by Maggie Joel
She hammered on the door and prayed she would not die this night.
After a long moment the door opened a crack.
‘Who’s zere?’
It was a man’s voice. She had not anticipated this. Hoarse and rasping, and with it came a gust of stale tobacco, unwashed bodies, smoke and something that had been fried a long while ago and still lingered.
‘I want my baby back,’ said Alice.
She could see almost nothing of the man, for the interior of the cottage seemed darker even than the night, but at her words she sensed a quick movement of his head, a sucking of his teeth, the rustle of layers of coarse clothing. She sensed his astonishment.
‘Git outta here!’
‘I want my baby back,’ said Alice a second time.
‘No babies here. Gorn, scram!’
‘Yes, there is,’ Alice persisted, though she felt that something must give—her courage or her bladder. Her legs perhaps and her heart too. All seemed on the verge of collapse. ‘I gave it to Mrs Flowers Friday night and now I have followed her here with some other woman’s baby and I want mine back.’
At this the door opened abruptly and the man stumbled out, so that Alice stepped back with a gasp and threw out a hand to steady herself. She felt his breath on her face
‘Ain’t no Mrs Flowers here. Ain’t no babies here.’
A baby cried then from somewhere behind him inside the cottage, a wail that split the night in two, and for the length of the cry they both stood in frozen muteness.
And then the wail stopped and the man’s arm shot out and grabbed the back of Alice’s neck and a blade flashed in the moonlight and Alice felt its edge at her throat.
‘I said no babies here. You show your face here again I will slice it right off.’
He let go of her and Alice fell backwards into the muck and the rubbish. She scrambled to her feet and fled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
LARGE EVENTS AND SMALL DETAILS
The Premier’s party took the midnight train from Cootamundra, arriving at Goulburn in the early hours. The mayor and various aldermen held a reception for them upon their arrival and members of the local Federal League gave a welcome address. The party lunched at the council chambers, attended by a hundred local gentleman and waited on by the ladies of the district. Toasts were drunk and the Premier made a speech. In the evening the Premier spoke at length at the Oddfellows’ Hall, which had been extravagantly hung with bunting and ribbons and flags, and the large crowd applauded him, and themselves, enthusiastically.
And afterwards what Alasdair remembered was the way an alderman’s wife had stifled a yawn at their pre-dawn arrival at the station and how a cockerel had crowed as they had sat in the carriage and travelled through the deserted streets. He remembered the line of native paperbarks behind the single row of buildings in the main street and the Premier stumbling as he entered the hotel and two porters exchanging looks of mutual disappointment that the Premier was, after all, just a man. He remembered the plate of mutton a woman had placed before him at the luncheon and the slight crack in the plate’s rim. He thought of the button that had come loose on his topcoat as he dressed and of the green baize that covered the speakers’ tables at the Oddfellows’ Hall and that hung in great folds and rubbed against his knees. He remembered that, as the Premier explained to the people why it was he had rejected the Federation bill a year ago and why he supported it now, a small piece of bunting above his head came unstuck and drifted to the floor.
For life was made up not of large events but of small details, and today’s receptions, the many speeches, though they may appear of vital importance at the time (otherwise why the rush to catch the midnight express last night, why all those aldermen up before dawn dressed in their finery, their wives yawning?), would not be remembered in a hundred years. There had been a referendum last year and when it had failed it had seemed nothing short of a catastrophe. But in the end it had not mattered, for here they all were, a year later, holding another one.
As he had boarded the express at Cootamundra an official had handed Alasdair a telegram. He had stuffed it in a pocket of his coat and boarded the train and overseen the stowing of his bags and gone to the Premier’s compartment to discuss some point of issue for the following day. He had bade the others of their party goodnight and retired to his compartment with the telegram still in his pocket just as though such telegrams came every day and did not mean very much.
He had sat on his bed and adjusted the light and pulled out the telegram—sent from Sydney a few hours ago in reply to the one he himself had dispatched earlier, and reaching him only due to the greatest good fortune, for he had been at Cootamundra no more than a few hours—and his hand shook.
It was from Greensmith. It said simply: PATIENT TRENT CONSCIOUS THOUGH STILL ILL STOP DOCTORS HOPEFUL OF RECOVERY STOP AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS STOP GREENSMITH.
The minister had folded the telegram in two and then closed his fists around it. He had slid off the bed and dropped to his knees and crouched with his forehead touching the floor. And when, a few hours later, the train had rattled into Goulburn, he had stood at the window and the dawn had glowed orange and a vast flock of white cockatoos had risen to the air and filled the sky.
The Tour of the South was completed. The party left Goulburn by the last train and would arrive in Sydney at midnight. They would sleep in their own beds that night.
As the train plunged northwards through the dark, the gentlemen sat facing one another, the mood at first loud and boisterous—for the tour had been a success—and later contemplative and silent as they were rocked by the motion of the carriage. They thought about the wives awaiting their return, the urgent papers requiring their attention, their beds and a pipe or a good cigar by the fire.
The Premier leaned across the small space and patted Alasdair’s knee and said, ‘Come on with us tomorrow to Bathurst, Dunlevy—there is space enough and it will be a big event. You shall be my opening speaker.’
