The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Yes, here were the words, and they were not the word of God, they were the word of Man, a man bewhiskered and benign and seated at a desk, a man who believed in compassion yet spoke with loathing.

  ‘The operation, naturally, was done without the blessing of law or church,’ Gregson went on, relentless and precise, ‘and for her sin she has found herself gravely ill and in the custody of the police. It is, sad to say, not an uncommon story in our colony. If Miss Trent lives, she will go to prison. If she dies—well, one does not wish to speculate on her likely fate.’

  He had finished, rather pleased with himself, as is the minister in his pulpit who contemplates the sins of his congregation and sees himself above them.

  Alasdair did not move. The breath had been driven from his body and he seemed no longer to hear properly. Words came and went, some audible, most very faintly. He saw the man’s lips moving and even those words he did hear ceased to have any meaning attached to them. He understood something very dreadful had happened and that it would pass, as all things did. He sat very still waiting for it to do so.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE WIFE OF THE MINISTER

  CONSTABLES ATTEND UNCONSCIOUS WOMAN

  Near death of female sought by police

  A woman was brought to the Sydney Hospital on Saturday last in an unconscious state and in the custody of two police constables.

  The woman, whose name was not released though it is believed she heralds from the Woolloomooloo area, was said to be suffering greatly from a loss of blood and is at present described as gravely ill. A charge of using drugs or instruments to procure abortion contrary to Section 58 of the Offences against the Person Act was levelled on the young woman, who is thought to be of about 21 or 22 years of age and a recent arrival to our shores.

  The police constables had gone to arrest the woman at a boarding house at the above-mentioned district when they discovered her in a state of unconsciousness having apparently lost a great deal of blood.

  It is thought that, had the constables not arrived when they did and immediately rendered assistance, the woman, who was weak and close to death, would surely have perished before the day was over.

  The story was hidden away on page five of the Herald, in among the Divorce Court listings, the reports from the quarter sessions and an advertisement for a family cough mixture, and Eleanor, seated at breakfast with a cup of coffee, almost missed it.

  A heat flared up in her so fiercely her face grew hot and red. Her hands shook and in her haste to turn the page she tore the newspaper. But the story was gone now. In its place, page six was safe and calming, a refuge filled with the upcoming Federation referendum—though, even here, those insistent black headlines swam before her eyes, stripped of meaning. On her face her flesh burned. It betrayed her.

  Well, and what of it? There was no one but herself to witness it. Alasdair had breakfasted early; he was now upstairs in his study preparing for the day ahead. She breakfasted alone.

  She placed the newspaper on the table, she removed the reading glasses her husband did not know she wore.

  The maid, Alice, burst into the room brandishing muffins fresh from the oven and butter in a little dish. (Or it seemed to Eleanor that the maid burst in and brandished. All was extreme and excessive this morning.) Alice curtsied. She placed the muffins on the table and Eleanor searched for hidden meanings in the maid’s mumbled, ‘Madam.’ After a time Alice withdrew.

  Eleanor picked up the newspaper. She turned back to page five.

  It was there still. The words remained. She read them again—slower this time, for what if she had been mistaken the first time? She was not mistaken. It was Miss Trent.

  Eleanor closed the newspaper and looked to the window. The frangipani was bald at this time of year, and on an upper branch a large black-and-white currawong was perched, whistling and trilling with an urgency that suggested some predator was about. It turned its head this way and that emitting an urgent warning.

  It had not occurred to her that Miss Trent might die. There had been blood on the carpet, a spot or two. Perhaps more by the time she had left. If she had thought Miss Trent might die, that Miss Trent was in mortal danger, what might she have done? Eleanor did not know. Perhaps nothing, perhaps something.

  She had gone to the police. They had waited overnight and then come for her and, it seemed, had saved the girl’s life. If the police had not come, who would have? Perhaps no one.

  So, did I condemn the girl to death or did I save her life? Eleanor wondered. She did not know. She had wished to play with fate, hadn’t she? To alter destinies. Now that she had played God she felt a little sick. A little frightened.

