Falling into Place Read online

  Claire can be playful, though she’s shy and often considered stand-offish – an excellent way of putting it, she thinks. She’s always to be found standing to one side of any gathering, observing her companions’ behaviour. She aims to become the David Attenborough of human foot-in-mouth age. In any case, she doesn’t have the heart for girl talk now.

  The prospect of joining the Sins clan has her flustered. With part of her brain she’s busy keeping Cynthia’s Wedgewood safe from her famous butter-fingers while other regions of her mind are wondering about the ball. Cynthia has offered her a marquisate necklace to wear with her jeans and suede-fringed cowboy shirt.

  “As useful as an ashtray on a motor bike!” Clive had said.

  “Claire could go as Lady Godiva,” Hal said. “I’ll provide the pony, she the hair!”

  “But my hair won’t suffice,” she’d told him, seriously. Hal had laughed like a loon. Claire thinks he’s entitled to an occasional naughtiness when Mama’s out of earshot.

  Cynthia bustles in with an ugly woollen shawl. It’s quickly rejected. What a shame it is, she opines that Claire hadn’t ‘been born better fleshed out’, then she could have worn Cyn’s best Balenciaga gown. Been born better! is Claire’s take-home message from this judgement.

  From the courtyard there’s a clatter of quartz stones heralding an arrival.

  Everyone but Fliss goes out to greet the newcomers – Bonnie and her brother, Bernard.

  The girls’ eyes widen at the handsome woman alighting from the battered old M.G. sports car.

  The brother, a surly chap, doesn’t help her up the steps with her case. He wears a flat cap of good quality tweed. When invited in, Bernard arcs his hand in a curt snub. He sweeps his eyes over them reprovingly, takes a last puff from a ciggie, grinds the butt out on the duco and lets it fall onto the driveway. He accelerates away in an explosion of quartz stones. One stone heads towards Cynthia, who flinches and steps back into the yew hedge.

  How did he do that? Claire wonders.

  “Oh sugar!” Cynthia says, as she’s helped up, “Tell Bernie to leave decorously, Bonnie. Lovely to see you, dear, but you’re not ON until tomorrow.”

  “Indeed, Mrs Sin. I got the pip stuck down at Boggy Creek…the piggish way the boys live, the stench of liniment, gaspers and beer. It’s lemon meringue pie every night and me fretting for the twins and their lassies. So here I am; the prodigal gel. I’ll do my duties unofficially.”

  This is code for: I’ll work gratis. Claire finds Bonnie confident and talkative.

  “Lovely to see you,” says Cynthia smiling widely, “whether officially or not.”

  “Bonnie, we’ve missed your clever cooking hands,” says Clive, taking her in a waltz hold and dancing her over the coarse flag stoned terrace to some Buxus plants that haven’t quite joined up to form a hedge. They fall over laughing.

  “Come, meet Claire.” They dance up to Claire and, introductions made, the three join hands as if circling a maypole; they must look right chumps dancing on rough-hewn stone as if wearing concrete boots, Claire thinks, but the rich don’t mind seeming silly. She feels drunk, although she hasn’t imbibed. At least her anxious mood has passed.

  “Bonnie, we’re in gastronomic hell!” Clive says, in a stage whisper. “We’ve ploughed through a mound of Fliss’ bloody sangers” – he lowers his voice saying this – “crisp enough but the blooming seeds are sticking to our teeth; if we don’t find an antidote, we’ll be burping and spitting all night. Fliss refused to give out her recipe, despite us threatening to draw her fingernails out. We need your fruitcake to disguise our sour breath.”

  Bonnie scans the gathering for Fliss.

  “It’s okay. She’s a martinet about finishing the dishes,” says Clive.

  “Ah! Well, cucumbers are sour out of season, and worse grown under plastic in a drought…My fruitcake should help with your sour breath. I hid the cake from nibblers who sample ’til there’s only a pile of crumbs, not that I’m telling,” she stares at Cynthia and Hal, who act the goat pretending to herd together for mutual support.

  The Sins seem to fear Bonnie, yet she’s their employee. Claire intends pondering this conundrum later.

  “When Alex called in to introduce Suz to me, me darlin’ bhoy says, ‘Come home, Bonnie, you’ll be needed.’ So here oi am.”

