The Women’s Pages

by Victoria Purman

  ‘You know what’s so awful?’ Tilly felt her lips trembling and pressed them against Cooper’s skin in a kiss to make them stop. ‘Without the war, I never would have become a reporter. The newsroom would never have needed someone like me to fill the void left by all the blokes. And I have loved my job. Really loved it. I’m really good at it.’

  ‘There’s no doubt about that,’ Cooper said.

  ‘What’s hard to reconcile is that the war blessed me and robbed me at the same time.’

  Cooper was silent. The strength in his arms around her never wavered.

  ‘I just don’t know what comes next, Cooper. I need to know how my story ends.’

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  ‘Tilly? A word if I may?’

  ‘Of course, Mrs Freeman.’ Tilly followed her editor across the floor to the enclosed office and waited by the guest chair while Mrs Freeman closed the door behind them, rounded the table and sat.

  ‘Tilly. I’ll come right out with it. You know what we reporters are like. I’m not going to bury the lead.’ Mrs Freeman crossed her fingers on the desk. ‘We’ve had a complaint.’

  Tilly startled. ‘I beg your pardon? A complaint about me?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Mrs Freeman passed a newspaper to Tilly, folded to highlight a story, a fashion parade Tilly had covered the day before at Mark Foy’s Piazza. The headline read ‘Summer Frocks Enthral Crowd’, which she had to admit wasn’t the most interesting slug line she’d ever written but the subeditors upstairs had gone with it.

  She had always loved Sydney’s magnificent department store with its bright white and glimmering golden frontages on Liverpool, Elizabeth and Castlereagh Streets. It had aimed to look Parisian when it had been built but Tilly had always thought of it as a castle with its gold highlights and its rooftop turrets. When the renovated building had opened in the late twenties, all of Sydney had stepped inside to soak up the glamour of the lavish woodwork, the enormous staircases and Sydney’s first escalator. Her mother had dressed Tilly and her sister Martha up in their finest and they’d walked to the drapery store, beyond excited. They’d waited in a long queue and when Tilly had stepped on the moving stairs for the first time, she had gripped the moving handrail and quivered with excitement and thought that travelling in this fashion had felt like flying.

  And she had shopped there before the war, mostly for little things—handkerchiefs for her mother’s birthday, a new slip, some face powder—but she had never covered a fashion parade. They had always been Kitty Darling’s to cover, but since Kitty wasn’t at work and a replacement had yet to be found for her, Tilly had been despatched. She hadn’t figured out why this particular fashion parade was so important, but calls had come down from Mr Sinclair to Mrs Freeman who had personally assigned the story to Tilly.

  At the parade, she’d assumed Kitty’s regular position in the front row next to the head of Ladies’ Fashion and had fired questions at her about every frock and hat, scribbling furiously during the whole event.

  The glamorous parade was held right under the domed glass roof in the centre of the ground floor. Red carpet had been rolled out to form a long catwalk and seats were set out in rows right along it. Above them the skylights captured Sydney’s bold summer light that bounced from mirror to mirror, illuminating the ground floor like a stage.

  Austerity was most definitely over. The parade had been filled with elegant models in dramatic long-stemmed American dresses in matt black crepe, with wide satin sashes swathing their hips in the style of a bustle to create a bottom where there wasn’t one. Tilly had had to ask the head of Ladies Fashion to describe to her the details on the frocks so she would get them just right. She wrote pages and pages of shorthand notes. There were gowns with long sheathed sleeves and upswept hairdos that sat like American donuts on their heads. There were cap sleeves that left arms bare, coupled with long Lauren Bacall side-swept fringes that looked romantic and glamorous.

  There were black satin and marquasite and hibiscus-pink crepe dresses, and sheer mist-grey chiffon, and peplums embroidered with glittering dew-drop bugle beads. Tilly couldn’t imagine ever being able to afford any of the creations and would have nowhere to wear them in any case, but she had found herself spellbound by how beautiful they were.

