Bittersweet

by Colleen McCullough

  Without ever saying a word, he taught her what Charlie was incapable of knowing: that she had been right to cling to the love of her sisters and her father, right to struggle for babies of her own. They were so delicate, so fragile, the parameters of the relationship he crafted between them, and she could only wonder at Edda’s density in not seeing what Jack had offered her — strength, safety, peace, a properly masculine love suffused with passion. Poor Edda! Always burning for other things.

  Therefore Kitty couldn’t tell herself that Jack stepped into her life and instructed her how to fix it; his refusal to do so was implicit in their every meeting. No, this was her battle; she had to sort things out for herself. In her own way. In her own time. A mighty conflict for a very small warrior.

  But she wasn’t alone. Somehow, without a word, or a look, or a gesture, he gave her to understand that he was on her side. That he loved her, loved her far more than ever he had loved her sister. If she closed her eyes, Kitty could feel that love enfolding her like a feathery, blissfully warm blanket, neither suffocating nor devoid of sensitivity.

  “Listen to me, Kits,” said Grace briskly the day before she and the boys left Corunda for their new life in Sydney.

  “I’m listening,” Kitty said dutifully.

  “With Edda and me both gone, you’re more alone than I like. If Charles had the sense he was born with — but he doesn’t — he would look after you better, but Horsey Dorcas and the politics just obsess him. There’ll be a by-election later this year, and Charles is preparing for it already — you must be aware he’s leased a shop and is using it as his headquarters. Oh, Kitty! You haven’t noticed? What is the matter with you? George Ingersoll is dying of cancer, and once he’s shoving up daisies, his seat will become vacant. Hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear,” Kitty said tiredly.

  “With Charles in Canberra, things will change. Luckily he won’t need to buy a house there, it’s only a two-hour drive, but he’ll spend most of his time in Canberra. If you want to try for another baby, do it now. Once he’s an M.P., he’ll be too worn out.” Amid rustling skirts and billows from a scarf, she descended on Kitty and hugged her, kissed her. “Oh, Kits, I fear for you! So would Edda, if she knew what’s going on. There’s a spare bedroom in my Bellevue Hill house, and you must promise me that you’ll come to me if you’ve no one in Corunda to turn to!”

  The lilac flared up in Kitty’s eyes. “No one in Corunda?”

  “Or go to Edda. Rawson’s a gentleman at least.”

  Kitty giggled. “Honestly, Grace, you are the dizzy limit! I am perfectly all right, I’m in no danger.”

  “Just remember the spare bedroom,” said Grace.

  George Ingersoll’s cancer was diagnosed in January of 1933, when he already looked so awful he was given a month at most to live. But George came of exquisitely stubborn stock, and hadn’t beaten off all political rivals for forty years just to curl up his toes and die at the bidding of a parcel of doctors, said he; this was merely a temporary setback — and no, he wouldn’t be resigning from federal parliament either. What did kill him late in October was a massive heart attack, apparently unrelated to his thwarted cancer. At his death he was still the sitting member for Corunda in the federal parliament, which meant Corunda voters held a by-election at the end of November.

  Charles Burdum had realised very quickly one aspect of political life: subtlety was wasted. So after the news got out of George’s cancer, Charles rented an abandoned shop in George Street and opened his campaign headquarters. There he installed Dorcas Chandler, several eager young Burdum partisans, all the fixings for cups of tea and hard bikkies, and roneoed excerpts from his exercise books that outlined his policies. Everything about the operation proclaimed clearly that when he entered the parliament, it would be as an Independent, that he had no truck with tired old party platforms.

  The long drawn out nature of George’s death had had repercussions. First and foremost, everyone took it for granted that when the Unhappy Event did occur, George’s replacement was bound to be Dr. Charles Burdum. So the Country Party, which had owned the seat since its inception, decided not to waste its funds by putting up a candidate at all. Had it not been for a Labor candidate out of the railway workshops, Charles would have been unopposed; as it was, most of Labor’s votes would go to this impertinent but undeniably important Burdum.

