The sisters had been debutantes. There were silver-framed photos of them in white, curtseying. The older one, Babs, admired Nance’s earrings but they both knew they were only paste. Bud was full of having been to dinner with some people called Menzies the night before. Nance thought, Could she possibly mean the prime minister? Like the brothers, the sisters were beautiful, confident, with that private-school poise, and a future in front of them of prosperous husbands and well-brought-up children.
After lunch Ken and Nance escaped to a park down the road. Sorry, Ken said. Bit of an ordeal, isn’t it. He touched her arm for a moment. Nance, you’re an unusual woman, he said. Having a profession and so on. They admire you for that.
He hesitated.
As I do, Nance, he said. You know that, don’t you. Admire…esteem… He was turned away so she only caught the words sideways. She wanted him to say it plainly: I admire you! I esteem you! That could even be Strathfield-speak for I love you! But the moment passed and he took his hand away.
Having seen Ken at home she felt she could make some sense of his contradictions. He was from that King-and-Empire world, but he didn’t want to be. He had a family, but he wasn’t part of it. The comedown of the Depression had made his family cling to a world that was disappearing, but it had made him rethink the failed old truths. He knew how to be witty but not how to be warm and spontaneous: no wonder, being the odd man out in the family.
And Nance could see why he liked her. He talked about working people, the ones born without privilege: well, she was one of them. She was a modern professional woman, independent in every way. She couldn’t be more different from his sisters. She was part of the world of the future, not the faded past, but at the same time she was presentable enough to meet his family.
She’d said no to Charlie Gledhill for what had seemed good reasons. Ken was another chance to spend her life with a man who could offer her ideas and action. She knew he liked her. She was willing to take on trust that admire and esteem were code for something more heartfelt. She’d have to make the running but she wasn’t too proud for that. She had enough warmth and spontaneity for both of them, until he got the hang of it. We’ve both been compressed, she thought. Together we can expand into our proper shapes.
The families met for the first time at the wedding. It was the eighth of May 1940. Dolly was wearing a nice dress from Cohen’s in Tamworth but next to Mrs Gee’s it looked gaudy. Her voice was a bit too high, her comments on the loveliness of the day and the splendour of the flower arrangements too forceful. Bert wore the suit he’d bought in the glory days of the Cally. That time was ten years gone and the suit hung loose on him, shiny around the knees.
Dick and Peter were handsome in their officer’s uniforms, although to Nance’s eye Frank was more handsome than either of Ken’s brothers, and she was proud to introduce him. She watched them shaking hands outside the church, Frank’s rough hand and Ken’s soft one. She loved bringing them together, these two men who were the most important people in her life, but with the helpless knowledge that they had so little in common. There was a pause before they both started talking about how lucky they’d been with the weather.
NINE
THEY WERE married in the morning and by evening they were in Forster, a few hours north on the train. Scanning the ads in the paper for seaside boarding houses, she’d been drawn to a French name. L’Hirondelle. She could try her old Tamworth High French. Bonjour, Madame, comment allez-vous? When she showed the ad to Ken he said, L’Hirondelle, that’s swallow, isn’t it? Sounds better in French, not so much an alcoholic’s paradise. Sometimes, she thought, I could wish him less witty.
The landlady—not French—showed them to the Honeymoon Suite. The double bed looked enormous after the single beds Nance was used to. She was ready to give Ken a wink, but the landlady was showing him the washbasin in the corner behind the curtain. At dinner the other guests twinkled and smiled. As soon as the jam roll and custard was finished it was clear that they expected the newlyweds to say goodnight.
When Ken had proposed, Nance’s only worry was about her hymen. Could a man tell if you weren’t a virgin? She didn’t think Ken had any experience with women, but there might be some way he’d know. As far as she was concerned, she and Charlie had just done the natural thing. How Ken would feel, she didn’t know. Some people thought it was terribly important for a bride to be a virgin. Once or twice she’d tried to steer the conversation around, but he was uncomfortable talking about anything personal.
