The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  Tilly tore open the paper. It was a bottle of French perfume. She couldn’t speak. Mary was by her side, her mouth open wide in surprise. ‘It’s not Jean Didier, is it?’

  Tilly laughed, almost speechless, full of joy. ‘No it isn’t. It’s … it’s Chanel No. 5.’

  Elsie, Mary and Martha stared at Tilly. She stared at the box and then at Cooper.

  ‘Where did you …?’

  He didn’t answer her question but stepped closer to her and their eyes met. She held her breath as he leant forward and kissed her on the cheek. His warm lips met her blazing skin. She gripped his arm to steady herself as he whispered, ‘Merry Christmas.’

  She nodded to her gift, still in his hands. ‘Your turn.’

  He unwrapped the paper to reveal a leather writing compendium in deepest brown, with sheets of off-white paper and envelopes inside.

  ‘Thank you. So I can write to you?’ he asked, an eyebrow raised.

  ‘I didn’t know you were staying,’ she replied, just to him. ‘It seems pointless now, I expect.’

  ‘Doesn’t mean I won’t write to you.’

  ‘Excuse me.’ Bert tapped a knife against his champagne glass and slipped an arm around Mary. ‘We have an announcement to make.’

  Mary shot a look at Tilly, and her face fell and Tilly knew that it wasn’t a baby.

  ‘Mary and I have a new home. My name was called in the Housing Commission’s ballot last week and we’ve finally got somewhere to live.’

  A rousing cheer went up in the room.

  ‘It’s a house in Avenue Road in Mosman,’ Mary said laughing. ‘It’s ready for us to move in. This is my way of saying that I’m moving out, Tilly!’

  Tilly rushed forward, hugged her friend and congratulated Bert.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’

  ‘It has been a little squeezed with the three of us,’ Mary said. ‘You’ve had the patience of a saint.’

  ‘Stop. I’m going to miss you dreadfully. You know that.’

  ‘I know. But it’ll be 1946 soon. Our whole future is ahead of us.’ She whispered in Tilly’s ear. ‘For you and me both.’

  Later, after Martha had taken the boys out for a walk to burn off all their pent-up energy from being on their best behaviour, Tilly waved goodbye to Mary and Bert and returned to the living room, where her mother sat with a cup of tea and Cooper. Stan had gone upstairs an hour before for a lie down, the excitement of so many people and the boys having worn him out, and Tilly was glad of a break. She wanted Cooper to get to know her mother better and the reverse was true as well.

  She made herself a fresh cup and sat on the floor by the tree, surveying the paper and string and packaging and her bottle of scent. It was the most glamorous gift she’d ever received.

  ‘So you’ve lived all your life here at Millers Point, Mrs Bell?’ Cooper asked.

  ‘Born and bred. I grew up on High Street. My father was a watersider. That’s how I met Stan.’

  Tilly listened while her mother told her story, her own mind drifting off as she stared through the back door into the yard. One less chicken was scratching in the dirt that day and Tilly’s belly was all the better for it. She thought over Mary and Bert’s news and what it would mean for her and her flat at Potts Point. She had been through so much upheaval that year that one more stone in the pond, rippling the surface of her life, was simply something she was going to have to bear. She couldn’t afford it on her own so perhaps she might put an advertisement on the noticeboard in the staff canteen at the newspaper and see who might be interested. Or perhaps she would find somewhere new to live.

  As it was, she didn’t want to think about those choices right at that moment. She was finding it altogether more fascinating listening to her mother’s proud storytelling and Cooper’s genuine questions. She loved the sound of his voice, the deep timbre of it, the way it seemed to echo in his mouth when he laughed, and as she let her head fall back on the armchair, and fluttered her eyes closed, she let it soothe her.

  And then a wail like nothing she had ever heard took its place and when she bolted upright, it was Cooper shaking her awake.

  ‘Tilly. It’s your father.’