  Kitty hadn’t suffered any increased attention from Charles as the months went by; indeed, she wondered if he remembered her existence, between his growing excitement at the vision of Canberra looming, and his ever-accelerating campaign in conjunction with his faithful helper Dorcas. Left in a limbo of his neglect, Kitty drifted, her mind on Jack Thurlow and the impossibility of her own situation, the legal property of the wrong man. How to extricate herself? What was the answer? Yet she wasn’t miserably unhappy. Somewhere beneath her skin of impotence lay a tensile strap of confidence that reinforced her strength, a confidence that everything did have an answer.

  Of course Charles was aware that his wife had lost interest in his activities, but while George Ingersoll lived, Kitty wasn’t worth the expenditure of precious energies. Like her, Charles drifted in a limbo, though his was of building an Australia Party.

  George’s death galvanised him. Overnight he saw Canberra a mere two hours away, and threw off his private inertia. Time to deal with Kitty, who looked as if she belonged in the Trelawneys: not quite a dowd, but definitely a frump. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, but where was he to find the time? Bother the woman! Too busy at the orphanage to hold morning teas and woo wives, was her trouble. Where to find the time to do battle? Then he had a bright idea — let Dorcas tell Kitty! Yes, let Dorcas do it!

  “Tell Kitty to smarten herself up,” he instructed. “Compared to Kitty, Enid Lyons is as plain as a pikestaff, but I want that fact glaringly obvious from the moment Canberra sets eyes on her. My wife must be a nonpareil. Go on, Dorcas, do as you’re told.”

  “I can’t do that, Charles!” Dorcas said on a gasp, plunged into an icy bath of terror. “Kitty is your wife! Whatever needs to be said, only you can say. I’m a virtual stranger, not even her chosen friend! Please, Charles, no! I’m an employee!”

  For all the good her protests did, he may as well have been carved from granite. Cold and gold, he stared at her with, she fancied, thunderbolts emanating like an aura, and she knew without being told that if she didn’t follow his orders, he would find a new political adviser.

  Somehow Kitty sensed what was coming. When Dorcas asked to see her for a cup of tea and a chat that Wednesday morning, Kitty shook her head. “No, not today,” she said. “Tomorrow. Wednesday mornings I have a cuppa with Jack Thurlow, and I’ll not break that appointment for Charlie or you or anybody else.”

  The pale blue eyes bored into her and found neither guilt nor disobedience: it was a statement of simple fact.

  Jack Thurlow? Who was he? Not a friend of Charles’s, nor a man who mattered politically or in civic terms. Memories stirred in Dorcas, who dredged up an old story about the fellow who used to be old Tom Burdum’s heir before Charles arrived. A boyfriend of Kitty’s half sister Edda — yes, of course! Therefore a man Charles’s wife must have known long before she met Charles. An old and treasured friend, Dorcas divined, in no way, shape or form a lover. So, preparing to have a cup of tea with Kitty on Thursday morning, Dorcas found her task unchanged by Wednesday trysts.

  But she had lain in wait to see an immaculately turned out Kitty set off for her appointment with Jack Thurlow. A lavender-blue dress whose silky elegance was set off by touches of apricot reflected in shoes, bag, a gorgeous cartwheel hat, face delicately made up, hair artlessly tumbled. Oh, what a beautiful woman!

  The pain chewed at Dorcas like an old, broken-toothed dog on a festering bone: I could be queen of the world if I looked like that. And she — she doesn’t care. If Charles’s stories are true, her face drove her to a cheese grater and a hangman’s rope because she loathed it, yet on Wednesday mornings
she draws aside the veil of cloud and lets her sun shine for a cup of tea with a man who spells the past, and was her sister’s years-long lover.

  It hadn’t taken more than a week in Charles Burdum’s employ to lift Dorcas Chandler out of her emotional desert and set her down in the midst not of an oasis but the oasis, the one Alexander the Great had entered as a man and left as a god. Inside and under the incongruities of gangling skinny height and equine face there existed a woman like all others: longing for love, needing a man’s strength, hungering to be wrapped up in a warmth that would never go away. To Dorcas Chandler, Charles Burdum represented all she yearned for, yet knew she couldn’t have. Owning nothing else to give him than advice and knowledge of an activity she understood down to its roots, she gave with heartfelt sincerity because her heart was in the task. Dorcas loved Charles Burdum, though he would never know it. The old dog, the stinking bone — but better that, than no bone at all.

