Miss Armitage walked to the Post Office every day. She was forty.
‘I was engaged once’, she used to say, ‘but my friend was killed in the war.’
Time had robbed this statement of its anguish. She now made it as proof of the gay youth she once possessed, as evidence of a past victory over her pale personality.
She walked to the Post Office to help Mrs Robinson sort the letters and put them into pigeon-holes. Mrs Robinson was the Post Mistress and had a thin mouth. She held her head to one side as if listening at a half-opened door.
Miss Armitage liked Mrs Robinson. ‘We have a lot in common’, she sometimes said.
When Mrs Robinson heard this remark she smiled at the one to whom it was addressed, a smile that admitted the claim while denying the equality it implied.
What they had in common was an interest they fed by opening and reading the most promising-looking letters they stacked in the pigeon-holes, an interest in the secret life of people.
A cast-iron kettle steaming on the stove in the kitchen behind the office supplied the means for lifting the envelope flap. When they read the letter they replaced it and pressed the still-moist flap back in position so that it was hard to tell that the envelope had been opened.
They did not read all the letter—well, not very often. There was so little time. They both suffered from a sense of guilt and this could be detected by the people coming for their mail at the little window beside the pigeon-holes. When they looked at people whose secret lives they knew, their glance was defensive. The people to whom they spoke felt this.
Confident with the information she had obtained from letters, Miss Armitage felt full of importance on her way home. She looked at the people she passed, feeling so superior in her new knowledge that she found it difficult to resist the temptation to make revealing remarks to them. She would not say anything to them about what she had learned in the letters—no, not her. She would merely cast a hint that in all probability Mary Grant was not the virtuous girl she was thought to be.
But she was very careful. Miss Armitage valued her good name. She would have betrayed or lied in order to preserve it.
I liked Miss Armitage, but I did not like Mrs Robinson. I did not know why this was so. Old Mrs Turner, now, there was a woman I liked. She made little pastry-men with currant eyes—she made them especially for me. I always ate the head last. Sometimes I carried them around with me wishing I didn’t have to eat them.
Mrs Turner had a daughter whose name was Gladys. She was about eighteen or something, but I didn’t talk to her much. She had no time for little boys. She liked big boys. I think she must have liked them too much because Mrs Turner told me, when I was sitting in her kitchen, ‘I wish she wasn’t so fond of boys—she’ll get into trouble if she’s not careful.’
I was sitting in her kitchen waiting for the little pastry-men to cook when she told me this.
‘Yes’, I said.
‘Well, it’s no use worrying’, she went on, rubbing her hand across her forehead so that it became marked with flour, ‘That’s what I always say. It’ll get you nowhere. Besides, it keeps you awake at night. There are nights when I don’t get a wink of sleep—well, not till Gladys gets in. Once I hear her safe inside, I’m all right.’
‘Yes’, I said.
I always found Mrs Turner very easy to talk to—that’s why I liked her.
One day, after I had said, ‘Hullo’, she said, ‘Have you heard anyone talking about Gladys down the street?’ Gladys had been away for a month on a holiday. She was staying on a farm and used to help the farmer feed the calves. When Mrs Turner asked me about Gladys, I tell you, I had to think quick. I couldn’t say, ‘They all reckon she’s gone away to have a baby.’ I couldn’t say that, because it’s not the sort of thing you say to anyone. It’s the sort of silly bloody thing Joe would say, but I wouldn’t. I get worried over things like that. Joe reckoned it all started from the Post Office. Miss Armitage opened letters, he reckoned. When you hear things like that it makes you look around to see if anyone’s about. I don’t like knowing it. I’d sooner not know anything like that. I said to Joe, ‘You want to shut up about things like that. You never know what might happen.’
‘What they are saying, Mrs Turner’, I said, ‘is that Gladys is stopping away longer than she should. You see, Mrs Turner’, I went on to explain, ‘they get worried over you, you being home on your own an’ that. They reckon she should be home here. I don’t say nothin’ about it, I don’t.’
‘People are cruel’, Mrs Turner said.
I suppose there are cruel people about. I’ve seen men belting calves with a whip, and once I saw Snarly Burns kick a cow in the guts that was having a calf. I’d have hit him if I’d been a man. When I grow up I’m going to hit him.
When Mrs Turner wrote to Gladys, Miss Armitage recognised her handwriting. She said to Mrs Robinson, as she held the letter in her hand, ‘Mrs Turner is writing to Gladys again—that’s twice this week.’
‘Anything wrong?’ asked Mrs Robinson, turning from the letters she was sorting. Her face was expectant, the eyebrows slightly raised, a pointer dog suspecting game.
‘You just don’t know’, said Miss Armitage, while looking at the letter she held. She turned it over and looked at the flap.
‘Take a quick look; see if what they are saying is true’, said Mrs Robinson, then turned swiftly away as if the movement released her from collaboration.
I met Miss Armitage going home from the Post Office while I was looking for fleas in my dog. I was eating one of Mrs Turner’s little men at the time.
‘What have you got there, Alan?’ she asked me.
‘A little man with currant eyes that Mrs Turner made.’
‘She is very good to you, isn’t she!’
‘Yes’, I said.
‘She must be a very worried woman’, she said.
‘Mrs Turner’s not worried over anything’, I said firmly.
‘Isn’t she worried over Gladys?’
‘No’, I said. ‘Gladys is having a holiday. Gladys is a lovely girl’, I added. I thought to myself, well bugger Miss Armitage anyway. ‘She’s one of the nicest girls in Turalla’, I went on.
‘I’m glad you think so’, said Miss Armitage. ‘Other people think differently.’
I didn’t know what to say to that.
‘Miss Armitage came to see me’, Mrs Turner told me when I called on her a week later.
I was surprised. ‘She’d be after one of those little men’, I said. ‘She saw me eating one. She’s a hell of a big eater Miss Armitage.’
‘No, she didn’t come for anything. She brought me that fruit cake she made herself.’ She looked at the cake resting on the table and smiled gently at it. ‘She told me she had heard what the people are saying down the street and she put her arm round me and kissed me.’ She thought a moment, then continued, ‘I have been unjust to that good woman.’
She sat down and lowered her head on to her arms. I think she was crying, but I don’t like looking at people when they are sad like that.
I went away.