by Kim Lock
Aida stood on the footpath, the handle of her case gripped in one hand, her handbag strap in the other. Her dark green dress had short, cuffed sleeves and was cinched in with a belt at the waist; the hem ended above her knees. Her dark hair was set in large rolls, the front swept across her brow. She looked as beautiful as Thomas had ever seen her; he knew why Elsie loved her. He wanted to put his hands on her waist, where Elsie’s hands always were.
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘If Mum arrives before I do, the whole fiction about the bus being earlier than the timetable stated goes out the window.’ She smiled then, and Thomas’s heart sank.
Aida hugged him, and her lips lingered on his cheek. ‘I promise I’ll ring often. And write letters.’ When she pulled away her eyes were glimmering with tears. ‘I need to do this. I need to figure some things out. You’ll be okay.’
‘Perhaps, but –’
‘Elsie will be okay, too.’ She turned to go.
‘Aida, wait.’
She paused, looking back at him over her shoulder. Her expression was pained.
‘Are you coming back?’
‘Thomas, I –’
‘Are you?’ He tried not to sound desperate.
Gesturing towards the bus terminal, she said, ‘I have to go.’
He watched her go; the click of her heels faded into the sounds of the traffic, her skirt swishing, swallowed up by the crowd.
Powerless, Thomas climbed back into the car and drove home.
48
The hall was cold. The sounds of Elsie’s footsteps and the whizz of the pram wheels echoed across the wooden floorboards. Inside the small community room off the side of the hall, next to the kitchen, the air was warmed by an oil heater. The patterned carpet muffled the ladies’ voices, muted the scrape of chairs pushing back and forth.
Gloria Watson spotted Elsie immediately as she parked Millie’s pram by the door. ‘Mrs Mullet, delighted you’re ready to join us again!’ she called from the kitchen, setting a tray of scones on the bench. She came through the kitchen doorway into the community room. Her hair kicked up beneath her ears and was held in place with a wide ribbon; the shell-pink of her lipstick matched her dress. ‘Here, let me have those,’ she said, taking the sandwiches Elsie balanced in one hand, freeing Elsie to re-tuck Millie’s blanket; she’d kicked it off and her chubby legs were exposed.
‘I‘ve been wondering how much time you were going to take come back to us, after this little one’s arrival,’ Mrs Watson said. She bent over the pram and made cooing noises. ‘I worried perhaps, now that your hands are otherwise occupied, you’d consider our Wednesday group too challenging.’
‘I’ve been busy, is all,’ Elsie said. ‘Time seems to disappear.’
She wished it was the truth. Millie was three months old. Two and a half months had passed without Aida. Tucking the blanket about Millie’s shoulders, Elsie took in her face, sweet and slack in sleep. At birth Millie had features that seemed entirely her own, but within weeks she had begun to develop a likeness of Thomas’s face: the fine nose, the low forehead with a dark spring of hair. In the plump of her cheeks and folds of her chin, Elsie saw the weeks that had passed. Each week with Aida away, Millie grew and fattened and Elsie’s heart could not help but grow with it. Yet every ounce of Millie was another week without Aida.
‘I know,’ Gloria Watson said. ‘The days go in a flash. Bert’s hardly at home now, what with his house calls –’ she flashed a smug smile ‘– and I’ve added an extra class on Mondays for sewing, plus the church committee has . . .’ she turned away from Elsie as she continued to speak, taking Elsie’s plate of sandwiches into the kitchen. Elsie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to follow, but she couldn’t lug the pram into the crowded space so she was marooned in the doorway.
‘. . . so it’s all kept me on my toes, that’s for sure,’ Mrs Watson said gaily as she returned. ‘We’re going to have a full group today, so pick yourself a good seat before they’re all snapped up.’
The seats were arranged in an oval shape, several were already taken, and Mrs Watson took her place at the head of the circle. Elsie sat in the seat closest to the door, so she could watch over Millie, and pulled her knitting from her bag.
‘What are you working on today?’ a lady on Elsie’s left asked. Elsie remembered her face but could not recall her name.
