Luncheon. Brown soup. Grey meat. Roast vegetables. A shearing-shed meal, Miss Thwaites might have said, but didn’t, sitting opposite Sophie, chatting amiably to the rector. As soon as they rose from luncheon, Malcolm took Sophie to see the camellias, her hand on his arm.
She was so nervous she shook. He smiled down at her, then looked past the bare English trees of the garden, the wilting camellia bushes, to the brown paddocks beyond. ‘Gosh, it’s good to be home. To smell sheep and grass.’
‘What does England smell like?’ Her voice sounded too high. A schoolgirl’s voice.
‘London smells sour. The fogs are ghastly. Yellow, so thick you can’t see your hand in front of you.’
‘You wrote to me about them. I … I liked your letters.’
‘I liked yours too. Look, there’s an eagle! It’ll be after the lambs,’ he added. ‘Wish I had my gun.’
Let him kiss me, she thought, partly because she wanted it, had even practised with the golliwog in the nursery (it seemed more appropriate than a doll), but partly because kisses — at least in the world of a Miss Sophie Higgs — were irrevocably linked with proposals of marriage.
The shadow of the eagle passed over them. ‘Sophie …’ said Malcolm, and led her behind the camellias.
She had expected words of love first. Instead he drew her to him. She felt the heat of his skin, the press of his body, his nose against hers — golliwogs didn’t have noses, she should have thought of that — so she couldn’t breathe, but then all at once they seemed to fit and she felt his lips, and realised she wanted this warmth hard against her even more than she wanted to be Mrs Overhill.
The whiskers tickled. His hand held her waist, hot even through her stays. Sophie had grown up with rams, with stallions, and when told not to look had peeked through her fingers. She even had a reasonable idea what ‘marital relations’ might entail, though women seemed badly designed compared with sheep.
‘Sophie,’ said Miss Thwaites, coming suddenly around the camellia hedge, her voice expressionless.
Malcolm released her. ‘I must apologise, Miss Thwaites. But under the circumstances …’ he smiled down at Sophie ‘… I hope that Mr Higgs will consent to giving me Miss Higgs’s hand in marriage. I hope she will be my wife.’
It was only later, in the carriage, that she realised that in the eighteen months since they had ridden together she and Malcolm had exchanged perhaps six sentences in person, and three of those as he handed her and Miss Thwaites into the carriage. Had his smile perhaps been more self-congratulatory than joyful, the smile of a job well done? She would never have a young man kneel before her now, asking for her hand, suitable for a Chapter Nineteen. Had Malcolm moved her like a piece in a game of checkers: place Sophie behind the camellias and have her discovered by a vigilant governess, with guests nearby to whisper the scandal unless she agreed to marry him?
But she loved him. She looked at the pink camellias he had handed her as she stepped into the carriage, and imagined the house that they’d live in, above the river.
‘No,’ said Mr Higgs.
Sophie stared at her father, standing like a large square bat among the chintz flowers of the drawing room, in his dark suit, and his well-shined gold watch and chain. Malcolm had just had afternoon tea with her and Miss Thwaites — Coronation cake in memory of their first ride together — before his interview with Mr Higgs. Sophie had asked him to stay afterwards for a celebratory dinner, the champagne already cooling in the ice chest.
But Malcolm had left without coming into the drawing room to say goodbye.
‘I don’t understand.’ It was impossible that her father had said no to Malcolm, no to something she wanted so badly, something that was so right.
Miss Thwaites looked up, startled, from her embroidery. ‘Mr Higgs, you seemed pleased with the alliance when we told you last week.’
‘That was before I met him. My girl can do far better for herself than that. Popinjay! I asked him if he felt any qualms about taking on the factories when I’m gone. Do you know what that whippersnapper said to me? “But of course I would sell them, Mr Higgs.”’ He mimicked the young man’s smooth tones a little too well. ‘“You might even consider selling now, Mr Higgs. Rest on your laurels, Mr Higgs. Enjoy your grandchildren, Mr Higgs.” Ha.’
Mr Jeremiah Higgs never yelled. But his hand trembled as he reached for a cigar.
