She knew the number as well as she knew her own birthday. The Enmore Pharmacy. She rang from a public phone near Singleton station. Charlie Gledhill’s voice sounded distant and hollow. She’d never spoken to him on the phone before. Bennetts is leaving, he said. You were my first thought, Miss Russell. Say you’ll do it.
When she told them, Max grinned all over his freckled boy’s face. You beauty, Nance! Frank turned to her smiling, pressing her hand, and even Dolly said, Well, thank God for that. Nance smiled and pretended. Wonderful!
All the way through dinner at the Criterion she had to keep it up. Next morning she stood at the station with the same little suitcase she’d brought to Tamworth. For three days she’d been part of a family again. She watched the Fiat turn out of the yard, saw Max waving a last cheery goodbye.
Finally she could stop smiling.
The first time around, the Enmore Pharmacy was a prison term. The second time it felt like a life sentence, with no days to mark off on the wall. At least now she was paid a wage, not an apprentice’s pocket money. A registered pharmacist got five pounds a week. That was good money compared to what most people were getting in 1933. But it had to stretch a long way. After she’d paid her board and sent the family some money, and put some in the bank for just-in-case, she was left with about a pound for everything else, and there was always something. Get your shoes mended, have your hair cut, buy soap and tooth powder. Even wholesale from the shop those things cost money. New clothes were out of reach. You’d get down in the mouth if you started to think about them. The best you could do was get something from the second-hand shop and hope you could wash the musty smell out of it.
The price for that good money was that she could never leave the shop. The apprentice—she had her own now—got out occasionally to deliver an order or take the tram to Pattinson’s for another bottle of Pot. Bromide. The registered pharmacist couldn’t step out, not even for a moment. The longing to be able to walk out into the air became a hunger. To be out from those four walls pressing in! She didn’t complain, but one day Charlie Gledhill said he’d give her Wednesday afternoon off. He’d come in for those few hours, keep his hand in. She liked him for that.
He called in at the shop most evenings on his way home from the hospital. He’d go through the books with her, decide what to order, discuss whether they should sell Bell’s Vigour Pills. Nance would boil up some water on the Bunsen and they’d have a cup of tea.
She was right that he’d come from nothing much. His father was a house painter in Lithgow and without the free public schools he’d have ended up painting houses too, he said. Luckily, from Lithgow Public he’d got a place at Fort Street Boys’, the best government high school in the state. Had to board with an uncle in Homebush to go there. Nance had been sent away at eight, he’d been twelve. Reckon it’s why we’re tough buggers, he said. You and me both.
He’d always wanted to be a surgeon, he said. Pharmacy was only ever a step on the path that could take a poor boy upwards. He’d done his apprenticeship at Five Dock Pharmacy, that was where he’d met Win. Then he’d been a demonstrator in the Pharmacy Department at the university. When they did the dates, it turned out that if he’d stayed there a year longer he would have been the one teaching Nance how to calibrate a pipette. Funny old world, isn’t it, Nance, he said.
Win’s father ran a nursery in Five Dock and he and his wife had taken to Charlie like the son they didn’t have. They’d lent him the money to buy the business. They came to the shop with him one day and she watched Charlie showing Mr Betts everything, the different sizes of mortars and how the pill machine worked. He jollied Mrs Betts along, putting his arm around her, telling her she looked nice, launching into one of his long stories to make her smile.
At the end of the day, Nance would have the accounts book out ready for Charlie on the counter, waiting for him to swing in, bringing the life of the world into the claustrophobic shop. They’d bend over the big greasy ledger together, his finger running down the columns, Nance beside him holding the page flat. She was Miss Russell at the start. Somewhere along the line she became Nance.
In August that year Nance turned twenty-one. Dolly and Bert sent her a watch, a dainty little thing, engraved on the back: To Nance on her twenty-first birthday, from her parents. It was a normal present for a twenty-first and useful for getting to the shop on time. Nance knew they couldn’t guess what a nightmare of clock-watching her life was. When she pressed the little latch into place around her wrist it was like locking herself to that life forever.