  “You didn’t say you’d seen Bonnie,” says Mama to Alex.

  “You never asked. Bonnie is family as much as those who bore me,” he says, letting, his words resonate with extra meaning but Cynthia, whom Claire expects to take umbrage, merely gives him a playful shove.

  “Anyway Bonnie,” Clive says, “Claire’s the most beautiful woman in the world. An accolade you deserved in your day. I’ve seen the photos!”

  Bonnie gives Claire an affecting hug. She’s the first Sin hanger-on who touches her.

  “You’re as lovely as he said, darlin’.”

  “Who said?” Claire asks, knowing Clive hasn’t spoken to Bonnie recently. So, if not he…?

  Bonnie has dimples and a beguiling gap between her front teeth. It’s easy to see her as a young beauty with her sinuous snake hips and olive complexioned oval face.

  Cynthia looks peeved at the profusion of compliments flying about; none intended for her.

  “Alex said so, of course,” says Bonnie.

  “Yes!” says Clive. “Claire’s more beautiful than all former fiancées, whose number’s legion…And whose fame’s legendary,” he says, ducking out of range of Claire’s hand.

  “Ooh! Ye kissed the blarney stone, Clive,” says Bonnie.

  “Long as it’s only the blarney stone he’s kissing’,” Claire says.

  “What will you wear to the ball?” says Bonnie.

  “Oh, Bonnie,” Claire says. “I haven’t a thing to wear.”

  All have a good laugh at that. “What a cliché,” says Clive. “My woman, the emblem of all women in having nothing to wear!”

  “Wear jeans,” says Suz. “Dada reckons Sins get away with anything. Play the hayseed. Won’t be hard for you.”

  Claire wishes Suz wouldn’t call Hal ‘Dada’. “But you’re not wearing jeans?” she says.

  “No. I bought one of those bubble frocks in Myers windows. Passion red.”

  “She’s a Remembrance Day poppy,” says Alex. “Waiting to open up.”

  “You’ve had a preview?” Claire asks.

  “I’m her principal advisor,” says Alex, laying it on thick.

  “You went shopping together?” Claire’s voice rises higher as the sentence progresses until she all-but wails. She’s giving away too much. All her ugly feelings of sadness, envy and betrayal are on show. No wonder she lost at Snakes and Ladders. What a seething mass of lust and envy she is.

  “You never shop with me, Clive,” she says, barely keeping a whine out of her voice.

  “Our agreement states, I pay. You buy.”

  “You might have mentioned I’d need a dress for tonight!”

  “I didn’t know you’d want to go.”

  Claire sighs. It’s true. It was her own crazy idea to engineer herself a partner.

  “Now Claire, I’ve got the very thing,” says Bonnie. “Come with me.” She takes Claire’s arm and leads her indoors.

  Chapter 29

  Bonnie’s Room

  Bonnie’s room is surprising. It’s thoughtfully furnished with elm-wood pieces, quite unlike the rest of the house that’s chock-full of ill-assorted stuff.

  Its washbasin has been plumbed in, judging by a slow dripping tap, an improvement on the arrangements in the bedroom wing upstairs, where there’s no tap capable of leaking.

  French doors lead onto a pretty walled garden shared by the morning room and the library.

  A small study next to the bedroom has a fine desk and the best armchair Claire has yet discovered at Arcadia. A real chair to relax in! And there’s a heap of books on a wine table.

  Lucky Bonnie, Claire thinks. The room is painted a delicate celadon green. It
’s fresh and spring-like and not cool, as one might expect.

  Bonnie opens a carved camphor-wood chest like the one Claire’s mum uses to pack away winter clothes; she takes out a bolt of cream-coloured silk that’s old but not discoloured. She holds it up to Claire’s face. “Perfect!”

  Claire touches the fabric tentatively. “Lovely,” she says.

  Bonnie bundles it into her hands. “Go on, love,” she says. “I planned to use it once. It’s yours.”

  “No. I couldn’t.”

  “The cream is perfect. I didn’t want a glary white against my skin. Yet you’re fair. Anyone would think I had you in mind buying it. Your veins show through it pinkly; it’s like you’re blushing permanently,” she says, brushing Claire’s face with the back of her hand. It seems too intimate a gesture between new acquaintances but Claire doesn’t flinch.

  Bonnie unrolls the bolt. Wedding gown quality.

