The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  On one of the newly paved streets was a row of villas made of honey-coloured sandstone, built in the Italianate style—with slate roofs and bay windows and cast-iron balustrading—by a team of Italian stonemasons brought to the colony at some expense. The new villas all had names, but they were not the Berwicks or Amblesides or Windermeres of a hundred other merchants’ houses that imagined a homesickness for a mother country most had never visited; these houses were named for the men who had built them, for the men who had bought the land and subdivided it, and for the politicians who had smoothed the passage of development. (One or two even echoed the ancient names the people of the Eora nation had once used, names cut down and made palatable to the European tongue, but these were very much the minority.) The new villas had bathrooms, they had running water and the new electric lighting. One or two subscribed to the telephone service. They were houses for the new century, built in the dying months of the old one.

  Inside one of these houses a maid moved from room to room lighting fires, drawing curtains, trimming wicks—for the house still retained a handful of kerosene lamps and the maid avoided, where she could, the new electric lights. This house was named Yarran, a Jewish-sounding name, perhaps, though more likely a corruption of Yarrandabby, the old Gadigal name for the headland, though it had been many years since an elder had stood on this headland and uttered its name.

  Her tasks completed, the maid—whose name was Alice Nimrod—went silently upstairs to the room of her mistress.

  She was a slight figure, insubstantial—not in height, for she was as tall as anyone in the house, taller than some, but in presence. She had worked five years in the large, newly built house, though she was not yet twenty, and she moved warily in the manner of one who dwells in another person’s house.

  Tonight her head was very full. She had got through the work of the day in fits and starts, hurrying over some tasks, lingering over others, her fingers moving restlessly, as restlessly as the thoughts in her head, and sometimes spoiling her work so that she must start afresh. Her throat was full too, she found now, full of strange words that she dared not utter and had not thought ever to utter in her life before. Yet the words fought to come out.

  How full her head was!

  At the top of the stairs Alice Nimrod stopped and turned about. She had no business to be here, and a maid in a place she had no business to be was in a precarious position. She walked the short distance along the landing and paused at her mistress’s bedroom door, her hand raised to knock.

  But she did not knock. Her hand fell to her side. She closed her eyes.

  Inside the room rain lashed the window.

  Eleanor Dunlevy looked up from her journal. It was already quite dark outside. The curtains had not yet been drawn, and in the window she saw only the darkness of the night and her own face made indistinct by the rivers of water on the pane. The face was very white in the strange light, and featureless, the eyes blank, obscured by the little round-framed spectacles that she had recently been obliged to adopt. Her husband, a man with his nose always in a newspaper or an official document of some description and who was five years her senior, did not require such aids to his vision. She pulled the spectacles off. They were attached to a little chain about her neck and she let them fall to her chest. She had not yet told her husband she wore them, spent her evenings staring unseeing at the blurred pages of her novel until he retired to bed.

  Outside leaves swirled and stuck to the pane, held fast by the force of the wind before being swept away into oblivion, and now Eleanor could make out two bright points of light in the darkness, which she thought must be the distant pilot lights of some vessel negotiating the safety of the harbour, but they turned out to be the unblinking yellow eyes of a possum wrapped around a branch of the Moreton Bay fig outside her window.

  She took up her spectacles and reviewed what she had written in her journal:

  Blanche wore a feathered piece on her head, ostrich, one presumes—

  Her eyes moved down the page.

  … the turbot was a rather odd colour though no one remarked on it … R. made some fatuous observation about the Prem. that amused everyone—not A., of course, who cannot afford to mock the P.!

  What was R’s fatuous remark? She could not for the moment recall. She and Alasdair had gone to a dinner at the Pykes’ and some of the gentlemen had come directly from a meeting at a town hall where someone had made a great speech and someone else had proposed something and three cheers had been offered and the future of the nation was, apparently, assured. Over the fish there had been a great deal of discussion about tariffs and free trade and the new federal capital. Someone had said, It boils down to just one thing: can we trust the other colonies?

  Could they? Eleanor did not know. She had put none of this in her journal. She had noted the ostrich feather and the colour of the soup.

  A. observed how the Prem’s speech had been particularly well received and that the bill was all but assured this time.

  Had Alasdair said that? It was the kind of thing her husband might have said, the kind of thing he would like to have said. She had written it in her journal and so it became true. She wondered if she wrote the journal for herself or if it were not for some faceless scholar years hence, sequestered in a dusty university library researching a dull biography. Alasdair’s biography.

  On their way to the dinner at the Pykes’ they had seen two constables pull a body from the bay, the sodden, clothed body of a female. It was not a common spot for suicides but any place, presumably, would do if one were determined. Sometimes they jumped from the quay and a day later were washed up in the bay by the current. Sometimes they jumped from the steamers. (Imagine sailing all this way across so many oceans simply to jump overboard with your destination in sight!) Occasionally the Herald reported the suicide, supplying a name and how many children were left behind; often there was no name, just a body fished from the harbour. When she and Alasdair had returned home, passing the same spot, the constables were gone. Eleanor had put none of this in her journal.

