by Lucy Walker
Mrs. Cleaver’s house was a dignified villa set decorously in a lavish garden, well screened from the road by a hedge of hibiscus. Oliver’s car swung up the short driveway and came to a stop below the veranda. A gardener materialised from the recesses of a shrubbery and began at once to take Carey’s case from the boot of the car.
As Oliver, taking Carey’s arm, went up the steps and crossed the wide porch-like veranda the front door opened, showing an impeccably capped and aproned maid: beyond her Carey could see a wide, tile-flagged hall with a few pieces of heavy carved furniture, a coat-stand and several large mirrors in gilt frames hanging from the walls. The house breathed comfort, reticence and good taste.
Carey felt relieved.
‘Is Mrs. Cleaver at home?’ Oliver said. ‘I think she is expecting Miss Fraser. Will you please tell her she is here … with Mr. Reddin of Two Creeks?’
‘Will you come inside, sir. Mrs. Cleaver is expecting you in the small drawing-room.’
They were ushered into a pretty room towards the back of the wide hall. It was beautifully furnished in the latest modern style … oyster wall-to-wall carpets, red and white striped chairs against a lovely heavy crimson set of curtains, and very highly polished blondwood furniture. A very attractive looking woman, in her late forties, rose from a chair by a square occasional table and came forward to meet them.
She was of medium height, with hair, black just going grey, set in curls resting on the crown of her head and of which there was not one hair out of place. She wore a simple dark charcoal grey dress of heavy silk which was so simple there was nothing but a piece of material to it. Yet it was the most elegant thing for that hour of the day Carey had ever seen.
Even as she shook hands with Mrs. Cleaver, Carey was fascinated by the perfection of every detail of the older woman’s grooming. Her hands were long and slender and her fingernails were beautifully polished but the colour was a pink so pale it was almost natural. The make-up on her face made her face look as if it was not made up at all. Yet Carey knew it was made up because no one could have her eyebrows such a perfect shape, nor the mouth so exactly the right colour, nor the skin so unblemished and clear unless artifice had been used. Nature, except in its rarest mood, was not so kind.
Mrs. Cleaver smiled in a friendly way that both charmed yet maintained a distance.
‘How do you do?’ she said. ‘Please do come in. I hope you have had a comfortable drive in from the country?’
With a gesture of first one hand then the other she indicated where Carey and Oliver were to sit.
Having smiled again at Carey, she sat down, crossed her feet at the ankles and not the knees, put her hands in her lap where they continued to look a decoration and not an embarrassment, and turned to Oliver.
‘I’m delighted to meet you again, Mr. Reddin. It is some years since we met, isn’t it? Shall we agree the years have been kind to us both?’ She smiled again as if in some pleasant conspiracy with Oliver. ‘I am so glad you brought Carey to me. I shall look forward with great interest to arranging her wedding for her.’
Carey knew she had received in those first few minutes her first lesson in deportment and demeanour. Every gesture and each word had its own private dignity so that Carey felt warmed and welcomed, yet not invited over the doorstep that divided the purely private from the purely public life of Mrs. Cleaver.
Sitting there, her own hands in her lap, unable to think what to say, Carey breathed a little prayer that when, in that far distant time, she was as old as Mrs. Cleaver, she would look like her and behave like her … in all times and places.
Mrs. Cleaver’s dark eyes took Carey in without appearing to do so.
‘Do you know Melbourne at all, Carey?’ she asked, with a smile. ‘Or am I to have the great pleasure of introducing an initiate to its many wonders?’
‘I was here with my Uncle Tam for three days a fortnight ago,’ Carey said quietly. ‘I only know Collins Street … and Bourke Street. Swanston too … I think.’
Mrs. Cleaver’s laugh was pleasant.
‘To know Collins Street is almost enough,’ she said. ‘It is probably the finest thoroughfare in the southern hemisphere.’ She looked at Oliver. ‘I know,’ she said with slight emphasis. ‘Because I’ve travelled.’
‘Yes, of course. I believe you chaperoned a party of eight young ladies on a world tour last year.’
