The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Where to?’ asked the driver, who was no stranger to odd behaviour, not least among his fares.

  And when they were gone up the hill and the still night air could no longer carry his words, Alasdair leaned out and replied, ‘Woolloomooloo.’

  Perhaps he had drunk a little more of Booker-Reid’s brandy than he had realised. The cab lurched from pothole to pothole in the streets nearing the wharves, and Alasdair found it increasingly difficult to retain his seat.

  ‘Here, stop here,’ he called, having only a vague sense that this was the right neighbourhood but not wishing to prolong the ride in the cab. He climbed down and waited, standing in the middle of the road as the cab trundled away and was gone into the night.

  He turned about him to get his bearings, picking out the bulky silhouettes of the wharves and the warehouses that lined the dockside, listening to the mournful calls of the ships entering and leaving the harbour. He set off confidently, the blood running faster in his veins. It was good to be outside finally. He sucked in the crisp, salt-rich air.

  Here was the house, unmistakable, with its steep gables and many chimneys, the overgrown banksia spilling onto the pavement. A light flickered in an upstairs room. Her room? He could not be sure. Perhaps not. He went up to the front door. He had come and gone at a late hour before this and the front door had never been locked, but perhaps on this occasion it was? No: he pushed it and it swung open. He entered, taking the stairs softly in the gloom of a single gas light turned down low. Quiet reigned inside the house, as it always did, and he paused to listen. Floorboards creaked and nothing more. The house was as silent as its ancient timbers and straining roof joists ever were, and whatever the residents did within their various apartments they did so noiselessly. He had wondered at it each time he had visited Verity, had wondered at the ferocity of his passion and love-making in such a church-like place, yet once inside the secrecy of her bedroom he always forgot such thoughts. He wanted to make love to her now, right at this moment.

  The thought that this might not eventuate could not be borne.

  He took the stairs two at a time, reaching the first floor and going to her door.

  He kneeled and felt with his fingers in the pot of the large fern where the key habitually resided, inching around the circumference of the pot as he had done each time previously. His fingers found nothing. He got to his feet and stood close to the door, listening. Beyond was only silence. He tapped softly.

  ‘Verity.’

  He waited.

  ‘Miss Trent.’

  The silence lengthened. It swirled about him, lapping at his knees, tickling the back of his neck, prickling his scalp.

  ‘Verity!’

  He pounded again and again on the door, over and over.

  But she did not come.

  Others did come, however. Footsteps thudded and distant voices mumbled and lights flickered and somewhere a door opened and Alasdair, his shame rising up to consume him, stumbled away down the staircase and out of the front door to stand, breathing heavily, outside.

  But despite the shame, or because of it, he was not ready to admit the misery of his defeat.

  He stole down the side of the house where an overgrown path led into the garden at the rear. Here he negotiated the bougainvillea and the frangipanis that grew unchecked and through whose ghostly branches he could hardly make out the house above him. Here were her rooms, or he took them to be, the bay window and little French balcony, and at neither door nor window was the curtain drawn. And no light at all from inside. She was not there, it was as clear as the moon in this cloudless night, but still he would not admit his defeat, stooping down and finding a stone and hurling it, like a love-stricken schoolboy, at her window. It bounced off the window and he waited, breathless, but no light went on, no door or window opened. The apartment remained in darkness and silence. He stooped again, but a light went on at another window, not hers, and a man appeared, some object—a firearm, perhaps—in his hand.

  Alasdair fled, stumbling and righting himself and stumbling again. The house did not want to let him go, reaching out its branches and its roots and its shadows and trapping him, but finally he escaped, running out into the street and standing there, in the middle of the road, like a drunken man who has lost all that he valued.

  But a cab came by at last and he flagged it down and got in.

  Three weeks shy of the shortest day of the year and the sun did not make an appearance the next morning until the church clocks had struck seven. Those final minutes before dawn put a dew on the lawns of the houses in Elizabeth Bay. By a quarter past the sun had warmed the rocks on the little bay and most of the dew had gone. A host of seasonally confused currawongs, magpies and butcherbirds, believing spring to have come early, now set up such a racket that it was futile attempting to remain another minute in bed.

