Amy's Children (15 page)

“Would you like a dance?” Lance said before he quite knew he had said it.

Kathleen stood at once and tucked her chair under the table. Lance liked that. She didn't protest about being unable to dance, or hang her head and go red. He looked swiftly at Amy, thinking that was what she might have done. Amy got up a small smile, and Lance thought she might be glad to have the table to herself for a while. He stood quickly as if this was the message he received from her, and went quite eagerly to slip an arm around Kathleen and lead her onto the floor. She put her head back and lowered her eyelids, and laid the tips of her fingers in Lance's palm.

“We have dancing once a week at school,” she murmured. “I am the boy mostly. It's good to be the girl.”

It was a foxtrot and to Lance's surprise Kathleen danced it well. When he paused and crossed his feet and made his body crooked, she ran with her feet slipping in and out in tiny steps to get close to his, not looking down, although people at the tables were.

She was nearly as tall as he was, and he thought he had never had a moment in all his life like this. She was soft and light as a bird, her brown dress birds' feathers he needed to press into to find her body. It quivered but not with fear. This light and lovely creature, scented faintly with boronia, he thought, but more with flesh, warm and neutral. He thought if she were stripped of her clothes, her body would be a paler brown, a creamy gold, deeper than the collar of her dress. He closed his eyes a moment and felt his hand was on the skin of her waist, smooth as the skin of her palm now curled inside his other hand, softer though, more flesh to dig into and spring back, not like the doughy flesh of older women, and he thought with shame of Eileen, whose waist had never been firm, and she didn't like it grasped anyway, and kept her nightdress there in folds, never allowing it hitched higher and often folding her arms on her breasts to keep his hands from them.

This girl, this angel, would be shy, but proud of her body, opening her arms to him, lighting the darkness like a flame.

He took her back to the table and was surprised to see Amy there.

There was no picnic, no meeting with the Yates boy, no possibility of Lance viewing the naked body of Kathleen.

Amy gave Lance her notice, even without another job.

After the dinner she barely spoke to Kathleen and Kathleen gave a show of barely noticing. She went off soberly to school a little earlier than before, saying goodbye to the knob as she opened the door. She crossed the street to Tina's house to wait for her there. Before, it was mostly Tina who came to wait for Kathleen.

Even Tina noticed Amy's mood.

“Jings she's crabby,” she said to Kathleen a few days later as they walked close to the paling fence, taking the short cut to school.

Kathleen stopped, swinging around, lifting her chin, lowering her eyes.

“If you can keep a secret I will tell you,” she said. Other groups of girls jerked past, knees lifted, their tunics playing the pleats, cases clanging against cases, bursts of laughter, a shriek or two, like hurrying navy blue sheep given voices.

Kathleen waited until they were well ahead. “Both of us are in love with the same man!” She kept her eyes closed, only opening them when there was the bite of Tina's fingers into her forearm.

She flew ahead, calling back, “I'll race you!” She didn't stop until she was panting along the school veranda, met there by Miss Parks who said with indulgence: “Not so fast, Kathleen! Ladies don't gallop.”

Miss Parks gave Tina the smallest and coolest of nods, a pupil with lesser academic potential warranting no more; whereas Kathleen was one of the school's brightest students. Miss Parks had her for English and loved her quickness, so many others were intelligent but dreamy. She felt a rising excitement watching her work, throwing that hair around to get it out of the way, face tilted sideways over her essay.

Miss Parks often wondered what would become of her. Dear Lord, she prayed, not a housewife in a dirty little place surrounded by grubby children, and a wet-lipped man with hairs all over his chest coming home the worse for drink.

Miss Parks, aged thirty-eight, shuddered, but felt a creeping of her loins holding the thought to her, transferred to the rub of hairs against her own naked thighs. Nonsense, nonsense! She belonged to a family of eight and saw her sisters, pretty and clever, go this way. But never her. She went to teachers' college, then to university on scholarships. She had been teaching now for sixteen years, and had a good bank account for her retirement. Twenty years on she would go abroad, walk the halls of Oxford, see Edinburgh, France and Sweden, perhaps murmur to scholars like herself, Yes, I was a teacher in a big girls' school. The musty smells of dusty corridors and books were sweeter than the fumes from the Chelsea Flower Show or the perfume factories of Grasse.

