Loving Daughters (5 page)

Liquid eyes black as treacle slipped over Enid and grey-green ones surveyed the top of Una's head.

Enid just slightly swung the broom as she went away.

8

Violet was angry at missing the best part of the funeral. She was able to leave Small Henry only long enough to go to the church, a five-minute walk from her place. He should sleep throughout the half-hour service, and if he didn't a cry would do him no harm. She frequently told her patients this but did not take her own advice with ultimate confidence.

Before leaving she lingered by him, looking with concern not love on his mauve coloured face, even in sleep wearing a pinched look, not completely trusting, which was communicated to Violet.

‘I don't trust the little bugger,' she said aloud, having shouted around sleeping babies all her nursing days, believing them to be insensitive to sound.

He merely drew a deep breath that shuddered his frail frame and slept on under Violet's gaze as she stood in her black mannish two-piece suit she favoured for the air of professionalism it gave her.

Ned heard her from the kitchen and coughed. The cough said see if there is anything I need before you go off, for he was not going to the funeral. He had not said so for Ned had little or no use for words. While Violet laid out her suit and cream silk blouse, answering Ned in his own language, he put a second flannel on with old khaki trousers and dragged on old military boots almost white with age. Violet took her best black shoes from the wardrobe and dropped them angrily by a chair. Ned could buy some good clothes and be there today as smart as any of the other Herbert men! She flung her head back at the mirror and dabbed perfume under her rather heavy jaws, thinking her good creamy skin would draw its quota of admiring glances.

Damn Ned if he was fool enough to wallow in self-pity for the rest of his life! But she felt a need to mention Small Henry in addition to leaving his door wide open by way of saying he was there if there was a fire and would Ned oblige by snatching him and making a dash for safety.

Ned built up big fires in summer and winter in the kitchen stove and front room. Often he sat close enough to set himself alight and dozed off with his newspaper (one from a pile Violet saved while he was at the war and wished she hadn't) tipped dangerously towards the flames. The crackling of the fire would startle him and in the early days Violet would put his head to her breast and stroke passionately at his hair, trying to erase the memory of the gunfire when Ned reared up wild eyed and agitated.

Now she rebuked him for the kind of wood he was bringing from the bush.

‘That wattle farts like a bullocky, Ned!' she said. ‘Get some box for goodness sake, or something that burns without waking the dead!'

She was ready to go and the service was about to start and all she could do was push the logs together in the grate with the toe of her shoe and say in a loud voice she would be back (unfortunately) before you could turn around.

‘Of course,' Ellen Power said, nodding under her fake fur hat when they were all about to go to the cemetery and Violet had to turn and go the opposite way. ‘You are the right one to have charge of the poor young thing!'

Part of Violet bristled at this – Wyndham deciding it was she who would take Small Henry and rear him!

Another part accepted readily this tribute to her status and capabilities as a nurse.

But she looked with resentment at Enid and Una climbing unencumbered into the Austin to go to the cemetery. Violet had not seen the cemetery since Nellie's burial. All denominations used it, the cost of the land being shared between Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians, there being too few Methodists in Wyndham to bear a share, and needing to change their religion on their deathbeds or have their bodies bumped over many miles to Candelo or Pambula. Wide strips of grass were planted to divide the sections. But Wyndham grew careless of tending it and allowed growth to run riot, so that Michaelmass daisies, a favourite of Kathleen O'Toole, struggling weakly on her grave, flung their seed onto the grave of Dora MacDonald where they grew luxuriantly, mocking the barriers of religion and the fact that Kathleen and Dora were bitter enemies in life.

Violet would have liked to see where Henry's young wife was buried in the Herbert plot. Quite a distance from Nellie, she would reckon, and as far towards the edge as they could get her. They would be out there with their sorrowful faces fooling everyone (mostly the Reverend Colin Edwards) into believing they were mourning the girl, when their thoughts would be with Nellie.

Violet saw again the girl's face white as the bed sheets. She had turned it from them, weak as she must have been, lowered lids on those protruding eyes, as if glad at last to be able to dismiss them. Violet had slapped the child to life, causing it to scream lustily, and Una to clap her hands to her ears with her face almost as pale as the girl's. Well, they had a lot to learn and God help the child if it was left in their care, although nothing was settled by any means. Leave them to stew on, while she enjoyed their sucking up to her and their new respect at her handling of Small Henry. His motley legs were a sign of good health, she had said, towelling them hard enough to break them, and she was openly scornful of Una's fear of touching his pulsing scalp under hair like the wet fur on a kitten.

