‘Yes.’
‘By appointment?’
‘Yes.’
‘And you gave him, let me see,’ said Colin, consulting the bill, ‘you gave him one pound, three and sixpence, of my money.’
‘Yes.’
‘Right!’ said Colin.
I dared not challenge his ominous composure. He was the only other inhabitant of my domain. I made white curtains and a yellow bedcover, and varnished the floor black. I was fortunate in the unpapered walls—all I had to do was kalsomine them white—and as for the massive hideous wardrobe and dressing table, I simply determined not to look at that side of the room any more than I could help. Una Porteous offered me a mat with roses on it, but I, too fired by my scheme for tact, cried no, no, no, I would make a hooked one. ‘Who does she think she is?’ Her bridling shoulders said it as she turned away. In retrospect I can understand her offence, but at the time I hardly noticed. I polished the brass bedstead and painted a honey jar white and filled it with flowers from the garden. And I was delighted, when I had finished, because I had made it from so little.
‘It is hard and unfemin-ine, if you ask me,’ said Una Porteous.
‘It’s all right,’ said Colin.
My half room and my husband became my only pleasures. Lying under the yellow bedcover, I would watch Colin undress, and as he was getting into bed I would reach out, and pull him down towards me, and sigh with relief at the contact. One night he said quietly that not every man liked his wife to behave like a whore, and a few weeks later he cried in spontaneous anger, ‘Look, just lie still, will you? That’s all you have to do.’
Whether my submissiveness is ingrained or was implanted I do not know. I only know that all open aggression on my part, in whatever field, has always led me to sorrow and retreat. But beneath my renewed submission a sour rebellion lay. I was told that there was no money for fares to the city. ‘We can think ourselves lucky,’ said Colin, ‘to have a roof over our heads, and food to eat.’
‘And besides,’ said Una, ‘when our local shops are having such a thin time, it’s them we should deal off, and not go traipsing into town all the time.’
I didn’t have a penny. I would certainly have tried to fiddle the housekeeping money, only, Colin now gave it to Una Porteous.
‘It’s Mum’s house, after all.’
‘Yes, and I am sure Nora wouldn’t begrudge me handling the money in my own home.’
I asked for a small allowance, and Colin said he would think about it. A fortnight later I asked if he had thought about it.
‘Thought about what?’ he said to his shaving mirror.
‘My allowance.’
‘What allowance?’
‘You must remember.’
‘Must I?’ He was inclined to be humorous. ‘Well, I don’t.’
I went back to the beginning and made my request again. When I had finished he pulled his mouth awry to tauten the skin under the blade. A minute passed in silence except for the scrape of the razor. Then he leaned forward and looked intently into his own eyes.
‘But why bring that up when I am shaving?’
He was shaving, he was reading the newspaper, he was just about to turn on the wireless, he had to go out and mow the lawn, he must get his eight hours sleep.
‘Then when can we discuss it?’ I cried at last.
‘One day soon, don’t worry.’
But when I asked again, ‘one day soon’, he sighed heavily, folded his arms, and raised his eyes to the ceiling. In that attitude, he heard me out, and then rose and left the room without a word in reply. I lost my head, and followed him, and threw myself against his silence, railing.
‘If you’ll excuse me saying so,’ said Una Porteous, ‘you don’t know how to handle a man.’
Unable to entreat any longer without utter abasement, I stopped. And a little later, when I mentioned moving to a place of our own, and Colin replied with surprise, ‘But why should we move? We’re quite comfortable here,’ I knew it was the reply I had inwardly expected, and that I must speak of moving no more.
Ever since my marriage, in my letters to my mother and Grace, pride had made me pretend to a perfect tranquility, but one day, while writing to my mother, my guard crashed down and I let pour forth on the paper a long and passionate complaint. It was Grace who replied, with an exhortation to duty, unselfishness, and common sense. She remarked how strange it was that Colin, about whose virtues I was always boasting, had developed these dreadful characteristics ‘all of a sudden’. She felt she was sure that now I had had time to cool down I would be seeing things once more in their proper perspective. She said that she was ’a great believer in working with the material to hand …
‘… and not crying for the moon, which has always been your big drawback, Nora.’
