Loving Daughters (14 page)

26

She did by thinking of him and talking of him all through the week she was at Percy's. Sybil, who was twenty and ripe like a black cherry, her body a piece of fertile ground ready for seed, raised the theory that it was Enid who bore Small Henry.

‘Think of it!' she said to the ring of sisters in their attic room on their unmade beds, the air around them musty with the smell of scent and face powder, stained underwear and grubby linen and unwashed flesh. ‘We didn't see her for six months or more!' She narrowed her black eyes at a vision of Enid shut in a back room at Honeysuckle all day, walking about the yard awkwardly at night for exercise.

Sadie said this was nonsense. ‘Henry had a wife! Addie Brown was at the funeral and Enid was there large as life passing around the cakes and bossing Una about!' Thoughts of Enid, immaculate in her room watching through the window the grey sea swirling, causing Sadie to get up and hand the jug from the washstand to a younger sister and order her to bring hot water from the kitchen, unbuttoning her blouse while she spoke. Sybil flung herself back among the tangled bedclothes raising both arms to exude more sweaty air.

‘He's perfect, absolutely perfect. Wait till you see him!' she said, mocking Enid.

‘I can wait – forever!' she said, giving her stomach a passing slap to discard any hint of fertility there.

Alex brought Enid home at the end of the week and there on the verandah was Una with Small Henry in her arms. Enid moved forward in her seat holding her handbag very tight. Alex took the gesture as an insult to his driving. Silly, nervous female he thought glimpsing her tense face.

Enid saw Small Henry's head with hair thinned out at the back where the pillow had rubbed it away. It was getting lighter in colour. Una should turn him for her to see his face! She saw Una tipping her head to bring Small Henry closer to her neck, jamming him there and giving her no chance of seeing him.

It was deliberate! She left her suitcase for Alex to bring in, and with a hurt and angry face gathered up a bag of jams and pickles from the hotel pantry and cuttings from the garden. Una went ahead and was in a chair in the living room, unwrapping Small Henry and expertly wrapping him again and lifting him to her shoulder. Still no face for Enid to see! She sat on the end of the couch, her luggage by her, waiting for the dimness to leave the room, wondering at the white blur in one corner until it emerged as the christening dress in a near finished state.

Well, look at her there, Violet thought, putting a few of her things together, for she thought while the car was on the road Alex might offer to drive her and Small Henry home. She does not look as if the holiday did her much good. She could look hangdog like George at times. Irritating. Give me a little brightness, I always say.

‘How was it at Percy's?' Violet said. ‘Any of that lot caught a man yet?'

Enid might have given her head a little shake before standing abruptly and going with her cuttings and jars to the kitchen. Una buried her face deeper into Small Henry's neck.

Well, I can't hang around here for the Reverend's next visit to sort things out, Violet thought as she stuffed napkins in a bag. I've got to get home to Ned's mess. There was George stepping from one foot to the other, waiting for a bidding to put Dolly in the sulky. A little run in the Austin would suit her better! She might throw a hint Alex's way, which was by the fire with a
Sunday Mail
that he had flapped open and was rolling the opposite way for easy reading.

But there was the money she needed from George for her hospital. Oh damn and blast it, Violet said to herself, plucking Small Henry from Una's arms to give vent to her annoyance. Laying him on the table she pulled the hem of his nightgown down around his feet, oblivious to the series of grunts he was starting and Una's woeful expression.

‘I've got to start for home,' she said loudly, the thought of Ned raising her voice several decibels.

Enid slipped into the room from her bedroom where she had gone to change into the puce dress. Small Henry's small and piteous face was turned towards her. It was a little fuller than when she last saw it, a little more flesh-coloured than that mauvish colour. Even the eyebrows, more defined now, were screwed into anger with the mouth a tear in his face showing wet and angry gums.

Violet, who had changed his napkin, rolled him up as if he were a parcel of meat and handed him to Enid.

‘There!' she said. ‘You might as well finish off the spoiling for that's what he's had all week!'

Enid backed to the couch to sit on one corner. The comfort of the dry napkin smoothed the anger from Small Henry's face and the jagged hole that was his mouth closed into a small tight rosebud and he made a sucking motion as if food might be at hand and a little practice would do no harm. Enid smiled at this and bent low over his face so that his skin breathed onto her skin like warm silk, her breath moving the fine down like the wind bending low over her flower beds and causing a smell to rise, sweet as the smell of Small Henry's face.

