Four days later, on Friday afternoon, Elsie walked up Mr and Mrs Watson’s garden path and spied Mrs Watson watching her through the window. Elsie stopped, a plate of lamingtons balanced in her hands, and pretended to inspect and admire the blooms of her roses.
After giving her what Elsie supposed was sufficient time to appraise her rose-tending skills, Mrs Watson opened the door.
‘Mrs Mullet! Come in. That sun has some sting to it.’
Gloria Watson, wife of Thomas’s colleague Bert, cut an impressive figure in a lemon-yellow dress and matching low-heeled day shoes. As she gratefully took the plate of lamingtons, Elsie noticed her hands were slender and elegant; a fine gold chain draped her wrist. She shepherded Elsie inside.
Four other women were seated in the living room. They all glanced up as Elsie entered, causing a hush in the murmured voices and a pause in the clink of dainty china cups on saucers. Elsie was suddenly aware that her shoes were a different shade to her dress.
‘Ladies, this is Mrs Thomas Mullet, from over on Church Street,’ Mrs Watson announced. ‘Also, Mr Mullet and Mr Watson work together at Bagnoli’s.’ She turned to Elsie. ‘We’re all so pleased to finally meet you, dear. It’s quite terrible of me not to have made your acquaintance sooner.’ With a promise to fetch more tea, she encouraged Elsie to sit.
Nervously, Elsie perched on the edge of a chair upholstered in a tiny floral print. She took in the other faces in the room; two women looked familiar, two did not. Each woman was tastefully dressed: wool skirts, smart blouses. Rings sparkled on fingers. Elsie smoothed the collar of her blouse, pulled her cardigan tightly around herself and folded her hands in her lap. She smiled.
One of the familiar women spoke up. ‘I believe we’ve met, at the store. Swaffer’s General Store?’ She was small and serene-looking. ‘I’m Bess Townsend – nee Swaffer. The daughter.’
‘Oh yes,’ Elsie said, gushing a little to hide her awkwardness. ‘Of course.’ When had she met Mr Swaffer’s daughter? She didn’t have time to ponder the question, as the other women introduced themselves. First there was Mrs Adelman, wife of a local cabinet maker, broad-shouldered with a crochet hook and yarn whizzing through her fingers. Then Stella Brown, wife of Kenneth Brown, owner of Brown’s Freightlines, huge with child and swamped in a tent-like maternity dress. Finally was Mrs Doctor Leonard Pollock, who refused to disclose a Christian name and instead laughed gaily and said she was so used to going by ‘Mrs Doctor P’, tall and blonde with fine eyelashes and blushing rose lipstick. Local women, wives of good men, hard-working and always smiling.
Gloria Watson returned with another pot of tea and Elsie’s lamingtons artfully arranged on a tray with slices of walnut cake.
‘That’s a gorgeous cardigan,’ she said to Elsie. ‘Is it a handknit?’
Elsie flushed. ‘Yes, I only finished sewing it up this morning.’
‘Is that so? Tell me –’ Gloria set a teacup on a saucer – ‘are you currently attending any knitters’ groups?’
‘Ooh, look out. Gloria’s recruiting,’ Stella Brown said.
‘I run workshops, you see,’ Gloria said, shooting Stella a look that Elsie couldn’t decipher. ‘And I have an opening in my Friday group. You would be welcome to come along.’
Elsie began, ‘That sounds lovely –’
‘Friday group?’ Mrs Adelman broke in with a frown. ‘That’s barely more than a beginners’ class. No, she should be in your Wednesday group. For experienced knitters.’
Gloria gave Mrs Adelman a somewhat strained smile. ‘That class is full, that’s why I’m inviting her to Friday.’
‘Full? Surely not.’ Mrs Adelman set down her crochet hook. ‘Wednesday is where the best work comes from. She’ll be wasted on Friday with a bunch of novices. You can squeeze in one more, surely.’
Mrs Watson seemed disinclined to accede to Mrs Adelman’s proposition. Her face went steely, giving her a doll-like appearance beneath her smooth blonde hair. But almost as soon as Elsie perceived it, Gloria’s ostensible reluctance disappeared.
‘Clare is right, perhaps you would be better suited to Wednesday.’
Elsie looked between them. The ensuing quiet seemed tense, but Mrs Watson gave a delicate shake of her shoulders, brushing it off. ‘Now, Mrs Mullet, the ladies –’
‘Elsie, please.’
