The Last Rose of Summer

by Di Morrissey

  Afraid of putting any weight near the guttering and breaking it away from the roof, Harold stretched out one hand. He grabbed a handful of Kate’s clothing and dragged her towards him. There was a tearing sound as some clothing caught on a gutter fitting. Then, with a feeling of relief, he gathered her body under his arm. She stopped crying and lay still. Slowly and awkwardly he pulled on the sheet to inch back to the window. As soon as his hand reached the window ledge he held on and Gladys rushed forward.

  ‘Give her to me!’ She took the baby as Harold clambered through the window. ‘Thank God, she seems to be all right,’ Gladys said, running her hands over the baby. ‘She’s kicking and moving. Not a scratch on her. She just got a bit of a fright. It’s a miracle.’

  Harold glanced swiftly around the room. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘You’d better find her, Harold. She’s probably gone to the Indian House. We’ll have to call Hock Lee in now.’

  Hock Lee arrived later in the day and brought a doctor with him. Mary was confined to her room and had refused to speak to anyone.

  As Mrs Butterworth set out tea, Hock Lee explained that the gentleman he’d brought with him was Dr Hodgkiss. ‘But he’s not a medical doctor,’ he added.

  ‘I deal with healing the mind as well as the body. It’s called psychiatry. It’s a rather new field of endeavour,’ said the doctor.

  ‘You think Mary is sick in the mind?’ asked Harold.

  ‘She does appear to be seriously disturbed. Frankly, it is very understandable knowing her story. She has had a desperately unhappy life, one of endless abandonment. Firstly by her natural mother; we don’t know anything about the father. Then she is given the love and attention she craves by Mrs MacIntyre and that is taken away. For which she blames the baby. She can see herself being abandoned again, so tries desperately to cling to Robert — to ingratiate herself — but he too abandons her. Despite the good intentions of yourself and your wife, Mr Butterworth, she fears for her position at Zanana. She is aware you have signed papers, binding the baby to you, while she is left in some sort of limbo. In her mind, Kate has always stood in her way. By getting rid of Kate she somehow believed she would hang onto the only security and love she has ever known.’

  ‘My goodness. Oh, the poor child.’ Gladys put down the teapot, tears in her eyes. ‘If only we knew all that was going on in her head.’

  ‘Just be thankful no harm came to Kate,’ said Hock Lee. ‘Mary is indeed a sad child.’

  ‘But is it still safe to have her around Kate?’ asked Harold.

  ‘That indeed is the crux of the matter. Frankly, I consider it a risk. Until she is older and better . . . adjusted,’ said Doctor Hodgkiss, ‘I would like to see her on a regular basis.’

  Mrs Butterworth cast a worried look at Hock Lee. ‘But what is to become of her? She can’t go back to that orphanage. It would kill her. Oh dear.’ Gladys began to cry.

  ‘There, there, Glad.’ Harold patted her hand. ‘Don’t take on now.’

  Hock Lee sipped his tea thoughtfully. ‘This is what I propose. There is a very good girls’ school in Sydney, at Rose Bay. She is old enough to go to boarding school. I will take her home to my family for holidays. And when the doctor thinks she is well enough, she can visit Zanana. You can visit her at the school on Sundays — take her out for the day. I will discuss it with Charles Dashford. The estate will pay the fees and provide what she needs.’

  ‘Well, that sounds a sensible solution,’ admitted Harold. ‘For the time being, anyway.’

  Gladys sniffed. ‘She is only eight years old. She’s still a little girl. It seems like she’s just going into another . . . institution.’

  ‘It’s a very expensive and good school, Mrs B,’ Hock Lee assured her. ‘It will give her many advantages later in life.’

  Mrs Butterworth nodded, then turned to the doctor. ‘You know, she was such a bright, happy little thing when she first came. Catherine fell in love with her from the moment they met at the children’s picnic here.’

  ‘Yes, Glad, we remember,’ said Harold gently.

  Doctor Hodgkiss leaned forward. ‘Mrs Butterworth, give us time and we might find that happy little girl who first came to Zanana.’