‘Still that jumper, I’m afraid,’ Elsie told her. ‘I’ve not even finished one sleeve.’ Her current work in progress was to be a crew-neck jumper for Thomas. She had hoped to have the jumper finished for this winter, but since Millie’s arrival, and now without Aida, Elsie found her days dragging painfully slow and empty while she simultaneously rarely had motivation to glance at her needles. Thomas’s jumper languished as a back piece and half a sleeve.
‘It’s not like you to move so slowly,’ Clare Adelman piped up. ‘What’s taking you so long?’
Elsie flushed. ‘The baby, and keeping the house. I don’t seem to have as much time for knitting as I used to.’
Several more ladies had arrived and murmurs of assent went through the group. ‘Best get a move on, Mrs Mullet,’ Gloria said, lightly. ‘Wednesday group is for seasoned knitters – we keep each other striving to be our best.’
Elsie dropped a stitch.
‘A schedule helps,’ an older lady spoke up. ‘I stuck to my schedule like a drill sergeant when mine were younger. Still do.’
Elsie had a schedule. Millie’s feeding times were set at four-hourly intervals throughout the day and although there had been the occasional deviation, like when she had a blocked nose and cried constantly, Millie was mostly happy to take her bottle by the clock (especially now that the doctor had told her to mix a spoonful of Farex into her milk so she would sleep through the night). Between feeds, Elsie tried to have the laundry washed and hung out in the morning, midday was for dusting, floors and tidying and the afternoon for baking and preparing tea. The problem wasn’t for lack of a schedule. The problem was that, despite the schedule, there were too few hours in days that seemed, paradoxically, obscenely long. It was an inexplicable contradiction.
‘You had help in the early days, didn’t you?’ Mrs Watson said, crochet hook dipping vigorously in and out of a colourful square of work.
‘Thomas did what he could.’
‘No, not Thomas,’ Gloria said, flicking up a length of yarn. ‘A young woman. Her husband worked away, at the mines.’
Elsie’s heart gave a thud. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
‘I remember meeting her when we had afternoon tea. While you were still –’ she mimed the shape of pregnant roundness.
‘Did you?’ Elsie said with a false, nervous laugh. ‘I don’t recall.’
‘Of course I did. Nice young lady. Quiet, though,’ she mused. ‘Made a divine walnut and apple loaf.’ She snapped her fingers, remembering. ‘Mrs Shepherd. Does she still live next door?’
Elsie thought she detected something in Mrs Watson’s tone: a heightened inquisitiveness in her query. A subtle emphasis on the words ‘next door’. Surely not. It was an innocent enough remark. And it was true – Aida had met some of the local ladies on afternoon teas. And she had lived next door.
She still did live there. Didn’t she?
‘Perhaps her husband needs to go away again, Mrs Mullet.’ Mrs Watson nodded towards the unfinished sleeve resting in Elsie’s lap, needles splayed. ‘Looks like you miss her.’
‘She’s –’ Elsie spoke up, ‘she’s away, presently. Staying with family in the city, I believe.’
‘Oh?’ Mrs Watson lifted an eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ Elsie said. What came next she could not have predicted. She would never know where it came from, but come it did, belched up and out for all the ladies to hear, irrevocably.
Elsie said, ‘Her husband died. A few weeks ago, a mining accident. He, uh, had an accident. Faulty
equipment. Terrible.’
Eyes widened around the circle. Murmurs of horror and condolence.
Elsie had killed Aida’s fake husband. Piling lies on lies.
49
Aida had only been at her childhood home with her parents for two weeks when the selection of bachelors began to trickle through the front door.
At first it was a slow drip: one gentleman on a Wednesday evening, another the following Sunday. But the drips grew into a stream, to the point where twice, even three times a week, a new nervous gentleman, approaching thirty and unattached and hankering, would appear and sit down for a contrived dinner with Aida and her parents. Between mouthfuls of her mother’s potato and ham bake, these hopeful sods shot looks of fright crossed with awe at her father and simpering looks at her mother. They wondered why she was still single, these men. Curiosity, desire and a touch of wonder showed on their faces. Why wasn’t this pretty, eloquent young lady from a prominent family married and beginning a family of her own? Twenty-one and still single – what was the catch?