Miss Parks dreamed on of taking Kathleen abroad with her, Kathleen a teacher in some big university, Miss Parks the chaperone and mother figure to the lovely Miss Fowler, who was wed to her career as Miss Parks had been to hers.

Miss Parks changed the course of the rush of love in her loins to the slender shape of Miss Fowler. They'd be Parky and Chook to each other, sharing literary discussions and tea and French pastries in a small but elegant flat furnished in exquisite taste. Together, they would observe the crowds on the Left Bank, take long walks, go to the theatre and art exhibitions and talk into the early morning in their shared bedroom.

 

When Amy went to work on the Monday after the dinner she watched for Lance to appear. She would greet him a shade more warmly she decided, send a little message of thanks with her eyes for the dinner.

He usually said Good morning, girls! to the office in general, then Good morning, Miss Fowler! sometimes with an excuse to linger at her desk.

This morning he rushed through with a Good morning, all! and went to Victor's office. Victor was back from his honeymoon, even paler of complexion, due to the misty mountain air, disappointed that Bonnie did not care for long walks, but showed a fondness for the home-made chocolates a village cafe was famous for, and for flirting with the hotel owner who did not disguise his fondness for plump little girls with china blue eyes.

Victor bore it all stoically, looking to the time when Bonnie would be installed in their flat, the upper floor of an old stone house in Ashfield, in a frilly apron, and flicking a feather duster over their new furniture.

Bonnie's old boss in the machinery shop did not replace her. He saved on wages by handling the few customers himself. Reading the war news he was fairly confident it would soon end in Europe and the Japanese would be run to ground shortly afterwards.

He had a stout wife with a lot of greying hair wound in plaits who looked foreign, like a German. He brought her into the shop two or three times a week while he went around the import agents, mainly to keep contact with them, for little new stock was coming into the country and even less was being manufactured for anything other than to help win the war.

He was nervous about Freda who hated the Germans as much as he did, but he was afraid anyone coming into the shop might take her for one. She would have been so hurt if he had told her this, or suggested she change her hair style, she would have cried for a week. He just watched people's expressions nervously when he was there with her, and got her to talk so they would know by her accent she was Australian.

 

Lance made a great show of welcoming Victor back, shaking hands and wrenching at his shoulder, making Victor's face light up, glad the miserable honeymoon was over, and feeling hopeful now that he was back at work, back into the old routine, that he and Bonnie would settle into contented married life, despite her show of impatience and restlessness.

Amy was certain Lance was keeping his back to her intentionally. Her cheeks burned a deep pink. The eyebrows of Miss Ross were raised above her typewriter carriage as she piously rolled paper into her machine.

Amy decided to look for something in her handbag, and seeing the compartment with Lance's note inside about the furniture she gave it a little pinch for reassurance. I am being silly, she thought. He has not changed towards me at all.

“You do these, Miss Ross!” Lance said, coming out of Victor's office with a sheaf of letters. “The replies are written on the back. File them with your carbon copy.”

He put a paper weight on them with quite a flourish and darted out.

Amy heard the clang of metal as the drawer of a filing cabinet shot home. “Ouch!” said Miss Armstrong who bruised her fingers. Watching Amy, she had neglected to get them out of the way.

In the days following, Amy hardly glimpsed Lance except to meet him on the front stairs, on her way to the park to eat her lunchtime sandwiches.

“Good morning!” Lance said although it was past midday. He went faster up the stairs and Amy went slower down them.

Lance had given Victor his rise in salary. Tom didn't think he should have it. Tom's wife Sadie was talking of sending their eldest girl to boarding school to allow her greater attention to her music. Anything extra the firm could afford would be useful for that.

Lance had felt miserable instead of pleased when Victor, thanking him for the extra pound in his pay packet, said it would take care of the weekly repayments on his furniture. Lance didn't want to be reminded of Amy's furniture. He had acted (he told himself) on an impulse, wanting nothing more than to cheer her drab life, and the same went for taking the two of them out to dinner.

