Thorn on the Rose

by Joy Dettman

  He wasn’t a drinker, and with a few glasses of wine under his belt, he could be a fool. He told Gertrude at midnight he was too drunk to drive her home, that she’d have to spend the night in his bed. She told him the walk home would do her good.

  He drove her home, and at the garden gate he kissed her like a lover and told her she was marrying him before they had another argument.

  ‘And wouldn’t we look like a prize pair of doddering old fools, walking down the aisle in our dotage.’

  ‘You’re never going to do it, are you?’

  ‘You know he’s not dead, Vern. Do you want me had up for bigamy?’

  ‘There’s nothing to stop you putting a ring on your finger and moving out to Monk’s place with me. We’ll do the house up for ourselves.’

  ‘Jim might have something to say about that. He sounds fired up about that house.’

  ‘Your granddaughter’s not. She’s no farmer’s wife.’

  Nor any man’s wife, Gertrude thought, but she held her tongue.

  Vern had never required a lot of encouragement. He dropped by on Tuesday morning for a quick cup of tea; he was back again on Saturday and Jenny was back to dodging him.

  There was only so much time she could spend at Elsie’s house, which Margot still considered to be her rightful place. She was treated like a deity by Elsie’s kids; there wasn’t an ounce of fat on any one of them. That pale Buddha waddling on tiny feet was looked on much as Jesus’s disciples may have looked on His walk on water. Jenny left her there to be praised and took Georgie down to the creek to teach her to swim — and she paid in full measure when Vern finally left and she hauled Margot home.

  ‘Mumma. Mumma.’

  The following Saturday when they heard that car coming, Jenny left, a kid under each arm. She borrowed Elsie’s worn-out pram and took the two kids for a walk down one of the forest tracks — and ran into Bobby Vevers and Johnny Lewis, out setting rabbit traps.

  Dragged that pram around and headed fast back the way she’d come, the youths following like two eager dogs panting behind one of Duffy’s bitches.

  ‘We’re not going to hurt you, Jen.’

  They wouldn’t get a chance. Pushed that pram faster, ran with it once she was back on the road, mouthing ‘bastard’ with each revolution of worn wheels and vowing she’d never set foot off Gertrude’s land again.

  She put the kids down for a nap one wet Saturday and hid in the shed with a book Norman had sent down in the carton of bits and pieces — a book which, until the kids had upended the carton that morning, Jenny had believed to be a Bible.

  It had a black cover like a Bible, but it wasn’t. She had in her hands D.H. Lawrence’s banned book, and what Norman had been doing with it, and why he’d sent it down with her old junk, she didn’t know, but fifty pages into it she didn’t care why he’d sent it. It was about a woman married to a crippled man, a rich man, and the woman spent half her life getting her clothes off with the gamekeeper.

  She didn’t hear them until they were in the shed.

  ‘You could smell it on him at the council meeting,’ Vern said.

  ‘I noticed him putting it away at the party.’ Gertrude was poking around where the chooks’ wheat was stored, feet away from where Jenny sat in the partitioned rear corner, Gertrude’s bathroom, her store room for preserves, and no door between them, only a wheat bag curtain. Jenny stopped turning pages, stopped breathing — almost.

  ‘What sort of a wage would he be getting?’ Vern mused.

  ‘Not much above the basic,’ Gertrude said. ‘The railways never did pay more than they had to.’

  ‘I don’t know how he pays that girl’s dress bills. Did his mother leave him much?’

  ‘I doubt it. Amber used to say that she’d never put a penny into the pot.’

  ‘She’s around there with Margaret now, talking about ordering her wedding gown from some Sydney bridal wear place.’

  ‘She needs her backside kicked — and the way she was talking to her father at the party, I felt like doing the kicking.’

  ‘A couple of kids will settle her down,’ Vern said.

  Eavesdroppers rarely hear what they hope to hear. Jenny didn’t want to know that Sissy was still treating Norman like a dog with a chequebook. But why should she pity him? He hadn’t come near her since the day she’d come home, and that visit had only been to tell her to stay away from Amber and Sissy. And he’d sent down a book that was so . . . so hot it almost steamed.

