The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  ‘May I get you a cushion?’ offered Eleanor at once. There were none on the settee. It would mean going again into the bedroom. Would Miss Trent allow such a thing? What might her visitor find there? More tiepins?

  ‘No, I shall be quite alright. Thank you. You have been most kind.’

  Miss Trent clearly wished her angel of mercy to be gone.

  Eleanor stood up. She brushed a speck of dust from her skirt. ‘You are certain there is no one I might ask to sit with you?’

  ‘No, thank you. No one.’

  Miss Trent answered in a low voice, her head down. There was no one. To whom would Miss Trent go for help? Eleanor gazed down at the crown of Miss Trent’s dislodged hat, observing the strands of dull brown hair that had come loose and partially covered the back of her bare white neck. It was a beautiful neck, she saw, pale and youthful and unadorned. She observed the gloved hands clasped rigidly together in her lap, the whiteness of her lip where she bit down on it as though to counter some awful pain. Miss Trent was very young. She was very alone.

  ‘Then I shall leave, if you are quite sure you will be alright?’

  ‘I shall be. Thank you. You have been so kind.’ A slight flush of Miss Trent’s cheeks showed her relief that her saviour was, at last, departing. She had not asked her saviour’s name. It was entirely possible that, in her distress, Miss Trent had not even observed the face of the woman who had come to her aid. She was a stranger and would remain so.

  Eleanor left, abruptly, without looking back, pulling the door shut behind her. She had noticed the spots of blood on the carpet at Miss Trent’s feet. They had not been there when Miss Trent had sat down.

  Outside the sun had begun to lower in the western sky. Three weeks shy of the winter solstice and the days were short but there was, as yet, no chill in the air and the sky remained a vivid winter blue with not a cloud in sight. A lorikeet swooped overhead in a brilliant flash of blue and green and orange.

  Eleanor walked rapidly away from the house for the third time that day, not noticing in which direction she walked. The day had not gone as she had imagined it would—though now she was uncertain what, exactly, she had imagined. Her idea of how things might go seemed, at best, misguided. That one might believe one could predict, perhaps even dictate, how something would be was absurd, deluded. One was an observer, a player in a larger game that someone else—God or fate—was controlling. Perhaps there was no game at all and life was simply a series of events, one leading on from another, utterly random, utterly unpredictable.

  But she was, surely, more than simply a passive instrument of fate?

  On she walked. And on.

  But I feel nothing, she thought. Nothing.

  What did one do now? Collapse, as Miss Trent had done? Sit down and reflect? Pull out the letter and read again those same words: My dearest … ? She had gone to Miss Trent’s aid. She did not know why she had done so. Except that Miss Trent might have died. Would that have been preferable?

  One could not commit murder.

  Eleanor walked south and eventually she found a police station. She was not sure if she was in Woolloomooloo or Kings Cross or Potts Point, but here was a police station with a blue lamp over the doorway and a drunken man lying sentry beneath it. She sidestepped the man and walked up the steps and spoke to the constable at the desk. She was taken to a room.

  Here she sat for a time on a hard wooden chair before a wooden table, another chair facing her. She waited. This was a punishment, she saw, this waiting, leaving her in this room for a longer time than she could endure. For it turned out that she did not feel nothing. It turned out that the difference between feeling nothing and feeling it all was an instant, a moment, a breath. She placed her hands on her lap and pressed down on her thighs.

  She had never felt such terror.

  When the policeman came in she informed the man she wished to report a crime. She wished to report an illegal abortion performed that very day by a Dr Leavis of Surry Hills on a Miss Verity Trent of Woolloomooloo.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  HARD LABOUR

  On that same day, the first Friday in June, the Premier’s Tour of the North arrived at Murwillumbah. On Saturday it moved on to Lismore then Byron Bay. Sunday being a day of rest, it was Monday when the party arrived at Grafton.

  It was on Monday, too, that Alice Nimrod, late in the afternoon, stood gazing up the daunting edifice that was Darlinghurst Courthouse.

