The Seamstress Read online

  Ben and Willa were looking at Hal’s bride, whose thickening waistline was stretching her dress, in front of which she was clasping her bouquet.

  The bride and groom were getting ready to leave and change their clothes. A good-looking man was wetly embracing the bride, bidding her adieu as she embarked on her marriage journey.

  ‘Will you look at that,’ said Willa.

  ‘What, a kiss for the bride? What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘And what a kiss it is. They haven’t even started on their honeymoon.’

  Ben fiddled with his glass.

  ‘Hal’s probably doing the same thing around the corner.’

  ‘That’s what I mean!’

  ‘We can’t all be flamin’ perfect.’

  ‘We can all try.’

  He put his free hand around her shoulder.

  ‘God, you’re strict, Willa. But,’ he added, ‘a man wouldn’t want you any other way.’ He laughed a bit. ‘Ah, I know what you mean. Once a woman has made her vows…I couldn’t think of you belonging to anyone else.’

  She moved towards Joanna, who was getting dirty and excited with her handstands, the dress over her head.

  ‘No one belongs to anyone else,’ she said.

  From the time she had been a small child, whenever ill, she’d concentrated so much on feeling sick that, as the nausea came upon her, she lost all presence of mind to get out of bed to vomit. Willa had had to change the sheets twice a night on one occasion.

  But this time she’d made it. Dad was away in the country buying meat, and Mum, hearing her, had got up to hold her head at the toilet bowl. Even though Jo was twelve now she wanted her mother to look after her, sponge her face and give her water.

  ‘Can I get in with you?’ asked Joanna. ‘It’s so cold in my bed.’

  ‘Oh goodness, what a sook,’ said Willa, running her fingers through Jo’s hair. Her one and only. But tucked her up in her bed.

  Jo immediately felt better.

  ‘What’s this novena you’ve been doing?’

  ‘It’s a special devotion we do to Our Lady. We say the rosary twice a day for nine days. “The family that prays together stays together.”’

  ‘And have you done it twice today?’

  Jo shook her head because they both knew she had opted to go down to the shop with her girlfriend after school and with their pocket money buy copious amounts of apple turnovers with ice-cream and questionable cream.

  ‘Would you like me to say it with you?’ asked Willa.

  Jo was doubtful. ‘Do you know it?’

  ‘Of course. I’ve heard you say it often enough.’

  ‘OK. We’ll do the Sorrowful Mysteries. First is the Agony in the Garden, then there’s the Scourging at the Pillar.’

  Willa winced.

  ‘I’ll lead you through it, Mum.’

  Even in the darkness, the woman didn’t allow herself signs of weariness.

  And so they started, with Jo rattling off: ‘Hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus.’

  Like an express train, thought her mother. Aren’t they meant to do it slower?

  ‘Now you do the response.’

  Willa completed the prayer haltingly. ‘Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, Amen.’

  They took a good while because Willa wasn’t used to praying fast. But they persevered through the five Sorrowful Mysteries and by the time they came to the last Glory be to the Father, their voices half muffled under the bedclothes, the repetition of the Ave had lulled them. Joanna thought she would die of love for Willa.

  They rented a beach place near the estuary, just for the four of them. Glistening blue sea and people walking down the street, some of them in bathers. Going on a holiday with your aunt and uncle was different from seeing them at home. Away from town, or its outskirts, anything could happen. They might see a shark. She could ask to have a look over one of those launches and see how you fit beds and kitchen stuff and everything down through that hatch.

  Lately they had all seen less of each other, and Murton Street was like a distant, happy dream to Jo, with its possibilities of mystery beyond the back lanes, with the paddocks full of large black mushrooms and even horses. And the pub with its beer garden where kids were allowed and Hawaiian music was played on electric guitars. And the corner shop where Miss Massey of the suet-pudding face emerged from behind her enigmatic black curtain.

  It was supposed to be better where Willa, Ben and Jo had moved—a couple of miles down the railway line, only a train station away. But to Jo nothing could be better than that large house with the wide dance floor down the middle.

