’

They took a long time to get home because Jason stubbornly insisted on walking every step. A few yards from the house Jim caught them up and carried Jason inside, Jason not objecting to Jim.

‘Wondered where you’d gone,’ the fencer said, putting the boy down on the bed at Frances’ direction. Frances supposed that he had been on another slope as Trev had sauntered back.

The next day Jason was difficult. Several times he mentioned Trevor Trent, only calling him the man who had lost him his gold, repeating how he didn’t like him.

‘Your father does.’

‘I don’t call him that,’ glowered Jason.

‘No, you call him
Burn
, and this is an interesting thing, darling, it’s not spelt as you thought.’ Cunningly Frances tried to change the discussion into a lesson. But Jason was in a bad mood and was not going to learn.

‘Nothing,’ he brought out again.

Frances decided she might have been overdoing the classes, and knowing how important it was to stop the minute there was the least boredom or restlessness, brought out the paints again, not objecting when Jason once more drew futuristic rivers and mountains. He soon got tired, though, and actually asked for a sleep.

‘But not in my room, in that hammock.’

‘That’s H,’ said Frances, ‘the letter shaped like a chair.’

Jason nodded, which was better than ‘nothing’ but not enough encouragement to go on with the impromptu instruction. She helped him to the hammock. This time she took no risk, she waited till he slept.
She felt quite confident about this.

And perhaps she was right and Jason wakened later
... or
perhaps the fraud lay doggo as he had before until she went away again. But she still couldn’t understand it. She hadn’t been far off, so how could he
not
be there when she came back barely twenty minutes later? Especially when he was gone from a garden so close and so visible from the house?

She dreaded raising an alarm a second time, yet this was something she could not delay, play around with. Her first encounter was Jim, and she babbled out her discovery, tears not far off.

He nodded sympathetically and soothed, ‘This time he can’t have gone far.’

They looked around for evidence of a laboriously dragged small leg, but on the smooth lawn nothing would have been brushed or flattened, and Frances was not really surprised when there were no signs.

Searching beside Jim, Burn West’s words after the last disappearance came starkly to Frances.

‘He’s in danger of being carried off ... kidnapped would be cloak and dagger ... less dramatic and more honest would be that Jason could be taken away.’

Had that happened now?

‘Here’s the young imp
!’
called Jim by the river, and racing to his side Frances saw Jason doubled up in the red boat.

‘You wicked boy!’ she called in vast relief, completely forgetting her child psychology. ‘You’re not supposed to play in the boat
!’

‘He looks more like he’s hiding in it,’ estimated Jim, laughing at the little secret figure.

Thanking the fencer, Frances went down the bank and plucked Jason out of the boat. ‘Why are you so bad?’ she cried.

‘Nothing.’

‘Oh, Jason, don’t answer nothing to France,
tell
France. Why did you pretend you were asleep again?’

‘Didn’t either. I was
so
asleep. Except not in this eye.’ Jason demonstrated the one-eyed sleep. ‘And I saw him in the awake eye. He was looking at me from up on the hill behind the trees. When he looked away again I came and hid in the red boat from him.’

‘You’re telling fibs, Jason, not just stories, big untruths. It’s very naughty of you to make up such bad things.’—That ‘France’ and ‘Berne’ of Jason’s had hurt no one, Frances thought, but Jason’s father would be annoyed at this new flight of quite malicious fancy.

‘’Tis
so
true! He was looking down at me, and I
don’t like him. I don’t want his gold.’

‘Oh—Mr. Trent.’ Frances spoke with relief.

‘Yes, that man.’

They were walking slowly back from the river now. Jim had returned to work.

Frances thought sensibly that if she was to consider Jason’s story, and after all a child, too, must be considered, then
Burn
West’s old mate certainly must be instructed not to scare them all like this a second time. But, she decided progressively, it must be
Frances Peters
who advised him of this, not
Burn
. Flushing vividly, she imagined the inevitable exchange of grins between the two men if
Burn
did the forbidding then later listened to a very amusing story that Trent had to relate.

‘Why don’t you like Mr. Trent?’ she found herself asking Jason unreasonably, unreasonable because you did not question an adult’s likes or dislikes, so why a child’s?

‘I don’t.’

‘He likes you.’

‘He doesn’t
!’

‘Jason, you’re being difficult.’

‘I’d like to do some mountains,’ said Jason, changing the subject, ‘but inside my room.’

