by Kim Kane
‘One has to admit, however,’ said her mother, smoothing things over, ‘that Mel-bourne sounds somewhat urbane. Infinitely more appealing.’
‘Oh, Mel-bin is not such a backwater,’ said Aunt Hen. ‘There’s quite a lot going on, really, if one has a jolly good poke around.’
‘Well, Mel-bourne does sound like the sort of place that might at least have a symphony orchestra!’ Elfriede laughed.
Hen Pen smiled politely. The other adults laughed too. Bea giggled along with them, teeth blinking. Imo looked at the adults and joined in. She held her stomach like a too-full man, spurting crumbs as a whale spurts water. ‘That is terribly funny, Mummy.’
Gert picked up her cake fork. ‘If I’d laughed with a mouth full of cake, I would have been sent to the nursery before you could say Molly McGolly,’ she said out of the side of her mouth.
Madeleine looked around. Nobody acknowledged either her or Gert. It was funny to be present but completely ignored. It made Madeleine feel as if she were dissolving, like a last shard of soap in the bath.
While Charlie hadn’t dissolved, she had disappeared, possibly under the table. Nobody appeared to have noticed. The other adults and Bea, however, were all giving Imo chocolate looks and laughing some more. The laughter bound them.
Mr Williamson glanced at his watch and stood up. ‘I’m sorry, but I really must tend to some business.’ He scattered more dimples around the table and checked his fob watch again. Madeleine was pretty sure he didn’t really see the time. She watched as Mr Williamson gave Mrs Williamson a vague pat on her back. Then he strode out of the room, flicking his hair and tucking his watch back into his pocket as he did so. When he had gone, the room was still for a moment, like the point at the very end of a breath. Even Anna, scuttling about the fringes of the room, muted her clearing.
Madeleine sat up straight and took a gulp of milky tea. She put the teacup carefully back in its saucer. Aunt Hen winked.
Mrs Williamson smiled, nodded and sat back, content. ‘Well,’ she said with Girl Guide enthusiasm, ‘who would care for a little more tea?’
The girls wandered back up to the nursery in some sort of trance – all except Bea, who was allowed to remain sitting with Mrs Williamson and Elfriede. Aunt Hen also remained but she wasn’t chatting, she was reading the newspaper quite seriously in the corner.
‘Your family is so lovely,’ said Madeleine as she lay back onto her little bed. And they were – they were like a real family, the sort that you saw in car ads or in oil paintings from the olden days, all lolling around together under willow trees, or playing with hoops; families in which gas bills and maths test results and Lean Cuisine and single parents would never figure. Families full of pretty, happy people in pretty (if uncomfy) clothes.
Gert had been as dreamily quiet as the other girls since they’d left the table, but this seemed to snap her into an unhappy mood. ‘I just don’t understand why Bea always gets treated like she’s an adult while I’m always lumped in with Charlie and Imo. I mean, surely if there was going to be a line, the obvious place to draw it would be below me.’ She kicked at a wooden cradle on the floor stuffed with dolls and knitted animals. ‘What happens in your family?’
‘I only have a brother,’ said Madeleine. ‘So it’s more like the kids versus the adults; I get thrown in with Teddy. And now . . .’
‘What’s it like to have a brother?’ Charlie’s voice was high with excitement.
Madeleine sighed and suddenly felt flooded with nostalgia. ‘Well, he has cheesy feet, especially after he’s worn his Air Jordans to basketball – they make his whole room stink. And he leaves the milk carton in the fridge when it’s empty. Drives me mad.’
The girls all looked as blank as a squash-court wall. Madeleine searched for better examples. How did you explain the concept of a carton of milk in the fridge to people who had a cow in their backyard? ‘His boots reek and he’s always taking the last piece of cake.’
‘Like Gert,’ said Charlie.
Gert pinched her. Charlie didn’t scream. She just rubbed her arm. ‘Get off, Gert,’ she said, frowning. ‘It was only a tease.’
Gert flicked Charlie’s leg with a hair ribbon and Charlie danced back, laughing. That, thought Madeleine, is more like it.
Gert caught sight of something on her front and stopped, holding out her dress. Down the bodice was a great dollop of raspberry jam. She rubbed it until it smeared and looked even worse. ‘And I wonder why I’m sent back to the nursery. Bea would never do that.’
