The Unexpected Education of Emily Dean Read online

  Lydia remained silent. She was flicking through a copy of the Illustrated London News and did not seem to be listening.

  ‘Come along. There’s room on the couch with Lydia. The news will be on soon and meanwhile Uncle Cecil’s been showing us a most interesting artefact.’

  Uncle Cec held up a smooth black stone. ‘Greenstone axe head. Found it this afternoon in the spring paddock. By jingo, those old blackfellas knew how to sharpen a stone.’

  ‘You ought to show Roy. He’d be interested,’ Grandmother said.

  Emily knew that Roy was an Aboriginal stockman who worked on and off at Mount Prospect. She couldn’t help a secret flutter of interest in the axe head but a splinter of rebellion had formed. If she wasn’t allowed to ring home, then she was not going to join them in the sitting room. Her father’s last-minute instructions came to her aid: Make yourself useful and don’t be a burden.

  ‘I thought I’d help in the kitchen if you don’t mind.’ She lingered, half hoping someone would notice her frosty tone and persuade her to stay.

  Grandmother, however, had moved on. ‘Pass it here, Cecil, I’d like to examine it myself.’

  Now that she was being ignored, Emily had no choice but to carry out her stated intention. She tried not to feel as if it were a defeat, and hurried back along the passage. She slipped into the kitchen through the connecting door to see Florrie at the sink scrubbing pots and Della peeling sheep’s brains in a tin dish at the kitchen table. Della was holding forth while Florrie listened with rapt attention.

  ‘For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.’ Della let the words roll off her tongue with relish. ‘Revelation, chapter 22, verse 15. The devil’s gaining ground, you mark my words.’

  Florrie had stopped scrubbing and was nervously squeezing the steel wool. ‘But we’ll be alright, won’t we?’ She stared at Della, her shiny moon face surrounded by stiff black hair.

  ‘It’s moral drift, that’s what it is,’ Della said, ignoring Florrie’s plea for reassurance.

  Emily gave a little cough to announce her presence. She didn’t want them to think she’d been eavesdropping.

  Della jerked round, the slimy brains almost slipping from her grasp. ‘Blimey, you shouldn’t sneak in like that.’ She gave Emily an appraising look. ‘Thought so. You’ve shot up. Still a skinny malink, mind you. We’ll have to fatten you up, won’t we.’

  Florrie had gone back to scrubbing pots, but at this her head bobbed up and she grinned.

  ‘A good feed of brains for tomorrow’s breakfast is just what you need,’ Della continued. ‘That’s if the men leave any.’ She wiped her bloodied hands on her apron.

  Emily felt queasy. The thought of eating brains for breakfast was as revolting as ever, although the days of biting Eunice to avoid it were probably over.

  ‘Who’d have thought we’d be feeding the enemy?’ Della added.

  ‘What enemy?’ The cook’s conversation was often hard to follow even without the biblical digressions.

  ‘Where’s that blinking Roy?’ Della said, changing the topic. ‘He should have been here for his dinner hours ago.’

  ‘You shouldn’t swear, Della,’ Florrie piped up from the sink.

  Her rebuke was received with a snort of contempt as Della beckoned to Emily, still loitering beside the passage door. ‘There’s a tea towel going spare if anyone’s got the inclination.’

  Emily hurried across, grabbing a tea towel from the stove rail and set to work, drying up. Meanwhile Florrie turned away from the sink, a dripping saucepan in one hand. ‘Swearing’s a sin, Della. Father O’Gorman says so.’

  Della gave a long-suffering sigh. ‘How many times have I told you that blinking’s not swearing. If I wanted to swear, I wouldn’t blinking well say blinking, would I?’ She pointed to the saucepan. ‘You’re dripping all over the floor.’

  It was enough to distract Florrie and she swivelled back.

  ‘If you don’t get on with it we’ll be here all night,’ Della added. ‘No more gasbagging.’

