by Olga Masters
Henry was the one he thought would love the farm best. He used to sit as a little boy in each furrow as he ploughed a paddock.
‘I’m making chocolates, Farder,’ he would say, shaping the moist black earth into squares. Sweeter than chocolate it was in Jack’s ears.
Would that new Henry grow to be anything like he was? Jack did not want the thought to settle in his head. He was quite frightened every time Violet came with the child to Honeysuckle that she might announce she was leaving it.
And here came that fellow! Barely a day passed without a visit. Jack tallied up the meals eaten with them since the funeral. Ten no less, not counting the morning and afternoon teas at which he ate abundantly.
Edwards on seeing Jack decided he would join him in the paddock, and giving himself no time to change his mind, ducked under the fence rail, scraping his back as he usually did, thinking of the way Una flew under them like that white tufty stuff that blew from the ends of grass. He walked to Jack, taking his hat off long before he needed to.
The horse, with a coat like toffee and big knobbly knees, appeared tolerant of the interruption, but not excited by it. He blinked great black eyes and lifted great black lips over teeth that looked like weather-beaten clothes pegs, then decided a sneer would be wasted on the plainly agitated Edwards, and sought nourishment in some grass flattened to its sweet roots by the slide.
Jack sat on a log, and this made it hard for Edwards to execute his handshake, but he did, by bending down, then Jack rose and a passing car saw with amazement the two bobbing figures in the middle of a paddock.
The travellers recognized them both and said to each other here is something to watch! Something will break soon, keep your ear to the ground, here comes news to liven the old place up, and give us something to chew on apart from tough corned beef.
Edwards took a seat beside Jack, and the horse laid his ears back listening to the silence. Edwards felt Jack’s were laid back too.
‘You have probably noticed,’ Edwards said, ‘my fondness for the Misses Herberts.’
The Misses Herberts! That sounded terrible, as if they were elderly spinsters. He looked at the horse and imagined Una grasping its mane and throwing a leg over its back, with her skirt falling back and frothy mysterious underthings showing.
‘Miss Una and Miss Enid,’ he corrected himself, foolishly fearful that Jack saw his image of Una. He had put Una first too, which was not the proper way.
Jack might have noticed, for he lifted his large face and appeared to sniff at the air, as if this way he would detect how the wind was blowing. Edwards stared at the ground between his feet.
‘They are fine young women,’ he said.
Jack brought his jaws together and his cheeks shook a warning. Edwards clenched his jaws too, sweating a little in the cool air.
He saw beyond the far fence smoke rising from the Honeysuckle chimneys. He longed to be there in the warmth and comfort of the house, but felt the stout chains Jack has used to bind the logs to the slide anchored him as well.
‘Very fine women,’ said Edwards miserably. ‘Both.’
The smoke at that moment rose thicker and stronger stating that Enid was stoking fires. Enid stoking this fellow’s fire? Jack got up and stood between Edwards and the house, as if this would put Enid farther from him. Edwards had the brief and terrifying thought that Jack might be shaping up for a fight. He stood too, so as not to be disadvantaged.
Their eyes met, Edwards’s like those of a pleading spaniel, Jack’s coming forward so black you would not believe any expression could be in them.
They were like pools of oil that would drag Edwards to their murky depths, if he dared say the wrong name.
‘It’s Miss Una,’ he said in a low voice, even he puzzled at the soothing note in it.
34
They were married in January, just one year after Edwards’s appointment to Wyndham.
Only weeks after the engagement was announced (a few days after the meeting in the paddock) the archdeacon came from Bega to confirm six or seven children, the first group in Wyndham for confirmation since the war. Edwards was proud of his achievement, the culmination of regular instruction in the church porch after school, with scarred boots banging the stool impatient to be gone, the road beyond the door a yearning thing, the bird calls far sweeter than Edwards’s earnest pleas to believe what he was saying, although he himself held doubts about much of it.
