The Women in Black (4 page)

7

Magda and Stefan had sat up very late playing cards with two friends on the Sunday night before the first Monday in December, and by the time Magda had cleared away the dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays and generally straightened the living room, and then made her
démaquillage
, it was past two a.m. She stood and looked out at Mosman Bay for a minute and sighed, and retired to bed. Stefan was reading a page of Nietzsche, as was his wont last thing at night.

‘Ah Magda, my beloved,’ said he, flinging aside his book, ‘a woman’s work is never done until I am almost asleep myself. Come into bed now.’

‘There is no law in this country,’ said Magda, ‘against men helping their wives to clear up the mess, is there?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Stefan, ‘I think there is.’

‘You are probably right,’ Magda agreed, as she got into bed; and it was easily three a.m. when at last her eyes closed in sleep.

The consequence was that when she looked into her mirror having risen at her usual hour the next morning, she looked a perfect fright, and she spent the next fifteen minutes lying on the sofa with her feet higher than her head, and with two large slices of cucumber covering her closed eyelids. Then she got up with a great sigh and ate some yoghurt, and got ready for work.

It will not be imagined that Magda wore the regulation Goode’s black frock while presiding over the Model Gowns. No: in this matter (as in several others) a compromise had been achieved whereby Magda agreed to wear black, but on her own terms. She had acquired a collection of suitable black frocks and what she called costumes, many of which were relieved, not to say enhanced, by discreet additions of white—collars, it might be, or cuffs, or both—or even, in the case of one costume, pale pink; all of which had been craftily purchased by Magda from the sort of expensive little shops which she preferred to patronise at a large trade discount further subsidised as per their agreement by Goode’s.

‘When I was
vendeuse
at Patou,’ Magda had remarked, ‘I wore nothing but Patou. Naturally.’

This was an absolute whopper, because in the first place, Magda had never been a
vendeuse
at Patou. However, she might have been; it was a good and serviceable story which had as much as anything else she had to say secured her the job of taking charge of the Model Gowns.

‘These people,’ Magda would often say to her Continental friends, ‘know
nothing
.’

Magda went up to the Staff Locker Room not, therefore, to change, but to put away her handbag and to tidy herself, walking past her inglorious colleagues in a cloud of Mitsoukou. She patted powder onto her nose, apparently oblivious of the sneers of onlookers, and turning around, gave them a dazzling smile.

‘A beautiful day, is it not?’ she asked. ‘I have enjoyed the journey here this morning so greatly. How lucky we all are, to live in such a place.’

And she left the room, walking past a frieze of faces which were dumbstruck with astonishment, incomprehension, and contempt: reactions which strained for articulation as her steps retreated through the door. ‘Stone the crows,’ said Patty Williams, voicing the thoughts of all of them.

It was at this moment that Lisa made her appearance. She stood, hesitant, in the doorway, frail as a fairy, in a gathered skirt and what might have been a white school blouse. Patty Williams glanced at her and turned to Fay Baines.

‘Now look what the cat’s dragged in,’ she observed. ‘Are you looking for someone,’ she called out, ‘or are you lost? This is staff only.’

‘I am,’ said Lisa. ‘I mean, I’m staff. I’m a temporary.’

‘Gawd strewth,’ said Patty
sotto voce
to Fay. ‘Have you got a locker number?’ she asked Lisa.

Lisa told her the number she had just been given at Staff Reception and Patty stared.

‘Oh, that’s just along here. Gawd,’ she said again to Fay. ‘That must be our new temp. Now I’ve seen everything. Come along and get changed then,’ she said, raising her voice again. ‘It’s time to go downstairs. There’s no dawdling here, you know,’ she added, sternly.

It was wonderful how assertive Patty could be when she had no fear of serious opposition, and for the next week she made Lisa’s hours of work just as frantic as she knew how.

