Amy's Children

by Olga Masters

  “He never said much. But he thought a lot,” Mrs Cousins said.

  The quaver at the end of the sentence was swallowed in the clink of china, as Mrs Cousins, mixing sentiment with the practical, swept a half row of sandwiches from one plate to fill another.

  Lance told Daphne he would take Amy to Petersham, then “slip” across to Newtown to attend to something at Lincolns. Would she tell Allan when he returned that he would call for him on the way back to Randwick? Daphne, watching Amy’s back and her raised arms as she put on her little navy straw hat with the binding of pale gold on the brim, did not notice that Lance made no reference to Kathleen, who, he suddenly decided, could find her way to Petersham by any method she chose.

  In her bedroom, Amy began to unbutton her yellow dress which reached high to her throat and had a little stand-up collar piped in yellow and white stripes. Lance took her hands away and finished the job, and she noticed how deft his fingers were, hardly fumbling at all.

  She put her head right over his shoulder for she was nearly as tall as he, and her lips were pressed into his warm back, which was rippling gently with the unbuttoning.

  “I’m tired of waiting,” was all she said.

  36

  Going home in the car, Lance and Allan each thought about telling the other what had taken place when Lance took Amy to Petersham and Allan took Kathleen to the park.

  They had travelled to within a mile of Randwick when Allan, feeling he might burst from his navy blue suit, suddenly yelled out: “Dad! Pull over!”

  Lance ran the car under a straggling gum beside a park where several small boys with shirts hanging out waded home through long grass, arms around homemade cricket bats and stumps, and a woman pushed a bumbling pram with a child inside, clinging with fat dimpled hands to the sides.

  Lance took the scene in briefly, looking at the woman for a resemblance to Amy, disappointed he couldn’t see the child’s face without understanding why, then turned his attention to Allan.

  Allan’s face was quite red, and he plucked at the cloth of his trousers over his knees. Lance ran his hand around the rim of the steering wheel and slapped it lightly. His little smile contained a recollection of Amy’s tousled head coming out from under her peeled-off yellow dress, and how hurriedly she had smoothed her hair, more embarrassed about that than her near nakedness.

  “They’re not sisters at all, Dad!” Allan said with great urgency.

  “I know,” Lance said.

  “She told you!” Allan cried as if Amy had betrayed Kathleen.

  “She didn’t have to,” Lance said. He started up the car and Allan called, “Wait!”

  But Lance said, “Son, I know a lot more about women than you,” and turned the nose of the Buick towards Randwick.

  John drove Kathleen to Petersham, silent most of the way, not sorrowing so much for Dudley as fearing Helen’s mood on his return home. She had flounced to the kitchen when Mrs Cousins ordered her to help clean up after the meal, and John felt his manhood might be in question since he had not insisted on bringing her for the ride. At Petersham, Kathleen slammed the truck door hard, and once inside the house threw her sailor hat on Amy’s lounge.

  Amy was in one of the chairs in her petticoat with bare feet and legs, thinking of the chair back as Lance’s chest and how she rolled her head around on it, and stretched her legs against his yellowish ones when their lovemaking was done and they both knew they must dress and he must go. But for Kathleen, he could be here still, she thought, and lowered her eyes, afraid her resentment might show.

  After a moment she opened them on Kathleen’s flushed face, with eyebrows at odd angles like tarantula’s legs above eyes cold with blue chips.

  Lance had ignored her when he called for Allan. “We must go!” he called to Allan who scrambled into the car and (Kathleen thought) gave an almost resentful look in her direction as if she were at fault. He was all tenderness and sympathy in the park, blaming Amy if anyone for the deceit; he seemed proud of her for her confession. He couldn’t change an opinion as quickly as that, Kathleen thought, fearful that he had.

  Then John hadn’t wanted to bring her home to Petersham; the dual rejection made her want to lash out at Amy, soft and pretty there in her chair like a newly fed gold and white kitten.

  “Greasy Guts is not strong on manners, Amy, be warned of that!”

  She shed her shoes by dragging them by the heels along the carpet.

