Bittersweet (15 page)

“Piffle!” said Tufts. “Maude would have spread the story.”

“No, she decided to sit on her knowledge — guess why?”

“Too easy,” said Edda with a sneer. “Maude earmarked the rich doctor as your future husband, Kits.”

“If there was a prize for instinct, Edda, you’d win it,” Kitty said, sighing. “You’re undoubtedly right.” She brightened. “Anyway, we have plenty of time. Cables may fly the aether in an hour, but it still takes six weeks to sail from Southampton to the east coast of Australia, and first the Board has to offer the job to a Pommy — that wouldn’t be popular, were his name not Burdum.”

Grace’s reaction was similar when Edda called the next day; for the moment she was standing by for Theatre, which wasn’t busy, and Grace was on the telephone party line into the Trelawneys, so could be visited. As a new mother, Grace craved company — why was it her lot to conceive if Bear so much as took his trousers off?

The side of Edda that loved her twin utterly was very happy to know that Grace’s impulsive marriage had worked so well; they were as content a couple as one could find, devoted to each other, fretting when they were apart, wrapped in their two sons, Brian and John. Brian had been born on 2nd April 1928, and John fourteen months later on 31st May 1929. Though Grace hadn’t managed to produce twins, she had produced her two children close enough together in age to suggest that they would enjoy an unusual bond of affection as they grew up. Certainly Brian, a frost-fair mite who walked and talked early, was passionately attached to his wee brother, now two months old, equally fair and equally forward. Of course there were those who predicted that this closeness in age would lead to lifelong brotherly hatred, but that was people.

Corunda had replaced district nurse Pauline Duncan with a fearsome dragon, Sister Monica Herd, who combined visits to the district’s housebound invalids with visits to new mothers. An import from Sydney who revelled in driving miles to see the sick, Sister Herd was exactly who Grace needed, just as the ward sisters had been in her nursing days. In other words, Sister Herd frightened the living daylights out of Grace, who cleaned up baby-messes at once and didn’t allow the nappy situation to deteriorate as it had during Brian’s diaper days. The prize Sister Herd dangled was a fully toilet-trained child at nine months: Grace worked with feverish zeal to achieve this freedom, terrified of Sister Herd’s visits — oh, that tongue! A whiplash soaked in acid.

“Bear’s due for another raise in pay,” said Grace over tea and pikelets served with jam and whipped cream. “Honestly, I’m so lucky! My boys are well ahead of anybody else’s the same age, I live in a nice house, and I have a good, teetotal husband — oh, how most husbands drink! The housekeeping money goes in beery urine.”

Edda nodded absently, used to this patter. But she was never proof against her nephews — pray that at least one of them has a bit of Edda in him to stiffen all that sweetness and light! Bear and Grace are fine as long as things are fine, but how would they cope if disaster struck? Then she shook herself and admitted that the other part of her love for Grace rather purred at the prospect of a very small and transient misfortune for them. That was the part of Edda didn’t love her sister wholeheartedly; it loved, yes, but with qualifications and
quantifications that grew every time she realised afresh how incompetent Grace was, how
stupid
. And how weak Bear was with her, the fool.

Even to having children, for heaven’s sake! Bear had told her, man-to-man (and what does that say about you, Edda?) that he feared he and Grace were the kind who made a baby nearly every time they — well, did it.

“So I’m not going to do it until we can afford another one, and especially until Grace has had a good rest. That means,” said Bear earnestly, “being abstemious while little John grows a whole lot more. When he’s two, we’ll go back to it.”

“Have you discussed this with Grace?” Edda asked, winded.

“She’ll like it. Oh, she loves me and — um —
it
. But a few minutes of pleasure can be followed by two years of mess and upheaval, and, well, Grace doesn’t thrive in chaos.”

“Most of the chaos,” Edda said tartly, “she causes herself! But you do whatever you think you must, Bear.”

She had left the subject severely alone thereafter, but if Bear and Grace truly were living without
it
, the chaos was no less. Grace just plain couldn’t organise herself.

“What are you going to be when you grow up, Brian?” Edda asked the child, perched on her knee.

“A train driver,” he said solemnly, eating his pikelet with jam and cream. “Big locomotives, but.”

