The Infinite Air

by Fiona Kidman

  Nellie won, of course. Jean didn’t take the office job, even though thirty shillings a week might have elevated their existence. Most days, Nellie and Jean lived on milkshakes that Nellie made in the communal kitchens of the houses where they lived, a cup of milk and an egg beaten together, raw fruit that farmers were sending to town when they had a surplus, a steak dinner twice a week at what Nellie called a ‘greasy spoon’ in Queen Street. It cost them two shillings and sixpence each. Ten shillings a week all up. Real money. The steaks were Jean’s favourite food. ‘When I get rich, I’ll eat rump steak every day,’ Jean said, which meant that Nellie somehow found the money for the treat, although some weeks it was a struggle. ‘Madame will provide you with an extra apple each day,’ Nellie said. ‘You need more fruit in your diet.’

  There was no way to argue with her mother. The portly accountant was irritated when Jean turned the job down, then suddenly appeared wistful, his fingers threading and flexing, as if they itched to be otherwise occupied. Jean felt released when she left his office, relieved that her mother had devised an alternative. At least, she told herself, she had done something. It was a start.

  In this way, her new life began. Alice Law was said to have once been so beautiful that girls at the college used to swoon and bring her flowers and bonbons. She did have a softly curved mouth that became expressive when she played, but otherwise she was plump with round spectacles and tight finger waves in her hair. In her private city studio, Jean was the centre of her attention, and for a time the music seemed enough. Miss Law said she had ability beyond her years, the very best, not that she wanted to give her students swollen heads, but they did have to believe in themselves.

  As for the dancing classes, with Madame Valeska, Nellie said she must work hard and look out for herself: she was there only to dance. She should focus on the classical side of things and not get carried away with fancy dance, which was merely an entertainment for those with nothing better to do. On no account was she to let young men take liberties in the ballroom dancing classes. They would try, she said, it was what young men did. As it happened, they were already seeking Jean out, begging her to partner them. When she obliged, allowing their rubbery hands to clasp her around the waist, she tried to remember to hold them away when their hot breath came too close to her cheek. One kissed her ear beneath her hair, and she thought that, after all, this was not so bad. Another copied a poem from a book: How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. She liked this even more and put the poem inside her music book.

  Nellie found the folded slip of paper and took matters into her own hands. She took Jean to see Damaged Goods, a movie which had somehow got past the censors and was causing a scandal and letters to the newspapers. The story concerned a young couple who contracted syphilis when the husband slept with a ‘girl of the streets’ (‘They’re called prostitutes,’ Nellie hissed in Jean’s ear), a fake doctor and miserable deaths for all concerned.

  ‘Let that be a warning to you, my girl,’ Nellie said when they left the theatre. ‘And make sure you don’t ever sit right down on the seat of a public toilet. You understand?’

  When Fred discovered that Nellie had taken Jean to see the film, he was so enraged that he came to the boarding house to berate her. ‘How could you?’ he asked.

  ‘Easily,’ Nellie said. ‘She needs to be saved from depraved men. She needs to know what she might let herself in for.’

  ‘You want to put her off men,’ Fred said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Men like you, perhaps,’ Nellie said.

  Nellie was considering taking Fred to court again to enforce him to pay more maintenance to her and Jean. Nellie said three pounds was not enough and, all things being equal and considering what Fred had put her through, he could afford to be more generous. But things weren’t equal. Jean could see this. Besides, it cost money to go to court.

  Whatever happened, Fred said, Jean must keep up with her piano lessons, as well as this dancing business. This was something he was willing to subsidise, in order that she might prepare herself for her exams. He still hoped, he said, that Jean would become a concert pianist. It was his dream, he told his daughter, just as once he had had dreams that were nothing to do with teeth and divorce.

  Jean had been steeling herself to ask her father something. ‘All right, but could I do something jolly?’ she asked boldly.

  Fred looked at her, a hint of the old indulgence in his eyes. ‘So what would you like, Mit? What’s the treat?’

