Loving Daughters

by Olga Masters

  ‘But you can’t see, I must warn you,’ she said, closing the dresser doors with her tipped back head, for her arms were full of their new plates and cups. He did not mind.

  ‘I will go again tomorrow and the day after to sketch some more, then do the painting,’ she said.

  He stood and took the china from her hand and kissed her mouth. ‘I couldn’t be more proud,’ he said tremulously.

  One afternoon a week later he found her frowning in the kitchen as she washed her hands in a bowl with her brushes lined up on the table to be washed too. The painting was obviously done. He was relieved, but all things considered, the week had not been intolerable. Only one bad patch and that was about midweek when they had chairs on their verandah and Violet came out of her gate wheeling Small Henry in a new perambulator.

  Edwards saw the stiffening of Una’s body and heard her breath being stifled in her throat while she wrapped her arms about her chest as if to stop herself leaping forward.

  They watched Violet steering the pram carefully over the ruts on the roadside, not looking their way.

  ‘She said nothing yesterday about getting that!’ Una cried. Edwards said he had seen the mail car stop and the driver drop something over Violet’s gate that morning. Dear me, he thought, I’m as bad as the rest of them! He watched Una biting her thumb then squeezing it with the other hand, narrowing her eyes on Violet’s receding back. She rose abruptly and went to the room she was now openly calling her studio and closed the door with a sound that clearly said don’t follow. She may well tear that painting to shreds, Edwards said to his distressed self.

  But she didn’t. In a couple of hours she was out of the artist’s smock she had kept from schooldays and into the apron he liked and doing something different with their eggs for tea.

  ‘By Saturday I will be done,’ she said, and he had to acknowledge a small chill of fear. How would she occupy herself then? He took up a magazine on loan from Honeysuckle to read while she set the table, deciding he would not worry about it until after Saturday.

  ‘I will be the first to see it then?’ he said, surprised at the surge of jealousy he felt should she say no. The congregation had improved on the Sundays following the honeymoon, which did not surprise Edwards or excite him. Perhaps they are thinking of seeing a consummation on the front pew, he told himself. When it was no longer a novelty to see Una at the rectory the numbers would revert, he felt sure, to the few of pre-marriage days.

  The door of the studio was not closed on the painting on the Sunday morning after it was finished.

  But taking a look inside, passing through the little hall, he saw she had thrown a cloth over the easel.

  ‘Patience, patience!’ she said gaily to him in good humour, anticipating the attention of the congregation at the morning service, dressed for it in a frock of biscuit coloured fabric matching the hat with the cherries. Both were on show in church for the first time and she was giving the hat several little shakes, practising the wobbling of the cherries to raise envy among the plain Robertson girls in the pew behind hers.

  George brought Enid in the sulky a good half-hour before the service was to start, Enid with flowers for both the church and the house, spreading them out on the kitchen table with Una running for church vases and those given for wedding presents.

  ‘Look, Colin!’ she called. ‘She has brought us half her garden!’ He paused and smiled, dressed in his surplice ironed even more carefully than Mrs Watts’s effort, liking the look of himself too and the approval in Enid’s eyes, raised briefly from the roses and maidenhair fern. It took her hands a little while to get working again, affected as they were at hearing Una’s free use of his Christian name.

  George spent the half-hour at Violet’s, given grumblingly a cup of tea and a wedge of her orange peel cake, the dryness of which escaped him.

  Ned was home, having established a new routine of spending three days at Halloween, then returning to Albert Lane for food supplies. This time he brought sheets and towels, dumping them on the washhouse floor. She was torn between annoyance at the extra work and some small pleasure that Ned’s hygiene was improving.

  ‘It might occur to him to bring the water as well!’ she said. ‘The tanks are low with the baby’s washing –’ Then she pulled herself up, fearing the complaint might reach Una’s ears. George read her thoughts in part.

  ‘Is she,’ he said, inclining his head in the direction of the rectory, ‘takin’ him off your hands now and again?’

