First Minute After Noon

By Ellen Tipping

Set in Australia against the background of a nations changing identity and the sexual revolution of the seventies, First Minute After Noon is a story of loveromantic, marital, and maternal; betrayal; and commitment. It is a story, too, of an emerging sense of being Australian, an exaltation in that vast untouched ancient continent, its muted colors . . . the swirling rhythms of a landscape formed over millions of years (or hours) by wind, water, and the heat of the sun.

Born at the darkest hour of the Second World War, Lucy grew up like a displaced English person in a family and a society that valued its British heritage and the traditional roles of its men and women. At the age of twenty-three, she fulfilled societys expectations and married. But Rob was a mystery to her, and she to him. They didnt even argue. Years passed. With two children, their life had stabilized when they met Piers and his wife, Chloe, recently arrived from England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Mar 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543405262

Ellen Tipping

Ellen Tipping is a psychologist. Literature and its illumination of human behaviour and relationships are lifelong passions. Hence, after years of policy-related research in health and education, she started writing fiction, which aims to do just that.

Book preview

PART 1

‘In my beginning is my end’

- T.S. Eliot

THE TICKING CLOCK

1980

. . . F light to Melbourne, just waiting to take off. Misty light of dawn, the sky subdued, dull grey. And above, when we break through that dull grey mass into the sky above, the vibrant intensity of white and blue and gold  . . . like that new life in love with you into which I feel reborn.

It is lovely now to sit and mentally hold your hand again, as I write, and feel the peace and fulfilment of your love flow over me  . . . but wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could actually be coming home to you now, to the warmth of your smile and the comfort of your arms . . . how shall we find the key that will stop the headlong gallop of the ticking clock each time we are together? How can we contrive to set up a secret store of hours when we are together?  . . . but always they will be too short, never could I have enough of you, my love, my Lucy  . . .

Piers pauses for a moment as the plane starts down the runway . . .

‘THE FLOWER MAN’

1985

12 noon

E mma used to call him the ‘flower man’, reminiscent of the Paul Cox film. She used to describe it to Lucy with a giggle long before Lucy had seen it. She’d say, her face tilted down coyly, eyes glancing up at her mother with a wicked little smile, that it was about a man who liked looking at girls taking off their clothes while he listened to opera. He never touched them, no, just liked looking. Not the sort of film you really want to see with your grandmother, which she had. Beautiful, all the same - photographically, she meant - and lovely music. A bit strange though, she’d wrinkled her nose, still smiling, ‘But you’d really like it, mum.’

That was when Emma was fifteen. She hated him then.

Lucy bumped down the unmade road in her old Honda, barely making it under the overhanging tea-trees.

Emma had called him the flower man because for years he’d arrived on Saturday mornings with a small bunch of flowers picked from his garden. He still did. He brought them for Lucy. He’d throw out last week’s, put fresh water in the vase and carefully arrange them, usually a selection of different colours and varieties: pink, red and magenta geraniums, camellias and azaleas when they were in season, white daisies and roses. He’d do this while Lucy was getting herself a piece of toast and putting on the kettle for coffee.

Funny how she never thanked him for the flowers: it wasn’t that she was ungrateful or didn’t like them. Saying ‘thank you’ would feel such a dismissive, banal gesture for such a poignant expression of love.

She turned into the driveway, got out of the car and walked up the grassy slope to the painted timber porch. Images from the past flooded her mind: herself as a young mother hurrying from the car with Emma as a baby, bunny rug tossed over Emma’s head to protect her from the dive-bombing magpies; Jake’s screaming face as a three year-old, bitten by a bull ant; she and her mother lying on the old cane lounges in the sun… this was the family holiday home till her parents moved there permanently when her father retired.

Her pretext for coming was not the wonderful Indian summer – still, warm autumnal days and a city pink with pollution – but to clean the house and stock the fridge for her father returning from a tour along the Great Ocean Road, ending with a night in Queenscliff. He was to catch the 9 o’clock ferry in the morning: Lucy would pick him up at the Sorrento pier.

