The Women's Pages Read online

  3

  Driving out of their street on Saturday evening on their way to the barbecue, Ellis felt more sad than anything. She periodically turned around to inspect the back seat where the platter of asparagus rolls rested next to Charlie in his portable bassinet. The asparagus rolls were garnished in parsley and covered in a damp tea towel. You could cover food with greaseproof paper if you wanted, but for dishes like this Ellis always used a damp cloth. It meant, in summer especially, the food would never dry out.

  As the car turned a corner, she felt a small stab of something that should have been guilt but she knew was not. She would have preferred walking to Betty and Mack’s, on her own, briskly, to clear her head if that were possible, or at least to feel the freedom of her body moving at pace. But Vince had worked until after five and they would have been late. And one of them would have had to carry the platter of asparagus rolls. Besides, you couldn’t arrive anywhere separately, least of all your friends’ anniversary party. Nor would she have been able to wear her new slingbacks. She looked down at them with satisfaction; they were camel coloured, patent leather, smart but not too high in the heel. Vince opened his window a little wider. One arm, bare and tanned, encircled the steering wheel while he leaned the other on the window. A stiff breeze tumbled through the car. She could smell his Aqua Velva aftershave, a Christmas present, and the dust from the street, the tarry road, and a whiff of something organic – the garbage bins from the strip of local shops they were now passing. There was a milk bar, the newsagency, a dry cleaner’s and a garden shop, which was barely a business, more the converted front yard of someone’s house, and which she’d never been into. Vince went to the newsagency for his Sunday paper and the cigarettes, but Ellis did her shopping farther down towards the main road. The Annandale shops had everything she needed, and only occasionally she went all the way to Parramatta Road and caught the bus to town. Once a week she took the bus in the opposite direction to visit her father in Ashfield.

  It was a beautiful evening, cicadas shrieking in the plane trees nearby. Dusk was beginning to settle and the pink-flushed sky promised more of the same warmth the next day. The uneasy feeling Ellis felt developed so quickly into such acute realisation that, when it struck her, she couldn’t believe Vince hadn’t noticed. She felt ill with it, in the middle of her stomach.

  ‘You okay?’

  He had noticed, then.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, taking her hand off her stomach and twisting around to look at the back seat again. ‘Charlie’s good,’ she added, just for something to say.

  If I think about it any more he’ll know, she thought. If I confront it tonight of all times, the fact that I cannot live with him any more, he will ask me what is wrong. She pushed the thought as far off as she could. He and Mack were old mates, having done their mechanical training together, despite Mack being a good ten years older. Mack and Betty were decent people. Their party would also be full of decent people, uncomprehending types who would never understand someone like her, who every day of her life now had to swallow down hard and in silence the bitterness of her choice.

  She breathed in deeply but quietly and looked out the window. Vince reached over to push the cigarette lighter in, then fumbled in his top pocket.

  ‘Open it for me, will you, love?’

  It was new packet, bought earlier for the evening out. Apart from his breakfast cigarette, Vince rarely smoked during the day and never while he was at work, unlike the other mechanics. She tore the strip off the cellophane, prised out the silver paper and extended one of the cigarettes, then handed him the packet. Her face remained unflushed, her hand refused to shake. But all the while her stomach beat with a low rhythm, flooding her body with a sensation that was curiously both empty and full. She wondered what happened to women like her, because there was no excuse, none whatsoever. Vince was dependable and thoughtful. He was the sort of man women wanted for a husband. Ellis should have felt more shame and guilt than she did – and then she felt guilty and shameful for not doing so. But already she was thinking of how she would have to get a place. Probably she would just move back in with her father for a while, if he would have her. She would have to return to office or retail work. It had been a few years now, but the chemist shop might even take her back.

