by Olga Masters
Back in the kitchen Enid peeled off her apron.
‘Henry and Cecil Grant are drinking rum as you would expect!’ Cecil had noted the apron with a hungry eye. No one else would see it!
‘Nothing seems to be going right!’
Una took off her apron too. She found joy in the fresh sight of her dress gathered gently across her bust, fastened with jet buttons. He would see it without the cape!
There were many more in the front room now and their voices reached the kitchen as the door slapped to and fro with the girls going in and out.
Like the creek after rain, Una thought of the babble. She saw it brown with scattered foam, flattening the reeds as it rushed along. Had he seen it?
She saw them together on a high bank looking down with the bush all around them fresh with wetness, their sides nearly touching.
Enid put the two big teapots on a tray, the signal that this was the last job, and looking the kitchen over for defects, for there would be eyes looking for them when the washing-up was on, told Una to bring the milk and follow her.
He was standing with Jack, holding his hat, with his face a little ruddy from the cold or the fire George had got going, leaping and crackling as if it was another person adding to the talk. Una suspected he saw her for he turned quite abruptly, giving more of his attention to Jack, and moved his hat further up his chest. Una and Enid saw the hat at the one time, Una lowering the milk jug and Enid the teapot, excusing herself to May Turbett and her raised teacup, and going to Edwards she took his hat to lay it on a music stand, giving it a distinction above the others piled on a table inside the front door.
Una, pouring too much milk in May Turbett’s teacup, splashed some on the table when Mrs Turbett jerked her cup away, and Edwards, surrendering his hat to Enid, saw Una move the tray to cover the splash and was torn between a desire to smile at the little face she pulled and to pay closer attention to Enid’s eyes, thoughtful and grey-green in colour.
He saw more of the eyes for they came closer to his own when she moved him and Jack to a tapestry-covered lovers’ seat near a chiffonier and seconds later was back with plates of meat and buttered bread and tea expertly handled.
‘Thank you, Miss Herbert,’ Edwards said. ‘But you shouldn’t be waiting on us with so many to look after.’
Jack gave a small but telling snort. ‘Bring the pickles, Enid,’ he said a trifle tersely.
‘Of course, Father,’ Enid said, finding them on the table and after spooning some on Jack’s plate, held the spoon, a question mark like her eyes, above Edwards’s plate.
‘Thank you,’ he said, although he didn’t know whether he wanted them.
Her face looked a little sad, he thought. Of course it would be. A family death! Although you would hardly believe it, scanning the faces in the room. The people’s throats, unclogged after a rapid intake of meat and Enid’s good bread, were sending forth a spatter of words, and sometimes a sharp cackle of laughter which caused Enid to stretch her quite long neck until it appeared to rise above everyone else, simmering the noise down, like a boiling pot removed from high heat.
Mrs Ena Grant, still in a glow of satisfaction on being asked back to the house, was making a good meal to save on tea, and should Cecil Grant call in before returning to Bega (he was a cousin on her husband’s side) there would be no need to offer food after this. Violet wasn’t here, she noticed, although she was at the church. What would become of the child? Henry, by the mantelpiece, seemed to be handling his grief well, talking to a former girlfriend Lila Johnstone, now bethrothed to one of the Power boys. Henry seemed already to have shaken off responsibility for the child, judging by his habit of lifting his shoulders now and again, and giving a lot of attention to the cigarette between his fingers. Ena could not see him taking the child back to Sydney to his mother’s relatives, even if Jack supplied an escort in Enid, Una or Violet.
