Loving Daughters (21 page)

40

Una was tired of the honeymoon by the middle of the week. She suggested taking the mail car home on Thursday, two days before the stay was to end. Edwards had paid for a full week at the guesthouse. He tried not to allow his expression to show a parsimonious streak but Una saw and gave her deep frown which was never far from her face since she began easing out of her exuberant state about Tuesday.

She was putting her hats one inside the other in the round hat case, and he saw with sorrow that she treated the one with cherries as if it were like the others. She is really going then, he thought. I must learn to accept the shortness of bliss, if that is the word for it.

He stood up from the chair and wished he hadn't, for he was developing the habit of adapting to her whims too readily. So he sat again and in reply to her raised eyebrows said he did not have much to pack.

‘No,' she said, and he felt she was acknowledging his indigent state.

‘But I think I shall take a bathe in the short time we have left,' he said. He did not ask her to accompany him.

He ran down the track to the place where he had bathed before. The waves he saw were brushing the sand tenderly and were unhurried in their wash backwards.

A different time, a different tide, a different mood. He pulled off his trousers, more efficient now, having put his costume on underneath his trousers and going without his boots.

The water lapped about him sadly as he floated. He could not find a wave rising and quivering like a breast. The water seemed heavy, sluggish. It had no arms to hold him. It was grey too, for the sun had gone behind a cloud and there were long shadows on the sand, streaking it with grey as well.

He left the water, but not wanting to return to Una too quickly sat on a rock to dry off a little, as he had forgotten a towel again.

I never got to do the thing properly, he thought, remembering Una getting her things together long before they set out, not forgetting cream for her nose, her bathing cap, and a comb all in a little bag she had obviously made for this very purpose.

Women are different, he said to the rim of the sea for he did not want to look at the part he had just left. I'm finding that out, but I've much more to learn. Much, much more.

He stood to pull his trousers on, keeping his back to the sea. Coward, coward, he told himself. Look back and say goodbye. No, don't. She is too cold and still, too sad. The water a billion tears. He began to scramble up the grass, not taking the track, pulling at tufts with his hands, his body sometimes only inches from the earth.

Crawling like an ant, he thought. An ant, no more than an ant.

A crow cried and he looked for it. Not in the gum where it was before. Aaah, aaah, it called again.

Edwards stood and watched the pines, but no branch bent, nothing black showed in the inky green.

Aah, aaah, came the sound again, and it was there deep in the tree.

I know you're there, cried his heart.

Aaah, aah, it said again. I'm coming, I'm coming.

He ran to beat the call should it come again, and only when he let himself inside the gate did he walk with dignity to the front door.

Una pointed out that it would be best to leave the mail car at Honeysuckle in case the furniture Jack gave them for a wedding present was not yet delivered to the rectory. ‘Besides we will need milk and things for the larder.'

How clever she is, he thought, sneaking a grip of her hand under the staring eyes of a pallid child on its mother's knee, suffering travel sickness and filling the car with the fumes from its turbulent stomach.

But Small Henry was not at Honeysuckle. With the discharge of Mrs Skinner and the Gough girl, Albert Lane creaked with emptiness. Ned disappeared after being underfoot the ten days. Violet, after loud and frequently repeated threats that she would have a few days to herself when her patients were discharged, found the quiet unbearable.

The melancholy air the rectory wore depressed her too. She put on her mauve flowered voile and set off for Honeysuckle. It was a warm day but she walked happily, her best black shoes gathering a film of fine dust. Her excitement at two patients at the one time so soon after the hospital opened had not yet worn off, and she smiled up at the sky and the tops of the trees as if they were friends congratulating her. Another booking had been made for April, but you never know, someone could turn up before then the way the Gough girl did, two or three perhaps.

She was the best nurse on the coast and her reputation could only be enhanced with the opening of Albert Lane.

The Gough girl had paid too, and the Skinner woman would have to since Jack controlled the cream cheque, and could, if the need arose, deduct the hospital bill from the Skinners' share and pass it to Violet.

If Una conceived straight away there would be that to look forward to. Yes, I reckon he would know what it's all about for all that lowering of the eyes and brushing at himself. She wouldn't be backward either at flashing around the bedroom with her drawers off! A pair of leg cockers, both of them, if you asked Violet!

