The Dressmaker (2 page)

Her mother replied formally, ‘Yes thank you, we always do,’ and smiled graciously to the others attending the banquet, before vomiting over the strange woman she thought was feeding her poison.

Again Tilly stood on the veranda, the breeze pressing her trousers against her slim legs. Below her, smoke circled from beneath a copper in the McSwineys’ yard at the base of The Hill beside the tip. Strangers assumed the bent railway carriages and dented caravans were part of it, but it was where the McSwiney family lived. Edward McSwiney was Dungatar’s night cart man. He could negotiate every outhouse, every full dunny can in Dungatar – even on the blackest, windiest nights – without spilling a drop. During the day he also delivered things, riding around on his cart with his middle son Barney and a bunch of kids hanging off the back.

Little Myrtle used to watch the McSwiney kids playing: the oldest boy, a few years younger than herself, then three girls and Barney, who was ‘not quite finished’. He was crooked, with an upside-down head and a club foot.

The town itself rested in the full glare of the morning sun. The railway station and the square, grey silo sat along the railway line, whose arc held the buildings against the bend of the Dungatar creek, like freckles on a nose. The creek had always been low, choked with willows and cumbungi weed, the flow sluggish and the water singing with mosquitos. The pioneer founders of Dungatar had allowed a flood plain along its inner curve, which was now a park of sorts with a community hall in the middle, Mr and Mrs Almanac’s low damp cottage at the eastern end opposite their chemist shop, and the school at the western edge, where Prudence Dimm had taught the children of Dungatar for as long as anyone could remember. The main road followed the curve of the park, separating it from the commercial strip. The police station was situated out along the road to the east, halfway between the cemetery and the town’s edge. It was not a busy road and there were few shops at its kerb, the chemist shop, then the Station Hotel, and then A and M Pratt, Merchant Supplies – a general store which sold everything anyone needed. The post office, bank and telephone exchange were housed together in the next building, and the last, most western building was the shire office and library combined. The houses of Dungatar, dotted behind the commercial strip, were dissected by a thin gravel road that ran to the football oval.

The green eye of the oval looked back up at Tilly, the cars around its edge like lashes. Inside, her mother stirred and called, and the possum thumped across the ceiling again.

Tilly went to the dress stand lying on the grass. She stood it up and then hosed it down, leaving it to dry in the sun.

O
n Saturday mornings the main street of Dungatar sang to the chug of farm trucks and solid British automobiles bearing smart pastoralist families. Younger children were passed into the care of older siblings, and sent to the park so mothers could shop and gossip. Men stood in clumps talking about the weather and looking to the sky, and thin-skinned, thick-boned women in floral sunfrocks and felt hats sat behind trestle tables selling raffle tickets.

Sergeant Farrat made his way past a young man slouched behind the wheel of a dusty Triumph Gloria and across the road towards Pratts. He encountered Mona Beaumont on the footpath outside.

‘Good morning, Mona,’ he called, ‘I see you have your brother safely at home.’

‘Mother sa-ays we can let the dreadful hired help go. That Mr Mac-Swiney …’ Mona had a way of making words flat and long so Sergeant Farrat always used his most melodious vowels when he spoke to her. ‘Not too hasty Mona, there’s a fair chance William will be snapped up by one of our eligible spinsters before long.’ He smiled mischievously, ‘You might find he’s busy elsewhere.’

Mona shrank a little sideways and picked at the pilling on her cardigan cuff. ‘Mother sa-ays the girls around here are un-refined.’

Sergeant Farrat looked at Mona’s tweed beret sitting on top of her head like a dead cat, her posture laden and graceless. ‘On the contrary Mona, history has made us all independent, these are progressive times – it’s an advantage to be adept, especially in the fairer sex …’

Mona giggled at the sex word.

‘… take for example the Pratt women: they know nuts and bolts and powders that are lethal to maggots in flystruck merinos, also stock feed and the treatment for chicken lice, haberdashery, fruit preservatives and female intimate apparel. Most employable.’

‘But mother says it’s un-refined –’

‘Yes, I’m aware your mother considers herself very refined.’

He smiled, tipped his cap and entered the shop. Mona dragged a crumpled handkerchief from her cuff, held it to her open mouth and looked about, perplexed.