It was Miss Jacobs who had the seniority and therefore strictly speaking the right to harry Lisa, or at least to make sure that she learned the routines and made herself useful, but what with Christmas and New Year and all the parties coming up, and consequently all the cocktail frocks vanishing off the rails and into the fitting rooms quicker than you could say
knife
, Miss Jacobs had her work cut out with pinning up the alterations; Patty had virtually a clear field for the exercise of her power and she grew into the role most famously.

‘Just left school have you, Lisa?’ she asked. ‘Just done the Inter, eh? Did you pass?’

‘I’ve just done the Leaving,’ said Lisa.

‘Well!’ said Patty, disconcerted and even appalled. ‘
The Leaving.

Well. I thought you were fifteen, or about that. The Leaving!’

Patty looked incredulously and even fearfully at the
wunderkind
. ‘You want to be a teacher, do you?’ said she.

‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m going,’ she said, believing that she was obliged to offer a truthful account of herself, ‘to be a poet. I think,’ and she trailed off vaguely, noticing now the horrible effect of her candour.

‘A poet!’ exclaimed Patty. ‘Jeez, a poet!’

She turned to Fay, who was spiking a document at the conclusion of a sale.

‘Did you hear that?’ she asked. ‘Lisa here is going to be
a poet
!’ And she smiled evilly.

‘No, I mean,’ amended the confused girl, ‘I’d like to
try
to be a poet. Or perhaps,’ she added, in the hope of deflecting Patty’s amazement, ‘an actress.’

‘An actress!’ cried Patty. ‘
An actress
!’

And Lisa saw at once that she had only magnified her initial error, and that she was now suddenly an object of open ridicule; for the appearance she presented in her black frock and utilitarian spectacles, thin and childish, was so far from their conception of the actress that the two women both now burst into laughter. Lisa stood helpless before them, and began to blush; she was even on the verge of tears.

Fay was the first to compose herself; she at any rate had recollections of her own attempt at a stage career to still her derision.

‘It’s real hard to get into the theatre,’ she said kindly. ‘You have to know someone. Do you know anyone?’

‘No,’ said Lisa in a small voice.

And then she had a sudden and brilliant inspiration.

‘Not
yet
,’ she added.

Miss Jacobs had overheard this conversation without appearing to do so, standing a few yards away from the group writing out an Alterations Ticket. She turned around.

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘She’s still young. She doesn’t know anyone
yet
. She’s just a slip of a girl.’

Miss Jacobs turned her back on the astonished silence which her utterance had created, and walked slowly to a nearby rail of cocktail frocks, which were meant to be arranged by size.

‘I think some of these frocks are out of order,’ she said, turning back to Lisa. ‘Would you look through them, Lisa, and put them right? That’s a good girl.’

Lisa, reading the sizes on the labels of the array of cocktail frocks, XSSW, SSW, SW, W, OW, (there were only two OWs in this range) and placing them in the correct order where necessary, resorted to her usual
vade-mecum
in times of trial. ‘Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,’ she chanted silently to herself, ‘In the forests of the night,’ and she had just arrived at ‘what dread feet?’ when a customer whom she had not so much as noticed interrupted her.

She held up a black-and-magenta sheath.

‘Have you got this one,’ she asked, ‘in a W? I can only see this SSW here.’

‘Just a minute,’ said Lisa, ‘and I’ll enquire from the stockroom.

I’m sorry,’ she added, as she had been schooled by Patty to do, ‘to keep you waiting.’

Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

The tyger had entered Lisa’s life, back in the days when she was no one but Lesley, three years previously, when she was at the beginning of her Intermediate Certificate year. Frail, apparently lonely, strangely disengaged, not much noticed by her teachers, a merely average performer academically, she had sat near the back of the classroom and faded into corners and against walls during recess. Her only cronies seemed to be two other girls similarly outside the fashion: a very fat girl and another who suffered from eczema: girls for whom there seemed everything to be done, but nothing which might be: girls who must find their way through the maze as best they might.

