The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

  By now she had lost all pretence in living a normal life. She couldn’t remember the last time she had been out, or even if she had any existence of consequence left, after these past few months. If it were not for the cat she might go entire days without speaking, and even then Viv’s conversational demands were minimal. Were she to sit any longer in that cold damp house she might develop mould as if she were just another leather boot or furnishing, the ottoman, or her writing table.

  It was at times like this that she felt acutely the lack of any family. If she had her mother, or a sister, or a brother, she could pick the phone up and whinge and be herself, which is what families were for, and not feel guilty for neglecting them. It was different with friends, unless they were very close, and in the last few years the only person she could call close was Martin. But Passageway had been so busy lately that going there for a drink was no guarantee of having a chat.

  It was a cloudy afternoon. The rain had been drizzling on and off for a week, and that was the excuse she had given herself for lying low, and again the reason she returned to her manuscript despite her earlier resolve. She would go for a walk. She pushed her chair back from her desk, not realising the cat was so close. He leaped to one side and mewed with alarm. She inspected the sky from the damp and dripping back verandah. It looked like there was a hint of sun. After tucking a folding umbrella into the pocket of her coat she set off. As soon as she slammed the front door Viv leaped to the table at the window and stared at her through the wooden venetians, his eyes narrowed to kalamata olives. She turned away. Perhaps she should get a dog, which would mean she would have to walk, get out every day.

  The air was crisp, despite the damp. As if to punish herself Dove walked straight towards Parramatta Road, then turned left, heading west. The rush of the traffic and the need to stay alert crossing side streets and negotiating pedestrian lights would keep her occupied enough until eventually she became bored, tramping along like some dogged backpacker in hope of something rewarding, a view or a monument. She had never walked this way along Parramatta Road, and it was clearly not designed for pedestrians. Of course: who would even consider walking along such a thoroughfare, choosing it for a place to stroll for pleasure? She passed block after block of sad businesses, many of them vacant shops, some furniture places, vast and empty of customers; a discount clothing store, a café that seemed stuck in 1958, a steakhouse, a bicycle repair shop. She was approaching the rise that peaked with Fort Street school to her left before she realised that she had passed Annandale and not given a thought to her story. At the top of the hill she looked down to the road that dipped under the railway bridge. Farther on there were more vast commercial blocks, the garden art place a foretaste of the discount furniture and baby accessory stores which would be followed by kilometres filled with hotels and car yards and building suppliers and barely a soul to be seen except in a car.

  As she continued walking, it came rushing back. The whole first scene, the starting chapter, that was at first just a story of its own but was now like a quarry that she returned to again and again, mining for narrative. When she began writing the story, Ellis was on the bus visiting her father. Dove stopped and looked back. She had just passed a bus stop, so she decided to walk back to it and wait. It was midafternoon, a weekday, and buses thundered past her on each side of the roadway. They would be getting more and more frequent as peak hour approached. Where would Ellis have caught her bus? She lived farther down Annandale, about halfway between here and the bay, so would have walked all the way up to Parramatta Road, perhaps getting the bus somewhere near Johnston Street. It seemed natural that Dove would sit at the bus stop and wait. It was silly, but as a bus passed her she scanned the inside looking for a young woman with a baby on her lap. In a few minutes another bus paused. It was a 483, to Strathfield via Ashfield. She alighted and fished her Opal card out of her purse, waving it over the machine as the bus door whirred shut with pneumatic ease.

  Dove sat about halfway along, on the left, at a window seat. It was all so possible. Here she was being carried towards Ashfield and it was as if it was meant to be. There were few people on the bus and it whizzed along for despite the increasing flow of traffic there were infrequent stops this far west of the city, unlike the ones Dove was accustomed to, and the bus had its own lane painted brick red. Was Ellis’s bus also a 483? Dove had not considered that at the time. It was a green and cream single decker bus with windows that only opened if you pushed them hard. Hers was sealed shut, clean and airconditioned, even on a mild day. The fabric seats were covered in a bold anti-graffiti pattern, and there were two sets of red seats facing each other, to be vacated for the elderly or the disabled. Sometimes these seats were occupied by people with the enormous prams that were everywhere these days, massive but smooth-functioning things which parents, mainly mothers, pushed directly up ramps and parked into place. Back in 1968 Ellis had had to take Charlie out of his stroller, fold it down, then stand and carry him balanced on one arm, the stroller on the other along with her shoulder bag, while she struggled onto the hot, ill-ventilated bus which lurched as it pulled away and lurched again when it stopped. The passengers were so thrust and jerked about it was if the driver held a grudge. Holding onto a baby in these circumstances was hard work. Then when Ellis alighted at the stop in Liverpool Road, she had to do the same thing in reverse, with no one to help her, and then at the gate to her father’s house she had got Charlie out of the stroller again.

  Charlie. Dove would work it out, she would.

