‘Stupid fucking animal!’ Ross yelled, but managed to control the car before they hit a tree. He stopped, and put his head down on the steering-wheel.
‘Are you all right, Dulcie?’ Dulcie asked herself in sarcasm because she thought that should have been his first thought. ‘Well, actually I did bang my head quite hard, Ross, in fact I think I’ll have a great big lump there by the time we get home, but don’t worry about me. You look just like James Dean in one of his sulks.’
Ross lifted his head up and looked at her. ‘I wasn’t sulking, it just gave me a shock, that’s all. If we’d hit him it would have buggered the car up good and proper.’
Dulcie felt her forehead, it was already swelling and it hurt. She wanted to cry with disappointment that her first date had gone so badly wrong. ‘Let’s go home,’ she said wearily.
Ross didn’t say another word for the rest of the way home. Bruce and Betty must have gone to bed because the living-room light was turned off. Ross parked the car and Dulcie hopped out immediately, making for the house. She had got to the back porch when Ross caught up with her.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, catching hold of her arm. ‘Let me look at your head?’
The porch light was on and he pulled her beneath it. ‘It looks bad,’ he said. ‘Shall I come in with you and bathe it?’
‘I can do it,’ she said wearily. ‘Betty would only get up if she heard you. Thank you for taking me to the pictures.’
But as she went to walk in, he caught her arm again. ‘You wish you’d never come out with me, don’t you?’
Dulcie was tempted to say yes, but he looked so crestfallen she couldn’t. ‘No I don’t.’
‘I’m sorry I made you hurt your head,’ he said. ‘I’ll make it up to you.’
In the yellowish light his eyes looked even more catlike than usual. There was a kind of begging look to them, the way the cats in the barn looked at her when they were hungry.
‘I’ve got to go in now and put some ice on this bump,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
He lunged at her, caught her up in his arms and kissed her passionately, just the way she’d hoped for for so long, then to her surprise and dismay, he turned and loped away across the yard without another word.
When Dulcie got up the following morning Betty was already in the kitchen making some tea. As she turned to speak to Dulcie, her hands flew up in horror. ‘My goodness, what’s happened to you?’ she asked.
Dulcie explained. ‘We didn’t hit the kangaroo,’ she finished up. ‘The car’s fine.’
‘I’d rather see a bump in the car than one on you,’ Betty said. ‘Let me put some ice on it.’
Dulcie had done that before she’d gone to bed, but it hadn’t helped much, she had woken to find a lump on her forehead like a small purple egg. Betty nudged her to sit down and holding a couple of ice cubes in a tea-towel she held it to her head. ‘So how was the date until this happened?’ she asked.
‘Fine,’ Dulcie lied. She had no intention of letting on that Ross felt they ought to become a pair of rebels. ‘But it gave us both a bit of a shock.’
‘I should think it did.’ Betty tutted in sympathy. ‘Bruce has hit so many of those wretched ‘roos over the years, he says it’s better not to try and avoid them because they invariably jump out of the way anyway. What was the film like?’
‘Great!’ Dulcie tried to smile and look enthusiastic. If she didn’t Betty would be probing all day. ‘Do you think they sell jeans for girls in the shop in town? I fancy a pair.’
Betty looked horrified. ‘Surely you don’t want to dress like a boy?’
The one impact that the film had made on Dulcie was girls in jeans. She thought they looked sexy and wonderful. When she couldn’t sleep during the night because her head hurt, and she couldn’t stop recalling that kiss from Ross, she’d decided that she was going to get a pair of jeans and be the first girl in Esperance with them.
‘I won’t look like a boy in them,’ Dulcie grinned. ‘Just you wait.’
‘Ross might not like it,’ Betty said darkly. ‘Men are funny about things like that.’
‘Too bad,’ Dulcie said with a toss of her head. Maybe she would rebel in her own little way. Her wages had been put up to two pounds a week since her seventeenth birthday, so she could afford to buy a few new clothes that would make Ross’s eyes pop out of his head. She wasn’t going to creep round him any more either. He’d have to come begging for kisses.
Chapter Fifteen
‘A
maid
!’ May exclaimed in horror. ‘You said you’d find me a job in an office!’
