The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  It seemed that as soon as they were married, Catherine had changed. Or she was the same, but an exaggerated version of herself: she was highly strung, people would say, easily excitable and quick to fall into one of her black moods. Now I suppose she would have been called a depressive. Not that this entirely accounted for her behaviour, in my view.

  I did drop in occasionally, for old times’ sake and because I genuinely cared for Edgar, we both did, Frank and I. I’d visit on my way home after work, in the late afternoon, when I knew that Edgar would be arriving home too, and stay for a cup of coffee or sometimes not even that. Once when I arrived I saw the Chevrolet Stylemaster parked ahead of me in the street. It was impossible to avoid the meaning of that, but I walked up to the house anyway, to see the girl, Milly, just leaving for the day. She came towards me and we spoke for a few minutes at the gate before I entered: she had left the front door open for me. I walked in to see Cliff emerging from the bedroom and featuring what can only be described as a smirk. I could have slapped his self-satisfied face. As always, I said little to him and went in to Catherine who was sitting on the edge of the bed, and dressed as if she planned on going out, aside from her slippers. As soon as she saw me she sighed and took her dressing gown off the back of the door and started unbuttoning her dress. She looked remarkably well that day, with colour in her cheeks.

  ‘Put the kettle on would you, Nell,’ she said, turning her back on me to continue undressing. ‘I could drink some weak tea.’ From outside I heard the throaty purr of the Chevrolet as it pulled out.

  By the time Edgar arrived home shortly afterwards she was back in bed, sulking and complaining about her health. ‘Another few months, my love,’ he said, sitting beside the bed and holding her hand. ‘I’m sure you can manage.’ She pressed her lips and said nothing. I took in her tea and left. I had seen enough.

  There were a few more episodes like this: I will not bother with the shabby details. Needless to say I saw even less of that family, if that’s what it was, and kept to myself. Frank was still away and I could have spent a lot more time helping them, or Catherine, but my help was not what she wanted. Or she wanted me for certain things only. One evening I had a parcel to deliver, some curtains that she’d asked me to have made up at work weeks before, so I was obliged to take them around.

  Sometimes you see the entire story in mere seconds, and then the story stays with you, swelling to fill your mind until your head might burst. Even if it is one of the oldest stories in the book.

  It was just after dark and when I approached I saw the three of them in the front sitting room, a corner lamp all that lit it up. Edgar’s figure, his back to me, was standing over Catherine, then he moved out of the door to reveal her and Cliff seated on either end of the couch. As soon as he left, Cliff slid across to embrace her. He was quicker than a lizard. As he placed his hand on her stomach she looked away from him and directly into my face. Her eyes glittered, catching the light from that one lamp. She laid her hand over his and stared at me through the window. I dropped my parcel on the porch, turned around and walked away as quickly as I could.

  *

  I felt sorry for Edgar, but angry with him too. He was a decent man, but he was smart and I couldn’t understand how he didn’t see what was so clearly evident. She must have been only a few weeks off giving birth when I saw him again. I was home one Sunday afternoon, when he knocked. I was very surprised to see him, I must admit, since I wasn’t even aware that he knew where I lived. My first thought was that the landlady would object, then I realised she would be out visiting her sister. Even so I was wary since she was a difficult, censorious woman, always hinting that she knew my husband was away.

  I was just completing a shawl I had been knitting for the past few weeks. It was in beautiful cream baby merino that the supervisor of haberdashery had let me have for half price. Despite everything I decided I would finish it and hand it over after the birth.

  Edgar was agitated about Catherine. He kept telling me how worried he was about her, how sick she had been. He felt she would not cope with the birth, and wanted to know if I could be around to help her. I think even then he was unaware of how much his wife disliked me, and had not seemed to notice that I’d put myself in the background as a consequence. He reminded me that she had no family to turn to, that she was very much alone and had few friends in Sydney. He refused my offer of a cup of tea or coffee, and kept prattling on and on about how delicate she was, how much she had suffered, how she needed support. Finally he mentioned Cliff.

  ‘Clifford’s been wonderful,’ he said, ‘visiting as often as he can and taking Catherine out for drives when she feels well enough.’ He went on until I could not stand it a second longer.

  ‘Edgar, are you that blind?’ I said. ‘This is insane.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ He seemed genuinely puzzled.

  ‘I mean, can’t you see what is right under your nose? Your wife is not that sick. She is simply having a difficult pregnancy, it happens all the time.’

  He blinked repeatedly.

  ‘And what do you think she and Cliff are up to, spending all that time together?’

  At that he became enraged. He stood up, his brow dark. His mouth pressed shut then opened once or twice like a faulty valve, until it finally opened properly and he shouted at me.

  ‘How dare you insinuate anything about Catherine!’

  I stood up too. ‘I don’t dare anything. I just know what I see.’

  He grabbed his hat and went to the door. ‘What would you know! You’re just jealous.’

