The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  I will not kiss her, she thought. I will not touch her again.

  ‘Why don’t you come back to my place?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thanks. But it’s better this way. I am getting the train straight back.’ She handed over the bag. ‘Everything you need is in there.’

  ‘I understand,’ the woman said, bending her face to the baby’s exquisite sleeping one.

  All of a sudden Ellis was conscious of her aching, empty arms. The baby weighed almost nothing but it was like she’d been holding a bag of cement. She should embrace this woman, for what she was doing. She said, ‘You were the best teacher, you know. And I’m sorry I was no good at music.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Not now.’

  ‘By the way,’ Ellis said. ‘I’ve thought of her as Columbine. But of course you’ll name her what you like.’

  25

  What was it that Emily had buried, in that dream? Of all the dreams that Dove – and Ellis – had had since then, this one had not recurred. All she was left with was the sound of Emily Brontë coughing as she walked away from the lonely new grave back to her home in the parsonage, back to prepare for the remaining weeks of her life.

  Dove’s mother had coughed, just before she died, after Dove had finished reading her the novel and when she was first writing her story. Ellis in that story was described as being rescued from the earth. Dove had dreamed this, had witnessed the extraordinary scene where she found Ellis suffocating, in a ditch somewhere, and had dragged her out and brushed the cold soil off her clothes and warmed her back to life. She had saved her, though for what purpose she did not understand. Except now she thought back on that dream, and the scene she had written a while ago, it struck her that the landscape from which she had rescued Ellis was very similar to the moorland route that went from behind the parsonage all the way to the ruin of Top Withens and beyond, its features bare and its weather bleak. She had described it then as scrubby, and Ellis lying abandoned by a road, but it could easily have been the track across the moors where she had found her, flanked by hillocks of dry grasses and with a horizon that vanished into a green-black haze.

  It struck her with a force almost as mighty as the naked wind on the Yorkshire moors that she would not discover from her dreams what it was that Emily had buried, but that it was up to her to decide, to invent it. Such secrecy, the flight across the moors before dawn, could only mean something shameful. Either that or something so intensely private, she could not dispose of it anywhere in or around her home.

  It was only about seven in the morning and she was in the bathroom thinking this. Quickly she dressed and made a cup of tea and fed Viv his morning biscuits then went to her bookshelves and took out the few books about the Brontës which she thought she already knew back to front. Deciding the truth of this secret was almost heady, but while it was all her creation now, it still had to make sense. Some of the speculation about Emily was such nonsense, considering how solitary a person she was, how isolated. That she had a lover and became pregnant, or was anorexic, or had willed her own death – or all of these things – smacked of desperation, sensationalism. For Dove you would only dispose in that way one of two things: the corpse of a baby was implausible, so it could only be a book – or a manuscript.

  Yes, there was some suggestion of the intensely private woman being secretly wooed, and perhaps this leading to a pregnancy which ended in miscarriage, which might explain Emily’s habit of shutting herself away from everyone in the household. But this was from the lunatic fringe of Brontë fandom (she would hardly call it scholarship). More persuasive was the idea from some researchers that there had been another manuscript, which Charlotte had destroyed. That was only a theory, but to Dove it was a start. Besides, she had seen it, as clearly as everything she had seen in this dream.

  She saw it again now, as she sat and made notes at her desk. She saw Emily sitting alone in her narrow bed with her writing desk on her knees, a candle in a saucer on the bedside table, a ladder-backed chair jammed under the door handle. Then she noticed that Emily was thinner, paler. She saw the title on the first page of the manuscript, the author’s distinctive handwriting, smaller and tighter than her sister Charlotte’s, not nearly as neat as Anne’s, and retaining some childish characteristics, perhaps because of her natural left-handedness. But she knew this was not the manuscript of Wuthering Heights. Emily, barricaded in her room, wrote away steadily, frowning and making corrections or angrily crossing out lines here and there, and sighing as she read over the pages. Occasionally she coughed and wiped her nose, absent-mindedly using the same handkerchief to wipe her pen, which she had to mend frequently, given that she pressed so hard on the pages with it.

