THE SINGER Christmas Picnic was becoming something of a legend. Each year it had become more opulent: it was now so extravagant that it verged on the vulgar. As far as Singer himself was concerned, the Singer Picnic was a bargain. I would not have wished my employees to know this, but I got it all very cheap from Baldwin’s, who owed me a favour over a certain little business to do with manila envelopes. Whatever the reason, there was no doubt that Singer Enterprises was the only establishment in Sydney to have smoked salmon at its picnic, and ham all round.
The thing had become something of a sacred cow, and Norah waxed lyrical, not to say hysterical, on the benefits of a day communing with nature. Personally, I had no interest in picnics. What thrill could there be to sit among ants, eating gritty bread-and-butter, and scalding your lip on milkless tea out of a chipped enamel mug? All right-thinking people agreed that vegetation was simply one of the impediments nature had put in the way of civilisation, and should be ignored where it could not be subdued.
Be that as it may, one sultry morning the entire kit and kaboodle of Singer Enterprises, and all its employees and family, set off through the bush on carts, everyone cranky in the early sun and slapping at flies. These picnics brought out the absurd in Rundle. He was kitted out like some pioneer of old times—It is only a picnic, we are not looking for the Inland Sea, you know, Rundle!—in enormous boots and moleskins, and a cocky’s hat that sat oddly above the mournful flaps of his face; he even had a Bowie-knife on his belt, and a compass on a string round his neck. He and I led the way in a cart with the marquee and a couple of muscular lads from Despatch, and in the spirit of goodwill towards all men I nodded and made noises of agreement as Rundle boomed on and on in my ear.
Rundle was a man with a systematic approach to conversation. He began by reminding me of all the spots he had chosen in previous years for the picnic, then went on to tell me about the spots he had considered choosing this year, ticking off on his fingers their various advantages and disadvantages; he wound up by speculating on the spots he might consider choosing for next year, and running through a few of their features. It was only nine o’clock in the morning, and already I was sick of the whole thing, straining to remain gracious with Rundle. A day of utter tedium lay ahead.
In spite of all Rundle’s laborious decision-making, the place was simply the usual kind of place. There were large red trees of irregular shape and inadequate shade, there was a patch of tufty grass, no doubt home to snakes, there was a small brown creek, and there were clouds of flies: all was according to tradition. I sat myself on a fallen log and watched dourly as the marquee was unpacked. Rundle pointed and perspired, and the muscular youths from Despatch, ant-like under the enormous lumpy trees, pulled and pushed, and shouted up a bit your end, mate, until the thing was perched on its poles, and then they stood back scratching their heads under their caps and batting away at flies.
Next to arrive was the Singer entourage. Norah sat up at the front of the cart, staring around at leaves as if they were interesting, with a slight superior smile on her face, as of one who considers herself in harmony with nature. Crouched behind her, hanging on grimly as if he thought he might soon be sick, was John, on whose face anxiety looked like bad temper. Lilian was leaning over the back of the cart with her bottom in the air, watching the dirt pass between the wheels.
Looking at her now, as the young men from Despatch were doing, I could see that Lilian was turning into something embarrassing. Norah dressed her nicely in sprigged this and spotted that, trying to minimise the balloons on her chest and the vast rump on her. But all the carefully chosen lace collars and smocking, all the discreet blues and muted pinks, all the expensive pin-tucking and darts, had a look of the grotesque on the great hot undeniable fleshiness of my daughter. She was like a piglet in a lace nightdress. Norah’s daintiness could make you forget the seamy femaleness beneath, but Lilian was a coarse parody of the feminine, a mocking reminder of what really lay under all the laces and lavender-water.
Now she was sitting in the cart with her legs wide apart, easing her flesh like some old slattern, without a thought for how she looked. She did not seem to realise that she should make an attempt to control, or at least conceal, her flesh. Had Norah taught her nothing about being a woman, that she was so entirely without shame?
Moreover, in spite of her lack of womanly charms, she was cultivating none of the shy attractive ways, none of the eagerness to please, none of the fluster and blushes that a plain woman does well to learn. She did not even seem to realise that incompetence is one of a woman’s essential graces. ‘Oh no, Father, I can get down myself !’ she called out when I offered her my arm, and jumped down so heavily that the trees rocked in their very sockets. She stood beside me, exuding animal warmth, and gawped at the young men from Despatch, wrestling now with trestle-tables, tripping over guy-ropes, and swearing audibly. I felt her take a huge chestful of air and suddenly hoot a Coo-ee!—‘to see if there is an echo, Father,’ she said—that made everyone turn to stare at Mr Singer’s large and surprising daughter, and I caught a smirk exchanged between two of the lads.