  When all the pots and pans had been washed and dried and put away, Della and Florrie bade Emily goodnight and retired to the servants’ quarters behind the house. It was a mysterious realm in which she had never set foot. Grandmother always said that everyone had a right to privacy – meaning the servants. Years ago Emily had climbed onto the table next to the meat safe where Uncle Cec butchered the carcasses in order to see into the servants’ living room. The window was dusty and partly covered with Virginia creeper, but inside she saw Della lying on a couch in her underwear. She hadn’t thought about that for a long time – the sight of Della’s big fish-white thighs.

  With Florrie and Della gone, there was no point loitering in the kitchen. She left, stopping outside the sitting-room door and wondered whether to go in. Classical music was playing on the wireless. It was all too tedious for words.

  Middlemarch by George Eliot. She’d been staring at the cover for quite a while – ever since returning to the white room. She knew she ought to unpack but she couldn’t face that tonight and had decided instead to begin reading George Eliot’s classic novel. So far, she had tried and failed to get past the first page. Reading it was essential if she was ever to achieve her goal, which was to have finished the classics of English literature by the time she turned twenty. She couldn’t remember exactly when this ambition had formed but it gave her a sense of purpose and, when she was feeling particularly dispirited about her friendship prospects at school, a secret sense of superiority.

  She was staring at the cover of the book, and yet her thoughts were about Dorothy. It was the last day of term. ‘See you next year,’ Emily had called, waving gaily, and Dorothy, surrounded by her acolytes, had waved back. As she walked past, Dorothy had turned to the girl beside her and stage whispered, ‘God, I hope not.’ Their laughter had followed her out of the school gates, her face burning with shame.

  Since then, she’d made a vow never to seek Dorothy’s friendship again. But she knew that the test of the vow was still in the future and required the new school year to begin. The infuriating thing was how often her nemesis kept appearing in her thoughts. Even now, while staring at the cover of Middlemarch, she was escorting her on a tour of the homestead, showing her the four bathrooms and all the bedrooms, the piano room and the billiard room. There’s the servant’s quarters too, she imagined telling her, making it sound as if there were squadrons of servants, and not just Della and Florrie, who were not only lacking in numbers but also the qualities expected of a servant, such as humility and obedience.

  Emily shook her head to clear her mind of the silly fantasy. Why did she want Dorothy to see Mount Prospect anyway when all she wanted herself was to go home? With a yawn, she put Middlemarch on the bedside table. Taking her sponge bag out of the suitcase, she set off for the bathroom.

  Just as she was passing Lydia’s bedroom, the door flew open and Lydia emerged.

  ‘Oh good, you’re here,’ she said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her into the room.

  Emily was still off balance when the door closed behind them with a decisive click.

  ‘The zip’s stuck,’ Lydia said, turning away to present the half-undone yellow dress.

  She put the sponge bag down on the floor. Up close, Lydia’s perfume smelt musky and mysterious. Her glossy dark hair was pinned up in a loose coil, exposing the back of her neck, which was pale and smooth and seemed to fill the whole of Emily’s vision. She took hold of the zip and tugged.

  ‘Be careful, don’t tear it.’

  ‘I’m trying not to,’ she replied. It wasn’t her fault that the zip was stuck. She could see where the material had got caught, but her fingers were sweating from the pressure of Lydia’s impatience, and damp marks were appearing on the yellow silk. She was beginning to panic when at last it came free.

  The dress slithered to the floor, lying there like a puddle of molten gold. Lydia steppe
d out of it and turned to face her.

  ‘It’s gorgeous. I wish I –’ Emily stopped herself just in time. She had been about to wish that she had a dress like that too. How wet it would have sounded.

  If Lydia had heard and guessed at the unsaid part, she gave no indication. She unhooked her bra and tossed it on the bed, before stripping off her knickers. It was clearly time to leave, but instead Emily found herself staring at her aunt’s perfectly shaped breasts and rosy nipples, the gentle swell of smooth stomach and the smudge of springy dark hair between her legs. At the alarming sight of Lydia’s pubic hair, her eyes skittered upwards. Lydia was surveying her with amusement.