  ‘Jealous! Of your selfish, spoiled wife?’

  ‘Yes, jealous. Bitter. Married five years and no baby.’

  For a moment I was unable to speak with shock and he was already out the door before I found my voice again.

  ‘I could say the same about you.’

  He whipped around. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t have a baby either. What makes you think it’s yours?’

  I slammed the door behind him and stood behind it. Fury had made me breathless. I almost expected him to pound on the door and demand that I explain myself, but all I heard were his long strides taking him down the driveway and out to the street.

  I made myself a gin and tonic but even after I drank it I felt bad. I felt like tossing the shawl into the rubbish bin but sat down and put the radio on and finished the lace stitch edging, forcing my fingers to stop trembling. When it was done later that night I packed it away. After I began looking after you I realised it was my gift to you, not her, and so I wrapped you in it right from the start.

  The next afternoon when I returned from work my landlady was waiting to see me. She said nothing but handed me an envelope: a notice to quit.

  *

  I always imagined that deep inside Edgar knew, but that so long as no one articulated it he could pretend it wasn’t true. A couple of months later I found him at Ashfield, alone and in the dark. It was as if he was squatting in that house. Catherine always resented being there and was never a homemaker, but when she left all the light and life seemed to vanish from it. I think the electricity was not working, or had been disconnected. He’d been washing in a cold tub and eating his meals in the café near the bank. He stood behind the screen door, looking sadder than anyone I had ever seen.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him. ‘I had no right.’

  He shrugged and invited me in. We sat in the kitchen drinking Scotch and water out of old Mrs Shaw’s best Stuart crystal tumblers, dusty though they were.

  ‘He visited in the hospital a couple of days afterwards,’ Edgar said. ‘When he picked the baby up I saw him and Catherine look at each other. Then I knew it was true.’

  He didn’t say these words to reassure me. They still sounded as toxic as when I had told him. I knew that my words had cracked open the hard shell of Edgar’s understanding, and had I
never confronted him like that, then he may never have seen that look over the hospital bed.

  ‘I left straight after that,’ he added. ‘I couldn’t bear it.’

  Then he put his head down and cried and cried, great heaving sobs, almost tearless, but as though his chest was going to break apart.

  ‘Edgar,’ I finally said, ‘you have to go and claim that child.’

  You would have been about six weeks old by then. He’d left that very night, walked out of the hospital ward and disappeared for two weeks until coming back to the house that was so cold and lonely. He’d had no contact at all but presumed Catherine and Cliff were at his flat, with you. I was beginning to feel a mild alarm. Catherine was no mother, and Edgar, I knew, would be the best father you could ever have. ‘She needs you,’ I added, ‘that baby. Cliff might have fathered her but she’s yours. Your daughter.’

  He pressed his hands to his eyes as if he feared they might escape from their sockets, then took his hands away and looked at me. ‘I’ll need you to come with me,’ he said.

  I agreed.

  ‘And I’ll need your help afterwards.’

  I agreed to that too. I felt it was the least I owed him. I had been staying with a friend, in her spare room. It was a cheerless situation, for she was not well off and was expecting her third child. Her husband, a semi invalid, was already hinting about when I might find a place of my own.

  We arranged to meet at Cliff’s Petersham flat the following week. He walked me up the hall to the front door. The house was completely dark by then. He promised he would have the electricity and gas reconnected, and in return I offered to go shopping for bottles and formula, and all the other basics.

  ‘He brought her in three dozen red roses, you know. To the hospital. Three dozen.’ He laughed, a humourless laugh. ‘The nurses had trouble finding enough vases.’

  *

  It was as if Catherine was ready and waiting for us. The place seemed almost empty, spare, not that it had ever been anything more than a bachelor’s flat. Cliff was nowhere to be seen. She opened the door when Edgar knocked, turned around and walked back inside without saying a word. Your father went straight over to where you were asleep in the corner of the sitting room, in the white pram which he had bought months before. He had bought most of the baby things, despite the fact it was she who loved to shop.

  I was waiting at the door but she appeared again, coming close where she practically hissed at me, glaring up, for even in her heels she could never surmount her dainty height.

  ‘If it wasn’t for your interference,’ she said, ‘everything would have been all right.’ She held my eyes as she pulled on her gloves, then turned away to go, adjusting the tilt of her hat in the hall mirror. Edgar was gazing at you. It was the first time he’d seen you since the hospital. Out of the corner of my eye I noticed him carefully reach in and pick you up. I would not turn and watch him, and be a witness to the tears creeping down his face.

  In front of the mirror she turned this way and that, checking out her appearance, smoothing down the fabric of her frock over her stomach. She looked very self-satisfied, despite her anger. Watching her fix her makeup, I gained the distinct impression that all her sickness throughout the pregnancy had been somehow concocted, as if she had been trying her hardest to expel all trace of a baby from her body. When she was done smacking her lips together she snapped her handbag shut and brushed past me without another word, let alone a glance behind her.

