Patty Williams and Fay Baines were sitting at a table in the Staff Canteen at Goode’s on the second Monday in December. They did not usually have their luncheon break at the same time, but with Lisa on the strength it was now felt to be a convenient arrangement as far as the manning of Ladies’ Cocktail was concerned, because in fact this section tended not to be too busy during the lunch hour, ladies, it seemed, who bought cocktail frocks preferring to do so earlier in the day or else, in a rush, much later. So here they were. But it was more convenient for Patty than for Fay as any intelligent person might have observed, for such a one would have noted that Fay’s make-up today covered a very wan reality: her eyelids indicated sleeplessness and her pallor dejection.
‘Is that a new face powder you’re trying?’ said Patty. ‘It looks paler than your usual. I always use the same one, myself. Never changed since I left school. I don’t suppose Frank’d notice even if I did,’ she added, with a modulation of tone which promised worse.
Here it came.
‘I could paint my face green and he wouldn’t notice, not him. Oh well.’
And she pursed her lips, because she suddenly thought to herself, I don’t want to be saying things like that to Fay.
‘The trouble with Frank is,’ she went on, more brightly, ‘he’s got this new boss who he doesn’t get on with. He says he’s too full of himself.’
Ah yes, that was indeed the trouble: it was so much trouble that Frank had disburdened himself of no less than three whole sentences at the Williams steakfest on the previous Friday night, at the conclusion of his first week under the new regime in the Wonda Tiles Sales Department.
‘The new boss is a slimy bastard,’ said Frank. ‘He thinks he owns the place. I don’t know who he thinks he is.’
There was something more specific about his new chief which got on Frank’s nerves and which he didn’t mention to Patty at all, partly because he had not in fact properly acknowledged it to himself: it was something which irritated and in due course infuriated him without his being able to face it squarely and in its entirety. It was that the new boss had placed a large framed photograph of his two sons—a pair of grisly little tykes, eight and ten or thereabouts, Frank would have said if asked—on his desk, his desk at Wonda Tiles! And as soon as the opportunity had arisen, he’d pointed them out to his subordinates.
‘Those are my two sons,’ he had said, bursting with fatuous pride, ‘Kevin and Brian.’ And he grinned broadly.
‘Eh, very nice,’ said Frank’s workmates.
‘Oh, yeah,’ said Frank.
And then as if all this weren’t quite bad enough, in the pub on Friday night the bastard had re-introduced the topic: and stone me if all the others hadn’t joined in with remarks about their own sons and even their daughters. On it went. Suddenly everyone was boasting about their kiddies; and it was all the fault of this smarmy bastard of a new boss. Frank slunk off home to Randwick in a fine sulk, and when he played golf on the Saturday his handicap went to hell.
‘Well anyway,’ said Patty, ‘he doesn’t like him. I don’t know. We can’t always have what we want, can we? He should try working under Miss Cartright for a week, I told him! Then he’d see.’
And having thus returned the conversation to their common ground, she looked again at Fay.
‘Is it the new powder or is it you?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit peaky. Are you feeling okay?’ And an exciting and horrible notion sprang into her mind: could Fay be under the weather? Could Fay be pregnant? She wasn’t eating much: she had a salad in front of her which had hardly been touched.
Fay looked up, slightly distractedly. Her deepest thoughts had been elsewhere. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was out late last night, that’s all. Not enough sleep.’
Oh, really, thought Patty.
Patty’s speculations were as grotesque a version of reality as usual. The fact was that Fay had had a dislocating experience on Saturday night. She had been at a party given by one of Myra’s cronies in a flat at Potts Point and she had suddenly, for no reason, become aware just before midnight that she was wasting her time: that she had in a sense met every one of the men there before, at every other party she had ever attended, and that she was tired of the whole futile merry-go-round. And what was worse than this, much, much worse, was that there was no other merry-go-round she could step onto; it was this one to which she was apparently condemned, whether she liked it or not, and suddenly now she did not, and there was not a damned thing she could do about it: try, try, try again, and die, she had thought despairingly, as she had travelled homewards in the back of someone’s Holden. And despite all that she had met a man who’d been at the party for a few drinks at the Rex Hotel last night as she had agreed to do, and had spent another inglorious evening making conversation with Mr Wrong, and now, today, she felt entirely washed out, that was all.
‘I just need a good night’s sleep, that’s all,’ she told Patty.
‘Yes, well,’ said Patty, and she looked around the room, and she saw Paula Price, who she used to work with in Children’s, who had done well for herself at Goode’s, having now risen to a position of seniority in Ladies’ Lingerie.
‘If you can spare me,’ she said to Fay, ‘I’ll just go over and chat to Paula; I haven’t seen her for quite a while.’
The upshot of this chat was that Patty returned to her Ladies’ Cocktail post via the Lingerie Department on the first floor, because Paula wanted her to see some divine nightdresses which had only just come in: an order which had arrived late but which Goode’s had accepted nonetheless because the stock was so exceptional.
Made in a new improved kind of English nylon which, Paula assured Patty, breathed, the nightdresses came in three different styles, in three different colours, but for some reason—perhaps, simply, because the time had come—Patty, against all the odds, had fallen straightaway for one particular model out of all the permutations on offer. When Patty—thin, straw-coloured and unloved Patty—saw the black improved nylon nightdress with the gently gathered skirt edged in a black ruffle, its cross-over bodice and cap sleeves edged in black lace through which was threaded pale pink satin ribbon, her heart was lost, and without a second’s hesitation her hand went, figuratively, into her pocket.
‘Put it on lay-by for me,’ she told Paula, ‘and I’ll settle up next pay-day.’
Well, it wasn’t all that dear, with the staff discount, after all, and she needed a new nightie; I mean, she thought, when did I last buy a nightie? And she looked at the swimming costumes as well, on the way back upstairs to Ladies’ Cocktail, but she left that for another day: I don’t want to go mad, she thought.