At breakfast next morning her mother was fully recovered, talkative and bright-cheeked. She admired the new dress, puzzled over the crochet pattern, and voted for Agnes Timms as the owner of the initials A.T. But Abigail said that, since the design seemed to be of a Greek plant, A.T. probably stood for Anastasia Tassiopolis, or something similar.
Kathy chattered on until at last her daughter said teasingly, ‘What are you excited about, Apple Annie? Did you find something extra special at St Mary’s?’
Kathy’s eyes twinkled. ‘I might as well tell you. I had dinner with your father last night.’
Weyland Kirk and his wife had never been divorced. Their relations were friendly, and two or three times a year they met to discuss business matters or Abigail’s future. Abigail was occasionally taken out by her father to some entertainment; and although they both behaved with careful courtesy it was always an awkward and hateful experience for Abigail. Something lay between them, an ineradicable memory of rejection of love, and Abigail could not pretend it was not there.
He asked her polite questions about her friends, even the ones he could remember from her childhood and she had almost forgotten.
‘You seem to be a bit of a loner, pet,’ he said, almost apologetically.
She answered coolly, ‘I really don’t care for people much.’
He had the same quickness of uptake as she, and he shot her a blue glance that laid her thoughts bare. Then he said gently, ‘Well, you can always trust your mother, anyway.’
She knew how much she had hurt him. She tried to be glad. He deserved it. But she was not glad; she was sorry and ashamed.
Now she looked without concern at her mother and said ‘Oh, yes? Did you just run into him?’
‘As a matter of fact I’ve seen him quite a few times lately,’ Kathy said. ‘Oh, darling, don’t be cross. I know it was deceitful of me, but I thought I wouldn’t mention it in case it all fell through.’
Abigail felt a sudden chill. ‘Whatever are you talking about, Mum?’
‘Oh, Abigail, I don’t know how to put it without sounding silly. Dad – well, he wants us to become a family again.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Abigail.
Kathy’s face was almost pleading. ‘No, I’m not.’
Abigail felt much as she had felt that morning her father had said good-bye. A burning wave of dismay, anger and fright swept up from her feet. But before it reached her face and turned it scarlet she managed to say, ‘And what about Miss Thingo? Is she going to join the party?’
Kathy said stiffly, ‘You know very well Jan went off to Canada a year ago. She has a name. Use it, and don’t be vulgar. What do you think I’m talking about, last Saturday’s TV movie? This is a serious matter for me and your father, so please don’t fool about with it.’
Abigail could hardly believe what she heard. ‘You’re really considering it! After what he did four years ago?’
Kathy smiled nervously. She used a cool tone, but it did not go well with her restless hands. ‘Next thing you’ll be saying he tossed me aside like a worn-out glove.’
‘He dumped you and me for a scheming little creep on his secretarial staff, that’s what he did, after being married twelve years.’
‘Hold on,’ said Kathy. ‘Fair’s fair. Jan wasn’t like that at all. And besides that, he fell in love with her. You don’t even know what that means yet.’
‘Oh, Mum, now you’re being wet!’
‘Oh, I know all you schoolgirls think you know every last word in the book about the relationships between a man and a woman; but love is a thing you have to experience before you know –’ she hesitated, and then blurted out – ‘how powerful it can be.’
‘Oh, come on!’
‘I’m only thirty-six,’ said Kathy. ‘I’ve missed being married.’
Abigail leapt up and began to pile the dishes noisily in the sink.
‘You’ve no self-respect!’
‘Okay, okay!’ cried Kathy. ‘It’s awful, it’s shameful, it isn’t liberated in the slightest – but I happen to love Weyland. I always have, and I always wanted him to come back. And now it’s happened and I want to go with him.’
Abigail was so outraged, so disgusted that anyone as capable and independent and courageous as her mother could be so… so – female was the word that sprang to her mind – that for a moment the significance of what she had said did not strike her.
‘What do you mean, go?’ she said, aghast.
‘He has to go to Norway for three years of architectural study, and he wants us to go with him and … and be together again as we used to.’
