Free The Women in Black by Madeleine St John Page B

they directed their slow steps as soon as they could towards water in whatever form they could most conveniently find it: they went to the beaches, the swimming baths, their own showers, and immersed themselves until at last the stupendous sun sank below the horizon and darkness laid its balm upon their assaulted senses. Patty reached Randwick on the Friday night before Christmas just as this benison began to fall.
    I wonder how long I’ve got before Frank gets in, she thought; he’ll be having a proper booze-up as it’s Friday night so he probably won’t get home till sevenish: so I’ve got time for a good long soak. And she took off all her sticky clothes and went into the bathroom, and turned on the shower. Standing under its downpour, she drifted into that primeval condition, a state of peacefulness suffused by an innocent sensuality, which immersion in water can alone induce, and it was fully fifteen minutes before she turned off the taps. She had washed her hair: her permanent wave was almost grown out and it hung in limp strands around her small face. As she re-entered the bed room her eye lit upon the secretive package which contained her new nightdress and she thought: I know, I’ll try it on now, and just see what it looks like on. And she did.
    She stood for some time gazing at herself in the full-length mirror in the wardrobe door, for she could not quite believe in the reality of the sight which met her eyes. Geez, she exclaimed to herself: geez-uz.
    I’ll be damned, thought Frank, if I’ll go to the pub with them lot tonight, and listen to any more bull about their fl aming kids. The topic was getting out of hand; some of the mates had even started producing—not half sheepishly enough, either—snapshots of their own: ‘Here’s my Cheryl—curly hair, see? She gets it from me—’ Frank was damned if he wanted to listen to any more of that, and in the pub, too. So tonight he sulked off—‘Things to do. See youse on Monday!’ And he went, without even thinking twice, to another pub on the other side of Central Railway Station, a little place he’d half noticed long ago, and he went into the public bar, and he asked for some whisky. I feel like a whisky, he thought; I just feel like a whisky.
    ‘Scotch or Australian?’ asked the barmaid.
    Well, there’s no need to go completely cuckoo, thought Frank.
    ‘Australian’s good enough for me,’ he told the barmaid.
    ‘Right you are,’ she said, and she poured him a measure of Australian whisky.
    Used as he was to drinking beer, Frank tossed it off.
    ‘Same again!’ he said.
    After some time he walked out into the street and found his way to his tram stop; it was a toast-rack tram on that route, and he wobbled slightly all the way home in a haze of whisky and unarticulated anguish. I wonder what’s for dinner, he thought.
    Patty had her back to the bedroom door and had only half heard Frank’s key turning in the lock. That will be Frank, she dimly thought, I’d better make myself look decent, and she opened the wardrobe door—her still-unfamiliar transparent-black-clad reflec-tion coming up close to meet her—to find her dressing-gown. As she did so, she suddenly saw, beyond her reflection, the figure of her husband, standing in the doorway of the bedroom.
    ‘What are you doing in here?’ he asked.
    ‘I’m just—I’m just getting my dressing-gown,’ said Patty.
    ‘Dressed for bed?’ asked Frank, taking in Patty’s apparel now quite precisely. ‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’
    ‘Well, not really,’ said Patty. ‘It’s new. I was just trying it on.
    I’ll take it off now.’
    ‘ I’ll take it off,’ said Frank.
    And he came over to Patty, who had turned away from the wardrobe and her refl ection, and stood in front of her for a few seconds, and then very gingerly he put his arms around her waist, and seizing in each hand a fold of the black nylon nightdress began to pull the garment up and over his wife’s damp head.