  She saw that her own part in the incident was not mentioned in the newspaper. No one knew of it except herself and the girl, Miss Trent.

  The predator that had set off the currawong’s urgent warning was a carriage attended by her husband’s secretary, Mr James Greensmith, come to take them to the railway station. They were to attend a pro-Federation reception at Penrith as guests of the mayor and the mayoress.

  ‘It is Mr Greensmith, madam,’ said Alice, appearing in the doorway and looking startled, though he was a frequent enough visitor.

  ‘Show him in, Alice. Mr Greensmith, please sit down. Have you breakfasted?’

  Her husband’s secretary, that ambitious young man, pleasant of feature with a keen eye for a fine suit of clothes and a smart gentleman’s hat, blushed furiously, as he was wont to do when alone, however briefly, with his employer’s wife.

  He appeared now to cast about for an appropriate response. ‘I have breakfasted, thank you, Mrs Dunlevy.’ He stood just inside the door, so that Alice had to move around him to get out. He carried a letter for the minister that he crushed in his hand then hastily smoothed again.

  ‘But you will join me in a cup of coffee. Or tea perhaps?’

  Faced with further alarming questions, Mr Greensmith nodded. ‘Coffee would be most welcome. But please, let me.’ And he darted forward, perceiving coffee pot and cups on the table and availing himself of both before resuming his position by the door.

  ‘Please do sit, I beg you, Mr Greensmith. I am not nearly ready, as you see, and shall need to abandon you for a time while I go upstairs. My husband will, I am sure, join you soon.’

  She excused herself, taking up the morning newspaper, and withdrew with it clutched in her hand, and the way James Greensmith observed her one might think he had never before in his life seen his employer’s wife with a newspaper.

  They were to catch the eleven o’clock train, so why Mr Greensmith had arrived to convey them to the station at nine o’clock was a mystery. It meant he had a very long wait indeed while Eleanor readied herself and gave some thought to selecting the most appropriate hat. Something bright and large and grand, she decided, for they were to travel to Penrith and the elegant hats she had purchased in the city this season could hardly be appreciated by the drovers’ wives whom one met in such places. As the wife of the minister, the people must be able to see her from some distance and they should feel that though she understood, was sympathetic even to their concerns, yet she was separate from them and would always remain so. The hat she selected was plum-coloured and wide of brim and sported a large ostrich feather that sprouted from the crown and trailed opulently behind her.

  She had once, as a girl of perhaps fourteen or fifteen, seen the wife of the new Governor. The Governor had been in the colony just a few months and the whole district had come out to see his wife (for the last Governor’s wife had been killed at Parramatta when her carriage had overturned in the driveway of old Government House—a thing of wonder still, all these years later). The wife of the new Governor had come to open a garden fete, or some such occasion, at the wharf in Balmain. Eleanor had seen her through a crowd of people, fleetingly, a figure slight and slender and elegant in a gown of purest sapphire blue beneath a white parasol that someone held above her head. She had laughed a little and inclined h
er head and the people had gazed upon her as they might a queen or a deity. Eleanor had gazed at her. After a short time the Governor’s wife had left in a carriage and the sun, which had been unrelenting all afternoon, had dipped behind a cloud.

  Eleanor placed the plum-coloured hat just so on her head. She looked at herself. She was no longer red-faced and hot. She was quite pale. She was, she realised, a little frightened.

  Alice stood in the doorway. ‘If you please, madam, Mr Dunlevy is enquiring if you are almost ready yet.’

  Eleanor turned and regarded the maid, who had clearly been sent to hurry her along.

  ‘You may tell Mr Dunlevy I am quite ready, thank you, Alice, and shall be down directly … Is there something else?’ For the maid hesitated.

  ‘Will you be out all day, madam?’

  ‘Yes, I have already informed Mrs Flynn we shall not be back until late afternoon. It is not an excuse to slacken off, Alice.’

  ‘No, madam,’ said Alice, and she left at speed.

  Eleanor stood up but she did not immediately depart. It was warm outside—she had got Alice to open her bedroom window—but Penrith was thirty miles inland and at the foot of the mountains and it was sure to be cold. She wrapped a possum fur about her shoulders and took up a muffler and left her room without a backwards glance.

