Matron told me, as she’d tell the others waiting outside, about the vacancies over in the west. ‘A little adventure might be good for you. You especially,’ she said, and I wished even then I’d had the courage to ask her what she meant rather than stand there guessing. ‘Don’t you think?’ she asked. ‘Hmm?’
But the thing was that I’d never yet thought of my own life as a thing whose shape and dimensions were within my own control, and if you asked me how my own life seemed to me at the time, then I’d probably have thought of a white apron or one of Nanna’s best vases or some other thing that I was supposed not to mess up or allow to fall.
‘Thank you, Matron.’
For all of the time we’d been at the hospital, we’d been obedient to the rule that you didn’t address Matron unless you were spoken to first. And, although this was my chance, the thoughts going around in my head wouldn’t neaten themselves up into questions I could ask without seeming rude. I wanted to ask her if her hand felt bare without a ring there, if it was enough that the children in the pictures on her desk were nieces and nephews. I felt I ought to confess to her about how my father said nurses were whores. She looked, to me, like a nun.
I’d stand there with you if I could, at the window of that train. I’d like to see Reggie again, the way she was then: fair as I was dark and with her hair styled in smooth coils on either side of her face. Perhaps if I could see that face again now, I’d be able to tell exactly what it was about Reggie that used to make my mother go all tight and disapproving when I brought her home for tea. Maybe it was nothing more than the too-good-to-be-true dolly sweetness of the large blue eyes or the way she painted her top lip into sharp little points in Schoolhouse Red.
Reggie’s mother made all of her clothes just the way my mother made mine, but Reggie had all the latest things straight away.
‘But look at them close up,’ my mother used to say. ‘No finish. No polish.’
The thing was, though, that Reggie was always onto the next frock before the slightly skewed zip or the unfelled hem could even begin to matter.
‘Just watch out for that one,’ my mother used to say.
And I’d say, ‘Oh, Ma.’
What I knew about Reggie was that she was clever in a quick way that had nothing to do with the inside of a schoolbook. It showed up in a kind of forethought that would have come in handy to her on a chessboard, not that any of us knew the least thing, then, about queens and knights and pawns. Reggie seemed always to know what was about to happen long before I did, and where to put herself to best advantage. We’d both been there in the ward when a baby, just a few days old, died for no good reason anyone could see, but I only stood there and gawped. I just stood there looking at the weeping mother sitting on the high bed, still holding a shape to her breast even though Sister had taken the baby away and laid it on its back in its cot where she was swaddling it tight in white sheeting.
I never even saw Reggie move, but when Sister turned around, Reggie was over the other side of the bed by the mother and it was me standing there with an empty look that needed filling with the job no-one wanted to do. Meanwhile Reggie got to make the mother a cup of tea and try to soothe her down. Two weeks later, when the mother sent Reggie a bottle of gin and a whole carton of Craven A cigarettes, I was still waking in the night from dreams in which I was treading the endless black and white chequered corridors to the hospital morgue with the weight of that dead baby in my arms.
And look again at the four of us, there on the train: Kitty, Isabel, Reggie and me. We’ve found a table to sit around, two of us facing forward, two facing back, and the old suitcases we’ve borrowed or been given are stowed in the luggage racks above our heads. But look where Reggie’s sitting. She’s got the window seat, and it’s not the one facing backwards either.
The train came alive underneath and all around us, and it was Reggie who worked out how to unclip the windows and slide them open to the small extent that they’d go. Doors were shutting and whistles being blown and I watched my mother where she stood there in that line of mothers. I saw her reach out as if to stop the train, and then draw her arm back and tuck it under the dark green strap of her handbag. Then the train gave itself a great grinding heave out of stillness into motion. And Isabel had her hanky out, waving it madly.
‘Hanky, hanky. Quick, Stel, give us yours,’ said Reggie, who never had one of her own when she needed it.
