Joan Makes History (7 page)
Freshly dug, the earth had a dark fertile look. But after the sunâhot even in what seemed to be winter hereâhad been on it for an hour it was again the somewhat grey, somewhat sandy, distinctly unpromising soil I had kicked at that first day but had decided would have to do. My heart sank then at the possibility that all that heaving and grunting, that chopping and splitting and stumping and burning, had laid bare nothing but a patch of arid dirt in which any crop would wither.
And what crop? I knew only two crops, and had seeds of one: if anything was going to grow here, it would be potatoes. I was no expert, having been too feckless back Home, too disgusted and weary to my heart of the whole business to have paid enough attention. I regretted that now, but in any case this bumpy field that had been wrestled out of the wilderness, with incorrigible holes and stumps, boulders and bald patches: this amateurish field, grey under the foreign burning sun, was so unlike the soft smooth
fields of home, that lay so tame and green under cloud or tepid sun, that it was all new in any case.
It is all new,
I said to myself, but still I tried to remember a thing or two.
Let the furrows march cleanly up the hill,
I remembered them saying, so when it came time to furrow the grey soil I was careful to plough up and down the slope.
Aye, you'll have a good runoff there,
I imagined Father saying with approval, the sodden nightmare of potato rot being in all our anxious hungry minds back there. My furrows, then, marched up and down the slope, and faced perfectly south.
Ye'll not catch me wasting time and good seed planting on a north slope,
I heard Father's voice saying, full of contempt for my ignorance.
I was careful, then, and stood with satisfaction looking along my furrows, on the slope that faced due south. I had checked it with the compass of a passing gentleman on a horse, who had been obliging enough to tell me I should plant to the north, but I had smiled and known better.
I did not pray over the planting of the seed: I had no wish to pray to a God who had made life one of starvation in the Old Country and of endless drudgery in the new. He was watching over those seeds, though. Ah, Joan, how wrong you were about everything you did, and how much that God of yours was caring for you, to make sure of success in spite of every mistake you made! God sent only the gentlest of rain down on my furrows, which with anything stronger would have become foaming rivulets. He sent only the mistiest most forgiving sun down on my scarce-covered seeds, which would have parched and shrivelled under anything more powerful and, although even He could not correct my folly in planting on the south slope, He had ensured
that the slope was slight enough for sufficient sun to reach the earth.
Every dawn found me awake, my hands clenched, my heart beating loud and urgent in my chest.
What? What? Why?
I wondered, until remembering, I arose from the sapling bed and went out barefoot to look at the field.
Will it be today? Will it be? Will it ever be?
And at last it was. At last, in a dawn made metallic by the crowings and warblings of those birds, under the soft fingers of yellow sun breaking over the crests of the trees, I saw thin stands of green, so vague I had to look away and catch them only out of the corner of my eye, so elusive were they: a blur of pale colour on the dark earth, a ghostly film of green. Those seeds, all our hope and our future, our sweat and toil, had swelled and burst with life: our seed had taken root and sprouted, new life had begun.
Our seed?
you ask.
Our
hope? Our future? Who was there, Joan, with you in that rough clearing among the rustling gums? Who had sweated alongside you, chopping and heaving, grunting and digging, burning and building, and who shared that crude hut that let so much of the elements in? Why, that boy I had met on the boat of course, he of the carrot-coloured hair and the intensity of persuasion, who had caught my eye, my hand and at last my heart. He had not left me, and now together we looked out over our gossamer green, our new life beginning.
It seemed to astonish no one that my fornications and lusts had caught up with me, or only astonished myself. I stared at the bland buttery skin of my belly and spread my fingers over its warmth: it was unimaginable to me that a creature had taken root in there, some faceless tadpole conceived out of a night of laughing and flesh, sprouting within me.
I had ignored, and hoped I was wrong in what I was starting to think, and disbelieved all the evidence, so that of course it was now too late for any kind of remedy.
I spoke to this stranger, this Duncan with whom I had laughed and humped, and who had taken root inside me. I felt him watching me, his face empty and unsuspecting. It was a horrible kind of power, to know that I was about to open my mouth on a few words that would wipe the calmness off his face and replace it with some sort of agitation, though I could not quite imagine what kind. The world could never be the same after I had spoken, and I was in no haste to change the world: I loved things as they were, with Duncan eyeing me with a kind of soft salaciousness that warmed me from within. While I was the only person to know of the existence of another being, that person did not exist, but it was not a secret that would stay hidden for very long, so,
although it was impossible to imagine that I would ever be able to find the words, and rock the world to its foundations with them, I knew it had to happen. I was like a reluctant machine, sitting numb in the Tudor Tearooms trying to set myself in motion to say what had to be said.
