You can’t be too careful, Cherry Bates thought that afternoon as she pushed the net curtains to one side and peered into the square. After the darkness of Miss Neville’s house, the only two-storeyed building in Jingera apart from the hotel, the harsh sunlight of the late afternoon hurt her eyes. The square outside was empty. It was time to make a quick getaway, as if she was some criminal rather than the wife of jovial Bill Bates the publican.
Absorbed in watching the square, she didn’t see the woman and child walking up the hill until they were almost at the war memorial. The woman was slight and pale. A purple hat partially concealed her cloud of curly fair hair. She seemed to have a firm hold of the little girl’s hand, as if the child might run away unless restrained. A rather brown little girl, in a brown frock, with brown skin and curly dark hair, but with such a pretty face.
‘That must be the McIntyres’ new tenants,’ she said, ‘out for a stroll.’
‘Who?’
‘The McIntyres’ new tenants.’
‘Ah, you mean Mrs Talivaldis and Zidra. I met them last week. The girl’s starting school soon.’
‘You didn’t tell me.’ Cherry moved closer to the window. ‘The woman’s wearing a purple hat, Miss Neville.’ Although she’d known since the day she met Miss Neville three years ago that her Christian name was Pat, she never called her that. At first she’d felt it sounded too familiar. Later it had become a joke. ‘Cloche hat. You must have a look, and she’s the sweetest little girl.’
Miss Neville laughed but didn’t move. ‘Purple hat be buggered,’ she said. ‘And I’ll be seeing more of the “sweetest little girl” in my bloody classroom before long.’ Miss Neville liked to swear a bit out of school. Never in the classroom though; she’d soon lose her job if she did that.
Cherry giggled. She liked the hardbitten way Miss Neville talked when there was just the two of them. She watched the sweetest little girl and the purple hat wistfully. Her own clothes always seemed so dowdy and drab, and she’d give anything to have a daughter to look after. Bill would make a lousy father though and she couldn’t afford to leave him. Never a shilling to call her own and Bill would have to die before she had any money. ‘Over my dead body,’ he’d said when she’d asked to be paid for the work she did in the bar.
Turning from the window as the purple hat and the little girl entered the post office, she looked at her reflection in the full-length mirror attached to Miss Neville’s wardrobe door. Face not too bad for someone who was closer to thirty than twenty, but her hair was looking a bit over-bleached and it had been a mistake to have that perm. Her eyes skimmed over her naked body – small-waisted, small-breasted – before glancing at Miss Neville’s reflection. Sprawled on the unmade bed that was rumpled from their love-making, she was blinking short-sightedly in Cherry’s direction. On the bedside table lay her glasses and her short dark hair, usually smoothly combed, was dishevelled.
Cherry felt a catch in her throat. There was something deeply moving about Miss Neville and her clothes, or lack of them. Naked, she was like a different person, as if she threw off her outside personality with her garments. These now lay higgledy-piggledy on the floor where they’d fallen half an hour before, whereas Cherry’s were in a neat pile on the chair next to the bed, waiting to be put on. Cherry walked over to the bed and smoothed down Miss Neville’s hair, which felt soft and silky. So dark were her eyes that it was hard to distinguish iris from pupil. Cherry ran her forefinger over Miss Neville’s finely cut nose, and traced out the line of her brow. Although now she looked far younger than her thirty-four years, in the smart clothes she wore for teaching she always seemed older.
Taking hold of Cherry’s wrist, Miss Neville pulled her down onto the bed, and kissed her on the mouth. Feeling her limbs grow heavy and the resolve to leave fading, Cherry gently pushed Miss Neville away and stood up. ‘I wish I didn’t have to go,’ she said. ‘But Bill will kill me if I’m late. You know what he’s like.’
‘A right proper bastard. I don’t know why you don’t leave him.’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? Nowhere else to go.’ She laughed, to show she wasn’t serious. After all, she could always go back to Burford to live with her mother in that shabby little fibro cottage on the river flat. She certainly couldn’t move in with Miss Neville, not that she’d ever asked her to. It was all very well saying she should leave Bill but they never talked about what would happen then. There was no place for the likes of them, apart from in Sydney or Melbourne, but the suggestion for them to leave Jingera together would have to come from Miss Neville.
From the chair she took her knickers, part of a matching set of cream silk underwear that Miss Neville had given her last birthday. Miss Neville remained lying in bed but she put on her spectacles for the next stage of the performance. Without needing to look, Cherry knew she was watching her dress. She always did; that was one of the many things Cherry loved about the school mistress.
After fastening her bra in front of the mirror, she smiled at her reflection. Bill didn’t know about these underclothes. He’d lost interest in her years ago. She’d been devastated by that neglect until she’d met Miss Neville. Now she was glad he left her alone. Now she felt revolted at the thought of the act of love with her husband. And revolted too by the sight of him, although everyone else seemed to think he was good-looking and good-natured. Everyone, that is, except for Miss Neville.
Cherry turned from the mirror and picked up the pale blue dress from the chair. She watched Miss Neville’s face as she stepped into it and slowly did up the front buttons. Leaning over her lover, she kissed her tenderly on the mouth. ‘I’m the luckiest woman in the world to have met you,’ she said.
‘Oh shit, Cherry, don’t come over all weepy on me.’ All the same, Miss Neville looked pleased.
