The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Says the fellow who spent the entire day at the races and never set foot in Newtown—and quite likely could not locate it on a map if called upon to do so,’ observed Fraser Pyke, who apparently had overhead this exchange and now came over, leaning his lanky figure against a handily placed bust of John Blaxland and attempting to light a cigar.

  Drummond-Smith ignored this and awaited Eleanor’s reply with a steady gaze. He had cornered her once in the ladies’ lounge, raised her hand to his lips and made a proposal as improper as it was unwelcome and took umbrage when she had cast him off.

  ‘Naturally I would have liked to attend,’ Eleanor replied, returning his gaze steadily, though he frightened her a little. ‘Unfortunately there was no room in the cab, and in this dreadful rain we failed utterly to secure a second cab. I am afraid, faced with such impediments to my journey, I reluctantly took the decision to remain at home.’

  ‘Very wise,’ said Pyke.

  ‘A most noble sacrifice,’ said Everett Judd, bowing to her gallantly.

  ‘And your husband does not join us this evening after his triumph?’ Drummond-Smith went on, relentless, his unblinking grey eyes seeing everything and making certain one knew it.

  ‘Do we know for a fact it was a triumph?’ said Mr Pyke, puffing away vigorously at his cigar.

  ‘What else could it be?’ said Everett Judd.

  ‘No doubt it was a triumph and no doubt Alasdair will be here,’ said Eleanor, speaking as a wife does speak of her husband, with utter belief and conviction.

  Alasdair Dunlevy had not forgotten about the Premier’s reception but he was among the last to arrive. He had only to travel from Newtown, but his secretary had failed to secure a parliamentary carriage and had been forced to find a hansom cab, a task that, in this relentless rain, had proved a challenge.

  It was an inauspicious end to what had otherwise been a successful night. The meeting had gone well, the turn-out, despite the inclement weather, had been good, the mood positive, triumphant even. Yes, the mood had swung momentarily in the other direction, but it had been easily recovered. The secretary, James Greensmith, had eventually secured a cab and they had ridden to Macquarie Street.

  But Alasdair had sat in the cab, Greensmith seated beside him brushing droplets of water from his coat, and felt the mood of the meeting slip away. Could they do it a second time? he wondered. A year ago victory had been assured, and the great and noble work of fashioning the new Federation, the first session of the new federal parliament in Melbourne and himself taking his place in that new parliament, had been so clear, so vivid. It had carried him day after day, week after week, from council chamber to town hall across the colony.

  And then they had failed. The expected majority had not materialised. The men of the colony had proved intransigent, intractable, narrow of mind and lacking in imagination. They had proved themselves incapable of grasping a reasoned argument and too easily swayed by base fears that had no foundation in logic. They had shown themselves to be stupid.

  So here they were a year later doing it all again, but somehow the glory of it was gone. Did he no longer believe in it? he wondered. Was it possible he had allowed himself to become distracted?

  And he thought: I appear outwardly to be the same man I was a year ago, but I am not the same man. Not the same man at all. And the thought filled him with wonder.

  And now he was arriving late for the Premier’s reception. Yet he stood in the doorway and did not enter. A footman hurried past carrying a tray of wineglasses, another passed going the other way, and in the centre of the room the Secretary for Mines and Agriculture was laughing. They were serving the rather inferior colonial wine, he saw, that came direct from this same minister’s own vineyards near Mudgee and for which the minister was the sole supplier to parliament at a premium price. It was little wonder the minister was laughing.

  He saw Eleanor on the far side of the room standing beneath the rather disapproving portrait of Frederick Goulburn and surrounded by a little cluster of ministers. It had not occurred to him she would be here; he had forgotten she had said she would attend. She was all in white and she wore her diamonds. They sparkled at her throat and along her arms and wrists. Her face was very pale and quite without expression, and she turned from one gentleman to the other yet appeared barely aware of any of them, indeed just as though she was not really there at all, and for a moment Alasdair could not catch his breath for his wife seemed the most beautiful, the most unobtainable thing in the room.

