Well-behaved Women
Page 16
Miss Carruthers didn’t get many visitors, but absolutely everyone who stopped by commented on that picture.
Everyone except the new nurse from the Silver Chain.
His name was Lucas. He came by every Thursday morning to check her blood pressure and whatnot. She caught him looking at the picture on his second visit, which pleased her, until she noticed that his face was clouded by confusion. Miss Carruthers waited for him to comment like everyone else, but he didn’t. He half-closed his eyes, squinting as if he couldn’t quite reconcile the young girl in the photo with the old walnut shell of a woman in front of him.
She cleared her throat, and he jumped, his face crimson.
‘Are you all right for your prescriptions, Miss Carruthers?’ he asked, rubbing the back of his neck as if she’d hit him there.
‘Yes, Lucas.’
‘I’d best be on my way then. See you in a week.’ His voice came out in a mumble.
Miss Carruthers would have laughed if she hadn’t found it so mortifying. Lucas could probably stare at that picture for hours, but he hadn’t once been able to look an old lady in the eye.
* * *
Tuesdays, she did her weekly shop. The local IGA was less than a 200-metre walk away, and aided by a shopping trolley, this at least she could manage.
Shopping for one was easy. A box of Dilmah, some biscuits, a few bananas, milk. On one of the bay ends, there was a children’s watercolour paint set on special for $24.99. Shirley hadn’t painted in years, but on a whim, she added one to her trolley.
At the register, a girl with a stud in her nose leaned against the counter, reading a magazine. Miss Carruthers placed her items down on top of its glossy pages, then she stood back and waited. The girl looked stunned. She hurried to scan the goods, took Miss Carruthers’s money, and placed the bag into the trolley for her.
‘Thank you,’ said Miss Carruthers.
The girl turned back to the magazine. ‘Have a nice day,’ she muttered.
The trolley rattled over the bricks as she gave it rein to pull home. Looking both ways, she entered the crosswalk and made to push the cart up the opposite kerb, but it seemed to have other ideas. The wheels turned, angling back down the hill. Miss Carruthers leaned back against it with her body weight and managed to swing it so it pointed back up to the footpath, but she still couldn’t get it off the road. She gritted her teeth, hating the way the skin under her upper arms hung like useless empty bags.
She heard the car before she saw it. A big grey Holden roared down the hill and came to a stop at the white line. The driver leaned on the horn. Miss Carruthers’s arms were shaking from the effort of holding the trolley.
‘Oi!’ The driver leaned one elbow and the top of his head out the window. ‘Come on, grandma.’
Her rage was like a million tiny bee stings. ‘I am not your grandmother, thank goodness for small mercies!’
She let go of the trolley. It missed the car by a wide margin and continued across the street, coming to a rest against a stop sign. The driver honked his horn and sped past her, coming close enough that her heart felt like it would seize up there and then.
Sitting at her dressing table before bed that night, she pawed her face with witch’s hands. She touched a purple vein in her neck, pulled at her rice paper skin. Her eyes were red around the waterlines, more so than they had been a week ago. When she’d been a girl, she’d laughed at vain women like herself, turned up her nose at people who needed ointments and lotions to feel beautiful. Her cousins had been so jealous of her tanned skin; her long, shiny hair; her perfect straight nose. They were all dead now.
She reached for a blue tub of eye cream. As she patted the cool gel into her skin, she glanced over her shoulder at the television. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were disembarking a plane with their baby son. The Duchess was resplendent in yellow. What would have happened, Miss Carruthers wondered, if Prince William had fallen in love with a plain girl, or, God forbid, an ugly one? You had to have it all to be the wife of a public figure. It wasn’t enough to just be smart, or pretty, or kind. And you couldn’t be too much of one thing—people had to like you. Other women had to look at you and see a friend.
* * *
Shirley had never been particularly good at making friends. Men, she had been good at. She’d never been without a steady boyfriend from the age of fifteen, and had been on dates with athletes, academics and struggling artists. But none of them compared to Cecil Partridge.
By 1949, they had been seeing one another for two-and-a-bit years. It was the longest she had ever stayed with any man, and all the signs had told her that tonight would be the night he would propose. She’d told her mother to make sure that there was film for the camera, and she had her hair set that afternoon. When he knocked on the door to her father’s house, she was ready, but she waited so he wouldn’t think she was too eager. Her heart beat out of time at the sight of him. Her arms wanted to wrap themselves around his neck, but she’d forced herself to be calm. Ladylike. She didn’t even let herself smile too widely.
But Cecil’s face was dour.
He took off his hat. ‘I think we need to talk.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s over,’ said Cecil. ‘I don’t think this is going to work out.’
‘Oh,’ she said. Her hand clutched the doorframe as she shook her hair out of her face and drew herself up taller.
‘I’m sorry. I have to think of my career.’