The archdeacon almost fell in love with Una himself. He watched her long hands in their frilled cuffs on the shoulders of the gawky, terrified children, gently moving in some cases a full hand from a mouth, the mouth refusing to close when the hand was dropped. The archdeacon would have a few words to his parish council after this! That beautiful girl! An asset to the church.
Any man with support from a wife as beautiful and charming as that would do a better job for the church. A fool of a rule if ever there was one! Not only would he say so but he would suggest (insist!) on an increase in the stipend, small though it might need to be, there would be an increase.
What a home she would make of the rectory, if this place was anything to go by! For everyone gathered in the Honeysuckle garden after the service for trays of tea, sandwiches and cakes. Here was the elder girl now offering cake. He pulled at a wedge, tearing it from the big, golden round, as if it was flesh cut gently to save a deeper hurt. He fancied he heard the girl wince and looked up to see her dart a smile to her lips, while her eyes stayed serious. She is anxious that everyone is being looked after. A fine girl too! An ideal wife for the church and why most of them choose mousy, drab women he would never know. Or bossy ones like the wife of the Candelo man, there in a dreadful hat looking quite boldly towards Edwards and Una together on a little seat as if their thoughts were already in unison, and they each needed a little spell, she from feeding the children moist tomato sandwiches and he from circling among shy farmers, ill at ease in suits and wives standing half behind them, shyer still.
‘You do all this so well,’ Edwards said in a whisper when his mouth was inches from her ear.
Una chose the time for the marriage to adjust to Small Henry’s timetable.
‘In the morning after his bath and sleep when he’s happiest,’ Una said, sending the wheel of the sewing machine flying, as she ran up a seam of a cream silk coat she was making for him for the wedding day. She clicked the thread from the needle and pulled at the silk to smooth out a little puckering.
Enid walked with her new step as if she was not certain the floor was safe, carrying plates to the dresser, for Una had moved the machine to the kitchen to work in a breeze from the back door, utilizing an authority that had come with her new status. She allowed herself a small glance at Enid’s face now, and brushed fragments of silk and cotton from her front and if there was any stirring under the fine pintucks she brushed that away too. She’ll be happier when I’m gone with the place to herself and more time to toady to her beloved Jack. Una trimmed a small armhole then clattered the scissors onto the machine.
Enid raised her head as if they had spoken, sharply and hurtfully.
‘Do you agree on eleven o’clock?’ Una said. ‘Then it will be all over by the time he is ready for his afternoon sleep!’
Una had proposed Small Henry stay at Honeysuckle the night before the wedding, and to her great joy he was there for nearly a week. Violet with her hospital only weeks old had two cases. Even Alex, drawn into the excitement of it, agreed to the drive to Albert Lane with Una to collect Small Henry, to leave the way clear for Violet to run between Mrs Skinner and an eighteen-year-old girl married to a Post Office worker at Pambula.
The fact that the girl, Florence, had hooked into Albert Lane was a source of triumph for Violet. Pambula had a cottage hospital but the girl, formerly a Gough, came from one of the Wyndham farms and returned home to wait out her last two or three weeks with the Gough buggy ready
to take her to Violet when her time came.
It was like a holiday although she had very little to do in her tiny Pambula house. As a girl at home she had milked cows morning and night and now, with her large stomach that left no room for a bucket between her knees, she stayed in the house empty of everyone but herself. She used to want to sneak back when she was a child to see how the rooms behaved with no people there.
Now twice a day she walked about the house, her round stomach, greasy with perspiration, rubbing against her thighs.
She walked between the beds and dressing tables, liking the cool boards on her bare feet and the tickle of hooked rugs between her toes, glancing through the windows now and again to hear and see the activity beyond her peaceful isolation. There was the running between cowbails and dairy, cans of milk suspended between thin Gough arms, the clatter of gates opening and shutting as cows were released, the yells of pain and anger when a cow kicked, the bellow of calves penned away from mothers, pleading for moist milky teats in open mouths.
