by Joy Dettman
Wasted effort. He returned to mayhem, Arthur’s companion having left his post, Arthur distraught, left at the mercy of the Johnsons . . . It was difficult these days to find reliable hired help.
Arthur’s current companion, Basil Clark, usually sat beside Arthur at family meals. This was his second long weekend off. Most of Arthur’s companions saved their free days up, taking four consecutive days a month instead of one each week.
Helen was thinking of Arthur’s companions. She could remember all of their names because she’d put them into alphabetical instead of chronological order. Burton, Clark, Duffy, Edwards, Frazer, Gordon, Hall, Henderson, Jones, King, Lawler, Morrison, Norris, Paterson, Pell, Porter, Stevens, Taylor, Tonkin, Tyler, Walters, Watts. Couldn’t remember all of their faces. Mr Paterson she could remember, and old Mr King.
Rachael decided early that it wasn’t worth getting to know their names because none of them stayed long. She giggled the first time Helen recited that list, and she said, ‘He will have to hire a Mr Albert or a Mr Zebo next. Given time, you’ll have a full alphabet of them, Heli.’ Then, last time they’d gone down to visit Aunt Bertha, Rachael had made Helen recite that list for her. They’d all laughed, even Olivia.
It was a year now since they’d last gone to Melbourne. It hadn’t been such a fun time, because they’d stayed at Judge Cochran’s house, and Percy had driven Rachael crazy all day, and Nicholas had driven her crazy at night with his lectures on Percy’s future prospects – until she told him that she had no intention of ever marrying Percy, that if he was the last man on earth and the survival of the whole human race depended on her, that she’d prefer Nicholas mate her with a baboon. Then she’d raced off into the dark and ended up at Aunt Bertha’s. They’d had to come home early.
Melbourne was the most wonderful place, because Arthur never went with them. It was a relief to sit at a table and not have to look at his scars and his mushed food and those blue-ringed bowls, purchased specifically for Arthur’s meals – they didn’t tip over when he scooped up his food. He’d spent years in hospitals. The other soldiers had returned long before Arthur, and he’d had to keep on going back to hospital for more operations. Like Jennifer, the doctors gave up. Nicholas couldn’t give up. He’d written to a surgeon in America two months ago.
‘Why do I have to sit here today, Father?’ Helen’s nose and her head were so full of tears, her voice didn’t sound like her own. He turned to her briefly, sighed, placed a small piece of parsnip in his mouth.
Rule: Squire daughters spoke when they were spoken to.
Rule: Squire daughters were seen, but not heard.
Rule: Squire daughters did not get themselves into trouble with Germans.
Helen and Rachael had known where babies came from, even before Jeanne Johnson explained the facts of life to them. How could they not have known when Mrs Johnson kept on having babies. Three years ago, when that last little Johnson was born, Jeanne, only fifteen, took over the kitchen for three days. She could do anything – even explain the details of procreation while preparing two chickens for roasting. She’d explained too why girls should never go out courting in the dark.
‘Things can get put in places where they’re not supposed to get put until girls are married,’ she’d said, the two chickens on their backs in the roasting dish, legs spread.
Rule: Squire daughters did not set foot in the kitchen, did not lean on that old table, eager for instruction.
A magical place, that dark kitchen. There were always jars of sultanas and bags of almonds, Arthur’s forbidden liquorice hidden there. Always loaves of bread to cut thick slices from, then fry in dripping – and Jeanne. They’d learned more from her graphic instruction than they’d learned from their governess.
‘What do you mean, Jeanne?’
She picked up a carrot and used one of the chickens to illustrate exactly what she meant. ‘Which ruins a girl for life, of course, and also gets them in the family way.’
Easy to see why it may have ruined them for life. Helen swore off marriage and babies that day. Rachael didn’t. She’d got in the family way last September, and she’d been excited about it.
‘Now he’ll have to let us get married, Heli. We’re going to run away to Melbourne, though, until he gets over the shock.’
