The Women in Black Page 3

  ‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ she told herself, ‘try, try, try again.’

  She was a brave girl, like most of her compatriots.

  5

  The great glass and mahogany entrance doors of F.G. Goode’s were opened promptly at five past nine every morning, Monday to Saturday, and for the rest of the day until 5.30 (or on Saturdays, 12.30) the ladies went in and out with their desires and their fulfil-ments. Most of the ladies arrived on foot; if they were very smartly dressed the doorman in his uniform of a lieutenant-colonel in the Ruritanian Army would touch his cap or perhaps give a slight nod; if they arrived by taxi or, goodness me, chauffeur-driven car, he would spring to the kerbstone and open the door and hold it while the lady emerged.

  Most ladies, whatever their primary business, lingered on the ground fl oor before ascending by lift or escalator, casing the perfume counter, the gloves, the handkerchiefs, the scarves and the belts and handbags. Sometimes they went straight to the soda fountain and sat at the marble-topped counter on a gold stool drinking a milkshake or an ice-cream soda because Sydney is a very big city and such ladies might have travelled far to get to Goode’s. They might take a headache powder with their soda to set themselves up for the day ahead.

  If it was the school holidays they might have a kiddy or two with them and those were the ladies for whom even a Ruritanian army officer might feel sorry—ghastly brats, these kids, who fought with each other and began every sentence with the words ‘I want . . .’

  Most of these kiddies were here for the shoes, because the Children’s Shoes Department had an X-ray machine so that you could be sure their foot bones were not pushed out of alignment by their new shoes, and this machine was extremely popular with the better-class mother, until it was discovered that the effect of all those X-rays was somewhat more dangerous than wearing improperly fitting shoes, dire as that most surely was.

  If the kiddies behaved themselves moderately well they were taken when all the shopping was done to have lunch in the restaurant on the fifth floor, which was therefore not a nice place to be during the school holidays, for the kiddies tended to play up just as soon as they were safely seated, very few mothers having the face to march them out again once they were, so that these luncheons were punctuated by squeals and slaps and spilt drinks and shattered jellies; and fewer mothers yet had the savoir-faire to leave a tip commensurate with the mayhem caused.

  Miss Jacobs, Mrs Williams and Miss Baines were all spared the worst of these aspects of life within the walls of Goode’s because very few ladies thought of trying to buy a cocktail frock or even a day frock with their little ones in tow. Up here, all was luxe, calme et volupté, with nice pink lights and pink-tinted mirrors which made you look just lovely, and the thick grey silence underfoot of finest Axminster.

  The women in black were all at their stations ready to face the summer day by nine o’clock precisely, when Miss Cartright came swishing over to them in her coin-spotted cotton piqué.

  ‘Girls!’ she cried.

  How they detested that. It was rumoured that she had been Head Prefect at PLC and couldn’t they just imagine it. Such side! Here she was. Now what?

  ‘One of the temporary staff will be joining you next week,’ said Miss Cartright with a bright smile. ‘I hope you’ll make her welcome. I know you don’t usually have a temp in this section, but I think she will be useful, and she can help Magda out as well.’

  Oh, gawd.

  At the very end of the Ladies’ Frocks Department, past Cocktail Frocks, there was something very special, something quite, quite wonderful; but it wasn’t for everybody: that was the point. Because there, at the very end, there was a lovely arch, on which was written in curly letters Model Gowns. And beyond the arch was a rose-pink cave illuminated by frilly little lamps and furnished with a few elegant little sofas upholstered in oyster-grey brocade; and the walls were lined with splendid mahogany cupboards in which hung, on pink satin-covered hangers, the actual Model Gowns, whose fantastic prices were all in guineas.

