Loving Daughters (2 page)

3

After tea at Honeysuckle, Enid made a wreath of wallflowers and daisies and laid it in a tub of water on the washhouse floor. There it rocked about, hitting the sides of the tub as if there was something disturbing it. Enid stayed until it was still, holding a lighted candle and the edges of her blouse together at the neck. Cecil Grant, the undertaker from Bega (who had an eye on Enid), had brought a coffin late the previous night. Cecil, his rumbling hearse and the girl's body would pass the night at the Wyndham hotel, the cost included in the funeral charges. The wreath had the effect of returning the body to Honeysuckle just as Enid had it thankfully out of the way. She felt now she should leave the candle burning in the wash house. Oh what foolishness, she said to herself, shutting the door with a brisk little click. It may well burn the house down and bring us more trouble.

She went to the bedroom she shared with Una, passing the kitchen, which was settling itself for the night under the heavy smells of food cooked for the meal when the funeral was over.

The bedroom was once Jack and Nellie's, Jack taking a smaller room when both girls finished their education at boarding school and Nellie by that time dead several years. It was a showroom at Honeysuckle, up a step from the living room and on a level of its own. It had been Nellie's sanctuary, furnished with mahogany pieces shining like dark brown silk. There were two chintz-covered chairs, thick hooked rugs on the floor and a double bed with a handsome crocheted quilt and pillow shams. Enid kept it immaculate, constantly straightening the clothes in the wardrobe, and wiping out the jug and basin on the marble washstand after every use. Lately she had emptied a drawer in the dressing table for the creams and powders Una had taken to using, to save a clutter and spillage on the unblemished surface. Enid saw three of Una in the dressing table mirrors for she now had a dress spread on the bed intended for the funeral. It was a black moire silk, plain except for a pale blue piping at the high neck and wrists of the long tight sleeves. She touched the trimming as if willing it to disappear. Enid glanced at it while she removed the pillow shams and turned the quilt back.

‘Perhaps it could be unpicked,' Enid said. She sewed but did not have Una's talent with the needle.

‘Tonight? Sunday!' Una said with round scandalized eyes. ‘Mother would die!'

Not Mother, Enid thought, taking out the black dress she wore to the last Bega races, thankfully untrimmed except for a large pale apricot floppy cotton rose which she now unpinned from a lapel.

‘Wear your black suit then,' Enid said, receiving her answer from Una's face. Wear the same dress two days in a row? With him to see!

‘I finished the wreath,' Enid said. ‘There were more flowers than for Mother's. But I made it smaller.'

Una approved but both faces were washed briefly with shame at the discrimination.

Una put her nightgown on, full below the bust with lace and tucks. She went to the mirror and brushed and coiled her hair.

Enid in bed blew out the lamp so there was only a fluttering candle on the dressing table to turn Una into a bride.

4

Violet's dream of turning her house into a hospital was reinforced when she took Small Henry home. His wailing through Sunday afternoon and a greater part of the night did not worry her too much. It was rather like an orchestra playing in its rightful setting.

It worried Ned a great deal. He had lost an eye in the Great War and had a glass one in its place, and he turned both, one ahead of the other, on the white bundle Violet carried about, then looked through a door or window as if directing her to take it there.

This is a good way of breaking him into the idea, Violet said to herself, binding a screaming Small Henry into a napkin large enough for a young calf.

Violet was a nurse when she married Ned, giving him that name in preference to Edgar, and being a woman of authority, the family followed suit.

Since she and Ned remained childless, she continued to take cases, or home confinements in Wyndham and nearby.

Lately there had been a dwindling of numbers, due to slightly improved roads and a growing trend to travel to Bega or Pambula to private hospitals there.

Here there were certain disadvantages of which Violet was well aware.

Few timed their trips to arrive with the imminent birth. Most went days or even weeks in advance, enjoying for a while the luxury of sleeping late and meals in bed. Then husbands at home with an added workload, and reluctant relatives caring for other children, soured on the arrangements. The women grew heavy with guilt as well as their unborn children, as hours stretched into days and they watched the arrival of other patients, moaning in labour as they staggered up the hospital steps.

How they envied them, longing for their own pains to start, turning their cheating bodies in shame, even from the lowly maid who brought their food. Many tearfully begged to be taken home, adding to the trauma by returning almost immediately, narrowly escaping giving birth in the hired car or family buggy.

