The Women in Black (6 page)

12

Magda opened her great brown eyes to the dazzling day. She glanced at the bedside clock: it was ten o’clock. She wondered for a moment whether she would get up and go to Mass, and then she turned over and went back to sleep again. I need it more, she said to herself, God knows.

Magda had an entirely satisfactory understanding with God: this understanding was the foundation of her success in the art of living. Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with himself, with the same consequences. That Magda and Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with each other was the consequence of numerous determinants, such as the fact that they had each survived hell.

When Magda awoke again it was to the sight of Stefan standing over her with the coffee pot and a large cup and saucer.

‘It occurs to me,’ said he, ‘that if I awaken you now—it is eleven a.m. by the way—you will have time to go to the Mass at midday.

Should you so wish.’

‘A-a-a-h,’ Magda sighed, and stretched. ‘First give me the coffee. Then I shall address the question.’

She sat up, in a heave of white arms and satin nightdress, and Stefan poured out her coffee.

‘I will fetch my own,’ he said, leaving the room.

Magda considered the day ahead. It would be pleasant to do nothing, and then to walk in a park, and to eat dinner in a restaurant with some friends. Stefan re-entered the room.

‘I will not go to Mass today,’ Magda told him.

‘The Pope himself would excuse you,’ said Stefan.

‘Do not speak so of His Holiness,’ said Magda sternly.

Magda was Slovene and Stefan Hungarian; as Displaced Persons they had been given entry after the end of the war to the Commonwealth of Australia, and it was in a migrant camp outside Sydney that they had first laid eyes on each other. They had begun their life’s conversation in French and as the efficient instruction provided by the Federal Government progressed, had switched over to English. Within a year of their arrival in Australia they were both fl uent, however idiosyncratic, English-speakers and they then began also to read voraciously. Soon Stefan was branching into the classics but here Magda could but barely follow him.

‘I cannot get along with this Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘This Hamlet prince, for example: he is not to me the stuff of heroes.’

Their common language soon came to contain various old-fashioned locutions which, transferred from the pages of such as Hardy and Dickens, had found their way eventually via Stefan’s into Magda’s discourse, and even sometimes into that of their many Hungarian friends who in Magda’s presence at least spoke English habitually. They all agreed sardonically that although the war—and more recently the revolution—and their own consequent fortunes had been a heavy price to pay for the privilege, they were and would remain grateful for the acquisition of ‘this wonderful language’ and they were still liable to laugh delightedly at a newly discovered idiom. ‘A pig in a poke!’ they might exclaim; and they would shout with pleasure, the way their Magyar ancestors might have done, as they rode their swift horses across the vast and fertile Hungarian plain.

13

At nine in the morning on the third Monday in December the great glass and mahogany doors of Goode’s Department Store were opened to a large bevy of early-rising housewives all determined upon the prosecution of their Christmas shopping campaigns. From the wooded slopes of the salubrious North Shore to the stuccoed charm of the Eastern Suburbs, from the passé gentility of the Western ditto to the
terra incognita
of the Southern, had they travelled by train, bus, tram and even taxi cab to this scene of final frantic activity. There remained presents to be bought for sundry difficult relations, there remained clothes to be purchased for their gigantically growing children, there remained even frocks to be found for themselves, and then shoes to match these frocks: there remained almost everything to play for, and they were resolved to win.

Miss Jacobs stood at her post, ready for anything whatsoever, her tape measure draped around her neck and her pins beside her. Let them come: she would be as a rock in the great storm.

Mr Ryder walked past.

‘Everything shipshape, Miss Jacobs?’ he called. ‘Ready for the fracas?’

‘I don’t know about any “
fracas
”,’ said Miss Jacobs to Lisa. ‘We’re bound to be very busy in the last week before Christmas, aren’t we now? I don’t know about any “
fracas
”.’

Christmas this year fell on the Tuesday of the following week.

‘And mind you tell them, Lisa,’ continued Miss Jacobs, ‘that if they want alterations doing before Christmas, we can only do hems by then, not seams, and we can’t do hems either after Wednesday, whatever they say. After Wednesday, with the holiday and everything, they can’t have their alterations until the New Year.’

‘Yes, I’ll tell them,’ said Lisa.

‘And I’ll just remind Miss Baines and Mrs Williams likewise,’ said Miss Jacobs.

