The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Was he? Alasdair tried to recall. It had all been so quick, all he could remember of the man was the uniform and the pistol. Had he been an Aboriginal? Perhaps. Dark-skinned, at any rate. A disquieting sense of a threat, unknown and unknowable, stole over him. A settler, downtrodden and destitute, made desperate by drink and debt and idleness—this was a type he understood, saw every day and could dismiss. But the blacks … One could see such a fellow every day for a year, for ten years, look into the fellow’s eyes and have not the slightest idea of his thoughts, of the feelings that stirred his soul.

  He stared at the water cascading all about them and turned his mind elsewhere. He could take the lease on a small furnished house in one of the better parts of Melbourne, overlooking the river, for he had visited the southern city and he had been much taken with the river and the elegant bridges that traversed it. Like a European city, everyone said, though he had not been to a European city and neither had most of the people who said it.

  The rain thundered on the roof of the cab with the sound of a cavalry charge and mud splashed up from the horse’s hooves and coated the windows and Alasdair pictured the small furnished house.

  They said no more to each other, though there was much, surely, to be said, and after an interminable time the cab turned sharply, went downhill and turned again, and slowed to a juddering halt. Alasdair paid the driver and dismissed him and followed at a dash the umbrella that Alice, the maid, held over his wife’s head.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  A HIGH IN THE BIGHT

  Many miles to the west a winter mist hung low over the blue gums on the banks of the Nepean River and at the railway stations higher up the line a frost prickled the ground, but here, where the harbour met the ocean, Friday morning dawned an unwavering and brilliant blue. The sun dried out the puddles and sparkled on the water and on the windows of the new villas in Elizabeth Bay in a way that was at once delightful and blinding. The ground was still damp underfoot and in places the gutters still overflowed, but otherwise it was as though the week of rain had never happened, that one had imagined the whole thing. Such was the weather in Sydney.

  In the ancient Moreton Bay fig the large possum moved up to a higher branch to catch the first trickle of winter warmth from the sun and one or two bedraggled ibis stalked the ground around the tree’s great roots and poked their long bills into the gutters to see what they could find there. The milk cart had already clanked and rumbled its way down the hill to the bay and back up again, and small buttoned-up boys on bicycles had delivered newspapers and goods from the butcher and the grocer. Inside the new villas, servants had already swept the ash from the grates from the night before and lit fires in the bedrooms and breakfast rooms ready for the day ahead.

  Eleanor Dunlevy was dressed in a morning gown of oyster grey silk with a woollen shawl wrapped about her shoulders, for the freshly lit fire had not yet lifted the chill from the room. She sat at her writing desk, a pen in her hand and her journal open before her. The curtains were parted just enough to allow a chink of sunlight to fall across the desk in a pleasing way. She considered what she would write. A great many images from the previous evening, snatches of words and thoughts and impressions, swirled inside her head. She tried to catch one or two, but they were as fleeting as dreams and she could not quite grasp at them.

  It seemed utterly fantastic that a man had appeared and brandished a gun. What had he hoped to achieve? If it had been simply to frighten them all, then she supposed he had achieved his aim, for undoubtedly everyone had been frightened, though none had admitted it afterwards. She wondered if Alasdair had been afraid. It had all happened so quickly one could hardly say what one had done or thought or what others had done.

  She heard a footstep outside her door and Alice came in with a brisk, ‘Good morning, madam,’ and crossed the room to draw back the curtains.

  Eleanor paused, her pen in her hand, the page opened before her. The swirl of images, thoughts and impressions burst and vanished like bubbles. It was no good; she could not write while Alice was in the room. Indeed, she could not think. She waited, her pen poised above the page. She did not look up; she did not watch as Alice moved about the room, tying back the curtains, retrieving one or two items of clothing or footwear from one place and moving them to another place, opening and closing first one drawer and now a second drawer.

  ‘Thank you, Alice,’ she said, and finally Alice left with a curtsy and a brief, ‘Yes, madam.’