How the fat girl, the girl with eczema, accomplished this feat is not recorded; in the case of Lisa, the thread was discovered within the pages of a poetry anthology which came into her hands one day in the school library—literally: it fell off the shelf while she was searching for a quite different book, and since it opened as it fell, her eye could not help alighting on the right-hand page: where she espied the word ‘tyger’. This having come to pass, the rest followed with simple inevitability, for no moderately alert fourteen-year-old is going to see the word ‘tyger’, spelt thus so mysteriously, so enticingly, without investigating further, and as Lisa did so, the chasm of the poetic opened at her feet. She had soon got the poem by heart, and during the next few weeks she pondered its meaning, and even its means, and when a few months later her class was asked to choose a poem, any poem in the English language, and write an essay thereon, Lisa was in a position to say much on the subject of Blake’s tyny masterpiece, and did so freely.

Her English teacher wondered aloud thereafter if she ought not to be sitting nearer the front of the classroom: it was possible, she thought, that the girl’s eyesight made so great a distance from the blackboard inadvisable. Lisa was made to move to a desk in the second row, and went on as she had begun; for Miss Phipps had, as it were, now tasted blood.

‘First-class honours material, definitely,’ she said in the Staff Room. ‘Didn’t know she had it in her. First class, definitely.’

It being the primary purpose of every teacher in the school to produce as many first-class honours results in the Leaving Certificate examinations as humanly possible, Lisa, all unknowingly, was now a marked child. As is the way of things, the attention and encouragement (discreet enough) which she now for the first time received affected her performance generally, and she improved in all her subjects. By the time she was in her last year, she was respectably in the ranks of the medium-to-high flyers: those students who would achieve not spectacular, but certainly solid, results, and almost certainly win Commonwealth Scholarships.

Filling in the application form for the last had been a matter not unproblematical.

‘Well, I don’t know, Lesley,’ said her mother. ‘I don’t know about
the university
. We’ll have to see what your dad says. He has to sign it anyway.’

They managed to corner him just as he began to go off one evening to the
Sydney Morning Herald.

‘No daughter of mine is going anywhere near that cesspit,’ said he, ‘and that’s final.’

By the end of the following week, he had agreed to give his signature to the form on the understanding that if his daughter were by some extreme chance actually to gain the scholarship, there would nonetheless be no question whatever of her taking it up.

‘It’s for the school, really,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘They want her to do it at the school. It’s good for their record.’

‘Yes, well,’ said E. Miles, compositor. ‘I didn’t want her going to that school anyway. A lot of stuck-up snobs.’

Here he was animadverting to the fact that the academy in question, a state high school, admitted only children of a certain intelligence: Mrs Miles’s delight when her Lesley had at the age of eleven found herself among their number had been one of many joys of parenthood which she had been unable, alas, to share with her co-author. She had had five years, now, of silent lamplit evenings, Lesley sitting doing her increasingly time-consuming homework at the kitchen table, her mother sitting on the cane chair, knitting or sewing or looking at
The Women’s Weekly
, invisibly glowing with pride. Her girl: a scholar.

8

By the end of her first week as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, Lisa’s appearance was more remarkably fragile than ever, and her black frock seemed to be nearer two sizes too large than one. Goodness me, thought Miss Cartright as she passed by Ladies’ Cocktail, that child looks positively starved: it’s hardly decent.

‘Have you had your lunch hour yet?’ she asked her later in the day.

‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ replied the child.

‘Mind you eat a proper lunch then,’ said Miss Cartright sternly.

‘You need plenty of food to keep going here. That’s why we subsidise the Staff Canteen you know, to see that you’re all well fed. So mind you eat a proper lunch every day, Lisa.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ replied she.

‘Lesley,’ said her mother, ‘I don’t want you eating that canteen food more than you can help. I’m sure it isn’t good for you: you don’t know where it’s been, or who’s been handling it. And it can’t be fresh. I’ll make you some nice sandwiches to take.’

