Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club

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Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 2

by Julian Leatherdale


  ‘So, I assume we have found the murder weapon, Sergeant?’

  ‘I believe so, sir. A Colt pistol in the upstairs bedroom. Four bullets missing from the chamber.’

  ‘And no signs of a struggle,’ the Inspector mused aloud. ‘Photographer been in yet?’

  ‘Not yet, sir. Should be here soon.’

  ‘And what about the woman they found upstairs? Has she been interviewed?’

  ‘Tight as a clam so far, sir. She’s being attended to by the medico. Lost a fair bit of blood, so still pretty groggy. And it looks like she’s also dosed herself up with something. The doc’ll let us know when we can talk with her.’

  A ball of sooty fur leaped through the window and landed on soft little feet on the desk. It was Rimbaud, Bernice’s cat, who liked to roam the neighbouring rooftops all night but always turned up at their window for supper. With a loud trill he butted his head against Joan’s chin, demanding the writer’s attention. Bernice’s ownership of Rimbaud was largely theoretical, given that it was Joan who usually ended up feeding him in her flatmate’s absence. A successful novelist, journalist and poet, Bernice loved the Cross’s bohemian life of endless parties; as Joan’s comrade-in-writing and literary mentor, she was easily forgiven.

  ‘Okay, okay, enough with the smooching,’ Joan said. ‘Typical bohemian male! Out all night, spreading it about, but always home in time for a good woman to give you a meal and a cuddle.’ She had a soft spot for this cat, whom she privately called ‘T.S.’ in honour of the poet Eliot and the lines from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ about the cat-like fog that wraps itself around the house and rubs up against the windows. Having put two tinned sardines in T.S.’s saucer (an expensive indulgence), Joan hurried back to her desk.

  Weekends were precious writing time. Her weekday job as a subeditor for The Australian Woman’s Mirror, a magazine that hit newsstands every Tuesday morning, left Joan very little time or energy for her own writing. After leaving school, Joan had stayed at home for almost six years helping her parents care for her wounded war veteran brother, Richard, while she worked a series of uninspiring sales jobs in a florist, a shoe shop and a small corner store, before deciding it was time to acquire some secretarial skills to improve her employability.

  Her parents had been astonished when, nearly four years ago, she had dropped out of her stenography and typing course at Mrs Holt’s Secretarial College to become a copy clerk on the Mirror. ‘Why are you throwing away your best chance at a proper job?’ they lamented—meaning, of course, a ‘respectable’ job (as a typist, maybe, or a nurse), and then only to fill the gap until she married and took on the role of wife and mother. Despite parental disapproval, Joan reminded herself every day what a privilege it was for a young woman (was twenty-eight still young?) to be working on one of the most popular magazines in the country (‘162,000 copies sold every week’). Apart from advice on domestic and personal topics, a large part of the Mirror’s appeal was its charter to publish short stories, poems and serials by women writers, including big names like Ethel Turner and Kathleen Dalziel, but also lesser-knowns and even unknowns. The senior editors had all cut their teeth on The Bulletin; her direct boss, Mr Lofting, a stern taskmaster, was happy to strike his blue pencil through columns of copy that did not meet his high standards. Joan told herself this was a priceless apprenticeship, the day job she needed to support her own literary ambitions.

  Two months ago, Bernice had introduced Joan to Reg Punch, a senior editor on The Australian Journal. Reg had told her a slot might be coming up for a serial in May. ‘Send me a chapter or two as soon as you can—April at the latest—and I’ll see what I can do.’ It was an opportunity not to be missed, and Joan had spent every spare minute since chained to the Corona.

  In the meantime, she continued to subedit her three pages a week of gossip and womanly wisdom sent in by the readers of the Mirror. The ‘Between Ourselves’ section was so popular it was always sandwiched between full-page ads for Foster Clark’s Creamy Custard (‘Her Puddings Bored Her Husband’) and Johnson’s Baby Powder (‘A restful balm over play-weary limbs’). It was ironic, Joan thought, that the readership of the Mirror lived in a world she had consciously rejected. Joan’s schoolfriends had long ago found their life’s purpose in the care of husbands, ‘little bundles of joy’ and Californian bungalows in middle-class suburbs, while Joan had chosen instead the perilous life of a ‘new woman’, as the tabloid press liked to characterise the independent younger female generation.

