The Dressmaker

by Rosalie Ham

  Tilly held the umbrella over the sergeant as he shovelled, the blue cape stuck in folds about him, his black pumps sinking in the clay. The rain trickled down, darkening his stockings.

  Much later Beula heard them singing as she crept up The Hill. She crouched at the back window and saw Tilly Dunnage leaning with Sergeant Horatio Farrat, who was wearing a frock. The kitchen table was littered with empty bottles, discarded clothing and old photograph albums, and the Holy Bible lay open, its pages stabbed and ripped – they’d found no understanding in it, so had killed it. The two mourners swayed together with their heads back singing, ‘You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it –’

  ‘No no no, not that one. That’s exactly what happened!’ said Tilly.

  So Sergeant Farrat sang, ‘Ma, he’s making eyes at me, Ma he’s awful nice to me –’

  ‘NO, definitely not that one either.’

  ‘Who were you with last night? Out in the –’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve got one Til, howbout When I grow too old to dream-–’

  ‘Yes Yes, that’s one she’d’ve liked. Lesgo, onetwo-tree …’

  They steepled together again and sang, ‘When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have you to remember, when I grow too old to dream, your love will live in my heart –’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Tilly, ‘she would have hated that one. All those songs are corruptive, pornographic.’

  ‘No wonder she got into trouble.’

  ‘That’s exactly right. That’s it!’ said Tilly and took the tea cosy from her head and threw it in the air.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s all the fault of persuasive popular song, and a lecher.’

  ‘Solved,’ said the sergeant and sat down at the table. He poured them a glass of champagne and they toasted.

  ‘Lessing Loch Lomon’ again.’

  ‘No more singing,’ said Tilly, ‘it’s corruptive!’ She went to the lounge room and toppled back through the kitchen with the radiogram in her arms.

  Beula jumped away from the window light and lay flat in the dark on the grass. Tilly braked on the veranda and with a grunt slung her radiogram out into the black night. There was a sickening uugghh sound and a muffled thud as Tilly went back inside. She grabbed her records and ran back out with them, stacked them beside her on the veranda, then stood in the oblong yellow light from the doorway, flinging them one by one to the wind.

  • • •

  When the edge of the flying radiogram hit Beula it dented her forehead, broke her nose and gave her mild concussion. She felt her way home along the worn tracks, along the fences she knew so well, and lay down. Her wound started to seep, and a black and green bruise swelled from the raw fleshy cavity in the middle of her face all the way down to her undershot chin and over the creased brow to her hairline.

  On Monday morning Sergeant Farrat took his preparatory bath and waited for Beula. He waited again on Tuesday morning until half past nine, then went looking. There was no response to his knock so he opened the door to Beula’s grease-and-dust-caked kitchen, immediately dancing backwards, coughing. He rushed back to the police car, took a bottle of eucalyptus oil from the glove box and poured it onto his handkerchief. Back at the kitchen door he pressed the scented cloth against his nostrils and entered. He found her, a stiff, black-stained tea towel draped over her head, lifting and sucking back in the middle where a nose should have peaked the material. ‘Beula?’ he breathed. There was a noise like rattling drops in a drinking straw and her arms raised a little. He pinched the edge of the towel and jumped back quickly, dropping it onto the floor. Beula’s eyes were bulging purple-red slits and there was a crusty, blackened hole in the middle of her face. Two brown stumps jutted where her eye teeth had snapped off at the gums.

  The sergeant led her to his car and drove her to the doctor at Winyerp. They sat in the surgery. Beula could make out the fuzzied outline of a white-ish figure moving about in front of her. It said ‘Hmmm.’

  ‘I tripped and fell,’ said Beula through her rotting face and burst adenoids, pink bubbles boiling through her lips.

  ‘You tripped?’ The doctor looked at the sergeant and made a gesture to suggest she’d been drinking.

  ‘It was dark,’ she said.

  ‘You may have suffered internal optical damage – it looks like the eye casement is shattered,’ said the doctor and handed her a letter addressed to a specialist in Melbourne.

