The Dyehouse

by Mena Calthorpe

  ‘Good day to you,’ Mrs Macaulay called.

  Esther heard the call a long way off, through a mist. She tried to frame a reply.

  ‘Well!’ said Mrs Macaulay. She put down her basket and opened the gate. Esther could hear the footsteps. They were coming closer. With a tremendous effort she wrenched her eyes open and looked up at the kindly, inquisitive face. Then her head drooped down. Mrs Macaulay was feeling her wrists, loosening her frock. She could hear surprised cluckings, like a flustered hen’s. She could hear the wheels of a cart, Mrs Macaulay’s shrill cry and a man’s answering voice. Then everything was quiet and dark.

  When she woke she was in bed. She looked at the ceiling. It was her own bedroom. There was a faint, clean smell of cologne; Mrs Macaulay had brought her own bottle over and had dabbed her temples and the front of her nightie.

  A man in a grey suit was bending over her. Her eyes began to focus better. It was the doctor, the one from the stone cottage close to the station.

  ‘That’s better,’ he said. He was drawing the sheets up round her shoulders.

  She had the uncomfortable feeling of lying down-hill.

  Oh, she thought, I’m packed up. My feet sticking up in the air.

  She laughed weakly.

  The doctor had turned away. He was writing something. Mrs Macaulay stood at the foot of the bed, a large white apron round her hips. She looked big and bright and competent.

  ‘Well,’ Dr Peters said. ‘We’ll have you right in no time.’

  Mrs Macaulay retreated to the kitchen. She banked up the fire and set more kettles and pots of water on the stove.

  ‘I wouldn’t bother,’ Esther said to him. She turned her head wearily. Then she closed her eyes, and drew her thin lips into a tight line.

  Dr Peters came back to the bed. He stood for a long time looking at her. He remembered passing this cottage years ago, watching the man and woman labouring on its framework.

  He noticed the neat, sparsely furnished bedroom.

  ‘You don’t want this baby?’ he said gently.

  She opened her eyes and looked suddenly into his face. There was no censure. It was a face of compassion and understanding.

  She looked away, startled.

  But she didn’t answer him. Doctors, even the most kind and humane of them, knew nothing of her problem. Nothing of her fight and struggle, nothing of the long poverty of her life, nothing of the way Barney felt. They were the guardians of life. The problems didn’t matter.

  She felt suddenly weak as she remembered: Barney! Had they telephoned him? She struggled to rise in the bed, but Dr Peters pushed her gently back. Barney would be going to see the woman. She pictured the mean terrace, the dark and secret windows, the shabby door. A shudder ran through her and she closed her eyes.

  Dr Peters bent over. He picked up her hand and looked at it. The nails were broken, the knuckles swollen and enlarged, the palm callused and hard.

  ‘Your hand reminded me of someone,’ he said gently. ‘My mother had hands like these.’

  Esther started to laugh. A weak laugh, which hurt her somewhere in the chest. Well it was funny, anyway. His neat suit, the stone cottage, the garden with the flowering shrubs, the white-clad girl opening the surgery door. And his mother had hands like these. It seemed a funny thing to say. She slipped back into the darkness.

  *

  In the evening Barney and Goodwin walked down the dim Parade.

  Now that the thing was under way Barney hesitated.

  ‘Risky, isn’t it?’ he asked Goodwin.

  Goodwin grinned.

  ‘She fixes up quite a few. Never heard of her having any trouble. That little sheila on the brushers was kicking up her legs again after four or five days.’

  The house was two-storeyed and detached. There were trees growing in the front garden and flowers blooming in ordered beds.

  ‘Looks all right,’ Barney said. He had not expected this.

  ‘I tell you she’s all right,’ Goodwin said. ‘Good as a doctor. Cheap too, and still makes a pile.’

  The door opened. The hall was wide, and seemed to run back into gleaming white walls. A tall woman in a grey linen frock stood before them. She was handsome, in her early forties. She looked well fed and well cared-for. An inner door opened. The office floor gleamed under the chromium-mounted fluorescent lights. The desk was massive and warm-coloured, like cedar. Barney sat down, feeling weak and dry, and looked at the woman. He took the notes from Goodwin and handed them to her. He felt hot.

