The Women in Black (2 page)

1

At the end of a hot November day Miss Baines and Mrs Williams of the Ladies’ Frocks Department at Goode’s were complaining to each other while they changed out of their black frocks before going home.

‘Mr Ryder’s not so bad,’ said Miss Baines, in reference to the fl oor manager; ‘it’s that Miss Cartright who’s a pain in the neck, excuse my French.’

Miss Cartright was the buyer, and she never seemed to give them a moment’s peace.

Mrs Williams shrugged and began to powder her nose.

‘She always gets worse at this time of the year,’ she pointed out. ‘She wants to make sure we earn our Christmas bonus.’

‘As if we could help it!’ said Miss Baines. ‘We’re run off our feet!’

Which was quite true: the great festival being now only six weeks away, the crowds of customers were beginning to surge and the frocks to vanish from the rails in an ever-faster fl urry, and when Mrs Williams was washing out her undies in the handbasin that night she had a sudden sensation that her life was slipping away with the rinsing water as it gurgled down the plughole; but she pulled herself together and went on with her chores, while the Antipodean summer night throbbed outside all around her.

Mrs Williams, Patty, and Miss Baines, Fay, worked together with Miss Jacobs on Ladies’ Cocktail Frocks, which was next to Ladies’ Evening Frocks, down at the end of the second floor of Goode’s Department Store in the centre of Sydney. F.G. Goode, a sharp Mancunian, had opened his original Emporium (Ladies’ and Gents’ Apparel—All the Latest London Modes) at the end of the last century, and had never looked back, because the people of the colony, he saw straightaway, would spend pretty well all they had in order to convince themselves that they were in the fashion.

So now his grandchildren were the principal shareholders in a concern which turned over several million Australian pounds every year, selling the latest London modes, and any modes from other sources which looked likely. Italian modes were in the ascendancy at present. ‘I got it at Goode’s’, as the caption said, on that insufferable drawing of a superior-looking lady preening herself in a horribly smart new frock before the envious and despairing gaze of her friend—the frocks and the poses might change with the years, but that ad always ran in the bottom left-hand corner of the women’s page in the
Herald
: I believe the space was booked in perpetuity, and the caption had long since become a city-wide catchphrase. Goode’s stayed ahead of the competition by means of a terrific dedication to the modes. They sent the buying talent abroad for special training at the great department stores of London and New York. When the new season’s clothes came into the shop twice a year the staff worked overtime, pricing and displaying, exclaiming the while.

‘Never mind if it does retail at £9.17.6,’ said Miss Cartright, ‘this model will vanish within a fortnight—you mark my words!’

And this they duly did.

2

Mrs Williams was a little, thin, straw-coloured woman with a worn-out face and a stiff-looking permanent wave. Her husband Frank was a bastard, naturally. He had married her when she was only twenty-one and he a strapping healthy twenty-six and why they had failed to produce any children was anyone’s guess, but here it was ten years after the event and still she was working although the house was now fully furnished, furnished within an inch of its life in fact, and there was no particular need for the money, which she was saving up in the Bank of New South Wales, not knowing what else to do with it, while Frank continued to give her the housekeeping money which as a point of honour she spent entire, buying a lot of rump steak where other people in her situation might have bought mince and sausages, because Frank did like steak. She would get home from Goode’s (they lived in a little house in Randwick) at about six o’clock, and take the steak out of the fridge. She did the vegetables and set the table. Just before seven Frank would get in, slightly the worse for drink: ‘Hoo-ray!’ he would call on his way to the bathroom. There he would wash vigorously, and by the time he stomped into the kitchen-dining room the steak was sizzling.

‘What’s for tea, Patty?’ he would ask.

‘Steak,’ she said.

‘Steak again,’ said he.

Whenever she tried to give him anything else, even lamb chops (‘There’s no meat on these things,’ said Frank, waving a bone in front of him) he complained. Mrs Williams didn’t care; she’d lost her appetite years ago. At the weekends she visited her mother or one of her sisters; Frank drove her there and fetched her, and while she was ‘jaw, jaw, jawing’ he played golf on the public course at Kingsford or drank in a pub. He was a bastard of the standard-issue variety, neither cruel nor violent, merely insensitive and inarticulate. Patty had in fact consulted a physician about her childlessness and had been assured that her own equipment was in perfect order.

