Loving Daughters (20 page)

38

The cleaning up at Honeysuckle after the wedding obviously went on well into the evening, for there was no answer when Una rang the Post Office after tea.

Una flung herself on the bed and burrowed her head into the pillow without regard for her newly laundered nightgown resting there. She kicked off her shoes, raising her legs immodestly, and he wasn't sure whether he should look away or indulge the pleasure of staring at the white linen at her crotch and the lace showering her thighs. He decided to look away since she had clamped her hat on her face but was watching him with one eye.

He took his Bible from where he had it stowed in the corner of a drawer and opened it to read, rather at random, but settling the silk cord fussily between the pages, to give the impression of choosing a certain chapter. She turned her eyes out of the hat.

‘Will that help?' she said, in a quavering voice.

‘It usually does,' he said.

She put the hat back more firmly. ‘To make Small Henry better?'

‘Small Henry is not necessarily sick,' he said.

‘He is. They have taken him to Bega hospital. I know.'

‘He is either at Violet's or Honeysuckle. And at either place he is in good hands.' He had a vision of Enid's hands and bent lower over his Bible to push them away.

Una climbed off the bed and when he raised his eyes to watch, she smoothed her skirt around her thighs. He went back to his reading. Just as you like, he thought. Keep it to yourself and see if it bothers me. Ashamed, he closed the Bible and put it away. She went to the mirror to brush and coil her hair.

‘It's more than an hour since we rang,' she said. ‘We can ring again.'

She waited for him to accompany her, and in a moment he stood and followed her into the hall, seeing the back of her neck like the inside of a creamy shell, and cheered at the thought of walking with her on the beach tomorrow. But they walked to Honeysuckle instead.

Rachel shouted through the phone that Violet decided to leave Small Henry at Honeysuckle in case he was coming down with something and would infect the two babies, still with a few days to go before discharging from Albert Lane.

Una, frightened and furious, rushed back to the bedroom and began to tear off her clothes. It's happening, it's going to happen! Edwards thought, beginning to part his coat.

‘Small Henry infect their wretched babies!' Una cried through her petticoat. She threw it down after her face emerged pink under tousled hair. ‘Infect them with what? They would infect him more like it! Enid won't care for him properly running after Jack!'

Her brassiere came off and he saw for the first time her breasts with their little squashed nipples in the circle of brown. Like marble cake he thought, with saliva in his mouth. The breasts waggled with her efforts. She pulled her nightdress over her head and removed her pants and stockings by reaching up under it.

Edwards felt he was looking at a play where they had forgotten to raise the curtain. By George, she got through all of that in quick time! He had thought women took much longer at dressing and undressing. But he knew nothing much about them, he thought ruefully and his ignorance was certainly coming home to roost now.

He wondered if this was the time for him to start undressing, and saw with sinking spirits she had already curled herself under the covers very close to the bedrail and with her back to his place and her eyes squeezed shut.

‘I'm going to go to sleep at once to be rested for our walk,' she said. His question hung silently in the air between them.

She lifted her head and punched a deeper hollow in her pillow. ‘We'll walk to Honeysuckle in the morning.'

He sat studying the floor between his feet. ‘Quite a walk that,' he said.

‘You walk a lot,' she said. ‘You enjoy walking, so you always say.' She sounded as if he said it more often than was necessary.

‘Not twelve miles at the one stretch,' he said.

‘Fourteen,' she said.

He stood and took off his top things first as she had and he kept his back to her, shielding his bare buttocks with the solid foot of the bed and ducking anyway below it to pull his pyjamas on. He had imagined them kneeling together to say the Our Father. He padded almost without sound to the window to look out on the sea like a great bare table with the moon hanging above it like a lamp. Cold, distant and lonely.

He felt like an unwanted guest at a table that would never be set with food to nourish him.

He crouched by the bed to say his prayers but they brought him no comfort either. Nor did the bed when he slipped cautiously between the sheets and thought of his bed at the rectory, unmade a lot of the time, tangled but welcoming, the harsh blankets mixed with the sheets and the pillow slip not slippery clean but smelling of humanity and comforting as flesh upon his cheek.

In a little while she turned and slipped an arm across his waist.

‘Thank you for coming to Honeysuckle with me,' she whispered.

Only his head turned. His hands were down between his thighs, pressed there to stay the quivering and leaping. ‘I'm fond of walking as you say.'

She removed her arm and turned her back. Her little round bottom hit his like a tennis ball on its last bounce.