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  More than five hundred people from all over Sydney turned out to bury Stan Bell on 29 December 1945. Stan’s comrades Arthur Black, Bob Bailey and Walter Rose were among the pallbearers at the funeral and afterwards led a rousing and emotional rendition of ‘The Internationale’, which would have made Stan proud.

  Elsie Bell remained brave and strong throughout, taking her place at the front of the gathering at the Abraham Mott Hall across Argyle Place—the Coal Lumpers’ Union having put aside any internecine workplace rivalry on account of it being Stan—and she had held the hands and accepted the condolences of grown men completely unabashed at shedding their tears. Tilly knew her mother would never be forgotten by the Waterside Workers’ Federation. She would be held in the bosom of that community of workers for as long as she lived.

  ‘It’s too bloody young’, was the most common refrain at the funeral, followed by ‘Those bastards worked him to death’, a sentiment that seared through Tilly like the hot rivet had through Billy McCartney’s eye when the bridge was built back in the twenties.

  Death had wrapped itself around Tilly like a cloak.

  Her husband and now her father—the two men she had loved the most in her life—were gone.

  Those last happy moments with her father had been at the Bells’ kitchen table, the scene of so many lessons about family and their hard-scrabble life and the realities of work for men like him and families like hers. Stan Bell had stood proudly at the head of the Christmas table, looking across at those he loved and who loved him to reflect on the year—and the war—they had endured. He had exhorted them to never forget those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for warmongering men. How could Tilly ever?

  The union paid for Stan’s funeral and ran an open bar at a nearby pub afterwards for the men. Back at the house, Tilly and Martha made tea and accepted the many generous gifts of cakes and slices from their neighbours, union wives and others who were strangers to them, but who had known and respected their father.

  Tilly held herself together as best she could. She poured tea. Sliced and served cake. Collected dirty dishes. Washed them and filled them all over again. She read The Magic Pudding to Martha’s boys in the private eyrie of their attic bedroom when they were in tears, consoled Martha when she found her sobbing in the bathroom, fed cake scraps to the chooks in the backyard, and tried to smoke a cigarette for the first time in months, but she quickly discovered she’d already lost the taste for it so she stomped it out with her shoe and then watched the chickens peck at it in the dirt.

  The screen door opened and closed with a clatter. The chooks flapped their wings and made a half-hearted attempt to take off but quickly changed their minds and continued to scratch.

  Elsie slipped an arm through the crook of Tilly’s elbow and sighed deep and weary. There was a lifetime of exhaustion in that exhalation. ‘You all right, love?’

  Tilly lifted her chin to rest on her mother’s head and pulled her in close. Tilly had been a head taller than her mother since she’d been ten years old and this pose was familiar and comforting. It made Elsie chuckle and Tilly let herself smile.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me, Mum.’

  ‘Of course I’m going to worry about you. And you don’t need me to tell you why.’

  The chooks bawk-bawked and gathered around Elsie but she flicked a foot at them to shoo them away. It was quiet in the backyard and Tilly wanted to hold her mother there in that moment, just the two of them, for as long as she could. They were the two widows of the family now; she was just thirty years old and her mother fifty. They were both far too young for what life had dealt them.

  ‘People said lovely things about Dad.’

  ‘That they did.’

  ‘And when they burst into song … well, that was hard.’


  ‘I know, love.’

  ‘And they also said nice things about you. Things I didn’t know.’

  ‘What didn’t you know?’ Elsie asked, perplexed.

  ‘That you’ve been cooking for striking families. Looking after their children. Forgiving the rent of boarders if they’re on strike.’

  Elsie shrugged. ‘That’s nothing to write home about.’

  ‘You don’t think?’

  ‘It’s what you do for your comrades. It’s what you do for the union, Tilly. We stick together. Plain and simple. The bosses want to divide us. They always have and they always will. Pitting one of us against another like these bloody chickens scratching here in the garden fighting over a carrot top. They want us to be weak, to be fighting each other, so we don’t have the energy to fight them.’ Elsie managed a chuckle. ‘You can’t be married to your father for more than thirty years and not have that sink into your noggin.’

