The Olive Sisters

by Amanda Hampson

  ‘Go, girl!’ calls Margaret. ‘Sure you wouldn’t like a try, Adrienne?’

  Maybe I’m more competitive than I thought, or maybe I’m just bloody sick of being treated as though I’m an idiot. ‘Sure, why not.’

  ‘Good on you,’ she says. Oh, shut up, I think.

  It’s a long way to the ground when you’re up on a horse. The ascent is extremely undignified but I can imagine the descent could be a lot worse. It’s a big, warm, live, unpredictable animal. Actually, it’s terrifying. I had the idea that I would be trotting around the paddock on my own but am vastly relieved when Margaret leads the horse. It’s like learning to drive. She’s shouting instructions to me and again I’m doing as I’m told. Surprisingly, it seems to work – the horse turns this way and that, almost like a car. The best bit is that when I get off I do it quite, well, professionally.

  ‘Well done! Good on you,’ says Margaret. I beam like a teacher’s pet. ‘Will you be coming with Deirdre next week?’

  ‘Um, no, Joy will be back on deck by then.’

  ‘If you want to do more riding you might like to come and help me in the stables and I’ll give you some lessons in return.’

  I agree to think about it and am taken aback when, as Deirdre leads her spirited mount in, Margaret throws her arm around my shoulders and proclaims me a natural rider.

  ‘Who would have thought, eh?’ Deirdre chortles. I don’t know what she means by that.

  The ride, unfortunately, has a stimulating effect on Deirdre and she talks non-stop all the way home. The sheer quantity of it makes me hot.

  ‘Oh, look, yer bloomin’ – me too.’ I ignore her. ‘Some women hate ’em. I love ’em. Like being on a battery charger, let’s you know you’re alive. Walter calls me his little firecracker.’

  Hot flushes as a spectator sport – that’s new. The subject of hot flushes naturally segues into other private women’s matters. So engrossed is she in giving me a blow-by-blow account of her hysterectomy – you’d think she’d performed the operation herself – that when we get back to her house I have to lean over and throw open her door in order to make it abundantly clear that it is time for her to exit stage left.

  Never again. On the way home I stop at the bottle shop and blow my entire pay on a decent bottle of wine.

  Joy rings to invite me to the Duffy’s Creek Christmas Eve party. I was hoping it was Lauren. She still hasn’t called.

  ‘I hear you went well with Deirdre,’ she says.

  ‘Deirdre. Yes,’ I reply coolly.

  Joy laughs. ‘She’s a bit of a handful, I know, but she’s got a good heart.’

  ‘She gave me the status on virtually every other organ in her body, but I don’t recall her mentioning her heart. She’s completely mad.’

  ‘That’s true. I thought you’d like Margaret, though.’

  ‘And did you think Margaret would get me on a horse, by any chance?’

  ‘Never crossed my mind, dear. Pick you up at six then?’

  The party is in Bramley Park, which is in the centre of town. It’s got a little rotunda and meanders along beside the river. The gathering is a Rotary do-gooders thing to raise money for some youth project.

  The evening is quite beautiful, the air sultry, the sky clear and blue. For once I’m perfectly dressed in a white cotton sleeveless top, purple silk sarong and sandals. Coloured lights have been strung from tree to tree. There are stalls set under the trees selling sausages and steak sandwiches, buttered corncobs and baked potatoes. A local winery has tastings, and schoolchildren roam around selling tickets for the chocolate wheel.

  There is a table of prizes provided by local businesses. It’s got the look of unsaleable items – an imitation Tiffany lamp; a stampeding elephant carved in wood. There is a small stage decorated with a sleigh and Santa painted on plywood with an improvised dance floor in front. The atmosphere is timeless: there is the sense that although people have done this every year since God knows when, the novelty will never wear off.

  Santa arrives on the back of the fire truck and throws sweets out to the crowd; almost no one can resist the scramble. He looks uncannily like my friend from the garage, Tinky Winky – which is a bit of a worry. I for one will not be sitting on his knee.

