The Midnight Dress (21 page)

‘So did you fall in love and marry that boy?’ asks Rose.

‘Boy?’ says Edie.

‘The one you kissed for the magpie food,’ says Rose. ‘That’s how it always happens in romance books. The woman doesn’t like the man at first but later they fall in love.’

Edie puts down her beading.

‘I fell in love with someone altogether different,’ she says. ‘Did I tell you the magpie stayed with me three whole years?’

‘Yes.’

‘Three years,’ says Edie. ‘Wherever I went, it went. If I walked to town it hopped along, tree to tree, and when they put in the telephone wire, it hopped along on those. When I went up the mountain it came as well, through the trees. It had a beautiful song. It sung outside my bedroom window every morning while all the other magpies were carolling down at the front of the drive. My mother said, ‘Better be careful, you know how your father hates singing birds.’ In the end she was right, he got rid of it, must have, because it disappeared when he went away. It had the blackest of black eyes. Have you ever looked into a magpie’s eyes?’

Rose shifts in her chair. Rethreads her needle.

‘Not really,’ she says.

‘Well, it’s the same as with crows, I suppose; they look right inside you. But there was something about that magpie, I can’t explain it. You understand, I suppose. I never gave it a name. It followed me to school and was the cause of much . . . discussion.’

Rose wipes her sweaty hands with a tea towel, the way Edie has taught her, so she doesn’t mark the fabric.

‘But when my father went the magpie went too, so he must have done something with it. Or it accompanied him, sometimes I like to think that too. Because he would have been so lonely on the road. He left when I was fourteen, nearly fifteen, and we were making wedding dresses. Now things had changed with the dresses, the Great Depression had come. Girls wanted their mother’s dress altered, or their sister’s, and we did that sort of work, which is not as exciting but work all the same. And sometimes in those old dresses, in the silk satin that had turned the colour of rancid cream, I saw other dresses struggling to be free. I looked at the woman and saw the dress she should wear. I looked at my mother and she shook her head ever so slightly, and I said nothing.

My father, before he left, sometimes he touched these dresses. He’d drift past them and stop, feel with his very fingertips, gently, and I saw some of his gentleness, which I’d never known. His voice was very quiet, you could hardly hear him speak, and he was always trembling with a quiet rage, but when he touched those dresses . . . well, I can’t explain. He got up one morning and went and joined the ranks of men who walked past the front gate, their numbers had swelled, the drifters, the men with no home. He woke one morning and put on the suit my mother had made him all those years before. His good hat. Stuffed a few coins in his pocket. He didn’t say goodbye, although he came to my door and looked down at me. I know he did, but I kept my eyes closed. He just walked off and never came back. And that morning the magpie was gone.

That first night my mother waited up for him but not after. She seemed to know he wasn’t coming home.’

Rose sews. Edie will get to the part about love soon, she always does, she just takes strange circuitous routes. At first these detours angered Rose, but now she settles back into them, waits.

The rain comes at last, a monumental downpour that makes the floorboards tremble beneath her feet.

‘I fell in love with someone else altogether the year my father left,’ Edie says, when it has passed. ‘His name was Luke Grace, and he was the only son of Mr Grace who owned Grace Fabrics. Very handsome, Rose: black hair, blue eyes, very tall. He was not stooped at all like his father, who’d spent his life bent over the counter, cutting and counting buttons into paper bags and writing receipts. I can still remember how that shop smelt. Each fabric contains its own scent, you know, it’s true. Satin like eggshell, linen like freshly mown grass, but the top note in that shop was gaberdine suiting. The whole shop smelt like a newly made suit, like the inside of a pocket. I would go there, Rose, to collect my mother’s orders.

I would buy five small bone buttons for myself or ribbons or a certain coloured embroidery thread. Luke Grace, if he was home from boarding school, might glance at me and I might glance at him. Yet at home I could lie on my bed and open the paper bag containing the ribbons, and the whole shop would be inside. At night I would sleep with that paper bag and those bone buttons and it was like he was lying beside me.

