Four Respectable Ladies Seek Part-time Husband

by Barbara Toner

  ‘Oh there you are,’ Adelaide said. ‘You didn’t say you were dropping in on Louisa. I would have come with you.’

  ‘I don’t need to account to you for my every move, now do I?’ He was smiling. Adelaide heard no smile.

  ‘I’m feeling much better now thank you,’ Louisa said quickly. ‘All I need is rest. I’ll be right as rain on my own, I promise.’

  Adelaide said, ‘Well if you’re sure.’ She nudged her husband towards the door. ‘You coming, Miss McCleary?’

  ‘I think I should stay for a few minutes, if you can spare me,’ Pearl said. ‘Mrs Worthington’s looking very pale.’

  ‘But I’ve had to leave Maggie with the baby. I’m sure she’ll be all right on her own, won’t you, Louisa?’ Adelaide was insistent, but her husband would have none of it.

  ‘You stay, McCleary. The baby can be attended to by his mother for once.’ It was no way for a loving husband to speak to a suspicious wife in front of neighbours and staff. Every female in the room knew it. He took Adelaide by her elbow and guided, possibly pulled, her from the house, leaving Pearl and Louisa to pretend nothing untoward had been said or heard. Louisa pretended for less than a minute.

  ‘He’s so moody,’ she said, lying back on the bed.

  ‘Are you still feeling ill?’ Pearl asked. ‘Can I get you tea?’

  ‘Miss McCleary,’ sighed Louisa. It was long, deep sigh of resignation. ‘I think I can trust you. Well, I do trust you. I didn’t faint. Sit down, why don’t you?’ Louisa patted the bed beside her. ‘I fainted because the situation I was in was very difficult and it was the easiest way out of it.’

  Pearl sat to receive the confidence that was coming whether she liked it or not, and she didn’t much like it. It was a complication and she had no room in her head for another. She said, ‘He does seem a bit out of sorts.’

  Louisa laughed drily. ‘That’s one way of putting it. He wants me to love him. Obviously I can’t and I wouldn’t but I can understand it. Adelaide’s hopeless with men. Always was. Always will be.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Pearl.

  ‘Don’t “oh” me, Miss McCleary. It sounds like a judgement. I’m sure you can handle men better than she can.’ Louisa smiled in expectation of the confirmation but there was none. Just a silence, heavy with reproof. It was infuriating. Pearl knew it was infuriating and cast about for a diversion because Louisa was not only peevish and prickly, she was deathly pale for someone who had merely pretended to faint. ‘Tell me about your fiancé,’ she was insisting. ‘I’m certain you manage him or you wouldn’t be trying to find him.’

  ‘I don’t think I manage him at all. I’m not sure I manage anyone.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Louisa scoffed. ‘You manage the whole household over there. And you manage Maggie and me. Martin Duffy wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t arranged it. None of us would be doing what we are if you hadn’t organised it.’

  It might have been an insult since it was uttered without affection, or it might just have been a statement of the obvious. Either way, Pearl acknowledged to herself, this wasn’t a comfortable situation. She might have been bound to Mrs Worthington by a contract that suited them for practical reasons but the last thing she wanted was a cosy chat about men. The cosiest feeling she had about Daniel was guilt. The cosiest feeling she had about men in general was that she couldn’t imagine ever coming across one who might meet her exacting standards.

  ‘Maybe your fiancé is sick of being managed by you and that’s why he’s taken off. Maybe you love him too much. That can happen with women like you who are prone to very strong feelings.’

  ‘It’s not true in this case.’ Pearl swallowed hard to still the indignation rising in her chest. ‘My fiancé is a lovable man with many good qualities but he’s more at the mercy of strong feelings than I am.’

  ‘Like my poor Jimmy. He loved me much more than I loved him,’ said Louisa. ‘That’s why I married him. It didn’t make us happy though.’

  ‘Someone’s knocking,’ said Pearl getting to her feet. ‘At the front door.’

  ‘It’s no one,’ said Louisa. But it was. Someone was knocking hard and fast and Pearl rose to admit them but Louisa grabbed her arm and held it, like a child clinging to a departing mother. ‘Please, please don’t answer it,’ she cried. ‘I can’t see a single other person today. I’ve had my fill. And this is a private conversation. I feel this is a very private conversation.’ So Pearl sat down again, the knocker went away and Louisa resumed where she’d left off.

