The Women in Black by Madeleine St John Read Free Book Online Page B

who he doesn’t get on with. He says he’s too full of himself.’
    Ah yes, that was indeed the trouble: it was so much trouble that Frank had disburdened himself of no less than three whole sentences at the Williams steakfest on the previous Friday night, at the conclusion of his first week under the new regime in the Wonda Tiles Sales Department.
    ‘The new boss is a slimy bastard,’ said Frank. ‘He thinks he owns the place. I don’t know who he thinks he is.’
    There was something more specific about his new chief which got on Frank’s nerves and which he didn’t mention to Patty at all, partly because he had not in fact properly acknowledged it to himself: it was something which irritated and in due course infuriated him without his being able to face it squarely and in its entirety. It was that the new boss had placed a large framed photograph of his two sons—a pair of grisly little tykes, eight and ten or thereabouts, Frank would have said if asked—on his desk, his desk at Wonda
    Tiles! And as soon as the opportunity had arisen, he’d pointed them out to his subordinates.
    ‘Those are my two sons,’ he had said, bursting with fatuous pride, ‘Kevin and Brian.’ And he grinned broadly.
    ‘Eh, very nice,’ said Frank’s workmates.
    ‘Oh, yeah,’ said Frank.
    And then as if all this weren’t quite bad enough, in the pub on Friday night the bastard had re-introduced the topic: and stone me if all the others hadn’t joined in with remarks about their own sons and even their daughters. On it went. Suddenly everyone was boasting about their kiddies; and it was all the fault of this smarmy bastard of a new boss. Frank slunk off home to Randwick in a fine sulk, and when he played golf on the Saturday his handicap went to hell.
    ‘Well anyway,’ said Patty, ‘he doesn’t like him. I don’t know. We can’t always have what we want, can we? He should try working under Miss Cartright for a week, I told him! Then he’d see.’
    And having thus returned the conversation to their common ground, she looked again at Fay.
    ‘Is it the new powder or is it you?’ she asked. ‘You look a bit peaky. Are you feeling okay?’ And an exciting and horrible notion sprang into her mind: could Fay be under the weather? Could Fay be pregnant ? She wasn’t eating much: she had a salad in front of her which had hardly been touched. Fay looked up, slightly distractedly.
    Her deepest thoughts had been elsewhere.
    ‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I was out late last night, that’s all. Not enough sleep.’
    Oh, really, thought Patty.
    Patty’s speculations were as grotesque a version of reality as usual. The fact was that Fay had had a dislocating experience on Saturday night. She had been at a party given by one of Myra’s cronies in a flat at Potts Point and she had suddenly, for no reason, become aware just before midnight that she was wasting her time: that she had in a sense met every one of the men there before, at every other party she had ever attended, and that she was tired of the whole futile merry-go-round. And what was worse than this, much, much worse, was that there was no other merry-go-round she could step onto; it was this one to which she was apparently condemned, whether she liked it or not, and suddenly now she did not, and there was not a damned thing she could do about it: try, try, try again, and die, she had thought despairingly, as she had travelled homewards in the back of someone’s Holden. And despite all that she had met a man who’d been at the party for a few drinks at the Rex Hotel last night as she had agreed to do, and had spent another inglorious evening making conversation with Mr Wrong, and now, today, she felt entirely washed out, that was all.
    ‘I just need a good night’s sleep, that’s all,’ she told Patty.
    ‘Yes, well,’ said Patty, and she looked around the room, and she saw Paula Price, who she used to work with in Children’s, who had done well for herself at