Authors: Rosemary McLoughlin
“Can’t say I know that word.”
“You soon will. Belongs to a bunch of misery gutses who don’t drink, smoke, gamble, dance, or want anyone to have a good time. Matron’s very strict. We’re all a bit
afraid of her, but as I say, highly qualified.”
The truck picked up speed on the steep slope into the town, which consisted of two wide intersecting streets with a war memorial in the centre.
“I’ll just unload all this and then I’ll drop you off at your house. Might be an idea to wake up the missus now.”
Charlotte shivered when she woke. Lochlann helped her on with her jacket.
“Relief to get away from that coastal heat,” said Scottie, putting on a cotton shirt before he drove on. “Smell that air. Can’t get any fresher than that. Fit for the
gods.”
They were met at the door of their three-bedroom weatherboard house by a welcoming Jean, Scottie’s wife, who had lit the fire in the stove, filled the water fountain – a tall
cast-iron container with a tap that sat on the edge of the stove and kept water hot – put flowers on the table and brought in essential provisions, as well as her own lamb casserole.
“Just give us a shout if you want anything, Doc,” said Scottie as he drove away. “Chalk and cheese,” he said to his wife beside him, answering the question before she
could ask him.
Jean wasn’t surprised when he couldn’t answer subsequent questions, knowing that he would have done most of the talking.
“Did you find out when the baby’s due at least?” she asked finally.
“What baby?” asked Scottie.
Lochlann held Charlotte’s arm to steady her. She was swaying as if she were still on board either the ship or the steam train. Every now and then the feeling of being in
motion came back to disconcert him as well.
“Let’s get you settled first,” he said. “Would you like a cup of tea and something to eat?”
“Nothing thanks. Couldn’t face a thing. Still feel ghastly.”
He guided her to the freshly made bed. They could smell the sunlight off the sheets when he turned back the covers. He retrieved her nightgown from the trunk and helped her undress. By the time
he found a tap to fill a glass of water for her, she was asleep.
Before attacking the casserole he went outside to have a look around. There were verandahs on three sides of the house. At the back were trees, on the left a water tank on a high wide platform,
under which was parked a Buick, on the right the surgery, which was attached to the house but had a separate entrance, and to the front was a street and above it on the hill, the hospital. One of
the sheds in the yard was full of chopped wood, and beside it a smaller open structure enclosed in wire netting, which he presumed was a hen house without hens. He couldn’t identify the
birdcalls or the shrubs or plants or the trees. Despite his weariness, he felt a stirring of interest in the unfamiliar nature of everything that surrounded him.
He re-entered the kitchen, looking forward to a bowl of lamb, with bread to soak up the juices, and strong sweet tea to finish.
There was a whirring sound in the hall. He identified the telephone on the wall and lifted the earpiece.
“Is that Redmundo 145?” asked a female voice.
“I’m not sure,” he answered, leaning into the mouthpiece. “I’ve only just arrived.”
“Are you the new doctor?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Putting you through. Go ahead, Matron.”
“Thank you, Cheryl.”
The matron was really sorry. She had seen Scottie drop them off and realised they must be feeling dreadful after their long trip but she had an emergency, a young man in excruciating pain with
an appendix that might rupture. There wasn’t time to send him on to the next town and there was no one else to call. If there was any way the doctor could see him . . .
“Of course, I’ll come straight up.”
“You know where it is?”
“Yes, Scottie pointed it out. I can see it from here. I’m on my way.”
As he walked with speed up the hill he hoped he would be equal to the task ahead and that he’d paid attention to the demonstrations he’d watched as a student. If he were in a city
hospital he wouldn’t be doing unsupervised surgery for years.
He had reason to be grateful to Matron Grainger that day and every day afterwards. She was a stickler for cleanliness and procedure and was expert in the administration of chloroform. Her age
(mid-thirties) and cold seriousness were the only impressions he had time to register before he scrubbed up.
“Thank you, Matron,” he said many times during the operation as she anticipated what was needed. “How many times have you assisted at one of these?”
“I’ve lost count. Over thirty at least.”
He didn’t tell her it was his first, and she may not have guessed, as everything worked out with textbook precision. He would have been unnerved by the unfamiliarity of the theatre if she
hadn’t been there to guide him and deal with the practicalities.