Bert’s letters were always full of how things would soon look up, but Nance didn’t see any sign of it. It had been four years now since the Depression had started. The churches couldn’t cope any more with so many hungry people, women and little children as well as men lining up for a bowl of soup. It was so bad now that, if you could prove you were starving, the government would give you food orders that you could take to the grocery and get a few basic things. Mothers came into the pharmacy with government orders for baby food.
Some pharmacies would only sell a shilling’s worth of anything that had to be dispensed. By the time you mixed up whatever it was, it wasn’t worth doing it for less than that. Charlie said, We’ll make sixpennorth our lowest price. But a lot of people only had the threepence and Nance couldn’t send them away. If someone was sick you had to help them.
The worst of it was the skinny people coming around trying to sell things: brooms, feather dusters, shoelaces, boxes of matches. Ten or fifteen in a day. You’d buy something from one, but then there’d be another. You couldn’t buy something from all of them, but how could you turn them away?
It sounded miserable at the Mittagong farm, too, looking after sheep that no one wanted to buy, putting in crops that didn’t fetch what it cost to harvest them, rabbits the only thing there was plenty of. Still, the Russells were among the lucky ones.
Frank was too old to be living with Mum and Dad and his little brother, and too clever to spend his best years skinning rabbits for a bob a pelt. He wrote to Nance about land being balloted, Crown leases that had been turned back to the government. Could you lend me fifty pounds? he wrote. You have to put that up to go in the ballot, show you’re serious. If he didn’t get the land he’d get the money back, and if he did get it he promised he’d pay her back as quick as quick. Fifty pounds was about all she had in the bank. It was frightening, seeing the teller write what was left: two pounds ten and fourpence.
Frank won a block in Queensland, a place called Bringalily, west of Brisbane. The lease had been surrendered because the land had been covered with prickly pear, but now the government had got some sort of caterpillar that ate the stuff and the place was mostly clear, Frank said. He was going to live in a tent and go to work on the roads until he had enough to get a cottage up and buy a few milkers.
Nance wrote to say she wanted to go with him, would do anything to get out of the pharmacy, had no fear of living in a tent. Compared with the pharmacy that kind of hardship sounded like paradise. But Frank said no. Not that I wouldn’t like your company, Nance, he wrote. My worry is, it’ll be rough at the start. If it’s me on my own I can manage, but I’d be anxious about you.
When she got the letter she cried and cried. Hadn’t known till she started to cry how she’d longed to be with Frank, working side by side, brother and sister again. Even after she wanted to stop crying she couldn’t. Some machine in her had been started up and she had no power to turn it off. Matron had to be called, hold the sal volatile under her nose. Afterwards she thought she might never feel anything, ever again.
Meg Naughton was still teaching at Lawson. She’d met a man there, a German, and they’d have got married but Meg wanted to keep her job, so they were living, as Meg wrote, in sin. It was a risk, she’d be sacked on the spot if anyone found out. How unfair, she said. Why should my brains wither on the vine for the sole reason that I’m a woman?
Nance missed her but with no money for the trai
n they couldn’t see each other often. There were some new women at the hostel who Nance got to be friends with. Molly worked in a shop. Every morning she put fresh newspaper in her shoes where the soles were gone. It was lucky she was behind the counter all day, she said, so no one saw. Rete was a qualified accountant but no one needed accountants so she had a job as a filing clerk. Considered herself lucky to get three pounds ten a week. Her dream was to have a bookshop. She’d talk about it over dinner as if it really existed. How she’d arrange the stock, what she’d put in the window. Nance tried to think of her own dream, but there was a blank where a dream might have been. She hadn’t found it before the pharmacy years, and those years had stifled everything else.
