Angel

by Colleen McCullough

  When she saw fat Marceline she wriggled down and was off to play, just as if those months in the child shelter and Queens Psych had never happened. As if she had never scribbled in blood, or gone through a plate glass window, or compelled innately kind people to tie her down.

  I am still flummoxed. Does she talk? She understands every word I say, but I haven’t been the recipient of a single beam or pulsation of telepathic communication. I had hoped against hope that I would once she was back home and accepted that her mother is no longer a part of her life. Nonsense! She accepted it the night her mother died.

  The Werners have proven treasures. They make a living by doing odd jobs under the lap and taking cash payments for them. Experience has shown that they’re as competent jacks-of-all-trades as Toby, so we’ve come to an arrangement. I’ve given them free tenancy of the front ground floor flat and I give them plenty of cash for the work they’re doing and the work they’ll continue to do in perpetuity. The five houses of 17 Victoria Street now have a pair of livein handymen to keep them in good trim. Lerner Chusovich has my old flat for the same rent because he can smoke his eels in our backyard without the neighbours bitching. It isn’t pink any more. Lerner likes smoked eel yellow with black woodwork.

  Toby and I discovered how to put ablution conveniences on the floor Jim and Bob share with Klaus. We’re having the Werners take a bit off Klaus and a bit off Jim and Bob. They open onto the landing, where Otto worked out how to put in two separate toilets, even if only one bathroom. Lashings of hot water from a big system and a shower stall as well as a bathtub. I found ceramic tiles painted in budgies for the walls-Klaus is ecstatic. Toby’s room is so big that the Werners just extended his kitchen area and added another screen to hide the result, but the ground floor still has to trot down to the laundry. Fritz and Otto tend to pee into the soil around the hideous frangipani in our minute front garden if they’re caught short, but the tree has improved out of sight on the urea-rich diet, so I decided to leave them to it. We now have perfumed frangipani float bowls on our tables.

  Though at first I shrank from it, in the end I bit the bullet and took over the whole of Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s floor for my own quarters. However, with new paint (mostly pink), some carpet in the living room and bedrooms, and decent furniture, I’ve lost my fear of it. Every house must have awful things happen in it from time to time, and I’m finding a strange comfort in being where she used to be. Used to be. That tense you can’t get away from.

  This sounds as if the work is finished, but it’s not. That will take several more months, so there’s a lot of plaster dust around, and toilets and bathtubs and sinks and stoves and showers and hot-water systems clutter up the halls, while the backyard is stacked with wall and floor tiles. The Werners just smuggle the lot in through their French doors onto the front verandah.

  I’m just so happy, now that my angel puss is home.

  I ought to record that my love life has sorted itself out beautifully, at least to my way of thinking. Weekends are Toby’s. He and I go up to Wentworth Falls.

  In future Flo will come with us. Toby wasn’t too thrilled about that, but I told him it was either both of us or neither of us. So he pulled a face and said he’d take both. About Duncan, he’s not, um, pleased.

  Duncan has Tuesday and Thursday nights with me. He came to an arrangement with the Missus, who is suffering dreadfully from the Harriet Purcell Curse. No dandruff or intractable thrush, though. She’s developed a neuropathy in her legs-not mortal, just makes her life a misery. I think Duncan was a bit appalled at my total lack of pity for her, but I daresay I have to make allowances for the fact they’ve lived together for fifteen years. I told him to give her a message from me-if she’s decent and understanding and does not feed his sons a morsel of poison about their father, I’ll lift the curse. She can’t play tennis, has to walk with a stick, and between the ACTH they’ve put her on and the lack of exercise, her weight’s going through the ceiling. She’ll soon be an XL and she wears lace-up flatties with rubber oedema stockings. Hur-hurhur.

  About John Prendergast I’m not sure yet, so the fortress has not fallen.

  Much though he denies it, I have

  a strong suspicion that he looks at me a bit like a patient with some peculiar sort of psychopathy. That’s the whole trouble with psychiatrists, they are never completely off duty. He probably analyses his performance in bed into the bargain. So I let him buy me an occasional meal and lead him ten times around the mulberry bush.

