by Robbi Neal
‘I can find us somewhere dry and we can keep each other warm.’
‘Yeah, and what if your nosy neighbour catches us? She knows where I work, doesn’t she,’ said Beth. ‘And we ain’t married, remember.’ She waggled her ring finger in his face.
Young Colin pushed his hand under the thick wool of her coat and rested it on her breast. He nuzzled his head into her neck under her scarf and she giggled because it tickled, which wasn’t the effect he was after. Frustrated that he still couldn’t persuade her to go up the lane he sighed and stood up. Nothing was going his way today. He walked to the other end of the verandah.
‘Sulking now, are we?’ she asked, and he was relieved when his mother called them both in to tea because he was sulking but he didn’t want to admit it. Sulking wasn’t manly.
‘When’s your dad coming back then?’ asked Beth as they resumed their spot on the verandah after dinner. Colin shrugged. He didn’t like talking about his dad going off and leaving him and his mum with five younger nippers to feed.
‘I dunno, Mum reckons he’s most likely gone to Hamilton and maybe his girlfriend’s gone up there with him, but I reckon he’s just gone on a bender and can’t find his way home. Or maybe he’s in a lock-up till he dries out. But he’s been gone a good long while,’ he said as he tried to get his hand up her skirt.
‘You’re not getting any,’ said Beth. ‘Not here with that old busybody Nurse Drake looking out her window.’
‘She’s got her own fella,’ said Colin, ‘so she shouldn’t be throwing no stones.’
Beth pulled away from him. ‘Go on.’
Colin sighed, he didn’t want to have to bother telling her about Nurse Drake’s business. He was over talking for the day, a man had other things he’d rather be doing. Now he wished he hadn’t said anything because he knew she’d persist till she got it out of him.
‘What’ll you give me if I tell you?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Come on, tell me.’
‘What’ll you give me then?’ He threw out his hands like he had nothing in the world until she filled them with her something.
‘You tell me or you won’t ever get nothing again!’ she said, walloping him on the arm.
‘Oww,’ he cried, making out he was hurt. She hit him again, this time harder. ‘Oh all right, before you beat the living daylights out of me. She’s a married woman, right, and her husband’s a miner in Bendigo and she has a boyfriend on the side. One of the local coppers. He comes round thrice a week regular as clockwork. Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday arvo.’
Beth almost couldn’t believe it. Nurse Drake committing unholy adultery? Colin lived next door to her so he’d know if it was true.
Colin could see she was in two minds about believing him, so he said, ‘Hey these ain’t houses like the Cottingham’s round the blasted lake, there ain’t no gardens and bushes planted just so your neighbour can’t see your dirty deeds.’
There were no secrets here. He watched her look at the space between the houses. She looked disappointed now that she believed him. Now she knew this piece of news it didn’t seem as exciting as when she didn’t know it and could still imagine all sorts of possibilities. He saw his chance of getting a bit of comfort fly away.
‘Come on, it’s dark and too cold to be sitting out here any longer. Walk me back to Webster Street,’ she said, opening her umbrella. ‘And pick me a rose on the way like Mister Hooley does for Edie.’ She slipped her arm through his.
Young Colin’s face darkened. She was always on about Mister Hooley. Mister Hooley this and Mister Hooley that. ‘Blimey I hate that geezer!’ he said.
‘Why?’ asked Beth pulling away from him. ‘How could anyone hate Theo Hooley?’
‘Think about it,’ he said. ‘How are the rest of us blokes ever to live up to his antics? A rose a week on her doorstep. All the kids following him up there, the women mooning over him as he passes their houses. I ain’t getting you no rose, Beth. You have to just take me as I am.’ And he stood tall, pleased he’d put it to her like a real man, a grown man who wouldn’t put up with any ruckus from his missus.
But it cost him because Beth removed her arm from his and sulked after that and he got wet from the rain because the umbrella wasn’t large enough for the two of them unless they stayed close. Beth looked longingly at every rose bush they passed and he seethed because he was green to the gills at the way she always went on about Theo Hooley.
