Amy's Children (20 page)

Kathleen (Allan calls me Kay)

PS Isn't it great the war is over?

 

The pink tongue that curled so eagerly around Amy's salad licked the envelope down and Kathleen put the letter in her handbag. She stretched out on her bed and stared at the handbag hanging from the knob of her wardrobe door. The wardrobe was new, she had persuaded Amy to approve the purchase on time payment when she got a raise for training little Nancy Whelan. Amy was quite jealous of me when I got an assistant before her, Kathleen said to herself, transferring the wardrobe to the second bedroom of the house she and Allan would share, and seeing herself stacking her offseason clothes in it.

Oh, life is pretty jolly good, she told herself with a great leap from the bed. And I'm in a letter writing mood! The legs of her chair skidded when she sat at her desk again. She wrote:

 

Dear Allan, My own sweet boy, how are you? I have an overwhelming desire to see you. As a matter of fact I
must.
We
must
meet to talk something over of a very urgent nature. My whole future depends on it. If I said
our
future what would my dear sweet boy say to that? But first our meeting. Where and when? Stand by the phone say, Wednesday, giving you time to get this letter and I will telephone from the box near A.H.'s, just after twelve o'clock. Should anything happen and my lunch hour be changed to one, please return then and stand by.

All my love, K.

PS When we meet I want your father there too. This is of vital importance for it concerns him nearly as much as it does us. K.

The meeting did not come off as Kathleen planned it.

Dudley's heart failed and he died at work, hand-stitching the lapels of a herringbone tweed sports coat.

“Grab the needle!” shouted the office manager Oscar Banks. He saw but could not reach Dudley with the appropriate speed because of the glass wall separating the office from the factory. Dudley slid downwards in his chair, his face pale as bread dough, the needle pointing menacingly from between two fingers.

Sydney Rivers of Rivers Exclusive Men's Tailoring dropped his scissors with a great clang and rushed to lift Dudley into what he hoped was a more comfortable position. Dudley's head lolled sideways into the collar of his shirt which Daphne had starched sharp enough to cut him. Dudley had thrust out his feet in the last movement his body made. His smallish feet seemed the most defenceless thing about him, and with his trousers riding up there was a lot of black sock showing and a piece of innocent white leg. His shoes were black and highly polished, placed together so much like a schoolboy's, it was a surprise not to see a school case nearby.

Word of Dudley's death reached Amy and Kathleen at Anthony Horderns fairly soon. Oscar, with an air of melancholy importance, took the tram to Annandale and put Daphne in a taxi to the hospital in Camperdown where Dudley's body had gone an hour earlier.

Someone at Rivers remembered Dudley mentioning a niece working at Lincolns (Rivers stocked Lincoln made casual wear on the shirts and underwear counter). Only when Amy was safely out of his house had Dudley acknowledged the relationship.

Oscar's young lady assistant, caught up in the same aura of melodrama as Oscar (and quite enjoying it as a change from the monotony of office routine), assembled her features into a suitable expression of concern and telephoned Lincolns.

Lance was with Victor at the door of Victor's office, and when he heard Miss Isobel Mackie say “If you mean Miss Amy Fowler she isn't at Lincolns any more,” he moved over to the switchboard and took the receiver from her hand.

Ignoring the round eyes riveted on him and deciding he cared nothing for any of them anyway, seeing only the blue of Amy's eyes he said, “Yes, yes, I see. We'll pass the message on.” He then ran down the stairs to find Allan.

It was close to midday on the day Allan was to stand by the telephone for Kathleen's call. They scrambled into Lance's Buick and reached Anthony Horderns ten minutes before twelve, Allan letting out his breath in a great puff of relief.

The four of them went to lunch in the tearoom. Kathleen cried with Allan's arm around her shoulders, and Lance held Amy's hand beside her plate of curry and rice, having insisted on their ordering something substantial enough to help bolster their grief.

Torn between tenderness and boyish embarrassment at the first sight of Kathleen's tears, Allan silently agreed with Lance that it would be ill-timed to raise the subject of Kathleen's letter unless she did. “It wouldn't be in good taste just now,” Lance had said, not admitting to himself that whatever it was, he didn't want anything disrupting his relationship with Amy.

