Loving Daughters (24 page)

46

She found Una lying full length face downwards on the double bed. It was unmade and Enid, removing her hat, turned her sleeves back and began to pull the bedclothes from around the prostrate form.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Sit on the chair. This is quite disgraceful!' She smelled his body on the sheet she held as close to her face as she dared. Una rolled over abruptly and Enid coloured, afraid she might have been seen.

‘Now get up,' she said, ‘And let me get this made!' Una rose slowly and went to the window. Enid looking for a profile saw only her thick, rumpled hair and marvelled that it spoke so clearly her hurt and anger.

By the corner of the bed on the floor was the wrinkled heap of his pyjamas. She turned her back on Una to fold them, breathing in their warm and fleshy smell. His most intimate garments. Thank you, God.

‘Go and stoke up the fire for dinner,' Enid said, thinking of it as his dinner. She stuffed their nightwear in a bag Una had embroidered and laid it on the chair looking like a small cushion as Una had intended. Enid saw the look Una gave it, as if it was evidence of a hobby out of which she had grown. And how jealous I was of her when she was sewing that!

Una leaned closer to the window and pressed her head to the glass for a moment as if she needed something to cool her face, then left the room.

Alone here, alone, just for a moment! Enid dared to put his collar box and brush to one corner of the dressing table, isolating them from Una's things. Did he miss his chest of drawers she had moved to the other room, she wondered. She would go and see, half angry at the thought that Una had probably buried it under things discarded from the other rooms.

Inside that room she found herself on the chair unaware that she had sat down. A white towel was on the rail of the washstand and a new cake of soap in the soap dish. A short lace curtain at the window gently brushed the sill. Like a wave, Enid thought, reminded of the shells they had collected as children. They could be lined up there on the sill, some large and crusted with a rough and creamy coat and others small and purply dark with a curve defying the eye to see the secrets within. Alex and Henry and Una had called them bum shells because they were shaped like one side of a human behind. Enid had disapproved, but away from the others smoothed and stroked at the slippery surface believing it to be a skin and pushing her fingers shamelessly into the crevice.

Una appeared in the doorway now and Enid jumped, as if her sin was discovered. She raised her eyes from her quiet lap and caught a glimpse of the ceiling, the plaster there forming a pattern of shells too, heaped in each corner with more spread in a circular pattern in the centre. She imagined him lying counting them, waiting for sleep with the twilight still in the room. A little shell boy, she thought.

Una laid a hand on the corner post of the bed. ‘I mean to have him, you know,' she said. ‘If I have to flee with him in the middle of the night, I will have him.'

The innocent room slipped away from Enid. With it went Una running hard with Small Henry's face bobbing on her shoulder. Enid stood. Yes, go, go, go if you want to.

‘Such foolishness,' she said.

George did not wait for Edwards through the Burragate service.

Edwards insisted he drive straight back to St Jude's and take Enid to Honeysuckle. He was disturbed at the memory of her face trying, he could see, to believe he had no part in Una's painting. I don't want her discomforted further. Perhaps I don't want to face her too soon, he thought miserably, facing the congregation outside the school looking for Una and for reasons why she didn't accompany him.

George was miserable too. He leapt from the sulky outside Violet's and went to the back verandah where the door to the kitchen was shut and the house wore a deserted look. The chair stood with the dislodged arm swinging as if it were someone with a broken limb who was in need of help but had abandoned all hope of getting it. George tramped around the house looking for Violet. He saw the perambulator usually on the front verandah had gone. Violet had taken Small Henry probably across to Rachel's and the two women would be on the back verandah there with Violet recounting the story of the painting. He set about mending the chair with a long sad face. He should have saved Violet the shock and horror of seeing herself like that. He had failed her. All he had said was that Small Henry's eyes were the wrong colour. He should have shouted angrily at Una and Edwards and seized that picture and ripped it to shreds before their eyes. He should have put his knee in the middle of the canvas and thrust it strongly through. Violet would have loved that. He seized the finished chair to demonstrate such an action and stabbed his knee into the leather seat. The scrape of the chair legs on the wooden verandah boards alerted the fowls who began to race wildly up and down behind the wire.

Starve, starve! for all I care, cried George to his own hollow inside. He put the chair against the wall for the best shelter.

Then in a little while he took a dipper full of corn from the washhouse and threw it to the fowls.

