Mud and Gold (47 page)

But there was another element in the blend,
one she could not identify; no, two of them. Both seemed familiar,
and one made her shudder a little, at an unpleasant association
that she could not grasp hold of. What was that smell?

David pressed his lips to a part of his
father’s cheek not covered with beard, but he screwed up his little
face as he did so. ‘Pooh! You smell funny, Papa.’ He closed his
eyes tightly for a moment, then opened them wide and smiled at
having solved the riddle. ‘You smell like a lady!’

‘Stop talking rubbish,’ Charlie growled.
‘And that’s enough of all this kissing me like you were a
baby.’

He made to push David from him, but Amy had
already snatched the child away. She turned from Charlie, knowing
that her face would betray what she had just realized.

‘Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.’
That had been one of her grandmother’s sayings, usually uttered
when Amy came out with something unexpected. The missing elements
of that smell were now so obvious that she wondered at her
stupidity in not recognising them before. Beer and gin, that was
easy. And sweat; he had been working hard, all right, though not at
any honest labour. But now she knew what made up the whole: cheap
perfume that accentuated rather than hid the smell that had made
her shudder. It was the smell of their bed after Charlie had
mounted her.

A woman! He’s been with another
woman!
‘Lady,’ David had said, but that was not quite the right
word. It would not have been a ‘lady’ that Charlie had found to
drink gin with and roll among dirty sheets. He had been with a
whore.

She schooled her face into a bland
expression, and turned back to Charlie. He was staring at her; she
returned his look as if nothing out of the ordinary had
happened.

‘What a silly thing to say, Davie! Come on,
I’ll put you to bed so you won’t annoy Papa with your nonsense.’
She even managed a small laugh.

When she had seen both boys settled in their
bedrooms, she walked briskly through the parlour. ‘I’m going to bed
now, Charlie,’ she said, still careful to sound untroubled. ‘I’m a
bit tired, I don’t think I’ll do any sewing tonight.’

‘Please yourself,’ he grunted in reply.

Once safely out of sight of Charlie and the
boys, Amy dropped her rigid self-control. She caught sight of
herself in the mirror, white-lipped and eyes wide.
Whore. Whore.
Whore
. The name Susannah and Charlie had both flung at her
echoed in her mind.

Amy moved mechanically, and was vaguely
surprised to find herself in her nightdress and lying in bed. She
stared up at the ceiling, clenching and unclenching her fists until
she realised what she was doing and forced herself to relax her
aching hands.

Anger was not something Amy had allowed
herself to feel for many years, and the strength of her emotion
frightened her. She wanted to smash something; preferably something
Charlie valued. She wanted to shout at him; to hurl back some of
the abuse he had heaped on her over the miserable years she had
spent with him, trying so desperately to please him, trying vainly
to earn his respect since affection was not to be hoped for. She
thought back over those mysterious outings he had made over the
years, and remembered with startling clarity the first of them: it
had been the morning after Malcolm turned six weeks old, when she
had had to do her duty and had been unable to hide the agony it
gave her. ‘Useless bitch.’ She heard the words again, felt once
more the hurt of them. And he had left her alone with Malcolm, the
places where she had been torn still throbbing from his thrusts,
while he diverted himself with a whore.

But she could not afford to feel anger. She
gradually became calmer as the reality of the situation pressed in
on her. He was free to do what he wanted. He had been free to do as
he wished with her since the day she had married him, and his
betrayal did not change that. He called her a whore for her sin
with Jimmy, but now that she had discovered his faithlessness the
only thing she could do was pretend to be as ignorant as ever. If
she confronted him with what she knew he would beat her, perhaps
using the stick that leaned against one wall of their bedroom, and
then order her not to speak of it again. She could at least save
herself the beating if she kept silent.

She heard him moving about in the parlour,
and knew he would soon come to bed. Another flash of anger shook
her, followed by a stab of fear. He was going to come into the room
and climb into bed with her. What if he chose that night to mount
her?
I can’t. I can’t pretend not to know. Not when he still
smells of another woman
. Disgust was a bitter taste in her
mouth at the idea of having him thrust that thing inside her when
it had so recently been in a whore.

