by Olga Masters
Now he felt a film of sweat on his forehead and an urge to take his hand from the wheel and slap it across Allan’s face. But he bowed closer to the wheel appearing to go faster. Allan stiffened his back against the seat as if urging the car backwards to Kathleen.
He loosened his body only when the car stopped with a whoosh inside the garage. It was one cut into the side of the rise on which the house was built. The roof formed a deck opening into the house, and Eileen left the door open if the weather was fine and would start dishing up the meal when the whoosh was heard.
Allan thought he might cry at the imagined sound of Eileen’s fork whipping hard inside the potato pot. He saw nothing of his father’s face because of the dark.
Only the feel of him listening for the light feet of Amy. He twitched about ready to say it didn’t matter, he did not expect to be driven to Petersham to see Kathleen.
But Lance put a hand on his knee. “I’ll take you there after tea,” he said.
33
They went out sometimes as a foursome on Saturday afternoons, Lance and Allan dropping Eileen off at her parents’ place, then, on the pretext of returning to Lincolns, collecting Amy and Kathleen at Petersham.
Once they went to a picnic spot by the Parramatta River where Kathleen took off her shoes and screeched at the chill of the water, and Lance bought double ice creams for them all.
They stopped at Lincolns before Lance and Allan took Amy and Kathleen home, and turned west again to pick up Eileen.
Allan took Kathleen to show her the new clothes racks in the dry cleaning shop and new overhead cupboards for storing the solvents and spare iron.
He had given the cupboards a coat of paint and when he closed the doors tenderly Kathleen put a cheek on his upper arm and rubbed it.
“You are wonderful,” she whispered. He pulled the transparent covering from the clothes rack and put it over their heads and kissed her.
Upstairs at the same time Lance kissed Amy.
They were by the switchboard and in a little while he turned to it and picked up the telephone, still holding her with one arm. The feel of his arm has changed, Amy thought, slipping out of it. He half turned his back to tell Eileen he would collect her in an hour. Trembling, Amy went and sat in her old chair and opened a desk drawer, then shut it at the sight of unfamiliar things.
She watched Lance’s hand go up and smooth his hair at the back. He needs a haircut, she thought, with the pain of a woman who wanted to tell him as a wife would, but knew she hadn’t the right.
When he put the phone down he went and stood behind her chair and kneaded her shoulders. She rubbed the back of her head on his stomach and thought again, like a wife, he should control the flabbiness, and felt sad again that she could not help him.
All of a sudden her shoulders went cold. The coldness began to spread to other parts of her, until she almost shivered.
For Lance took his hands away and stuffed them in his pockets and took a couple of paces towards the middle of the room.
There were footsteps on the stairs, Allan and Kathleen hurrying up laughing and making a lot of noise with their feet as if their exuberance was released that way.
They came in swinging clasped hands. Amy tried but failed to get her lips to smile. She got up and tucked the chair neatly under the desk. She turned from their questioning faces on the pretext of looking at her face in the mirror that once hung on the side of a filing cabinet. But the cabinet had been moved and she felt rebuffed as if this had been done to her on purpose.
Allan and Kathleen let go their hands and led the way on quieter feet down the stairs.
“Something happen?” Kathleen asked in that kind of voice that does not care too much about an answer.
She was folding washing brought in from the clothesline and making a pile on the kitchen table. She wore shorts and a blouse that slid a little over one shoulder. Most of the time she adjusted it but now they were at home she let it fall and left the strings at the neck untied.
The hollow between her breasts was visible through the opening. Amy half expected her to fling off the blouse and her brassiere too and allow the breasts to bounce in exuberance as her feet did on the stairs at Lincolns.
When the towels and underwear and their Anthony Hordern uniforms were in a neat pile Kathleen flopped down on a chair and laid her face on a rough towel on top.
“Amy,” she said with her eyes closed. “He kissed me under the cellophane. I felt like a bride.”
