‘Is she a dancer?’
‘She was. She’s old now.’
‘We certainly won’t stay long, but how lovely to hear Swan Lake in a street, out of the blue. Mother used to play records of dances and we had a lovely time while Father prayed with the cows.’
The gate was not only unlocked, but slightly open. Angel led Miss Varnham and Barnaby Grange around to the laundry door. She hoped Elsa might be close by but there was no sound, even after she quietly knocked.
‘Aunt Elsa lives downstairs. She’s probably in the kitchen. I’ll go in and have a look. You stay here – I won’t be long.’
‘Take your time, dear girl. We’ll look at the garden won’t we, Barnaby?’
‘All gone to seed, the garden,’ said Elsa, suddenly appearing at the door. ‘Angel – who are these people?’
‘These are my friends, Miss Varnham and Mister Grange. I told you about them. I wanted them to meet you. They brought tomatoes for you and onion and—’
‘How do you do? I’m not used to visitors.’ Elsa patted her practically non-existent hair. Angel thought she looked very serious.
‘We won’t disturb your busy day – we’ve heard so much about you.’ Winifred took Elsa’s hand in hers and pressed it warmly. She gave her the bag. ‘Just a few poor things for the pot.’ And Elsa, not used to gifts of any kind, glanced inside the bag, smiled and pressed it to her breast. It could have been diamonds.
‘Jessie’s here, Angel. Clara won’t come down.’
Angel explained in her way.
‘Jessie owns this house. She teaches at the – university and she’s a real witch!’
‘Angel! Stop it!’ said Elsa sternly. ‘O, my goodness! Come in, all of you and I’ll make a cup of tea.’
‘We’ve just had lunch but I’d love to meet Jessie and see the old house – and so close to the harbour. I hope the other aunt joins us.’ Winifred swept into the house behind Elsa as though she owned the place. ‘Come along, Barnaby.’ Winifred lowered her voice close to Elsa’s ear. ‘Maths genius.’
In Elsa’s sitting room sat Jessie – spine straight as steel – clothes on the black side of black, with her long plait sitting still and stiff and not a hair out of place.
‘O, how absolutely gorgeous! I’ve always wanted very long hair but not to be, not to be. All I have is the bun with a stick through it. How do you do?’
Jessie turned, still sitting, and with eyes the colour of her spine regarded Winifred Varnham with a look that could well have been fatal.
‘Who is this woman?’
‘Miss Varnham and Mister Grange are friends of Angel’s,’ Elsa said in a voice that quavered a little. ‘And they have come for tea.’
‘Tea?’
‘Yes,’ said Angel. ‘And we brought presents for Elsa and Clara and nothing for you and I brought a maidenhair fern from the gully in my bag and—’
Jessie snatched the bag from her and looked inside.
‘It’s dead.’
‘Such a shame,’ said Winifred. ‘Perhaps it just needs water.’
‘You don’t tell me when a plant is dead or not. There’s not a plant in this country I cannot identify and I know when it’s dead! I am highly regarded—’
‘Miss Frost at school, Mother.’ Suddenly, in words. And Barnaby shared a smile with the floorboards. Jessie glared at him disbelievingly.
‘I’ll put the kettle on.’ Elsa had almost made it to the kitchen when Clara appeared at the door.
‘What on earth’s going on here?’
‘Intrusions! How dare you and Elsa allow this child to invite strange people to tea!’ Even though Jessie stood away from the chair, the highly disciplined plait did not move an inch from her spine. ‘People from cheap boarding houses with no purpose in life – girls! Girls with nothing to do but break their nails and paint their faces like clowns. University full of them!’ Words bitter as green berries, straying off the matter at hand. Winifred was astonished.
‘Are you always so angry?’
‘How dare you!’
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Elsa, so grateful for the diversion. From upstairs Stravinsky thumped through the floorboards.
‘That’s The Rite of Spring,’ said Angel. ‘I bet you didn’t know that, Jessie.’
‘Twenty.’ In words.
‘Aunt Clara used to teach ballet here. There was a barre and a mirror.’
