Loving Daughters (13 page)

24

Enid was at the dressing table that afternoon when Una came bursting in and pressed herself against the closed door with her head back. Habit caused Enid to look up, widen her eyes, and slightly shake her head before returning to creaming her hands.

‘I thought I was being chased,' Una said, still with her eyes closed.

Enid watched her face in the mirror for a change of colour. ‘You are so ridiculous, Una. One grows tired of your nonsense.'

Una flung herself full length on the bed, throwing both feet together with a clamping of her leather shoes held high above the counterpane.

‘I shall be washing the curtains and the counterpane soon anyway,' Enid said, getting up.

Una sat up too. ‘Oh dear, I thought I was doing something forbidden. Sin is so joyful!'

Enid rolled up her sleeves preparing to put on an old jacket to work in the garden until it was time to get tea. Una studied herself in the mirror of the wardrobe, daintily picking a few leaves and twigs from her skirt and jumper, for she had flung off her tussore dress when Edwards left and had gone for a walk in the orchard. She lifted her hair clear of her eyes and pressed the great mass of it to the back of her head.

‘See!' she said. ‘That's how I'd look with my hair cut! What do you think?'

Enid buttoned her jacket and left the room.

‘She has no intention of cutting her hair,' Enid said, hurrying from the sharp edge of her fear towards her garden as if it were a friend certain to comfort her.

When she came inside two hours later Una was cutting the pattern for Small Henry's christening dress. She had turned back the green cloth on the dining table and had one eye on the dress she borrowed and the other on her paper.

Enid stared at the small white garment feeling a resentment that Small Henry wasn't inside it.

She imagined the puffing of the cloth for his body and his mauve feet turned outwards from the hem and the wrinkles of his neck coming out of the bound neckline. She had taken no interest in the girl's efforts to get a few things together for the baby and felt remorse that she did not know where the dress came from.

Una frowned from the scissors to the dress. ‘It's only the yoke that bothers me,' she said. ‘I should unpick it, but I think I can manage.' She flung the dress down and Enid had to suppress a wince. The sleeves were under the bodice and it seemed Small Henry's arms were carelessly crumpled and should be straightened.

‘You learned draughting,' Enid said.

‘I did, I did,' Una said, neatening an edge of a paper shape with her tongue in the corner of her mouth. ‘So I did, so I did.'

She frowned some more, grinding the scissors blades together absently while she stared hard at an untouched sheet of paper. ‘But all this is different. Different.'

Enid said nothing, fighting an urge to escape.

‘You agree it is different, sister dear?' Una said with scissors poised.

‘It's a small dress. Yes, that makes it different,' Enid said.

‘I see many differences. Many, many differences.' Una began to cut. ‘All around.'

Enid turned some flowers in a vase and a disturbed rose dropped its petals, some falling from the small table to the floor. She picked them up and with a hand closed over them went towards the kitchen. She heard the silent scissors at her back. She built up the stove, catching sight of the soup pot with a softening of her heart. She put the lid on hastily when she heard the squeak of scissors and turned to find Una there.

‘Will we be taking it to him in a basket like Little Red Riding Hood?' Una said. ‘I'll do the errand! It will be a lot easier than twenty pounds of sugar and half a pig!'

Enid began to bring things from the pantry, frowning past Una to the kitchen clock, calculating the time she had to prepare tea.

‘The soup?' Una said. She held the scissors with their points into the table. They were like two small swords digging into flesh.

‘Do mind the scissors and the table!' Enid said. ‘As for the soup, George can take it in the sulky. Also it won't be ready until the day after tomorrow!'

‘Quite a wait, isn't it? Quite a wait!' Una went off to the living room cutting the air with her scissors.

Enid went to the window to watch a wind running through her pansies causing them to nod for seconds after it had passed. Brown like his eyes. It's alright, it's alright! they said.

George came in as she was taking the remains of the corned beef to make it into hash for tea. He had a piece of timber for shelves for the closet and held it up, marking with his thumb a suggested width. These men, she thought with rising anger. Can't they talk? She nodded without speaking too. She watched George go, the timber slanting across his slight backside and his profile a wish-wash colour like poor soapsuds. They were a hesitant lot!

‘Show me where you want them!' he called from the lumber room.

