The Tying of Threads (15 page)

They were sampling the morning tea menu at Woody Creek’s new tea room – three tables and twelve chairs set up beneath the veranda of Blunt’s drapery store. Two years ago, Miss Blunt had sold her business to John and Pauline Taylor, a city couple who, since N. and B. Wallis had moved into Charlie’s, had become disillusioned by drapery and were in the process of diversifying. Enough of the locals, loyal to Miss Blunt, had paid her exorbitant prices but didn’t feel the same loyalty towards the Taylors, not when they could buy similar items for a third of the price at Charlie’s. N. and B. Wallis now stocked pantihose, underwear and various items of cheap children’s clothing. They were go-getters, and that’s about all Jenny had to say for the pair who’d bought Georgie’s shop.

Maisy no longer entered that beeping door, not since she’d been called an old biddy, when all she’d attempted to do was explain to the B half of the Wallis duo how Woody Creek businesses had never attempted to cut the throats of the other businesses, that there was room for all in Woody Creek as long as everyone stuck to selling what they’d always sold. Her advice hadn’t gone down well, and since that day, Maisy had taken the Taylors under her wing.

‘They did well last Friday,’ she said. ‘Me and Patricia had one of their ham and cheese omelettes for lunch and these chairs were full.’

The farmers and their wives still came to town on Fridays, or the few who chose not to make the longer drive to Willama came in to do their shopping, though the streets, once crowded on Fridays, were no longer crowded.

‘They’ll get no one sitting out here come winter,’ Jenny said.

‘If it takes off, Pauline said they’ll move things around inside and set their tables up in there.’

The male Taylor was a retired baker. He baked in the room Miss Blunt had used as a fitting room, and when he was working at his old trade the shop smelled of baking. On the days he didn’t bake, a whiff of the past still clung to the rear corners of Blunt’s drapery, but the days he didn’t bake were becoming rare. He supplied cakes and pies to the hotel. He’d made and decorated a beautiful wedding cake for the Jenner wedding. A couple like the Taylors would survive, though maybe not as drapers. In the time Jenny had been drinking tea out front of the shop, not one customer had walked in through the door.

‘How did she look?’ Jenny asked.

‘A damn sight happier before she saw Sissy—’

‘I meant Sissy,’ Jenny said.

‘The same,’ Maisy said. ‘Basically the same. Bigger, of course, older, her hair’s half-grey but still hanging around her shoulders, and she had so much hairspray on it, it almost cracked when she turned her head. She was wearing one of those stretchy material dresses that hug every bulge. She’s got a stomach on her as big as I had when I was nine months pregnant with the twins, but otherwise much the same.’ Maisy’s fork bit into a slice of lemon meringue pie. Her tongue tasted. ‘Their filling is more gluey than mine. The lemon isn’t supposed to be gluey.’

‘Did Lorna speak to her?’

‘Lorna didn’t say anything to anybody. Not a syllable. I thought she was going to have a stroke. She turned purple, or her nose did. Did she have a nose job or something?’

Some people never change. Maisy hadn’t, or not in personality. She took up a lot less space these days, ate only a portion of the lemon filling, all of the meringue, but didn’t touch the pastry. Egg whites were full of protein, she explained. Dieters required plenty of protein and as she no longer used sugar in her tea, the body needed a certain amount of it to supply energy.

She’d been the best cook in town for sixty-odd years, had won first prize at the CWA’s cooking competitions every year until she’d started counting calories.

‘You know how people say, “She went as white as a ghost”? They do, or Lorna went yellow – except for her nose – and all I was going to say about it was that whoever did the work ought to be sued for malpractice. She used to at least have a nose that matched the rest of her hatchet face. It’s a scarred blob of a thing now.’

‘I’ve seen it. Go on.’

‘There’s nothing to go on with. I hotfooted it back to the taxi and told the driver to go. I wouldn’t have seen as much as I did if Maureen hadn’t told him to wait.’ She hunted a fly eager to taste her pie, then ate a little more of the lemon filling. ‘That day I ran into Amber in Woolworths, I should have twigged. I mean, seeing her, and then Lorna on the same day, and sort of in the same place, should have got me wondering, but I didn’t even think about them in the same breath. I mean, it would have been too ridiculous. And it is – or it was.’

‘Did Amber say anything to Sissy?’

