Bittersweet

by Colleen McCullough

  “Would Grace mind talking to me? And Heather?”

  “Grace would talk the leg off an iron pot. Tufts is harder to get on side, but she’ll do it for Charlie.”

  “Tufts? Is that a nickname?”

  “Yes, almost as old as we are.”

  “How did she get it?” Dorcas asked.

  “A nanny who was fascinated by our forwardness when we were about a year old. I think a part of the forwardness was due to Grace and Edda, only twenty months older than us. We worshipped them! But it was so hard to say Heather! Our infant tongues tripped on it constantly. Anyway, the Nanny had the bright idea of bringing in a kitten — Kitty from Katherine — and a sprig of heather. Trying to explain, she said that heather grew in tufts, and went on to describe what a tuft was. I found it much easier to say tufts than heather, and started calling Tufts Tufts. The next thing, everybody was calling her Tufts, even Daddy.”

  “Unusual,” said Dorcas.

  “How extraordinary!” Kitty exclaimed with a sigh. “I had quite forgotten how Tufts became Tufts.”

  “Nicknames usually point up some character trait in their subjects,” said Dorcas, veering into politics. “Bismarck was the Iron Chancellor, the Duke of Wellington was Old Hooky, Louis XIV was the Sun King, Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen, and the Roman nobleman actually tacked his nickname onto his family name as a mark of distinction, even if it meant idiotic or crooked.”

  The big violet-blue eyes were staring at her, slightly glazed. “You’re ideal for Charlie,” Kitty said. “He’d lap that up.” She looked suddenly urgent, intense. “Dorcas, you reported on fashion for newspapers, so you must know a lot about it. Promise me that you’ll smarten yourself up for Charlie, please!”

  “A good income will make all the difference,” Dorcas repeated.

  “Have you heavy drains on your purse?”

  “My parents.”

  “No one else?”

  The voice sharpened. “What do you mean?”

  “A jobless brother? A boyfriend?”

  The cheeks were dull crimson. “That is my own business.”

  “And I should mind mine? But don’t you understand, my dear, that in coming on to Charlie’s private staff, you’ve virtually made your business his? I know him, and I can tell you that he’s very possessive. The size of your salary and its perquisites should tell you that you’ve been bought. Charlie is a millionaire. Such men tend to view human beings as property bought and paid for. I’m not decrying his nobility of nature or the fineness of his character — even in 1932, with hundreds of thousands of men out of work, he’s managed to keep Corunda more prosperous than most places, and he throws all of himself, including a very big heart, into everything he does. But there is a tiny bit of Soames Forsyte in him for all that — he’s a man of property,” said Kitty.

  To which Dorcas Chandler made no reply.

  And that, thought Kitty, is as much as I can do for that poor woman, who does harbour a secret, a secret that costs her money. If she can’t confide it to Charlie, then it carries the seed of her destruction with it, and she knows that all too well. The contract clauses will have told her that he’s hedged himself against embarrassing disclosures, debts incurred without his consent or knowledge, a multitude of vague implications that, if not contractually tackled, might lead to things like blackmail. But she had signed the contract without a murmur. Poor woman!

  Kitty’s own life had steadied down into a routine that saw her at the orphanage most days, but home in time to spend the evenings with Charles, who hadn’t asked to spend a night in her bed. Perhaps, she thought as Dorcas Chandler eased her way into his life, he too had given up the ghost of his marriage? Not that she thought him interested in Dorcas, bought and paid for; just that he was more comfortable conversing with Dorcas. Which, as 1932 pressed on, led to his asking Kitty if she minded Dorcas for dinner some nights.

  “An excellent idea!” Kitty said at once. “Who knows? I might learn something too. Children are a delight, but the level of conversation is pretty basic.”

  Dorcas’s appearance was improving; the black outfits so old they had gone green had vanished, and she had either put on some weight, or the better clothes displayed her figure better. She was wearing face powder, lipstick and a touch of rouge, and had gone to a salon to have her hair cut and marcelled in the French fashion. No Hollywood film studio would ever offer her a contract, but she now looked more smartly professional.

