by Maggie Joel
He had thought he had made good time, was disconcerted to find it was well after ten o’clock, closer to eleven, and he had missed one meeting and a delegation was seated in an adjacent room impatiently awaiting his arrival.
He thrust his hat at James Greensmith, his secretary.
‘Good morning, Mr Dunlevy,’ said Greensmith, jumping to his feet.
An impressive stack of papers and completed correspondence lay before him on the desk and a great deal of work appeared to have been done.
‘The Premier’s secretary delivered some confidential papers which I have placed on your desk, Mr Dunlevy,’ Greensmith announced. ‘Three telegrams came in, two of which require a reply. A number of reporters from the daily newspapers have requested comments relating to the incident last evening. I sent them packing, naturally. The delegation from Goulburn are awaiting your presence, as you see. The ones from Orange were here and waited some time but have now departed. And Mr Judd was looking for you.’
He was very well dressed, James Greensmith—perhaps a little too well dressed for a man who was another man’s secretary. Alasdair noticed this; he had noticed it before but now it struck him anew. And Greensmith had sent the newspapermen packing, had he? That was a little high-handed of him. There was something about the fellow’s eagerness, his excessively smart attire, that caused Alasdair to suspect his secretary had been making the most of his employer’s absence to plan his own future, that some portion of the completed correspondence was on his own behalf to men whom he had identified could advance his own career—including, no doubt, some well-connected member of the Legislative Council whose eldest daughter Greensmith had identified as a potential future wife.
It was unpleasant to feel one was being made a fool of.
‘They will have to wait,’ announced Alasdair, regarding the three-man delegation from Goulburn with distaste. ‘I have a meeting with the Premier this morning.’
He went into his office and closed the door, leaving Greensmith to fumble through the ministerial diary. He would find nothing. The meeting had been arranged in a hasty aside in the corridor of Parliament House two days earlier as the Premier had hurried from one place to another, its purpose off the record and undisclosed—though a place on the Premier’s next tour of the north seemed, surely, the most likely reason.
There was also, of course, the small matter of the Solicitor-General’s position, which was now vacant.
His meeting this morning with the Premier. It was the reason he had gone to see Verity. He had said nothing to her, naturally, but the knowledge of it had driven him to her. Curious, the impulses that drove a man. Her scent was all about him, her essence in his head. He would carry these things with him into his meeting with the Premier.
He sat at his desk and for a time did not move. The confidential papers lay on the desk before him, the three telegrams, two of which required a reply. He swung the chair—which was new and had a clever, if occasionally unnerving, swivel feature—around to face the window, and from this vantage point he observed the currawongs in the plane trees outside and the constant stream of officials and parliamentary staff at the rear of Macquarie Street who moved from one wing of Parliament House to the other, from the dining room to the stables and into the kitchens and back again. So much bustle! Such important work! And this on a day parliament was not in session.
He sat up. Where had Verity been going at such an hour, in such a hurry—and in so clandestine a way?
For it was clandestine.
He stood. The currawongs, sensing his presence, flew off.
What secret could she have from him?
A knock at the door and the face of his secretary interrupted these unsettling thoughts.
‘Mr Judd is here, Mr Dunlevy. Shall I send him in or are you occupied just now?’
Mr Dunlevy was ‘occupied’ standing at the window, though his secretary’s question contained no hint of irony.
‘Yes, yes, by all means. Send him in,’ said Alasdair, waving the secretary away and resuming his seat, which chose that moment to swivel away, leaving him stranded in undignified mid-air.
Everett Judd, whom Alasdair had last seen standing with some solemnity amid the chaos that was the immediate aftermath of the incident at last night’s reception, carried his cadaverous frame into the small office with apparent difficulty and eased himself into a chair. Judd had been tall once, not so very long ago in fact, vibrant and vital, a man with energy, passion and a love of politics that had carried them all along in his wake. But the man seated before him was diminished, a widower whose wife of forty years had died, and the passion, the energy, was spent.