  ‘Haven’t you ever seen a naked body?’ she said, crossing the room to where a satin dressing gown had been thrown carelessly over the curved cherry-wood bedstead. Lydia laughed, slipping on her dressing gown. ‘Safe now, you can look.’

  She tried to laugh too, in a casual way, as if naked female bodies were something she was all too familiar with. To cover her discomfort, she picked up the framed photograph of Harry on the bedside table and examined it with what she hoped would pass for genuine interest. In fact, she felt far too frazzled to see anything of Harry at all.

  Lydia was taking no notice of her anyway. She was opening a drawer in her dressing table and, as Emily glanced over, she took out a silver cigarette case and lighter. Flicking open the case, she held out the neat row of unfiltered cigarettes. ‘Want one?’

  Emily quickly put down the photograph and shook her head. Nobody had ever offered her a cigarette before. But then she allowed herself to feel a kind of thrill, thinking that Lydia had identified a maturity in her, and considered her someone to whom cigarettes might be offered.

  Lydia moved to the window and opened it. She perched on the sill, lit a cigarette and blew the smoke outside. ‘So they’ve dumped you here.’

  ‘Only for a week,’ she replied swiftly, repeating her earlier words to Eunice.

  ‘What a little odd bod you are,’ Lydia said. ‘You might as well get used to it. You’re stuck here, just like me.’

  Emily felt herself frown and the emerging bond over the offer of the cigarette evaporated.

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still here at Easter,’ Lydia added.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She blinked at her aunt in horror. ‘I have to go home before school starts.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry. Eunice can give you lessons. She was a governess once.’

  The idea of months at Mount Prospect with Eunice taking over her education was so appalling that she emitted a sharp shocked cry. It sounded horribly like a bark, and she quickly cut it off and tried to look unconcerned, but Lydia was laughing again. It was too awful and, with as much dignity as she could muster, she grabbed her sponge bag and stalked out.

  Once in the bathroom, she gave the tube of toothpaste a vicious squeeze. ‘I won’t stay, I will not,’ she muttered to herself before shoving the toothbrush into her mouth, scrubbing with a furious intensity. After she had finished rinsing out her mouth, she caught sight of her scowling face in the mirror above the basin. Watch out the wind doesn’t change, she heard her mother say, and tried to let her features relax. Even without the scowl, it was no good. Her mouth was far too big and her face too long. She was hideous.

  Back in the white room Emily opened her suitcase and rummaged around for pyjamas. She slid between the crisp white sheets and lay flat, listening to the regular chug of the generator, yet to be turned off by the last person to bed.

  ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.’

  It was ages since she’d said that prayer as, to be perfectly honest, she was no longer sure she believed in God. But she couldn’t tell her father that and, now, so far from home, it was a connecting thread.

  Her eyes closed, but instead of drifting into peaceful sleep, her mind was awhirl with all kinds of tormenting thoughts. She would be stuck here forever, with Eunice forcing her to conjugate irregular French verbs or, worse, something to do with mathematics. She was hopeless at algebra and geometry. If only she could think about happy things. Home.

  With her eyes shut tight, she imagined her dear little bedroom with the row of books in the bedhead bookcase. But then her thoughts took a different turn and she saw herself standing once more beside the open suitcase as she tried to delay the moment of packing. Was it only twenty-four hours ago that her parents’ voices had echoed through the house?

  ‘You want to get rid of me.’

  ‘I don’t, Sybil. I want you to get better.’

  ‘Better, better. Good, better, best, never let it rest, until the good is better and the better best.’ Her mother began to chant, louder and louder, ‘I am better best, better best, better best.’

  She’d heard her father trying to calm her. He spoke low and soft, and she couldn’t make out the words. There was a lull before her mother’s laughter rang out, a manic series of high sharp hoots that went on and on, and then her father was shouting, ‘You can’t go on like this. I can’t go on.’

  Back in the white room Emily grabbed the sheet and pulled it over her head. ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the lord my soul to keep.’ She said it over and over until none of the words made sense anymore. Until she couldn’t hear any other words in her head. Until somehow she fell into an uneasy sleep.

