by Olga Masters
The wedding cake on its own small table was covered with a transparent cloth so that the silver beads trimming each tier were blurred like tears.
Enid flung the window up to let in some smells from the oleanders then shut it sharply. No, she said going to the kitchen to take a tray of her quite famous pork pies from the oven.
Let the room stay cold.
Edwards’s face with a woebegone expression came to her while she was filling a platter of bacon and eggs for the men’s breakfast at the kitchen table.
No, no, cried her thumping heart. I want you happy. Jack saw the breakfast arrangements, having just come in, and expressed his displeasure with a snort towards the living room.
‘The baby’s sick,’ Enid said. ‘We are not sure what will happen!’
Happen? What did she mean? But she was rolling cut sandwiches in damp teatowels.
‘Can’t it go to Violet’s?’ Jack said. When he chose to he did not acknowledge the hospital’s existence and certainly not the presence of patients.
He had to acknowledge it now. It should never have been allowed. It was a disruption. Ned wandering between it and the farm, no use at either place. His condition worse now. The hospital the cause!
And that child – Small Henry as they all called it but not him! – here this past week. Lately he had come in for dinner and there it was on a rug on the floor by the table, sucking on a bone from the roast joint, with all their necks craning to watch his every move.
When he had lost the bone once Alex got up and gave it back to him, and Small Henry rewarded him with a long blue look, as intent on giving it as finding the bone’s way to his mouth. Then he rocked his body a little as if this was a language, still with his eyes on Alex saying I’ve seen you around here, you must belong. I do too, so we can get to know each other better. But don’t take your size as the yardstick to measure superiority.
He rocked a little harder to emphasize this and Alex allowed his mouth to slip into a lazy, dreamy grin, and when he returned to his food he turned his potatoes over for the tops had grown cold. Many times he slid his eyes back to the little figure rubbing his heels together and flapping his arms up and down, still holding the bone.
‘Oh, dirty, dirty!’ Una had cried, running to him and picking threads from the rug from his bone, and closing his hand more firmly over it managed to get between him and Alex. Jack lifted the salt shaker up and slapped it on the table as he did when they were all young and misbehaving at the table.
Bugger him, Alex thought, and deciding against having pudding went and sat with the Sydney Mail on an easy chair at the edge of the rug, able to look at Small Henry all the time.
Alex came in now through the front of the house, asking with his tipped up head where the child was. He had driven the car to the front to polish it for the wedding.
Jack cut his bacon angrily. Things would need to get back to normal after this wedding! They would, mark his words, with the child back at Violet’s and it close by for Una to carry on with it.
Enid was rushed off her legs, bathwater and clothes constantly in her way. She wore an anxious expression now, working swiftly as if she wanted to have this thing over and done with, her eyes raised in a frowning way every now and again towards the clock or the other part of the house. It was so still there he screwed his head around to make sure it hadn’t vanished. Alex went to the car out the front with a tread that seemed to increase Enid’s anxiety.
All this fuss about a wedding! Jack looked at the clock too, but only to estimate when it would all be done with.
Enid slipping gracefully about the ordered house again! The quiet, the peace. He had seen her doing her cooking at the little table, her basins jammed together, while the big table was used for bathing the child, Una taking all day about it and splashing and douching and calling out for them to come and look at ridiculous things like a roll of fat at the back of his neck.
‘I’m going to paint him, yes I’m going to paint him! He’s too beautiful not to be painted!’ she cried, showering water over everything as she wrapped him in a big white towel Nellie had used for her babies. Well they soon would be spared the mess and disorder, it would be at that rectory when Violet (and he knew this would happen) passed the child to someone else when she had patients, in spite of all her boasting about how capable she was.
None was more capable than his Enid, look at her now closing the dresser doors with a cloth wrapped around her hand so that she would not mark the glass. Jack made a gesture towards the front of the house, and Enid brushed her cuffs unnecessarily.
‘I’ll see,’ she said and slipped away.
Soundlessly she opened the bedroom door and there were Una and Small Henry asleep on the tangled sheets. Her old kimono was awry and her hands tucked between her knees and Small Henry’s damp head was on her damp hair. A virginal sleep, her face holding to her the last minutes of her girlhood, the face a little tense, as if she were hanging on, not ready to let go, not yet abandoning the old life.
Una by the edge of the sea, with a toe in the water.
I can’t go in yet. Soon, but not quite yet. And she wrapped her arms around her body clutching it although the day was warm.
Enid now tapped the foot of the bed lightly and Una’s eyes sprang open. For a second they held her new life in them, she was a little frightened of it too, a little less confident, questioning that it was right after all. She closed her eyes swiftly as if this needed to be kept from Enid who called her name.
Una sat up and propped on an arm looked down on Small Henry.
He slept on, a redness in his cheeks, a shrine of sweat in the creases of his neck. His round head, now almost bare of hair, was touched with wetness too, a great round silvery head, ready to butt into life, no longer vulnerable, tender and uncertain.