Violet plodded on home, nodding to Tom Grant opening up the shop under instructions from Ena to close it, as a mark of respect to the dead, only during the church service, and pay no heed to Rachel Holmes shutting the post office for the day. Rachel was a Herbert cousin, widowed in the war, with her husband's name on the new monument, and a healthy appetite for socializing. Violet's anger simmered stronger at the thought of Rachel on the Honeysuckle coach eating largely of good Herbert fare.

Never mind, never mind, none of them know what's around the corner, Violet said to herself seeing Ned in the dim hallway of Albert Lane as still as a monument raised to himself. He had closed the door of Small Henry's room but the child's shrieking was audible and Violet, to fuel Ned's agitation, took her time in getting out of her good clothes and into the kitchen to mix a bottle.

By the time Violet had the teat in Small Henry's mouth Ned had gone towards the bush, past the pens where the fowls set up a squawk rivalling Small Henry's, and threw themselves frantically against the wire, unable after more than a year to accept the fact that Ned had never tossed even a breadcrust their way.

Ah well, I should be grateful for a bit of a racket, God knows it's deadly quiet around here most of the time, Violet said to herself holding Small Henry well down on her lap to feed him where other women might have pressed him to their chest.

He sucked eagerly, eyes squeezed shut, moving a tiny ear in his greed and Violet's anger ran from her tight chest downwards to die under the weight of the tiny body. She fell to dreaming about the hospital. More shelves here, she said to herself, taking the bottle from an outraged Small Henry's mouth and pointing the teat towards a corner of the room. George can run them up for me, Una can hem the sheets and napkins, Enid can pass over some of that glut of vegetables she often had.

Money! I will need money though. She had very little of her own left over from confinement cases (some debts were still outstanding) as she liked new clothes, and, when shopping in Bega with Enid and Una, was easily carried away on the tide of their enthusiasm.

Ned's war pension went into the bank barely touched, for there was the monthly cheque from Halloween, and they lived cheaply as it was fast proving a waste of time and money cooking for Ned. He would turn away from the meat and vegetables she served him, saying he saw nothing like that for months on end ‘over there'.

‘Well, you're over here now, Ned,' she would answer, tipping his plateful onto hers, and cursing him later when her stomach tightened with wind from the turnips and cauliflower. ‘And if you die of malnutrition, that's your lookout!'

She knew she would have no such ready answer when Ned refused her request for a hundred pounds to set up the hospital.

She stood suddenly, Small Henry having finished his bottle and fallen asleep. The violent movement should have unleashed the contents of his stomach and flung them down Violet's back. But Small Henry in response to the rubbing she gave his back, hard enough to dislodge a portion of his skin, opened his lips to belch, then tucked them up again, moist with a trickle of milk and settled back into a deep, sighing sleep.

‘Listen to that!' Violet cried, binding him in his blanket and ignoring the flopping of his head from side to side. ‘I drag the wind out of them if it's the last thing I do!'

In his room she laid him in his basket sitting on an old deal table and shoved it noisily against the wall, standing by Small Henry's head to survey the rest of the room.

‘Three cots, more shelves and the table' (kicked with her foot) ‘will be for bathing them on!'

She flung up both windows for the chilly winter air to rush into the room as if there were already a roomful to breathe it, and closed the door behind her.

She looked down the hall imagining people trooping in, women heavy with child, men tiptoeing nervously on the linoleum, herself straight of back in her blue and white striped cambric uniform, severe and unsmiling to let them know at once she would tolerate no blubbering nonsense.

I feel it all coming closer, she said to herself, turning towards the kitchen and allowing the vision to disappear for the present.

There was Ned inside the back door, his clothes carrying damp patches and twigs from his tramp through the bush, and his eyes on Small Henry's door, asking if he had been returned to Honeysuckle yet.

Not as bloody close though as I would like, she went on thinking, flinging a cloth on the table for dinner.

9

Violet walked to Honeysuckle next day, seeing inside the open front door a packed suitcase. As she looked Henry appeared with another. He lowered his eyes on seeing Violet as if to shut away the sight of Small Henry in the crook of her arm. With his foot he pushed the cases together. Violet knew his wife's things were in the smaller one, and he was taking them to Sydney to hand over to her brother living in the slums with a wife who would receive them with no small degree of pleasure, having a brood of children and an unreliable breadwinner in her husband.

