A Complicated Woman

by Sheelagh Kelly

  Nat tilted forward. ‘Soft bugger, it’s a paper bag.’ He went to pick it up and shoved it into the dustbin. Then, still intrigued by the night-time sky, gazed up again to study all the millions of stars – many more than at home, it seemed. ‘I wonder if all them constellations are upside down an’ all?’ murmured Nat. ‘I’m not very well acquainted with heavenly bodies.’

  ‘I hope that isn’t another dig at my physique,’ puffed his wife, holding her thick waist. ‘You made me like this.’

  Nat saw Oriel flinch and was abashed that his wife should make such a quip in front of their daughter. In some matters she could be almost prudish, then at other times she would come out with a most inappropriate comment like this. To detract from his blush he made an exclamation. ‘You’ve just solved a problem. Summat’s been throwing me since we got here. When I’m out for a walk I’ve been really disorientated, never seem to know what time o’ day it is without looking at me watch. That’s ’cause sun’s in a different position in t’sky. Wait for me to come home from me rounds tomorrow and I’ll show you. Away now, it’s too cold stood out here.’ Grabbing another mallee root for the fire, he led the way back.

  Just before entering, however, he gave a shout. ‘Whoa, look out!’ He shielded his wife from some imaginary terror. ‘Mind that paper bag.’

  Even Oriel had to laugh as her mother pushed and pummelled him indoors.

  The next day when he came home with the artist’s equipment that he had bought whilst on his scrap-collecting round, Nat proceeded with his theory to his wife and daughter.

  ‘Look! Normally at this time the sun would be somewhere over there. Everything in this country is back to front or upside down. It really throws me.’

  ‘Oh, that’s it then, we’ll have to go home,’ teased Bright.

  ‘It’ll take more than t’moon being upside down and t’water going wrong road down t’plughole to get me back there.’

  She laughed. ‘You love it here, don’t you?’

  ‘Aye, as long as Spud keeps sending me money orders every couple o’ months I won’t be going back to England.’ He turned to her. ‘Why, don’t you like it, then?’

  ‘Oh yes! It’s just some days, I miss the old streets. The bar walls.’ She paused in the driveway to look back beyond the perimeter fence at the avenue of elms. No matter how the settlers had tried to make their parks and towns a corner of England they could do nothing about the seasons. When Bright thought of April she pictured daffodils and sticky buds but here in front of her was the bronze tinge of autumn. ‘Isn’t there anything you miss?’

  ‘Nowt.’ Then Nat pondered. ‘Aye there is – fish and chips. Fish they have here tastes like a monkey’s bum looks.’ Despite his protestations his wife insisted on having it every Friday.

  ‘Oh, and I miss my Evening Press – and my Sunday paper too,’ added Bright. There was no sabbath publication here. ‘What about you, Oriel, do you miss anything?’

  Thinking of Errol, the young woman shook her head. ‘Nothing springs to mind. What I do find strange about here is, the people refer to England as home when some of them have never even been there.’

  Nat knew what she meant. ‘Aye, they’d get a shock if they did. The poms treat their own like muck so God knows what they think to colonials – except when there’s a war on, of course.’

  ‘Listen to him – poms!’ laughed Bright.

  ‘Oh, I’m a dinkum Aussie now you know.’ He became alert and frowned. ‘Eh, there’s some little buggers larking in our field. They’d better not be harming my hoss. Oy!’ Face enraged, he laid his parcel of paints on the ground and set off across the grass.

  Bright looked concerned as he descended with menace upon the culprits, managing to deal each of them one hard punch to the head as they ran in terror.

  ‘Nat, they’re only boys!’ She threw a quick glance at Melinda, who had come to see what the noise was all about, and lowered her voice; ‘God, I’ve never seen him like that before,’ she breathed to her daughter.

  ‘I have,’ murmured Oriel, her own anxiety turning to relief as her father strode back to the house, face like thunder. The maid beat a hasty retreat. Bright looked at Oriel quizzically. Yes I’ve witnessed another side of him that you haven’t seen, thought Oriel with some satisfaction. ‘He can’t stand boys. I’m only glad he never got hold of them. He would’ve murdered them.’

