It was now too much for her to manage, she did need help, but she regretted telling Edward that, for she might have guessed that he would immediately see St Vincent’s as an ideal source. It wasn’t that she was averse to taking on an inexperienced orphan, heaven knows they needed a start in life more than anyone. It was just that Edward had cooked this up with Miranda without first consulting her, and she felt she would have to take whoever was offered, whether she liked them or not.
She heard a car draw up and peeped through the lace curtains. It was Miranda. Just the sight of that tight wimple round her face made her own face tighten with irritation.
But as she watched the girl got out of the car, and Mrs Wilberforce had to blink to make sure she was seeing right. A very pretty blonde girl, not the kind of mouse she’d expected.
‘If I’ve got to have her, it will be on my terms,’ she said aloud to make herself feel stronger, and glanced at herself in the mirror over the mantel before going to open the front door.
Mrs Wilberforce was fifty-seven, but no one thought she looked it. Her hair was a deep auburn, only slightly grey at the temples, and she’d retained her slender figure, unlike most of her girlfriends. Why should she be intimidated by a nun?
The bell rang and she made her herself walk slowly to answer it.
‘Good afternoon, Mrs Wilberforce,’ Miranda said. ‘This is May Taylor. May, this is Mrs Wilberforce.’
‘I’m very pleased to meet you, mam,’ May said, and smiled.
Mrs Wilberforce was taken aback by the girl’s looks. Her hair gleamed like gold satin, her eyes were wide and almost turquoise blue, her skin was peachy toned, with not a blemish in sight, she even had straight, white teeth.
Mrs Wilberforce took them through to the dining-room at the back of the house. She had already laid out tea things there, and as the afternoon sun came through the French windows, it was far more pleasant at this time of year than the drawing-room.
Half an hour later, the tea drunk, biscuits and cake eaten, Mrs Wilberforce had heard only Miranda speak, the poor girl had hardly been able to say a word for herself.
‘Reverend Mother,’ Mrs Wilberforce said – she had to use the woman’s right title in front of the girl – ‘would you mind waiting in my drawing-room while I speak to May alone? We won’t be long.’
‘Of course, Mrs Wilberforce,’ Miranda said politely, but as she got up, the stiffness of her stance and facial expression showed her displeasure.
Mrs Wilberforce waited until the door was shut and she’d heard Miranda go into the other room. ‘Would you like to be my maid?’ she asked point-blank. ‘Or have you been pushed into this?’
She liked what she’d seen of this girl, she spoke well, she appeared to have good manners, but she was almost
too
pretty, those big blue eyes looked so hungry for affection.
‘Yes, I do want to be your maid,’ May said, but hesitated, as if there was a ‘but’.
‘You can say anything you like. I’d like to know what is on your mind,’ Mrs Wilberforce said firmly.
May shot a look at her as if trying to summon up the courage to say something.
‘Reverend Mother can’t hear you,’ Mrs Wilberforce prompted. ‘I don’t want to take someone on who isn’t really happy about it.’
‘Well, it’s just that I’m scared she’ll always be coming round here,’ May said, looking down at her hands. ‘I know she is your relative, but I want to forget St Vincent’s, I haven’t been very happy there.’
Mrs Wilberforce smiled inwardly. She had got the initial impression that Miranda and the girl were equally fond of one another. Clearly this wasn’t so.
‘Reverend Mother rarely calls here,’ Mrs Wilberforce said. ‘She’s my husband’s cousin, not mine. I wouldn’t be encouraging her to visit, not unless you want me to.’
May suddenly beamed. ‘Then I’d like to come if you’ll have me,’ she said. ‘But please don’t tell her what I said.’
‘Of course not, May.’ Mrs Wilberforce felt a weight lifted from her shoulders. ‘Now, is there anything else you want to ask me before I show you round?’
‘Will I be able to go to the beach on my day off in the summer?’ May asked.
‘Of course, and you can often take a walk down to Keane’s Point on the river too in the afternoons when there’s nothing to do.’ Mrs Wilberforce smiled. ‘As long as you do the work I ask you to do, and do it well, be polite to my guests when they call and come straight home from your evening classes, I’m sure we’ll get on just fine.’
‘Mother said you are English too?’ May said. ‘It’s so nice to hear your voice. It makes me think of home.’