I watched the edge of the table in its red cloth and ran my chilled fingers along a groove, where the cloth could be made to take on a crease from the pressure of my fingernail.
Look, it is like this,
I said jerkily into the friendly silence between us, and Duncan, who was a stranger to me, but not stupid, seemed to become very still, listening with his whole body, as if he knew the universe was beginning its topple. He waited, but my voice had sounded strange to me, unnerved, unsteady, and I could not go on. There was a long silence in which I ran my fingernail along that red cloth in its groove and listened to the fear beat in my head. At last Duncan stopped my hand and said in a quiet way,
So, Joanie, do you want to have a discussion, is that it?
and I looked at him and saw that he could not guess, and was thinking, perhaps, of discussions of a conventional nature on the subject of futures, and where ours was going, and prospects, and intentions.
No,
I said, meaning the thoughts of such a sane and tidy discussion, and jerked my hand out of his so that I felt him become stiff, waiting.
Yes,
I said, after creasing the tablecloth some more.
Yes, it is like this.
I needed momentum to carry me into the next sentence, but the words died on their way from my brain.
Duncan, that patient man, waited, thinking only of words I might say that he would have an answer for. I wondered if perhaps he knew already, whether his calmness meant he had already thought out this future and knew how to deal with it. Did he
know, after all, and was he just waiting for me to speak the words?
Come on, Joanie,
he said.
Spit it out,
and I took a breath and ran at the words:
It is like this, Duncan, I am with child.
I almost laughed to hear what kind of quaint antique words I had chosen to break the news, so Duncan stared at a face twisted and writhing with mixed passions of amusement and dismay, and I watched him wonder if I was making a joke in poor taste, or what was happening. I tried to be clearer:
I am pregnant, Duncan,
I said bluntly, and the cold words sobered me, and there was, all at once, nothing to laugh at.
I told Duncan all I knew in the way of dates, and certainties, what doctors had said, and how there was no doubt, and all those mechanical facts about this thing that was happening to us. When he had learned all there was to learn, he sat playing with his spoon in his saucer for a long time in silence. I watched his face bowed over the cup: I could see his eyes shifting in thought beneath his lowered eyelids, and I was struck chill with how little I knew of this man. I knew how to make him laugh, and how to make him pant and groan, and bite my flesh with his sharp teeth, but I could not even guess what thoughts were teeming behind his eyes.
It had started to seem to me that Duncan and I would stay here for ever in the Tudor Tearooms, paralysed by the inexorable workings of biology, when he reached over the table and patted my shoulder.
Well Joanie,
he said cheerily,
I will take you home now.
He smiled, although it seemed that the smiling muscles did not have their hearts in it: but he took my hand, and walked me home in silence, kissed me on the cheek in the entrance of the
flats, and waited to make sure I reached our floor safely before walking out into the night.
As for me, I was paralysed. I could feel the swift-running silent clock of my body and its guest racing towards their own plans, but somewhere remote from that I remained Joan, woman of destiny, whose life was surely in her own hands? Whose future was surely her own choice to make? Whose great, if vague, plans were surely her own to direct?
I was in the mood for telling, though, and having told Duncan, I now had the task of telling Father, and of course Mother. I chose to tell Father first: the words came more easily than they had for Duncan.
My hairless father watched me, those oiled eyes of his not blinking, as if continuing to listen, in the silence after I had spoken. He could have been considering in what way my lips parted when I was in ecstasy, and what sort of sound I had made when the foreign seed of my paramour had been shot into me. But when he spoke, it was of beef.
He is a good prospect, that boy, although the colour of a carrot,
my handsome father said, and smiled a fluid smile at the thought of my vegetable love.
And he is a man of little imagination, I would say, and men of little imagination make the best husbands, you will find.
My father nodded so the light caressed the bumps of his skull, that I had been allowed to play with as a child.
Darling,
he said, and smiled his bald man's exposed smile at me, so the skin on his skull moved,
I had hoped for a little more elegance, more chic, for my daughter, but perhaps it is the responsibility of those from the civilised lands to take these rich orange men in hand.
He smiled tidily at me after this speech, and watching that flawless stone head I felt rubbery, shapeless, ill-put-together,
as I stammered,
I did not have it in my plans to marry just yet.
