The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘means you can take full charge and steer the magazine into a newer, more exciting direction. Should you choose.’

  It was implied she would not fail to choose.

  ‘It’s only a few years since you’ve joined us,’ he reminded her. ‘I can see you’re still young but quick to learn. And full of potential.’ He leaned back in his chair and plugged his mouth with the cigar.

  She didn’t seem to be required to speak, beyond muttering the occasional yes and thanks. It was a great step for her. Finally she did say something.

  ‘I’m honoured. And grateful.’

  ‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘But you do need to understand that this trust in your capabilities deserves some loyalty in return.’

  The vice-president took a considered chew of his cigar. He was the kind of man who rarely lit up but was usually rolling one around in his hands, taking it out of his mouth and jabbing it for emphasis. He did this now, pointing at Ellis. He didn’t mean loyalty to him, mind you, that was not what he expected. He meant to the company. If she were to accept this offer – and really, was there any doubt that she would; he was simply running through the formalities for the sheer pleasure of savouring the power it gave him, just like the cigar in his mouth – then he would expect in return nothing but her absolute commitment. He’d need her to remain at the helm and guide the magazine through its crucial years of change, and of course she could take the odd holiday but it needed to be understood – he jabbed again with the cigar, right at her belly now – that none of this nonsense about running off to get married or taking time out to look after babies would be tolerated.

  Ellis, as was perhaps correct, was standing before her seated employer. He liked to work in his shirtsleeves with a loosened tie to suggest that despite the continent of inlaid maple between them and the submarine cigar berthed in his mouth, he was only one of the workers at heart.

  She swallowed the humiliation at having her body accused, as it were, and at being made to stand and be accountable for all modern women who dared to have a career and who might betray the great faith their male employers were starting to put in them by being weak enough to fall in love, or to have children. Despite the acid shame and faint dread inside her, Ellis remained steady and focused, holding the vice-president’s gaze as she stood. As if deliberately, she smoothed down her skirt over her still flat stomach and then reached out over the desk to shake his hand.

  ‘You have nothing to worry about,’ she said. ‘You can count on my cooperation one hundred per cent.’

  The smile remained on her face as, head erect, she walked across the executive level and down two flights of stairs back to the editorial and production floor, where she went straight to her own desk. At lunchtime, when the office was quiet, she picked up the phone and called Tom.

  23

  Dove understood how women were discriminated against. She had lived through some of that herself. Though she could not claim that the few incidents had seriously violated her, not really, not when atrocities were committed against women, the memory of the student coffee lounge where Jabe had groped her breast was still raw. But she had never experienced what women like Ellis had experienced.

  Nevertheless, she did not know how Ellis could do that, how she displayed such an implacable spirit. It seemed nothing short of callous. She saw her speaking quietly into the phone, then resuming work and not leaving until the normal time. She saw Tom arriving at Ellis’s flat about an hour later, heard the argument that went on, a muted one for neither was prone to scenes or shouting. She saw Tom on the balcony smoking cigarette after cigarette, throwing the butts into the stand of palms that formed the tiny front garden of the block of flats in the main street of Potts Point, where Ellis now lived, without caring who might be below, or even if they might land farther out on the footpath. She saw him walk out, then return, then walk out again. And she saw Ellis, the very next day, telephone to tell work she would be in a little later, then make a few more calls before heading off herself. This morning, she wore a peasant top over a camisole, a floral skirt and brown boots. Around her neck was a lace choker and her hair, which she now wore permed, was piled into a pleasing mess. The magazine was featuring fashions popularised by Yves St Laurent, and while Ellis rarely took samples the fashion editor offered, she had decided she liked this new look. She was vastly different to the Ellis of just a few years before, in velour jersey scoop-neck tops and flared jeans, or the Ellis of the late 1960s, a lookalike Mary Quant in miniskirts and patterned tights, her hair short and sleek as a fur seal.

  On this morning, Ellis took the bus to work as usual but everything was so different that Dove would not have been surprised if the bus turned out to be painted purple or sparkly pink instead of blue. Ellis had made a decision from which there could be no going back. Tom could or could not return as he wished. She did not believe that she owed him anything and refused to be disproportionately grateful just because it was he who had introduced her to the position at the magazine, and her whole career, five or six years ago. She was the one who had carried it through, become successful, done the hard work.

  When she arrived at the office she phoned the personnel department and straight after morning tea went up to the seventh floor for a meeting, then went the next floor up to the executive level and knocked on the door of the vice-president’s secretary and insisted on a meeting straightaway.