That pleased Mrs Wilberforce – after all her years in Australia she was often afraid she might have inadvertently developed the ugly native drawl. May had partially retained her English accent too, and she thought that with a little coaching she could bring it back completely. ‘I come from a place called Worcester,’ she said. ‘I can’t imagine you’d know where that is if you were only seven when you were sent out here, but I could show you pictures of it. But tell me, May, do you like Australia?’
‘I don’t know yet, mam,’ May said, looking at her with wide, appealing eyes. ‘I haven’t liked it much so far. But maybe it will be different once I leave St Vincent’s.’
Mrs Wilberforce felt a lump come up in her throat. She had been out to St Vincent’s twice with Edward, and on both times she’d come away feeling tearful. She had seen nothing to alarm her, yet she had the feeling that unpleasant things did go on there. Perhaps she’d discover the truth once May settled in.
‘Come along then,’ she said, getting up. ‘I’ll show you the rest of the house.’
As Mother drove May back to St Vincent’s half an hour later, May knew she was cross about something, almost certainly because she’d been sent out of the room. But May didn’t care. She liked Mrs Wilberforce and felt she liked her too. The house and garden were lovely, and even if her bedroom was very small, it was much nicer than she’d expected. But best of all was the certainty that Mrs Wilberforce didn’t like Mother, she hadn’t said so of course, but May had felt it, and maybe with her help she could break free of the woman for good.
‘I’m going to miss you,’ May said, forcing herself to sound really sad, because it wouldn’t do to show she was delighted with this job. ‘Mrs Wilberforce wants me to start on Saturday, I won’t even be at St Vincent’s for my birthday on the Tuesday afterwards.’
‘I’ll pop in to see you that day and bring any mail from your sister,’ Mother said, glancing at her sideways. ‘We can meet for lunch sometimes on your day off too.’
‘That would be nice,’ May lied. ‘Mrs Wilberforce said I could keep up my piano practice too.’
Mother put her hand on May’s knee. ‘You’ll always be my special girl,’ she said. ‘That’s why I found you such a nice job. I hope you appreciate it?’
May looked down at the hand on her knee and shuddered. In the last year that same nasty veiny hand had been right up her knicker legs, prodding, poking, stroking, making her feel sick, and she wished she dared brush it off now and tell the dirty bitch to leave her alone. But she couldn’t, not yet. It wasn’t safe. She knew too she would have to submit to even more fondling before she got away.
But one day she’d make her pay.
Dulcie was kneeling down in the garden planting out some petunias as Bruce and Betty arrived home one afternoon from a shopping trip up in Kalgoorlie.
‘There’s a letter for you, Dulcie!’ Betty called out as she got out of the car. She had picked up the post on the way home and she recognized the handwriting as May’s, the first letter to come from her in over three months.
Dulcie leaped up and came running over. As Betty handed her the envelope she let out a whoop of delight.
‘You sit down and read it,’ Betty suggested. Dulcie’s shoes were covered in mud, as were her hands. ‘I’ll make us a cup of tea and bring it out on the veranda.’
Dulcie was so excited she couldn’t even wait until she was sitting down, but ripped open the envelope and began reading it as she walked back to the house.
The address was View Road, Peppermint Grove, in Perth and it was dated 22 May, a month ago.
Dear Dulcie,
she read,
As you can see I’ve left St Vincent’s now and I’m working as a maid here in Peppermint Grove for Mrs and Mrs Wilberforce. It’s a nice house, a real one like back in England with an upstairs. It reminds me of the posh ones by the park back in England. The river is just two minutes away down the hill, but it’s more like a beach because people swim there in the summer. Cottesloe beach is a walk away in the other direction. There’s lots of shops, buses and trains. I have to do cleaning, washing and ironing, and when Mrs Wilberforce has guests I wait at the table and all that stuff. She’s very fussy, everything has to be just so, sometimes I get really fed up, it’s so quiet and lonely too. I go to night school now, I’m learning to type and do shorthand. I’m not very good at shorthand, I can’t remember it for more than a minute! Oh, and I get four pounds a week! Last week I bought a dress, it’s pink with one of those bell-shaped skirts that are in fashion. Have you seen them? I’m going to let my hair grow now. Mr W. is a cousin of Rev. Mother, he works in a bank. She keeps coming round and Mrs W. is getting cross about it, I don’t think she likes her much. I often tell Mrs W. about you. Is Ross your boyfriend now? I can’t believe you are eighteen and I’m fifteen, we used to talk so much about what we’d do then, and how it would be when Daddy came for us. But it’s all different now, isn’t it? Are you going to stay there now? Do you love Ross?
