Free Loving Daughters by Olga Masters

back towards the fowl pens and down the hall to the closed front door as if the hospital would suddenly spring up for Violet.
    â€˜I need some help to get it started,’ she said, taking the lid off the teapot for the dipper of water in the kettle was already near the boil.
    â€˜Money?’ said George, and Violet gave him a smile for his cleverness.
    George had a bit put away. Alex had some steers of his own and George had pigs and when these were sold the returns boosted any savings from wages. (Jack did not pay too generously.)
    The girls received no regular wages, but gifts of money from Jack for clothes and occasional visits to Sydney or to the seaside towns of Pambula and Merimbula.
    George thought of the bathing costume Una bought with money for her birthday six months ago. She ordered it secretly from a catalogue, for Jack would not approve anything so brazen, and showed it to him in secret too. It was a lovely thing of dark green wool with bands of orange at the sleeves running right up to the shoulder and around the scooped-out neck. In its box of tissue paper George saw it a tender and sensual thing and would have liked Una to put it on for him, so that he could picture Violet in it. Violet would have strained the wool and her thighs would have come out of the green legs like thickly poured cream. George put her in the costume now, her breasts nearly brushing her teacup filling their green wool nests.
    Her face was soft and happy – if it could always be that way! She sipped her tea, cut more cake for George and talked on in low tones like music whispered from piano keys. She would miss out on the two local women nearing the end of their pregnancies and booked into Mrs Black’s at Candelo. Mrs Black was not as good a nurse as Violet, giving more attention to the horses she kept than to her patients, and known to go off and ride in a show, leaving a woman in labour in the care of her daughter Stella and a drunk doctor.
    Here was Violet saying something that made his heart jump. If she had a spare room – ward, I mean! – she would take the occasional broken limb. Or a bad case of boils. George saw himself with one of his heavy winter colds that irritated Enid and Una, and Violet putting him into pyjamas and a bed fragrant with eucalyptus.
    â€˜Nothing infectious, though,’ she said, dashing his hopes and rising briskly in good imitation of the efficient matron.
    She attacked the washing-up as if already practising the ultimate in hygiene, finding a clean teatowel for George to wipe up. (At home he left all this to Enid and Una.) The day was closing in, the lemon tree casting a great shadow over one end of the back verandah. George hung his towel on the verandah line and taking a dipperful of corn from a sack in the wash-house, with the air of one who was part of the household, flung it to the fowls, who immediately turned from sad little bundles to a great screeching agitated tablecloth with grain running into a score of crevices.
    He came inside to find Ned back by the kitchen stove and Violet standing by a corner of the table. She might have told Ned about the hospital! It was their secret, he didn’t want anyone else sharing it! He took up his hat, trying to read her expression and Ned’s, whose eyes were on the scarlet line around the stove door and whose soft pale hands were holding up a khaki knee. No, she hadn’t said anything for her brown eyes were melting toffee with the dream stuck to them. He spun his hat on his hand which was his way of saying he was leaving.
    â€˜I’ll walk you to the door, George,’ Violet said loudly as was her habit when she wanted Ned to be informed too.
    They were passing Small Henry’s door when he gave two or three warning grunts and by the time they reached the front verandah his wailing was rushing under the door and through the skylight above it. Violet’s face tightened and her eyes snapped and her