Lilly disturbed his thoughts. ‘Penny?’ she asked, putting her hand gently on his head and leaning in close as if he was still six years old.
‘Nothing, Mum.’ He closed the piano lid and walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and opened the paper.
Lilly got the apple upside-down cake she had made that afternoon out of the rosella tin and cut them each a thicker-than-respectable slice. Theo nodded at the paper spread out in front of him.
‘I just don’t see how all these legislative changes that occur in the middle of the night in the celebrated Parliament House in Spring Street actually affect real lives down here in Ballarat. The miners are just as poor and badly behaved as ever; the rich are still cosseted in their big houses near the lake. I just don’t see why these pollies get these big fat wages to sit around and yell at each other,’ he said.
Lilly knew he wasn’t at all interested in politics and was really thinking of the Cottingham girl. It was a worry, the way he was so set on her when he could have had someone else by now. He could be settled and starting his own family and making her a grandmother — oh, wouldn’t that be the sweetest thing.
Theo felt her gaze on him and spotted another item that might distract her from the subject of Edie Cottingham, which he could see she badly wanted to raise.
‘Listen to this, Mum: “Wireless communication successfully sent across Bass Strait,”’ he read out. Lilly cut him another slice of cake.
‘I should be a porker with the amount you feed me, Mum. But I’m not, it just doesn’t seem to stick, does it?’
She worried for him, nothing had ever made him fatten, she was sure his innards had dried out so much in the African heat he could no longer absorb any nourishment at all. The worry of it made her cut another slice of cake and put it on her plate.
Theo folded the newspaper and leant over and tucked it in the basket for fire lighting, as though he could neatly fold up time and tuck it away. He wondered, as he had many times before, if he should not have come back from that war, whether he should have died over there. War was a bad thing, it emptied a man out. His feet didn’t seem to stick to the ground any more and that was why he needed Edie; she would tie him to the earth.
There’s nothing to him, thought Lilly, he needs something to weigh him down. And she took the last piece of cake.
Fourteen
The Rose
Sunday, 15 July 1906, when Theo does a simple thing, really.
Theo sat at the kitchen table. He had pushed his plate of roast lamb to the side to make room for the paper, which rose and fell like a mountain over the loaf of bread. He turned the next page and read that if you hung roses upside down you could dry them and that way keep them forever, but they would lose their colour and the petals would separate. He thought of his mother’s rosebud dress and his father who had finally succumbed to consumption, having survived far longer than Doctor Appleby Senior had said was possible, passing away when Theo was twelve. His father had said that Lilly was his rose, so Theo knew that a rose was a true symbol of love. He wasn’t interested in drying roses if they lost their colour. Colour and wholeness were of the utmost importance to him. The article went on to describe how to dry the roses keeping the bud intact and maintaining most of the colour. It was interesting information but he didn’t want a rose to preserve and he didn’t want just any rose. He wanted a rose that was of the deepest crimson. He wanted a rose that made you want to become one with it, in the same way he wanted to be one with Edie. He closed the paper and left his roast lamb unwanted on the plate, so Lilly finished it for him.
‘I’ll be back,’ he said to Lilly and he walked into Missus Blackmarsh’s garden next door. She had many rose bushes meticulously placed in her yard like children lined up at school and he examined each one, looking at its roses and its leaves and half an hour later he chose the rose he wanted. It had the richest blood-red petals and stood out from all the other roses. He went back inside and said, ‘Mum, where are your scissors? Quick.’
She didn’t question him, just put down the knife she was using to chop the celery, wiped her hands on her apron and fossicked in her drawer of kitchen utensils. She handed him the scissors and went back to chopping celery.
Theo returned to Maud Blackmarsh’s garden and tenderly held the stalk, supporting the flower in his hand as he cut it from the branch.
Maud, her hands on her hips, watched through the front window and turned to Milton Blackmarsh and said, ‘I think Hooley’s finally lost all his marbles, he just stole my best rose. That was my show rose. I was going to win with that one.’
‘Well, you won’t be winning with it now I expect,’ said Milton.
Theo put some water into an empty milk bottle and put the rose in the bottle, carefully resting the stem against the rim, and put it in the middle of the kitchen table.
‘I’m going out, Mum,’ he said and went to see Missus Johnson whose two boys were due to come for piano lessons that afternoon and explained he wouldn’t be available and their lesson was postponed.
‘Indefinitely?’ asked Missus Johnson, but Theo was away in his
