A Second Chance (61 page)

Sid took me out for lunch at a flash tearoom
before we came back home. I didn’t like to let on that I was
feeling a bit crook. I’ve felt a bit funny ever since. I suppose
it’s the heat. I carried Eddie through the cooler weather, so it
wasn’t so bad. It seems a lot harder this time. And I’ve got a few
months to go yet. Still, there’s no use moaning about it.

Amy wrote a short reply that same afternoon,
seated at the kitchen table from where she could keep Daisy and
Eddie in her sight.

The children were sitting on the kitchen
floor, Eddie with a magnificent book that Sarah had sent from
Auckland as his Christmas present, and which had immediately become
his most treasured possession, propped on his lap. It was a large
volume, bound in rich brown leather with gold lettering, and filled
with stories of dragons and castles and brave heroes, all
beautifully illustrated. Eddie was recounting one of the stories to
Daisy, in a mixture of actual reading and telling from memory.

Daisy’s attention was divided between
listening to Eddie and the apparently fascinating possibilities of
her own feet, one of which she was currently engaged in putting
into her mouth. She removed it, took hold of both feet and waved
them vigorously, chortling as she did so. It was hard to believe
she was the same child who had kept the adult members of the
household awake much of the previous night, howling at the
discomfort brought on by her current bout of teething. Daisy seemed
quite untroubled by her broken night, her overly-bright cheeks the
only sign today of the offending tooth.

‘Do you want to come and do one of your nice
drawings?’ Amy asked when Eddie seemed to have come to the end of a
story. She placed a sheet of notepaper on the table beside Eddie’s
crayons. ‘I’ve got a letter to send off to Mama, and I’ll put your
drawing in with it.’

‘All right.’ Eddie got up and came over to
the chair Amy pulled out for him.

‘Don’t leave your book on the floor,
Daisy’ll get into it,’ Amy reminded him, not for the first time.
She rose and picked the book up herself, and put it on the table
out of Daisy’s reach.

Daisy crawled on the floor while Eddie
worked at his drawing and Amy put the vegetables on for their
dinner. When they were almost ready, she set the table, carefully
stepping around the baby.

Daisy pulled herself upright against Eddie’s
chair and tugged at his arm. Eddie held his drawing down to her
level to show her.

‘See, that’s you, and that’s Granny, and
that’s me on Patch’s back,’ Eddie said, pointing out each coloured
blob in turn. ‘It’s for Milly.’

‘For Mama, you mean,’ Amy corrected him.

Eddie looked back at her, a hint of defiance
in the set of his head. His new habit of referring to his mother by
her name was proving hard to break. It had started when he saw the
note she had enclosed with his crayons, signing herself as “Milly”.
Eddie could now read well enough to sound the word out for himself,
and recognise it as the name he sometimes heard Amy use to Beth or
David when one of his mother’s letters arrived.

He seemed to have taken Milly’s failure to
called herself “Mama” to heart. Ever since the arrival of her note
he had been behaving a little oddly whenever she was mentioned. His
odd behaviour did not, however, extend to the crayons Milly had
sent, which were well-used and already noticeably shorter than they
had been when new.

‘It’s for Milly,’ Eddie repeated, still
talking to Daisy. ‘She was my mama. She went away.’

‘She’s still your mama, Eddie.’ Amy thought
she had caught the hint of a tremble in his voice. She wished she
could take him in her arms and tell him that of course his mother
would come back for him, but she could not when she was so unsure
of it herself. She was not going to lie to Eddie.

She sighed, and chose a more down-to-earth
distraction. ‘I think Uncle Dave and Aunt Beth might be late again
tonight. You can have your dinner now, and then have pudding when
they’re back.’

Eddie brightened visibly at the suggestion
of dinner. Amy dished him up a plateful and placed it before him,
then smiled at the sight of Daisy, who was still holding herself
precariously upright against Eddie’s chair, and was now looking up
at his laden plate with a rather woebegone expression. Amy cut a
chunk of bread from the loaf in front of her, swept Daisy onto her
lap and gave her the bread to gnaw on.

Daisy was soon all smiles and crumbs. Amy
popped her back on the floor so that she could finish getting their
pudding ready to go in the range, while Eddie chose to take his
plate and continue his dinner sitting on the floor with Daisy,
talking away to her as if he was sure she understood every word.
When he finished eating, he retrieved his book from the table and
opened it to where he had left off.

