Bittersweet

by Colleen McCullough

  “We’ll see Les Kimball at the Rural Bank tomorrow afternoon,” Tom said warmly. “You may as well bank with the Rural, all the Burdums do — or have. It’s a modern establishment, the bank of the New South Wales Government. Is that what you want?”

  “Thank you, yes.”

  “I was under the impression that my son, Henry, remained a no-hoper after he left New South Wales,” old Tom said as he broached his third cup of tea.

  Charles shrugged. “It would appear not, Grandfather. He founded an insurance company, became one of Lloyd’s underwriters, and married into the Lancashire plutocracy. As an only child, I inherited a fortune when he died — but, as you probably know, by then he had become what the English call eccentric, denied his wealth and family, and chose to live like a funded itinerant.”

  “And your mother too is dead, I understand?”

  “When I was born,” Charles said in a tone of voice that indicated he didn’t wish to talk about her. As if to soften this, he gave an irresistible smile and said, “Who will give me an honest assessment of the Corunda Base Hospital? I mean someone who knows the place inside out, has seniority yet no desire to be its superintendent, and isn’t afraid of treading on a few medical toes when he gives his opinions?”

  “Liam Finucan,” said old Hannah instantly.

  Old Tom nodded. “Yes, Charlie, he’s your man. I might be on the verge of ninety-six and long past serving on the Hospital Board, but I swear Liam is the only senior medical man situated to help you — and he will help you. He’s staff, a true pathologist with no private practice. Add, a Protestant Ulsterman who qualified in London — too good for Corunda, which got him because of his marriage to a Corunda girl. She was a trollop and they’re now divorced, but by nature he’s really a bachelor. I can arrange for you to see him tomorrow.” He frowned. “Can you afford a car?”

  “I have a Packard in the process of being delivered to me from Sydney. It’s due to arrive early in the morning.”

  “An American car rather than an English one?”

  “I note your car is German, sir.” The face, such an intriguing blend of beauty and ugliness, creased up impishly. “I bought it due to its colour — maroon, not the inevitable black.”

  “I thought all cars had to be black!” said old Hannah, shocked.

  “For which, blame Henry Ford.” Charles finished the last of his Hunter Valley claret and politely stifled a yawn. Time for bed.

  When Charles met Dr. Liam Finucan the following afternoon, it would have been difficult for Kitty Latimer to have identified him as the same man were it not for his height. He was wearing moleskin trousers of the sort could double for riding breeches, a soft-collared white shirt with Balliol tie, a tweed jacket, elastic-sided boots (with built-up heels — cunning!), and a broad-brimmed felt hat. Only the tendency to strut hadn’t vanished, though he was trying to lessen it; these rude Colonials didn’t bother hiding their amusement at any kind of affectation, especially in a man, and they were as unkind as ruthless. The concept of masculinity, he was learning, was forged in hardened steel.

  Dr. Liam Finucan, who had been in Corunda for eighteen years, fancied that Dr. Charles Burdum looked like a Burdum without the erosion of barbed wire and Solvol soap — a soft fellow, as the English were if their class was elevated enough. And he wore a ruby ring on his left little finger, a very strange, effeminate conceit in this part of the world. His eyes were the colour of a British soldier’s Great War uniform, a coppery khaki more rust than green, and he was quite as ugly as he was handsome. However, Liam found him curiously likeable, and had no axes to grind about the vacant superintendency, so cherished no preconceived resentments.

  “If I’m to consider taking the job,” Charles said in the Grand lounge over drinks with Liam, “I need an unbiased report from someone who knows all the ins and outs. My grandparents say you’re my best bet, so here I am. What do you consider the allurements of this job as it’s being offered to me?”