For months, she’d been training herself, trying to become the ideal wife. She’d started paying more attention to how she dressed, holding her tongue in public, accompanying him to every event and eating nothing so as not to embarrass him. She laughed at all his colleagues’ terrible jokes, she fixed his tie, she sat with the other wives and girlfriends of junior party members, all silent and hungry and bored, and she’d pretended to enjoy it. A few weeks earlier, after months of putting him off, Shirley had given in to Cecil’s urges in the back seat of his car, believing that marriage was the only possible outcome.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said, trying to keep her voice down so her parents wouldn’t hear. ‘I thought you were going to propose.’
He made a face like a man with a stomach ache.
‘I care about you, Shirley. We’ve had fun together. But, let’s face it, you’re not cut out to be a politician’s wife.’
‘Not cut out? I’ve done everything you’ve asked me to do. I thought you were happy.’
‘It’s not enough,’ he said, his voice so quiet she was sure he was ashamed. ‘Voters will find it hard to like you. A person only needs to look at you to know you’re judging them.’ Something inside Shirley snapped. She wanted to lash out at him like a wounded dog, but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. It took every piece of strength she had, but she forced herself not to give away a single sliver of emotion.
‘Go, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again.’
Cecil seemed relieved as he walked back down the front steps to his car. But he stopped by the driver’s side door to light up a cigarette, and the pair of them watched one another in the dark for a few minutes without saying a word.
Shirley wondered if she was in shock. She was twenty years old, and though she’d been on dates with many men, she’d never had her heart broken like this before.
I’ll wait, she thought to herself. If I wait long enough, he’ll be back.
She reached thirty, and then forty, and still, Cecil Partridge didn’t return to her. She saw his name in the papers from time to time: his wedding announcement, the birth of his daughter. She noted, with some vindication, that even without Shirley holding him back, he never even got close to becoming Premier.
* * *
The day after her run-in with the man in the Holden, Shirley stayed in and took her phone off the hook. It was the twenty-ninth of July, Cecil’s birthday. He would have been ninety-five if he were still alive. She wondered what he looked like now, but could
only picture the young man who’d stood on her front steps, wringing the brim of his trilby.
She didn’t use her computer much, but that morning she turned it on. Obituary, she typed. Cecil Partridge. The computer began to think.
‘This is ridiculous,’ said Miss Carruthers, turning off the screen.
The next morning, Lucas let himself in only to find her sitting at her easel in her underwear, trying to choose the best angle from which to view her spindly body in the mirror. She was painting a portrait of herself.
‘You didn’t come to the door,’ he said, his face scarlet. ‘I thought you might have hurt yourself.’ His eyes sought out the photograph again, so embarrassed that he seemed not to be breathing.
Miss Carruthers narrowed her eyes. ‘For goodness sake, Lucas, you are a nurse! You help people much older and more decrepit than me to shower! Surely, this old body is nothing you haven’t seen before!’
She was so upset that her voice wobbled. ‘If I do not answer my door, it does not mean that I have died. I’m not quite so old as that yet. Am I incapable of passing my days without supervision now?’
Lucas hurried out of the room, the door banging shut behind him.
‘I’ll come back and check on you tomorrow,’ he called from the hallway.
* * *
She worked on her painting night and day for weeks, keeping it hidden in the laundry whenever Lucas dropped by. She was the very model of a demure old lady, allowing him to take her temperature and measure her heart rate without snapping at him, and even asking him now and then to make her something small to eat before he went. When he sat with her at her dining table, he no longer perched on the edge of his seat, ready to run away. Before long, he stopped staring at the photograph on the telephone table as if he needed to rescue the princess in it from the haggard old crone keeping her prisoner. It was a chore, being so obedient, but it was almost worth it to be treated like a person again.
She wished she could explain it to him. In her mind, she and the girl in the portrait were exactly the same. She felt the same now as she had then. It was only her outside that had changed.
It was a few weeks later that Lucas brought another photograph along to show her. It wasn’t framed, and the back had started to yellow with age, but it was almost identical to the one in Miss Carruthers’s apartment.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ he asked, sitting next to her on the couch.
Her hands shook as she took the photograph from him. It was from the same set as hers, taken the same day. She could remember it so clearly. Cecil had bought himself a new box brownie, and he’d wanted her to pose. His golden girl, he’d called her, and he’d tucked a sprig of wattle behind her ear as an excuse to stand close and kiss her.
‘Where did you find this?’ she whispered.
‘My grandad kept it in the drawer of his desk. I always knew it wasn’t my nana.’
In seven decades, she’d had a lot of practice holding back her tears. Miss Carruthers handed him back the picture and stood up.
‘Did he love her?’ she asked. ‘Your grandmother?’ She knew it was a selfish thing to ask, but she couldn’t help herself.
Lucas nodded. ‘Very much. Until the day he died, he’d dance with her in the living room every Sunday night. Their little tradition.’
She nodded and turned away, wanting to cry so badly that it stung like electricity.
‘But you should read the back,’ he said.
He placed his hand on her forearm and guided her to sit back down. This time, she took the photograph with both hands and breathed deeply as she turned it over.
My duchess, 1953, the inscription read.
Miss Carruthers gingerly rose from her seat. She went to the front corridor and picked up her photograph. She wiped her nose.
