Amy's Children (11 page)

Kathleen pulled up a sock, already stretched from its most recent pull. “I was doing the very same work as last year.”

“Old Cec can't teach past sixth class,” Fred said. Cecil Shaw had taught the three Scriveners who started school at seven and left at fourteen. May had sent Amy's children when they turned five. The little Diggers Creek school was a mile and a half down the road from the farm. Amy remembered the wet grass bowed across the track soaking her shoes and socks on a winter's morning as she picked her way to the school steps. The same would have happened to her daughters, to those very shoes Kathleen was wearing.

She stood up quite abruptly. “It must be time she was in bed,” she said, conscious suddenly of something else to face. She had not shared a bed with anyone in a long time. Already she felt a creeping of her skin, a rejection of a body in contact with hers.

Fred went with John to stay the night at Annandale, as he had to return to camp next day. In the bedroom Amy saw that Kathleen was eager to get her case open and take out a new nightgown. The smell of flannelette rushed up Amy's nostrils, making her think of the new little gowns May had made for Kathleen, Patricia and the baby. She jerked the blind at the window up, then down, and went to the little cane dressing-table to pull the band from her hair. Kathleen saw her different in the mirror, older, her eyes larger, her face smaller. She made her case tidy before closing it and standing it against the wall.

Amy thought of suggesting that Kathleen hang what dresses were in there in the wardrobe, and take one of the little cane drawers for her pants and socks, but suddenly felt too tired to bother. She had to fight a rising anger against May, Fred, and even Kathleen, who she suddenly decided might not have been caught up in an adult's scheme, and was very likely not an innocent victim of a plan to transfer responsibility to Amy. Amy began to fuel her anger with the idea that Kathleen wanted to come to Sydney, had begged May to allow her to, that she wanted to go to high school to become a teacher, a nurse, perhaps a doctor with Amy having to devote the next few years of her life to educating and caring for her.

She moved angrily under the blankets and Kathleen shifted her body timidly to the edge of the bed, thinking Amy wanted more room, guilty that she was the cause of her discomfort.

Kathleen started at the sound of movement above the ceiling.

“By the way, there are two old women up there,” Amy said. “They use the kitchen, so you will see them.” She raised herself and punched her pillow and turned it over. Kathleen had a pillowslip stuffed with a sheet since Amy had no second pillow.

She settled herself for sleep before she said more. “They are very inquisitive, so don't tell them your business.”

There was another long silence before Kathleen spoke. “I'll call you Amy when they are around.”

“That's a good idea,” Amy said. “Goodnight.”

The following afternoon (it being Sunday) Amy took Kathleen to show her Lincoln Knitwear.

She walked her briskly, Kathleen's unbuttoned coat flapping about her thin dress, the one printed with violets, obviously her best. Amy thought of the clothes Kathleen would need for school, and first of all of the school she would go to. She passed one on her way to Petersham Station on the few occasions when she travelled by rail to work, once when her heels were blistered with new shoes and another time when Lance, with an air of great conspiracy, allowed her to have an extra hour at home the morning the shop delivered the sitting room furniture. She heard the shouting behind the high brick walls and hurried from it, reminded painfully of Peter.

Perhaps I'm being punished for something, she told herself, hurrying now, Kathleen plunging out to keep up. I know what it is I'm punished for but I wish the punishment could have held off until I got my house fixed up more. I might have to get another job, one paying more. No, I can't do that because of the furniture. Amy felt a choking in her throat, a feeling of suffocation, of being stifled. She slowed her pace, swallowing and putting a hand up to grip her neck. Kathleen looked up at her, with eyes a darker blue than Amy's. She had Irish colouring like her father's and his dark, rich, curly hair.

“I could stay with Aunty Daphne, could I?” suggested Kathleen. Amy felt a sense of shock. She was reverting constantly to an image of Kathleen as the little girl she had left at Diggers Creek. This leggy clear-eyed girl tuned into Amy's brain as if her own was wired to it.

“No, you can't!” Amy cried, not wanting to be brusque, but putting it down to all her worries.

