The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  But Mr Flynn, who worked on the wharves and was enjoying the last few hours of his Sunday off, did not make anything of it.

  Eleanor left the kitchen and went up the stairs to her room and softly closed the door. The room was quiet, dark. She made no attempt to turn on a light or to light a candle.

  Alice was gone and she was responsible for the girl’s sudden departure. This was not in dispute. Her accusation of the child’s paternity, her utter belief that the girl had colluded in a sordid affair with her husband, these now appeared … less certain. It was possible—likely, even—that the child belonged to the girl’s sister. And that this wretched female was indeed now deceased.

  But still, it made no sense to Eleanor how the child had ended up here, in the upstairs attic room.

  The moon was newly risen and still low in the sky and a strip of moonlight struck the floor and a corner of the bed, reaching as far as the writing desk. She saw that the drawer to her desk was slightly open when she had certainly locked it the day before. She touched the drawer and found that the lock was broken. She ran her fingers along the bevelled wooden edge of the desk, along the jagged metal of the broken lock.

  Alasdair had done this. She could not tell when. Last night, perhaps, while she had been out. And she had not noticed it when she had come home. She sat on the bed. She could not imagine what it was he looked for.

  She felt that she was not sure what either of them looked for.

  And all this time there had been a child, secreted upstairs. The wonder of it struck her.

  But how had the child come to be here? She saw, in her imagination, Alice, dashing through darkened streets in the rain, wrapped in a sodden shawl, holding the newborn to her breast. Bringing it, for safety, to this house. (For where else could she take it?) This vision, of the young girl and the infant at her breast, so vivid, so compelling. It seemed to Eleanor almost biblical in its timelessness. Its sadness. She could not rid herself of it.

  The thought that she had made a dreadful, dreadful mistake crept in around the very edges of her consciousness. That she had treated the girl shamefully, or worse, circled around and around her head.

  Mrs Flynn knew it. Had been flustered and embarrassed in her attempts to hide her knowledge from her employer. It had been a mistake to ask Mrs Flynn for Alice’s whereabouts.

  The household was destroyed, Eleanor saw. She did not see how it could ever be salvaged. If she located the girl, if she rescued Alice and the child from whatever miserable place it was they sheltered in, well, there could be no question of offering the girl her position again. That was quite impossible, and Alice would not expect it. But she might offer help. She might offer money, a testimonial. She saw that this was the very least a Christian woman could do.

  Eleanor stood up.

  She realised she was crying, had been crying for some little time, the tears running silent and unbidden down her face. She did not want to care what happened to a wretched maid, but she saw that, if she saved this girl, she might also save herself.

  Night came upon the city, bringing with it the army of rats that in the daylight went unseen but as the darkness spread swarmed along every inch of the waterfront from Watsons Bay to Drummoyne. In a small number of suburbs the night brought on a fairy tale of electric-lit drawing rooms and dazzlingly brilliant dining rooms, but in the majority of places the darkness sucked the life out of the streets and the people retreated from it.

  In one of these streets a hansom cab crawled. It had come from Devonshire Street, turned into Crown Street and back into Fitzroy. The cab had crossed many of these same streets already, crossing and recrossing Surry Hills from Elizabeth Street to Bourke, from Cleveland Street to Foveaux. Every so often the veiled lady within the cab called out an instruction—slow down, not here, go this way, stop here, go on—and the cab stopped and started and turned back on itself and slowed down and sped up so that the cab driver shook his head and muttered to himself, though it would be a good fare. But have a heart, lady, he thought to himself as they turned once more into Riley Street.

  They were seeking someone, he understood that, for the lady sat forward and leaned out of the window when they passed some destitute young girl, or some drunken mother or some down-on-her-luck gin house whore, so that he wondered what exactly she might want with such a person—not that it was any concern of his.

  ‘Stop! Driver, stop!’ she cried and he called out, ‘Woah!’ to his poor worn-out horse and stopped the cab on the corner where some poor unfortunate soul lay on the ground. But the sky had long since turned grey and then black and you could no more see who it was than you could see the face of the lady beneath her veil.

  ‘No, go on,’ she said, very quiet, and he sighed and urged his horse on again.

  When they approached the corner of Riley and Albion and he saw the great dark mass that was Frog Hollow ahead of them he flicked his whip at the lumbering animal, urging it to hurry past, but the lady called out, ‘Stop! Stop here!’

  ‘Not here, lady. Ain’t safe.’ And he urged the horse on.

  ‘I command you to stop!’

  And so he did stop.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘No place for you, lady. You get out here I cannot answer for what might happen and I will not be here waiting when it does.’

  Though he would be sorry if it did, for they had spent a time together, he and she, and he had listened to the gathering anguish in her voice and he had an idea that beneath that veil was something so out of his reach it might just break his heart.

  And here they were, just as he had foreseen: unearthly figures emerging from the depths of the great pit like ghouls in a cemetery. Or like rats, circling and sniffing the air, and he took a tight grip of his whip and with his free hand he reached behind him for the cosh he carried for emergencies. This felt like it was about to become an emergency. He could see their pale faces, the light glinting in their ghoul eyes.