Lance was concerned not only with training Allan in the running of Lincolns but utilizing the time they were together (mainly travelling to and from work) for character building. Although he and Allan were close, Lance felt uncomfortable much of the time over his affair with Amy, and he was unable to find words to justify it. It's no use though, he would tell himself, taking off his coat at home to sit down to one of Eileen's roast dinners. I cannot give her up and don't intend to.

Allan was disappointed that Lance attached so little importance to Kathleen's letter. He took it from Allan's hand and frowned over it almost as if it were an order form filled out by someone on their first day in the factory. He handed it back without saying anything, Allan wincing and blushing at the way the line containing “my own sweet boy” leapt out, as if Lance had folded the letter that way on purpose.

Allan began to think he should keep a few things to himself concerning Kathleen. Perhaps Lance was jealous because she was younger and prettier than Amy. That was probably it, Allan thought, making no secret of the tender way he folded the letter and put it in his shirt pocket.

In Lance's own (secret) words he had “gone off” Kathleen. He suspected she was looking to Allan as a substantial meal ticket. He saw that Amy was afraid of her. When he proposed a meeting with Amy he watched her mind flick to Kathleen, mentally accommodating her. He thought often of a time when Kathleen would not be around. He did not know where she would go or what effect it would have on Allan, but he dreamed of Allan meeting another girl and the relationship dissolving amicably (so as not to upset Amy).

Lance saw Kathleen now with her wet eyelashes resting on her cheeks and her cheek very close to Allan's shoulders. I would dearly love to tell her her nose is red, he thought. He saw her lift her eyelids now and again to see what other of Anthony Horderns staff was observing her. She'll get a great kick out of the funeral, Lance thought. She's just the type.

Lance told Eileen he was going to the funeral. He lied about it. He said that Syd Rivers had asked for a good representation of people in the clothing trade to honour Dudley's memory, since Dudley had been a tailor for thirty years, most of the time with Rivers. Because Rivers was a good customer of Lincolns Lance said he should go. The funeral was at two o'clock on Saturday afternoon. Eileen could not see why Lance had to take Allan and sulked through their early lunch. Since the funeral was in Annandale and her parents' place only a few miles farther west she suggested she and Allan spend their time there while Lance was at the church and cemetery.

Allan stopped eating his meat pie (Eileen always bought pies with the Saturday shopping to save cooking lunch) and watched the gravy ooze onto his plate, terrified at the outcome of the proposal. But Lance squared his shoulders in a way he had when he was about to deliver a sound argument, and said that Allan had never been to a funeral, and since he would be faced with this kind of thing in his business life, he should learn the correct procedures now. It was Allan's turn to square his shoulders at this extension of his responsibilities. Eileen saw the manly gesture and in her pride relented. A good thing it was a Protestant funeral. If it had been a Catholic one she would have put her foot down, Eileen told herself.

Lance had further informed her that he would not be home until late in the evening, so it might not be worth her while cooking tea for them. Victor had been off Thursday and Friday with one of his bad chest colds, and Lance needed to spend a couple of hours on the accounts. It would be an opportunity to acquaint Allan with that side of Lincolns. In a fresh rush of pride Eileen failed to perceive the unlikelihood of Allan learning anything worthwhile leaning over Lance's shoulder with his thoughts somewhere else, in this case on Kathleen. Kathleen's existence had so far been kept from Eileen, something else Allan was beginning to resent, since he had a strong desire to show Kathleen off and to curb his mother's habit of pushing him towards girls at the church.

Of course neither Lance nor Allan went to Lincolns. They collected Amy and Kathleen from the Petersham house and went to St Stephen's Church of England, then to Rookwood Cemetery for the burial.

“Oh dear, this dreadful place!” moaned Kathleen in Allan's ear, as if the overgrown graves and broken headstones and upturned jam jars, long empty of their flowers and rimmed with greenish slime, were no fit resting place for the uncle she despised.

Afterwards they went to the Coxes for sandwiches, made in large quantities by Mrs Cousins, while Helen in green linen with large white buttons holding down four large patch pockets clung to John's arm throughout both ceremonies, dabbing at her eyes with a lace handkerchief on hire from her glory box.

