Nurse Abroad(19)

Grant had known what the children liked ... lots of small presents, heaps of coloured wrapping, balloons, crackers, sweets, nuts, cherries, oranges, gay candy walking sticks, marzipan, and, knowing their keenest taste of all, books in plenty.

“Keep them quiet during the long winter evenings next year,” he said.



He had books for Sarah too, two on pioneering days, a book of New Zealand poems, a small but expensive phial ox scent.

Sarah, was suddenly ashamed that she had spent so little thought on his present. She had thought herself rather clever, achieving something so impersonal, and obviating the need for writing, to please the children, “To dear Grant ...!” when she had bought the book token.

She looked up, caught his look of quizzical amusement over their bright heads.

“When I choose my book,” he said solemnly, “you must write in it.” Sarah flushed.

He said to the children, “But now come out and see your main presents.” He shepherded them outside, except Mrs. Mac, who said she would get busy on the dinner.

Grant led them across the old stables and through to a small room behind. He opened the door carefully, and there, tied beside a bed of straw each, were two puppies, one a black-and-white sheepdog for Rory, and the other a golden spaniel for Pauline.

His reward lay in the rapturous and incredulous delight of both children. Pauline looked bemused.

“To have a pony and a dog!” she said, and immediately: “I shall call him Jed.” She flung her arms around Grant, kissed him.

Rory would think out the name for his dog later, true to type. No sudden decisions for him. The children were down on their knees in the straw. Sarah felt Grant’s hand under her elbow.

“Come and see your main present now ... only I’m afraid it’s not a live one ... or even a new one!”

He drew her out of the stable and round to the right.

“It was my uncle’s,” he said, mysteriously. “I’ve had it reconditioned.”



He flung open the double doors, and there, in all the glory of new Duco, was a neat, not-too-modern Austin.



Sarah caught in her breath, sought for words. “Oh, Grant ... how truly lovely. Now I’ll be able to—” She stopped.

He finished it for her, unsuspecting her true meaning:

“Now you’ll be able to go to Cheviot, or to town, whenever you wish—and be independent. Most farmers’ wives have their own cars. Suits the menfolk better too—they can’t always spare the time.”

Sarah stood before him in a pale blue cotton frock, spotted in deeper blue, starry-eyed and flushed with pleasure.

“Grant, I—I don’t know what to say, it’s rather overwhelming.”

He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t want to burden you with having to be grateful. After all, you do pull your weight, whatever your original motives were.”

Sarah steadied her raptures, said in an offhand tone, “Oh, I see ... the labourer worthy of her hire, in fact.” She decided not to tell him just what having her own transport was going to mean to her.

Grant said, “The engine has been thoroughly overhauled, new tires put on, brakes tested. I had to make sure of everything. My uncle loved pottering about with the car’s innards, but he was a positive menace ... he didn’t have a clue.” He looked up at Sarah suddenly. “What’s the matter? You’ve lost your colour.”

That made Sarah crimson. “I feel all right,” she said quickly. “I think you’re imagining things.”

No, she couldn’t bring herself to tell Grant how Duncan’s carelessness about mechanical faults had affected all their lives.



The day was glorious. The dinner was really much too huge for midsummer, and they took an hour’s siesta after it, Sarah banishing the children to their own rooms, and carefully confiscating their sweets and chocolates temporarily.

Then they heard Grant shouting up the stairs that they could stir their lazy bones, he’d the picnic baskets and was going to take them to the sea, so grab their swimsuits.

The beach was a lovely one, with golden sands and a rocky shore where great green-blue Pacific rollers crashed and roared.

Grant said, as Sarah came up from driving through a huge breaker, shaking her wet hair out of her eyes. “I thought you’d have worn a bathing helmet. I thought girls didn’t like ruining their hair-do.”

She laughed, and pushed the wet locks back “Oh, I can’t bear rubber caps. I like the feel of the water rushing through my hair. Besides, I’m one of the lucky ones. My hair curls a bit, and seems to be self-setting. I just rinse the salt out, and it dries very quickly.”



