The Midnight Dress(53)

‘I know what you’re saying, and I don’t need any of those talks.’

‘Rose.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing, I just like saying your name sometimes.’

‘Well, don’t.’

They’re treading water. That’s what it feels like.

Inside, she opens his sketchbook and moves through the pages. There are no more drawings of Pearl. There’s a fish, a caravan with dragon wings, the drawing of a hand.

‘Not drawing Pearl any more?’ she says by the camp fire.

‘I couldn’t get her right,’ he says.

He shouldn’t have been trying. Rose doesn’t say it; she sits in her canvas chair and begins to reapply black polish to her nails.

‘I think it’s the heat,’ he says after a while, ‘and the rain that drives you a bit balmy here.’

She wants to keep needling him except there’s the sound of high heels on gravel, and Mrs Lamond is coming toward them in her best lycra, her face painted up like a clown. Mrs Lamond comes almost every night now. She brings a thermos and two coffee cups. Her mouth puckers like a drawstring around her smokes. She looks as pleased as punch.

‘How’s that dress of yours going?’ she asks.

‘Good,’ says Rose, standing up; she picks up her backpack, climbs onto her bike.

She keeps her face as motionless as a mask.

‘I’ll stay at Miss Baker’s tonight,’ she says.

‘Suit yourself,’ he says.

‘They’ve started burning the cane,’ says Rose.

From the rusty bike she saw a whole field of it ablaze. The evening air was alive with the chatter of parrots, black ash fell like snow.

‘I saw it,’ says Edie. ‘It’s the McDonalds, they’re fools, go too early each year. We’ve got more rain to come.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Ants,’ says Edie.

‘Okay,’ says Rose. ‘If you say so.’

She opens the windows for Edie then takes her chair at the table.

‘Will the dress be ready in time?’ Rose asks.

Only four skirt panels have been sewn, the rest is in pieces.

‘If we work hard, yes.’

Rose threads her needle to begin on the skirt panels, while Edie takes up the bodice again. She’s making bones from wire coathangers, which she cuts with tinsnips: the wires are hidden inside secret pockets, cotton wool at either end. Rose watches Edie work and is amazed at the deftness of her fingers, which are old and liver spotted and swollen.

‘Did it take long to get over that boy?’ Rose asks. ‘The one you were going to run away with.’

The house creaks, groans, strains. Listens.

‘Yes,’ says Edie. ‘It took a while.’

It seems an unnaturally short answer for Edie, whose stories usually unravelled into the kitchen hour after hour.

‘And?’ says Rose.

‘My mother, she fed me, helped me wash, made me do small jobs, little things like hems and buttonholes. When you’re in love you think nothing will ever be the same, but then the tide rushes out and there it is, everything, just as it was. I didn’t go back to school; my schooling was finished. I’d never felt very good there. I wasn’t really like the other girls. I never was and now I certainly wasn’t. Somehow they all knew, all of them, they whispered it: Edie thought she was going to marry Luke Grace.’

‘Remember the house,’ they would say, ‘the magnificent house, before that dressmaker came and married Jonathan Baker and brought the whole place to ruin.’

My father, it was said, had been spotted from time to time on the roads down south; yes, Mrs Adsett, who had family in Melbourne and went there once every two years for three months, said she saw him near the turn-off to the Goodnight Scrub, thin as a whip, just standing there, swaying in the breeze, and when they stopped the car he peered in as though he’d never seen humans before. Yes, that would be my father. That was exactly how he looked. Mrs Adsett apparently squeezed five bob into his hand, quite a lot in those days, and said, ‘God bless you and keep you safe.’ This was just one of the stories. The judgement was pretty clear: why should my mother sit in the big house and make wedding dresses while her husband was off wandering the countryside, a swaggie?

My mother didn’t take her supplies at Mr Grace’s shop any more; she had to order them from away. At first there were still dresses to be made but not as many from the town. Only one wedding dress in the whole of 1934. It had a rayon underskirt, white lace with matching veil. The sweetest thing you ever saw. We thought the curse might be broken, but it wasn’t. There were confirmation dresses; I could do those myself with my eyes closed. Then they petered out too. Word spread, I suppose.

We made one yellow party dress for Miss Elizabeth Sharp at the beginning of 1935; she was the new schoolteacher from away so didn’t know the town stories yet and saw our advertisement on a card in Hommel’s window. Soon after that it was taken down. She was happy enough with the dress, but hers was the last.

My mother had taught me everything there was to know about the making of a dress. She showed me pintucks and box pleats, she taught me standard yokes and double yokes, and she taught me the many ways of sleeves. We sat all day, every day, sewing. We had a singer treadle then, and when there were no more dresses my mother took a job making ham bags for Olsson’s piggery and also patchwork, she was very good at that. And she could make curtains out of feed sack, and dresses too, so you wouldn’t even notice; she was clever that way and enough to keep us in food. All the while I practised. And all the while the forest spoke to us in the long empty silences of the afternoon.