  Violet’s chair creaked with the stiffening of her body. ‘I’m not having him wondering where his home is!’ she said.

  George acknowledged the wisdom of this with a sweep of his eyes around the kitchen and a small and secret dream that it was his too. He asked a question of the closed door and it answered that Small Henry was down for his long morning sleep. He wouldn’t have minded a game with the little tyke since Alex wasn’t around to take over as soon as he got him laughing. Violet and him and the little bloke!

  Ned came through the hall from the front verandah carrying a chair from the pile of discarded furniture.

  ‘I see!’ Violet said. ‘Just the thing for watching the night life from the verandah of Halloween!’

  An arm of the chair swung downwards as Ned set it down, and George was shown wordlessly how a connecting piece of wood had broken in a socket leaving a portion embedded there.

  Violet took up Small Henry’s bathtub from the table and flung the contents on the roots of the lemon tree, causing the fowls to frantically throw themselves against the wire.

  ‘Nothing coming your way that I know of!’ she said, dumping the tub in the washhouse. ‘But you exercise your vocal chords, I’ll say that for you!

  ‘I’ll tell you!’ Violet said, back in the kitchen where Ned had the chair under one arm and George was standing too in mournful observation of it. ‘If it wasn’t for the yelling of Small Henry I’d be taking myself off to Bega to get tested for deafness!’

  ‘I’ll fix it after church,’ George said. Violet was calmer. Ned would take himself and the chair off to Halloween and she and Small Henry could go to Honeysuckle with George and Enid in the sulky. That would be a way of filling in the afternoon. Una would not be there for this was the one Sunday in four that Edwards took a service directly following the one at St Jude’s in the Burragate school several miles away. Una would accompany him. Good riddance to her too. Nursing Small Henry for half an hour to get what she called ‘a feel of his little body’.

  ‘I’ll do the nursing and you do the drawing,’ Violet had told her, letting his legs sprawl on her own thighs while she sat near the back door, able to keep an eye out for Ned should he emerge from the bush.

  But she did not go to Honeysuckle, nor did Una go with Edwards to Burragate.

  George in the end took Edwards in his sulky to save the time Edwards would have to spend in harnessing up his horse. This turn of events caused Dolly to snort with a backward swing of her head towards Edwards’s horse, placidly sniffing at grass under his tree with nothing more arduous to do but switch flies from his tail and mane.

  What happened in Violet’s kitchen sparked off the change in plans.

  After the service in St Jude’s, Edwards and Una walked with George and Enid to Violet’s with the picture in a temporary frame, wrapped in a piece of old sheeting Enid had thoughtfully added to the linen cupboard in the rectory.

  Edwards carried the picture and Una held his other arm, her red lips smiling under the cherries.

  Enid was not quite in line with the others, back a pace or two so that she could study undetected Edwards’s strong jaw and thick dark hair. She thought of it lying on one of the pillowslips she had made fragrant with lavender. She saw Una with her chin raised to see better under the brim of her hat and marvelled that she seemed unconcerned with what was hers.

  They trooped into Violet’s kitchen with the
exception of George, who went to work on the chair on the back verandah. His hang dog air temporarily banished, he walked with a spring in his step to collect tools from the washhouse. Then he gouged at the wood in the socket, blowing out the fragments with puffed out cheeks. He would have the job done in no time. The pity of it was Ned would carry the chair off to Halloween and have it disintegrate in the weather beating onto the exposed verandah. He would like Violet in it, her round arms on the chair arms and her hands hanging loose as he liked to see them.

  A cry from Violet shocked him into dropping the chisel. Ned sitting on the verandah edge swung around with his good and bad eye and his mouth forming three expressionless circles.

  George went to see.

  Una was at the corner of the table with the picture balanced there, her long white arms supporting it. The others were in various poses of horror and disbelief.

