The Blue Mile (12 page)

Olivia

‘
O
livia, might I recommend the pea salad for entree? Sounds terribly humble but wait until you taste the minted mayonnaise.' Bart Harley is so at ease with himself and his world, I want to hate him. I desperately want to push him out the great arched window beside our table. Watch him go splat on the footpath below. But he's so charming. Suave and urbane, and all the same, there's nothing arrogant about him. ‘Isn't it a tasty dish, Em darling?' he says, as if the future turning of the earth depends upon Mother's approval of his opinion of this minted mayonnaise. He's no Don Juan. The only thing desperate about him is his desire to win my approval too.

I look back down at the menu. It's all festive fare: devilled oysters, lobster tartlets, turkey and goose with all the trimmings, cherry pie, plum pudding . . . everything but a partridge in pear sauce and all mouth-watering, but I don't think I can eat a thing.

Still, I say: ‘Yes, please, that sounds lovely.' And good God, but I think I might be going to cry. Stare harder at the menu. How am I going to get through three courses of this? Glance at my watch: five to seven. Longest almost hour of my life so far, much of it spent listening to Bart Harley going gooey over this frock, toasting Mother's design with French champagne; he's completely in awe of her and freely admits he has been since they first met a year ago. A
year
ago? She's had her design on him going for a whole year. Of course she has. And when he is not going gooey over her, he's a King's Counsel Crown Prosecutor putting razor-gang thugs in prison, presently going after some doctor who's been doing unseemly things at the behest of that infamous mobsteress Tilly Devine. He plays jazz clarinet and goes sailing in his spare time. He's forty-three and never been married. Never found ‘the One' – until now. Bart Harley is too fabulous.

‘Oh look, there's young Warwick.' Mother is calling someone over to the table now: ‘Ollie, Warwick Bloxom is Bart's new clerk – his baby lawyer. What a pleasant surprise.' Her too-casual tone suggesting that this Warwick's appearance is no surprise to her at all.

I look up quickly and see a pleasant-faced boy, fresh from the pleasant-boy factory with his long fringe neatly brilled back and dinner jacket cut high at the waist, Oxford style, the type you wouldn't see at Pearson's because he lunches at the Australia Club, possibly with his father, who is possibly a stockbroker, a wheat merchant or member of parliament for the Nationalist Party, or all three. Much monied, evening dress every night type, all fopsy accoutrements present and accounted for but a topper, and I must force myself to be pleasant in return to him: his mother or sister might possibly want a bunch of summery things for Home one day.

‘How do you do?' I manage, before burying my face in the menu again, and Mother digs her heel into my toe to make me look up again.

‘Miss Greene, isn't it?' He bows slightly, and he's slightly awkward about it, too: he's been put up to this, I know it. He holds my gaze for so long he's being paid by the second for it, and what I wouldn't do for a brim to slide under, or for the chandelier above us to come down and send me through the floor.

‘What brings you in tonight, eh, Rick?' Bart Harley rescues the moment, as fabulously avuncular as he is smooth.

‘Oh,' and Warwick gives a light chuckle, rather be elsewhere now: ‘I've brought Mother in for dinner, sir, with my aunt up from Melbourne, proving to them that this is not the den of iniquity they imagine. But never fear,' another phony chuckle, ‘I'll ditch them after we've eaten –'

Bart Harley laughs at that, a genuine and jolly laugh. ‘You two must have a dance later,' he says, and he is referring to me.

Mother adds a glissando trill and they're all laughing.

We two must have a dance?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho ho.

When hell freezes and the earth stops turning, but I think of his mother and his aunt and say: ‘That would be lovely.'

The pea salad is, at least, when it arrives, and I give it my full attention. ‘Oh dear yum, Mr Harley, you were right about this minted mayonnaise.'

‘It's Bart, please.'

La la la la la la,
listen to the string quartet in the corner playing ‘Angels We Have Heard On High', very prettily too, tinkling over whatever lovey-dovey gushy mush from Barty Woo I'm not listening to next. Chatter is rising round the dining room; it's filling up, and I dare a few more glances about, to find a few more distractions from my anxieties confabulated and otherwise. The business opportunities here do indeed appear to be abundant. Mother spake the truth, and so does the regular assertion in the women's pages that Australians do not know how to dress after five. Half the men in drack sacks as if they've just come in from the office, and far too many dowdy dowagers in dreary unmitigated crepe atrocities like matrons from the Anti-Liquor League – which is not likely judging from the quantity of wine being consumed in here. I've never seen so many wine bottles in one go.

