‘I’ve got a nice vegie soup going on the stove. Could you just hang out the rest of the wash? Thanks. We’re lunching in the garden. The weather is too nice to be inside.’
Zora hurried away to the kitchen while Bernie and Joan collected the tin tub from the laundry shed and pegged out the last of the washing, all steamy and fresh, on the prop line. The garden was perfumed with the scent of Cox’s orange pippins, figs and lemons. Rosellas whirred and chinked cheerily in the bushes, while every now and then the savage cries of yellow-tailed black cockatoos could be heard high overhead. It was all a balm to Joan’s nerves.
‘My God, it’s so peaceful here,’ sighed Bernie. ‘I have to admit it would be nice to stay for a while. Not forever though. I’d go mad with boredom.’
‘You’d get a lot of writing done,’ Joan pointed out with a smile.
‘What does that mean?’ Bernie glared at her in mock outrage. ‘I already get plenty of work done in the middle of all the noise and craziness of the Cross, thank you very much!’
Zora had profiled Bernie for the Mirror a few years back, admitting to an admiration laced with envy for her talent and prolific productivity, and describing her as a great beauty and unconventional mind—‘speedy as a swallow in movement, quick as sunlight in speech’—leaving those who met her with an impression of ‘a dryad or a Grecian dancer of old born into modern life’. Bernie had been pleased as punch and counted Zora as a good friend ever since.
They settled into rattan chairs in the dappled shade of a large jacaranda. Zora served up piping-hot bowls of vegetable soup—‘all the vegies are from my own garden’—and Bernice opened the bottle of plonk that they had brought as a gift. They proposed a toast to friendship and began to eat. Zora asked about the production of Bernice’s play Bathsheba that was scheduled to open in a week’s time. Zora had spent her early years in the theatre, touring Queensland to raise money for wartime comfort funds, teaching elocution classes and writing drama reviews. She still enjoyed seeing plays. Joan told her about the strange Haven Valley Theatre production of The Bacchae. ‘It sounds most odd!’ Zora said, laughing.
‘I gather Norman is still overseas?’ asked Bernice.
‘Yes, he’s trying to get an exhibition up in New York and find a publisher in London,’ Zora replied with a sniff. The celebrated Lindsays lived a few stops further up the train line at Faulconbridge, and Bernice had been a guest at their house more than once. Norman and Rose had packed their bags a year ago and headed for the United States in disgust after Norman’s latest novel, Redheap, had been banned in Australia, with sixteen thousand copies shipped back to the publisher in London. Only a few weeks earlier this year, the same censor had stopped the importation of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It was hard not to sympathise with Norman’s despair at the cultural wasteland that was Australia.
Zora had little time for Norman, however, ever since the publication of her love sonnets, Songs of Love and Life, back in 1918. Her publisher, George Robertson, had asked Lindsay to illustrate the book but he had refused, claiming that women were not constitutionally capable of writing erotica or love poetry.
‘Norman is only interested in the rude physicality of sex,’ Zora had told Bernie and Joan. ‘All-conquering, rampant, shameless sex represented by Woman as Life-Force, the root of all—let’s face it—male creativity. Nothing to do with romance or love. Or female desire. That is why he and Rose ridiculed my poetry.’
To talk about these comparatively mundane matters was a pleasant distraction from the tumult they had left behind back in Sydney. Joan and Bernie had decided not to bring up the murder or the police investigation if it could be helped. Thankfully, Zora rarely read the gutter press, preferring to stick to literary journals and books. Strange to think that lurking somewhere close by (Behind that stand of gums perhaps? Or over the other side of the fence?) was an undercover detective sweltering in his raincoat and being driven mad with hunger by the smell of hot soup (Had he brought a wrapped lunch?). Joan almost felt sorry for him and had to suppress the absurd impulse to invite him to join them.
