One Life

by Kate Grenville

  Being without Frank was lonely, but Auntie Rose was kind and loving. She was more a mother to Nance than Dolly had ever been. They sat together on the back step in the sun of a morning and Auntie Rose slipped each hank of Nance’s hair through her fingers to be smoothed away into the plait. Auntie Rose was Dolly’s older sister. She’d never been to school. She could write her name but that was all. Uncle Ted didn’t own any land, he was a labourer, ploughing or shearing on other people’s farms.

  Auntie Rose worked from before dawn, when she got up to milk the cow, to last thing at night, when she put the yeast bottle by the fire ready for the next day’s bread. It would still be dark outside when Nance woke up hearing her riddling out the stove. She’d turn over, coil herself back into the bedclothes. Auntie Rose would come in and wake everyone for school later but there’d be no rousing, no scolding. The kitchen would be warm, the fire busy in the stove, and there’d be a good smell of breakfast cooking.

  When they all got home from school Auntie Rose had made the butter, fed the skim milk to the pig, worked in the vegetable garden. She mended everyone’s clothes on the Singer, turned sheets sides to middle, made aprons and working clothes. Made her own soap, her own boot polish, saved the feathers from the Sunday-lunch chook to make pillows. She bought hardly anything. Sugar, flour, tea: that was about it. Hair ribbons. Red crepe paper to make a costume when Nance was Little Red Riding Hood at school.

  At the weekends the children went cray-bobbing in the creek, played jacks in the dust, fossicked for the broken pieces of china they called chainies. Behind the pub was a good place to find them, where someone long ago must have thrown their rubbish. Nance liked the blue-and-white ones best. It was her great-granny Davis who’d started the pub, so the chainies had probably been her teacups and dinner plates.

  The school was one room, with a house at the back where the teacher Mr Keating lived. A playground lumpy with tussocks of grass where they played croquet at lunchtime, smelly privies down the back, and next door a paddock where the children who rode in to school, like little Ernie Ranclaud, tied up their ponies.

  In the morning they lined up and Mr Keating marched them into the school with a tune on his fiddle. Every week they had to learn some poetry off by heart. It was usually the big girls and boys he called on, but there came a day when he pointed to Nance. Luckily she’d learned her verse, stood up in her place, and it was as if the words themselves were taking her by the hand and pulling her along.

  Though the mills of God grind slowly,

  Yet they grind exceeding small;

  Though with patience He stands waiting,

  With exactness grinds He all.

  Good girl, Nance, Mr Keating said. You spoke that with real understanding.

  One afternoon when Nance came home from school Auntie Rose said, Pet, your mother’s sent word, she’d like you back home. The words were out of Nance’s mouth before she could stop them: Auntie Rose, I wish you were my mother! Auntie Rose went on mixing the pastry, her wrists deft with the knife in the bowl, and when she’d turned the pastry out on the board and flattened it with the heel of her hand she said, Nance dear, you know I’d like that too. But your mum would miss you. She rolled for a minute, picked the pastry up and flipped it, looked across the table at Nance. You know, pet, she loves you.

  No, she doesn’t, Nance wanted to say. Why does everyone have to pretend?

  Auntie Rose rolled again, flipped again. You know, pet, she said, things didn’t work out for your mother the way she wanted. Course they don’t for most people. Some take it harder than others and your mother’s one that takes it hard. She can’t help it, pet, is what I’m saying.

  There was only the comfortable crackle of the fire in the stove and the little hiss from where the kettle had a leak. Auntie Rose wasn’t going to say it, not straight out, but she was telling Nance she knew how difficult Dolly could be. Nance thought, It’s all right. It’s not just me.

  Now come here, pet, Rose said, we’ll make some jam tarts. Get the glass, see? Put the edge in the flour so it won’t stick.

  She took Nance’s hand, smoothed it over the pastry, so cool and silky. When you’re an old lady like me, she said, with children of your own, you’ll show them how to make a jam tart and you’ll say, My dear old Auntie Rose who loved me so much, she was the one showed me this.

