The Women in Black Read online

  ‘Now look what the cat’s dragged in,’ she observed. ‘Are you looking for someone,’ she called out, ‘or are you lost? This is staff only.’

  ‘I am,’ said Lisa. ‘I mean, I’m staff. I’m a temporary.’

  ‘Gawd strewth,’ said Patty sotto voce to Fay. ‘Have you got a locker number?’ she asked Lisa.

  Lisa told her the number she had just been given at Staff Reception and Patty stared.

  ‘Oh, that’s just along here. Gawd,’ she said again to Fay. ‘That must be our new temp. Now I’ve seen everything. Come along and get changed then,’ she said, raising her voice again. ‘It’s time to go downstairs. There’s no dawdling here, you know,’ she added, sternly.

  It was wonderful how assertive Patty could be when she had no fear of serious opposition, and for the next week she made Lisa’s hours of work just as frantic as she knew how.

  It was Miss Jacobs who had the seniority and therefore strictly speaking the right to harry Lisa, or at least to make sure that she learned the routines and made herself useful, but what with Christmas and New Year and all the parties coming up, and consequently all the cocktail frocks vanishing off the rails and into the fitting rooms quicker than you could say knife, Miss Jacobs had her work cut out with pinning up the alterations; Patty had virtually a clear field for the exercise of her power and she grew into the role most famously.

  ‘Just left school have you, Lisa?’ she asked. ‘Just done the Inter, eh? Did you pass?’

  ‘I’ve just done the Leaving,’ said Lisa.

  ‘Well!’ said Patty, disconcerted and even appalled. ‘The Leaving.

  Well. I thought you were fifteen, or about that. The Leaving!’

  Patty looked incredulously and even fearfully at the wunderkind. ‘You want to be a teacher, do you?’ said she.

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m going,’ she said, believing that she was obliged to offer a truthful account of herself, ‘to be a poet. I think,’ and she trailed off vaguely, noticing now the horrible effect of her candour.

  ‘A poet!’ exclaimed Patty. ‘Jeez, a poet!’

  She turned to Fay, who was spiking a document at the conclusion of a sale.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked. ‘Lisa here is going to be a poet!’ And she smiled evilly.

  ‘No, I mean,’ amended the confused girl, ‘I’d like to try to be a poet. Or perhaps,’ she added, in the hope of deflecting Patty’s amazement, ‘an actress.’

  ‘An actress!’ cried Patty. ‘An actress!’

  And Lisa saw at once that she had only magnified her initial error, and that she was now suddenly an object of open ridicule; for the appearance she presented in her black frock and utilitarian spectacles, thin and childish, was so far from their conception of the actress that the two women both now burst into laughter. Lisa stood helpless before them, and began to blush; she was even on the verge of tears.

  Fay was the first to compose herself; she at any rate had recollections of her own attempt at a stage career to still her derision.

  ‘It’s real hard to get into the theatre,’ she said kindly. ‘You have to know someone. Do you know anyone?’

  ‘No,’ said Lisa in a small voice.

  And then she had a sudden and brilliant inspiration.

  ‘Not yet,’ she added.

  Miss Jacobs had overheard this conversation without appearing to do so, standing a few yards away from the group writing out an Alterations Ticket. She turned around.

  ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘She’s still young. She doesn’t know anyone yet. She’s just a slip of a girl.’

  Miss Jacobs turned her back on the astonished silence which her utterance had created, and walked slowly to a nearby rail of cocktail frocks, which were meant to be arranged by size.

  ‘I think some of these frocks are out of order,’ she said, turning back to Lisa. ‘Would you look through them, Lisa, and put them right? That’s a good girl.’

  Lisa, reading the sizes on the labels of the array of cocktail frocks, XSSW, SSW, SW, W, OW, (there were only two OWs in this range) and placing them in the correct order where necessary, resorted to her usual vade-mecum in times of trial. ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,’ she chanted silently to herself, ‘In the forests of the night,’ and she had just arrived at ‘what dread feet?’ when a customer whom she had not so much as noticed interrupted her.

