by Rod Jones
Lying on the stretcher that night, waiting for sleep, her eyes staring up at the unpainted boards of the ceiling, the silence of the house was like a question.
On Saturday nights, Alfred came home late. He told his mother that he was ‘going to the Troc’.
One afternoon after work, Alma questioned him about the fights.
‘Sometimes there’s a blue with the Eagles,’ Alfred told her. ‘They own the footpath outside the Trocadero on Saturday nights and we reckon it’s our job to take it away from them. But the blokes we really hate are the Ranch. They put one of our mates into hospital, a few months back. They use bike chains, broken bottles, razors. I wouldn’t put anything past those Yarraville buggers.’ He stopped himself. She could see that he hadn’t meant to swear in front of her. He recovered, then went on. ‘There’s the Checkers in Yarraville, too. They own everything on the other side of Charles Street. The locals hate us. They say we give the place a bad name. The councillors, or at least some of them, call us larrikins and say the best thing that could happen would be to put us in uniform and send us off to France to fight for King and country. We might be larrikins, but we’re onto that kind of bulldust. The only purpose of the war is to make the rich richer. Look at the toffs filling their pockets with the profits from selling armaments!’ He glared at Alma, daring her to contradict him.
On Sunday morning as soon as the others had left for church, she heard a knock at the door of the sleep-out. She had been half expecting him to try something like this, but now the moment was here, she was frozen to the spot. All she knew was a screeching in her ears, the premonition of danger.
‘Go away, Alfred,’ she called. She kept thinking that Mrs Lovett would arrive home early. Or that Mrs Thomas next door might hear them.
Finally, Alma opened the door. He put his arms around her shoulders and buried his face in her hair. ‘You must know I’m sweet on you,’ he breathed.
EVERY SUNDAY MORNING in July, while the others went to church, he came to the sleep-out. As soon as they were alone, they undressed and lay together on the creaking stretcher. All the time she was with him, she heard phantom doors opening and closing, as though part of Mrs Lovett had stayed home, on patrol, and this voiceless ghost of conscience had recourse to her through the slamming of doors—until she reasoned that those sounds must have been coming from the Thomas house.
She did not love Alfred. Yet she was allowing him to believe that she might. It was he who loved her. That much was clear. So what? she reasoned. A young man believes he loves every pretty woman who smiles at him.
‘I shall never do it with him again,’ she promised herself after the first time, ‘or even allow myself to think about it.’ But it was too late. Her resolutions were useless. She was the Alma she wished to be, from day to day, and she was the other creature she knew herself also to be when she was alone with Alfred. She knew they would keep coming back to each other now, meeting secretly. She hadn’t realised how much she had needed warmth and touch, how much she missed being wanted. But she had lost herself, and she had lost her peace. She was already two people by now.
Week after week, it went on. They undressed, took their pleasure together; then, overcome by panic and guilt, they dressed again quickly and separated.
Alma went to sit in the parlour, the room where she had sat so often at the piano, rehearsing in her mind what she would say to Mrs Lovett when she arrived home with Teddy and Olive, how she had passed the morning, the chores that had occupied her. The blinds were usually drawn to protect the rug from fading; she opened them and the emerald and ruby stained-glass panes poured their radiance into the room. She heard the sound of the gate opening and closing. She supposed Alfred was going off on his bicycle, hoping perhaps that the whoosh of speed and wind might cleanse his guilty feelings.
Alma knew she had to keep their sexual life a secret. She blamed herself, not Alfred, for what had happened. Although they were nearly the same age, he was still a boy in many ways. She sat on the hard black oilcloth couch; a fox was draped along the back, head and all. The beady glass eyes and fixed smile gave it a slightly exasperated look. The longer she sat in the room with the exalted light coming in through the stained glass, as in a church, her sitting there itself came to seem like a trespass. She might have been living on the Lovetts’ charity, but now, in a sense, she was earning it.
On weekday afternoons when he came home from the harness shop now, instead of playing with the children, Alfred sat with her, taking turns to read from Palgrave’s Golden Treasury. Once he bought her flowers. Alma kept them in a vase on top of the piano, where Mrs Lovett couldn’t help but notice them, though she said nothing. When the flowers died, and the curled dead petals littered the top of the piano, Alma collected them in a paper bag, too precious to be thrown away.
One Saturday afternoon in August she was sitting on the front verandah, preoccupied, the children playing in the street, waiting for the piano lesson to finish so they could all go inside, when Alfred came and sat next to her. He seemed not to notice that something was wrong.
SHE LAY ON the stretcher in the sleep-out and listened to Mrs Lovett chiding her son in the kitchen. ‘What was in your head, Alfred? Cabbage?’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ he said, without conviction.
‘Ah!’ his mother exclaimed. ‘I suppose you are going to try and put all the blame on her out there!’
A claw of panic raked through Alma’s belly. It made her shudder to hear herself being referred to like that. She was glad that Teddy and Olive were down the street, playing with their friends.