  Bright touched her lips thoughtfully, but with Nat’s approach she attempted to soothe his ruffled temper. ‘Don’t let them get you so worked up. That animal would make mincemeat out of them.’ She was rather afraid of Nat’s horse, who was not averse to nipping anyone given the chance. ‘Come on, I’ll make a pot of tea.’ She fought for something that would wipe the harried look from her husband’s face. ‘Why don’t you set your easel up and have a bash at your painting?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve things to see to at t’yard.’

  ‘Go on! I’ll bring your lunch out here.’

  Nat’s face remained dark, but as her suggestion sank in his mood gradually lifted. Fetching a chair from the house, he began to set everything in order. Bright watched him through the window and smiled at her daughter. ‘Here, take him these sandwiches and we’ll leave him to it.’ Towards the end of the afternoon, his wife and daughter wandered up behind him and exclaimed over his almost completed landscape. ‘Ooh, that’s really good, is that!’ said Bright. ‘Isn’t it, Oriel?’

  Whilst her husband continued to work, she studied his brush strokes with great attention, comparing the picture with the actual scene in front of them, cocking her head and frowning.

  ‘D’you mind me saying, you just haven’t got that tree quite right there. If you alter that it’ll be perfect.’

  Oriel, standing at her father’s side noticed his smile wither. Though he maintained his artistic position he was deeply hurt, she could tell. ‘Are you going to put it in a frame?’ It was Bright again.

  ‘Ah, I don’t see no point,’ muttered her husband. ‘I’m only a fifth-rate artist. Nobody’d want that on their wall.’

  ‘But it’s not as if you want to sell it or anything, is it? You’re doing it for your own enjoyment.’ She patted him.

  He glanced up briefly from his canvas. ‘Yellow Peril’s here.’

  Distracted, Bright observed Mr Kee, the Chinese vegetable merchant, trundling slowly along the road on a cart painted with dragons, and cabbages dangling round its sides.

  ‘I’ll get Melinda to deal with him. He makes me nervous – never looks you in the eye.’

  As soon as she had gone into the house Nat began to wipe his brushes off and laid them in their box, folding up the easel and packing everything away, totally disenchanted by the fact that his wife had not disagreed with him about being a fifth-rate artist.

  His wife may not have seen his hurt but Oriel had and now tried to make him feel better. ‘She can sometimes be a bit blunt, can Mother.’ Her eyes followed Melinda, who went running down the drive to catch the vegetable seller. ‘She didn’t mean to. It would kill her if she thought she’d hurt your feelings.’ How often had she herself been stung by one of her mother’s thoughtless remarks?

  Nat was about to retort that he wasn’t bothered in the slightest but when he caught the look of genuine compassion on his daughter’s face he merely gave a little smile and nodded. ‘Happen she’s right anyway. I just thought I’d try me hand, that’s all.’ He put the paints away knowing he would never take them from the box again.

  Whilst her father packed up, Oriel went into the kitchen where Bright was preparing a joint of meat for the oven. She did not tell her mother how much pain her flippant remark had caused. However, the culprit had had time to ponder on her own thoughtlessness and drew her daughter aside with a cringing whisper.

  ‘I’ve said the wrong thing again, haven’t I?’ At Oriel’s nod she bit her lip. ‘I didn’t mean to. I tend to forget how sensitive he is. I think his picture’s really good. I just wanted it to be perfect for him.’ She left the subject abru
ptly as Melinda came in, muttering that the Chinese would be taking over the place soon if the Government didn’t do something about so many of them creeping in. She was followed almost immediately by Nat, who attempted to get his landscape past the gathering as unobtrusively as possible. Melinda spotted it.

  ‘Aw, that’s ripper!’ Depositing her vegetables on the table, she went to examine the picture more closely whilst Nat tried to escape. ‘Are you gonna sell it?’

  ‘Nay. Hold on, it’s still wet.’ At Melinda’s flow of compliments he muttered, ‘You can have it if you like it that much. Don’t suppose anybody else’ll want it. Shall I stick it in your room?’

  ‘I doubt it’ll dry in there, it’s too cold.’

