The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean

by Robertson, Mira;

  She reread all she’d written. It was unsatisfactory, particularly the reference to his smile and teeth. The adjectives were far too commonplace. Glancing at her watch she saw that more than an hour had passed – she had no time to redo it. Eunice, who was now recovered, was sure to be on the warpath. She shoved the letter into the top-left hand drawer of the desk, pushing away the fact of her non-existent friendship with Dorothy and the question of why she was writing to her at all. Perhaps there would be time to finish it later, and if it missed today’s mail it could go next week.

  Mr Beatty was late. Emily was outside picking lavender, and the afternoon air was full of its scent. She placed another bundle of lavender into the basket and moved onto the next bush. Wielding her secateurs, she began to snip off the long stems. Despite being under Eunice’s orders, there was something satisfying about it all – the bushes shorn to a neat curve, the thick sheaves of lavender piled in the basket and the comforting drone of the bees. Listening to the bees made her think about her parents, recalling a story from the time of their courtship.

  They were already engaged when her father had invited her mother to stay at Mount Prospect. A bush holiday, her mother would refer to it, making it sound either desirable or dreadful, depending on her mood and how things stood between her and Emily’s father. They’d gone for a picnic in the pony cart and been attacked by a swarm of bees that had chased them for miles. Her father always said it wasn’t miles – a few hundred yards at most. Her mother had been stung three times, and her face blew up like a balloon. She said it was a bad omen and she should have taken note, then and there. Sometimes she said it with a laugh, as if it was a joke and she didn’t mean it. But other times she made it sound as if she did. It was always like that. One could never quite be sure what Mother meant or what she really felt.

  A series of short sharp blasts of the horn announced the arrival of the mail van, interrupting her thoughts. She dropped the secateurs and ran round the house, colliding with Grandmother as they tried to push through the front door together. Before she could apologise, Grandmother had elbowed her aside with unprecedented rudeness, charging towards the kitchen without a word of explanation.

  Following her into the kitchen, Emily was in time to see Mr Beatty enter through the back door, carrying the leather mailbag. With the most cursory of thank yous, Grandmother took it and set off for the dining room. Emily followed once more and watched from the doorway as the bag was upended onto the dining-room table. Letters, newspapers and a couple of parcels tumbled out. As Grandmother swept up the letters, sifting through them like a cardsharp shuffling the deck, Emily knew what she was searching for. A letter from William. He was expected home soon, but nobody knew quite when. Grandmother’s sorting became more and more desperate until at last she gave up and let the whole pile drop back on the table.

  Emily shrank back a little as Grandmother brushed past her on the way out of the room, her face set in a mask of disappointment.

  Alone now, she approached the table and began to pick up the scattered letters, but there was scarcely time to glance at the first one before Eunice arrived, out of breath, in a rush of skinny limbs.

  ‘I’ll take those,’ Eunice said sharply and, before Emily could take evasive action, the letters were plucked from her fingers. ‘The mail must be sorted first, you know that.’

  It was true, she did know. And she knew too that Eunice liked to sort the mail in private, for she’d been shooed out on previous occasions. But this time when the mail sorter clapped her hands and said, ‘Off you go’, she stood her ground. Somewhat to her amazement, Eunice capitulated with the face-saving proviso that there should be no talking. She nodded her agreement, feeling that she’d just won a minor battle in the war between them.

  Eunice examined each item, slowly sorting them into piles, and Emily felt sure that, if she hadn’t been there, envelope flaps would have been fiddled with and airmail letters held up to the light. She was certain that Eunice was a snoop and felt an undeniable sense of schadenfreude – a word she had been dying to use since Mrs Martingale had introduced it in class – in knowing that there would be no letters for the fake cousin. Everyone knew that Cousin Eunice had no friends and, beyond that at Mount Prospect, no family.

  Her pleasure however was short-lived, and it was soon Eunice’s turn to enjoy the suffering of the other as she finished sorting and turned to Emily with a satisfied expression.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, there’s no need for such a long face. The whole world doesn’t revolve around you, my dear. I’m sure your parents have plenty to do without writing letters for the sake of it.’

