Introducing the Honourable Phryne Fisher

by Kerry Greenwood

  They leaned companionably into the wind, watching the city come nearer. The little book in the cabin had informed Phryne that Melbourne was a modern city. Most of it was sewered, had water and in some cases electricity laid on, and there was public transport in the form of trains and trams. Industry was booming, and cars, trucks and motorcycles outnumbered horse transport thirty to one. Most streets were macadamised and the city was well served with a university, several hospitals, a cricket ground, the Athenaeum Club, and a Royal Arcade. Visitors were urged to attend the Flemington races or the football. (Collingwood were last year’s premiers, the pamphlet claimed, to Phryne’s complete bemusement.) Ladies would appreciate a stroll around the Block Arcade, the shopping highlight of the city, and would admire Walter Burley Griffin’s interesting addition to Collins House. The Menzies, Scott’s, or the Windsor Hotel were recommended for first-class passengers. Phryne wondered where the steerage passengers were advised to stay. ‘Elevator House, I expect,’ she said to herself. ‘You can always rely on the Salvation Army.’

  ‘Eh? Yes, splendid people,’ agreed Dr MacMillan absently, and Phryne realised that she had spoken aloud. Had she been at all used to blushing, she would have blushed, but she wasn’t, so she didn’t.

  Clearing customs required less expenditure of charm than Phryne had feared, and within an hour she and her mountain of baggage were through into the street and waiting for a taxi. Dr MacMillan, lightly encumbered with a gladstone bag full of clothes and a tea-chest of books, hailed vigorously, and a motor swerved and halted abruptly before them.

  The driver got out, surveyed the pile of impedimenta, and remarked laconically. ‘Y’need another cab.’ He then yelled across the road to a mate, Cec, who was lounging against a convenient wall. Cec vanished with a turn of speed which belied his appearance, and returned in charge of a battered truck which had evidently once belonged to a grocer. ‘Cox’s Orange Pippin’ still decorated the flaking sides.

  So these are the natives, thought Phryne. Cec was tall and lanky, blond with brown eyes, young and ferociously taciturn. The other driver, who was apparently called Bert, was short, dark and older. Both were strikingly attractive. I believe they call it ‘hybrid vigour’, Phryne mused.

  ‘Load up,’ said Bert, and three porters obeyed him. Phryne observed with amazement that at no time had the hand-rolled cigarette moved from its place on the driver’s lower lip. Phryne distributed tips with a liberal hand and took her place in the taxi. With a jerk they started off for Melbourne.

  It was a fine, warm autumn day. She doffed her moire coat and lit a gasper, as they left the wharf area with a great smoking and roaring of engine and proceeded to take a series of corners at alarming speed.

  The driver, Bert, was examining Phryne with the same detached interest as she was examining him. He was also keeping an eye on the traffic, and the following grocer’s van driven by Cec. Phryne wondered if she would ever see her expensive baggage again.

  ‘Where we goin’ first?’ yelled Bert. Phryne screamed back over the noise of the labouring engine, ‘First to the Queen Victoria Hospital, then to the Windsor Hotel, and we aren’t in a particular hurry.’

  ‘Nurses, are you?’ asked Bert. Dr MacMillan looked resigned.

  ‘No, this is Dr MacMillan from Scotland, and I’m just visiting.’

  ‘You staying at the Windsor, Miss?’ asked Bert, removing his pendant cigarette and flinging it through the rattling window of the taxi. ‘Toffy, are you? The time will come when the working man rises up against his oppressors, and breaks the chains of Capital, and. .’

  ‘. . then there won’t be any more Windsor,’ finished Phryne. Bert looked injured. He released the steering wheel and turned his head to remonstrate with the young capitalist.

  ‘No, Miss, you don’t understand,’ he began, averting death with a swift twiddle of the wheel that skidded them to safety around a van. ‘When the revolution comes, we’ll all be staying at the Windsor.’

  ‘It sounds like an excellent idea,’ agreed Phryne.

  ‘I saw enough of such things during the war,’ snorted Dr MacMillan. ‘Revolutions mean blood and murder. And innocent people made homeless.’

  ‘War,’ said the driver sententiously, ‘is a plot by Capital to force the workers to fight their battles in the name of economic security. That’s what war is,’ he concluded.

  ‘Is Cec still following?’ Phryne asked, hoping to divert this fervent communist.

