Amy's Children (9 page)

The Misses Wheatley had never worked. Before coming to Sydney they had lived on the family's wheat and sheep property. After their parents died they stayed on with their brother Henry.

Henry was forty-five when he took a wife, a woman with a small dressmaking shop in Dubbo. She was thirty-eight, widowed with two children. The Misses Wheatley handed over to the bride and groom the main bedroom which they had occupied since their parents' deaths, and went back to the one they had shared for most of their lives. The new Mrs Wheatley frowned on the arrangement whereby the children, a boy and a girl, shared Henry's old room. Henry, ever anxious to please her (and unable to see her as the domineering shrew she seemed to others) agreed that it would be a good idea for his sisters to have an independent life.

The Misses Wheatley were quite eager to go to Sydney and the ten pounds a month Henry promised to pay them seemed like a fortune. They saw themselves, after rent was paid and food was bought, giving generously to the collection at the Methodist Church on Sundays, going to the movies and on day trips to the mountains by train, going to Manly by ferry for a walk between the harbour and the sea, and having coffee and cake at a cafe. They had never had money of their own, using store accounts in Dubbo for new clothes for church and the show, never in need of evening wear for they were brought up to believe dancing was sinful.

Henry's wife sent the money at the end of each month. The Misses Wheatley had reckoned on it coming at the end of every four weeks.

Miss Grace didn't want Miss Heather to make an issue of it, and upset the source.

“We do get the money on the dot though,” she pleaded.

“On the dot or not on the dot,” said Miss Heather, the younger and brighter of the two, beginning to realize she was now in charge of both their lives, “there are fifty-two weeks in the year and we only get money for forty-eight.”

“We can manage,” said Grace, shutting out of her vision the great loaded apple tree on the farm that would keep them in puddings for weeks. They had just halved an apple bought on Parramatta Road from a dreadful little foreign man, who had tried to force them to take more, throwing his hands in the air at the ten shillings offered, slamming the till open and shut at the way they were taking all his change.

The nine shillings and eleven pence was to see the week out. Heather, eating her half of the apple carefully because of an unsteady tooth at the rear of her upper jaw, looked keenly at Grace, wondering if her pallor meant she was coming down with the bronchitis she had suffered all her life, and how she would cope with the expense of a visit to a doctor if this were necessary. Their cheque was due at the end of the week, but it could fail to arrive should an emergency like floodwaters keep Henry from getting into Dubbo to the post office. Heather automatically and foolishly looked out the window to the sky, clear and blue, and hoped for the same for Dubbo.

Henry's wife was glad to be rid of most of the old-fashioned furniture that crowded the farmhouse, and agreed to paying the cost of railing it to Petersham. Amy was nearly as excited as the Wheatley women to see it unpacked. She loved the satiny finish on the chiffonier and the slender turned-in legs of a lovers' seat, capable of supporting weighty lovers in spite of its frail appearance. Some of the little tables and cabinets Amy would have died for.

She said so to John one Saturday afternoon, while engaged in a favourite pastime, drinking tea in her kitchen.

“Perhaps they will die and give it all to you,” John said, thinking of the Misses Wheatley as old enough for death to be imminent.

“Oh, I didn't mean that!” Amy cried and got to her feet and seized the tea-towel to chase him around the backyard.

He dodged behind the lavatory and she shrieked at him to take care where he trod for she had planted a passionfruit vine to cover it.

He jumped clear and flung himself on his back on the grass, his big boots at the end of his still body pointing their toes to the sky.

Amy thought of Peter, and went soberly to peg the damp tea-towel to the clothesline.

I think I'll always love him, no matter what comes, she said to herself.

What came, surprisingly, was Lance Yates.

With Amy's help he arranged a benefit night in the public hall a few doors along King Street from Lincolns. The proceeds were to be for the war effort. He hired film equipment to show scenes of fighting in the war zones and activities on the home front. Amy looked hard at the pictured Land Army girls for a glimpse of Jean Sheldon. There was none, but she saw enough to wonder how they managed to remain so well groomed, hardly a hair out of place while they tossed hay and cut cabbages.