To her surprise, as they were planning the wedding Ken said, We don’t want children straight away, do we, Nance? What about you get one of those cap things? Someone had told him about the hymen breaking, the mess and the pain and so on. Getting fitted for the cap meant the doctor broke the hymen, so that solved his problem. It solved hers too. She felt bad not confessing. But it had only been a little while with Charlie, and it was all finished now.
It was unusual for a woman to get herself fitted for a cap. There was still a feeling that it wasn’t quite nice, even for a married woman. One of the doctors at the hospital knew someone but she wondered what she’d have done if she hadn’t known the right sort of doctor. And what had her mother done in the years before the cap? A respectable married woman wouldn’t have gone into the pharmacy in Gunnedah and asked for the Housewife’s Friend, and french letters weren’t for decent married men. But having only three children, Dolly must have used something. Perhaps the sponge-on-a-string worked better than you’d think. Or she might have said no. In that case, no wonder Bert started to look somewhere else.
Leaving the doctor’s with the little beige box in her handbag, Nance thought, Mine is the first generation of women, in the history of the world, to have any choice about children. All those millions of women who were nothing but baby-machines. So many of them must have been like me, wanting it both ways. Children, of course, but a life of their own too.
One thing was starting to lead to another when Nance stopped and said she’d go behind the curtain for a minute. Don’t go away, she said. He didn’t laugh. There wasn’t much room behind the curtain and it didn’t quite reach down to the floor. She kept jogging it with her elbow as she got into the new nightdress with the shoestring straps and squatted on the lino to put the cap in. It must have looked as if she was wrestling in there, and in a way she was. You had to smear special cream all over the rubber dome and then fold it in half to get it in. The cream made it slippery. She imagined it springing like a frog over the curtain. Charlie had always made a joke about getting the french letter on. But beyond the curtain the room was deadly silent.
When she came out Ken was under the bedclothes, turned away so all she could see was a striped flannelette shoulder. She switched off the light, padded over to the bed and got in. The mattress sagged as he turned to her and they rolled together into the dip. She’d never done it in a bed before, only ever on the ground with the trees overhead and the small night noises all around. Never in pitch dark before, either. There’d always been light from the stars or the moon, enough to make out the smile on a face that was close to your own.
Next morning she slipped out of bed before Ken was awake. You were supposed to douche before you took the thing out. She tried to be quiet but the room filled with little splashing noises. Then it was breakfast with everyone smiling too much and the landlady giving Ken extra bacon because he needed to keep up his strength. It was a relief to get outside.
She’d have liked them to hire a boat on the lagoon and sit beside each other, the two of them jostled together on the rocking water. But Ken wanted to fish from the beach. That meant standing in the foamy wash with her brand-new husband a little figure in the distance.
They were at Forster for a week. Every night it was the same silent business of wrestling with the cap. Every day was fishing. By the end of the week she couldn’t wait to be at home. They’d rented a f lat in Maroubra, not far from the hospital, upstairs on a quiet road with the hopeful name of
Melody Street, where the sea breeze streamed in the windows. In their own place things would go better.
One of the things Nance had looked forward to about being married was sharing the stories of the day’s events, a cheerful exchange over dinner and a few laughs to ease the way into bed. On the way home from the hospital every afternoon she’d think of something that might amuse Ken. There was always a little drama of one kind or another. The nurses were forever falling in love with the doctors and getting their hearts broken. The head wardsman was having an affair with the manager’s wife and thought no one knew. A patient in the lock hospital tried to kill himself by jumping off the rocks but all he did was break his leg, so now he had a broken leg as well as syphilis!
Ken listened and smiled, but he wasn’t really interested and he didn’t have any stories of his own to offer in return. Oh, the usual, he’d say. Conveyancing. Probate for Miss Butler. Pretty dull stuff. She felt she was coming up against a bland blank place in him like the high unseeing side of a ship.
