One Life - Kate Grenville

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knew from what Dolly and Max wrote that things were bad in Tamworth. No one had the money to buy anything, so shops were closing all along Peel Street. The commercial travellers who had been the backbone of the Cally’s income stopped coming. People on properties still came into town but they didn’t go to the Cally for the four-shilling dinner, or even to the Greeks’. They brought a sandwich from home. Out at Goonoo Goonoo there was no more polo. The King girls had to wangle jobs at David Jones. At the Cally they’d let go all the staff except Arthur and Con, and they were only kept on because they were willing to work for board and keep.

      Thank God you have a job, Nance, her mother wrote. Lucky we got you in there in time. Nance knew she was saying, There’s nothing for you here.

      She wouldn’t have known any of it from her father’s letters. Bit of a downturn, that’s all, he said. Things are bound to look up any day.

      As an apprentice Nance was paid sixteen shillings a week. Bert had paid the first year’s university fees in advance and he sent her money every month. Now each cheque was smaller than the last. Still enough for her board, but not much else. Ever since she could remember she’d been able to have plenty of good food, a new dress now and then, the pictures on a Saturday afternoon. Now there was no money for new clothes or shoes and the pictures were a luxury she had to scrimp for. At the Glendons’ there was no more butter, only dripping. No more chops, now it was scrag end in a stew and a lot of potatoes. Bacon once a week, the rasher thin enough to see through. Getting the tram from the university to Enmore came to seem an indulgence. She walked, and ate her sandwich on the way, so she hiccupped all afternoon.

      But she had a job, no matter how badly paid, and if you had a job you had to hang on to it. Every day she saw long lines of skinny men standing with their heads down outside the church soup kitchens or holding cardboard signs saying they were clean and honest and would do any kind of work. When Mr Stevens needed a delivery boy, the queue of people went down the street, and they were mostly grown men.

      In the short days of winter, the wait for the tram home was dark and cold, the wind spiteful as it sliced up Enmore Road. One night she watched the tram light coming towards her, the rails gleaming, the road slick with rain. The trams had been a little adventure in the beginning but now they were the emblem of the hard machine of her days.

      I could step out in front of it, she thought. That would put an end to the misery and the loneliness and the feeling that every day would be like this forever. It would hurt, she supposed. But if she was lucky it would all be over in a second.

      In the moment she stood with that choice, she was free of everyone else in the world: what her mother wanted, what her father said, what Mrs Glendon thought. It was just her, Nance Russell, alone with eternity. She’d have prayed, if she had the words for a prayer, or believed there was anyone to hear it.

      Now more than ever seems it rich to die. They were the words that rose out of memory.

       Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

       To cease upon the midnight with no pain.

      She’d sat in that hot classroom while the blowflies droned against the windows, and listened to Mr Crisp read. For many a time I have been half in love with 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

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