  Nance would have liked to take her chainies back to Sydney, but knew her mother would pounce on them. What’s this rubbish! She took them across the creek to a fold in the rocks that made a little hidden place where the rain never reached. One day she’d come back and they’d be there.

  While she’d been gone, her parents had moved again, left the Crown and taken over the Federal in Campbelltown, a township not far from Camden. Nance had hardly got used to the Campbelltown school before they were off to the Queensland Hotel in Temora, in the wheat belt in the south of the state. It was the grandest pub they’d had. In the middle of town, with carpet on the stairs and a chandelier in the dining room. Dolly sat behind the till in the red velvet she was partial to. Mrs Russell from the Queensland Hotel, that was something!

  The time apart had made Nance and Frank awkward with each other. He was a boy now, playing boys’ games with other boys. They were still good mates, but not the one person, the way they’d been before, and Temora Public School was big enough for them to be in different classes.

  Nance was nine. Temora was the sixth time she’d been the new girl. Six times she’d been out of step in class: at the last school they might have already done the Rivers of Europe, and here they hadn’t started it. For a while she’d be top of the class. But at the last school they might not have got up to Kings and Queens of England, 1066 to the Present Day, and here it was over and done with, and she’d missed it. At lunchtime being the new girl was lonely, unwrapping your lunch and chewing away as if you didn’t need company. She knew now that you didn’t wait to be asked. Wander over when they got out the skipping rope, join the line as if she’d always been there.

  Somewhere between the schools she’d missed Long Division and Lowest Common Denominator, but she was a good reader. She liked poetry best.

  There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around

  That the colt from old Regret had got away.

  At home they had a Bible and an old red Prayer Book. Bert had a few Westerns beside his bed and Dolly had Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and every morning the paperboy delivered the Temora Independent. Always a big headline with a photo: ‘Level Crossing Tragedy’, and there was the car on the tracks crumpled up like paper. ‘Demented Russian Holds Up Train’, a small dark man in handcuffs beside Constable Cassidy caught with his mouth open.

  The strain behind every day was Dolly and Bert arguing, never in front of the customers but in the bar after they’d closed up. One evening Nance crept down in her nightie to listen. She could hear her mother going on and on. Not the words but the tone, that scorch. Suddenly Dolly came out, slamming the door behind her, her face crooked with feeling. She caught Nance on the bottom step.

  Your father’s a rotten bugger of a man, she said. I might as well be dead.

  Don’t say that, Mum, Nance said. You’ve still got us. Oh, Dolly cried, you children! You children don’t matter!

  Then they were moving again. Frank told her it was because of Benni, the nursemaid who looked after them. Benni was half Chinese, that golden skin. Her mother was ordinary Australian, was how Benni put it. That makes me betwixt and between, she said. Not like you kids, true blue. She had a lovely smile. Frank said, I think Dad’s on with Benni. Nance didn’t understand. How do you mean, she said. I’ve seen him, Frank said. Coming out of her room in the night.

  Bert and Dolly and Max went to Beckom, a one-horse town twenty miles away. Dolly said the school there was no good, so Frank and Nance stayed behind in Temora. Frank was boarded with Miss St Smith, who took the photos for the Independent. Nance was left with the dressmaker who made Dolly her red velvet jacke
ts.

  Miss Medway lived with her mother in a little poky house on the edge of town. They were strict Catholics and strict in every other way too. Starting with the moment Nance put her bag on the bed in the sleepout at the back of the Medways’ house, it was awful. Miss Medway whipped the bag off the bed. Don’t ever do that again, Nance, she said. You’ll soil the cover. Her shoes had to be lined up exactly under the bed. In the wardrobe all the hangers had to face the same way. The Medways even had a special way of rolling the socks.

  Everything was about your immortal soul and there was grace at every meal and no meat on Friday. There was a Jesus hanging over every bed and He was there again in the corner of the parlour, with a shelf underneath for a candle and a dried-up cross from Palm Sunday. Nance had to go with Miss and Mrs Medway to mass. When it was time for Holy Sacrament everyone glanced at her sitting in her pew with a little sympathetic smile that said, Poor thing, not a Catholic?

