by Olga Masters
“Now let’s sit down on the new chairs, while John does the window!” Amy said, leading Daphne towards the sitting room. She was crossing the hall when the doorbell rang.
Opening it she found Lance Yates there.
“Why, Mr Yates!” cried Amy. “Aunty Daph, this is Mr Yates. I wasn’t expecting to see you! But come in, do come in, Mr Yates!”
Oh what a fool I sound, Amy said to herself, pretty sure her face was red. I’ve said his name too many times. Aunty Daphne will think something is going on. Nothing is going on!
She was relieved to have her back to them both and wished for something to do, cushions to plump up, instead of standing, feeling such a gawk.
“I’ve been to the factory,” Lance said, sitting on a chair, showing no familiarity with it. “And I dropped in to tell you what we are planning.” He gave Daphne a smile as if she would appreciate the wisdom of this course of action.
“It’s quite a madhouse at Lincolns as Miss Fowler will tell you. Once work starts you don’t get a chance for a private conversation all day.”
“I know that well,” Daphne said. “I was a machinist. That’s where I met my husband. He’s a tailor.”
A little trickle of amusement ran into Amy’s brain. Here was Daphne using Dudley’s trade, allied to Lance’s, to establish a bond between herself and Lance. But for no reason that she could name, she was pleased Daphne appeared to like Lance.
But what was Lance here for? To tell her of major changes at Lincolns? Selling out, closing down, her job gone? A fire burning it to the ground? Now Lance slid his eyes away from Daphne to her and she saw, as she often had before, they appeared like his skin to have a light application of oil.
“We’re taking over the place next door,” Lance said.
Amy knew the place. A dark little boot repair shop with a back door opening into a hall where the bootmaker lived in the two rooms opening off it. He had a small child and a wife heavily pregnant with another. They were going to the country town of Guyra in the west of the state to live with the wife’s family and await an opportunity to open a bootmaker’s business there. The fresh air would be good for the children after Newtown, the pale thin young man (who appeared to need the fresh air most) told Lance. The man coughed a lot, fascinating the tough slum children with the way his cavernous chest leapt and quivered under his liberally darned grey jumper, as if someone had dropped a handful of grasshoppers in there. They would prolong their visits to the shop, hoping he would have a coughing turn to enliven the errand.
But what did the Yates brothers want the shop for? A dry cleaning shop, Lance told Amy. There were no others in Newtown, and when the war was over and the men out of uniform and in suits again there would be plenty of business.
“Women will want to get away from the washtubs and get their silk dresses cleaned for them when it’s safe to go out after the blackouts.”
Lance made it sound a wonderful glamorous time and his oily eyes told Daphne it was the kind of life she was suited to. Daphne stroked a mauve silk thigh, glad she had chosen that dress to wear.
Amy closed the door on John’s hammering. In a little while Lance stood up to go. “That’s it then,” he said, the businessman with no thought of prolonging the visit. Amy timidly offered tea. I’ve never given him a cup of tea, she thought. Perhaps I won’t get it right! He refused with a smile that drew Amy and Daphne together on the lounge, cementing their relationship with a tender blessing from his eyes. They did not move, yet he seemed to have drawn them physically closer together.
Amy let him out the front door and when she closed it John made a large single bang with his hammer.
Daphne rushed to the kitchen. “So rude to bang away there and not come in and say hello to that nice man! Where are the manners I taught you?”
John put the hammer in his bag and looked for splinters of wood among the gas jets of the stove, brushing at it with his big hands.
“Oh, leave him alone!” Amy said. “Look at the marvellous job he’s done on the window!”
“Just for that you can walk back with Amy’s table!”
“Oh, that’s too much to expect!” Amy cried, though she could hardly wait to get the table in her sitting room.
She stole a glance at John’s face. “But if he does he can stay and have tea with me. We’ll have a can of tomato soup between us and toast the rest of the bun loaf.” Amy had bought a loaf of sweet currant bread to follow their chops.
John carried the little table across his shoulder on their walk back from Annandale.
“Oh, what an eventful day it’s been!” Amy said as they turned into Crystal Street.
It was not to end there. Sitting on the steps in front of her locked door was a young man in soldier’s uniform and a girl in a too short winter coat over a pale green cotton dress sprigged with violets.
It was Amy’s brother Fred and Amy’s daughter, Kathleen.
16
Amy would have found it hard to believe Kathleen was there, except that she slept beside her that night in the three-quarter bed Amy was now glad she’d bought, although a single one would have cost less.
Fred had been home on his first leave after joining the Army and had brought Kathleen up to Sydney with him.
“You came to Sydney before to join up and didn’t come and see me or Aunty Daph!” The rebuke was for May, rather than Fred. Amy sensed swiftly and accurately that May’s lapse in letter writing over the period was due to the scheme kept from Sydney, since given time Amy might have raised objections.
Amy looked at Fred’s face for the man who must be there to replace the boy whose face hungered for change when he handed up her case to the mail car those years ago.
Fred’s top teeth protruded slightly in his round face. He had a habit of running his tongue over them before he spoke, needing to bring his chin forward with the effort entailed. Amy wondered if he thought this helped in bringing the jutting teeth into a straight line.