She burst out laughing. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

“Bear and I take them both down to the shunting yards when he’s home,” said Grace. Her glance slewed sideways, grey and cunning. “What about you and Jack?” she asked.

“What about us?” Edda countered, making Grace work for it.

“Well, you’re an item, you have been for years. But you never seem to push things along, do you?”

“I don’t want to — push things, as you phrase it, Grace. I don’t want a husband or children.”

“Well, you jolly well should!” said Grace crossly. “Don’t you realise how awkward you’re making life for me?”

Edda’s eyes were always a little strange, but sometimes they could grow uncomfortably dangerous, as they did now while she stared at her twin. “How have I made your life awkward, dear?” she cooed dulcetly.

Grace shivered, but a lifetime of Edda made it possible for her to stick to her guns long enough to fire the round she had always intended to fire. “People gossip about Jack Thurlow and me,” she said grittily, “and I dislike it. There’s nothing going on between us because he’s your friend, not mine. Now people are saying I made up the romance between you and Jack to hide my own involvement with him. That you and Jack are
my lie
!”

With a kiss for Brian’s cheek, Edda put the child down and rose to her feet. “Hard cack, Grace!” she snapped. “If you think for one moment that I’m going to marry Jack Thurlow just to make
your
life more endurable, then you’ve got another thing coming! Try looking after yourself, then you won’t need Jack.”

At the corner of Trelawney Way and Wallace Street an irate Edda, not looking, stepped into the road amid squealing brakes.

“Jesus, Edda, I nearly hit you!” Jack Thurlow was saying, his face white. “Get in, woman.”

“Going to see Grace?” Edda asked, strangely unshaken.

“I was, but I’d rather see you. Busy?”

“I have to be near a phone, so how about my hospital home?” She laughed. “When I think of how Matron went on about men on the premises when we started training over three years ago! Now that we’ve turned into sisters, she can’t say a thing.”

They had been lovers for a year, and it had been good for Edda, who had done a copious amount of research before setting off down her primrose path to Sin. From Polynesian, Indian, Chinese and various other sources she had worked out her personal “safe” period for sexual intercourse, and adhered to it inflexibly. Luckily her menstrual cycle was clockwork regular, so the “safe” segment ought to be sufficient. Thus far it had worked, which gave her additional faith in it, but no amount of physical desire in the world, she vowed, would see her break that schedule. She had also armed herself with a dose of ergotamine tartrate to dislodge an early foetus, and more than that she couldn’t do.

“I’m chuffed,” she said, putting the kettle on.

He gave her that wonderful smile. “Why, exactly?”

“Why do you suppose we drink so much strong tea?”

“Habit. It’s a drug within the bounds of the law.”

“Very true!”

“Why are you so chuffed, Edda?”

“We’ve managed to throw so much dust in Corunda’s eyes that the whole town is convinced you’re sleeping with Grace.”

“Shit!” He sat up straight, face suddenly angry. “I might have known!
Grace?
Grace is a duty, not a thrill!”

Finished making the tea, Edda sat down. “What I’ve never really worked out,” she said as she poured, “is why Grace became your duty. She’s not your relative.”

“It’s impossible to explain to someone as efficient and well organised as you, Edda,” he said, clearly at a loss. “Grace is one of those people who can’t manage —”

“Oh, well do I know it!” Edda interrupted, voice bitter. “Yet before she went nursing, when we lived at the Rectory, Grace
was
organised. She always knew what she wanted and how to get it — even Father noticed that, and it foiled Maude on more than one occasion. Underneath all that woolly thoughtlessness there’s a Grace quite capable of organisation and method. It’s just that she gets what she wants by being helpless, so the old Rectory efficiency has been buried. How deeply? I don’t know. Except that it’s there, Jack. Believe me, it’s there.” She shrugged. “Grace has bamboozled you into thinking you owe her a duty, but the truth is that you owe her nothing. You toil on her behalf, and she never pays. In other words, you give her charity. In which case, go to it, my friend.”

“Yes, a charity duty,” he said, nodding. “That fits. But I can’t have Corunda thinking the worse of her.”

“I have a partial answer,” she said.

“You wouldn’t be Edda if you didn’t. Tell me!”