‘How lovely, Angel,’ said Winifred. ‘I was only just a moment ago telling the others that Mother used to dance while Father prayed. Do you dance or pray, Jessie?’
‘How dare you!’
‘Just curious – not the slightest offence intended. But I have to say that you remind me more of my father than my mother.’
‘Tell them why you’re here, Jessie,’ Clara asked unexpectedly.
‘Naturally to keep an eye on my property.’
‘And collect the rent?’
‘It’s time – and a perfectly normal thing for a property owner to do.’
‘You know they haven’t got it,’ said Angel with her fists clenched and standing straight up and down.
‘England.’ In words.
Jessie flapped like a crow on heat.
‘Mad people – mad! – all of you. Get out of my house!’
‘I cannot imagine why you are so angry, Madam, but it is very deep and very bad for your health,’ said Winifred. ‘I think your university has left the dust of ages and its stone walls and stuffy halls in a brain that craves fresh air. It is possible that it has been too long since you’ve studied a plant in a gully or a field and felt happy to be doing so—’
‘Stop! Who on earth do you think you are!’
‘She is the Duchess of Nullabri,’ said Angel. ‘And the grandest lady in this room.’
‘England – England.’ In words again, shaking his head and laughing at distant memories.
Before Jessie could respond, Elsa came in with a tray of tea and biscuits she had made and a small jug of milk. She was about to put the tray onto the small table by the window when Jessie cried, ‘Take that away! Take it all away!’ Jessie flapped onto the chair. ‘I’ll not have insanity brought into my house, uninvited, to use our rations.’ And Elsa got such a fright she dropped everything onto the floor and there was tea and milk and biscuits all over the place and she rushed to the kitchen and back, in tears, crying ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry’ as Stravinsky came to a dramatic end. Clara chuckled for the first time in a very long time and nobody noticed.
‘Have you told her yet?’ Clara said to Elsa while Elsa was doing what she was trained to do, kneeling at the feet of her betters with a towel and a brush pan. Though, to be fair, Angel helped.
‘What?’
‘Have you told Angel the news?’
‘O, I’m sorry, Clara, I forgot all about it.’
‘We have some news for you, Angel.’ Clara passed another tea towel down to Elsa.
‘What news?’
‘We’ve had a letter from your Uncle George – your mother’s brother.’
‘I didn’t know I had an Uncle George. I can’t remember my mother telling me.’
‘Well, he’s coming up from Melbourne and he wants to meet you.’
‘O?’
‘He’s coming here to this house next Sunday to meet you, Angel.’ Elsa was at last off her hands and knees, all of which were red and tough as indeed they’d been trained to be. ‘You’re always here on Sundays so we thought it would be easier.’
‘And when was I to be informed of this arrangement? When was my permission to be sought for such a meeting between a stranger from Melbourne and a scrap of a girl with half a brain?’
‘O, do stop spoiling things, woman.’ Winifred Varnham was annoyed and alarmed by Jessie’s attitude. ‘And just in case the meeting is unacceptable, Mister Grange and I will come to
o. And if you don’t want the meeting to take place in your house, we will simply go outside. Of course, we will generously donate food and beverage if it is required, but if the sun is shining a picnic outside would be very nice.’
‘What a good idea,’ said Elsa.
‘I’m going upstairs,’ said Clara. ‘I think the record’s stuck.’
Jessie was speechless.
Angel was very thoughtful. An uncle? She had never imagined an uncle of her own. She wondered if there were others – brothers and sisters. Angel’s mother never talked about her home in Melbourne. She wondered if Uncle George would look like her mother. Was he older or younger? Did he have a wife and Angel a family of cousins? Was he a nice man? She wondered what it would be like touching an uncle who was a stranger to her. She wondered about his hands – his fingers.
‘I’ll make fresh tea,’ said Elsa, who had pulled herself together remarkably. Training. ‘Why don’t you take your friends down the front to the rocks and show them the harbour and I’ll call you when the tea’s ready?’
‘Okay.’ And Angel opened the door that led to the fence and the rocks. She stood aside for the others to pass.