  Amy did not say anything. Her lips and eyes stayed tender.

  “Amy!” Kathleen called, banging a heel on the floor. Amy slid downwards in her chair and spread her knees under her petticoat and thought, he might have got me with child. You never know, but I don’t need to think about that just now, only about the next time. Please God, oh please, let it not be too far off.

  “Amy!” Kathleen shouted, very straight of back and leaning very far forward. “They know about us!”

  “You told him,” Amy said quite pleasantly, as if she was merely making polite conversation.

  “The deceit was terrible!” Kathleen shouted, as if Amy needed to be stirred to angry argument.

  “Then there is no more deceit,” Amy said, shaking out her hair and pressing both hands to the back of her head. The gesture said a big debt had been paid, a long illness had been cured. Freedom was beautiful.

  “Did you tell him?” Kathleen asked, her eyes on Amy’s quiet face and lowered eyelids.

  “I didn’t need to.” Amy opened her eyes very wide and looked straight into Kathleen’s. “He saw the stretch marks on my belly.”

  “How disgusting! What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He just kissed them.”

  37

  It was nearly six months before Amy became pregnant.

  Every month when she discovered she wasn’t, she felt let down, as if she was cheating in her love for Lance, then in a little while she would feel relief that she did not have to face the trauma of a pregnancy. I guess I must be a little mad, she decided.

  Patricia came in the winter, fifteen and smart in a navy blue coat with silver buttons.

  “Dad bought it for me,” she said, running a finger along the stitching on one of the side pockets. Amy waited for her to raise her eyes to see if this was some sort of joke. She did look up, then quickly away to a pair of fat china cats on the mantlepiece that Lance had bought for Amy when they passed through the china and glassware department one day on their way out of Anthony Horderns. Patricia’s face, a nice open one with some freckles and a brown fringe, went soft at the sight of them, then wistful, wishing for a pair like that for her grandmother.

  “He’s the yardman at the Moruya hotel,” Patricia said, taking in the rest of the lounge room with travelling brown eyes.

  Amy sat. Kathleen did too, and her face said, this is indeed interesting.

  “What’s he look like?” Amy asked, then asked herself why did I say that when it doesn’t matter at all.

  “Alright,” Patricia said. “Fat.” Then she looked down on her coat as if repenting and stroked a button. “Not real fat. Just a bit.”

  “Is he by himself?” Kathleen asked. Amy flinched. Patricia looked puzzled.

  “He was,” she said. “He was sweeping the yard.”

  In a moment she broke the silence. “Norman told us he was there so we went to see him.”

  “Who went?” asked Amy.

  “Granma and I.” She went and stroked one of the cats. “Then he came out to the farm to see Lebby and brought me the coat.” For the first time she looked in Amy’s face. “Because I was coming here.”

  Norman had brought Patricia to Sydney, and arriving late in the evening took her to Daphne’s, then caught a tram back to Central to get a train to Queensland. Norman was having a holiday with Fred who was now working on a sugarcane farm outside Gympie. Fred had not gone home to Diggers Creek after the war. He met an Army nurse while in camp at Enoggera and the girl’s father gave him work after he was demobbed.

  Fred sent
twenty pounds to Norman to come north for the holiday, the first in his life. It was partly an expression of gratitude that Fred had avoided active service and Norman had stayed at Diggers Creek with the old pair, dreary as the prospects were compared to his life with Beryl. But Fred asked Norman not to “let on” to Beryl where the holiday money came from.

  “Beryl wants us to get a place of our own and she wants to keep on nursing after we’re married,” Fred wrote. “It’s only fair for me to watch the pennies too. Mum’s the word, as we used to say.”

  Gus described his future daughter-in-law as a bloody tightwad and wanted nothing to do with any woman who went out to work after she was married.

  John and Daphne brought Patricia to Petersham, where they were received by an astonished Amy and a surprised but subdued Kathleen, doing her best to monitor the conversation to ensure there was no reference to the letter she had sent to Diggers Creek, suggesting Patricia come to Sydney.

