Loving Daughters (11 page)

20

Edwards buried a saucepan with an egg in it into the hot ashes in the stove and made himself tea from water in the kettle. It was not on the boil and tea leaves floated on the surface. He slapped them on the kitchen table and turned them into the letter
U.

He wandered to his front door looking at the road, empty without Una, needing to look over his shoulder to where she sat, making sure she had been there.

Her hair had been curved over her cheeks, covering her ears like birds' wings. Different to her usual way. He had wanted to ruffle it. He stroked his hands across his grey jumper, as if it were her hair.

No, it was his mother's hair, grey too, wiry to touch. He took his hands away and went quite swiftly to the kitchen for his egg. He turned it out, barely set, and not bothering to sit at the table properly, but screwing himself to an angle, mopped it up with a slice of bread. A splash of yolk fell on his jumper and he brushed his hand on it, wondering what to do with the yellow on his knuckles and finally finding a tea towel to wipe them.

He went into the living room with the towel, holding it like a serviette, remembering his lonely nursery tea at home in England.

Everything around him was of enormous proportions, his chair where his legs did not reach the first rung, the table large enough for the ten children who belonged to the former rector, and his nanny with an apron white and stiff like the serviette he was expected to use, but was afraid to, in great fear of picking up the apron by mistake.

For on one terrible and memorable occasion he had flung himself up under her apron.

He had been standing by her as close as he dared while she was lighting a gas lamp on the nursery wall. The high-backed chair in the corner, on which she usually sat to watch him eat, became a tiger; the claws at the end of the chair arms were waiting to spring out and crush him. There was nowhere to go. The cupboard next to the chair was locked and the sofa next to it sat an inch above the floor. He dived up under nanny's apron and clung to her belly, surprised at its hardness, and tried to wedge himself between her legs.

Her screams brought his mother running. He saw her take hold of one of the chair arms, since the apron had been tugged brutally from his head.

‘Don't, don't!' he cried, still believing it was the tiger's paw.

‘Don't indeed!' his nanny said. She looked with a great and angry knowing on his mother, protecting her belly with two spread hands. ‘He will get more than don't, I should think, when his father has been told!'

He held the corner of the table, putting his face there, waiting for the distance to close between him and his mother. He could not run and fling himself on her. But she could lift him up, past her thighs and belly, and he could hold her neck and raise his legs and bind them to her back, and her grip would be so tight and sure, there would be no chance of his slipping downwards to where he must not on any account go.

‘His father should beat him, Madam,' Nanny said. She was trembling, he supposed, for her words were trembling too. ‘He is not a happy child like his brother.'

His mother let his father beat him. But afterwards when she went to him, sobbing on his bed, she pulled his stockings up over his legs striped pink and red with tears in her eyes too. He flung her hands off him and turned his head to burrow it in the pillow, wondering if he would be beaten for this too, not caring if he died, hoping he would.

Later in the day she took him to the park. He still hated her. She took him to the water, murmuring her regret that she had not brought bread to feed the ducks. This omission brought tears to her eyes again. He failed to understand it. He didn't like to see her cry, but saw no reason why she should. She had not been hit. He fiddled with his stockings, and she put a hand out to cover his, appearing to be afraid he would pull his stockings down and expose his welts.

Walking home she held his hand still, but he made it into a tight little fist, and left it that way while they went through the park gates and turned towards the rectory.

She stopped by the hawthorn hedge, near enough for the red berries to appear to be part of her hat trimming. He thought, even through his misery, they made her hat look much nicer. She saw his face less pinched and thought he might be starting to forgive her and squeezed the hard little fist. But she made her eyes sorrowful and her mouth severe.

‘It was a very bad thing you did to Nanny, you mustn't forget that,' she said.

When he turned away to look at the passing pedestrians and traffic – so urgent and unconcerned! – she tried to prise his fingers open.

‘All boys get beatings sometime,' she said, in a voice that surprised him with its note of pleading.

He wanted to tell her his brother James hadn't that he knew of but she began to hurry, and he had to take little running steps to keep up and clutch at her hand now, staying clear of her quivering bottom.

Nanny came to the front door to meet them. His father had apparently gone somewhere and was not yet back. His mother, breathing in fluttery relief, said, ‘Dear me, we needn't have hurried,' and put a hand to his shoulder blades.

Do it, do it, said the pressure of her fingers.

‘He is ready to say how sorry he is, Nanny,' his mother said.

He imagined Nanny's white apron billowed towards him, but did not imagine one hand near her groin holding it down. He stood back very far and reached out a hand to shake her other one, stretching his body from the waist, like a bent black hairpin, his little white face the pinhead. ‘Quite the little gentleman, Madam,' Nanny said.

