The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  The next morning Tilly ran into Mr Kleinmann in the hallway. She had just closed the front door when he appeared from his and called out her name. She turned, worried that she was late and hoping he wasn’t after anything more than a brisk hello and have a good day.

  ‘Mrs Galloway?’

  She slipped her keys in her handbag. ‘Good morning, Mr Kleinmann.’

  He shuffled towards her, barely lifting his feet. ‘Can you spare a moment?’

  ‘I’m just on—’ He’d been kind to her when he’d seen her with Cooper and noticed her black eye. ‘Of course. What can I do for you?’

  He nodded. ‘If you wait here. I come back.’

  ‘I’ll follow you. How about that?’

  ‘Please. Come,’ he said and together they slowly walked the fifty feet to his door. She didn’t cross the threshold, thought it most polite to wait, but that didn’t stop her from looking across the living room. It was the same design as her flat so she knew its shape and flow immediately. On his mantelpiece there were two small silver frames with photographs she couldn’t make out at this distance, and an unusual candelabra with room for nine candles. There was one armchair with a folded rug on it and, on a cabinet on the opposite wall, a violin case.

  ‘Here,’ Mr Kleinmann said. Tilly looked across to see him holding a cake plate in both hands and she knew immediately he didn’t want to walk any further without his stick. Quickly she went to him.

  The cake smelt of lemon and looked like the richest cream had been mixed with cheese and set.

  ‘It’s käsekuchen. A cheesecake, you say here. For your sad news, Mrs Galloway.’

  ‘Mr Kleinmann,’ Tilly whispered. ‘You shouldn’t have.’

  His eyes glistened. ‘What can comfort you in such a time? Food. That’s all I can do. You take it.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’ She took it from his hands. It was heavier than she’d imagined. The scent made her stomach rumble.

  ‘You have lost a loved one. I too have lost. Your husband is dead a long way from here. My family, too.’

  ‘Your family?’

  He slumped against the door frame. ‘My brothers and sisters. My nieces and nephews. Almost everyone I knew back in Vienna. They were sent to Mauthausen. The camp.’

  A chill ran up her spine. ‘I’m so terribly sorry, Mr Kleinmann.’

  ‘I escaped in ’38. I am lucky, I think.’

  Tilly immediately understood why he’d been such a vigilant air-raid warden. All this time she’d misjudged him, belittled his officious over-concern. She had betrayed the first rule of her profession: to ask and, most importantly, to listen.

  She hurriedly kissed his cheek. ‘This is so lovely of you. Thank you.’

  He smiled and his eyes shone with kindness. ‘You go to work. Eat some cheesecake when you get home.’

  As she left, she looked over her shoulder at this little old man and wondered about his huge story. ‘Have a good day, Mr Kleinmann.’

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  For the next week, Tilly’s days passed in a blur of tears and tiredness. Sleep in the dark hours still came fitfully, as there always seemed to be activity in the flat through the night. Either it was Bert pacing or Mary placating, believing the darkness camouflaged their voices, and more than once all three of them had found themselves at the kitchen table in the dark, too tired to boil the kettle for tea but needing a cup desperately.

  There had been no further discussion about the nightmare, the struggle, the black eye. It remained the elephant in the room. What good would words do when they understood implicitly that there was no solution but time? How could they blame Bert? The soldiers and camp guards at Changi were the real enemies; they had inflicted his war souvenirs, his physical and emotional wounds. The only acknowledgement of the altercation had been a surprise gift from Mary. She had wordlessly handed Tilly a paper-wrapped parcel one day when she’d returned home from work and inside was a new Helena Rubinstein foundation in Tilly’s exact shade. Tilly understood it was for her bruises and thanked Mary with a nod of unspoken understanding.

  The interrupted nights led Tilly to sleep in the late afternoons, and she had drifted into the habit of dozing on the settee as she listened to the Women’s Weekly session on 2GB, but those snatches of sleep never seemed to be enough. The air in the flat had changed and no matter how much Tilly opened the windows to entice the harbour breeze in to whisk it away, it hung like stale cigarette smoke, a thick and cloying tension which set Tilly’s teeth on edge. She realised she was still spending every waking minute on alert, as they had done during the darkest days of the war when the threat of air raids consumed every waking thought. She wished sleep would come, worried about trying to find the appetite that had deserted her, or constantly walked on eggshells around Mary and Bert.