  Nance was always out of step and Miss Medway or her mother always correcting her. They never hit her. It was the feeling of being watched every moment and worrying that you were breaking one of the rules that was so suffocating. A few times when she’d done something wrong she tried fibbing. That meant a lecture from Miss Medway about what a wicked sin it was to tell a lie. She sat looking at Jesus all through Miss Medway’s lectures. The first few times she was frightened but after a while she thought, Go on, Jesus. Strike me dead.

  Now she and Frank became strangers. The playground was divided into the boys’ part and the girls’ part, and when they caught each other’s eye across the painted line she’d see Frank’s face go wooden and her own face stiffened instead of smiling. It was as if they both felt they’d get into trouble if they showed they knew each other.

  Frank never came to visit her at the Medways’ and Nance only went once to Miss St Smith’s house, when Dolly wanted photographs of her and Frank. Nance was nine, Frank was ten. Miss St Smith was waiting with Frank on the verandah. Her house was in the good part of town and she was a big confident woman in an expensive-looking pale-blue costume. She had that well-brought-up loud way of speaking. Come along, children, she said. None of those long faces! Frank dear, buck up, won’t you? And Nancy, I’ll thank you to give me a better smile than that!

  The only place she could go to be unhappy in peace was the woodheap. She’d sit there in the dusk, the chooks murmuring around her feet. People were always going on about orphans, she thought. How awful it was for them. She thought it would be good to be an orphan. At least you’d have the other orphans. And it wouldn’t be your fault that your parents didn’t love you, because they’d be dead. But why didn’t her parents love her? She knew she must be lovable because Auntie Rose loved her, and Frank loved her, even though they’d lost the knack of talking together. Her parents should love her, because parents were supposed to love their children. Instead, she was nothing but a nuisance to them.

  She sat on until the chooks gave up waiting for her and put themselves to bed. There was no reason why anything would ever change. Oh, she thought, all my life is wasted!

  When she went to Beckom for the next holiday, Bert and Dolly were packing up again. Off to Sydney, her father said. The Botany View in Newtown. Lowered his voice to what he must have thought was a whisper. Been punished long enough, he said and winked.

  Dolly was full of how wonderful the Botany View was going to be. It was near the brickworks, thronged with thirsty workers every lunchtime. No house trade, no night work, easy to run. The place would be a gold mine. It was the same story: this time everything would be perfect.

  Oh, what a silly thing I was, Nance thought. Sitting on the woodheap thinking it would be forever!

  Then it turned out that Newtown was an unsavoury quarter. Nance would stay on with the Medways. This time she’d be on her own in Temora, because Frank would be boarding at Newington College in Stanmore. Max would go to Newtown Public.

  When the school year ended she packed her bag to go home for the Christmas holidays. She went out and waited for Bert on the porch. She was ready too early, Miss Medway kept trying to make her come in out of the heat, but she perched on her case watching down the road. And there he was, a big man in a suit she’d never seen before, his familiar face, and the voice she knew. Well, there you are, Nance! His hand on the gate, his smile turned up to her. Something opened in her and the pent-up tears flooded out.

  Oh, things could be so simple! It was nothing more than a matter of Bert saying to Miss Medway, I’ll be taking Nance back with me. That was all it took.

  They all looked different, city folk now. Max loved the public school, the kick-about with a ball at lunchtime. The unsavoury quarter business didn’t worry him.

  Frank hated Newington. The other boys were snobs, he said. A boy told me I was from the sort of family that had to buy their own silver, he said. Would you know what that meant, Nance?

  Of course she didn’t.

  Means it’s supposed to have come down in the family, he said. If you have to buy it, you’re not good enough.

  Nance didn’t care what Bert and Dolly would do with her. Anything was better than the Medways’. That was until they told her. She was going to a convent in another suburb. She’d be a term boarder there, just come home for the holidays.

