Loving Daughters (3 page)

5

In the Honeysuckle kitchen Enid stoked the stove and Una, at a corner of the table, sliced carrots and turnips to go with boiled beef for tea.

‘I'll make an onion sauce,' Enid said, clearing space at the other end for her work, but distracted by some squeaky giggles from Una. Her face was pink and the hair on her bowed head had slipped heavily onto her forehead and her small white teeth and her small pink chin were shaking as she clenched the vegetable knife with its point among the peelings.

Enid, marshalling her features into severity, began mixing her sauce. Una collapsed on a chair eventually, flinging her arms behind her over the back.

‘Where would you rather be confined?' she said in a fair imitation of Violet's voice. ‘I thought the other one was going to say “underneath the big gum in the corner of the cow paddock”!' She took up her paring knife and a turnip. ‘Henry is such a fool!' she cried.

When it was time to find a saucepan she clapped the lid on as if boxing Henry's ears.

‘Now do that properly,' Enid said. ‘The water in first and have it boiling, then the vegetables. And remember the salt.'

Una sewed and sketched with painstaking care, superior to Enid in these skills, and Enid took every opportunity of asserting her authority in the areas where she excelled.

Una left the stove to go to the window and look out. It was a long stretch for her body to the sill, across the top of a line of tea tins, empty of their original contents and now used for biscuits and buns. Her protruding bottom, round as a pumpkin in an old tweed skirt, drew the hem up above the dip in her knees. Enid, frowning on the sight, suggested she go and set the dining table in the living room.

‘It will make it look as if tea is closer,' she said, a logic learned from Nellie.

She was annoyed with herself for talking so long in the living room with Violet and felt a temporary envy of Violet with only herself and Ned to cook for. A meal for two! What would it be like, she wondered, reminded then of the changes to be faced when the baby was born. She saw her kitchen in chaos, with napkins drying by the stove, and a bath tub on the table. It would not do! The girl did not like the country, you could see that plainly. The three of them should go back to Sydney as soon as she was fit to travel. But if they stubbornly stayed …!

Enid's face went hot and her throat tight, and she clasped her nose which had a tendency to turn red when she was agitated. She rushed to the mirror through the kitchen door in the hall to stroke at her nose, only emphasizing the redness with streaks of flour from her fingers. She turned away and scrubbed her face with her apron, and had her breath back in its rightful place when there was the sound of notes struck on the piano, coming from the living room.

That Una! Enid ran, then stopped to walk normally through the door. Una had the cloth on the table but was at the piano, standing sideways, striking notes, her chin on her neck and her hair against her cheek and neck thick as a horse's mane. The loose hair both offended and frightened Enid.

She took a handful of cutlery from the sideboard drawer and began to lay the table, eyes down.

‘Go off and do your hair,' she said.

Una threw back her head, loosening her hair still more. She lowered the piano lid, holding her fingers inside as if she might crush them if her feelings overtook her. She stayed so long with her small pert face directed towards a corner of the room that Enid looked too, although aware of nothing there to hold her gaze.

Enid took up the cruet and swinging it from two fingers walked, almost sauntered, to the kitchen to refill the vinegar. Her profile over her shoulder said see this relaxed body, free of the tension tying you foolishly in knots! Go and do your hair like a sensible girl!

But in the kitchen Enid went to the window giving her the best view of her garden and did not know how tightly she held the sill. Evening was coming on and some oranges and lemons high on the trees burned like small soft lamps. How glad she was she had insisted on keeping the trees, deaf to the Wyndham view that fruit trees belonged in an orchard and flowers in a garden. The fruit had once been small and sour, tossed in disgust to the pigs. Cattle had thrust their heads into the foliage spoiling the symmetry. But when the trees became part of the garden Enid planted ivy at their roots, and it was as if the trees looking down drew comfort from this token of companionship and burst into blossom, then bore bright gold and pale yellow fruit and appeared like crowned royalty, ruling their subjects with a gentle hand, more by example than direction.

Those who thought the trees out of place and Enid better employed inside the house, and said as much to Jack, changed their view as the garden developed into something close to a small, well-kept park.