‘Elsie,’ Gloria corrected, pointedly. ‘The ladies and I were discussing tips for getting whites bright enough without the sunshine. It was such a cold and wet winter this year.’
‘Very cold,’ Elsie agreed, still uncertain as to whether or not she had actually been invited to one of Gloria’s knitting groups, and if so, which one?
Mrs Doctor Leonard Pollock balanced a plate of cake in her hand and leaned forward. ‘I don’t like to use so much bleach,’ she confessed. ‘But everything was starting to look rather grey.’
Bess Townsend nee Swaffer said, ‘I bleach Tim’s shirts. I couldn’t have him going to work with his shirts looking like that.’
Murmurs of agreement chased each other around the room. Using a pair of sugar tongs, Gloria dropped a cube into her cup. ‘The smell fills the house, though,’ she said, stirring her tea. ‘I have to open all the windows for fresh air, but it lets all the heat out.’
‘Dreadful,’ Elsie said.
‘How do you manage, Elsie?’
‘I . . .’ She glanced between their faces. Admittedly, stain removal wasn’t a topic to which she had ever allocated great amounts of consideration. But the roomful of ladies’ eyes were fixed on her intently, inquisitively, and she felt obliged not to look at all incompetent. ‘I use bicarbonate of soda,’ she offered. Was bicarb a stain remover? A prickle stole up the back of her neck.
Stella nodded sagely. ‘Bicarb. It’s so very useful.’
Elsie breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Discussion continued in this vein for some time. Elsie picked up a lamington and took a bite, and was dismayed to discover that the sponge was too dry. She took a mouthful of tea to wash it down. Gloria had taken a bite and set the untouched remainder at the edge of her plate. To distract herself from a mounting anxiety over her dehydrated lamingtons, Elsie glanced around the room. The floors were spotlessly polished timber, a vase of hydrangea blooms sat atop an upright piano against the far wall. Did Mr Watson go to work at Bagnoli’s and talk about how perfectly his home was kept? Did Thomas come home and make comparisons? Elsie made a mental note to pick more flowers for arrangements. And to learn to embroider doilies.
The topic moved on to children, with Stella’s newest arrival due in a matter of weeks. Gloria proclaimed her relief that her own children were almost in high school and she herself (in her thirties, she whispered) was too old for any more. Mrs Adelman’s two young girls were actually here today, but had been banished to play in the backyard. Effusive approval was given of how well-behaved (read, quiet) the children were. It was a credit to Clare Adelman’s mothering skills.
‘A credit,’ Elsie agreed.
‘What about you, Mrs Mullet? Will we hear the patter of little feet from Church Street soon?’
‘Oh, I –’
‘Speaking of which,’ Gloria vigorously picked up her cup, ‘did you hear about the Talbots’ eldest daughter? Seems she’s disappeared from school for the past three months.’ Her statement was met with four sets of pursed lips. Knowing glances were exchanged. ‘I heard Cynthia Talbot telling Mrs Potts that she’d gone to stay with a cousin in Queensland somewhere, to do some nanny work,’ Gloria said.
‘I heard it was a cousin in Newcastle,’ Mrs Adelman put in.
‘There is no cousin.’
‘Of course there’s no cousin – the girl’s in a delicate condition.’
‘Fancy that.’
‘What shame. Her poor parents.’
‘Poor? Ha! Clearly money doesn’t buy morals. Girls these days. I’ve seen her driving around in cars with boys more than once.’
‘No good can come of that.’
‘None indeed.’
‘What’s becoming of the world?’ Stella tutted, smoothing her dress over her bulging middle. ‘The rejection of honest Christian values.’
‘Oh, I know.’ Mrs Watson set down her cup with a ching of consternation. ‘These young women, so loose with their morals. They think they’re so modern but they have no idea about life. No idea what it takes to keep a husband, to raise a good family. The hard work and the respectability of it.’
‘And this contraceptive pill they’re talking about, mark my words –’
‘Threatening the institution of marriage! The very fabric that holds our good society together –’
‘Precisely. If this so-called medicine becomes available, it will only encourage fornication.’
Fornication. Elsie repeated the word in her head, enunciating each syllable. She liked the way it sounded, curved and forbidden. For-nee-kay-shun.
‘Honestly, I don’t know what these women continue to complain about. We can vote, we can own property – what else do we need? Let the men be men and the ladies be ladies. Why confuse things?’