‘I did. We had a wonderful time. And now, Mr. Reddin, we must get down to business. I understand your wedding is to take place on 18th October. In the meantime Carey is to be introduced to some activities in Melbourne … the Elizabethan Theatre, the Symphony Concert … Opera? Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes is to open next week, by the way. Some plays? Am I right? Then, of course, there is a wardrobe to be arranged.’ She turned again to Carey. Her eyebrows were faintly raised and there was amusement in her eyes. ‘I’m afraid that is likely to take up a lot of our time unless we get a designer to call here. Would you like that, Carey?’
Carey glanced swiftly at Oliver. Mrs. Cleaver was quick to notice this inquiry on Carey’s part.
‘The child hasn’t any money of her own … or any will of her own, probably,’ she thought. ‘He’s found a sweet inexperienced pretty girl somewhere and wants me to make her ready for marriage in a fortnight. These men.’
But she continued to smile as she leaned forward and pressed a bell button in the wall over the square honey-coloured table. She did not wait for Carey’s answer to her last question.
‘This sort of occasion is always spoilt by business, Carey,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m going to ask Myrna to take you to the sun-room where two other young ladies … both from outback … have just finished having their hair set and their manicures. They will look after you while I talk to Mr. Reddin.’
All three rose. Again Carey looked across the room to Oliver for direction. What should she do now? Just go outside with the maid … if that was who Myrna was?
Oliver stood, tall and silent, and nodded his head slightly at Carey.
‘I think that would be a better arrangement,’ he said formally.
‘Say good-bye to Mr. Reddin now, will you Carey,’ said Mrs. Cleaver lightly. ‘I’m so very sorry I never allow private partings, even between engaged couples. You see, we all lead a kind of exaggeratedly formal life here. Rather convent-like in that respect, I’m afraid. But all my old girls tell me later that it makes their release out into the world so much more exciting. And the strictness and formality here proves such a wonderful defence. Almost an armour, they tell me.’
All the time she was speaking she was smiling cheerfully and in her eyes there was a hint of commiseration for two lovers about to be parted so coldly.
The maid had arrived at the door and Mrs. Cleaver made a signal to her with her hand. The maid stepped aside as if waiting for Carey to precede her out of the door.
Oliver came across the room to the door. As Carey turned to go he held out his hand. She put her hand in his.
Mrs. Cleaver did not know, of course, that there had never been any partings between herself and Oliver, private or public. If there was a flush in Carey’s cheeks now she would think it was because she minded saying good-bye to Oliver here in the little drawing-room.
As it was, of course …
Yet she did mind saying good-bye to him.
It wasn’t that he was anything more than a remote stranger … the executor who was going to marry her to resolve a problem of where to keep her … or that she felt there was a necessity to do anything more than shake hands with him for the rest of her life.
Perhaps it was because leaving him was like cutting a painter. He was the only person she knew, the only person with whom she had any personal tie or connection seven hundred miles south of Wybong.
Perhaps it was because she was in a strange house in a strange city … but she minded saying good-bye to him. She didn’t want to take her small hand away from his big strong one. She would not let her eyes do anything more than give
a swift glance into his eyes. Could it be that she was hoping for some fleeting regret in those clear cold grey eyes of his, too? And she was afraid of its absence, yet more afraid of its presence?
‘Good-bye, Oliver,’ she said in a low voice.
‘Good-bye, Carey. I will call for you at four o’clock on Thursday, 16th October. If you need anything will you please let me know?’ He was grave, formal, and distant.
With an infinitesimal sigh Carey turned and followed Myrna from the room.
Mrs. Cleaver turned back to her chair and as she sat down she said:
‘Now, Mr. Reddin, will you let me know what the position is, please? You understand it is essential for me to know as much as possible about you both in order to make Carey happy … as well as to prepare her for her marriage?’
Oliver had resumed his seat and he took out his cigarette-case.
‘May I smoke?’ he asked, with a slight smile. ‘Is it permitted in a young ladies’ establishment?’
‘Yes, of course. Please smoke.’
