The Home Girls (14 page)

After that the town referred to the incident as that “cock show”.

Many forecast a dark future for Lucy witnessing it night after night.

Some frowned upon Lucy when she joined groups containing their children at the show or sports day.

The Lang women's house had only one bedroom, one of two front rooms on either side of a small hall. The hall ran into a kitchen and living room combined which was the entire back portion of the house.

It would have been reasonable to expect them to make a second bedroom by moving the things from what was called the “front room”. But neither Jess nor Carrie ever attempted or suggested this. The room was kept as it was from the early days of Jess's marriage. It was crowded with a round oak table and chairs and a chiffonier crowded with ornaments, photographs and glassware and there were two or three deceptively frail tables loaded with more stuff. On the walls were heavily framed pictures mostly in pairs of swans on calm water, raging seas and English cottages sitting in snow or surrounded by unbelievable gardens.

Even when the only child Patrick was living at home and up until he left at fifteen he slept in the single bed in his parents' room where Carrie slept now. He was fifty miles up the coast working in a timber mill when he met Carrie a housemaid at the town's only hotel. They married when he was twenty and she was nineteen and pregnant with Lucy who was an infant of a few months when Patrick was loaned a new-fangled motor bike and rounding a bend in the road the bike smacked up against the rear of a loaded timber lorry like a ball thrown hard against a wall. Patrick died with a surprised look on his face and his fair hair only lightly streaked with dust and blood.

Jess was already widowed more than a year and managing the farm single handed so Carrie and Lucy without a choice came to live there.

Lucy could not remember sleeping anywhere but against her grandmother's back.

Sometimes when the grandmother turned in the night she fitted neatly onto the grandmother's lap her head on the two small pillows of her grandmother's breasts.

She was never actually held in her grandmother's arms that she knew about. When she woke the grandmother's place was empty because it was Jess who was up first to start milking the cows which was up to twenty in the spring and summer and half that in the winter. Carrie got up when the cows were stumbling into the yard seen in the half light from the window and Lucy waited about until eight o'clock when they both came in to get breakfast. Lucy was expected to keep the fire in the stove going and have her school clothes on. She usually had one or another garment on inside-out and the laces trailing from her shoes and very often she lied when asked by Carrie or Jess if she had washed. Carrie did little or no housework and Jess had to squeeze the necessary jobs in between the farmwork. Carrie was content to eat a meal with the remains of the one before still on the table, clearing a little space for her plate by lifting the tablecloth and shaking it clear of crumbs, sending them into the middle of the table with the pickles and sugar and butter if they could afford to have a pound delivered with their empty cream cans from the butter factory.

Carrie trailed off to bed after their late tea not caring if she took most of the hot water for her wash leaving too little for the washing up.

Jess grumbled about this but not to Carrie's face.

Once after Jess had managed on the hot water left and the washing up was done and the room tidied she said in Lucy's hearing that she hoped Carrie never took to bathing in milk.

Lucy had a vision of Carrie's black hair swirling above a tubful of foamy milk. Her own skin prickled and stiffened as if milk were drying on it. She left the floor where she was playing and put her chin on the edge of the table Jess was wiping down waiting to hear more. But Jess flung the dishcloth on its nail and turned her face to busy herself with shedding her hessian apron as the first step towards getting to bed.

This was the life of the Lang women when Arthur Mann rode into it.

Jess and Carrie inside following their midday meal saw him through the kitchen window with the head of his horse over the fence midway between the lemon tree and a wild rose entangled with convolvulus. The blue bell-like flowers and the lemons made a frame for horse and rider that Jess remembered for a long time.

“It's a Mann!” Jess said to Carrie who did not realize at once that Jess was using the family name.

The Manns were property owners on the outer edge of the district and they were well enough off to keep aloof from the village people. Their children went to boarding schools and they did not shop locally nor show their cattle and produce at the local show but took it to the large city shows.

