The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean Page 12

  Now that Grandmother had agreed to the lessons, the question of what and how to teach Claudio became pressing. Madame Dubois often read aloud to the class from famous French children’s books like Patapoufs et Filifers by André Maurois. She made the class take dictation. Writing down the words of a great author like Maurois allowed them – mes poulettes, as she called the girls – to imbibe the true flavour of French culture, and the essence of the French people.

  It was an inspired idea, but Emily was at a loss as to what could reveal the culture and essence of the Australian people. Most of the books she knew were not by Australian writers, nor were they about Australia. She tried to think of the books she’d read as a child and remembered The Magic Pudding by Norman Lindsay. But then she recalled Uncle Cec quoting Albert. Eat away, chew away, munch and bolt and guzzle. Never leave the table till you’re full up to the muzzle. How could she ever explain the language to Claudio, or make sense of the story of Albert, the eponymous pudding, and the assorted koalas, possums, bandicoots and penguins who were trying to kidnap and eat him? Perhaps the solution lay in William’s library.

  The next afternoon, she sat down at the men’s dining table. Claudio took a chair and sat opposite her. On the table in front of him, he put a black notebook, a stub of pencil and a small, well-thumbed Italian–English dictionary. He looked at her, waiting for a sign to begin. She cleared her throat, feeling nervous and, in imitation of Madame Dubois, announced that the first lesson would be comprehension.

  ‘Comprensione,’ Claudio said, nodding.

  ‘A story by a famous Australian author.’

  He nodded again. She was pleased that he was taking the lesson as seriously as she was. It gave her some confidence.

  ‘“The Drover’s Wife” by Henry Lawson.’

  ‘The driver wife,’ Claudio repeated.

  ‘Drover,’ she corrected, trying to think of how to explain it. ‘Like Roy. Someone who rides along with the sheep or cattle, moving them from one place to another.’

  ‘Un pastore? Is with the sheep. Keep them safe.’

  Feeling that it was important to get the lesson underway, she agreed that a drover was probably un pastore. She began to read in a shaky voice. After a few sentences her nerves abated and her voice became stronger. Claudio listened intently, his eyes never leaving her face. She had decided to read a page and then stop for questions to make sure he understood, and was looking forwards to playing the part of the teacher, instructing him on meanings and pronunciation and the foibles of the English language. She was particularly keen to say ‘foibles’ to him. It was a favourite. She had already written down some words in the exercise book Grandmother had found for her, along with their meanings; words like squatter, urchin and swagman. Grammar would have to be explained too, and the way the mother and children spoke, for it was not proper English and she didn’t want Claudio to learn the wrong way to say things. She wanted him to speak the King’s English.

  But when she stopped at the end of the first page, he urged her on. How could she stop now when the snake had gone under the house and was bound to come up through the cracks in the floor and bite one of the bambini? She had to read on. She worried that a real teacher like Madame Dubois would have insisted on sticking with her lesson plan, but in the face of his desire she gave in and continued.

  She read slowly, hoping that he could follow, for there were many words that she was sure he would not know. Here and there she skipped a few lines and even a paragraph where she felt the story got side-tracked and Claudio began to fidget. It was the snake that held them in suspense.

  Of course she had read the story in preparation for the lesson but reading it aloud to him, the harshness of the woman’s life and her terrible loneliness became so real that she felt it as her own and there were moments where tears blurred the words. She reached the last few lines and her voice grew husky. ‘Mother, I won’t never go drovin’; blarst me if I do!’

  She spoke the words of the eldest boy as if they were her own. And then the last line, where the mother hugged the boy to her worn-out breast and the sickly daylight broke over the bush. With her head still bowed over the book, she quickly wiped her eyes, erasing the evidence of her unprofessional behaviour.

  Taking in a breath, she looked up to see Della and Florrie standing at the end of the table. How long had they been there? She could not remember hearing the squeak of the kitchen flywire door, nor had she registered the crunch of footsteps on gravel. Della was holding a wooden spoon as if she’d been in the middle of stirring something, and Emily noticed that Florrie’s eyes and the tip of her nose were red.

