The hall was cold. The sounds of Elsie’s footsteps and the whizz of the pram wheels echoed across the wooden floorboards. Inside the small community room off the side of the hall, next to the kitchen, the air was warmed by an oil heater. The patterned carpet muffled the ladies’ voices, muted the scrape of chairs pushing back and forth.
Gloria Watson spotted Elsie immediately as she parked Millie’s pram by the door. ‘Mrs Mullet, delighted you’re ready to join us again!’ she called from the kitchen, setting a tray of scones on the bench. She came through the kitchen doorway into the community room. Her hair kicked up beneath her ears and was held in place with a wide ribbon; the shell-pink of her lipstick matched her dress. ‘Here, let me have those,’ she said, taking the sandwiches Elsie balanced in one hand, freeing Elsie to re-tuck Millie’s blanket; she’d kicked it off and her chubby legs were exposed.
‘I‘ve been wondering how much time you were going to take come back to us, after this little one’s arrival,’ Mrs Watson said. She bent over the pram and made cooing noises. ‘I worried perhaps, now that your hands are otherwise occupied, you’d consider our Wednesday group too challenging.’
‘I’ve been busy, is all,’ Elsie said. ‘Time seems to disappear.’
She wished it was the truth. Millie was three months old. Two and a half months had passed without Aida. Tucking the blanket about Millie’s shoulders, Elsie took in her face, sweet and slack in sleep. At birth Millie had features that seemed entirely her own, but within weeks she had begun to develop a likeness of Thomas’s face: the fine nose, the low forehead with a dark spring of hair. In the plump of her cheeks and folds of her chin, Elsie saw the weeks that had passed. Each week with Aida away, Millie grew and fattened and Elsie’s heart could not help but grow with it. Yet every ounce of Millie was another week without Aida.
‘I know,’ Gloria Watson said. ‘The days go in a flash. Bert’s hardly at home now, what with his house calls –’ she flashed a smug smile ‘– and I’ve added an extra class on Mondays for sewing, plus the church committee has . . .’ she turned away from Elsie as she continued to speak, taking Elsie’s plate of sandwiches into the kitchen. Elsie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to follow, but she couldn’t lug the pram into the crowded space so she was marooned in the doorway.
‘. . . so it’s all kept me on my toes, that’s for sure,’ Mrs Watson said gaily as she returned. ‘We’re going to have a full group today, so pick yourself a good seat before they’re all snapped up.’
The seats were arranged in an oval shape, several were already taken, and Mrs Watson took her place at the head of the circle. Elsie sat in the seat closest to the door, so she could watch over Millie, and pulled her knitting from her bag.
‘What are you working on today?’ a lady on Elsie’s left asked. Elsie remembered her face but could not recall her name.
‘Still that jumper, I’m afraid,’ Elsie told her. ‘I’ve not even finished one sleeve.’ Her current work in progress was to be a crew-neck jumper for Thomas. She had hoped to have the jumper finished for this winter, but since Millie’s arrival, and now without Aida, Elsie found her days dragging painfully slow and empty while she simultaneously rarely had motivation to glance at her needles. Thomas’s jumper languished as a back piece and half a sleeve.
‘It’s not like you to move so slowly,’ Clare Adelman piped up. ‘What’s taking you so long?’
Elsie flushed. ‘The baby, and keeping the house. I don’t seem to have as much time for knitting as I used to.’
Several more ladies had arrived and murmurs of assent went through the group. ‘Best get a move on, Mrs Mullet,’ Gloria said, lightly. ‘Wednesday group is for seasoned knitters – we keep each other striving to be our best.’
Elsie dropped a stitch.
‘A schedule helps,’ an older lady spoke up. ‘I stuck to my schedule like a drill sergeant when mine were younger. Still do.’
Elsie had a schedule. Millie’s feeding times were set at four-hourly intervals throughout the day and although there had been the occasional deviation, like when she had a blocked nose and cried constantly, Millie was mostly happy to take her bottle by the clock (especially now that the doctor had told her to mix a spoonful of Farex into her milk so she would sleep through the night). Between feeds, Elsie tried to have the laundry washed and hung out in the morning, midday was for dusting, floors and tidying and the afternoon for baking and preparing tea. The problem wasn’t for lack of a schedule. The problem was that, despite the schedule, there were too few hours in days that seemed, paradoxically, obscenely long. It was an inexplicable contradiction.
‘You had help in the early days, didn’t you?’ Mrs Watson said, crochet hook dipping vigorously in and out of a colourful square of work.
‘Thomas did what he could.’
‘No, not Thomas,’ Gloria said, flicking up a length of yarn. ‘A young woman. Her husband worked away, at the mines.’
Elsie’s heart gave a thud. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I did.’
‘I remember meeting her when we had afternoon tea. While you were still –’ she mimed the shape of pregnant roundness.
‘Did you?’ Elsie said with a false, nervous laugh. ‘I don’t recall.’
‘Of course I did. Nice young lady. Quiet, though,’ she mused. ‘Made a divine walnut and apple loaf.’ She snapped her fingers, remembering. ‘Mrs Shepherd. Does she still live next door?’
Elsie thought she detected something in Mrs Watson’s tone: a heightened inquisitiveness in her query. A subtle emphasis on the words ‘next door’. Surely not. It was an innocent enough remark. And it was true – Aida had met some of the local ladies on afternoon teas. And she had lived next door.
She still did live there. Didn’t she?
‘Perhaps her husband needs to go away again, Mrs Mullet.’ Mrs Watson nodded towards the unfinished sleeve resting in Elsie’s lap, needles splayed. ‘Looks like you miss her.’
‘She’s –’ Elsie spoke up, ‘she’s away, presently. Staying with family in the city, I believe.’
‘Oh?’ Mrs Watson lifted an eyebrow.
‘Yes,’ Elsie said. What came next she could not have predicted. She would never know where it came from, but come it did, belched up and out for all the ladies to hear, irrevocably.
Elsie said, ‘Her husband died. A few weeks ago, a mining accident. He, uh, had an accident. Faulty equipment. Terrible.’
Eyes widened around the circle. Murmurs of horror and condolence.
Elsie had killed Aida’s fake husband. Piling lies on lies.