The Women’s Pages Page 19

  ‘See? September. The twenty-third of September 1942.’ And she laughed and cried. All this time she’d thought the worst and there’d been a mistake. The goddamn army had made a mistake. ‘How can he possibly have died in July when this letter arrived in September? He’s still alive, Cooper. Talk to the Americans. Find him. Talk to the army. Tell them this isn’t true.’ And when she looked down at the envelope in her hands, she saw it was shaking.

  Then Mary came forward and before she could sweep Tilly into her arms, everything went black.

  ACT TWO

  1,000 lost on torpedoed prison ship

  The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 October 1945

  Chapter Nineteen

  Tilly woke to the sound of voices in the flat. It was Archie and their children. A girl and a boy, the pigeon pair they’d always wanted. They had been christened Elizabeth and Donald, but as soon as they’d been brought home from hospital they were Betty and Don. Two years apart, as close as two siblings could be. Don adored Betty and Betty cared for her little brother as she might a new puppy. That wasn’t to say she didn’t grow impatient with him sometimes—when he cried, she would stomp about the house with her hands over her ears—but when he was happy, she could make him laugh like no one else could. Betty was a sweet-natured little miss with the prettiest blonde bob, and Tilly knew that first thing in the morning it would be unbrushed and unruly and, without the barrette pinning it away from Betty’s eyes, falling in her face like a pretty wave. And she just knew Don would be spooning Weet-bix into his mouth with such great haste that he would have dribbled droplets of milk down his flannelette pyjamas that Archie’s sister-inlaw had sent as a Christmas present all the way from Myer in Melbourne. Don had been named after Bradman and he was already obsessed with the game, just like his three cousins who’d taught him how to wield a cricket stump for a bat the way the real Don had when he’d been a lad.

  ‘Someday I’m going to play for Australia at the Sydney Cricket Ground, Dad,’ Don had called to Archie one sunny Sunday afternoon as he’d waved his bat around in the street, answering Archie’s deliveries with a belt right into the neighbour’s front yard. And as for their oldest? When Tilly had asked Betty what she wanted to be when she was a grown-up, Betty had tilted her head and looked at her parents as if the answer was so obvious they should have known all along. ‘Why, I’m going to be a lady reporter like Mum, of course.’ And she and Archie had turned to each other and shared a look that only parents who look at their children with pride and wonder can understand.

  The sound of her children giggling was one of the most precious things on earth to Tilly. If she could have bottled that sound, she would have, snatched it up in a pickling jar and lifted off the lid when they were grown just to be transported back to their childhoods for a moment, to remember their innocence, their laughter and their complete adoration of their mother and father.

  As Tilly stretched in the comfort of her warm bed, she listened to the soundtrack of the early morning in their comfortable, light, airy house. Outside her bedroom window, birdsong chorused from the fruit trees in the backyard, already plump with peaches and nectarines. From the street, there were only footsteps because it was quiet and lined with jacarandas, a home for people and more birds and dogs walking their owners, and not the traffic of newly purchased automobiles. From the kitchen, the kettle whistled as it boiled on the stove. Archie would have poured himself a cup of tea, black with two sugars, while the children ate their breakfast.

  And then, when Tilly could no longer bear missing out, when she was bursting to see her children and clutch them to her, to smell their soapy cleanliness and feel the tickle of their silky hair against her cheek, she put her feet on the floor and without even pulling on her dressing-gown, opened her bedroom door and walked down the long hallway to the kitchen, as if she were floating on clouds.

  When she pushed open the door, there were four strange people sitting at the table staring wide-eyed at her.

  It wasn’t Archie and Betty and Don.

  The northern sun streamed in through the window overlooking Orwell Street and Tilly blinked at the glare of it. Slowly, she found her focus. It was her mother, her father, Mary and George Cooper. They were staring at her as if she had a head wound or some other horror they could barely face, their mouths agape, their eyes hooded, their mouths pinched.

  And then she remembered. Where she was. Who she was. What had happened and how it had happened. But she would never be able to answer why.

