Tirra Lirra by the River

by Jessica Anderson

  ‘Professional reasons.’

  ‘Exactly!’

  I told her about going back to Sydney and starting afresh. ‘And I feel I can’t afford to look old.’

  ‘Exactly! You’ve seen my “before” photographs. What an old fright! What parts could I have got looking like that?’

  But without a pause she went on. ‘But of course I could have got more parts. I would have had a genuine range, middle-aged to oldish. And with television coming on, the more genuine the range the better.’

  ‘Then why …’

  ‘Vanity.’

  She was looking at me sideways. ‘Yes,’ I agreed with relief, ‘vanity.’

  I became more cheerful, but, as if we were on a see-saw, the loss of my weight of worry sent Hilda’s side sinking down. She was forty-seven, and had a lover of thirty. He was playing in New York, and as soon as she knew he was to go, she had made arrangements to have a facelift while he was away.

  ‘So that I can surprise him,’ she said, swinging a foot, ‘with my bloody beauty.’

  But now she woke in the middle of the night, and asked herself what he was doing, at that very minute in New York, and if he would ever come back at all. It would be better, she said, if he didn’t. Since she was going to lose him anyway, for certain, it would be better if she lost him now, and got it over with.

  In the middle of the night, she also thought about her son.

  ‘I don’t think it’s unreasonable to want to know where he is. I haven’t heard from him, let alone seen him, for five-and-a-half months. Of course I know he will turn up. He’ll turn up when he wants money. I’ve never said that to anyone before. Oh, he’s a charmer, an absolute charmer. I wouldn’t mind a drink. I wonder if it really makes the tissues bleed. Better not risk it. Damn. I’ll be glad to get out of here. It does me no good, all this time to think.’

  She had been ‘done’ before me, so her bandages came off first. And immediately, up went her side of the see-saw.

  ‘There! What did I tell you? He’s marvellous, this man. Of course the swelling hasn’t gone down yet. And those little scars, there and there, I’ll cover those with my hair. I can’t have my hair dyed for three weeks, but what I’ll do, I’ll go into hiding for three weeks, and clean out cupboards and read good books. Give me your address, and we’ll have dinner or something before you go back to Sydney. I’m dying to see yours.’

  As soon as she went, my side of the see-saw began to sink. The bandages came off three days later.

  ‘There!’ said the surgeon. ‘Now, what did I tell you?’

  It did not help that I could guess, by the strain in his voice, something of what he was feeling. It did not help that I could understand and even sympathize with him. Even the most skilled and conscientious craftsman—like him, like me—is fallible, and has, every now and again, a moment of irretrievable error. I knew that well. Couldn’t I recall occasions when I had circled a customer, saying that all it needed was a bit taken in here, and a good pressing there?

  ‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘time … the swelling … the tightness. It does take time.’

  (‘Of course, when the skirt has had time to hang.’)

  ‘And,’ he said, ‘you’re not used to it yet.’

  (‘Don’t forget it’s a style you’ve not worn before.’)

  The difference was that my agitated circling always ended in my confessing my liability and making what reparation was asked. ‘Yes, you’re right. Take it off. I’ll make you another, or reimburse you, whichever you want.’ But how could he admit liability? To do so would be to lay himself open to ruin. In his place I should have acted in the same way.

  ‘As a usual thing,’ he said casually, ‘the benefit lasts for about five years.’

  I nodded at myself in the hand mirror. Five years. Quite. Precisely. After all, I had known it would turn out like this.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said.

  He gave me a sharp glance, but it was easy, with a face like that, to hide what I was thinking.

  ‘It will be very nice,’ he said constrainedly, ‘in a week or so.’

  ‘I’m sure it will be.’

  I was almost purring. I was thinking that the operation had been my last throw of the dice. I had never intended going back to Sydney; I had not had the heart nor the strength. As soon as I got back to my flat, I would take all the sleeping pills I had. I wondered if there were enough. In my mind’s eye, I saw the bottle, almost full. I put down the mirror.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, softly and politely.