  And how they were symbolic of a different life. And as Tilly had looked on in awe, she imagined herself lighthearted and young again. For a few brief moments she was a woman in the first chapters of something interesting with a man she rather liked; on the brink of discovering where it might lead. All the endless possibilities of the days and nights ahead glittered like the dew-drop bugle beads catching the light on the catwalk.

  But it didn’t last long. Reality snapped at her like fresh elastic on her cheap underwear. She’d looked around her at the women in the audience and realised she wasn’t one of them: the matrons, the ladies who had spent the war lunching, their daughters with their primped film-star blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes with just the right amount of shadow on their lids, and envied them for the simplicity of the decisions they were making about the right choice for the perfect debutante ball gown. They would wear their mother’s pearls and be escorted by the sons of the families their own families had grown up with, young stockbrokers and doctors and lawyers and businessmen, whom they would later marry in a wedding which would feature in Kitty’s society news page, and the virtuous and privileged circle would continue.

  They had had a different war to the one she had endured. They moved in a different universe and she wondered how it was possible they lived in the same city, caught the same tram, drank the same tea. But she’d come back to the newsroom and written her story in the same way she tackled every other one: with a commitment to the facts, with a dedication to telling the story and with her opinions in her cheek.

  ‘“Summer frocks enthral crowd”,’ Tilly read aloud. She couldn’t imagine what on earth was incorrect about that. She looked to Mrs Freeman for guidance or a reprimand. ‘Was it Betty Grable?’

  Mrs Freeman stared at her blankly. ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I swear that’s what the head of Ladies Fashion told me. I can check my notes. The chiffon dress in delicate mist-grey was based on Betty Grable’s dress in Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe.’

  Mrs Freeman rolled her eyes. ‘For Christ’s sake, Tilly. I don’t give a fig about the models or Betty Grable’s dresses. This is your error.’ She jabbed a perfectly manicured finger at Tilly’s second paragraph.

  Tilly read it aloud, muttering to herself. ‘“Seated front row at the parade, as a special and honoured guest of the retailer, was Mrs Robert Fowles of Rose Bay, in a pastel-pink rayon crepe-de-chine blouse with a high tie neckline and a fluted jabot front. Her suit was the palest grey and her shoes a stylish grey kid heel. She wore a miniature coachman’s hat of strawberry straw covered with lilies of the valley. The fine balibuntal straw, with upswept sides and dinted in the crown, was designed especially for her by a Frenchman, and it gave a luxury note not seen since Sydney’s pre-war days.”’

  Tilly read it twice and stared in bewilderment at her editor. ‘I do know how to spell the name of the chairman of the board’s wife. I arranged Mr Sinclair’s appointments for years.’

  Mrs Freeman pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘Tilly, it’s not the name. It’s the colour of her crepe-de-chine blouse with the fluted jabot front.’ She picked up her notepad and held it at arm’s length, squinting just a little. ‘“It was most definitely not pastel pink. It was salmon pink. What standard of woman reporter are in your employ these days, Mrs Freeman? I’ll be speaking to my husband about this. You can count on it.”’

  Tilly sat back in her chair, speechless. She had been chastised by the wife of the chairman of the board of the paper—and one of Sydney’s most illustrious charity matrons—for inaccurately describing the colour of her blouse, which had probably cost more than Tilly’s monthly wage. Tilly tried not to be furious. She remembered her interview w
ith Daphne Teale two weeks before, the Red Cross worker who’d walked into Belsen. Such anger over the colour of a blouse when millions had been murdered. The incongruity was enraging.

  Tilly swallowed her fury. Mrs Freeman had been nothing but professional and accommodating and the last thing Tilly had wanted to do was embarrass her editor. ‘I’ll personally apologise to Mrs Fowles, Mrs Freeman. And I apologise to you for my error.’

  Mrs Freeman leant forward on her desk, her elbows crossed. She searched Tilly’s face, looking for signs of nerves. Tilly knew the look: the pursed lips, the narrowed eyes, the question about her state of mind sitting there on the tip of her tongue, about to be asked. The cock of the head to one side. She’d been studied in such a way by everyone, like a specimen on a glass slide under a microscope. She shrank a little inside. Since she’d returned to the newsroom, her colleagues had been treating her with kid gloves, as if she might break like a sparrow’s egg tipped from a nest.