  On the way down to the sea in the old car, Jo and Eve started up all the songs and even Jock occasionally joined in. Had Ben wanted to come? Nah, business to see to at the Railway Arms.

  Willa had learned how to drive. With Jock’s help she’d managed to get an old bomb to take them all out occasionally, as Ben wasn’t allowed to drive any more and in any case had lost possession of the car.

  They sang the fast songs: ‘Everythin’s Up to Date in Kansas City’ and ‘You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun’. Jo and Eve, the singers, liked the fast songs. It seemed to Willa as if Jo was more like Eve than herself: quick and impatient and keen to get places fast. Not for Jo better to travel than to arrive. She liked to get there.

  Eve was got up in one of her after-five dresses, while Jock and Willa wore old trousers and shirts—the three of them might have been headed for different destinations altogether. Jo in her new white shorts and top was dressed as though for a game of tennis.

  Like two bucolic innocents the woman and her brother-in-law sat under the jetty, almost in total silence, murmuring phrases every now and then about bites and baits and skippy, exchanging a word with other fishermen. Their hands holding the lines would never join but the quiet composure of the couple made for an idyll that would do justice to a Corot picture. Was this love, then?

  Jo had a box brownie and pleaded to have her photo taken in jeans and checked shirt, screwing up her eyes into the sun, wielding a large fishing reel borrowed from the cottage owners, since they didn’t own anything so flash.

  Eve did not want to fish but talked graciously with the owners of the cottage and read books. She didn’t wear trousers, like her sister. Alone in the hired weatherboard house she sighed and lit a cigarette, then checked her fingernails and face. Why the hell had she agreed to this trip? A week of smelly fish with Jock and Willa chuckling like a pair of goons over their catch. And not a pub in sight.

  At least there was the wireless and she twiddled the knob until she came across daytime serials. There was a mirror on the wall above the radio and she stared at her face, examined the new lines, found a hair on her chin and clucked quietly in disgust. She was forty-six. She noticed a scrawny look to her arms. Was this how it would be from now on? Had she had her last bout of sex with Jock? Or anyone? If she’d known that at the time (this year or last year?) she’d have made more of it.

  Jock taught Joanna how to bait the hook and cast a line. After ten minutes she caught a large flounder.

  ‘Look!’ she squealed. ‘What is it, Unk?’

  ‘Could be a flounder,’ he said, peering close. ‘Or it could be a mullet, a stunned mullet, like you, Bubs.’

  Her mouth was hanging open.

  He did a rare thing for him: laughed out loud. When he did this it was like a comic strip: ‘Hee-hee, haw-haw, har-har.’ As with any moment of happiness, it was fleeting but just the same they tried to prolong it. Jo, with her skinny brown arms and glasses glistening, imitated her uncle.

  ‘Och, you’re a blether; push your glasses back,’ said Jock.

  Long after midnight, when Ben was snoring soundly, there were sounds of a taxi pulling up and a loud knock at the front door. Willa swiftly put on her dressing-gown so that Jo wouldn’t waken, very matter-of-fact, and went to see to it.
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  On the doorstep stood Eve, dishevelled and spluttering: ‘Enough. I’d had it. Had it.’

  ‘Eve, what is it, hen? What’s happened.’

  ‘I’ve left the bastard.’

  ‘Left Jock?’

  ‘Who else?’

  The younger woman took a funny little case from her sister—it must have been Hal’s school case—and drew her inside.

  ‘What has he done?’

  ‘Nothing. He does nothing. He says nothing.’

  ‘Well, I know he’s quiet. But he does as much as he can, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Oh Willa, it’s driving me up the wall, the silences.’

  Eve sat herself down in the old kitchen and sniffled a bit.

  ‘He’s in his own head all the time. I hate that new house we’re in, little war-service home for couples who are growing old. Respectably. I will not go gently.’

  She was slurring everything and looking about in agitation.

  ‘Is that lover boy, snoring like a hog?’

  Willa said, ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Life hasn’t seemed so much fun since Murton Street.’

