Chapter One
This hill was never so steep when Daphne was a girl. She used to walk up it, tugging the hand of her little brother behind her, and it seemed like nothing.
When she reached the top, she’d always turn to look back at the water.
Middle Harbour. Sydney Heads. From that height she could see across to Seaforth and the bushland that ran along Dobroyd Head.
She could see Clontarf Beach. She couldn’t see Balmoral Beach, for that was below her, down the hill, tucked away.
Now that she’s seventy-one, the hill feels like a mountain. One she must climb.
The path she’s treading now – up Beaconsfield Road to Middle Head Road, then along to Mosman Junction – is one she has known for almost as long as she can remember.
For she lives in the house she grew up in.
She brought up her own children there, and helped her parents ease out of this life within its walls.
Her grandparents before that. If the world outside the house hadn’t stretched as far as the horizon on one side and to the city of Sydney on the other she might have thought her life small.
Contained. Except a vista so grand is a canvas for a vivid imagination, and she’s had that. Although it’s contracted a little now.
Old ladies live in their memories, not their wildest dreams. Her mother told her that once, and Daphne found it sad at the time but she understands it now. The time has passed for her to have dreams. Memories take less work and they’re more comforting.
At the crest of the hill she pauses and turns to look down the road she knows so well with its mix of houses old and new.
The suburb has changed from being unwanted in the wake of World War II and its dangers for harbourside dwellers to become popular with those looking for a life near both city and sea.
The view over the harbour from the top of Beaconsfield Road has, however, barely changed in that time. And she has never tired of it.
Other things, yes, she has tired of. Being a mother: that’s tiring when your children are young and need you. And being a wife is tiring now that her Hector doesn’t have as many marbles as he used to.
Being Daphne. Yes, that can be tiring too.
Not that she’s in a hurry to depart this Earth, mind. There’s beauty here yet. There’s this view, for one thing. For every thing.
She sighs and it’s a contented sound. A person is fortunate if she can be made happy by a view. Or at least mildly pleased. Happiness is beyond her now, like those wildest dreams.
That might sound dire but she’s a pragmatist. Always has been. Because she’s had to be.
Daphne was born in 1920 and World War I swirled around her young life.
Her father had served; her mother had lived with the uncertainty of whether or not he would come home.
He did, but he was changed. Not the man Daphne’s mother remembered.
He tended to his garden by day and would sit outside at night and look at the sky.
Daphne’s mother’s father gave the family money so they could get by and eventually they moved in with her grandparents, into the house on Beaconsfield Road. Her father was good with his hands and after a few years went back to carpentry, the trade he’d had before the war.
He had a young apprentice, Hector, who was dashing, with Clark Gable hair and moustache.
Hector was from a large Catholic family in Cammeray and Daphne’s Protestant grandfather didn’t approve of the match, or the suburb Hector came from.
It was ‘too far west’, he said, but he’d always been a snob.
Her mother talked him around and soon Hector joined the crowded household.
Thankfully Daphne’s brother, Edgar, had moved out by then. He and Hector did not like each other.
Daphne thinks about Edgar as she walks past The Tar, a slender strip of street connecting Middle Head Road and Wolseley Road.
If she were to turn down it then take the steps to Mulbring Street, she’d be cutting close to where the tram used to follow its steep route to Balmoral Beach.
Edgar fell off that tram once, skylarking, cut his leg open and almost bled to death.
Hector thought he was a foolish young man and that was probably the root of the mutual dislike.
Further up the road Daphne comes to the house that used to hold a doctor’s surgery.
Her doctor’s surgery. Doctor Blaine. Stern but kind as needed, and she’d needed it with two miscarriages then a stillbirth.
Doctor Blaine had patched up Edgar when he fell off the tram and propped her up when she despaired that she’d ever have children.
‘You’re young yet,’ he kept saying, ‘and there’s time. ’
Time. That’s something else she thinks about on a regular basis. How it means nothing – how fifty years seems like a flash – and everything, because it’s so stuffed full of memories and emotions that even one day can feel as weighty as a mountain.
He was right, though, Doctor Blaine. Daphne had a daughter, Janet, then a son, Noel.
Janet lived in London for several years. She’s home now, and helping to care for Hector when Daphne can’t be there; has done ever since Daphne asked her if she could help out while she worked at the frock shop.
Janet said she could do better than that and moved in.
Her children are grown-up, her husband has moved on to his second wife, and Janet was living in a pokey little flat in Annandale, working part-time at the local library and pining for the harbourside suburb she grew up in.
The house on Beaconsfield Road is more than big enough for the three of them.
For three more, if needed. And another three.
It was a good purchase, as Daphne’s father said.
Hector had been fretful when Daphne left him this morning and she gave Janet instructions that she didn’t need, because, as she said, ‘It’s not as if I haven’t done this before, Mum.’
Daphne knows she can trust Janet to look after Hector.
The giving of instructions is reflexive, because she’s Janet’s mother and apparently she feels some sort of subconscious need to boss her child around.
She really has to train herself out of it or they’ll get on each other’s nerves.
More than they already do. Which is normal for an adult child and an even more adult parent living in close proximity, she thinks.
It would be unkind for Daphne to admit to anyone that she feels lighter when she reaches the crest of the hill and walks along the flat of Middle Head Road to Mosman Junction. It’s knowledge that keeps her going on the days when caring for Hector feels like a heaviness.