  In a little while Amy, feeling like a swimmer trying to keep afloat with an eye on the shore at the same time, sat abruptly on the arm of one of her chairs. Controlling the restlessness of her hands by pinning them between her knees, she murmured that it was perhaps unfortunate she was going out that evening, it being Saturday and the rare event of a date at the movies with Lance.

  “No need for anyone to get up to boiling point,” Daphne said, patting the space on the lounge beside her and sending an invitation with her eyes to Patricia to sit there.

  She brushed Patricia’s overlong fringe out of her eyes.

  “She’s the livin’ spit of May at the same age,” she said. “We’ll get a pair of scissors to that fringe. Where has John got to?”

  Amy was glad to go and look for John. She reached the kitchen as his big boots crunched the gravel outside the kitchen door.

  He had been inspecting the back garden, a little wistful of face, Amy thought, since he no longer came at weekends to work with her. He looked around the kitchen wistfully, still seeing the small jobs he’d done for her, the last a board with hooks where she hung her two saucepans and frying pan. He noticed a loose knob on a dresser door, waggled it and said he would get some wood glue from the truck and fix it.

  Amy watched while he took the knob off, then set it in place with the glue applied, lining it up with its companion with a measuring eye. She wondered if he was thinking of Helen, doing jobs of this kind for Helen.

  When he drew in his lips to whistle through them she decided he wasn’t, that he had no thoughts at all beyond making the knob secure and leaving no smudge of glue on the scrubbed pine. His marriage to Helen was, Amy believed, Helen’s idea. One day perhaps he would look down on the heads of his children and ask himself why did I do that? And then he would look at Helen, a stranger there, plump and comfortable in an old dress, or thin and nagging in an old dress.

  What way will it be then for Lance and me? she asked herself, but seeing no answer anywhere and wanting to change the subject in her mind went into the lounge room.

  She saw with surprise Patricia’s brown head in the curve of Daphne’s arm. It’s terrible the way I keep forgetting my children, Amy thought, sitting gingerly on the small space left on the lounge, wanting to take hold of Patricia’s hand but feeling she had no right to.

  Patricia went to live with Daphne.

  A week later Amy was pretty sure she was pregnant.

  38

  Daphne knew even before Lance.

  Amy got up very early one Sunday morning, about three weeks after Patricia came, to walk to the Coxes. She left a note for Kathleen who was still asleep, saying they were out of milk and she would look for a shop open at that hour and buy a bottle.

  She had slept hardly at all. She alternated between joy at the thought of the coming child and terror at the difficulties she would face. She tried to remember when her stomach began to swell with the other children and had to face the fact that with each successive pregnancy her waist thickened earlier.

  She sat up quite wildly in bed and clutched her middle as if to try and curb the rising that had already begun. She looked through the window, her wan face on the wan night. Her pillow had grown icy cold without her head, and back on it she rubbed it with her cheek, making it colder with her tears.

  Why wasn’t Lance here beside her to share her secret? Oh, the baby will be beautiful! A boy, a boy, a son! Oh, I’m so glad, so glad! Lance! Lance! Be glad too! Whatever will become of us! She pulled the blankets over her head and cried herself to sleep.

  No one was up at Coxes when she got there. The back door was never locked so she went in that way.

  “Who?” Daphne called the moment Amy’s feet touched the step into the hall.

  “Me, Aunty Daph,” Amy said and took off her coat at the bedroom door.

  “I came out for milk.” She looked down at her shoes and saw with half her worrying mind that they would need repairing soon.

  Daphne’s hair was loosely plaited over one shoulder. It should have made her look younger, but instead she looked older in her pintucked white nightgown than in her house dress with the hair scraped back in a bun. Dudley’s pillow was on the bed when it was made up in the daytime. At night it rested on a chair. Amy saw it tossed away like Dudley’s lifeless body and tears came into her eyes. She moved it gently and sat on the space left.

