by Olga Masters
The kitchen was neat, Amy had made out her shopping list for Saturday morning and propped it against the tea caddy on the mantlepiece, turning it to a different angle to invite Kathleen’s comment on such advanced attention to this small chore, but none was forthcoming.
“Come and we’ll sit in the sitting room and talk about what we’ll do!” Amy said, leading the way.
“I should take my King Lear, I suppose,” Kathleen said.
“Oh, bother that old has-been! Let’s live for tomorrow!” Amy was a little jealous of Kathleen’s familiarity with Shakespeare. She had only learned the Seven Ages of Man in sixth class at Diggers Creek.
Kathleen sprawled on a chair and Amy wedged herself into the corner of the lounge, and after a moment reached down for the sewing, which was rolled up and tucked under a cushion.
“That’s where I’ll put King Lear next time!” Kathleen cried. “Cheat!”
Amy had made a blouse on Daphne’s machine, and was now doing the buttonholes and sewing on small pearl buttons. She would wear it to the dinner. It’s worked out so well, Amy thought, Kathleen coming. I wouldn’t like it on my own, and I don’t even need to remind her that we are supposed to be sisters, for it seems we really are.
She bit off a thread of cotton, slipped it into the eye of her needle and held her work close to her face to make the first stitches.
“In case I haven’t mentioned it already,” Amy said, “tomorrow night you and I are dining out!”
“Whoopee!” Kathleen yelled and flung her feet to the floor and whirled in a dance, an old pleated skirt of Amy’s flying out around her.
She had few clothes, keeping her schoolwear in meticulous order, and looking out for letters from Fred, now in the Northern Territory, who often sent a pound note, which Kathleen usually spent on such things as shorts for school sports, or an extra blouse.
“Oh, goody!” she would cry, kissing it before waving it above her head. Amy was pleased too, Kathleen managed the money carefully, although Amy felt disappointed that she seldom shared any small luxury item with her, like a chocolate bar or ice-cream cone. She sees me as the provider, and I suppose she is right, Amy decided.
“Now sit down in ladylike fashion,” Amy said, stitching with great care. “And listen while I tell you.”
“Certainly, Granma!” Kathleen cried, with straight back and straight face and arms folded. She moved them down below the ridge of her breasts and Amy slipped the point of her needle into her skin and flung the blouse away to save it from a bloody stain.
“Oh, watch out!” she cried. Watch out, I’m sounding like a grandmother! Watch out, she’s growing up too fast with those breasts! Amy sucked her finger silently.
After it was safe to stitch again she said: “My boss Mr Yates is taking us both to dinner in a posh restaurant.”
“Mr Yates! I’ve never met him. Is he a married man?”
“Of course he’s a married man!” Amy said. “He has a son a bit older than you.”
“Keep him away then. I don’t like goony boys!”
“The boy is not coming,” Amy said.
“Is the wife?” Kathleen asked.
Amy studied the buttonhole smoothed out on her knee. “It’s not that sort of an evening out. It’s a kind of thank you to me for extra work.” She looked down on the lounge seat as if it might speak in support of this.
“Oh,” Kathleen said, with her mouth shaped like the letter similarly named.
There was silence while Amy put her pink face close to her sewing.
“He’s not doing a line for you, is he?” Kathleen asked.
“Of course he’s not doing a line for me! He’s asking you too.”
“Very nice of him! Very nice indeed!” Kathleen slumped back in her chair, hooked a leg over the arm and swung it.
“You can wear your brown dress,” Amy said. “We’ll be warm in the car.”
The brown dress, also made on Daphne’s machine, was of cinnamon-coloured wool with a lace collar and cuffs, a row of buttons from neck to waist covered with the material, and a belt drawing in Kathleen’s slender waist.
For several moments Kathleen knocked a heel against the side of her chair.
“What will you wear?” she asked, so abruptly that Amy felt slapped. She folded the blouse with great care, sleeve to sleeve, Kathleen watching.
You’re wearing that, said the accusing eyes. You made it especially for going out with him.
