Mandarin summer, p.12
Mandarin Summer, page 12
Which was why she vaguely understood that he had had to get her away, without help, without rehab, to start owning the land and more and better land he had hoped, than her parents, but away from them where they couldn’t see his mistakes, and why, in the end, she would know better than he, what to do with it.
The cottage was progressing slowly, but Luke was held up for lack of building materials which were supposed to be delivered to the local hardware merchant but the railways had let them down. There wasn’t good roofing iron to be had for love nor money. So although there were things that could be done it was still going to be a long time before they could go and live there.
And if the rain didn’t come soon it wouldn’t be much use thinking about putting a cow on the land either. Some days a sharp little wind would come eddying up out of the gum trees, raising clouds of dry twigs, and fine yellow dirt in the air.
The creek which never had been a creek at all but a water hole from an underground spring was by now totally nonexistent. Dan Cape had told Luke that when it did eventually rain it would make a decent little bit of a bog, enough for a cow or two like they planned on to get enough to drink. It was what happened when weather like this came that would be the problem.
There was a big flat rock by the place where the waterhole should be. They sat on it one evening to talk about how they would make ends meet. Constance was learning a lot about cooking both from her own trial and error and from Schwass’s help.
Only an evening or so before, he had instructed her to cook a chicken so that he could teach her to make a Chinese meal. They had left it to cool until the next day and then he had slid in in his usual fashion armed with fresh cabbages and celery, cauliflower and green peppers, and they had chopped and shaved away at the vegetables with his by now familiar flashing hands, and shown her how to shred the chicken, prepare the oil and cook the food in it. It had been a delicious meal, and the family had been delighted. Constance wondered if they knew who was behind it, but it seemed that they thought it was pure invention on her part for they congratulated her warmly on her skill. She wondered if she ought to tell them and wrote Schwass a note about it but he had torn it up and chuckled and chuckled in his silent way, shaking his head from side to side. He had taken his paper and pencil out then and written that next time she would do it, and of course she would too, it was not difficult once you had the hang of it. So that she told Luke now, that she had approached the Brigadier and asked him if there would be any work for her as a cook at Carlyle House after they had shifted, and he had said that there could very well be, so then Luke had to admit that he too had spoken to Barnsley in much the same manner about orchard work and he had said he would give that some thought too. Not that he had been able to promise them much in the way of wages. They both had to understand that he wasn’t well-off and it had been quite a strain on the budget feeding three extra mouths. They both laughed at that, it had a familiar ring.
It would be hard work though, Luke had reminded her. She said she knew that, but it didn’t seem as if there was much choice. She was going to add that it might be very difficult for her in a few months, and perhaps impossible when the child came. But it was something that they still hadn’t mentioned since the first night and this was a good quiet moment together which she didn’t want to spoil. He was sitting slightly below her on the rock and she was able to rest her hand on his thinning hair. She noticed how thin the back of his neck was and how he hunched a little, it was the coughing she supposed. He kept her awake some nights with it, but it was a little better. He deserved things to be a bit easier than this, there was no point in reminding him that they could get worse. While Barnsley had agreed that it would be a good idea for her to go on cooking even when they were not in residence, there had been an edge of reservation, and that was even before Emily’s misdemeanours. She wondered if he guessed at her condition. He had that way of looking through a woman, it made her feel uncomfortable. She was ashamed for the von Hart woman sometimes when she saw them together. She thought that it was not hard to guess what she did for a roof over her head and he looked at her at the table some nights the way he might look at her when they were actually in bed together. It made her shiver. Her hand tightened over Luke’s shoulder. There was a time and a place for everything.
‘You put Emily to bed did you?’ said Luke.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s a troublesome child.’
‘That’s not fair, she’s been very good now for weeks. She can’t remember every wretched rule about that place.’
‘She’d been told quite specifically not to go into the poppy field,’ said Luke.
