by Joy Dettman
Life. It’s like walking through a gallery of portraits. Some you see and take an immediate liking to, so you stop a while, get to know those features and maybe wish you could take that one along with you when you move on, though all the while knowing you can’t, because it belongs to someone else. Most of those portraits you ignore, forget about the instant you step away to the next.
She moved on to a derelict rooming house for a time, but if you couldn’t pay the rent, you didn’t get a room, and if you kept paying out money for that room when you had none coming in, you eventually ran out of the stuff. Out on the street again, wearing all she owned on her back, she wandered into the Fawkner cemetery to admire the flowers. There she considered her options and, just about to decide that she only had one, along came Mr Bowen.
When people meet in a cemetery, it’s customary to talk about who they’ve lost, so Kathleen claimed the fancy tombstone of a Joseph William Brown, dead these past two months. She told Mr Bowen that she’d been forced to seek employment as a housekeeper since her father passed on.
An innocent man, Mr Bowen had been tied so close to his dead mother’s apron strings, he’d never been game to look at another woman. He told her that he’d worked for thirty years in a menswear shop and how each night he’d come home from work and dear Mother placed a nourishing meal before him. He told her, too, of dear Mother’s treasured collection of ornaments, and how the dust was building up on her ornaments, and how badly dear Mother’s house missed her touch. He talked about her for an hour – then he offered Kathleen employment, one day a week.
She’d never been backward in coming forward. She turned up on his doorstep at seven the next morning and he paid her in advance. He was surprised to see her there when he returned late that night. She placed a meal before him – nourishing or not, she didn’t know – the pie she’d bought out of her own pay at the baker’s, the spud she’d helped herself to, then boiled in its jacket. He ate it. Being too late to send her out into the street where she’d be in moral danger, he allowed her to sleep in his mother’s room.
He’d been the one in moral danger, though too innocent to know it. A week later, still innocent but enjoying the meals she cooked from dear Mother’s recipe book, a neighbour suggested to him that it was not quite fitting to have a young servant woman living with him in the house. He wasn’t the type to argue with a woman, so he suggested to Kathleen that she leave. She didn’t. A month later, he suggested that some of the items in his mother’s extensive wardrobe might be more appropriate than her own wardrobe. And her hair, perhaps he might style it as he’d styled dear Mother’s. After three months of hurrying home to her each night, dodging the neighbours’ stares, he suggested that in order to still neighbourhood and church gossip – if she was agreeable, then perhaps they could wed.
She was agreeable. She loved dear Mother’s house and its garden, loved the pictures on the walls, loved dear Mother’s piano – hadn’t liked her photograph or her dust-collecting ornaments, but she kept them dust free. So she put her age up ten years and wed Mr Bowen in the Methodist church with a bunch of flowers from his garden, and he went to his narrow bed that night, and she went to dear Mother’s.
And that’s the way they lived for six years. Six long years of growing, of being fussed over, of never having to worry about where the next few bob would come from. Six years of learning from that odd little man, of allowing him to fuss with her hair, tuck it beneath dear Mother’s hats when they walked out together. Six years of holding on to his arm and playing the fine lady, of keeping her mouth under control. Six years, too, of watching him glow when he introduced her to his work colleagues as his wife.
Life. It’s an amazing journey. Mr Bowen ran out of life at fifty-eight. He dropped dead at work one day, and she howled like a banshee when they came to tell her. She howled at his funeral, howled when she went home alone to that empty house, wondering how the hell she was going to pay for the very fine funeral she’d ordered for him. She didn’t know then about the will that left everything to her, his mother’s ornaments, house, her piano, her pictures on the walls and one hundred and fifty-eight pounds of his own savings.
Only twenty-three at the time, with no one to advise her, no family and little education, she did everything wrong. Owning a house meant that things had to be paid for, things had to be fixed if they broke. Mr Bowen hadn’t told her about that. She managed for a few years on his savings, and for a few more by selling what she could live without. The ornaments went first, then the pictures off the walls, though she missed seeing them as much as she missed seeing Mr Bowen bustling around the house. She sold dear Mother’s dinner sets, her crystal, followed that with the linen and the beds, bar one. Last of all she sold her piano.
