The Home Girls (8 page)

“All that blowing and skiting and her a maid! No more than a housemaid.

“I'll bowl her out!” cried Mrs McMahon. “First chance I get and there'll be plenty I'll bowl her out!

“I'll bowl her out with pleasure!” cried Mrs McMahon when Mr McMahon did not speak.

He turned his face and looked at her only for a moment before turning back and with his shoulders shutting her away.

Mrs McMahon resisted an impulse to grasp his shoulder and turn him towards her.

She was raised enough in the bed to see only the tip of his ear and his black hair swirling around the crown of his head.

Look at me, she cried inside her and the tears got into her voice.

“Deceiving me like that!”

Mr McMahon turned then and she fell back onto the pillow.

“Lift Jackie to the other side,” he whispered.

Afterwards they put Jackie back and he was folded warm and moist against the warm and moist body of Mrs McMahon.

Mr McMahon raised himself on his elbows.

“Don't bowl her out straight away,” he said. “Leave it just for a day or two.”

Sleep was coming to Mrs McMahon gently like a soft blanket pulled across her brain.

Only a maid, she thought. A housemaid.

No better than me after all.

THE DONE THING

She opened the refrigerator door and said to the inside of it: “We should visit them.”

Turning around with the milk she looked at the back of his neck as if it would answer her.

She thought it drooped with eyes down.

She took her place at the table not looking into his face but pulling her scrambled eggs to her.

When the kettle boiled she turned to the stove to attend to it and it was his turn to study the back of her neck.

Her thick hair was combed upwards into a bun but a few strands escaped and trailed onto her collar without taking anything from her air of neatness.

He saw her shoulders move when she poured water into the teapot and glimpsed her profile.

How strong she is, he thought. I wish I were strong like her.

When she was sitting down again he said: “Couldn't we ask them to come here?”

He looked around the kitchen which she seemed always to be adding to. One corner was filled with a string of baskets starting near the ceiling. They were like big straw pockets filled with her recipe books, tea towels and the bottom two with vegetables. Dried ferns sprouted uselessly from an old pottery jug which had the cracked part turned to the wall, and she had painted over an old-fashioned washing board, her latest find, and hung it to use as a notice board on which she pinned messages to herself or him, recipes and household hints.

Perhaps this sort of thing wasn't their taste. No, it was better to see their place first.

Her face tightened.

“You don't do it that way,” she said not as mildly as she usually did when he made similar blunders.

Yet it was he who had gone to a good boarding school and then to University to take a science degree, and she who had left State school at sixteen and become a typist.

She was working in the city headquarters of the Forestry Commission when she met him.

Six months ago the Commission appointed him to work from a small office in this small timber town providing a cottage on the outskirts, the first you came upon to suggest the huddle of cottages and shops half a mile on.

She liked the place the minute she saw it, particularly the view of the hills and the sweep of pine forests which never seemed to excite the locals who owned or worked in the two general stores, the bakery, butcher's, two banks, newsagents, post office, two timber mills or had small dairy farms or larger cattle runs.

The school and schoolhouse were at the other end of the town, set apart like the forestry cottage perhaps to suggest transients were people a little apart from the locals.

There were churches but no resident ministers.

Louisa did her shopping quickly and efficiently and came back to sit with her crochet—she had made their bedspread and was at work on one for the spare room—looking at the hills where the clouds sometimes gathered above a tall peak.

“Like a bride taking off her wedding veil,” she said once to herself.

She wrote a lot of long letters, the replies brought home by her husband because all their mail went to the Forestry office in the absence of a mailman.

She rebuilt the garden keeping one of the tanks for garden water and buying potted cuttings from the street stalls that seemed to be held every other Friday by one or another of the numerous local charities.

“You should join in with us,” said one of the stallholders once glancing at her middle flat under her camel coloured skirt.

“When she settles down,” said the other stallholder whose eyes were kind in her ruddy farmer's face.

It was Jim who learned that his former fiancée had come to live in or rather near the little town.

“You wouldn't guess who I saw today,” he said coming into the kitchen one evening where the smell of quinces lingered. She had lined up her jars of pale pink jelly on a bench top so full of pleasure in her handiwork she could not bear to put them away in a cupboard just yet.

She waited for him to tell her.

“Annie,” he said.

“Really?” she said.

He went into the bedroom to hang up his coat and she waited for him to come back.

“Passing through?” she said as he went by into the scullery off the kitchen which they used to wash their hands because the old-fashioned bathroom was off the back verandah.

She liked it though after the city home she was reared in with a white tiled sterile bathroom and toilet near the bedrooms.

“No,” he said taking his place at the table. “She's living here.”

“Married?” she said.

“They bought the farm Craggy Hills had for sale,” he said by way of saying she was, and slipping easily into local jargon in a way she had not yet acquired.

He ate some of his dinner before he told her more.

“It was funny,” he said. “But I was driving past the farm a week ago and I started to think about her. I'd just glimpsed these two going up the drive from the front gate. They had their backs to me and I started to think about her. I must have recognized her unconsciously.”

“Yes, you must have,” she said dryly.

If the subject had been a different one he might have laughed his there-I-go-again laugh but this time he picked up a piece of bread she had taken to making lately. His face had reddened.

“How was your day?” he said after a while.

“OK. A Mrs Henning or Hanning rang and asked for something for a church street stall. How do they know I'm C of E?”

“They know everything,” he said.

She took one of her jars of quince jelly—after a couple of days she could bear to part with it—and a crochet cushion cover and was delivering them to the stall and receiving effusive thanks when she saw a woman she knew to be Annie coming out of the bakery.