She could turn away when she liked and go to the kitchen and eat a succession of small soft cakes, putting the lid tightly on the tin after each, telling herself it would be the last. Her husband was a nervous city boy attached to a stamp collection, glad to have her out of the way, failing to look for means of visiting her, which she bore stoically, defending him on grounds of his busy and important life.
Ned stayed away from Albert Lane while the hospital was empty, returning and settling himself in when the two patients came and Small Henry was out of the way. Violet had not set their bedroom up on the end of the verandah as she planned to, Ned at Halloween and appearing to be dug in there. She moved a single bed into Small Henry’s room for herself. Ned slept on the kitchen couch, his military overcoat for a blanket, rising suddenly like a prehistoric creature from a swamp when Violet came into the kitchen during the all-night vigil with her patients, for Mrs Skinner and the Gough girl were delivered within twelve hours of each other, an event that set Albert Lane dancing on its stumps and all of Wyndham sharing the excitement and Violet’s triumph.
‘Goes to show how much we needed it!’ said Rachel to the first customer in the Post Office after the births.
Rachel had been among those opposing the scheme. She was the businesswoman of Wyndham, superior to Ena Grant (whose shop was in her husband’s name although it was widely accepted that she was in charge). Rachel was proud of her efficiency at handling mail, telegrams and money orders, able to estimate to the halfpenny the cost of sending parcels, and her brisk and businesslike manner on the telephone amazing those customers who had never used one.
She repeated far and wide the praises of the postal inspector when he made quarterly visits.
Rachel was jealous of the intrusion of Violet, also with a business venture, and took the side of those supporting Ned, claiming Violet was abandoning him, and she would set the telephone tingling with her wrath. If only her Ernest had been spared, how she would have cared for him!
She slapped stamps on letters with pudgy hands, casting dark looks at the spruced up Albert Lane opposite, waiting for its first case the week it was ready.
But this case did not arrive. The wife of a telephone linesman living closer to Candelo than Wyndham, under pressure from Nurse Black (‘I’d like to see her certificates,’ said Violet darkly), changed her mind and was confined in Mrs Black’s hospital.
Violet crossed the road to pour out her troubled heart to Rachel. It had all been a waste of time and money. No one wanted her to do well, jealousy was behind it!
Rachel hid her blushing guilt behind the tea caddy as she made a consoling cup for them both. Afterwards she pulled the Post Office door to and crossed back to Albert Lane with Violet in a passion of newly unearthed loyalty.
Together they looked in on the ward, the beds immaculately made and on each bedside table nothing but a doily. Violet’s drooping face spoke her fear that this was how it would always be. Rachel unconsciously took a step back as if she was not at home in this alien world.
She felt her stomach dry, her thighs lonely.
Violet went and raised the blind several inches to see out on the road where the world was more secure.
Rachel saw Violet’s hips and waist lost in the shadows under the window. Alien too! The pair of them, another sex, not belonging in this place made ready for new life.
The room was holding its breath, the hard, clean floorboards ready to creak with feet made heavy with a bulk of living, breathing flesh. The air made ready to be shattered with a scream, the iron bedhead waiting for the grasp of a hand, the shaking in protest, then afterwards smoothed out, loved, thanked.
Only the sunlight blinked in the room. Violet turned from the window, smoothed her skirt at the hips and came forward, Rachel stepping into the hall to allow her to pass.
Both faces swung to shut the room away. Violet took the knob to close the door with a gentle click, drowning out any sigh that might have risen from either chest.
35
Small Henry was sick the day of the wedding.
He had been hot and his skin dry through the previous night and Una and Enid, as well as he, hardly slept. Enid, waking one of half a dozen times after drifting into a short, light sleep, saw Una, not bothering with a dressing gown, hushing him before the dressing table mirror. At the same time she was frowning on her face, anxious about the way it would look after hours without rest.
