The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  But on she plunged for she was set on a certain course and would not waver from it.

  ‘I am curious about an unfortunate young woman who was brought into the hospital in the custody of the police a week or so ago and whose future, we are led to believe, is in a precarious state, not least because she is gravely ill and does not wake.’

  Winks nodded slowly as she spoke, and he now sat back in his chair and placed his hands together over his stomach. The lines on his face were deep and numerous like the rings of an ancient oak.

  ‘I know the particular case of which you speak. It is, as you say, a most unfortunate case. What is it you wish to know?’

  ‘Does the woman live?’

  And thus was the most momentous question asked in so simple a way, as though it meant little, as though nothing at all hung on the reply.

  ‘Yes. She lives.’

  The reply came and nothing changed in the world and nothing changed in Eleanor’s expression, although both had altered in a subtle and infinite way.

  ‘A recovery appears more likely than not,’ said Winks. ‘She was insensible for some days but now has regained a little of her wits. Though her condition is still grave and may yet prove fatal.’ Eleanor was silent for a time. She did not know if she had desired Miss Trent to die or to live. Now that she had her answer she realised that what she desired meant nothing, that it would not alter the course of any lives, except perhaps her own.

  ‘Is she aware of her surroundings, of her … predicament?’

  ‘That I cannot say.’

  ‘And what of that? The police charge? It is an extremely serious one?’

  ‘Indeed. As I understand it, the charge—’ And here the old gentleman hesitated delicately and gave her a look he might have reserved for the seventeen-year-old monarch were she here in his rooms. ‘Eleanor, I do not mean to be coy, but you do understand the nature of the charge?’

  ‘I do.’

  He nodded. ‘That is as well—I do not like to use euphemism when plain speaking will suffice. I understand the charge against the young woman will likely be dropped.’

  Eleanor was not sure she had heard him correctly. ‘But—that cannot be so!’

  She felt herself disorientated and the great injustice that had been done to her seemed, by his words, to be condoned.

  ‘The unfortunate young woman was arrested at her home and not—’ he coughed delicately ‘—whilst the act itself was being performed. And the doctor—whoever this devil is—cannot be located. Absconded.’

  ‘And so she gets away with this … this abhorrent act?’

  Winks took a conciliatory approach: ‘It is for God and not us mortals to sit in judgement.’

  But Eleanor wondered if God did indeed sit in judgement of Miss Trent. It seemed to her he favoured her; that his justice, if one could call it such, was partisan and arbitrary.

  ‘And for all we know,’ said Winks, oblivious, ‘it may have been a simple miscarriage.’

  ‘You cannot seriously believe that?’

  For a moment Eleanor was too stunned to think. And Winks offered no reply to her question.

  ‘And what of the other party—the man?’ she persisted, when she had calmed herself a little. ‘We know she is not married. What do we know of him?’

  ‘I do not believe we know anything of this man.’

  ‘And so he gets away with it too. Scot-free.’

  ‘Again, we may only speculate. Perhaps he colluded with Miss Trent in this terrible act and perhaps he is utterly ignorant of it.’

  ‘If a man is utterly ignorant in a matter such as this it is because he chooses to be.’

  Eleanor stood up. She went to the window. It afforded a view of rooftops, chimneys, the wall of another part of the hospital—the boiler room, perhaps, as great bellows of steam erupted periodically from a series of vents. When he had been deputy superintendent, Ambrose had had rooms overlooking Macquarie Street. He had had two secretaries. Today she had walked straight in to see him. She did not know why she thought of this, the thought crowded into a head already crammed to bursting.

  ‘Ambrose—’ she turned back to face the ageing administrator ‘—would you know if any man had visited her during her time here?’

  ‘I would not. But I do not believe she would have been allowed any visitor during this time that she has been on a police charge.’

  ‘Is she permitted visitors now?’

  He regarded her with eyes almost as old as the century. ‘You wish to visit her, Eleanor?’

  ‘I feel it my duty, Ambrose. She is clearly a lost soul.’