  ‘Yeah, Cec is on our tail. He’s a good driver,’ said Bert. ‘But not as good as me.’

  The city was flying past, halated behind them in the cloud of exhaust and dust generated by the ex-grocer’s van, and they stopped suddenly at an unimposing entrance. As the air cleared, Phryne saw the legend of the main door and realised that she must part with Elizabeth MacMillan. She felt an unexpected pang, but suppressed it. The doctor kissed Phryne on the cheek, gathered her Gladstone bag and her coat, and Cec unloaded the tea-chest onto the pavement without actually endangering the lives of too many passers-by. Elizabeth waved, the driver hauled his unwilling motor into gear and, avoiding a clanging tram by inches, belted down to Collins Street, described a circle around the policeman on point duty, and groaned up the hill. They inched up, past the Theosophical building and the Theatre, past two churches, some rather charming couturières, and brass plates by the hundred, until Phryne saw a large and imposing grey building dead ahead, and entertained a momentary apprehension that her driver might try his steed on the majestic flight of steps that fronted it.

  Her fears were unfounded. The driver had done this journey before. Bert hauled the motor around in another three-point turn and stopped, grinning, in front of the austere portals of the hotel. The doorman, not blanching in the least at this outlandish vehicle, stepped forward with dignity and opened the door by its one remaining hinge. Phryne took his gloved hand and extracted herself from the car, brushed herself down, and produced her purse.

  The driver abandoned his vehicle and handed over Phry- ne’s coat, grinning amiably. He was wearing a new cigarette.

  ‘Thank you so much for the interesting ride,’ said Phryne. ‘How much do I owe you and — er — Cec?’

  ‘I reckon that five shillings will do it,’ grinned Bert, avoiding the doorman’s eye. Phryne opened her purse.

  ‘I think about two-and-six will do it, don’t you?’ she said artlessly.

  ‘And a deener for Cec,’ Bert bargained. Phryne handed over the extra shilling. Cec, a gangly man with more strength than appeared to inhabit his bony frame, transferred Phryne’s trunks and boxes into the care of a small army of porters, all in the livery of the hotel. Then, with a whoop and a cloud of dust, the drivers vanished.

  ‘I’m Phryne Fisher,’ she informed the doorman. ‘I made my reservation in London.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Miss,’ replied the doorman. ‘You’re expected. Come in on the Orient this morning? You’ll want a cup of tea. Come this way, if you please.’ Phryne surrendered herself, and stepped up into the quiet, well-ordered, opulent world of the Windsor.

  Bathed, re-clothed and hungry, Phryne came down into the hotel dining-room for luncheon. She cut a distractingly fashionable figure in pale straw-coloured cotton and a straw hat, around which she had wrapped a silk scarf of green, lemon and sea-blue. She chose a table under the cluster of marble cupids, selected clear soup and a cold collation from the menu handed to her by a neat girl in black, and considered the inhabitants.

  The women were well-dressed, and some quite beautiful, though admittedly a little behind the mode. The men were dressed in the usual pin-stripe and the occasional dark suit — solicitors or bank managers, perhaps. A few bright young things in flannel bags and sports jacket or Fugi dresses swinging braid, and caked make-up livened things up. One actress was in grease-paint, wearing a set of beach pyjamas in gold cloth and a turban. Her fingers dripped with jewels, and a leopard-cub on a strong chain sat at her feet. The Windsor took them all in its stride.

  The soup was
excellent; Phryne demolished it and her collation and three cups of tea, then returned to her room for a rest. She fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until the dressing-gong sounded for dinner.

  While she had been asleep, her clothes had been unpacked, pressed, and hung up in the massive wooden wardrobe. The room was decorated in excellent, if subdued, taste, though she would have preferred a less aggressive pink for the lampshades and fewer statues of nymphs. Phryne had a grudge against nymphs. Her name, chosen by her father, had been Psyche. Regrettably, at her christening he had not been himself, due to a long evening at the club the night before. When called upon for her name, he had rummaged through the rags of a classical education and seized upon Phryne. So instead of Psyche the nymph, she was Phryne the courtesan.

  After some investigation, Phryne had been comforted. The courtesan had certainly been a spirited young woman. In court, her case going badly, her Counsel had torn down the front of her robe and revealed her beautiful breasts to the Court. They had been so in awe of such perfection that they had acquitted her. And it had been Phryne who, having amassed a pile of ill-gotten gold, had offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes if she could have placed on them an inscription, ‘The walls of Thebes: ruined by time, rebuilt by Phryne the courtesan’. But the sober citizens of Thebes had preferred their ruins.

