Tim Read online

  "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 aro
und. 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.

  "I was an ordinary primary schoolteacher until I went to England and got accidentally drafted into a school for mentally retarded kids," John Martinson said as he led her into the school. "It fascinated me from the very beginning, but I didn't have any formal training in the techniques and theories, so I just had to teach them the way I would any normal kids. These are the mildly retarded children I'm referring to, of course; there are many who are totally ineducable. Anyway, I was staggered at how much they learned, how much they responded to being treated like ordinary kids. It was terribly hard work, naturally, and I had to develop a massive storehouse of patience, but I persevered with them, I wouldn't give in, and I wouldn't let them give in either. And I began to study. I went back to school myself, I did research and went all over the place looking at other people's methods. It's been a very satisfying career."

  The deep-set, dark blue eyes surveyed her keenly all the time he talked, but without curiosity; he seemed to accept her presence as a phenomenon she would explain herself in her own good time.

  "So you think mildly retarded people can learn," Mary said thoughtfully.

  "There's no doubt of it. Too many uninformed people treat the mildly retarded child as more retarded than he really is, because in the long run it's easier to adopt this line than spend the staggering amount of time necessary to coax a normal response out of him."

  "Perhaps a lot of people feel they haven't got the special qualities needed," Mary offered, thinking of Tim's parents.

  "Perhaps. These kids long for approval, praise, and inclusion in normal family life, but so often they're left sitting on some outer perimeter, loved but half-ignored. Love isn't the whole answer to anything; it's an integral part of everything, but it has to be joined to patience, understanding, wisdom, and foresight when dealing with someone as complex as the mentally retarded child."

  "And you try to fuse love to all these other things?"

  "Yes. We have our failures, of course, quite a few of them, but we have a larger proportion of successes than most schools of this kind. Often it's well-nigh impossible to evaluate a child accurately, either neurologically or psychologically. You have to understand that first and foremost this child is organically impaired, no matter what degree of psychological overlay may also be present. Something upstairs in the brain isn't working just as it should."

  He shrugged his shoulders and laughed at himself. "I am sorry, Miss Horton! I haven't given you time to get a word in edgeways, have I? It's a bad habit of mine to talk the leg off my visitors without having the vaguest idea why they've come to see me."

  Mary cleared her throat. "Well, Mr. Martinson, it isn't a personal problem really, it's more an interested onlooker's curiosity which prompted me to get in touch with you. I'm very well acquainted with a young man of twenty-five who is mildly retarded, and I want to find out more about his situation. I tried reading, but I didn't understand the technical jargon very well."

  "I know. Authoritative tomes there are aplenty, but good basic books for the layman are hard to come by."

  "The thing is, since I commenced taking an interest in him, which is over the past nine months or so, he's shown signs of improving. It took a long time, but I've even taught him to read a tiny bit, and do very simple sums. His parents have noticed the change, and are quite delighted. However, I don't know how much progress I ought to expect, how hard I ought to push him."

  He patted her arm and put his hand beneath her elbows to signal her that it was time they moved on. "I'm going to take you on a tour of our classrooms, and I want you to look at all the children very closely. Try to find one who strikes you as similar to your own young man in behavior and attitude. We don't permit visitors to disturb our classes, so you'll find we do all our observing through one-way windows. Come with me now, and see what you think of our children."

  Mary had never really taken much notice of the scant few retarded children she had encountered during her life, for like most people she was acutely uncomfortable when caught staring. It amazed her now to discover how varied they were in physical make-up, let alone mental capacity; they ranged from children who looked quite normal to some so terribly malformed it was an effort not to turn the eyes away.

  "I used to teach a class of mental giants once," John Martinson said a little dreamily as he stood beside her. "Not one kid in the class who rated below 150 on the old IQ scale. But do you know, I get more satisfaction out of spending a month teaching one of these kids to tie his own shoelaces? They never jade or grow bored with achieving. I suppose because they have to work so hard to achieve. The harder anything is to attain, the more one prizes it, and why should that be any the less true for a retarded human being?"

  After the tour John Martinson conducted her to his little office and ordered her coffee.

  "Well, did you see anyone who reminded you of Tim?" he asked.

  "Several." She described them. "There are times when I want to weep for Tim, I pity him so much," she said. "He's so aware of his shortcomings, you see! It's dreadful to have to listen to the poor fellow apologizing because he's 'not the full quid' as he terms it. 'I know I'm not the full quid, Mary,' he'll say, and just to hear him breaks my heart."

  "He sounds educable, though. Does he work?"

  "Yes, as a builder's laborer. I suppos
e his workmates are kind enough to him in their way, but they're also very thoughtlessly cruel. They get a terrific kick out of playing practical jokes on him, like the time they tricked him into eating excrement. He cried that day, not because he'd been victimized but because he couldn't understand the joke. He wanted to be in on the joke!" Her face twisted, and she had to stop.

  John Martinson nodded encouragement and sympathy. "Oh, it's a pretty common sort of pattern," he said. "What of his mother and father, how do they treat him?"

  "Very well, all considered." She explained the circumstances of Tim's life to him, surprised at her own fluency. "But they worry about him," she ended sadly, "especially about what will happen to him after they pass away. His father says he'll die of a broken heart. I didn't believe it at first, but as time goes on I'm beginning to see that it's very likely."

  "Oh, I agree, very likely. There are many such cases, you know. People like your Tim need a loving home a lot more than we normal people, because they can't learn to adjust to life without it if once they've known it. It's a very difficult world for them, this one of ours." He considered her gravely. "I take it, from your choice among our children who remind you of Tim, that he's quite normal to look at?"

  "Normal to look at?" She sighed. "If only he was! No, Tim's not normal to look at. Undoubtedly he's the most spectacular young man I've ever seen-like a Greek god, for want of a more original simile."

  "Oh!" John Martinson dropped his eyes from her to his folded hands for a moment, then sighed. "Well, Miss Horton, I'll give you the titles of some books I think you'll have no trouble understanding. You'll find they'll help you."

  He rose and walked with her to the front hall, bending his head down to her courteously. "I hope you'll bring Tim to see me one of these days. I'd very much like to meet him. Perhaps you'd better call me first, though, because I think it would be better for him if you came to my home rather than the school."