Jim came over to carry him into the house. As they went up to it Frances asked him, and she could not have explained why she did so: ‘Yesterday when we were at the panning, Jim, and you were in the field, were you talking to anyone?’

‘Thought you heard voices, eh? I do myself down at the river,’ Jim chuckled. ‘No, just me and the fence.’

‘And him,’ disliked Jason blackly. His little face showed clearly that he was going to be in a difficult mood.

When they got him to his room Frances made him comfortable, put paper and paints handy, then asked Sandra to pop in now and then while she slipped out for a while. She went to the garage and took out her small car. There was something she had to do.

She was going to Uplands to tell Trev to please,
please
,
until things settled anyway, keep away from Jason. It was impolite, she knew, but she had no choice.

It was only some ten minutes along the road to Uplands. She got out at the gate to open it only to find it bolted. Evidently Trev was not stopping here, only ‘spinning’ out from Wagga Wagga, as Jim had said, which meant that Jason would have been story-telling today, the man would not have travelled that distance both yesterday as well as now.

About to give up and come back, possibly tax Jason, Frances suddenly knew she would not rest until she satisfied herself, so she left her car and walked up the long drive
... over half a mile, surely
... to the homestead. It proved much older than West of the River, though, of course, West was quite recent.

It was also undoubtedly not being lived in at all.

Frances just stood and stared at that last fact.

She knocked on the doors, even tried them. She
w
alked round the house. After a while she came back to the front door, noting the dust around the doormat, other unmistakable signs of a substantial period of absence. There isn’t anyone here, she thought, and there hasn’t been. Not even briefly ‘spinning’ in and out. No one at all at Uplands.

She walked slowly and thoughtfully back to the car, got in, drove home.

She sat beside Jason who was still absorbed with the posters and she remained so quiet that at length he asked, ‘France, why are you looking at me like that?’

His little voice breaking in on the drift of her wonder startled her. For a moment she still stared at him. Then in supreme inspiration she retorted ‘Nothing’, received Jason’s shocked look ... then actually his delighted chuckle.

She laughed, too. It was all (or she was determined to make of it) a fuss over nothing.

But when the men told her at the evening meal that Burn would be back tomorrow she felt a vast relief.

CHAPTER SIX

Frances
decided to say nothing to
Burn
about what had happened, though if the fencer mentioned Jason’s second disappearing act to his boss and West demanded an explanation she was aware that she must tell all. But she doubted if Jim would bring the subject up; like all the employees at West of the River he led a busy day-to-day existence, for country life always demanded that. Then seen, too, in retrospect the whole thing seemed rather trivial and childish. Just a simple instance of a naughty little boy having
a
lark.
—
(If deeper down in Frances she had other thoughts as well, she succeeded in putting them aside.)

It was also less embarrassing to Frances to adopt this attitude, since a full report to
Burn
would have made her look a fool in his eyes. Someone who could not judge a friend from an interloper. Someone without discernment. So Frances decided to keep everything quiet, and as Trev Trent was away in Wagga Wagga it could be weeks, a month, before he encountered Burn, and by that time the matter become one of such small interest that with luck it might never be brought up at all. Trev might not grin, ‘Yes, I met Frances, but she gave me the brush-off. You certainly drilled her well,
Burn
.’ The dislike Jason had taken to him need not be recounted. The little boy’s hiding away in the boat from him, which she felt sure now must be based entirely on Jason’s imagination, could be forgotten.

Fortunately
Burn
West, apart from a casual ‘How
have things been going?’ for which he did not wait a reply, did not delve. He had brought things with him, things he obviously was as anxious to open as Jason and Frances were anxious to see.—Though Jason characteristically pretended no interest at all.

The little boy stood apart as Frances and
Burn
pored over his first correspondence lesson; drawing each other’s attention to some aspect of it,
but ...
cunningly ... never Jason’s. But even then the boxes of bright pencils, the chalks, the small blackboard did not win him, though when
Burn
narrowed his eyes significan
tl
y at Frances and they both moved casually out of the room they smiled as they heard his clumsy little leg dragging behind his agile one as he tried to hot-foot it to the table to gloat at the things that awaited there. They watched through the half-closed door as he touched the piles of new exercise books, the reading primers. His fingers on the pencil boxes and rubbers were almost reverent.

‘Here,’ whispered Frances joyfully to
Burn
, ‘is a quick brain.’