  It was a formidable structure, this courthouse. With its Doric-columned portico, a pedimented gable entrance and those colonnaded wings, it was worthy of any great city in the empire, worthy of Ancient Greece itself. It completely dominated and obscured the colony’s first purpose-built gaol, which had been erected directly behind it. In less civilised times, on a day when a public hanging was underway, the more squeamish citizens might stroll along Oxford Street and take solace in the elegant lines and smooth sandstone, in the tiled marble floors of the magnificent courthouse and so forget the horrors behind.

  It was meant to be daunting, it was meant to be formidable. Alice Nimrod, late on Monday afternoon, shrinking before its magnificence, understood that. It was meant to strike fear and awe into the hearts of every wretched man and woman who was brought through its doors.

  Her footsteps slowed as she approached. There seemed to be very few people about: two police constables nominally standing sentry who silently observed her approach, one or two court officials coming out of one side door, crossing the courtyard and disappearing inside another. The vast double-height front doors remained solidly closed as though to repel all intruders like the gates of some great medieval castle. Alice stopped before these doors, presuming some way inside would present itself. A sign affixed to the wall suggested that a Jury Assembly Room, Sheriff’s Office and Court Keeper’s Office were somewhere within but gave no clue as to how to enter nor how to reach these obscure places.

  The two constables observed her. She abandoned the massive front doors and went instead to a side door. Here was a glass case just inside the doorway within which was a typed sheet headed Court 3 and beneath this Crown v. Nimrod. There were other cases, too, being heard that day—nine in all, which seemed a heavy workload for any courtroom—but it was here that Alice’s eyes went and stuck fast and got no further.

  Crown v. Nimrod.

  Somewhere deep inside her the fading but always present figure of her mother moaned and wept inconsolably for the shame that had befallen her eldest child.

  Crown v Nimrod.

  It was as though Milli had offended against the Queen herself and though Her Majesty, seated on a throne in a castle on the far side of the world, could know nothing of this one particular case, yet still it was a shame almost too great to endure.

  Alice pulled her shawl over her head. The middle part of the day was past and the sun had dipped already towards the warehouses and church spires of the city. The rain had held off and for four days the sky had radiated a light so vivid, so blue, it hurt the eyes. But as the winter day waned the warmth drained from it with a swiftness that caught a person out. You needed a shawl and Alice drew hers closer about her shoulders.

  She entered the courthouse and no one stopped her; indeed no one was abroad at all, though she could hear voices behind distant doorways. She found herself in a vestibule carpeted in crimson and gold—not the rich carpets of the Dunlevy house, but a functional and hard-wearing carpet that stamped its authority on the person who walked upon it. The walls were painted a deep forest green and a pale cream that ought to have had no place in a chamber carpeted in crimson, but here was a room that thumbed its nose at good taste. This building had a job to do and, if its walls clashed horribly with its carpets, what of it? A silent and dimly lit corridor led off to the left with, about halfway along its length, a coldly uncarpeted staircase fashioned from some ancient timber so dark and knotted it might have been salvaged from a medieval manor house. There was a smell, too, of musty disuse, which was curious for a bui
lding not much more than half a century old.

  Alice took the corridor rather than the staircase, passing long, hard wooden benches on which no one sat and a series of closed doors, and the signs above the doors—COURT OFFICIALS ONLY, BARRISTERS ROBING ROOM, PUBLIC DEFENDERS—suggested worlds beyond her knowledge, and her fear grew. The corridor twisted and turned, throwing up corners at random intervals, and she found herself outside in a courtyard. The sudden sunlight made her stand and blink. It was a small, square, sandstone place walled in on all sides, and apart from yet another unwelcoming bench it seemed to be a place to pass through rather than one in which to linger.

  But where was Court 3?

  Alice sat down on the bench, which was half in the sun and half in shade, one part of her warm, the other part cold. She did not know if Milli had been called before a judge already, for the afternoon was fading and surely, Alice thought, she must be too late.