  *

  The party was predictable. As always Betty had tried hard with the food, but if only she didn’t feel the urge to experiment, Ellis thought. Mack insisted on barbecuing, as was his male right, but hadn’t an idea of how to cook even a sausage. The three or four times Ellis had been a guest at the Denmans’, the meat had been ritualistically burnt. Mack had the primal conviction of his gender that chops and steaks needed cooking into submission. And something to do with the cricket had meant his mind wasn’t on the job anyway. The television set was fuzzy, and a man she didn’t know was up a ladder at the corner of the shed fiddling with a makeshift aerial. Ellis inspected the T-bone steaks incinerating beside a mound of black sausages, and then continued helping Betty hand around dishes. Even though it was a barbecue, Betty had produced canapés using the Women’s Weekly Cookbook that Mack had bought her for Christmas. Despite that, the cheese straws tasted doughy. And Ellis decided there and then she would be happy never to see an angel on horseback again. Several people asked for her to return with her platter of asparagus rolls, but they had vanished quickly. The mushroom vol-au-vents, chewy and wobbly at the same time, sat ignored on the table outside until Ellis took them over to some of the other women.

  ‘Betty cooked them,’ she said with meaning. Three of the church friends – Ellis didn’t remember their names – obediently took one each. Down the back, the men ate potato chips and drank beer from the keg beside the shed. The television glowed like an underwater light in the dark of the shed.

  Party lights were strung across the porch and around the Hills Hoist, illuminating the faces of those sitting around in eerie primary colours. Three women were crammed into the canopied garden seat that was pressed too hard against the back wall for swinging, their heads bathed in alien green. Next to them two of Betty’s older friends from tennis were seated in deckchairs, nursing lemonades with almost pointed temperance. Just by glancing at their faces Ellis knew that these two had been discussing Betty’s last miscarriage. The others were talking about the prime minister’s personal secretary, all these months after her appointment. Ellis admired Ainsley Gotto: she was so young, not much older than Ellis herself.

  ‘Apparently she smokes cigars!’ one woman said.

  ‘Yes,’ Ellis said. ‘How amazing is that?’ Then, judging the mood, held out her hands for the empty wooden nut bowls. ‘Can I take them?’ she said before anyone else could speak. Three sets of eyes followed her as she went inside with the bowls to look for the potato chips.

  At the door she realised the back of the house had become dark in the past hour, as no one had come in. Along the hall there was a sliver of light from under the door of the front room, where the children were playing board games and one of the older girls was minding Charlie. She heard a noise in the kitchen and saw Betty sitting at the kitchen table, pressing a serviette to her eyes. Ellis stepped over behind her and held her lightly across the shoulders for a few moments. Then she switched on the kitchen light and quickly disposed of the uneaten potato salad – with condensed milk mayonnaise, how could Betty have done that? – and the half-eaten cheese straws, and sat beside her, listening to the children in the front room chattering over a game of Scrabble. Betty stared at the serviette before pressing it to her face again. Crescents of black mascara had come away against the red and white checked cloth.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Ellis said, rubbing Betty’s shoulder again, but knowing there was really nothing she could say. No kind words existed to erase the pain.

  ‘Never mind.’ Betty screwed up the serviette then stood and went over to the sink where she poured a glass of water which she drank in one go. She turned around and h
eaved in a lungful of air, an Olympic champion facing down the final lap.

  ‘Don’t say anything to Mack, will you?’ She went to the bathroom and shut the door.

  Later, Ellis was standing at the kitchen sink, hands in soapy water, getting a start on the dishes. Although the cricket was over, Vince was still parked in front of the television. She supposed he would insist he was right to drive home. Betty had returned to the backyard, foraging for dirty plates and beer glasses, but Ellis knew she would get distracted talking and forget the greasy plates in her hand. Her laugh was a silvery trilling thing that shot up the garden like a small bright bird, a canary or finch, something that had escaped from confinement but was nervously looking to hide again.

