Loving Daughters

by Olga Masters

  He touched his writing pad as if he should write the information down to make it more believable. Then he returned to the kitchen window and saw the empty sulky and the lowered head of Dolly.

  He watched the house – surely it would open a door or window and show her to him! He threw up his window knowing the rattle had no chance of reaching those closeted inside. She had found a reason to call on him the last time she was at Violet’s!

  She was avoiding him, discarding him. He would have Enid then! He went to his living room again. Enid it will be! He fiddled with his writing pad and uncapped his ink.

  Dear Mother, I have practically made up my mind. She is in your image, so very like you.

  He sat sideways at his table, then got up again and returned to his kitchen window. Nothing. Only the chimney, with an air of mocking him, sent up a burst of smoke. They were making tea with never a thought of him. They could have sent George for him. It was the sort of thing George was used for!

  He would go to his woodheap, his own fire needed lighting if he was to have anything hot to drink before going to bed. He would not necessarily look their way. He stood looking hard at his wood.

  Then out of the corner of his eye he saw. Una with Small Henry in her arms at the window. From out of his blanket she took a tiny hand and waved it back and forth, back and forth.

  His horse under the big tree chose that moment to lift its rump while it rubbed the side of its head on a foreleg.

  The wretched thing! He should throw a lump of wood at it. Then it decided to dance sideways for no reason that he could see and gave him back the entire window. He swooped upon a log of wood, a great thing testing his strength, and raising it, waggled an end, returning the salute.

  Then Violet’s great back filled the window and they were gone. He saw her shoulders working, she was snatching Small Henry from Una and pushing her ahead. He saw Small Henry’s face, no bigger than a pinhead it seemed, dance away from him, and nothing of Una at all.

  He dropped the wood and went inside. He saw shadows reach out from the corners of his room and dance quite crazily for a moment on the writing pad.

  Dear Mother, If ever I should have a child of my own I would never have a nurse for it.

  28

  He dressed next morning to go to Honeysuckle with the excuse that he would welcome Enid back after her week at the sea, then changed his mind, put the horse in the sulky and took the road towards Bega. He sped past a surprised Violet dispiritedly shaking a mat on her front verandah.

  He never said he was going anywhere, like Candelo or Bega, said her expression, fastened to his black back. He might have asked did I need anything! After all the kindnesses I’ve shown him! I’ll be putting a stopper on the tea and cakes from now on.

  She flung the mat into the front room when passing the door, not fussy where it landed, and tramped angrily to the kitchen. Ned was there, scraping his feet on the floor from his seat on the couch, and through Small Henry’s closed door came the noise of his yelling.

  ‘I’ll make changes in this place before long, see if I don’t!’ She filled the big kettle for Small Henry’s bath, needing to step around a stick with one end forming a natural handle, which Ned had found in the bush and now appeared to use all the time.

  I thought it was his eye, Violet said to herself. I see now it’s the other end as well. And what’s in between is as good as useless too! She slowed her movements to punish Small Henry, who increased the volume of his bellowing, and Ned, who rose agitated and pointed his stick towards the bedroom door.

  ‘They ruined him down there!’ Violet cried, flinging a wash cloth in the china basin that was Small Henry’s bath. ‘I’m left to repair the damage. And repair it I will!’

  Her shouting shocked Small Henry into silence for a moment, then he started up again, inserting a fluttery feebleness into his cry as if warning of impending exhaustion.

  ‘And I might well dump him on them after all!’

  Ned raised his head like an animal alerted to something that pleased him. She would wipe that look from his face!

  ‘There’ll be bellowing to take his place, make no mistake, Ned!’ Ned looked about him, as if he’d received an order from a superior officer which he did not fully understand.

  ‘I’m opening a hospital here, Ned. I’ve planned it all and I’m ready to go!’

  Ned was in the kitchen doorway now, pinning a toe of his boot down with his stick. Violet saw his back and the edge of his face, the side with the lost eye. Enough! Enough! He heard, he knows, he knows!

