The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  The baby wriggled. It tossed its head, becoming restless. In a moment it would awake and cry. It would wake the whole household. It was this and not God, not Moses in the basket, that decided her. She leaped up. She wrapped a scarf about her head and one about the baby and slipped down the first flights of stairs. On the landing, she paused. The floorboards in Mr Dunlevy’s room creaked as he paced but his door did not open. No sound came from Mrs Dunlevy’s room. Alice slipped down the second flight and let herself out of the side door.

  The rain did not let up. Alice hurried with her head down and her scarf over her head but the scarf was soon soaked through and the rain drove directly into her face and into her eyes. She could not shield herself as her arms were full and the package she carried was more important than the rain lashing her face.

  The streets were empty save for the occasional cab setting up a terrific spray as it passed. Alice slowed her headlong dash lest she slip in the mud and in the fast-running gutters. She lost her bearings at one point; she knew the area as well as anyone, but in the darkness of a moonless night and in the driving rain familiar streets became unknown and strange. She thought she must be on Devonshire Street and, yes, here were the railings now on her right and on the other side of the railings the old cemetery. She followed the line of the railings and she prayed she did not mistake her way and was someplace else entirely. The graves in the old cemetery emerged intermittently out of a low-hanging mist, only the tops showing, made grotesque by the darkness and by her fear, for it was known that on the wettest nights slimy and putrid matter seeped out of the ground and onto the neighbouring pavements. But now she saw on her left the lights of the great railway station and she let out a little gasp of relief. It was tempting to pause for a moment to catch her breath but she was late, or she had a sense she must be late, for the journey had taken longer than it ought due to the blackness of the night and the encumbrance of the rain. Half past midnight was the time of the appointment and somewhere far off a church clock chimed, hollowly, forlornly, spurring her onwards.

  The baby was an awkward size and had grown heavier at every step so that her arms had begun to ache almost at once and now they burned with pain, and as she held him to her breast she could not feel his heartbeat so that the thought that she might be carrying a dead thing struck her with horror. But there! He had moved. That was all she needed. She covered him again with the old blanket and set off once more.

  She was close enough now to make out the stone-and-brick building of Sydney Terminal Station and its brightly lit entrance hall, and she hurried towards it. The sweep of roadway leading to the station was deserted, no horse or carriage stood waiting and none arrived to drop anyone off or pick anyone up, and she wondered just how late it was. In her urgency she almost slipped, throwing out a hand to the wet ground to save herself. Even here, where the road was properly paved, the rain had turned the ground to mud. She steadied herself and made one last final dash, landing up in the entranceway where she came to a halt.

  Even at this late hour and on such a dreadful night people gathered, made sluggish by the rain, lugging great boxes and trunks, dragging crying children, pausing in the entranceway to open and close umbrellas and shake sodden hats or just taking shelter, putting off the moment when they must leave the station and go outside. The rain had created great puddles that splashed mud up over the women’s skirts and over the men’s boots as they ran through them. A porter hurried past with head bent and hat pulled low. He glanced at Alice with her bundle as he passed but did not stop her; no one’s gaze lasted more than a second. It was not the night to be asking questions. And perhaps many young women came alone to this station late at night clutching babies to their breasts.

  I am late, thought Alice, but she did not move. She stood in the ticket hall, patting the baby’s back and gazing about her, struck dumb for a moment, for this was the station of their dreams, where she and Milli had come often as children. The station was new then, the fearful old shed that had stood for twenty years replaced with this stone-and-brick creation, all archways and beautiful brickwork and big solid walls. Like a church, Milli had said, except that here no one told you what to do or think. Here was a place that made no demands on you and instead offered you the chance of escape, or at least the chance to dream of escape. They had never once taken a train, but they had watched the people who had journeyed here from Penrith and Bowenfels and Mount Victoria, the trains that had come over the mountains. They had stood at the departure board and Milli had said, ‘I shall catch any train, Alice. Any train to Emu Plains,’ for that was where the trains went, and together they had imagined a place called Emu Plains. Milli had caught a train, years later and all the way to Melbourne, and whether she had ever gone to Emu Plains Alice did not know.

  She did know that this station would be gone soon too, the whole thing pulled down, all these archways and this beautiful brickwork, though it had stood barely twenty years, and a new station, much grander, would be erected right where the old cemetery stood. Mr Dunlevy had talked of it over breakfast. A grand new station built on a cemetery.

  A clock chimed the quarter hour and Alice picked up her skirts and ran towards the platforms, passing each one until she reached platform 14. It was the last one, squeezed in as an afterthought, the furthest away, the hardest to reach, the least used.

  Not a soul about. No train waited at the platform, no passenger came or went. On the neighbouring platform a solitary station official carrying a hurricane lamp, checking and locking up, glanced at her across the deserted railway tracks but did not stop, and he was too far distant for her to see his face nor him to see hers.

  The baby began to cry. If it was hungry it was no wonder. She had tried to give it bread soaked in water to suck on, and who knew if that was enough to keep the poor little thing from perishing? The baby did not thrive but it was not dead. She held the little bundle close to her own shivering body but, as she was soon to hand him over, she held him a little less tightly. She turned her face away from him. She placed herself far away, on that train to Emu Plains.