And now my damned wife was summoning me from her chair. ‘Oh Albion dearest, could you come here a moment?’ She had already made her way across the creek to where Rundle had set up the all-too-folding chairs in what little shade there was, and sat with her swollen ankles and everlasting fan, with the crease between her eyebrows that I hated, and that whine in her voice that made me want to trumpet in her face like a rogue elephant.
‘If something could just be found to raise my feet a little, Albion, the grass is damp, you know, and my legs ache so.’ Rundle and I scurried around, finding a hamper that was too high, and a box that was too hard, and finally a stool that was acceptable.
Lilian galloped over the tufts to us, and startled me by suddenly laughing a gusty laugh and pointing—‘Look, Father, that tree is just like a person, look, it has elbows and everything, look, it even has a...’ But she stopped; she had spoken the truth, but the truth had swept her a little further than she dared to go. For the tree was indeed like a person: to be exact, it was like a fat female with her clothes off. There was dimpled pink flesh that was as plump and smooth as the inside of a thigh, with busy creasings and foldings around angles in the branches like elbows and knees. What had silenced Lilian was a dark puckered orifice in the trunk not far above Norah’s head, the skin of the tree bunched around it like the neck of a bag, a thing humanoid to the point of obscenity.
My eyes returned from these puckers and plackets to my pasty-faced wife. ‘Look at the dimpled flesh, Norah,’ I said, ‘on that tree,’ and Norah looked, but blankly, seeing only leaves and branches, and wondering aloud about the possibility of bird-droppings.
We sat tilting on our chairs in the sandy soil, and waited like galahs for Rundle to boil the billy. I had suggested a good supply of vacuum-flasks, but of course boiling the billy was the high point of a picnic for Rundle. We had to go through the whole drama of gathering up the sticks, being scientific about laying it—a fire needs oxygen, Rundle reminded us as we sat in a row watching him balance one twig on top of another—then there was the puffing and blowing at the smoulder until it lit. Smoke swirled around our heads, Rundle wiped at his streaming eyes, the billy tilted and nearly put the whole thing out, but Rundle stood back as triumphantly as if he had just invented the wheel. I sat consumed with irritation like an itch: what was the point of all our heroic pioneers having been so uncomfortable, if not to spare us this sort of thing?
At last the great table was set up, only slightly lopsided, under the marquee, and Rundle came over. ‘Ready, Mr Singer?’ he asked, positively purple with the responsibility of it all. What a freak of nature Rundle was, especially with the smudge of ash on his nose, and the Bowie-knife which had now swung around on his belt so that it dangled lewdly into his groin. Look sharp, Rundle, I wanted to say. You are not doing anything for the dignity of Singer Enterprises, man! but I replied calmly to set an example which I hoped he might follow, ‘Yes, Rundle, I am quite ready.’
The next bit was the only part of the Singer Christmas Picnic that I enjoyed: I knew I had the right kind of carrying voice for my task, and a grasp of the suave platitudes appropriate for the moment. How it warmed my heart to see their faces crease with laughter at my little jokes! I swelled with the knowledge that I was the ultimate head of the ultimate family. They were gathered around me, laughing obligingly at jokes which in cold blood even I would have admitted were not terribly funny. Everyone nodded, smiled and greeted with applause the various achievements of Singer Enterprises over the year: the introduction of the window envelope, the installation of the Pneumatic Cash Railway, and the marriage, finally, of Miss Freeman. I felt myself expand under the trees, matching them in sheer bulk and solidity: I had never felt more substantial, knowing that the boots of every man here, the corsets of every woman, the bread in every child’s mouth, were all thanks to me.
After the proprietor’s speech of welcome, the next thing was the parade, and this was the reason for the purple panic on the face of Rundle. I looked away discreetly as he hissed various last-minute instructions, and pushed and prodded at workers until they formed ragged lines. Then he waved his arm in a wild way at the band of St Brendan’s (of which Rundle was apparently a pillar), and with a colossal fart from the tuba, the parade began. Rundle led the way, but was unable to resist anxious glances back over his shoulder, so that the Singer Enterprises banner he held—embroidered and gold-fringed by the ladies of Notepaper—dipped and twisted dangerously. Courtesy of Mr Singer, each female had been provided with a corsage (cheaper in bulk) so that every bosom crawled like a nest of spiders, and each man had a buttonhole, even though the weaselly fellow who did the privies did not in fact seem to own a buttonhole in which to poke his buttonhole, but had put it in a convenient rip in the front of his shirt.