‘I'll have the shiraz with the beef,' Bart Harley tells the sommelier. ‘And you, Em dear?'

‘I think the riesling for the goose, don't you?' Mother replies, and I'm tempted to ask if her consumption is legal. This will be her third glass – after the champagne cocktail in the Library Lounge and the chablis she just had with her lobster entree.

‘Would you like a glass of something, Olivia – perhaps a spritzer?' Bart Harley asks me.

And I decline: ‘No, thank you.' I'm not going to be carted off for a drunken giraffe when this place is raided after nine. I have been drunk, just the once, on our cognac last Christmas Eve when Mother was out – I tried it, retched savagely on it, don't know how anyone does it, not to mention Mother, and she hasn't even got to her martini yet.

I glance away, across the room again, and imagine I catch a glimpse of a dark-haired boy in white tux and midnight trousers. Wanting to find him here, and not merely for another pathetic glimpse of the heroic dustman, but because, even to the utterly untravelled, this is clearly not New York: did that chap over there truly just blow his nose into his napkin? Glance the other way at the sound of a party coming in through the doors of the dining room, the sound of barging gaiety: a small flock of funsters has arrived. My kind of clientele, at last.

With Cassie Fortescue in their midst.

There she is. My nemesis and Min Bromley's cousin, and as sincerely, edibly, hatefully gorgeous as ever. Petite and perfectly proportioned, I hope her overbeaded headband slips off her glossy auburn bob, down her minuscule nose and strangles her.
Sticky, sticky, stick.
How I despise her, this girl who first composed that taunt. Still, I mentally redesign her boxy shift, lengthen it a little so she doesn't appear so dumpy in it, and so last summer, one tier of flouncery too much at the waist. Her beau, whom I instantly recognise as Denis Clifton, looks like he got his clobber off the rack at Gowings – you would not know his father is Director-General of Customs House, but there's Sydney High old boys for you. How I could clothe this city, and how I betray myself. I should design Cassie Fortescue a trousseau entirely of rayon. Flapper.

Mother's heel spikes me again as the main arrives:
Eat your turkey and grow up, Olivia Jane.

No, I don't want to.

So she leans across and whispers in my ear: ‘Back straight, darling.' Not hissing. ‘How I wish you could see yourself as I do – as we all do. You are the most beautiful girl in the room.'

You are my mother and you're drunk.

I don't know how she's not, as New Yorkers might say, utterly spiflicated by half-past eight, halfway through dessert, halfway through her glass of sweet muscat, when that Arthur Spence fellow appears at the dining room doors and announces: ‘Supper time, ladies and jellybeans!' Pencilled eyes more crazed than puckish, and he's swapped his tux for a gold lamé vest. ‘Show begins in ten minutes!'

Mother looks at her wristwatch and stifles a yawn. ‘Martini time already?'

‘You are insatiable,' Bart Harley remains gooey as the cherry pie. ‘Shall we?'

‘Ollie?' Mother asks.

‘Yes, shall we what?' I'm watching Cassie and her pack flap to their feet and head for the doors.

‘Shall we carry on into the Jazz Room for the show?'

No. Jazz Room: Cassie and dancing in there. And I'm tired, ghastly delirious tired now. But Mother must be too. I don't know how she does it. Three times a week. This show that's as much business as it is pleasure for her. Remember: this is all for me. Going blind with drop crystal beads and diagonals for me. Me and me alone it will be, as Mother is going to marry Bart Harley. The least I can do is walk into the room, and then disappear into this show, into this frock. Only across the hall . . . Stand up. Grow up. It's not hard.

Through the tables and there's a hand on my arm: ‘Dear girl, come here and let us see your gown.' When my heart resumes beating I find two crepe dowagers smiling above their pearls at me – the dowagers belonging to that Warwick Bloxom, who's striding for the stairs, ‘I'll fetch you a cab, Mama,' as the aunt from Melbourne clucks at me: ‘I must tell you how becoming that style is on you. Those colours. Delightful.'