  To one side of the cave there was a small Louis XVI-style table and chair, where ladies could write cheques or sign sales dockets, and to each side was a great cheval glass where a lady having donned a Model Gown (did she dare) in one of the large and commodious fitting rooms might look at herself properly, walking around and turning, to get the effect of the frock in the sort of proper big space where it would ultimately be seen. A chandelier hung from the ceiling; almost the only fitment lacking to the scene was the bottle of Veuve Clicquot foaming at the mouth and the tulip-shaped glass; in all other respects the cave was a faithful reproduction of the luxurious space in which its clients were to be supposed continually to have their being: and the pythoness who guarded the cave was Magda.

  Magda, the luscious, the svelte and full-bosomed, the beau tifully tailored and manicured and coiffed, was the most over whelming, scented, gleaming, god-awful and ghastly snake-woman that Mrs Williams, Miss Baines and even, probably, Miss Jacobs herself had ever seen, or even imagined. Magda (no one could even try to pronounce her frightful Continental surname) was just a terrible fact of life which you ignored most of the time, but if they were going to share a temp with Magda they knew who would be doing most of the sharing: they were going to have Magda slithering out of her pink cave and sliding over to Ladies’ Cocktail and pinching that temp away from them just the minute she showed herself useful.

  That was a fact, because Magda was the kind of woman who always got what she wanted: you could tell. Because Magda (gawd help us) was a Continental: and weren’t they glad they weren’t.

  At least Mrs Williams was; she was quite definite about that. ‘Gawd,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand to get about like that.’

  Miss Jacobs simply looked more than usually affronted, even slightly offended, as if she had just seen a spider in her teacup. Fay Baines thought her frightful, just frightful, the way she walked, and that; but at home in front of her mirror she wondered seriously just what sort of make-up Magda used and how she put it on, because the woman was forty if she was a day, and she looked—you had to hand it to her—she looked terrific. You had to hand it to her.

  6

  When Lesley Miles arrived for her interview for a position as Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, she was given a form to fill in, and the first word she wrote on it, very carefully and with a spooky sense of danger, was ‘Lisa’.

  This was the name she had chosen for herself several years before: she disliked the one she had been given more than she could say, and had long since resolved to take another at the first opportunity. This was the first opportunity.

  ‘Lisa Miles!’ cried a voice; and Lesley-Lisa sprang to her feet and followed a woman into the small room where the interviews were being conducted.

  ‘Well, Lisa,’ said the woman—and Lesley’s new life, as Lisa, commenced.

  How very simple it was: she was sure she would get used to it immediately. She sat up very straight, like a Lisa, and smiled gaily. Now it would all begin.

  Miss Cartright, who was conducting the interview, looked piercingly at the teenager seated before her: one had to be careful to get the right kind of girl here at Goode’s, even if she was only a temporary hired for the Christmas rush and the New Year Sales which followed. This one was at least evidently intelligent: the form she had completed showed that she was about to sit for the Leaving Certificate. But what a face! What a figure! She had the body and the mien of a child of around fifteen, and an immature one at that: small and thin, even skinny, with frizzy blonde hair and bright innocent eyes behind utilitarian-looking spectacles. Still, she would look more adult in the black frock: her own clothes were impossible—obviously homemade, and not well-made either: a little cotton print frock, with badly set-in sleeves, and a peter-pan collar. Poor kid.

  Lisa, having ironed her pink frock—which was her best—with the greatest care, and wearing her high-heeled shoes with a brand new pair of nylon stockings, was confident that
her appearance approached the condition of Lisa-ness as nearly as was possible in all the circumstances, and sat on, smiling and eager and absolutely oblivious of Miss Cartright’s inner thoughts.

  ‘And what are you thinking of doing, Lisa,’ asked Miss

  Cartright, ‘when you leave school?’

  ‘Well, I’m going to wait and see what my Leaving results are,’ said Lisa, looking vague.

  ‘I don’t suppose you mean to make a career in the retail trade?’said Miss Cartright.

  ‘Oh, no!’ cried Lisa.

  Miss Cartright laughed.

  ‘It’s quite all right, Lisa. It doesn’t suit everybody. But as long as you are working here, you will be expected to work hard, and as if it were your permanent job. Do you understand that?’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Lisa, desperately. ‘Of course; I do understand. I’ll work very hard.’