“It was awful for me when I was there with Uncle Dudley!”

“Granma said about him,” Kathleen said.

“What did she say about him?” I don't really want to know, said Amy to herself, but it's hard to find things to say.

“He's grumpy most of the time,” Kathleen said. After a while, flinging her chin up towards Amy she said: “Does it matter?”

Amy gave the first warm laugh since Kathleen had come and Kathleen, pleased, leaned close to her as Amy walked now in more relaxed fashion for they were nearing Lincolns.

My goodness yes, Amy thought, I will have to start sorting out what matters and what doesn't.

“There it is,” she said when Lincolns came up.

It was not much to see, and Amy with the swift thought that Kathleen might not be impressed, felt afraid to check her face, in case her expression said so.

The brass plate on the front door was not as bright as when Amy used to polish it. The bay window (for the buildng was once a private home) was frosted over to keep the sight of women at work from passers by, but more importantly, in the view of the Yates brothers, to keep the women's eyes on their machines instead of straying streetwards.

Amy felt cheered at the sight of the bootmaker's. It seemed to look different already and to have edged closer to the factory.

“We're taking that shop over,” Amy said. When Kathleen was silent Amy explained that there would be machines in the back rooms for cleaning and pressing people's clothes that couldn't be washed.

“It will be so good when the war is over,” Amy said.

“It will be terrible if Fred gets killed,” Kathleen murmured. She moved closer to Amy, the sleeve of her coat clinging to Amy's sleeve as if she were clinging to Fred as long as she could.

“He won't be,” Amy said, ashamed that she would miss him hardly at all, whereas Kathleen would suffer, perhaps as she herself had done when Peter was lost.

They stopped in front of the bootmaker's window, seeing shoes turned on their sides, heels and half soles in rough little heaps, a great deal of dust, a heavily rusted shoe last, some tins of polish bowled about and coming to rest in any old place, a shoe brush with the bristles worn to the wood in one corner and an old rag doll streaked on its grubby body with tan boot polish. The doll belonged to the bootmaker's two-year-old child, who sometimes sat in the window when the mother went shopping farther down King Street where the butcher's, grocer's and fruit shops were. To ease the pain of separation the child was allowed to play in the window and watch for her return.

Amy turned away at last to look at the space where Lance left his car and realized she had brought Kathleen not so much to see Lincolns, as in the hope that Lance might have returned on the Sunday afternoon to have a look again at the bootmaker's shop. She might then have taken the opportunity of introducing Kathleen as a younger sister.

He might call at Petersham again and John and Aunty Daphne might happen to be there too, Amy worried.

On their way home Amy took Kathleen's arm, lightly so as not to make it too obvious she was courting support.

“I would never have got my job there if they knew I had children,” Amy said.

She felt Kathleen's arm stiffen slightly and tightened her hold.

“Granma said that might be so,” Kathleen answered.

Well, did she, Amy thought. Much she knows about it! She put aside May's care of her children, years of it now, and felt only anger that her life was upset just when she was starting to enjoy it.

They were making their way to the railway station for Amy had decided on taking the train. It would be Kathleen's first ride on an electric train. When they alighted at Petersham on their way home they would pass the school and see what kind it was from the wording on the brick wall. Amy did not know if it was for young children or a high school.

“It's for kids up to sixth class,” Kathleen said reading the sign. She did not totally conceal the scorn in her voice.

In a little while the scorn drained away, her face shrinking with the anxiety taking over.

“Perhaps I could go there tomorrow, and ask about the high school,” Kathleen said.

“Could you find your way?” Amy asked, relieved at the possibility of her day at Lincolns following a normal pattern. She had the odd and foolish notion that once she was at her desk there would be nothing other than her work to contend with, no problems apart from that.

“Of course,” Kathleen said, looking back swiftly at the school.

To her surprise Amy thought about Kathleen all the next day. Kathleen sat there at the edge of Amy's brain while she worked with her invoices and accounts, seeing a new girl who was to start as a presser, working out the difference between her age and Kathleen's, while taking her down to meet the forewoman. Lance was at the far end of the factory with Tom, examining a freshly dyed fabric by holding it up to the light. Amy wanted him to see her, yet was afraid he might. She hurried back to her desk, finding it a little less the cosy refuge it had always seemed.