These were occupied with the display, Patty chattering to Fay about the deficiencies of her last-year’s-model swimming costume as they had been revealed the day before on Coogee Beach.

‘It’s got elastic around here,’ she said, drawing a line across part of her anatomy, ‘but the elastic’s going, and anyway it’s faded. So I think I’ll get a new one. Anyway you need two cossies, really. I need another one. I think I might get one of those satin lastex ones. I’ll see. I’ll spend my Christmas bonus on myself, for a change.’

As if anyone had ever suggested she should do anything else.

The coming Thursday was pay-day: she would have her fortnight’s wages plus the bonus, and she would pay for her nightdress, and she might get a new swimming costume as well, and never mind the Bank of New South Wales. She had already bought all her Christmas presents.

‘We’re going to Mum for Christmas Day, all of us,’ she told Fay, ‘as per usual. What will you do?’

Ah, that was a sore point, even a sad one. There wasn’t time to go down to Melbourne to her brother’s, even if she wanted to. If Fay didn’t accept Myra’s invitation to go with her to Myra’s parents, who had retired to the Blue Mountains where they lived in a little fibro cottage at Blackheath, then she would be quite alone, and this being unthinkable, she realised, but did not want to admit, that she was bound for Blackheath.

‘It will be a nice break,’ said Myra. ‘We can stay till the Thursday morning and come back down on The Fish, you’ll be back in plenty of time to start work.’

It was the thought of The Fish which made the whole prospect tolerable to Fay’s imagination: that legendary train, The Fish.

‘I’m going to the Blue Moun tains, with my girlfriend Myra,’ she told Patty. ‘I’ll stay till Thursday morning and come back on The Fish.’

‘Oh, that’s nice,’ said Patty, ‘you’ll be nice and cool.’ And you could do with a break, she thought; you’ve been looking an absolute misery. So much for all those men you’re always talking about.

Perhaps she really is in trouble, she thought: hmm, oh well, it’s none of my business.

Magda gave her black-clad sisters a further day to themselves, and then she struck. Early on Tuesday morning she emerged from her rosy cavern and sailed across the carpet to Ladies’ Cocktail.

‘Good morning, my ladies,’ she cried happily. ‘I hope you are not too busy this week, for I am going to steal your little schoolgirl away for a while now and then. I have spoken to Miss Cartright and she says I may borrow your Lisa for a few mornings, a few afternoons; you will hardly notice.’

Not much, you will, she thought, except that you will have to go to the stockroom yourselves and it will do you good too, instead of sending little Lisa every single time, and for every other errand requiring a pair of legs.

‘Well,’ said Miss Jacobs, ‘if that’s what Miss Cartright says, I’m not going to argue with you.’

Patty looked offended, as she usually did in Magda’s presence, and Fay looked askance.

‘Shall I come now?’ asked Lisa.

‘That will be very kind,’ said Magda. ‘I will show you the way we do things in Model Gowns, there will be much for you to learn, and then we shall see.’

Lisa slipped out from behind the counter which belonged to the Ladies’ Cocktail section and, glancing and half-shrugging as if in apology to her colleagues, followed Magda across the carpet and under the archway which marked the entrance to the shrine, and Miss Jacobs, Mrs Williams and Miss Baines saw her no more, until the sun had crossed the meridian, and twelve Cocktail Frocks had been sold, and three trips made to the stock-room, two by Miss Baines, and one by a much-complaining Mrs Williams.

14

‘Well, Lisa,’ said Magda, extending a graceful arm, ‘here are the Model Gowns. Do you by the way know what is a Model Gown?’

‘Well,’ said Lisa, ‘not exactly. I’m not sure—’

‘Very well,’ said Magda, ‘I will explain to you. These frocks are all unique. There are no others like them in all this city. Oh, if you were to go to Focher perhaps you would find one or two, I don’t know, that woman is capable of anything, but as far as we are concerned there can be no others of their kind in Sydney. A woman who buys one of these frocks knows that she will not meet another wearing the same frock, which is so terrible a thing to happen to a woman, even if she looks better in the frock than her rival. So to say. So we have the exclusive right to sell the frock in Sydney. You might find it at George’s in Melbourne, that is all. Who goes to Melbourne? So that is by the way.’