‘Get your own rotten hanky,’ I said, but she saw the picot edge just peeking out of the sweetheart neckline of my new dress. All in fun, I clutched at it, but too slow—she had nimble-fingered my little lacy hanky away from me and swept it out beyond the glass. I could see it streaming away from her fingers in the rushing air, and I saw how the bright red on the lace had dulled to the colour of rust. I also saw how Reggie’s arm, the whole length of it, was on the wrong side of the body of the train. And what do you think will happen if a train comes the other way? Hmm? Bang, gone, no more arm.
‘Pull your arm in, Reg,’ I said.
‘Yes, mother,’ she said.
And I think it was just the train’s gathering speed, or a sudden gust of wind—or perhaps the two together; I don’t think Reggie meant for it to happen, but in any case the hanky got free of her grip, snapped open for the briefest of moments—a tiny lace-quartered parachute in an updraft—and was gone.
Six weeks after that my mother died. She’d been standing on a stool putting the kitchen curtains back up after having them down in the wash. The doctor told my brothers that a blood vessel had burst in her brain, that it would have been fairly quick, and that there was nothing anyone could have done even if they’d been there when she fell. I suppose I could have gone home for the funeral but it would have been two days and a night there on the train, and the same back again, and with no mother to see at the other end anyway.
Our new Matron let me have two days off work, although I’d probably have been better off up and about in my uniform than staying back at the boarding house, pacing the parlour like an orphaned kitten. Perhaps I was lucky that an old local lady called Mrs Cowan died at about the same time. She’d turned one hundred the year before and had had a letter from the queen, and we nursed her in the hospital for two weeks while her lungs filled slowly with fluid for the very last time. I went to her funeral and sat in the second row at the church and the family was kind about the terrible way that I cried.
Before I lived in Kirby, I’d never stopped to think that farmers might be as vain as anybody else, or that grown men might bitch among themselves like a dorm full of first-year nurses. But it didn’t take me long to learn that farmers put their best fences in full view of the passing traffic, and sow their crops most neatly there as well. How straight and strong is a fence, how high is a crop, how fat a mob of sheep—these are the things that tell you who’s who in a district, and around here it’s always been the Kingsmiths who’ve had the best of everything.
I know my mother would have liked to see me married to Teddy Kingsmith. The eldest of those three boys, he was tall and well-dressed, and I know she’d have liked his full lips and the way he said please and thank you. She’d have asked for a picture of the Kingsmith place—red bricked and two storeyed and built close to the road even though that family had more land than anybody to choose from—and she’d have put it on the mantelpiece like a trophy.
The first we saw of Teddy Kingsmith was in the hospital after he’d been smashed up in a truck accident while he was away on National Service. They’d put his plaster on down in the city, right up to the hip on one side of his body and as far as the shoulder on the other, then sent him back to Kirby to be close to his family while he healed. It was me who he liked first. I’ll never forget the big gap-toothed grin he gave—to me especially, or so it seemed—on the afternoon that he galloped up and down the corridors on his crutches, stiff-legged as a giraffe let loose on the field at Flemington, and the doctor said yes, alright, he could go home.
The next town al
ong the highway from Kirby was Pickering and by city standards it was half a lifetime away, but the country kids just got in their cars and drove—to dances, debates and plays, to football games in the winter, cricket in the summer. When I think of that time, I think of Teddy’s Holden ute and how many people you could get in the back if you really tried, the girls with scarves tied down tight over their ears and hair. There was a day we drove all that way to go to a Junior Farmers event where a serious-looking girl with oversized spectacles gave a pancake-making demonstration, as if I needed anybody to show me how to make a well in the flour and patiently work in the egg.
‘Don’t try to do it too fast,’ the girl said, and my mother in my head said, haste makes waste.
