The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  *

  She took her notebook and coffee out to the back porch where it was actually sunny this day. Since the dream of Emily on the moors – which was too powerful and lasting for a dream but what else could she call it? – the story had stalled. Without being able to see or imagine what came next, let alone how it fitted in, she would sort out some details about Ellis and sketch out some scenes.

  The house in Ashfield she had imagined for Ellis and Edgar was a version of the place she lived in now. And yet it was vastly different in many respects. It was a family home for a start, and while her house might also once have been a large family home, for a long time it had not been anything more than a place for students and single people like herself, more recently inner city working couples. It had been divided back in the 1960s and the scullery and second toilet converted into Dove’s kitchen and bathroom. Her front door was the original side or tradesman’s entrance. The people next door were lawyers, and those before were student tenants of an elderly Greek couple who sold their side of the house just before Dove moved in. The lawyers had told Dove they were happy here and planned to renovate before starting a family. In the space of less than a decade the inner city suburb had become a desirable place for a young family, with babies fitting into the blossoming hipster lifestyle. She saw these new mothers and fathers everywhere, with three-wheeled prams parked outside tiny cafés, the parents bearded and tattooed and clearly uninterested in departing to the roomier outer suburbs, as was the case back when she was in her early twenties.

  Ellis’s family home was much larger. Dove saw it standing on its block, not a quarter acre but nevertheless large. She had seen all this clearly right from the start when the story had first come to her, but she made notes anyway: red brick, classic Federation in style right down to the rising sun emblem above the doorway and the rooftop finials. A green wire gate, in need of repainting. The path leading up to the front door, the path where Charlie took his first baby steps, was tessellated, in black, cream and terracotta tiles. Both front and back doors had wire screen doors with timber frames, old-fashioned doors in which Edgar would replace the wire mesh now and then. He had not done this for a while and Dove could see a large gaping tear in the back door that suggested he was too old and frail to bother with this any more. Or perhaps he was no longer there and the house was empty.

  When had he stopped doing these sorts of jobs around the house? When had he stopped mowing the lawns with his cherished rotary mower, raking the clippings into neat piles which he then loaded into the wheelbarrow and piled in a heap right at the back fence under the plane trees? When had he organised a local mowing service to come and take care of the front lawn and the large backyard instead? The yard was mainly grass, from the back step all the way down to the shed, which he now rarely entered. When, for that matter, had Ellis’s father died?

  She did some calculations in her notebook. Edgar might be alive but he would be very old. Ellis herself was now about sixty-five, give or take. She wouldn’t still be living there, surely. But she had redecorated some of the rooms, not long before she married Vince. When she returned to live with her father after leaving Vince she must have fixed up the larger spare bedroom, for herself and Charlie, who would have only been one. Meeting and marrying Vince: that was another hole in the narrative she’d have to think about. Halfway through writing this down Dove gave up and shut the notebook. These were imaginary people. None of them was alive, no matter their age.

  Despite the sun she could feel the damp seeping from the wooden garden chair through her jeans. Her mother’s place had always been dry and airy. Up on the second floor, its windows never shut except in the heaviest rain, it was always light. Yet with the palms so close by, and the lorikeets fussing around every evening, it was like being in the midst of a garden.

  Viv emerged from the shade down the back. He tiptoed his way to the step then turned and sat with his back to Dove, his tail whipping from side to side. Her phone beeped. She checked the message: Martin, saying it was quiet in Passageway, to come up for a drink. She thought for moment then texted him back: No tks. Going to agent about Mum’s flat. But she took her things inside and put on the CD of Turkish music he’d given her, observing from the corner of her eye how Viv sat at a distance and pretended not to care but in fact listened attentively with his neat head to one side, ears twitching. Her mother was right: she had always said that if cats could play a musical instrument it would be the violin. Seated, his head erect, Viv’s shape even resembled one. When the gypsy strings kicked in she almost heard his purring and heartbeat joining in the rhythm.