  Her dear father, crumpled, wincing in pain, slowly stood, pressing one hand flat on the table to support himself. He held out an arm. ‘Your friend here from the paper got a message to us this morning.’

  When he beckoned her, she went to him and his strong arm around her was safe and familiar and she wished she didn’t need it. Then her mother crushed her into her embrace and sobbed into Tilly’s shoulder. Tilly was so sorry for them in that moment. They had lost a future, too. It should have been filled with a happy daughter and a sonin-law they loved and Betty and Don. Her grief was theirs now. Their hearts would harden and crack just a little, and they would look back on this day too and realise they had been a little bit broken by Archie’s death, that they would always feel the pain and sorrow of their eldest daughter as if it were their own.

  Tilly lifted her chin, held her mother closer in the crook of her neck, and looked over at Mary and Cooper. Mary’s eyes were puffy and red, her shoulders were rounded and tired and she was still in yesterday’s clothes. So was Cooper. He still had his tie on, although it looked as if he’d been yanking at it; it hung around his neck like a present’s discarded ribbon.

  Her parents slowly released her and Elsie reached up and smoothed her fingers down Tilly’s cheek. Tilly could barely feel the contact. What had happened since they picked her up off the floor the night before?

  ‘I gave you two of my sleeping pills, Tilly,’ Mary said, as if she’d read the question on Tilly’s mind. Or had Tilly actually asked it out loud? ‘I wouldn’t normally but they’re from a doctor. A proper doctor, and I thought that with—’ Mary stopped.

  ‘We thought you needed to sleep,’ Cooper said.

  ‘Thank you.’ Tilly’s tongue felt thick and furry and her own voice sounded far away, an echo. She tried to lift the corners of her mouth to smile but she wasn’t sure her lips had made the right shape.

  Mary stood, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to her eyes. ‘I’ll get your dressing-gown. You must be cold. Why don’t you sit next to your mother and we’ll make a cup of tea?’

  Every limb felt as thick as tree trunks and when Tilly stared down at her outstretched fingers, she saw fat pork sausages.

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Tilly?’ Elsie hovered behind her as if she feared she might fall out of her chair.

  ‘What time is it?’

  Mary reappeared and draped Tilly’s pink chenille dressing-gown over her shoulders. Tilly lifted her arms and slid them through the sleeves and Mary leant in to tie the knot at her waist. Elsie pressed Tilly into a chair and Tilly looked at the things on the table, as still as in a photograph. There was an ashtray filled with ash and cigarette stubs, some stained with lipstick prints. A pack of cigarettes she recognised as Cooper’s Woodbines. Cups and saucers. The crumbs from a fruit cake on a plate. A bone-handled knife with a smear of margarine on its serrated edge. A crust from the black bread she’d bought the day before. And in the middle of the table a newspaper was spread out. The words moved and spun and Tilly glanced across the table at Cooper. He turned it around towards her and pushed it closer. She read the headline. It was only a small story of eight paragraphs, on the top right-hand column, dwarfed by an advertisement for household goods next to it. As if the deaths of Archie and all those other people were less important than refrigerators and washing machines and electric home cleaners.

  Cooper watched her read it.

  ‘Did you write this?’ she asked.

  He shook his head. ‘I haven’t been back
to the newsroom.’

  And from the fog in her head the memory emerged anew of what she’d asked him the night before. Tell me everything. ‘You’re still here?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Are you hungry, love?’ Elsie asked. Two warm hands gripped Tilly’s shoulders. ‘We have some cake. Or there’s toast. You should eat something. It’ll make you feel better.’

  ‘Just tea, Mum.’

  Elsie bustled to the stove. Tilly heard a match strike and a cupboard open and close.

  Someone was missing.

  ‘Where’s Bert?’

  ‘He’s gone out,’ Cooper said quickly and at the sink next to Elsie Mary’s back stiffened. ‘Do you remember what I told you yesterday? About Archie?’

