Loving Daughters (27 page)

53

Lanterns were bobbing around the rectory when they climbed through the fence of the church paddock.

‘Carry me!' Una said. ‘Pretend I've hurt my leg!'

He bowed his head, partly to hoist her on his back, partly to shut out the frowning face of the church.

Violet's face was below the first raised lantern.

‘There you are!' she cried. ‘Frightening everyone half to death!'

‘It's my turn to be frightened now!' Una cried. ‘Looking at you!'

Violet dropped the lantern to her side as if her face did offend. Then she jerked it up and swung it so that Una had to crush her face into Edwards's shoulder away from the blinding light.

‘Your poor sister!' Violet cried in a burst of passion.

‘Help me to bed,' Una murmured to Edwards. ‘I must get my leg up.'

They passed Jack and Enid in the kitchen, Enid by the table with cups set out and Jack a dark shape by the dresser. A lantern gave the room its only light, Enid having lit the best lamp and placed it on the living room table. Edwards saw and thought how beautifully Enid placed a lamp.

‘I am too exhausted to undress myself,' Una said closing her eyes.

Edwards, sitting on the chair, decided he wouldn't undress her.

When does a man revert to a beast, he thought. At the height of his passion or when it has subsided?

Enid slipped into the room with a cup of tea for each of them. So beautifully chaste, he thought, watching her move a candle to make room for Una's tea.

Mercifully she went out almost at once to rejoin Jack in the kitchen drinking tea on one of the chairs that seemed far too small for him.

‘I saw that painting,' Jack said. ‘When I went looking to see where they put the furniture. I paid too much for it!'

The ghostly light in the kitchen swallowed Enid's ghostly smile. ‘It's a poor specimen of a man who would allow a wife to paint a picture like that!'

Enid, who took no tea, rolled down her sleeves and packed some plates she had brought food from Honeysuckle on. She was going then. Good! He got up and found his hat, so there would be no delay. He had put Dolly in the buggy, which got little use these days, to give Enid a better ride when she insisted on going to the rectory to see if Una was safe.

She had always loved a buggy ride, her gloved hands folded in her lap and her slim body assuming a dreamy quality even while she kept it erect with her chin up. The other one rode a horse well, but Enid was better in a buggy.

‘I'll untie Dolly and wait at the gate,' Jack said. It got him out of goodbyes. The fellow had nodded to him going through the kitchen, that would be good enough. But Edwards was upset to find Jack gone and wanted to go to him and thank him for bringing Enid to the rectory.

‘No, no,' Enid said. ‘I'll tell him goodbye for you.'

He took her hand, thinking with pleasurable surprise that he would always be free to shake hands with her.

‘I'll write and tell Mother all about you,' he whispered, and realized it was an odd thing to say, for she dropped his hand and almost ran across the verandah and down to the waiting Jack.

He went to the kitchen looking for something to do, but Enid had made it neat and had brought in kindling wood to start the fire next morning. He had missed evensong for the first time since coming to Wyndham, so taking up the lantern still in his damp clothes he went to the church to pray for a while.

It was several weeks before he wrote to his mother.

By that time Una was reduced to a rag doll of a figure and on this late summer afternoon was without shoes and in an old kimono on the couch, flapping the curtain to make a draught between bouts of retching.

He offered tea and a drink of water but she flapped her head from side to side as if a spring inside her neck had come loose.

She became still and Edwards thought she might be sleeping so he steathily took his pad and sat before it, one eye on the raised knee on the couch with the kimono trailing on the floor.

It took him quite a while to get started.

When he did he wrote: ‘Dear Mother, I most definitely must learn to swim.'

54

Rachel brought the news to Violet of Una's pregnancy, going there without shame straight from the rectory where she had found Una, pale and with uncombed hair, head on folded arms on the kitchen table.

Edwards had filled a cup with some of his pale blue tea and was putting it by her elbow when Rachel came to the back door with a colander of newly gathered beans

‘Oh poo! I wouldn't want her here screaming and carrying on the way she would and upsetting all the other patients!' Violet rose rapidly from her chair and attended to the big kettle on the stove, so Rachel could indulge in a broad smile (all the other patients!) and rehearse the words to be repeated to Ena Grant when she went for cheese and sugar before she opened the Post Office.

But less than an hour after Rachel had gone, Violet wiped Small Henry's mouth of toast crumbs and carried him across to the rectory.

She hadn't, as she frequently said, put foot inside the door since the day Una showed her the painting.

Una had raised her head by this time and was holding a wan face in one hand. Edwards sprang from his chair by the open kitchen door when he saw Violet, his head on one side in his characteristic cleric pose, not used so much since his marriage, and looking on Violet as if she were a new parishioner, one newly defected from another religion.