Reading his fiery thoughts and unable to step away from the flame, Beth said, ‘Mister Hooley told me how to preserve rose petals.’
‘What’re you going to do with them? Serve them up with custard?’
And she laughed and forgave him for his moodiness and put her arm back through his and he patted her hand and thought how he loved her and could spend the rest of his life listening to that laugh. His mum said laughter was the secret to a happy union, which meant he and Beth would be real happy.
Saturday, 9 May 1908, when Young Colin makes a decision.
The next day Colin got up at 3 a.m. like he always did. He put on his clothes that were stiff with cold and rubbed his hands together to bring his fingers to life. His mum had packed him some bread in a tin case and tea in a thermos and it was waiting on the kitchen table for him. The rest of the family were still asleep. Davo Conroy, who lived in Number 3, was waiting out the front and they walked to work together.
‘Uncle Davy, think I’ll marry Beth when I’m twenty-one.’
‘You’ve got a four-year wait if you’re going to wait till twenty-one, mate.’
‘Beth seems to like a man who can wait,’ said Colin bitterly.
Seventeen
Beth
Sunday, 29 October 1911, when secrets are made and kept.
The laundry was outside, a little room that sat on the far edge of the back verandah. Inside it there was a large copper and a concrete double sink with a wringer that perched between the two sinks; there were shelves, neat and evenly spaced like railway tracks that went all the way up to the ceiling. Normally the shelves held the glass preserving bottles. If the preserving had just been done, the jars would sit on the shelves like autumn, filled with the shades of burnt orange and lime green of peaches, pears, figs, grapes and apricots. Over winter these would slowly disappear and be replaced with clean empty bottles waiting for the next year’s fruit. The laundry door was usually jammed ajar with a wedge of firewood. That way Beth could easily carry the laundry or the bottles of preserves in and out without having to bother with the door latch. Now the door was not only shut and latched, it was bolted and locked. Beth wouldn’t let anyone in the laundry, and what was even more concerning to Edie was that she was doing all the laundry in the kitchen, by hand, without the wringer or the copper, and wouldn’t explain why. Even more mysteriously she wouldn’t let anyone inside the laundry, they couldn’t even peek in. Beth was immovable. No one was allowed to look inside the laundry.
‘Oh, come on, Beth, you can tell me. Why you won’t let us in the laundry?’ pleaded Edie.
‘I don’t understand why you are doing the laundry in the kitchen,’ said Paul. ‘We have a perfectly good laundry and there is nothing wrong with it. I think I should demand that you use the laundry properly and whatever you have locked up in there needs to see the light of day.’
But Beth turned on her heel and said, ‘Well, Mister Cottingham, the day you feel I am not doing a good enough job is the day you can give me the sack but the laundry stays locked.’
Beth remembered the exact date that Theo told her about the roses. It was Sunday the fifth of January 1908.
Beth had said to him, ‘You and your roses. It’s all very well to leave a rose on the porch each week Mister Hooley but who do you think it is that has to clean up the mess it makes on the porch?’ And as soon as she said the words she wished she hadn’t. She had been too mean. Her words had cut his heart. She could see the grey wash over his face, his eyes became dull and his skin paled as if she had brushed away his life w
ith no care at all. He was devastated that Edie left his roses on the porch to wither, and Beth had to clean them up.
‘I had hoped Edie would have collected the rose after I’d gone,’ he muttered.
‘She’s not the sort of girl that would do something romantic with them, Mister Hooley,’ Beth said softly, trying to close up the wound. ‘Her mind is filled with caring for Gracie, and besides she’s a practical girl.’ Not like me, she thought. If they were her roses she would put them under her pillow so their magic would make her dream of love.
Beth watched as he gathered himself together, stiffened and put his pain away somewhere she couldn’t see. He said lightheartedly, ‘Well, that’s a wicked waste, you could at least use the petals for tea,’ and he had told her how to dry roses by hanging them upside down.
