This future prospect tickled me so much that I leaned across the desk and kissed Mr. Hush on the lips, a salutation he returned with interesting gusto.
“Sir, you are a sweetie!”
He giggled. “I must confess I’ve always thought I was, but it’s nice to have confirmation. It would be best if you leave it to me to arrange for Flo’s release.
In the meantime, I’ll make sure that you have enough money to live on until probate is granted. You’ll have Flo back well before that day.”
I caught a taxi out to Queens, though I didn’t go straight to Sister Agatha’s office. I went to the Psych Pavilion and caught Dr. John Prendergast on his way to a conference.
“John, John! Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz left a will which names me as Flo’s guardian!” I yelled. “Child Welfare will be handing her over to me very shortlyyippee!”
His face went very teddy bearish. “Then we’ll keep her here for you.” He picked me up like a feather and whirled me around and around. “Since I’m not keen on nurses,” he said, leading the way to Flo’s room, “the story of my life is that every woman I fancy belongs to a patient, and is therefore out of bounds. You are about to depart from this category, so I don’t suppose you ever have a spare evening for dinner with a rather less nutty than usual psychiatrist?”
“You’ve got my phone number,” I said, looking at him with a fresh eye.
Hmmmm. My horizons are expanding. A Rugby front row forward type.
Variety, she had said. Keep them all different, princess, and you gotta have a virgin before you die. Though I very much doubt that John Prendergast is a virgin.
Flo greeted me with open arms as usual, but I greeted her with hugs and kisses by the dozens. And a few tears. “Darling Flo, you’re coming home with me soon,” I whispered into the ear close to my mouth.
The biggest smile in the world lit her weeny face up, she threw her arms around me and squeezed me fervently.
“No fool, our Flo,” said John Prendergast without surprise.
“Autistic, my foot!” I snorted. “Flo is unique. I think God is very tired of the mess we’ve made of things, so He’s inventing a new model. It’s speech gets us into so much trouble. But if we can read each other’s thoughts, lies and duplicity go out the window. We’ll have to be what we really are.”
Next on my list was Sister Agatha, who had definitely girded her loins for battle, judging from the expression on her face when I erupted into her office.
But I didn’t
give her the chance to open her mouth, the sour old biddy.
“Sister Toppingham, I quit!” I declared. “Today is Wednesday and I’m not here. I’ll work tomorrow and Friday, then I’m gone!”
Gobble, gobble, gobble. “I require two weeks’ notice from you, Miss Purcell.”
“Hard cack, ace, you’re not getting it. On Friday afternoon, I am goneygone.”
Gobble, gobble, gobble. “You are impertinent!” “Impertinence,” I said, “increases both exponentially and synchronously with financial independence.”
I blew her a kiss and blew out of there. Goodbye, Sister Agatha!
Then it was off to Bronte in another taxi to break the news to my very worried family.
I’d chosen my hour deliberately. Dad and the Bros were at the shop, only Mum and Granny would be home. What a pity Granny isn’t Dad’s mother.
Then we’d get the truth. But Dad’s parents Passed Over-I’m catching the disease-before I was born. The patch of Potty grass, I noticed on my way in through the back door, is poisonously green and lush. Willie was taking in the sun.
“Da daaaa! You are looking at someone so rolling in riches that she doesn’t need to work!” I announced as I walked in.
Mum and Granny were sitting having lunch. Bread, butter, a tin of IXL
apricot jam and the teapot. Both of
them looked oh so glum-debating events at 17c Victoria Street for the umpteenth time, I guessed. Love affairs with married bone surgeons, murder and suicide, missing children, a daughter gone gaga-not any parent’s or grandparent’s idea of heaven.
When I trumpeted that, they sat up in a hurry. “A cup of tea, dear?”
Mum asked.