A parade is a thing calculated to stir the blood: amass a crowd of people in ragged lines, get them behind some embroidered banners, make sure there are tubas on hand, and it would take the soul of a reptile not to be stirred. My daughter was no reptile: her feelings flowed so close to the surface they could be read on her very skin. She said—shouted, rather, for the tuba was assertive—‘Jolly good, Father, isn’t it?’ and watched with her hands clasped at bosom-height, over-acting her ecstasy, I thought, and drawing attention to her chest in an unfortunate way.
The workers marched and wheeled in a ragged sort of order before us, and when they had finished, we set up a patter of applause. Rundle bowed, wiping perspiration off his brow and actually laughing with relief, I cut a symbolic slice off a leg of ham, and the picnic was launched.
We ate our way through ham and mustard, and beetroot, and potato salad; the keg of beer was broached with much spurting foam, and Lilian went around with plates offering bits of the famous smoked salmon. I grew weary of standing on the bumpy ground with Rundle telling me how many pounds of mustard he had bought, how many hams, how cheap beetroot was when you bought it by the bushel; how could he think Mr Singer would be interested in the price of beetroot?
I murmured my marvelment, I hoped not so enthusiastically as to encourage him to go into how he had arrived at the precise number of potatoes, but he was not to be stopped. He told me how he had sat down, by way of a scientific experiment, with a plate of ham before him, to see how large a smear of mustard the average man needed for the average plate of ham. From this he had ascertained how many smears of this size were to be got out of a jar, and thereby—Rundle did not spare me any detail of his mathematics— by multiplying the number of smears by the number of employees, and dividing that figure by the number of jars—or was it dividing the smears by the employees, and multiplying by the jars?—thereby arriving at the number of jars of mustard the picnic would need.
Esprit de corps was the name of the game at the Singer Picnic: what the parade had started, the afternoon games were to continue. Rundle produced a number of chaff-bags, and a number of soupspoons and china eggs for the Ladies’ Heats, and cricket paraphernalia for the men, and Miss Morgan of Fastenings was deputed to round up all the girls.
This was a delicate matter: when does a girl cease to be a girl? The matrons of Singer Enterprises were naturally not expected to hump themselves along in sacks or scurry with eggs, but it was thought appropriate that the young ones—the girls from the packing room, and the junior sales staff—would throw themselves into the spirit of the thing. The delicacy was in drawing the line, which is why Rundle handed over to Miss Morgan.
Miss Morgan herself, with her liver-spotted cheeks and her quivering dewlaps, was clearly not eligible, while little Miss Connie Entwhistle of Fastenings—her cheeks as pink as a man could wish, and I could personally vouch for the rest of her being equally pink— clearly was. But what about Miss Spragg, who in the soft light of Envelopes was a peachy enough proposition, but who in the crude daylight here could be seen to have a pucker between her eyebrows that was nearly a wrinkle, and pouches of flesh starting under her eyes? And what of Miss Parkinson? She had won the egg-and-spoon race last year—Miss Parkinson was built on the same lines as a wading-bird, and had more or less waded her way to victory on her long shanks—but this year there was a certain indefinable change in her. I happened to know—Mr Singer liked to keep track of his staff, and Rundle could be relied on to keep me informed—that a young postal employee was showing interest. Would Miss Parkinson be wounded not to be asked, and wish she could join the fun, and perhaps win again? After all, the egg-and-spoon race at the Singer Enterprises Christmas Picnic might well be the only thing Miss Parkinson would ever win. Or would she feel she was above such amusements now that she was spoken for? Would she be offended to be invited, as if the postal clerk and all he represented did not exist? Only Miss Morgan could have any hope of charting a course among all these delicacies.
And Miss Morgan rose to the occasion, as always: Miss Morgan would have made a fine diplomat. I saw that Miss Parkinson, her long cheeks flushed with excitement, had been entrusted with the starting-pistol, and Miss Spragg was fussing around the finish line with a notepad, a pen and a stopwatch—clever Miss Morgan!
