Una Porteous walked about the house heaving sad gusty sighs. ‘If only you had learned how to handle him!’
The depression was over. The women were happy to pay me for making their dresses. At best, I could have left entirely, and at the worst could have sought alleviation in change. I did neither. I excused my terror of leaving the house by telling myself that I must not waste time and money on the mere alleviation of my state, but must stay in the meantime, and work, and save for total freedom.
Three months after I had begun to earn money, Colin came home with a girl.
‘This is Pearl,’ he said.
Pearl burst into tears and ran to the window and stood with her back to the room. I looked at her back, observed with distant accuracy the set of her raglan sleeves, and then turned to Colin. His eyes were waiting for me, and the hatred that had brooded there so long now flared out clear and victorious.
‘I want a divorce,’ he said. ‘I want to marry Pearl. I’ll do the right thing about money, of course. And then, there’s your dressmaking.’
My voice, when it came, was thin and meek and choked.
‘All right.’
But then anger struck like a gust from outside me, making me dizzy. I can hear my voice now, loud with spite.
‘I hope she will be able to handle you!’
Pearl turned from the window. ‘I’ll tell you one thing I won’t do,’ she cried through her tears.
I was taking the opportunity thoroughly to inspect her, so I suppose I sounded preoccupied. ‘What won’t you do?’
‘I won’t take Col’s hard-earned money,’ she wailed, ‘and give it to queenie boys.’
‘Where are they playing tennis, Doctor Rainbow?’
He has just arrived, and has put a thermometer under my arm. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I woke up hearing it. Can’t you hear it?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘I often hear it. The first time I thought it was a dream, but this time I’m sure. Listen. There it is again.’
‘Oh,’ he says, ‘that. That’s shooting from the rifle range. Miles away, but this northerly brings it.’
‘It sounds exactly like tennis.’
‘I shouldn’t have thought so.’ He is looking at me keenly. ‘Does it disturb you?’
‘I find it melancholy.’
‘I’ll shut the window.’
‘Most of us,’ he remarks quietly, as he comes back after shutting the window, ‘have some sound that disturbs us.’
‘Do you?’
He hesitates. ‘I don’t like wind in trees. I think that’s a fairly common dislike.’
‘I like it. When my nephew was young I used to take him to catch yabbies in the creek. There were she-oaks close by, and the sound of the wind in them was so peaceful, I’ve always remembered it. Is that deep little creek still there? Behind the school?’
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘We’ll have that thermometer now.’
He reads the thermometer, puts it back in its case, then turns away to shut his bag. ‘You can’t get up today.’
‘What?’
‘I’m sorry. Except to go to the toilet, perhaps with somebody’s help.’
‘I understood from Betty Cust …’
‘That was dependent on how you were.’
‘I am quite well.’
‘You’ll be even better tomorrow.’
‘Very well, Doctor Rainbow.’
Does he detect the challenge in this evident agreement? He gives me one of his quick looks. I meet his eyes and penetrate for the first time the barrier of his forbidding appearance and see something gentle and friendly and humble in his regard that reminds me of Dorothy. I open my mouth to remark on the resemblance, then recall that I am forbidden the subject, and at the same time a possible reason for the embargo occurs to me.
Did Dorothy commit suicide, and did he, perhaps, find her?
No sooner have I formed the question than I realize it has been lying just beneath the surface of my consciousness, waiting to be asked.
I get up as soon as he goes. Very slowly, with one hand against the wall, I make my way to the bathroom, and although I am trembling when I get back into bed, I feel none the worse for it. When Betty comes to get my lunch I tell her that I am mortified beyond endurance by chamber pots and dependence, and that it will not be necessary for Lyn Wilmot to do anything more for me.
But Betty’s calm smile makes me feel I am making a big silly fuss over nothing. ‘Oh, let her keep on, Nora. You’re getting well so quickly now.’
‘I don’t want her. A bit of dust won’t hurt, and everything else I can manage for myself.’
‘You’re being stubborn. Do you want to undo all our good work? Do you?’
‘Oh, very well,’ I say with a cross sigh.
She laughs. ‘Sometimes you remind me of Grace.’
‘I have just been thinking of Grace. Was she very much distressed when Dorothy died?’
I intend this as an introduction to my question. ‘It made a very great difference to Grace,’ says Betty. But she speaks warily, and hurries away to the kitchen, and I am so touched by her concern for me, and so amused by her innocence in believing me to be vulnerable and tender-hearted—me!—that I desist from the question, and decide to let her tell me in her own way, in her own time. She makes my lunch, and after she has cleared away the things she comes and stands by the foot of my bed, looking pleased with herself and hiding something behind her back.
‘A surprise, Nora. Put your glasses on.’
I reach for my spectacles, ‘Letters!’
The pleasure leaves her face. ‘No. I raised your hopes. I’m sorry.’
‘I thought the mail strike may be over.’
‘No. I wish it were. It’s only this. Although,’ she says as she brings it from behind her back, ‘I mustn’t say only this.’
She holds it up, an embroidered wall hanging. ‘The one you made for mother. I told you I would bring it.’
