The Art of Preserving Love

by Robbi Neal

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘surprisingly I’m not.’

  He unbuttoned her woollen coat and slipped it off her shoulders and arms and he carefully folded it and put it at the corner of the blanket. Then he removed her cardigan, folding it and laying it on top of the coat. He kissed the top of her head and slipped her silk shirt up over her arms and he folded that and put it on top of her other clothes. She should stop right here and now. She had always believed that sex was for marriage, but then she thought I am thirty-five years old. I am old enough to make my own decisions and my own life and to be a companion. He sensed her hesitation and kissed her again and she forgot her qualms as he undid the zip on her skirt and it fell to her ankles. Then he picked her up and carried her over to the rug and laid her down gently, as though she had no weight at all, pulling her folded clothes to form a pillow under her head. He pulled the other blanket over them both and over their heads so they were in their own world. He pulled aside her silk chemise and kissed her breasts and she arched her back, reaching up to him. He trickled his fingers up her legs and inside her and a moan from somewhere deep in her soul was released and he smiled at her and moved on top of her and softly into her and she moaned again as he moved in gentle sweeps until he moaned himself and collapsed over her.

  She lay there in the darkness of the blanket. Realising she couldn’t breathe, she pulled it back and looked at the clouds and they laughed at her as they went on by with better things to look at. She thought, Well, that’s that. I’m a companion.

  He pulled her back under the blanket and kissed her hair and cheeks and his kisses were delicious and sweet and she felt so safe, she wanted to sleep in his arms, but he got up on his elbows and she had to move aside as he pulled his arm out from under her and pushed back the blanket to reach over into the picnic basket. He dangled a fig above her mouth. He lowered it so she could take a bite and said, ‘Are my kisses as good as this fig?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll need another bite of the fig to be sure.’

  He laughed and lay back down beside her and they pulled the rug in tight to trap their warmth and lay like that for a long time, occasionally pulling out sandwiches and fruit from the picnic basket.

  As it came close to five the weather dropped several degrees more as it always did and Edie shivered and even the blanket and Virgil weren’t enough to keep her from feeling the cold. He got up and pulled her to her feet and they dressed. They drove back in silence and he walked her to the door and kissed her goodbye. As she walked inside she hoped Gracie and Paul wouldn’t see that she was a different person.

  Forty

  The Beach

  Wednesday, 28 March 1923, Fitzroy, Melbourne, when Reuben tries to save Alice.

  The house in Gore Street, Fitzroy, was a small single-fronted cottage. It had a picket fence that was sweet and suggested grander things but instead enclosed eight feet by ten feet of brick paving that constituted a front yard and even less in the backyard. The house had a small hallway one person wide, running the length of it to the galley kitchen at the back. You needed to be in a good mood to use the galley kitchen because if there were two people in there it was impossible to move without bumping into each other. The kitchen contained a small table pushed hard up against the wall so you had to walk sideways to get past it. It had a washbasin and a cooker and an ice chest and two shelves high on the wall over the cooker. It looked out over the tiny backyard where two small children were playing with the dirt that ran between the brick paving, scooping out what they could to make into hills for their stick motor cars to drive through.

  Alice and Reuben were in the kitchen and Alice wasn’t in a good mood. She stood at the table peeling potatoes. Reuben sat at the end of the table, right in the corner of the kitchen which was where he wanted to be, hoping he could stay out of the firing line. He didn’t hold out much hope.

  ‘Australians have strange ways,’ Alice said loudly.

  There’s no need to yell, I’m right here, he thought.

  ‘They blurt out all manner of private information and they don’t even blush, and they do it all within the first fifteen minutes of meeting them. They tell you all their intimate details, and the intimate details of their neighbours, and I’m sure if they don’t know what those were they’d make them up. Urgh.’ She threw down the potato she was peeling and Reuben winced as it broke into pieces and scattered across the floor. He got down under the table and picked the pieces up. They couldn’t afford to waste food like that. Alice ignored him and she picked up another potato. He held onto the valuable pieces he had picked up.