Amy typed notes inviting all the office and factory staff, and gave them to Victor to slip into pay packets two weeks before the event. Lance had suggested a printed notice for upstairs and down, but Amy said she would like to send a personal invitation to everyone.

“I'll do them in my lunch hour,” Amy said. “They'll read a notice but won't believe it means them.”

All the office staff went, and several from the factory squeezed together on one of the long seats, maintaining the division between office and factory. Mr Yates, putting on his most genial manner during the interval when tea and biscuits were passed around, failed to spark them into a convivial mood. They looked much the same as they did at their machines, except that they knew where to put their eyes then. Lance made a lot of mistakes with their names and had to be put right by the forewoman.

“Well, she looks like a Phyllis and not the way I imagine an Edna would look,” he said, rubbing one side of his oily face.

Edna and Phyllis looked at each other, a flash of fear and a question in each pair of leaden eyes. Were their jobs in danger, displeasing him with ill-suited names? And should they consider exchanging them? Their tea slopped about in the thick cups and biscuit crumbs were scattered on their knees. They longed to be home in their dark little slum houses, smelly with humanity and soap suds, and vibrant with the cackling sound from their gossiping mothers.

Mrs Yates came to the film evening. She was short and plump and corseted and dark, and oily skinned like Lance. Amy thought their similar skins might have attracted them to each other in the first place. She had a ripe but not healthy look and painted her face liberally. Amy was pretty sure Mrs Yates believed she was smarter looking than any of the other girls there. She had a fixed smile for everyone when the lights were on, and Amy felt that Mrs Yates felt she was impressing them with her manner, non-condescending in circumstances where she had every right to be condescending.

After the film equipment was packed in the boot of his car and Amy had washed the cups and saucers and stacked them on a shelf above the sink, Lance drove her home to Petersham.

Mrs Yates removed her smile in the car. In the back seat Amy sat with her crochet bag holding a damp tea-towel (she had remembered to take one, feeling in those times of shortages there would be none provided) and the biscuits left over from supper, which Lance insisted she have. Mrs Yates felt Lance spent too much on the film evening, war effort or not. Her uneasy feeling about Amy increased minute by minute, compelled as she was to observe her there in her pale green blouse, cream jumper and navy skirt. She knew the jumper was one from Lincolns and began to think Lance might have allowed her to take it without paying.

She flung her head halfway round, seeing Amy's straight back and her hair springing away from a green band like a portrait in a frame, for the car's rear window was directly behind her. Why couldn't she sit in the corner as others would? Mrs Yates thought, leaning towards Lance to look in the rear vision mirror and accuse Amy with a heavy frown.

“Can you see there behind you if anything's coming?” she asked Lance. He gave his attention to turning the car into Amy's street and slowed his speed approaching Amy's house. He knows where I live, Amy thought. Perhaps he's seen me in the front garden sometime on his way past. Her face was hot and her hands gripped her crocheted bag as she got out. She knew she should ask them into the house.

“Which place is it?” Mrs Yates asked to establish that Lance did not know.

Amy pointed to the light in the upstairs window, indicating that the Misses Wheatley were not yet in bed although it must be half past ten. She hoped neither was ill, but as she looked both appeared, quite robust, to pull the blind down, one on either side. They will be pleased I got a lift home, Amy thought, already looking forward to recounting the evening's programme for them. She dismissed the show of curiosity, quick enough to see Miss Heather indicating to Miss Grace that they had looked long enough. To prove they were not of a prying nature, Miss Heather put a hand between the blind and window to lower the window another couple of inches without showing so much as an eye.

Amy went around to Lance's side. “Would you care to come in?” she said, nervous at the thought of sitting them on the two kitchen chairs and keeping from them the fact that there was no third.

“We must get home to Allan,” Mrs Yates said.

