‘She’s making a rod for her own back,’ Louisa was saying to Pearl.
‘Must fly, Mrs Worthington,’ Pearl replied. ‘Thanks for your help.’
‘No,’ said Louisa curtly, ‘thank you for yours.’ She marched angrily up her path, overwhelmed by the rejection of her generously offered tea and the uppity tone of someone who was so far from being her social equal. She closed the front door behind her, leaned against it and was, without warning, overwhelmed by trembling because if anyone was scared to death, if anyone felt alone and abandoned and friendless, she did. Her mother was right. She had no one to blame but herself.
Louisa slowly removed her smart brown coat and her jaunty cream hat, sent by her mother from Paris, and hung them with her bag over the coat stand. Then she walked with purpose down the no longer highly polished floorboards into the dining room where she took from the dresser a pile of papers.
She held them without looking at them. She crumpled them in her fist. Then she took them to the table where she smoothed them and spread them so she could study the horror in the clear light of day. One at a time, most recent first, delivered the night before with the stallion and the colt. It was the most alarming of all on the one hand, but no worse than the first on the other.
Two hundred was agreed, so two hundred you’re getting, it said. Pay up or we’ll break you. She knew they could and she knew as well that her choice was this: private crime or public ruin. She went into the kitchen and vomited into the sink.
Across the road, where peace had been quickly restored by Pearl singing ‘Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral’, Adelaide was eating a scone. ‘Maggie does her best, but they aren’t a nice family, I don’t care what anyone says. The mother was pleasant enough. I forgive her, may she rest in peace, but I can never forgive him. Not after what he did.’
‘What did he do?’ Pearl asked, rocking the baby gently, placing a soft finger over eyes that flickered in barely achieved sleep.
‘He provoked my father into shooting him.’ It should have been damning enough but Pearl’s silence seemed to require a reason for the shooting, which might have annoyed Adelaide had she not been enjoying her scone. ‘By making ridiculous accusations about cattle and land. You’d have thought the stupid man was sitting on a gold mine.’
‘Look, he’s asleep,’ said Pearl. ‘Would you like me to get on with lunch so you can get back to the ledgers?’
It was the last thing Adelaide wanted to get back to. She said, ‘Excellent idea, thank you, Miss McCleary.’ She watched as Pearl carried Freddie to his room and she went into the office where the ledgers were laid out on the desk that had been her father-in-law’s, then her mother-in-law’s, then her husband’s, and should now by rights be hers. She yawned. How warm and soft and welcoming the desk looked. If she could just rest her head on that desk, as she had done at school when Miss Valiant had ordered them to sleep after lunch, she would feel so much better. She placed her head on her folded hands and closed her eyes, but she didn’t feel better.
She thought how cruel it was that she’d inherited her father’s head for figures. Had the gift for arithmetic travelled down the female line, the hateful bookkeeping would have been a piece of cake. And how unsettling of Pearl to say only, ‘Look, he’s asleep,’ when the question of loyalty to her family was hovering quite obviously between them and needed addressing. Surely a housekeeper with even the slightest inkling of her place should have sided unequivocally with the household that employed her, but somehow she hadn’t. Why hadn’t she? And why was Marcus so cruel? Why was he so unaware of the pain she was in? The war was one thing. His temper was another thing altogether. Her sunny nature was being tested to the limit.
She raised her head to stare uselessly at the ledgers, struggling with net and gross as she always did, and outrage with her lot filled her famously mild breast. Women had babies and the men who fathered those babies were obliged by virtue of their manhood to stride into the world and deal with its horrors from which women should be shielded, especially women who were useless at sums.
‘I’m going out,’ Marcus said from the doorway, startling her and causing her to knock a pile of receipts to the floor.
In the silence that followed they considered each other without love. Adelaide decided that her husband was no longer handsome. He was too thin, too pale and somehow too tall and too stooped. His once friendly eyes were dull. What she saw in them was an interest in her no greater than he might have had for a broken chair he wasn’t inclined to fix.