  The door closed. Eleanor listened to the sound of her own breathing. She lifted her head and looked out of the window and felt a moment of relief, of satisfaction, at the blue sky and the dazzling brightness of the morning, at the world returned to its natural state. Nothing bad could happen on such a day, and the horror of the man with the gun slid a little into the background, became fixed in her thoughts with the darkness and the incessant rain of yesterday. She took off her spectacles and peered at the fig tree outside. There was no sign of the possum. Instead, there was a large white cockatoo, indeed several cockatoos, released from the tyranny of the rain, wheeling and dipping and shrieking to one another high above the old tree.

  But she had been writing in her journal. She looked down and the page was blank. She stared at the blank page and imagined words on it. She remembered the throng of ministers, how clever it was, that phrase, how pithy. That was what she had been going to write. But it no longer seemed clever. It no longer seemed pithy. It seemed dead. She could not write it. And that was Alasdair’s world, not hers.

  Instead she wrote: I believe that today is the day.

  Downstairs Alasdair was already at his breakfast, seated at the far end of the table, one leg crossed over the other, the newspaper open on the table before him, a half-drunk cup of coffee at his elbow. He wore a morning suit, light grey and pinstriped, and a matching waistcoat. His choice of suit was entirely dictated by the time of day and not by the climate, he wore the same suits all the year round, no matter the season. Man had reached a point in his evolution where he controlled the elements, they did not control him—it was not something Alasdair had actually said but it was what he believed. It was something all men believed, despite the daily evidence to the contrary. For all summer long, violent cyclones buffeted the tropical northern coast and occasionally they destroyed whole settlements in a single day, and every week ships floundered in great storms and were dashed to pieces against the rocks. It was right there in his newspaper. But every day Alasdair put on a light grey pinstriped morning suit, every day he read his paper.

  Eleanor sat down and poured herself a coffee. ‘Good morning, Alasdair.’

  ‘Good morning.’

  He raised his head, acknowledging her presence but without, it seemed, quite seeing her. At his throat he wore a soft black satin necktie with a pearl tiepin. She had given him a gold tiepin engraved with his initials to mark the occasion of their twentieth wedding anniversary, but today he wore a pearl tiepin and she could not recall the last time he had worn the gold one. Did husbands value the things their wives gave them? She no longer knew. Children, an heir—yes, presumably husbands valued these things; but a gold tiepin—paid for with his own money—apparently not.

  She observed him then looked away, and though her eyes were no longer on him she continued to see him, for she had spent almost every day of the past twenty-three years with him and there was not a phrase he could utter, a movement he could make, a thought he might express that she could not guess at and predict.

  She had been seventeen when they had met. A girl, really.

  Seventeen. An age when it was possible to feel fully grown and knowledgeable about the world though one has seen little and experienced less. At seventeen Eleanor had barely moved beyond the walls of her father’s stone cottage in Balmain; her world had been the docks, the foundries, the shipbuilders’ yards that lay between Mort Bay, Ballast Point and Darling Street Wharf. But her mother, whose first husband had been a schoolmaster, and with an eye to improving her
daughter’s chances, had enrolled the youthful Eleanor in dance classes, had taught her to play the piano, had taken her, on a sweltering Saturday afternoon better spent—surely—down at the water’s edge, to a lecture at the town hall.

  The lecture on that sweltering afternoon had been given by a celebrated professor from the University of Sydney on the Disappearance of the Great Explorer, Mr Ludwig Leichhardt. As no trace of Mr Leichhardt had been found since his party had set out from the Darling Downs in 1848, it threatened to be a short lecture.

  It had not been a short lecture and Eleanor had found it necessary to sit perfectly still and not fidget and to ignore the spreading patches of dampness under her clothes as the temperature in the hall had crept ever upwards and the professor had expounded theory after theory to account for the disappearance of the Great Explorer and his entire party. Only a brief reference to the possibility of cannibalism towards the end of the lecture had roused her, briefly, from her torpor.