He was never a burden before, but he’s no longer the man she used to know. His wit, his sharpness, have gone. What’s left is a man who looks like Hector without the attributes that kept her interested in him all these years.
That’s marriage, though: In sickness and in health. She believes in those vows. She lives them. And sometimes she needs a break from them. Which is what the frock shop gives her.
Now it’s a charity shop run by a church organisation, but Daphne’s always called it the frock shop because that’s what the original owner called it. Daphne had a job there when she was a young woman, working mornings because the owner, Ophelia Pankhurst, didn’t like waking up before ten.
Ophelia’s name was almost certainly made up but it suited her, because she had beaux who were as tortured as Hamlet and she said winning the right to vote was the best thing that could ever happen to a woman.
Maybe those two aspects were related, the quality of the men Ophelia knew not making the case for a man to be the best thing that could ever happen to a woman. In Daphne’s opinion, of course.
Ophelia would give Daphne advice about men – once she deigned to appear in the shop each day. It could be at midday. Or four o’clock. Advice about men, and about clothes, and about what women should wear for men.
‘Not too revealing,’ she’d say, sometimes even to a customer, tugging at fabric around a bosom as if that would magically make a dress looser in fit. ‘You need to offer a man mystery.’
If a customer dared to disagree she’d sigh dramatically and say, ‘If you wish to be a trollop, of course I can’t stop you.’
Ophelia liked to emphasise words, and Daphne had thought it an affectation until she met Ophelia’s mother and found it ran in the family.
From Ophelia, Daphne also learnt about fit and cut, materials and hem lengths.
About what worked on a short woman with what Ophelia called an Edwardian figure – ‘all dainty wrists and ankles and a waist, Daph, but oh my, the bosom and the hips!’ – and a tall woman with neither waist nor bosom nor hips, and all shapes in between.
It was a training of the eye. An education Daphne didn’t know she was receiving until Ophelia found the Hamlet she wanted to marry and sold the shop.
Daphne wasn’t part of the sale but she remained at the shop. The name changed, the new owner lasted for three years then sold, and the business has changed hands several times since. Yet Daphne has remained.
Because it’s now a charity shop, Daphne is not paid to work there.
Which is fine – she’s past official retirement age, even though she was still being paid until she was sixty-eight, which was when the last owner sold the shop to a man who rents it to the church that runs the shop.
She doesn’t need money; has never really needed it, because living in the family home has meant she and Hector never needed to find money for a house themselves.
No, working at the frock shop has given her things money can’t: dignity, distraction, a sense of achievement. And fun.
Even though women of her generation usually gave up jobs when they married, Hector never minded her going to work, although she missed a few months here and there when the children were small. He knew she enjoyed it.
‘It’s like dressing real-life dolls, isn’t it, love?’ he said once, and he was right.
As Daphne turns the key in the shop’s front door and steps inside, she can see the evidence of the weekend volunteers: clothes shoved back onto racks, half-sticking out; shoes not in pairs; jewellery still on the counter.
The shop isn’t tiny but it’s not large enough for messes to not be noticed.
There are racks of clothes down each side of it, with shoes underneath each of them; a large counter where the cash register and the jewellery live, and three stands in the middle of the floor, displaying accessories.
Daphne sighs then purses her lips. Why can’t anyone maintain standards, she wonders – and it’s said in Ophelia’s voice, because Ophelia used to say it of people she thought badly dressed or badly behaved or both.
‘Manners extend to dressing, Daph,’ she would say. ‘A well-dressed person is being polite to everyone who must look on her.’
Of course, in those days the manners included the wearing of gloves and hats and very little jewellery, lest a lady look gaudy or gauche.
There was so much she learnt from Ophelia – including how to run a shop. Which, clearly, the weekend volunteers do not know.
With an even bigger sigh Daphne turns on the lights, puts her handbag in the small office out the back – the one place she doesn’t keep tidy, administration not being of as much interest to her as clothes – and sets about putting the shop to rights.
She needs it to be just the way she likes it because it is the place where she can most be herself.
Working at the frock shop – in whichever incarnation – has always given Daphne the chance to be creative.
To look at a woman’s figure and find just the right dress for her special occasion, or a scarf that makes an outfit better, or a skirt that fits properly.
Clothes can make or break a woman’s mood.
There is a lot of power in what she knows about clothes, and it gives her satisfaction too.
Ladies who come in may be looking for a bargain but they’ll be given Daphne’s expertise if they want it.
In return, Daphne is given respite from what’s happening at home.
From her memories of the babies who didn’t make it, and the years that have gone by in a flash, leaving her gasping sometimes with the awareness that life is so desperately short and so exquisitely long, and wishing she knew, at her age, how to really be in this world without all these things getting on top of her, but …
She doesn’t. She only knows how to live as Daphne, with some days being too bright and some too dark, and what evens them out is having purpose and having fun. The frock shop gives her both.
As she returns order to the shop floor she breathes in and smells not only the old clothes but Ophelia’s heavy perfume and a favourite customer’s shampoo and the aftershave of the mayor who used to visit far too often, as well as coffee and cigarettes, and cinnamon toast that one owner used to buy at the milk bar next door.
All of that crammed into her memory; all of it here now. Her life in this frock shop. There is nowhere else she wants to be today.