Amy's Children (7 page)

“A nice old school report there!” Daphne cried. Peter drew his legs up even higher.

“Put your feet on the floor!” she shouted, slapping a fork down hard.

Amy knew the report to be the results of the trial examination pending the major one three or four months off.

“Only fifty-five for geography,” John said.

Amy wanted to laugh.

It didn't seem such a big issue to her, not enough to paint such acute unhappiness on Peter's face. “Pooh!” she said, and his eyes met hers gratefully. “It's not the big one!”

Peter's shoulders went back as if he would be ready for the big one. Daphne slapped down another fork. “He didn't study for that exam! Is he goin' to study for the next one?” The cutlery jumped and screwed itself about and Daphne straightened it, her face dark, as if someone else was responsible.

Amy took plates from the dresser to warm them on the rack above the stove.

“I was just about to do that,” Daphne said.

Amy was in a place of her own in Stanmore when war broke out in Europe in September 1939.

Similar to those she passed on her way to Coxes in Annandale, it was also within walking distance of Lincolns so she could save on tram fares. The closed-in balcony was her living area, but she had to go into the bedroom for water, as the only tap was over a handbasin there. Amy filled her small round tin dish and carried it to the balcony to wash her cup and plate. She used as little hot water as possible, for the gas meter had to be kept fed. Her one extravagance was to bake a mutton chop and a potato in her tiny oven.

Peter visited her one Saturday and she halved her dinner, with much laughter, serving it on her two bread and butter plates. She had an apple pie which she started to cut down the middle then decided she didn't want anything sweet and put it on a saucer at his place.

He was at Teachers' College, the one attached to Sydney University, and his scholarship gave him fifty pounds a year, much of which was given to Daphne for board.

“I nearly got a job Friday nights and Saturday mornings at Coles but there were too many after it,” he said, taking very small bites so that he would not finish too far ahead of her. “But the lady said I would most likely get the next vacancy—if there is one.”

That would be something I would like, Amy thought, a job in charge of people. She saw herself immaculate in a tailored suit going down the counters in Coles, looking severely on the staff whether they were serving or not, frowning more deeply if she had to straighten goods in fixtures.

No, I don't think I'd like that so much, Amy decided, thinking of her corner at Lincolns. She had a swift vision of it waiting for her. Come and be cosy here, it seemed to say. She smiled and Peter saw.

“How did you go on the switchboard?” he asked as if he had the same vision.

“Oh, I'm always wondering who will ring next!” Amy cried.

“I might ring you up,” Peter said. “Would they mind?”

“You haven't got the phone on, have you?” She felt a jealous pang at missing out on such a momentous event, wondering where they would install it.

“No, from a box.”

After that they talked about the possibility of war, for Peter had listened to Hitler's speech on the wireless the previous night and he thought England would come into it straight away.

“Then us.” He looked at his hands, sliding the palms one against the other. She thought of them holding a gun.

“You wouldn't go though before finishing your teaching course?”

“I don't know.” He got up and took his plates and looked around wondering what to do with them, since there was no sink or bench. She brought the dish, feeling sad her place was not better equipped but not sure this was the cause of her change of mood.

“Germany will round up all the young ones,” he said, pleased to find where the tea-towel hung. Amy had boiled the kettle for their tea and poured the rest over their plates.

“I could walk all the way home with you,” she said when they were crossing the park. But she knew by his silence he didn't want that.

 

He wrote to her the following week.

 

I felt very mean not asking you to walk back to our place. But Mum says a lot about you deserting (that's her word) your children. Don't worry, she is guilty about asking you to leave. People are so strange. (Not you.) Classes are a bit of a bore. It's hard to settle down with so much going on. If I enlist I will tell you first.

Love from Peter.

 

When she put the letter down on the little cane dressing-table she got a picture of his face over the tea-towel very serious, but with blood running from the forehead into the corner of his eye and down to the corner of his mouth, opened in astonishment that something was happening to him: he didn't know what.