Alvin Pratt, his wife Muriel, daughter Gertrude, and Reginald Blood the butcher worked cheerfully, industrious behind their counters. Gertrude tended to groceries and dry goods. She tied every package with string, which she snapped with her bare fingers: a telling skill the sergeant thought. Mrs Muriel Pratt was the expert in haberdashery and hardware. People whispered that she was more suited to hardware. The smallgoods and butchery were in the far back corner of the shop, where Reginald carved and sawed carcasses and forced mince into sheep intestine, then arranged his sausages neatly against circles of trimmed loin chops. Mr Alvin Pratt had a courteous manner, but he was mean. He collected the account dockets from the counter three times a day and filed the debts alphabetically in his glass office. Customers usually turned their backs to him while Gertrude weighed up rolled oats or fetched Aspros, because he would pull files from big wooden drawers and slowly turn the blue-lined pages while they waited.

Sergeant Farrat approached Gertrude, large and sensible in navy floral, ramrod straight behind her dry goods counter. Her mother, dull and blank, leaned on the counter beside her.

‘Well, Gertrude? Muriel?’

‘Very well thank you, Sergeant.’

‘Off to see our footballers win their final this afternoon I hope?’

‘There’s a lot of work to finish up here before we can relax, Sergeant Farrat,’ said Gertrude.

The Sergeant held Gertrude’s gaze a moment. ‘Ah Gertrude,’ he said, ‘a good mule’s load is always large.’ He turned to Muriel and smiled. ‘If you’d oblige me with some blue-checked gingham and matching bias binding? I’m going to run up some bathroom curtains. ’They were used to the sergeant’s bachelor ways; he’d often purchased materials for tablecloths and curtains. Muriel said he must have the fanciest linen in town.

At the haberdashery counter Sergeant Farrat gazed at the button display while Muriel measured and ripped off five yards of gingham, which he took from her to fold, stretching it against his uniform, sniffing its starchy newness while Muriel spread wrapping paper on the counter.

Gertrude looked down at her copy of
Women’s Illustrated
beneath the counter. ‘DRAFT YOUR OWN COW GIRL SKIRT’ cried the cover and a pretty girl twirled, unfurling a gay, blue and white checked gingham skirt, cut on the cross with bias binding bows to garnish. She smiled a sly, secret smile and watched Sergeant Farrat-– a stout figure carrying a brown bundle under his arm – walk out the front door and across the street towards the Triumph. The Beaumonts’ car was parked beside the park. Someone sat in the driver’s seat. She stepped towards the door but Alvin Pratt called from the rear of the shop, ‘
GerTRUDE
, a customer at chaff!’ So she walked between the shelves beneath slow ceiling fans to the rear, where Miss Mona and Mrs Elsbeth Beaumont of Windswept Crest stood against the glare of back lane gravel. Mrs Beaumont ‘had airs’. She was a farmer’s daughter who had married a well-to-do grazier’s son, although he wasn’t as well-to-do as Elsbeth imagined on her engagement. She was a small, sharp, razor-thin woman with a long nose and an imperious expression. She wore, as ever, a navy linen day dress and her fox fur. Circling her sun-splotched wedding finger was a tiny diamond cluster next to a thin, gold band. Her daughter stood quietly beside her, wringing her handkerchief.

Muriel, laconic and unkempt in her grubby apron, was speaking to Elsbeth. ‘Our Gert’s a handsome, capable girl. When did you say William got back?’

‘Oh,’ said Gertrude and smiled. ‘William’s back is he?’

Mona spoke, ‘Yes, and he’s –’

‘I’m waiting,’ snapped Mrs Beaumont.

‘Mrs Beaumont needs chaff, love,’ said Muriel.

Gertrude pictured her with a chaff bag hanging from her nose. ‘Do you like oats mixed with your chaff, Mrs Beaumont?’

Elsbeth inhaled, the dead fox about her shoulders rising. ‘William’s horse,’ she said, ‘prefers plain chaff.’

‘I bet you’re not the only woman glad to see your son back,’ said Muriel and nudged her.

Elsbeth glanced sideways at the girl leaning over a bin shovelling chaff into a hessian sack and said loudly, ‘William has a lot of hard work ahead of him at the property. Catching up will settle him and then he can truly work towards our future. But the property won’t be everything to William. He’s travelled, mixed with society, very worldly these days. He’ll need to look much further than here to find suitable …
companionship
.’

Muriel nodded agreement. Gertrude stood next to the women, the chaff against her knees. She leaned close to Elsbeth and brushed at something on her shoulder. Fox fur floated. ‘I thought something had caught on your poor old fox, Mrs Beaumont.’

‘Chaff most likely,’ said Elsbeth and sniffed at the general store.

