Settling the Account (48 page)

‘I’ve nothing to say.’ Amy spoke the words
to the wall behind the bench.

‘Nothing that’s any sense, I’ll be bound.
I’ll have none of your whining and grizzling, woman.’

Amy turned to face him. ‘You’ve sent my son
away, Charlie. Don’t expect me to thank you for it.’ She regretted
having spoken as soon as she saw the self-satisfied expression her
words brought.

‘I don’t care a damn what you think of it.’
He looked her up and down contemptuously. ‘You look a right hag
this morning.’ Clearly pleased at having had the last word, he
shoved the door closed behind him and went outside.

Amy finished clearing all traces of
untidiness from the kitchen, then went back to her bedroom. A
glance in her mirror showed there had been truth in Charlie’s
taunt. A few pins had survived the night to leave her hair roughly
held up on one side, while the rest tumbled down in a tangled mass.
Her eyelids were swollen and her face still bore traces of red
blotches.

‘Hag,’ she whispered to the unsightly
reflection. She turned away when the eyes in the mirror filled with
tears.
Don’t be such a baby
.
Dave’d feel terrible if he
saw me in this state over him
.

She splashed cold water on her face and
scrubbed it dry with a rough towel, then attacked her hair with
comb and fingers until she had bullied it into submission. Her
scalp was tender by the time she had finished, but she ignored its
complaints as she stabbed pins into the heavy pile of curls.

This morning, tidying Charlie’s room was a
more disagreeable chore than usual; not because he had left it any
more disheveled than he normally did, but because of her intense
reluctance to have anything to do with him. She was careful never
to go in there when Charlie was in the house, but just being in his
bedroom brought her into a contact that was unpleasantly intimate.
The room reeked of him, bringing back memories she would far rather
forget.

The stink of stale urine told her that
Charlie had used his chamber pot in the night. She hauled it out
from under the bed to take outside and empty. A thick gob of
spittle lurched drunkenly around the inside of the chamber pot as
she carried it, greenish-brown amid the yellow of the urine. As she
emptied the pot and rinsed it out, Amy wondered for a moment if
Charlie had deliberately used it so as to make work for her, rather
than walking the few steps outside. There was probably no active
malice in it, she decided. After all, why should he take the
trouble to go outside, exposing himself to the cold night air, when
he had a wife to clean up after him?

She put away the clothes he had left lying
on the floor, then made his bed, smoothing the sheets until no
trace of a crease remained. The sheets still smelt faintly of soap
from the wash of a few days before, the clean smell pleasant after
the stink of urine. As she folded his nightshirt and placed it
under the pillow, Amy remembered the musty smell of unwashed sheets
that had filled her nostrils on the first night she had lain
shivering with fear in this same bed. The sheets had been musty
again when she had come home from Mrs Coulson’s with her babies.
I don’t think he even knows you’re meant to wash sheets. If I
wasn’t here, he’d have this room smelling like an old goat in no
time
.

There was no real need for her to go into
the boys’ room; certainly no work for her to do there. She went
through anyway. Even if the room might never be used again, she
could not bear to have it shut it up and ignored as if the boys had
never existed.

There was so little left of them, a mere day
after David’s departure. The room still smelt of boys, but that
would fade within days. She had already made the bed and tidied the
room hours before David’s fateful confrontation with his father,
and the few clothes David possessed she had helped him pack, just
as she had done for Malcolm when he had left.

The only visible reminder of the boys was
the trophy Malcolm had won in the riding race at the A and P show
so many years before, and which Amy still dusted every day then
restored to its pride of place on top of the chest of drawers. She
lifted it, and turned it to and fro so that the silver caught the
light from the window, while she summoned up the memory of
Malcolm’s day of triumph and the way Charlie had soured it for him.
But the trophy was showing signs of its age, despite Amy’s careful
polishing. It looked like a relic of someone long dead, and did
little to lighten the bedroom’s comfortless air. The room looked
neat and tidy, and quite unoccupied.