Stepping on to the porch she glanced at the rusting windows - silly having iron-framed windows so close to the sea - opened the front door and walked into the living room; she felt depressed by the worn Persian carpet, and oddly spooked by the musty emptiness. Was it fear of present intruders or past ghosts or, or… something else? She pulled open the curtains and found the old black and white television, hidden by her father in case of burglars, and that reminded her to look for the telephone under a cushion on the couch to prevent said burglars running up a huge telephone bill on long distance calls. She wanted to ring Piers, but maybe, maybe she should just wait for his call.

She went back to the car, lifted the box of food from the boot and carried it in, putting the milk and vegetables in the fridge and the fruit in the bowl on the kitchen bench. She felt agitated. She started dusting the mahogany sideboard, picking up, in turn, the delicately hand-painted porcelain vase, the cloisonné bowl, and the marble fruit-stand: all treasured by her mother and brought out from England by Lucy’s grandmother, and all more in keeping with an eighteenth century drawing room than a fibro beach shack.

She carried the crystal bowl and decanters into the kitchen… sudden memory of them sparkling in the afternoon sun when her mother was still alive. It calmed her for some reason: washing each piece, polishing it dry, and then carrying it back to the living room. She climbed on a chair and cleaned the mirror above the mantelpiece, glancing wistfully at the little bunch of dusty pussy willows her mother had dipped in blue and gold vegetable dye years ago. She quickly threw them in the bin. Her father wouldn’t remember, wouldn’t care. It was only for Lucy they were a poignant reminder of her mother.

She pulled off her rubber gloves - pleased that she’d remembered to bring them - and flopped on the sagging old sofa, glancing at this morning’s Age, but her thoughts were elsewhere.

Strange being in this house, so comfortably familiar, if not especially comfortable, and feeling so alien; no… not alien… alone, sad. Why hadn’t he rung back? Even yesterday he’d seemed strangely preoccupied. She wanted to go for a walk, but was worried about missing his call. I will ring again. She picked up the phone and dialled his number, still no answer.

She wandered into the kitchen, put on the kettle, staring out the window… imagining him moving around the garden in the early morning choosing the flowers, putting them in the small jar of water kept permanently in his car for the purpose – does he ever change the water? - shopping at the market then arriving at her place, taking the flowers out of the water, holding them, just bunched together in his hand, and walking up the path into the house. There was no sense of his own self-image, how he might appear to neighbours, to Rob, to the children or to friends who might have called in.

She turned away from the window, made a cup of tea, and sighed. It was a simple, unselfconscious and direct communication of his love for Lucy. There could be no words to express an understanding of that communication: finger tips lightly brushed, eye beams twisted and held for a moment but not words, not thank-yous. She sat down at the kitchen table with her tea and a ham sandwich. It wasn’t just the flowers: she never thanked him for anything. Gratitude would seem irrelevant, even divisive with the oneness, the mutuality of their love. For either one to say thank you to the other would have implied a separateness that neither felt.

And she didn’t call him anything either. She referred to him as Piers and called him by name when she wanted to attract his attention. But, even when they were alone… and somehow she couldn’t use any of the terms of endearment with which she fondly addressed Rob and the children - my love, darling, sweetheart, beautiful girl or boy as the case may be, and would you believe bunny, even bunnikins. Funny how her imagination was inexhaustible, even childish, when her love was mixed with lightness and humour.

How many years had she lived this dual existence? It must be… god… getting on for ten years… that long. And their love was the most marvellously kept secret… Or was it? Over the first few years after they’d met, members of the family and friends would have come to understand that there was a deep affection (even a love) between them. God, thinking about it now… they had certainly been more open, even reckless, about its expression in the early months… Lucy found it hard to believe but she remembered one evening dancing at a dinner party, locked together, immobile save for the thudding of their hearts and the tingling of her thighs, while his wife, Chloe, and Rob chatted with the dinner guests. And she remembered other occasions… lingering in the kitchen or the dining room while others were moving out, to cling and kiss, her hands stroking his hips and thighs. But how did it start? It all gets so confused… the sequence of events. The past is such a jumble.