  Miss Trent, who had been abandoned by God or favoured by him, depending on how the thing was viewed, lay in a bed at the far end of a long and overcrowded women’s ward on the second floor of the hospital. She lay unmoving and with her eyes closed. She did not look like the same woman whom Eleanor had helped up the stairs to her apartment and left seated on the settee as she was beginning to haemorrhage. This woman looked smaller, slighter, more fragile. It was still a rather plain face: too pale, too narrow, too sharp where it might have been better softer. Her eyelids were a shade of mauve and they flickered as though the eyes beneath the lids moved constantly in some hectic dream. Otherwise she did not stir.

  There was nothing very appealing about her—there had been nothing then, there was nothing now. If Miss Trent held some secret allure, then she held it very close.

  But Eleanor could not draw away.

  There was unfinished business. Not the unfinished business she had anticipated, which was to hear of the girl lying in the morgue, halfway dispatched to some meagre and anonymous plot of land in a nearby churchyard; nor the alternative—shackled in a cell at the mercy of constable, prison warden and judiciary. But neither outcome, apparently, was Miss Trent’s fate.

  The door which Eleanor had expected to close remained firmly open.

  She could not, for the moment, muster her thoughts. She studied Miss Trent’s hands. They lay, or had been placed, on her chest as though she were dead. One finger twitched. These were not aristocratic hands but neither were they servant’s hands. Something between. A governess, a shop girl. If these hands had scrubbed wooden tables and emptied slops or gutted fish it had been a long time ago. But who knew the truth of Miss Trent’s former life? Miss Trent was recently arrived in the colony, which meant she was free from the curse that dogged every Sydney-born man and woman. No one would ever wonder if Miss Trent’s people had arrived here in chains on transport ships, their backs seared and split open by the lash; no one would wonder if her grandmother had been a convict and a prostitute. Fortunate Miss Trent.

  ‘You may sit,’ said one of the nurses, indicating a chair, her eyes sweeping over Eleanor’s face, but Eleanor did not sit. She was, after all, not a visitor and she hardly cared if the patient lived or died. Instead she studied Miss Trent, whose life she had, inadvertently, saved. She could go no nearer and she could not draw away, for it is a terrible thing to save the life of one who is despised. It is a burden.

  The mistress lived.

  Even if her child did not. Had Alasdair known about the existence of the baby or about the abortion? Had he arranged the abortion—paid for it, even? For he had gone to her at her home in the hours before she had had the abortion. A bastard child, unwanted. Perhaps he had demanded she rid herself of it. Perhaps the child had not been unwanted.

  These were questions no wife should ever be called upon to consider.

  This feeling that welled up inside her now, it was nothing so simple as hatred, and she stood, dumb. She would not allow it to overflow or consume her.

  Miss Trent had not told Alasdair about the baby, about the abortion. Eleanor felt certain of this as she stood looking down at the girl. Or perhaps she merely wished it to be so. And Alasdair did not visit her in the hospital. Surely that meant—

  She could not say what it meant. That he did not know she was here? That he was afraid to come lest he be seen? He was with the Premier
in the south while his mistress lay prostrate and helpless. Perhaps it simply meant that the Federation meant more to him than Miss Trent did.

  This made her suddenly a little giddy, made her wish to laugh out loud. Made her wish to reach out and strike the face that lay so still on the bed. But the nurse had returned and made a second sweep of Eleanor’s face and so Eleanor turned and left the ward.

  In the corridor outside the ward she found James Greensmith clutching a portfolio of papers and a telegram, now opened, and the expression on his face was no longer that of a secretary.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  NO BABIES HERE

  Clouds blew in over The Gap and rolled over Watsons Bay and Bondi, for occasionally, and confusingly, the weather came in from the ocean and not from the west at all. Rain splashed onto the doorstep of the minister’s house at Elizabeth Bay and the cook, Mrs Flynn, stood at the back door watching it. She was an uncomplicated soul who wasted no energy contemplating the differences between herself and her employer or, by inference, the differences between any two groups of persons in her city, wretched or wealthy or anything in between. If a person made a wrong step in their brief time on earth that was their lookout. She felt no compulsion to point out their error or to offer what little assistance it might be in her power to give. But this morning, these last few days, she found herself unaccountably uneasy.

