Miss Lily’s Lovely Ladies

by Jackie French

  ‘To the factory, thank you, Rogers.’

  Rogers jiggled the reins. The horse began to trot.

  She expected the horses to head out of town. A corned-beef factory needed cows, and cows lived in the country. But instead the carriage turned into a side street, and then another, and then began to climb.

  Another turn at the top of the hill. The houses were strange here. Small, like dolls’ houses. No, not like dolls’ houses — those were small editions of big houses. These were squished together like layers on a cake, with grimy choko vines and ivy instead of butter cream, and a smell recognisable as what Miss Thwaites described as ‘pooh’ — familiar only because Sophie was familiar with the smell of her own from the few seconds before she flushed the water closet.

  A child with a naked bottom and a tatty singlet squatted on a doorstep. A woman with lips and cheeks and hair coloured the wrong clashing reds glanced hopefully out of a window at the carriage. Otherwise the street was deserted.

  Dirty air, heavier than smoke. A fine layer of soot on Sophie’s white sleeve already, just from the open carriage window. Dirty houses, with layers of grime streaked by rain and then more grime on top of that. And then a corrugated-iron building taking up a whole block, burping dense black smoke from too many chimneys to count. The sky seemed an eternal grey, as if it had never known blue.

  How could this exist in the same city as proper houses and the Tearooms?

  The carriage stopped.

  Sophie knocked on the driver’s panel, then spoke as it slid open and Rogers’s head peered in. ‘I asked you to take me to my father’s factory.’

  ‘This is it, miss.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you, Rogers.’

  She let him help her out. He handed her the cake.

  There were no stairs, just a doorway in the corrugated iron. She could feel the heat as she stepped through, like a hot, soapy towel clapped over her face. It smelled of hot tin, steam and smoke, not meat. Light came through a gap between the walls and roof. Dirt floor, greasy machinery, long metal benches, faces …

  So many faces. White faces, smudged faces, women with lank hair or greasy scarves — girls too, her age or younger, much younger, all turned to her, their hands suddenly idle.

  Someone barked an order. Most of the faces looked away. Only one came closer. It belonged to a girl, five years old perhaps at first glance, ten at a second. She was wizened like a monkey, or like the woollen coat the washerwoman’s helper had shrunk. She wore what was left of a dress, enough to cover a rabbit-boned body. The rags, like her face, were bleached of colour. Bare feet on the dirty ground. Red hands, so thin the skin seemed to be painted on her bones. One hand reached forward. A finger touched the cake.

  An icing rose fell off.

  ‘Look what you done now!’ A man stepped closer, in a rusty black suit, shirt greasy at the collar. ‘You’re for it, you are. Sorry, miss.’ He gave a clumsy bow. ‘You’re Mr Higgs’s daughter, ain’t ye?’

  Sophie nodded. The child shrank back.

  ‘Not her fault. She ain’t seen nothin’ like that afore.’ A woman with hair like a worn-out mop and an even greyer face, presumably the child’s mother, carefully didn’t look up from the bench, her swollen hands picking up a corned-beef tin, dipping a label, slapping it on, putting the tin down, taking another. The small girl still stared at the cake.

  ‘Would you like a slice?’ It was automatic: that was what you said, when there was cake.

  The girl glanced up at the man, then nodded at Sophie quickly.

  Sophie used the silver cake knife to cut a wedge. She held the plate out to the girl.

  The child grabbed it, stuffed it in her mouth, swallowed, then licked her fingers carefully, looking at her dress in case there might be crumbs.

  There weren’t.

  Sophie stared. She had never seen anyone eat like that. Like one of the farm dogs, gobbling its food.

  The girl still stared at the cake. No, thought Sophie. At food. The child had gulped too fast to even taste the cake.

  ‘Mind yer manners. Say thank you to Miss Higgs.’ The woman kept working, her tone apologetic. ‘She’s hungry, see. I’m sorry, Miss Higgs. I learned her better. But things are tight just now.’

  ‘Tight?’

  ‘With our Bennie not working, and her dad took bad.’