It was a bad time to be a solicitor. With the war on, no one was buying or selling houses, no businesses were starting up and no one was suing anyone. It was lucky that people kept dying, otherwise Ken would be making even less than he did. They’d worked out that Ken paid the rent and Nance paid for everything else. She wondered how they’d be managing if she wasn’t working.
After tea Ken would get out a brief and read, the pink tape draped over his knee for tying it up again. She felt she shouldn’t disturb him, so she read too, or did some sewing or knitting. Then they went to bed and read some more. She’d have a novel and Ken would have one of the dense orange-covered books that came in the mail from the Left Book Club.
Once or twice a week he’d go out after dinner. Another party meeting, he’d say, and she’d remember the men rising to their feet with the sheaf of pages and couldn’t face going with him. In any case, Ken didn’t seem to want her company. No, Nance, he’d say. No need for you to come. Listening to the wireless on her own she told herself that politics was his passion. It was how she’d met him. It was what she admired in him, that knowledge about the big meaning of things. She couldn’t ask him to stop just because she wanted his company in the evenings.
Living together, they found their differences were more noticeable. She smoked, and he liked to boast that a cigarette had never soiled his lips. She’d grown up playing cards, but he didn’t approve. She got the feeling he thought it was vulgar. She’d get out her Keats and Shakespeare and re-read those words that never lost their power but, despite his first-class honours in English, Ken wasn’t interested in poetry. If he read anything that wasn’t from the Left Book Club it would be what he called a rattling good yarn by Edgar Wallace. She came to see that, for Ken, poetry was a code you cracked to get honours in an exam, not a blazing discovery.
Everyone said that a marriage required compromise. She wasn’t going to stop quoting poetry, but she didn’t look to Ken to share the pleasure. She sat out on the back steps to smoke and she gave up cards.
After a time, Ken left his father’s practice and set up his brass plate on a room in Maroubra. A man shouldn’t play second fiddle to his father forever. All the same, Nance had seen the look on Mr Gee’s face when Ken told him: too abruptly, too thanklessly. Ken could have pretended it was something they’d come to together. Could have saved the old man’s pride. It was the first time she saw the steel in him.
On Friday nights a group from the Coast Hospital went out together: the other pharmacists, some of the nurses, the ward orderlies. A cheap meal, a few beers, a few laughs. Ken came once or twice, but he didn’t enjoy it. No one around the table knew what a Christian Socialist was or was interested in the threat to democracy. She’d see him forcing a smile while he listened to Stan tell the one about the spider and the nun, and pushing back his cuff to glance at the time. Soon it turned out that he had to stay in the office on a Friday night, in case someone came. Stay till eight o’clock, she said. Then come along and have sweets with us. Sweets. In the Gee household you didn’t have sweets, you had dessert. Oh, good idea, he said, but he never came.
There was no point begging or scolding. That had been her mother’s way. That was no good. If a man didn’t want to be with you, no amount of begging or scolding would make him. Dolly hadn’t had any choice. Making life miserable for other people was the only power she had.
It was different for Nance. She wasn’t dependent on a man. In fact, she thought that might be part of the problem. She’d been running her own life for so long, she was used to shaping things as she wanted. She knew that other women adapted their lives around their husbands, but she knew she couldn’t. She was like those girls who learned to dance with other girls, taking turns to be the man. They never got the hang of following, once they knew what it was like to lead.
At the end of a few months she could see she wasn’t going to like life with Ken. She didn’t want to be on her own every night while her husband was out. Didn’t want to sit stiff and uncomfortable watching him with her friends. She was happy to put away her cards and her cigarettes but Ken’s indifference to poetry betrayed the depth of the gulf between them. The failure wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t her fault. It was that the two of them were too different. She wasn’t happy and she didn’t think he was either, and it was hard to imagine how things could ever get better.
It was a decision she had to make alone. There was no one to talk it over with. Her mother, with her own miserable marriage, would have nothing useful to say. Besides, she’d never warmed to Ken. I could have told you would hang in the air. Joan was blissfully content to be Mrs Harry Mulhall. She’d be shocked and uncomprehending. Frank would understand, she thought, but how could you talk about things like this in a letter?