47

After dinner at Honeysuckle Enid drew the blinds to cool the front room and allow her to sit in the dimness to think. She should have looked directly into his face when Una threw the piece of sheet off the picture. She would have seen then if it shocked him too. Did he want Small Henry too? He might have married Una just to get Small Henry! Oh, foolish thought that!

She left the couch to escape it, and plucked the flopping head of a dying rose from a vase full to save it scattering petals everywhere. She thought about the flowers she had taken them. Him! Una would leave those in the church to die, you could be sure of that. She should have seen them returned to the house to scent it abundantly for him!

She began to move in agitated fashion about the living room, smoothing at doilies, straightening magazines, rubbing with a finger at a smear on brass. As if it were his house she was tending.

She moved a crystal vase of asters and decided she would go to the rectory next day to start making his garden. He wanted her advice, he said. George could put Dolly in the sulky for her and she would load it with her garden tools and set off after dinner.

Two long beds by the front verandah where Una had started to dig. She knew by the angle of the spade it was Una who had begun digging and abandoned it. Then there was the back of the rectory. So much could be done to the back! Thank goodness it was quite well fenced from his horse. She would take her scythe and show him how to cut the grass low and neat for a nice piece of lawn.

She remembered as a child how church had been enlivened for her by keeping an eye on the kitchen door, open to show the harassed minister's wife getting a string of children ready.

He needed his privacy. A line of bushy shrubs could be planted to screen that back door. Honeysuckle over his lavatory. It was awful for him to go in there and people seeing. She had a use now for all the cuttings she had to discard. The sucklings that sprung up beneath her shrubs and had to be ruthlessly dug up and thrown away. Like destroying her children. Not any more!

She went rapidly to the kitchen and found Jack there and stopped, cheated. It wasn't him! She did a strange thing then.

‘Oh, Father!' she said and went and put her arms around him.

Jack sat, overcome, and held his hat looking at it, and she with very pink cheeks bustled about to start making him tea.

Jack said he had been to Halloween and Ned was there and told him about the row in Violet's kitchen.

‘Ned said she painted this ugly picture of Violet,' Jack said. Really now! said the new Enid inside the old one. Ned can talk when he wants to. These men! (But not
him
.) They loosen their vocal chords when it suits them. Other times they depend on gestures to have the women at their beck and call. She wanted terribly to push the round fat butter cake to Jack and tell him to cut what he wanted from it.

But she cut two slices with lowered eyes and put the tin back in its place.

‘Violet is no oil painting at the best of times,' Enid said. One part of her was pleased to see some of the real Violet in that painting. She fancied herself the best looking of the Herbert women in spite of the added years and extra bulk. She dropped remarks at times that showed she was the most handsome of the trio, in her opinion. Well, that picture told a different story!

Jack was more pleased with her face now. It had the smallest smile starting up. And to his great delight she had decided to pour herself some tea and sit at the table to drink it.

‘I may read for a while after this,' she said dreamily. Jack scraped his chair legs approving. A little rest would be good for her!

She saw his face soft even while snapping at his cake. She thought of the lines from the Coleridge poem: ‘The lovely lady Christabel whom her father loves so well.'
He
had loaned the book for her and Una to read but Una had not bothered. She would take it somewhere quiet to read this very afternoon.

Jack saw the smile deepen on her face and her eyes running around her kitchen. Yes, she was happy to have the place to herself. That flibbertigibbet made more work than she ever did. He always believed that things lying around like sewing and drawings and books made the place hotter!

‘I'll take the
Mail
and read on the verandah,' Jack said, believing he was in communion with her thoughts.

‘Me too,' she said, smiling in a sweet way. ‘I'll take my book to the big rock and sit in the cool for a while.' Like Nellie used to! She would take the children to paddle in the creek on Sunday afternoons sometimes and allow him the peace of the house for his rest. Life was good again after the worries of the past six months. She was happy again, that was the main thing. He put his empty cup and saucer to the middle of the table and tucked his chair under the table to tell her so before going out.

Enid buttoned her sleeves and put on a shady hat before the mirror in her bedroom, pulling the bun at the back of her head loose and laughing when her hair fell down her back. Quickly she removed the hat, redid her hair and put it on again before taking up her book.

She opened it to read again his name on the flyleaf written in his mother's slightly backward hand.

Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon he followed the creek from behind St Jude's to the part that ran through Honeysuckle and then he took the road home.

48

But not that Sunday afternoon.

He used the long walk from Burragate to reflect on the happenings of the morning.

He decided to concentrate on Una to avoid a recurring vision of Enid's face. Those eyes! Violet's black like coals with flames beginning to lick them, Enid's asking not accusing, and Una's near his shoulder with a coyness in their liquid toffee depths. Like toffee they could melt or harden as well he knew!

He would have a session with Una immediately he got home and tell her her behaviour was unacceptable. She must apologize to Violet to avoid a permanent rift that he quite likely would be blamed for. Perspiration ran under his collar and his boots were white with dust. This dreadful road, this dreadful little place! Likely as not there would be no dinner for him with Una in a black and frightening mood and Enid gone. Enid! He would tell her boldly he had no part in the wretched picture! Damn the other one, blast her socks, as she sometimes said! She would need to take a grip on herself.

He thought of his mother slipping quietly in and out when his father had business with church people. He remembered her anxious face telling the cook when the tea was to be sent in and feeling the scones with her little fat hand and her head up, wanting to be sure they were neither too hot nor too cold. Mothers needed to be around daughters-in-law. The daughters-in-law were quite frightened of them, he understood, and took pains to show how capable they were of caring for their sons.

He imagined Una with lowered eyes testing scones for their temperature. But a second later he had her tossing them from their plate as one tosses a pancake, catching some, with others bowling about the table and floor.

He walked faster from her merry face, rubbing his Bible on his trousers, for it seemed to be sweating too.

He began to dread the long blank afternoon. In earlier days he would take a walk after midday dinner along the creek bank, cooled by the sight of the green moss on the rocks, the willows trailing long green strands in the water and the mystery of dark waterholes, crinkled on the surface when a wind sneaked up on them and still as mirrors other times. Sometimes a bird flopped in them, a water duck he supposed. He loved the way the bird, having disturbed the water, rocked in its movement, as if this was its plan.

Sometimes he joined George in the Honeysuckle paddocks bringing the cows home, and finding Enid in the garden talked to her with an eye on the house, for Una usually threw up a window and leaned out, bright and lovely as one of Enid's blooms that bent over, tall and slender.

These times seemed far off now. He felt like someone looking back on a carefree childhood. He had not appreciated the freedom of it! Life worked that way he was beginning to realize. God held up a mirror for you to reflect on the way it was, and see it as clearly as he saw himself reflected in the creek water.

No doubt about You, he thought with Wyndham coming up, you know it all and show a man how powerless he is!

But he would utilize what strength he had to deal with Una, he told himself, straightening his back and stepping briskly out in case someone was about. He would show Wyndham a long walk in the January heat was something he enjoyed if eyes were watching.

Inside the front room of the rectory, however, Una had succumbed to the heat. She lay on the couch under the window, slapping at a curtain to make it billow and hopefully raise a breeze. She was wearing a camisole with the ribbons untied and a pair of bloomers. They were made with a band at the waist peaked to meet her navel and gathered until they fitted into bands just above her knees. She was plucking at the bands now and waving both legs in the air.

‘These are supposed to be my coolest bloomers! They are not doing much of a job, I can tell you!' she said.

He sat on a chair and laid his hat on the floor as if he were visiting a parishioner. He saw some of her breast was showing where the camisole was loose. He saw the table set and covered with mosquito netting, the mint in its dried state no longer effective. He suddenly felt quite faint with hunger, too faint for an argument.

Going through the kitchen to wash his hands in a back room that was both washhouse and bathroom he saw the oven door ajar and his meal keeping hot between two plates.

She had obviously eaten although she appeared to be able to survive long periods without food. He felt grateful for the sight of his meal and lifting the top plate saw there was a generous serve of chicken and vegetables glazed over with a sauce. His heart melted with the melting sauce.

I will have to start praying for a hard heart and an ungentle hand instead of the other way around, he thought, admiring the arrangement of food as he carried it in. An artist at work, though he would rather not be reminded of art just now!

Una sat up with her face turned to the window opened as wide as she could get it. Anyone passing along the road could see her near nakedness. He told her this quite mildly.

‘Actually someone can see me now,' she said and he stood greatly agitated, clattering his knife and fork on his plate.