She tried her hand at a cleaning job, but cleaning up after others had never been her style. She tried being a shop girl, and she hadn’t been the shopkeeper’s style so, eight years after Mr Bowen’s death, she packed up, sold her last bed, and his house, put the money in a calico belt, packed dear Mother’s trunk with the best of dear Mother’s clothing and took a cab to Spencer Street Station, where she caught a country train, not caring much where it took her, just knowing, vowing, she would never again return to the streets of Melbourne.
She caught a few trains over the next years, worked in a few houses, took a job as a barmaid at a hotel. That was the job she’d been born for: fast moving and fast to give the customers a laugh – and that’s all she gave them, having seen enough of the ugly side of men during her time in the trade she was introduced to before she was old enough to know there was such a trade.
Turning forty and losing her first back tooth set her to thinking about her old age and finding another husband like Mr Bowen. She never equated what she’d felt for him as love – he’d been her mother, father and little boy. That heady romantic stuff only happened in fairy-tales. Handsome prince courts beggar girl, promising her happily ever after, not taking into account the Queen already ensconced in the palace, and the court fool, determined to break up the romance. That wasn’t for Kathleen. What she needed was a husband to provide her with three meals a day, and losing that tooth set her looking around for one.
She was working at the Stockman’s Hotel in Willama when Harry Dolan walked into the bar. He looked sixty-odd, was clean shaven, short, rotund and no fashion plate, unlike Mr Bowen. He owned a good looking truck, but she’d barely given him a second glance, until he returned a week later, and someone mentioned that he owned the Molliston hotel, and that he made the apple cider she sometimes poured. She also learned that the Dolans had been making that same cider for generations and how Harry had no surviving offspring who might continue the family tradition.
That was a real plus, and in more ways than one. She’d already tasted his cider, which could have taken the paint off a dunny roof.
‘You’re the apple of my eye, Mrs Bowen, and I’m a man who knows his apples,’ he said to her one evening, aiming to plant a kiss on her mouth.
She dodged it. ‘Are you thinking to take advantage of a widow, Mr Dolan?’
He invited her to Molliston for a weekend, so she caught the train down on a Saturday morning and he picked her up at the station and drove her out to his place. When she saw his land in that green valley, and his acres of front garden hedged by apple trees in bloom, it was like stepping inside one of the pictures on Mr Bowen’s wall. She wanted it and he wanted her. That weekend they struck a bargain.
There were a few surprises at her wedding, which was conducted by Father Ryan in the Molliston Catholic church. She recognised Tom Thompson’s face in the crowd of onlookers and, as it turned out, Harry had four permanent lodgers living at the hotel, plus a black-clad, live-in sister-in-law – and he wasn’t as old as he’d appeared. The new Mrs Dolan may have had her reasons for choosing an old husband, but he’d had his own reasons for choosing a younger wife; he aimed to produce half a dozen little cider brewers and during the next twelve months worked himself to death tryin
g to achieve his aim.
She wore green to the funeral. His sister-in-law wore black. And when he was in the ground, at the feet of his three former wives – no doubt they fought over which one would get to kick him first on the other side – Joseph Reichenberg had come to her fence offering cash for Harry’s swampy bottom paddock. Never one to say no to a good deal, she’d taken Reichenberg’s money while the sister-in-law turned the air blue, packed her bags and walked out. It seemed that Kathleen had made an unforgivable error in selling that land to the old German.
So there she was, widowed for the second time, a business owner with four lodgers who expected two meals a day, clean rooms and empty chamber pots. She left them to their expectations, packed a bag, loaded it into Harry’s truck and headed off on a holiday, aware that she needed time and space in order to make a few decisions. She’d made them too, and made the right ones this time.
Now she had to make another decision, and had no time or space to think about it. O’Brien’s truck was coming down the hill, its tray loaded with pickers. Billy skedaddled across the yard and up the pear tree.
