The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  ‘Hear, hear!’

  ‘A nation can only be great inasmuch as the whole of its people enjoy that greatness, feel that greatness, and can leave it as an inheritance to their children.’

  Miss Scott paused and looked at her audience. She leaned forward. She abandoned the lectern entirely and walked to the edge of the platform.

  ‘Ladies, is there anything in the bill that will make the people—the many, not the few—happy and prosperous? Certainly a few people will walk the floor of the proposed new two-house parliament, a few people will draw handsome salaries, a few people will rejoice in a great increase of power. We, the people, will be taxed to pay for all these things and as compensation we will have the pleasure of trying to make ends meet, a thing politicians never do. Ladies, I urge all of you to have nothing to do with this unjust bill!’

  The room erupted and all but a handful were soon on their feet, hats in the air, feet stamping the ground so that the very foundations of the hall shook.

  ‘Really!’ said Miss Dempsey loudly in Eleanor’s ear. ‘Have you ever heard such wantonly militant, such deplorably misguided nonsense?’

  As the roar went on and on, and it seemed for a time that order would not be restored, Ned Dempsey heaved himself to his feet and acknowledged the applause, and when the hall had fallen silent he placed his thumbs in his waistband and threw back his shoulders and cast a shrewd eye at the expectant onlookers.

  ‘Ladies of Sydney,’ he began, and there was more applause. ‘The ordinary healthy, happy woman is generally an uninterested conservative. Home and friends, perhaps husband and children, fill up the measure of her desire, and she sees no reason for wishing to alter the old ways, which have brought her satisfaction. But when a great subject is under discussion, when a great movement is afoot, she must wake from her lethargy of indifference!’

  A silence followed this, then a smattering of applause, not least from Miss Dempsey who was fervent in her enthusiasm, but it was a brave gambit, indeed, accusing one’s audience of lethargic indifference and Eleanor, peering at the speaker in some astonishment, was surely not the only person in the hall to recognise that his entire opening speech had been lifted word for word from Tuesday’s Herald.

  The remainder of Mr Dempsey’s address fell rather flat, urging as he was the ladies of the colony to encourage their menfolk to vote against the bill while at the same time declaring that their place was in the home supporting their husbands and their husbands’ views. It was a contrary position to take and the applause he received was, accordingly, somewhat muted and Miss Dempsey, who expressed herself quite offended, proposed they depart at once.

  The road outside the town hall had cleared and the woman who was run over, if it had been a woman, was gone to the morgue or to the hospital or back to whichever gin house she had stumbled out of. A young Aboriginal boy took the penny that Eleanor offered and went off to secure a cab for her, returning triumphantly a few minutes later. There was little point in taking Miss Dempsey with her, for the Dempseys lived in another part of town entirely, Ned Dempsey’s loss of his cabinet post and any attendant income necessitating a sudden and dramatic change of residence. But twenty years a politician’s wife had taught Eleanor that these things were not irreversible—a year from now Ned Dempsey might be Attorney-General or Premier (though one hoped not), and it was as well to maintain some connection with his sister in the meantime. So Eleanor kissed Marian Dempsey warmly on both cheeks and left her on Darlington Road to fend for herself as best she could.

  The ride home through the darkened streets was exhilarating. Rain had been forecast, though there was no sign of it yet; it was a cloudless night, cold and still, and the moon hung in the eastern sky, casting a glow over the rooftops.

  And Eleanor was elated. The reason for her elation remained elusive, yet she felt it was tied up somehow with these women at the meeting who wished to vote at the referendum and, if they could not do so, then they wished to have nothing to do with it. It seemed to Eleanor churlish and not a little ridiculous, for the referendum would go ahead regardless, yet they spoke as though this state of affairs—paid employment, voting, the payment of taxes—was something to aspire to.