Her daughter didn’t argue, for in fact although she had been pleased by the canteen’s multi-coloured salads and trembling jellies with their tiny rosettes of whipped cream, she found the canteen itself and its clientele melancholy, and that not poetically so. By the end of her first week she had established a routine whereby, rushing up the fire stairs to the Staff Locker Room and changing back into her own clothes and fetching her sandwiches and a book, she was able, having rushed down the same stairs to the street below and up Market Street and then across Elizabeth Street—barring cars, taxis and trams—to Hyde Park, to enjoy forty-five minutes in the embrace of its amorous green.

The weather was now abominably, relentlessly, hot, and she discovered that by sitting to one side or another, depending on the prevailing breeze, on the rim of the Archibald Fountain, she could enjoy its cooling spray as it was blown against her. Sitting thus, her stomach full of the hearty meat or cheese-filled sandwiches cut by her loving mother, her mind full of the anguish of the tale of A. Karenina which she was now very near finishing, she ascended into a state of wondering blissfulness which was induced to a large degree by the sheer novelty of being and acting quite alone: the exquisite experience of happy solitude.

It was while she was sitting thus on the Friday of that first week, her blouse now damp from the spray of the fountain and with but a few minutes remaining to her before she must rush back the way she had come and rehabilitate herself in her black frock, that Magda passed by and, having previously eyed Lisa from the portentous entrance to Model Gowns, hailed her.

‘Ah, Lisa, I think, is it not? My name is Magda—you will have seen me without doubt presiding over our Model Gowns at Goode’s, where we must now—’ and here Magda consulted a diamond watch—‘return, I believe.’

‘Oh yes, thank you,’ Lisa stuttered in confusion.

Magda’s eye swept over her as she rose, gathering her book and her litter. What a tiny and half-made creature this was, who had been proposed to her as an assistant in her Model Gowns—should she need her. As if she might!—but come to think of it, she could be useful for one or two tedious little tasks; and in any case, if she were to spirit Lisa away from Ladies’ Cocktail for a while, it would spite those catty women who had the present charge of her. Well, she would do it, and soon, too.

‘Dear Miss Cartright—she is so elegant, don’t you agree? She has true style, unlike many women I see around me,’ and here Magda cast a great lustrous-eyed glance around her which comprehended everyone within a radius of one hundred yards, and sighed, but with resignation. ‘She tells me I am to have the use of your no doubt excellent services during the next few weeks while I cope with my Christmas rush. Is that not so?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Lisa, ‘I think she did tell me that I was to help you too sometimes.’

‘Yes, well, we shall plan that in the next week,’ said Magda comfortably. ‘In the meantime, I wonder why your back is wet. Have you been sweating?’

‘Oh no!’ cried Lisa, ‘I’ve been sitting by the fountain—it’s just the spray.’

‘You silly girl!’ exclaimed Magda. ‘Do you not know how dangerous is it to sit by a wet fountain in such heat? My God. You will catch
la grippe
if you persist in this folly. Furthermore, damp clothes are very inelegant. Please do not do such a thing again. The damp is also bad for your hair,’ she added, casting a critical eye at the same, and thinking, I wonder if I could persuade her to go to Raoul, he is the only person in this entire city or perhaps this entire country who could cut such hair. Ah, the people here know
nothing.
And this child here knows, my God, even less.

They had reached the Staff Entrance and Lisa ran up the fire stairs to change. Magda looked at her retreating figure and began her own slower and briefer ascent in a state of some satisfaction. She was doing arithmetic in her head and reassuring herself that, at the rate she and Stefan were going, they would by the end of the next year have saved enough capital to buy the lease of a shop in Macleay Street or even Double Bay: for Magda had every intention of presiding in time over her own extremely exclusive and exorbitantly expensive frock shop, and the Model Gowns could go to hell.