by Olga Masters
“Do you know who is to blame for Allan and me?”
“Joe Miller!” Patricia cried with the certainty of being right.
The hair and the heels made a loud denial.
“It was over centuries before I even met Joe!
“No!” She swung herself around to face Patricia with her back to the end of the bed. Her eyes travelled over Patricia’s face as if deciding whether she was able to bear the weight of the announcement to come.
“Sooner or later you will learn this. Madam Amy is preggers.”
“What’s that?”
Kathleen rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Then she sketched a great hoop in the vicinity of her stomach.
Patricia’s brown eyes flew very wide. “Dad?”
Kathleen collapsed on her stomach, head back over the edge of the bed. “You poor innocent!” she said to the underneath.
Patricia hauled her up by the shoulder and Kathleen clambered to the head of the bed, taking Patricia’s pillow and stuffing a corner into her mouth. Her muffled laughter squeaked around it and her shaking body made the bed shake. Patricia was very still.
“Ted would be a mighty straight shot if he fired from the Moruya hotel to Crystal Street Petersham!” She rolled over on her back. “You convulse me!”
Patricia barely moved. She lowered her eyes and plucked at the quilt and when she finally looked up she was in tears. Kathleen plumped the pillow into its rightful place. “It’s quite a serious matter,” she said, head on the pillow, eyes on the ceiling. “But a laugh’s as good as a tonic, you know.”
In a moment Patricia got gently off the bed and began to brush her hair in front of the mirror with the tortoise-shell frame that had belonged to Daphne as a girl. She addressed her reflection. “I’m frightened.”
Kathleen got up too and tidied her navy dress about the waist, unable to resist an affectionate little caressing of her flat stomach. Patricia saw in the mirror, and asked briefly with her eyes if Kathleen allowed boys to do more than kiss and cuddle her. She will tell me in time she thought, returning her thoughts to Amy.
“Poor Dad,” she said. “I thought that he and Mum might—you know—”
Kathleen took the brush from Patricia and stroked her hair back from her forehead, wrinkling it, then wrinkling it more with worry that the lines might be permanent.
“Oh, I must stop frowning this way!” she said, addressing her own and Patricia’s reflections in the mirror. Patricia was on the edge of the bed, her brown eyes very big in their wetness. Brown-eyed people look better crying than blue-eyed people, Kathleen thought, remembering Amy’s weeping when she announced she was pregnant.
“Amy’s been crying quite a bit,” she said. “It’s had that effect on her.”
“Oh, poor Mum!” Patricia cried, taking up the pillow to dab her eyes.
Kathleen sat on the chair, now repaired by John at Daphne’s insistence, the one propped against the wall when Amy had the room, and making her back very straight tapped the back of the brush thoughtfully on her knee. Patricia, now partly ashamed of her tears, thought how much she was like the teacher they all thought she would become.
“You wanted to be a teacher, didn’t you?” she said.
Kathleen tossed the brush onto the chest and flung her legs out in a gesture of abandonment.
“Both Miss Parks and I broke our hearts when I had to leave.”
“Aunty Daph said in her letters Mum wanted you to stay on.”
Kathleen leapt to her feet and put her face close to the mirror to separate her eyelashes and pinch her eyebrows into an unruffled line, displaying a sudden and quite remarkable energy.
“My dear little Innocent! You can’t take a scrap of notice of what people say. Amy may have talked a lot about me going on and becoming a teacher, etcetera and etcetera. But...” And she picked up her shoes to put them on, holding them up first to admire their slender line and high heel bought to impress both Joe Miller and Patricia, who was still in cuban heels from the general store in Moruya. “But...I must warn you that you have to live with people to discover what they are really like.”
She took her handbag from the doorknob and swung it towards Patricia to indicate they were moving on.
“We’ll go to Tina’s. She has an older sister with fourteen children. Well, it seems she has that many. It’s a good idea to keep reminding yourself how it could be you.