  She threw some cups and plates from breakfast into a tin dish and flung a towel over a limited space on the table, partly covering jam and butter and the teapot and not caring. She would have a girl from one of the farms helping when she had the hospital. Una could be here a lot of the time, since she was so fond of playing at mothers.

  Violet had been, as she put it, sooling Edwards onto Enid. She decided now, with a small rush of pleasure, she would change to Una. Enid was too good a catch for him anyway. Going off like that without a word! She would let him know what real manners were. Not all bowing and hat removing and opening doors and gates the way she saw it!

  She went for Small Henry, shedding his steaming napkin in the bedroom and returning to the kitchen with his bare behind defenceless, crushed like a peach, and not much bigger inside one of her large arms.

  She laid him on the towel where his flailing legs failed to disturb his genitals, looking too like a smaller squashed peach. Lifting him into the water she saw Ned taking the track to the bush.

  ‘You’re one of them too!’ she shouted to Small Henry above his new protesting squeal. She lathered his face and head with soap so that he looked like a small, angry Santa Claus. ‘You’ll grow up just like them! No better! Give me a world without men! Free of the burden they bring, the worries they lay at your feet!’

  She rinsed Small Henry as if he were a newly peeled potato and dried and dressed him. She screwed the cap on the powder tin after flooding his crotch and fished the soap from the water, ‘I’m meeting the cost of all of this!’ she cried. ‘The dill water as well. And what about later on when he starts in on the gruel, the oatmeal and the mashed potato? And no cheque from Halloween every month!’

  She sat and pushed the teat of the bottle into Small Henry’s mouth and watched his last slow tear run into his ear while he drank.

  ‘I must have that hospital, and the least you can do is help me get it! You’ve tied me down here, you’re the reason why I can’t go out on cases now! Hear that, hear that! I must have a better reason for being anchored in this hell hole!’

  Small Henry’s answer was an expansion of his chest as he took the first strong flow from the bottle, with eyes squeezed shut and fingers curled in ecstasy.

  The room that had rocked angrily about Violet now settled down. The sun was warm on her back, and the fire in the stove snapped and hummed to say it was burning without attention. The only other sound was the scrape of a fowl’s throat from the pen, all the others reduced to a morbid quiet, since Ned had gone too long for even their optimism to hold out.

  Violet, barely aware of it, rocked Small Henry gently with her eyes on the dresser. A dozen china plates and soup bowls, a dozen cups and saucers. Four bed pans, four enamel basins, four single iron beds and mattresses.

  That wretched man! She could have given Small Henry an earlier bath and left him and a day’s supply of bottles and napkins with Rachel, and taken the empty seat in the sulky. He would be going as far as Candelo. A missed chance of seeing what the stores there had to offer. One had a large parent branch in Bega through which an unlimited range of goods could be ordered.

  That wretched man! She would have worn her black suit, looking every inch the matron.

  She swirled the last of the milk in Small Henry’s bottle but he shut his lips tight as a closed flower against th
e teat. She hoisted him to her shoulder where he broke wind at both ends.

  ‘There he goes, farting like a bullocky already! Not one of them any different!’

  She laid him in his bed and shut the door on him, going to the back verandah for a mop and looking into the bush for a sign of Ned.

  ‘This quiet’s a killer!’ she said, missing Honeysuckle and Una rushing around, hair awry, bursting out with something unexpected, like a pantomime of Jack or George, or throwing her scissors down with a great clatter and a cry.

  ‘I feel like some toffee! Let’s make a batch of toffee and a mess while she’s away!’ Enid did not tolerate sweet making except for shows, where hers was usually the most professional of all the exhibits.

  How would the reverend feel about toffee making when he was expecting the bishop? Hee, hee. Violet relished the scene with the same pleasure as a mouthful of treacly toffee.

  She flung her mop about the bedroom floor, setting up a rattle from a small table in a corner displaying brass ornaments made from spent ammunition, which Ned carried home from the war, and Violet at first lovingly polished and arranged on a white embroidered table cover.