  She had read in the newspapers about the return of Malcolm MacGregor, the man they called Mad Mac when she was a child, the daredevil pilot who had become respectable since the war, although still daring in his ways. He had returned a decorated hero, and tried to settle down as a farmer, but all he wanted to do was fly. Now he had opened a small airline where he charged people for joy rides in a Gipsy Moth aeroplane. Photographs showed not the wild-looking youth who had gone off to war but, rather, a sombre man with a clipped moustache.

  ‘Well.’ She hesitated. ‘I want to go for a ride in Malcolm MacGregor’s plane. Oh, please, Dad, that would be a real treat. Say that I can go, won’t you?’

  Fred looked from Nellie to Jean with disgust. ‘You see what you’re doing to her? You’re putting more mad ideas in her head than you anticipated. Stop doing this to my daughter, Ellen.’ He used her given name when she most angered him.

  Nellie looked at him with defiance, but Fred would have none of it.

  ‘I’m not paying for it,’ he said, ‘and that’s that. That man’s flying over the city in a plane painted brown, advertising chocolate. The chocolate plane. Is that what you want? Pay attention to your music, Jean, that’s my advice to you.’

  CHAPTER 8

  ALICE LAW’S PRAISE OF JEAN’S PROGRESS IN MUSIC continued to be fulsome. She didn’t need to be told to sit up straight, or be chastised for not practising her scales and arpeggios. She followed the clicking of the metronome hour after hour without complaint. ‘Good, Jean, good. Perfection doesn’t come in a day, but if you can accept the discipline it will come.’

  This approval was enough to send Jean to Madame Valeska’s studio every day to practise on her own piano, which now lived there. The studio had a high ceiling, and stained-glass windows that cast showers of blue and pink light across the bare golden-red surface of the floor. Valeska’s real name was Doris Scott, somebody whispered. She was married to a man with huge biceps called Len Wilson, who had been a weightlifter and taught the students acrobatic dancing.

  The girl who told Jean Madame’s other more prosaic name was called Freda Stark. Every day before they began lessons, the students were expected to skip for thirty minutes. Jean and Freda skipped side by side, the fastest there, and before they realised what they were doing began trying to out do each other. Freda never seemed out of breath. She could do a hundred and fifty skips a minute and Awesome Annies and Toads, then she invited Jean to be part of Double Dutch. Their feet moved faster and faster. Freda sang:

  Lizzie Borden took an axe

  And gave her mother forty whacks,

  When she saw what she had done,

  She gave her father forty-one.

  This became their daily ritual, single skipping, doubles, chanting rhymes together. It was a long time since Jean had had friends — they weren’t to be trusted, she’d decided — but Freda Stark was different from the girls at school. She was under five feet tall, as slender as a heron and as quick in her movements. Her hair gleamed in a copper-coloured bob, her saucy grey eyes rimmed with black kohl, lips shining with Vaseline. A shameless girl, Nellie said when she met her. Besides, her father was in trade: he mended shoes for a living. His shop was in the same street, so the girls walked to and from Madame Valeska’s together.

  Freda had been born up north — in a little village in a green valley, was how she described it, with the sea not far away and mangrove swamps and kingfishers. She excelled at tap and jazz, and acrobatic ballet, which she performed with the
muscular Len Wilson. He lifted her high above his head, as if she were made of down. Her mother made her costumes, beaded and sequined, that skimmed her hips, shimmering round her knees as she slammed her way through one Charleston after another. As long as she could remember, Freda said, she had danced. Her father was a dancer, too, and on Saturdays, when his shop was closed, he tap-danced in shows at Fuller’s, where there were jugglers and acrobats, trapeze artists, singers and comedians. That was until the theatre burned down one fiery scorching night. Nellie said grudgingly that she supposed they were all in the entertainment business in one way or another, but it wasn’t something she’d want Jean mixed up in.

  When she was still a small child, after the family had moved south, Freda had shocked the neighbours when she ran outside and danced naked. ‘I love the feeling of the air on my body,’ she told Jean. ‘That’s how dance should be performed. Don’t look so worried, there’ll come a time when it’s what people do. I’ll do it, and they’ll throw flowers at my feet. Like Pavlova.’