Things were not turning out too badly, after all (she would put Ned to one side for the moment) and she would have Small Henry back. Making his strange noises as he watched the birds hop down on the back verandah. Turning his blue eyes up at her when she came near him. Smiling with his eyes, like Ned when he had both of his.

She quickened her steps, getting a little closer to him. She hadn't seen him since the wedding. And he had a tooth. George had called to tell her when he was at the store on Monday.

And the Reverend and Una had walked from Pambula to see how he was!

Devotion like that was useful. She could pass him over to them when she had more than enough work at the hospital. Honeysuckle was too far away and Enid showing signs (from George's conversation) of getting overfond of him. He was safer at the rectory if he had to be anywhere but Albert Lane.

Una discovered he wasn't at Honeysuckle when she alighted from the mail car as Alex was collecting packages from the driver. She looked up angrily at the house as if it had betrayed her. Enid, coming from the kitchen untying her apron on her way to the bedroom, came upon her in the living room biting her lips and looking about her as if she suspected he was really there. But when Edwards was about to come through the door with the luggage she told him she would ask Alex to take them to the rectory almost straight away.

‘We won't be staying,' she said to Enid, who had not so far seen into Edwards's face but was nonetheless trying to fix the image of it to her mind. She was quite pleased with her own face, seeing it in the mirror of the dressing table. Her eyes had gone bright and her nose wasn't red. I believe I'm inclined towards that red nose when Una's around all the time, she told herself, giving it a stern and silent warning to behave itself. She pinched and stroked it, pleased to see it return to a good natural colour, and putting it in the air she smoothed her muslin blouse down and tightened the belt of her grey linen skirt, thankfully not one Una had made.

‘You'll stay for dinner at least,' she said, flinging a white damask cloth on the table. Edwards had his hands on a chair back and his head at an angle that had the power to melt Enid's heart.

‘That woman!' said Una, not attempting to help Enid with the cloth at the corner of the table where she stood, Edwards needing to fight an urge to pull her away. ‘She is allowed to get away with everything!'

‘Do sit down,' Enid murmured to Edwards at the drawer that held the cutlery. He sat and tried, she could see, not to look to Una for directions.

‘The furniture came,' Enid said.

‘All the more reason for us to go at once and put it in place,' Una said.

‘I've done that,' Enid said, measuring with her eye the centre of the table for the cruet.

‘It still may need to go into place!' Una said. She picked up her bag from the chair and went coolly into her old room, tossing her head backwards should Enid be watching.

‘I am sorry,' Edwards murmured.

Enid, laying the table with an air of serenity, thought about how pleased he would be to see how she had arranged the things in the rectory. She had made the bed holding onto a dream that she would share it with him. Lavender inside the pillowslips. For him, for him!

‘The Robertsons killed and gave us some beef,' Enid said. ‘We're having it for dinner and there is some to take home for your tea.'

‘So kind,' Edwards said, but looked partly distracted towards the bedroom door. ‘She will be happier when she sees Small Henry.'

Enid stirred the sugar in the silver bowl and snapped the lid shut. A snap in her eyes too before she lowered them. ‘It was hard for you to part with him,' he said.

Always he says exactly what you want to hear, Enid thought, marvelling at the miracle.

‘Violet had first claim on him,' she said. She, too, would say what he wanted to hear. He was almost overcome by her saneness and goodness. Oh, perfect love, he said to himself remembering the hymn Mrs Palmer sang at the wedding. I mean, oh perfect woman, of course! He stood, determined to help her bring in the dinner however Jack may disapprove, and Una appeared and ran her eyes over the table.

‘Just like old times!' she said. ‘It all might never have been!' She went ahead of them and the back door banged. Through the kitchen window they saw her walking in the garden, pulling the heads of roses to her and fingering the petals. In a moment she ran into the garden shed, returning with shears with which she cut the air a few times before slicing at the bushes. Enid winced but turned resolutely to the meat, sweating brown juice through its shiny yellow coat. Edwards was carrying it to the dining table when Jack came in.

That fellow again! said his undisguised expression. He is here as often as before.

I won't explain, said Enid's expression in return. I'm done with all that. ‘You can carve as soon as you like, Father,' she said, for Alex and George were there and Una was putting her roses wrapped in wet paper with the luggage by the front door.