Out of the old habit of neatness, she
smoothed the faint creases in the coverlet that David’s makeshift
pack had left, and immediately regretted having added, however
slightly, to the impersonal look of the room. She noticed something
dark just visible where the coverlet met the floor. Amy knelt to
retrieve it, and found it was a solitary sock, obviously dropped by
David in his rush to pack and unnoticed by either of them until
now.

Amy sank onto the bed and sat there with the
sock in her lap, Malcolm’s trophy resting against the neatly-darned
black wool. A small silver cup and an unmatched sock; that was all
that remained of the years the boys had spent in this room. They
would not be hard to carry with her if she left.

So little to show that the boys had lived
here, and little enough tangible sign of her own presence in the
house. Her diligence kept the house from being overcome by dirt and
general shabbiness, but that was a mere absence of squalor that any
competent housekeeper could manage. There had never been any
question of her being allowed to make the house reflect anything of
herself; the only part of it that had ever felt as if it belonged
to her was her own tiny bedroom, where Charlie never came and where
she could have her few little treasures around her. If she bundled
all her belongings up, they would not make too heavy a parcel. She
could carry it easily enough if she left…

If she left. The realisation of what she was
contemplating brought Amy’s meandering thoughts to an abrupt halt.
She had spent more than half her life in this house.

But what was there to hold her now? Even
when Charlie’s violence had driven her from his bed she had been
reluctant to deprive the boys of their father, and to deprive
Charlie of his sons, by leaving him. Now she had no children, and
no father of her own to be upset by the scandal of an abandoned
marriage. All she had to do was pack up her belongings, wait until
Charlie went out, and walk away. He might rant and rave; might even
be foolish enough to risk her brothers’ vengeance by coming after
her; but he would get used to her absence soon enough. Her bedroom,
and the boys’, would stand empty, and the house would soon become
shabby and unkempt. It would be as if she and the boys had never
lived there.

As if the boys had never existed at all. As
if seventeen years of childbearing and rearing, of being beaten and
humiliated for six of those years, of struggling to protect her
sons and give them all that she could of happiness and affection,
had never happened. A small surge of revolt welled up in her at the
thought of accepting such a defeat. It battled against the lure of
never again having to spend a night under the same roof as
Charlie.

It was a strong lure. She could go home
again; back to the house where she had been happy. She could have
her old room, sleep under her bedspread in her old bed, and make
the room look as if she had never left it. It would be like going
back to being a child again.

But she was not a child, and it was no use
pretending otherwise. How could home be the same place it had been
half a lifetime ago, with the memories of her lost children to
haunt her? How could it be the same without her father there? It
was John’s house now, and much as she loved him, and however
welcome he would make her, she knew she would be a burden to him if
she came home. He did not need another woman around the house to
help Sophie; what he did need was all the bedrooms in the house for
his own children. It was all very well dreaming of having her old
room back; she would be evicting two small boys from it if she did
so.

And watching John’s houseful of children
grow up around her while she was as childless as if she had been
barren would be even harder to bear than knowing herself to be a
burden. Bad enough if he had nothing but sons, but there was Mary
to make it even worse.

To her own mild surprise, after three boys
in a row Sophie had produced a little girl. At three years old Mary
was plump and sturdy like her mother, and almost as
uncommunicative, but she had thick black hair, blue eyes, and a
shy, pretty smile. Whenever Amy saw her, she was vividly reminded
of David at the same age, before his beautiful curls had been
shorn. And Mary stirred another memory that was equally poignant.
Her hair might not be as long and wavy as Amy imagined her own
daughter’s to be, nor her eyes as huge or as startlingly blue, but
if Amy had to live in the same house as her, Mary would be a
constant, painful reminder of Amy’s own loss.

The thought of living on in this house with
Charlie, with no David to add any spark of happiness to her life,
was not appealing; but surely it must be better than going home and
having the old wounds torn open daily, and making a nuisance of
herself into the bargain. She had no fear of Charlie; there was
nothing he could do to hurt her now. If life held no great hope of
pleasure ahead, at least she could minimise the pain.