‘Of course,’ said the physician, ‘we cannot investigate this question properly without seeing your husband. The fault may lie there; indeed it probably does. He may even be sterile.’

‘Gee,’ said Patty, overwhelmed. ‘I don’t think he’ll come at that.’ She couldn’t even mention the subject to him.

‘How often do you have intercourse?’ asked the physician.

‘Well,’ said Patty, ‘not that often. He gets tired.’

The fact was that Frank’s attentions were desultory. The physician regarded his patient with some despair. It was too bad. Here was a woman well into her childbearing years with no baby to nurse: it was entirely unnatural. She had lost all her bloom and was therefore not likely to attract another man who might accomplish the necessary; so if her husband failed to come up to scratch her life would be wasted. It was too bad, it really was.

‘Well,’ said he, ‘just keep trying. Conception is essentially a tricky business. Maximise the chances as much as possible; you’ve got plenty of time yet.’

She was thirty when this conversation took place and as she left the surgery, the physician looking idly at her back view thought, she’d clean up quite well with a new hairdo, some paint on her face and a black nightie; but the husband probably wouldn’t notice, the bastard; and in this assumption he was probably correct. Frank worked in the sales department of the great roof-tile company whose vari-coloured wares were at this time so enticingly displayed in Parramatta Road; drank with his mates every night after work in a pub near Railway Square and then went home to Patty and his half pound of rump steak. After that, and watching Patty wash up, and a few frames of television, which had only recently arrived in the Commonwealth of Australia, he lumbered off to bed—‘Think I’ll turn in’—where Patty—‘Okay dear’—followed him. She lay beside him in a blue nylon nightdress and soon she heard his snores.

The vacant child’s room, painted primrose yellow so as to cover either eventuality, waited in vain for its tiny occupant, and Patty, in a state of unacknowledged and unwitting despair, went on working at Goode’s, this year as all the previous years, until she had a baby on the way.

‘I don’t understand it, I really don’t,’ said her mother, Mrs Crown, not to Patty but to Patty’s sister Joy.

‘I don’t think Frank’s up to much,’ said Joy darkly.

‘Oh, go on,’ said her mother. ‘He’s a fine strapping fellow.’

‘Looks aren’t everything,’ said Joy.

‘I don’t understand it, I really don’t,’ said Mrs Crown.

‘Never you mind,’ said Joy.

Joy was younger than Patty and already had two; Patty was the one in the middle; their elder sister Dawn had three. There was obviously nothing wrong with the Crown breeding ability. Joy thought Patty never should have married Frank. In the mean time, when she wanted something special, a party frock for example, Patty got her the staff discount at Goode’s by pretending that the frock was for herself, which it obviously wasn’t if you were looking, because it was an SW and Patty took an SSW, but no one ever noticed.

3

Patty and Fay, and Miss Jacobs (whose Christian name remained a secret) all arrived at Goode’s Staff Entrance by twenty to nine in the morning, as they were meant to do, except that Fay once in a while was late, and looked it—harried and untidy. They went up to the top of the building (Staff and Administration) in the Staff Lift and went to the Staff Locker Room (past Accounts) to change into their black frocks, which were hanging in their lockers where they had left them on the previous night after changing to go home.

These black frocks were worn through the week and dry-cleaned by Goode’s over the weekend ready to start another week’s work on Monday morning, and smelt peculiar. Not nasty, but different—simply the result of the smell of frequent dry-cleaning, mingled with the scent of cheap talcum powder and sweat. Every Goode’s assistant had this smell while she was wearing her black frock.

These garments, which were supplied by Goode’s who retained ownership, were designed to fl atter both the fuller and the thinner figure and truly enhanced neither, but then, Goode’s assistants were not there to decorate the shop but to sell its wares. So each woman climbed into her black frock with a sigh of resignation, twitching hopelessly at it to make it sit better while regarding her refl ection in the full-length mirror. The frocks were made of rayon crêpe in a somewhat late 1930s style, which had been retained because it was neat in outline and used relatively little cloth.

Patty Williams’s frock was an SSW as we know, whereas Fay Baines was an SW, but Miss Jacobs was a perfect OSW, especially around the bust. Her size and her general appearance were pretty well the only things about Miss Jacobs which could be known; everything else was a mystery.

