Loving Daughters (17 page)

32

When he set the bottle down, not quite finished, he worried about that and the wet and caked rear of Small Henry.

But he seemed oblivious to any discomfort, having curled his head close to Edwards's neck, causing Edwards to bend it towards the other shoulder, to keep his hard collar away from Small Henry's face.

He was in that pose when Ned came through the bush at the back, his arrival heralded by the fowls, who made a rush to the wire already picking at imaginary seed. Ned walked with the aid of his stick quite briskly across the verandah and into the house. He looked around as if making sure he was in the right house, his mouth round to match his round glass eye, heightening his vacant look.

Edwards, obeying instinct and training, stood and extended an arm and spread hand from beneath Small Henry's rump.

Ned looked to the stove, as if he too needed to obey an instinct and add more wood to it.

‘Mrs Violet is out for a short while,' Edwards said, speaking loudly as did most others when addressing Ned. He felt he should not say she was searching for him.

Small Henry shuddered at the noise, and Edwards set up a swaying motion, which caused Ned to stare in disbelief, then look with his mouth still hole-shaped, everywhere but in Edwards's direction.

Edwards felt he was failing badly in his duty, unable to take the opportunity of attending to Ned's spiritual needs, which must be great indeed. For all the long hours he spent in the bush, though, he looked far less affected by it than Violet.

At the back of Edwards's head the click of the gate and the sound of Violet's feet told him she was back. She had not hurried, having caught sight of Ned making his way through the gums, as she made hers along the road from the
turn-off.

She shed her warm coat in the bedroom and came to the kitchen rolling up her sleeves. Edwards found he could picture her getting ready for a confinement.

‘Stove nearly out, Ned!' she said. ‘Has the bush dried up at last?' Ned tilted his face towards the ceiling, studying it, then, lowering his good eye, appeared to be taking a last long look at the room before he went through to the front bedroom.

Violet flung a clean napkin on the table and took Small Henry from Edwards, as if she was plucking a wasp's nest from a wall. Ignoring his sleeping state she lifted his blue feet and removed his napkin, roughly wiping at the caked excreta smearing his rectum. It reminded Edwards of a ripe plum with a deep incision in it. Violet, taking the soiled napkin to the wash house, returned with a dipper of warm water to sponge him, and Edwards felt relief for him although wearing a worried look for the slack genitals between the flaying legs, wondering if there was some deformity there.

‘He'll grow into it!' Violet shouted reading his blushing thoughts. ‘The time'll come when he'll be smaller there than anywhere else! No one knows that fact better than I do!'

She turned her eyes as she spoke on Ned coming from the bedroom, and had to snap her mouth shut and pretend she saw nothing unusual in his appearance.

He was wearing pyjamas and military trousers under a wartime greatcoat, and his digger's hat. He was not using his stick to aid his walking, but had more clothes bundled in a towel and the towel tied in a knot and slipped over the end of the stick which was suspended across one shoulder.

Violet found her voice when Ned reached the fowl pens and had to compete with their raucous din, more frantic than usual, for Ned was opening the gate and pushing his way through them, while they pecked at his boots, and stretched hopeful necks towards the bundle on his stick, some leaping on others' backs in a bid to reach it.

‘Where's the cat?' Violet yelled. ‘You're a dead ringer for Dick Whittington!'

Ned took eggs from boxes and filled two pockets, making his way out, needing to unhook his bundle from a broken end of wire, while the fowls made a fresh onslaught on his legs.

Violet bound Small Henry in his blanket.

‘He's taking up residence on the farm! It couldn't work out better if I organized it myself!'

She stomped to the bedroom to put Small Henry down. Edwards wondered about her voice. Did anger overrule the sorrow, or was it the other way around? He tipped his head sideways in his troubled pose. Marriage! What a state it could become. I want it though, he thought, suddenly anxious to return to the rectory, to picture Una there.

Violet was back and Small Henry quiet.

‘He's settled down then?' Edwards said, proud in the use of a new language he would have thought once strictly reserved for parents.

The closed door said yes, but Violet's closed face said nothing.

Edwards felt it his duty to offer some comforting words about Ned.