“I should have taken Amy there one Saturday arvo when Constance was visiting. Constant Constance, Tina and I call her.
“Would you believe, little sister, Amy actually seems to be glad she is!”
42
Amy did not face the real reason for putting off telling Lance until she recovered from the shock of telling him.
I think I knew all along what he would say. I just pretended to myself I wanted to enjoy the secret on my own. It was not that way at all.
She was walking around her bedroom in her petticoat, whispering to herself. She had taken off her yellow dress for relief from its tightness at her waist. She slithered the silk against her skin, taking pleasure from it in spite of the realization of being terribly alone.
She sat on the edge of her bed with her bare feet cooling on the linoleum (a gift from Lance) thinking she did not hate him, or even resent him, wondering why this was so. She licked a tear running into the corner of her mouth, not knowing about it until she tasted the salt. Perhaps I am a little mad, she thought.
She hadn’t intended telling Lance the way she did. After work one Thursday, he took her to a cafe opposite Railway Square for the asparagus on toast she loved. Allan was not with him.
“I’ve left him to get the tram home,” Lance explained, moving the salt and pepper to get a better view of Amy’s face. A purple shade of lipstick was fashionable that year. It darkened Amy’s blue eyes to violet. Lance liked it.
“He needs to get some independence,” Lance said, leaving the violet for a moment. “You can make ’em too soft.”
Amy’s face went soft. She saw a little boy with serious brown eyes and a sturdy body struggling up steps, refusing to hang onto a rail, brushing her hands aside.
Lance usually avoided mention of Allan or Kathleen. Amy was glad of this. It helped reinforce her dream of the coming child as the real son of Lance. She fancied a future of Eileen and Allan together, more like wife and husband than mother and son, and herself, Lance and the baby in a separate household. Perhaps the Petersham house, Amy would think, looking around it and making mental changes to accommodate Lance.
Had Lance known, he might have envied Amy the luxury of fantasy. Or fantasy of a nature distinct from his. He worried that Allan, since his rejection by Kathleen, might tell Eileen of the affair with Amy in a fit of spite. His mental picture of the ensuing scene would send him running to Allan’s side to check out his mood.
On one occasion Allan left a five-pound note on the counter after serving a customer with dry cleaning, then went and bowed his head in despondency over the ironing board, oblivious to the light patter of feet when the next customer saw the money and made a run for it, taking his overcoat to the rival cleaners and the cash to the Prince of Wales on the next corner.
All Lance could allow himself for relief was a hard slamming of the till and a rush for the factory with barely a glimpse of Allan’s tragic, guilty face.
There Lance’s own guilt took over. The boy was the only thing that was really his! He couldn’t risk losing him! He might leave Lincolns and go into a bank (Eileen fancied banks and sighed over the neat young men in them), and leave the way open for Tom’s son. He rushed back to the dry cleaning shop to tell Allan he would relieve him, and Allan could give Victor a hand in the office with some practice on the adding machine, something he knew made Allan feel superior.
Amy told Lance she was pregnant after they had left the cafe and had passed Grace Brothers’ windows. They stopped to look at a georgette dress the colour of Amy’s lipstick, displayed on a wax model.
The top bloused over a tight wa
ist, and the skirt was narrow and knife pleated. The collar was a soft scarf with a tiny pearl button holding it in place.
Lance wanted her to have it.
“I know you sew your own things,” he said, gripping her hand hard in case her feelings might be hurt. “But just for a change why don’t you have that dress?”
She loved him for not saying he would pay for it, though she knew he would.
“Let’s sit for a while on the church seat,” she said.
The seat faced Broadway, and the traffic fed into George Street at two intersections. Amy noticed a car, a navy blue Chevrolet filled with young people in fancy dress, obviously on their way to a party. The men were in straw boaters and striped blazers, and the girls were very blonde or very dark with heads coming from layered collars. Like painted gumnuts with leaves still on the twig, Amy thought.
