The Women in Black Page 5

Oh, really, thought Patty.

  Patty’s speculations were as grotesque a version of reality as usual. The fact was that Fay had had a dislocating experience on Saturday night. She had been at a party given by one of Myra’s cronies in a flat at Potts Point and she had suddenly, for no reason, become aware just before midnight that she was wasting her time: that she had in a sense met every one of the men there before, at every other party she had ever attended, and that she was tired of the whole futile merry-go-round. And what was worse than this, much, much worse, was that there was no other merry-go-round she could step onto; it was this one to which she was apparently condemned, whether she liked it or not, and suddenly now she did not, and there was not a damned thing she could do about it: try, try, try again, and die, she had thought despairingly, as she had travelled homewards in the back of someone’s Holden. And despite all that she had met a man who’d been at the party for a few drinks at the Rex Hotel last night as she had agreed to do, and had spent another inglorious evening making conversation with Mr Wrong, and now, today, she felt entirely washed out, that was all.

  ‘I just need a good night’s sleep, that’s all,’ she told Patty.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Patty, and she looked around the room, and she saw Paula Price, who she used to work with in Children’s, who had done well for herself at Goode’s, having now risen to a position of seniority in Ladies’ Lingerie.

  ‘If you can spare me,’ she said to Fay, ‘I’ll just go over and chat to Paula; I haven’t seen her for quite a while.’

  The upshot of this chat was that Patty returned to her Ladies’

  Cocktail post via the Lingerie Department on the first floor, because Paula wanted her to see some divine nightdresses which had only just come in: an order which had arrived late but which Goode’s had accepted nonetheless because the stock was so exceptional.

  Made in a new improved kind of English nylon which, Paula assured Patty, breathed, the nightdresses came in three different styles, in three different colours, but for some reason—perhaps, simply, because the time had come—Patty, against all the odds, had fallen straightaway for one particular model out of all the permutations on offer. When Patty—thin, straw-coloured and unloved Patty—saw the black improved nylon nightdress with the gently gathered skirt edged in a black ruffle, its cross-over bodice and cap sleeves edged in black lace through which was threaded pale pink satin ribbon, her heart was lost, and without a second’s hesitation her hand went, figuratively, into her pocket.

  ‘Put it on lay-by for me,’ she told Paula, ‘and I’ll settle up next pay-day.’

  Well, it wasn’t all that dear, with the staff discount, after all, and she needed a new nightie; I mean, she thought, when did I last buy a nightie? And she looked at the swimming costumes as well, on the way back upstairs to Ladies’ Cocktail, but she left that for another day: I don’t want to go mad, she thought.

  10

  Fay Baines and her friend Myra Parker were sitting in a booth in Repin’s eating toasted sandwiches, because they were going to a five o’clock, and since it would not finish until after their usual dinner time they ought to have, as Myra pointed out, some proper food to keep themselves going instead of ruining their figures by stuffing themselves with ice-creams and chocolates to stave off their hunger half-way through the film. This was the sort of forward-planning for which Myra was always to be trusted.

  Myra’s head was much better screwed down than Fay’s; Myra had a knack for managing the affairs of life. She was now a hostess-cum-receptionist in a nightclub, with a considerable dress allowance, but she did not take advantage of Fay’s discount privileges at

  Goode’s, because the evening frocks at Goode’s, she said, were not the type of thing.

  ‘I need something more glamorous,’ she told Fay. ‘I’ll try the Strand Arcade, or maybe the Piccadilly.’

  It was the Saturday following that wan Monday when Fay had sat in front of a salad in the canteen and made such a poor (but interesting) impression on Patty Williams, and she still wasn’t looking her best even though she’d now clocked up several good nights’ sleep. Myra poured herself a second cup of tea from the heavy little silver-plated teapot; she leaned back comfortably in her seat and lit a cigarette, and peered at Fay as she exhaled the smoke.

  ‘Honey,’ she said—Myra tended to meet quite a few Americans in the line of her duties—‘honey, I don’t like the looks of you today: you don’t look your usual lovely self. Is anything up?’

  Fay looked at her plate. What could she say?

