Bittersweet

by Colleen McCullough

  Walking behind Grace and her sons, a black-clad Edda turned her head to assess the size of the crowd following the coffin out of St. Mark’s and into the small cemetery next door, where families of the rectors were buried alongside Burdums and Treadbys. Black, black, black, a bobbing flow of black. No one in this trying time lacked black clothes for funerals.

  Far more people are dying than being born, for the life force is flickering low, and if people don’t know of any other way to avoid conceiving a child than to avoid the sexual act entirely, then that is what they do. Who would wish this world on a child? Things just go from bad to worse.

  What is happening to us Latimer sisters? What must still happen?

  That fool, Jack Thurlow! Thanks to Jack’s indiscreet, oft-repeated vows to shelter Grace, people are already gossiping that my twin sister has her next husband picked out before she’s seen this one put into his grave. How cruel a weapon, the tongue! Look at her, you stupid people! She’s devastated by her loss! No one can help her, not even bloody Jack Thurlow! A man without a purpose who thinks he’s found one. But unless we three can stiffen her backbone, she’ll knuckle under to Jack and do as he says. She’s a submissive woman who knows no other way to live than lean on someone. Death in life, fear in love, solace in belonging.

  We are a legion of black crows. Kitty has come. I knew she would. I drive in the spike, Kitty lops off the head. Each of us is necessary, with Tufts to provide the earth and Grace the water.

  It’s hard to get Kitty on her own since she married Charlie Burdum — a very possessive man. But then, all men are possessive; it is the nature of the beast. Her isolation atop Catholic Hill is deliberate. Without a car, a difficult place to reach, and I for one can’t afford a car. Nor has he taught Kitty to drive. How much marriage changes things! An unknown man enters the equation and the four sisters are fragmented — I miss Kitty!

  Poor little Brian. Two years old. This plod is about as far as his tiny legs can carry him — trousers hemmed to knee-length because they’re turned up to the crutch, coat buttoned to keep it on, it’s so big, tie knotted. Black armband, Edda, black armband! His left sock has fallen down, there’s a juicy chunk of snot in his right nostril that he’s itching to pick out, and his silvery hair is sticking up in a cocky’s comb on his crown. Oh, adorable! A bit of their blood is me, I am in Brian and John, even if I have no children of my own. The smell of stocks and carnations! Bittersweet. I will always link the perfume of stocks and carnations with this awful funeral.

  Though wakes were deemed Papist, the Reverend Thomas Latimer had been moved by an instinct he didn’t quite understand to hold a reception after the graveside ceremony was over; about a hundred people gathered inside St. Mark’s Parish Hall to partake of the tipple of their choice as well as plenty of finger-food. Charles Burdum had insisted on footing the bill.

  Tufts got the job of buttonholing Charles while Edda pounced on Kitty and smuggled her to a little room only those from the Rectory knew. Bear’s death had blighted Kitty, but not with crushing impact despite the relative recency of her own loss; she would not sink any lower because of it, Edda saw in profound relief. Physically she looked very well.

  “Your dress sense has improved, Kits,” Edda said, choosing a chair opposite her sister’s. “The hat is delicious — where did you find it?”

  “I didn’t,” said Kitty’s low, honeyed voice. “Charlie enjoys prowling the better shops looking for things he’d like to see me wear.” The voice dropped even lower. “He’s a woman’s sort of shopper, Edda, and his taste is much better than mine. I have too much frilly Maude in me.” She sighed, giggled a true Kitty giggle — how wonderful to hear it! “He’s possessive, so much so that he finds it hard to accept the love I feel for my sisters.” She shrugged. “Well, how could he comprehend it? He’s an only child, and while he was brought up in a family environment, he knew neither mother nor father. The result is that he tends to think my love for my sisters short-changes my love for him, and I can’t seem to get it through his head that they’re two different kinds of love, in two separate compartments. How I hate being on top of that wretched hill! With the Depression worsening, there are no more taxis in Corunda, I have to offer someone with a car a sum of money that’s actually an illegal transaction.”

  “I’m sorry,” Edda said, careful not to speak through her teeth. The bastard, the bastard! “You have several motor cars.”

  “But I can’t drive.”