  And so even in this she had failed her sister.

  She lifted her face to the patch of purest blue above and she wished with all her heart Milli had not done this thing. She wished she might help her sister, though it seemed to her there was nothing she could do. Milli had made her own plan without Alice’s assistance, without her blessing.

  She does not need my help, thought Alice as she sat on the bench.

  The first Alice was aware that something was happening was the muffled shout she heard from some distant part of the building. A shout, a scream, a cry—one followed the other, and whether man or woman or both was impossible to distinguish. And a disturbance—for such Alice took this to be—in a courthouse where so many wretched and desperate souls were confined must not be a rare occurrence, but Alice jumped up, she followed the sounds. Her heart beat a little faster.

  She hastened from the courtyard, retracing her steps along the twisty-turny corridor. More shouts followed, urgent now rather than muffled, and Alice arrived back at the chamber she had started from and it became clear that the noises came from above, up the ancient staircase. She set off up two short flights and came almost at once to a bare and unfurnished waiting room and she understood that she had found the site of the disturbance, if not its cause.

  And when it had seemed to Alice that the courthouse was utterly deserted and herself the only occupant, here now was a great and clamouring mob of persons—men and women of the common classes like herself—and all crowded in a doorway, pressing and pushing and creating the utmost commotion. The door, a solid affair with a frosted-glass panel, was wide open and beyond, though she could see only the high ceiling, was a courtroom—or what she took to be a courtroom, for she’d not had cause to view one before now. And she saw among the crowd a number of court officials and clerks pushing the people aside and cursing them and struggling to restore order, and a constable too, for she saw the top of his tall hat.

  But what could be the cause of such excitement?

  ‘Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God! It is too late!’

  ‘Give the woman some air!’

  ‘It is not air the lass needs!’

  ‘Get these people away, for the love of God!’

  ‘She will die, like as not.’

  ‘Aye, they will both die.’

  Words came tumbling one on top of another from a dozen mouths, so that Alice could perceive neither their sense nor their substance and her head buzzed with it all.

  ‘She is dead! ’Tis certain the lass is dead!’

  At this the crowd surged forward once more and someone screamed and someone else fainted and a cry went up—‘Send for a priest!’—and Alice craned to see. Someone had fainted; a young man, it seemed, which was curious, for people usually spoke of young ladies fainting yet this was a man. But as the young man slithered away to the ground a gap appeared in the crowd and Alice thrust her way into it and saw the courtroom. She had a confused impression of wood panelling and cream-coloured walls, of a very high ceiling and a row of wooden benches on which, at present, no one sat. She saw that the faces of the clerks were a peculiar greyish hue and several of them were kneeling down and one or two were standing back in horror and there in the middle of them all was her sister Milli, in the final stages of childbirth.

  Alice cried out and threw herself at her prostrate sister, but the court officials and the constable made a final effort to shut out the crowd and Alice was forced back and found herself on the wrong side of the door as it was slammed shut. She regained her footing and flung herself once more at the door, but with the futility of a fly at a window.

  ‘It is my sister!’ she cried, banging on the door. ‘She is my sister! Let me see her!’

  She banged her fists again, but the door was solidly built and would not give.

  The crowd, deprived of the spectacle that had kept it amused, grumbled a good bit and began to drift away, all but one woman. This was a stout elderly soul in a patched tartan shawl and features as scoured and coarsened as stone on a windswept hillside, but perhaps this woman had known motherhood or remembered the warm embrace of her own mother for she broke from the dispersing mob and came to Alice’s assistance.

  ‘Hush, lass, you shall not help your sister by banging on the door and carrying on,’ she said, putting a restraining hand on Alice’s arm. ‘It is her time and the baby is coming, ready or not. Come now, calm yourself. Is it her first?’

  And the hands she placed on Alice’s arm were deformed by age and by work but no less kind for that.

