What was there to think about, up to and including that child? “Yes, Rawson, I’ll marry you,” she said huskily.
He came to lift her hand, kiss it reverently.
“A marriage of convenience,” she said, clasping his fingers and smiling up at him. “I can’t deny, Rawson, that I’m accepting your proposal for one reason only — it gives me the desire of my heart, a degree in Medicine.”
“I am quite aware of that; but you wouldn’t accept were I the sort of man who repels you. Our blossoming friendship counts for much, don’t try to deny it,” he said, stiffly stilted.
“How strange! We’ve gone all uncomfortable,” Edda said.
“Well, it’s not exactly a traditional proposal of marriage. Very bleak and bare!”
“Then let’s talk logistics,” she said, “and do sit down again. Do we have a grand wedding, or a quiet wedding, or a secret one?”
“I incline to secrecy, for a few reasons.” He finally sat. “Would you like to hear them?”
“Please.”
“Really, because I doubt a quiet wedding is possible. I have living parents, two brothers, two sisters-in-law, three nieces and three nephews, plus the usual plethora of aunts, uncles and cousins. They would have to come to a quiet wedding.”
“I’m nearly as bad — three sisters, one brother-in -law, one sane parent and a parent with pre-senile dementia, two men who aren’t brothers-in-law but would have to be invited, and at least a dozen women who couldn’t possibly be ignored. That, for me, would be quiet, compounded by the fact that my father would insist on marrying us in person in his church,” she wailed.
Two pairs of startled eyes locked on each other. “Dearest Edda, this is awful! Your father is a minister of religion?”
“Church of England, an important New South Wales rural parish of huge area, and until the Depression came along, very rich in C of E terms.” She giggled. “Archbishops? Bishops? I know them by the score, and they may truthfully be said to have dandled an infant me on their purple-clad knees.”
“My God, Edda, I knew you were eligible, but not this eligible!”
“The only thing about me that your family will be able to object to, Rawson, is my lack of money. My antecedents and my background are all that they should be.” She looked uncomfortable. “As for a grand wedding, dear Rawson, my father cannot afford it.”
“A grand wedding is not, nor ever would be, a consideration,” Rawson said, sweeping grand weddings under the tattiest old carpet his imagination could conjure up. “No, my dearest Edda, given our mature ages, I think we choose a secret wedding. Our families may feel rebuffed, but the scalpel cuts as keenly to either side of the central aisle. Let all the introductions and opinions and spats take place after our wedding, which I suggest occurs in one month’s time at a registry office here in Melbourne.”
“Mordialloc?” she asked.
He looked blank. “Mordialloc? Why there?”
“I like the name.”
“You are allowed to respond to as many names as charm your ear, my quirky friend, but we’ll still marry in an obscure office right here in the heart of Melbourne city,” Rawson said firmly. “Then we’ll take a small ocean liner from Sydney to California, in which legendary place we’ll honeymoon until the New Year of 1932. While we’re away, let the storm break — private as well as public. Blood relatives, friends, colleagues and enemies will all hear on the same day. Shock, horror and consternation will reign. But will we care, cosseted by the same hands as pamper film stars? No! Reality will be postponed until our return.” Suddenly he looked naughtily boyish. “Then, it’s face the music time! Only our work will sustain us — you at university, I in politics.”
“How much you pack into that one word, politics! I hope I’m a satisfactory wife,” she said, assailed by qualms.
“Darling Edda, in you, I intend to show this country what the wife of a politician should be, and isn’t. You’re not shy, you have a mine of conversation, your appearance is stunning, and when it’s discovered that you have your own professional career, it will frighten the daylights out of my colleagues. When a journalist asks you for an opinion, he’ll get it — and be impressed.” He drew a breath. “Both my brothers married well in terms of the right background and adequate wifely fortunes, but said wives are dreary, uneducated and, depending upon the enterprise, sometimes a real handicap to their husbands. You will never be that! Even on its periphery, you’ll relish the cut-and-thrust of political life. I won’t hamper your medical career, but I will ask you for help.”
