Amy's Children (19 page)

You are stalling, Amy Fowler, she said to her shining eyes in the mirror of the little cane dressing-table.

An opportunity to meet Lance came when Kathleen woke with a heavy cold and Amy, hoping her face did not give her away, insisted she stay at home in bed while Amy explained her absence to Mr Benson. She was aware that it was the exciting prospect of seeing Lance that made her bow in imitation of Mr Benson receiving the news. Keeping her eyes shut and her head lowered for a long moment, she did not know what expression Kathleen wore from her sick pillow.

She caught the tram to give her time to telephone Lincolns from a box and Lance said he would meet her in the tearoom at Anthony Horderns. Amy was joyful at the prospect of being seen with a man by her fellow workers, but this was tempered by the thought that some of them might tell Kathleen. It was lovely to get out of cutting lunch, Amy thought, relishing the asparagus on toast Lance ordered for her.

“We'll drive to the park and sit there for ten minutes,” Lance said.

Ten minutes is not long enough to tell him Kathleen is my daughter, Amy told herself, relieved. They sat squashed together, holding hands, Amy with her shoes off and her toes rubbing gently at the new grass. Her feet were nicely tanned like her legs and Amy, looking at them, wondered how she had ever thought they resembled the Misses Wheatleys'. Lance was smiling down on her feet too. They're probably the prettiest feet he has ever seen too, Amy thought without shame at her conceit. She rubbed a cheek against the tweed of his coat.

“I always loved the clothes you wore,” she said. “I used to say to myself, ‘what will he be wearing today?' and watch out for you until I found out.”

“I thought you hated me,” Lance said.

She pressed her head hard into him as if she would make an opening to pour her love in and he would be convinced this way.

“The city is dancing,” she said although her eyes were actually closed. “What is it doing, a waltz or a twostep?”

“You can dance, can't you? You said you couldn't, but I know you can.”

“Did you hate me that night?” she whispered.

“I loved you that night!”

“Only that night?'

“Not only that night.”

She had to put her feet into her shoes and stand up. She could keep her back to him. He might think her foolish if he saw her tears.

 

Kathleen was to learn about the meeting.

“Son,” Lance had said to Allan on their drive home from work on the Monday after Amy had first telephoned Lance at the factory, “I won't keep anything from you.”

Allan took off his tie and laid it on the back seat with his suit coat. He dressed up for work although he often mixed dyes, pressed clothes in the dry cleaning shop and shared many of the menial tasks of the more lowly paid. Lance wanted to impress on everyone Allan's grooming as a future boss. The good cut of his trousers said so and his sleeve links of silver in the shape of a curled snake with a semiprecious stone for an eye terrified the new girls when his arm hovered over them, as they tried desperately to stop the fabric they were machining from curling like a slice of dry bread. Had they known it, Allan had a secret admiration for their skills, the way they made tiny invisible stitches and slipped thread through a needle eye and knotted the end faster than it took to blink. He didn't want to stand out from them, he wasn't comfortable having to hold his body a long way away from the dye vat to avoid splashes on his clothes. He didn't like it when his tie dangled close to the rim, since he had no free hand to grab it.

Allan was glad to be free of his coat and tie, and added to his comfort by wrenching his shirt buttons open. Lance saw this as a manly gesture, but left his own coat on, feeling like a kind of understudy, as if following the act would detract from its significance.

Of course he's a man! Lance sped past a tram, wondering if Allan, like him, felt pity for people travelling this way and thinking then of Amy and feeling light and happy, because she walked and was different from the ordinary hordes, superior and beautiful, swinging along on her slim strong legs.

It was Amy he was talking about to Allan.

“I love her, son. Perhaps you've seen.”

There was silence but no chilling of the air between Allan's blue silk shirt and Lance's grey pinstriped suit coat.

“Yes, Dad, I know.”

Lance put a hand on Allan's knee and shook it. “God, a man's lucky to have you!”

 

Lance told Allan about the lunch with Amy and how it had come about.

“Is she sick?” Allan cried, leaning towards the wheel and nearly bouncing onto it when Lance had to pull up to let a woman with a pram cross in front of him.

