The Newspaper of Claremont Street (6 page)

Before Weekly got to the Laceys' she was tired. The mad wasted evening with no money to add to her mountain and Nastasya's remark to which Weekly had been unable to reply made her feel she could hardly step out on the pavement. She was making an effort, a supreme effort, to get over the disappointment of not being paid. If the Torbens felt it was a privilege for her to work for them, peeling vegetables and cooking after a long day of work, and being battered by their conversation, Weekly did not share the feeling. But she was unable to put into words to herself the mixture of annoyance and indignation and hurt she felt.

Mrs Lacey was ready for Weekly.

‘Take everything out of the children's rooms,' she said as Weekly stepped into the kitchen and began pulling the stove to pieces.

‘Move everything from under their beds and do out the cupboards, Weekly.' Mrs Lacey always wanted her children's rooms cleaned thoroughly. It was as if there was something in the lives of her children she did not know about and she was afraid of this unknown mysterious thing as is if it was something evil. Every week Weekly cleared out the heaped-up innocence of the children, broken crayons, cut-out paper patterns, scraps of dolls' clothes coming unstitched because the sewing had been done without knots to hold the cotton, and all sorts of things made with cardboard and beads and bits of string. She tidied the same boxes of stuffed dolls and animals and sorted the same shelves of picture books. There was nothing in the rooms except the stepping of children from one thing to another, and there was nothing in the remains of sticky sweets, stamps, sea shells, apple cores and other small hoarded things except the innocence of childish dirt and inconsequential untidiness.

‘I can't think how they get their rooms in such a state,' Mrs Lacey sighed. She was dressed for going to town.

‘I'll go in there next thing,' Weekly comforted her as she plunged the pieces of the stove into the sink, which was frothing over with hot water and detergent.

Like human bodies after surgery, the gas stoves in Claremont Street were never quite the same after being attacked by Weekly. Every week all the stoves deteriorated just a little more as she scoured off the grease and burnt coffee grounds, and chipped blackened cheese and jam out of the ovens. It was the same with the shower curtains too. She never spared them. It gave all the housewives a kind of secure contentment. They liked, quite naturally, to feel the soothing comfort of having their things well cared for.

The shop at the end of Claremont Street did a brisk trade in shower curtains, parts for the stove and other household articles. Weekly's harsh cleaning methods were very good for business.

‘Margie I can't ever understand why you let Victor take your things.' As Weekly heard Mrs Lacey's car pull out of the drive and, with crashing gears, take off along Claremont Street, she relaxed into private thoughts and, as her arms gradually turned red to her thin elbows, memories came up in her mind.

‘Margie I can't ever understand why you let Victor take your things. You'll hardly have a thing to call your own, and you should never give him money.' Her mother had been quite angry and had shouted. ‘He'll have us through the law courts and in the poor house before he's finished.'

‘But you give him money,' Weekly had muttered to her mother.

‘That's my business,' her mother had replied. ‘And it's all the more reason why you shouldn't!' Her mother sighed, ‘I don't know why he's like he is.' Weekly knew her mother would never look at the photograph of Victor when he was a little boy. She often looked at it herself. In the photograph he had round childish eyes, a little puffy underneath, and round cheeks and a sweet hopeful little mouth. Weekly loved the photograph. Sometimes she kissed it as she had done when she was a girl.

Her mother had a horror of poverty and when Weekly herself remembered what she had known of it she shivered with fear.

‘Remember,' her mother said, ‘you must never give him your money. He'll take everything and he'll have you in the poor house.'

‘I need the toilet,' Weekly replied, still shivering. And her mother, sorry for frightening her, tried to comfort her. ‘He'll have us both in the poor house before he's finished.'

On her fourteenth birthday Victor gave Weekly a present. She sometimes thought about it; it was a white, imitation-leather handbag with a broken chromium clasp and two handles.

She had thanked him.

‘Aw! Thank you Victor, but the clasp's broke.'