But Jess easily recognized a Mann when she saw one. When she was growing up the Manns were beginning to grow in wealth and had not yet divorced themselves from the village. They not only came to dances and tennis matches but helped organize them and there were Manns who sang and played the piano in end-of-year concerts and Manns won foot races and steer riding at the annual sports.

They nearly all had straight dark sandy hair and skin tightly drawn over jutting jawbones.

Jess going towards the fence got a good view of the hair and bones when Arthur swept his hat off and held it over his hands on the saddle.

“You're one of the Manns,” said Jess her fine grey eyes meeting his that were a little less grey, a bit larger and with something of a sleepy depth in them.

Arthur keeping his hat off told her why he had come. He had leased land adjoining the Langs' to the south where he was running some steers and he would need to repair the fence neglected by the owners and the Langs neither of whom could afford the luxury of well fenced land.

He or one of his brothers or one of their share farmers would be working on the fence during the next few weeks.

“We don't use the bit of land past the creek,” said Jess before the subject of money came up. “The creek's our boundary so a fence is no use to us.”

Arthur Mann's eyes smiled before his mouth. He pulled the reins of his horse to turn it around before he said there would be no costs to the Langs involved. He put his hat on and raised it again and Jess saw the split of his coat that showed his buttocks well shaped like the buttocks of his horse which charged off as if happy to have the errand done.

Jess came inside to the waiting Carrie.

Lucy home from school was playing with some acorns she found on the way. Jess saw her schoolcase open on the floor with some crusts in it and the serviette that wrapped her sandwiches stained with jam. Flies with wings winking in the sun crawled about the crusts and Lucy's legs.

“She's a disgrace!” Jess cried trying to put out of her mind the sight of Arthur Mann's polished boots and the well ironed peaks of his blue shirt resting on the lapels of his coat.

With her foot Carrie swept the acorns into a heap and went to the mirror dangling from the corner of a shelf to put her hat on. Jess took hers too from the peg with her hessian apron. She turned it around in her hands before putting it on. It was an old felt of her husband's once a rich grey but the colour beaten out now with the weather. It bore stains and blotches where it rubbed constantly against the cows' sides as Jess milked. Jess plucked at a loose thread on the band and ripped it away taking it to the fire to throw it in. The flames snatched it greedily swallowing the grease with a little pop of joy.

Lucy lifted her face and opened her mouth to gape with disappointment. She would have added it to her playthings.

“Into the fire it went!” said Jess. “Something else you'd leave lyin' around!”

She looked for a moment as if she would discard the hat too but put it on and went out.

It was Carrie who encountered Arthur Mann first working on the fence when she was in the corn paddock breaking and flattening the dead stalks for the reploughing. Almost without thinking she walked towards the creek bank and stood still observing Arthur who had his back to her. He is a man, she thought remembering Jess's words with a different inference. His buttocks under old, very clean well-cut breeches quivered with the weight of a fence post he was dropping into a hole. He had his hat off lying on a canvas bag that might have held some food. Jess might have wondered about the food and thought of a large clean flyproof Mann kitchen but Carrie chose to look at Arthur's hair moving in a little breeze like stiff bleached grass and his waistline where a leather belt shiny with age and quality anchored his shirt inside his pants.

He turned and saw her.

As he did not have a hat to lift he seemed to want to do something with his hands so he took some hair between two fingers and smoothed it towards an ear. Carrie saw all his fine teeth when he smiled.

“Hullo . . . Shorty,” he said.

“No . . . Boxy,” she said.

She was annoyed with herself for saying it.

He probably knew the nickname through his share farmers who were part of the village life and would have filled the waiting ears of the Manns with village gossip. Carrie did not know but he had heard too about the nightly cock show.

Arthur thought now of Carrie's naked body although it was well covered with an old print dress once her best, cut high at the neck and trimmed there and on the sleeves with narrow lace. Carrie was aware that it was unsuitable for farm work and took off her hat and held it hiding the neckline. She shook her hair the way she did getting ready for bed at night and it swung about then settled into two deep peaks against her cheeks gone quite pink.