  Della nodded a wordless thank you, before touching Florrie on the arm and, with a movement of her head, indicating the kitchen. They retreated inside, leaving Emily and Claudio sitting opposite each other.

  She fiddled with the book, closing and straightening it, but it was not enough to quell the awkwardness she felt. The protective shield of her teacher-self shrivelled like an insect wing against the glass of the kero lamp.

  ‘Brava, Emilia. Was beautiful. Sad, her life.’ Claudio’s face was lit up. ‘She got him, chop up. Like Lydia, she kill him. Very good story, Emilia.’

  Claudio’s praise was for the story, but it did not stop her from feeling that she had achieved something too. It buoyed her up and helped her recover momentum, for it was important not to rest on her laurels – the real teaching was yet to begin. Words had to be written down and explained, pronunciation corrected and the rules of grammar applied. Claudio threw himself into it with gusto, and she soon had to go in search of a new pencil for him.

  17

  LIFE AT MOUNT PROSPECT CONTINUED to follow its usual pattern, which for Emily included her furtive morning visits to William’s workshop during the time that Eunice was absorbed in her piano practice. Now there was a new addition: by late afternoon she and Claudio were often to be found at the outdoor dining table, working their way through Henry Lawson’s short stories. Sometimes they abandoned formal lessons, moving to the kitchen garden instead, where Claudio had taken over from Old Stan, the one who had retired because of his rheumatism.

  Della was pleased to have him tending the vegetables, and Emily had heard her tell Florrie, ‘Mussolini’s got a real green thumb.’

  When together in the kitchen garden they practised conversation. Claudio’s English had improved already under her tutelage. Sometimes Emily tried out her Italian too, for he had taught her some words and phrases. Il mio nome è Emilia. Oggi il cielo è blu.

  The Italian words thrilled her with their extravagant and sensual sounds, and it was exciting to speak to him in a language that nobody else knew, even if she was only commenting on the weather or introducing herself. Once he even sang a nursery rhyme to her from his childhood. It began trotta, trotta, bimbalotta. The rhythm of the words made them easy to remember.

  ‘From my nonna. Is not proper Italian,’ he told her. ‘Is dialetto.’ But it had made him sad, and he did not repeat it.

  Today Claudio was staking the tomatoes as she weeded nearby, working along a row of beans. He wore a white singlet and a pair of baggy khaki shorts. In spite of the army’s rules, he no longer wore the magenta-dyed uniform, and not even Eunice seemed inclined to make an issue of it.

  From beneath the brim of her straw hat, Emily cast furtive glances in his direction. His arms and shoulders were the colour of burnished copper, a description she couldn’t wait to include in her still-unfinished letter to Dorothy. She poked the weeding fork into the soil at random. The white singlet and baggy khaki shorts would need to be replaced by something more distinguished. He had moved a little way ahead, and she watched a bead of sweat form at the base of his neck, in the hollow just below the edge of his black curls. She felt it burst, salty, on the tip of her tongue, and swallowed hard. The drop of sweat rolled down his spine and sank into the cotton singlet.

  Claudio hammered in another stake with the wooden mallet then sat back on his heels. He turned to her, lif
ting the front of his singlet to wipe the sweat from his face, and she glimpsed his strong pale belly, which made her thrust the weeding fork deep into the ground. She twisted it, pulling out the mallow weed with clods of dark soil still clinging to its roots.

  ‘What did you do before the war?’ she asked.

  ‘Ah, before the war. Eat, drink vino, sing.’ He grinned. ‘You?’

  She would not be put off. ‘I’m serious, Claudio.’

  ‘I am going to study. Engineer.’ He saw the look of surprise that she quickly tried to mask. ‘You don’t believe?’

  ‘No, I mean yes, of course I believe you.’ She felt caught out with all her secret prejudices – the ones she did not believe she had. She was not like Grandmother and Eunice. ‘Did you study?’

