The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  It didn’t seem like a moment before Cooper reached for her elbow and they were being ushered through the door and on the other side of it she caught a glimpse of that other life and it thrilled her. They had stepped into a party. Crowded tables were lined up in tight rows on either side of the dance floor, decorated with bowls of flowers and glamorous people chatting and laughing. A bar stretched along one side of the room and there was a bandstand at the far end, on which a group of musicians wearing tuxedoes were belting out the latest American songs, and people were crammed into every available space, dancing, talking, flirting and laughing. They were having fun and the thrill of thinking that she might have some fun tonight too gave her a smile she couldn’t quell.

  Cooper guided Tilly through the crowd and he quickly found two seats next to each other at the end of a long table. Tilly set her handbag there while Cooper manoeuvred his way to the bar. She stood for a moment so she could take it all in. The room was crowded with men in American service uniforms—the owners of gleaming teeth, all-American smiles and wallets full of cash. With them, young Sydney women who had already retired their drab austerity fashions to re-emerge wearing crimsons and purples and reds in every hue. Strands of pearls gleamed at their necks and were perfect shining full moons in their ears. Those men who weren’t in uniform wore dapper suits with wing-tipped collars and velvet bow ties and there was more than one corsage on show. The scent of perfumes mingled with the sweet smell of whisky, and the stage lights behind the five-piece band streaked through puffs of cigarette smoke like searchlights in a Sydney fog.

  The walls were decorated with large caricatures of military men and above the bobbing heads on the dance floor Tilly tried to pick out who they were but she was too far away to properly see. Roosevelt, obviously. Eisenhower? She slipped off her woollen coat and hung it over the back of her chair, before smoothing down the skirt on her navy crepe day dress. She hadn’t thought about changing as she’d had no idea Cooper would take her to so fancy a place. But it was dark and no one would notice. And if they did, she suddenly didn’t care.

  ‘Whisky for me. Gin and tonic for you.’ Cooper slid in beside Tilly and lifted his glass to clink with hers. ‘Cheers.’ He upended the glass and swallowed the whole shot.

  She eyed her gin and tonic, remembering the first time she’d ever been drunk. But she wasn’t twenty years old any more. She sipped it. She liked it. She lifted the slice of lemon from her glass and sucked on it. Her mouth tingled.

  ‘Is that a new suit?’ she asked Cooper. The navy suited his blond hair and the cut of the snug-fitting collar with wide, square shoulders and two buttons looked modern.

  He straightened his tie. ‘It’s fresh off the rack from Lowe’s. Six pounds, three and six it cost me. Plus the obligatory thirty coupons. I even have new socks.’

  He pinched the pleat down the front of his left leg and lifted the cuff. ‘Cashmere. Feel them.’

  She reached down to run her fingers along the fine weave. ‘Fancy.’

  ‘Tell me. Does it say weary and cynical war correspondent? Because that’s the look I’m going for.’

  ‘It says cashed-up war correspondent to me. It suits you, I suppose.’ It did and he knew it so Tilly wondered why he needed her approval. The suit hung elegantly from his tall frame, and the colour deepened the tan on his face. His hair had been freshly cut too, and it was swept back from his forehead, sitting short around his ears. This hairdo looked better than some of those he’d sported in the past. Once, back in ’41, he’d hopped off a military plane from New Guinea with his head completely shaved. ‘Lice,’ he’d explained. Tilly had shivered with dread and taken three steps away from him.

  ‘Why, thank you very much.’ He looked her over. ‘You don’t scrub up so badly yourself.’

  ‘This old thing?’

  And where she might have expected a wink and a grin at her joke, there was something different in his countenance. A soft sadness in his eyes had replaced the sceptical glint she was used to, and he dropped his gaze to his glass of Scotch for a long moment. It wasn’t like Cooper to be sentimental or complimentary or speak without a newsman’s cynicism shadowing every word. Perhaps it was the music or the end of the war or, more likely, that he hadn’t been in the company of a woman for a long while. When his eyes lifted, he held her gaze and she suddenly felt self-conscious so she turned away, searching for distraction in the twirling couples on the dance floor.

