Loving Daughters (18 page)

34

They were married in January, just one year after Edwards's appointment to Wyndham.

Only weeks after the engagement was announced (a few days after the meeting in the paddock) the archdeacon came from Bega to confirm six or seven children, the first group in Wyndham for confirmation since the war. Edwards was proud of his achievement, the culmination of regular instruction in the church porch after school, with scarred boots banging the stool impatient to be gone, the road beyond the door a yearning thing, the bird calls far sweeter than Edwards's earnest pleas to believe what he was saying, although he himself held doubts about much of it.

The archdeacon almost fell in love with Una himself. He watched her long hands in their frilled cuffs on the shoulders of the gawky, terrified children, gently moving in some cases a full hand from a mouth, the mouth refusing to close when the hand was dropped. The archdeacon would have a few words to his parish council after this! That beautiful girl! An asset to the church.

Any man with support from a wife as beautiful and charming as that would do a better job for the church. A fool of a rule if ever there was one! Not only would he say so but he would suggest (insist!) on an increase in the stipend, small though it might need to be, there would be an increase.

What a home she would make of the rectory, if this place was anything to go by! For everyone gathered in the Honeysuckle garden after the service for trays of tea, sandwiches and cakes. Here was the elder girl now offering cake. He pulled at a wedge, tearing it from the big, golden round, as if it was flesh cut gently to save a deeper hurt. He fancied he heard the girl wince and looked up to see her dart a smile to her lips, while her eyes stayed serious. She is anxious that everyone is being looked after. A fine girl too! An ideal wife for the church and why most of them choose mousy, drab women he would never know. Or bossy ones like the wife of the Candelo man, there in a dreadful hat looking quite boldly towards Edwards and Una together on a little seat as if their thoughts were already in unison, and they each needed a little spell, she from feeding the children moist tomato sandwiches and he from circling among shy farmers, ill at ease in suits and wives standing half behind them, shyer still.

‘You do all this so well,' Edwards said in a whisper when his mouth was inches from her ear.

Una chose the time for the marriage to adjust to Small Henry's timetable.

‘In the morning after his bath and sleep when he's happiest,' Una said, sending the wheel of the sewing machine flying, as she ran up a seam of a cream silk coat she was making for him for the wedding day. She clicked the thread from the needle and pulled at the silk to smooth out a little puckering.

Enid walked with her new step as if she was not certain the floor was safe, carrying plates to the dresser, for Una had moved the machine to the kitchen to work in a breeze from the back door, utilizing an authority that had come with her new status. She allowed herself a small glance at Enid's face now, and brushed fragments of silk and cotton from her front and if there was any stirring under the fine pintucks she brushed that away too. She'll be happier when I'm gone with the place to herself and more time to toady to her beloved Jack. Una trimmed a small armhole then clattered the scissors onto the machine.

Enid raised her head as if they had spoken, sharply and hurtfully.

‘Do you agree on eleven o'clock?' Una said. ‘Then it will be all over by the time he is ready for his afternoon sleep!'

Una had proposed Small Henry stay at Honeysuckle the night before the wedding, and to her great joy he was there for nearly a week. Violet with her hospital only weeks old had two cases. Even Alex, drawn into the excitement of it, agreed to the drive to Albert Lane with Una to collect Small Henry, to leave the way clear for Violet to run between Mrs Skinner and an eighteen-year-old girl married to a Post Office worker at Pambula.

The fact that the girl, Florence, had hooked into Albert Lane was a source of triumph for Violet. Pambula had a cottage hospital but the girl, formerly a Gough, came from one of the Wyndham farms and returned home to wait out her last two or three weeks with the Gough buggy ready to take her to Violet when her time came.

It was like a holiday although she had very little to do in her tiny Pambula house. As a girl at home she had milked cows morning and night and now, with her large stomach that left no room for a bucket between her knees, she stayed in the house empty of everyone but herself. She used to want to sneak back when she was a child to see how the rooms behaved with no people there.

Now twice a day she walked about the house, her round stomach, greasy with perspiration, rubbing against her thighs.

She walked between the beds and dressing tables, liking the cool boards on her bare feet and the tickle of hooked rugs between her toes, glancing through the windows now and again to hear and see the activity beyond her peaceful isolation. There was the running between cowbails and dairy, cans of milk suspended between thin Gough arms, the clatter of gates opening and shutting as cows were released, the yells of pain and anger when a cow kicked, the bellow of calves penned away from mothers, pleading for moist milky teats in open mouths.

She could turn away when she liked and go to the kitchen and eat a succession of small soft cakes, putting the lid tightly on the tin after each, telling herself it would be the last. Her husband was a nervous city boy attached to a stamp collection, glad to have her out of the way, failing to look for means of visiting her, which she bore stoically, defending him on grounds of his busy and important life.