Oliver offered her his case but she shook her head.
‘Not now,’ she said. ‘I don’t allow it with the girls, just to teach them they can be chic without developing unnecessary habits. I have my cigarette with my coffee alone in my own study. Well now, is there anything special you wish to tell me about Carey?’
‘You want the blunt truth, Mrs. Cleaver, so you shall have it. I’m a busy man with a big property on my hands and a lot of Shire commitments. The problem of getting married has nagged at my mind for some time. When Carey was left on my hands it occurred to me she might be the answer to that problem. She is a very pretty girl and there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t feel that was quite an important qualification … if not, of course, the first.’
He stopped and looked directly at Mrs. Cleaver.
‘I think something could be made of her,’ he went on. ‘She is good material. Comes of reasonably good family, has a lot of common sense … some spirit. I will confess I decided on the spur of the moment but I have not regretted my decision.’
‘And Carey’s decision?’ Mrs. Cleaver asked softly.
‘She didn’t have any option. She has no home: nowhere to live. When I said she has common sense, her immediate realisation that this was not only a reasonable thing to do but possibly a very good one for both of us, rather aptly demonstrated common sense.’
‘Then I take it that this is not … at this stage … a love match?’
‘I think there is a lot of baloney talked about love, Mrs. Cleaver,’ Oliver said, with a cold note in his voice. ‘Living a lifetime together amicably is much more important, and encompasses that emotional state in a well-suited match surely?’
Mrs. Cleaver had been presented with this situation very often in her career as a ‘finisher-off’ of young ladies. The outback man has too often to make his marriage arrangements this way.
What surprised her was that Mr. Reddin, whose property was not so far distant from the capital, and whose family had considerable connections in Melbourne, had not been attracted to someone in his own immediate circle.
Thinking of Carey during the few moments she had seen and spoken with the girl, she thought she could see what had happened. The girl had arrived in his life at a crucial moment when he was thinking he ought to get married. She was pretty, very sweet, and with a hint of character? Youth was, of course, her greatest asset. It made her malleable to a masterly mind like Mr. Reddin’s.
Mrs. Cleaver nodded her head thoughtfully.
She saw Mr. Reddin’s point of view. A great deal could be made of Carey. A rich and fairly powerful man could afford to make, to his own order, the woman who would ideally suit his background.
This sort of situation could be easily enough handled, and oddly enough she had found it work out well so often; but somehow it gave her a small pang to think that either or both of them had missed out in life those first ecstatic pangs of falling in love. But they had so much else, and it was not for her to comment on the ways of a man with a maid. Otherwise she would be out of business.
‘I see,’ she said noncommittally. ‘I am quite clear as to the situation and I think you will be quite happy with Carey when she leaves me.’ She stood up. ‘I expect you are a busy man, and I won’t detain you.’
Oliver rose, and they moved together towards the door.
‘I hope,’ she said very gently, ‘that Carey also will be very happy.’ Then before Oliver could reply she added, ‘I’m to draw on your accounts with your pastoral agency, I understand?’
‘As much as you think necessary,’ Oliver replied. ‘I want Carey to look the part. That is essential. My wife has a considerable position to maintain in the Shire. Frankly I’m not so interested in the city social whirl.’
‘She shall be everything you expect in that respect, I promise you.’
As she shook hands with Oliver and watched him, escorted by Myrna, walk down the hall, pick up his hat from the hall-stand and go through the front door she could not help a small feeling of misgiving.
‘I hope he is not as hard as he appears,’ she thought. ‘On the other hand he is a fine looking man and Carey Fraser could be lucky.’
But she sighed as she went to find her new protégée in the sun-room.
There unfolded before Carey two weeks of the busiest and most exotic life.
Far from being afraid of the dreaded Mrs. Cleaver, Carey daily became more entranced with this wise, worldly yet charming woman.
And as for clothes! Beauty, elegance, chic! Those were Mrs. Cleaver’s standards. Simplicity was her god. Accessories must never be flamboyant in either colour or design. They were the finishing touches only.