And this was a triumph for Alasdair, hard-earned and a long time coming. He swelled, a little, with pride.
The Premier added, ‘Though do not bring that wife of yours—we do not wish an anti-billite in our midst!’
It seemed that the Premier might laugh now to indicate that this was a little joke, but the Premier did not laugh. It was not a little joke, and Alasdair’s triumph, hard-earned and a long time coming, turned to cold dismay.
But the telegram smouldered in his pocket and Miss Trent lived. He touched the telegram and his fingers glowed warm. The train to Bathurst would depart mid-morning the next day so he would have only a few hours in Sydney, but that was all he needed.
They arrived at Sydney Terminal at midnight, and though the hour was late and the train had been delayed, men were there from the press, and a number of other gentlemen and even one or two wives, though Eleanor was not among them. The Premier gave an impromptu speech on the platform, which a number of the gentlemen of the press copied down and others did not, for nothing was said that had not been said on other platforms and at other stations. And Alasdair wondered what it would be like for the Premier, sometime hence, to exit a train and not be greeted by the members of the press and not be called upon to make an impromptu speech—for such a time would surely come.
He left in a cab at the first opportunity, observing those members of his party whose wives had ventured out in the dark and the cold and the incessant rain—it still rained here in Sydney!—to meet them. It was very strange to know that his wife was not among them and perhaps (for all kinds of vague but extraordinary ideas now eddied about his head) never would be again. He stared out of the window of the cab and thought how strange it all was.
The house in Elizabeth Bay was in darkness and no one waited up for him. He hammered loudly on the door and a light came on upstairs. In a moment the door opened and Alice stood there in a nightgown and a shawl, holding a candle. She threw up a hand to cover her throat as a lady would who had mi
slaid her pearls and her face was frightened.
He got her to fill him a bath and find him some refreshment for he was hungry, he realised, though he did not know what he wanted. In the end he accepted a piece of cold apple pie and a glass of port in his study, where he sat, warm from the bath and exhausted, but fearing he would not sleep.
He did sleep, awaking at dawn to a clear sky and a shaft of early daylight that struck his pillow an inch from his head. He lay for a moment, as one did as a small boy on birthdays and other important days, not wanting the day to start and fearing it never would. He must tell Alice he would need a new set of clothes for the trip to Bathurst, and whether the Premier intended that Alasdair continue on with him to Wellington and Orange he did not know but it was well to assume he would.
The importance of it, this building of a nation and his part in it, struck him afresh and he basked, for a moment. The Premier’s comment about his wife could be ignored, could be discounted for the joke it undoubtedly was. It would not spoil this moment.
And Alasdair lay, stunned by the sunlight, by the clearness of the sky, by the chorus of jubilant currawongs outside his window. When at last he sat up it seemed to him that the room must have changed in some subtle way as he had changed, but there was nothing different. He dressed and roused Alice for his coffee and his breakfast and gave her instructions for his departure. She got in a muddle with it all as though she did not have the space in her head for more than three things at once. She had a small cut, he saw, on her throat, and the imperfection of her, of Alice the maid, was for a moment dispiriting. When he had sent her away he got up and went to stand at the window so that he might view the bay through the bare branches of the winter frangipani, something he had never before done.
It occurred to him he must be gone before Eleanor came downstairs, and now that he had had this thought it became, suddenly, imperative. He chased and cajoled the unfortunate Alice until all was done to his satisfaction then sent her out to find a cab. He stood at the front door surrounded by his bags. He listened for Eleanor’s door to open upstairs but no sound came. Was she awaiting his departure, he wondered, before venturing downstairs? And, perversely, he had a mind to hold off his departure.
But the cab was here and his bags stowed. He climbed in and told the driver to take him to the Sydney Hospital.
‘Driver, wait! Alasdair! Where are you going?’
His mind was far away and Alasdair could not, at first, make sense of these words, he could not identify the voice that spoke them. When he had swum across the ocean that separated his thoughts from the place where his physical body was, he saw it was his wife who addressed the cab driver, who stood at the door of his cab without hat or gloves or even a coat. She shivered, her arms hugging herself as though it were a winter morning in some cold place and not a Sydney morning with the sun already high in the southern sky warming the earth.
Her eyes searched his face. They peeled back layers of skin revealing the soft tissue beneath. His flesh burned.
‘I am going to the station,’ he replied, indignant, as might any man be at such a question. He was on official business. He was to join the Premier.
But they had passed this point. They were already halfway down a path that was uncharted and brutal and had no place for denials. And so he added, in a quite different tone, ‘And to the hospital.’
These words, freeing him.
A vaguely quizzical look came into Eleanor’s eyes and he thought for a brief, bright, extraordinary moment that she had accepted what he said, but the look was gone almost at once, leaving no look at all, a blankness. Calm acceptance, he took it for. But he was wrong.
She grabbed the handle of the cab door and jerked it open and began to get in.
Dismayed, he held her off.
‘What are you doing, Eleanor? For God’s sake!’