I raise my eyebrows and stare, so astonished by the excellence of the design and the beauty of the colour that I cannot speak. Betty is delighted by my response. Laughing, she brings the tapestry to me and spreads it over my knees.
‘How you had the patience!’ she says.
I examine the back of it. ‘It must have been a fluke.’
‘If that’s what you think, I’ll get hold of some of the others. Old Mrs Partridge’s. And I’ll ask Gordon Rainbow to bring the one you made for Dorothy.’
I turn the embroidery to the right side and run the flat of my hand over it. ‘An orange tree,’ I say. And I hear myself, during those first few northern winters, telling people that I was going home, and that never again would I live in a climate where oranges don’t grow. ‘Do you mind if I keep this for a while?’ I ask Betty.
‘As long as you like.’
I put it out of sight on the lower shelf of my beside table, but for the rest of Betty’s visit my consciousness of it makes me absentminded, and as soon as she goes I snatch it up and examine it by the light of the reading lamp.
I am pleased to find many little flaws in it, and moreover in this case it would have been better if I had combined a little wool with my silks. But these criticisms made, I am forced to return to my first estimate of its merit. The leaves and fruit of the orange tree compose a tight bouquet above a straight trunk, and eight little birds, all fabulous yet touchingly domestic, strut or peck beneath it. They are in danger of giving it a spotty effect, and yet they don’t, and that risk, taken and surmounted, is its merit and distinction. Alternately I grieve for that lost time, and rejoice that it was not lost entirely. Much of my long life can be apportioned into periods of waiting, but during that first long period perhaps I was able to play and create because for most of the time I waited without panic, whereas in the second long period, in the iron-grey and terracotta suburb, all my little talents were blighted by panic and despair, so that there were only the ill-cut dresses for the women, and the cakes
for the tennis club.
Colin offered me a settlement of three hundred pounds, in return for which I was to leave him and allow him to divorce me for desertion. I would have accepted gratefully if it had not been for Colin’s own lawyer. He was one of the men at the tennis club. He had a local office, and having seen Una Porteous pass his windows, he took the opportunity of ringing me privately.
‘Your husband has told me a great deal about your faults. Too much. But one thing he didn’t mention was your stupidity. You are entitled to much, much more than three hundred pounds.’
‘Am I? Why?’
I heard him sigh. ‘Because the law says so. You know what I’m doing, don’t you, talking to you like this?’
‘What, ethics or something?’
At the tennis club he used to slap his forehead in exasperation at his own play. I think he did it now. ‘Or something! You are legally entitled,’ he continued flatly, ‘to an income for life. He wants the divorce, not you.’
‘Oh no, you’re mistaken. I want it too.’
‘You didn’t instigate it.’
‘I would have, sooner or later.’
‘Irrelevant. You didn’t.’
‘I intended to leave him.’
‘Irrelevant. You didn’t.’
‘Three hundred is all I want. It’s a matter of pride.’
I think he hit himself on the forehead again. ‘Pride!’
‘All I want is a stake until I can earn a living.’
‘But can you earn a living? You’re untrained. Times aren’t easy yet. And you’re no longer young.’
‘I’m only thirty-five.’
But as I said the words, it sounded old, and I was filled with panic, and a longing for the undemanding dullness and steady misery of my captivity. His persuasive speech continued, and I looked at my lap, and heard only noise and garbled words, until he raised his voice and said angrily, ‘At the very least, the very least, you must ask for a thousand pounds.’
I lifted my head. A thousand! I was thunderstruck at the thought of all that money. I was tempted, assailed by longings for pleasure, books, silk stockings, a room of my own, a hat like Mary Astor’s. I felt strong and brave again, with not a scruple left. ‘All right!’ I cried. ‘I will!’
A week of wrangling and indignation followed.
‘A thousand! Poor boy!’
‘A bloody thousand, no less!’
‘Skinning the poor boy out!’
‘Talk about gold diggers!’
But I, silent, determined, and perfectly composed, met all lesser offers by shaking my head and giving a slow smile. Until, in a ten-second turnabout, I settled for less.
‘Okay, okay—eight hundred.’
I was packing my suitcase as I spoke—or shouted, rather—at the top of my voice. They brought me a statement to sign. I signed it and pushed it violently away. Una Porteous came to say a sweet and tragic goodbye, but I pushed her away too. I believe now that that frenzy of movement and shouting, that blind rush, was an instinct on my part to build up a momentum on which I could forget my terror of leaving the house, but at the time, even as I went on like that, a detached part of me was standing by and making comment.
‘Oh, look at you, going on like this. You’re certainly mad. Is that you shouting? Yes, it is. Goodness.’
Anyway, my ruse, if it was that, worked, and two hours later I was lying upside down on a narrow bed at the Menzies Hotel in Elizabeth Street, with my eyes shut, my hands folded behind my head, and my feet crossed on the bedhead. I assured myself that I was calm and steady, but I know now that I was neither. I had the money saved from my dressmaking (twenty-eight pounds) and Colin’s cheque for eight hundred. After an hour I got up and made myself go out. It was a miracle. In those crowded streets, where nobody knew who I was, my trepidation was absorbed as easily as the sound of my footsteps, which in the streets of the suburb had sounded so loud and outrageous. I went to David Jones and bought four novels and a handkerchief of fine white linen with a broad yellow border.