She was smallish, slim and quick and she got into a truck and drove off.

A week later Louisa was shopping late on a Friday—the little town kept a custom from early days of its settlement and stayed open till eight o'clock on Friday evening—and went to Jim's office to go home with him.

Annie and a man, her husband obviously, were standing under the roof that extended over the footpath outside the office. Jim had his back to them locking the door. Louisa was on the other side and they unconsciously made a foursome.

Jim came down the two steps.

“Hullo, Annie,” he said.

She raised a small face framed with fair hair under a woollen cap. The evening was grey with a mist of rain.

“Peter my husband,” Annie said. “Jim Taylor.”

My God, he's not going to introduce me, Louisa thought.

It was Peter who smiled at her. “Mrs Taylor,” he said “Annie, my wife.”

“Louisa,” Jim murmured almost as an afterthought.

There was a silence only as long as an intake of breath.

“We could go for a drink,” Peter said inclining his head towards the hotel next door but one from the Forestry office.

“Peter, the baby!” Annie cried almost scandalized.

“Yes, yes! I forgot,” he said.

Forget the baby? said the quick frown on Annie's face.

“Bye, bye,” they said together and made for their truck and obviously their baby.

Louisa saw Annie the following week on the other side of the street in the town. Louisa stood still with her parcels and smiled and Annie hesitated at the door of the truck. A big timber lorry rumbled slowly between them and when it passed Annie was backing the truck her chin lifted and her eyes on the rear window.

Louisa walked the half mile to her house glad to see its friendly winking windows and surprised she got there so quickly.

She filled in the afternoon weeding the earth around her tomatoes, rubbing vaseline into her summer shoes and putting them away in tissue paper and reading for a while in the sun on the front verandah wondering through her distraction why she felt a vague depression and seeing from time to time the lift of Annie's chin as she backed the truck.

“I must learn to drive,” Louisa said aloud as she often did when alone.

It was a couple of days after that during breakfast she said they should go and visit Annie and Peter.

“What is their name?” she said.

“Pomfrey,” he said and she wondered briefly how he found out.

“Did you know him at all?” Louisa asked.

“No,” he said.

“Well, we should go and visit them,” she said.

“Do you read all these things in books?” he said.

“People know by instinct what to do,” she said and felt she almost disliked him.

“We were here first and they have come and don't know anyone,” she said after a little silence.

“We call on them and take something.”

Her eyes strayed to her kitchen shelves lined with bottles of preserves, deciding whether to take her peaches which were the more successful or her apricots which she could have cooked a little longer.

She put the apricots with four tomatoes in varying shades of ripeness into a basket the next afternoon which was a Saturday. Then she added a loaf of her bread changing it for a larger one, and then a smaller one and finally going back to the one she chose first.

He glanced into the basket when he came into the kitchen in a pullover she had knitted him.

“This all right?” he said indicating his pullover and pants.

“This all right?” she said half humourously indicating the basket.

“You would know,” he said.

When they were nearly there he said: “They mightn't be home,” but she couldn't tell from his profile whether he hoped they wouldn't be.

They were. Standing on their steps they appeared to be deciding what they could do with the front garden neglected for years by Craggy Hills.

“This is really nice of you,” Peter said coming down to meet them.

He tipped the basket to show Annie as if urging her to enthusiasm.

Annie had a nice wide smile that transformed her small face.

Louisa felt her own face was too big, in spite of the thick fringe she wore to shorten it.

“Come on in, come on in,” said Peter.

He is doing all the hosting, Louisa thought. We'll leave very soon.

But they stayed and ate dinner with them.

Annie put the apricots out in a dish and Louisa wished she had brought the peaches.

“We like them chewy,” Louisa said. “I hope you do too.”

“They'll be lovely,” Annie said. “We mean to grow fruit.”

She glanced through the funny little window to see Peter and Jim making their way back after an hour's absence.

“Here they come,” Louisa said with relief.

The two pairs of eyes watched them.

“One saves the trees and the other cuts them down,” Louisa said laughingly.

Annie wasn't amused. “Peter won't cut anything down that should be saved,” she said going to pick up the baby and taking him to the window to see his father.

“See Daddy coming?” she said making Louisa feel even more foolish because she was a stranger to babies.

She thought the child unattractive with large very red cheeks. It amazed her further that the parents considered this a redeeming feature and pointed them out in case Louisa and Jim didn't notice which appeared an impossibility.

Even now Annie couldn't resist plucking one of the cheeks.

“Old Poppy Cheeks,” she said.

Oh God, we're going to be here for hours yet, Louisa thought gazing at the table.

The men came in. Louisa looked up expecting an apology but their faces wore a sort of self congratulatory look for leaving the women together.

“This is nice,” said Peter seeing the table set.

They ate some canned soup, a salad with ham from a tin and the apricots with cream.

My bread is the best part of the meal, Louisa thought and began to plan a menu to serve them when the visit was returned.

I'll show her, she thought watching Peter eat the uninspiring salad with obvious relish.

They were more than half way home before they spoke. He is waiting for me to say something about them (her) she thought.

Out of habit because it was always she who started a conversation no matter what the occasion, she fished around in her mind for something to say.

Then she thought: By hell, I won't mention them! I won't say anything at all about them!

She glanced out of the car window passing a cottage near the road with a side wall thickly crusted with a kind of ivy studded with small creamy flowers.

“See that!” she said and he jerked with the suddeness of her speech.

“It's gone now, but it was a climbing plant. I'll get some slips of it from somewhere and plant it by the garage to cover that ugly side near the house.”

He drove a way before answering.