Lance cried out: “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” His face was so ugly she had to turn quickly from it, mainly in fear that she would remember it only that way.
She had held his hand tightly, partly to ascertain through the feel of his flesh if he loved her still.
She let the hand go. And pulled her skirt down, for it had a habit of riding up, and Amy thought his face flinched watching her. Perhaps she merely felt the flinch, because his eyes appeared to be on the traffic. She wondered if he was not really seeing it, although he appeared to be, and thought how silly and naive she was to have believed all this time that she always knew what he was thinking.
A bank of trees struggling for a show of greenness against the dust separated the church from the pavement. Amy saw a small bird land on a twig not strong enough to hold it. The bird flung its little cocked-up tail around and with a triumphant tweet hopped to a stronger branch and slid its beak along a leaf, gobbling at the moisture with an eager throat and rapidly blinking eyes.
Amy got up and walked quickly to the pavement and crossed the street to the tram stop. She was grateful that the traffic came on heavier, shutting out Lance’s figure should he be following. She did not look back even from the safety of the tram.
I think I’ll go home to have the baby, she said to herself, keeping the picture of the little bird in her mind.
43
Lance sent her a letter.
Dear Amy (it said), I’m sorry. Telephone me here at the factory. Lance.
In other notes he had said Dearest Amy and put Love at the bottom. She began to crumple the page then smoothed it out and decided to put it with the others from him, including the first he had written, asking her to dinner to celebrate her ownership of the furniture. She had a chocolate box partly filled and when she closed the lid she was terribly sad that the envelopes would be jostled about in there with no support from each other, no chance for them now to be tightly packed as she once thought, perhaps with the need for a larger box.
She wondered if she should throw them out and use the box for something else, perhaps a crochet hook and some cotton with which she would work on some table mats or a collar and cuffs set, or something for the baby while she was in hospital. Lying on her bed again in her petticoat she decided to dismiss the idea of table mats since she would soon have no place of her own.
Immediately she got home from work she took off her dress, the buttons fastening it in front now transferred to the extreme edge, and got the evening meal in her petticoat. It was December and very hot weather, and the first week after she told Lance about the baby.
Kathleen changed into shorts and a cotton knit top Amy got cheaply from Lincolns because the machinist had put a pale blue cuff on one sleeve and a darker shade on the other. Amy had unpicked the sleeves, cut strips from them and bound the armholes. She wore it for two summers, then Kathleen said it was no use to Amy while she was “like that” and took it for herself.
Kathleen looked with distaste at Amy peeling potatoes with the straps of her petticoat slipping from her shoulders and some strands of hair dangling towards her nose.
“One day the Misses Sweetleys will see you like that and all will be revealed,” Kathleen said.
“Shut up and set the table.”
“God, that counter at A.H.’s isn’t going to hide you forever, Amy.”
Amy sat to slice the handful of beans she had gathered from the garden. She smiled on them. They were such a tender green, supple but not limp, a delicate little spring curling from their tops. It seemed a shame to have to tear it away.
“At least you’ve stopped weeping,” Kathleen said.
Amy got up to find a saucepan. Her petticoat was stuck to the points of her buttocks, and the backs of her knees were exposed like pale pink blotting paper marked with a blue pencil.
“How can I ask Joe to tea with you looking like that?”
“If you do, warn him there’s worse to come.”
“You disgust me. Not just the way you are either.”
Amy sent a rush of water over the beans.
“Have you heard from Grease Pot?” Kathleen asked.
“No. Have you heard from the Junior Size?”
“No,” said Kathleen. “Nor do I want to.”
Amy was at the stove and a lot of her neck showed above the petticoat. Bent with the hair parted it looked as young as Lebby’s as Kathleen remembered her.
“Amy!” she cried and Amy turned with the saucepan poised above the flaring jet, her eyes like the blue flame yet to gather warmth.
Kathleen got up and flung a cloth on the table. I nearly said I’d help you, Amy, she said to herself, biting her lip in confusion.
