Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  That was logical. Georgie nodded. She was uncombed, dusty, barefoot and leggy, but beautiful anyway. Not a freckle on her face, dark lashes, well-defined brows — Laurie in female form.

  ‘Get your brush and I’ll do your hair.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you look like a rag mop.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I said so. Where’s your brush?’

  ‘I don’t like hair brushed.’

  Gertrude got the brush and Jenny brushed, and because she brushed Georgie’s hair, she brushed Margot’s, who stood before her, jaw clenched, fists clenched.

  Did I once stand with my fists clenched, wanting to get away when Amber brushed my hair? Jenny wondered. She couldn’t remember Amber ever taking a brush to her hair — only Norman. She could remember his timid hands wielding the brush.

  ‘How old are you, Margot?’

  ‘Five,’ Georgie said. ‘When I get five, I can go to school.’

  ‘I asked Margot. Do you go to school, Margot?’ Jenny asked, brushing white hair, as white, as sparse as her father’s. And not a murmur out of her. Georgie did the talking.

  ‘She can’t walk that far.’

  Maybe she couldn’t. She had her father’s short legs along with their hair, she had their thickness of body, their hands.

  ‘I bet you can walk that far,’ Jenny said.

  ‘I can walk a long, long, long way, and I can swim, and I can run more faster even than you.’

  ‘You could run faster than me when you were ten months old, kiddo.’

  ‘Go over to Elsie’s, love. I want to talk to your mother,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Our muvver?’

  ‘Of course she’s your mother,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Why does she call you Granny for like everyone calls you Granny for then?’

  ‘I’m her grandmother.’

  ‘Her grandmuvver!’

  ‘Go over to Elsie, you chatterbox.’

  ‘And him too,’ she said, looking at Jimmy.

  ‘He can go later.’

  ‘I want to go later, too.’

  Gertrude gave up trying to get rid of her. ‘That was a stupid thing to do.’

  ‘It worked.’

  ‘I told him I’d take Jimmy up there for lunch on Friday —’

  ‘And me,’ Georgie said.

  ‘You can have lunch with Jenny,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘He won’t go, and even if he was willing, I wouldn’t let him — and I won’t be here anyway.’

  ‘You can stay until Friday. He said he’d pick us up at twelve.’

  ‘As if Jimmy will let me out of his sight.’

  ‘Kids are adaptable,’ Gertrude said, and turned to the watching girls. ‘Go out and see if the chooks have laid some more eggs.’ They didn’t move. She clapped her hands. ‘Skedaddle, I said, both of you. Take your brother with you and show him how we get eggs.’

  They skedaddled. From the doorway Jimmy watched them go.

  ‘He’s got a right to know his grandfather and Vern has got a right to know him,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘You take him in there on Friday and they’ll kidnap him.’

  ‘If I don’t take him in, we’ll spend the next week in court. Locking a grandfather away from a grandson he hasn’t seen in two years won’t go down well with a judge. It was a stupid thing to do.’

  Jimmy had ventured out to the yard, a car in each hand. They watched him.

  ‘I told Vern out there that he’d catch more flies with honey than he would with vinegar. I’m telling you the same.’

  ‘I swat flies, Granny.’

  ‘People need to know where they came from, who they came from. Like it or not, that little boy is a Hooper.’

  ‘I’d rather not know where I came from.’

  ‘Stop talking back and listen to me. That little boy could end up owning everything Vern’s got, everything Jim had. Vern’s not going to live forever — I don’t know how he’s lived this long.’

  ‘Everything he owns will go to his daughters.’

  ‘A man like Vern puts no store in women.’

  ‘Then why has he been coming down here for the past twenty years?’

  ‘I’m his cousin,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Pull the other one, Granny. It’s made out of rubber.’

  ‘Sydney didn’t change you for the better, my girl.’

  ‘A lot of things didn’t change me for the better, Granny.’

  But people do need their own people, even when their people live in a two and a half roomed shack. There were moments when being home was close to bliss. She’d missed that old wood stove with its oven always waiting hot to bake potatoes, to bake puddings — and how she’d missed its warmth on cold nights.

