Settling the Account (77 page)

Maudie reached down into her basket and
pulled out a small bottle. ‘I put some of this in her tea. It’s
wonderful stuff, it knocks you out in no time.’ She passed the
bottle across to Frank. ‘Here you are, you’d better look after it,
Pa. Put it somewhere safe, mind—you don’t want Ma finding it. You
don’t need to give it to her every day, so it should last a while.
Every other day should do.’

‘But… it’s some sort of medicine, is it? You
went and slipped your ma some medicine on the sly? Did you ask
Richard if you could?’ Frank corrected himself before Maudie had a
chance to answer. ‘No, I know you didn’t, he was with me the whole
time. Maudie, you shouldn’t go dosing your ma like that—specially
not now, the state she’s in.’

‘Oh, don’t go making a fuss,’ Maudie said.
‘It’s some stuff Richard used to give me when I was expecting—I
think it’s just laudanum or something. Some nights I couldn’t get
off to sleep, and I was getting really tired. So it must be all
right for Ma.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ Frank said. ‘You
just see that you ask Richard if it’s all right.’

‘But he’ll only go on about it,’ Maudie
said, reluctance clear in her voice. ‘There’s no need to go
worrying him.’

‘Well, if you don’t tell him I will. And I’m
not going to give your ma any of this stuff till Richard says it’s
all right. I don’t care if he does tell you off.’

‘Oh, all right, then.’ Maudie glared at
Frank. ‘I’ll ask him, if you’re going to make a fuss about it.
Anyway, Richard never stays grumpy for long.

‘Come here, you two,’ she told Maisie and
Beth, who were sharing the task of peeling a mountain of potatoes.
Maudie hustled them off into a corner of the room.

‘Now, what you have to—’ Maudie stopped
abruptly, and looked over the girls’ heads at Frank. ‘Don’t you go
listening, Pa,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.

‘No, I won’t take any notice,’ Frank
said.

He made a great show of talking to Lucy, but
it was impossible not to catch a few words of what Maudie was
telling the girls so earnestly: ‘She’s expecting, you know,’ ‘Not
till September,’ ‘Even bigger soon,’ ‘Makes her sore in her…’ The
last word of that phrase was delivered in a voice too low for Frank
to hear.

‘And on top of all that, she’s got this
thing wrong with her blood,’ Maudie finished in a louder voice.
‘Richard says she needs to rest, so that’s what we’ve all got to
make her do. Pa, you’ll have to help too.’

‘Mmm? What was that?’ Frank asked, feigning
a sudden realisation that Maudie was speaking.

‘You’ll have to help with getting Ma to
rest. She’s pretty smart, Ma is, so we’ll have to be even smarter.
You girls are going to have to be one step ahead of her, and you’ll
have to keep it up all day.’

Maisie was directing a blank look at Maudie.
‘What’s she on about?’ she asked Beth.

‘I don’t know,’ Beth said. ‘What do you
mean, Maudie?’

‘You’ve got to stop Ma trying to do so much
work. She thinks she’s got to organise you two all the time because
you’re hopeless—’

‘We are not hopeless!’ Beth protested.

‘Well, Ma thinks you are. Anyway, you know
what she’s like—she’s always got to be bossing everyone around.

‘It’s just a matter of being organised,’
Maudie went on. ‘You’ll start first thing in the morning. What
happens when you get up, Pa?’

‘Your ma gets up the same time I do, and she
comes out to get breakfast on. It’s worse in the summer, with me
getting up so early.’

‘Yes, well, we don’t need to worry about
that,’ Maudie said briskly. ‘Ma’ll be right again by next summer.
Now, you two,’ she told Beth and Maisie, ‘it’s time you started
getting breakfast on by yourselves.’

‘We help her with it,’ Beth pointed out.
‘She wakes us up when she comes out of a morning.’

‘Helping her with it’s not enough,’ Maudie
said. ‘You should be doing it by yourselves.’

‘But she won’t let us,’ Beth said.

‘Don’t give her the option. You know what
time her and Pa get up—you need to get up about half an hour before
that. Maybe a whole hour until you get into the way of it. Get
everything on the go, then take a cup of tea into Ma before she’s
even got out of bed. That’ll make sure she stays there.’

‘She’ll go crook,’ Beth said. ‘She’ll say
what were we doing, getting up so early.’

‘Tell her you couldn’t sleep,’ said Maudie.
‘Say you woke up early and you couldn’t get back to sleep, so you
thought you might as well get up.’

‘I suppose…’ Beth said doubtfully.