  She spat a stream of tobacco into the camellia bush outside, closed the back door and returned to her kitchen and the pastry she was rolling out.

  Alice Nimrod, kneeling before the stove scraping and cleaning furiously, sat back on her haunches. She waited. But Mrs Flynn said nothing. She had said nothing for five days, and after a moment Alice went back to her work.

  It was only once the pastry had been completed to Mrs Flynn’s satisfaction and laid inside a pie dish with stewed apples, when two cloves had been placed just so and a dusting of cinnamon sprinkled on top and the pie deposited into the oven, that Mrs Flynn spoke. ‘I hope you do not live to regret it, Alice, and that’s all I have to say on the matter.’

  ‘And why should I regret giving the baby a chance of a better life?’ cried Alice all in a rush and jumping to her feet, for these words had been ready and straining to be released these five days and more.

  ‘Because that baby is no more on a farm in the country with cows and sheep and what have you than it is with Her Majesty at Windsor Castle.’

  ‘You do not know that!’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  For a time neither spoke. Mrs Flynn pulled out a chair and sat down on it. She sighed—and she was not, as a rule, a woman who sighed; she was a woman who got on and did what needed to be done. But today she sighed. ‘You have lived on those streets, Alice Nimrod. You know what kind of place this is, same as ever I do.’

  And Alice did know. But sometimes to know a thing did not help. Sometimes it made things worse.

  Alice went upstairs and she beat the curtains in Mr Dunlevy’s room and she dragged the carpet sweeper over the rugs and flung open the windows to air the place, and the rain thundered onto the roof and the guttering and onto the sill so that she had to close the windows again almost at once.

  Mrs Flynn thought the baby was dead.

  Alice pulled the layers of bedding from Mr Dunlevy’s bed and bundled them up and placed new ones on. She put away the gloves and collars and shirts that had returned from the laundry and noted which had a mark on them the laundry had missed and which were not starched just right. She polished the bedheads and she dusted the desk and the shelves and the drawers and the pictures on the walls and the photographs in their frames.

  And she saw that everything had been moved about in Mr Dunlevy’s room. The dust was disturbed, things had been taken up and replaced in a slightly different way: drawers, books, everything. She wondered if Mrs Dunlevy had done it, though why Mrs Dunlevy might do such a thing Alice did not know.

  They had avoided each other since Friday evening, and five days was a long time for a servant to avoid her mistress and an even longer time for a mistress to avoid her servant, but they had managed it. This was, in large part, down to Alice, who spent a great deal of her time scurrying back up the stairs and darting into rooms and turning about and walking back the way she had just come, and she did this because she had no wish to witness her mistress’s shame for she had found that, inexplicably, she shared in it.

  This was confusing to her and she wished Mr Dunlevy would return from his trip, though she could not see how this might improve things. But she felt the awkwardness of her situation.

  The one o’clock gun sounded at Fort Denison and the second post came and then the third, and in the scullery Mrs Flynn’s apple pie cooled on a tray. The clocks in each room chimed and chimed again, marking another hour, marking the end of another day. Five days had already passed since Alice had handed over the baby. The moon came up before the afternoon was even half done, for the June days were almost at their shortest, and soon it would be six days. When she saw the moon, when she counted the days that had passed, Alice was filled with such a great terror she forgot to breathe.

  Mrs Dunlevy dined alone and did not eat even a single slice of the apple pie so that Alice took it back to the kitchen.

  ‘What can be done?’ she said to Mrs Flynn, and she was not referring to the uneaten pie. She rarely asked anyone for anything, for you almost never got what you wanted or, if you did, then the cost was likely to be more than you could afford. But tonight she asked Mrs Flynn.

