by Olga Masters
She snapped a small purse shut now, one on a long chain he hadn’t seen before and this disturbed him too. The bag of creamy-coloured leather shaped like a large envelope which she carried with her from the house after the wedding sat on the dressing table with some pots and jars. Goodness, he had thought it would be one bag for one woman.
He had a lot to learn, he could see, and felt terribly inadequate that all he could do in preparation was to brush at his coat with his fingertips and smooth down his hair with his hands.
She went out of the room ahead of him, sauntering down the wide hall filled with the smell of the evening meal cooking, something savoury, Edwards could detect with rising spirits.
Mrs Chance put her head out of one of the doors and her bold eyes asked if they had spent the time in the bedroom at you-know-what.
No, we didn’t, said Edwards’s bold eyes in reply.
And if you ask me, said his back passing through the front door and crossing the verandah to meet the sparkling sea, it’s quite a way off yet.
Una had her small chin raised as they walked through the town which was a cluster of shops just past the wharf where the fishing boats came in. There was the smell of fish, tempered by the sharp salt smell of the water. A rough bank ran between the wharf and the first shop, which had a narrow front and backed over the water at high tide. It sold among other things sweets and fruit, the latter displayed in a glass dish in the centre of the window, wrinkled oranges and speckled bananas that did not look inviting and from which rose a cloud of little insects. There was a handwritten notice behind the fruit that said the shop also sold teas.
Next door was a shop with a similar front that sold harness and the smell of new leather wafted out as they passed it. Edwards was glad to reach it. He feared Una might have wanted to go into the other and have tea at one of the little tables.
His mother had sent him money for a wedding present, and he had saved only some of it to meet honeymoon expenses, having been tempted to buy a bathing costume while in Bega to arrange for the marriage and receive gratefully the modest increase in his stipend.
He looked forward to wearing the costume, a plain black wool, deciding something untrimmed was more suitable to his calling in life.
He had seen Una in her green one when they went to the seaside in the Austin for a picnic soon after the engagement. Enid had not changed but sat with him on a sandy shelf made by a jutting rock and watched the sea run eagerly up into the channels and back again, leaving foam like a long white moustache stained with coffee.
Una, embarrassed at giving him his first view of her long and creamy legs and arms and quite a bit of back too, stood dipping a foot into the water. Edwards was beginning to think the costume a waste of money when she took a sudden plunge in, splashing Enid’s stockings and his clerical trousers, for the excursion had followed a Sunday morning service.
‘Dear me, that was sudden,’ said Edwards, noting that Una did not call out an apology but went swimming off, turning her face from side to side, her hair streaming out like a mermaid’s.
‘She is given to doing things suddenly,’ Enid said.
‘Of course,’ Edwards said. ‘It’s part of her charm.’
‘Of course,’ Enid said, lifting her chin and looking not at Una but out to sea.
Now Una was up to her suddenness again. She stopped and he found himself a few paces ahead before he realized it. Turning he saw her staring at the Post Office, legs apart, hands on hips, her bag dangling carelessly from one.
‘Look!’ she said, frowning towards a recess in the porch front. He was a little slow but he saw eventually a telephone behind a glass door. She gave him a brilliant smile.
‘We can ring Rachel!’ she cried. She snapped open her purse and he heard coins tinkle as she dipped it to one side. He drew some from his pocket and stared at them. He was still holding them when she opened the door of the recess and stood waiting for the ring. She looked like a nervous boy in a sailor suit afraid he was not welcome at a party. After several minutes the postmaster, a rotund man with glasses well down on his nose, opened a door showing a small switchboard he was obviously tending and told Una there was no answer from the Wyndham Post Office. He looked Edwards over before closing the door as if undecided about connecting him with Una. Edwards was still gently shaking the money in his closed hand. Una heard the noise.
‘There is nothing to pay,’ she said, running down the steps, sounding scornful. She walked rapidly off as if eager to get the Post Office away from her and appeared from the direction she was taking to intend returning the short way back to the guesthouse. He was blowed if he would follow like a chastened pup, he thought, stopping as she was about to plunge through a thicket of dogwood.
‘We made a slide once when we were here on holidays and slid down that hill!’ she called, needing to shout, for the wind was humming around her and about to rise and sweep the slope with a tearing force.
‘Come!’ he shouted, inclining his head towards the road. ‘We can walk up the hill another time, if you insist on being blown into the sea!’ She reached down before joining him and pulled burrs and twigs from her ankles, as if to say she was in agreement only to protect her clothes.
They walked for a while nearly side by side, and then he reached forward and took her hand, which was slack in his for a while, then warmer, then the tips of her fingers scratched gently at his palm and he considered swinging it joyfully but didn’t quite dare. He saw her mouth stretched to deepen the indent at the corners and the wide brim of her navy blue hat – how many did she own? – throwing a lacy pattern on her cheek. Her knees threw her skirt in and out, moving so fast there was this continual whoosh, following the tap of her feet on the gravel. They were speaking. Her skirt on her knees, her feet on the road, her sharp little breath, all saying something. She glanced back sometimes over her shoulder and it seemed to him she was running from the past into her new life, charging forward with some misgivings but in the main prepared to meet it head on.