She turned her back to show Amy her own bowed neck and took cutlery from the kitchen drawer.
44
Kathleen suggested Patricia come into Anthony Horderns and meet Joe Miller.
“You can give me the lowdown on what you think,” Kathleen said.
“But are you going to marry him?” Patricia saw herself as bridesmaid.
“Depends,” Kathleen said.
Patricia wanted to say “On what?” but felt the inadequacy of one who believed the luxury of such a choice would always evade her.
They were in blouses and shorts over bathing suits on the back steps of the Petersham house. Patricia had stayed overnight and slept on the lounge. Amy had never allowed the lounge to be used this way before. Now she did not care. She felt it had betrayed her, as Lance had.
It being Sunday, Kathleen and Patricia were going to Bondi.
“Where it all began,” Kathleen whispered to Patricia, rolling her eyes towards the kitchen window, behind which Amy was washing the breakfast things.
They were delayed in getting away. The front gate clicked open, and they both jumped up and ran to meet Daphne with tear marks on her face and a screwed-up handkerchief in her hand.
“Aunty Daph!” Patricia cried.
Daphne gave her head a little shake and went faster into the house to meet Amy coming out.
“Aunty Daph!” Amy echoed.
Under her breath Kathleen said: “Hell, what now?”
“It’s come to an ’ead,” Daphne said, unclicking her handbag to put her wet handkerchief there.
Amy took her elbow and steered her into the lounge room. She sat and occupied herself for a moment with spreading a fresh handkerchief on the arm of her chair.
“I should get covers,’ Amy murmured, briefly back on good terms with the lounge.
“Although I suppose it’s a little late now.”
“It makes two of us,” Daphne said.
Patricia turned a little pale and looked around the room as if it might be swept away at any moment and she should memorize it. Kathleen leaned back in the corner of her chair and made her face quiet.
“You’d know without me tellin’ what Madam wants,” Daphne said.
“Your house,” Kathleen said.
Patricia jumped with a wild look around the room as if this time it was really going. Then she put an arm around Daphne’s neck and laid a cheek on her shoulder.
Amy watched as she clo
sed her eyes, channelling the full force of her love to Daphne.
Amy raised her legs and laid them crossways on her chair, nudging the bulge of her stomach gently with her knee. He’s safe there, she thought. All mine. Loving no other than me.
She sent a small frowning glance to Kathleen and Patricia.
“There’s nothing stopping you two going off to the beach.”
“Whatever is going to happen to us?” Patricia whispered to Kathleen. They were in the tram, which was shrieking as it turned its nose up Oxford Street on its way to the coast.
They passed mean little balconies with people lined up on them watching with dreams in their eyes. Patricia was surprised to see an absence of envy and discontent in their expressions, since there appeared to be no prospect of their going to the beach.
They were crossing the sand looking for a place to leave their towels when Kathleen paused, rushed on and hissed: “Look neither to left or right, but straight ahead! Fix your eyes on that buoy four breakers out and do not move them!”
Patricia immediately looked to either side and behind her, stumbling over a pair of legs belonging to a sunbather and pitching forward to arouse the attention of every group within a radius of fifty yards.
Kathleen ran so fast then, jumping over bodies and sending sand flying into faces that Patricia, scrambling to her feet, was afraid she would lose her. Kathleen dropped down at last near a Greek family, the women in black headscarves and the men in navy serge trousers and sandshoes, all solid enough to make a protective wall, and there she lay getting her breath back in little moaning pants.
“Oh, look what you’ve gone and done!” She closed her eyes and pushed her face into the sand as if she were planning on suffocation. Patricia put a hesitant hand between her shoulder blades. She withdrew it from the quivering flesh, and on her knees peered over the heads of the Greek people for clues among the crowd. Kathleen sat up and pressed her face between her knees.
“He’s here,” she said.
“Joe?”
“No other.” Kathleen squeezed her eyes shut.