Loving Daughters

by Olga Masters

  ‘I need to have further talks with the archdeacon before approaching the father.’ He took up his hat and laid it on his kneecap.

  ‘An engagement perhaps,’ Mrs Palmer said, still using a murmuring voice.

  This was not what she wanted either. She wanted, in a fresh surge of jealousy, one of the Herbert girls in dresses and hats seasons old, losing her looks to a brood of children, in constant torment that she couldn’t feed and clothe them adequately.

  She had been plain and freckled and gawky and only Gordon had wanted to marry her. His face had never worn that soft, protective look and his thighs had never strained under the cloth of his clerical trousers, but fell away feeble and bony.

  She had sat up in bed on their honeymoon, watching him undress. She thought he would hurry through, flinging his clothes off to leap in bed beside her. But he took his time, folding his clothes as he removed them and sitting down to remove his boots, even studying them before putting them down, looking for any sign of wear, frowning over them for a long time.

  It seemed like a lesson to her on the kind of life she would have. She had let the blankets fall away to show her daring sleeveless blue silk nightgown but he appeared not to notice.

  He got up from his chair and put his collar studs and sleeve links carefully away, and all she saw was the back of his pyjamas, the cord so tight at his waist that the top bloused over, emphasizing his slightness.

  She lay down then and closed her eyes, so she did not know if he looked her way, and when he had blown out the light she heard his hesitant steps to the bed, and was tipped slightly on the mattress when he got in, but moved swiftly back to her edge.

  ‘Asleep?’ he said after a while.

  ‘Sound asleep!’ she said. He appeared to be digesting this, then slipped under the covers. Her spirits rose with him when he sat up.

  ‘You told them we would have early morning tea, didn’t you?’ he said. The dark put a thin and querulous edge to his voice.

  It gave hers strength and authority when she said: ‘I told them!’

  She waited with a beating heart, feeling him stirring. ‘I forgot my prayers,’ he said.

  She had forgotten hers too, and considered punishing him by remaining in bed. But she got up and knelt on her side with her face in the cold stiff sheet.

  He knelt with his face turned away from her. She pressed both hands to her face to shut out the sight of him and the sharp tarry smell of soap on the sheets – the cheapest boarding house for their honeymoon! – and could not bring herself to say a conventional prayer. She could only pray for the strength of mind not to hate him.

  Edwards’s thighs had brought this back to her and she lifted her eyes to his face to return to the present. His eyes were asking gently about her own unhappiness.

  I’m alright, said the toss of her sandy head. Her hair made Edwards think of tufts of pale grass growing out of sand. He had a fresh vision of Enid and Una. Una’s hair was the more abundant, but Enid wore hers dressed neatly. Yes, Enid’s hair in its way was every bit as attractive as Una’s.

  Edwards rose, taking his hat from his knee. He avoided looking at Mrs Palmer’s disappointed face, but she sat on, not uncrossing her legs.

  ‘I should go,’ he said. ‘It’s such a long drive for my horse.’ He saw its mournful, drooped face through the open door.

  ‘Why go on to Bega?’ she said, eyes washing over him, like water too deep to see the bottom. ‘Wait till Gordon comes. He could perhaps put your case to the next diocese meeting. Rushing in is not always a good thing.’

  With me it wasn’t. Stay the way you are a little longer! Visit me again like this!

  Edwards sat. Here was a nice woman! Warm and kind, taking on the burden of another’s problems, how wrong the gossips were that said she was hard and bossy.

  A flush was on her cheeks and she had uncrossed her legs and was staring at the tips of her shoes close together on the floor. The toes of his boots were not too far from hers.

  ‘Stay and eat dinner with us,’ she said.

  ‘I could not think of imposing,’ he said, wondering about the state of their larder compared to his.

  ‘There would be no imposition,’ Mrs Palmer said, seeing him part his legs and rub his thighs on the inside. A man is allowed so much, she thought, crossing her legs again, as if she needed to imprison a feeling there, and as a woman was denied the luxury of relief.

