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derisory wage, in cash, and continued to live at home, over the shop. She might still have been covered with flour to this day if her Ted hadn’t come along in his smart military outfit. Once that was removed, he had less to say for himself; but that was life, wasn’t it. She might have felt as badly as she suspected his doing, that she had not provided him with a son, were it not that her Lesley was the utter apple of her eye.

7
    Magda and Stefan had sat up very late playing cards with two friends on the Sunday night before the first Monday in December, and by the time Magda had cleared away the dirty glasses and emptied the ashtrays and generally straightened the living room, and then made her démaquillage , it was past two a.m. She stood and looked out at Mosman Bay for a minute and sighed, and retired to bed. Stefan was reading a page of Nietzsche, as was his wont last thing at night.
    ‘Ah Magda, my beloved,’ said he, flinging aside his book, ‘a woman’s work is never done until I am almost asleep myself. Come into bed now.’
    ‘There is no law in this country,’ said Magda, ‘against men helping their wives to clear up the mess, is there?’
    ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Stefan, ‘I think there is.’
    ‘You are probably right,’ Magda agreed, as she got into bed; and it was easily three a.m. when at last her eyes closed in sleep.
    The consequence was that when she looked into her mirror having risen at her usual hour the next morning, she looked a perfect fright, and she spent the next fifteen minutes lying on the sofa with her feet higher than her head, and with two large slices of cucumber covering her closed eyelids. Then she got up with a great sigh and ate some yoghurt, and got ready for work.
    It will not be imagined that Magda wore the regulation Goode’s black frock while presiding over the Model Gowns. No: in this matter (as in several others) a compromise had been achieved whereby Magda agreed to wear black, but on her own terms. She had acquired a collection of suitable black frocks and what she called costumes, many of which were relieved, not to say enhanced, by discreet additions of white—collars, it might be, or cuffs, or both—or even, in the case of one costume, pale pink; all of which had been craftily purchased by Magda from the sort of expensive little shops which she preferred to patronise at a large trade discount further subsidised as per their agreement by Goode’s.
    ‘When I was vendeuse at Patou,’ Magda had remarked, ‘I wore nothing but Patou. Naturally.’
    This was an absolute whopper, because in the first place, Magda had never been a vendeuse at Patou. However, she might have been; it was a good and serviceable story which had as much as anything else she had to say secured her the job of taking charge of the Model Gowns.
    ‘These people,’ Magda would often say to her Continental friends, ‘know nothing .’
    Magda went up to the Staff Locker Room not, therefore, to change, but to put away her handbag and to tidy herself, walking past her inglorious colleagues in a cloud of Mitsoukou. She patted powder onto her nose, apparently oblivious of the sneers of onlookers, and turning around, gave them a dazzling smile.
    ‘A beautiful day, is it not?’ she asked. ‘I have enjoyed the journey here this morning so greatly. How lucky we all are, to live in such a place.’
    And she left the room, walking past a frieze of faces which were dumbstruck with astonishment, incomprehension, and contempt: reactions which strained for articulation as her steps retreated through the door. ‘Stone the crows,’ said Patty Williams, voicing the thoughts of all of them.
    It was at this moment that Lisa made her appearance. She stood, hesitant, in the doorway, frail as a fairy, in a gathered skirt and what might have been a white school blouse. Patty Williams glanced at her and turned to Fay Baines.
    ‘Now look what the cat’s dragged in,’ she observed. ‘Are you looking