‘I am sure he will miss the comforts of his real home and be back soon to them.'

‘Who wants him back?' Violet said. ‘The way's clear for me now to go ahead with my hospital!'

Una would never use words like that. His way would be her way. His dreams and plans hers too. He looked out of Violet's window to the sky spread with a furrowed cloud. Like a field, he thought, feeling his ankles bogged in softness, light as air, walking with Una. We will keep our eyes upwards and see no ugliness anywhere.

The clatter of a metal spoon on tin caused Edwards to look downwards. Violet had a basin of stew, removing some for her own meal and pushing the remainder down the table.

‘Take this home with you and heat it,' she said. ‘It will only go to waste here!'

‘Thank you, but I couldn't,' Edwards said, holding his hat tightly as if this helped him resist accepting it. There was nothing in his larder but bread and eggs, but that would do him until Mrs Watts came tomorrow and cooked him dinner at midday.

He moved towards the door with his bent face. ‘I'll offer up evening prayers for the safe return of Ned,' he said.

Violet waited until the gate shut before she shouted a reply for only the kitchen walls to hear.

‘God's will, they're fond of saying. When it's your will they don't agree with it! Let him rot in the bush, rot there for all I care, I'm having my hospital!'

33

He decided to go and see Jack next day.

Mrs Watts came and set his soiled clothes to soak in a wash tub, built up the kitchen fire to make him soup, and, as was her habit, put the chairs on tables and pulled the living room couch out to enable her to give the place a good sweep.

He told her he did not think he would be home for dinner, but he would appreciate the soup for tea. She had been to the church to shyly collect the two brass vases and began polishing them on the space left by the chair legs on the table.

He said he would not be leaving immediately but would read up for his Sunday sermon on the front verandah. (He was in fact allowing a decent part of the morning to get away before confronting Jack.)

His words filled her with a terrible inadequacy. Because she could not read or write, she felt she had less right to an existence than those who could, and wondered that he bothered to mention such things to her.

But had she known it, he had a deep admiration for her and would have liked to stay and watch her hands bring a lustre to the old brass, as her belly in a hessian apron jumped gently and rhythmically under the table.

How many children had she borne, he wondered. There were older boys who worked with their father on the farm, and some girls and then Wilfred. She was past child-bearing age, he decided, wondering at his thoughts taking this trend, and looking away from her for a clearer vision of Una, trying to see her cleaning his brass.

He said he was leaving for Honeysuckle after his half-hour's reading and he would not come back inside.

She raised sharp, intelligent eyes under straight black brows, and he thought she had been a handsome woman. Which one? the eyes said, and the hand slowed its polishing.

‘The child's christening needs to be arranged,' Edwards said. He should not be saying this! His father would never allow his mother to talk of anything but domestic matters with servants.

‘The young one has made a beautiful dress, I hear,' Mrs Watts said.

You and the rest of them hear everything! These little places with ears hanging on every doorstep, at every window! When Una is here we will close the doors to everyone. Or go and become swallowed up in a city. I hear! I hear! Don't let me hear it again!

She saw his angry face and bowed her own deeper over the vase. I should not have said that, she thought. But once something is said, there is no way of blotting it out. This I have learned without the help of books.

He took up his hat and showed her his stiff, cold back as he went out. I hurt the poor thing, he said to himself. I didn't intend it, but there's no way I can amend it.

He was miserable tramping along the road, but needed to transfer his thoughts to confronting Jack.

The walk seemed the shortest he had ever taken, and he was within a half mile of Honeysuckle with the beginning of the Herbert paddocks when he saw him.

Jack.

There he was by a horse in harness, staring hard at Edwards, and it was an amazing thing that resentment could show on a face at all that distance. Edwards raised his hat high to let the greeting be seen. Jack bent his head but it could have been part of a movement to adjust logs and stumps on a slide, in getting the new paddock ready for spring planting.

A crop of potatoes for Sydney, something he had never attempted before. Enid thought it was a good idea. Alex saw it as added work, on top of running Halloween. George saw it restricting his visits to Violet.