Ned stayed away from Albert Lane while the hospital was empty, returning and settling himself in when the two patients came and Small Henry was out of the way. Violet had not set their bedroom up on the end of the verandah as she planned to, Ned at Halloween and appearing to be dug in there. She moved a single bed into Small Henry's room for herself. Ned slept on the kitchen couch, his military overcoat for a blanket, rising suddenly like a prehistoric creature from a swamp when Violet came into the kitchen during the all-night vigil with her patients, for Mrs Skinner and the Gough girl were delivered within twelve hours of each other, an event that set Albert Lane dancing on its stumps and all of Wyndham sharing the excitement and Violet's triumph.

‘Goes to show how much we needed it!' said Rachel to the first customer in the Post Office after the births.

Rachel had been among those opposing the scheme. She was the businesswoman of Wyndham, superior to Ena Grant (whose shop was in her husband's name although it was widely accepted that she was in charge). Rachel was proud of her efficiency at handling mail, telegrams and money orders, able to estimate to the halfpenny the cost of sending parcels, and her brisk and businesslike manner on the telephone amazing those customers who had never used one.

She repeated far and wide the praises of the postal inspector when he made quarterly visits.

Rachel was jealous of the intrusion of Violet, also with a business venture, and took the side of those supporting Ned, claiming Violet was abandoning him, and she would set the telephone tingling with her wrath. If only her Ernest had been spared, how she would have cared for him!

She slapped stamps on letters with pudgy hands, casting dark looks at the spruced up Albert Lane opposite, waiting for its first case the week it was ready.

But this case did not arrive. The wife of a telephone linesman living closer to Candelo than Wyndham, under pressure from Nurse Black (‘I'd like to see her certificates,' said Violet darkly), changed her mind and was confined in Mrs Black's hospital.

Violet crossed the road to pour out her troubled heart to Rachel. It had all been a waste of time and money. No one wanted her to do well, jealousy was behind it!

Rachel hid her blushing guilt behind the tea caddy as she made a consoling cup for them both. Afterwards she pulled the Post Office door to and crossed back to Albert Lane with Violet in a passion of newly unearthed loyalty.

Together they looked in on the ward, the beds immaculately made and on each bedside table nothing but a doily. Violet's drooping face spoke her fear that this was how it would always be. Rachel unconsciously took a step back as if she was not at home in this alien world.

She felt her stomach dry, her thighs lonely.

Violet went and raised the blind several inches to see out on the road where the world was more secure.

Rachel saw Violet's hips and waist lost in the shadows under the window. Alien too! The pair of them, another sex, not belonging in this place made ready for new life.

The room was holding its breath, the hard, clean floorboards ready to creak with feet made heavy with a bulk of living, breathing flesh. The air made ready to be shattered with a scream, the iron bedhead waiting for the grasp of a hand, the shaking in protest, then afterwards smoothed out, loved, thanked.

Only the sunlight blinked in the room. Violet turned from the window, smoothed her skirt at the hips and came forward, Rachel stepping into the hall to allow her to pass.

Both faces swung to shut the room away. Violet took the knob to close the door with a gentle click, drowning out any sigh that might have risen from either chest.

35

Small Henry was sick the day of the wedding.

He had been hot and his skin dry through the previous night and Una and Enid, as well as he, hardly slept. Enid, waking one of half a dozen times after drifting into a short, light sleep, saw Una, not bothering with a dressing gown, hushing him before the dressing table mirror. At the same time she was frowning on her face, anxious about the way it would look after hours without rest.

Enid felt a short, sharp, shameful revenge. Serve her right! Well, serve her right! To help put the thought from her she got up and held the clock to the window to see the time. Only four, too early to start the preparations for the day, but she could see no more rest for her.

‘He's hot, really hot!' Una said, turning away from the mirror and easing her body onto a chair to avoid disturbing Small Henry, who leapt and quivered while she bound him more tightly in his rug and rocked him from her uncomfortable pose on the chair edge. As if forgetting the hour, Enid flung the bedclothes back to air the bed and remembering Una would not sleep there again began to change the linen. Una paused in her rocking motion to watch Enid tug the sheet from beneath the mattress with an odd, remote and sad expression that caused Enid to abandon the job and throw the pillows lightly together without removing the slips.

She pulled the curtains back to look out on the creeping day. A fine day, said her heart. Across the silvery paddocks on Hickey's farm were the still shapes of cattle, and it seemed that the fence running into the gully and up the other side was the living thing and the cows merely shapes carved from some dark grey substance. Mist hung low swirled about the tops of trees and the sky had broken into a thousand small pink shapes. It was almost warm already.

‘Sun up yet?' said Una as if she should say something to Enid's back to make sure she too was not a frozen shape.

