by Maggie Joel
Mrs Flynn, whose domain the kitchen was, stopped dead in the act of rolling out her pastry and stared in astonishment at her. ‘They have never done such a thing before,’ she declared.
It was true, the baker had not done such a thing before, but today, if anyone cared to look in the pantry, they would see that two loaves were missing. A more thorough search of the house would find the missing two loaves carefully stowed away beneath Alice’s bed, but Alice was reasonably certain Mrs Flynn would not undertake such a search. Would not do anything, in fact, that was of the slightest deviation from her regular routine. Mrs Flynn was a thin, sharp-edged woman of late middle years and very rigid rules who went about her work with a furious look in her eye as though someone had once done her an injustice and she was not about to forget it. But she was not an unkind woman, and she was fair.
‘I am only here,’ she had announced darkly a week after Alice’s arrival in the house, ‘on account of my grandmother, a Scot, a wee lass from the Highlands, who poisoned her husband on their wedding night.’
Mrs Flynn had said this as she prepared a fowl for a luncheon and Alice, fourteen years old and still finding her way, had silently scraped mud off the potatoes.
‘They did not hang her, on account of they needed women in the new colony. So they put her on a convict ship, and on that there convict ship she was ravished by a dirty marine whose throat she cut and whose blood-soaked corpse she tipped over the side of the ship.’
It was a grim tale, but Alice had been unmoved. Anyone could say their grandmother poisoned her husband, couldn’t they? Anyone could say their grandmother cut a man’s throat and tossed him overboard. Though why you would make it up, she could not say. Alice had got on with scraping the potatoes. There had been no ending to the story, and whether Mrs Flynn’s grandmother had flourished or perished was unknown, though her family lived on—for here was Mrs Flynn, her granddaughter—and that was something, Alice supposed.
Mrs Flynn put down her rolling pin and shook her head.
‘That daft lad is not likely to realise his mistake and return with them missing loaves.’
No, he was not likely to do that.
‘There is nothing for it but you will have to go out and fetch them missing loaves yourself,’ she announced as though the idea were hers.
‘I shall leave at once,’ said Alice. ‘And I shall be as quick as ever I can.’
CHAPTER SIX
A DEAD CLERK
Alasdair Dunlevy’s mother had been a Sussman, a fact that had caused him some disquiet in the early years of his political life, though the notoriety that accompanied this name had diminished as the century drew to its close. And in a penal colony notoriety was rarely a bad thing. Indeed, it was rarely a thing at all.
His grandfather, Reuben Sussman—an Englishman whose obscure Jewish origins lived on only in his name—was a financier and small-time speculator at a time when the century was new and the markets unregulated who had found himself, while still a relatively young man, in a position of some trust at a modest but long-established and highly respectable provincial bank in the north of England. Through a series of recklessly ill-advised dealings and increasingly misguided decisions the bank, under Reuben’s management, lost so much money the shareholders baulked and took fright, triggering a run that eventually caused the bank to fail. Amid the immediate sensation of the calamity a great many businesses went bankrupt, a great many ruined men took their lives and a great many widows and fatherless children were left destitute. At his trial, it was never firmly established whether Reuben intended to defraud the bank to his own betterment or whether it was simply mismanagement on a spectacular scale but, finding himself the architect of so much misery, it could hardly have come as a surprise when a sentence of transportation and penal servitude for ten years was declared.