Lucy wandered back into the living room, looking intently at a studio photograph of herself and her sister Sunny, as young teenagers. How could it have happened? She’d always been, and still was, timid, conventional, even… prim. But also… flirtatious in a fluttery sort of way, but surely that was more as a teenager. Over the years, she’d even been accused of being a tease, and she had to admit that she probably had been: because… there was no - what you might call - follow-through.

She picked up the photograph and stared wistfully at that skinny young girl - pretty, in an insipid sort of a way, with pale skin, a light sprinkling of freckles, long fair hair - not blond - pulled back in a pony tail. A soft face, a gentle face with small features, indistinct really… that could have been highlighted with more makeup, but weren’t. She remembered the compressed powder that she’d piled on her ‘red cheeks’, the blight of her teenage days, and the Yardley’s Natural Rose lipstick. Lucy had attracted what her mother described as ‘nice boys’: the sort of boys that her sister, Sunny, being more striking and voluptuous, ‘frightened off’.

She did have boyfriends. But looking back there were few she was keen on and only one with whom she became close. She was the pretty little handmaiden full of sweet smiles, coy glances, decorous kisses and innocent cuddles. That’s what she and Sunny were meant to be, alluring but chaste. And in love with love, perhaps she still was. It was partly mum, Lucy thought… her childhood had overflowed with romantic poetry - The Lady of Shallot, The Forsaken Merman…

‘She combed its bright hair and tended it well

When down swung the sound of a silver bell

It is Eastertide in the world, ah me

And I lose my poor soul Merman here with thee’

Ah that one, so loved by her mother and communicated to her daughters, how powerful: the beauty and the sadness, love between man and woman, mother and child, love intensified by the pain of separation.

But it was also partly the times, growing up in the 1950s. There was a subtle pressure, an expectation on girls to please - even flatter – boys… men. Was it to make them feel better about themselves, to make them feel attractive, successful as men? Even if they weren’t. Was it kindness? Or was it pathetic: demeaning for women, and, ironically, patronising to men? Yes, it was last night, reading that book that she’d thought about it like that for the first time: it was so beautifully expressed ‘how quickly she learned to embroider his wit, to rest on his silence, to entertain his interests…’

She rummaged in the drawers of the sideboard for the old biscuit tin of photographs and meandered into her parents’ bedroom. Funny how she still thought of it as their bedroom; she looked at the neatly made twin beds, Queen Ann, and matching dressing table that her mother had bought as a bride and always described as pretty. At some point she and Sunny had taken over the twin beds; she remembered the cream wireless which sat on the dressing table between them, with its emblematic swan and orange glow in the dark.

Lucy sat on the bed nearest the window, resting against the plump pillows with her feet up; she sipped her tea and looked out at the craggy tee tree challenging gravity, leaning at a crazy angle, almost horizontal, and getting closer to the ground or structural failure each year. She opened the tin box and looked at the old photographs. Lying back on the pillow she thought of her mother: it was over a year since she’d died…

Lucy could see her now, smiling, lifting her high when she was a small child, holding her to her soft large breasts, kissing her lightly - quick butterfly kisses, demure, chaste - on the tip of her nose, on her cheeks and hair. Lucy could see her mother’s hair, her hair when she had washed it, falling softly around her shoulders in two loose ringlets on either side of her head. She could see her sweetly pretty smile (there were no other words to describe it). She could see her dressed in her orange and cream striped cotton dress with the square shoulders and the short box sleeves, her slender-strong arms. And that time when she went to a ball with their father (one of the rare occasions they saw her dressed up): the rustle and swish of her French taffeta dress, fitted bodice and the skirt’s tiered flounces of old rose, cream and green flowers against a black background. (Lucy still had it; she’d even worn it). But she couldn’t hear her voice. She strained to hear it: the warmth, the resonance. The image of her face was so vivid but her voice . . . Funny about memories: the pictures crowded her mind. And Lucy could almost catch the scent of her mother’s face: the cream which she’d worn, Town and Country, in a little oval glass jar with a white bakelite top.

But were they accurate her memories, the shifting images… reconstructed fragments? How much was