The Man She Could Never Forget

‘Might be for the research station. Plenty of people coming and going there,’ Harold offered, but Bessie was going to have the last word.

‘In that case you don’t need to do the yard.’

Caroline decided she couldn’t stand behind an allemande vine, wild with shiny green leaves and brilliant yellow trumpet flowers, eavesdropping any longer.

‘Bessie, Harold, it’s me, Caroline!’

She passed the bush and came into view, expecting to be welcomed like a prodigal son—or daughter in her case—but to her utter bewilderment both of them burst into tears.

Eventually they recovered enough from their shock to rush towards her, arms held out.

‘Oh, Caroline, you have come back. Now we have you and Keanu back where you belong, everything will be good again.’

Wrapped in a double, teary hug, Caroline couldn’t answer.

Not that she would have been able to. Although she knew he was here—knew only too well—hearing Keanu’s name knocked the breath out of her. But it had been the last part—about everything being good again—that had been the bigger shock.

But it also gave her resolve. If the trouble was so bad the islanders thought she, whom they’d always considered a helpless princess, could help, things must be bad.

She eased out of their arms and straightened up. Of course she had to help. She didn’t know how, but she certainly would do everything in her power to save the islanders’ livelihood and keep much-needed medical care available to them.

Enough of the doormat.

M’Langi was her home.

‘But why are you working in the house, Bessie? What happened to the young woman Dad appointed after Helen left?’

With Keanu, a voice whispered, but she had no time for whispering voices right now.

‘That was Kari but from the time that Ian got here we thought it would be better if she kept her distance,’ Bessie explained. ‘Ian is a bad, bad man for all he’s your family. In the end I said I’d do the housework. I mind Anahera’s little girl too, but she’s no trouble, she plays with all your toys and loves your dolls, dressing and undressing them.’

Caroline smiled, remembering her own delight in the dolls until Keanu had told her it was girl stuff and she had to learn to learn to make bows and arrows and to catch fish in her hands.

‘Anahera?’ she asked, as the name was vaguely familiar.

‘Vailea, her mother, worked as the cook at the research station while we were caretakers there. But there’s all kinds of funny stuff going on there too, so now she’s housekeeper at the hospital and Anahera—she’s a bit older than you and went to school on the mainland; her grandmother lived there—well, she’s a nurse here so I mind her little one.’

It was hard to absorb so much information at once, so Caroline allowed herself to be led up to the house, where a very small child with dark eyes, olive skin and a tangle of golden curls was lining up dolls in a row on the cane lounge that had sat on the veranda for as long as Caroline could remember.

The cane lounge, potted palms everywhere, a few cane chairs around a table, once again with a smaller pot in the middle of it, and the swing she and Keanu had rocked in so often—this was coming home …

‘This is Hana,’ Bessie said, leading the little girl forward. ‘Hana, this is Miss Caroline. She lives here.’

Caroline knelt by the beautiful child, straightening one of the dolls.

‘Just Caroline will do,’ she said, ‘or even Caro.’

Caro.

No one but Keanu had ever called her Caro, but now wasn’t the time to get sentimental over Keanu, for all he looked like a Greek god, and had sent shivers down her spine just being close to him.

She was here to …

What?

She’d come because she was unhappy, seeking sanctuary in the place she’d loved most, but now she was here?

Well, she was damned if she was going to let things deteriorate any further.

But first she had to find out exactly how things stood, and whether whoever ran the hospital would give her a job, and most importantly of all right now, she had to find the steel in her inner self to work with Keanu …

‘Are you being paid, Bessie?’ she asked, thinking she had to set her own house in order first.

Bessie studied her toes then shook her dark, curly hair.

‘Anahera pays me for looking after Hana, but it’s been a while since Harold got a wage.’

Caroline was angry. She knew their fondness for the Lockhart family and gratitude for what her father had done for the islands would have kept them doing what they could whether they were paid or not.

Knew also that the couple wouldn’t be starving. Like all the islanders, and many people she knew on acreage on the mainland, they had their own plot of land around their bure—the traditional island home—and Harold would grow vegetables and raise a few pigs and chickens, but that didn’t make not paying them right.

‘Well, now I’m here we’ll shut off most of the rooms and I’ll just use my bedroom, bathroom and the kitchen. I can pay you to keep them clean and I’ll vacuum through the rest of the place once a fortnight.’