  “I know, but you can learn, and you are going to learn — why? Because every Wednesday you’re coming to lunch with Tufts and me at the hospital.” The uncomfortable eyes bored into Kitty hard. “You’re surely not afraid of Charlie, are you?”

  “No, no!” Kitty cried, flushing. “It’s more that he has fixed ideas about me, and one of those concerns the place his wife must have in his life. He polices me! This is too taxing for me, that isn’t worth my doing, and sisters should be packed away with the rest of childhood. Just as if I had made such a colossal step upward in marrying him that nothing before I did the deed has any importance any more! One thing I’ve learned for certain, Edda — Charlie won’t let me live in my sisters’ pockets.”

  Edda hadn’t really known what Kitty was going to say, or how she would react to the news of Grace’s threatened change of fate, but not for a moment had she suspected Kitty harboured so much conscious resentment of her husband that thus far Grace hadn’t come up. So when Tufts sidled around the door, Edda welcomed her feverishly.

  Kitty simply carried on in the same theme once the hugs and kisses were over. “Oh, if you knew how much I hate that house on top of the hill!”

  “I seem to remember,” said Edda dryly, “that you had a wonderful time tricking it out, because I was with you on your excursions.”

  “Yes, I had something to do then! Now — how could either of you understand? You’re so busy, you do admirable work and you do it well and you get praised and noticed.”

  “Oh, Kits!” Tufts cried, feeling more tears, but for a far different reason than Grace and two little boys. “Don’t tell me that you’re not in love with Charlie, please!”

  “I must be, because I put up with things. I mean, I don’t dream of walking out on him, and I’m not afraid to walk out on him —” She stopped, shivered. “No, I’m not afraid the way many of the women we’ve seen are — that they might be killed, or so bashed up they’ll never be the same again — it isn’t like that, honestly. All the same, Charlie expects me to be there for him in a second, at the lift of a finger, and if I’m with a sister, he — he sulks so! It’s as if I’m not entitled to have any kind of pleasure in other people if he sees that I love them. He’d never lay a hand on me in anger, but he makes me suffer all the same. Daddy’s not involved because Daddy means Maude, and Charlie is nobody’s fool — he knows how Maude affects me. My sisters — oh, very different!”

  Tufts kissed her full twin very tenderly. “Dearest Kitty, Charlie is plain jealous. Some people are, and there’s nothing can be done about it, it’s an innate character trait. You have to put up with it, but you also can’t give in to it. Start as you intend to go on, and that means you must see as much of Edda, Grace and me as you want or need. When Charlie whinges, tell him that it’s hard cack, you’ll see us no matter how he feels. Come on, you can do that!”

  And how much of this, Tufts was wondering, lies in the tragedy of a stillborn child? No one knows why it happened, but ignorance is the worst of all private dilemmas. So I suspect he wants to blame her, and she most definitely wants to blame him. Charlie, Charlie, why didn’t you show your grief to her? If you had, she wouldn’t be busy piling up grudges. And he, of course, thinks she is obtaining all her comfort from her sisters. What a pickle!

  Suddenly Kitty’s mood changed. The lilac-blue eyes took on a furtive gleam, her face became conspiratorial. “Girls, tell me what’s going on under today’s surface calm. Something is! Jack Thurlow is involved, and Charlie is acting like a prude with an inexpressible
secret. I am too unwell, blah, I mustn’t be upset, blah, blah, I can have no interest in vulgar gossip, blah, blah, blah. Tell me, I demand to know!”

  Edda’s response was to spring catlike to her feet, descend on Kitty and hug her, kiss her. “Jack Thurlow is the crux of the matter, and I don’t know how else to describe it than to say that I think he must be off his head. The man’s an alienist’s dream come true, riddled with complexes and primal urges, blah, blah —”

  They chorused it together: “— blah, blah!”

  “— Stop laughing, Kitty! Oh, but it’s good to hear you roar! So good!” Edda cried, wiping tears of mirth and sorrow away. “Men are possessive, we’ve just been through that on the subject of Charlie, and the main reason why I shall never marry. I refuse to be owned. Our Jack is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and a snail in a racing car, and an elephant hiding behind a grain of sand. All that you see is contradictions. I should know, we’ve been lovers for years. Jack walks through a self-made fog.”