  What amazed Kitty was the degree of Dorcas’s and Charlie’s passion for politics. Though Charlie had many duties that took him to the hospital or other Corunda destinations, he still managed to spend a lot of his days with Dorcas, yet the moment she arrived for pre-dinner drinks, he was into politics again, and wanted to talk about nothing else until Dorcas went back to Burdum Row; sometimes he was so immersed in a theory that he would escort her just to keep the discussion going.

  Admittedly the times provoked political passion, with rival theories for economic recovery fuelling not only the parties, but factions within each party. After the landslide victory of Joe Lyons and the United Australia Party that Christmas of 1931, it might have been expected that the wrangling would cease, but not all U.A.P. parliamentarians were in favour of London’s insistence on retrenchment. Lyons and his ruling cadre were, so the misery went on. When Jack Lang refused a second time to pay interest on the state’s loans until times were better, Lyons and the federal government paid up. But this time Canberra insisted on being paid back. Jack Lang refused to pay up or permit his funds to be garnished. Feelings ran so high that the situation culminated in Lang’s attempting to barricade the New South Wales Treasury — it was states’ rights against central power with a vengeance.

  On 13th May 1932, Lang’s world fell apart when the Governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, dismissed J.T. Lang and his party from office as incapable of governing responsibly. Fed up with the turmoil, New South Welshmen and women voted in a conservative government, and resistance to retrenchment perished, though its opponents still hated its every measure.

  To this and much more Kitty was forced to listen each time Dorcas came to dinner, more and more often as Charles leaned on her opinions more heavily. It wasn’t that Kitty was indifferent, or unconcerned, or shallow; simply, that since her passions were not engaged, she heard the talk the way a sober person hears two drunks — it went around and around in the same eternal rut. If something new happened, she was galvanised, but something new didn’t even happen once a week; more likely, once a month, which mean twenty-nine or thirty days of repetition, repetition, repetition. By the end of Jack Lang, Kitty wondered how much more political conversation she could take without jumping up and screaming “Shut up! Shut up! SHUT UP!”

  And winter was here again, snow clouds over the Great Divide, the freezing Antarctic winds stripping deciduous trees bare, and a blue misery in Kitty’s heart that she couldn’t seem to blow an atom of warmth into. Her husband was happy despite his lack of conjugal pleasures because he was, withal, a man who didn’t live for those. He lived for politics, and there was no doubt that when the country next went to the federal election booths, he would be standing as an Independent. All he had really needed was a Dorcas.

  June arrived, official winter. On its first cloudlessly sunny day Kitty took a car (why did Dorcas have her own, but Kitty had to hope for a spare?) and drove down to the river out Doobar way, where the land was at its lushest and fat lambs were still finding a market. Not everybody was starving — just the lower classes, which undoubtedly suited Sir Otto Niemeyer down to the ground.

  Kitty left the car to walk along the river, suddenly free of everything Burdum, from House to Row to Charlie. So bitter a wind, yet such sweet air! Fascinating, the contradictions. This was where Edda used to ride, have her trysts with Jack Thurlow.

  Since Grace had publicly spurned him, Jack had rather faded from sight in Corunda; gossip said he stuck to his property. He continued to do very well with his Arab horses,
despite the hard times; in fact, he was more visible in Dubbo and Toowoomba, exhibiting his spectacularly pretty horses.

  But here he was, riding down the bridle path toward her on a huge grey charger whose Roman nose said it had no Arab blood. Kitty scuttled off the path and stood well away, hoping he would canter past her without slowing down, let alone stopping.

  Fat chance! He stopped, slid off the beast immediately.

  “Well, starve the lizards, Kitty Latimer!” he said, smiling.

  Immensely tall; she had forgotten that, though Edda would have qualified it as “moderately” thanks to her own height. He was exactly six feet. What age was he now? Forty-odd sounded a little excessive. It was hard to tell the age of men on the land; they looked older when they were young and younger when they were old. His hair was still the corn-gold waves of a Burdum thatch, his skin richly tanned, his eyes very blue. Absolutely nothing of the two-faced Janus here! Handsome in a masculine way, and a beautiful smile.