‘We'll need our rest, so I'll say goodnight,' he said.

‘You've said it,' she said.

When he woke in the morning she was almost finished dressing and he got up and dressed too. The light was too dim for each to see much of the other and her eyes were down concentrating on lacing canvas shoes. He had brought his second best boots, clumsy things, unsuitable for the beach but all he had apart from his best. And this tramp will finish them off, he thought getting into them.

She took a writing pad from among her things and lighting a candle wrote something on a page, carrying it off on whispered feet to the dining room. He puzzled about it, his mind foggy with sleep, but on their way out he saw it propped up on the sideboard saying they left early for a long walk and would not be back until evening.

I can't accuse her of an untruth, I'll say that much, he thought on their way out. Three cows kept by the Chances to supply guests with milk and cream raised their heads in surprise to see them, then flung them down to chew at some grass, saying if this is your idea of recreation it wouldn't be mine. Edwards's eyes on them said it wasn't his either, be sure of that, and half their luck taking things easy on the grassy slope, keeping their stomachs full while his was hollow already and it not yet five o'clock. All they needed to make it perfect is the bull, he thought, not bothering with repentance as he opened the gate for Una. He saw her face fresh and dewy as the small wild flowers coming up through the grass to greet the day.

‘We'll walk briskly, shall we? Then dawdle, then run, then trot. It will be fun!' she said, taking his arm.

‘A mile of trotting, dawdling, et cetera? Is that what you mean? We need to find fourteen different ways of travelling!'

‘We'll find Small Henry at the end,' she said and dropped his arm to rush ahead. She walked so rapidly he had difficulty in keeping up and difficulty too in disguising a pant.

‘Is this the brisk part?' he said. ‘I doubt that I'll have the strength for the run. Or even the trot!'

‘It's all that kneeling!' she called back to him. ‘Your feet have gone to sleep!'

‘Kneeling's my living!' he said. ‘Our living!'

She stopped suddenly, a slender shape on the dusty road. He caught up with her, grateful. He wanted to take her in his arms, and when she turned her face to him, he did. No one was about. No sign of life. No car or dray or sulky. Only a belt of trees on one side of the road and a sweep of paddocks on the other, the farmer's house nowhere in sight for it was built long before the road was made, and not only was it two miles into the bush, but faced the opposite way with the dairy and cow bails in the front to the constant grumbling of the wife and growing daughters. All the farmer's cattle were out of sight too, so that clouds, rolled like great, thick white blankets, were all that moved. She laid her chin on his shoulder and looked up at them, and her body in his hands was like a bird that to his great surprise, though not wounded, allowed itself to be held.

‘We'll dawdle the next part,' she said into his neck. ‘So you need not take your arms away.'

39

They reached Honeysuckle soon after midday.

‘There it is!' Una cried when it came in sight, and raced forward with an energy that amazed him. Just as he was thinking she would reach it long before him and he would arrive dejected and rejected, she halted and sat down on a stump at the side of the road. She was plucking at little tuffs of grey-green dried up moss when he came up to sit with her.

‘I am frightened of what we might find when we get there,' she said. He took her hand and squeezed it. Things are improving, he thought. I can squeeze her hand now without having to decide if it's safe to.

‘You'll find him there, happy and well. See if you don't,' he said.

She got up. ‘The house looks as if someone is dead there,' she said.

‘If it looks that way it's because you are not living there,' he said. But she was frowning too heavily to heed him.

‘This is absurd,' she said. ‘Knocking on your own front door!' A flash of her eyes accused him.

Enid opened the door. From behind her came the smell of roasting meat and another thinner smell, fragrant and sweet like vanilla. Whatever happened he must not fall down in a faint.

‘Small Henry!' Una cried. ‘Where is he?'

Enid moved to let her past and she flew around the dining table looking for him on the floor then on to the kitchen where, judging by her cry, she found him.

‘Is he alright?' Edwards said, sinking down onto the couch, thinking heaven might be like this. Enid sat there too.

‘A tooth,' she said, and put a finger in the centre of her own bottom set.

‘You walked all that way,' she murmured in disbelief. He felt a sense of guilt that he hadn't walked to see her. Una came in with Small Henry, her arms bound about him as if cemented there. He looked at Enid's arms lying with the inner part turned upwards on her lap and her fingers curled loosely as he had often seen them. Disturbed at their emptiness he stood and looked at Small Henry, Una craning her neck to see his face too.

