Amy's Children (23 page)

“Your father said you're not to worry about a thing!” she said.

“That traitor!” Allan cried, and flinging the comic from him he swung over and buried his face in the pillow.

Although Kathleen had known Joe Miller for less than two weeks, it took a good part of the Saturday afternoon to explain his charms, real and imaginary, to Patricia.

Patricia, however, refused to be totally humbled in her role as the younger sister with the more menial job. There were gems to be offered from her first week as a wage earner and she was determined to offer them.

She had won praise from Mrs Campbell for her pyramid arrangement of display packets of tea, biscuits and dried fruits in the shop window, none of which were available yet from the shelves inside. Wartime restrictions had not been lifted, and Australia was exporting large quantities of goods to Britain, suffering more acutely the aftermath of war.

Daphne had not been a responsive audience when Patricia rushed home to tell her.

“Dud would have given his two eyes for a helpin' of rice custard! But where does all the damn rice go? Into the hollow innards of them Poms. We died for them in the war and now we starve for them in the peace!”

Patricia explained that the idea was to show customers what the shop would be selling when there was no more rationing, introducing the remark with “Mrs Campbell said”, which had freely punctuated all her speech since she started her job.

“Just as well them two came from Scotland and not further down,” Daphne said, scorning the use of the word England as she did its inhabitants. “Else you wouldn't be workin' for them, make no mistake about that!”

Patricia at this stage, unable to imagine an existence anywhere but behind Campbell's counter, vowed to keep from Daphne any hint of liaison with England or the English.

She jerked herself up now on her bed and wrapped her arms tightly around her knees, biting them in her agitation.

“If I meet a boy I like I'll have to ask him straight away if his grandmother comes from England.

“If she does I'll be sunk.” She looked around the room, the first of her own, as if to assure herself it had not been swept away from her. Daphne had given her a chest of drawers from her own room and promised a cupboard John had made for brooms and dust pans, which could be spared from the side veranda and was seldom if ever used as John had intended.

“Madam has her eyes on it for her linen, but she's got another think comin',” Daphne had said. “We'll get it cleaned up nice and in there with your dresses hangin' up before them weddin' bells start to peal.”

Patricia's eyes rested on the corner where it would go and her mind dreamed up dresses she was most unlikely to own filling it.

“You know about the new wardrobe I'm getting?” Patricia addressed Kathleen's stomach, since her head was hanging over the side of the bed, her feet tapping the floor on one side and her hair sweeping it on the other.

“There will be times in my life,” Kathleen said, “when I'll pine over Allan and what might have been.”

Patricia did not ask what might have been but her silence did.

“A beautiful home, a life of leisure, tons of clothes, my own car, a maid probably.” Her hair whooshed back and forth and her heels clicked together in time with her words.

“Do you know who is to blame for Allan and me?”

“Joe Miller!” Patricia cried with the certainty of being right.

The hair and the heels made a loud denial.

“It was over
centuries
before I even met Joe!

“No!” She swung herself around to face Patricia with her back to the end of the bed. Her eyes travelled over Patricia's face as if deciding whether she was able to bear the weight of the announcement to come.

“Sooner or later you will learn this. Madam Amy is preggers.”

“What's that?”

Kathleen rolled her eyes towards the ceiling. Then she sketched a great hoop in the vicinity of her stomach.

Patricia's brown eyes flew very wide. “Dad?”

Kathleen collapsed on her stomach, head back over the edge of the bed. “You poor innocent!” she said to the underneath.

Patricia hauled her up by the shoulder and Kathleen clambered to the head of the bed, taking Patricia's pillow and stuffing a corner into her mouth. Her muffled laughter squeaked around it and her shaking body made the bed shake. Patricia was very still.

“Ted would be a mighty straight shot if he fired from the Moruya hotel to Crystal Street Petersham!” She rolled over on her back. “You convulse me!”

Patricia barely moved. She lowered her eyes and plucked at the quilt and when she finally looked up she was in tears. Kathleen plumped the pillow into its rightful place. “It's quite a serious matter,” she said, head on the pillow, eyes on the ceiling. “But a laugh's as good as a tonic, you know.”