They praised the elder Herbert girl to soured wives immersed in motherhood and small, dirty houses. The wives' envy turned to dislike of Enid as they waited darkly hopeful for her life to become a pattern of theirs.

Enid watched the may bushes toss their heads about above a bank of salvia, losing its fiery red to the approaching dusk, and a border of white daisies, their navy blue centres no more than a blurred hole.

Yes, I am pleased with you, she said to herself, feeling the tightness around her heart melt like a dish of butter on a hot window sill.

She turned to see Una, binding an old shawl to her shoulders with tightly folded arms, slip through the hall and pass out the back door, off walking to the old racecourse before tea. Well, let her go, Enid thought, taking a stack of plates to warm by the stove. She saw her garden again glancing sideways from the dresser. She hasn't got what I have.

But she did not know which was the stronger emotion, pity or triumph.

Two weeks later Edwards came.

6

A legacy from a bachelor who grew up in Wyndham and later became a successful seed merchant in Bega brought Colin Edwards to the church and rectory of St Jude's

There was no resident minister during the war years, a man coming from Candelo or Bega once a month to take a service.

The seed man left the legacy for the appointment of a minister to St Jude's, and the sum covered a single man's stipend for two years.

It was considered providential by the Bega Parish Council that Edwards was available, his arrival in Australia known to one council member through a relative, a high-ranking Sydney churchman, with whom the member kept in touch, adding an aura to his own humble post.

This was enhanced by taking Edwards in and boarding him for the few weeks spent in Bega adjusting to the new environment.

Edwards came out from England with a shipload of returned soldiers at the end of 1919. He avoided large packs of diggers on the journey, conspicuous in his clerical dress among the khaki uniforms. It was the robust soldiers unmarked by the war who made spitting motions with their lips and snorting noises through elevated noses when close to him. Those on deck chairs with frail hands clutching sticks, and faces hardly less white than their abundant bandages, appeared humbly grateful when he sat by them to talk, although there were padres (in uniform like the soliders) who were carrying out counselling duties until the ship docked.

(These he avoided too.)

Edwards's only brother James was lost in the war. He had risen to the rank of captain and died in Egypt. The event brought great stress and grief to the family, particularly the father in charge of the fashionable parish of Kensington.

Colin had secretly believed he would be pleasing his father greatly by joining the church.

But it was clearly James who was favoured. He studied law, took a degree then joined the Army at the outbreak of war. He died tipping from his horse, like a child playing war games.

Colin, struggling with his studies at theological college, returned home to help ease his parents' grief, or so he believed. When he walked between his father and his mother in the drawing room, his father ran cold eyes over him as if he were a stranger yet to be introduced whom he was sure he wouldn't like.

His mother turned her drowned eyes to the window to give him no view of her face, only her little plump hand holding a sodden handkerchief on her knee.

His father said little about the opportunity of going to Australia. But it surprised Colin to hear how many of his father's colleagues told him he would do a fine job in a new country where there was a shortage of young men trained for the church.

Colin allowed his eyes to say briefly there was no less a shortage in England since the war had taken so many, then he lowered them as was expected of him in the company of his superiors.

His mother wept openly as he was boarding the ship, but he could take little comfort in this manifestation of her love for him (although she may have been weeping for James as well), aware of the stiff shape of his father, intolerant of emotional behaviour.

He suspected the enlisting would have pleased them both. It might have helped avenge James's death for his father and he had heard his mother blurt out to a woman relative, who was on a visit to offer sympathy, that she was so proud of James's legs in their beautiful shiny leggings.

But I am no good at killing and that is all there is to it, he said to himself, watching the great sheet of sea from the ship's deck, surprised that he saw no beauty in it, and came close to hating it for its contribution to his loneliness.

He dreamed of rising to great heights in the church in Australia (a bishop no less – that will show him!) and greeting his parents in his fine house on their visit to Australia.

The dream was disposed of fairly quickly when he got to Wyndham and found the church let the rain in and the damp crept up, staining the wood at the base of the altar and causing mildew on the strip of carpet by the pulpit.