  The woman turned around, unlocked a drawer and took out the cash-box. She placed Barney’s notes on top of the pile and snapped an elastic band around them. Then she locked the box and the drawer. She wore the keys on a heavy gold bracelet on her wrist.

  They stood up to go. There was a funny noise. It sounded like someone whimpering. Then a long, agonized moan. A radio was suddenly turned up loud.

  ‘What’s that?’ Barney said.

  ‘Little girl,’ the woman said. She was almost arch. ‘Naughty little girl, but she’s getting better.’

  ‘You got a doctor here?’ Barney asked. He was listening.

  He got up quickly. The woman was speaking, but he was in the hall, through the door, out into the street, where even the smoke-laden air of Macdonaldtown seemed clean.

  ‘You’ll do your dough,’ Goodwin said, catching up. ‘There’s no refunds. You know that, don’t you? Don’t you?’ His voice was shrill with annoyance and surprise.

  It was good on the train. Good as the stations rushed past. Good to be going home to Esther. The problems could be faced later.

  He ran from the train, up the road past the houses with their yellow lights half-hidden in the gully. He could hear the possums scolding in the trees.

  The lamp was lit, but the woman waiting beside it was not Esther.

  When Esther woke again her mind was clear. She was no longer in the low double bed that she shared with Barney. She was in a long, narrow room. A hospital ward. The lights were on and outside it was dark. The nurses were taking off the quilts, folding them, getting the patients ready for the night.

  Now that the pain was gone, she lay with the blanket drawn up round her, feeling drowsy and tired. The cottage seemed remote.

  For years the sound of the train coming up the cutting from Jannali had governed her life. Time to put the kettle on, to stir the food simmering in the pot, to lay the cloth and set down the cutlery. It had been important for years, and now today it just didn’t seem to matter.

  The little nurse came in and took out the flowers. She shook down the thermometer and put it into Esther’s mouth.

  ‘All right?’ Esther asked shyly.

  The nurse smiled, putting the thermometer back in the sterilizer, but she didn’t answer Esther’s question.

  ‘We’ll have you on your feet soon,’ she said. She bent over, pulled the pillows forward. Esther sank back and lay looking at her hands. The pain was no longer troubling her and she felt guilty. It was years since she had lain in bed like this. She had a mental picture of the kitchen. Well, things would go on just the same. Barney would get his breakfast, feed the chooks and be on his way to the station, just as when she was smoothing things out for him.

  The night nurse looked into the ward. She was a bright, smiling-faced young woman. She went over to Mrs Finlay, who was very sick, and stood beside her for a few minutes. Then she pulled the switch and plunged the room into darkness. Esther settled down into her pillows. She made sure the bell was handy. But she lay for a long time looking into the darkness, listening to Mrs Finlay’s laboured breathing, watching the flash of the light as the sister passed the door, listening to the hum and roar of the traffic as it sped along the road that led to the southern suburbs. Pictures flashed through her mind. Barney meeting her years ago after the football. Walking home on a cool summer’s evening. The open bushland, and the block they had chosen for the house. She wondered what had gone wrong with them. Yet she knew. Poverty had stifled the
m. She saw Barney lined and old for his years, waking long before dawn, herself bending over the stove, stirring the pots, hurrying the food.

  They were caught in a treadmill, she thought. The others were caught too: Mrs Finlay, the pretty little bride from Miranda, the old lady in the end bed.

  The light flashed through the door. Sister was bending over her.

  ‘Not sleeping?’ she asked.

  Esther blinked her eyes and closed them against the light.

  ‘Not very well,’ she said.

  The light disappeared momentarily.

  ‘Take this.’

  Esther reached up and took the tablets and the drink. She pulled the sleeves of her old-fashioned nightgown down to her wrists.

  ‘You don’t want to worry,’ the sister said kindly. ‘Things often turn out better than we think.’

  The light disappeared. For a moment Esther saw the white dress, the legs strangely spindly, the painted door-jamb. Between waking and sleeping she thought again of Barney.