‘So she blunders across one of their grubby little secrets. It’s only their guilt,’ said Constance hotly.
‘Hush Constance,’ said Luke uncomfortably. ‘You know I’m not supposed to have told you about them.’
‘But you have haven’t you. So why go round blaming an eleven-year-old child?’
‘She’s nearly twelve,’ said Luke sharply. ‘And you’re talking about us going on working at Carlyle House. If anything’s going to stop us it’s the way she carries on. She’s undisciplined.’
‘I disciplined her while you were away,’ said Constance coldly.
He said nothing. He didn’t want to criticise her openly about the child. He wanted things to be right between her and him, it had to be the girl’s fault she played up, not Constance’s.
It always seemed to come to this. Things would be going well and then they would start to quarrel about Emily. So what would another child do to them right now?
Constance sighed.
‘Look,’ she said, trying reason, ‘the poor kid hasn’t had any attention for such a long time. I promised I’d take her for a picnic on Sunday. Can you spare me for a couple of hours? It might settle her down.’
It was almost too much for Luke. ‘We can’t waste Sundays.’
‘It won’t be wasting them if it makes her a bit happier.’
‘You shouldn’t take her. Then she’ll know she’s done wrong.’
‘I sent her to bed early. Isn’t that enough?’
Circular arguments and exhaustion. I was taken on the picnic. It was a strange morning. I had woken covered with perspiration, my bedding was saturated as if I had a deep fever. My mother came through to check that I was awake and tell me that my breakfast was ready in the kitchen where I now ate all my meals. She had already been up for some time and when she bent over me I saw that there were beads of sweat on her face too.
‘I’m so hot,’ I said.
She pushed a damp strand of hair off her forehead. ‘It’s the weather, they think it might be going to break. Look outside.’ She held the door of my room open so that I could see the sky outside. It was black and thick with deep cloud.
‘Rain?’
She looked excited, almost girlish. ‘They think so.’
I knew then that this was another lesson to be learnt in our new way of life. The seasons and their passing, the rain, and the sun, the wind and the heat and the cold all meant something other than whether I was comfortable or uncomfortable, and these were things by which my life would come to be governed.
‘No picnic?’ I said.
She looked as if she was going to throw her head back and laugh for pure joy. ‘I don’t think so. Now come and have your breakfast.’
The air was so thick and sticky that the smell of food hung heavily and the thought of eating was repulsive. But as I sat there toying with my food and bitterly disappointed about the picnic, the atmosphere began to lighten. It was a physical thing, you could actually feel the change happening. At the window the sky began to lighten and as I watched, the clouds started to roll away, moved by a sharp little breeze that had whipped up. As the clouds vanished the sun emerged, at first with a violent angry glow from between the moving clouds, turning their blackness to a harsh orange, and then a patch of blue sky appeared. I don’t know how long it took, it may have been a few minutes, for that was all it seemed like, or it may have been much longer, but it was so fascinating to watch that I could not take my eyes from this phenomenon. The light began to glow blue and gold again.
Now my mother sagged and her shoulders drooped back into the tired shape they wore so often now. My father put his head around the door and said in a bitter voice, ‘I suppose you’re going on your bloody picnic now then?’
‘It might come back,’ said my mother wearily lifting her head. ‘The rain, it could come back.’
‘They say it won’t.’
‘The food’s ready. I said I’d take her.’
It hurt, being such an imposition. ‘I don’t want to go,’ I said.
‘Oh don’t be such a baby,’ snapped my mother, and she started slamming a pile of tomato and cheese sandwiches into a basket. ‘Do you want to come?’ she said to my father. It was a betrayal as far as I was concerned. There was an understanding between her and me that the picnic was just for the two of us.
‘I don’t want to intrude,’ he said stiffly, knowing as well as I did that he was not welcome.
It only needed a word from me to ask him but I kept silent. They looked at each other and my mother pursed her lips.
‘I’ll be up at the cottage just after lunch,’ she said.