Una sprang from her place too and covering her face with her hands fled to the bedroom and slammed the door.

‘Well, she looks as if she'll make a great success of it, I must say!' Violet said, taking the chair Edwards had vacated and moved forward for her.

She adjusted Small Henry on one thigh, raised with the point of her shoe on the floor.

By jove, Una was spot on, Edwards thought. She does have limbs like logs of wood.

He was reminded to stoke the fire, which he did, Small Henry's bright gaze following his every move. The little fellow! I would love a nurse. Why do women hold babies as if they were in a steel trap?

Small Henry rocked himself back and forth indicating a need to escape. Violet scooped him up, squashing his rump with another bind of her arm and went to the window to look across to Albert Lane and down the back to the gully and bush. Edwards watched her profile aimed at her tankstand with the eyes sliding around to take in as much of the back as possible.

Dear lady, he thought, give Small Henry to Enid. Her arms ache for him and her heart is broken. Ned will come home and stay. He will be happy, you will be less tormented, Small Henry will be happy and Enid ecstatic. Why not give it a try?

But Edwards knew people seldom took the course that created happiness. Not even for themselves. They kept the soft bladder of their feelings inside a hard leather covering, pumped tight like a football. They preferred to hang onto the tightness and the hardness, not caring that it was reflected on their faces. I think many people are frightened to be happy, Edwards decided. If it means being generous, they'd rather be miserable.

Violet went and sat on her chair again. Edwards remembered that it was several weeks since he had seen Small Henry, and although Violet was not his natural parent, she would probably be like all others and look for complimentary remarks on the child's progress in the interval.

Edwards was just about to say that Small Henry was coming along very nicely and looking most healthy when his horse whinnied. Violet swung sideways in her chair to see through the window and Edwards went right up to look. Dear me, I am as bad as the rest of them, he thought. A horse's whinny is an event.

Violet hoisting Small Henry to her shoulder looked past his round swivelling head.

A buggy was at her gate and there was a man running around the horse to lift down a young woman shaped like a giant vegetable marrow.

‘It's the Tasker girl!' Violet cried. ‘She was going to Bega! Wyndham wasn't good enough for her!'

Edwards held the poker about to attend to the fire again, an activity of great interest to Small Henry, and the next moment he had flung it from him and had Small Henry in his arms crowing and jigging in triumph.

They both watched Violet make her way across the paddock, unhurried, head up, straight of back. Only the starched uniform was missing.

Inside the house she got into it, wordlessly and sternly, leaving Mr Tasker and his terrified moaning daughter to wait on the verandah.

Edwards saw it blinding white at the window which she raised. Then she straightened a chair and swept an arm across a counterpane, and going into the hall stood with hands folded below her bust.

Humbly with hat in hand Mr Tasker helped his daughter into the room. The girl bit back her screams at the sight of Violet's face and holding the head of the bed rubbed her sweaty face in the hollow of her sweaty arm. She screamed freely when Violet was out of the room, and Edwards, now on the back verandah gathering up Small Henry's napkins and bottle to stow in the foot of the perambulator, paled at the sound.

Small Henry held the sides of the perambulator with fat, dimpled hands.

‘We'll go! You're needed here!' Edwards shouted, hoping this would urge her to go to the desperate girl.

Violet at the kitchen table was setting out a little stack of enamel basins. They still had their shiny newness, and it might have been the shine from them giving Violet's face its dreamy shine.

Edwards manoeuvred the perambulator over the edge of the back verandah, not daring to invade the sacred territory of the front.

The girl's screams followed him to the roadway, and speeding away from them he felt the eerie quiet of the rectory in sharp contrast. But no less terrifying.

An hour later, Jack saw him approaching the Honeysuckle paddocks.

He was hoeing the newly sprouted potatoes, and put his hat back to see the better. Edwards thought it a salute and raised his own.

He stretched well back behind the perambulator, so that from a distance he looked to Jack like a large black grasshopper.

Jack threw down his hoe in disgust and put his hat back on his sweating forehead. That topped everything.

But look what his beloved Enid had been spared.

55

George had to go next day in the sulky to collect most of Small Henry's things, for there was no chance of Violet having him back with the Tasker girl bearing twin sons. (She was respectably married to a transient telephone linesman but sharing her parents' home.)

George came away unhappy but impressed. Violet had no time to do other than jerk an elbow towards Small Henry's old sleeping basket filled with his napkins, nightgowns, rompers and woollen jackets, rather matted for Violet was not the careful washer Enid was. Violet was bathing the two rabbit-like creatures and dabbing at their bleeding navels with a heavy frown.

She's got an important job there, very important, George said to himself, putting the basket in the sulky and wondering how long he should linger on the chance that she would rush to the doorway and call him back for tea and her peel cake.