‘I’m sure Mr Overhill didn’t mean —’ began Sophie, then realised that would have been exactly what Malcolm meant. ‘I’ll tell him that I don’t want them sold,’ she said quietly. Impossible to imagine Jeremiah Higgs without his factories. ‘You’ll give permission if he says he’ll keep the factories, won’t you?’
‘I will not. That monkey would never have asked you to marry him without my money. And he had the hide to demand I get rid of the source of it!’
‘You don’t understand a man like Malcolm. You’ve forgotten what love is like!’ Her anger sounded like a child’s: shrill and petulant. She felt she was battling cotton wool, suffocating but immovable.
‘I remember all too well, Sophie love. Would he want you without your money?’
‘The young man will have no power to sell his wife’s possessions, Mr Higgs; I believe you must trust Sophie to make sure her affairs are managed properly,’ said Miss Thwaites quietly. Miss Thwaites had explained the Married Women’s Property Act to Sophie long ago, and how long and hard it had been fought for.
‘She’ll do whatever those Overhill biddies want her to.’
‘I won’t!’ Sophie wanted to stamp her foot, run up to her room, burst into tears. But each of those actions would make her seem like a child too young to know her own mind. She hunted for another weapon, and found none.
‘One lass can’t stand against an entire family. Once I’m gone you’ll be on your own, except for them.’ The anger had gone, the red drained from his face. The unspoken ‘If only I had a son’ was almost loud enough to hear. He gazed at her, then seemed to come to a decision. ‘If he wants you enough, he can wait till you’re twenty-one!’
‘I want to marry him now!’
‘Why?’ Her father’s small green eyes stared at her. ‘And don’t talk to me about love, my girl. Love is all very well but it don’t put cabbage on the table. It’s not like you won’t have more offers.’
‘I want a … wider life.’
He snorted. ‘You think the Overhills will give it to you?’
No, thought Sophie. But I can take it from them. ‘They dine at Government House! At Parliament House! I could chair committees like Mrs Underhill does. Do things!’
Her father gave the grunt that might mean yes or no. ‘It only needs enough brass to start a committee and be its chair. You just need a bit more experience. In three years you can choose for yourself.’
‘Few women are lucky enough to be able to choose their future, Sophie.’ Miss Thwaites spoke quietly. She didn’t add: ‘And your governess wasn’t one of them.’ What would Miss Thwaites be, if she could choose? thought Sophie.
‘I’m going to write to Malcolm! Tell him I’ll marry him as soon as I’m of age!’
Mr Higgs stared at her. Sophie waited for words from the novels so beloved by the Suitable Friends: ‘I’ll cast you off without a shilling’, or even ‘Marry him and you’ll be dead to me.’
But even if he had fourteen factories, Thuringa, a governess lover and a missing wife, her father had only one daughter. We’re evenly matched, she thought. The only sure weapon her father could use against her would hurt him just as much.
Mr Higgs gave a sudden snort. ‘My ma asked me when I joined the army, just fifteen, “Why do you want to do it, Jeremiah?” And I said, “I want to see things.” I dreamed of a bigger world than Greymouth. And I found it too. You’re your father’s daughter, and no mistake.’ He was silent a moment, then suddenly smiled. ‘Mebbe I’d better write a letter myself, then.’
‘To Malcolm?’ Sophie asked, a seed of triumph in her voice.
‘To someone I knew a long time ago. Mebbe I’ll make it a wire instead. And I don’t want any more questions.’ He waved his hand. ‘Off you go and practise your piano.’
She still didn’t play the piano, and he knew it. She’d been dismissed.
Three whole years, thought Sophie as her father limped from the drawing room. How should she fill up three whole years?
Chapter 9
The difference between a girl and a matron is how many movements it takes for them both to rise from their chair. A matron shoves and creaks; a girl rises in one smooth sweep. If you rise in one effortless, swift action, you may still be taken for a girl at eighty, at least until they light the candles.
Miss Lily, 1913
Mrs Overhill arrived at the Higgses’ Sydney house in puce and ostrich feathers, carefully timing her visit to arrive an hour after Mr Jeremiah Higgs’s carriage had rolled down the cobbles to his office. She patted Sophie’s arm with a hand covered in a mauve lace glove. ‘I am delighted, my dear. Simply delighted.’
