Amy's Children (6 page)

“Dear me,” Daphne said, both shamefaced and admiring as Amy flung the boxes aside, bruised leaves and stalks clinging to them.

Peter found a marble, a large one with colours swirled inside like the sweet known as a bull's eye.

He tossed it to Amy who wasn't ready to catch it. It hit the little bone near her throat and rolled down the front of her dress. She shrieked and dived a hand for it, bursting open two buttons. Peter's jaw dropped like the marble at the sight of a piece of breast, round and blue veined, tucked into her brassiere.

“Stop that silly nonsense!” Daphne cried and raised her hoe as if to strike him. When she lowered the hoe she trailed her eyes down Amy's front, very cold eyes, following Amy's hands fastening her buttons.

Peter went inside, returning with some books. He made a seat of an old apple tree stump.

“That's more like it!” Daphne called, hoeing hard.

“We could plant a passion vine to fill the corner,” Amy said.

“We'll see,” Daphne said, tearing weeds from the teeth of the rake.

Amy went past Peter's bowed head to bring the wheelbarrow. He saw her ankles above her oldest shoes, passing each other like dainty, busy birds.

He dared not look upwards to her dainty, busy bottom, feeling Daphne was watching.

That night getting the tea, Daphne managed to allow everyone a view only of her back.

She looks as if the rake is still stuck up there, Amy thought, setting the table. Aloud she said: “Perhaps I should start looking for somewhere to live.”

John on the couch straightened his back, rounded his eyes and lost control of his mouth. Amy, hating herself, went to the window with a handful of forks, looking out at the debris, piled in a great heap to dry.

“That'll make some bonfire, Johnno,” she said. He got up and stumped across the back veranda and down the steps. Daphne put her head out the side window.

“Tea's on the table, can't you see?” she yelled, and Dudley came in, his face asking sourly why the shouting. I have everything to put up with, grumbled Daphne to herself—the worry of the boy's big exam, Dudley never saying a civil word, the extra on the bills. Her fifteen shillings goes nowhere (though when it was first offered Daphne told Amy it was more than she expected).

“We're making a vegetable garden down the back, Uncle Dudley,” Amy said cheerfully. Dudley pulled out his chair at the end of the table and sat, the noise and the movement Amy's answer if she expected one.

She went to her room as soon as the washing up was done. She knew the sight of her little cane chest of drawers would lift her spirits. It was the only piece added to the room since she had come.

Amy had been out walking one Saturday afternoon when she came upon an auction sale at a house. The furniture was piled on the small front veranda. Some spilled into the garden and a few pieces were over the front fence on the footpath. The auctioneer was standing with one foot buried in the cushion on a seagrass chair and the other caught between the veranda railings.

His assistant crouched like a monkey on the rail top. He looked a lot like a monkey too, dark and skinny, a breadboard in his little brown clawlike hands. The board against his bunched knees supported his writing pad to record the sales. The crowd expected him to lose his balance at any moment and this entertained them as much as the auction, since few of them could afford to buy anything.

He reached down and caught up the dressing-table by one of its legs. The drawers tipped open and this caused the crowd to cry “Oops!” and the young man to slap the drawers back into place. The mirror sent silvery shafts right out onto the street, and when it jerked back and forth the reflected cars danced crazily. For a second Amy saw herself streaked to a great length, quivering crazily too before the mirror was tipped to lie flat, where it blinked and flashed at the sky, attempting to outshine the sun itself.

“Here-we-have-a-lovely-piece-for-a-lady's-room!” boomed the auctioneer, his eyes on Amy. She raised a hand in acknowledgment, and the auctioneer shot a finger at her.

“Two shillings from the little lady!” he cried and everyone looked with respect and some with envy at Amy. She turned pink and ran a finger across the blue band holding back her hair, making it smooth above her forehead and bunching it up beautifully at the back. She had no more than five shillings in her purse and felt it nervously now in sudden fear that some coins might have escaped.

“Here we have sixpence over there!” The auctioneer's eyes swept beyond Amy for a moment then back to the top of her head. Amy's hand went up with the purse in it.

