The Golden Dress by Marion Halligan

Author:Marion Halligan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ligature Pty Limited
Published: 2021-11-09T07:08:34+00:00

16

Gift Wrapping

There are some landscapes that open before you like words on a page.

Here are the smooth flanks of hills, the yellow grass silver in the wind, the poplars that march without ‘the piddling fear of drains’. Here is the bus like a beetle scuttling along under its round carapace, dull now, lost the glossy shine of its youth. And the river, the long last light of the river sinuous through the paddocks.

Though he had not expected the dust. From a distant knoll the beetle bus may have trailed clouds of glory but they were in the eye of the beholder. Inside its rattling badly jointed body their fine grit puffed and whitened, stuck to sweat and snuffled in the nostrils. Of course, Enid Casey on her way to the train to take her to her job as a maid in the city had brushed it impatiently from the sleeves of her turned black coat and thought with pleasure of clean washed streets and the polished leaves of shrubs in tidy gardens. So the dust is documented. And he, following Enid’s journey in reverse, in the train from the city to the town, in the bus to the smaller town, wondered about the ironies in store for him, for there would be some, he was not an innocent Enid and knew that his expectations would somehow be tricked and turned about. But he did think this awareness had prepared him for whatever might happen.

He thought with pleasurable sentimental sadness of the turned black coat. It had at first foxed him, and Jane hadn’t known either, but her mother had. It’s just what it says, she explained. You unpick all the seams, then turn each piece inside out, so that the worn outside is on the inside. Of course it only works with good quality fabric. Then you sew it all up together again, and you’ve got a garment almost as good as new.

Did you ever do that? asked Jane, who found the idea of such making-do intolerable.

No, said her mother. No. We never came to that.

It was Enid’s aunt’s coat that was turned, and her elders were pleased with it—it didn’t really look rusty at all. And so was Enid happy, until she got to the city. Whenever he thought of that second-hand coat, he felt quite tearful. It was such a tough little symbol. And he always wondered if Dorothy Hennessy herself had ever done such a thing. He knew she hadn’t done everything she’d written about, not possibly, but some things she must have, and a good question was whether turning a coat was one of them. Perhaps that was one of the things he’d find out on this trip.

Last week Jane’s mother had rung him up. I forgot to tell you, she said. Sometimes people turned things twice. But they’d have got back to the first side again.

Exactly. But sometimes the second side got so worn it made the first seem all right again. So they’d go back to it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.