“Underneath his posturing Charlie’s all right,” she said to Grace, smoothing one silk-sheathed leg to make sure the seam of her stocking was straight. “He means well, it’s just that he can never overcome his Pommyness. To us, he patronises, but he has no idea it seems that way. Look at what he’s doing for Tufts — you have to be glad over that, and it’s all his doing.”
“Yes, yes, I’m very happy for Tufts!”
Edda’s string bag thumped on the table. “You know bloody well I’m not patronising you, sister, so use what’s in there without getting huffy. Some sliced ham, slices of devon sausage, lamb chops and a piece of corned silverside. You have to eat better meat than sausages occasionally.”
Grace flushed, but held her temper. “Thank you, dear, most kind of you.” She fished in the bag and put the meat in her ice chest. “Fancy a woman as deputy super!”
“It might have been you if you’d stuck to nursing,” Edda said, a little cruelly. “Wrong sex or not, our Tufts will do very well. Charlie’s helping her get a degree in Science and accountancy qualifications, so the Lords of Creation won’t be able to attack her on educational grounds.” She gurgled in the back of her throat. “And good luck to any man who fancies taking Tufts down a peg or two! He’ll wind up singing soprano.”
Grace giggled. “You’re right. But wouldn’t you have liked the deputy’s job, Edda?”
“Not if it were Bart’s or Guy’s. I want to travel.”
“So you keep saying, but when?”
“When I’m good and ready.”
On 25th October 1930 the state of New South Wales had gone to the polls to elect a new government. Its people voted Jack Lang in; New South Wales now had a Labor government whose Premier implicitly believed that Sir Otto Niemeyer’s drastic program of retrenchment was wrong, wrong, wrong. What Jack Lang wanted was to increase public spending and get as many men back in jobs as humanly possible. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the underground railway system were suddenly going again, and Lang was adamantly opposed to paying back interest on the state’s City of London loans while so many Australians suffered because of those loan interest rates.
Even cranky Grace was lifted out of her perpetual troubles as she pored over the newspapers Bashir Maboud saved for her every day, talking, as had become her habit, to an unresponsive Bear as he sat on his bench after his walk.
“Jack Lang has to be right,” she said, waving a broadsheet at him coming on toward Christmas of 1930. “Look at Corunda!” she exclaimed. “Almost everybody has a job, so the Depression hasn’t made the inroads here that it has everywhere else. Thanks to the building of the new hospital! Dearest Bear, your misfortune was to have your skills in something first and hardest hit. And after that, you were too proud to take the dole because you can’t do the work it calls for. Well, lots take it anyway!”
He made no answer at all, but then he never did; or listened, or seemed to realise that she sat beside him rustling her newspapers and prattling on, forever talking, talking…
Done with the first two pages of the Corunda Post, a journal with grand pretensions, she turned to page three, more entertaining.
“Fancy that! Suicide rates in Corunda are increasing,” she said, her voice still light and breezy. “Why do people hang themselves? It must be an awful death, dangling at the end of a rope slowly choking, which is what people do who hang themselves. When the law hangs a criminal, the Post writer says here, he or she falls down a trapdoor and the sudden jerk when he or she stops literally breaks the neck. No, I wouldn’t choose to hang myself, and I hope I never do anything that sees the law hang me…”
Her voice faded to a murmur, then spontaneously rose again. “Women like to put their heads in the gas oven, but men don’t. I wonder why? Gas smells horrible, and it’s choking again, isn’t it? Taking poison isn’t popular, I suppose because one always dies in such a frightful mess, and it’s certainly not fair to those left behind to have to clean up the mess. No, it always comes back to men hanging themselves and women sticking their heads in the gas oven.” She got up, chortling. “Interesting, if macabre! Time for me to start cooking tea, too. Sausages again, I’m afraid, but I’ll curry them for a change. Edda brought me a bag of raisins.”