  I’m surprised at how many people I know. There’s the pink-slippered aviator Martha, taking unfair advantage of the wine tasting. She looks quite glamorous in a vivid floral frock, and I see she’s wearing shoes tonight. Leonie and a gaggle of hairdressers with equally bedevilled hair-dos are here, and I can see the Goldsmith solicitor boys trailing about with their families in tow. The sorrowful receptionist appears to be one of their wives. She doesn’t look any happier tonight. Margaret Simmonds gives me a friendly wave and on the other side of the park I can hear Annabelle Challis’s distinctive fat-lady laugh. I manage to narrowly avoid Deirdre – thank God – walking arm-in-arm with Walter, who is as round as she is lean. They’re sporting matching black jeans and crimson cowboy shirts.

  And everywhere I look I see Joe Oldfield. And every time I sneak a look at him, he catches me. I can tell he finds me amusing. I’m annoyed that he’s here. I can’t relax now. I’m all tense and jittery.

  Darkness slowly descends; our faces glow red and orange in the lights. People settle down on their rugs and open up eskies. Hark! The herald angels sing. A motley crew of children wearing back-to-front white shirts mumble their way through the old favourites. A local band – The Bush Brats – takes over the stage, a couple of guys on drums and guitar and two girls singing country pop. They’re surprisingly good. People start to get up and dance. The girls sing about someone who’s something of dreamer and something of a fool and right on cue Joe appears at my side.

  ‘May I have this dance?’

  ‘No.’

  He laughs out loud. ‘Come here, you.’ Slipping his arm around my waist, he pulls me to the dance floor. He holds me close as if I might make a run for it, but as it happens this gal ain’t going nowhere.

  Ten

  WITH CHRISTMAS ONLY weeks away, it was decided that Jack, who needed to go back to work, would drive home alone and return to the farm for Christmas.

  By the time he returned the mood had shifted. The three women, each in her own way, had changed – as if they had become distillations of themselves, undiluted as it were by the influence of men.

  He arrived on a day thick with heat to see Rosanna and Isabelle wandering languidly up to the house, deep in conversation, hair wet and tangled from swimming in the river. It was as though he didn’t exist; had never existed. His relationship with Isabelle suddenly seemed very fragile. There was something he wanted from her, something visceral. Something she was reluctant to entrust him with. Deep in his heart he knew that Isabelle was not in love with him.

  ‘We’ve made some decisions while you’ve been away,’ Rosanna said as they sat down to dinner.

  Jack felt his gut tighten. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mamma wants to go home to Genova,’ Isabelle said, looking at him steadily.

  ‘All of you?’ Jack’s voice sounded thin and strained.

  ‘Don’t be daft!’ snorted Rosanna. ‘Isabelle’s married – in case you’ve forgotten.’

  Jack felt no relief. ‘What? Sell the farm?’

  The women looked at each other guiltily. ‘No,’ said Rosanna. ‘We can’t sell it. Papa’s blood, sweat and tears are on that ground, not to mention our sweat and tears. In any case,’ she continued more cheerfully, ‘Mamma might decide that Italy is not what it’s cracked up to be and want to come back. I’m going with her,’ she said through a mouthful of food. She spoke briefly to her mother in Italian.

  Signora Martino now spoke directly to Jack in a way she never had when Franco was alive, her voice full of emotion. When she finished, Rosanna translated. ‘Her parents are getting old, our grandfather is almost blind now and our grandmother hasn’t been well. They want to see Mamma – they’re paying the passage for us. My aunt has been helping care for them but Mamm
a feels she should be there.’ She abruptly turned her attention to her meal, clearly feeling no further obligation to explain anything to him.

  Jack looked at Isabelle, not knowing what sort of response to expect, but her face was unreadable. The decision was made. Rosanna was the boss around here now, so it seemed.

  Driving north after Christmas, Isabelle was silent. She sat pale and hunched in a blanket of grey misery. Jack longed to reach out and break the surface of her stillness. He felt helpless in the face of it.

  Within a week of Rosanna and her mother’s departure, colourful postcards from exotic ports began to arrive that would brighten Isabelle’s day. Finally, a letter came to say the travellers had arrived in Genova. Increasingly Isabelle seemed to live by or through these letters that arrived every week. Not privileged to read them, Jack was offered titbits across the table while he ate his dinner.

