He made noises like a baby, and in some ways was as demanding. Not that Dove had any idea of looking after a baby either. And as for the noises, she had only imagined what Charlie sounded like, having of course never heard him. But she knew he was a manageable child, so much so that Ellis and Vince had settled into an easy routine. After dinner she always got Charlie off to bed and tidied his things while Vince did the dishes, but even before the baby came along he helped around the house. Hence the terrible conflicting emotions in Ellis as she dealt with the realisation, that evening, that she could no longer live with a man she did not love.
Dove saw her again in Betty’s kitchen: almost on cue there was a wail from the front bedroom, where one of the older girls had offered to settle Charlie to sleep with a bottle. Ellis had realised that with her baby so healthy, so palpably here, she was perhaps the worst enemy to poor Betty Denman. Later that evening when she went to fetch him, just after telling Vince they had to leave, he was asleep in the arms of Betty’s niece. Ellis decided then she would have to enlist her father to help with Charlie when she went back to work.
Dove rubbed Viv’s head, hot from the sun. The encounter with Ellis and Les struck her as being entirely plausible, the more she considered it, but only if she worked harder at it. Already the story had become too complex, and leaped around in time. She needed to go further back, and think more carefully about the start. If there was one.
5
When she returned from boarding school for the last time, soon after turning sixteen, Ellis found her father had aged. He was still working at the bank and active in his bowls club, but she thought now how old he was, his hair very grey and thin. All the girls at school had fathers who were much younger than hers.
Since she was so capable there was no need to employ their housekeeper any longer but someone needed to run the place for him, a man who didn’t cook or shop. For the four years Ellis had been at boarding school, Mrs Wood had come around with prepared meals and done the weekly cleaning and laundering for Edgar. Before that she had come every day in the morning and prepared Ellis’s breakfast and taken her to school, then met her again at the school gate in the afternoon and brought her home to prepare dinner until her father returned from work.
Now Ellis took charge of the small household. By that stage she found the kitchen as old-fashioned as Mrs Wood had – her school’s domestic science rooms had featured double stainless steel sinks and electric St George stoves. Their kitchen did not boast a single electric appliance and indeed Mrs Wood had complained when she’d had to plug the iron into the one power point above the bench, which she considered unsafe. She had always brought along her own electric beaters, a Sunbeam handheld, to beat egg whites into snowy peaks for a lemon meringue pie, which was Edgar’s favourite dessert, or if Ellis were lucky, a pavlova. Sometimes as a treat she’d allow Ellis to hold the beaters for the final few minutes while she eyed the power point with suspicion. Mrs Wood now worked for Strathfield Council as a demonstrator, showing housewives the marvels of things like electric frypans that could cook an entire family roast using a fraction of the power of a normal oven.
Three nights a week, Ellis attended the technical college, learning typing and shorthand in the commercial department. Her father had suggested this plan, rather than taking the day classes, as that way she could get an office position and also learn on the job. He had not particularly cared that she become qualified for anything, or gain employment, since to him the house represented enough of an occupation. But one of the wonderful things about her father was that he did not pressure her nor force his opinions on her. Perhaps he understood something of the changing world, sniffed it in the air, and realised that now, a whole generation after the war, after everything had been turned upside down and inside out, after women had driven trams and worked night shifts making ammunition parts and represented constituents in parliament and run their own electrical engineering companies, there could never be a turning back.
At school she had been lucky enough to encounter a couple of teachers who were intelligent and well qualified, who suggested by example rather than outright instruction that there was something more to life than running a house. The irony for Ellis, something she began to feel consciously when she returned from boarding school to commence her adult life, was that she was so very competent at this. And, despite her enthusiasm, untalented when it came to music, or dance, or any of the finer creative pursuits, except for arts and crafts. It would be too easy, she realised, to slip into the role of minding house for her father, then later in life, in his older years or after his death (not that she particularly wanted to think about that), to find she was a spinster with nothing more than a weekly bridge game or tennis to look forward to. Sardines on toast for Saturday dinners – because otherwise why would a person on their own be bothered? – knitting cardigans for charities, and the Tuesday matinée movie.
The other girls at school planned to become teachers themselves, or to do nursing. A small number went on to something called finishing school, in the city, which Ellis understood to be a place where girls practised walking with books on their heads, or learned the correct order of cutlery for banquets. She had no desire for anything in particular, but only knew she was not suited for teaching, had no interest in emptying bedpans and anyway was squeamish when it came to syringes and blood. And certainly she could not see the need for learning how to cross her legs elegantly, or that sprinkling sliced tomato with sugar made for a better sandwich. These were the sorts of things that, in her view, should come pretty naturally to any reasonably intelligent young woman.
Going through the list of courses on offer at the technical college, she rejected Hairdressing and Floristry, Cookery and Craftwork on similar grounds: she did these things all the time and had done since she was a girl.
She had placed the college’s brochure down on the kitchen table one night, next to her father, waiting while she served the dinner. Fried chops and cauliflower in cheese sauce, one of his favourites.