‘Angel – you have a stain on the back of your skirt …’
‘We sat on the grass, Elsa, and watched the ocean for a while. The grass was damp.’
‘I don’t think it’s grass, Miss Varnham.’
‘O, o, yes, I see …’
‘What is it?’ cried Angel. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Come with me. Angel. Come to the bathroom …’ And Elsa turned off the kettle, took some clean rags from a drawer, held Angel’s hand and led her away through the sitting room.
‘Now, what’s happening behind my back and nobody saying a word?’ Jessie, from the chair, and under a weak ray of sunlight.
‘O, do shut up!’ said Winifred and felt better for saying it. She and Barnaby strolled through the kitchen door and down to the rocks and the harbour.
‘Is Angel sick?’ In words.
‘No, Barnaby – not at all. Fit as a fiddle. She’ll be with us shortly. We’ll sit here for a while and enjoy the view. I wonder how Missus Potts is getting on with the husband from Brazil?’
And Barnaby laughed. He could laugh and frequently did so. He needed no numbers for his laugh. It was uncalculated and always pleasing to the ear.
The man from Brazil
That evening in the boarding house, the dining table’s war-effort food was consumed quietly and without complaint, since the diners, all eyes and ears, were more interested in the unusual events of the day, the atmosphere of the room and the mood of its proprietor. Angel Martin missed it all since she had to go to her broom cupboard with a belly ache after coming to one of life’s stumbling blocks for females, as Elsa explained along with the facts of life, telling her that she should lie down and think about it. So, in Angel’s absence it was Harry Potts who helped to clear away after the evening meal.
Poor thing, poor Harry, thin as a stick, plates stacked, teetering in one hand and the other holding up his pants. Even his hair seemed to have lost weight. It had been his first day back at Persia Potts’s Bushland Boarding Establishment – Reasonable Rates and, after more than a year’s absence, on that occasion it seemed to those who witnessed and listened, the ‘Welcome home, Harry Potts’ had not been going terribly well. It had all begun at three o’clock that afternoon.
‘You wouldn’t have a crust, would you, Missus?’ Creeping up behind her and frightening the daylights out of her at the clothesline with pegs in her mouth and bloomers tucked under her armpit. ‘And maybe a bit of a cuddle for your old Harry? I be coming home.’
‘I’ll give you coming home!’ Spitting out pegs and facing him. ‘Where the hell have you been all this time with me here working like a carthorse with not a minute to myself looking after mad people in this place and a man dead, still in one of the coppers’ ice chests with no one going anywhere near him and you – and you! Lying under a tree in the gully pretending to be a bushfire – I’ll give you coming home!’
‘That’s my girl! I be glad to be back.’
‘You shamed me, Harry Potts. What do you think I’m going to tell them now?’ Nodding her head towards the house. ‘They’ll all know what you are – a tramp, Harry Potts, nothing but a bludger and here’s me telling them you’re a timber man in Brazil. You bloody shamed me, Harry Potts.’
‘Brazil was thirty years ago, darlin’. Tell them I got brain damage from the mozzies. Tell them I lost my memory and didn’t know who I was. Tell them I was taken by the enemy and questioned – you’re good at stories.’ But Persia Potts had become very red in the face and her pupils had become small and she, without warning, hit Harry Potts’s left earlobe, which nearly knocked him off his feet but Harry just smiled and regarded her with affection.
‘Well, here I be, Persia, wanting a feed and some warmth and ready to work around the house and the grounds just like old times.’
‘And how long will that last, may I ask?’
‘Who can tell? I be getting too old for the swag, love. I just might stay and give you a hand.’
‘I’ll watch for the pigs flying,’ she said. But when he pecked her on the cheek – finding a spot between the copper burns – she didn’t flinch. ‘Then you’d better help with tea. There’s potatoes to peel and beans and the table to be set and … and well, you’ll have to clean up first. Get some of your old clothes out of my room, if they haven’t rotted away. I won’t have you seen the way you are. There’s a reputation to keep. The girl, Angel, helps for her keep but she had to go to bed – nice for some!’
‘I remember her. Down in the gully, nice girl – with a woman, tall, long dress, and a bloke, head down, sketching all over the place.’