Daphne's tightly held jaws relaxed a little when Lance laid a light hand at the back of her waist, holding a cup of tea in the other.

“You were a good wife. He had a good life with you, I'm sure of that.” Lance was pleased Allan was within earshot to benefit from this example of etiquette suitable in cases of bereavement.

After a suitable pause, and at a signal from Kathleen, the toe of her shoe prodding his ankle, Allan asked Lance if it would be alright to go across to the park for a while. Kathleen put on a wan expression as if her grief was impossible to bear in the crowded room.

Daphne put a handkerchief to a wildly working mouth.

“He went there every Saturday to watch the cricket. Never missed.”

“He never said much. But he thought a lot,” Mrs Cousins said.

The quaver at the end of the sentence was swallowed in the clink of china, as Mrs Cousins, mixing sentiment with the practical, swept a half row of sandwiches from one plate to fill another.

Lance told Daphne he would take Amy to Petersham, then “slip” across to Newtown to attend to something at Lincolns. Would she tell Allan when he returned that he would call for him on the way back to Randwick? Daphne, watching Amy's back and her raised arms as she put on her little navy straw hat with the binding of pale gold on the brim, did not notice that Lance made no reference to Kathleen, who, he suddenly decided, could find her way to Petersham by any method she chose.

In her bedroom, Amy began to unbutton her yellow dress which reached high to her throat and had a little stand-up collar piped in yellow and white stripes. Lance took her hands away and finished the job, and she noticed how deft his fingers were, hardly fumbling at all.

She put her head right over his shoulder for she was nearly as tall as he, and her lips were pressed into his warm back, which was rippling gently with the unbuttoning.

“I'm tired of waiting,” was all she said.

Going home in the car, Lance and Allan each thought about telling the other what had taken place when Lance took Amy to Petersham and Allan took Kathleen to the park.

They had travelled to within a mile of Randwick when Allan, feeling he might burst from his navy blue suit, suddenly yelled out: “Dad! Pull over!”

Lance ran the car under a straggling gum beside a park where several small boys with shirts hanging out waded home through long grass, arms around homemade cricket bats and stumps, and a woman pushed a bumbling pram with a child inside, clinging with fat dimpled hands to the sides.

Lance took the scene in briefly, looking at the woman for a resemblance to Amy, disappointed he couldn't see the child's face without understanding why, then turned his attention to Allan.

Allan's face was quite red, and he plucked at the cloth of his trousers over his knees. Lance ran his hand around the rim of the steering wheel and slapped it lightly. His little smile contained a recollection of Amy's tousled head coming out from under her peeled-off yellow dress, and how hurriedly she had smoothed her hair, more embarrassed about that than her near nakedness.

“They're not sisters at all, Dad!” Allan said with great urgency.

“I know,” Lance said.

“She told you!” Allan cried as if Amy had betrayed Kathleen.

“She didn't have to,” Lance said. He started up the car and Allan called, “Wait!”

But Lance said, “Son, I know a lot more about women than you,” and turned the nose of the Buick towards Randwick.

 

John drove Kathleen to Petersham, silent most of the way, not sorrowing so much for Dudley as fearing Helen's mood on his return home. She had flounced to the kitchen when Mrs Cousins ordered her to help clean up after the meal, and John felt his manhood might be in question since he had not insisted on bringing her for the ride. At Petersham, Kathleen slammed the truck door hard, and once inside the house threw her sailor hat on Amy's lounge.

Amy was in one of the chairs in her petticoat with bare feet and legs, thinking of the chair back as Lance's chest and how she rolled her head around on it, and stretched her legs against his yellowish ones when their lovemaking was done and they both knew they must dress and he must go. But for Kathleen, he could be here still, she thought, and lowered her eyes, afraid her resentment might show.

After a moment she opened them on Kathleen's flushed face, with eyebrows at odd angles like tarantula's legs above eyes cold with blue chips.

Lance had ignored her when he called for Allan. “We must go!” he called to Allan who scrambled into the car and (Kathleen thought) gave an almost resentful look in her direction as if she were at fault. He was all tenderness and sympathy in the park, blaming Amy if anyone for the deceit; he seemed proud of her for her confession. He couldn't change an opinion as quickly as that, Kathleen thought, fearful that he had.