  Did she remember her own name? Who she was? Every injury she’d ever suffered came back to her in a lightning-fast catalogue: a burn on her forearm when she was ten and cooking porridge on the wood fire at Argyle Place. A skinned knee when she’d toppled over running down Hickson Road behind one of the McCartney boys on their billycart. The needle pricks on the pads of her fingers when she was learning to sew with her mother. The sprained ankle when she’d jumped off a tram too eagerly on Pitt Street in her new work court shoes and then the pain of hobbling into work. The day Archie left for the war. They all inflicted hurt in varying degrees. But this pain at knowing Archie’s fate was numbness. A raw emptiness. It wasn’t painful, at least not yet.

  ‘I remember what you told me. About the Montevideo Maru. About Archie and Canberra.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Galloway.’

  The dam had been breached and Tilly could hear it in her father’s inhalation of breath. She knew then that they had been waiting until they could be sure she remembered that Archie was dead.

  ‘It’s a bloody crime what they did.’ Stan slammed his big fist on the kitchen table and the cups and saucers and the ashtray and the empty cake plate shook and clattered. ‘It was a prisoner ship. They torpedoed it. In cold blood. All this time … three bloody years it’s taken them to get the Japs to tell the truth.’ His giants fists clenched on the table like gnarled tree roots.

  Stan’s words hung in the air. His breathing, already laboured before his exhortations, rasped.

  ‘I know,’ Tilly said finally, and she reached for her father’s hand, her small one on his, and she felt like a child again, marvelling at the giant of a man she was lucky enough to call her father. ‘I know.’

  Tilly tried to make sense of everything. Was there a relief in knowing the truth? She couldn’t think about that yet. Archie was gone and there had been no funeral and there would never be a grave she could visit, nor anywhere to leave flowers, to sit and talk to him when she needed to bring him back to life.

  What a futile waste. She’d been writing to a dead man for years. What had happened to all the letters? All the food parcels she’d sent through the Red Cross to Rabaul? What was she to do now with all the jumpers she’d knitted for Archie that were neatly folded in the camphorwood chest in her room, ready to wear and keep him warm when he’d returned home?

  All the days that had been snatched from him. All the moments that make up a life. A summer breeze blowing puffs of wind into the sails of boats on the harbour. The waves at Bondi. The giddy licking of a dog on the walk home with an ice block in one hand and a fresh loaf of bread in the other. The first rose of spring. The first Ashes Test of the summer and every cricket game forever. The birth of a child. A baby’s cry. Its first steps. The sun on his face. The soft touch of his wife’s hand in the night.

  And then there was tea and toast and silence and an unspoken understanding that Archie’s death, and the loss of so many others, had been a tragedy and that no one, none more so than Tilly, would ever get over it.

  Chapter Twenty

  The previous Sunday, a letter had arrived for Tilly, delivered by one of the copyboys from the paper, who’d walked all the way from Pitt Street on his gangly legs.

  Reggie had doffed his flat cap and said solemnly, ‘A letter from Mr Sinclair, Mrs Galloway. And these.’ He’d presented her with a bunch of pale white roses, as pretty as anything Mary had ever picked from the gardens of Potts Point, and Tilly had held them to her nose and inhaled their scent. She’d even managed a smile for the young lad. And then he’d added on his own behalf, because Tilly had always been the copyboys’ favourite, ‘We’re all so very sorry to hear about your husband. Damn those Japs.’

  And she’d thanked him and closed the door and put the blooms in a jam jar and set them on the kitchen table. She’d propped the letter against the jar and studied the looped handwriting. Right away she had been able to tell that it hadn’t been written by Mr Sinclair—it was far too neat—and she’d supposed it was most likely scribed by Miss Northcott, the woman who’d taken on Tilly’s job when Tilly had been promoted to reporter. Miss Northcott was a mature woman, bright and efficient, and apparently gave no quarter to the men in the newsroom, which Tilly had decided was an attribute worth celebrating.

  Mrs Galloway.

  The letter was still there on the kitchen table, a week later. It wasn’t the kind of war souvenir she’d wanted to tuck away with Archie’s letters and the telegrams from the army, so once she’d read it, she’d left it be, staring at it every morning as she’d sipped her first cup of tea of the day, studying the handwriting on it as the flowers slowly wilted, until Mary had thrown the stiff stems away and replaced the dead blooms with fresh ones.