Fred explained that he was not sure of the way to Annandale and went almost directly to camp after his medical. Then he was given leave to go home to Diggers Creek before he got a posting.
“Where to?” Amy cried, thinking of Peter who died in New Guinea without any of them being aware he was there.
“I don’t know at all,” Fred said, forgetting to wash his tongue over his teeth and letting his eyes rest on his big boots on Amy’s carpet.
Kathleen had wriggled herself into a corner of the lounge and was stroking the velvet near her, discovering the raised edges of the rose, then raising her face to show her pleasure and compliment Amy.
Amy wondered if she was missing the old leather couch with the raised end on which the children rode. Then with a hot face she looked away from Kathleen, aware that she would have outgrown that childish game. She’ll be a woman in a few years, Amy thought, seeing the sprawl of her long legs in their white socks and black shoes fastened with a strap across the instep. Will I have to buy new shoes when they wear out, Amy worried, taking her eyes away, unable to bear to look too long in case there were already signs of wear.
Fred, rolling a cigarette, hoping Amy would take note of this elevation to manhood, looked across to explain about Kathleen.
“She has to go to a better school, according to Ma.”
Kathleen’s young fingers dug around a rose. Only a sweep of brown eyelashes quivered agreement.
“Tell Amy,” Fred said, realizing too late he should have put the word mother in somewhere. But Amy did not look to him at all like a mother.
Kathleen pulled up a sock, already stretched from its most recent pull. “I was doing the very same work as last year.”
“Old Cec can’t teach past sixth class,” Fred said. Cecil Shaw had taught the three Scriveners who started school at seven and left at fourteen. May had sent Amy’s children when they turned five. The little Diggers Creek school was a mile and a half down the road from the farm. Amy remembered the wet grass bowed across the track soaking her shoes a
nd socks on a winter’s morning as she picked her way to the school steps. The same would have happened to her daughters, to those very shoes Kathleen was wearing.
She stood up quite abruptly. “It must be time she was in bed,” she said, conscious suddenly of something else to face. She had not shared a bed with anyone in a long time. Already she felt a creeping of her skin, a rejection of a body in contact with hers.
Fred went with John to stay the night at Annandale, as he had to return to camp next day. In the bedroom Amy saw that Kathleen was eager to get her case open and take out a new nightgown. The smell of flannelette rushed up Amy’s nostrils, making her think of the new little gowns May had made for Kathleen, Patricia and the baby. She jerked the blind at the window up, then down, and went to the little cane dressing-table to pull the band from her hair. Kathleen saw her different in the mirror, older, her eyes larger, her face smaller. She made her case tidy before closing it and standing it against the wall.
Amy thought of suggesting that Kathleen hang what dresses were in there in the wardrobe, and take one of the little cane drawers for her pants and socks, but suddenly felt too tired to bother. She had to fight a rising anger against May, Fred, and even Kathleen, who she suddenly decided might not have been caught up in an adult’s scheme, and was very likely not an innocent victim of a plan to transfer responsibility to Amy. Amy began to fuel her anger with the idea that Kathleen wanted to come to Sydney, had begged May to allow her to, that she wanted to go to high school to become a teacher, a nurse, perhaps a doctor with Amy having to devote the next few years of her life to educating and caring for her.
She moved angrily under the blankets and Kathleen shifted her body timidly to the edge of the bed, thinking Amy wanted more room, guilty that she was the cause of her discomfort.
Kathleen started at the sound of movement above the ceiling.
“By the way, there are two old women up there,” Amy said. “They use the kitchen, so you will see them.” She raised herself and punched her pillow and turned it over. Kathleen had a pillowslip stuffed with a sheet since Amy had no second pillow.
She settled herself for sleep before she said more. “They are very inquisitive, so don’t tell them your business.”
There was another long silence before Kathleen spoke. “I’ll call you Amy when they are around.”
“That’s a good idea,” Amy said. “Goodnight.”
17
The following afternoon (it being Sunday) Amy took Kathleen to show her Lincoln Knitwear.
She walked her briskly, Kathleen’s unbuttoned coat flapping about her thin dress, the one printed with violets, obviously her best. Amy thought of the clothes Kathleen would need for school, and first of all of the school she would go to. She passed one on her way to Petersham Station on the few occasions when she travelled by rail to work, once when her heels were blistered with new shoes and another time when Lance, with an air of great conspiracy, allowed her to have an extra hour at home the morning the shop delivered the sitting room furniture. She heard the shouting behind the high brick walls and hurried from it, reminded painfully of Peter.
Perhaps I’m being punished for something, she told herself, hurrying now, Kathleen plunging out to keep up. I know what it is I’m punished for but I wish the punishment could have held off until I got my house fixed up more. I might have to get another job, one paying more. No, I can’t do that because of the furniture. Amy felt a choking in her throat, a feeling of suffocation, of being stifled. She slowed her pace, swallowing and putting a hand up to grip her neck. Kathleen looked up at her, with eyes a darker blue than Amy’s. She had Irish colouring like her father’s and his dark, rich, curly hair.
