by Olga Masters
“I didn’t bring everything,” said Sylvia. “They would’ve been crushed up in the case.”
To have dresses and hats to leave behind! Even Rose and Yvonne finishing the table setting lifted their heads at this.
“I’m sitting next to you at supper,” whispered Esme turning her eyes towards Rose and Yvonne daring them to dispute this.
They each made a half toss of their heads putting the sugar bowl and milk jug each with a beaded cover and the jam and butter with great care in the centre of the table.
Esme did sit next to Sylvia at supper but she would have been better next to Lennie.
“Ask Varnia to pass the bread,” he whispered in an aside to Yvonne which Esme heard.
She reached past Rose and Yvonne and pulled at the shirt on Lennie’s shoulder twisting it about.
Fighting at the meal table, even talking to excess was not tolerated by either parent and Mr McMahon slapped the bread knife so sharply on the table some of the things rattled about.
Esme with swift eyes towards Sylvia noticed how fussily with her lovely slender hands she put her bread and butter plate back in its place and straightened the pudding spoon which had gone askew. Esme immediately made similar adjustments at her place.
“Look at her,” whispered Rose to Yvonne.
“You’ve asked God’s blessing on this food. Don’t make a mockery of it!” said Mrs McMahon and although she didn’t look Sylvia’s way Esme felt Mrs McMahon was laying the blame on her.
Esme sneaked a hand down to touch the cool waistline of Sylvia’s dress.
Sylvia brushed some breadcrumbs on the tablecloth into a little heap and dropped them onto her plate and laid the knife at a perfect angle across it.
Esme wanted to but daren’t do the same at her place.
After supper they did the usual things like washing up and Mr McMahon, Frank and Lennie went out in the half dark for more wood, to see that the dairy was locked against dogs and fowls and that calves in their paddock had no chance of joining mothers and sucking them dry by morning.
Esme would have liked her father to have suggested they all go to the sitting room and light a fire there and let Sylvia entertain them with stories of her life in the city.
Esme pictured Sylvia at the table with its ruby red cloth stroking it with her fine white fingers and the lamplight making a cameo of her face with her hair lost in the shadows.
Perhaps she would change her dress for them. People in books changed their clothes a lot particularly in the evening. The best that could be expected of the McMahons was for Mrs McMahon to take her apron off and Mr McMahon to discard his blucher boots for an old pair of patent leather shoes he danced in during the early days of their marriage. The children under a rigid rule changed into old things no longer worth mending as soon as they came in from school or church.
But Esme thought it was best to leave the idea of a family gathering a dream.
Mrs McMahon’s face had tightened more than once at supper when Esme talked about her job and flat in Sydney. Esme thought her mother rose unnecessarily and sharply a couple of times to put the teapot back on the stove bringing about a break in the talk.
At bedtime Esme and even Rose and Yvonne were disappointed that Sylvia shook from her case the nightdress her mother made her to go away.
“You can see right through my new ones,” Sylvia said.
Oh.
Mrs McMahon came in with the lamp and blew out their candle. She wasn’t making up a bed on the couch for anyone but taking Jackie to share the double bed with his parents.
Esme raised herself in bed.
“She’s wearing the nightie you made her,” she said.
Mrs McMahon raised the lamp.
“It’s ironed up very nice,” she said.
“A woman at the flats did it for me,” Sylvia said, “She brings in my clothes from the line and irons them all and puts them outside my door.
“She would do anything in the world for me.”
Mrs McMahon turned to leave.
“Don’t talk but get right to sleep or your father’ll be in with the strap.”
Esme crushed her cheek on Sylvia’s shoulder hating her mother.
“Not you,” she whispered.
She laid an arm across Sylvia’s waist.
“We can whisper,” she said. “They won’t hear.”
Light from the window outlined Sylvia’s features and her spread hair.
“Tell me all about your little flat,” Esme whispered.
“It’s not little. The sitting room is as big as all this house.”
Mindful of the rule about not talking Esme’s gasp went inward.
“As big as this house except for the kitchen,” Sylvia amended.
“And where you work?” Esme whispered.
“It’s big too. Everyone has their own desk. I have the best.”
“How do you know what to do?” whispered Esme and the heads of Rose and Yvonne rose like fish from a lake.
“I know. I show the new girls when they come.”
She lifted her hands from the bedclothes and held them up to catch the light and arranged them as if they were to be painted.
“You typewrite, don’t you?” whispered Esme.
“I’m fast too,” said Sylvia.
“Are there boys?” whispered Esme.
“Men!” said Sylvia too loud and the larger bedroom heard.
“I warned you!” called out Mrs McMahon and Mr McMahon winced.
“It’s natural she’d talk,” he said.
“Skite!” said Mrs McMahon. She wriggled her body so that Jackie fitted into the curve between stomach and thighs.
Mr McMahon wriggled too.
“Put him on the other side of you,” he whispered.
“They’d hear,” said Mrs McMahon.
Through the wall Esme put her lips close to Sylvia’s ear.