It suddenly struck her that it was not going
to happen. Charlie could only manage to take out his lust on her
once or twice a week, and even then he sometimes had to admit
defeat and roll off her exhausted but unsatisfied. He had spent the
afternoon with a whore; that was a guarantee of an undisturbed
night for his wife.

Amy closed her eyes and pretended to be
asleep when Charlie came to bed, while her mind turned the puzzle
over and over. But when she at last dropped off into genuine, if
uneasy, slumber she had still not decided what emotion she felt
most strongly at the idea of Charlie with a whore. Was it anger? Or
hurt? Or (a small voice whispered in her head) relief?

July – November 1890

The Leith family gained two new members that
July. Early in the month Sophie gave birth to a sturdy boy for whom
no name but John, after his father and grandfather, was considered.
To avoid the confusion of three generations in the house with the
same name, the youngest John was from the beginning referred to as
‘Baby’ by the rest of the family.

The nurse did not have to wait two weeks for
her next patient to need her; Jane’s baby decided to come a week
early, so that there was a mere nine days between the two cousins.
If Harry was disappointed at having a second daughter he showed no
sign of it to those around him, declaring staunchly, ‘There’s
nothing wrong with girls, there’re plenty of boys around here,
anyway.’

There should have been three new
grandchildren for Jack that year, but it was not to be. Amy had her
third miscarriage late in July, and in September she had several
days of bleeding that seemed too heavy for a normal monthly flow,
accompanied by painful cramps. She was not sure if it should be
counted as yet another miscarriage, but whether or not it meant
another dead baby the loss of blood left her weary and
dejected.

Every miscarriage left Amy a little weaker,
and getting through her daily tasks was becoming more of a
struggle. Often she would have to stop for a few seconds and gather
strength to go on with heavy tasks. Sometimes she lost awareness of
what was going on around her for a moment or two, and the resulting
lack of concentration earned her many slaps when she did not
respond quickly enough to Charlie’s biddings.

She hated telling him about the
miscarriages, but she felt it was his right to know. Each time he
looked grimmer and more irritable, though he said little.

After the ordeal of telling Charlie, she
wanted to hide from the sorrow of another lost baby, not talk to
anyone else about it. Lizzie noticed Amy’s increasingly wan
appearance, but her attempts at probing for the reason were met
with assurances that nothing was wrong, that Amy was just
‘tired’.

*

On a mild day in early November, Frank was
driving the family home from their weekly trip to the store, having
with difficulty curtailed a long discussion between Lizzie and the
storekeeper’s wife, when Lizzie tapped his arm as they passed the
Royal Hotel.

‘Look at that,’ she said. ‘There’s Charlie
going into the hotel. In the middle of the day! Isn’t that
disgraceful?’

Frank followed Lizzie’s disapproving stare.
Charlie had tied his horse to a hitching rail outside the hotel and
was making his way up an alley. The path led to stairs at the rear
of the hotel, giving access to the upper floor. With a start, Frank
realised just where Charlie was heading.

‘Well, I do think that’s shocking,’ Lizzie
declared. ‘He should be home working—he could give Amy a hand with
a few things, too, instead of wandering off by himself. Do you
know, she has to chop her own kindling half the time? She says he
doesn’t think of it and she doesn’t like to bother him. And Mal
wears her out with his nonsense, too, it wouldn’t hurt Charlie to
cart him into town even if he won’t take Amy. Fancy him going out
drinking! He should be ashamed of himself.’

‘Shh, Lizzie,’ Frank said, looking around to
see if anyone was within hearing distance.

‘I don’t see why you’re shushing me,’ Lizzie
said, making no attempt to keep her voice down. ‘It’s not me
parading about drinking in broad daylight. And Amy’s not even very
well. All he thinks about is his own comfort. You’d think he could
make do with a bit of beer at home.’

‘It’s not beer,’ Frank said quietly.

‘Well, gin or whisky or whatever it is.’

‘No, it’s not drink at all—well, maybe he
drinks a bit up there, I don’t know.’ Frank glanced at Maudie and
Joey on the rear seat of the buggy, but they were too busy sharing
out their haul of sweets to take any notice of the adult
conversation. ‘Men don’t go round the back and upstairs at the
Royal for a drink.’