  She always kept this manuscript locked in her desk when she was not working on it. During this time, after Branwell’s funeral when she caught that cold, she became thinner, and spoke less to her family, sometimes going for days without saying a word, not even to Keeper. She rose every morning to take breakfast at her usual place at the table, ears blocked against the household around her. She fed the dogs, and performed her household tasks, and became thinner and quieter. Dove, who never heard very much at all when she peered into such scenes, nevertheless now heard the cough that accompanied her all the time, felt the horrible fluid power of it, as Emily pressed a handkerchief to her mouth. Every few days she descended to the outhouse and rinsed and wrung these handkerchiefs, pegging them out on the line that ran to the chicken coop. As the weeks went on, as the end of the year approached, they dried into small flags rigid with frost.

  It was too sad. Emily was turning into an old woman, and she had not finished with being a child. She had been working hard on a manuscript that would never in her view be good enough to leave after she had gone. It was born a deformed thing, a puny weak creature that could not stand against the raw, healthy force of her firstborn. She could not have burned it in the kitchen or parlour fire for then her sister would know, and Charlotte’s disapproval would be as ferocious and as unbearable as her devotion. And so that was why her only option, after reading through the entire manuscript with her brows drawn and mouth set firm against her cough, the candle guttering in the cold nights that marched even colder towards December, had been to wrap it against prying eyes, and take it as far away as she could and place it where it belonged. Dove could almost see Emily calculating: she could still walk that distance, though in a couple of weeks more she would not have the strength, and she could walk that path with her eyes closed, in her sleep if she had to, she knew it so well.

  And so what perhaps was another masterpiece was consigned to the clammy earth, where every year the deep snow would pile above it and in the warmer months the worms would nibble through it like any other organic thing.

  It was never Charlotte who destroyed that second novel: it could only be the author herself whose implacable courage against the inevitable was already well known. Given all that she had done, Dove knew that the other famous grim stories about Emily were nothing by comparison. Searing her arm with the hot poker after the rabid dog bite had been easy. Refusing the doctor for her consumption not worth a second thought. And dying was simply a joke.

  26

  Ellis was alone in her office one afternoon when her assistant came to the door.

  ‘There’s a woman to see you, she says she knows you.’

  Over Amanda’s shoulder Ellis caught sight of a familiar figure: Mrs Wood still wore a twinset, with a small string of pearls and a pencil skirt. She looked chic. Rising to greet her, Ellis realised that Mrs Wood was so much older than she had always remembered her. But of course, so was she. It must have been at least fifteen years since they had last seen each other, on her wedding day. Nevertheless Mrs Wood’s hair was barely touched by grey, and still in its French roll.

  ‘Thanks Amanda. Could you get us some coffee?’ She closed the door. ‘Mrs Wood. Please sit down.’

  ‘
Thank you’.

  Ellis could not sit behind her desk and extend authority over this woman. She sat in one of the easy chairs under the window next to a coffee table with a stack of the latest issue of the magazine. She crossed her legs. She was wearing what she privately called her uniform: shell top with black trousers, her black jacket on a metal coat stand in a corner of the room. Sometimes she wore a jersey knit top or a silk shirt. Flat shoes and minimal jewellery.

  ‘You never knew Frank, of course. My husband.’ Mrs Wood took out a cigarette and a slim gold lighter. She now smoked Dunhill Blue. ‘By the way, call me Nell. After all these years.’

  ‘You married during the war,’ Ellis said. ‘I remember the photo in your sitting room, on the sideboard. You couldn’t get enough material for a full wedding dress.’

  ‘He was killed.’

  ‘In the war.’

  ‘Not the war you’re thinking of. The Korean War.’ She stubbed out her cigarette in the glazed bowl next to the magazines. ‘Thirty-two Australian men were killed in the Battle of Kapyong, in April 1951.’

