The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  They first talked together, alone, in the huge kitchen at Steve’s place, having volunteered to take care of the coffee while the others finished listening to a program on the radio.

  ‘Can you help me set out the cups?’ she said. ‘And find the sugar.’

  ‘Yes, for sure.’ He hunted around in the pantry and produced a sugar bowl and a packet of Scotch Finger biscuits.

  ‘Should we open them?’

  ‘Why not? There’s plenty of food there. Looks like Steve’s olds eat nothing but sweet biscuits.’

  Away from Philip, he seemed more chatty, relaxed. Ellis noticed they did everything together, though Philip was at teachers’ college and would soon be doing his two years’ country service. Philip was a keen amateur photographer and was forever fiddling with lenses and coloured filters. If he didn’t have his Canon around his neck it would not be far away, in his briefcase or in the car. Those celebrating twenty-firsts, and the couple of engagements within the group, had been presented with dozens of photographs of the event, where Philip had almost without their realising taken unofficial photos. When people, some who had not known him very long, offered to pay for the prints he always magnanimously brushed them aside, claiming he was glad to practise his skills, and besides Ron often developed them in his laboratory, after work. Ron had once mentioned to the group that Phil could have been a professional, if he wanted, but his friend had frowned and, it seemed to Ellis, shut him down.

  Ron worked at the university as a laboratory assistant. After that first night in Steve’s kitchen he began paying her special attention and if she suspected that Philip was somehow miffed, these suspicions were allayed when Philip – despite a dark and glowering sort of demeanour, one suggestive of strong tempers and inflexible views – extended his great and talkative wit towards her, almost pointedly, it seemed. Though the first few times he came upon Ellis and Ron talking together, in a corner of Steve’s recreation room, or on the church porch after service, he stared then turned on his heel and found someone else to talk to or direct his camera at. But then he also went out of his way to be helpful to Ellis, offering lifts here and there if she needed them. One evening he appeared in his mother’s Hillman Minx as she was walking down the steps of the technical college in Mary Ann Street.

  ‘I’m here to drive you home,’ he said. The passenger door was already open as if there were some sort of arrangement.

  She was flattered, and disturbed, easing herself into the seat while trying to thank him as well as seek an explanation.

  ‘Your boyfriend’s busy.’ He said it like Ron was an affliction, and she was demanding.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting him, actually.’ She pushed aside the clutter of camera equipment on the floor of the car. ‘He hardly ever picks me up.’

  Philip ignored that. All the way he chatted nonstop about plans he and Ron had for a camping trip in the next holidays. She had the distinct feeling these plans were meant to convey something to her.

  The next evening she asked Ron if he had put the idea to Philip to pick her up.

  ‘And is it true you’re going to the Kangaroo Valley in the summer break?’ Not that she was proprietorial, just that she felt he should have mentioned it. But he only shook his head and smiled.

  ‘That’s Phil for you! Full of odd ideas.’

  Philip made suggestions as to where she might get a job, gave advice on where she should shop for clothes (his three sisters had discovered all the bargain stories in town), and loaned her books on odd topics that from politeness she pretended interest in: a biography of John, the saint for whom their church was named, a book about religious icons. Along with his passion for photography, and his love of football and cricket, he had a strangely prodigious knowledge of church history, which to her seemed an odd thing in a geography teacher. All his interactions with her comprised a mixture of enthusiasm and even generosity but with an unmistakable disdain, as if she were a crippled relative whom his mother had ordered he be kind to. He never once betrayed a sense that there might have been something between Ellis and Ron, despite using the word boyfriend with special disdain.

  *

  Away from Philip, Ron was an insistent sort of man, and she became carried away by his infectious enthusiasm for fun. Whether they were simply taking a walk around the park at night, chatting and joking, or sitting in the car twisting the radio dial this way and that, getting the latest hits, time spent with Ron was always something of an adventure.

  He made her laugh. Besides, he had a job, he’d bought his own car, new, and was paying it off, and he’d already travelled. He’d been camping in New Zealand and had cruised around the Fiji islands with his family when he was sixteen, her age. And although he still lived with his parents, he and his brother shared a converted garage as a bedroom and boys’ den. It was a place of late-night comings and goings with a radio left on most of the time. Eric always seemed to be going out just when they arrived back from church or a movie. There was an old lounge chair with its legs sawn down so it slumped in front of a second television, bought when Eric had turned twenty-one two years before. Ellis’s father had only acquired his first television while she was away at boarding school. He spent long patient minutes before every program fiddling with its controls to get a good picture and by the time he was done she felt almost intrusive, asking to watch a show she wanted.

  Most amazing of all in Ron and Eric’s den was something called a lava lamp, which Ron’s cousin had recently brought back from America, a dim lamp with orange-coloured water and blobs of pale wax. The first night he took her to his place, she was fixated by it. He held her close and turned her head to face him while he reached around and up her jumper. She watched the blobs that rose and fell with a slow hypnotic pace.

  ‘Kiss me,’ he murmured, feeling down her side, across her breasts, and down her waist, past her hips, before cupping her buttocks firmly.

  Kiss him? She did not know how. And if she thought about it she would know even less.