  Mrs Macaulay would wait and pass the news on to him, before she began on the neighbours. She saw the inquisitive, astonished face, the hand on the knocker, the neighbour’s inquiring glance. Well, they could talk now. She slipped into a quiet, restful sleep.

  The next evening Barney was lined up with the visitors.

  Esther saw him tiptoeing down the ward. He had shaved carefully, but he looked tired and grey. He had a bunch of yellow daisies in his hand.

  He bent over, kissed her and sat holding her hand in his, hanging onto it and pressing it. He wanted urgently to tell her about the woman. About how he had changed his mind; how good he felt in the train going home to her. But instead he talked about work, how well he was managing at home.

  ‘You’ll be home soon,’ he said gently. ‘I talked to the doctor.’

  The baby was safe.

  And before he went Barney bent over, holding her hand under the blankets.

  ‘I wanted to tell you, old girl,’ he said. ‘That deal with the woman—I called it off.’

  He saw Esther’s eyes fill with tears.

  He bent over and kissed her gently.

  ‘I wouldn’t really have risked you,’ he said.

  Barney’s behaviour had astonished Goodwin. To back out then! To take the cash out of kitty and walk out with Sweet Fanny Alley!

  At work Barney was morose and uncommunicative.

  ‘The dough’s there—you can always use it,’ Goodwin said.

  And later, with Barney still disinclined for discussion, he said, ‘You wouldn’t call the coppers?’

  ‘I don’t call copper,’ Barney said. ‘And I got my problems. Plenty!’ Esther, though out of hospital, was still far from well.

  He was dragging the cloth through the winches, packing down the hydro.

  ‘Can’t understand him,’ Goodwin said to Oliver Henery. ‘Lays out his money, gets introduced to the real thing, then runs out and leaves his dough.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Oliver said. ‘There’s one thing you can always bet on, dames will be always having kids.’

  He looked across at Barney.

  ‘Poor old bugger,’ he said, ‘you’d wonder any sheila’d be in it.’

  ‘It’s his missus,’ Goodwin said. ‘Lean old girl with grey hair. Must be close on fifty.’

  ‘Many a good tune—’ Oliver said, and laughed.

  He didn’t really like Goodwin, but he was handy to know in an emergency.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Many people knocked at the Dyehouse door.

  But the faces, as Miss Merton came to know them, were the faces of the defeated.

  One by one the pageant passed, the faces white, disembodied blobs.

  ‘You got a job for me?’

  A mid-European woman, thickset and heavy in the legs. She had been walking for a fortnight, fighting through the maze of streets in the industrial areas. Her dark, anxious eyes had looked into half a hundred small, untidy offices.

  ‘You got a job for me?’

  Young man in a Harris tweed coat and an accent that jolted Miss Merton out of her apathy to examine him more closely.

  What was he doing at the Dyehouse?

  She noticed his hands, and listened to the cadence of his voice. He sounded like theatre, like a world that existed outside the Dyehouse and the smell of hydrosulphite and sulphuric ether. Young man wringing his hands and just one step ahead of the police who were so soon to catch up with him.

  Pale, apathetic men whose lives had been spent in the vapours of dyehouses, women with fallen wombs and strained stomach muscles. The load for women, officially, was thirty pounds. Officially.

  ‘Any jobs at the Dyehouse today?’

  They were working overtime now, and at full capacity. Jobs were getting hard to find. The migrants knocked at the Dyehouse door, searching in groups. Men able to speak English introduced smiling dark-eyed girls or weary, sullen older women.

  Some of the men had been out of work for weeks, and their need made them desperate. But the Dyehouse was full. Some stood for a while peering into the warehouse, at the cloth in the fixtures, the trucks standing loaded in the aisles. Then they turned and walked out into the Parade.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  There had been trouble over the sick-pay claims. Renshaw, moody and irritable over the fluctuating performance of the nylon-setter, had little time or patience to consider the personal affairs of the employees. In the main he left all such work to Miss Merton, usually glancing indifferently over statements and then signing them with a flourish. The thing had been building up for some time, and it finally exploded over the case of Barney Monahan.