  ‘It’s probably just this new face powder,’ she improvised, ‘I think maybe it makes me look pale.’

  ‘Then you’d better not use it,’ said Myra, ‘you don’t want to look pale. You can use some of mine when we go to the Ladies’. You want to look your best later on, don’t you?’

  Myra smiled slyly, and blew out more smoke. She was referring to a dinner engagement with two men she had met at the night club.

  ‘I’ll bring my friend,’ she had said when the date was suggested to her, ‘she’s game for anything—but a really nice girl: you needn’t get any funny ideas, youse. Fay’s a nice girl. And so am I, in case you hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘That’s exactly why we want you to go out with us,’ said the more extrovert of the two men, ‘don’t we, eh?’ and he nudged his friend in the arm.

  ‘Oh yeah, right you are!’ said he.

  ‘We’ll meet you at the Cross, then, eight-thirty, at Lindy’s,’ said Myra. ‘And don’t keep us waiting.’

  ‘As if we would,’ they said. ‘Eight-thirty sharp!’

  Fay’s heart sank. She had been meeting these men, or others resembling them in every important particular, throughout her adult life. She had eaten their dinners, drunk gin-and-limes at their expense, and she had danced in their arms; she had fought off, and sometimes submitted to, their love-making. She had travelled this particular road to its bitter and now dusty end and her heart now failed her, but to decline this evening’s engagement had been a thing impossible: Myra would have thought she was mad.

  ‘Gee, yes,’ she told her friend. ‘You never know, do you? He might be the one I’ve been waiting for. Is he tall?’

  Myra thought about the less attractive of the two men: the other she had bagged for herself.

  ‘Not very,’ she said, ‘but he’s not short. Just medium. Listen, though,’ she added, quickly, ‘I think he’s rich. I think I remember seeing a gold watch on his wrist. I reckon you’ll like him; I reckon he’s your type. Wait and see!’

  ‘Yes, okay,’ said Fay, a tiny flicker of hope and courage stirring within her sad heart. ‘I’ll wait and see.’

  ‘That’s the stuff,’ said Myra.

  11

  Lisa and her mother were going to the pictures this Saturday evening, too; it was what they usually did on Saturday evenings. Sometimes Lisa’s father came with them; it depended. ‘We’ll wait and see whether your dad wants to come,’ said Mrs Miles to her daughter about half an hour before he was due to come home from the races where he had spent the afternoon and God knew (Mrs Miles never would) how much of his salary. She wiped the working surfaces of the kitchen over once more with a sponge and rinsed it out. Lisa sat at the table.

  ‘I hope that job isn’t too much for you, Lesley,’ said her mother, looking at her carefully. ‘I was hoping to see you get a bit fatter, now your exams are over.’

  ‘I’m all right, Mum,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m fine. I’ll get fat in the New Year, after the job ends. I’ll stay home all day and read, and get fat.’

  ‘That’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘I’ll buy you some chocolate to eat, to help you along.’

  ‘Oh thanks, Mum,’ said Lisa.

  Lisa and her mother had a secret which they had only shared by the fewest of words and looks: a secret and terrible plan had now begun to formulate itself whereby Lisa, should she actually gain the Commonwealth Scholarship which would pay her fees, would in fact, by one means or another and in d
efiance of her father’s ukase, enter the University of Sydney in the new term. The secret occasionally became present in both their minds at once: it then seemed to hover above their heads in the form of a pink invisible cloud which glowed at its margins, too beautiful to indicate, too frail to name. It hovered now, as each imagined Lesley, Lisa, fatter, stronger, and an undergraduate. First, though, they must each—again secretly, in private and alone—suffer the agony of waiting for the examination results upon which all else depended. Three more weeks of this agony remained.

  ‘There’s your Dad now,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘Let’s see what he wants to do.’

  The paterfamilias came into the kitchen.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said.

  He did not kiss them. He stood in the doorway, looking quite pleased with himself, as well he might: his pockets were full of five-pound notes.

  ‘Did you have a good day, Ed?’ asked Mrs Miles, meaning, did you enjoy the racing.