She got up and left the room and Amy watched the door almost in disbelief. In a little while she came back with King Lear.
22
Amy went to Brennans in Newtown in her lunch hour next day and bought two pairs of silk stockings at three and elevenpence each. It is stupid the way I am sucking up to her, Amy thought, but all the time imagining handing the stockings to Kathleen when she got home to Petersham.
Kathleen had never had silk stockings, and if Amy hadn’t become friendly with a girl in underwear and hosiery she would never have been allowed two pairs. Silk stockings had all but disappeared with wartime rationing. A dye to paint legs was hailed with great enthusiasm until it was discovered that perspiring feet sent the dye running into shoes and it was abandoned. Legs were bared, except in the event of gifts of stockings from American servicemen, repaying households for their hospitality during Rest and Recreation leave.
Good-looking girls crossing long silken legs in trams and trains were given long hard stares and it was whispered more than once: “A Yank’s ground sheet, bet your money on that!”
The stockings quivered from their wrapping, shimmering as they dropped fold after fold from Kathleen’s hands. She was on a chair in the sitting room, ready in her brown dress. She whipped off her white socks with one hand and drew the stockings on up to her thighs, after a moment raising agonized eyes to Amy.
“Garters!” she cried. Amy ran for her chocolate box of cottons where a roll of elastic and scissors was tucked into a corner.
“Good and beautiful Amy!” Kathleen cried, throwing out a leg to bind the elastic around her thigh, snip the length off, then begin a matching one, moistening the end of the cotton with a dart of her little tongue before threading the needle.
Amy went to the bedroom and sat on the bed and closed her eyes. “Thank heavens,” she said aloud. “Thank, thank heavens!” She caught up her blouse and ran to the kitchen to heat the iron.
Amy had to restrain Kathleen from opening the front door and waiting in the doorway or on the step.
“In the sitting room! We’ll wait there,” she said, brushing her skirt, although it was spotless, newly dry cleaned at Lincoln’s shop.
“I know why that place is called Maytime Dry Cleaning,” Kathleen said.
“Of course. Because May is a nice fresh white flower,” Amy answered.
“No!” And Kathleen’s hair swung back and forth like a branch in a gale. “It’s the letters of your name.”
“Oh, rubbish!” Amy said.
“You’ve gone red.”
“I have not!” Amy spoke too soon, before she opened her little powder compact and studied her face.
The doorbell rang and Amy’s body jerked and Kathleen raised a cool hand. “The reason I’m going tonight is to watch out for you, Amy.”
She slipped past her to open the door, speaking over her shoulder with her hand on the knob. “Someone has to.”
23
Amy was so quiet throughout the dinner that Lance gave up after a while and concentrated on Kathleen.
“What do you do at school?” Lance asked, digging his spoon into his lemon souffle, wondering if it might sweeten Amy up. She was sitting there very stiff about the face, not eating with the gusto he expected. Having sneaked a look at her occasionally at Lincolns, tucking into what looked like ordinary sandwiches, he had looked forward to watching her at work on something more exotic. He rather hoped to see a childish bulge in her cheeks, gone very pink both with pleasure and embarrassment at the show of greed.
Here she
was, eating with ladylike bites, tipping half back on her plate from each forkful and taking the food between her teeth as if she didn’t want her lips to go near it.
Lance felt the evening was so far a failure, and that to save it he had better turn his attention to Kathleen, the sister. She was a pretty little thing, older looking than a schoolgirl, more of the elder sister look he thought, seeing her eyes flash from Amy’s plate to Amy’s face from time to time.
Kathleen emptied her mouth, dabbed it with her serviette and swept her hair away in her effort to give her attention to Lance’s question.
“We do all the subjects. Biology I like. It would be wonderful to be a doctor.”
Lance straightened with respect. Amy straightened too, but to avoid a slump of neck and shoulders. It was going to be an effort to finish her souffle.
“I got a boy your age, a bit older,” he said, thinking of Allan in a white coat. He was getting on better with his son now. Allan had grown taller, lost some of his pimples and his fat and wasn’t hanging around his mother so much.