“Do they want you to you-know-what?” she whispered.
“Of course,” said Sylvia.
Esme drew back to study Sylvia’s lovely remote profile.
“You don’t?” she said.
Sylvia was silent.
So was Mr McMahon with his profile also outlined by the moonlight.
Across Jackie Mrs McMahon saw.
His lips tucked in at the corners were finely sculptured like Sylvia’s.
She rose slightly in bed but he did not turn his head.
Angry she pulled at her pillow.
“I’ll get her working tomorrow!” she said. “Sitting about with her hands in her lap! Lady Muck! She’ll work the same as the others do!”
“She’ll probably do it well too,” said Mr McMahon.
Very still he felt he was about to leave his warm bed and step into the icy flooded current of Berrigo Creek.
“She’s a housemaid.”
“A what?” shrieked Mrs McMahon and to quieten her he put a hand across Jackie and laid it on her thigh. He felt it quiver like the flesh of a young horse he was breaking in.
“She’s got an office job!” said Mrs McMahon.
“She couldn’t get one. Bess wrote and told us.”
“Us? Why don’t I know?”
“Bess wrote when she left there and said it was a good place. It’s not to say she won’t get an office job when times get better.”
“Bess pushed her out! She was frightened she might get something better than their Margaret. I know that one! She’d be glad she’s only a maid!”
Only a maid, thought Mrs McMahon her flesh no longer quivering.
I was a maid.
“You were a maid,” said Mr McMahon, “You were all right.”
Mrs McMahon for a moment wanted to steer his hand towards her inner thigh. But she raised her knees and it slid away to lie indifferently on Jackie’s stomach.
“You knew all that time and you didn’t say! I see where she gets her lies and deceit from!”
“Bess wrote and I got the letter in the mail one day when I picked it up. Just by chance.” Mr Mc
Mahon a fairly devout Catholic appeared still grateful to God for organizing this.
“All that blowing and skiting and her a maid! No more than a housemaid.
“I’ll bowl her out!” cried Mrs McMahon. “First chance I get and there’ll be plenty I’ll bowl her out!
“I’ll bowl her out with pleasure!” cried Mrs McMahon when Mr McMahon did not speak.
He turned his face and looked at her only for a moment before turning back and with his shoulders shutting her away.
Mrs McMahon resisted an impulse to grasp his shoulder and turn him towards her.
She was raised enough in the bed to see only the tip of his ear and his black hair swirling around the crown of his head.
Look at me, she cried inside her and the tears got into her voice.
“Deceiving me like that!”
Mr McMahon turned then and she fell back onto the pillow.
“Lift Jackie to the other side,” he whispered.
Afterwards they put Jackie back and he was folded warm and moist against the warm and moist body of Mrs McMahon.
Mr McMahon raised himself on his elbows.
“Don’t bowl her out straight away,” he said. “Leave it just for a day or two.”
Sleep was coming to Mrs McMahon gently like a soft blanket pulled across her brain.
Only a maid, she thought. A housemaid.
No better than me after all.
THE DONE THING
She opened the refrigerator door and said to the inside of it: “We should visit them.”
Turning around with the milk she looked at the back of his neck as if it would answer her.
She thought it drooped with eyes down.
She took her place at the table not looking into his face but pulling her scrambled eggs to her.
When the kettle boiled she turned to the stove to attend to it and it was his turn to study the back of her neck.
Her thick hair was combed upwards into a bun but a few strands escaped and trailed onto her collar without taking anything from her air of neatness.
He saw her shoulders move when she poured water into the teapot and glimpsed her profile.
How strong she is, he thought. I wish I were strong like her.
When she was sitting down again he said: “Couldn’t we ask them to come here?”
He looked around the kitchen which she seemed always to be adding to. One corner was filled with a string of baskets starting near the ceiling. They were like big straw pockets filled with her recipe books, tea towels and the bottom two with vegetables. Dried ferns sprouted uselessly from an old pottery jug which had the cracked part turned to the wall, and she had painted over an old-fashioned washing board, her latest find, and hung it to use as a notice board on which she pinned messages to herself or him, recipes and household hints.
Perhaps this sort of thing wasn’t their taste. No, it was better to see their place first.
Her face tightened.
“You don’t do it that way,” she said not as mildly as she usually did when he made similar blunders.
Yet it was he who had gone to a good boarding school and then to University to take a science degree, and she who had left State school at sixteen and become a typist.
She was working in the city headquarters of the Forestry Commission when she met him.
Six months ago the Commission appointed him to work from a small office in this small timber town providing a cottage on the outskirts, the first you came upon to suggest the huddle of cottages and shops half a mile on.
She liked the place the minute she saw it, particularly the view of the hills and the sweep of pine forests which never seemed to excite the locals who owned or worked in the two general stores, the bakery, butcher’s, two banks, newsagents, post office, two timber mills or had small dairy farms or larger cattle runs.
The school and schoolhouse were at the other end of the town, set apart like the forestry cottage perhaps to suggest transients were people a little apart from the locals.