“And I’ll give it gladly,” she said warmly, smiling. “Oh, to think that in five years I’ll be registered to practise Medicine! But under my own name. I pity the poor patient whose appointment is to see Lady Schiller! That, I’ll keep for your world.” A look up. “How long does it take to arrange a secret marriage?”
“A month. You’ll continue to stay downstairs until my ring is on your finger — a ruby for your engagement ring?”
“Do you know, I think I’d prefer an emerald? Anyone from Corunda thinks rubies are old hat.”
“An emerald it shall be. Tomorrow morning I’ll introduce you to George Winyates and Karl Einmann, my secretaries, upon whose discretion you can utterly rely. They’ll know our plans, but no one else. They’ll arrange accounts for you at all the places you might shop regularly, including bookshops. The accounts will be temporarily in your own name, but after the knot is tied, they’ll be for Lady Schiller.”
“Lady Edda,” she said dreamily, and laughed. “It sounds — oh, I don’t know, unreal.”
“It is. You’re not Lady Edda, you’re Lady Schiller. Women who tack their Christian name onto the ‘Lady’ are the daughters of dukes or marquesses. The wives of knights don’t have that privilege.”
“How extraordinary! I’m learning already.”
“You must have fox furs and sables, but never mink,” he said, pulling a face. “Mink is coarse to the touch and too Hollywood.”
“Medicine!” she exclaimed, telling him where her heart was, and how little she would value furs alongside her profession. “Rawson, I can’t thank you enough for this chance, and I say that from the very core of my soul. I’ll go for surgery, abdominal and general. I’d like neurosurgery, but I’m a little too old, and it’s too demanding a field,” A different thought entered her mind. “Will we live in this flat?”
“Have you any objection?”
“Not at all. I’d just like to know.”
“There is a suite of four rooms beyond my own bedroom suite, and I thought of turning it over to you.” The big nose and chin that saved him for handsomeness endeavoured to meet across his mouth; he pursed his lips, then smiled. “I snore notoriously, so I won’t ask you to share my bed. You would have a bedroom, dressing room, bathroom and a sitting room, and I would ask you to speak with the interior decorators who do my work, tell them what you want. They will obey your every request. I thought you might like to use the guest flat downstairs as your medical refuge, thus keeping your studies separate from our life together.”
“Wouldn’t the other tenants object?”
“They’d better not,” he said crisply. “I own the building.”
Her head was whirling, a combination of tiredness — she had spent a large part of today walking — and shock.
“Downstairs to bed,” he instructed, pulling her out of her chair. “Come up for breakfast at eight, then we’ll get down to the real business. And, Edda?”
“Yes?” she asked, smiling up at him muzzily.
“I adore you. Perhaps not in the way a man adores his wife of choice, but it’s sincere and ardent. I do adore you.”
And if only, thought Edda, climbing into bed, he loved me the way a man does love a wife! Well, that cannot be. But so many compensations! A degree in Medicine, and Lady Schiller the political hostess. How very strange and wonderful!
It sounded like a fairytale, and so everybody would regard it, from her family clear through to h
is, and the whole world in between. Like Kitty, another fairytale romance ending in marriage to a rich, handsome, busy and successful man. And look at her, with a huge empty house and two miscarriages to show for nearly two years of wedded bliss. Oh, Kitty!
What will my marriage bring? Edda asked herself, certain that its pains would outweigh its pleasures. Except for Medicine. That was worth any price the gods might ask her to pay. At least she knew Rawson’s secret, she had some bargaining power; Kitty had somehow wound up owning no power whatsoever, and Edda was too modern in her thinking to deem that a good thing, even if it was tradition. There was no question of her, Edda, ever using Rawson’s secret against him to achieve some desire of her own. He wouldn’t renege on his offer to put her through Medicine, the only factor that might have tempted her.
Busy-brained Edda, she couldn’t leave it alone; her mind alighted upon Rawson’s expressed wish to produce a child — now when would it be easiest for her to go through a pregnancy? Never, she concluded, sighing — which also meant, any time at all. If he did quicken her, she would carry the child, go right on with her work until her water broke, then be back at work a few days later. Why not? Woman used to be expected to do that — what had changed except social attitudes? Yes, thought Edda, I will cross that bridge when I come to it, and take it in my stride. I have to! I am a twentieth-century woman, I have the chances my ancestors only dreamed of. And I will do it comfortably, because I will be married to a wonderful man who carries a terrible burden.
