The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean Page 13

  The room was as messy as it had been on that first night, when Lydia had invited her in. The bed was unmade and blankets trailed onto the floor where a pillow also lay. She reached out and picked up the pillow, holding it to her face, breathing in the lingering trace of Lydia’s particular smell. The shock of seeing Lydia, even though it had turned out to be an illusion, continued to reverberate through her body. The soft feel of the linen pillowcase, and the faint-yet-pungent scent trapped in its weave, helped to calm here. After a bit she got up and lay down on the bed to recover more fully. A few minutes was all she needed.

  She let her body sink into the mattress and found herself staring at the framed photograph of Harry on the bedside table – the one she’d been unable to absorb due to the shock of Lydia’s nudity. She saw now that Harry was leaning against the side of a car in his army uniform. In the background was the orchard, and she wondered if Lydia had taken the photograph. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up, and his bare forearms were folded across his chest. The creases in his pants were crisp, and his slouch hat looked brand-new.

  She rolled over and picked it up. Harry’s face was in shadow, but she could just make out a wispy moustache and the shape of his mouth, a shy half-smile on his lips. What would it be like to kiss that mouth? She closed her eyes, concentrating on the imagined sensation of his lips against hers. It was something of a failure; she couldn’t feel anything.

  ‘Where on earth has she gone? There’s water all down the path.’

  At the sound of Grandmother’s voice, her eyes sprang open. She popped up like a jack-in-a-box and slid off the bed away from the window, dropping the photograph of Harry onto the floorboards beside her with a clatter. Irritated footsteps clicked past on the verandah, followed by the sound of the hose scraping along as it was dragged to a new position.

  ‘Really, Lydia is the end. Leaving the window open like that. The house will be filled with flies.’

  A second set of footsteps approached the window. She froze.

  ‘Typical. No thought for others,’ added Eunice as she pulled down the window with a bang.

  Resting against the side of the bed, Emily waited until Eunice’s footsteps retreated. She reached over and picked up Harry’s photograph and, with fumbling fingers, returned it to its place on the bedside table. Halfway to the door, the awareness of what she’d seen caught up with her, and she turned back hoping she was mistaken. A single glance was enough to dash her hopes. The glass had split in two and, though it was held in place by the frame, the crack line was all too visible.

  Her heart skipped a beat and her thoughts tumbled over each other: Hide it. No, leave it, deny everything. Just go. No-one knows.

  She reached the door and opened it a sliver, peering out into the hallway. It was empty, and she darted through, pulling the door shut behind her before sidling along the passage to the white room where she collapsed on the bed.

  Barely a second had passed before there was a sharp tap on the glass of the French doors. She looked up to see Grandmother and Eunice staring in. It seemed there was to be no respite. She had to finish the job and, with Eunice chivvying her along, she returned to the watering.

  The hose was on the last hydrangea when she saw Lydia, Uncle Cec and Roy riding across the paddock towards the house. The knot in her stomach tightened like a fist. An image came to her of Della holding a chook upside down by its feet; on the chopping block – a stump blackened with the blood from previous beheadings – lay an axe. The chook had accepted its fate and was already limp. There was no point flapping and squawking; it was all over.

  She glanced across at Lydia’s window and briefly considered the possibility of re-entering the bedroom and stealing the photograph. But the window, which earlier had exerted such a magnetic attraction, now repelled her with equal force. There was nothing to be done except to confess. Yes, that was it.

  She would go and confess and that way it would be over or, if not over, at least it would have begun. Oddly enough, with this recognition, calm descended and the knot in her stomach dissolved.

  She wound up the hose and left it beside the tank before returning to the white room to wait. She knew that, after a long morning shifting sheep, Lydia would want to change out of her jodhpurs. With the door to the white room open, and Lydia’s room just down the hall, she was sure to hear her aunt arrive.

  On registering the click of Lydia’s door, she began to count and when she reached a hundred – enough time for Lydia to have changed clothes – she left the room. Standing in the passage outside her aunt’s closed bedroom door, her feeling of calm began to give way to panic, but she forced herself to knock. She took a step back and waited, but nothing happened. The door did not fly open. Lydia did not call out: ‘Who’s there?’ or ‘Go away.’