  Having rubbed salt into the wound, Eunice picked up a parcel wrapped in strong brown paper. Something about the way she put it aside made Emily suspicious and she reached across the table for it. There it was: Miss Emily Dean written in her father’s dignified handwriting. She couldn’t help giving a little cry of delight.

  In the privacy of the white room she examined the parcel, feeling sure it was a book. Perhaps it was Jane Eyre? Perhaps her father had listened to her after all? As she turned it over, delaying the moment of discovery, a wave of longing for her father washed over her. She imagined him making a special trip into the city to buy her book, thinking of her, missing her. Yes, she was positive. She couldn’t stand the excitement any longer and tore at the brown paper in blatant disregard for Grandmother’s waste not, want not philosophy. She ripped away the last bit of wrapping, and for a second her desire triumphed and her eyes shaped the letters on the dust jacket into the right words: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Then came shock, as her brain registered the title: Songs of Praise. A hymn book.

  She felt like crying and did not know whether it was from disappointment at such a utilitarian gift, or relief that she had not been entirely forgotten.

  8

  EMILY WOKE TO HEAR FOOTSTEPS hurrying back and forth in the passage outside her room. She was still lying in bed when Eunice knocked.

  ‘Hurry up, slowcoach. Church.’

  Church? Then it was Sunday again, the second since her arrival. Unlike the order of the school week, the days at Mount Prospect all slid into each other.

  She pulled off her pyjamas and slipped on some underpants. Taking a clean singlet from the chest of drawers, she glimpsed her naked chest in the dressing-table mirror. It was undeniable. Even since she’d arrived they had grown. They. Her breasts. Breasts that three months ago had been nothing more than two little gumnut caps. She’d been desperate then for some kind of development. Everyone else – that is Dorothy and her entourage – talked about cup sizes and having their bras professionally fitted at Buckley & Nunn’s while she had remained as flat as a board. Nevertheless, she had longed for a bra and had told her mother so.

  Seeing the swell of her breasts in the mirror should therefore have been cause for celebration, but it was quite the opposite. From having nothing to show, she now had too much. If only her mother had listened when she’d tried to explain. Instead Mother had been flippantly off-hand: ‘Don’t be silly, they’re just little buds, no need to swaddle yourself in armour yet, my darling.’

  She could not believe how her mother could get it so wrong. Everyone in her class wore a bra, even Veronica who stuffed hers with cottonwool. Veronica, though, was beside the point, as she did not actually need one, whereas with each passing day Emily had become more aware than ever of the way her nipples seemed to thrust against her thin cotton blouse. Where before everything felt firm, now things jiggled uncomfortably when she ran. How could her mother not realise that ‘armour’ would become essential?

  Interrupted by another knock on the door she turned away from the mirror and hurriedly pulled on her singlet. By the time Eunice peered in, she was struggling into a dress that only last summer had been too big.

  Eunice began tugging and plucking at the dress. ‘You must have grown,’ she said in an accusing tone. ‘Haven’t you got something else to wear?’

  Last Sunday’s ski
rt had not returned from the wash, and she knew her only other option was the pink-gingham puffy-sleeved lace disaster hanging in the wardrobe.

  ‘No,’ she said with vehemence.

  Eunice flipped bony fingers against her stomach. ‘Then hold it in while I do up the zip.’

  She tried to hold in her stomach, even though it was not her stomach causing the problem. She held her breath as Eunice yanked at the side zip.

  ‘Now turn around,’ Eunice ordered.

  Under scrutiny, Emily wondered if Eunice had noticed anything else – the bulges – but all she said was, ‘Hurry up and don’t forget your gloves.’

  The black Packard bumped over the cattle grid at the end of the drive and turned onto the road. Emily was stuck between Eunice and Lydia in the back seat. She felt hot. Her hands were sweating inside her cotton gloves, and it wasn’t long before the backs of her legs were glued to the seat. She could feel Lydia’s irritation too; it was like sitting next to a prickly shrub.

  ‘For goodness sake, stop wriggling,’ Eunice said.

  ‘I’m not,’ she replied, her only crime a slight bump against Eunice in her attempt to avoid the prickles on the other side.