Una stared at the wet mark his head made on the pillow through her hair, and then at his face. While she looked his eyes sprang open and he let out a breath and raised a fat leg and flung it from the sheet. He turned his head from left to right, swiftly and energetically, found Enid and grinned broadly, then flashed his eyes on Una and began to pump his legs up and down and flap his arms wildly against his wrinkled nightdress. It was soon raised to expose his belly which he pushed forward, bringing a smile to Enid’s face and Una from the bed to lean across and scoop him and take him to the mirror to kiss his face, ecstatic to find it cool and moist. She found his light blanket and bound him in it and raced down the step into the living room, calling back to Enid.
‘He can bathe in the tub with me! Mix a bottle for him to have when we’re done. Hurry, hurry, hurry!’
Enid did not know if she was calling to her or instructing herself.
She flung the crumpled bedding to the foot of the bed, shutting out her sight of the wedding dress with its new low waist and sleeves just below the elbow, curling back like the petals of a great, creamy flower. The dress itself was like a flower there against the brown chair back, and seeing it at the side of her face as she made up the bed with fresh linen it seemed to open and bloom to the sound of Una’s voice, calling endearments to Small Henry, racing with him tucked under her arm gathering his things. The living room as she ran through it came to life too, the roses opening wider and the silver and glasses taking on an added sparkle.
Enid on her way to the kitchen flung a window up to let the smell of oleanders in, mixed with the rich smell of her pies and the talcum powder Una was shaking playfully in the air, still running with Small Henry and calling him a sham, a put on, not really sick, just frightening her and never, never do it again, never pretend or it will kill her. She would die.
Jack was in the kitchen with relief on his face and his hands on his hips and George eating the last of the bacon with a mournful face, not having taken too kindly to the suggestion that he take the sulky in case there was someone in need of a lift back to Honeysuckle from the church. Vi
olet would want a seat in the Austin, you could be sure of that.
Enid saw the hands of the clock moving towards eight. Three hours to go. It is going to happen after all. I thought it mightn’t, but it will.
Nothing will stop it now.
36
The wedding went off smoothly until the end when Small Henry’s temperature rose and there was a foolish attempt to keep it from Una.
‘Put him in a room and tell her he’s asleep and not to be disturbed,’ Rachel said, and Violet, holding him against her shoulder where his head was burrowed and his legs hung slack, snorted her scorn and turned him sharply from someone so naive.
Enid came up in her dark blue morrocain with a beaded collar and looked into Small Henry’s face, telling herself he was merely tired after all the excitement. ‘They are almost ready to go,’ she whispered, for she had seen Alex take the luggage from the verandah and strap it to the rack at the back of the Austin. They were to have a week’s honeymoon in Pambula, the suggestion of a room at Uncle Percy’s hotel in Merimbula scorned by Una, who foresaw bedlam among the six cousins at the presence of a bridegroom.
Una had seen that all was not well with Small Henry. Dragged by Jinny Turbett to inspect and praise more liberally a china butter dish given for a wedding present, she had her head in its new blue hat raised so high she seemed the tallest in the room and her creased brow, turned from the table of gifts, asked questions of Violet and Enid. In a moment she was attempting to pluck Small Henry from Violet who swung him away, and Enid said not to disturb him, they would put him down presently.
‘Down where?’ Una cried, her eyes flashing towards a remote bedroom door where she pictured him shut away and left to fret and weep for her.
‘Let me have him please, Violet,’ she said, as if her married state had increased her rights to him.
And taking him she sat on a chair, her blue hat sinking down over Small Henry like an umbrella. The guests craned their heads and their talk died to a murmur, although their new lowered tones failed to blur the edge of excitement that was there.
Something going on here! Just when things were winding down and thoughts had to turn to cows and bails, and manure slapped on stone floors, and flies buzzing around heads and no hands free to wave them off, and some dropping into the froth of milk and crawling there to the despair of the milker, who saw them then as enemies they would never conquer.
Just when this had to be the train of thought a crisis developed, and my goodness, supposing she wouldn’t go off with him and leave Small Henry, or better still take Small Henry on the honeymoon!
The way her arms were bound to him now it looked as if she would never free them. Ah, this is interesting, said eyebrows raised high enough to move wedding hats, and eyes looking for Edwards so as not to miss his expression when he saw what was going on.
He came settling his coat after taking it off to wash, and he brushed the front now with his well-shaped hands, the women admiring, some of them wondering how hands like that would feel on their bodies after the calloused groping ones of their husbands. One of the fine hands now drew the blanket back from Small Henry’s face, and then Una raised her face to his and there was less than an inch between the profiles, making them look like a poster for a romantic and passionate moving picture. Many of the onlookers blushed and felt uncomfortable as if they were watching them undress.
Edwards put his hands under Small Henry on Una’s lap and put him in Violet’s arms. He took Una’s arm and folded it over his own arm and it quivered there, half intending to pull away. But Una rose and the guests fell back, making a path for them.
‘He’s just a little hot,’ Enid murmured. Her eyes sought Edwards and he nodded in a way she knew and gave a small smile that said you are the wise one, I leave you in charge. He took Una with him to the door, her face over her shoulder, clinging to Small Henry rocked in Violet’s arms.
‘He’ll be alright,’ Edwards said soothingly.
