Down in the City (24 page)

Quite suddenly she was convinced that her reaction had been right. And the sudden discharge of nervous tension decided her to tell him.

While she smoothed cold cream on her face, Stan was putting his suit away, finding his dressing gown, tying the cord around his waist. She wiped her face with tissues and after several hesitations began, ‘Stan, I was down at Laura's today…' But he had gone into the bathroom. The shower was running.

The door opened. He called, ‘Did you say something? I was just about under the shower.'

‘No! No, I was singing.'

There was an astonished pause, then, ‘Singing?' he said, and added with exaggerated politeness as he banged the door again, ‘Pardon me!'

Thinking of what she had, in a moment of hysterical foolishness, so nearly done, Esther sat paralysed. Then she saw the image of herself caught in the glass—raised hands, tense mouth—and deliberately relaxed.

The moment of shock past, she thought that, after all, she had done no harm. Stan was making a happy commotion in the bathroom, whistling and bellowing. The night outside was clear and bright with stars. The room was homely—untidy, of course, because Stan was in and he always kicked the rugs out of place—but familiar and colourful. She leaned forward to smell the freesias that he had brought for her, and was completely reassured. Their scent was real, tangible. Stan was singing so loudly now that she was sure the McCarthys next door would start to bang on the wall.

She lifted her hairbrush and began to do her hair. Monday lay in cast-iron bands: around it were high fences and warning signs.

It was Sunday and they were in the car early, driving through long miles of suburbs before they came out into the bush: low, grey, industrial suburbs, hills and plains of single-storied houses jammed together, without a tree or a lawn or a flower. The only reds and greens and blues were on advertisements as gleaming, provocative and numerous as the jewels of Aladdin's cave. Such white and yellow, black and gold! Such lines and curves of colour! They were the gardens, the sights, of the suburbs. Children learned to read from them: through them they were introduced to art.

They drove through streets of closed and bolted shops where large cats slept among the softening fruit in greengrocers' windows, and flies walked miles across the pink-icing pastures of Saturday's unsold cakes. Bicycle shops and shoe shops, hotels and cinemas.

It was deserted as no-man's land so early on a Sunday morning: an occasional, monumental, newspaper vendor stood on a corner, his papers and placards grouped round him. Stray children flew zig-zag like swallows across the empty streets.

At last the suburbs rushed away and the shape of the land could be seen again: semi-bushland scattered with farms, vineyards and orchards. Stalls offering eggs and tomatoes and flowers for sale joggled one another at crossroads, and cows grazed in the paddocks. They neared the looming wall of mountains and began the ascent.

The wireless played all the time. Interspersed with advertisements for shaving cream and lawnmowers, on record after record, American voices proclaimed the invincibility of love, love, love. It's the only thing, they said.

Stan joined the crooners. Once, when he heard the lyric properly, he snorted with incredulous amusement. ‘Did you hear that? The poor coot's goin' mad!'

Esther smiled faintly. ‘It's understandable.'

And that really made him laugh.

When they reached Katoomba, on the Blue Mountains, it was disappointingly hot and dusty, covered by Sunday's peculiar pall. Aimless crowds stared and ambled, ate ice-cream and oranges, hung over the railings at Echo Point and cooed their breath away over the vast valley.

‘Isn't it big? Isn't it blue? Wouldn't it be a long way to fall if I pushed you?'

But finding after a time that the valley was too deep, and the mountains too intensely blue, unteasable, not funny, most people wandered to cosier spots where humans could perform against human-sized backgrounds.

‘Dunno,' said Stan doubtfully as they sat in the parked car on the rim of Jamieson Valley. ‘Dunno if we shouldn't have gone somewhere else.' He looked at her.

‘No, I'm glad we came here. It was worth coming just to look over the valley again. It's breathtaking, isn't it?'

‘The Grand Canyon'll be bigger,' he grinned.

The day passed in a slow, hot haze. They drove round to some of the other beauty spots—waterfalls without water at this time of year, precipices complete with legends—and finally had lunch at a hotel.