‘Your horse,' she said in the mild tone she adopted from him. ‘It hasn't a name, has it?'

He had never thought about naming it and the omission gave him a feeling of guilt.

She left the couch and he had to rivet his eyes on his plate to avoid seeing her body, slender and white as a young gum and moving with the same grace.

‘I'm going to go now,' she said, flinging back the curtain which had fallen across the window again, and thus giving Wyndham a full view of the camisole and bloomers.

‘I'll name your horse!'

Like that?

But she went to the bedroom and returned in a loose housedress, tying the belt at the waist and tucking sandshoes under her arm. In a moment she was leaping across the dug ground and running towards the horse under the tree. It flung its head up, then made a half-circle like a question mark in the air. He saw her drape both arms around its neck, patting, stroking and talking to it, then he went and found a plate of cold pudding under the mosquito net and took it to the window to eat and watch some more.

After some attempts at resistance, some head swinging and shaking and a front leg lifted and dropped two or three times, the horse allowed itself to be led off by the neck. I doubt it would do that for me, Edwards marvelled. He watched Una take the horse close to the fence that ran down the side of Violet's house.

Ah, I see.

He turned from the window not wanting to watch any more. That is a cowardly attitude, he told himself, taking his empty plates to the kitchen. From the window there he had a better view of Una and horse, now close to Violet's kitchen door. It flew up while he watched and shut down so fast he saw only a large arm and the bottom half of Violet's face, cruel and forbidding. My goodness, he thought, that window frame could have been the picture frame! Una tossed her head and the horse did too and cooperated by walking briskly by the fence until they reached the side gate.

There Una set up a rapid stroking of the horse's neck and what appeared to be an affectionate though one-sided conversation.

So that's how you name a horse, Edwards said to himself. My baptisms are dull by comparison. After a minute the horse raised its head so suddenly it might have struck Una, lowered its rear and propped itself on two front feet.

It had been aroused by a sudden banging on the tank by an unseen Violet, who set up the din with a broom handle, hitting the part of the tank empty of water. Una clung to the horse's neck to stop it galloping off.

Edwards left the house and raced, unsure of his footing at times but plunging on to reach them. He leaned over the gate while Una was pacifying the horse, as wild of eye as he had ever seen it, and spoke to Violet leaning on the broom by the tank.

‘Violet,' Edwards said firmly as his scant breath would allow. ‘Never do that again. It's quite dangerous!'

Violet jabbed the ground with the broom. ‘Don't call me Violet!'

‘Call her Vile!' called out Una, smoothing and slapping at the horse's neck, not totally brave, Edwards thought, although she intended Violet to hear.

Which Violet did. She ran from behind the tank and rattled the gate so hard the horse plunged again.

‘Please!' Edwards cried. ‘It's scarcely the horse's fault!' He hoped he was not seen jumping too noticeably from the path of the swirling tail.

Violet gave an ugly laugh which said she was wise to whose fault it was. The top of Una's head showed over the horse's back and Edwards saw it suddenly tilted downwards. Well, he had better look Violet squarely in the face, he supposed, lest she think him a coward as well.

‘Una would very much like to see Small Henry,' he said, realizing at once how ill-timed it was. Violet outsnorted the horse and using the broom as a walking stick jabbed her way into the house.

When she disappeared Una picked up a heavy stone at her feet and flung it, hitting the tank so hard Edwards expected to see a great hole and water gushing out. But the stone hit the empty rims and set up a great ringing clatter that was too much for the horse.

It reared and plunged and broke a violent volume of wind and galloped off, racing by the fence, letting them see it was the nearest thing to escaping. It swung around when it reached the corner of Violet's front yard and galloped back and Edwards thought if it found any rail lower than the others it would leap over it and be gone forever. Una put both hands to her cheeks and raced for the rectory. She had no apparent fear of being at any time in the path of the galloping horse.

Edwards felt it safer to stand his ground. The horse circled the paddock twice more and Edwards thought at such evidence of boundless energy he would never again worry about undertaking the trip to Bega in the one day.

Eventually it slackened its pace and when it stood it pawed the ground a couple of times, lowering its eyes and turning its head as if embarrassed at the emotional display and already beginning to regret it. In a little while it ambled off and took up its old position under the tree and let the black wrinkled skin on its legs ripple a little before it was completely still.

Edwards decided there was nothing else for him too, but to go home.