"I am put in my place," Justine said, and grinned. "Why is it, Justine, that you didn't introduce me to any of your friends? I didn't see a sign of anyone at Bothwell Gardens except Mrs. Devine," Meggie said as they sat in Germaine Rocher's salon watching the languid mannequins preen and simper.
"Oh, they're a bit shy . . . . I like that orange thing, don't you?" "Not with your hair. Settle for the grey."
"Pooh! I think orange goes perfectly with my hair. In grey I look like something the cat dragged in, sort of muddy and half rotten. Move with the times, Mum. Redheads don't have to be seen in white, grey, black, emerald green or that horrible color- you're so addicted to-what is it, ashes of roses? Victorian!"
"You have the name of the color right," Meggie said. She turned to look at her daughter. "You're a monster," she said wryly, but with affection. Justine didn't pay any attention; it was not the first time she had heard it. "I'll take the orange, the scarlet, the purple print, the moss green, the burgundy suit . . . ."
Meggie sat torn between laughter and rage. What could one do with a daughter like Justine?
The Himalaya sailed from Darling Harbor three days later. She was a lovely old ship, flat-hulled and very seaworthy, built in the days when no one was in a tearing hurry and everyone accepted the fact England was four weeks away via Suez or five weeks away via the Cape of Good Hope. Nowadays even the ocean liners were streamlined, hulls shaped like destroyers to get there faster. But what they did to a sensitive stomach made seasoned sailors quail. "What fun!" Justine laughed. "We've got a whole lovely footie team in first class, so it won't be as dull as I thought. Some of them are gorgeous."
"Now aren't you glad I insisted on first class?" "I suppose so."
"Justine, you bring out the worst in me, you always have," Meggie snapped, losing her temper at what she took for ingratitude. Just this once couldn't the little wretch at least pretend she was sorry to be going? "Stubborn, pig-headed, self-willed! You exasperate me."
For a moment Justine didn't answer, but turned her head away as if she was more interested in the fact that the all-ashore gong was ringing than in what her mother was saying. She bit the tremor from her lips, put a bright smile on them. "I know I exasperate you," she said cheerfully as she faced her mother. "Never mind, we are what we are. As you always say, I take after my dad."
They embraced self-consciously before Meggie slipped thankfully into the crowds converging on gangways and was lost to sight. Justine made her way up to the sun deck and stood by the rail with rolls of colored streamers in her hands. Far below on the wharf she saw the figure in the pinkish-grey dress and hat walk to the appointed spot, stand shading her eyes. Funny, at this distance one could see Mum was getting up toward fifty. Some way to go yet, but it was there in her stance. They waved in the same moment, then Justine threw the first of her streamers and Meggie caught its end deftly. A red, a blue, a yellow, a pink, a green, an orange; spiraling round and round, tugging in the breeze.
A pipe band had come to bid the football team farewell and stood with pennons flying, plaids billowing, skirling a quaint version of "Now Is the Hour." The ship's rails were thick with people hanging over, holding desperately to their ends of the thin paper streamers; on the wharf hundreds of people craned their necks upward, lingering hungrily on the faces going so faraway, young faces mostly, off to see what the hub of civilization on the other side of the world was really like. They would live there, work there, perhaps come back in two years, perhaps not come back at all. And everyone knew it, wondered.
The blue sky was plumped with silver-white clouds and there was a tearing Sydney wind. Sun warmed the upturned heads and the shoulder blades of those leaning down; a great multicolored swath of vibrating ribbons joined ship and shore. Then suddenly a gap appeared between the old boat's side and the wooden struts of the wharf; the air filled with cries and sobs; and one by one in their thousands the streamers broke, fluttered wildly, sagged limply and crisscrossed the surface of the water like a mangled loom, joined the orange peels and the jellyfish to float away.
Justine kept doggedly to her place at the rail until the wharf was a few hard lines and little pink pinheads in the distance; the Himalaya's tugs turned her, towed her helplessly under the booming decks of the Sydney Harbor Bridge, out into the mainstream of that exquisite stretch of sunny water. It wasn't like going to Manly on the ferry at all, though they followed the same path past Neutral Bay and Rose Bay and Cremorne and Vaucluse; no. For this time it was out through the Heads, beyond the cruel cliffs and the high lace fans of foam, into the ocean. Twelve thousand miles of it, to the other side of the world. And whether they came home again or not, they would belong neither here nor there, for they would have lived on two continents and sampled two different ways of life.
Money, Justine discovered, made London a most alluring place. Not for her a penniless existence clinging to the fringes of Earl's Court-"Kangaroo Valley" they called it because so many Australians made it their headquarters. Not for her the typical fate of Australians in England, youth-hosteling on a shoestring, working for a pittance in some office or school or hospital, shivering thin-blooded over a tiny radiator in a cold, damp room. Instead, for Justine a mews flat in Kensington close to Knightsbridge, centrally heated; and a place in the company of Clyde Daltinham-Roberts, The Elizabethan Group. When the summer came she caught a train to Rome. In afteryears she would smile, remembering how little she saw of that long journey across France, down Italy; her whole mind was occupied with the things she had to tell Dane, memorizing those she simply mustn't forget. There were so many she was bound to leave some out.