  ‘That’s the terrible truth. I married Jimmy Worthington because he loved me so much and then we made each other miserable. Be careful, Miss McCleary. Unequal loving isn’t a recipe for a good marriage.’

  ‘Is there one?’

  ‘Maybe not. I’m enjoying our part-time husband though, aren’t you?’ Louisa caught Pearl’s pained expression. ‘Not your type?’

  ‘He’s not here to be anyone’s type.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Louisa. ‘Tell that to young Maggie. Tell it to Adelaide. They’re completely smitten. You must have noticed. He has his charms, Miss McCleary, even if they aren’t apparent to you.’

  ‘I’ll be charmed when he’s been of some use.’ Pearl now did get to her feet, telling herself that colour was restored to the pretend patient’s cheeks even if it wasn’t entirely ‘The baby will be wondering what’s happened to me,’ she said.

  ‘The baby will be doing no such thing,’ Louisa replied. ‘I’d like you to stay. Please won’t you stay a little longer? We’ve so much more in common than I thought we had. And you’re very soothing company.’

  But Pearl was growing agitated. Where was Martin Duffy? He should have come home when he’d left her. She hoped with all her might that he wasn’t somewhere acting on his own judgement. She wished with all her might that she’d told him to do nothing without consulting her. She left without so much as a backwards glance, which was a shame because any glance at all might have taken in the troublesome file now sitting on the hall table where she’d placed it half an hour before.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Martin Duffy was, indeed, acting on his own initiative, chatting to Archie Stokes without authorisation, under the impression he was doing all manner of good. ‘She’ll never sell the horses for meat,’ he was reporting to the grocer. ‘It goes against her grain.’

  They were in the storeroom, to which Mr Stokes had led him the minute he’d asked for a quiet word. The grocer was listening attentively, less for information than for tone, for innuendo, for any suggestion of a little something that could be taken down and used if and when the time was right. ‘She told you about the offer, did she? Made out of the goodness of my heart, I can assure you. There’s nothing in it for me.’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Martin Duffy. ‘Who was going to kill the horses?’

  ‘A bloke I know. Out of town. Good butcher.’

  ‘Does he kill your pigs?’

  Mr Stokes, who was rearranging tins on shelves above his head, expelled air noisily through his nose, on guard, but not wishing to appear so. It wasn’t as if the whole town didn’t know who killed the pigs. Owen Jenkins killed the pigs because he was Maisie Jenkins’ father-in-law. She grew the pigs and Owen Jenkins killed the pigs. All above board.

  What alerted the grocer was the cousin connecting the pigs to the horses and the horses to him, which could give rise to all sorts of idle speculation, the least dangerous of which was that he’d sell the horse meat as some other kind of other meat in a product that rendered its flavour unrecognisable and that he might feed it to an unsuspecting township. Which he should have been able to do with no shame attached, given the horse was a perfectly edible meat product that should be used in times of deprivation and might have been anywhere else in the world except Prospect where horses were valued more highly than wives.

  Mr Stokes nursed a quiet outrage at the idiocy of a town in which he was a favourite only because it suited him to be one. He hadn’t been going
to sell the bloody stuff locally anyway. It didn’t matter, given the way things were working out. How quickly the grocer’s brain worked. How clearly. Not unlike Pearl McCleary’s, even though hers was female.

  ‘Funny business,’ said Martin Duffy.

  ‘What? Horse meat?’

  ‘No, the horses. Why Mrs Worthington has so many.’

  ‘She not told you why?’

  ‘Nope. She told you?’

  ‘I’ve got a theory.’ Mr Stokes groaned as he sank to his knees to pull a large box of tins from under the bottom shelf. ‘You tell Mrs Worthington those horses are never going to be worth anything and my offer is the best she’s going to get.’

  ‘I will. I agree with you,’ said Martin. ‘It’s a shame.’

  The grocer heaved himself to his feet. ‘It is a shame. A woman like that, sliding into poverty.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think it’ll come to poverty. She has her friends.’