  The bus turned into Liverpool Road and she realised she would be getting off soon. Even though she had never really decided what street Ellis had lived in as a child, she knew it must be somewhere around Victoria Street, for she could see the Canary Island date palms, massive even back then. And despite the fact that many of these places were ruined or compromised by unsympathetic renovations, or turned into boarding houses, or destroyed entirely and the blocks turned into flats, she could see enough to know she was getting close.

  She alighted at the stop after the 7-Eleven. From here on the streetscape changed dramatically. It would be barely recognisable to the Ellis who had lived here until the 1960s. It was a crammed stretch – noodle houses, travel agents, Korean BBQ restaurants, moneylenders, pide shops – with the civic centre and shopping mall planted firmly in the middle. The tiny plaza was forever busy, if not with shoppers and pub-goers, then with the incorrigible pigeons, or ibis that colonised the palm canopies and lorikeets that raided them in screaming twilight posses. It was not a restful place.

  As she turned to walk back she found she was right outside the School of Arts, squashed between a Turkish pide house and an unremarkable office building. It had the original lettering above the door, SCHOOL OF ARTS 1912, and in every respect looked unchanged since Ellis was a girl. It now seemed to be home to several small businesses. Peering through the frosted glass doors, Dove strained to see a glimpse of the interior, but quickly backed off down the steps in case anyone thought she was prying. Inside and to the left had been the meeting room where Ellis had learned ballet for a short time until it had become apparent that she had no real talent for it. The teacher had had a quiet word with Nell Wood, who brought Ellis along to lessons once a week when she was six or seven, and encouraged more practice at home during the term breaks. She had loaned them some short-playing records for the purpose, an extract from Handel’s Water Music, the drill-like first few minutes of ‘Boléro’, to stimulate flow and encourage precision, respectively. In the front room Mrs Wood would push back the furniture and roll up the rug while Ellis swayed and bent emulating a willow tree in the breeze, or marched with her limbs as straight as possible. After performing in the annual Christmas pageant, where Ellis to her humiliation was cast in the role of a boy, she refused to re-enrol, and it was a relief to everyone.

  Dove passed the police station and crossed the road to a small park. Straight ahead, she thought, was the way, but sh
e turned into the park first. It was carpeted with couch grass, distinctively blue-green, in need of mowing. Its garden beds contained camellias and azaleas, some still in bloom, and there were large eucalyptus nicholii flanking either side, which must have been planted some twenty or thirty years ago. After the rain, their pepperminty smell lingered in the air. She crossed the park and came out to another street, which all of a sudden became quiet, though it was only metres from Victoria Road, and was wide and shady. Some of the houses were enormous and looked like they had remained untouched for decades. Farther down she saw the street name – Tintern – and then passed another huge house named Arundel. Romantic names, steeped in legend. It was tempting to find Ellis’s family home here, but as beautiful as the prospect was, Dove knew this was not it.

  Victoria Square was a grassy block of tall trees down the centre of the road, like a private green lung for the residents, untouched, not landscaped, barely tidied. Summer nights, she guessed, they would gather for barbecues or, on weekends, for kids’ parties. She could easily imagine fairy lights strung through the trees, and tea candles in jars placed on sawn-off logs or other makeshift picnic tables, while people shared platters of hummus and Turkish bread and dug canned drinks out of plastic tubs filled with ice.

  Children could run around all day in this place and be totally safe, it was that quiet. She walked all the way around Victoria Square, wondering if this was where Charlie had played when he was little, or his mother, but developing the distinct sense that he did not. The street she knew without doubt was the one where Ellis had lived was back around the corner, but as she turned into it and approached the next roundabout she knew with increasing certainty that Charlie had not.

  On the opposite side of the road a private hospital sprawled across one entire block. Each side of the road featured squat red brick flats that had replaced Federation houses, built in the 1960s or later. When Ellis walked home from the bus stop she would have passed them as building sites. Maybe men on scaffolding had whistled to her as she walked with her head erect trying to ignore them. Or maybe they had all been built in a sudden spurt of development in the four years she was away at high school. On the next corner a man was on a ladder painting the side eaves of a house that stretched back way out of her sight but featured five chimneys. A miniature version of the house sat beside it, possibly once the garage, or servants’ quarters. He paused and stared at her as she passed, pushing back a conical coolie hat. Then he took out a handkerchief from the front pocket of his overalls and rubbed it across his face before dipping a long thin paintbrush into a small tin and applying it with slow meticulous strokes.

  To her left was a row of houses with sentinel Canary Island date palms, the same concrete footpath that had been here for decades, and the whiff of domestic activity faint but unmistakable, though now it contained the scent of spices – star anise and pepper, she thought – rather than onions and boiled meat. And here was the first part of the story of Ellis unfolding as if it had all been true, as if the house she now faced had indeed been the family home to people she had only invented. Except for the fact that a clipped murraya hedge replaced the plumbago, and the green wire gate was now a smart picket one painted in pale grey, this was the house where Ellis’s father had opened the door that morning and said ‘Hi-de-hi!’ as his grandson took his very first wobbly steps on the path leading to the front verandah.