  There was no way she could give up this place and move into her mother’s flat. The cat had settled right in to the point where she could not imagine how he had lived in a flat all those years, balcony or not. Each morning after breakfast he wailed at the back door then paraded around the garden with his tail like a flagpole, and Dove had stopped worrying when he disappeared for hours. She had installed a cat door. When she arrived home she would hear its flap rattle as Viv raced through, only to stop when he saw her and sit inscrutably on the mat until hunger overcame his feigned indifference. If she called him up from the garden he would appear from behind a bush or jump off the makeshift table down the back, then sidle along the edges of the yard, pausing to sniff leaves and paw at imaginary insects, pretending to ignore her but finally bolting up the steps unable to contain himself, on the chance that food was involved – food which he would then affect to disdain, until she had turned her back on him. The mechanical growling that had accompanied everything he did had now almost vanished, and she no longer woke in the middle of the night to find him anxiously kneading her chest or stomach with his front paws. He was without her mother’s music – although she did her best – but in every other way the cat’s life was transformed. She watched him almost trembling with pleasure in the music. She couldn’t confine him again.

  15

  The first time she met Vince she recognised that, like her, he was quiet and dependable. He rarely smiled but his demeanour was not to be mistaken for that of someone sour or gloomy. She met him on her first day at Rose’s Automotives, on his way back to the workshop after lunch, when he stepped inside the office.

  ‘I’m Vince,’ he said. ‘Welcome aboard.’

  ‘Thank you.’ So far that first day none of the other men had spoken with her. Mr Rose himself was busy and Shirley, though she was pleasant enough, was preoccupied with her retirement plans, interrupting herself numerous times to make telephone calls to removalists and agents – ‘I don’t have a home phone, and Mr Rose doesn’t mind’ – instead of explaining to Ellis how the office was run. And when she did explain, she told Ellis things she didn’t need to know, like how to set out an account or why they needed to deduct tax from the weekly pay. She hadn’t listened when Ellis had told her she’d recently completed a bookkeeping certificate and had been doing that anyway for the past two years at the pharmacy, where she’d worked part time. All she needed to know were things like where Shirley kept the carbon paper and who their regular suppliers were. She was seated at her desk holding up a stack of grease-spotted invoice books and wondering where to store them when Vince appeared.

  ‘We’re a bit rough, but the men are a decent bunch,’ he added, as if he thought that was her biggest concern. Out in the yard behind the workshop she could hear them laughing and joking as they prepared to get back to work. She had seen him half an hour earlier go out for lunch, unlike the other men, taking his sandwich from the order basket that the newest apprentice had brought back from the corner shop.

  Should she step out from behind the desk and shake his hand, or just sit there smiling? What was the correct way to deal with men at work? There was a hierarchy, she knew, and most of the men wouldn’t even dream of entering the office, but stayed just outside the doorway in their grimy shoes, rubbing their hands with a rag. She noticed how clean his hands were, that he carried a fo
lded newspaper and when he smiled his face transformed. Before she could speak Shirley bustled back into the office.

  ‘Vince, you’ve met our new girl, Ellis? Now don’t go holding her up, not on her first day.’

  Ellis and Vince smiled at each other over Shirley’s broad cheerful back. Orange and white polka dots were not what she would wear at that age, Ellis thought.

  Rose’s Automotives had only ever employed one part-time woman in the office but the older Mr Rose told Ellis when she applied for the job that the business was expanding, and that the role might be full time soon.

  Shirley was a war widow, she explained that first morning, and her three grandchildren were quickly growing up and why would she keep working? She was moving into a smaller place that the people at Legacy had found her, and the first thing she was doing after she settled in was going on a long P&O cruise with her closest friend. Of course it would take her several months just to clean out the old home in Haberfield, which she and Clem had built when they were first married.