Laughs come in many varieties, and the one my father demonstrated to me now was of the musical, unamused, premeditated kind. He kept it going for some time, as if he thought my obtuseness needed an extensive demonstration. He was in love with his laugh. He was in love with the way he sat elegantly in his chair, with his black silk sock showing below his cuff, with his small feet in the gleaming shoes tidy beside each other. He ran a hand over his skull and was in love with that too, and the way he could control even that hair of his, that had tried to make a fool of him by falling out and leaving him a balding man, and which he had shown who was boss, by shaving it all off.
But I would not be out-laughed by any bald man.
I have a destiny ahead of me,
I said in a matter-of-fact way to discourage a further demonstration of laughing.
I am to be a woman of destiny.
Knightley was a man much given to the sly fingering of his private parts.
We will lick this country into shape,
he would cry.
We will even civilise the bloody blacks.
Those who did not know about the convenient hole in his pocket would have been inspired by the transcendent pleasure they could see on his face. But I, Joan, was the woman whose unpleasant duty it was every once in a while to scrub those trousers in my tub of suds, and I knew about the flesh-fingering holes in his pockets. I stood with my sudsy hands coiled in my apron, drying them between rinses, looking over the rails of the fence at where the man Knightley stood heavily on the earth in his hidden socks (which I knew were also full of holes, but holes of no lascivious intent): I watched him exchanging tales of gold with other men.
Mark my words,
I could hear their words carry through the still air that ate the steam from my copper,
You mark my words, oh my very word, yes.
Knightley stood with a skinny stranger newly arrived in our town, a stranger with tall tales of California and even taller ones of finding gold in our hills, perhaps in Knightley's very own paddocks. Knightley became heated in his enthusiasm for the idea, although not heated enough to ride with the stranger into the hills and suffer cold nights, stalking elusive nuggets beside
chilly creeks. No, Knightley was a man well settled on his acres, with his sheep and his fine stone house freshly built: but he was a blustering boasting bluff sort of fellow, and enjoyed the hyperbole of the skinny man, and the possibility that, after all, there might be nuggets under his very nose, on his own land, waiting to be picked up and pocketed.
The man from California had evidently not been overburdened with nuggets on the goldfields there, otherwise he would not now be so skinny and aflame with hope on the back of such a broken-down drudge of a horse. But he blazed with conviction that, any day now, he would return triumphant from his journeys into the hills, with bits of bliss in his pockets that could be held up between thumb and forefinger to admire.
I shall be a baronet,
he cried.
My old horse will be stuffed and put into a glass case!
Knightley, a man with a poor grasp of words, and no way at all with a grand phrase, nodded and admired, and had ample time to waste with him.
Personally, I was sceptical of this man, whose sharp finger never stopped pointing towards Knightley's hills and who never stopped promising. Such grand opulent kinds of history are not for me: I know of other kinds, more intimate, which are worth any number of promises and tall tales. I was there, and can let you into one or two secrets on this matter.
Women who wash other people's soiled garments learn a thing or two, and there were curious secrets of Knightley I would as soon not have learned. I was nothing but the laundry woman: I, Joan, was a down-at-heel person who came humbly to the back entrances of all the grand houses on the hill, and spent my days scrubbing things on a ridged board, my hands growing puffy from the big bar of yellow soap. I scrubbed at soiled collars, cuffs
full of gravy, socks full of holes: I poked at bed linen tangling in the copper, and heaved and grunted afterwards, hoisting the dripping sheets up into the sun on the clothes-prop.
Of a Monday I was to be found scrubbing for Mrs Cassell and her household, and of a Tuesday it was the Bigelows' endless pinafores and embroidered bibs, and the lawn nightdresses, full of the smell of mother's milk that could not wait for a babe's suck. Poor Mrs Bigelow seemed fertile to a fault, and I had traced the progress of her fallings (the sudden way there were no rags to wash), her confinements (the bloodied sheets and towels), and the growth of her many infants on her good rich milk.