  ‘I should complete the errand I set out on,’ he said. But looking towards the door, they both saw Palmer coming through the gate.

  The men exchanged a greeting and Mrs Palmer left them to see to dinner.

  Palmer had had a bad morning. He took a group of Anglican children for religious instruction, less than a third of whom had church-going parents. His eyes, when raised above the book of parables he read from, accused them of these failings and the bold eyes of the children dared him to interfere.

  For most of them the morning meant relief from the rigours of regular schoolwork, and they utilized the time in holiday spirit.

  Palmer’s nickname was Small Balls, and a row of the class this morning had passed along a paper under their desks, each one drawing a scrotum as they saw his. They were reduced in size as they went along, the second last being two dots, smaller than pin heads.

  The last child made no attempt at a drawing, but wrote the word ‘invisible’.

  The others seeing this burst into laughter they failed to control, and Palmer asked for the paper. He looked at it and considered sending the group to the headmaster, but knew the large raw-boned man to wield the cane without mercy.

  After a long sad look at the drawings, some done so well there was no mistaking the subject, Palmer dropped the paper in a waste basket.

  Relief escaped the children in a sigh that settled their ribs after the tight and fearful pain they bore, aware of what might have been ahead of them. Palmer suggested they kneel and pray forgiveness for their wickedness, and they feel on their knees as one, grateful for the reprieve and grateful that the last few minutes before the bell clanged for dinner could be utilized in additional sly merriment.

  ‘Our Father which fart in heaven,’ hissed the boy who wrote ‘invisible’, and the others crushed their heads on the wooden desks, arms folded around faces, as if giving themselves up totally to piety.

  Palmer saw their shoulders shaking.

  Now he felt some slight resentment that there was a visitor at the house. Mavis may not be pleased at stretching the meal to fill an extra stomach, a hollow one if he knew Edwards.

  A churchman calling unexpectedly was seen as his responsibility. Mavis could take it out on him subtly during the meal and openly afterwards.

  He hung his hat on the stand and saw in the mirror there the reflection of her face, absorbed and quite soft as she set the table. She did not look resentful. Thank you, Lord!

  Edwards wore a strained look. Something wrong at Wyndham? Of course there would be! He got the dregs appointed to that backwater.

  Palmer expanded in his chair feeling that Edwards was shrinking in his. Through the window he could see, beyond Mavis’s neat garden, part of the solid old school he had just left. That was over for a week! Candelo, quivering nervously those mornings he went there, seemed settled now, snugly at peace, wearing a small and gentle smile like his.

  A good place this! He had done very well. Poor, unhappy Edwards! What fresh trouble was that awful little settlement giving him? Palmer blinked his contentment while Edwards’s head was inclined towards the window through which there came a volume of noise. Of course it would startle Edwards, unused as he was to anything but sleepy, silent Wyndham.

  A muted roar was in the air, no words distinguishable, an urgent chorus, not from finely tuned instruments, no murmuring liquid background, but the beat of feet on earth, the final crescendo the crash of wood on wood, as a gate slammed to. />
  What on earth? said Edwards’s startled brown eyes. There was Mavis flashing from kitchen to dining room with a bowl of freshly whipped potatoes, and there were other smells, fragrant and stomach stirring.

  Palmer rose with patronizing energy. ‘The children out of school for dinner!’ he said. ‘They’re a high spirited, happy lot! Extremely intelligent as well. I quite enjoy my morning there!’ He led the way to the dining room.

  There was no point in Edwards making the trip to Bega after all. After dinner, Palmer, remaining politely uncurious during the meal (church matters were never discussed in the presence of wives and children), used the telephone in his study to confirm what he suspected. The archdeacon was away for a week, visiting a married daughter in Goulburn and only the curate was in charge.