As soon as she decently could she would ask, but it seemed safe to assume the child would stay with Violet. If passed over to Enid and Una that would put a spoke in their wheel, dressing to kill as they did and off to the Bega races and the Sydney Show and anything worthwhile at Candelo and Pambula. Ena with her hand temporarily empty of food picked like a small brown dusty bird at the crumbs in her saucer, and inhaled a new smell from the kitchen which was doubtless another cake, slipped into the oven since the meal started. They were a capable pair, the Herbert girls, no denying it, but she wouldn’t want their grocery bill, thank you very much! She put her feet out from under her chair admiring her new shoes of brown leather and looked at other women’s feet. Jinny Turbett was in large clumsy lace-ups. She would never catch a man in footwear like that! When Ena had the chance she would mention to May Turbett the new stock in for spring, beige and light tan, slender with narrow straps at the instep, in Jinny’s size.
‘I don’t mind if I do!’ she said when Enid came by with the new cake. Trying not to eat too fast she looked the company over. The men were bright eyed with their talk of spring crops and new cows coming in, for it looked like a good season. The flowers at the burial showed that frosts had not been too heavy. There would be money around and Ena would get her share across the counter of the store.
You can say what you like, she said to herself, accepting more tea from the pot Una held. I quite enjoy a good funeral.
Edwards was the last to leave, having hoped for another chance to speak to Una, and wanting the cars and superior buggies and sulkies out of the way before he set off. He was troubled by this pattern of behaviour, feeling the day would come when he would have no choice but to depart with a gathering of faces staring at the wobbling wheels and peeling paint of his sulky and his horse’s rump, resembling coarse dark sandpaper worn thin in places.
‘Wherever and whenever it is I pray for a good sharp bend to get me out of sight as quickly as possible,’ he told himself (speaking aloud too) on numerous occasions.
Had he been aware of Una at the kitchen window, he would have been grateful there were no early bends on the road back to St Jude’s.
Una was at the end of the small table with her face between the window frame and the edge of the blind, not causing even a flutter of the curtain. She smiled to herself at the comical picture he presented, for he was still new to handling a horse and sulky and did not hold the reins confidently on his knee but had them raised in the air and his head inclined to one side in the listening pose that was becoming familiar to her.
She dreamed on for a moment when the road was empty then turned and found Enid, who had slipped into the kitchen for the broom to brush crumbs from the precious living room linoleum.
Liquid eyes black as treacle slipped over Enid and grey-green ones surveyed the top of Una’s head.
Enid just slightly swung the broom as she went away.
8
Violet was angry at missing the best part of the funeral. She was able to leave Small Henry only long enough to go to the church, a five-minute walk from her place. He should sleep throughout the half-hour service, and if he didn’t a cry would do him no harm. She frequently told her patients this but did not take her own advice with ultimate confidence.
Before leaving she lingered by him, looking with concern not love on his mauve coloured face, even in sleep wearing a pinched look, not completely trusting, which was communicated to Violet.
‘I don’t trust the little bugger,’ she said aloud, having shouted around sleeping babies all her nursing days, believing them to be insensitive to sound.
He merely drew a deep breath that shuddered his frail frame and slept on under Violet’s gaze as she stood in her black mannish two-piece suit she favoured for the air of professionalism it gave her.
Ned heard her from the kitchen and coughed. The cough said see if there is anything I need before you go off, for he was not going to the funeral. He had not said so for Ned had little or no use for words. While Violet laid out
her suit and cream silk blouse, answering Ned in his own language, he put a second flannel on with old khaki trousers and dragged on old military boots almost white with age. Violet took her best black shoes from the wardrobe and dropped them angrily by a chair. Ned could buy some good clothes and be there today as smart as any of the other Herbert men! She flung her head back at the mirror and dabbed perfume under her rather heavy jaws, thinking her good creamy skin would draw its quota of admiring glances.
Damn Ned if he was fool enough to wallow in self-pity for the rest of his life! But she felt a need to mention Small Henry in addition to leaving his door wide open by way of saying he was there if there was a fire and would Ned oblige by snatching him and making a dash for safety.
Ned built up big fires in summer and winter in the kitchen stove and front room. Often he sat close enough to set himself alight and dozed off with his newspaper (one from a pile Violet saved while he was at the war and wished she hadn’t) tipped dangerously towards the flames. The crackling of the fire would startle him and in the early days Violet would put his head to her breast and stroke passionately at his hair, trying to erase the memory of the gunfire when Ned reared up wild eyed and agitated.
