She wrestled and shoved the radiogram into the wardrobe and locked it there.
‘Be quiet and don’t growl if the old lady visits me,’ she told it.
That important business over, she took time off to get into brassiere, briefs and matador suit. Then she brewed herself a cup of tea and turned the wireless on full blast. She danced around the kitchen, doing intricate little jive steps as she prepared the evening meal—poached eggs, baked beans and some spinach.
‘Got to keep up the old strength,’ she told the wireless announcer. She had eaten, cleared away the dishes and was sitting catching up on her mending when Mrs. Abbott arrived.
‘I suppose you know what I’ve come about?’ said that lady.
Lola said, ‘Should I?’ Then she turned down the wireless, and waited with the attitude of politeness and insolence, carefully blended, that she kept especially for landladies and women police.
‘Do you mean to say that Mavis and Lyle never told you they were going?’ said Mrs. Abbott.
Lola shrugged her shoulders.
‘I know nothing about it,’ she said. ‘How do you know they’ve gone?’
‘’Course they’ve gone,’ said Mrs. Abbott. ‘Owing me a lot of rent, too. Did they say anything to you about selling the radiogram they used to have going night and day?’
‘Mrs. Abbott, don’t start talking to me as though you were a plain-clothes cop,’ said Lola, ‘or I’m liable to do the lolly.’
‘I would have been entitled to take it for back rent,’ said Mrs. Abbott.
‘Well spoken for a landlady!’
Lola returned to sewing the sequins around the neck of her black jumper—the interview was over.
A few days later Mrs. Abbott sought to revenge herself by sending the man who came to seize Lyle’s bike across to the Hansen’s flat.
‘They might know something about it,’ she said.
Lola routed him in short order. Indeed, she pursued him right down to the garden gate, shouting the age-old war-cry of the sailor’s wife when dealing with duns.
‘If my husband were home from sea he’d deal with you. Very cheeky when there is just a woman by herself in the house…’
There can be nothing in all this world as terrifying as a poor weak little woman whose man is away at sea.
That night she wrote to Brownie.
‘Sharon’s nappies are still hanging on the line over at Abbotts. I see them every time I go past and they make me feel a bit low—they look so ragged and lonely, though I must admit they are becoming a beautiful colour, much better than poor old Mavis ever got them. The sun is bleaching them snowy. I wish old Abbott would take them down. They remind me of old Sharo, who wasn’t such a bad little kid once you got used to the look of her—and the smell. Anyway, we mustn’t be morbid. I suppose we’ll see them all again some day, and meanwhile I am having victory after victory over the squares. Today a man came from the loan company…’
Here followed a ball to ball description of what Lola had said to the man and what the man had said to Lola.
But final victory was with the squares, for the police caught up with Lyle in Tweed Heads, and he was arrested on the double count of fraudulent debt and taking a motor-bike, the property of Universal Credit Loan Company, inter-State, and attempting to avoid repossession of the said bike. The Magistrate said that, but for the fact that the defendant had never been in trouble before and had a wife who was expecting her second child, he would have taken a much more severe attitude…
The defendant seemed to be on the fringe of the bodgie cult which doubtless had contributed to his foolish behaviour…In paroling the defendant he was giving the defendant a chance…
Lola, reading the
Courier Mail,
suddenly felt a strong rush of affection for Lyle, standing in the dock, wearing his black shirt and bodgie pants (doubtless now very shiny at the seat and knees), and for poor Mavis (doubtless now very pregnant and floppy), weeping in the court, and for Sharon Faylene, looking as though she had been grown under bags (and doubtless still sucking that trusty dummy).
Shortly after this Lola received a letter one morning which read:
Dear Lola and Brownie,
Doubtless you have read of us in the paper—in the social news—as Lola used to say. It was terrible while Lyle was in remand, but we are doing all right now. We are in that big, old, falling-down place at the end of Eastman Street, No. 20. Come down as soon as you can. I have ever so much to tell and cannot come up in case old Abbott sees me and wants to get some rent out of me. Please come soon. Longing to see you both and have a good laugh over old times.
Signed
Mavis.
P.S. Would you like to move in with us and take out the fiver we owe you in rent? Just a suggestion. If you would rather the fiver I can let you have it the pay after next.
Lola took the letter into the bedroom to Brownie. He had arrived home two days before and had paid off laden with wages, overtime and accumulated pay. Lola pointed to the postscript.
