The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  Tilly played with the sugar bowl, lifting the lid and placing it back on the crystal bowl with a little tink tink. The brightly lit jukebox in the corner was playing Johnny Mercer, who was urging Tilly to ‘Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive’.

  She tried to take his exhortation to heart.

  The uniformed waitress behind the counter, decked out like a nurse in pristine white with a cap pinned to her hair, expertly made milkshake after milkshake and Tilly watched her efficient one-woman production line. She slotted a metal container in its stand, frothed the milk with a flick of a switch, and then held it almost as high as her head and aimed the stream of milk into a glass held at hip height without spilling a drop. She was working two milk machines at once behind the counter and had served a dozen customers in five minutes, at least. How many milkshakes had she made for the Americans during the war, Tilly wondered. They’d crowded into the booths here and at The Clock down the road, where rumour had it that prostitutes had hidden in plain sight during the war years.

  ‘Mrs Galloway.’ Cooper slid into the booth opposite Tilly, simultaneously taking off his hat and waving a waitress over to take their order: two chocolate malt milkshakes.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  Cooper crossed his arms on the table and studied her. It made her mouth dry and she felt immediately skittish. When she’d been waiting for him, she’d been anonymous, just another single woman in the crowded milk bar. But now, being the subject of his intense focus made her feel shaky and uncomfortable. Mount Vesuvius had erupted the March before, forcing the evacuation of San Sebastiano, whose villagers had already endured occupation and bombings. Scientists had kept a vigilant eye on it ever since and that’s how Tilly felt. Like a disaster waiting to happen. Mary, her parents, Cooper and even Bert—when he was home—peered into her eyes and observed her, as if they were taking her emotional temperature, on edge in case she cracked. In one respect, it was only to be expected. She had erupted the day Cooper had told her about the Montevideo Maru.

  ‘You look tired,’ he said, and it wasn’t a joke to make her laugh but a concerned observation.

  ‘I am,’ she replied and offered nothing else. What else was there to explain? He would know why.

  ‘Hope you like milkshakes. I’ve moved into a flat just near here and this is my new local. My non-alcoholic local.’ Cooper lit up a cigarette.

  When he offered her one, she waved it off. ‘You’re just around the corner then.’

  ‘It made sense to find somewhere a little more permanent. I’m sick of living out of a suitcase.’ He offered her a vague smile but it didn’t last long.

  ‘You said you had something to tell me. About Archie.’ She wasn’t in the mood for small talk. He would understand why, but when she saw a flash of disappointment in his eyes, she felt guilty. He and Mary were clearly in some kind of cahoots to get her out of the flat and while she understood it, it didn’t make her any more inclined to talk or see anyone or be watched for signs that she was about to fall apart.

  He straightened and leant back in the booth. ‘It’s about the Japanese and the Red Cross.’

  ‘Yes?’ Tilly blurted, not immediately sure of their connection and what that had to do with Archie.

  ‘The Japanese refused to have anything to do with these aid organisations, not even when it came to providing humanitarian aid during the war. They didn’t pass over any nominal rolls to the Allies with the names of prisoners on them. They refused to pass on mail with any regularity. The eight thousand POWs in Europe, poor bastards, at least got parcels from the Red Cross and letters from home. I found out that the Portuguese government was the go-between, seeing as they remained neutral during the war.’ Cooper shook his head, as if even he couldn’t believe the convoluted ridiculousness of what he found himself relaying. ‘But with the Japanese, it was complete radio silence. Thousands and thousands of men and women were never heard of at all, officially or unofficially. That’s why people are turning up who were thought to have died. And the opposite, unfortunately.’

  ‘Vera Maxwell,’ Tilly said quietly.

  Cooper furrowed his brow. ‘Who?’

  ‘The cookery editor at the paper. She hadn’t heard anything about her husband. Missing, presumed dead, was all she was told. But he was found alive on an island in New Guinea. I can’t remember the name of the place. Or maybe I’ve forgotten it already.’

