All the time she had sat there a custard had been boiling over on the stove, and she had not noticed it. The mess was awful. She kept apologising for it as they lifted her, and for the trouble she was giving them, and it was this more than anything else that upset Pa. She was the sort of woman, Meggsie, who never apologised.
Her daughters were scattered. One lived outside Rockhampton up in Queensland, another out west. The third, Vera-me-youngest as Meggsie called her, and as she had always been known to them, was married to a lawyer on the North Shore. They phoned her now, and two hours later she drove up in a Mazda.
Ma had known her as a girl and had found her very clever and offensive in those days. She was now a good-looking woman in her fifties, very tastefully dressed. Ma, feeling embarrassed at her own shabbiness, still thought of her as Vera-me-youngest, but she introduced herself as Mrs Moreton.
She was cold at first. For several years now she had wanted Meggsie to give up working and come and live with her. Meggsie was torn but had decided she was too well settled to leave the Warrenders. Mrs Moreton believed they had influenced her, and she looked about now for something that would allow her to feel superior.
She found it at last.
The cars in the drive — there were three of them — were what you might have expected. But the house! The furniture, for example. She knew what these people were worth — who didn’t? — but there was no decent furniture in the place, not a thing you could look at. No antiques. Shoddy Thirties veneer, old-fashioned and ugly. They had made no improvements. She remembered coming here once a week, when she was sixteen or seventeen, to collect her pocket money and to be given a box of handkerchiefs or a pair of gloves by Mrs Warrender when her birthday came round. In those days she had thought the place unattainably grand. She was angry with herself for having been so naive. Her own house was a dozen times more impressive.
They left her alone with Meggsie and did not hear what was said.
She wanted Meggsie to go to hospital. Meggsie refused. She was happy where she was: they had a night nurse for her. Mrs Moreton was put out. She was grateful for what they were doing but felt snubbed. ‘Don’t be silly,’ Meggsie told her.
She rang daily after that but did not come again till the end.
She was sick for nine weeks. They had the night nurse. Otherwise it was Ma and Ellie who looked after her and put up with her complaints that everything they did was done badly, that the place was going to ruin, that the new girl they had got hold of might be a dab hand at foreign cooking but didn’t know the first thing about plain food.
In the afternoon while Ellie rested Pa would drop in for an hour or two, to tease her, taste her medicines and tell her jokes. ‘Stop it,’ she would yell, ‘you’re killing me.’ Vic too liked to sit with her.
He would go out in the early morning in his dressing-gown, send the nurse to make tea, and when she came back, wave her off. Ellie would find her asleep under a reading lamp in the front room.
In these hours he did all the things the nurse might have done. ‘Vic,’ Ellie told him, ‘you don’t have to do these things. That’s why we’ve got the nurse.’ She meant to spare him something she thought men shied away from, the intimate business that has to do with bodies. ‘Don’t worry,’ he told her, ‘I don’t mind. It gives us a chance, you know, to talk a bit.’
‘Did you know,’ he said one day, ‘that Meggsie was a twin? Can you imagine it, two Meggsies? The other one died of the Spanish flu. She grew up in Chillagoe, did you know that? When it had a population of 7,000. It’s a ghost town now.’
He would be half-asleep on these occasions, very tender and talking half to himself. What he was talking about, she knew, was the mystery of other people’s lives, how little we know of one another; lying very close to her, just on the edge of sleep, and almost ready, she thought, because of the softness of his mood, to put into words at last the facts and details of his own life, all that part of it that was still secret in him.
One night Meggsie called to him where he sat half-dozing against the wall.
‘Vic, love, are you there? I want to give you something — a present.’ She sometimes wandered at this hour, but she did not seem to be wandering now. ‘Go to the bottom drawer of me dressing table.’
He got up and went to the cedar chest of drawers where her photographs sat in their celluloid frames. One was of the girls when they were little, the other a composite of half a dozen faded snapshots, her husband Len out west somewhere with a lot of other fellows, all standing in a row in hats.
The drawer was stiff. He had to get down on his knees to shift it. It jerked, came open, and in the half-light from the hallway he saw with a little shock that it was full of leaves. Was he dreaming?
‘Take one,’ she said behind him.
He put his hand into the drawer in a gingerly way, afraid for some reason of snails, and rustled among the dry leaves. But no, it wasn’t leaves. It was lottery tickets, hundreds of them, thousands — every fifth share she had bought, regularly on her afternoon off, from Mr McCann the local newsagent, over more than forty years. He felt among them.
But they were leaves. He had taken them for lottery tickets only in the way one’s mind works in dreams, though whether it was his dream or hers he could not tell. It was just about the time that ballots were being drawn to send young men up to Vietnam. Greg was eighteen, and he thought it might be Greg’s name he was about to draw. Or was it his own? Again? Could they ask you to go again?
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded. ‘Have you got one?’
He took one of the tickets and went to the bed and showed it to her.
‘No,’ she said, without even looking at it. ‘That’s not the one.’
He brought her another.
‘No.’ She was quite short with him, as if he were being deliberately stupid. He felt like a very young child who could not see the answer to some simple problem in arithmetic.
‘Meggsie —’ he began.
‘Go on,’ she told him, ‘you’re wasting time.’
He dipped again.
‘Yes, that’s it,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Good boy! You were always a good boy really.’ She smiled. ‘Now, don’t show it to anyone, eh? Don’t tell, or you’ll lose your luck. Don’t even show it to me. Put it in your wallet.’
He obeyed. He put the ticket, which had after all never won anything the first time around, in his wallet.
‘No,’ she said, catching the feeling of despair that had come over him, ‘don’t worry. It’s a good one. I wouldn’t give you anything that wasn’t lucky, love, you know that. Don’t you know that after all this time? Trust me.’
He did not remember it had happened till the next day when he was in the office and in conference. He broke off for a moment to check his wallet, and there was the ticket.
He told Ellie about it, but wondered later if he had made the point clear, since what it had to do with was what he had felt; the odd sensation, when he put his hand into the drawer, that he was moving it among dried leaves, going back years, each with its number. Greg’s ballot too had been part of it.
With Meggsie’s death a prop went from the house. They all felt it and were surprised how her various forms of tyranny, which they had been inclined to laugh over, had determined the way they lived. Impossible to modernise the kitchen — that was Meggsie’s province. Part of her power lay in the fact that only she could manage its many inconveniences. Impossible to suggest that nobody these days ate puddings, a different one each night.