  Palmer sat with a flourish after clicking the receiver inside its metal holder and moved a blotter tidily before him. The room was neatly furnished, with no dust anywhere and some flowers on a bookcase.

  Edwards thought of the table that passed for his desk in his living room, mostly strewn with his writing pad, magazines borrowed from Honeysuckle and socks dropped there after a search for holes, usually found in abundance.

  Palmer motioned him to sit on the chair facing his desk, but Edwards remained standing, holding his hat, seeing a little frill developing at the edge, through the sun and rain beating upon it. He dropped it to his side.

  There had been canned salmon for dinner. Edwards ate with relish and envy, believing it to be part of abundant delicacies in the larder, unaware that it was a treat kept by Mavis for rare occasions. He had noticed the children eating slowly of the tender moist flesh, giving silent credit to their mother for their good manners.

  He did not know the unexpected treat had a soothing effect on their small troubled hearts. As it frequently happened, they had spent most of their playtime pressed together in a corner of the weathershed, sheltering each other from the jibes of classmates, isolating them, punishing them for their father’s presence in the schoolroom.

  Mavis came in with a tray of tea for the two of them to finish their meal in the intimate and male confines of the study.

  Edwards said he could not stay any longer. ‘I must be off before the afternoon closes in,’ he said, looking at the sky through the window, as if instructing it to cloud over.

  ‘Please don’t get up,’ he said to Palmer.

  Stay there and pretend you’re the archdeacon for a while longer!

  Mavis shook the cushion on the chair he had sat in with a light and tender movement of her large, bony hand. When he took it to shake he liked the supple feel and he may have imagined a curling of her fingers inside his palm. I’d like to sit and talk with her again, he thought, telling himself her face said the same of him.

  ‘Thank you for all your kindness,’ he said in a low voice, for Palmer had come to the study door.

  ‘Oh no, thank you,’ she said, puzzling both of them.

  When he was gone she turned her back on Palmer and straightened the doily where the tea tray had been.

  ‘Did he say what he wanted of the archdeacon?’ Palmer said, the letdown putting an irritable edge to his voice.

  She decided not to tell him. She should, if she wanted him to take the side of Edwards in the matter of an early marriage.

  She didn’t want an early marriage for Colin Edwards! She remembered suddenly she did not learn from him which Herbert girl he wanted to marry. Let it be neither!

  ‘Perhaps his church roof is leaking,’ she said.

  30

  He might well leave the church. He would make a new attempt to see the archdeacon and tell him he could no longer bear the confines of his appointment to Wyndham. He was in the prime of life, he wanted marriage, he would not spend the next eighteen months celibate! He would find other work. He tried to see himself in an occupation of which Enid would approve. Una would not mind anything. But for Enid he would need to be a teacher, a bookkeeper, or a farmer although he could scarcely manage any of these.

  The sulky bowled along the road towards Wyndham, dust flying around his horse’s feet, the harness on the brown back tapping it gently, now and again a shake and a snort, a dipping of the head as if to say, this is more like it, be a sensible fellow and go home and forget all that nonsense.

  Just ahead of him the Grubb children lined the road, let out of the little school a half mile down one of the turn-offs, their classmates taking other tracks into the hills where there were three or four other farms.

  The heart of Edwards softened at the sight of them, particularly the little girl he had nursed in the house during his first visit. There she was yards behind the others with the neck of her dress undone at the back, appearing too big for her, perhaps one handed down from an older sister. The hem brushed her naked calves and he saw her little feet were bare. Edwards thought of the road scraped with frost of a morning.

  He pulled the horse up alongside her. She turned her face and there it was as he remembered it, under thick brown hair like Una’s, remembering their intimacy with a sly, shy twinkle in eyes as brown as Una’s were.

  ‘Come up,’ he said, and she was on the sulky stirrup in a moment and the others, an older girl and two big boys came together in a little bunch, one of the boys embarrassed at the memory of delivering his father’s message to the house and hastening Edwards’s departure.