  Nellie said to Freda, when the pair set out to the studio together, ‘You’ll look after her, won’t you? Hold Jean’s hand when you’re going on the trams.’

  Freda laughed when they were out on the street. ‘You’re not a baby, Jean. Doesn’t she realise I’m six months younger than you? Come on, I’ll race you.’ They ran all the way down to Albert Park beneath the university and threw themselves under the trees, lying in dappled shade while Freda lit two cigarettes and passed one to Jean. When the smoke curled up between them, Freda said, ‘Why does she look down on me? You and she are having a harder time than my family. You don’t even have a house any more.’

  ‘We will,’ Jean said, stubbing out her cigarette on the grass. She pushed her hair behind her ear. ‘When I’m famous.’

  ‘That’s all very well, but how long will that take? Look, don’t take it to heart, it’s just that your mother’s got all these ideas about suffragettes and emancipation and the theatre and keeping yourself pure, but she doesn’t have a clue about working people. She spends all her time wanting to be better than them, but you’re living on the bones of your backsides just like any of the poor. And she depends on someone like me to look after you.’

  ‘My mother’s just my mother. You don’t understand her.’

  ‘I don’t understand the Queen of England either. Oh come on, Jean, stop looking all stony-eyed.’

  ‘Well, if you’re going to go political on me.’

  ‘Anyway, the Queen of England isn’t really the queen.’ Freda screwed up her eyes against the smoke from her cigarette. The sun played through the branches above them. A group of university students, all young men, walked past them, one of them whistling in their direction.

  Jean pretended not to see them, although Freda returned their gaze. She stretched her lithe body, arching her shoulders back.

  ‘Of course she’s the queen,’ Jean said.

  ‘No she’s not, because the King was married in secret to someone else before he married her. And anyway, she might be called Mary now, but they all called her May.’

  ‘Freda, that’s lies. What a terrible thing to say.’

  ‘Haven’t you ever heard that story?’

  ‘People say all sorts of things about royalty. They proved it wasn’t true. Someone was trying to blackmail the King.’

  ‘Oh, so you have heard the story?’

  ‘It was propaganda. The man who said that went to jail for lying about the King.’

  ‘Oh, I forget that you’ve been to a smart school, Jean. Say, have you got a brother called Harold?’

  Jean dusted herself and got to her feet. ‘We’ll be late for class.’

  Freda leapt to her feet in one smooth action, her hands not touching the ground. ‘So have you?’

  ‘One of my brothers gets called that sometimes, but his first name is Frederick, the same as our father.’

  Freda laid her hand on Jean’s arm. ‘You’re beautiful, did you know that? The most perfect-looking girl in the world.’ She slipped her arm through Jean’s, stroking the inside of her elbow. ‘I’ll bet boys are after you.’

  ‘I don’t go with boys,’ Jean said.

  ‘Why ever not?’ Freda laughed. ‘You should.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do,’ Jean said, feeling herself redden.

  ‘I could show you,’ Freda said.

  ‘How could you? You’re not a boy.’ Jean inhaled the scent of canna lilies that glowed orange and red on a bank above the park, and nearer, Freda’s spicy smell, which made her think of nutmeg. They were so close the hairs on their arms touched.

  ‘Oh Jean, don’t be silly,’ Freda cried, mocking her, ‘of course I’m not a boy, but I could show you a thing or two. You want to have fun, Jean. You’re a deep one, I don’t know what to make of you.’

  They had left the park, walked on down the steep little hill towards Queen Street. A huge new theatre was being built, the Civic. It would be more like a palace than a theatre, the architects said.

  ‘I want—’ Jean said, vehement, and stopped, suddenly sad.

  ‘What do you want, Jean?’ Freda asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t know. I just don’t. Am I supposed to be a dancer or a pianist or what? What do you want?’

  ‘I want to dance.’

  ‘Well, there you are, Freda. At least you know.’

  ‘I want to fall in love,’ Freda said. ‘That, too.’