She turned away quickly so that she wouldn't see him fall.

Peter died halfway through 1942 when Australia was at war with Japan. Daphne refused to allow him to enlist during the war in Europe.

“No son of mine is goin' to fight for that mob,” she said, meaning the English.

Stinkin' Poms, she called them. She and May had lost their only brother in the Great War more than twenty years earlier.

Peter brought up the subject of enlisting on a Saturday afternoon, watching Daphne hoeing between two rows of young silver beet.

He was seated on the same apple tree stump where he had been the time he threw the marble down Amy's dress. Everything reminds me of her, he thought. Even the war. Perhaps I just want to go to war to fight for her.

He was still part mesmerized by the memory of her fishing the marble from the front of her dress. That vision gave way to another—Amy in the blouse she wore the day he went to her place and ate dinner with her.

The blouse was silky, deep blue with full sleeves, something new she'd bought. He wanted to ask her if she remembered the marble when she leaned over him with his plate, giggling at the little serve. But there she was distracting him with that column of thick cream poured into the opening for her neck. It was even lovelier than he remembered. He needed to concentrate on his chop, hoping his face did not show the heat that came there.

She was so smartly dressed in spite of being home from work, so different from the women he saw on his way up the stairs. The unfamiliar male tread brought tousled heads through doorways, old kimonos clutched to slack bosoms.

Amy had stood well back from the washing-up dish to keep her cream skirt free of splashes, and afterwards she went to the little cane dressing-table to put something from a jar on her hands and comb her hair. She is perfect, he thought. Perfect. Why is it, in a way, I wish she wasn't?

He wanted Amy there hoeing, and began to hate his mother and think how ugly she was. Ashamed, he got up and went inside and shut himself in his room. John no longer shared it; he'd moved in where Amy used to be. It looked so different now with John's old clay-covered boots lying on their sides on the floor, and the bureau he took from his old room littered on top with dogeared paperbacks and comic books. Peter hated looking in there.

He lay on the bed, averting his eyes from the table Daphne had bought him, spread with his books. He should be studying but he wanted to hold the feel of Amy's silk shoulder rubbing his as they walked through the park. He hated himself for his cowardly act in not allowing her to come right home with him. She might have been re-established as a regular visitor.

 

Daphne approved of Peter's enlisting when Japan came into the war even though he was through college and teaching in a school at Bondi.

He telephoned Amy to tell her he had been to Victoria Barracks that morning and signed up for military service, and he would go back to teaching a class of eight-year-olds in the afternoon. He thought (providing he passed his medical) he would start training pretty soon at a camp in Liverpool. He was told that he might not have the rank of private for too long with his higher education.

“I want to get stuck into the fighting though,” he told Amy, his voice from the phone booth sounding as if he were speaking from inside an empty petrol drum. She stored this away in her mind to tell him when she saw him, hoping she could imitate the hollow ring his words had and make him laugh. She couldn't say much at the switchboard, particularly with Miss Sheldon tending to behave as if she had not yet mastered the art of operating it, and checking on her more than ever.

“Little she knows but I don't want the greasy-skinned thing within a bull's roar of me,” Amy muttered to herself one day after both Lance and Miss Sheldon had paid unnecessary visits. The phrase was one borrowed from May and Daphne.

Lance had removed the rack of clothes and taken down the sign from the front door. He didn't want her burdened with clothing coupons, which had been introduced with wartime rationing, and the factory was making long johns for servicemen, khaki jumpers and greatcoats, and fewer civilian things. Amy was glad. She felt guilty whenever she saw the great piles of children's clothes on the factory tables, or read details of their manufacture from invoices. She had sent home two or three parcels to May, unhappy that she was no longer familiar with the girls' measurements, imagining May's scorn if they couldn't be worn. It was more than a year now since she had sent anything.

May and Daphne exchanged more letters than May and Amy. Amy did not know what excuses Daphne used when she had moved out of the Coxes. She thought about asking Peter what Daphne said about her, or what references there were to her in May's letters, or for fresh news of the little girls, but her time with Peter was always so short it seemed a shame to spoil it with any unpleasant topic.

