Page 91 of The Ship of Brides
‘You’ve not been around here for a while.’ It wasn’t quite a question.
‘I’ve been staying with my aunt May.’
‘Oh, yes. She passed on, didn’t she? Cancer, wasn’t it?’
Frances could answer now without her eyes filling. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I was there... to help her for a bit.’
‘I’m sorry for your loss. You probably know your mother didn’t do too good while you were gone.’ Mr Radcliffe glanced past her through the door, and she fought the urge to close it a little more.
‘She’s... dropped behind on her payments. Not just with me. You’ll get no tick at Green’s now, or Mayhew’s.’
‘I’ll manage,’ said Frances.
He turned to the gleaming motor-car that stood in the road. Two boys were peering at themselves in the wing mirror. ‘Your mother was a pretty woman when she worked for me. That’s what the drink does to you.’
She held his gaze.
‘I suppose there’s not a lot I can tell you about her.’
Still she said nothing.
Mr Radcliffe shifted on his feet, then checked his watch. ‘How old are you, Frances?’ he said.
‘Fifteen.’
He studied her, as if assessing her. Then he sighed, as if he were about to do something against his better judgement. ‘Look, I tell you what, I’ll let you work at the hotel. You can wash dishes. Do a bit of cleaning. I don’t suppose you can rely on your mother to keep you. Don’t let me down, mind, or you and she will be out on your ears.’ He had been back there, shooing away the boys before she’d had a chance to thank him.
She had known Mr Radcliffe for most of her life. Most people in Aynsville did: he was the owner of the only hotel, and landlord of several clapboard properties. She could still remember the days when her mother, before the booze tightened its grip, had disappeared in the evening to work at the hotel bar, and Aunt May had looked after her. Later Aunt May rued the day she had told Frances’s mother to go work there – ‘But in a two-horse town like this, love, you got to take the jobs when they come, right?’
Frances’s own experience of the hotel was rather better. For the first year, anyway. Every day, shortly after nine, she would report for work in the back kitchen, alongside a near-silent Chinese man who scowled and raised a huge knife at her if she didn’t wash and slice the vegetables to his satisfaction. She would clean the kitchens, slapping at the floors with a black-tendrilled mop, help prepare food until four, then move on to washing up. Her hands chapped and split with the scalding water; her back and neck ached from stooping at the little sink. She learnt to keep her eyes lowered from the women who sat around bad-temperedly in the mid-afternoon with little to do but drink and bitch at each other. But she had enjoyed earning money and having a little control over what had been a chaotic existence.
Mr Radcliffe kept the rent and paid her a little over, just enough to cover food and household expenses. She had bought herself a new pair of shoes, and her mother a cream blouse with pale blue embroidery. The kind of blouse she could imagine a different sort of mother wearing. Her mother had wept with gratitude, promised that, given a little time, she would be back on her feet. Frances could go away to college, perhaps, like May had promised. Get away from this stinking hole.
But then, freed of the responsibility of earning and even of keeping house, her mother had begun to drink more heavily. Occasionally she would come to the hotel bar and lean over the counter in her low-cut dresses. Inevitably, late into the evening, she would harangue the men around her, and the girls who worked there; she would swat at non-existent flies and shriek for Frances in tones that were both critical and self-pitying. Finally she would clatter into the kitchens to attack her daughter verbally for her failures – to dress nicely, to earn her keep, for allowing herself to be born and ruining her mother’s life – until Hun Li grabbed her in his huge arms and threw her out. Then he would scowl at Frances, as if her mother’s failures were her own. She didn’t attempt to defend her: she had worked out years before that there was little point.
In the face of their poverty, Frances could never work out how her mother acquired the money to get as drunk as she did.
And then, one night, she disappeared – with the evening’s takings.
Frances had been taking a five-minute break, seated on a bucket in the broom cupboard, eating a couple of slices of bread and margarine that Hun Li had left for her, when she heard the commotion. She had already put down her plate and stood up when Mr Radcliffe stormed in. ‘Where is she, the thieving whore?’
Frances froze, wide-eyed. She already knew, with a familiar sinking feeling in her stomach, whom he was talking about.
‘She’s gone! And so has my bloody cash! Where is she?’
‘I – I don’t know,’ Frances had stammered.
Mr Radcliffe, normally so urbane and gentlemanly, had become an enraged, puce-faced creature, his body somehow threatening to burst out of his shirt, his huge fists balled as if in an effort to contain himself. He had stared at her for what seemed like an eternity, apparently weighing up the possibility that she was telling the truth. She had thought, briefly, that she might wet herself with fear. Then he had gone, the door slamming behind him.
They had found her two days later, unconscious, at the back of the butcher’s. There was no money, just a few empty bottles. Her shoes were missing. One evening that same week, Mr Radcliffe went round ‘to have a word with her’ then came back to the hotel to tell Frances that he and her mother had decided it might be best if she left town for a while. She was bad for business. Hardly anyone would give the Lukes credit. He had personally helped her out. ‘Just till she straightens herself out a bit,’ he said. ‘Though God only knows how long that’ll take.’
Frances had been too shocked to react. When she arrived home that evening, took in the heavy silence of the little house, the bills sitting on the kitchen table, the note that failed to explain exactly where her mother was going, she had laid her head on her arms and stayed like that until, exhausted, she slept.
It had been almost three months later that Mr Radcliffe had called her in. Her mother’s shadow had diminished; people in town had stopped murmuring to each other as she passed – some even said hello. Hun Li had been conciliatory – had made sure that there were scraps of beef and mutton in her dinner, that she had regular breaks. Once he had left her two oranges, although he later denied it and raised his cleaver in mock anger when she suggested it. The girls in the bar had asked if she was doing all right, had tweaked her plaits in a sisterly manner. One had offered her a drink when she finished her shift. She had refused, but was grateful. When another had popped her head round the kitchen door and asked her to nip up to his office, she had flinched, afraid that she was about to be accused of theft too. Like mother like daughter – that was what they said in the town. Blood would always out. But when she knocked and entered, Mr Radcliffe’s face was not angry.
‘Sit down,’ he said. The way he looked at her seemed almost sympathetic. She sat. ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave your house.’
Before she could open her mouth to protest, he continued, ‘The war’s going to change things in Queensland. We’ve got troops headed up here and the town’s going to get busy. I’m told there are people coming in who can pay me a much better rent on it. Anyway, Frances, it doesn’t make sense for a young girl like you to be rattling around in it alone.’
