A great scurrying then, and he was at the back door, and someone was coming, he wanted to look back, but he had to open the door, and he couldn’t very well look back even if…He opened the door on to the back verandah. And somebody was coming, coming slap up against him, almost jamming him in the door. A girl ran out on to the verandah. She was a white blur, her dress, as it pushed past him, and the feel of her arm on the back of his hand. She looked back a moment angrily, taking her anger from the woman and fixing it on him, he felt. She looked a bit of a bitch, with that sharp, red, painted mouth. Her breath had come past him with a rush. But she did not stand there looking at him, or say anything, say she was sorry, she ran on.
What’s been happening now? asked Mr Furlow fretfully.
She, she…, wailed Mrs Furlow.
Hagan did not hear what She had done. She was running down the hill in the mud, in a pair of high-heeled shoes that went over as she ran, and the mud splashed up on her dress. She was thin, there wasn’t much of her, not his type at all. Anyway, he couldn’t stand on the verandah all the afternoon. He would have to find that groom. He went down the step and across the yard. The girl had reached the bottom of the hill, had pulled open the door of a shed and gone inside, slamming the door after her. She had some guts the way she ran, even if that little behind, he’d never had anyone thin, not like that woman in the jacket, you couldn’t see her running down the hill. He went on across the yard. His hat was tilted over his eyes, he walked with his elbows slightly bent, stiffly in his suit of best clothes. He whistled a tune that he had heard somewhere on the gramophone. In front of the stable door a red cock was treading a hen.
9
When Margaret Quong had finished dinner she helped her mother wash up the plates. She stood with a towel waiting to receive the rinsed plates. And she was at once both deft and absent, wiping, staring out of the window, and digging with her tongue into a hole in one of her back teeth. She began to hum. She had eaten a bit too much. It was still too early to go back to school. In fact, she had just that feeling of detachment and suspended time which makes your eyes expand, or at least it seems like that, and it is difficult to think of much, or thought has no connecting thread, and reaching back with your tongue to a hole in a back tooth is a gesture of well-being, comfortable, almost voluptuous.
Anyone’d think, said her mother, that this was a hotel.
Margaret did not answer. She seldom answered her mother. Words beat on the border of her mind, but did not penetrate. If she selected a remark from out of the habitual wash of words it was one that needed a reply, one of those remarks that form the structure of an inevitable relationship. So now she hummed, and let her mother look at the clock, and frown, and say:
Coming in at any hour for meals. Just like a hotel.
Mrs Quong flicked the water from her fingers. It fell back into the sink. It spattered with a little hiss, like the voice of Mrs Quong. Then she drew down her sleeves.
Ethel Quong was sour and thin, her whole aspect was a little virulent, so that people avoided her, and she said she had no friends at all because she was married to a Chinaman. And why had she married Walter Quong, they said. Well, it had happened like this. Ethel had a friend called Mabel Still who lived at Clovelly and was married to a man who travelled in Ford parts. Still took in a number of the towns in the south of the state, like Tumut, and Batlow, and Moorang, and he went to Happy Valley too, not that there was much business there, only a Chinaman called Walter Quong, Mabel said. He kept a garage. He was ever such a good chap, they said, and you had to be broadminded, and what was a Chinaman, they said. At this time Ethel was a housemaid at Government House. She used to visit Mabel Still, go out to tea on her afternoon off, or in the evening to a movie. Yes, she said, you ought to have a broad mind. She agreed with Mabel over that. Mabel lent her books on sex. She felt very proud of her broad mind. You had to move with the times. She went a lot to the Stills, and there she met Mr Quong, he was up in Sydney, on business, he said, and Harry Still had asked him along. Mabel said, couldn’t you see Walter Quong was a good chap? Ethel had to agree. She didn’t really like the idea of hobnobbing with a Chinaman, but if you had a broad mind, and anyway you called him a Chinese, and he was only half. They had a game of cards after supper. Walter asked if he could take her home. She let him drive her some of the way.
She had to admit to Mabel that she liked Walter Quong. He took her over to Manly one day. It was rather hot. Walter took off his coat, and made some jokes, and nobody stared too much, so she enjoyed herself. A Chinaman was like anyone else, she told herself. They went on the roundabout. He gave her an ice-cream in a cone. Then they sat on the beach and it began to get dark, with the sea coming in very cool and continuous and a hot scent off the pines. It was very pleasant running the sand through your fingers and listening to the sea and Walter’s talk. But she said that she ought to go. Now, he said, why did she have to go, when he knew that she had the evening off, was she meeting a friend, and she laughed and said, no, she hadn’t a friend, but they ought to be getting back. Walter said it was all nonsense. Well, perhaps it was. You could see the surf whiten on the shore through the darkness. It was cooler in the dark. She lay back on the sand. That was the way it happened when she hadn’t meant it to, she told Mabel afterwards. She didn’t know why she had let it happen, only something came over her on the beach, and she was letting Walter, but of course she needn’t see him again. Only supposing. Yes, said Mabel, supposing, only it wouldn’t. But it did. And that is why Ethel married Walter Quong. She called the child Margaret. She had narrow eyes. There’s no mistake, said Ethel, your sins will always find you out.
Margaret was spreading the towel to dry.
You’re growing out of that dress, said her mother. You’re all wrist.
She looked at Margaret and frowned, because she was long and gawky, those long straggling legs under the dark woollen skirt, and the drawn-out wrists, and the eyes. Margaret continued to pat the towel. The woollen pocket of her dress hung down with the weight of Rodney’s shell. She was feeling happy. She would go for a music lesson after tea.
Look at the time, said her mother. Anyone’d think it was out of spite.
What is? said Walter, coming in.
I don’t know what you expect, she said, coming in at such an hour. And look at all that mud on your boots.
Yes, he said. It’s muddy outside.
He looked at her and smiled. Walter was always ready to smile. It was the most natural activity of his yellow face.
Well, she said, we don’t want to have it muddy in here.
Where d’you expect me to put my feet?
I don’t mind where, she said, only I don’t want mud on the floor.
I can’t walk on the ceiling, Ethel. I’m sorry, it can’t be done.
And I don’t want cheek. Dinner’s over, anyway.
Good, said Walter. I had a bite down with Arthur. I just dropped in to see how you were.
Then he smiled yellowly out of his fat and went outside to tinker with the Ford.
She looked out of the back door. She was thin and sour. She watched him, fat and yellow, crawling under the car. She was exasperated, she was drying up, and Walter only smiled. Or put her to shame with that girl he asked to the cemetery, or the time he got drunk at Moorang and tried to make water through the keyholes all along the main street. And then he only smiled. Mrs Quong’s face was taut with bitterness as she turned away from the door.
You’d better look sharp, she said to Margaret.
Because it irritated her to see that child looking at herself in the glass. Margaret in a red tam-o’-shanter pulling it down over her eyes. You would hardly believe she had a dash of anything but Chinese.