  ‘All he ever had was his pride in that bugger of a girl’s voice,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Over at Elsie’s or down at the creek with the boys.’

  ‘You’ll need to watch her around Joey.’

  ‘Don’t talk such blatant rot! Those kids have been friends since they were toddlers.’

  ‘A girl who looks like her won’t live long as a nun. You fool yourself into thinking that she will, and you’ll be in for a fall.’

  The afternoon sun glaring through a rough-cut opening in the shed wall, burned Jenny’s face; the book she held open burned her hands, and knowing that Vern believed she was like the woman in that book scorched her soul. And as if Lady Chatterley could do it all the time without having babies. It was fiction, that’s all, fiction written by a man who had Vern’s dirty mind — and Bobby Vevers’s and Johnny Lewis’s dirty minds, and those twin bastards, and probably every man.

  ‘That boy looks five years older than he is, and if you think he’s not out there looking for it . . .’

  ‘Don’t judge him by yourself,’ Gertrude said, her voice growing distant.

  ‘And don’t you get your back up every time I open my flamin’ mouth.’

  ‘Then stop attacking that girl every time you open your mouth.’

  Too far away for Jenny to hear more. The car left fifteen minutes later.

  Vern went home to where no one attacked him, where he was free to say what he liked — other than to his future daughter-in-law, who he found fiddling with the knobs of his wireless.

  He hated people fiddling with his wireless, changing it from the station of his choice, but he kept his distance, walked by his sitting room and on down to the kitchen where he sought comfort in cake. That independent bugger of a woman could make him feel like a callow youth caught with his fly undone. And what had he said today to get her back up? He could have said a lot worse than he had.

  He’d helped himself to a fair sized chunk of fruitcake before Margaret heard him rattling the tin.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea to go with it, Father?’

  ‘It would go down well enough,’ he said.

  He had no intention of taking tea with his future daughter-in-law, who he’d expected to be gone, and if Margaret would stop encouraging her, then she might have been gone. He made a point of dragging a chair to the table, Margaret’s work table. She served him there, allowing him to make his point.

  A tray loaded, she carried it into the sitting room. Lorna smelled it and came from the library, a book in hand. She didn’t tolerate fools gladly, and tolerated Cecelia Morrison less gladly than most, though she had not interfered with the engagement. With the war still escalating, the safest place for her brother was wed and living out at the farm.

  Margaret sat with Sissy, delighted they were soon to be sisters. She was nine years Sissy’s senior, though at times seemingly the younger of the two, and excited as a child. She was to be Sissy’s bridesmaid. She’d never been a bridesmaid.

  They’d chosen the wedding frock. She’d taken Sissy’s measurements and together they’d filled in the order form, ticked the Cheque enclosed box.

  Lorna placed her book down and took her teacup and cake. She bit, swallowed tea, watching the two heads together, still praising the gown modelled by a slim-hipped slip of a girl. Lorna, never a womanly woman, who shuddered at the thought of wedding gowns and bridal beds, left them to their oohing and aahing, and joined Vern in the kitchen.

  ‘What time will Jim be back?’ he
said.

  ‘Not before six.’

  Jim was playing cricket. As Gertrude had once suggested, a few months of military training hadn’t done him any harm. He’d trained with the second Fulton boy, a top cricketer who had encouraged Jim to join the team. Jim wasn’t much good with the bat or ball, but he had good reflexes and the height to take catches.

  ‘Why isn’t she up there watching him play?’

  Well may you ask, Lorna’s eyebrows said, as she helped herself to more cake.

  Vern wasn’t pleased with Jim’s choice of bride, though he had no one but himself to blame for it. He’d planted the seed.

  During his nine or ten months away from Gertrude, needing something to keep his mind off her, he’d decided to do what he could about keeping Jim out of the war. He’d pointed him towards the Fulton girls. There were four of marrying age, and a nicer bunch of girls you’d never meet.

