Swords and Crowns and Rings (23 page)

Observing that her sister looked sallow and unwell, Olwyn was not only envious, for it was her privilege to be the delicate one, but inquisitive. Mrs Moy coped with her briefly.

‘It's just growing-up,' she explained. ‘And it will happen to you by and by. But it is not to be discussed by little girls.'

Cushie's disturbed appearance did not go unnoticed by others. Mrs MacNunn, giving the bedroom windows their annual clean, saw Cushie dawdling in the garden across the road, and something clutched her heart.

‘There's something the matter,' she declared to the Nun. ‘I'm worried, Jerry, I'm telling you straight.'

‘Yeah? Go on,' he said, lowering the newspaper.

‘She's got that look about her. I was thinking...she and Jackie always so thick, ever since they were babies.'

‘It's always on the cards,' said Jerry. He eased his aching leg.

‘Our Jackie wouldn't. He's a decent boy.'

The Nun gave her a look.

She burst out, ‘I just got to know, Jerry! I mean, if it's true... that poor kid! And that mother of hers has a lemon for a heart.'

The matter troubled Mrs MacNunn deeply. She spied intermittently from the upper windows, hoping to get some clue from Cushie's appearance as she walked briefly amongst the garden trees. But all Mrs MacNunn could sense was an intuitive feeling. of change. The girl looked downcast, pallid, distrait.

‘If it happened, it musta been when Jackie was back from High Valley that time he cleared out. Wouldn't be more than six weeks or so. Ah, God, I'm shook to know what I ought to do.'

‘We could drop young Jack a note—ask him straight out,' suggested the Nun.

‘Oh, I couldn't! Never! I couldn't bring myself to it,' declared Mrs MacNunn. Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘Such a dear little girl she was, too. Confiding-like. I always felt for her.'

‘You want to put it out of your head, Peggy,' said her husband. ‘Been no gossip around the town, has there? And you know what this place is like. If Prior's pig is in pod, they know it before Prior does.'

Still, Jerry kept his ears open. He learnt that Mr Moy of the Bank had taken an unexpected week's holiday and gone to Sydney for family reasons. He learnt, because he was a drinking mate of the station booking clerk, that Miss Moy, who hadn't been too well, was shortly going through to Sydney to stay with her wealthy relatives over Christmas.

He reported this to his wife. ‘Now, old hen, maybe we're doing the right thing and maybe not, but I think you ought to send young Jack a note and tell him he can maybe see Cushie when the train stops for coaling at Ghinni Junction.'

‘I'll do it!' cried Mrs MacNunn excitedly. ‘And that leaves it up to Jackie and keeps our noses out of it, if they ought to be kept out.'

But Cushie was not being sent to the wealthy Jackamans.

‘If they should ever know!' said Isobel. Her eyes flashed; her pride stabbed her husband in his newly sensitive heart. ‘
That
would be the last straw, to have my sisters crowing over me in such a sordid matter.'

Cushie was being sent to her aunt, Claudie List. Isobel had always detested her, resenting Bede's faithful attachment to this pretty sister who had been a wild devil during the War, and had rightly come a cropper.

Mr Moy was the eldest of his family. The three girls who followed him had gone early into service. He scarcely knew them, and certainly never spoke of them. Skivvies! Best forgotten. The other sister, Virgie, considerably older than Claudie, had disappeared from view in some sordid scandal. Cushie and Olwyn did not even know that they had an Auntie Virgie Moy.

It was an insufferable thought to Cushie's mother that in this family crisis she had to rely for help on the despised Claudie. But there was no one else. And Claudie would be paid well for her silence, out of the trust Papa had left for his granddaughter Dorothy.

‘You're not being fair to her, you know, Isobel,' complained Mr Moy. ‘Claudie's always had a good heart. And even if she did make a mistake during the War she came out of it all right.'

‘At least she has the right connections to help Dorothy out of her predicament,' retorted his wife cuttingly.

Mr Moy flushed darkly. Money would do the trick, as always.

It hadn't done so for Claudie, because the Moys had had no money behind them at all. Claudie, getting pregnant by an anonymous soldier while her husband Billy List was overseas with the AIF, had to have the kid in a charity home and have it adopted out quick smart. But, of course, some nosey parker let poor Billy know about it at once: ‘Dear Digger, it breaks my heart to tell you this, but your wife has been playing around with every Tom, Dick and Harry and now she's had this bastard...'