  It wasn’t just the heat, but the fact that she felt as if she were about to burst out of the dress. It was making her breathless. Almost worse than the inability to breathe had been the brief dismissive glance from Lydia as they’d gathered in the entry hall waiting for Uncle Cec to bring the car round to the front. It had seemed to contain everything Emily believed true about herself – that she was quite hideous. Thus absorbed in miserable thoughts, she missed some of the conversation until Grandmother’s sharp tone penetrated.

  ‘Really, Lydia, you do say the most ridiculous things.’

  ‘I don’t see why I should have to go,’ Lydia responded. ‘I’m an atheist.’

  ‘Whether you believe or not is hardly the point,’ Grandmother said in the falsely patient tone of someone who has had to repeat the same thing too many times. ‘One goes because it is one’s duty – especially in wartime. It is what keeps things going, as I’ve told you before.’

  ‘You mean protecting the natural order of things,’ Lydia said scornfully.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with the natural order of things.’

  Lydia gave a mirthless laugh, and even Emily could see that Grandmother had rather missed the irony of Lydia’s point.

  ‘Nothing wrong at all,’ confirmed Eunice.

  On arrival, the main street of Garnook was deserted, as it was every Sunday morning. Uncle Cec drove past the row of closed shops and turned right into Church Street, where most of the town’s inhabitants and those of the surrounding district were now gathering. Just up ahead Emily could see Claudio perched on the dicky seat of the gig, facing in their direction. Della was driving with Florrie seated beside her. They’d set off early that morning as it took a lot longer to travel in the gig and Della hated to be late for Mass.

  ‘Careful, Cecil,’ Grandmother said sharply as Uncle Cec swerved past the gig before overcorrecting onto the left-hand verge, almost collecting a family who were dawdling along on foot.

  Back in the centre of the road, the Packard cruised slowly past the crowd gathering outside the Catholic church.

  ‘Papists,’ Grandmother muttered with disdain.

  ‘And dagoes,’ Uncle Cec mused in an observational way.

  ‘Certainly looks like a full house,’ Eunice added, as if it were somehow undesirable to have so many parishioners.

  Emily had seen the Italians last Sunday, a group of men standing apart from the main crowd, dressed in maroon-coloured army uniforms. She’d peered at them with interest as it dawned on her that these men were like Claudio. It was a shock to realise he was not the only one – their ‘one’. She saw how the men were all talking and many of them were using their hands to gesticulate, as if vitally important ideas were being exchanged. It was the same now, and she twisted around as the Packard rolled past, keen to go on watching until Eunice gave her a jab in the side.

  The car continued to the end of the street and came to a stop in front of the small limestone church. Presbyterian parishioners were dotted about outside, creating a tableau vivant almost as motionless as the row of stiff and gloomy cypress pines along the side of the church.

  Entering the churchyard, she was still thinking about the Italians. How different they were from Australian men, who spoke in monosyllables, squeezing out stingy words between lips that scarcely moved. Nor did Australian men move their hands in that excitable manner, instead letting them hang limply on the ends of their arms like small dead animals, or else stuffed into the pockets of their trousers and visible only in lumpy outline.

  Grandmother led the way across the yard and into the church, and with her customary authority took up her usual place in the front pew. Emily shuffled in last. It was already stuffy; the scent of lavender water competing with the sharp tang of male sweat. Wedged in beside Uncle Cec, she waited for the minister to arrive and the service to begin. Last Sunday, Uncle Cec had pointed out Elspeth McDonald, the church organist, who’d fallen in love with the travelling piano tuner, Herman the German.

  ‘Turned out he wasn’t a German,’ he’d whispered to her. ‘Hungarian called Lazlo. Still, everyone called him Herman the German. Fella vanished five years ago and she’s never got over it. Poor Elspeth.’

  Remembering this, she glanced across to see Elspeth drooping on the piano stool like a heat-stressed tulip. According to Uncle Cec, nobody knew where Herman had gone, but they weren’t surprised. After all, travelling salesmen and tinkers came and went, and in that way they were always disappearing. When all of the town’s church organs grew wheezy and out of tune, everyone hoped he’d turn up, although now with the war on, it was generally agreed he’d be better off staying out of sight. Even the Germans who’d arrived at the turn of the century, before the Great War, had been rounded up and interned. Germans who’d never been to Germany, and Germans who didn’t even speak the language, as there was no telling what national sentiments might be aroused by Hitler’s vision of a thousand-year Reich.