Busy in the kitchen chopping up some of the precious raisins finely to add a tinge of sweetness to the curry — very mild anyway, as the boys disliked too-spicy food — Grace boiled the salt out of the sausages before slicing them into thick coins and tipping them into a pot. She mixed melted lard, flour and curry powder to a paste, worked it with water until it was a thin sauce, poured it over the sausages and tipped in her shredded raisins. Simmer slowly… There! Brian and John would love it, and maybe even Bear would eat a little of it, especially if she fried some bread as a base to pile the curry on. Rice was horrible stuff if left savoury, but stale bread, cut into doorsteps and fried on both sides, always went down well. The only way rice was edible was as pudding.
“Tea, chaps!” she bellowed out the back door to the boys.
Brian and John came at once, Brian half dragging his little brother, faces beaming because they were always starving and they loved everything their mother cooked. They even loved fish paste or Marmite sandwiches, bless them! Oh, for the days when she might have used butter instead of lard, and stock instead of water!
“Bear! Tea!” she yelled out a window on the plant verandah.
He was sitting bolt upright on his garden seat, his jacket pitched on the ground — unusual for Bear to be untidy, even in his state of mind. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his hands apparently in his lap, for all she could see were his elbows — sharp, bony pyramids covered in callused skin.
“Bear! Tea!” she yelled again.
When he didn’t move, her mouth tightened; so he was about to pass into a new phase of his dry horrors, was he? Didn’t he understand the effect it had on the boys? She left the house through the back door and so came upon him in profile, hands loosely in his lap, where a great dark red stain had gathered, seeped into the wool of his trousers and the cotton of his shirt, then, saturated, dripped between his legs onto the rusty ground. His pen-knife was glued to his fingers by jellied blood and his face was serene, eyes three-quarters closed, mouth faintly smiling.
Grace didn’t scream. First she ventured close enough to see the deep gashes in his forearms, on their insides and running up from his wrists many inches. Yet for all of his thoroughness, he had missed the arteries, at least while there was sufficient blood in them to spurt; his was a slow, steady, venous bleed, and it must have taken him the entire making of a curry to die.
Satisfied as to what had happened, she turned on her heel to walk back to the house. Inside, she went about the routine of feeding her sons their curried sausages. Only when they were eating did she go to the phone and ring the hospital.
“Put me through to Dr. Charles Burdum, and don’t you dare tell me he’s not there.”
“Yes?” came his impatient voice.
“This is Grace, Charlie. Please send an ambulance to my home. Bear has cut his wrists.”
“Is he alive?”
“No. But send someone for Brian and John.”
“Can you cope until help reaches you?”
“What a stupid question! If I couldn’t cope, someone else would be talking to you this minute. Don’t dither, Charlie. If Liam is there, send him — he’s the coroner, and it’s a suicide.” She hung up, leaving Charles winded.
For once there were no curtains drawn furtively back on Trelawney Way; people stood outside their houses to watch as the ambulance drew up quietly and was let into the Olsen yard. Charles followed it in his Packard with Edda and Tufts; Liam rode in the ambulance.
Tufts took over the children, getting them ready for bed. Who in the old days would ever have dreamed that Grace could be so sensible, so forward-thinking? The boys weren’t perturbed, she had behaved so normally, and they knew nothing of ambulances or inquisitive neighbours as they splashed their way through
a bath and dived into their bed, a double one that they shared.
Liam Finucan and the two ambulance men cared reverently for Bear Olsen, one of them even going so far as to hose down the lawn and the garden seat so that it wouldn’t fall to Grace to remove her husband’s blood; the ambulance departed as quietly as it had arrived. Only busy vocal cords on the party line told various garbled versions far and wide of what had happened to the unfortunate, inoffensive Bear Olsen.
Charles and Edda inherited Grace, whose extraordinary spurt of practical good sense began to flag soon after the ambulance left and she could hear her boys chattering to Tufts from their bed. The worst was over.
“The worst is over,” she said.
“You did superbly well,” said Edda, holding Grace’s hands. “I’m so proud of you I could burst.”
