In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  They were going to grow old together, surrounded by children and grandchildren. They would restore the house to its original Edwardian charm, and fill it with old furniture, books and paintings, mementoes from places they would travel to. It would be a place of memories and imagination where family and friends would find a welcome and a bed whenever they needed it. It would be everything that Ruby believed she had been robbed of and it would house the story of their lives together. But that story was cut short by Owen’s death.

  ‘I haven’t been very good at hanging on to the people I love,’ Ruby says aloud, ‘and now it’s too late. But you know all about that, don’t you, Cat? That’s why you’ve brought me back here.’ And pushing the op shop box aside she reaches out and picks another at random.

  Confident now, with two boxes under her belt, Ruby opens it quickly, gasps in shock and closes it again. It’s only now that she notices that this box is actually marked: a note in felt pen on the side reads ‘1947–1969 Me and Ruby.’ She jumps up from the chair, takes several steps backwards and stares at the box as though it might explode at any minute. Then, very slowly, she walks around it, viewing it from every angle, trying to calm herself.

  There is a tap on the door and it is opened immediately.

  ‘I thought you might be here,’ Paula says, stepping inside. ‘It’s months since I’ve been in here. Catherine kept it locked, very mysterious about it, she was. Anyway, I spotted you through the window so I thought I’d come and give it a clean.’ And as she walks past Ruby towards the long table and the boxes, her eyes flick back and forth, apparently registering everything from the pictures on the wall to the pile of discarded wrappings on the floor.

  ‘Not now, thanks, Paula,’ Ruby says, pointedly walking briskly to the door and holding it open. ‘I’ve got some work to do in here,’ and she gestures to her to leave.

  ‘It’s months since it was cleaned,’ Paula protests, running her fingers along the edge of the table and then examining them for dust. ‘I’ve got a bit of time this morning if you want to leave me to it. It won’t take me long.’

  ‘Well as you can probably see I’ve cleaned and reorganised it myself quite recently,’ Ruby says, ‘now if you don’t mind …’

  Paula tosses her head. ‘Okay, well it’s up to you,’ she says, looking around again, this time as though searching for something. ‘But there might be some things of mine in here. I’d like to come in sometime when you’re not busy and have a look for them.’

  ‘What sort of things?’ Ruby asks, still holding the door.

  ‘Things I lent to Catherine. I can’t remember exactly, but you know how it is, you lend someone something and then you forget until they give it back. Only now, of course, she won’t be able to give anything back.’

  Ruby grits her teeth. ‘Well I suggest you think hard and try to make a list of things you might have lent her, and I’ll look out for them. In fact,’ she says, in a moment of inspiration, walking over to pick up the op shop box, ‘they might be in here. Why don’t you take this box off to the staff room now. You can check whether there’s anything of yours, and if there is anything you or any of the staff would like. You’re welcome to help yourselves. There may be more for you to go through when I’ve finished. Anything that’s left can go to the op shop in town.’ And she thrusts the box into Paula’s arms and urges her to the door.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Paula says, awkwardly clutching the heavy box, ‘I know when I’m not wanted,’ and she makes her way out of the door and down the hall.

  Ruby closes the door, locks it and returns to the box. Tentatively she lifts the double layer of tissue paper that covers the contents. The nightdresses are a shock: small, wafer thin white cotton yellowed with age, their initials, CR and RM, still readable among the other faded laundry marks inside the back of the collar – Catherine Rogers, and the smaller one, Ruby’s own, Ruby Medway. Ruby lifts hers from the box and shakes out the folds. It was already well worn when it was issued to her on arrival at the convent. There is a very neat darn under one armhole and she puts on her glasses to study it closely, remembering the nun’s metal ruler rapping her knuckles until they bled when she got the stitching wrong.