There were murmurs of agreement, but Clare Adelman was shaking her head, slowly. ‘That marriage bar has to go. It’s completely outdated that a woman shouldn’t work just because she gets married.’
To her own surprise, Elsie felt her head inclining in a nod of agreement.
Gloria rolled her eyes. ‘It’s only a silly public service rule. Nobody’s really stopping a lady from finding other kinds of work if she has to.’
Bess laughed. ‘Like old Mrs Johns who still makes and sells all her cheeses, because her husband drinks his pension within two days.’
‘See what I mean? Women have everything they need. But these girls going around with boys . . .’
Elsie felt a strange, conflicting pull deep inside. While the women gossiped back and forth, part of her relished the banter – recognised it as the harmless, hushed, everyday conversation she’d grown up with amongst her sisters and mother, and later her girlfriends and colleagues. And these women were right – girls today were so much freer than her parents’ generation. And it was causing a tear in the moral fabric of society.
But.
For the first time since her wedding, Elsie allowed herself to feel wistful. She missed the office; she missed the satisfaction of a day’s work well done – of solving problems, of her speed and accuracy at the typewriter, her infallible positive countenance in the face of the most irate or odious instruction. But equally as swiftly, she snapped a lid over those feelings. She was a married woman; she would be a proper housewife. Like these women, Elsie would prepare nourishing and perfect meals, the washing would always be hung out smartly to catch a full day’s sun – even her flawless typing could translate into a flawless, stain-free bathroom. Surely.
Elsie missed Thomas. He wouldn’t be back until Sunday afternoon – at least forty-eight hours away. It seemed so long.
It was the descent of drawn-out silence that finally broke Elsie from her inward reverie. When she looked up, four faces regarded her expectantly.
‘I’m sorry,’ Elsie said, ‘could you repeat . . . ?’
‘I was enquiring after the house next door to you and Mr Mullet,’ Gloria said. ‘Is it still empty?’
The flash of a face in the window, looking out at her. Had she imagined it? Or was Elsie a terrible neighbour, as Mrs Watson had called herself, for not making acquaintances sooner?
The women were waiting for an answer.
The house next door was always quiet, its window dark and revealing nothing. But it wasn’t empty – Elsie was sure of it. An empty house is lifeless, an unoccupied shell. This house was quiet, yes, but it was the quietness of an indrawn breath, the laden pause between uttered words.
Without knowing why, Elsie lied.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I believe the house is empty.’
*
Elsie slept late the next morning. Without a husband to cook breakfast for and begin the day with, she let herself doze for a while before she rose, dressed, and made herself a piece of toast with honey.
When she had finished eating, she went into the backyard to feed the chooks. They had bought the chooks earlier in the week. Four hens on the point of lay, who would lay four fresh eggs every day for their breakfast.
‘Here, chook chook!’ she called, shaking a tin of grain. Inside the small yard, three hens surrounded her feet.
‘Where’s the other one?’
Elsie checked the nesting box, but the fourth hen wasn’t there. Then, she spotted a brown lump on the far side of the pen, on the outside of the fence. Elsie dropped the grain and rushed out of the pen.
The hen lay in a pile of russet feathers. Her comb was a bloodless grey and her beady eyes were unblinking, her breast barely rising and falling against the sand.
Elsie squatted down. ‘Oh dear, how did you get out?’ Unsure what to do, she slipped her fingers beneath the hen and tried to lift her to her feet. The chicken gave a weak gurgle and slumped back to the ground.
‘What’s wrong?’ Stricken, she cast around at the other three hens, who all seemed healthy, scratching at the grain in the dirt, safely inside the fence. She hadn’t even given them names; they were going to do that together when Thomas came home from Melbourne tomorrow.
Elsie’s heart pattered helplessly. She considered calling for the vet, but knew it was pointless. The hen was beyond help and the vet would cost too much.
She would have to put the chicken out of her misery.
Elsie crossed the yard to the garden shed and searched the dim interior until she found a shovel. She carried the shovel back to the chook yard and then dropped it, horrified. What was she going to do – bludgeon the chicken to death? Bury it alive?
Elsie trembled. Internally she scolded herself: this is not how a housewife behaves. For heaven’s sake, she told herself, we eat chicken for dinner.