She then gave a page of trifling news items, and ended with a request not to write any more letters like that, ‘because they worry poor mother’.
I tore her letter into tiny pieces, flushed them down the lavatory, and ran from the house. I went to the local shops, one by one, and asked for work. Of the people I asked, I remember nothing but their refusals. Only for the newsagent’s wife. I can still see her angry face as she replied.
‘You’ve got a nerve, Mrs Porteous. Thousands out of work, men hungry, yet here you are asking for work. You with a husband to keep you!’
I walked to the next suburb, where nobody knew me, and went from shop to shop. I would have done anything, but nobody wanted anything done. In my beautiful dress, I walked the streets like an invisible person. I went home and wrote to Lewie.
What causes exiles the most distress
Is that nobody recognizes their national dress.
It was returned a week later, marked Address Unknown. I rang Ida.
‘I can’t say where he is, love. All I know is, he’s done a bunk. I think he owed so many bits of money, here and there, that in the end it embarrassed him to see people. Even me, though I told him and told him.’
My few books, all poetry, became useless to me. My panicky mind blocked the rhythms and garbled the words, and very soon I began to wonder what I had ever seen in them. The only other books in the house were school texts, and the nearest free library was my old haunt in the city. A neighbour lent me The Forsyte Saga, and I still associate it so firmly with that period of my life that even the names of the characters depress me. I refused to watch it on television with Hilda and Liza and Fred.
‘Say Soames,’ said Liza, ‘and she screams.’
But in spite of the comedy I made of my marriage for my friends at number six, I see now how extremely selective I was, and how many incidents and areas of feeling I did not touch upon, or could not have touched upon, because I had forgotten them until now. I had forgotten how increasingly sly I became. Outwardly calm now, and ingratiating, I would await the opportunity to steal threepences and sixpences from Una’s purse or Colin’s trousers.
Fred loved Elizabethan prose, and often quoted from it. The words I am thinking of went something like this, ‘Want cannot be withstood. A man can do but what he can do, and when the lion’s skin is out at the elbows, why then, the fox’s case must help.’
My lion’s skin, never too sound from the start, must have been out at the elbows indeed for me to adopt so readily the skin of the fox. The image of myself as sneak thief comes back the more vividly for having lain so long quiescent. There I stand, one hand cupping purse or pocket to control the chink of coins, while the other dips, and selects by touch. My eyes are turned towards the door, my heart beats light and fast, and my ears strain to gauge my safety by the two voices in the living room. The coin pinched and pocketed, I prance on tip-toe to the lavatory, where I pull the chain before loudly opening and shutting the door. I then saunter back to the living room, where Una Porteous has just turned on the wireless. Three chairs are grouped about the cabinet. Meek in my revenge, ascendent in my secrecy, I fold my hands, and sit, and smile.
One curious sidelight occ
urs to me here. At that time there was a newspaper in Sydney called Smith’s Weekly, a coarse-grained affair of cartoons and ‘humorous’ articles. One of its regular themes concerned wives stealing from their husbands’ pockets. The popular acceptance of these jokes suggests that in Australia I had many sisters in petty theft. But perhaps such jokes were also current elsewhere in the world at that time. I have no means of knowing.
I secreted all I stole, and when I had enough, I went to see Ida Mayo, being careful to choose those days when Una Porteous visited a cousin in a distant suburb. At Bomera the big double doors still stood open, Folly and Wisdom still faced each other across the marble hall, and in Ida’s rooms the little lamps still shone, though on less opulent and fewer materials. There was a new lot of artists, shabbier than the last, but outwardly just as insouciant.
‘They do help each other out,’ said Ida. ‘I’ll say that much for them.’
‘No word from Lewie?’ I would ask.
‘I did hear he was in Melbourne. Things aren’t quite as bad there. New South Wales is the worst hit. Still, I’m getting by. These slumps don’t last for ever. Just hang on, Nora, and I’ll give you that job after all. And in the meantime, keep your hand in.’
Sometimes the gentle watercolourist would be sitting in Ida’s rooms. ‘That’s right, sweetheart, whatever work you do, always keep your hand in.’