  ‘I hope so, Doctor.’ She folded her hands in her lap and said firmly, ‘But I’m not going to be the one to tell her she has to leave here and go to boarding school’.

  Hock Lee sighed. ‘I shall do it.’

  Upstairs in the bright, pretty bedroom that had been the first room of her own, Mary sat in the middle of the floor, methodically cutting up every toy, every book, and every piece of clothing that she had been given.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Amberville 1959

  The mid-afternoon stillness was barely ruffled by the sudden commotion of a dusty truck rattling down the main street of Amberville.

  The dog lying by the door of the butcher shop dragged itself to its haunches and sleepily scratched behind an ear. Mr Lennox in the newsagency looked up briefly from his Pix magazine. At the Athena Cafe, Mr Spiros turned the gas on under his pan of oil ready to fry up sixpenny bags of chips for the soon-to-be-freed schoolchildren to eat as they made their way home from school.

  Odette stretched her legs under her small desk tucked in a corner of the editorial room at the Clarion. She sighed. Another uneventful day. Her six months’ trial period had come and gone with no mention of the fact by Mr Fitzpatrick. She felt, however, that she had passed the grade for she was being given small stories to cover, most of which appeared in the newspaper.

  Mr Fitz was beckoning to her. Odette grabbed her notebook and pencil and hurried to his small office. He squeezed back into his swivel chair.

  ‘Sit down, Odette,’ He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and shuffled some papers, pulling several towards him. Odette tensed as she recognised the story she had written about the Amberville musical and drama society. He skimmed the pages and cleared his throat. ‘Umm . . . this isn’t bad. I liked the tack you’ve taken.’

  Odette relaxed.

  ‘However, it’s too long, too much piffle. Cut it by a third at least and bring it back to me. By the way, was it your idea to do it as a humorous piece?’

  Odette nodded, biting her lip. ‘The musical society are a boring lot. They all take it so seriously, so I thought that was a better angle.’

  The old newspaperman allowed himself a slight grin. ‘I don’t know that the society’s committee will be amused, but our readers will . . . and that’s the main thing. Good work, girl, we’ll make a reporter out of you yet.’

  Odette floated from the editor’s office. The weeks of being a copy girl, making tea, running messages and being a dogsbody, struggling over her little stories for an editor who was fanatical about grammar, punctuation and spelling, were paying off. Then finally the day had come when three paragraphs she had written appeared in the paper just as she had written them — unaltered. Since then she had had several small stories printed and was given regular little sections to write. One week she was asked to write ‘Your Week by the Stars’ because the syndicated column had not arrived from Sydney.

  ‘I can’t do that, I don’t know anything about horoscopes and forecasts and astrology stuff,’ she protested.

  ‘Make it up. Give everybody a good week. Tell them they’re coming into money. The newsagent’s having a hard time, help him sell a bunch of lottery tickets.’

  Odette’s name had never appeared on any of her articles, and she knew her first by-line would signal that at last she had made it.

  Odette loved every moment of her time at the Clarion. Mr Fitz could be an irascible boss at times, but she was fond of him for she realised he was taking a great deal of interest in her. He ran his mini-empire with two reporters, a photographer, compositor and printer.

  Mrs Dorothy ‘Dottie’ Jackson wrote the women’s news. She was nearing sixty and despite her tough manner was regarded as a good old stick. She knew everyone in town and up and down the valley, and seemed to ha
ve an encyclopedic knowledge of every skeleton in every family’s closet. She favoured good suits, frilly blouses and sensible shoes, and always looked rather formally dressed. This contrasted with her habit of rolling her own cigarettes which she coughed over constantly.

  Tony James, the news reporter, was young and aiming for the city, regarding his time on the Clarion as a tedious paying of dues. He’d come from an even smaller provincial paper and, like Odette, found Amberville stifling. Tony was crazy about football, cars and girls. He pinned up colour pictures from American magazines of movie starlets, along with buxom models from Pix and Man magazines. The pictures were getting a bit flyblown, faded and curling at the edges, but he insisted on keeping them above his typewriter as ‘there aren’t any good sorts to look at in Amberville’.

  ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Odette.

  Tony had the grace to squirm. ‘Well, I don’t mean you, you’re different, you’re . . . one of us.’