  Wednesday, May 17th, 1961 We are baffled, bamboozled, buggered if we know. Flo has been home for a month now, and she won’t scribble. There are freshly painted half-walls everywhere in my quarters and the communal passageways and landings, I bought her more crayons to add to her collection, and I tell her a hundred times a day that she’s welcome to scribble to her heart’s content. All she does is nod, smile, step over the crayons and wander off to watch Fritz and Otto as they work, hand them washers, nails, screws, bolts, trowels. Always the right thing for the job. They’re fascinated by her.

  Oh, she still clings to my legs, sits on my lap, hums her tune. The snuffbrown pinnies are things of the past, but I have not made her wear shoes and the dresses I’ve bought for her are fairly plain. To Flo, colour is for crayons, though not any more. These days she walks up to the shops with me, something she never did with her mother, so sometimes I wonder if, out of sheer

  ignorance, I’ve thrown a spanner into how Flo and The House work. My one barometer is Flo herself. If Flo likes it or seems to enjoy it, we do it. Certainly she loves her weekends at Wentworth Falls, packs her weeny port on Friday nights and makes sure that the canvas dillybag is aired out for Marceline. Poor Toby! Not one, but three women.

  Little though I liked the thought, I’ve made Harold’s room my bedroom, and put Flo in her mother’s old bedroom. That cranny Flo used to be in is now the linen closet and the Delvecchio Schwartz reference library. I wondered if I was removing myself too far from Flo, but luckily Marceline took care of that by transferring to Flo’s bed. She sleeps, my angel puss, so sweetly and soundly, never stirs, never seems to have bad dreams.

  The nightly gallops and guffaws ceased the moment I found the will, but I’m still far from positive that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has properly Passed Over.

  When I went that first night to Harold’s room, my hair on end and my skin solid goose pimples, I heard a soft sigh as I closed the door. Not her sigh.

  Harold’s. Like a goodbye forever.

  Then her voice said “Youse done good, princess. Ripperace!”

  Something fluttered and flapped. One of Klaus’s budgies. I looked at it, it looked at me, then I held out my hand and it hopped onto my finger, jigged up and down gleefully.

  “Oh, thank heavens!” Klaus cried when I presented the bird to him. “My little Mausie flew out the window the moment I opened it. I thought I’d lost her for good.”

  “No worries, ace,” I said. “You’re not going to get rid of little Mausie that easily. Will he-eh, Mausie?”

  All the above notwithstanding, Flo won’t scribble, and it has all of us beaten. Jim and Bob, Klaus and Pappy spend hours with her and the crayons, coaxing and cajoling. Even Toby has succumbed to Scribble Mania. He went out and bought several blocks of butcher’s paper and showed her how to scribble on those, but she just looked at me sadly and dropped the pink crayon he offered her.

  Thursday May 25th, 1961

  It’s taken a long time, but the Mesdames Fugue and Toccata are finally sorted out to everybody’s satisfaction. They stuck to their story that they only paid thirty quid a week in rent, I blew a succession of raspberries, and so it went for a long time. But today we agreed on four hundred quid a week from each of the ladies, thirty of it on the official books. Though I am fond of the Mesdames, you can’t run a very superior brothel catering to all sorts of tastes above and beyond the usual without also being as tough as a pair of old boots.

  They are tough. So for a short momen
t they tried pulling a few Council strings to get me into hot water, but I simply sent each of them a weeny Kewpie doll with chinaheaded pins shoved up their fundamental orifices, back and front, and a third in the mouth for good measure. Ooooooaa! The message was correctly interpreted, the Mesdames gave in.

  It seems to be a watershed. Today I spread the cards for the first time, after Flo had gone to bed, and The House lapsed into silence except for Klaus’s violin.

  The House is happy. The Queens of Swords are very well placed, so are the King of Pentacles and the King of Swords. Only the Page of Swords-Flo-isn’t perfectly at peace. It’s the scribbling, it’s got to be the scribbling. There isn’t a card with a meaning I can pick as related to scribbling, but it all began to settle into place when I turned up the Six of Cups, reversed. Something is going to happen soon. Especially as the next card was The Fool-an unexpected appearance? Then three Nines and four Twos-conversation, correspondence, messages. Oh, pray all this says communication is on the doorstep!