Enid went to the dressing table to gather up some tumblers half full of water and Small Henry's full feeding bottle and passed through the door.

‘It hasn't, but there's no doubt it will!' she said. Alone with Small Henry, Una needed to look on her wedding gown hanging from a chair back and her satin shoes on the floor beside it to know her wedding day was real.

‘It's no use!' she said, coming into the kitchen an hour later with Small Henry, having sponged him in the washbasin, alarmed at the small hot body and red ears and slack lips that refused to take a teaspoon of cool water. ‘I can't get married with him sick!'

His head lolled on her shoulder and his little rump was tense on her arm. ‘He's never been sick before!' Una cried. ‘He'll die!'

Enid, swirling icing on small cakes, took a fragment between her teeth that had splashed on her wrist. Her eyes remained lowered. Una, on a chair by the stove as if both she and Small Henry were cold, fixed blazing eyes on Enid.

‘You don't care! My baby! He could die!' She burst into tears. Enid laid her knife down and came from her side of the table. She put her hands on Small Henry's waist to lift him from Una's shoulder.

‘Let me have him,' she said, but Una stood skidding the chair back, shaking Enid off.

‘I'll lie with him on the bed for a while,' Una said, putting her streaked face into his neck and making for the bedroom.

‘Una!' Enid called, as in the old days. And in the old days Una would have backed like a bird checked in flight, elbows flapping. But now she was still, a profile over her shoulder, so high it was clear of Small Henry's head. Enid might have called for Una the child to return to the woman's body.

‘We must decide what is to be done,' Enid said, and the profile turned a little more, waiting.

I have to assume the wedding will go on, Enid thought. Aloud she said: ‘Perhaps we should have Alex take him to Violet's in the car.'

Violet would not want that. She had old Hetty Power, who had brought babies into the world in earlier times, to stay with Mrs Skinner and the Gough girl and free Violet to attend the wedding. A sick Small Henry would need to be isolated from the patients and old Mrs Power might not be able to cope. Violet would not want to miss the wedding.

‘He's not going to Violet's!' Una cried. ‘I want him at my wedding!'

She walked with him rapidly to the bedroom and shut the door, Enid following her to the living room with a stack of plates for the sideboard.

The white cloth that had been used for Jack and Nellie's wedding was already on the big table, spread there after its meticulous ironing. No flowers there but vases of them at every high point in the room, on the little raised platforms of the chiffonier, the taller of the little tables and mantleshelf.

She remembered the funeral when the heady smell of stocks and wallflowers was mixed with the smell of food. She had marvelled at the warmth then although it was winter and now at the height of summer the roses curling back their outer leaves gave off a cool smell.

The wedding cake on its own small table was covered with a transparent cloth so that the silver beads trimming each tier were blurred like tears.

Enid flung the window up to let in some smells from the oleanders then shut it sharply. No, she said going to the kitchen to take a tray of her quite famous pork pies from the oven.

Let the room stay cold.

Edwards's face with a woebegone expression came to her while she was filling a platter of bacon and eggs for the men's breakfast at the kitchen table.

No, no, cried her thumping heart. I want you happy. Jack saw the breakfast arrangements, having just come in, and expressed his displeasure with a snort towards the living room.

‘The baby's sick,' Enid said. ‘We are not sure what will happen!'

Happen? What did she mean? But she was rolling cut sandwiches in damp teatowels.

‘Can't it go to Violet's?' Jack said. When he chose to he did not acknowledge the hospital's existence and certainly not the presence of patients.

He had to acknowledge it now. It should never have been allowed. It was a disruption. Ned wandering between it and the farm, no use at either place. His condition worse now. The hospital the cause!

And that child – Small Henry as they all called it but not him! – here this past week. Lately he had come in for dinner and there it was on a rug on the floor by the table, sucking on a bone from the roast joint, with all their necks craning to watch his every move.

When he had lost the bone once Alex got up and gave it back to him, and Small Henry rewarded him with a long blue look, as intent on giving it as finding the bone's way to his mouth. Then he rocked his body a little as if this was a language, still with his eyes on Alex saying I've seen you around here, you must belong. I do too, so we can get to know each other better. But don't take your size as the yardstick to measure superiority.

He rocked a little harder to emphasize this and Alex allowed his mouth to slip into a lazy, dreamy grin, and when he returned to his food he turned his potatoes over for the tops had grown cold. Many times he slid his eyes back to the little figure rubbing his heels together and flapping his arms up and down, still holding the bone.

‘Oh, dirty, dirty!' Una had cried, running to him and picking threads from the rug from his bone, and closing his hand more firmly over it managed to get between him and Alex. Jack lifted the salt shaker up and slapped it on the table as he did when they were all young and misbehaving at the table.