  She was one of two non-Catholics in her class. In the whole school there were only a dozen. When everyone else did the Legion of Mary the non-Catholics had to do their sampler, and when the rest went away for a week on Retreat they had to stay behind with one of the Sisters. Oh, it was wonderful, the others said when they came back. But you wouldn’t understand.

  Nance wished she could be a Catholic. She’d be happy to believe whatever you had to. Imagine, though, going home and telling Dolly! Not that her mother was religious, but if you were a Protestant you didn’t turn.

  Up in the dormitory you had to get dressed and undressed under your nightie, otherwise it might be an Occasion of Sin. At the end of the room there was a life-sized statue of Mary holding Baby Jesus. Wherever you stood she was looking somewhere else.

  Once a week Sister passed a slate around the class. You were supposed to write down all the good deeds you’d done during the week, but they had to be Catholic things: Holy Mass, Spiritual Communion, Self-Denial. Nance just passed the slate along to the next girl.

  Someone had to come to see her every week because her washing was done at home. She supposed it was to save money but it was one more difference that set her apart. Sometimes Frank was sent, stiff in his Newington uniform, embarrassed by the picture of Jesus pointing to a light shining out of his chest. Other times it was Bert. How’s my girl, he boomed, not realising you were supposed to moderate your voice. He always brought the same thing: two bars of Old Gold chocolate.

  Dad, I’d rather have milk chocolate, she said, speaking quietly to give him the idea.

  What’s that, pet? Oh, that’s all right, Nance, milk next time. But it was always Old Gold, because that was what he liked.

  They didn’t often have treats at the convent but one Saturday they were to go to a fete at a nearby school. It was a rare privilege to leave the grounds behind the high walls. The trouble was, the day opened wet and stayed wet and the nuns said they wouldn’t be going if the rain kept up. The girls spent the morning going in and out of the chapel praying for the rain to stop. Even Nance went in with the others, knelt down the way they did and thought, Please, God, let it stop raining.

  Lunchtime came and still it rained. See, Nance said to Maureen, next to her at the table. God’s laughing at us.

  Maureen said, That’s a wicked sinful thing to say, Nance Russell!

  Who cares, Nance said. God’s not doing anything for us, is He?

  Then the surprise: at the end of the meal, Sister stood up and announced that they would all put on their galoshes and macs and get out their umbrellas, because they were going to the fete.

  Nance wondered why they’d changed their minds. Then she thought, It’s to keep e
veryone believing. Better to get wet than to grizzle that God didn’t answer our prayers.

  Oh, what bliss to walk out the big blue gate and along the road where ordinary bustling life was going on! To know that there was still a world out there, and she’d surely get back to it one day.

  She’d been at the convent three terms when Dolly and Bert sold the Botany View. They bought a block of flats in Kings Cross and a house in the southern suburb of Cronulla and retired to live off their rents like gentry. They left Nance at the convent. She went to the Cronulla house for the holidays, but it was hard to enjoy because hanging over every day was the knowledge that soon she’d have to go back behind the hated walls.

  She’d become a troublemaker. She made the other girls try to prove that God existed. And if He existed, then why hadn’t He made the rain stop the day of the fete? She scoffed at the miracles in the Bible and laughed at the plaster saints in the chapel. She had a couple of the girls half convinced. Then someone snitched. She had a frightening interview with Mother Superior: the light behind her so she was a dark silhouette. You are doing the Devil’s work, Nance Russell, Mother Superior said. You are sending girls to Hell. God didn’t frighten Nance, but Mother Superior did.

  That was a Friday, and the next morning Nance went home for a long weekend. She was still shaky from the interview with Mother Superior. She thought she’d got too tough for tears but she was hollowed out behind her brave front. Once she was home she collapsed. She could hear herself howl, the sort of noise an animal might make. They crowded around, touched her and tried to soothe her. Even Dolly tried to give her a bony hug. At last she told them. Mother Superior said she was sending girls to Hell, she said in a voice gone ropy with crying. Dolly boiled up. How dare she! Who did the woman think she was? The insult of it!