Off Reuben went, leaving behind a young wife and three daughters, the youngest just a year old, to the fledgling colony. He served out his term quietly enough—for he was not a violent man nor an indolent one—and eventually earned his freedom. Perhaps at this point the penitent and middle-aged Reuben might have returned home to England (though it is doubtful what sort of a reception he might have got), but fate stepped in. The colony, finding itself deficient in free men with any sort of financial background, offered Mr Sussman a position in the newly created colonial treasury, an irony that went unremarked in a city where half the public buildings had been designed by a convicted forger. His wife having died during his years of incarceration, Reuben sent for his three daughters, the eldest two of whom were now approaching their majority and the youngest but eleven. His three daughters duly arrived and he installed them in a pleasant little sandstone cottage overlooking Dawes Point. Here he lived out his days, and following his death his daughters lived on. The eldest two, Athena and Delphine, never married; perhaps their father’s disgrace, coming when it did in their young lives, had scuppered their chances, though they appeared to bear no grudge. Alasdair remembered his two maiden aunts fondly, seated fanning themselves by the window in their little cottage, sporting the lace caps of some previous century and starting each fresh reminisce with the words, Do you remember how dear Papa used to … And of course the youngest daughter, Lily, did marry, for she was Alasdair’s mother, though the circumstances of her meeting with and betrothal to Fergus Dunlevy were unknown to him.
Alasdair’s cab had traversed Potts Point and was now making its way north towards the dockyards at Woolloomooloo. The morning, which had begun spectacularly with the sort of unending blue sky that brought the whole notion of winter into question, had continued on in similar vein and now the light was so bright it creased the eyes. It was almost certainly responsible for the accident on Victoria Street that resulted in two overturned drays and a large quantity of spilled beer and a queue of vehicles all the way back to Darlinghurst Road.
Alasdair heard the shriek of metal and the shattering thud as the two carts collided and he glanced out of the window in time to see first one and then the other split and fracture and topple over, but his own cab was ahead of the smash so he turned away, dismissing it.
The harbour was ahead of him now and the masts and funnels of the Newcastle colliers and the ocean-going steam packets came into view. The air was filled with smoke and steam and gulls circling, with the shouts of the men working on the wharves, and Alasdair thought of the Dunlevys.
Compared to the colourful, roguish Sussmans, the Dunlevys were insubstantial, ethereal, crude. There was a Conall Dunlevy from County Mayo who crossed the Irish Sea sometime around the beginning of the century to work as a navvy on the canals and later on the first railway lines. This Conall had a number of children, the eldest of whom, Fergus, showed enough early promise, despite his modest beginnings, to earn himself a scholarship to a small local grammar school—at which point, Conall and the rest of the Dunlevy family fade into background and no more is heard of them. The young Fergus acquitted himself decently but found that, on completing his schooling, his expectations had been raised but his prospects remained distressingly limited. Frustrated by this lack of opportunity, and seeing little prospect of change, he came out to the colony as a free settler and went to work in a clerk’s office for a legal firm where he remained and worked hard, eventually gaining a law degree. As the century reached its midway point he met and married Lily Sussman and had a son, Alasdair.
Both his grandfathers were many years dead but Alasdair’s sense of Reuben and Conall burned brightly in him and had fashioned him in a way his own father had not. Of his two grandmothers, he knew almost nothing. That Conall Dunlevy had stayed in Liverpool long enough to marry a local girl, name and origins unknown, and to sire a quantity of offspring was the sum of his knowledge. As for his Sussman grandmother, she had shrunk into the mists of time, a ghostlike figure dying unnamed and forgotten in England as her disgraced husband served out his sentence on the other side of the world. His mother, Lily, seemed barely to remember her, and Lily’s two maiden si
sters seemed never to refer to her, or if they had he could not, now, remember it.
They were a strange pairing, his parents, Lily Sussman and Fergus Dunlevy. Lily had had a quiet presence that somehow made her the centrepiece of every room. His father, at over six foot, a large figure by any measure, and with a brooding manner that often overtook him and kept him away from the house and in his office for days on end, filled a room yet was rarely its centre. Where Lily had an almost intrinsic sense of good taste, his father strived for it and despised it in equal measure. They had moved to a large house at Ashfield as the family’s wealth had grown, additional servants were employed, a carriage was kept, but where Lily managed the new servants without appearing to do so, Fergus avoided them and preferred to dress himself. He had rarely spoken of his upbringing, never made reference to the family he had left behind or to the Irish navvy father who had not wanted his son to take a scholarship and who had refused to speak to him once he had.