  ‘They squawk like hens, the women do — that accent puts my teeth on edge. They call by without making an appointment, even on a Sunday afternoon. They put my kettle on the stove before I’ve even had time to offer them a cup of tea myself — oh, which of course doubles for a meal as well as a drink — and they whinge constantly about everything, especially their politicians. And this bloody heat!’

  Reuben winced again. He didn’t like her swearing. It wasn’t right for a woman to swear and not at all fitting for a pastor’s wife. He knew where she was going when she got worked up like this. It always went the same way: first her complaints about the new country and then her complaints about him.

  ‘And we’ve got no money. You’re not providing for us. Surely that is your first responsibility,’ she slammed the pot filled with potatoes and water onto the cooker.

  ‘We’re living by faith, Alice,’ he said, as he always did.

  She scowled at him. ‘Well, you mustn’t have much faith then because we are hungry,’ she said cruelly.

  Her words hurt and he braced himself for more, ‘I’m waiting for God to lead me to my flock,’ he said, reaching over and the putting the broken pieces of potato into the pot. He didn’t even have to leave his seat. ‘God hasn’t deserted us. The door just isn’t ready to be opened yet. Remember, Alice, when God shuts one door, he invariably opens another.’

  ‘Since we got off the boat, all I’ve seen is God shutting doors. We’re stuck in this grimy city, where we’re so close to the neighbours we can hear every argument they have and, even worse, we can hear every time they make up.’ Reuben winced for a third time. ‘If I put my hands out I can touch both sides of the house at once,’ she said.

  He started to say that was an exaggeration but thought better of it.

  ‘Look around you, Reuben. This isn’t what you promised me. Look at what we have: no land, no acres, no trees, no horizon, just a kitchen table, an ice chest, a bed, two kitchen chairs and some fruit boxes for the children to sit on and now there’s going to be a third.’ She counted off the items on her fingers.

  ‘I still get invited to preach when the Baptist Union can find a spot for me, and they’ve given us this house. I think they are being very welcoming all things considered,’ he said. Sometimes he was invited to be a guest preacher at Collins Street. At other times he travelled by train to Sandringham or Mount Martha as an interim preacher when their usual pastor was away. He would be paid his travel costs and a small fee for giving the sermon and someone would invite him to their house for lunch before he returned on the train. News of his skill as a preacher was spreading among the churches and he was getting more and more invitations. He was sure that soon a church would invite him to be their permanent pastor. He spotted a potato that had rolled onto the floor and under the cooker. He bent down and retrieved it and handed it to Alice. The potato was gnarled and green. She dusted it off and looked at it as if he had handed her poison.

  ‘I’m so tired of eating vegetable broth because that’s all we can afford to make. It makes my stomach churn.’

  He felt sorry for her then because it was true. She could only keep liquid down — she couldn’t stomach any actual vegetables. She complained all the time that there was something else inside her besides the baby and it was killing her. The doctor had taken him aside and told him she was fragile, and added, ‘I’m speaking physically and emotionally
and mentally, Reverend.’

  Alice said what was inside her was making her vomit and she was vomiting into the toilet often; he assumed it was because of the pregnancy, but he remembered that with the first pregnancy she hadn’t vomited all the time, at least not that he knew of. Back in England she had blossomed with the pregnancy, she had been round and full and her skin was golden and her hair shiny. He’d had to keep away from her, it was all he could do to resist her because he didn’t want to risk any damage to the baby while she was pregnant, so he’d gone to London often. But now she was thin and pasty and her bones protruded and her hair hung lank to her shoulders. There was a sharpness to her that hadn’t been there when he had asked her to marry him.

  ‘We don’t belong here, Reuben,’ she said. ‘This isn’t what you promised me.’

  He sighed. ‘I didn’t promise you anything, Alice, from what I remember.’

  ‘But you were a different man then, it was going to be a different life.’

  ‘And you were a different girl then who was happy with whatever the good Lord gave her. Where has that girl gone, Alice?’

