May looked up at him with wide eyes. ‘No, not one. I gave up writing in the end,’ she said. ‘Mother said it was pointless as it was plain Dulcie had lost interest in me.’
That statement rang true to Dulcie. They were almost exactly the same words Mother had used to her when she kept writing to Susan soon after her arrival here. She knew how hurtful it must have been to May.
With tears in her eyes she hugged her sister tightly. ‘I could never, ever lose interest in you, May. I think Mother must have destroyed my letters because she wants to keep us apart.’
Aware that this visit could come to an abrupt end at any moment, Dulcie hastily explained that she wasn’t at the same place she’d started out and that Bruce and Betty were her new employers. She took a scrap of paper from her bag and wrote down the address. ‘Keep it safe, May,’ she said. ‘Even if Mother doesn’t give you any further letters from me, it’s only a year till you leave here. Write and tell me the minute you’ve got a job.’
Bruce assured them both that he would make certain Reverend Mother wouldn’t intercept any further mail and said he thought he and Betty would go back to her now and have it out with her and leave the girls to talk alone.
May looked fearful. ‘Be careful what you say to her,’ she said in a quivering voice. ‘She can be so horrible if anyone upsets her.’
‘So can I,’ Bruce laughed. ‘Now, you and Dulcie have a chat and we’ll come back in a while.’
The two girls sat on the veranda steps, just the way they used to in the past. Yet it wasn’t comfortable the way it had been then. May was pleased with the sweets Dulcie had bought her, she admired Dulcie’s new hair-style, her dress and shoes, and said she thought Betty and Bruce seemed very nice, but it was almost like trying to start up a conversation with a stranger. May was willing enough to gossip about the other girls, many of whom Dulcie didn’t even know, yet every time Dulcie tried to steer her into more personal things, May veered off in another direction.
Always a keen observer, Dulcie noticed that May’s hair had been allowed to grow much longer than the other girls’. Her uniform striped dress was newer than anyone else’s and it fitted her properly too. She hadn’t expected that her little sister would have developed a woman’s body when she wasn’t even quite fourteen yet, but she had, her breasts were bigger than Dulcie’s, and she had real curves, while Dulcie still had a very boyish shape.
The once strong similarity between them wasn’t so marked now, except for the blonde hair and blue eyes. It was as though each facial feature of May’s, which had once been identical to her own, had been altered slightly in the last two years to make her more outstanding. Her mouth was wider, her lips fuller than Dulcie’s, her nose had a slight flare to the nostrils, her eyes were a more intense blue. Although Dulcie normally found it hard to picture her mother any more, when she looked at May it all came back to her. She could see that in a few years her sister was going to be even more beautiful.
Most of Dulcie’s old friends had left here now, so she didn’t find it odd at first that none of the other girls broke off from their game to come over to speak to her. Yet after a little while she sensed that both she and May were being watched closely, and seeing several familiar faces, Dulcie waved. Two girls came over briefly to admire her dress, hair and shoes, and ask what her job was like, but they didn’t speak to May at all, and soon returned to their game.
‘Have you upset them?’ Dulcie asked curiously. In her time here any old girl turning up was an event, everyone wanted to speak to her to find out what life was like away from the convent.
‘I expect so,’ May said airily. ‘They’ve always been jealous of me, they were even when you were here. I have piano lessons, you see. Mother gives me them, they don’t like it.’
‘You’re still her pet then?’
‘Yeah,’ May said with a non-committal shrug.
Two years earlier May would have elaborated, boasting about her special treatment, but the way she said nothing more made Dulcie suspect her sister had come to see the downside of being a pet. Treats and the absence of severe punishments couldn’t really compensate for being alienated from the other girls. As she remembered, it was only them who made this place tolerable.
‘I have to keep in with Mother,’ May blurted out. ‘I don’t like it, I hate her mostly. But I don’t want to be sent out to some sheep station way beyond the black stump. I want to work in an office or a shop, here in Perth.’
Having discovered for herself what could happen if a girl got into Mother’s bad books, Dulcie sympathized in part, but it also reminded her that May hadn’t asked her anything about her job, or even if she was happy. It saddened her to find May had grown even more self-centred and calculating than she’d been as a little girl.
