The Seamstress Page 4

  I regard the grave and wonder about indiscriminate vandalism. Or perhaps tree roots had wrought the damage. Whatever it was, I’ve had it repaired.

  The polished granite surfaces on top and the stout little pillars on each corner of the grave have now been made as new. The masons have done a good job. His presence, his existence, is recognised—has been re-established. Relationships are stated in a fitting manner and it is clear that here he lies, above his adored mother’s remains. Nothing will be placed on top of him. He will not be sandwiched between his mother and his wife, my mother. She, the living, according to her wishes, will not have a burial at all.

  I leave the graveside, full of mixed emotions, not all yet identified. The eucalypt scents are pungent around here; I’ve never before noticed how sweet and familiar that smell is. Did my parents ever talk about that type of pleasure? What did they talk about and why hadn’t they made a better fist of it? God knows they started off passionately, as she once told me.

  Matrimony: what an onus to take on, the duties and favours you have to perform for each other if you’re trying at all. The other day at the office, a husband rang in on a Monday morning to report that his wife had had a fatal car accident the day before. ‘So,’ he said, before signing off, ‘she won’t be in to work today.’ The lapse into banality brought a preposterous tone to the man’s grief.

  Oh yes, death makes a fool of everyone, gives us the runaround, as in my mother’s case. He hovers, then retreats a little, like a bad actor, pussyfoots forward again. Playing a cruel game with Willa. She has recently recovered yet again from pneumonia.

  I don’t believe I ever asked her whether she really believed in the hereafter. I think she does.

  Dad the reprobate has a respectable resting place here, but what will become of Mother’s ashes? Perhaps they should go back to Scotland. No, I won’t have that.

  The day Jock Eastley came back from overseas was to Joanna the first day of her life; it was the first time memory was important enough to carve a day on her mind.

  There was a banging on the front door and even though she was three it registered that this was the moment her mother and aunt had been sitting waiting for. At the sound, her aunt flew down the wide hallway that separated Joanna’s parents’ rooms from her aunt and uncle’s. Yes, she flew, and was uttering a cry even before she opened that gargantuan door. The next thing Eve was in his arms, or more aptly he was in hers. No bear hug this, his old strength missing.

  Joanna’s mother was next in line for an embrace. The khaki cloth was rough, the slouch hat was knocked off him by the passion of the two women, his wife and her younger sister. They gazed at him for an age, eyes welled up, and Jock smiling his shy smile that broadened and deepened when he spied the three-year-old standing to one side looking up the body lengths of the grown-ups.

  He bent down and picked up the child, who placed her toddler’s arms right around his neck and pressed her little chubby chops to his thin cheek. It was then that he started to shake with tears and Willa gently prised her startled child from his grasp.

  Jock’s early Scots life had been marred by a cruel stepmother— where would we be without them in tales of incomprehensible jealousy? Her resentment of the quiet, dark boy was based on intuition. She felt he had a knowledge of things he had no right to know. And what is more hateful to a nervous bully than having a deep, knowing child in one’s presence?

  But that evening, when he came back to them, aged thirty-four, his sister-in-law took her child and tactfully withdrew after a while. Eve led him into their living room, holding his wasted arm, and sat down facing him. With her clever fingers she touched his face, which still looked grey, even though weeks had passed since he had been released from the prison camp in Singapore.

  ‘What have they done to you?’ said Eve.

  ‘Unmanned me,’ replied Jock.

  ‘We’ll see about that.’ And Eve noted his broken teeth, the place where the strong eyebrows had been, now disappeared from the raining blows of rifle butts.

  ‘You didn’t know Willa had had a baby!’ she laughed.

  ‘Well…a while ago there, I couldn’t, uh, see her. She was…in shadow. The light wasn’t good.’

  Eve looked at him with enquiry all over her face.

  ‘It’s my eyes, pet.’

  ‘Your eyes.’

  ‘Aye. My eyes.’ He gave a kind of smile. ‘They’re gone, Eve.’

  She touched his temples, then put her fingertips over his eyelids. ‘But you can see me?’