  Odette accepted this as a compliment and listened with good-natured patience to Tony’s endless tirade about the parochialism of Amberville’s population and the pokiness of the Clarion’s offices.

  She, however, was starry-eyed and loved the smell of printers’ ink and hot metal in the composing room, the sound of the rattly old Wharfdale printing press and chaotic disorder of the editorial office.

  Thursday afternoons after the print run was finished and the paperboys were out delivering all over town on their bicycles, Mr Fitz would open a couple of bottles of beer and, if he was in the mood, hold forth, regaling them with stories of his days as a young reporter in Fleet Street.

  Tony would whisper to Odette, ‘Jeez, here we go again’, but Odette enjoyed his stories and dreamed that one day she might get a real cadetship on an important newspaper. However, she recognised that the Clarion met a valuable need in the rural community, and the sessions where Mr Fitz ripped her stories apart, although gruelling, were teaching her lessons that would be invaluable later.

  ‘Why did you start off with this sentence? Is that going to make anyone want to read on? No! You’ve got to grab the reader in that opening line and paragraph. And you always forget to answer one of the basic Ws, which are . . . ?’

  ‘Who, what, when, where and why,’ she’d answer meekly.

  ‘Back you go, girl. Do it over.’

  And Odette would take her copy, covered in Fitz’s elaborate blue pencil marks and, bashing away with two fingers on the ancient Remington, rewrite it yet again. With increasing frequency her little pieces appeared in the paper and she pointed them out proudly to Aunt Harriet.

  ‘Why don’t you get your name on the stories like those other two who work there?’ her aunt would demand. ‘Really, I can’t see that this job is going to get you anywhere, Odette. And from what I gather, newspaper people are not the most savoury people.’

  ‘What do you mean, Aunt Harriet?’

  ‘No class, dear. Always boozing down at the pub, I’m told. It’s beyond me why you want to work there. Still, it is a job and I suppose that’s something.’

  Odette kept quiet. Dorothy Jackson had a great deal of class, though it was true the men did spend time at the two pubs in town. Mr Fitz maintained he got more news leads over a schooner than from any other source.

  Her aunt did not share Odette’s love of reading or writing. Aunt Harriet subscribed to The Lady magazine which arrived months after its publication in England. She patiently waited for the day when Odette would get a good office job and settle down, because a young woman simply did not make a living writing.

  When her small article about the intrigues and petty power plays of the musical and drama society appeared, for once Odette was grateful she had yet to earn her by-line. Aunt Harriet was a devoted member and no one suspected that her young niece, sitting quietly in the darkened rear of the school auditorium, was responsible for the stinging review and story which appeared in the Clarion. Had Aunt Harriet known the viper was in her nest, she would never have been able to appear at the local theatre again.

  At breakfast, Aunt Harriet had almost choked on her toast spread with Robertson’s Fine Cut Marmalade. ‘Odette, you must find out who was responsible for this scurrilous piece. It makes us out to be such fools.’

  ‘It was done humorously, Aunt Harriet. I mean, all those farmers’ wives dressed as sheep . . .’ Odette could barely keep from laughing.

  ‘It was a rural satire, Odette. Some sophisticated people appreciated it, but obviously it was too subtle for moronic newspaper people.’

  ‘Obviously, Aunt Harriet. Well, I have to get down to that den of banal and obtuse morons. See you tonight.’

  ‘Don’t be flippant, Odette, it doesn’t suit you.’ But she was criticising the space Odette had occupied.

  The relationship between Odette and her aunt was generally friendly, but distant. In the years they had been together, it had added an extra dimension to Harriet’s life, despite her frequent complaints about the extra cost, work and responsibility.

  For Odette, no one could ever fill the huge and gaping hole in her life left when her parents had been killed. She was grateful to Aunt Harriet and knew that her gruff manner and fussiness often masked a desperate need for affection. It made Odette feel guilty at times. It was hard for either of them to express any sort of warmth or affection towards each other. Odette suspected that if she was to give her aunt a warm hug and a kiss, much as the older woman would want this, such an action would be greeted with a brisk, no-nonsense rebuff.