  ‘It’s good to hear of a happy ending, isn’t it?’

  Tilly looked blankly at Cooper.

  He continued.

  ‘The Japanese government signed the Geneva Convention back in 1929, which was supposed to set out some civilised rules about how POWs should be treated if there was another war. But they never ratified it.’ Cooper stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Although Germany did, so what fucking point was there in having it anyway? I interviewed prisoners in Singapore and as you know I’ve been interviewing others at Concord, trying to get the full picture of what happened to them. They don’t say much, or they laugh it off with a joke, until they think I’m not looking and I see their faces. They say there’s something about the Japanese, about shame and disgrace and family honour. If you’re Japanese and you’ve been captured, you don’t want to go back home. You’ve disgraced your name. So that’s how they treated our men and women.’

  The hairs on the back of Tilly’s neck prickled. She thought of Bert. His scars. The agony and fear she’d seen on his face.

  ‘Are you making excuses for the beatings and the beheadings and the torture, Cooper? The starvation? The rapes? Because no one’s said it, but I’m sure it happened, aren’t you? Men are men, no matter where they’re born. And war turns some men into beasts.’ Her voice shook. She felt the cool sheen of sweat on her top lip.

  Cooper reached across the table and took her hand. If she wasn’t feeling so numb, it might have been comforting.

  ‘You know that’s not what I’m saying. Aren’t we all simply trying to understand the whole thing? The Germans? The Japanese? And who knows what the hell our troops have been up to. We ask them to go to war and kill and then we act surprised when they do. All I’m trying to say, Mrs Galloway, is that the Japanese look at being a POW much differently than we do. We want them back. You’ve wanted Archie home all this time. You wouldn’t think less of him for having been captured, would you? In their culture, being captured means you’ve disgraced your emperor and your family and humiliated yourself.’

  A waitress set their milkshakes on the table, tall glasses with scoops of chocolate ice-cream bobbing in the frothy milk. Tilly pressed her lips around the straw and drank. Cooper lifted his glass and sipped. At the counter, the till closed with a metallic jangle and the milkshake blender screamed and rumbled. Bing Crosby was singing with the Andrews Sisters and the happy chatter all around them hit a crescendo as the door to the milk bar swung open and more laughing young women with painted faces and Brylcreemed young men with freshly erupted pimples and old sports coats arrived all at once.

  Tilly pushed her glass towards the middle of the table. She suddenly felt sick. ‘What was it all for?’

  ‘The war?’

  ‘Of course the war. I’m still having trouble remembering what it was all for. Millions dead, Cooper. Millions. I waved my husband goodbye one day and I never saw him again. What for? Will his death, or any of those millions and millions of others, mean there’ll be no more wars? So the Japanese have some warped fear of being disgraced in the eyes of their families. I can tell you what is much, much worse than that fear they’re worried about. And that’s holding on to hope, day in, day out, year after year. That is the real hell.’

  Cooper’s face blurred in her vision and her voice rose, catching in her constricted throat. ‘Right now, all I can think about is me and what I’ve lost. My heart’s not big enough to be compassionate about the people who murdered my husband. Right now, I hate them. Every single one of them. I know that makes me sound cold-hearted and mean, but I can’t help it. I’ve lost everything. My husba
nd. My job. Somehow, from all of this, I have to make a new life and I have no idea where to start.’

  Tilly slid out of the booth, grabbed her handbag and stood. When Cooper moved to follow her, she shook her head. ‘Thanks for the milkshake. I’ll see you.’

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  One of the missing pieces of Tilly’s puzzle was delivered in a telegram, small and pink and delicate and deadly.

  When the boy from the post office handed it to Tilly on her doorstep, he cleared his throat and said her name aloud to check that she really was Mrs AH Galloway of Potts Point, to guard against the horrifying possibility that he might inadvertently present the worst imaginable news to someone else’s wife.