Miss Entwhistle, Miss Baxter, Miss Flaherty, all known to me from the stockroom, one or two others with whom I was not yet familiar, and Miss Singer, were definitely on the humping-and-scurrying side of the invisible line that divided the female species. The young ladies from the shop stood holding their eggs gingerly, their cheeks flushed with having everyone looking at them. One of them dropped her egg before the starting gun went off, and giggled as if it were the funniest thing in the world, picking it up with a dainty little bob, and Miss Flaherty showed all her fine little teeth, laughing along with her, and they both tucked the hair behind their ears with a graceful gesture.
By contrast, Lilian was all frown, concentrating. She had gathered her skirt up in one hand so that she could run efficiently, as if she did not know that a young lady does not expose her meaty calves to the gaze of the world, and that efficiency is not the point in a ladies’ egg-and-spoon race. Did Norah teach the girl nothing? We all watched, and Miss Parkinson waited with the gun in her hand, as Lilian experimented with the best technique, whether it was better to hold the egg out at the end of your arm, or clutch it up against your chest. Finally she was ready, and waited for the starting gun crouched like a jockey, with her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth as if it all mattered. ‘Lilian must think she is in the Empire Games,’ I remarked to Norah, but to my surprise Norah came back at me rather tartly, ‘She wants to win, Albion, and why should she not?’
A good crowd was gathered to watch; on rugs on the lumpy ground all the shop-ladies were gathered. Some reclined, others sat bolt upright, depending on the ferocity of their underpinnings. Behind them, caps on the backs of their heads, legs a-straddle, arms akimbo, stood all my awkward lads, in their greasy cloth caps, and their pants too short in the legs.
The day had grown hot, and the cask of beer had grown empty, and under these influences the young men from Despatch had taken the liberty of removing their jackets. They were all well-built. I employed them scientifically, on the basis of their chest measurements; there were employers who believed in the fallacy of wiry strength, it was often debated at the Club, but personally I believed in muscle you could measure. Their bodies were their glories, but above their necks there was not much worth looking at. Their features were jammed together in the centre of their faces like an after-thought, and they all stared out woodenly at the world, as if it cost money to have an expression on your face.
One young chap, a gingery fellow with a neck like an ox, the pearl-white skin of his shoulders almost luminous, was particularly conspicuous, having stripped down to his undershirt so that his particularly fine pectorals could be clearly seen. When he passed close to us I caught the sharp animal tang of his fresh sweat, and saw Norah pick it up too, and follow him with her eyes as he joined the other young men. I caught Rundle’s bloodshot eye, and by a meaningful jerk of the head and lift of the eyebrow, instructed him to get the young man’s shirt back on: it might be a picnic, but it was not a free-for-all!
Miss Parkinson took up a threatening stance with the pistol, and Lilian watched every move, positively scowling with concentration, so that Miss Parkinson’s finger had barely squeezed the trigger before Lilian shot off, egg a-tremble. When the shot was fired, Miss Entwhistle gave a jump, squealed, and dropped her egg again; Miss Baxter began to waver forward in a sort of zig-zag, as if chasing her egg rather than propelling it, and laughing away fit to burst: they were in a state of quite delightful flush and titter.
Lilian had never looked less delightful. Her large pink tongue was now protruding so far from her mouth that she could have caught flies with it, and her thick red cheeks shook at each step she took. While all the others tripped along calmly and daintily, their skirts flouncing nicely around their ankles, Lilian was galumphing along like a rhinoceros, her flesh shaking around her at each step and her chest bobbling along under its muslin.
I became aware that I was not the only male watching her overeager efforts with her egg. The gingery lad had put his shirt back on, but was now standing taking up a lot of space on the grass, his eyes devouring the breasts of my daughter. This thick-necked ginger lout had the face of a cockroach. There was something greedy in the way he stared, and when he muttered something out of the side of his mouth to the youth next to him, I knew precisely what sort of thing he was saying.
Miss Entwhistle came gracefully last, puffing in the prettiest way: the exertion had put a charming colour in her cheeks. Lilian was the colour of Rundle’s beetroot, and was blowing like a whale. She won by a good margin, and the oafs unlocked their hands from over their chests, clapping rather more enthusiastically than I thought warranted by a ladies’ egg-and-spoon race, and Lilian, sweaty and dishevelled, grinned around as if she had never heard of mockery, and waved at me as if she might have escaped my attention. I clapped, as faintly as I could, but the cockroach was actually cheering her.