  She knew her aunt cared about her and in her own way loved her, but she showed it by deed not word — the piece of cake, cup and saucer and milk jug left on the table neatly covered by a cloth when Odette came in late from working at the paper, the finely knitted if plain jumpers, her clothes always starched and fastidiously pressed despite Odette’s offer to do her own laundry.

  Her aunt took her on Sunday drives and small trips to nearby places of interest. Sometimes, driving in her two-year-old FE Holden, Harriet would reminisce, her hands in leather driving gloves fingering the steering wheel as she talked of her youthful days. It revealed a side of Harriet that Odette found somewhat sad.

  Harriet had been a very bright student and had her parents been wealthier she would have gone to university. Instead, she began work in the local bank and was soon moved to a bigger branch. Although a woman couldn’t aspire to be bank manager, Harriet knew she was destined for bigger things. An important job in a city bank loomed. However, the death of her elderly mother had meant she’d had to return home to care for her invalid father.

  ‘I wish you’d known your grandfather. He was a lovely man, with a great dry sense of humour. Your father inherited a bit of that, I’d say. Of course, I have no regrets about giving up my career to look after Father; your dad couldn’t do it, what with his own life and family. It was my duty and I can hold my head high and look God in the eye, Odette, for I cared for my parents and made their lives comfortable and happy until the day they died.’

  Odette made conciliatory noises about the virtue and nobleness of Harriet’s fine sense of duty, but in her heart she wondered if Harriet had done the right thing. Had Harriet’s father ever felt a pang of guilt? Knowing she’d given up her chance of a good career and maybe meeting a man better suited to her than the locals of a small town to nurse an old man? Maybe he might have been happier knowing his daughter was leading a fulfilled and contented life even if it had meant seeing her less.

  Odette felt uncomfortable as she sensed that implicit in Aunt Harriet’s words was a hint that Odette should be aware of her familial obligations.

  Odette pushed thoughts of Aunt Harriet to one side as she rode her bicycle to the rear of the Clarion’s office. She pushed her bike into a corner of the yard and ran her fingers through her windswept curls. She walked through the noisy composing room and waved to Mac, the compositor, busy at his clattering linotype churning out hundreds of lead slugs of copy. She didn’t stop to talk today as she was running late and it was
n’t easy talking to Mac as he never stopped setting type and the old machines operated at speech-defying decibels.

  Settled at her desk, Odette pulled papers and notebook from her school satchel, which she used as a briefcase, then hurried to make the morning brew of tea so it would be ready when the rest of the staff straggled into work. It was taken for granted this was her task, but Odette rationalised she wanted tea as much as anyone. Tony James maintained that Odette ‘ran on cups of tea like a car runs on petrol’.

  The editor was the last to arrive and nodding blearily to the calls of ‘Morning, Mr Fitz’, he headed for his cubicle.

  ‘Been on the turps last night, I’d say,’ whispered Tony to Odette.

  ‘He’ll start to steady down and focus after three cups of my tea,’ laughed Odette.

  ‘I’m off to the courthouse to see what riveting cases are lined up for next week. See ya.’ Yanking his jacket off the back of his chair, Tony departed.

  By his second cup of strong black tea, Mr Fitz was functioning. ‘Odette, get Mac up here. Then come back in an hour, I might have a story for you.’

  Odette was busy cutting articles out of the city newspapers for their reference library when the now restored editor rapped on the glass of his partition and beckoned her to come in to him. Odette leapt to her feet, then reached for her notebook and pencil. She’d been told off for not taking notes when he talked.

  He was curt and to the point. ‘I want you to get down to the river and talk to the mob camped there. Locals are in an uproar about them. Some sort of confrontation might take place. Get both sides of the story.’

  ‘Er . . . what is the story, Mr Fitzpatrick?’

  ‘Gypsies, girl. They drift in every couple of years. Find out what you can. Take Horrie to do some pictures. He’s a big bloke, so they won’t try anything if he’s about.’

  ‘Gypsies aren’t dangerous.’

  ‘Is that so? Ask the locals who’ve had stuff snitched and been conned. Get the whole picture — where they come from, where they go, who they are, and so on.’