‘You have seen the newspaper, Dunlevy?’ said Judd, dispensing with any preliminaries. His voice was quite flat and devoid of emotion, as one for whom emotion, feelings, have run their course and he has no further use for them.
‘The report of last night’s intruder? Yes, of course.’
‘That, yes, and the incident at Granville,’ said Judd, shifting himself in the chair as if his bones distressed him.
‘The break-in at the signal box? Yes, I saw. What of it?’
‘It means some person or band of persons out there is so intent on derailing the Federation they would derail a train to do it.’
Alasdair laughed. Somehow he had not anticipated this. ‘Hardly that, Judd! Another deranged and disgruntled soul who has lost his position and whose wife has left him and who seeks comfort in a bottle of gin.’
‘You think so?’ Judd fixed him with a sharp eye. He leaned forward. ‘And could such a man destroy a signal box and ransack its contents and conspire to wreck a train?’
Alasdair leaned back warily—he would master this damned chair; it would not be master of him! ‘If driven to it, no doubt. And who, precisely, do you believe they are, the fellows perpetrating these outrages?’
Judd spread both hands, palms up. ‘A well-organised, funded and ruthless gang who will stop at nothing to disrupt the bill … Or one opium-addled malefactor with a grudge. Who can say?’
Alasdair got impatiently to his feet. ‘But it is ludicrous! Does the public vote for or against Federation because a signal box is destroyed, a railway line incapacitated?’
‘The act is an end in itself,’ said Judd patiently. ‘Destruction, fear, chaos—it is its own objective. A civilised and democratic vote on a question of nationhood is anathema to such men. The outcome of the vote is irrelevant; it is the process itself they wish to destroy.’ And the very calmness of his voice as he outlined this dystopian vision was chilling. One might be discussing railway timetables.
Alasdair gazed out of the window at the kitchen orderlies and the currawongs. He snorted derisively so that Judd should be in no doubt as to his opinion. But his thoughts went to revolutionaries in Riga and Moscow who threw bombs at the Czar, who blew up railway lines, who destroyed telegraph lines—their aim was to change the regime and, presumably, once this was achieved, they wished to create a new regime in its place. Or was that not the aim? Was it simply destruction? And were these men now come to New South Wales?
He turned back to the old man. ‘But this is not Russia, Judd, and Englishmen do not do such things.’
‘We are not in England.’
Alasdair dismissed this. ‘It amounts to the same thing.’ He resumed his seat. He wished Judd gone. ‘We are a nation that decides its fate in parliamentary debate, in gatherings of men in municipal halls.’
Judd shifted again, closing and opening his fist, spreading the fingers each time as though they were stiff. ‘Feelings are running high, Dunlevy.’
Alasdair sat back and observed him. ‘Is that what you came here to tell me, Everett?’ He sighed. ‘The people have accepted that the bill will be passed. Nothing can stop it. Why, they are more anxious to find out where we will choose to place our capital! Look at these …’ And he scooped up the pile of correspondence on his desk. ‘Submissions and proposals and entreaties from the councillors, the aldermen, the ma
yors and the wives of the mayors of every single insignificant town and settlement in New South Wales south of Sydney staking a claim to become our federal capital. See here: Bathurst, Goulburn, Cooma, Orange, Wagga Wagga, Blayney—I do not even know where Blayney is!—but every single one claims their town and only their town is perfectly placed to take on the role, that no other rival has a case to make. This is where feelings are running high, man, and it is nothing to do with nationhood and everything to do with self-aggrandisement and self-interest.’
Judd made no reply. He eased himself to his feet. Frowned for a moment at the neat rows of parliamentary periodicals and law books that lined Alasdair’s shelf. Seemed to have nothing further to say. Then: ‘You mention the capital, Dunlevy. Do you recall the words spoken in parliament at that same session? That federal parliament would, in the first few years of Federation, be held in Melbourne; and if Melbourne then refused to relinquish the federal parliament, if it decided to go back on its word, what was our recourse as New South Welshmen?’