‘On the inside!' she called back. In the beginning the cupboard had been a source of great joy to her. Now she saw it only in the rectory, and she couldn't bear to look at it taking shape in the lumber room, restoring the room to order as she had wanted for so long. I need to stop this foolishness, she said to herself, knowing she had no such intention.

She was wearing one of her small soft smiles when Jack came in and she put down the knife she was using to peel potatoes and wiped her hands on a dishcloth.

‘You're in for tea, Father?' she said, giving all her attention to scrubbing her fingers. ‘Go into the front room by the fire and I'll bring it to you there.'

But when Jack took off his coat he sat by the kitchen table. ‘She's in there with all that sewing,' he said, inclining his head towards the living room. He considered that Una sewed too much and there was unnecessary spending involved. He suspected when she asked for money for flannels and pyjamas for him and the boys she bought materials for dresses and fripperies, thinking he would not notice.

Enid now made the end of the table neat for his tea things and poured his tea. He liked watching her do these things, efficiently and not fussily like some women, but he wished she would sit and let him say what he wanted to and get it over.

He looked towards his hat where it hung, wishing he had it to turn between his hands. He looked down at his heavy thighs pressed near the table for they would not fit under it.

‘Una and that fellow …' he said.

He thought he heard an intake of breath but straight after there was a tinkle as she set her teacup on its saucer. Her eyes were downward, but he thought (he wasn't sure) that they might have run wide and wild around the room before she lowered them.

‘She wouldn't be too far away there. She still needs you to keep an eye on her.'

He pushed his cup forward for more tea. It seemed a long time before she poured it. He drank it quickly then got up and got into his coat and went out through the back door.

He tried to remember what expression was on her face. But this was impossible. He had not looked at it.

25

She went too, into the garden to weed a rose bed.

She had dodged the job for weeks, seeing the space as too restricted to crawl into, but she was there now, tearing at soft cress-like growth, casting it backwards from her, unconscious it seemed of thorns plucking at her sleeves and digging into her back.

Some pierced her hands and blood was mixed with black earth, and she used the weeds to wipe her skin, and saw the red smearing the green as if bearing blooms.

Una, her cutting out done, wandered into the kitchen and saw the tea preparations halted, the fire low, and through the window her sister's crouched shape under the roses.

‘Well, drat her socks!' Una cried. She threw the window up noisily, and Enid backed out from under the bushes. She stood holding the trowel against her skirt and seemed to grow taller.

Her head was back, her eyes on the sky and she rubbed a sleeve across her forehead, resting her face for a moment on it. A wind came and swooped the shrubs about, and made tracks through the flower beds, but nothing of Enid, her clothes or her hair, appeared to move. Weird, weird, thought Una. But beautiful, yes quite beautiful. I'm glad he's not here to see.

She went and poked among the coals in the stove, then went for the rice canister in the pantry, more than anything to pass the window again. Enid was now in a back corner of the garden where there was a trellis with a climbing rose. She had taken hold of the wood and was shaking it, stopping now and again to lay her face in the crook of her elbow and turn it from side to side.

Una, picking up a potato to peel, felt her mouth as dry as the skin offending her hands. She dropped the knife to look again at Enid, now with her face inside both arms upstretched, holding the trellis.

Una made the rice pudding, nutmeg on top, and had it in the oven when she remembered that Enid had been putting raisins in it lately. Oh, hang the lot of them! she told herself, giving the oven door a little kick with her shoe, as there was the sound of Enid's shoes in the hall. In a little while she came into the kitchen, buttoning the cuffs of a puce-coloured dress that had been Nellie's. She seldom wore it and it didn't suit her, only the collar of rows of light-coloured lace saved her face from taking on the same puce shade. She wants to look her ugliest, Una thought, fighting a small gladness.

‘I made a rice pudding without raisins,' Una said. ‘You weren't here to ask.'

Enid went for the raisins, chopping them so swiftly and finely it looked as if she had no regard for her fingers, then taking the pudding out, swirled the nutmeg out of the way, scattered the raisins in and returned it to the oven.

There, said the snap of the oven door, another of your mistakes rectified.

Una put her hands on her hips. ‘Well, I shall go and do some machining on Small Henry's christening gown, shall I?'

