Read Online The Home Girls by Olga Masters - Free Book Online Page B

Mrs McMahon when Mr McMahon did not speak.
    He turned his face and looked at her only for a moment before turning back and with his shoulders shutting her away.
    Mrs McMahon resisted an impulse to grasp his shoulder and turn him towards her.
    She was raised enough in the bed to see only the tip of his ear and his black hair swirling around the crown of his head.
    Look at me, she cried inside her and the tears got into her voice.
    â€œDeceiving me like that!”
    Mr McMahon turned then and she fell back onto the pillow.
    â€œLift Jackie to the other side,” he whispered.
    Afterwards they put Jackie back and he was folded warm and moist against the warm and moist body of Mrs McMahon.
    Mr McMahon raised himself on his elbows.
    â€œDon’t bowl her out straight away,” he said. “Leave it just for a day or two.”
    Sleep was coming to Mrs McMahon gently like a soft blanket pulled across her brain.
    Only a maid, she thought. A housemaid.
    No better than me after all.

THE DONE THING
    She opened the refrigerator door and said to the inside of it: “We should visit them.”
    Turning around with the milk she looked at the back of his neck as if it would answer her.
    She thought it drooped with eyes down.
    She took her place at the table not looking into his face but pulling her scrambled eggs to her.
    When the kettle boiled she turned to the stove to attend to it and it was his turn to study the back of her neck.
    Her thick hair was combed upwards into a bun but a few strands escaped and trailed onto her collar without taking anything from her air of neatness.
    He saw her shoulders move when she poured water into the teapot and glimpsed her profile.
    How strong she is, he thought. I wish I were strong like her.
    When she was sitting down again he said: “Couldn’t we ask them to come here?”
    He looked around the kitchen which she seemed always to be adding to. One corner was filled with a string of baskets starting near the ceiling. They were like big straw pockets filled with her recipe books, tea towels and the bottom two with vegetables. Dried ferns sprouted uselessly from an old pottery jug which had the cracked part turned to the wall, and she had painted over an old-fashioned washing board, her latest find, and hung it to use as a notice board on which she pinned messages to herself or him, recipes and household hints.
    Perhaps this sort of thing wasn’t their taste. No, it was better to see their place first.
    Her face tightened.
    â€œYou don’t do it that way,” she said not as mildly as she usually did when he made similar blunders.
    Yet it was he who had gone to a good boarding school and then to University to take a science degree, and she who had left State school at sixteen and become a typist.
    She was working in the city headquarters of the Forestry Commission when she met him.
    Six months ago the Commission appointed him to work from a small office in this small timber town providing a cottage on the outskirts, the first you came upon to suggest the huddle of cottages and shops half a mile on.
    She liked the place the minute she saw it, particularly the view of the hills and the sweep of pine forests which never seemed to excite the locals who owned or worked in the two general stores, the bakery, butcher’s, two banks, newsagents, post office, two timber mills or had small dairy farms or larger cattle runs.
    The school and schoolhouse were at the other end of the town, set apart like the forestry cottage perhaps to suggest transients were people a little apart from the locals.
    There were churches but no resident ministers.
    Louisa did her shopping quickly and efficiently and came back to sit with her crochet—she had made their bedspread and was at work on one for the spare room—looking at the hills where the clouds sometimes gathered above a tall peak.
    â€œLike a bride taking off her wedding veil,” she said once to herself.
    She wrote a