Abigail felt as if her mother had risen and hit her with the teapot. ‘Norway! Why Norway?’
‘Well, he’s always had this strong feeling for Scandinavian design, because of his family, I expect. But he wouldn’t be in Norway all the time. He has to take some seminars in the University of Oslo, and of course we could often go to Denmark … and England sometimes.’ Her voice trailed away.
‘Mother,’ said Abigail, ‘don’t you realise that he could easily leave you again?’
‘Yes,’ admitted Kathy. ‘I have to take the risk, you see.’
Flushing, she looked at her daughter, and the innocence and frankness of that gaze was such that Abigail thought, amazed, ‘She really is in love with him; she has been all along.’
Such jealousy fired up in her heart that she felt dizzy.
‘Then you can take it by yourself.’
Her mother looked as if she had been slapped. ‘You can’t mean that, darling.’
‘You forget that he dumped me, too,’ said Abigail tartly. ‘That’s not going to happen to me again. I can’t stop you doing something idiotic if that’s what you want, but you can’t make me do it, too.’
‘But, Abigail, how can I … I can’t leave you here at your age!’
The shock of realisation hit Abigail. ‘She’d really leave me, if there had to be a choice.’
Pride forced the hurt into the back of her mind. With an effort she composed her face. She even smiled.
‘Oh, well, let’s be practical, Mum. I can easily change over to boarding-school until I’m ready for university, and then I’ll go and flat with someone, or live in college.’
‘Oh, no!’
‘Don’t try to wheedle me out of it, Mum. I’m not going. No way.’
Her exit was spoiled because the door slipped out of her fingers and slammed. She couldn’t very well open it again and explain to her mother that she wasn’t so childish as to go around slamming doors. She stood in the middle of her bedroom feeling sick with fury and shock and a horrible kind of triumph, because she knew how much she had wounded her mother.
‘She’s hurt because she knows I’m right. How could she, how could she be like that, with all she’s got – me, and the shop, and her friends and… ?’ Here a burst of anger made her feel sickish. ‘And Dad! The nerve of …’
Her mother tapped on the door. ‘Abigail, I’d like you to come and help me unpack and catalogue some things today. I got so many items from St Mary’s.’
‘Thanks, but I don’t want to,’ answered Abigail curtly.
‘But,’ wailed Kathy, ‘if you go to boarding-school where will you spend the holidays? You’d loathe it with Grandmother and we haven’t anyone else. Oh, please, darling, I know it’s been a surprise. I suppose I told you all the wrong way. But please come with me and let’s talk it out down at Magpies.’
Abigail did not reply. After a while her mother gave the door a ferocious kick. The girl could not help grinning; Kathy was such a child.
After her mother had gone she washed up, and put on her green dress, which made her feel better. But not much better.
She had a terrible feeling that her mother would go to Norway, regardless. She could not mistake that look on her face. It was happiness and hope. All these years, then, she had longed and hankered for Weyland Kirk to come back to where she felt he belonged. It was like some late-late-show movie – brave little wife making the best of desertion and loneliness, and then one rainy night, gaunt and pale, in comes Gene Kelly. Oh, Kathy, can you ever forgive me? I made such a mistake. I ruined my life, but oh, how can I forgive myself for ruining yours? It’s always been you, Kathy, always.
Bring up the reunited lovers music, and she falls into his arms and a bit later he dances up and down the stairs on his knees.
Abigail could just imagine what the girls at school would say. Some, the sloppy romantic ones, would think it just lovely. Together again! But the others, the toughies, would think it disgusting. Love was for the young, everyone knew that. Like having no wrinkles or varicose veins. And besides, they’d say her mother was being grovelly. He whistles and back she goes like a well-trained dog.
The more she thought about it the angrier and more embarrassed she felt. ‘There’s the shop, too. After all her hard work building it up. She’s not thinking straight – early menopause or something. And what about me? Turning my life upside down once more for him? A lot he cared about me when I was little and needed him! I don’t owe him anything,’ thought Abigail, white with fury. ‘Not one kind word.’
