The Italian Romance (18 page)

‘She's in her room, Mick. She got a letter.'

‘From Bernard?'

‘I think it's upset her a little.'

‘Nothing's wrong, is it?'

‘I don't think so, love. It's just upsetting for her, you know. She's been lying down for over an hour.'

‘Maybe you should go in. Why don't you make her a cup of tea?'

‘Yes, I was going to do that. Maybe a nice sandwich. But you know what she's like. She's just as likely to hide the letter and not say a word about it. She's got that from you.'

‘What? What have I got?'

‘You wouldn't let your right hand know what your left hand is doing, Mick Ferguson. She's just as bad. Secretive.'

‘I don't know any secrets, woman. I don't know what you're gabbing about.'

‘I only asked you this morning what you thought of your daughter-in-law sending young Leo to boarding school and you didn't answer me. Just...' and Lilian's mother shrugged her shoulders.

‘Who? Noeleen? I didn't tell you what I thought because I
didn't think anything. Why should we care where she bloomin' sends him. A school's a school, isn't it?'

‘He's your darn grandson. And his father's away in the war.'

‘Oh, for goodness' sakes, don't start, Viv. Leave the poor girl alone. She's doing the best she can with the boy.'

‘She's a snob, Mick, and you know it. We said that when they married.'

‘You said it.'

‘Yes, and you agreed with me,' she said.

‘No, I didn't. What's all this rewriting of history? You said this, you said that. I never said a bloomin' thing.'

‘Ah, you wouldn't remember. It was eleven years ago.'

‘And you would remember. What
I
said.'

‘Yes, I would. I'm the only one around here who seems interested in this family. If I left it up to you, the whole pack of them would drift off and we'd never see them again.'

‘Oh, for goodness' sakes.' He shook out his newspaper and opened it to the centre pages. He disappeared behind it. ‘I'm only the one who slaved six days a week to feed the whole blinkin' lot of yez. And educate them. And put a few rags on their backs.'

‘There now, that's her going out the front door! She probably heard you, Mick! My goodness, I wish you'd be more careful with what you say.' Viv put her hands on the brass window lifts and shoved upwards. She put her knee on the kitchen bench and pushed her forehead against the flyscreen. ‘I can't see her. I wonder which way she went?'

Mick Ferguson stood up. His chair chalked against the linoleum floor. ‘I'll be down the back,' he said and the screen door banged after him.

Viv peered out the window. It overlooked the shaded side footpath and the wild clumps of damp Boston fern which erupted against the paling fence here and there. She said, ‘Noeleen never wanted that child in the first place.'

Lilian climbed out of Mr Harrison's open-backed truck. Along the sides of the truck he'd painted: HARRISON'S DRAPERS – WE DRESS THE BEST IN THE WEST. The sockets of Mr Harrison's eyes were craters. His cheekbones stretched the skin. He hadn't missed one day's work since the telegraph arrived about Billy the Coot, saying he was missing presumed dead in a jungle in New Guinea.

‘Thanks, Mr Harrison,' Lilian said. She slammed the door.

‘Sure I can't take you down to the house, um...?' His hand gripped the brake. He almost pushed it before she'd stepped back from the open window. He couldn't even remember her name. He couldn't remember anyone's name these days. No one seemed to mind. They all just went in to his shop, or passed him in the street, and answered to whatever name sprang to his lips.

‘I'd like the walk, really,' she was saying as he drove off. The four wheels exploded tiny dust storms which gradually gathered into one long, white veil. He beeped his horn a hundred yards up the road, suddenly recalling her presence.

