Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

The wheat will become flour or perhaps it will sail to overseas lands. The famous Winyerp sorghum will become stock fodder.

The town will be quiet again and the children will go back to the creek to play. The adults will wait for football season. The cycle was familiar to Tilly, a map.

Molly inched out from the kitchen and poked Tilly with her walking stick. ‘What are you staring at?’

‘Life,’ said Tilly and picked up her cane basket. ‘I’ll be back soon.’ She headed down The Hill.

‘Don’t bother,’ called Molly. ‘I’d rather my possum came back.’

Marigold Pettyman and Beula Harridene stopped talking to watch her approach. ‘Think you can sew, do you?’ sneered Beula.

‘You copied those dresses from a Women’s Weekly I’m told,’ said Marigold, as though it were a clever thing. ‘You can do mending then?’

Tilly looked at the inglorious women. ‘I can,’ she said flatly. She marched back up The Hill with her groceries, clenched fists and gritted teeth. She found Lois Pickett sitting on the step clutching a plump, crumpled paper bag. ‘You’ve got a good view from up here,’ she said, ‘and a nice garden coming along.’

Tilly moved past her onto the veranda. Lois stood up, ‘I heard you could sew, you made your dress you wore to the races and Muriel says you didn’t even use a pattern for Gert’s weddin’ dress, just a dummy.’

‘Come in,’ said Tilly pleasantly.

Lois upended the paper bag and spread an ancient musty frock, stiff and greasy, across the kitchen table and pointed at the decayed armpits. ‘Gone under here, see.’ Tilly looked pained, shook her head and opened her mouth to speak but just then Purl Bundle called YOOHOO from the veranda and clicked straight through the door in her high-heeled scuffs and red pedal-pushers, all bright and blonde and barmaidy. She thrust several yards of satin and lace at Tilly and said, ‘I’ll have a line of night attire and lingerie that’ll put some spring back into the old mattress, thanks.’

Tilly nodded. ‘Good,’ she said.

Lois asked, ‘P’raps you could just cut the top off and make it a skirt?’

That afternoon Molly sat scratching beneath the layers of her knee rugs and Barney lounged on the step at her feet, staring, his bottom lip fat and hanging, a look of pure wonder on his face. Tilly was driving golf balls between the Tip and the McSwineys’ with her number three wood. One of the balls whizzed past Miss Dimm who’d rolled up over the hill-top, her face to the clouds and an arm reaching for the unseen obstacles. She held under one arm a bolt of blue-and-white checked cotton and a paper bag full of buttons, zippers and school uniform patterns, sizes 6–20. Miss Dimm was extremely short-sighted and also very vain, so wore her glasses only in the classroom. She’d always kept her hair in a short page-boy bob and worn a white blouse tucked firmly into a voluminous gathered skirt. She was enormously fat-bottomed but very pleased with her tiny feet, so tiptoed everywhere in dainty slippers tied with ribbons, and when she sat she settled her crossed ankles prom-inently. She tripped up to the golf bag and felt the clubs sticking out.

‘Golf clubs,’ said Tilly and held one up.

‘Oh,’ said Miss Dimm, ‘lucky you, you’ve got lots of of them! I’m looking for little Myrtle Dunnage.’ She headed off towards the house. On the veranda she stared directly at the pink and blue tea cosy on Molly’s head and said, ‘I’m here on behalf of the Dungatar Public School Parents and Teachers Committee and I’d like to see little Myrtle Dunnage please.’

‘I bet you would,’ said Molly, ‘In fact I reckon you should be able to see, then you’d know what we have to endure every time we see you.’

‘Come in, Miss Dimm,’ said Tilly.

‘Oh, there you are.’ Miss Dimm turned to the sun-speckled wisteria vine behind Molly and held out her hand.

They negotiated a fair price and all necessary fittings for nine school uniforms and as she was leaving, Miss Dimm thanked Molly’s hat again, fell down the small step, regained her momentum and skipped away. Barney had collected the golf balls in Tilly’s wicker basket and was driving them off the crest with Tilly’s one iron when the homely teacher passed him, stumbled and somersaulted out of sight, her lace petticoat flailing, slipper ribbons spinning.

Teddy was on his way up when he was felled by Miss Dimm. ‘Oh God,’ he said and scrambled towards her as she lay flat on her back with her skirt up over her face and her dimpled thighs, like purple brocade on lard, exposed to the world. Barney leaned over the crest.

‘What do you think you’re doing, numbskull?’ Teddy stood and brushed the grass from his new plaid trousers.

‘Playing golf,’ said Barney and held up a one iron.

‘The balls are landing on my roof.’

‘Good shot,’ said Tilly and shook his hand. ‘You deserve a cup of tea.’ She led him away.

Teddy blinked at his brother, thin and pimply and crooked, limping off with the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He helped Miss Dimm up, ‘Come on, I’ll lead you to the path.’

‘Why, thank you … who are you?’

Next morning Faith browsed through a Women’s Illustrated while Tilly knelt in front of her, pinning her hem. The cover headline read, ‘Dior’s Extravagance sets women back ten years – Balenciaga rebels, Page 10’. Faith mouthed ‘Bal – en – see – aga’ and perused the fashion articles – tunic, soft, standaway collar, chemise, seer-sucker, denim, America, Anna Klein, Galanos, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Molyneux, other names she couldn’t pronounce. ‘Ruth said you get lots of parcels from the city,’ she said and looked down at Tilly, ‘and postcards from Paris written in French from someone called Madelaine?’

Tilly stood and eased the bodice so that it sat higher over Faith’s decolletage. Faith wrenched it down again.

Molly cleared her throat and in her best Elsbeth Beaumont voice said, ‘She claims she used to care for Madame Madelaine Vionnet, the famous Paris fashion designer,’ she looked accusingly at Tilly. ‘She probably died .’

‘She was very old,’ said Tilly through the pins in her mouth.

‘Did she teach you to sew?’ said Faith.

Molly aimed her nose at the picture rails. ‘Apparently Madame Vionnet recommended our genius here to Balenciaga because of her unusual talent for bias cutting.’ Molly made a sloppy fart sound with her tongue and vibrating lips.

‘I’ve never heard of either of them,’ said Molly.

‘Elsbeth’s cousin Una said Gertrude’s wedding dress was very Parisian,’ said Faith, ‘I’m going to Paris, one day.’ She looked dreamy.

‘Who with?’ Molly cackled mischievously.

‘I can hem this while you wait if you like.’

Faith glanced over at Molly.

Tilly persisted, ‘Molly can sit on the veranda; would you like a cup of tea?’ Faith nodded and removed her frock. She sat in her slip and stockings reading Tilly’s catalogues, poring over the pictures. When Tilly handed her the skirt with the hemline finely stitched and perfect, Faith put aside the magazines. ‘I shouldn’t have gone to all this trouble really, it’s just a silly old box cluster pleat that deserves to be chucked out. It’ll probably end up on one of the McSwiney girls.’

Muriel came next. ‘Make me something else that suits me, this time something I can wear to work but that looks real good, like my outfit for Gert’s wedding.’

‘With pleasure,’ said Tilly.

When Ruth returned from the railway station with the mailbags the next morning, she and Nancy spilled the contents onto the post office floor and found Nancy’s fat brown envelope. She opened it and flicked through her new magazine until she found the feature – colour photographs of a New York fashion parade highlighting the latest designs of Emilio Pucci and Roberto Capucci. They looked at the fashions and the angular girls with prominent cheekbones and dark lines on their eyelids and said, ‘Aren’t they something,’ then Nancy headed for The Hill.