Mr Grace taught his son everything there was to know about the shop. He’d say, ‘This lovely lady wants the floral dimity and Dresden blue, see that she has chosen a colour that is most compatible with her eyes, remember how we must cut fabric with a pattern, Luke?’ Luke watched very solemnly. He did exactly as his father told him, spilling eyelets into packets and wrapping ribbons into figure eights. Or, his father said, ‘Now, the buttons that this young lady has chosen are, I believe, amongst the most beautiful buttons in the world. They’re made in Italy – yes, that is right, Italy – and see on the side of the jar there is even the address – isn’t that wonderful, Miss Edith Baker? See, you can smell Rome when you put them to your nose.’

These things made me blush and Luke also.

I don’t recall when he suddenly grew up. One day he was home from boarding school and almost a man. ‘Can I help you?’ he said.

‘I’m just looking,’ I said.

‘Are you making something special?’

‘No, nothing special.’

‘You’re all grown up.’

‘So are you.’

He cut me an extra length of ribbon when his father wasn’t looking and winked. He sometimes walked with me out the door into the sunshine, and afterward I would forget to breathe and later, walking home, would have to take huge breaths to make up for it.

Mr Grace at first did nothing to stop our courtship. He’d always been very kind to me, nothing like old Mrs Rendell, who kept the post office, and wouldn’t say good morning and whispered under her breath, ‘Well, look what the cat dragged in.’ And the women at Coolibah Cafe, where my mother sometimes took me on Saturday morning, they’d stop talking as soon as we entered, and wouldn’t start again until we left.

Mr Grace encouraged us in a way, when he thought it was all very harmless; he called us ‘the lovebirds’ and his laugh floated down from the high shelves. He thought, perhaps, it was just a fleeting thing. Sometimes on a Saturday Luke and I would walk a ways to the creek. No, he never went up the mountain with me, Rose, just to the creek, and it was there he asked me to marry him. I was sixteen and he was seventeen.

Do you know what love is like, Rose? It’s like having a sky, a whole sky, racing inside of you. Four seasons’ worth of sky. One minute you’re soaring and then you’re all thunderclouds and then you’re deep with stars and then you’re empty.

Once in the shop in the button aisle, he put his hand up to my face when his father wasn’t looking, and kissed me on the lips. It was nothing like that kiss from Peter Hansen. Luke Grace’s kiss was delicate, gossamer-light, sweet.

Don’t be stupid, must have been what Mr Grace said, or something like that. I tried to imagine his reckoning. It wasn’t because I was dirt poor. My mother did well enough with the dresses, enough to keep us fed and clothed. Not even because I’d once had a pet magpie. Not because we lived in a house that was once splendid and now ruined. There were certain things being said, since my father left, and I was only just becoming aware of them. They were things said about my mother, who was good and kind and never in all her life hurt a soul.’

Edie stops then, places the beading in her lap. Rose looks at her face and quickly away again.

‘What kind of things?’ Rose asks.

‘Terrible things.’

‘Like what?’

‘Can you imagine?’

‘Was it because of your father going mad?’

‘Yes,’ says Edie. ‘And because he left, just walked out; they said she can’t have been a very good wife and all in all she must have been a very wicked wife, she must have done something to him, and to Granny Baker too. Everything had been good at the big house until Florence arrived.’

Rose bites her bottom lip.

‘We’ll run away,’ was what Luke Grace said to me. ‘Do you mean it?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I swear on my heart.’

We arranged the time. The bend in the road beside Hansen’s corner. I went there in the morning just after the sun came up. I left a note for my mother saying goodbye, and she must have woken, read it, felt very sorry for me, yet she didn’t come looking. She knew I’d be home.

I waited all day. First when the sun was high in the sky and baking, and later when the afternoon rains came.

Finally I went home, drenched. My little suitcase by my side. I came in through the back door, right here where my mother was, and she was sewing just the way she always did. I had the whole day inside of me.

