Angel

by Colleen McCullough

  I wrapped the cards up again and took the silk off the Glass, drew it closer.

  Suddenly I remembered a tiny series of events that concerned the Glass, mostly I think because of Flo’s face. Very early last year, when Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz thrust the Glass at me and invited me to touch it. Flo had gasped, her face a study in awe and amazement. It hadn’t really been significant at the time, but I understood now that I must have been the first person Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz had ever let touch the Glass. Then around about the same time I’d become involved with Duncan, she said something to me about everything depending on the Glass. Just what, I can’t remember, though it will be in one of my exercise books. But I do recall very clearly what she said on that last evening when Flo and I had walked into the front room to find her in the darkness communing with the Glass.

  “The fate of The House is in the Glass,” she’d said, and put both my hands on it, then joined them together. And Flo had watched with obvious wonder.

  Maybe, in that cryptic and oblique way she tackled everything, she was telling me that I had her official permission to use the Glass, that I was her chosen heir to its mysteries.

  I got up, switched off the lights and sat down again at the table with my face the same distance from that faintly clouded sphere, just enough light coming in from outside to see. And I stared, fixed the focus of my vision on the inside of the crystal, and kept it there.

  “The fate of The House is in the Glass.” Well, if it was, I didn’t have the wherewithal to see how, because

  after half an hour of gazing, gazing, gazing, I saw nothing that wasn’t already in the room. No visions, no faces, no anything.

  I covered it and started to get ready for work.

  This evening, as already said, I ate with Toby. We’d finished and I was putting stuff back in the fridge while he washed the few dishes, when the door bell rang. Toby dried his hands on the tea towel and went to answer it. Since Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s death, only Toby, Klaus or Jim took door duty.

  Without her to watch over it, The House was suddenly vulnerable.

  He seemed to be gone a long time, so long in fact that I began to worry.

  Then I heard footsteps coming, his and another’s, the low murmur of two male voices.

  “Dr. Forsythe wants to see you, Harriet,” Toby said, coming in first with scowling face. Oh, I wish he didn’t dislike Duncan!

  Who walked in with the aloof expression doctors can assume like an extra garment. I got a nod, a slight smile, but no blaze of feeling from his eyes.

  I invited him to sit down, with a glare for Toby, who ignored it and remained standing by the door.

  “No, I can’t stay, thank you. As you probably know,” he went on in his best clinical manner, “there is some gossip circulating through Queens about us.”

  When my mouth opened, he waved it shut. “Because of it, one of the registrars in the Psych Pavilion came to see me today to ask me about my Harriet Purcell.

  He’d seen the name on a police report and a Child Welfare 300

  report, and he wanted to know if the Harriet Purcell of the gossip could possibly be the same Harriet Purcell. I asked him why he chose to approach me instead of you, and he said he thought it unwise until he had verification from”-a tiny, wry smile-“a sensible man.”

  “Flo,” I said as he paused. “It’s Flo.”

  “She’s in the Psych Pavilion, Harriet, admitted there two days ago from a Child Welfare centre.”

  My knees stopped working, I sat down in a hurry and stared up at him.

  “What’s the matter with her, Duncan?” “He didn’t tell me, and I didn’t ask. His name is Prendergast, John Prendergast, and he said to tell you that he’d be in Psych all day tomorrow. He’s very anxious to interview you.”

  Tears started pouring down my face, the first I’d shed since they took my angel puss away. Maybe if Duncan hadn’t been hampered by Toby’s presence, or Toby by Duncan’s presence, they might have attempted to comfort me. As it was, when I covered my face with my hands and wept harder, they left me to it.

  Just before the door closed, I heard Toby say to Duncan, “Isn’t it a pisser that she doesn’t love either of us a tenth as much as she does that child?”

  Angel puss, angel puss, you’re on your way home! Now that I’ve found you, nothing will keep us apart. Child Welfare have put you on my turf, which is a lot closer to home than Yasmar.

  Tuesday February 21st, 1961

  It’s pretty new for general hospitals to have psychiatric wards. Only the big teaching hospitals do, and the inmates are not the poor sad chronic epileptics, tertiary syphilitics, senile and other dementias of places like Callan Park and Gladesville. They’re all patients whose symptoms are not so firmly based in organic brain damage-schizophrenics and manic depressives in the main, though I’m not very up on psychiatry. When I was doing routine chests I’d get an occasional girl with anorexia nervosa, but that was about it.

  So the Psych Pavilion is a new building, the only one not clad in glass with aluminium framing. It’s very solid red brick with few windows, and what windows there are have bars. There’s a huge steel double door around the back for servicing, but apart from it, the place has just one door, another steel affair with an inch-thick glass panel in it, reinforced with steel webbing. When I got to it just after four o’clock, I saw that it had two separate locks with the insides on the outside. So I had no trouble getting in, all I had to do was turn both knobs simultaneously, but the moment the door closed after me, I saw that in order to get out, I’d need two different keys. A bit like a jail, I suppose.