Bugger him, Alex thought, and deciding against having pudding went and sat with the
Sydney Mail
on an easy chair at the edge of the rug, able to look at Small Henry all the time.

Alex came in now through the front of the house, asking with his tipped up head where the child was. He had driven the car to the front to polish it for the wedding.

Jack cut his bacon angrily. Things would need to get back to normal after this wedding! They would, mark his words, with the child back at Violet's and it close by for Una to carry on with it.

Enid was rushed off her legs, bathwater and clothes constantly in her way. She wore an anxious expression now, working swiftly as if she wanted to have this thing over and done with, her eyes raised in a frowning way every now and again towards the clock or the other part of the house. It was so still there he screwed his head around to make sure it hadn't vanished. Alex went to the car out the front with a tread that seemed to increase Enid's anxiety.

All this fuss about a wedding! Jack looked at the clock too, but only to estimate when it would all be done with.

Enid slipping gracefully about the ordered house again! The quiet, the peace. He had seen her doing her cooking at the little table, her basins jammed together, while the big table was used for bathing the child, Una taking all day about it and splashing and douching and calling out for them to come and look at ridiculous things like a roll of fat at the back of his neck.

‘I'm going to paint him, yes I'm going to paint him! He's too beautiful not to be painted!' she cried, showering water over everything as she wrapped him in a big white towel Nellie had used for her babies. Well they soon would be spared the mess and disorder, it would be at that rectory when Violet (and he knew this would happen) passed the child to someone else when she had patients, in spite of all her boasting about how capable she was.

None was more capable than his Enid, look at her now closing the dresser doors with a cloth wrapped around her hand so that she would not mark the glass. Jack made a gesture towards the front of the house, and Enid brushed her cuffs unnecessarily.

‘I'll see,' she said and slipped away.

Soundlessly she opened the bedroom door and there were Una and Small Henry asleep on the tangled sheets. Her old kimono was awry and her hands tucked between her knees and Small Henry's damp head was on her damp hair. A virginal sleep, her face holding to her the last minutes of her girlhood, the face a little tense, as if she were hanging on, not ready to let go, not yet abandoning the old life.

Una by the edge of the sea, with a toe in the water.

I can't go in yet. Soon, but not quite yet. And she wrapped her arms around her body clutching it although the day was warm.

Enid now tapped the foot of the bed lightly and Una's eyes sprang open. For a second they held her new life in them, she was a little frightened of it too, a little less confident, questioning that it was right after all. She closed her eyes swiftly as if this needed to be kept from Enid who called her name.

Una sat up and propped on an arm looked down on Small Henry.

He slept on, a redness in his cheeks, a shrine of sweat in the creases of his neck. His round head, now almost bare of hair, was touched with wetness too, a great round silvery head, ready to butt into life, no longer vulnerable, tender and uncertain.

Una stared at the wet mark his head made on the pillow through her hair, and then at his face. While she looked his eyes sprang open and he let out a breath and raised a fat leg and flung it from the sheet. He turned his head from left to right, swiftly and energetically, found Enid and grinned broadly, then flashed his eyes on Una and began to pump his legs up and down and flap his arms wildly against his wrinkled nightdress. It was soon raised to expose his belly which he pushed forward, bringing a smile to Enid's face and Una from the bed to lean across and scoop him and take him to the mirror to kiss his face, ecstatic to find it cool and moist. She found his light blanket and bound him in it and raced down the step into the living room, calling back to Enid.

‘He can bathe in the tub with me! Mix a bottle for him to have when we're done. Hurry, hurry, hurry!'

Enid did not know if she was calling to her or instructing herself.

She flung the crumpled bedding to the foot of the bed, shutting out her sight of the wedding dress with its new low waist and sleeves just below the elbow, curling back like the petals of a great, creamy flower. The dress itself was like a flower there against the brown chair back, and seeing it at the side of her face as she made up the bed with fresh linen it seemed to open and bloom to the sound of Una's voice, calling endearments to Small Henry, racing with him tucked under her arm gathering his things. The living room as she ran through it came to life too, the roses opening wider and the silver and glasses taking on an added sparkle.

Enid on her way to the kitchen flung a window up to let the smell of oleanders in, mixed with the rich smell of her pies and the talcum powder Una was shaking playfully in the air, still running with Small Henry and calling him a sham, a put on, not really sick, just frightening her and never, never do it again, never pretend or it will kill her. She would die.

Jack was in the kitchen with relief on his face and his hands on his hips and George eating the last of the bacon with a mournful face, not having taken too kindly to the suggestion that he take the sulky in case there was someone in need of a lift back to Honeysuckle from the church. Violet would want a seat in the Austin, you could be sure of that.

Enid saw the hands of the clock moving towards eight. Three hours to go. It is going to happen after all. I thought it mightn't, but it will.

Nothing will stop it now.