by Maggie Joel
‘Stop it!’ cried Alice, for who can bear to hear their own fears voiced—and with such grim satisfaction—by another? ‘That ain’t so! Not nowadays. There’s laws against it.’
‘Laws?’ Mrs Flynn laughed. She laughed so hard she had to pull up a chair and heave herself into it.
And it was funny, hilarious even, the idea that the law existed to protect people like themselves.
Alice went back to her work. She cleaned a tea stain from the carpet so that you would not know it was there. She polished the silver. She cleaned all the shoes that she had not cleaned over the last few days.
She answered a summons from Mrs Dunlevy.
Sydney Hospital was in Macquarie Street on the site of the old Rum Hospital. That notorious structure, built by convicts to house convicts, had been constructed on a grand scale but with a breathtaking disregard for workmanship. It had suffered repeated outbreaks of typhoid, and on hot summer days the smell from the drains was so foul it disrupted parliament next door. As the century drew to a close the old hospital had finally been pulled down and this new building constructed, this time of solid no-nonsense colonial sandstone with a handful of turrets, elevated colonnades and cast-iron lace balustrades thrown in to add a dash of whimsical high Victorian romanticism. The members of the two legislative chambers could breathe easily once more.
In Macquarie Street the working day was ending, the road and walkways congested with merchants and shop workers and clerks and lawyers heading to the quay and the tram stops, and it was under the cover of these crowds and the fading daylight that Alasdair Dunlevy ascended the two flights of steps and entered the hospital through its green double doors.
Here, on the other side of the doors, was a foyer beneath a distant and lofty ceiling, a floor tiled ambitiously in marble, and walls richly panelled in dark cedar. A staircase of the same timber, wide and resplendent, rose to a half-landing that was walled entirely by stained glass, before dividing in two. The effect was half English manor house, half gentlemen’s club and the occasional nurses, stiffly dressed and with covered heads, who silently crossed and recrossed the space were as spectral nuns in a medieval convent, so that Alasdair stood for a moment, confused by the silence, by the calm, by the improbable scale of it all. Here to his left was a boardroom, its door ajar, showing tall, arched windows that gazed with a certain sedate benevolence at the mercantile bustle of Macquarie Street below, and nestled discreetly beside the doorway was a modest reception desk.
A clerk stood behind the little reception desk, waiting, and Alasdair, who made speeches in the Assembly chamber and routinely addressed a hundred or more men at Federation meetings, could feel the young man’s gaze upon him and was disconcerted. He had hoped to find his own way—to request assistance was, at this moment, abhorrent to him—but the impossibility of this was apparent. The corridors to left and right told him nothing, they might lead anywhere.
At last the clerk could wait no longer. ‘May I assist you, sir?’ He sounded a little impatient. This gentleman plainly needed assistance yet refused to ask for it, and clearly this irritated the young man, who appeared to have no other function than to assist those who did not know their way.
Alasdair turned to the man—who was slight and pale and brittle in the manner of one who is the first in their family to wear a collar and not toil all day with their hands—and addressed him. ‘I am enquiring after a patient,’ he said. And then he raised up his heart, for it still caused him a moment of breathlessness to utter her name: ‘It is a Miss Trent, whom I believe was brought here sometime early on Saturday morning.’
Offering no comment, the man consulted a large ledger opened on the desk before him, moving his finger down a list. And as this was his sole purpose, the pinnacle of his function as it were, he did so with a flourish and a solemnity that was impressive, or was intended to be. He turned a page, he moved his finger down a second column and then the finger paused. A tiny frown creased the man’s features. He looked up at the gentleman making the enquiry. He looked down again and the frown deepened. A slight flush appeared on his face.
Alasdair felt a tightening in his stomach.
‘Would you oblige me, sir, by waiting here one moment?’ said the clerk, and without awaiting a reply he emerged from the reception desk and scuttled across the tiled foyer and up the staircase.