“Just think,” Matron said, tidying up and collecting all the instruments to be sterilised while Lochlann stitched the wound, “if you hadn’t arrived when you did young
Billy Ericsson here wouldn’t have made it.”
“He’s obviously destined for great things. We’ll have to follow his progress from now on to see what he achieves.”
When Lochlann arrived back at his house, replaying the operation in his mind, he looked at the shape in the bed, and for a second couldn’t think for the life of him who the person under
the coverlet could possibly be. He stood disorientated, swaying on his feet, trying to concentrate his mind and ignore his exhaustion. It was with a sickening jolt he remembered it was
Charlotte.
After three days Charlotte felt well enough to leave the bed, and her determination to be a wonderful wife resurfaced. Groceries, milk, bread and meat were delivered to the
door, so she didn’t have to face meeting any of the townspeople. She turned down Lochlann’s suggestion of bringing a woman in to help her.
“It can’t be too difficult with just the two of us,” she assured him. “It’s not as if I’ve never seen the inside of a kitchen.”
He lit the wood stove in the morning before leaving to do his house calls. Arriving back at one o’clock he saw a concerned man hovering at the gate wondering if he should rush in with a
bucket of water. He found Charlotte standing in the middle of the kitchen, her eyes streaming from the smoke, bewailing the fact she didn’t know what to do. Water in the vegetable and potato
saucepans hadn’t come to the boil, and lamb chops were lying cold in the pan. She had forgotten to stoke the stove earlier and had crammed in too many pieces of wood at the last minute,
cutting off air from the few embers that remained.
“I’m sorry. I thought I’d watched Cook so often I’d know what to do, but she had a range run on anthracite and this is so different.”
“Never mind. It will only take a minute.” He coaxed back the flame with kindling, an open flue and better placed wood, and was only thirty minutes late for afternoon surgery.
During the next week she shrivelled a joint of roast beef in an overheated oven and burnt two saucepans dry. Potatoes welded to the bottom of one of them wouldn’t soak off, so the pan had
to be thrown out. She scorched her hand picking up the metal tongs from the top of the stove, and dropped many slices of bread into the embers while trying to make toast. After a cast-iron baking
dish slipped on to the floor and splashed scalding fat over her legs, she told Lochlann she had changed her mind about not accepting help. Lochlann, for safety’s sake if for no other reason,
was relieved and employed Mrs Parker who had worked for the previous doctor and was thrilled to be asked. She started with two hours per day, but after adding shopping, cooking and gardening to her
cleaning duties, was soon doing a full week.
Every day, after their morning tea and a chat, with relief Charlotte took herself off to the back verandah where she sat on one wicker chair and put her feet up on another. Sometimes she read,
but more often she stared at the trees and the blue sky and contemplated her impending motherhood with satisfaction.
Mrs Parker felt honoured to be privy to the secrets of the house and especially enjoyed sharing the midday meal with the couple.
Many people were curious about the doctor’s wife. Only Scottie the mailman, and his wife Jean, had spoken to her since she arrived, and both reckoned she was putting on the dog. Mrs Parker
was proud to enlighten them that the doctor’s wife was not putting on the dog. Her accent was genuine, she explained. She was the daughter of a Lord. The reason she didn’t see anyone
was not because of snobbishness, but because of anxiety about her approaching confinement, especially since she had been so ill for all those weeks on the trip on the way over. Mrs Carmody, as Mrs
Parker called her, refusing to address her as ‘Charlotte’ seeing she was the daughter of a Lord, was ideal to work for as she never interfered or told her what to do. Mrs Parker
didn’t add that Mrs Carmody seemed to know so little about running a house she wouldn’t know what orders to give – her loyalty to her employers precluded giving out any negative
details.
“Would you like to be my receptionist instead?” Lochlann asked Charlotte, thinking she might be bored. “It would be a good way for you to get to know the townspeople.”
The startled look she gave him made him add, “It’s light work. You’d be sitting in a cubicle beside the phone so you wouldn’t have to move about or be on display.”
“I wouldn’t know what to do. I’ve no experience.” Her eyes pooled with tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think anything like that would be expected of
me.”