Billy List, a decent country boy, straightway volunteered for a trench raid, and got a bayonet in the lower gut. For a long time Claudie had gone from man to man, blithe, wayward, always ready for a grog and a laugh, kicking up her heels, funny as a circus, really. But of course, Belle was right: she was common as dirt. But somehow, like dirt,
good.

Mr Moy had even liked the woman she shared her little house with, a Mrs Iris someone. They were partners in a hairdressing parlour and seemed to be doing satisfactorily, Mrs Iris must have put up the money, of course. Claudie never had a sausage. But she'd been properly trained as a hairdresser: how their poor old mother had scraped up the money to pay for her apprenticeship Mr Moy couldn't imagine.

‘You mustn't look down on Auntie Claudie because she hasn't been educated to be a lady,' he said to Cushie. ‘All the money to be spent on education in our family went on me and your poor Uncle Graham, God rest his soul. But blood's thicker than water, and Claudie will look after you and be good to you.'

‘Daddy,' she whispered, ‘I want to marry Jackie. He loves me, really he does. He'd come back to Kingsland tomorrow if only he knew about me...about this.' She said imploringly, ‘Mama made me promise not to communicate with him; but you could, Daddy, you could send him a telegram. Oh, please, Daddy!'

‘My dear girl, he's under age; his parents would forbid the marriage,' said Mr Moy. ‘For goodness sake be sensible. The thing's quite impossible. Outrageous! To think of my daughter,' he gulped, ‘being married to that young scamp, that unprincipled seducer...'

‘He didn't seduce me, he didn't!' cried Cushie, so wildly that Mr Moy had quite a
frisson.
‘If you want to know, it was I who suggested it, not Jackie.'

Mr Moy could not believe it. The shock was fearful. He had to sit down.

‘God grant your mother never hears you say such words,' he said in a groan.

Sitting there, he felt himself shrink, like a snail with salt on it. The secret, ineradicable carnality of these young girls! Virgie and Claudie, gorgeously pretty, lighthearted and empty-headed, flashed across his mind. Tears, yells, shame, grief! It was insupportable what parents of girls had to suffer.

And yet somewhere at the back of his head there was a small pleasure: Cushie was a Moy, not a Jackaman. For who could imagine Isobel, or indeed any of her snobbish, affected sisters, getting into such a predicament? Too mean and too artful, thought Mr Moy in a rare burst of perspicacity.

‘We shall say no more. I am more grieved and horrified than you can imagine. I ask only that you obey your mother and myself to the letter. You owe us something, you know, for all the shame and anxiety you have caused us.'

Cushie subsided into a spiritless melancholy. Even Olwyn's inquisitive questions failed to arouse her. The little girl—she now seemed very young indeed to Cushie—had become even more fragile, with a sallow, birdy face.

Cushie had never been able to get close to her sister, but now the reedy voice, the pathos of the illness-racked little body, gave her a physical pain in the chest.

Olwyn seemed to have changed. With some belated affection or anticipated loneliness, she kept bringing little things for Cushie to look at. Once it was a family album in which she had found a portrait of their mother as a young girl.

‘Look, that's Grandmama Jackaman.'

Cushie looked at the light-eyed, Irish face under a frizzy, Queen Alexandra fringe. It was pretty, and rather mulish, not at all like the fat, crumpled old face that had smiled moistly at Cushie at the funeral of Grandfather James, twenty-five years later. Against her leant a little girl. Her fair hair was pulled back under a thin tortoiseshell bandeau. Her dress, adult in style, with a tiny bustle, was of fawn and blue shot silk.

‘That's Mama. Her name was Isobel Jackaman. Her hair was really golden then.'

‘It's still the same, Olwyn.'

‘No, she keeps it that way with camomile wash. She hides the bottle behind the wardrobe.'

‘You know too much, little snoop.'

‘I know what's the matter with you, too.'

Cushie looked at her in fright. Olwyn continued, self-consciously bold-eyed. ‘I heard the servant talking to her daughter when she brought back the ironing. She said the young madam had got the curse, and the fuss she'd made would kill the cats.'

‘If Mama knew Mrs Cartwright gossiped that way she'd dismiss her.'