Aida had despised them all. The way their elbows stuck out when they ate reminded her of vultures’ wings: eager for the discards, ready to lay personal claim to the failed and hopeless. She didn’t know how to talk to them; she would open her mouth and out came stutters, inane one-word responses.
And so it was after many weeks of such doomed set-ups, of Aida’s weeping and refusals to assist her mother at the church fete or take up clerical work in her father’s office, that Aida’s father came home one evening and announced he was putting the house in Gawler, on Church Street, on the market.
He was selling Aida’s house; the house next door to Elsie and Thomas. It was time, her father told her, to forget the past and get on with her life.
‘How am I supposed to do that?’ Aida said, recalling that last night in hospital: a row of cribs, a baby crying. A fleece swaddle, a scrunched up face and a card stamped BFA. Baby for adoption.
‘You need to pretend it never happened,’ her mother said.
‘It doesn’t exist,’ her father added. ‘Forget it.’
Forget her baby. Forget her parents’ betrayal. But, even though her parents knew nothing of them, Aida heard also that she should forget Elsie, and Thomas, and their baby. And that sent her into such a state of panic that one morning, when her father was at work and her mother was out giving a talk at the Ladies Auxiliary, Aida packed her suitcase, called a taxi, and fled to the bus terminal, trembling as though she was being chased.
50
It had been late one evening in summer, the three of them sitting in the backyard, crickets shrieking in the warm dark, when Aida finally admitted who her father was. My father is John Glasson, she’d said. The State Minister for Health. Thomas knew the name – he had read it in the paper, heard it on the wireless. He could imagine the scandal Minister Glasson had endeavoured to avoid by banishing and lying to Aida – how necessary her absence, her compliance. Her silence.
Now, Thomas was once again thinking of Aida’s father as he stood in front of Elsie, his case still in his hand after he’d run through the front door.
‘You’ve what?’ Elsie cried.
‘I made an offer yesterday,’ he exclaimed, barely able to contain his excitement. ‘Her father has accepted it already.’
‘But . . . can we afford it?’
Thomas grimaced. ‘If we’re careful.’
He watched his wife look out the window, over the fence towards Aida’s empty house. He could see her mind racing to make sense of it. Last week, the For sale sign had appeared in front of Aida’s house. The sight had doubled Elsie over with distress, right there on the footpath.
Thomas dropped his case on the floor. ‘Say something,’ he urged.
‘That’s Aida’s house,’ she said, turning back to him. He couldn’t read her expression. Dismay? Relief? At Elsie’s hip, Millie’s hands grabbed at the buttons of her blouse. Absently, Elsie took hold of her small hand, held it gently. Millie gurgled.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I was afraid someone else might . . .’ He went to his wife and placed a hand on her cheek, their daughter between them. ‘I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else living there. Could you?’
Elsie searched his face. ‘Of course I couldn’t. But, my love . . .’
‘What?’
‘Is she coming back?’
Thomas brought her closer. Millie squealed with delight between them. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
*
She did. Aida came back to them.
51
‘Mrs Mullet, what can I do for you?’
‘I need a prescription, please.’ Elsie folded her hands over her lap and smiled at the doctor. ‘For the contraceptive pill.’
Doctor Boyd frowned as he flicked through her file. ‘How old is your baby?’
‘Millie has her first birthday in a few weeks.’
‘Surely you must want more?’
Elsie stomach churned. ‘Maybe one day, but not right now.’
‘Why not? Doesn’t Mr Mullet want more children?’
Unsure what else to say, Elsie gave him another thin smile and clutched her handbag tighter in her lap.
‘You’re only –’ he peered down at his folder ‘– twenty-three.’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Plenty of fertility left. Why wait?’
‘I’m not ready for another one right now, what with Millie still so young,’ Elsie lied.