  Behind them, the band ended a tune with a cymbal crash and the crowd broke into wild applause. Cooper turned and lifted his hands to join in. His cigarette dangled from his mouth as he whooped out of the side of his lips. Not for the first time, Tilly wondered what he’d seen, what had gone unreported between the lines of the stories he’d sent back home. Details about the war and its consequences were emerging in more detail with every edition of the newspaper and the grim and appalling reality was only beginning to be told. Were people ready for the truth? Perhaps there would be a time for it, for the reckoning of the damage done and the damage caused, but it wasn’t tonight and it wasn’t here. There would be a price to pay for it all, a collective communal hangover. It was just a question of when.

  Sydney still wasn’t of a mind for that reckoning. The city and the entire country hadn’t stopped dancing and celebrating since VP Day but Tilly felt as if it had all been happening on the other side of a window. She could see it, but couldn’t touch it or feel it. She was still stuck somewhere between the middle of her war and the end of it.

  ‘You glad to be home?’ she shouted above the music.

  ‘Sure. What’s not to love about the old home town?’ Cooper flicked his cigarette at the ashtray and rested an arm on the back of her chair. He didn’t meet her eye but looked over to the dance floor.

  ‘How long are you back for this time?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The bean counters have been on at Mr Sinclair who’s therefore been on at me to take some leave. I’ve got months and months owing. So I thought the end of the war was as good a time as any to come back home and see what real life’s like for a change.’ He turned to her. ‘It’s been a while since I’ve seen my father and my nieces and nephews.’

  ‘How many do you have now? Six?’

  He looked up to the ceiling while he thought. ‘Six. No, wait. I don’t know if I’ve told you about number seven. Robert Allan Johnson was born two months ago to my oldest sister,’

  ‘April?’

  ‘Yes, April.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘So there’s Ronald, Dennis, Raymond, Diane, Kathleen, Carol and Robert.’

  ‘I suppose you’ve missed out on a lot with all the time you’ve been away.’

  ‘Too true.’ He lit a cigarette for Tilly who took it. They sat back, smoking languorously for a long while and watching the dancers move and sway.

  ‘Tell me, Mrs Galloway. Do you have all the postcards I sent you?’

  Cooper was probably on his tenth passport by now. Home in Sydney for a month, then Townsville or Darwin or New Guinea or Singapore. Earlier in the war, he’d spent twelve months in London and had been in Paris weeks before it fell in 1940. Tilly didn’t even have a passport.

  She lifted her chin to exhale into the air above them. ‘Of course. I keep them as a reminder of all the places I wasn’t allowed to go during the war.’

  Cooper looked surprised at her jibe. ‘You covered the war.’

  Tilly scoffed. ‘I never got to go where the real action was, like you did.’

  There was a flash of darkness in his eyes. ‘You shouldn’t be envious of that.’

  ‘Why not? I’ve worked hard to be a good reporter. I could have been a good war correspondent too. A real one. You told me that yourself.’

  ‘When did I say that?’ His deadpan look made her laugh.

  ‘You don’t remember?’ She’d never forgotten how his praise had uplifted her. ‘Three years ago when you were back from New Guinea that first time, and Mr Sinclair had just announced that Cleary was th
e Daily Herald’s new war correspondent.’

  Cooper had started a slow clap and the men in the newsroom had joined in.

  ‘You turned to me and said he’d only got the job because his father’s on the board of directors.’

  He conceded that point. ‘Which happens to be true.’

  ‘And you told me that I run rings around him and that I should have got the job.’ How could he not remember something so important to her? She’d been both thrilled and furious all at once about his compliment and at the fact she hadn’t been considered because she was a woman. The thought that he’d said it simply to humour her or tease her was mortifying.

  ‘Did I say that? Was probably half cut at the time.’

  ‘It was ten o’clock in the morning at the staff meeting!’ Tilly exclaimed.

  ‘My point exactly.’

