The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  After a time she had rallied and one evening—weeks later, for it had been late October by then—they had attended a reception at Parliament House. Eleanor’s first engagement since the loss of the child, though neither of them had spoken of it in those terms. And he had understood—of course he had!—that it would be arduous for her. Women felt these things more keenly than men. He would be at her side to guide her through it. But in the end he was delayed, a meeting had gone on longer than anticipated, and he arrived at the Assembly lobby some minutes after the hour they had arranged to meet.

  After some little time, when he felt at first concerned by his wife’s non-appearance and then foolish, thinking she had changed her mind and fled home, he saw her emerge from the ladies’ lounge. He started forward. But then he checked himself. For Eleanor had a curious flush on her face and her eyes were quite strange to him. A moment later George Drummond-Smith emerged from the same room, pulling on his gloves and walking with a kind of swagger, as was his wont, but that evening the swagger was accentuated. And any number of others witnessed it, the lobby filling up with parliamentarians and their wives. The looks they exchanged …

  Alasdair felt himself shrink and become quite still. That curious, almost feverish look in his wife’s eyes as she came to him and placed her hand on his arm, turned him utterly cold.

  ‘What were you doing, alone, in a room with that man?’ he asked her, and she stared past him as though she had not heard. Her first engagement since the loss of the child. He had thought to make himself particularly solicitous of her needs, to guide her through it. Now, he wondered. Now, he felt himself a fool.

  How much of a fool? Had his wife merely been careless? Indiscreet? It was contemptible of him to imagine anything more—she had just lost the child, had been bedridden!—but yet he had thought. He had wondered. Had felt an ice-cold seed of doubt take root deep within him.

  The following morning, though surely he had not sought him out, he saw Drummond-Smith in the chamber. Alone. He hesitated on the threshold and in that moment Drummond-Smith saw him and the mocking smile on the man’s face sealed his fate. Perhaps all their fates. A confrontation could not be avoided. Alasdair marched boldly in.

  ‘What do you mean, man, following my wife about like that last night? It is unseemly at best—’

  Drummond-Smith sat back in his seat, shuffled together a pile of papers, settled his gaze on the man before him. ‘If your wife has shown a preference for me over her own husband, I cannot be held responsible—’

  ‘How dare you—’

  ‘—and I would advise you, Dunlevy, not to make a fuss. I hold in my possession certain letters from your wife to me that are, shall we say, less than discreet.’

  ‘I do not believe you!’

  At this Drummond-Smith shrugged, delighted it seemed. He crossed one leg over the other as though he were watching the final overs of a particularly intriguing test match.

  ‘Then by all means go to her,’ he said. ‘Go to your dutiful wife and demand the truth.’

  Alasdair tossed off a laugh at this. At the absurdity of it, the arrogance of the man. But the laugh died, almost at once, on his lips. The enormity of Drummond-Smith’s words—

  That thing that he most feared—

  Even the suggestion that it might be so—

  An indiscretion. A liaison.

  He could not speak. He could not think.

  A liaison between his wife and this—this man!

  There were no letters, of course. Eleanor was not so stupid. But to think that was to admit her capacity for subterfuge, for deceit.

  He could not catch his breath.

  He turned around. He walked away, a pace, perhaps two. He turned back.

  Drummond-Smith just sitting there, observing him.

  By all means go to her!

  The words taunted him, as they were intended to do. He would not go to his wife with such an accusation. He knew it, instantly and as surely as Drummond-Smith knew it. No marriage could survive such an accusation. He could not countenance her denial, would know at once that she lied. And if she did not deny it …

  No, this thought was the most terrible to him.

  That she might be innocent of the charge had become, already, an impossibility and he wondered at how far he had travelled so quickly without even knowing he had departed.

  He turned on his heels and left.

  But something had changed. Some small but vital part of him that had survived the death of the child, the loss of the vote, had succumbed. He had thought about his wife with George Drummond-Smith, whose walrus moustache rivalled that of the Premier himself.

