Chapter Five
Margot loved this white lace dress when she was a teenager.
It has loose sleeves, almost see-through, a skirt that falls below her knees, and an underlay of cotton for the bodice and skirt.
She wore it to a dance at a time when lots of girls wore jersey and polyester and other fabrics that clung to the body.
Clothes that drew attention to a neat figure were for girls who did want to grow up.
Who wanted to be married. That had never appealed to Margot: to have to accommodate a man.
She had enough to deal with in her interior life.
Her head was full of stories and memories; her imagination so vivid that it crowded out almost everything else.
And it’s not as if she needed to marry so she wasn’t poor, the way some girls did. She had money. For a while.
She looks at herself in the long mirror in her bedroom. The dress still fits her even though she hasn’t tried it on for years. It still hangs in the same wardrobe she’s always had. Even after her parents died, she didn’t move into their bedroom. It’s her aunt Lavinia’s room now.
There are other bedrooms in this house. Margot could move into the one that has trees outside the window, or the one that has more light. She doesn’t want to, though. They’re not familiar. This room is safe, and she needs a place to feel settled and steady when her imagination takes flight.
Lavinia needs to see this dress – Margot doesn’t think she’s ever shown it to her. She makes her way down the creaking stairs to the sitting room.
‘Hello, darling,’ Lavinia says as Margot enters. She is standing by the sideboard, looking at the collection of photographs there. She does that from time to time.
Margot tries never to look at them because she doesn’t think people can be captured in photos. How can something that is still represent a human in motion? She hates to think that anyone could believe a photo of her would be anything like the real her.
Lavinia gives her a quizzical look. ‘What are you wearing?’
‘I’ve had this dress since I was seventeen!’ Margot picks up the sides of the skirt and half-curtseys. ‘Do you like it?’
Lavinia’s face is unreadable. Then she smiles kindly. ‘I might have when you were seventeen,’ she says. ‘But, darling, it’s past its prime, don’t you think?’
Margot looks down at the dress and fails to see what she means. ‘No,’ she says, and is met with raised eyebrows.
‘Are you planning to wear it out?’ Lavinia says.
‘I might.’ It’s been hidden away for decades so it deserves a little spin – to the shops, perhaps.
‘It’s not quite the shade it’s meant to be.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Darling … it’s yellowed badly.’
Margot glances down at the dress again. It looks the same to her now as it does in her memory of it. This happens to her sometimes, that she imagines things to be different than they are, but she really thinks Lavinia is wrong in this instance. So she decides to change the subject.
‘Who are you looking at?’
‘Your dear brothers.’ Lavinia points to the photograph of two young men in army uniform.
Margot blanches and wishes she hadn’t asked the question. She can’t talk about them. Even if they are the reason she exists.
‘They were lovely boys,’ Lavinia goes on, sadness in her voice the way it always is when she mentions them.
Margot can’t participate in this conversation, though, because she never met them.
Toby and Oliver were eighteen and nineteen when they went to war, and a year older when they died together in 1943.
Margot’s father’s first wife, their mother, died not long afterward – from the shock, Lavinia always said.
Then he met Margot’s mother, Perry – given name Petunia, which she never liked – and Margot was born in 1955.
Their only child, but her father’s third.
Her parents gave her everything a girl could need.
Their home was comfortable and Margot always had the prettiest dresses, as well as piano and ballet lessons, a dog and a doll’s house.
Sadness pervaded the household, however, without Margot even realising it.
Her father would smile but rarely laughed.
Margot felt like she could never quite reach him – it was as if he was always somewhere else even when in her presence.
She knew he loved her – he demonstrated that in his care of her – yet his eyes were distant.
Her mother tried to make up for it by ensuring Margot had a lovely life, but it always felt as if the household was living in two parallel dimensions at once.
As a child Margot was creative with a daydreamy streak, but not one so extravagant that it stopped her excelling at her schoolwork.
She topped her classes in mathematics and English.
A good all-rounder, her teachers would say.
In her daydreams, she made up worlds in her head where there was laughter and sunshine always.
It was these worlds that kept her from collapsing entirely when she was in her late teens and both of her parents died.
Later, she would wonder if it was grief that killed them: her mother dying of a cancer that ate away at her stomach, the strain of tending to her father’s sadness too great; and her father dying of a heart attack.
Once Margot was in the big house on Avenue Road on her own, with all those empty bedrooms, Lavinia, her father’s sister, came to live with her.
Lavinia had never married, and the childhood polio that had left her with a pronounced limp meant she was destined to need some care as she aged.
Margot not only wanted to offer Lavinia a place to live where someone could keep an eye on her, but she wanted the company.
Except it’s Lavinia who looks after her, really. She knows this. She is grateful for it. Her aunt is her dearest friend and closest companion, and Margot wishes she had thought more about both of their circumstances before she let the money run out.
Her brothers would never have done that, she is sure.
Every time her father talked about them he said how capable they were, how smart, how logical.
Except if they were still here to manage the money, Margot probably wouldn’t exist at all.
It is a notion that turns her brain inside out from time to time, and one that Lavinia doesn’t know about.
The boys have been phantoms haunting her whole life, but despite that Margot never asks Lavinia to not talk about them. Lavinia knew them and loved them.
‘I wish I had known them,’ Margot says to her aunt now, as she often does, although she’s never sure if that’s true.
She wanders over to the windows and looks out at Mosman Bay, at the yachts moored outside the Rowers Club, at the ferry from the city slowly making its way to the wharf to drop off passengers and pick up others.
People who go to work, maybe, although at this time of day they should already be at work.
There’s no work for Margot. Each day runs into the next without the structure of a job to tell her whether it’s a weekday or not. That’s why she loses track of which day it is. Maybe. Actually, since her late teens she hasn’t been too good at keeping track of the days. Or the hours. Or the minutes.
