The Idea of Perfection (19 page)

There was a pause, then Coralie found a word that was both polite and truthful.

It’s very different, she said. She raised her voice. Very different, isn’t it, Mrs Trimm?

The old lady did not seem to have an opinion as to whether it was
different.
She was fingering a part where raw seam edges created a fringed effect. It had always been one of Harley’s favourite parts of this particular piece.

Is this on purpose, dear? she asked. Did you do this on purpose?

Harley looked at her watch. It said half past seven.

Yes, she agreed with Mrs Trimm. She seemed to have been here, smiling hard, for hours.

It was on purpose.

She wondered if her watch might have stopped.

AT HIS AGE William did not need to be taken to school. In fact he was always nagging her to let him walk there on his own. But she knew that
on his own meant with the others,
the rough uncouth boys who had skateboards and said
Igunna
when they meant
I’m going to.
Not appropriate companions for William, who was quite bright, but had to be encouraged to take his homework seriously.

She had walked down to the school with him today, and waved as he went in, although he never turned around to wave back, and then she had come back and cleaned up the breakfast things, and mopped the floor. Hurrying to get the mop out in the sun, she realised she was frowning.

It was one more thing to remember, not to frown while you ran outside with the mop.

Then she stripped the beds, turned the mattresses, and got the freshly-ironed sheets out of the cupboard she thought of as
the linen press.

She loved the feel of the crisply ironed fresh sheets snapping out over the bed on a cushion of air, and the glassiness of the starched pillowcases. It was only logical that the slippery texture of a thoroughly starched and ironed pillowcase would minimise the dragging effect on the skin of the face.

As she made the bed it brought a picture from her childhood. It was not a picture she wanted to see, but just for a moment, before she could blank it out, she did: her mother, flat on her back, asleep in the musty double bed, stretched out under the bedclothes fully dressed from when she had come in late from the Mail Exchange the night before. Her face pointed straight up to the ceiling, the shoes still on her feet made peaks in the bedclothes, and the handbag had kept her company all night, at the ready on her arm.

She put the picture away from her. There was no point in dwelling on things like that. You
put them behind you,
and did not look back.

She tucked the sheets hard under the corners of the mattress.
Hospital Corners.
Her mother had had no idea how to make a bed properly, had never heard of
Hospital Corners.
Felicity had learned about
Hospital Corners,
and starching, and the importance of turning mattresses on a daily basis, from Hugh’s mother, who had taken her under her wing.
I’ve always wanted a daughter,
she had said. Felicity had had to stop herself saying,
And I’ve always wanted a mother.
It might have sounded a little bit funny, seeing her mother was still alive.

 

 

She had sent away to Sydney for a new book that had diagrams of chin-tightening exercises. You started by pulling the mouth out sideways into a kind of leer. Then you tensed the muscles around your neck and jaw. She tried it in front of the bathroom mirror. It was rather grotesque.

However, she could see how it exercised all the muscles that held up your chin. They stood out in a frill of tendons around your jaw.

It was probably very good for you, even though it did make you look as if you were being electrocuted.

She did it six times, and then the muscles began to ache.
No pain, no gain.
That was what the books said. So she did seven more.

Hugh said he did not care, and he probably meant it.
Darling, I‘dlove you even with wrinkles
, he had told her, many times. She thought it was probably true. He was not one of those men who would trade in their wife once she got old, and replace her with something that had no
laugh-lines.
Hugh was a man who liked life to stay the same. She thought he had made a sort of agreement with life, that he would not demand too much of it, if it left him alone.

He liked the Land & Pastoral that way. There was not much margin for surprise there.

It was nothing to do with Hugh, the staving-off of the laugh-lines and so on.

It was something more private than that, and more important.

She did another chin-clench in the mirror. The trouble was that although making yourself look electrocuted tightened up the muscles around your chin, it also creased the whole of the lower part of your face up into
lines.

The question was, whether the
chin-firming
effect was enough to make up for the
line-forming
effect. It was yet another little dilemma.

And now here she was, frowning about the dilemma itself. It seemed that thinking about almost anything led to a dilemma, and where you had a dilemma you had this little pucker between the eyebrows.

She smoothed it out with a bit more Creme Jeunesse. That was better. But as soon as she forgot, she knew something under the skin would swell back into the smoothed-out place and make that little buckle in the skin again.

You had to fight the feeling, sometimes, that your body had a mind of its own. But a person could not be on guard for ever against themselves.

 

 

The woman from the Museum was apparently a well-known person. That common-looking Coralie from the craft shop had told her that the PM himself owned one of her patchworks.

But Felicity had noticed straight away that the woman had been neglecting her moisturiser. Every time she smiled, cracks in her skin radiated out from her eyes.
Laugh-lines,
indeed.

And she should do something about her hair. With that big face she needed to make a bit more of her hair. A good perm, perhaps. The lipstick was on crooked, too, and it was the wrong colour. With that sort of skin she should never wear that sort of pink. She could have told her that the dress was a bad mistake. That big ethnic sort of pattern, brown on cream, looked more like a tablecloth than a dress. Being so big herself, she would do better to avoid big patterns like that.

Moreover, she had happened to notice that the button on one of the square pockets over the breasts did not quite match the ones that did up the dress down the front. The woman had probably lost a button from the front and replaced it with this one from the pocket, and put the one that did not quite match on the pocket, where it would not show so much. She had made the mistake of thinking the not-quite-matching button would be a little secret between herself and the dress.

You lost buttons, naturally. Buttons were often sewn on very poorly. These days, as soon as she brought any garment home, she went over the buttons and reinforced the stitching with proper button thread.

