THE
HOUNDSTOOTH SUIT
The houndstooth suit, bought from David Jones on layby, has worn well over the past two decades. Its original owner considered it an investment, and later the representation of a long-held dream.
She noticed its black-and-white pattern as she walked through the department store on Elizabeth Street in the centre of Sydney. The grand old building was where her mother used to bring her when she was a child, then a teenager, whenever there was an occasion that needed a dress. Her father would say, ‘Buy her whatever she likes,’ as if it was nothing. Over the years, though, she came to know how much not-nothing it was.
They weren’t wealthy. Far from it. Her mother was an expert at scrimping and saving, her father a hard worker who was gone from early in the morning, running his greengrocer shop. The family had four children then three, after one died falling from a horse. Their lives were hard but full of love.
She was the only daughter. That’s why her father wanted her to have whatever she liked. He spoiled her, everyone said. Everyone but her mother. Her mother thought she deserved the world. So there were pretty dresses for special occasions. She has them still.
When she saw the houndstooth suit she knew it would make her look smart at her secretarial job in the city. Having learnt wellfrom her mother, she scrimped and saved to pay for it, knowing its high quality meant it would last for years.
Except she didn’t need it for years. A few months after she bought it she met the man who would become her husband. Once they married, she left her job and became pregnant with the first of her three children.
She missed working outside the home. Her old life – that structure of arriving at work at a certain time, performing tasks, leaving at a certain time – was a romantic memory and she longed to make it manifest in her present. Ten years after she married, though, with her children needing her to run them to school and make lunches and mend clothes, and her husband saying she didn’t have to work, that he would take care of everything, she abandoned the dream. And the suit.
She dropped it off at her local St Vincent de Paul shop, and felt as though a piece of her heart had been dropped there with it. Yet holding on to it was causing her pain, because it reminded her of something she couldn’t ever have again. Not in the same way.
So the suit wasn’t there when her husband left her the following year, saying he was overburdened by all his responsibilities and wanted to be free again. It wasn’t there when she needed to return to work as a secretary in an office in the city to support herself and her children. It didn’t know how much she regretted giving it up and that she searched for it in charity shops whenever she could.
For the suit was more than just a jacket and a skirt to her. It held her sense of self. Her belief that she could do anything she set her mind to. It was her armour and her disguise.
Instead of finding its way back to her, the suit found a new owner who appreciated its quality, who wore it until she didn’t need it any more, then donated it to another charity shop. And so it goes.
SEPTEMBER
1991
CHAPTER ONE
This hill was never so steep when Daphne was a girl. She used to walk up it, tugging the hand of her little brother behind her, and it seemed like nothing.
When she reached the top, she’d always turn to look back at the water. Middle Harbour. Sydney Heads. From that height she could see across to Seaforth and the bushland that ran along Dobroyd Head. She could see Clontarf Beach. She couldn’t see Balmoral Beach, for that was below her, down the hill, tucked away.
Now that she’s seventy-one, the hill feels like a mountain. One she must climb.
The path she’s treading now – up Beaconsfield Road to Middle Head Road, then along to Mosman Junction – is one she has known for almost as long as she can remember. For she lives in the house she grew up in. She brought up her own children there, and helped her parents ease out of this life within its walls. Her grandparents before that. If the world outside the house hadn’t stretched as far as the horizon on one side and to the city of Sydney on the other she might have thought her life small. Contained. Except a vista so grand is a canvas for a vivid imagination, and she’s had that. Although it’s contracted a little now.
Old ladies live in their memories, not their wildest dreams.Her mother told her that once, and Daphne found it sad at the time but she understands it now. The time has passed for her to have dreams. Memories take less work and they’re more comforting.
At the crest of the hill she pauses and turns to look down the road she knows so well with its mix of houses old and new. The suburb has changed from being unwanted in the wake of World War II and its dangers for harbourside dwellers to become popular with those looking for a life near both city and sea. The view over the harbour from the top of Beaconsfield Road has, however, barely changed in that time. And she has never tired of it.
Other things, yes, she has tired of. Being a mother: that’s tiring when your children are young and need you. And being a wife is tiring now that her Hector doesn’t have as many marbles as he used to.
Being Daphne. Yes, that can be tiring too.
Not that she’s in a hurry to depart this Earth, mind. There’s beauty here yet. There’s this view, for one thing. For every thing.
She sighs and it’s a contented sound. A person is fortunate if she can be made happy by a view. Or at least mildly pleased. Happiness is beyond her now, like those wildest dreams.
That might sound dire but she’s a pragmatist. Always has been. Because she’s had to be.
Daphne was born in 1920 and World War I swirled around her young life. Her father had served; her mother had lived with the uncertainty of whether or not he would come home. He did, but he was changed. Not the man Daphne’s mother remembered. He tended to his garden by day and would sit outside at night and look at the sky.
Daphne’s mother’s father gave the family money so they could get by and eventually they moved in with her grandparents, into the house on Beaconsfield Road. Her father was good with hishands and after a few years went back to carpentry, the trade he’d had before the war.
He had a young apprentice, Hector, who was dashing, with Clark Gable hair and moustache. Hector was from a large Catholic family in Cammeray and Daphne’s Protestant grandfather didn’t approve of the match, or the suburb Hector came from. It was ‘too far west’, he said, but he’d always been a snob. Her mother talked him around and soon Hector joined the crowded household. Thankfully Daphne’s brother, Edgar, had moved out by then. He and Hector did not like each other.