‘Thanks quite a lot to you, Nanny,' his mother said, with feeling so deep her voice trembled.

He watched her lift her hat from her head – a dull thing without the berries! – and go off to put it away, concentrating on the bustle back of her dress, which he had not noticed when she wore it previously. Ashamed, he turned his burning face from Nanny's watching eyes.

Now he began to walk about his living room, touching a few odd things, still with the tea-towel. He should take it to the kitchen and hang it there, but he was not good at doing that sort of thing, and Mrs Watts would come tomorrow.

He threw it crushed up on the table beside his writing pad and idly capped his ink bottle. He was reminded of owing a letter to his mother and uncapped it again, then squeezed himself into his chair, not pulling it out with a flourish, as he imagined was more suited to his station in life.

‘Dear Mother,' he wrote, ‘I have been thinking a lot about you today, possibly because I'm wearing the grey jumper you knitted me, which I thought would be too warm for this climate, but that is not so.'

The words, very high on the page, ran quickly into the shadows. Dull, puny things escaping in their shame! He felt the need to escape too and went to look out on Wyndham merging into the dusk.

But it was grey too, all grey, the war memorial a blackish-grey, the posts holding up the roof over Grant's store verandah, a washed-out grey, the sky a nothing colour, but grey when you looked at it for any time, his staggering fence posts grey too, and the wattle tree where Una's horse had been tethered not the silvery grey of daytime, but cut out dark and sharp with hard decisive scissors, a guard for the road. A grey, grey road leading to nowhere.

He sat on his couch with his back to it. He remembered Una's small round buttocks settling onto the saddle. She had shaken them down as you would shake seed to the bottom of a bag, and made her back very straight as she pulled on one rein to turn her horse around.

He got up and went to the table, flicking his pen so that it rolled off his pad, leaving it a white and gleaming thing, relieving the dark, pleasing him as a soft light would.

Dear Mother, said his mind, and he watched almost surprised not to see the words crawl along the lines.

You will be surprised to hear, since I paid no attention to young ladies at home, that I must make up my mind now to choose between two.

He should describe them next of course. Una first, or Enid? The elder of the two is Enid. (I fancy you would like that name.) A very capable homemaker, which would please you also.

The younger is Una, lively and lovely. (Both are extremely handsome.)

The room was quite dark now and he projected all three women into it, his mother leaving for a bedroom down the hall, a faint rustle from her dress, Enid with her back to him too, arms raised, attending to something on his mantelpiece. And Una. She had her hands on her hips, her back to him as well, but her head thrown provocatively over her shoulder.

He looked down on his writing pad, as if it were a face about to speak.

It was he who spoke. In the room, shadows swallowing all but the edges of his furniture, he threw his words, hitting the wall, loud and resonant, as if they came from the pulpit, in his most impassioned address.

‘Both of them, Mother, have the most beautiful little bums!'

21

In their room at Honeysuckle, Enid and Una slept with their backs to each other, the space gradually widening since the funeral. On the morning following Una's ride to the rectory, Enid rose first, as was her practice, and noticed Una did not roll to the middle of the bed, as was her practice, revelling in the luxury of the bed to herself, binding herself in the blankets and taking possession of both pillows.

She stayed huddled at the edge as if she had not been warm all night.

Enid got into her dressing gown, taking time settling her cuffs as if to say I am quite prepared to talk if you are. She went to the kitchen for a jug of hot water, for George was always up first to light the stove. When she came back, Una was sitting up with her dressing gown around her shoulders. Enid loosened the neck of her nightgown and pulled the sleeves up to pat her skin with the steaming cloth. She got into corsets as quickly as possible, embarrassed because Una wore only a suspender belt, grateful to pull on her warm loose dress and fasten the belt, pleased too with her slim waist. Una had made the dress. Both of them were thinking this.

‘If I were not here to make your clothes, how would you manage?' Una said.

Enid covered her dress with an apron that had been Nellie's.

‘Why on earth would you not be here to do the sewing?' she said, brushing her hair and frowning on her nose, daring it to turn red.

‘I said make your clothes,' Una said, in a voice cool as the air coming through the window. Enid pulled it down sharply.

‘There's tea made in the kitchen,' she said.

‘Then bring me a cup here to sip in the gloom,' Una said.

‘You know how Father feels about food in bed when you're not sick!' Enid said, showing Una the back of her neck, almost to the door.

‘You should ask Father how he feels about being lovesick!' Una said.