‘What do you think?’ she asked.
They pretended to discuss it sensibly, but both of them knew that unless No. 20 Eastman Street was a hopeless hovel they would go there. Lola summed it up:
‘All that cheap rent, Brownie. We wouldn’t have to work for ages. We could just be together.’
The two rooms Mavis and Lyle had taken over were terrible. The mark of Mavis’s housekeeping was upon them. Terrible is too mild a word. They were hellish. In one corner stood a bucket of Sharon Faylene’s napkins. They were soaking till Mavis got around to washing them. They looked as though they had been waiting some time, and in the meantime they were a prime attraction for the blowflies that zoomed around in heavy black swarms. In the other corner was a sink where cockroaches had frisked undisturbed for twenty-five years, and they were damned indignant about the intrusion of Mavis and Lyle. Against one wall was a doddering table, and on what had once been a gas stove there stood a two-burner primus. It was glued to the stove by a mixture of splashed fat and boiled-over stew; and when Lola and Brownie entered it was smoking away like a very old tramp steamer. It was heating a bottle for Sharon Faylene. Mavis had the bottle standing in a saucepan in which she was also boiling Lyle’s white socks. Sharon Faylene, clad in the usual napkin, was crawling amongst the matches and cigarette butts that littered the floor. Occasionally she found a dead cockroach and Lola noticed her thoughtfully eating one, but decided it would be beside the point to mention it. And over everything poured the exhausting sunshine of a Brisbane March. It streamed through the window that could not be shut or shuttered. It streamed over the dirt and decrepitude and pointed up every hole in the floor and crack in the walls; and it turned poor exhausted Mavis into a perspiring heap, distressful to see, as she sat on a kerosene box pulling herself together with a cigarette. She shrieked, and then wept with delight when she saw Lola and Brownie.
‘Gawd, it’s good to see you again,’ she kept saying, as she led them in to show them the bedroom. This was slightly better. True there was no bed. All three of them slept on a double-bed mattress and a pile of grey blankets thrown in one corner; and from the way they smelled it was obvious that Sharon Faylene had not yet been trained out of bed-wetting. But at least it was cool and quiet, and the door and window worked; and when Lola looked up she saw that the ceiling was high and beautiful, plastered in a design of scrolls and frond-like leaves, with here and there in the corner a hint of the gilding that the damp and weather had not yet washed away.
‘’Course it’s a bit rough yet,’ said Mavis. ‘But when I get organized we’re going to do wonders. Lyle’s buying a bed this pay. He’s got a fabulous job now in the Cold Storage. Gawd, I should be put into it myself.’ She wiped her sopping brow and went on:
‘The sink is not too good. Sometimes the water runs and sometimes it doesn’t; and then, when you pull out the plug, there must be something wrong with the pipe because it just runs straight underneath the house, but I don’t suppose it matters because we’re up on such high stilts anyway.’
‘How is the dunny?’ asked Lola, who had never quite become accustomed to the lack of sewerage and the prevalence of gastro-enteritis in Brisbane. ‘Does it have a chain?’
‘It does,’ said Mavis with a touch of the house-proud in her voice. ‘It’s down under the house, and the wooden part of the seat has gone long ago, but there’s plenty of water, plenty of it. In fact there’s so much that the cistern flows over; and if you’re going to be there any length of time you have to go down in your raincoat, and you should see all the ferns that are growing around it—terrific. Lyle calls it El Grotto. “Why bother to go to Capri?” he says.’
Brownie stood fingering a frond of bougainvillaea that had grown through a window and was creeping along the wall.
‘Couple of seasons and this’ll have all this wall down,’ he said.
He took the heavy purple flowers, pushed them back outside and wrenched the shutter closed. The room was filled suddenly with gloom and dusk, and outside on the wooden shutters the bougainvillaea rustled angrily.
‘Listen to it,’ said Lola. ‘It’s furious, Brownie. This was one house it was going to eliminate and you’ve stopped it for a little while.’
Brownie was back in the kitchen looking at the wood stove.
‘Does that work?’ he asked.
‘Don’t know,’ said Mavis. ‘I’ve never tried it. Haven’t been game.’
He rattled the flue and half a hundredweight of soot crashed down from somewhere.
‘It should be all right with a bit of a clean out.’
He looked around, the fierce light of Scandinavian house cleaning in his eye.