  ‘Just like the Irish,’ she said, holding up the misshapen potato. ‘When poor, eat potatoes.’

  ‘Everyone’s poor at the moment, Alice. There are men lined up outside the Collins Street church for handouts, men lined up outside government offices hoping for a scrap of work for the dole. Wages are going down not up. The paper says it’s only going to get worse. It’s probably exactly the same in England.’

  ‘Not in Ashgrove House it won’t be, I promise you that. Do you think your father is eating rotten potatoes?’ She picked up the knife to cut what white segments she could from the potato.

  ‘We aren’t starving yet!’ He slammed his fist on the table and instantly regretted it. He hated losing his composure. It wouldn’t help matters at all, in fact would only make things worse.

  The knife slipped and Alice cried out and grasped her bleeding thumb in a tea towel. The cut hurt and bled, oozing a stream of her anger.

  ‘Quick, put it under water,’ he said. He reached to hold her hand up and take her to the tap, but he bumped his head hard on the shelves. She glared at him. She blamed him for the cut but he wouldn’t take it, he didn’t make her cut herself. He rubbed his head and sat down again.

  ‘We’re not starving,’ she said holding her thumb tight in the tea towel that was turning red with her blood, ‘because we owe money to the grocer and the butcher and everyone else you can think of and they let us get away with it because you’re Reverend Rose, so they trust you to pay it back. Why can’t you write to your parents for some money?’

  Reuben sighed again, he would control his temper no matter what unreasonable thing she threw at him, ‘God is looking after us, Alice, not my parents. When I turned to God I turned my back on my worldly inheritance. How can I serve my flock if I’m not one of them? How can I tell them to trust God if I don’t? How can I tell them that Jesus looks after the poor if I’m not standing with them? Anyway, I have some good news that should cheer you up. I’ve been asked to go to Queenscliff next July. Apparently it’s a lovely seaside village.’

  ‘Like in Cornwall?’ She dropped the tea towel to the floor and wiped her hands on her apron, leaving a fresh bloodstain. She had never been to Cornwall but she had heard there were lovely coastal villages that the rich visited. When she married Reuben she’d hoped he would take her there.

  ‘I expect so,’ he said. ‘It’s the seaside anyway and you’ll like that. You’re always saying you miss the country air. Their pastor is going away for three weeks and we can stay in the manse the entire time and I will get paid a full stipend for the three weeks. We can all go. It will be doing God’s work combined with a holiday.’

  ‘A holiday,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So that should improve things, don’t you think?’ He certainly hoped it would.

  ‘It will be winter.’

  ‘We can rug up.’

  ‘If only life could be fixed with a simple trip to the seaside,’ she said bitterly, and turned to put her thumb under the tap.

  Forty-One

  The Shadow

  Friday, 11 July 1924, Melbourne, when a ruckus occurs.

  ‘She’s added Walsh to her name now,’ Beth said to Clara.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Adela Pankhurst. She married a fella from the union in seventeen and they’ve got several children. She’s left the Communist Party. Paul is furious. And disappointed, I think.’

  They had come straight from work, still in their uniforms and were standing next to each other at the back of the Fitzroy Town Hall Reading Room. The room was only meant to accommodate a hundred people but Beth was sure there were already at least a hundred and fifty crowded in to hear Adela Pankhurst Walsh. The seats were all gone when she and Clara arrived. It was stuffy and women were fanning their faces with pamphlets. There were only a handful of men scattered among the audience.

  Adela came out of a side door and everyone applauded. She stood behind a podium and gripped its sides tightly. She waited for quiet and then nodded to a man at the side of the room who held a baby girl in one arm and the hands of two young children with the other. Beth thought he must be her husband, Tom. Adela was dressed in a very smart suit that Beth thought looked quite expensive.

  Turning to the crowd, Adela bellowed into the silence, ‘I am going to form a new organisation. This will be a revolutionary organisation that will combat the evil of communism …’

  ‘That’s even more of a turnaround than I expected,’ Beth said to Clara and someone said, ‘Shhh.’