  It did not seem worth reading the small pile of letters I found on the carpet inside my door. I crumpled them up, threw them in the grate, and as they were burning went to my bedside table and counted the pills. They say it is rare for a suicide to leave no note. I left none. I couldn’t be bothered. That is the literal truth. As if influenced by my face, I was fixed in indifference. My hand did not shake nor my heart beat faster. Hand and heart were simply and equally part of the mechanism. If workmen in the street had not asked that all taps in the house be turned off, it is reasonable to suppose that I shouldn’t be here now, sitting in this sun. Saved by the London County Council and a stomach pump.

  Three weeks later, Hilda came to see me. I had just come home from the hospital, where I had insisted that I took the pills by accident. They didn’t believe me, of course, and sent people to talk to me, but I shut my eyes and repeated the story. ‘You seem to hate us for trying to help you,’ said one of them. ‘Not at all,’ I replied. What I hated them for was the stomach pump. ‘I took them by accident,’ I kept saying. My face was a help. With my eyes shut, they might as well have been talking to a stone, and in the end, they went away. I should have been home in a few days except for my old enemy, bronchitis, which this time they treated with a much improved variety of the new drugs.

  When Hilda came to see me I told her about the bronchitis, but made no mention of the pills because I intended to take another dose, and did not want her to feel that she could have stopped me if she had said this, or done that. She had had her hair dyed, and set so that it concealed her scars, and when she had come in, wearing a new suit, and a hat with a little veil, she had had an air of responsiveness to the early Spring day, or to anything else that might turn up. All this had vanished at the sight of my face, but she quickly controlled her dismay and began to chatter, to tell me that her son had turned up, and her lover was due next week. She could not keep it up, however. She suddenly stopped. ‘Oh, Nora!’ she said, and sat on the edge of my bed.

  Misfortune impressed her. She reminded me of Olive in the abortionist’s waiting room. I waved a hand. ‘I’m laughing,’ I said. ‘Take my laughter on trust.’

  ‘Oh, but it will be all right.’

  But I would not discuss it. I sat down and told her about the new drugs for bronchitis, and every time she tried to interrupt, I told her a bit more.

  ‘Another benefit of the war. It seems,’ I said, amused by the double meaning private to myself, ‘that I shall never again have such terrible bronchitis.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ she said unhappily.

  ‘Isn’t it! Not even in a cold winter.’

  ‘But are Sydney winters so cold?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going back.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They say the housing shortage is terrible there. The population has doubled, or some such thing. And after all, I have a flat here.’

  ‘And will you still make clothes?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  She went to my mirror and twitched at the veil of her hat. ‘Do you like my hat? I got it from a little lady who has come up from the country to open a hat shop. Poor darling, she’s going broke.’

  But her worried eyes were watching me in the mirror. ‘What about that dinner we were going to have?’

  I pressed a hand to my chest. ‘I’m still a bit …’

  ‘Well, I’ll ring you.’

  I smiled at her.
Between us were a few feet of space, and (again) the great distance created by my intentions. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘do that. Say, the end of next week.’

  The pills I had taken had sent me away so easily, first heaving me up on the swell of a wave, and then dropping and engulfing me, that I did not want to use any other kind. The process had not been so entirely pleasant that I could not imagine horror, during that drop and final engulfment, if the method should differ even slightly. But I had none of the pills left, and after what had happened I could hardly go back to my usual doctor and ask for more, and the fraud and finagling by which I intended to get them would take about a week.

  Before the end of that week Hilda came back.

  ‘Nora, do you want a job?’

  Amusement would have aroused her suspicions. ‘What kind of a job?’

  ‘At a theatrical costumers. I’ve just heard of it.’

  ‘I’m not interested in theatrical costumes, Hilda.’

  ‘Yes, you are.’

  ‘I don’t know what makes you think so.’

  ‘The way you spoke of Gischia’s designs for Murder.’

  She meant Murder in the Cathedral. ‘I’m not a designer,’ I said.

  ‘I know you’re not. I’m talking about making. Try it, Nora. I know the people.’

  ‘It’s much too specialized.’