‘Not while I was watching. She was watching Lorna, not Sissy.’ Maisy pushed the plate from her reach and sat back in her chair. ‘Remember that Reginald cousin of your father’s?’

‘Charles the parson’s son?’

Maisy nodded. ‘That’s who she’s married to.’

‘Who who is married to?’ Jenny asked.

‘Sissy.’

Jenny’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re kidding me?’

‘I’m not.’

‘He’s old,’ Jenny said.

‘He’s ten years younger than me. I remember thinking what a nice sort of boy he was when he came up here that time to bury Norman’s mother. He looks like a walking skeleton and I could smell the drink oozing out of his pores, and at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning out front of a church.’

‘What the hell possessed her to marry him?’

‘God knows, but she’s married to him. Did your father ever talk about a cousin Alma?’

‘He had a million cousins, Maisy.’

‘She seems a nice enough woman. Sissy told me on the phone that Alma was engaged to a bloke during the war and he didn’t come back to do the right thing by her. She’s got a daughter. They lived with Alma’s father until he died, then the sisters and brothers – there’s about ten of them – anyway, they all put in money and bought them a house near Lorna’s.’

‘Dad told me once that his mother was one of thirteen.’

‘An army of them came up here to bury her. We had trouble finding enough beds. I squeezed in three of your father’s male cousins. Vern took two or three couples, Lonny and Nancy Bryant had five staying out at their farm the night you turned up.’

‘Fifty-five years ago,’ Jenny said.

‘You can’t be fifty-five!’ Maisy said, then shrugged. ‘I suppose you must be. Which reminds me – Alma was saying when we were out front of the church that her sister saw your mother – that Juliana woman – or what she said was that her sister Clarice saw the foreign woman who was found dead up here that night – saw her while she was alive and pregnant – on the train up here – which seems like yesterday, not fifty-five years ago,’ Maisy said.

‘Did the Duckworths buy Reginald a house?’

‘They got them a Commission flat in one of those big blocks of units they’ve built in Collingwood, or near Collingwood.’

‘That’s miles from Kew. Why go to church at Kew?’ Jenny asked.

‘The Duckworths take turns at having them out for Sunday dinner,’ Maisy said. ‘Sissy told me she’d spoken to Lorna at the church before and that they’d seen your mother before but didn’t recognise her until she heard her voice – while Sissy had her back turned. It’s funny that. I used to be able to pick Bernie and Macka by their voices if my back was turned, but face to face I never could. We never hear from Macka, you know. Not once, not that I’d expect him to write; neither one of them wrote more than half a dozen lines all the time they were away in the war, but he could have phoned. I thought he’d have the brains to see through that woman in a week and come running home.’

Disinterested in talk of the twins, Jenny ate the last of her vanilla slice then pushed the plate to the edge of table where a beady-eyed sparrow might steal the crumbs. He wanted them. He flew in to perch on the back of a spare chair but failed to find the necessary nerve to fly to the plate.

Norman used to feed the sparrows at the station; they’d pecked around his shoes for crumbs. She stole a corner of Maisy’s discarded pastry and tossed it towards the gutter, and a flock emerged from somewhere for a free meal.

‘You’ll have every sparrow in town coming here to eat,’ Maisy said.

‘They might keep the flies away.’

The birds left as fast as they’d arrived, apart from that one bright-eyed hopeful who returned to his perch to eye Jenny’s plate. She stole another piece of pastry, this time offering it on her palm, prepared to sit with her hand extended until greed got the better of that cheeky little coot. Norman had sat with crusts on his palm until temptation had got the better of the station’s birds. My bright-eyed friends, he’d named them.

My Bright-Eyed Friend
, Jenny thought. Amy and Jim had been at her for months to come up with a rhyme. Amy had suggested a witch and goblin rhyme, only because she’d found half a dozen tiny goblins in a box of junk she’d bid on at an auction.

They were magical books. They reminded Jenny of the fairy book Jim had brought one morning to Norman’s station where four year old Jenny had fallen in love with it, then up in Sydney, at a secondhand book stall, she’d found an identical copy and bought it for herself more than for Jimmy. She still had it, and it was still intact. They’d designed their first book,
The Lady’s Garden
, along the lines of Jenny’s old fairy book.

