by Olga Masters
Amy’s costume had no sleek finish like Kathleen’s. It was in wool, bought while she was at Lincolns, not showing much back, with two little white buckles where the shoulder straps met the bodice she had thought quite wonderful at the time, and a skirt all the way round, not just in front like Kathleen’s. It was in navy blue, a colour she suddenly hated.
If she put it on, her legs would seem even shorter with the skirt halfway down her thighs. Her knees were not good. She could not imagine the sun smiling on her skin as on Kathleen’s, toasting it to the colour of pale honey. Without looking, she saw her legs, shamefully shaded by her veins to a milky blue like separated milk.
She dug her fork into the earth and stood up, and heard the steps of the Misses Wheatley leaving the house. They saw Kathleen and stiffened. Kathleen raised a cool head and trailed cool eyes over them, showing them the back of her head when she returned it to the grass.
Amy was mesmerized by the Misses Wheatleys’ legs. They were in grey lisle stockings, wrinkling about the ankles, especially on the thinner Miss Grace. In spite of the warm spring day they wore coats with fake fur collars, and their shoes were of black leather, Grace’s with laces and Heather’s with a tongue.
Amy raised the clothes prop as an excuse to look away from them. When the click of their heels could be heard no more, she went inside, sat on a kitchen chair and curled her legs under it, pulling her skirt over them. I won’t go where there is a mirror, she told herself.
For if she looked in one she was sure the Misses Wheatley would look back.
30
Amy got a new costume, a dark green one with a zigzag pattern in white.
“You’re dazzling, S.T.,” Kathleen cried when she put it on.
“Shut up and pass me the coconut oil!” Amy said, blushing.
They spent a Sunday tanning in the backyard, and went to Bondi the Sunday after. Kathleen jumped from the stone edge of the walk along the beach front and laughed at the way the sand squeaked when her feet hit it. Amy laughed too but took the steps, pleased at the sight of her costume hugging the tops of her legs. If there hadn’t been so many people about she would have pulled at the cloth and let it snap back cosily again.
But Lance Yates was looking. He was there with Allan coming from the beach, a rolled-up towel under his arm and Allan with his flung over a shoulder. Amy had time to feel glad their towels were out of sight in the beach bag Kathleen carried, one Tina had helped her make. The four of them stopped, Allan pushing his feet deeper into the sand, Kathleen dropping her bag down low enough to rest on her old sandals, Amy noticing the suitable footwear of Lance and wishing for some of her own.
Allan in shyness put a hand up and smoothed the hair on one side of his head, and felt for any that might be standing up at the back. He did not appear to be looking that closely at Kathleen, nor she at him, but Amy sensed they had seen a great deal of each other in the time it took for her to shape her mouth into a smile of greeting.
“My goodness me!” Lance said, and the oil trembled in his eyes and at the corners of his mouth, and even his teeth seemed to have received a light coating. Handy for the beach, Amy thought. He doesn’t need coconut oil like the rest of us.
“We’re just coming out,” Lance said, regretting that they were.
“You’re going in?” Allan, not yet bold enough to meet her eyes, addressed Kathleen’s right shoulder.
Lance looked at the crowded beach around them, searching, Amy could see, for a place for them. She wondered if, when he found it, he and Allan would go and she would never see them again. She had to curb an impulse to reach out and take hold of Lance’s wrist, a nice strong one attached to a yellowish hand. The thought caused her to redden and look at the sea, the black swimmers’ heads like flies caught in foaming milk, remembering the farm suddenly, and to her surprise not hating it. In fact, quite suddenly and unaccountably, she loved everything, including a small boy in an ugly woollen costume drooping from his hips with the weight of sand and water, beginning to dig with a wooden spade near her feet and lifting up a scarlet face and running nose. He had freckled limbs and spiky hair and Amy should have found him unattractive and shooed him off, but she could quite easily have scooped him up and hugged him.
