The Watch Tower by Elizabeth Harrower

Author:Elizabeth Harrower [Name, Author]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction classics
ISBN: 9781921921988
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Felix cursed when he saw that there was no parking space vacant near the factory. ‘Who do they all belong to, anyway? Silly damn stupid women shoppers, I suppose. Look out! Was that a place there?’

‘Where?’

He laughed bitterly. ‘It’s too late now.’ He speeded up a little. ‘I’m past it now. You’ve got to look out for a space if it’s not too much trouble. I can’t take my eyes off the road.’

‘I am looking, Felix, but the thing is—’ Laura swivelled about in her seat, striving as she perpetually was impelled to for omniscience. ‘We’re not usually looking for anywhere in town at this time in the afternoon.’

‘I am aware of that,’ he enunciated with awful distinctness. ‘But thank you for telling me.’

Returning to Sydney after a week in Melbourne, they had collected the car from Bill Willis’s factory near the airport, and Felix and Bill (whose factory supplied the labour for the Shaws’ excess orders) had stood swaying on the edge of the gutter, smoking, reflectively uttering great truths about the state of the rag trade.

Laura was fidgety, and wanted to push on to the factory and home. Felix knew. But she had been too useful in Melbourne. People had complimented him on his wife! He stood and stood, then pretended to lose his way in the streets behind Bill’s factory, and only after he had silenced her completely, sped towards the city.

Now, alternately gliding and darting along the road in search of a parking place, he began to feel resentful again: he wanted to drop Laura off at the factory so that she could surprise the staff, but he wanted to keep her in the car so that if he should be forced to tramp miles back from whatever spot he eventually found, she would have to tramp, too.

‘Look, Felix, there’s a place just ahead where that man’s pulling out.’

‘Where?’

‘On this side. Look! The blue Ford.’

Accelerating slightly, he passed the vacant stretch. ‘Where do you mean? I can’t see it.’

Laura tried to sound sympathetic and cheerful. ‘Oh, what a shame! You just missed it.’

‘What? That?’ Felix turned to stare at her despite the convoys of dusty, multi-coloured cars menacing the road from end to end.

‘Why?’ Laura contracted under his eyes.

‘Blue Ford! Blue Ford! That, my dear woman, was a Chevrolet. Had I known that that was the car you meant, I could easily have got in. As it is, we’re so close to Elizabeth Street we might just as well go down to the parking lot and get a bus back up.’

Laura stared at the veined hands folded loosely on her lap.

The news went through from the cutting- and finishing-room to the factory proper: ‘Old Shaw’s back!’ Twenty heads were lowered. Twenty machines roared.

Felix stood in the doorway, smiling a closed smile. He loved this about the factory. Even when no one looked at him, not daring to, everyone noticed him. The machines were thundering. He smiled, tolerating the bent backs of girls over whom

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