“I could stay with Aunty Daphne, could I?” suggested Kathleen. Amy felt a sense of shock. She was reverting constantly to an image of Kathleen as the little girl she had left at Diggers Creek. This leggy clear-eyed girl tuned into Amy’s brain as if her own was wired to it.
“No, you can’t!” Amy cried, not wanting to be brusque, but putting it down to all her worries.
“It was awful for me when I was there with Uncle Dudley!”
“Granma said about him,” Kathleen said.
“What did she say about him?” I don’t really want to know, said Amy to herself, but it’s hard to find things to say.
“He’s grumpy most of the time,” Kathleen said. After a while, flinging her chin up towards Amy she said: “Does it matter?”
Amy gave the first warm laugh since Kathleen had come and Kathleen, pleased, leaned close to her as Amy walked now in more relaxed fashion for they were nearing Lincolns.
My goodness yes, Amy thought, I will have to start sorting out what matters and what doesn’t.
“There it is,” she said when Lincolns came up.
It was not much to see, and Amy with the swift thought that Kathleen might not be impressed, felt afraid to check her face, in case her expression said so.
The brass plate on the front door was not as bright as when Amy used to polish it. The bay window (for the buildng was once a private home) was frosted over to keep the sight of women at work from passers by, but more importantly, in the view of the Yates brothers, to keep the women’s eyes on their machines instead of straying streetwards.
Amy felt cheered at the sight of the bootmaker’s. It seemed to look different already and to have edged closer to the factory.
“We’re taking that shop over,” Amy said. When Kathleen was silent Amy explained that there would be machines in the back rooms for cleaning and pressing people’s clothes that couldn’t be washed.
“It will be so good when the war is over,” Amy said.
“It will be terrible if Fred gets killed,” Kathleen murmured. She moved closer to Amy, the sleeve of her coat clinging to Amy’s sleeve as if she were clinging to Fred as long as she could.
“He won’t be,” Amy said, ashamed that she would miss him hardly at all, whereas Kathleen would suffer, perhaps as she herself had done when Peter was lost.
They stopped in front of the bootmaker’s window, seeing shoes turned on their sides, heels and half soles in rough little heaps, a great deal of dust, a heavily rusted shoe last, some tins of polish bowled about and coming to rest in any old place, a shoe brush with the bristles worn to the wood in one corner and an old rag doll streaked on its grubby body with tan boot polish. The doll belonged to the bootmaker’s two-year-old child, who sometimes sat in the window when the mother went shopping farther down King Street where the butcher’s, grocer’s and fruit shops were. To ease the pain of separation the child was allowed to play in the window and watch for her return.
Amy turned away at last to look at the space where Lance left his car and realized she had brought Kathleen not so much to see Lincolns, as in the hope that Lance might have returned on the Sunday afternoon to have a look again at the bootmaker’s shop. She might then have taken the opportunity of introducing Kathleen as a younger sister.
He might call at Petersham again and John and Aunty Daphne might happen to be there too, Amy worried.
On their way home Amy took Kathleen’s arm, lightly so as not to make it too obvious she was courting support.
“I would never have got my job there if they knew I had children,” Amy said.
She felt Kathleen’s arm stiffen slightly and tightened her hold.
“Granma said that might be so,” Kathleen answered.
Well, did she, Amy thought. Much she knows about it! She put aside May’s care of her children, years of it now, and felt only anger that her life was upset just when she was starting to enjoy it.
They were making their way to the railway station for Amy had decided on taking the train. It would be Kathleen’s first ride on an electric train. When they alighted at Petersham on their way home they would pass the school and see what kind it was from the wording on the brick wall. Amy did not know if it was for young children or a high school.
“It’s for kids up to sixth class,” Kathleen sai
d reading the sign. She did not totally conceal the scorn in her voice.
In a little while the scorn drained away, her face shrinking with the anxiety taking over.
“Perhaps I could go there tomorrow, and ask about the high school,” Kathleen said.
“Could you find your way?” Amy asked, relieved at the possibility of her day at Lincolns following a normal pattern. She had the odd and foolish notion that once she was at her desk there would be nothing other than her work to contend with, no problems apart from that.
“Of course,” Kathleen said, looking back swiftly at the school.
To her surprise Amy thought about Kathleen all the next day. Kathleen sat there at the edge of Amy’s brain while she worked with her invoices and accounts, seeing a new girl who was to start as a presser, working out the difference between her age and Kathleen’s, while taking her down to meet the forewoman. Lance was at the far end of the factory with Tom, examining a freshly dyed fabric by holding it up to the light. Amy wanted him to see her, yet was afraid he might. She hurried back to her desk, finding it a little less the cosy refuge it had always seemed.
She listened for the end of the day. Tom switched the machines off, their whine dying away, replaced by the run of feet up the back stairs, past the office, tumbling down the flight to the door. A young woman named Dorothy, lame in the left leg, was last.
Her feet were like a clock ticking out the last minute of the working day. Sometimes the foot of the afflicted leg scraped the stair. Amy winced with the scrape, imagining pain.