Alasdair now understood that Miss Trent had died. The frown on the clerk’s face, the finger poised on the page, the slight flush to his face, leaving his post to seek assistance—all of it told him she was dead.
He wondered at the great wave that now rushed over him, for it swept up every part of him, leaving nothing in its wake, and yet he remained here in the marble-tiled foyer, at the reception desk. He saw the thick cream-coloured pages of the ledger, the neatly entered columns of names. He saw the clever workmanship of the desk, how the corners had been worked so that the joins were invisible. He saw the names of the hospital board and its benefactors engraved on a great panel on the wall. He saw all these things, though his mind seemed gone.
The clerk returned accompanied by a second man, much older and more senior, in thick white whiskers, a stiff high collar and an old-fashioned frockcoat, carrying pince-nez which he placed on his nose as he approached. There was a coldness about this man, a disapproval striving to appear as blandness.
‘Would you come this way?’ the man said with no preamble, no introduction, as though he dealt habitually with people of no consequence. But Alasdair found himself following, for it was easier to have someone else decide what he must do, even someone like this man.
They ascended the wide and resplendent staircase to the floor above and walked in silence for a time along a featureless corridor until they came, finally, to a door. Beyond was an office, plain and thinly carpeted and airless, a place of bureaucratic functions and small tasks. The hospital official entered the office, sat down at a desk and leaned forward a little. He had mastered his features now. He was businesslike.
‘My name is Gregson,’ he announced, when Alasdair had followed him in and taken the seat opposite. ‘You are enquiring about a patient, I believe. A Miss Trent?’
Alasdair was. They knew this. He inclined his head. He had not removed his hat. It was not that sort of a place, not that sort of occasion.
The official, Gregson, did not continue at once. Instead, he studied his visitor through slightly narrowed eyes, stroked his beard, ran a fingernail over his front teeth, and Alasdair despised him.
But the man was talking. What was he saying? Alasdair brushed the man’s words aside. He cut him off.
‘Does she live?’ he demanded. ‘Does Miss Trent live or not?’
Gregson sat back, affronted. ‘Certainly, sir, she lives, though she remains gravely ill and her recovery is in no way assured.’
He said more but Alasdair found himself at the window, and after a moment or two found he looked out upon the courtyard at the rear of the hospital, at a circle of lawn and a fountain mounted on a sandstone plinth. He tried to make sense of the scene but could not. He turned back to the room and to its jumble of chaotic images which now sorted themselves once more into a man seated at a desk, talking.
‘You are aware that Miss Trent was in police custody when she was brought here?’
But the man’s words made no sense. Alasdair sat down, seizing the chair as a sinner seizes absolution. ‘I think not. You have made an error, sir.’
The realisation that they were talking at cross purposes, that this man was speaking of some other woman entirely and Verity might, after all, be lying in the morgue, was an agony beyond endurance.
Gregson frowned so deeply he was required to place his forefinger and thumb on the pince-nez so that they did not fall off. He studied again the records laid before him.
‘Miss Verity Trent of Woolloomooloo. Brought in on Saturday morning last, under the charge of two constables. Suffering severe loss of blood and possible internal injury and infection.’
Ala
sdair shook his head. He did not speak for a time. ‘I do not understand,’ he said finally.
And Gregson gazed steadily at him. The man was old, so old he might have worked here when convicts walked the hallways of the original building, so old his white beard was as yellow as ancient parchment. His eyes were not unkindly, but they had looked for too many years on too much hardship and desperation to be anything other than dimmed and remote. He reached up and removed the pince-nez from his nose and slid them into a pocket, a gesture that had, perhaps, assisted him through the ages to navigate difficult interviews.
‘Sir, what is your connection to this woman, if I may enquire?’
‘You may not.’
Gregson gave a sad, almost imperceptible nod of his whiskered head. ‘Then I am afraid I can tell you no more.’ He closed the book that was open on the desk before him.
Alasdair slammed both hands down on the desk that separated them. ‘You will not tell me of what it is Miss Trent is charged?’