  In the instant that Edda spoke the last sentence, Kitty’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s it! A fog! Charlie walks around in a self-made fog too. But Jack’s safe because you won’t marry him. He gets rid of his dirty water without putting a ring through his nose.”

  “Lovely metaphors, girls,” said Tufts, gurgling.

  “What is Jack about to do that has Charlie convinced will sweep me into a seething snakepit of misery and despair?” Kitty asked, finding a thrill of warmth in her for these beloved women, who could even lift the terrible grief inspired by the dead.

  “He’s moving Grace and the boys out to Corundoobar tomorrow and marrying Grace as quickly as he possibly can,” Tufts said as she gave Kitty a saucer of sparkling wine. “Drink up, Kits.”

  “Not bad,” said Kitty, sipping, “though I suspect that today I’d probably find urine drinkable.”

  “Oh, Kitty, I love you!” from Edda.

  “Of course you do,” said Kitty on a purr. “Edda, Jack Thurlow has been your excuse for lingering in Corunda since we were in our teens. Do you think that Grace, Tufts and I don’t know he’s just an excuse? What really keeps you here is the mystery of the four Latimer twins, not any outsider like a man. Until you go — and you will go! — you enrich our lives, which is what Charlie, being a man, can’t see. Whether Charlie likes it or not, I’m going to learn to drive, and see as much of my sisters as I choose.”

  “All well and good,” said Tufts practically, “but none of it answers the riddle of Jack Thurlow. What do you think?”

  “What do you think?” Kitty riposted.

  “That it’s insanity. Poor Grace!”

  “I agree” from Edda.

  A silence fell; they sipped their saucered wine.

  “Maude has rather faded from our lives, Kitty. Or at least from mine,” Edda said suddenly.

  “Oh, having the use of Daddy’s car, she flits in and out of Burdum House,” Kitty said lightly, setting her glass down with a thud. “The trouble is that Mama lost her joy in living when I married Charlie, who snatched her role from her. They’re both Napoleons, but he has the penis to go with the conceit.”

  “Keep up the salt, Kits! Penis indeed! It isn’t a dirty word, but people react as if it were,” Edda said, a laugh in her voice. “How do you feel about Maude these days, little one?”

  Kitty grimaced. “Oh, Maude! Our Clytemnestra, or do I mean Hecuba? I lost my terror of her as soon as I went nursing, but you know that. After my marriage she vanished into thin air, a part of the insubstantial pageant faded. Sometimes Shakespeare says things so perfectly there can never be another way to say them. Daddy had her to rights all along — she’s just — there. A part of the Rectory furniture.”

  A golden head poked around the door, its mobile face impish. “There you are!” Charles flung the door wide. “What is this, a secret confab? Secrets from me? I can’t have that, girls!”

  “Chook secrets,” said Edda, rising, “and therefore beneath your notice, Charlie. However, take heed! Kitty is coming to lunch in our hospital cottage every Wednesday, and you are not invited, even to poke your face around the door.” She strolled across to tower over him, and punctuated her next speech with an occasional prod of her right index finger in the middle of his chest. “Since you moved her to the top of Catholic Hill, I see hardly anything of my little sister, and that” — poke — “is going to change. You” — poke — “haven’t even organised any driving lessons for her, and that” — poke — “is going to change, too.”

  Charles flushed, lips tightening. “A mere oversight,” he said stiffly. “I’ll start teaching her tomorrow.”

  “Oh no, never the husband as instructor!” Edda said quickly. “Bert the ambulance man is Corunda’s best driving teacher.”

  “Then Bert it shall be,” Charles said, outmanoeuvred. “It’s time to join the others, ladies.”

  The reception was at its height, the participants sufficiently soaked in the liquors circulating faster than the food to be on the downward spiral to a soft muzziness that would permit the closing of Bear Olsen’s door forever. Maude had taken Brian and John to the Rectory, where Grace was staying, and the widow, freed from them, seemed to become more visible as a person than she had while tied to her sons.

  When it happened she was standing with the Rector, Dr. Liam Finucan, Dr. Charles Burdum, old Tom Burdum, Jack Thurlow and Mayor Nicholas Middlewore; her three sisters were some yards off in a clump that included Matron Newdigate, Sister Meg Moulton, Sister Marjorie Bainbridge and Matron Lena Corrigan. Nurses all.

