One Life. Kate Grenville

was Nance’s thought, but how could she say that with her mother at one end of the table smiling for once, and her father at the other thinking everything was settled? And what better idea did she have to put in its place?

      Something else stopped her from saying no: it might turn out all right. Tamworth was a narrow world. When you stood up on the top of the hill behind the town you could feel you knew every single person who lived there. It was as small as that, the grid of streets that naked. Up there with Una and Wade one day she’d declaimed to the warm breeze blowing off the plain:

       Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

       He stared at the Pacific—and all his men

      Looked at each other with a wild surmise—

       Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

      The others had laughed, and yes, she’d said it as a joke. There was a private joke behind the public one, though: she meant it. In her own small way she might be like Cortez, and find a world bigger than a dusty country town that rode on the sheep’s back.

      THREE

      BY THE middle of March 1930 Nance’s suitcase was under the second bed in the room of her friend from St George, Maggie Glendon, at Bondi. Sydney felt like home. Nance loved the feel of the sea breeze, it was like the best days at Cronulla. Sun glinted off cars and gleamed along tram tracks. Seen from the bustle of Bondi, sleepy old Tamworth was a good place to have left.

      The Glendons’ flat was round the back of a liver-coloured brick block where the stairs always smelled of potatoes being boiled to death, but that was all right because it was near the beach, and everyone welcomed her. She and Maggie shared a cramped bedroom like sisters. Maggie had had to leave school when her father died. Now she worked in Hosiery at David Jones. She’d have loved to do something more than a dead-end job but there was no money. Mrs Glendon was a timid woman who seemed overwhelmed by widowhood. Maggie’s brother Wal was a cheerful fellow, had left school at fourteen, had a job on the trams.

      The first day of lectures Nance got the bus through the city and out to the university, proud of the heavy bag of books over her shoulder. Other than some of her teachers, she’d never known anyone who’d gone to the university, and here she was walking between the sandstone gateposts!

      At nine o’clock the professor came into the lecture hall, black gown billowing around his long legs. She opened her notebook, uncapped her pen, and got ready to become a pharmacist.

      Botany was more or less familiar: The Structure of Life Processes in Green Plants, Principles of Classification, Floral Biology. But Chemistry was a foreign language. Empirical, Molecular and Structural Formulae. Gravimetric Determination of Phosphoric Acid. The Calibration of Pipettes.

      Among eighty men, six women were doing Chemistry and Botany. They were expected to sit together in the front row. There was a Mavis who she got a bit friendly with, and a clever young woman named Marjorie. She’d have liked to go to lunch with them and ask them what a covalent bond was, but the minute classes were over she had to race for the tram so she’d be at the shop on Enmore Road by one o’clock. Mr Stevens would be at the door with his watch in his hand. He’d tell her again that a master could dismiss an apprentice for tardiness.

      The pharmacy was cramped and airless and full of the noise of traffic. The cars roared and beeped, the trams screamed going round into Stanmore Road. The dispensary was a dark corner under the stairs. In rows, with their gilt-lettered labels, the pharmacy bottles looked a bit grand. It was only when you shook the stuff out that you could see it was nothing but dried-up leaves, seeds, gritty stuff like sand. Mr Stevens measured the amounts. Then it was Nance’s job to grind them in the mortar and make them into a pill or a cream.

      When she wasn’t grinding away at the mortar and coughing at the fine powder that floated out, or rolling the pills in sugar, or washing out bottles, Nance had to serve in the shop. The customers frightened her. Half the time she’d never heard of whatever it was they were asking for, let alone where in the shop to find it. Enmore was full of people too poor to go to the doctor and some of them didn’t realise Nance had no idea what to do for a nasty chesty cough, or the big red stye on their eyelid. She asked Mr Stevens or Moira, but she felt stupid to be forever pestering them. Then there was the worry of handing someone the wrong package and killing them.

      Moira was the apprentice she was replacing. She’d done her Finals but was staying on for a week to show Nance the ropes. At the end of each day they went over the dockets together. That was another worry, if they didn’t come out right would she have to make up the shortfall? Some of the things on the dockets were a mystery and finally she asked, What are these FL things?

      Oh, Nance, keep your voice down, for heaven’s sake, Moira said, and jerked her head to tell Nance to follow her into the back room.

      Look, she said, they’re french letters, you know anything about them? No, well, they go over the feller’s willy. Stop the babies coming.

      She laughed. Moira was a coarse sort of person, though not when Mr Stevens was about.

      Know what a willy is, do you, Nance? Country girl like you? You’d have seen the bulls and that?

      The bulls and the horses were all Nance knew about sex, apart from Tom Vidler’s kiss at the Tamworth Memorial Dance.

      The fellers are awkward about coming in and asking, Moira said. Needn’t be, in my view. I like a feller with a french letter in his back pocket.

      Nance felt like an innocent fool, but at least now she understood about the young men who’d come in expecting to be served by Mr Stevens and got her instead. They’d stammer out a request for a comb or a pair of shoelaces. Blushing, mumbling, spilling their change. Later she’d see them lurking outside and when Mr Stevens was behind the counter they’d come in again. They’d wall themselves off from the women with their shoulders and murmur together.

      Moira showed Nance the place under the counter where Mr Stevens kept the FLs. There were things for women, too, that you had to know about. Little pieces of sponge with a string that you soaked in vinegar, and the Housewife’s Friend. Kind of a foamy thing you put up yourself, Moira said. Terrible mess on the sheets.

      Monday to Friday she got to the shop at one and was there until seven or eight at night. There was another pharmacy next door and they played the game of who could stay open longer. On Saturday and Sunday she had to be at the shop at nine in the morning. At one o’clock she could go home, but she had to be back again at six and stay till whenever the shop closed. Saturday nights were busy, sometimes they didn’t close till ten. There was no morning of the week when she could sleep in. No complete day was her own, not even a full afternoon. Her life before pharmacy seemed a mad luxuriousness of time.

      For the first weeks her feet ached so she could feel the bones against the floor. At the tram stop there was no seat and there were nights when she sat down to wait on the footpath, feet in the gutter like a tramp. She was past caring.

      Eventually her feet got used to it, but she didn’t. Did you have a nice day, dear, Mrs Glendon asked every evening. Nance tried to smile, tried to eat her dried-up dinner, too tired to be hungry. Mrs Glendon had left school at fourteen, had never worked outside the home. Nance training to be a pharmacist seemed wonderful to her. How could Nance tell her, It’s awful! I don’t understand the lectures! And Mr Stevens rouses on me if I’m not back at the shop on time!

      Each day she put on the white coat again knowing there was nothing ahead of her but loneliness and exhaustion. She wished she’d never won that prize at the Intermediate, never attracted Mr Crisp’s interest, never squeaked that pass at the Leaving. She hated every day, went to sleep with her wrist still tightening around the movement of the pestle, and on the other side of the too-short sleep there was another day like the last one.

      By the time Nance was desperate enough to write to Bert and Dolly to tell them how awful it was, it was too late. Something terrible had happened to the stock market in America a while earlier, and now