“No! She's looking wonderful!” Lance said forgetting Kathleen, picturing Amy with her shoes off.

“Is it the old one sick or the young one?” Allan cried, beating an elbow into Lance's side.

Lance, unable to believe anyone could think of Amy as old, began as evenly as he could to explain about Amy telephoning because Kathleen was sick in bed—

“But how sick? How sick?” Allan cried, and Lance was afraid Allan might wrench the car door open and leap out.

“She couldn't go to work, so it meant Amy could meet me. We had asparagus on toast.” He thought with remorse of Allan eating the roast beef sandwiches Eileen had made for them that morning and how he hid his in the back of his desk drawer.

Allan put the back of his hand to his mouth and chewed a finger. “I'll go and see her tonight,” he said in the voice of a man. “You can drive me there.”

Lance's first thought was one of joy that he would see Amy. Then he saw himself outside the house crouched over the wheel in the dark and Amy running out angry with him, seconds after Allan ran in with chocolates—

“I'll take her something like a box of chocolates.” Allan pulled what money he had from his trouser pocket, tipping his rump sideways to get it all out, and stirred it with a finger to count it.

“We can say we have to go back to the factory.”

“No, we can't!” Lance pictured Eileen serving the mashed potatoes—her way of scooping each serve into a mound and spooning the peas to completely surround it. It made Lance impatient, she made such a business of it the food grew cold.

Now he felt a film of sweat on his forehead and an urge to take his hand from the wheel and slap it across Allan's face. But he bowed closer to the wheel appearing to go faster. Allan stiffened his back against the seat as if urging the car backwards to Kathleen.

He loosened his body only when the car stopped with a whoosh inside the garage. It was one cut into the side of the rise on which the house was built. The roof formed a deck opening into the house, and Eileen left the door open if the weather was fine and would start dishing up the meal when the whoosh was heard.

Allan thought he might cry at the imagined sound of Eileen's fork whipping hard inside the potato pot. He saw nothing of his father's face because of the dark.

Only the feel of him listening for the light feet of Amy. He twitched about ready to say it didn't matter, he did not expect to be driven to Petersham to see Kathleen.

But Lance put a hand on his knee. “I'll take you there after tea,” he said.

They went out sometimes as a foursome on Saturday afternoons, Lance and Allan dropping Eileen off at her parents' place, then, on the pretext of returning to Lincolns, collecting Amy and Kathleen at Petersham.

Once they went to a picnic spot by the Parramatta River where Kathleen took off her shoes and screeched at the chill of the water, and Lance bought double ice creams for them all.

They stopped at Lincolns before Lance and Allan took Amy and Kathleen home, and turned west again to pick up Eileen.

Allan took Kathleen to show her the new clothes racks in the dry cleaning shop and new overhead cupboards for storing the solvents and spare iron.

He had given the cupboards a coat of paint and when he closed the doors tenderly Kathleen put a cheek on his upper arm and rubbed it.

“You are wonderful,” she whispered. He pulled the transparent covering from the clothes rack and put it over their heads and kissed her.

Upstairs at the same time Lance kissed Amy.

They were by the switchboard and in a little while he turned to it and picked up the telephone, still holding her with one arm. The feel of his arm has changed, Amy thought, slipping out of it. He half turned his back to tell Eileen he would collect her in an hour. Trembling, Amy went and sat in her old chair and opened a desk drawer, then shut it at the sight of unfamiliar things.

She watched Lance's hand go up and smooth his hair at the back. He needs a haircut, she thought, with the pain of a woman who wanted to tell him as a wife would, but knew she hadn't the right.

When he put the phone down he went and stood behind her chair and kneaded her shoulders. She rubbed the back of her head on his stomach and thought again, like a wife, he should control the flabbiness, and felt sad again that she could not help him.

All of a sudden her shoulders went cold. The coldness began to spread to other parts of her, until she almost shivered.

For Lance took his hands away and stuffed them in his pockets and took a couple of paces towards the middle of the room.

There were footsteps on the stairs, Allan and Kathleen hurrying up laughing and making a lot of noise with their feet as if their exuberance was released that way.