Violet remembered then that this was the first day since the funeral the mail car was going all the way to Nowra, the nearest railhead to meet the train to Sydney. No one had taken the trouble to let her know, but what else would you expect, Violet thought, lifting Small Henry to her shoulder with a swooping motion so that Henry's eyes were drawn for a second to his shawl. She threw Enid's arrangement of cushions on the couch roughly together to make a bed for Small Henry, and Enid coming into the living room saw and winced. Una came in behind, her face brightening at the sight of Violet and the baby who in some vague way she connected with Edwards.

She took the piano seat and Enid temporarily suspended her job of turning out the room where Henry's wife's body had lain, the last chore in restoring the house to its former order. Violet took a chair at the foot of the couch, not too close lest she give the impression of a deep bond of affection between her and Small Henry, but close enough to show at this stage she was in charge of him.

‘Has he been behaving?' Enid said, uncertain that this was a suitable question.

‘Crying all the time, like most newborn babies!' Violet said.

Enid felt the beautiful peace of the house.

‘And how is Ned?' she said, actually seeking information on Ned's reaction to the intrusion of Small Henry.

‘The same!' Violet said sharply. They all blamed Ned's condition on the war, and one day pretty soon she would say right out that Ned hadn't found old Phoebe's tree yet, but he was getting terribly close.

‘Just as well I came,' she said testily to Henry on a chair, smoking with his elbows on his knees and his eyes mostly on the floor. ‘You wouldn't have seen him before you left!'

He's not seeing too much of him now, Enid thought drily.

Henry got up and carried his cases to the verandah. Una followed, standing on the verandah stonework while Henry sat on the edge. Many times in the past she had stood and he had sat, in similar poses, waiting for the car to take her back to school. Her black clad legs were long and thin and her clothes had always seemed too big for her, particularly the mushroom hat with a binding of ribbon at the edge, brown like her eyes, slits of rebellion under a forehead of thick hair.

She had followed him about in the holidays, mostly to the racecourse where dead and whitened tree trunks, narrow as a woman's body, had been made into seats and a stand for judges to watch the races, and a counter to serve beer on, and logs jammed together and bound with leather at either end. The timber was weathered smooth as silk, particularly that making the rough ladder on which they climbed to the judges' stand, he following, wondering at the mystery between her legs where they disappeared under the hem of an old cotton holiday dress, and when they sat together, she studying the back of his neck, tanned by the sun, except where his fair hair grew in a duck's tail, pushed about by his collar.

Now at nineteen and twenty-three the gap had widened between them, although her heart was soft towards him, and she might have cried before the car came, had she not kept her teeth together and her chin up. She had joined her hands together behind her and was beating them gently on her rump as she used to do to steady herself waiting for the mail car to school.

When she slid her eyes around cautiously to look at him, she saw his head down and only a piece of fair cheek and a red ear visible above his overcoat collar, giving him an air of innocence as great as when they climbed the racecourse ladder.

They heard the mail car rumbling towards them, and Violet and Enid came onto the verandah.

Una looked for Small Henry, but there was nothing to show of him except the crumpled front of Violet's grey morrocain dress where he had lain. Only that to show Small Henry had been born! Una looked back to the living room, longing for him to wake and cry for the sound to follow Henry, who was climbing into the car. Something for him to carry away!

But he was gone like the grass seeds she had watched from the racecourse ladder, blown by the wind to rest somewhere. Like a grass seed too, Henry had stopped to give roots to the child, and now he was blown away again.

Jack, Alex and George, working in the corn paddock, watched the car carry Henry off. They were not close enough to each other to speak. There was no reason to pause in their work either, for they could look and listen while they tore the corn from the stalks, now dank and smelling of mould, the long silken tassels turned to dead strings.

Alex compared the sound of the engine to that of the Austin. The mail car was a Ford and both Bob Twyford the driver and Cecil Grant (with his Ford hearse) had tried to persuade Alex to buy a similar make. Well, listen to that engine, growling and straining like a mongrel dog on a leash! The Austin purred like a well-fed kitten.

Dinner would be in an hour and he would look in on it on his way to the house. As a boy Alex had dreamed of finding an old chest and tearing it open, half blinded by the jewels inside. His Austin was like that inside the old dark shed, when his eyes could pick it out after the bright sunlight outside. Bright as a jewel with its deep green paintwork and cream wheel spokes, warm brown polished wood inside, blending with the finest leather. If Henry had stayed he would be hankering for a licence to drive it. He was gone now! Even straining your ears you could barely hear that labouring engine. There was Jack with his back to the road, just slightly slower in stamping the corn stalks into the earth. The old geezer didn't like Henry going, not that he gave too much away!