Lance began to think of an outing—himself, Allan, Amy and this girl—on one of the Sundays Eileen spent with her parents, who hung on in their old house in Lewisham. Eileen went there as often as she could to cook, clean and wash for the old pair, sighing a good deal of the time and making frequent reference to the selfishness of other members of the family, who left the task almost entirely to her. She would probably be glad to be dropped off and then Lance could wheel the car around and go back for Amy and Kathleen. If the boy was with them, Eileen would see no harm in it. Better still he could make an excuse of seeing to something at Lincolns, taking the boy with him. He glanced at Amy taking little sips of her coffee. She might be happier on a picnic, sitting on the grass near a spread tablecloth with the breeze blowing about her fair hair. Maybe crowds of people upset her.
On the other hand they did not seem to upset the younger one. She screwed her head around to watch the dancers on a square of floorboards fitted into the carpet. The space was not much bigger than the supper table in the Diggers Creek hall, Kathleen was thinking.
“Would you like a dance?” Lance said before he quite knew he had said it.
Kathleen stood at once and tucked her chair under the table. Lance liked that. She didn’t protest about being unable to dance, or hang her head and go red. He looked swiftly at Amy, thinking that was what she might have done. Amy got up a small smile, and Lance thought she might be glad to have the table to herself for a while. He stood quickly as if this was the message he received from her, and went quite eagerly to slip an arm around Kathleen and lead her onto the floor. She put her head back and lowered her eyelids, and laid the tips of her fingers in Lance’s palm.
“We have dancing once a week at school,” she murmured. “I am the boy mostly. It’s good to be the girl.”
It was a foxtrot and to Lance’s surprise Kathleen danced it well. When he paused and crossed his feet and made his body crooked, she ran with her feet slipping in and out in tiny steps to get close to his, not looking down, although people at the tables were.
She was nearly as tall as he was, and he thought he had never had a moment in all his life like this. She was soft and light as a bird, her brown dress birds’ feathers he needed to press into to find her body. It quivered but not with fear. This light and lovely creature, scented faintly with boronia, he thought, but more with flesh, warm and neutral. He thought if she were stripped of her clothes, her body would be a paler brown, a creamy gold, deeper than the collar of her dress. He closed his eyes a moment and felt his hand was on the skin of her waist, smooth as the skin of her palm now curled inside his other hand, softer though, more flesh to dig into and spring back, not like the doughy flesh of older women, and he thought with shame of Eileen, whose waist had never been firm, and she didn’t like it grasped anyway, and kept her nightdress there in folds, never allowing it hitched higher and often folding her arms on her breasts to keep his hands from them.
This girl, this angel, would be shy, but proud of her body, opening her arms to him, lighting the darkness like a flame.
He took her back to the table and was surprised to see Amy there.
24
There was no picnic, no meeting with the Yates boy, no possibility of Lance viewing the naked body of Kathleen.
Amy gave Lance her notice, even without another job.
After the dinner she barely spoke to Kathleen and Kathleen gave a show of barely noticing. She went off soberly to school a little earlier than before, saying goodbye to the knob as she opened the door. She crossed the street to Tina’s house to wait for her there. Before, it was mostly Tina who came to wait for Kathleen.
Even Tina noticed Amy’s mood.
“Jings she’s crabby,” she said to Kathleen a few days later as they walked close to the paling fence, taking the short cut to school.
Kathleen stopped, swinging around, lifting her chin, lowering her eyes.
“If you can keep a secret I will tell you,” she said. Other groups of girls jerked past, knees lifted, their tunics playing the pleats, cases clanging against cases, bursts of laughter, a shriek or two, like hurrying navy blue sheep given voices.
Kathleen waited until they were well ahead. “Both of us are in love with the same man!” She kept her eyes closed, only opening them when there was the bite of Tina’s fingers into her forearm.