  ‘I didn’t know. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No one knows, or cares. Or very few. We remember who we want, or need to. We were married seven years. Frank was a career soldier: he loved me, but he also loved what he did. Our marriage started during one war, ended in another. And what I had to show for it were a few photos. And my smoking addiction.’

  ‘And do you still have your five o’clock G and T?’

  At that Nell smiled. ‘You remember? No, not any more.’ She paused. ‘Anyway, that’s not why I’ve come.’ She bent down to her bag and fished out a copy of Pages from two months previously. Ellis remembered it, though the issue had been put to bed some months before that.

  ‘I read this article, by that activist who had the abortion in the sixties. After all these years I owe you an apology.’

  Apology? Ellis had always supposed that Mrs Wood had done what she had to. Besides, she had provided a name and phone number. It was all she had needed. Ron and his fifty pounds had taken care of the rest.

  The magazine had a special feature on women’s sexuality and focused on myth debunking. Orgasm (vaginal or clitoral). Abortion. Sex therapy. Fantasy. Just printing words like clitoris and abortion in bold caps on the contents page had meant three meetings with the managing editor before she persuaded him. They weren’t one of the other racy women’s magazines, with their male centrefolds and offers of sexy makeovers for dowdy girls, magazines of endless controversy that saw editors sacked and hired nonstop and brought mentions in parliament. They were a respectable magazine for men and women alike, though their main reader was the family-minded woman, who would not expect them to sink that low. But Ellis had convinced him they needed to be topical, otherwise the circulation figures would plummet, and did they want to be relevant or not?

  The issue had contained a story written by a well-known women’s doctor and family planning activist about her own illegal operation, when she was a student, and the reason she had established a women’s health clinic in Glebe. Even with her contacts, the medical student had been forced to seek a backyard operation, but one far worse than Ellis’s experience, which had been around the same time. This woman had stayed with an aunt on the other side of the city, who had refused to talk about the operation, let alone help her. She had paid dearly for the privilege and suffered for two weeks afterwards until a kindly doctor on duty at the emergency ward of a public hospital took pity on her and scheduled her for a second procedure, to clean out the incomplete abortion and finally stop her bleeding.

  ‘I knew what I was doing, and I sent you off to your fate.’

  ‘Well, it could have been a lot worse,’ Ellis said.

  But how lucky she had been. Had she had to return for another operation, or had a D and C like the woman who’d written the story, she didn’t know what she would have done. She even felt lucky that it had only cost fifty pounds, that Ron had at least escorted her until she was picked up in the back streets of Surry Hills. It had not been far from where her office was now, she realised.

  ‘It cost me a fortune too,’ Nell was saying. ‘And mine was many years earlier.’

  ‘You mean you knew exactly what it would be like?’

  Nell nodded.

  ‘And you never said?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You just let me go and do it.’ Ellis spoke bitterly. ‘I was only seventeen.’

  ‘So was I.’

  ‘But you were married.’

  Nell still wore her ring, a thin gold band. She gave Ellis a look.

  ‘You mean you weren’t married?’

  ‘Of course I wasn’t. And I suffered a great deal. Mostly you did. This woman’s story,’ she tapped the magazine, ‘I could have written it.’

  Ellis did not ask who the man was. She felt Nell believed she ought to know but somehow she was refusing to tell her. She waited.

  Nell took another cigarette, smiling. ‘Look how far you’ve come,’ she said. ‘How much you’ve achieved.’ She looked around the office, with its long white desk, its Marimekko-print curtains framing a view of the city and harbour. It was ten floors up, and although Pages represented a small corner of its parent media empire, it had a strong following, with its circulation steadily increasing since Ellis had been editor. The editorial team had moved floors the year before, symbolically up a few levels into the former executive area which had been redecorated, and Ellis had acquired her own office.

