by Olga Masters
“I’ll take my desk!” she said. “Miss Parks has made me a space for it.” She had cleaned it out and rubbed it down with furniture polish, clicking her tongue at some freshly revealed scratches she made herself, but blamed on Amy. She polished the brass corner pieces, her deep frown suggesting that this should have been done regularly but had been carelessly overlooked (by Amy).
Amy had to make a visit to Annandale to inform Daphne of the new development.
“Good riddance to her Ladyship!” Daphne cried, using tissue paper lavishly to wrap her best cutlery and store it in a shoebox.
She had just come from the side veranda and had glimpsed Mrs Cousins, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, watching through the latticed end of her back veranda.
Daphne had the presence of mind to shout out: “I measured up and all the curtains will fit the new windows!” which brought a curious Patricia from her bedroom and sent Mrs Cousins, with a face as red as the hibiscus she believed was concealing her, scuttling inside.
“I just fixed next door!” Daphne said, turning a kitchen chair on one leg from the table for Amy to sit down. “I’ll make a bed for the cat out of me curtains before I’ll leave them for her!”
“I’m worried,” Amy said, “that you might have been depending on some board money from Kathleen.”
“What you’d get from her she’d take back via the iron and the lights and the gas on sky high and butter spread inches thick on her bread.
“Trish can have a room to herself and her Ladyship’s bed will come in handy if we can ever afford to bring Lebby up for a holiday. If my sewin’ goes well we’ll be doing that!”
But Lebby’s mind was on matters other than Sydney and her relatives there.
She was going to become a boarder at Moruya convent and study under the nuns for her Intermediate Certificate.
For the past few months Lebby had joined a small class of girls taken by Sister Louise. She called it a business course with elementary instruction in bookkeeping (for she could keep only one lesson ahead of her pupils), and shorthand and typing, at which she was more proficient.
The class was looking towards work with banks, solicitors or grain merchants in Moruya, or perhaps Nowra or Bega.
But Sister Louise, with an ear for their chatter between lessons and an eye for their shortened skirts and stealthily painted lips and nails, shrewdly assumed the more prominent target was a husband.
Lesley Fowler was different.
One afternoon in the convent music room, where she could watch for the approach of the mail car to take her home to Diggers Creek, she picked up a violin, and putting it under her creamy chin, drew sounds from it that were nothing like a cat’s wailing, and far superior to those made by the Potter sisters and Desmond O’Reilly, who had been learning for two years.
Sisters Louise and Anastasia, of the same mind, agreed to go and see May.
They praised Lebby’s learning ability, her obvious appreciation of the arts, her ladylike manner and nice speaking voice, and said she would waste her life in an office. They looked carefully down May’s hall over the wild front garden to the roadway, lest their eyes give away their hopes that Lebby be spared a future spent trying to keep ordered a dirty little house like this and a brood of dirty children.
The nuns left and Gus came in and took Lebby on his knee on the rocker, and May, impressed by the whiteness of the nuns’ wimples and the high polish on their shoes, felt the need to clean the kitchen as a belated mark of respect, and to help eradicate her shame that they had witnessed her housekeeping at its worst.
She swept the small deal table under the window clear of its cut pumpkin, dripping tin, flour, sugar and tea bins and scrubbed it clean, her hands like two restless row boats in a foamy grey sea.
Gus lifted the curls from the back of Lebby’s neck and blew on her skin as he had done since she was a few months old.
“It’ll cost me that paddock of steers and the old sow and her next litter,” Gus said, giving Lebby’s neck a few little bites, causing her to giggle and shriek as she had done since she was one.
The presence of the nuns still invaded the kitchen, infecting May with the disturbing thought that they were able to witness the spectacle of Gus and Lebby.
She sent the bins and pumpkin skittering back onto the damp table.
“Now cut that out! She’s gettin’ a bit big for that caper!”
Lebby stood with a serious face and smoothed her dress down to sit sedately on the sofa. Gus got up to look for his tobacco on the shelf.
“They’ll not be askin’ for the full fee by the way they were talkin’,” May said to make amends for the reprimand and bring joy back to Lebby’s face.
“So long as they don’t get her into a black hood and on her knees from mornin’ till night.”
“Oh Pa!” Lebby laughed with a big shake of her head.
Amy did not like Lebby. She was irritated by her giggle and the way she clung onto Gus, rushing to him when he came inside and walking in the paddocks pressed to his side.
She did little or no work in the house, and May appeared to overlook this while constantly complaining of the chaos.
Amy had dreaded a meeting with Ted, but he was gone by the time she got to Diggers Creek.
“I might as well tell you right off he’s shot through again,” May said brutally, then repented at Amy’s rush of tears, mistakenly believing Amy had been depending on Ted’s support.
Amy picked up her case and took it to the room she would share with Lebby until Lebby left for the convent in a few weeks’ time.
“I will be by myself, thank goodness,” she whispered to the mantlepiece where she would put her treasured vases and china cats.
She marked out a space with her eyes where she would put a cot, the iron one she had slept in herself, roped to the rafters of the shed. She would paint it white and hang it with mosquito net.
I mean I’ll be by myself only until he comes, she corrected her thoughts, feeling the need to apologize. She thought of waking early and watching for him to wake and snuffle and move his hard little head, butting at the pillow.
I wonder who he will look like, she thought. Me, perhaps. I hope.
She did not see Lance again, although she nearly chanced to. He had a new car which she did not recognize when he passed the house on his way down the south coast taking Eileen and Allan and Allan’s new girlfriend Marjorie.
Lance thought from Amy’s description of the Scriveners’ place it was somewhere hereabouts. But instead of slowing down to try and pick it out, he pressed the accelerator and shot ahead, in sudden fear that Allan, given a similar description by Kathleen, might become suspicious.
But Allan was totally engrossed in Marjorie, an arm along the back of the seat holding her shoulder, his other hand holding hers in her lap.
Marjorie’s free hand was arranging and rearranging her hat, a green one with flying yellow ribbons, and the bobbing green and yellow hat was all that Amy saw, lifting her eyes briefly from her baby son sleeping on her knee.
The car made her remember, though, sitting on the veranda long ago with the other children, dreaming of being carried away to a better life.
She did not have those children any more.
Miss Parks had Kathleen, Daphne had Patricia, and May and Gus or perhaps the nuns at St Margaret’s had Lebby.
But this one was hers to keep forever. She crushed him so hard against her he squirmed and whimpered, and she had to rock him quiet again.
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The Commandant
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Homesickness
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The Even More Complete
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Diary of a Bad Year
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Wake in Fright
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The Dying Trade
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My Brilliant Career
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Dark Places
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The Long Prospect
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The Unknown Industrial Prisoner
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The Glass Canoe
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A Woman of the Future
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Eat Me
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Strine
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The Middle Parts of Fortune
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