  And she could not agree, she could not understand it. Her own mother had worked in paid employment—cleaning and gutting fish down at the quay when little more than a child before the schoolmaster, John Bass, newly arrived in the colony, had offered her a life of modest respectability in Balmain: a respectability her mother had grasped at with both hands and clung tenaciously to, and when she had found herself widowed and her children dead and that respectability threatened, she had married the retired Captain Tremaine and moved into his cottage and raised a child she could enrol in piano lessons and take to edifying lectures at the local town hall. No, there had been nothing in her mother’s grim childhood to which one might aspire.

  And there was even less in that of her grandmother, Molly Dowd, a domestic servant in a merchant’s house in Liverpool, England, and transported at the age of eighteen for some undefined misdemeanour in the first decade of the century, arriving in the penal colony already six months pregnant with Eleanor’s mother. She was an elusive and shadowy figure this Molly Dowd, the year of her birth and the date or place of her death being unknown and unsubstantiated. She had disappeared very early from Eleanor’s mother’s life, the misdemeanour that got her transported being sometimes euphemistically referred to by her mother as theft and other times as lewd and licentious behaviour though it seemed clear to Eleanor, now, that her enterprising grandmother had been caught selling the one thing she had—herself—right under the roof of the merchant’s house. Again, hardly something to aspire to.

  Next month her mother would be twenty years dead and there was no one now who remembered that Eliza Tremaine had ever been Eliza Bass, and one would have to go far back into the annals of the colony to connect Eliza Bass, schoolmaster’s widow, with Eliza Dowd, daughter of a felon. No one ever had made this connection, so far as Eleanor knew, and for this she was thankful, for while it was fine to live in a colony that had sprung triumphantly from the quagmire of a penal settlement, it was quite another to have a grandmother who was a convict and, in all likelihood, a prostitute.

  But yet Eleanor was elated. To attend a political meeting on one’s own was, it turned out, invigorating. She had sat through hundreds of dull political meetings in her time, always as Alasdair’s wife, always with the single thought on her mind: was it enough to get him elected, was it enough for him to retain his seat? She had rarely, if ever, considered what Alasdair said at such meetings, what the other speakers said, what might be at stake. For if one had no power in a society, why should one concern oneself with its politics? She did not know the answer to this but it troubled her. Her elation waned a little.

  The cab plunged downwards towards Elizabeth Bay and she called out instructions to the driver. He pulled up at the house and leaped down to open the door and pull down the step. At the same time the front door opened and Alice burst out, hastening to her with an unfurled umbrella though the sky was still clear, perhaps a cloud or two rolling in now from the west, but there was certainly no need for the umbrella. And Eleanor said, rather curtly for her elation had faded now, ‘No, Alice, it is not raining. Please take it away. Though it is rather cold. I shall go up to my room directly. Is there a fire lit? Then do so, and I should like a warm drink, perhaps a coffee.’

  She went into the house and disgorged hat, gloves and coat and Alice dropped first one glove and then the other, then, realising she had left the front door wide open and the cold air coming in, attempted to close it and only succeeded in dropping all the items she held. She seemed close to tears. This was irritating, for one does not want a maid who cries.

  ‘Your clumsiness does not improve, Alice, though I had fervently hoped it would,’ sighed her mistress, who at that moment loathed the enforced dullness of forever maintaining a house, of forever maintaining a front before the servants. ‘He
lp me off with these boots. We encountered the worst kind of streets this evening and were obliged to walk some distance and I fear it has spoiled the leather.’

  ‘Yes, madam. And, madam, Mr Dunlevy is in the drawing room,’ said Alice.

  ‘Eleanor.’

  Alasdair called to her from the drawing room and she stood up, the boots now removed, a soft pair of house shoes in their place. Eleanor smoothed down her lavender skirt and studied herself in the mirror that filled one wall of the hallway. She remembered she had felt elated in the cab.

  ‘Thank you, Alice, you may go,’ she said, and she waited for the girl to curtsy and depart before entering the room. ‘Alasdair.’

  He stood with his back to her at the fireplace, though no fire was lit, and perhaps he had not long returned for the room was cold, his gloves laid carelessly on an occasional table as though he had come home in a great hurry and there had been no time for Alice to put away his things. He turned and studied her silently, as she had just studied herself in the mirror, and under his gaze she swept into the room and sank down on a chair.

