Pearl in a Cage (37 page)

‘You are employed to care for the house. Care for it.'

‘She's my daughter —'

‘Which you chose to forget for some considerable time.'

‘Don't you come at me with that.'

He turned, walked away. But the years, those aching years he'd put into that girl. He stepped from foot to foot in the passage, every nerve ending urging him to go. And he must not. His housekeeper must go. The key to his room was in his underwear drawer. He retrieved it and returned to Cecelia's room. She was a heavy girl. It was no small task to manhandle her from that room, fight her into his own, close the door and hold it while inserting the key, but he got the door locked.

Panting, heart racing, he turned to Amber. ‘Your services are no longer required, Mrs Morrison. You will leave my house tonight.'

‘You've always leaned to that other one —'

‘Pack your bags, madam.'

‘You think I don't know why?'

‘Pack your bags.'

‘If I go, I'll take Cecelia with me.'

‘And train her in the ways of a whore?'

‘You bastard.'

‘If I am so, then it is you who have made me so, madam. Out.'

His spectacles lopsided, the bridge wire twisted in the scuffle, he faced her in the passage, his lips a small tight split in the sagging pink cushion of his face.

She went to her room and closed the door. He walked out to the verandah where he stood attempting to adjust his spectacles while waiting for his heart rhythm to steady. Oddly enough, his shoulder, which required little excuse to ache, had tolerated the unaccustomed exercise well. He flexed it, drew a deep steadying breath, set his spectacles back on his nose and returned to his station.

She watched the side gate close, then walked to the locked door and stood listening to Cecelia's injured bull bellow. She knocked, but was ignored, or not heard. Walked around to the window, but the curtains were drawn. Attempted to open a window that had never opened, not when they'd furnished that room as a nursery fourteen years ago. She tapped gently on it, wanting her girl to pull back the curtain. Cecelia screamed, and Amber turned towards his station. He was watching her. He wanted her gone.

This was her house. She'd wed him for this house, and for his mother's furniture, her bone china tea set. And wanted to run from him on her wedding night . . .

She'd tried that. What else was out there? Worse than him, that was what else. Choices had to be made, the bad measured against the worse.

They'd taken her memories in that place where she'd been; this house had brought them back. Her hand on a familiar bowl, and she remembered using the bowl. A tablecloth spread, and she remembered embroidering it.

She walked around the house and inside via the front door, where she stood a moment staring at the hall table. Loved the grain of that timber, and the vase she'd always set on it, a delicate thing Norman's mother had sworn was a gift from Queen Victoria to some Duckworth long since dead. She walked into the parlour where she squatted before the crystal cabinet, her finger tracing the rim of gold decorating a dainty cup. Eight dainty cups, saucers and plates, a tiny milk jug, a delicate sugar
bowl, the large cake plate. All there, all perfect. Didn't want to leave them, or leave her big-as-an-ox baby, her plain-as-mud baby, but her baby.

‘Take a pill,' she said. ‘Take a pill, slow down and think.'

They'd given her two bottles when she'd left that place, a hundred in each. She took what she needed, and who knew better than she what she needed.

He had at one time kept the key to that door on top of the kitchen dresser. She felt for it, but didn't find it. Even if she had, she couldn't let her girl out. He wanted her gone from this house. She had overstepped her boundaries. She didn't like boundaries.

‘Cook him some dinner,' she said. ‘A broth of oleander flowers, a stew of its twigs. A tea sweetened with pills?'

She smiled and looked at the pill on her palm. Too precious to waste on the beast and his stray. She washed it down, then stood on at the window, looking out but only seeing in.

‘Make a start,' she said. ‘Let him see you have made a start.'

Back in the bedroom, she climbed onto a chair and got his mother's case down from its place on top of her wardrobe. Underwear in, hat on the open lid, shoes on the bed. He'd see it when he came in. He wouldn't see her. He'd think she'd gone to Maisy's, gone to her mother's, gone to the hotel. He'd believe what he wanted to believe. Always had. Hadn't changed since the day she'd met him.

Not a brutal man, though. She'd known brutal men. Remembered that too. Remembered everything now.