‘So we won't go without them. Our first flowers in our first house!' She went to Edwards's side and flung an arm around him, rubbing a cheek on his shoulder.

Enid saw him close his eyes to shut away from them the ecstasy there.

41

Una was not critical of the arrangement of furniture at the rectory but hummed a tune happily while she selected a wedding present vase for the roses. Head to one side she put them first on the centre of the table in the living room, then to one end grouped with the marble figurine of the shepherdess she had begged Nellie to buy her once when on a visit to Sydney.

‘It's a suitable sort of ornament, don't you think, for a church house?' she said.

Edwards, helping in his braces, was never happier in his life.

In a little while he heard her in the room next to theirs moving things around and he went tut-tutting in husbandly fashion at the way women called for help in minor things and attacked major ones with a great display of independence.

‘Look how she has put the stuff in here any old how!' Una said, pushing his old chest of drawers against the wall. Edwards wanted to fly to Enid's defence. She had done so much and done it so effectively, but he wanted Una's good mood to continue.

‘Take the bottom end of the bed and put your end of the rail in that little slot,' she said. He did, managing it quite well, marvelling at her knowledge of these things and a little fearful too that she might be contemplating sleeping here apart from him.

Of course! It was their guest room. How wonderful if Mother could come. Interrupting her as she was flinging sheets on the bed he took her in his arms and rocked her back and forth as she did with Small Henry.

He did not kiss her, just bowed his head, crushing it into the sweet flesh of her neck, feeling the rush of hair on his forehead. He lifted his face and felt he could shelter it there in her hair forever. But he glimpsed the dent at the edge of her mouth, a barometer of her mood, and reading impatience there went to the other side of the bed to help smooth out the sheets and blankets.

There was only a hooked rug on the floor and she straightened this with her foot and a frown and he knew she wished it was covered with a linoleum square like those in their bedroom and living room, which she had selected to add to the pieces Jack had agreed to buy for the rectory.

‘Draughts will come up through the cracks and lay me low with pneumonia!' she had said in the Bega store during the purchasing. ‘It will be bad enough suffering boards in that cold old kitchen!'

Jack with a short curt nod indicated his agreement, but jammed his hat on and went out to wait in the car, the gesture stating there was to be nothing more added, and he would wait only a limited time for them.

Una now found a white linen runner for the top of the chest and plumed a cushion on a chair by the washstand which held a china jug, basin and chamber pot given as a wedding present by Rachel and secondary to the larger set from Alex, in the more modern commode cabinet in the main bedroom.

‘Shall we share a jerry, or have one apiece?' Una said when, on the week of the wedding, she saw them taken out of their packages at Honeysuckle. ‘I bags the blue daisies if we have one to ourselves!'

Enid bent her hot face over the wrapping paper she was folding for future use. Una flung herself onto a chair with her legs stretched out before her, her head back and her eyes rolled towards the ceiling. Enid slipped away to put the paper in the lumber room. ‘We must try and believe she never pees,' Una said. ‘Hard as it is this is what we must believe!'

Edwards now had the irreverent thought of his mother urinating in the pale green chamber pot then returning it to its little shelter behind a door.

He was looking its way when Una flung both arms around him from behind. ‘What do you think of it?' she said dreamily into his neck. He only thought of her as a soft and human burr he would never want plucked from him.

In a moment she moved to the chest of drawers, opening each one and checking, it appeared, to see that nothing was inside.

‘Come!' she said, reaching one of her long white arms back to him. ‘We'll go and get him!'

He followed her through the kitchen that had looked so homely a half hour ago. Not any more. The canisters on the shelf too stiffly new, unmarked by hasty thumbs, the china on the dresser sterile, the stove cold and black as if it would never burn, the paper trimming a little shelf near the window cut into peaks, sharp as knives, the window too clean with too white curtains, the floor scrubbed to a hard grey coldness, resenting his feet. He was glad to leave it, following her straight little back and determined neck but grew afraid again when his horse by the sulky under the tree snorted loudly and shook his head, as if delivering some sort of warning.

As they came closer to Violet's house his heart slipped from its rightful place and beat somewhere up near his throat and he tried to be stern with himself and despise his weakness, but there was nothing, nothing, to dispel the feeling of doom.