  “Gorgeous,” Claire says.

  “The war,” Bonnie says, brushing away any questions with a flick of her wrist. She takes the bolt and pleats and drapes it over Claire’s shoulder.

  Claire gasps at the dexterous way Bonnie handles the slinky fabric so she resembles a Greek goddess. Her every move is answered by a liquid silky flow. Her image in the mirror astonishes her.

  “The secret’s in the bias,” Bonnie says. “Never put up with life’s average warp and weft.”

  Claire nods, she understands about cutting on the bias – her mum sews. “Will it stay on?”

  “Only if you want it to,” says Bonnie, wryly.

  She is the most surprising servant imaginable, Claire thinks. She produces some gold curtain tasselling, draws it diagonally across Claire’s breasts, wrangling them into classic orbs.

  Bonnie studies her protégé critically. “Bra off, love. Greeks didn’t wear ’em.”

  Claire’s eyes widen but she obeys. Once she’s been transformed into a classical beauty, her bearing alters subtly to match her new sense of self. She always knew she had it in her to be Greek. “Bonnie, how clever you are!” she says.

  “I studied dress design until life got in the way.” Bonnie gestures eloquently, though Claire would prefer a more detailed explanation.

  “Couldn’t you find a use for this?”

  Bonnie shakes her head.

  “What if someone steps on my…train?” Claire asks. “I’ll unravel like a ball of string.”

  “Ha! Down here folks have serious stuff to hide. If only a naked body was the worst of it.”

  “No kidding!” Claire says, her heart rate picking up. “I thought it’d be respectable and dull here.”

  “No! We all have something on each other. There’s an unspoken agreement to keep mum.”

  The prospect of a story excites Claire. She’s emboldened to come clean to Bonnie. Tell her what she’s only told her diary and Alex so far. “Can I tell you something, Bonnie? I want to be a writer,” she says. “Clive doesn’t know yet. It was Alex speaking of his love for Shakespeare and realising I loved him too. Not Alex. I mean, Shakespeare,” Claire blushes.

  “Alex can be persuasive…”

  True, Claire thinks. “Silly of me,” she says, “to fight my way into a job where I’ll always find work and then go and risk it all. I want to go from full on nursing to slow poetry. From a life that’s ‘red in tooth and claw’ to the meandering life of poets in sylvan glades. Poets save no one.”

  “Mm,” says Bonnie, through a mouthful of pins. She knots the tassel behind Claire’s back.

  “So?” she asks, indicating Claire’s reflection in the glass.

  “So, I’ll be a poet, Bonnie,” she says, irrelevantly. “I’ve decided.”

  “That’s nice, love. Did the slinky gown give you the idea?”

  “Why would a gorgeous frock inspire me to lock myself away and scribble nonsense?” she says, musing. “No. I’ve been dreaming about it for a while. Scared of being crap at it. Even before I met Clive, I had the urge…”

  “Sure, you did, dear,” says Bonnie drily.

  “But Alex said we only get one go at life. It hit me. I couldn’t tell Clive that first night.”

  “Today he’s going on about all the kids we’ll have. I’ll be nursing them until my breasts drop off. Maybe a dual degree in nursing and literature might pacify him…”

  “Two half-lives? No. Write. If you can’t do what you love at 19, then when? I’d a chance at 19 and I let it go. Get some pencils. Get on with it. Clive will come around.” Bonnie’s voice comes out croaky as if Claire were an idiot determined to defy her.

  “Thanks, Bonnie,” Claire says. “But aren’t writers meant to endure poverty and crap jobs to prove they’ve the right…to write?”

  Bonnie laughs ironically. She shrugs.

  “I want everything I want. And soon. Am I asking too big a helping of life, Bonnie?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get everything you wanted, Bonnie?”

  “No. I should have fought harder.” She sighs. “It may be difficult to believe, Claire, knowing me hardly at all, but I’ve had more hopes fulfilled than most do.” She speaks defiantly. “I’ve a family I love. All of them. Not just those easiest to love.” She’s sounding emphatic and cross.

  Claire turns to Bonnie, hugs her tight. “The boys are lucky to have your affection.”

  “The boys had three parents and that, my dear, is why they’re better than average. None of us doubted we loved them for an instant.” Bonnie takes a hanky from her pocket. Her tears have marred the perfection of the silk. “Look what your kind words made me do.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. Life’s about being used, so used that one day you’re all used up.”