Outside then, out as far as the front verandah. The bench seat had been bought since she'd left. His packet of cigarettes and matches were on the parlour windowsill. She didn't like smoking, had never enjoyed the habit, but the burning of a cigarette used time. She needed to use time, so she lit one and watched it turn to ash; lit another.

The side gate gave her fair warning. It squealed on heavy hinges and she was out the front gate. It didn't squeal. She walked right, down past the post office, its door closed, past the bank,
taller than its neighbours, down past Charlie White's shop. Her eyes shielded from the cut of a low-hanging sun, she failed to see, or chose not to acknowledge, Jean, who glanced out before closing the old green doors. The corner forced a decision. West, out towards the slaughteryards, the sun in her eyes, or north and over the railway crossing. More people to the north, more eyes to stare, but she couldn't stand the glare. She turned.

A walker passed by. She offered a nod in reply to his ‘Good evening'. No words in her for the outsiders. Plenty within.

Knew every inch of this town, every house, every vacant block, every pair of eyes staring from behind lifted curtains. Turned west again, the setting sun now fallen behind towering trees growing alongside the creek. She followed the creek along a track that ran through the bottom of Dobson's land then through McPherson's. She'd walked this way with her father. Always thought of him in this place. Loved him, loved him, loved him — and hated that old bitch. Wanted that old bitch dead.

Wanted her father's money. Nearly five hundred pounds, Maisy said. Five hundred pounds! That money should have been hers, not that old trollop's who had dragged her from her father's house and back to a hut to rot.

Glanced towards the forest, darkening now. What if she walked down there and asked the old bitch for half of what she'd got? What had she ever given her?

‘Nothing.'

Wanted to watch her grow old, crippled, crawling, begging.

Matches rattling in her pocket. She laughed.

‘Burn the old bitch in her bed,' she said.

Saw him behind her then, a lanky beanpole of a boy she'd seen at Maisy's house. He worked for George.

‘A nice evening, Mrs Morrison,' he said.

She nodded and walked on, followed the creek down to the bridge.

And the bastards with their eyes were there too. Two of them, sitting in her place underneath the bridge, an old one with a long white beard and a younger one, boiling a billy.

She had to go.

Climbed up the bank and out to the road. Go where? She had nothing. Nothing. Nothing. No one. No one. No one.

Threw his matches at a tree and watched them scatter, then turned towards the town.

Lights showing at the McPhersons' windows, dog barking. She walked past, walked past George Macdonald's mill. Turned to the left before Vern Hooper's block. Couldn't face him. He knew where she'd been. They all knew. His daughters knew.

Walked by Henry King's derelict hut. Someone was living in it. Walked the diagonal across the road, across a vacant paddock, taking the route she'd walked on her way to school, cutting the distance where she could with diagonals. Retraced her childhood steps to the school gate, unchanged in thirty years, as the school was unchanged. She'd run down that same verandah, played in that same schoolyard. Happy here, her and Maisy, Sylvia and Julia. Wanted to open that gate and go back to twelve again, before the breasts, before the womb, before . . .

‘Everything.'

Julia was lucky. She'd lived opposite the school gate. Maisy was almost as lucky — her aunty had lived near the Kings. Sylvia wasn't so lucky. She'd lived four miles out, had ridden in on horseback. She'd got lucky later, got married and went to live in Sydney.

She turned to Julia's house, as unchanged as the school — except for the woman watering the garden. It wasn't Julia. Recognised the haircut. ‘Bitch,' she said.

How long had she been teaching up here? Amber was already wed, already thick with Cecelia, when the infants' mistress had come new to town. She'd looked like a girl. She still looked like a girl. Never had a man to age her, that's why. Hated her for her independence, her lack of need of a man to pay her bills.

The hose left to run, the teacher came to the gate. ‘It's Mrs Morrison, isn't it? What a lovely evening for a walk,' she said.

A chimp stretches his lips in a grimace when angry or afraid. Amber offered a similar stretching of her lips as she turned to walk on. Then she changed her mind. She crossed the road.

‘Cecelia is distraught,' she said.

‘I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm afraid we ran out of time, Mrs Morrison.'

‘She reads it well.'