‘Where to?’ she asked, dropping to her knees to retrieve the dockets.
‘Just out.’
‘And when will you be back?’
‘Later,’ he said, heading out the door.
‘Marcus? Marcus!’ she called after him. ‘How do you carry twelve?’
Chapter Five
So there was Adelaide distraught over figures that made no sense, and there was Louisa clutching the abominable letters, and here is Maggie, equally troubled by the columns in front of her though sums were the least of her worries. Maggie could have told Adelaide in a trice that if you are adding you never carry twelve, you save the two and carry the ten although if you’re multiplying you carry by adding – but who knew that Maggie was cleverer at sums than even Adelaide’s mother?
Maggie could add a column of ten items in under ten seconds. She could divide 243 into 17926 and tell you how much was over, which she sometimes did for fun. It was a lucky knack because had she not been able to add her means to her ways and subtract them from her needs in order to make mismatching ends meet, her family would certainly have starved to death. She might have been sixteen when her father had left home but she’d been holding that family together since the twins were born.
The house stank. Smoke from charred bits of chook pen continued to drift accusingly around the backyard and over the vegetable patch where Ed and Al were burying the hens and hoping to find potatoes. Maggie stared at the page in front of her, which she’d carefully ruled and divided into two columns called Income and Expenditure.
A month ago, the Income column had contained two entries: one from Mrs Mayberry, the other from Mrs Quirk at The Irish Rover where she’d washed dishes four mornings a week for three years. But that job had gone. Mrs Quirk had said she should be happy to give it to a returning soldier, and there was no doubt that the Foley lad had returned from somewhere, but was his need greater? Maggie had asked Mrs Mayberry for more hours to make up the shortfall but Mrs Mayberry had declined adding if Maggie had been better at washing up, Mrs Quirk would never have entertained the idea of the soldier.
The page opposite Income and Expenditure was headed Weekly Budget, which began with the now single figure from the Income column and then listed, by day of the week, how much was spent on what and how significantly it reduced the starting figure. The tally as it currently stood was worse than it should have been mid-week. It stood at precisely empty. The next entry in the Income column wasn’t due until Friday, which was when Mrs Mayberry would pay her for thirty-five hours of housework undertaken five hours seven days a week.
She should never have bought the cheese, let alone the pickles. She should have bought flour. She shouldn’t have gone to Nightingales. But why shouldn’t she? Why couldn’t she be a chooser when being able to choose was in the family line? The answer was clear enough. Yesterday’s choice of cheese had made today’s choice between eating and begging.
Maggie turned away from the troubling sums to stare out the window imagining, as she often did, a lush garden with a well-tended orchard and rows of vegetables and a pig pen and a proper chook house and ducks and geese and a couple of cows and goats and everything else you could grow to eat on a couple of acres of excellent soil. But it had never been that. Her father’s heart had never been in it. He’d married a landowner’s daughter without having ever been on the land, he’d gone into battle with neighbours who’d cheated him out of acres he knew he’d honestly purchased, and then he’d gone to rack and ru
in, just like the acres.
She looked with bitterness to the great wide paddocks of Somerset Station, still in the Bluett family even if they had installed a manager, and she thought of the income she should have had. She thought of the man who’d come on the train who’d fight for the land, who’d stock the paddocks and make everything grow in the gardens with his magic touch. She thought of his magic touch and how she would tingle to it. He’d be tanned and broad and gruff and loving, with arms so shapely she would long to be in them day and night. He’d do the work while she spent his money in Nightingales, where she’d order a pound of this and a pound of that and five pounds of this and six dozen that.
It wasn’t far from that thought to the next, which was that Nightingales owed her sixpence worth of something and she meant to have it. She thought it so quickly that she was on her feet with her hat and shawl on before she had time to consider the wisdom of it. It was justice and the Nightingales owed her justice. The Bluetts and the Nightingales owed her justice. As well as sixpence. Captain Nightingale might own the shop but Adelaide Nightingale was in charge and she was a Bluett. He might have been back from the Front but he wasn’t all there, so Theresa Fellows said. Therefore her argument was with the Bluetts, as it always had been. Too bad about the horrible baby.