  At the conclusion of the talk Eleanor had left her mother fanning herself by a window and gone in search of cooling lemonade and had, instead, found a young man. This man, a tall gangly youth inhabiting a body he seemed unused to and with a manner both self-assured and diffident, had sported a cream-coloured frockcoat and a white linen shirt as would one about to set forth himself to conquer mountains and cross deserts. She had noticed—how could she not?—his thick black hair and the lively grey eyes that had flittered restlessly about the room and settled, at last, on her. And having found her, the young man had expressed to her, in words at once eloquent and stilted, his admiration for both the celebrated professor and the lecture which he had found thrilling. Eleanor had agreed at once (though she had mostly found it dull) because that was what she had been taught to do. The young man had introduced himself as Alasdair Dunlevy, and when she had appeared in no great hurry to return to her mother he had taken the opportunity to express to her his hopes of being selected himself to join a surveying team journeying into the interior in the next few months, the only obstacle being the urgent need to raise the capital which his father, inexplicably, had refused to provide.

  Eleanor had commiserated and they had married four months later as the summer had drawn to a close and the European trees in the city had shed their leaves, and instead of going off into the interior Alasdair Dunlevy had gone into politics. And, on the whole, having a politician for a husband was better than having an explorer who would be forever away exploring and who might simply disappear altogether and never be heard of again.

  Or so Eleanor had told herself.

  ‘Such a relief the rain has finally ceased,’ she remarked, placing a napkin over her lap.

  ‘Indeed.’

  She sipped her coffee. It was bitter and she winced but she relished its bitterness. It made her feel alive. She had more to say about the weather but she reserved her comments. Her father had used to say that if you wanted to know what the weather would be like in three days’ time, you should look at what the weather was like in Perth today, as it took the weather three days to traverse the continent. And when her father was proved right, which he was around half the time, he was pleased as punch, and when he was wrong, which he was the other half of the time, he never mentioned it. For sometimes the weather got as far as South Australia and changed its mind or simply gave up altogether, and other times Sydney made up its own weather. But her father had enjoyed the weather—he had been a naval captain—and he would read out snatches of it from the newspaper over breakfast. ‘A high in the bight!’ he would exclaim with glee, and though Eleanor had not the least idea to this day what that meant she had loved the sound of it.

  She saw that Alasdair’s face had darkened over the newspaper.

  ‘Has our adventure of last night made its way into the newspaper?’ she enquired.

  ‘It has.’ And he put back his head as though to distance himself from the words, and read aloud, ‘Outrage at Parliament House. Man Wields Gun at Crowded Room. Arrested Man Detained by Police. Premier and Ministers Reported Safe.’

  How curious it was. Now that it had been turned into words for the newspaper, the event, so shocking at the time, meant little to her. She felt nothing, except perhaps relief that she and Alasdair were seated at the breakfast table discussing the day’s news and any possibility that a catastrophe was befalling them seemed suddenly remote.

  ‘And what of the man? Do they say who he is? What he was doing there?’

  She had no interest in the man, neither his motivations nor his fate; it was the exchange between she and Alasdair that was important.

  ‘An itinerant, out of work, of no fixed abode. A previous arrest for disturbing the peace.’ Alasdair frowned and shook out the paper a little angrily. ‘Not an anarchist, hardly even an anti-billite. Merely an opportunist.’

  He spoke as though he were proving a point, though to whom was not clear. He folded up the newspaper and placed it on the table, the frown still present, and it seemed to Eleanor there was something else on his mind, or perhaps there was more to the story than he had told her. Now he pulled himself back from whatever place he had gone to and saw her observing him and it seemed, for a moment, he must surely confide his thoughts to her.

  But no. He placed his napkin on the table, and in a moment he would get up and go upstairs, put on his coat and leave the house. The moment, if this was a moment, would pass. Eleanor felt a quickening of her breathing, a pressure in her chest. She looked down at her lap.

  He was angry with her.