  Tilly’s lips quivered and she breathed deep. Her dear mother. She had held this family together forever.

  Elsie went weak in her daughter’s arms. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do without him, Tilly. I just don’t know.’

  Tilly held her mother’s shoulders and met her sad eyes. ‘You’ve got me and Martha and the boys. We’ll see you right, Mum.’

  Tilly didn’t leave Argyle Place until the boys were already fast asleep and she and Martha had tucked Elsie into bed with one final cup of tea. Tilly waved goodbye to Martha, promising to call by the house the next day to see their mother, and went straight to Cooper’s in a Legion cab.

  He’d come to the funeral but they’d only exchanged a few quick words afterwards on the footpath in front of the Abraham Mott Hall, when he’d quickly told her he’d been invited to the pub. She’d had to hide her sudden envy that he was already welcome into the world from which she would forever be excluded because of her sex. She had lost her dear father, but Cooper would get to drink with his friends and be a part of the conversations she so desperately wanted to hear. The stories, the tall tales and true, the elevation to sainthood they would inevitably bestow on a dead union man.

  Perhaps he’d seen her crestfallen expression, because he’d held back as the solemn crowd moved off to begin a long afternoon of drowning their sorrows, reaching towards her to rest a hand on her shoulder.

  ‘I’ll see you after.’ It hadn’t been a question.

  Her answer was direct, demanding, urgent. ‘When?’

  He’d moved to her then, quickly pressed his cheek to hers, cool on her warm skin. ‘Tonight. Come to my flat. When you can. I’ll wait for you.’

  The cab dropped her off on Darlinghurst Road and she walked the rest of the way, every step in rhythm with her quickening pulse, the burden of her grief feeling heavier and heavier the closer she came to Cooper’s dingy bedsit. It was on the second floor of a red brick apartment building in a laneway off a backstreet and when she’d climbed the stairs she stood by his front door for a moment before knocking. She closed her eyes, laid a flat hand on her chest and felt the thud against her ribs.

  She was standing on a threshold and she was about to step over it. Would she be judged for what she was about to do? And would she care about the judgement of someone who looked down on her for being lonely and filled with grief? How could anyone else ever understand what she had lived through? She was thirty years old and so much of her life and her dreams had been packed away in her camphorwood chest when Archie went to war and they were still in there, buried in letters and sorrow and in the knitted cardigans Archie would never wear and in her punishing anguish.

  She had once been someone’s loving and patient wife. But she was no longer that wife. She would forever be a widow and would carry the scars of that every day for the rest of her life. But wasn’t she still a woman? That essential part of her had been packed away in a box, with her dreams, when Archie had gone to war. Was it wrong to want comfort and tenderness and even love again?

  There was a man behind that door who wanted her. She hadn’t let herself believe it—hadn’t been ready to believe it—before that day, before his invitation, before the urgent press of his lips to her cheek in the street after her father’s funeral. Before the tingling desire she’d felt watching him leave, and the expression on his face when he’d turned to look back at her. And right then, in that moment, she’d known that she would go to him and she would finally let herself want him too.

  She lifted a hand. Made a fist. Knocked. The door opened quickly and Cooper didn’t speak. She met his eyes. He took a step towards her.

  She crossed that threshold.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  The next morning Tilly and Cooper lay together, tangled in the sheets on Cooper’s sagging mattress.

  They had fallen asleep that way, him on his back with his arm around her; she on her side, tucked up against him, one leg draped over his. But now they were awake, listening to the early morning sounds of the room and the world outside. A ticking clock. Footsteps from the next flat. A whistling kettle. Doors slamming from the hallway and the odd shout and curse.

  Cooper entwined his fingers in her hair, messed and unruly. Her curls had been rubbed flat on his pillow during the night and he pushed her fringe back from her forehead with gentle fingers, his touch so light it was like a whisper of breath on her skin. She turned her face to him and lifted a hand from where it had been resting on his chest to trace the stubble on his chin, prickly and rough and real.