  She knocked again, and again there was no response. Perhaps there was a chance to avoid the confrontation after all. A chance to take the photograph and hide it, leaving its disappearance as an unsolved mystery. Her fingers closed over the wooden doorknob and twisted. With a push, the door opened and she stepped into the room. Too late she saw Lydia lying on the bed.

  Worse still, she was holding Harry’s photograph on her chest.

  ‘He’s going to die.’ Lydia spoke in a small flat voice.

  It was not what she expected to hear. She moved towards the bed. ‘Who?’

  Lydia sat up and thrust the photograph at her. Still discombobulated by the mention of death, Emily found herself staring once again at the cracked glass across Harry’s face.

  ‘It’s –’ she began, but before she could form the next two words, Lydia said them first.

  ‘My fault.’

  ‘Your fault?’

  ‘He’s going to die, in fact I’m sure he’s dead already, and it’s all my fault.’ Lydia put her hands to her face and began to sob.

  Emily stood by the bed holding Harry’s photograph, watching her weep. Intermingled with shock and confusion at Lydia’s claims was a growing sense of relief that her confession might no longer be necessary.

  In her fantasies she had sometimes imagined scenarios such as this where Lydia came to her for comfort and advice. However, she was never able to bring the details of these occasions to mind – could not envisage what her aunt came to her about, or what advice she gave. Even though she tried hard to give life to their exchanges, the specifics simply never came. Now she seemed to be in a real-life version.

  She placed the photograph of Harry back on the bedside table and, with some trepidation, sat down on the bed. She thought about putting her arm around Lydia’s shoulders, but that would have required some awkward manoeuvring. Instead she rested a sympathetic hand on Lydia’s leg and waited.

  After a bit, a muffled voice spoke from behind a screen of hair and hands, ‘Handkerchief. Dressing table, top right-hand drawer.’

  She slid off the bed and shot across the room, removed a handkerchief from the drawer and returned to her position. Lydia took it and blew her nose.

  Curiosity had overtaken her initial shock, and her responsibility for the broken glass seemed irrelevant now; nothing compared to Lydia’s claims that she had caused Harry’s death. How could she get her aunt to speak?

  ‘I’m sure he’s not –’

  ‘How would you know?’ Lydia cried. ‘Look at it’, and she waved towards the cracked photograph.

  ‘But –’

  ‘Don’t you understand? It’s a sign. I don’t love him – I never have – and I’m responsible for his death.’

  She waited but Lydia said nothing more, staring at her in desperate sort of way. Exactly how the cracked photograph was linked to Harry’s imminent or actual death was confusing, but Emily instinctively understood that a lack of love could be deadly. Even so, she wanted to reassure Lydia and tell her she was wrong and that she was not to blame, and anyway, Harry was most probably alive, in fact he was sure to be alive, and even if he were dead, which he wasn’t, it wasn’t her fault. But the consoling words refused t
o be spoken.

  Just as she was wondering what to do next, Lydia suddenly leaned in and, despite the awkward angle, wrapped her arms tightly around her. It was over in an instant and, before she had time to reciprocate the hug, Lydia pushed her away and hopped off the bed. ‘Breathe a word and I’ll kill you.’

  The next thing Emily knew, she was standing outside the bedroom door, her head spinning. She stepped back and, stumbling somewhat, hurried along the passage, not stopping until she reached the kitchen, where she poured herself a glass of water and sat down at the table. She needed to think about what had happened, about Lydia’s confession. About her causing Harry’s death. It was mad, she knew it was, and she laughed uneasily.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Della emerged from the pantry carrying two large jars of bottled peaches.

  Emily wished she could tell Della. But it was impossible. She jumped up from the table.

  ‘I can’t tell you, otherwise I’ll be killed.’ She laughed again, not knowing what else to do, and ran from the kitchen leaving Della with a puzzled frown.