‘We’ll have to get up really early,’ Maisie
said, pulling a face at the notion.

‘But you can take turns,’ Maudie said. ‘You
won’t have to get up that early every day. So that’s not a problem,
is it?

‘Then there’s all the other jobs that need
doing,’ she went on before the girls had a chance to respond. ‘You
mustn’t just wait around for Ma to tell you what to do next. You
know what jobs get done what days, just get on and do them.’

‘But she
likes
telling us what to
do,’ Beth protested.

‘No, she doesn’t. Well, she does when she’s
all right, but just now while she’s not the best it only makes her
grumpier, trying to think out what to tell you all the time. No,
the thing to do is to start doing a job before Ma even has the
chance to think of telling you.’ She fixed them both with a hard
stare. ‘And you’ve
got
to make a proper job of things.’

‘We do,’ Beth said.

‘And she’s
so
fussy,’ Maisie put in.
‘If you leave just a tiny spot on the floor when you do the
scrubbing, she goes on and on.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with being fussy,’
Maudie said self-righteously. ‘I’m fussy myself about
scrubbing.’

‘Oh, yes, it’s easy for you to be fussy,’
Beth said, stung into a rare show of temper by her sister’s
superior tone. ‘Easy to be fussy when you don’t have to do it
yourself.’

Maudie held Beth’s eyes, a sombre expression
on her face. ‘Don’t you want Ma to get better?’

Beth’s lower lip trembled. ‘Of course I do.
I want it more than anything.’

‘Me, too,’ Maisie put in.

‘Then it’s up to you two to look after her.
That’s not asking much, is it?’

The girls shook their heads.

‘Right, you can start now,’ said Maudie.
‘Maisie, you carry on with those spuds, but I want you to show me
how you do the floor, Beth. You can do that corner over there. Then
when you’ve finished the vegies I’ll get you both to—’

‘Are you going to help us?’ Beth
interrupted.

‘No,’ Maudie said. ‘I’m going to watch you
two do the jobs and see where you need to be doing them
better.’

‘While you just sit and do nothing?’

‘Oh, I’m going to write out a list of the
jobs for you, so you won’t have to remember what needs doing every
day. Get me a pencil and some paper, Beth.’

‘But that’s not fair,’ Beth said. ‘You just
sitting there watching us. Why don’t you help?’

Maudie’s calm seemed unshakeable. ‘What’s
the point of that? I can’t be here every day, can I? The best thing
I can do for you two—and for Ma—is see that you know what to do to
make things easy for her. That’s sense, isn’t it? Isn’t that sense,
Pa?’ she added, making a claim on the authority he could offer.

Frank only hesitated for a moment before
answering; any vague affront to Beth’s and Maisie’s dignity faded
into insignificance against the hope that Maudie was holding out.
‘It sounds pretty good to me. Don’t be too rough with them, though,
love,’ he added in an attempt at mediation. ‘You don’t need to go
ordering them around so much.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Maudie. ‘Come
on, you girls, get on with it.’

Beth and Maisie muttered under their breaths
in a half-hearted fashion, but Maudie had judged them accurately:
they were both willing to put up with a good deal of bossing from
Maudie as long as they thought it would help them look after
Lizzie.

‘Now, Pa, it’s your job to see she goes to
bed early,’ Maudie told Frank. ‘If you start going to bed a bit
earlier, she won’t want to sit up by herself. So you make sure you
do that. You won’t forget, will you?’

‘I think I can manage that, love.’ Frank
waited till Beth and Maisie were paying them no attention, then
spoke to Maudie in a low voice. ‘I don’t know if you should’ve been
telling the girls all that stuff, you know,’ he said. ‘You were
talking about the baby and all, weren’t you? I don’t know what your
ma would have to say about that.’

‘She won’t know unless someone tells her,
and no one will.’

‘I suppose so, but… well, they’re a bit
young for all that, aren’t they? Well, I know Maisie’s older than
you, but she’s not married.’

‘Richard says ignorance does more harm than
knowledge ever could,’ Maudie said, reciting it like a lesson
carefully memorised. ‘I think that’s quite right, don’t you?
Anyway,’ she relented, leaning closer to whisper in Frank’s ear, ‘I
didn’t tell them much. Nothing that’d frighten them off.’

Maudie drew up her list of tasks for the
girls, and when she judged they were due for a rest she went over
the list with them in great detail. She seemed satisfied with their
understanding by the time Rosie came home from school and Kate got
up from her afternoon sleep.