And it is somehow. I find myself actually smiling in return. There's no reason for her to lie; I'm sure she has no idea who I am, and possibly couldn't care less. I must be wearing the frock well; and that's the point, isn't it.

‘One of our own designs,' Mother gets a sale in before they go. ‘Our card.'

‘Incorrigible,' Bart Harley's crooked smile says of Mother, and of me: ‘Absolutely delightful,' holding the door of this Jazz Room open for us. Perhaps I might find that pleasant one day too. There aren't many men who would so enjoy a woman behaving as Mother does, not to mention handing out business cards under his nose, outrageous ones with gold lettering that look like invitations to a ball. But he's clearly thrilled by her enterprise, her joie de vivre, and –

Oh, but as I step through the doorway the stench of male odour in this Jazz Room overwhelms. Good God, gagging at it. The place is crowded already, a different crowd from the dining one, multitude of shoulder-to-shoulder tables crammed around the floor and a small stage, all surrounded by heavy velvet drapes, four walls of that folly rose, ingrained with endless nights of dancing sweat and tobacco smoke and some other awful, acrid smell. A trumpet screams through the dimness and the room starts spinning, I am feather-headed and the folly walls are closing in, and as I look at Bart Harley again, gesturing to a table in the centre near the dancefloor, all I can see is me eating my Mexican chocolate cake alone in the cottage on Christmas Day, picking the crumbs out of the bottom of the tin, and I've got to run away. I've got to get some air.

I yank Mother by the wrist before she whirls off to someone she's spotted across the floor: ‘Ladies?'

She waves me away: ‘Back out in the hall and up to the right.'

And I dash for it, celluloid heels skidding across the boards to the toilet rooms, to splash some water on my face, and while I'm at it I manage to smudge my make-up so that now I look like I've got a black eye. Startling under the bright bulbs surrounding the mirror. Damn. Always carry a phial of witch-hazel in your handbag for such unfortunate events. Unless you're hopeless and, like me, don't listen to your mother. I can't carry this off, I tell the chi-chi gold taps and the marble basin. Miss Greene Hats and Frocks in Homebush, here I come. I don't have the nerve for business. I make things. Beautiful, luxurious, stylish things. That's what I do, all I want to do, and I'm good at it. Can't I just do that and avoid everything else?

Mais non
, Madame Chanel appears in the mirror, a vision of elegant insouciance:
Do you think I simply woke up famous and in Paris one day? I began with hats and frocks in Moulins, oui? The things I've done to get here. Pull yourself together, ch
é
rie. Find the woman in this dress – if there is no woman, there is no dress.

I can almost feel her poke me in the ribs with her nail file. But that's the very problem right there, isn't it? There is no woman in this dress.

‘Ollie? Ollie Greene – that
is
you.'

And that is Cassie Fortescue, trotting out from the conveniences to my left. This show couldn't be better for farce.

I sigh: ‘Yes. Me.'

But I swear Madame Chanel says:
Look at her.
Finger under my chin, and so I do. I see Cassie Fortescue at my shoulder in the mirror, in her too-short dress and – oh dear – two black eyes. She is bouncing and smiling behind me, waving like a kitten after string. ‘I thought it was you in the dining room. God, how the hell
are
you, old beanie beanster, old sticky – it's been
ages,
hasn't it?'

‘Yes, it's been a long time.'
Sticky.
A flash of rage: I want to hold her face an inch from the lavatory water and see how she likes it. Or simply say:
That dress is so much more appalling at close range – God, where the hell did you find it? You look like a frilled cover for a dunny brush.

I don't do anything but stare, though. There's something odd about her, beyond the frock. She's hopping about from foot to foot, already dancing, or like a child who's had too much cake. She says, grinning: ‘Auntie called you this morning to keep shtum on Minnie, didn't she?'

I nod. Odder and odder, Cassie. Tell the whole ladies room what a shtumly devoted cousin you are, or put an ad in the paper: of the three compartments in here the doors of two remain closed and the occupants very quiet – no doubt so that they can hear every word.