“Come across,” said Arthur. “I'm stopping for smoko.”

Carrie nearly moved then became aware of her feet in old elastic-side rubber boots and buried them deeper in the grass.

She inclined her head towards the corn paddock as if this was where her duty lay. Still holding her hat at her neck and still smiling she turned and Arthur did not go back to the fence until she had disappeared into the corn.

Carrie spent the time before milking at the kitchen table in her petticoat pulling the lace from the dress. Lucy home from school with her case and her mouth open watched from the floor. When Carrie was done she stood and pulled the dress over her head brushing the neck and sleeves free of cotton ends. She swept the lace scraps into a heap and moved towards the stove.

“Don't burn it!” Jess cried sharply. “Give it to her for her doll!”

Lucy seized the lace and proceeded to wind it around the naked body of a doll that had only the stump of a right arm, its nose squashed in and most of its hair worn off.

A few days later Arthur rode up to the fence with a bag of quinces.

Lucy saw him when she looked up from under the plum tree that grew against the wall of the house. She was on some grass browning in the early winter and her doll sat between her legs stuck stiffly out. Arthur raised the quinces as a signal to collect them but Lucy turned her face towards the house and Arthur saw her fair straight hair that was nothing like Carrie's luxuriant crop.

In a moment Carrie came from one side of the house and Jess from the other. They went up to the fence and Lucy got up and trailed behind.

Arthur handed the quinces between Carrie and Jess and Jess took them taking one out and turning it around.

She did not speak but her eyes shone no less than the sheen from the yellow skin of the fruit.

“The three Lang women,” Arthur said smiling. “Or are there four?”

Lucy had her doll held by its one and a half arms to cover her face. Ashamed she flung it behind her back.

Arthur arched the neck of his horse and turned it around.

“I'll buy her a new one,” he said and cantered off.

Neither Jess nor Carrie looked at Lucy's face when they went inside. Jess tipped the quinces onto the table where they bowled among the cups and plates and she picked one up and rubbed her thumb thoughtfully on the skin and then set it down and gathered them all together with her arms.

Then she went into the front room and returned with a glass dish and with the hem of her skirt wiped it out and put the fruit in and carried it back to set it on one of the little tables. Carrie's eyes clung to her back until she disappeared then looked dully on Lucy sitting stiff and entranced on the edge of a chair. She opened her mouth to tell Lucy to pick up her doll from the floor but decided Jess would do it on her return. But Jess stepped over the doll and put on her hessian apron and reached for her hat. She turned it round in her hands then put it back on the peg. Carrie saw the back of her neck unlined and her brown hair without any grey and her shoulders without a hump and her arms coming from the torn-out sleeves of a man's old shirt pale brown like a smooth new sugar bag. Then when Jess reached for an enamel jug for the house milk Carrie saw her hooded eyelids dropping a curtain on what was in her eyes. Carrie put her hat on without looking in the mirror and followed Jess out. She looked down her back over her firm rump to her ankles for something that said she was old but there was nothing.

In bed that night Lucy dreamed of her doll.

It had long legs in white stockings with black patent leather shoes fastened with the smallest black buttons in the world.

The dress was pink silk with ruffles at the throat and a binding of black velvet ribbon which trailed to the hemline of the dress. The face was pink and white and unsmiling and the hair thick and black like Carrie's hair.

Lucy lay wedged under the cliff of her grandmother's back wondering what was different about tonight. She heard a little wind breathing around the edges of the curtain and a creak from a floor-board in the kitchen and a small snuffling whine from their old dog Sadie settling into sleep under the house.

Lucy marvelled at the silence.

No one is talking she thought.

Every afternoon Lucy looked for the doll when she came in from school. On the way home she pictured it on the table propped against the milk jug, its long legs stretched among the sugar bowl and breadcrumbs.