  Grace looks every inch the widow, thought Liam Finucan, from the slight wispiness that had ill become her until now, to the enormous, exhausted eyes, gone near as pale as Edda’s.

  Her hands, ungloved, were clamped around a glass of white wine, a picture of stilled function; the line of her jaw as she turned her head to follow the conversation sharp, pure. And, Liam noted, intrigued, all of a sudden every one of the hundred people in the hall had decided to stare at her as if at an actress on a stage. Grace, he sensed, was about to step into her starring role.

  “Jack!” The word came out like the crack of a whip.

  He had been gazing at her anyway, but her tone startled him; he blinked, smiled at her tenderly. “Yes, Grace?”

  When she spoke it was in a loud, carrying voice with vowels rounded, sibilants bitten off and consonants crisply enunciated, a voice that told its pricking audience that she had thought about what to say before saying it. “There are wild rumours spreading all over Corunda, Jack, and I’ve racked my brains as to the best way to scotch them. It’s being said that today, with the soil not settled on my beloved husband’s grave, I already have his successor picked out and ready to go. But I have done nothing to cause these rumours, so now, here in public on my beloved husband’s funeral day, I intend to lay the rumours to rest as well.”

  “Grace, please,” said Jack, bewildered, “I don’t know what’s troubling you, but here and now isn’t the right time to speak.”

  “I beg to differ,” she said, and moved away from the group to stand alone, feet planted sturdily; her wine glass was given to Nick Middlemore as if he were a handy waiter. “This is exactly the right forum to make my feelings known, and once they are known, there can be no mistaken ideas about my future, or the future of my two children.”

  Divining what was coming, her sisters stood tensely, yet made no move to go to her; this was one thing Grace had to do herself, unsupported. “Though plans for my future were made with the best of intentions, they were not made with my knowledge or consent.” She pinned an utterly confused Jack on a fiery stare, then smiled at him. “You are very kind, Jack, and I honour you for it, but I am not alone in my present troubles. I have a family, I have many friends, I have very loyal and helpful neighbours. I loved my husband with every part of me, and it will be a long time — if ever — before I can so much as think of any other man. I am a decent woman. My father is the Rector of St. Mark’s. How could I fly in the face of
convention for the sake of a material comfort I haven’t known in years? I would be branded a common trollop — and rightly so!” One long, floating hand went out. “Come, Jack, let us be friends. Simple, ordinary friends. I thank you most sincerely, but let there be no more rumours that I am moving out to Corundoobar. My home is on Trelawney Way.”

  “Bravo, Grace,” said Edda under her breath, eyes meeting those of Tufts and Kitty. Somewhere, deep down, they had all known.

  Jack Thurlow stood stunned. He had taken Grace’s hand quite automatically, a look in his fine eyes that Liam Finucan thought reminiscent of the awareness that comes a split second ahead of the poleaxe. His mouth worked, quivered; then he shook his head. “I —” he managed, then could manage no more.

  Oh, you poor man! thought Kitty, seeing Jack Thurlow for the first time as someone other than Edda’s tamed tiger. It isn’t the grief of thwarted love, because you don’t love Grace; it’s the bitter humiliation of public rejection when you haven’t deserved such treatment. How to explain that you brought it on yourself?

  Charles stepped into the breach easily. “Yes, Jack, so very kind of you, especially when gossip turned one thing into another far different from what was meant, eh?” He put a hand on Jack’s arm and guided him away.

  “Did we all know she’d refuse?” Matron Newdigate asked.

  “To accept wouldn’t have been in character,” Meg Moulton said. “Grace likes a fairly hard life, it gives her legitimate grounds for complaint.”

  “Living the life of Lady Muck out at Corundoobar and sending her boys to board at King’s wouldn’t suit Grace,” said Tufts. “She likes the Trelawneys.”

  “Why wouldn’t she?” Lena Corrigan asked, laughing. “Grace is the Queen of the Trelawneys — Way, Road, Street, Lane, Circle and all the rest — and she’s not about to abdicate. It’s taken her the years of her marriage to be crowned, but like Victoria, with widowhood she’s entrenched.”