Bessie began to mutter about dust, but Caroline waved away her complaint.

‘Lockharts have been eating dust since the mine began,’ she said, ‘so a little bit on the floor of the closed rooms doesn’t matter. And now,’ she announced, ‘I’m going down to the hospital to ask whoever runs it for a job. Even if they can’t pay me, they can surely find me something to do.’

She left her case and headed back down the way she’d come. Work would give her the opportunity to find out what was going on. Even small hospitals were hotbeds of gossip.

Although …

Of course she could work with Keanu. She didn’t know the man he’d become so she’d just treat him like any other colleague.

Male colleague.

Friendly, but keeping her distance …

Definitely keeping her distance, given how the accidental touches had affected her …

Lost in her muddled thoughts, she was halfway to the hospital when she remembered the only people there had been Keanu and an aide. What had he said? Hettie and Sam were on a clinic run? Caroline knew the hospital ran weekly clinics on the other inhabited islands of the group and today must have been one of those days.

That was probably the only reason Keanu had accepted her help with the injured man earlier.

She walked back up the hill, wondering why she’d thought returning to the island was such a good idea.

Wondering how things had gone so wrong, not only with the island but between herself and Keanu.

Had she judged him too harshly?

Refused to accept he might have had a good reason for stopping communication between them?

But surely they’d been close enough for him to have given her a reason—an explanation?

Hadn’t they?

Totally miserable by the time she reached the house, she went through to her old bedroom and unpacked the case that either Bessie or Harold had left there.

Then, as being back in her old room brought nostalgia with it, she slowly and carefully toured the house.

Built like so many colonial houses in those days, it had a wide veranda with overhanging eaves around all four sides of it. She started there, at the front, looking down at the hospital and beyond it the airstrip, and onto the flat ground by the beach, and although she couldn’t see the research station, she knew it was there, sheltered beneath huge tropical fig trees and tall coconut palms.

As she knew the village was down there, on the eastern shore, nestled up against the foothills of the plateau. The village had been built on land given by her father, after the villagers on another island had lost their homes and land in a tsunami.

Now some of the villagers worked in the mine and at the hospital, and worshipped in the little white church they’d built on a rocky promontory between the village and the mine. A chapel built to celebrate their survival.

She knew the beach was there as well, but that too was hidden, although as she turned the corner and looked across the village she saw the strip of sand and the wide lagoon enclosed by the encircling coral.

On a clear day, from here and the back veranda, she’d have been able to see most of the islands that made up the M’Langi group, but today there was a sea haze.

The western veranda formed the division between the main house and the smaller copy of it, an annexe where Helen and Keanu had lived.

No way was she going there now, although their home had been as open to her as hers had been to Keanu.

This time she entered the house through the back door, through the kitchen with its different pantries opening off it and the huge wooden table where she and Keanu had eaten breakfast and lunch.

The pantries had provided great places for hide and seek, although Grandma’s cook had forever been shooing them out, afraid they’d break the precious china and crystal stored in them.

Caroline opened the door of one—empty shelves where the crystal had once reflected rainbows in the light.

The sight sent her hurrying to the dining room, on the eastern side of the main hall. Looking up, she saw with relief that the chandelier still hung above the polished dining table.

Grandma had loved that table and the grandeur of the chandelier. She had insisted Caroline, Keanu and Helen join her there for dinner every evening, the magic crystals of the chandelier making patterns on the table’s highly polished surface.

Helen would report on anything that needed doing around the house, and talk to Grandma about meals and what needed to be ordered from the mainland to come over on the next flight.

Grandma would quiz Keanu and Caroline about their day at school—what they’d learned and had they done their homework before going out to play.

Ian might have sold her grandmother’s precious crystal to cover his gambling debts but at least he’d left the chandelier.

He must have been desperate indeed to have packed the delicate objects before sending them out on the boat that made a weekly visit to the harbour at Atangi.

Before or after he’d started skimming money from the mine?

Taking away the livelihood of the workers?

Shame that she could be related to the man brought heat to her cheeks, but what was done was done.

Unless?

Could she do something to help set things to rights?

Refusing to be waylaid, she continued with her exploration. Next to the dining room was the big entertaining room Grandma had always called the Drawing Room—words Caroline still saw in her mind with capital letters. Here, at least, things remained the same. The furniture, the beautiful old Persian carpets—Ian couldn’t have known they were valuable.