‘Foolish girl,’ she whispered, opening the top drawer and placing both pictures inside.
Lucas had packed up his things and was waiting when she returned to the sitting room. He placed a hand on her shoulder, and she cupped his cheek in her palm, filled with a sudden fondness for this awkward young man.
‘See you next week?’ he said.
‘So long as I don’t fall off my perch in the meantime.’
This time, when his face reddened, Miss Carruthers was amused rather than enraged.
‘I’m only teasing you, Lucas.’ The hint of a smile began to surface as she looked at him. ‘There’s a lot of life still left in me.’
‘I’ll bet there is, Mrs C.’
‘Miss,’ she said, patting the young man on the shoulder. ‘I never married, after all that.’
Lucas looked surprised, but if he had some comment to make, he quickly smothered it, and for that she was grateful.
As she shut the door behind him, Shirley felt lighter.
Slowly, she ambled back to the sitting room, collecting her paints and brushes on the way.
THE WOMAN AT THE WRITERS FESTIVAL
Jessie Oliver is nothing special.
She is odd-looking, in an unremarkable sort of way. Her hair is obviously dyed, and a shade of black that makes me think of shoe polish. Her teeth are crooked and stick out when she smiles, and her eyes are bug-like, as if she’s concentrating very hard on staying awake.
If she were not the author of the moment, not the darling of this year’s writers festival, she would be the kind of woman you would move away from at the train station.
She walks out onto the stage in a ridiculous pair of cork wedges, footsteps clunking loudly on the wood. There is still five minutes to go until the beginning of her session, but everyone here is so eager to hear her speak that they start hushing each other as soon as they spot her. They don’t want to waste a single word. Almost every woman in the audience is clutching a copy of her book to their chest.
It has become increasingly apparent to me that people will read whatever the Books and Arts Program tells them to.
Jessie Oliver pulls her tiny reading glasses out of their case and balances them on the end of her nose. She smooths out her peasant skirt, fashionable for a brief moment in the 1970s but today more reminiscent of a quilt cover, and settles her hands in her lap. Next to her on the table, a copy of her book, well-thumbed and adorned with neon pink Post-its. I see her glance about the room, pretending she is humbled and nervous.
There is something about this woman that makes me feel like my insides are bending out of shape.
At the top of the hour, the chairwoman begins her interview.
‘Thank you, everyone,’ she says, ‘and welcome to the 2015 Perth Writers Festival. I’m Elsie Gardiner, and today I am very pleased to be joined by local author Jessie Oliver, whose book The Old Familiar Places was recently longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and shortlisted for the Ned Kelly Awards. Please join me in welcoming Jessie Oliver.’
The crowd bursts into rapturous applause, with one group at the front—obviously a book club—even standing up to cheer.
Beside Elsie on the stage, Jessie Oliver blushes, looking at the ground to hide her smile.
When she looks up again, her eyes meet mine, and I feel like my pleura is popping, like I am being stabbed right between the ribs.
‘Thanks so much, everyone,’ says Jessie. ‘I honestly can’t believe that this is all really happening.’
Me either, I think. ‘When I first began writing The Old Familiar Places, I was divorced, I was on the verge of having to move back in with my parents … I had truly hit rock bottom. This book has been an absolute blessing. It has changed my life.’
The crowd breaks out into applause again, this time a quieter, more respectful flurry. The woman beside me looks like she may burst into tears. She turns to me, placing one doughy hand on mine. ‘Isn’t she marvellous?’ she whispers.
It takes all the strength I have just to get through the session.
* * *
I work as a dental hygienist. I used to tell people that I was a writer-slash-dental-hygienist, but saying that did not make it true.
Aside from cleaning teeth, sometimes I answer phones and schedule appointments. This does not leave me a lot of time or energy to write. Most nights, when I sit down at the computer, all I can think about is teeth.
That morning, at five minutes to nine, the phone rings. I have been there since seven-thirty, sterilising implements and getting ready for the day. My first patient has not yet arrived, and I am sitting alone in the empty office, spinning around in the receptionist’s chair to keep myself awake.
‘Good morning, Bright Smile Dental, Peggy speaking.’ ‘Peggy, it’s Dr Delaney—I’m so sorry to have to do this to you, but I’m going to have to cancel all my appointments today. My mother is sick.’
‘Oh,’ I say. ‘That’s no good—is she all right?’
‘She’s fine, she’s just broken her leg. But I think it’d be better if we just reschedule everyone, don’t you?’
I look at my watch. 8.58 am. The first patient is due any minute.
‘Fine,’ I say. ‘But they won’t like it. You know some clients take the morning off work to be here.’
‘I know. I had a lunchtime appointment for fillings that took forever to find a time that suited—but it can’t be helped. If you can reschedule as many as you can, it would be a big help. You can go home after that. You’ll still be paid for a full day.’
‘All right.’
She pauses. ‘You can use the day to work on your novel.’ I wonder if I am imagining her smirk. She sounds a little too amused for my liking.