  “The run-down nature of the place,” Liam said without a moment’s hesitation. “Frank Campbell was a penny-pinching Scot who scrimped and cut corners on everything. All that’s carried Corunda Base through twenty-five years of his administration are the quality of the medicine and the nursing, both achieved against the odds. At the root of the trouble was the Hospital Board’s love of old Frank’s parsimony — wicked! It rejoiced in the fact that he fed the patients and staff alike on sixpence a day and made the nurses darn the linen on duty. For me, the pathologist, it meant a chronic shortage of reagents, chemicals, glassware, stains, equipment — you name it! I’ve found it much easier to get major apparatus because any man of enterprise can coax a willing donor into buying an automatic microtome blade sharpener or an imposing microscope. No, where the place has hurt the most has been in basic supplies, from toilet paper to scrubbing brushes and high-watt light bulbs. Do you know that babies are nursed on newspaper? Antimony is toxic! All to save the linen, not to mention the expense of laundering! While the Board members cheer Frank on! Weasels? I’d call them cockroaches!”

  “Do they know the grisly details, or just the figures?”

  “Just the figures, of course. The Reverend Latimer would’ve been horrified if he’d known the details. But he could have found out.”

  “If it means extra effort, Liam, people won’t exert themselves.”

  “The food is terrible, really terrible, yet out at Bardoo is a hospital farm and convalescent home that should be producing milk, cream, eggs, pork, and some vegetables in season. The convalescent side Frank turned into a boarding house, and the edibles that should have gone to the hospital kitchens he sold to local shops or suppliers. Digusting! Wicked!” The softly accented voice, modified by so long in Australia, had not so much risen, as hardened. “I tell you, Charlie, that man should rot in a worse hell than Lucifer could devise. He made a profit out of sickness and death.”

  “By Jove!” Charles exclaimed, having no idea what phrase an Australian would use. “Is there State Government money as well?”

  “Yes, of course, but I’d be willing to wager more was saved than ever spent. Frank was brilliant at fiddling the books, though he never took a farthing for himself. There have been dozens and dozens of bequests to the hospital — it’s a favourite charity. But nothing has ever been spent unless on a specifically named item.”

  “This is wonderful!” Charles cried. “I’d envisioned years of fighting the faceless slugs of a civil service for the funds to make Corunda Base as modern as the Mayo Clinic, but now you tell me there’s actually money in the bank? How much? Six figures?”

  “Seven figures,” Liam said with angry emphasis. “There are four million pounds residing in the Corunda branches of several big Australian banks. That’s why Frank Campbell was so hated — he was sitting on a fortune he refused to spend.”

  Charles was gaping. “Four million? That’s impossible!”

  “Not when you think about it,” Liam said flatly. “Take the Treadby ruby bequest. The patch ran out in 1923, but the bequest came into being in 1898 — the first £100,000 in each year were to go to Corunda Base, and did. Not a single penny of it was ever spent, including the miserable interest the banks pay. All the result of a blazing row between Walter Treadby and his sons. Walter changed his will and died two days later, an after-effect of apoplectic tendencies that dumped the Treadby rubies in Frank Campbell’s undeserving lap for twenty-five years. Had Walter lived a further two days, he would have removed the new codicil from his will.”

  The laughter broke through; Charles roared with it. “Never underestimate a tendency to apoplexy! Tell me of the Hospital Board.”

  “The Board’s as bad as Frank was. Well, they’re Frank’s own creatures, he hand-picked them to obey his every dictate, and they did. For example, the nurses, always recruited from poor families — girls without any education or hope of registering later on, but splendid nurses he paid virtually nothing. The land is tax- and rate-free, the electrical power supply nego
tiated down to next to nothing, and the gas dirt cheap.”

  “No wonder the Board never opposed him,” said Charles, tone tinged with admiration. “The man was a genius of sorts.” He looked suddenly cunning. “I don’t suppose you’d like to be the Deputy Super?” he asked.

  “No, thank you!” Liam snapped. “I’ll gladly help you all I possibly can, Charles, but my ambitions are confined to having the best pathology department in the state, from analytical equipment to the breadth of its functions and facilities. I also want a radiologist in a separate radiology department, a staff appointment rather than a private practitioner. I have been used as the radiologist when I have neither the time nor the talent — I can see a break, but hairline fractures? I cringe. Erich Herzen is better, but he’s not trained either. We need a true radiologist capable of more complex techniques, and we need an X-ray technician.”

