Tonight is a special occasion. It’s a work thing. A party to launch the new consultants’ clinic. Fancy place, atrium preening with plants, a coffee dock, and lifts – a far cry from the old dingy surgeries and tatty waiting rooms. You work for a foot surgeon. Mr Stafford. He’s portly, self-important. But he’s got a right, you suppose. He wears three-piece suits like a lawyer and a handkerchief in his breast pocket, his only concession to flamboyance. He keeps his distance – from you, from his patients. He’s like an old-fashioned headmaster. You think he would secretly like to be called Sir. You wouldn’t mind, but in this day and age you’re not sure if that’s not a crime too. So he relies on his bearing and his obvious wealth to command respect. With his fees, that’s not hard. He’s married, of course, and years older than you, but he depends on you for all sorts of things. His Girl Friday he calls you, which shows his age and yours, because you get the reference. George says you’re like the ‘other woman’ for him. Nothing could be further from your mind but George has always revelled in being outrageous.
You met her at secretarial school. She started off as your pal, at least that’s what Mother called her. The one with the strange name, Mother would add, as if you were besieged with friends. Short for Georgina.
‘What a handle,’ she would say, ‘I don’t know what possessed my parents!’
‘Why didn’t you shorten it to Georgie?’ you asked.
‘George makes more of a statement,’ she said.
George was always brighter than you. Her brisk, brunette manner was a cover for ambitions a well-read girl from her background couldn’t afford. You and she started out working in the typing pool at the gas company together. Clackety-clack, ding! A synchronised orchestra like Esther Williams and her troupe on dry land. You went for lunch every day at the Parliament Hotel, and to dances on Saturday nights at the Arcadia, long since demolished. Your first holiday abroad – when you were thirty-two, imagine! – was with George. You went to Rome on an organised tour. It was only after you arrived that you realised it was for honeymooners, eloping or fleeing their families, or wanting to get a blessing direct from the Holy Father. You and George were the only singletons. That’s the word they use now, a production-line term as if you were cartons of milk or an easy cheese serving. George flirted madly with anything in pants, but you were too embarrassed. A pair of the hotel’s breakfast waiters, brothers, took a fancy to you. There was a particular night on the Piazza Navona – the boys took you to see the Neptune fountain. Ridiculous to call them boys, but now you can’t see them as men. George was walking ahead, draped around Nando – how lightly she distributed her favours, you thought; what a prude you were then – and you were leaning against the curved lip of the fountain desperately holding off his brother. You remember the hardness of Licio’s body grinding up against yours, how insistent his ardour was, and how little it meant.
‘Cara,’ he breathed.
And suddenly you thought of Mother. No, not suddenly. You were always wondering what she would think. Perhaps if you had succumbed then. What? Perhaps you could have banished Mother altogether. But you couldn’t. And then you dissolved. Not discreet ladylike weeping, but something more akin to the fountain beside you, as if some inner hydrant had been opened and was spraying everywhere, drenching the bystanders. Licio backed away, hands aloft in defence, then thumping his breast in Latin exasperation, saying ‘I do nothing.’ Mother was dead only six months then.
‘What on earth’s the matter?’ George asked after the brothers had sloped off fearing your hysteria was contagious. You shook your head. You felt ashamed, as if you had acceded to some squalid backstreet encounter and miserable because you knew you had queered George’s chances.
* * *
Despite that, she stayed. Despite her beautiful kissable mouth (she has always known how to make the most of her best features) and her sauciness and her proud, uncompromising name. You felt sure she would marry but she never did. Here the two of you are – twenty-five years on – still girls together, though others might snidely call you companions. She will be at the party too – for backup. Nothing worse than wandering around these drinks and finger-food functions without an anchor, without someone to go back to. That’s what George has become. The woman you go back to. Like Mother, really.
There, ready. Except for the jewellery. Mother’s locket, with that picture of Father cut down to size. You thread her wedding band around the chain. It wouldn’t be right to wear it on your finger. On your breast a costume brooch – also hers – like a spray of baby’s breath.
Exploitation, George calls it. ‘I wouldn’t do it for my fella,’ she says hotly. Hers is the president of a bank. George plays golf with hers; she dresses down for casual Friday.