‘That Miss Jacobs,’ said Fay to her friend Myra in Repin’s where they were drinking iced coffee, ‘is a real mystery.’

Even Miss Cartright found a moment now and then to wonder about Miss Jacobs, who had never missed a single day’s work through either illness or misadventure. Who was she: where did she live and eat and sleep; what was her existence outside the opening hours of F.G. Goode’s? No one there had the merest idea, except for the Wages Department who knew where she lived but declined to share the information should anyone think of asking, which they didn’t. Miss Jacobs left Goode’s every evening in the skirt and blouse

(and if it was winter, the jacket or coat) in which she had arrived, carrying a large string bag with a brown paper-wrapped parcel or two within it. What was in these parcels, for example? No one could say. She walked away down Castlereagh Street in the direction of the Quay: which could mean all kinds of places from Hunter’s Hill (unlikely) to Manly (just possible).

Miss Jacobs, stout and elderly, had a swarthy face and exiguous dark grey hair tied into a small antique-looking bun at the back of her large round head. She wore glasses with steel frames and always had a clean white handkerchief tucked into her bosom.

She wore black lace-up shoes with Cuban heels and had a stompy rather pathetic walk. Mr Ryder caught up with her in Pitt Street one evening and attempted to accompany her for some distance in a spirit of friendliness, but whether for necessity or not, she parted from him at the very next corner and walked away alone down Martin Place, muttering a word about Wynyard, but Mr Ryder thought this must be a put-up job because he himself travelled via Wynyard and had never seen Miss Jacobs in the vicinity thereof.

Miss Jacobs had not only worked at Goode’s for longer than Mrs Williams (who had started after leaving school in Children’s and transferred to Ladies’ four years ago) but was also rather important to the scheme of things in Ladies’ Cocktail, because she was in charge of alterations, which you could probably tell by the fact that she always wore a long tape-measure around her neck, so as to be ready for the ladies who wanted hems adjusted or even seams:the assistant who was serving such a lady would come out of the fitting room saying ‘Miss Jacobs, Miss Jacobs please? Alteration here when you’re free!’ and Miss Jacobs would look up from the hem she was pinning in another fitting room and say around the pins in her mouth, ‘All in good time, I’ve only got one pair of hands. And legs, for the matter of that.’ And the lady she was pinning would smile, or titter, in sympathy, as it were. When the frock was pinned it would go up to the seventh floor for sewing by one of the alteration hands and when it was done (it might have to wait its turn for a few days) it would be delivered, like so much of Goode’s merchandise (‘Send it, please’) in one of Goode’s blue and yellow vans, which were a familiar sight in all the better-class suburbs of Sydney:

F.G. Goode’s
Serving the People of Sydney since 1895
.

Miss Jacobs had been serving the people, at any rate the ladies, of Sydney since
before the war
—that utterly legendary and even fabulous era. She had started in Gloves and Hosiery, done a stint in Ladies’ Day Frocks (where she was taught to take charge of alterations) and then gone down to Ladies’ Sportswear and Casuals, but she had not cared for the
ton
of this department very much, and had been glad to come back to the second floor when a vacancy occurred in Ladies’ Cocktail, where she had now been ever since the New Look, tape-measure at the ready, and a box of pins to hand.

4

Fay Baines was twenty-nine if she was a day, and Patty Williams wondered if she might not actually be thirty, and that wasn’t all that she wondered. For whereas Patty had Frank to talk about, albeit there was virtually nothing to say (‘Frank played golf on Sunday’) and beyond that her house (‘I think I’ll have loose covers made for the suite. I want a new vacuum cleaner’) to say nothing of her mother (‘It’s Mum’s birthday on Friday; we’re all going over Saturday’) or her sisters (‘Dawn…Joy’), Fay Baines talked about nothing but
men.

It was chronic; this one and that one, going out here, and there, and all over the place, with Tom, Dick and Harry. And was there any sign at all that any of them might be thinking of marrying her? Not on your life. Patty sometimes wondered if Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention Bill, Bruce and Bob were all quite real. After all, the woman was thirty if she was a day.

In any case it wasn’t quite nice, when you came to think about it, because Fay lived by herself, all alone in a fl atette near Bondi Junction, apparently; so there was no one, like a mother, to keep an eye on things and make certain that Fay didn’t go too far, which Patty suspected she just might do, being at least thirty-one, or at any rate no spring chicken, and obviously desperate, not that anyone wouldn’t be in her situation, but anyway men took advantage, being interested in only one thing; unless they were Frank.