‘Yes,’ said Lisa, bemused. ‘I see.’

‘And the stock is all here. We do not keep different sizes of the same model,’ Magda continued, ‘for then of course the frock would cease to be unique. Do you see?’

And Lisa nodded, and gazed at the frocks, whose chiffon and taffeta edges frothed out in their luminous ranks around her.

‘Now let us look perhaps at a few of these frocks,’ said Magda, ‘and you will see what such a Model Gown looks like. Let me see.

We have our day frocks here and our costumes, as you would say I suppose our
suits
, here for instance this Irish linen, it is Hardy Amies, so very well cut, I would like it for myself but on the other hand I am not at my best in the English style, it is for a thin woman with no hips, I cannot understand why, English women are all made in the shape of a pear. Never mind. It is nothing to me. The French, they cut to fit a real woman with hips and a bosom, but they make her look slim nonetheless:
that
is artistry. There is no one to touch them, my God, it is a remarkable civilisation. I hope you have learnt some French at your school, have you?’

‘Yes, oh yes,’ said Lisa, ‘I took French for the Leaving Certificate.’

‘
C
’
est bien
,’ said Magda. ‘
Nous parlerons quelquefois français
,
non
?’

‘
Je lis un peu
,’ said Lisa, ‘
je ne parle pas bien.

’ ‘You will come and see some French evening frocks,
en tout cas
,’ said Magda, ‘which will interest you I dare say more than the costumes or the day frocks. For a
jeune fille
, the romantic. And we have some English ones too of course, they are not bad, see what you think. Here is Hartnell, he is the dressmaker of the Queen as you know, Amies again, also he makes for the Queen, and a Charles James—
magnifique.
Now some French, you see—Jacques Fath,
ravissante
, a little Chanel, she has such wit that woman, and the great Dior. Who can touch him?’

Lisa stared, more bemused than ever; her head began to swim. She had lately come to see that clothing might be something beyond a more or less fashionable covering; that it might have other meanings. What she now but dimly and very oddly, very suddenly, saw was a meaning she could not before have suspected: what she now but dimly, oddly, and so suddenly, saw was that clothing might be—so to speak—art. For these frocks, as each was named and held out briefly before her gaze by Magda, seemed each to exist in a magical envelope of self-sufficiency, or even a sort of pride; each of these frocks appeared to her however ignorant still lively intelligence to be like—it was astonishing— a poem.

‘Gosh,’ she said, ‘golly.’

Her hand reached out, gently, tentatively, and she touched the many-layered skirt of a pale evening frock.

‘Are they very expensive?’ she asked, her eyes large and fearful.

‘Ho!’ snorted Magda. ‘Ha! they had better be expensive. My God! You will see my stock book very soon and then you will know. But with such a frock, the price as you may one day appreciate is part of the charm. Now I will tell you something else, one or two things, and then you had better go back to those Cocktail ladies, and later I will speak to Miss Cartright again and will suggest to her that you will come to me in the mornings, when it is not so busy here, to help me with something I am going to explain.’

And she led the way to the Louis XVI table and pulled out the drawer.

‘
Voilà
!’ she said. ‘Here then is my stock book. Now then. As you know, the abominable sales will begin on the second of January and I too must put my stock on sale. So it is time to review it. Now you see, here are listed every one of my frocks, their names, their wholesale and their retail prices, and you will be most kind to make out a little ticket for each one which is not sold yet—you see we make a tick in the last column here when a frock is sold—with the price on it, and when all that is done, we will go through the stock and I will decide on the sale price depending on how long the frock has been here and its condition and so on. Then you will write the sale price beneath the old price so that the ladies know they get a great great bargain. And first of all you will arrange all the frocks of each section in the same order as that in the stock book, you see, which will be more convenient, we will know where we are. And of course you will always make sure that your hands are quite quite clean before you come in here and touch these so-expensive frocks,
ma petite.
Okay?’

And she smiled brightly, thinking to herself that it was very nice to have a little assistant, even a thin pale little schoolgirl like Lisa, who knew nothing; in fact, it was very nice to have the charge of so ignorant a little girl, for she, Magda, could teach her everything, and suddenly now, she, Magda, realised how pleasant it was to give instruction, to fill an empty head with knowledge, drop by precious drop: cut, style, taste; Amies, Fath, Dior.