One Sunday (28 page)

Not a tear left in her now. They'd congealed. Helen felt congealed – as if that scream jammed in her chest had spread, filled her ears, her throat, her head, so that her insides were now a gummy mess of solidified scream.

She'd been crying when her father told her to change her frock and go with him and Arthur to take the flowers to the cemetery – or that's where she'd thought they must have been going, or to Willama where Rachael was.

He'd come to her room and again taken that grey frock from the wardrobe, but she'd snatched it from him, thrown it on the floor, stomped on it and bawled so hard she lost her breath. He must have thought she'd gone insane with grief because he tried to make her take a spoonful of Arthur's medicine. Never, never would she let him put that in her mouth. Never. She'd hit that spoon, splashed that medicine all over his shirt, so he was the one who'd had to change.

Olivia helped herself to a dose of that medicine, and instead of fixing her hair as she'd been told to, she went to bed. Nicholas ended up driving off with only Arthur and that huge bunch of roses.

That's when the scream congealed. She was standing at her window, watching Nicholas's car raising dust all the way up to Bridge Road, and suddenly her head felt hot and heavy, and that heaviness crept down her chest to her legs until she felt too heavy to ever move again – so she moved fast, ran down to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator and stuck her head inside it – until Mrs Johnson and Tilda had come walking in talking about Rachael.

‘She said she was found outside the Reichenbergs' gate at dawn, and she was –' Then Mrs Johnson noticed the refrigerator door was open. ‘What on earth are you doing, Miss Helen?'

Had to move. Had to get out of there. Had to make her brain make her feet move. Read. Get a book. Make her brain move. She raced up the passage to the library and found her father's
The Home Doctor
on his desk.

Like a sign from God telling her she'd gone insane, her father's bookmark had been left open at a page on insanity: . . .
The loss of so many of our mentally strong sons, the intermarriage of the degenerate classes, is producing families more degenerate than themselves, and in more vast numbers than the mentally strong in our society
…

Olivia was not mentally strong. Nicholas blamed her for Rachael's disobedience, which he considered a symptom of instability. And Freddy too had been unstable because he ran away to war at seventeen – which probably meant he and Rachael had been mentally strong, not weak. Helen, too scared of her father to be disobedient, knew she was the mentally weak one. Also, Rachael remembered things from when she was three years old. Helen could barely remember anything that happened before she was five.

She was insane enough to go through Nicholas's drawer of old letters again, and she found Freddy's – and was halfway through reading it when she heard the car return. She put it, and the envelope, in
The Home Doctor
, and ran with the book up to the front of the house, out the main door, right around the west side and down the back to the quince tree, which was a totally insane thing to do. The book was too big. She'd never be able to smuggle it inside, and she'd ripped a page when she dropped it in her struggle to get into the old cubbyhouse.

Safe in there, though. Safe enough to read Freddy's letter.

She read that letter four times, and it calmed her because her brain understood every word of it, and she could even almost remember him – or remember the way he'd spoken, because that letter wasn't one of those empty, meaningless things full of empty, meaningless words. A real person had written those words and he'd said what was on his mind, be it polite or not – like Rachael, so much like Rachael.

Sweet, sweet Helen, he'd written. He had known her and loved her. Maybe it was he who had shown Rachael the tunnel into the quince tree, and maybe he'd guided Helen here today so she could read his letter and know him.

The old tree grew alongside and over the washhouse, shading it in the mornings, and shaded by it in the afternoons. A cool place, and within its interior, when she and Rachael were small, they'd made a fine cubbyhouse.

She wasn't small now, and it was a totally insane place for a grown woman to be sitting, but all day she'd wanted to crawl into a deep black hole and die, so coming in here was a better idea than that – like crawling back into the womb of the great earth mother, still safe from life, until she was ready to be born as who she was meant to be.

Safe enough to read her father's book too:
In a careful examination of 1500 school children in New York City, 90 percent were found to be mentally, physically defective or both
. Reading what Nicholas had just read was almost like taking a peep inside his head. There was no way to discover what really went on in his head. If it was anything like her own, it spent its life circling, always searching for a safe place to rest. Rachael had been Helen's safe resting place. Where did Nicholas rest?

Probably in books. Every night he read late. Every morning he sat at his desk, updating his account books and writing letters. Had he not been born Nicholas Squire, he might have been a schoolteacher, or a bookkeeper. Every item purchased on the estate was recorded, every penny listed in his account books, every move he made controlled by his own unbreakable rules. His inability to control Olivia's drinking frustrated him, and Rachael's dogged disobedience had near driven him to distraction.

Which is why Helen obeyed him blindly, because hand in hand with fearing him, she pitied him. When he sang Percy's praises, she agreed. If he told her to change her frock, she changed it fast; if he told her she couldn't have her hair cut, she didn't cut it.

Rachael had cut her own hair two years ago, and laughed when she made a mess of it. Nicholas hadn't laughed, but that ragged look not fitting the image of a Squire daughter, he'd driven her to Willama to have a professional haircut before locking her in her room for two days.

Mustn't think of her. Mustn't. Mustn't think of Mrs Johnson and Tilda coming on her with her head in the refrigerator. Mustn't think of anything.

One factor in the increase of insanity is the –

If Nicholas could see her now, he'd be convinced she was insane. She was sitting in the dirt, in a very inappropriate way, shoes off, stockings off, knees up, ankles crossed, the skirt of her gold frock hitched high because she didn't want to soil it.

