She lay there in the darkness of the blanket. Realising she couldn’t breathe, she pulled it back and looked at the clouds and they laughed at her as they went on by with better things to look at. She thought, Well, that’s that. I’m a companion.
He pulled her back under the blanket and kissed her hair and cheeks and his kisses were delicious and sweet and she felt so safe, she wanted to sleep in his arms, but he got up on his elbows and she had to move aside as he pulled his arm out from under her and pushed back the blanket to reach over into the picnic basket. He dangled a fig above her mouth. He lowered it so she could take a bite and said, ‘Are my kisses as good as this fig?’
‘Hmmm,’ she said. ‘I’ll need another bite of the fig to be sure.’
He laughed and lay back down beside her and they pulled the rug in tight to trap their warmth and lay like that for a long time, occasionally pulling out sandwiches and fruit from the picnic basket.
As it came close to five the weather dropped several degrees more as it always did and Edie shivered and even the blanket and Virgil weren’t enough to keep her from feeling the cold. He got up and pulled her to her feet and they dressed. They drove back in silence and he walked her to the door and kissed her goodbye. As she walked inside she hoped Gracie and Paul wouldn’t see that she was a different person.
Forty
The Beach
Wednesday, 28 March 1923, Fitzroy, Melbourne, when Reuben tries to save Alice.
The house in Gore Street, Fitzroy, was a small single-fronted cottage. It had a picket fence that was sweet and suggested grander things but instead enclosed eight feet by ten feet of brick paving that constituted a front yard and even less in the backyard. The house had a small hallway one person wide, running the length of it to the galley kitchen at the back. You needed to be in a good mood to use the galley kitchen because if there were two people in there it was impossible to move without bumping into each other. The kitchen contained a small table pushed hard up against the wall so you had to walk sideways to get past it. It had a washbasin and a cooker and an ice chest and two shelves high on the wall over the cooker. It looked out over the tiny backyard where two small children were playing with the dirt that ran between the brick paving, scooping out what they could to make into hills for their stick motor cars to drive through.
Alice and Reuben were in the kitchen and Alice wasn’t in a good mood. She stood at the table peeling potatoes. Reuben sat at the end of the table, right in the corner of the kitchen which was where he wanted to be, hoping he could stay out of the firing line. He didn’t hold out much hope.
‘Australians have strange ways,’ Alice said loudly.
There’s no need to yell, I’m right here, he thought.
‘They blurt out all manner of private information and they don’t even blush, and they do it all within the first fifteen minutes of meeting them. They tell you all their intimate details, and the intimate details of their neighbours, and I’m sure if they don’t know what those were they’d make them up. Urgh.’ She threw down the potato she was peeling and Reuben winced as it broke into pieces and scattered across the floor. He got down under the table and picked the pieces up. They couldn’t afford to waste food like that. Alice ignored him and she picked up another potato. He held onto the valuable pieces he had picked up.
‘They squawk like hens, the women do — that accent puts my teeth on edge. They call by without making an appointment, even on a Sunday afternoon. They put my kettle on the stove before I’ve even had time to offer them a cup of tea myself — oh, which of course doubles for a meal as well as a drink — and they whinge constantly about everything, especially their politicians. And this bloody heat!’
Reuben winced again. He didn’t like her swearing. It wasn’t right for a woman to swear and not at all fitting for a pastor’s wife. He knew where she was going when she got worked up like this. It always went the same way: first her complaints about the new country and then her complaints about him.
‘And we’ve got no money. You’re not providing for us. Surely that is your first responsibility,’ she slammed the pot filled with potatoes and water onto the cooker.
‘We’re living by faith, Alice,’ he said, as he always did.
She scowled at him. ‘Well, you mustn’t have much faith then because we are hungry,’ she said cruelly.
Her words hurt and he braced himself for more, ‘I’m waiting for God to lead me to my flock,’ he said, reaching over and the putting the broken pieces of potato into the pot. He didn’t even have to leave his seat. ‘God hasn’t deserted us. The door just isn’t ready to be opened yet. Remember, Alice, when God shuts one door, he invariably opens another.’
‘Since we got off the boat, all I’ve seen is God shutting doors. We’re stuck in this grimy city, where we’re so close to the neighbours we can hear every argument they have and, even worse, we can hear every time they make up.’ Reuben winced for a third time. ‘If I put my hands out I can touch both sides of the house at once,’ she said.
He started to say that was an exaggeration but thought better of it.
‘Look around you, Reuben. This isn’t what you promised me. Look at what we have: no land,