‘You mean you've just broken it.' He was only a small boy but had a way of making her feel big and stupid. ‘And mind your dirty hands, you're making black fingermarks all over it,' he said.

‘Aw! I'm sorry,' she'd said.

She remembered it as the only present he had ever given her. She had kept it always with a best hanky in it and never used it.

Weekly tried to think of her money mountain. Sometimes the thought of the silver cone brought a fresh breeze, laden with the scent of pine forests and cold clean air from the shining surface of a clear fast-flowing river. Things Weekly had never seen, but her money seemed to smell of them.

Thinking of her money comforted her and she wondered why she had loved her brother so much and why she had given him away to people who were so worthless and who had never done anything for him or for her.

She struggled back into the peace of the Laceys' house. After work she would walk by her car and see how it was. She looked forward to this. Her method of getting the car was, in a sense, a way of pleasing Victor. If only he could know, he would approve that she was getting it for nothing. But Weekly told herself severely that if Victor knew where she was or if she knew where he was, she
would not have the car for more than half an hour and her thrift and careful saving over the last years would all disappear overnight.

As she passed the Kingston house she had a shock to see the car was no longer on the verge. It had been there so long it had become part of Claremont Street. Her first terrible thought was that Victor had come back, found out that the car was hers, and had taken it.

‘Take a holt on yerself,' she told herself. Her own hoarse voice, under the trees in Claremont Street, gave her a shock.

Of course the car was in the garage being fixed up for her. She hurried on home telling herself she'd be the death of herself, scaring herself the way she had.

On her door was a scribbled note.

Weekly sighed. She supposed she would have to go but she would eat her meal first.

Every time Torben was ill—and he was ill quite often, an earlier disease had damaged his lungs—every time he was ill he was a little worse than the time before. And, every time he remained, after the illness, frailer than before. But every time he was ill he seemed to get better with a tremendous determination and effort. He seemed
to recover when all hope of his recovery had gone. It was as if he did this, time after time for Nastasya, as if he loved her so much he was determined to go on living so that she would not have to be alone.

Weekly squeezed a lot of little oranges with Nastasya and they poured the juice into a cordial bottle and went with it to the hospital. The two women, both elderly and, in their own different ways, strangely dressed, stood together at the bedside where Torben was propped up on several firm pillows. An oxygen cylinder hissed as his side and there was a mask on his face; the white gauze and the knowledge of illness altered his appearance so much that they might have been standing beside a strange man. A transfusion dripped tremulously.

‘He vill recover Veekly,' Nastasya whispered. ‘He vill live for me, you will see!' Torben opened his eyes, they were as blue as always, and very tired. He looked at his wife a moment, tenderly, and then closed them.

‘He vill sleep Veekly! And tomorrow all vill be quite better!' Nastasya was trembling, her hands were shaking but she gave a little laugh.

‘The silly, silly nurses!' she said. ‘See Veekly, they have put his transfusion without first to take off his pyjama so they will have to cut off the sleeve to take off. Always they do this silly, silly thing!'

When Torben looked at Nastasya before he closed his
eyes, Weekly saw how he looked, and understood something of his love and devotion. She felt in some way privileged to be present at a time of this tender look which lay for a moment on Nastasya. Weekly had loved Victor; she had been devoted to him in her own way. Had she been able to look at Victor again now, she would have looked at him as Torben had looked for the last time at Nastasya.

She tried not to think of Victor when she went to bed, at last, after her long day. She put Crazy out on the verandah and climbed into her bed. It was time to have the room to herself. She enjoyed the privacy and quietness of her ugly room.

Sometimes when she was very tired Weekly's money stopped being a mountain and became a cradle. Instead of hoisting herself up onto the top of her shining money mountain she sank into a golden cradle; it had unlimited gentle musical depths and she lay resting, listening to her own lullaby of coins dropping softly as she fell asleep.

Weekly first went to look at the valley one Tuesday after work. All the morning she was thinking about the long drive and how she would be very late home to Nastasya. She had thought it better not to say anything of it to her. Since Torben's death Nastasya, unable to bear being alone, had implored Weekly, ‘Do not leave me Veekly,' she sobbed.