*

‘Frank! I want you to go into town, and
you’d better hurry up or it’ll be too late for today.’ Lizzie’s
voice carried easily from the corner of the paddock where she stood
to where Frank and Joey were repairing a stretch of fence, near the
opposite corner.

Frank looked up from the work to watch
Lizzie scurrying towards them, lifting her skirts to move more
freely. The tone of her voice, not to mention her unusual haste,
told him she was in a great state of agitation. When she was close
enough for him to see her expression, he found it was not distress
that had put that spark in Lizzie’s eyes; it was excitement.

‘I don’t think I can go today, love,’ Frank
said, knowing as he spoke that she was unlikely to be put off quite
so easily. When Lizzie got that look in her eye, she could be as
hard to stop as the creek in flood. ‘I want to get this lot
finished this afternoon. I’ll go tomorrow if you like.’

‘No, that’s no use, it might be too late by
then. You can finish your fence tomorrow.’

‘I don’t know that I can—looks like it might
rain tomorrow. What’s the rush, anyway? What are you after in
town?’

‘Ma told me just now when I was up there.’
Lizzie paused for effect, then made her announcement. ‘The new
doctor’s arrived.’

‘Yes, I heard that when I was in town the
other day,’ Frank said.

Lizzie’s mouth briefly dropped open in
shock. ‘You knew he’d come and you didn’t tell me?’

Frank shrugged. ‘Didn’t think you’d be
interested. Mind you, I’m not sorry old Doctor Wallace’s gone. He
was a dead loss—he never did you a bit of good that time you were
ill. It was your ma and Amy that pulled you through. He didn’t
even—’

‘Yes, yes, never mind all that old
business,’ Lizzie said, cutting Frank’s flow short. ‘It’s the new
doctor I’m interested in. He’s quite young, Ma said—not too young,
though. And he’s well off—he must be, anyway, being a doctor. And,’
she beamed at Frank, clearly feeling that she had saved the best
news till last, ‘he’s not married!’

Frank studied her in amusement tinged with
irritation. He knew where all this was leading, and he did not
particularly approve. ‘Well, I don’t see what that’s got to do with
you, Lizzie,’ he said, trying unsuccessfully to make his voice
stern. ‘He mightn’t be married, but you are. And I’m not about to
start sharing you. Mind you, I might be able to get on with this
fence a bit better if I did.’

‘Oh, don’t be so… so
awkward
,’ Lizzie
said, frowning at him. Frank knew he would have earned a more
abusive name than ‘awkward’ if Joey had not been there to hear.
‘You know what I mean. Now, I want you to go and see the
doctor—Doctor Townsend, his name is, isn’t that a nice name? He’s
from England. Anyway, go and see him, and tell him he’s to come out
tomorrow afternoon, about three o’clock. That’ll give us time to
get the lunch dishes done and everything, and the girls and me can
do a load of baking.’

Frank was determined not to make it too easy
for her. ‘What do you want the doctor for? You’re not sick, are
you? You’re looking a bit thin in the face,’ he added with a total
disregard for the truth.

‘Of course I’m not sick! I want you to tell
him—’

‘Is one of the kids sick?’ Frank asked,
beginning to enjoy himself. ‘I’ll get him to come today if they
are—no sense waiting till tomorrow if one of them needs a
doctor.’

‘No, today’s too soon. Tomorrow’ll be just
right. I think I’ll get Amy down, she could do with a rest from
himself, and she can help me think it all out. I’ve got to sort out
what Maudie’ll wear, and I want her to make some nice
biscuits—’

‘Is Maudie sick? She shouldn’t be doing
baking, then, should she? What’s wrong with her?’

‘Maudie’s
not
sick! I just want the
doctor to come out so we can get to know him. That’d be
neighbourly, wouldn’t it?’

‘He’s not a neighbour,’ Frank pointed
out.

‘No, but he’s new. We should be making him
welcome.’

‘I don’t know that I want to make him
welcome. I don’t know what sort of chap he is. I mean, he might be
the sort of fellow who turns up and goes marrying people’s
daughters just because he likes the sort of biscuits they
make.’