But, oh God, there was Grandmother, chic and glittery and poisonous and probably thrilled to her long claw toes to get her hands on a lonely Abigail and teach her what’s what and who’s who. Grandmother’s house, expensive suburbia, with a surly houseman, Uruguayan or something, who lived in separate quarters at the end of the garden, the Bridge ladies, the theatre parties, and Abigail required to hand round the teensy bits of fish goo on decarbohydrated crackers. They were always on diets, the Bridge ladies, though not one of them had a soul in the world to care a spit if she turned into a porker or not.
She went around the unit saying, ‘Norway!’ She saw it as a kind of iceberg with houses on it. And Lapps, weren’t there Lapps, with funny knitted hats with tops like two horns? Penguins? Polar bears, then. Norway, a million kilometres away from Sydney and the life she and Mum had made for themselves without Dad’s help.
Alternatively she raged and sulked, and then reassured herself with little bursts of optimism. ‘Of course she didn’t mean it, that crazy lady. She’ll think it over and see it doesn’t make sense.’
And then she imagined Dad dancing up and down the stairs instead of Gene Kelly; but instead of laughing she cried, because even though she hated what he had done all those years ago she knew she still loved him and was afraid that if they lived together she’d come to love him still more and so could be hurt worse.
In this way the day went past dreadfully and speedily, and when the Bridge began to bellow with the home-going traffic she stirred herself, washed her face and, taking her shawl, she went next door.
‘I’m bored, Justine. Like me to take the kids to the playground for a while?’
The young woman, who usually looked like a starved cat, now looked like a sleepless starved cat. She seemed at the end of her tether.
‘If you could just take Natty off my hands. Goodness, how super! Vincent has been moaning all day, and I’ve just pried open his trap to look at his throat, and it’s like a beetroot. I was just about to hustle him and Natalie along to the doctor. But if you could look after Nat –’ She threw her arms thankfully about the girl. ‘You’re a pet, Abigail, bless you. Good heavens, is that the family tatting you have on your dress? I can’t believe it.’
‘Abigail has big Dracula teeth dripping with blood,’ croaked Vincent.
‘Oh, shut up, you,’ she snapped. Justine looked pained and Abigail felt ashamed, for after all the little viper was sick. She busied herself putting Natalie into her outdoor gear.
The child whispered excitedly, ‘When I was watching through the window I saw the little furry girl.’
Abigail hugged her. ‘You and your little furry girl! And how could you see her all the way down there in the playground?’
‘I don’t know; I just did. I wonder where she comes from?’
‘I expect she lives in one of the little terrace houses,’ said Abigail as they went down in the lift.
‘I’d like to live in a little house,’ said Natalie, ‘with sunflowers higher than the roof and little hollows in the stairs. And a bedroom with a slopey roof. And a chimney.’
The little girl, freed from the oppressive presence of her brother, skipped blithely along, looking at the children sliding down slippery-dips, hanging on the bars like rows of orangoutangs and climbing over the gaudily painted locomotive that stood near the sandpit. Abigail lifted Natalie up to the driver’s seat, but she was frightened at the height; and, besides, most of the children had begun their obsessive game of Beatie Bow, and she wanted to watch.
‘Why do you want to watch when the silly game scares you so, Natty?’
‘I just want to look at the little furry girl watching, because I like her, you see.’
‘You’re a funny little sausage.’ Abigail sat on a cement mushroom and watched curiously while the children formed themselves into their hushed circle, and ‘Mudda’ took her place in the middle. Natalie pulled at her shawl.
‘There she is, Abigail. Do look.’
Abigail looked. At the edge of the playground, absorbed in the children’s activities, yet seemingly too shy to emerge from the half-shadow of the wall, was a diminutive figure in a dark dress and lighter pinafore. Her face was pale, and her hair had been clipped so close it did indeed look like a cat’s fur. Eagerly she watched the children, smiling sometimes, or looking suspenseful, as the game went on, and then jumping up and down excitedly as Beatie Bow emerged from her grave and frightened everyone to death.
