The Midnight Dress(63)

‘Big night?’ asks Mrs Lamond, when he is outside taking down the clothes line.

He doesn’t answer.

‘Leaving just like that?’ she says.

‘Just for a week or so, might as well see the top end while it’s dry. Can you keep some stuff here for me?’

‘You’re already six weeks behind,’ says Mrs Lamond. She’s speaking quietly, but there’s a tremor in her voice, like she might explode. If she builds up speed with her words, she’ll disintegrate.

‘You know I’ll make it up,’ he says, knowing this.

He leans forward, touches the locket at her throat.

‘I thought,’ she says.

‘What did you think?’ he says, gently.

It takes her a while to answer. She’s like a schoolgirl now, embarrassed, tears in her eyes.

‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she says.

He gives her the sketchbooks. A pile of art books, his paints.

‘Stuff that’s important to me,’ he says.

‘Don’t want to lose any of it’, he says.

‘Elaine.’





Rose doesn’t confront Paul Rendell on the day she burns down the hut. She does exactly as Edie says and goes home to the caravan. Her father isn’t there. His fishing gear is still gone. Everything is the same as she left it that morning, the beautiful morning for climbing, only the day is now ruined. She pulls the curtain around her little bed. The flames jump inside her. She can’t smell the mountain on her skin, only ash. She closes her eyes and covers her face with her hands until she sleeps.

‘Tolstoy,’ says her father at half past six.

She doesn’t answer him.

‘What’s up? You sick?’

‘I’m okay,’ she says.

She doesn’t confront Paul Rendell the next day either, the Monday; she doesn’t leave her bed. She lies, curled in a ball, blazing.

‘I’m getting worried now,’ her father says.

Truth be told she’s not afraid of walking up to Paul Rendell and punching him in the face; it’s not about that. She doesn’t want to go into town in case she sees Pearl. The newsagency and Crystal Corner are only three doors apart. Rose doesn’t know what she’ll do if she sees Pearl. Her true emotions might be unleashed: she might spontaneously combust, right there and then, or there might be a tsunami of tears. She’s not sure which. It’s safer to stay on the bed.

But by Tuesday the smouldering ruin of the house has cooled inside her. She sits up, plaits her hair. She paints on her eyes, her lips, puts on her crucifix, her shirt with the devil riding a horse. She takes an apple to eat on the way.

She rides the bike into town, against the afternoon sun, to the Blue Moon Book Exchange, even though she knows he won’t be there. Old Mrs Rendell watches her walk up and down the aisles of the newsagency. The bamboo-print curtain to the exchange is pinned back, so that Mrs Rendell can see inside, and there’s a new sign: PLEASE LEAVE ALL BAGS AT DOOR.

‘Back again,’ says Mrs Rendell, when she catches Rose’s eye.

Rose tries to think of something to say. She looks at Mrs Rendell, who raises her eyebrows.

‘How’s your dress coming along, then?’ says Mrs Rendell.

‘It’s good.’

‘How’s Miss Baker?’

‘Good,’ says Rose.

‘Funny old thing that she is,’ says Mrs Rendell. ‘Harmless enough, I suppose. She had one of the Hansen boys wanting to marry her when she was well past marrying age, but she turned him down, you know, and then he went and died with the war.’

Rose sees the ripped dress, the magpie, the sky.

‘My mother always said beggars can’t be choosers. I was fortunate, of course, lucky when I found Mr Rendell Senior, there never was anyone else. Did you know there was also once a story that Edie’s old mother, Florence, was a dabbler.’

‘What’s a dabbler?’

‘A dabbler in the dark arts,’ says Mrs Rendell.

Dark arts sounds stupid when Mrs Rendell says it. It almost makes Rose laugh.

‘I thought she made wedding dresses,’ says Rose.

‘Oh, she did, all right, but all the while she was up to other stuff, running around the rainforest half-naked.’

That does make Rose laugh. Mrs Rendell looks shocked; she fans herself a little harder.

‘Anyway, were you looking for something, love?’

‘No,’ says Rose. ‘I was just . . .’

Old Mrs Rendell raises her eyebrows again: she has her proof the girl is there to nick something.

Rose walks back onto Main Street and stands in the sun; she looks across to the park. Perhaps she’ll sit in the shade there and see if he passes that way, coming home from a shift perhaps; she isn’t sure of those times. Her stomach growls and she places a hand there. She’s about to step off the footpath when a cane train grumbles past, wheels wailing, in a diagonal across the street. She counts forty bins raining stalk. The street is full of the stuff. She bends down to pick up a piece that has landed near her foot, and when she stands again he’s there.

He is with another man, older, bearded; they’re talking.

‘Paul,’ she says. It’s a foreign word. Like a stone in her mouth.

Paul Rendell laughs. He is going to ignore her.