Write soon and try and send me a picture of you.
Love and kisses,
May
Betty came out with the tea just as Dulcie had finished reading the letter for the second time. They sat down on the two chairs on the back porch, and Dulcie told her the gist of what May had to say. She wasn’t going to give the letter to her to read as she was embarrassed at the references to Ross.
Dulcie supposed he was her boyfriend. They went to the pictures almost every week and he took her out on the motorbike he’d bought, but although he held her hand in the pictures and kissed her goodnight, it didn’t seem like a real romance.
‘It sounds like she’s fallen on her feet,’ Betty said. ‘Peppermint Grove is the nicest place to live in Perth. My sister and I used to go and look around there all the time when we were girls. I used to dream of living in one of the houses overlooking the river.’
‘May’s a funny girl,’ Dulcie said thoughtfully. ‘She hasn’t said that she likes it there. If I’d been sent somewhere like that and got paid so much I’d have thought I was the luckiest girl in the world.’
‘Some people don’t know when they are well off,’ Betty replied. ‘But I suppose it must be a bit lonely if she’s only got Mrs Wilberforce for company all day.’
‘I wish she’d told me what the people were like, what she thinks about and what she does in her spare time,’ Dulcie said wistfully. She went on to read out that sentence about their father. ‘That’s the closest she can get to saying she’s sad it didn’t turn out the way we hoped it would. But then she isn’t much good at letter-writing.’
‘She’s very young,’ Betty reminded her. ‘When I was fifteen all I thought about was boys and wishing I had some pretty clothes.’ She wished Dulcie would think about herself and not others so much. But she decided she would change the subject.
‘How is it going with Ross anyway? Can we expect the sound of wedding bells one day?’
Bruce and Betty teased her a great deal about Ross, yet even if it was always light-hearted, Dulcie sensed they hoped they might have a future together.
‘I don’t think Ross thinks along those lines.’ Dulcie sighed, She could see him over by the barn working on a repair to the tractor with Bob. The winter sun was warm today and he’d taken off his shirt. Just the sight of his muscular chest and arms made her tingle, but she didn’t think he felt the same way about her.
‘Of course he does,’ Betty scoffed. ‘Why else would he spend all his spare time with you?’
Dulcie got up from her seat, it was time to get the supper on. ‘Maybe it’s because he’s too shy to look for anyone else,’ she said. ‘I’m what you might call convenient.’
Betty said nothing more as they both went indoors. Dulcie had made a mutton stew in the morning and it had been cooking slowly all day, she only had to make some dumplings to add to it and peel some potatoes.’
As she laid the table for supper Betty came back into the living-room. ‘What did you mean exactly by “convenient”?’ she asked.
Dulcie blushed. Betty hardly ever let a chance remark pass by, and obviously she’d been brooding on that one. ‘Well, I’m just here, aren’t I? He doesn’t have to make any effort,’ she said.
Betty put her hands on her hips and glowered at her. ‘Don’t you ever put so little value on yourself,’ she scolded. ‘I never heard anything like it. I
know
that if you lived fifty miles away in the bush, Ross would still want to see you. I daresay he’d walk there barefoot if necessary.’
‘That’s not the impression he gives me,’ Dulcie retorted.
‘He’s never told me about his life before here,’ Betty said. ‘But I nursed him when he first arrived and I learned a great deal about how it had been from the way he reacted to me. There were deep scars on his body from whips and canes, there were marks from boils that had never been treated, and he wasn’t just thin from a long journey without food, but from long-term undernourishment. I don’t think he’d ever known any love and affection, he didn’t trust anyone. It took months before we got any kind of normal response from him, he was brusque, know-it-all, shifty and quite frightening really. I have to admit there were times when both Bruce and I felt like chucking him off the place.’ She paused for a moment, looking at Dulcie.
‘We healed his body completely, we taught him how to behave so he could fit in with us, and he showed his appreciation not in words, but by working like a demon for us. We’ve grown very fond of him and I believe he feels the same about us, but we know there is a part of him we’ll never reach. I believe you could, Dulcie, that is if you want to. The question is, do you?’