  She had pride, never forgetting that creatures as unblessed as she were not supposed to own pride; so she went to tea with Kitty burdened by conflicting feelings. The ugly employee ordered to tell the beautiful wife that she wasn’t pulling her weight, the proud woman determined to keep her love a secret, thereby safeguarding her self-esteem.

  Kitty cut through everything at the very beginning.

  “Dorcas, don’t sit there with a metaphorical axe poised on the back of your neck,” she said, pouring tea. “Have an Anzac bikkie, they dunk a treat in hot tea, never fall apart — there’s nothing worse than having to fish bits of soggy bikkie out of a teacup — it just can’t be done with elegance.”

  “I — er — have never dunked a biscuit,” said Dorcas stiffly.

  “Oh, you poor thing! The fun you’ve missed! I brought my Anzac recipe from the Rectory — made on golden syrup, not sugar, or it isn’t a proper Anzac. You have no sisters, otherwise you’d dunk.”

  “I have no sisters and I do not dunk, but that’s a syllogism.”

  “Like all cats are grey in the dark? But they aren’t.”

  “You know what a syllogism is,” Dorcas said. “Few do.”

  “And I’m not about to be diverted, Dorcas. Charlie has sent you to instruct me not to dress and act like a farm missus now he’s declared his political ambitions publicly. How silly men are! Until Grace told him, I don’t think he even noticed my metamorphosis.” She chuckled, sighed. “Well, that’s Grace, and she’s been gone ten months. You can tell Charlie that you obeyed orders, but that I made no comment one way or another. I will talk to him in my own good time, and when I do, he’ll understand. No, better to say, he’ll hear me and comprehend. He’ll never really understand, it’s not in him. Today, I want to talk about you.”

  The eyes went wide. “Me?”

  “You. I want to know your terrible secret, the one that blights this wonderful dream of a job. You’re terrified of losing it.”

  No answer came; Dorcas sipped her tea and nibbled an Anzac.

  Kitty watched her, in complete control. Dorcas was wearing a two-piece suit of rusty tweed speckled in black, and sported a smart, snap-brimmed black felt hat tilted to the left side of her head; her bronze-brown hair was well cut and had been marcelled, and she had improved the way she made up her face, especially around the eyes. Shrewd but vulnerable eyes.

  “Come, Dorcas, of course you have a terrible secret,” Kitty said, smiling at her with genuine kindness and sympathy. “I want to help you, but I can’t until you trust me enough to realise that I am both friend and ally. So let me tell you what I think you hide.”

  “Mrs. Burdum, whatever you say will be pure imagination.”

  “Oh, no, pokering up won’t wash with me! Formality is simply another fence to cower behind.” Kitty’s voice added real tenderness to its warmth. “When you were a very immature, ignorant girl of about fifteen, some man took cruel and cynical advantage of you. I suspected you have no sisters because sisters would have cared for you in ways mothers never do. Whatever their motives, mothers can be hideously destructive, and about their daughters — so blind!”

  “You’ve said nothing to impress me thus far, Kitty.”

  “There was a baby — a son, I think, whom you love very much. But the real drain on your money is his father, who blackmails you.”

  The fight went out of Dorcas with almost explosive force, leaving her defenceless. Awful to witness, but how much harder to endure?

  “Today the slimy leech goes,” Kitty said strongly. “No, he goes! The basis for his blackmail won’t exist, because you’re telling Charlie all about him. Dorcas, don’t do a Grace and start crying! Do the new Grace, who grew a backbone overnight when the wolf started ripping down her door. Did your parents disown you? Surely not!”

  “No, they took Andrew so that I could continue my journalism. I was twenty when it happened, not fifteen, but I was so ignorant! Andrew’s father cut a swathe through the lower Blue Mountains villages — handsome, charming, a dazzling preacher full of evangelical spirit! We gave him every penny we had — religious believers are such easy targets. I even gave him my body — I was so grateful to him, that he found me attractive, but all his son means to him is more money.”

  “How many children did he father?”

  “That’s the oddest thing,” said Dorcas, musing. “Just Andrew.”

  “How old is Andrew now?”

  “Fourteen. He goes to the public school in Katoomba.”

