by Maggie Joel
‘Corangamite, dear lady. It means bitter. Or thereabouts. A rough translation, at any rate.’
And Mrs Rothe was gratified, or looked to be. At any rate, she smiled.
Bitter. Yes, one would be bitter journeying all that way and finding only salt water. But why go all that way—for what reason? Eleanor felt she had missed the point of the story. It seemed to her that Sir Bertram told them a story from another time, another century, when such things as explorers still existed, when there were still uncharted places left to explore. She recalled Alasdair had wanted to be an explorer, too, at one time. She looked across the table at her husband—he had been placed opposite her. He looked impatient, as though the elderly gentleman’s reminiscences irritated him. She had a feeling Alasdair would not wish to be reminded of his earlier aspiration to be an explorer, though it was a noble enough calling—perhaps less so in these modern times, when such an ambition might seem faintly absurd, but twenty or thirty years ago, yes, it was noble—heroic, even. Certainly, she had thought it so at the time. She remembered the story of Mr Leichhardt embarking on his great expedition and the celebrations and speeches that had accompanied his departure, and he had gone and been lost and, finally, forgotten. But they had named a suburb after him and that was something, was it not?
Alasdair looked annoyed. Or preoccupied. She tried to catch his eye but he avoided her, frowning at his brandy glass, glowering at the coffee the maid was now pouring into his cup. He was wearing a new silk tie, grey with black stripes, and a tiepin with a small diamond at the head. It was not quite in the right place, his tiepin; it was slightly off centre.
The gold tiepin with the engraved initials that she had taken from Miss Trent’s room was in her reticule. It nestled in a compartment of the little bag on her lap and, as she thought of it, it seemed to grow in size and then to diminish. She wondered why she had taken it, why she had not left it in that bedroom to be found by him the next time he was there.
But perhaps there would not be a next time?
And now here they were at dinner and the discussion around the table had moved, inexplicably, to art and literature.
‘Surely it is about time’, Alasdair was saying, leaning forward in his chair and unaccountably animated, ‘that one of our own men produced a work of literature worthy of the great works of Mr Dickens and Mr Hardy, of Mr Trollope and Mr Thackeray?’
And Eleanor was astonished. Alasdair had never spoken of literature before. He had never expressed a preference for this author over that, had never admitted to an admiration for the literary classics, yet here he was exhorting his fellow New South Welshmen to produce a work of fiction worthy of Dickens, of Hardy.
‘Oh, but Mr Dunlevy, we have the Bush Poets, do we not? Mr Lawson and Mr Paterson and others,’ replied Cecily Pyke, moved to utter the first words she had spoken all evening that did not concern her daughters, of whom she had a quantity. And then, perhaps regretting her outburst, she looked to her husband for confirmation.
‘Oh, certainly,’ agreed Fraser Pyke, who, as well as being a member of the Assembly, was also a pastoralist and an occasional Methodist lay preacher and who surely had no more idea of who Lawson or Paterson were than he had the members of the Imperial Russian court. He looked pleasantly bewildered by this turn in the conversation. He had previously been discussing the Premier’s Tour of the North which, one gathered, had been a great success and from whence Henry Rothe—in his London-made clothes and the largest mansion on the point—was that afternoon returned. Why did Alasdair not get invited on these trips with the Premier, Eleanor wondered—but only for a moment. Her husband’s career was in many ways a mystery to her, and it seemed to her that one of them, or perhaps both, had deliberately cultivated it to be so.
‘Speaking personally, I only have time to study law books and legal journals,’ said Judge Thistledon, lifting his distinguished head and addressing them with a faint note of censure in his voice. ‘Though I do not deny I read some Dickens as a younger man.’
He managed to make this sound like a vice of which he was now cured, and Eleanor gave a little laugh as if the judge had made a joke, though she knew he had not. Thistledon was a neighbour of Booker-Reid’s, a bachelor forty years on the judiciary, a man who rarely smiled and looked out on the world through eyes that did not blink. A heavy brow and a neatly trimmed white beard went some way to compensating for the absence of hair on his domed and shiny head and somehow added to her impression, long held, that the judge lived outside of the normal plane of human endeavour.
