A Woman of Courage (19 page)

‘Doesn't look like much,' Hilary said.

‘It'll open up the south. Just what the place needs.'

There were two immediate problems: where she was going to stay and what she was going to do for a living.

‘Stay with me,' Sean said.

‘You got a spare room?'

‘No need for that.'

‘Oh yes there is.' It would have been easy to say yes but it was too soon. Back in Adelaide he'd had the attraction of the unknown; she still fancied him – even more, if anything – but she didn't
know
him, did she? To move in with him would be asking for trouble.

‘You can have my bed and I'll sleep on the couch.'

Maybe she'd risk that much. ‘Till I find my feet,' she said.

Perhaps it was the time difference or uncertainty over her future or her expectation that Sean would come on to her during the night, maybe all three: whatever it was, she slept badly. Sean did not come on to her but that made her even more uneasy; it might mean he was serious about her and she wasn't ready for that, either. The next morning she dragged herself out of bed, made them some breakfast and set out to conquer the west.

It wasn't easy.

She managed to find herself a room in a boarding house but the landlady was clearly in two minds about letting a room to an unaccompanied woman.

‘Four quid a week. Two meals a day and shared facilities. And no fun and games,' she said. ‘Anything like that, missy, and you're out the flaming door. OK?'

‘There won't be nothing like that.'

‘Too right there won't.'

Getting a job wasn't easy either. Being from back east didn't help but after two days she landed some shifts in a lunch bar and café in a side street off St George's Terrace. The pay would cover the rent but not much more and she wondered whether she had been a fool not to settle for a share of Sean's unit, with all that implied. But instinct told her she was better off as she was; she wanted no extra baggage at the start of her search for her first million.

Not that she was likely to make it in her present job. The pay was pretty ordinary and there were no tips: it might be a different part of the continent but it was still Oz. She scoured the Situations Vacant columns. Television had been around the eastern states since the Melbourne Olympics in 1956 but over west it was brand new. There were firms advertising for technicians and installers but when she applied the hairy man who ran the show gave her the old brush off and no error.

‘Employ a girl to clamber around on rooftops? In your dreams, darling.'

Laughing as he said it too, which made it ten times worse.

A foot in the door was all she needed. Finding a door that would open for a woman was a tricky business but challenges were meant to be overcome.

3

She met Sean's parents. That was a disaster. Mrs Madigan looked at her like she was a strychnine salad: sweet tomatoes on top, poison underneath. No layabout easterner who couldn't even speak properly was going to lay claim to her Sean.

‘You're not Irish, are you? You don't
look
Irish.'

‘I had a friend called Irish back in Adelaide,' Hilary said. ‘If that helps.'

Mrs Madigan's eyes peeled Hilary's skin; she'd never been one for jokes. A sandwich short of a picnic if you ask me, she thought.

‘Your parents living?'

‘Wouldn't have a clue, Mrs Madigan. Back at the home they said I was an orphan but they told me lots of things that weren't true, so the fact is I dunno if they're alive or dead.'

Madigan's law: everyone has to have a background. ‘I don't understand what you're saying.'

‘They shipped me out here when I was a kid. Stuck me in a home then sent me to work on a farm when I was fifteen. Later I moved to Adelaide, met Sean and now I'm here to make me fortune.' She gave Mrs Madigan the sunniest of smiles, which was not returned.

‘At least you're Catholic?' Mrs Madigan hoped. Certain things in life were not negotiable.

‘I don't think I'm anything much.'

See Mrs Madigan's rattrap mouth now.

4

Hilary took a long hard look at herself. Her looks would be on her side when dealing with a man but not necessarily with another woman. Her figure likewise. Being a woman at all had already proved to be a challenge. Well, she had to live with that but her lack of education and the way she spoke remained problems. She went for a walk by the river. She passed a planing mill. She listened to the screech of machinery and thought that planing off her own rough edges might be a good place to start. She listened to herself talking to the customers in the café and thought that planing was hardly the right word. A hammer and chisel might do a better job.