  Hungry. The peasants during the French Revolution had been hungry, Miss Thwaites said. Marie Antoinette had said, ‘Let them eat cake’, when they couldn’t afford bread. Miss Thwaites had made it clear that Marie Antoinette should have given them bread. Jesus had fed the five thousand with bread too, which was also admirable.

  This seemed an excellent chance to be admirable too.

  The girl bent down and picked up the fallen icing rose. But she didn’t thrust it into her mouth. Her fingers traced the petals. Perhaps, thought Sophie vaguely, she didn’t know you could eat something shaped like a rose.

  So many mouse-like faces glancing at her, at the cake, then down. Shadowed skin that might be discoloured by dirt, that she’d remember years later and know was the colour of hunger, of tuberculosis, and of the slowly eroding diseases of poverty that sucked away life but left you still able to pack meat into cans.

  There wasn’t enough cake for them all.

  She thrust the plate onto the bench next to the woman. ‘Please. Take it home.’

  The woman put her hands on the girl’s shoulders, perhaps to stop the child from grabbing it at once.

  ‘Are you hungry too?’ Sophie asked.

  The woman’s eyes were stained with loss. ‘I’m always hungry, miss. Can’t eat if the little uns need it more.’

  The man in the rusty suit shoved himself between the woman and Sophie. ‘If they don’t brings their lunch, then that’s they’s fault if they get hungry. Now, you step this way, Miss Higgs. I’ll take you to your dad.’

  ‘Yes. I would like that,’ said Sophie.

  Chapter 7

  Most people only ever understand one world: their own. You need to learn that every person feels things much like you. That isn’t meant to be sentiment, my dear.

  I am not a saint, asking you to bleed with those who hurt. Imagine the world is like a machine. To use it properly you must understand how it works. Our world is other people. Understand them, and you will begin to know how you can move the world.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  FLANDERS, 12 JULY 1917

  The dog snuffled softly. The front-line guns were muffled now. There had been no shots nearby all the time Sophie had been talking, almost as though the soldiers out there had been listening to her story too. But of course they were too far away to hear anything but a mutter of voices.

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘An argument. My father was angry because I’d gone out alone. I was angrier because … because it was another world, one he’d never let me see. I’d felt bad down on the factory floor, and hadn’t liked it.’

  ‘And then?’

  She shrugged in the sooty darkness. ‘I demanded he send out for bread for them. He liked giving me what I wanted. A pony for his daughter, crumbs for the ducks, bread for the factory workers. Not much difference. The coachman brought back loaves and loaves, one for every person. I watched them eat while Dad stood next to me, his hand on my shoulder. I made him promise he’d give them bread every day. Some of the women called out to thank me as I left. One even called me “a little saint”. They got all the bread they wanted to eat at the factory after that, and could dip it in the liquid from the corned beef — and if they stuffed some in their apron pockets like Dad had said they would, well, it showed their families needed it.’

  ‘Did he keep his word?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Even told me a year later it had been a good idea, he was doing it in all his factories. It hadn’t occurred to me he had other factories till then. He said he’d discovered that people worked better with full bellies. And at Christmas time I insisted every child got a ball and an orange. I preened myself for so m
any Christmases thinking of those balls and oranges. One day off a year,’ she said softly. ‘Christmas Day, and I gave those children a ball. Maybe they played with it then, though I expect they slept. I was so proud of myself.’

  ‘Lady Bountiful?’

  ‘I didn’t know that term then. But, yes.’

  The moon was rising, its light shining through the shattered walls. Strange to think that same moon stared down at war and at the peace back at Thuringa, had floated above Dad and Miss Thwaites only hours before. And above Miss Lily perhaps, wherever she was.

  ‘So did you go on playing the Lady Bountiful? Was that why your father sent you to England?’

  ‘No. I think Dad half liked my being interested in the factory, even if women aren’t supposed to know factories exist. Dad even liked arguing with me about increasing the wages. I was about fifteen then, and had finally worked out why the factory women couldn’t buy their own bread. It seemed such an easy way to do good with no inconvenience to myself.’

  ‘I think you may be being hard on yourself.’