On his last leave from training he got away from the house in Annandale as soon as he could and took Amy to Bondi. She smiled when she heard, remembering her mind picture of Bondi Beach when she was at the hotel, thinking how much better it was seeing it with Peter. He wanted to show her the school where he taught and show her where shells had fallen, for it was only a week after the attack by Japanese submarines on Sydney Harbour, and people were taking the trams to walk about the streets in the wild wintry weather, disappointed that everything looked much the same as when they'd seen it last. A few air raid wardens in caps with badges were standing about, looking as if they would like to be questioned but daring anyone to have such gall.

Amy was proud of Peter and clung to his arm, and imagined people thinking look at that nice young soldier and his pretty girlfriend. She did not look older than him, she was sure. Her cheeks were pink with the cold and she knew the tip of her nose was pink too, but her hair did not blow about too much, since it was bound with a navy blue ribbon matching a navy jumper bought cheaply from Lincoln Knitwear because the seams did not meet properly under one arm. Sitting on her bed with her ankles crossed she had darned the hole so neatly no one could possibly detect it.

She had a deep green blazer over the jumper and a navy skirt with pleats that flew out when she turned quickly. He took her into a cafe for tea and toast. It was a long time since she had eaten properly made toast. In her room she had a wire and metal contraption comprising two sides that clapped together with the bread between them. When held over a gas flame the result was usually scorched bread not toast, and no matter how much care was taken there was always a burnt taste.

The toast the waitress served was beautifully brown, the melting butter putting a shine on the finger lengths stacked on the plate so neatly she hated disturbing it. The waitress looked with great tenderness at Peter. “Oh no,” she said, shocked when he offered threepence more than the cost of the meal.

“I don't have anything much to spend my pay on,” he apologized to Amy when her eyes fell on a roll of pound notes thicker than she had ever seen.

They walked about, mainly on the cliffs, watching the sea turn the brown rocks black, and hardly allowing them to get their colour back before there was another great wash sucking savagely at the crevices, and making grinding noises with the sand.

“You can't believe it,” she said of the shelling, looking down on the streets with the trams like busy beetles and the dark shapes of strolling people.

She felt a great safeness because he was there. They found a little ham and beef shop open and he bought some cakes from a glass cabinet which the woman, elderly and fat, but with the same expression of devotion the girl in the cafe wore, put in a box for easy carrying.

“Let me!” Amy said, caught in the wave of reverence for him. He smiled and tucked the box under an arm. The woman, checking with dark eyes that she wasn't observed by other customers, reached under the counter and with partly hidden hands slipped a cake of soap in a white and gold wrapper into a paper bag. She closed it quickly on the smell when suspicious heads turned, and handed it to Peter. Outside he passed it to Amy.

“There's no rationing of soap in the army,” he said.

“I will make it last and last,” Amy said, smelling it through the bag. “And I'll put a bell on it so's I won't leave it behind in the bathroom!”

In the tram he held the box of cakes on his knee and both of them noticed a grease stain making a blot on the cardboard. He put a thumb over it and she looked out the window, and when she looked back the stain had spread further and he was trying to cover it with his spread hand. The people lined up opposite, their rows of legs making Amy think of a fence made up of odd bits of wood, fixed their eyes on the box. Amy wanted to laugh at him trying to look unconcerned as the grey turned a deeper grey. She wanted to take it from him and hold it but this would make the people stare more. In a little while there was no hope of covering the stain and a corresponding stain of deep pink spread over his face. Smiles began to trickle from eyes to mouths on the watching seat.

Amy straightened her back and cleared her throat. A-hem! it said with a deep and severe frown. Don't you dare laugh. They looked away and some kicked the wood of their seats with guilty heels. She leaned towards him and whispered. “Do you want to get out and walk the rest of the way?” No, said the shake of his head. She slipped an arm through his and a hand near his on the box.