About them there was nothing. Nothing, nothing. Some white sky relieved by trees that went on forever. Someone was here once! They made this road. Edwards scraped his foot on it to make sure. She had stopped, and he stopped too, wanting to stride up level with her, but not lest it draw attention to his always lagging behind.
Will she always be ahead, he thought, or I those few paces behind?
They rounded a bend and a cart came towards them pulled by a horse whose feet made clopping noises, the cart rattling and the wheels squeaking. A man was driving. He may have been young, but he was grey with dust, blending into the grey cart which held, apart from him, a heap of slack corn bags. There was a shine on his trousers, with grease, not with newness and even the bits of scrappy leather tying his boots resting on the shafts were greasy too.
He stopped the cart and a myriad flies rose in delight from the horse’s rump and settled on the boots, running and darting, the sun twinkling on their wings and bringing a shine to the grease. Edwards put out his hand to shake the man’s but the man gave his head a small shake and clung to the reins with his eyes clinging to Una. She had taken off her hat and swung it on her hand, the crown spinning so no flies came near her.
He ran his eyes over her hair as if it were food tempting him. She smiled and shook it, then moved her hat up so that her eyes shone just over the crown and she rocked her body just slightly like a shy actor about to perform from a stage.
‘Good afternoon,’ Edwards said, raising his hat, and the man jerked his eyes back to him as if he needed to be reminded where he was, and the horse took the movement as a signal to walk on, which he did, Edwards needing to step back smartly to avoid being trampled on.
Una slapped the top of her hat onto her head.
‘Let’s run!’ she cried and took off, he following, straining to keep up, his black trousers and her brown stockings quickly covered with fine dust. At th
e gate of the guesthouse, which swung freely, for the earth beneath was hollowed by wheels and feet, they stopped, dusting themselves down and laughing.
But when Una raised her eyes and saw the house she frowned. It sat there like a man fallen asleep with a pipe in his mouth.
She is thinking about telephoning, he thought. Well there have been some good parts so far, and for those I must be grateful. Keep it up, God, and if it’s not asking too much, spin it out a little. Thanks.
38
The cleaning up at Honeysuckle after the wedding obviously went on well into the evening, for there was no answer when Una rang the Post Office after tea.
Una flung herself on the bed and burrowed her head into the pillow without regard for her newly laundered nightgown resting there. She kicked off her shoes, raising her legs immodestly, and he wasn’t sure whether he should look away or indulge the pleasure of staring at the white linen at her crotch and the lace showering her thighs. He decided to look away since she had clamped her hat on her face but was watching him with one eye.
He took his Bible from where he had it stowed in the corner of a drawer and opened it to read, rather at random, but settling the silk cord fussily between the pages, to give the impression of choosing a certain chapter. She turned her eyes out of the hat.
‘Will that help?’ she said, in a quavering voice.
‘It usually does,’ he said.
She put the hat back more firmly. ‘To make Small Henry better?’
‘Small Henry is not necessarily sick,’ he said.
‘He is. They have taken him to Bega hospital. I know.’
‘He is either at Violet’s or Honeysuckle. And at either place he is in good hands.’ He had a vision of Enid’s hands and bent lower over his Bible to push them away.
Una climbed off the bed and when he raised his eyes to watch, she smoothed her skirt around her thighs. He went back to his reading. Just as you like, he thought. Keep it to yourself and see if it bothers me. Ashamed, he closed the Bible and put it away. She went to the mirror to brush and coil her hair.
‘It’s more than an hour since we rang,’ she said. ‘We can ring again.’
She waited for him to accompany her, and in a moment he stood and followed her into the hall, seeing the back of her neck like the inside of a creamy shell, and cheered at the thought of walking with her on the beach tomorrow. But they walked to Honeysuckle instead.
Rachel shouted through the phone that Violet decided to leave Small Henry at Honeysuckle in case he was coming down with something and would infect the two babies, still with a few days to go before discharging from Albert Lane.
Una, frightened and furious, rushed back to the bedroom and began to tear off her clothes. It’s happening, it’s going to happen! Edwards thought, beginning to part his coat.
‘Small Henry infect their wretched babies!’ Una cried through her petticoat. She threw it down after her face emerged pink under tousled hair. ‘Infect them with what? They would infect him more like it! Enid won’t care for him properly running after Jack!’
Her brassiere came off and he saw for the first time her breasts with their little squashed nipples in the circle of brown. Like marble cake he thought, with saliva in his mouth. The breasts waggled with her efforts. She pulled her nightdress over her head and removed her pants and stockings by reaching up under it.
Edwards felt he was looking at a play where they had forgotten to raise the curtain. By George, she got through all of that in quick time! He had thought women took much longer at dressing and undressing. But he knew nothing much about them, he thought ruefully and his ignorance was certainly coming home to roost now.
He wondered if this was the time for him to start undressing, and saw with sinking spirits she had already curled herself under the covers very close to the bedrail and with her back to his place and her eyes squeezed shut.