  ‘Rosanna and Mamma have been to visit my father’s village. She said it makes Duffy’s Creek look very cosmopolitan, and our house the height of luxury,’ Isabelle laughed. ‘Rosa says that Mamma never stops talking. Listen: “You wouldn’t recognise our mother who art in Italy, she has become so extroverted. She haggles at the markets, scolds tradesmen, talks to everyone in the street. She knows everyone. When we meet people who haven’t seen her for twenty years they’re all bawling and hugging – it’s hilarious! They all ask about kangaroos and crocodiles and why I am not married yet at the ripe old age of twenty-five. Little do they know.”’

  ‘What does she mean – little do they know?’ asked Jack.

  ‘Rosanna says she’ll never marry.’

  ‘How can she know that?’ Jack felt disturbed somehow.

  ‘She knows her own mind, I suppose,’ said Isabelle, folding up the letter with a sigh.

  They had been married almost a year by the time Isabelle told him what the doctor had said. She was shy about matters of the body – shy or modest, he wasn’t sure if there was a difference – and he had yet to see her naked. He hadn’t thought much about children but it had never occurred to him that they wouldn’t have any. It was just a natural part of life.

  He suggested she see another doctor, which she did. Later there was an appointment with a specialist. Soon he could read it in her face when she started to bleed each month.

  Every morning she had a letter ready for him to post to Rosanna. He wondered what on earth she filled them with – their life was so quiet, there seemed little to report. He was grateful to Rosanna for her dedication – her letters were like oxygen to Isabelle, whose moods he was finding increasingly difficult to read. Some days she was calm and serene, just as she always had been, but at other times she looked dishevelled when he got home, as if she had been asleep – although she always denied that she had. There was an indefinable tension between them. It was as though she had drawn an invisible circle around herself that kept on expanding, the gap between them ever widening. She rocked herself to sleep at night; eyes closed tight, arms wrapped around herself. He finally asked her why she did that. Her lips set tight. He never knew when he was about to cross the line but her silence told him when he had.

  She made little effort to make friends in Elenora; she was either too busy or too tired, so she said. There was a plump bottle blonde called Christine who lived a few doors up with whom she was friendly for a while. Although Jack found the woman’s mannerisms irritating – she fancied herself to be theatrical – he encouraged Isabelle in the friendship.

  Before Isabelle married, she and Rosanna had taken the bus every Saturday afternoon to the picture palace in Tindall. For some reason he couldn’t fathom, she was reluctant to go with him now, but would, on occasion, go alone. She had met Christine at the Thursday matinee; they had taken the same bus home and discovered they were neighbours. They began to go together every Thursday and on good days he would sometimes hear Isabelle hum the songs from Singin’ in the Rain – which she had seen several times – in the next room and the quiet tapping of her slippers as she did a little turn around the kitchen.

  Quite abruptly, it seemed, Christine’s name wasn’t mentioned any more. ‘What’s happened to your new friend?’ Jack asked over dinner one night. ‘I thought there was talk of her and her husband coming over for cards.’

  ‘She’s a bit of a busybody,’ said Isabelle dismissively.

  ‘Really? What did she busy her body about?’

  ‘Just nosy. Asking personal questions, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And you don’t want her coming here, spying on you,’ Jack joked, but he saw by the way Isabelle glanced away that he had struck a chord.

  ‘We’ve got nothing to hide, Isabelle. There’s nothing mysterious going on here,’ he said teasingly.

  Isabelle stood up and clattered the dishes as she cleared the table. ‘There are things you don’t understand, Jack.’ She stacked the dishes in the sink and turned on the taps. Jack felt they were on the brink of something. He got up and crossed the kitchen. Her back was stiff and unyielding as he put an arm around her shoulders and turned off the taps.

  ‘Enlighten me,’ he said.

  She closed her eyes and slowly shook her head. A tear slid down her cheek.

