The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  The lively evening air smelled strongly of mock orange blossom. The days were becoming warmer though the nights could get cool, and she wore her royal blue belted cardigan, the one she had knitted herself and adorned with silver buttons. She could also still smell the summery scent of cut grass from when the next-door neighbour had trimmed the front lawn that afternoon. The scent pulled at her memories, stirring something that emerged no more clearly than a formless sadness, a yearning for something undefined, just out of reach.

  At her front gate a shape appeared.

  ‘I thought it best to wait here for you.’ Mrs Wood nodded towards the house in which sat Ellis’s father and all the unspeakable consequences of knowing what was happening. She pressed a piece of paper into her hand. ‘And please don’t think this sort of information comes easily to me,’ she said, almost hissing the words, she was speaking that low.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Mrs Wood turned to walk away but then an afterthought made her stop and face Ellis again. ‘This young man. You’re sure he’ll pay? Because it’s not going to be cheap.’

  She thought for a moment, about the last time she saw Ron, how awful it was. There was not even the hope that she could marry him and sort it out that way, if she had wanted to. But she hadn’t. She didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want her life together with him, with any man, to be tainted like that right from the start.

  ‘Yes, he’ll pay,’ she said. He would pay.

  And although Mrs Wood was already walking off, Ellis thought she heard the faint words, ‘Good luck,’ wafting back on the breeze along with the scent of mock orange and cut grass.

  10

  Now is the time for all good women to come to the aid of the party. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

  Dove typed the lines three more times, then took a sip of her wine. Her laptop was on the bar and this time of the day, early afternoon, the place was empty apart from her and Martin, who periodically disappeared outside to smoke. The bar was called Passageway for good reason. It was barely more than a hall, with a line of stools against the bar leaving just enough room to squeeze past to the back of the premises, down a step to the toilets, then along a hallway, even narrower, and down another two steps to a courtyard.

  ‘Another?’ She was drinking shiraz and Martin took her empty glass and held it up.

  She wondered whether to order another, if that might mean the rest of the day would be a write-off. On a whim earlier in the afternoon she had left the house and walked up to the main street. Since giving up work, she had realised just that morning, she was in risk of becoming a hermit.

  ‘No. I might go home and play music for the cat.’ Lately, she had barely even spoken to the cat.

  Martin poured her one anyway. ‘On the house.’

  Coming to Passageway was logical. It was close by, served good drinks, was quiet and she could catch up with Martin, if he was in the mood for a chat. Since their university days, nearly twenty years before, Martin had not become a politician or head of a powerful union or someone important at the ABC, as suggested by his intellectual reach and his many political activities. Nor had he finished his architecture degree either, but had started and abandoned yet another – law – before working in a series of short-term jobs. Research assistant to the Honourable Gough Whitlam, speech writer for a federal parliamentarian, editor of an arts journal that burned bright and fizzled out within eighteen months, deputy director of a charity that sent teachers to Africa, and more positions that Dove had forgotten. All his jobs ended prematurely though amicably as Martin’s restless spirit moved on. He opened Passageway when his elderly father died and left him a small legacy, and as far as Dove recalled, the three years he’d been here were the most consistent in his life. It appeared that a bar was the perfect milieu for Martin’s expansive mind and anecdotal wit, although despite being talkative and opinionated, he also knew when to stay quiet.

  And he played excellent music, not too loudly. He was pausing the iPad playlist behind the bar now. He slotted a CD into the old player and turned around.

  ‘What do you think of this? Maybe Viv would like it.’

  She listened carefully, but could not identify it. She had no ear for music, despite all Jane’s efforts.

  ‘What is it?’ It was wild, slightly off key, with lots of strings.

  ‘Turkish music.’

  It had taken her a long time after her mother died to work out that Viv was missing one vital element from his life, so she started playing him classical music. At first she could not bear to listen to the works her mother had been so skilled at playing and opted instead for safe, predictable, pieces. Four Seasons, of course. Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. As soon as she got the sound level right the cat seemed happy, though this had taken a while. She first fiddled with the sound and tone and he growled and fretted and scampered around the house until she worked out that playing the music quite loudly in a room but with the door shut was perfect for him. This must have been how her mother played, loud but hidden away.

  In the flat her mother always kept her violin and music stand in the spare room, and for some reason now the thought of her mother playing alone in that small room with the door shut, perhaps with the cat waiting outside the door, filled her with more sadness than anything else. She felt sadder than when her mother died, sadder than at the funeral, embarrassingly small though that was. Apart from Dove, her mother had died alone and the funeral was attended by a handful of friends, mostly distant, and a few relatives with whom, Dove knew, her mother only kept in touch at Christmas time out of a sense of duty. At the funeral, the organisation of which she had handed over entirely to the White Ladies, her mother’s wish, she only began to have a sense of the disconnect of her mother’s life. That Dove’s own life was largely disconnected was not a revelation to her: Jane had always been open about the adoption and to Dove it was normal. And as for the rest, it was largely her choice, and mostly something she had lived with all her life, the knowledge of her outsider status. To her that was normal too.