  What he had laughed off as absurd had become tangible. Become the Truth.

  ‘I know about Miss Trent.’

  These words, flung at him by his wife, echoed about the drawing room; they ricocheted from one wall to the other. They silenced the great clock in the hallway and the one on the mantel. They expelled all other thoughts from Alasdair’s head and for a time he was insensible.

  He had misheard, surely? Had inserted these words into the space between them because they were so much on his mind. He had invoked them. Invoked Verity.

  I know about Miss Trent.

  Thoughts crowded and jostled, spilling one over another until he was bewildered. Until his only recourse was attack: ‘How dare you! You would accuse me—my wife!—in my own house?’

  She did not flinch but faced him with a fury that, for a moment, took him aback.

  ‘I have seen you with her! I know where she resides! Here, I have the letter you wrote to her, arranging your tawdry little liaison!’ And with a trembling hand she pulled from her reticule a crumpled envelope and shook it in his face. ‘Do you deny—’

  ‘Hypocrite!’

  The word fell, crashing to the floor, and the cockatoos in the ancient fig outside erupted into screaming flight.

  He repeated it—

  ‘Hypocrite!’

  —and at least had the satisfaction of seeing her step back, the fury turn to—what? He could not guess. But before she could think to summon a reply he caught her by the arm, just above the elbow, holding her fast and speaking in a low voice: ‘I am well aware what you did last year—and as we still grieved for our lost child!’

  The charge was made and in her face he saw—

  But he could no longer read her face, the mask she wore. The strangeness of her, it felled him. And when she began to reply—

  ‘No! Do not speak another word. I will not hear it. Your behaviour is utterly, utterly beyond the pale. I forbid you to speak of this. I forbid you to leave this house or to speak of this to anyone!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ANY TRAIN TO EMU PLAINS

  The rain began as soon as Alice had closed the front door following Mrs Dunlevy’s return. Great fat drops, slowly at first, but with a quality to them that, you knew, meant a downpour, steady and drenching and prolonged. Already Alice could hear it rattling on the roof tiles, dripping into the gutters, pattering onto the leaves of the great fig tree outside.

  She gazed at the discarded items—hat, gloves, coat, the soiled boots—but she did not tidy them. She went to the kitchen. There was a back door here, accessed from the outside via a passage down the side of the house. The grocer’s boy used it, and the coalman and the butcher’s boy and everyone, really, who came to the house who was not Mr or Mrs Dunlevy or one of their guests. Mrs Flynn had used it an hour or so ago, wrapping a shawl over her head and clutching some of the leftover loaf and some of the side of beef and wishing Alice a good night and hurrying out into the darkness.

  Alice shivered, for the nights had grown darker. She no longer saw the twinkling of lights on the harbour from her attic window, she no longer saw the stars on a cloudless night. Or perhaps they were still there—the lights on the harbour, the stars in the night sky—and it was simply that Alice no longer looked for them.

  She went to the back door and she paused, drew breath and opened
it cautiously, just a crack, and peered through into the night and only then standing aside and letting the damp figure who was outside come in.

  ‘Why’d you leave me out in the rain?’ said Mrs Renfrew indignantly, and she handed her bundle to Alice and shook the raindrops from her shawl.

  Alice took the bundle and cradled it in her arms. Then she began to cry, silently and piteously, turning away so that she might not be observed. After a moment she stopped. She lifted the blanket from the baby’s face and stared at it. Its face was a mottled yellowish-pink hue, the dark fuzz of hair on its head a little thinner than it had been. The baby stirred and snuffled, balling up a fist and screwing up its face, but otherwise made no sound.

  ‘Is he alright?’ she asked dubiously.

  ‘Blessed if I know,’ said Mrs Renfrew. ‘He’s alive, ain’t he?’ She stood, looking about her. ‘Coo,’ she said.

  She may or may not have noticed Alice crying silently a moment or two earlier.

  Alice looked around her. ‘This is the kitchen,’ she said, feeling some explanation was required.

