Good girl, Nance, Mr Keating said. You spoke that with real understanding.
One afternoon when Nance came home from school Auntie Rose said, Pet, your mother’s sent word, she’d like you back home. The words were out of Nance’s mouth before she could stop them: Auntie Rose, I wish you were my mother! Auntie Rose went on mixing the pastry, her wrists deft with the knife in the bowl, and when she’d turned the pastry out on the board and flattened it with the heel of her hand she said, Nance dear, you know I’d like that too. But your mum would miss you. She rolled for a minute, picked the pastry up and flipped it, looked across the table at Nance. You know, pet, she loves you.
No, she doesn’t, Nance wanted to say. Why does everyone have to pretend?
Auntie Rose rolled again, flipped again. You know, pet, she said, things didn’t work out for your mother the way she wanted. Course they don’t for most people. Some take it harder than others and your mother’s one that takes it hard. She can’t help it, pet, is what I’m saying.
There was only the comfortable crackle of the fire in the stove and the little hiss from where the kettle had a leak. Auntie Rose wasn’t going to say it, not straight out, but she was telling Nance she knew how difficult Dolly could be. Nance thought, It’s all right. It’s not just me.
Now come here, pet, Rose said, we’ll make some jam tarts. Get the glass, see? Put the edge in the flour so it won’t stick.
She took Nance’s hand, smoothed it over the pastry, so cool and silky. When you’re an old lady like me, she said, with children of your own, you’ll show them how to make a jam tart and you’ll say, My dear old Auntie Rose who loved me so much, she was the one showed me this.
Nance would have liked to take her chainies back to Sydney, but knew her mother would pounce on them. What’s this rubbish! She took them across the creek to a fold in the rocks that made a little hidden place where the rain never reached. One day she’d come back and they’d be there.
While she’d been gone, her parents had moved again, left the Crown and taken over the Federal in Campbelltown, a township not far from Camden. Nance had hardly got used to the Campbelltown school before they were off to the Queensland Hotel in Temora, in the wheat belt in the south of the state. It was the grandest pub they’d had. In the middle of town, with carpet on the stairs and a chandelier in the dining room. Dolly sat behind the till in the red velvet she was partial to. Mrs Russell from the Queensland Hotel, that was something!
The time apart had made Nance and Frank awkward with each other. He was a boy now, playing boys’ games with other boys. They were still good mates, but not the one person, the way they’d been before, and Temora Public School was big enough for them to be in different classes.
Nance was nine. Temora was the sixth time she’d been the new girl. Six times she’d been out of step in class: at the last school they might have already done the Rivers of Europe, and here they hadn’t started it. For a while she’d be top of the class. But at the last school they might not have got up to Kings and Queens of England, 1066 to the Present Day, and here it was over and done with, and she’d missed it. At lunchtime being the new girl was lonely, unwrapping your lunch and chewing away as if you didn’t need company. She knew now that you didn’t wait to be asked. Wander over when they got out the skipping rope, join the line as if she’d always been there.
Somewhere between the schools she’d missed Long Division and Lowest Common Denominator, but she was a good reader. She liked poetry best.
There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from old Regret had got away.
At home they had a Bible and an old red Prayer Book. Bert had a few Westerns beside his bed and Dolly had Ripley’s Believe It or Not! and every morning the paperboy delivered the Temora Independent. Always a big headline with a photo: ‘Level Crossing Tragedy’, and there was the car on the tracks crumpled up like paper. ‘Demented Russian Holds Up Train’, a small dark man in handcuffs beside Constable Cassidy caught with his mouth open.
The strain behind every day was Dolly and Bert arguing, never in front of the customers but in the bar after they’d closed up. One evening Nance crept down in her nightie to listen. She could hear her mother going on and on. Not the words but the tone, that scorch. Suddenly Dolly came out, slamming the door behind her, her face crooked with feeling. She caught Nance on the bottom step.
Your father’s a rotten bugger of a man, she said. I might as well be dead.
Don’t say that, Mum, Nance said. You’ve still got us.
Oh, Dolly cried, you children! You children don’t matter!
Then they were moving again. Frank told her it was because of Benni, the nursemaid who looked after them. Benni was half Chinese, that golden skin. Her mother was ordinary Australian, was how Benni put it. That makes me betwixt and between, she said. Not like you kids, true blue. She had a lovely smile. Frank said, I think Dad’s on with Benni. Nance didn’t understand. How do you mean, she said. I’ve seen him, Frank said. Coming out of her room in the night.
Bert and Dolly and Max went to Beckom, a one-horse town twenty miles away. Dolly said the school there was no good, so Frank and Nance stayed behind in Temora. Frank was boarded with Miss St Smith, who took the photos for the Independent. Nance was left with the dressmaker who made Dolly her red velvet jackets.
Miss Medway lived with her mother in a little poky house on the edge of town. They were strict Catholics and strict in every other way too. Starting with the moment Nance put her bag on the bed in the sleepout at the back of the Medways’ house, it was awful. Miss Medway whipped the bag off the bed. Don’t ever do that again, Nance, she said. You’ll soil the cover. Her shoes had to be lined up exactly under the bed. In the wardrobe all the hangers had to face the same way. The Medways even had a special way of rolling the socks.
Everything was about your immortal soul and there was grace at every meal and no meat on Friday. There was a Jesus hanging over every bed and He was there again in the corner of the parlour, with a shelf underneath for a candle and a dried-up cross from Palm Sunday. Nance had to go with Miss and Mrs Medway to mass. When it was time for Holy Sacrament everyone glanced at her sitting in her pew with a little sympathetic smile that said, Poor thing, not a Catholic?
Nance was always out of step and Miss Medway or her mother always correcting her. They never hit her. It was the feeling of being watched every moment and worrying that you were breaking one of the rules that was so suffocating. A few times when she’d done something wrong she tried fibbing. That meant a lecture from Miss Medway about what a wicked sin it was to tell a lie. She sat looking at Jesus all through Miss Medway’s lectures. The first few times she was frightened but after a while she thought, Go on, Jesus. Strike me dead.
Now she and Frank became strangers. The playground was divided into the boys’ part and the girls’ part, and when they caught each other’s eye across the painted line she’d see Frank’s face go wooden and her own face stiffened instead of smiling. It was as if they both felt they’d get into trouble if they showed they knew each other.
Frank never came to visit her at the Medways’ and Nance only went once to Miss St Smith’s house, when Dolly wanted photographs of her and Frank. Nance was nine, Frank was ten. Miss St Smith was waiting with Frank on the verandah. Her house was in the good part of town and she was a big confident woman in an expensive-looking pale-blue costume. She had that well-brought-up loud way of speaking. Come along, children, she said. None