  ‘Not bad, not bad,’ said he, meaning, I won over a hundred quid, which begins to make up for the hundred and fifty I lost last week.

  ‘Will you come out to the pictures with us tonight, Dad?’ asked Lisa. ‘We can see—’ and she gave him an account of the alternative programmes which were showing in the neighbourhood.

  ‘Oh well, I don’t mind,’ said Mr Miles expansively, ‘I don’t mind.

  You ladies choose. Maybe we’ll have a Chinese meal beforehand.

  What do you reckon? Lesley can pay for it now she’s working.’

  ‘Get away with you,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘Lesley has to save that money. We’ll eat at home. I’ve got some lovely lamb chops.’

  ‘Keep your chops,’ said Mr Miles. ‘I’m only kidding. The treat’s on me. Go and get yourselves ready both of you and let’s be off.’

  They ran to do his bidding, almost elated: these moods of good humour were rare enough to be entered into with as much alacrity as gratitude. Lisa put on her pink frock, and looking at herself in the full-length mirror in her mother’s wardrobe thought to herself, it’s not really—it’s not quite—I wish—and realised that without her noticing it at the time, her two weeks at Goode’s had somewhat altered her perception of the Good Frock. Oh well, she thought. I’m just going out with Mum and Dad, it’s not as if—and now realised that all manner of possibilities had started lately to crowd her mind, all manner: that life really was, in all manner of possibilities, truly now and almost tangibly beginning.

  12

  Magda opened her great brown eyes to the dazzling day. She glanced at the bedside clock: it was ten o’clock. She wondered for a moment whether she would get up and go to Mass, and then she turned over and went back to sleep again. I need it more, she said to herself, God knows.

  Magda had an entirely satisfactory understanding with God: this understanding was the foundation of her success in the art of living. Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with himself, with the same consequences. That Magda and Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with each other was the consequence of numerous determinants, such as the fact that they had each survived hell.

  When Magda awoke again it was to the sight of Stefan standing over her with the coffee pot and a large cup and saucer.

  ‘It occurs to me,’ said he, ‘that if I awaken you now—it is eleven a.m. by the way—you will have time to go to the Mass at midday.

  Should you so wish.’

  ‘A-a-a-h,’ Magda sighed, and stretched. ‘First give me the coffee. Then I shall address the question.’

  She sat up, in a heave of white arms and satin nightdress, and Stefan poured out her coffee.

  ‘I will fetch my own,’ he said, leaving the room.

  Magda considered the day ahead. It would be pleasant to do nothing, and then to walk in a park, and to eat dinner in a restaurant with some friends. Stefan re-entered the room.

  ‘I will not go to Mass today,’ Magda told him.

  ‘The Pope himself would excuse you,’ said Stefan.

  ‘Do not speak so of His Holiness,’ said Magda sternly.

  Magda was Slovene and Stefan Hungarian; as Displaced Persons they had been given entry after the end of the war to the Commonwealth of Australia, and it was in a migrant camp outside Sydney that they had first laid eyes on each other. They had begun their life’s conversation in French and as the efficient instruction provided by the Federal Government progressed, had switched over to English. Within a year of their arrival in Australia they were both fl uent, however idiosyncratic, English-speakers and they then began also to read voraciously. Soon Stefan was branching into the classics but here Magda could but barely follow him.

  ‘I cannot get along with this Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘This Hamlet prince, for example: he is not to me the stuff of heroes.’

  Their common language soon came to contain various old-fashioned locutions which, transferred from the pages of such as Hardy and Dickens, had found their way eventually via Stefan’s into Magda’s discourse, and even sometimes into that of their many Hungarian friends who in Magda’s presence at least spoke English habitually. They all agreed sardonically that although the war—and more recently the revolution—and their own consequent fortunes had been a heavy price to pay for the privilege, they were and would remain grateful for the acquisition of ‘this wonderful language’ and they were still liable to laugh delightedly at a newly discovered idiom. ‘A pig in a poke!’ they might exclaim; and they would shout with pleasure, the way their Magyar ancestors might have done, as they rode their swift horses across the vast and fertile Hungarian plain.