She paused at the gate. Wisdom piped up. Take only what you need and take something you can hide. She removed the shawl, went back to the house and took from the wardrobe a moth-eaten coat which had been her mother’s. ‘Alec, Edward,’ she called, ‘I’m going into town. Any mischief while I’m away and I’ll thrash the living daylights out of you.’
She walked very quickly up Hope Street, staring straight ahead, having no wish to speak to any neighbour about any fire or any badly behaved boys or any strange-looking coat that didn’t fit and plainly wasn’t hers. That coat had deep, deep pockets which she intended to fill with dinner.
The store was busy and as alluring as it always was to a girl for whom its every item was a reckless indulgence. As usual, the smell was of food so fresh and expensive that wellbeing could be the only outcome of eating it. There was a queue. Of course there was a queue. Returned soldiers might have been desperate for work but Mr Stokes made do with kindly Mrs Lambert, wife of Bert who ran the stables, and Ginger Albright, her nephew. Customers were taking their time as they always did because there was just so much to choose from and because they loved to discuss the pros and cons of every purchase.
As far as Maggie was concerned, the throng couldn’t have been better, but oh how it could have been! Mrs Mayberry being somewhere else would have been miles better. As it was, the newly acclaimed oracle was causing much of the congestion around the smallgoods. An admiring group had gathered about her, wanting to be amazed at what she was ordering because now she was an oracle, what she was ordering was surely what they should be ordering.
‘Hello, Mrs Mayberry,’ Maggie said pointedly, having wandered the full length of the counter while she decided whether drawing attention to herself was better or worse than being noticed while trying not to be. Mrs Mayberry acknowledged her with a blink because she was in full flow.
‘It was the Bolsheviks, of course it was. We never had a flu like it before. Did I say bacon? I meant black pudding.’
Maggie moved on, weaving in and out of people with money, noticing that there weren’t many possibilities worth sixpence.
‘You come back for your tuppence, missy?’ called Archie Stokes with a loud laugh. ‘She accused me of robbing her yesterday.’ And while Maggie wanted to unmask him by shouting back, He is a thief! she smiled and positioned herself by the display closest to the door and least occupied.
She tried not to look at anything in particular, or anyone in particular, but to study instead, as if it were an everyday shopping list, the ancient note she’d found in the lining of her mother’s coat pocket in which was folded a very small key. She didn’t recognise the key or the recipe scrawled on the note for Drought Buns. She put the key back in her pocket and thought if she wanted anything it would be a bun, but a bun was out of the question. More to the point would have been a pie, and just slightly out of reach was a selection of family-sized savoury pies on a stand, each worth nine pence at least.
If you’re not a criminal, if you have no experience of petty theft, but if you are absolutely determined on a course of stealing food and you’re hungry, then it simply isn’t easy to act with forbearance. You don’t even pause to consider how you might execute the sleight of hand required to secrete a pie about your body in a shop crowded with people who have been wary of you from birth and who are staring at your coat. A pie is the one thing you crave beyond liberty. Common sense tells you to walk away, but can you? Maggie was hungry, her brothers were hungry, Archie Stokes had cheated her, Mrs Mayberry was starving them, and this was a shop related by marriage to the family that had brought her family to its knees.
Maggie walked up to that pie tray and, as casually as you like, she knocked a single pie to the ground. She picked it up and attempted to cram it into her pocket, but it crumbled. Five people saw it happen. Ten people formed a circle around her accusing her of theft in tones that ranged from disgusted to overjoyed. Someone demanded that Bob McDermott, the policeman newly installed from Bowral, should be fetched so poor Maggie could be cast into jail.
‘Seize her!’ cried Oracle Mayberry as Maggie made a futile lunge for the door. There were so many people in the way milling and pointing and wondering what they were missing that she had no clear path. They made room only for Archie Stokes, who had Maggie firmly by the neck before anyone could say, Urk, black pudding.