But you don’t see it that way. The surgeon’s wife is sickly and can’t often attend these things. Nothing Mr Stafford can do about it. (Her feet are perfect, apparently.) So you’re roped in. You’re happy to do it. You see it as part of your job. You collect his dry-cleaning, you make him tea, you arrange his appointments, you order flowers for his wife. Soon you’ll be doing the rounds of nursing homes recommending the best one for her particular needs. Well, you do have expertise in that area. So what’s the big deal about swanning around in your finery for an evening, playing the role of hostess? Although you’d never admit it to George, you actually enjoy it. You enjoy being mistaken for his wife. You like the way he steers you about the room with his hand lightly at your elbow and introduces you as merely Pauline (though in his rooms it’s always Miss Larchet) as if you two are intimate. That’s why you have to look the part. That’s why the impersonation has to be perfect. You are not playing yourself.
Perfume – always the last thing before you leave. A quick spray at the ears and the wrists. It buoys you to the door like the splash of holy water the ladies at the home used to spray you with. A good luck charm, a way of warding off evil. Blue Grass. Mother is with you.
ASSISTED PASSAGE
It was not a glamorous ocean liner. Not like the Oriana or the Castel Felice she’d seen in the brochures. No, the Australis was a peeling monster, a colossus of weeping rust and complaining steel; the gangways smelled of sea rot. When they’d pulled out of Southampton, the passengers had unspooled thousands of streamers, the frail satin-coated ribbons of candyfloss pink and bridal white strained and then snapped, amidst a tremendous symphony of triumph and grief. Names were flung into the air, arcing flimsily like trailing cobwebs across the narrow strip of roiling water that separated ship from shore, as the streamers sank dejectedly into the fermenting foam and the crowd on the quay was reduced to a frantic, fleshy blur.
Anita imagined the Australis as the little ship, swollen-sailed, in the bottom right-hand corner of the schoolroom map at the Tranquila convent. She heard the ports of call in a teacher’s droning rote. Port Said, Aden, Colombo, Fremantle, Melbourne, Sydney. The momentousness of the journey only became real when they were gathered all together for safety drill on A deck, a ragbag of refugees and migrants, families like steps of stairs, gangs of lanky young men and tight bunches of girls with brassy laughter and high-built hair.
Anita had shared her first night at sea with just such girls in Cabin C12, a tight coffiny space, overseen by a glassy grey monocle.
‘Would you look at this? No better than steerage,’ Stasia Kearns muttered. ‘Sure, the convicts would have better than this.’ Stasia was from Tipperary, plain and plain-speaking. Anita was assigned the bottom bunk, sleeping under Stasia – the Irish side of the cabin, the other girls joked. Muriel Kendall from Glasgow (call me Mew) and Lil Fuller, a Londoner, made up the group, whose rituals were to become so familiar − Stasia undressing like a nun on a strand, struggling out of her clothes under cover of her dressing gown, Mew and Lil gaily stripping off. Both of them boasted exotic underwear – lace-topped slips and coloured knickers – peach and peppermint. Mew backcombed her hair and sprayed her beehive into a sticky helmet; Lil had a miniature city of cold creams and compact
s and an elaborate bedtime routine of blemish-hunting.
‘Oh Gawd,’ she would moan, ‘a nose hair!’ Tweezers were brandished with operatic brio.
In their company, armed with only hairbrush and toothpaste, Anita felt like a scrubbed and indolent child.
They were barely out of port when the feverish round of on-board romances started. Mew took her feline nickname, her beehive hair and her tight shift dresses to the Brisbane bar where beer came cheap at five cents a glass and flirted with a series of young men. But her constant companion was Viktor Varga, a Hungarian music teacher who practised on the bar-room piano all day. He must have been forty, a sombre man with professor spectacles and a russet beard, and miles too old for Mew – Lil said she was making a fool of him − but he was invaluable as a source of gossip, a constant witness to the shenanigans that were supposedly going on right under their noses.
‘Vic says there’s two fellas who’ve already swapped their wives,’ Mew reported. ‘So they’ll be setting up house with strangers when they get to Sydney.’
Stasia tut-tutted; Lil paid little attention. She was single-minded in her devotion. She lusted after the assistant bursar, Bob Penney, a clean-cut fellow with pinched-thin features and a dapper air, who sat in a timbered kiosk on B deck dispensing cash or transcribing pencilled messages of love and regret and transforming them into the rat-tat urgency of telegrams. Lil loved the uniform, the seamed trousers, the gold epaulettes, the peaked cap.
