Melting Moments Read online

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Books Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Anna Goldsworthy 2020

  Anna Goldsworthy asserts her right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  9781863959988 (paperback)

  9781743820858 (ebook)

  Cover design by Sandy Cull, www.sandycull.com

  Text design and typesetting by Akiko Chan

  Author photograph by Nicholas Purcell

  Cover image Ildiko Neer/Trevillion Images

  For my mother,

  in memory of Moggy

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  The train slows as it approaches the station, and he slides into view. He is not quite as she remembered. A little slacker around the jowls, perhaps, and not as bright of eye. Her heart pounds as she makes her way to the door.

  ‘Ruby!’

  It sounds like a cough. And now he is holding her, with no sign he plans ever to let go. She has waited a long time for this moment, and rehearsed it repeatedly in her head. It is an important moment to get right, for the sake of future retellings to grandchildren, if nothing else. The crowd eddies and swirls around them; she has this man clinging to her, as if she were life itself. After a good amount of time, and then some more, she pats him on the back, and he releases her.

  ‘You told me to pack light, you see!’

  Found accommodation, travel light, his telegram had read, and so she had filled a suitcase with sheets and tablecloths and clothes; a suitcase full of her new life, and his.

  He laughs, heaving the suitcase towards the bus, and she steals a look at his body. It is leaner and more muscled than she left it. More sure, despite the uncertainty in his face. And she remembers their wedding night, two years ago now, or near enough.

  They had fumbled, knowing they were working to a deadline.

  ‘Why won’t it go in?’ he had asked, finally.

  She had been mortified. It seemed confirmation that she was, after all, abnormal. She couldn’t manage this simple task that even her mother had succeeded at, for goodness sake.

  She thought of the bull out at stud with the cows, the violence and conviction of its movements. ‘I think you have to push.’

  ‘Heavens!’ He recoiled. ‘Surely not!’

  And so instead they had cleaved to each other all night, too aroused to sleep, too innocent to do anything about it. And the next day she had seen him off on the ship to New Guinea.

  ‘Be sure to come back,’ she had said. ‘Unfinished business.’

  She blushes now at her immodesty. But for weeks afterwards she had seen the keen, blind angle of his sex everywhere: in the railway crossings, in the bows of the violinists at the Palais. She didn’t know how she would bear it.

  ‘And how was your trip?’ he asks, once they are seated on the bus.

  ‘Everything was fine until Broken Hill,’ she tells him. ‘My godfather! The stationmaster called me in, and wanted to know why I was travelling at these times.’

  Her voice sounds trivial before her husband, this officer in uniform.

  ‘I said, “I’m going to see my family,” and he asked where my family was. And I thought – well, I can’t say I’m going to Brisbane, because that would be flouting the restrictions. So I had to tell a lie.’

  She checks to see how he has registered this fact about his virtuous bride: he is listening intently, betraying no judgement.

  ‘I said I was going to Redfern. It was the only place I could think of!’

  ‘He must have thought you were turning tricks!’

  His raucous laughter speaks of appetite – healthy, undamaged – and she joins in, reassured. She is sitting on this bus with a man she scarcely knows, a man with whom she plans to build a life. And perhaps they will be up to it, after all.

  The apartment is modest, but he did so well to find it that she will not complain. He deposits her suitcase on the bedroom floor, and they stand awkwardly for a moment. She is not quite sure how to launch herself as a wife. There is a marriage to be consummated, but perhaps first she will make a cup of tea.

  It is a relief to move into the kitchenette.

  ‘How have the last two years been for you, dear?’ he asks.

  She laughs mirthlessly. ‘Fine. Just fine.’

  She had thought she would stay in Adelaide, but it had become difficult. Men seemed to be everywhere. Each morning, as she walked into the business college, there would be a flurry of hats removed, of conversations catching in her wake. She felt a little contemptuous – why weren’t they off at the front? But she would still meet their eyes, just to see if they were looking. And they mostly were, and she felt that jolting complicity: that men and women do things to one another in bedrooms. As if she needed to be reminded.

  She went back to the farm, but even here things were not as simple as she remembered. Bobby confided that Father had been making the occasional error of judgement. Only last week she had found a stash of empty gin bottles in the barn, hidden behind a bale of hay.

  ‘Mother seems a little miserable,’ she says now. ‘But I think she was glad of my help.’

  Actually, there had been a strangeness between her and her mother this time. One evening, when she was sobbing on her bed, her mother had come in and taken a brush from the dressing table, and brushed out her hair in long, calming strokes, as she had done when she was a child.

  Surprised by such tenderness, she was prompted to talk.

  ‘I feel like Miss Havisham.’

  Her mother paused. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You know. Miss Havisham, the disappointed bride. Great Expectations. You have the book in the parlour.’

  ‘I do not have any such book. And I do not know what you are talking about.’

  Her mother had put the brush down and left the room, and she had reminded herself not to look for sympathy there.

  ‘Mother’s been working hard with the fowls,’ she tells her husband now. ‘Perhaps they’ll be able to sell that accursed farm if the war ever ends.’

