Yes, Sandra, she’d said. But now she, Martha, had started to unravel. Soon there would be nothing left.
February
OUTSIDE IT was like a furnace. Televisions everywhere blared bush-fire warnings. Cliff bought himself a scratchy and a milkshake and found himself a cool corner in the food hall, where he sat down with the bright new cardboard and got out his lucky coin. Scratch scratch. Only two squares left, one each side of the feather. It wasn’t looking good, but you could never tell, you could never tell. He started at the bottom corner of the fifth square, and then there it was, the edge of a—heart! Two hearts. He turned the ticket upside down and started in the middle of the last square, gently, so as not to damage the image. It was dark in the middle, and it looked like a—no? Was it? Yes! YES! It was a third heart. Three hearts! Three happy hilarious hearts and two thousand bloody beautiful buckaroos. Three hearts full of happiness and hope. Three whole hearts lucky for love.
Cliff sat at the plastic table. The cleaner came and took away his empties and wiped down the table, and still he sat with the scratchy in his hand, beaming at the freshly cleaned table. His body was motionless, but in his head he was down in Gawler Place, he was walking around the corner, he was not standing outside the glass window as he had a hundred times; this time he was pushing open the swing door and walking past all the brightly lit silver machines, right up to the counter, and he was slapping down two thousand dollars in hundred-dollar notes and buying Martha the best bloody knitting machine they had in the shop.
SANDRA was at home, writing. It had taken her three hours to write two hundred words. To give her body a break she had gone outside into the bright heat of the garden and pulled up some weeds in the shade of the walnut tree. Her hands busy, her mind still pushed and shoved at words as she tried to pare down the text she was writing for the exhibition to lean muscle, to get each muscly word working with the next one, so the meaning pumped through the whole from beginning to end. When she returned to the house, shuttered against the heat, she was momentarily blinded by the dark.
She sat down at her desk and rewrote the passage, then read it again. Did the words say what she wanted them to say? Would a reader take away what she had spent so much time putting in?
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. You can’t control the interpretation. Let it go. And suddenly she thought of Martha’s orange horse, standing there with its ears cocked forward, listening intently to the silence. What was it Martha wanted to say with that horse? Just a bit of fun, she had said. But it had to be more than that.
Soon after visiting Martha that first time, Sandra had shown her an article about Bronwen Sandland, a visual artist who had knitted a housecozy for her house. Martha read it with interest but was not particularly impressed.
“Waste of wool,” she said.
“What about your horse, then?” asked Sandra.
“Someone gave me that yarn,” said Martha. “And it’s not wool, it’s acrylic. You wouldn’t want to wear it. A horse is all it’s good for.”
“Lots of people wear acrylic.”
“Not me,” said Martha firmly. “It doesn’t breathe properly. And I don’t knit it either.”
“You knitted the horse.”
“Yes, well, someone who didn’t know better was trying to be kind. So I took it.”
“But what if you were allergic to wool?”
“There’s other natural fibers,” said Martha. “But wool is best, it’s soft and wears well. There was a dead sheep once, and the fleece was out in the paddock for fifty years, and a British wool firm made a suit out of it.” She was watching Sandra closely, and there was something in Martha’s eyes that Sandra hadn’t seen before.
“But if you can’t stand wool, there’s plenty of choice—silk, cotton, linen, llama, alpaca, angora, rabbit, even undercoat from dogs. Made a beautiful pair of mittens once from a golden retriever. Fantastic color, and soft. Shall I make you a pair?”
Was Martha sending her up? Sandra took the question at face value, declined the offer as politely as she could, and quickly went home.
MARTHA was startled by a sharp rap at the front door. When she opened it, a man in some kind of uniform, with a logo on the chest of his green sweater, stood before her. She didn’t recognize the logo.
“Martha McKenzie?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Special delivery. Just sign here and I’ll bring it in.”
“What am I signing?” Martha knew about signing and fine print and that you had to be careful.
“It’s just to say that you’ve received this delivery.”
“What delivery?”
“I don’t know, madam. My job is just to bring it, not to know what it is.”
Martha was mystified.
“But I didn’t order anything. Are you sure there’s not a mistake?”
He checked the paperwork. No, he assured her, there was no mistake.
Martha wouldn’t sign until she had seen the boxes and the address labels. She held the door open while the man brought them in, one at a time, obviously heavy. He left them, piled up, a flat brown castle in the middle of her living room.
Martha made a cup of tea and sat down to watch them. They didn’t move.
Ten minutes later she fetched her large scissors, cut the heavy sticky tape, and carefully opened the thick brown paper. Underneath were two plain brown cardboard boxes. On the end of one she saw the word KNITTING.
Knitting machine, that’s what it was. A knitting machine.
Martha had just started reading the manual when there was another knock at the door. It was Cliff, with a bunch of marigolds.
“What’s this?” he said, looking surprised.
Martha told him.
“Where did that come from?”
“I don’t know. I’m going to ring up and find out.” Cliff held his breath while Martha made the call. She came back frowning.