‘As good as getting an officer,’ she said as she invented excuses to parade past his little box with the three clocks overhead, an owlish chorus line of London, Sydney and New York time.
‘They’re not allowed to fraternise, you know,’ Stasia said.
‘What?’
‘Not allowed to mix with the passengers,’ Stasia explained.
She was the only one spoken for. Promised to Frank W. McKinney, the manager of a sheep station in Western Australia.
‘What’s the W stand for, darling?’ Lil asked.
‘I never asked,’ Stasia said miserably.
She had ribboned bundles of his letters, which she spread out on her bunk and leafed through like a perplexed bookkeeper. They’d been corresponding for two years – Stasia had answered his ad in a lonely hearts column. Wanted, it had read, Irish colleen to make an exile very happy. Build a little bit of home in a far-off land. Must be able to cook. Stasia had a photograph of him, ruddy and corpulent, standing, arms folded, on a belt of red earth bisected by a slash of blue horizon.
‘So he’s really only a pen pal,’ Lil said.
‘Oh no,’ Stasia said, ‘he’s popped the question.’
Lil’s silent oh mirrored the porthole.
‘We’re engaged,’ she said as she wrung her naked ring finger. ‘On paper.’
‘What about you?’ Lil, narrow-eyed, demanded of Anita.
* * *
What about her? She was travelling on assisted passage to a new life in Sydney. Her Uncle Ambrose was sponsoring her. He’d visited the summer before, arriving unannounced with a great welcome for himself. Her father was the superintendent in St Jude’s Hospital (janitor, fixer of beds, jack of all trades) and they lived in a small cottage just inside the gates. Anita had never met her uncle before and he was most unexpected. A big beery man who towered over her neat father in his mustard work coat. Uncle Ambrose came bearing a wallet full of photographs of toothy boys and a blonde woman with sunglasses and a polka-dot dress.
‘Meet Peggy,’ Ambrose said, ‘the wife.’
‘Not the wife he went out with,’ Mam muttered.
‘So what are your girls up to, Mossie?’ Ambrose asked.
Mam inhaled deeply. Viv had just announced she wanted to enter; by September she would be a postulant. She had incubated her piety in the draughty classrooms of the Tranquila convent, thriving on the penitential discipline, the ringing of bells, the droning of prayers and the robust Christianity the nuns offered. At home, The Word came sailing through the letterbox but seemed destined directly for Viv; she would snaffle it quickly and take it into the bathroom, reading it behind the locked door. It was a glossy magazine – well, by their standards – boasting full-colour plates of the accomplishments of the Foreign Missions. White-robed Fathers posed in the doorways of adobe mission churches, or stood surrounded by beaming parishioners. Viv pinned one of these pictures over the bed. It showed a barefoot, umber-skinned boy climbing among the high branches of an orange tree with a large wicker basket strapped around his waist. Behind him there was a searing blue sky. The caption read: Moses, our houseboy, gathers in the harvest. Anita often gazed up at Moses and thought, if there is a heaven, this must be it. The acid sky. A tree that bore oranges – imagine! And a beautiful boy with a dazzling smile to fetch them down.
Up till then, Anita had thought she and Viv shared everything. A room crushed under the eaves, a sagging double bed. She’d known Viv’s perilous menstruation, slept in the copper snaggle of her hair. But with Viv’s announcement, she’d realised how little she knew. When she wasn’t looking, God had come between her and Viv.
‘One of them wants to be a nun and the other one might as well be,’ Mam said.
‘Lenore,’ Anita’s father said warningly.
Sensing the discord, Ambrose eyed Anita.
‘And what about you, Neet?’ Ambrose was the first to call her that, making her name sound like an anagram.
She shrugged. She was eighteen, just finished school and hadn’t thought about the future, her own or anybody else’s. She hadn’t been much of a scholar. She struggled with the big picture of History, Mathematics defeated her, she scorched and burned in Home Economics. The only reprieve came in Geography. The ritual naming of things. Principal towns and their industries; rivers and their tributaries, the mapping of boundaries. Her heart lifted whenever the laminated map was pulled down over the blackboard. She loved to trace the jagged outlines of countries and the intricate fieldwork of continents. She would run her hand along the grid-lined oceans. When she placed her finger on the black spot that was home, high up and almost out of reach, she felt the tiny pulse of connection. What she longed for, though, was a kind of telescopic vision so that she could see all the other worlds that were contained in there – St Jude’s, the cramped rooms of home, but mostly, the insides of other people’s heads.
