The Women in Black by Madeleine St John Page B

week.
    ‘Will you come out to the pictures with us tonight, Dad?’ asked Lisa. ‘We can see—’ and she gave him an account of the alternative programmes which were showing in the neighbourhood.
    ‘Oh well, I don’t mind,’ said Mr Miles expansively, ‘I don’t mind.
    You ladies choose. Maybe we’ll have a Chinese meal beforehand.
    What do you reckon? Lesley can pay for it now she’s working.’
    ‘Get away with you,’ said Mrs Miles. ‘Lesley has to save that money. We’ll eat at home. I’ve got some lovely lamb chops.’
    ‘Keep your chops,’ said Mr Miles. ‘I’m only kidding. The treat’s on me. Go and get yourselves ready both of you and let’s be off.’
    They ran to do his bidding, almost elated: these moods of good humour were rare enough to be entered into with as much alacrity as gratitude. Lisa put on her pink frock, and looking at herself in the full-length mirror in her mother’s wardrobe thought to herself, it’s not really—it’s not quite—I wish—and realised that without her noticing it at the time, her two weeks at Goode’s had somewhat altered her perception of the Good Frock. Oh well, she thought. I’m just going out with Mum and Dad, it’s not as if—and now realised that all manner of possibilities had started lately to crowd her mind, all manner: that life really was, in all manner of possibilities, truly now and almost tangibly beginning.

12
    Magda opened her great brown eyes to the dazzling day. She glanced at the bedside clock: it was ten o’clock. She wondered for a moment whether she would get up and go to Mass, and then she turned over and went back to sleep again. I need it more, she said to herself, God knows.
    Magda had an entirely satisfactory understanding with God: this understanding was the foundation of her success in the art of living. Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with himself, with the same consequences. That Magda and Stefan had an entirely satisfactory understanding with each other was the consequence of numerous determinants, such as the fact that they had each survived hell.
    When Magda awoke again it was to the sight of Stefan standing over her with the coffee pot and a large cup and saucer.
    ‘It occurs to me,’ said he, ‘that if I awaken you now—it is eleven a.m. by the way—you will have time to go to the Mass at midday.
    Should you so wish.’
    ‘A-a-a-h,’ Magda sighed, and stretched. ‘First give me the coffee. Then I shall address the question.’
    She sat up, in a heave of white arms and satin nightdress, and Stefan poured out her coffee.
    ‘I will fetch my own,’ he said, leaving the room.
    Magda considered the day ahead. It would be pleasant to do nothing, and then to walk in a park, and to eat dinner in a restaurant with some friends. Stefan re-entered the room.
    ‘I will not go to Mass today,’ Magda told him.
    ‘The Pope himself would excuse you,’ said Stefan.
    ‘Do not speak so of His Holiness,’ said Magda sternly.
    Magda was Slovene and Stefan Hungarian; as Displaced Persons they had been given entry after the end of the war to the Commonwealth of Australia, and it was in a migrant camp outside Sydney that they had first laid eyes on each other. They had begun their life’s conversation in French and as the efficient instruction provided by the Federal Government progressed, had switched over to English. Within a year of their arrival in Australia they were both fl uent, however idiosyncratic, English-speakers and they then began also to read voraciously. Soon Stefan was branching into the classics but here Magda could but barely follow him.
    ‘I cannot get along with this Shakespeare,’ she said. ‘This Hamlet prince, for example: he is not to me the stuff of heroes.’
    Their common language soon came to contain various old-fashioned locutions which, transferred from the pages of such as Hardy and Dickens, had found their way eventually via Stefan’s into Magda’s discourse, and even