That night Allan had been playing a minor role in a school concert. Lance had said he couldn't be there, he needed to catch up on some work at the office before Victor's return. There was no risk of the lie reaching Randwick. Sadie and Eileen were not speaking, so neither family encroached upon the private life of the other.

 

The rift started years earlier when Allan ruined a birthday party for Sadie's and Tom's little Jean. Allan swept a knife blade of cream from the top of a sponge cake and aimed it with commendable accuracy at Jean's forehead.

Jean shrieked and smeared her cheek and new party dress with a handful of the cream. The small guests shrieked too for this was more entertaining than Pin the Tail on the Donkey. Sadie shrieked at Eileen when she failed to chastise Allan, who had whispered to his mother the name Jean called him in reference to his chubby bottom. Eileen with a fat father and two fat brothers felt the humiliation just as deeply.

After the party both women sat by their telephones waiting for an apology from each other. In the end Sadie rang demanding it and Eileen slammed the earpiece so violently into its hook the wall shook, wobbling a picture of the fat father beside it.

 

After the concert Lance failed to attend, Allan at breakfast next morning bowed mournfully over his plate.

“I'll be there next time,” Lance said. Inside himself he was saying how glad he felt to be done with all foolishness, in the next minute bringing a blush to Eileen's cheek with his praise for the crispness of the bacon.

Near the end of the week Amy looked for and found a reason to go downstairs to the factory.

I'll tell him. Now I'll tell him. Her brain tapped out the words. Only her tapping heels spoke them.

The top of Lance's head was visible, bowed between the long cutting-out tables where a hand-operated electric cutter was moving through several thicknesses of fabric. With great concentration, Lance watched the hand of the woman guiding the cutter and gave a little slap of approval to the pile of tunic sleeves she had pushed to one side. He needed to raise his eyes, Amy was so close. She saw them dried of their oil. She plucked a pile of invoices from a spike on a rough little table and ran for the stairs. I hate him, I do, I do. I hate him! So said the soles of her shoes, sluggish on the wood. A great sigh from the presser was in her ears.

That evening over tea in the kitchen, Kathleen broke the silence by asking for money for things from the chemist's for experiments in the school laboratory.

“That's ridiculous!” Amy said. “You're not going to be a chemist!”

“Miss Parks said I could be,” Kathleen answered. “But she wants me to be an English teacher.”

Amy swept her plate to the bench where the washing up was done.

“I'm giving up my job at Lincolns,” Amy said, filling the kettle, the rush of water causing her to raise her voice, the better for her ears to believe it too.

“Good on you, Amy!” Kathleen cried. Amy turned her face in astonishment and Kathleen took the last slice of bread and buttered it with great speed.

Just look at her, Amy thought. Not a care in the world where the next slice is coming from.

“What's so good about it?” Amy asked, taking things from the table speedily too. “Jobs don't grow on trees, you know.”

Kathleen chewed and swallowed. “You're very capable, Amy,” she said with her eyes on the little line John had put up for the dishcloth. Amy took the cloth and the line slapped the wall a couple of times.

“What did he say when you told him?” Kathleen asked.

Amy pointed her chin at the middle of the window and swirled the soap in its wire holder so hard an angry sea of foam swished against the sides of the dish.

“He simply said I was to train Miss Ross to do my job before I go,” she said.

 

“Train Miss Ross to do your job. She's quite able to handle it!” Lance said to Amy when she gave her fortnight's notice.

It was, it had to be, the result of the changes in Lance's life. Allan had started to sing in the Baptist Church Choir. Lance had gone with Eileen to hear him. He had never attended church with Eileen since they were married. He was proud of his son, in his good clothes, his hair done so nicely with just the right amount of hair cream. Eileen with too much scent on was doing all the right things throughout the service. She nudged him when he did not appear to be going to rise with the congregation. He was daydreaming. That was his boy up there, better looking than the others, a bright lad who would take over Lincolns one day. He would join Lance there in what time? Three, four years at the most. Almost tomorrow! My God it was closer than he thought.