  It’s air-conditioned and very nicely decorated. How on earth had they prevailed upon Matron to let them run riot with brilliant colours and fabrics?

  That’s easy to answer. The whole world, even Matron, retreats before Mania.

  All

  our defences cannot cope with those who suffer disorders of reason because you can’t reason with them. It’s a very frightening thought. The four floors are neatly split. Labs and offices on the ground, male patients on one, female patients on two, and child patients up the top on three. The receptionist buzzed Dr. John Prendergast and told me to take the lift all the way up` to the third floor, where he’d meet me.

  A big teddy bear of a man, curly brown hair, grey eyes, the build of a Rugby player. He ushered me into his office, seated me and went behind his desk, which always disadvantages the visitor. Even as we went through the pleasantries, I realised that he’s a cunning bastard. Deceptively mild and dopey.

  Well, you don’t fool me, I thought. I’m not only sane, I’m smart. You’ll get no ammo from me that might explode in my face.

  “So to Florence-Flo, you call her?” he asked.

  “Flo is what her mother called her. As far as I know, Flo is her proper name.

  Florence is a Child Welfare presumption.”

  “You don’t like Child Welfare,” he said, not a question.

  “I have no reason to like Child Welfare, sir.”

  “The reports say the child was neglected. Was she abused too?”

  “Flo was neither neglected nor abused!” I snapped. “She was her mother’s angel puss and the recipient of enormous love. Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz may not have

  been an orthodox mother, but she was a very caring one. Flo isn’t your average child, either.”

  After that outburst I forced myself to be calm, selfpossessed, alert. I told Prendergast what kind of life Flo had led, about the lack of interest in material comforts, about her mother’s brain tumour and odd physical appearance, about Flo’s arrival on the dunny floor during a tummy ache, about the doctor who had prescribed the hormone which had resulted in Flo.

  “Why has Flo been admitted to Queens?” I asked. “Suspicion of derangement.”

  “You surely don’t believe that!” I gasped.

  “I’m not making any judgements of any kind, Miss Purcell. I think it’s going to be weeks before we have the slightest idea
what Flo’s problems are-how much of her present state is due to what she witnessed, how much of it has always been there. Does she talk?”

  “Never, sir, in anyone’s hearing, though her mother insisted that she does talk. I’ve discovered that the reading centres in her brain are either badly impaired or simply not there.”

  “What kind of child is she?” he asked curiously. “Hypersensitive to emotion in others, extremely intelligent, very sweet and gentle. She was so afraid of her mother’s murderer that she’d bolt under the couch even before he appeared, though no one else except me considered him dangerous.”

  And so it went, on and on and on, a bit like a fencing match. He knew I wasn’t telling him everything, I knew he was trying to trap me. Impasse.

  “The police and Child Welfare files say that Flo was present in the room when her mother was murdered. After both parties were dead, she remained in that room without attempting to summon help. And she used the blood to fingerpaint on the walls,” he said, frowning and shifting in his seat as he stared at me. “You don’t seem at all surprised that Flo defaced the room-why?”

  I gazed at him blankly. “Because Flo scribbled,” I said. “Scribbled?”

  Well, well! No doubt because they regarded both house and child as shockingly neglected, Child Welfare hadn’t mentioned the scribbling! They’d missed its significance.

  “Flo,” I said, “scribbled all over her mother’s walls. She was allowed to scribble, it was her favouritealmost only-occupation. That’s why Flo and the blood came as no surprise.”

  He huffed and got up. “Would you like to see Flo?” “Would I!”

  As we walked down the corridor he deplored the locks on the door to the outside world, the bars on the windows. The new drugs were making such a difference to patient behaviour that security measures weren’t necessary. “But,”

  he said with a sigh, “general hospital wheels turn very slowly. R.P A. has abolished its locks, so it’s only a matter of time before Queens does.”

  Flo was in her own little room, attended by a nurse who wore not only the badge of her general training, but

  a psychiatric one as well. My angel puss was sitting quietly in her cot, so thin and small in her skimpy little hospital gown that I wanted to weep. My horrified eyes took in the heavy canvas bodice buckled over her shoulders and across her back with leather straps. From the bodice to the underside of the cot, stout ropes held her so that she could sit up or lie down easily, but couldn’t get to her feet.

  I stood stunned. “Heavy duty restriction harness on Flo?”

  Prendergast ignored me, went to the cot and let down its side railing. “Hello, Flo,” he smiled at her. “I have a very special visitor for you.”