  How proud I was then of my husband, the statesman, who has stood at the Premier’s side this whole time and whose tireless campaigning must surely rival that of Mr Reid himself, she wrote and then she stopped writing and placed her pen on the blotter. Her hands were quite pale in the lamplight; a flattering light, but still the lines were visible. One could disguise the cruel march of time on one’s face, one’s body, but on the hands there was no hiding it. Gloves, yes, while in company, but alone there was no denying it. A flicker of panic stirred within her, consuming all momentarily, then as quickly dissipating.

  She snapped the journal shut and pushed it away from her, and at the same moment a knock came at the door.

  The room had become dark, but the hallway outside was brightly lit so that the opening door cast light into her room and, for a startling moment, the slight figure of the maid, Alice, appeared immense and monstrous.

  No servant was ever quite invisible. Alice, who had the features of utter banality and unremarkability true to her class but a face which ought to have been free of expression and somehow never was, had never achieved invisibility. She stood now quite motionless in the doorway, not speaking, her face and hands an extension of the plain black dress and starched white apron, collar and cuffs she wore so that it was not at once clear where the uniform ended and the girl began. Her shoulders were a little stooped, a strand of hair had worked its way loose from her cap, her hands hung at her sides as though lost without something to carry.

  ‘The curtains, madam,’ she said at last.

  If the kitchen had caught on fire, or a ship wrecked in the bay, one imagined she would announce it in just the same tone.

  But this evening two bright red spots showed clearly, one on each side of her face.

  The girl plunged into the room. She made for the window, drawing the curtains then pausing to caress the thick crimson velvet, smoothing it out so the folds fell just so. She st
ood back as though to admire them, though she must have drawn them and opened them every day of her life for the last five years, and nothing about the way they fell this evening was different to how they had fallen any other day of those five years.

  ‘Thank you, Alice.’

  But Alice did not leave. Alice remained where she was, taking up so little space yet taking up all the space in the room.

  ‘Was there something else?’

  Those livid spots on either side of her face.

  The girl must be unwell or she wanted an afternoon off or she had broken some piece of china. Was she giving her notice? But, no, apparently it was none of these things, as Alice bobbed a brief curtsy in the vague direction of the window and said, ‘No, madam.’

  The door clicked shut behind her. Eleanor let out her breath. A slight weight of oppression slid away. She stared at the window. Though it was obscured now by the thick crimson curtains, she could still hear the rain lashing the pane.

  A hatbox lay opened on the bed, a number of pairs of gloves laid out beside it.

  It was monstrous that one should have to go out in this weather.

  She was dressed already in white brocaded satin, the bodice embroidered with gold, and her diamonds. It was the dress she had worn to the Governor-General’s ball in April for the opening of the special session of parliament. Mrs Dunlevy wore white, the Herald had reported the following morning, though it had listed almost every other lady’s dress in detail—Lady Darley’s silver appliqué and shaded heliotrope chiffon, Mrs Barton’s pale pink silk and deep flounces of lace, Mrs Dickens’ embroidered netting and black trimming. But Mrs Dunlevy wore white.

  The morning edition of the newspaper lay on her writing desk, where she had placed it after lunch so that she might read it alone in her room. A steamer, the Albatross, had gone down in the Cook Strait with the loss of all hands. It had been missing since Tuesday and now the captain of another ship had reported seeing pieces of decking and masting floating in the water. It was a wholly inauspicious name, wasn’t it, the Albatross? Surely one was anticipating catastrophe by naming a ship thus. Eleanor saw, for a moment, the pieces of decking, the masting floating in the water. The newspaper listed the names of the perished officers and crew, recording their rank and whether or not they were married. Most were.

  She picked up her pen and became aware that Alice was standing just outside the door. She held her pen above the page, and did not move. The page narrowed into a tiny white dot before her eyes. What did the girl want? Why did she stand there? She would get up and fling open the door and demand of the girl what she meant by it.

  But Eleanor did not get up, she did not fling open the door, and after a time she heard the floorboards creak and Alice went away.

  She had been holding her breath and she let it out now in a rush. She picked up the newspaper and read again the list of passengers. She had scanned the list already, but what if she had missed the name of someone with whom she was acquainted? For here was a Mrs Pavey travelling with her daughter—there had been a Miss Pavey, had there not, many years ago, the sister of a friend of someone? But if Miss Pavey had married, her name would no longer be Pavey; she would have some other name. There was no one, then, on the list whom she knew. She ought to be relieved.

  Beneath the story of the lost steamer the paper reported an outbreak of plague at Alexandria. The rain beat at the window and she thought of infested rats in some far-off land and primitive people crowded together in makeshift dwellings. It was not Egypt, of course, to which the news item referred; it was a suburb of the same name here in this very city, a place perhaps two or three miles to the south-west. A poor place. A part of the city she had never visited.

  She put the newspaper to one side and picked up her pen once more.