  According to what Joan’s parents read in the newspapers, these ‘fast’ single women, living alone or sharing with their ‘flapper’ sisters in squalid boarding houses and overcrowded apartment blocks in Darlinghurst and Kings Cross, were exposed to terrible moral dangers. They smoked and drank in public, wore provocative clothing and mixed freely with unmarried men at cafes and nightclubs—not to mention dancing to jazz and guzzling cocktails at booze- and cocaine-fuelled parties. Dr and Mrs Linderman pleaded with Joan to ‘hurry up and find a nice fellow to settle down with’.

  Joan was pretty sure that Hugh was not the kind of ‘nice fellow’ they had in mind. His war service would certainly earn him points in her father’s estimation. First Lieutenant Hugh Evans had been twice mentioned in dispatches for gallantry and awarded a Distinguished Service Order thanks to his company commander, Major Gordon Fielding-Jones, who by a strange if not altogether happy coincidence was her mother Gloria’s brother-in-law and Joan’s rich uncle. Joan’s second brother, James, had also served under Gordon but, sadly, had gone missing in action. The problem was Hugh did not have a drop of patriot’s blood left in his veins. He had been badly gassed and now suffered from crippling episodes of gas neurosis. Coming home as a disability case on a pension, Hugh’s frequent bouts of panicked choking and depression scuppered any chance of a job. Instead he had joined the Balmain branch of the fledgling Australian Communist Party (under the false name of Billy Watts to protect himself against police spies and the loss of his pension) and sat at home writing anti-war poetry.

  As Joan returned to her typewriter, a sudden gust of wind burst through the open window and unpinned one of her crime scene photos from the wall so that it fell onto the keys. Startled, she snatched up the photo and studied it closely. A pretty young woman in black stockings and shawl lay sprawled on a bed in a depressingly shabby boudoir, the only sign of violence the bright stain blooming on her pillow. Joan felt a chill creep across her neck. She repinned the photo to the wall and resumed writing. But she could not dismiss the unpleasant impression that this interruption was symbolic in some sinister way. Maybe even a warning.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Tap-tap, tappity-tap-tap-tap, ping. As the dusk deepened into night, Joan lit yet another cigarette and kept working. T.S. continued to doze on the rug at her feet. In the night-time mirror of her window, Joan glanced now and then at her oval face, floating ghost-like with its broad forehead, thick eyebrows, refined Greek nose and shoulder-length black hair. It was a handsome face, classical in its proportions; more of a Diana than an Aphrodite, thought Joan.

  She enjoyed the early evenings, listening to the boarding house coming to life all around her: the muffled slam of doors and twinging creak of floorboards, the thump and gurgle of the makeshift plumbing hastily installed when the decaying mansion Bomora had been divided into flats and bedsits with a sink in each room and a toilet on each floor. Plywood partitions split in two the old house’s ballroom, parlours, dining room, bedrooms and library. Mildewed wallpaper, chipped statuary, scuffed chequerboard marble floors, smoke-stained ceilings and oil paintings, cobwebbed chandeliers … these were the melancholy vestiges of grander days.

  The plywood pretend walls were paper-thin but this did not bother Joan; the sounds of the boarding house were familiar and oddly comforting. To the left of Joan and Bernice’s flat, vaudeville performers Iris and Velma warbled melodically in the early evenings and fought like cats later when they got on the plonk. Two doors down, Archie, r
etired midweight boxer and now part-time nightclub heavy, sat in his sweaty singlet, eating beans out of a saucepan and listening to the wailing of Bessie Smith over and over on his Victrola. Eleanor and Jessie, two of Phil Jeffs’s harlots (or ‘painted houris’ as that salacious broadsheet, The Arrow, liked to call them), shared a room downstairs; they had convinced Mrs Moxham, the nosy landlady, that they worked in retail, but Bernice was certain that she would soon sniff out the truth.