She beat her breast and tore her clothes and hair in her grief after the funeral. Weekly did not know what to do.

‘I cannot bear the noise of cars and people goink home at five o'clock and when it's half past five and Torben is not coming I really cannot bear! Veekly do not leave me all alone in this flat.'

‘I'll come in every day,' Weekly promised, and for a long time went in after work, forcing herself to do this.

‘Hi Newspaper!' Valerie called out to her from the shop. ‘Where are you these days?' But Weekly hurried across to the flats where always she found Nastasya, redeyed from weeping and her hair not brushed, sitting at the little table surrounded by half-smoked cigarettes and Torben's photograph, with his kind loving smile unchanged, in front of her.

‘Photographs do not change Veekly even after a man is died,' and Nastasya howled aloud. ‘It is terrible alone in this flat, all the time I hear peoples but not anyone for me; I hear the lifts, and the wind cries like a woman in pain outside my window, and peoples pass my door laughing and talking. Hear the wind Veekly! Is like a woman moaning. All the time I am crying like the wind. These flats make a person more alone.' Nastasya sat all the time by herself and did not go out to fetch food and, though Weekly cleaned up, the flat became neglected and Nastasya was dirty and helpless. She seemed entirely without hope.

Unable to think of any other way of calming Nastasya, Weekly took her back to her own room and put her to bed there.

‘It's just for one night mind!' she told Nastasya as she made a bed for herself on two uncomfortable chairs. ‘Just
for one night Narsty, to set you up, and tomorrow you'll be better. It's just for one night.'

A few days later they began fetching things over from the flat. First some bedclothes and then pictures and then Nastasya's wickerwork trunk and various ornaments and books, and then her bed and all her treasures and Nastasya herself were settled and filling for ever Weekly's cherished privacy. Even Crazy had never achieved this. One night when the kittens were still very small, Weekly had put Crazy and her family out on the verandah. The next morning, when she opened the door, to her amazement Crazy was standing with a night-long patience, holding a kitten in her mouth waiting and waiting to come back into the room. All night long it must have seemed only a matter of waiting to take the kittens back where she wanted them. No one could wait like Crazy. Gently, Weekly, with one foot, had lifted the cat to one side. She also understood patience.

The advertisements she read every night describing land for sale made her so excited she could hardly read them. As soon as she had read one she became so restless she wanted to go off at once to have a look, but she had to contain herself in patience till she had time to go. No one could wait like Crazy except Weekly. No one could wait for what they wanted as Weekly could and did. She was as patient as the earth when it came to waiting for the earth.

But even though Crazy had waited and waited she never was able to settle her family back into Weekly's room, but Nastasya, who had never waited for anything longer than it took a nurse to warm a cup of milk when she was a little girl, had a place in Weekly's room, and furthermore, to Weekly's dismay, filled it up with all her things, making it almost impossible to clean thoroughly every morning, as was Weekly's way.

‘What time is it Weekly?'

‘Diana Lacey, I thought I learned yo' how to tell the time last week. Shout me where's the ‘ands are on the clock.' Diana Lacey was home with chicken pox. Mrs Lacey, frightened of illness, made Weekly wash and iron all the curtains in case they were infected.

‘Chicken pox ain't in curtings,' Weekly said, ‘it's where there's children only and even then it goes orf in time.'

‘Little hand's on the one, big hand's on the six.'

‘Well an' wot time is that then?' Weekly rubbed the iron over the curtains, she had let them get too dry. She spread a dampened cloth over the material and steam hissed up on all sides of her.

‘One o'clock,' the little girl's thin, bored voice came through the bedroom.