  Daphne raised herself in bed watching. There seemed nothing for Amy to do but turn her hands palms upwards in the lap of her tweed skirt and stare at the button fastening it to one side, wondering if she only imagined the buttonhole stretched with strain. A car rumbled past and Amy wondered who would have what mission so early in the morning, and then thought it might be someone going to hospital to have a baby. A silence followed, then the rattle of a milkman’s cart, and Amy switched her thoughts to the need to get milk. She considered running out and hailing the driver, except that Daphne’s expression riveted her to the chair.

  “How long you gone over?” Daphne asked.

  Amy jumped only slightly; it was hardly noticeable. Her hands gripped and then released the chair arms. She got up, leaving her shoes to fall over, and got into the bed in Dudley’s old place and howled like a terrified child.

  Daphne took her in her arms. Amy smelt moth balls and flesh, some mustiness and hair with a faint odour of soap, and felt a hard bone in Daphne’s shoulder against her chin and the soft sponge of Daphne’s cheek on her forehead.

  Daphne’s hand pressed Amy’s head onto the end of her pillow and the other hand pinned her body to the bed.

  “Cry quiet,” she whispered. “So’s not to wake the others.”

  “Is Patricia alright?” Amy asked, wiping her eyes dry by rubbing them in Daphne’s hair.

  “Course she is,” Daphne said. “She starts a job Monday.”

  Amy hit Daphne’s nose with her sharply raised head. “I won’t be able to work soon. Whatever will I do?”

  Daphne swung herself out of bed with the speed and energy of an eighteen-year-old. She had belted her flannel dressing gown at the waist in the time it took Amy to sit up, surprise chasing some of the tragedy from her face.

  “I’ll come back with a cuppa tea,” Daphne said. But Amy scrubbed her face dry with a piece of sheet and followed Daphne to the kitchen.

  “I should be thanking you for helping Patricia get a job,” Amy said, unable to suppress the self-pity in her voice. “I can’t seem to think of anything but—you know. It.” On the couch now she rubbed one stockinged foot upon the other.

  Daphne gave the handle of the kettle a little shake as if this would hurry the boiling. “There’s a few worries storin’ up here too, make no mistake about that.” She unhooked two cups and set them on saucers with hardly any noise in spite of the angry jerking of her arms.

  Worries! Amy heard the word with an odd sense of relief. There were others with worries then, apart from her. She watched for Daphne’s grey flannel shoulders to turn so that she could see her face.

  She saw the changes since Dudley’s dea
th. Daphne’s complexion had always been muddy, now the muddiness had darkened. There was more grey in her hair, still hanging loose.

  “You should put a bit of colour on that gown,” Amy said, making her eyes very round in a bid to restrain her tears.

  Daphne looked down at herself.

  “Just a bit of contrast on the collar and cuffs,” Amy said. “There’d be something in your work basket if we looked.”

  Amy went for Daphne’s wicker sewing basket, which was leaning to one side with age, its lid like a hat covering eyes ashamed that it could no longer maintain a youthful pose. Amy searched among the ends of material, until she caught up a roll of braid and allowed it to unfold, her face taking on a pleased look that the piece was long enough, and the red and black pattern on white ideal for a trimming. Daphne peeled off her gown and Amy caught it as Daphne tossed it towards the machine and set to work, sniffing just a little, and with the tip of her tongue in the corner of her mouth to catch a tear if one or two fell. “Two strips on the collar, one on the cuffs and across the pocket. I’ll only need to unpick the pocket part way down.” Amy found Daphne’s scissors in a machine drawer and clattered them on the raised flap, and wriggling her bottom on her chair, set her feet firmly on the treadle.

  Daphne, looking terribly large in her nightgown, put a cup of tea at Amy’s elbow and carried her own to her bedroom. The machine was running and Amy’s head was bowed close to the braid when Daphne returned with her hair unplaited over her cardigan. The whirring machine and the slosh of water in the bathroom and the clatter of brush and comb on the marble shelf under the mirror made Amy wonder for a moment if anything was really different about the morning.

  Patricia heard too and came out with the quilt from her bed wrapped around her.

  “Your Ma’ll have to make you a dressing gown,” Daphne said, the braid now in place on the pocket reflecting the brightness in her guarded eyes.

  Patricia swept the quilt around her in sudden joy.