  ‘Och yes. Yes. But I can’t see print. Read.’

  And can’t speak, love. What has happened to your speech? she might have said if she could only get into her head the order of importance of his violated body. She took up a cigarette and thought of the way he’d been when he left.

  ‘And Hal?’ he said.

  ‘He’s fast asleep.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘You know what sixteen-year-olds are. They’re wearing themselves out in all directions.’

  Jock lit up a smoke, too.

  ‘He didn’t know you were coming back tonight. None of us knew how many hours it would take.’

  She held his hand again. ‘He’s been looking forward to it.’

  He took a drag then stubbed out. ‘I won’t be able to play cricket with him.’

  Eve shrugged. ‘He’s pretty self-sufficient. You’ll be proud of him.’

  ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Like me. He’s small but strong. Not puny.’

  ‘Well, that’s good, then,’ he said after a while. ‘For he was a tiny chap born.’

  Eve nodded.

  ‘He might not even remember me now. I should have been here.’

  She waited.

  ‘The whole show hasn’t been worth it. Look at me.’

  ‘You wanted to go, Jock. You had to go.’

  ‘Oh, aye. We all had to go.’

  Eve held his hand up to her cheek and kissed the back of it. That was good; his speech was going to come back.

  ‘It’s an uneven world, love.’

  He nodded agreement and they regarded each other, looking into their past, trying to gauge the future between them. What was going to be the worst? But wasn’t it enough that he was back at all? He was back.

  Jock the ex-butcher took a job in the repatriation hospital as an orderly. His daily life from then on followed a regular pattern, wheeling people around. He bought the evening paper and peered at its headlines on the train coming home. Dressed in his fading khaki trousers and shirt that looked as though they were just off the ironing board. His routine was to buy two bottles of beer for before their meal, have his shave, and then, as children do in the evening, take his bath.

  An occasional whisper in the air, abruptly stopped conversations when he entered a room, signalled a secret kept from him. He couldn’t possibly know, Eve thought; she had been careful. But she heard him whistling under his breath, for there was a pop song for every occasion, a song about somebody taking his place.

  He dug a vegetable patch and Jo, so much closer to the earth, squatted beside him, looking underneath the leaves to discover the first beans. He let her eat them raw. Strawberries and potatoes, just like a treasure trove, finding them hidden, then gathering the luscious red berries, digging up the spuds, not knowing how many you’d get.

  They sat together like farmer Giles and his mate, he in his khaki, she in miniature dungarees. She wore glasses and they slipped off the small nose on a regular basis as she bent forward to dig with the little spade he had bought for her.

  ‘Push your glasses back, Bubs,’ he said, guiding her hand with a light touch.

  She was the oldest and the smallest. Dainty has almost gone the way of the wireless. But that is what she was: exquisite in a daintiness that combined with swift, economical movements. She could as easily sing any song or dance a quickstep, or reach up with her long-handled broom to the high ceilings and eliminate every cobweb in sight. She could and d
id scrub, she polished, kept the chip bath heater in good order, and at the end of the day, before he’d come home from work, she’d have her bath, put on a taffeta skirt and blouse, do her nails, brush her hair up and put on make-up and pretty shoes. She looked as if she was going off to a dance every afternoon at five, but she was getting ready to greet Jock when he came through the door.

  But before he came home sometimes, once her work was done and the food ready to put on the wood stove, it was her habit to walk from one room to another, linger at a window in a familiar pose, one elbow cupped in the opposite hand, holding a cigarette, mulling over odd snatches of verse, love lyrics.

  In the old country she had played the piano, but there was no piano here. Now she turned over a book of poetry in her hands, over and over, smoothing the pages with her palm.

  ‘But what does it mean exactly?’ Jo would ask her much later, trying to solve the intensity of her aunt’s inner life.

  ‘It means that I’m a greedy woman.’

  After dinner, which they called tea, with her legs curled up beneath her in the large chair, Eve thought her own thoughts, as Jock did his.

  ‘Were you busy today?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, pet,’ he’d say, and pour them both a glass of beer.