Sophie tried not to show her shock. Hadn’t Malcolm told her that Mr Higgs had refused his suit?
Mrs Overhill seated herself with a creak of whalebone. ‘Your dear papa is quite right, of course. You need a little more experience of the world —’ the qualification ‘our world’ hung above the scent of toast from breakfast ‘— before anything is announced. No formal engagement yet. Just an Understanding.’
Who was supposed to ‘Understand’? thought Sophie. The creditors waiting for the Overhills’ wealthy new wife? Other possible suitors for her hand? She carefully didn’t look at Miss Thwaites.
‘There is a concert at the Conservatory on Tuesday,’ said Mrs Overhill. ‘Everybody will be there. We will call for you at eight.’
She, too, didn’t glance at Miss Thwaites. Miss Thwaites was not ‘everybody’. Mrs Overhill had claimed the right to be Sophie’s chaperone now.
‘And a pantomime on Saturday — such fun …’
Sophie wore pale yellow, Mrs Overhill in blue satin beside her, Malcolm with his back to the driver, elegant in white tie. On either side the new electric lights glowed along the Conservatory drive.
Sophie told herself that she was happy. An Understanding was close to an engagement, after all. If only she hadn’t felt the family had put a label on her — Property of the Overhills — just like a label on a can of corned beef. If only, most of all, she’d been able to talk to this new, be-whiskered Malcolm alone. But private conversations, it seemed, were a luxury for after they were married. She had known him better, she thought, on those rides more than a year earlier.
She glanced at him, found him looking at her too, saw his smile in the flare of the electric lights, thrust aside again the question she couldn’t ask, ‘Do you really love me?’
Mrs Overhill surrendered her cloak — blue satin with fur trim — to the attendant; Malcolm took Sophie’s ruched silk. They climbed the stairs, Mrs Overhill pausing on every fourth step (‘My heart, you know’, patting the ample flesh above that object), till at last they reached the Overhills’ box.
And, as Mrs Overhill snored lightly after the first crescendo, above the shadowed heads of the audience in the stalls, with only the stage lit, they had the privacy she’d longed for.
‘Malcolm?’
Malcolm glanced at his mother, her head back in her seat, then squeezed Sophie’s hand. ‘You look impossibly lovely.’ He had said she looked lovely when he handed her into the carriage, but this was different.
‘I … I’m sorry about having to wait,’ she said.
‘Your father will come round.’ He said it so easily that Sophie knew he believed it to be true, that Malcolm Overhills would always get their way with a Jeremiah Higgs.
‘Malcolm, darling,’ she tested the word, was glad when he smiled at it, ‘do we really need to sell the factories?’
He looked genuinely startled. ‘I should have thought you’d want to. Sophie, you must understand …’ His voice trailed off. Suddenly she wished he had the courage to say: ‘The factories will demean you — and me — as long as we are associated with them.’ Instead he said, more confidently now: ‘There’s no need to worry your head with business. Not now, and definitely not after we are married.’ He smiled again. ‘You’ll have plenty to occupy you then.’
A household to run. Children. Perhaps his mother would even relinquish her role as patron of the St Anne’s Ladies’ Guild. Suddenly she thought of her own mother’s vanishing. She would vanish into Mrs Malcolm Overhill. But that was exactly what she wanted to be …
‘Mother will call on your Miss Thwaites tomorrow,’ he added. ‘Miss Thwaites seems a sensible woman. Mother will ask her to intercede with your father. Explain the advantages of marrying this year.’
She wasn’t sure what to reply. She nodded instead.
‘I’m going to Warildra next week,’ he added softly, below the surge of the violins. ‘Shearing. It’s time someone oversaw things there; the pater’s hopeless. You’ll be coming down to Thuringa in a month or so, won’t you? I can’t tell you how much I missed riding with you, all that time in England.’
She wanted to talk about the men in chains, the factories that were so much part of her father. Instead she said: ‘I wish we had sheep at Thuringa. I love the way lambs’ tails wiggle.’
He laughed, quietly, under the music. ‘You can see them wiggle every spring when we’re married.’
Perhaps her father was right, she thought suddenly. She needed the experience to ask the right questions before she would be ready to be a wife. ‘I … I saw some of your black stockmen in chains,’ she attempted.