‘He won’t let you marry Chris! Not in a million years. He’ll put you away.’
‘No he won’t. He’ll never allow his grandchild to be born out of wedlock.’
‘He’ll never allow you to bring a German into this family either. You know that!’
‘He’ll have to. You know what he was like when Jennifer took little Raymond away. He’ll want my baby. He won’t care too much who its father is. He never had one – or his father never married his mother – which is why we’re Squires. There’ll be some fireworks for a while, I know that, so it will be better if I’m not here while they’re going off,’ she said.
Better for her!
September, a star-studded sky but no moon, those trees outside the window looking black, and black fear crawling in Helen’s spine. Nicholas would be worse than livid. He’d have to give up on having grandsons who might one day be Lord Somebody or the Earl of Something – if there was a plague in England. Or maybe he wouldn’t…
‘I’m going with you, Rae. I’m going to join a convent.’
‘Nuns spend all day praying, they end up with rheumatism and corns on their knees – and you’re not old enough.’
‘I’m not staying here. He’s going to be hiss-spitting crazy.’
‘Come then. Chris won’t mind – but you’ll have to climb down that rope ladder, in the dark, on Friday night, because we’re catching the Saturday morning train.’
‘I can climb.’
She hadn’t been able to climb. Nothing had gone the way they’d planned. Nothing. In the end, Rachael had married who Nicholas told her to marry.
Rule: Squire daughters obeyed blindly.
‘Why?’
She was thinking ‘why’. She must have said it, because Nicholas glanced at her.
Why had probably been her first word, which might have been the reason her lower lip had grown so full, bunched up since infancy. He’d never replied. No questions were answered in this house. No one spoke of the five babies Olivia had lost at birth, five sons. They were in the cemetery, with names and dates. Most had been born between Rachael and Freddy, who had run away to fly aeroplanes when he was seventeen. Helen would have been four at that time and she couldn’t even remember him. She couldn’t remember Arthur before the war, and he hadn’t joined the army until the war was almost over.
She glanced down at Arthur’s empty bowl, allowing her swollen eyes to slowly creep higher, up his fine cotton shirt to the navy and white spotted cravat – and the puckered yellow centipede scar crawling out of it, and into the hollow where his jawbone should have been, crawling beneath the smoky lens of large spectacles and disappearing into the cavity of his lost eye. People wore spectacles so they could see better. Arthur wore spectacles so people couldn’t see him as well.
His hair used to cover a lot of the damage. He’d worn it long, and Jennifer would comb it to the left side, over the brow and the mutilated ear. It had covered the side of his scalp where no hair grew, but he was going bald. Soon he’d have no hair at all.
Nicholas still had his hair. Arthur must have inherited his bald head from his grandfather, or his great-grandfather – not that anyone ever spoke about the Squire male ancestors. There were some stains on the bleached white underskirt of the Squire name. When you can’t remove a stain and you can’t discard the stained garment, you have to appliqué over it, cover it with prissy embroidery, though the person wearing that garment knows it’s still there. Some of the older people in Molliston knew about the Squire stain too.
Helen had grown up imagining Molly Squire to have been a rich English widow who had come to Australia with a dozen servants, bought the land and built herself a mansion. Until Rachael showed he
r a handwritten rhyme, she’d known nothing about the Squires’ convict ‘stain’.
She’d led a life of ill repute, had pretty Moll, the prostitute.
Sent in chains from her native land, cast up upon a foreign sand.
Where she met young Wal, a bold young thief, who brought her little more than grief.
And o’er two states they were pursued until the night Wal’s past he rued.
The trappers close upon their trail, when from the dark they heard a wail.
And on that cold and frosty dawn, they found them, in a den forlorn.
An infant on Wal’s lap, at rest, another held to Molly’s breast.
They left her there to take her chance, while young Wal did the scaffold dance.
And many a tale was told of Moll, but never a sight was seen,
And many a rumour spoken, of the beauty Moll had been,
And many a year gone by before she was sighted with her daughters,
Clad in naught but the skin they wore, a-frolicking in the waters.