The house was a mile along the avenue. The two huge cross-beamed gates were wide open, pinned back on the grass by wooden stakes. She was wearing sandals. Red dust began to coat her heels and the narrow ridge of bone which ran up behind her ankles. The strap of her sandals rubbed her skin. She plodded along under the hot sun for half a mile before she bent over and unbuckled them. The roadway was smooth, almost stoneless. She hooked two fingers through the sandals so they dangled at her side as she climbed the slight rise. The cicadas were going mad in the hot grey trees. She barely heard them, so much a part of the summer silence, and when a bluebottle fly buzzed at her head and she fanned at it, she differentiated its sound from the constancy of the others only for a moment. It was the bush itself, the tough spareness of the grass and the sharp life lived down there, light cutting on the spin and bob of the leaves, a startling bird playing hide-and-seek among the trees, and quite possibly the pulsing irradiance of the small yellow sun, too high and too secretly alive
to gaze on, that spoke into her ears and lulled her. Her skin began to ooze sweat. She felt the red heat on her paleness.

The road dipped. She could see the sprawl of the house and to one side of it the small tin-roofed cottage of her marriage. Two hundred yards away on the other side were the men's quarters, a white L-shaped building, long, narrow; grass grew in the cool, south-facing join. Someone had long ago erected a couple of wooden benches there, so the men could enjoy the shade and the breeze as they contemplated their lives in the evenings, smoked their rolled tobacco, filled their heads with the seductive whiff of hops.

Her feet slapped quicker on the dirt. There was nobody about. She came to the house, climbed up the wide stone steps. The verandah was tiled in black and white squares, overhung by the slant of a white wooden roof. It was cool. Her feet had been burning; she hadn't known it until they touched the relief of the stone.

She dropped her sandals beside the coir mat and she opened the screen door. The hallway was empty, quiet. A splinter of sunlight glossed a few feet of the dark-stained wooden floor. ‘Hello,' she said. ‘Anyone home?' The screen banged after her. The hall was wide. Doors were shut on both sides, and this made her uncomfortable.

‘Mae,' she called. ‘Are you there?' She began to tiptoe. The hallway led through two glass doors into an inner room. She turned the handle of one of them and looked in. The heat was awful in there. The ceiling was high, squared off, and a large square skylight was cut into it. There were no other windows. Smaller rooms ran off, and at the back it opened onto the kitchen. Mae grew ferns in the airless room, and a palm. It was meant to be beautiful, white-wickerwork chairs, a mirror-clear rosewood dining table, and it was, but a dreadful summer panted in it. On a normal day all doors and windows would be open to it, every breeze directed towards it.

She almost whispered, ‘Mae!', as she stood at the threshold.

There was a sound behind her. Lilian closed the glass door again in fright.

Mae stood in her bedroom doorway. The toes of one foot were still pointing their way into a slipper. Her dress was open at the bodice; her hand held the two flaps together.

‘Sorry, Mae,' Lilian said. She looked down the hallway to the sunlight beyond the verandah.

‘Is something wrong?' Mae said. The right side of her face was creased from where she had been lying on it, and the grey curls were flatter against her head there, too.

‘No. Nothing wrong.' She looked at her handbag, dangling now from her wrist. ‘Just I got a letter, that's all. I thought you might like to know.'

Mae seemed to wake up. ‘Oh, good, love. Let's go out to the kitchen.' She fiddled with her dress as she walked towards her daughter-in-law, and the buttons slipped into their holes. She pushed at her hair. She looked almost herself.

‘Are you all right, Mae?' Lilian said.

‘Oh, yes, love, of course I am. I was just having a little lie down, that's all. Oh, Lordie, feel the heat in here. Leave those doors open, will you, sweetheart. Aren't you a good girl to come down?'

They walked through the damp swelter. Lilian rushed the last steps to open the kitchen door. Mae came through after her and closed it over behind them. ‘Don't want that getting in here,' she said.

Lilian, who did not understand the intricacies of domestic battle against heat and light, easily relinquished the logic of her own need to open it up again.

Mae opened the icebox. She brought out a crystal jug, draped by an embroidered muslin cloth which dropped four heavy beads from its angled edges. ‘I made some lemon squash last night.'