  He said nothing, though he had called for her, and she could not quite read him; there was a tension that she recognised, for it had been present a great deal recently, something held tightly in check.

  ‘You attended the anti-bill meeting this evening,’ he said at last.

  ‘I did.’

  He turned back to the fireplace, looked down at his feet, one resting on the brass fender, then he turned back.

  ‘And do you not think—’ he paused, appeared to be searching for the right words, and went on ‘—that for the wife of a pro-Federation minister to attend a vehemently and very public anti-Federation demonstration might be highly compromising and extremely embarrassing? That it might, in fact, be considered an act of disloyalty, of betrayal? That it might harm, irreparably, your husband’s career?’

  ‘No, I had not considered that. I do not consider it now.’

  ‘Indeed!’ He threw back his head, disbelieving, it seemed, her calm denial.

  How had he found out, and so quickly, before she was even returned? Someone had seen her at the meeting (the reporter perhaps—Peters of the Mail, or some other). She realised she had not intended to tell him, or perhaps that she might wait until the referendum was over and done with and then she might reveal it, amusingly, triumphantly, over breakfast. But Alasdair had found out and it was somehow not amusing, it was not triumphant.

  ‘Alasdair, you did not wish me to accompany you to your meeting tonight so I went, instead, to my own. Is that so very wrong?’

  His head swung around and he stood over her. ‘You did this to spite me? Do you think this is a game, then? All that I have strived for, that this colony has strived for, democracy, the Federation—is it merely a child’s game to you?’

  ‘Until I am allowed to have my say in the new nation, yes, I rather think it is.’

  ‘Your say?’ And he laughed. ‘So now you are a suffragist? Good God, this is not about votes for women, it is about building a nation! It is bad enough that these foolish women choose to appropriate the Federation for their own ends, but to have my own wife fall under their spell, to publicly throw in her support for them—it is intolerable!’

  ‘I did no such thing! I merely sat in a chair—’

  ‘Do not pretend to such naivety, Eleanor. You are a minister’s wife and when you attend a meeting like that it will be assumed you support it. And you were seen, make no mistake about that.’ ‘And tomorrow I intend to attend the pro-Federation league at the town hall. Surely that—’

  ‘No! You will not attend any meeting, for or against. You will remain in this house and receive no callers. You will speak to no one until the referendum is over.’

  She gasped, half laughing. ‘You are not serious, Alasdair? I am to remain here, a prisoner in my own home, for—for ten days? Do not be absurd. It is monstrous! Preposterous!’

  ‘It is my will. If you have engagements, you may send word that you are indisposed. I will not be challenged on this.’

  Eleanor stood up. She walked a little away and then she returned. She stood before him. ‘You would censure me?’ And when he made no reply, ‘You have made a grave error of judgement, Alasdair, if you insist on this.’

  ‘I am your husband and I do insist on it.’

  They faced each other in the very centre of the room, in a yard or two of empty space in a room that positively overflowed with chairs and many little tables and a glut of paintings on the walls and vast lustrous ferns in great pots that they had selected together, she and he, and arranged for their comfort and pleasure and so that others might see and appreciate their good taste, and it was all rendered redundant. Their very furniture mocked them at this moment, or so it seemed to Eleanor. She had no use for it, for this room.

  ‘You leave me no choice,’ she said, and she spoke only in part to her husband, and in part to the furniture and the room that contained it. ‘I know about Miss Trent.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  DECEIT

  And yet Alasdair’s evening had begun well enough. The Federation meeting in Marrickville. The town hall crowded, lively even. The rain, threatening all day, had held off. And he had no sooner arrived than a note from the Premier was thrust into his hand by a parliamentary messenger requesting his presence on the three-day tour of the southern districts. They were to depart on the morrow and if this short notice implied someone else had fallen ill or was otherwise indisposed and himself a last minute replacement, what of it? It was an opportunity and he would grasp at it.

