“Knockout in the first round,” he said, wiping his eyes on his own hanky.
“God, I love you!”
“And I you,” I said, touching his face. “I don’t know why, but I do. There’s a lot of strength and courage in you, Duncan, there has to be to cope with life and death, maiming and disease. But when it comes to personal relationships, you’re a coward. Be everything you can be, and the hell with what other people think. Now take the Missus home.”
“May I see you again?” he asked, suddenly back the way he had been that night when we came in from Victoria Street, lit up from within, crackling with life.
“Not now, not for God knows how much time to come,” I said. “Harold murdered Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz on New Year’s Day, then killed himself.
And I have to keep my nose clean because I’m going to apply for custody of Flo.”
Of course he was shocked, horrified, sympathetic, eager to help, but I could see that he didn’t understand why I wanted Flo.
Never mind. He still loves me, and that’s an enormous comfort.
Tuesday January 3rd, 1961
Work today. Brave words to Duncan and all, I can’t afford to lose my job. If I can hire some kind soul to look after Flo while I work, between what’s left of my salary and the rents of The House, the pair of us ought to be able to liveterrible word!-respectably if not luxuriously. At five, she’s school age, but what school would take her? I’d have to enquire about special schools, but I’ve never heard of any in the State system, at any rate. And how would Flo survive in a special school, surrounded by retarded or spastic children? There is nothing wrong with her, but she’s like that plant which closes up when its leaves are touched. Yes, there’s the Spastic Centre at Mosman, it’s got a terrific reputation, but would Flo qualify? She’s not spastic, she’s just a mute.
All questions for the future, when I’d been granted custody of Flo. In the meantime, I had to keep my job and its male charge pay, save as much as I possibly could. If the Public Trustee isn’t cooperative-and what public institution ever is?-Flo and I might not even be able to live at 17c, let alone utilise its rents. No birth
certificate, no marriage certificate. She had Flo at home on the dunny floor, not in a hospital maternity ward. There’s no point speculating. All I can do is wait.
Sister Agatha carpeted me at nine o’clock this morning, sent a replacement technician to cover my absence. Serious, very serious.
“Do you realise the extent of the inconvenience you caused yesterday, Miss Purcell?” Sister Agatha demanded. “You telephone at ten minutes to six in the morning-ten minutes before you are due on duty!-to say you won’t be in. And do you tender a reason? No, you do not. You hang up in Miss Barker’s ear.”
I stared into the cold blue eyes with this odd vision of the dancing Sister Agatha imposed upon the icicle in the chair, but I couldn’t fuse them together no matter how I tried. And of course she was the recipient of a letter from Harold, which wasn’t going to help. But it did give me an idea. I knew perfectly well that to explain about Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, Harold and Flo would only turn her more against me-respectable women didn’t get themselves embroiled in murders and their consequences.
“I am very sorry, Sister Toppingham,” I said, “but I was too upset to think logically yesterday morning. This is an embarrassing subject, but I think you will have to know.” Embroider, Harriet, lie when you have to. Flo is worth a million lies. “My father received an anonymous letter which accused me of having an affair with Mr. Duncan Forsythe. It is, of course, nonsense. But you must see that
it completely destroyed my day. My father demanded my presence at home, and I had to go.”
“Hmmmf,” she said, and paused. “And did you clear this most disturbing business up, Miss Purcell?”
“With the help of Mrs. Duncan Forsythe, Sister, yes, I did.”
Cunning old bitch, she wasn’t about to tell me that she was already in the know. Mentioning the Missus did the trick, however. “Your apology is accepted, Miss Purcell. You may go.”
I lingered. “Sister, there is one unfortunate consequence of this frightful matter. Um, it appears that there will be legal enquiries, so I may have to leave work at something close to my official knocking off time on some afternoons over the next few weeks. I assure you that I will endeavour to make any appointments as late in the day as possible, but I will have to knock off in time to be where I’m supposed to be.”
She didn’t like that, but she understood it. No hospital department head ever enjoys being reminded that the staff work a lot of unpaid overtime. “You may keep such appointments, Miss Purcell, provided that you notify me on the relevant days.”