She’d written that rhyme to explain to six year old Trudy how she’d grown in another lady’s tummy garden. Their second book they’d built around one of Jenny’s reworked childhood rhymes. The butterfly book rhyme had been conjured up one night after she’d seen Joey Hall, Elsie’s son, who Jenny had grown with. They’d spoken about chasing butterflies on Granny’s land, spoken until dawn. He lived in Queensland and rarely came home, but when he did, the years slipped away.

Little family going places, Daddy sparrow has the cases . . .

The female half of Taylors’ drapery frightened Jenny’s rhyme and her bright-eyed friend away when she came with her teapot to refill their cups. She was a pleasant woman who had the right personality to make a place for herself in this town. The B half of the Wallis duo had been given the right initial.

Jenny turned to look at the shop she had known all her life. Same window, same veranda, though not quite the same. Concrete had been laid beneath it; a concrete footpath now led to it and away, or away as far as North Street. The once open drain out front was now concrete and the road was sealed, or its centre was sealed.

The last time she’d seen Sissy she’d been standing at Miss Blunt’s counter. They’d had words. After Margot’s birth they’d rarely met, but when they had, they’d always had words. May have had a few more that day had Ray King not parked his motorbike out front, had Jimmy not wanted to take a closer look at that bike. Jenny had gone one way, Sissy the other. Sisters? They’d never been sisters. From that day to this they hadn’t set eyes on each other. How many years ago? The war was over; the boys had started coming home.

Sissy and Cousin Reginald. My God. The one and only time Jenny had set eyes on Reginald had been the day of Norman’s funeral. He’d eyed her. She’d been the town scandal and no doubt the family scandal, an unwed mother of three – though apparently not the only scandal. Alma Duckworth had also produced a daughter out of wedlock and raised her.

‘Sissy used to send me a Christmas card until around eight years ago,’ Maisy said. ‘She didn’t say, but that could have been when she married Reg. She probably didn’t want me to know. By the way she talks about him on the phone, she can’t stand the sight of him.’

‘God help him.’

‘She wouldn’t be easy to live with. She was a bugger of a kid,’ Maisy said.

‘I lived with her, Maisy, and she couldn’t stand the sight of me, either.’

‘Your mother was much the same as her when she was young. She led your gran a terrible dance. I was down there the day she tried to talk Amber out of marrying your father.’

Granny had tried to talk Jenny out of marrying Ray. She hadn’t listened either, nor had she when Ray had come back to town with his two babies. Should have told him to go. Instead she’d spent years caring for Donny and Raelene. Wasted twelve years of her life—

Maisy was talking, and when she mentioned Norman, Jenny reined her mind back from its wandering. ‘I always had a soft spot for him, and the things they wrote about your father in the paper that time when they were trying to get your mother released from the asylum. They should have been sued. Your dad worshipped the ground Amber walked on. He came to life when she walked into the room. She could be charming when she felt like it, and some nights she’d play up to your dad and he’d almost wriggle like a pup with pleasure. I remember one day she came over to my place in hysterics. Norman had got down on his knee and asked her to marry him. She’d had no intention of marrying him then.

‘It was later,’ Maisy said. ‘I was pregnant again, and she asked me what it was like having kids to a man I didn’t love. She knew I’d married George for his house. I remember telling her that I loved his kids and they loved him, so I loved him too. Then the next thing I knew, she and your father had set the date.’

‘He didn’t own a house?’ Jenny said.

‘He lived in one in the centre of town, and it was furnished better than most. You’d remember the parlour and the crystal cabinet. Amber and your gran used to eat off tin plates and drink out of enamel mugs – not that I’d ever say a word against your gran. I loved her and her cosy little hut. I spent half my life running down there when I was a kid. Anyway, six months after the wedding your mother told me she’d made the biggest mistake of her life. “And don’t you dare tell Mum I said that,” she said to me. She hated your gran for being proved right.’

‘Why would she call herself Miss Duckworth?’ Jenny asked.

‘That’s got me beat. It led to her downfall. And telling them that her father Charles had been an Anglican minister. For a while, Alma thought she might have been their Parson Charles’ illegitimate daughter, except Miss Duckworth had said she’d lived with her father in Launceston until his death. It was the Tasmanian branch of Duckworths who found out there’d never been a Charles Duckworth parson in Launceston, which is what got them suspicious.’