She'd started back in Adelaide but what with one thing and another it hadn't come to anything. Now she made friends with a waitress, a Pom who'd been in the country five minutes. Unlike Hilary, this one had a cut-glass accent. She listened to her. Every night she repeated what she had done before, standing in front of her little mirror in her room at the boarding house and practising the sounds she'd heard. Her lips shaped a phrase Miss Anderson had taught her in the old Middlemore days.

How now, brown cow, grazing in the green green grass. Sounded more like heow neow to begin with but gradually it got better. Two months of aching jaws and she could have fooled herself. Ay am Lady Lulu. Ay speak laike a membah of the royal family. Though it slipped sometimes. Oi speak loike a member of the royal femly. Bloody hell!

As for education… She visited the library every minute she could spare, took a book at random off the shelf and sat, dictionary at her side, reading and looking up every word she didn't know. In time it did her confidence no end of good. Not only did she pick up knowledge of things she hadn't known before but acquired the knack of talking about them as a lady – no longer a lydy – should.

She thought about the occupations that were most likely to be available to a woman. Eventually she landed a job in sales at an up-market couturier where her still fragile oh-so-posh accent was more appreciated than it might have been in Subiaco. There were snags. She needed to dress the part, which wasn't cheap, and it was cruel on the feet. The pay was nothing to write home about, either, and for months she had only the most menial of jobs. Sweeping the floor, cleaning the windows, vacuuming, hanging up dresses that would have taken a year of her present pay to buy.

‘Lousy pay for a lousy job,' she told Sean. ‘I've got to be crazy.'

But she wasn't and knew it. She and Sean were an item now, a lot closer than they'd been and likely to get closer yet, but she still refused to move in with him. She was beginning to think she was in love with him but had seen too many examples of how easily things could go wrong. She'd known two girls back in Adelaide who'd got themselves up the duff. In each case the bloke had done a runner and there they were, stuffed in more ways than one. It wasn't going to happen to her.

‘All in good time,' she told herself and Sean.

Mind you, it was getting harder to say no and there'd been moments when they'd got very bloody close, but somehow she'd avoided the trap. It really got up Sean's nose. You couldn't blame him, could you? Lots of times he threatened to walk away but she would not give in. Her virtue – whatever that was – was not an issue, but self-preservation was.

During her sessions in the library she'd read something that expressed it better than she could. ‘I've got miles to go before I sleep,' she told herself. ‘Or even think of sleeping.' All she knew was she was hungry to get from where she was now to somewhere undefined but wonderful. ‘I'm on the first step of the highway,' she told herself. ‘I'm going to follow it to the end. All the way to the stars, if I can. And no one and nothing is going to stop me.'

5

Independence didn't come cheap; there were weeks when she was pushed to find the rent without dipping into what she thought of her run-away money, what she'd managed to put aside in Adelaide. Somehow she hung on, eating less than a little and then only at the cheapest places. She walked everywhere she could rather than take a bus. Determined to remain independent she wouldn't let Sean buy her meals but she loved the fact that he was always offering. In the nick of time the shop owner relented and let Hilary start selling, with an increased allowance against commissions.

She would never have believed it but she had a flair for it. Within three months she was selling more than any of the other staff; two months more and customers were asking specifically to be served by
that nice Miss Brand.

‘At this rate you could find yourself taking home fifteen pounds a week,' said Mrs Shargey, the shop owner. ‘Maybe even twenty, in time.'

It was an unheard-of wage for a woman, especially one of Hilary's age and background. It was nice not to have to watch the pennies so closely for once but she knew that twenty pounds a week, or five times that, would not take her where she wanted to go.