  Saturday June 3rd, 1961

  It’s the start of winter, and it’s raining so hard that Toby and I have had to forego our weekend at Wentworth Falls. Flo and Marceline have been wandering around all morning looking thwarted. Though the front door is unlocked again these days, I put them under stern orders not to open it and go onto the verandah.

  We were all gathered in my living room drinking coffee and planning what we were going to have for lunch. How nice this is, I thought, feeling a wave of well-being wash over me. Thank you, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, for giving me the opportunity to be who I am meant to be. You are ripperace, princess, ripperace. Oh, just when are you going to Pass Over properly?

  Suddenly Flo stopped scuffing her feet through the carpet, raced to her crayons, chose three like lightning, and started to scribble on the wall. Flesh pink, then a pale, ashen blue, then a lot of dark purple.

  And I knew. “A strange woman with blue hair and wearing a dark purple dress is coming up the stairs,” I announced.

  No one moved. No one said a word.

  A knock on the door made the lot of them jump. Toby leaped to open it. A strange woman with bluerinsed hair and wearing a dark purple dress was standing on the threshold.

  “I do beg your pardon,” she said, hesitating, “but I’m looking for Mrs.

  Delvecchio Schwartz.”

  They all pointed at me.

  “That’s her,” Toby said, wriggling his brows at the rest, who rose to their feet in silence.

  “I am Mrs. Charles PomfrettSmythe,” the stranger said, “and, um, I was wondering if-?”

  “Come in, come in,” I said as the others filed out. “It’s a terrible day out there, princess.”

  “Indeed it is,” she said, sitting opposite me on a pink velvet chair drawn up to the walnut table. “However, my chauffeur carries an umbrella.”

  “Good help is worth hanging onto,” I said, patting the Glass.

  Mrs. PomfrettSmythe gazed about. “I hadn’t thought, from what Elma Pearson told me, that your house was so pretty,” she said.

  “Things change, princess, things change. A sudden abscissal astringency necessitated a new decor in order to return the chondral energy fluxes to normal,” I said smoothly. “So it was Mrs. Pearson put you in touch, was it?”

  “Not exactly, no. Everyone seems to think that Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has Passed Over, but I’m so desperate that I thought I’d try anyway,” she said, removing her dark purple kid gloves.

  “There is always a Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. I am the, um, second edition.

  This is my daughter, Flo.” “How do you do, Flo?” she asked nicely.

  Flo stuck her tongue out, not rudely, but in that way small children do when they are weaving around Mummy’s legs trying to see the stranger from all angles.

  “What’s wrong, Mrs. PomfrettSmythe?” I asked.

  She grabbed her gloves convulsively. “Dear Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, it’s my husband! He took a

  chance on a particular stock-something to do with funny little gadgets that act like sheep culling gates, only not with sheep. With electricity, I think,” she said, very distressed.

  “Sheep culling gates?” I asked blankly.

  “Perhaps you don’t know how they cull sheep in the country, but I do-my father was a grazier. The gate swings between two stockyards, and whoever is on the gate can send a sheep into either of the stockyards,” she explained.

  “After my husband bought his first lot of stock-share stock, not sheep-he did some research and put everything he has into buying more.” She was growing more and more flustered, from which I deduced that the chauffeur with the umbrella was in danger of being lost, along with the limousine he drove, and the mansion in Point Piper.

  “How about a nice cup of tea?” I asked soothingly. “Oh dear, I’d love one, but there isn’t the time!” she wailed. “I had to come at once because he’s had an offer for the stock, and he has to give his answer by two this afternoon. I think he’s still keen on keeping it, but all his friends and colleagues are convinced he’s going to lose everything, so they’re pressing him to accept.” She started pulling her gloves through her hands and stretching them in a way Lady Richard would have deplored.

  “Such a terrible dilemma,” I said. “Yes!” Stretch, stretch, stretch. “What baffles me, Mrs. PomfrettSmythe,” I said,

  frowning, “is why an eminent businessman like your husband is seeking his answer from a soothsayer. I mean, you’ve never been here before.”

  “He doesn’t know I’m here!” she cried, utterly ruining the gloves. “He left the decision to me!”