  ‘She has her enemies,’ said the grocer. ‘I’m not one of them. Tell her I’m at her service. Where Thomas at the bank might not be, I could be.’ It was a risky overture, but he was nothing if he wasn’t a gambling man and something told him that with this young fella in the mix, he couldn’t lose.

  ‘What are your terms?’ Martin Duffy asked. ‘I could pass them on to her to think about.’

  ‘Step into the office and I’ll see what we can do.’

  And so it was that when Martin Duffy entered The Irish Rover ten minutes later, a rough and ready contract was burning a hole in his pocket. Louisa had only to sign it to banish every money worry she had, even if she wouldn’t sell the horses. There’d be interest of course, and a reckoning, but not one she had to worry her distractingly pretty head about. He was delighted with himself. Good with money after all. What an idiot, Pearl would have thought.

  Had she and Louisa considered the recipe for an unsuccessful marriage, they would surely have counted among its chief ingredients a difference of opinion over money. It worms its way into a marriage’s foundations, giving rise to secrecy and suspicion as surely as damp gives rise to rot. Look at Mr Stokes stealing from the Nightingale household. Here was a wife reporting it to her husband but there was a husband telling her she was a fool.

  Not that Adelaide considered her marriage unsuccessful. She’d never have allowed herself to be attached to any such thing. But she was sorely challenged, she couldn’t deny that.

  ‘Thanks, Maggie. You can go now,’ she’d said briskly when she’d reclaimed the baby in the hallway where Maggie was waiting in her hat and coat. It hadn’t occurred to her to ask why Maggie had been at Louisa’s when she should have been at work. She had far too many ingredients on her marital plate, all of which needed to be weighed one against the other. Her disrespectful, possibly treacherous husband was chief among them.

  Maggie didn’t enquire after Mrs Worthington either. She was out of that house in a flash, dashing straight back across the road to collect the wretched file, but she’d found the Worthington front door well and truly closed and though she’d knocked until her fists hurt, no one had answered. With no alternative she’d gone to work without the file to be greeted on the doorstep by her employer wearing an experiment in Hair for Victory and a face like thunder. ‘You are a disgrace. If I didn’t need you urgently, I’d sack you on the spot,’ she said.

  It was remarkably similar to the sentiment Adelaide was planning to convey to her husband when she found the right words and tone. She had so little experience in fighting her corner. She sought inspiration from the spirit of her late mother, whose firmness of intent and ferocity of expression had been such a key ingredient in her parents’ marriage. But she was not her mother. Instead of demanding to know what her husband had been doing in Louisa’s kitchen, because she couldn’t think of a single innocent reason for it, she said, ‘We need to talk about money.’ He was in the hall, ready to depart it seemed, but she was in his way.

  ‘We certainly do not,’ he said. ‘You have your housekeeping. You get all the food we need from the shop. You want for nothing.’ He tried to brush past her but she stood her ground.

  ‘Marcus, I’ve been running the shop for years. You might have your head in the sand but I don’t. There’s something wrong with the bookkeeping.’

  ‘Adelaide, you know nothing. Mr Stokes does the sourcing, the buying and the pricing and he oversees the selling. You pay the wages and you get yourself into a state over numbers you don’t understand so he needs to correct them. Now let me pass.’ And with that he closed a door in her face, both literally and figuratively, wounding her in every conceivable way.

  Adelaide stood very still in the hallway before taking a shocked if figurative step backwards from the husband to whom she had plighted her troth. It was one thing to nurse, sympathise and make allowances for a man rendered unstable by the war. It was another thing altogether to continue loving a stranger who couldn’t keep his contempt to himself, even in company. Her hurt was beyond consolation, a hard knot of despair she would carry forever. It would shape her marriage irretrievably; it would loosen the bonds she’d imagined were unbreakable.

  Her thoughts turned inevitably to gentle Martin Duffy, who she knew even now was seeking expert help on her behalf and whom she trusted to be her ally regardless of her slight ability with sums. She wanted him to put his hand firmly in the small of her back as he had done when they’d last parted company. His touch had been so sure, so comforting, so manly that her spine had tingled.