The papers were saying there was a coming boom in property values, as had happened in the eastern states. The Commonwealth Games were scheduled for 1962 and the government was talking up the state's prospects. Not just talk, either. The bridge across the Swan had been a start; now the old Guildford aerodrome where Hilary had landed was being replaced by a new international airport. The stadium was being built and accommodation for the athletes: not the crummy junk Melbourne had provided for the 1956 Olympics but family-type homes that could be sold to investors after the Games were over.

There was a feeling in the air that at long last West Australia was coming into its own. There was talk of mining ventures in the far north; a huge mansion was being built on the banks of the Swan by a woman called Bella Tucker who people said had struck it rich. More and more Hilary sensed that the property market was on the edge of lift off and was determined to be aboard the rocket when it left the launching pad. More and more she was convinced that her present job, well paid though it was, was as dead an end as anything she'd done.

She still went to the library at weekends, and homed in on the subjects she thought would be the greatest practical value to her – textbooks on bookkeeping, valuation and building construction. Also poetry: she'd read that poetry was a way of taking life by the throat. She liked that, the challenge implicit in tackling both poetry and life.

Believing in the coming boom it made sense to get in on the ground floor. She went to see a real estate agent and within the hour found herself the owner of a block of undeveloped land in a suburb called Morley Park.

‘Morley Park?' Sean said. ‘There's nothing there. How much did you pay, anyway?'

‘Hundred and fifty pounds.'

‘You're mad! How you gunna pay for it?'

‘Five quid a week. I can manage it OK, with the commission.'

‘But I thought you wanted to move on?'

‘I do.'

‘You're around the twist, you know that?'

‘You ain't seen nothing yet.'

‘Now what you planning?'

She gave him the father and mother of sunny smiles. ‘Hang around, you might find out.'

She went back to the estate agent, who rubbed his hands, thinking she'd come to buy another block.

‘Best investment you'll ever make,' he said. But changed his tune when she said she wanted a job. ‘We don't employ women.'

‘Then now's the time to start.'

Jack Almond shook his head. ‘The customers wouldn't stand for it.'

‘How do you know if you've never tried it?'

‘Stands to reason.'

‘Maybe some of them would appreciate the friendly female touch.'

‘And maybe they wouldn't.'

But she sensed that she was winning.

‘Tell you what I'll do,' Hilary said. ‘Give me a go and I'll buy another block off you.'

‘Commission only?'

‘I've got to live, Mr Almond.'

By his expression he was wondering why.

‘Ten a week,' he said.

‘Make it fifteen.'

‘Ten. And think yourself lucky.'

She was in.

She went back to the dress job and resigned.

‘You're mad,' Mrs Shargey said, vexed at losing her best sales girl.

‘You could be right,' Hilary said.

She needed a real estate licence, not easy for a woman, but Jack Almond had clout and she got it without much hassle. But that was only one of her problems.

Rent; food; paying off the two blocks of land. She needed a car. And she had to look the part. Whichever way you looked at it, ten quid a week would not stretch.

There was only one way she could see how to do it. She thought about it long and hard. She stared at herself in the mirror. ‘Do you really love him?'

He was a good bloke; safe. Kind and considerate. OK, his mother was a problem but she wouldn't be marrying her, would she? Because Sean had proposed to her and she had promised him an answer. She certainly fancied him. Was that love? She decided yes, it was. She liked him, too, which was a bonus. They'd get married and he'd help her get where she had to go and they'd be happy, the best of lovers and the best of friends. Give it a go, she urged her reflection. She decided she'd say yes.

She went to him, heart going pit-a-pat. ‘You still want to marry me?'

He looked at her, eyes bright with hope. ‘You know I do.'

‘OK, then.'

Minutes later, his face buried in her breasts, heat like a tidal wave engulfing her, she cried: ‘We are going to be happy! So happy!'

6

That might be how they saw it but Mrs Madigan was ropeable.

‘You're getting married?' Like they'd said they were going to Zululand.

‘That's about the size of it.'

‘Have you spoken to Father Devlin?'