I am impatient to be on with the main story here, but I will complete my week for you for the sake of tidiness. Of a Wednesday there were the gigantic pantaloons of Mrs Cotterill, who was a widow and liked a fresh tablecloth every other day and clean sheets twice a week, so my Wednesdays were busy, her lines all full of those vast pantaloons that filled with the wind and tugged gaily at the rope while the tablecloths snapped and flapped around them. Thursday was my day at Mrs Ridge's establishment, where no lady had ever set foot, but many females of light laughs and loose lips, and most of the gentlemen of this town, and here there were copperfuls of sheets until I was sick to death of their weight through the wringer, and endless slippery piles of underthings: chemises, slips, petticoats, nightdresses, pantaloons as provocative and unlike poor Mrs Cotterill's as possible: endless piles of slithering tantalising garments, and not much else, just a few collars if Mrs Ridge's gentleman Norman had favoured her with his presence that week. And Fridays, well, Fridays were sombre days at the rectory, where cups of tea for the washerwoman were not very forthcoming, and Miss Skinner the reverend's sister
inspected every tedious bit of starched surplice and bib and bit of fine clergyman's lace, and counted the wine-stained double damask napkins used at Communion. I did not feel inclined to sing over my scrubbing or enjoy a bit of a joke with Bridget in the kitchen at dinnertime, because Miss Skinner had a habit of gliding up behind people on her silent feet and giving a laughing person a nasty fright.
My Saturday was not my own, but it was at least in my own home, for Saturday was the day I took in the washing of the Purvises, the McElroys and the Russells, and that Knightley: all optimistic folk, but either not prosperous enough just yet to have my services in their own establishments, or in Knightley's case, being bachelor gentlemen requiring little washing done.
Oh, I was a busy woman. It was a source of great grief to me, of which I would rather not speak, or at least on which I would rather not dwell, that the good Lord, who was responsible for the starching of all those surplices and napkins, had not endowed us with a child. But this is not the story of Joan and her husband and the way years had passed without issue, in spite of every kind of remedy tried that anyone had suggested, in the way of wort swallowed, and sage infused, and eucalyptus and tar applied, and gymnastics somewhat creakingly employed. Those years had passed and now in the mornings in our rustling chaff mattress, Ted would take my hand in his:
Good day to you, Joanie,
he would say, and squeeze my fingers before going off with his hoe to someone's garden, to tell me that it did not matter, and just the two of us was enough for him. His hand squeezed and consoled me with these kind lies, and only he and I knew how I lay and sobbed into his chest at night for longing for a little one.
Well, I said this is not my story and it is not, I have already said more than I meant about myself here, and it is no one's business but my own. However, be all that as it may, that is why from Monday to Saturday my hands were in suds and starch or struggling with the heavy linen of gentry's tables and beds, and I had plenty of time and mind left over from these activities to consider the whims and fancies and all the tricks and little secrets that my gentry got themselves up to in the garments I knew so intimately.
Miss Mary was a fine neat girl with a part in her hair as straight as a horizon and tiny pale hands. Even in the heat of summer Miss Mary's shifts had never been stiff with perspiration as Miss Anne Bigelow's were, poor red-faced girl who overheated so easily! And Miss Mary's fine lawn and muslins came to me often so clean, with only a brown spot like a penny to show where someone (not neat Mary, surely) had been reckless with a slopped saucer, or once an entire strawberry crushed in the folds of the skirt, when she had sat down on it in some mishap. That strawberry was like a drawing, lying perfect, flattened into the white muslin, and I picked it off and popped it into my mouth, where it tasted so good that Eadith the thin-lipped undermaid saw me smiling into my suds, savouring strawberry, which I did not often have a chance to taste, and not being one to easily tolerate a smile in anyone but gentry, began to snoop and sniff and count garments ostentatiously: five, six and seven, sure that the smile of the washerwoman could come only from some wickedness or thievery.
Well, Miss Mary was a fine neat girl then, off whose clothes one did not hesitate to eat: so I was surprised to pick up her lilac drawn-thread lawn with the spotted cuffs, and find the sleeve
with a great soiling of mud, a smearing of dirt that was stiff on the fine cloth. Now, such smudges and cakings of mud were common enough in my own household, for sure, and I was not surprised that in the case of the Bigelows or the Purvises I had to soak and rub and scrub at such large quantities of garden embedded on sleeves and knees. But I wondered, as I rubbed away carefully at Miss Mary's lilac lawn, musing into the warm suds over this and that, as I was in the habit of doing: I wondered what mishap might have happened to Miss Mary, that this sleeveful of earth was evidence of: a broken ankle from slipping on a patch of moss, or a sprained wrist from stumbling down the terrace steps? I would hear it all later from Cook or even Eadith, who loved a good mishap. Meanwhile in the suds I watched all manner of small tragedies rise and form and froth away again.