She thought: He’s trying to accept me for what I am. He thought I was the type to spend half my time in beauty parlors ... he was just as surprised when he found me grubbing in the garden without gloves on. He can’t reconcile those things with his idea of a glamorous gold-digger.

She wasn’t to know Grant was thinking: Her brows and lashes really are as black as that. They don’t owe anything to art.

The water was surprisingly cold for such a warm day, stinging and refreshing, though, of course, not nearly as cold as northern waters.

When they came out Sarah stuck her head under a small spring that fell down the cliffs, then rubbed her head dry vigorously, her hair emerging as a tousled mass. She tugged a comb through it carelessly, and it curled upwards as naturally as a baby’s.

“There! I can’t be bothered fussing any more. Come on, kids, let’s play leapfrog.”

Presently she and Pauline went off behind the rocks to change, emerging in shorts and sun-tops, and found that Mrs. Mac had spread the picnic cloth. They did full justice to the sandwiches and mince-pies and goose-bones Grant had packed.

After their meal they explored the rock-pools with the children, Grant answering their endless questions about the different shells they found, with endless patience ... cockles, cat’s eyes, the tiny pink shells that looked like rose-petals but which Grant confessed they had always called toe-nails. There were mussels and limpets, crabs and sea-anemones, much as they had always known.

As the tide went down he showed them how to dig for pipis in the sand, bringing up a bucketful of the flat bivalves.

“They’re very tasty cooked,” he said. “If you can only get rid of the sand. Lovely with vinegar, pepper and salt. You really need to put them in a colander and let a tap run on them for about an hour. That gets all the grit away. Then drop them into boiling water.”

Pauline swallowed. Her eyes were apprehensive.

“You mean ... alive?”

He nodded. “Don’t you like the idea, Paul?”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t care if it’s sissy and silly, I—”

He cut in. “It’s all right, Pauline. I don’t eat crayfish—or do you call them lobsters?—for the same reason.”

“Oh, gee, you are—are a—what’s the word I want, Sarah?”

“I suppose you mean kindred spirit,” said Sarah, trying not to feel moved.

“Right ... tip the pipis out again,” commanded Grant. “They’ll soon burrow into the sand.” As the children bent to it, he said to Sarah, an amused glint in his eye, “Goes against the grain, doesn’t it?—To find your flinty partner can be so humane.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, subduing a dimple. “After all, isn’t there a saying ... So much good in the worst of us ...?”

He said in her ear, “One of these days that tongue of yours will earn you a clip on the ear!”

Her reply was as cool as ever and meant for his ears alone. “Is that the way the wild colonial manages women? By brute force? I find New Zealand men lack finesse.”

He was unperturbed. “My dear Sarah, if I allowed my tongue as much free rein as yours, I could win hands down in any verbal encounter we engaged in.”

“Why don’t you?” Her tone was provocative, challenging.

“Because, my dear, in spite of everything, I’m rather sorry for you.”

This left Sarah temporarily bereft of speech. Then the angry color flowed back into her cheeks.

“Thank you, Grant Alexander, but I believe I can do without your pity. I’m more than capable of fighting my own battles.”

“I’m sure you are. Thus far you’ve certainly won, haven’t you? The spoils of war are definitely yours.”

The spoils of war ... the legacy ... and the price she had paid was the lives of her mother and father ... she looked down, her eyes blurred with tears. Oh well, the children, unconscious of all this, were energetically helping the busy pipis to return to the safety of their wet sand.

Sarah summoned the rags of her philosophy to cover her. Grant Alexander himself this morning had put into her keeping the means for a certain measure of independence. As soon as the children went back to school at the beginning of February, she would take that part-time position at the nursing home that the matron had offered her a week ago, and which Sarah had reluctantly turned down because of lack of transport.

Despite this passage at arms, Sarah found Grant in festive mood for the rest of Christmas Day, thought she suspected this was for the children’s sakes.

They drove back fairly early, and because there were the cows to milk, the poultry to feed, and the men had gone to their homes for the day.