‘Oh, I knew before, about the curse. Some of my friends told me. But I didn't know it came out of your nose. I'm not looking forward to it for myself, I can tell you.'

‘Oh, Olwyn, you have it all wrong. Mama will explain when the time comes. Come now, let's look at some more pictures.'

Mama and Daddy on their honeymoon, straw-hatted, stiff as pokers; Daddy lined up in a mummified group before the new Bank building; baby pictures of Olwyn—and slipped in amongst these was a water-colour impression of Cushie, slapdash, too pastel, a blunt-profiled child looking downwards as though scolded. The likeness that Isobel had attempted and impatiently discarded indicated more wistfulness than the mother had ever consciously discerned in the real child.

‘Oh, Mama!' said Cushie faintly. The tears cascaded down her face as though there were a depthless reservoir in her heart. Had the young mother who had drawn this three-year-old loved her?

Cushie's passionate desire to be loved was no less now than it had been then.

‘Of course I love you,' she remembered her mother saying, over and over again. ‘All mothers love their children.'

‘But I want to be loved my way,' replied the little child.

It was all she really knew and comprehended about life. The rest of the world and its opinions were nothing to her. She was a trespasser. Deep and true in her soul she knew only that she believed in loving, and all denial of this was dishonour.

She became aware that Olwyn was pressing against her, a spiky, insect-like little being, smelling strongly of menthol.

The child was alarmed. ‘Don't cry, Cushie. You'll be coming home soon. Why are you crying? Is it because you will miss us?'

‘Yes, I'll miss you, Olwyn.'

The child was astonished. ‘Goodness! I always thought you hated me.'

Kingsland merely stirred and turned over in its sleep as the early express went through. The air was chill, although the sun was up early, licking away the dew. The milk cans on the station ran with moisture; the half-washed porters wiped cold red noses on the backs of their hands.

‘I'm glad Mama didn't come,' said Cushie, as her father took down her luggage out of his new motor.

She looked around her, at the brindled sky, the cloud shadows mousing over the blighted hills. The poplars had their curly new leaves; the leafless jacarandas would soon bloom. But finality was in the air, as though a tune had ended.

‘It's funny. I feel I'll never see all this again.'

‘Don't be fanciful, dear. And please hurry. The train's in already.'

Mr Moy was more nervous than he had anticipated. His daughter's pale face swam a little before him; he itched with desire that she should be gone, and at the same time longed that she should stay. ‘Do hurry, dear. I want to see you settled comfortably.'

The train was snoring intermittently, giving tiny jerks back and forth. Steam clouds, smelling strongly of rust, burst from amongst the wheels. There was no one in Cushie's non-smoker compartment except a black bundle in a corner, an elderly woman still asleep after her night's uncomfortable journey.

Mr Moy said with awkward kindness, ‘Everything will be all right. Auntie Claudie will meet you at the Travellers' Aid rest-room. Don't worry, dear. It will soon be over.'

‘Oh, Daddy!'

He could see she might cry, so in haste he kissed her and hastened from the carriage. A whistle, a bell, and then to his horror he saw the grocer woman, Mrs MacNunn, uncombed hair jammed like sofa stuffing under a hat, an old coat around her shoulders, running up the platform. She saw him at once, came at him with a smile like a clown's, crying, ‘Just one word with Cushie before she goes—oh, I'm that out of breath!'

What could he do? He froze, his ruddy face turned purplish, not with anger but indignation. For he saw at once that the woman, determined as a terrier, was going to speak to his daughter.

‘Mrs MacNunn,' he said in his Bank voice, ‘I'm just seeing my daughter off. Really...family occasion...my wife...'

‘Oh, get away, or I'll give you such a puck in the chest,' she said, jocosely. ‘Cushie and me's been friends since she was three months old. Give us a kiss, pet'—and she stuck her face through the train window and made a succulent sound somewhere in the direction of Cushie's face, saying almost simultaneously, ‘Look out for him at Ghinni Junction. I've sent a letter.'

Jerking her head back out of the window, she hit Mr Moy painfully on the chin with it; and what with her apologies and loud laughter, and the train whistle blowing, and the porters slamming the doors, and the clouds of steam, Mr Moy had scarcely time to say farewell to his daughter, or do more than pant a few steps along the platform to see the last of her face under the blue summer hat as it disappeared for ever.