  ‘Murton Street,’ Eve mumbled. ‘You know, Sis, I was drunk that night. I never meant to do anything, really…’

  ‘You know what? It doesn’t even matter. What matters is you and me and Joanna. And Jock.’

  The brief sobriety wore off suddenly, as drunkenness can.

  ‘Jock! You don’t know how it is. You think he’s Mr Sweet.’

  She licked her lips and lunged into her suitcase for the bottle of Scotch she’d brought.

  ‘Oh, bugger! It’s been leaking. It’s all through my huh-huh-hankies.’

  ‘Never mind, dear, there’s still a little left.’

  ‘Will you have a wee half wi’ me?’

  ‘I will,’ said Willa, robustly.

  ‘Just a wee one. That’s all there is!’

  ‘Just a Wee Deoch-an-Doris.’ They both sang it softly, looking at each other, Eve with her eyes wandering and blinking, the accumulation of everything—love, fury, whisky, puzzlement—mingling in her bloodstream.

  ‘Tell you what, Sis, I’ll get in with Jo and you take my bed. We’ll see how you feel in the morning, yes?’

  ‘I’ve got my jamas. And I can always suck my handkerchiefs, ha-ha…’

  But she was practically nodding off and it didn’t take much for Willa to hoist the little frame down the hall to her own bed.

  I remember my mother with yards of material on the lounge-room floor, on all fours with her scissors, cutting straight lines. There she is, at the sewing machine. White, firm fingers create bridesmaids’ dresses for cousins: young girls not noticing their aunt’s growing diffidence in the face of youthful hauteur.

  Willa under-charged for the purple horrors and the girls accepted it with a wave and a ‘Thanks, auntie,’ looking at their watches, not entirely delighted, you felt, with the frocks, as though they were somehow lacking in that element of chic so coveted in the fashion magazines. Willa’s worried look made me hate my cousin and her lousy wedding and her poxy bridesmaids.

  ‘They’re not satisfied,’ my mother said, looking after the departing backs.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ I muttered. ‘You should have charged them more; they wanted A-line purple dresses and you made them to order.’

  ‘Oh, well.’ Willa sighed, clearing away threads, putting things back in place in the little room she used for sewing. ‘I did my best. But still.’

  She was maybe thinking of the older sister, mother of the betrothed cousin. That sister, like the others, had not been unduly uppity, or unreasonable. But Willa wanted to please, and for the first time she questioned her competence.

  It’s not that I remember them just now and then. I don’t recall them in any conscious way, the aunts: they are simply in my very muscle and sinew. Three women with pretty legs and grey-blue laughing eyes. Was this the traitor within? Was it in the eyes, something hiding behind there that would give them away at a later time?

  They were full of reciprocal compliments, yet not seeing themselves as objects of beauty, as I did. Self-deprecating jokes and quips about lantern jaws and noses that were too big and difficult hair were lost on me. Generosity of spirit particularly reigned at weddings, funerals, parties. Wakes.

  ‘I love your frock, Sis!’

  ‘Och, it’s not as nice as yours. Did you make it? Voile, I see.’ Rubbing it briefly between thumb and forefinger. The feel of good cloth through the fingers.

  ‘It’s lovely, Sis. So is your hair.’

  The cadence of their voices, the laughter. They were homebodies; they lived their lives gaily and decently, with the occasional indecent act. They didn’t attend public meetings, nor did they worry themselves about political events. Life was too busy, bringing up the children and keeping the home front in good order.

  And organisers with it. In earlier times, because they all lived at some place along the railway line between the outer suburbs and the big city, they made arrangements about looking after each other’s babies according to train timetables. Using one sister as headquarters—the only one with a telephone—or else ‘dropping a line’, they would settle on a certain time, then pass their offspring through the train window to the other, like a bundle of goods, while each one went off to town for essentials, or to buy a new hat. Sometimes they went to town in a group, with one remaining behind to do the child-minding. The homecoming from the trip to town would be a gathering at someone’s house for a cup of tea to collect the bundle.