  ‘… and uphold the Christian way of life and family,’ Adela yelled. ‘Australia will be a great member of the British Empire. We will bring an end to the current industrial strife and restore goodwill and cooperation to industry. We will be deeply committed to ending communism and to furthering charitable work. We will hold regular tea parties for the wives of unemployed men, and children’s meetings. Women, you must think about what your new-found employment is doing to the men of this country. Men who spilled their lifeblood over the whole surface of the earth, whose bones are strewn thick beneath every sea in the interests of future generations. Think of how you are draining their initiative from them, stealing their rightful places as providers and protectors! Are your men at home melancholy, turning to drink and gambling? Of course they are! Because of you women who insist on working!’

  Beth could feel her blood boiling. She took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Adela Pankhurst Walsh you are a traitorous piece of work! Rights for women! Rights for women! Rights for women! Let women work!’

  Clara joined in right away and a few other women joined in on the third ‘Rights for women,’ but Beth was immediately identified as the ringleader and two burly men nodded at each other and before she had time even to close her mouth she found herself lifted off the ground as the two men grabbed her by the arms and escorted her from the meeting, not caring they were hurting her arms, tearing her dress or dragging her good shoes along the ground. Clara came running out after her.

  Beth was deposited on the steps of the Town Hall under its six massive columns like a bag of rubbish.

  ‘Did they hurt you?’ Clara cried, then she turned on the security men. ‘How dare you manhandle her like that! Look at the size of you and look at the size of her.’

  Beth had suffered far worse, having been jailed overnight several times in the past few years, but she wanted the men to be ashamed for being on the wrong side and nodded as Clara railed.

  Beth brushed the feel of the men’s hands off her arms and, when she felt Clara had railed long enough, she said, ‘Don’t worry, Clara, I’m fine. I just can’t believe Adela. One minute fighting for women’s rights and now she’s got a husband and children of her own, suddenly women should be in the kitchen and nowhere else.’

  ‘Let’s go home,’ said Clara, ‘and not think about her any more.’ She tucked her arm into Beth’s and squeezed
it and Beth smiled at her. Beth gave one last death stare to the two security guards and they walked arm in arm to Flinders Street station and caught the train home to Port Melbourne. From the station they walked to the little single-fronted cottage they rented in Princes Street. Every five minutes Beth said, ‘I just can’t believe her,’ and Clara would reply, ‘The bitch — she beggars belief.’

  Beth had moved into Clara’s little house in Port Melbourne on her very first day in Melbourne and had never moved out. Beth felt at home living with Clara, and she felt at home with herself. She liked being an independent modern woman, it made her feel real, and now she wanted that for all women. She had the passion of the newly converted. Beth collected the afternoon mail from the letterbox and Clara opened the front door and Beth took off her coat, hung it on the hook and led the way down the narrow hallway to the kitchen at the back which looked over a tiny backyard just big enough for Beth to grow some herbs. She had nine pots of herbs lined up around the fence — nasturtiums, peppermint, parsley and chives, watercress (which was a pain because it had to be replanted so often but was so lovely in sandwiches), arthritis herb, which she made into pots of tea for Lilly who needed it for her joints, comfrey for wounds (Edie had told her to grow that), lavender for the beautiful smell, and rosemary for roast lamb.

  ‘I’ll pop the kettle on. Or would you prefer something stronger? I think we have some Cutty Sark left.’

  ‘Both, thanks.’ Beth sat at the table and flicked through the mail. ‘Bill,’ she tossed the envelope onto the side table, ‘Bill,’ toss, ‘bill,’ toss, ‘bill,’ toss. ‘Oh, I don’t recognise this one.’

  She turned the envelope over, held it up to the light and tried to read the postmark. She opened it and took out the letter inside and as she read her heart pounded against her ribs like a jabbing stick and her skin turned white.

  ‘Beth, what’s wrong?’ said Clara.

  ‘It’s from my husband.’