  Claire touches Bonnie’s shoulder. “You okay?”

  “Yes! And I’ve dangly earrings handed down from ‘you know who’.”

  “Thanks,” Claire says, pulling her hair back. “Maybe it was the gown that showed me how molten things can be. Made me think bold thoughts. Clive will let me write if he loves me.”

  “Yes. Come, Cinders. Your carriage awaits.”

  Chapter 30

  Ball Part 1

  Partnering Hal at the Bachelors and Spinsters Claire feels like a Doric column being ferried over the dance floor by a forklift on speed. Hal’s complexion worries her. A yellowish cast shows beneath a sheen of perspiration.

  “Hal, take it easy,” Claire says.

  “I have a goddess to live up to,” he replies.

  He’s referring to Claire’s Grecian gown that Bonnie sacrificed her wedding silk for; it’s held together by pins and running stitches. A metaphor for Claire’s makeshift engagement, perhaps?

  Hal wafts her past his friends, acknowledging them with a brisk wave and a cocky shout: “Ahoy there, Percy! Did I not get lucky tonight?”

  “You, old dog,” say Hal’s chums. “You intend monopolising her?” one gent asks.

  “By Jove, I do,” says Hal. “Rogues aplenty here tonight, my dear,” he whispers.

  In this abbreviated manner, she’s met Jim from bowls, Henry from polo, Percy the entrepreneur who’s accumulating land for a Retirement Village on the outskirts of town, and Jean and Jon from the Friends of the Warrnambool Botanical Gardens.

  “Why aren’t you introducing me properly to your friends?” Claire asks, hurt.

  “You’ll meet them at the wedding. That lot are my best chums. I’m saving you for mere acquaintances, those with whom I need cachet.”

  “Why do you need cachet?” Claire asks, deciding to make it her word of the night.

  “Because we need to impress those we don’t yet know.”

  “But if you don’t know them, why care?”

  “I may want to know them. And you make me appear interesting.”

  “Wouldn’t it better to be interesting?”

  “No. These chaps with whom I’ve a nodding acquaintance will see you are a looker and award me high points.”

  “You’ll bask in my…glory?�
�

  “I’m afraid so. We humans are deeply shallow.”

  “So, I’m just here to prove you’re a dominant male?” Claire tries not to sound pissed off.

  “Indeed. Your gloss will rub off on me. Sorry, but it’s been like that since God was a boy.”

  “It stinks!” Claire feels her face reddening. “That it should take a pretty girl on your arm to earn respect,” Claire says, then blushes, realising how conceited she sounds.

  “You’re lovely,” Hal says. “An accident of birth, most likely. Still, it didn’t stop you from using your looks to ensnare a dominant male. Men always want the prettiest girl. It’s tough, but there you are.”

  The barn-dancers line up all scraggly but Claire doesn’t want to dance. Hal’s honesty about romance has upset her. She sees the truth of it. Ever since she started seeing boys, she’d known the dating game was superficial. She turns to him, “I hate this system, Hal. It’s good that you’re so honest about it. Still, it makes me sad.”

  “Why, my dear?”

  “Let’s sit this one out.”

  “Of course, I’ve run you ragged,” he says, but his breath has a laboured quality to it. He leads her to some unoccupied chairs grouped in semi-circles around circular tables arranged so that one might talk or watch or both. Hellebores float in shallow bowls.

  Seated, Hal takes Claire’s hand in his two bony ones. “Why so sad?”

  “Oh, Hal. I’m being a sook. My life’s full of hope, opportunity, love. Meanwhile, Pat, my kindest friend, will never be loved. Ghastly acne – it’s so cruel, random…”

  “It’s Presbyterian.”

  “Presbyterian?”

  “Remember Pressies are born with a huge pressie – they’re the Elect of God, who, in my opinion, doesn’t exist in the form projected onto him by the godly. But Cynthia feels smug about her destiny.”

  “What makes her so?” Claire asks.

  Hal hesitates while a Sinatra look-alike sings, My Way. “Nothing. Just self-belief. But it works.”

  “Do Presbyterians give money away?”

  Hal shakes his head. “Collect it oftener. But they have their destiny. Pressies are our royals.”