Violet's scheme was to turn her two front rooms, one a sitting room and the other the bedroom she and Ned shared, into wards for a maximum of six cases. One of the other smaller rooms also opening off the hall would be the labour ward, and the opposite one would take most of the sitting room furniture and double as a waiting room. She and Ned could make a room for themselves at the end of the front verandah, already partly closed in and presently sheltering some broken furniture and empty tea chests that held their wedding china while Ned was at war.

The tea chests (and Violet) were housed at Honeysuckle while Ned was away. Violet had her uses there, nursing Nellie through her last illness, then sharing the housework with Enid and later Una when both left boarding school. She was restless without nursing work, for there were few confinements with the men away at war. She tried the patience of Enid, who as young as eighteen was eager to be in full control of the Honeysuckle household. Violet constantly gave advice on cooking and cleaning, although she was slapdash in most culinary skills. She criticized Enid's plans for her garden, causing Enid to go behind the locked door of her bedroom to write to a Sydney nursery for seeds and seedlings, and make sketches of beds and borders. Violet talked at length about enlisting as a nurse and following Ned to England and later to France. (Enid often wished she would, but was too well brought up by Nellie to say so.) It was soon too late anyway, for Ned's eye was shot out and he was invalided home before the war ended.

Violet and Ned named their cottage Albert Lane after the site of that skirmish with the Germans. It was the first built in Wyndham in many years and was Violet's idea, she being passionately opposed to their moving onto Ned's farm, Halloween, where there were suitable share farmers named Hoopers. Let them stay and Ned go there and potter about as the mood took him. A new house was just the thing to rehabilitate him. It was directly opposite the new war memorial too, of which Violet was greatly in favour (then) although part of Wyndham opposed it. Save the money, many said, and rename the public hall, which was next door, the Wyndham War Memorial Hall. Violet threatened to give a piece of her tongue to the source of this proposal, and Ned's good eye watered liberally and his glass one took on a drowned look as well. His hands, growing pale and weak looking, clutched at his knees, for he was either on the kitchen couch or a verandah chair, as if the hands were shouting the words working inside his throat.

But when the pink and grey marble monument was finally up, enclosed with a metal chain suspended from smaller pillars, Violet had less enthusiasm for it than Ned. He would sit on the verandah recounting the opposition to it, now blamed on Eric Power, who in Ned's few trembling words had never heard the crack of a bullet, or lived for weeks on end in wet and rancid clothes, but was most of the time at home in a feather bed, the fruits of which were ten children, considered by Eric to be the superior war effort.

By this time Violet was ready to defend Eric. Sitting near Ned, sewing a dress, biting at a thread impatiently and trying to decide whether to carry on or bundle it up and take it to Una to fix, she informed him, not for the first time, that Eric Power had tried to enlist but was discovered to have flat feet.

Violet kept fowls and ducks in pens not far from the back door. She had in the beginning a modest dream of killing and cleaning the poultry with Ned's help and sending it off for sale to guest houses in the seaside towns of Pambula and Merimbula. She was enthused by the arrival of new life, yellow and tender and fluffy.

But the ducks grew old and scruffy, and the pens dry and brown like the sad-eyed occupants, and Ned seemed to wither too, standing staring at them through the sagging wire. After a while, the squawking, perhaps reminding him of French farmhouses at the other Albert Lane, sent him scurrying into the bush where he would remain for hours.

In the early days when the Herberts were pioneers of Wyndham, an old Herbert woman named Phoebe had been found dead in a hollow tree after she had been missing for weeks. Violet, fearing a similar fate for Ned, would stand on the edge of the bush, only her beating heart breaking the silence.

Later she grew less patient and less fearful, talking aloud to her angry footsteps in the otherwise silent house, saying he could finish up like old Phoebe for all she cared.

But she was not yet brave enough to openly announce her plans about the hospital, warning Enid and Una, who were in her confidence, not to say anything in front of the ‘boys' in case word got back to Ned.

‘He'll come round in the end,' Violet said on this particular occasion, about two months before the birth of Small Henry, visiting Honeysuckle and gossiping with Enid and Una in the living room.

The annual Wyndham picnic races had been held the week before, so the projected hospital had to be shared with that major event as a talking point. Priority was given to the food tent operated by Wyndham's meanest woman, Mrs Ena Grant, wife of the Wyndham storekeeper.

Una flung away the petticoat she was sewing and pantomimed, with exaggerated movements of her slender body and long arms, Mrs Grant removing portions of food from plates filled by other helpers. Then Una became the helpers and put the food back, and Mrs Grant removed it again, and after a while Una's body became a flurry of movement and her head rapidly swung from left to right in pursuit of her opposition, until she was jerking and spinning like a mechanical toy.