Reggie rolled her eyes beside me, then got up and went outside for a smoke, but I don’t think that it was actually her who said it, afterwards as we stood around in the fading light outside the Pickering Town Hall. I think it was someone else who said, in that lighthearted way that’s only half a heartbeat from dead serious, that it wasn’t fair: I’d got to ride all the way there in the cab of the ute alongside Teddy, they said, and now it was someone else’s turn on the way home. And, although it was almost dark, there was no mistaking who it was standing there with her hip already resting on the passenger side door of the ute. He proposed to her a few months later.
If ever we girls thought we were bold and brave and different, if ever we fancied ourselves blue stockings—well, we weren’t any of those things. Within twelve months of us getting on that train, all four of us had rings on our fingers. Your father and I barely knew each other and yet we partnered up for life as if it were nothing more serious than the foxtrot and the music had already begun.
You asked me the last time you came home what I saw in your father back then, and I suppose I could say that he was good-looking enough, although somewhat on the short side. I could say that his hands were firm and dry when he took hold of mine on the dance floor and that there was something endearing about the way his hair stuck up in the middle of the back of his head where he couldn’t see to brush it. Maybe I thought his silences and those darkest-brown eyes were signs of hidden depths.
I think he thought I was pretty. I think he thought I’d do. He was twenty-two years old and starting to look about for a wife and I came to him like a lost banknote on a windy street: a windfall that he quite reasonably thought he might as well put in his wallet as throw back on the ground. There was nothing much more to it than that. If ever I thought that he would love me passionately, then I had to settle for steadily, and oftentimes I’ve suspected—and been anywhere from comforted to outraged by the thought—that if you cut my head off and stuck someone else’s in its place, Colin would neither notice nor love me the less.
Your father and I set our wedding date three times because it turned out the first two times that the Saturdays we had chosen were already claimed by other couples. It was the season for marriage—after harvest, before seeding—and in the end the wedding was so late that a honeymoon was out of the question. My family never came to the wedding, although my eldest brother’s wife went through my mother’s possessions as soon as we announced our engagement, picking out things she thought I’d be wanting and putting them in a trunk that crossed the country just the way I had, two days and a night on the train. There were plates and cups and one of Nanna’s best vases, tablecloths, quilts and my mother’s doll. But right on top, so as I’d find it as soon as I opened the lid, was a brown paper parcel full of cut out pieces of ivory satin and French lace. It was left to me to stitch them together into a dress that was nothing like as beautiful as it was supposed to be.
Our engagement happened so quickly that it had already been decided on before he took me for the first time to the farm. That happened on a day in midsummer and I’d never been so far from Kirby along the northern road; our socialising never took us out that way. The Palfrey place wasn’t a small holding, but with the rocky paddocks on the eastern boundary and the salt pans spreading out on either side of the ditch where the river used to run, the land was hardly strong. As Colin drove, my eyes took in the unspooling miles of fences so old and sagging that they’d barely keep in a determined lamb. I saw the rusting water tanks and listing windmills, the old weatherboard farmhouse capsizing into the earth, but I didn’t mind any of it, really. I suppose I was too young to see the hours and dollars that it would take if you set your heart to fixing it all to perfect, but I also thought all that brokenness quite pretty.
Mr and Mrs Palfrey had been married a long time and Colin was a surprise, born late. I wonder if it was just all the years they’d had together that made them seem more like siblings than husband and wife. They were both fairly short, with narrow bones and bird-sharp faces. They had accents from the north of England and there was something downcast and resigned in their manner that made me think of them standing in queues. They had a particular wordless way of being together, silently and presciently handing between themselves things like plates and cutlery and spectacles. After the tea, Colin went with his father to the sheds, leaving his mother and I to get acquainted.
‘So, you’re going to marry him?’ she said, as if there was still a chance I might not.
She walked me around on the cushiony green of her couch grass lawn out the front of the big house, showed me her lilac and her roses. The big house was as ugly as it is now—as graceless and as grey—but her garden was beautiful. She’d made it grow in a thin layer of shade cast by the gum trees your great-grandfather planted out even before he’d dug the foundations. She offered to take me down to the cottage, which is where Colin, she supposed, would live. If ever he took on a wife.