The family’s wealth had grown.
How oddly benign it sounded, put that way. As though wealth simply happened to one. The truth was more complicated. More subjective. His father, Fergus Dunlevy, for many years the unremarkable and unexceptional solicitor in a modest Kent Street practice, had bought at a knockdown price the estate of a bankrupt client, a great slab of empty bushland at Redmyre with barely a road connecting it to the city some seven miles to the east. It was an act of speculative brilliance, for a year or two later the railway had come, cutting straight through this land, and having successfully petitioned the government for a station to be built there, Fergus had subdivided and made a fortune. Strathfield it was called now. But that was merely the start. After this spectacular success, and with the seventies boom in full swing, his father had purchased other tracts of land, ever further from the city, and each time he had subdivided and sold for vast sums, always with the promise of new railway lines, new stations. And sometimes the promised railway, the all-important station, had eventuated. More often it had not and the speculators and builders who had purchased his land had been left with worthless plots, far from the city and quite inaccessible. The boom was long over now, the scramble to build new railways had slowed almost to a trickle, but great fortunes had been made by a great many men (and also by a great many politicians, particularly those concerned with railways and public works), Fergus Dunlevy included, though as many men, or more, had lost their fortunes. Had been made bankrupt. Such was the way of the world. Fergus had purchased the mansion at Ashfield and filled it with a legion of domestics and a stable full of thoroughbreds. Alasdair looked out of the cab’s window and thought of his father, whom he had once asked to fund him on an expedition into the interior on which he had, as a young man of twenty-two, been offered a place. He was to be an explorer, that was his dearest wish.
He had only asked his father on that one occasion. The subject had never come up again.
They had left the dockside now. Grand houses had been built here only half a century earlier, their lawns rolling down to the water’s edge, but now the dockyards had swallowed up all the available land and the grand houses had been subdivided, had faded, had fallen into disrepair. The grand people had moved out to Elizabeth Bay, Double Bay, Point Piper.
Alasdair had brought with him a leather portfolio which he had placed on his lap, and an umbrella which lay on the floor at his feet. He stared at these articles and could not quite make sense of them. He did not need either but habit, or subterfuge, had made him reach for both.
He thought about the man who the night before had burst into Parliament House brandishing his gun—his unloaded gun, it transpired. Did that make them all faintly ridiculous, scattering in all directions like chickens when a fox has got into the coop? Are we the men, then, to lead this nation, he wondered, that a madman with an unloaded weapon can so easily throw us into panic and disarray? He was glad that the only person to have witnessed his own panic and disarray was Charles Booker-Reid and possibly not even him. He thought, too, about the incident at Granville overnight. A signal box destroyed. A train that might have been wrecked but was not. Youths were blamed. Perhaps by the time the later editions came out someone would have been charged. Well, he was not responsible for the railways; he certainly was not responsible for the disaffected and disenfranchised few who chose to advertise their cause with threats of violence and acts of destruction. He was one man in public office and he represented the law-abiding majority. The country he was helping to create was built on solid ideals, on Christian values. Destruction for the sake of it had no place and was without meaning. Without end.
Anarchy, Charles Booker-Reid had said.
But the train had not been wrecked and Granville was a long way from the city.
Do you remember when you ran your first campaign … and how you said it would all be worth it in the end?
What on earth had prompted Eleanor to say that about his first campaign, about the halls and the people, about it being worthwhile? Alasdair shifted uneasily in his seat. He had no wish to be reminded of a time that was long past when his thoughts were set clearly on what was to come. For his greatest moments were ahead, he felt it: the new nation, the new century, just a few short months away. Close enough to touch.
It had begun already, the future, his future.