  “I see X-ray is a sore point, Liam, but I give you my word that when the dust settles, radiology will be a department of its own having nothing to do with pathology,” Charles said, smiling. “It also doesn’t escape me that this hospital has an excellent pathologist. Now tell me about the cheap nurses.”

  This interview plus several more endowed Charles Burdum with a knowledge of Corunda Base Hospital that most of the men involved in the selection of a new Superintendent never expected or suspected. Charles acquired a reputation for uncanny shrewdness, and also took the job. The day after he was officially informed of his success, he started work; no pussyfooting around for the new Superintendent!

  Between his arrival on the Melbourne day express and the notice of his appointment in the Corunda Post, three weeks had elapsed. During them, old Tom Burdum gifted his grandson with Burdum House, the mansion Henry Burdum, the founder of the family, had built on the heights atop Catholic Hill, which was Corunda’s best residential district. Charles staffed it at once from maids to groundsmen, pulled the dustcovers off the furniture, and then laid plans for a two-acre garden in the style of Inigo Jones. His maroon Packard had arrived together with two small flivvers for running around in when the big car was too ostentatious; and a carrier from Sydney delivered some ten huge trunks packed with belongings from England that apparently Charles could not live without. His ten thousand books, he told his grandparents, were crated and warehoused in London, but would not make the six-week sea journey until he converted one of Burdum House’s larger rooms into a proper library.

  “I confess,” said old Tom Burdum to the Reverend Tom Latimer, “that my grandson Charlie is a bigger bite than I can comfortably chew. I’ve hung on grimly to reach this age in the hope that I’d live to set eyes on my Pommy grandson, who wasn’t in a hurry to come out. What I hoped was that he’d be more satisfactory than Jack Thurlow. Well, he is — but does he have to be so Pommy?”

  “Tom, he is a Pommy,” said the Rector, “and he has no idea what that means. They have to arrive here before they understand Pommyness. Yet I don’t despair for him. He’s not as thick about the phenomenon of Pommyness as most Pommies are. In fact, I think when Charlie is told not to come the superior Pom over colonials, he will actually pipe down.”

  “That’s perceptive of you, Rector.” Old Tom leaned back in his chair, a steaming cup of tea at his elbow and one of Maude’s butterfly cream cakes on a plate — delicious! “At first I didn’t think I could like him, but it turned out to be easy. He’s no slouch, my grandson Charlie! Jack looks and behaves right for Corunda, yet now I’m starting to get a feeling that Charlie may be righter in the long run.” The creased, incredibly old face broke into a wide grin. “The Pommyness means he has some ratbaggy notions that will have to be pounded out of him, but he doesn’t have any ironbound conviction that he’s better than the colonials just because he’s a Pommy. In fact, his background and education say he’d behave the same to Pommies as he does to us colonials.”

  “You’re getting muddled, Tom, but I know what you mean,” said the Rector. “Eton, Balliol, and Guy’s put him a long way out in the forefront of society, even Pommy society. After all, he has the money to be a Prince of Wales playboy — Mayfair parties, horseraces at Ascot, sunshine on the Côte d’Azur, skiing at Kitzbühl, et cetera. Yet he qualified in Medicine and hasn’t known an idle day since his time at Balliol. I think your grandson Charles has a streak of the altruist in his nature. So, incidentally, does your other grandson, Jack, though in a different way.” A fierce frown descended on the Rector’s brow. “One thing they share in common is a reluctance to come to church.”

  Old Tom burst out laughing. “Jack’s a lost cause, Rector, as well you know. However, I’m sure that when the novelty of his appearance in Corunda wears off, Charles will grace the Burdum pew in St. Mark’s. If he attended at the moment, he’d stir up a near-riot — the whole town is dying to inspect him at close quarters, and where else than in the Burdum pew can the poor chap be imprisoned? Ask three of your own four daughters.”

  Which left the Reverend Mr. Latimer without a word to say.

  Of course every member of the Corunda Base Hospital staff was agog to meet the new Superintendent, who hadn’t worn the first set of creases into his starched long white coat or heated the leather seat of his office chair before he was in action, marching up and down the ramps, sidling into wards waving an airy hand to signal that he wasn’t really there at all, invading Matron’s sacrosanct areas and privileges, demanding the account books, bank books and property portfolios from Secretary Walter Paulet, and even going so far as to sample the patients’ frightful meals.