  ‘Sorry, Mel, you should’ve said.’ Bright looked concerned.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t meaning to whinge. Just saying that the painting might get spoiled. There’s loads o’ slaters in there too – you don’t want them paddling all over it and making a pattern.’

  ‘What the hell are slaters?’ Nat frowned.

  ‘Yer know! Those flat little armoured things that you find where it’s damp.’ Melinda thought she might as well hammer her point home.

  ‘You mean woodlice!’ exclaimed Nat.

  ‘No, slaters.’

  ‘Well, we call ’em woodlice.’

  Bright jumped in. ‘You should’ve mentioned it before, Mel. We can’t have Alice getting a chill. We’ll get you a little kerosene heater. I’m sorry, I never thought it’d get as cool as it does.’ Her expectations of perpetual sunshine had been quickly disillusioned by the morning mists that had lately begun to swirl over the paddocks. ‘D’you think winter’s going to be as bad as the ones we got at home?’

  ‘I hope not.’ Nat tried to fake cheerfulness as he went to dispose of his painting. ‘I’d reckoned on saying goodbye to my bronchitis.’

  * * *

  It was thus that winter caught them off guard. Whilst there might not be blizzards to contend with they found that the overcoats they had thought to discard were once again necessary as protection against the frost. Even in the house there was little escape, for the draught percolated its wooden boards, attacking knee and ankle joints. Having been spared his annual bout of bronchitis earlier in the year by favour of glorious sunshine, it was all the more dispiriting for Nat when, in the grip of the cold damp air, his jaded lungs were revisited by this ailment, his racking cough keeping the household awake throughout most of July. Whilst others might grumble, Bright said kindly that it was a change for him to keep her awake instead of the other way around – her increasing size made it difficult for her to get comfortable when lying down – but the constant interruption of sleep made them both rather irritable.

  With her parents so indisposed Oriel did not deem it right to enjoy herself at the peace celebrations held in the city that month, contenting herself with festooning the house in paper decorations, and thus avoided her own personal injury. The festival, which began so well, developed into a riot by returned soldiers aggrieved at their treatment, and many were arrested. Demanding their release, a mob stormed the state offices, resulting in a bloody head for the Victorian Premier, Mr Lawson, who was struck by a flying inkstand.

  ‘I’ve never known a place where they fight so much,’ sighed a corpulent Bright when her daughter read her the account from the newspaper. There had been nothing but social unrest throughout the country since they had arrived. ‘Peace Day – hah! Isn’t it enough that they’ve been fighting Germans for four years without fighting each other?’

  Now that the birth was approaching she grew increasingly uneasy but did not know why. True, she was fearful of the pain, and nervous of being responsible for a tiny individual again, but that was not the whole of it. Sometimes she felt a kind of panic. Even in the confidence that Nat would never leave her this time her brain would begin to race for no sensible reason and then her heart would pound and she would have to make excuses for herself all the time.

  As one who lived in perpetual bafflement over the female psyche, Nat was again bewildered by her need for constant reassurance but gave it gladly, answering her anxious queries with the promise that he would love their child whatever its sex. Nevertheless, having witnessed his hatred of boys, Bright was relieved and happy in the safe arrival of their second daughter.

  Victoria Prince was born amid a downpour on the first of September, two weeks before her mother’s birthday, spring instead of autumn, an unremarkable child, except to her parents.

  Oriel, still in the grip of rejection by her lover, felt even more wretched as she watched them dote over the new arrival. It was ridiculously childish, she knew, but that knowledge could not prevent this awful feeling of loneliness. Life seemed to revolve around Victoria. Even Melinda, usually such good company, was full of babytalk, saying her own child looked so grown up beside the newborn. From a maggoty creature Alice had developed into a golden-haired cherub, but neither infant held any attraction for Oriel. And the spring rains did naught to lift her mood.

  Bright sensed that her elder daughter felt left out and tried her best to include her, especially when organizing the christening at the local Catholic church, but when all was said and done, she told Nat, she was an adult. Besides, Bright had other worries on her mind.