Amy saw Lance's disappointed face, and shared with him a vision of his large, rather shapeless son whose one interest was assembling wireless sets and who sided with his mother in all marital arguments. Amy, along with the remaining office staff, learned this through Miss Ross who was taken into Miss Sheldon's confidence. Withholding this and other sidelights on the Yateses' domestic habits would place at risk Miss Ross's reputation as Sheldon's sole confidant. Unthinkable.

Amy was relieved for herself and sorry for Lance. He bent lower over the wheel to start the car and jerked his chin once, which she thought was the only farewell gesture he allowed himself. She went into the house unhappy, wondering that she should be, thinking she should be grateful to Mrs Yates, awful as she was, for sparing her a drive home alone with Lance. Her house seemed terribly empty too and desolate when she got inside. In her bedroom the little cane chest of drawers looked forlorn and ashamed, as if it had failed like a barren parent to produce more of its kind.

She went into the kitchen to hang up her tea-towel, hearing the ring of her high heels on the bare floors, unhappy at the sight of the closed sitting-room door. She went down the back path to the lavatory, thinking it should be inside the bathroom in the modern way, wondering where the Yateses' was.

When she was in bed she began to imagine the Yateses coming in. She closed her eyes and furnished the sitting room. She sat the two of them in large fat velvet covered chairs and switched on a lamp giving a peach-coloured glow to a little table (such as the Wheatleys had) and some magazines beside the lamp, not trash but intellectual publications like
The Bulletin
, and no romantic novels such as Mrs Yates would most likely read, but a thick book with a bookmark in it and an author's name that could not fail to impress.

She would offer food and drink from a little glass-fronted cabinet containing a bottle of sherry and fine-stemmed glasses and a barrel of wafer biscuits. She would put a match to the gas fire “to take the chill off the room”, without having to consider the cost.

She raised herself to look briefly at her curtainless window before lying down for sleep.

“I'll have it all one day, I know I will,” she said, and to her surprise the partly empty room did not echo the words back to her.

A year later the sitting room was furnished.

Lance paid for it.

Amy protested but he got around it. He wanted to give her a raise of one pound a week because she had become his right hand (as he termed it), but there were complications.

A raise could not be kept from Victor, who made up the wages every week. Lance, anxious to keep him in his employ because of the shortage of manpower in civilian life, had promised him the first raise. Lance knew Victor was looking out for it. He was in love with a plump little girl named Bonnie Wright, who worked in an office machinery shop farther down King Street. The girl was talking about joining the women's military forces and Victor wanted marriage before he lost her to some Army colonel (or such were his fears). Sometimes she came into Lincoln Knitwear and Victor adopted the air of a spaniel willing to be kicked, and indeed disappointed if he wasn't, while she twirled her handbag and kept her mouth stretched into a great smile. There was a cold glitter in her eyes for the audience of girls, part patronizing as well since she had snapped Victor up from under their noses, not that she was all that fussed about the victory.

“I think a lot about joining up,” she said, not looking at Victor but knowing the expression he wore, the girls delighting in it too. “Do my little bit!”

“Get my little bit more like it!” cried Miss Armstrong to Miss Garter and Miss Harris in the washroom before going back to their desks, for Bonnie had come in her lunch hour from the shop. Business was slack, the owner, a Jew, waiting for the postwar boom when offices would hum with activity and he could put away forever his sign Quota Sold for Today.

Bonnie dusted the typewriters and adding machines and moved them to different angles, polished the brass doorknob and keyhole and watched the clock for the time to ask Mr Cohen what he wanted on his sandwiches for lunch. She sat at a typewriter behind a little table in one corner, for the shop had no counter.

“I'll get typists' bum without the typing,” she said one day to the empty shop.

The girls at Lincoln Knitwear suspected Miss Wright was in danger of losing her job in a non-essential industry. That, in their view, was the reason for her constant threat to join the forces, a safety measure against the indignity of dismissal. She was also safeguarding herself against an early marriage to Victor.

“It'll be a little bit she'll get from Victor!” Miss Harris, combing her hair with one hand, raised the other waggling a little finger separated from the others. She watched it in the mirror pecking the air like a bird's beak.