  The fights. Oh, the fights.

  ‘I’m not an invalid so stop treating me like one. I’m allowed to go out for a beer with the boys. I can’t spend all my time here cooped up with you in this bloody flat.’

  Bert’s words sliced like a knife and they cut deep. And before he slammed the door, he would hurl at Mary, ‘Don’t wait up for me. I’m not your son.’

  Tilly’s own distress at being forced to bear witness to the disintegration of their marriage flared in waves and was interspersed with a sense of numb invisibility that made every limb weak. When husband and wife were exchanging bitter retorts, she wanted to scream at them, to shout that they should be bloody grateful that Bert had come home at all. That Mary’s god had answered her prayers. But that terrible rush of blood would always fade, after which she wanted to weep for what the war had done to both of them.

  She grappled with the growing realisation that her own home was no longer the safe haven it had always been and she grieved for that almost as much as she grieved for Archie.

  ‘Are you awake?’

  Slumped in the armchair by the wireless, Tilly startled at the sound of Mary’s voice. Since the incident with Bert, she had been keeping her distance from Tilly. Mary had created for herself a mask of reserve and calm dignity and wore it many long hours of the day. But the pain was evident in Mary’s face each evening when she retired to bed, her face drawn, her mouth pinched with worry, her eyes downcast and dark at the idea that she’d passed another evening wishing in fervent hope that her husband might return and sit by her side and perhaps even take her in his arms. Mary’s sorrow was palpable.

  ‘I’m awake.’ Tilly yawned and stretched her arms up to the ceiling. ‘I think Edwards’ Gardening Talk must have put me to sleep.’ If Tilly made Mary smile, she might hold her attention and keep her close for just a moment. It had been so long since they’d talked and Tilly desperately wanted to.

  Mary leant on the door jamb, folded her arms and sighed. ‘I’m sad I missed it. I’m going to have a garden one day. When someone does something about the housing. I don’t think one single house was built during the war.’ She glanced around the flat. ‘Or repaired.’

  ‘You’ll get your house.’

  ‘I hope so.’ Mary shook off her sentimental thoughts and suddenly scowled. ‘You don’t have a Bex powder, do you? I swear I bought some last week but I seem to have run out.’

  Tilly sat up. ‘Are you feeling unwell?’

  Mary pressed a hand to her forehead and her eyes fluttered closed. ‘A little. It was worse this morning but I can’t seem to shake it. I’ve had a day of it and I think I just need to sleep it off.’

  Tilly went to her friend’s side. ‘Mary?’ Was there a way to be diplomatic about her question? ‘You’re not …?’

  Mary seemed perplexed. ‘I’m not what?’

  Tilly’s gaze drifted to Mary’s slender waist. ‘Expecting?’

  Tilly waited for either realisation or confirmation but neither came. In the sudden silence of the living room, their eyes met and held and Mary covered her mouth with a hand. She stumbled to sit down and then covered her face with her hands as she began to weep, openly, raggedly, gr
ief tearing at her throat as she sobbed.

  Tilly was horrified. What had she said?

  ‘There’s no baby. It’s not possible for there to be a baby.’ Mary uncovered her face and her truth spilled out in a huge, unsuppressed rush. ‘All this time I’ve waited for Bert to come home and … he won’t touch me.’ Mary’s pleading eyes implored Tilly for an answer but Tilly had none.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’ Mary begged, desperate for an answer.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you. Absolutely nothing at all.’ Tilly had never imagined their troubles ran this deep. ‘Bert’s been through a lot of strain, Mary. It’s natural he’ll have some nerves. His readjustment to civilian life, and to you, will take some time. He just needs time to settle, that’s all.’ Mr Sinclair’s words of well-meaning advice to Tilly when she’d been demoted came back to her in that moment.

  ‘You’ll have a job to do in looking after him,’ he’d said. ‘He’ll need you. There’s been so much chaos. See him back to normal, Tilly. That’s what wives want to do.’

