Juliet Bell - The Other Wife

Betty

‘I don’t know why Mother thought she was pretty.’

Richard didn’t even look at Betty as he spoke about her. He’d learnt that from his father.

‘Neither do I.’ Mr Mason fell quiet for a moment. ‘But she was like that. She always saw the good in people.’

Richard snorted.

Mr Mason rose from his chair and walked over to where Betty was sitting on a couch, reading a book.

‘You can’t just sit around here all day.’ He straightened up. ‘Maddie!’

The housekeeper walked into the room. She was the third or fourth since Mrs Mason’s death. They came. They stayed for a little while and they went away. Only Betty was stuck here.

‘I need you to sort this one out.’

The girl glanced at Betty uncertainly. ‘What do you mean? I get her off to school every day. What else am I supposed to do?’

‘She’s old enough to start pulling her weight around here now.’

‘Yes, Mr Mason.’

‘And after school she can work with you in the kitchen. She needs to learn what you do. Cooking, cleaning…’ His voice trailed away as if he was unable to imagine what else might need doing around the house. ‘She’ll be someone’s wife if we’re lucky one day. Or she can work for someone if she has to. Like you.’

Maddie’s face set in a stony look. ‘Yes, Mr Mason.’

‘Right. Off you go, then.’ He turned to Betty. ‘Both of you now.’

Betty scurried after the cleaning girl.

‘And do something about her hair.’ The final words were shouted after them as Maddie pushed Betty towards the kitchen, where she took a long, hard look at Betty’s hair.

‘How’d you get hair like that anyway?’

Betty tugged at her dark, tight curls and shrugged.

‘I don’t understand. I can’t see someone like him taking in a half-caste.’ She stared again at Betty’s hair. ‘This needs sorting out, though.’

She opened and shut cupboards for a minute. ‘Now, you don’t tell anyone I showed you how to do this. OK?’

Betty nodded. Maddie mixed milk and honey together in a pan and smoothed them onto Betty’s hair, before combing her kinks and curls away. Eventually she lifted Betty up so she could look at herself in the mirror that hung high up next to the door. ‘See. No more frizz.’

‘It looks like your hair.’

Maddie narrowed her eyes. ‘Don’t say that.’

Betty did her hair like that every day when she went to school. It didn’t make any difference. Nobody at her school talked or looked like her. Maddie was unsympathetic. ‘You’ve just got to fit in.’

But Betty didn’t fit in. Betty didn’t talk the same as her classmates. Betty had cracks in the skin at the end of her fingers from the dish soap and the oven cleaner she used when she cleaned the kitchen after school. Betty had bags under her eyes from getting up so early to smooth down her kinky hair. Betty had cheeks that erupted into freckles at the slightest hint of sun, and arms that turned a rich brown when she stayed outside at break-time. Betty wasn’t like this Eliza Mason whose name was written on the class list.

Eliza Mason, she imagined, would be a good girl who fit in and knew how to behave with all these strange children who treated her like the foreigner. Eliza Mason would belong in the living room at the big house with Richard and Mr Mason, not out in the kitchen with the cleaning lady.

One day, Maddie held out her finger to Betty. There was a thin gold band with a tiny sparkling clear stone at the centre. ‘He’s called Mick. He works for his dad in construction. But he can sing. He’s auditioning to go on the cruise ships and then we’ll both be off.’

Betty never found out whether Maddie’s Mick got his job on the cruise ships and whether Maddie went with him, but she went somewhere. And then there was another woman, and another, and another. And they never knew that Eliza used to be Betty, or that she used to sit in the nice living room with Mrs Mason. They just saw a girl who didn’t belong. As the years passed, her world got smaller. School. The kitchen. The tiny bedroom well away from Mr Mason and Richard. And the yard outside the kitchen door. The yard was her escape. She would go there and listen to the music and the voices on her cheap plastic radio. Sometimes she heard a voice that sounded like her dad, or like the way she thought she remembered her dad talking. She listened to the Beatles and the Stones, and then to Bowie and Queen, and The Who. Something about them made her think of another home and another world from a long, long time ago.

In the yard the sun would beat down on her skin and she could imagine the warmth of the fire. In the yard she didn’t have to behave a certain way. She could touch the ground with her fingers and feel the air on her face, and stare up at the sky. And she could imagine what it would be like to launch herself into the clouds and fly free like the sparks that were now almost all she remembered from the big ship that had brought her to this life. She wished she was a shining spark against the night sky, flying far away from this place and these people that held her down. Flying back to that half-forgotten place she still thought of as home.

Jane

Another Christmas was approaching and once more I stared out the window at the coaches parked in the school’s circular driveway. They were very different from the old bus that had brought me to Our Lady years ago when I was just a little kid. These coaches had air-conditioning, and toilets. And music played during the journey. At least, that’s what the girls who rode them home for the holidays said. I wouldn’t know. In all the years I’d been here, I’d never been ‘home’ for the holidays. I hadn’t even heard from the Reeds in years. They had probably forgotten I ever existed, and that thought didn’t bother me at all. Our Lady was home now. The only person in the world I cared about was here.

‘They’ll all be leaving soon.’

I could hear the happiness in Helen’s voice.

Below our dormitory, the front doors of the senior-school boarding house opened and girls poured out, bubbling with excitement at the thought of going home. We watched them as they fought for the best seats on the coaches. Helen and I were anxious for them to leave too. For the next six weeks we would be the only students at the school. It was our own private heaven.

‘Come on, I want to show you something.’ Helen moved away from the window.

‘What?’

‘It’s a surprise.’

Together we started down the big wooden staircase that led to the main entrance of the boarding house. As always, Helen didn’t hurry. She never hurried. When I was smaller, that had bothered me and I’d wanted to grab her hand and drag her along at my speed. But now I was used to it. I was content to walk beside her.

‘Oh look, it’s the orphans.’

‘There’ll be no Christmas for you.’ Miranda and her friends were standing near the front door. ‘It’ll just be you and the nuns. And all those prayers.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘No Christmas dinner and no presents for you.’

‘She might get some more of last year’s hand me down clothes.’

‘Maybe this year she’ll get a training bra.’I fought down the urge to tug at my slightly too small dress. I was still wearing hand-me-downs from the Reeds, although occasionally, at the nuns’ urgings, Mrs Reed sent some money to buy me things I needed. A bra was not one of those things. At fourteen, I was still flat chested. The girls sniggered, flexing their shoulders to show off their developing busts.

The anger I’d got so used to carrying with me since I’d arrived at school flared up. I didn’t care about Christmas dinner or growing breasts, but I wanted to shake them and shout at them until they saw that not having those things didn’t matter one bit. Helen and I were perfectly happy without them.