‘Now, now,’ she said, catching me in her arms.

I was ill after that, grew very thin, coughed and coughed and coughed. Black rings appeared beneath my eyes. I could hardly sit up I was so weak. My body was almost destroyed by love.

‘Some people are built for love,’ said my mother. ‘Some people are not.’

‘They say you’re a witch,’ was what I shouted.

‘Edie,’ was all she said, but my words had hurt her terribly.

She bent down her head and began to cry.

And it was a stupid thing to say, because if she were a witch for loving the mountain then I must have been one too.’

Rose has nearly finished attaching the third panel of the skirt. The floor is littered with money beetle jewels. She opens and shuts her fingers and counts the needle pricks. The rain thunders on the roof, pauses, thunders again.

‘It’s after midnight,’ Edie says. ‘You can’t ride home in this. I’ll clear the day bed and you can lie down there. Will your father worry? Should you phone him?’

‘He won’t be worried,’ says Rose. ‘And we don’t have a phone.’

Suddenly Rose is so tired that she yawns into her hands. Edie looks at her, shakes her head kindly, and goes about removing boxes from the day bed: newspapers in piles, several toilet dolls in crocheted skirts, some cracked ceramic figurines. She motions for Rose to lie down, takes the embroidered shawl from the back of the chair and spreads it over her. The shawl smells strange to Rose, like old dried lavender, just the ghost of a scent remaining.

‘I’m sorry I took someone else there,’ says Rose. ‘It’s just Pearl is my best friend and I wanted to show her.’ She’s surprised to find her cheeks burning and the nettle of tears in her eyes.

‘Don’t worry,’ says Edie. ‘It doesn’t belong to me, that place, Rose.’

Rose is asleep before Edie leaves the room. She wakes once during the night, when the rain has paused and the sound of the mountain fills the house, the magnified whispering of trees and the creeks’ speaking in tongues. She opens her eyes and sees that a family of possums have climbed through the kitchen windows to graze on crumbs and eat the fruit left out on shelves. They stare at her brazenly with glowing eyes.

The cool air Edie speaks of? It drifts down off the mountain, unravelling itself through trees, dipping its fingers in streams. It comes in through the back door and through the windows cast open for it. The fat possums shiver and return to their meals. It lifts up the months on the calendar and leafs through the newspaper pattern on the table. It fills up the yellow kitchen and spills into the hallway.

Rose closes her eyes again and smiles.

Buttonhole Stitch

People see him being taken in. He’s beside the big detective from out of town, who’s camped at the Raindance Motel. The big detective has his hand on Paul Rendell’s back, a protective, fatherly act; he’s talking to the young man as they go in through the front door and down to the tiny interview room.

‘Sit down, Paul,’ says Glass. ‘I’m glad you’ve agreed to come and talk to us.’

One of the officers, Williams, knows Paul. They went to the same boarding school and played football together. He avoids Paul’s face.

Paul is fidgeting with his shirt. Scratching his chest. Wiping at his eye.

‘We just want to have a bit of a chat about all this,’ says Glass. ‘So we can get it right in our heads, your involvement with these girls. Okay?’

‘There isn’t any involvement,’ says Paul. ‘Am I under arrest?’

‘No, Paul, you’re not under arrest,’ says Glass.

‘Just say what you know, Paul,’ says Officer Williams, quietly. ‘And you can go home.’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ says Paul. ‘I can’t say anything if I don’t know anything.’

Out on the street Mrs Fanelli has seen Paul taken in. The Albert brothers saw him too. The council gardener, pruning. Everyone who works or is shopping at Hommel’s Convenience Store, right next to the station.

Mrs Rendell sits behind her newsagency counter, fanning herself furiously, her face burning.

It takes off, the news; there is nothing she can do to stop it. While her son is questioned, the story is whipped up into eddies along Main Street. It accelerates, steamrolling into shops, careening through the schoolyard, ploughing through the mill yards and out into the fields.