Elsie pictured her mother, out on their small farm at the edge of town. Valiant and aproned and formidable, ducking out to perfunctorily kill and pluck a chicken for their meals and returning to the kitchen with barely a blood spatter on her apron, gripping a pale, pimple-skinned bird by the legs. Alice Rushall had always seemed so busy. Elsie and her sisters had been constantly scolded for getting under their mother’s feet, getting in her way, and shooed outside to collect the eggs or feed the pigs or muck out the horse’s stall and whatever they did, they were not to bother their father. But Elsie and her sisters had wanted to do none of it. Her older sisters read ladies’ magazines and housewives’ manuals and dreamed of husbands and houses of their own in town. Elsie had grown up listening to Rose and Lila fantasise about evenings at the drive-in, swishy full skirts and scarlet lipstick. Their futures would contain nothing that smelled of animal shit or anything that, before it became dinner, first required them to kill it.
Spoiled, she had been, and sheltered. A girl who had a future of newfangled conveniences like refrigerators and grocery stores springing up around her parents’ small farm like beacons of modernity.
And besides, Elsie thought now, she couldn’t eat this bird. Clearly the hen was sick, suffering from some unknown hazard that would make eating the animal unsafe.
Elsie wrung her hands. The bird gave a slow blink into the dirt as she tentatively touched its body. Again she considered the discarded shovel. She longed for Thomas to be home.
‘Snail bait, I think.’
Elsie shrieked and spun around.
Standing with her hands clasped before her was a young woman with the most striking green eyes Elsie had ever seen. One foot was placed further forward than the other, as though she had hesitated mid-step and decided not to come any closer. A floral shift dress hung shapelessly over her body.
‘Oh, hello,’ Elsie said breathlessly. ‘You gave me a fright.’
‘Sorry,’ said the woman with a fleeting smile. ‘I’m Aida. I . . .’ she pointed at the house next door and trailed off.
Yes. Elsie remembered the face. The flash of it from behind the curtain. ‘It was you,’ Elsie said. ‘In the window.’
The young woman stared at her, almost sizing her up. Thick, dark eyebrows framed those startling eyes and her cheeks were full and clear. She had sleek, straight black hair parted-off centre and pulled back loosely behind her neck. Elsie tried to guess her age – she couldn’t have been older than twenty.
‘You’re Elsie,’ Aida said. ‘And Thomas, your husband – he’s away.’ She cleared her throat and shrugged her shoulders. ‘I hear you talking, sometimes – the houses are so close together.’
‘Aida,’ Elsie repeated. ‘It’s nice to meet you.’ She wiped her hand on her skirt and held it out. ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been around to visit, to be honest I didn’t even know if anyone lived there. Is your . . . husband home?’
Aida dropped her gaze to the hen in the dirt. ‘She ate the snail bait, I’d say.’
Elsie looked from the sick hen to the vegetable patches where indeed the pale green pellets of the snail bait she had scattered around the lettuce seedlings were visible amongst the mulch.
‘I didn’t realise they’d eat it . . .’
‘Chooks will have a go at almost anything.’
‘What should I do?’
‘Not much you can do,’ she said, gently. ‘She’ll die. Humane thing would be to make it quick for her.’
Elsie hesitated. ‘I’ve never done it before.’
Aida looked up at her again and Elsie felt strangely caught in the weight of those green eyes. Aida squatted next to the forlorn bird, her hair rolling forward over one shoulder. Slowly, Elsie sank alongside her. With steady fingers, Aida caressed the hen’s silken feathers before lifting her into her lap. She ran her hands over the bird, murmuring to her quietly, and Elsie watched the hen soften and relax. There was something hypnotic about the steady, assured strokes of the woman’s fingers. Tingles wound up Elsie’s spine.
With a snap, Aida deftly broke the bird’s neck.
Beneath the gum tree, Elsie dug a hole in the sand. Aida fetched a clean towel and wrapped it around the hen’s limp form before lowering it into the hole.
Together they scraped dirt over the body. Elsie’s skirt was scrunched around her thighs and gumnuts dug into her knees as she pressed the earth flat. More than once her fingers touched Aida’s, gritty with sand. Matching crescents of dirt formed beneath their fingernails.
Straightening, Elsie brushed off her skirt. ‘Thank you,’ she said. It was the first words they’d spoken since the hen’s execution.
‘You’re welcome,’ Aida said.
*
By 11.30am the following morning – Sunday – Elsie felt aimless. There was hardly any washing to do with her having been alone for two days, so she had washed the sheets again, and hung them out in the sun. She had mopped the tiles, vacuumed the carpets, dusted all surfaces and scrubbed the bathroom to a gleam. Again.