  By midday the thermometer on the front verandah had tipped ninety-five degrees. Uncle Cec predicted it would reach a hundred and ten by late afternoon. He was anticipating a record. For the last forty years he’d kept a daily log of the weather, including temperature minimums and maximums, wind direction, rainfall and other climatic conditions such as fog, hail and frost. There was nothing to be gained from a heatwave – stock and pasture suffered – but Emily could see by the glint in his eye that he was nevertheless hoping for a record, as if it were a personal achievement and something to be proud of.

  Nobody had much appetite for lunch. It was too hot to eat, and they sat in desultory fashion around the dining-room table, picking at salad leaves and thick slices of cold mutton. A couple of times she glanced at Lydia, hoping to catch her eye, but Lydia did not respond; in fact she did not speak at all except to ask to be excused before Della brought in the teapot.

  19

  THAT AFTERNOON, WITH THE HEATWAVE still in full swing, Emily was excused further chores and had the freedom to escape to William’s workshop. Once there she sat at his desk and opened the top left-hand drawer of the desk, took out the unfinished letter to Dorothy and read over the last few pages describing the fight between Claudio and Vincenzo and her courageous intervention. She imagined an envious Dorothy reading it, and had to give herself a severe reminder that pride cometh before a fall.

  She filled William’s fountain pen with ink and leaned back in the chair. What else to write? The question of Claudio’s political views still troubled her, but it felt risky to put such things on paper, although imagining the look of horror on Dorothy’s face made it tempting. Then there was the fresh herbal sort of smell he had, and the way the bead of sweat had rolled down the little hollow at the back of his neck when they had been working in the kitchen garden. But, no, she couldn’t write about the bead of sweat. It was a secret.

  She closed her eyes and let her mind drift. Not that it really drifted: it was more like a limpet that had latched onto a rock. The rock of Claudio. She opened her eyes and sat up straight. She really ought to try to give Dorothy a more rounded picture of her visit. She couldn’t just write about Claudio. But her enthusiasm for such a task waned immediately, and she put the letter away in the desk drawer. It could wait.

  Since discovering William’s library she’d been devouring books like a glutton at a banquet. This morning, however, she’d made a promise not to begin anything new until the last page of George Eliot’s masterpiece was turned. Reading willy-nilly, and without regard to whether the books chosen were really classics of English literature, she would never reach the goal she’d set for herself. For example, she had not been able to put down The Count of Monte Cristo but, from the point of view of her mission, reading a French novel was time wasted. Yet defining the category was also tricky. Was The Call of the Wild, for example, a classic of English literature? She suspected that it was not and that she had lost yet more valuable time when she should have been reading Shakespeare.

  William’s hefty The Complete Works of William Shakespeare had done nothing to inspire confidence. She’d tried to make a start on the plays last year without success and hoped that in the not-too-distant future she would discover a passion for them, for without Shakespeare she could hardly claim to have read the classics. Her father was fond of quoting the Bard (as he called him). Her mother too, although it was always the same line: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child. Sometimes she said it as a joke, but not always.

  Would she really need to read all of Shakespeare’s plays? And what about the sonnets? A representative sampling was surely acceptable. It was the same with Dickens. Otherwise there was just too much. It struck her that so far she had approached the task in a haphazard way and that she really ought to make a proper list in alphabetical order. To avoid beginning such a burdensome task, she left the writing desk and walked across the room to William’s library, having decided that it would be useful preparation to peruse the bookshelves first. Reading the titles, she assured herself, was not the same thing as reading the book itself.

  As she shuffled along, absorbing titles, still hoping that she might come across Jane Eyre, her foot bumped something. She looked down to see a book on the ground, surprised not to have noticed it there before. Perhaps a mouse running along the shelf had dislodged it, as the books were all piled up at random, and it was possible that this one had been balancing precariously for some time. She picked it up, glancing at the title and fully intending to shove it back on the shelf.

  Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. The words woman of pleasure held an immediate attraction. But the title did not announce itself as a classic and, anyway, she had to honour her promise. On the other hand, there was no harm in simply flicking through a few pages. Allowing herself this slight relaxation of the rules, she read on the inside cover that the author, John Cleland, was born in 1710, a fact that seemed to elevate the book’s status. Surely any novel written that long ago and still read by people today had to be considered a classic? It was a slippery slope and she knew it. But knowing was not the same as being able to stop herself from acting. It would not hurt to at least discover what the term woman of pleasure meant. It was her duty, in the name of education.

  She curled up in the big leather armchair and began to read. The first sentence went on for more than the length of a normal paragraph, and she had decided to abandon it when her father’s voice, admonishing her to try, try and try again, intervened and kept her going. In the first dozen pages, the eponymous heroine, Fanny, set out for London to seek her fortune after the death of her parents. Once she arrived in the city, she was ‘rescued’ from wandering the capital’s streets by a kindly older woman. At her new lodgings Fanny retired for the night with a certain Phoebe.

  Emily had begun to skim over the text, still unsure whether she could really be bothered reading on, when Phoebe began to caress Fanny with, as the author put it, lascivious touches. All of a sudden, Dorothy’s words popped into her mind. She’s just an old lesbian. She was Miss Maunder, the headmistress, whom Emily was rather in awe of. She had never heard the word lesbian before and, looking it up in the dictionary later, she’d felt quite shocked. Now, to her amazement, simply by reading about Phoebe’s caresses, she began to experience the lascivious touches as if they were happening to her and, exactly like Fanny, she found herself transported, confused and out of herself. Pleasure was engulfing her whole body, reaching such a pitch of intensity that she heard herself moan. There was nothing she could do to stop it.

  Emily returned to her senses, lying in the armchair, staring up at the workshop roof. It was like looking at the night sky, for it was dotted with pinpricks of light where roofing nails had fallen out or rusted away. She felt confused. What time was it? Had she been lying there for hours? Her thoughts were sluggish, and her body floppy, as if her bones had dissolved. She gathered her s
trength and sat up in the chair, pulling down her skirt from where it had become twisted around her waist. Guilty feelings were making themselves felt and, in order to assuage them, she immediately made herself a promise: she would not read another word of Fanny Hill.

  In the days that followed, it turned out that not even her increasingly squeamish feelings of guilt were enough to stop her. She discovered that Fanny soon moved on from Phoebe, and the descriptions that ensued, of Fanny’s sexual adventures with the many young gentlemen who made her acquaintance, were terrifying for their violence and, yet, at the same time, tremendously exciting. Each time she picked up the book, she oscillated between wanting nothing more to do with the sensations that reading of Fanny’s exploits aroused in her body, and an overwhelming desire for that very arousal. It didn’t matter how much she reprimanded herself, she seemed to have lost all willpower. She kept promising herself that she would stop reading, but it was only when she had turned the last page that she was able to do so.

  20

  ON THE FOURTH DAY OF the record-breaking heatwave, everyone was resting, lying on couches and daybeds throughout the house, garments unbuttoned and silk hand fans fluttering, while outside the sun throbbed with relentless intensity. The house was silent except for the creak and groan of the roof expanding in the afternoon heat.

  Emily lay on the leather daybed in the billiard room, looking out across the paddocks at the shimmering heat haze. She could see a mob of sheep, like rounded grey boulders, huddled under the shade of two pine trees. She imagined them panting, their mouths ajar and flanks quivering. A small flock of galahs flew past and she saw one fall, spiralling down in an awkward flap of wings. It hit the ground and did not move. It was the heat, Uncle Cec had explained. Sometimes birds just dropped out of the sky.

  Her mind wandered. Where was Claudio sheltering? The shearers’ quarters would be unbearable. Even protected by thick walls and wide verandahs, the homestead was becoming uncomfortable. She closed her eyes, intending to think about Claudio, but strangely it was thoughts of Harry that came to her. It was all terribly sad and she couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, fighting on the frontline, in love with Lydia and longing to be with her, reading her letters over and over until they fell apart and wondering why no more had arrived.