Amy got up from her chair and swept the pile of things from under Kathleen and carried them into the next room where there was a copper and laundry tubs. Kathleen heard the clatter of the ironing board (which John had shaped from an old door of a demolished building) being laid across the tubs.
“Amy!” Kathleen called. She had her face on the table now, one cheek upwards, her eyes still closed. “Give me back a towel. I need to smell the sun and the wind!”
I know what you want to smell, Amy thought, and sent the iron hard across a tea-towel, burning out the sweet smell of fresh grass and pure air.
“You got the huff Amy? Didn’t he kiss you?”
Amy flung the iron onto its little stand and rushed on Kathleen, who was on her feet in time and around the other side of the table. She laughed, believing it to be a game. But Amy’s face said differently. Her blue eyes glittered like chipped glass under her sweaty hair, and her breath blew out from a pouted underlip as she charged with her scarlet face first to one corner then the other.
Kathleen’s face went sober and she grabbed a chair back for protection, then tangled with the legs, and when it seemed Amy was bearing down on her, pushed the chair towards her and ran past it. She got the front door open in time to escape, with Amy only yards behind her. She flew out the gate, slamming it shut almost on Amy’s stomach. One of the Misses Wheatley coughed from an upstairs window.
Oh pull your head in, Amy cried inside herself, running into the house.
Two hours later Kathleen came in and saw the table set and a plate of salad at her place. Amy, seated at the table, was wearing powder and lipstick. Her hair was freshly done and she was in a clean blouse and her old but still respectable navy skirt.
“Did you get anything at Tina’s?” she asked pleasantly.
“Two rotten pears and a dirty look from oily Uncle Ol,” Kathleen said, cutting into a tomato slice and laying a piece on her darted-out pink tongue. “Thank you for my tea, Amy.”
“You’re very welcome,” Amy said.
34
That night Kathleen wrote to her grandmother.
Dear Grandma, I read your last letter at Aunty Daph’s. It seems to me the best way out of the situation is to send Patricia to us. It would be very good for Amy (I call her Amy all the time now). Unfortunately she has fallen for this married fellow and no good will come out of it, only heartbreak for poor Amy. Patricia here to set up with a job, clothes etc. will take her mind off herself. I will inquire at A.H.’s to see if there is anything. I have a junior helping me in books now, so it is too late for Patricia there. But something would turn up. Who knows I might get her in at Lincolns. As a matter of fact the son Allan and I are going out quite seriously. He’s a good line and if I may say so, a good catch as he will take over the business one day. Talk it over and write to Aunty Daph when you make up your mind. They are all well there, John and Helen getting married next year if they can find a flat. We are lucky with this house. If Allan and I married (don’t fall down in a faint) we could have the rooms the terrible Misses Wheatley have. I am always at Amy to get rid of them. But I think Allan’s father (who likes me a lot I know) would probably want something better for his only son. I haven’t met the mother, who is a churchy type. Allan goes but only to please her. Hoping to hear from you soon. Love to Lebby. Her turn next.
Kathleen (Allan calls me Kay)
PS Isn’t it great the war is over?
The pink tongue that curled so eagerly around Amy’s salad licked the envelope down and
Kathleen put the letter in her handbag. She stretched out on her bed and stared at the handbag hanging from the knob of her wardrobe door. The wardrobe was new, she had persuaded Amy to approve the purchase on time payment when she got a raise for training little Nancy Whelan. Amy was quite jealous of me when I got an assistant before her, Kathleen said to herself, transferring the wardrobe to the second bedroom of the house she and Allan would share, and seeing herself stacking her offseason clothes in it.
Oh, life is pretty jolly good, she told herself with a great leap from the bed. And I’m in a letter writing mood! The legs of her chair skidded when she sat at her desk again. She wrote:
Dear Allan, My own sweet boy, how are you? I have an overwhelming desire to see you. As a matter of fact I must. We must meet to talk something over of a very urgent nature. My whole future depends on it. If I said our future what would my dear sweet boy say to that? But first our meeting. Where and when? Stand by the phone say, Wednesday, giving you time to get this letter and I will telephone from the box near A.H.’s, just after twelve o’clock. Should anything happen and my lunch hour be changed to one, please return then and stand by.