All the groups of people looked handsome and happy. Amy was happy. She looked in vain for an unhappy face. People were going into the water smiling and coming out smiling, and dropping wetly into their little place and rubbing at their wet hair, some using old towels with few places thick enough to be effective. They smiled even wider looking for the most absorbent parts of their towels and upwards at the sun, thankful for its blessed rays. There was music in Amy’s ears but none was playing anywhere. The people’s voices were a singsong of sound, waves of it rolling up like the surf itself. The crash on the sand was like an orchestra warming up. Amy half expected the voices to die away and let the thundering music of the sea take over, and suddenly, miraculously, as if Lance had commanded it, there was only his voice she heard.
“Let’s find somewhere quieter.”
Amy saw the faces of Allan and Kathleen become eager. What’s mine saying, I wonder? She pointed it to the sand in case they saw too much. They walked dodging the groups, stepping onto the edges of towels, even over the heads of children, around prams swathed in mosquito netting, sometimes kicking sand on tender pink backs.
“Wow!” the owners said but laughed, and Amy thought never again, never during the rest of her life would she see anyone frown, an unhappy face.
They were into the open, away from the crowds before she realized it, and looking up at the rocks resisting the swirling sea and two or three fishermen hung between the cliff and the sky, she needed to look back to check that the distance was there, it seemed she’d hardly walked at all.
“But it’s away from the flags, Dad,” Allan said and Amy caught Kathleen’s smile, tenderly acknowledging his concern that she might be deprived of her swim.
“Oh, yes,” Lance said, taking his first real look at Amy’s costume, and then giving his head a little perplexed scratch in a way she remembered at Lincolns when he was looking at a new design for a line of knit shirts.
“We can sit in the sun for a while.” Amy’s murmured words covered those inside her head. He and I will sit in the sun. You others will go and swim.
They did that. Allan and Kathleen ran across the sand and hopped over the little waves breaking on the shore until they were in line with the flags that told swimmers to bathe between them. Amy watched them wade in, Kathleen taking the chill off the first plunge by dabbing handfuls of water on her legs, Amy thinking she should not worry at Allan watching closely while Kathleen bathed her thighs.
But her face warmed, not entirely from the sun’s heat, and she experienced an odd sense of relief when Kathleen dived and swam like a bobbing fuschia quite far out, and Allan following was there if she got into difficulties.
She spread Kathleen’s towel out in readiness for her and sat on her own, both hands on the sand propping her up. She could see only the bottom half of Lance, a tan fading out the yellowish colour of his legs, some little tufts of hair on his toes she found quite vulnerable. He wore black trunks with the emblem of a diving female shape above one thigh. She saw those too. Neither of them was saying anything and Amy felt surprise that this did not seem to matter.
In a little while she felt something run over her fingers, something like the feel of a small, gentle harmless animal, a sand creature perhaps scuttling for shelter, stopping and stroking, deciding not to go on. Amy did not look for quite a while, holding the anticipation to her, the surge of the sea abated now, less turbulent than the surge inside her.
She turned her hand over and his palm slid across hers, and then she turned her body around and laid her face on her arm and his face was closer to hers than it had ever been, and she thought never again in all my life will I be lonely or unhappy or frightened. Or alone.
Never alone again.
31
Lance insisted on dri
ving them home. He could make a slight detour for a look at Lincolns. Amy could see the changes since she had left. Allan, with his nose beginning to peel and more sunburn cracking his lips, hoping he did not look too awful for Kathleen, reminded Lance there was nothing much added since Amy was there, other than new signwriting on the window of the dry cleaning shop, and the front window of the factory cleaned of its white paint and now displaying the uniforms of fighting men and women that had been made in the Lincoln factory. There was still need for a camouflage so that workers could not be seen at their machines. Lance and Tom overcame this by hanging the Union Jack and Australian flag to cover the opening. Allan, now working at Lincolns, wanted the American flag there too and Lance and Tom, by this time tolerant of the Americans, conceding that they had helped save Australia from a Japanese invasion, allowed it to be laid on the floor. Allan laid his head to one side, very close to Kathleen’s shoulder, pointing out the rippled effect, almost as if the flag were flying from a mast. Amy, noticing the Land Army uniform, remembered Miss Sheldon with a little prickle of jealousy. She treated herself to a small inward chuckle. I quite like being jealous, she told herself.