She’d led a life of ill repute, had Moll the ageing prostitute.
And all of ye who’ve heard folk say that a life of crime will never pay.
I’m here to tell you it’s a folly. Just take a look at Squire Molly.
They’d had to hide it from Nicholas, and there was only one safe place – in their cubbyhouse, underneath the quince tree, in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, in a kerosene tin bucket.
Then, one night at the dinner table when Nicholas was singing Percy’s praises, Rachael recited a few lines of the rhyme, then asked Nicholas if it was true that his grandfather had been hung for highway robbery and murder. She’d been marched to her room and locked in.
It was probably true. Gwyneth Murphy learnt the rhyme from her great-grandmother who had lived in Molliston before it was even a town; she had helped ferry travellers across the river before the bridge was built.
Helen sniffed as she wiped her face with her serviette. Nicholas turned to her, shook his head, but how could she not sniff? Her nose kept dripping, even if it was blocked solid.
‘Tears won’t bring them back,’ Olivia said.
A breath sobbed in through her mouth and Helen looked at her mother. ‘I can’t eat, Mummy. I can’t swallow. Please make him let me leave this table.’
Olivia glanced at Nicholas. Again he shook his head. She looked at her plate – there was not a morsel left on it – then she stood, walked heavily with her wineglass to the sideboard where she refilled it. Poor Olivia, she was too big to hide in Molly’s wardrobe or she might have hidden there instead of in a wine bottle. She’d started hiding in that bottle when Jennifer ran away with Raymond, or that’s the first time Helen and Rachael noticed. For months, Nicholas had been white hot, hissing furious. He had been deceived and bested by refined, soft-spoken, obedient Jennifer, and he’d had no inkling of what was in her mind. No one had.
He’d blamed everyone – the Johnsons, Arthur’s companion, Olivia too – and why blame her? Raymond was her living, laughing proof that she’d done her duty: produced a son for the estate, who in turn had produced a son. Sons were important. Sons were gods. From the day Raymond was born, Nicholas had planned the future of this unblemished Squire. He’d inherit the estate. Jennifer hadn’t given a damn for the estate, or for Nicholas’s money. Four years ago she’d crept away in the night and taken Raymond with her.
Rachael, only fourteen, decided she’d leave home too, go to live with Aunt Bertha and study music in Melbourne. She didn’t get far.
At thirteen, Helen had first dreamed of escape to become a schoolteacher like Aunt Bertha. She made the mistake of telling Father Ryan at the dinner table one night. Nicholas gave the governess a month’s wages and put her on the train, and she’d been one of the good ones. Without lessons to fill the long days, Helen found other means of filling them. She began borrowing her father’s books, and discovered why Squire daughters must never aspire to higher education.
It was in The Home Doctor. Educated girls didn’t breed. In America, where heaps of girls went to university and even became doctors, it almost totally stopped them having families. It said in that book that by 1939, girls with university educations would not be able to have babies at all. That was the day she realised she was Nicholas’s breeding stock. That was the day she realised why Percy Cochran was spending so much time up here. Nicholas had been grooming him to sire his stock. That was the day Helen decided to educate herself to a non-breeding level.
She read everything, even the old books Molly had crated in as decoration for her library, though she preferred Frankenstein, which Rachael had bought for her in Melbourne. It was written by a nineteen year old girl, but they’d had to smuggle it home then hide it, because it was one of those books classified as unsuitable reading material for Nicholas’s breeding stock. He owned hundreds of books on every subject from wars to poetry, from farm books to medicine. Helen had grown selective and an expert in never leaving behind a giveaway gap – if you spread fifty books just a little on the library shelf, you could easily fill up a one book gap.
‘You’ll wear out your eyes and addle your brain with all of that reading, Miss Helen,’ Mrs Johnson always said if she caught her reading in the laundry. ‘Out of here now, Miss, and put that book back. What on earth would your father say if he caught you in here, sitting like that? Remember, you’re a young lady now, not a child.’
