Tess Evans - Book of Lost Threads

‘G’day, Aunt Lily.’ Mrs Pargetter offered him a frosty Good evening, George , and returned to her shandy.

Finn introduced him to Moss, who felt her hand sinking unpleasantly into his soft, sweaty palm. She hastily withdrew her own. He was a strange-looking man, his small, quite handsome features all tightly corralled in the centre of his very large face, while tiny red capillaries traced complicated map lines on his cheeks. He was dressed in neat moleskins and an expensive-looking linen shirt.

Moss smiled politely. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Sandilands.’

‘Sandy, please. Everyone calls me Sandy.’ Mrs Pargetter looked up sharply. ‘Well, almost everyone.’

There was no room for Sandy to join them, so after making a time to meet with Finn the next day, he wandered off into the bar.

‘What’s this project?’ Moss asked.

‘You won’t believe it,’ Finn responded. He hardly believed it himself. ‘You’ve heard of the Big Banana and the Big Pineapple?’ She nodded. ‘Well, Sandy is planning something similar for Opportunity.’

‘What is it?’

‘Actually, it’s a Great Galah.’

‘A Great Galah? What on earth gave him that idea?’

‘His father was always calling him a great galah, apparently. Sandy seems to think it was a term of affection. He says it will not only honour his relationship with his father, Major Sandilands, DSO and Bar-I’m not joking, that’s how he refers to his father: Major Sandilands, DSO and Bar -but he reckons that this galah thing’ll bring in the crowds. You wouldn’t know it, but he’s the richest man in town. Worth squillions. He’s willing to pay for the lot himself. He’s very passionate about it.’

‘He’s barking mad,’ pronounced Mrs Pargetter. ‘And his father was a nasty bully of a man.’ She drained her glass for emphasis.

‘Drawing up the plans keeps him happy,’ said Finn mildly. ‘It keeps the demons at bay.’

WHEN MRS PARGETTER WAS LILY Baxter, she and her older sister, Rosie, were considered to be beauties, although it was generally agreed that Rosie, laughing and vivacious, was the more attractive. The girls were well-read and genteel, daughters of the schoolmaster, but it was still considered a great coup for eighteen-year-old Rosie when she married George Sandilands, the son and heir of a wealthy local grazier. Despite her supposed good fortune, the only peace Rosie Sandilands experienced in her thirty-eight years of marriage was the four years in which her husband was overseas becoming a major and winning medals. Rosie was always publicly addressed by her husband as Rosalind , and privately as Woman , in tones of exasperation, anger or contempt. He prided himself on using physical force only when he considered it to be absolutely necessary. Lily was the only one Rosie ever allowed to see the bruises.

Their son, George Junior, was known as Sandy. From an early age the boy learned that to show affection to his mother would only enrage his father. So he trembled in the suffocating dark beneath the bedclothes when he heard his mother cry, and cravenly sought his father’s approval at every opportunity. This went some way to protecting him from the Major’s anger, but not from his contempt. He was a bright enough lad, but not well coordinated, and his father’s jeering voice could be heard at school sports days and football matches: You great galah! Can’t you do anything right? The boy’s attempts to read quietly, a pastime that he loved, called forth similar abuse. Nancy boy , his father called him, and in his misery Sandy ate the cakes and scones and sweets his mother pressed on him, the only way she could express her love and pity.

At nineteen, Lily was still not married and lived a quiet life, keeping house for her father and playing the organ at St Saviour’s. She was a dreamy girl and looked forward to a future as a wife and mother. Her sister’s early marriage had left her a little uneasy on this score, but her father, a widower for fifteen years, was in no hurry to marry off his second daughter. He was afraid of George and averted shamed eyes from any evidence of Rosie’s unhappiness, privately vowing to protect his younger daughter from the same fate.

Lily was a talented musician and was often asked to play piano at various gatherings around the district. Because of this, she went to many dances but rarely danced, sitting conscientiously at the piano with a straight back and firm wrists as she’d been taught. The women all agreed that she was a pretty girl but a bit too pleased with herself. The men granted that she was a bit of all right , but felt that she thought herself too good for them. Why else , they asked, would she sit all snooty-like at the piano when she could be dancing? There are plenty more fish in the sea , they told each other . Don’t have to chase Miss Up-Herself. Lily, meanwhile, would sit with her straight back and pretty face, wishing only to be swirling on the dance floor with some young man or giggling in the corner where the girls assembled like multi-coloured butterflies.

The ensemble she played with included old ‘Trooper’ Morgan on drums and Tony Capricci (Eyetie Tony) on the saxophone. Both men treated her with a kind of elderly gallantry, which she accepted with rueful gratitude.

The night she met Arthur she had slipped away from the piano for a cool drink, leaving Tony exuberantly calling for a ‘Pride of Erin’. She was looking particularly attractive in a dress of butter-coloured lace, her long auburn hair framing her face.

‘Is the pianist allowed to dance?’

She turned to see a small, dark-haired young man with soft puppy-dog eyes, and a nervous grin over which struggled a self-conscious pencil moustache. He was dressed in a navy-blue suit with an obviously new white shirt. His tie, she noticed, needed straightening, and his hair was just a little too long over his collar.

‘I thought you needed looking after,’ she would say on their honeymoon. ‘That’s the only reason I agreed to dance with you.’

‘Not the only reason you agreed to marry me, I hope,’ Arthur would retort. ‘My good looks and charm must have had some effect.’

The truth was that his charm lay not in his looks, exactly, but in his shy smile. It had taken all his courage to approach her, but he managed to hold out his hand in invitation. Lily looked over at Tony. Please? her eyes said.

‘Go ahead, bella mia . We can play without you.’ Tony beamed.

Arthur was the new clerk at the Commonwealth Bank. A job with prospects , her father noted approvingly. Their courtship was brief. War loomed, and there was a kind of desperate gaiety and sense of urgency that fermented the social process. So, ten months after their first dance, they married at St Saviour’s and honeymooned at Marysville, where they fumbled through their first sexual experience with enthusiasm and good humour, returning to Opportunity with smug little smiles.

Shortly afterwards, Arthur was promoted to a job in Melbourne. Lily was delighted as they began to furnish their little flat in Carlton, two rooms at the back of a sagging Federation house owned by a Mrs Moloney. Their landlady always appeared slightly harried, and her face and body were so angular that Arthur set himself a challenge to detect even the slightest of curves under her drab button-through housedresses. She didn’t believe in becoming familiar with her tenants and always addressed the two young people as Mr and Mrs Pargetter. Lily was delighted to be addressed as Mrs Pargetter; she sometimes felt that she was still a girl, posing as a woman, and the ‘Mrs’ reassured her.