  Cooper had taught her everything she knew about being a reporter. Not only had he explained to her about the elegance of a crisp first paragraph and the best ways to tighten copy when it was too verbose, she had learnt from him that a story wasn’t just the who, what, why, where, when and how of it. He’d encouraged her to put to full use the personal qualities that she had assumed would hold her back and he had never hectored or lectured her.

  ‘You’re curious,’ he’d said. ‘Smart. You’re not afraid to ask a complete stranger a question. And that’s what this job is, by and large. Asking people questions and putting those answers together in a way that interests other people. It’s simple, really. People respond best when reporters like us talk to them as if they’re actually fellow human beings. It’s a conversation, Tilly. If you want to find out what really makes people tick, what their beef is, it helps to listen to them. Too many people in our line of work don’t do that. They fill in the dots in a story they’ve already written in their heads. They’re after a confirmation of the facts according to what they believe the story to be and that, Mrs Galloway, doesn’t make them a reporter’s rear end.’

  The other worthy piece of advice he’d given had saved her bacon more than once.

  ‘Be good to the copyboys,’ he’d said. ‘They’re the lowest of the low around here, and they get a lot of crap thrown at them. I started at fifteen and spent a year being a dogsbody. I’ve never forgotten who was decent and who wasn’t.’

  Cooper had a lot of reporting years up on Tilly. At thirty-five years old, he’d notched up twenty years on the road. The day he’d looked at her, put his pencil on his desk and informed her she’d written a story he couldn’t improve on was the day she knew she’d made it.

  ‘You’ll always be able to say that you were once a war correspondent, Mrs Galloway. You had the licence to prove it. I hope you’ve framed it and hung it somewhere.’

  She huffed and sipped some more of her gin and tonic. ‘“Woman war correspondent”. I still feel like a fraud calling myself that. You know, when I got my licence, I thought I’d be off to New Guinea or Malaya. Just like you boys.’ She swallowed the anger that burnt anew, fired by her gin. ‘The war changed everything, opened up so many places for women. Places we thought we’d never set foot in. Factories, offices, courtrooms.’ She waved a hand in the air and felt a little woozy. Perhaps she needed to eat something. ‘And a group of us women reporters thought we’d be allowed to cover the truth about what was going on.’

  Cooper’s expression was cynical and the laugh in his voice was harsh. ‘You think war is about truth?’

  Tilly had been slightly envious of the women she’d interviewed in Townsville. They were young—some nearly ten years younger than she was at the time—and they were uniformed and crisp in their navy suits and stiff blue shirts. They even saluted each other. The women had titles like Flight Officer and Wing Officer, and they did crucial work for the air force as radar operators and cypher assistants, sitting in top secret rooms while coding machines clattered away and meteorologists undertook weather observations.

  ‘I didn’t get to do what you did, Cooper. Not even close. And by the way,’ she started, suddenly nervous to tell him. ‘I have news.’

  George stared at her for what seemed like forever. ‘Is it—’

  ‘No. Not Archie.’ Her husband’s name filled the space between them for a long moment.

  ‘I’ve been demoted.’ She hadn’t wanted to tell anyone before she needed to, expecting that admitting it would make her feel like a failure. As it turned out, she should have trusted that instinct. She did feel like a failure.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘I’m off general news. It’s the women’s pages for me from now on, where I’ll no doubt spend the rest of my days covering weddings and flower shows and the chairman of the board’s wife’s latest charity fundraiser.’ Tilly heard the bitterness and disappointment in her tone and didn’t care. ‘I need another gin, Cooper. Or perhaps three.’

  When he returned with the fresh drink she’d requested and another for himself, a double she noted, she watched as he slammed it down and decided to try it herself. The bubbles in the tonic made her burp and she covered her mouth.

  Cooper fired questions at her. His whisky breath was warm on her cheek. ‘When?’

  ‘Next Monday.’

  ‘Who broke the news? Freeman or Sinclair?’

  ‘Sinclair. He called me up to his office.’

  ‘Why? Did he give you a reason that made any sense?’