  And serve them right, thought Phryne Fisher, donning silk undergarments and a peacock-blue gown by Patou. I hope that the Romans invaded them. Now, shall I wear the sapphires or the enamels?

  She considered the long sparkling earrings, pulsing with blue fire, and hooked them through her ears. She swiftly tinted and arranged her face, brushed her hair vigorously, and threaded a fillet through the shining strands. Then she gathered a sea-green cloak and her purse, and went down to dinner.

  She restored herself with a cocktail and an excellent lobster mayonnaise. Phryne was devoted to lobster mayonnaise, with cucumbers.

  It was a fine night, and none of her companions looked to be in the least interesting, except for a humorous gentleman with a large party, who had smiled very pleasantly at her, in apparent admiration of the gown. He, however, was occupied and Phryne needed to think. She ascertained that the Block Arcade was still open, it being Saturday, and returned to her room to change into trousers and a silk pullover, stout shoes and a soft felt hat. In such garments, she was sufficiently epicene to attract no attention from the idle young men of the town but she could make her femininity felt if she wanted to.

  Since she wanted to think and to walk, she donned her subfusc garb and went into the warm dusk.

  Trams passed with a rush and a rumble; the city smelt of autumn leaves, smoke and dust. She walked, as the doorman had directed, straight down Collins Street. In case it turned cool, she had put on a reefer jacket, box-pleated, with pockets, and as she was unencumbered with a purse, her hands were unusually free. Forests of brass plaques decorated the sober buildings of Collins Street; it reminded her of Harley Street, and London, though the crowds were noisier here, and cleaner, and there were fewer beggars. Phryne felt the crackle of leaves under her shoes.

  She passed the Presbyterian Church, the Manse, the Baptist Church, and paused on the other side of the road to stare at the Regent Theatre, a massive pile, decorated to within an inch of the stress-tolerances of concrete. It was so unashamedly vulgar that Phryne rather liked it.

  A group of factory girls, all art-silk stockings and feathers, bright with red and blue and green shifts and plastered with a thick veneer of Mr Coles’s products, jostled past Phryne in the harsh street, shrilling like sparrows. Phryne resumed her even pace, passing through the crowd under the Town Hall eaves and across Swanston Street.

  CHAPTER THREE

  She said, ‘My life is dreary, dreary, Would God that I was dead!’

  Tennyson ‘Mariana’

  Cec cocked a thumb at a girl drooping in a tall man’s arms on the pavement in Lonsdale Street.

  ‘Tiddly,’ commented Bert as he came to a halt. ‘And only eleven in the morning. Cruel, innit?’

  ‘Yair, mate?’ he yelled to the man, who was hailing him, ‘where ya goin’?’

  ‘Richmond,’ replied the man, hauling the girl forward by the waist and packing her ungently into the cab next to Cec. ‘She’ll give you the address. Here’s the fare.’ He thrust a ten-shilling note into Bert’s face and slammed the door. ‘Keep the change,’ he added over his shoulder, and he hurried away, almost breaking into a run as he rounded the corner into Queen Street. The crowd swallowed him, and frantic honking and personal remarks from the traffic behind as to Bert’s parentage made him move on.

  ‘He was in a bloody hurry,’ Bert commented. ‘Beg pardon, Miss. What’s the address?’

  The girl blinked and rubbed her eyes, licking cracked lips.

  ‘I can go home, now,’ she whispered. ‘I can go home.’

  ‘Yair, and the fare paid, too. Where’s home?’ asked Bert in a loud voice calculated to pierce an alcoholic fog. ‘Carm on, Miss, can’t you remember?’

  The girl did not reply, but slid bonelessly sideways until she was leaning on Cec’s shoulder. He lifted her gently and said to Bert, ‘Something wrong, mate. I can’t smell no booze. She’s crook. Her skin’s hot as fire.’

  ‘What do you reckon?’ asked Bert as he rounded into Market Street and stopped to allow a dray-load of vegetables to totter past.

  ‘Dirty work,’ said Cec slowly. ‘She’s bleeding.’

  ‘Hospital, then,’ said Bert, avoiding a grocer’s lorry by inches. The overwrought driver threw a cabbage at the taxi, and missed.