  Perhaps the lady made some movement, for they switched their attention away from him and the horse and towards her. One made a lunge at the door and almost got it open. He heard her cry out and he struck the horse and shouted, ‘Giddup! Giddup now!’ and the horse started up, terrified, and they were gone at a trot. The driver did not slow until they had reached the lights of Crown Street.

  He thought this would have frightened the lady but all she said was, ‘Take me to the asylum.’

  She meant the Benevolent Asylum at the junction of Pitt and George and Devonshire streets, where the old tollgate had once stood and where the women—since as far back as he could remember and far beyond that, for the building was convict-built, he was sure—went for their lying-in, those that had no bed of their own and often no husband either. He knew the place, all the cabbies did, though most of the women who went there went on foot.

  He reached the place and waited in the rain as she went inside. He crouched over his reins, pulling the collar of his coat up higher, but his coat was soaked right through and the rain ran down his neck and into his ears and filled his boots, and he thought with a kind of despair that he would die right here on this cab this very evening and that in Heaven, if there was a Heaven, it would be raining there too.

  Presently the lady came out and he saw from the way she held her head she had not found what she sought.

  ‘Home, lady?’ he called out, because all that mattered now was getting to his own home, unharnessing the horse and getting himself into bed as quickly as possible, with a warm mug of milk and a nip of rum to help him on his way.

  ‘Yes, alright,’ she said in a voice quite different now, a voice that was very low and tired and beaten. She still wore that veil, though he wondered why she bothered when the night was as black as a priest’s hat and a man could no more see the lady’s face than he could see into her heart. Though it was black, he decided, her heart. But the way she had said, Yes, alright, that made him wonder what she did look like beneath that veil, and the part of him that was still wistful an
d that remembered how it felt to fall in love thought of all the beautiful things in the world that he could not have, and his bed, which a moment before he had wished for, now seemed a cold and lonely place.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  ASYLUM

  The deputy superintendent at the Benevolent Asylum, an ardent young man named Quinn whose soft edges were steadily being hardened by the work he had chosen, knew Mrs Dunlevy. Or, rather, he knew of her. The wife of the minister was a long-serving member of the asylum’s Ladies’ Committee and so he did not hesitate to show her, at her request, the records of recent admissions. And if he privately considered it odd she make such a request late on a Sunday evening and clearly in a state of some agitation, he kept such thoughts to himself.

  He watched her, though discreetly, and the soft glow of the desk lamp cast a shadow over one side of her face and illuminated the other so that he thought of Renaissance paintings and the sufferings of saints and a great many other things about which he knew almost nothing but which seemed to him at that moment fateful and immense. If the minister’s wife searched the records for a particular name, she did not deign to share it with him, and when she closed the book and looked for a moment, searchingly it seemed, into his face, he said nothing and showed no surprise. It was evident she had not found that for which she searched. He watched her depart into the rainy night and a waiting cab.

  He wished very much he had been able to assist her.

  It occurred to him that many of the women—the unmarried ones, that is—provided a false name when they were admitted and he wondered, on reflection, if he might have mentioned this to her. Indeed, the thought now took such a hold of him that he started towards the door to follow her but could see, already, Mrs Dunlevy’s hansom moving off and the moment was past. So he gave it up and instead returned to his little room upstairs and the warmth of a wood stove and a nip of rum.

  And this was a pity, for a cursory study of the admission records would have shown him that a Catherine Foley, a young woman nineteen years of age and with an infant a week or two old, had arrived at the asylum’s doors very late on Friday evening.

  Catherine Foley was still here, her name invented—borrowed, perhaps, was a fairer description—but her predicament real enough. Common enough. For the asylum was full this night and every night. Catherine was the name of Alice’s mother, Foley her maiden name, a girl from the west of Ireland and, though she had been dead these five years, Catherine Nimrod could, in this way, help her daughter.

  And Alice Nimrod needed help. She lay with her dead sister’s baby on a tiny cot in a long and echoing ward crammed with such cots rammed up against each other, leaving not an inch of space between, and the hundred and more women who filled this place tossed and turned, cursed and wept. Some of the women had their babies with them and some did not. Some of the women had lost their babies, and in another ward not too far away were the babies who had lost their mothers. There was little talking among the inmates; each was wrapped tightly within her own separate world. This was not to say the place was quiet and calm, for misery is rarely quiet and here, where so many souls, their spirits and their bodies broken, gathered in a single space, the misery leached out of the walls and echoed in the very rafters, it rose up out of the floor. It was made manifest in the legion of vermin that crawled and burrowed through the soiled bedding and over the scabbed bodies of the women.

  But there was order, of a kind, among the misery. The women—those who could stand, who could walk a few yards unaided—had attended the service at the chapel that morning. A Proddy service, it had turned out, and Alice Nimrod, who had never been to such a thing before, had sat and wondered at it, at the emptiness of it, as if they were addressing a different God entirely and not the God she was used to; one who was very far away and who seemed untroubled by earthly failings. And in her mind this distant Proddy God became confused with the Dunlevys, who were equally grand and distant and untroubled by things that tore other people’s lives apart.