Rule: A Squire never sits, ankles crossed, knees up, perched on a pile of soiled sheets in the laundry. A Squire never darkens the door of the laundry.
Rachael got mad at Nicholas once because she wasn’t allowed to leave the house for a week. She went to the laundry with a roll of pink crepe paper which she prodded into the boiling copper. All of the tablecloths and serviettes had come out pink.
Too sad to think about that. Too sad to sit at this table and know that never again would Rachael sit beside her, never again would she nudge her with an elbow when Father Ryan was sermonising. Just too sad. And she was bawling again, loudly, uncontrollably, her forearms on the table, her head down on her arms, her shoulders heaving, and that hair, still hanging loose, dragging in the gravy.
‘Sit up, Missie. Sit up!’
There must have been a rule that said a Squire daughter never allowed her hair to fall in the gravy. If there wasn’t, Nicholas would write a new rule today and slot it in.
‘Sit back. Breathe deeply, and control yourself.’
Great gob of gravy congealed in her hair, too thick to drip. She sniffed, wiped her face with her serviette, wiped at the gravy.
‘How can you sit there? How can you make me sit here? I want to go to my room!’
‘Control yourself, Missie!’
Helen Squire had lost control. Helen Squire was a muck-up. Today her addled brain had forgotten all the rules. She wept while her meal was removed, hot tears rolling, blurring the world. Blur of Arthur’s blue ringed bowl. Blur of his spoon. Blur of Arthur’s face. When he was brought home from hospital the first time and Helen saw his face, she hadn’t controlled herself. She’d run to her room and crawled into the wardrobe. Rachael found her rocking there. She crawled in with her, cuddled her.
‘Remember the liquorice, Heli? Remember when he and Freddy used to feed it to us and turn our teeth black?’ she said. ‘Remember Freddy’s cackleberry mush? You must remember. Every morning for a week he and Arthur cooked us scrambled eggs on toast and we ate it in the kitchen. It was only weeks before Freddy left. Remember when Mrs Johnson was so sick after one of the Johnsons was born. You must remember.’
Must or not, Helen had no memory of Freddy, or of Arthur before the war. She knew only this Arthur, and for months after he first came home she screamed when the lamp was blown out at night and the black dark entered her room, his face riding it.
Jennifer had been afraid of the dark, she’d been afraid of the Australian bush, afraid of spiders and bees, of the screaming owls and the wind storms that roared through the trees, and of N
icholas, but she’d gotten over being afraid when Arthur kept coming back from the hospital looking worse, not better, because she’d been more afraid of being married to him for the rest of her life and having more of his babies to hold her here.
She hadn’t set a foot out of place, though. For six months after her tiny daughter died, she’d gone about the house in the same way, played with Raymond, combed Arthur’s hair. Then one dark night while thunder rolled and lightning flashed, when only a mad person would even have considered stepping outside that door, refined, fearful Jennifer did more than step outside; she walked through that storm to the station, where she and little Raymond caught the morning train to Melbourne before anyone knew they’d gone. When there is worse within than without, who’s afraid of storms and dark roads?
Helen Squire, that’s who.
‘Arthur has expressed his desire to go to the site, Olivia. I’ve asked Johnson to pick some roses. We’ll take them out later.’
Johnson? They were all ‘Johnson’ to Nicholas, the males and females, the old, the young and everyone in between.
Olivia sipped her wine, nodded.
What site did he want to go to? They took flowers to Grandma Lorna’s grave on her birthday. At Christmastime they put flowers on all of the graves, even Great-grandmother Molly’s and that row of dead babies’ graves. Did he want to take flowers there for Rachael? She wasn’t with the dead yet. Two o’clock on Tuesday would be time enough for his flowers.
All day Nicholas had been making telephone calls to his friends in the city. They’d all come up here for the funeral, the judge, his wife and Percy, the Owens and despicably sweet Veronica, who actually liked Percy. Aunt Bertha, who never came up here, would come for Rachael. Tuesday, only two days away.