  ‘Out! Out!’ she cried, jabbing her mop towards them. ‘All of them out!’

  She would have a closet in their place, similar to the one George was putting up in the lumber room at Honeysuckle to take the few things brought in by her patients. Not much in the case of Tess Skinner, whom Violet assumed would be confined there, since Violet delivered her other children in the house and she wouldn’t be doing this any more. She felt an urge to move the big bed and wardrobe to the end of the verandah.

  ‘In a couple of weeks it’ll be warm enough to sleep there,’ she said, hurrying the season along ahead of its time. ‘He might prefer old Phoebe’s hollow tree and he’s quite welcome to it!’

  Banging the mop on the verandah rail and getting a view of the big gum under which Edwards’s horse usually sheltered, she steered her thoughts back to him, bubbling away like a pan of sour jam on a too-hot stove.

  ‘I’ll see him mated with the flighty one if it’s the last thing I do!’ she cried. ‘She’ll keep him on his toes! I could have got a bolt of calico and started her on the sheets. How dare he go off, sneaking off without a word! How dare he?’

  29

  Violet’s gaping mouth and angry brow were seen by Edwards when he passed the house, dolling his hat and raising the reins in salute. Guilt invaded him and he sent his horse faster as if he could leave the feeling behind this way. He should have called on Mrs Violet and asked if he could do any errand for her, a custom he knew to be practised in Wyndham when neighbours made a trip to a larger town. Well, what was done was done, and he hoped the farther he left Violet’s accusing shape behind, the less troubled he would feel.

  He could not bear another day spent without some positive step towards a future with Enid or Una. Una or Enid! He must have it out with the archdeacon. Marriage was normal and necessary. He wanted it! He could have either of those girls with a snap of his fingers. Snap his fingers he did, holding a hand high as he raced along, the crisp air chilling his face and deepening the ruddy colour.

  ‘I can have either!’ he shouted to the sky, a clear blue with only one puffy cloud racing with him. A pillow of cloud! He laughed up at it. He saw a streaming vapour like a girl’s hair trailing the cloud pillow, and would have stood in the sulky and whooped except that he would lose his balance.

  He slowed his horse. He could not wear him out this way. Bega was too far off to make the return trip in the one day. Where he would spend the night he did not know. The sky was his roof though, look at it up there! He felt he should be shouting to the sky as if the world was his house, and he could behave as he liked in it.

  He was surprised to see Candelo come up so soon. The Anglican church and rectory set back from the road was several hundred yards past the first cluster of houses.

  The Minister’s wife, Mrs Palmer, had made a garden around the front steps, and bright cushions were tilted on chairs on the verandah.

  Edwards having tied his horse to the front fence went up the steps, pleased at the sight of the front door open, a shine on the floor covering, a bowl of bright yellow flowers on the piano. He was staring at them thinking of Enid when Mrs Palmer answered his knock. She was fair, sturdy and strong looking, unlike many ministers’ wives who were small with a cringing air, going about with downcast eyes, as if a reticent and humble front made their husbands appear powerful and authoritative, which Edwards knew, in many cases, they were not.

  Mrs Palmer seemed pleased to have a visitor and offered Edwards a chair and tea. She kept up a conversation while in the kitchen, which was next to the dining room, through an archway separating it from the front room. A superior dwelling to his, Edwards had to concede with lowering spirits.

  ‘Gordon is visiting the school this morning,’ Mrs Palmer said while her hands, visible to Edwards, buttered bread at a table.

  Surprised at himself, he didn’t mind. When he stopped (this was a day he was doing everything on impulse) he had vague thoughts of sharing his problem with Palmer, whom he considered approachable, though not as forthright as he would be, given a parish of this size.

  He believed he saw now the reason for his hesitant manner.

  Mrs Palmer was the stronger of the two, and he imagined now as she brought in the tea tray that it was her husband who lurked in her shadow. He hoped he did not come in soon. The Palmers had only two children, he remembered, and he wondered how they managed this (or she did) and looked foolishly for a solution in the vicinity of her hips and thighs, as if there would be something there to give her secret away.