  Tilly gritted her teeth. ‘He told me that since Arnold, Charlton, Cleary and you—’ she poked him in the chest, ‘are all back from the war, I’m surplus to requirements.’ Just like the Land Army girls and the WAAAFs and the WRANS and the RAAFNS and the AWAS and the women all over the country being sacked from their jobs in munitions plants and canneries and factories. ‘The boys are back, Cooper.’ She took a steadying drag on her cigarette. ‘And girls like me have to make way.’

  Cooper shook his head in disbelief. ‘That’s a mistake.’ He slammed his fist on the table. ‘Damn it. I need another.’ This time he waved down a waiter, passed him a handful of notes, and narrowed his eyes at Tilly. ‘Did you just take this lying down or did you fight?’

  ‘Of course I fought. I know I’m as good as any of the men up there. Take Arnold. He’s a drunk. Did you know that he disappeared for a whole week a couple of months ago. One whole week! And when he finally reappeared, no one said a word. And Charlton? He’s so lazy he can barely drink his own beer.’

  George’s eruption of laughter temporarily halted Tilly’s tirade.

  ‘I’ve run rings around them while you’ve been gallivanting all over the world being Ernest Hemingway.’

  Cooper chuckled. ‘If only.’

  ‘And the other thing that really got my back up …’ Tilly breathed deep to calm down. ‘Mr Sinclair told me the change would do me good, that I could spend my time better helping Archie settle in when he gets home.’

  Cooper’s gaze dropped to her lips for half a second and her mouth went dry. The gin hit with a whoosh and a warmth flooded her, making every limb feel loose.

  The band struck up Glenn Miller’s ‘Pennsylvania 6500’ and the Americans in the room began whooping. Men and women were dancing, happy, twirling, smiling, flirting, laughing. Tilly stood on wobbly legs. She couldn’t talk about Archie any more. Not with Cooper. She held out a hand, her palm pointing to the ceiling in an invitation. ‘Get me out on that damn dance floor, George Cooper.’

  He was on his feet in a flash.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Tilly had always loved dancing with Archie. His parents were ballroom dancers in Taree and had provided expert tuition to their son. He knew every dance craze going around and had taught them all to Tilly, from the lindy hop and the cakewalk to the jive and the jitterbug and swing.

  ‘Being in your arms is like dancing with Fred Astaire,’ she’d told him and he’d kissed her quick and whirled her feet off the floor every single time she said it.

  If Archie had been at the Roosevelt that night, the crowd would have parte
d, gasping in admiration and bursting into applause at how skilfully he moved Tilly, twirled her, pulled her close and then swung her out into the space. Every man would envy him and every woman would want to be the next one to dance with him.

  George Cooper was definitely no Fred Astaire. It was abundantly clear that his considerable talent had been poured into words, not quick steps. However, what he lacked in talent, he made up for in half-drunk enthusiasm and Tilly forgot her anger and all her frustrations about work long enough to enjoy herself. When the band struck up a slow song, Cooper gently pulled her in close and tucked her head in the crook of his shoulder and she didn’t fight the overwhelming urge to be held and comforted.

  Tilly’s eyes drifted closed as they swayed to a jazz ballad and she felt a warmth rise inside her chest. She let the heat and the movement lull her into some kind of peace. Cooper’s breath was whisky-sweet and the lapels of his new suit jacket were infused with something pine and crisp. Her mind wandered and she imagined a forest, not a jungle; snow, not drenching rain; and her attention focussed on the alive, not the missing.

  At ten o’clock, after a couple more drinks and more cigarettes, Tilly and Cooper walked out of the Roosevelt and, instead of crossing the road back to Tilly’s apartment, they turned right towards Victoria Street and the water. The night was cool but still, and the nightlife sounds of Potts Point faded as they got closer to the wooden warehouses of the Fitzroy Stevedoring Company that lined the wharf. The waterfront might have been busy during the day and during the height of the war, but the buildings and wharves were silent now, hulking in the dark. The only sound was the water lapping at the wharf.

  Tilly walked to the edge and peered into the murky depths below. Cooper grabbed her elbow and she wobbled.