  Claudio shook his head. ‘No. War come and I am conscritto.’ He frowned, searching for the English word.

  ‘Called up?’

  ‘Yes. Not free, you understand. We must fight. Both of us.’

  ‘Both of us?’

  Claudio slipped a hand into the side pocket of his trousers. He took out his little notebook and, from between the pages, produced two worn black-and-white photographs. She rose as he handed her one of the photographs. Two young men dressed in Italian army uniforms stood stiffly side by side, their expressions serious. One, she recognised, was Claudio. He put his finger on the image of the young man beside him.

  ‘Umberto,’ he said in a husky voice. ‘Dead in Libya. Era gentile, mio bel fratello. He is only twenty.’

  She knew fratello meant brother – he had taught her all the family words. She wanted to say that she was sorry but the phrase remained lodged in her throat. He handed her the second photograph. A family portrait of mother, father, the two soldier sons and two girls stared back at her.

  ‘Mama and Papa.’ He pointed to the older girl. ‘Regina. Gone.’

  She glanced at him. Did he mean that she was gone forever, that she had died, or that she had gone somewhere else? Again she wanted to speak, and again the words would not come.

  He touched the face of the younger girl. ‘Milena. Fourteen now.’

  They stared at the photographs together.

  ‘What will you do when it’s over? The war, I mean.’

  Claudio looked at her and she could not read his expression. ‘I will go home.’

  He took the photographs from her almost roughly and put them back in the notebook.

  ‘Free man again.’

  He walked across to the waterbag hanging on a branch of the nearby apple tree. She watched him lift the bag and pour water into his mouth without touching the spout. Some of the water splashed over his face and down his chest. She was thirsty too, but it was impossible to cross the few yards that separated them. All she could hear were the words free man again. He did not want to be here: his life was elsewhere and this was a prison even if there were no bars or chains.

  Having drunk his fill, Claudio hung the waterbag back on the tree. He returned to the tomatoes and picked up the mallet. She watched him move away down the row, feeling the gulf between them – and something else too. Guilt, for she knew she wanted him to stay here, she wanted him to remain a prisoner. She sank down and poked her fork into the ground beside a clump of weeds.

  ‘Emily?’

  She turned to see Lydia, dressed in jodphurs and riding boots, a stockwhip looped over her shoulder. How long had Lydia been standing there? What had she seen? There was nothing to see. Nothing.

  ‘Be careful.’ Her aunt’s eyes sought hers and would not let go.

  ‘About what?’ She could not look away, although she wanted to more than anything.

  With a motion of her head Lydia indicated the weeds next to the fork. ‘Nettles,’ she said. ‘You need gloves or they’ll sting like mad.’ And with that, she adjusted the coiled stockwhip firmly onto her shoulder and walked off towards the yard.

  18

  THE NEXT MORNING, AS EMILY dragged a hose along the verandah, she found herself thinking of Lydia’s warning about the nettles. She knew it was really about staying away from Claudio, and there could only be one reason why: Lydia wanted Claudio for herself. It was an unwelcome thought, and with it came equally unwelcome memories such as Lydia tending to Claudio’s bloody nose, and the night she’d heard her laughing by the stables. The more she thought about that night, the more she was sure Lydia hadn’t been alone.

  She reached the end of the verandah and poked the hose under the first hydrangea. One more job on Eunice’s list, and in this hot weather the wretched things had to be watered every morning. ‘Ten minutes on each,’ Eunice had instructed her. She walked across to the water tank and turned on the tap, adjusting the pressure to a gentle flow, so that the water soaked into the soil and did not run off onto the gravel pathway. It was going to take two hours, enough time to read some chapters of Middlemarch, which, ever since beginning the lessons with Claudio, had been neglected. With the hose drizzling on the hydrangea, she sat on the windowsill outside Lydia’s bedroom, next to the flyscreen that was propped against the wall. Lydia had taken it off so that she could throw her cigarette butts into the garden bed, something that infuriated both Grandmother and Eunice, who were forever complaining about picking the filthy things up.