  Finally a letter arrived from Rosanna that lifted Isabelle out of the fog she had been trapped in. She greeted Jack at the door waving the envelope, as jubilant as if she had won the lottery. Rosanna was coming home.

  Isabelle began immediately to make plans to travel down to Duffy’s Creek to meet Rosanna when she arrived in a month’s time. She was suddenly a different woman, busy and industrious, and had thrown off the lethargy that had slowed her down for so long. There was a sort of intensity in her that was quite new, a sense of purpose.

  ‘Look at this lovely cotton shirting I found at the sales.’ She skipped about the back verandah and held it against herself as Jack pulled off his boots on the step. He never knew what to say about fabric.

  ‘I don’t think I’ve seen you in, ah, turquoise?’

  ‘It’s for Rosanna, silly,’ she laughed. ‘Look, here’s the pattern. It’s B, the shirt-waister.’ She held up the packet of patterns and he squinted politely at a drawing of a woman wearing a dress.

  ‘Hmm, dinky,’ he said, and hung his hat and jacket on the hook at the back door.

  ‘Rosa said she’s put on some weight, so I’m making everything one size larger.’

  ‘Everything?’

  She looked guarded. ‘I’m buying all the fabrics in the sales.’

  ‘It’s not the money …’ he said. And it wasn’t the money; it was the nervous energy with which Isabelle was attacking this project, spinning around like a willy-willy that would eventually fall to the earth as dust. At least that’s how it seemed to him.

  With his trips to the farm Jack had had more than his fair share of time off work, and could not ask for more. After New Year he and Michael would be away for at least a week with a couple of surveyors looking at a possible new mine purchase on the north coast. He suggested to Isabelle that she might like to stay on at the farm with Rosanna, perhaps even until the end of January.

  He was struck by the childlike way she eagerly took up his suggestion. He could see that she had not given thought to anything past getting back to the farm. Everything else she was leaving up to him and Rosanna.

  Driving south, Jack couldn’t decide whether he was looking forward to Rosanna’s return or not. At first he was relieved to see his wife happy and excited, to see her emerge from a malaise for which there had seemed no cure apart, perhaps, from a baby of their own. It was something he had no control over. But now he felt a finger of jealousy prodding at him, needling him. He knew it was laughable to be jealous of his sister-in-law. It wasn’t as though he wanted himself and Isabelle to be a pair of cooing doves, but there was something about the sisters’ familiarity with each other, something he now felt he might not achieve even if he were married to Isabelle for forty years. She seemed to always drift just beyond his reach.

  Isabelle had
planned that they arrive at the farm the day before Rosanna’s return in order to ready the house for her homecoming. They left at sunrise and before they met the main highway had to stop several times to wait for herds of cows crossing the road for the morning milking.

  The day was gloomy, with slow drizzle that irritated Jack because of the need to turn the windscreen wipers on and off. He was concerned that, without humans about, mice and rats might have burrowed their way into the house over the winter months and would have almost certainly taken over the sheds. He felt a surge of disgust at the thick odour of rat that he knew would pervade the buildings that he would have to clear out.

  Not that Isabelle would take things easy. Her trademark white gloves and creamy complexion gave people the impression of someone who’d had a privileged upbringing. He remembered his shock at seeing her on her knees in the propagating shed and her embarrassment at being caught dirty-handed. But he knew that once they reached the farm she would set to work in her methodical way. She had no time for modern mops and cleaning powders; everything was done exactly how her mother had taught her. Linen was washed, starched, ironed and folded precisely the way her mother did – towels folded three times widthways and twice again. It was more than habit – it was a mark of respect, a silent tribute in every movement.

  The grey sky finally gave way to blue and Jack’s spirits lifted as they turned into the driveway leading up to the house. It had rained heavily for some days, judging by the sleek swiftness of the creek as it passed the bend in the driveway. The Prefect’s shock absorbers were stretched to the limit splashing in and out of deep puddles. As they tipped from side to side Isabelle held onto the dashboard, laughing as though on a fun-fair ride. Sunlight played through the leaves, bouncing scraps of light around the car. Jack wound down the window and the joyous calls of the bellbirds made them both smile.