To keep my hand in, I made dresses for Una Porteous and her friends. I had never made a garment for anyone but myself, and at first I was dismayed by my lack of skill in cutting the cloth so that I was able to construct it round these variously shaped bodies, but they praised me so lavishly and repeatedly that my critical sense gradually diminished, and my standards were undermined. I read Colin’s school books and became fascinated by geometry. I worked through the first theorems and at night deserted the wireless to sit in our bedroom and solve problems. Una Porteous took my chair from the group of three and set it in ostentatious loneliness against a wall. I was thirty. ‘You would never think it,’ said the women for whom I made dresses. And they were right. When I caught sight of my reflected face I was startled to see it still so fair and candid. I discarded Colin’s geometry book, seized his French grammar instead, and found it much to my liking. My mutterings irritated Una Porteous.
‘But what good will it do you?’
I would raise my face and give her a preoccupied smile. ‘Ai-je? As-tu? A-t-il? A-t-elle?’
Helped by the memory of my own school French, I made good progress, except, of course, for my grotesque pronunciation. I began to defend myself with French verbs. When I was furious with Colin I no longer lost my temper, but said with smiling vehemence into his face, ‘Fus, fus, fut, fûmes, fûtes, furent.’
I was thirty-one, thirty-two. Panic attacked me again, the strong bird rising. I began to walk again.
The pattern I traced this time with my feet, dictated by streets and houses, was rectilinear, and as I walked I looked into the faces of passers-by, and hoped for rescue in fantastic ways. I was thirty-three. I sometimes rang Ida, but no longer went to see her. Deterred by an obscure shame, I no longer left the suburb. I had good food, the necessary clothes, a fire against the cold, a dentist to maintain my teeth, and a doctor to attend me in illness. Newspapers and magazines came into the house, Una Porteous would furnish me with writing paper and stamps on request, and for all other needs I made application to Colin. To explain my growing fear of leaving the suburb, I told myself that I was waiting for ideal conditions. I now used my stolen money to buy lottery tickets in false names. On buying the ticket I would be filled with light-heartedness and a belief that I would, must, win, and at this stage I studied the “To Let” columns of the Herald and made detailed and continuously changing lists of the books and clothes I would buy. Trust would then decline to a mere fervent hope, and during this stage I memorized the number of the ticket and whispered it over and over on my walks. But on the morning of the drawing I always lost all hope, and when the results were published I read them impassively, without disappointment.
On my walks, because I never saw any other walker as regular as myself, my thoughts sometimes turned to Dorothy Irey. This was the time when Grace’s and my mother’s letters were telling me of her clever children, her good husband who was ‘doing so well,’ and the extended house that Grace said was ‘the best home in the street’. As I walked I would imagine myself in her place, but would feel neither regret nor envy, because I knew that I did not want that either. Married to Bruce Rainbow, and living in ‘the best home in the street’, I knew I would still have been mad with restlessness, and moreover would have had the guilt of having become the plague of a kindly man.
‘All very well for her,’ I would tell myself. ‘She’s so gentle. But I’m not.’
At that time I also thought a great deal of Olive Partridge. Grace’s tantalizing news of Olive was that she had written a novel. ‘One of those modern things. I can’t say I cared for it much.’ I knew the name of it—Cut and Choose—but I had neither seen nor read it. My correspondence with Olive had become thin, and had then petered out. Recently I had made several attempts to write to her, but the banality that was the curse of my letters to my family now extended to my attempts to write to Olive.
And only now, back in Queensland, in my late seventies, do I suddenly understand why. I was banal because I was lying. If my pride had allowed me to tell the truth, my letters would not have been banal.
The cut in Colin’s salary was well compensated by the drop in prices. He enrolled us both in the Green Gardens Tennis Club and bought me a racquet, canvas shoes, and the stuff for a pleated dress. I still felt the heat terribly, and in the early afternoons I sat inertly in the tennis shed, going into a doze in which the percussion of balls grew louder and louder in my head until it startled me awake. But when the shadows lengthened across the court, and I felt the stirring of cool air on my bare arms, I would jump to my feet and wait impatiently for my turn to play.
The vehemence of my game embarrassed Colin. ‘Tone it down,’ he whispered.