The cottage had been built as a place for farm workers so nobody had thought to circle it with trees. Mrs Palfrey went ahead of me and the sun flaming down on us was so hot that it seemed to be making a noise; there was no point trying to talk over it. Small, sticky flies formed and re-formed patterns on the back of her shirt and I flapped at my face, having yet to learn how to avoid breathing them in.
His mother said not to expect flowers. Around the cottage was a fenced yard that separated nothing from nothing else. The baking dirt within and without was equally barren, and the wires were either slack or curling away from their posts, broken. Thorny bushes clung to the dust-stained bricks of the cottage and its outhouse, but even these were stripped of their leaves to the height a sheep could reach.
‘I’ll leave you to have a look about,’ she said. She seemed tired, but I supposed she rarely had visitors.
And now I was alone I could do all the things I wanted, like open up the cupboards and drawers, stand at the kitchen sink and look through the window, imagine my children in that frame.
Half the yard was taken up with the clothesline, a huge metal thing with levers and titling arms and great long stretches of wire. Before long, I’d know that thing better than I knew myself, but on that day it looked to me like a semaphore station or some other sort of machine for sending signals across the pale, dry acres of wheat and sheep all around. It wasn’t until we were driving away that Colin told me the water he and I would use to cook, to wash our clothes and dishes and selves, was the water his mother would no longer have for her garden. For her, I was neither a pleasure nor a boon. She was getting me at the expense of her roses.
I did see the horse that day at the farm, but from far enough away that his pale grey coat showed white against the orange of the soil. I never actually saw him move, but clearly he did because each time I looked out from where we sat with our tea cups on the front veranda, he was standing—quite still—against a different part of fence that ran between the big house and the road. Later, I learned that he was called Lad, that he was old, and now had no particular use. Although he’d been shut out of Mrs Palfrey’s flower garden, he had free run of the rest of the home paddock that in those days took in the big house, the cottage and the sheds. Noon would find him pressed up against the side of one or the other of those bu
ildings in whatever narrow stripe of shade that remained. Or else he’d be down at the edge of the home dam, up to his hocks in the silt. They kept him out of sentiment and loyalty—the horse had been Colin’s boyhood show pony—and all it cost was a bucket of chaff each day and the occasional inconvenience of horse dung on the paths.
The horse never spoke to me until after the wedding. When I’d seen him only at a distance, my eye had automatically filled the pale contours of his frame with firm flesh, sleeked his coat and thickened his mane and tail, but once I saw him up close, I understood that he was ancient. His pale grey coat had shagged into clumps and he had become so thin, his skin so sucked in against his skeleton, that he was a lesson to me in anatomy. On either side of the tail end of his spine were hollows, the sagging skin propped up again on the lower side by diagonal bones that in all my life of looking at horses I had never imagined to exist there beneath the big, smooth curves of their haunches. From inside the cottage, I sometimes saw the ridge of the horse’s back drifting through the frames of my window like the peaks of a dirty iceberg. Or I’d step out the back door to find him rubbing the side of his head against the dusty poles of the clothesline, making an orange streak on his already grubby pelt.
My mother-in-law never sought me out. I’d imagined I would do things like bake cakes and walk them up to her at the big house, but, although I waited for the drapes there to open, they rarely did. In summer she kept them drawn against the sun, and in winter against the cold. And, besides, the pathway to her door would have taken me past those shameful, shrivelling roses. I came to think that the best way to earn her approval was to keep cheerfully and self-sufficiently to myself, so I kept house and made meals and in the busy times, which seemed to go for ten months of the year, more than half those meals were packed into a picnic basket. If I wanted to see my husband, I’d eat sandwiches alongside him while he circled the paddocks in one machine after the other as the seasons went by.
Mothers Grimm Page 14