‘Then Bea should help herself to bigger spoonfuls of jam,’ said Madeleine. ‘Mum Crum always says that kids who are neat aren’t being kids.’
‘I’d like your Mum Crum,’ said Gert. ‘Perhaps she’d be interested in replacing Nanny.’
‘You’d like parts of her,’ said Madeleine. ‘And so do I.’
Madeleine went over to Gert’s bed and picked up Gert’s teddy. Although it was meant to be a bear, it had hard, strong limbs. Mum Crum would approve of a teddy like that, she thought. It was like a bear that had done a lot of Pilates.
Madeleine bent the bear’s legs and sat it next to two dolls on the windowsill. Beyond them was a pale moon, as wispy as a ghost in the afternoon sky – a shadow moon, a moon made of winter cloud. Somewhere, sometime, under that very same moon was Mum Crum – Mum Crum and her crazy ideas, just so far away.
The next afternoon, the girls crowded around Elfriede in the dining room after lunch. Bea had eaten with the adults, while the others – the littlies, as Nanny insultingly called them – had eaten in the poky room off the kitchen again.
Madeleine, as the old visitor, had lost her new-girl status and was now just lumped in with the family. That always happened with new kids at school – they were celebrities for a week or so, until everyone realised they ate salami sandwiches and listened to the top-twenty hits too.
‘Do you want to come and see the garden, Elfriede?’ Gert asked. Madeleine noted Gert hadn’t used Friede as Mrs Williamson had, and she agreed with the decision. Elfriede felt better. Even in the warm glow of Elfriede’s beauty, there was a coolness to the girls’ cousin that Madeleine thought was probably European. It was funny, though, because it seemed everybody else’s name here was shortened or changed: Bea, Imo, Charlie, Hen.
‘Oh, you must see the garden, you just must,’ said Imo, taking Elfriede by the hand.
‘Leave poor Friede alone,’ said their mother. ‘She’s still adjusting.’
‘I’m fine, thank you, Isabelle.’ Elfriede smiled. ‘And I should love to see the garden.’
‘I shall let the children escort you, then. Don’t forget your hats.’ Mrs Williamson turned to Elfriede. ‘This sun is so strong here, even in winter. Gert and Charlie are already as speckled as Dalmatians.’
It was a perfect time of day, Madeleine’s favourite hour. Although it was winter, the sky outside was clear. The sun was high, and the garden was fresh and sparkly. Oranges hung bloated on branches in a small orchard down near the empty tree. Gert pulled at one and offered it to Elfriede. The tree juddered and another three fell with a thud. Imo scooped them up from the grass.
‘Ooh, how lovely. At this time of year!’ Elfriede held the fruit up to her face to smell it.
‘Do you have them at home, Ms von Fürstenburg?’ asked Madeleine.
‘Call me Elfriede, please,’ said Elfriede. ‘Otherwise I shall feel like my mother!’
Bea laughed and took an orange from Imo. ‘These are English,’ she said. ‘Daddy’s sister sends her stones and seeds as a treat.’
‘It is a beautiful garden.’
‘Mummy presses local plants in her herbarium,’ said Gert. ‘Then she sends the plants and seeds in tiny muslin bags to her friends back home in Germany and in England. Isn’t that right, Bea?’
‘Hmm,’ said Bea creamily. She was walking just ahead of the pack and she led the group in a gentle turn until they were heading back up the hill again.
Gert and Madeleine wandered up th
e path, their steps in sync. Bea strolled beside Elfriede, pointing out this and that plant, this and that flower. ‘I often get the names of the plants wrong, but Bea never does,’ whispered Gert.
Madeleine laughed. ‘I think it’s a good thing. It makes you far more interesting.’
‘Really?’
Imo yawned. ‘I like the bits of the garden I can eat.’
Elfriede’s mouth contorted in the beginnings of a yawn and she looked away to swallow it.
They had walked around the side of the house, past a croquet lawn and up to a garden enclosed by a picket fence. Madeleine could hear the creek running nearby.
‘This is the kitchen garden.’ Gert opened a gate in the fence, which sat under a little archway covered with glossy leaves.
Bea walked Elfriede up some of the small paths that stemmed from the gate. ‘Rosemary,’ Bea said, ‘for lamb. Cumquats, for marmalade and—’
‘For hurling like bombs.’ Charlie picked up a cumquat and threw it at a sparrow on the fence. The sparrow got away.