“Three shillings, any advance on three shillings, any advance on three shillings? Going, going, gone! This lovely little piece for a lady's bood-wor! A place for her to store her bloomers and things!”

His eyes for a moment stripped Amy to her underthings, while she blushed scarlet and looked inside her purse. The auctioneer, losing interest in Amy once the sale was made, slapped the chest, nearly upsetting both it and the skinny young man, who turned his threatened fall into a leap and handed the chest over by one leg, then took Amy's money, leaping back on the rail to be ready for the sale of a rolling pin.

Amy felt terrible making her way through the crowd. The chest was difficult for her to carry, and worst of all she could not avoid seeing her red embarrassed face in the mirror whatever way she turned it.

“Muggins!” called a fat woman without teeth who wanted the chest but had an out-of-work husband. “There was no sixpenny bid! You paid an extra bob for it!”

Amy put her face between the cane legs and ran. Oh, I do look a fool, she said to herself, avoiding the eyes of pedestrians. Oh, I shouldn't've bought it. I shouldn't've! Her purse felt terribly light, flat in her hand, reproaching her. She would have to manage until next pay day, nearly a week away, on two shillings. She would have to walk home every night. If only someone would catch up with her and say, “Let me buy that from you, here's five shillings!” She shifted the legs to straddle her hip and met eyes that asked whatever was going on. Oh, take the thing, Amy cried to herself. They will laugh at me when I get home, if ever I do!

Peter was the first to see her and ran from the veranda to open the gate.

“I saw this flashing!” he said. “It's the mirror!” He took the chest from her and bound his long thin arms around it. She ran and opened the front door for him.

“Whatever's that?” Daphne cried, coming down the hall. The little drawers answered her, running eagerly out and back as Peter tipped them. He laughed and set the chest down and stood back to admire it.

“Was it alright to buy it, Aunty Daph?” Amy asked, pleased with their faces.

In her bedroom Amy set it against the wall opposite the foot of her bed. Admiring it she backed until she sat on the bed.

Daphne was in the doorway. “More for a little girl's room. But lovely.”

Amy was about to tip the contents of her suitcase, in which she stored her underwear, onto her bed to transfer them to the drawers. Instead she went with bowed head and put her fingers into the open parts of the plaited cane that made a frame for the mirror. They did not easily fit but the fingers of Kathleen and Patricia would have. She turned away and smoothed the bed where she sat. Someday I'll have them with me, she thought, and it's a good idea to start getting some things together.

She looked across at Daphne, half expecting she would be reading these thoughts, but Daphne, having heard Dudley come in after watching cricket in the park, was going out pulling at the door.

“Keep this shut on it,” she said.

It wasn't Dudley but Daphne who forced Amy to leave.

She had been several months at Lincoln Knitwear, but it seemed like years.

She always ran up the stairs to her office although she was usually early, and when she closed the flap at one end of the counter shutting her inside, she felt like a proud home owner closing her door on the outside world.

She would start rattling her old typewriter at once, for the factory began operating half an hour before the office. Waiting for her there would be a stack of paper sheets filled out by the forewoman. From these Amy typed her labels. She was often excited by something new.

“Royal blue/white polo neck”, or “burnt orange contrast basque, cuffs”, were enough to make her decide to fly down to the bottom floor at midday when the machines stopped and the presses ceased their great steamy sighing, and the women, still at their places, were eating sandwiches and reading from paperback novels, very tattered. They had so little time for lunch it was hardly worthwhile moving away.

Amy replenished the stock sold to the public, although she believed there could be a better turnover.

“Help me make a decent notice for Lincoln's front door,” Amy said to Peter one Saturday afternoon, and checking Daphne's whereabouts (she was in the vegetable garden) he put aside his homework.

“‘Seconds for Sale',” said Amy, quoting the existing notice. “You would think they were selling
time
not
clothes
!”

Together they printed in bold letters an invitation to inspect top quality goods at greatly reduced prices.
Some with Tiny Flaws
, Peter printed in the smallest letters he could make.