May’s fifteenth birthday was only one week away and for the last couple of months she’d spent every waking hour in daydreams of swarming around a city centre office being admired by all the male staff. When she was called over this afternoon to Mother’s study she imagined she was going to be told the location of this place.
‘With an office job you would have no accommodation, May,’ Mother said sharply ‘Rooms are too expensive for a young girl just starting out and I don’t believe you would be able to deal with living alone anyway. Besides, you need to learn to type and do shorthand to get a good office job, you can do that at night school with this job.’
‘Where is it?’ May asked suspiciously. ‘If it’s out in the bush I’m not going.’
‘It isn’t out in the bush, it’s here in Perth, in Peppermint Grove, and Mrs Wilberforce is a relative of mine.’
May was slightly cheered by Peppermint Grove. She had been there several times with Mother and it was a nice area with beautiful houses, set beside the River Swan, with Cottesloe beach only a twenty-minute walk away. But she didn’t like the idea one bit that it was to work for a relative of Mother’s. Everything she said and did would be reported back, not to mention Mother dropping in all the time.
But of course she couldn’t say that. ‘What does a maid do?’ she asked.
‘Answer the door and telephone. Washing, ironing, helping with the cooking, cleaning. Mrs Wilberforce entertains a great deal and when she has guests she’d expect you to wait at the table. But it is not a hard job, May, and the experience could be invaluable to you as Mrs Wilberforce is a real lady and likes everything done as it should be, you can learn a great deal from her. You can attend night school twice a week, and she’ll give you a whole day off, plus four pounds a week wages.’
The thought of four pounds a week almost wiped out May’s reservations. That was a pound more than Dulcie got at eighteen! ‘Can I meet Mrs Wilberforce first?’ she asked.
‘I shall be taking you there for an interview tomorrow,’ Mother said. ‘Now, just be sweet and willing like you can be when you want to, and I’m sure Mrs Wilberforce will take you on. You see, she particularly wants an English girl, and one who speaks well. She is English herself, her husband is Australian of course, he’s my second cousin. He is a banker, and they have two married sons.’
May didn’t entirely believe that this job would be a good one, she had stopped believing anything the woman said after she’d discovered she’d lied about Dulcie’s letters. She hadn’t forgotten either that she would probably never have been told about her father dying back in England but for Mr and Mrs French coming to the convent. Not that either of those things mattered too much now, all May wanted to do was get out of this place and away from Mother.
After being dismissed, May didn’t go back to the schoolroom as she should have, but skirted round the side of the chapel and sat down on a secluded bench. She’d missed many a morning or afternoon of school this way, the Sisters just assumed she was still with Reverend Mother. She put her arm down through the back of the bench and rescued her cigarette tin from its hiding place. While in Perth with Mother about a year ago, she’d gone into a sweet shop owned by an old lady and made conversation with her. By her second visit she’d made the old girl trust her so much she asked May to mind the shop while she went and put her kettle on for a cup of tea. It was so easy to steal a couple of packets of cigarettes and slip them up the elastic of her knicker legs. She did the same again every time she went to Perth, and it was doubly rewarding as the old lady always gave her a bar of chocolate just for coming to see her.
May would’ve liked to share the cigarettes with another girl, but there was no one here she could trust. All the girls were jealous of her, they would do or say anything to get her into trouble, and it wasn’t worth taking that risk now she had so little time left here.
Opening up the tin, she took one cigarette from the packet of Craven A inside and lit it, hiding the tin again afterwards. As she leaned back to enjoy it, her mind turned to all her other hiding places. There was a tin in the woodshed holding nylon stockings, lipsticks, nail varnish and other cosmetics. Down at the pig sty a small tin holding almost ten pounds was tucked away behind a broken brick. In the boiler-room was a cardboard box containing a tight pale blue skirt, a white blouse, some underwear and a pair of high-heeled shoes.
Clothes were so easy to steal, she’d got them on two separate occasions when she’d been in Boan’s department store with Mother. As she was already carrying a large store bag holding purchases Mother had made, it was a cinch to slip something else in. The real difficulty was getting it out of the bag when she got back here without Mother noticing anything. Fortunately both times Mother had sent her into the convent ahead of her, and she’d slipped her items into the broom cupboard a couple of doors away from Mother’s study, then retrieved them later, hiding them under her cardigan.
