‘That should definitely be in the dictionary,’ she said.
‘What about you?’
‘Nothing I’ve ever invented, even when I was a kid. But I read a book recently that had a new word in it. Nymphet. And faunlet. I liked that.’
‘Really?’ He smiled. ‘I was working for a bookshop for a while. Just farther up the road here. We made a fortune posting that book off to customers in Victoria. You know it was banned down there? Probably still is.’
‘Yes, I know.’
It had taken ages to persuade Miss Neville to lend her a copy. She got the impression that the library had obtained it only very reluctantly, and that if Miss Neville had had any say in it, then Lolita would never have debased the collection of Ashfield library at all. There was apparently a waiting list to read it, but Ellis had not been convinced. She spent a lot of time in the library and had never encountered anyone asking for the book. After weeks of polite questioning and being told it was on loan to someone, Miss Neville had finally produced it from a cupboard in the office behind the loans desk. One week, she had said, stamping the card harder than necessary and ferreting around for a paper bag. She had handed it over to Ellis holding it by her fingertips, as if mere brown paper could not protect her from the filth inside.
‘Have you read it?’ Ellis had asked her, somewhat mischievously, to be told emphatically of course not. Why she had wondered, was there this special breed of righteous librarians, mostly female, with the self-appointed task of guarding the morals of the suburbs? Miss Neville was like a younger, thinner version of dour Muriel Curry, her ex mother-in-law, who had held the same suspicion of novels, any novels, as she had of hard liquor, dancing and women who wore red shoes. After Lolita, Ellis knew her relationship with the librarian had changed forever.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘What exactly do you do at the printery?’
‘Just routine stuff, part time. A lot of proofreading for Clive. But I love typefaces too, you know. They tell amazing stories.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s what I thought too!’ She leaned back, feeling she had been too enthusiastic, but Tom seemed not to notice.
‘Do you know, there’s this strange story about a drowned typeface.’
She shook her head, she didn’t know it. He went on to describe the beautifully flawed typeface that was lost after being thrown into a river. It had been used to print a King James Bible in the early twentieth century, and nothing more. Its bookbinder owner was unwilling to pass the type on to his partner and so threw the entire stock from a bridge into the River Thames. Night after night, for months until it was all consigned to the water and the mud, Edward Cobden-Sanderson tossed heavy blocks of type, as many as he could manage – for he was elderly – from the Hammersmith Bridge, fearing detection but never being caught.
It was a haunting thought. ‘Why did he do that?’ she said.
‘No one really knows. Clearly it meant something more to him, so much that he sacrificed it forever.’
Ellis felt inexplicably saddened by this story. She stood up. ‘I must go,’ she said.
‘Before you do,’ Tom said, ‘the reason I dropped by when I saw you come in here.’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I remembered, after you left the print shop. There’s this job going, at one of the magazines. I do some freelance work for them. You might want to follow it up.’
He handed her a card, on which he’d written his name and a phone number.
‘Call me if you’re interested. I could introduce you to the editor if you like.’
21
Wuthering: that was a made-up word, surely? Dove had researched it and could find no instance of the term before 1846. Wuthering was a true neologism, one that Emily Brontë fashioned from the local dialect, or at the very least had been the first to offer in print. Just mouthing the word she could feel the tremendous roaring of the wind, the icy blast that enveloped those caught and exposed in it, the elemental force that penetrated coats and cloaks, ear muffs and gloves, and sent people searching desperately for shelter. It was a wild, mongrel, wilful sort of word, one that was unpindownable. Terrifying and exhilarating at the same time.
There was another powerful word, not exactly a neologism, but certainly one that was new to Ellis’s world, and Dove could see this word forming in the back of her mind. Feminism, and as she typed it she felt the power of that word. She lived in post-feminist times supposedly, where liberal, spirited, independent women spurned the term as something linked to irrelevancies like the arguments over high heels or leg shaving, or rallies for equal pay. In only another year or two Ellis would be calling herself a feminist and dealing with all the compromises of being personally empowered, progressive and open-minded, but in a work context that was only slowly catching up – indeed at times it would seem not to be moving at all. Being in the world where this word was making its impact felt was, for women like Ellis, sometimes disorienting. Power often was. Or in her case, empowerment, which was not the same thing. Dove understood that much.
And she understood that something frightening was about to happen. Something liberating but frightening, and as she thought about it – and thought again about the maddening autonomy these characters exerted, well beyond her control – she believed she began to understand the author of Wuthering Heights a tiny bit more. Emily Brontë never compromised in her portrayal of Heathcliff and Cathy. Perhaps her sister Charlotte was actually correct when she claimed that having formed these beings Emily did not know what she had done. Or maybe she had, and resolutely refused to reflect on the implications – moral, artistic – of these creations, but let them be who they needed to be. In which case Charlotte was also right when she remarked that her sister would have wondered why anyone would complain about the relentless, implacable and disturbing natures depicted in her novel, about the spirits so lost and fallen that certain fearful scenes prevented a reader from sleeping at night.
