The Women's Pages

by Debra Adelaide

It was the final week of Ellis’s job. Of her career. A massive restructuring meant there would no longer be an executive editor or managing editor of Pages magazine. Those roles were taken by the publishing director of the magazine section of the company, now just part of a diverse media empire owned by shareholders. The vice-president by this time had died, a heart attack, the same as his father, though no one now kept shrines to them in the former executive level offices. The magazine production staff had shrunk over the years, and the premises had changed again. Ellis’s office had gone from being open plan, to a proper office, back to open plan: it was half glassed in, now a big shared space with the art director and fashion editor at their own uncluttered glass desks nearby. All of them were part time by this stage. She had been working three days a week for the last few years.

  Ellis was content to be leaving. She had been here for so many decades the joke was she was part of the furniture. Beneath the jokes she detected a fluttering of criticism from the younger staff that she had not left say ten years ago when that would have been more seemly, for a woman of her position. It was not as if she needed the money. And what dinosaurs didn’t change jobs every three years or so?

  It was true she had had to cope with enormous changes. There were no more senior writers, and all the contributors were now freelance, every one of them. The women’s pages that had occupied her at the very start of her job had long gone, for they were anachronistic, but Ellis still missed the interaction with readers those pages had offered. Not that she wanted those pages back, but she could not help feeling a stir of nostalgia for the section that had brought her into the industry. It was not fanciful to say that this job had saved her sanity. Right from the start she had found even the most mundane tasks useful. She had proofread like no one else, the most scrupulous proofreader the magazine had ever employed. She read through every single dull, self-important letter from readers, even the ones that offered recipes for the most basic dishes, white sauce or meatballs. There was no task back then that she thought too unworthy, she tackled everything with care. Valerie had, she now thought, resented her willingness to take on anything, as if she were sucking up to the management.

  In her last week she was sifting through her personal papers, though in the office she had shared for the last few years, there’d not been much room for paper. Her laptop sat beside the company’s desktop computer on her glass-topped desk. A poster of the fiftieth anniversary issue cover of Pages, featuring Mike Walsh and Kylie Minogue, then the outgoing and rising stars of popular television, in a celebratory embrace, decorated the far wall of the offices.

  Pages magazine was being redesigned. The executive editor had already decided from the three different concepts the new designer had sent through: there was to be a lot more white space, clearer delineation between headlines, pull quotes and body copy. Typography was going to be treated a great deal more seriously, as was photography, though there was to be a lot less of that. In the meetings to discuss the revamping Ellis had thought the emphasis was too much on style over content, but the executive editor insisted they were on the right track. People wanted quality not quantity, he said. Readers were sick of sound bites and web pages. They were becoming bored with swiping pages with their fingers. And they no longer wanted throwaway papers. They would pay for a quality production, that’s what the research said. There were no new contributors or content editors. The journalists, the writers, all freelance, were always referred to as content providers. She could not remember when that had happened, exactly, or how, just that it was irreversible.

  And she could not recall the last time she had spoken with a feature writer. Once the magazine had boasted half-a-dozen of them, all eminent, some award-winning writers in their different fields: arts, sport, travel writing. Now copy arrived via the mothership of the company, some of it seeming not to have a by-line until she made enquiries. It was her job simply to arrange it, and oversee production. Indeed she could not recall the last time she had had the luxury of commissioning a piece. And soon the pages would be determined entirely by design. The new designer would be coming in later that morning, to discuss handover issues. There was also the suggestion of a name change, but so far no one had provided a better alternative.

  She placed a pile of old proofs into the recycling box by the door. These she had kept for nostalgic reasons as they were the last pages to be set in hard copy, before they shifted to computerised layout. They had used a clear glue – what was its name? – and their offices were always littered with slivers of paper. Another set of proof pages was bristling with pink Post-it notes, with corrections and comments written in purple ink, in her own hand. What on earth had they done before Post-it notes were invented? She could not remember that either.

  There was no door to Ellis’s office. Sitting in her chair at her desk, she could see straight towards the lift where on either side were posters of other memorable Pages covers: a royal visit, Charles and Diana with a baby; a former prime minister with his younger second wife. Both covers emphasised the colour gold – was that deliberate? she couldn’t remember – and from this distance the blocky playful capitals of the magazine title looked absurdly old-fashioned. A few years previously, they changed it to Didot, with its clean and clever contrast of fine and strong lines. Along with the magazine’s simple crisp title, Didot offered just a suggestion of classical design without sacrificing its contemporary edge. The design team then had been very clever, she thought. If Pages had still been the Women’s Pages, it simply would not have worked. That would have demanded a more flowing, or more relaxed type. In which case they may as well have stuck with Cooper Black, which is what it was when Ellis began. Design changed too rapidly now. A look or a style became tired within five years.