‘When I was a young fellow I had my Bible in my saddlebag and that was all I required,’ said Sir Bertram, stretching out in his chair and unconcerned that he no longer held the attention of the room. ‘It served me well enough—though I recall as a child being utterly absorbed by the journals of Mr Watkin Tench.’
‘Alasdair is named for Mr Tench, Sir Bertram,’ said Eleanor. ‘It is one of your baptismal names, is it not, Alasdair?’
But her husband had shrunk a little since he had made his initial appeal to literary endeavour and at each response the skin had tightened on his face and the clothes stiffened on his body so that they resembled items made of wood or stone within which he was trapped, or so it seemed to his wife. He gave Sir Bertram a tight smile, though it was Eleanor who had made the observation.
‘That is so, sir. A whimsy of my father’s,’ he said, and these words appeared to cost him a great deal.
‘Which did not inspire you to take up exploring, Dunlevy?’
‘No, Sir Bertram. I have always known my destiny was to serve the people of this colony as their representative.’
And Eleanor thought: he has forgotten who he once was.
She was regretting her decision to wear the blue silk gown. It was too similar to Blanche Rothe’s peacock blue brocaded satin, though they were seated some distance apart and her own gown had a tulle-sheathed bodice whereas Blanche’s was trimmed with silver embroidery and grey chiffon. But the shade of blue was uncanny, as though they had gone to the same dressmaker—which they had—though who was there at the table who would notice it? None of the gentleman, and Cecily Pyke had shown only a glancing interest in her appearance even before the advent of motherhood; now it was debatable whether she knew which decade she was in. And Blanche herself, a beauty at seventeen and still a beauty almost three decades later, who had been born into great wealth and married into greater wealth and found all things amusing, would not care a jot. But still Eleanor regretted her decision.
The discussion had moved on.
‘If they had only built the City Loop back in the seventies when it was really needed, when all the other railways were being built, we would not now be faced with this impossible dilemma,’ said Henry Rothe, who had found himself briefly Minister for Public Works a year or two back and so talked of the railways.
Opposite him Blanche Rothe, in peacock blue, took a neat little bite from a square of toast and caught Eleanor’s eye as though they shared a joke.
What was the impossible dilemma? Eleanor wondered. She sat back in her chair feeling the energy of a few moments earlier drain from her. What was the joke she shared with Blanche?
‘But my dear Rothe, there was no money in it,’ said Booker-Reid in his bored way. ‘Why build a railway underground at unimaginable expense and to the general disgruntlement of every George Street storekeeper and every city tram operator when you can make an absolute fortune building a railway—or promising to build a railway, at any rate—in an area far outside of the city in which one (or one’s brother or one’s wife’s brother) happens to hold a vast, untapped parcel of land? It is economics of the most basic kind.’
‘A somewhat cynical view of our city’s public works,’ observed Fraser Pyke, the idealist pastoralist.
‘Cynical—yet utterly true. We lived through it, did we not, Dunlevy? Came in at the tail end, anyhow. And your father benefitted from the policy greatly, did he not?’
Alasdair started slight
ly as though he had not been paying attention to the discussion, and now a frown shadowed his face. ‘The seventies was a boom time, Charles. Anyone who owned land did well out it.’
‘Even swampy land with no drainage and no natural water some ten miles from the city, what? But no matter—so long as one could convince an enthusiastic and train-gorged public that a railway was coming, the speculators queued up to purchase it and paid whatever was asked. And if most of those proposed and promised railways failed to get built or languished for years in parliamentary debate or were thwarted by lobbyists demanding other routes and different lines, what of it, eh, Dunlevy?’
‘In case you have failed to notice it, we do have a working rail network,’ Alasdair replied in a tight voice, ‘and a fine and extensive tram network.’
‘Which we are still paying off and have been in recession because of ever since.’ And Booker-Reid laughed as though this was the greatest source of amusement to him. He signalled the maid to top up the gentlemen’s glasses.
Alasdair tried, and failed, to look as if he were not annoyed.