She aired all these cogitations to Joy, Dawn and their mother, omitting the rider about Frank, and they all agreed, eating sponge cake at the kitchen table while the children ran about Mrs Crown’s small back garden, if one might so dignify a rectangle of couch grass and a spindly gum tree with an empty old rabbit hutch next to it.

‘She should share a proper flat with some other girls,’ said Mrs Crown, ‘like Dawn used to, before she got married.’

‘Yeah, no thanks to
you
, Mum,’ said Dawn, somewhat heatedly.

There had been the most awful row about that move out into the world: Mrs Crown had accused Dawn of all sorts of evil desires and intentions when Dawn had announced that she was leaving home to share a flat with two friends, when all Dawn had wanted was some privacy. How her mother had carried on! Now she was talking as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Typical!

‘Well,’ said Mrs Crown, cutting herself some more cake, ‘times change, don’t they?’

‘No,’ said Joy in her irritating way, ‘people do.’

‘Anyway,’ said Patty, ‘Fay Baines should share a flat and not live alone, if she cares about her reputation. That’s my opinion. What would a man think, a girl living all alone like that?’

And the four women sat and reflected for a moment, envisioning exactly what a man would think.

Fay Baines,
pace
Patty Williams, was in fact twenty-eight years old, an SW with a tendency to become a W if she didn’t watch herself, and while Mrs Crown and her three daughters were indulging in their impertinent speculations, eating cake the while, she was sitting in an armchair crying into a small white handkerchief. It was one of a set of four which she had been given, all folded in a flat gold cardboard box, by one of her admirers.

When she wasn’t crying she was a handsome girl, with wavy dark hair and large innocent brown eyes, and she was fond of cosmetics, which she applied quite copiously, especially when going out.

‘You look good enough to eat,’ Fred Fisher had said, the first time he came to pick her up.

When they got home again he did begin to eat her, or as near as makes no difference, and she had had her work cut out fending him off. Then he called her an ugly name and left in a temper. This was the sort of thing which happened to Fay, who never seemed to meet the sort of man she dreamed of: someone who would respect her as well as desiring her; someone who would love her and wish to marry her. Somehow the sight of Fay was not one which inspired thoughts of marriage, and this was grievous, for Fay wished for nothing else: which was natural, everything considered. Meanwhile men were forever getting the wrong idea, just as Mrs Crown and her daughters suggested they would.

Fay was pretty well alone in the world: her mother, a war widow, had died some years ago and her brother—who was married with two children—lived in Melbourne, where once in a while she visited him. But she did not get on with his wife, who in Fay’s opinion gave herself airs, and these visits became less and less frequent.

‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ said Fay to herself, ‘try, try, try again.’

Someone had written this on the first page of her autograph book when she was in her teens and it had made a lasting impression. Fay, wanting to be a showgirl, had had soon to settle for being variously a cigarette girl and a cocktail waitress during her late teens and early twenties; and when she was twenty-three she had met Mr Marlow, a rich and middle-aged bachelor. Two years later he had given her £500 in cash and told her that he was going to live in Perth and that it had been wonderful knowing her. She had stayed in the solitary flatette, now no longer essential, out of sheer inertia; forsaking the rackety life of the cocktail waitress with its peculiar hours and large tips she had gone to work in a dress shop in the Strand Arcade. There she had made the acquaintance of Mr Green, a frock manufacturer; when he suddenly announced that he was getting married she as suddenly forsook the Strand Arcade with all its memories and went to work at Goode’s, where she had now been for just over eighteen months.

The men she saw these days were a rag tag and bobtail collection of faces from her livelier past, blind dates organised by her friend Myra Parker (comrade and mentor since Fay’s nightclub days), and men whom she met at the parties to which she was taken by Myra, or by the rag tag and bobtail. And the £500? That was in the bank. She intended to splash it all on her trousseau, when the time came. Sometimes, as now, she found herself crying, because the time was so long in coming that she could fearfully suspect that it might never do so, but after a while, when her hanky was all used up and sopping, she dried her eyes, washed her face and lit a Craven A.

‘If at first you don’t succeed,’ she told herself, ‘try, try, try again.’

She was a brave girl, like most of her compatriots.