Small Henry decided he would not cooperate immediately. They had been gone a long time to him and should not be forgiven at once. He stared down at a foot caught in the folds of Una's skirt. Edwards stared too and put out a hand and grabbed the foot. Small Henry with the start of a smile pressed it hard against Una and Edwards pulled at it, tickling it gently. Small Henry laughed as he pulled it away. Edwards grabbed it boldly and Small Henry equally bold thudded it back into Una's stomach. He opened his mouth wide to laugh again and Una saw the tooth. She put a finger in and felt it and sought a chair to recover from the shock and the joy.

‘A tooth! His first tooth! He has a tooth. He's grown a tooth for us!' she cried, swinging him back and forth with her face in his neck. When Edwards saw it the cheeks were flushed a deep pink and the eyes full of tears. Enid began to set the table and Edwards watched to take pleasure in her calmness. Una raced towards her old bedroom crying out that she and Small Henry would take a little rest. Although Enid did not lift her eyes from folding two extra serviettes, Una balked at the step, then ran on and they heard the springs of the bed in Henry's old room leap to take the two bodies, Una's triumphant shout and Small Henry's chuckle.

After doing a few more things to the table Enid slipped to the kitchen returning with a tumbler of water for him, which he drank with his face turned from the direction of the room where Una and Small Henry were.

‘Come with me into the kitchen,' she said, ‘while I finish off dinner.'

‘Perhaps I could do something to help,' he said, remembering.

Jack came in and found him on one of the kitchen chairs in the pose remembered from earlier days, his hands crossed on his knees. Jack's jowls shook and his black eyes snapped. He had thought the fellow was removed from the Honeysuckle kitchen forever! He looked to Enid to explain. ‘They have come to see how Small Henry is,' she said. Jack had seen her face, as if there was a light under the skin and behind her eyes and darting about the corners of her mouth. He saw it that way when she began counting plates, then a frowning concentration take over as if the number wasn't coming out right. He put his hand on a chair back. Perhaps he should wait here in the kitchen until dinner time.

Enid's heart asked him to go. Give me five minutes with him. Can you spare me that? There, two will do. He's here in my kitchen and I can't believe it yet. Stay and I'll never believe it. Go somewhere please. He may say nothing to me, or I to him. But you speak to me without words, don't you? So it's a language I understand. Let us have this silent conversation, this fragment, the last we may ever have. Go away, please. That's all I ask in return for all you have taken from me.

She went to the pantry, returning with a jug of liquid, and slicing a lemon swiftly slipped the pieces in and Edwards watched them sink to the bottom like a pale swimmer then rise and bob about in a lazy float.

‘Come somewhere cool,' she said, leading the way out. ‘And have this to drink before dinner. Both of you.'

Alex drove Edwards and Una back to Pambula to resume their honeymoon. Una sat as she had on the first trip in a corner of the back seat and kept her face to the scenery passing the curtained window. Alex was not pleased about the errand. There was a tennis game at Towamba and he had intended going. There were people there who had not seen the car. There were girls who worked during the week in Eden, home to the farms for the weekend. Pretty, soft young things to tease between sets, and sit with for tea and buttered teacake, admiring the length of leg stretched on the grass, and the shortness of skirts, not folded piously at ankles, but spread out like the petals of a flower creeping higher as they moved, sometimes as if in energy and exuberance bodies wanted to leap altogether from the confines of their covering. The back of Alex's neck told Edwards that was where he wanted to be. Edwards turning for comfort to Una saw her neck saying she wanted to be back at Honeysuckle, holding Small Henry.

Well, blow them both, thought Edwards, letting the wind dig a deep path in his hair and send his coat collar flapping. He did not know how to draw the blind at the window and Alex was not going to offer any help. He remembered taking Una's hand to comfort her on the trip yesterday. Now he had no desire to. This must be how married people change, Edwards thought. It comes earlier than I expected, I must say. He took in great gulps of air for the wind was stronger as they approached the coast. He started to feel pleased to be free soon of the obligation to Alex, then had to change the feeling back to gloom at the thought of coping with Una's mood. The Austin stopped at the guesthouse gate to let them both out, Alex giving a curt nod as he swung the car around in a swirl of gravel as if performing on a race track. Edwards saw him go with envy. He looked with such certainty a single man. Una in her usual way went rapidly ahead, and he had to hurry so as not to be dragging behind in view of Mrs Chance, who was doing something at an upper window.