Of the people I had known at Bomera, only Ida and the gentle watercolourist were left. The remittance men looked like confidence men, Folly and Wisdom had their toenails painted red and cigarette bumpers stuck in their mouths, and the current lot of artists and their girls were so drunken, broke, gay, and anarchic that they made the first lot appear, by contrast, mere decorous fancy-dress Bohemians.
Ascending the staircase I encountered a group of them descending, and they surrounded me to comment first on my hat (‘Robin Hood or Pinocchio?’), and then on my hair, which I had had cropped to a bob that morning.
‘If you look at the underside of the cut,’ said a man named Wallace Faulks ‘you can see the grain. Look, just like in a section of wood.’
I was charmed by such detailed observation, which reminded me of Lewie. It was as a guest (always rather detached) at one of their parties that I happened to hear Daff tell the story of the abortion car.
I suppose her name was Daphne, but I never heard her called anything but Daff. The big black car left, she said, every Monday and Wednesday and sometimes Thursday, from Doctor So-and-so’s rooms in Macquarie Street, opposite the Botanical Gardens. It collected ‘that day’s batch’, and after leaving the Gardens passed Parliament House, Sydney Hospital, the Old Mint, and then took the curve out of Macquarie Street to go past the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages and St Mary’s Cathedral before turning sharply at the Blind Society Building to head for the eastern suburbs.
I wondered why everybody was laughing. I couldn’t see the joke until Daff said that she had asked the driver if he couldn’t make a little detour and pass Darlinghurst Gaol. ‘He wasn’t a bit amused’, said Daff. I saw the point then.
But in spite of my interest in the company of the artists and their girls, my detachment from them grew. Some were only eighteen, none more than twenty-five. They made me feel the full dull weight of those wasted years.
‘They all drink such a lot,’ I complained to Ida.
‘Don’t they! Even those nice young actors.’
‘It would be good to see Lewie again.’
‘I still haven’t a notion where he’s got to. And anyway, he’ll have changed too.’ Ida flung out both hands. ‘Everything’s changed. It changed everything.’
Prosperity had not returned to Ida. ‘I’m making enough to live on, and please God, I always will. But those plans I had for expansion—a good little shop with a workroom—you know the way we used to talk?—all that’s had to go by the board. I’m sixty-three, and last year I had a bit of heart trouble.’
Among the books I had bought on the day of my release were both Olive Partridge’s novels, the second one a very recent publication. Lying on my bed at Menzies Hotel, I read them with growing puzzlement, because I could find no trace in them of the Olive I had known. In the course of reading she gradually altered in my mind until she became a tall, beautiful, ‘troubled’ woman in a long green dress that moved about her ‘like water’. I knew perfectly that this was a composite image of several of her characters, but all the same, from that time, until I met Olive again, every time I thought of her, that is what I saw.
I stayed at Menzies for two weeks. I read, I bought clothes, I visited at Bomera. In the Botanical Gardens I walked along narrow paths and let one hand lag idly on foliage. And more and more often, without warning, I would feel the same surge of excitement and strength as when Colin’s lawyer had said, ‘One thousand pounds.’ Where there had been a vibrant space at my side, there was now an intimation of a presence, and sometimes, in a silent greenhouse or palm grove, I nearly turned towards it, whispering.
‘You’re looking better every day,’ said Ida.
I went to her mirror and looked at my face as if it were somebody else’s. ‘It’s almost puzzling, how the body recovers.’
‘It’s hope that does it.’
‘I hope for nothing,’ I said, in the laconic way that was becoming my habit.
The watercolouri
st, an old man now, spent much of his time in Ida’s rooms, and I would often interrupt their little treats for two, buttered crumpets, welsh rarebit, or chicken soup, over which they were as absorbed as children.
‘You will soon be getting married,’ I told Ida one day.
‘He’s a dear old fellow, but I’ll marry nobody.’
‘Neither shall I.’
‘You? You will. What else can you do?’
‘What a thing to say! Work, of course.’
‘What at?’
‘Oh, something.’ Through the French doors of Ida’s room, beyond the verandah, I could see a ship coming in to berth. ‘But first of all,’ I heard myself saying, ‘I’m going away.’
‘Where to?’
I didn’t really have a firm intention of going anywhere, but I said London because it was the first place I thought of. And to myself I said that I could go, too, if I pleased. Nobody could stop me. I jumped to my feet and laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘that’s where I’m going. London.’
And that’s how I came to go to London, not because I particularly wanted to, but as an affirmation of the wonderful discovery that nobody could stop me.
‘Nora,’ said Ida, ‘that eight hundred won’t last for ever. And if you truly don’t want to remarry, what will you do when it’s gone? You’re too old for shop jobs. They won’t pay senior wages to inexperienced women. And when it comes right down to the honest truth, you’re still only an amateur dressmaker. You still can’t cut.’
I laughed. ‘You and your cutting! I’ll be back in a year, and I’ll still have some money. Time enough to think about it then.’
Tirra Lirra by the River Page 8