  ‘The nasal bone has crashed against the lacrimal bone splintering it. This in turn has severed the lacrimal duct, damaging the sphenoid bone and therefore the optic foramen and, unfortunately, the all important macula luteras. It’s too late to do anything about it now of course …’

  The lights had gone out for Beula.

  Sergeant Farrat gave her dark glasses, tied a scarf around her chin, placed a white cane in her hand and put her on a train to Melbourne with a tag pinned to the back of her cardigan which said, ‘Beula Harridene, C/- police station, Dungatar, Ph: 9 (trunk call)’. Then he went to see Tilly, stepping from his car in the orange glow of dusk, his green-beaded, silk brocade matador’s costume glinting. Tilly had altered it to fit the sergeant by adding gold silk inserts and the sergeant had attached green tassels to them. They stood in her garden, waist deep in flowers and bushes, herbs and vegetables, the air around them clear and fresh from the recent rain.

  ‘I see Molly has put the tip fire out,’ joked the sergeant.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tilly.

  ‘Did you hear about poor Beula?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She’s gone to the sanatorium.’ The sergeant rubbed his hands together.

  ‘Tell me everything,’ said Tilly.

  ‘Well …’ he began, and ended by saying, ‘… it must have been an awful fall, she looks like she’s been hit by the corner of a flying fridge.’

  ‘When did it happen?’ said Tilly.

  ‘The night of Molly’s funeral.’

  She looked up at the heavens and smiled.

  That afternoon Nancy arrived to fetch Mr Almanac. She found him in the back room stuck fast, his head bent into the cupboard where he kept his apothecary measures, his round shoulders resting against the ledge. Nancy carefully backed him out and shunted him out the door, checked for traffic and gave him a gentle shove. He tripped down the kerb and across the road while Nancy switched off the lights, padlocked the refrigerator and secured the front door. Mr Almanac accelerated towards his wife, who was dozing in the sun. He tumbled past her and continued through the house, whose hallway ran from the front door to the back. Nancy glanced across at Mrs A, then up and down the street. She frowned, cupped her hands around her eyes and peered back into the gloomy shop. She looked at Mrs A again, then bolted across the street, past Mrs Almanac, who felt the passing breeze and opened her eyes. ‘Holy Mary, mother of God,’ she heard Nancy say.

  Sergeant Farrat followed Mr Percival Almanac’s foot scrapes all the way across the back yard to the creek’s edge. He stood on the bank looking sadly at the brown water, mosquitos singing around him. He removed his blue cap and rested it over his heart before dropping it despondently on a log and carefully removing and folding his clothes. When all that remained were his red satin boxers he eased into the still creek. In the centre his white head sunk and small bubbles circled on the watery surface, then Mr Almanac’s head rose. The sergeant held him over his shoulder like a rigid upright question mark with slimy green cumbungi streaming from his bent neck, yabbies clinging to his ear lobes and leeches hanging from his lips.

  Tilly stood by the muddy mound of her mother’s grave and related the details of Beula’s and Mr Almanac’s accidents. ‘Like you said, “Sometimes things just don’t seem fair”.’

  • • •

  She heard the g
alah before she reached the crest of The Hill. The committee members of the Dungatar Social Club were being held against the veranda by the bird, which was dancing at them, screeching, wings outstretched, crest rigid. The women wore ‘Tilly originals’ and looked afraid. She strode to the veranda, looked at the galah and said, ‘Shsss.’

  He stopped, cocked his head at her and closed his beak. His crest flattened and he waddled pigeon-toed to the gatepost, climbed to the top, then turned and hissed once more at the intruders.

  ‘Your garden, Tilly,’ said Trudy, ‘so pretty, such a big job you’ve done and still managing to sew so well!’

  They were all smiling at her.

  ‘A very fragrant garden indeed.’

  ‘You have some very unusual plants.’

  Tilly plucked a blade of grass and chewed it.

  Trudy cleared her throat, ‘We’re putting on a eisteddfod –’

  ‘We’re doing Macbeth’, snapped Elsbeth, ‘Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It’s a play. Itheca and Winyerp Dramatic Societies are doing A Streetcar Named Desire and H.M.S. Pinafore –’

  ‘Light entertainment,’ said Muriel disparagingly.