  She’d missed Granny’s garden, being able to walk outside to pick a bunch of silverbeet, to pull up a carrot, an onion. And be it from goat or cow, having gallons of free milk placed fresh each day into the Coolgardie safe was riches, as was the glut of eggs filling the safe’s lower shelves. She made egg custards, made bread pudding, made egg and vegetable pies with pastry almost as light as Amber’s, made macaroni cheese casseroles as tasty as Myrtle’s.

  ‘You learned something worthwhile in that place,’ Gertrude said.

  The knots in her neck and shoulders unravelled in Granny’s house. Myrtle, Sydney, Amberley, began their slow slide into the mists of once upon a time. She told Gertrude of her struggle to light the gas oven, told her how Mrs Collins had nearly blown herself up one night, or singed her hair and eyebrows. She displayed her once-red frock, now a respectable near black, and she modelled her blanket overcoat. Gertrude looked impressed.

  ‘You’ve come a long way with your sewing,’ she said.

  ‘Necessity is the mother of all learning,’ Jenny said. She flashed the total in her bankbook. Gertrude was impressed with that too, if not by the name on the book’s cover.

  Jenny didn’t unpack her case, not fully. She slid it beneath her bed, Jim’s letters still inside with Maisy’s bulky cardigan, the elastic-waisted skirts. She’d fix those waists when she had time. The fabric was good. Billy-Bob’s watch remained hidden in one corner. She should have thrown it away . . . or sold it before she’d left Sydney . . . or taken it to a jeweller and asked him to grind that engraving off so she could wear it. It was a nice watch, small enough for a woman to wear. She’d never owned a watch. Given time she might be able to look at that name. Given a year or two that New Year’s Eve might fade, the Yanks might become the villains in a book she’d read about Wilfred the Leprechaun and Myrtle the fairy godmother — and the factory pixies. Maybe — in time.

  She missed Amberley’s bathroom, taps, sinks, but that missing was balanced by Granny’s shelves of apricot jam, chutney and tomato sauce, she could gaze on when she sat in the old tin tub in the shed’s partitioned corner. She loved Granny’s glut of butter coupons; Gertrude had never wasted money on butter. Jimmy liked butter on his bread. Gertrude barely spent a penny on clothing. She had a book full of clothing coupons.

  ‘If I’d had them in Sydney, I could have sold them on the black market, Granny. There are classy shops up there that will buy them from you — so the toffs’ wives don’t have to wear the same ball gown twice.’

  ‘That goes on down here,’ Gertrude said.

  She missed the crisp sheets and fresh towels supplied on Mondays. Granny’s sheets were patched and old, their crispness long boiled away. Her wash trough was still slimy; her clothes line prop, two years older, hadn’t grown out of its bad habit of falling down in a strong wind.

  At least things had changed for the better in town. A few sneered at her when she rode in on a borrowed bike, but many nodded now, and Jessie Macdonald-Palmer grabbed her in Charlie’s shop and danced her in a circle.

  Hilda sneered, but clipped her coupon and sold her a pound of butter. She sneered again when Jenny asked for two packets of cigarettes.

  Granny didn’t approve of Jenny’s smoking. She smoked one in t
he orchard before Vern drove down on Friday, drove down alone to collect his lunch guests. Jimmy was pleased to be getting dressed up to go for a ride in a car. He liked cars. But when the moment came to leave and he realised Jenny wasn’t going with him, he cried and clung to her. She lifted him into the car to sit on Gertrude’s lap, and for the next two hours imagined that car continuing down the road to Melbourne.

  She smoked two cigarettes in the two hours he was away, but at two thirty they returned, Jimmy clutching a large and brightly painted tin truck.

  ‘Dat’s a tip twuck,’ he said, offering it to Jenny for inspection.

  ‘Grandpa gave it to you, didn’t he?’ Gertrude said.

  ‘Buying him with toys?’ Jenny said.

  ‘Don’t look for the bad in everything he does.’

  Jimmy wanted his truck back. She gave it to him and he ran inside to load the rest of his fleet onto his truck’s tray.

  ‘Vrooom, vrooom, vrooom.’

  ‘He’s a decent man when he gets what he wants. Thwart him and you’ve made a bad enemy.’

  ‘Most of us are decent when we get what we want. That’s no character reference.’