  He led her to a log, first checking that there was no bull-ant nest nearby, then sat her down and loomed over her.

  “All bundled up in woollies like that, you look ten years old. Sensible, but,” he said. “How is Lady Schiller?”

  “Thriving, to the best of my knowledge. Studying Medicine in Melbourne. I like her husband.”

  “I was just going home. Fancy a cuppa and a scone?”

  “Please! I can tell you lots about Edda. I’ll drive, but where do I go?”

  “First cattle-guard on the Doobar road. The homestead’s on top of a hill, you can’t miss it — too many horses.” He swung himself onto the grey gelding and trotted off. Someone different in my life! Not a new face, but it may as well be, for it was never a face filled my eyes before.

  Corundoobar was a magnificent homestead, its house of stone, Georgian in simplicity, verandahs held up by Doric pillars all the way around. His flower garden must be a veritable chocolate box in spring and summer, she thought. The view was superb from its vantage point atop the hill and on the river. There was snow on the distant ranges.

  It smelled wonderful inside, as a home should smell, Kitty thought: beeswax polish, dried herbs and flowers, clean linen, cologne water, fresh air. Its windows were floor-to-ceiling and could be used as doors, and one was open a crack to allow cross-currents, while pot-bellied stoves and open fires kept the rooms warm.

  The interior was scrupulously cared for, yet had no woman’s touch. Subtle lacks, rather than blatant ones.

  “Who keeps house?” she asked, sitting at the kitchen table and watching him work cold butter through salted self-raising flour — he was making the scones himself, from scratch! An amazing man.

  “I keep house,” he said, adding cold milk. “It’s a poor sort of creature can’t keep a house clean and tidy.”

  “Or make a scone.”

  “My hands are always cold, so I don’t melt the butter — the vital requirement for working butter through flour. After I add the milk, I mix with two knife blades — see?”

  “I can’t boil water,” she said lightly.

  “You’d soon learn if you had to.” He pressed his dough gently on a floured board, took a block of sweaty cheddar cheese and grated some over the top, then cut the slab into two-inch squares. These he transferred to a baking tray, and slid the tray into his wood-fired stove oven. Twenty minutes from starting, the scones were done — risen high, cheese melted, tops browned.

  Kitty’s mouth was already watering as he piled the steaming scones onto a plate, set out cut-glass dishes of butter and jam, and gave her a knife. Somewhere in the midst of this, he had made a pot of tea and produced two Aynsley cups, saucers and plates.

  “You have nice things,” she said, splitting her scone and buttering both sides. “Feather light!” she pronounced through a full mouth. “Fine food on fine china — you’re a treasure.”

  He considered her through narrowed eyes. “I suspect you’re a treasure too,” he said, “but your trouble is that no one wants your sort of gold. Everyone assumes it’s just tissue-thin plating.”

  Her breath caught; she had to cough not to choke. “How very perceptive you are! People usually dismiss me as a gold-digger, though I imagine Edda saw to it that didn’t happen.”

  A slow smile lit his eyes. “Oh, Edda! Yes, thanks to her I do know a lot about the Latimer sisters. Especially you and your face. I wonder why so many people can’t seem to get past how other people look? Charlie Burdum wanted a showcase wife to flaunt and prove that very small men can walk off with the best women, then to cap it he fell for you like a ton of bricks. Oh, it was honest on his part, never think it wasn’t. He had to have you.”

  “Edda really talked to you, didn’t she? I wish she had to me half so frankly. I might have decided differently.”

  “She said as much as a sister dared. I was on the outside, it didn’t matter what I thought or how I reacted.”

  “You’ve been around a long time, one way or another,” Kitty said, smiling at him. “I’m very glad your plans for Grace fell through, however. You had a lucky escape.”

  His head went back, he laughed heartily. “Don’t think I don’t know it! But Corundoobar needs a wife and family as much as its owner does. I’ll be forty before I know it,” he said seriously.

  “Someone will turn up, Jack,” she comforted.

  “I know, everything in its due time.”

  She gazed around. “I love this place. It’s a home.”