‘Of course they lose their colour, shape and perfume,’ he’d explained. ‘If you want them to stay whole you have to get glue. You must carefully, with a toothpick, put glue at the base of each petal. Then you must smear the glue down the stalk to where you want to cut it. About, say, two inches. Then snip the stalk where the glue ends, fast but carefully so as not to disturb the bloom, and seal the end of the stalk with the glue. Then when the glue has dried get a container, like a tin, and fill it with two inches of sand, then place the bloom upright in the sand and put it somewhere safe to dry out for four weeks. It will dry as a complete bloom that you can carefully lift out of the sand when you want to.’
‘Who would want to bother with all that nonsense?’ she’d said.
At first she collected the roses because she thought that one day Edie might change her mind and want them, and then she began to collect them for herself. To her, the roses Theo left on the porch were the seeds of undying love. She had even thought that maybe she could feed Colin rose tea from the petals and make him love her with the same passion that Theo loved Edie; but she never did. Maybe because somewhere deep inside, somewhere she wasn’t yet willing to acknowledge, she was dissatisfied with Colin. But she didn’t know why, and when that feeling eked into her consciousness she would push it away and remind herself that of course she loved Colin. If she had spoken about it to her sister, Dottie would have laughed and told her that if she had to remind herself she loved Colin, then she obviously didn’t. ‘We’ll marry one day, Beth,’ Colin would say after he had taken her up the laneway and frantically plunged himself into her and her heart would sink, because marrying wasn’t necessarily the same as undying love.
Each Sunday after Theo’s visit, Beth carefully gathered up the rose and carried it, hidden in her apron, to her bedroom. There she jammed the door shut with her bedside chair. From her drawer, she got the glue she had cooked on the stove and sealed in a jar and the toothpicks she had purchased and very carefully followed the instructions Theo had given her. When the glue had dried she placed the rose into a clean preserving jar already filled with sand from Gracie’s sandpit.
She used a different glass jar each week. If it was a half-pint jar she cut the stem shorter and left it longer for a one-pint jar. She always made sure to have a jar clean and thoroughly dry and filled with sand ready for the next week’s rose. Sometimes when there wasn’t a spare jar she would look in the pantry for one that was nearly empty and when Edie and Mister Cottingham weren’t around she would quickly tip the syrupy fruit into the compost and wash the jar and dry it ready for her rose. She thought of them as her roses now. Even though he brought them for Edie. When she had carefully placed the bloom in the jar, she cut a strip of brown paper, wrote the date on it and glued the label to the jar. She then carried the jar to the laundry and put it on the shelf. She kept the jars in order, putting the date on them the way you did with anything you were preserving so that you knew how long you had had it. Beth knew that she had one hundred and ninety-nine jars of dried roses filling every inch of the small laundry. Beth had soon used up the three dozen jars the Cottinghams owned and so had to scrounge jars from everyone she knew. ‘Oh, do you have a few spare preserving jars I could borrow?’ she asked the women at church and her sister Dottie and when they looked at her and waited for an explanation she said, ‘Oh, I’m making preserves for the church fete.’
‘Well, you are thinking ahead,’ the churchwomen said, but Dottie had dropped her head to the side, scrunched up her lips and looked hard at Beth and Beth knew Dottie didn’t believe her and was waiting for the truth. But Beth couldn’t tell anyone what the jars were really for. She knew she couldn’t keep borrowing jars, especially from Dottie, and so she used her saved sovereigns to purchase more. They came in a box of a dozen and after the first two boxes Mister Turnbull, with his wife staring over his shoulder, said, ‘What on earth are you preserving, Beth, that you need so many jars?’
And she said, ‘Body parts, Mister Turnbull,’ and looked pointedly at Missus Turnbull so that she stepped back and pretended she was busy making up bags of tea.
Beth preserved as little fruit as she could get away with. She felt that using the jars for fruit was a waste, they had a more important purpose. So she only served preserved fruit when the Cottinghams asked for it, and most of the time they didn’t think about the fact that the fruit always seemed to be stewed now.
Eventually Beth could no longer move in the laundry without the risk of knocking the jars over and she didn’t want to do that — the longer the roses sat preserved in their jars the more sacred they became. So now she did the washing in the kitchen.
Eighteen
The Birthday
Sunday, 5 November 1911, when there is no remedy for what ails Beth.
