Amy's Children (10 page)

“Ooh, you're awful, Harry!” cried Miss Armstrong, mostly called Army.

Behind Amy's back Amy was called Chook, since her name was Fowler. She smiled when she found a little note on the floor by Miss Harris's desk which read “Ask Chook for the heater”.

The office was cold in winter and Amy had asked Lance for a radiator. She promised to supervise its use, only to warm the room for a couple of hours each morning, and again on very cold afternoons for the last working hours.

“Thank you! Thank you very much indeed, Miss Fowler!” cried the chorus of voices when it arrived. Amy smiled at the emphasis on her name.

They warmed one foot after another, hurrying back to their places afterwards for Amy remained at hers, her feet in beige stockings and well polished shoes crossed elegantly, not feeling the need for warmth, or stoically setting a good example by placing duty before personal comfort.

Lance suggested a heater for the fireplace in the Petersham house.

“No, no, please!” Amy cried. “I'd have to go on a waiting list to get one, and the summer would be here and I wouldn't need it. Please! The other stuff is enough.”

That was a three-piece lounge suite in rose-coloured velvet splashed with brown flowers, a carpet square and a cabinet with a flap that dropped down for a writing table, with glass-fronted doors on either side. Amy looked forward to the time when she could afford some pieces of good china to put behind the glass, but did not mention this to Lance, afraid he might offer to provide them.

Amy explained the furnishings to John while he sat on the extreme edge of a chair, looking back over his shoulder at the rest of it, wanting to put it as far from him as he could. Amy, in her irritation with him, crushed herself into a corner of her chair, her bare toes tickling the velvet. I'm determined to enjoy it no matter what the silly goon thinks, Amy told herself. Sit on the blasted floor if you want to.

“Shut the door when Mum comes,” was all John said.

I'll do nothing of the sort, said Amy to herself when he had gone. She went to the foot of the stairs to call the Misses Wheatley.

“Come and see my pretties!” she cried out. The Misses Wheatleys came with Grace in the lead.

“We saw it come!” she said. Heather dented her knee quite sharply under Grace's right buttock.

“We were worried it might be burglars,” Heather explained.

“I'd have precious little to burgle!” Amy answered. “Except for this. What do you think?”

“It makes our stuff seem so old-fashioned!” Heather cried. She stroked a chair arm and Grace put out a foot in an old-fashioned black lace-up shoe such as nuns wear and stroked the carpet, the plainest one Amy could find, light brown in the centre with a darker brown border.

“Real carpet,” Grace said.

“But I love your hooked rugs!” Amy cried. “You know I do!

“It's just a start. I'll get curtains and a little table when this is paid off!”

That wasn't totally a lie, she assured herself. She estimated six months' worth of pay rise in the furnishings. I hope it doesn't get out of hand, she worried.

She closed the door quite sharply when she went out and the Misses Wheatley, starting up the stairs, looked back surprised.

The following Saturday she opened the sitting room door ready for Daphne's visit.

I will tell her the truth, she decided, going in with a jug of wallflowers for the mantlepiece.

John came with his mother and Amy fried chops for dinner at twelve o'clock. He brought a hammer, nails and screws in the old canvas shoulder bag he carried his sandwiches in for work, to repair the casement window above the kitchen stove. Dear old boy for remembering, Amy thought, seeing it as a gesture of forgiveness for the furniture.

Daphne made it easy for her too. “John said you got some new things for the front room,” Daphne said. “Don't tie yourself down with payin' a lot of stuff off, or you'll land in trouble. You might lose your job. You never know.”

“Oh, it's nothing like that!” Amy cried truthfully. “I'll watch the chops and John will show you.”

When they came back to the kitchen Daphne said that Amy could have the little table they had moved to the end of the hall where Peter stacked his books for school and college.

“Oh, can I?” Amy cried, in danger of injuring herself when she clapped her hands to her face still holding the cooking fork. “I've always loved that little table!”

She turned back to the stove and Daphne saw the drooped bow of her apron at her waist. She put on a carefully controlled face.