‘Right as rain!’ called a bold voice from a stout frame that had borne many children, not all of whom survived the rigours of childhood ills, but whose optimism remained unshaken.
The cry was caught up by the others. ‘Go off and enjoy yourselves, have a good time by the sea! Don’t worry about a thing! Goodbye, goodbye!’
Alex had the back door of the car open for them and Una did not look back, for she could not bear to see faces that were not Small Henry’s. All she could manage was a wan smile when she settled in the back seat. She dropped her head so that her hat became a blue mushroom and all an anxious Edwards could see was a piece of jawline which looked rebellious in spite of the anxiety occupying the remainder of her face. He put a hand on a fold of her dress on the seat, a blue silk she had made for the going away, not brave enough to take her hand seeing the tense curling of her fingers.
She turned large accusing eyes on him. ‘I left him sick,’ she said. ‘He won’t get better without me.’
Edwards looked away to the swiftly flying trees beside the road. All through the ceremony he had wanted to have his mother there.
God is wisest after all, he told himself. It is just as well she wasn’t.
37
They were in a guesthouse high above the sea where they were taken to their room by the owner, Mrs Chance, who modestly lowered her eyes at the sight of the bed covered with a counterpane so white and crisply laundered it seemed a sacrilege to disturb it. But Una threw her hat on it and went to the window to gaze at the sea. Edwards saw with relief her hands linked behind her were no longer tense. Mrs Chance waited in vain for compliments on the room, for she had brought in a small table and covered it with a white cloth for them to have breakfast in private if they wanted it and she had two bowls of flowers on the mantelpiece, although heaven knows they were hard enough to come by in the January heat. She went off in a huff resolving not to put herself out further.
The moment she was gone Una flung herself around, her small face brighter than the yellow daisies.
‘Did you see it?’ she cried. Edwards didn’t know what, except that she was happy again. ‘The telephone in the hall when we came in! A telephone! We can telephone Rachel and she can go across to Violet’s and see how Small Henry is!’ He hoped his face did not give away his instant thought on the cost.
‘Jack gave me some money before we left,’ she cried, having read him correctly. ‘Don’t worry about that part!’
‘I wasn’t worried about that part,’ said Edwards with dignity. ‘I’m pleased to have you set your mind at rest.’ He sat on the one chair, looking at his thighs, hoping she would come and sit on his knee.
A woman had never sat on his knees.
He felt his flesh creep a little now, ready to leap into contact with those round little buttocks in the slippery, flowered silk. He could put a hand up under it and move the hand around her underthings. He could do that if he wanted to!
He stood, hands on the chair arms, and saw her sink onto the window seat cupping a glum face in her hands. She raised her knees wrapped in her skirt and laid her chin on them, an untouchable figure rocking herself there with the blue sea, triangular shaped, seeming to sit on one shoulder.
‘After tea we’ll telephone,’ he said.
She looked at her feet in their new brown shows rubbed carelessly together. She was casual with her fine things. He was ashamed of the thought that followed of Enid, taking scrupulous care of hers. ‘They will just say he is better,’ she said. ‘They will keep the truth from me.’
‘The truth most likely is he is better,’ Edwards said, fighting an urge to be short with her. This was his honeymoon, for heaven’s sake!
‘Come for a walk by the sea before teatime,’ he said. He did not say before bed although he looked at it. Una creased her eyes towards it too, then rose with a sigh and smoothed her skirt.
‘That’s a good girl,’ he said, putting a hand out to her.
‘Should I put different clothes on?’ she said. He dropped his hands. He had barely felt the stuff of her silk dress. She lifted her case to the bed and opening it began to take things out in little heaps. There was a shower of ribbons falling from the first heap and then a larger garment, white and lacy, which she tossed on the pillow.
‘We unpack,’ she said. ‘That’s what we do first.’
His case was older and shabbier than hers and he was acutely aware of its lightness. He put it across the chair and with his back to her took out the shirts and vests Mrs Watts had ironed for him. He should have put his woollen jumper in. It would have taken up some of the space. He saw her hang her things in the wardrobe leaving a half for him. He did not need it. But how to tell her?
‘Spread your things out so they won’t crush,’ he said, opening a drawer in a big chest. ‘I’ll lay my things out in here.’ The drawer made a hollow noise when he shut it and he felt she could not fail to notice it was almost empty.
But I am a man of God, he told himself. It is only right I live more frugally.
But he remembered Alex’s back in the tweed motoring coat, the crisp edge of his shirt and his jaunty cap. I haven’t a motor, so those things would not be of any use to me, he thought. But he was not comforted.
Una took two dresses from the wardrobe and looked critically at each, then threw one on the bed and jabbed the other back. She crossed her arms and lifted the blue silk over her head and he saw her white neck and shoulders and the little crushed ribbons at the top of her breasts. So that’s where they went!
He smiled at them but she got into her other dress quickly, new too, white dotted closely with navy blue and with a big white collar, a sort of sailor dress, suitable he supposed for the seaside.
The people were right. She was a fashion plate but he loved her for it, and it was too early to start worrying about where future clothes would come from. She had made herself enough, he supposed, to last a long time.