Una flung herself on the bed and Edwards took the chair and it occurred to him that this appeared to be the pattern of behaviour for them when they entered their bedroom. Una pulled half of the pillow across her face, as if closing her eyes was not enough. Edwards took his bathing costume from his drawer.

‘There is time for a bathe before tea,' he said. ‘Will you come?'

The pillow waggled.

‘Very well,' he said in a voice as chilly as he expected to find the water. Awkwardly he draped the costume across his arm and went out passing Mrs Chance fiddling at the hallstand.

‘A warm day for your walk,' she said.

Not as warm as your curiosity though! Not as bubbling hot as that! Not as seething and boiling as your speculation! And false it all is!

He took the track to the sea that other honeymooners and holiday-makers had cut through the earth. Were some of the feet heavy and sad as his? Yes, they would be, he told himself. The pathway through life wasn't easy, as he frequently told others, but with faith the dark clouds rolled back and showed the sun.

I had better heed my own advice, he said to his thudding feet, now on the descent to the beach, the track cut so deeply the sides almost reached his knees. By jove, some of those feet must have been heavy indeed! Well, he thought, springing onto a rock, I'll make mine light for a start! He took off his boots then sheltered by a large rock removed his trousers and pulled on his costume.

It reminded him of undressing with Una in the room.

I seem to be destined to keep this thing under cover, he said to himself, stuffing its slackness inside the black wool, then peeling off his top clothing. What has marriage brought me so far? To dress and undress in secret, to find a rock or a bed bottom to hide behind! To take a shameful view of this thing he imagined would get working at last, loosening the creeping sting at his groin, opening the flood gates, rushing as the wave rushed now and filled his toenails with foam. Flesh on flesh, lightly moist, a tickling of hair, a cushion of a breast, a nipple to gently bite, a knee to lift and stroke a hip, jutting gently as a rock jutted here, submissive as a wave flowed over it.

Edwards bound his arms around his hunched knees and bowed his face on them, letting the sea sing in his ears. A seagull squawked, flying low over his head, and he lifted his face and cried out, shut up, shut up! Shut out that body in the crumpled dress on the bed, the flinging arms, seeking a body, but not his!

He stood and jumped to meet the next wave, letting it swirl about him, his feet sinking into the sand when it receded, holding on to the wetness. He walked farther in and a strand of seaweed floated by his thigh. He flung it off. Limp like the other!

He looked at it wobbling like a stranded jellyfish under the black wool. He saw the fold of cloth, like a fold on nothing.

Oh damn and hell, he called to the swooping gull, swooping himself into the deep. He put his head into a wave, then turned and laid a cheek on it. He rolled over floating because he could not swim and shut his eyes against the stinging sun. The waves were small and gentle and he thought of the peace of Enid's arms, and when he was lifted light as the lemon that floated in her jug of drink, he thought of her breasts rising and falling. I am lying on her sweet, cool, soft body. Feel her rock me.

He opened his eyes to a line of pines on a ridge beyond the guesthouse, straight, stiff trees, not moving, trapping the wind inside them, remaining with heads proud and cold. That is she, the other one. Unconsciously he used Jack's term.

Enid the sea bobbed him about and after drifting a little he put a foot to the bottom, to find by stretching, a scratch of sand at his toes. She is not drowning me. She is the one, the one! He made for the shore, fighting the drag of water. ‘Don't worry, little one! I'll be back to you!' he cried out, running to his clothes.

His remembered he had no towel. She would have made sure he brought a towel!

He dabbed with the outside of his coat his wet chest, and peeled the costume from his body, pulling his trousers on, drying his crotch with his hands, slapping affectionately at it. Wait, wait! We can wait!

He tore up the hill, his big boots wanting to pull him back on the slippery grass, and the wind flying about him, drying his hair. A crow in a large and solitary gum took flight crying aah, aaah, aah and he answered, null and void. Aaah, aah, aah, null and void!

I will sit quietly on my chair and tell her. She can bind her skirt about her ankles and I'll be glad. Yesterday never was. Null and void, null and void!

He tapped on the door and when there was no answer opened it. She was standing by the window holding a hat, a creamy coloured hat trimmed with bunches of red cherries. She held it above her, ready to drop it on her head.

Her lips were smiling, red as the cherries. ‘You've never seen this hat on me, have you?' she said.

When it was on she had to lift her chin to see him from under the brim. She put a leg forward and laughed and laid a hand on one hip, as if ready to be photographed. His eyes clung to her face for a moment, then slipped down to her feet.

They were naked as was all the rest of her.