For my part, I wished the picnic had never been mentioned. Still, I went and collected my swimming gear for the previous day my mother had mentioned the possibility of a swim in the river. I was anxious to look at the waterfall which Elva von Hart had mentioned to me and perhaps try the pool beneath it. If we were to go on what already seemed an ill-fated expedition then I must try to make the best of it.
And when we set off through the garden, and then along the path that led past the orchard I began to feel as if it was an adventure after all, for already we were venturing into forbidden territory. The black clouds of early morning had been replaced by heat haze and the round golden fruit hung shimmering in the orchard.
My mother seemed in a mood now to forgive me for excluding Luke. Perhaps she was secretly glad. On an impulse she stopped and reached up to one of the mandarin trees, scooping a handful of fruit as she did so. It was a deliciously defiant gesture. We smiled at each other.
Past the orchard, there was an open field and this sloped down to the river. We had to pass through a rich carpet of pennyroyal in full bloom with bees bumbling absurdly, ecstatically through the flowers. I could have lain down amongst them. We reached the river, a slow clear stream, and I could see that it was very low between its banks, for the line where it had reached before was easy to see. The banks had a crust of mud down from the old waterline, and above, on one bank there stood a squat plank building whence came a steady thudding like a beating heart, only louder. I turned to ask my mother what it was, but she looked equally perplexed. ‘I think it’s the pumphouse,’ she said at last. ‘It raises water to the house. Something like that.’
It made sense, it explained why the edges of the clear little river were so ugly and parched.
Given that, it was a pretty river though and you could see pebbles shining on the bottom. Here and there at the edges, there were stagnant little pools amongst outcrops of grey rock. On one of these rocks my mother spread out a clean ironed tea towel and put the sandwiches out in prim little piles.
‘Are we going to have our picnic now? So soon?’ I asked.
‘This is as good a place as any to swim,’ she said.
I said that I wanted to find the waterfall pool, but she was adamant that this was the place she had chosen to stop. I dabbled in the river but it could hardly be called a swim for the water came only halfway up to my knees. Afterwards we ate. I was deliberately slow, sensing that she had lost her earlier bravado. She was always a slightly anxious person, for all she had her feet so firmly on the ground. She was anxious that others should think well of her. Perhaps that’s why she put up with what was really an intolerable situation at Carlyle House, being pushed around, and told to do this and do that, and never said thank you to, and having to take orders from wretched little Becky Barnsley. So I guessed that she had probably got restive worrying about what my father was thinking of her right now. Nobody seemed to stay the same for long in this place. I thought she must be getting infected by the changeable moods of others.
‘Well do you want to go now?’ I said as ungraciously as I could.
Now I could see that she was anxious about me too. ‘We can stay a little longer I suppose,’ she said doubtfully. ‘What do you want to do?’
‘Just go for a little walk,’ I said. I had been going to punish her by stalking off home without yielding to her blandishments, but I reminded myself that this was the mother I loved so much even if I hardly seemed to know her any more.
‘I suppose it’ll be all right.’
She lay against the smooth rock and her face had a drawn waxy quality.
‘Are you all right?’ I said, falling to my knees beside her and putting my hands on her face.
She studied me. I felt she was going to say something to me, something that would break down the barriers between us, but then I knew she wasn’t sure, that whatever it was, she didn’t trust me or herself to say it. She took my hands in hers lifting them from her face, and said, ‘You won’t get into any trouble will you?’
I turned away from her angrily. That was all it was ever about, whether I would get into trouble or not. I said as much to her, and she said nothing, hunched there against the rock.
Constance watched her daughter making her way down the river bank. She thought she looked healthy enough. Emily was putting on weight and her skin was tanned, her hair bleached almost blonde from all the the sun. But there was a pinched little look around her mouth and eyes.