  By the end of her first week Ellis had spoken once or twice more with Vince, each time noting he was somehow different. The other men were noisier, though quiet, almost deferential when they encountered her, but Vince seemed not to change the way he spoke around her: he had the same measured, slow manner, and she never heard him yelling out bloodys and shits like the other men did when they were under a car and thought no one could hear, especially Mr Rose, who hated swearing. Vince always went out for lunch and always seemed to have something to read, even if it was only the Daily Telegraph.

  On the Friday, Shirley’s last day, Ellis brought in a large plate of cakes, to hold a farewell afternoon tea. She thought that lamingtons and her home-made miniature sausage rolls would be easy for the men to eat: she couldn’t see butterfly cupcakes or meringues in their large grease-stained hands.

  ‘You made these yourself?’ Shirley said, handing around the lamingtons to the three apprentices. Ellis nodded. ‘You’ll make someone a fine wife one day, I reckon.’ Ellis turned away to the crate of soft drinks that Mr Rose had supplied as a treat, pulling out a bottle of Coca-Cola. Vince reached in and took it from her, holding the bottle opener.

  ‘Here, let me.’ He opened it and then one for himself, turning around to listen as Mr Rose stood on the hoist to say a few words of farewell. He clinked his bottle against hers. ‘Cheers,’ he said, and winked.

  *

  Over the next few weeks, on her afternoons off and the weekends, she worked on modernising the front room, having realised they hardly ever sat there any more, it was so gloomy and uncongenial. She removed the prints of John Constable landscapes in their pigs’ ear gilt frames, and made slip covers for the Jacobean lounge suite that had been there all her life. She couldn’t disguise the dark carved frame but made new beige covers for the tapestry seats, which she broke up with scatter cushions in purple, orange and red. She threw out the dried flower arrangements and put away the heavy ornaments that were neither useful nor pleasing to look at – squat vases that barely held a stem, a series of shepherdess figurines that were impossible to keep clean, silver-plate fruit bowls that they had never used but which she recalled Mrs Wood polishing with Silvo, month after month – items that had sat there since her father was a boy and which he kept from indifference or reverence for previous generations who had long departed the world. Along the mantelpiece, which she painted cream, she placed thick short candles, orange and scented. The old dark brown carpet square that had also been there forever was banished to the back sunroom and the floor was now polished boards.

  She kept her father out of the room until it was finished, then surprised him.

  ‘Ta da!’ She opened the door the morning it was all done, and ushered him in.

  Edgar blinked, exaggerating the light.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Well . . . it’s a bit bare isn’t it?’ He went over to the mantelpiece, picked a candle up and sniffed it, replacing it carefully.

  ‘You never use it anyway.’ She could tell he was impressed with her efforts, even if it wasn’t to his taste. He preferred the smaller sitting room across the hall where he told her that her grandparents had kept a card table covered in a green cloth and where they had entertained weekly, with sherry in decanters and ham sandwiches and pipe tobacco, the scent of which Ellis swore she could still catch every time she went in there. The card table was long packed away but the old wireless stood in a corner with a pot plant on the top. Her father had set up the television and his easy chair, one that tilted backwards and supported the legs with side levers, which he had bought anticipating his retirement.

  In the refurbished living room, Ellis sat and read and played records on her portable player, sometimes doing her craftwork or just painting her nails. When Vince called on her one Sunday afternoon they sat there listening to music and chatting until her father arrived home from a game of bowls.

  He called out his usual ‘Hi de hi!’, rapping at the doorway over the sound of the Beatles singing ‘We Can Work It Out’. She turned the record player off.

  ‘Hi Dad. This is Vince.’

  Vince had arrived with a bunch of carnations for Ellis which she’d placed on the coffee table. He now produced a bottle of tawny port for Edgar.

  ‘I’ll make us all some coffee.’ Ellis went to the kitchen.