  She did not feel the injustice of her situation, for it seemed to her that if you stood too close to these distant gods, the Dunlevys, you might get burned and she had got burned. It was the way of things.

  But she was frightened. She had come to the asylum late at night and been provided emergency refuge. Tomorrow the admissions committee would consider her case. She could not sleep for worrying about it. If the horror of leaving was any worse than the horror of staying, she did not know.

  In the morning the Protestant chaplain came to her and said some words of comfort and blessed her, though Alice was uncertain what his blessing meant for he was not a priest, he had no rosary, no Hail Marys, nothing. He was unarmed.

  She waited all day. She had prepared a story of a husband who had deserted her, the circumstances of the baby’s birth. She had no papers to prove her story, but did any of these women? They would discover she was not the child’s mother, this was her great fear—was it possible a doctor would examine her? She thought of strange hands touching her. She did not know if a crime had been committed. She had taken her sister’s baby.

  Late in the afternoon two police constables came into the asylum. A man had come into the place and broken the jaw of one of the women, his wife, and in another ward a woman had smothered her newborn and been dragged out screaming and cursing, but these two constables just arrived looked straight at Alice. She had not been summoned yet to address the committee and when, now, a young man called out her name, instead of answering his summons she took up the baby and fled out of the door and no one came after her.

  Outside the city was heading into evening, the streets surrounding the asylum already dark with occasional pools of light. But gas lighting frightened Alice now and she avoided it. She went from place to place, drifting as one did drift when one’s destination was unknown, and the faces she sometimes saw were not friendly. She thought after a time that she must come up with some plan. She thought she could perhaps go to Mrs Flynn, who had helped her and had been her friend, after a fashion; who at least believed in a sort of justice. But she did not know Mrs Flynn’s house and she wondered if she would go there even if she did know it. She thought about returning to the Dunlevys and prostrating herself at their door. But she did not turn in a northerly direction. Her body took her away from such places as the Dunlevys inhabited. She thought of how Milli had hidden her face in the shadows, ashamed of her downfall. Alice had not done the wicked thing Mrs Dunlevy had accused her of and she did not know why she might be accused of such a thing, but she had done other things. She had stolen the baby.

  The night lengthened. It was as unending as such nights must be. Alice walked and hour followed hour, unmarked and forgotten as soon as it was past, for each was the same as the last. She walked and she clutched the baby. They seemed to have become one, she and the baby, and she would not abandon it now even if it meant they both must perish. But she had thought this vaguely, in an abstract way, while she was lying on the cot in the asylum. The reality of walking the dark streets in the rain with a baby was quite different. She feared for her resolve.

  ‘Zat Miss Nimrod? Thought it was.’

  A face emerged out of the night so suddenly and at such close quarters Alice started backwards. The cold and the wet and the distress of her situation had dulled her thoughts, and for a time she could not place the face or the words it spoke. And when her numbed thoughts assembled themselves and she saw that it was Mr Renfrew, clothed in the remnants of a suit that had once belonged to someone else and with the water cascading from his hat, she was confused. The only other time they had met he had struck his wife and demanded money from her.

  She stared at him, dumbly, helplessly.

  ‘Look like you could use some help,’ he said, as though a young woman clutching a baby in obvious distress on a dark night was the natural state of things, and in the world the Renfrew’s inhabited no doubt it was. But kindness came in all packages, the Bible taught you that—though if you read a few
pages further on the Bible told you something else again, or that was Alice’s recollection of it.

  Mr Renfrew had frightened her a little the only other time they had met, but Alice had lost too much to remember her fear. He was a man with a wife and a clutch of children whom he had not entirely abandoned, which put him above most men. He was a little drunk, she saw. A glistening in his eyes, a slight unsteadiness to his step, suggested this was so. And the fumes of some sly grog consumed illicitly, yes, she could smell this now. Some men were better after a drink or two, it softened their raw edges, and Mr Renfrew was, perhaps, one of these. It hardly mattered, she realised.

  It took all her strength not to fall at his feet.

  ‘Come on home with me, lass,’ said Mr Renfrew, patting her arm. ‘My missus will take care of you. You are among friends now.’

  And he gathered her up and led her to salvation, of a kind.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  BITTER

  On Tuesday morning the greatest fears of the federalists seemed realised. The day dawned grey and overcast and the city was lost in a fog from Bondi to the lower mountains. But before the anti-federalists could thrust aside their curtains and leave their houses to herald this late and much-needed intervention the sun rose above the horizon and the early fog melted away. By the time the clock at the GPO struck eight and the polling booths opened the sky was a clear blue as far as the horizon extended.

  Voting began sluggishly in the city, though in the suburban polling stations queues formed even before polling opened and the early risers—the men who worked in the factories and warehouses or with deliveries to make, the tradesmen, some on foot, some in their drays—waited for the doors to open so that they might get on with their days. The pro-federalists were up early handing out cards and leaflets at the tram stops and the railway stations, urging the reticent to do their civic duty. For nothing was certain—a year ago less than half the electorate had voted, a year ago the promised majority had not materialised and the day had been lost. If it failed again today, there would be no third attempt. There would be no Federation.