  ‘Try to put yourself in his place. He owns three mansions and he’s sitting up there in one of them, dependent on his daughters and loathing that dependency. Be he right or wrong, he swears that Jim wouldn’t have gone near that war if not for you. And now you’ve come home with Jim’s son and you expect him to live in a hovel with a family of darkies living next door.’

  ‘How can you call them that?’

  ‘I’m calling them what his daughters call them, what he said to me today, what most in town say when my back is turned — and what a judge in a courtroom would say.’

  ‘I thought he liked Joey.’

  ‘He’s got nothing against Joey, not personally. It’s his race he’s got a problem with. Our grandfather lost a lot of stock to the blacks when he first settled that land. He had no respect for them, and the older Vern gets the more like the old coot he becomes.’

  ‘What was his father like?’

  ‘Weak as water. My dad had the gumption to break away. Vern’s father stayed and kowtowed to the old man all his life. He died young.’

  ‘What about your grandfather?’

  ‘We thought he was immortal, darlin’. He was the toughest old pommy coot you’d be likely to meet in a month of Sundays. Honest to a fault. Ask him for a potato and he’d give you a sackful, but steal one from his acre paddock and you’d made an enemy for life — as had your kids yet unborn. Vern’s the same. As far as he’s concerned, you stole his son. If he decides to go after Jimmy, he’ll spend his last penny on raking up every bit of mud he can find to throw in your face.’

  ‘Teddy frows mud sometimes,’ Georgie chimed in.

  ‘Take your brother outside,’ Gertrude said. ‘Go out and get a load of dirt in that truck.’

  Kids are adaptable. Jimmy liked having other kids to play with; he loved stealing warm eggs from the hens’ nests, was wide eyed with wonder when Gertrude let him hold a newly hatched chicken. He liked watching milk squirt from goat to bucket.

  Jenny watched him squat with Georgie, loading his tip truck with dirt. He’d never played in Sydney’s dust. Did Sydney have dust? He’d never had a dirty face, dirty hands and feet, had never been bathed in a small tin tub.

  ‘You’ve got a good little boy there.’

  ‘I know it.’

  ‘Vern is picking us up again next Friday.’

  ‘I won’t be here.’

  ‘Carting him back to Sydney will be the fastest way to end up in court. Vern was on your side until you came home pregnant with Georgie. He would have got over Georgie if you hadn’t gone after Jim.’

  ‘I didn’t go after Jim.’

  ‘From the day you heard that Sissy was engaged to him, I saw your intent written all over your face, my girl.’

  ‘I didn’t go after him.’

  ‘You wanted to throw a spanner in your sister’s wedding plans and don’t bother denying it to me. You wouldn’t have looked at that boy twice if he hadn’t got himself engaged to Sissy.’

  ‘I looked at him twice because he came down here more than twice telling me that he didn’t want to marry Sissy. And the reason he kept coming down here telling me was because I was the only person in the world who’d listen to him. If you think I’d have a baby just to nark Sissy, then all I can say to you is that you should have had a few more of them, because the only person having a baby narks is the one who is having it.’

  Jenny walked to the door, then turned back. ‘And while we’re on the subject, Jim Hooper was the only decent man I’ve ever known in my life, and how he got that way is one of God’s miracles because he didn’t get it from his bloody father. And if you ever so much as think about saying that to me again, then I’m gone, Granny, and I’m gone for good and so are Jimmy and Georgie. I’ve got sixty pounds in the bank and twenty in my purse — and I know that I can sing, and that I can hold my own in a factory too, and that some people even like me for who I am. I’m here with you because I want to be here with you, not because I have to be here.’

  She went outside to squat with her kids in the dust.

  BEDS

  Gertrude was beyond the age of sharing her bed. She’d been sharing it with the girls since Jenny stole their lean-to bed. Two weeks of sharing was two weeks too long. She tolerated it until the following Friday, then before lunching with Vern and his daughters, she walked up to Fulton’s and ordered a brand-new bed. It could arrive as early as Monday and they needed to find space enough for it.

  On Saturday they cleared out the northern end of her long bedroom, dragging dusty old trunks out to the more honest light of the kitchen, where ancient treasures might be relabelled junk and pitched.