  Eleanor got up. She dressed quickly, choosing a morning gown of palest yellow that seemed to complement the season’s sudden rush towards spring. She would arrange a little tea party for that afternoon, she decided, and was at once taken up with the preparations for it.

  But no sooner had she dressed herself than the extraordinary burst of energy dissipated. She sank down onto the chair. The gown of palest yellow now seemed ill-advised. Precipitous. It hung heavily on her frame. The tea party, foolish.

  Downstairs the front door opened and closed, and she sprung up and stood at the window in time to witness Alasdair’s early departure.

  She thrust both fists at the windowpane and for one teetering, blinding moment found she might pound on the window, might even break the window, stand at the broken pane, perhaps bloodied, screaming loudly like a madwoman. The impulse was gone in a moment, but it left her breathless, dismayed.

  Alice tapped on the door and came into the room with hot water and a hasty, curtsied, ‘Morning, madam.’

  Eleanor kept her face turned away. She stood very still and rigid as the maid moved about the room. She wished to tell the girl to leave at once but could not speak. Did not trust herself to sound quite normal. And so she waited.

  ‘Will there be anything else, madam?’

  ‘No.’ She shook her head. Still did not turn.

  The door closed. The room became her bedroom once more and not simply a place where servants came and went.

  Eleanor sat down. Alasdair had returned very late last night. Now he was gone out again before the hall clock had chimed the half-hour. She had not suggested, last night, that he might think about moving back into their shared bedroom. The dinner at Booker-Reid’s, the cab ride home, had not been favourable. And then he had ridden off into the night.

  To find her, presumably.

  It only now occurred to her that Alasdair might not know what had happened to the woman, Miss Trent. That he might go to her flat and find the police there. Or that the police had come and gone. The woman arrested. She realised she had shut her mind to it. To the possible implications, outcomes. Her own part was over and done. What happened now to this woman, her own husband’s part in it, no longer concerned her. It happened offstage. She stood at the window. The new beginning she had anticipated, had engineered even, had not eventuated.

  ‘Alice, I am arranging a small tea party today,’ she announced to the maid as she came downstairs a short time later.

  There would be a tea party. It would be a simple affair but it required arranging. She began to make those arrangements.

  But her plans were put into disarray when Adaline Jellicoe called.

  Her friend’s presence was announced by a card on a tray handed to her in her room by Alice.

  ‘What does this mean?’ enquired Eleanor sharply of the servant.

  But Alice, not comprehending the question nor, probably, the circumstances, could provide no answer.

  And so, thought Eleanor, seated at her desk, all her efforts to avoid this had come to nothing. The object of her fear had come to her, was seated in her drawing room, or waited outside in a cab.

&nbs
p; ‘Very well,’ she said, standing up.

  She went to the window and saw that Adaline Jellicoe waited outside in a hansom cab. She emerged now from the cab wearing a veil, and if she had come directly from a funeral at which she was the sole mourner she would look thus: cloaked in a solitude that kept her apart from others. She might look out at the world and the world might look in at her but there was no possibility of communion, or so thought Eleanor, who stood at her window and dreaded her friend’s arrival. But it could not be put off. She left her room and went downstairs.

  ‘Mrs Jellicoe,’ she said, entering the drawing room and at once setting the boundaries for the visit. The last time they had met she had addressed her as Adaline. ‘Do, please, sit down.’ And Eleanor smiled, because it cost her nothing to do so. Alice hovered in the doorway awaiting instruction. ‘Tea, I think,’ she said, and the maid departed, leaving behind her in the room a disturbance and unease of which she was perhaps dimly aware, for it crackled in the very air.