“Yes, Sister, thank you, Sister,” I said, and escaped. Not too bad, all considered. Oh, why isn’t Royal Queens one of those hospitals like Vinnie’s and R.P A. that never has a quiet weekend? If I were rostered for weekends, I’d have whole days during the working week to do what has to be done. Between Ryde and Queens, I hadn’t picked my places of work very well.
Thursday, January 5th, 1961 Joe the Q.C. has given me the name of a law firm specialising in children’s work. Partington, Pilkington, Purblind and Hush, in Bridge Street. Straight out of Charles Dickens, but she assures me that there are heaps of Dickensian-sounding law firms, it’s a part of legal tradition and most of the partners listed in a firm’s title have been dead for a thousand years if they ever existed at all. My pick is Mr. Purblind, but I’m to see Mr. Hush next Monday at four o’clock.
I still can’t get any sense out of the Child Welfare, who keep on refusing to tell me where Flo is. She’s well, she’s happy, she’s this and she’s that, but if she’s in Yasmar they won’t admit it. The inquest on Harold and Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has been set for Wednesday of next week, so I’ll have to think of a brilliant reason why I might need the whole day off. All of us in The House are obliged to attend and answer questions if we’re called, though Norm tells me that the Boys in Blue haven’t found hide nor hair of Chikker and Marge from the front ground floor flat. Fled interstate is the theory, which means that they might not have been on the game, but they were up to something. Trouble is that without fingerprints, no one knows exactly who they are. Possibly bank robbers. I think they are just seedy people who don’t trust The Law.
Something very strange happened last night at about ten past three. We were all in, and all asleep. I was woken by the sound of heavy footsteps thumping down the hall
from upstairs, for all the world like Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz doing a small hours patrol. No one else walks like that! Even The House, a stout old Victorian terrace, used to shake when she walked. But Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz is dead, I saw her dead, and I know that right now the poor creature is lying in a morgue drawer. Yet she was walking upstairs! Then came the rumble of her laugh, not the hur-hur-hur, the ha-ha-ha. My hair went straight for the first time in its life.
The next thing they were all clustered at my door. Klaus was beside himself, weeping and moaning, so was Bob. Jim was trying to brave it out, and Toby’s face was white. So was mine, not easy for people with dark-tan skin.
I brought them inside and tried to settle them in my chairs, but they twitched, jumped, shivered. So did I. Only Pappy wasn’t scared witless. “She’s here with us,” she said, eyes shining. “I knew she’d never desert The House.”
“Rubbish!” Toby snapped.
“No, whatever it is, it’s real,” I said. “We were all sound asleep, and it woke us up.”
I put the kettle on, made some tea, and put a stiff dollop of brandy in every mug. Vows never to touch the stuff again are not proof against Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz.
Then Pappy dropped her bombshell. Our night experience had filled her with a joy I hadn’t seen in her since the halcyon days of Ezra. She was sparkling.
“I’m not going to Stockton,” she said. We all stared at her.
“After Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz passed over,” she whispered, “she appeared to
me. Not in a dream-while I was reading. She told me that I couldn’t desert The House. So I went to see the Sisters at Vinnie’s, and asked if I could train there as a nurse but live here. Nuns are so kind, so understanding!
They decided that at my age and with my experience of hospitals, I would make a better nurse if I lived out than in. I start at Vinnie’s with the next batch of probationers later this month.”
This was the first bit of good news since New Year’s Eve, and we all needed it desperately. Pappy is strange, very mystical. Yet even after hearing what she had to say, I refuse to believe that it was the real Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I heard upstairs. I would rather think that emanations from my lost angel puss stole into our minds and deluded us.
Where are you, Flo? Are you all right? Do they understand? No, of course you’re not all right, and of course they don’t understand. With your mother gone, you belong to me, and I’ll shift heaven and earth before I’ll see you sent to an orphanage. If I can’t get you home, you’ll die. Your fate is in my hands because your mother put it there. Which is the greatest mystery of all.