Enid had the stove stoked and the fountain, set into the side of the stove, filled before seeing the teapot under its cosy. She poured tea into a kitchen cup, one of her favourites, thick and white, remembering Nellie's hot tan tea that tasted wonderful after the blue grey stuff at boarding school.

It was just light enough to see the garden through the window and she stood watching the beds take shape and the shrubs separate from the fog.

When she returned after refilling her cup, she could see the yellow of the wallflowers, and the sight made her eyes fill with tears.

She let them run over her cheeks, wondering at the pleasure of taking liquid in, and having liquid flow out. More of the garden could be seen now, in particular the corner where there was a large flat rock. Jack had been surprised when she didn't want it moved. In crevices where the earth showed she planted vines that raced across the surface, and her centrepiece was a low-growing shrub with feathery foliage that bore mauve, star-shaped flowers, coming out suddenly, as if fighting an inherent shyness.

When I made that garden I thought I was happy. Silly woman, I didn't know what happiness was.

She was pouring water onto oatmeal for porridge when Una came into the hall, and took a coat from the stand, muffling her face in the cloth as she put it on. Enid watched her through the back kitchen window, striding to the dairy to bring milk back for breakfast. That's not the way a clergyman's wife should walk, she thought, feeling happier.

Jack, dressed for a day's work outdoors, came into the kitchen and Enid poured him tea.

‘Where's that one?' he said, looking towards the silent living room.

He sat at the corner of the table holding his hat, as if to put it down would contribute to time wasting.

‘The dairy way – walking,' Enid said, liking to have Jack think she was preparing breakfast without help.

‘Walking! At this time of day! She's always wandering about leaving you to do everything. Now there's that car, she'll be riding in that if she isn't walking!' Jack swallowed a large draught of tea. ‘A mistake, that car! All the money it cost and you have to keep pouring more into it! “To see how it runs in the rain”! You wouldn't need to try a horse out in the rain!'

He got up and slapped his pockets. ‘My tobacco and pipe, Enid? Where did someone put them?' Enid, slicing rounds of bread to warm by the stove for quick toasting, went to the living room and returned with the tobacco and a small smile.

I love him, I do love him, I love him helpless. And she lowered her warm face because she was not sure whom she meant.

‘Alex's up, I hope,' he said. (He would never go and look.) ‘He needs to be to make up for the time he lost yesterday.' He got into his coat and Enid noticed he seemed slower than usual. Is he getting old? I don't want him old!

‘You're worried about Ned's place and Hoopers going, aren't you, Father?' she said.

How like Nellie she was! He turned his large red face from her. It's not only Ned's place I'm worried about, he said to himself, finding a place for his tobacco. She was still there by the table, her face soft. He hadn't seen her look like this before! She was usually bustling, with her arms working from the shoulders, rapidly moving across the table, reaching up to the shelves, with the cloth of her dress barely settled in one place before moving to another.

Now her shoulders were still, slightly bowed, her arms loose and her hands linked together, long fine hands, with fingers gently, not nervously stroking each other. Like Nellie at the altar where he found her after that clumsy walk, feeling such a fool! Then she turned with that lovely head at the end of her slender neck, tipped back a little to smile on him. Nothing overawed her! Enid, now returning the bread to the crock, lingered by the little table, looking at her garden. That was her pride and joy. She would never leave that! He saw her profile and a gentle absent biting of her bottom lip.

‘George can do some digging for you today,' Jack said. ‘I'll tell him at breakfast.' He should get away, but felt compelled to stay. As if there was something hanging in the air unsaid!

She took porridge plates from the dresser and stacked them on the bricks beside the stove. That was for him, he liked his porridge in a hot plate and she never forgot. She was alright! She was back now at the window looking out. That flibbertigibbet needed to do more inside to give her more time in her garden.

‘I thought I might go to Wyndham today for a few things from the store,' she was saying now.

‘Take Dolly and the sulky, or let George drive you,' Jack said.

‘I can walk, thank you Father, since the day seems to be fine.'

‘You can't go carrying great parcels,' said Jack to her back, for she was unhooking cups from the dresser.

‘Just a few small things. I noticed we're out of nutmeg and darning wool.' She stacked things on a tray with downcast eyes.

Jack felt disturbed, trapped, until Una came through the back door swinging a can of milk. There was a deep, black border of damp on her brown shoes and some leaves clinging to her skirt and stockings where she waded through the line of poplars.

‘You go into Wyndham after breakfast,' Jack said to her. ‘Your sister wants some things from the store. No need to take all day about it!'

His back was almost through the door when Una called out.

‘Certainly, Father!'