  13

  At nine in the morning on the third Monday in December the great glass and mahogany doors of Goode’s Department Store were opened to a large bevy of early-rising housewives all determined upon the prosecution of their Christmas shopping campaigns. From the wooded slopes of the salubrious North Shore to the stuccoed charm of the Eastern Suburbs, from the passé gentility of the Western ditto to the terra incognita of the Southern, had they travelled by train, bus, tram and even taxi cab to this scene of final frantic activity. There remained presents to be bought for sundry difficult relations, there remained clothes to be purchased for their gigantically growing children, there remained even frocks to be found for themselves, and then shoes to match these frocks: there remained almost everything to play for, and they were resolved to win.

  Miss Jacobs stood at her post, ready for anything whatsoever, her tape measure draped around her neck and her pins beside her. Let them come: she would be as a rock in the great storm.

  Mr Ryder walked past.

  ‘Everything shipshape, Miss Jacobs?’ he called. ‘Ready for the fracas?’

  ‘I don’t know about any “fracas”,’ said Miss Jacobs to Lisa. ‘We’re bound to be very busy in the last week before Christmas, aren’t we now? I don’t know about any “fracas”.’

  Christmas this year fell on the Tuesday of the following week.

  ‘And mind you tell them, Lisa,’ continued Miss Jacobs, ‘that if they want alterations doing before Christmas, we can only do hems by then, not seams, and we can’t do hems either after Wednesday, whatever they say. After Wednesday, with the holiday and everything, they can’t have their alterations until the New Year.’

  ‘Yes, I’ll tell them,’ said Lisa.

  ‘And I’ll just remind Miss Baines and Mrs Williams likewise,’ said Miss Jacobs.

  These were occupied with the display, Patty chattering to Fay about the deficiencies of her last-year’s-model swimming costume as they had been revealed the day before on Coogee Beach.

  ‘It’s got elastic around here,’ she said, drawing a line across part of her anatomy, ‘but the elastic’s going, and anyway it’s faded. So I think I’ll get a new one. Anyway you need two cossies, really. I need another one. I think I might get one of those satin lastex ones. I’ll see. I’ll spend my Christmas bonus on myself, for a change.’

  As if anyone had ever suggested she should do anything else
.

  The coming Thursday was pay-day: she would have her fortnight’s wages plus the bonus, and she would pay for her nightdress, and she might get a new swimming costume as well, and never mind the Bank of New South Wales. She had already bought all her Christmas presents.

  ‘We’re going to Mum for Christmas Day, all of us,’ she told Fay, ‘as per usual. What will you do?’

  Ah, that was a sore point, even a sad one. There wasn’t time to go down to Melbourne to her brother’s, even if she wanted to. If Fay didn’t accept Myra’s invitation to go with her to Myra’s parents, who had retired to the Blue Mountains where they lived in a little fibro cottage at Blackheath, then she would be quite alone, and this being unthinkable, she realised, but did not want to admit, that she was bound for Blackheath.

  ‘It will be a nice break,’ said Myra. ‘We can stay till the Thursday morning and come back down on The Fish, you’ll be back in plenty of time to start work.’

  It was the thought of The Fish which made the whole prospect tolerable to Fay’s imagination: that legendary train, The Fish.

  ‘I’m going to the Blue Moun tains, with my girlfriend Myra,’ she told Patty. ‘I’ll stay till Thursday morning and come back on The Fish.’

  ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Patty, ‘you’ll be nice and cool.’ And you could do with a break, she thought; you’ve been looking an absolute misery. So much for all those men you’re always talking about.

  Perhaps she really is in trouble, she thought: hmm, oh well, it’s none of my business.

  Magda gave her black-clad sisters a further day to themselves, and then she struck. Early on Tuesday morning she emerged from her rosy cavern and sailed across the carpet to Ladies’ Cocktail.

  ‘Good morning, my ladies,’ she cried happily. ‘I hope you are not too busy this week, for I am going to steal your little schoolgirl away for a while now and then. I have spoken to Miss Cartright and she says I may borrow your Lisa for a few mornings, a few afternoons; you will hardly notice.’