At first, Rita doesn’t recognise her. Aunt Katherine is not quite a different woman, but Rita had to look twice to confirm that it was, in fact, Aunt Katherine. For this is an Aunt Katherine that she has never seen before. And neither has Vic, for that matter.
The hair, which always looks as though it has simply settled wherever the wind has blown it, is brushed and combed and tied at the back into a white-and-grey bun. A bun that Rita can imagine Katherine wore when she was a girl, and as a young woman. The sort of bun that women from the age of Queen Victoria would have worn. In fact, Aunt Katherine is a kind of echo of the portraits of Queen Victoria that still hung in classrooms even when Rita was a school girl. And the face. There’s powder on her face, Rita observes (in the light of the hallway where she is standing, staring at Aunt Katherine). And lipstick. And something around the eyes. Not much. Not showy. But just enough to make a different Katherine. Enough to make Rita look twice.
And the clothes. Gone are the dark sacks she always seems to be throwing over herself — or, perhaps, it is always just the one sack. They are gone, and in their place is a long, black skirt, ankle length, and a black, button-up top. Both of which, like the bun that her hair has been brushed into, have the appearance of clothes out of another era. The sort of clothes that women don’t wear any more. But it is clear that Katherine once, on special occasions, wore them, and is wearing them again. They are her clothes, from her era, and she stands before Rita in the doorway like a perfectly maintained and outfitted Victorian lady of a certain age.
And while Aunt Katherine could never have been called attractive, she is what the age that bred her might have counted as pleasantly plain. Modestly so. In short, respectable. Which is the last way that Rita would have described her, until now. And it is a lesson. That people can surprise you. That they have different faces. That people might easily contain people, who contain people, who contain more. And Aunt Katherine may very well be one of those.
For a moment she reminds Rita of those bush women in the stories they read at school, who dress in their Sunday best for no one, and walk bush tracks, promenading for no one, because it keeps them in touch with the way they once were. But Katherine is not dressed for no one. And she is not sad like the women in those stories. Rather, she is impressive. A Victorian lady, with all the authority of her kind, standing on Rita’s doorstep, even a touch of the regal in the tilt of her chin, her face in half-profile. An expression that says she speaks plainly, and will accept no nonsense; the same no-nonsense bearing that once spoke for an empire that isn’t any more. For it has been swept away by the sad and violent years, and only the legacy and the left-overs of it will continue into this post-war world that Vic and Rita are entering, and which Aunt Katherine will not.
And Rita is not sure how long she has been standing in the doorway staring at Aunt Katherine, at this figure that seems to have just popped out of History. And what’s more (and, she knows, ridiculously so) there is a part of Rita that is not quite sure how to address this figure. There is almost an impulse to curtsey. So she doesn’t know how long she’s been staring at Aunt Katherine without speaking, but it must have been long enough, for she suddenly hears Aunt Katherine’s voice informing her in the plain-speaking manner of the Victorian madam that she doesn’t intend standing in the cold all night. And, with the voice, the familiar Aunt Katherine returns.
In the kitchen, Vic, too, is struck by the transformation in Katherine and watches his aunt, as he has never seen her before, sit at the table and delve into a shopping bag she has with her and extract a pair of black leather, ankle-high shoes. Her best shoes. Shoes that she must have had for years and worn rarely, for they are the sort of shoes you don’t see any more, but which look, nonetheless, new. The shoes she is wearing, Vic notes, are caked in the mud of the paddocks, the sodden ground upon which her tent sits, and the dirt tracks that call themselves streets and roads along which she would have walked to get to the station. These shoes she now removes and replaces with her best.
She looks about the kitchen, from Rita to Vic — Katherine: the wild, pioneering woman who lives in a tent on the fringes of the city, who has pitched her tent all over the country, wherever the fancy took her, and always gone her own way, outside of, even indifferent to, society. And Katherine: the complete Victorian madam, from bun to shoes, what the age that bred her might have counted as pleasing while not pretty, even plain, but imposing all the same, carrying in her bearing and manner, and in her upright carriage as she now stands to leave, the full weight and authority of an empire that no longer exists.