White Gardenia

by Belinda Alexandra

  ‘Anya,’ I said, doing my best to smile.

  Prince’s was only a few blocks away so we agreed to walk. Jack explained that the party we were covering was a ‘big do’, although I didn’t need to be reminded of that. I was feeling nauseous enough as it was. The event was a dinner dance being thrown by Philip Denison in honour of his daughter’s twenty-first birthday. The Denisons owned Australia’s largest department store chain, so they were important to the paper in terms of advertising. That’s why the owner of our own newspaper, Sir Henry Thomas, was going to be there.

  ‘I’ve never done anything like this before, Jack,’ I told him. ‘So I’m relying on you to tell me whom we should photograph.’

  Jack pulled a cigarette from the box-shaped bulge in his top pocket. He sniffed it and tucked it behind his ear.

  ‘Pretty well anybody who’s important in Sydney is going to be there,’ he said. ‘But do you know what is really so newsworthy about this event?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘It’s the first time Henry Thomas and Roland Stephens will have been in the same room for more than twenty years.’

  The point was lost on me. I stared blankly at Jack.

  ‘Ah,’ he smiled, ‘I forgot that you’re new to this country. Roland Stephens is Australia’s biggest wholesaler of fine fabrics and wool. He might be one of the richest men in Australia, but he relies just as heavily on Denison’s patronage as Sir Henry does.’

  I shrugged. ‘I still don’t get it,’ I said. ‘What’s the big deal about them both being in the same room? It’s not as though they are competitors.’

  Jack gave me a sly smile. ‘It’s not about business between those two. It’s a feud over a woman. A beautiful woman named Marianne Scott. She was Sir Thomas’s fiancée…before Roland Stephens stole her away.’

  ‘Is she going to be there?’ I asked, thinking that the event was starting to sound more like a night at the Moscow-Shanghai than a Sydney society do.

  ‘No,’ said Jack. ‘She’s long gone. They both married other women.’

  I shook my head. ‘Who can explain the rich?’

  Jack and I arrived at Prince’s and were told to wait with the rest of the press. We would be admitted after all the important guests had arrived. I watched Rolls Royce after Rolls Royce pull up to the red carpet. The women were dressed in Dior or Balenciaga gowns, the men were in tuxedos, which only made me feel more self-conscious about my own tatty dress. I saw Sir Henry Thomas step out of a car, accompanied by his wife. I’d seen his picture at the paper many times but I had never met him. I was in too lowly a position to be introduced to him.

  Bellboys opened the doors for the guests as they arrived, and even though more than a hundred people were entering the restaurant, everyone still tipped them. I noticed one man in particular approaching the doors. He was broad-shouldered and tall with a head like a lump of granite. He reached into his pocket and threw some coins in the air, making the bellboys scramble for them.

  I turned away, disgusted.

  After the VIP guests had arrived, the press were allowed inside. Bertha had taken me to lunch at Prince’s a few times. The décor was white walls and white tablecloths with huge mirrors everywhere. Like Romano’s it had a dance floor, but the carpet around it was a rose colour. ‘To bring out the beauty in the women’s faces,’ Bertha told me.

  Some of the guests had already taken their places at the oval tables surrounding the floor and were watching the dance band set up. But most people were still mingling and Jack said that we needed to work quickly, before the conversations became more involved and people got niggly about having their photograph taken.

  ‘Sydney Herald. May I take your photograph?’ Jack asked groups of people, although by the time they answered him, he had already flashed his camera. After he had taken a picture, I would rush forward, apologise, and ask for the names of the people who had appeared in it. I would then scribble these down in my notebook and run after Jack, who was usually onto his next subject by then. Most of the guests were polite, especially the business wives who wanted to promote themselves and their husbands in the paper. Although one young man who was talking with a group of friends turned around and gazed at us with contemptuous eyes. ‘Oh, if you have to,’ he said, waving his hand. ‘I’d hate you to lose your jobs.’

  We photographed all the Denison family, including the recently jilted Sarah, and the more attractive of birthday-girl Ruth Denison’s friends. Jack scanned the room to see if we had missed anyone.