  She holds it up in front of her, picturing her own skinny arms in those flimsy sleeves, clutching the folds of the fabric around her body, feeling the brush of the fabric against her thighs. How long did she wear this? How many times did she wet the bed in it, peeing herself with fear, knowing she would get a beating? But how did Catherine manage to keep these, to get them out of the convent? Did she hide them somewhere? Steal them from other younger girls to whom they had been passed on? The fabric is so fragile it seems as though it might fall apart any moment. Ruby inhales the scent of it – lavender, of course, Catherine had it everywhere, but another smell too, the smell of the past, of sadness. It brings back the terror of dark nights on a thin mattress that barely protected her from the coarse steel springs of the iron bedstead. Her heart pounds at the memory of lying there listening for the sound of footsteps in the passage, the swish of a nun’s habit, the rattle of rosary beads, the creak of the door. She holds her breath now, just as she did then lying rigid with fear as the nun’s hand felt under the coarse grey blanket searching for a damp patch on the mattress. She shivers with the terror of being dragged from the bed, stripped of her nightdress, the leather belt slashing indiscriminately at her back and buttocks. And now – sixty years on – she bites her lip again as she did then to stop herself from crying.

  ‘Filthy child. You girls are scum, that’s what you are,’ the nun would shout. ‘All of you, filthy, lazy scum.’

  Closing her eyes now, Ruby can hear the hiss of contempt, smell the fear in the dormitory as the girls lay in silent terror waiting to see who would be next. There were always three or four, sometimes more, ordered to gather their sheets and carry them down three flights of stairs to the laundry, returning to spend the rest of the night naked and shivering on damp mattresses, their blankets confiscated, listening to muffled sobs, and greeting the dawn in shame.

  Ruby sets the nightdresses on the table and turns back to the open box. There, wrapped in tissue paper, are their rosaries: Catherine’s made of small black beads, her own a pale amber colour, the only things – other than ragged secondhand clothes, well-worn shoes and combs with broken teeth – that they were ever given in the convent. Alongside the rosaries are the two prayer books they had stolen from the chapel on their last day, just to see if they could get away with it. There are more clothes next, a cotton dress with a faded floral pattern that Catherine had worn that last day, socks, vests and knickers, a threadbare cardigan with darns at the elbows; the things that would have been in her bag when they left. Ruby can barely remember what had been in her own bag – very little, she thinks, maybe just one change of clothes and shoes. What else? Now she wishes she could remember what she might have found if this were her own box, if she had listened to Owen that day and stopped feeding the fire.

  Beneath the clothes are some papers. The map of Perth with the location of Benson’s Hotel marked on it that Freda Benson had given them, a faded Benson’s Hotel brochure offering ‘a warm welcome and outstanding facilities, for the whole family or business travellers’. Next a small brown envelope with Catherine’s name and the date written on it – her first pay packet – a newspaper clipping from some years later about the Bensons selling the hotel, and a plastic envelope full of black and white photographs. Ruby peers at it through the plastic. The top photograph is of herself arm in arm with Catherine, both in their bathers, knee deep in the water on Scarborough beach, the wind whipping their hair back from their faces. She can almost feel the chill of the water and the salty sting of the wind; a spring day, a Monday, their day off from the hotel, and Harry with his camera, urging them to smile.

  ‘Come on, girls, this one’ll make the front cover of a magazine – Australian beach belles,’ waving his hand to describe a banner headline. He always had delusions of gran
deur when it came to his photographs.

  Ruby bites her lip and puts the package of photographs on the table. Later, she thinks, not now, can’t cope with it now, and as she turns back to the box her heart seems to stop. A book, an exercise book with a familiar but previously forgotten cover. One of Catherine’s journals. Ruby can see her now, sitting up in bed in the room they shared when they worked at Benson’s Hotel. She is wearing a red and white spotted nightdress with thin red shoulder straps that she’d bought with her first week’s pay, and scribbling away in the dim glow of the bedside lamp.

  ‘I’m writing it all down, Rube, our adventures, everything that happens to us from now on.’

  ‘Whatever for?’ Ruby had asked. ‘Who’s going to want to read about that?’

  ‘We will, you and me. One day when we’re old we’ll be sitting in our rocking chairs on a verandah, with crocheted rugs over our knees, and we’ll read it together and remember. Best friends, we’ll still be best friends then, and we’ll laugh and cry together.’