  Alasdair would not look at her. He stood at the front door, impatient and tapping his cane against his leg, his hat already on, gloves in his hand, and Mr Greensmith stood wretchedly at his side. The letter or telegram brought by the secretary was in Alasdair’s hand and, as Eleanor now appeared, was thrust wordlessly into his pocket.

  ‘Our train departs at ten o’clock,’ Alasdair said. His lips hardly moved as he spoke and he addressed the door, his cane, the wretched Mr Greensmith.

  ‘My dear, I believe you informed me it departs at eleven.’

  ‘No. I certainly did no such thing.’

  ‘Oh, but,’ and she turned to Greensmith, ‘I am sure I am right. Mr Greensmith, you can vouch for me—do you not recall Mr Dunlevy said eleven?’

  And the secretary stared and blinked rapidly at her, appalled to find himself in a such a position.

  ‘For God’s sake, Eleanor! You are not a child. Do not expect me to treat you as one!’ Alasdair placed a hand on her upper arm, his fingers closing around her so that she almost cried out, and marched her out of the house and deposited her at the steps of the carriage. He released his grip and they boarded and sat side by side, Greensmith facing them with his back to the driver. No one spoke.

  On the longest platform at Sydney Terminal Station the train was ready to depart, the doors already closed, a uniformed porter stowing the final bags into the carriage, the guard with the whistle between his lips and the flag in his hand. But at the sight of Mr Greensmith running at him and waving both arms he paused. And whatever Mr Greensmith said, whoever’s name he mentioned, was enough to make the guard lower his flag and fling open a door and even allow himself a little bow and a mumbled, ‘Sir,’ and, ‘My lady,’ and one or two people stuck their heads out of windows and wondered at the tall gentleman and his smart wife who had held up the train yet swept into the first-class carriage with all the dignity of the Governor himself, though the man scowled darkly and his wife stared before her as though she saw nothing and was not really there at all.

  At last the whistle was blown and the flag waved and the train set off on its journey westwards to the mountains and beyond.

  For a time no one spoke. They had reserved a compartment and having found it and seated themselves—Eleanor at the window, Alasdair opposite with Greensmith beside him—they sat in silence as the railway yards at Redfern flew by, followed in quick succession by the suburbs of Stanmore and Petersham and Lewisham. Alasdair studied some documents then lit a cigar. At Ashfield Greensmith offered to go in search of refreshments. It was not known if refreshments were available or not but he seemed anxious to go in search of some, even if meant jumping off the train to do so.

  ‘And, for God’s sake, find me a newspaper,’ Alasdair called after him. ‘Dashed if I know what happened to mine.’

  The door slammed shut behind him and a moment later they set off again and it was not known whether Mr Greensmith had rejoined the train via another carriage or been left behind.

  A train travelling in the other direction sped past, causing the windows to rattle and the compartment to fill with noise. They passed large merchants’ houses with long, shady gardens that dipped down to the railway line. In one of these gardens two little girls in white dresses and wide straw hats waved at their train. Eleanor watched the two little girls, their smiling, upturned faces, the shady strip of lawn dotted with trees on which they stood, the solid respectability of the large merchant’s house behind them, and she felt that she envied them a little. In an instant the two little girls had gone and she had not returned their wave.

  ‘How dare you rebuke me in front of others, Alasdair.’

  She turned to face her husband as she spoke, not knowing, really, that she would speak but, now that she had, a great flood washed over her and it seemed the few words she had spoken barely touched on all she felt, all that she had endured.

  Alasdair did not move and it seemed that he would make no reply. But his hands, shuffling through the pile of papers, became still. ‘You are my wife. I shall rebuke you if I choose.’ He did not look up.

  She turned away and stared straight ahead at the window and another train rushed past with a whoosh of steam and noise, and when the train was gone the whoosh of steam and noise went on, it seemed, inside her own head.