  His eyes focused like a hawk choosing its prey. ‘This won’t go in the paper but to be correct we’d better take it,’ he said, leading me through the crowd. I saw that we were heading towards the man I had seen earlier, the one who had flipped his coins at the bellboys. He was standing with an older couple. I wanted to ask Jack who the man was, but he had already asked him for his picture. The two other guests moved to the side while the man lifted his chin for the frame. Jack’s camera flashed.

  ‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, moving forward. ‘Would you kindly give me your name?’

  At that very moment the whole room seemed to fall silent. The man’s eyes widened and his mouth moved, but he said nothing. I glanced at the couple who had been standing with him. They were staring at me, mortified.

  Jack coughed, then tugged me away by the belt of my dress. ‘Anya,’ he said, ‘that’s Roland Stephens.’

  I felt myself turn hot then cold. Jack pulled me towards the door. I felt as though all eyes were on me. We passed one of the social reporters from another paper. Her face was luminous with glee. I could just see me appearing in her column the following morning: ‘The Sydney Herald deemed it appropriate to send an ignorant little novice in a tatty dress to one of the most important events for the season…Can you believe she didn’t know who Roland Stephens was? Shame, shame, shame.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Jack,’ I said, once we were outside.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ he said. ‘It’s Diana’s. If Caroline couldn’t make it, she should have come.’

  A feeling of dread passed over me. ‘Will she get in trouble?’

  ‘Well,’ he said, shrugging, ‘just think. Sir Henry was there. This gives Roland Stephens one more thing to gloat about. It makes it look like Sir Henry employs people who don’t know what they’re doing.’

  All that night I tossed and turned. I had to get up once to be sick although I hadn’t eaten anything since lunchtime. It was one thing to get myself fired but to pull down Diana with me was unthinkable. I clenched my teeth, hating Sydney, or more specifically its social world. Why hadn’t I just stayed at the coffee lounge where the most difficult thing I’d had to deal with was people requesting milkshakes without ice-cream?

  The next morning, the one I believed would be my last day of employment with the Sydney Herald, I put on my black and white dress with the air of someone dressing for a funeral. If I was going to be reprimanded and fired for not knowing who that arrogant man was, then I intended to be reprimanded and fired in style. My only regret was Diana.

  When I arrived at the women’s section I could tell by the sympathetic looks from the other girls that the story had already got around. Ann was busy in her office moving things about. I had worked with her long enough to know this meant that she was excited. I wondered if she thought she was going to get Diana’s job. I decided to be brave and go straight to Diana with the truth. I braced myself, but when I walked into her office she looked up and smiled at me.

  ‘I had a wonderful night,’ she said, beaming. ‘Harry took me for a dinner cruise on the harbour. No socialites. It was bliss.’

  She hasn’t heard, I thought. I was about to ask her if I could sit down so I could explain what had happened last night, but before I could say anything she burst out with, ‘I’m glad you’ve put on that lovely dress today because Sir Henry has asked us to meet him at his office at ten o’clock.’

  I tried to stammer out that I needed to talk to her but her telephone rang, and w
hen she started talking about the layout of the trousseau feature I knew it was going to be a long call. I rushed from Diana’s office to the ladies’ room, sure that I was going to be sick. But the chill of the tiled walls calmed me. After checking the stalls were free, I confronted my reflection in the mirror. ‘See this through and take the blame,’ I told myself. ‘Act professionally for Diana’s sake.’

  Just before ten o’clock Diana and I made our way downstairs to the executive floor. Sir Henry’s secretary led us into his office. He was talking on the telephone to someone about paper costs and signalled for us to sit down. I sank into the leather chair next to his desk. It was so low I could barely see him over my knees.

  I looked around the room at the various portraits of the Thomases who had run the company before the present one. There were several original paintings on the walls but the only one I could recognise was a picture of nymphs floating in the air. The artist had to be Norman Lindsay.

  ‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ Sir Henry said, putting down the receiver. I had never seen him up close before. He had a face like a stage actor, theatrical, deeply lined and noble.

  He didn’t bother to introduce himself to me. Why would he? In a few moments I was going to be out of his life for good.

