The Midnight Dress(21)

The crows were calling out along the laneway and the city was hazy with heat. She could feel it thrumming – all the carriages and traps and the trams coming down George Street – through her bare feet pressed to the floor. She held the black satin lining in her hands.

Her secret pocket she hid in the seam and she knew, as she placed it there, that he might never find it. She wrote the note in pencil, very simply, and folded it with great care. It was a sack suit, coat and trousers and matching waistcoat in olive broadcloth, all the rage. Double topstitched. Patch pockets. When her father went over the suit, each seam, each buttonhole, each cuff, she held her breath.

‘Very good,’ was all he said, though. ‘Very good.’

Jonathan Baker had decided he would no longer think of Florence Mercier. There were, after all, many other ladies he would meet at the dances. When he collected the suit he didn’t look to see if she was standing in her doorway but kept his eyes on the tailor.

But later, when he found the note, he realised he was very late and had to run. He sprinted out of Lennon’s Hotel onto George Street, shot across the intersection at Alice Street, hurdled the low hedges into the botanical gardens. He didn’t stop running until he saw her standing there beside the fountain, fragile and luminous in the sun.

The parchment-coloured petticoats are unfastened and the dresses lie in an exhausted pile. Rose’s fingers ache from the work and she stretches them out in front of her. The frogs sing in the humid night air. She hasn’t said a single word.

Edie looks at her with a half-smile. She hauls herself up from her chair.

‘You’ve done very well,’ she says. ‘Now the next thing to do is to measure you up. There isn’t much of you, is there?’

She takes the tape measure from the sewing box and asks Rose to stand in front of her. When she sees Rose’s face, she adds, ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

Edie has measured up countless girls, countless women – farmers’ daughters and mayors’ daughters and brides-to-be. Fat women and rickety-thin old ladies, plump young girls she would encase in confirmation dresses and slender belles she would dress in elegant ball gowns – but never in her life has she come across a girl that looked so terrified of a tape measure.

‘What’s wrong?’ says Edie.

‘Nothing,’ says Rose.

The old woman holds up the mildew-flecked tape measure. She lays it against Rose’s shoulder tip and bends down to the floor. Her knees click. She wraps the tape measure around Rose’s waist, her hips. She sees the girl’s eyes are squeezed closed.

‘I suppose they got married and lived happily ever after then,’ says Rose.

She doesn’t like to encourage the old woman, but with her up close like that she has to say something.

‘Well,’ says Edie, who takes the pencil from behind her ear to write down a figure on the back of a brown paper bag. ‘In a fashion, I suppose.’

‘When Florence Mercier saw Jonathan Baker her hand went to her throat. He held her note in his hand and the sight of it made her nearly faint. They walked along the river first, all the way to Customs House, not speaking, until Jonathan Baker couldn’t contain himself any longer.

‘There’s a leaf shaped like a love heart and just as red,’ he said. ‘It’s not the only one. There are leaves like satin and others covered in thorns, there are flowers, purple, yellow flowers, in shapes you could never dream of, some trees drop pods like purses to the forest floor, inside there are seeds like gold, there are fruits so blue they hurt your eyes to look at them.’

He took one from his pocket then, a little blue quandong, dried, held it out to her, placed it on her hand.

Florence Mercier looked into his eyes.

They caught the ferry, crossed the brown river, came back again.

‘There are waterfalls, the big ones that everyone knows about, but others too, smaller ones, secret ones. I could take you there.’

Her cheeks coloured then paled.

‘In the forest there are trees as wide as trams, thousands of years old, and when you look up you can’t see the top and all night you can hear the creeks telling stories.’

‘Is your house right there in the trees?’ Florence asked, her first words, she was trembling.

‘No,’ he said. ‘The house is in a paddock, down below the mountain.’

‘Oh,’ said Florence, and he thought she looked a little disappointed.

‘But I’ll build you a house,’ he said, ‘I promise. I could build you a house there, high among the trees.’

They were by the fountain again, watching their silvery reflections in the water. He reached out and touched the velvety mole on her cheek. It was a bold act, right there in the sunlight, but she didn’t pull away.

‘Yes,’ was what she said.

Edie writes down the measurements, puts them on the table and places the lampshade on top. Rose isn’t sure where the lampshade fits in, it makes her nervous. The first of the breezes comes again, she feels a tendril of it against her neck and she closes her eyes.

‘I better go home,’ she says.

‘Yes, it’s late and you have school,’ says Edie. ‘Are you scared of the walk?’

‘No,’ says Rose. It’s the truth.

‘Good,’ says Edie. ‘There’s no point to being frightened of the night.’