‘What plans does she have, Mossie?’ Ambrose demanded, all business.
Her poor gentle da looked at her quizzically. There’d been talk of a secretarial course and afterwards the typing pool at the Gas Board. Girls like her didn’t have plans; life took its course; things happened.
‘She should come out our way. Trip of a lifetime. We’d sponsor her, see her right. Great life out there, Moss. We’d fix her up with a nice Aussie bloke.’
That was the clincher for Mam. She had often regaled Anita and Viv with tales of her own ancient flirtations. Racy episodes with young men that dissolved into hilarity in the retelling or petered out with the same line. ‘And then I met your father.’
Anita wasn’t sure if it was a happy ending.
‘Soon,’ her mother would go on, as if she couldn’t wait, ‘your titties will grow like this.’ She grabbed one of her capacious breasts and placed Anita’s hand on it. ‘Then your monthly bleed. Ready to be a woman.’ The word had a fat, obscene sound. Anita could hear the womb in the middle of it. Her titties, as if in sympathy, barely grew. Now with Viv out of the picture, all of her mother’s romantic energy would be trained on her.
‘She’d love that, Ambrose, wouldn’t you, Nita?’ Mam had said.
It was a done deal, as far as her mother was concerned, as good as an arranged marriage.
Nothing could have prepared her for the terrible vertigo of seafaring. The heft and sway of the waves formed a sickening horizon at the portholes, the decks seemed always at a dizzying tilt. When storms came, they churned not only her innards, but the digestion of the ship. It became sick in a gale, coughing up its fixtures. In the dining room t
he cutlery would fall in a silvery faint, the soup bowls drooled.
Port Said was their first stop, though they were not allowed to disembark. All the same, Mew urged them to don their best dresses, in which they promenaded along B deck. Below them hawkers held up cages of screeching birds. There were goats on tethers and chickens in crates.
‘A gunny gunny man,’ Bursar Bob said cheerily, ‘look girls! He’s going to do a trick.’
They crowded around the rails, Lil moving in to his side, Mew winking at Anita in companionable conspiracy.
At the foot of the gangway, a large robed man with an extravagant moustache held a little chick in his palm and lifted it up to them, as if for inspection. He stroked its beak and made purring sounds at the golden furry ball. Anita expected a swish of handkerchief and for the peeping chick to disappear. The conjuror smiled, a silvery flash, popped the chicken into his mouth and swallowed it whole. He beat his chest and roared triumphantly. Coins rained down on him from the Australis. He scrabbled desperately on the ground amid the hail of copper, then plucked a fresh chick from a crate by his feet. Anita thought she was going to be sick.
The Australis moved on. They approached the Canal. The Suez, a puckered seam Anita remembered from the schoolroom map. After so much open space they were suddenly enclosed; after so much solitude on the high seas, they were suffocated by land, miles of it, ochre and tinder dry, flat and arid, sentries of palm trees the only relief from the cloudless skies. And after weeks as a solitary ship on a singular journey, there were other craft, liners and tankers and launches, as if this narrow tumult of water were spawning craft. It was a welcome break from the vastness of ocean, the monotony of an empty sea. They travelled through the Canal at night. As darkness fell, the Australis sprouted illuminated wings; the crested insignia on her prow opened up and on its nether side was a huge searchlight by which they navigated their way. It was like a giant moth-catcher, or a portable moon that kept just ahead of them. Halfway down they halted in the Great Bitter Lake to let the north-bound convoy through. Our sister ship, Bursar Bob declared, as the Sydney passed by and recognised the Australis with an ill-tempered belch of her klaxon. Lining her decks, leaning over the rails, their doppelgängers waved at them. Anita stared at the familiar silhouette, the same geometry of funnel and porthole; even their signature smoke scrawl in the sky was replicated. The Sydney drew level and for a moment they were twinned. And then, with an impatient belch, she was gone. Anita, standing on deck, felt her old life receding.
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