  “To you?”

  “Yes, to me! He just doesn’t know what to do, and whenever he doesn’t know what to do, he leaves the decision to me.”

  The lightbulb flashed on. “So if you make the wrong decision, he has someone to blame.”

  “Exactly!” she said wretchedly.

  “Well, we can’t have that, princess-can we, Flo?”

  Flo carefully chose four crayons from her repository and went to the wall.

  This, I realised, was the tricky bit; Mrs. PomfrettSmythe’s attention had to remain focused on me, which meant some sort of mediumistic behaviour-a trance, certainly, mutters and moans, definitely, but how does one produce ectoplasmic drooling? Bubble gum and soap? Research, Harriet, research!

  For today, I flopped back in my pink chair, sighed and sagged, gave little screechy squeaks. And squinted at Flo through half-shut eyes. She took the dark purple crayon first and scribbled. Mrs. PomfrettSmythe. Then she produced some wavy-edged rectangles in bottle-green. Money. Lots of bright yellow circles. Gold coins. And finally a pyramid of tiny pale ochre dots. A sand heap. Now that I know, it’s easy. Flo’s words are colours and shapes. As her drawing skills

  improve, it will be manifest. But the real miracle is that Flo can see the right answers to all the questions “me ladies” ask. Can see the torment in a soul, can see into every heart. Can see murder coming. My weeny angel puss, God’s new experiment. Well, with me, she’s safe. That’s what Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz understood. Knowing, I think now, that she herself would soon be ill-equipped to cope with all that Flo is going to become. She’d passed the task to a younger, better educated Harriet Purcell. Today I realised at last why the first Delvecchio Schwartz submitted to her fate so tamely. We’re there for our angel puss; she’s the one who really matters.

  When Flo dropped the crayons, I groaned and emerged slowly from my trance. Mrs. PomfrettSmythe was staring at me as if I had sprouted an extra head.

  “Princess,” I announced, “you tell your husband to hang onto his funny little gadgets for dear life. What the world has been waiting for is a way to sort the electrical sheep from the electrical goats. These funny little gadgets are sheer dynamite.” I stroked the Glass. “Silicon! Amazing stuff.”

  “Are you absolutely sure, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz?” she asked doubtfully.

  No, Flo is sure, I thought to myself. The s
heep culling gates are transistors-very newfangled, but I’m technically trained. There are a few medical machines made out of them, and even a computer or two. Canny Mr.

  PomfrettSmythe! Clearly he’s latched onto some staggering advance in them, so maybe the days of vacuum tubes and thermionic emission are numbered? Then I had another thought: are Mr.

  PomfrettSmythe’s friends and colleagues plotting to buy him out? No sooner had I wondered this than Flo took a peagreen crayon and scribbled a sort of liver shape, followed that up with rays of jaundice-yellow. Yep, that’s the story.

  And Flo just read my thoughts, answered my unspoken question. The breakthrough at last! Flo has admitted me to her mind, she and I just became one. I am vindicated. Mrs. PomfrettSmythe was still looking at me enquiringly, her question still hanging in the air.

  “I am absolutely, positively, definitely sure,” I said with utter conviction.

  “What’s more, you can give him a tip from-use my name!-Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz. A wise man ought not to believe everything his friends and colleagues say.”

  “I will, I will!” No idiot, Mrs. PomfrettSmythe; she got my drift. The pale purple kid handbag flipped open. “Um, how much is that?”

  I made a grand gesture. “No charge the first time, princess, but from now on, I’ll charge like the Light Brigade.” Charge her for today? Not on your nelly!

  On Monday I’m going to open two share portfolios, one for Flo and one for me, and our first punt is going to be on Mr. PomfrettSmythe’s funny little gadgets.

  My first client was gazing at me in awe and vast respect; then her eyes went to Flo, displayed only the tender admiration women feel for a beautiful child.

  “I’d appreciate it,” I said, getting to my feet, “if you give Mrs. Pearson a ring on the phone and tell her that the one and only Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz is open for business in her new incarnation. The magnetic mu is less than one again, and the vectoring of the equanimities is complete. Things have returned to normal at The House.”