‘I will think of it as God's rain,' he said, leaving it to go into the rectory where the rain had also come in to invade the recess that held the kitchen stove, so that the iron claws of the stove appeared like the feet of a stubborn black steer, guarding his territory with head down, determined to remain, whatever depth the water reached.

Edwards turned some wet wood over, plucking splinters from the short alpaca coat he wore when not in the cassock. It reached to the top of his boots, which he favoured, liking the idea of people knowing immediately who he was, for aside of pride in his status, he was still a little shy at introducing himself.

A little money had been spent furnishing the rectory with a bed and cedar chest of drawers for the bedroom (other bedrooms were left empty), a couch, two chairs and a table for the living room, and a dresser, safe and chairs and table for the kitchen.

‘Quite enough for one,' Edwards said, humble and grateful when he saw it. ‘Quite comfortable. Thank you.'

He wandered about the rectory with an air of ownership when he was alone, the councillor with whom he boarded going off in his old brown Studebaker to Bega. The councillor was glad to have the house to himself, as he put it, although this was scarcely so, for his mean wife ran the house and interfered in the butchery business as well, not serving choice cuts at her table, as you would think, but mutton scraps, pork knuckles and bacon that had been oversalted and had to be soaked in water so long it emerged like old thin grey socks and tasted much the same.

Edwards unpacked his case and put his brush and comb and the circular celluloid box for his clerical collars, a gift from his mother, on top of the chest with a mirror in a wooden stand.

He interrupted his task to glance through the front and side windows although the view was the same from both. No buildings could be seen from that part of the house, although there was the corner of an apple orchard, indicating life somewhere not too far off.

Edwards wondered if the apples on the kitchen table had come from that orchard, unaware that every farm in Wyndham had several trees bearing a January fruit, a dullish red on the green skin, hard and tough of flesh, needing an effort with jaws and teeth to draw juice into the throat.

He did not know as well, but was soon to learn, that the orchard belonged to a Presbyterian family named Tunks, intolerant of other denominations, and unlikely to contribute to largesse delivered to the rectory for Edwards's arrival.

He walked about his living room, glad to see through the windows there the Wyndham Post Office, hall and monument and a corner of the Ned Herbert home. But the silence and the creaking floorboards frightened him. He stepped from one to another, the squeaking under his boots like some protesting mouse. Even leaping across three or four boards it seemed that those he was about to land on set up their squeaking in advance. He sought safety at length on the rug before the fireplace where he stood sweating slightly and clinging to the mantelpiece.

‘Well, it's something I can do, I suppose, when things get too deadly dull around here,' he said, making his way to the kitchen, aware that his voice was squeaking too.

A fresh nervousness came over him there, realizing so little of his life had been spent in kitchens. He had gone to boarding school and then to college, spending only a few months assisting his father's staff before leaving for Australia. He remembered standing in the kitchen doorway at Kensington, looking past a cook and maid working at the table with lowered eyes, waiting for his mother to bring him shoes warmed at the hearth, hurrying in her fluttery way, lest his father come upon them.

Here was a kitchen he was in charge of, and good heavens, what was he to do with it? He stood by the table, grateful for the sturdier floorboards, setting up no protesting squeak. With the apples on the table was butter in a dish, the dish inside a flat wooden box lined with sand. He felt the butter through the damp muslin covering it and touched the wet sand. Keep sand wet, was written in untidy letters on the side of the box. I hope I do, Edwards thought, nervously prodding at the sand, should it dry up under his eyes.

His glance took in the other goods, jam and jelly in tall, thin glasses, pickles in a sturdy jar, a teacake wrapped in a serviette and bread smelling so fresh he glanced about him to check that the donor was not lurking somewhere in a corner.

Also on the table was a little pile of linen, and Edwards laid his hand on the fresh crispness of tablecloths and towels.

Topping the pile were two hand towels, embroidered near the hem with the words St Jude's.

The apostrophe separating the last two letters was so perfectly done, it was as if paint in a rich satiny blue had been dropped from the tip of a brush and fallen in a tear shape.

Edwards touched it to prove there were stitches.

Handsome indeed, he said to himself, I wonder who sewed that?

Una had.