Sitting under the sweet-smelling trees, feeling the sunlight and breeze playing on her face and listening to the trills and peals of birds all about her, Joan thought that if this was not Arcadia, praised and yearned for by the poets and painters, then we are perversely blind to its blissful and dramatic beauty. Norman Lindsay, the undisputed (if remote) king of Sydney’s Bohemia, might have first moved to the Blue Mountains to help his pleurisy, but he found more than fresh air here. He discovered a landscape of sunsoaked lushness, verdant valleys, naked cliffs and bright waterfalls—an antipodean Arcadia his imagination could populate with fauns, nymphs and satyrs.
After a long lunch that concluded with apple pie and cups of tea, Zora took her guests on a ramble down to Jellybean Pool, a local swimming hole in the bush. Even though it was a school day, a group of skinny adolescent boys were whooping and laughing as they launched themselves off half-submerged boulders. Their cries reverberated against the rock walls. Sunlit greenery fringing the pool was reflected, a perfect inverted image, in its mirror surface. A mulchy smell filled Joan’s nostrils and the sun-drenched rocks gave off a dry baked aroma.
Joan and Bernie took off their shoes and stockings and dug their toes into the shingly beach that sloped gently under the tea-brown water. The pool was exhilaratingly cold. Holding their skirts up, the two women inched their way into the liquid coolness up to their knees, daring each other like silly schoolgirls to plunge in further. Zora had come prepared with a blue-striped bathing suit beneath her dress and a swimming cap, and she dived underwater with a yell of defiant delight. She had offered her guests togs and towels, but the two city-dwellers declined, feeling perhaps a little self-conscious in the knowledge that a detective might be watching.
Sun’s warmth, birdsong, green light, plash of limbs, yelps of joy. Time stood still.
And began again. ‘April and Davidina will be home from school soon,’ Zora informed her guests as she towelled herself dry. ‘I have some copy to finish before the afternoon mail. But you’re most welcome to stay. Read in the garden, have more tea and pie, doze under the trees.’
‘This has been absolute heaven!’ exclaimed Joan, kissing Zora on the forehead. ‘Just the escape Bernie and I needed!’
Bernice nodded enthusiastically. ‘But we have deadlines too, my darling. So we’d best be off. Thank you so, so much!’
The man in the raincoat was on the platform, smoking, when they arrived for the four twenty-two city-bound train.
‘Nice day for it,’ Joan said, waving and smiling.
The fellow looked startled at first and then, with a lopsided grin, he raised his fedora in a polite salute.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
It was a cold and rainy Thursday morning. When Joan opened her eyes at quarter past seven, she saw the silver shadows of drops and rills reflected on the ceiling. A new ceiling with new plasterwork. She looked to her left. New wallpaper, a new wardrobe, and a new overstuffed armchair. New in the sense of unfamiliar to Joan; aged and careworn in terms of its natural life as furniture.
Most of Joan’s clothes and other possessions were still in boxes. Only her typewriter and manuscript (anchored by its river stone on the kitchen table) gave these alien surroundings of the Bayswater Road flat any sense of ‘home’. The solicitor Abbott had warned her not to pursue her detective work while under surveillance. Handing over evidence she had already gathered to Bill hardly breached that rule, thought Joan, and nobody could stop her working on her novel. While Bernice was inside perusing the library in Zora’s study the day before, Joan had told Zora about the approach she was taking with her own book: a story in which the main characters were a policewoman and a female crime writer who was overtaken by the twists and turns of a real crime and must become her own detective in order to finish writing her novel. Zora applauded the idea. Her own daring unpublished novel, Rose Brown By Herself, an anti-romantic satire about a modern,
independent woman, had featured as its main protagonist a married woman named Rose Brown who wrote a novel about a ‘real girl’ called Rose Brown. ‘George knocked it back, saying it was too risky for 1920 and would not return him the costs of production! Hopefully times have moved on.’
The day in the mountains had been a tonic to both Joan and Bernice, even if they’d spent it being followed by a plainclothes cop. As Joan washed up a teacup and slung the kettle on the gas ring for her breakfast cuppa, she took pleasure in the other reason her heart was much lighter this morning: a handwritten note in the letterbox downstairs when she and Bernie had arrived home from Glenbrook. It was from Hugh.