They came in swinging clasped hands. Amy tried but failed to get her lips to smile. She got up and tucked the chair neatly under the desk. She turned from their questioning faces on the pretext of looking at her face in the mirror that once hung on the side of a filing cabinet. But the cabinet had been moved and she felt rebuffed as if this had been done to her on purpose.

Allan and Kathleen let go their hands and led the way on quieter feet down the stairs.

 

“Something happen?” Kathleen asked in that kind of voice that does not care too much about an answer.

She was folding washing brought in from the clothesline and making a pile on the kitchen table. She wore shorts and a blouse that slid a little over one shoulder. Most of the time she adjusted it but now they were at home she let it fall and left the strings at the neck untied.

The hollow between her breasts was visible through the opening. Amy half expected her to fling off the blouse and her brassiere too and allow the breasts to bounce in exuberance as her feet did on the stairs at Lincolns.

When the towels and underwear and their Anthony Hordern uniforms were in a neat pile Kathleen flopped down on a chair and laid her face on a rough towel on top.

“Amy,” she said with her eyes closed. “He kissed me under the cellophane. I felt like a bride.”

Amy got up from her chair and swept the pile of things from under Kathleen and carried them into the next room where there was a copper and laundry tubs. Kathleen heard the clatter of the ironing board (which John had shaped from an old door of a demolished building) being laid across the tubs.

“Amy!” Kathleen called. She had her face on the table now, one cheek upwards, her eyes still closed. “Give me back a towel. I need to smell the sun and the wind!”

I know what you want to smell, Amy thought, and sent the iron hard across a tea-towel, burning out the sweet smell of fresh grass and pure air.

“You got the huff Amy? Didn't he kiss you?”

Amy flung the iron onto its little stand and rushed on Kathleen, who was on her feet in time and around the other side of the table. She laughed, believing it to be a game. But Amy's face said differently. Her blue eyes glittered like chipped glass under her sweaty hair, and her breath blew out from a pouted underlip as she charged with her scarlet face first to one corner then the other.

Kathleen's face went sober and she grabbed a chair back for protection, then tangled with the legs, and when it seemed Amy was bearing down on her, pushed the chair towards her and ran past it. She got the front door open in time to escape, with Amy only yards behind her. She flew out the gate, slamming it shut almost on Amy's stomach. One of the Misses Wheatley coughed from an upstairs window.

Oh pull your head in, Amy cried inside herself, running into the house.

Two hours later Kathleen came in and saw the table set and a plate of salad at her place. Amy, seated at the table, was wearing powder and lipstick. Her hair was freshly done and she was in a clean blouse and her old but still respectable navy skirt.

“Did you get anything at Tina's?” she asked pleasantly.

“Two rotten pears and a dirty look from oily Uncle Ol,” Kathleen said, cutting into a tomato slice and laying a piece on her darted-out pink tongue. “Thank you for my tea, Amy.”

“You're very welcome,” Amy said.

That night Kathleen wrote to her grandmother.

 

Dear Grandma, I read your last letter at Aunty Daph's. It seems to me the best way out of the situation is to send Patricia to us. It would be very good for Amy (I call her Amy all the time now). Unfortunately she has fallen for this married fellow and no good will come out of it, only heartbreak for poor Amy. Patricia here to set up with a job, clothes etc. will take her mind off herself. I will inquire at A.H.'s to see if there is anything. I have a junior helping me in books now, so it is too late for Patricia there. But something would turn up. Who knows I might get her in at Lincolns. As a matter of fact the son Allan and I are going out quite seriously. He's a good line and if I may say so, a good catch as he will take over the business one day. Talk it over and write to Aunty Daph when you make up your mind. They are all well there, John and Helen getting married next year if they can find a flat. We are lucky with this house. If Allan and I married (don't fall down in a faint) we could have the rooms the terrible Misses Wheatley have. I am always at Amy to get rid of them. But I think Allan's father (who likes me a lot I know) would probably want something better for his only son. I haven't met the mother, who is a churchy type. Allan goes but only to please her. Hoping to hear from you soon. Love to Lebby. Her turn next.