  She opened Middlemarch at the place she’d last reached to discover that Dorothea and Casaubon had arrived in Rome on their wedding journey. It seemed that her morning was destined to involve Italy and Italians, and she wondered if Claudio had ever visited Rome. She would have to ask him.

  As she read on with growing interest, her left hand strayed to her chest. It had become a constant worry – had they grown even bigger? If only she did not feel so naked in her light summer blouses. They were not tight-fitting in the way of the church dress, but even so, her need for a bra was becoming ever more urgent.

  Her mind drifted from the page, and she began to think about whether there was a haberdashery shop in the main street of Garnook and, if so, whether it sold bras. There was a baker and a butcher, a bank and a general store that sold all kinds of goods, possibly even women’s underwear. But how could she get there without asking someone to take her? Which also meant explaining why she wanted to go. No, it was impossible.

  Putting the book down, she went to move the hose. On her return, she sat on the sill again. Without the flyscreen, all she had to do was open the window and swing her legs around, and she would be inside Lydia’s room in a flash. And in Lydia’s chest of drawers, there would be bras to spare. Nothing could be simpler.

  Lydia, however, had made it clear that she considered her bedroom to be sacrosanct and, without her permission, entry was forbidden. The invitation of the first evening had never been repeated, despite Emily lingering in the hall outside the door, hoping to be invited in. The ban on entry extended to everyone in the household, which meant there could be no dusting, cleaning or putting away of clean clothes unless Lydia chose to do it herself, which she didn’t, a fact ascertained by the most cursory glance through her bedroom window. It was apparent to Emily that even Grandmother was powerless to enforce the normal rules.

  With Middlemarch once more forgotten, she walked up and down the verandah, wrestling with temptation and her conscience, while waiting for the obligatory ten minutes to pass before moving the hose to the next hydrangea. Supposing she could overcome her moral scruples, there was still the matter of whether she had the gumption to act. Her mother had told her more than once that gumption was of vital importance and a person lacking in it was not worth very much at all. She feared that she was exactly that person, and wondered, not for the first time, how her mother failed to see this.

  She paced the verandah, feeling obsessed by the growing pile of bras in Lydia’s chest of drawers. Why not simply ask if she could borrow one? It was the logical thing to do. And yet … and yet. To ask meant exposing her need and the risk of rejection. Worse still was the thought of Lydia’s piercing gaze and the possibility that she might have to undress in front of her.
Something more was at stake too, although it remained murky and half thought, relating to secrets, no matter how innocent.

  But if she wasn’t going to ask Lydia directly, she had to face the reality that entering the bedroom uninvited was risky. If Lydia found out, she would be merciless. Yet the window had begun to exert a magnetic force, so that with each turn along the verandah, she found herself moving ever closer, her footsteps slowing and her eyes darting towards the forbidden territory.

  For the watering of three hydrangeas she continued to wrestle with herself. Then, after placing the drizzling hose carefully at the base of the fourth shrub, she gazed around, taking in the sweep of lawn and the orchard beyond. Crimson rosellas squabbled noisily in the pear tree. A pair of magpies carolled on the lawn, and a chirping flurry of sparrows flew in and out of the sprawling grey-leafed bush beside the water tank. Bird and animal life abounded, but she was in luck: there was neither sight nor sound of a human being.

  Just as she had imagined, the window slid up easily, and she was quickly inside the room. She pressed herself against the wall, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the dim light and her heart to stop pounding, when something fluttered on the edge of her vision. Someone was emerging from the wardrobe. Lydia! Her legs gave way unexpectedly and she slid to the floor like a ragdoll. Escape was impossible. Better to remain huddled on the floor and hope against hope for mercy. She closed her eyes and waited for the furious assault.

  Seconds ticked by and nothing happened. What was Lydia doing inside the wardrobe anyway? She squinted across the room – she was still there! And then a snort of laughter burst from her as she recognised her own reflection in the wardrobe mirror.