“The news from Europe is terrible. And all those taken prisoner by the Japs. Thank God he's done with sufferin'.”

John on a kitchen chair cleared his throat, and stared with hunger at the window he was to mend.

“How's Uncle Dud?” Amy asked. Dudley was no friendlier towards Amy than in the old days, but she kept up a show of concern for him.

“His old cricket comes first as usual and you daren't open the paper before him!”

Amy dared not smile. But you like your mats kept straight and the blind down so as not to fade your lounge, now don't you? Amy was conscious suddenly of the way people clung to their habits to make grief more tolerable, to keep up a pretence of nothing changing, despite the intervention of death. She had not thought of Dudley as grieving for Peter. Now she saw him with his head down on his way to cricket, a miserable ache in his heart, fearful of coming upon the young men of Peter's age, gathered around the pitch. Worse still, Daphne's tight cold face said that Dudley did not miss Peter at all, never thought of him, whereas she grieved every minute of her waking life.

I am glad I am done with marriage, such as it was, thought Amy. All the misunderstandings. I would never want to be part of it again. You are lonelier married, far lonelier. I am not lonely at all. Dear little table! She transferred it from the Coxes' house to her sitting room, placing it at the end of her lounge, and pictured herself curled up drinking a cup of tea there and working with her little account book. She kept strict control of her income, buying only the plainest food, budgeting so that the rent and gas and light bills never fell in arrears. I would rather have a little table than a man, she told herself, bustling about the kitchen, cleaning up after the meal, trying to keep a smile from her face lest Daphne think her strange.

“Now let's sit down on the new chairs, while John does the window!” Amy said, leading Daphne towards the sitting room. She was crossing the hall when the doorbell rang.

Opening it she found Lance Yates there.

“Why, Mr Yates!” cried Amy. “Aunty Daph, this is Mr Yates. I wasn't expecting to see you! But come in, do come in, Mr Yates!”

Oh what a fool I sound, Amy said to herself, pretty sure her face was red. I've said his name too many times. Aunty Daphne will think something is going on. Nothing is going on!

She was relieved to have her back to them both and wished for something to do, cushions to plump up, instead of standing, feeling such a gawk.

“I've been to the factory,” Lance said, sitting on a chair, showing no familiarity with it. “And I dropped in to tell you what we are planning.” He gave Daphne a smile as if she would appreciate the wisdom of this course of action.

“It's quite a madhouse at Lincolns as Miss Fowler will tell you. Once work starts you don't get a chance for a private conversation all day.”

“I know that well,” Daphne said. “I was a machinist. That's where I met my husband. He's a tailor.”

A little trickle of amusement ran into Amy's brain. Here was Daphne using Dudley's trade, allied to Lance's, to establish a bond between herself and Lance. But for no reason that she could name, she was pleased Daphne appeared to like Lance.

But what was Lance here for? To tell her of major changes at Lincolns? Selling out, closing down, her job gone? A fire burning it to the ground? Now Lance slid his eyes away from Daphne to her and she saw, as she often had before, they appeared like his skin to have a light application of oil.

“We're taking over the place next door,” Lance said.

Amy knew the place. A dark little boot repair shop with a back door opening into a hall where the bootmaker lived in the two rooms opening off it. He had a small child and a wife heavily pregnant with another. They were going to the country town of Guyra in the west of the state to live with the wife's family and await an opportunity to open a bootmaker's business there. The fresh air would be good for the children after Newtown, the pale thin young man (who appeared to need the fresh air most) told Lance. The man coughed a lot, fascinating the tough slum children with the way his cavernous chest leapt and quivered under his liberally darned grey jumper, as if someone had dropped a handful of grasshoppers in there. They would prolong their visits to the shop, hoping he would have a coughing turn to enliven the errand.

But what did the Yates brothers want the shop for? A dry cleaning shop, Lance told Amy. There were no others in Newtown, and when the war was over and the men out of uniform and in suits again there would be plenty of business.