  ‘How is everything with you, Tilly?’

  Her work? Her mind? Her life? Her desk? Her heart? ‘I’m getting on with things, Mrs Freeman.’

  The editor shared a kind smile. ‘That’s all you can do, I expect, isn’t it? Get on with things? In my experience, grief is a long journey with no clear destination. It may not seem possible now, but one day you’ll find comfort in the simple things again and then before you know it, it will be Easter and then spring and Christmas and 1947. Distance helps, if that’s any comfort to you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tilly replied, wondering where Mrs Freeman’s particular understanding and sympathy had been born. ‘One day at a time. That’s my plan.’

  ‘What you’ve been through …’ Mrs Freeman’s lips parted on a sad smile. ‘Don’t be too hard on yourself, that’s all.’

  ‘Thank you but I’ll own up to my mistake, even if I find it to be petty and ridiculous. My failure to understand the importance of the difference between pale pink and salmon pink has nothing to do with what happened to my husband. It wasn’t professional of me and I can only say I will do better next time.’ The heat in her cheeks confirmed everything that the girl from Millers Point had always believed about herself, that even though she was smart as a whip, there would always be places in Sydney a watersider’s daughter would never belong. She had observed the crowd at the fashion parade, but had never been one of the young women choosing their debutante gowns. While one might have thought the war had been a great equaliser, given death knew no class or rank distinction, Tilly realised that the war had only cemented Sydney’s social strata, not shattered it. That was the reason why the waterside workers were fighting the shipping companies and the government, why men and women were on strike, fighting for a pay rise and fair working hours. Her anger at the inequality made bile rise in her throat.

  ‘I’m aware this isn’t your dream job,’ Mrs Freeman started and then paused.

  ‘It’s not that, truly.’

  ‘I do understand it wasn’t your choice to come under my aegis, to report on fashion parades and the comings and goings of society matrons. The women’s pages isn’t hard news, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. New season hats can’t compare with state parliament or the latest breaking news, can they?’ Mrs Freeman’s tone could have been belittling, but wasn’t. Tilly’s interest was piqued.

  Tilly tried to find the right words to express her disappointment in her demotion and her exile from the newsroom, in a way that wouldn’t insult the woman sitting opposite her who had been nothing but accommodating. ‘A job’s a job, Mrs Freeman. A woman …’ Tilly paused. ‘A widow needs to pay the rent and put food on her table. I know the situation facing so many others and I really am very grateful to have a job at all. But …’

  Mrs Freeman raised a perfect eyebrow. ‘But?’

  ‘But …’ Tilly waited, wondered if she should be so forthright and then realised she had nothing to lose. ‘I’d rather be writing about what women are doing and not what they’re wearing.’

  Mrs Freeman’s lips pulled together in a firm line and Tilly couldn’t shake the intuition that she was trying to hide a smile.

  ‘How are you getting on financially, Tilly?’

  ‘I received a bereavement payment from the army and I saved most of Archie’s pay when he was, well, when we thought he was alive. I won’t go without, at least for a little while.’ It felt like blood money and Tilly would have gladly sent it all back with interest if she could have Archie instead. ‘But I’m going to have to find a new flat.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘My flatmate is Mary Smith from classified ads and she and her returned serviceman husband have won a Housing Commission house in the lottery. They found out just before Christmas.’

  ‘Good luck to them. And how is Mary?’

  There were secrets but they weren’t Tilly’s to tell. ‘Mary is kind and patient and she loves her husband very much.’

  Mrs Freeman saw through Tilly’s words. ‘I don’t think there’s a woman in Sydney whose life hasn’t been changed in some way by the war.’

  Tilly muttered under her breath. ‘Some have faced more hardships than others.’

  Mrs Freeman’s eyes lit up. ‘Exactly. And they’re the ones who need us the most. I have some news, Tilly. And it involves you.’

  Mrs Freeman walked to the window on her elegantly turned-out dancer’s feet. She pointed through the dusty glass to the street below.