  ‘Miss Hills?’

  It was strange to be addressed by a name that was not your own and Alice started and for a moment could not speak.

  ‘Mrs Flowers?’

  For here finally was the name in the newspaper, the illegible signature on the bottom of a scrawled note, the person who, until this moment, existed only in the imagination, as a saviour, perhaps.

  Salvation, yes, but did the person who offered salvation also offer damnation? It seemed so to Alice.

  The reality of this Mrs Flowers was a stout, black-clad figure, short and squat, in a large shapeless bonnet of no obvious colour and tied beneath her chin by a tattered ribbon, with a heavy black coat that reached almost to the ground and beneath which the toes of mud-plastered boots were visible. Her face was at first in shadow and seemed at home there but she lifted her head and the light caught her then let her go, for there was something a little curious about her eyes, blankly hidden behind little round spectacles that yet summed up in one swift glance all that there was to know about Miss Hills (not her real name) who had got herself into trouble and was desperate enough to arrange this meeting. Having appraised Miss Hills, she pulled back her lips in a smile that showed one or two teeth, no more, and she nodded as though she had seen all she needed to see.

  ‘How old is the baby?’

  ‘Five days.’

  ‘Boy or girl?’

  ‘It is a boy.’

  Mrs Flowers nodded. ‘Good. It’s easier to place a little boy.’

  ‘You said there is family all ready for him?’

  ‘So there is. A good Christian couple out in the country. On a farm. Childless. They are awaiting him this very moment.’

  It was exactly what the advertisement in the newspaper had said: a good Christian family of moderate but honest means. It was exactly what Alice wanted to hear.

  But she hesitated.

  ‘There has been a
change. The mother, she—the mother is no longer living and will not want the baby back at the end of three years. It will need to be fostered for longer, till it is six or seven, maybe. If I could have it myself I would but I cannot. I have a position …’

  ‘The cost will be more,’ said Mrs Flowers, and this, probably, was her reply to any change in circumstances.

  Alice stared at her helplessly. ‘I do not have it.’

  But this was no barrier, it seemed. ‘When will you have more?’

  ‘I do not know. In a few weeks, months … I do not know.’

  Mrs Flowers nodded. ‘It will have to do.’

  ‘It is my sister’s child,’ Alice said, though she had hoped not to say this. ‘Shall I be able to go out there to visit, if I wish to?’

  ‘Not at first. The baby must be allowed to settle in for a time. They will write to me, for they are educated people, and I will forward the letter to you if you have a mind to read it.’

  This was as sentimental as she got, Mrs Flowers; this was the limit of her compassion. Now she was brisk, businesslike: ‘Give me the money. Quickly now. Three pounds. And it is ten shillings every month after that. You must pay it to the post office at Pitt Street. Do not miss a month and do not be late; I cannot answer for the baby’s welfare if the money stops.’

  The flare of the gaslight struck the blank discs of her spectacles and bounced right off, unable or unwilling to penetrate further.

  It did not quite make sense to Alice that the baby’s welfare would be in jeopardy if she was late with the money—had Mrs Flowers not said the people were a good Christian family?—but everything came down to money, in the end, didn’t it?

  Alice pushed her fears aside. She would not let them in. There could be no suggestion of danger, despite Mrs Flynn’s warnings, despite what she herself knew of the world. If she let in even the possibility of danger it would all collapse in a heap and that could not be allowed to happen. It could not.

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the money. It was a significant sum—but it was a significant transaction.

  She pushed her fears down.

  Mrs Flowers took the money and counted it quickly, peered at the notes, holding them up close to her short-sighted eyes, biting each coin with her few remaining teeth. And then the money was gone, inside the capacious black coat. ‘Hand it over then.’

  She meant the baby. Held out both hands to take it.

  A train pulled into the platform opposite with a screech of brakes and couplings and wheels. Great clouds of smoke and smut and steam filled the air. Doors opened and a handful of tired passengers emerged, a porter came running. Alice handed over the baby and by the time the doors of the carriages closed again and the train had gone to the sidings for the night Alice was already hurrying back to Elizabeth Bay before she was missed. And the baby was—

  Well, who knew where the baby was?

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  DECEIT II

  Eleanor did not sleep. She sat at her desk, protected by the darkness. She listened to the rain on the windows and on the roof, so insistent and unceasing that the days of blue-skied sunlight seemed like they belonged to another city in another climate. She pressed her fingers into the flesh of her upper arm and felt the tenderness there in the shape of a man’s grip.

  She heard the sounds of the house, at one point imagining footsteps on the stairs, the sound of a door far off at the rear of the house closing, and had leaped up, confused, the blood roaring in her ears, but not going to the door, not going to the window. Simply standing in the darkened room, waiting, every nerve raw. After a time, and when it became clear she had imagined it, she sank down once more to the chair.

  The clock in the hallway struck and chimed its way around the hour and on to the next hour, charting a passage through the night.

  What had she done?