  Tilly set the kettle on the stove and went to the sink while she waited for it to boil. The aluminium was sparkling and she almost saw reflected in its shine the grieving hands of her mother, who believed in cleanliness almost as much as she believed in the power of a union. There was no godliness in her heart any longer, so she sent all that hope to another form of collective action. Tilly wondered if having a belief would have helped her get through the loss of her husband. Would it be easier if she believed in a higher power, a purpose, a plan? While the idea of being reunited in the afterlife was one that might provide comfort to a believer, Tilly thought it was an awfully long time to wait. She was thirty years old. She might live another fifty years. Four years had been hard enough to bear. What would another fifty do?

  Outside, the sun had risen, as it had done every day since Archie had been killed, as it would go on doing every day. Mary would no doubt tell her that the sun shining down on Tilly was a sign from God, that he was sending her his love and guidance after her bereavement. For a moment Tilly wished herself a cat so she could curl up in it and sleep forever.

  On the street below, life continued and Tilly watched over it from her eyrie as she’d done every day for the past week. Couples walked arm in arm along the footpath; children skipped gaily ahead of their parents, pigtails bobbing and skinny legs dancing; and cars slowed along Macleay Street looking for a park. She had grown to know the rhythm of the street since she’d lived there. Tomorrow, when the working week began, deliveries would be made to the butcher across the street, and sides of lamb would be lugged inside by men with shoulders as wide as the front doorway. Gentlemen in need of haircuts would come and go from the barber’s shop in the bottom of the building and when they stood outside smoking, the smell of their tobacco and cigarettes would waft into the kitchen through its open windows. When the sun set, the Roosevelt would fill with people celebrating love, that evening’s romance or the end of the war—perhaps all three at once.

  And all over this city and the entire country, widows and grieving families would be waking, drinking tea and trying to make it through another day.

  The boiling kettle shrieked and Tilly lifted it from the stove. While the tea brewed, she fetched her cigarettes and matches from her handbag beside her bed and tapped out a cigarette in the light of the window. She put it between her lips and went to strike a match but was distracted by the flapping wings of a magpie on the kitchen window ledge. She stilled. Its head bobbed and it looked through the window at her, its white beak opening in a song
that trilled its way through the glass and right through her. She wondered what the birds in New Guinea were like. Had Archie longed for that peculiar Australian sound of the warbling magpie—the oodle-ardle, each bird trilling its different lifelong song? Were the birds in the jungle as exotic as she imagined, with plumes of deepest crimsons, iridescent emerald greens and glittering opaline blues? Had Archie been able to cast his eyes over such beautiful things in the jungle when he was held captive, or had all the birds fled with the fighting, as skittish of gunfire as a flock of pigeons in Hyde Park were of a handclap?

  The magpie took flight. Tilly’s match went out and she put the cigarette back in its pack. For the first time in four years, she’d lost the compulsion to smoke.

  She sat and sipped her tea, finding the silence in the flat comforting. Since she’d found out about Archie, it had been full of so many people. She and Mary had spent so much time alone, just the two of them, passing time, wishing the days away until the war ended and now it had been full to bursting almost every day with the two of them, Bert, Bert’s sister Irene from Newcastle who had caught the train down to see her brother and had stayed overnight Wednesday on the settee, and Tilly’s parents who had stopped by three times in the past week. On Friday afternoon, the women reporters had stopped by with flowers and a basket of homemade jam and mustard pickle and a batch of scones baked just that morning by Vera Maxwell but the women hadn’t stayed very long, which Tilly found to be somewhat of a relief.

  No one had asked directly, but Tilly knew what they were all thinking: how on earth have you not been driven mad by the knowledge that your husband has been dead all this time?

  She was a reporter after all and was fully aware that it was a very good question. If she’d had the answer, she would have told them. Was she going mad? She didn’t think so, or at least, if she was, it had started so long ago and had been so incremental that she hadn’t realised it.