  But even as I shook my head, my interior eye was assailed by a medley of rich rippling colour, of bright lights and inhabited shadow—all latterly derived from the theatre, no doubt, but first of all from Ida Mayo’s hands manipulating satins and brocades beneath her little lamps.

  Hilda was watching me. ‘They badly need someone,’ she murmured.

  ‘If I can get it,’ I said, ‘I’ll take it.’

  I got the job and the pills on the same day. I put the pills in my bedside drawer, and with the relief of death available at my right hand, so to speak, I decided to hang on, provisionally, from day to day. ‘Provisionally’ was the word always in my mind. Before a week was out it was clear that I had fallen among people who would accept me for what I was, whatever I was, and in that same week, the work itself began to engross me. Far from being a drastic departure from my former work, I found it an illumination and a synthesis of it. Those women ‘mad about clothes’, always running to me with bits of cloth and pictures cut from magazines, always asking ‘But is it me?’ hadn’t they been forever seeking to express their conception of themselves? And wasn’t that conception usually imaginary? A composed character? I myself had once dressed with the same vague intention.

  Vague. Yes. One impediment to success was the vagueness of the intention. Like most amateurs, they, and I, were beset and confused by vogues imposed from outside, by persons who seemed as unstable and capricious as ourselves. For that reason, success was discouragingly rare, but in theatrical work, where a clear intention is carried out by a team of professionals, success is exhilaratingly regular, though never to be taken for granted. As for the special problems, I found them easy to surmount. If you can make a good suit, you can make anything, and it is not difficult to pick up the tricks that make cumbersome robes manageable, or a garment easy and quick to put on and take off.

  I became chief dressmaker, and worked with many designers. A few were brilliant, and I often had the pleasure of seeing one of these alter his designs at my suggestion, a pleasure denied to him, since it was a natural part of his great talent that he absorbed suggestion and regarded the result as wholly his own. I did not resent it. What could have better suited my nature, as it had developed, than exerting the more influence by pretending to have none? And if I sometimes heard, in ironic echo, Una Porteous’s voice bemoaning my inability to handle a man, and stopped to wonder, I did not really find it surprising that I was ready to develop a diplomacy, in the interest of this work, that I had refused to develop in marriage with Colin Porteous.

  In a year or so, except when very tired, I stopped fussing about my face as I had once stopped fussing about my clothes, and in fact, some blessed lines had begun to reappear, and mobility to return. That, if you like, had been a mistake in theatrical presentation.

  Though I never consciously and finally renounced my intention of returning to Australia (and was later to find the vestiges of that intention embedded in me), I no longer spoke of it, and I suppose that it was at this time that my memories of my home country began to grow blurred and misshapen. Holland Park was my village, my flat, my resting place, but how eagerly, after the idleness of Sunday, I returned to my work. I grew to love those big cluttered low-ceilinged rooms, and the memory of winter afternoons there—the light, the smell, the visitors and the voices—can still fill me with nostalgia. I worked there, always a subordinate to the designers, for twelve full years, and as a part-time overseer for another six. I sometimes think I would still be there but for my hands, and, to a lesser extent, my eyes. They let me down badly, those two.

  The warmth is making me drowsy. I let Dorothy Rainbow’s embroidery drop to the floor and fold my hands in my lap. In this spring sunshine I have my first unqualified pleasure in being back. I reflect that it was worth hanging on, provisionally, if only for this present blessing of sun on the skin. I ask myself why Dorothy Rainbow did not hang on, provisionally, and why nothing was offered to appease the remnants of that need that once drove her to walk. I think of how the web of her tracks across the suburb must have merged with the web of mine, and how in dry weather we both trod in little puffs of dust and left low cumulus trails behind us. She wears narrow black boots and treads in this dust absently and gently, her head nodding as if to a tune audible only to her. Her son also has a preoccupied air, but if he gives the effect of hearing music, it is a heavy and solemn music …

  I open my eyes and stare at the wall. The evasiveness of the Custs, the dust on the magpie embroidery, and Grace’s comment—‘The Rainbow house is up for sale …’ combine in my mind to form an incredible pattern. Oh, but surely, an incredible pattern. To disperse it, to smash it by movement, I pick up the magpie embroidery and take it to the window.

