Joan leaned down and whispered, ‘I hope she gets better soon, Greta.’
Ruby gave Joan a sharp look. ‘I don’t suppose you had anything to do with all that stuff in the papers about that chap Gordon and his wife, did you?’
‘Maybe a little, Ruby. Fingers crossed, eh?’
Ruby nodded. She still had that dogged, exhausted look that all the powerless eventually acquire after years of being exploited and defeated. The law would presumably take its inevitable machine-like course and her part in it would feel marginal. Joan could tell that, of course, Ruby wanted justice for her daughter and hoped that whoever killed Ellie would hang or spend their life in gaol. But Joan also knew that for people like Ruby, it was kinder sometimes not to torment oneself with hope at all.
Joan felt Greta tugging at her hand. ‘Miss, miss,’ the girl whispered urgently. ‘Please, miss, I have to tell you something.’
They both paused and were left slightly behind as Ruby and Hugh kept walking.
Joan bent down to hear the little girl over the background rumble of the crowd. ‘What, Greta? What is it?’
Greta pointed at Hugh. ‘That man kissed my mummy in his car. I saw them. I was hiding near the front gate and I saw them.’
‘You mean Hugh?’ asked Joan.
‘Yes, he kissed Mummy in his posh car. Outside our house.’
‘Are you absolutely sure about this, Greta?’ Joan had squatted now so she could look Greta directly in the eyes. The little girl did not blink; there was no trace of doubt in her face.
‘Of course, I’m sure. That’s him alright. Why would I fib?’
Joan’s body convulsed with the shock of this moment and hot prickles of inexplicable fear ran across her neck and down her spine. This couldn’t possibly be true, could it? Surely, the little girl had made a mistake. Hugh looked nothing like Gordon for a start: he was at least twenty years younger and half a head shorter with blond hair as opposed to grey, a slimmer physique with an oval-shaped face, not square-jawed and jowly. And why on earth would he be in Gordon’s car with Eleanor anyway? Was it even remotely possible he was having a relationship with Ellie? None of it made any sense to Joan, but it deeply unsettled her.
‘Hey, Joanie, don’t get lost.’ It was Hugh shouting and waving over the heads of the crowd as it swirled about the woman and child standing in the middle of the roadway, cutting them off from view. ‘Come on!’ Joan had to think fast; she must protect this little girl from whatever strange and unthinkable way the truth would reveal itself.
‘Greta?’
‘Yes.’
‘Promise me something.’
‘What?’
‘Until I find out what’s going on, promise you won’t tell anyone what you just told me.’
The little girl spat in her hand and held it out for a handshake as her oath. Joan did the same and they shook hands.
And then Joan and Greta, still holding hands, ran to rejoin Ruby and Hugh.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
As Joan and Hugh walked on by themselves to the north side of the bridge and back again, Joan’s mood was distracted, even a little agitated, stirred up by her encounter with Greta.
‘You okay?’ asked Hugh.
‘Still thinking about Greta,’ replied Joan. ‘Poor kid.’
‘Yeah. Poor kid.’
As she walked beside him, Joan glanced sideways now and then at Hugh and the question arose in her mind: How well do I really know this man? It was a reasonable enough question, she supposed, but not one that had ever really bothered her before. In every action, big or small, Hugh had shown himself to be honourable—towards her, at least. Kind, thoughtful, even self-sacrificing and courageous. Why would she have reason to doubt him?
The demolition party at Bomora was scheduled to begin around six o’clock. Once they were back on the south side of the bridge, it took more than two hours for Hugh and Joan to reach Kings Cross as the city’s trams and buses were packed with Sydneysiders travelling in both directions. Bernie was waiting for them at the flat. She had not joined in the public festivities as planned. ‘I gave up trying to catch a tram hours ago. The city has gone mad. How was it?’
‘Wonderful!’ Joan gave a her a hug and a kiss. ‘I’m sorry you didn’t get down there. But I’ll tell you all about it in excruciating detail later. Right now, I’m in the mood for a party!’