“I rang up the place it came from, and they said someone paid cash and told them to send it here. A gift, they said.”
“Do lessons come with it?”
“I didn’t ask. But I can work it out myself. A neighbor near the farm had one, though not as flash as this. It’s the same brand.”
For the next couple of hours Cliff helped Martha, flattening the packaging, taking it out to the trash bin, screwing bits together, holding and helping.
Martha was in a flap. “I don’t know about this. It would be so quick. You can knit a sweater in a day with this thing. But the stuff I’m doing for Sandra is supposed to be hand-knitting. No one had these machines in the old days.”
“But you do it with your hands, so it’s still hand-knitting.”
“Yes, but it’s not genuine, is it?”
WHEN Sandra saw the knitting machine, she didn’t know what to think. Martha saw straightaway that whoever her benefactor might be, it certainly wasn’t Sandra.
“You mean it just showed up?”
“Yep. In the mailbox.”
Sandra raised her eyebrows.
“Not really in the mailbox. But like a letter. Out of the blue.”
“Any idea who sent it?”
“Nope.”
Sandra went through her own mental checklist. Kate had told her of such gifts in the context of her church, but surely no one there knew Martha well enough. Kate and Tony? No. Sandra knew that money was tight with Tony’s new business.
“What does the fabric look like?” asked Sandra.
“Well, like this. Like hand-knitting, but finer and smoother.” Martha showed Sandra a piece the size of a cushion cover. Sandra examined it.
“How quick is it?”
Martha smiled and slid a silver mechanism along the needles.
“That’s a row.”
“What about the shaping, and the colors?”
“I’ve been looking at the book. If we did everything in five-ply it would be OK. But it wouldn’t be the genuine article. Would it?”
“But it would be much q
uicker?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Well, how about you make one thing, and then we’ll talk about it?”
“It won’t be authentic hand-knitting.”
“It’s handmade, though,” said Sandra. “I know that boutiques sell clothing made by women with knitting machines, and it’s still called handmade.”
“But it’s not hand-knitting,” said Martha.
“Close enough. It will still show what the clothes were really like. You can sew them up roughly if you think they need to look more homespun. No, no, I didn’t mean it, Martha. I know you take pride in your work. And any way, Martha, knitting machines are part of the history of knitting. The first one was invented in the fifteen hundreds, to make stockings. They called it frame-knitting. So you shouldn’t really object. And I don’t think we’ve got a choice, have we? You’re so far behind now—unless we do it this way it will never get done.”
Martha’s face had the blank look that Sandra remembered from her years of secondary school teaching. It was the kind of face you got when you had put a kid totally offside.
MARTHA had a quick tea and decided to try something more complex than a cushion cover. The pattern book had a man’s sleeveless vest similar to the one in the war book, a bold Fair Isle. The instructions were clear, the machine worked like a dream; she finished the vest and sewed it up before midnight. So easy-peasy.
She called Sandra the following morning as she had arranged. “I’ve finished the vest.”
“Already!”
“Yes, but you can’t have it.”
“Can I come and see it?”
“All right. But it’s not going to work.”
Sandra came over straightaway.
“Looks all right to me.”
“But it’s not. It’s not the real thing. I couldn’t sleep for thinking about it.”
“But Martha, it’s the reproduction that’s important, not how it’s reproduced. People can see what the clothes were like. Most people won’t even know.”
“Any knitter would. Even you would know, and you don’t knit.”
“But Martha, don’t you see, it doesn’t really matter. The kind of knitting doesn’t matter. A knitting machine is part of the history of knitting. Using a machine to help create replicas—it’s all one and the same.”
“Not to me. There are plenty of machine-knitters out there. Get someone else to do it.”
“But I want you! Don’t you want to show off your skill? Show what you can do? This is your exhibition.”
Martha gave her a look that was hard to interpret.
“I’ll hand-knit for you, but I’m not putting my name to this stuff. It’s not right to pretend they’re hand knits when they’re not.”
“Don’t be such a purist, Martha! This is a technological age. Besides, I’m the one with the responsibility. We’re a bit behind, and this is a great way to catch up. If you don’t deliver, I’m the one who’ll have to explain. You don’t want to let me down, do you?” Sandra didn’t like what she heard coming out of her own mouth. Emotional blackmail. But she had to galvanize Martha somehow.
“I can’t get it done if you stand here yabbering all day,” said Martha. “Go on, Sandra, go to work, so I can too.”
WHEN Cliff came by a couple of hours later, the knitting machine, packed back in its boxes, was sitting on the front doorstep. Martha was sitting on the doorstep too, knitting fast.
“What are you doing out here?” asked Cliff.
“Waiting.”
“What for?”
“The Salvation Army truck. I’m giving the machine to them.”
“How come? I thought it was just what you wanted. And you need it.”
“Nope. Don’t like it. Don’t want it. It’s all right for other people, but it’s not right for me.”
“But it would save so much time!”
“Shut up, Cliff, you sound just like Sandra. I’m not having it. That’s that.”
Cliff sat next to her on the step, watching Martha’s busy fingers.
Two thousand beautiful buckaroos.