David and Beth came in just as Amy was
beginning to think she would have to dish their meals up and keep
them warm by the range. They both looked tired and strained. One of
Beth’s Jersey cows had been ill, and Beth had been getting up
several times a night to dose it with medicines of her own
invention that she brewed on the range. The heifer was on the mend,
but Beth was still keeping it in a shed close to the house so that
she could check on it frequently. The run of broken nights had been
capped by Daisy’s efforts of the previous evening.

Amy waved aside a weary Beth’s attempts to
help dish up their meal. She made them both sit down, and was
relieved to see them gradually look a little more like their usual
selves under the influence of a good dinner. Neither of them made
any move to pick up Daisy, who was still contentedly sitting beside
Eddie, gnawing on an increasingly soggy crust.

Amy placed bowls of stewed fruit and custard
on the table. ‘I’ve filled your bowl a bit full, Eddie, so come and
start it up here.’

Eddie came readily enough; a large helping
of roast mutton, potatoes, peas and beans had not spoiled his
appetite for pudding. He had just plunged his spoon into the bowl
when Amy glanced down at Daisy, and saw that she was taking an
unhealthy interest in Eddie’s picture book.

‘Eddie, you’ve left your book on the floor
again. Pick it up—quickly, now—look, Daisy’s going to chew it!’

Daisy had indeed managed to get a corner of
the book’s cover into her mouth. She closed her eyes, a look of
contentment on her face, and sank her little teeth into the
leather.

Eddie scrambled from his chair, crossed the
few steps to Daisy, and snatched up his book. ‘You leave my book
alone!’ he cried, his voice shrill. He clutched the book to his
chest with one arm, and to Amy’s shock he swung his other arm at
Daisy, catching her a blow on the side of her head.

Time seemed to stop. Eddie stared down at
Daisy, his eyes wide with the enormity of what he had done. It had
been a clumsy blow, with no real force behind it, but everyone in
the room was stunned into silence. Then Daisy opened her mouth and
began howling her outrage, Beth moved to scoop her up into her
arms, and at the same moment David erupted from his chair.

‘Don’t you touch her, you little bugger!’ he
roared. He grabbed the front of Eddie’s shirt, lifted it till Eddie
was on tiptoe, and shook him like a dog with a rat.

Amy had never seen such rage on David’s
face. She wanted to take hold of him and pull him away from Eddie,
but as if she were in a bad dream she found herself unable to move,
not even when she saw David raise his fist.

Eddie did not seem to take in the
significance of the fist so near his head, but he was certainly
aware of the anger suffusing the man who loomed over him. He hung
limp in David’s grip, staring back into the eyes glaring at
him.

David abruptly let go of Eddie’s shirt.
Eddie staggered back a step or two, and swayed on his feet. Through
it all, he had somehow managed to keep hold of his precious book.
The rage had seeped out of David’s face, to be replaced by
something closer to horror. He turned away from Eddie and pounded
both fists on the table, setting the dishes rattling.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ he cried, his
face contorted with distress. ‘I don’t know what to
do!
’

Amy recovered the power of movement at last.
She took hold of Eddie’s arm, left Beth to cope with her distraught
husband and child, and dragged Eddie from the room. She hurried him
though the house, not stopping until they were in his bedroom. She
pushed Eddie onto the bed and stood over him.

‘That was a wicked thing to do, Eddie!
Hitting a little baby who can’t stick up for herself!’

‘But she was wrecking my book,’ Eddie
protested. ‘Look!’ He held it out to show Amy the damage, which
consisted of the small marks of Daisy’s front teeth and a generous
smear of dribble, with a few crumbs of bread stuck to it.

‘That doesn’t mean you’re allowed to hit
her.’ Amy knelt beside the bed and put a hand on each of his arms.
‘Listen to me, Eddie. You’re never to hit girls, and you’re never
to hit little kids smaller than you. That’s just being a bully. You
don’t want to be a bully, do you?’

Eddie lowered his eyes. ‘She was wrecking my
book.’

‘And that’s because you left it on the floor
again. She’s a baby, Eddie. She doesn’t know any better. You gave
her an awful fright—and look how you upset Uncle Dave.’

