Olympia’s response was distant and dismissive.
I’m sure every mother of a wounded son feels he deserves special consideration, she wrote in reply. But I’m sure you of all people believe in fairness. It can’t be one rule for this family and a different one for the next.
Did Olympia forget how Gordon had bullied both Gloria’s sons into doing their patriotic duty? There blazed in her heart a righteous anger that insisted some behind-the-scenes string-pulling was the least Gordon could do to repay Gloria for the sacrifice of her two boys. Gloria explained her ‘disappointment’ in a strongly worded reply. Olympia wrote back: I have indulged your self-righteousness and jealousy of me for far too long. Enough is enough. Gloria was forbidden to trespass in Olympia’s opulent corner of the universe ever again. In short, she was ‘cut off’.
‘You have something that Olympia or Gordon would hate to see come to light,’ said Hugh. ‘Throw in a hint about Gordon’s shady dealings with Jeffs and we have a juicy front-page story for your old boyfriend Bill. I think we can easily convince Mr and Mrs Fielding-Jones to part with some hush money. And they’ll have no idea who’s behind it. What do you say?’
‘It sounds dangerous, Hugh.’
‘And hanging on to evidence from a murder scene isn’t? At least this way you get to help your parents. I pulled off things much trickier than this when I had that short stint in army intelligence.’ Hugh gave her a reassuring smile. ‘Why should the rich always get away with being such bastards, Joan? Just think of it as a more equal redistribution of unearned wealth. And once they’ve paid up we can tip off the police anonymously. If they’re guilty of murder, they won’t escape punishment, I promise!’ Hugh was very persuasive when he wanted to be. ‘Think it over. And for heaven’s sake, keep that scrap of paper well hidden. Or, better still, give it to me for safe-keeping.’
‘Thank you, darling.’
‘Celia thinks I’m at a branch meeting until late. How about we catch a matinee screening of The Cheaters? What do you say? To make up for last night.’
They both stood up from the table and Hugh signalled to the waiter for their bill. Joan went up on tiptoe to caress her lover’s face as she surreptitiously slipped a few coins into his pocket for the coffees. ‘I love you, Hugh Evans, you know that?’
He smiled. ‘I love you too.’ And they kissed with the fervour of two people willing to risk everything for each other if that was what life demanded of them.
CHAPTER SEVEN
When Joan arrived back at the flat at around six that evening, Bernice and Jess were already busy dressing up for a night out, talking nineteen to the dozen as they swapped hats and jackets and complimented each other’s appearance in the pockmarked baroque mirror that hung over the fireplace, another incongruous reminder of Bomora’s soon-to-be-cut-short days of splendour. Stirred up by all the excitement, the cat sharpened his claws on the divan bed and bounded around the room with yowls of glee.
‘What are you two up to?’ Joan enquired, puzzled by the air of girlish giddiness in Bernice’s bedroom. Bernice was in one of her high-spirited ‘theatrical’ moods, full of grandiose pronouncements as if addressing a crowd. ‘Life is the farce we are all forced to endure!’ Joan recognised the line from Rimbaud. It was one of Bernice’s favourites. Joan then noticed a ‘sniff’, a shilling bag of snow, cut into lines on Bernie’s bedside table. The girls were doping themselves up for a fun night on the town. A bottle of sparkling burgundy, more than two-thirds empty, also stood on Bernie’s dresser next to three drained brownies of Tooth’s.
Was Bernice embarking on another of her terrible, self-destructive benders? Please God, no, prayed Joan. The booze alone would take Bernice down the all-too-familiar path of maudlin and argumentative drunkenness, which sometimes led to frightening fits of rage and blackouts; she had been escorted home more than once by a police officer. Combined with the cocaine, it could even trigger one of Bernice’s full-blown manic episodes. But who was Joan to judge? How else was Bernice meant to handle her grief over Ellie’s death: with dignity and self-possessed grace? Not bloody likely!
Joan had expected to come back to a scene of deep sorrow following Bernice’s visit to Tempe that morning, but she should have known better. As Bernie loved to tell anyone willing to listen, being a bohemian was about more than just living in squalor and dressing cheaply; it was about confronting life in all its raw beauty and terror. Bohemians did not recoil from suffering. As pilgrims seeking the life force, they knew it was unavoidable: the taste of divine nectar one moment and a draught of bitter poison the next. And so Bernice and her fellow bohemians lived fully in these moments, at the whim of famine and feast, cavorting with happy abandon today, dancing in the embrace of death tomorrow, all to escape the soul’s enslavement to the deadly soul-numbing bourgeois ‘money system’.