  Tilly wondered how many mothers and daughters and sisters and friends and neighbours and bosses and colleagues and doctors had expressed that same sentiment to soldiers’ wives upon the return of their loved ones. Here you go. He’s yours now to fix and cure and love and fear and hate and mourn. Hadn’t Mary tried all the things expected of her? She had waited with the patience of a saint for her husband to return from the war. She had remained faithful. She had kept her hopes and dreams alive, even in the bleakest moments. She had prayed to her god day in, day out, for salvation. And yet she still was suffering so.

  ‘Oh, dear Mary,’ Tilly said and sat next to her, an arm around her shoulders.

  ‘The nightmares, Tilly. He says he keeps seeing the execution of one of his mates. That his head was impaled on a post and left there for everyone to see.’

  Tilly covered her mouth.

  ‘He dreams he’s being chased by a Japanese guard and that he’s caught and he’s kicked and punched to the ground. The agony—’ Mary turned her face up to Tilly ‘—the agony of watching him go through this and not being able to do anything about it. It’s killing me, Tilly.’

  Tilly clasped Mary’s hand and they held on tight to each other.

  ‘It’s been months now and we’ve … not once. He won’t even kiss me.’ Mary’s voice dropped to a devastated whisper. ‘He still sleeps on the floor. He can’t even bear to be next to me in bed.’

  ‘He loves you, Mary. I know he does.’

  ‘He did love me, once. I know that. But now.’ Mary looked too exhausted by it all to even cry. ‘Every night when he comes home I ask him where he’s been, and he shouts at me and says it’s none of my business. I know you’ve heard it, Tilly. I’m so sorry you’ve had to. I know where he goes. He meets up with boys from his battalion. He’s just spent four years trapped in Changi with them and away from me and he chooses them over me.’

  Tilly couldn’t think of words of comfort for her friend so she said nothing.

  ‘I want to be a mother. I want to have a baby of my own. Two. That’s what got me through all these years, knowing I’d be a mother when Bert came back. Remember how I used to say, “When Bert comes home the first thing I want to do is have a baby”?’

  Tilly remembered. She’d become too pessimistic to think it for herself with any conviction but Mary had never let that glass-half-empty attitude colour thoughts of her own future. Along with knitting socks for the troops and jumpers for their husbands, Mary had knitted booties and blankets and jackets for her dream babies, fashioning layettes of blush pink and baby blue and lemon yellow. They’d laughed and Tilly had played along, mostly to humour Mary. They’d chosen names for their dream babies—Mary favoured Jennifer and Gay for girls and Phillip and Robert for boys, while Tilly had toyed with Elizabeth and Joy for girls or Donald and Glenn for boys—and Mary invented a story that their children might one day fall in love with each other so Tilly and Mary could be bonded by marriage as well as their deep friendship and the war and their shared adversity.

  ‘Bert used to want the same things as me. To be a father. It wasn’t just me pushing for it. It was all we talked about before he went away. Before, he couldn’t keep his hands off me. And now … how on earth will I ever if we don’t …’

  Tilly had no answer. She had never felt more powerless and useless. How could Bert not want to make love to his beautiful and adoring wife, who had prayed every day for his return, who truly believed that God had answered her prayers? Tilly had had her chance of resuming her normal marital relations snatched from her by a torpedo. Oh, how she had missed it. And to know that the person you had missed so much, whose skin you were desperate to feel pressed up against your own, whose hand your fingers itched to hold, whose lips you craved to be pressed against your own mouth, didn’t want you? The devastation of that rejection was incomprehensible. Tilly missed that part of her own life with a desperation she had put away in a box, its lid snapped tightly shut. That part of her womanhood had lain dormant, preserved for Archie, and for what? She had suppressed it so long she feared it had withered and died inside it.

  She pulled Mary tighter into her embrace. ‘Have faith, Mary.’

  Mary seemed to calm. ‘I know I have so much to be thankful for. Especially when I think of what others have lost. You especially, Tilly.’

  ‘It’s not just me, is it?’ Tilly replied, her resolve to stay calm teetering. ‘How many millions of people go to bed these days with an empty space beside them and an empty space inside their heart. It’s almost unfathomable, isn’t it?’