“Ta, but no,” I said, went to the sauce cupboard and dug Willie’s bottle of threestar out from behind the Worcestershire, P M.U., tomato and Camp Essence of Coffee and Chicory. “I’ll have a snort of this. Brandy,” I went on as I glugged some into Stuart crystal, “is good for the soul. Ask Willie. You know, Mum, you ought to save the old Kraft cheese spread glasses, they’re indestructible and they don’t look too bad with those tulipy things painted on them.” I sat down and tilted the posh glass at them. “Bottoms up, as the bishop said to the choir boys.”
“Harriet!” Granny squawked.
Mum’s shrewd. She relaxed. “It’s all sorted out,” she said.
“That it is,” I answered, and told them the whole story.
“Harriet Purcell!” Mum breathed at the end of it. “I wonder if she is Roger’s sister? It would account for a lot.”
“If she is, then neither Dad nor Auntie Joan and Auntie Ida know,” I said, “but feel free to speculate. Maybe one of them will remember an unfathomable remark their parents made yonks ago. Or mysterious absences from the family fold occasionally to visit some place spoken of in whispers. Ask Auntie Idashe’s got a memory like an elephant and she’s into gossip-typical old maid.”
“Won’t you be sorry to give up X-ray?” Mum asked. Poor Mum, she would have loved to have had a job of work aside from domesticity, but it didn’t happen in those days. I believe she did once apply to train as a nurse at R.P A, in about 1920, but Granny put the kybosh on that quick-smart. Mum’s a lot younger than Dad. Maybe that’s why I like older men? Pappy would say so, certainly, but then, Pappy can find something Freudian in a hole piped in cream on top of a jammy cake.
“Mum, I’ve had it up to the back teeth with gainful employment,” I said.
“The work itself is terrific, but the people in charge are straight off the Ark.
Believe me, I don’t intend to be idle. I’m going to have a lot to do, between supervising the unruly tenants, trying to work out a way of communicating with Flo, and getting the best return from Flo’s money.”
“Well,” Mum sighed, “it’s not difficult to see that you’re on top of the world, dear, and so am I for your sake.” She coughed delicately and went a little pink.
“Um, what about Dr. Forsythe?”
“What about him?” I asked, very offhand.
Her courage failed her. “Um, nothing, I suppose.”
On the way out, I went down to where Willie’s cage 340
was sitting in a sunny corner. From his crusted breast feathers, still on the porridgeand-brandy. Discriminating bird.
“Hello, my gorgeous chap,” I cooed.
He opened one eye and looked at me. “Get stuffed!” he said.
“Watch it, ace!” I said.
I was three paces away when he replied. “Watch it yourself, princess!”
When I spun around, stunned, he was dozing.
I laid on a feast in my living room-smoked eel, potato salad, coleslaw, shaved ham, crusty French baguettes, butter neither too hard nor too soft, about a ton of Greek rice pudding, and all the threestar we could drink, given that everybody has to work tomorrow. Lerner Chusovich was visiting Klaus, so he came, and I’d phoned Martin to bring Lady Richard, who arrived in subtle lilac alleviated by a red wig. Martin, much to our relief, has finally given in and been fitted for dentures at the Sydney Dental Hospital, where they cost nothing because the patients are guinea pigs for the students. The mouthful of teeth has made a great difference to his career, as he is colossally handsome, as graceful as a weeping willow, and as charming as George Sanders when handling the ladies who are now flocking to have him take their portraits. Move over, Annigoni! I also invited Joe the Q.C. and her friend Bert, and later Joe Dwyer arrived from the Piccadilly with two bottles of Dom Per
ignon. I had debated whether to ask the
Mesdames, but decided that they could stew for a few more days. Chastity Wiggins just invited herself after she heard the screams of joy from her window, so I made her promise that she’d keep the news to herself.
“The first thing I’m going to do,” I announced to the assembled mob, “is make a few changes to The House. A bathroom and toilet on every floor, fresh coats of paint, decent lights, new linoleum and some rugs, new fridges and stoves, a couple of washing machines for the laundry plus a Hills Hoist clothes line, and no gas meters! I’m going to have a decorating scheme that makes Flo’s scribbles look deliberate-avant garde ultramodern. I may be in loco parentis for Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, but we operate in different ways. My way is comfort, modernity and nice surroundings.”