I was a democratic man of business relaxing with his employees, and I intended to roll up my sleeves later for a game of cricket with these lads, but one could carry informality too far. I strode over, casually but quickly, and said in a voice not intended to carry, ‘Lilian, you have made a spectacle of yourself.’ The laughter dropped away from her, and how hideous she now looked, scowling, with her cheeks scarlet and her nose shiny! I was overwhelmed by the dreadful vigour of the blood in her face and her sheer coarse bulk.
With a hand under her elbow—I could feel the heat of her pulsing against me—I steered her away from where the eyes watched from under the cloth caps, and handed her a dipper of water from the bucket and a comb from my pocket. ‘Set yourself to rights, Lilian,’ I said. ‘And remember next time that there is no need to try so hard.’
Like Lilian, I did not believe in coming second in a race: a person might as well come last if they were not going to win. I had to admit that, had I been unlucky enough to have been born a girl, I might have been as Lilian was. In that sense, I could understand Lilian’s refusal to tuck her animal fleshiness away, and join the simpering hypocritical games: I could see that without realising it she was trying to tear at the tissue of lies going on around her. I should have been pleased that she had the wit to see through it, and that she was not simply another in the vast herd of human blanks.
But the point was that I had not been born a woman, and what was proper in me was mortifying in my daughter. I saw now—too late!—that I had not done her any favours, in encouraging her intellect. My daughter had grown into a freak of nature, a misfit with the brain of a man in the body of a woman.
When John was chivvied along by Norah to join us for another cup of the everlasting tea, I was struck afresh by the perversity of life, for he would have made an excellent girl. He mooned around at the edge of things holding his cup and saucer crooked, so that tea splashed on the cuffs of his creams, his head sat at a cringing angle on his neck, and his shoulders were hunched over as if to make himself shorter. He had refused to go in any of the games at all, saving us all the embarrassment of seeing the way his feet appeared to flap on the ends of his ankles when he tried to run, and how his elbows stuck out like a chook in a fluster.
The problem was that in spite of John’s frog-like look, his pale damp skin, his fears, his silences, his stupidity in the face of even the simplest building-block or golliwog—in spite of all this, John was a male. It was hard to imagine he would ever amount to much of a man, but he was male; whereas Lilian, no matter how brave and no matter how bright, would always belong to the secondary sex.
I thought ruefully of all the muslins and voiles from which I had chosen Norah: it was clear to me now that I must have ignored some signal from nature, and had picked an unsuitable set of genes. It was a bitter irony. I had approached the problem systematically, researching the latest scientific ideas and thinking the thing through logically, and yet had ended up with such a failure that my line was likely to end with me. Others—fools—had merely let their fancy dictate their choice to them: they had swallowed all the nonsense about love, and chosen their mates on great gusts of blind feeling— these fools had produced manly young chaps and sweet-voiced little girls who would all reproduce themselves copiously—there was a monstrous injustice somewhere!
Cricket was another of those manly accomplishments I had long ago made sure I was competent at, and during last year’s picnic, although Mr Singer’s team had lost with a good grace to Mr Rundle’s team, Mr Singer himself had put up a fine show. In fact, he had actually driven the ball so hard into the cleft of a paperbark that it had had to be left there for the tree to swallow. Efficient Rundle had produced a spare ball, and what a cheer had gone up for Mr Singer!
I had felt last year that Rundle was uncomfortable at trouncing Mr Singer’s team quite so thoroughly. When the subject had come up during the months that followed, I noticed he hastened to remind everyone of the ball stuck in the tree, and several times he had got up to demonstrate in front of the desk, with a rolled-up newspaper, just the kind of action Mr Singer had used to get it there. ‘Classic cricket,’ he would repeat. ‘Absolutely classic cricket.’ This year, Rundle announced that he would not play: he appointed himself umpire instead. ‘Oh, I am getting on, Mr Singer,’ he twinkled at me, as if this was an amusingly original phrase, ‘time to hand over to the younger ones now, sir,’ and it was the gingery lout with the pectorals who was going to open the bowling against me.
Nature had been kind to Rundle, providing him with a dusty patch of flat ground among the trees. Sunlight poured itself down all around, insects droned away in the afternoon heat, and the leaves far above shook themselves together spasmodically in a fluky breeze. The clearing lay expectant under the sun: the wicket, hammered into the hard ground with the back of Rundle’s axe, gave the patch of dirt a human meaning.