The summer heat was returning but it was not going to be like the year when Gracie was born. The sun was muted by calm breezes and unable to yell out fiercely.
The days were cool in the mornings and cooler again in the afternoons, which everyone felt was the proper way of things for Ballarat. During the day the warm northerly breezes teased the women’s skirts as they crossed the Doveton Street intersection and made them flounce deliciously. The skirts were getting shorter and rising well above the boot, making the old women scoff at the state of the world and making the miners smile, thinking things might at last be turning in their favour. The afternoons were pleasant and the lake was full and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons the townspeople ambled around it, agreeing that life would always be like it was right now and what more could anyone ask for.
In the early hours of Sunday morning, Beth and Gracie both lay awake in their beds. Beth’s bed had timber slats that had lost their varnish and no longer shone. Gracie’s bed was a brass one that had ceramic balls atop each of its posts with hand-painted pictures on them of ladies on garden swings with bluebirds flying around their heads. Beth and Gracie were each lying perfectly still, though Gracie had her arm around her doll named for her mother Lucy. Gracie thought Lucy was the most beautiful doll she had ever seen, she had eyes that opened and shut and if Gracie used her little finger she could touch the tiny white teeth inside the doll’s smiling mouth. The doll had a white dress trimmed with lace and she had soft brown hair that curled slightly at the ends.
Gracie could hardly move as her body was in a commotion, every part of her tingled with excitement. She felt it down in her toes and she stretched them to see if the tingling disappeared but it didn’t and it coursed all the way up to her head, where her hair was tied in cotton rags to keep its curl. Gracie wanted to savour the tingling and she smiled because today was special but tomorrow wouldn’t be and so the tingling wouldn’t be there tomorrow when she woke up. It was here for today only and she was going to make the most of it and make the feeling last as long as possible. It was here because it was her birthday. She wondered for a moment what her birthday presents would be and if Beth had made her a cake. But mostly she enjoyed knowing that today would be a perfect day because it was her birthday.
As soon as Beth opened her eyes, she knew it was a special day. Her body tingled all over with expectation. She lay with her hands by her sides, under the bedc
lothes, and felt the trembling begin in her toes and swim this way and that up through her body as she tried to think of why it was a special day. Gracie had grown from a sickly baby into a robust child and today she was six years old. But Beth knew that wasn’t it. There was something else, something that was hiding itself from her.
Beth’s thoughts drifted to Colin Eales and she absently twisted the engagement ring he had put on her finger a few weeks ago. ‘There you are, Beth,’ he’d said. ‘You’re mine good and proper now. Next year you and I are twenty-one and we’ll marry.’ He hadn’t asked her and he hadn’t waited for an answer, he’d just assumed they belonged together. Round and round she turned that ring while she thought of his needy kisses and the way the silly blighter would quickly peck her on the cheek over and over, trying to get the kissing done as quickly as possible so he could throw his hand down her blouse to grab hold of her breast. And when he did grab hold of her breast he held tight like he had just got the best toy and was going to hold on so the other boys didn’t come and take it. Sometimes he would get his other hand up her skirt and once he got that far she would give in and let him have what he wanted, which he would take quickly, as though he had to gulp her down before someone took her away. But more and more lately she would push him away and he would say, ‘But we’re engaged, Bethie.’
‘Engaged isn’t married,’ she’d say and walk back down the lane and stand where Nurse Drake could watch them through her window.
Beth’s thoughts travelled to Theo Hooley, and how he stood on the porch waiting patiently for Edie. For over five years that man had been waiting. How did he have such constancy? She wondered if his lovemaking would be slow and careful like his life. They said he could never find his words but he never had trouble finding a few choice words for her when he came to the door. He’d lecture her on her rudeness, or tell her she knew nothing about reading the clouds for a weather forecast, or that she should be more informed about what was going on in the world if she really cared about women’s rights as much as she claimed she did. Or he’d tell her of the punishment she’d receive if she was a digger in the army and tried that rudeness on a superior. But while he said all these things there was a curve to his lip and she didn’t know if he was serious or just teasing her.