The heat seemed to increase. Their faces grew flushed. Their clothes stuck to the leather of the seats and Stan cursed because he had forgotten to collect the covers on Saturday.

But in spite of all they smiled, talked, and Stan, at least, was happy. He was profoundly relieved to feel that he was starting again with the past clean, the future unmarred, and Esther was wrapped in confidence caught from his mood.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

A barmaid might want to make extra money. Wait. How did Laura know she was a barmaid? Cassie. She must have asked her friend. At least ten women do assembling work for Stan. She must be one of them. It's quite simple. Yes. But if she is? Why have I come? She will want to know. Stan will want to know. He would have to hear the whole story. He would call it checking-up. It would be much worse than accusing him. Then what?

Stan had left home at eight-thirty and Esther had waited until nine o'clock. Now as she crossed the busy intersection it was nearing twenty past nine. She had walked slowly, allowing herself to be jostled and passed by. But soon she would be there and she had nothing prepared as an excuse, no reason to offer the woman, or Stan. Her thoughts had not gone so far ahead. The necessity for a reason became apparent only now—now when she was almost there, when it seemed equally impossible to go back or forward.

I'd be surprised to find her at home at all at this time, she thought, and the feeling that she was persecuting some innocent hard-working woman increased with every step. Her intentions seemed, this morning, melodramatic, incredible, deceitful, and she wondered how it was, when she had so little desire, that she was borne so inexorably forward. There was a nightmarish quality in the steady clip-clip of her high heels, the sense of being powerless to change the decision taken in a moment of hysteria.

As she turned the corner of Baker Street to reach the main entrance to the towering red-brick building, Stan ran down the steps to the car. Like a slow-motion film, when she turned to the window of a shop, the scene ran again and again. He had been hurrying. She saw the movement of his arms and legs, the familiar bulge of junk in his pocket. She stood very still until at last she heard the sound of the engine starting up and the car moved off down the street, going straight ahead without turning to pass close to her. It disappeared round a corner some hundred yards ahead.

Stan said that he had some deliveries to make first thing this morning: he was bringing her materials. Was he? It's late. It took him a long time. What makes you think he came here first? He had several calls to make.

On a wall of the bare, marbled entrance hall the tenants' names and flat numbers were listed on white cards under glass. Mrs V. Rogers in Number Four. And Mrs Rogers must be in if Stan has just been here…If? You saw him. You said yourself he had deliveries to make. You see how it is. It's all right. Don't go up.

And she said, ‘Four,' and climbed the stairs until she reached a dark door marked with a small figure four. She pressed the bell and waited. Almost at once she heard someone moving in the hall, hurrying, and then the door opened wide.

‘Well? What did you forget?' Vi cried, holding Stan's cigarette case in the air. ‘Oh!' She dropped her hand when she saw Esther. ‘I though it was someone else—a friend. He's always forgetting things.'

‘I'm Esther Peterson—Stan Peterson's wife. May I come in?'

Their eyes locked for a moment in silence, then Vi said, ‘Yes, come in.'

Esther walked into the hall and Vi shut the door. She led the way. ‘I don't go out to work till two on Mondays so I like to have a sleep-in while I've got the chance,' she said, thrusting her hands into the pockets of her silky-cotton housecoat, holding the skirt out in front of her.

As they crossed to the armchairs under the corner windows both women bent their heads at the blaze of sunshine that poured into the room.

‘I am early,' Esther said. ‘But Stan was even earlier, wasn't he? That was his case you had?' Her voice was calm.

Their eyes were inseparable, willed together. While the voices went slowly, haphazardly, to the point, they found immediate contact at the level of the heart.

Vi leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. ‘Yes, it's his,' she said dully, pulling it from her pocket and tossing it on the table. ‘He had a message for me to pass on to one of the boys…Did you see him just now?'

‘Yes.'

‘He see you?'

‘No.'

‘Oh.'

There was a slight pause. Esther balked at the next question, paralysed by nausea. Finally she said, ‘You don't work for Stan, do you, Mrs Rogers? You aren't connected with his business?'

With a look of smouldering anger Vi said, ‘No I don't and no I'm not.'

‘I see.'