‘Now y'oum guessin', try again!' Weekly spat on the iron. ‘It's half past one,' she relented. She too was watching the time. She wanted to get off and go look at
the valley. She wondered which would be the shortest way to get to this place hidden behind the pastures and foothills along the South-west Highway. It was a strain thinking about the valley and talking gossip about the Chathams to Mrs Lacey and then playing at ‘I spy' with Diana. It was a strain too thinking about the valley when she felt she had no right to go looking at land. Perhaps this was because she had spent her childhood in a slatey backyard where nothing would grow except thin carrots and a few sunflowers. And all round the place where they lived the slagheaps smoked and smouldered and hot cinders often fell on the paths. The children gathered to play in a little thicket of stunted thorn bushes and elderberry trees. There were patches of coltsfoot and they picked the yellow flowers eagerly till none were left.

All land is somebody's land. For Weekly the thought of possessing land seemed more of an impertinence than a possibility.

Back home in the Black Country where it was all coalmines, brick kilns and iron foundries, her family had never owned a house or a garden. Weekly had nothing behind her, not even the place where she was born. It no longer existed.

The steam rose from her ironing.

‘Iron bands on knickers,' Miss Jessop at the Remand home told the girls to write in their laundry notes.

‘Please Miss Jessop my knickers haven't got iron bands on 'em.'

‘Margarite Morris leave the room and stand outside the door!' No one could tell Weekly to stand outside a door now. Again she thought about the valley and how she would drive there straight after work. She had not had a great deal of practice driving yet.

The Chathams had paid for her driving lessons as it was unthinkable for them not to do something when it was known that the Kingstons had given the car to Weekly. That week she was heaped with presents of all sorts.

‘What's the story today Newspaper?' Valerie leaned her bosom comfortably on the counter.

‘Here's some lipsticks for yo' Val,' Weekly sank onto the broken chair, tired as if she would never get up. ‘They was given to me, Muttonhead's wife, yor sister ain't she?' Weekly teased. ‘Yo' have them,' she said, ‘I never use 'em—they're yor colour ain't they?'

When she had learned to drive and had passed her test—this took great patience and it was not only her patience—she tried to think of a place where she could take the car and drive to and fro on her own. The whole of the little township had been absorbed into a suburb of the city. The city, in the last few years, had become ringed with these suburbs. All of them had four-lane highways
filled with traffic, high-rise dwellings filled with families, and there were modern shopping arcades full of clothes and shoes and food. They were decorated with designs in blue mosaic tiles. There were supermarkets and gift shops with big signs everywhere in wild coloured neon and American spelling. There was nowhere for Weekly to practise her driving, but then she remembered a lonely place behind the sand dunes where there was a concrete patch and a ramp, put there during the war.

It was to this place Weekly drove her car one morning as soon as it was light. It was the first day after getting her licence. The municipality, in an endeavour to beautify the local beaches, had planted Norfolk pines along the edge of the dunes. Every tree was screened from the terrible winds by a carefully erected little fence. Weekly, intent on her clutch and gears, and concentrating on the position of the brake, had a riotous drive lasting five minutes, the concrete patch and ramp being very short, and in these five minutes, before anyone else was awake, undid the work of several men and countless working hours.

Fortunately she was unable to stop quickly enough and so gained the road, rather by chance than skill, before getting bogged in the sand.

Though she had driven quite a lot since then she still felt nervous before driving out to find the valley. Partly it was because she was tired. Her room was no longer the
place of rest it had always been when she returned tired out after her long day of work. Nastasya sat waiting for her to prepare food and, as soon as Weekly stepped into her room, she began to talk.

‘My Fazere, Veekly, had country Es-state with gardens and lawns and orchards, and every summer I ran wild there. You can have no idea of hot houses full with grapes and the fruit trees so laden, Veekly, the boughs had to be tied up with ropes. One winter, I remember, I had been ill and was there with my Nurse all alone except for the servants. Servants, Veekly, we had so many, two footmans behind every doors and a manservant behind every chair. Veekly I tell you...' Nastasya leaned forward always at this point, earnestly explaining to Weekly. ‘I tell you Veekly, the washing of their white gloves alone employed five vimmin every veek—as I was tellink you I was there only once in winter, so cold, and my nurse wrapped us both up warm in sheepes skins and we walked out in the night. Everything is burnink, I cried to my Nurse, but she says is all right, it is just the peasants keepink warm my Fazere's fruit trees to keep off the frost, and so it was, hundreds of fires glowing between the fruit trees, can you imagine Veekly, the orange-coloured flames leapink and the smoke hanging in the cold air, can you for a moment imagine...' Nastasya fell silent, brooding; she had forgotten the
name of her beloved nurse. She sat for hours, often, trying to remember it.