Could Dove, however, exert the same pitiless inexorable spirit as the author of Wuthering Heights? When she thought about what had happened already, and what was going to happen in her story, she felt profoundly disturbed, so much so that she knew there were scenes she felt she was not going to be brave enough to write. In one of these scenes that loomed like a film trailer, teasing and unresolved, she saw Ellis at an interview for the magazine, and understood the exciting prospect of the position, understood that Ellis, still young, had immense talent and that the position would nurture much in her, a particular feel for the magazine industry that combined creativity with hard-headed business skills. Ellis was poised at a moment in time where a whole generation of people, women and men, but clearly mainly young women, would finally slough off the first half of the century, escape the much-lauded postwar boom years and embrace their future.
But the cost. Dove considered the scene as it unfolded in more detail and knew she would write it in one way, despite her misgivings. Two scenes in particular, and the idea of them so forceful that no one would recognise the Ellis who had not so long ago been soaking her husband’s greasy work clothes or preparing his favourite dishes, even if she disliked them. Or who visited her father every week to help him around the house, when she had a baby to care for.
They would recognise her, she supposed, if they kept in mind that she was a woman who married too young and not for love, who at the time believed it was the only role available to her, and who was trying to atone for something she believed was entirely her fault. Above all, they would recognise the actions of a woman who had never known her own mother and whose life thus was and always would be undermined by the terrible loss, indeed a tragedy that claimed her from the start. They would understand this was a woman who went through life with the wind forever whistling through a space in her chest.
Wuthering. The wind had always wuthered in Ellis’s heart, no matter how hard at times she could pretend all was sunny.
22
On her first day Ellis was given the job of sorting through recipes that readers submitted for publication. The best each month won a prize of a year’s subscription to the magazine. The deputy editor made it clear that it was a relief to relinquish this insulting task.
‘If we had a proper cookery editor,’ she said, ‘then I wouldn’t have had to think about it at all.’
Valerie was tall with bold dyed red hair, her body draped in silk scarves, and she wore cork-soled sandals that clattered dramatically as she strode out of the lift each morning.
She handed Ellis a cardboard box of letters and returned to her desk to blow menthol-scented smoke into the air as she shouted into the phone. Periodically the photography director would saunter over to perch on her desk and they would laugh like lunatics. When the test kitchen sent up plates of pinwheel sandwiches or upside-down cakes or chocolate mousse in coffee cups, Valerie would wave him and the fashion editor over first, before inviting the lesser mortals in the office to sample the leftovers.
The first winning recipe Ellis selected was for chicken casserole Italienne, cooked in a clay dish called a Schlemmertopf. It was the first time she had come across a recipe that called for so much garlic, and she had never heard of a Schlemmertopf. Most of the recipes submitted were dismal. Novelty ways with minced meat. French onion soup dip. A spicy lamb dish that sounded interesting but went on to feature gingernut biscuits, of all things, that you were meant to soak in boiling water. When she showed Valerie her choice, the deputy editor wrinkled her nose and said, ‘I don’t think so. Where on earth would readers find a Schlemmertopf?’
So Ellis chose instead a recipe for a foolproof lemon meringue pie. There was nothing exciting about a lemon meringue pie, in her view; however the reader had understood the importance of using fresh lemons, to ensure the lemon base set correctly, and she knew this was true: Mrs Wood had always made their lemon butter using fresh fruit from their tree in the back garden. ‘If you buy lemons,’ she said, ‘you don’t know how old they are.’ The winning reader wrote her a letter of gratitude.
The magazine’s full title was the Women’s Pages. But they all called it the Pages, and Valerie explained the name would soon be official, with the revamp. New sections, new cover design and so on. She hinted smokily from a narrowed mouth that she was pretty much opposed to all this since the magazine did very nicely as it was, and that the new editor who’d come on board only a few months earlier was throwing his weight around far too much. He didn’t understand that the position was more of an executive one, that the magazine had always been her thing. Soon she was confiding in Ellis, in short quiet bursts of conversation when she passed her desk. Ellis understood this was part of her breaking-in process. And that she would probably soon be forced to take sides.
‘Everyone knows that this editor,’ Valerie said, refusing to use his name, ‘has no experience in the business. But what can you expect from a guy who only got the job because he’s gone to the same private school as the publisher’s son?’
Ellis murmured something inoffensive. She hadn’t heard of any of these people.
‘And you know, my greatest success,’ Valerie leaned closer to Ellis for this piece of information, ‘has been making this middlebrow household magazine appeal across the board.’
That was true enough. Ellis had already done her research and knew that despite its name and content, the Pages turned out to be read by a surprising number of men.
A few weeks after commencing, sifting through handwritten recipes – every week someone seemed to think that deep fried camembert was the most inventive dish they’d heard of – Ellis was wondering how to appear to be busier than she was. The various test kitchen dishes she’d sampled seemed deeply unexciting. For all Valerie’s boasting and flamboyance, the magazine was unexciting and predictable, as far as she could determine. In her spare time, and there was plenty, she looked through past issues and noted how often the same subjects were recycled: features on rock gardens or tie-dying received new photo shoots but not much else. Valerie boasted that the Pages contained current affairs but in fact these were profiles of politicians’ wives, safely offered in the same format, always ending with their list of favourite foods, favourite piece of furniture and favourite holiday destinations. The fashion editor rarely appeared at work before noon, and already several times Ellis had been asked to help set up shoots in the little studio, getting the models dressed and running around scouring makeshift props, so they could meet deadlines.