  Next door to them was Mary, a mousy country girl from Dubbo who had been in Sydney for only three months and was paid a pittance as secretary to a shyster solicitor; she made barely a peep, except for gentle sobbing late at night. On the other end of the rowdy scale, the two painters, Arturo and his ‘brother’ Vincent, threw boisterous Saturday night parties in their downstairs flat attended by writers, actors, artists and other hangers-on in the bohemian community of the Cross. Joan and Bernice had been lucky enough to be invited to some of these soirees and assumed the two gents were keeping Mrs Moxham sweet with money or crates of bootleg. Tonight, they had the Divine Melba singing La Bohème at full volume on their gramophone.

  Joan glanced at her alarm clock again—quarter to nine. So it looked like Hugh was having another bad night. These gas neurosis attacks were so unpredictable. Joan never demanded explanations when he failed to turn up for a date. She suspected that she must truly love this angry, righteous man as it was so easy to forgive him just about anything.

  Joan sniffed the air. The fumes of frying potatoes, lamb chops, mince and onions and the unmistakeable stink of boiled cabbage were now drifting under the door and through the open window. Her back ached. It was time for a break, maybe something to eat. She could fry up the two rissoles she had bought that morning from the ham-and-beef place opposite the tram stop.

  Joan cranked the page out of the Corona and added it to the stack of paper on her desk. This precious first draft was anchored by a water-smoothed river stone, a souvenir from the creek opposite her parents’ house that had been Joan’s childhood playground in Willoughby. So very long ago. Before her brothers went off to war. Before her father got sick and gave up his dwindling medical practice. Before she moved away to discover a larger world.

  For the first eight months of her course at the secretarial college in Elizabeth Street, Joan had taken a bus and then a ferry every day from her parents’ house to the city. She soon tired of the morning and evening stampede through the turnstiles at Cremorne Point and Circular Quay. When she got the five-day-a-week job at the Mirror she decided to find a flat nearer the city. Which was when she had met the wonderfully worldly Bernice Becker, journalist, novelist, playwright, poet, dancer, actress, divorcee, mother of two boys (left in the care of their grandmother) and a Bohemian with a capital B. Introductions were made through Joan’s old schoolfriend Dottie Francis, who had known Bernice in New York when she had pursued an unsuccessful career in the theatre there for a couple of years. You’ll love her, Joanie—she’s a firecracker! Dottie had written.

  Bernice was an accomplished writer with no less than four novels to her credit, as well as many short stories, poems and plays. Her freelance journalism had been published in The Sydney Morning Herald, Truth and The Bulletin. She was five years older than Joan but with the vitality of a much younger woman. While she would admit she was no traditional beauty (she had a mannish jaw and a long equine face), it was generally agreed she possessed a quality that moviegoers liked to call ‘oomph’. At the scandalous 1923 artists’ ball (when police raided Sydney Town Hall with a tip-off about copious bootleg and drunken copulation), Bernice had become notorious overnight for her entrance in a body-clinging leopard skin tunic and dog-tooth necklace: a pagan hybrid of a tribal goddess and Diana the Huntress. With her thick black tresses, mesmerising dark eyes and unapologetic lust for adventure, Bernice was worshipped by a retinue of heartbroken lovers.

  From their first meeting at a pub in Crown Street, Joan was drawn to Bernice, who declared her intention to take the younger woman under her wing. ‘I can tell you’re a serious writer, Miss Linderman, and I believe we’re going to get on like the proverbial house on fire!’ Bernice’s prediction proved pretty much on the money in the four years the two women had shared their little rundown flat in Bomora. In that time Joan had fallen in love with the village life of the Cross, thanks in large part to Bernice, who proved to be less of a flatmate and more of a mentor. As a member of the artistic circle I Felici, Letterati, Conoscenti e Lunatici—the Happy, Literary, Wise and Mad, shortened to the Noble Order of the Evil Itchy (a cheeky corruption of I Felici)—Bernice had introduced her protégée to a ragtag collection of poets, journalists and editors (including Reg Punch), who liked to meet on Saturdays for long, boozy, philosophical lunches.

  Half-starved, penny-pinching bohemians were in plentiful supply in the dives of the Cross. As the surrounding suburbs had disappeared under a slum tide of terraces and hovels, the wealthy had made their escape, their antique villas demolished or reborn as melancholic boarding houses like Bomora. Bernice’s latest conquest, Laszlo, a Hungarian sculptor, lived in Elizabeth Bay House, once the grandest home in the district but now occupied by artists on peppercorn rents, a jaded colonial relic with its lovely rooms cut up into dingy studios.

