by Robbi Neal
When Virgil prickled and sat up straighter in his chair to try and be taller than Theo, Paul defused everything by talking about the forty-four hour week again, which he was adamant was needed to protect the health of the workingman and the predicted financial collapse which nobody but he believed would actually happen, and Gracie sat grinning like this was the best entertainment she’d ever had. Edie had never had two men fight for her and didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to hurt either and was a fluster of upset. Her tea went cold in its cup and whenever anyone asked her a question all she could manage was ‘Hmmmm.’
When the scones were gone and the afternoon had gone as well, both men tried to be the last to leave but eventually Edie saw it dawn on Virgil that nobody could outlast Theo and he got up and said, ‘I must be going.’ Glaring at Theo, he added, ‘I don’t want to wear out my welcome.’
Edie walked Virgil out to his car, where he stopped and took her hands in his and, hoping Theo was watching, said, ‘I think next week we might go for a drive on Saturday afternoon instead of Sunday,’ then he leant in to her and whispered, ‘and back to my place afterward,’ but she leant away from him even though she didn’t know why and when he tried to kiss her, his lips landed on her cheek. He slammed the car door when he got in and it made her flinch.
When she went back inside Theo was deep in conversation with his mother in Lucy’s room. By the time he came out Edie was in the kitchen with Gracie and Paul washing the dishes.
He stood in the doorway. ‘Lovely scones,’ he said. ‘I’m off, I won’t be back for a fortnight, I have things I have to organise,’ as though he had not the slightest fear that Virgil might get the advantage during his absence.
Saturday, 6 September 1924, when Edie knows.
A week could be a very long time. It could take from one Sunday afternoon to the following Saturday and a whole life could be lived in the middle.
At three Virgil arrived at the door. The weather, being stubbornly changeable and unreliable in autumn, surprised everyone by being pleasant. Virgil suggested they drive to Lal Lal and Edie, who couldn’t concentrate on anything, would have agreed to go anywhere he wanted.
They walked around the racecourse and discussed nature and trees and birds and Edie thought neither of them said one word to each other that they actually wanted to say. After they had walked more than she wanted to they meandered back to the car and Virgil said, ‘Do you want to come back to my place?’
Edie said, ‘I would like to but I need to get home to help care for Lilly,’ even though Lilly was up and about now and probably putting dinner on and needed no care at all. Suddenly she felt guilty she’d put him off like that with a lie and added, ‘But you could come in for some tea if you like,’ realising it was a poor consolation and wasn’t at all what he wanted from her.
‘If I like?’ he said bitterly and he got in the car and forgot to get the door for her so she opened it herself and got in the passenger seat. They drove to Webster Street in silence, and the silence continued even after he had parked outside her house. Some minutes later she realised she was waiting for him to say something and he wasn’t going to and was probably waiting for her to say something. She didn’t know what to say so she reached for the door handle and said, ‘I’ve never seen you lost for words before.’
‘I am lost for words. Edie,’ he said and he reached into his pocket and pulled out an envelope. He gave it to her and said, ‘I should have done this when you wanted me to.’
‘Oh,’ said Edie and she turned it over in her hand.
He got out and walked around and opened the door for her.
She got out of the car and he put her arm in his and walked her down the driveway. The pebbles were out of tune under her feet. She couldn’t find her mind, or any other part of her. Every time she thought she’d found just one thread to hang onto, it floated away on the breeze until it was just out of reach.
At the door he took her face in his hands and kissed her and she remembered how sweet his kisses were, and the feeling of losing something when they stopped.
She realised that Theo had never kissed her.
Virgil pulled away and smiled. ‘I’ve never forgotten our first kiss.’
‘You didn’t even ask,’ she said.
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said, laughing. ‘I saw a pretty girl and I took her,’ and she watched him walk back down the drive in his blue vest with his blue eyes.
‘Darn it,’ she said again, leaning against the kitchen table as she opened the envelope and read Virgil’s letter.
‘What does it say?’ asked Gracie.
‘Don’t bother her, it’s obvious what it says,’ said Paul.
‘It’s a marriage proposal. Now I have two,’ said Edie.
‘Oh,’ said Lilly, hoping Edie would choose Theo.
Edie flopped onto the chair and buried her head in her arms on the table and thought of the irony of life and how as a young girl she had desperately wanted just one proposal. Back then she would have imagined having two offers being exciting, but it wasn’t, it meant there was a choice to be made that could change everything. It meant someone was going to be hurt and she was going to be the cause of it. Paul and Gracie reached over and wrapped her in their arms.
‘What will you do?’ asked Gracie, putting her head against Edie’s.
Edie looked at her. ‘Nothing. It’s my own stupid fault; I shouldn’t have let this happen. I will choose neither. I can’t leave you and Papa. I never could and I never will. I won’t accept either of them.’
‘Bloody hell!’ said Gracie.
Edie was shocked, which was exactly what Gracie wanted.
‘Of course you can leave us. I can look after Papa perfectly well and we have Lilly now too, don’t we, Lilly?’
Lilly looked at Paul and he nodded. ‘She’s not going anywhere.’