‘Oh yes! Blame it on our charming guest! See, she came to live with us on purpose just to get you into trouble. Butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth!’
Alma began to shiver uncontrollably.
‘It is a pretty mess you’ve got us in. A very pretty mess indeed!’ Mrs Lovett went on.
‘But I never thought this was going to happen.’
‘Oh, I dare say. You never thought! It serves you right.’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’
‘Of course you didn’t, you idiot! As if she hasn’t already got enough on her plate. A woman in her situation, married to another man, a deserted wife, and now in the family way—’
All Alma could do was lie there, even though she wanted to run away and hide—anywhere but here in this house in Empire Street at this moment. Mrs Lovett’s words, spoken coldly and objectively like that, sounded so cruel, so heartless, they could have been talking about someone else. But they weren’t. They were talking about her, Alma.
‘So you went knocking on her door, pestering her?’
Alfred tried to say something. His voice was dispirited, scarcely audible.
‘Imagine how delighted your dear father would be, were he still with us, to hear this news, or even your brother Archie.’
The mention of his little brother was too much. Alma heard Alfred break down, sobbing. ‘Why am I always the one to get the short end of the stick?’ he blubbered. ‘I should have taken Archie’s place and gone to France to fight. If only I’d been fired off in a gun, all this would never have happened.’
‘Stop feeling sorry for yourself.’
‘All the fine lives that have been lost in Flanders, I could have been one of them…’
‘I told you. Stop whining.’
‘Do you know what I’m go
ing to do? I am going to sign up first thing in the morning.’
‘What good will that do? How is that going to change anyone’s situation? Maybe you will be smarter some day.’
‘Mother—do you feel ill? You look very pale.’
‘Of course I feel ill. How would any mother feel, hearing this news when she comes home from the shops expecting no more than a pleasant evening by the fire. This is a dreadful business! We must be sure no one finds out. It won’t take much to set the neighbours’ tongues a-wagging. How am I ever going to be able to hold up my head in church?’
Alma knew she was the cause of this tide of woe that had begun to spread through the Lovett household. She had betrayed Mrs Lovett’s kindness. Alma must have seemed to her like a thief who had crept into their home and robbed Mrs Lovett of her son.
Teddy and Olive returned from their play, faces flushed from the cold air and innocent fun. Alma emerged from the sleep-out and hugged them. She followed the children into the kitchen to see the others. Mrs Lovett put on a pretence of normality; Alfred was withdrawn. Teddy gave his mother an inquiring look. With a slight shake of her head, she pretended nothing was wrong and tried to reassure him with her eyes: Alfred will be back to his old self soon.
That evening after they had finished eating and the children had been put to bed, they sat around the kitchen table. Mrs Lovett bore the heavy look of one who is struggling with many contradictory thoughts at once.
‘You put your own appetites ahead of your children’s happiness?’ Mrs Lovett asked her at length.
Alma felt like she had been slapped. ‘Why do you have to put it like that? It makes me sound like I am greedy, that I eat all the food while they have none.’
Mrs Lovett drew straight in her chair. This gesture made Alma feel that she really was selfish.
‘Alfred has a responsibility. But he cannot be expected to support another man’s children,’ Mrs Lovett said. She had meant to say it kindly, Alma knew, but it had come out sounding mean.
Alma stared at the tabletop, the oilcloth with its drab pattern. She felt at a strange remove, as though this were all taking place somewhere far away, and what they were discussing had little to do with her.
‘Will I have to go to court, Mother?’ Alfred asked. He couldn’t disguise the panic in his voice.
‘It would serve you right if you did,’ his mother told him.
Alma had never felt so alone. She knew how people would think of her. Alfred had picked her up in a park, a public place. She had moved into Empire Street, dependent on the charity of Alfred and his mother. There was already stigma in that. Now this.
Alfred had made no move to comfort her. He looked too guilty even to meet her eyes. Mrs Lovett propped her elbows on the table. ‘I thought that if Alfred gave you a ring, it might make things easier.’
Easier? Easier for her? For Alfred? For me?
Alma held up her left hand. ‘I am already wearing a ring. It is the ring my husband gave me.’
‘I meant, if Alfred gave you a ring, it would be like a promise to marry you. It might be more acceptable to people.’
‘I don’t see how that would change one single thing,’ Alma replied. ‘Anyway. Divorces take years, don’t they?’
Mrs Lovett rested her puffy hand on the table next to her empty teacup. The kettle was on the boil, filling the kitchen with steam, but none of them got up to take it off. ‘Well, people are fools, and there’s nothing more certain than that,’ Mrs Lovett told her. ‘Doubtless some tongues will be wagging, but with a bit of luck they’ll get tired and stop.’ Then she added, ‘It’s just that—it might be better if you kept out of sight.’
‘Out of sight?’ Alma asked. ‘But I have children to walk to school, and clothes to hang on the line. Do you really think you can hide me away?’