Now she rebuked him for the kind of wood he was bringing from the bush.
‘That wattle farts like a bullocky, Ned!’ she said. ‘Get some box for goodness sake, or something that burns without waking the dead!’
She was ready to go and the service was about to start and all she could do was push the logs together in the grate with the toe of her shoe and say in a loud voice she would be back (unfortunately) before you could turn around.
‘Of course,’ Ellen Power said, nodding under her fake fur hat when they were all about to go to the cemetery and Violet had to turn and go the opposite way. ‘You are the right one to have charge of the poor young thing!’
Part of Violet bristled at this – Wyndham deciding it was she who would take Small Henry and rear him!
Another part accepted readily this tribute to her status and capabilities as a nurse.
But she looked with resentment at Enid and Una climbing unencumbered into the Austin to go to the cemetery. Violet had not seen the cemetery since Nellie’s burial. All denominations used it, the cost of the land being shared between Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians, there being too few Methodists in Wyndham to bear a share, and needing to change their religion on their deathbeds or have their bodies bumped over many miles to Candelo or Pambula. Wide strips of grass were planted to divide the sections. But Wyndham grew careless of tending it and allowed growth to run riot, so that Michaelmass daisies, a favourite of Kathleen O’Toole, struggling weakly on her grave, flung their seed onto the grave of Dora MacDonald where they grew luxuriantly, mocking the barriers of religion and the fact that Kathleen and Dora were bitter enemies in life.
Violet would have liked to see where Henry’s young wife was buried in the Herbert plot. Quite a distance from Nellie, she would reckon, and as far towards the edge as they could get her. They would be out there with their sorrowful faces fooling everyone (mostly the Reverend Colin Edwards) into believing they were mourning the girl, when their thoughts would be with Nellie.
Violet saw again the girl’s face white as the bed sheets. She had turned it from them, weak as she must have been, lowered lids on those protruding eyes, as if glad at last to be able to dismiss them. Violet had slapped the child to life, causing it to scream lustily, and Una to clap her hands to her ears with her face almost as pale as the girl’s. Well, they had a lot to learn and God help the child if it was left in their care, although nothing was settled by any means. Leave them to stew on, while she enjoyed their sucking up to her and their new respect at her handling of Small Henry. His motley legs were a sign of good health, she had said, towelling them hard enough to break them, and she was openly scornful of Una’s fear of touching his pulsing scalp under hair like the wet fur on a kitten.
Violet plodded on home, nodding to Tom Grant opening up the shop under instructions from Ena to close it, as a mark of respect to the dead, only during the church service, and pay no heed to Rachel Holmes shutting the post office for the day. Rachel was a Herbert cousin, widowed in the war, with her husband’s name on the new monument, and a healthy appetite for socializing. Violet’s anger simmered stronger at the thought of Rachel on the Honeysuckle coach eating largely of good Herbert fare.
Never mind, never mind, none of them know what’s around the corner, Violet said to herself seeing Ned in the dim hallway of Albert Lane as still as a monument raised to himself. He had closed the door of Small Henry’s room but the child’s shrieking was audible and Violet, to fuel Ned’s agitation, took her time in getting out of her good clothes and into the kitchen to mix a bottle.
By the time Violet had the teat in Small Henry’s mouth Ned had gone towards the bush, past the pens where the fowls set up a squawk rivalling Small Henry’s, and threw themselves frantically against the wire, unable after more than a year to accept the fact that Ned had never tossed even a breadcrust their way.
Ah well, I should be grateful for a bit of a racket, God knows it’s deadly quiet around here most of the time, Violet said to herself holding Small Henry well down on her lap to feed him where other women might have pressed him to their chest.