  ‘I’m she,’ Tilly replied and felt a great wave of sorrow for the boy, for he really was a boy, barely out of short pants and certainly not yet in need of a razor. For every happy family, for every cry of jubilation and joy his telegrams received, just as many would have been thrust back at him in frantic refusal. How many doors had been slammed in this poor boy’s face?

  ‘Sincerest apologies, madam.’ He nodded solemnly, tugged on his flat cap, and left Tilly right there in the hallway. He knew what pink meant. He didn’t need to loiter. Her door was wide open behind her and a breeze from the stairwell swirled and caught the hem of her skirt and it fluttered about her calves.

  She heard the shuffle of footsteps. Mr Kleinmann looked over at her and the telegram in her hands and lowered his head. He whispered something she couldn’t hear or didn’t understand and then gently he closed his front door behind him and retreated back inside.

  Tilly went to her room and sat on her bed. Her name and address peeked through the clear window, typed on a typewriter most likely very similar to her own on her desk at the Daily Herald. She wondered about the people whose job it was to sit behind desks day after day and type up these death notices, stuff them into envelopes, making sure the name and address were set in just the right position to be seen through the clear window, and then pass them on to someone else who would pass them on to someone else who would give them to the telegram delivery boy. Did a little piece of death rub off on each of them as the information was passed down the line? What a burden the truth was to carry.

  She steadied herself and carefully opened the envelope. She slipped out the folded pink paper. Such a jolly colour, almost watermelon, which before the war might have signalled something to celebrate instead of the worst news imaginable.

  And there it was. Finally. Her truth. We regret to inform you that L/CPL AH Galloway is now reported missing, believed deceased while POW on or after July 1, 1942.

  Reading the words there couldn’t hurt Tilly any more. She had endured all the suffering and pain she was capable of in the years and months he’d been gone. These words on the pretty, pink, cruel paper, typed by a stranger who might have laughed and sipped tea while she worked to take her mind off the reality of the words she was typing, the sentences that could shatter someone’s life, were water off a duck’s back now. It was as if she had just read about the cliffhanger in a film she had already seen.

  Tilly tucked away the telegram with the others, with Archie’s letters, delivered after he was already a ghost, and closed her bedroom door quietly behind her.

  Tilly walked the city point to point, from the flat to her parents’ terrace. She bustled her way through crowds of shoppers, past schoolgirls in their straw hats and uniforms, past rubbish collectors and ferry commuters and office workers wearing smart suits and post-war hopefulness. She didn’t saunter, she strode. The city pressed down on her, sucking the breath from her lungs, the buildings looming tall and menacing when she raised her eyes skyward. But she had to keep going. She had to keep moving, giving every building and monument only a few seconds of her attention and every passer-by the merest glance because she didn’t want to connect with anyone or see or feel anything.

  At Argyle Place, she couldn’t bear her parents’ silent grief. But the flat, which had always been her haven, her place of comfort for so long, was now a prison. The tension between Mary and Bert quivered unceasingly, like a violinist’s bow, and she found herself swallowing her screams of rage at them, the words sitting fierce and unspoken on the tip of her tongue. ‘Love each other,’ she wanted to scream. ‘Be thankful you’re home, Bert. At least you have a husband, Mary.’

  Tilly was struggling to recognise her dear friend. Where had her Pollyanna gone? In her place was a woman who walked on eggshells in her worn-out shoes, her voice reduced to a whisper when Bert was near. She’d become afraid of the night, for it meant an aching loneliness and a ratcheting anxiety about what state Bert would be in when he staggered through the door.

  And what had happened to the man Mary loved? Or had loved once, a long time ago. He’d walked up the gangplank onto a troop ship and disappeared in Singapore. Someone else had returned home, wearing his skin as a shell, like a hermit crab.

  The cruelty. The fighting. Bert would come home late at night, with a skinful under his belt, and then anger and grief raged in both of them. The walls in the flat afforded no privacy and Tilly heard everything.