All my love, K.
PS When we meet I want your father there too. This is of vital importance for it concerns him nearly as much as it does us. K.
35
The meeting did not come off as Kathleen planned it.
Dudley’s heart failed and he died at work, hand-stitching the lapels of a herringbone tweed sports coat.
“Grab the needle!” shouted the office manager Oscar Banks. He saw but could not reach Dudley with the appropriate speed because of the glass wall separating the office from the factory. Dudley slid downwards in his chair, his face pale as bread dough, the needle pointing menacingly from between two fingers.
Sydney Rivers of Rivers Exclusive Men’s Tailoring dropped his scissors with a great clang and rushed to lift Dudley into what he hoped was a more comfortable position. Dudley’s head lolled sideways into the collar of his shirt which Daphne had starched sharp enough to cut him. Dudley had thrust out his feet in the last movement his body made. His smallish feet seemed the most defenceless thing about him, and with his trousers riding up there was a lot of black sock showing and a piece of innocent white leg. His shoes were black and highly polished, placed together so much like a schoolboy’s, it was a surprise not to see a school case nearby.
Word of Dudley’s death reached Amy and Kathleen at Anthony Horderns fairly soon. Oscar, with an air of melancholy importance, took the tram to Annandale and put Daphne in a taxi to the hospital in Camperdown where Dudley’s body had gone an hour earlier.
Someone at Rivers remembered Dudley mentioning a niece working at Lincolns (Rivers stocked Lincoln made casual wear on the shirts and underwear counter). Only when Amy was safely out of his house had Dudley acknowledged the relationship.
Oscar’s young lady assistant, caught up in the same aura of melodrama as Oscar (and quite enjoying it as a change from the monotony of office routine), assembled her features into a suitable expression of concern and telephoned Lincolns.
Lance was with Victor at the door of Victor’s office, and when he heard Miss Isobel Mackie say “If you mean Miss Amy Fowler she isn’t at Lincolns any more,” he moved over to the switchboard and took the receiver from her hand.
Ignoring the round eyes riveted on him and deciding he cared nothing for any of them anyway, seeing only the blue of Amy’s eyes he said, “Yes, yes, I see. We’ll pass the message on.” He then ran down the stairs to find Allan.
It was close to midday on the day Allan was to stand by the telephone for Kathleen’s call. They scrambled into Lance’s Buick and reached Anthony Horderns ten minutes before twelve, Allan letting out his breath in a great puff of relief.
The four of them went to lunch in the tearoom. Kathleen cried with Allan’s arm around her shoulders, and Lance held Amy’s hand beside her plate of curry and rice, having insisted on their ordering something substantial enough to help bolster their grief.
Torn between tenderness and boyish embarrassment at the first sight of Kathleen’s tears, Allan silently agreed with Lance that it would be ill-timed to raise the subject of Kathleen’s letter unless she did. “It wouldn’t be in good taste just now,” Lance had said, not admitting to himself that whatever it was, he didn’t want anything disrupting his relationship with Amy.
Lance was concerned not only with training Allan in the running of Lincolns but utilizing the time they were together (mainly travelling to and from work) for character building. Although he and Allan were close, Lance felt uncomfortable much of the time over his affair with Amy, and he was unable to find words to justify it. It’s no use though, he would tell himself, taking off his coat at home to sit down to one of Eileen’s roast dinners. I cannot give her up and don’t intend to.
Allan was disappointed that Lance attached so little importance to Kathleen’s letter. He took it from Allan’s hand and frowned over it almost as if it were an order form filled out by someone on their first day in the factory. He handed it back without saying anything, Allan wincing and blushing at the way the line containing “my own sweet boy” leapt out, as if Lance had folded the letter that way on purpose.