Up the hill beyond the kitchen garden and picket fence was another little hook of garden. ‘Mummy designed this,’ said Imo. The hook garden had a tiny stone seat and a pond, which ran in a loose heart shape. It was almost completely hidden from the house.
‘I love all the secret spots in this garden,’ said Elfriede. ‘It’s so romantic.’
Charlie grabbed her stomach. ‘That sort of talk makes me queasy.’
‘Look at the fish!’ Madeleine pointed to the thick, meaty carp that wove their way along the bottom of the pond. Some were speckled orange, white and black; others had mottled skin, splotchy like a dog’s mange.
‘That’s my favourite.’ Charlie pointed at a fish huddled under a lily pad, staying clear of the sun. It had a porous skin, purple-black like velvet.
Imo knelt down and wriggled her fingers in the water, whistling. ‘Toow wooooo. Look, you can touch their noses.’ One of the big mottled fish, which had silver scales as big and shiny as coins, swam up to her fingers. The others followed in a braid of silver tails. Imo shrieked and pulled her hand out. Madeleine stared at the fish. Their bodies were at once grotesque and mesmerising.
‘They are enormous,’ said Elfriede. ‘I’ve never seen them quite this big.’
‘They have whiskers like dogs,’ said Gert.
‘You mean like rats,’ said Madeleine.
The girls hovered around Elfriede. They knelt on the pond’s mossy bank and let the wintry sun warm them.
‘Aren’t you uncomfortable?’ asked Charlie. ‘You can sit on the bench, you know. It is for adults.’
‘Mummy would never curl up on the ground,’ Gert commented, her voice brimming with admiration for Elfriede.
‘Uncomfortable? This is heavenly.’ Elfriede lay down and stretched out, long and lean; then she arched like a cat. ‘I could sleep right here.’ She rolled luxuriously over onto her side and reached an arm long. Just seeing that stretch made Madeleine ache to stretch too.
‘Ah, but there’s just one more thing I must do.’ Elfriede stood up again. Madeleine watched as she slid her feet out of her shoes and dipped under her skirt to unclip her stockings. They fell to her ankles in two glossy clumps. Elfriede stepped out of them. ‘That is much freer.’ She grinned and sat back down, wriggling her toes before she lowered them into the pond. Carp scattered.
‘Oooh, it’s much colder than I’d expected!’
Madeleine stared at Elfriede’s long toes. Seeing them was like sharing a secret. They were so white they looked green through the water.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a grown-up’s toes before,’ said Charlie. ‘A lady’s.’
‘Ladies have toes too,’ said Gert.
‘Do you often go with bare feet in Germany?’ Charlie asked Elfriede.
Madeleine giggled. ‘You’ll see more than just a woman’s toes when you go to Germany, Charlie. My mum says Germans are really into nudity – like as a political statement or something – and that when she was a backpacker, every time she went to the park she saw big rosy bottoms sunbathing in rows.’
‘Madeleine.’
Madeleine looked up. All four Williamson girls were staring at her, mouths open like those clowns you stuck balls into at Luna Park.
Elfriede blushed pink beneath her powder. ‘I have never seen anyone naked in a park in Hamburg, Madeleine, but there are some Swedish baths being established in Berlin,’ she said. ‘I’m told they are somewhat progressive.’
‘I want to fish with my toes too!’ cried Imo, and within seconds both she and Charlie had kicked off their boots and dumped their feet in the pond.
‘Well, it does look nice.’ Bea drew her bony feet from her stockings. She inched her apron and dress up to her knees and lowered her feet into the water.
‘Bea?’ Gert, looking startled, followed suit, and so did Madeleine. The water was freezing, and it was sort of greasy, too. Actually, for all the fuss, it wasn’t that pleasant at all.
Elfriede left her feet in the pond and lay back against the bank. The five girls copied, stretching their necks from left to right as Elfriede did to rid themselves of cricks. Madeleine could feel the cold of the moss beneath her dress.
Elfriede sighed, as content as a cat in cream. ‘And so I think I know you all now. Your mother has told me. Bea is the beautiful one, Gert is the clever one, Charlie is the adventurous one, and with Imogen it’s too early to know, but she’s possibly the musical one, because she is always whistling!’
‘Out of tune. Possibly the annoying one. Definitely the spoilt one,’ whispered Gert. Madeleine smiled and scratched one foot with the other. It was only now that her feet had stopped hurting from the cold.