Una caught up the christening gown and pinned it to her front with her chin. ‘See!' she said. ‘No lace or flowers. Imagine when he's grown up showing him something lacy and frilly and telling him he wore it. He would hate me!' She turned and tossed it from her and at that moment the back screen door banged and Enid lifting her face acknowledged the arrival of Jack. She stood returning Small Henry to Violet and slipped away to the kitchen.

Una leapt into a clear space in the room to pantomime the meeting between them. She thrust her body forward from the waist and pushed out her lips in the shape of a giant kiss. She held the pose, then as in a passion of ecstasy she flung a leg up and wound it around an imaginary figure. Alex turned to the fire to stifle his laughter by turning some logs. Violet's mouth twitched while she rocked Small Henry to silence. George saw only her softened face and wished he was close enough to touch her. Una's head was back and her arms stretched out and upwards, the fingertips just touching to illustrate the bulk of Jack.

Violet laughed outright and George moved up and touched her elbow. He tipped his head towards the back of the house, which in George's language was stating he would harness Dolly and bring the sulky around to the front.

Oh, well, I have to, I suppose! Violet thought, dumping a bag of Small Henry's things near the door with Una hovering near, arms poised to take Small Henry the moment Violet was prepared to surrender him. Alex there by the fire with his head in his paper was going to make no offer!

Violet trudged off to Henry's old room for her case. Always the way, she grumbled to herself, those who have got it stick to it – meaning Alex's car. She would have to stay with George, dull as he was. There was the sulky in front now, and Una looking as if someone had thrown a bucket of cold water over here.

‘Well, come for the ride,' Violet said. ‘Take him and wrap him up well, in case he goes down with pneumonia!' Una plucked a bonnet from Violet's bulging bag and bore Small Henry to her bedroom, flinging him on the bed.

‘Stay quiet there, you little turd!' she cried, crushing on her small hat and flinging her blue cape around her shoulders. ‘Keep still while I change my shoes, you little piece of rabbit dung. I need more time to get ready, but I haven't got it. He's seen me in this too many times already. Yell away, yell away!'

For Small Henry, fooled into thinking a change of position indicated a meal was on its way, was arching his back and squealing, threatening to smother himself inside his blanket. She took him up at last, crushing his bonnet on, laughing because the white wool made his face seem even redder, and flew out and climbed in the sulky beside Violet, who was crushed against George, to his great joy.

Enid saw the sulky from the kitchen window. Speeding towards Wyndham. Towards him.

Jack had just finished telling her about the Hoopers. The son-in-law, finding himself with a free morning, decided to go and collect them, giving them no time to warn Ned or Jack, and they drove off with pigs squealing for a meal, and cows trailing towards the bails, uttering an occasional pleading, mournful cry.

Both Jack and Horse reared their heads at the sound of the long blast of the horn. The son-in-law laughed for the first time that day and Mrs Hooper, sitting where she chose to in the back of the truck to guard her china from breakages, for the son-in-law had flung it on carelessly, broke down and cried.

Jack had seen her with her head down and a man's handkerchief to her face which was turned from the direction of the little grey house with the chimney still smoking.

Jack thought Enid was paying more attention to her garden through the window than to his story, but when he reached the part about Mrs Hooper's tears, Enid cried, ‘Oh, Father!' and burst into tears herself.

27

Mrs Watts had not disturbed the writing pad Edwards left on the table, the cover turned back like a bed turned down, waiting for occupancy. Mrs Watts, unable to read or write, dusted around it, aware there was nothing written there, but so deeply ashamed of her illiteracy she felt that even looking on it was equivalent to looking at a married couple in bed.

Edwards was aware of it too, lightning his lamp when it was too dark to see, and there was nothing to hear, after the sulky had carried Una back to Honeysuckle.

Dear Mother, the younger Miss Herbert was visiting this afternoon. It was totally unexpected. Passing my kitchen window I looked up and there she was.

He could not believe it. One minute there was the drab, empty front of Violet's house, the verandah posts drooping dejectedly as he looked on them, the patch of road so cold and still it might have been scraped from the surface of the moon. He took some bread and cheese from his safe and passing the window again there was the sulky pulled up and Una springing from it, her blue cape flying and her arms upstretched to take Small Henry from Violet. It was as if he had turned his back on a blank wall and someone had hung a picture while he wasn't looking.