  ‘No. Doing good can be deeply self-centred. I thought I was being Lady Bountiful again, but really I wanted to show Dad I could make useful suggestions about the factories. If well-fed workers are more productive, then give them enough money to buy their own food.’

  ‘Did he actually increase the wages?’

  ‘No. He told me he couldn’t. If he did, the other factory owners would be pressured to do the same. His wages were already on the high side, and if they went higher he’d be ostracised. They’d make him pay, one way or another. Factory inspections, pressure on suppliers. Money-makers belong to a club, he told me. The only way to get into it is to make money. The only way to stay in it is to obey the rules. They’re not rules that are written down, but everyone knows them nonetheless. Stupid rules — like not killing the men who begin a war, only those who fight it.’

  ‘And not paying your workers a decent wage is one of the rules?’

  ‘He said so.’ She smiled, reminiscing. ‘I called him a coward.’

  ‘No wonder he sent you to England.’

  ‘No. That was because of a man.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I wondered if we’d get to that.’

  ‘Or a boy,’ she added slowly. ‘He was just a boy then, and I was a girl.’

  ‘Sounds like the beginning of all the best romances.’

  ‘It was,’ she said. ‘For a while.’

  Chapter 8

  Love? Love all you want, my dear. But love makes a very inadequate meal by itself.

  Miss Lily, 1913

  SYDNEY, 1912

  It was a blue and gold day: blue shadows and blue trees, and infinite possibilities. The light was gold. Timber cantered along under the trees: a perfect horse, playful enough to challenge a nearly seventeen-year-old girl who had been riding since she was four, but a horse with all vices scrubbed from her equine soul. Lady Jane ran before them: ostensibly a cattle dog, but Sophie’s ever since a swaggie had carried a red and black puppy to Thuringa in a billy and swapped her for a forequarter of mutton and a pound of tea.

  Nine years earlier a boy had insulted her. Back then she had no idea how very Suitable indeed the Overhills were, despite Miss Thwaites’s disdain. Today Sophie Higgs was going to enchant Mr Malcolm Underhill, partly to show that she could.

  One of the Suitable Friends had mentioned a month back that Mr Malcolm Overhill was in the same college at Oxford in England as her cousin, and had sailed back for the Christmas break. The only risk to Sophie’s plan was if the young man had brought friends home with him. If he had, though, they weren’t with him today.

  Moonbeam Joe, the head stockman on the property, was supposed to accompany her, but he had wrenched his back working cattle a week ago and his formidable wife had informed him that he was not to ride till he could stand straight again. Sophie had told Miss Thwaites truthfully that she was riding to the river as usual. She hadn’t mentioned she planned to ride along it, past Thuringa’s boundaries.

  But they were still on Thuringa land — just — when Lady Jane barked as she saw the other rider.

  ‘Hello!’ Sophie carefully let Malcolm Underhill hail her first, pulling at Timber’s reins as he cantered up to her. His horse was good, a big black gelding. He rode it well. Lady Jane sniffed at the horse’s fetlocks before deciding it was acceptable too.

  ‘I’m sorry. Am I trespassing?’ She smiled at him from under her white hat. ‘I’m Sophie Higgs, from next door. We have met, you know. Years ago, at the Tearooms in Sydney.’

  ‘I say, Miss Higgs, of course I remember you. Astonishing we haven’t met again.’

  It wasn’t, and they both knew it. Malcolm’s family were the upper class in this society, while the Higgses were Trade. The chasm was too wide to breach.

  This year that would change.

  Sophie waved the flies away with a gloved hand. ‘I am trespassing. I’m so sorry. It was just so lovely here by the river.’

  ‘I think I may be the one who’s trespassing. But you’re right — it’s a cracking ride. Look here, may I accompany you home?’

  ‘Of course. We might even offer you a slice of Coronation cake.’ She smiled again. She knew she was beautiful, except for the two front teeth that crossed slightly, but which you didn’t see if she smiled in a certain way. Even if she hadn’t been beautiful she might have believed she was, flattered and sheltered by her father, Miss Thwaites and the Suitable Friends. She knew that too.

  ‘How can one resist Coronation cake?’