‘Poor old Narsty,' Weekly said. ‘You silly old crab, maybe yore old nurse never had a name!' Weekly was sorry for Nastasya. She had lost everything she ever had. She had known such elegance and wealth. Torben had often, with interruptions from Nastasya—they always talked at once—described the clothes Nastasya's mother wore: the fine hand-embroidered gowns and shawls, and the diamonds that sparkled on the lovely white skin of her elegant neck. As she worked for them Weekly felt she had actually seen the comfort of this richness. It was as if she had handled the precious jewels in the Torbens' mean little flat, which was all they had to live in after the generations of family strength and wealth handed from fathers to sons and daughters. And as more sons and daughters were born, strength was added to strength in their inheritance and possession.

Through Torben's descriptions Weekly saw all this destroyed. She even felt she had been present when the great staircases were torn out and burned and the bearskin rugs, tossed onto the bonfire, writhed in the flames as if they were still live bears. Nastasya had known all this, possessed it all once, but her background had crumbled, disappeared completely and she had lost everything in the subsequent flight.

‘Pore old Narsty!' Weekly wanted to help her, but she was quite unable to understand that Nastasya, the product of her upbringing, was ill-equipped for the life she had before her and no amount of help from Weekly could make her overcome her self-centred arrogance.

‘In summer my cousins were always there too and we stole the cherries Veekly, you could not know these cherries, very pretty fruits, small and bitter in brandy, in beeg jars of brandy and my Mother and my Aunt, I always had to kiss their hands you know.' Nastasya carefully explained, ‘My Mother and my Aunt were very severe to the servants. They thought, ha ha ha, the servants stole the cherries. Ha ha ha!'

‘Naughty Narsty!' Weekly said, she was still reading and getting more and more excited over the descriptions of land and sheds and equipment. Now that Nastasya was in her room every night Weekly had to try hard not to be interrupted while she read about pastures and fences and water. An abundance of water, as written in the advertisements, seemed to Weekly to present moss-trimmed troughs one below the other, with paths of washed pebbles alongside. She seemed to see the clear water flowing over, from one deep trough to the next, all down the hillsides. The water was clean and bright and cold and there was plenty, so much that it overflowed and washed the sides of the troughs, cleaning the moss and cooling the feet of
those who went there. When Weekly saw this water in her mind she could not remember whether she had once, as a child, been taken to such a place or whether she had only read about it in her reading book. She never saw water like this when she was out looking at the places advertised. More often the ground was damp and swampy, with only a doubtful promise of water in summer and far too much in winter. Sometimes there was a tank or a dam, nothing very big and certainly nothing so lovely as the troughs which overflowed in her mind.

Now Weekly had her own car she was able to drive out every Sunday to look at land, and her wish for some became even more intense. She did not want very much, just for a few acres to be her own land. She drove in the car to where the places described in the advertisements were. Sometimes she took Nastasya, and it was like taking a block of wood for a drive.

‘Narsty,' Weekly said, ‘turn yer 'ead and look at them trees'. When she was out she tried to ignore Nastasya, and she stared into green paddocks, fenced with round poles for horses and scattered in the corners with flame tree flowers. Her eyes lingered on the deep grass, splashed white with lilies. She stopped to admire almond blossom painted on a blue sky and she longed for a little weatherboard house surrounded by glossy leaved trees, their neat darkness illuminated with oranges. She paused
on the fringes of vineyards and saw fresh light-green leaves bursting on the gnarled, kneeling vines, and later the scent of the broad bean flowers made her even more restless.