‘She's here!' he cried, taking a bite from the cheese before flinging it down and walking rapidly into his living room.

He touched his writing pad as if he should write the information down to make it more believable. Then he returned to the kitchen window and saw the empty sulky and the lowered head of Dolly.

He watched the house – surely it would open a door or window and show her to him! He threw up his window knowing the rattle had no chance of reaching those closeted inside. She had found a reason to call on him the last time she was at Violet's!

She was avoiding him, discarding him. He would have Enid then! He went to his living room again. Enid it will be! He fiddled with his writing pad and uncapped his ink.

Dear Mother, I have practically made up my mind. She is in your image, so very like you.

He sat sideways at his table, then got up again and returned to his kitchen window. Nothing. Only the chimney, with an air of mocking him, sent up a burst of smoke. They were making tea with never a thought of him. They could have sent George for him. It was the sort of thing George was used for!

He would go to his woodheap, his own fire needed lighting if he was to have anything hot to drink before going to bed. He would not necessarily look their way. He stood looking hard at his wood.

Then out of the corner of his eye he saw. Una with Small Henry in her arms at the window. From out of his blanket she took a tiny hand and waved it back and forth, back and forth.

His horse under the big tree chose that moment to lift its rump while it rubbed the side of its head on a foreleg.

The wretched thing! He should throw a lump of wood at it. Then it decided to dance sideways for no reason that he could see and gave him back the entire window. He swooped upon a log of wood, a great thing testing his strength, and raising it, waggled an end, returning the salute.

Then Violet's great back filled the window and they were gone. He saw her shoulders working, she was snatching Small Henry from Una and pushing her ahead. He saw Small Henry's face, no bigger than a pinhead it seemed, dance away from him, and nothing of Una at all.

He dropped the wood and went inside. He saw shadows reach out from the corners of his room and dance quite crazily for a moment on the writing pad.

Dear Mother, If ever I should have a child of my own I would never have a nurse for it.

28

He dressed next morning to go to Honeysuckle with the excuse that he would welcome Enid back after her week at the sea, then changed his mind, put the horse in the sulky and took the road towards Bega. He sped past a surprised Violet dispiritedly shaking a mat on her front verandah.

He never said he was going anywhere, like Candelo or Bega, said her expression, fastened to his black back. He might have asked did I need anything! After all the kindnesses I've shown him! I'll be putting a stopper on the tea and cakes from now on.

She flung the mat into the front room when passing the door, not fussy where it landed, and tramped angrily to the kitchen. Ned was there, scraping his feet on the floor from his seat on the couch, and through Small Henry's closed door came the noise of his yelling.

‘I'll make changes in this place before long, see if I don't!' She filled the big kettle for Small Henry's bath, needing to step around a stick with one end forming a natural handle, which Ned had found in the bush and now appeared to use all the time.

I thought it was his eye, Violet said to herself. I see now it's the other end as well. And what's in between is as good as useless too! She slowed her movements to punish Small Henry, who increased the volume of his bellowing, and Ned, who rose agitated and pointed his stick towards the bedroom door.

‘They ruined him down there!' Violet cried, flinging a wash cloth in the china basin that was Small Henry's bath. ‘I'm left to repair the damage. And repair it I will!'

Her shouting shocked Small Henry into silence for a moment, then he started up again, inserting a fluttery feebleness into his cry as if warning of impending exhaustion.

‘And I might well dump him on them after all!'

Ned raised his head like an animal alerted to something that pleased him. She would wipe that look from his face!

‘There'll be bellowing to take his place, make no mistake, Ned!' Ned looked about him, as if he'd received an order from a superior officer which he did not fully understand.

‘I'm opening a hospital here, Ned. I've planned it all and I'm ready to go!'

Ned was in the kitchen doorway now, pinning a toe of his boot down with his stick. Violet saw his back and the edge of his face, the side with the lost eye. Enough! Enough! He heard, he knows, he knows!

She threw some cups and plates from breakfast into a tin dish and flung a towel over a limited space on the table, partly covering jam and butter and the teapot and not caring. She would have a girl from one of the farms helping when she had the hospital. Una could be here a lot of the time, since she was so fond of playing at mothers.

Violet had been, as she put it, sooling Edwards onto Enid. She decided now, with a small rush of pleasure, she would change to Una. Enid was too good a catch for him anyway. Going off like that without a word! She would let him know what real manners were. Not all bowing and hat removing and opening doors and gates the way she saw it!