“It will be difficult,” said Jim, frowning. “The Council is not very cooperative about renovations.”
“As I don’t intend to inform the Council, Jim, it’s irrelevant what the Council thinks. I’ll do everything under the lap.”
“The Werner brothers!” said Klaus and Pappy together.
“They can do everything you want, Harriet,” Klaus explained. “They smuggle the bits and pieces in after dark.”
So there you are. Fritz and Otto Werner have surfaced. Dear Mr. Hush will be pleased!
“What about the empty flats?” Bob asked.
“We’ll wait until they’ve been done up, then I’ll hand 342
pick the new tenants,” I said, and lifted my glass of bubbly. “Here’s to Flo, to Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, and to The House.”
As the noise settled down and people began to clump, Toby joined me on the floor in the corner.
“I’m surprised you didn’t invite Norm and Merv,” he said.
“Norm and Merv belong in the Fugue and Toccata category, Toby. I’ll tell them when I’m good and ready.” I drained my glass-bubbly isn’t really a patch on threestar-and put it down. “Are you going to forgive me for taking Flo on?”
I asked.
Gone red with love, his eyes caressed me. “How can I not? She’s your own flesh and blood, it seems, and that I understand. Besides, you’re not going to suffer because of her. The old girl came good in the end. What a place to hide a will!”
I nestled against him, my hand on his upper arm discovering nicely bulging muscles. “You’d have liked to hear me telling Mr. Hush that I found it concealed in her favourite ornament.”
“I’ll give you this, Harriet, for such a rambunctious, noisy sort of woman, you’re mighty close when you want.”
“What Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz did for a crust is no one’s business except The House’s.”
“I’ve connected the septic tank,” he said, pushing the hair off my forehead.
“Want to come up to Wentworth Falls and have a look this weekend?”
“With knobs on, ace, with knobs on. Hur-hur-hur.” Pappy helped me tidy up when I asked her, pushed Toby out the door protesting.
“How much of this did you know?” I asked her.
The almond eyes elongated, the rosebud mouth curved into a faint smile.
“Some, perhaps, but by no means everything. One always had to make deductions, and often more from what she didn’t say than said. What I did know was that from the moment I told her I had met a Harriet Purcell at Queens, she never let up on me until I brought you home. So I realised that your name held some significance for her, but what, I had no idea. If anyone got the message, it was Harold. He knew that you stood higher in her affections than the rest of The House put together, though I don’t think for a moment that she told him a thing. But he loved her, poor little man, and after almost forty years of having his mother to himself, he couldn’t accept sharing the woman who had taken her place. He knew she loved you even before you turned up in the flesh, and it ate at him more and more as he watched the two of you together. I think you were right to fear him. I think that for a long time, it was you he planned to murder, not her. Though I’m sure he never planned what did happen. We’ll never know what passed between them that night, except that I’m sure she threw him the ultimate insult. The knife was there, he picked it up and used it. But no, I don’t think he intended to.”
“Did she see it in the cards or the Glass, Pappy?” “You’d know that better than I, Harriet. What I do know is that she wasn’t a charlatan, though she may have started out that way. She could see things, especially in the cards when they concerned The House, and with Flo when it came to her clients. Those women swore by her, and they weren’t consulting her on private matters. They consulted her to inform their husbands what was going to happen to the stock market, to money, to how the Government’s actions might affect commerce.
They paid her a fortune, which means that what she told them had to be absolutely accurate. And though we found scrapbooks full of clippings about these men, we found no books on economics or business trends.”
“It’s the fact that she submitted so tamely really gnaws at me,” I said.
“She believed implicitly in destiny, Harriet. If her time to Pass Over had come, she would have accepted it simply and naturally. What’s more, it started just before the New Year of 1960-that’s when Harold and the Ten of Swords first appeared. She hadn’t even heard your name then, though she turned you up in the cards at the same moment as Harold and the Ten of Swords. You were her salvation, the Scorpian Queen of Swords with the massive Mars. All she said to me was that you would preserve The House.”