There were churches but no resident ministers.
Louisa did her shopping quickly and efficiently and came back to sit with her crochet—she had made their bedspread and was at work on one for the spare room—looking at the hills where the clouds sometimes gathered above a tall peak.
“Like a bride taking off her wedding veil,” she said once to herself.
She wrote a lot of long letters, the replies brought home by her husband because all their mail went to the Forestry office in the absence of a mailman.
She rebuilt the garden keeping one of the tanks for garden water and buying potted cuttings from the street stalls that seemed to be held every other Friday by one or another of the numerous local charities.
“You should join in with us,” said one of the stallholders once glancing at her middle flat under her camel coloured skirt.
“When she settles down,” said the other stallholder whose eyes were kind in her ruddy farmer’s face.
It was Jim who learned that his former fiancée had come to live in or rather near the little town.
“You wouldn’t guess who I saw today,” he said coming into the kitchen one evening where the smell of quinces lingered. She had lined up her jars of pale pink jelly on a bench top so full of pleasure in her handiwork she could not bear to put them away in a cupboard just yet.
She waited for him to tell her.
“Annie,” he said.
“Really?” she said.
He went into the bedroom to hang up his coat and she waited for him to come back.
“Passing through?” she said as he went by into the scullery off the kitchen which they used to wash their hands because the old-fashioned bathroom was off the back verandah.
She liked it though after the city home she was reared in with a white tiled sterile bathroom and toilet near the bedrooms.
“No,” he said taking his place at the table. “She’s living here.”
“Married?” she said.
“They bought the farm Craggy Hills had for sale,” he said by way of saying she was, and slipping easily into local jargon in a way she had not yet acquired.
He ate some of his dinner before he told her more.
“It was funny,” he said. “But I was driving past the farm a week ago and I started to think about her. I’d just glimpsed these two going up the drive from the front gate. They had their backs to me and I started to think about her. I must have recognized her unconsciously.”
“Yes, you must have,” she said dryly.
If the subject had been a different one he might have laughed his there-I-go-again laugh but this time he picked up a piece of bread she had taken to making lately. His face had reddened.
“How was your day?” he said after a while.
“OK. A Mrs Henning or Hanning rang and asked for something for a church street stall. How do they know I’m C of E?”
“They know everything,” he said.
She took one of her jars of quince jelly—after a couple of days she could bear to part with it—and a crochet cushion cover and was delivering them to the stall and receiving effusive thanks when she saw a woman she knew to be Annie coming out of the bakery.
She was smallish, slim and quick and she got into a truck and drove off.
A week later Louisa was shopping late on a Friday—the little town kept a custom from early days of its settlement and stayed open till eight o’clock on Friday evening—and went to Jim’s office to go home with him.
Annie and a man, her husband obviously, were standing under the roof that extended over the footpath outside the office. Jim had his back to them locking the door. Louisa was on the other side and they unconsciously made a foursome.
Jim came down the two steps.
“Hullo, Annie,” he said.
She raised a small face framed with fair hair under a woollen cap. The evening was grey with a mist of rain.
“Peter my husband,” Annie said. “Jim Taylor.”
My
God, he’s not going to introduce me, Louisa thought.
It was Peter who smiled at her. “Mrs Taylor,” he said “Annie, my wife.”
“Louisa,” Jim murmured almost as an afterthought.
There was a silence only as long as an intake of breath.
“We could go for a drink,” Peter said inclining his head towards the hotel next door but one from the Forestry office.
“Peter, the baby!” Annie cried almost scandalized.
“Yes, yes! I forgot,” he said.
Forget the baby? said the quick frown on Annie’s face.
“Bye, bye,” they said together and made for their truck and obviously their baby.
Louisa saw Annie the following week on the other side of the street in the town. Louisa stood still with her parcels and smiled and Annie hesitated at the door of the truck. A big timber lorry rumbled slowly between them and when it passed Annie was backing the truck her chin lifted and her eyes on the rear window.
Louisa walked the half mile to her house glad to see its friendly winking windows and surprised she got there so quickly.
She filled in the afternoon weeding the earth around her tomatoes, rubbing vaseline into her summer shoes and putting them away in tissue paper and reading for a while in the sun on the front verandah wondering through her distraction why she felt a vague depression and seeing from time to time the lift of Annie’s chin as she backed the truck.
“I must learn to drive,” Louisa said aloud as she often did when alone.
It was a couple of days after that during breakfast she said they should go and visit Annie and Peter.
“What is their name?” she said.
“Pomfrey,” he said and she wondered briefly how he found out.
“Did you know him at all?” Louisa asked.
“No,” he said.
“Well, we should go and visit them,” she said.
“Do you read all these things in books?” he said.
“People know by instinct what to do,” she said and felt she almost disliked him.
“We were here first and they have come and don’t know anyone,” she said after a little silence.
“We call on them and take something.”
Her eyes strayed to her kitchen shelves lined with bottles of preserves, deciding whether to take her peaches which were the more successful or her apricots which she could have cooked a little longer.