  It had been a very long time since he had looked on her as a stranger might. And even now the illusion of her beauty, her aloofness, was fading, replaced by half a lifetime of married co-existence.

  Yes, now the illusion was quite gone. He looked at her again and saw, instead, his wife. He was relieved. He was a little saddened.

  He remembered to be angry with her.

  ‘Here.’ And he tore off his hat and shook the rain from his coat and thrust both at his secretary and marched into the room.

  And James Greensmith, the secretary, who was soaked through, having stood on the corner of King Street for twenty minutes trying to flag down a cab but who was a determined young man with great ambition and would not be another man’s secretary all his life, thrust Dunlevy’s coat and hat at the nearest footman and hurried after him.

  The important gentlemen swirled about, they made many impromptu little speeches, they uttered phrases they trusted others would copy down and repeat and that might, perhaps, be reported verbatim in the next day’s newspapers, and if they were not quite making history, if they were not actually building a nation, they were at least talking about it.

  It was shame, then, that the history that was made that evening, the words that were reported verbatim in the next day’s newspaper, came not from a member of the Assembly or of the Council, but from quite an unexpected quarter. It was a pity that the Premier’s reception, for all its portents of triumph and celebration, was to be remembered solely for the note of terror on which it ended.

  Alasdair Dunlevy was not the last to arrive.

  A slight young man with pinched features and wildly blinking eyes and dressed in the livery of a Parliament House footman ran up the Assembly stairs and entered the building. His right arm was stuffed inside the tunic of his uniform and this appeared to slightly impede his movement. The young man pushed his way roughly past those standing in the doorway of the reception chamber, causing a flutter of outrage. He flung off his liveried coat. He leaped onto the dais where, earlier the Premier had stood to make his brief speech of welcome.

  The man was not a footman, it now became apparent. He let out a furious cry. He brandished a small pistol.

  ‘We shall never give in! You shall not take our—’

  But whatever it was that should not be taken the assembled and stunned crowd were never to learn, for the man was abruptly and vigorously cut off as a crush of constables and uniformed military men and other anonymously dressed gentlemen whose presence, up to this moment, no one had noticed and who might have been in the employ of the government or might just happened to have been passing, surged at the man and he disappeared beneath a flurry of hats and coats and arms and legs and boots. A number of the wives screamed, many of the members of the Legislative Assembly exclaimed in horror and dismay, and more than one cried, ‘Save the Premier, secure Mr Reid,’ and one or two, less partisan, enquired of the Leader of the Opposition, ‘Where is Mr Barton? Is he safe?’ and for a time chaos appeared to win the day.

  But the man had been wrestled to the ground and was now being carried, kicking and cursing violently, towards the door. The crowd swelled, making a path which closed in again once the man and his captors were gone. A shocked silence followed—but only for a moment. The gentlemen, finding that they had not, in fact, been frightened, now quickly found their voices, and the wives recovered themselves too, all but one, an elderly lady from the country, whom it was found had fainted and to whom a great many of the gentlemen now
attended. Everyone began to talk very loudly, for fear made people talk, or it did once the danger was past, and the ladies fanned themselves and held their hands to their chests and exclaimed, and the gentlemen offered solicitous and consoling arms, and huffed and puffed and became very red in the face, and several of the younger gentleman, those who had never been in the military and had never faced an enemy in battle and who had been the most frightened, laughed and slapped each other on the back and talked the most loudly.

  Like all moments of danger and excitement, everything happened very fast, and afterwards people found themselves in quite other parts of the chamber from where they had thought themselves, talking to someone quite different from whom they had been talking to a moment or two earlier. Alasdair found himself on the far side of the chamber, close to the dais where the man had jumped and where the discarded livery uniform lay, a button ripped off and rolled a short distance away. He did not recall how he had got there nor how he had reacted to the man’s presence. He had a sense he had moved with the crowd, had shouted and exclaimed, as they had. His heart was beating extremely fast. With whom had he been standing? What had he said? He had been badly frightened—of course, they all had—but the moment was past. The uniform lay on the floor, a button torn off, and he could not take his eyes from it and nor could he pick it up.