Joan had been surprised that Hugh had accepted her invitation to the Itchies’ ‘house-cooling’ party at Bomora as he was not at all comfortable with her bohemian friends and their antics. He assumed they were all without morals or politics, which was not strictly fair or even true. It was more a matter of personality and style. Hugh grew quieter the more he drank while most of the Itchies grew louder and rowdier. She hoped that he would not feel too awkward.
‘Aren’t you going to change into something?’ she asked. ‘It could get pretty dirty!’
‘Nah, I’ve got no more use for this bloody suit.’ Hugh grinned. ‘It’ll make a fitting farewell!’
Bernice and Joan disappeared into Bernice’s bedroom. Joan could not resist her flatmate’s offer of a little sniff, especially after the week they had both endured. It was time to step out of reality for one night and celebrate their newfound freedom! With Gordon and Olympia behind bars and awaiting trial, it was unlikely the police would take any further interest in Bernice or Joan. She hoped Hugh would not mind too much. He did not so much disapprove of drugs as a personal vice as condemn them as a way of ‘turning the working masses and the dispossessed into sleepwalkers, robbing them of revolutionary consciousness’. Which was all true enough, but so dreadfully dull.
‘Let’s go destroy a colonial mansion!’ announced Bernice when they re-entered the main room.
Hugh laughed. ‘Sounds like a good idea to me!’
As Joan pushed open the iron front gate of Bomora and led Hugh and Bernice up the gravel path to the front portico, she could hear the party was already well underway. The electricity was obviously still on as lights blazed from every window; the chains across the front door had been easily disposed of with a bolt cutter and the lock prised off with a crowbar. It seemed that word had spread far beyond the Evil Itchies, as the lobby of the house was full of people whom Joan did not recognise, most of them well-oiled and in riotous party mode.
‘Hey, Joanie, Bernie!’ Frank Bennett came barrelling down the stairs, arms outspread, the gracious host of this evening’s carnival of chaos. ‘And you must be Hugh. Welcome, welcome. Plenty of booze in the bathrooms, beer only sixpence a bottle. Come and choose your tools of mayhem and I’ll take you through the basics so you only hurt the house and not yourselves.’
Even before they reached the upstairs flats they could hear sounds of merriment mingled with destruction. To add to the party atmosphere, someone had discovered Velma and Iris’s old piano abandoned in their flat. A pianist was pumping out popular songs and show tunes (‘Puttin’ On the Ritz’, ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’, ‘Get Happy’) at a manic honky-tonk pace and volume while accompanied by an over-confident singer with a shaky grasp of melody and lyrics.
Most of the cedar doors were already off their hinges and in the process of being sawed in half. Inside each room the slam of mallets tearing into wood and plaster could be heard, punctuated by great savage cries of excitement and gusts of hilarity. One happy crew (including shy virgin poet Cecily, looking very flushed and excited) was busy dismantling the stairs with a glorious splintering of wood as elegant handcrafted bannisters came out like rotten teeth, all Mrs Moxham’s religiously observed polishing and dusting rendered absurdly redundant.
‘We left your old room just for you and anyone you’d like to invite to help,’ said Frank.
‘Nice touch,’ said Bernie.
In the ‘tool room’, which had once been the linen cupboard, were stacked axes, hatchets, mallets, hammers, saws of all sizes, wrenches, screwdrivers, crowbars and many pairs of gloves, as well as tool belts and aprons. ‘I would like all the tools
back in one piece if possible, please!’ said Frank after demonstrating the safest technique for handling each one. ‘Happy wrecking!’
Hugh hefted a long-handled mallet over his shoulder as Joan and Bernice put on leather aprons, pulled on gloves, grabbed hammers and crowbars and made a beeline for their old flat. While the pianist thumped away merrily on the ivories next door (‘Happy Days Are Here Again!’, ‘Walk Right In’, ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’), the wreckers had already destroyed the flimsy partition that separated Velma and Iris’s old flat from Joan and Bernie’s.
Joan could clearly see the wall on the far side half stripped of its floral wallpaper as if a giant cat had raked it with her claws and left the floor strewn with shredded paper and curled-up scraps. Now the wreckers were at work ripping up the wainscoting, which came away with the sound of someone biting into a fresh apple. Bernie, Joan and Hugh were keen to follow their example. Frank had warned them to not touch any of the exterior walls and to stay away from the light switches so as not to cut through the electric wiring. Apart from that precaution, they were free to smash and rip to their hearts’ content!