‘What do they go there for, then?’

‘It’s… well, there are women there,’ Frank
said half under his breath.

Lizzie frowned at him in puzzlement, then
her eyes grew wide. ‘Women?’ she echoed. ‘You mean
whores?
’
She mouthed the word silently.

Frank nodded. ‘That’s right.’

Lizzie opened and closed her mouth several
times without saying anything. It was so unusual to see Lizzie lost
for words that Frank could not quite hide a smile. They were out of
town and rattling along the beach before Lizzie had regained her
composure.

‘Well,’ she said at last. ‘Well, I never.
Women like that, right there in the main street. I never would have
thought—’ She broke off in mid sentence and stared at Frank through
narrowed eyes. ‘You seem to know an awful lot about it all.’

‘Me?’ Frank laughed aloud as he caught her
meaning. ‘Hey, don’t go looking at me like that, Lizzie. I’ve never
been up there.’ He shifted the reins into one hand so that he could
slip one arm around Lizzie as she balanced Beth on her lap, letting
the horses slow to a walk as he did so. ‘I thought that was pretty
obvious when we got married,’ he murmured in her ear, thinking back
to the fears that had so racked him before his wedding with the
detached amusement years of happy marriage gave.

‘You sounded quite an expert on those
women,’ Lizzie said, but there was no real suspicion in her tone.
Frank was sure she was remembering his first clumsy attempts on her
virginity.

‘Well, men talk among themselves. You can’t
help picking up things like that in the hay paddock or whatever.’
He gave her a squeeze. ‘Lizzie,’ he whispered, ‘there’s never been
anyone else, you should know that. Why would I ever have bothered
with other women when I had you to look forward to?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Never mind about that, I
was being silly.’ Lizzie looked back over her shoulder in the
direction of Ruatane. ‘Why on earth would Charlie want to go to a
place like that?’

Frank loosed his hold on Lizzie to urge the
horses into a trot as he considered her question. Amy wasn’t his
Lizzie, but she was pretty and sweet-natured. And it was obvious
she put everything she had into trying to please Charlie; he must
be hard to please if that wasn’t enough for him.

He glanced around at his family with a warm
feeling of satisfaction. There was no one else like his Lizzie, but
Charlie surely had nothing to complain about with his own wife and
sons. ‘I don’t know, Lizzie,’ Frank said. ‘I can’t imagine
why.’

*

‘These buttonholes are a beggar,’ Lizzie
complained as she knotted a fresh length of white cotton. ‘That
last one came out a bit funny. Never mind, it won’t show under your
jacket.’ She stabbed the needle into the cuff of the new shirt she
was making for Frank. ‘Amy’s always been so fussy about things like
that, if she did a buttonhole that didn’t look right she’d unpick
it and start again, even if it was just for Charlie—as if he’d even
notice. He wouldn’t be a bit grateful, anyway. Ooh, I had a hard
time being polite to him yesterday, after what we saw him up to in
town the other day.’ She pulled a face.

‘I know. The filthy look you gave him after
church—you weren’t exactly polite, Lizzie.’

‘Well, I didn’t say anything, did I? When I
think of him going to that place—whorehouse, did you say it’s
called?’

‘So I’ve heard,’ Frank said. ‘I wouldn’t
know, really.’ He turned his attention back to the magazine he was
reading as he and Lizzie sat close together on the sofa, sharing
the lamplight and each other’s warmth.

‘I had to be careful not to let on to Amy
what I was so annoyed with Charlie about, too. Not that I had much
chance to talk to her, that grumpy old so-and-so always makes her
rush away.’

‘You don’t think she knows about him going
there?’ Frank asked idly, not lifting his eyes from the page.’

‘Of course not! She wouldn’t put up with
that.’

‘What could she do about it?’

‘She could tell him off, for a start. Tell
him he wasn’t to go back there.’

Lizzie’s indignation had run away with her
usual good sense. ‘Could she really, Lizzie? I don’t think Amy does
much telling in that house.’