Sorry for the silence. New Guard plans are afoot and I have to watch my back. Gordon is on to you about blackmail, thanks to Geoffrey. He has eyes on you but will not risk hurting you. Just wants to scare you. Does not suspect me—yet. Olympia is off her rocker. Lady bloody Macbeth! Heard about poor Jessie’s death and is now on a rampage of revenge for both women. Who knows what she’ll do next? Stay safe.
Love,
Hugh
It was such a relief to know he was okay. Having managed to preserve his cover, there were reasons for Hugh to be busy. The bridge’s grand opening was this coming Saturday and the papers were full of speculation about what the New Guard would do to disrupt the ceremony in protest against Premier Lang. There were rumours of plans to make a citizen’s arrest of the Premier for corruption, but also counter-rumours that unionists would mingle with the throng of merrymakers to quash any suspicious activity. The Premier and the official party would certainly be surrounded by a praetorian guard of New South Wales police officers.
It was a week of high tension all round. At a rally in Manly on Monday night, Lieutenant Colonel Campbell had frothed with indignation at Prime Minister Lyons’s recent inclusion of the New Guard when talking about the need for ‘suppression of military formations’. ‘We put him in,’ Campbell declared, reminding his audience of the New Guard’s presence at Lyons’s election rallies last December, ‘and if he doesn’t carry out his policy, we’ll put him out.’ On Tuesday the Associated Chamber of Commerce had passed a motion calling on the Commonwealth government to ‘ruthlessly stamp out communism’ and even exile its propagandists to remote Pacific islands.
In the midst of all these political dramas, Hugh was warning of Olympia’s lust for revenge over the death of Ellie and now Jessie. Was Jessie to be another martyr claimed by the Ladies’ Bacchus Club: a woman exploited and violated for male sexual pleasure and destroyed by male violence? What on earth did Hugh mean when he wrote, ‘Who knows what she’ll do next?’ And why should this pose any kind of threat to Joan? Was it remotely possible that Olympia, in league with her daughter Amelia, had killed poor Rimbaud and left the threatening note?
Even in the unfamiliar setting of this new flat, Joan grieved for T.S. and his morning ritual of scratching at the window latch to be let in from his nocturnal rooftop ramblings. While she was sickened at heart by the deaths of Ellie and Jessie, the truth was her cat’s absence was the most deeply felt. His gracious presence had been such a taken-for-granted daily blessing.
Over a quick breakfast of toast and tea, Joan wondered what Bill had done with Ellie’s love letter and the street photo. It occurred to her that if they were tendered as evidence in court, there could be a legal hitch if they had been obtained from Gordon’s premises without a search warrant. But Joan had been careful to tell Bill the exact location where she had obtained them: the second drawer of the desk in Gordon’s study. If Bill could persuade the cops to obtain a search warrant, then these objects could easily be ‘found’ again in their original location. What was the ethical problem with that? None that she could see.
All Joan wanted at this stage was for the spotlight to be taken off her and Bernice. She could not bring herself to imagine a scenario in which either of them were charged and tried for murder, though such miscarriages of justice must happen all the time, especially when the police were getting bad press and were keen to solve a case quickly. But the taint that came with being suspected, shadowed, investigated and arrested, especially once their names appeared in the press as suspects, would be enough to destroy their lives.
It was almost inevitable that Mr Lofting would let her go (‘With the greatest of regrets’) for fear of scandal sullying the Mirror’s name: murder did not really sit well with the magazine’s image. Their new landlady would likely terminate their lease. Editors at newspapers, magazines and publishing houses would stop taking their calls. Would their colleagues and friends in the Itchies stand by them? And who knew how their families would react? They would be prey to tormenting doubts and wrung dry of compassion once friends and neighbours besieged them (‘I always had my doubts’, ‘She was wilful and strange even as a child’, ‘City life ruined her, turned her into a monster’ and so on). The shame would crush her parents, her mother most of all.
It was still early, the sky pearly grey beyond the flat’s window. Joan had not touched her manuscript in days. How could she persist now that so much had changed, now that she, the writer, was so deeply entangled in the narrative, no longer the detached outsider but a character at the mercy of the story itself?