  Dove was astonished. Ellis virtually barged into the inner sanctum, where the vice-president, again in shirtsleeves and unwrapping his first cigar of the day, half rose in his chair, then sat back, mouth slightly open, as he listened to Ellis. The executive offices were panelled in beautiful Queensland maple, with glass partitions rising from waist height to the ceiling. Next to the vice-president’s office was another even larger one, with an ensuite and drinks cabinet and a one-hundred-and-ninety-degree view of the city, but which was left empty in memory of his father who had started the company and who would always remain the president, at least so long as his son was around. On the father’s vast desk sat a silver tray with decanter and a crystal tumbler which the secretary renewed every morning at eleven o’clock, with two fingers of Scotch whisky and five cubes of ice. At the patriarch’s home there were similar rituals, regarded by everyone – the rest of the family, their circle of friends, along with anyone else who happened to be in the know – with indulgence as the endearing eccentricities of the wealthy and powerful classes. For example, a place was always set for him at dinner, his widow sitting to the left, his eldest son the vice-president to his right, and at these dinners, whether grand events or private family meals, three things were never served, for the patriarch had hated them: carrots, in any form; apple sauce, even when there was roast pork; and hard boiled eggs, with their ugly grey rims surrounding the yolk.

  All this information was but a maddening distraction to Dove who was trying to tune into the conversation unfolding before her, but it was as if they were behind thick impenetrable glass that allowed vision but nothing else. Ellis, she feared, was taking a huge risk but one that might pay off, for it would show the vice-president, sexist bully that he was, that she was a person of firmness and decisiveness, who was as prepared as he was to insist on deals and barter with people’s lives, in return for results. In his parlance, she was showing she had balls. If he agreed to her proposal she would not let him down. But at the end of her five-minute lecture – which is what it looked like to Dove, Ellis even at one stage placing her hands on her hips – he was sitting back in his chair, his lips pressed shut around the cigar, his eyebrows knitted. And she was holding her chin high, still refusing to sit down. By lunchtime it was all arranged. And when Ellis returned to her desk on the sixth floor and sat down again it was like a film come abruptly to an end.

  Dove raked over all that she could see, sifting it for details. She knew that Ellis had also made a phone call to someone in the country, but she had no id
ea who they were or where they were. And all she understood from the meetings at Ellis’s work was that management had agreed she could take her accumulated leave in one chunk a little later in the year. After that the scene simply stopped. No credits, nothing. She had no idea what would come next, or even if she would be allowed to witness it.

  24

  Ellis had never learned to drive, as it happened. She had intended to, but after she left Vince, left her father’s place and moved to the inner city, there was nowhere she could not reach by bus or train, or taxi, and the years went past until she was nearing her thirties and there seemed no point.

  This time she was travelling by taxi. She paid the driver and got out with some difficulty, adjusting the bundle in a pale yellow shawl in one arm, a bulky overnight bag in the other, and a small shoulder bag. As she walked past the ramp in Eddy Avenue she considered buying a bunch of flowers. The stall had been there for as long as she remembered, and always had something interesting. Sweet peas would have been nice, or poppies. Columbines would have been perfect. But flowers were impractical. Soon she would be on the train and then it would be several hours before she could hand them over.

  She took the escalator up to the country trains and stood before the yellow and black indicator board. Her train was leaving from Platform 4. She had fifteen minutes, not long enough to go and have breakfast. Instead she bought a takeaway coffee in a polystyrene cup and a packet of Smith’s Crisps to take onto the train while she waited. The railway pie was considered to be surprisingly good, but she would not risk it, while the look of the doughnuts and finger buns glistening with sugary lacquer made her queasy. But she was starving. In her bag were two apples and a can of Tab, which she had packed at the last minute, and she would save them for later. There were also two small bottles in an insulated bag. She had boiled them sterile and made up hot formula earlier in the morning. Her breasts were still sore and leaking but she had tucked pads into her bra and hooked it looser than usual. In another week or two she should be right, the postnatal sister had advised. Besides, not every woman fed her own baby. In fact she, who had been a midwife since the fifties, could tell Ellis that breastfeeding was only slowly coming back into favour.

  She had not contacted Tom. He had been offered a position in Melbourne and would have left anyway if she had not lied and told him she was flying to London to visit relatives and then travel around Europe. She had already lied when she told him she would terminate the pregnancy but she could never do that again. Instead she had booked the hospital and taken her accumulated holiday leave as planned, telling everyone she was off overseas for three months. She phoned her father in the final few weeks instead of visiting him, pleading flu or other reasons. Caftans and other Indian-inspired fashions assisted in the conspiracy. Tom sent a postcard from Melbourne, a picture of the neon Skipping Girl Vinegar sign taken at dusk, which she put in the drawer under the telephone.

  The baby was placid. She was the sweetest thing Ellis had ever held. She was perfect yet also unformed, her chest softer than anything but beating with a visible urgent pulse that showed the great strength inside that would make her grow. Out of her tiny mouth her breath issued with a wholesome fragrance. Even when she cried she was as supplicant as a baby bird. Everything about her was startlingly fresh. Ellis could hardly bear it. She resisted holding her for hours on hours, then gathered her up and pressed her close, marvelling at the softness of her cheeks, the down-like gold of her hair, before replacing her in the bassinet and closing the door of the spare room.