Saturday January 7th, 1961
A woman from the Child Welfare came today. I saw her standing on the verandah when I returned from the
shops, a dowdily dressed woman in her fifties with all the earmarks of spinsterhood, from the ringless left hand to the whiskers sprouting on her chin. Why don’t they ever pluck or shave them? You’d think that a pardonable vanity would push them to it, but at least half of them seem to prefer to wear the whiskers like a badge. It’s a good thing that the War freed up women like this to work, otherwise what would become of them? But then again, I suppose the War also cut down on the supply of husbands. Certainly there aren’t as many single around my age as there are in the Chris-Marie and upward age brackets. Mind you, Australian men are hard to catch and harder to hang onto.
As Chris and Marie have found out, New Australian men are a piece of (wedding) cake compared to the Old ones.
This spinster specimen introduced herself and I introduced myself. Miss Farfer or Arthur or Farfin, something that sounded like Arf-Arf in her squeezed-up voice. So I called her Miss Arf-Arf and she answered to it without seeming to notice. As I unlocked the door and she followed me inside, I couldn’t see her reaction to the scribbles, the neglected ugliness of The House’s public halls. Then, as luck would have it, we emerged into the side passage right at the moment Madame Fugue had chosen to roast Verity.
“You fuckin’ stupid fuckin’ bitch!” was the only audible bit, thank God, but I suspect it was more than enough.
“What is that house?” she asked as I opened my door.
“A private hotel,” I said, and ushered her into my nice pink flat. There she informed me that she had come to inspect Florence Schwartz’s past living arrangements. Past living arrangements.
“I have been every day since Tuesday, but there is never a soul home,” she said peevishly.
Oh, dear. We were off to a bad start and it only got worse. A notebook was produced and duly entered as I explained the nature of The House, its tenants, who we all were, what we did for a crust, how long we’d been here, how well we’d known Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo, whom Miss Arf-Arf persisted in calling Florence. That she had already conferred with the pair who took Flo away was obvious from her questions. Did Flo ever wear shoes? Why wouldn’t Flo talk? What sort of hours had Flo kept? What did Flo’s mother feed her?
Thank God for Pappy’s presence of mind over the occult paraphernalia, because Miss Arf-Arf toured the place from top to bottom and left no coverlet unturned or drawer unopened. What would she say if she knew that until shortly before her mother’s death, Flo had still been on the breast? Like the soothsaying, our secret.
I refused to let her look in Jim and Bob’s flat or in Klaus’s room because they weren’t in. It didn’t please her to be denied, but she was a lot less pleased over Toby’s reaction to her request to come up and see him.
“Go to buggery!” he snarled, and slammed his trapdoor. I left the front room until last, hoping against hope, but of course Miss Arf-Arf wasn’t going to miss The
Scene of The Murder. Very disappointing, obviously. We’d cleaned it scrupulously, so much so that even the crayon scribbles on the walls were barely visible. Of any bloody fingerpainting, not a smear or a smudge.
“However, I have seen the police photographs,” she said smugly.
I was dying to tell her to go to buggery too, but I didn’t dare. With Flo’s fate undecided, what I said to anybody from the Child Welfare had to be friendly, candid, sane and balanced. So I ended the tour with the offer of a cup of tea.
Miss Arf-Arf accepted.
“Considering the insalubrious location of these premises and the state of Florence’s mother’s personal accommodations, my dear Miss Purcell, you’ve made a very pleasant corner for yourself,” she said, munching one of my Anzac bikkies. No dunking for her!
I told her that I was going to apply for custody of Flo. “Oh, that would never do!” she said.
I asked her what she meant, and she explained that Florence was being well cared for where she was (no mention of a place-it might have been in Melbourne or Timbuctoo from the way she spoke), so custody wouldn’t become an option until after everybody decided that no will or relative existed.
“Which may take many months,” she ended.
I looked into her watery blue eyes and understood that if I started to plead eloquently with all the emotional stops out, tried to tell her that Flo would die unless she
came home very soon, my chances of ever getting Flo would diminish immediately.