  But sitting in the tiny chapel at the crematorium, glancing at the few pews dotted with distant relatives and friends, all grey and pastel coloured, it struck her that there might have been a pattern in her life and her mother’s life, and that her mother also had great holes in her existence of which Dove had been barely aware. She realised she should have asked more questions about the exact relationship, say, between the people she called Uncle Graham and Aunty Rose, and herself: perhaps they were not her mother’s real uncle and aunt either, but close family friends. They had just always been there, and it had not occurred to her until this moment to question how they had got there. Long ago neighbours, perhaps. Or cousins several times removed. But it was too late to disturb the smooth, even tracks on which her small family’s modest train had run for all these years, too late to disrupt the polite means by which they had all communicated for all her life. A funeral was not the time to ask, Excuse me, Uncle Graham, but how exactly do I know you? The funeral had ended with a recording of Bach’s Chaconne, a piece Jane had favoured for its stately controlled passion, which continued to play as the coffin disappeared behind the red velvet curtains.

  The sadness of thinking about her mother playing to the cat behind a closed door for all those years would not go away.

  ‘I like it,’ she said to Martin, gesturing to the CD player. The Turkish music was haunting and plangent. It contained strains of something almost familiar but out of reach.

  Martin nodded, reaching for glasses. The bar was beginning to fill up. She decided to finish her drink then go home before succumbing to tipsy emotions. She typed another line.

  When she first studied art she had no intention of doing anything more than something creative that would also please her mother’s desire for her to become qualified, but it had hit her, even before Jane had become ill, how much she was unsuited to graphic de
sign. She hated the manic pace of her job, the fact that she seemed to be the oldest person in the company by more than ten years, that she was obliged to turn out glib commercial work, the fact that she was not particularly talented anyway. She discovered she was good with colours but not with shapes. Or some jobs inspired her in the fine details, but she found it hard to concentrate on the overall concept. Her creative director had hinted they had lost a few clients because of Dove’s failure to meet deadlines. It wasn’t just that her mother was sick for months and she’d needed time off: she was tired of it all, tired of wringing out some perkiness, some fun, some cartoonish approach for clients trying to sell laundry products or vodka lolly drinks or street festivals.

  For fun she changed the font in the last line she typed. It was not writing but it was doing something like it. If she performed enough of these exercises maybe real sentences would grow. Writing her story was more frustrating than she could ever have imagined, although she had not really imagined it: writing had leaped upon her unawares, from out of the dark, its claws unsheathed. But maybe she should not have given up work after all, or instead kept going part time. Mute grief, she suspected, was rendering her incapable of any productive work. Dove and her mother had been fond but independent, and even though they were both single, there had never been any question of them living together. After she had recovered entirely from that first stroke, Jane had still been able to cook, and clean, and do her washing and, with Dove’s help, she coped. In fact it was not even a question of coping. She managed very well, and if Dove had not been around she would simply have bought her groceries online and caught taxis to her appointments. She had long given up her car to Dove anyway, asserting she never liked driving and didn’t need it anyway, the flat being so close to the station. Dove for her part drove infrequently too, however as she was younger it was understood that she might have been more of a free spirit than her mother and would want to get out a lot more.

  Sitting in front of her laptop in Passageway, now squeezed on either side by after-work drinkers, Dove was struck by how unlike a free spirit she was. Now that her mother was dead and there was no reason for her not to travel, to go anywhere she liked, or stay out all night, or bury herself under her bedcovers and not answer the phone for a week if she wanted, she found she had no desire to be free. Coming to have a quiet drink with Martin now and then was the most adventurous thing she could do. Her life struck her as unbearably sad. Pathetic, even. But probably that was just the second glass of shiraz. She should go home.

  Standing on the footpath outside the bar she decided she would go back to her mother’s flat, first thing the next day. She had been avoiding it, though telling herself that there was no pressure to clear it out and settle her mother’s affairs. But equally there was no reason not to, now. And as tidy as the place was, she knew it would still be a big job. That sort of thing always was.

  ‘Hey!’ Martin emerged from the bar holding out the Turkish music CD. ‘Take it. Play it to Viv,’ he said and rushed back inside.

  *

  She took the cat with her, careful not to open the pet carrier until she closed the front door. He poured out of the basket like a bowl of oil, then slinked up the hallway and into the lounge room. After gliding around the room he came to sit quite still at the French doors. He closed his eyes and licked his paws.

  The place did not smell as stale as she’d anticipated. But she took a few steps across the living room to open the French doors anyway, to let in the air. The tiny balcony contained one wooden chair and table, where an amber pressed-glass ashtray still held two silver butts. Her mother’s one small indulgence, the occasional Sobranie cigarette while having a glass of wine of an evening.