‘Going out, are we?’ Joan asked.
Bernice snatched a lovely feathered cloche from the mess of clothes on her bed and tossed it to Joan. ‘Get your kit on, dear. Laszlo has invited us all for a shindy at the Big House tonight. Everyone will be there!’
The Big House was, of course, the once-grand mansion down on Onslow Avenue overlooking Elizabeth Bay. The caretaker, Mr Griffiths, had taken it upon himself to rent out rooms as studios and bedsits; the lion’s share of this cash income went on alcohol so that he could stay roaring drunk most days of the week. Thankfully, his intoxicated laissez-faire attitude allowed for the hosting of (according to general opinion) ‘the wildest, most fabulous parties in the Cross’. Bernice was right: everyone who was anyone in Sydney art circles would at some point grace tonight’s revels.
‘I’m too tired, Bernie,’ Joan pleaded. ‘I barely got a wink last night.’ ‘Come on, Joanie. It’s what Ellie would have wanted!’ Bernice kissed her flatmate on the forehead. Of course! Tonight was a wake for Eleanor. Bernice and Jess had clearly decided there was no better way to mourn their friend than to throw themselves headlong into a night of reckless pleasure. Bernice was probably right, Joan conceded; it was exactly what Ellie would have wanted.
‘Can I borrow that green dress?’ Joan asked, pointing at a backless emerald satin number draped over the bedstead. One of the advantages of living cheek by jowl with the rich in Kings Cross was that their cast-offs sometimes ended up in the second-hand clothes shops to be scooped up by Bernice, who had a keen nose for a bargain and was surprisingly adept at fixing, sewing, trimming and dyeing.
Bernie handed her the dress. ‘Have a sniff. Jessie’s shout.’
Joan was not a regular user of cocaine as she did not want to risk a habit or let it interfere with her writing or daytime work, but she was tempted to indulge tonight. The world looked so bleak in the wake of the events of the last twenty-four hours.
The rush came on fast, and the shabby flat took on a lovely sparkling clarity and warmth, appearing as beautiful as any mansion or flashy apartment in the sky. Joan slipped on the satin dress and admired herself in the mirror over the mantelpiece.
Tomorrow and all its uncertainties could wait, she decided. She and Bernice and Jessie would drink and dance and dance and drink all night long.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The electricity had been shut off over a year ago, so the famous oval hallway of Elizabeth Bay House appeared an even vaster cavern than it did in daytime, its size exaggerated by the unsteady glow of many dozens of candles in jam jars. Shadow and light embellished every architectural detail, bringing them to life—the architraves around the doors swelling like varnished tree trunks and the iron banisters on the staircase bending like bulrushes in the wind. The dimness also served to hide the state of decay and filth that the grand villa had fallen into over the last ten years.
Peering into the gloom, Joan could see figures milling about, talking, embracing, laughing drunkenly, making glorious fools of themselves. The spiral staircase was packed with bodies: men with jackets off, shirts unbuttoned; women loose-bloused, hair down. Jazz was playing loudly on a gramophone in an upstairs ro
om, the trumpet shrieking of Louis Armstrong punching out the melody of ‘All of Me’ in staccato bursts. ‘My beautiful Amazon!’ cried a voice with a syrupy foreign accent. It was Bernie’s lover, Laszlo, eager to show off his muse to a circle of male acquaintances. Bernie, who loved the spotlight, allowed herself to be swept off with Jess in tow.
As Joan pushed her way through the throng, she saw many familiar faces, all haloed in a benign glow thanks to the cocaine. It was not hard to spot the two German-born artists who lived here, both beautiful, earnest boys with cornsilk hair. Wolfgang had renounced his well-to-do family’s traditional calling of medicine, declaring he wanted ‘to paint bodies not cut them up’; Paul was lucky that his mother was a painter and his family supported his studies at the Julian Ashton Art School. In the front hall lurked bright-eyed, baby-faced Rex. He was a gifted painter but felt he was condemned to live in the shadow of his famous commercial artist father, Harry Julius, loved for his newspaper cartoons and the satirical sketches he’d done for the wartime newsreels.