He sucked eagerly, eyes squeezed shut, moving a tiny ear in his greed and Violet’s anger ran from her tight chest downwards to die under the weight of the tiny body. She fell to dreaming about the hospital. More shelves here, she said to herself, taking the bottle from an outraged Small Henry’s mouth and pointing the teat towards a corner of the room. George can run them up for me, Una can hem the sheets and napkins, Enid can pass over some of that glut of vegetables she often had.
Money! I will need money though. She had very little of her own left over from confinement cases (some debts were still outstanding) as she liked new clothes, and, when shopping in Bega with Enid and Una, was easily carried away on the tide of their enthusiasm.
Ned’s war pension went into the bank barely touched, for there was the monthly cheque from Halloween, and they lived cheaply as it was fast proving a waste of time and money cooking for Ned. He would turn away from the meat and vegetables she served him, saying he saw nothing like that for months on end ‘over there’.
‘Well, you’re over here now, Ned,’ she would answer, tipping his plateful onto hers, and cursing him later when her stomach tightened with wind from the turnips and cauliflower. ‘And if you die of malnutrition, that’s your lookout!’
She knew she would have no such ready answer when Ned refused her request for a hundred pounds to set up the hospital.
She stood suddenly, Small Henry having finished his bottle and fallen asleep. The violent movement should have unleashed the contents of his stomach and flung them down Violet’s back. But Small Henry in response to the rubbing she gave his back, hard enough to dislodge a portion of his skin, opened his lips to belch, then tucked them up again, moist with a trickle of milk and settled back into a deep, sighing sleep.
‘Listen to that!’ Violet cried, binding him in his blanket and ignoring the flopping of his head from side to side. ‘I drag the wind out of them if it’s the last thing I do!’
In his room she laid him in his basket sitting on an old deal table and shoved it noisily against the wall, standing by Small Henry’s head to survey the rest of the room.
‘Three cots, more shelves and the table’ (kicked with her foot) ‘will be for bathing them on!’
She flung up both windows for the chilly winter air to rush into the room as if there were already a roomful to breathe it, and closed the door behind her.
She looked down the hall imagining people trooping in, women heavy with child, men tiptoeing nervously on the linoleum, herself straight of back in her blue and white striped cambric uniform, severe and unsmiling to let them know at once she would tolerate no blubber
ing nonsense.
I feel it all coming closer, she said to herself, turning towards the kitchen and allowing the vision to disappear for the present.
There was Ned inside the back door, his clothes carrying damp patches and twigs from his tramp through the bush, and his eyes on Small Henry’s door, asking if he had been returned to Honeysuckle yet.
Not as bloody close though as I would like, she went on thinking, flinging a cloth on the table for dinner.
9
Violet walked to Honeysuckle next day, seeing inside the open front door a packed suitcase. As she looked Henry appeared with another. He lowered his eyes on seeing Violet as if to shut away the sight of Small Henry in the crook of her arm. With his foot he pushed the cases together. Violet knew his wife’s things were in the smaller one, and he was taking them to Sydney to hand over to her brother living in the slums with a wife who would receive them with no small degree of pleasure, having a brood of children and an unreliable breadwinner in her husband.
Violet remembered then that this was the first day since the funeral the mail car was going all the way to Nowra, the nearest railhead to meet the train to Sydney. No one had taken the trouble to let her know, but what else would you expect, Violet thought, lifting Small Henry to her shoulder with a swooping motion so that Henry’s eyes were drawn for a second to his shawl. She threw Enid’s arrangement of cushions on the couch roughly together to make a bed for Small Henry, and Enid coming into the living room saw and winced. Una came in behind, her face brightening at the sight of Violet and the baby who in some vague way she connected with Edwards.
She took the piano seat and Enid temporarily suspended her job of turning out the room where Henry’s wife’s body had lain, the last chore in restoring the house to its former order. Violet took a chair at the foot of the couch, not too close lest she give the impression of a deep bond of affection between her and Small Henry, but close enough to show at this stage she was in charge of him.