He did not need to say it. Alasdair had been there. He had heard the reply: The only solution would be war.
There was a definite police presence in Macquarie Street. Alasdair had failed to notice it an hour earlier but here it was, now that one’s head was clearer. Not the usual fellow who tipped his hat and said a respectful, ‘Good morning, sir,’ as you arrived at Parliament House, but clusters of uniformed constables in twos and threes patrolling the length of the street, their countenances stern, without expression. No tipping of hats. No respectful greeting. He passed two of them now and they peered right through him and saw directly into his head so that he looked away, picked up his pace a little.
Was this, then, a sign of how it would be? Judd’s words come to pass so quickly. A new world, certainly, but not necessarily a better world? No, one could not believe such a proposition. It rendered all of Man’s endeavours worthless at best, devoid of meaning. Judd was lonely, his recent widowhood hanging heavily. Why, the man had been clasping Eleanor’s arm last night as though she were his wife. They had all witnessed it. It had seemed endearing then. Now it seemed a little—sad to admit—pathetic. And, yes, perhaps a little … indecent.
Alasdair slowed as a black cab rattled passed him, turning his face away so that its occupant would not see him.
Judd had arrived, unannounced, at his office not to voice his concerns about the referendum and the recent spate of protest. He had come to discuss Eleanor.
Alasdair stopped in the street. True, nothing whatsoever had been said by Judd during their curious meeting to suggest this, and yet the idea, once formed, would not be dislodged.
He set off again, quickened his pace. He thought about his meeting with the Premier. Made a brisk review of the year thus far in his ministry, the triumphs, the—
No, one did not think in terms of defeats. The challenges, then. The opportunities. There were many. For it was a curious office, the Secretary for Public Monies, falling as it did, uneasily, between Colonial Treasurer and Secretary for Public Works and covering much of the same ground as those two portfolios while having none of their power. And as practically everything that happened in the colony had something to do with public money, Alasdair had found himself on every committee, responding to questions, making speeches and drafting reports on every subject from infectious diseases to drought relief, from snagging in the Darling River to the registration of goat ownership. In the last session of parliament alone he had been appointed to a sessional committee dealing with foreign seamen and he had reported back from another sessional committee on the phylloxera vine pest that destroyed the European wine industry and now threatened the colony. He had fielded questions concerning next year’s Paris Exhibition—would the colony be represented? (Apparently not, for no one admitted to having organised anything, certainly Alasdair’s department had not, after which the usual concerns had been voiced lest it was found that Victoria had stolen a march on its neighbours and were themselves to be represented at the forthcoming exhibition.) The question of the City Railway (or lack thereof) had come up, as it always did, and there was the usual and very vocal consensus that the railway was both imperative and necessary—to which Alasdair had added his own voice—but that, due to various reasons which were equally vital and compelling, it could not happen yet. Or any time in the next ten years. Perhaps twenty years. He had made a speech in response to the long-awaited report of the Board of Health on the provision of infectious diseases, a report that had stalled for some years as it attempted to identify which diseases should be considered infectious within the meaning of the Act and which should not. And he had responded to an ardent speech made by a fellow member concerning the carriage of fruit on trains—a practice that flagrantly contravened Sunday trading laws.
This subject of the carriage of fruit on trains was a vexing one that came up with surprising regularity (or perhaps it was not surprising when one considered that the members of the Assembly who raised the issue invariably turned out to hold a substantial financial stake in the particular railway concerned or in the fruit industry or both). That such shameless partisanship and self-interest should rule parliament no longer struck Alasdair as odd. He had become inured. He had come to suspect that the Board of Health’s report on infectious diseases (which recommended the creation of a weekly updated map identifying street by street and house by house the sites of such infections) was simply a method by which the members and their wives might know which places in the city to avoid on the weekends as they made their way to the theatres and recital halls.