  The kids enjoyed it, all three draping themselves in scarfs from Germany, a silk shawl bought in Japan, pulling on shoes with turned-up toes worn by Gertrude when she’d dined at the captain’s table. A history lesson, a geography lesson, the contents of Gertrude’s trunks.

  They found a sheet-wrapped, well-flattened surprise down the bottom of her camphor wood trunk.

  ‘My wedding gown,’ Gertrude said. ‘It’s got to be.’ She took it to the table to unwrap, expecting it to fall apart. It was as stiff as a board, a fine brocade, a little yellowed but intact.

  ‘It must have been beautiful, Granny.’

  ‘I felt like a princess in it. My grandfather paid for its making.’ She opened its folds carefully, held it high by the shoulders, gave it a gentle shake — and her marriage lines, wrapped with the frock, fluttered to the floor.

  Jenny pounced on the paper.

  ‘That’s where it was!’ Gertrude said. ‘I spent weeks looking for that when Archie was declared dead. I talked myself into thinking I’d burnt it.’

  Archibald Gerald Foote. Physician. Age 23. Gertrude Maria Hooper. Age 19.

  ‘Archibald Gerald?’ Jenny said, that name on paper, the profession, ringing alarm bells. Archibald Gerald Foote, physician, who had aborted Gertrude’s son. Gerald Archibald, Sydney abortionist — old Noah, who had hung around this town for years during the depression!

  Ridiculous. Of course it was ridiculous. As if Gertrude wouldn’t have recognised her own husband. As if Amber wouldn’t have recognised her own father.

  But would they have seen him up close enough to recognise? She had. How much of him could they have recognised anyway, with that beard, that long hair, his glasses and black coat?

  It was the answer to everything though. It was the answer to why he’d given her that pearl-in-a-cage pendant, why he’d posted the matching earrings. He’d known she was his granddaughter. Maybe he’d noticed her resemblance to him. That had to be it. Old men didn’t go around giving ten-year-old girls antique pendants just for the hell of it.

  A shudder travelled down her spine. Maybe some old men did. Maybe he’d offered a trinket to Nelly Abbot, to Barbie Dobson . . . If I’d told Constable Den
ham old Noah had given me that pendant, would Nelly and Barby have been alive today?

  ‘You look like a stunned plover,’ Gertrude said.

  ‘I was . . . thinking. Do you remember that old bloke they locked up for interfering with one of the Duffy kids?’ Gertrude remembered him. ‘Did you ever get a good look at him, Granny?’ Gertrude’s head was down, working hard at refolding the wedding gown back into its original creases. ‘Did you ever see him close up?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I saw him in Sydney and he was calling himself Dr Gerald Archibald,’ Jenny said. ‘A girl from the factory got herself into trouble. He got rid of it.’ She didn’t mention her own appointment with him.

  ‘What were you doing mixing with girls like that?’

  ‘Do you remember what he was calling himself when he was here?’

  Gertrude remembered. She placed the sheet-wrapped gown into the bottom of her camphor wood trunk and picked up a necklace of shells and coral she hadn’t laid eyes on in fifty years. As she lifted it, the aged thread broke, scattering shells to every corner.

  Chasing them amused the kids, but didn’t change the subject.

  ‘It was something longish, I know that much. Could it have been Archibald?’

  ‘Forester,’ Gertrude said. ‘Albert Forester. And there’s probably thousands who look like him.’

  ‘It was him. I used to talk to him. I gave him a sausage wrapped in bread for his dinner one night, and he told me that I had a voice that would charm the angels. He used to wear a ring on his little finger. He was still wearing it.’

  ‘Did he recognise you?’

  ‘I was standing at his gate when he opened the door. He wasn’t looking at me. I couldn’t believe it. He was dressed up like a toff, with only a little beard, but it was him.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  Take care, Jenny Morrison. Take great care. ‘A few months before I left the factory.’

  Gertrude turned back to the scattered beads. Everyone has secrets they don’t wish to share. Gertrude had a secret she’d never share. Now Jenny had one of her own. Neither one pushed the subject further, not that day.

  They trod on shells, picked up coral beads, swept them up for days. Ten years from that day, a shell would turn up in the dustpan, but they cleared enough space down the northern end of Gertrude’s bedroom, and when the new bed arrived on Tuesday, there was space for it.