When you were on your own there were a lot of rules you didn’t have to take any notice of. One of them was that a respectable young woman should live in a church hostel. Molly and Rete and Nance found a boarding house nearby that would cost the same, but without the rules. They slept in the one room, Molly and Rete in the double bed and Nance in a stretcher in the corner. It was like having sisters, plenty of fun and no secrets. At bedtime Rete put sticky stuff on her hands and then gloves, because of her dry skin. On a Friday night Molly put her hair in papers so she’d look nice for her afternoon off. They told Nance that castor oil made eyelashes grow, so Nance smeared it on every night. No matter how bad things were, you had to believe that one day you’d be living in a world where it mattered if you had soft hands and long eyelashes.
At night everyone gathered in the parlour to play cards. Nance was always late getting in because of the shop, but the others would wait for her. It was something to look forward to, walking into a room full of people pleased to see you.
Oc was a good bridge partner, and he was sweet on her, but she wasn’t interested. And what was his mother thinking, calling him Octavius, even if he was the eighth child? The one she liked was Don McDonald. He was Canadian, had come for a visit and more or less got stuck when the Depression hit. Couldn’t play cards to save his life but was musical. He had a job at Paling’s in the city, demonstrating the pianos, and he could belt out anything on Mrs Cahill’s old upright.
Oh, give us ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, Oc would call out. He’d watch Nance while Don sang, but she’d be watching Don. He’d be singing in his light tuneful voice, smiling at her through the words about the bright flame of love, and she’d be smiling back. She felt bad for poor Oc, but you didn’t have any control over who you were drawn to. Still, Don would be going back to Canada, he made no secret of that. There was no future in it.
It was a funny home-made social world at the boarding house, the girls all crammed together two or three to a room, the boys down the hall in theirs, everyone playing cards and eyeing each other. But what could you do other than flirt across the table? The men weren’t in any position to get married. If they had jobs at all, they were poor sorts of jobs. Nance thought of all those young men and women, all over Sydney, all over Australia, all over the world, their bright days melting away. No chance to pair off when nature intended them to, and when would that chance come? For a woman, the time of being desirable was so short.
Oh, this is a terrible life, she said. Our lives are passing!
She’d never lived before with people who talked about politics but at the boarding house everyone knew what should be done. Mr Bannerman, an older man who went door to door with doilies, was sure that things would come right if you left them alone. It wasn’t the government’s job to look after people, he said. The invisible hand of the market—supply and demand—was the only way for things to come right. Oc and Don disagreed. With no one spending any money, how was demand ever going to get supply going again unless the government got money back into circulation? They got vehement about it, because it wasn’t an abstraction, it was their lives. Some nights Mrs Cahill had to come in and read the riot act.
Nance had never heard of deflation, didn’t know who Keynes was, or how to argue about the invisible hand. But she thought about how it had been at the Cally. As soon as the guests stopped coming, Dolly and Bert had to let all the staff go. Without jobs, those people had stopped spending. That meant all the little shops that had relied on them went bust. Then the shop people in turn stopped spending. It was as inevitable as gravity. Unless the government stepped in and broke that cycle there was no reason anything would ever change. Nance had always thought about what was happening around her as an act of nature, like the weather. She began to see that events occurred because men in London and Washington and Canberra made one decision rather than another.
Now she was over twenty-one she could enrol to vote. There was an election coming up in 1934 and she went down to the local school with the others on voting day. As she marked the boxes she could hear Mr Bannerman’s scorn. He’d never quite said so, but she had a feeling Mr Bannerman didn’t think ignorant people like her should be allowed to vote.
The conservatives won again, but not by much. Labor got one million, five hundred and fifty-five thousand, seven hundred and thirty-seven votes. She looked at that last digit and thought, That’s my vote. My voice.
SIX
AT THE start of 1937 Charlie graduated with honours and two prizes for surgery, and started his residency at the hospital. One night at the shop he said he had a favour to ask. As a resident he often had to spend the night at the hospital and Win didn’t like being alone in the f lat. Would Nance go and stay with her now and then? It was an easy favour to grant. She liked Win and it made a change from the boarding house. Win would make tea for them, she was a good cook, then they’d have a few hands of rummy and Win would tell the story of falling in love with Charlie, how she went into the Five Dock Pharmacy one day for cough syrup and there he was.