  I’ll need to pray pardon for these kinds of thoughts, he told himself, blushing towards his teacup. She put hers down on the small table between them and asked about the health of Small Henry.

  ‘A christening there quite soon,’ Edwards said.

  ‘A sad affair,’ Mrs Palmer said, and Edwards, thinking of Enid as he swallowed his sultana cake, and of Una when he looked at the piano where he had seen her reflection in the shining wood of the one at Honeysuckle, and wondering where any sadness could be, was some time remembering the circumstances of Small Henry’s birth.

  ‘The young mother’s death, yes,’ he said, making his voice sound pious.

  He saw by Mrs Palmer’s expression that it was not to be totally regretted. The mother had sinned and sin was for punishment.

  ‘He’s in the care of an aunt?’ she asked next. (She gained this information from Rachel Holmes with whom she had occasional telephone conversations, the two having sung together in the same church choir as schoolgirls.)

  ‘At the moment, yes,’ said Edwards, and felt her sharpish look upon him, allowing her to interpret a family intimacy, involving him.

  ‘Is the father likely to return for him?’ Mrs Palmer said.

  ‘That is hardly likely,’ Edwards replied, putting his cup down with a crisp little clink of china.

  ‘Perhaps the young sisters –?’ Mrs Palmer said. The reputation of the well-dressed, gadding and unencumbered Herbert girls had spread far beyond the borders of Wyndham. Mrs Palmer, jealous of their freedom, and what appeared to be a generous clothes allowance, felt pleasure that here was something threatening to restrict them. Immediately she felt she should temper the thought with something more charitable.

  ‘They are both capable, from what I hear.’

  Edwards needed to blink away the light suffusing his eyes and running down to tenderize his mouth. Capable! Indeed they were capable. And one of them his! He crossed his legs and Mrs Palmer’s attention was caught and rivetted to his thighs, one squashing the other on the chair she had never thought so frail before. Ah, I see, thought Mrs Palmer. And I had thought this day as drab and empty as most of the others! Which one, I wonder?

  She concentrated on a vision of the Herbert
girls at a diocese garden party in Bega, so smartly turned out she was doubly conscious of her old navy serge suit, too hot for the warm spring day. Let it be Enid, the haughtier one. See how she manages on a miserable stipend. Edwards was smiling protectively, she thought, on someone envisioned. The younger one? She had looked shyly from under her hat trimmed with cornflowers and stood slightly behind her sister, with her half-smiling lips looking as if they had been coloured a deeper red. Paint on the face of a clergyman’s wife!

  Mrs Palmer now shifted her solid legs and raised a fair freckled face. This was interesting indeed! She refilled both their cups without asking, signalling a developing intimacy, aware that her breasts fell forward over his cup and rose and quivered when she leaned back in her chair. She sipped her tea with lowered eyes.

  ‘Both charming girls,’ she murmured.

  She saw his eyes bright as the gold rim on the cup.

  ‘Is it too early for felicitations then?’ she said. ‘Or quite in order?’ She put her head to one side in coquettish fashion which Edwards observed, in spite of the train of his own thoughts, did not suit her.

  He moved his cup and saucer to one side of the table as if it would be an obstacle in the serious discussion to follow.

  ‘There are difficulties to overcome,’ he said. ‘They may be minor.’

  The father objects, said the pupils of her eyes, swimming in watery curiosity.

  ‘There is a condition of my appointment to Wyndham that I remain single,’ Edwards said.

  She remembered now. Gordon was at the diocese meeting and heard the matter discussed. When he mentioned it to her (mainly because he would no longer need to take a share of the responsibility of the Wyndham parish with other district clergy) she had snorted scornfully at this fresh evidence of the meanness of the church.

  Not prepared to add even a few shillings to the already miserable stipend!

  Her anger was heightened by the lean Christmas they were facing, her children unable to swap with schoolmates tales on the toys they would receive.