  As the congregation waited, Emily wondered yet again why church pews had to be so horribly uncomfortable. All around her, arthritic old bones shifted restlessly, tortured by the hard benches and cramped conditions. From the corner of her eye she could see beads of sweat forming on Uncle Cec’s bald head. They rolled down his forehead in droplets, only to catch in his wiry eyebrows, gleaming like dew. She had begun to sweat too. Not a breath of wind stirred the syrupy air and, as the minutes ticked by, she became aware of a sour tomcat smell seeping from Mrs Burns in the opposite pew. Despite the heat, the old woman was clad in an ancient woollen coat and, as the air inside the church grew ever hotter, the coat began to give up its malodorous secrets. It wasn’t long before Emily was forced to breathe through her mouth.

  Just when it seemed that the whole congregation was in danger of melting, the minister, Reverend McIver, entered through the side door and strode swiftly to the pulpit. Reverend McIver, as she’d discovered last Sunday, was a thin pale man with a flinty face. He began to speak, but she blocked out the sound of his Scots burr and replaced it with her father’s voice. How many of his sermons had she listened to in her life? Hundreds. As a little girl she’d burst with pride because he was the one up the front talking. His sermon voice still had the power to thrill her, and it was his voice she heard now, issuing a clarion call to goodness, humility and unselfishness as it echoed around the high airy spaces of St Andrews, Eastmalvern Presbyterian Church.

  When the sermon was finally over, Elspeth McDonald launched into the opening bars of ‘O, Valiant Hearts’. Since the local boys and men had left for the war it was sung every Sunday and, like Lydia and her fondness for ‘Those in Peril on the Sea’, Emily was susceptible to the emotional power of certain hymns. Sharing her new hymn book with Uncle Cec, she sang with gusto. Her mind was filled with battlefield images of the Somme. It was the wrong war, she
knew that, but the photographs came from a book of her father’s. She began to imagine herself as a soldier, leaping forwards to her death across a foreign field. Or perhaps a nurse, with a red cross emblazoned on her white pinny, dashing out to rescue the fallen.

  Her voice swelled with the others as they began the second verse.

  ‘Proudly you gathered, rank on rank, to war,

  As who had heard God’s message from afar;

  All you had hoped for, all you had, you gave,

  To save mankind – yourselves you scorned to save.’

  At the words to save mankind – yourselves you scorned to save, she felt an ache in her throat and tears sprang into her eyes as, all of a sudden, she thought of her unlce William.

  9

  WITH THE SERVICE OVER, THE congregation filtered out of the church and into the heat of the late morning. She knew from the previous Sunday that there would be at least half an hour of hanging about while the Mount Prospect older generation caught up with neighbours and the socially acceptable elements of the congregation. Most of the churchgoers – albeit Presbyterian – were not, in Grandmother’s words, top drawer and Emily suspected that some, like poor Mrs Burns, were not in any drawer at all.

  Small groups clustered wherever there was shade. Grandmother and Eunice positioned themselves in a prime spot on the south side of the church, while Uncle Cec and his friend Hector Macrae strolled off for a cigarette. Lydia ignored everyone, walking briskly out of the churchyard and turning onto the street.

  Emily trailed after her at a distance, far enough away to pretend that she was simply going in the same direction, and if questioned could convincingly assert that she had not been following. Last Sunday she had made the mistake of falling into step with Lydia, who had told her in no uncertain terms to go away and wait by the car.

  She was surprised when Lydia turned right at the first corner, having expected that they were going to walk along Church Street and back – even if in single file – and take in the sight and sound of the town’s parishioners. Traipsing down a deserted dusty side street was less appealing. Did she really want to follow? Before she could make up her mind, a sleek car, the colour of fresh cream, cruised past. The passenger door opened, and Lydia had scarcely climbed in when it drove off with a smartly executed U-turn.