  Sick pay was always a contentious matter. There were fixed rules.

  1. Employee must report sick within twenty-four hours.

  2. Employee must fill in and sign statutory declaration, duly witnessed by a JP.

  3. Employee must state reason for absence from employment.

  4. Employee must ask that this absence might not jeopardize his continuity of service (i.e., that he should not be penalized by losing proportion of his holiday pay, or lose long-service privileges).

  5. He must claim payment for the day.

  To the uninitiated the demands were formidable. The more experienced had the thing down to a fine art.

  Move 1: Ring Miss Merton. In a husky voice announce sickness. ’Flu. You hope to be in tomorrow.

  Move 2: Tomorrow. Lean through window to Miss Merton. Confirm previous day’s illness. Wait until Miss Merton says, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’ Bundy on.

  Move 3: Mention to Renshaw that ’flu had laid you low the previous day. He gets snaky if he’s overlooked.

  Move 4 (if a woman): Report to head girl serious bout of ’flu previous day. Commence work.

  Move 5: After breaking back of first job, chase about looking for the shop-steward. Get a statutory declaration form. Fill it in. Go in search of a JP—Mr Mayers is always happy to oblige.

  Move 6: Take the statement to Miss Merton. Wait while she reads it. What’s this? She says it’s wrong.

  ‘I notice there is no doctor’s certificate,’ says Miss Merton. ‘You will have to make a statement about your holiday pay. You will have to ask that your absence should not interfere in any way with the proportion of your holiday pay due to you for this month.’

  ‘Oh, garn,’ you say.

  Miss Merton picks up a pen. She writes in a bold hand, ‘And I ask that such absence shall not jeopardize my continuity of service. I wish to claim sick-pay.’ She hands it to you to initial.

  Many New Australians were employed at the Dyehouse, and this added considerably to the work entailed on sick claims. Few of them could speak English, and usually they brought the form to Miss Merton, smiling and anxious for help.

  ‘Larcombe says they’re complaining about the sick-pay claims,’ Renshaw said. ‘Cuthbert wants every employee to personally fill in the statement on his claim.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Miss Merton. She was feeli
ng tired and exasperated. It took up endless time trying to explain all the complications to people still struggling with the rudiments of the language.

  ‘And Cuthbert says you’ve got to watch that “personal illness” angle. You’ve got to see that the statement is “my personal illness”, and not “personal illness”. Cuthbert says that personal illness could be the personal illness of wife or child. Sick-pay applies only to the personal illness of the employee.’

  ‘I suppose he means Barney Monahan,’ said Miss Merton.

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Renshaw, ‘we’ve got to draw the line somewhere. Some of these blokes know a thing or two.’

  ‘Yes.’ Miss Merton pressed her lips together.

  ‘Don’t need to take it to heart,’ said Renshaw. ‘Just watch them for that “my personal illness” angle, and the rest is up to them.’

  Miss Merton sat tapping her pen on her desk.

  ‘It seems heartless,’ she said. ‘Wife sick. Everything at odds. And this form waiting for “due to my personal illness”. There’s not much margin for the joys and tragedies in people’s lives, is there?’

  Renshaw bent over and patted her on the arm. He was sorry about Barney. But he was up against the blank wall of the Company.

  ‘You’re a bit of a sentimentalist,’ he said.

  She looked at him, suddenly angry.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘We’re all human beings. It’s hard to see what else Barney could have done. According to this he could be just a malingerer.’

  The bundy cards were on the table. She took them up and began writing in the reports.

  She put the affair at the back of her mind.

  She began writing up the absentees. The names and numbers of those who had reported sick. The names and numbers of those who had resumed work. The names and numbers of those finishing up, those drifting on, those sacked, together with suitable explanations.

  Sometimes, under Renshaw’s instruction, she wrote in ‘mutual consent’. But Cuthbert found the phrase too elastic. ‘Mutual agreement’ was the term.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Renshaw when the phone rang, and Cuthbert voiced his criticism of the term, ‘he could be right. Always sounded like adultery to me.’