‘I wonder why she doesn’t play. Perhaps she’s crippled or something,’ said Abigail. ‘Let’s go and talk to her.’
They were close to the child before she noticed them, so engrossed was she. She was about eleven, Abigail thought, but stunted, with a monkey face and wide-apart eyes that added to the monkey look. She wore a long, washed-out print dress, a pinafore of brown cotton, and over both of them a shawl crossed over her chest and tied behind. Her feet were bare, and Abigail was surprised to see that the skin was peeling from them in big flakes.
‘Hullo, little girl!’ said Natty shyly.
The child whipped around in what seemed consternation. She looked an ugly, lively little creature, but scared to death. With a stifled squawk she fled along the wall and dived up one of the steep stone alleys that still linked the many irregular levels of The Rocks.
‘Well, she didn’t like us,’ said Abigail. ‘Or perhaps she comes from another country and didn’t understand we wanted to be friends.’
Natalie nodded, her eyes full of tears once more.
‘Oh, Natty, do stop crying. You’re like a leaky jug or something. What’s the matter now?’
‘I don’t know.’ But when Abigail had delivered her back at the unit, she gave the elder girl a hug and whispered, ‘I cried because the little furry girl has been unhappy.’
‘How do you know?’ Abigail asked, but the child just shook her head.
Kathy came home early. She had been steeling herself all day to face discussion of the problem of leaving Sydney.
‘Now, Abigail, let’s be straightforward and honest …’
‘I am,’ said Abigail. ‘But before we get on to that, what are you going to do with Magpies?’
‘Lucille said she’d buy it.’
‘Wouldn’t it be more sensible to lease it to her, so that you can get it back afterwards?’
‘Afterwards!’ gasped Kathy. ‘Of all the cynical …’ She had turned quite pale. ‘If you want to know, Dad said he’s never stopped caring for me.’
‘And now for the violins,’ said Abigail. The moment the words were out of her mouth she felt terrible, as if she’d taken up the vegetable knife and stuck it into her mother. As for Kathy, she exploded: ‘That’s a lousy thing to say. Especially from you. When did you ever feel anything for me when Dad left home? You were so wrapped up in your own troubles anyone might have thought no one else was hurt.’
‘Well, you might remember I was only ten,’ protested Abigail, aghast at this broadside from her mother who had never attacked her before.
‘You’ve been twelve since then, and thirteen and fourteen, the wideawake kid who knows all about men and women and sex and love; and never, not once, have you ever said or asked anything about what I felt when Dad left. Did you ever think of me as a deserted wife, or just of yourself as a deserted child?’ shouted Kathy. ‘And now I have a chance to experience happiness again, you’re going to throw a spanner in the works, because you know very well I won’t leave you here with no one but Grandmother to look to if you get ill or … or … anything.’
She hurried off to the bathroom and spent so long there that Abigail went unhappily to bed.
The next morning Kathy said, ‘If you’re going to help at Magpies today we’d better get going. Are you?’
‘Why not?’ said Abigail, and she was glad to hear a voice that was hard and flip, as she wanted it to be.
And for the rest of the painful day, and all the next, no word passed between them except those of ordinary civility. Abigail was glad they were busy, for crates of stuff arrived from the old farm at St Mary’s – oil paintings black with smoke and grease, battered colonial furniture, goldfish bowls and petit-point evening bags, and all the fascinating detritus of some unknown person’s expended life.
Kathy looked as if she had been crying in the night, for she had put on eyeshadow, which she rarely did. She looked ridiculous, like a finch that had lost a fight. Abigail was so upset she felt dislocated; her emotions were so turbulent that she felt like some sea creature with horny shell and poisonous spines, and bits of weed and shell attached as camouflage. Except that all the camouflage she had was her cool expressionless face, and her green dress, which she kept stroking and touching, as though it gave her comfort, the way Natalie stroked her teddy-bear. And she went on doing this, unconsciously, until at last Kathy screamed:
‘Stop that! You’ve been doing it all day; you’re driving me up the wall. I wish you’d take that wretched dress off; it’s too cold for this weather. Why do you get so obsessed with some stupid garment? It just sends me round the bend.’