How lovely it would be to tell her sisters! Or, if but one were possible, to tell Grace. How odd! Grace, existing in straitened circumstances, beset by all the worries of a widow from fatherless children to lack of income, yet it was this selfsame Grace she yearned to tell? The full sister, yes, but also the twin. Kitty would oppose the marriage, knowing the pain it was bound to bring; Tufts would consent but never condone it, seeing the element of sale in it; and Grace would deplore it from jealousy and narrowness of mind. Yet she, Edda, hungered to confront them with it before it happened. Somehow to hit them in the face with it afterward felt like treachery.
Even taking their reactions into account, Edda wanted Grace and Kitty and Tufts to be there at her wedding. That it could not be, she understood. Grace would blab far and wide, Kitty would tell Charlie, who would blab far and wide, and Tufts — well, Tufts was Tufts, a hard act to follow.
Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. chose to issue an elegant press release upon the subject of his marriage timed to reach its recipients while their ship was on the high seas bound for California, and leaving some hundreds of staggered people with no one to talk to. The release included a black-and-white photograph of bride and groom, their first sight of Sister Edda Latimer for the majority. Intriguing, to say the least. The couple stood close together, he in a three-piece suit, she in afternoon clothes, looking not at each other, but directly into the camera. The best photograph colourist in Melbourne had hand-tinted matte sepia versions as per instructions, revealing that the bride had chosen to wear a dark red ensemble of incomparable smartness. Chic, right down to her dark red seven-button kid gloves. A severe beauty, slightly haughty, was the consensus of opinion; Lady Schiller looked to members of the Nationalist Party as if she would be an excellent consort for the man expected to be their future leader.
There was already a Lady Schiller, of course. Rawson’s father was a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George thanks to his business and pastoral career. Sir Martin and his Lady Schiller stared at their copy of the press release, softened by the inclusion of a personal letter from their middle son.
“She’s not socially brilliant, but she’s acceptable,” Lady Schiller said. “An exquisite outfit, though the colour is perhaps a little adventurous for a bridal gown. Twenty-six years old — she’s not an eighteen-year-old bottle-blonde, at any rate, for which we must be thankful. Father a Church of England rector… Mother was an Adelaide Faulding — good family too, if it’s the one I’m taking it for. I doubt Rawson would marry beneath him.”
“She has lovely eyes,” said Sir Martin. “Very unusual.”
“According to Rawson’s letter, she’s a medical student — I don’t care for that,” said Rawson’s mother.
“Then she’s brainy,” said Rawson’s father, whose wife wasn’t.
“Brains should not be what a man looks for in a wife. Medicine is inappropriate, all that vulgar nudity and exposure to disease.”
Martin Junior, an amiable and obedient oldest son who had been designated to take over the Schiller business enterprises, declared himself delighted. “Time Rawson put Anne behind him,” he said. “Face it, Mother, he’s the Schiller who will shine the brightest, and his wife looks an ideal mate. Brains and brains.”
“I agree,” said Rolf, the youngest son, designated to manage the family’s pastoral empire. “Too unusual to be a raving beauty, but she rather frightens me.”
“She’s a designing harpy!” Gillian snapped. Martin Junior’s wife, she had turned forty, and knew she hadn’t done so gracefully. Four children and an extremely sweet tooth had ruined her figure, and Martin Junior had ruined her disposition.
“I’m with Gilly,” said Constance, who was Rolf’s wife. “She laid a trap for poor, silly Rawson, I know she did.”
The three men guffawed. Lady Schiller Senior smiled. The lines were drawn about where she had imagined they would be. Neither Gilly nor Connie had a particle of dress sense, and dark red would make them look as if they had a terminal illness. Just as Rawson, the middle child of whom nothing much had been expected, had utterly eclipsed his brothers, the new and youthful second Lady Schiller was definitely going to cast her two sisters-in-law permanently into the shade. As for the first Lady Schiller, time would provide the right answer.