  The houses were less densely packed now, the streets wider. The train stopped at Granville and Mr Greensmith re-entered the compartment triumphantly with tea that no one drank. They went through Blacktown, Rooty Hill, St Marys and Werrington. Now the streets were unpaved, then there were no streets at all, just tracks, and the trees were all eucalypts and paperbarks, the creeks dry, the homesteads sparse.

  Outside Kingswood the train screamed to a halt and the undrunk tea spilled from the cups and splashed onto Alasdair’s papers and Eleanor was flung forward and only Mr Greensmith’s quick thinking saved her from falling.

  ‘Good God, what the devil do they mean by stopping so suddenly?’ said Alasdair.

  ‘I shall go and see, Mr Dunlevy,’ said Greensmith, already pulling open the door.

  Eleanor regained her seat. Some part of her was bruised and tender though she did not attempt to find out which part.

  Through the window blue gums stretched from ridge to ridge as far as the eye could see. If Penrith lay a mile or two up the line, it was well hidden. She and Alasdair had come this way, Eleanor remembered, in the early days of their marriage, when Alasdair was campaigning for his first seat. They had stayed the night in a pub, sleeping in a wretched and rickety old bed that looked like it had come out with the First Fleet and been slept in by every convict and emancipist who had come this way since. An old Aboriginal woman who cleaned the place had said, The Governor slept here once, though which governor she had been unable to say. She had left them with a shrug and a candle and they had fallen, with the fury of youth, onto the bed because it was the early months of their marriage. And Eleanor remembered how the bed had shaken and the plaster had crumbled from the wall. She had been coy at first about their nights together, because it seemed this must be what her new husband wished her to be, but when she had not been coy he seemed to like it more and so she abandoned coyness and she had abandoned herself, enjoying her nakedness and relishing the moments when she shocked him. And while his thoughts had seemed often elsewhere during the daytime, and she had known they dwelled occasionally on other women, at night he had always returned to her. Now it seemed to Eleanor she could as soon reach out and touch the tip of the furthest blue gum as she could reach her husband across the small space of the train compartment.

  ‘It is a great log!’ cried Mr Greensmith, returning to the compartment and full of the news he br
ought. ‘Laid across the tracks and put there deliberately, they are saying. A railway official has come down the line from the next station to warn us and had the driver not seen him and stopped in time we would be wrecked for certain!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ said Eleanor. ‘Are we quite safe, Mr Greensmith, in your opinion?’

  And: ‘This is monstrous!’ said Alasdair, setting aside his papers, standing up and taking the cigar from his mouth as though there were an important decision to be made and he was the one to make it. ‘Is it generally known that I am on this train, Greensmith?’

  ‘There has been no announcement, Mr Dunlevy, but it might reasonably be ascertained by anyone acquainted with your schedule. Or it might merely be coincidence.’

  Greensmith looked at his employer unhappily. A sense that this might in some small but vital way be his responsibility seemed to weigh heavily on the young man’s shoulders.

  He turned to Eleanor. ‘Yes, Mrs Dunlevy, I feel sure we are safe enough. The station is sending down a carriage to take us to Penrith. Though, as there is no very good road nearby, I fear it may take some little time to reach us.’

  ‘Then I suggest,’ said Alasdair, ‘that we wait in the relative safety and anonymity of this compartment until such time as it arrives.’

  ‘We shall be very late for the mayor’s reception,’ said Eleanor.

  They were very late. The carriage when it came could get no nearer than a drover’s track that passed close to the railway some five hundred yards up the line and so the party was required to alight from the stranded train and make its way on foot along the track to the place. Their journey along the five hundred yards of railway track in the chilly air of the lower mountains was made for the most part in silence, Eleanor—a step or two behind her husband, who had set a demanding pace—holding her skirts with as much decorum as the situation allowed for and leaning heavily on Mr Greensmith’s arm. And when it generally became known that a carriage had come to take the stranded passengers on to Penrith there was a great rush of persons exiting the train and making their way along the track only for a nasty scene to follow when it became clear there was only one carriage and only four passengers could be taken. It also transpired that two officials—councillors from neighbouring districts—were aboard the train and were also making their way to the mayor’s reception, which meant Mr Greensmith found himself turned out of the carriage and told to make his way as best he could by other means.