  “So nearly all your fat salary goes to your parents, son, and a blackmailing turd. My dressmaker must have saved your bacon.”

  Dorcas licked her lips. “How did you know?”

  The laugh was victorious, merry. “Darling, you walk like a woman who has borne a child, and you’re too worldly to be a virgin. That your secret was an illegitimate child was manifest. What else could so blight the job of a lifetime?” The violet died out of Kitty’s eyes. “It’s not too late to rescue Andrew. Bring him to live with you in Corunda at once — it’s not December yet, and when school starts in February, he’ll go to Corunda Grammar for a private education. By the time he matriculates, he’ll be a part of Corunda, well polished and cosily tucked under Charlie’s wing.”

  A trembling Dorcas stared at her, aghast. “I can’t possibly tell Charles!” she cried. “He’d sack me in an instant — the scandal!”

  Kitty blew a rude noise. “Rubbish! You silly woman, how could you work so long and closely with Charlie, yet know him so little? This is meat and drink to him! Charlie, the champion of lost causes, unmoved by your plight? The father of your son a putrid parasite feeding off the boy’s mother, draining her dry for fourteen years? My husband both esteems and likes you — it’s his answer! Is Andrew an attractive boy?”

  “He’s handsome, but he has something better — character.”

  “Tell Charlie!” Kitty urged. “Tell him right now — today, this minute. He’s down at the other end of this great echoing cathedral, a few yards away. Get up, get up! Get up, woman! Go and tell him just as you’ve told me, and ask him to rid you of Andrew’s father. Oh, he’ll love that! It’s been so long since Charlie donned his armour that the shine has worn off, and his warhorse is creaking in every joint. This will put the spring back in his step! Go, go!”

  Intimidated by Kitty’s bullying, Dorcas fled to bare her sins.

  Kitty went to put a trunk-line call through to Lady Schiller II in Melbourne. Christmas of 1933, she had resolved, would be a reunion in Corunda for all four Latimer sisters. Ten days, Christmas through to New Year… The only affairs left unsettled were her own.

  That thought glowing like blown-on coals, coming on sunset Kitty drove to Corundoobar to find Jack in from the paddocks. She knew because his petrol-drum mailbox by the cattle-guard was empty. Leaving her car at the bottom of the hill, she strolled up through the blooming gardens, pausing to admire a single glorious rose, a bush of weeping Geraldton wax, sweetpeas rioting across a trellis. Where does he find the time? Yes, he was in; Alf and Daisy came to greet her, a busin
ess of grins and tail wags — Jack’s dogs were too well-behaved to leap and lick. Then he came out onto the front verandah, hair still damp from the shower, and waited for her.

  On the top step, now reduced to smallness by his height, she tilted her chin to look up.

  “I’m moving in with you,” she said, “right this minute.”

  “Not before time,” he said gravely. “I won’t say I was fed up with waiting, but I have grown a few grey hairs on moonless nights.” His hand described a wide circle in the air. “Here we are, Kitty. All yours, from me to mine.”

  “I’ll be your mistress, but I can’t be your wife. Charlie would never consent to a divorce.”

  “We live to please ourselves on Corundoobar. We’ll take you on any terms with nary a shadow of regret.”

  No scrap of doubt assailed her, even now the moment was a reality. The embraces, the kisses, the love-making would come, but for some little while Kitty felt in no need of them, too exalted by the surge of peace and comfort invading her spirit.

  And, understanding what she felt, he stood with her to watch the crimsoned sun swallowed by the messengers of night.

  Then he slipped an arm about her and turned her to the door.

  “Come inside, it’s chilly.”

  “I have a suitcase in the car, but the car has to be returned to Charlie,” she said, one nagging barb. “I want nothing from him, nothing!”

  “I know. Don’t worry yourself, and don’t talk of him.”

  Bert the cat, filling Jack’s chair, was tipped off it so quickly that he landed, half-asleep and hugely indignant, in a heap on the floor. Jack sat down with Kitty on his lap.

  When she leaned against him she could feel the steady rhythm of Jack’s heart, and nothing else mattered. Would ever matter. Oh, dear God, grant him the gift of a long life! The only fear that will dog me now is the thought of existing without him. Her head went down on his shoulder, her eyes closed on wet lashes. I have come home at last.