The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  ‘But Milli—the baby …’ cried Alice, and she would have turned and run back up but her saviour propelled her downwards. Reaching the bottom of the stairs they paused and Alice saw what it was they pursued: just ahead of them, disappearing around a corner in the corridor, was the matron who had passed by them with her bloodied consignment. This woman had made slow progress, for she moved with the waddling gait of a very fat person, wheezing as though she might expire at any moment, but—they could both see it!—was still clutching her cargo.

  And they set off after her, Alice only dimly perceiving why they did so.

  The matron, some yards ahead of them, had entered the small interior courtyard, sun-filled a short time earlier but now in shade. Tired by her exertions, she sank down onto the bench to fan herself, though the warmth had gone out of the day. She lay the bundle gently upon the bench beside her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall. Her excessive and fleshy body was disinclined to action.

  She had laid the bundle gently and not, as one might expect a bundle of bloodied and soiled sheets to be laid, with careless disregard.

  And Alice, at last, understood and stifled a cry. She did not pause. She divested herself of her guardian angel, the elderly woman in patched tartan, and striking out on her own she made her way along the silent corridor at such a smart pace that in a moment she had reached the shady little courtyard and the bench on which the fat and wheezing woman rested. In another moment Alice had ducked back inside and was gone, and the place where the bundle had lain was now bare.

  A very short time later a slight young woman who had arrived at the courthouse carrying nothing now departed holding a most precious bundle, and could be seen hastening out of the side door of the great building and down the driveway and out of the gate and was soon lost among the throng of people on Oxford Street.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CORANGAMITE

  After the deed was done Eleanor had gone home and awaited Alasdair’s return. She had thought to greet him at the door, her excitement—yes, it was excitement, or something close to it—had thrilled through her, it had filled her up. She had stood at the door to greet him.

  But in the end he had returned so late from a meeting she had given up and gone, alone, to her bed.

  And so it had been on the second evening too. The third day, a Sunday, Alasdair had breakfasted without her, worked in his study all day, gone out in the evening, returning in silence. When she sat across from him at the dinner table he had been somewhere else. Her excitement, if that was what it was, had wavered. But this evening, a Monday evening, it had soared again. Three days had passed since she had done her deed and something, surely, must break.

  Eleanor dressed slowly and purposefully. She chose a deep blue silk gown, the bodice sheathed in the palest tulle. She attached diamonds at ears, throat and wrist.

  But every hour she feared a policeman at the door.

  The terror that had overtaken her at the police station seemed to have taken root. But it could be channelled, she had discovered. Its energy could be diverted. She had reported Miss Trent’s crime to the police—the deed was done and could not be undone, and the police, one presumed, were duty-bound to investigate. At the police station a man had demanded her details and she had given a false name, which a second man had carefully written down, and an address that did not exist, but the witness to the crime was of no consequence. The police would find the doctor—she had been precise about the doctor’s name—and they would find Miss Trent. The evidence was there, it was undeniable. The carpet was stained red, the place smelled thickly of her blood. Miss Trent may lie but her body could not.

  And if Miss Trent should tell them who the father was?

  Eleanor felt certain she would not. It was not in her nature. The girl was frightened. She would be very much more frightened. She must remain silent and steadfast or incriminate herself. How odd that Eleanor knew this for certain, or felt that she did. No, she would not believe she had placed Alasdair in danger. Surely, whatever outcome now befell Miss Trent, no scandal could be ascribed to him. She was glad she had retrieved the little gold tiepin. There could be nothing that connected her husband to that woman, to that place.

  As to Miss Trent’s likely fate …

  Well, it was not one’s place to speculate. Miss Trent had transgressed and must pay the price that society, that the law, deemed appropriate.

  And as to her husband … She lifted her face to the mirror and studied herself. She did not flinch. As to Alasdair, surely there could be a return now to how things were. Was it naive to think she might suggest, in a day or two, he move back into her room?