  “That’s because at heart you’re a farm missus,” he said, his voice quite impersonal, “though you don’t know what a farm missus is. Well, she’s got half a dozen kiddies underfoot, her legs are bare in summer and she wears gumboots in winter, she doesn’t own a decent dress, her darning basket overflows with socks — I could go on, but that’s enough to give you the idea.”

  The tears were threatening, but Kitty knew better than to shed them; Jack wasn’t saying these things to her, but to her kind of person. “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said brightly, with a smile. “Isn’t it odd, how our loves aren’t given where our natures dictate they should be?”

  “The older I get, the odder it seems,” he said with an answering smile.

  “Are you surviving the Depression?” she asked when he began to clear the morning tea away, wondering if this was his signal for her to take her leave.

  But no. Table cleared, he pulled his Windsor chair out from it to sit, turned toward her, and leaned back at leisure.

  “I’ve been lucky,” he said, smiling. “My fat lambs barely make a profit, whereas the Arab horses sell as fast as I can breed them. What money there is has risen to form a crust on top, so the wealthy are the only ones buying.”

  As he spoke a grey animal streaked across the kitchen from what she guessed was the back door, rose effortlessly into the air and landed in Jack’s lap, not merely filling it, but overflowing it. An enormous cat! Jack finished speaking without paying any attention to it beyond shifting to enable the cat to lie with its head against his heart.

  “Meet Bert,” Jack said then. “The minute I finish eating, he’s on my knee.”

  “I didn’t think cats came that big,” she said, watching his hand cup the cat’s face and stroke it back to its ears; the sound of purring filled the room.

  “He weighs twenty-one pounds,” Jack said proudly, “and he rules the roost — don’t you, Bert?”

  Kitty reached out a tentative hand. “Hello, Bert.”

  A pair of bright green eyes surveyed her shrewdly; this was no dumb beast!

  “You’re in,” said Jack, grinning.

  “How do you know?”

  “He’s still here, hasn’t budged. If you were Edda, now — poof! He’d have gone.”

  “Getting back to the Arab horses, I assume you mean that private school princesses still have daddies who gift them with whatever they want. Including mounts for the horse-mad.”

  “Well, you were a private school princess.”

  “But Edda was the horse-
mad one. Horses frighten me.”

  “I noticed, but cheer up. Nowadays cars are handier.”

  It was a long morning tea; they seemed to yarn about everything from Edda through Maude’s dementia all the way to the progress of the new hospital; Kitty felt as if they were two old friends meeting again after a decade spent far apart. Jack took her on a tour of the house and introduced her to his two blue cattle dogs, Alf and Daisy, who weren’t allowed indoors. He refused to let her wash the dishes.

  “Come and have tea and scones again?” he asked, walking her to her car. “I won’t stink of horse if I know you’re coming, that’s a promise.”

  “Is the same time next week too soon?”

  “No, it’s good. Best stock up while we can — sometimes I’m away selling horses.”

  “Next week it is, Jack. And — thank you.”

  The moment she drove off he turned back into the house, Kitty noticed, and she felt a twinge of regret. Blighted she might be, but it would have done her heart good had he watched her disappear. Well, he hadn’t, and why should he?

  Many new ideas had come to Kitty as she talked with Jack, who had been on the periphery of Rectory life since the days of Thumbelina, with a big sign pinned on his back: RESERVED FOR EDDA. But Edda hadn’t wanted him, she had simply needed him. At first because he gave her Fatima; then because he gave her physical satisfaction. What a fuss that had led to, when Grace wriggled into the situation! Grace hadn’t wanted him either. Like Edda, she had needed him. Not for carnal pleasure, but to repair the chook run door or dig the potatoes. Oh, poor Jack! Mauled and mangled by the elder Latimer twins, neither of whom had any notion what they were doing to him.

  We weren’t brought up to assume that men would fall in love with us, and that was especially true of Edda, who thought herself cold and would have been incredulous if told a man could love her. But Jack Thurlow had loved her — of course he had loved her! A Burdum, but of opposite sort from my Charlie. A man of the land, content with his lot, whereas Charlie will never be content.