All the wives brought cakes or scones to the Green Gardens Tennis Club.
‘They really liked that cake of yours,’ Colin would say, in a satisfied voice, on the way home.
‘I liked Molly Furlong’s cake.’
‘Not a patch on yours. They really liked that cake of yours.’
Compliments on my youthful appearance pleased him less. When the local ‘sheik’ said, ‘I could fall for your wife, Col, I really could’, I would feel Colin’s eyes upon me in a sharp and hostile appraisal that belied his laughing mouth, and that night, without speech or preamble, he would seize me and fling himself upon me in methodical but frenzied sexual labour, while I maintained my detachment by murmuring inwardly, ‘Que tu sois, qu’il soit, que nous soyons …’ For on those occasions when my blood rose, and I could not help but respond, I considered myself vanquished, and felt humiliated beyond endurance. Far more than Colin’s person, I had grown to hate the physical bond between us, and the moment when we got into bed, and lay down side by side, was for me a moment of intense and bitter misery.
In my plans for escape I included no lover, but in my hours of lonely sewing and musing, when my head was bent over my work, and the crow of the backyard rooster rose above the distant hubbub of the primary school, I would become conscious of a heart-swelling hope, a vibrant space at my left side, a yearning in the nerves of my skin. Never once did I allow these longings to take on the density of an ideal, as I would formerly have done, but nor did I try to extinguish them. I kept them, rather, at a delicate distance.
Employers were advertising in the Herald once more. Junior Shop Assistant. Expert Shorthand-typiste. Experienced Tailoress. They could still afford to take their pick. I had quite stopped telephoning Ida. On Saturday nights, Colin, with his legs crossed and one foot jigging, sat between his mother and me at the local picture theatre. He bought a Dodge motor car, and every Sunday morning he cleaned and polished it on th
e driveway near the front gate. I think the closest I ever came to attacking him physically was one Sunday afternoon, when, as I got into the front seat beside him, he said in one of his genial outbursts, ‘Well, Mrs Porteous, aren’t you proud of your nice clean car?’ On most Sunday afternoons, he would take Una Porteous and me to visit those of his relatives who had not suffered too badly in the Depression. The men collected round ‘the Dodge’, while I sat with the soporific women. In this society, where there were no ‘sheiks’, they said I was artistic and refined, but had no sense of humour. ‘Nora’s a bit like Bette Davis,’ someone would occasionally remark. But Bette Davis was nobody’s favourite actress.
These relations, and the tennis people, because they were shared acquaintances, did siphon off some of the tension caused by the co-habitation of bitter enemies. Their conception of our marriage presented us with a model by which, if we pretended to follow it, we could avoid total disaster. Thus passed many months of meaningless harmony, slick as a ribbon but studded with carbuncles of silent misery. Who was I? Nora Porteous, née Roche, thirty-five, domestic worker, amateur dressmaker, detested concubine, and student of the French subjunctive tense.
‘Why don’t you charge for those dresses you make?’ asked Colin one day.
‘I thought you didn’t want me to.’
‘Times have changed.’
I had so settled into our uneasy jogtrot that it took me some time to realize that Colin had also changed. For years only the compliments and criticisms of others had made him notice me, but now, as if he had stepped over an invisible line, he began to circle me and rake me with his eyes.
‘Your legs are getting thin. Why are your legs getting so thin?’
He reached out and ran a finger along my jaw line. ‘That’s where you’ll go first, when you start to go. When you bend your head you’re puffy just there.’ I would wake to find that he had turned his head on the pillow and was staring at me with hatred, and I would turn away or leap out of bed. At the table I would bend over my plate to escape the same brooding stare. It was an invasion. My enemy had entered my hut and was squatting in a corner, waiting. Now, when I was alone and sewing, I was no longer visited by longings for love, but by dread that attacked me like an unhealthy mist. When I went into the bathroom, and a moth flew into my face, I screamed and sobbed. One day I embarked on a walk but at the first corner turned suddenly and made for home at an ugly panicky trot. I grew thin and silent, and as I knelt at the feet of the women, with pins in my mouth, I was conscious that their commonplace words held undertones of pity and curiosity.
Tirra Lirra by the River Page 7