The Tasker girl and her twins stayed nearly a month. Violet thought it wisest to keep the babies until they gained enough weight to be the size of average newborn infants. The girl's husband, in regular work, could afford the extra.

Ned was there most of the time. He passed through the hall several times a day and stood about the front verandah, scaring the Tasker girl when she looked up and saw his glass eye in an opening between the window curtains.

He made enormous fires in the kitchen stove, turning the room into a furnace. Violet cursed him loudly once as she pulled half-burned logs from the firebox and threw them on the hearth, covering them with a kettle full of boiling water which hissed and spattered, sending a great shower of black ash over her clean uniform.

Oh go to the bush, she cried silently. Go, go, go!

But when he went and the Tasker girl and her babies had gone the quiet had a chilly edge that Violet could not escape. She saw no reason to build up the fire in the stove since there was no one but herself to cook for and no further use for great quantities of hot water.

She had made up her mind to go to Honeysuckle and bring Small Henry back when Ned burned Halloween to its chimney, surrounded by some sheets of blackened corrugated iron, formerly the roof.

He had fallen asleep on the chair that George had mended and a spark had settled in the fuzzy wool of his khaki trousers and he had felt the sting and stamped a foot, sending a shower of sparks to ignite the paper pinned down by his chair leg. Both trouser legs were well alight when he got outside and rolled himself in the grass that grew abundantly by the sagging wire that once enclosed Mrs Hooper's brave but struggling garden.

George saw the flames and smoke from the Honeysuckle calf pens and galloped Horse to Ned, who was staring in fascination at his wounds while the Halloween timbers burned away under their load of iron.

All that work I did on that chair, George thought as he hoisted Ned onto Horse and bore him off, leading Horse with a finger hooked through the bit.

Ned's thin white legs and half-burned boots dangled by Horse's side causing confusion. Horse would jerk forward when an empty stirrup hit him to be pulled up by George, only to step out smartly when Ned's boot scraped his belly. He stopped abruptly once and set up a quivering of his flesh, asking for an explanation.

George dealt him a clout on the side of his head in reply. ‘You wouldn't be much bloody use in the war either,' he muttered.

Violet put Ned to bed in the labour ward and he seemed quite pleased to be there.

She set the kettles over the heat, then bustled off to get into a uniform. ‘Why not?' she said to the mirror, neatening the pieces of black hair either side of her cap.

She said she must clean Ned's wounds, setting a tray with tweezers, antiseptic and two basins of hot water, but if George liked to wait she would make them both tea when she was done.

George did wait and had to watch while she set another tray, this one with a cloth and cup and saucer from the new lot (George paid for them!) to take to Ned. George felt the starched edges of her dress and cap would cut his flesh if she came near enough. Her words did.

She told George the Taskers paid their account with a little extra and she was now in a position to give him back portion of the money she borrowed to start the hospital. ‘I'm most grateful, George,' she said, cutting thin bread and butter for Ned's tray.

He rode Horse home to Honeysuckle with his mouth working.

Jack's was too, on the verandah after riding from the ruins of Halloween and scorching his fingers looking under the iron for Ned.

Enid brought Jack a strong cup of tea, leaving instructions with George, sitting mournfully on the edge of the verandah, to watch that Small Henry stayed on the rug.

Jack after a draught of tea said it was a pity the windows and doors of Halloween could not have been salvaged to be used on the old house or barns at Honeysuckle.

‘Let's not talk about it,' Enid said. ‘Ned got away thanks to George.'

George not sure that this tribute was to his liking dropped his head a little lower.

Enid put her sewing aside and clapped her hands to Small Henry rubbing his heels lightly together on the rug.

‘Show Grandad and Jaw-Jaw what you can do!' she cried.

Small Henry decided to take his time and chew a little longer on a wooden peg. He transferred the peg from one hand to the other, opening his mouth to receive the unchewed end and misfiring, jabbing it into a fat cheek. Then he cast it from him and rocked himself on his bottom still, with his delicately coloured heels together and his toes curled so that they appeared like a scalloped edge to his feet. A small smile settled thoughtfully on his face while he contemplated the next course of action. Like a runner starting a race he put his forehead forward until it nearly touched the rug. He spread his hands and heaved his bottom up. He wobbled for a moment. Then he undertook shakily but with no thought of failure to separate his body from his thighs and sent it upright. It was there, level with George's screwed round head, with Jack's knees, Enid's sewing basket close enough to dash to the ground, the wrinkled rug fathoms away.

He put his head back to crush his yellow curls on his neck and laugh, then fell sharply on his bottom.

Enid gathered him up and held him. Small Henry, my beauty! He stands by himself! Soon he will walk. She wished for a million ears to hear the magnificent tidings.