  Nat always knew when his wife was ill for she made him aware in no uncertain terms by her moaning. As she herself admitted, she was a very demanding patient. However, the type of affliction from which she was suffering now did not bear advertisement. Only when Nat and Oriel went out for half an hour to the warehouse and returned to find Melinda trying to calm a screaming baby, several pans boiling over on the stove and his wife nowhere in sight did Nat begin to suspect that all was not well.

  ‘What’s all this to-do? Where’s me wife?’

  ‘She’s in the bath!’ Melinda shoved his new daughter at him. ‘The bub wants feeding and I can’t get any sense outta Mrs Prince. Here, I’ll have to go see to those saucepans or they’ll boil dry.’

  Anxious over his wife, Nat handed the screaming baby to Oriel, who drew back. ‘I don’t know what to do with it!’ To her the human infant was synonymous with a kitten, so lightly clad in flesh that its bones threatened to bend under the lightest touch. She had only ever held it once, the mere thought of damaging their precious bundle invoking panic.

  ‘You’re a woman, aren’t you?’ At her continued reticence, Nat gasped in exasperation and carried the purple-faced infant to the newly installed bathroom where he found his wife up to her shoulders in the tub, teeth chattering.

  ‘Bairn’s screaming to be fed!’ When she did not greet him, he came forward looking perplexed, and dipped one hand into the water. ‘It’s stone cold! Has hot tap run out?’

  Bright shivered, as much from terror as from cold. ‘I… feel funny in the head.’

  After a second’s vacillation he dumped the squirming baby on the linoleum and came to comfort its mother, wrapping his arm round her quaking shoulders and drenching the sleeve of his jacket. ‘How d’you mean, love?’

  She could not bring herself to say what horrors were in her brain. The knives and the blood and the voices. How could she feel like this at a time of such happiness?

  Nat coaxed her from the bath and helped to towel her dry. ‘D’you think you can manage to feed t’bairn? Here, I’ll help you.’ He patted her shivering skin, then noticed Oriel’s worried face in the gap between door and jamb and called for her to fetch him a blanket.

  With anxious face, she hurried to the cupboard, grabbed a blanket and inserted it tentatively through the gap, not wishing to intrude, trying not to eavesdrop on the intimate endearments. She took a sharp step backwards as her parents emerged, her father cuddling both the wide-eyed woman and the screaming infant. Clasping her hands over her bosom, Oriel watched them go into their own room, whence the door was closed to her, swamping her with emptiness.

  In a while, when Nat had managed to soothe his wife and sat cuddling her in their room whilst their
infant drew from her breast, Bright regained her normal rate of breathing and, though still quivering, murmured, ‘I’m all right now.’ After a few heaving exhalations she added, ‘It comes and goes. In the hospital they told us it’s not good for the brain to be overheated and gave us cold baths.’

  ‘Does it work?’ he asked hopefully.

  Despite her torment, she laughed, albeit nervously. ‘Well, the shock of it takes your mind off things for a while.’

  ‘I’ll go and make a cup o’ tea.’ He began to rise.

  ‘Don’t leave me!’ Her eyes were wide again. Dislodged, the baby started to complain.

  He embraced her. ‘It’s all right! I’m here. I’ll always be here.’ He assisted her with the infant, who calmed immediately that her mouth was full. After a moment of rocking and comforting, he suggested, ‘Might be an idea to go see t’doctor.’

  ‘No!’ Bright became frantic. ‘They’ll stick me in the madhouse again! I might never get out.’

  ‘You know I’d never allow that!’ Nat tried to reassure her but felt ill-equipped, not knowing what it was that instilled such terror. ‘I’ll be with you every minute o’ the day if you want me to.’

  ‘I’m sorry for being such a nuisance to you,’ came his wife’s agonized groan. ‘I’ve been nothing but a pest since we got married, what with the flu and now this. You must find it hard to understand – God knows, I do meself.’

  After Oriel’s birth there had been an excuse for the hysteria – she had been cast out of her home with a tiny baby to care for, no money, no friends – but now she had a husband who loved her, two beautiful daughters and a wonderful new life. Why had this insanity come crawling back into her brain like a malevolent slug? She curled protective arms around the infant, shielding it from its own mother.

  ‘You’re not a nuisance!’ Though frightened himself, he maintained his reassuring stance.