‘I’m going to go to sleep at once to be rested for our walk,’ she said. His question hung silently in the air between them.
She lifted her head and punched a deeper hollow in her pillow. ‘We’ll walk to Honeysuckle in the morning.’
He sat studying the floor between his feet. ‘Quite a walk that,’ he said.
‘You walk a lot,’ she said. ‘You enjoy walking, so you always say.’ She sounded as if he said it more often than was necessary.
‘Not twelve miles at the one stretch,’ he said.
‘Fourteen,’ she said.
He stood and took off his top things first as she had and he kept his back to her, shielding his bare buttocks with the solid foot of the bed and ducking anyway below it to pull his pyjamas on. He had imagined them kneeling together to say the Our Father. He padded almost without sound to the window to look out on the sea like a great bare table with the moon hanging above it like a lamp. Cold, distant and lonely.
He felt like an unwanted guest at a table that would never be set with food to nourish him.
He crouched by the bed to say his prayers but they brought him no comfort either. Nor did the bed when he slipped cautiously between the sheets and thought of his bed at the rectory, unmade a lot of the time, tangled but welcoming, the harsh blankets mixed with the sheets and the pillow slip not slippery clean but smelling of humanity and comforting as flesh upon his cheek.
In a little while she turned and slipped an arm across his waist.
‘Thank you for coming to Honeysuckle with me,’ she whispered.
Only his head turned. His hands were down between his thighs, pressed there to stay the quivering and leaping. ‘I’m fond of walking as you say.’
She removed her arm and turned her back. Her little round bottom hit his like a tennis ball on its last bounce.
‘We’ll need our rest, so I’ll say goodnight,’ he said.
‘You’ve said it,’ she said.
When he woke in the morning she was almost finished dressing and he got up and dressed too. The light was too dim for each to see much of the other and her eyes were down concentrating on lacing canvas shoes. He had brought his second best boots, clumsy things, unsuitable for the beach but all he had apart from his best. And this tramp will finish them off, he thought getting into them.
She took a writing pad from among her things and lighting a candle wrote something on a page, carrying it off on whispered feet to the dining room. He puzzled about it, his mind foggy with sleep, but on their way out he saw it propped up on the sideboard saying they left early for a long walk and would not be back until evening.
I can’t accuse her of an untruth, I’ll say that much, he thought on their way out. Three cows kept by the Chances to supply guests with milk and cream raised their heads in surprise to see them, then flung them down to chew at some grass, saying if this is your idea of recreation it wouldn’t be mine. Edwards’s eyes on them said it wasn’t his either, be sure of that, and half their luck taking things easy on the grassy slope, keeping their stomachs full while his was hollow already and it not yet five o’clock. All they needed to make it perfect is the bull, he thought, not bothering with repentance as he opened the gate for Una. He saw her face fresh and dewy as the small wild flowers coming up through the grass to greet the day.
‘We’ll walk briskly, shall we? Then dawdle, then run, then trot. It will be fun!’ she said, taking his arm.
‘A mile of trotting, dawdling, et cetera? Is that what you mean? We need to find fourteen different ways of travelling!’
‘We’ll find Small Henry at the end,’ she said and dropped his arm to rush ahead. She walked so rapidly he had difficulty in keeping up and difficulty too in disguising a pant.
‘Is this the brisk part?’ he said. ‘I doubt that I’ll have the strength for the run. Or even the trot!’
‘It’s all that kneeling!’ she called back to him. ‘Your feet have gone to sleep!’
‘Kneeling’s my living!’ he
said. ‘Our living!’
She stopped suddenly, a slender shape on the dusty road. He caught up with her, grateful. He wanted to take her in his arms, and when she turned her face to him, he did. No one was about. No sign of life. No car or dray or sulky. Only a belt of trees on one side of the road and a sweep of paddocks on the other, the farmer’s house nowhere in sight for it was built long before the road was made, and not only was it two miles into the bush, but faced the opposite way with the dairy and cow bails in the front to the constant grumbling of the wife and growing daughters. All the farmer’s cattle were out of sight too, so that clouds, rolled like great, thick white blankets, were all that moved. She laid her chin on his shoulder and looked up at them, and her body in his hands was like a bird that to his great surprise, though not wounded, allowed itself to be held.
‘We’ll dawdle the next part,’ she said into his neck. ‘So you need not take your arms away.’
39
They reached Honeysuckle soon after midday.
‘There it is!’ Una cried when it came in sight, and raced forward with an energy that amazed him. Just as he was thinking she would reach it long before him and he would arrive dejected and rejected, she halted and sat down on a stump at the side of the road. She was plucking at little tuffs of grey-green dried up moss when he came up to sit with her.
‘I am frightened of what we might find when we get there,’ she said. He took her hand and squeezed it. Things are improving, he thought. I can squeeze her hand now without having to decide if it’s safe to.
‘You’ll find him there, happy and well. See if you don’t,’ he said.
She got up. ‘The house looks as if someone is dead there,’ she said.
‘If it looks that way it’s because you are not living there,’ he said. But she was frowning too heavily to heed him.