I strode to the wicket feeling my muscles moving pleasurably under my shirt—a gentleman knew when it was appropriate to remove one’s jacket, and that time was now—and limbered up with a few swings. I was no muscle-bound bruiser, but I was a fine figure of a man, a man in his prime. Over on the rugs under the trees, the women watched me. Norah began to clap her hands together; she did not actually go so far as to produce any sound, but the other women soon took it up. I saw Lilian beating her palms together as vigorously as if knocking the dirt out of a rug, and Miss Baxter and Miss Entwhistle going at it conscientiously, keeping an eye on Mrs Singer so they would know when to stop. They worked away at it in their different ways as their males gathered in the clearing, ready to perform before them, but the bush swallowed the sound they made so that it was as insignificant as the rattle of a beetle through leaves.
Up at the other end, the ginger boy was snapping at his braces where they bulged over his chest, and grinding the ball into his groin. He stared down the pitch at me, but I could see that his blank insect-eyes were not registering his employer standing at the other end, or the father of the girl he had ogled as she galloped over the grass with an egg. This boy’s eyes saw only a problem of distance, speed, and angle: Albion Gidley Singer was nothing more to him than a thing in front of a wicket.
As he walked back to start his run, I took up my stand, thumping the end of the bat into the dirt, flexing my wrists: I was already relishing the percussion the ball would make as it connected with the bat. From far, far away across the sunlit grass, I saw him begin his run. He had started much too far back, like all beginners. He was positively small in the distance, crabbing towards me with the sweat-stains showing in his armpits, and his boots beating up the dust. A bird warbled abruptly and swooped low over the wicket; he was still miles away, and I was still readying myself, gripping and re-gripping the bat, when I heard a clatter behind me, and Rundle was braying ‘Out! Out!’ The fool, did he not see we had not even started yet?
It could only be a mistake, or perhaps a joke. Who had knocked the wicket over so that it sprawled stupidly on the grass? What was this silence, in which I heard the wind in leaves? What was this stillness, everyone moonfaced, watching me? ‘Out,’ Rundle said again, but quietly. ‘Clean bowled, Mr Singer sir, I am afraid to say,’ and there was young Parkinson from Accounts already coming towards me and reaching out for the bat.
‘Jolly bad luck, Father,’ Lilian trumpeted as I sat down, ‘he was as fast as anything, wasn’t he, Mother?’ I wanted to crush that red face, to stop her loud artless voice from going on. My chest was aching with the outrage of it, my throat stringy with suppressed tears. How dare they, how dare they, my heart repeated, but just who it was that had dared, and just what they had done, I could not quite have said.
The thick-necked ginger lout had the face of a cockroach, but he was a dab hand with a ball. I recovered my equilibrium somewhat when Parkinson was dismissed for 2, O’Malley managed a mere 5, and Gorman was out for a duck as I had been. With each of my team-mate’s disgraces, my own shame faded. ‘Oh, he is awfully good,’ Lilian cried after watching him deliver a sizzler to McAllister, who frankly ducked. ‘He is amazing, Father!’ and I was recovered enough to be gracious. ‘Yes indeed, Lilian, I happen to know the poor lad has never learnt to read, so what a good thing it is that he can throw a ball.
When the cricket was over, Mr Singer made sure he led the applause, and was to be seen nodding and smiling, and making a remark to the young lady beside him. Our sweaty genius of the ball stood luminous with sunlight in the middle of the clearing, grinning and rubbing the ball along his thigh as if he did not know how to stop. In fact, Mr Singer had to go out onto the pitch in the end, to shake him by the hand and more or less usher him off the pitch and over to the refreshment tent. I saw Miss Flaherty get up from the grass and start over towards him. But off the pitch, out of the sunlight that lit him up, and with the ball removed from his grip by Mr Singer, so that he stood with his large hands dangling, he was simply a sweaty gawky lad in pants too short in the leg, and I saw her falter, reconsider, and turn away.
The day finished as it had begun, in a colossal tedium of folding things, and packing things, and installing things and people into carts, and jolting back through the dusk with a headache. For many a weary mile, Rundle exclaimed at the performance of my daughter. ‘My word, Mr Singer,’ he said, and said again, and then said once more, ‘she will not be beaten, will she Mr Singer? My word, Mr Singer, your daughter certainly does not mind exerting herself,’ and so on and on. Was Rundle simply a blind mule of a man, with not an idea in the wide world of the things a father might not welcome in a daughter? Or was Rundle a sneak, mocking me in his meeching way? I nodded and did my best to assemble an agreeable expression on my face, but I wanted nothing better than to forget the way my daughter had wobbled and joggled her way to victory, and to forget, too, the way her father had been vanquished without even lifting his bat to the ball.