  ‘If it ever does.’

  ‘And what about you, dear? How have the last two years been for you?’

  She is not clear on why he was granted a medical discharge from active service. He never seemed the anxious sort – but she is not sure she really wants to know. She wants to preserve him as the go-ahead young man he was in Adelaide when they went out dancing at the Palais.

  He takes a sip of tea. ‘I don’t know that I care to talk about that just now.’

  They finish their tea, and sit for a while in silence. Then she stands, and moves to the bedroom to make up the bed.

  Somehow he has a better idea, this time, of what needs to be done.
She doesn’t ask why. He is attentive, even industrious, and she is relieved that they have been able to do this thing. That they have earned their status as man and wife. Afterwards he looks at her with such tenderness that she feels a surge of pity, and supposes it must be love.

  ‘My Ruby. My gemstone.’

  He curls into her, and his breathing slows into sleep. And so she is finally a woman, with her sleeping husband in her arms.

  But she finds herself weeping, on this, her first proper night as a wife. She weeps for the two of them, in a bed together in Murray Bridge, wide awake, before New Guinea. She wants to be there again, and for him to be butting up against her, confused and almost delirious with desire, and for the beginning of their married life not to feel so much like an ending.

  PART ONE

  1

  When Ruby first moves up to town, she stays with the Miss Drakes on Prospect Road, on the recommendation of Aunt Marjorie. The Miss Drakes have a horror of draughts, of catching a chill on the kidneys, but the atmosphere in the parlour – with the curtains drawn to protect the furniture – is the closest of all. Occasionally a ray of light steals through the gap, illuminating the cat dander that glitters and somersaults in the air like plankton.

  ‘I’ve been warning you off tomatoes for years, haven’t I, Ethel?’ says the elder Miss Drake, over afternoon tea.

  ‘Tomatoes never used to repeat on me, but now they do,’ laments Aunt Marjorie, who is a fellow office-bearer at the Temperance Union and a frequent visitor to the home. ‘It’s a crying shame, really, because I did used to enjoy a tomato chopped up on my toast in the morning, but those days are well behind me now.’

  Miss Drake takes a final, conclusive slurp of tea. ‘At our age, we have found that regardless of how thoroughly you chew, tomatoes will repeat.’

  Ruby is not sure how old the Miss Drakes are, but estimates they must be at least forty. On the mantelpiece, amidst the doilies and trinkets, stands a framed photograph of a young man in uniform, posing before a trompe l’oeil garden. His legs are bound up to his knees in puttees; the strap of his slouch hat is tight across his chin. He is clasping his arms behind him, so that his belly juts out like a petulant toddler’s, but he is a fine-looking man and Ruby’s eye is often drawn to him. She has never asked which of the Miss Drakes he belonged to.

  ‘We’ve found mutton to be a more reliable offering,’ ventures the younger Miss Drake.

  ‘You can’t go wrong with mutton,’ agrees her sister. ‘I’m sure Ruby can attest to that.’

  In fact, of all the challenges of boarding with the Miss Drakes, mutton is the most redoubtable. Not only the eating of it – although this does require a concerted act of will – but especially the smell. When Ruby first moved in, she would often wake gasping in the night as though drowning in mutton stew. To think she had once been vexed by Mother’s mania for fresh air!

  It is a smell that seems to cling to her, following her on the tramcar to work, so that she now takes a constitutional during her lunch break, rather than risk squeezing into the kitchen with the other girls. Only last week, Isla from the typing pool had whispered something about mutton dressed up as lamb and Ruby had jumped out of her skin – before realising it was a reference to Mrs Wright’s ill-judged attempt at the Mainbocher silhouette.

  ‘Above all, one must take proper time over one’s meals,’ offers the elder Miss Drake. ‘The world’s gone mad. Everybody in a hurry, running hither and yon. No one with the time or care to chew properly.’

  The eyes of all three women alight upon Ruby.

  ‘How are you getting along with that night school? Not overdoing it, are you, dear?’

  ‘I’m getting along well enough, thank you, Aunt Marjorie.’

  ‘She certainly keeps herself occupied, practising her shorthand and what have you.’

  ‘Well, I paid good money for that course, and I’m determined to make the most of it.’

  Aunt Marjorie winks at the Miss Drakes. ‘No doubt keeping busy with those typewriting machines and whatnot.’ As if she knows anything about it.

  On Tuesday and Friday evenings, Ruby catches the trolley bus along Grenfell Street after work, gratefully clasping a ham sandwich in a paper bag. As she takes the lift to Beasley’s Business College, she feels she is ascending to her future. Everything at Beasley’s speaks of modernity: the efficiency of shorthand; the percussive pleasure of typing; the mechanical sweep and shudder of the return key, clearing away the past and making space for the new. And then there is Miss Starr herself, formidable yet chic, emphatically not the sort to dwell upon her own digestion.

  A quiet and orderly office is an effective one.

  In typewriting, as in life, speed follows mastery.