  It was a thought that only came to Eve much later, that her life was a travesty, one year folding on top of another.

  ‘I had a lover, back Home,’ she told Jo, who was still too young to be told such things and who only half understood.

  ‘His name was Bill Dunne and he wrote poetry. We would meet on fine days, near Loch Lomond.’

  ‘Loch Lomond in the song?’

  ‘The very same. There was a large, smooth stone I’d lean on, so smooth it was,’ said Eve as she did her ironing, looking deep into the cloth, on the back verandah in Australia in 1951, while Jo sat on the step and listened with all her might.

  ‘He had blond hair and blue eyes, a real Celt, and wore fine suits with a buttonhole.’

  Didn’t all suits have a buttonhole or two, thought Jo, but said nothing.

  ‘He’d sit on that stone and read to me. What a voice in him.’

  ‘What about when it rained?’

  ‘There was a rotunda, not far away.’

  Why did she tell all of this to a little girl, Eve? Because young ears don’t put you on trial; they haven’t learned how to. They listen, especially little girls of that time who spent a lot of their lives in their own head, interior lives like Eve’s, playing with words and images.

  She thought it might be possible to make a kind of artistry out of home duties. She read bits of her books out to Jock and he searched valiantly for something to say about them, something that would make her pleased, to feel as if he understood her meaning. But was more comfortable holding skeins of wool for her between his big brown arms and hands, while she rapidly rolled them into balls from which she would knit jumpers for him and Hal. She sat by a footstool at his feet and cut his toenails for him on winter evenings. Wifely duties and pleasures. Sometimes she would look up and find an expression on his dark features that was unfathomable.

  It had been built as a hospital in Murton Street: solid, square, spacious. But these current tenants were not ill, not yet. They were, Jock aside, bursting with rude, vibrant health, though it could be said they revelled to their detriment. The front door that sheltered within a large porch was heavy and reliable. It opened on to a passage that originally would have held a couple of stretchers, the odd bed. It was still wide enough to hold parties in. And they did. Postwar parties.

  On one side of the passage were the four large rooms that made up the East flat—Jock and Eve’s, with Hal. The West side belonged to Willa, Ben and Joanna. Then there was the Back flat. The rooms—wards—were expansive enough to accommodate three or four beds in each. There were deep skirting boards, lofty ceilings and large fireplaces surrounded by brilliant tiles. The whole building was constructed for big-hearted, brave people. Joanna didn’t know she had the biggest bedroom in the street.

  Fireplaces that would be seen as stylish, later, glowed with life in the winter. Their kitchen, on the West side, was generous: a big stove, plenty of space for a wooden clothes horse on wet days, and a sofa along one side, near the vast dresser. No fridge, but a wood and flywire safe to keep perishables in. Joanna was a good eater, and as she wasn’t allowed to talk too much at the kitchen table she became a listener. When they had someone to eat with them, she sat under the table, appearing to be doing nothing in particular, but she heard everything—the chewing, the drinking from a glass—and she wondered at the silences.

  Jo hung around her dad when he was in a good mood, which was often at the end of a meal as he was having another glass of beer. She’d push her side against his and ask if she could go and buy an ice-cream. He’d look serious, as if he had to give it plenty of thought. Then he’d say, ‘Let’s see, is there room for one?’

  And he’d turn her to face him, putting his ear to her stomach like a doctor, and gently prod her abdomen.

  ‘Hm, here’s the chop in the right hand-corner.’

  ‘Dad!’ Joanna chuckling away and wriggling.

  ‘Oops, here’s the roast potato. Let’s see, the beans must be somewhere over here. Ay? Jock’s beans! Did you leave any for him?’