‘Maybe there’s s-something else you’d like to find wrong with me while you’re at it!’ Abigail could not keep her voice from shaking. It was unreal. She and her mother did not go on like this. They were friends.
‘Oh, shut up!’ yelped Kathy, turning to her work. Abigail grabbed her old patchwork shawl (it, too, had come from some deceased estate) and tore up to the corner of the street and caught a West Circular Quay bus. She sat there and boiled while the bus bumped and halted and jerked onwards, and inside the tears ran down and put out the fire of her anger.
It was true. She did wear things until they almost fell off. But always before her mother had laughed.
‘That’s Abigail, always rapt in something. And why not?’ she had said. Already there was a change in both of them.
‘It’s true,’ she thought, sorrowfully, ‘I never did think of what she must have felt. Never once did I put my arms around her and say, “Don’t mind, I’m still here.” It was always Mum who did that to me.’
A bus seemed an unlikely place to have your heart broken in, but she felt that was happening. She didn’t even have dark glasses to hide behind. All she could do was to open her burning eyes to their utmost so that the tears wouldn’t fall out, and put on the calm, slightly scornful face she had, thank God, practised for years.
‘It’s all his fault, trying to creep in, spoiling what we have,’ she thought. But it was not her father that her thoughts returned to over and over again, it was Mum. ‘If she’s loved him all this while, and not thought of anyone else, it must have been hell for her. But she’s never complained, and when I made those snide remarks about Jan she even said I was unfair. I don’t think I could ever say a good word for someone my husband left me for. But it’s true, I would expect my only daughter to stand by me. And I didn’t. I just thought of how awful it was for me, the way I’m doing right now.’
She had left the bus almost without noticing it. Great steely skies, blanched with approaching winter, arched overhead, and amidst these floated the half-circle of the Bridge, spangled with crimson patches from the sunset, long gone but still painted on the high clouds. The windows of Mitchell and other tall buildings shone tremulously with this ruby light. A cold dusty wind blew from the south, bringing in gusts the iron voice of the city, the dirty, down-at-heel city around Central Railway, drowning the hoot of the hydrofoils, the swish-swash of ferries drawing in and pulling out at Circular Quay.
There were still children tearing around in the playground, and she halted for a moment to watch them. Mothers and older brothers were calling them in. There were not enough to play Beatie Bow; they were chasing each other, screeching aimlessly.
Her eyes turned instinctively to the corner of the wall where it met the street. There lurked Natalie’s little furry girl, looking cold and forlorn.
‘She looks the way I feel,’ thought Abigail.
But how did she feel? Not quite lost but almost. Baffled. A sense of too many strange ideas crowding around her, a feeling of helplessness and difficulty with which she could not come to terms. She thought, ‘Maybe they’re right. Maybe there is such a thing as being too young and inexperienced to know your own mind.’
Or perhaps it was something simpler. In Norway, if there was family discord once more, she would have no bolt-holes, no familiar places or friends, probably not even anyone to whom she could speak in English. At the thought of this her sensation of vulnerability grew so strong that she almost cried out aloud.
‘Mum’s got to listen to me,’ she thought. ‘Maybe she could cope if something went wrong, but I couldn’t, I know I couldn’t.’
Distinctly she saw the little furry girl sigh, as though sadly disappointed.
And for an instant she reminded Abigail of Natalie, when tormented beyond endurance by the demonic Vincent.
‘Poor little rat,’ she thought. ‘The things kids have to put up with!’
All at once she had an irresistible desire to speak once more to this child, to find out why she watched, why her clothes were so poor, why Natalie thought she had been unhappy. Most of all she wanted to see her smile. She tiptoed along in the shadow of the wall. The little furry girl, looking hopefully at the children, did not see her.
‘Boo!’ whispered Abigail.
The child leapt in the air like a trout, gaping at Abigail. Her eyes were a light hazel, and Abigail noticed that her hair was tufted and bristly as though growing out after having been shaved.