‘I will not—unless, sir, you have some connection to Miss Trent, the nature of which you are willing to divulge.’
‘How dare you, sir!’
Alasdair found himself on his feet, his chair toppled backwards. It was ludicrous to take offence when what the man seated before him had hinted at was undeniably true. Yet here he was, offended, denying.
He righted his chair. He sat down. He met the man’s gaze. ‘Very well then. Miss Trent is a member of my constituency. That is, her fiancé was. The fellow was a recent arrival to our shores who took up a position and found a place to live within my constituency. And then promptly died. She arrived—Miss Trent—from England a few weeks later to find her fiancé deceased and herself in a very invidious, precarious even, position. She tried various places and people, or so I understand, but none would aid her. At last, and taking the advice of whom I cannot say, she presented herself at my office and my secretary took her particulars. Made cognisant of her plight, I instructed my secretary to render what small assistance we could. It was, I am ashamed to say, little more than the address of a boarding house where Miss Trent might safely reside and one or two other names of persons who may be able to assist her. She had no family, it seemed, here or in England. That was the extent of my contact with the unfortunate lady until yesterday, when we learned she was no more at the boarding house and was understood to be here at this hospital. If some awful occurrence has befallen her, then, having taken some initial interest in her case, I feel duty-bound to render my assistance.’
Alasdair raised his chin and stared the man down. There was enough truth in this drawn-out explanation to allow a glow of self-congratulation at the compassion, the benevolence of his actions. If his actions had very soon gone beyond benevolence, well, that was no one’s business but his own.
The ageing Mr Gregson remained impassive, unmoved by this speech, other than to remark, ‘Am I to understand you are a member of parliament, sir?’
Alasdair inclined his head.
The old fellow appeared to consider and then to make up his mind. ‘Very well then. Miss Trent, I am sorry to say, appears to have found herself in a certain condition.’ He looked directly at Alasdair as a man did who wished his meaning to convey more than his words could.
And they did convey meaning.
Alasdair reeled. ‘She is with child?’
Alice found her mistress seated at her writing desk, though there was no paper before her on the desk and no pen in her hand. Mrs Dunlevy sat very upright, looking towards the window. A branch of the big tree outside tapped softly against the glass and for a moment they both observed it.
‘Alice,’ said Mrs Dunlevy, ‘you went out last night and you took something with you, something from the house, and you returned very late. Can you explain what you were doing and what it was that you took?’
The branch tapped again, softly, the merest brush of leaves against glass, but insistently, as though its destiny was to overrun the house and return this place to its original state, if not today or next year, then eventually. What was stone and brick and glass compared to God’s own work, compared to a tree?
Alice felt a coldness spread through her body. ‘I did go out, madam, yes.’
Though how Mrs Dunlevy could know of it when Alice had gone out after her and returned to the house before her, she did not know. And even as she wondered this a curtain twitched in the upstairs window of the house opposite and the elderly lady who lived there, who never left her house, who sat hour upon empty hour at this very window, appeared briefly—triumphantly!—and was gone.
‘I am very sorry I did not ask before I went, madam, but I was desperate.’
Mrs Dunlevy turned very slowly to face her, and lifted her eyebrow enquiringly. ‘Desperate?’
‘Yes, madam. What I mean is I had forgot some of the laundry, and so when the girl came to take it away some got left behind. I realised it and I bundled it up and I went out, late, after you and Mr Dunlevy had gone out for the evening, and I took it there myself. I know I should have told you, madam, but I had made a mistake and I did not wish it known.’
Mrs Dunlevy turned back to the window. She did so with a single smooth movement that involved head, neck, shoulders, her expression not changing, the eyebrow returned to its normal position. She does not move like we do, thought Alice, like most people; she moves like a swan. Alice had not seen a swan, but she had the sense that this was how one would move: slowly, gracefully, without the ugly, jerking, hurried movements that other people made, that she herself made, could not help making. It was the difference between them. One of the differences.
Alice’s hands shook. She clenched them tightly into fists behind her back.