When she tried to talk about the farm a little later, May cut her short. ‘How can you stand being somewhere like that?’ she said with a horrified expression. ‘If Mother sent me somewhere like that I’d run off to Sydney or somewhere lively.’
‘Have you got any real idea how big Australia is?’ Dulcie asked, smiling at her sister’s naivety. ‘You can’t
run
off to anywhere, you need money for fares, food and somewhere to sleep. I really do hope Mother gets you work in an office or a shop, but don’t bank on it, May. Be careful, you put one foot wrong with her and she’ll make you pay.’
May looked up at her, perhaps sensing that Dulcie really knew what she was talking about. ‘Why did you leave your first job?’ she asked at last.
Dulcie had no intention of telling her about the misery she experienced there, but at the same time it was a good opportunity to slam home the message that Mother couldn’t be trusted. ‘Because the farmer’s wife ran off,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t very nice there, May, and I’m pretty certain Mother knew it and sent me there purposely.’
All at once May snuggled up to her the way she’d done as a little girl. ‘I’ve missed you so much,’ she said in a croaky voice. ‘I told myself I hated you when no letters came, but it didn’t really work. I just felt sad.’
‘I always think about you every night,’ Dulcie said truthfully. ‘I pray for you to be kept safe and that the Sisters are kind to you. I don’t go to church any more, but it looks as if God answered my prayers because I can see they feed you better here now.’ She playfully pinched her sister’s plump cheeks.
‘Someone said they had an inspector round,’ May smirked. ‘It must be true because the food did get better suddenly. We get an orange or an apple most days now. At Christmas we even got a little tin of sweets each.’
‘I sent you a manicure set,’ Dulcie said.
May sat upright. ‘Was it a pale blue leather case?’
Dulcie nodded. ‘She passed it on to you?’
May grinned. ‘No, but I saw it in Mother’s study, and I pinched it. I’ve got it hidden away.’
Dulcie hardly knew what to say. ‘You mustn’t steal things,’ she said, more out of habit than real conviction.
‘It’s not stealing when it belonged to you in the first place.’ May shrugged. ‘Mother’s the thief, not me.’
From then on May did begin to show some interest in Dulcie, if only to ask if she went out dancing. Dulcie told her that she’d been to two dances, one on her seventeenth birthday in December and again on New Year’s Eve. She described the new turquoise shantung dress she wore, and said how Bruce and Betty had taught her to waltz.
‘Did anyone ask you to dance?’ May asked, wide-eyed.
‘A few boys,’ Dulcie said. ‘But they were a bit funny, none of them came to talk to me later, Betty said she thought it was because they thought I was Ross’s girl.’
She had to explain then who Ross was, and how she, Betty, Bruce, John and Ross had all gone to the dance together.
‘Isn’t Ross your boyfriend then?’ May asked.
Dulcie smiled. ‘I think I’d like him to be, but I don’t think he likes me as anything but a friend. He didn’t even dance with me once, he kept disappearing to go and get a beer.’
She was just telling May that Bruce let her drive his Holden now and she often took Betty into town to drop her off at her friends, when Bruce came back and interrupted her.
‘We’d better go now, Dulcie,’ he said, and she thought he was cross about something because his face was all tight and set.
‘It was nice to meet you, May,’ he said, coming a few steps nearer and kissing her cheek. ‘If you ever want a holiday with Dulcie we’ll be more than happy to put you up. I’m sorry I’ve got to drag her away now, but you make sure you hold on to our address.’
Dulcie waved back to May right until the car turned the corner at the end of the road and she couldn’t see her any more. ‘What happened between you and Mother?’ she asked. Bruce and Betty had both seemed strained and anxious to get away in a hurry.
‘She denied that any letters had come from you, she tried to say that you were too lazy to write any, and that you’d told us a pack of lies to make us feel sorry for you,’ Bruce said, half turning his head as he spoke to Dulcie in the back. ‘I said she was the liar as I’d personally posted letters written by you to May. It was all very nasty.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Dulcie said. She thought Bruce and Betty were cross with her now.
Betty turned in her seat to look round at Dulcie. ‘Why didn’t you tell us your father was in prison?’ she asked.
Dulcie felt as if she’d been given a sudden and hefty jolt. ‘She told you that?’ she asked incredulously, her eyes instantly filling with tears. ‘I didn’t think she knew!’