‘Oh yes,’ said Lilly. ‘Yes, you do have me.’
Gracie stood as tall as she could, which wasn’t very tall, so she stood on the chair and put her hands on her hips. ‘Edie, you have been the best mother a girl could ever want but I can look after Papa and I have Lilly who will feed us both and make us fat, won’t you?’
‘I imagine Gracie can look after us,’ said Paul, ‘though I don’t need looking after.’
‘But Gracie needs her own life,’ said Edie, and then she realised what she had said. ‘Gracie, I never regretted it, not for a moment.’
‘It’s okay, Edie. I will follow my heart when my Englishman arrives.’
‘Gracie, you don’t know how life is going to turn out,’ said Edie.
‘I do know,’ said Gracie stubbornly. ‘I love you, Edie, and if you don’t follow your heart I will never smile again and you know what that would do to Papa.’
‘I have noticed every gentle wrinkle around his eyes and committed them all to memory,’ said Edie and she smiled and knew her decision.
‘Well, it’s settled then,’ said Paul and he thumped his umbrella on the ground firmly, as if it was a gavel in the courtroom finalising everything, and it made the floorboard quiver and the table bounce.
Lilly topped up the teapot with hot water and Edie took a cup to her room and sat down at her dressing table and replied to Virgil’s letter and then she took out her notebook. She had one empty page left and she wrote:
Sixth September Twenty-Four
Plan — Marry him.
Forty-Eight
The Widower
Monday, 15 September 1924, when Reuben finds a little redemption in Ballarat.
Two weeks he had been in Ballarat and the gossip about him had spread from the Arch of Victory to Bakers Hill and from Mount Buninyong to Black Hill. He hadn’t even given his first sermon yet. But the gossip about the new pastor was all any one talked about. Some of the women said his wife had left him and run back to England, some said that she had gone completely bonkers and was in an asylum, some said he had done her in and then everyone said, ‘Nooooh — he couldn’t. He’s a man of God,
’ and the person who had said it would laugh awkwardly and say they had only been joking. But one thing everyone knew was that the new pastor was English, handsome, and his voice made you feel like you could fly away. What’s more he had three little tykes and he needed a woman in his life.
Reuben was well aware of the gossip about him that filled the streets of Ballarat. He had walked up to people too quickly and overheard things; he had seen the way the women looked at him and he knew when the women came to the door of the manse, married or not, they were offering him more than the steaming lamb casserole they held out under his nose. He remained stoic and dignified through it all, ignoring the women’s attempts to lure him. He was so relieved to finally have his own church and he was well aware that, apart from the fact he was no longer that man, any untoward behaviour on his part would raise the ire of the church deacons. And weren’t they a bunch of stuffy old men who constantly told him that he didn’t understand the workings of a small Australian town. Hah — nobody understood the workings of small rural towns like those from small English villages. He had a thousand years of village gossip in his blood.
Monday was Reuben’s day off but he was so glad to have his own church that he didn’t mind when his flock came to see him. They could come any day of the week so long as he got paid his stipend and could feed the children — but now he could see why Alice had been so worried, why she had nagged him endlessly about the money. Food was so expensive and money was so hard to come by and a pastor’s stipend, even full-time as he had now, was small.
When the knock on the door came he stood Martha and Wycliffe in front of him and said sternly, ‘Now, you have to be good, not a sound, and look after your brother.’ They both nodded and agreed they would be good so he went to the door and opened it to two women. The younger one was short, he was sure if he stood right up against her she would barely reach his elbows, and the older one was not much taller. He’d seen them in the congregation on Sunday, when he had sat through Deacon Blackmarsh’s effort at a sermon, but he didn’t know who was who yet. He ushered them into his study, ‘First door on the left,’ he hurried them along and blocked their view so they wouldn’t see the hallway.
The women stood in the study. ‘Gracie,’ said the older woman, nodding at the younger one, ‘and I’m Edie.’
He indicated the two chairs in front of the desk. The chairs were shabby and he suddenly felt embarrassed offering them. Then he saw the study with their eyes: it was dark and dank. He didn’t like the study or the rest of the house, which was filled with the previous pastor’s choice of furniture. Everything felt old and tired to him, but he was too poor to replace anything. He had just got all of them seated when the screaming started. It was loud and high-pitched, like children being beaten, or a cat tormented by schoolboys. The women were shocked, their eyes wide.
‘It’s the children making a racket in the kitchen,’ he said above the noise. ‘I will just be a minute, please sit, I won’t be long.’ He heard the older sister whisper to the younger one, ‘Missus Blackmarsh says he’s a widower, left with three littlies, the oldest only three and a half and the youngest a baby still at just thirteen months.’
Reuben stood at the door of the kitchen and took in the war zone that confronted him. Wycliffe and Martha were upending bottles of peaches and sauce over baby Wesley’s head. ‘We baptise you,’ they were laughing, ‘we baptise you,’ and tomato sauce and preserved peaches poured over Wesley in a thick red waterfall. The preserved peaches and the tomato sauce were gifts from some of the women in his congregation, but all he could see was good money he would have to spend replacing the food going down the drain. His temper was already lost.