Charlie and Win had planned to wait until he got through Medicine before they started a family, and a few months into his residency Win was starting to show. But every time Nance went to the flat, Win was less well. Nausea, palpitations, swollen ankles. Win made light of it. Oh, Charlie doesn’t seem worried and he’s the doctor! In the shop, though, Charlie was more and more preoccupied. One night it all spilled out. Win had eclampsia: high blood pressure. She was taking magnesium sulphate and avoiding excitement but that was only a half measure, not a cure. The only cure was to get the baby out. The problem was, Win wasn’t far enough along. The baby would die if delivered now. She might die, too, from the shock. But if you waited until the baby was sure to survive, the mother could go into convulsions and they could both die. On a great shuddering sigh Charlie said, It puts the doctor in a terrible position, Nance. There was a silence between them because it wasn’t just the doctor, any stranger. The doctor was the husband and the father, and he was haggard with the choice that had to be made.
A few weeks later Nance had hardly opened up the shop when the call came through. Charlie’s voice was strangled, a thickness around every word. She’d never heard a man cry before. Win had gone into convulsions. They’d done an emergency Caesarean but it was too late. Mother and baby were both dead. Nance said, Oh, how terrible, I’m so sorry, and there was a long silence. She squeezed the receiver hard, pressed her ear to it. Finally she heard the click of him hanging up.
Win’s father phoned later. Could you close the shop, please, Miss Russell? His voice was brisk and businesslike. She understood that Mr Betts was one of those men who needed to be busy and not stop to think. She inked a black edge around a sheet of paper, wrote the phrases she’d seen on other shop doors.
At the funeral Charlie’s face was warped by grief. She lined up with everyone else and spoke to him. He glanced at her without seeing, pressed her hand. She was nothing but another person who wasn’t his dead wife. She saw his white lips say, Thank you, thank you. Then she had to let the next person take his cold hand and murmur something that he didn’t hear, and have him say, Thank you, thank you.
It was Nance’s first death. While the clergyman talked about someone called Winice, she thought about Win, the fun they’d
had. Everything they’d done seemed significant. For a lark she and Win had read each other’s palms one night. She remembered the silkiness of Win’s skin, the warmth of her fingers, the weight of her hand. The lines on the palm were neat, like embroidery, the flesh rosy. Now that hand was in the coffin. It would be cold and pale, stiff by now. No one would ever hold it again. No one would ever sit with Win over a bottle of beer and laugh themselves to tears about the silly things in the palm-reading book. That was what death was. Nothing solemn or grand, just a hole in the world. She looked at her own hand. It would be in a coffin, cold and dark, one day. Then it would just be the bones she could see under the skin.
Afterwards Mr Betts came up to her. Keep the shop closed, Miss Russell, he said. A month. Let’s say six weeks. Mr Gledhill told me to tell you specially, thank you for your support and naturally you’ll be paid. He glanced at her for the first time and she saw how his eyes were shrunken in their sockets, the blue of them bright against the bloodshot whites.
For once it was Nance waiting for the others at the boarding house that night. They said to shut the shop, she told them. What will you do, Nance? they wanted to know. She opened her mouth to say, I don’t know, and found that she’d said, I’ll go and see the family.
She knew then that she’d never leave behind the longing. Family. She’d thought that seven years of pharmacy had driven it into the ground. But the less a family was a family, the more the longing for it would never leave. She thought, On my deathbed I’ll still be longing.
The place Frank had won at Bringalily had been covered with the wreckage of prickly pear when he’d gone there. No stock, no crops, no house. He’d worked a long time on the roads around Bringalily to get a bit of cash. Reckon I’m the champion gravel-spreader of Queensland, he wrote. Once the farm was up and running, Dolly and Max had joined him. Bert stayed on at Mittagong. No one spelled it out, but it was a way of quietly burying a dead marriage.
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