“Victor has the keys to upstairs,” Lance said as an excuse not to go there.
Amy, with a rush of love for his thoughtfulness, decided he was thinking of her, afraid she might feel pain at the sight of her old desk with Miss Ross’s things on it, and Miss Ross’s second best umbrella on the peg behind her chair.
She stole a glance at Lance’s profile, pensive before the window, and saw the corner of his mouth digging into his cheek, and was struck by the marvel of kissing that mouth. I could not go on living if I was never to kiss that mouth, Amy thought, and stared into Kathleen’s eyes, saying this without sound, and Kathleen returned the stare, puzzled, and looked at Allan as if he were her only security in a situation suddenly frightening her.
Allan and Kathleen sat in the back seat going to Crystal Street and Amy beside Lance. Only Kathleen said: “Oooh, my sunburn is sticking to the back of the seat,” and Allan, deepening his own with his blush, thought her wonderful to make him feel less embarrassed about it.
Lance said they would not go inside and Allan scrambled over to sit in the seat Amy vacated.
Amy wandered to the back of the house and looked for a long time at a yellow rose turning its petals back, and thought of making a yellow dress with a collar turning back, touching her bare tanned shoulder with a crisp little peak. Wearing it for the first time for Lance to see.
When she turned her head Kathleen was on the path watching her. She shook her little purse in the air.
“I’ll get some cold meat for our tea with the money we saved on fares,” Kathleen called, nearly shouting as if she suspected Amy was suddenly hard of hearing.
Amy gave a little vague smile as if she would never have thought of such a thing.
She was getting into bed, calling out goodnight to Kathleen and Kathleen calling goodnight back when she began to feel something was missing.
Kathleen hadn’t called her S.T. since they encountered Lance and Allan on the beach.
She never did again.
32
It was hard, nearly impossible, for Amy and Lance to have time on their own.
“Let me try and get the telephone on for you,” Lance said, when Amy, knowing his habit of going to Lincolns at weekends, slipped away and found a phone box and Lance’s amazed and joyful voice answered at the other end.
But she protested that it would be a long wait, for the production and installation of telephones for domestic use was low on the list of essentials.
“Blame the silly old war!” Amy said, hardly thinking of Peter at all.
But she was relieved, aware that Kathleen would know the source of the telephone, and at this stage she was trying to keep the relationship from her.
You are stalling, Amy Fowler, she said to her shining eyes in the mirror of the little cane dressing-table.
An opportunity to meet Lance came when Kathleen woke with a heavy cold and Amy, hoping her face did not give her away, insisted she stay at home in bed while Amy explained her absence to Mr Benson. She was aware that it was the exciting prospect of seeing Lance that made her bow in imitation of Mr Benson receiving the news. Keeping her eyes shut and her head lowered for a long moment, she did not know what expression Kathleen wore from her sick pillow.
She caught the tram to give her time to telephone Lincolns from a box and Lance said he would meet her in the tearoom at Anthony Horderns. Amy was joyful at the prospect of being seen with a man by her fellow workers, but this was tempered by the thought that some of them might tell Kathleen. It was lovely to get out of cutting lunch, Amy thought, relishing the asparagus on toast Lance ordered for her.
“We’ll drive to the park and sit there for ten minutes,” Lance said.
Ten minutes is not long enough to tell him Kathleen is my daughter, Amy told herself, relieved. They sat squashed together, holding hands, Amy with her shoes off and her toes rubbing gently at the new grass. Her feet were nicely tanned like her legs and Amy, looking at them, wondered how she had ever thought they resembled the Misses Wheatleys’. Lance was smiling down on her feet too. They’re probably the prettiest feet he has ever seen too, Amy thought without shame at her conceit. She rubbed a cheek against the tweed of his coat.
“I always loved the clothes you wore,” she said. “I used to say to myself, ‘what will he be wearing today?’ and watch out for you until I found out.”
