The Midnight Dress(55)

She didn’t cry a tear, the old witch, I can imagine she said, or something to that effect: Not a single tear.

But she didn’t see how my mother made that suit. How she spent all day patternmaking and cutting then sewed the whole night. She wouldn’t let me do anything; I just waited, and when it was sent in the parcel at the post office, the word had already spread that the man of the old Baker house had died, been found dead in a park, and that his wife had only asked for his measurements. The women turned away from her on the street. She was served in shops without a single word.

‘Perhaps you should go now?’ is what my mother said to me. ‘Go to a bigger town and learn things your own way. You could get a job as a seamstress anywhere.’

‘I don’t want to leave you,’ is what I said.

In Brisbane I had trouble with my hearing. I was dizzy with all the commotion, the scrape and screaming of the trams and the ferries’ slicing up of the river. I had a little room above a draper’s and each time the trains passed through Central Station the walls shook and the bed rattled. I stayed there for two months and then went to work at the munitions factory at Rocklea. It was boring work, but the women there were good and they took me under their wing. I went to the dances at Cloudland to keep them happy, and I danced with the soldiers. I wrote letters to my mother, but she didn’t often write back. It was as she said it would be.

‘Edith Emerald Baker,’ she said, ‘we have started something here that needs undoing,’ and she pointed to the house that was falling down around us, then she pointed out the window at the mountain. She meant a spell, a spell that place had cast over us, that was what she wanted broken by turning me away.

But these things aren’t easily undone, Rose.

I didn’t marry, although I was asked again, by Peter Hansen himself, who was serving in the navy and actually didn’t look too bad in his sailor suit. Now it was him who ripped my dress. It’s a strange way for someone to ask you to marry them, I know.

I made the dress at Lowood House, which was a hostel for country girls, and there was one old machine on the second floor. I made all the girls’ dresses there. They brought me the fabric and the patterns.

I held the stuff in my hands. The daisy-print voile, the green poplin, which was very popular in those years; I think there must have been whole warehouses, somewhere, filled with it. I held the fabric in my hands and saw other dresses, magnificent dresses, but I didn’t mention them. I followed the patterns and made the dresses they wanted.

I found your material, Rose, in a small shop in Ipswich; I touched it and saw your dress shimmering there. ‘Navy,’ said the girls, raising their eyebrows, when I arrived home. ‘Indigo,’ I said. ‘Unusual choice,’ they said. ‘There’s something about it, that’s all,’ I replied.

I used Vogue pattern number 6601, with the cape collar, of course. Ignored the dress I saw.

I borrowed another girl’s black heels.

Peter Hansen danced with me half the night. He had desperate eyes. He was due to leave in two days. He said, ‘Come outside with me, I need to talk to you.’ So I did.

‘We’ll get married,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow. The chaplain can do it.’

I said, ‘I don’t want to get married.’

He said, ‘Don’t be stupid.’ He couldn’t believe his ears. I went to leave, but he grabbed me by the skirt. That was the first rip, right there. He was always very strong. It’s quite hard to rip silk taffeta, you know. ‘Look what you’ve done,’ I said.

‘Marry me.’

‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said.

‘Who else is going to marry you?’

I went to go inside then, but he caught me and I fell on the grass, which was wet, so that was the top separated from the skirt. Two other men came running when I screamed. I had to go home like that. He drowned, you know, went down with a ship, which I’m sorry for. No one deserves that type of death.

Edie didn’t say that after the war they danced in the streets. She was over thirty by then. She took the Sunshine Express from Roma Street to Leonora, and with each degree of latitude the land unfurled, the moon was stamped low on the giant sky, the towns raced past and disappeared.

In the house there was only silence. Moths flew from the cupboards, shadows the size of birds. Her mother was so small and faded, Edie barely knew her. Florence didn’t have very long to live.

She touched Edie’s face with her trembling hands. ‘Yes,’ is what she said. All she could say was yes.





Cross-stitch





I can’t show you the tree where Paul Rendell hanged himself. There are no pictures of it, not in the Cairns Post or anywhere else. It’s not the sort of thing they display. In the articles, the tree is only mentioned in passing, an extra in the drama, a bit player. A thirty-two-year-old Leonora man was found hanging from a tree branch on the main track to Weeping Rock, it read. The headline was MAN IN MISSING GIRL CASE DIES.

There would be certain criteria for choosing a tree for such a job. It couldn’t be just any tree: it needed to be climbable, it needed the right sort of limbs. In the rainforest, trees stretch themselves all the way to the canopy, thirty, forty, fifty metres, more, before laying out branches. Paul Rendell needed a reachable limb, something sturdy and straight.