In Corunda, where the press release was softened by four letters from Edda to her father and her three sisters, the news caused a sensation. But to no one quite as profoundly as it did to Charles Burdum. When Kitty, waving her letter and the press release, told him upon his return to Burdum House that fateful evening in early December of 1931, Charles looked as if he were going to faint. Reeling to a chair, he sank into it awkwardly and held out a hand for the press release, pushing Edda’s letter away.
“Edda? Edda has married Rawson Schiller?”
Eyes round, Kitty took in his shock and poured him a drink. “Charlie, you look as if it were a disaster! Why, for heaven’s sake? It’s wonderful news! Look at her letter, do, please! In February she starts Medicine III in Melbourne — her greatest dream, the desire of her heart, and now she has it.”
“At what price?” he asked bitterly, angrily.
“That’s her affair, Charlie, not yours. How can either of us ever know? Except that Edda isn’t to be bought, and I take strong exception to your implication that she can.”
“If I’d known she hankered after a medical degree that much, I would have paid to put her through!” he snapped.
“Bullshit!” Kitty exploded, losing patience and tolerance. “You’ve always known, and Lord knows you have the money, but Edda isn’t one of your favourite people, I am aware of that. She tells you what she thinks, from petty things like my not having a mode of transport from the top of this hill, all the way to how you’re building the hospital. You’ve enjoyed knowing Edda can’t have what she wants, and don’t bother trying to deny it. With you, Charlie, it all goes on underneath consciousness so that you can tell yourself what a super chappie you are! Charles Burdum, the rock upon which Corunda stands. Feeding Edda scraps like the promise of her own operating theatre when you know perfectly well one is enough, and it belongs to Dot Marshall. Well, she was applying to some hospital in Melbourne to run an operating theatre there, she says, when she met Rawson Schiller.”
The alcohol was having an effect; Charles sat up straighter. “Oh, yes! She met Rawson Schiller through my agency, no one else’s! Since you, madam, won’t come to Melbourne, I took your sister to the Lord Mayor’s charity din
ner. It cost me a hundred pounds to buy her a plate at that dinner, and this is the thanks I get — she up and marries an ultra-conservative bigot who’d see working men on subsistence wages, the Chinese deported, Melanesians back in the sugar fields, and women barred from all employment. If your precious sister has married a man like Rawson Schiller, then she is no better than a common harlot!”
Whack! Whack! Kitty’s blows, one to either side of his face, happened faster than lightning. At one moment she was sitting in her chair arguing with him — oh, fiercely, maybe, but in a civilised manner — and the next his ears were ringing, his head hammered. Eyes blazing magenta fire, she stood over him and kept on whacking his ears, eyes, cheekbones, jaw.
“Don’t you dare call my sister a harlot, you puffed-up, piggy, pompous, pox-doctor’s clerk! You’re a gutless, nutless eunuch!”
Fending her off, he managed to wriggle out of the chair and move to the door. “Harlot! Whore! Strumpet! And you, madam, go wash out your mouth with lye soap! Such disgusting vulgarity!”
“Go to hell!” she shrieked. “You don’t care about working men, all you really care about is yourself. It was you deserted Edda at that dinner, left her alone at a table full of strangers — she told me! Rawson Schiller rescued her. And guess what? He’s tall! No one can ever call him a Napoleon, eh, Boney?”
Then she pushed past him, ran to the back door, and out. Came the sound of a flivver starting up: afterward, silence.
Charles went first to the sideboard, then returned to his chair, where he sat and shook so badly that it was five minutes before he could lift the glass to his mouth without spilling the drink. It had been so sudden, so convulsive, so spontaneous. No time to think and no time to draw back from voicing aloud what he should have kept to himself. Edda was a harlot, but no sister could stomach such a candid insult. The rage still possessed him, fuelled now by the additional uncaged beast of anger at his wife, whose love for him was always marred and diminished by what she felt for those wretched sisters of hers. Kitty was his wife — legally, emotionally, totally his! Yet she always held some part of her back to lavish on her sisters. It wasn’t right!
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