‘Wycliffe! Martha! What is the meaning of this? I can’t trust you to look after your brother for two minutes and not only are you wasting precious food but you are being sacrilegious while you do it!’
He was too harsh. Martha burst into tears and looked at him with sad, lost eyes. Tears streamed down her face making tracks in the sauce that was smeared over her cheeks. Wycliffe sulked. Reuben tore his hands through his hair. This was his life now, trying to manage the children, trying to hold a job to feed them, trying to keep his faith.
He only ever said Alice had died. He never told anyone that they had gone to Queenscliff, that he had expected it to make everything better, that she had been so consumed by disappointment that in the middle of his sermon she had got up, handed the new baby to the woman sitting next to her and quietly walked out. They had found her clothes neatly folded in a pile on the beach, her shoes sitting side by side on top, but they had not found her. Not in the days nor the weeks that came after, and he hoped that the sea had carried her back to England. The churchwomen in Melbourne had tried to help him, they pitched in and cared for the children while he arranged the funeral, but then he had told them one by one that he didn’t need their child-minding and their house-cleaning because he needed space to make decisions. He couldn’t hear anything other than the rushing of waves and needed to listen in silence and find out what should be next. Should he give everything up, write to his mother to ask for the passage home and get back on the boat?
One night he heard the children thank God for him as they said their bedtime prayers, and he knew he had to stay strong because he was all they had now. But he couldn’t pray himself and he couldn’t hear God’s voice, which was just as well because he was angry with God and sometimes with Alice. He had had enough death in the war. Why did God think it was okay to send more into his own home? Or was it the other side of God? Was it Satan who had sent him more death? Either way he wouldn’t stand for it. How could Alice do this to him? Leave him alone with the children?
So he’d written to his mother. He sealed the envelope and put it on the kitchen mantle to post the next day and just as he had the children in their coats ready to leave the house (and that alone had taken him an hour to manage) for the post office, Mister Wallace, the secretary at the Baptist Union, had opened the picket gate and walked up the path. Reuben told the children to take off their coats and go inside and put the baby in the cot while Mister Wallace told him that a church in a country town was considering him as a replacement for their minister who had finally retired after far too many years in the post.
Three days later Mister Wallace came back again to tell him that the deacons had decided on him and that he could go as soon as he felt ready. Mister Wallace told him there would be a double-storey brick manse and a regular weekly stipend. There was a public school around the corner for the children, just over the road, really, in Dana Street, and that would keep them out of his hair most days, though he had no suggestions regarding the baby.
The letter home didn’t get posted and Reuben decided this was God talking to him and looking after him. Perhaps he would forgive God and they could get on with things. He packed up the house in Fitzroy Street and packed up the children and took the train to Ballarat.
Two weeks later it was clear the decision had been a mistake. Nothing was better at all. Reuben squatted on his haunches in the middle of the catastrophe in the kitchen, put his head in his hands and cried. Even though he and the children had only been in the manse a fortnight, Martha had already scribbled on the walls of the hallway with black crayon — large sweeping circles that she said were angels taking her mama to heaven — and nothing that he had tried would remove it. Wycliffe was sullen and moody and wouldn’t speak. Wesley whimpered and just never stopped. And he himself was the centre of unwanted gossip.
Seeing their father in tears for the first time in their lives the children sobered up. Wesley stopped whimpering and sat open-mouthed, licking sauce from his face. Martha stopped crying and wiped her tears, spreading sauce further across her face. She and Wycliffe put their saucy, sticky arms around his neck, spreading tomato sauce and peach juice all over his suit and his tears washed away his temper.
‘Come now, Martha, I need you to look after the little one,’ he said gently.
‘But how
can she when she is barely more than a baby herself? Is she two? She looks just over two.’
He turned and it was the younger sister. She walked over and picked up Wesley and didn’t even seem to bother that the child was covered in sticky saucy mess.
‘You go and talk to my sister about her wedding and I’ll fix all this up,’ she said and smiled at him. Suddenly he knew that he was where he was meant to be. He was filled with contentment and his life didn’t seem so bad. He could manage it, he could find his way. He stood up and towered over the short girl. How old was she? Seventeen? Nineteen at best — a child still. He used to take girls like her and fill them with his lust. Then he banished the thought. He couldn’t become that man again. He watched, his hand gently on Martha’s head as Gracie got a cloth from the sink and ran it under the water, then still holding Wesley on one arm, she came back to him and she reached up on her toes and wiped the sauce from his shoulders, his collar, and last of all his cheek.
‘There,’ she smiled, ‘you just look like a normal father who loves to play with his children.’
‘Thank you,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘my sister is waiting — off you go.’
For the first time in his life Reuben felt that a female had the upper hand and he started to protest, but seeing the determination in her face, the pursing of those lips that only a few minutes ago had filled the room with their smile, and feeling that really she was much taller than him, he put his head down and did as he was told.
When he got to the office the sister was waiting patiently, not a scrap of irritation in her, as though waiting was something she was quite expert at.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘the children.’
‘Oh, Gracie will sort them out,’ she said.
‘Hmm,’ he said, realising that despite any real evidence he was sure she was right.
‘So you are getting married?’