Enid with twitching lips got up and straightened the tablecloth after Una had flung herself back in her chair, and Violet used the inside hem of the dress she was altering to wipe the tears of laughter from her eyes.

‘You should take it on,' Violet said to Enid, as she had been saying for the past two or three years, referring to the operation of the food tent.

What followed each picnic races was equally predictable.

A few days after the event the workers gathered for their meeting, ranged on a wooden plank in the public hall, sharing the Herbert women's view that Ena Grant should be removed permanently from the food tent. They waited for Ena's arrival, stern of expression and resolute of mind.

‘If anyone feels they can do a better job, they have only to speak up!' Ena said, opening the exercise book containing her figures, one damaged in transit from the warehouse, but charged to the committee at full price.

No one spoke up although Enid, proud of her skill for management, wanted to. But leaders of charity work in Wyndham were matrons or established spinsters, and Enid at twenty-one might have been verging on spinsterhood but was not yet ready to draw attention to it.

Now Violet, Enid and Una each lifted their chins, like birds anticipating a scattering of seed, something with a taste they knew and favoured.

The food tent! Who gave what and who cunningly covered their donation to take it home untouched? Who dodged the job of stoking the fire under the tins boiling the water for tea, and spent their time flirting with the men leaning on the counter between races?

But there was no time for a burst of words from lips hastily moistened for an easy passage. At that moment Henry's wife drifted into the room, light and ghost-like in spite of her bulk. She took a straight-backed chair near the piano, folding her hands one above the other on her thighs and looked down on them past her stomach under the stretched cloth of her dress.

She had not been included in the outing to the races, but left to drift about the big, cool, empty house where she did no more than wipe a few dishes left by the washing-up dish, not putting them away in their rightful places, and Enid, clicking her tongue at the sight of them, felt immediate remorse, for the isolated, misshapen heap reminded her of the girl herself.

Enid felt remorse again now at the sight of the girl's misshapen body in her unsuitable dress, and wished she and Una had made her something loose and full to wear. Nellie, if she had lived, would have insisted, in spite of the shame and embarrassment the hurried marriage brought. It was hardly worthwhile now, a waste of good material, and Enid shrewdly suspected the birth was closer than the date given.

The conversation stopped, the expressions on the faces of the Herbert women slipped into a coolness, not quite a frown, not totally a lost smile, but features rearranged as in a schoolroom when a loved lesson is over, and the next one is of a more perplexing kind.

Violet, deciding she would do no more to her dress, jabbed the needle through the cotton on the reel and rolled both together on her lap.

She stroked quite gently for Violet at the blue and white spotted muslin.

‘Where would you rather be confined?' she said, and the girl started at being addressed, certain as usual that she would not be capable of answering a question from a Herbert woman, whatever it was.

‘Confined at home or in hospital?' Violet said, now at liberty to frown as deeply as she wanted to.

‘Aunt Violet is thinking of making her house in Wyndham into a small hospital,' Enid said quite kindly as she saw the terror in the girl's eyes at the ordeal ahead.

‘Not immediately,' Enid said in answer to the wild look the girl sent around the room.

Violet stood and stuffed her sewing into a basket and flung it over a stout arm. Small hospital indeed! And not immediately! But she had time only to pout in Enid's direction, for there was the rumble of the mail car in the distance and she had to be on the roadside to hail it for a ride home. She tossed her head huffily to the Honeysuckle doorway filled with Enid and Una as she climbed into the car.

Henry's young wife went off too before Enid and Una had left the doorway. She took the same vague direction Henry had taken earlier, on the pretext of looking at steers in a far paddock. She came upon him prodding with a stick at the edge of a dam and when he saw her with the side of his face, he dropped the stick and picked up some stones and sent them skimming across the water.

‘Watch this one,' he said as the girl dropped onto a log, grateful that her presence was known to him. The child thudded and tumbled inside her and she steadied it with one hand and put the other on the space beside her, wishing for him to come and join her. But he turned from the dam after a while and picked up his coat from a stump, checking that his tobacco had not fallen from a pocket and, putting the coat on, lowered his head and walked rapidly off.

She thought he might be having a game with her, that he might turn and run back, but he went on, growing smaller as he went over the first rise, and she saw only his head bobbing in the hollow as if swimming, and he sailed up the next hill like someone clinging to the crest of a wave. The grass all around him was like a sea too, a whitish waving sea soon to swallow him completely.

She put her hand on her stomach for comfort.

‘He will be different when the baby comes,' she whispered. ‘I know he will.'