  Their room.

  Alasdair was, that moment, some miles away in the west of the city, speaking at a Federation meeting at the public bar of a hotel in Leichhardt.

  A great many men attended the meeting in noisy solidarity for the bill, and in another hotel across the street a great many other men—perhaps not as many—met to denounce the bill. At the conclusion of both meetings, which either by bad luck or malicious intent had occurred simultaneously, the two groups spilled out onto Norton Street, where opinions were passionately exchanged, a punch thrown, a bottle smashed, and it was only due to the heavy presence of the local constabulary that prevented the event descending into pitched battle. Amid the chaos the secretary, James Greensmith, managed to secure a cab, and all the way back to the city he sat exclaiming in thrilled dismay at the sudden and dramatic turn that events had taken.

  ‘Do you think, sir, it was paid agitators who kicked the thing off?’ he asked, his clothing a little disarranged, for he had been briefly manhandled by the crowd.

  ‘No, I do not,’ Alasdair replied shortly, and though they were hardly into George Street he signalled for the driver to stop and he turned his secretary out into the night to make his own way home.

  Alasdair sat back in his seat but he was unsettled. This was not democracy; indeed, it was not the way of Australian men to care strongly enough about their politics to fight in the street. To take against those of a different race, yes, it was part of a man’s nature to do so, but Australian men were all of the same race, the same species, for the most part, if one ignored the obvious difference of Anglican and Papist, Englishman and Irish, rich and poor. He was unsettled, he was disappointed. Tonight it had been the Black Labour issue that had fuelled men’s tempers. The proposed dissolving of the barriers between the six colonies would trigger a flood of black workers from the north; Chinamen and men of the other Asian countries toiling in the comfortably distant northern cane fields were just waiting for their chance to swarm south. This was the prospect the anti-billites presented. The white men in the southern colonies would be put out of work at best, overrun and diluted at worst, and it was an easy fear for the anti-billites to fan, for all white men did fear this, though the more rational ones among them saw it for what it was: a baseless fear fanned by a scared opponent.

  And was it fear, above all else, that drove men? Alasdair wondered.

  The moon had climbed above the rooftops and bats circled, twittering excitedly in its glow. Above him the cab driver made clicking noises with his tongue to encourage his reluctant horse, and the cab stopped and started, lurching alarmingly as it failed to negotiate a pothole in the street and Alasdair experienced each sound, each vibration magnified tenfold. It was disagreeable to be in a cab going home in the dark with a distinct chill in the air and he wished to be free of it, but instead of being cheered as the cab began its descent to the bay an oppression came over him. He called out to the driver to stop and let him out. He would walk the remainder of the way down the hill. He tossed a coin at the man and set off.

  But his footsteps slowed as he approached the house.

  The oppression came over him, it consumed him.

  He had spent the day replying to correspondence, had spoken to a journalist from the Herald and another from the Mail and Advertiser. He had met delegations of town officials f
rom Goulburn and Bathurst and Cooma, provincially clothed self-satisfied men, each convinced of their own importance, each convinced their town and their town alone should be made the federal capital. He had listened to their arguments, he had pointed out that the referendum had yet to happen, that there would be no federal capital at all if it did not pass.

  ‘Gentlemen, we are building a nation!’ he had said to the town officials and again to the journalist from the Herald, words he had spoken a hundred, two hundred times this twelve-month, but today the words had fallen from his mouth like a platitude, empty, devoid of meaning.

  For Miss Trent was nowhere to be found.

  He had gone to the house at Woolloomooloo on Saturday evening and had stood at her door and she had not answered. He had returned the following evening, though it was a Sunday, but the outcome had been the same. He had walked around the exterior of the house, looking up at the windows, some lighted, some in darkness, had waited for a time in the shadows, had started forward as a carriage appeared, as a figure had approached the house, as another had emerged from it. Had slunk back into the shadows at each fresh disappointment. He had left, finally, debased and shamed. And yet he would go there again this evening, though he and Eleanor were to attend a dinner first.

