Chapter Twenty-Seven
Another year has begun and Margot is trying to feel positive about it.
She has some money now, and she thinks it’s enough to last them for at least a few months.
Although not forever, obviously, so the matter of finding a job is still pressing on her.
As is the fact that she doesn’t have any skills for any kind of job.
Which means she has to think about finding something she can do without experience or skills.
At her age. She’s not a school-leaver whom everyone would excuse for having nothing behind them – in fact, they’d probably welcome it.
A school-leaver is malleable. A woman in her mid-thirties is not.
‘Do you have any ideas?’ she asked Lavinia the other day as they sat looking at the water.
A currawong was hopping around in the tree in front of their verandah and Margot wanted to keep watching it rather than having to think about something like a job. Birds were so much more interesting.
‘I guess you couldn’t be a nanny,’ Lavinia said, and it sounded like she was being serious. Which Margot found funny.
‘No. I don’t really like children,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ Lavinia blinked. ‘Has this always been the case?’
‘Yes. Even when I was a child.’
Lavinia nodded slowly. ‘Gardener, perhaps?’
This too was amusing, as the garden at the house was unkempt.
‘No,’ Lavinia said before Margot could respond. ‘I can’t say you’ve ever been keen to put your hands in the dirt.’
Margot shrugged.
‘What do you like to do?’
Margot pondered this. ‘Read,’ she said.
She was a regular visitor to Mosman Library, up the hill.
As books were heavy to carry when on foot, she only borrowed two at a time, or three if Lavinia also wanted something to read.
However, there was no job that involved simply reading – Margot had already thought about that. Reading was a leisure activity.
Reading is what Margot’s doing on the verandah this sultry summer afternoon with the humidity rising and no break of it in sight.
She’s rereading Ruth Park’s Swords and Crowns and Rings, a favourite.
The librarian recommended some new books to her but she’d wanted a Ruth Park the way she used to want her favourite doll when she was a child.
The telephone rings and she hears Lavinia answering it, then her aunt calls her name.
‘Yes?’ Margot says as she enters the kitchen.
‘It’s Mr Williams,’ Lavinia whispers.
‘Mr Williams?’
‘Mm.’ She holds out the receiver and smiles.
‘Hello?’ Margot says.
‘Miss King.’
‘Mr Williams?’ It’s a question – of course it is. She doesn’t know why he’d want to call her.
‘Please, call me Stephen.’
Is she meant to invite him to call her Margot? She’s not sure she wants that – yet.
‘Thank you, Stephen,’ she says, and she thinks she hears him chuckle. ‘Is everything in order with the furniture?’
‘Absolutely. Yes, all fine. I’ve already had interested buyers.’
‘That’s good to hear.’
‘I’m calling because I’d like to invite you to have dinner with me.’
Margot’s eyes go wide and she looks at Lavinia, who can’t possibly know what has been said but Margot feels compelled to share her surprise.
Lavinia smiles and shrugs in response.
‘Oh,’ Margot says after a few seconds.
‘I imagine this is unexpected,’ Mr Williams – Stephen – says.
‘Yes!’
Lavinia is by now gesturing but Margot can’t understand her.
‘If you’re free on Friday evening, may I pick you up at six o’clock?’
As Margot is permanently free in the evenings she doesn’t have to check her diary.
Indeed, she doesn’t have a diary because she doesn’t need one.
But she has to think about this. An invitation to dinner could lead to another, and another.
She’s not sure she knows how to go out to dinner. Nor does she have the clothes to wear.
Still, she can’t sit at home every night hoping something in her life will change and taking no steps to change it. Plus her taste of the broader world when she and Lavinia went to the city has left her wanting more.
‘All right,’ she says.
Another chuckle. ‘I’ll take “all right”,’ he says. ‘Six o’clock on Friday, then.’
‘Yes, thank you. Goodbye, Mr … Stephen.’
‘Goodbye, Miss King.’
She hangs up the phone and recounts the invitation to Lavinia, who seems greatly pleased and starts suggesting what Margot should wear.
Margot knows, however, that she will need to spend some of the furniture money at the frock shop.
The next day she takes the bus up the hill – it’s too hot to walk – and finds not Daphne but the other lass who’s been working there. Christina, she says her name is. Pretty girl. Margot wonders if she’s ever been a model.
Christina picks out a salmon-pink dress which she says is from the 1950s.
Margot is almost sure it’s the same one she saw in the window weeks ago.
Obviously no one wanted it then – however, it’s not uncommon for some of the frocks to be here for months.
They’re not to everyone’s taste, but that’s only because some people only like new things. Margot isn’t one of those people.
The pink is flattering against her skin tone and the shape flatters her figure. And at a cost of ten dollars, she knows she won’t find better.
At 5 p.m. on Friday she puts on the dress and a simple gold necklace. She has a long neck, so necklaces suit her. She puts her hair up and dons gold drop earrings her mother used to favour for evenings out.
Lavinia pronounces her approval, and at six o’clock on the dot the doorbell rings.
‘Miss King,’ Stephen says, beaming, as Margot opens the door to him.
‘Please call me Margot,’ she says without really deciding to.
‘Margot.’ He takes her hand and raises it to his lips, which hover over her skin before he lets go.
She is charmed; she can’t help it. Stephen can’t know how much she loves chivalrous gestures, which makes it even more chivalrous to her.
As they descend the steps to the road he offers his hand to steady her in her low heels. She takes it and smiles.
He escorts her to his car, an older-model Mercedes-Benz, then drives them to Kirribilli, nestled next to the northern approach to the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
Margot has always loved the Bridge. She’s never known Sydney without it, although Lavinia has told her stories of a time when crossing from the north shore to the city was by ferry alone, unless a person travelled inland to Parramatta, where the harbour ends in the so-called Parramatta River that isn’t really a river at all.
From where Stephen parks the car they can see across to the lights of the city, and Margot feels something shift with the realisation that she has never been to the city at night.
In fact, since her parents died she hasn’t gone out at night at all.
There is a world out here. A city, with ferries and restaurants and the Opera House sitting right there – right there!
– across the water from where she stands now.
‘It’s so beautiful,’ she almost whispers.
Stephen offers her his arm, and she takes it. ‘It is,’ he says. ‘Sometimes I find myself taking it for granted. Then I see a view like this and remember that there’s nowhere quite like it in the world.’
Margot wouldn’t know. She hasn’t been outside of Sydney.
Except … there’s a tug, in her solar plexus.
Almost like a gentle hook has found its way into her and someone is pulling on it.
Is there a life out there that she’s meant to be living?
Are there places she’s meant to visit? Music she’s meant to hear? Conversations she’s meant to have?
She gasps with the possibility of it, then feels a pang of fear at how enormous it all seems. How far beyond her.
‘I love your dress,’ Stephen says, bringing her back to the here and now.
‘Thank you,’ she says.
‘It looks like it was made just for you.’
They pause on the footpath and she turns to him with a smile. A big smile that feels unfamiliar on her face.
‘Thank you,’ she repeats. ‘I feel as though it was.’
He gestures to a door next to them. ‘Shall we?’ he says, then opens it for her.
And as she walks into the restaurant she feels as though she is stepping through the wardrobe into Narnia, a land she has never visited but is desperately curious to explore.