Joan worked her way from the front door to the hallway and into the former dining room, with its imposing black marble fireplace now cluttered with empty beer bottles. She had already started work on a second Resch’s. More friendly faces floated by, waved, winked, blew kisses, patted her on the shoulder. It was just as well that the young men here tonight were passable to good physical specimens, thought Joan, as their togs did them no favours. Stained shirts with frayed collars, buttonless jackets out at the elbows, trousers held up by string belts, shoes with soles hanging out like the tongues of panting dogs: the bohemian male ‘uniform’ of sorts. These men of ideas and dreams resembled a bunch of bagmen on the susso with their scarecrow clothes and pinched, hungry faces. The bachelors (without the benefit of wives to wash, iron and mend) not only looked shabby but stank of tobacco, beer, turps and stale food. The older men (with the benefit of wives) scrubbed up better in the sartorial sphere, but their youthful profiles and physiques had been ruined by years of lousy food and copious alcohol consumption. Joan felt a complicated affection for them all.
Was that Virgil Reilly slouching against the doorway to the old library? He was busy sweet-talking a living embodiment of one of the slinky, semi-clad flapper ‘Virgil Girls’ that he drew for Smith’s Weekly. The women here—all dolled up in high heels, stockings, bangles, pearls, diaphanous gowns and skull-hugging cloche hats pulled tight over peek-a-boo bangs and luscious curls—were either hard-working office girls starving themselves to afford their glad rags or daughters of the genuinely rich enjoying a night slumming it with the bohemian fringe. Either way, if the women were keen, the men like Virgil were up for it. Excepting perhaps Oscar, Felix and Gerald, the trio of frocked-up drag queens who always added a note of extravagance to the evening’s regalia but trod carefully when it came to drunken flirting.
The saddest figure in the room, over by the old servery stacked high with bottles of bootleg, was Rayner Hoff. He sat alone, drinking steadily, purposefully. He was the most talented sculptor of his generation, a gentle, generous teacher at East Sydney Tech, loved by his students, most of them women. He had a big rectangular head—not unlike the rough-cut blocks of stone he worked with—and a handsome Clark Gable face, thick moustache and deep-set, soulful eyes. Dressed in drag as a fairy godmother at last year’s artists’ ball, Rayner was no stranger to fun and frolic, but in the last few months his reputation had suffered a blow. In Joan’s opinion, Hoff had designed and carved the most dignified monumental sculptures of serving men and women imaginable for the Hyde Park War Memorial. The central interior sculpture in bronze was shocking and heartbreaking all at once: a wartime Pieta of a dead soldier, a naked youth, borne on a shield by his wife, mother and sister. But some of Rayner’s other work for the memorial had seen him embroiled in controversy. Outraged by the maquettes for two sculptures featuring female nudes, one as Civilisation Crucified and the other as Victory After Sacrifice, Archbishop Kelly and other leaders of the Catholic Church had accused Hoff of blasphemy and obscenity. The forces of wowserism had triumphed yet again, forcing a humiliated Hoff to shelve his ‘offensive and indecent’ statues. Now poor Rayner, formerly the liveliest merrymaker and prankster at parties, sought solace and self-obliteration in alcohol.
‘Oh, Joan, it is you! You were missed at lunch on Saturday. But then I heard all about your macabre murder. Such a horror! And all within the walls of your humble digs!’
Joan knew the man to whom these fruity tones belonged. She turned and smiled at Sam Rosa—short, pink, bald Sam with his pudgy hairless arms and skull-like grin, the Grand Master of the Noble Order of the Evil Itchy, one-time fearless anarchist and two-time fearless editor of Truth. Bernice, up for any challenge, was one of his favourite freelance writers. She in turn indulged him at the madcap meetings of the Evil Itchy, acting as his sidekick to ‘initiate’ all new male members with long, lingering kisses while Sam himself was ritually kissed by the younger, prettier female members. The pair had been friends since the heady early days when the club met at the Café La Boheme in Wilmot Street, before a police raid closed the place for good. Sam had welcomed Bernie’s protégée, Joan, with open arms.
‘Thanks, Sam. It’s been a bloody nightmare, let me tell you. But tonight I’m here to drown my sorrows—and to raise a toast to poor Ellie!’ Sam solemnly raised his beer glass and they clinked.
‘To poor Ellie, another victim of the class war!’ he declared.
‘Any other Itchies here tonight?’ Joan asked.
‘I think Reg Punch could be moping about somewhere, the gloomy bugger.’