The job she eyed, from her assistant’s desk in the corner of the open-plan office, was that of the woman who was sent off to interview celebrities and arty types. She commanded the most thrilling authority, being able to slam her phone down with satisfaction and announce to the room that she’d nabbed an exclusive with Bob and Dolly Dyer, or this playwright that everyone was talking about, David Williamson, before snapping her fingers for a photographer and marching out into the real world of culture and personalities.
‘There’ll be a lot more of that too,’ Valerie hinted one day when she brushed past Ellis’s desk as she was proofreading the winter soups supplement. Apparently, if the editor had his way, there would be more of what she derided as highbrow arty stuff.
Occasionally Valerie’s phone call bark became a whimper as she responded to a call from upstairs. She would disappear before lunch and when she returned, huddle in with the photography director for the rest of the afternoon, both of them swathed in cigarette smoke.
The magazine’s more sophisticated revamp somehow sat uneasily with Valerie’s style. She continued to manage but refused to be enthusiastic about its fresher layout, its uncluttered feature articles. The fact that the puzzles and games were relegated to the very back of the magazine, and soon banished forever, she seemed to take personally. Ellis wondered if it was as simple as two bold, extravagant personalities competing, if Valerie had somehow shone brighter when the magazine was a more humble entity featuring photo spreads of cute kids and animals with punning captions.
One day the editor refused to approve the feature she’d done on Mrs Whitlam, claiming it was trivial and boring. The pasted-up pages came back downstairs and they all had to stay at work late putting together something to substitute.
‘He said he wanted more substance,’ she grumbled. ‘Less about her curtains and more about her being a social worker, or something.’ She sniffed to show the extent of her interest in Mrs Whitlam’s previous career.
‘She is an interesting woman, though,’ Ellis ventured. Valerie threw her a look and marched back to her desk.
It was the same look that Ellis remembered catching years ago from those women at Betty Denman’s place when she’d said she admired Ainsley Gotto. Perhaps people like Valerie, for all their boldness and appearance of independence, hadn’t really twigged that things had changed, were changing every day. Or they did understand and didn’t like it. The Whitlams had copped a lot of criticism, especially Margaret whose dress style was now being unfavourably compared with Sonia McMahon’s, but Ellis felt quite giddy when she thought of them. Suddenly she had a new understanding of this place, a sense of the whole country shifting around, resettling in a newer, stronger position, with these tall god-like creatures in charge. She thought about Australia as an idea now, a possibility, in a way that she’d never thought about the country before. And her place in it, however minuscule.
Within a year, Valerie took extended leave. The day before she was due to return to work, a telex arrived announcing she had decided to remain in London, where she’d met someone.
The editor appeared in the office with a frown. He too was leaving for another position and the person who had been filling in for Valerie was going off to have a baby at the end of the week.
‘Would you like a chocolate truffle?’ Ellis said, holding out a plate that she’d just brought up from the test kitchen. She had made some at home the we
ek before and suggested the kitchen try them.
He looked dazed, but took one.
‘Delicious. Did you make them?’
‘Yes,’ she said. And it was almost true.
*
Ellis’s temporary promotion soon became permanent. She came in to work early and left late, and when the new managing editor, who worked for the parent company, made comments about women being unreliable, always disappearing to follow lovers or have babies, she made sure she kept her mouth shut.
The magazine sold and sold, and soon the days of editing the cookery and craft sections of the Women’s Pages, with its crochet patterns and recipes for devilled sausages, seemed a laughable distant past. As deputy editor she had much autonomy. She introduced restaurant reviews and more interviews with artists, musicians and actors. The social pages stopped covering weddings in the eastern suburbs and charity balls and now featured the crowds at gallery openings, first nights of plays, and the interesting types who gathered in Balmain pubs discussing books and politics. The women’s pages, in her mind, were still represented in the re-formed magazine, and always would be; but instead they included profiles of prominent women and featured more articles on social issues than domestic ones. They had published an interview with Germaine Greer and followed it up in the next issue with an article about women lawyers. The features editor was planning a long piece on adoption, and anonymous interviews with women whose babies had been taken away.
But Ellis was not fooled. By the mid-1970s she was not secure enough in her position to imagine that there was really such a thing as equality, despite what everyone was saying. Some time in the middle of that decade she was required to make a choice. She stood in the office of the vice-president and executive editor. In a couple of years several of the many progeny of the parent company had merged, and the consequent restructure meant the vice-president had more control over each. He was a cliché, a cigar-chewing, pot-bellied man with a cheery geniality that barely cloaked his contempt. In his world, several floors above that of the Pages, women like Ellis were always implicitly undergoing some sort of test. He was planning to promote her from deputy to editor.
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