  The horses began to amble along side by side, both riders keeping their pace as slow as possible, talking, as the young mostly do, of themselves and each other, with Lady Jane panting behind.

  That was the beginning.

  It was only years later that it occurred to Sophie that Malcolm had ridden that way to meet her too.

  She meant him to fall in love with her, of course. It seemed reasonable. She was used to being irresistible, in every sense of the word.

  She hadn’t meant to fall in love herself.

  It began with corned-beef sandwiches. Ridiculous to fall in love over corned-beef sandwiches.

  They rode together every morning after that. Not by themselves, of course; even Sophie couldn’t manage that. But Miss Thwaites, after consideration, allowed her to go out escorted only by Moonbeam Joe as long as she was back by mid-afternoon. (Miss Thwaites didn’t ride herself.) The young man was eminently respectable, after all, and out in the country the chaperonage rules were relaxed.

  They rode to the Bushranger Cave one morning. It was only a few metres deep — a crevice where a young man had waited, damp and scared, for the troopers to find and shoot him, with a colony of bats that fluttered out in panic as soon as Lady Jane nosed inside, instead of a chest of gold coins.

  ‘Maybe he buried it,’ said Sophie hopefully.

  Malcolm laughed. It was a good laugh. ‘Not in the cave. It’s all rock under the dust. See? If he buried it out there …’ his hand waved across the hills ‘… a hundred men could dig for a year and never find it.’

  Yet it was still a day of sunlight and cicadas, the horses meandering under tree dapples, bark crunching like toast under their hooves, their breath hot, their sides sweaty. Collecting fallen branches to light a fire, with a twist of last week’s Sydney Morning Herald to get it going; boiling the billy that had once held plum jam; drinking the black tea Sophie disliked, but drank because you couldn’t drink lemonade from a billy …

  Moonbeam Joe had let them light the fire. He accepted his mug of tea as though he hadn’t made many thousands of fires, a hundred times more expertly than Malcolm Overhill, and retired to drink it by the horses near the stream. Sophie sat, her back against a tree, hot as the billy under her silk and whalebone stays, her bloomers, her thick serge skirt and high-necked cotton blouse, envying Malcolm in his open-necked shirt and trousers, and unwrapped the damp damask napkin that held her sandwiches: scrambled egg with shredded lettuce, a
nd chicken with grated carrot, pickled beetroot, lettuce and mayonnaise. Lady Jane sat at Sophie’s feet, waiting for her share.

  She glanced at Malcolm, vaguely curious about what the Overhills’ cook would have given him.

  It was corned beef. Plain corned beef, on buttered bread. He bit into the first sandwich while she stared. Plain corned beef, without even pickled beetroot or mango chutney …

  Had he meant it as a taunt? No. The smirking boy back in the Tearooms might have done it, but not the young man flirting with a girl he obviously admired. He mustn’t have thought about it at all.

  Corned beef was never eaten in the Higgs household, even below stairs. Every can of corned beef opened in England or India or Hong Kong, spilling out its fatty gelatinous goo before you came to the thick, veined, still-pink meat more suitable for spooning than slicing — every single tin meant a few more pennies to be transformed into Sophie’s dresses and hats, or cans of caviar to adorn the family’s hard-boiled eggs. But that was its only role in the Higgs household: to bring wealth, not to be eaten, or even, when possible, acknowledged.

  How could a family be so confident of its status that it would eat corned beef? Not even dressed with pickles? Even as Sophie stared, Malcolm threw Lady Jane a crust. The dog snapped it before it had time to fall, then looked back, waiting for Sophie’s chicken.

  And suddenly she saw him more clearly than she had ever seen another person. His arms were tanned darker than the tree bark, his hat pushed up off his forehead to let the sweat dry. Behind them the horses cropped the tussocks.

  He was beautiful. The whole day was beautiful, every part of it. And because you couldn’t love a day, that left Malcolm himself to love. Malcolm, with the sunlight on his face. Malcolm, who could carelessly eat corned beef.

  He caught her glance and smiled, then held her gaze a moment longer. Both of them automatically turned to Moonbeam Joe, eating his slab of fruitcake, so obviously there to prevent anything more than glances.