  Ruby transcribes these pithy remarks in shorthand, and then carefully types them out until they have become her own. Afterwards, she catches the tramcar back down to Prospect Road and lets herself into the house. The blackout curtains are drawn, but she always switches off her torch before creeping into the bedroom, where the younger Miss Drake is already snoring. If she wakes up she will likely ask Ruby to help settle her over the chamber-pot, and some nights this seems more than she can bear.

  On her very first evening of night school, Mr Singer had kept her late at the National Mutual even though she had expressly told him she needed to leave punctually at five. So that by the time she arrived at the college, the class had already begun.

  ‘Lateness is the first sign of disorganisation,’ Miss Starr observed.

  A dark-eyed girl in the back row shifted over to make room for her. ‘My name’s Florence,’ she whispered. ‘Florence Lloyd.’

  It would have been rude not to reply. ‘Ruby Whiting. How do you do.’

  ‘No businessman seeks a chatterbox as a secretary,’ said Miss Starr pointedly.

  Ruby had started the course with no intention of making friends, but soon Florence Lloyd is saving her a seat every week, and Ruby finds she enjoys her company. The girl is no beauty, and yet she has a boyfriend whom she talks about constantly, always referring to him as Dale Robinson – never just Dale – as if he were a matinée idol. Sometimes, as Ruby sits in the parlour on Prospect Road of a Sunday afternoon, discussing tomatoes and their propensity to repeat, she imagines the Hollywood weekends of Florence and the glamorous Dale Robinson: tennis parties, cocktails, jazz bands at the Palais. A wonderful life, surely, and on the whole she is glad someone is living it.

  Florence often asks Ruby to join her for a milkshake after class, but there is always a reason not to – some darning that can no longer be put off, or a letter overdue to Mother – until one evening in October, when she has no ready excuse. As they walk towards Rundle Street and into the milk bar, she marvels at the way Florence is able to absorb it all – the office workers hurtling past with their briefcases, the sullen girl taking their order, the soldier kissing his sweetheart in the next booth – with no interruption to her conversational flow.

  Dale Robinson has a dear friend Ralphy Phillips who already has a girlfriend which really is a crying shame because none of our set is the least bit keen on her and Dale Robinson and I both agree that you and Ralphy Phillips would simply be perfect for each other.

  Ruby sucks the cool liquid through the paper straw, which becomes soggy in her mouth, wondering what Dale Robinson could possibly know about her. And yet it is not unpleasant to be so discussed. Absent-mindedly, she catches the eye of a man striding past the window; he winks and tips his hat, and she feels a surge of joy. Here she is, Ruby Whiting from the farm, sitting in a milk bar with a new friend, in a town that finally seems to be making room for her.

  ‘You do get us a lot of attention,’ Florence observes. ‘You should be one of those model girls.’

  ‘For goodness sake,’ Ruby demurs. ‘There are much lovelier girls out there.’

  ‘I don’t know about that. And I have news. Dale Robinson is having a twenty-first birthday party at the Palais on Saturday.’

  ‘How gorgeo
us.’

  ‘And I want you to join us.’

  ‘Heavens.’

  There are countless reasons why she cannot. She has promised Mother she will return to the farm at the weekend to help with the fowls. And she has nothing to wear: only her debutante dress, which she now realises – much as she loved it at the time – betrays her as country bumpkin. Most pertinently, there is no swain, nor any prospect of there being one.

  ‘I still think you’d be perfect for Ralphy Phillips,’ laments Florence. ‘I just wish he hadn’t been snapped up by that Mavis Adams.’

  ‘Did you say Mavis Adams? If that’s who I think it is, her father was at school with my Uncle Frederick.’

  ‘That’s Adelaide for you,’ says Florence knowingly. ‘Just a big country town.’

  A double-decker trolley bus thunders past, laden with office girls and men in suits, as if to prove that Adelaide is anything but.

  ‘Dale Robinson has another friend who wants to come to the dance, and you could certainly do a lot worse. We both think you should go with him.’ Florence leans towards Ruby, grasping her arm. ‘Do say yes, Ruby! I have it all arranged!’

  There is something about the evening – the warm air spilling through the window with its bouquet of asphalt and gasoline; the voluptuous milkshake in her mouth; the silences and sudden laughter of the lovers in the adjacent booth – that inclines her towards recklessness. Back at home, she takes her debutante dress out of the wardrobe and hangs it in the sunroom to air.

  On Saturday evening, Florence and Dale Robinson come to Prospect Road with a man called Eddie Pickworth. It is immediately clear – both to Ruby and the Miss Drakes – that Eddie Pickworth will not do at all, but when she arrives at the Palais she sees a young man sitting across the table, with a serious, broad forehead and a steady gaze. After she has danced with Eddie Pickworth, and chatted to Mavis Adams, and then done her duty several more times with Eddie Pickworth, the young man approaches her, introducing himself as Arthur Jenkins. He has a delicate, pencil-thin moustache, and during the foxtrot, moisture collects there like dew. She feels an unfathomable urge to wipe it dry. When the band plays ‘Embraceable You’, his grip becomes tighter. He doesn’t seem to mind the smell of mutton at all.