While Bernice got stuck into the wallpaper in her bedroom, Joan laid about with her hammer and made short work of the pockmarked mirror over the mantelpiece and the glass in the window that looked out onto her favourite rectangle of sky, now sunk deep into blackness except for the lights of the city and the illuminated arch of the new bridge. Using her crowbar and hammer the way Frank showed her, Joan then jemmied the window frame away from the wall with a satisfying crack followed by a long squealing groan as the nails popped and the frame came apart. No more struggling to get that bloody thing open for the late afternoon southerly buster. Was it really only two weeks since she had sat here writing her crime novel and dozing off with Rimbaud in her lap to be woken by Bernie’s screams?
A few feet away, Hugh swung his mallet with deadly force at the living room wall, making a large ragged hole in no time at all. Within minutes, his face, hands and suit were caked in white dust from the pulverised plaster, giving him the grotesque appearance of a ghost and exaggerating the lunatic smile on his face. Stripping off his ruined jacket, he continued to wreak havoc in his shirtsleeves. It was thirsty work, and he stopped now and then for a swig of beer. Joan could only imagine the revolutionary fantasies unfolding in her red-ragger boyfriend’s head. With his face and torso soaked in sweat and his body tensing and twisting to swing the heavy mallet, he resembled the noble muscular Soviet factory worker in a thousand communist propaganda posters.
As Joan swung her own hammer with destructive glee and tossed debris out the hole that was once a window into the yard below, she felt the strength of her anger flow through her as she smashed and smashed and smashed at the bars of her cage. Like every woman she knew, she was a prisoner of male power and prejudice, trapped in men’s narrow estimation of female capabilities and worth. How would this ever change? Joan raged inside her head. To change men’s minds and build a different world for women would require destruction of one kind or another.
Did any of the men she knew and loved truly respect her as an independent, capable person? Her father had supported her literary ambitions more than her mother ever did, though he too expected her to marry and have children. As she knew from Zora’s profiles, a woman’s writing was a secondary calling, while her real work was as wife and mother. Bernie had walked away from that life and sacrificed her children to become a successful writer. Bill Jenkins had dismissed Joan’s interest in crime writing as frivolous; did he think differently now she had turned up evidence in a real murder case? Most probably not.
Smash, smash, smash! It all had to come down, these ancient walls that boxed women in, these suffocating codes. But the question always remained: how to salvage romantic love between men and women from this wreckage? That troubled Joan deeply. Could it be saved?
When she’d finished pounding the window frame into kindling, she turned her attention to the furniture in the room. It was obvious that someone—probably kids from the slums of Woolloomooloo—had broken into the building in the last day or so and made off with anything they could use for firewood, including Joan’s desk, chair and the drawers from Bernie’s vanity table. They had made a start on the wardrobe in the main room but must have been interrupted. Joan grabbed an axe and took great pleasure in finishing the ugly thing off.
Beer bottles littered the corridors as Itchies and strangers drifted in and out of the rooms, stepping through the gaping holes in the interior walls and shattered remains of doorjambs to admire the work of their fellow wreckers. Most of the party guests gathered for the climactic obliteration of the chandelier in the lobby, which plummeted to its explosive demise and was then set upon without mercy so that barely a shard of crystal was left unbroken.
Just before eight o’clock a fireworks display crackled and popped in the night sky over the harbour. The house-cooling party took a break from its frenzy of destruction and hooted and clapped the closing act of the day-long celebration. As the last glitter of fire died away in the darkness, searchlights from warships bathed the great arch and pylons of the newly christened bridge in an eerie light, as if it were already a magnificent ruin.
Down the far end of the little yard at the back of the house, Hugh and Joan had found an old iron lacework bench that must have once graced an arbour on Bomora’s former estate before it was subdivided and sold off. They sat not far from where Joan and Bernie had buried poor T.S. in the flowerbed only five nights earlier.