  But the rich had far from deserted the Cross. Some hung on, eking out a precarious existence on dwindling inheritances, falling share dividends and the rent they earned by letting out rooms in their crumbling villas. But there was another, more appealing choice. On the unmarked graves of the old villas, there arose, phoenix-like, a new species of building inspired by the high-rises of New York and London: blocks of flats.

  Joan found it strange to think that only a few streets away from her own down-at-heel flat, her wealthy Aunt Olympia and Uncle Gordon lived in a penthouse apartment at the top of Kingsmere, one of the most elegant of the new brick fortresses that towered over the village of Kings Cross with panoramic views of the city and harbour. As Joan sat down to her modest meal of two gristle-and-sawdust-textured rissoles garnished with HP sauce, she could picture her aristocratic aunt in her Art Deco dining room at the top of Kingsmere, quaffing champagne and tucking into truffles and caviar, oysters Kilpatrick and cold fillets of sole in horseradish sauce.

  Shortly after her aunt and uncle had moved into their apartment two years ago, Joan had been invited for the rare treat of a dinner party and given a tour of the spacious rooms with their dark wood panelling, vibrant coloured walls and polished parquet flooring. As well as a living room and study, four bedrooms and two balconies, the apartment boasted a ballroom, two modern Art Deco bathrooms, a kitchen and pantry and a ‘telephonette’ from which one could ‘ring down’ for the caretaker or the resident chef or the florist or the hairdresser or one of the uniformed chauffeurs. It was the last word in luxury and avant-garde design.

  ‘My clever niece is a writer for a women’s magazine!’ her aunt had announced to the gathered company with her glass raised for a champagne toast out on the east-facing balcony as an amethyst dusk settled over Bondi in the distance. Olympia seemed genuinely pleased to discover a member of her immediate family had ‘creative ambitions’.

  While Joan appreciated her aunt’s enthusiasm for her new career (including a ‘small deposit on your future success’ in the form of twelve pounds in an envelope), she also felt wretchedly guilty and more than a little patronised. Joan knew that Olympia’s interest was only an opportunity to show her off to her high society friends as if Joan were some clever performing animal. What made Joan feel especially treacherous was that the invitation was also a calculated reproach to her own mother.

  Gloria had never seen the inside of Olympia’s apartment and never would. The two sisters, both well-brought-up young women from a genteel, affluent family, now lived in separate worlds. Olympia had married ambitious lawyer and businessman Gordon Fielding-Jones from Point Piper, while Gloria, afflicted with a youthful outburst of social conscience, had married Horace, an idealistic doctor from Au
burn who prioritised the pursuit of doing good ahead of making money.

  As the years passed, the sisters’ paths continued to diverge. Hosting balls and cocktail parties in her Vaucluse mansion, Olympia helped her husband to cultivate powerful allies while his legal practice thrived on its reputation for a no-holds-barred defence of the rights of the rich in such troubling matters as the eviction of tenants, intimidation of workers, cutting of government red tape and destruction of business rivals. Happy clients had brought their own rewards. Thanks to an early tip-off from an amenable alderman, Gordon had made a handsome profit from the purchase of six slum properties marked for demolition when the City Council widened William Street in 1920. Joan heard these stories of her aunt and uncle’s ruthless dealings from her mother.

  Meanwhile, Gloria and Horace lived in Willoughby on the modest proceeds of Horace’s medical practice. When the Depression bit harder and Horace’s income shrank even further as he cared for patients too broke to pay him, Olympia made it clear she had no time for such idiotic altruism and that Gloria and her saintly husband must never look to her for charity.

  Joan was torn. Of course, she despised Olympia for her hypocrisy and cruel treatment of Gloria and her family. But as an aspiring writer and bohemian free spirit, Joan could not altogether throw off her fascination with her aunt. For all her undeniable faults, Olympia’s view of Gloria as a dull, conventional soul, shackled by duty to her husband and children and robbed of life’s jouissance, was disturbingly accurate and aroused Joan’s worst fears for her own future.

 

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