  ‘The hospital for women,’ said Cec with ponderous emphasis. ‘The Queen Victoria Hospital.’ The girl stirred in Cec’s arms and croaked, ‘Where you taking me?’

  ‘To the hospital,’ said Cec quietly. ‘You’re crook.’

  ‘No!’ she struggled feebly and flailed for the door handle. ‘Everyone’ll know!’ Bert and Cec exchanged significant glances. Blood and foul-smelling matter were pooling in the lap of the blue, cheap-and-showy dress she had worn to her abortion. Cec grasped the hand firmly and pressed her back into the seat. She was panting with effort and her fingers seemed to brand his wrist. She was only a child, Cec realised, perhaps no more than seventeen. Haggard and fevered, her dark feathery hair escaped from its pins and stuck to her brow and neck. Her eyes were diamond bright with pain and fever.

  ‘No one’ll know,’ soothed Bert. ‘I know one of the doctors there — you remember, Cec, the old Scotch chook with all the books who came with the toffy lady? She won’t say nothing to no one. Just you sit back and relax, Miss. What’s your name?’

  ‘Alice,’ muttered the girl. ‘Alice Greenham.’

  ‘I’m Bert and that’s Cec,’ said Bert as he skidded along Exhibition Street, dragged the taxi into Collins Street and gunned the failing engine up the remains of the hill to Mint Place.

  They dumped the cab outside the hospital, and without apparent effort Cec carried Alice Greenham up the steps to the front door. Bert hammered with clenched fist and pounded on the bell. Cec stepped inside as the door swung open, while Bert turned on the nurse who had admitted them and barked. ‘We got an emergency. Where’s the Scotch doctor?’ Nurses are constitutionally incapable of being daunted. The woman stared him in the eye and was silent.

  Bert, at length, realised what she was waiting for.

  ‘Please,’ he snapped.

  ‘Dr MacMillan is in surgery,’ she announced. Bert drew a deep breath, and Cec spoke while offering the girl in his arms to the nurse.

  ‘She fainted in our cab,’ he explained. ‘We came for help,’ he added, in case he had not made his meaning clear. Cec did not talk much, finding in general that words conveyed nothing of what he wanted to say.

  Alice Greenham moaned.

  ‘Bring her in here,’ the nurse relented, and they followed her into a bare examination-room, painted white. Cec laid her down on a stretcher bed.

  ‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said the nur
se, and vanished. Bert knew that nurses did not run, but this one walked very fast. Bert and Cec looked at each other. Cec was striped with blood.

  ‘I spose we can’t just go and leave her,’ faltered Bert. Jeez, Cec, look at you!’ Cec brushed fruitlessly at the bloodstains. He sat down next to Alice and took her hand.

  ‘She’s only a kid.’

  ‘She’s in some grown-up trouble.’

  Bert did not like hospitals, and was about to suggest that they had done their duty and could now leave, when Dr MacMillan bustled in.

  ‘Well, well, what have we here? Fainted, did she?’ she demanded. ‘Is she known to you?’

  Cec shook his head. Bert piped up, ‘A bloke put her into our cab in Lonsdale Street. Gave me ten shillings to take her to Richmond. Then she keeled over, and Cec noticed. . the blood, and we brung her here. She didn’t say much, but her name’s Alice Greenham.’ Dr MacMillan smiled unexpectedly.

  ‘Sister will give you a cup of tea,’ she announced, ‘and you will wait until I come back. We must talk about the man in Lonsdale Street. Sister! Give these gentlemen tea in the visitor’s room, and send Sister Simmonds to me immediately.’

  Phryne reached the Block Arcade, from which shone a soft, seductive light, out past the severe, dark stone Athanaeum Club with its pseudo-Roman decoration. The Arcade, by contrast, was entered by charming portals fringed with delicate iron lacework, and the floor, such of it as could be seen beneath the scuffling feet of thousands of loafers, was tiled most elegantly in black and white. Phryne drifted along with the crowd, observing with detached amusement the mating habits of the locals; the young women in shocking pink and peacock blue, dripping with Coles’s diamonds (nothing over 2s.6d.), painted, and heavily scented with Otto of Roses. The young men favoured soft shirts, loose coats, blinding ties and Californian Poppy. With the reek of burning leaves drifting in from some park, motor exhaust and the odd salty ozone tang produced from the trams, the Arcade was suffocating.