Joan was interested to hear that; she might seek him out to reassure him that her novel was going well and he would soon have some chapters on his desk.
As Sam drifted off after a passing lithesome beauty, Joan made her way through the crowd in search of Reg. ‘Another victim of the class war indeed!’ sniffed Joan. Why were women always victims or vixens in men’s eyes, wives or whores, muses or mistresses? Always stand-ins, mascots for something else: liberty, revolution, motherhood, purity, piety, beauty, eros, art? Could men never just see women as people first? As strong or weak, ashamed or brazen, self-sacrificing or self-interested like themselves?
Distracted by a tap on the shoulder, she turned to find Jess, a little unsteady on her feet, frowning. ‘Are you alright?’ Joan asked, taken aback at the intensity of Jess’s expression.
‘There’s something I have to tell you, Joanie. Come here.’ Jess drew Joan into a quieter corner and spoke low into her ear. ‘You have to promise to keep an eye on Bernie.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She won’t tell you, but she loved Ellie.’
‘I know. We both did.’
‘No, no, you don’t understand,’ said Jess urgently. ‘I mean, they were lovers.’
Joan was lost for words. What was Jess saying? Joan had suspected that Bernie had had a crush on Ellie, which may well have deepened into feelings akin to love. But lovers?
‘What about Laszlo?’ Bernie had been seeing her Hungarian sculptor for the last year.
‘Bernie said she would give him up in the blink of an eye if Ellie did the same.’
‘You mean give up the game?’
‘No, no. That’s work. It has nothing to do with this.’ Jess sounded impatient, as if Joan was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Ellie had another lover too, but she never told us much about him. She wanted to keep him a secret. All I know is that she called him her knight in shining armour and said he was going to take her away from all this. I never saw Ellie look so happy as when she said that.’
‘Cripes!’ Joan’s mind was racing as she tried to take it all in: Bernie, Ellie, a secret lover … Could Ellie’s lover have been Gordon? With his wealth and power he might well have appeared to be a knight in shining armour. Had he made promises to Ellie he had no intention of keeping? ‘What did he look like?’ Joan demanded. ‘Was he an older man?’
‘I never got a good look at him;
he only called round to the flat once. Came to the front door. Ellie was furious—she didn’t want anyone to see him. He seemed familiar though. Something about his voice.’
‘How long ago was this?’
‘January, maybe? I’m not sure.’ Jess seized Joan by the arm. ‘But listen, the thing is I think somehow Bernie found out about him. She and Ellie had a fight. A really bad fight.’
‘When?’
‘About a week ago. In our flat.’ Jess was crying now. ‘I wonder if maybe Ellie tried to break up with this man and it ended badly. Who knows?’
‘So you don’t think it was Frankie who killed Ellie? It could have been this fellow?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just worried …’ Jess choked on her words. ‘I’m worried that Bernie blames herself for Ellie’s death. I’m worried she could do something … you know … stupid. Please don’t tell her I told you any of this.’
‘I understand.’ Joan kissed Jess on the cheek. ‘I’m glad you told me. I won’t say a word to Bernie. I’ll keep an eye on her. And you take care of yourself. This is hard on all of us.’
Jess wiped her eyes and lifted her chin, all trace of vulnerability gone. ‘Ellie always said life’s too short to feel sorry for yourself.’ She took another swig from the beer in her hand then pushed her way into the throng.
The air of unreality Joan already felt all around her had just become more dreamlike. Over the last four years, she and Bernie had become good friends who shared their daily frustrations like sisters. Joan could not help feeling disappointed that Bernie had not confided in her about Ellie. Was it possible that she felt ashamed of her own desires? No, Bernie was not one to feel shame. Did she fear that Joan would be shocked or unsympathetic, perhaps?
Female desire was hardly ever spoken about. It was as if men—and most women for that matter—didn’t want to admit that it existed. It made the whole sex thing complicated and awkward. A man’s sex drive was a force of nature that had to be tamed and controlled while a woman’s desire was nothing more than the maternal drive to reproduce. Let’s face it, women weren’t meant to like sex; it was generally agreed that they tolerated it to please their spouses and to increase the progeny of the race and nation. Except for the women of the Ladies’ Bacchus Club, who had sought out Eleanor’s knowledge as ‘a celebrant’ of female desire on Bernice’s recommendation: not as a prostitute, it now occurred to Joan, but as a lesbian, well-versed not in men’s pleasure but in women’s.
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