‘I don’t need to learn more cookery,’ she said. ‘I already know how to fold beaten egg whites for a soufflé.’ She pointed to the illustration and laughed.
‘What about this? You like flowers.’ He pointed to Floristry.
‘An uneven number of rose stems makes for a pleasing display,’ she read out. ‘I don’t think so, Dad.’
He adjusted his glasses and read up and down the list before putting the brochure down and tapping hard at the last course listed.
‘Typing,’ he said, ‘and general secretarial skills. That would be handy.’
Later, when Ellis thought about it, she realised he was right. Besides, it would be something new.
At times like this she yearned to ask her father what her mother had done, who she had been, but all her life she had known that was a forbidden topic. Had her mother been artistic, fashionable, practical? Was she a nurse or a librarian or just a young woman like so many young women, someone who marked time working in a shop or minding children until their real career came along and they married?
In her bedroom that night she had stared into the dressing table mirror, perhaps the same mirror of the same dressing table her mother had used. When she was younger Ellis would gaze fiercely into this mirror, into her own dark blue eyes, at her dark brown hair, trying to will her mother’s image into being, wondering if there was any similarity at all. Tonight she felt almost angry at the thought. Her mother had gone away and left her when she was just a baby. She would be nothing like her mother, nothing at all. She hoped her mother, whoever she was, wherever she now lived, had never made a perfect soufflé or known how to knit in bobble stitch, as Ellis did thanks to Mrs Wood.
She would be more than domestically accomplished. After finishing her secretarial certificate she planned to take bookkeeping and accountancy, though so far she had peeked into the rooms of those classes on her way to Miss Allman’s Tuesday night typin
g class and seen only men in the lecture rooms of the Mary Ann Street premises. But after the revision exercises and the practice typing she did on a dummy keyboard at home, her hands covered in a black cloth and her eye on the clock, Ellis found that her days stretched out. If her father had not been there to make tea for, or to check that his bowling gear was all clean and pressed, his sandwiches packed and thermos filled, then she might have howled inside that large cool house, howled for the suffocation, the hollowness, of her life at sixteen.
6
When she was at university, Dove had settled in with a small group of friends who were mainly older than she. Perhaps it was her single-child status, or her mother’s relaxed style of parenting which meant she had rarely been constrained by rules in the ways other children she knew seemed to be, but she had always felt older than she was, and uncomfortable around people her own age. Most of her classmates struck her as immature and boring. Their madcap escapades – illicit parties in the colleges, nude midnight runs around the ovals, or quests to find the most bogan clubs in the outer suburbs – seemed to dominate their imagination. One acquaintance found hilarity in seeking out the most unreconstructed cafés in town, dragging everyone off to places with laminex and studded vinyl booths to eat meals like minute steak with tinned mushrooms in sauce, served with white bread and margarine. Look, he would say, curried sausages! A pie and tinned peas! They were all meant to exclaim over the meals, even the menus themselves, typed crookedly and in sticky plastic folders. After the second adventure she could not see the point, while the sight of the proprietors of these places, always a Greek or Italian husband-and-wife team, dressed in grease-spattered white overalls, hovering uncertainly between humiliation and delight at the sudden patronage, disturbed her.
She knew her friends thought her boring too. Nerdy and straight. But she actually liked attending classes, enjoyed her studies. To her university was not a place to be endured while the rest of life went on in bars or at the beach or down the snow in winter, it was her life. Art and design were exciting. Sometimes she even found it thrilling. The mature age students were the only ones who seemed to share this. They were a loose knot of friends, coming together after lectures in a corner of the university’s central coffee lounge to share notes or flip through magazines. Sometimes they wandered up to Newtown to see a movie at the Dendy, or they walked down to get cheap meals in Chinatown. But they didn’t visit each other’s homes and never went away together. There were a couple of tighter strands in this knot of acquaintances. One of these was Martin, a tall gaunt man who never smiled, who was studying architecture, but distractedly as if something else were always on his mind. Later Dove learned he had switched degrees, having nearly completed civil engineering. Another was a fey woman who dressed in long velvety skirts and always wore hats, even in lectures. Martin had an alarming yet admirable habit of appearing at lectures to announce some event, student or political, the sort of thing that did not interest Dove, making the lecturer wait on the side of the podium while he finished his speech. He would then lope away to some other more important activity and never, as far as Dove recalled, attended his lectures. Angela, the velvety woman, would sit in the front row and interrupt with questions. Dove wondered if these people’s ages conferred a status on them in the eyes of their teachers. She would never have dared skip classes or ask questions. Martin and Angela trailed numerous friends behind them, what with their political activities, and in Angela’s case, her tarot card readings and reputation for benign witchcraft. Dove was inclined to be suspicious of them both, but her desire for friends, or perhaps her suppressed fear of being friendless, kept her in check. And they were pleasant enough to her. Or they were not unpleasant.