  And Miss Cartright, thinking it might be rather quaint to see the girl in such a context, decided to put her in Ladies’ Cocktail, where she could give a hand to Magda in Model Gowns now and then because, although she looked so childish, she was evidently bright as well as willing, and might be quite useful, all things considered.

  ‘You start on the first Monday in December, then,’ she informed the new Sales Assistant (Temporary), ‘and your wages will be paid fortnightly, on Thursdays. Now we will go and see about your black frock.’

  It was only now that she realised that it was very unlikely that there would be a frock which would fit this skinny child. Oh, well:perhaps she would grow into it, once the strain of the examinations was behind her. Lisa followed her from the room, up the fire stairs to the Wardrobe Room, and so enchanted was she at the idea of wearing black that she did not care in the very least that the frock she was given was one size too large, she being an XXSSW; for in any case, she had never ever had a frock which fitted properly.

  The interviews for temporary staff had been held on a Saturday afternoon, after Goode’s—and every other shop in the city—had closed for the weekend, and Lisa had arrived just at closing time, when the streets were still busy with people going home or to the pictures or to restaurants. Now, a good hour later, she emerged from the Staff Entrance into the city in its Saturday afternoon and Sunday condition: so silent, so deserted as to suggest a terrible and universal disaster, the visitation of some dreadful plague, or of the Angel, even, of Death itself. Each footfall could be heard as she walked down Pitt Street and Martin Place; as she passed the GPO she saw a woman posting a letter, and in George Street she saw a man in the far distance, going towards Circular Quay; the streets were otherwise quite empty.

  She walked down the dark mysterious concourse of Wynyard Station towards the trains, and by the time her own arrived, there were only three other passengers on the platform. She had never before been in town on a Saturday afternoon, and the episode, following upon the novelty of the interview for her very first job, induced a feeling of awful strangeness—and yet, of a certain ghostly familiarity; for Lisa believed herself to be in all likelihood a poet, and this experience seemed to her to be one about which one could certainly find oneself writing a poem, as long as one could manage to recall this feeling, this apprehension, of a world transformed, and oneself in it and with it: a sensation and an apprehension for which, for the moment, she had no precise words.

  Lisa, she said to herself, sitting in the train as it rattled across the Bridge. My name is Lisa Miles. The feeling of strangeness was still within her, and equally, she within it, as she knocked on the door of the house in Chatswood where she lived with her parents—she had as yet no key.

  Her mother opened the door. ‘Hello Lesley!’ she said.

  In the few weeks between the ending of the Leaving Certificate examinations and her first day at Goode’s, Lisa went to the Blue Mountains with her mother, read Tender is the Night and part of Anna Karenina, went twice to the pictures, and most of all stood silent and impatient while her mother, making her some new clothes, adjusted pins.

  ‘Stand still,’ she commanded. ‘You want to look nice, don’t you?

  It’s your first job.’

  ‘Yes, but I’ll be wearing a black frock,’ said Lisa. ‘They won’t see me in my own clothes.’

  ‘They will when you arrive and when you go home,’ said her mother.

  ‘It won’t matter then,’ said Lisa.

  ‘It always matters,’ said Mrs Miles.

  ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright / In the forests of the night,’ Lisa began.

  ‘Oh, you and your tiger,’ said her mother. ‘Don’t distract me:and stay still.

  ’ Lisa was an only child, and this fact was believed by onlookers to account for her general queerness. Her father was a compositor on the Herald and was rarely to be seen, generally arriving home in the wee small hours, sleeping till the afternoon and going off to a pub to drink beer for an hour or two until it was time to go to work. During his waking hours on Saturday he glued himself to the wireless to listen to the racing, having placed several off-course bets. Mrs Miles had not the slightest idea of the size of his salary, and would have been stunned if anyone had told her. If she had known how great a proportion of it ended up in the pockets of the off-course bookmakers she would have fainted dead away.

