Fay Baines was twenty-nine if she was a day, and Patty Williams wondered if she might not actually be thirty, and that wasn’t all that she wondered. For whereas Patty had Frank to talk about, albeit there was virtually nothing to say (“Frank played golf on Sunday”), and beyond that her house (“I think I’ll have loose covers made for the suite. I want a new vacuum cleaner”), to say nothing of her mother (“It’s Mum’s birthday on Friday; we’re all going over Saturday”) or her sisters (“Dawn . . . Joy”), Fay Baines talked about nothing but men.
It was chronic; this one and that one, going out here, and there, and all over the place, with Tom, Dick and Harry. And was there any sign at all that any of them might be thinking of marrying her? Not on your life. Patty sometimes wondered if Tom, Dick and Harry, not to mention Bill, Bruce and Bob, were all quite real. After all, the woman was thirty if she was a day.
In any case it wasn’t quite nice, when you came to think about it, because Fay lived by herself, all alone in a flatette near Bondi Junction, apparently; so there was no one, like a mother, to keep an eye on things and make certain that Fay didn’t go too far, which Patty suspected she just might do, being at least thirty-one, or at any rate no spring chicken, and obviously desperate, not that anyone wouldn’t be in her situation, but anyway men took advantage, being interested in only one thing; unless they were Frank.
She aired all these cogitations to Joy, Dawn and their mother, omitting the rider about Frank, and they all agreed, eating sponge cake at the kitchen table while the children ran about Mrs. Crown’s small back garden, if one might so dignify a rectangle of couch grass and a spindly gum tree with an empty old rabbit hutch next to it.
“She should share a proper flat with some other girls,” said Mrs. Crown, “like Dawn used to, before she got married.”
“Yeah, no thanks to you, Mum,” said Dawn, somewhat heatedly.
There had been the most awful row about that move out into the world: Mrs. Crown had accused Dawn of all sorts of evil desires and intentions when Dawn had announced that she was leaving home to share a flat with two friends, when all Dawn had wanted was some privacy. How her mother had carried on! Now she was talking as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Typical!
“Well,” said Mrs. Crown, cutting herself some more cake, “times change, don’t they?”
“No,” said Joy in her irritating way, “people do.”
“Anyway,” said Patty, “Fay Baines should share a flat and not live alone, if she cares about her reputation. That’s my opinion. What would a man think, a girl living all alone like that?”
And the four women sat and reflected for a moment, envisioning exactly what a man would think.
Fay Baines, pace Patty Williams, was in fact twenty-eight years old, an SW with a tendency to become a W if she didn’t watch herself, and while Mrs. Crown and her three daughters were indulging in their impertinent speculations, eating cake the while, she was sitting in an armchair crying into a small white handkerchief. It was one of a set of four which she had been given, all folded in a flat gold cardboard box, by one of her admirers.
When she wasn’t crying she was a handsome girl, with wavy dark hair and large innocent brown eyes, and she was fond of cosmetics, which she applied quite copiously, especially when going out.
“You look good enough to eat,” Fred Fisher had said, the first time he came to pick her up.
When they got home again he did begin to eat her, or as near as makes no difference, and she had had her work cut out fending him off. Then he called her an ugly name and left in a temper. This was the sort of thing which happened to Fay, who never seemed to meet the sort of man she dreamed of: someone who would respect her as well as desiring her; someone who would love her and wish to marry her. Somehow the sight of Fay was not one which inspired thoughts of marriage, and this was grievous, for Fay wished for nothing else: which was natural, everything considered. Meanwhile men were forever getting the wrong idea, just as Mrs. Crown and her daughters suggested they would.
Fay was pretty well alone in the world: her mother, a war widow, had died some years ago, and her brother—who was married with two children—lived in Melbourne, where once in a while she visited him. But she did not get on with his wife, who in Fay’s opinion gave herself airs, and these visits became less and less frequent.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” said Fay to herself, “try, try, try again.”
Someone had written this on the first page of her autograph book when she was in her teens and it had made a lasting impression.
Fay, wanting to be a showgirl, had had soon to settle for being variously a cigarette girl and a cocktail waitress during her late teens and early twenties; and when she was twenty-three she had met Mr. Marlow, a rich and middle-aged bachelor. Two years later he had given her £500 in cash and told her that he was going to live in Perth and that it had been wonderful knowing her. She had stayed in the solitary flatette, now no longer essential, out of sheer inertia; forsaking the rackety life of the cocktail waitress with its peculiar hours and large tips she had gone to work in a dress shop in the Strand Arcade. There she had made the acquaintance of Mr. Green, a frock manufacturer; when he suddenly announced that he was getting married she as suddenly forsook the Strand Arcade with all its memories and went to work at Goode’s, where she had now been for just over eighteen months.
The men she saw these days were a rag tag and bobtail collection of faces from her livelier past, blind dates organised by her friend Myra Parker (comrade and mentor since Fay’s nightclub days), and men whom she met at the parties to which she was taken by Myra, or by the rag tag and bobtail. And the £500? That was in the bank. She intended to splash it all on her trousseau, when the time came. Sometimes, as now, she found herself crying, because the time was so long in coming that she could fearfully suspect that it might never do so, but after a while, when her hanky was all used up and sopping, she dried her eyes, washed her face and lit a Craven A.
“If at first you don’t succeed,” she told herself, “try, try, try again.”
She was a brave girl, like most of her compatriots.