Rosalie Ham - The Dressmaker

‘… take for example the Pratt women: they know nuts and bolts and powders that are lethal to maggots in flystruck merinos, also stock feed and the treatment for chicken lice, haberdashery, fruit preservatives and female intimate apparel. Most employable.’

‘But mother says it’s un-refined –’

‘Yes, I’m aware your mother considers herself very refined.’

He smiled, tipped his cap and entered the shop. Mona dragged a crumpled handkerchief from her cuff, held it to her open mouth and looked about, perplexed.

Alvin Pratt, his wife Muriel, daughter Gertrude, and Reginald Blood the butcher worked cheerfully, industrious behind their counters. Gertrude tended to groceries and dry goods. She tied every package with string, which she snapped with her bare fingers: a telling skill the sergeant thought. Mrs Muriel Pratt was the expert in haberdashery and hardware. People whispered that she was more suited to hardware. The smallgoods and butchery were in the far back corner of the shop, where Reginald carved and sawed carcasses and forced mince into sheep intestine, then arranged his sausages neatly against circles of trimmed loin chops. Mr Alvin Pratt had a courteous manner, but he was mean. He collected the account dockets from the counter three times a day and filed the debts alphabetically in his glass office. Customers usually turned their backs to him while Gertrude weighed up rolled oats or fetched Aspros, because he would pull files from big wooden drawers and slowly turn the blue-lined pages while they waited.

Sergeant Farrat approached Gertrude, large and sensible in navy floral, ramrod straight behind her dry goods counter. Her mother, dull and blank, leaned on the counter beside her.

‘Well, Gertrude? Muriel?’

‘Very well thank you, Sergeant.’

‘Off to see our footballers win their final this afternoon I hope?’

‘There’s a lot of work to finish up here before we can relax, Sergeant Farrat,’ said Gertrude.

The Sergeant held Gertrude’s gaze a moment. ‘Ah Gertrude,’ he said, ‘a good mule’s load is always large.’ He turned to Muriel and smiled. ‘If you’d oblige me with some blue-checked gingham and matching bias binding? I’m going to run up some bathroom curtains. ’They were used to the sergeant’s bachelor ways; he’d often purchased materials for tablecloths and curtains. Muriel said he must have the fanciest linen in town.

At the haberdashery counter Sergeant Farrat gazed at the button display while Muriel measured and ripped off five yards of gingham, which he took from her to fold, stretching it against his uniform, sniffing its starchy newness while Muriel spread wrapping paper on the counter.

Gertrude looked down at her copy of Women’s Illustrated beneath the counter. ‘DRAFT YOUR OWN COW GIRL SKIRT’ cried the cover and a pretty girl twirled, unfurling a gay, blue and white checked gingham skirt, cut on the cross with bias binding bows to garnish. She smiled a sly, secret smile and watched Sergeant Farrat-– a stout figure carrying a brown bundle under his arm – walk out the front door and across the street towards the Triumph. The Beaumonts’ car was parked beside the park. Someone sat in the driver’s seat. She stepped towards the door but Alvin Pratt called from the rear of the shop, ‘ GerTRUDE , a customer at chaff!’ So she walked between the shelves beneath slow ceiling fans to the rear, where Miss Mona and Mrs Elsbeth Beaumont of Windswept Crest stood against the glare of back lane gravel. Mrs Beaumont ‘had airs’. She was a farmer’s daughter who had married a well-to-do grazier’s son, although he wasn’t as well-to-do as Elsbeth imagined on her engagement. She was a small, sharp, razor-thin woman with a long nose and an imperious expression. She wore, as ever, a navy linen day dress and her fox fur. Circling her sun-splotched wedding finger was a tiny diamond cluster next to a thin, gold band. Her daughter stood quietly beside her, wringing her handkerchief.

Muriel, laconic and unkempt in her grubby apron, was speaking to Elsbeth. ‘Our Gert’s a handsome, capable girl. When did you say William got back?’

‘Oh,’ said Gertrude and smiled. ‘William’s back is he?’

Mona spoke, ‘Yes, and he’s –’

‘I’m waiting,’ snapped Mrs Beaumont.

‘Mrs Beaumont needs chaff, love,’ said Muriel.

Gertrude pictured her with a chaff bag hanging from her nose. ‘Do you like oats mixed with your chaff, Mrs Beaumont?’

Elsbeth inhaled, the dead fox about her shoulders rising. ‘William’s horse,’ she said, ‘prefers plain chaff.’

‘I bet you’re not the only woman glad to see your son back,’ said Muriel and nudged her.

Elsbeth glanced sideways at the girl leaning over a bin shovelling chaff into a hessian sack and said loudly, ‘William has a lot of hard work ahead of him at the property. Catching up will settle him and then he can truly work towards our future. But the property won’t be everything to William. He’s travelled, mixed with society, very worldly these days. He’ll need to look much further than here to find suitable … companionship .’

Muriel nodded agreement. Gertrude stood next to the women, the chaff against her knees. She leaned close to Elsbeth and brushed at something on her shoulder. Fox fur floated. ‘I thought something had caught on your poor old fox, Mrs Beaumont.’

‘Chaff most likely,’ said Elsbeth and sniffed at the general store.

‘No.’ Gertrude smiled innocently. ‘I can see what it is. Looks like you need a box of napthalene. Shall I fetch you one?’ And she reached again, pinched some moth-eaten fox fur and let it float in front of them. The sharp eyes of the women circling Elsbeth Beaumont focused on the bald patches on the mottled, thinning pelt. Mrs Beaumont opened her mouth to speak, but Muriel said dully, ‘We’ll charge the chaff, as usual.’

William Beaumont Junior had arrived back to Dungatar the night before, only hours before Tilly Dunnage. He’d been attending Agricultural College in Armidale, a small inland town. When William stepped from the train his mother flung herself at him, squashed his cheeks between her palms and said, ‘My son, you’ve come home to your future – and your mother!’

He now sat waiting for her and his sister in the family car, the Amalgamated Winyerp Dungatar Gazette Argus crumpled in his lap. He stared down the main street at the hut on The Hill, watching smoke curl from the chimney. The hut had been built long ago by a man who supposedly wanted to spot advancing bushrangers. He dropped dead soon after its completion, so the council acquired it and the surrounding land, then dug the tip at the base. When they sold The Hill and dwelling, they sold it cheap. William fancied for a moment that it would be nice to live up there on top of The Hill, detached but seeing everything. He sighed and turned east to the flat plains, to the cemetery and the farming country beyond the police station at the edge of the town, past the crumbling brick-rendered shop façades and warped weatherboards covered in peeling paint.

‘My future,’ muttered William determinedly, ‘I will make a life worth living here.’ Then self-doubt engulfed him and he looked at his lap, his chin quivering.

The car door opened and William jumped. Mona climbed neatly into the back seat. ‘Mother says to come,’ she said.

He drove to the back of Pratts, and, while he was loading the chaff into the boot, a big girl standing in the huge open doorway smiled at him: a grinning expectant girl standing beside her plain mother against a backdrop of fishing rods and lines, lawn mowers, rope, car and tractor tyres, garden hoses and horse bridles, enamelled buckets and pitching forks in a haze of grain dust.