  A year ago, when they were still grieving the loss of their child. She had no idea at all. She had remained in bed for a time. A long time. The vote had been held and lost and Alasdair had moved into the second bedroom. After a time she had got better, or that was how the doctor had described it: Mrs Dunlevy getting up from her bed, getting dressed, venturing outside, accepting one or two visitors. Getting better.

  After a little more time she had attended a reception at Parliament House, her first engagement since the loss of the child, arriving by cab to meet Alasdair there but arriving too soon and finding, quite suddenly, that it was more than she felt able to do, entering the reception on her own. It was too soon—though the doctor had assured her she was better. She must enter the room on her husband’s arm and that way, if there was sympathy, if there were silent looks, she could endure it, she felt.

  But she had arrived too soon.

  There was no sign of Alasdair and all about her people were massing, cabs were pulling up outside, more and more of them. In a moment someone would see her.

  There was a lounge where she might sit and wait for him. She crossed the lobby and entered the room and stood, a little breathless, a little dismayed. It would pass, of course, this terror. But until it did she found herself dismayed.

  The oppressive little room of gilt cornices and thick carpet and massive leather sofas added to her dismay. There were few spaces in this building where a lady might go, this stuffy little lounge being one of them. The host of dead parliamentarians whose portraits crowded the four walls made it clear that even this small square of government was but grudgingly granted.

  When the door behind her opened and closed, she turned to Alasdair with a smile because this fracture in their marriage had not yet appeared, though they had lost the child, though he had moved, by then, into the second bedroom.

  But it was not Alasdair. It was George Drummond-Smith.

  ‘I—Oh!’ she said, confused.

  Drummond-Smith, whom she had known, a little, over many years, who had dined on occasion in their home, whose wife one had met perhaps twice in ten years. A man who spoke of trivialities to her and of world events to her husband, which did not mark him out from any other gentleman of her acquaintance, but whose fixed, unwavering gaze when one was speaking or from across a room was unsettling. He was wearing evening dress that night, all the gentlemen were, and gloves, which he now pulled off. A cane, his top hat. He removed that too. He did not seemed surprised to see her, just as though they were meeting by arrangement. He smiled, gave her that fixed look, advanced towards her. He pulled his gloves off—she particularly remembered that—just as though he had some important business to attend to.

  ‘Eleanor,’ he said, though he had never used her name before nor been asked to. She did not like that, nor the way he said it.

  ‘Mr Drummond-Smith,’ she replied, meeting his gaze, making a point. ‘I am awaiting my husband.’

  ‘Indeed? But he is not here, I think.’

  It was, she thought, a curious thing to say.

  He stood before her very close, too close, and the light was reflected brightly in his eyes, it bounced off his forehead so that his flesh appeared not quite human. His great walrus moustache; he took such pride in it. She imagined him combing it, grooming it. He reached out and took her gloved hand, not taking his eyes from hers. He raised her hand to his lips, at the last moment undoing the little button at her wrist and sliding the glove from her hand, kissing her fingers. She had a sense of something supressed in him, an energy barely contained by his clothes. It radiated out of him. He did not take his eyes from hers.

  And, stupidly, dimly, up to this point she had not understood his intent. He had followed her into the room, she realised.

  She pulled her hand sharply away. Or tried to. He clasped it more tightly. He slid his arm about her waist, pressing it against the small of her back to pull her towards him.

  ‘Come, Eleanor, do not be coy. You are hardly a blushing virgin.’

  ‘How dare you!’

  She snatched back her hand and made for the door and there was a moment when she thoug
ht he would spring after her, that he would prevent her from leaving.

  Instead he let out a hard little laugh: ‘Leave, if you must, my dear!’ And then, as she reached the door: ‘I do not take kindly to being made a fool of!’

  Outside Alasdair was standing at the reception desk. He gave her the queerest look as she burst from the lounge, furious and flustered.

  A moment later Drummond-Smith emerged, pulling on his gloves.

  ‘That man is odious!’ she declared, shaken, and she took her husband’s arm.

  Alasdair stared at her as though he had not heard. ‘What were you doing, alone, in a room with that man?’

  What had she done? Eleanor did not know. But why, then, did she remember that one evening? She wondered if perhaps she did know and her unease grew.

  As the dawn crept in she arose from her desk and went out of the room and to her husband’s door. It was half open. There was movement within and she stood, uncertain, then pushed open the door. Inside Alasdair was dressed, or completing his dress: knotting a tie, buttoning a waistcoat, smoothing down his hair. A trunk stood open upon the table with items already inside and Alice, the maid, stood midway between wardrobe and trunk, a pile of shirts in her arms. The girl stopped dead and stared, her eyes quite wild and terrible, as though she knew all that went on in the house. Alasdair stopped and stared too; his eyes were fearful and furious and then nothing at all as he turned from her.

  Eleanor wondered how, after twenty years, she could know someone so little.

  ‘Leave us, Alice,’ she commanded, and the girl all but dropped the pile of clothes in her haste to get out. Eleanor closed the door behind her. The trunk on the bed. Alasdair’s clothes in the trunk. And a portmanteau, fastened and bulging, by the door.

  ‘You are going somewhere?’

  She felt something rise within her. Her words so calm, so quiet, so reasonable, but something was rising. It frightened her a little.