  How had she not realised it before now? It was not a recent anger. She raised her head and looked at him. Really, it should be she who was angry at him.

  She had brought the note downstairs with her. The one that someone had gone to the trouble of sending her three days earlier. Had removed it from the desk drawer, still in its cream-coloured envelope, and closed her fingers around it, had walked downstairs with it in her hand. She sat at the table now with the sharp corners of the envelope cutting into her palm.

  It appeared that, occasionally, one acted without knowing exactly why. The note was courage, she saw now. A prop. A thing that was tangible when all else seemed insubstantial, inconclusive.

  But what she said was: ‘What appointments do you have this morning, Alasdair? Is it the referendum?’

  She saw him pause. The frown returned then was gone. His face was blank, expressionless.

  ‘Naturally. A party meeting, a bill to redraft, a report to write and another to comment on. A meeting with a delegation of councillors from Tamworth, or Singleton—I cannot recall which. Luncheon with a man from the Advocate and one from the Sunday Times. Correspondence to deal with, preparations for this evening’s meeting, a speech to write.’

  On and on it went. As he spoke Alasdair looked at the newspaper before him on the table, at his coffee cup, at the door as though expecting it to open. He did not look at her.

  ‘Alasdair, the man last night—were you frightened?’ she asked him. She had meant to ask him something else entirely, about his day or last night’s meeting at Newtown, but instead she asked him this.

  He waited before answering. Thoughts passed across his brow; what husband desires to be asked such a question by his wife? Finally he said, ‘Yes, I believe I was,’ and at last his body settled into a posture of relief, for it is a great strain to be forever wary and untruthful. She saw it in his face, heard it in his voice, his relief.

  Eleanor leaned a little forward in her chair, her eyes alive. ‘Alasdair, do you remember when you ran your first campaign and how we travelled together from place to place? All those church halls and literary institutes and council chambers, and how we met so many people—some of them quite dreadful!—and how we stayed at all those horrid little hotels that had sawdust on the floor and how you said it would all be worth it in the end. Do you remember? And it was, was it not? Worth it?’

  She paused, a little breathless. She did not know why she had said all that, where it had come from. They
had not talked of such things for years. She wondered if the man with the gun last night had caused her to say it, but knew at once that it was nothing to do with the man with the gun.

  Opposite her Alasdair sat unmoving, his face as empty and without meaning as the sky now that the clouds had gone.

  ‘Certainly it was worth it,’ he replied. ‘I won the election.’

  But, no, that was not what she had meant. That was not it at all.

  Alasdair did not wait to hear what she meant. He pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘I must go,’ he said, and before she could think of a reply he left.

  For a time Eleanor did not move. The note crumpled in her hand.

  She had thought she knew every part of him, inside and out.

  She got up and walked around to the other end of the table. She sat down at his seat, put on her spectacles, picked up the newspaper and studied it as he had. OUTRAGE AT PARLIAMENT HOUSE. The man’s name was Peter O’Leary. It was a nothing sort of name, the kind of name one would hear and at once forget. He was a carpenter, though he was not currently in employment, thought to be twenty-nine or thirty years of age—records were unclear. The man had spent time at the Callan Park asylum. He was yet to be questioned by police concerning his motives. There was nothing to say if the man was an Aboriginal or not. The gun, the newspaper noted, had not been loaded. And so they had not, in fact, been in any danger after all. The panic that had swept the chamber now seemed misplaced, absurd.

  Beneath this was a report on a signal box at Granville that had been broken into during the night. Tools and equipment had been removed, the place set on fire. Constables had discovered poles carefully laid across the railway tracks. They had been removed before the first train of the morning came through or it would certainly have been wrecked. Youths were blamed, though no one had been apprehended or charged. There had been other, similar incidents in recent weeks—whether copycat, the same perpetrators or quite unconnected, the newspaper did not speculate—but it clearly implied the Federation referendum was the catalyst. It was only a matter of time, it warned, until catastrophe.