Jack had his own dream. Henry was in Sydney. He might help him market the potatoes. Jack saw Henry with one of those fruit and vegetable shops, not stocked with the withered stuff he'd eyed off so scornfully when in Sydney, but carrying Honeysuckle produce, the summer crop of fruit, much of which was wasted, potatoes, pumpkins and melons that could be specially grown.

What was Henry working at now? They hadn't heard since he left. He had been putting bicycle parts together in a factory before he brought that girl home. Before that he worked for a grain merchant. He liked that better, and wrote about helping to haul bags of seed from a lorry, the corn inferior to that grown at Honeysuckle.

They should have bought a lorry, instead of that car, only useful for gadding. Enid did not care all that much for it. With a lorry Henry might have stayed at home and got some carrying work. He could have carried loads of produce to the railhead at Nowra, which would be even better than being in Sydney selling it.

Henry was the one he thought would love the farm best. He used to sit as a little boy in each furrow as he ploughed a paddock.

‘I'm making chocolates, Farder,' he would say, shaping the moist black earth into squares. Sweeter than chocolate it was in Jack's ears.

Would that new Henry grow to be anything like he was? Jack did not want the thought to settle in his head. He was quite frightened every time Violet came with the child to Honeysuckle that she might announce she was leaving it.

And here came that fellow! Barely a day passed without a visit. Jack tallied up the meals eaten with them since the funeral. Ten no less, not counting the morning and afternoon teas at which he ate abundantly.

Edwards on seeing Jack decided he would join him in the paddock, and giving himself no time to change his mind, ducked under the fence rail, scraping his back as he usually did, thinking of the way Una flew under them like that white tufty stuff that blew from the ends of grass. He walked to Jack, taking his hat off long before he needed to.

The horse, with a coat like toffee and big knobbly knees, appeared tolerant of the interruption, but not excited by it. He blinked great black eyes and lifted great black lips over teeth that looked like weather-beaten clothes pegs, then decided a sneer would be wasted on the plainly agitated Edwards, and sought nourishment in some grass flattened to its sweet roots by the slide.

Jack sat on a log, and this made it hard for Edwards to execute his handshake, but he did, by bending down, then Jack rose and a passing car saw with amazement the two bobbing figures in the middle of a paddock.

The travellers recognized them both and said to each other here is something to watch! Something will break soon, keep your ear to the ground, here comes news to liven the old place up, and give us something to chew on apart from tough corned beef.

Edwards took a seat beside Jack, and the horse laid his ears back listening to the silence. Edwards felt Jack's were laid back too.

‘You have probably noticed,' Edwards said, ‘my fondness for the Misses Herberts.'

The Misses Herberts! That sounded terrible, as if they were elderly spinsters. He looked at the horse and imagined Una grasping its mane and throwing a leg over its back, with her skirt falling back and frothy mysterious underthings showing.

‘Miss Una and Miss Enid,' he corrected himself, foolishly fearful that Jack saw his image of Una. He had put Una first too, which was not the proper way.

Jack might have noticed, for he lifted his large face and appeared to sniff at the air, as if this way he would detect how the wind was blowing. Edwards stared at the ground between his feet.

‘They are fine young women,' he said.

Jack brought his jaws together and his cheeks shook a warning. Edwards clenched his jaws too, sweating a little in the cool air.

He saw beyond the far fence smoke rising from the Honeysuckle chimneys. He longed to be there in the warmth and comfort of the house, but felt the stout chains Jack has used to bind the logs to the slide anchored him as well.

‘Very fine women,' said Edwards miserably. ‘Both.'

The smoke at that moment rose thicker and stronger stating that Enid was stoking fires. Enid stoking this fellow's fire? Jack got up and stood between Edwards and the house, as if this would put Enid farther from him. Edwards had the brief and terrifying thought that Jack might be shaping up for a fight. He stood too, so as not to be disadvantaged.

Their eyes met, Edwards's like those of a pleading spaniel, Jack's coming forward so black you would not believe any expression could be in them.

They were like pools of oil that would drag Edwards to their murky depths, if he dared say the wrong name.

‘It's Miss Una,' he said in a low voice, even he puzzled at the soothing note in it.