  The lady who had fainted was being assisted to a chaise longue. A doctor had been called. And now a number of people were talking at him, among them the banker, Henry Rothe, who had helped various of the ladies and was now temporarily unemployed, and another was Charles Booker-Reid, who said, ‘Anarchists!’ and whose eyes bulged in his head as though he had been shot.

  But where was Eleanor?

  The image that presented itself to him was one he’d had over and over again in the early years of his marriage: his wife thrown from a carriage, still and pale and dead, or trampled beneath hooves, or bloodied and drained of life in their marriage bed, a nurse in the next room cradling a newborn in her sorrowful arms. None of these imagined events had ever happened, though he had feared them, almost daily, for a time. There had been no overturned carriage, no startled horse. There had been no newborn. His panic, the panic of a man consumed by love, had gradually been tempered.

  The horror he felt at this moment, though it was dissipating now, was the horror of sudden death itself and not the horror of her death, his wife’s.

  For, really, her death would simplify things.

  The sense of wonder he had felt earlier returned to him. But it was a terrible wonder, no longer filled with joy.

  He saw Eleanor on the far side of the chamber. She stood near the doorway and his secretary, Greensmith, was at her side. That annoyed him. Why, he wondered, had Greensmith gone to the wife and not to the minister—his employer—whose life, surely, it was his first priority to preserve?

  But something momentous and not a little frightening had just happened and the politicians in the chamber now reacted in the only way they knew how—they all began talking a great deal and making speeches to one another. Charles Booker-Reid was making one now:

  ‘Good God, I am deadly serious, Rothe. If you indulged in a spot of newspaper reading you might be too. Complacency is rarely a sound policy.’

  ‘Certainly there is ill feeling and ignorance in some quarters, Booker-Reid, but anarchists?’ said Rothe, placing a foot on the fender and leaning back to survey him in a show of nonchalance that belied the shocking incident of a moment ago. ‘Too much newspaper reading clearly creates a tendency to jump at one’s own shadow.’

  ‘Were the Melbourne constabulary jumping at their own shadows when anarchists blew the front of a house off in Fitzroy last year?’ Charles Booker-Reid demanded.

  ‘Youths playing with detonators does not herald an anarchist uprising. Besides, that was Melbourne.’ Rothe produced a cigar and made some little performance of lighting it. His wealth was such that it surrounded and protected him so that a madman brandishing a pistol did not touch him.

  ‘And because it is Melbourne it might as well be on the moon? I am not simply talking about the anti-billites, Rothe; I am talking about the sort of militant, anti-establishment, anti-government types who throw bombs at the Czar and attempt to wreck trains for the sake of seeing the carnage it will bring.’

  And Charles Booker-Reid, who could look on with wry indifference as his unlosable seat was lost to the Opposition, was, Alasdair saw, quite purple in the face.

  Henry Rothe laughed. ‘My dear chap, we are not in Imperial Russia, we are in New South Wales, and so far as I am aware no trains have been wrecked and no bombs have been thrown. What do you say, Dunlevy?’

  Alasdair remembered he’d been at a meeting earlier that evening, a triumphant meeting where men had slapped him on the back and shaken his hand, but he could no longer recall how that triumph had felt. ‘I would say a man has just invaded the innermost sanctum of Parliament House and brandished a pistol at a room full of ministers and the Premier himself.’

  ‘My point exactly!’ said Booker-Reid.

  Henry Rothe laughed at them. ‘And no doubt tomorrow’s papers will describe the fellow as a deranged loner acting on his own, a madman with some petty grievance and a history of instability. It is hardly a revolution.’