  ‘Let’s take a seat at the table. I have some things I want to show you,’ he said, standing up and directing us to a long medieval-looking table with high-backed chairs around it.

  I glanced at Diana. I wondered what she was thinking.

  We took our seats at the table and Sir Henry pulled out a file from a shelf next to it. To my surprise he addressed me. ‘As you probably know, Anya, newspapers are driven by advertising. The advertising dollar is everything. More so now than ever.’

  Oh God, I thought, he’s going to draw this out.

  Sir Henry scratched his head. ‘We’ve been reproached by our cosmetic advertisers because we don’t have a beauty column in the paper, as they do in America and Europe.’

  I nodded and glanced at Diana again. She was beaming. I was beginning to think she knew something I didn’t.

  Sir Henry pushed an advertisement for Helena Rubinstein towards me. ‘Diana and I have discussed it and we have agreed to put you in charge of the column. She’s told me that you’ve been very helpful to Bertha and from time to time you’ve written copy yourself.’

  I wiped my palms on the underside of the table. His offer hadn’t been what I was expecting but somehow I found the clarity to nod my head.

  ‘Diana thinks you have the right knack to do it. I think you’re clever and witty too. Also, even if the competition cottons on to it, I doubt they will have anyone on staff as beautiful as you. And that’s important in a beauty editor.’ Sir Henry winked.

  I was sure I was hallucinating from lack of sleep. When did Sir Henry develop his idea that I was clever and witty? Surely not from the previous night.

  ‘What sort of things will be in the column?’ I asked, surprised that I had managed to formulate an intelligent question.

  ‘There will be two parts,’ said Diana, turning to me. ‘The first will be something along the lines of what’s new, where you can write about products that have come out on the market. The other part will be beauty tips. There’s nothing hard about it and I will be supervising you.’

  ‘We can discuss the finer points later,’ said Sir Henry, getting up to answer a telephone call. ‘I just wanted to meet you, Anya, and see what you thought of the idea.’

  Diana and I let ourselves out of his office. On the stairs back to the women’s section, Diana grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘I’ve been telling him for months about my idea for a beauty column and that I wanted you as the editor. But this morning when I got in it was suddenly “Go! Go! Go!”’

  The door to the stairwell opened and I heard Sir Henry call me back.

  ‘You go,’ said Diana. ‘I’ll meet you upstairs.’

  Sir Henry was waiting for me in his office. He closed the door behind me but remained standing. ‘There’s one more thing,’ he said, a boyish smile breaking out on his wrinkled face. ‘I thought what you did last night was clever. You know, pretending that you didn’t know who Roland Stephens was. Your little stunt was the topic of conversation for the rest of the evening. Some people were even saying I must have put you up to it. An Australian girl couldn’t have got away with it, of course, but you made it seem real. That man is so arrogant he deserved a good dent in his ego.’

  Although I was given the title Beauty Editor, I wasn’t really anything more than a D-grade ranking journalist. But I wasn’t worried about that. It was better than being a non-ranking office girl and it did earn me a little more money. The best thing about the position was that I wasn’t snubbed any more at social events. In fact, those women were threatened by me. They thought when I was looking at them I was finding fault with their skin or hairstyle, and more than once I was cornered by the wife of a prominent politician or businessman begging me for advice about her first grey hairs or wrinkles.

  ‘There’s the beauty guru,’ Bertha laughed, whenever she saw me at the office. The title was appropriate. Every week in the column I told women how to make themselves attractive. I instructed them to dip their elbows into lemon halves to keep them white or to rub petroleum jelly into their cuticles to make their nails strong. I did none of those things myself, except to clean my face thoroughly before I went to bed. But my readers were none the wiser. My work, going dancing with Judith and Adam, watching Irina sing at the coffee lounge, made my second year in Australia pass by quickly. At Christmas, Irina and Vitaly announced their engagement with the marriage set for November the following year. Apart from still missing my mother, my life in Australia was happy and I was sure 1952 was going to be my best year yet. But I was wrong. Something would happen to turn my life upside down, all over again.