‘Busy down there,’ Lavinia says as she puts a pot of tea on the table they use for all their meals. It has a view of the bay and a good stretch of Cremorne Point with its trees and flowers and nice houses.
Margot has a nice house too, thanks to her parents.
They left it to her. There was money as well.
Lots of it. But in the end not enough to live on forever.
Because what they didn’t leave her was any instruction about managing that money.
It was only recently that she realised she should have been investing her wealth so she could draw an income from it.
No one tells you these things when you inherit a lump sum.
And they really should, especially if you’re a woman who has never had to work because your parents paid for everything, then left you everything.
Because now Margot needs money to take care of Lavinia.
She doesn’t really care about herself. Well, some days she does a little bit.
Most days she finds the prospect of caring for herself to be overwhelming.
Which is why she’s lucky to have Lavinia, who looks after her as best she can.
Rather than Margot looking after her, which was meant to be the deal.
Lavinia is ‘delicate’ – that’s always been the family story. Most days Margot knows how she feels.
‘Margot?’
‘Hm?’
She closes her eyes and sees the image of Mosman Bay.
Tonight, when she’s trying to sleep, she’ll replay that image and it will comfort her to think of the water and the boats and the people going about their days.
Ever since her childhood she has liked to picture something when she tries to sleep, although if it actually worked she wouldn’t have chronic insomnia.
It’s like a talisman now, though, the need to picture something, and she doesn’t want to give it up.
‘My darling, there’s tea for you.’
Margot opens her eyes and looks into Lavinia’s. They used to be bright, almost a cornflower blue, but they’ve faded with the years, as most things do. When she was a child Margot used to think Lavinia was magical, and it’s possible she wasn’t wrong.
‘Where did I go?’ Margot asks, even though she knows.
‘Where do you always go?’ Lavinia touches her cheek. ‘Margot in Wonderland.’
Margot’s mother used to say that when a young Margot would spend hours in the garden talking to the flowers and the birds and the butterflies.
Lavinia smiles sadly. ‘I miss your mother.’
‘So do I.’
Perry had quite a presence, and once she was gone there was a space that could never be filled. You can never replace a big personality, Margot thinks, no matter what you do. Nor should you want to.
‘Oh. Tea,’ she says, picking up her cup and sipping the tepid liquid.
‘It cools quickly,’ Lavinia says.
‘That’s all right.’ Margot smiles at her aunt then looks out the window again, at the bay and the boats and the sunshine and the trees. ‘Should we go for a walk later?’
‘I don’t know that I can, my darling.’
Lavinia’s knees haven’t been good for a while, which Margot forgets sometimes because inside the house she always seems mobile.
But in order to go for a walk around the bay they’d have to descend quite a few stairs, and climb up them again to return home, and stairs aren’t good for Lavinia’s knees.
If Margot had money she could take Lavinia to see a specialist and have those knees seen to, but instead they’re waiting on a place on a list in a public hospital, and that could take years.
‘Sorry, I forgot,’ she says.
‘You go, though,’ Lavinia says. ‘It’s such a lovely day.’
‘Mm.’
‘You won’t wear that dress, though, will you?’ Lavinia says, frowning.
‘Well …’ Margot glances down at it. ‘I don’t have many others.’
Her wardrobe is as limited as her funds. Occasionally she goes to the frock shop up at the junction, where Daphne will often have something set aside for her, but even then she can’t always afford to buy the garment.
‘You want to have others, though, don’t you?’ Lavinia asks gently.
‘Yes, of course!’ Margot loves clothes, revelling in the creative expression that can be achieved with them, and she adores the fashion magazines that Daphne gives her each time she visits. Looking at those clothes is as close as she will ever come to having them, though.
Lavinia takes her hand and Margot’s breath catches because her aunt looks so serious.
‘We don’t have any money,’ Lavinia says, her voice soft but her grasp firm.
‘I know,’ Margot says, as if it’s just a simple fact they should both accept.
‘Margot, we need some.’
Margot sighs dramatically and looks out the window again. The view is more pleasant to contemplate than the truth.
‘How are we supposed to get some?’ she asks eventually.
‘You need to find a job.’
Margot blinks several times. ‘A job?’
She knows people have jobs, of course. But she’s not skilled at anything, as Lavinia knows.
She could have been. The early signs were there in her schoolwork.
It’s just that since her parents died, the concentration she had throughout her school years has proved elusive.
She hasn’t been able to stick at anything.
Lavinia mentioned secretarial school once and Margot looked into it, she really did, but the idea of being cooped up in a room learning to type, then, worse, cooped up in an office having to take dictation from some boss made her feel nauseated.
She wasn’t made for that. She was made for gardens and flowers and birds and boats and dresses and views.
‘I can’t do anything,’ she says to Lavinia. ‘I don’t know how.’
‘You’re young enough to learn. You’re only thirty-six.’
Margot chews her bottom lip, mulling over the possibilities for a woman of her age to find employment and failing to latch onto anything.
‘What about working in a shop?’ Lavinia suggests.
Margot doesn’t like the idea of having to talk to customers but she doesn’t have an alternative to suggest.
‘Perhaps,’ she offers.
‘I’ll think about which sort of shop.’ Lavinia seems somewhat mollified.
‘All right,’ Margot says.
She looks down at the lace dress again, seeing – for the first time – that it is, in fact, a little too old to be worn outside the house.
‘I’ll go and change for my walk,’ she says.
‘Lovely, darling.’ Lavinia smiles vaguely and goes to turn on the radio. She loves listening to the talkback in the afternoon.
Margot does not, so she slips upstairs and puts on her simplest dress before heading out for a stroll.