By the end of her first week as a Sales Assistant (Temporary) at Goode’s, Lisa’s appearance was more remarkably fragile than ever, and her black frock seemed to be nearer two sizes too large than one. Goodness me, thought Miss Cartright as she passed by Ladies’ Cocktail, that child looks positively starved: it’s hardly decent.
‘Have you had your lunch hour yet?’ she asked her later in the day.
‘Oh, yes, thank you,’ replied the child.
‘Mind you eat a proper lunch then,’ said Miss Cartright sternly. ‘You need plenty of food to keep going here. That’s why we subsidise the Staff Canteen, you know, to see that you’re all well fed. So mind you eat a proper lunch every day, Lisa.’
‘Oh yes, of course,’ replied she.
‘Lesley,’ said her mother, ‘I don’t want you eating that canteen food more than you can help. I’m sure it isn’t good for you: you don’t know where it’s been, or who’s been handling it. And it can’t be fresh. I’ll make you some nice sandwiches to take.’
Her daughter didn’t argue, for in fact although she had been pleased by the canteen’s multi-coloured salads and trembling jellies with their tiny rosettes of whipped cream, she found the canteen itself and its clientele melancholy, and that not poetically so. By the end of her first week she had established a routine whereby, rushing up the fire stairs to the Staff Locker Room and changing back into her own clothes and fetching her sandwiches and a book, she was able, having rushed down the same stairs to the street below and up Market Street and then across Elizabeth Street—barring cars, taxis and trams—to Hyde Park, to enjoy forty-five minutes in the embrace of its amorous green.
The weather was now abominably, relentlessly, hot, and she discovered that by sitting to one side or another, depending on the prevailing breeze, on the rim of the Archibald Fountain, she could enjoy its cooling spray as it was blown against her. Sitting thus, her stomach full of the hearty meat or cheese-filled sandwiches cut by her loving mother, her mind full of the anguish of the tale of A. Karenina which she was now very near finishing, she ascended into a state of wondering blissfulness which was induced to a large degree by the sheer novelty of being and acting quite alone: the exquisite experience of happy solitude.
It was while she was sitting thus on the Friday of that first week, her blouse now damp from the spray of the fountain and with but a few minutes remaining to her before she must rush back the way she had come and rehabilitate herself in her black frock, that Magda passed by and, having previously eyed Lisa from the portentous entrance to Model Gowns, hailed her.
‘Ah, Lisa, I think, is it not? My name is Magda—you will have seen me without doubt presiding over our Model Gowns at Goode’s, where we must now—’ and here Magda consulted a diamond watch—‘return, I believe.’
‘Oh yes, thank you,’ Lisa stuttered in confusion.
Magda’s eye swept over her as she rose, gathering her book and her litter. What a tiny and half-made creature this was, who had been proposed to her as an assistant in her Model Gowns—should she need her. As if she might!—but come to think of it, she could be useful for one or two tedious little tasks; and in any case, if she were to spirit Lisa away from Ladies’ Cocktail for a while, it would spite those catty women who had the present charge of her. Well, she would do it, and soon, too.
‘Dear Miss Cartright—she is so elegant, don’t you agree? She has true style, unlike many women I see around me,’ and here Magda cast a great lustrous-eyed glance around her which comprehended everyone within a radius of one hundred yards, and sighed, but with resignation. ‘She tells me I am to have the use of your no doubt excellent services during the next few weeks while I cope with my Christmas rush. Is that not so?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Lisa, ‘I think she did tell me that I was to help you too sometimes.’
‘Yes, well, we shall plan that in the next week,’ said Magda comfortably. ‘In the meantime, I wonder why your back is wet. Have you been sweating?’
‘Oh no!’ cried Lisa, ‘I’ve been sitting by the fountain—it’s just the spray.’
‘You silly girl!’ exclaimed Magda. ‘Do you not know how dangerous is it to sit by a wet fountain in such heat? My God. You will catch la grippe if you persist in this folly. Furthermore, damp clothes are very inelegant. Please do not do such a thing again. The damp is also bad for your hair,’ she added, casting a critical eye at the same, and thinking, I wonder if I could persuade her to go to Raoul, he is the only person in this entire city or perhaps this entire country who could cut such hair. Ah, the people here know nothing. And this child here knows, my God, even less.
They had reached the Staff Entrance and Lisa ran up the fire stairs to change. Magda looked at her retreating figure and began her own slower and briefer ascent in a state of some satisfaction. She was doing arithmetic in her head and reassuring herself that, at the rate she and Stefan were going, they would by the end of the next year have saved enough capital to buy the lease of a shop in Macleay Street or even Double Bay: for Magda had every intention of presiding in time over her own extremely exclusive and exorbitantly expensive frock shop, and the Model Gowns could go to hell.