  Small Henry looked from the canvas with large eyes black and pleading. A hand was stretched forward spread out to become a quarter of the picture. Violet’s chin and mouth showed at the top of the canvas. Her great arms and thighs held Small Henry like logs of wood. They were a pen locking him in, and Una had given the flesh a greyish colour like ageing timber, hard as granite.

  ‘The little bloke’s eyes are blue,’ was all George could find to say.

  Una looked down on the picture rather like peering with curiosity into a deep well.

  ‘Paintings shouldn’t be pretty,’ Una said. ‘They should say something. You agree, don’t you, Colin?’

  Enid, wishing she didn’t, raised her eyes to Edwards from her seat on the edge of a kitchen chair. He put a finger inside his collar as if it needed loosening and stretched his brown jaw and she knew nothing else but that she loved him. She pleated between thumb and forefinger the material of her dress on her knee.

  Edwards swung his head to see the time on Violet’s clock. There was barely time to reach Burragate in time for the service.

  Then Small Henry gave a shout from his room and all heads were jerked up but Violet’s. Una loosened her hold on the picture as if there was another use for her arms. Violet allowed the smallest smile to touch the corners of her mouth. George saw. That’s better, that’s better. She had been standing holding a chair back and now her fingers loosened and actually rippled up and down on the wood as if it were a piano keyboard.

  ‘Do excuse me,’ she said and went to the dresser behind Edwards, forcing him to duck to avoid being slapped with the suddenly opened door.

  She took out a bottle and dumped it firmly on the kitchen table. ‘If you don’t mind,’ she said, gesturing lightly with her elbow towards the painting. Edwards removed it swiftly and laid it against his trouser leg. That was a wonderful thing to do, Enid thought, and standing gave him the sheeting.

  ‘Thank you,’ he murmured, placing it carefully across the frame. Una looked almost disinterested, as if it was something done so long ago she had forgotten it. She lifted her head higher with Small Henry’s yelling.

  Edwards watched in agony for the tears to fill her eyes and run over her cheeks. He saw how tightly she held her little bag at the corner of the table.

  Violet held Small Henry’s bottle in a basin of hot water, lifting it out to shake a little on her wrist, then dipping it back in again, swirling the milk almost lazily. She wore the smallest smile, listening to the shrieking from Small Henry’s room as if it were a favoured piece played on a piano.

  She decided the bottle was right and, holding it aloft, left the door into the hallway and that into Small Henry’s room wide open after she passed through them. Small Henry stopped a yell, trailed it off and turned it into a crow. The kitchen heard the cot rattle as he flapped his arms and pumped his legs up and down.

  Una rushed from the room to tear across the paddock to the rectory. Two families beside their buggies saw her billowing skirt and frantically bobbing hat. My goodness! The women, who had been hot and irritated by the continued talk between the men, saw compensations for the delay.

  This was a turn of events if ever there was one. A minister’s wife racing like a furious boy, throwing out her feet in their good shoes, not minding the clods and manure and dead pieces from the big gum under which Edwards’s horse raised his head in surprise, and amazed further to see Edwards running behind George to the front, where Dolly in the Herbert sulky was hitched to a telegraph post.

  Edwards carrying something in a white cloth stopped and turned and cut Enid off in her run to the rectory, although she straightened up and slowed down in dignified fashion when she saw the buggies moving off with such reluctance the horses began to step backwards, wondering if this was expected of them.

  Edwards passed the thing in white to Enid with a plea in his brown eyes to do the best she could to console Una. I will, I will, Enid’s eyes said back. Anything you ask. I am mad, mad!

  With no one else in sight now she ran to the rectory, barely aware it was she who was left to carry the picture.

  46

  She found Una lying full length face downwards on the double bed. It was unmade and Enid, removing her hat, turned her sleeves back and began to pull the bedclothes from around the prostrate form.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Sit on the chair. This is quite disgraceful!’ She smelled his body on the sheet she held as close to her face as she dared. Una rolled over abruptly and Enid coloured, afraid she might have been seen.