Allan began to think he should keep a few things to himself concerning Kathleen. Perhaps Lance was jealous because she was younger and prettier than Amy. That was probably it, Allan thought, making no secret of the tender way he folded the letter and put it in his shirt pocket.
In Lance’s own (secret) words he had “gone off” Kathleen. He suspected she was looking to Allan as a substantial meal ticket. He saw that Amy was afraid of her. When he proposed a meeting with Amy he watched her mind flick to Kathleen, mentally accommodating her. He thought often of a time when Kathleen would not be around. He did not know where she would go or what effect it would have on Allan, but he dreamed of Allan meeting another girl and the relationship dissolving amicably (so as not to upset Amy).
Lance saw Kathleen now with her wet eyelashes resting on her cheeks and her cheek very close to Allan’s shoulders. I would dearly love to tell her her nose is red, he thought. He saw her lift her eyelids now and again to see what other of Anthony Horderns staff was observing her. She’ll get a great kick out of the funeral, Lance thought. She’s just the type.
Lance told Eileen he was going to the funeral. He lied about it. He said that Syd Rivers had asked for a good representation of people in the clothing trade to honour Dudley’s memory, since Dudley had been a tailor for thirty years, most of the time with Rivers. Because Rivers was a good customer of Lincolns Lance said he should go. The funeral was at two o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Eileen could not see why Lance had to take Allan and sulked through their early lunch. Since the funeral was in Annandale and her parents’ place only a few miles farther west she suggested she and Allan spend their time there while Lance was at the church and cemetery.
Allan stopped eating his meat pie (Eileen always bought pies with the Saturday shopping to save cooking lunch) and watched the gravy ooze onto his plate, terrified at the outcome of the proposal. But Lance squared his shoulders in a way he had when he was about to deliver a sound argument, and said that Allan had never been to a funeral, and since he would be faced with this kind of thing in his business life, he should learn the correct procedures now. It was Allan’s turn to square his shoulders at this extension of his responsibilities. Eileen saw the manly gesture and in her pride relented. A good thing it was a Protestant funeral. If it had been a Catholic one she would have put her foot down, Eileen told herself.
Lance had further informed her that he would not be home until late in the evening, so it might not be worth her while cooking tea for them. Victor had been off Thursday and Friday with one of his bad chest colds, and Lance needed to spend a couple of hours on the accounts. It would be an opportunity to acquaint Allan with that side of Lincolns. In a fresh rush of pride Eileen failed to perceive the unlikelihood of Allan learning any
thing worthwhile leaning over Lance’s shoulder with his thoughts somewhere else, in this case on Kathleen. Kathleen’s existence had so far been kept from Eileen, something else Allan was beginning to resent, since he had a strong desire to show Kathleen off and to curb his mother’s habit of pushing him towards girls at the church.
Of course neither Lance nor Allan went to Lincolns. They collected Amy and Kathleen from the Petersham house and went to St Stephen’s Church of England, then to Rookwood Cemetery for the burial.
“Oh dear, this dreadful place!” moaned Kathleen in Allan’s ear, as if the overgrown graves and broken headstones and upturned jam jars, long empty of their flowers and rimmed with greenish slime, were no fit resting place for the uncle she despised.
Afterwards they went to the Coxes for sandwiches, made in large quantities by Mrs Cousins, while Helen in green linen with large white buttons holding down four large patch pockets clung to John’s arm throughout both ceremonies, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief on hire from her glory box.
Daphne’s tightly held jaws relaxed a little when Lance laid a light hand at the back of her waist, holding a cup of tea in the other.
“You were a good wife. He had a good life with you, I’m sure of that.” Lance was pleased Allan was within earshot to benefit from this example of etiquette suitable in cases of bereavement.
After a suitable pause, and at a signal from Kathleen, the toe of her shoe prodding his ankle, Allan asked Lance if it would be alright to go across to the park for a while. Kathleen put on a wan expression as if her grief was impossible to bear in the crowded room.
Daphne put a handkerchief to a wildly working mouth.
“He went there every Saturday to watch the cricket. Never missed.”