  Alice put out her own hands to steady herself and allowed the old woman to seat her on one of the hard wooden benches. She stared into the woman’s face and shook her head numbly.

  ‘No, it is not her first.’

  ‘Well, then, she knows what to do, don’t she? I have had six and, let me tell you, you know what to do after that many.’ And the woman nodded to herself and seemed pleased, as though Milli lying on the floor of the courthouse in the final stage of her confinement was an entirely ordinary occurrence, perhaps even one to be applauded.

  ‘They said she was dead!’ said Alice, searching the woman’s face. Reassurance, if it came, would come from here, she felt.

  ‘Dead! What does a man know about it? A sight of blood and they go all to pieces.’ The woman aimed a contemptuous glance at the young man who had fainted and was now being fanned by his girl and his mother. She turned back to Alice. ‘Serves them right, anyhow. Look what she has done to their fine court—gone and given birth in it! Ha! That is what I say. Serves them right, God forgive me.’ And when Alice stared at her, uncomprehending: ‘Did you not hear, dearie? Where you not there in the court? That old devil—God forgive me—of a judge give yer sister three years’ hard labour. For breaking a winda! No wonder she keeled over and went into her confinement.’

  Alice heard these words from very far away, a tiny voice in a great void. The rest of her shrank and she heard nothing more.

  The bench on which Alice and the elderly woman sat had been built for poor people. Every expense had been spared in its design and construction with the expectation that the persons who would avail themselves of it would be the family, dependents and associates of criminals. The lowest of the low.

  The elderly woman in tartan patted Alice’s hand and smiled a sad and distant smile. Alice felt as though the woman had been talking all this while—her thin lips forming words, perhaps in an effort to alleviate the very suffering and indignation they described—but Alice had heard nothing. There was a buzzing in her head.

  ‘Poor child. You have had a shock.’ And the woman nodded and patted. She had no teeth and perhaps had no need for any. She smelled of boiled cabbage and sour sweat and sawdust and a dozen other things.

  ‘Three years’ hard labour,’ said Alice, from very far off.

  ‘Yes, dear.’

  They had not sat long when the door to the courtroom opened. Alice jumped up and started forward; a shudder of fear flooded her heart and caught in her throat. A woman emerged, a matron or nurse, carrying sheets, blankets, bloodied and soiled, an
d went down the stairs. She looked at no one: important, busy—or ashamed.

  Alice ran to the doorway but pulled up sharp, for there was Milli on the floor and Milli was not dead. She lay, her body covered for modesty by a large blue cloth which, to the onlookers, appeared curiously patterned and providential (for what courtroom anticipates its clients halting proceedings to expel a child?) and turned out to be the British flag that hung in each court, torn from its hooks and pressed into emergency service. If Milli was cognisant of the assistance rendered her by the empire, she did not show it; her eyes were closed and her breathing was laboured and uneven, her hair matted and bedraggled, her face drawn and exhausted and grey. When her eyes opened she let out a scream, shrill and piercing and dreadful, that seemed to express not gratitude for help rendered, but outrage that her child had been taken from her.

  ‘Milli!’

  Alice ran to her sister and fell at her side, but at once an official hauled her up and shoved her away.

  ‘Do not approach the prisoner!’

  A second man joined the first, for it took two of them to drag Alice from her sister and attempt to bundle her from the courtroom. She bit the hand of one, drawing blood and forced her way back inside, and in the general commotion that this caused Milli stopped her scream and her gaze fell, instead, on her sister’s face.

  ‘Alice, the baby! Do not let them take it away or I shall never set eyes on it again! Alice! Do not let them—’

  But the door was closed on her and Alice, reeling, understood that the baby was born, that the baby was somewhere, might indeed be living.

  She shook herself free of her captors, cursing and screaming at them so that the two guards backed away, one nursing his injured hand. They advanced but seemed undecided whether to forsake her or to arrest her, and as they delayed the woman in tartan clutched Alice’s arm and led her very smartly away down the wooden staircase.