Miss Rose picked up the hose, directed it on a fern. ‘A reading is not a recitation, Mrs Morrison. I did explain to Cecelia that she must memorise it. She was given time.'

Then Julia Blunt popped her head out. ‘I was sure I recognised your voice, Amber. One moment, dear.'

Always smaller than her classmates, now bespectacled, her shoulders narrowed by labour over the sewing machine, Miss Blunt returned displaying a froth of blue, the three rolls of crepe paper transformed into an old-world gown, its ankle-length skirt stiff with layer upon layer of paper frills.

Amber could recognise beauty when she saw it. She knew who'd be wearing it.

‘We're all so proud of your little songbird's voice. You are in for a delightful surprise, my dear.'

‘Her father paid you to make that?'

Amber's question was innocent but her tone accused. Like puppets attached to the same string, the women shook their heads while two mouths shaped the same lie.

‘The costume fund.'

Their visitor stretched her lips in the chimp's grimace and walked on.

‘She is not the girl I once knew,' Miss Blunt said.

‘One hears such terrible rumours,' Miss Rose said.

Miss Rose came by Norman's house on the Thursday evening with the costume, but overhearing more than she wished to hear, she chose not to announce her presence and hurried away.

There were no dressing rooms at the town hall, only the meeting room on one side, the supper room on the other and an open area beside the stage. Windows were uncurtained and thus offered no privacy, which was the prime reason costumes were not provided for the senior students. However, she had supplied a costume for Jennifer. Thus she must get it to the Morrison house prior to the concert.

On Friday at five, John McPherson arrived to transport the last of the props and costumes to the hall, and while he and the costume women carried their loads indoors, Miss Rose ran across the road with the blue, arriving at the Morrisons' gate in time to see the husband removing his wife from the house, while from indoors came a scream she knew too well. Again the infants' mistress turned tail. She'd dress Jennifer in the lavatory.

Time slipped into a different gear between six and seven thirty. Always chaotic, that last hour, the rounding up of infants, the late arrivals, the tying of fast bows, the finding of shoes, and she loved every minute of it.

As did John McPherson, who for the past three years had been setting his camera up in the stage wings to trap the best of the concert magic.

He trapped Jenny in her Alice Blue Gown and matching bonnet, trapped those eyes still wide with surprise, trapped her
shy smile, and in his darkroom well after midnight, when he watched the photograph develop, he knew he had come of age. Only a boy in 1923, his camera new the evening he was called on to aim his lens at a dead woman in a pine coffin. He had wept when he'd developed those prints, wept because the best photograph he'd ever taken was of a beautiful dead woman. At twenty-seven, his camera now an old and familiar friend; he'd captured living beauty.

He made a second print, which he personally delivered to the
Willama Gazette
office on Monday morning, with a brief covering story. And they printed it, on the front page of the Wednesday edition, beneath large capitals: ‘
WOODY CREEK'S SMALL SONGBIRD
'. And below it:

Jennifer Morrison, ten-year-old daughter of Woody Creek stationmaster Mr Norman Morrison, stole the show on Saturday evening with her delightful rendition of ‘Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown'
.

No mention of Amber, who had not yet left Norman's house; his one attempt to remove her having raised the demon in his daughter. Bedlam. Bedlam and worse. He'd walked Jennifer over the road in the dead of night and roused Maisy. ‘For a few days,' he said. ‘Cecelia is . . . is crazed.'

During her menses, that girl had always been at her most difficult. He had secured a booklet instructing him how best to deal with a developing woman. It suggested she should be protected from chills and spicy foods, which could put extra strain upon delicate organs already congested. It suggested the menstruating female should receive tender care, be kept away from parties, dancing and other stimulation. However, her menses this month, having coincided with her disappointment at not taking part in the concert, when added to his ongoing attempt to evict her mother, had caused an over-stimulation. She'd attacked him about the head and shoulders with the heavy end of the hair broom, thrown her meal at him, refused to attend to her hygiene — and wet her shared bed. Her behaviour such
that he'd spent the night of the concert at his station and, had a goods train filled with cattle gone by, he might have hitched a ride with them to a city slaughteryard.