  Maggie’s thoughts were headed in the same direction. Fear of discovery had been put aside because the Mayor was out and had left no angry directives about missing documents. His wife was concerned only for the Candlelit Garden Party for Peace. She would require Maggie for serving duties and her brothers for washing up but more urgently, she needed her to make adjustments to the Victory dress with which she would enthral her guests. She handed it over, a monster of a thing in red, white and blue built from all manner of fabric and bone. ‘I wore it to the Federation Ball,’ she said fondly. ‘It’s a wonderful piece. It will do beautifully once the hem is raised. I want some ankle showing but no calf.’ She studied Maggie’s hemline. ‘That skirt’s far too short. Please don’t arrive again for work wearing anything so unattractive. Your mother is dead and I don’t expect your father ever told you. Fashion should always be tempered by modesty. Men expect it.’

  Maggie, now sitting quietly in the kitchen hemming, wearing an overall over her too-short hemline, smiled quietly to herself. Martin Duffy wasn’t a man who expected modesty, she was pretty sure of that. He was a man who liked a bit of spirit and she intended to show him that she had plenty. She intended to be a spirited wife who would stand shoulder to shoulder with him, building, farming, raising children and sheep and ducks and a fortune so they could travel.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Norah Quirk was equally sure of Martin Duffy’s inclination for fun. Cheeky, devil-may-care Norah Quirk whose chief interests were flirting and gossip, who was fancy-free, the right age and up for anything. She was leaning towards him, exposing him to more velvety cleavage than was seemly for a Post Office clerk on a lunch break, though possibly not for a pub-owner’s daughter. ‘They’re a boring lot down there. Never go anywhere or do anything. You ought to come to the Saturday dance or a bush picnic. Do you play tennis?’ And he, with temptation in his eyes, was sighing if only he weren’t so busy.

  ‘Busy at what?’ she asked and he replied that his cousin had him running all over the place. ‘Well let me know when you want a break,’ she said. ‘Give me half an hour’s notice and I’ll join you.’

  ‘I will,’ he said. And he might have safely left it at that but he turned at the door to ask by the way did she know a good lawyer. It was out of his mouth and into the clutches of Norah Quirk faster than a snake into a dead log.

  She said, ‘I’ll ask Mum.’ She thought, Mr Stokes will love this.

  Pearl would have had a pink fit. As it was, her heart was alrea
dy thumping because she remembered Maggie’s file ten minutes after she’d passed it without seeing it and was gripped by the catastrophe about to envelop poor Maggie if it was still where she’d left it on Louisa’s hall table. She picked up baby Freddie and said, ‘You need a walk, you sleepyhead.’

  Adelaide, overhearing her, declared briskly, ‘I’ll take him. There’s washing and cleaning to be done here and I’m sure you haven’t given a thought to dinner.’ The housekeeper had forgotten her place so the spirit of Cordelia Bluett would remind her of it.

  Pearl took stock. There was very little to take. She was in no position to argue with anyone from whom she intended to ask a favour as soon as the right time presented itself, so Maggie would have to bear the consequences. ‘What do you think Captain Nightingale might like?’ she replied. ‘Mutton? Shoulder of mutton?’ She couldn’t have sounded more sedate. But in the endless mood-fuelled possibilities between what is said and what is heard, Adelaide found, You’ve married a monster and look, you’re trapped, so she bristled.

  ‘I know he seems hard to please, Miss McCleary, but he isn’t. You thought he was grumpy earlier. He wasn’t. He was concerned for Mrs Worthington. And in case you’re wondering, he only dropped across to enquire after her health because I’d said how pale she’s been lately. So, there you are. Mind your own business.’ Her face was red. Her voice was flat.

  ‘Well she seemed better when I left,’ agreed Pearl evenly. ‘I think she should see a doctor though.’ And because she sounded unflustered, Adelaide’s own fluster abated.

  ‘Do you?’ she said. ‘Do you? She’s such a funny person. I can never tell when she’s acting. She acts so much of the time. Shoulder of mutton will do fine.’ She packed the baby into his pram and took her misery with him to the river. She imagined finding Martin Duffy alone and thoughtful and she dallied in case he miraculously appeared, but Martin Duffy had finished his beer and headed home with his triumph.