Carey found the table conversation most difficult. It all had to be ‘small talk’. The art of conversation was not the art of being interesting on one topic, Mrs. Cleaver said, but being able to ask the right polite question that would get the right polite reply and yet would allow for a change in the topic two sentences further on.
Carey thought she would never learn the art of conversation easily when it was so much easier to take refuge in silence.
‘But I’m not really silent inside myself,’ she explained to Mrs. Cleaver. ‘I’m noticing things and thinking about things and even saying things … inside myself.’
‘Of course. We all do that. But outwardly we must make some attempt to put the other person at his or her ease. That is the great test. Is your companion at ease with you when you are silent … talking inside yourself?’
Carey went with Mrs. Cleaver to hear Peter Grimes and the State Symphony Orchestra and to a ballet recital: on Saturday they went to the races at Flemington. Each afternoon a different girl was hostess to their formal afternoon tea parties and each evening a different girl ordered and arranged the menu for the evening dinner. Every morning was given up to face massages, hand-grooming, and the dressmaker.
She went shopping with Mrs. Cleaver at George’s in Collins Street and to the smaller select shops in the arcades. She bought dresses and hats and shoes and ornaments; handbags and gloves and beautiful underclothes. She bought the most beautiful little pink hat in the world. It was to be worn at cocktail parties and it had big mauve flowers round the crown and a tiny spotted mauve eye-veil. Carey loved it so much she would have liked to take it to bed with her.
‘My darling hat,’ she said as she put it away. Then added, ‘I hope Oliver likes you.’ Then remembered in time Oliver was the man she was going to marry … so soon. Oh dear, so very soon!
At the moment she wished to go on staying with Mrs. Cleaver for ever; for ever getting ready, talking about the great day, preparing for all those impossible social impasses that might occur in the life of a young girl marrying a pastoralist with a big Melbourne house and a social position as well as a grazing property near the mountains.
‘I do hope Oliver doesn’t have to pay for all these things,’ Carey told Mrs. Cleaver one morning when they had done a lot of ordering in George�
��s in Collins Street. ‘I do hope my own farm will pay for most of them …’
‘Don’t talk about what things cost, or who will pay for them,’ Mrs. Cleaver chided. ‘It’s not polite, my dear child. But, of course, you must never buy indiscriminately unless your husband agrees.’
Carey felt more startled than chided. My husband.
Those actual words had not occurred to her before. They were away at the back of her mind and she had been avoiding them.
She said nothing and Mrs. Cleaver, thinking the girl might be hurt by the rebuff, tapped her hand gently.
‘For the moment, Carey, we have no worries, dear. Mr. Reddin has arranged with his pastoral account to see that you are fully equipped …’
‘Oh yes, I know,’ Carey said hurriedly. ‘But I do have a farm, you know … Mr. Reddin is my trustee.’
‘Do not refer to him as Mr. Reddin, Carey. You must always refer to him as you speak to him as “Oliver”. On rare and formal occasions you may say “my fiancé” and later, of course, “my husband”.’
‘I see,’ said Carey. ‘It’s just that he is such a stranger. And so much older than I am. Do you know, Mrs. Cleaver, he must be nearly double my age.’
They were returning to the house in a taxi. Mrs. Cleaver was silent for quite some time.
‘Carey,’ she said at length. ‘You do understand what marriage means, don’t you? Your engagement does seem to have been so very short, and engagements are generally a period during which two people get to know one another and get close to one another. It is like a preliminary to marriage. It smooths the way. I have been just a little worried about this distance between you and your fiancé. He does not appear to have written to you, nor you to him.’
‘No,’ said Carey. ‘I didn’t know what to say to him. I suppose he doesn’t know what to say to me.’
Mrs. Cleaver suppressed a sigh.
‘You haven’t a mother, or aunt, have you? I feel that you might need someone to help you with advice. Carey … you would ask me if you were troubled about anything, wouldn’t you? I mean … are you sure you know just what marriage means? You have to share your life in every way. Sometimes it is not easy with someone who is almost a stranger …’