It had begun the moment he had met Miss Verity Trent outside the offices of the shipping company four months ago. Life, of course, was filled with curious twists of fate, some minor, other portentous. If, for instance, his cab had turned into Victoria Street a minute or two later than it had, they would be stuck in that queue of vehicles right now and not sailing through Woolloomooloo. If he had decided to remain in his office that Friday afternoon in February to finish some item of work, or if he taken some other cab via some other route that day …
But he had not remained at work. He had taken that cab, he taken that route and there was fate, awaiting him beneath the spreading branches of a giant golden wattle at Circular Quay.
He raised his face to the sky and let the sun penetrate his skin. How was it possible for a man to not even realise he is lost until he is face to face with his salvation? He stared at the stream of cabs going in the opposite direction, the line of horses tossing their heads in the sunlight, the drivers with their coats folded beside them and their hats pushed back, and he remembered that day.
An afternoon in early February, a Friday, the midpoint in a summer like any other yet like no other summer before it, when the sun dazzled the eyes, it pricked the skin, it turned the grass in Hyde Park a burnished yellow. It brought tiny basking lizards out onto the pavements of Hunter Street and College Street.
Parliament was closed and all the premiers were in Melbourne for the extraordinary meeting of the constitutional convention in a last-ditch attempt to break the Federation deadlock. The meeting had concluded the evening before and Alasdair had travelled by cab at dawn to Sydney Terminal to meet the Premier off the overnight express. On the platform, Mr Reid, who was not a man to disappoint a crowd, announced to the waiting newspapermen that Mr Braddon’s amendments had been accepted, that the new constitution might, now, be agreeable to the people of New South Wales. The clamour of supporters and well-wishers at the station was so great it had been all Alasdair could do to shake the Premier’s hand and climb with him into a waiting carriage.
And thus was the unbreakable stalemate broken, the possibility of a second referendum made real. It was a great day.
It was about to get even greater.
Alasdair accompanied the Premier to Macquarie Street then made at once for his office at Richmond Terrace where he saw, with his own eyes, the torpor that had descended over parliament since the referendum defeat seven months earlier lifted, saw men hurry from building to building and from chamber to chamber attending briefings and calling meetings and drafting documents and his own sense of purpose, a purpose that had gradually leaked out of him as the dream of Federation had faded, was renewed. All morning he attended
briefings, he called meetings, he drafted documents. In the afternoon he took a cab from Macquarie Street to Circular Quay.
And there he met Verity Trent.
Of course, he had not known she was Verity Trent then. She had been merely a young woman standing outside Customs House amid the wool warehouses and the bonded stores and the government paper store that crowded along the quay, a woman standing perfectly still and alone in the afternoon heat. A barque had come in from Wellington on the dawn tide, another from Hobart. A steam packet, the Damascus, was preparing to set sail for Cape Town and London. Merchants and seamen and dockworkers and custom officials and shipping company clerks had swarmed, hurrying from place to place, but not she. She looked as if she was waiting. She looked as if the thing she waited for meant more to her than the brilliant summer sky or the dazzling light on the water or the day itself.
As he drew level with her in his cab she turned towards him. But, no, not towards him, towards an official—suited, hatted, overdressed in the heat—who emerged from a building shaking his head, one hand held out in apology, and handed her a document, speaking to her for a moment—no more—and departing again. And she started to follow then she stopped and gave up and her look of defeat, of utter helplessness, made him bang on the roof of the cab and call out to the driver, made him quit the cab and almost forget to pay the man. It made him go at once to her aid.
He had had in his care papers from the Premiers’ Conference, though four months later he could not now recall what the papers contained nor where he had been taking them. He remembered that she wore a skirt in some pale green shade and a short, tightly fitted jacket of the same pale green, and beneath this a white blouse heavy with lace at neck and cuff, and little black boots that seemed hopelessly wrong for the climate, a hat that clung to the back of her head but offered no protection from the sun, that she carried an umbrella which she used as a parasol. He remembered that what he had taken for utter helplessness was not that at all—it was merely what he had wanted to see so that he might rescue her, when of course, really, it was she who had rescued him.