  I returned to the flat in Potts Point one evening and found it deserted. I knew that Irina and Vitaly were at the pictures. There was a note on the coffee table from Betty saying that she had gone for a dip in the Domain baths. She’d drawn a map in case I wanted to join her. It was hot that day, a real Sydney heat wave. It was half past seven but the sun was still burning. I kicked off my shoes and opened the doors and windows. I found Ruselina lying on the banana chair on the balcony, wearing a Chinaman’s straw hat and sunglasses and catching the beginnings of the evening sea breeze. Down on the street I could hear the happy shouts of children playing under a hose.

  ‘It’s what the Australians call “stinking hot”, isn’t it?’ Ruselina said.

  I asked her if she wanted some lemonade.

  ‘Thank you. A telegram came for you today, Anya,’ she said. ‘I put it on the kitchen table.’

  I rushed to the kitchen, wondering who would have sent me a telegram. My heart leaped with excitement when I opened the envelope and saw that it was from Dan Richards, my American friend. The telegram said that he was coming to Sydney the following week and asked me to meet him at the consulate on Tuesday at eleven o’clock.

  ‘Hey,’ I called, running out to Ruselina, ‘it’s from Dan, my old friend. The one who tried to help us get to America. He’s coming to Sydney next week and wants to see me.’

  I couldn’t imagine any surprise more wonderful than seeing Dan again. We had kept up correspondence over the years, mainly Christmas cards but occasionally a letter. He was the father of two children by now.

  ‘An overseas visitor! How wonderful for you!’ said Ruselina, tilting her hat so she could get a better look at me. ‘Is he bringing his wife and children?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I assume he will be, though the youngest is barely five months old. He must be coming on either a holiday or business.’

  I read the message again. I was puzzled about why Dan had sent me a telegram rather than writing a letter and giving me more notice. I hoped that he was bringing Polly and the children. I had never met his wife but had always been intrigued by her. Dan described her as a lively and stron
g-minded woman. I knew that she would have to be someone special to have inspired such loyalty in a man.

  I was wide awake at five o’clock on the morning I was supposed to meet Dan. I’d slept well but I couldn’t lie in because of the anticipation of seeing him again. I’d already prepared my best summer dress. It was ironed and hanging on the wardrobe door, a cherry-red shift with a matching hat, one of Judith’s creations. The hat was decorated with a trim of gardenias. The dress was simple and flattering, it was the hat that gave it balance and personality. My meeting with Dan would be the first occasion I’d have to wear it. I slipped out of bed without disturbing Irina and went to the kitchen. I made tea and marmalade toast and tiptoed out onto the balcony, careful not to wake Betty when I passed her on the lounge. But there was little chance of that. Betty was a sound sleeper. As soon as she put on her pyjamas and her hair net she was usually out cold until her alarm went off in the morning.

  The street was summery green and the harbour was dazzling in the early sunlight. I could hardly believe that in a few hours I would cross paths with Dan Richards again. I closed my eyes and saw him as he had been during those language and culture afternoons in Shanghai. So gallant and dashing, trying to pronounce the Russian words I wrote down for him. I laughed when I thought of his red hair and freckled skin. His charming, boyish smile. There had been a time when I thought I could fall in love with him. That made me smile too and I was glad that I never had. He was a good man, a kind man, but we would not have been suited to each other. Besides the fact that he was happily married, I was too complicated for him. But I was glad that we had remained good friends. He had been loyal to me and generous. I was lucky to have had his help when I needed it.

  A pain pinched my stomach. Another memory came floating up like a piece of wreckage from the depths. It was at odds with the summer breeze and the joy I had been feeling just a second before. Another day, another city, another consulate…I’m looking for my husband. Gunfire in the distance. The terror in the eyes of the people crowding the halls. Please don’t worry. Everything has been chaotic here. Chinese antiques and books half packed into boxes. A photograph of a man I loved. Dan’s grim mouth. Anya, is this your husband. Dmitri Lubensky? A ship waiting in the dock. Its funnel billowing steam. Good God, Anya! Dan struggling with my luggage, his arm tucked under my elbow to stop me from stumbling. Papers clutched in my hands. My legs weak with shock. Trust me, there will be a day when you’ll be glad that man’s name doesn’t belong to you.