“We have to become less furtive about our relationship, is first and foremost. If you’re known to be sleeping with me, Corunda will have to revise its theories about you and Grace. Yes, I know it’s scandalous to be sleeping together, but for no other reason than the act. We’re both unattached, free to love.”

“What I call ‘pristine scandal’ — virtuous enough within itself,” Jack said, laughter creeping into his eyes, “but all too easily tainted by exposure to the heat of human attention.”

“Sometimes I suspect you got high marks at school, Jack. I’ll have to leave your name and number with the hospital switchboard.” His laughter spilled over. “That will definitely set the gossip ball rolling!”

Jack would be an ideal lover, the seventeen-year-old Edda had told herself, though it was toward the end of 1928 before she learned the fact as a fact, and then she had only her tastes to tell her. No matter that she couldn’t compare: Jack knew how to please her.

It had happened suddenly, unexpectedly, in the glaring daylight by the river — anyone might have come along and found them! But no one had, and that set the pattern of their luck as this new phase in their old relationship flowered to full perfection.

Simply, they had been sitting side by side on the grass, the horses tethered to a tree, when he reached for her and kissed her with an experimental lightness that she ardently returned as soon as she got her breath back. The kiss deepened; an alien desire spread through her that prompted her to remove his shirt as fast as he was removing hers. No protests, no pretexts, no pretences, no hesitation. Edda thought the feel of Jack’s naked body against her own skin the most glorious sensation imaginable, something far beyond the blind groping of an ignorant brain. It reminded her of being lashed by that snake; she was sophisticated enough
to know that the snake/man metaphor was very popular in psychiatric circles. But that didn’t detract at all from the colossal wrench of utter pleasure invading her, or the feel of those muscles.

And her luck had held: no pregnancy, because his impulse had occurred during her “safe” period. After those first frenzied couplings that had come almost without pause, Jack lay so exhausted that Edda, invigorated rather than fatigued, was able to explain her system of birth control, all worked out, but with no place to go until this day. Her energy and logic took him aback, but he listened, and, wanting no babies himself, he readily agreed to limit their sexual activity to her “safe” times. In fact, it had been a shock to find her a virgin; she gave a flawless imitation of an experienced woman of the world, and she was twenty-three. The little fraud! But at least she had prepared for this day, which made her a rare virgin indeed.

Now, of course, Jack knew Edda well enough to obey orders; if Grace needed their affair to be made public, then so be it. The worst repercussions would fall on Edda, who surely knew what she was unleashing. His own reputation would be enhanced. Thus Jack co-operated willingly in letting Corunda know which Latimer girl he was entertaining in a biblical way.

Edda broke the news to Grace personally on her next visit, and, hurting because she was wounded, spoke extremely frankly.

Quite what reaction she had expected Edda hadn’t known, save that she thought Grace would be very pleased, and loved her enough to feel glad she too had some masculine company.

What Edda saw was a stiffening of Grace’s body, an expression of blazing anger on that pinched little face — why
was it pinched? Had the person inside it shrunk? And why did Grace’s eyes blaze?

“You — you snake in the grass!”

A confounded Edda drew back. “I beg your pardon?”

“You bitch! You traitor! You selfish, selfish cow!” Grace cried, beside herself. “Why did you have to steal Jack, of all men? Aren’t there enough others in Corunda for you?”

Edda tried, hanging desperately onto her temper. “The last time I saw you, you complained to me that Corunda deemed Jack Thurlow your lover, and you asked me to help allay that. I have obeyed your request. Corunda knows which woman Jack Thurlow is really involved with, and it isn’t you.”

“Bitch! You stole him from me!”

“Bullshit I did, you stupid ninny!” said Edda, temper going. “Jack belonged to me, not to you, always! I introduced him to you, remember? How could I steal from you what you’ve never, never owned? You have a husband, a really decent one at that — why should you need any part of
my
lover?”

“Bitch! Thief! Jack is my friend!
My friend!
My husband approves, and if he approves, what business is it of anyone else’s? Leave Jack Thurlow alone, you — you snake!”

Little Brian was standing, arms wrapped around his baby brother, looking from his mother to his beloved aunt in complete bewilderment, his clear blue eyes full of unshed tears. Neither Grace nor Edda noticed him.