‘Oh, she knew all right, it was like the hidden card up the sleeve,’ Betty said with a deep sigh. ‘It took the wind out of our sails. We’d already said how well we knew you, and how honest we’d found you.’
Dulcie hung her head in shame. There had been many times she’d almost told Betty, but she always lost her nerve at the last minute. The longer she kept it to herself, the more difficult it became to admit it. Now she’d messed everything up and they distrusted her.
‘I didn’t tell you any lies,’ she whispered. ‘I only left it out.’
‘Look at me, Dulcie!’ Betty said.
Dulcie lifted up her head and she saw no anger in Betty’s face, or disgust, only bewilderment. ‘She said your father murdered your mother. Is that true?’ Betty asked.
‘No,’ Dulcie said, shaking her head. ‘He was convicted of manslaughter, but he didn’t even do that.’
Bruce drove to a quiet road and pulled up. ‘Why don’t you tell us the whole story now?’ he suggested.
It was a lovely tree-lined suburban street with pretty houses and neat gardens. As Dulcie started to tell the story she was reminded of how her father had loved the equivalent kind of street back in London, how he’d choose a walk through them in preference to a quicker main road. He always used to say they’d live somewhere like it one day.
She told them everything, not the abbreviated version she’d given Ross. It was surprisingly clear in her head for over the years she had mentally sifted through the views and facts which Susan and her granny had so often discussed in front of her, both before and after the trial, and added that information to what she had witnessed herself.
‘Mum and Dad used to fight all the time,’ she said finally. ‘But Dad would never have hurt her. Gran used to say “she’d try the patience of a saint”, and she was right because even though I was only little then, I used to wonder why Mum kept doing the things she did to upset him.’
Bruce and Betty were both silent for a few minutes after she finished, both turned in their seats looking at her in the back of the car. Bruce appeared older suddenly, the bags under his eyes more pronounced, his eyes grave. Betty looked as if she might cry, her sweet face puckered as if trying to control her emotions.
‘I got you to tell us about your father, Dulcie, because I wanted to know how you really felt about him,’ she said. ‘You see, when you said he just left you and May at the orphanage because he couldn’t look after you, both Bruce and I got the impression he’d abandoned you. I’m sorry to say we couldn’t help but see him as a heartless man. Then of course when Reverend Mother told us he killed your mother –’ She broke off as if unable to finish.
Dulcie understood completely. Under those circumstances they couldn’t be blamed for imagining Reg Taylor was a brutal, black-hearted murderer.
‘He wasn’t like that at all,’ Dulcie said sadly. It was awful to think that by keeping her past from them her father’s character could be so distorted. ‘I always felt bad about saying he’d put us in the orphanage, because if he’d been free he would have looked after us better than most women could.’
‘I can see that now,’ Bruce said. ‘And it makes it even harder to tell you what Reverend Mother told us.’ He paused, looking at his wife as if for support. ‘You see, your father died in prison six months ago.’
There was complete silence for a moment, Dulcie looking at them as if she hadn’t or couldn’t take it in.
‘Daddy’s dead?’ she gasped eventually. ‘No, he can’t be! Mother just told you that to hurt me.’
‘I’m so sorry, Dulcie, but it
is
true,’ Bruce said. ‘Reverend Mother showed us the letter she received from England. He had a fall while working on a prison building and he died as a result of his accident. There was a copy of his death certificate too.’
Dulcie looked at them bleakly. It was such a shock she couldn’t even think, much less speak.
‘I asked why she didn’t write and tell you,’ Betty said, reaching out for Dulcie’s hand. ‘Her words were, “Dulcie isn’t my responsibility any longer.” I don’t know how I controlled myself. I wanted to slap her.’
‘But she can’t have told May either!’ Dulcie said, looking from one to the other of them. ‘She would have said something if she knew.’
Betty nodded, but said nothing.
‘We’re so terribly sorry, Dulcie,’ Bruce said gently. ‘If only you’d told us about him, we would have encouraged you to write to him once you got to our place. If you didn’t know that Reverend Mother knew about him, does that mean you were unable to write to him ever since you got to Australia?’
Dulcie nodded, and said how they weren’t allowed to write back at the Sacred Heart either. ‘They told me I wasn’t to tell anyone about where he was, and I didn’t. So when we got here I just carried on that way. So did May.’