‘No.’ Gertrude smiled innocently. ‘I can see what it is. Looks like you need a box of napthalene. Shall I fetch you one?’ And she reached again, pinched some moth-eaten fox fur and let it float in front of them. The sharp eyes of the women circling Elsbeth Beaumont focused on the bald patches on the mottled, thinning pelt. Mrs Beaumont opened her mouth to speak, but Muriel said dully, ‘We’ll charge the chaff, as usual.’

William Beaumont Junior had arrived back to Dungatar the night before, only hours before Tilly Dunnage. He’d been attending Agricultural College in Armidale, a small inland town. When William stepped from the train his mother flung herself at him, squashed his cheeks between her palms and said, ‘My son, you’ve come home to your future – and your mother!’

He now sat waiting for her and his sister in the family car, the
Amalgamated Winyerp Dungatar Gazette Argus
crumpled in his lap. He stared down the main street at the hut on The Hill, watching smoke curl from the chimney. The hut had been built long ago by a man who supposedly wanted to spot advancing bushrangers. He dropped dead soon after its completion, so the council acquired it and the surrounding land, then dug the tip at the base. When they sold The Hill and dwelling, they sold it cheap. William fancied for a moment that it would be nice to live up there on top of The Hill, detached but seeing everything. He sighed and turned east to the flat plains, to the cemetery and the farming country beyond the police station at the edge of the town, past the crumbling brick-rendered shop façades and warped weatherboards covered in peeling paint.

‘My future,’ muttered William determinedly, ‘I will make a life worth living here.’ Then self-doubt engulfed him and he looked at his lap, his chin quivering.

The car door opened and William jumped. Mona climbed neatly into the back seat. ‘Mother says to come,’ she said.

He drove to the back of Pratts, and, while he was loading the chaff into the boot, a big girl standing in the huge open doorway smiled at him: a grinning expectant girl standing beside her plain mother against a backdrop of fishing rods and lines, lawn mowers, rope, car and tractor tyres, garden hoses and horse bridles, enamelled buckets and pitching forks in a haze of grain dust.

As they drove away Mona blew her nose and said, ‘Every time we come to town I get hay fever.’

‘It doesn’t agree with me either,’ said Elsbeth, looking out at the townfolk. The women from the street stall, the shoppers and proprietors were gathered in clumps on the footpath to look up at The Hill.

‘Who lives at Mad Molly’s now?’ said William.

‘Mad Molly,’ said Elsbeth, ‘unless she’s dead.’

‘Someone’s alive – they lit her fire,’ he said.

Elsbeth swung around and glared out the rear window. ‘Stop!’ she cried.

Sergeant Farrat paused outside the shire office to peer up at The Hill, then turned to look down the street. Nancy Pickett leaned on her worn broom outside the chemist shop, while Fred and Purl Bundle wandered down from the pub to join sisters Ruth and Prudence Dimm outside the post office building. In his office above, Councillor Evan Pettyman picked up his coffee cup and swung his leather shire president’s chair to gaze out the window. He jumped up, spilling his coffee, and swore.

In the back streets Beula Harridene ran between the housewives standing on their nature strips in brunch coats and curlers. ‘She’s back,’ she hissed, ‘Myrtle Dunnage has come back.’

At the Tip, Mae McSwiney watched her son Teddy standing in the backyard looking up at the slim girl in trousers on the veranda, her hair lifting in the breeze. Mae crossed her arms and frowned.

• • •

That afternoon, Sergeant Farrat stood at the table concentrating, his tongue earnestly searching for the tip of his nose. He ran a discerning thumb across the sharp peaks of his pinking shears, then crunched them through the gingham. As a child, little Horatio Farrat had lived with his mother in Melbourne above a milliner’s shop. When he’d grown up he joined the police force. Just after the graduation ceremony, Horatio approached his superiors with drawings and patterns. He’d designed new Police uniforms.

Constable Farrat was immediately posted to Dung-atar, where he found extremes in the weather and peace and quiet. The locals were pleased to find their new officer was also a Justice of the Peace, and, unlike their former sergeant, didn’t join the football club or insist on free beer. The sergeant was able to design and make his own clothes and hats to match the weather. The outfits didn’t necessarily compliment his physique, but they were unique. He was able to enjoy their effect fully during his annual leave, but in Dungatar he wore them only inside the house. The sergeant liked to take his holidays in spring, spending two weeks in Melbourne shopping, enjoying the fashion shows at Myers and David Jones and attending the theatre, but it was always lovely to get home. His garden suffered without him, and he loved his town, his home, his office. He settled at his Singer, pumping the treadle with stockinged feet, and guided the skirt seams beneath the pounding needle.