  A lump swells in Ruby’s throat – a lump of grief. Not grief over Catherine’s death, but the older grief for what they had lost, the dislocation of everything that these journals represent. Ruby tries to focus once again on the present, not daring to drift back into the morass of hurt and anger that she has stored for so long. Breathing deeply she steadies herself and begins to flick cautiously through the pages. The notebook covers several months and on the inside of the back cover Catherine has written ‘More follows … watch this space.’ Leaning back over the box Ruby sees that there are several similar notebooks, their dates scrawled across the front covers. Catherine’s post-convent life and her own are contained in these books. Ruby toys briefly with the tempting idea of destroying them, unread. Who’s to know? And who would care? But the painful answer is that she herself would care. She will read this journal and all the others, line by line, however painful. For too long she has walked wide circles around the past, savouring only the hurt, allowing the good times to fade into oblivion.

  A tap at the door jolts her out of her reflections. Paula again? Shaking her head, Ruby puts the journal down on the table, straightens her shoulders and walks briskly to the door.

  ‘Yes, Paula,’ she calls, ‘what is it now?’

  ‘It’s not Paula, it’s me,’ Alice says, popping her head inside. ‘Should I come back later?’

  ‘Only if your name is Paula,’ Ruby says, opening the door wider, ‘in which case it would be best not to come back at all.’

  ‘That bad, eh?’

  Ruby nods. ‘Come on in. Are you okay? You look as white as a sheet.’

  Alice steps inside and closes the door behind her. ‘You look a bit pale yourself. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I had to talk to someone.’

  ‘You came at the right time,’ Ruby says. ‘I was just about to start wallowing in grief and maybe some self-flagellation. What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s this,’ Alice says, holding out a sealed envelope. ‘It came in today’s mail – I can’t bring myself to open it alone. It’s a letter from my daughter.’

  In the last few weeks she seems to have got into a habit of doing everything very quickly, probably because of the pressure of getting the café up and running, but now as she walks back to the café from the house Alice slows her pace, and then stops. She can’t go back in there yet, she just has to read the letter again and this time she needs to be alone. It’s a glorious day and Benson’s is busy with visitors. She hesitates. She could go up to the cottage, or find somewhere quiet outside, and looking around she remembers the bench in a shady curve of the path that leads from the office to Fleur’s workroom. No visitors there. Once there she is about to settle on the bench but opts instead for the huge camphor laurel on the other side of the path and flops down on the ground, leaning back against its broad trunk, well out of sight. The last thing she needs right now is someone coming over to talk to her.

  Reaching into the pocket of her jeans she pulls out the envelope that, until it was posted yesterday, was in Jacinta’s hands. It seems like a physical connection. Did Jacinta post it herself or perhaps ask Jodie to post it for her? Alice strokes the envelope, trying to feel her daughter, feel that intimate connection. Then she takes out the letter and unfolds it again.

  ‘How rude,’ Ruby had said when she had done as Alice asked and read it with her. ‘Rude and unkind; honestly, Alice, not even a polite greeting. I know she’s your daughter but I really want to shake her. Of course it’s terrible for her but you’re her mother, and it’s terrible for you too. Doesn’t she have an ounce of generosity?’

  ‘She used to,’ Alice had said, staring at the letter, unable to take her eyes off it. ‘Perhaps I killed that when I killed Ella.’

  Ruby was right, it isn’t much of a letter, no salutation, no real sign-off, certainly no affection. ‘Like a note to the milkman,’ Ruby had said. And Alice can see that it is, but it is also more than that. It’s a communication and that surely is better than no communication at all. And there is something else quite remarkable about it although Ruby, practically incandescent with anger at Jacinta’s two curt sentences typed in the centre of the page, had failed to see its possibilities: ‘I have your things. We’re going away today until the end of the month so tell your friend to get in touch after that to arrange a time to collect them.’