‘This is just the latest, then, in a series of errors you have made recently, Alice,’ said Mrs Dunlevy, turning once more and studying her steadily, gravely.
Alice waited. Her gaze, no match for her mistress’s, sunk to the floor.
‘Things have been left undone, or they have been done late—the laundry, the dusting, the beds, the silver. The list goes on. Do not think I have not observed it. Your work has become sloppy.’
It seemed extraordinary to Alice that the thing she had feared—this very meeting with her employee, these exact words spoken—had come to pass. And because she had imagined it, had feared it and now it was happening, she felt very far away, watching herself from elsewhere, another Alice Nimrod, not herself.
‘It is true I did get behind, madam,’ said the other Alice, ‘but I have worked double hard today to catch up. And I have caught up now, madam.’
‘I am glad to hear it, for I will not put up with laziness. You have a good position here and mark my words, Alice, I will not be made a fool of, do you understand?’
Mrs Dunlevy’s expression did not change, nor did her gaze fix directly on Alice but at some distant place that only she could see. A cold place, it seemed to Alice.
‘Yes, madam. Of course, madam.’
‘Then you may go. We shall say no more about it. For now.’
Alice left, both the Alice in the room with Mrs Dunlevy and the Alice observing from a great distance and now, all in a rush, the two Alices collided once more into a single Alice who found herself filled with such a jumble of different emotions she could not think. She stumbled once as she walked across the landing.
Much later she went up to her room in the attic. She did not have a writing desk nor paper nor pen. But she did have a piece of an old laundry bill and a pencil. And she did have a little table beside her bed, and if she moved the water jug to the floor she could make a space to write. She considered for a moment and then she wrote, as she had always known she was going to from the moment she had picked up Mr Dunlevy’s newspaper:
Dear Mrs Flowers …
Verity was with child. It had not occurred to Alasdair. And yet why should she not be with child? His child.
The elderly clerk watched him, watched his face, seeing all or seeing nothing, it was impossible to tel
l.
‘Yes, I am afraid so,’ the man said, with a sigh for all of Man’s failings or, more precisely, for all of Woman’s failings. ‘I fear you were sadly deceived by Miss Trent, sir. She was not set upon the moral path you must have presumed. Or if she was, she has strayed very far from it.’
‘Indeed,’ said Alasdair.
But a child! His ears rang with it. And she had told him nothing, though they had lain together so intimately, her nakedness a thing of wonder in his arms, her breath on his chest, the softness of her flesh beneath his fingers. He had done this, given her his most precious gift, and with it she had created a child. Their child.
He would not think of that other child, the one his wife had carried inside her for eight months and that had reversed the natural order of things by dying before it was born.
But the joy and the grief—they made him giddy!
‘She has been offered spiritual support but refused it, I believe,’ continued the clerk in the manner of one for whom the rejection of God’s love was, clearly, incomprehensible.
‘Then I shall see her myself,’ Alasdair declared, rising once more and casting himself, in both their eyes, the hero.
But there was something, a cliff edge it was, that he remembered he stood at, balanced precariously. He peered over its edge and felt the dizziness of vertigo.
‘She has not said who the father is, I take it?’
The elderly clerk shook his head. ‘She has not. As I say, she remains in a state of unconsciousness. Though perhaps she has said something to the police? I cannot say. And perhaps the wretched woman does not, herself, know.’
‘Good God,’ said Alasdair, as this seemed expected.
The precipice was gone. But at once a second opened up to take its place, this one right beneath his feet and he almost could not speak.
‘But, Mr Gregson, you mentioned the police. I still do not understand why the police are involved. There was an injury to Miss Trent, but—no, I am afraid I do not understand.’
Or perhaps he did. Perhaps he had known from the moment he had arrived at the hospital, for when the old man replied his words were the words he was always destined to speak, words that might have been revealed by a prophet centuries earlier in a Book of Revelation: ‘Miss Trent attended a doctor who performed a certain illegal operation on her person and now the child is no more.’