  He then turned all the lights off except for the lava lamp and pulled back the blankets for them to snuggle under in the chilly room. It was winter and she kept most of her clothes on. Before she realised it, they were not just playing around, as he’d done before a few times in the car, when he pushed his hands up under her skirt and past the band of her pants, another time when he had pressed her against the porch wall and released her breasts from her bra, at the same time placing her hand against his hard groin. She felt his fingers fumbling around, heard him sigh, close into her neck, then felt some great pressure between her legs, followed by a sudden warmth that could have been her own body or his. Despite what she had understood from all the talk at school, it didn’t hurt at all. Even as it was over and Ron was groaning with his head on her chest and she could feel a dampness in her crotch, she was not entirely sure whether they had done it or not. Not until Ron raised his head and said, ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think so.’ There didn’t seem to be any blood, though she felt sodden with something.

  ‘Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.’

  She pushed herself up in his bed and looked down on him, his hair flopping over his forehead.

  ‘It’s okay. It was all right.’ All right? Why would she say that? Wasn’t it meant to be the most amazing thing in the world?

  ‘Your fault, though,’ he said, reaching up to kiss her again. ‘So damn sexy. I just couldn’t help myself.’

  Then he gave her a handkerchief and she cleaned herself and dressed, refusing to let him put on the overhead light. She retied her shoes by the glow of the lava lamp. A lump of wax in the shape of Casper the friendly ghost separated into two and rose to the top.

  *

  Ron drove the car slowly along the street until they were three houses before Ellis’s, then cut the engine. VWs had such a distinctive tick-tick sound. Deceiving her father did not com
e easily, for she loved and respected him with equal devotion, but this wasn’t the first time she’d stolen illicit time with Ron. As she was so late, she would have to walk down the side path to where the back door would be unlocked. Even though it was dark she knew her way, knew without needing to look when to avoid tripping on the raised crack in the path, knew to clear the corner downpipe without kicking it or stepping on the grate. Her father’s light in the front room was off, she’d observed as they drove past. The screen door would not squeak if she opened it slowly enough, and then her bedroom was at the kitchen end of the hall. If her father did hear her she could always have just been going to the bathroom right next to it.

  They sat in the dark looking ahead, Ellis twisting her hands in her lap while Ron drummed on the steering wheel with his fingertips. This time they’d not been to Ron’s place, but had just been sitting in the car for ages after church. She could have walked home, it was only a few blocks, but he had insisted on driving her. If her father did know she wasn’t coming straight home every Sunday, he had said nothing, seeing as having a daughter attend youth fellowship after the evening service was hardly cause for concern in anyone’s book. If only he knew, Ellis thought, twisting her hands tighter. She realised they were trembling so she placed them under her armpits. Ron stiffened beside her.

  ‘No need to be like that,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’ She turned to look at him but his face was in profile. He had an attractive straight nose and dark hair that flopped over his brows, which he was prone to pushing back in an unselfconscious gesture that she had found endearing right from the start.

  ‘So aloof.’

  ‘How do you expect me to be?’ Now she felt a distinct wave of revulsion for him. Perhaps the strain echoed through her voice, but he turned and placed his hand over hers and pressed them firm.

  ‘I’m sorry, Ellie. I’ll sort something out, I promise.’ He pulled her head towards him and laid it on his chest. She suppressed a sob, wishing she could believe him but doubting that he could ever sort this something out. Even her father never called her Ellie.

  ‘I’d better go.’

  The worst thing, thought Ellis, trying to make her hands stay still while he hummed in the dark, was that he had not really even been her boyfriend, despite Philip’s occasional arid use of the word. They’d been seeing each other, that was true. But in the eight months or so, there had been no real date, no night alone at the movies, just the two of them. No quiet dinner at a restaurant somewhere. Nothing to mark out that what they were doing was somehow special, set apart from the rest of the group. She went along with him to fellowship events as if she were any of the other girls. At times in the movies if they were at the end of a row or behind the others, in the dark he would hold her hand and sometimes press it into his lap. He never, though, put his arm around her, only those few times they were alone at his place.

  And he had never appeared at her front doorstep bearing a rose or an orchid, to shake hands with her father and promise to drive carefully and bring her home by ten-thirty. The rest of the young people in their group were aware that she and Ron had a thing going but that it was also casual. Had either of them disappeared, or had they simply not spoken to each other again, no one would have said a word. What she had realised – and now she knew this was not a sudden revelation but something that had been in the back of her mind all along – was that as Ron and Philip had been friends since primary school, indeed neighbours until Philip had moved into rooms above a hotel near the teachers’ college where he worked as a night manager, there was a bond between them; and that she, like any other young woman, was bound to be an interloper.

  What Ron had just told her, however, after they left the fellowship meeting earlier that night, was somewhat more complicated than she could possibly have imagined. All she understood was that now she was as near enough to being on her own as she had ever been.

  ‘We can still see each other,’ Ron said as she got out of the car. It was almost as if he had done nothing wrong, nothing at all, and she nearly felt sorry for him except that already she felt the bitter taste of jealousy.

  ‘No, we can’t,’ she said. But she closed rather than slammed the door of the VW.