She flew ahead, calling back, “I’ll race you!” She didn’t stop until she was panting along the school veranda, met there by Miss Parks who said with indulgence: “Not so fast, Kathleen! Ladies don’t gallop.”
Miss Parks gave Tina the smallest and coolest of nods, a pupil with lesser academic potential warranting no more; whereas Kathleen was one of the school’s brightest students. Miss Parks had her for English and loved her quickness, so many others were intelligent but dreamy. She felt a rising excitement watching her work, throwing that hair around to get it out of the way, face tilted sideways over her essay.
Miss Parks often wondered what would become of her. Dear Lord, she prayed, not a housewife in a dirty little place surrounded by grubby children, and a wet-lipped man with hairs all over his chest coming home the worse for drink.
Miss Parks, aged thirty-eight, shuddered, but felt a creeping of her loins holding the thought to her, transferred to the rub of hairs against her own naked thighs. Nonsense, nonsense! She belonged to a family of eight and saw her sisters, pretty and clever, go this way. But never her. She went to teachers’ college, then to university on scholarships. She had been teaching now for sixteen years, and had a good bank account for her retirement. Twenty years on she would go abroad, walk the halls of Oxford, see Edinburgh, France and Sweden, perhaps murmur to scholars like herself, Yes, I was a teacher in a big girls’ school. The musty smells of dusty corridors and books were sweeter than the fumes from the Chelsea Flower Show or the perfume factories of Grasse.
Miss Parks dreamed on of taking Kathleen abroad with her, Kathleen a teacher in some big university, Miss Parks the chaperone and mother figure to the lovely Miss Fowler, who was wed to her career as Miss Parks had been to hers.
Miss Parks changed the course of the rush of love in her loins to the slender shape of Miss Fowler. They’d be Parky and Chook to each other, sharing literary discussions and tea and French pastries in a small but elegant flat furnished in exquisite taste. Together, they would observe the crowds on the Left Bank, take long walks, go to the theatre and art exhibitions and talk into the early morning in their shared bedroom.
When Amy went to work on the Monday after the dinner she watched for Lance to appear. She would greet him a shade more warmly she decided, send a little message of thanks with her eyes for the dinner.
He usually said Good morning, girls! to the office in general, then Good morning, Miss Fowler! sometimes with an excuse to linger at her desk.
This morning he rushed through with a Good morning, all! and went to Victor’s office. Victor was back from his honeymoo
n, even paler of complexion, due to the misty mountain air, disappointed that Bonnie did not care for long walks, but showed a fondness for the home-made chocolates a village cafe was famous for, and for flirting with the hotel owner who did not disguise his fondness for plump little girls with china blue eyes.
Victor bore it all stoically, looking to the time when Bonnie would be installed in their flat, the upper floor of an old stone house in Ashfield, in a frilly apron, and flicking a feather duster over their new furniture.
Bonnie’s old boss in the machinery shop did not replace her. He saved on wages by handling the few customers himself. Reading the war news he was fairly confident it would soon end in Europe and the Japanese would be run to ground shortly afterwards.
He had a stout wife with a lot of greying hair wound in plaits who looked foreign, like a German. He brought her into the shop two or three times a week while he went around the import agents, mainly to keep contact with them, for little new stock was coming into the country and even less was being manufactured for anything other than to help win the war.
He was nervous about Freda who hated the Germans as much as he did, but he was afraid anyone coming into the shop might take her for one. She would have been so hurt if he had told her this, or suggested she change her hair style, she would have cried for a week. He just watched people’s expressions nervously when he was there with her, and got her to talk so they would know by her accent she was Australian.
Lance made a great show of welcoming Victor back, shaking hands and wrenching at his shoulder, making Victor’s face light up, glad the miserable honeymoon was over, and feeling hopeful now that he was back at work, back into the old routine, that he and Bonnie would settle into contented married life, despite her show of impatience and restlessness.
Amy was certain Lance was keeping his back to her intentionally. Her cheeks burned a deep pink. The eyebrows of Miss Ross were raised above her typewriter carriage as she piously rolled paper into her machine.