  Mrs Flynn, who thought the baby was already dead, said, ‘Go and get it back, Alice Nimrod, if you are able.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘Leave it outside the orphanage where it should have been all along.’

  ‘And never see it again?’

  ‘And know it lives.’

  At half past midnight on platform 14 of Sydney Terminal Station everything was as it had been five nights before—the rain came down in sheets, a porter stalked the empty platforms with a lamp held high, the last trains arrived and the passengers moved silently about in the great billows of steam and smoke like exhausted, ancient ghosts. And a girl with a baby waited in the shadows, shivering with cold and fear as though she did not know if she feared salvation more than she feared death.

  Though neither came.

  Alice watched her. The girl wore a rain-soaked sagging straw hat and she turned this way and that, starting at every sound and occasionally wiping a sleeve over her nose. She waited, but how long she would wait depended on many things and some of them Alice could guess, others she could not. A train whistled distantly and approached the station and the girl cocked her head, and in another moment she and her bundle would be on the tracks beneath the oncoming train and both their miseries would be over.

  But here, now, was Mrs Flowers emerging from the steam and the smoke and the shadows and offering her own particular brand of salvation. She called out to the girl, approached her and spoke again, sharply. Alice pressed herself into the shadows and heard nothing of the transaction. In a moment it was done, money and baby exchanged, the bundle wrapped tightly inside the older woman’s coat, and all of their destinies forever altered—the child’s, the girl’s, possibly Mrs Flower’s too, though this seemed less certain.

  Mrs Flowers walked away at a rapid pace and did not look back and was at once swallowed up in the darkness and the smoke so that her brief presence had an unnatural and unreal quality to it, like a spectral visitation.

  The girl, having handed her child over to a stranger, stood quite still with a hand pressed against her mouth. She walked blindly away and there seemed every likelihood her night would end beneath the wheels of a train; or, if not this night, then another.

  But Alice Nimrod did not stay to observe it. She set off after the hurrying black figure of Mrs Flowers, skirting the puddles and leaping the overflowing gutters, startled by the speed at which the woman moved, and with a baby in her arms.

  They left the station, hea
ding eastwards along Devonshire Street and making a series of turns down ever narrower and darker laneways so that Alice, who had grown up in these streets, hardly knew where they were. When they had reached the darkest, the narrowest laneway at the heart of a maze of such places—a laneway so narrow you could touch both sides at once without even stretching, a place so foul that the pigs which roamed other Surry Hills laneways, rooting out and consuming its refuge and detritus, were here quite absent—Mrs Flowers reached her destination. She pushed at an unseen gate and was gone and she did not pause, not even for a moment, to look behind her, for Mrs Flowers did the work of the devil and so she had little to fear from mortal souls.

  She had little to fear from Alice Nimrod, whose soul was of the most mortal kind and who was but a few yards behind and so reached the place a moment later.

  Alice found the gate with her hands for the darkness was all-consuming and unforgiving. The gate was not latched; indeed, it was barely attached to its hinges at all so that, when she pushed it and slipped inside, it almost clattered to the ground.

  Beyond was a space filled with dark shadows and unpleasant odours, a tiny yard, overgrown and piled high with whatever such places were piled high with. It backed onto the rear of a dwelling, which in this neighbourhood was a crumbling and single-storey worker’s cottage.

  No light showed. Someone in one of the neighbouring cottages sang loudly and drunkenly and further away men’s voices were raised in dispute and something smashed, a bottle or a window. A bat flew overhead with a great flap of black leathery wings and Alice stifled a cry. Something scurried over her foot.

  From the cottage there was no sound at all, no baby crying, nothing.

  Alice waited, straining to hear, gathering her courage about her. There was a cesspit here; she felt the muck oozing beneath her feet and she wondered what else it was in this yard that emitted such unpleasant odours. A dead dog? Animal bones and butcher’s offal and other rubbish from the house, human and animal, which, if you lived among it long enough, you no longer noticed? But what if it was not the corpse of a dead dog?