  Alasdair had nothing to say to this and he left them. Booker-Reid’s scaremongering was disturbingly compelling and he would have liked to laugh it off, as Rothe had, but he felt disinclined to laugh at anything.

  The man had had a gun.

  He pushed his way through the throng until he reached his wife, who had left the chamber and was now in the foyer beyond.

  He found he did not know how to address her.

  ‘Eleanor. My dear. You are unharmed? I am afraid I could not locate you in all this mayhem. Were you alarmed?’

  ‘Alasdair. I believe I was very much alarmed. I looked for you inside.’

  Eleanor did not look alarmed. Her expression was difficult to read; some immense emotion swirled just below the surface, he fancied, though he could not label it fear and had no other name for it. She watched him as though from a very great distance.

  ‘Are you alright, sir?’ said Greensmith, hovering a little in the manner of a subordinate who, in the face of danger, had found himself absent from his master’s side and was now anxious to make amends. Not that anxious, perhaps, for Greensmith, a young man of pleasing if somewhat bland features, of average stature and clothed conservatively in the best coat and hat that a man on a secretary’s salary might afford, remained steadfastly at Mrs Dunlevy’s side as though he had been posted there.

  ‘Quite alright, Greensmith, as you see. Come, Eleanor, let us go. There is nothing to be gained by remaining here. A lot of silly talk, in fact, that I think it might be best to avoid.’

  Eleanor did not enquire what the silly talk was of and he was thankful, for he did not wish to tell her. She had her coat on already and a fur pulled closely about her neck against the chill night air outside. She had been leaving then—without him? Or had she stood here to await him? He did not know.

  ‘It will be a devil of a job finding a cab,’ he said instead, finding safety in platitudes, and he left her and went down the front steps just as if he intended to stand in the wind and the rain hailing a cab himself. Greensmith had an umbrella ready in his hands but, instead of following, his secretary opened the umbrella over his wife’s head, though she was quite sheltered from the weather on the covered verandah. Irritated, Alasdair summoned a footman and ordered him to find a cab. He rejoined his wife and secretary, and they stood silently staring ahead of them, the rain beating on the roof above.

  Word of the incident had spread and people—newspapermen and policemen and others who had just appeared—were arriving outside Parliament House, and at the same moment the guests were departing so that the small party outside quickly became a crowd and it was some little time before a cab was found. When one was at last secured it was the footman who held an umbrella over Alasd
air’s head as they splashed through the puddles to board it and his secretary who followed behind shielding his wife, who held out his hand to assist her to step up into the cab, who closed the door on them and who stood and watched as the cab pulled away.

  The driver laid a rug over their knees and Alasdair leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. His heart had not stopped its overly rapid beating. He was more frightened now, he found, than when the thing had happened, was shaking it seemed, and that was humiliating. He held his hands very tightly together and did not speak. He thought instead about the vote in three weeks’ time. He thought about the national government that would be formed in a year, or perhaps two years, and how he might be a minister in that government. Australia’s first national government. That would be a thing, that would be a moment for the history books. And the parliament would be in Melbourne. He opened his eyes and pondered this, the length of time that parliament might be in session and that one would be required to be in Melbourne. Away from home.

  ‘Alasdair, it was horrid,’ said Eleanor in a low voice. ‘That man—’

  Alasdair started. A part of him had forgotten his wife was seated beside him in the carriage.

  ‘Charles Booker-Reid blames anarchists,’ he said, and he laughed to show her he was not at all afraid.

  But Eleanor did not laugh. ‘Do you believe that to be so?’ Her voice was almost lost in the patter of rain on the cab’s roof.

  They did not face each other; the hansom cab did not allow for it. One must sit side by side facing the rear of the horse, seeing it shake its head and snort, hearing its harnesses rattle, seeing the flick of the driver’s whip from above and smelling the foul coils of smoke from the man’s pipe, and in this darkness, on this night, one stared ahead at nothing.

  ‘The man was an Aboriginal, I am certain of that,’ said Eleanor when he did not reply.