  ‘Climb in, all of you,’ Edwards said, and they did, the guilty one keeping his eyes down and feeling obliged to take the worst place in the sulky, on the floor among feet, huddled there with a face pressed to scarred knees.

  The sulky shafts tipped, and the horse’s back broadened as both adjusted to the load, and after a few strained steps the horse settled into a trot, and the swaying sulky sent the little brown-haired one close against Edwards’s arms, where she remained gripped to his flesh to avoid slipping down the sloping seat on top of her brother. The warm little kitten of a thing! He did not want to shake the reins in case his arm disturbed her, the chill of separation more than he could bear.

  She pressed her chin into his shoulder to whisper: ‘Where is your baby today?’

  The others heard and expected to be tipped from the sulky there and then. The boy next to her dug an elbow into her side, the girl next to him turned her head to give all her attention to the spinning sulky wheel, the boy on the floor pinned his head between his knees so he wouldn’t hear if something more terrible was to come.

  Edwards laughed, he couldn’t help it, which in the children’s view was worse than a rebuke.

  The little thing had him confused in a relationship with Small Henry! There was gossip about Small Henry’s future and this little sweet, innocent thing, knowing Small Henry was somewhere near him, associated him with fatherhood. The tongues that were long and moved freely in this place were coupling him with Enid or Una and this little one had added Small Henry. The little thing with her pink, shamed face crushed to his shoulder might well have spoken what could become a fact.

  Small Henry should not grow up in the house of Ned and Violet, him with his neurosis and her with resentment against the role thrust upon her. And if the hospital came to pass, that was no place for a child. Women moaning in childbirth in a terrifying way. Once he visited the maternity hospital in Bega soon after his arrival from England, filling in for the curate who was ill with influenza. He walked in on a moaning woman the nurse did not have time to get out of his way. He never forgot the woman’s eyes begging him to do something. He looked down on the swirl of hair on the crown of the little girl’s head, so like Una’s. Una loved Small Henry, holding him as she did as if he were moulded to her own body.

  He would take that baby in his arms and see what it felt like next time he was at Violet’s. This very afternoon! He moved an arm a little sharply to hurry his horse along and the little girl looked up, thinking it a rebuff.

  No, little one, I
love you too. All soft, innocent things, I love. Una I love!

  31

  He went straight to Violet’s to apologize for going off to Candelo without asking if there was any errand he could do for her.

  ‘But I’m not troubled about any apology,’ he said to his honest eyes in the mirror, as he brushed himself up for the visit. ‘It’s Small Henry I must see.’

  He knocked for several minutes, seeing no sign of life through the open door down to the back where the fowls were picking in desultory fashion at the wire enclosure.

  A little wind swirled the dust inside, ruffling the feathers of those crouched waiting near the dry troughs. Edwards waited too in the creeping silence for footsteps or a flash of Violet’s dress in the bush or on the track made by feet, mainly Ned’s, into the gully.

  A great gully of silence there, the gums and the shivery grass and the blackened stumps waiting like the fowls, as if they too had a spirit locked up inside them, and eyes that blinked without expression, and voices that had no sound, but a power to deepen the menacing quiet.

  Edwards glanced behind him across to the Post Office, closed against the cold, then along to the verandah of the store which no one crossed, and where the windows, hung with the hurricane lanterns, held the dusty china and garden forks and spades that were there when he came to Wyndham.

  But it was less frightening than Violet’s empty hallway and what lay beyond, so he kept half turned in that direction while he knocked some more.

  He was about to give up and leave for the rectory when he heard the cry of Small Henry.

  Three grunts came first, then a small wail that was more of a question. Is someone there to get me? There was no cry following for a moment, then some more grunts, angry and peevish, then a vibrant yelling that told even Edwards’s inexperienced ears there was no way he was going to stop unless someone came.

  Edwards felt he was hung there, caught by some invisible thread, permitted to squeeze through the skylight if this were possible, but with no licence to open the door and stride in.