  ‘I’m still the same person.’ Though Ellis knew she was not. She was nothing like the young woman who had first started as a typist and general office assistant for the cookery section of the Women’s Pages. That person had long been buried. And she was certainly not the girl who years before that had gone to Mrs Wood feeling faint and sick, desperately after a contact for an abortion.

  ‘Well, yes.’ Nell paused. ‘Ellis, you asked me once about your mother.’

  Ellis nodded.

  ‘I wouldn’t tell you anything. Do you remember her?’

  Ellis did not. Tried as she had over the years, there was nothing but a blank space. Not a scrap of a lullaby or song, or the sound of a laugh, or the glimpse of a necklace, or the scent of clothing kept in a camphorwood box.

  ‘She left when you were a baby. Your father refused to speak of her ever again.’

  ‘I know. He still won’t talk about her.’

  Nell took another cigarette. ‘I expect he’s not mentioned the rest of his family either.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was one.’

  ‘Have you ever gone through the photos in the tin box?’

  Ellis knew what she meant. Her father kept photos and mementoes in a locked box, more of a trunk, which he rarely opened. Occasionally, when he’d had a few drinks at Christmas for instance, he’d open it and show Ellis a picture of her grandmother, or a great-uncle. People far too distant to have any meaning for her. There were a few of herself as a baby, and some of him as a small boy, solemn and rosy-cheeked, with a straw hat pushed back on his head, or sitting beside a bucket and spade on a beach, curly haired, but still frowning.

  ‘I’ve wanted to,’ she said, ‘but somehow I can’t. Not when I know he wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll have to wait then,’ Nell said. Ellis knew what she meant. ‘One day, have a look, then we might talk again.’

  ‘You make it sound all mysterious.’ Ellis walked her out the door and down the hall to the lift.

  Nell gazed at her. Her eyes were very clear, grey. Ellis realised how reserved a beauty she was. She barely had on a lick of lipstick and she was wearing the same style of clothes she’d worn most of her life, but there was a dignity, a presence about her. She could not imagine Nell being their housekeeper, the person who showed her how to remove grass stains and who had instilled in her a lifelong preference for ironed sheets.<
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  ‘Well, it is mysterious. You of all people don’t need me to tell you how complicated life is, how it never unfolds like a story. Goodbye, my dear.’

  For the first time in her life, she pulled Ellis close and hugged her, then kissed her on the cheek and hugged her again.

  27

  Dove would not fail to tell the story of Charlie but the purpose of the author walking across those dark pre-dawn moors to bury a parcel had distracted her. By then she knew in her heart that she should not think ill of Ellis, even though she now appeared to have abandoned a child not once but twice. And worse. Three babies had resulted in her being a mother to none. She should not judge, but it did seem to her incomprehensible at best, criminal at worst. Mothers were not meant to do this. Even Ellis’s own mother leaving her as a baby did not mean Ellis had to inherit this monstrous irresponsibility.

  She resolved not to think about Ellis, to rid her from her imagination if at all possible. In any case, perhaps the story was all but done now. Things seemed to be explained and tidied up. She placed the story draft onto a USB stick and wiped the original from her laptop, then locked the stick and the printed manuscript away in a drawer of her desk, and placed the key in a wooden jewellery box kept in her wardrobe. If she was not confronted with it then maybe she could forget about it. The entire thing so filled her with despair, even faint revulsion, she shared Charlotte’s view that in its own way hers was also a story of perverted passion and passionate perversity.

  Of course it was not that simple. The story gnawed at her heart, when it was not burrowing through her mind. Within weeks it was pulling her back with a shocking elemental force, and she found herself unlocking the drawer and reading through her notes despite all resolve. Emily did not do this, she thought, scanning the printed manuscript and scribbling notes and corrections almost as if her hand were directed by an unseen force. Emily reserved no pity for herself and did what she needed to a defective story, when she realised she had caught consumption and would be dead within months, unable to finish it to her own ruthless satisfaction. She had found the strength of will to let it go entirely. But Dove could not. Just as before, when she had tried to distract herself, nothing worked. She was as bound to the story as ever.