  He’d always been objectively handsome, the kind of man women looked twice at as he sauntered past. ‘He’s a catch,’ they might have said to each other, a lifted eyebrow and a pursed lip shaped for a whistle if they were the kind of girls to do that sort of thing. Tilly had always appreciated that about him in a superficial way—the cool sweep of his cheeks and his strong jaw, his commanding height and his charming smile. When had she suddenly lost her immunity to all of it? Why had she suddenly craved him so?

  She pressed her nose into his neck and inhaled the cigarette and pine smell of him. There were no curtains nor a blind on the window but there was nothing to see anyway except dust and grime streaked with summer rain drops, long since dried, and beyond that a small and dim lightwell in the centre of the block of flats. Only the merest rays filtered in, making it feel like the earliest sunrise although it was most likely later. In that half-light, Tilly held on to Cooper, watching the shadows on his cheeks and his eyes, her breath catching when they disappeared as he turned towards her. Was this a dream? Was she still asleep or awake in a world that had changed in just twelve hours? She had long been denied the early morning comfort of being in bed with someone, of sharing their warmth, of feeling muscles move under skin, and he was right there and she ached with an unsated desire all over again. She pressed her intimate parts against his hip.

  For the first time in so long, she felt alive.

  Every nerve ending flared and fired at the feather light touch of his skin, his long arms and thighs; his narrow hips and curved calves and rounded buttocks; his sweet and soft lips and bony jaw and bristled cheeks. And she hadn’t realised just how much until that morning.

  Cooper turned to her. She felt him move but tightened her grip on him, pressing her thigh harder into his leg, slipping an arm across his chest and tucking her hand under his armpit.

  ‘You hungry?’ he murmured drowsily. ‘Do you want something to eat?’

  ‘No.’ The truth was that she was famished but she wanted this more.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘For god’s sake, give me an excuse to get out of bed.’ He played at pleading with her. ‘I need a cigarette, Mrs Galloway.’

  She reluctantly let him go. He flipped back the sheets and strode across the room, his buttocks pale above tanned and lean legs, heading for the bathroom. Tilly lay back, her limbs akimbo, and stared at the ceiling.

  She hadn’t smoked a cigarette since the news about Archie and hadn’t missed it at all. Cooper had t
asted like cigarettes when she’d kissed him that first time the night before, right there on his doorstep, but the taste of Woodbines on his mouth hadn’t made her want a cigarette. It had made her want him.

  Tilly threw her arms above her head.

  Cooper padded across the floor and slid back into bed next to her. He lifted an arm and she moved in beside him again.

  ‘I didn’t really need a cigarette.’

  ‘I guessed.’

  He pressed his lips to her forehead, gently, slowly.

  ‘Tell me something,’ she murmured.

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Your question.’

  ‘Where did you get those condoms?’ She and Archie had never used one. No one she knew ever had. Archie had withdrawn from her at the last minute in the hope that would prevent her from getting pregnant and it had worked, although they had barely had a sex life before he’d enlisted. Six months in all.

  ‘It pays to know Americans,’ Cooper said. ‘They used to get rubbers handed to them like lollies during the war. “Put it on before you put it in”, they used to say. They were all scared witless of taking diseases home to their wives. A bit hard to hide what you’ve been up to when you go home with the clap.’

  ‘So soldiers got condoms while women were told to abstain. Somehow those two things don’t fit together, do they?’

  ‘Did you …?’ Cooper didn’t finish his question but she knew what he was asking.

  Tilly nodded against his chest. ‘Yes. The whole time. Four years.’

  He pulled her closer.

  ‘I didn’t marry a soldier. I married an insurance clerk. And back then, we had our whole life planned out, when it was all so new and we were in love and so, so naive as it turned out in the end. Remember how things were back in 1940? Everyone was saying the war would be over in a few months. I thought Archie would come back and we’d go back to that life. We thought the most exciting thing that would ever happen to us would be a train trip to the Blue Mountains for a holiday. I wanted to see the Three Sisters, you see?