“It’s not. It’s not,” he rushed to reassure her. “It was for your sake I was suggesting it. I thought you might be looking for a bit of diversion since painting has
been ruled out.” Her paints and brushes remained unpacked as she said that, in her condition, even the thought of the smell of linseed oil and turpentine made her feel sick. “I already
have someone lined up if you’re not interested, so don’t think I’m putting you under any pressure.”
“That’s all right, then. I’d rather not expose our unborn child to infections brought in by shopkeepers and farmers when I don’t have to, if you don’t
mind.”
Lochlann told her to think no more about it – he sympathised with her misgivings. The position could now be offered to Marie Dawson, a kind intelligent widow whose children were reared and
whose warm personality would be popular with the patients.
Charlotte detected relief on Lochlann’s face after her refusal, and saw him jump the front gate when he returned to the surgery for the afternoon.
“Someone’s in a good mood,” smiled Mrs Parker, watching from the kitchen window. “Oh, for the energy of youth!”
Charlotte was glad of Mrs Parker’s presence in the house when Wombat Churchill came into the yard uninvited and began to split logs that had been thrown over the fence
early that morning by Billy Ericsson’s grateful father.
Mrs Parker took out a pot of tea and some Anzac biscuits to share with Wombat while they sat together in the shade on the side verandah under a passion-fruit vine. His disfigured face made
Charlotte shiver, and when he laughed – at least it looked as if that was what he was doing though it was hard to tell as his mouth had restricted movement, and there was no sound emerging
– he showed a few blackened teeth among the gaps and looked as if he wasn’t the full shilling. He kept looking towards the kitchen window.
Later, Mrs Parker asked Charlotte if she could spare the time to meet Wombat as he was too shy to come to the door.
“I’d rather not,” Charlotte answered. “What if his disease is catching?”
“He doesn’t have a disease,” Mrs Parker explained, keeping her voice low so that Wombat wouldn’t overhear. “He fell into a fire when he was four and was lucky it
was only his face that was burnt. Hasn’t said a word since that day.”
Charlotte experienced a flicker of fellow feeling.
“No one knows if his vocal chords were damaged or if it was pure fright that struck him dumb, poor coot. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Reluctantly, Charlotte went out and offered her hand. Wombat didn’t take it, miming that his hands weren’t clean, and made an odd little bow instead.
Next day she saw a dozen one-day-old chickens in the fowl pen, and a week later a pink and grey galah in a cage appeared on the verandah. Mrs Parker said to Charlotte that Wombat must have taken
a shine to her.
“I wish he hadn’t.”
Charlotte was feeling vulnerable. Used to being surrounded by servants, thick exterior walls, upper storeys, anterooms and separate entrances, she couldn’t get used to living in a six-room
wooden bungalow where every window could be looked into from the outside and where the paling fence, only waist high, left the garden exposed. “It’s not as if we want those
things.”
“He’s the town’s Good Samaritan,” Mrs Parker explained. “Helps out everyone who needs it with gardening and chopping wood in his spare time after he’s done a
full day’s work at the butter factory. The town would be a poorer place without him.” Mrs Parker voice had taken on a pleading tone. “Still lives at home. Parents are real
battlers.”
When Charlotte was young, Nurse Dixon rarely bothered to tell stories, but when she did they were always about ugly people who did nasty things to children. Looking at Wombat, the fear Charlotte
felt back then returned unbidden and paid no heed to her adult reasoning.
Keen to justify herself to Lochlann for rebuffing Wombat’s overtures of friendship, she said she was worried about the effect Wombat’s presence around the house would have on the
baby. “What if it’s born deformed?” she asked.
“That’s not possible. Pre-natal influences don’t work like that.” He did think her nervous attitude might be harmful, however, so asked Wombat if he would fence off a
section behind the surgery, the part furthermost from the house, and plant a vegetable garden there. A project dear to his heart, Lochlann said, hoping it would keep the affectionate man occupied
and out of Charlotte’s sight until after the baby was born. Wombat was grateful to be asked and was reluctant to accept payment. The pink and grey galah was removed by Mrs Parker when
Charlotte complained about its noise.