In a moment Patricia got gently off the bed and began to brush her hair in front of the mirror with the tortoise-shell frame that had belonged to Daphne as a girl. She addressed her reflection. “I'm frightened.”

Kathleen got up too and tidied her navy dress about the waist, unable to resist an affectionate little caressing of her flat stomach. Patricia saw in the mirror, and asked briefly with her eyes if Kathleen allowed boys to do more than kiss and cuddle her. She will tell me in time she thought, returning her thoughts to Amy.

“Poor Dad,” she said. “I thought that he and Mum might—you know—”

Kathleen took the brush from Patricia and stroked her hair back from her forehead, wrinkling it, then wrinkling it more with worry that the lines might be permanent.

“Oh, I must stop frowning this way!” she said, addressing her own and Patricia's reflections in the mirror. Patricia was on the edge of the bed, her brown eyes very big in their wetness. Brown-eyed people look better crying than blue-eyed people, Kathleen thought, remembering Amy's weeping when she announced she was pregnant.

“Amy's been crying quite a bit,” she said. “It's had that effect on her.”

“Oh, poor Mum!” Patricia cried, taking up the pillow to dab her eyes.

Kathleen sat on the chair, now repaired by John at Daphne's insistence, the one propped against the wall when Amy had the room, and making her back very straight tapped the back of the brush thoughtfully on her knee. Patricia, now partly ashamed of her tears, thought how much she was like the teacher they all thought she would become.

“You wanted to be a teacher, didn't you?” she said.

Kathleen tossed the brush onto the chest and flung her legs out in a gesture of abandonment.

“Both Miss Parks and I broke our hearts when I had to leave.”

“Aunty Daph said in her letters Mum wanted you to stay on.”

Kathleen leapt to her feet and put her face close to the mirror to separate her eyelashes and pinch her eyebrows into an unruffled line, displaying a sudden and quite remarkable energy.

“My dear little Innocent! You can't take a scrap of notice of what people
say.
Amy may have talked a lot about me going on and becoming a teacher, etcetera and etcetera. But...” And she picked up her shoes to put them on, holding them up first to admire their slender line and high heel bought to impress both Joe Miller and Patricia, who was still in cuban heels from the general store in Moruya. “But...I must warn you that you have to live with people to discover what they are
really
like.”

She took her handbag from the doorknob and swung it towards Patricia to indicate they were moving on.

“We'll go to Tina's. She has an older sister with fourteen children. Well, it
seems
she has that many. It's a good idea to keep reminding yourself how it
could be you.

“I should have taken Amy there one Saturday arvo when Constance was visiting. Constant Constance, Tina and I call her.

“Would you believe, little sister, Amy actually seems to be
glad she is
!”

Amy did not face the real reason for putting off telling Lance until she recovered from the shock of telling him.

I think I knew all along what he would say. I just pretended to myself I wanted to enjoy the secret on my own. It was not that way at all.

She was walking around her bedroom in her petticoat, whispering to herself. She had taken off her yellow dress for relief from its tightness at her waist. She slithered the silk against her skin, taking pleasure from it in spite of the realization of being terribly alone.

She sat on the edge of her bed with her bare feet cooling on the linoleum (a gift from Lance) thinking she did not hate him, or even resent him, wondering why this was so. She licked a tear running into the corner of her mouth, not knowing about it until she tasted the salt. Perhaps I
am
a little mad, she thought.

She hadn't intended telling Lance the way she did. After work one Thursday, he took her to a cafe opposite Railway Square for the asparagus on toast she loved. Allan was not with him.

“I've left him to get the tram home,” Lance explained, moving the salt and pepper to get a better view of Amy's face. A purple shade of lipstick was fashionable that year. It darkened Amy's blue eyes to violet. Lance liked it.

“He needs to get some independence,” Lance said, leaving the violet for a moment. “You can make 'em too soft.”

Amy's face went soft. She saw a little boy with serious brown eyes and a sturdy body struggling up steps, refusing to hang onto a rail, brushing her hands aside.