They were alone, enjoying the light breeze off the water and the spectacle of the bridge. Joan smoked. Inside, the party had shifted into a slower gear. The pianist had drifted away an hour ago, at which point the abandoned piano had been promptly attacked with mallets and saws and dissected down to its iron frame and pedals. A few zealous latecomers were still finding things to destroy (the plumbing and the plaster ceilings) but, by and large, the guests had sated their appetite for mayhem and were either too tired or too drunk to do any more damage.
‘Has Judgement Day come yet?’ Joan asked, turning her gaze from the harbour to Hugh’s face.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Hugh. ‘Probably not. But it feels like we’re at a crossroads. Fighting a battle for this country’s soul. I’m afraid that if we let the capitalist class win this one, they will never take their boots off our necks.’
Hugh continued to stare at the harbour, seemingly lost in thought, and Joan let her gaze linger a little longer on his handsome, noble face, glossy with sweat from his physical labours. He had removed his plaster-caked jacket and slung it over the bench. Joan could not help noticing how his sweat-soaked shirt showed off his muscular chest and arms, all pumped up by the hard work of swinging a mallet. He might be a wounded warrior, a red-ragger poet bearing a flag for a lost cause, but there was a beautiful, unselfconscious strength in this man.
Joan thought then of her night at the Ladies’ Goddess Club, how her body had stirred and tingled with desire, how that feeling had deepened as her skin unfolded tendrils into the air, how her blood, nerves and hair had surged upwards and her skin and bones dissolved into sparks, and all the star-dusted night sky had glistened over and under and inside her so that, for one moment, she was a goddess and her whole body was filled with a never-ending oblivious sweetness.
She felt the call of the god again now, Bacchus beckoning her to find bliss in her lover’s arms. Joan leaned over and kissed Hugh on the mouth. Caught off guard, he gasped. And then his eyes closed and his right hand came up to stroke her face, to hold it closer, and his tongue and lips answered the passion of that kiss. Their breathing came rougher now, their joyousness finding voice in sighs and small moans of pleasure. Joan sank deeper into his embrace, her body pressed close against his, flesh seeking flesh, her heart racing with excitement but also fear—please, don’t let this stop, please, I beg you. She felt his right hand stroke her neck tenderly then, dropping lower, brush against her nipple, before taking her brea
st fully in his palm, stroking it with greater and greater urgency. She murmured, ‘Oh, Hugh, Hugh, my love.’ And then just as suddenly as this lovemaking had begun, she felt Hugh struggle and pull away, breaking the spell.
‘Jesus wept!’ Joan reeled back as if she had been slapped in the face, which was now flushed and twisted with the rage of humiliation. ‘For Christ’s sake, what kind of bloody saint do you think I am? I’ve tried to give you time to get over whatever it is that bothers you, I really have. But I’m in love with you, Hugh. And I want you to love me too. Is that wrong? Is it too much for me to expect that you desire me? Like any normal man.’
It was Hugh’s turn to appear king-hit. His chest caved in as if winded, his head hanging down in utter abjection. His voice was hoarse with tears when he spoke. Joan could not hear him.
‘What did you say?’ she demanded.
‘I said I am not a normal man, Joan,’ he moaned wretchedly. ‘I have not told you the truth.’
Now Joan felt a sickening wave of dread and revulsion at whatever betrayal he was about to confess. Was it possible that out of all the men that she had trusted in this city of shadows, Hugh would prove to be no better—and possibly even worse—than all the rest?
There was no escaping the truth. The deadweight of its certainty crushed her whole body, threatening to squeeze the last drops of hope and happiness from her heart.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Hugh struggled for some time to bring his sobbing under control. He then leaned forward on his elbows and rubbed his face with his hands, still unable to look at Joan directly. When he spoke his voice was hoarse and barely rose above a whisper.
‘I love you, Joanie. I know that must sound strange given what’s happened, but it’s true. It’s because I love you that I cannot … bring myself …’ Here, Hugh almost choked on his own words. ‘The fact is I have syphilis. The pox.’ He spat the word out with disgust. ‘Another legacy from my time in France. But one that cannot be talked about openly. I hope you understand now; that’s why I cannot … will not … make love to you. I refuse to hurt you in that way, Joanie, though so many men have done this to their wives and girlfriends, feckless bastards that they are.’
Death in the Ladies' Goddess Club Page 27