Lisa and her mother were going to the pictures this Saturday evening, too; it was what they usually did on Saturday evenings. Sometimes Lisa’s father came with them; it depended. ‘We’ll wait and see whether your dad wants to come,’ said Mrs Miles to her daughter about half an hour before he was due to come home from the races where he had spent the afternoon and God knew (Mrs Miles never would) how much of his salary. She wiped the working surfaces of the kitchen over once more with a sponge and rinsed it out. Lisa sat at the table.
‘I hope that job isn’t too much for you, Lesley,’ said her mother, looking at her carefully. ‘I was hoping to see you get a bit fatter, now your exams are over.’
‘I’m all right, Mum,’ said Lisa. ‘I’m fine. I’ll get fat in the New Year, after the job ends. I’ll stay home all day and read, and get fat.’
‘That’s a good girl,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘I’ll buy you some chocolate to eat, to help you along.’
‘Oh thanks, Mum,’ said Lisa.
Lisa and her mother had a secret which they had only shared by the fewest of words and looks: a secret and terrible plan had now begun to formulate itself whereby Lisa, should she actually gain the Commonwealth Scholarship which would pay her fees, would in fact, by one means or another and in defiance of her father’s ukase, enter the University of Sydney in the new term. The secret occasionally became present in both their minds at once: it then seemed to hover above their heads in the form of a pink invisible cloud which glowed at its margins, too beautiful to indicate, too frail to name. It hovered now, as each imagined Lesley, Lisa, fatter, stronger, and an undergraduate. First, though, they must each—again secretly, in private and alone—suffer the agony of waiting for the examination results upon which all else depended. Three more weeks of this agony remained.
‘There’s your dad now,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘Let’s see what he wants to do.’
The paterfamilias came into the kitchen.
‘Hello there,’ he said.
He did not kiss them. He stood in the doorway, looking quite pleased with himself, as well he might: his pockets were full of five-pound notes.
‘Did you have a good day, Ed?’ asked Mrs Miles, meaning, did you enjoy the racing.
‘Not bad, not bad,’ said he, meaning, I won over a hundred quid, which begins to make up for the hundred and fifty I lost last week.
‘Will you come out to the pictures with us tonight, Dad?’ asked Lisa. ‘We can see—’ and she gave him an account of the alternative programmes which were showing in the neighbourhood.
‘Oh well, I don’t mind,’ said Mr Miles expansively, ‘I don’t mind. You ladies choose. Maybe we’ll have a Chinese meal beforehand. What do you reckon? Lesley can pay for it now she’s working.’
‘Get away with you,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘Lesley has to save that money. We’ll eat at home. I’ve got some lovely lamb chops.’
‘Keep your chops,’ said Mr Miles. ‘I’m only kidding. The treat’s on me. Go and get yourselves ready, both of you, and let’s be off.’
They ran to do his bidding, almost elated: these moods of good humour were rare enough to be entered into with as much alacrity as gratitude. Lisa put on her pink frock, and looking at herself in the full-length mirror in her mother’s wardrobe thought to herself, it’s not really—it’s not quite—I wish—and realised that without her noticing it at the time, her two weeks at Goode’s had somewhat altered her perception of the Good Frock. Oh well, she thought. I’m just going out with Mum and Dad, it’s not as if—and now realised that all manner of possibilities had started lately to crowd her mind, all manner: that life really was, in all manner of possibilities, truly now and almost tangibly beginning.