‘Then at least be discreet. I would not like to have the neighbours think you shameless.’ Mrs Lovett spoke in a severe tone Alma had never heard her take before.
‘Shameless? I can assure you, I feel very much ashamed.’
‘You cannot imagine how much it would pain me to see our family’s disgrace on public display.’
She thought she knew Mrs Lovett. Now, suddenly, Mrs Lovett was like another person.
A divorce would free her to marry Alfred, but where was she going to find one of those? Alma’s greatest fear was that Welfare would take away her children. The decree nisi and decree absolute would be invoked, the grounds of adultery or cruelty or desertion—the things she read about in the Argus. All those questions—Whose desertion? Whose adultery? Whose cruelty?—would have to be answered in public, and decided by a judge who had to be called Your Worship, and barristers, she had heard, cost fifty pounds. The mysterious way in which an ordinary woman became a ‘co-respondent’—that’s why Alma could not offer Alfred the respectability he craved. What kept her awake that night was the prospect of having to go to court and all their names appearing in the newspapers. Everyone would know the truth about her.
Even if she did somehow manage to get a divorce, Alfred would not be one step closer to marrying her. Any day now, she felt, Mrs Lovett would sit her down and ask her to leave the house. Alma and the children would be alone again, penniless, back in the park where Alfred had found them. Good Lord, where would she go? How long would it be before she ended up with the whores in front of the Plough Hotel, and the government taking the children?
To make matters worse, little Teddy fell ill. For three days he lay feverish and moaning. All through the night she sat on the wooden chair beside his pillow, which was soaked with perspiration. She was frightened it might turn out to be diphtheria. The Waters baby had been taken by it. Alma kept the candle burning until it had wasted away to a stump, then guttered out. At dawn, she stretched herself out on her bed and immediately slipped into sleep. It was nine o’clock when she woke, and sunshine was sliding in through the gaps at the edges of the blind. Teddy’s eyes were open. She rushed to his side, stroking his face and kissing him. His cheeks were cooler. She said a silent prayer of thanks. Her child was going to live.
Alfred came home from work one morning not long after he had set out. Alma and Mrs Lovett looked up as he came through the kitchen door. ‘Alfred!’ Mrs Lovett cried. ‘What are you doing home? Are you sick?’
He flopped in a chair, his face pale. Mr Ward had sent him home, saying there was not enough business coming in to pay his wages.
Alma had been following news of the Great Strike. It had begun with the railway and tramway men in New South Wales and soon spread to other states. Wharfies, coal lumpers, coalminers, seamen, firemen, gas workers, slaughter men, butchers and draymen were all on strike. Alma knew from her own experience that flour, bread, meat and milk were in short supply in the shops. The streets were dark at night: a shortage of coal had led to electricity restrictions.
That afternoon Alfred went to the foundry in Seddon to try to get his old job back, but the men there were on strike too.
Alma found an advertisement in the paper and showed it to Alfred, looking over his shoulder and reading aloud: ‘The principal classes of work for which men may be required are coaling, loading, discharging, despatching, working ships, handling wheat, flour, foodstuffs, &c.’ The advertisement called for men to register at the Athenaeum Theatre in Collins Street.
He looked horrified. ‘Don’t y
ou see that they’re calling for strikebreakers? You don’t expect me to scab, do you?’
‘Is that what it means?’
‘I’ll tell you something. I’d rather go hungry than be a dirty scab.’
As the weeks of the strike passed, Alfred’s mood did not improve. Being out of work hurt his pride. In the yard he passed her silently. If she tried to speak to him, he pretended not to hear. At the table he would not meet her gaze.
There was no money coming into the house, and Alfred’s mother had to rely on her meagre savings. Alfred was no longer the same young man who had rescued Alma. No wages, shortages of food in the shops because of the strike, bad news from the war on the Western Front—it all seemed to weigh on him. Although he had never been one to go to the pub, one afternoon he brought home bottles of ale and sat on the back porch, bundled up in his greatcoat, drinking.
‘I have failed in my efforts to reform you,’ Mrs Lovett told him.
‘Nothing to reform.’ Alfred added that the Christian Women’s Temperance Union had only succeeded in giving her a weapon with which to irritate him.
From her bed in the sleep-out, Alma listened to them arguing.
‘I can see that you are unhappy, my boy. And, it’s true, the world has given us troubles, lately. But you won’t find answers at the bottom of a bottle. You are behaving like an ungrateful child.’
‘What have I got to be grateful for?’
‘You should be grateful for all God’s gifts.’
‘What?’ he asked. ‘You mean all this?’
Alfred sawed a piece from the loaf and spread it with dripping. He sipped his hot tea, and opened the newspaper. ‘Strike’s still going at Angliss’s,’ he said, to no one in particular. He opened his mouth and took a bite of his bread.
Alma had heard that the bosses had been bringing in blacklegs to the meat works—returned soldiers, some of them.