‘Four girls, four flavours. Like ice-cream! Now, tell me, Bea . . .’ Elfriede tapped Bea’s knee and smiled, and Bea smiled back. There was an intensity in their locking smiles that excluded everybody else in the circle. Elfriede’s eyes twinkled. ‘Do you have a beau?’
Bea blushed. Her eyes darted from Gert to Imo to Charlie to Madeleine. ‘No.’
‘What?’ Elfriede looked genuinely shocked. ‘A girl as beautiful as you?’
Now Gert blushed. ‘Bea’s only seventeen,’ she said, flicking her feet in the pond to create little splashes.
‘Almost eighteen,’ said Bea. ‘And I have come out, but life is very dreary up here.’
‘Well, we shall have to do something about that.’ Elfriede tapped Bea’s knee again. ‘I had many beaux by your age. Only I suspect it’s difficult to find a boy as handsome as your father. He has set the bar high.’
‘Do you have a husband?’ Imo bellowed over the top of Elfriede’s ensuing laugh. Elfriede seemed to laugh more at her own jokes than she laughed at anybody else’s.
‘No.’ Elfriede looked at Imo out of the corners of her eyes. ‘Not at the moment. Do you mind if I smoke?’
The girls watched as Elfriede drew a long cigarette from a silver case. As she sucked in, her cheekbones became wedges.
‘I didn’t know that ladies smoked.’ Gert cocked her head to the side. Elfriede drew back on her cigarette and the end flared red. ‘Not even Aunt Hen.’
‘Most don’t,’ said Elfriede a little smugly.
‘You really shouldn’t,’ said Madeleine. ‘Smoking causes lung cancer and stroke, and my grandfather died of emphysema because they gave him cigarettes in the war and he got hooked.’
Elfriede gave a startled cough, looked at her strangely for a moment, then drew in on her cigarette again. ‘The Crimean War?’
Madeleine nodded, silently vowing to be more careful about what she said.
‘What made you decide to journey so far, Elfriede?’ asked Bea.
Elfriede blew smoke out through her nose like a dragon. ‘I’ve been travelling for some time. After, well . . . my parents . . . I’m accompanying a cousin of my father’s on a world tour. Next stop Sydney.’
‘Oh,’ the sisters all said, with varying levels of interest (Gert’s intense, Bea�
�s polite, Charlie’s indifferent, Imo’s non-existent).
‘What’s your father’s cousin like?’ asked Madeleine.
‘Ancient. Straitlaced but perfectly friendly. I think my mother wanted that – the straitlaced bit.’ Elfriede looked over Gert’s hat and gave Bea an I’ll tell you later wink.
‘Bea’s seventeen,’ said Gert, ‘but I’m twelve. Like Madeleine. Charlie and Imo are really the babies.’
‘Beg your pardon, Schatz?’
Gert was dangling her legs a little bit away from the group. She and Madeleine were the furthest from Elfriede except for Charlie, who had just hopped up and was now skimming pebbles. Charlie didn’t seem to care that Elfriede seemed to favour Bea. Madeleine could see that Gert did. Elfriede looked over at Gert and Madeleine and smiled a sunny afternoon smile through the smoke. It promised nothing.
The sound of a gong rang out across the yard. Elfriede started. ‘What was that?’
‘Nanny,’ said Bea. ‘The gong has to be loud so that the men can hear it. Two gongs for the servants and one for us. It’s Nanny’s code.’
‘Our cousins had a gong in England, and so now Nanny’s installed one here,’ added Gert. ‘Nanny’s like that. Daddy says she’s as English as Gentleman’s Relish. She has been with our family for a jolly good part of Queen Victoria’s reign. She was nanny to our cousins, and when they finally grew up Daddy said it was too good an opportunity to miss and that we must do anything we could to keep Nanny in the family. She’s frightfully loyal, even if she hated the move. She said she expected Victoria to be more like a proper colony – with Mogul palaces, embroidered slippers and jewels. Daddy says that for all her strengths, Nanny is not terribly good at geography. Hen Pen says that just proves she shouldn’t be teaching it, and that in England many of the governesses are so frightful that there is a tremendous push to educate them!’
‘Gert, don’t prattle,’ said Bea. ‘You are dull.’
The gong rang again – once – only this time from a different direction.
‘Goodness,’ said Elfriede. ‘Does Nanny have an orchestra of gongs?’