Soon her other child would start to make its presence known to others. Barnsley knew. She knew he knew. At first she thought she must be imagining that he knew, but now she was sure. She hadn’t had the time to examine what Barnsley thought about her, or his actions towards her, but now with the sun beating down on her face and really alone for the first time in all these weeks, she had time. There had been that moment at the beginning when he had mentally undressed her. She’d wanted to hide herself, put her hands in front of her crotch, or over her breasts, because those were the places she knew he was looking. What frightened her most was her own response. She loathed him as soon as she looked at him and he had looked back at her in that intimate all-knowing manner, and yet she had felt something else, a strange terrible lurch of desire. Lust, she thought with disgust. All through those war years the letters came from Luke in Cairo, from the desert, and later occasionally, so very occasionally, from the prisoner of war camp, and faithfully, week after week after long week she’d send hers off to him. When she lay down to rest after her work at the hospital she had cradled a small fluttering bird longing for something … to be free? … she hardly knew any more, she only knew it was there, that it was alive, that she and it must comfort each other until all would be well again. And then he’d come home and there had been nothing. Only the hacking cough at nights, the dry-eyed echo of pain, their daughter hot-eyed and resentful lurking at the bedroom door. Yet out of nothing came another child. It didn’t seem fair. There should have been something else. She forgot what it was that she had been waiting for. And yet, there was that moment when she saw Barnsley for the first time, and she remembered it with shame. The small bird had fluttered again.
In the kitchen one evening when she was alone she had been bent at the oven and as she pushed it shut two hands had closed over her breasts from behind her. It was him.
She had spun round, fury in her, and fear too. She hadn’t heard him coming into the room. He dropped his hands, and stood back, laughing at her. Her hand flew to her mouth to stifle a scream, as she waited for his next move. But he did nothing. He didn’t speak to her or move towards her, it was as if it hadn’t happened.
‘Miss von Hart asks if you could scramble an egg for her. She has a digestive upset,’ he had said. Then he left the room.
She should have told Luke but she didn’t know what it would do to them. And what possible good could it do? Would Luke go crashing off to Barnsley and demand revenge for her honour? Would anyone believe her? Worst of all, had it really happened?
The more she thought about it the more she decided that it couldn’t, that she was beginning to hallucinate with sun, and work, and pregnancy and the constant intolerable heat of the kitchen. But if she was, why had she had that particular horrible hallucination? She must be sick. There must be some secret evil sick part of her. She shivered in the bright day.
For she knew really that it was not madness or sickness but fact. It was her own reaction which so frightened her. She had liked Frederick Barnsley to look at her, and when he had touched her her whole body had rippled with fire.
And then he had stopped looking at her. She had gone into the dining room to serve dinner a night or two later and he had been looking at her covertly, but also calculatingly, appraising what it was that she was hiding. And she knew that he had guessed and that he wouldn’t look at her any more.
Hers and Luke’s situation was desperate. It was only that which drove her to ask him about the cooking job continuing, and she chose her time well when there were only he and Elva von Hart left at the dinner table one evening. She had no way of telling whether Elva guessed at the Brigadier’s interest in her, but if she did she gave no indication. It seemed the safest way to cover herself, asking in front of her. For some reason the woman seemed to like her.
Barnsley had been affable and business-like. He said he was interested in her keeping her position, and that they were all pleased with her work. It would depend on a number of factors, he had said. She knew that her pregnancy was one of them, an unspoken matter between them, but seemingly there was some other one, for Elva had turned to him and said, ‘But nothing is decided yet is it Frederick?’
A look had flashed between them, one that bade Elva to be silent, and she had fallen quiet, and got up from the table to go and stare listlessly out of the window. For a moment Constance had felt close to her. There was something trapped about the woman, for all her beauty and her talent. It was something Constance felt in this house too. It was not only in the house, but up at the cottage too, for she had not become accustomed to the idea of the sad little farm being her home in spite of a certain affinity with, and practical concern with the land. Barnsley had ensnared them both.
