expanse, a cluster of buildings, then what looked like a town, the diminishing distance to Melbourne measured by a series of cobalt blue signs printed with the words Griffiths Tea. Suburbs passed in a blur of grey wooden buildings, brickworks, warehouses and the smell of gas.
At Spencer Street station, a taxi driver suggested a good boarding house close to the city. On that journey, she was heartened by the bright sunlight, plane trees in full foliage along St Kilda Road bordered by grass with an expanse of public garden beyond.
At the Bide a While boarding house, a woman wearing a long white apron over a blue twill dress introduced herself as Mrs Buchanan then led Vivien to a single room on the second floor. As they climbed the stairs, she recited the rules of the house:
‘No pets. Lights out at ten. If you want clean sheets, leave your dirty ones outside your door on Mondays. No electric radiators. No cooking in the room. Board and lodging two and six paid in advance. Breakfast at seven sharp. Dinner at six-thirty. You’ll get a cut lunch, the bathroom you’ll share with four other young ladies must be left clean and tidy at all times. No riff raff and no male visitors under any circumstances. This is a respectable house.’
Vivien walked to the Hawksburn post office and sent a telegram to Helen.
IN MELBOURNE STOP WILL WRITE SOON STOP VIVIEN
Chapter Five
Melbourne 1935 Bide a While
By April, the boarding house had become a miserable, freezing place. Vivien shivered night after night under a skimpy eiderdown and wore clothes over her pyjamas to keep warm. Meal-times were so dreadful she stopped going to the dining room; she’d rather starve than see and hear the others chew and slurp, feel their eyes on her, answer their questions.
Vivien wrote to Helen, told her about life in the boarding house and her hunt for work. Helen sent her some money and photographs of her baby girl, Janet, who would soon be old enough to sleep in Vivien’s old room. She added, I’ve sent you some winter clothes. I’m also sending you some evening dress samples. I’ve told Mum I can’t look after my baby, design and sew as well. She has to find someone else to make the patterns and do the sewing. Vivien laughed. Helen was finally standing up to Mum.
When she was thin and weak and had almost decided to go back to Sydney, even if she had to stay in a boarding house there, the job came up. Weeks before, she’d registered with modelling agencies and knocked on the doors of fashion houses. After she thought she’d heard all the ways she could be rejected, an agent told her about a new store specializing in bridal wear: ‘They want a girl who’ll work as a sales assistant, as well as do a bit of modelling.’
In that magic place of filtered light and hazy outlines, she’d dressed plaster models in satin, lace or silk gowns, safe from the outside world; the seeping rain, the flat, empty streets and the blank-eyed vagrants who shivered, huddled against the walls of city buildings.
The manager, Chris, tall and thin and always dressed in black at work, wore her long blonde hair in a stiffly lacquered pompadour, wore dark red lipstick and nail polish. She was worldly and sophisticated, but wearing a long white satin bridal gown, white silk gloves, her face veiled, she looked chaste and remote.
When Chris heard Vivien’s tearful confidence about Doug, she squeezed her hand and let her cry before she spoke. ‘The best cure for one man’s another. What you need is a good time with no strings. My chap’s married. He won’t divorce his wife, but I’m hanging on to him; playing the field when I get the chance. You won’t catch me crying over any man.’
Chris was often free on Saturday afternoons, because her married lover had to be home with his family. ‘He makes up for it,’ Chris confided and showed Vivien a diamond-studded watch.
They went to the Botanical Gardens and threw Mrs Buchanan’s cut lunch of date sandwiches to the swans, walked and talked and often went to a film. Chris didn’t like to cook, but sometimes they went back to her flat and between them made scrambled eggs or cheese, spaghetti or tomatoes on toast. Chris always drank wine, but Vivien refused, happy just to have company. One night, Chris showed her a small brown bottle of Benzedrine pills.
‘I told the doctor I was putting on weight and he gave me these.’
Amazed, Vivien protested. ‘You’re as skinny as a rake!’
‘I mean to stay that way. If I want to stay up late, I just take a couple of these and I can dance all night.’ She added, ‘I’ve also got an inhaler called Bennie which gives me a boost as well as some Nembutal sleepers.’ She looked at open-mouthed Vivien. ‘You really are a ninny. Everyone’s doing it.’
When she came home from work one night early in May, Eddie was standing beside a green truck under the streetlight outside the boarding house. He grinned, doffed his hat, made a mock bow and said, ‘How’s the best-looking girl in the world?’
Vivien couldn’t help laughing. ‘Better for seeing you ... I think.’
‘You look half starved. They do a nice roast down the junction. What about it?’
‘In that truck?’
‘It’s real cosy in front. I’m not expectin’ you to ride on the tray.’
He asked for nothing but her company on Saturday nights. He took her to films, out for meals and sometimes to the Tivoli. His words tumbled out so fast she couldn’t keep up with his thoughts, and sometimes he lost track himself. He was a milkman four nights a week from eleven to seven, had a quick kip on a stretcher at a shop he’d rented then filled the day building shelves, getting it ready for business. Most of all he talked about all the money he’d make. Her mind drifted; she was just relieved to be out of the gloom of the boarding house, its smell of hot fat and floor polish and the furtive loneliness of its inhabitants.
When Eddie took her to meet his father and Gran, the old woman kept her mouth tightly closed while she looked Vivien up and down as if she were a dummy in a store window. Mr Bertoli looked at her in a different way. Gran served lunch in a long narrow kitchen where a wood-fired oven burned in the corner. She wore a floor-length black dress and a white starched apron, her hair screwed in a knot at the back of her head. Gran was unimpressed by Eddie’s fabricated version of the way he met Vivien, but when he mentioned her convent education, she bristled and hissed, ‘Did he tell you I’m a martyr to me piles?’
Vivien managed a sympathetic face. ‘No, he didn’t. How uncomfortable.’
‘They give me jip day and night. Well, Missie, I wish the Pope had them.’
Eddie took her out to Mario’s to celebrate his hundred-to-one win on a horse he’d backed because he liked its name, Ginger Meggs.
‘I booked the best table; we’ll celebrate in style.’ He scoffed. ‘They’ll be expectin’ a dinkum dago.’
In the restaurant’s warmth and gaiety, Vivien felt alive and excited for the first time since she’d left Sydney. Chris’s fur coat protected her from the chill of the June night and the dress sample she’d borrowed from the store, a sleekly-fitted, dark blue satin gown with a flare at the hem, bore no resemblance to bridal gowns or dresses for mothers-of-the-bride. Heads turned as she walked in on Eddie’s arm. Dressed for the occasion in a rented tux and white tie, he was almost handsome.
Eddie ordered a bottle of chianti. Vivien shook her head when the waiter filled her glass, but when she saw Eddie’s irritation, she drank wine for the first time since she’d left Sydney. She savoured its sharp bite; soon the room tipped and she was vaguely aware of three Eddies, talking, talking, talking, as she downed glass after glass in sweet oblivion. Although she had no memory of how she came to be lying naked on the tray of the truck with Eddie inside her, she was disgusted with herself, Eddie and her life as she hauled herself up the staircase at Bide a While.
Waking to another grey morning, Vivien tried to shut out any memory of the night before by hiding under the meagre bedding, holding Chris’s fur coat like a talisman