“What about the person who gave it to you?” asked Cliff.
“I don’t know where it’s from. They never asked me if I wanted it. It was just anonymous, so I can’t give it back.” Cliff stared ahead without seeing anything.
“Was it too hard to use?” he said at last.
“Oh, I can use it all right. There’s a vest in there you can have, hanging on the back of the chair, that I made on that machine. Take it away before Sandra gets her hands on it. But I just don’t want to use that thing. I’m not that kind of knitter. Besides, the Salvos will find good use for it.”
Cliff went in and tried on the vest, which fitted him perfectly. He paraded before her and tried to persuade her to keep the machine. He was risking fury, he could see. Martha would not budge.
Perhaps he should try and get his money back. But he didn’t want her to know who gave it to her. Especially now that she so clearly didn’t want it.
“Shall I take it away for you?”
Martha laughed. “Thanks, but it’s too heavy for you, mate. And the Salvos will be here any minute.”
And there came the truck down the street. Cliff watched the Salvo men carry his prize away. It was now or never. He had to make up his mind. As the driver turned on the engine, Cliff tapped on the window. The driver wound it down and looked at him quizzically.
“Influence is not government,” said Cliff. “George Washington,” he offered by way of explanation. The driver stared at him.
“It’s a bloody expensive machine, mate. Make sure it gets a good home.”
The driver saluted and drove off.
And it was a bloody expensive vest he was wearing, that was for sure.
But by the time Cliff walked back to his cubby half an hour later, he was reconciled to the idea. Plenty of winter nights he’d stayed at the Salvos’ emergency accommodation. Next time he needed a bed, he wouldn’t feel so guilty. And there was always the next scratchy, the next horse. It wasn’t really a big deal.
SANDRA was knitting a scarf in Martha’s tiny living room. At work earlier that day she had decided to try to bridge the increasing sense of distance between herself and Martha. Maybe they could have a companionable time together. She brought coffee and chocolate, a peace offering. She would be humble and spend time under Martha’s tuition. The scarf was simple, even rows of stripes, nothing fancy. It might do as a war-effort piece.
Sitting opposite, Martha was knitting long skinny triangular pieces for a skirt. Sandra was hoping that she would get out the pieces she had already done and lay them on the floor, as she had a couple of weeks earlier with a 1910 dress. Sandra wanted to see the whole. Sandra always wanted to see the whole thing, the big pattern, the long chain of cause and effect. History spread out. If you understood the past, you might be able to prepare for the future.
They had knitted for over an hour with barely ten words between them. It was hard to know what to talk about. Sandra made another attempt.
“When did you start that skirt?”
“Two days ago.”
“What pattern are you doing?”
“Just stocking stitch.”
“Don’t you ever get tired of knitting?”
“Sometimes.”
It was hopeless. Martha was shut down, incommunicado. Sandra had decided to pack up and go home, when she noticed a mistake in her work. She had dropped a dark purple stitch, hard to see in the artificial light, and it had run down four rows below. She held the knitting closer to her glasses and angled her elbow to pick it up.
“What’s the matter?” asked Martha.
“Dropped a stitch.”
Sandra worked on in silence. Martha, knitting steadily, watched her.
Sandra sighed. “I can’t get it. The more I work on it, the farther down it goes. I’ll have to undo it all.”
“Give it to me.”
Like a child, Sandra handed over her knitting. Mar
tha turned the work so that it caught the light.
“You’re lucky. It’s fixable.” She took a crochet hook from the table beside her. Sandra watched as Martha’s thick fingers deftly caught the dropped stitch, knitted it up through the missed rows, popped it back on the needle, and handed it back.
“Your tension is good now; it’s about the same as mine. You could do some of this skirt if you wanted to. Do you want to knit a panel?”
“I don’t really have time.”
“You’re here now.”
“Tonight’s my only night free this week.”
“What about your lunch break? Couldn’t you do it then?”
“No.” Sandra had visions of herself sitting in the history staff room, knitting her scarf or a bit of Martha’s skirt. Being questioned about it by the eminent visiting historian, from whom she was hoping to extract an introduction to a university in Germany. Justifying the pattern as a genuine 1932 reproduction. Being smiled at, condescendingly. The funny little knitting woman.
“Why not?”
“You just don’t do that sort of thing at my work.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know. You just don’t. It’s not appropriate. It would be like knitting at a funeral.”
“But I thought you said you were interested in women’s work. The history and the culture and that.”
“Yes, I am, but that doesn’t mean I actually do it. Not seriously, anyway. That’s for specialists like you.” The words slipped easily from her tongue. “When you think about it, and talk about it and write about it, it’s more about”—Sandra struggled to say it simply—“the idea of women’s work.”
“It’s not much use then, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you said this exhibition was a ‘feminist celebration of domesticity.’” Martha, quoting from the invitation, fresh from the printer, rolled her eyes as she said it. “But if you don’t actually do domestic stuff, if you don’t believe in it enough to do it yourself, it’s not much use, is it? It’s just words in your head, and meanwhile your back gets cold.”
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