Being a thorough worker, recommended from one lady to another for her thoroughness, I inspected the drawn-thread lilac lawn for other stains that my small scenes of violence would necessitate: a large green behind on the skirt if it was a slip on moss that was the problem, a rip of an underarm if it was those terrace steps, or a torn hem if it had been a heel caught in loose stitching: but none of these appeared, and the image that formed more conclusively in the suds was of a young lady lying on her side, with some thoughtful dampstopper under her skirt, but that left elbow sinking in the soft earth of an expensively tended damp lawn, the elbow joining with the earth as the young lady lay without moving very much, doing something interesting enough to take her mind off her drawn-thread lilac.
All else was intact, and there were no holey-kneed stockings, no muddied petticoats, no bloodied handkerchiefs used to staunch wounds or wipe at mud.
I hung the drawn-thread lilac lawn out at last in the crisp sun, that gave such a clear edge to everything visible, satisfied that every mark was gone, and watched it dancing from the line, and knew that I was joined in a tiny way to Miss Mary, lying on her side for so long engrossed in something or other.
I sighed into my suds at the end of my thoughts, and I thought a great deal, for although I was a red-handed small-eyed washerwoman with dank damp hair and nothing in the way of womanly graces to flesh out my limp overwashed bodices: although I seemed no one, and could not as much as spell my own name, I was someone, though someone whose name would quickly be forgotten for never having been written down. I, Joan, was someone who thought things over, as the business of squeezing clothes through suds did not by any means engage the whole of my mind.
I imagined, and signs fed my imagination. It came to me as the weeks passed that Mondays at the Cassells were of interest to me now, because of the signs I was seeing there. I was the only person to see them, and what signs! I saw the lilac drawn-thread become soiled in various places, for all the world as if Miss Mary had taken to lying on grass or in the shrubbery inspecting something for long periods of time, or doing something close to the earth that filled her attention. I saw her in the street in the lilac drawn-thread lawn, for it was a favourite, and indeed becoming to her, and I had stared at my handiwork, though Miss Mary, smiling the blind smile of the privileged, did not see the lanky woman in the bonnet with the red wooden cherries, and would not have guessed that such a one knew her secret.
Well, I feel you shifting from one foot to the other, growing impatient with my boasting and mysteries.
On with it!
I hear you
say. Let me put before you, then, the signs on which my imagination had gone to work. What else could they have meant, the muddied back of the white spotted voile with the dove-grey inserts, the grass stains on the back of the blue pelisse, the hole in the knee of one of the best Coventry stockings, the rip at its top where it fastened to the suspender, the button missing from the daffodil tulle bodice, the fastening askew at the back of the sky-blue organdie, and a glove tangled in among the petticoats, of which the thumb had been torn almost clear off, along with the buttons someone had been mad with impatience to be done with?
While in other households I watched children grow up, fall off swings, learn to eat with a spoon, go through childish illnesses, all without seeing them, but knowing from bloodied sailor suits, suddenly clean pinafore fronts, nightdresses stiff with childish vomit: as I knew all this, I knew what Miss Mary was up to in long grass and damp shrubberies, twisting and tearing, and at last there was a sign more unmistakable than all of that. For, after all, could Miss Mary not have simply become somewhat prone to accidents, slipping on grass and rocks, clumsily tearing stockings and gloves, and producing evidence that the imagination of her washerwoman was misreading? But I could hardly misread this particular evidence, or lack of it: a month passed, then two months, and there was no sign of Miss Mary's womanhood: so that when prim Eadith could not resist, but had to tell even me, the mere washerwoman, that Miss Mary was to be married within the month, and was it not romantic, such impulse and haste and oh, what a perfect gentleman he was: when she told me all this, I smiled into my suds but I was not surprised. I could have told her that myself, lacking only the precise name of the glove- and lawn-ripping gentleman.
But when I knew, I was dismayed, knowing what I did of Knightley and his pockets and socks. I would not have wished such a sly and lewd gentleman on any young lady, no matter what quantities of gold might be found in his hills or what number of sheep he owned. What gold he had found already, that man, mining the interior of Mary Cassell! I hoped he would appreciate the quality of his find.
They cheered, and got their rice ready outside the church, and thought I was a terrible grouch, not cheering with them as Knightley in his topper entered the church, but I knew a thing or two that they did not, and could not bring myself to cheer. I held my reddened hands together, and watched Miss Mary step from her carriage on the arm of her father, and saw or thought I saw tears under her veil, not just from the joy of being the radiant bride everyone said she was, and I tried to meet the eye of that Knightley, to convey to him my scorn for all I knew.