  As Gertrude liked to say, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.

  The army had a herd mentality; Jim, born a sheep, had taken a fancy to military khaki. He’d come home on leave from the camp talking about joining up. It was a disease of youth. During the last war, there’d been a stampede of young chaps joining up to see the world. They all believed they were immortal.

  ‘There’s more to winning a war than putting on a khaki uniform,’ Vern had said. ‘A country needs her farmers at home growing food. That’s where you’ll do the most good.’

  A man’s heart had to be in the land. Always a bookish bugger of a boy, Jim might have been something had Vern forced him back to that city school — might have made him into an architect.

  He’d dragged Vern across the paddock one morning to look over Monk’s house, to point out its leaking roof, the bathroom floor rotted through in one corner. It had been a grand old house once.

  ‘It needs people living in it,’ Vern had said. ‘Not worth putting the money into doing it up if no one is living there.’

  He’d never told him to marry, or not in so many words. ‘I’ll do it up for you as a wedding present.’ That’s all he’d said.

  He’d never come near to suggesting he ought to marry Sissy Morrison — though in hindsight, maybe he was responsible for that, too.

  For years Jim had been squiring her and Margaret to every ball, to every dance, which would need to be stopped if Jim was ever to have a chance of taking up with a nice girl. So back when the ball season started, he’d tried to toss a spanner into the works.

  ‘Stop carting that girl around with you and your sister and let her find someone who’ll marry her. She’s not getting any younger,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m not stopping her,’ Jim said.

  ‘Of course you’re stopping her! You walk into the hall with her. You walk out with her. Everywhere you go she’s beside you. Half the folk in town think that you’re courting her.’ That’s all he’d said.

  Then came the mushrooms.

  Jim arrived in from the farm telling of a crop of mushrooms growing in the corner of Monk’s grand old dining room.

  ‘The least we have to do is to fix the roof, Pops. It’s a magnificent old place. If we don’t fix it now, we’ll be pulling it down in a year or two.’

  Arthur Hogan, master builder, wed to one of the middle Macdonald girls, had taken a run out to the farm with them to give an estimation for roof repairs. Jim, as he was apt to, had gone off on a tangent.

  He knew every inch of that house. He’d led Hogan from room to room, led him into the old bathroom where they’d stood for half an hour praising the falling tiles. Too much like his mother, that boy — with her same ability to spend money.

  ‘Fix the roof,’ Vern had said to Hogan. ‘You can do the rest when he weds — and at the rate he’s going, I’ll probably have twenty years to save up for it.’ That’s all he’d said.

  Toss a seed into fallow ground and, given the right conditions, it will sprout. He’d planted that seed in Jim’s book-addled brain and the bloody thing had grown twisted.

  With a bit of help from Margaret.

  She’d been scratching around in Joanna’s jewellery box one wet afternoon, trying on rings. Every time she saw Arthur Hogan she started dripping and trying on rings.

  She’d tried on a nice diamond, with a couple of smaller diamonds on the shoulders, and Vern had got talking about how he’d bought it for Joanne when he took her down to the races the year Artilleryman won the Melbourne Cup.

  ‘A late engagement ring,’ he’d said.

  You could have knocked him down with a feather when a week later that same ring turned up on Sissy Morrison’s finger.

  ‘I’m over twenty-one, Pops.’ That’s all Jim would say when Vern had tried to argue about it. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  That military camp had done more than give that boy a yearning for bloody khaki.

  Vern had been trying ever since to look on the bright side. He doubted there was any love between the engaged couple, but in his experience love and marriage didn’t necessarily go hand in hand. Marriage was for the producing of legitimate offspring, which he’d done three times, without love. He’d loved Gertrude for fifty years and that bugger of a woman wouldn’t wed him.

  And when all was said and done, he had achieved what he’d wanted: to keep his boy safe from war. And whatever else he might think of Sissy Morrison, she was one of the few girls in this town built to bear Hoopers — even if his grandkids did take after her. And when all was said and done, the engagement had been responsible for him getting back with Gertrude — even though he now had to censor every bloody thought in his head before he let it out of his mouth, thanks to that hot-pants little bugger.