  The dinner was at the house of Charles Booker-Reid, a man he despised, a dinner at which nothing of importance would be uttered and at which his presence would make no difference, and yet Booker-Reid wielded some influence still, had the ear of one or two prominent men. And so he would take Eleanor to dinner, though his heart strained within its cage so that he stood for a long time, unmoving, outside his house.

  Eleanor opened the front door to him. He wondered if she had been watching for him. It irked him that she had done so—did they not have servants?

  ‘My dear, you look fatigued,’ she said, standing in the doorway to deliver this charge. ‘How went your meeting? Come inside, the fire is lit in the drawing room. Let Alice bring you some refreshment.’

  And at last she stood aside to let him enter.

  His wife was dressed already in a lustrous blue silk gown, diamonds at ears, throat and wrist. Her colour was high and her eyes shone, two points of light as bright as the yellow eyes of the bats that circled above, of the old possum that lived in the fig tree outside. There was a bright, almost brittle quality about her; it had been there these last three days and Alasdair was glad, now, that he had accepted the invitation from Booker-Reid. To sit opposite his wife at their own dinner table with her profuse gushing was a prospect suddenly untenable.

  The servant, for whatever reason, was not in attendance, and so he removed his own hat and coat and gloves.

  ‘The meeting went badly and then descended into a pitched battle,’ he said in answer to his wife’s enquiry.

  He did not, as a rule, report the outcomes of his meetings to her, for it seemed to him she rarely showed an interest, but this evening he wished to shock her from her complacency. Was it complacency? It seemed more like a sort of hectic agitation, the cause of which he could not guess.

  ‘Heavens!’ she exclaimed. And she searched his face as though to see whether he was in earnest or in jest. ‘Was anyone hurt?’

  ‘I certainly hope so,’ he replied. ‘At any rate, I hope so of the dunderheads who peddle their nonsense and whip the common masses into a frenzy of such irrational fear they can no longer tell their heads from their feet.’

  ‘There were people who disagreed with you, then?’ said Eleanor.

  ‘It is hardly a question of agreeing or not agreeing, Eleanor. Naturally a man is free to disagree, but when his head has been filled with so much nonsense he cannot make a rational decision …’ He gave up. She did not understand, could not be expected to.

  She had gone ahead into the drawing room. The fire was lit and she stood before it, smiling. ‘Come inside, Alasdair,’ she said.

  But he could not look at her, he could not come into the drawing room. ‘I must dress for dinner,’ he replied briefly. He went up to his dressing room and closed the door.

  And after a time he did dress, slowly and meticulously, taking some little while to knot a new tie and at last pausing and staring at himself in the mirror. He could not find one of his tiepins, a gold one engraved with his initials. He searched, turning first one drawer inside out and then another. At last he flung open the door and called, ‘Alice!’

  It occurred to him the maid had taken it. She had never taken anything before, to his knowledge, but it was simply a matter of time. They all stole eventually.

  It struck him that he ought to have a valet, though he had never perceived this lack in his household before. But a gentleman ought to have a valet. This fussing about dressing oneself was petty, it was undignified. In London a gentleman of his standing, a minister of the Crown, would have a valet, unquestionably. And a butler. His parliamentary colleagues, those who had been born in England, who had been educated there, thought nothing of keeping a manservant to dress them, a butler to open their front door, a liveried footman, a carriage. But those, like himself, born in the colony scorned such ostentation, they mocked it, and perhaps this was simply to mask their discomfort. His grandfather had been a navvy, had built canals and railways with his bare hands, could not sign his own name on a document. And his father had had so many servants they had been housed in a separate wing, yet he had never learned how to deal with a single one of them until the day of his death. This incongruity between his grandfather and his father troubled Alasdair occasionally. It troubled him now. He felt that he took an uneasy middle path between them.

