COMING ROUND THE BEND

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 822, 29 April 1955, Page 16

COMING ROUND THE BEND

SOME LADY TYPES

With

Denis

Glover

HE’S the old-fashioned hard-to-get type. She’s been in the one office for twelve years and never complains about her salary, She takes shorthand but no sugar in her tea. She arrives early, bearing flowers from her mother's garden, and contrives to do all her shopping in the lunch hour. She got engaged once, and the boss was at tremendous pains to find out that the fellow was no good. She’s the perfect hostess-always so merry and bright. And her suppers and savouries! stout men and their stouter ladies gobble them up as if they hadn't eaten for weeks. She makes everyone feel so periectly at home, Between parties she | suffers from listlessness and perpetua] headaches-migraines she calls them. Her husband is an authority on newspapers. He. studies them four nights in five while eating fish and chips out of them. She’s a beauty salon type. She lives under several layers of beauty, none skin deep. Very sensibly she works by appearance only: her sound effects are so infrequent as to merit astonishment. Masklike indifference lifts to her three simple expressions of agreement, disagreement or disdain at the pencil stroke of an eyebrow. She always looks differently the same. To herself in the mirror she frowns. "I wish I were someone different." On the strength of having been to an expensive girls’ school she has a girlish enthusiasm for the arts-all or any of the arts. On the strength of father’s money she buys all the expensive art books, and can discuss up to halfway through the introduction with genuine knowledge. Her husband cleared out and took a job as a steward on a ship. Somewhere on the political merry-go-round her husband fell off into a title. She has to have a couple of servants because of her position, (She is herself. more ruthlessly capable, in half the time, than half a dozen servants.) She treats them with friendliness: this is a democratic country and for all she knows they may marry a title of their own, or win an overseas lottery, Not that they’d be quite ladies, but the very thought gives one a feeling of insecurity. She’s a wonderful woman, and I hope she recognises herself because she’s the only real one of the lot. She has two children and lives at the top of a high hill. She won't buy bread, because her own is so much better. She has time to garden like a peasent and read like a professor, but to much more conversational purpose. Her husband, who lives in a bubble of fun however hard he works, sings and sings for the joy of it, without so much as a tuning fork. ae ah" ae eee ee eer ee" © See ee er Ee