“I was taken out of myself,” Grace said, face pinched, white, terrified. “How could I let my children see their father like that? Now they have no father, but at least they won’t have any nightmares either. Having children changes everything, Edda.” Her eyes filled. “Oh, and we were having such an interesting tea for a change! Curried sausages flavoured with your raisins. The boys ate every scrap, so I gave them Bear’s share as well, and they ate that. Which means I’m not keeping up with their growth or their appetites. I’ll have to keep on cooking Bear’s share.” An eerie chuckle sounded. “No food where he’s gone now!”
“Was there any warning?” Charles asked.
“None at all, though I did read him bits of the suicide article in today’s Post. But he doesn’t ever hear what I say, honestly!” she cried, a proffered handkerchief taken, used. “Did I give him the idea, Edda? I was only trying to get him interested in something, anything! I read him the papers every day, truly!”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Grace,” Charles said strongly.
She turned her wide eyes upon him, their depths displaying wonder. “I don’t blame myself, Charlie. Why should I? Giving him the idea isn’t blaming myself. That’s like saying the only way not to get stung by a bee is not to wear perfume. Honestly, you Pommies are a weird mob! You read too much into things. No, the only one to blame is Bear. How much I love him! Even when his stupid pride made me want to cut his throat, I still loved him. Oh, the children! I need Daddy’s help with them.”
“Tomorrow, Grace, not tonight,” Charles said. “Thanks to your magnificent handling of things, they won’t suffer repercussions of the kind they might have, and they’re too far off school age to be tormented by other children.”
“The things you think of!” Edda exclaimed. “The important thing, Grace, is that they’ll grieve in a natural way for a daddy who isn’t here any more. You did that for your boys, no one else.”
“But how am I to live?” Grace asked. “I’m going to have to depend on charity.” That broke her as nothing else so far had; she bent over and wept desolately.
I hardly know my twin, Edda was thinking: the most bizarre mixture of hard-headed pragmatism and utter lack of foresight! While I have existed insulated from reality, my sister has coped with increasing reality. When life was easy, she was a selfish, empty-headed Little Miss Dainty. Since times grew hard, she’s become a downright heroine on a level with other women. The two Graces shift and slide within each other like warring men shut up together in the same cell. But it’s this new, tough Grace has won.
Charles opened his black bag, produced an ampoule and hypodermic equipment, and pushed a needle into Grace’s arm before she could object. “What you need most of all, Grace, is a dreamless sleep, and I’ve just ensured that. Edda, get her into bed.”
“That was sensible, Charlie,” Edda said, returning. “Tufts is reading the boys a story, she said to start without her.”
“Well, the only thing we have to discuss is Grace,” Charles said with a sigh that became a wince. “I have to tell Kitty — she’ll be a cot-case! And I have to tell your father.”
“I can’t stop your telling Kitty, but I will tell Daddy,” Edda said, lip lifting in a snarl. “Nor should you tell Kitty on your own. She’ll need Tufts.”
Even at this time he could feel anger; Charles rounded on Edda fiercely. “Sisters be damned! Kitty does not need a sister there! She is my wife, a mature woman, in no need of sisters!”
The back door banged, and Jack Thurlow walked in. “Is what I heard true?” he demanded. “The party lines are buzzing with it.”
Saved by an outsider from a gargantuan fight with that selfish little dictator Charlie Burdum! Edda thought, making a pot of tea while Charles explained — emphasising his own importance, of course.
But Jack’s patience was thinner than Edda’s, nor was he prepared to take a back seat of no importance or relevance. His fist thumped the table. “Grace has no need to worry you, Charlie. I intend to look after her and her boys. As soon as they can pack, I’m moving them in with me at Corundoobar. Oh, I’m going to marry her, but not to please the old chooks who run Corunda’s morals — she needs a husband right now, or she’ll never handle those growing boys. My own silly mother ruined our lives when our dad died, and she a Burdum and all! The minister was one of those real God-botherers, not a bit like Tom Latimer. And he bullied and badgered her into living for what other people were saying. Since when should flapping tongues dictate how a lone woman with children lives her life? So Grace comes to me now, you hear? I won’t see her go wanting a minute longer! And I’ll educate Bear’s boys, word of a Thurlow on that. My dad mightn’t have been the husband old Tom Burdum wanted for his daughter, but he was a good husband and a good dad. I’ll board this place up until times are better, then Grace can sell it to have her own bit of money —”
He gave a great sob and stopped, aghast at his own spate of words, as if the man speaking them were someone he didn’t know. His eyes went suddenly to Charles, then flew to Edda; both his shoulders hunched up as if he took an actual weight on them.