However, you still lost a button now and then, and they were surprisingly hard to match. She had lost a pretty little button off her pink silk once, and had sent away to Honey cutt’s for a match. The first one they sent was not satisfactory and had had to be returned. The second had not been completely satisfactory either. There had been some attempt at unpleasantness, but she had a good carrying voice on the phone, and the vowels she had learned to copy from Hugh’s mother stood her in good stead with people in shops.

It was true that you could disguise the fact that buttons did not quite match by taking one from somewhere less conspicuous, as this woman had done.

But it meant it was not perfect. You always had something to hide.

 

 

The meeting had started well enough. The woman from the Museum in Sydney told them her name, and welcomed them, and congratulated them on the idea of the Karakarook Heritage Museum. She had not giggled or said
um
and her posture was good.

But then she let people waste time, talking about the obviously unsuitable things they had brought along. It was polite, she supposed, but you could let politeness go too far. She had not gone along to hear Merle Armitage, with her glasses still crooked — it would be so simple just to pop in to Livingstone and get the man to straighten them — explain how you made the gusset for the thumb of a lace glove. It was not even real lace. Then Mrs Fowler had gone on and on about knitting jumpers, when anyone who knew anything about knitting knew that her casting-off was always much too tight.

Something could be done about disfiguring moles like hers. She could mention it to her discreetly some time. There was a man in Sydney who did wonders with moles.

Mr Cutcliffe was there, wearing the same polyester tie he always wore. He had brought along a terrible old shirt, the antique collarless kind, with a big brown stain on the front. Personally, she would not have given it house room.

One had to be cordial and courteous to Mr Cutcliffe, because he was William’s teacher, but he was not really up to much. She was not completely happy with the school. These little country schools, how could they get the quality staff? More than once she had heard Mr Cutcliffe say
anythink
in an unguarded moment.

Once upon a time, long ago, she herself had said
anythink.
Everyone in her family had always said
anythink.
But once she was meeting different kinds of people at Honeycutt‘s, she had quickly learned better. By the time she was going out with Hugh she hardly had to think before she said the word.
Anything.
There was a pleasure in getting it right, and knowing you had got it right, and making sure other people knew you got it right.
Anything.

Ben Hall’s shirt,
Mr Cutcliffe had said, and Felicity had thought he must be some local football hero, until he had added,
The one they shot him in
,
there’s the blood,
and she remembered the bushrangers.

The worst thing about the meeting for the Museum Committee was that Alfred Chang had been there. He had brought along a whole lot of funny old black-and-white photographs. They showed Karakarook as it had been in the beginning, a raw naked town surrounded by hills littered with cut-down tree trunks as thick on the ground as spilled toothpicks. The big plane trees along the driveway of
Heatherbrae
had not even been planted, and the Post Office and Town Hall were bald and new, and beside them the Mechanics’ Institute had grand iron railings out the front that were not there any more, and a sort of colonnade that had been filled in with fibro.

They had been in his uncle’s things, he said, when he died, and had come to him because the family knew he was interested in photography.

The way he spoke, he seemed to think it was all quite normal, as if his uncle was just like other people’s uncles, whereas of course his uncle must have been Chinese. It was almost as if he did not realise that being Chinese was unusual.

Photography’s a bit of a hobby with me, he said. I’ve fixed up a darkroom and a bit of a studio. Up above the shop.

He was telling the woman from the Museum, of course, but it had seemed to Felicity that he had been speaking directly to her.

While everyone was looking at the photos and exclaiming at how
different
it all was, and how it was all
just the same,
he held one out to her across the table.

Here, Mrs Porcelline, he said.

There was that same silky thing in the way he said her name. The way he said it, it actually sounded slightly rude.

This one might interest you. The bank, when it was first built.

He made her lean right over the table to take the photo. He would have been able to look right down her front. It was the only problem with the little pink top. The other thing was, as he gave her the photo, his fingers brushed hers. It could have been an accident. Anyone looking would have assumed it was an accident. You had to know about him being in love with her, to know it was on purpose.

She felt sorry for him in a way. Going to so much trouble, coming to the meeting, all the business with the old photos, just so he could sit across the table from her and touch her fingers.

She looked at the photograph of the Land & Pastoral, although it did not interest her. The shadows of the stone pediment were very sharp and black on the paper, and there were two men in a buggy in front of it, and a blur that was probably a dog running past.

When she passed it back to him she was careful to slide it across the table. That way, their fingers would not touch again.

But he would not take it back.

Keep it, he hissed in a stage-whisper, so everyone looked.

Keep it, Mrs Porcelline.

He would have gone on hissing at her across the table all night, so she smiled and mouthed
thank you
across at him, and put the photo away in her bag to show how grateful she was.

After that she kept her face turned away, looking along towards the woman from the Museum. She could not see, but she could feel him, watching her, for the rest of the night. She did not look, but she made sure she kept her chin nice and high, and the corners of her mouth turned up.

 

 

Although supposed to be such an important person, the woman from the Museum had not seemed to be all that interested in Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s magnificent old heirloom quilt, that had come down to Hugh. It looked as though she did not fully realise just how valuable it was. Felicity had been prepared to point out the piece that was said to be out of her wedding dress, and the embroidered spider’s webs and butterflies, but did not feel she had been given the opportunity.

Not that she had any intention of leaving Great-Grandmother Ferguson’s quilt in the Karakarook Heritage Museum. She would make it clear that it was simply on loan — she had seen that, in art galleries,
on loan from so-and-so
— and when they left Karakarook at the end of the year, she would take it with her.