She was nearly to the living room door when Enid cried out, ‘Una!' Una backed like a horse pulled with reins, until she reached the kitchen, where she stopped with rump extended and hands tucked under her armpits flapping them up and down.

A bird now, about to fly. Enid sank into a chair by the stove smoothing at her hands, rubbing at the small bloody marks. Thomas came in and slid against her leg, and getting no response turned to Una who slung him like a scarf across her shoulder and set a tray with things for the dining table, pinning Thomas to her shoulder with a cheek. Thomas twisted about and twitched his whiskers hoping to get to the milk jug. She released him and he landed on his feet, hooping his back and trying to decide between a leap on Enid's lap and a watch on the woodbox out of which a mouse was known to have tumbled in the past. ‘Out!' cried Enid, suddenly throwing out a foot, and Jack coming through the back door cried ‘Out!' too and swung the door wide to help Thomas on his way. Una with the tea tray rattling felt she was dismissed too and decided not to return from the living room but leave the two of them to the intimacy of the kitchen.

‘Let them roll and toss before the fire and a shower of coals fall on his naked bum!' Una muttered, making for the little room where the sewing machine was.

Enid was confused. Jack was in. For tea? No, there were the dirty cups and the clock hands, unless it had gone crazy, showing an hour past afternoon tea time.

She stroked the pot though in a distracted way, he thought. That other one was not giving her enough help!

‘I'll wait for the hash,' he said, nodding at the end of beef under one of her gauze coverings.

‘Of course,' she said, and taking the cover off it, stared for a long moment then put it back again.

She bowled some green apples towards her and began to peel them. She knew he liked a plateful of them stewed, sometimes before going to bed. He felt steadier. He didn't like seeing her unsettled, without her usual calm. The crack of the fruit as she split it startled him and he looked at the peel curling from her hand and dancing in a crazy way upon the table.

In a minute she had a saucepan full of slices, with sugar shaken through and some water thrown in and they were at the back of the stove.

‘I see some of the apples on that tree are turning yellow,' Jack said. ‘George can take a ladder and gather some for eating.'

A basketful for him. The two of them admiring, she inviting him to run his thumb over the greeny-yellow skin of the fruit to feel and wonder at the greasy surface. She knew his thumbs. They were long with a bluish tinge to the skin at the joint. Sometimes he sat with his hands on his thighs and the thumbs made deep dents in the black cloth of his trousers. She thought of her thumbs there, surprised that she felt no shame. She would press them deeper than he did and there would be a jerk of the flesh as he snapped his legs open and she on her knees would move her body till it was against his crotch and he could raise his knees and press them into her back and she would bring him even closer with her arms wound and crushed to his back.

Her elbows were amongst her apple peelings, and Jack, although he did not want to, was looking at her face with her fingers pressing the flesh upwards on her cheeks. Then she reached for a colander and put the peelings in.

‘I think, Father, I will go to Percy's for a week. I feel the need for a little holiday.'

He stood quickly and caught up his hat, holding it in a grip as if it was the hand of a friend who had unexpectedly solved a problem for him.

I'll give her five pounds too to spend at the shops there, slip it into her hand as she is going, he thought, turning his face from her with the odd and foolish thought that she might guess and spoil the surprise.

Una could be heard back in the living room.

‘Tell her,' Jack said, and Una hearing the raised voice came with a small, creased, curious face into the kitchen.

‘Your sister is going to the sea for a week,' Jack said, as if it needed to be said very loud to be confirmed.

Una's face went vivid. Her whole body leapt and quivered inside her clothes. Jack looked from her to Enid who seemed shrunk inside her puce dress. She had got thin. She needed a holiday!

‘Violet will come and stay with Small Henry!' Una cried, bringing both hands together in a clap. ‘I shall have him here to fit while I make his christening dress!'

Jack had not wanted that. He had thought the flibbertigibbet might settle to some serious housekeeper if she had the place to herself for a while. It would help prepare her when she and the fellow …

But he wasn't going to object. His Enid must get away for her holiday without disruption. She might finish up not going at all if there were arguments.

Enid was making the hash with mechanical hands. Small Henry! She had not thought of him for hours. His little shape rushed accusingly at her, and although his eyes were squeezed shut his face wore a hurt look. Small Henry, forgive me! Don't hate me. Please don't hate me! I'll make it up to you.