  Strangely, Cliff was not waiting for her in the car. I could hear her heels clicking angrily all the way up the footpath.

  32

  At her desk Dove let out a great long sigh. Then she closed the laptop and sat back in her chair. Her back ached. It was nearly midday and she would get up and have an early lunch. She was tired. She kept waking suddenly in the early hours to realise that the abortion she had seemed to experience along with her character was just an invention. Or that Ellis had never opened that box to discover a photo of her mother taken when she was married and seen that the resemblance between them was nothing short of shocking. Or that the baby, Charlie, never existed.

  In the kitchen she made herself a strong coffee. But as she pressed the plunger it gurgled then spewed up, spraying her T-shirt with hot mud.

  ‘Fuck. Fucking fucking fuck!’

  Viv sat in the corner and curled his tail around his body, regarding her with slit eyes.

  ‘Fuck it,’ she said again but much quieter.

  She tossed the plunger into the sink, wiped the bench and washed her hands, then went to her bedroom to change. She needed to get out. She would go into town, David Jones or somewhere, and buy a proper coffee maker, a good quality espresso machine. It was ridiculous that she, a writer, should be depriving herself of something as basic as decent coffee. And it was not like she could not afford it. Yet as soon as she thought that she felt guilty, and then felt angry with herself for such stupid pettiness. Her mother would not have begrudged her the best espresso machine one could buy. But every time she considered something special she couldn’t shake off the idea that this was an extravagance she did not deserve, and mere exploitation of the profits of her mother’s death.

  She knew what the problem was, she thought on the bus into town. She should never have left her job, painful though it had become. And she had forgotten to be careful what she wished for. She had taken advantage of not needing to work for the first time in her life. Lately, she had written every day and decided that only after finishing this novel would she think about getting another job. There would be no pressure. She wouldn’t have to worry about a thing, all the bills would be paid, she could even take time off from this job of being a writer – the one that didn’t pay – go away on holidays for a week or two, and work from home in a disciplined manner. And when the story was finished she would then acquire an agent and only after that look around for a new position, something part time in design again that would perhaps allow her to work on a new project. She was not foolish enough to imagine she would find a new job as a writer.

  But she had been foolish enough to think she exercised some control over the story. Now that it had made her back ache and confounded her to the point she wanted to yell at people who simply did not exist, she knew she understood very little about what she was doing. She wished she had never imagined this story, that she could wind the clock back to before that first dream when she saw Ellis travelling on the bus – just like she was now, how infuriating was that? – to visit her father, and understood this was one small scene out of a much larger story.

  In the past few months she had twice decided it would never work, and ignored the story. To distract herself, she had decided to pursue activities that she had never done before, and so enrolled in a meditation course at a local alternative therapy centre, and taken up motorcycle riding. This latter involved a proper course of instruction and was a great deal harder than she envisaged. She had bought a second-hand motor scooter and found that riding out along the quiet back streets of some suburbs, where she felt safer, the marvellous, easy freedom did not stop her mind roaming back into the story. She went to weekly meditation classes for three months and practised at home every afternoon, but while she knew meditation was meant to empty her mind, she could not control the images that crowded in. Invariably she found that after going for a ride, say out to Breakfast Point where the streets were quiet and clean and safe to the point of being eerie, she would return home only to go straight to the story, a scene fresh in her head.

  In meditation classes, more than once the instructor had leaned close to her, when she was seated cross-legged, her eyes closed, and whispered, ‘Dove, stay in the moment please. Concentrate on the flame only.’ How did she know, Dove wondered, that she was not visualising the candle flame that had been placed before them in the intimate and darkened room with the seagrass matting, but that she was looking directly at a dark green tin box?
Or a girl sitting on her bed hugging her knees? Her head had remained full of questions and gaps in the narrative. Where was Ellis now? The question of what had happened to Charlie. When Edgar had died. And the mystery that loomed like swollen thunderclouds in almost every scene in her head: why Ellis’s mother had left.

  She did not assume for a minute that now she had found the answers to these questions, the story would leave her alone.

  By the time she reached the city she had made a decision. She would look for a new position, even if it was part time. She had to – to preserve her sanity. Only the other day Martin had mentioned that someone he knew working on one of the magazines was looking for new designers. At David Jones she bought a Saeco espresso machine, ridiculously expensive for one person’s use, big and complex enough to serve a café, and ordered it to be delivered. Afterwards she went down to the food hall and bought some fennel, rocket and organic chicken sausages and a tub of beetroot and Persian feta salad for dinner. She walked across to George Street and down to Dymocks, deciding to spend only ten minutes there before going home.

  It was like a conspiracy. Facing her just inside the doorway was a stand of Penguin classic reprints, and in the middle of the top shelf was a copy of Wuthering Heights.

  33