  She held up a black-and-magenta sheath.

  ‘Have you got this one,’ she asked, ‘in a W? I can only see this SSW here.’

  ‘Just a minute,’ said Lisa, ‘and I’ll enquire from the stockroom.

  I’m sorry,’ she added, as she had been schooled by Patty to do, ‘to keep you waiting.’

  Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

  The tyger had entered Lisa’s life, back in the days when she was no one but Lesley, three years previously, when she was at the beginning of her Intermediate Certificate year. Frail, apparently lonely, strangely disengaged, not much noticed by her teachers, a merely average performer academically, she had sat near the back of the classroom and faded into corners and against walls during recess. Her only cronies seemed to be two other girls similarly outside the fashion: a very fat girl and another who suffered from eczema: girls for whom there seemed everything to be done, but nothing which might be: girls who must find their way through the maze as best they might.

  How the fat girl, the girl with eczema, accomplished this feat is not recorded; in the case of Lisa, the thread was discovered within the pages of a poetry anthology which came into her hands one day in the school library—literally: it fell off the shelf while she was searching for a quite different book, and since it opened as it fell, her eye could not help alighting on the right-hand page: where she espied the word ‘tyger’. This having come to pass, the rest followed with simple inevitability, for no moderately alert fourteen-year-old is going to see the word ‘tyger’, spelt thus so mysteriously, so enticingly, without investigating further, and as Lisa did so, the chasm of the poetic opened at her feet. She had soon got the poem by heart, and during the next few weeks she pondered its meaning, and even its means, and when a few months later her class was asked to choose a poem, any poem in the English language, and write an essay thereon, Lisa was in a position to say much on the subject of Blake’s tyny masterpiece, and did so freely.

  Her English teacher wondered aloud thereafter if she ought not to be sitting nearer the front of the classroom: it was possible, she thought, that the girl’s eyesight made so great a distance from the blackboard inadvisable. Lisa was made to move to a desk in the second row, and went on as she had begun; for Miss Phipps had, as it were, now tasted blood.

  ‘First-class honours material, definitely,’ she said in the Staff Room. ‘Didn’t know she had it in her. First class, definitely.’

  It being the primary purpose of every teacher in the school to produce as many first-class honours results in the Leaving Certificate examinations as humanly possible, Lisa, all unknowingly, was now a marked child. As is the way of things, the attention and encouragement (discreet enough) which she now for the first time received affected her performance generally, and she improved in all her subjects. By the time she was in her last year, she was respectably in the ranks of the medium-to-high flyers: those students who would achieve not spectacular, but certainly solid, results, and almost certainly win Commonwealth Scholarships.

  Filling in the application form for the last had been a matter not unproblematical.

  ‘Well, I don’t know, Lesley,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t know about the university. We’ll have to see what your dad says. He has to sign it anyway.’

  They managed to corner him just as he began to go off one evening to the Sydney Morning Herald.

  ‘No daughter of mine is going anywhere near that cesspit,’ said he, ‘and that’s final.’

  By the end of the following week, he had agreed to give his signature to the form on the understanding that if his daughter we
re by some extreme chance actually to gain the scholarship, there would nonetheless be no question whatever of her taking it up.

  ‘It’s for the school, really,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘They want her to do it at the school. It’s good for their record.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ said E. Miles, compositor. ‘I didn’t want her going to that school anyway. A lot of stuck-up snobs.’

  Here he was animadverting to the fact that the academy in question, a state high school, admitted only children of a certain intelligence: Mrs Miles’s delight when her Lesley had at the age of eleven found herself among their number had been one of many joys of parenthood which she had been unable, alas, to share with her co-author. She had had five years, now, of silent lamplit evenings, Lesley sitting doing her increasingly time-consuming homework at the kitchen table, her mother sitting on the cane chair, knitting or sewing or looking at The Women’s Weekly, invisibly glowing with pride. Her girl: a scholar.