  She had once been fascinated by typography. There was that time when she’d applied for a job at a printer’s workshop, naively expecting to be able to design type. Instead she had used type in ways she had never imagined, but she had still never designed a typeface as she’d once hoped to do. Since the mid-1980s they had called them fonts, not typefaces, and of all of them on the company’s Apple Macs, she still preferred the default one, New York. Now for some reason New York had been banished from the fonts menu. Venice, with a look that to her suggested gondolas; Los Angeles, almost handwritten; Chicago, which she loathed with an irrational passion – all the fonts named after cities that Steve Jobs had loved – they were now inexplicably gone. Once she had even considered resurrecting Doves from a hundred years back, the typeface that she and Tom had talked about, the first day they met. All that research she had done on the topic of typefaces, late at night, using books she borrowed from the local library. The creator of Doves had kept it in his heart, even though he’d drowned it.

  Ellis had a strange compulsion to tear down everything she could from all her years at Pages and keep them for herself. An irrational desire. It was merely a popular magazine, a glossy with attitude, or an evening frock in sensible shoes as the former fashion editor had put it. It had kept her busy all these years, used her skills, paid the rent, and had not been without its battles. Yet now the end was here she felt a fierce affection, a possessiveness, for what she had achieved. She looked around the office. If all the issues she had ever worked on were here before her she would have tried to take them in her arms and run away with them.

  Ellis was not an emotional woman. Ever since she was quite young she had firmly kept the lid upon her sensibilities and stayed calm when others had not. She had fought with no one at work, retreated from petty office dramas, engaged in little that would suck her energy and leave her spent. She had preserved herself, she realised. And that was what people would call her now, she thought, behind her back. Well preserved, like a jar of cumquats. Now she felt an unaccustomed desire to wilt. She sat at her desk, slumped back into her chair and pulled out the last drawer to be cleared.

  It was uncharacteristically messy with receipts, manuscript articles, n
ews clippings, letters, bills and cards. It was the drawer she reserved for things she thought she ought to keep, or might want to look at later, though either rarely proved to be the case. The envelope was addressed to her at work, and could have been opened then regummed over the years. She recognised the handwriting.

  Dear Ellis,

  You have probably thought there was no more to the story I told you some years ago, when we last spoke. Before you become alarmed, let me assure you that as far as your life is concerned, I have told you all that you needed (and deserved) to know. All I told you was the truth.

  But I was not truthful when I told you that I was seventeen when I had my abortion. I was much older than that. And it was after Frank was killed.

  I was a widow, you understand, and there was no possibility of keeping it.

  I lodged with you and Edgar until you were nearly three. If you have any early memories of a woman in that house (as I suspect you have) then it was not your mother as you always hoped, but me. I kept to myself as far as I could, sleeping next to your room. The news about Frank was as devastating as you could imagine. For so much of our married life we had been apart and I grieved for all the wasted time as much as I grieved for him.

  Simply, your father and I were both lonely. But there was no question of us marrying. Your father would be forever infatuated with your mother. A marriage based on mutual bitter disappointment was not what either of us desired. And a marriage made from compromise . . . Well, that is something you understand can crush you flat. I would remain a widow. There would be no baby. My experience was a lot more messy and dangerous than yours, but I survived.

  Afterwards I could not bear to be in the house when he was. You might remember that as soon as he came home from work I would put on my hat and coat and leave. He found the flat for me down the road, and paid the rent for the first few years, until I insisted otherwise. But I agreed to keep looking after you because I owed him. And I owed you, for if I had not intervened, then maybe, just maybe, your mother would not have gone away. Please forgive me, Ellis.

  You will understand how some words are impossible to say, which is why I have written this in a letter to be sent to you after my death. You will, I hope, understand that I did not wish to see you again, after telling you all that I have. I think you know that I have always had your welfare in mind, and hope you recall fondly the years we spent together when you were young and your father at work. I certainly have. Indeed those memories are the only thing that have sustained me, all these years.

  Kindest regards,

  Nell Wood

  34

  A ritualistic clearing of her desk the night before was followed by a dinner. She treated herself to a whole night out. She had a meeting the next morning at the magazine, a formality but still important, even though she’d all but got the contract. She went to Passageway, again crowded with after-work drinkers, but she didn’t mind not being able to talk to Martin. He waved at her from the other side of the bar, she called out, ‘I think I’ve finished that story!’ and he smiled and gave her the thumbs-up.

  There were a few people there she’d been chatting to in the past few months. They shared a bottle of wine and talked about the government and the strangely apocalyptic weather and agreed they were both related, then she went and ate Thai.

  She returned home slightly drunk to find the cat sitting on her desk, refusing to jump down, and she didn’t mind this either. The new copy of Wuthering Heights was still out. She picked it up. An astonishing and unexpected thought gripped her: now that she was done with it, and here was a new clean copy, she might even read it again. It would be different to reading her mother’s copy of the novel, the one she’d taken into her in hospital then brought home again. She’d only just unpacked the box of possessions from that time, now more than a year ago. What she had brought back from those months in hospital was so little, almost nothing to represent a woman’s life even in her dying weeks. Jane’s reading glasses, purse, hand cream, her Classic Coral lipstick – and the annotated copy of the novel that had started it all.