  Mum caught her eye and smiled as she cleared away the dishes. They had an ice chest for the meat and butter. The ice man came every Friday, and Jo and the kids down the road would race out to get a sliver of ice to suck. The joy of hanging perilously on to the wooden railings out the front, sucking a piece of ice! It was the house of her early childhood, the perfect place to be, with rambling out-houses and a life of its own. Back lanes that led to fields of mushrooms. And there were hiding places for her like the jasmine-covered roof over the washhouse where no one else went. There was the woodshed, where the neatly stacked wood could be made into a barricade to watch Uncle Jock or Dad cut the chook’s head off just in front of the dunny that belonged to Mr Webster and his two daughters, Valma and Esme, of the Back flat. But the house was comfortable and spotless, no matter how wild the previous night’s bacchanalia.

  Jo was in love with Hal. She trailed behind him all the time and he didn’t seem to mind. Even as the girls started to hang around him, waiting upon his pleasure—for he started young—he got rid of her with the natural tact of a male who is genuinely set up in every way to like and enjoy women, all his life.

  ‘What about finding me a quarter-inch blade, Stinker?’ he’d suggest.

  Everyone had a different name for her. But he’d known her since she was in nappies.

  ‘One like this, look, only not broken.’ And she’d search, conscientious as a good apprentice, through his toolbox, on her fool’s errand in the vast laundry, as he’d mosey into the shed with Daphne, or Valma, or Esme, softly slipping the bolt behind them.

  Hal turned his hand to fretwork, sawing pieces of plywood meticulously as he pursed his lips and warbled the latest songs to himself. He made doorstops and other ornaments, which he’d then paint and present to his mother—or Valma, or Esme.

  Hal did as he was told most of the time. But his parents had never cast the same watchful eye on him as they did towards his little girl-cousin. His particular kind of maleness had made him independent, an early rambler. He’d be out at the footy reserve, or learning how to lay bets when he was thirteen, or he’d go down to the ice-cream shop near the pub, where dough-faced Miss Massey served kids cigarettes. He’d wander into that shop for quite a few years after with no intention of buying. Young teenage boys learned that they could pleasure themselves and Miss Massey beyond the black curtain behind the counter that led to the back room, for a few minutes, for the price of a packet of fags. Joanna wondered later why the ice-cream shop had often been closed at odd times for no good reason that she could figure out.

  With time, the son would become the father, in a sense—not sexually, though the potential would be there, but there would be a shift
of loyalty. The mother would flirt with the grown-up offspring. Unable to please her as a little boy, he would ultimately, as a bewhiskered and muscular young man, swaggering a little in his grey trousers hanging on snake hips and white singlet, win her smiles. Aren’t many women like this: they come to prefer their male offspring far more than a husband, or than their own kind? They can scarcely believe they have borne and nurtured such virile, desirable creatures.

  Jock’s sensuality after the war was short-lived: urgent and brief. Quickly and easily satisfied, he rolled over and slept immediately. Eve would get out of bed and light a cigarette, standing at her bedroom window in her habitual pose, looking out at his bloody vegetables.

  ‘He knows,’ she said to Willa one day.

  ‘It must be instinctive. None of us has said anything,’ her sister replied.

  Jock knew that a war couldn’t put Eve out of action as it did him. He saw nothing with his poor eyes, but he noticed changes of voice, a head turned away when it shouldn’t have, if mention was ever made of one of two fellows. And he knew that she knew that he knew.

  No one was perfect, she said to herself, shrugging.

  And he knew that she thought this. A whiff of fatalism hung about them.

  It was Hal’s twenty-first and Jo’s eighth within a day of each other, and Hal’s coming-of-age took over the whole house, though the main hub was on the East side of the passage. Willa was just months away from falling ill.

  The whole clan gathered. Uncles with piano accordion and harmonica came. ‘Swing it!’ cried Eve to everyone and every song, fast or slow. Jock quietly sipped his beer. Everyone danced in that wide dance hall of a passage, beer flowed, and food like they hadn’t had for years was piled on groaning tables. Ham and beetroot, saveloys and tomato, gherkins, pineapple and cheese on sticks, curried eggs, celery and radish—the cornucopia of postwar excess, years on, prodigal with the feeling of deliverance slowly fading. The test of a good party, someone said, was that no one was supposed to remember the next day what they had said or done. That way you could be exonerated on all counts.