  8

  By the end of her first week as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, Lisa’s appearance was more remarkably fragile than ever, and her black frock seemed to be nearer two sizes too large than one. Goodness me, thought Miss Cartright as she passed by Ladies’ Cocktail, that child looks positively starved: it’s hardly decent.

  ‘Have you had your lunch hour yet?’ she asked her later in the day.

  ‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ replied the child.

  ‘Mind you eat a proper lunch then,’ said Miss Cartright sternly.

  ‘You need plenty of food to keep going here. That’s why we subsidise the Staff Canteen you know, to see that you’re all well fed. So mind you eat a proper lunch every day, Lisa.’

  ‘Oh yes, of course,’ replied she.

  ‘Lesley,’ said her mother, ‘I don’t want you eating that canteen food more than you can help. I’m sure it isn’t good for you: you don’t know where it’s been, or who’s been handling it. And it can’t be fresh. I’ll make you some nice sandwiches to take.’

  Her daughter didn’t argue, for in fact although she had been pleased by the canteen’s multi-coloured salads and trembling jellies with their tiny rosettes of whipped cream, she found the canteen itself and its clientele melancholy, and that not poetically so. By the end of her first week she had established a routine whereby, rushing up the fire stairs to the Staff Locker Room and changing back into her own clothes and fetching her sandwiches and a book, she was able, having rushed down the same stairs to the street below and up Market Street and then across Elizabeth Street—barring cars, taxis and trams—to Hyde Park, to enjoy forty-five minutes in the embrace of its amorous green.

  The weather was now abominably, relentlessly, hot, and she discovered that by sitting to one side or another, depending on the prevailing breeze, on the rim of the Archibald Fountain, she could enjoy its cooling spray as it was blown against her. Sitting thus, her stomach full of the hearty meat or cheese-filled sandwiches cut by her loving mother, her mind full of the anguish of the tale of A. Karenina which she was now very near finishing, she ascended into a state of wondering blissfulness which was induced to a large degree by the sheer novelty of being and acting quite alone: the exquisite experience of happy solitude.

  It was while she was sitting thus on the Friday of that first week, her blouse now damp from the spray of the fountain and with but a few minutes remaining to her before she must rush back the way she had come and rehabilitate herself in her black frock, that Magda passed by and, having previously eyed Lisa from the portentous entrance to Model Gowns, hailed her.

  ‘Ah, Lisa, I think, is it not? My name is Magda—you will have seen me without doubt presiding over our Model Gowns at Goode’s, where we must now—’ and here Magda consulted a diamond watch—‘return, I believe.’

  ‘Oh yes, thank you,’ Lisa stuttered in confusion.

  Magda’s eye swept over her as she rose, gathering her book and her litter. What a tiny and half-made creature this was, who had been proposed to her as an assistant in her Model Gowns—should she need her. As if she might!—but come to think of it, she could be useful for one or two tedious little tasks; and in any case, if she were to spirit Lisa away from Ladies’ Cocktail for a while, it would spite those catty women who had the present charge of her. Well, she would do it, and soon, too.

  ‘Dear Miss Cartright—she is so elegant, don’t you agree? She has true style, unlike many women I see around me,’ and here Magda cast a great lustrous-eyed glance around her which comprehended everyone within a radius of one hundred yards, and sighed, but with resignation. ‘She tells me I am to have the use of your no doubt excellent services during the next few weeks while I cope with my Christmas rush. Is that not so?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ said Lisa, ‘I think she did tell me that I was to help you too sometimes.’

  ‘Yes, well, we shall plan that in the next week,’ said Magda comfortably. ‘In the meantime, I wonder why your back is wet. Have you been sweating?’

  ‘Oh no!’ cried Lisa, ‘I’ve been sitting by the fountain—it’s just the spray.’

  ‘You silly girl!’ exclaimed Magda. ‘Do you not know how dangerous is it to sit by a wet fountain in such heat? My God. You will catch la grippe if you persist in this folly. Furthermore, damp clothes are very inelegant. Please do not do such a thing again. The damp is also bad for your hair,’ she added, casting a critical eye at the same, and thinking, I wonder if I could persuade her to go to Raoul, he is the only person in this entire city or perhaps this entire country who could cut such hair. Ah, the people here know nothing. And this child here knows, my God, even less.