  Eleanor was silent. She waited. She would not be rushed in her own drawing room by a caller who was unexpected and hardly welcome. Her visitor wore a buttoned jacket of lavender grey, tight at the waist and arm, capped at the shoulders, over a high lace collar, a skirt of the same stuff, white gloves with tiny pearl buttons at the wrist and pearls at her throat. Her hat, very small and round and pinned to her hair, was also of silver-grey silk, and no doubt the wearer had sat before her dressing table this morning and dressed herself with the same care and attention as did any lady of their acquaintance, but here the comparison ended for Mrs Jellicoe was not the same as any lady of their acquaintance and never would be again.

  Mrs Jellicoe sat. She slowly rolled back her veil, which was made of a thin gauze. Look on this face, she said, though she uttered no words.

  Eleanor gazed upon the woman now uncovered, but unlike the smile it cost her something to do so. There was some trickery here, for the face she saw was the face of a friend as familiar to her as the twisting roads and pretty little bays that surrounded her own home, but the person who stared out at her from behind the grey-blue eyes was strange to her. A face, dark-browed, straight-nosed and full-lipped and surrounded by a mass of glorious chestnut hair, and striking to some men, less so to others, and with both poise and bearing intact. But it was a face, a body, from which the essence had been gouged.

  ‘Eleanor,’ said her visitor at last, her voice very low, ‘I understand how disagreeable it is for you to receive me in these circumstances. Distasteful, even.’

  It was disagreeable, it was distasteful, but to have it remarked on in as many words made it plain to Eleanor just how far her friend had fallen. She offered a hopeful smile while knowing the situation was without hope.

  ‘Leon is being difficult,’ said Adaline, staring down at her lap. ‘About the children. About the settlement.’

  The tea arrived on a tray, with lemons and sugar in a silver bowl, in the tentative hands of Alice, the maid. These things offered reassurance and normalcy and Eleanor fell upon them greedily.

  ‘Here, Alice,’ she said, indicating, ‘place the tray here,’ and then watching as the girl departed and the room turned cold once more.

  ‘I wondered if perhaps Alasdair—who is his friend—might speak with Leon,’ said Adaline, as though the arrival of the tea was nothing. ‘I wondered if he might …’

  But her words, her plea for help, hung in the air, unfinished. She attempted to complete it with her hand, lifting it into the air and describing an arc, but when this too failed she sat immobile on the settee. Her tea went undrunk.

  Beyond the room the maid moved from place to place. In the kitchen sounds could occasionally be heard.

  ‘You are quite well?’ enquired Eleanor, as though the plea had not been made. As though this was like any other call from any other caller. She saw Adaline at her bedside a year ago, placing a hand on hers and holding it tightly. She recalled the sudden stillness of the bedroom at that moment. The calmness that had descended for a time when all about her had been, up to that moment, chaos. ‘And the children? They are well?’

  And when Adaline nodded once, a slight jerk of her head, and said in her strange brittle voice, ‘Yes, quite well,’ Eleanor felt the shame of her questions.

  It struck her they were same, she and Adaline. Miss Verity Trent, and the housekeeper, Dora Hyatt. Leon and Alasdair. That this must draw them closer, this shared horror. And there was a moment, as Eleanor sat on the very edge of her settee, nursing her cup of tea, when it seemed the space between herself and Adaline could be traversed. That the relief that this would bring her would be worth the horror—

  But the moment passed. She stared it down until it wilted and was gone.

  ‘Alasdair has been so busy, of course, with his meetings,’ she said. ‘The Federation,’ she added, lest Adaline, in her despair, had forgotten.

  She saw then how unimportant it must seem to Adaline, the Federation. This colony which she was soon to leave, or so one understood, with its absurd referendums. These politicians, squabbling. But politicians squabbled in England, too, one presumed.

  And it had done the trick. A wall had come up, protecting them both. Adaline’s face was quite composed, her hand quite steady. The danger was passed. Soon she would get up to leave. Eleanor would not speak to Alasdair, and Alasdair would not speak to Leon Jellicoe, who had been his friend. And in all likelihood neither of them would see Adaline Jellicoe again, for she had a passage booked, they had heard, to England.

  In the meantime, Mrs Jellicoe’s tea was undrunk. It grew cooler and cooler as the moments passed. A moment would come, quite soon now, when she would be gone and the teacup would be removed and washed up and put away. Eleanor thought about this moment. She clung to it.