The quince tree was an overgrown tangle of interwoven branches that swept the ground. Access could be gained to its centre by climbing over one of the lower branches alongside the washhouse and crawling beneath others into a space large enough for two little girls and their dolls. Not so large now, but very safe from watchful eyes. No one had seen her crawl in, and if she was silent, it would be the last place in the world her father would look. He wouldn't be looking anyway; he'd be sipping scotch on ice with Father Ryan. The Johnsons' dogs might sniff her out if they were let off their chains, except they wouldn't be let off because Father Ryan didn't like them and they didn't like him.

The young person feels cravings which cry out for satisfaction but society and the demands of religion forbid them…
That may have been fact. Rachael had immoral cravings for Chris, but she'd satisfied them. No chance of her ever going insane – though it had been totally insane trying to run away with Chris that night.

They'd packed their cases, just the little ones, and counted Helen's money about six times. She'd saved eight pounds and seven shillings, only because she never wanted anything enough to spend her allowance. Rachael hadn't been able to save sixpence.

That night they'd waited until Nicholas went to bed, then Rachael climbed down a rope ladder Chris had made for her and Helen passed the cases out, but when she tried to climb down, every time she put her foot on the rope it swayed. She told Rachael to pass her case back up, and to go. She wouldn't go. She found a proper ladder and dragged it to the window, giggling as she climbed up it and guided Helen's feet backwards onto the rungs.

‘We're eloping, Heli.'

They should have walked down to the river and through the wood paddock. They'd planned to, but the wind was blowing a gale, making those trees howl and throw their branches around, so they cut diagonally across the orchard paddock, well clear of the Johnsons' house.

The dogs must have heard them anyway, because the blue heeler, which Helen loathed, came running out of the dark at her heels. She screamed, threw her case at it, and ran for her life, back towards the house. Rachael ran towards the wood paddock, the three dogs after her. Of course, Mr Johnson and his boys chased her. They cut her off at the boundary fence and carried her home. Then Mr Johnson climbed that ladder and hammered long nails into the window frame so the window couldn't be opened. They were locked in.

Helen shouldn't have done what she did late the next day, and she knew at the time that she shouldn't have done it, but Olivia had come to their room crying about how she'd failed and begging God to tell her why she'd failed. Nicholas, who loathed her hysterics, was hiss-whispering angry.

She'd probably done it because of chamber pots, too. She'd had diarrhoea since they started packing their cases, and she wasn't even allowed to go to the bathroom. She knew they'd end up locked in their room for days and days, and she'd already used that chamber pot. She loathed and despised chamber pots with such a pure blind hatred that she wanted to smash every one she saw. Anyway, that's probably why her mouth opened up and told her parents about Rachael's baby, maybe imagining a grandchild would make Nicholas and Olivia happy.

It hadn't. Nicholas's face turned stone white and Olivia fainted, falling flat on the floor. It took Mr Johnson and two of his sons to get her up and out of that room, and while all that was going on, Rachael sat on her bed shaking her head and staring at Helen, asking with her eyes why she'd gone and done such a thing.

Helen screamed when she lost control. Nicholas lost control of his pitch. His well-modulated tones deserting him, his voice crept high, and to control this, he hiss-whispered. He whispered while stripping their room, tossing everything out the door and into the passage – clothes, books, hairbrushes, playing cards, the drawers from their dressing table – every single item, except the large jug of water, the washbasin, their Bibles and that chamber pot, which had been under Helen's bed; it had always been their rule that if you used it, you slept with it until the other one had to use it.

After he locked the door, Helen tried to say sorry but Rachael just sat quietly, her eyes turned to the sealed window. For hours, every time Helen tried to say anything, Rachael shook her head, as though she was saying
Shut up, Heli
.

At nightfall Nicholas brought in two bowls of porridge and another jug of water, but no milk, no sugar and no light. They didn't eat the porridge. Rachael was in bed, and Helen didn't want to give her stomach any more ammunition.

The next morning she woke to the sound of smashing china – those porridge bowls shattering against the wall and door when Nicholas stuck his head in. It made an atrocious mess, they didn't get whatever he'd been bringing in and they had to clean it all up, but at least Rachael forgave her. They even got the giggles, thinking about Nicholas's oatmeal face mask. ‘Very good for the complexion, my dear,' Rachael said in her best Aunt Bertha voice.

He starved them until midday, when he had to let Mrs Johnson in to empty the chamber pot and replace it with a big bucket, which at least had a lid. She brought in two slices of dry bread and filled their water jug. They ate the bread and put the bucket in the corner, beside the wardrobe. By leaving one wardrobe door open and moving a chest of drawers in beside it, they could squat in private.

After a day of that bucket and a diet of dry bread and water, Helen started praying that Nicholas would take them down to the Catholic Sisters' home for wayward girls where the food might be a little better and they'd at least be allowed to use a bathroom. She'd been on her knees, saying Hail Marys, on the Sunday night when Nicholas opened the door and Rachael flung a washbasin of soapy water at him, not knowing that Father Ryan was with him. He got most of it. He stood there dripping, speechless for an instant, then he bawled at Rachael to take up her Bible and fall to her knees.

She hadn't. She said she was very sorry about the water, which was meant for God Almighty Nicholas Squire, then she said she was also sorry, but she'd defiled her Bible by using a few of its pages for more personal matters than praying, and if God Almighty Nicholas Squire didn't supply them with more appropriate paper then she'd have to defile more Bible pages – which, of course, convinced Father Ryan that Rachael was beyond redemption.

He left the room and Nicholas locked the door, but on Monday morning the priest was back, this time armed with holy water and a chair, which he sat on for hours while bellowing about asylums for the insane, homes for wayward girls, demons, devils, hellfire, purgatory and anything else he could throw in, and all the while Helen had prayed while Rachael pretended to sleep.