He wrestled the door from her and she fell back, stumbling a little. Behind her he saw the cab driver, who had jumped down from his perch and had his mouth open and the whip in his hand, and Alasdair stared at the man’s stupid face rather than at his wife’s. He resumed his seat. He pulled the door shut and shouted at the man, ‘What do you wait for?’
The man sprang back up to his seat and cracked his whip and the horse started awake and the cab jerked forward. Alasdair stared straight ahead.
At Macquarie Street the clerks and lawyers and government officials strolled towards their places of business, the usual morning industry made languid by the suddenness of sunlight after so much rain. The people shone and the streets, submerged by the deluge only hours before, were bone-dry.
Alasdair viewed them across a great distance. The horror of it wrapped him in a mantle that pinned his arms to his sides and dulled the thoughts in his head.
It had come too soon, the confrontation with Eleanor. He was not prepared. He had meant to do it on his terms not hers. He wished very much to be angry at her for that appalling scene, but for the moment the horror of it precluded his fury.
The cab pulled up outside the hospital and Alasdair gave the driver a large sum without once looking at him. The man’s gaze was a torment to him. He instructed the man to wait here, with his bags, until his return. It would be a short visit, but the moments on which a man’s life turned were short—for how long did it take to fall in love, to propose marriage, to receive a firstborn in one’s arms, to fall out of love?
Miss Trent was in a women’s ward on the second floor and he wondered if he might be prevented from seeing her but no one questioned him. A nurse bid him a good morning and another offered a smile and pointed out to him a bed at the far end. ‘There is a chair,’ the nurse said. ‘You may sit if you wish.’
Alasdair walked towards her. On each side tall windows looked out on colonnades that ran the length of the ward, dappled in the sunlight, like a viceroy’s residence. The ceiling, distantly high to catch the breeze in summer, made him reel. And here, finally, was Verity. She made a still, slight figure barely distinguishable from the large hospital bed and the coarse hospital sheets that trapped her. Her face on the pillow was white and as contemplatively still as an angel on a tomb.
He thought, She has died, and no one even noticed!
But her face slowly turned towards him.
He stumbled. Those final few yards that separated him from her were infinite and terrible, her eyes on him as he crossed that unimaginably vast space made him feel his nakedness, and he crossed the remaining few yards quickly, coming to her side, pulling up the chair and taking her hand.
‘Verity,’ he said. His voice came from some deep place.
Now all the hours and the days that he had not sat with her at her bedside, that he had spent in other places and in other towns, in hotels and trains and town halls, all the mementos of her that he had scoured his drawers for and burned, all of this was manifest in his face for her to see. His shame laid bare.
‘Will you forgive me?’ he whispered.
She frowned at this, her brow creasing, the eyebrows arching, as though she did not understand what it was she must forgive, as if she had thought it was she, not he, who must ask for forgiveness—for their baby that she had destroyed.
Or this is what he thought, for she said absolutely nothing. He squeezed her hand.
At last she spoke. ‘You know, of course, why it is that I am here?’
He did. He could not unknow it.
‘I told them it was a miscarriage,’ she said, her voice very low and quite without emotion. ‘Though it was not.’ And she turned her face away and towards the window.
‘Yes,’ said Alasdair. He would have liked to say, I understand, but he could not say it for he did not understand. Their child, destroyed.
‘The police have left me alone. I am not worth their while,’ she said.
At this, Alasdair sat dumbfounded.
‘You did not know?’ she asked, turning to him and scrutinising his face. ‘I thought that was why you were here.’
‘No, I did not know
.’ He took a long breath. ‘I came here to say I will do whatever can be done. I will engage the best lawyer in the colony to defend you.’
For a time neither spoke.
‘Well, now you shall not need to,’ she said. ‘But it was a kind thought.’
‘A kind thought?’
He stood and turned about. A nurse further down the ward, tending another woman, looked up and stared at him. He sat down again.
‘It was not a kind thought, Verity. It was necessary. To save you.’
He flinched at the melodrama of his own words, at the assumption that he could save her. But he had not said yet what he most needed to say.
‘Verity, it is no longer possible for me to continue in this manner. Indeed, I do not wish to. We cannot marry but we may be together—if not here, then in another city. Melbourne. London. Wherever you wish it to be.’
His words burst from him, the more so for being so long contained, and once they were free, he was free, and a world of possibility opened before him. Before them both.
‘If I must retire from public life I will do so, gladly.’ He gave a little laugh, afraid that he might not be able to express what was in his heart. ‘All those things that mattered to me I no longer care for. They are like … dust. I will find something else to do. With you at my side.’ He touched her face. ‘Verity, there will be other children.’
The hansom cab into which the minister had climbed had gone some little time ago, in a flurry of whips and shouting and the clatter of hooves, and a quiet calm had then descended on the peaceful little bay so that it was once more like any other morning.
But it was not like any other morning, for the minister’s wife stood in the road, her arms by her side with no hat and no gloves. With nothing.
A face had appeared briefly at an upstairs window of a neighbouring villa, a servant stood at an opened back door and paused in wonder, but now both were gone. Elsewhere blinds were closed, curtains drawn, doors were closed. After a time Eleanor turned and went back inside.