  ‘Where have you been, Bert?’ It pained Tilly to hear Mary ask this same question night after night, that she had been reduced through her fears to this kind of woman. A fishwife, a nag, a harridan. Why were there no labels for the men who caused this pain and suspicion and fear?

  Bert’s answer would come, in a slur of words, bitterness in each syllable, and Tilly would cover her ears but still she heard it.

  ‘None of your bloody business.’

  ‘I’m your wife. Of course it’s my business.’

  ‘For god’s sake, woman. None of the other bloke’s wives nag like this. What happened to you when I was away? What happened to the girl I married? There’s a knowledge in your eyes now, I can see it. I know exactly where it’s come from.’

  ‘I’m still that girl. I still love you. Come to bed now. Don’t sleep on the floor tonight.’

  ‘You think I want to get in that bed with you? Who else has been in it, hey? I hear the Americans were splashing round their fat wallets and their chocolates and their silk stockings to any girl who’d open their legs. Yes, they were very keen on themselves, I hear. That was you, Mary, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s a horrible, horrible thing to say. I waited faithfully for you for four years. I didn’t know if you were alive or dead and I waited and prayed for you, Bert. For us.’

  Their endless arguments were variations on this theme, over and over, every night. Bert would shuffle home in his cups and Mary would beg him to join her in the newly purchased double bed in their room.

  Why were they wasting such precious time when they still had each other? Didn’t they know how lucky they were? After Bert’s harsh accusations and Mary’s sobbing rebuttals, she would retreat to the bathroom to wash her face and cry in private.

  Tilly would go to Mary, put her arms around her and comfort her in a way that Bert was unable or unwilling to, and find some useless words to say.

  ‘He’s been through so much. Give him some more time, won’t you?’

  It was supposed to heal all wounds, wasn’t it? To change everything? It flew, too, when you were having fun. But what if you weren’t having fun? What if time was like warm toffee, stretching and teasing and enticing you to smell and taste and devour with a sweet promise, until it turned on you and set hard as a rock and all those memories and sadnesses and horrors were ensnared in its sticky grasp forever, like a fossil in amber? Give him time. The lie of Tilly’s words stuck in her throat like a fishbone. Time changed nothing. Time brought nothing but pain.

  ‘When I reach for him, he pulls away, as if I’m a stinging nettle. As if I’m poison.’ Mary’s shoulders fell in hunched defeat and her haunted eyes filled with tears.

  ‘Oh, Mary.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  Tilly had no answers. All she could do was hold her friend, press her comforting arm tighter around her sho
ulders, listen to her, whisper words of understanding.

  ‘I know you love Bert. I know you love him with all your heart. And he loves you.’

  But I don’t know anything about Bert, Tilly thought. Except that he’s not the man you thought he was. That he’s a drunk. That he hurts you and it pains me. But Tilly would not say those words out loud to her friend. What good would they do?

  In Hyde Park Tilly lay on the grass, her eyes to the sky, counting the clouds that stretched like spun fairy floss on the bright blue day. She had always loved Sydney’s big skies. Growing up at Millers Point, her outlook had always been sweeping: across the harbour from the arches of the bridge to the tops of ships in the distance; from the suburbs in the west, to somewhere in the distance the Blue Mountains. When she and Archie had lived at Bondi for those treasured months together, the sky had stretched out past the curve of the beach, beckoning them to places they imagined they might one day visit: Hawaii. Fiji. Tahiti. Now, the sky belonged to the faraway place that had taken Archie from her. It was the sky from which the Japanese had descended and bombed Rabaul and then the Montevideo Maru and robbed her husband of his life and a thousand others of their lives and her of her husband.

  She closed her eyes against it, and lay, sprawled, one arm above her head, feeling boneless and broken as if she had plunged from one of the nearby buildings on Elizabeth Street, forming the outline of a body drawn in chalk on a footpath in a James Cagney movie. The damp from the grass was cool on her back and her legs and her hair.