  There was no sign of Alice.

  He abandoned the search for the gold tiepin. He dug out another pin and stabbed it in his new tie. It stuck out inelegantly, in the wrong place, at the wrong angle. He sat down on a chair and stared at himself in the mirror.

  Where had Verity gone?

  And to whom?

  Charles Booker-Reid’s house at Woollahra was a late Regency mansion constructed to imposing and ultimately overambitious proportions by an English merchant who had come to the colony, made his fortune then promptly lost it all building a lavish and increasingly costly house worthy of his position. With its portico and Doric colonnade it rivalled the Rothes’ Hyde at Potts Point, and how Booker-Reid had ended up with it was a mystery to Eleanor, though oddly in keeping with what one did know about the man, which was, for the most part, unfavourable.

  Alasdair said nothing in the cab, remained closed off from her and unfathomable, when she felt herself fizzing and bubbling and light-headed beside him, the blood pulsing through her veins and throbbing in her ears. She imagined herself making light-hearted conversation with him here in the cab, imagined herself making a clever and humorous observation—for all her troubles were over and his, though he did not yet know it, were over too—but she said nothing. No observation, clever or otherwise, presented itself to her, so she sat in silence. But inside she felt herself fizzing and bubbling.

  She imagined, over and over again, the constable arriving at Miss Trent’s door.

  Nine places had been set around the table, which by any measure was an odd number, and only three of the dinner guests were ladies. This curious arrangement struck Eleanor, who was one of the three ladies (Cecily Pyke and Blanche Rothe were the others), and from her place seated between Fraser Pyke and Judge Thistledon she wondered why Alasdair had accepted Charles Booker-Reid’s invitation. There was, surely, little political capital to be gained from a man who had lost the safest seat in New South Wales and who, on being newly elected, seemed unable to recall the exact location of his new constituency.

  ‘Eat up, eat up,’ said Booker-Reid, rubbing his hands together and presiding over the julienne soup and the medallions of foie gras, the roast loin of mutton and the lobster cutlets, the iced pudding and the out-of-season glacé strawberries with an almost pantomime glee while touching almost nothing himself. He drank a good deal though. He was a widower, his young wife perishing barely
a year into the marriage of some unnamed and unknown illness.

  The dead wife’s father, the explorer Sir Bertram Egremont, was here, and one of the dinner guests. Clearly the old gentleman bore no ill will towards the son-in-law who had driven his only daughter to an early grave, for he was seated, quite at ease, at the foot of the table, a brandy in one hand, the other resting on the arm of his chair. The man must be in his seventies at least but he cut a fine figure, lean and leathery with a shock of snow-white hair, seated perfectly upright in a tight fitting if outdated collar and cravat and sporting a splendid set of bushy mid-century whiskers. Sir Bertram was speaking, Eleanor saw, in that way that all men of his age had: dully and at great length and with an unshakeable belief that his audience hung suspended from his every word.

  ‘We set off from Melbourne heading west,’ said the ageing explorer, ‘why, it must be nearly fifty years ago, and we went on horseback where we could, and on foot when the bush became too impenetrable—which it was most of the time, dense enough to lose the man in front of you though he was but five yards ahead, and terrain rough enough you were lucky to cover ten miles in a day, half that on some days. We had mules and a few goats and a couple of blacks to guide us, though the mules died soon enough—one fell and became lame and a second was bitten by a snake—and the goats were driven off one night by some blacks, and the blacks that were to guide us left after a week or so. After many days of no fresh water we set up camp on the shores of Lake Corangamite. And a bitter day it was, let me tell you, when we ran into the cold waters of that lake to slake our thirst only to find the water was brine though we were many miles inland. And that is what it means, of course, in the local Aboriginal dialect.’

  ‘That is what what means, Sir Bertram?’ asked Blanche Rothe, leaning a little over the table towards him with an intentness in her face, though Eleanor had seen her eyes wander during the old explorer’s words.