The Winds of Heaven (21 page)

‘Mum’s helping me make it,’ she said. ‘And sorry, but I’ve got to rush, Mrs Sheedy, Mum’s expecting me.’

‘But – ’

‘Bye!’ Clementine hurtled away down the street, and she was still hot and angry when she burst in through the kitchen door.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked her mother.

‘Mrs Sheedy!’

Mrs Southey laughed. ‘Caught you, did she? Hope you didn’t give her any cheek; she’s an old lady, after all.’

‘You can still be awful if you’re old.’

‘Like me, I suppose.’

‘Not
you
.’ Clementine tossed her parcel onto the kitchen table and enveloped her mother in a hug.

‘What’s that for?’

‘Oh, nothing.’

Her mother smiled and picked up the parcel. ‘Is this the material for your skirt?’

‘Yes.’

Mrs Southey took the kitchen shears from the drawer. Snipping the string, she folded back the crisp brown paper and the two of them looked down at the deep green cloth inside.

‘Oh, Clementine, it’s beautiful! How much is there?’

‘Four-and-a-half yards.’

‘A full skirt then.’

‘With patch pockets.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And buttons down the front, don’t you think? In the same colour?’

‘That might be a little difficult,’ said Mrs Southey. ‘You hardly ever see that shade of green. Tell you what though, I’ll make you covered ones, in the same material.’

‘Oh,
will
you?’

‘Of course. Didn’t I just say I would?’ Her mother lifted the fabric from its wrapping and held it up against the light. ‘Oh!’

‘What is it?’

‘I forgot, there’s a letter for you over on the sideboard.’

‘A letter?’ Clementine went to the sideboard. She picked up the single envelope lying there and looked at the postmark. Even after all this time, those two words, Lake Conapaira, could make her heart move strangely beneath her ribs. It was a little like the feeling she’d had so long ago when she’d seen those signs for
Griffiths Tea
from the windows of the train. As if she expected something wonderful.

‘From your cousin that must be.’ Clementine’s mother was looking over her daughter’s shoulder at the envelope. ‘Since she’s the only one left up there.’ She gave a little ‘tsk’
of disapproval. Mrs Southey hadn’t been able to get over the fact that Aunty Rene had gone off to live with another bloke when she was still officially married to Uncle Len. ‘At her age!’ And the photograph Aunty Rene had sent a year back, of herself in a slinky gold dancing dress, with a headdress of bright pink feathers on her electric curls, had been the very last straw. ‘Off to the Roxy again, it looks like,’ Mrs Southey had commented, studying the picture hard. ‘Rene always was a fool.’

‘But why? Why can’t I go?’

The three of them were sitting round the kitchen table discussing the letter from Lake Conapaira. Fan had asked Clementine to come and visit. ‘
Only for a few days
,’ she’d written. ‘
I know you must be busy and have lots of other things to do. But it’s so long since we’ve seen each other…
’

There were three kisses at the bottom, and a fourth one, big and wobbly, which had come from little Cash. And now Mum was saying she couldn’t go.

‘But I’ve got a whole week free when my summer job finishes!’ protested Clementine. ‘Why can’t I go then?’

‘Clementine – ’

‘I’ve been up there on my own before, when I was only
thirteen.
’

‘That was different,’ said Mrs Southey.

‘How was it different?’

Mrs Southey didn’t reply.

‘I’m nearly
seventeen
, Mum. I’m going to university in a few weeks time.’

‘Don’t count your chickens,’ said Mrs Southey, who would occasionally sound as if she couldn’t quite believe that
Clementine’s bright future was actually going to happen, and was every day expecting another letter to come: one that would inform them regretfully that Clementine’s matriculation score, her scholarship, her place at the university, had all been a mistake.

Clementine regarded her mother scornfully. ‘I don’t know what you’re worried about.’

Her father cleared his throat. ‘Things are a bit unsettled up there now,’ he said. ‘That’s what’s bothering your mum.’

‘Unsettled?’ But she knew what they meant, she’d known it all along, how Aunty Rene had taken off and how Fan was mostly on her own with the baby because her husband was away working more than he was home. They acted (or rather Mum acted, Dad wasn’t quite so bad) as if Fan on her own wasn’t a suitable person for their daughter to stay with, as if having to get married at fifteen because you were having a baby made you somehow unreliable, even dangerous.

When little Nerissa Parr at school had got pregnant at the end of third year and had to leave Chisolm College, Ba Purcell had remarked to Clementine, ‘It’s always the good girls who get caught.’

‘Why?’ Clementine had asked.

‘Because they are kind, and nice,’ Daria, the Hungarian girl, had answered. ‘And because they don’t know anything, of course. Which is good for the boys, I think.’

‘Fan’s a good person,’ Clementine said to her mother now.

‘I know, love, but – ’

‘She’d never hurt anyone, ever!’

Dad was reading through the letter again. ‘Poor lass
sounds lonely. Must be rough on her, all by herself with the little fellow.’

‘Well, nobody asked her to go and get herself – ’ began Mrs Southey, and then fell uneasily silent, because both Clementine and her father were gazing at her sternly. ‘No more than a kid herself,’ said Dad.

That night Clementine heard them talking in their bedroom when they thought she’d gone to sleep, Mum saying things like, ‘Rene let her run wild!’ and ‘No wonder she turned out like she has!’ while Dad just kept on murmuring, ‘It’s a shame, Cissie! A crying shame!’

It made her hate the pair of them. They didn’t
know
Fan like she did. They didn’t know how kind she was, how loving, how there wasn’t a streak of meanness in her, and how she always understood. Or perhaps they thought kindness and love and understanding didn’t matter, not if it went with stuff like failing in school and going all the way with boys and having to get married because you’d got a baby.