Enid felt a short, sharp, shameful revenge. Serve her right! Well, serve her right! To help put the thought from her she got up and held the clock to the window to see the time. Only four, too early to start the preparations for the day, but she could see no more rest for her.
‘He’s hot, really hot!’ Una said, turning away from the mirror and easing her body onto a chair to avoid disturbing Small Henry, who leapt and quivered while she bound him more tightly in his rug and rocked him from her uncomfortable pose on the chair edge. As if forgetting the hour, Enid flung the bedclothes back to air the bed and remembering Una would not sleep there again began to change the linen. Una paused in her rocking motion to watch Enid tug the sheet from beneath the mattress with an odd, remote and sad expression that caused Enid to abandon the job and throw the pillows lightly together without removing the slips.
She pulled the curtains back to look out on the creeping day. A fine day, said her heart. Across the silvery paddocks on Hickey’s farm were the still shapes of cattle, and it seemed that the fence running into the gully and up the other side was the living thing and the cows merely shapes carved from some dark grey substance. Mist hung low swirled about the tops of trees and the sky had broken into a thousand small pink shapes. It was almost warm already.
‘Sun up yet?’ said Una as if she should say something to Enid’s back to make sure she too was not a frozen shape.
Enid went to the dressing table to gather up some tumblers half full of water and Small Henry’s full feeding bottle and passed through the door.
‘It hasn’t, but there’s no doubt it will!’ she said. Alone with Small Henry, Una needed to look on her wedding gown hanging from a chair back and her satin shoes on the floor beside it to know her wedding day was real.
‘It’s no use!’ she said, coming into the kitchen an hour later with Small Henry, having sponged him in the washbasin, alarmed at the small hot body and red ears and slack lips that refused to take a teaspoon of cool water. ‘I can’t get married with him sick!’
His head lolled on her shoulder and his little rump was tense on her arm. ‘He’s never been sick before!’ Una cried. ‘He’ll die!’
Enid, swirling icing on small cakes, took a fragment between her teeth that had splashed on her wrist. Her eyes remained lowered. Una, on a chair by the stove as if both she and Small Henry were cold, fixed blazing eyes on Enid.
‘You don’t care! My baby! He could die!’ She burst into tears. Enid laid her kni
fe down and came from her side of the table. She put her hands on Small Henry’s waist to lift him from Una’s shoulder.
‘Let me have him,’ she said, but Una stood skidding the chair back, shaking Enid off.
‘I’ll lie with him on the bed for a while,’ Una said, putting her streaked face into his neck and making for the bedroom.
‘Una!’ Enid called, as in the old days. And in the old days Una would have backed like a bird checked in flight, elbows flapping. But now she was still, a profile over her shoulder, so high it was clear of Small Henry’s head. Enid might have called for Una the child to return to the woman’s body.
‘We must decide what is to be done,’ Enid said, and the profile turned a little more, waiting.
I have to assume the wedding will go on, Enid thought. Aloud she said: ‘Perhaps we should have Alex take him to Violet’s in the car.’
Violet would not want that. She had old Hetty Power, who had brought babies into the world in earlier times, to stay with Mrs Skinner and the Gough girl and free Violet to attend the wedding. A sick Small Henry would need to be isolated from the patients and old Mrs Power might not be able to cope. Violet would not want to miss the wedding.
‘He’s not going to Violet’s!’ Una cried. ‘I want him at my wedding!’
She walked with him rapidly to the bedroom and shut the door, Enid following her to the living room with a stack of plates for the sideboard.
The white cloth that had been used for Jack and Nellie’s wedding was already on the big table, spread there after its meticulous ironing. No flowers there but vases of them at every high point in the room, on the little raised platforms of the chiffonier, the taller of the little tables and mantleshelf.
She remembered the funeral when the heady smell of stocks and wallflowers was mixed with the smell of food. She had marvelled at the warmth then although it was winter and now at the height of summer the roses curling back their outer leaves gave off a cool smell.
