The Midnight Dress (9 page)

‘He’s not old,’ says Pearl. ‘He’s only thirty.’

‘How do you know that?’ Rose raises her eyebrows.

‘I read it in the newspaper. He plays for the Leonora Lions. He’s been to university. He studied literature. No one ever goes anywhere in this town. He knows so many different things.’

Rose shakes her head.

‘Oh, it’s only a game, anyway,’ says Pearl, exasperated. ‘He’s only here till the end of the crush. He’s just helping out his mother. His father died. It’s so boring in this town. So boring I could die.’

The first of the cold droplets hits their faces. Pearl closes her eyes and tilts her head skyward.

‘I’m going home,’ says Rose.

She has drawn her eyeliner
très
thick and painted black lipstick immaculately on her bow mouth. She has tried to powder over her freckles. She wants the effect to be startling, frightening even, although she doesn’t know why she wants to scare Edie, of all people, who rescues ceramic blue birds and keeps them in a flock on her kitchen wall. There’s a box of them too, beneath the table, all their wings in pieces, waiting to be repaired.

Looking into that box now makes Rose feel fidgety.

‘You wouldn’t believe how many of those birds are out there,’ says Edie. ‘You’d be surprised how many people own the things then throw them out at the dump or hand them in to Lifeline or sell them at garage sales. I don’t go out much any more, of course, so I think my flock is nearly done.’

Rose sits sullenly. Edie has not made one mention of her make-up.

‘Did you come through the cane?’

‘Yes,’ says Rose.

‘You have to be careful of snakes,’ says Edie.

Everyone’s always going on about snakes. Rose hasn’t seen a single one. Leaving the caravan park, she started on the road but then cut through a cane field along a row, and then a vacant paddock rife with milk thistle. It cut almost fifteen minutes off the forty-minute walk. The afternoon clouds hang motionless in the sky and when they move they’re like huge ships unmoored, dragging their shadows behind them.

In the fields she’s closer to the mountain, she realised, almost in its shade. She can see the places where the mountain pleats and the open scrub turns to rainforest. When she leaves home she can see the Leap, on the sea side, and as she walks Weeping Rock comes into view. That rock makes her shiver, stirs something in her like a half-forgotten dream.

Edie hands Rose a pile of old confirmation dresses, once white, now yellow, heavily rust-stained. Rose sits staring at them on her lap until Edie lifts up one of the skirts.

‘It’s the tulle petticoats we want,’ says Edie, holding up the hook again.

Rose opens up the dress carefully and looks for the seam.

‘Shall I tell you a love story?’ says Edie.

‘I hate love stories,’ says Rose.

‘It involves the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Jean-Claude Mercier, remember him, and a Mr Jonathan Baker, who was born right here in this very house in the very first room down the hallway. He nearly killed his mother coming out. She was very small, Lillian Baker, even smaller than me.’

Rose starts to unpick. She gives the old woman nothing.

‘The great-great-great-great granddaughter’s name was Florence and she was the only daughter of Herbert Mercier of Herbert Mercier & Sons Gentlemen’s Outfitters, in George Street, Brisbane. There were three sons – Herbert, Frank and Arthur – and not one of them good with a needle. Sloppy is what their father called them. They were never paying attention, clowning around to their father’s despair. But Florence, she was different, she knew all the mysteries of folding and draping and the pleasant secrets of pintucking. Her hand was fine. Her father loved to watch her stitch, her solemness, which he thought was just as it should be.

So Florence’s brothers did the measuring and cutting and she sat in the back room all day, every day, and sewed. It was a small hot room with one window looking over a laneway where crows stood on the awnings and clicked and clacked their feet on the tin roof.

She had never been anywhere, Florence Mercier, not ever. Not counting the daytrips they sometimes made to her uncle’s house at Enoggera, where they swam in the creek. In the creek the current pulled against their legs. Her father had urged her to let go of the bank, he had shown her himself, how there was nothing to fear, the waters would only take her to the riverbend, where she could climb back out again. When she finally let go of the bank and floated away on the river’s back, it had terrified her but also filled her with awe: the way the world was always leaning someway, draining someway, pulling someway. The tides, the moon rising above the rooftops, the water flowing from the mountains to the sea.

Florence Mercier had a large and unsightly mole on her right cheek, the size of a fingernail, a dark velvety brown. She had a long calm face and a wide forehead, huge brown eyes. Her skin was smooth and very pale. She would have been a beauty, were it not for the mole, and its presence was commented upon in all the shops up and down the street.

She was pale from never going in the sun, Florence. Fragile.

She sewed and sewed and sewed. By hand often, and then by machine. They had a very good machine, a Varley Medium that Herbert Mercier had imported from Yorkshire. The machine said dig, dig, dig, diggity, dig all day long and it lulled her almost to sleep. She traced her fingers over pinstripes, slid her nails through hand-stitched buttonholes, stood up, sat down, barely breathed.

Jonathan Baker arrived the summer Florence turned twenty-two, which was very old in those days for a girl not to be married. Later she would say it was the heat, there was a heatwave at the time, you see, and the city was broiling in its own skin, all the shabby brown streets stinking with horse shit and the river turned grey. Horses hung their heads and dogs lay in shadows and women suffocated in their stays, no amount of fanning took that feeling of suffocation away.

Jonathan Baker had a head of lustrous black hair and his skin was a burnt biscuity brown. He had bright blue eyes. Florence had never seen anyone like him. He wasn’t like anyone from the city: he came into Herbert Mercier & Sons in his moleskins and chequered shirt and his voice was so quiet that it could barely be heard. And it wasn’t that she had never seen the sons of graziers or pastoralists before, she’d seen many, sewn them suits by the dozen, but this man was . . . What is the word she wanted? This man was gentle.

