The Midnight Dress(38)

‘Do you?’ says Edie. ‘You might be right.’

They sit at the table, and Rose threads her needle and begins practising on her pillowcase. Edie hums beneath her breath. She hasn’t performed her opening of the windows because it’s not yet six o’clock. The house is shadowy, closed-up like that.

‘There was a really big tree, giant – you could fit a whole car through it,’ says Rose.

‘Oh yes, the big tree, the red cedar, there’s hardly any of those left in this part of the world. They came looking for them, specifically, the loggers. That one is a beauty. There are bigger, though.’

Rose looks up from her work.

‘Another place. I’ll tell you about it one day.’

Rose pricks her finger, sticks the tip in her mouth to taste the blood.

‘Shall I tell you the story of my magpie?’ says Edie.

Rose looks at the closed windows and, as if sensing the time, stands with the old woman, who has already begun to tell the magpie story. They open the casements, the cracked and crazed louvres, throw open the door to the coming night

‘Now I was twelve the year Granny Baker died. The house was already falling apart then. My father was never the same after the war, I told you that, you might have heard of such things but to live with it, each day, it was like walking through a minefield. Still. I’m sure there are worse things. The farm fell apart, you see, because he refused to work it, and the more he refused to work it the more Granny Baker blamed my mother. It was all her fault: the ruin of the farm, the ruin of the house, the war, everything. The cane was cut down and not planted again but still grew wild; the big fields filled up with weeds.

The tree that grows through the front steps, well, it was just a sapling then. A big blow came one year and lifted up a part of the roof and carried it away, so we had canvas there instead, waiting for the new tin which my father now couldn’t afford. Sometimes we’d be sitting there, eating our lunch, say, and the canvas would lift with a big wind and let in such sunshine that we all shone like angels, and the clouds rolled over us.

A lot of the weather came in. There were other parts of the roof that had started to leak, you see. The paintings buckled in their frames, and the settees grew mouldy, and sometimes, sitting at the table, you’d feel a little rain, just a sprinkle on your head.

It wasn’t the Depression yet, but already there was a steady procession of men that went past the front gate – swaggies, we called them. Some stopped here, asked for just a little tea. I’d run back up the drive and ask, and mother would measure out spoonfuls into a tin, and some flour, and wrap up biscuits in newspaper. These men always took off their hats to say thanks. Some said little, others more; they told you just where they’d been. Easy country, hard country, wet country, dry country. Country with work, country without.

The year I was twelve Granny Baker had a cough that wouldn’t go away: all night it echoed through the house, she coughed and hawked and choked and gasped. She turned the colour of old paper. Even when she was dying she was full of spite. Sometimes I had to help my mother turn Granny Baker in her bed. She was as small as a child; I could feel the bones beneath her skin. My mother was gentle with her. Always gentle with her in return. She combed back Granny Baker’s hair and made it rest on the pillow like a grey cloud.

Her old chair, the lilac-covered one, well, it was put outside when Granny Baker departed, by Mother herself, and it was the only thing my mother ever did that seemed in defiance. She put it out in the grass, which had grown long by now, as though she were putting out Granny Baker herself from the house. My father didn’t say a thing. He never said a thing any more.

She sat down at the table and wrote a list. She read it out to me: We’ll need this many yards of duchesse satin and this many spools of thread and so much bias binding and so many packets of pearl buttons and this amount of soft tulle . . .

‘That first list is still here somewhere,’ Edie says to Rose. ‘My mother counted the money into my hand and folded the note in half, and I walked into town to buy these things.’

‘I thought you were going to tell me about a magpie,’ says Rose.

‘I am,’ says Edie. ‘Show me how you’re doing there.’

Rose holds up her pillowcase.

‘Not too bad,’ says Edie. ‘Well, I brought home all those yards of satin and those pearl buttons and the makings of veils. My mother went to work sewing wedding dresses. The first were very plain: straight up and down, drop-waisted, which was the style then. Not even any lace at first, but later more: lace she found in the house, along the edges of pillowcases and on the good curtains, which, I might add, had come all the way from France. She made them and I knew she could do better; I knew she could, but I didn’t say anything then, and I didn’t know my talent yet.

That came one morning when she handed me a length of silk satin, just to hold while she was opening up her pin box, and I told her exactly the dress that was sleeping inside. The bride-to-be who wore that dress was standing right there. Her name was Sophia Fanelli, you might go to school with some of them – they’re thick on the ground around here. They always grew big cane, good cane, the Italians, and produce hundreds of babies.

Sophia only died last year. I think she was six or seven years older than me.

She took off her day dress in our kitchen, right here, and I can still see the way her black hair fell against her cheek when she bent down to pull up her stockings. Her breast was milk-white against her yellow petticoat. Sophia Fanelli was very pretty.