  After such news it had proved no easy task to turn one’s thoughts to the meeting. One of the speakers had failed to turn up but this was not necessarily a bad thing, for the minister who did put in an appearance, the Secretary for Public Monies, now assumed centre stage; gave the final speech of the evening and accepted the applause, the accolades. The event ended with welcome promptness, even a little early. Then, right at the very close of the meeting, some grog-soaked wretch in rags who had haunted the rear of the hall throughout the meeting and been noisily ejected at one point had reappeared, this time clutching a screaming brat in her arms, had come up to the stage and thrown herself at Alasdair, hurling some incomprehensible invective and, when this failed to have the desired effect, spitting on his face and lapel and having to be forcibly manhandled away by three attendant constables.

  Alasdair had no sooner extricated himself from his outrage, pushing the flustered Greensmith aside and tearing off his soiled coat, than his eyes had fallen in astonishment on the grizzled face of Gregson, the hospital administrator.

  For a moment he had stared at the man—those bushy white whiskers, the stiff high collar, that old-fashioned frockcoat, those absurd pince-nez—appalled, as though he had been caught out in a lie. Which, he supposed, he had. Certainly Gregson had every right to be here; it was a public meeting and this was, presumably, the man’s domain. But Alasdair was appalled. His anonymity, or the illusion of it, was shattered.

  ‘Come away from this circus of madness, Dunlevy, my carriage is outside.’

  This, perhaps, was the most unlikely turn the evening had taken: George Drummond-Smith appearing at his elbow and offering an unlikely escape. And himself accepting, though in his disorientated state Alasdair had not so much accepted the offer of escape as found himself bundled into a waiting hansom cab, the door slamming shut on him, and himself and Drummond-Smith fleeing the scene.

  ‘Your meetings are, by some measure, the most entertaining, Dunlevy,’ Drummond-Smith declared as the cab set off northwards along Illawarra Road at a brisk clip, and he had settled himself into his seat, the better to observe his fellow passenger. ‘Didn’t the last one descend into pitched battle?’

  ‘Hardly that!’

  Now he had caught his breath a little, Alasdair sat up, rearranged one or two items of apparel that had become disarranged, and began to consider how he might, with dignity, extricate himself from the cab. Even
five minutes in the confined space of a hansom cab with this man, Drummond-Smith, was not to be borne.

  ‘I have amused myself greatly this evening observing, first, Henderson’s meeting at Erskineville then Arnold’s meeting at St Peters,’ Drummond-Smith continued. ‘I have heard Arnold spoken of as a future premier but after this evening’s performance I am afraid I simply cannot see it. Dull. Utterly turgid, staid and dull. Your meeting, however—’ at which point he actually leaned over and tapped Alasdair on the knee with his cane ‘—a positive riot of exuberant spirit! Speaking of which, my evening began with the delightful ladies of the Women’s Suffrage League who met at Darlington to speak against Federation—but of course, you already knew this, Mrs Dunlevy being counted among their number.’

  Alasdair had extricated himself from the cab at that point, his dignity no longer a priority. He had come home on his own. He had awaited his wife’s return.

  It was a lengthy wait. For much of it, Alasdair sat perfectly still on the armchair that his wife usually favoured. He did know why he had chosen this armchair.

  They were all his armchairs, of course. Paid for with his money.

  It was the ride home with Drummond-Smith. It drove the breath from his body. Made him feel as though he might break every stick of furniture in the room. Forced him to recall, in every tormenting detail, the incident last year, the accusations that had followed it.

  He stood up, unable to remain stationary any longer. He walked about the room.

  But was it not almost exactly a year since Eleanor had lost the child?

  This pulled him up short. He thought back. Realised the anniversary had come and gone nine days ago, unnoticed. By himself, at least. And three days later the vote had been lost.

  He took up his pacing again, but slower now. It was not a time he wished to recall. Eleanor had been bedridden for some weeks afterwards and he had been a little afraid of her, he realised, during that time. His wife facing an enemy he could not defeat—her own body, God’s will, call it what you may.