  There was movement behind Ellis, a creak of floorboard under lino. A heavy cut-glass bowl dripped suds down her hands as she held it up out of the water. Before she realised it, before she registered the smell of tobacco – Champion Ruby, quite fragrant really – she felt the pressure around her waist. Betty still used yellow soap in a wire holder, which meant the dishes were very slippery. And they would streak without a good rinsing. Ellis felt a hardness pressed into her back, at the same time as her hair was lifted to one side and lips, beery wet, sucked at her neck. She placed the bowl, very carefully, in the dish rack, and turned around. She had brushed past him collecting scraps from the trestle table.

  ‘Les. Shove off. You’ve had too much to drink.’ She leaned back against the sink, daring him to touch her again.

  He held out his arms, smiling. Ellis had caught his eye once or twice before, and could not believe that a husband of one of Betty’s church friends would behave like this.

  ‘Come on. You know you want me.’ He stepped back, arms still out, as if to say, Look at me, how can you resist?

  She peeled off the pink rubber gloves – she would not leave wet handprints on him – and dropped them on the draining board.

  ‘Just go,’ she said.

  He came closer again, gripped her by the shoulders. His breath was urgent and demanding with alcohol, his voice pleading.

  ‘But I love you. You’re gorgeous.’

  She would not call out or even remonstrate with him, though she felt like it. The crushed serviette Betty had used on her eyes was still on the kitchen table where she had sat in the dark. Now Ellis heard her laughter fluttering around again from out in the garden, followed by a series of tinny clinks. Someone throwing beer bottles into the garbage bin.

  He was an abject sight. She pushed him away. Both hands on his chest, firmly. No wet handprints. And took them back again quickly before he could grab them and place them further down.

  ‘No. You just don’t love your wife.’

  His wife – was she out there in the dark garden? Ellis couldn’t recall, but she sometimes worked night shifts at the convalescent home. Ellis almost changed her mind but even as she opened her mouth to call Vince, Mack, anyone, she saw Betty’s crumpled face. And here was Les’s cheery innocence. His likeability. The fact that they were alone in the kitchen. She heard the clink of glass again. The keg had run out an hour before. She glared at Les, who stopped smiling. His mouth set in a line, he patted his top pocket and pulled out his tobacco and papers and started rolling with quick firm fingers. As he looked down she noticed a blooming bald patch. That he was quite short, really. She sighed. How could she almost feel sorry for him?

  ‘Don’t know what’s up your arse, love.’ He stuffed the cigarette into his mouth, struck a match and lit it, his eyes slits as he drew back on the smoke. ‘Suppose you’ve just always been a tight bitch.’

  Ellis turned around, yanked the plug out of the sink and squeezed the Wettex until it shrank dry, and when she turned again he was gone. She wiped her hands meticulously on a clean tea towel, then went out to the back patio and down the garden to the shed.

  ‘We need to go home now,’ she said to Vince. ‘I’ll go and organise Charlie.’

  4

  Dove had never had much time for cooking and she wondered how her main character was so plausibly domestic. Here was Ellis having made a huge platter of asparagus rolls and when Dove wrote the details of her secret recipe it was as if she had been making them herself all her life. She had never even eaten an asparagus roll, she thought, and had certainly never made them. She felt like she was in the back seat as Vince drove Ellis out of their street to the Denmans’ barbecue, that she might have been spotted by Ellis as she was turning around to check on Charlie. His portable bassinet was strapped to the bench seat with an old belt of Vince’s that Ellis had adapted, not trusting the bassinet alone would hold Charlie safe, even though everyone did it.

  Dove had written enough of this story by now to understand there was a pattern, not in the story so much – she despaired there would ever be a pattern – but in the way she approached it. Or it her. She could see scenes quite clearly, but then after writing them down she would see them all over again from different angles. And these angles would offer new images. In this way she now saw what was only fuzzy the first time round, which was the baby lying peacefully as Vince drove. Charlie was not far off sitting up on his own, and had he not already been sleepy Ellis would have needed to hold him in her lap. As it was he settled down the minute the car set off, the rhythm as always a comfort. There was still a lot of heat in the air so Ellis had soaked a clean tea towel, wrung it out and placed it over the asparagus rolls to prevent them from drying out.