She listened for the end of the day. Tom switched the machines off, their whine dying away, replaced by the run of feet up the back stairs, past the office, tumbling down the flight to the door. A young woman named Dorothy, lame in the left leg, was last.

Her feet were like a clock ticking out the last minute of the working day. Sometimes the foot of the afflicted leg scraped the stair. Amy winced with the scrape, imagining pain.

She had thought in bed the previous night she would hate the end of work on Monday, having to face going home, wondering about Kathleen, angry at the changes. She had always loved putting her key in the front door and having the hall rush at her and seeing the sitting room door, left open since she got the furniture, looking as if it had waited all day for her return. She would dash in just to pat a chair back, then tumble her things on the kitchen table for her solitary meal, sometimes a slice of ham carried home folded inside greaseproof paper, a gherkin and beetroot from a glass jar on the counter of the ham and beef shop. She would boil a potato while she took off her good clothes, then set the table with a check tablecloth made from a remnant of material bought from Anthony Horderns shopping one Friday night with Daphne. She had the kitchen to herself which she liked; the Misses Wheatley were usually out of it by the time she got home. Normally they only boiled a kettle of water there, carrying their teapot upstairs where one of them had set out some paste sandwiches and two bananas on a heavy silver tray their sister-in-law had despised.

Amy made her own meal as attractive as possible, whipping her potato as smoothly as May and Daphne did. She had planned to buy a table runner to embroider during her lunch hour, for the table Daphne gave her. She had a chocolate box of stranded cottons carefully bound on cardboard on her wardrobe shelf to work the design.

Well, nothing like that is happening tonight, she told herself, hurrying up Crystal Street. Then she began to think of Kathleen with a rising excitement. Which of her meagre supply of dresses had she put on? What had happened at the school, what was happening tomorrow? In her excitement, she squeezed the little parcel of four sausages she'd bought for their tea.

Perhaps I have missed having company without realizing it, she thought, pushing open the gate.

Kathleen was nowhere to be seen. Amy looked around the backyard and into the downstairs rooms. Jabbing her green jacket on a coat-hanger to put in the wardrobe she heard noises above the ceiling.

She's up there I reckon, Amy thought, already frightened, hurrying up the stairs.

Kathleen was in the Misses Wheatleys' sitting room on one of the hooked rugs, legs bent inwards from the knees, playing with a set of chipped marbles in the space. She had a little cotton bag, made on May's machine, into which she tipped the marbles and tightened the top.

She looked up at Amy, her mouth part open. “It slipped out,” she said.

Amy knew at once. The Misses Wheatley had been told that Kathleen was Amy's daughter. The stiff maiden lady faces had so far received the news, it was settled there, spread across their skins, milky with a blue tinge smeared with pink running from the edges of the eyes upwards across the forehead. It was making its way to the Misses Wheatleys' brains.

“I don't want you bothering the Misses Wheatley,” Amy said. She stretched out a hand indicating Kathleen should get up and come downstairs.

“She's no bother,” said Heather, a brief blinking of her eyes saying it was Amy who did the bothering. Some late afternoon light came through the window, darting at the edges of her gold-rimmed glasses. Amy turned from the sharp little needles and Kathleen followed her downstairs.

“You can set the table,” Amy said, deciding to stay calm and think what to do next while she cooked the sausages.

“Sausages!” Kathleen cried, seeing them. “Wait till I tell Granma!” She saw hope run across Amy's face. “In a letter I'll write.”

She swung her marbles in their little bag like a hoopla she was about to toss at a target. “I'll put my jacks away first!” Her running feet were like little hammers hitting Amy's brain.

Over tea Amy said: “You haven't met Aunty Daph, yet. We might go there after we wash up.” The sausages had cheered her, and Kathleen too ate hers with relish, carefully taking a small portion at a time with each forkful of potatoes so that the potato wouldn't outlast the sausage.