‘That's good,' Lilian said. She put her bag down on the table
and walked quickly over to the dresser. She took out two glasses, brought them to the table.

Lilian watched with horror as Mae poured. The older woman's hands were shaking. She struggled with the weight of the jug, held it underneath with the flat of her other hand. A puddle grew against the base of one glass.

Lilian pulled a chair out, its feet scraping on the flagstones. She snapped open her handbag and spent overlong in plucking out the folded letter which lay staring at her. ‘Ah,' she said at last. ‘Here it is.'

Mae was dragging her own glass across the table. She sat down heavily on a stool.

Lilian said, ‘Oh, thanks, Mae,' and picked up hers, sipped at its cold bitterness. ‘Oh, that's really good.' She held the glass up against her forehead.

‘You should wear a hat, Lilian. You'll give yourself sunstroke,' Mae said.

‘I left without it. I will the next time.'

Mae held her hands clasped together on the tabletop. She leaned slightly forward. ‘What does he say?'

Lilian opened out the sheets. ‘He says, they're back in Moresby, having a nice rest. They can swim and he says they just laze about on the beach. Here.' She counted off the first three pages, and kept the fourth to herself. ‘You read it.'

Mae reached out with both shaking hands. She put the pages down in front of her, smoothed them, over and over. ‘Oh, love, my glasses. Where did I leave them?' She looked behind her, to the bench beside the sink.

‘Would they be in your room?'

‘Oh, they might be. What am I doing, leaving them in there? Unless...' She patted the side of her dress. ‘Oh, here the blessed things are. Must have stuck them in my pocket without thinking.' She perched them on her nose and wound the wires behind her ears. She peered at the letter; her mouth worked at the words, and
her tongue and lips made little, sibilant sounds until she quietened. She picked the pages up, held them close to her face. She placed the first one face down on the table. ‘Hotter than up in the mountains,' she said as she read.

Lilian nodded.

Mae finished the second page. ‘Doesn't say a word about the Japs.'

‘Maybe they're not allowed to,' Lilian said.

‘Maybe.'

‘Did you get to the bit about the mozzies?'

‘Yes, just ... I hope they give them out nets for their beds. They'd be foolish not to.'

Mae was finishing the third page when Vince Malone's large frame filled the kitchen doorway. He was wiping his boots. ‘G'day, love. You should have told us you were coming over. I would've got one of them to give you a lift. How'd you get out here?'

‘Vince, she's got a letter from Bernie.'

‘That's good.' He walked slowly over to them. His sweat smell was strong. Lilian could see the glisten on his bare arms and legs.

‘Get yourself a glass, Vince.'

‘I'll get it.' Lilian jumped up from her seat.

‘No, I'll get it, love. Stay where you are.' Vince was taller than the wooden dresser. The door he opened, with its panel of coloured glass, seemed insubstantial. A trickle of sweat suddenly wormed down his thigh from under his shorts and caught in the hollow at the back of his knee. ‘So. What's the story?' he said as returned to the table.

Lilian stood again, and poured lemon squash into her father-in-law's glass. Vince lifted it straight to his lips and drank the entire contents. He wiped his hand across his mouth and coughed a throaty cough. ‘Give me another drop, love, there's a good girl.' And Lilian poured in the last of it. It filled his glass almost to the top.

She hooked her foot around a rung of her chair, and pulled
it closer to her. She was lowering herself into it when Vince said quietly to Mae, ‘You all right?' He settled his big, sun-browned hand on her wrist. Mae flashed an embarrassed look at Lilian.

‘I'm fine,' she said. Her husband slid his hand away, aware too of Lilian.

‘So how's the boy?' he said. ‘Good, is he?'

‘You'd think he was on a holiday camp up there, wouldn't you, Lil?' Mae said. She rubbed the spot where her husband's hand had been. Her arms were thin, splotched with large freckles.

‘He's not letting on much,' Lilian said, in agreement with the other woman.