  4

  DAWN LIGHT FLICKERED THROUGH THE grapevines hanging along the verandah eaves and through the open curtains that she had forgotten to close the night before. The warmth on her face woke her, and for a second she did not know where she was. Then a rooster crowed and memory flooded in. A dog began to bark and a flock of cockatoos passed overhead, trailing their raucous cries. Emily lay there, loneliness pressing down on her chest like a brick.

  Every sound was alien. She longed for the familiar rattle of the tram as it reached the corner of her street and continued down Wattletree Road. She even missed the irritating sound of Mr Boothby’s tuneless whistling as he pottered in the garden next door, remembering her mother’s opinion that whistlers really ought to be shot; nobody should have to put up with them.

  She was beginning to feel tearful at the thought of home when a bang like a gunshot startled her. The Japs! She leaped out of bed and was scrambling for clothes when it happened again, followed by the sound of something rolling and bouncing on the corrugated iron roof. How could she have forgotten that noise? Not the Japs after all, but parrots pecking unripe pears from the tree where the branches hung over the roof. Thankful that nobody had witnessed her panic-stricken behaviour, she nevertheless made a conscious effort to continue dressing in a casual sort of way. As she buttoned up her blouse, she heard Lydia’s words: I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re still here at Easter.

  By the time she had slipped on her sandals, her mind was made up. She stuffed her spongebag and pyjamas back into the suitcase, picked it up and left the house through the French doors.

  Outside, the dawn air was cool. The sun, already lifting from the horizon, was staining the fairy-floss strands of cloud a vibrant shade of pink. Before long it would be a fiery disc in the blue sky, sucking the moisture from every living thing.

  She crossed the lawn – lopsided because of the weight of the suitcase – passing beds of roses and lavender. At the laden apricot tree, she paused and plucked three fragrant ripe orbs, shoving them into the pocket of her skirt. It was a long way to the train station and she was bound to get hungry. Not that she expected to walk all the way: it was too far and too hot for that, and her case was already weighing her down. Someone would be sure to see her on the road and give her a lift. She couldn’t be late. There was only one train a day and it left Garnook Station at ten o’clock in the morning.

  She continued on through the orchard and through the little wooden gate that led to the gravel drive. It was half a mile to the main road. Mrs Flynn, Lydia’s fox terrier, appeared and trotted behind her. The foxy
’s wet nose bumped the back of her ankles, and she tried to remain calm, knowing that foxies could be snappy. After a while Mrs Flynn seemed satisfied with her investigation and detoured away, her nose now glued to the ground, scurrying after a scent that only she could detect.

  With each step, the suitcase banged painfully against her leg. She swapped hands and tried not to think of how far there was to go. Overhead, yellow-tailed black cockatoos flapped up from the pines that lined each side of the drive, their haunting cries ringing out in the dawn air. Uncle Cec had told her that the black cockatoos only arrived once a year to eat the pine nuts. She wondered where they came from and where they went next. Like her, they weren’t from around here.

  Little clouds of dust puffed up around her feet with each step. Shadows from the pines created a pattern of light and dark across the drive. In the distance she could see the wrought-iron archway over the cattle ramp where the drive ended and the road began. How would she ever get to the railway station when even the arch at the end of the drive was so far away? Perhaps she should give up and return to the homestead? She heard Father’s voice telling her: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try and try again. Yes, she would keep going, although thinking of Father made her nervous. Would he really understand her effort to return as the triumph of try, try and try again?

  Putting one dusty sandalled foot in front of the other, and with the suitcase growing heavier with each step, she let her eyes wander past the pines to where the redgums grew thickly along the edge of the swamp. Further in, many were dead from waterlogging, their stiff scarecrow branches stark against the blue sky. At dawn and dusk, cockatoos and galahs swirled and screeched over the swamp, heralding the beginning and end of each day. With the setting of the sun they came to rest in sentinel rows along the dead branches of the waterlogged gums. They hadn’t always been dead – and it hadn’t always been a swamp. At one time the water had run through freely and the trees had flourished.