Amy thought she saw a trace of contrition in
Eddie’s face. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt Daisy,’ he said, so quietly
that she barely caught the words. ‘She just made me wild.’

‘Well, you can’t go around hitting people
just because you get annoyed. I want you to think about what you
did.’ Amy unbuttoned his shirt as she spoke. ‘You’re going straight
to bed with no pudding.’

‘I don’t care,’ Eddie muttered, his face
taking on the defiant expression that made him look so like his
father. He reluctantly let her take the book out of his arms so
that she could finish undoing his buttons.

Amy pulled the nightshirt over his head.
‘And no stories tonight, either.’ Eddie’s face fell at that, but he
said nothing. He climbed into bed; when Amy leant down and
attempted to kiss him, he turned his face away.

She picked up his book from the chest of
drawers where she had placed it. ‘I’m going to put this book away
until I’m sure you’re sorry for what you did.’

Eddie sat up in bed, his mouth open in
shock. ‘That’s not fair!’

‘Hitting a little baby’s not fair.’ With an
effort, Amy hardened her heart against his disconsolate expression.
‘You can have it back when you’ve learned your lesson.’

Eddie’s mouth trembled. ‘Are you going to
send me away?’

‘Send you away?’ Amy frowned in confusion.
‘What do you mean, Eddie?’

‘Milly said it. When her and me came here.
She said if you didn’t want me she didn’t know what she’d do. She
said she’d have to send me to a boys’ home. She didn’t want to, but
she’d have to. And if I was bad you wouldn’t want me. And hitting
Daisy was a really bad thing.’ The last words came out muffled as
Eddie buried his face in the covers.

Amy placed the book back on the chest,
crouched beside the bed and put her arms around the small figure.
‘Of course I want you, Eddie. You’re my little boy—mine and Mama’s.
I’m so very glad you came to live with me. And even if Mama…’ She
caught her breath, but it was too late to call back that “if”.
‘Even if Mama fetches you away, I’ll still want you to come and
have holidays with us. So will Aunt Beth and Uncle Dave.’

Eddie’s expression suggested he was
recalling how he had last seen David looking at him. Amy gave him a
squeeze. ‘Come on, let’s do your prayers, then you can have a quiet
little think about what you did, and why you’ll never do it again.
Then tomorrow you’ll say sorry to everyone, and you’ll all be
friends again. Yes, even Uncle Dave.’ She kissed his smooth cheek.
‘You’re a good boy, really.’

*

The kitchen was surprisingly peaceful when
Amy entered the room. Daisy was nestled in the crook of David’s
arm, the traces of tears still visible on her lashes, but showing
no other sign of her earlier distress. Amy bent to kiss the baby,
and sat down.

‘Is Daisy all right?’ she asked Beth, who
was in the process of pouring out cups of tea.

‘Yes, she’s just fine. She got a fright, but
I don’t think it really hurt her. There’s not a mark on her.’ Beth
stroked Daisy’s cheek, and Daisy gurgled contentedly. ‘Boys can be
a bit rough when they get worked up—I remember Danny gave Rosie a
shove once and knocked her over, and she hit her head on a chair.
She made a heck of a fuss, but it was no worse than what she’d get
running around outside, or falling off the pony. Ma did Danny a lot
more damage than he’d done Rosie. He was a lot older than Eddie is,
though, he should’ve known better,’ Beth added, with a quick glance
at David. ‘I know Eddie shouldn’t have done it, but there was no
harm, really.’

‘No, he shouldn’t have done it,’ Amy said.
‘I’ve sent him to bed with no pudding, and I’ve taken his book off
him for now.’ She turned to David. ‘He’s sorry for what he did. And
he loves Daisy, you know he does. I’m sure he won’t do anything
like that again.’

Beth had done a fine job, with Daisy’s
assistance, of calming David down, but he still looked troubled. ‘I
don’t know what to do with Eddie,’ he said earnestly. ‘I mean…’ He
lowered his eyes for a moment, then raised them to meet Amy’s. ‘I
know you don’t like me going on about Pa, but… I don’t want to be
like he was, thumping Mal and me so we were scared stiff of
him.’

‘You won’t be,’ Amy said. ‘Your father
couldn’t help the way he was made, but you’re not like that. I know
you got a shock just now, but you stopped yourself before anything
happened.’

‘But I don’t know what to do. What am I
supposed to do when he plays up?’