  SPLIT PINS

  On the first Saturday in November, two cars left the Hoopers’ backyard and drove in convoy out Three Pines Road. Vern was behind the wheel of his new maroon Chrysler; he turned right at the fork. His two-year-old green Ford, with Jim behind the wheel, continued over the bridge. Jim was taking Sissy out to introduce her to the farm manager and his wife, who would be her nearest neighbours come December, and to show her over Monk’s house before Arthur Hogan and his crew started on the renovations.

  The farmhouse Vern had been born and raised in was as old as Monk’s, a third of its size, but in better repair. Sissy, wearing her best manners and a near pleasant demeanour, was ushered into a parlour much like Norman’s. There the manager’s wife poured tea and offered cake. Sissy was no longer a child; she’d learned when not to behave as a child. She smiled when a smile was expected, preened when her ring was admired, smiled until Jim led her out the back door then expected her to walk over rough ground, through drying grass, across wide paddocks, to climb between fence wires while flies swarmed like bees around their queen.

  ‘You could have driven me around there in the car,’ she said.

  ‘Petrol,’ Jim said. The V8 Ford drank the stuff and the monthly ration was next to useless to those accustomed to driving to Willama every week or so. Jim conserved his petrol when he could. ‘It’s only a hop, step and a jump, Sis.’

  Jump being the operative word. The garden Vern had envied as a boy was overrun by sheep, the gravel path leading to the back door was scattered with sheep dung. Sissy, her mouth shut, her eyes slitted against the flies, stepped over, around, in sheep poop. There was more of it on the rear verandah where a few sheep had been taking advantage of the shade.

  If he expected her to live on a stinking sheep-poop, fly-riddled farm he could think again. She wanted to live in the Hoopers’ house in town, with Margaret. Since she’d turned sixteen, she’d coveted the Hoopers’ house and everything Margaret had. And she would live there too — though she’d keep her mouth shut until December.

  Jim opened the rear door and the smell of mould and mice hit her. She took her handkerchief from beneath her bra strap and held it to her nose, making her point without saying a word.

  He led her into a large room overlooking the creek. ‘We’re going to put a wall up in here
. This end will be the kitchen and the other half a dining room.’

  ‘It stinks.’

  ‘It’s nothing to what it was. We had a crop of mushrooms growing in the corner,’ he said with pride. He loved this house with a passion he didn’t feel for his fiancée. Love grew, so the books said. If it was going to grow anywhere it would grow in this house. Anything was possible out here.

  As excited as a kid, Jim led her though empty halls while in the yard sheep bleated and shook off more dung. Sissy wanted to go home, wanted to put her head under a pillow and scream.

  ‘Down here, Sis. You’ve got to see this.’

  She hated him calling her Sis. Just hated it. Her name was Cecelia and no one ever used it — except her mother and father, and she hated them, too.

  ‘I’m not your sister. I’m your fiancée,’ she said, shoes clomping on bare boards, following his voice to a room as big as a church where she found him running his hand over a carved monstrosity of a fireplace, mirrored inserts going up to within feet of the ceiling — a fifteen-foot ceiling, and dark. And they didn’t even have the electricity on.

  ‘How could anyone live out here without electricity?’ How could anyone live out here without ten maids? ‘The whole place smells mouldy.’

  ‘The rain has been getting in. They’ll fix that. We’ll get the electricity connected. No one has lived here since around ’32.’

  ‘The Monks had maids?’

  ‘That’s why the bank sold him up,’ Jim said, leading the way to his bathroom, which might have been the height of luxury a hundred years ago. Today, two legs of the bath had gone through the floor and the pipes feeding it swung free.

  ‘Look at those old tiles, Sis. I told Hogan I want to reuse them if we can get enough off intact.’ She was backing away from his tiles. ‘Watch where you walk,’ he warned. ‘The floor is rotten.’