That would be how she described him then.

When she walked into the shop from the back room and saw him standing there, her heart leapt in her chest. That was always how she told the story. He was newly to the city and had money to burn. He was sorely in need of a new suit, being there to look at machinery and find a wife, and was staying with the honourable member for Toowong himself, his pocket filled with other letters of introduction.

Florence did her best to hide her mole. She was quite practised in the fine art of turning away, very good at looking at things that didn’t need to be looked at so that the horrible side of her face – that’s how she thought of it – was hidden from view.

‘Florence will make Mr Baker tea,’ said her father.

Florence served it carefully, keeping the right side of her face averted.

Her brothers slouched at their table, tape measures in their hands.

‘Where did you say you were from, the North? Was it cattle you said. Or cane?’ asked her father.

‘Cattle,’ said Jonathan Baker very quietly. ‘And cane.’

But all of it was there in his eyes, the towering sky and carpet of fields, the lazy rivers and the crocodiles. Florence shivered and met his gaze.

Who was this young lady with the disappointed face, Jonathan Baker thought. He watched her drift into the room and then out again, saw a large brown beauty spot just below her right eye. She kept hiding it from him, turning her face, again and again, as though she were playing a game.

A faint breeze stirred the curtain in the front room and everyone in the small gathering watched in anticipation.

It was the heat, Florence always said. It was the heat.

‘Wild country up there, I’ve heard,’ said her father.

‘Wild enough,’ said Jonathan.

‘How interesting,’ said Florence.

‘Yes,’ he replied.

These were the only words they spoke to each other before she sewed the secret pocket into the lining of his suit jacket. She made the suit with her very own hands, and in the stifling little room behind the shop thought about sewing the secret pocket.

Sitting before the sewing machine she undid her blouse buttons and rested back in her chair. His trousers hung with a perfect crease over the stand and before her lay the pieces of his jacket. She took off her shoes. The clock ticked on the wall and apart from her father moving in the next room, writing in his ledger, it was the only sound. She stood up and counted her steps around the perimeter of the room as though it were a cell. She cried, briefly, with her face in her hands, beside the window, but she could not stop what she knew she was about to do.

The crows were calling out along the laneway and the city was hazy with heat. She could feel it thrumming – all the carriages and traps and the trams coming down George Street – through her bare feet pressed to the floor. She held the black satin lining in her hands.

Her secret pocket she hid in the seam and she knew, as she placed it there, that he might never find it. She wrote the note in pencil, very simply, and folded it with great care. It was a sack suit, coat and trousers and matching waistcoat in olive broadcloth, all the rage. Double topstitched. Patch pockets. When her father went over the suit, each seam, each buttonhole, each cuff, she held her breath.

‘Very good,’ was all he said, though. ‘Very good.’

Jonathan Baker had decided he would no longer think of Florence Mercier. There were, after all, many other ladies he would meet at the dances. When he collected the suit he didn’t look to see if she was standing in her doorway but kept his eyes on the tailor.

But later, when he found the note, he realised he was very late and had to run. He sprinted out of Lennon’s Hotel onto George Street, shot across the intersection at Alice Street, hurdled the low hedges into the botanical gardens. He didn’t stop running until he saw her standing there beside the fountain, fragile and luminous in the sun.

The parchment-coloured petticoats are unfastened and the dresses lie in an exhausted pile. Rose’s fingers ache from the work and she stretches them out in front of her. The frogs sing in the humid night air. She hasn’t said a single word.

Edie looks at her with a half-smile. She hauls herself up from her chair.

‘You’ve done very well,’ she says. ‘Now the next thing to do is to measure you up. There isn’t much of you, is there?’

She takes the tape measure from the sewing box and asks Rose to stand in front of her. When she sees Rose’s face, she adds, ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

Edie has measured up countless girls, countless women – farmers’ daughters and mayors’ daughters and brides-to-be. Fat women and rickety-thin old ladies, plump young girls she would encase in confirmation dresses and slender belles she would dress in elegant ball gowns – but never in her life has she come across a girl that looked so terrified of a tape measure.

‘What’s wrong?’ says Edie.

‘Nothing,’ says Rose.

The old woman holds up the mildew-flecked tape measure. She lays it against Rose’s shoulder tip and bends down to the floor. Her knees click. She wraps the tape measure around Rose’s waist, her hips. She sees the girl’s eyes are squeezed closed.

‘I suppose they got married and lived happily ever after then,’ says Rose.

She doesn’t like to encourage the old woman, but with her up close like that she has to say something.

‘Well,’ says Edie, who takes the pencil from behind her ear to write down a figure on the back of a brown paper bag. ‘In a fashion, I suppose.’

‘When Florence Mercier saw Jonathan Baker her hand went to her throat. He held her note in his hand and the sight of it made her nearly faint. They walked along the river first, all the way to Customs House, not speaking, until Jonathan Baker couldn’t contain himself any longer.

‘There’s a leaf shaped like a love heart and just as red,’ he said. ‘It’s not the only one. There are leaves like satin and others covered in thorns, there are flowers, purple, yellow flowers, in shapes you could never dream of, some trees drop pods like purses to the forest floor, inside there are seeds like gold, there are fruits so blue they hurt your eyes to look at them.’

He took one from his pocket then, a little blue quandong, dried, held it out to her, placed it on her hand.

Florence Mercier looked into his eyes.

They caught the ferry, crossed the brown river, came back again.

‘There are waterfalls, the big ones that everyone knows about, but others too, smaller ones, secret ones. I could take you there.’

Her cheeks coloured then paled.

‘In the forest there are trees as wide as trams, thousands of years old, and when you look up you can’t see the top and all night you can hear the creeks telling stories.’

‘Is your house right there in the trees?’ Florence asked, her first words, she was trembling.