‘Will I nick up and tell them you’re not opening today, Mrs Dolan?’
‘No, Mike. Up you go, but keep your eyes peeled for that Russell Street car. We won’t get much warning today.’
As Mike joined his mate up the pear tree, the widow walked down to the cider pit, a low hump on the landscape – a blot on the landscape, some called it, but a cool blot on a hot afternoon. It had taken a month to empty that pit of rotting apples, dead mice and other unidentifiable detritus, and a week more to scrub its walls and floor. Once furnished with a small piano, a gramophone, a table and a couple of chairs, there wasn’t a lot of space left, but space enough for a barrel of ale and an empty tea-chest.
She auditioned her pear tree roosters, negotiated a mutually satisfying arrangement with Len Larkin, local agent for the Willama SP bookie, then she’d thrown a party, a celebration of Harry’s life. Every Saturday night since there’d been some reason for a party, and any of the local chaps coming up with a reason got free drinks. Her Sunday afternoon get-togethers were tame affairs – tea and scones served to those who made a donation to the orphans.
The padlock off, she opened the heavy door, bobbing her head as she stepped in and down. Four deep, steep steps to the floor. Dark in there, cool. She lit the lamp, set it on her piano beside a folded tablecloth, one of the previous Mrs Dolan’s hand-embroidered things. She spread a second cloth over the table, set a plate of stale scones in the centre, placed a vase of paper flowers on the piano, then headed back to the hotel for her teapot, taking a look out through a front window while she was there.
She couldn’t sight her lookout roosters. Those pear trees, planted in the days of the coach trade, were the size of elms, and at this time of year they supplied good cover. Most of what was in that front garden had been planted in the coach days. Someone had set up a statue of a half-clad, well-built woman then circled her with belladonna lilies. Those bulbs multiplying as they did, there were flowers eight feet deep around her now.
An interesting plant, the belladonna, full of surprises – the way the winter greenery died, and just when you’d given them up for dead, a hundred spikes rose out of the earth, like a field of blood-tipped spears marking some ancient battle site, the hafts growing longer each day, until the spikes burst open to reveal clusters of large trumpet shaped pink blooms that saturated the land with perfume.
‘That little mongrel. Is he back here?’ she muttered, sighting Vern Lowe standing within the circle of belladonnas, looking like an evil troll wearing a wig.
He could move like greased lightning, that little coot; he was in the cider pit when she returned with the big enamel teapot and her cups.
‘The word is, you open up down here at three on Sundays,’ he greeted her.
‘You’ve got a nerve coming back here after last night. You were told to get out and stay out.’
‘I knew you didn’t mean it, Red,’ he said, offering his open-mouthed grin, showing a blue tongue framed by venomous fangs.
‘My name is Mrs Dolan, and you’re not welcome here.’
‘Don’t go gettin’ too high above yourself now, Red. Don’t you go forgettin’ that I knew you when you wasn’t so high.’
‘And don’t you go forgetting either that I knew you when you were lower than a snake’s backside, Vernon Lowe, and you’re not much taller now.’
Skinny as a snake and half as trustworthy, he’d probably been the one who smashed her window last night. He was small enough, but she didn’t want him flapping that mouth around town, and he knew it. Maybe it was better to keep on his good side. He’d be gone soon. The teapot set down, she walked to her piano and sat, lifted the lid. Having spent a thousand hours at Mr Bowen’s piano, she could get most tunes out of those keys.
O’Brien and his pickers wandered in, followed by one of the Murphy boys. They all looked the same: black hair, black eyes, heavy eyebrows, all steps and stairs of young Mike. She never tried to remember their names.
‘Want to man the keg, Murph?’ she asked. ‘Two free drinks, and no more.’
He saluted, made himself comfortable on the upturned tea-chest and started squirting beer into glasses.
O’Brien and his pickers moved close to the keg, crowding her piano. Vern Lowe stood back until Murph was free.
‘Have you got change of a fiver? I need smokes too,’ he said, offering the note.