‘Did I give you a start?’ she said. ‘It was only a joke.’
The other blurted, ‘I wasna doing naething! I were only watching the bairns!’
Her voice was hoarse, her accent so extraordinary that Abigail caught only a word or two. But before she could ask the girl to repeat what she had said, the hazel eyes glistened and she said in a half-sob, half-cough, ‘I dunna want it to be true, but then again I do, oh, I do!’
This time Abigail heard clearly. Involuntarily she stretched out a hand to this odd troubled child as she might have done to Natty, but the girl leapt away like a hare up the cobbled lane she had used the previous time.
More for curiosity than anything else, Abigail stretched her long legs and raced up the steep alley.
She could not remember ever walking up it before, though it was directly opposite the playground. It ascended as abruptly as a staircase between tall stone walls of warehouses or shops. She did not have time to look. At the top was a little flight of crooked stone steps, and there she could see the child’s shawl fluttering, as she hesitated and peered back at her pursuer. The shawl showed dark bottle-green under a street lamp.
‘Don’t be a silly little twit. I only want to talk to you,’ cried Abigail breathlessly. She bounded up the steps into the light and saw that she was in Harrington Street, a queer old road, not much used now, all different levels, so that sometimes one had to step down from the footpath and other times up. The little girl had flickered out of the light, but Abigail could see her bare feet and the edge of her skirt showing in the shadow of a thickety shrub that had followed its network of snaky roots down the crevices of a crumbling stone embankment.
She called out teasingly, ‘I can see you hiding there!’
Just then, down in the city, the Town Hall clock began its baritone booming, distorted and half drowned by the traffic. But Abigail distinctly heard the first four notes of the simple tune which denoted the half-hour, and she thought, ‘Five thirty. I’d best be getting home, I suppose.’
Something, she did not know what, made her hold out her hand to the hidden child and say, in a doomed, dramatic voice. ‘Oh, Mudda, what’s that, what can it be?’
There was a muffled squeal of surprise or terror, Abigail could not guess which, from the little girl; but before she could make another move she heard a clinking and creaking and rattling and the unmistakable sound of a horse’s hoofs. And out of the gathering dusk at the south end of Harrington Street, its two side-lamps shining dimly, for they held only stumps of candles, came a high old-fashioned cab, glittering black in the wavering light from the street lamp.
Abigail was stunned. She stood in the middle of the street, as though she’d lost all power to move, until she could see the very breath from the horse’s nostrils in the cold air, and the panic on the face of the tall-hatted cabbie. His lips were curled back, displaying a black gap in the middle of his teeth. He half rose.
‘Get outa the road, wench! D’ye want to be run down?’
At that moment the little girl darted from the shadows, almost under the nose of the horse, and pushed Abigail sprawling out of the way. She crashed on what seemed to be wet cobblestones, while the cabbie leant over her and flicked at them both with the tip of his whip, shouting ‘Danged baggages! Are ye cracked, standing there like two dummies?’
The cab creaked and clattered onwards. Abigail lay looking up at the lamp. The pedestal was a thick pillar of grooved iron; at the top was a glass-windowed lantern in which waved and waggled a blue fishtail of flame. She had seen pictures of such lamps before, and she knew the light came not from electricity but coal gas.
‘Dreaming!’ she thought. ‘That’s all. I’m dreaming.’
But the cobbles were cold and dank, her knees were stinging where she had fallen, the air was full of strange smells, horse manure and tidal flats, wood smoke, human sweat, and an all-pervading odour of sewage.
She felt the little girl withdraw, heard the patter of her bare feet along the road, and panic swept through her.
‘Don’t leave me – I don’t know where I am!’
She scrambled up and ran after the child. Strange, foreign-looking women in long aprons came out of dimly lighted doorways to stare. Children, more dirty and ragged and evil-looking than she had imagined children could be, looked up from floating paper boats in the gutter. One of them threw something stinking at her; it was a rabbit’s head, half decayed.
She did not know where she was; all she knew was that the furry little girl might be able to tell her, so she held her skirts up to her knees and ran after her in both terror and desperation.