  The day it happened was the first time Joanna considered her father as a coward. Because he looked big and strong, she saw him as that. On the other hand, her aunt was slight of build but there was about her an indestructible force. That’s how it seemed. She was someone you looked on as formidable on occasion, and the rest of the time as gaiety personified. She was fun and above all she was a force. If any member of her family detected frailty they said to themselves: Well, that’s the way she is, sometimes. None of my business.

  The night before, Willa, Ben and Jo had visited Eve and Jock. The men drank beer quietly, even Ben, by now lapsing into the stage of his life of steady drinking without the bullish impulses. The women drank tea. Everyone was getting older, time or drink, one or the other or else both, taming them. Jo was seventeen. Time—perhaps this was at the heart of it? That Sunday was Mother’s Day and Eve had not heard from Hal.

  Jo was fervent about Sammy Davis Junior’s voice, which was on the wireless at the time. For the first time she and Eve disagreed.

  ‘Mr Wonderful, they’re calling him,’ said Joanna, all enthusiasm, referring to the musical.

  ‘Mr Bloody God-awful, I’d call him!’ said Eve.

  The youngster inwardly shrugged; it was obvious her aunt was a square. And vulgar to boot. Jo, priggish but chary, knew how fiery Eve was and didn’t push it, except to say, ‘I think he’s the best singer around at the moment.’

  ‘Well, I think he sings like shit,’ said Eve.

  Jo remembered an earlier time, the scene of the accordion-playing at the party, and how everything had gone quiet then. Willa was now looking down at her hands.

  Nor did Ben, who usually laughed at Eve, say or do anything. She had a way of leaping into anger and it was a brave person who faced her down. The rudeness was unforeseen—came out of nowhere, we say—but everything comes out of somewhere: perhaps out of the pain of feeling overlooked. Is there anything worse than being held out of count? And how hard would it have been for Hal to send a card? Joanna wanted to know.

  With constraint all about them that not even Willa and Jock’s calm could dispel, and Ben looking bored and restless, they left after a while.

  At the office the next day, Jo’s first job, a phone call came from her father. The girl could hear her workmate answering it, saying she would get Joanna.

  ‘Is it for me?’ asked Jo, pleased to be grown-up enough to be getting phone calls at work.

  But he rang off swiftly
, leaving the message to go to Aunt Eve’s house after work rather than go home. Joanna did not like or understand relayed messages. He could have spoken to her direct. She was uneasy all afternoon.

  Most of the clan were at Eve’s house. There was a hush when Joanna, favourite niece, came in smiling with uncertainty, looking for Eve. Willa’s eyes were red.

  ‘You’re going to have to be…’ said her mother.

  ‘Brave?’ Joanna said. For she knew.

  No one could have really expected too much bravery in the face of this. Jock had woken up in the middle of the night and gone to investigate the strong smell in the kitchen. He found Eve slumped at the gas oven, quite dead.

  I remember that nothing was too trivial to be shared at that table back in 1961. You got everyone’s wish list at morning tea. It was a time to skite about your soft furnishings, new fridge. But if you were eighteen, like me, you simply sat absorbed, not even knowing you were sifting and noting.

  My mother also worked there, in Ladies’ Fashionware on the ground floor, whereas I had scaled the peaks and arrived at giddy office level. We made room for Willa at the table as she came in late, a worried, soft look on her face, walking swiftly with that straight carriage, most of the movement from her hips down, the way she used to dance. I murmured, ‘Hello, Mum,’ and lowered my gaze so no one would see the admiration there.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she said, putting down her cigarettes before going to get her tea, showing dimples that were turning into lines.

  ‘Been busy?’

  I said, ‘Yes, fairly.’

  Even later than Willa came Fiona with her poor clothes and a blue-eyed smile to engulf everyone. Fags were lit and customers’ fickleness gone over. Fiona worked in the basement, packing and loading merchandise for the reps’ station wagons. Work to keep you thin, keep you in line. Yet her gaze was ever outward, always looking to give someone else a boost.