She went for Small Henry, shedding his steaming napkin in the bedroom and returning to the kitchen with his bare behind defenceless, crushed like a peach, and not much bigger inside one of her large arms.

She laid him on the towel where his flailing legs failed to disturb his genitals, looking too like a smaller squashed peach. Lifting him into the water she saw Ned taking the track to the bush.

‘You're one of them too!' she shouted to Small Henry above his new protesting squeal. She lathered his face and head with soap so that he looked like a small, angry Santa Claus. ‘You'll grow up just like them! No better! Give me a world without men! Free of the burden they bring, the worries they lay at your feet!'

She rinsed Small Henry as if he were a newly peeled potato and dried and dressed him. She screwed the cap on the powder tin after flooding his crotch and fished the soap from the water, ‘I'm meeting the cost of all of this!' she cried. ‘The dill water as well. And what about later on when he starts in on the gruel, the oatmeal and the mashed potato? And no cheque from Halloween every month!'

She sat and pushed the teat of the bottle into Small Henry's mouth and watched his last slow tear run into his ear while he drank.

‘I must have that hospital, and the least you can do is help me get it! You've tied me down here, you're the reason why I can't go out on cases now! Hear that, hear that! I must have a better reason for being anchored in this hell hole!'

Small Henry's answer was an expansion of his chest as he took the first strong flow from the bottle, with eyes squeezed shut and fingers curled in ecstasy.

The room that had rocked angrily about Violet now settled down. The sun was warm on her back, and the fire in the stove snapped and hummed to say it was burning without attention. The only other sound was the scrape of a fowl's throat from the pen, all the others reduced to a morbid quiet, since Ned had gone too long for even their optimism to hold out.

Violet, barely aware of it, rocked Small Henry gently with her eyes on the dresser. A dozen china plates and soup bowls, a dozen cups and saucers. Four bed pans, four enamel basins, four single iron beds and mattresses.

That wretched man! She could have given Small Henry an earlier bath and left him and a day's supply of bottles and napkins with Rachel, and taken the empty seat in the sulky. He would be going as far as Candelo. A missed chance of seeing what the stores there had to offer. One had a large parent branch in Bega through which an unlimited range of goods could be ordered.

That wretched man! She would have worn her black suit, looking every inch the matron.

She swirled the last of the milk in Small Henry's bottle but he shut his lips tight as a closed flower against the teat. She hoisted him to her shoulder where he broke wind at both ends.

‘There he goes, farting like a bullocky already! Not one of them any different!'

She laid him in his bed and shut the door on him, going to the back verandah for a mop and looking into the bush for a sign of Ned.

‘This quiet's a killer!' she said, missing Honeysuckle and Una rushing around, hair awry, bursting out with something unexpected, like a pantomime of Jack or George, or throwing her scissors down with a great clatter and a cry.

‘I feel like some toffee! Let's make a batch of toffee and a mess while she's away!' Enid did not tolerate sweet making except for shows, where hers was usually the most professional of all the exhibits.

How would the reverend feel about toffee making when he was expecting the bishop? Hee, hee. Violet relished the scene with the same pleasure as a mouthful of treacly toffee.

She flung her mop about the bedroom floor, setting up a rattle from a small table in a corner displaying brass ornaments made from spent ammunition, which Ned carried home from the war, and Violet at first lovingly polished and arranged on a white embroidered table cover.

‘Out! Out!' she cried, jabbing her mop towards them. ‘All of them out!'

She would have a closet in their place, similar to the one George was putting up in the lumber room at Honeysuckle to take the few things brought in by her patients. Not much in the case of Tess Skinner, whom Violet assumed would be confined there, since Violet delivered her other children in the house and she wouldn't be doing this any more. She felt an urge to move the big bed and wardrobe to the end of the verandah.

‘In a couple of weeks it'll be warm enough to sleep there,' she said, hurrying the season along ahead of its time. ‘He might prefer old Phoebe's hollow tree and he's quite welcome to it!'

Banging the mop on the verandah rail and getting a view of the big gum under which Edwards's horse usually sheltered, she steered her thoughts back to him, bubbling away like a pan of sour jam on a too-hot stove.

‘I'll see him mated with the flighty one if it's the last thing I do!' she cried. ‘She'll keep him on his toes! I could have got a bolt of calico and started her on the sheets. How dare he go off, sneaking off without a word! How dare he?'