  Dove placed her hand on the picket gate then removed it. Something was wrong. She could see the scene that had replayed in her mind a thousand times, the scene so vivid where her story had first begun. It was as if it had happened just this morning, but there was a piece missing. And it was not like the last section of a jigsaw puzzle either, it was the entire scene, as complete as it could be but lacking one vital element. On that day in her story her first glimpse of Ellis had been when she was alone on the bus. Dove had then gone back and viewed the scene again, and then rewritten it to comment on the fact that she could not say at what point she’d realised Ellis had a baby.

  It was a relief, when she finally understood it, even though it upset her as well. She could not say because it had not happened. She could not finish the story of Charlie because he had never existed. Standing there at the gate, her eyes suddenly stupid with tears, Dove knew she had invented him, and she had done it because she needed him. She needed him more than Ellis.

  28

  The tin was a bit larger than a lunch box. It looked like its original purpose had been as a strongbox or cash tin, Ellis never knew. It had just always been there, always fastened shut, painted a green so dark it was nearly black. Only now and then did she remember her father opening it. She took it down from the top shelf of the cupboard in the spare room and placed it on the bed. She sat beside it for a moment, then realising how dusty the box was, took it out to the kitchen bench and wiped it clean. Light poured into her apartment through the French doors. The place was only small but positioned to capture the sun. A few years back, after she had settled all her father’s affairs, she had moved from the Potts Point flat and bought a place of her own nearby. Recently she had done it out in unforgiving white and pale grey.

  Then she sat down in front of the coffee table and opened the tin. There was no lock now but the clasp had rusted with age. After she flicked it back she needed to fetch a knife to prise the tin box open. She took a breath. The sweetish musty smell of old paper. How long since it had been opened, she had no idea. All her father’s papers, his chequebook, his will, his long expired passport, the deeds to the house, had been kept in an expanding manila file in the left-hand compartment of his wardrobe, for as long as she could remember. After his death she had known to go straight there and hand over everything the solicitor needed for probate. It was in exactly the place it was meant to be. It was almost as if her father were still there, having asked her to fetch the file for him so he could write a cheque. Banking had instilled a sense of disciplined ceremony in Edgar when it came to the household finances. When it was time to settle accounts, he would sit at the kitchen table with a tidy sheaf of bills, unscrew a fountain pen kept specially for the purpose, and write three or four cheques, blotting each with an old-fashioned wooden ink blotter that he would roll from side to side. Ellis, when she was very young, would be allowed to help tuck the cheques into envelopes, which he then addressed and blotted and handed to her so she could lick the stamps. When she was a little older, she was allowed to walk up to the postbox on her own.

  After the funeral director had been paid and the household bills finalised, she returned the chequebook to the bank herself and closed his two accounts. She supposed she could have done all that by mail or over the phone, but she had always liked visiting the branch in Liverpool Road where he had worked for most of his life.

  When she sold the house she sent his clothes off to the Smith Family and organised a dealer to come and give her a quote for the furniture. The rest she sorted through as quickly as possible, taking very little. The ornaments had never interested her, the few vases were impractical. There had never been any formal family portraits, just the one photo of her wedding which she took out of its cheap frame and tucked into the dark blue photo album that she had started when she was a schoolgirl, with her Box Brownie. Going through all the utensils, the crockery, the garden tools, she saw that there was nothing she wanted to keep. She threw out the contents of the cupboards and left the cleaning things in the laundry for the contract people who came when the house was empty, before the new owners moved in.

  That was almost three years ago and since then the tin box had gone straight into the spare room. She did not know why she could never bring herself to open it. The desire to know about her mother was something that had flooded through her almost from nowhere when she was a girl, when she went to boarding school, when she was sixteen. She had felt it like an unstoppable force of nature, like rain swelling then breaching a dam, rising and rising to flood through her entire being. If she did not
do something about it she might drown. But Nell Wood had refused to discuss it and she had had to swallow down the tide. Then over the years it had lapped at her periodically – on her wedding day when she turned around to walk back down the aisle; on the day she left Vince; after her baby was born and she took her away on the train – until Nell came visiting her at her office that day.

  Her father was frail by then, but he had regular visits from community nurses and the local volunteer organisations and there had never been any discussion about moving to somewhere smaller. He had made some practical changes to accommodate his arthritis so that he did not need to use most of the house, remaining in the front rooms where he could shuffle on his frame from the television and to the bathroom and back to his bed across the hall. With meals delivered every weekday, the cleaner on Fridays, a man for the gardens every other weekend, scarcely a day went by when someone didn’t visit. He agreed to keep the cordless phone always nearby and Ellis rang every afternoon and visited on the weekends, taking cakes and other treats, though his appetite had shrunk. Everything about her father had shrunk. When he found it too exhausting to go out for Sunday lunch, something they had done for years, she realised it would not be too long.

  In those final years only once more had she asked about her mother and he had set his mouth and pretended not to hear.