‘Seize who?’ asked Adelaide from the doorway. ‘Mr Stokes, what on earth are you doing? Let the girl go.’
Chapter Six
What is a woman plagued by uncertainty to do? There were fixed points in Adelaide’s life from which she took comfort, stanchions which had provided the parameters for her slim sense of purpose. These included love for her mother, devotion to her father, affection for her brother, a fondness for Church, relief in her marriage and an assumption that she was known to be a lovely person, all of which were well and good. Less in keeping with her reputation for loveliness was the hatred she felt for Maggie’s father. Frank O’Connell had brought upon her family’s head the terrible humiliation of a court-ordered settlement from which her own father had never recovered, and as a consequence, neither had she. You nurse hatred like that in your heart, however soft, then forgiveness will never be easy to summon.
‘Good Lord! Mrs Nightingale!’ Archie Stokes panted, releasing Maggie’s head but maintaining a firm grip on her upper arm. ‘Lucky thing, too. This might need a woman’s touch.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘The child is a thies,’ lisped Florence Mayberry. ‘After all I’ve done for her.’ It was a remark that as recently as a week ago would have brought the house down, but Mrs Mayberry’s stock had grown so high that the offence she was taking at Maggie’s pilfering seemed infinitely more to the point than any small loss to the shop.
Someone cried, ‘Thack her!’ because a popular lisp is a contagious thing but Mrs Mayberry smiled beatifically, though her brain was racing. She knew that the quality of mercy droppethed like a something or other and could flatter a woman newly acclaimed as The Voice of the People. On the other hand, the people had spoken. She raised her hand and nodded to indicate she had heard it.
Adelaide looked from Mrs Mayberry to Maggie, from Maggie to Archie Stokes and then back to Maggie, whose expression bore none of the hallmarks of shame but hovered somewhere between defiance, shock and anger. It was the expression of someone who hadn’t realised she was out of a job. ‘He robbed me of sixpence yesterday,’ she said. ‘He wouldn’t pay me back so I took what was owed.’
‘The pies are a shilling,’ said Archie acidly. ‘And I have witnesses who can prove I robbed her of nothing. I’ve worked for your family, Mrs Nightingale, since before she was born and I know how to add up.
’
‘I think I’ll deal with this in the office,’ said Adelaide.
Oh God, the turmoil in her heart and in her head, in her past and in this awful present. Who is the greater villain? A two-faced employee you know is robbing you blind or a pilfering child on whom revenge for the sins of her father could now so justifiably be taken? ‘Mr Stokes, you can return to the counter. We have so many customers waiting. I’m sorry, everyone, for the inconvenience. Maggie, follow me.’
It sounded decisive, definitely, and as long as it took them to reach the office door, she could be decisive. She would be fair to both of them. Everyone had seen Maggie take the pie. No one had seen Archie Stokes steal Maggie’s sixpence. But she knew he was capable of such an act because he stole from her every day, sixpence here, a shilling there. Maggie’s father was a thief and Maggie might well be a thief. Archie Stokes was a liar. One of them was in the wrong. Justice must be done. But in the office, behind the closed door, the facts of the case deserted her. ‘Sit down, Maggie,’ she said as she took off her gloves. ‘Did you lose many chooks in the fire? Is it completely out? Why do boys love fire?’
‘I lost three good layers,’ said Maggie cautiously, not sitting down. ‘What do you care?’
Adelaide’s heart hardened at the insolence. ‘I don’t care, especially. What bothers me is that you stole from me. I deserve an explanation.’ She didn’t need an explanation. It was in the girl’s blood.
‘I’ve given you one,’ said Maggie wearily. ‘And you don’t believe me. No one will believe me. They’ll say, “She’s an O’Connell, what can you expect?” I’ll go to jail, the boys will go to an orphanage and that will be the end of us, which is what you’ve always wanted.’ In her head she went on to think, Then the man who runs the orphanage will fall in love with me and he will burn your house down.
Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband Page 5