  It was impossible to be resentful. Emily Brontë had written this novel especially for her. For her benefit she had sat alone in her narrow bed in the parsonage, her lap desk on her knees, death all around her with that graveyard right next door, the cold wind from the moors behind rattling the windows. She should be grateful. For her Emily had made Catherine say the words, It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff . . . I am Heathcliff. She was grateful. Of course Emily had written it for her alone.

  But for whom had Dove written her story? Apart from herself.

  35

  She folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope. Kindest regards. Nell Wood had bathed her scraped knees with Dettol and warm water, and wiped her tears and blown her nose. For months she had sat patient and rigid on a blue metal chair in the cold School of Arts dance room while Ellis stumbled about learning ballet. She had guided her hand drawing her loops and hooks practising running writing after school. She had confided her dearest domestic secrets to Ellis: a good pinch of salt would bring out the flavour in hot chocolate; knitting into the back of the first row of stitches made a much neater band; eucalyptus oil was the best thing for removing sticky labels from jars.

  How had this letter been misplaced all these years? Nell Wood had died fifteen years ago. She had been to the funeral, a quiet service in the crematorium chapel, with a handful of the Grange staff, herself the only mourner from outside. She thought and thought about it, but quite honestly Ellis now had no idea whether she had read it and immediately suppressed it, or if it had arrived one day among a whole lot of other mail for the magazine and become mislaid and forgotten in the drawer.

  She tossed it into the box of things she was taking home, then took it out again, considering whether after all this time she really needed it, or even cared. She was still holding it when the woman walked out of the lift, directly ahead of her. She recognised herself in her at once: the same penetrating blue eyes, the same dark hair, the way she jerked her bag over her left shoulder as she strode across the room. The baby, the girl, the woman she had always thought of as Columbine walked straight up to Ellis and looked her in the face before she spoke, shaking her head in wonder and disbelief.

  ‘I’ve imagined you for so long,’ Dove said. ‘I can hardly believe that here you are.’

  Author’s note

  The Women’s Pages began life in the short story, ‘The Sleepers in that Quiet Earth’, first published in Best Australian Stories 2011, edited by Cate Kennedy (Black Inc, 2011), and reprinted in my collection Letter to George Clooney (Picador, 2013); my thanks to the editors of these books for their advice.

  I am very grateful to my publisher, Alex Craig, who embraced this novel from the start and reassured my doubts all the way through. I have been fortunate to have wise and insightful editorial input from Ali Lavau and Julia Stiles. Thanks also to Emma Rafferty, editorial manager and excellent traffic controller; and to Therese Scott and Mandy Keevil from Ashfield Library for help with local history.

  Doves Type did exist and has now been resurrected. See Simon Garfield’s Just My Type (Profile Books, 2010). Special thanks to Gregory Ferris for finding Doves Type for my computer; the chapter openings of this novel are in Doves.

  A special thank you to Antony for the love and the endless encouragement (and all the dinners). And finally thanks to my daughter Ellen for the beautiful purple notebook and the perfect green chair: I used them both to write this book.

  About Debra Adelaide

  Debra Adelaide is the author or editor of over twelve books, including the bestselling Motherlove series (1996–98) and Acts of Dog (2003). Her novels include The Hotel Albatross (1995), Serpent Dust (1998) and The Household Guide to Dying (2008), which was sold around the world. In 2013 she published her first collection of short stories, Letter to George Clooney, which was short- and long-listed for three
literary awards. Her most recent book is the edited collection The Simple Act of Reading (2015). She is an associate professor in creative writing at the University of Technology Sydney.

  Also by Debra Adelaide

  Novels

  The Hotel Albatross

  Serpent Dust

  The Household Guide to Dying

  Short story collection

  Letter to George Clooney

  Anthologies

  Motherlove

  Motherlove 2

  Cutting the Cord

  Acts of Dog

  Non-Fiction

  A Bright and Fiery Troop (ed)

  Australian Women Writers: a Bibliographic Guide

  A Window in the Dark (ed)

  Bibliography of Australian Women’s Literature

  Stories from the Tower (ed)

  The Simple Act of Reading (ed)

  First published 2015 in Picador by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd

  1 Market Street, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2000

  Copyright © Debra Adelaide 2015

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. This publication (or any part of it) may not be reproduced or transmitted, copied, stored, distributed or otherwise made available by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical) or by any means (photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise) without prior written permission from the publisher.

  This ebook may not include illustrations and/or photographs that may have been in the print edition.

  Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available

  from the National Library of Australia