Vi looked at her hands, mentally reviled herself for being shaken, hated her unsteady breathing and tried to restrain it, but added attention increased the quivering search for air. Her nerves strained. ‘Why have you come? What's it all about? I think you'd better tell me.'

‘I want to know—what is your connection with my husband?'

‘Do you?' Vi said pleasantly. ‘Your husband.' She stopped and bit her teeth together, looked at the windows. Esther gazed at her face, at her mouth and hair. Turning back, Vi asked, ‘How did you know that there was a connection at all?'

‘He was seen here.'

‘Ah, yes, I suppose he would be…some kind friend…' The response was distracted, stock, as if she were not concerned in the affair. Her whole attention was bent inwards in an effort to control her increasing desire to shout the truth straight out, to tell her all she wanted to know and a lot more besides. She simply said, ‘The connection is that I've known Stan for nearly twenty years. We're friends.'

‘Are you…?'

‘What else do you expect?'

‘I don't quite know. What should I expect? You are an old friend, you say, of Stan's.'

‘That's right.'

‘That's not all, is it?'

‘No, no, it's not,' Vi said with sick intensity, and the words revealed to both the cold abyss of an uncertain future to which they were now, by those words, irrevocably committed.

‘For how long?'

‘Oh, what's it matter? For years, a lot of years.' Vi slumped back and covered her eyes with her hands in a gesture of weariness. There was no exultation in her attitude. After a minute she said, ‘Well, what happens now?'

Esther said, ‘And after we were married?'

Some subtle change of expression, blind, stricken, on the face of the woman opposite her, communicated itself to Vi through some sense other than her eyes. Reluctantly she said, ‘What's the matter? You're not going to faint or anything are you?'

‘After we were married?'

Having expected abuse, tears, even violence, Esther's tight control weakened Vi. It made her tell the truth, called forth in her a certain answering restraint. It became in such an atmosphere as necessary for her to tell as for Esther to hear.

She said, ‘I didn't see him for months.'

In the lack of response there was something that made Vi's head come up. ‘If it's any satisfaction to you,' she said contemptuously. ‘Oh, he tried all right. He's a boy wonder—Stan. Maybe he was having another little try just lately. He was away for just on seven weeks if you're interested. He's back, so I don't care if you know it. And I'll tell you that while he was playing Prince Charming to you, I didn't exist. He dropped me without a message, without a word!' She clenched her fists and leaned forward. ‘But he came back, you see, and he's come back again, and I
took
him back, and I'll keep him as long as I can—make up your mind about that! We're old pals, Stan and me; I know him and he needs me whether he knows it or not. You didn't make him happy.'

Again, a silent warning, an intimation of some shrill sensation like an aching nerve, penetrated Vi's excited fluency and made her end a speech which, having begun to stir the old unvoiced bitterness of Stan's desertion, might have continued for hours without relieving her of all the pent-up jealousy and pain. ‘Well, anyway…' she said heavily, eyeing Stan's wife.

At length Esther said, ‘I thought you were married?'

‘Was. He was killed in an accident two years afterwards. He was just a kid—twenty-two. I was twenty.'

Esther's eyes followed her as she took a cigarette from Stan's case, dropped the matches, stooped to pick them up, lit the cigarette and held it in a hand that shook.

‘Stan could have married you at any time, then?'

Vi blew a cloud of smoke and waited. ‘You've thought of that? He never did. He didn't care to, my dear.' She relapsed into her normal voice. ‘He had bigger ideas.'

Then, as if to disavow her last remark, to cancel it out, she lay back with her eyes closed, her hand rising and falling now and then with the cigarette.

The details of the room in which they sat imposed themselves on Esther's eyes: the polished wooden floor, the pale rug, the green-and-white curtains. There was a photograph of a plump woman in old-fashioned dress beside the midget wireless set.

At the other end of the short hall she could see the pale blue bedroom, the unmade bed. She looked back at the closed face of the woman, the smooth round arms, the soft curves under the blue gown: talcum powder streaked one bare foot whose high-heeled mule had fallen off and lay sideways on the edge of the rug.