  ‘So we’re doing Macbeth, and we’ve chosen YOU to do the costumes.’

  Tilly looked at each of them. They were all nodding at her, smiling. ‘Really?’ she said, ‘Macbeth?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Trudy.

  Elsbeth held up The Complete Works of Shakespeare, and Costumes Throughout the Ages. ‘We have some ideas about what we want …’

  ‘Show me,’ said Tilly. Elsbeth hurried towards her, the page open at drawings of men dressed in dull togas with rope looped around the waist, full sleeves and scalloped collars and women in tight, draw-string vests.

  ‘I like the ones over the page,’ said Trudy. Tilly turned the page. The pictures showed men costumed in skirts with layers and layers of petticoats and yards and yards of lace dripping from arms covered in voluminous cuffed ruffles and frills. They posed on the page in stockings, below-knee pantaloons with godet bell-bottoms or deep flounces above high-heeled Cromwell slippers tied with large satin bows. Their hats were oversized and heavily plumed. The women wore three-tiered full skirts with ruffled bustles, elaborate multi-storied architect-designed fontanges, feather muffs and jackets with complicated jabots or frilled revers.

  ‘But this is Baroque,’ said Tilly, ‘seventeenth century.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Elsbeth.

  ‘It is Shakespeare,’ said Trudy.

  Muriel was incredulous. ‘You’ve heard of him haven’t you?’

  ‘She may not have,’ said Mona. ‘I hadn’t until last week.’

  Tilly raised an eyebrow and recited,

  ‘Double, double, toil and trouble;

  Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

  Fillet of a fenny snake,

  In the caldron boil and bake;

  Eye of newt and toe of frog,

  Wool of bat and tongue of dog …’

  The committee members looked at each other, confused.

  Tilly raised an eyebrow. ‘Act four scene one, three witches at the cauldron? No?’

  The women remained blank. ‘We haven’t actually read the play yet,’ said Muriel.

  ‘I prefer the costumes I selected, don’t you? asked Trudy.

  Tilly looked directly at Trudy and said, ‘They’d definitely be the most effective.’ Trudy nodded emphatically at her friends.

  Elsbeth took a step closer to Tilly. ‘Can you manage them?’

  ‘I can, but –’ said Tilly.

  ‘How soon can you start?’ interrupted Elsbeth.

  Tilly studied the pictures, thinking. The women looked at each other and shrugged. Then she smiled at them. ‘I’d be more than delighted to contribute to your drama by making these costumes … provided you pay me.’ She snapped the book closed and held it to her breast. ‘You still have outstanding accounts that go back twelve months and more.’

  ‘We’ll bring the matter up at the next meeting,’ said the treasurer, lamely.

  ‘Well, that’s settled then,’ said Elsbeth, wiping her hands down her skirt and starting off down The Hill.

  ‘I won’t start until I’ve been paid the outstanding accounts and I want cash up front. Otherwise I’ll offer to take on Itheca and Winyerp’s costumes instead. They always pay me.’

  Elsbeth and Trudy looked to Muriel, who looked back at them evenly. ‘He’ll never lend it to us,’ she said.

  ‘Mother!’ said Trudy and stepped up to the treasurer, and poked at her nose, ‘You have to ask father.’ Alvin had ceased extending credit to his daughter and her family again, charging only food to the Windswept Crest account – they even had to do without soap.

  Muriel folded her arms. ‘No one’s paid Alvin either, he’s got accounts go back ten years. We can’t feed everyone for nothing forever,’ she said haughtily and glared at Elsbeth. Elsbeth and Trudy looked accusingly at each other.

  ‘Well,’ said Elsbeth, ‘William will just have to wait another year for his new tractor.’

  ‘He can play Macbeth!’ said Trudy.

  ‘Yes!’ they said and the committee moved as one towards the gatepost.

  As she watched the women waddle off down The Hill, Tilly smiled.

  • • •

  Tilly rose early and dressed for gardening, then attacked the French marigold bushes, cutting the branches from the thick stem and carrying the bundles inside. She selected a big bunch of flowering heads and put them in a vase of water, then she stripped the remaining stalks of leaves and flowers, chopped them roughly, and threw them all into a huge pot of boiling water. The kitchen filled with steam, boiled wood and a sweet burned scent. When the marigold water cooled she bottled it. That night she packed a bag and headed for the shire offices.