‘All mad, that lot, but except for the girl don’t give much trouble. Go and find some clothes and keep yourself to yourself. I’ll see you in the kitchen after you’ve washed, Harry Potts, you stink to high heaven. Wash and start peeling.’
‘And then?’ He winked.
‘Tea!’
‘And then?’
‘There’s things to do and you don’t look at me like that, Harry Potts. Those days are long gone and look at you skin and bone and all of you shrunk to half the size …’
‘Not all of me be shrunk, Persia Potts.’
After the kitchen chores had been attended to, Missus Potts took off her pinny, wiped through her hair with a wet comb, and brought Harry to another broom cupboard at the front of the boarding house that served as a drawing room for guests. In the drawing room, there were two chairs close enough to strangle a two-seater lounge, and a standard lamp and four guests, one of whom sat so far under the mean light of the lamp the lampshade could have been his hat. He was a casual and absorbed in a book entitled Small Finds Without Provenance: A beginner’s guide and didn’t look up when Missus Potts, carrying a spare chair, crammed her husband into the room. Harry’s old clothes hung long and loose on his scarecrow frame. He wore a tie that didn’t go with anything at all and carried the overwhelming smell of mothballs. The others, including Winifred Varnham, had polite but distinctive question marks in their eyes.
‘Well, as you’ve already seen,’ said Missus Potts, ‘my Harry’s come back to me safe and sound, praise be.’
‘Where’s he been?’ someone asked with little interest.
‘Lost! Lost in the wild jungle of Brazil …’ Harry Potts sat still and quiet with head lowered as he’d been told to ‘… alone with nothing but logs of wood, wild animals and snakes as long as tram lines and all the time trying to get back to Duffy Street—’
‘Via Queensland?’ said Winifred Varnham.
‘No food, bitten from head to toe, malaria more than likely, dysentery, too. He would have been out of his mind and probably was most of the time.’ Aiming a glance at Winifred Varnham that could have been a near-deat
h experience. ‘Out of his mind and then, down the river on logs, a boat rescued him that was just about to sail to Queensland, Miss Varnham, Queensland, where they let him off to fend for himself and him nearly dying at that stage—’
‘You should write plays,’ said a woman with a newspaper. Even Harry had to wipe his eyes.
‘But still getting any work he could to survive – anything for a crust to keep him going but it all got the better of him and he lost his memory in Queensland, Miss Varnham – lost his memory of Duffy Street and me and the house but he just walked and walked to the south until he found the gully …’ Pointing behind her with her thumb. ‘And here he is! Praise be!’
‘What a story!’ said the woman with the newspaper.
‘Yes, indeed,’ added Winifred.
Harry raised his head at that point and quietly checked with his wife if it was all right to go out back and finish his beer. The guests were silent in the broom cupboard and Missus Potts sat on the chair vacated by Harry.
‘There!’ she said at last. Then to Winifred, ‘How is your sister, Miss Varnham?’
‘There has been some progress, Missus Potts.’
‘Good! I hope she gets better very, very soon.’ And Missus Potts sucked in her lips until they were as thin as paper cuts.
‘Any chance of a cup of tea, Missus Potts?’ asked the man with the book and the lampshade, who hadn’t listened to a word of the drama.
‘Tea’s off. There’s none left. You’re too late. I’m out of tea. It doesn’t grow on trees, you know.’ And she picked up the chair and stamped out of the room.
In the morning – and what a morning it was – the high northside air, fresh from the bush, was so pure it almost hurt to breathe. At eight o’clock birds were still waking in their nests and currawongs sang their particular morning song – so beautiful the trees would have clapped their leaves if they’d been able to.
The salt air of Sydney’s east, the salt air from the Bay. And Mariana was nice, too, different, but Angel had begun to find it cloying and irritating though she still sucked a strand of hair when no one was looking. Beyond that she thought it best to take salt in small doses. Sundays were enough. Sundays were no longer the same anyway. Her music still played, forever beautiful in its way but the colours of her music and the world were different.
The Aunts’ House Page 15