  *

  She filled the tub and added bubbles from a pink bottle that had been on the shelf for years – she couldn’t remember how long, or who had given it to her. They hardly ever had baths, her father having a thing about wasting water or soaking in your own dirt or something. She couldn’t remember exactly what his objection was now, just that it was one of those things that had been there all her life. Lying there with the bubbles up to her chin she realised she seemed to have forgotten lots of things, and yet memories of other events were crystal sharp, stabbing her mind with a cruel clarity. Despite the fog in her head she saw every step she had taken that night a few months back, after she and Ron had made love properly, when his brother was out.

  It had not even been very late. She’d been home by nine-thirty and had shared a cup of hot chocolate with her father before going to bed, as if everything were perfectly normal and she had not done the most foolish thing in the world, or had unwittingly changed the course of her life. She saw herself sitting there at the kitchen table, swirling the chocolate that had gone muddy in the bottom of her cup, and wondering how her father could stand there draining his own cup before tightening his dressing gown cord and kissing her goodnight. She wondered how he could possibly not know. Surely he would slam his cup down on the table and then accuse her. He would smell the odour of stolen virginity on her as he bent to kiss her on the forehead. Well after he had left the room her body had still been tense with the awful thrill of it. She forced herself to stand and rinse her cup at the sink before switching off the kitchen light. She’d had a long bath that night too.

  Ellis now wondered how she could have fallen for Ron’s clichés. Sexy. Damn sexy. Worse, thought them a compliment. And though she despised him for his weakness she knew it was not entirely his fault, and despised herself even more. But now it was clear there could be no future with Ron, she knew she could not afford to hold a grudge against him. She would not be guilty of that too. Despite the haze surrounding her in the past few weeks, she could see clearly now what needed to be done.

  She pulled the plug in the bath, dried off and got into a clean nightgown before brushing her teeth. She spat vigorously into the basin, then cleaned them again before snapping off the light and going to her bedroom. She sat on the bed, hugging her knees and thinking, staring at the night-light in the shape of a fat crescent moon with a cartoonish cow jumping across it. It had sat on the bookshelf on the wall opposite for as long as she remembered. It was time to get rid of that light, she thought, before turning down the covers.

  8

  The cat climbed right into her lap, his motorised purr vibrating gently through his whole body and into her hands. His eyes closed, his neat head nudged her stomach until she rubbed it again. The motor hummed louder. Was this normal? Perhaps she had better take Viv to the vet, today.

  She could not even remember his name now, the man in the booth. Jared? Jason? A Greek or Hebrew name, something with a J, she thought. Not James. An unusual name. Martin would remember: she still saw him these days.

  The man’s smile had stretched wider than normal, and she’d noticed his teeth, small and gappy. His arm had tightened, and then she had felt his fingers stretching around to land on her right breast. No one else noticed. Most people were gone. Martin was sorting pages and Angela had sat down to fill up a fountain pen before her next lecture. Dove edged back, but there was no more room to slide away. Plus the pressure on her breast was so subtle, even she doubted it. Angela was talking to Martin about a film they had seen the night before.

  ‘Distorted,’ Martin said, not looking up from some pages he was marking. ‘The guy always uses the camera like that.’

  He shuffled the pages, ca
ught a folder just before it fell, then slipped Dove’s Ball Pentel into his top pocket and scratched his neck under his beard.

  Nothing, surely, was amiss. Martin’s glasses, stuck together at one joint with sticky tape, were slipping down his long nose as he leaned towards Angela, who was wiping the tip of her fountain pen with a tissue. Dove felt the hand, the whole hand now, squeeze her breast. Angela carefully replaced the cap on her bottle of ink – she had numerous stains on her fabric bag from past leakages. Dove pushed the man beside her at hip level and he just smiled again, then turned to face Martin.

  ‘Did you see his first? Forget the name of it. They showed it at the film festival a few years ago.’

  He squeezed her again. It was almost affectionate. Unbelievable: he was groping her while carrying on a conversation. But maybe it was her? Maybe there was nothing going on. Or maybe this was what adult sophisticated people did and she was stupid, middle-class and repressed, unliberated and prudish, and should be enjoying it. She squirmed, swallowing her distress. She thought she might gag with the effort of doing nothing. How had her face not turned red? How had neither Angela nor Martin noticed she was being violated?

  ‘Are you going to hear Wandsworth speak later?’ Martin had put down his armload of books and papers and was retying a sneaker lace, one foot up on the edge of the booth table.

  Because perhaps it was not a violation. J yawned, pushed his hair back with his free hand, massaged her breast harder with the other.

  ‘Nah. Heard him speak last week.’

  Wandsworth was a famous visiting lecturer from New York. It was too casual. It was surreal. J, she knew, was their friend. She should shove him away and cry out. They would be puzzled, offended, hurt. J would continue smiling, holding his hands up as if to show how clean they were. He really had a soft, round face. Curls clustered around his forehead. You could use him as a model for Cupid. She would be considered a fool. How rude it would be to accuse their friend of groping her, if that’s what it was. What a breach of good manners it would be to cry out, here in a public place, and protest that she was being mistreated so.