  How proud I was then of my husband, the statesman—

  Eleanor raised her pen to strike out the words but then could not do so. To strike out something one had written in one’s journal, was that not censorship of the most insidious sort, censorship of one’s own thoughts? But they were not her own thoughts. Whose thoughts were they? How proud I was— She hated those words! They contaminated her journal. But she could not strike them out. She closed the book and placed it in her desk drawer and turned the key in the lock.

  Did Alasdair have a duplicate key? she wondered. She unlocked the drawer. Beneath the journal was a note, a single page—two or three lines, no more—on unheaded notepaper folded inside a plain cream-coloured envelope. The note had arrived with the first post a few days earlier. It was a note she was reasonably certain had not been intended for her eyes but that had, somehow, found its way to her. She had read the note just the once and put it away. She had told no one about it.

  She slowly turned towards her dressing table, a fussily ornate mid-century piece of polished walnut topped by a large bevelled mirror, and regarded herself. She had dressed, had skilfully arranged her own hair, without studying herself at all, but now she made herself look. Her eyes filled her face. It was an illusion, but she could not shake it off. The pleasing regularity of her features, a strong nose and chin, a prominent brow, a clear complexion, all these things eluded her gaze. She turned to see her profile but could not quite catch herself. Were her features too regular? Did one tire of them over time? Did they hint at a conventionality, an absence of some kind? She had fought long and hard to hide the most secret parts of herself, but was it possible she had succeeded too well? She had turned men’s heads once and sometimes did so now, though she had accepted the first proposal she had received and had not regretted it. But did one tire, eventually, of pleasing regularity?

  She locked the desk drawer a second time and stood up.

  An urgent tap at the window stopped her heart and she put a hand to her chest. She went to the window and threw back the heavy crimson curtain, at first seeing nothing, but a second tap proved to be the overgrown Moreton Bay fig reaching out in the darkness and in the wind and in the rain with its outermost branch towards the house, towards her. And the giant possum, a male, unmoving as the rain splashed onto its sodden brown pelt, its yellow eyes unblinking and unsurprised. They—the possum and the monstrous ancient tree—had something timeless about them, as though they had both been here a great many years, before this house and this suburb, before even the city itself. There was a recrimination in the tap-tap-tap, in the unblinking yellow eyes.

  Eleanor let fall the curtain and turned away. She was going out. She must get ready.

  The rain continued to fall. The night lengthened and the city, a place of sparkling water and dazzling light in the daytime, became a place of shivering misery from which men scurried.

  Eleanor sat in a hansom cab as it splashed through the deserted streets. She had sent Alice out into the night to find the cab and the girl had taken an umbrella and gone all the way up to MacLeay Street before she had found one.

  It was a filthy night, and Eleanor wondered about Alasdair’s meeting and who might see fit to attend it on such a night. But they were all well attended, he said, and the newspapers said it too. Two hundred people had come, they reported, or two hundred and fifty, to hear the Premier speak, more to hear Mr Barton. Yet Eleanor was yet to attend a single one of Alasdair’s meetings this time around, when she had attended a dozen or more the last time, a year ago. She had intended to go with him this evening, but in the end she had not. The rain; it was the rain that had stopped her. But there were still three weeks to go. Twenty days. She leaned back in the cab as a weariness overcame her.

  They had left William Street and turned north into College Street. A void on her left, utterly black and impenetrable, was Hyde Park. Soon they would be at Macquarie Street and the moment of arriving would be upon her. She awaited with a growing dread the slowing of the cab, the opening of the carriage door, the dash through the puddles and the cold gripping the back of her neck, but it could not be put off. One could hardly tell the cabbie to turn about and take her home again. She pulled her fur c
loser about her.

  Mrs Dunlevy wore white.

  ‘We’re here, lady,’ called the cabbie above the pounding of the rain.

  Eleanor gazed at the rain as it beat against the carriage window, drumming an insistent and incessant rhythm. It had been there for days—not the rain, though that had been present for days too, but the insistent and incessant drumming. She could pinpoint its beginning precisely to the moment she had received the note that was folded now inside an envelope in her writing desk drawer, a note that began My dearest and went on to confirm a meeting of which she had no knowledge; a note that was unsigned, though she recognised the florid and careless hand of her husband.

  She understood her husband was having an affair.

  CHAPTER TWO

  FROG HOLLOW

  The distance from Elizabeth Bay to Surry Hills was about two miles, mostly by way of Darlinghurst Road and Crown Street. The maid, Alice Nimrod, made this journey in the rain not long after Mrs Dunlevy had departed in the hansom cab. It was not a journey she wished to make, but she was soaked through already from the dash all the way to MacLeay Street to find her mistress a cab so more rain hardly mattered.

  The maid hastened through the dark and deserted streets, and the rain beat down on her hat and coursed down her neck and splashed up over her boots. Her coat was wet through, and her skirt clung to her legs so that her cold flesh shrunk from it. She pulled her collar tighter about her and half closed her eyes against it, but nothing could stop it, the relentless rain. On and on she went, Alice Nimrod, and it was fear that drove her on.