“That will show just how tiny they are,” Amy said. She pulled her head smartly away from touching his at the sound of Daphne's feet on the back path, and he scrambled back to the table and his books.

 

Amy repaired some of the flaws. Lance Yates found her in her lunch hour mending a cuff where the wool was unravelled. The sight brightened his yellowish eyes, spilling a trickle of oily light over Amy's bent figure. She was intent on her stitches so did not see.

“We are not selling so much because we ask for cash,” she said.

She felt sorry for the people coming in, fingering the clothes hungrily but without enough money to buy. They asked sometimes for them to be put aside on a deposit of a shilling or two. Lance Yates was adamant that there were to be cash transactions only.

“They will pay a bit off then leave it for six months and the day after we hang it up and sell it they'll be in for it.

“Besides,” and tilting his head back, he quickly checked that the main office could not hear, “you have enough to do here without keeping track of other people's stuff.”

His next words made Amy even happier.

He was having the switchboard moved to Amy's counter for her to operate it.

The board was proving a distraction in the main office. There was a tendency to halt pens and typewriters when other than routine calls came in. Too often June Carter, combining invoicing with operation of the switchboard, tried to handle complaints instead of passing them on immediately to Miss Sheldon. Lance was rarely in the office, but mostly supervising pressing operations, for which he had a fetish, standing over the presser and sending her into a lather of perspiration rivalling the steam flying from the machine.

Miss Jean Sheldon was twenty-nine, abandoned by a former lover, and making a determined bid for Lance's attention, though he was married with a son.

The girls in the office observed Lance's eye for Amy, and Miss Sheldon's jealous one aimed in the same direction.

Those who disliked Miss Sheldon (nearly all) were gratified (though grudgingly) by this development, and warmed to Amy when she seemed unaffected by Lance's attention.

They did not fail to observe the unnecessary trips Miss Sheldon made to the “front” as it was called, in case Amy got the idea she was not under Miss Sheldon's supervision. When Lance gave Amy an instruction Miss Sheldon often repeated it, wording it differently.

After Lance told Amy she was to operate the switchboard Miss Sheldon came to Amy with lifted chin. I always think of our old ginger cat the way that fur is coated on her face, thought Amy. Miss Sheldon ordered Amy to spend an hour a day for a week practising taking calls and putting others through to the factory.

“Yes, Miss Sheldon,” Amy said. “What time tomorrow?”

“I didn't say tomorrow.” Miss Sheldon had permanent creases between her reddish eyebrows. One flared up before the other, Amy always noticed.

“But Mr Yates did,” Amy said.

She almost decided to take the tram home to get there quicker with her news. But she reminded herself she had no rise in salary to warrant such extravagance. Her concession to the occasion was to bound along, darting around people coming towards her. They will think me mad, she told herself, not minding at all.

Peter was often hanging over the front gate waiting for her. Sometimes John, washed and with his hair combed after his work among the bricks, sat on the step and waited too. But tonight an early gloom had settled over the house and little front garden, and their absence made it darker still. Even the light in the front glass seemed dimmer than usual.

“I'm home!” Amy called going down the hall. Daphne, setting the table, lifted her eyes then lowered them. She looks like Mum when I told her I was leaving, Amy thought, unhappy that she seemed to have brought the outside chill in with her.

Dudley did not look up from a sheet of paper he was studying, and Peter on the couch had his knees drawn up and his chin on them and was staring ahead under his floppy hair, making her feel she should wave her arms to have him notice her. John's grin was like a flag raised.

Amy slipped into her room to hang her bag on a brass hook, one of four attached to a piece of carved wood found under the house when they were looking for flat boxes to plant tomato and lettuce seeds. John had fixed it to her wall and helped her polish the hooks, and Peter had watched from the end of her bed.

Daphne had called them out sharply when Dudley asked silently, with his head cocked to one side, for an explanation of the talk and laughter.

Now Daphne was making the same gesture towards the paper Dudley held. Isn't it strange, Amy thought, that people married to each other, though so different, do the same kind of things? She wondered briefly if she had adopted any of Ted's habits. I don't think so, she assured herself.