In the kitchen, Elsie waited for the kettle to boil and glanced at the clock. Thomas had said he would be home around four. She drummed her nails on the counter, ran her finger around the rim of her teacup. Perhaps she could call in on one of the ladies she had met at Mrs Watson’s? Clare Adelman seemed nice. But then she remembered it was Sunday – those women would all be busy with their families: children racing about, grandparents visiting, elaborate Sunday roasts being prepared.
Slowly, she made a cheese sandwich, cutting the cheese into even slices, buttering the white bread with care. Carrying her teacup and plate into the living room, she settled into her chair by the window, set down her tea and sandwich, and picked up her knitting.
She took her time. Sip, swallow, sigh. Bite, chew, swallow. She tasted the creamy cheese and the fluffy nothingness of the bread. The needles clacked rhythmically, the yarn slipping across her little finger. Eventually, she let herself check the clock again.
11.57.
‘Blast it all,’ she said, tossing her needles down. ‘You’re being ridiculous. You’re not bored – you have plenty to do.’
Striding down the hall, she pushed open the back door and hurried down the steps. On the washing line, the clean sheets were still a little damp, flapping limply in the breeze. Although still comprised mostly of weeds, the grass showed a greenish tinge now that it was being watered and mowed. The small patch of vegetables had a dubious, tentative aspect, but she hoped with time (and more chook poo, if she could keep the chooks alive) the garden would become productive. The three remaining hens scratched purposefully in the sand. After the loss of the hen yesterday, Elsie had frantically picked up every little pellet of snail poison she could find, but she was too afraid to let them loose in the garden.
Returning to the kitchen, she made a dramatic show of washing her dishes. Water gushed noisily into the sink, the bottle of detergent let out an urgent, wet blurt as she squeezed it. She tossed the cup into the water then cursed as she withdrew it from the suds without its handle. Dripping suds across the freshly mopped floor she threw the cup into the bin. She fished the broken handle out of the water and discarded it. With more care, she ran the sponge over the plate.
When she looked out the window, she was surprised to see the curtains at Aida’s kitchen window had been drawn open. In her mind, she kept replaying the deft, gentle stroke of the young woman’s hands across the hen’s feathers, the swift and assured tug and crack of the bird’s neck.
Elsie swallowed dryly and looked away.
*
‘Oh, bugger it.’
After she had slid the lump of butter into the flour, Elsie realised she was supposed to melt the butter first. Never mind, she thought, poking the slippery mound. Surely it would still mix together.
With some difficulty, she managed to rub the butter through the flour to make a bowl full of crumbs. With greasy-floured hands, she cracked one of her hen’s speckle-shelled eggs into the bowl and fished out a shard of shell before adding sugar and a large handful of chocolate pieces.
Fashioning the crumbly dough into neat balls wasn’t as easy as promised in the Women’s Weekly. Elsie frowned at the magazine propped open on an upturned saucepan on the bench and dragged the back of her hand across her forehead, leaving a gritty smear. The chocolate pieces didn’t stay glued in the mixture – they kept falling loose and lolling onto the tray annoyingly, looking like dead beetles. Elsie picked them up one by one and pressed them back into the balls of dough. That would have to do.
A sense of satisfaction finally overtook her when she slid the trays into the hot oven. She washed her hands and strode to the bedroom to change. Pulling open the wardrobe, she deliberated for a few minutes before selecting a sunny yellow above-the-knee dress with a white collar. She brushed her hair, dabbed rouge on her cheekbones and touched perfume behind her ears.
Back in the kitchen, she was quietly thrilled by the sweet, homely waft of baking. The biscuits were not as flat and round as she would have liked, and as she set them onto racks to cool a cascade of crumbs shed onto the bench, but they were home-baked biscuits nonetheless.
*
Elsie gripped the warm container and stepped out the kitchen door.
The sun was high in the sky and musk lorikeets rioted in the trees. Her heels sank into the earth. After hesitating at the invisible centre line between the houses, she decided to approach the front door. Politeness should abide despite the familiarity offered by the recently shared euthanasia of accidentally poisoned poultry.
Elsie walked along the narrow strip between the two houses, climbed the front steps and knocked on the door.
Silence came from inside the house. Insects clicked and whined in the grass; she could hear the lowing of cattle in the distance. A fly hovered around her ear and she swatted at it, before knocking on the door again, with more force.