  On the tiled floor of the balcony was a row of black pots with dark brown stalks. Dove felt a spurt of guilt, until she remembered they would have died anyway. Her mother had a magic touch with maidenhair ferns, and it had become almost a joke: whenever she’d gone away and it had been up to Dove to care for them, the ferns had died, no matter that Jane went away for a weekend or a fortnight. Her mother had tried putting them in the bath where Dove only had to spray them with the shower. She had placed them on special absorbent mats to keep their roots cool. She had inserted slow-release water dispensers, which she made from plastic water bottles plugged with rubber stoppers. All methods had failed and Dove had regularly replaced the plants from the local nursery. During her first few weeks in hospital, before she deteriorated to the point where she could no longer talk, her mother had reminded her about the maidenhairs, and Dove had promised to check and water them. Indeed she had, once or twice, but she now remembered that just around the time her mother’s condition turned, to the point where she had begun phoning nursing homes, the plants had started to demonstrate signs of stress.

  She’d found her mother, after the second crippling stroke, lying immobile on the floor, and organised the ambulance, and spent most of the night at the hospital until she was settled and there was nothing else she could do for the moment. After that she’d returned to the flat to fetch Viv. She had packed his food and bowls and disposed of the litter tray, and locked him in the pet carrier then closed all the windows and fastened and bolted the French doors on the balcony – her mother, a fresh air fiend, and living on the second floor, always left windows open – when she’d noticed the row of ferns. She had unlocked the doors and fetched the plastic jug from the kitchen and doused them all in water as quickly as she could before locking the doors once more, all the while as Viv wailed piteously from his carrier by the door. She had only managed to visit the flat twice again since then, once to fetch the copy of Wuthering Heights Jane had requested, and during all those weeks when she had sat and read the novel to her mother, the thought of the maidenhairs had crossed her mind once or twice. But she hadn’t had the time or the energy or maybe the interest to go and check on them, especially when in her mind the plants were doomed anyway.

  She passed her hand across the stalks. The dusty remains of tiny leaves fell onto the balcony to join those dropped in the last months. The garbage bags were in the bottom drawer of the kitchen. She went over, took one out, and went back to the balcony, grasping the first of the dead plants and lifting it free of the pot. She paused, watching the dry dirt trickle to the concrete floor, then she replaced it and swiftly dropped all three pots into the garbage bag. The pots were only small. And she would never replant them with anything else.

  She picked up a butt from the ashtray. It held a faint imprint of lipstick. Max Factor’s Classic Coral: Jane had never worn any other. Even living alone, in the evening, she always wore lipstick. Dove emptied the ashtray into the bag then took it to the kitchen sink. Placing the bag by the front door to take downstairs later, she returned to the kitchen for the dustpan and broom.

  Quickly, she decided what she had to do. Take each room one at a time. The bedroom would be the most difficult so she would tackle that first. But going in there and boldly opening wide the wardrobe doors she realised it would not be that hard at all. Jane was much shorter and smaller than she, so there was no question of keeping any of her clothes. She took from her bottom drawer in the wardrobe a silk Liberty print shawl, in rich dark reds and midnight blue, that Jane had had for as long as Dove could remember. She took the camphorwood jewellery box that held some jet beads with matching earrings, several rose gold chains, and Dove’s baby charm bracelet. She already had Jane’s watch and rings, which had been on her when she first went to hospital. From the spare room she took the violin and stood it by the door. Jane had lived her small neat life as if every day she were preparing for death. When she’d moved into this flat, she had cleared out all the clutter of her life. She’d bought new linen, new crockery, all minimal and spare, got rid of most of her appliances and kitchen clutter. ‘Am I ever going to use this again?’ She’d held up the waffle maker. They’d both laughed. Dove had pestered her for it when she was about twelve, and they had used it on
ce.

  Nothing was out of place, everything had been filed or disposed of or put away, and the only outstanding mail was what Dove herself had neglected in the last few months. She’d already had the phone, the internet, and the gas disconnected, and the electricity would go when she finished the cleaning. She would return with boxes for the books and the CDs. Everything else she would place in bags for a charity, St Vincent de Paul or the Smith Family. They could come for the clothes, the linen – only two sets of sheets and towels, nothing extraneous – and take the furniture, the modest serviceable kitchenware – she thought Jane had got it from Ikea – everything. When that was done she could set about selling the place. And then she could get back to her story.

  By the time she was done Viv was waiting by his carrier at the front door, composed and purring. She thought it might have unnerved him, but it had been the right thing to do, bringing him back.

  11

  She made the phone call from the telephone booth outside the corner grocery store, two blocks up from her house towards the main road. She imagined the grocer and his wife, who’d known her all her life, peering out through the dim recess of their shop and watching her every move, dropping sixpence into the slot, slipping Mrs Wood’s piece of paper out of her pocket. She imagined they knew that sweat was pouring down her armpits, soaking her blouse under her cardigan, that they could lip-read or perhaps even hear every word of her conversation.