  Her father and Vince talked about decimal currency and Jørn Utzon’s sacking and when she returned with the tray they had moved on to Holden’s installation of seat belts and the plans to introduce drink driving as an offence. Vince responded to Edgar’s slightly formal questions with respectful gravity, with the same calm ease as when he was discussing spark plugs or gaskets at work. He seemed to be a man entirely sure of himself, which Ellis found intriguing. It was not something she recognised in herself.

  It was a bit ridiculous in this day and age, and rather staged, for them to be sitting awkwardly in the front room with coffee in the percolator going cold and Vince unwilling to seem rude and take the last piece of lemon slice, but Ellis had known her father would appreciate this sort of introduction. It would be better than having Vince casually say hello after bringing her home from a date. And it was nothing like her previous relationship with Ron. She briefly closed her eyes then opened them again, picking up the cake plate.

  ‘Vince, please eat this. I’ll only have to throw it away.’

  ‘What about this war, then?’ Edgar was saying. It sounded like a test, but she knew it was just his manner.

  ‘I don’t really approve. Hard to understand it all, isn’t it?’

  ‘What if you’re called up?’

  ‘Of course I’d go. You have to do your duty.’

  ‘Vince’s brother has already gone,’ Ellis said. Gary was now in Phuoc Tuy Province where most of the Australians were based. It would look bad if his brother were to object.

  Predictably, thought Ellis, the talk moved on to politics.

  ‘Mr Holt is doing an okay job so far, don’t you think?’ This time Vince got in first, testing the water.

  ‘Considering Menzies is a hard act to follow.’

  Vince nodded, not quite confident enough to commit himself.

  ‘Time will tell,’ her father added.

  She was gratified to hear that Vince understood there were certain responses. But after a few more minutes of polite evasive talk she interrupted.

  ‘Vince, it’s okay. Dad always votes Labor even though he’s in banking.’

  He father sat back with a small smile. When Vince left, he shook his hand, clasping it with the other. ‘Call me Edgar,’ he said.

  *

  After that it all unfolded as if it were meant to be. It was not a white wedding, nor an elaborate one. Instead Ellis made herself a duck egg blue slub silk dress with close-fitting chiffon sleeves and long buttoned cuffs, with matching satin ribbon under the bustlin
e. The skirt came to the knees. Although she had thought about a short one like Sharon Tate had worn recently, she realised this would offend Vince’s mother, possibly also her own father, even though he was more accepting of her modern dress sense. Vince’s mother, on the other hand, was a strict Presbyterian and coming to the wedding at St John’s, small as it was, was enough of a compromise on her behalf. She sat with her second husband wearing her best frock, a capacious one patterned in pink cabbage roses, which had clearly been worn many times before, judging by the yellowed underarms. She wore brown lace-up shoes and carried a faux crocodile handbag, and fanned herself during the service with a large man’s handkerchief. Her hair had been permed tightly. Mr Curry wore a dark brown suit with a handkerchief card in the top pocket. He took Ellis’s hand after the service and told her to call him Harry. ‘Harry Curry,’ he joked mildly. ‘Not a name people forget in a hurry. Get it?’

  There were no bridesmaids, and no best man as Vince’s closest friend was away, and Gary was not due for leave any time soon. Even if they had planned the wedding around him there was no guarantee that he would come, as according to Vince he was unreliable. On his last leave, he’d gone off up the north coast with mates, not even staying one night with his family after arriving back in Sydney.

  As they stood at the altar Ellis made her vows in a clear voice. She did love him, in a way. And she did honour him and believed obeying him would be entirely possible. But as Vince slid the ring onto her finger she also believed she could feel Mrs Curry’s small brown eyes from the second row, boring through her back past the blue slub silk and seeing all the way into her womb. Of course, she could just have been suspicious that they’d decided to get married so early, not six months after they first met, and that the wedding was so small. But Ellis couldn’t shake off the uneasy feeling that Vince’s mother had also seen all the way through her, and seen what she herself knew to be there. Damage and violation, and more: an emptiness that might never be filled.