The doctor leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He gave her a long stare. ‘It seems a pity. Respectable folk like you.’
Elsie waited to hear if there was more to that sentence, but ostensibly the inference was hers to draw.
‘How nice of you to flatter us, Doctor,’ Elsie said, ‘I’ll be sure to pass your recommendation on to Mr Mullet.’ She let that hang as suggestively as his own comments.
The doctor picked up his pen, shaking his head slowly as he scribbled. ‘Birth control has its uses, I’ll admit. Some ladies, I see them after five, six, seven babies. They’re desperate, terrified of going near their poor husbands. But you? Seems a shame.’ He ripped off the sheet and handed her the prescription. ‘Still,’ he added, ‘at least you’re not one of those promiscuous young single girls, wanting the pill but without a husband. Wanting all the perks, but none of the responsibility.’
Thanking him, Elsie took the prescription and left his office.
*
When she got home, Elsie took the pharmacist’s package from her handbag, and placed it into Aida’s hands.
Aida said, ‘Thank you,’ at the same time as Elsie said, ‘Are you sure . . . ?’
‘Else . . .’
‘I know you want to be safe. But it doesn’t happen without . . . you know.’
Aida lifted her eyebrows.
‘You don’t usually enter that situation without me . . . I suppose I’m saying I feel responsible.’ Elsie didn’t know quite how to articulate the matter. It was oddly mechanical and perfunctory, standing in the hallway discussing the pragmatics of sex like a recipe for a good lamb casserole while Millie crawled about their feet. Aida’s intimacies with Thomas were inextricably linked to Elsie’s – in that if there was a chance Aida could become pregnant, Elsie would be right there, essentially encouraging that one necessary element of proceedings, that final act. In other words, Thomas didn’t orgasm inside Aida unless Elsie, in the heat of the moment, suggested it.
It was all very erotically well managed.
Aida smiled at Elsie’s squirming. ‘We’re all adults,’ she said.
Elsie couldn’t help but laugh. She pushed Aida’s hair off her shoulder; the strands slipped heavy between her fingers. Elsie was acutely aware that they were feeling their way in the dark. No advice columns could guide them; no written articles could offer safe and proven counsel. If
she was feeling uncertain or confused, Elsie couldn’t simply pick up the phone and ask her mother. They were alone in their relationship, but in its own unexplainable way that was the greatest solace. They had each other. That is how they forged their way forward: by being together. Working it out as they went.
Elsie watched her walk down the hallway to the bathroom, parcel clutched at her chest, and felt the soft, barely there cramp that gripped low between her hips. Her monthly had arrived yesterday. She had been hoping, praying, that it wouldn’t.
Standing at the pharmacist’s counter, handing over the money for the contraceptive pill, Elsie felt the ludicrous irony of it. Still, she thought of the relief, the peace of mind, it would bring Aida, and she was grateful for its mercy.
52
The blankets slid away from Aida’s upper arms and the cold air roused her from sleep.
‘Did I wake you?’ Thomas murmured.
Aida nodded and yawned.
‘Sorry. Elsie said you went to bed early. You’re not feeling well?’
‘Just a headache,’ she replied softly.
‘Do you need something for it?’
‘I’m fine. I had a Bex.’
Although the bedroom was dark, the bathroom light was on and an ambient yellow glow came through the open bedroom door. Aida could hear the sounds of the tap being turned on then off, the toop-toop of Elsie spitting toothpaste into the sink. The bathroom light went off, and Elsie padded into the room.
The door clicked shut.
Aida’s stomach sank a little. She wasn’t in the mood. She moved closer to Thomas so Elsie could climb into bed, and Thomas threaded his arm around her waist. Aida closed her eyes.
She felt Elsie’s lips brush her forehead; she came with the scent of Pears soap and lavender face cream. Aida breathed deeply and Elsie ran her fingertips down her arm; she felt Thomas move closer to cup his hand over Elsie’s hip on the other side of her. Sandwiched between them, Aida felt sleep rolling over her and for a brief moment she felt something like contentment.