Bernie’s philosophy had always been that, for a writer with courage, life’s pitfalls were opportunities for imagination and understanding. Suffering, in her view, was a gift. Joan wondered if she still felt like that. Could a writer’s faith in making sense out of the story really get her through such dark times? Why should a writer be any more privileged than all those characters she had so nonchalantly tormented? Maybe this was life’s perverse revenge, Joan thought: plunging one into a story over which one had no control.
Joan cleared her breakfast things from the table to make room for the typewriter. She was determined to reassert her authorship if only in how she framed the story and recorded the details. And she was heartened by Zora’s encouragement. The challenge for Joan was to see herself as the woman police officer saw her; to reframe the story so that her own innocence would not be presumed. How did the case look to Armfield?
Joan Linderman barely spoke a word as they walked towards Central Police Station. Sergeant Armfield was well used to that wide-eyed thunderstruck look on people’s faces when they realised they were ‘a person of interest’ in a police investigation. There was no fail-safe test in Armfield’s experience to separate the look of the person who was shocked because they were genuinely innocent from that of the person who was shocked because they had been sure they would never be caught.
That difference would become clearer in the way the suspect handled the police interview. The guilty were usually more garrulous and defensive, the innocent less confident and more anxious to please. But, if Armfield had learned anything after all these years, it was that there were no hard and fast rules.
Bernice shuffled out of the bedroom, yawning, her sleeping mask askew. ‘Christ, you’re keen. Have we got any tea left?’
Joan pointed to the canister by the kettle. ‘A little. How did you sleep?’
‘Not well. I keep dreaming about that poor bloody cat! I miss him.’
‘Me too.’
Bernice scooped another spoonful of Goldenia into the pot. Despite their brief respite yesterday, this morning Bernice appeared stooped under her burden of fear, her face grey with worry. Outside, a siren began its shrill wail.
‘So do you think Bill has talked to the police yet?’
Joan had told Bernice all about her adventure at the cinema, the handing over of the letter and the photo, the close call with Gordon’s bullyboys.
Joan shrugged. ‘I hope so.’
‘Exciting as it is, I don’t really like having bloody coppers on my tail the whole time.’ Bernie’s voice quavered a little; Joan could hear the effort it was taking for her to appear unafraid.
‘It feels like the calm before the storm, Joanie. Any minute now, they’re going to find some conclusive piece of evidence. And then the
constabulary and the legal fraternity will come down on me with the swiftness and force of an avalanche and history will be rewritten and someone will stand up in a courtroom and tell a jury how I killed Ellie.’
‘That is not going to happen, Bernie,’ said Joan with a confidence that she did not feel. Like Bernice, she experienced her life at the moment as an absurd pantomime from which the backdrop of everydayness could be abruptly ripped away to reveal the unrelenting stage machinery of fate hidden beneath. ‘I’ll try to ring Bill this morning before work to see how things are going.’
Bernie sat down at the table opposite her and sighed. ‘Thank you, my dear.’
Bill was not in the office when she rang Truth and she thought twice about leaving a message. It was not as if he was unaware of the urgency of their situation.
At the Mirror offices, she did her best to immerse herself in the niceties of ‘Between Ourselves’, for which the ever-helpful Olive had done a first cull in Joan’s absence. ‘She shows such promise for one so young,’ Mr Lofting informed Joan within minutes of her arrival, causing her such violent irritation that she had to restrain herself from yelling in his smug owlish face, ‘Well, just give her my bloody job then!’
Joan also attempted to forestall any probing questions from her colleagues by announcing, ‘I am happy to say that the police have everything in hand, my involvement in this unpleasant business is now concluded and I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, thank you for your concern and support.’ That seemed to do the trick, though nothing could stop the looks of sham pity betrayed by glints of gossip-famished suspicion. On and off during the day, Mr Lofting hovered paternally at her desk, asking, ‘How is it going, Miss Linderman, is everything alright?’ until she wanted to scream.
Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 23