Nancy continued her walk, her pace quickening joyously as she neared the hospital again. Andy would be so thrilled to hear the news! She knew better than to run once she entered the hospital but hurried nevertheless, beaming as she arrived at the bedside. ‘You’ll never guess . . . but I’ll read the letter aloud to you, then you’ll have an excellent reason for getting better,’ she said breathlessly. ‘Oh, Andy, she’s coming to visit us at the Walleroo.’
She read him the letter from start to finish, saying as she ended: ‘So we must send someone to meet the SS
South Pacific
, because the upcountry journey is better tackled in company, don’t you think?’
She smiled hopefully at her husband but he was shaking his head at her. ‘Nancy, didn’t you notice the date? She must have arrived in Australia a week ago; she could be anywhere by now, because as she says in her letter she’ll need to earn the money to pay for the journey as she goes along.’
‘Oh, Andy,’ Nancy wailed. ‘She’ll think – she’s bound to think – that we didn’t care enough about her to meet the ship!’
‘She won’t think that; she’ll just think we’re too busy to spare the time,’ Andy said comfortingly. ‘But there’s no help for it, so we’ll just have to wait till she turns up and then give her a grand welcome. We’re bound to be home before she arrives.’
‘Yes, I guess you’re right. And I’m sure she’ll stay for a good while because it’s the heck of a journey,’ Nancy said. ‘It’ll be lovely to have Jess’s daughter here. Do you know, darling, I still miss Jess.’
‘Of course you do,’ Andy said heartily. ‘You’ve never said much, Nan, but I know how much you would have liked a daughter. This child is an orphan; I reckon she’ll be happy to stay for a good long time.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ Nancy said absently. She was stroking his arm as she spoke, looking idly at the scars which she knew he had received when he had been struck by shell fragments during the First World War. Now, she saw one she had never noticed before. It was a thin straight line, three or four inches long, with stitch marks on either side, and for a moment she stared at it, puzzled, tracing it with her forefinger. ‘What on earth . . .’ she was beginning, when suddenly the truth burst upon her. ‘Well, I never did . . . you never told me you had a blood transfusion when you were injured, Andy.’ She looked across at him and saw the lurking smile she loved dawn on his face. ‘This scar is from a blood transfusion, isn’t it? I’m sure I can’t be mistaken.’
‘Too right,’ Andy said. He was still smiling. ‘I reckon my life’s been saved twice, don’t you? The first time, this little blonde nurse took one look at me and realised I was bleeding internally and needed a blood transfusion. Lucky, wasn’t I?’
‘I don’t know why I never noticed it before,’ Nancy said slowly, only half listening to her husband’s words. ‘I suppose it was because your arms are covered with fair hair and there are several scars on them. Andy, why are you laughing? Why are you looking at me like that?’
Andy shrugged, but he was still smiling. ‘I’ve waited twenty-five years for you to remark on that scar. I guess I didn’t make much of an impression on you, though you made a hell of a one on me, you little blonde nurse, you! When I got your letter and photograph in answer to my advert, I was almost sure you were the nurse who’d saved my life out in France . . . almost sure, but not certain. Then, when you came down the gangway . . . well, I knew at once, of course. At first, I was a bit hurt that you didn’t recognise me – I’d recognised you, after all – but then I remembered the number of patients who must have passed through your hands, and I remembered how thin and pale I had been after losing all that blood, not a bit like my usual self.’ He grinned at her shyly, then slid his hand up her arm, across her shoulder and round the back of her neck, until his fingers were buried in the soft golden floss of her hair. ‘I guess I fell in love with you that very first time, when you bent over the bed and said, “You’ll be fine, soldier, but I think maybe your bandage is loosening.”’
Nancy gasped and turned to stare into her husband’s familiar, much-loved face. Her mind flew back to that makeshift hospital in France, to tent No. 3, and the young soldier bleeding to death from an internal haemorrhage, needing help, needing her. For a moment, she could only stare at him as tears welled up in her eyes and began to fall down her cheeks. Then, heedless of her surroundings, of the other men on the ward, she cast herself on his chest, her arms round his neck, and began desperately kissing everything she could reach. ‘I love you, love you, love you,’ she said wildly. ‘When we first married, I was ashamed of the way I felt about you, because it made me seem fickle and shallow, but how different it would have been if I’d recognised you! Oh, Andy, you’ve made me feel such a fool.’