Charles was so staggered he simply stood and stared.
Things crawled through Edda’s jaws and cheeks, a wormy army on the move: is this the real Jack Thurlow, the man for whose sake I have delayed leaving this town for years? If it were me in Grace’s shoes, would he have come rushing to my rescue like Sir Galahad with the Grail in his sights? Jack doesn’t love me or Grace, he’s in love with duty, and at this moment he sees his duty as if God had written it in flaming letters across the sky. For months he’s been yearning to take up Bear’s burdens and tend Bear’s responsibilities as if they belonged to him. He’s grabbing at Grace like a madman after the moon’s reflection in a pool.
“My dear chap,” Charles was saying, rattled into Pommyness, “is all this really necessary right now? I assure you that I am very happy to fund Grace and her children. It is my duty to do so, Jack, not yours.”
“Bear and I were mates, good mates,” Jack answered in hard tones. “You seem to have taken responsibility for all of Corunda — isn’t that enough? I have time and room for Grace.”
Tufts found a spluttering, confounded Charles Burdum when she entered the kitchen; Edda was wrapped in making the tea, as if her segment of the kitchen were on a different continent.
“Sit down, Edda, I’ll finish that,” Tufts said.
“Jack says he’s taking Grace and the boys to Corundoobar.”
“Interesting. Sit, Edda, sit! I’ll come with you to break the news to Kitty, Charlie,” Tufts said. “Edda, I presume you’ll tell Daddy? Good! And shut your mouth, Charlie, you’re catching a fine crop of flies. They carry germs, you know.”
There were other cases of suicide in Corunda too; things weren’t getting better, they were steadily worsening Australia-wide, and that went for Corunda as a part of the nation. As 1930 slipped away, ever-increasing unemployment combined with lower and lower wages for those who did have work. If bank directors and chairmen of boards somehow managed not to suffer from retrenchment, that was simply the way of the world, whose governments everywhere protected the fat cats, even Stalin’s U.S.S.R. T
hough it had held out well early on, Corunda’s prosperity was rapidly disintegrating, despite the new hospital. The spectre of retrenchment grew more visible as all the factors creating good economic health occupied more and more space in newspapers and magazines; terms a working man would never have known before 29th October 1929 were now bandied about in pubs and soup kitchens as the Great Depression ground on — and on.
Having connections to the Burdums and the Treadbys, Bear Olsen’s death provided a more public forum in which to air a growing problem, even in Corunda: the burial of suicides in consecrated ground. A vocal minority of Corundites wanted to carry the curse of suicide physically into the grave by denying suicides a funeral blessing or hallowed soil. Old Monsignor O’Flaherty could be expected to oppose, argue though his curates did for a kinder interpretation of God’s laws, but he was by no means the only Christian minister of religion so inclined. Some Protestant ministers were equally intransigent on the subject. The arguments were heated and nasty, and produced a new array of cracks in Christian institutions: two Corrigan suicides in the West End saw a huge exodus from Catholic St. Anthony’s when the Reverend Thomas Latimer offered the Corrigans assurance that the God of Henry VIII was not as inflexible as the Vatican about the state of grace of the dead, though one of the Rector’s own curates felt quite as strongly as Monsignor O’Flaherty that self-murder was the only crime God would not forgive. A formidable force in Corunda, Thomas Latimer was generally felt to be in the right of it when he thundered from his pulpit in a memorable sermon that no man or woman or child who took their own life under such conditions as these prevailing at the present time could be deemed sound of mind: madness too was in God’s gift, and carried self-murder with it as part of the package. His learned yet intensely emotional opinion seemed reasonable, logical, and, as 1931 loomed closer, one people could live with, if not wholeheartedly accept.
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