  ‘I can’t think of them. I think of you and what you’ve lost.’ Mary looked over at the photograph of Archie that still sat on the mantelpiece. Mary had moved Bert’s when he’d complained he felt ridiculous staring at a photograph of himself, as if he was a movie star, but Tilly understood the real reason why. Seeing his visage from five years ago reminded him that he was no longer that man, in looks or in character. He missed his old self as much as Mary did.

  ‘How could I begrudge you or anyone else their own happiness because mine was lost? Especially you. You’re as much a sister to me as Martha is, you know that. We’re family, Mary.’

  ‘And you’ll always be mine, too.’

  ‘What if I give you and Bert more time alone together?’ Tilly offered. ‘When I’m back at work, I can make sure I’m out in the evenings too. We’re all a little snug here, the three of us, aren’t we? That can’t have helped.’

  Mary shook her head. ‘This is your home too, Tilly. I couldn’t ask that of you.’

  ‘You can and you should. There has to be a silver lining in all this, somewhere. You have a chance to find your happiness again and I will do everything I can to see you get it.’

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  ‘“Anarchy and lawlessness”.’ Tilly rolled her eyes at the story she was reading and looked over the top of her paper at Cooper, who had the opposition tabloid spread in his outstretched hands.

  They were sitting on opposite sides of a wooden table decorated with a red-and-white chequered tablecloth, a fiasco chianti bottle with a drizzled candle sprouting from it and a wicker basket containing thick crumbly slices of pane di casa. The Mediterranean cafe in Darlinghurst had been Cooper’s idea. ‘I’ll bring you up to speed on everything that’s happened in the newsroom while you’ve been away,’ he’d said when he’d phoned her the day before. Tilly had readily agreed to the idea of lunch. Her talk with Mary was still fresh and raw in Tilly’s mind and she hoped that a romantic Saturday night on their own might be good for Mary and Bert. All Tilly had to do was stay out of the house all day and well into the evening.

  ‘Honestly,’ she continued. ‘I can’t believe what I read in our own paper sometimes.’

  ‘Menzies again?’ The cigarette pinched between Cooper’s lips bobbed as he spoke.

  ‘Who else?’ Tilly dropped the Daily Herald to the table. ‘My father will be apoplectic. Menzies wants to
send all the strikers to jail.’

  Cooper shrugged. ‘She’ll be right. I’ll go with you to visit him. I’ll even fashion a shiv out of an old comb. We can smuggle it in for him in a loaf of bread.’

  Tilly threw her head back and laughed heartily.

  Cooper smiled out of one corner of his mouth. ‘Just don’t let on that I’m keeping company with a jailbird’s daughter.’

  ‘I think people already know you’re keeping company with a commie’s daughter. Your reputation will be taking a battering.’

  Cooper grinned. ‘Lucky I don’t have much of one left then, isn’t it?’

  It had been a tough few months for Tilly’s father and his comrades on the waterfront. By the end of October thousands of other workers were on strike, not just on Sydney’s waterfront but across New South Wales and the whole country. Strikes at the Port Kembla steelworks and by power workers at the Bunnerong power station were the tip of the iceberg: it seemed the whole country was riven by industrial action.

  Tilly was sick and tired of reading the attacks in the newspaper, which went on day after day, headline after headline, week after week. Big business, the Daily Herald and the country’s conservative newspapers claimed the communist-led militant unions were dragging the state through its gravest crisis since before the war. Workers insisted they were only digging in their heels for a prolonged fight because they deserved shorter hours and fairer pay. The end of the war hadn’t meant the end of the battle. Opposition Leader Robert Menzies had accused Prime Minister Chifley of yielding to anarchy and surrendering to lawlessness by giving in to the unions.

  To some, these threats were only headlines on a page that would be put in a basket at the end of the day to take to the butcher’s the next.

  But it was all so much more personal to Tilly. Every time striking workers were attacked and impugned, Tilly’s father and thousands of other fathers and husbands and wives and mothers, who wanted nothing more than to earn a decent wage for their labours and be treated fairly while they were doing it, were attacked too.