Andy sat up straighter in his bed and smoothed her hair back from her damp face with a gentle hand. ‘It don’t matter,’ he said gruffly. ‘Nothing matters except that you love me and I love you.’ He chuckled deep in his chest. ‘What do twenty-five years matter when all’s said and done? Oh, Nancy Sullivan, you’ve spent twenty-five years making me the happiest man on earth, and that’s all that matters.’
Chapter Fourteen
Debbie arrived in Sydney on an extremely hot day in early February. She was enchanted by her first view of the great modern city, but it would be idle to pretend she was not disappointed when she examined the crowds who had come to meet the ship and was unable to see the tall, blond figure she had half expected amongst them. Once she got on to the quayside, she saw that there were several people holding up placards with names written across them, but hard though she stared she could not see her own name anywhere. Plainly, none of the Sullivans, not only Pete, thought it necessary to undertake the tremendous journey just to meet a young girl whom they did not really know.
However, she told herself that she understood. Pete could not have been back on the Walleroo very long and doubtless had a great many demands on his time. Besides, despite her first intention to work en route, she had been advised by a young officer on the SS
South Pacific
that this was not a good idea. He said she should catch a train which would take her most of the way, and then finish her journey by ‘cadging a lift’ – his words – with someone delivering mail or goods to the cattle stations. ‘Get to your friends first, then see what they advise,’ he told her. ‘Remember, they want your company . . . and I believe there’s work enough for dozens on most cattle stations.’
Right now, however, the young seaman who had carried her trunk down the gangway was saying that he was prepared to carry it all the way to the railway station if she was willing to pay him a few bob. ‘I mean to buy a present for me girlfriend,’ he explained. ‘But I spent up at the last port, so any money I can earn is welcome.’
They reached the railway station and found the train for Queensland already waiting by the platform. So whilst Debbie bought her ticket, the young seaman stood guard over her trunk, then bade her a hasty goodbye and set off for what he described as ‘a poke around the shops’.
It was a pity in a way, Debbie thought, as she climbed aboard the train, that she had decided not to get a job right here in Sydney, and then to make her way up to Queensland by slow degrees, because she would have seen more of the country that way. But the young officer had been right. No one would want to employ a waitress, or a shop assistant, or a barmaid for a matter of days, so she would have had to work perhaps for several weeks before moving on. That would have prolonged the journey ridiculously, and besides, the train fare was not yet beyond her means. In any case, the truth was that she was longing to reach the Walleroo. She kept telling herself that Pete would have changed, that he might be married or at least engaged, that she must not place any reliance upon his feeling for her as she felt for him. But such good sense made no impression on her hopeful heart. What was more, once aboard the train, she soon realised that the countryside trundling past the windows only seemed strange and wonderful for a short period. The small towns through which they passed were all rather similar and the bush was mainly gum trees, brush and a tangle of undergrowth interspersed by stretches of desert where almost nothing grew. Long before they reached Queensland, she had grown weary of the journey and was eager to reach her destination. There was no dining car aboard the train, and when they stopped at small wayside stations she was invariably offered the same food in the refreshment room, so that as well as growing weary of the journey she also grew extremely tired of being presented with a large – and tough – beef steak topped by two greasy fried eggs and surrounded by flabby chipped potatoes. Then, of course, she had left Sydney in hot, dry sunshine, but as she travelled further north the weather changed. It became sultry and humid, and the scenes outside the windows of her carriage were more often than not obscured by sudden downpours: tropical rainstorms accompanied by thunder and lightning which seemed intent on ripping the sky apart whilst Debbie watched, awed, as much impressed as frightened by the display.
She got on well with her fellow travellers, all of whom were extremely friendly and helpful, and as they scuttled aboard the train through swirling rain and collapsed into their seats she asked her neighbour, a tousle-headed youth called Mick, about the change in the weather which had started a couple of days before.