  Here, from another angle than on that first day, is the lawn, the cabbage-tree palm, the street. I shake the embroidery out of the window, releasing much dust, and then stand and stare, like Lyn Wilmot or Una Porteous, up and down the street. A little girl opens a garden gate and steps into the street, while from the other direction comes an old gentleman, very tall, thin, sallow, and all in white, Don Quixote dressed for bowls. They meet. He pulls his rag hat from his head, extends one foot, and bows very low. The little girl and I laugh at the same time. They cross and part, drawing further and further away from each other on the street, and I look longingly from one to the other until both disappear. I don’t go back to the chair. Even in winter and early spring the sun here is never as gentle as it seems at first. It has made me slightly sick. I go back to bed and in less than a minute I am asleep.

  ‘Nora. Nora.’

  Betty Cust’s voice, very low, is testing the depth of my sleep. I want her to go away, but the recollection of all her kindness obliges me to open my eyes.

  ‘I’ve brought you two letters.’

  They are from Hilda and Liza. I am too excited to find my spectacles. I pull open the bedside drawer, I give anxious cries and thump the bedclothes. It is Betty who finds them. She takes them from the back of the drawer and gives them to me.

  I read bits of the letters aloud, and then put them aside to read carefully and privately later. I sit back and beam at Betty. How truly incredible my incredible pattern seems now, a product of sickness and loneliness. Smiling at my joy, Betty takes my place in the cane chair, with her sun-spotted hands folded in her lap, and asks if either Hilda or Liza had children. I speak vaguely of Hilda’s son, being dubious about explaining the breach between them when he ‘got off’ with her lover, but I can be quite frank about Liza, who in the war years suffered such drastic bereavement, losing her husband and all three of her sons.

  I am sociable and talkative. I d
escribe Liza’s hat shop and how Hilda and I tried to stave off her ruin by sending people to buy her hats.

  ‘But it was hopeless. She had always wanted a hat shop in London, and she didn’t even notice that young people weren’t wearing hats any more. It was through her that we met Fred. He was looking for tenants for the two top floors of his house. They had been vacant for years because his requirements were so particular. He wanted three thin old women.’

  ‘Why thin?’

  ‘He couldn’t bear fat women.’

  Thin Betty, on behalf of all fat women, is offended. ‘Too bad about him!’

  ‘That’s exactly what we used to tell him.’

  ‘He sounds quite unreasonable.’

  ‘Oh, poor dear, he was. Is, I mean. He’s not dead.’

  ‘Was that the house where Peter visited you, the last time he went over?’

  ‘Yes. On Lansdowne Rise, not far from where he visited me the first time, when I was still in Holland Park. All the little back gardens in that block opened on to a private square. What we liked about the square was that it was hilly. Some of it was mown grass, but there were patches of old elms and beeches and broken paving and shrubs gone wild. If you stood under one of those big trees you could imagine yourself in a forest. Or if you were feeling urban you could sit out in the open, on one of the benches, and see people at the back windows of the houses. The houses were all the same, of course, three stories with cellars …’

  I go on to describe Fred’s house, but as I speak I see the four of us in the square on a summer evening. We are all sitting on one bench, Fred sideways on an end, when Liza says, ‘Look.’ We look where she is pointing and see that Belle, having missed us, has extended her head round the garden gate. She sees us, comes through the gate, sits down and licks herself, and then sets out towards us at her leisure. The sunlight seems infused with a blueish smoke, though no fires are burning, and we all watch Belle stepping with deliberation across the grass, through shade and then through smoky sunlight, until, knowing herself observed, she sits down and cleans herself again. We all look away, pretending indifference, and presently she comes on again, with no sign of pleasure or recognition or even of her real intention, until she arrives at our feet. She then composedly sits, with her back to us, and we all relax, and look at the sky, and into the trees and the smoky light, and begin to talk in quiet voices.