‘Just some darkies refusing to work. It should never have got to that stage. Darkies need a firm hand. A touch of the whip will do it. The pater’s away too much, lets things get out of hand.’
‘Why don’t you employ white men?’
‘Less expensive. Darkies work for rations. Most of their families are on the reserve so it’s really just flour and tea and tobacco. Mama won’t have black housemaids, of course. Don’t worry; she’ll see we have suitable staff after we’re married.’
He leaned over in the dimness of the box and kissed her. The world shivered, exquisite for long seconds. This was love. His hand still held hers, warm and tantalising through her glove.
The kiss ended. I have everything I ever wanted, thought Sophie, and wondered why the emptiness remained.
Mrs Overhill sat in the Higgses’ drawing room, nibbling her scone with teeth the colour of her engraved notepaper, then stared at it, as though counting the size and regularity of the sultanas. She put it back on her plate. ‘Of course Mr Higgs may keep the factories if he insists upon it.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be glad to know that.’ Miss Thwaites was serene. She held up the silver teapot, specially made, larger than any pot Sophie had ever seen.
‘No, thank you.’ Mrs Overhill gave the slightest hint that the tea had not been adequate to tempt her into drinking more. ‘Although I do think that Mr Higgs might consider his daughter’s reputation …’ She looked down at her scone disparagingly. Sophie almost thought she was referring to the neat placement of sultanas when she added: ‘Why not announce the engagement now? The marriage itself can wait, if Mr Higgs wishes it.’
‘Mr Higgs believes eighteen is too young when a girl has seen so little of the world.’
‘That is precisely my point. Please, let me be frank, Miss Thwaites. Dear little Sophie will see far more of the world — our world, the world she will be part of — once she is married. The longer she stays in her father’s house the more she will be exposed to … certain influences.’
Cousin Oswald and conversations about factories? Rumours that might be reawakened about a missing mother? Sophie glanced at her mother’s portrait on the wall. What would her mother have thought of Mrs Overhill? She looked back at the scones steaming on their salver. They’d be cold by the time Mrs Overhill left, and she was starving. But a hearty appetite wasn’t ladylik
e. Ladies must be restrained. Safer — especially with Mrs Overhill judging her every move — not to eat at all.
She would rather have Malcolm than a scone.
‘More hot water?’ asked Miss Thwaites. ‘You are sure the tea isn’t too strong?’
Sophie had never seen Miss Thwaites quite like this before. She’s angry, she thought. She’s angry for me. And for Dad too.
‘I am sure you see, Miss Thwaites, that marriage will open many doors that are shut to a daughter of a butcher’s shop.’
It was a mistake. The insult was too open. Sophie felt a flush of anger too. She pushed her hands under a cushion so Mrs Overhill wouldn’t see them clench. This woman would be her mother-in-law, expecting to guide her daughter-in-law, just as Sophie would be expected to follow her husband’s will. Marriage was supposed to be the culmination of a girl’s life. Instead it might become a prison, with far less indulgent warders than Mr Higgs and Miss Thwaites.
The striped wallpaper of the room was closing in on her.
She realised Miss Thwaites was speaking, her voice like velvet over steel. ‘I’m so glad you agree that Sophie needs to see more of the world, Mrs Overhill. Miss Higgs’s father has been considering a finishing year for her in England. So important for a young girl, don’t you think?’
Sophie stared. Why hadn’t Miss Thwaites mentioned this before? Suddenly she realised that her guardian was angry enough to let information slip.
Mrs Overhill blinked, and then recovered. ‘It is difficult to finish what was never started at all.’ She glanced down at her scone again. A fly was crawling on it. She smiled, as though the presence of the fly were a personal triumph. ‘Dear little Sophie is going to England? How delightful for her. Then she will be presented at court during the season?’
‘A slice of fruitcake?’ offered Miss Thwaites.
‘I never eat fruitcake. Sophie will need the recommendation of two ladies who have been presented at court themselves.’ Mrs Overhill took out her fan, and opened it with a snap. The fly abandoned the scone. ‘I can be one of them, of course. I remember my own presentation well. The dear old Queen. How we miss her. I am sure one of my other friends would be glad to recommend Sophie too …’
Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies Page 6