But the elegant, glass-fronted cabinets were empty. Grandma’s precious collection of china—old pieces handed down to her by her mother and grandmother—was gone.

That was when tears started in Caroline’s eyes. Ian had not only stolen physical things, he’d stolen her memories, memories of sitting on the floor in front of the cabinet while Grandma handed her one piece at a time, telling her its history, promising they would be hers one day.

That she’d lost them didn’t matter, but the treachery of Ian selling things he knew had been precious to his mother turned her tears to anger.

Taking a deep breath, she moved on into Grandma’s sitting room.

The little desk she’d used each day to write to friends was there, and Caroline could feel the spirit of her grandmother, the woman who, with Helen, had brought her up until Grandma’s death when Caroline was ten.

Opening off the wide passage on the other side were large, airy bedrooms, all with wide French doors and folding shutters that led onto the veranda. The filmy lace curtains still graced the insides of the windows, although they were beginning to look drab.

Grandma’s was the first room, the huge four-poster bed draped with a pale net, the faint scent of her presence lingering in the air. There’d always been flowers in Grandma’s room, as there had been on the dining-room table and the cabinets in the drawing room …

Leaving her exploration, she hurried out into the garden, minding the thorns on the bougainvillea as she pulled off a couple of flower stems, then some frangipani, a few yellow allemande flowers, some glossy leaves, and white daisies.

Back inside she found vases Ian must have considered too old and cracked to fetch a decent price. She filled them with water and carried them, one by one, into the three rooms where flowers had always stood.

Soon she’d do more—head into the rainforest for leaves and berries and eventually have floral tributes to Grandma that would rival the ones she used to make.

But there was still half a house to explore.

Her father’s room was next, unchanged although the small bed beside her father’s big one reminded Caroline of the rare times Christopher had come to the island. The visits hadn’t lasted long, but she and Keanu had always shared their adventures with him. They would put him in his wheelchair and show him all their favourite places, probably risking his life when they wheeled him down the steep track to Sunset Beach.

The next room must have been Ian’s, then three smaller, though still by modern-day standards large, rooms—hers in the middle.

But as she poked her head into Ian’s room it was obvious he hadn’t been living there as the furniture was covered in dust sheets that seemed to have been there for ever.

‘He lived in the guesthouse.’

Bessie had come in and now stood beside Caroline, looking into the empty, rather ghostly room.

The guesthouse was off the back veranda opposite Helen and Keanu’s suite of rooms, but detached and given privacy by a screen of trees and shrubs.

‘I don’t think I’ll bother looking there,’ she said to Bessie. ‘It was about the only place on the island Keanu and I weren’t allowed to play so there’d be no memories.’

She was back on the front veranda when she heard the whump-whump-whump of a helicopter.

Now she could go down to the hospital and ask for a job.

Right now before she’d let her doubts about working with Keanu solidify in her head.

Or perhaps tomorrow when she’d worked on a strategy to handle working with him …

He had to go up to the house and make peace with Caro, Keanu decided, not skulk around down here at the hospital.

Sam and Hettie would employ her, that much was certain, so he would be working with her. But doctor-nurse relationships needed trust on both sides and although all his instincts told him to run for his life, he knew he wouldn’t.

Couldn’t.

M’Langi was more important than these new and distinctly uncomfortable reactions to Caro. Finding out what had been happening and trying to put things right—that was what the elders expected of him.

So he was here, and she was here, and …

He sighed, then began to wonder just why she was here. He’d never totally lost touch with what Caro was up to, being in contact with her father all through his student years, asking, oh, so casually, how she was doing.

And friends from the islands, staying at the Lockharts’ Sydney house on a visit or while studying, would pass on information. So now he thought about it, he’d known she’d studied nursing, because he’d smiled at the time to think both of them were fulfilling at least the beginning of that childhood promise.

But he’d never expected her to return to Wildfire to actually finish the job, especially as he’d known a little of the life she’d been leading. Known from the Sydney papers he would buy up in Cairns, for the sole purpose, he realised, of torturing himself.

He might pretend he’d bought them for the business section, which was always more comprehensive than the one in the local paper, but, if so, why did he turn to the social pages first, hoping for a glimpse of Caro—a grown-up, beautiful Caro—usually on the arm of a too-smooth-looking bloke called Steve, to whom she was, apparently, ‘almost’ engaged.