  She had not known him well when they married, during the war: he was a handsome soldier at a dance she had attended, and when he had suggested after a brief acquaintance that they make a go of it, she had seen no reason at all to say no.

  She had until then had a hard life, for she had been born into a bakery business, and had been covered with flour since the age of eleven when she had been drafted in to assist her elders as soon as she came home from school. She was shown how to put the glacé cherries on the fairy cakes, and subsequently instructed in more difficult operations, until by the age of fifteen there was almost nothing she didn’t know about fancy baking.

  At this stage she left school and joined her family at their trade on a full-time basis. She was paid a derisory wage, in cash, and continued to live at home, over the shop. She might still have been covered with flour to this day if her Ted hadn’t come along in his smart military outfit. Once that was removed, he had less to say for himself; but that was life, wasn’t it. She might have felt as badly as she suspected his doing, that she had not provided him with a son, were it not that her Lesley was the utter apple of her eye.

  7

  Magda and Stefan had sat up very late playing cards with two friends on the Sunday night before the first Monday in December, and by the time Magda had cleared away the dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays and generally straightened the living room, and then made her démaquillage, it was past two a.m. She stood and looked out at Mosman Bay for a minute and sighed, and retired to bed. Stefan was reading a page of Nietzsche, as was his wont last thing at night.

  ‘Ah Magda, my beloved,’ said he, flinging aside his book, ‘a woman’s work is never done until I am almost asleep myself. Come into bed now.’

  ‘There is no law in this country,’ said Magda, ‘against men helping their wives to clear up the mess, is there?’

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Stefan, ‘I think there is.’

  ‘You are probably right,’ Magda agreed, as she got into bed; and it was easily three a.m. when at last her eyes closed in sleep.

  The consequence was that when she looked into her mirror having risen at her usual hour the next morning, she looked a perfect fright, and she spent the next fifteen minutes lying on the sofa with her feet higher than her head, and with two large slices of cucumber covering her closed eyelids. Then she got up with a great sigh and ate some yoghurt, and got ready for work.

  It will not be imagined that Magda wore the regulation Goode’s black frock while presiding over the Model Gowns. No: in this matter (as in several others) a compromise had been achieved whereby Magda agreed to wear black, but on her own terms. She had acquired a collection of suitable black frocks and what she called costumes, many of whic
h were relieved, not to say enhanced, by discreet additions of white—collars, it might be, or cuffs, or both—or even, in the case of one costume, pale pink; all of which had been craftily purchased by Magda from the sort of expensive little shops which she preferred to patronise at a large trade discount further subsidised as per their agreement by Goode’s.

  ‘When I was vendeuse at Patou,’ Magda had remarked, ‘I wore nothing but Patou. Naturally.’

  This was an absolute whopper, because in the first place, Magda had never been a vendeuse at Patou. However, she might have been; it was a good and serviceable story which had as much as anything else she had to say secured her the job of taking charge of the Model Gowns.

  ‘These people,’ Magda would often say to her Continental friends, ‘know nothing.’

  Magda went up to the Staff Locker Room not, therefore, to change, but to put away her handbag and to tidy herself, walking past her inglorious colleagues in a cloud of Mitsoukou. She patted powder onto her nose, apparently oblivious of the sneers of onlookers, and turning around, gave them a dazzling smile.

  ‘A beautiful day, is it not?’ she asked. ‘I have enjoyed the journey here this morning so greatly. How lucky we all are, to live in such a place.’

  And she left the room, walking past a frieze of faces which were dumbstruck with astonishment, incomprehension, and contempt: reactions which strained for articulation as her steps retreated through the door. ‘Stone the crows,’ said Patty Williams, voicing the thoughts of all of them.

  It was at this moment that Lisa made her appearance. She stood, hesitant, in the doorway, frail as a fairy, in a gathered skirt and what might have been a white school blouse. Patty Williams glanced at her and turned to Fay Baines.