  The letting agent for the house at Woolloomooloo was a man named Orange whom one might imagine would sport bright red hair and fiery red whiskers or perhaps heralded from Ulster or the Low Countries, but in defiance of his name Mr Orange had an olive complexion and fine glossy black hair and dark lashes over eyes that had no more rested on the floodplains of Holland than they had the moon.

  ‘This is a respectable establishment,’ the agent said, searching among a ring of keys to select the correct one and, like the establishment which needed to proclaim its respectability, Mr Orange, who was not quite a gentleman, needed to wear an expensive suit of clothes and gloves made by an Italian tailor.

  Alasdair stood behind him and stared with loathing at the little man, the letting agent, who was not little at all, who was in fact a fine specimen of manhood, but who must proclaim his position in the world through his ownership of this large ring of keys and hence anything and anyone behind the door he might open. Alasdair waited impatiently while the man found a key and fitted it into the door. It proved to be the wrong key and Alasdair turned away rather than watch the man forage again for the correct one. He ought to have taken this step days ago, he realised, struck by his own intransigence, but until last night he could not really believe in Verity’s disappearance. He was not entirely sure he truly believed it even now, when they were at the stage of breaking into her rooms, when his life and hers were about to be thrown wide open for the world—for this man, at any rate—to see. They were about to see the room emptied of her things, Miss Trent gone, the walls echoing to her silence and to his folly. His loss.

  It was intolerable to stand here, waiting.

  The correct key was at last located and fitted smoothly into the lock and the door swung open. The man, Orange, went first into the room and Alasdair held back, delaying the moment he must enter, delaying the moment of his loss. His folly.

  ‘Miss Trent?’ the man called, but it was a courtesy, no more. Neither expected her to be here. And so it proved. The two rooms were empty of her presence.

  Though her things remained.

  At first Alasdair did not understand. Were these her things? Had he misremembered? The furnishings came with the apartment but the clock on the mante
l, the coats and hats and umbrellas and gloves in the hallway, the clothes in the bedroom, the great sea trunk, the little crowd of objects by the bedside table, all were hers. The bed was made, the clothes neatly put away but all still here, nothing to even suggest a departure, planned or otherwise.

  He went back into the main room.

  ‘Well, she is not here but neither has she done a flit,’ observed the man, Orange, whose eyes ran swiftly and critically over furnishings, wallpaper, doors and windows and locks as befitted an agent paid to take care of another’s property. ‘Ay, ay—what’s this?’

  He kneeled before a rusty brown stain on the carpet near the sofa. A second stain could be seen beneath the legs of the sofa when he pushed it a little to one side. The man exclaimed and stood up, pulling away the cushions on the sofa and finding further stains, larger this time, discolouring the fabric.

  ‘What has happened here?’ the agent demanded, turning to Alasdair.

  Alasdair stood behind him and said nothing. He felt the disbelief, the confusion clouding his head.

  But Mr Orange was insistent. ‘I must ask you, sir, what has been going on in this apartment?’

  Alasdair pushed the agent aside, kneeling down to see for himself. It was blood, though neither had spoken the word out loud.

  ‘How can I say? You know as much as I.’

  But the agent was outraged. ‘This is a respectable establishment, sir. Whatever has occurred here, whatever has happened to this young lady, it is not allowed. I am afraid she will have to vacate at once.’

  And Alasdair sprang to his feet. ‘Damn you—the young lady has disappeared! Do you not understand this fact?’

  ‘That is no concern of mine,’ countered the man, and he drew himself up stiffly in the face of this sudden truculence. ‘I have a duty to my client. I shall be forced to terminate the lease henceforth. Please remove the lady’s items immediately.’

  Alasdair advanced a step towards the man.

  ‘These rooms, sir, are paid for until the end of the year. And I have paid for them. If you do not wish to receive a legal writ and a visit from my lawyers, if you do not wish to see your position with your employer terminated forthwith, you will get out—’