  Mrs Renfrew had brought with her an odour, something earthy, pungent, like the thunderboxes of the many houses Alice had lived in as a child. It was a smell the Dunlevys would notice at once, if they had a mind to come this way. She must hurry Mrs Renfrew out again, though she hesitated to do so because it was something, wasn’t it, having someone here to visit her? Not someone delivering the groceries or the meat or the coal but here to see her, Alice Nimrod.

  ‘You been to see her, then—your sister?’ said Mrs Renfrew.

  Alice buried her face in the baby’s blanket, feeling the tiny thing squirm and wrestle for a moment with the bindings that held it.

  No, Milli is dead and gone, killed herself.

  But the words did not form in her mouth and could not be uttered, not now, perhaps not ever.

  So Alice said nothing and after a time she patted the baby gently on its back and took a turn about the kitchen.

  ‘I have found the baby a home,’ she said, but Mrs Renfrew stopped her with a gesture.

  ‘Do not tell me. I do not wish to know. Whatever is the poor wee thing’s fate, it is no concern of mine.’

  And so instead Alice said, ‘You have been a true and good friend to me and my sister, Mrs Renfrew, and I am grateful.’

  These words felt awkward and oddly shaped in her mouth for Alice had few occasions to thank others.

  But Mrs Renfrew dismissed this too.

  ‘I do not want your thanks. I want my money and whatever food these folk can spare.’ She ran a starved, almost manic eye over the cupboards and the door to the scullery. Her arms were so thin the bones themselves seemed to have shrunk, as though she had the skeleton of a bird, and how much nourishment she can have provided to the baby, who knew? The baby was alive and that was all that had been asked of her.

  Alice put the baby against her shoulder and reached into the pocket of her dress and offered up a small pile of coins over which Mrs Renfrew cast a practised eye, then she went out to the coal scuttle and brought in the basket she had filled with all the leftovers she had been able to get her hands on that she thought no one would notice, though she was pretty certain Mrs Flynn had got wind of what was going on for she had turned the place upside down this evening looking for the remains of the roast duck from the day before, and when Alice had suggested a possum had got it or a fox, perhaps, she had raised a sceptical eyebrow.

  Mrs Renfrew surveyed the goods critically but, perhaps realising there was no more to come, neither food nor money, she accepted it without complaint, pulled on her shawl and made for the door. ‘Listen, girl, you better warn that sister of yours to be careful,’ she said after a moment’s hesitation. ‘Them people she borrowed from is still looking to make good on their loan and her being in Darlinghurst Gaol ain’t gonna keep her safe. If they catch up to her in there, they shall slit her throat, sure as sure, and if they cannot find her, they will slit yours instead.’

  But Alice walked up and down the kitchen with the baby and the words My sister is dead, which might have changed something or might have changed nothing at all, remained unsaid.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Mrs Renfrew, and she was gone. But the odour she had brought with her remained for a long time.

  For a moment Alice did not move. Her sister’s baby was a weight in her arms so heavy she could hardly bear it and at the same time was so light, so tentative, a thing of gossamer and air, that it seemed it might slip away and be gone, and how these two things could both be so she did not know.

  A noise from the main part of the house stirred her and a fear that lately was always present, if occasionally dulled and vague, flared. If Mrs Dunlevy came into the kitchen now—

  But Mrs Dunlevy never came into the kitchen. Why should she come now, today?

  Alice crept into the hallway, kissing the crown of the baby’s head though hardly aware that she did so. She heard voices from the drawing room, Mr and Mrs Dunlevy, and she darted past the door and up the stairs and no one came out, no one called her name. When she reached her own room at the top of the house she paused, calming herself, waiting for the baby to wake, but it did not.

  She lay the baby in a drawer, lining it first with newspaper. She left it sleeping and went downstairs and she wondered why it was that God had chosen her, why Father McCreadie had come for her and not for Milli, why it was she who was saved. And the baby too; perhaps the baby was saved. It was strange to her.