Jack put Henry to one side to think of the girl. It was all her fault, dead as she might be! She would have told Henry on the quiet she wanted to go back to Sydney when the baby was born, he going ahead to find a job and somewhere to live, apart from their former squashed existence in her brother's rented rooms in Surry Hills, which became intolerable and brought them to Honeysuckle for minimal living costs and Violet to deliver the baby for nothing.

Jack had been prepared to restore Henry's former wage and give them the old house he and Nellie had lived in before Honeysuckle was built a mile away close to the new road.

Jack came upon her once sitting on the narrow little verandah rubbing her feet gently into the earth. He had pulled his horse up, hidden by a thicket of eucalyptus, and watched the girl get up and clear a window of cobwebs to look in. Not much to see but four rooms and a fireplace that would take a stove and had a chimney still in working order. Nellie had made a home of it! He was beginning to think grudgingly that the girl might too, when she moved to the end of the verandah, standing so that her big stomach became a silhouette. Jack wheeled his horse then and cantered away, too angry to care whether she had seen or not. Those stomachs on women offended him! The girl had trapped Henry, there was no doubt of that. He was glad he did not have to look at her that evening at tea, for she had gone to bed with stomach cramps, he overheard Enid say, and Henry went off to play cards at the Hickeys.

George blamed the girl too, but had envied Henry, mostly at night, George's room being next to theirs. He heard, or imagined he heard, the thud of Henry's body leaving hers, and the stirring of bed springs as he gathered the bedclothes around him for sleep. A woman with you in bed! Violet next to him! He needed to rub his face into the pillow to rub her away. The girl spoke little in the daytime in the Herberts' company, and he listened hard at night for her voice, thin and wispy like her hair.

She had a short haircut, one of the few in Wyndham, convincing Jack that here was another reason why she got herself in trouble.

Girls with long hair wouldn't be free with their favours, Jack thought, with his mind on Enid.

George had to keep in mind Violet's haircut. But that was different, she was a nurse and it was convenient with her cap.

She had given them a demonstration when she returned from having the cut in Bega. Even Jack did not turn at once from the sight of the starched white cap sitting as easily as an upturned cup on Violet's thick hair, black as ebony and showing all that lovely white neck.

George tipped a bag of corn into the dray causing it to tip and Dolly in the shafts to shake her harness by way of telling him to steady on.

‘Steady on yourself,' George said. ‘I might find some other use for your useless legs after this!'

He had just thought of it, but there might be an excuse to go to Wyndham in the sulky after dinner and call on Violet to drink tea with her and eat of the cake she kept for him, a bit rough on the outside, not professional like Enid's but full of sultanas and peel inside, just to his taste (rather like Violet). There would be no more work on the corn, for Alex was moving steers to the south paddock and Jack was off to the share farm where a family called Skinner with six children were tenants. Jack needed to keep an eye on the place. Skinner was lazy but not so his wife, who had a hard, lean body and unusually long arms and legs. He had seen her with a foot and a hand steer a great bristly boar into a pen, the pig blinking a hateful eye but doing no more than grunting low as he scrambled over the rails. They were in need of repair, as you would expect, but Skinner was waiting for George to come and do the job.

Here was Jack now pulling his braces over his shoulders, a sign they were leaving for the house. George would go ahead to open up the shed where the corn was stored, feeling his way inside with hanging harness slapping his face and rats and mice scuttling for safety. Alex would look in on the car in the neighbouring shed, opening the back door and scraping at the floor with his fingers to remove any twigs and fragments of earth left there by shoes after the funeral. They were a pretty careless lot!

Alex stayed there until the corn was in the shed and Jack was unharnessing Dolly and George made his way towards the house. The fire in the living room was burning well judging by the smoke from the chimney. George knew there was curry for dinner made from the meats left over from the funeral meal. He felt the hollowing out of his stomach to take it and the taste buds in his mouth at the ready. He hoped no one had called right on dinner time, as sometimes happened. Enid thinned the helpings out if she had not cooked more than enough and it was his plate that was lighter than Jack's or Alex's. What was this? There was someone there, a shape with Enid and Una in the garden looking down at the flower beds. But it was Violet! He had thought with that baby to care for he would hardly see her now. But there she was! Violet! Staying for dinner! He clicked the back gate open louder than was necessary and she was the first to turn her face. It softened too and the mouth stretched at the corners, digging into her creamy cheek. She was pleased to see him, though the others weren't, pulling faces at the thought of having to go inside and dish up the dinner. Violet could have most of his!