Mrs. Williams was a little, thin, straw-coloured woman with a worn-out face and a stiff-looking permanent wave. Her husband Frank was a bastard, naturally. He had married her when she was only twenty-one and he a strapping healthy twenty-six and why they had failed to produce any children was anyone’s guess, but here it was ten years after the event and still she was working although the house was now fully furnished, furnished within an inch of its life in fact, and there was no particular need for the money, which she was saving up in the Bank of New South Wales, not knowing what else to do with it, while Frank continued to give her the housekeeping money which as a point of honour she spent entire, buying a lot of rump steak where other people in her situation might have bought mince and sausages, because Frank did like steak. She would get home from Goode’s (they lived in a little house in Randwick) at about six o’clock, and take the steak out of the fridge. She did the vegetables and set the table. Just before seven Frank would get in, slightly the worse for drink: “Hooray!” he would call on his way to the bathroom. There he would wash vigorously, and by the time he stomped into the kitchen–dining room the steak was sizzling.
“What’s for tea, Patty?” he would ask.
“Steak,” she said.
“Steak again,” said he.
Whenever she tried to give him anything else, even lamb chops (“There’s no meat on these things,” said Frank, waving a bone in front of him), he complained. Mrs. Williams didn’t care; she’d lost her appetite years ago. At the weekends she visited her mother or one of her sisters; Frank drove her there and fetched her, and while she was “jaw, jaw, jawing” he played golf on the public course at Kingsford or drank in a pub. He was a bastard of the standard-issue variety, neither cruel nor violent, merely insensitive and inarticulate.
Patty had in fact consulted a physician about her childlessness and had been assured that her own equipment was in perfect order.
“Of course,” said the physician, “we cannot investigate this question properly without seeing your husband. The fault may lie there; indeed it probably does. He may even be sterile.”
“Gee,” said Patty, overwhelmed. “I don’t think he’ll come at that.” She couldn’t even mention the subject to him.
“How often do you have intercourse?” asked the physician.
“Well,” said Patty, “not that often. He gets tired.”
The fact was that Frank’s attentions were desultory. The physician regarded his patient with some despair. It was too bad. Here was a woman well into her childbearing years with no baby to nurse: it was entirely unnatural. She had lost all her bloom and was therefore not likely to attract another man who might accomplish the necessary; so if her husband failed to come up to scratch her life would be wasted. It was too bad, it really was.
“Well,” said he, “just keep trying. Conception is essentially a tricky business. Maximise the chances as much as possible; you’ve got plenty of time yet.”
She was thirty when this conversation took place and, as she left the surgery, the physician looking idly at her back view thought, she’d clean up quite well with a new hairdo, some paint on her face and a black nightie; but the husband probably wouldn’t notice, the bastard; and in this assumption he was probably correct. Frank worked in the sales department of the great roof-tile company whose varicoloured wares were at this time so enticingly displayed in Parramatta Road; drank with his mates every night after work in a pub near Railway Square and then went home to Patty and his half pound of rump steak. After that, and watching Patty wash up, and a few frames of television, which had only recently arrived in the Commonwealth of Australia, he lumbered off to bed—“Think I’ll turn in”—where Patty—“Okay, dear”—followed him. She lay beside him in a blue nylon nightdress and soon she heard his snores.
The vacant child’s room, painted primrose yellow so as to cover either eventuality, waited in vain for its tiny occupant, and Patty, in a state of unacknowledged and unwitting despair, went on working at Goode’s, this year as all the previous years, until she had a baby on the way.
“I don’t understand it, I really don’t,” said her mother, Mrs. Crown, not to Patty but to Patty’s sister Joy.
“I don’t think Frank’s up to much,” said Joy darkly.
“Oh, go on,” said her mother. “He’s a fine strapping fellow.”
“Looks aren’t everything,” said Joy.
“I don’t understand it, I really don’t,” said Mrs. Crown.
“Never you mind,” said Joy.
Joy was younger than Patty and already had two; Patty was the one in the middle; their elder sister Dawn had three. There was obviously nothing wrong with the Crown breeding ability. Joy thought Patty never should have married Frank. In the meantime, when she wanted something special, a party frock for example, Patty got her the staff discount at Goode’s by pretending that the frock was for herself, which it obviously wasn’t if you were looking, because it was an SW and Patty took an SSW, but no one ever noticed.