“Women will want to get away from the washtubs and get their silk dresses cleaned for them when it's safe to go out after the blackouts.”

Lance made it sound a wonderful glamorous time and his oily eyes told Daphne it was the kind of life she was suited to. Daphne stroked a mauve silk thigh, glad she had chosen that dress to wear.

Amy closed the door on John's hammering. In a little while Lance stood up to go. “That's it then,” he said, the businessman with no thought of prolonging the visit. Amy timidly offered tea. I've never given him a cup of tea, she thought. Perhaps I won't get it right! He refused with a smile that drew Amy and Daphne together on the lounge, cementing their relationship with a tender blessing from his eyes. They did not move, yet he seemed to have drawn them physically closer together.

Amy let him out the front door and when she closed it John made a large single bang with his hammer.

Daphne rushed to the kitchen. “So rude to bang away there and not come in and say hello to that nice man! Where are the manners I taught you?”

John put the hammer in his bag and looked for splinters of wood among the gas jets of the stove, brushing at it with his big hands.

“Oh, leave him alone!” Amy said. “Look at the marvellous job he's done on the window!”

“Just for that you can walk back with Amy's table!”

“Oh, that's too much to expect!” Amy cried, though she could hardly wait to get the table in her sitting room.

She stole a glance at John's face. “But if he does he can stay and have tea with me. We'll have a can of tomato soup between us and toast the rest of the bun loaf.” Amy had bought a loaf of sweet currant bread to follow their chops.

John carried the little table across his shoulder on their walk back from Annandale.

“Oh, what an eventful day it's been!” Amy said as they turned into Crystal Street.

It was not to end there. Sitting on the steps in front of her locked door was a young man in soldier's uniform and a girl in a too short winter coat over a pale green cotton dress sprigged with violets.

It was Amy's brother Fred and Amy's daughter, Kathleen.

Amy would have found it hard to believe Kathleen was there, except that she slept beside her that night in the three-quarter bed Amy was now glad she'd bought, although a single one would have cost less.

Fred had been home on his first leave after joining the Army and had brought Kathleen up to Sydney with him.

“You came to Sydney before to join up and didn't come and see me or Aunty Daph!” The rebuke was for May, rather than Fred. Amy sensed swiftly and accurately that May's lapse in letter writing over the period was due to the scheme kept from Sydney, since given time Amy might have raised objections.

Amy looked at Fred's face for the man who must be there to replace the boy whose face hungered for change when he handed up her case to the mail car those years ago.

Fred's top teeth protruded slightly in his round face. He had a habit of running his tongue over them before he spoke, needing to bring his chin forward with the effort entailed. Amy wondered if he thought this helped in bringing the jutting teeth into a straight line.

Fred explained that he was not sure of the way to Annandale and went almost directly to camp after his medical. Then he was given leave to go home to Diggers Creek before he got a posting.

“Where to?” Amy cried, thinking of Peter who died in New Guinea without any of them being aware he was there.

“I don't know at all,” Fred said, forgetting to wash his tongue over his teeth and letting his eyes rest on his big boots on Amy's carpet.

Kathleen had wriggled herself into a corner of the lounge and was stroking the velvet near her, discovering the raised edges of the rose, then raising her face to show her pleasure and compliment Amy.

Amy wondered if she was missing the old leather couch with the raised end on which the children rode. Then with a hot face she looked away from Kathleen, aware that she would have outgrown that childish game. She'll be a woman in a few years, Amy thought, seeing the sprawl of her long legs in their white socks and black shoes fastened with a strap across the instep. Will I have to buy new shoes when they wear out, Amy worried, taking her eyes away, unable to bear to look too long in case there were already signs of wear.

Fred, rolling a cigarette, hoping Amy would take note of this elevation to manhood, looked across to explain about Kathleen.

“She has to go to a better school, according to Ma.”

Kathleen's young fingers dug around a rose. Only a sweep of brown eyelashes quivered agreement.

“Tell Amy,” Fred said, realizing too late he should have put the word mother in somewhere. But Amy did not look to him at all like a mother.