Cherry fastened her shoes before giving Miss Neville another kiss. After retrieving a lipstick from her pocket, she repainted her mouth a bright red. Her nose would have to remain shiny. Next the usual routine: clattering down the stairs, peering out of the kitchen window to make sure there was no one in the yard next door, creeping out the door and through the gate leading to the narrow lane behind the houses. An excuse was ready if she met anyone, but so far no one had ever noticed, let alone asked what she was doing. If they did, she’d tell them how she was learning French. ‘Je veux parler Français,’ she would say. ‘Je veux parler Français.’
Miss Neville had taught her the French word for every part of the body and had promised to teach her some verbs next. Cherry started to hum; she couldn’t remember knowing such happiness as this. If only she’d met Miss Neville ten years ago at sweet sixteen; if only she’d met her before being swept off her feet by Bill Bates.
But when you came to think of it, she’d been extremely fortunate ever to get to know Miss Neville at all. They might have just continued passing one another in the town, nodding and smiling, for years. It was sheer luck that they’d both happened to be in Burford on that Sunday afternoon nearly three years ago. They’d met at the bus stop and cemented their friendship as the bus trundled along the winding road between Burford and Jingera. Just as they were descending the last hill into Jingera, Miss Neville had invited Cherry to afternoon tea. After that, there had been no looking back, although it had been some months before they’d become lovers. An unlikely friendship, Cherry always thought, between the barmaid and the teacher. And not one that Bill could approve of. He thought Miss Neville was too bossy, and that bossiness might be contagious, like chickenpox or measles. If he knew what she was really like he’d approve of her even less. So would everyone else in town. Corrupting the morals of our kids, they’d say. Just as they’d said all those years ago when she was at Burford Girls’ High School when Mr Ryan, the maths teacher at Burford Boys’, had got thrown out of his job and the town because he was a poofter. The humiliation if people found out about her and Miss Neville would be impossible to bear. Bill said she cared too much for appearances but it was all very well for him, he hadn’t been brought up with his dad beating his mum, and poor Mum trying to pretend everything was okay until one night Dad had just slammed the door behind him and never come back again. Though life was better after he’d gone, Cherry – conventional little girl that she was – pretended to the other kids that he’d gone out west shearing. Couldn’t bear anyone to know the family secrets. Thought they’d start to hate her, and so she’d developed her laughing self as a form of protection. If she smiled at people they seemed to respond by unburdening themselves. Smiling was a good defence. Being married to Bill was a good defence too.
Now she slipped into the hotel by the back door and sauntered into the bar. A dozen or so men were drinking there. Bill scowled at her and glanced pointedly at the clock on the wall behind the counter. Again she was repulsed by his appearance: big body, thinning blond hair, ruddy face and thick neck. Funny how things change. She’d thought him so handsome when they first met. Everyone had told her how lucky she was and she’d believed them.
After smiling sweetly at him, she pulled four schooners of beer for a man who seemed to be in no hurry to take them back to his mates. Then she moved around the tables picking up empty glasses. Pausing in front of a window, she peered out at the street. The late afternoon sunlight cast irregular slabs of shadow from the buildings opposite. The curtains of Miss Neville’s bedroom were now drawn and there was a lamp on in the sitting room downstairs, although more than that she could not see. Further down the hill, the woman with the purple hat and her child were leaving the post office.
Bill came out from behind the bar and stood in the doorway overlooking the square. ‘There are the reffoes,’ he said loudly. ‘Been here for over a week now and hardly been out at all. The woman’s spent the whole time scrubbing out the house and playing the piano, Mrs Blunkett said, but I saw the kid hanging around outside the post office the other day.’
All of the drinkers, even the most morose or loquacious, gave up what they were doing and flocked to the windows. Cherry seized the opportunity to dash into the hallway. She took a compact out of the drawer in the hallstand. In the bar the men were now commenting so loudly it was a wonder the reffoes didn’t hear.
‘Jeez, have a perv at that,’ said one. ‘Wouldn’t mind gettin’ stuck into ’er.’
‘Good looker, sport. Where’d ja say they were from?’
‘Didn’t. Just bloody reffoes from Sydney.’
‘Better than bloody Abos, eh?’
‘Yeah, the reffoes work and the coons don’t.’
‘What’re they doing down here? The season don’t start till November. Don’t get no holidaymakers from Sydney this time of year.’
‘Dunno. Why doncha ask? Satisfy your curiosity the bloody obvious way.’
In the hallway Cherry finished powdering her face. Silly gossips, she thought as she slipped the compact back into the drawer; far worse than a bunch of women. For a moment more she stood listening as the conversation continued.
‘Poor little kid looks a bit lost.’
‘Sydney, you say they’re from?’
‘Yeah, but they’re reffoes from Europe. Husband dead. She’s a widow.’
The men sobered up a bit at this. Probably thinking it could have been one of them or one of their sons, Cherry thought. Could have been their widow and daughter beached up in Jingera.
Slipping out the side door onto the verandah, she found she was too late to meet the reffoes. They were walking on the other side of the road, heading down the hill towards the McIntyres’ cottage and not into the square as she’d hoped. Then the woman and the girl both turned at the same time and looked straight at Cherry, who smiled and waved. The woman hesitated before waving back. The girl had an engaging grin.
She watched the pair walk down the hill and turn into the front gate of the McIntyres’ cottage, a shack rather than cottage, held together more by vines than nails. A bit like the place she’d grown up in, only that didn’t have the vines.
The clock struck the quarter hour. Back in the bar, she collected empty glasses and wiped down the messier tabletops. Then, putting on a bright smile, she returned to the serving side of the counter to take more orders.