  It had been two weeks since the birth and she would have left sooner if it could have been arranged, the very next day if at all possible, but she had unexpected complications and required rest. A painful misalignment in her lower back, and some stitches. She had spent five days in hospital then another week confined to home, treating herself with ice and hot water bottles. Getting up the stairs with her hospital bag and the baby had been murder.

  After Strathfield she drowsed during the long trip through the western suburbs, the baby tucked into her arms as if it would be there for the rest of her life. At the foothills of the Blue Mountains the baby roused and began making the mild animal squeaks that passed for her cries, and Ellis placed her on the empty seat beside her, changing the disposable nappy and wiping her hands clean with a damp flannel she had prepared and placed in a plastic bag. The baby, settled again in her arms, accepted the teat of the bottle which was still warm. Well before they reached Katoomba she had slipped into sleep again, a small dribble of milk trailing out of her plump wet mouth. Her body was a soft parcel, perfectly compliant within the shape of Ellis’s arms. Outside the carriage a drizzle had developed, the kind of soft mist that enveloped the primaeval mountainscape like the innocent infant rain that supposedly descended upon the garden of Eden at night.

  The birth had not been as bad as she expected. This time she had read a couple of books which sounded grave and sensible, but when the labour commenced she forgot all the advice she might have gleaned from within their sterile descriptions of what amounted to a force that was more elemental – shocking and exhilarating at the same time – than she anticipated. She had leafed through A Child Is Born and marvelled at the insider’s view of the being developing within her, changing week by week according to Nilsson’s surreal photographs, like something from science fiction. There was not a great deal to read that she found useful. The nurses at the antenatal clinic seemed surprised when she asked for suggestions of books, reassuring her that she would be in safe hands when the time came. Towards the end of the pregnancy she consulted Dr Spock’s The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, expecting that the early chapters would contain something useful on the event that was about to take place. Trust yourself, said the opening lines. You know more than you think you do.

  She had slapped the book shut then and put it away. She would never know anything. Afterwards, she packed it in the bag and brought it with her along with the rest of the items she had acquired for the baby in the last few weeks.

  In the end the birth was over sooner than she expected. Either that or real time suspended while hospital time speeded and skidded to a halt in its own unique manner. She seemed to be watching a nurse sitting in a corner of the delivery ward and reading for hours. But then the same nurse had also been bringing her ice and warm towels and after that never left her side, rubbing her lower back and telling her in a low voice that she was doing really well. Gripped by pain so powerful she could only gasp and moan, lying on her side and panting in between contractions, she succumbed to a dizzy otherworldly state when someone slipped a mask of oxygen over her face. By the time she realised the ridiculous hospital gown was riding up and exposing her backside, the midwife was getting her to sit and draw up her legs. She clutched hard on a pillow placed between her chest and her knees and breathed in and out with extraordinary effort, understanding why it was called labour.

  Yet as undeniably corporeal it all was, at the same time she felt detached. In a dream, she was floating above herself and wondering at the curious spectacle of her engorged lower body draped in a green hospital sheet, legs askew, like an enormous bloated praying mantis. And when the midwife pressed on her abdomen and the doctor – it seemed he was conjured up from thin air just minutes before the baby crowned – held up his hands, she was astonished, not that this dripping lumpy sausage was a baby, but that it was her baby.

  The train slowed, shuddered, stopped altogether. She looked out the window but it was hard to tell where they were. Paddocks either side of the train, a few indifferent sheep and slicing sheets of rain that replaced the hazy moisture that had accompanied the train all through the mountains and fogged up the windows. But it could not be much farther judging by the time, so she tidied the baby’s few things, fastened the overnight bag and put on her jacket.

  How and where had her mother gone, when she left? All her life Ellis had wondered why she had disappeared, but now she thoug
ht more about the actual event. Had she also gone on a long train trip somewhere, but one so far away that returning was an impossibility? She did not imagine her mother simply patted her on the head and drove off in the back seat of a taxi, or was spirited away by some mysterious person, like in a fairy story. But the most compelling image was of her mother stepping on a train at Central, just as she herself had a few hours ago, and heading west in one long silver journey that spat her out so far at the other edge of the country there could be no coming back. Try as she could, Ellis could never salvage the smallest scrap of memory of that time. She shook her head. She was not doing what her mother had done, only what she needed to do. Drawing a lipstick from her shoulder bag, she coloured her lips and ran her fingers through her hair.

  When she got out at the station the sun had broken through but the clouds remained dark and swollen. She had been in the last carriage when the train left, so was at the very end of the platform. She thought she might have to wait and looked up the platform for the waiting room sign, but then a small figure in a dark skirt and coat rose from a seat and walked straight towards her. They stared at each other. Ellis thought if she spoke she might cry. Then she pressed the baby close to her chest before holding her out. The other woman raised her arms and for a few moments there were two sets of hands around the bundle before Ellis stepped back.