  In the hallway Alice took up the boots Mrs Dunlevy had discarded and studied them. They were covered in mud. It was a shame, for they were lovely things. If she could she would make them nice again. If she made the boots as good as new, and if she thought very hard about how God had saved her, how God had saved Milli’s baby, then it was alright that later tonight she was going to hand the baby over and not see it again for years, perhaps. She wondered if this was why God had saved her: so that she might save Milli’s baby. If Father McCreadie was here she would ask him, though she had not set eyes on him in five years and had never wanted to ask him a question about God before. She imagined herself asking her question now and she tried to think what answer Father McCreadie might give.

  He would not know the answer. He would make up some lie.

  She knew this with a certainty that stilled the heart and made her wonder why she had not known it before and how she knew it now. But she did know it and she could not, now, unknow it.

  She picked up the boots and stood up to return to the kitchen.

  ‘I know about Miss Trent.’

  Alice froze midstride, and her heart, which had lurched and shook and caused her all manner of trouble all day, quivered at these words. It was no name she knew, but the voice—it was Mrs Dunlevy’s—cried it the way Milli had cried out the Lord’s name in the courthouse as the baby had ripped her open in its hurry to reach the world.

  ‘Hypocrite!’

  This was him, Mr Dunlevy.

  And then:

  ‘No! Do not speak another word. I will not hear it. Your behaviour is utterly, utterly beyond the pale. I forbid you to speak of this. I forbid you to leave this house or to speak of this to anyone!’

  The door flew open and Alice flattened herself against the wall as Mr Dunlevy burst from the room. If he had paused to look around he must surely have seen her there, the muddied boots clutched to her breast, but he did not stop, he did not look around. He went straight up the stairs, his footsteps thudding with each step, and a door slammed. Its echoes filled the hallway, filled the house, long after he was gone.

  The house now screamed out its silence, it reverberated off the walls, it shook the very foundations, it pinned Alice to the floor and for a time she forgot to breathe.

  But was that the baby crying, two floors up, distantly? Oh, it could not be!

  Alice cried out, a sob of dismay, and her hand flew to her mouth to stifle it. She dropped the boots and sprung from her hiding place at the exact moment Mrs Dun
levy came out of the drawing room and they all but collided. They came face to face, the mistress and the servant, and whose face it was that was the most ashen, whose eyes it was that showed the most dismay, was impossible to say. Alice saw Mrs Dunlevy’s face and she heard again the words her husband had spoken for she could not unhear those words and she could not pretend she had not heard them, and she saw that Mrs Dunlevy knew this too.

  There was no place to hide. All was laid bare.

  And what now? For no servant should see her mistress’s shame, should witness her mistress’s disgrace. No household can endure it.

  Alice did not wait to find out. She fled up the stairs, past Mr Dunlevy’s closed door and up to her own room at the top of house where the baby had awakened. She pounced on it, scooping it up and clasping it to her chest to quieten it, to quieten her own beating heart.

  The baby wailed and she pressed its face to her breast and felt its tiny fists push against her flesh. The amount of time she had left with it could be countered now in hours, in minutes.

  At midnight the house was heavy—not with sleep, for no one slept, but with silence, with misgivings, with passion spent and with passion unspent, with so much emotion, indeed, that the air was dense with it and Alice found it difficult to catch her breath.

  She sat on the bed, cradling the baby but not looking at it. She had put on all the warm clothes she possessed and now her heart pounded the blood about her body as though she had fled in fear of her life though she sat perfectly still. She must go, must leave this minute or the moment would be lost. She must leave!

  Alice raised her face to the slanted square of ceiling. The rafters were low enough to touch.

  What should I do, Milli?

  But Milli did not speak to her. No one spoke to her. Of course they did not. Alice was quite alone. Except for the baby, whose fate—

  But the baby’s fate was God’s decision, not Alice Nimrod’s. God had let Milli die. God had put Mrs Flowers in her path. Alice thought of Moses in the basket. The slave girl. The child floating down the river to its destiny …