‘Have we heard anything more from these so-called anarchists?’ enquired Henry Rothe. ‘I have been in the north with the Prem so I fear I may have missed something.’ In any other man, this would have been conceit, but Henry Rothe had no need for conceit. He had a beautiful wife and a magnificent house and a satisfactory, though not particularly taxing, parliamentary career.
His wife, speaking almost at the same moment and aiming her remark at the other two ladies, said, ‘I saw Adaline Jellicoe this morning. She was cancelling an order for a dress. It was rather sad, really. I cannot think why she did not send her maid to do it.’
And Blanche did look a little sad when she spoke of Adaline Jellicoe, who was divorcing her husband, and this was no affectation either. It suited her dramatic looks.
‘Poor Adaline,’ said Cecily Pyke desperately. ‘I do wish there was something we could do for her.’
But there was nothing they could do for her.
‘The Premier is to speak at Newcastle on Saturday,’ said Rothe. ‘I’ve declined that particular excursion—too much on—so I believe Drummond-Smith is to accompany him this time.’
Alasdair shot Henry Rothe a look of such tightly contained fury that Eleanor felt its ripples from her own side of the table. Did it matter to him so much that another man accompany the Premier and not himself? Apparently it did.
‘Alasdair’s meeting at Leichhardt descended into a riot this evening,’ she announced, because it was important the room understand her own husband’s contribution to the Federation, even if the Premier, evidently, did not.
‘Hardly that!’ Alasdair cut in, clearly irritated, though he himself had described it thus to her earlier. And as is the way at such gatherings and at such moments, the rest of the company fell silent so that his words fell with a crash they surely had not intended.
‘Judge Thistledon, I heard a woman gave birth in your court,’ said Fraser Pyke, stepping into the void that had followed Alasdair’s outburst. ‘Can it be true?’
‘Indeed, it is true,’ said Thistledon, refolding his napkin and placing it neatly on his plate. For a moment he held Pyke in his gaze and his eyes did not blink. ‘And if one did not know better, one might actually believe the wretched women did it on purpose. She had already shown her utter contempt and misuse of the judiciary, so it is not absolutely outside the bounds of possibility that she planned the whole thing.’
‘Misuse of the judiciary? However did she do that?’ asked Cecily Pyke with a curious half-smile. One never knew with the judge if he was speaking in jest, though it was perhaps safest to assume he was not.
‘I am afraid to say it, Mrs Pyke, but they all do it. That is, the poorer class of female who finds herself approaching her confinement having made no provision whatsoever to shelter or support herself. They commit some minor misdemeanour and get themselves incarcerated for a week or two and have their confinement in the comfort of a prison infirmary at the expense of the taxpaying citizen. Then off they go, pleased as punch. This wretch had done it twice already—although she had not come before me prior to today or she would have paused to think again. And you can be sure I did give her pause—I informed the woman in no small way I knew what her game was and that I was not going to put up with it. Gave the woman three years’ hard labour.’
Mrs Pyke started. Her husband said, ‘For what offence? What is it they do to get themselves arrested?’
‘This particular wretch had broken a window. A butcher’s shop window, I believe.’
This was met with a silence.
Mrs Pyke, in a quiet voice, said, ‘Do you mean to say that when she heard her sentence it caused this woman to commence her confinement?’ She looked down at her napkin and not at Thistledon. Two spots of bright colour had appeared on either side of Cecily Pyke’s face.
‘Who may say what caused it, for am I no physician, but that was the moment at which it happened, yes,’ said the judge, and he plucked a cigar from the box before him on the table. They were American hand-rolled cigars.
‘And the woman and her child,’ said Fraser Pyke, shaking his head when the box of cigars was turned towards him, ‘how did they both fare?’
‘The woman is serving her sentence at Darlinghurst Gaol. As for the child—’ Thistledon paused to strike a match ‘—that I cannot say. I can tell you my courtroom had to be cleared and was not fit for use again for the remainder of the day.’
‘Scandalous,’ observed Charles Booker-Reid, leaning back in his chair and regarding his dinner guests through the blue trail of smoke from his own cigar.