  It had been very hot earlier in the week, too, when Ellis had bumped into Betty Denman. She had been extra anxious that day to get home and put Charlie down for his nap in his room with the fan. By the time she had got home he had almost been asleep and she had lifted him from his pram into his cot without bothering to change his nappy, before putting away the shopping. This was tricky because like a lot of mothers Ellis had looped the string shopping bag over the handles of the pram (the parcel of meat she’d tucked behind Charlie’s head, to keep out of the sun), and removing the baby first threatened to topple the pram backwards. Dove kept an eye on it, parked in the hallway, while Ellis turned on the fan and lowered the blind in the nursery, half expecting that Ellis would emerge to a mess of broken eggs and a split sour cream carton, the potatoes rolling down the hall like misshapen bowling balls.

  Dove began revising the barbecue chapter, stopping for typos and fiddling with punctuation, until she realised she had some serious questions to consider. For instance, was the cricket transmitted on television in early 1968? She thought perhaps not and, having captured the other details of Ellis’s world, was obliged to follow this through. She would have to consult the newspapers, or the TV guides. That would mean a trip to the library. But the more she thought about it she doubted the cricket would be on in the evening anyway. Where would they be playing cricket after dark?

  She pulled out the purple notebook and began a list of things like that needing verification. The Aqua Velva was an odd touch: she had no idea where that had come from, but she knew it was a popular men’s aftershave at that time, like Old Spice, and like Brut was in the 1970s when she was a child. Where that detail had come from, she had some idea: she could even remember the catchy TV jingle, Where, where, where would you be without Brut 33?, and her singing it in the bath when she was just a little girl, three or four. The Aqua Velva, she decided, was a Christmas present to Vince from Charlie, his very first. Ellis would have written on the card in a pretend child’s hand.

  As she re-read the scene she had drafted she wondered about Ellis and Les. How realistic was it? And yet there again was the undeniable sensation of having peered into a character and seen her entire life, her story, her personality, as complete as it would ever be. And while Dove knew she alone had hauled this person Ellis out from the black soil of her imagination, she also knew she was incapable of altering a thing about her. It was as if she were merely responsible for getting her breathing again, brushing off the dirt, and sending her o
n her way.

  In truth she had felt almost nervous when she had written that Ellis was contemplating ending her marriage. Ellis was dependable. She was responsible, a homemaker since she was sixteen, and had never let anyone down in that respect, her husband or her father before that. As a daughter she was both loving and dutiful: after she had recovered from the birth and become organised enough to travel on the bus with a small baby, she had been visiting her father every week. Vince had married her when she was working and studying part time and had not questioned her giving up either. Nothing in this story hinted at Ellis’s profound misery.

  *

  Dove shut the notebook and went to make a cup of coffee. As she reached into the fridge she heard the bleat of her mobile phone from the front room where she had left it the night before. It needed charging, but she ignored it. No one wanted her urgently now, or if they did they could email her or use the home phone. Work no longer contacted her: she had taken so many days off, then gone to half weeks, then taken leave altogether, but her office friends (if that’s what they were) seemed relieved not to have to deal with her unconventional behaviour: instead of wilting in tears she had become steely and detached in pursuit of this story. Other people, she was advised, took cruises or cleared out houses or found new hobbies to cope with grief. She was just retreating into words.

  But she didn’t care what they thought, she was functioning. Before the story claimed her this morning she had been intending to do the laundry and take the cat to the vet. Since her mother had died she had no idea if he needed vaccination or worming. She had never owned a cat. But then the day was kind, and the cat seemed perfectly healthy. He was sunning himself on the back porch, and Dove thought she would look over her story again, and now here it was past midday. She made the coffee and took it out to drink on the porch. The cat – she still forgot to think of him by his name – nudged her arm. His name was Viv, short for Vivaldi, a mouthful for a mere cat, she always thought. But then even her mother had called him Viv.