She was in love with Ken, but there was steel in her too. When you make a mistake you have to face up to it, she thought. Admit you’ve failed and cut your losses. I’ll leave, she decided. Next weekend. Go back to the boarding house. She could imagine the fuss. Everyone would be agog. People loved a scandal. She’d have to face up to that too. It didn’t work out, she’d say. No harm done and no bad feeling. She’d be so matter-of-fact, they’d soon lose interest. Two years of separation and she and Ken could get a quiet divorce. Then they could both start again.
But at work next day Joan said, Harry and I are going to Bobbin Head on Saturday, Nance, why don’t you and Ken come with us?
Nance thought, I can hardly say: Well, actually, I’m going to leave my husband on Saturday. She told Joan she couldn’t come because she had something to do. Joan wanted to know what, and Nance said the first thing she thought of. I’ve got to stay home and wash the windows.
Wash the windows! Joan laughed, but in a puzzled way.
The silliness of the excuse made Nance realise she only half meant to leave. This is a big decision, she thought. I’d better not do it unless I’m sure. Why wasn’t she sure? Was this what love was, the kind of love the great writers talked about, that made you do one thing when you wanted to do another? She did love Ken, but she was strong enough to know when you should resist love. She’d resisted with Charlie Gledhill, and could do the same with Ken. No, it was something else that was keeping her in this marriage.
There was something at work in her that was stronger than all her reasons for leaving. She could feel it moving in her as it did in every kind of animal. It was the urge to have children. It wasn’t about seeing babies in the street and wanting your own sweet little bundle. It wasn’t about wanting someone to love you. Somehow it was less personal than any of that. It was more fundamental, like hunger or thirst. It was the primitive drive of the species.
And a child could be a new start. It might even bring them together. Without the passion-killer of ducking out to put the cap in, she and Ken might learn to relax with each other. Perhaps she could make him love her. And if none of those hopeful things happened, at least she’d have a child.
When she told Ken she wanted to s
tart a family, he said he’d have to think about it. She’d learned that was his cautious lawyer’s way. Never commit yourself. But that night in bed he made up to her and, when she went to put the cap in, he said, No, Nance, leave it.
It did seem as if things went better after that. Ken was still out two or three nights a week at meetings, but at the weekends he’d find the time for the two of them to go out together: to the Domain to listen to the speakers, or a ferry ride to Manly.
After three months she was sure. The weight of doubt and decision lifted. From now on her role was simple. All she had to do for the next six months was to be a container.
Ken hugged her when she told him, held her close the way she’d always hoped he would. After tea he put the wireless on and they foxtrotted around the kitchen, and when a slow tune came on they danced cheek to cheek. It will be all right, she thought. He’ll be different now. Being a loving father will make him a loving husband.
Bert and Dolly offered their congratulations. You’ll have your dear little baby, Dolly wrote, and didn’t need to say, Even if your husband is a disappointment.
TEN
A WEEK after Ken and Nance had got back from Forster, Germany invaded France. Then it was the Dunkirk business. It looked as though Britain would fall within a month.
Frank wrote to say he’d joined up. He didn’t want to, but Dolly had nagged and it was true, he said, it was a matter of all hands to the pump. There was the disaster in Europe, and then there was Japan as well, heading south through one country after another. Everyone was very sure that Australia was in no danger. The Japanese would never get past Singapore. In the cartoons they were pathetic creatures, buck-toothed and shortsighted, straining away on bicycles. The Whitehall bigwigs called them yellow dwarf slaves. Still, the war was too close for comfort.
Frank was made a bombardier on an anti-tank gun. There was a picture in the paper of a man sitting behind one, swivelling the barrel like a movie camera-man, with two little wheels. There’s a hole the size of a sixpence to look through, Frank wrote. The trick is not to do the natural, stand up to have a proper look. You only get to do that once.
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