easeful Death. She hadn’t known then how you could be half in love with easeful death. Still, the words had lodged in her somewhere, and now they were the words for what she felt. Keats knew how much you could want it all to be over. The weariness, the fever and the fret. He’d known, and out of memory his words were speaking to her.
She remembered the shake in Mr Crisp’s voice as he read. Now she thought he might have known what it was like to want to die. Everyone who’d ever read that poem and had wanted to die was with her on the Enmore footpath, a spilling crowd of faceless and voiceless people, all bound together by having their feelings put into words. Standing in the dusk watching the great yellow eye of the tram light rushing towards her, she understood why some words were worth binding in leather and handing on. In the darkest hour, all the other humans who’d known dark hours were there with you. They’d been to the dark places before you, and they were with you now.
FOUR
NANCE DIDN’T tell Maggie what she’d been so close to doing. Didn’t even think of telling Mrs Glendon or Wal. In that moment with eternity she’d touched the edge of something that lay beyond their world. She could be dead, and she’d chosen not to be. Her life was hers now. She was free to do whatever she chose.
She couldn’t get away from the pharmacy or the university, but she could get away from having to pretend all the time with the Glendons. Moira had told her about St Margaret’s Hostel for Women. It was around the corner from Stevens’ shop. You got a bed in a room you shared with another woman and they gave you breakfast and dinner. Twenty-five shillings a week, the same as Bert was paying Mrs Glendon. She’d save on tram fares, and get to sleep for a little longer in the morning.
Churchy, you know, Moira warned. Grace at meals, all that. And you have to go to church of a Sunday. But not bad people, do their best for you.
The gleam of polished lino and the smell of cabbage at St Margaret’s were depressing, and the rules were strict. Just the same, her only regret was that she hadn’t moved earlier. She shared a room with Meg Naughton, a girl the same age who was at the Teachers’ College. Meg had some frightening ideas. She was an atheist, she told Nance the first night. Best be straight about it, Nance, she said. They can kick me out if they have to, but I won’t be a hypocrite. And she was a socialist. Nance knew the word, sort of, and with anyone else she’d have bluffed her way through, but Meg was someone you could ask. Very simple, Meg said. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That’s my belief. To Nance that sounded fair and sensible, especially when you looked out the window at the world.
But Meg’s ideas went in other directions that Nance couldn’t follow. Men keep women down, Meg said. Keep us uneducated, keep us poor. Far as I’m concerned, that means marriage is nothing more than legalised prostitution. Nance thought Meg was wrong, but she wondered if that was just because she’d been taken in like all those other women. Meg didn’t mind when Nance disagreed, urged her on, in fact, because she loved an argument. The unexamined life is not worth living, she’d say. What if we agreed about everything? We might as well not be alive.
With Barbara from along the hall, Meg and Nance would get the train out to the Blue Mountains or the Hawkesbury River on a Saturday for the afternoon. To get away from the city for a few hours was bliss: to see the bush tossing in a clean sea breeze, smell leaf-mould underfoot, cup your hands and drink from some swift cold creek. Always with an eye on the time, and the shop waiting again at six o’clock, but a reminder that there was a life beyond the pale-green walls of the pharmacy and the grim streets of Enmore. Meg said this was a chance to remember how small a person’s life was in nature’s big picture.
On Sundays she went to the Glendons’ for the family lunch. She knew she should invite Meg, too, her family was at Broken Hill, even further away than Nance’s. The trouble was, she knew Mrs Glendon would find Meg’s ideas shocking, and Wal wouldn’t understand a woman with such firm opinions. It would be too hard to be the go-between juggling the different parts of her life, the old and the new, around the same table.
It was common knowledge among the first years that half of them would fail. Barbara had done Chemistry the year before and helped her, but Nance was sure she’d be one of those failures. Her father’s money would have been wasted. So would her year of hell.
The results were pinned up on boards in the quad in late December 1930. At the top of the page there was a note in red ink: X denotes female student. The women were all Miss, where the men just had their initials. She supposed the men who made up the lists would say they were being polite. But she hated being singled out like that.
She’d passed. Fifty-four in Chemistry, thanks to Barbara. Fifty-eight in Botany. That was a credit. Only two of the other women had passed: Mavis Sherlock and Marjorie Hyder. Marjorie had come within one mark of topping the year in Chemistry. In Botany she was ten marks ahead of the nearest man. They had to give her dux and the Gray Prize. Marjorie was a small quiet woman with a square face that was usually hidden under her hat. Today she was flushed, had pushed her hat back as if to say, Yes, I am Marjorie Hyder!
Nance felt as if the year behind her was a ragged landscape of mountains and valleys she’d trudged through, a road with no rests and no glories. She thought, I got through that. I can get through anything.
She wondered what would have happened if her parents had been unadventurous and contented with their lot. She’d have grown up in Gunnedah, left school at fourteen as they had, married a farmer, had six children. Gone to her grave without knowing how to calibrate a pipette. It would have been a happy enough life, but Meg would call it unexamined. Yes, she wanted to meet someone, get married, have children. She wanted to be happy. But she knew now that she wanted something else as well.
Over Christmas she spent one of her two weeks’ annual holiday in Tamworth. The town was quiet. Half the shops were closed. The Cally had a hangdog look. A panel of iron lace had fallen off the verandah and a rusted downpipe had left a long red stain on the side wall. The dining room had an unused musty smell and the laundry was silent. Mrs Chipp was the first to be let go, I bet, Nance thought.
Dolly had become small and sour. She mostly stayed in her room with a headache. Bert tried to be hearty but you could see the cracks. He disappeared for hours at a time. Frank was still out at Uncle Willie’s, working for board and keep. Max had left school when the Depression hit. He was helping out in the Cally now, except no help was needed.
It was Max who told Nance that their father was mixed up with some woman living up on Paradise Street. He’s, you know, head in the sand, Max said. With the Cally going downhill. She’s like an escape for him.
You reckon Mum knows, Nance said.
Reckon she does, Max said.
The woman on Paradise Street made Nance understand her mother for the first time. There’d have been other women, Nance realised now, heaven knew how many. Benni in Temora was one, but every town, every pub, would have had a woman who caught Bert’s eye. It was why Dolly was forever wanting to move. Another town, another hotel. All she could do now was retreat to her room. Perhaps Meg was right about marriage.
Nance leaned on the windowsill of her old room, looking up at the washed-out green of the hill behind the town. There was nothing for her here. Only that failing hotel, the cranky mother, the father muddled up with some other woman. If this had ever been any kind of home for her, it wasn’t one any longer.
In 1931 Nance started second year. That was Materia Medica, the nuts and bolts of being a pharmacist. From the recipe books of the British Pharmacopoeia and Martindale’s, the students learned the exact ingredients, in Latin, of any medicine a doctor might prescribe. The Australian