So there you have the Papele Sutama Theory. I am fairly comfortable with it.
Monday April 10th, 1961
I came back from Wentworth Falls this morning by train, leaving Toby behind to carry on with his construction. Like me, today is his first day of independence; we both finished at our places of work last Friday with neither fuss nor fanfare.
When I set eyes on Toby’s refuge, I was amazed. I’d expected what he’d called it, a shack, but instead I found a truly beautiful, very modern small house well on its way to completion. There had been an old dead house on the site, he explained, and it yielded him enough lovely old sandstone blocks to make his foundations, footings, floors and the piers between his windows as well as the few internal walls. His money had mostly gone into the glass, a corrugated iron roof and fixed fittings.
“I modelled it on a Walter Burley Griffin House on top of the crest at Avalon,” he said, “which belongs to Sali Herman. I don’t have its water views, but I do see the mountains and forests forever. Nice, to think that this part of the country’s so rugged no one logged it out in the old days, and now they can’t log it at all, thanks to government embargoes.”
“You’ll get the afternoon sun,” I frowned. “With all this glass, it will bake you.”
“I’m putting a very wide verandah on the western side,” he said. “In the evenings I’ll sit out there and watch the sun set over the Grose Valley.”
He’d done all the building himself, with a little help from Martin and the rest of the Cross camp scene.
“I’m a bushie,” he explained. “Where I come from, you can’t just ring up a plumber or a chippie or a stonemason. You learn to make do with your own pair of hands.”
The place was terribly overgrown, but there was the remnant of an old apple orchard, right at this moment loaded with fruit. I made such a pig of myself that I was exceedingly grateful for the flushing toilet and its septic tank, which he informed me he’d got working by chucking a dead rabbit into it. The things you learn!
We just went to bed together after we’d eaten and he’d washed the dishessome things will never change, he’s still the most obsessive man I know.
Manna from heaven for me! I’ll never have to do any of the housework. Just a spot of cooking.
I’d wondered what sort of lover that would make him, but I needn’t have.
He’s an artist, he appreciates beauty, and for some reason he thinks I’m beautiful. No, I’m not, but beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as t
hey say.
What are Mum and Dad going to say when nudes of Harriet Purcell pop up in art galleries? The lovemaking is delicious, but I really think he’s more interested in painting me. Of course as he grows more famous he’s going to lose his clinical eye and branch out into stuff that only the high art connoisseurs will appreciate, I suspect, but they’re the ones who pay the biggest bikkies anyway.
I still like the smoking slag heap in the
thunderstorm. And his portrait of Flo, which he’s given to me. He never did get around to painting Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, though he doesn’t seem to be sorry about it.
He’s a lovely hairy man, which would please her. Not black hair like Mr.
Delvecchio, but dark red. As I suspected, muscular and strong, and not at all disadvantaged by his lack of height. He says it makes my breasts more accessible.
I prowled the tangles and snarls, combed the you-know-where with me tongue, hur-hur-hur.
“But you mustn’t think,” I said to him as I packed my little weekender bag and prepared to make the four-mile traipse to the railway station, “that you own me, Toby.”
His eyes were dark, probably because dawn was barely breaking. “You don’t need to tell me that, Harriet,” he said. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again now. In some ways you’re very like Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. No man can own a force of Nature.”
Good bloke!
The big C-38 steam engine was just approaching the station when I crossed the bridge over the line, and I stopped to lean over the parapet, get massive clouds of black coal smoke and soot in my face. She’d come down from Mount Victoria, the gorgeous beast. I love steam trains, spent the whole trip home leaning out of the window to get the sound and smell of her pushing those conrods around, work, work, work. The Government is switching to diesel locomotives, which are dismal. You never see any evidence of the power. I adore power on display, including that in muscular men.
Friday April 21st, 1961
Flo came home today, clinging to my hip like a monkey, all wreathed in smiles.
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