‘Oh my word, didn’t no one tell you about the wet in Queensland and the Territories?’ the young man said, staring at her incredulously. ‘This is a durned big country and there’s two completely different types o’ weather. As you get further north, I reckon it becomes more tropical like; there’s rain forests and that, and you get what they call the wet. Right now we’re in February and that’s often the worst month, with storms and torrential rain every few days. Why, the folk runnin’ cattle an’ sheep stations can be cut off for weeks at a time.’
‘Oh!’ Debbie said, considerably startled. She had assumed that the whole country would follow a similar weather pattern and had congratulated herself, on board the ship, on her wisdom in choosing what she had thought of as the Australian summer in which to arrive. Most of the books she had read, now she came to think of it, had concentrated upon New South Wales and Victoria, with a sideways glance at Perth, and had said very little about Queensland. So she gazed with new interest at her companion, who had already informed her that he had been born and bred on a cattle station a hundred miles from Cairns and knew the whole area well. ‘Then I’ve come in the monsoon season, have I?’
The young man shook his head indulgently. ‘It ain’t as bad as that,’ he told her. ‘Sure, we get plenty of rain and sometimes the floods get real serious, but it don’t just rain for four or five months like it does in some countries. We can have a fortnight of decent weather, with sunshine every day, and the cattle’s coats steamin’, then the dark clouds begin to pile up and you can hear the thunder rolling, and you’ll have a downpour and storms for another couple of days.’ He chuckled. ‘You ought to have come in the dry if you wanted to see much of the country while it’s not under water.’
This conversation gave Debbie fresh heart. So there was a perfectly reasonable explanation for the absence of the Sullivan family when her ship had docked. From what Mick said, the Walleroo could have been cut off by floods, or they might never have received her letter. There had been sacks of mail aboard the train which she had watched being deposited on small station platforms as they made their way steadily north, but now she realised that much of the mail contained in the sacks might not arrive at its destination for many weeks. So it was perfectly possible that she and her letter might arrive simultaneously at the Walleroo.
From the moment of learning about the havoc wrought by the wet, Debbie cheered up immeasurably. Subconsciously, she had actually begun to doubt her welcome at the Walleroo. If Pete had married, then it was not impossible that his parents – and his new wife – might see her as an unwanted intruder, and if so, whatever would she do? But if they had never received her letter, or had been cut off by floods, their failure to come and meet her was perfectly understandable.
After Mick’s revelations regarding the wet, Debbie began to enjoy the journey once more, and by the time she and her trunk were deposited on the station platform at Mungana her natural optimism had reasserted itself and she was looking forward to her arrival at the Walleroo.
Mick had also been bound for Mungana, though from there he would travel a hundred miles in the opposite direction to the Walleroo. He went with her to see if he could find her some sort of vehicle to take her out to the cattle station, then booked her into a small hotel for the night and bade her a cheery farewell. ‘You’ll be good. You’ll get there, and it’s a bonza homestead,’ he said earnestly, though Debbie knew perfectly well that he had never set eyes on the Walleroo. ‘Just remember there’s precious few pretty girls in the outback, so everyone will want to help you. So long, Debbie.’
Since the young man had found several drivers willing to take her at least part of the way to her destination, Debbie went to bed with an unworried mind, and despite the sudden drumming of rain on the roof in the early hours slept soundly till morning.
Debbie arrived at the Walleroo during one of the fine spells which Mick had told her about. The last stage of her journey had been accomplished in a truck and the driver had gone out of his way to set her down within feet of the veranda, so she bade him a grateful farewell, heaved her trunk off the ground with considerable difficulty, and began to climb the veranda steps. She was still struggling with the trunk when two things happened simultaneously. The screen door burst open to reveal a very large and very black woman with a watermelon smile and small, sparkling black eyes. And at the same moment a hand reached over Debbie’s shoulder, lifted the trunk as if it weighed no more than a feather, and deposited it upon the veranda itself. Debbie squeaked and glanced up to find a tall young man grinning down at her. He had clumpy brown hair and a great many freckles, but her heart dropped for this was most definitely not Pete. However, it would be rude to let her disappointment show so she said timidly: ‘Jamie? I don’t think you can be Jacko because Mrs Sullivan always called him the baby of the family, and I know you aren’t Pete . . .’