  They had reached the Staff Entrance and Lisa ran up the fire stairs to change. Magda looked at her retreating figure and began her own slower and briefer ascent in a state of some satisfaction. She was doing arithmetic in her head and reassuring herself that, at the rate she and Stefan were going, they would by the end of the next year have saved enough capital to buy the lease of a shop in Macleay Street or even Double Bay: for Magda had every intention of presiding in time over her own extremely exclusive and exorbitantly expensive frock shop, and the Model Gowns could go to hell.

  9

  Patty Williams and Fay Baines were sitting at a table in the Staff Canteen at Goode’s on the second Monday in December. They did not usually have their luncheon break at the same time, but with Lisa on the strength it was now felt to be a convenient arrangement as far as the manning of Ladies’ Cocktail was concerned, because in fact this section tended not to be too busy during the lunch hour, Ladies, it seemed, who bought Cocktail Frocks preferring to do so earlier in the day or else, in a rush, much later. So here they were.

  But it was more convenient for Patty than for Fay as any intelligent person might have observed, for such a one would have noted that Fay’s make-up today covered a very wan reality: her eyelids indicated sleeplessness and her pallor dejection.

  ‘Is that a new face powder you’re trying?’ said Patty. ‘It looks paler than your usual. I always use the same one, myself. Never changed since I left school. I don’t suppose Frank’d notice even if I did,’ she added, with a modulation of tone which promised worse.

  Here it came.

  ‘I could paint my face green and he wouldn’t notice, not him. Oh well.’

  And she pursed her lips, because she suddenly thought to herself, I don’t want to be saying things like that to Fay.

  ‘The trouble with Frank is,’ she went on, more brightly, ‘he’s got this new boss who he doesn’t get on with. He says he’s too full of himself.’

  Ah yes, that was indeed the trouble: it was so much trouble that Frank had disburdened himself of no less than three whole sentences at the Williams steakfest on the previous Friday night, at the conclusion of his first week under the new regime in the Wonda Tiles Sales Department.

  ‘The new boss is a slimy bastard,’ said Frank. ‘He thinks he owns the place. I don’t know who he thinks he is.’

  There was something more specific about his new ch
ief which got on Frank’s nerves and which he didn’t mention to Patty at all, partly because he had not in fact properly acknowledged it to himself: it was something which irritated and in due course infuriated him without his being able to face it squarely and in its entirety. It was that the new boss had placed a large framed photograph of his two sons—a pair of grisly little tykes, eight and ten or thereabouts, Frank would have said if asked—on his desk, his desk at Wonda

  Tiles! And as soon as the opportunity had arisen, he’d pointed them out to his subordinates.

  ‘Those are my two sons,’ he had said, bursting with fatuous pride, ‘Kevin and Brian.’ And he grinned broadly.

  ‘Eh, very nice,’ said Frank’s workmates.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Frank.

  And then as if all this weren’t quite bad enough, in the pub on Friday night the bastard had re-introduced the topic: and stone me if all the others hadn’t joined in with remarks about their own sons and even their daughters. On it went. Suddenly everyone was boasting about their kiddies; and it was all the fault of this smarmy bastard of a new boss. Frank slunk off home to Randwick in a fine sulk, and when he played golf on the Saturday his handicap went to hell.

  ‘Well anyway,’ said Patty, ‘he doesn’t like him. I don’t know. We can’t always have what we want, can we? He should try working under Miss Cartright for a week, I told him! Then he’d see.’

  And having thus returned the conversation to their common ground, she looked again at Fay.

  ‘Is it the new powder or is it you?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit peaky. Are you feeling okay?’ And an exciting and horrible notion sprang into her mind: could Fay be under the weather? Could Fay be pregnant? She wasn’t eating much: she had a salad in front of her which had hardly been touched. Fay looked up, slightly distractedly.

  Her deepest thoughts had been elsewhere.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was out late last night, that’s all. Not enough sleep.’