‘We don’t run the bank from down here,’ she said.
‘I’ll take a couple of hundred, Red – make it worth your while cashing it.’
Two hundred smokes might make a dent in his fiver. She took his money, gave the note a sliding glance as she left her piano, gave it a decent scrutinising while walking across the yard to the hotel for the necessary change and his fags. It was neither old nor new, and no fake. She added it to her cash box, took out a few smaller notes and returned to her cider pit, counting out three singles, a ten bob note and coins, attempting not to breathe as she did so – Vern’s sweat smelled bad.
Always the runt of the pack, he was around her age, one of the urchins she’d run with for a time. She’d fed him a few crusts once or twice, when she was at Sam’s first establishment. She’d run into him again when she could be bought at that last city place, though he’d never tried to buy her.
He took his two hundred smokes, gave her a grin, picked up his beer and moved away, his stink moving away with him.
Other drinkers crowded the piano now, glasses filling and emptying to the hum of conversation, laughter.
‘So, who does the copper think done it? Ma was saying you were getting pretty pally with him this morning, Mrs Dolan. Did you find out anything?’
‘They’re whispering in town that there was going to be a grandchild.’
‘And who was whispering that?’
‘Jeanne Johnson.’
‘If she said it, it would be fact. She could worm information out of a stale loaf of bread, that girl.’
Mr Croft, the dairyman, took his time coming down the steps. ‘The sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. It’s written clear in the good book,’ he said, buying directly into the conversation. He had to be eighty years old and had long since gone beyond male to that shrunken, bird-boned sexless place where age sends many. He always popped in for one drink on Sundays; having cleaned himself up for church, he liked to get a bit of wear out of his ancient Sunday suit – always dropped a coin in the collection tin too.
Voices rising, falling, the piano tinkling, the dairyman’s ongoing monologue like waves slapping ineffectually on sand. The air grew warmer each time the door opened, but with most of the pit’s construction being below ground level, it was still ten degrees cooler in than out.
‘Someone left flowers down where the Squire girl was murdered,’ a new arrival offered.
‘I saw Squire and Arthur putting them there half an hour ba
ck.’
‘You know how Rachael was carrying that brown handbag last night? Well, it’s supposed to be missing. Old Jessie Martin accidentally overheard Thompson telling one of the city coppers on the phone that the handbag with seventy-eight pounds in it has disappeared.’
‘Accidentally on bloody purpose, she heard it. It’s a fact, though,’ one of station master Wilson’s boys said. ‘The copper was speaking to my old man about a handbag this morning.’
‘I heard her last night telling Chris Reichenberg she had money and was going to Melbourne. She was trying to talk him into going with her.’
‘She’s been on with him for years. Dave was a fool for marrying her.’
An itching between her shoulderblades, the piano player shrugged, reached an arm up her back, scratching, while her eye searched for Vern Lowe. He was too low, his greying woolly head now lost in the crowd.
‘There’s talk going around that Chris Reichenberg killed her and that the copper is only waiting for the city blokes to get here before he makes the arrest.’
‘It’s Squire who reckons Chris killed her, not the copper. Chris was down here, drunk as a lord when I left at two. He was having trouble killing mosquitoes.’
‘Poor bloody Gimpy, losing his wife and his kid, eh?’
Len Larkin entered, closing the door behind him. ‘I didn’t think you’d be opening. Move your arse, Murph, or I’ll just open my mouth and you can squirt it straight in.’
‘Did you know that Dave’s wife was expecting? Or so Jeanne Johnson says.’
‘And Jesus turned rainwater into beer,’ Len said, claiming his seat on the tea-chest.
‘He’s probably killed her himself. He’s found out that she’s played him for a sucker and he’s done his block and killed her.’
‘Sucker, my backside. All of a sudden he’s got that truck, he’s got that house. Where the hell do you think he came by that sort of money? He sold his sheep to make the payment on his loan last year. If he married her to get at Squire’s money, then he’s not going to kill the goose that lays the golden egg, is he?’