‘No better than she should be,’ Mum was saying, and Clementine didn’t know if she meant Fan or Aunty Rene but she jumped out of bed and ran down the hall and burst into their room, where, across a stretch of shadowy carpet and a dark wash of Onkaparinga double blanket, she could see the gleaming of their eyes.

‘Fan’s good,’ she said again. ‘You don’t
know.
It’s not her fault what happened. That – that she had a baby and everyone went away.’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ said her dad, and her mum said, ‘Of course she’s good, I didn’t say she wasn’t,’ which was a downright lie.

‘There’s no need to go getting all upset,’ her mum went
on. ‘Go back to bed and get your sleep. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ bawled Clementine. She didn’t, either – because what was the use? It was awful not being able to explain, having the words but not knowing how to arrange them so they’d understand. It made her hate them more.

‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said again. ‘I just want to go to Lake Conapaira and see Fan.’

She ran back to her room but she didn’t go to sleep. She knelt up on her bed like she used to do when she was little and gazed at the lights of the Brothers’ house shining through the trees. ‘Fan’s good,’ she whispered, and the lights shone back at her, calm and accepting, constant in the night.

In the morning at breakfast her parents said she could go to Lake Conapaira.

Clementine loved them again.

The mirror in the Cootamundra rest-room was positioned in the strangest place, tucked right behind the door, so that going inside, Clementine hadn’t noticed it was there. Leaving, she was suddenly confronted by a young woman walking towards her, a slender, brown-haired girl in a full green skirt and gingham blouse. And just as she’d done that time in the bathroom of the house in Palm Street, when she’d seen the skinny kid in Snugglepot and Cuddlepie pyjamas, Clementine recognised the stranger by her clothes. That was
her
skirt, the green skirt with patch pockets that Mum had made for her from the green linen she’d bought at Grace Bros. That brown-haired girl was
her
. And though the girl wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t even really pretty – as Mum was
always saying, ‘You’ll do.’ She would do. She would always be small, of course, but she was no longer small as a child. She had breasts and hips and a firm narrow waist; her freckles had faded, and her mousy hair darkened to light brown.

She looked at least seventeen, and Clementine was glad of this unexpected revelation because she’d begun to feel shy about meeting her cousin again. Fan had always been older, and beautiful, and more experienced, and so much had happened in her life since Clementine had last seen her. Fan had done
real
things; all Clementine had done was go to school.

She thought she might have grown up a little bit. She knew that if she ever met a boy she liked she’d never behave in the silly way she’d done with Simon Falls, daydreaming about him all the time and never
doing
anything, walking past the King’s School for months after he’d gone away. And if David Lowell – well, not David Lowell, because he’d vanished as completely as Simon Falls had done – but someone
like
him, ever asked her out she wouldn’t get angry like she had with David. She wouldn’t be mean to someone just because he was a Home Boy. Or because he’d liked her when she’d never wanted him to.

But these were small, trivial steps, she knew. Fan’s growing up was big and serious. She was a married woman. She had a husband and a child, and this seemed amazing to Clementine: to be someone’s
wife
, to be able to say ‘my husband’ of another human being. Fan was an adult. When would she be one? When she started at university? When she left it with her degree? When she became a teacher or whatever else there was to be? When she was married, if she ever found someone, or when she was – and here Clementine
stopped short in her reflections, because she had almost concluded them by saying to that girl in the mirror at the Cootamundra rest-room, saying right out loud, ‘when I’m grown up, some day – ’

It was well into the morning: it was half past nine. Clementine wandered up the hall towards her cousin’s bedroom and stood for a moment outside the door, yawning and rubbing at her heavy eyes. She couldn’t understand why she felt so sleepy. It was three whole days since she’d got here, long enough for the tiredness of the journey to have ebbed away. Three days since Fan had met her at the station and Clementine had barely recognised her.

There’d been no one else waiting on the platform to meet the Sydney train, only this woman with the little boy in the stroller – a tall woman in a drab cotton dress with the hem coming down. Common sense should have told her that it was Fan and yet even when the woman turned and Clementine had seen her face, thin and gaunt as Fan’s had never been, she could still hardly believe it was her cousin. A thought had rushed into her mind before she could stop it: she looks like she’s been left out in the rain.

She’d had to struggle to stop herself from crying out loud, ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong?’

‘Clementine!’ Fan’s slow sweet voice was just as it had always been. ‘Oh, Clemmie!’ And then the corners of her down-turned mouth had lifted and her great eyes shone, and she’d loosened her hold on Cash’s stroller and held out
her arms – and then Clementine had wondered how on earth she could ever have doubted that this was Fan.

Perhaps it was the hair. Fan’s beautiful long hair had been cut, shorn off into a thick, ungainly bob that barely reached the tips of her ears. It had darkened too, lost its treacle and wild-honey colours and become an ordinary brown that was almost the same shade as Clementine’s.

Fan had caught her staring and put up a hand as if to cover it. ‘Oh, you’re looking at my hair! I cut it off. It was too much trouble, seeing as – ’ here she’d smothered a giggle, ‘seeing as I didn’t have good old Mum to help me keep it proper. Remember that? Remember how she used to drag the comb through, and I’d yell and she’d yell, and you’d put your hands over your ears. Oh – ’ She’d begun laughing then, that sound that made you think of bright water flung into the air. So it’s all right, Clementine had thought as they’d walked down the lane towards Palm Street, the stroller rattling over ruts and stones and Cash leaning back in it, waving his small hands at the big bright stars. Fan looked different because she was tired, that was all. Hadn’t Mum warned her that she might notice a change in Fan, because young mothers often got tired, especially when they had to manage on their own?