  ‘Steel mills are making bathrooms and kitchen appliances now instead of planes and ships. Uniform manufacturers are turning production back to suits and frocks and children’s clothes and sheets. I can’t wait for new sheets myself. Mine are so thin I can see the springs in the mattress.’ She chuckled and turned back to Tilly. ‘Factories that made bullet casings are now making lipstick. Hooray to that, I say. And who buys all those things, with their husband’s pay or with their own?’

  Mrs Freeman threw the question to Tilly.

  ‘Women?’ Tilly offered.

  ‘Exactly. We’re the shoppers in households and for the first time women have had money of their own. Now that austerity and wartime manufacturing have come to an end, the whole economy is gearing up to sell things to us again, instead of to the government. They want to sell more fabric, shoes, soap, perfume, cigarettes, cleaning products, make-up, shoe polish and even push carts for children’s birthday presents.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand what all this has to do with me,’ Tilly said, perplexed.

  ‘There have been discussions going on at board level for almost a year and they’ve finally agreed.’ Mrs Freeman beamed. ‘We’re going to have a bigger women’s section in the paper, a weekly lift-out every Thursday instead of the measly half a page a day we have now. Think of it, Tilly. Six whole pages full of news for women each week, and more if we get the advertising to support it. Vera will continue to write her cookery column. We’re going to expand Talk of the Town because who doesn’t love gossip, except when it’s about oneself. We’ll be answering more Dear Agatha letters and we’re finally going to let her off the leash and print some of the hardest questions women are asking. If we receive a frank letter about marriage, we’re going to answer it frankly. She’ll be giving fearless—and mostly uncensored—advice to Sydney women about their sex lives. Even if we have to make up the first few letters ourselves, just to get things going.’

  Mrs Freeman crossed her arms and stared into the distance. ‘Do you know what the war has done to marriages in this country, Tilly?’

  In her mind, Tilly saw Mary cowering in the bathroom, sobbing. She heard her begging Bert to come back to bed.

  ‘Aside from my own?’

  Mrs Freeman’s face fell. ‘Yes, of course. I’m talking about the ones who were lucky enough to come home.’

  ‘Not really, no,’ she lied.

  ‘When women talk to each other—I mean really talk to each other—they tell the truth. Their husbands and boyfriends and sweethearts are not the men who left wearing a fresh uniform and a smile. Whet
her it’s nerve disorders or the sufferings from battle or captivity, there has been a toll on their sexual power.’

  So it wasn’t just Bert?

  ‘And wives are desperate for help. They’re beside themselves about what to do. We can be that place for them, Tilly. We can, as you put it so succinctly just now, not just write about what they’re wearing, but their lives and their challenges. What do you think?’

  ‘I think it sounds marvellous.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear that because you’re going to be the new editor.’

  There was a buzzing in Tilly’s ears and her vision blurred and then settled.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You heard me.’ Mrs Freeman sat on the edge of her desk and stared at Tilly. ‘Did you know that I worked hard to poach you from Sinclair?’

  ‘I didn’t know that. And now I’m completely perplexed.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Sinclair made it known that he wanted you to return as his secretary. I was infuriated and when I heard I marched into his office and told him that was not going to happen. As soon as those important men returned from the war—’

  ‘Poncing around as if they were Ernest Hemingway.’ Tilly smiled and Mrs Freeman laughed.

  ‘Precisely. They thought we would all step back into the shadows, where no doubt most of them think we should have always been. But the shadows are full of secrets.’ Mrs Freeman’s mouth curved into a sly grin and she raised her eyebrows in mock surprise. ‘And I know many of them.’

  ‘Secrets?’ Tilly asked, shocked.

  Mrs Freeman nodded.

  ‘You don’t mean Mr Sinclair?’

  Mrs Freeman laughed. ‘Goodness, no. He goes home every night to kiss his wife and goes to church on Sundays with his ten grandchildren. I’m talking about Mr Robert Fowles.’

  Tilly’s thoughts raced. She was frantically trying to put together a puzzle without all the pieces.

  Mrs Freeman sat at her desk, crossed one leg over the other and settled in.