  “He’s a busy boy,” said Tufts to Kitty and Edda over hot bacon sandwiches in their cottage.

  “Having little heart-to-hearts with your favourite medical man, Liam Finucan,” said Edda, chewing blissfully. “Oh, there is nothing like crisp bacon rashers on fresh white bread!”

  “I freely admit that Liam is my favourite medical man,” said Tufts without resentment, “but since Kitty’s bantam rooster took over the coop, I scarcely see Liam. As you say, Edda, constant heart-to-hearts with the new Super.”

  “I wonder when the spiffy new broom is going to get around to deciding what to do with his four newly registered sisters?” Kitty asked, basking in the distinction of having told the Great Man to piss off and leave her in peace. She’d also told him he was a presumptuous twirp! Since she had relayed the story to several nursing friends as well as to her sisters, it had become general gossip, though thus far Kitty had not been offered the opportunity to meet him in her hospital guise. In fact, his way of insinuating himself into hospital business without ever once introducing himself to his subordinates was seen as unorthodox and rude — but then, he was a Pommy and they were mere colonials!

  Tufts was speaking; Kitty emerged from her brown study. “I imagine that we four junior sisters are pretty low on his totem pole,” Tufts said, licking her fingers. “Liam says he’s a master-planner and formulating a new character for Corunda Base, which is why he’s to be found poking into forgotten corners. In fact, according to Liam, the man’s a powerhouse dynamo capable of rare analytical detachment and logical construction.”

  “I knew a bacon sandwich would get more out of you than a whole syringe full of truth serum,” Kitty said smugly. “So the bantam cock is counting every feather in the hen-house?”

  Edda smiled. “Matron must be foaming at the mouth.”

  “Oh, he conquered Matron during their first five-minute talk,” Tufts contributed, enjoying her position as oracle even more than the lunch. “Apparently they see eye-to-eye about nursing and nurses, and matters domestic and culinary.”

  “I heard a rumour that the fur is flying out at the convalescent home,” Kitty said.

  “My darling sisters,” said Tufts, “there is so much fur flying in so many directions from so many pelts that the air is thick with it.” She dropped her choicest item. “We are to see Dr. Burdum himself at eight tomorrow morning. Lena too.”

  “Out of Limbo at last!” Edda cried.

  “Yes, but up to H
eaven, or down to Hell?” asked Kitty, face falling into a grimace. “I have an odd feeling about Dr. Burdum.”

  “Well, it’s going to be difficult for you — how do you get back into his good books after telling him to piss off?”

  The eyes flashed a sudden burst of violet. “Huh! He asked for it, the miserable little worm! If he offends me again, I’ll do worse than tell him to piss off.”

  The four new sisters, veiled yet still in aprons, presented their starched persons to Dr. Charles Burdum’s outer office at one minute before eight the next morning; they were apprehensive, but not frightened. Lena Corrigan suffered least, but no one envied her. To volunteer, especially once certificated, to nurse mental patients was so extraordinary that there was little chance an enlightened hospital chief would refuse to employ her. The days of Frank Campbell were gone; Dr. Charles Burdum, even on such short notice, was proving himself a sensible and sensitive chief.

  Cynthia Norman, who had been an assistant secretary with nostrils just above the level of the typists’ pool, and was now Dr. Burdum’s personally chosen private secretary, sent all four in together. The new Superintendent didn’t rise to greet them, nor bid them sit down; three stood facing his desk (which, noted Edda, had had its legs cut down), while the fourth turned her back on him to examine the titles of his many medical tomes. That it didn’t appear insolent was due to the crowded room.

  Seated, he looked quite tall, a common trait in small men, whose trunks tended to be average in length; they lost height in their legs. Disproportionate, thought Edda, the tallest of them. How glad I am that I’m wearing two-inch heels on my shoes! Blocky heels on stodgy work shoes, but heels for all that, ha ha. Now why does he provoke that attitude in me? Not because he’s a Pommy, no. More because he’s so bloody sure of himself.