She became accustomed to meeting them in the student coffee lounge, where they were sometimes sitting with a much younger man. For the first few times Dove and he never spoke. These were not the sorts of gatherings where people were necessarily introduced to each other. One day after lunch the booth was unusually full, and Martin and Angela arrived just as some others were leaving. They stood around sipping their coffees, Angela flicking her long black hair over her shoulder, waiting to slide into a seat. Martin was consulting some papers. He always had papers and manila folders, held loose so that they often slipped to the floor. He gave the impression that his entire life, like his arms, was profoundly cluttered, as if his intellect and imagination were so far reaching, so broad and diverse, that they could not be contained by the organisational tools of lesser students, such as Dove, with her colour-coded ring folders and Post-it notes. It was the type of disorganisation you might attribute to genius. When Martin dropped papers or borrowed pens – he rarely returned them – you somehow felt that pearls were landing at your feet. Picking them up and handing them back – flyers for a forthcoming rally at Town Hall square, press releases for a visiting activist, never course notes or journal articles – you felt enriched, briefly. Your pen would at least be conscripted into the service of a worthy cause.
Dove was indeed at that moment groping through her bag for a Ball Pentel, her favourite type, to lend to Martin when she became aware of the younger man slipping into the booth, moving close beside her and pressing her against the wall. She felt his arm behind her and stiffened. He smiled. She found the pen, wishing she had a cheap biro instead, and handed it over, glancing at the man’s face, side on. He seemed to have a pleasant smile.
‘What are you doing later today?’ he said.
Before she could answer he turned to Martin and asked him about that new member of parliament who’d said something inflammatory about the country being swamped by Asians.
‘John Howard’s encouraged that,’ was all that Martin said, shaking his head. ‘Fucking hell.’
She opened her mouth to reply, then shut it again. She was doing nothing later that day, or just doing the usual. Going home to the flat where she still lived with her mother, revising her notes (boring, nerdy) having dinner, watching Friends, the new show that everyone was excited about, which she tried to be. Her mother hated it. Instead, she would be reading. She was always reading. Tonight, if she hadn’t already finished it while Dove was at university, it would be Camille’s Bread, shortlisted for that year’s Miles Franklin award. Jane had been telling Dove she should read it. It was set in Glebe for a start, and she was sure Dove would like it. It’s about us, she said, ordinary inner city people, about relationships, and love and being a parent. Dove turned off at the mention of macrobiotic food but her mother’s enthusiasm stayed with her. Jane always read the most up-to-date novels. She had already read through the highlights of the latest fiction listed for awards, what people were talking about. Highways to a War, she told Dove, was all about loss and moral values and it was admirable but it did not really do it for her like Camille’s Bread did, which was about bread for a start: how amazing was that!
‘Dove,’ she said, ‘don’t you remember when you were a kid how much you liked white slices, how you’d pull them out of the bread bag just like Camille and eat them with no butter, no Vegemite, nothing?’
What a small thing. She couldn’t imagine telling this man any of that. She knew what she was meant to say. Going to see Cosi or Love and Other Catastrophes at the Dendy cinema, or catching the latest Midnight Oil performance at the Revesby Workers’ Club, an acceptably unreconstructed venue.
By the time the man had resumed his attention to her, Dove had decided.
‘Going home and watching the news,’ she said, getting up. ‘I want to see what this Pauline Hanson woman is all about.’ She thought his mouth dropped open as she moved away.
7
She met Ron at church soon after returning home. She had not particularly planned to keep attending church, it was something they’d had to do every week at her Anglican school, but she kept it up out of habit, and for the welcome routine it provided. But an older woman had approached her one Sunday after morning prayer and grabbed her hands.
; ‘You should come in the evenings,’ she’d said. ‘More fun for young people like you.’
And Ellis realised it would be a good way to make some friends her own age, now that her life had entered a whole new phase. Doing her secretarial certificate and looking for a part-time position in an office left little room for going out and meeting people.
It turned out that two of the woman’s seemingly numerous children were involved, running the fellowship group and playing guitar. They met at seven-thirty in the church hall for an hour or so after church, and drank lemonade and weak coffee with biscuits while they sang folk songs or played records, and discussed Bible readings. Sometimes they went to the bowling alley on Saturday night, or to the movies. One of the members was, like her, an only child but with generous, hospitable parents who allowed the group access to their huge house, which had a pool and double garage. They sometimes gathered here, in the living room if Steve’s parents went out, which they often did, or the recreation room adjacent to the garage where Steve had a number of musical instruments, a dartboard and even his own fridge.
Ron had joined the group several months before she had, along with his friend Philip, both of them having left a church in a neighbouring suburb. When asked why by various members of the youth group, Philip always responded firmly though non-specifically, indicating that their church had not been nearly so progressive as St John’s, where the rector was happy to let the youth group take charge of the music for the evening service, and where the rector’s wife, who was not much older than the members of the group, wore white lipstick and sometimes appeared at the evening services in pantsuits, to the outrage of some of the congregation.
The Women's Pages Page 3