“I thought you hated me,” Lance said.
She pressed her head hard into him as if she would make an opening to pour her love in and he would be convinced this way.
“The city is dancing,” she said although her eyes were actually closed. “What is it doing, a waltz or a twostep?”
“You can dance, can’t you? You said you couldn’t, but I know you can.”
“Did you hate me that night?” she whispered.
“I loved you that night!”
“Only that night?’
“Not only that night.”
She had to put her feet into her shoes and stand up. She could keep her back to him. He might think her foolish if he saw her tears.
Kathleen was to learn about the meeting.
“Son,” Lance had said to Allan on their drive home from work on the Monday after Amy had first telephoned Lance at the factory, “I won’t keep anything from you.”
Allan took off his tie and laid it on the back seat with his suit coat. He dressed up for work although he often mixed dyes, pressed clothes in the dry cleaning shop and shared many of the menial tasks of the more lowly paid. Lance wanted to impress on everyone Allan’s grooming as a future boss. The good cut of his trousers said so and his sleeve links of silver in the shape of a curled snake with a semiprecious stone for an eye terrified the new girls when his arm hovered over them, as they tried desperately to stop the fabric they were machining from curling like a slice of dry bread. Had they known it, Allan had a secret admiration for their skills, the way they made tiny invisible stitches and slipped thread through a needle eye and knotted the end faster than it took to blink. He didn’t want to stand out from them, he wasn’t comfortable having to hold his body a long way away from the dye vat to avoid splashes on his clothes. He didn’t like it when his tie dangled close to the rim, since he had no free hand to grab it.
Allan was glad to be free of his coat and tie, and added to his comfort by wrenching his shirt buttons open. Lance saw this as a manly gesture, but left his own coat on, feeling like a kind of understudy, as if following the act would detract from its significance.
Of course he’s a man! Lance sped past a tram, wondering if Allan, like him, felt pity for people travelling this way and thinking then of Amy and feeling light and happy, because she walked and was different from the ordinary hordes, superior and beautiful, swinging along on her slim strong legs.
It was Amy he was talking about to Allan.
“I l
ove her, son. Perhaps you’ve seen.”
There was silence but no chilling of the air between Allan’s blue silk shirt and Lance’s grey pinstriped suit coat.
“Yes, Dad, I know.”
Lance put a hand on Allan’s knee and shook it. “God, a man’s lucky to have you!”
Lance told Allan about the lunch with Amy and how it had come about.
“Is she sick?” Allan cried, leaning towards the wheel and nearly bouncing onto it when Lance had to pull up to let a woman with a pram cross in front of him.
“No! She’s looking wonderful!” Lance said forgetting Kathleen, picturing Amy with her shoes off.
“Is it the old one sick or the young one?” Allan cried, beating an elbow into Lance’s side.
Lance, unable to believe anyone could think of Amy as old, began as evenly as he could to explain about Amy telephoning because Kathleen was sick in bed—
“But how sick? How sick?” Allan cried, and Lance was afraid Allan might wrench the car door open and leap out.
“She couldn’t go to work, so it meant Amy could meet me. We had asparagus on toast.” He thought with remorse of Allan eating the roast beef sandwiches Eileen had made for them that morning and how he hid his in the back of his desk drawer.
Allan put the back of his hand to his mouth and chewed a finger. “I’ll go and see her tonight,” he said in the voice of a man. “You can drive me there.”
Lance’s first thought was one of joy that he would see Amy. Then he saw himself outside the house crouched over the wheel in the dark and Amy running out angry with him, seconds after Allan ran in with chocolates—
“I’ll take her something like a box of chocolates.” Allan pulled what money he had from his trouser pocket, tipping his rump sideways to get it all out, and stirred it with a finger to count it.
“We can say we have to go back to the factory.”
“No, we can’t!” Lance pictured Eileen serving the mashed potatoes—her way of scooping each serve into a mound and spooning the peas to completely surround it. It made Lance impatient, she made such a business of it the food grew cold.