  She suggested then that they should go to the Regent tearooms, and get a teacup reading from Madame X, as it was free between two-thirty and five, and why not just forget rehearsal for today? Madame X, self-styled after a movie of the same name, was a woman of perhaps fifty, her yellow curls touching her ample shoulders, wearing a coloured headscarf and a pink blouse with a dagger embroidered on the sleeve. She shook her finger at Freda and Jean. ‘I know you two are out on the town. You’re dancing girls, aren’t you?’

  All the same she picked up their bone china teacups and peered inside them, first Freda’s and then Jean’s. She wrinkled her nose as if she had seen something distasteful.

  ‘What is it?’ Freda asked, wide-eyed.

  ‘Oh there’s nothing much there,’ Madame X said.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ Jean said. ‘Or do you just make it up? Any old tosh?’

  Freda dug her elbow into Jean’s ribs and giggled.

  Madame X slammed down the cups and glared at them. ‘You want to know? Very well. In yours, Miss,’ and here she looked at Freda, picking up her cup again, ‘I see something very dark.’

  ‘What is this dark thing?’

  ‘I’ve got no idea.’ The woman looked so agitated that Freda stopped laughing. Madame X put down the cup, her hands trembling. ‘You will go into the underworld for a time.’ They were all quiet then.

  ‘Will I stay there?’ Freda asked.

  ‘For a time, I said, for a time.’

  ‘I think I’ve had enough of this,’ said Freda.

  ‘As for you,’ Madame X continued, taking up Jean’s cup again, ‘it’s strange. I see nothing at all.’

  ‘Am I dead?’

  ‘No, I don’t believe you are. There’s just nothing. Only space. You’re somewhere in it. I can’t tell where.’

  Nellie found out that Jean hadn’t been to class, having stopped by Madame Valeska’s that afternoon in order to walk her daughter back to the boarding house. ‘That girl is a bad influence, Jean,’ she said. ‘I’d rather you kept away from her.’

  It was, of course, impossible to avoid Freda, and Jean didn’t want to anyway, but she met her in more surreptitious ways, coming out to the street early when her friend was due to call for her. If Freda noticed, she said no more about it, or about Nellie.

  GRADUATION PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE GIRLS Jean had gone to school with began to appear in the Weekly News. They wore puffy white dresses, confections of organdy and lace. Winifred and Annabel one day. Phyllis, Clarice and a Miss Betsy Biss another, which made Jean laugh. ‘They sound like a nursery
rhyme,’ she said to Freda.

  ‘Are they really virgins?’ Freda asked, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘How would I know?’

  ‘I only asked.’

  It didn’t bear thinking about. Jean did wonder how many of the girls had blue toes at the end of their first ball. She had coached a few of their partners through painful steps in preparation for dancing with them. Valeska had offered her an extra five shillings a week to help some of the difficult cases. She could hardly do pointes for days after these sessions. ‘I reckon they owe us dirt money,’ Jean said, tossing aside the newspaper.

  SOMETHING CHANGED IN ALICE LAW’S ATTITUDE. At the last recital, there been what her teacher described in unfriendly tones as ‘an incident, a thing that should not have occurred’.

  It had begun when the teacher was planning who would play solos. ‘Now, Jean, we all know that when you play it’s wonderful, but you’ve performed at the last two recitals. I think it only fair that you take a back seat this time.’

  ‘But people expect me to play Chopin,’ Jean said. The ‘Raindrop Prelude’ had become a central element of her performance work.

  ‘They expect a recital that represents the abilities of all my students, Miss Batten.’

  When Jean told Nellie, her mother exclaimed over it. ‘People will think your work has slipped.’

  ‘I tried to tell her that.’

  ‘Is it about me?’ Nellie said, her face hot. ‘Does she think that what I play is a bad influence? Just because it’s popular.’

  Alice Law was unmoved when Jean made a second plea for a better place on the programme. ‘Not this time, Jean. Now please don’t make any more trouble about this.’

  But trouble was what Jean had in mind. On the evening of the recital, when the chosen girl started to play, Jean was possessed by a flash of rage. She walked to the stage and sat down on the edge, as close as she could get to the piano.