  28

  Two mornings later Evan woke depressed and moody. He checked his comatose wife in her cot, then lay down and conjured lewd images of Una, but the only thing he felt was an uneasy numbness-– a faint plegia contaminating his limbs and appendages. He stood up and looked down at his penis, hanging like a strip of wet chamois. ‘I’m just anxious,’ he said and started packing.

  Mid-morning Evan threw his Gladstone bag onto the back seat and ducked down behind the wheel of his Wolseley. The curtains on all the neighbours’ windows fell back into place. He set off for Melbourne, eager for Una.

  Tilly’s stomach lurched but she stayed, and when Marigold answered the door she handed her a bunch of French marigolds.

  Marigold’s hand flew to cover her rash. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I’ve brought flowers,’ she said and swept into the Pettymans’ house.

  Marigold sneezed and said, ‘How unusual.’

  ‘Tagetes patula,’ said Tilly. ‘They deter white fly from tomato plants, and they’re good for repelling eelworm in roses and potatoes as well. The roots have a component that deadens the detector that triggers eelworm release – numbs it completely,’ said Tilly.

  Marigold looked at Tilly’s feet. ‘You should have taken your shoes off.’

  Tilly sat down in the lounge room. Marigold studied her features; a fine looking girl with a pale complexion, Evan’s complexion, but Mad Molly’s thick hair and full mouth. ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ she said.

  ‘No you’re not,’ said Tilly.

  Marigold’s eyes bulged and the tendons in her neck rose like a warring lizards, ‘Evan sent a wreath!’

  ‘The very least he could do,’ said Tilly. ‘Shall I find a vase?’

  Marigold grabbed the flowers and rushed out to the kitchen holding them at arm’s length. They were dropping pollen on the carpet. ‘What do you want?’ she called again.

  ‘Nothing – just visiting.’ She picked up a photogr
aph of Stewart on the table beside her and was studying it when Marigold returned and sat down opposite. ‘It’s all very hazy now, but you left I seem to remember, because your mother became unwell?’

  ‘Not quite in that order, however –’

  ‘Where did you learn to sew?’ Marigold fiddled with the button of her dressing gown.

  ‘Lots of places.’

  ‘Like where?’ Marigold’s eyes darted across Tilly’s face, searching.

  ‘I returned to Dungatar from Paris but before that I was in Spain and before that in Melbourne, at a clothing factory. While I was at school in Melbourne I took sewing classes. It wasn’t a very good school, my benefactor –’

  ‘Who was your benefactor, your father?’ Marigold was tugging at the button at her collar now and the veins on her temples pulsed.

  ‘He’ll be paid back,’ said Tilly.

  ‘I had quite a bit of money put aside for Stewart’s education,’ Marigold said and looked out the window, ‘but it’s all gone.’ The button popped off into her fingers.

  Tilly continued, ‘Apprentices don’t get paid much but I managed to travel and keep on with my learning so –’

  ‘Well,’ said Marigold, ‘no one was ever displeased with anything you made for them here, not like that Una …’ She slapped her hands over her mouth, ‘Don’t tell Elsbeth I said that!’

  ‘Never,’ said Tilly. ‘Would you like me to make you a new frock for the eisteddfod?’

  ‘Yes!’ she said and sat forward. ‘I’d like something special, very special. Better than everyone else. I won Belle of the Ball you know. Do you want a cup of tea?’ Marigold flitted into the kitchen, returning a short time later with an afternoon tea tray.

  ‘There’s one thing I’m going to say. I know you didn’t mean to murder that boy,’ she sipped her tea and Tilly’s stomach twisted, ‘that Teddy McSwiney, but I know how Mae felt. You see, my son fell out of a tree and died. Landed on his head.’

  Marigold showed Tilly all her photograph albums – Evan and Stewart when Stewart was three weeks old, Marigold and her parents before they died, the house before the front fence was built, and there was even one of Tilly in a school photo, with Stewart. Marigold glanced at Tilly and said, ‘Where did your mother come from?’