  ‘But look,’ Alice had said, her hand shaking as she took the letter from Ruby. ‘Look at this.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The phone number,’ Alice said, ‘she’s put her phone number. Remember they’d moved and I didn’t have the new address, and I had such a job finding where they’d gone? It felt as though they’d deliberately hidden themselves so I couldn’t find them. But I did find the address and now Jacinta’s included the phone number. Don’t you think that’s good? Don’t you think it means something?’

  Ruby hesitated. ‘I think it means she’s being practical,’ she said. ‘Don’t try to read something else into it, Alice, I don’t think you can handle having your heart broken a second time.’

  Ruby had pulled Alice towards her then, hugging her, hanging on tightly as though trying to compensate for the chill of Jacinta’s message, and Alice had absorbed every second and every nuance of that hug. In prison she had lived, night and day, shoulder to shoulder with other women, but affectionate physical contact, while not forbidden, was looked upon with suspicion. When she had arrived at the bus stop in Margaret River, Declan, apparently rendered speechless by her arrival, had hugged her as though both their lives depended on it. But Ruby’s hug was different; it was empathy and affection and Alice had longed to collapse into it.

  Now, in peaceful seclusion under the tree, she believes more than ever that the telephone number is significant. It is, she thinks, a sign of trust. Jacinta has provided the number for, as Ruby rightly says, practical reasons, but in doing so she has trusted Alice not to use it for any other purpose. That has to be a good sign – trust and perhaps a test? And if she passes … what then? Ruby’s scepticism hasn’t dulled the sense of possibility that Alice had felt when she saw that number at the top of the page. Perhaps Declan will see in it what she sees, but she wants more time to think before she shows it to him, this evening perhaps, or later in the week.

  The end of the month, Jacinta said – it’s not really very long and Alice rests her head against the tree trunk, closes her eyes and for the first time in years of not allowing herself to believe in the possibility of reconciliation she pictures herself and Jacinta facing each other. She imagines the smallest of cautious smiles playing around her daughter’s lips as she reaches out her hand.

  It’s the sound of a voice and footsteps that drags Alice back to reality and she folds the letter, tucks it into her pocket and is about to get to her feet when she recognises the voice as Paula’s, and she’s talking on the phone. Alice decides to stay put and let her pass.

  ‘Bloody Todd,’ Paula says. ‘Nothing’s too good for him, living in the
house and that, but what about me?’ And then there’s a scuffling sound as she drops down onto the seat on the other side of the path.

  Alice is not given to eavesdropping but she’s stuck now, and while Paula is silent listening to the person on the other end of the line, Alice can also hear her attempting to light a cigarette. Well hopefully she won’t be there long. Alice sits tight and Paula, never one to modulate her tone, continues her conversation.

  ‘Yes, but I’ve told them I want to take over the lavender products. I could do that job standing on my head, I said, and Ruby said they might combine it with the job in the shop …’

  Alice freezes. It’s the first she’s heard of the possibility that Paula might take over from Fleur and her immediate reaction is dismay. Paula must be making this up. Ruby hasn’t finished the new job descriptions yet, so either Paula has got the wrong idea from somewhere, or it’s pure fantasy. Just the same, it’s disturbing that Paula might believe that this is what’s going to happen.

  ‘Well I don’t know …’ Paula is saying now, ‘she just said they’re restructuring things. They’ll let me know. I told them it makes sense. I mean, I know this place as well as anyone, better than either of them, and they’re always saying what a good job I do.’

  There’s a pause, presumably while the person she’s talking to asks a question. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Paula replies, and Alice can hear her inhaling on her cigarette, ‘a few days after Catherine died Glenda resigned, and then Fleur said she was leaving too. There’s just that Kim in the shop now. She’s about as much use as tits on a bull. It needs a mature person, a proper manager. Madam Ruby and her handmaiden Alice are keeping an eye on it in the meantime. Keeping their bloody hawks’ eyes on everything, if you ask me. Anyway, Lesley, did you find somewhere to stay?’

  Alice holds her breath. So is that Lesley Craddock she’s talking to? Paula had seemed to be getting quite thick with her before she left. There is a scuffling and it sounds like Paula is getting to her feet.