“No arguments, if you please!” she said, at her most imperious. “Alicia is getting a bargain.”
“I think, Octavia,” said Drusilla later, after the visitors had driven off in their chauffeured motorcar, “that now we can all afford new dresses for Alicia’s wedding. A lilac crêpe for me, with a beaded bodice and beaded tassels around the overskirt – I have just the right beads put by! Do you remember the ones our dear mother bought to sew onto her new best half-mourning gown just before she passed away? Ideal! And I think you might purchase that powder-blue silk you so admired in Herbert’s material department, don’t you? Missy could tat up some lace insertions for the neck and sleeves – very smart!” Drusilla stopped to ponder, brow furrowed, looking at her dusky daughter. “You’re the really difficult one, Missy. You’re too dark for pale colours, so I think it will have to be...”
Oh, let it not be brown! prayed Missy. I want a scarlet dress! A lace dress in the sort of red that makes your eyes swim when you look at it, that’s what I want!
“...brown,” Drusilla finished at last, and sighed. “I understand how disappointing this must be, but the truth of the matter is, Missy, that no other colour becomes you half so well as brown! In pastels you look sick, in black you look jaundiced, in navy you are at death’s door, and the autumn tones turn you into a Red Indian.”
Missy said not a word, the logic of this being inarguable, and not knowing how much her docility pained Drusilla, who would have welcomed a suggestion at least – though of course scarlet would not have been countenanced under any circumstances. It was the colour of tarts and trollops, fully as much as brown was the colour of the respectable poor.
However, nothing could keep Drusilla’s spirits oppressed for long tonight, so she cheered up again rapidly. “In fact,” she said happily, “I think we can all have new boots as well. Oh, what a dash we’re going to cut at the wedding!”
“Shoes,” said Missy suddenly.
Drusilla looked blank. “Shoes?”
“Not boots, Mother, please! Let us have shoes, pretty dainty shoes with Louis heels and bows on the front.”
It is possible that Drusilla may have considered the idea, but Missy’s cry from the heart was smothered immediately by Octavia, who, in her invalidish way, did quite a lot of the ruling at the house called Missalonghi.
“Living all the way out at the end of Gordon Road?” Octavia snorted. “You’re not right in the head, girl! Just how long do you think shoes would last in the dust and the mud? Boots are what we must have, good sturdy boots with good sturdy laces and good sturdy thick heels on them. Boots last! Shoes are not for those who must go on Shank’s pony.”
And that was that.
By the Monday following the visit of Aurelia and Alicia Marshall, life had returned to normal at Missalonghi, so Missy was allowed to take her habitual walk to the lending library in Byron. Of course it wasn’t all selfish pleasure; she went armed with two large shopping bags, one for either hand to balance the load, and she did the week’s marketing as well.
Quiescent for the week she had stayed at home, the stitch in Missy’s side came back in full force. Odd, that it only seemed to bother her on long walks. And it was painful, so wretchedly painful!
Today her own purse had joined company with her mother’s, and her mother’s purse was unusually fat, for Missy had been commissioned to buy the lilac crêpe and the powder-blue silk and her own brown satin at Herbert Hurlingford’s clothing emporium.
Of all the shops in Byron, Missy hated Uncle Herbert’s the most, for he staffed it exclusively with young men, sons or grandsons naturally; even if one were purchasing stays or under-drawers, one had to suffer the attentions of a sniggering cad who found his task exquisitely funny and his customer the embarrassed butt of his jokes. However, this sort of treatment was not meted out to everyone, only to those whose means were sufficiently pinched to make shopping in Katoomba or – God forbid! – Sydney an impossibility; it was also chiefly reserved for Hurlingford women who had no men to exact retribution. Old maids and indigent widows of the clan were uniformly regarded as fair game.
As she stood watching James Hurlingford bring down the bolts she indicated, Missy wondered what he would have done had her own brown satin been a request for scarlet lace. Not that the clothing emporium stocked such a fabric; the only reds it offered were cheap and vulgar artificial silks kept for the denizens of Caroline Lamb Place. So along with the lilac crêpe and the powder-blue silk, Missy bought a length of very beautiful delustred satin in the shade known as snuff. Had the material been any other colour she would have loved it, but since it was brown, it may as well have been jute sacking. Every dress Missy had ever owned had been brown; it was such a serviceable colour. Never showed the dirt, never went in or out of fashion, never faded, never looked cheap or common or trollopy.
“New dresses for the wedding?” asked James archly.
“Yes,” said Missy, wondering why it was that James always succeeded in making her feel so uncomfortable; perhaps it was his exaggeratedly womanish manner?
“Let’s see, now,” burbled James, “how about a weeny game of guessies? The crêpe is for Auntie Drusie, and the silk is for Aunti Octie, and the satin – the brown satin – must therefore be for little brown Cousin Missy!”
Her brain must still have been filled with the image of that impossible scarlet lace dress, for quite suddenly Missy saw nothing but scarlet, and out of the recesses of her memory she dredged the only insulting phrase she knew.
“Oh, go bite your bum, James!” she snapped.
He would not have been so shocked had his wooden dress dummy come to life and kissed him, and he measured and he cut with a hitherto unknown alacrity, thereby unintentionally giving each lady an extra yard of fabric, and he couldn’t get Missy out of the shop fast enough. The pity was that he knew he couldn’t confide his dreadful experience to any of his brothers or nephews, because they would probably echo Missy’s words, the bastards.
The library was only two doors down, so when Missy went in she was still flying the flags of her anger in her cheeks, and she banged the door after her.
Una looked up, startled, and began to laugh. “Darling, you look absolutely splendid! In a paddy, are we?”
Missy took a couple of deep breaths to calm down. “Oh, just my cousin James Hurlingford. I told him to go bite his bum.”
“Good for you! Time someone told him.” Una giggled. “Though I imagine he’d much rather someone else bit it for him – preferably someone masculine.”
This sailed straight over Missy’s head, but Una’s burst of merriment did the trick, and Missy found herself able to laugh too. “Dear oh dear, it wasn’t very ladylike of me, was it?” she asked, sounding more surprised than horrified. “I don’t know what came over me!”
The radiant face turned up to her looked suddenly sly, not the slyness of dishonesty but the slyness of someone fey, away with the fairies. “Straws and camels,” intoned Una in a singsong voice, “eyes of needles and days of dogs, revolving worms and well reaped whirlwinds. There’s a lot in you, Missy Wright, that you don’t even know is there.” She sat back and hummed like a gleeful naughty child. “But it’s started now, and it can’t be stopped.”
Out came the story of the scarlet lace dress, the terrible longing to wear something other than brown, the defeat of having to admit no other colour than brown suited her, so that on this glorious day when she might actually have attained a dress in some other colour, still she must wear brown. Her feyness quite vanished, Una listened sympathetically, and when Missy had got it all out of her system, she looked her up and down deliberately.