Mrs Pyke looked up with very bright eyes, the flush still on her face. ‘I do wonder at the depths of desperation to which such a woman must have fallen to be driven to such an extreme,’ she observed to no one in particular.
‘No doubt the woman was desperate,’ Eleanor countered, weary of Cecily Pyke’s veiled and rather pious reproaches, weary of her quantity of daughters. ‘It is hardly the act of a rational, God-fearing person who has lived a moral life.’
And at this, Mrs Pyke, who was her friend, flushed again and Eleanor turned her gaze away for she did not, altogether, believe her own words.
‘And do we not feel even a moment’s compassion for this woman?’ said Alasdair, stirring as though he had just that moment woken from a sleep. ‘Can each of us say, in all honesty, that we have never committed an act some might consider immoral?’
He made this statement to the table in general yet Eleanor felt a flush creep over her own face for the rebuke was aimed solely at herself.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THRIVE
The baby did not thrive. Instead it cried piteously, expelling a sound from its lungs to echo the suffering of ages and a black muck from its bowels that was as viscous and primeval as Hell itself. And then it fell silent. It lay limp and unresponsive as though it had tasted life and had found it wanting and turned its tiny, red-creased face away from such torment.
Alice Nimrod thought it dead. She snatched it up and held it to her breast and felt, faintly, its heart still beating, the blood still moving sluggishly about its little limbs. The baby lived, though it did not thrive. It would not live much longer if she could not get it to feed.
She could not think what she would do. She had taken the baby and that was perhaps a crime, she did not know. If the baby died in her care, was that too a crime? And what if they should hear the baby cry downstairs? This was her biggest fear.
She had returned to the house with the baby under the cover of darkness and had fled up the stairs to her room at the top of the house. Here, she had swaddled the baby in a shawl and laid it in a drawer and run downstairs to be the housemaid once more.
In the kitchen Mrs Flynn had looked up and observed her with a thoughtful and disapproving silence that spoke of a hundred young maids who had engineered their own downfalls and in whose image she clearly saw Alice. Then she had packed her bag
, pulled on her coat and left for the day. Mrs Dunlevy had returned from a fitting at her dressmaker and gone at once to dress for dinner. Sometime later Mr Dunlevy had returned. Alice had missed the moment of his return as, in a sudden terror of what she might find, she had run upstairs to her room, where she had scooped up the baby, motionless and silent and wrapped in the shawl, knowing it was dead but finding it lived still.
She was frightened to leave it. Had stood at the window as Mr and Mrs Dunlevy had departed in diamonds and silk, leaving her alone in the house with the baby that did not thrive.
She unbuttoned her dress and placed the baby’s mouth to her breast but no milk came. So she carried up milk from the kitchen in a cup and dipped her finger into the milk and placed her finger on the baby’s lips, inside its mouth, over its gums, but the tiny, squirming, wriggling thing dribbled the liquid out, it turned its head away, it wailed in fury. She tried a dab of sugar on its lips, and honey too, and finally, in desperation, a drop of gin from a bottle she found on the lowest shelf of a cupboard in the scullery. The baby would not take it; it seemed not to know how to feed, how to swallow, and Alice held it and her body became as stiff as the baby’s. It shamed her to realise she did not know how to care for it. Would she know, she wondered, if she had given birth to it?
The crying became louder and fear shook her body.
She did not know what to do.
She wondered for a time about Mrs Flynn, whose domain was the kitchen and the scullery three floors below and who returned home to her own family each night, sloughing off the house in Elizabeth Bay, and returning, different and changed, at dawn to prepare the day’s meals. She wondered if Mrs Flynn would keep her secret or if she would shrug her old and bony shoulders and betray her. In the pantry the meat hung, a goose or a lamb or half a pig or a side of beef, dangling lifeless from a hook waiting to be cut into pieces. Sometimes the blood dripped onto the cold hard floor and congealed there. Sometimes it stained Mrs Flynn’s apron. Alice imagined that Mrs Flynn, if asked about the baby, would say: ‘Drown it!’ Drown the baby. As though it were a cat or a stray dog. And not because she was cruel, not because she was callous, but because she was practical.