Such was the business of the Office of Public Monies. And yet it was vital, if not the work itself, then the ownership of the office, for if one aspired to be elected to the new federal parliament, one needed to be a minister in the Legislative Assembly. And so Alasdair made speeches in the chamber, he drew up reports, he attended committees.
And today he met with the Premier.
A knot of determined pressmen greeted Alasdair at the steps of Parliament House and he ran through in his head one or two pithy statements he had prepared on the short walk over.
‘What does the Premier have to say on the outrage last night?’ one man demanded, pushing to the front of the little crowd.
‘Is Mr Reid alarmed by the rise in violent protests?’ cried another, and it became clear it was the Premier and Mr Barton that interested them. A minor minister—and they did not get more minor than the Secretary for Public Monies—did not.
But the Premier was not here, was he? And the minister was. Alasdair held up his hand for quiet:
‘Gentlemen.’
He held them then, just for a moment. Just long enough to allow a silence to fall, the jostling to cease. Respect to be established. He lifted his head so that the men at the rear might catch his words. ‘I am about to meet with the Premier and I can assure you neither he, nor indeed any member of his ministry, will be cowed by these childish and uncoordinated acts of disorder and lawlessness. The vital work of the Federation—’
‘But surely last night’s attack was coordinated.’
‘Bloke went to the trouble of disguising himself as a waiter.’
The days when a gentleman, when a minister of the Crown, might speak uninterrupted and unimpeded were, apparently, gone. Alasdair held up his hand once more. He raised his voice:
‘Gentlemen, if you care to recall the Premier’s own words at Tamworth on Wednesday, as reported in your own newspapers—’
But no one cared to recall the Premier’s words, at Tamworth or anywhere else.
They had just spotted Leon Jellicoe.
The former—now disgraced—Solicitor-General had just stepped down from a cab and was making his way, head down and at a quickened pace, towards the other doorway. The little knot of pressmen spied him at once, deserting the minor minister and descending on him.
Alasdair looked on. It was unfortunate timing, but parliamentary careers rose and fell on timing, good timing or poor, fortuitous
or regrettable. Jellicoe’s, undoubtedly, was regrettable. And Jellicoe, at whose Potts Point house Alasdair had frequently dined and whose cellar he had enjoyed, saw Alasdair in the moment before he was besieged by the excitable men of the press, and gave him a confused look, as though not quite able to place him. He was a muscular figure, clean-shaven with a steady gaze. The sort of fellow who looked well on a horse, his strength and vigour being of the most basic masculine kind but also of the intellectual kind, of the kind that can, in time, make its possessor a leader of men. But this Jellicoe, surrounded now by a multitude of clamouring pressmen, was a shadowy and hollowed-out facsimile of that other man. The strength, the vigour faded. A poor copy of the man who had once been talked of as a future premier.
It was unsettling. One had no wish to witness another fellow’s downfall—this ghastly affair, this very public divorce—though undoubtedly Jellicoe had brought his present calamity down upon his own head. Still, it was unsettling. One was aware of living in a glass house, metaphorically speaking.
Alasdair looked away. He frowned. His conscience did not often prick him. He thought of his umbrella, left behind in the hansom cab. To lose an item in his possession under such circumstances became, somehow, at this moment, significant, crucial, when surely it was the most trivial thing in the world. But still he thought of the lost umbrella.
He took the steps up to the entrance of Parliament House two at a time. He was vigorous. He was strong! He thought about the Solicitor-General’s position which was now vacant. It was a prominent position—more prominent, certainly, than Secretary for Public Monies.
The thought pleased him and made him, at the same time, a little uneasy.
The parliamentary reception desk was unmanned. A handful of faceless clerks and functionaries could be seen moving along distant corridors and in the outbuildings that bordered the Domain, but of the other members of the Assembly there was not a sign.