Stealing the shoes was her biggest triumph, for she’d done it right under Mother’s nose. Mother was buying a new pair for herself, horrible black heavy lace-ups, but another woman sitting just one chair away was trying on pair after pair of beautiful shoes. Maybe if they hadn’t been size fours, the same size May took, she wouldn’t have thought of it. But the dainty white ones with the peep-toes that the woman had already discarded as too young for her seemed to be saying,
Take me, take me,
so she did, slipping them into the shopping bag beneath the length of flannelette Mother had bought for the Sisters to make new nightgowns.
But now as she sat here thinking about all these goods and how she was going to retrieve them, it occurred to her that if Mrs Wilberforce was a relative of Mother’s and on good terms with her, she couldn’t start wearing all these things right off without drawing suspicion on herself.
‘You evil old witch,’ she murmured. ‘You’re still going to try and keep me in your web, aren’t you? You won’t succeed though, I’ll do it your way for a while, but only till I’ve got some money behind me.’
May had remembered Dulcie’s words about needing money to get anywhere, and although she’d managed to steal some change from the donation box in the chapel every time she was sent in there to do some cleaning, the visitors were mean and the most she’d ever got at one time was two shillings.
But it mounted up, she had almost ten pounds now, and maybe at this job she’d find some way of adding to it, on top of her wages.
She’d been stealing things for so long now that it was second nature to her. If she saw something she wanted, she took it. It was her way of getting back at all those who had so much and didn’t care that girls like her were shoved into orphanages and forgotten. Although she wasn’t clever in the classroom, she felt she could outwit almost anyone, and she’d had considerable practice.
A thought sprang into her mind and she smiled at its cunning. As soon as she got to this new job, she’d make up a parcel of the things she couldn’t explain, and post them to herself. Then she could tell Mrs Wilberforce that Dulcie had sent her them as a present. She might even be able to get the woman’s sympathy by hinting that Mother had intercepted their letters in the past.
Suddenly she felt optimistic again. She dogged out her cigarette, pulled the tip apart and scattered it in a flowerbed, then made her way round the back of the convent to the schoolroom.
Eunice Wilberforce kept glancing out of the window the following afternoon. She was nervous because she didn’t want one of Miranda’s girls, she’d hadn’t liked Edward’s cousin even before she became a nun, and she liked her even less now.
‘What possessed you, Edward, to tell her I needed help?’ she murmured to herself. ‘I’d have been much happier with a girl I’d found myself. I don’t want some cowed, frightened little thing. I want someone with a bit of personality, a pretty, fresh-faced girl I can have some rapport with.’
Edward didn’t like Miranda much either, he’d spent a great deal of his early childhood with her and even though he was six years older than her, she had continually got him into trouble. But being a strong Catholic he felt proud she’d taken her vows and risen to become a Reverend Mother. He got his bank to make donations to St Vincent’s, and every year at Christmas he always sent out a huge hamper of treats for the girls.
Mrs Wilberforce glanced around her very English drawing-room with pride. There were oriental rugs on the polished floor, a sumptuous couch and armchairs, and an antique china cabinet filled with old Worcester porcelain that had been in her family for generations. The older she got, the more important maintaining her Englishness seemed to be, though she couldn’t for the life of her explain why.
She had lived in Australia for thirty-eight years and whilst she was happy and considered herself very fortunate, she still ached for all things English. That was why they bought this two-storey-house in View Road. She fell immediately for its English Edwardian grey stone, its bay windows and cast-iron railings surrounding the overgrown front garden. It bowed to Australian style in as much as the original house had been extended to one side with all the new upstairs rooms opening up on to a veranda, but it had a tiled roof, not the usual tin, and the downstairs rooms had all the elegance and graciousness of the Edwardian period.
Before and during the war they’d had both a live-in maid and a daily woman to do the rough work. Mrs Wilberforce had dispensed with the maid once the boys got married and moved into their own homes, and her daily gradually dropped first to three days a week, then two, and finally retired a year ago, since when she had had to struggle on alone.