  ‘Now get up,’ she said, ‘And let me get this made!’ Una rose slowly and went to the window. Enid looking for a profile saw only her thick, rumpled hair and marvelled that it spoke so clearly her hurt and anger.

  By the corner of the bed on the floor was the wrinkled heap of his pyjamas. She turned her back on Una to fold them, breathing in their warm and fleshy smell. His most intimate garments. Thank you, God.

  ‘Go and stoke up the fire for dinner,’ Enid said, thinking of it as his dinner. She stuffed their nightwear in a bag Una had embroidered and laid it on the chair looking like a small cushion as Una had intended. Enid saw the look Una gave it, as if it was evidence of a hobby out of which she had grown. And how jealous I was of her when she was sewing that!

  Una leaned closer to the window and pressed her head to the glass for a moment as if she needed something to cool her face, then left the room.

  Alone here, alone, just for a moment! Enid dared to put his collar box and brush to one corner of the dressing table, isolating them from Una’s things. Did he miss his chest of drawers she had moved to the other room, she wondered. She would go and see, half angry at the thought that Una had probably buried it under things discarded from the other rooms.

  Inside that room she found herself on the chair unaware that she had sat down. A white towel was on the rail of the washstand and a new cake of soap in the soap dish. A short lace curtain at the window gently brushed the sill. Like a wave, Enid thought, reminded of the shells they had collected as children. They could be lined up there on the sill, some large and crusted with a rough and creamy coat and others small and purply dark with a curve defying the eye to see the secrets within. Alex and Henry and Una had called them bum shells because they were shaped like one side of a human behind. Enid had disapproved, but away from the others smoothed and stroked at the slippery surface believing it to be a skin and pushing her fingers shamelessly into the crevice.

  Una appeared in the doorway now and Enid jumped, as if her sin was discovered. She raised her eyes from her quiet lap and caught a glimpse of the ceiling, the plaster there forming a pattern of shells too, heaped in each corner with more spread in a circular pattern in the centre. She imagined him lying counting them, waiting for sleep with the twilight still in the room. A little shell boy, she thought.

  Una laid a hand on the corner post of the bed. ‘I mean to have him, you know,’ she said. ‘If I have to flee with him in the middle of the night, I will have him.’

  The innocent
room slipped away from Enid. With it went Una running hard with Small Henry’s face bobbing on her shoulder. Enid stood. Yes, go, go, go if you want to.

  ‘Such foolishness,’ she said.

  George did not wait for Edwards through the Burragate service.

  Edwards insisted he drive straight back to St Jude’s and take Enid to Honeysuckle. He was disturbed at the memory of her face trying, he could see, to believe he had no part in Una’s painting. I don’t want her discomforted further. Perhaps I don’t want to face her too soon, he thought miserably, facing the congregation outside the school looking for Una and for reasons why she didn’t accompany him.

  George was miserable too. He leapt from the sulky outside Violet’s and went to the back verandah where the door to the kitchen was shut and the house wore a deserted look. The chair stood with the dislodged arm swinging as if it were someone with a broken limb who was in need of help but had abandoned all hope of getting it. George tramped around the house looking for Violet. He saw the perambulator usually on the front verandah had gone. Violet had taken Small Henry probably across to Rachel’s and the two women would be on the back verandah there with Violet recounting the story of the painting. He set about mending the chair with a long sad face. He should have saved Violet the shock and horror of seeing herself like that. He had failed her. All he had said was that Small Henry’s eyes were the wrong colour. He should have shouted angrily at Una and Edwards and seized that picture and ripped it to shreds before their eyes. He should have put his knee in the middle of the canvas and thrust it strongly through. Violet would have loved that. He seized the finished chair to demonstrate such an action and stabbed his knee into the leather seat. The scrape of the chair legs on the wooden verandah boards alerted the fowls who began to race wildly up and down behind the wire.

  Starve, starve! for all I care, cried George to his own hollow inside. He put the chair against the wall for the best shelter.

  Then in a little while he took a dipper full of corn from the washhouse and threw it to the fowls.