Maudie was not foolish enough to try the
appeal to their better nature that had worked so well with Beth and
Maisie. She told the two little girls what jobs they should be
doing, told them that they had to do whatever Beth and Maisie said,
and announced that she would watch them do the dusting and the
other tasks that were delegated to them. When she had finished
speaking, she folded her arms and waited for the protests.

‘You can’t tell us what to do!’ Rosie said
immediately. ‘We don’t have to do what you say.’

‘Oh, yes you do,’ Maudie said calmly.

‘No, we don’t. We don’t, eh, Kate?’

‘No,’ Kate agreed, always eager to follow
her sister’s lead.

‘Yes, you do,’ Maudie repeated. ‘Because if
you don’t…’

She put a hand on each girl’s shoulder, drew
them close, and spoke in a low voice. Kate gave a frightened
squeak; Rosie’s eyes grew wide, but she managed to maintain her
mutinous air.

‘He wouldn’t,’ she said. ‘Richard wouldn’t
do that.’

‘He would if I told him to,’ Maudie
said.

Rosie turned to a higher authority. ‘Pa,
Maudie says if we don’t do what she says she’ll make Richard give
us horrible medicines.’

‘And needles,’ Kate put in, her voice high
with fear. ‘Big needles.’

‘Well, if you’re going to be naughty, I’ll
tell Richard you’re sick,’ Maudie said in a coolly reasonable
voice. ‘I’ll tell him you need medicine, you see. Nasty, nasty
medicine—and injections, too. So you’d better do what I say.’

‘Don’t let her, Papa,’ Kate pleaded.

Frank tried to harden his heart against
their pleas, with only partial success. ‘Don’t frighten them,
Maudie.’ He paused, and chewed reflectively at his lip. ‘But you’d
better do what your sister says, you two,’ he told the little
girls. ‘She knows what’s best.’

‘And if you don’t…’ Maudie left the threat
hanging unspoken, then she swept Rosie and Kate out of the room so
that she could check their dusting skills.

*

Frank was in the room when Lizzie woke from
her unexpected afternoon nap.

‘How do you feel, love?’ he asked softly.
‘Did you have a good sleep?’

Lizzie frowned in confusion. ‘Fancy me going
to sleep like that. I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Well, there’s nothing wrong with having a
lie-down. I wouldn’t mind one myself sometimes of an afternoon.’ He
studied Lizzie’s face, noting with pleasure how the signs of
tension had drained from it. ‘You look good, Lizzie. Course, you
always do look good.’

‘You talk a lot of rot,’ Lizzie scoffed. She
heaved herself up against the pillows, brushing aside Frank’s
attempt to help. ‘I’ll get up in a minute. See what those girls are
up to. Is Maudie still here?’

‘No, Richard came and got her about half an
hour ago. It was good to see her, eh?’

‘Mmm,’ said Lizzie. ‘She said she’ll come
out again soon.’

‘That’ll be good. I bet you liked seeing
Lucy, too.’

‘I suppose so,’ Lizzie conceded. ‘She’s not
a bad baby. I gave Maudie a bit of good advice—that girl had no
idea about a few things.’

Frank sent out a silent message of gratitude
to his daughter for her uncharacteristic meekness in having allowed
herself to be lectured in such a way. ‘It’s good if you can help
her.’

‘She’s not going to have her christened till
my baby’s born. We might get the two of them done together. Fancy
her calling her that.’

‘What, Lucy? It’s quite a nice name, isn’t
it?’

‘It’s all right. I mean the other one.’
Lizzie’s mouth curved into a self-satisfied smile. ‘Didn’t she tell
you? She’s called her Lucy Elizabeth.’

*

Frank looked up at what he took for a sound
from the direction of the bedroom, then slumped back in his chair
when he realised the noise had come from outside.

‘It’s pretty quiet up there,’ he said,
indicating the passage with a tilt of his head. ‘Seems like ages
since the nurse got here.’

‘It’s not as long as all that,’ Richard
said. He pulled out his watch and checked the time. ‘Scarcely two
hours.’ He closed the watch and put it away, then patted Frank’s
arm. ‘I’m sure it seems much longer to you, though.’

‘Yes, it does.’ Frank stared at the passage,
willing some noise to come out of it. ‘You know, I hate hearing her
yell out when the pains take her—when she does that, I think it’s
the worst thing in the world. Then this part starts—the quiet bit,
when she’s under the chloroform and you can’t hear anything. This
is the worst bit. At least when she’s yelling out I know she’s
alive.’