‘It would,’ he said, ‘take a bosun and six A.B.’s of the Wilhelmsen Line working bell to bell for six weeks to get this place clean. Still, it can be done. We’ll stay.’
It was the day they moved in—a Saturday afternoon, still and sunny with the scent of the oleanders heavy on the air. Mavis, Lyle and Sharon Faylene had all gone down to the park to watch soccer practice. The house was silent save for the swish of Lola’s skirts as she danced from room to room and her voice raised in an excited sing-song.
‘Oh, Brownie, it’s a beautiful old house.’
They had come in through the front door and there, right in the hallway, the magic started. Coloured light lying on the floor and the walls; coloured light from the red, blue and golden glass set around and above the door. Light lying like gilt around the black hair pulled high on the crown of Lola’s head. Light the colour of old rose bathing the wondering face of the boy and girl as they stood there hand in hand.
Light like flame lying across the broken feet of a plaster Venus who stood, suitably draped, in a niche where she upheld a broken gas bracket. And down where the light fell away into darkness they pushed open another door with two broken panels and a handle of amber cut-glass and they were in what must have once been a dining-room. It was wide and high: all its windows looked south-east, which is the only way to look in Brisbane, and all these windows were crammed with the purple arms of bougainvillaea so the glare from outside came through muted and beautiful. At one end was a fireplace such as has not been built in a Brisbane house since the turn of the century at least. It was like a small cavern edged round with Spanish tiles all glazed in a strange design of red and white roses. They were set alternately, first a white rose, then a red, and sometimes a jagged space, the work of time or vandals. It was all surmounted by an overmantel of cedar that had once been polished and carved into a design of vines and more roses that rioted over the myriad small shelves that had held the gilt clock, the Dresden Shepherdess, the Wedgwood jars.
‘My head is getting dizzy with fancy fireplaces,’ said Brownie as they walked into the second of the big reception rooms that lay one each side of the hall. ‘Don’t you think they’re a bit much, dear? I mean, if simplicity is good taste and all that jazz.’
‘I suppose they are,’ Lola agreed; ‘but I’m sick of simple little modern rooms big enough to hold a bed, a dressing-table, a wardrobe and a douche-can; all this mid-Victorian trimming cheers me up. I suppose I should find it all sad and ruined, but I don’t. It just looks as though it has decorated a lot of living in its time, and it’s ready to decorate a lot more if it gets a chance. Look at that,’ she waved towards the looking-glass that rose above the mantelpiece, flanked by what were supposed to be small Grecian columns made of marble.
‘Isn’t it terrific? It reflects nearly all the room.’
Brownie went nearer and surveyed one of the columns closely.
‘Someone has written “Harry and me camped here the night of August 14th, 1950,” ’ he said. ‘Like you said, darling, it’s seen a lot of living.’
Lola laughed and said, ‘I won’t be squashed. I’m in a poetic mood.’
They went out on to the verandah that ran round three sides of the house.
‘I didn’t know there was so much wrought iron outside New Orleans,’ said Brownie.
It edged in the verandah to waist height. Like town lace, it ravelled round the house and the bougainvillaea and climbing roses twined amongst it.
On both the north and south sides of the house there were three bedrooms that connected with the verandah by french windows long since denuded of glass, and at the back of the house a narrow stairway of sandstone steps led down to the garden and the underneath of the house—to the wash troughs choked with weeds and the toilet surrounded by ferns and a bathroom that must have been a housemaids’ hell of mirrors to polish, marble to clean, copper to burnish, a bath the size of a modest swimming pool; and no water laid on at all.
‘They must have toiled up and down the stairs with buckets of water,’ said Lola. ‘Ah well, as I remarked to the Duchess only the other morning, I think the working-class was happier in those days.’
She sat down on the bottom step, and plucked a dog rose and held it crushed up against her cheek.
‘Oh, Brownie,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe it. It’s all so beautiful. Let’s stay here till our money runs out.’
When Mavis and Lyle and Sharon Faylene came home from the soccer the house-cleaning was already on. Brownie had picked the lock on the shed at the bottom of the garden and discovered two chairs, a chest of drawers and the most beautiful iron bedstead. Lola had been down the street and returned with hamburgers, cokes, sand-soap, bar soap, kerosene, phenol and Brasso. Brownie was scrubbing the bed, piece by piece, in his own special solution of kero, phenol and sand-soap, and as he finished Lola carefully polished the brass spikes, globes, crescents and assorted squiggles with which it was decorated.