What the hell did ‘almost’ mean?

It couldn’t have been jealousy that had made him feel so bad—after all, he’d been the one who’d not almost but definitely married someone else. Someone he’d thought he’d loved because she’d brought him out of the lingering misery of his mother’s death, his loneliness and his homesickness for the island.

So kind of, in a way, he’d betrayed Caro not once—in disappearing from her life—but twice, although that wasn’t really true as trysts made between twelve-and fourteen-year-olds didn’t really count.

Did they?

It was all this confusion—the unresolved issues inside him—that was making him angry, and somehow the anger had made her its target.

Which was probably unfair.

No, it was definitely unfair.

Especially as she was obviously unhappy. He’d put that down to her seeing him again, which would be natural after the way he’d behaved towards her.

So maybe he should stay well out of her way.

Except he’d always hated it when Caro was unhappy. And if he’d caused or even contributed to that unhappiness, which he must have, cutting her off the way he had so long ago, then shouldn’t he do something about it?

At least see if they could regain a little of their old friendship.

Friendship?

When one glimpse of the grown-up Caro had sent his pulses racing, his entire body stirring in a most un-friend-like manner?

Not good for a man who was probably still married …

On top of which, he was torn between two edicts of his mother. The childhood one, always spoken when the two of them as children had left the house, plainly spoken and always understood: take care of Caroline.

Then, as his mother had been dying from pancreatic cancer that had appeared from nowhere and killed her within six weeks, while he, a doctor could do nothing to save her. Then she had cursed the Lockharts …

Well, Ian Lockhart anyway.

Anyway, wasn’t he beyond superstitions like curses?

He shook his head to clear the memories and useless speculation, checked the few patients they had in the hospital, then let out a huge sigh of relief when he heard the helicopter returning.

He almost let himself hope it was bringing in a difficult case, something to distract him from the endlessly circling thoughts in his head.

Hettie and Sam had left the hospital’s makeshift ambulance down near the helicopter pad so Keanu walked down to the airstrip, not really wishing for a patient but ready to help unpack anything they might have brought back. And it would be best to break the news about the FIFO nurse and Maddie not coming now, rather than leaving it until the morning.

Would he tell them about Caroline’s arrival?

He’d have to at least mention it.

Sam would be only too delighted to have an available nurse.

And he would be doomed to work with the woman he didn’t really know but had been instantly attracted to in a way he’d never felt before.

It was because of the old friendship. The attraction thing. It had to be, but with any luck, after the way he’d treated her, she’d want to have as little to do with him as possible.

He was almost at the helicopter now, and could see Sam and Jack Richards, the pilot, lifting out a stretcher.

Good! That means work to do, Keanu thought, then realised how unkind it was to be wishing someone ill. But it was only when he saw the patient that he felt a flush of shame at his thoughts. It was old Alkiri, from the island of Atangi, the elder who had been one of his and Caro’s favourite people and true mentor when they had been young.

He moved closer and greeted the elder in his native language, touching the old man’s shoulder in a gesture of respect.

Even through the oxygen mask, Keanu could see the blue tinge on their patient’s lips and he wondered just how old Alkiri might be.

‘He had a fall, perhaps a TIA as apparently he’d been falling quite a lot recently.’

TIA—transient ischemic attack—often a precursor to a full-blown stroke. Had Alkiri been putting these falls down to old age? He was a private man, unlikely to seek help unless he really needed it. Yet, as Caroline’s grandfather’s boatman, he had not only lived here at Wildfire but had taken two small children under his wing. It was he who had taken them and the village children to and from the school on Atangi, teaching them things about the islands, and life itself, that to Keanu were as important as the learning he’d had at school.

He should tell Caro Alkiri was—

He stopped the thought before it went any further. It had been automatic for he knew she’d loved the old man as much as he had—and probably still would …

But he was no longer the boy who’d run through the house, calling for his friend to pass on a bit of news.

And she was no longer the girl he’d always wanted to find so he could tell—

They strapped the stretcher into the converted jeep, especially modified for just that reason, then Jack and Hettie rode back to the hospital, Sam walking with Keanu to check on any news and pass on information from the clinics on the other islands.

The scent of a nearby frangipani hung in the air, but today such a reminder that he was home didn’t soothe Keanu as it had on other days, on other such walks with Sam, or Hettie or whoever had done the clinic run.

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