“Oh, no, it can’t be helped,” Mother agreed. “But one does wonder — why here?”
Soon after their arrival he had gone across the road to speak to the woman in the iron hut, to ask her among many other things, why they were living down Terminus Road. If her answers varied, he accepted the variety; there were several answers to most questions. He took it for granted he would be allowed to squat outside her hut yarning, and eventually, when it was built, he used to barge into her kitchen, though only when her husband wasn’t there. The reason for that was too obvious. Mr Poulter didn’t like him.
“Why did you marry Mr Poulter?” Arthur asked over the tea she had poured out in thick white cups.
Mrs Poulter laughed, and thought.
“Well,” she said, “there was his hands. Bill had lovely hands. A man’s hands, mind you,” she said.
Arthur looked at his own.
“Of course,” she said, “he’s mucked them up by now. Couldn’t help it. A working man. Times when he worked on the roads, too. But I must have fell for Bill’s hands.”
“Can he play the piano?” Arthur asked.
“Bill would have a fit!” Mrs Poulter was certain.
At that moment Arthur wanted so badly to play the piano, he knew he could have done it, only Mrs Poulter did not own one.
“Here,” she said, “you’ll think I’m a funny sort of woman.”
Suddenly anxious, she came and sat down opposite, at the kitchen table.
“Bill’s hands! I married Bill because he was the only thing I could ever think of. And because he needed me,” she said.
She leaned so close, almost crouching over the table, he could see the moisture on her sunburnt skin, he could see down the crack between her breasts.
“I expect he must have needed somebody,” Arthur said, serious and interested. “The darning and all that.”
“Yes,” she said.
Her rather blunt white teeth were showing in her smile.
“Bill couldn’t put on a mutton-flap to boil.”
She was that firm and pretty, with her smooth arms, and wedding-ring.
“I wonder why I’m telling you all this?”
“Because that’s the way people have a yarn.”
“Yes,” she said, laughing. “But a man!”
“A man isn’t all that different,” he said, sipping the disinfectant-coloured tea, which had turned pretty mawky by now.
“Not different in himself, I suppose,” she said. “Some men. Oh, Idunno!”
Her doubt was not deep enough to last.
“Ah dear,” she said, “it might have been lonely here.” She went and stood against the window. “With only your mum opposite.”
“Mother’s good,” Arthur said.
“Ah yes,” Mrs Poulter agreed. “I didn’t say Mrs Brown wasn’t good.”
Mrs Poulter loved her potplants. She would keep on poking at them, ruffling them up, tweaking them as she talked. From time to time she would stand back to get a better look.
“Do you like boiled fruit-cake?” she asked.
“Too right I do!” said Arthur.
“One day I’ll boil a fruit-cake. Ah dear,” she cried, remembering, “there’s a lady at Mungindribble has a lovely recipe for boiled fruit-cake. If I only knew.”
“You could write for it, couldn’t you? Eh, Mrs Poulter?”
“Yes,” she said, as though she wouldn’t.
She was tweaking her cerise geranium.
“It’s that long,” she said, “since I got a letter. I knew a girl — one of the housemaids at the station — used to write letters to herself. They took her away in the end.”
“What, to Peaches-and-Plums?”
“What’s that?”
“That,” he said, and laughed, pleased because he was able to tell, “why that’s the nut-house down at Barranugli. They planted it out so lovely with flowering things that people call it Peaches-and-Plums. See? People come from all round when it’s the right season.”
She was delighted.
“Well I never!”
It was the embroidery of life on which they were engaged. They followed no particular pattern and could seldom resist adding another stitch.
That Arthur Brown. Harmless enough. Nobody could ever accuse you.
From her house, like a houseboat moored in the backwaters of grass, Mrs Poulter would often beckon. To tell. To show.
Once she showed him a bloodstained finger she had found in a match-box, in the grass beside the road. Arthur was so upset he had to sit down on Mrs Poulter’s step.
“In the grass?” he panted.
“Go on!” she cried. “Don’t be silly! It’s a trick I learned!”
Which, in fact, it was: Mrs Poulter’s own finger, got up with red ink, stuck through the end of the match-box, lying on a bed of cottonwool.
“Golly,” she said, “you’re a kid,” she said, “Arthur, at times!”
She had to touch him to comfort him.
And once at dusk, when her husband had gone up the road, taking the cow for a late service, Arthur Brown had jumped out at Mrs Poulter on her way back from the dunny to the house.
“Urrrhhhh!” she screamed.
“Ha! Who got a fright?”
She had, too. She had broken out in the trembles.
“Thought I was going to criminally assault!”
Even after they had pushed inside her house Arthur couldn’t get over his joke.
“That’s the sort of thing I don’t go for. Not a bit of it, Arthur. Never ever do it again,” Mrs Poulter said, switching on the light.
Then he was afraid his friend might have stopped liking him.
“Are you honest?” she had to ask.
He was so afraid, he hoped the light would show her he was.
“Don’t you know me, Mrs Poulter? Eh?”
“I thought I did,” she said.
“When shall we go for a walk, eh? For another walk?”
“That depends,” she said, “on a lot of things.”
Her eyelids would not let him make sure.
“Now,” she said, taking up a book, “I’m going to settle down. By myself.”
Mrs Poulter liked to read the paper for the deaths and ads. She did not care for books, though she owned two. She owned the Bible and Pears’ Cyclopaedia. Sometimes she would sit with one or the other, which meant, he discovered, that she had begun to get sick of him.
“I’m going to settle down, and have a read of the Cyclopaedia,” she was telling him now.
Of course it was inconceivable that Mrs Poulter shouldn’t want him to walk with her. He knew this as he went away. Or did he, though? Arthur was sweating, he was crying, as he crossed back over Terminus Road. Too many pictures of contentment flickered in front of his mind’s eye. She had a little black pig which ran rootling round the back yard. She could lift the combs out of the hives without ever bothering to put on a veil. She stored pears on high shelves, the burn fading out of her skin towards the armpits.
Once Arthur dreamed the dream in which a tree was growing out of his thighs. It was the face of Dulcie Feinstein lost amongst the leaves of the higher branches. But Mrs Poulter came and sat on the ground beside him, and he put out his hand to touch what he thought would be her smooth skin, and encountered rough, almost prickly, bark. He would have liked to wake Waldo to tell him. In the morning of course he could barely remember.
And in the morning, it was a Sunday, Mrs Poulter said: “What about that walk, Arthur, you and me was going to take? Oh,” she said, “not now! Morning’s for church, isn’t it?”
So he had to wait.
For the rather sultry, still stately afternoon, while people were either asleep, or holding their full stomachs, or totting up the past with a relative. He saw Mrs Poulter looking up and down, still dressed in her church-going clothes.