“It’s not that they’re inhuman, or even inhumane,” I said to Toby later up in his airy attic, “it’s just that they go by the rules, that individual circumstances are dismissed.”
“Of course,” he grunted, scrubbing away at a hotel type picture of a blue gum in a clearing. “They’re public servants, Harriet, and public servants don’t rock the boat. Everything is decided by the grey ghosts on some committee.
Miss Arf-Arf’s report will go into Flo’s file along with all the other reports, and when the file measures two inches thick, it will go Upstairs for a decision.”
“She’ll be dead by then,” I said, winking away my tears.
He put down his brushes and came across to sit facing me on a hard chair drawn up very close, then he leaned forward and pushed a flopping bit of hair off my forehead. “Why do you love her so?” he asked. “I mean, she’s a nice little kid, even if she is a bit strange, but anyone would think that she’s your own, the way you talk. You call me obsessed, but Flo is a much greater obsession with you than anything I can drum up.”
What kind of answer would make him see the specialness of Flo?
“It’s hard for anyone on the outside of affairs of the heart to understand, but the truth is that I just looked at her and loved her,” I said.
“No, it’s not hard,” he said, and shrugged. “It’s easy 15m not on the outside.” He gave me a lovely smile and tucked my hair up again. “If you must, Harriet, then go for it with all that spectacular energy and enthusiasm you manage to summon up, even at times like this. But do me a favour, think about your life. If you get Flo, you’ll never be free again.”
That’s true. But there’s no contest, which is what Toby will not see. Flo is worth everything to me, even the loss of freedom. I wouldn’t walk on coals of fire for Duncan Forsythe or any other man, but Flo? She’s my angel puss. My child.
Monday January 9th, 1961
I arrived at Messrs. Partington, Pilkington, Purblind and Hush’s chambers in Bridge Street exactly one minute before my appointment with Mr. Hush, who, from what his incredibly snooty secretary said, ordinarily does not see clients as late as four o’clock. I apologised for inconveniencing Mr. Hushwhat a wonderful thing it is to be hospital trained! If the garbageman lectured me about a dent in the lid of my can, I would put my hands behind my back, stand to attention and apologis
e. It’s so much easier than attempting things like justification or excuse. The incredibly snooty secretary was delighted at my
response, gave me a cat’s anus sort of smile, all puckered up, and told me to sit and wait. Law firms, I realised, are in the amateur league compared to hospitals. If I had half an hour to play with, I could have Miss Hoojar jumping through hoops. Interesting that law firms run on spinsters too.
Where would the professional world be without them? And what’s going to happen when my generation, so much more married, takes over? There’ll be private secretaries and department heads trying to cope with sick kids and defaulting husbands as well as the work. Ooooooaa!
Mr. Hush looks like a butcher. Big and beefy, with purple grog blossoms all over his nose. Right, I decided after one look, cut every scrap of fat out of the meat, skin off the tendons, and give him nothing but good red muscle. I launched into my story without a single unnecessary word, stripped it of all its colour and flavour, and ended by saying, “I want custody of Flo, Mr. Hush.”
He was terrifically impressed by all this crisp logicdon’t tell me I can’t handle men!
“Some personal particulars first, Miss Purcell. You are of age? You work?”
“I’m twentytwo and I’m a qualified X-ray technician.” “Can you afford what might be an expensive exercise?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you have private means.”
“No, sir. I have enough saved to meet the legal costs.”
“Your answer indicates that you have no source of income other than your job of work. Is that correct?” “Yes, sir,” I whispered, deflating rapidly.
“Are you married? Engaged to be married?”
“No, sir,” I whispered. I knew where he was going. “Hmmmm.” He tapped his teeth with a pencil.
He then proceeded to tell me that there were three kinds of custodyadoption, guardianship, and the offer of a foster home. “Frankly, Miss Purcell, you would not qualify for any of the three alternatives,” he said, wielding his cleaver impersonally. “In this state, considerable research has not revealed one instance of custody of a child being awarded to an unmarried, working woman with no blood kinship. Your youth also predicates against custody. Perhaps it would be wiser to abandon your quest right now.”
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