Lance usually avoided mention of Allan or Kathleen. Amy was glad of this. It helped reinforce her dream of the coming child as the real son of Lance. She fancied a future of Eileen and Allan together, more like wife and husband than mother and son, and herself, Lance and the baby in a separate household. Perhaps the Petersham house, Amy would think, looking around it and making mental changes to accommodate Lance.

Had Lance known, he might have envied Amy the luxury of fantasy. Or fantasy of a nature distinct from his. He worried that Allan, since his rejection by Kathleen, might tell Eileen of the affair with Amy in a fit of spite. His mental picture of the ensuing scene would send him running to Allan's side to check out his mood.

On one occasion Allan left a five-pound note on the counter after serving a customer with dry cleaning, then went and bowed his head in despondency over the ironing board, oblivious to the light patter of feet when the next customer saw the money and made a run for it, taking his overcoat to the rival cleaners and the cash to the Prince of Wales on the next corner.

All Lance could allow himself for relief was a hard slamming of the till and a rush for the factory with barely a glimpse of Allan's tragic, guilty face.

There Lance's own guilt took over. The boy was the only thing that was really his! He couldn't risk losing him! He might leave Lincolns and go into a bank (Eileen fancied banks and sighed over the neat young men in them), and leave the way open for Tom's son. He rushed back to the dry cleaning shop to tell Allan he would relieve him, and Allan could give Victor a hand in the office with some practice on the adding machine, something he knew made Allan feel superior.

Amy told Lance she was pregnant after they had left the cafe and had passed Grace Brothers' windows. They stopped to look at a georgette dress the colour of Amy's lipstick, displayed on a wax model.

The top bloused over a tight waist, and the skirt was narrow and knife pleated. The collar was a soft scarf with a tiny pearl button holding it in place.

Lance wanted her to have it.

“I know you sew your own things,” he said, gripping her hand hard in case her feelings might be hurt. “But just for a change why don't you have that dress?”

She loved him for not saying he would pay for it, though she knew he would.

 

“Let's sit for a while on the church seat,” she said.

The seat faced Broadway, and the traffic fed into George Street at two intersections. Amy noticed a car, a navy blue Chevrolet filled with young people in fancy dress, obviously on their way to a party. The men were in straw boaters and striped blazers, and the girls were very blonde or very dark with heads coming from layered collars. Like painted gumnuts with leaves still on the twig, Amy thought.

Lance cried out: “Why didn't you say something sooner?” His face was so ugly she had to turn quickly from it, mainly in fear that she would remember it only that way.

She had held his hand tightly, partly to ascertain through the feel of his flesh if he loved her still.

She let the hand go. And pulled her skirt down, for it had a habit of riding up, and Amy thought his face flinched watching her. Perhaps she merely felt the flinch, because his eyes appeared to be on the traffic. She wondered if he was not really seeing it, although he appeared to be, and thought how silly and naive she was to have believed all this time that she always knew what he was thinking.

A bank of trees struggling for a show of greenness against the dust separated the church from the pavement. Amy saw a small bird land on a twig not strong enough to hold it. The bird flung its little cocked-up tail around and with a triumphant tweet hopped to a stronger branch and slid its beak along a leaf, gobbling at the moisture with an eager throat and rapidly blinking eyes.

Amy got up and walked quickly to the pavement and crossed the street to the tram stop. She was grateful that the traffic came on heavier, shutting out Lance's figure should he be following. She did not look back even from the safety of the tram.

I think I'll go home to have the baby, she said to herself, keeping the picture of the little bird in her mind.

Lance sent her a letter.

Dear Amy
(it said),
I'm sorry. Telephone me here at the factory. Lance.

In other notes he had said
Dearest Amy
and put
Love
at the bottom. She began to crumple the page then smoothed it out and decided to put it with the others from him, including the first he had written, asking her to dinner to celebrate her ownership of the furniture. She had a chocolate box partly filled and when she closed the lid she was terribly sad that the envelopes would be jostled about in there with no support from each other, no chance for them now to be tightly packed as she once thought, perhaps with the need for a larger box.