  The enormous sad eyes stared at me in wonder, then the rosebud mouth broke into a huge smile, and Flo held out both arms to me. I sank onto the mattress, enfolded her in a hug and patted kisses all over her weeny face. Angel puss, my angel puss! And she kissed me, stroked me, snuggled against me and looked into my face. Put this in your pipe and smoke it, Dr. Bloody John Bloody Prendergast! No one watching could mistake Flo’s delight in seeing me.

  For a long time I was conscious of nothing except the joy of holding her.

  Then, looking at her properly, I saw the bruises. Flo’s arms and legs were mottled with great blue-black patches.

  “She’s been beaten!” I yelled. “Who? Who dared? I’ll have the whole of Child Welfare pilloried!”

  “Calm down, Harriet, calm down,” Prendergast said. “Flo did this to herself, here as well as at the child

  shelter. That’s why she’s tied down. You may not believe it, but this shrimpy little creature tore the calico restriction harness to shreds-not once, but half a dozen times. We had no choice other than to resort to leather and rope.”

  “Why?” I asked, still doubting.

  “Trying to escape, we think. The moment she’s free, Flo takes off, literally throws herself at the nearest object. I’ve seen her myself, cannoning into the wall time and time again. She doesn’t care how badly she hurts herself. At the child shelter she went through a plate glass window one floor up. That’s why they sent her here. How she didn’t kill herself or break anything, we’ll never know, but she was badly lacerated.” His big, wellshaped hand slid her short gown up a trifle to let me see the neat rows of stitches on the inside of both thighs. “It was either heavy restriction harness or heavy sedation, and we don’t like sedation in here. It’s convenient for the staff, but it masks symptoms and delays diagnosis.”

  “Her pubes?” I whispered. “Stitched too, I’m afraid. surgeons in for a consultation, fine as is. Whoever sutured her brilliant job.”

  “R.P A. Cas, eh? Then Flo was in Yasmar,” I said. “I didn’t say that, nor will L”

  “Why wasn’t Flo admitted to R.P A. psych?”

  “No bed,” he said simply. “Besides, we’re the premier unit for small children.”

  We called the plastic but they think she’ll be up in R.P A. Cas did a 307

  “Anyway,” I said triumphantly, “it all proves one thing. This is Flo’s way of getting what she wants, and she wants me. She was willing to run the risk of dying to find me. That says a lot.”

  He eyed me speculatively. “Yes, she certainly wants you. Um, would you persuade her to be less frantic?” he asked.

  My lip curled. “Not in a fit, ace!” “Why, for God’s sake?” he demanded.

  “Because I do not choose to. Why should I help you lot soften her up until she’s malleable enough to be sent back to Yasmar? Flo is mine. If her mother could speak, I know she’d say so. That’s why I’m applying for custody,” I said.

  “You’re young and single, Miss Purcell. You’ll never get her.”

  “So everybody says, but ask me if I care what everybody says. I’ll get Flo.” I smiled at her. “Won’t I, angel puss?”

  Flo closed her eyes, stuck her thumb in her mouth and began to hum her tune through it.

  They let me stay with her for half an hour, though Prendergast never let up on me, tried every way he knew to find out what I was hiding. Crafty bugger, he knows there’s a lot more to it than I’ll admit. Fish away, ace, fish away! You won’t crack me. I’m a big old gum tree, her mother said so.

  When the secretary emerged from her cubbyhole to unlock the door for me, she handed me a sealed

  envelope. “Dr. Forsythe asked me to give you this,” she said with total lack of curiosity. Like a patient on chlorpromazine. Well, maybe she is.

  The note asked if I’d meet him in the coffee lounge underneath the railway station at Circular Quay at six o’clock. An hour hence. I decided to walk, just dream the miles away in a happy haze. No, I don’t have Flo yet, but at least I know where she is. After this, Child Welfare will know that I’m a force to be reckoned with, hur-hur-hur. Little Florence Schwartz wants me! Even if she’s sent back to a shelter, they won’t be able to keep me away from her. Dr. John Prendergast may be a nosy bastard, but his report is going to say unequivocally that Florence Schwartz is emotionally dependent on a twentytwo-year-old spinster who has to work for a living. Let the grey ghosts wrestle with that one!

  Ripperace.

  As I reached the rather dirty gloom underneath the Circular Quay railway station, I realised that all of this had happened on or next to the day that I looked into the Glass. Is that what scrying consists of? Could it be that the scryer doesn’t actually see things, but that the act of focusing all that mental energy into an object with exquisitely arranged molecules has the ability to change events? What a thought!

  So when I entered the deserted coffee shop, my mind wasn’t on Duncan. In fact, for a moment I wondered what I was doing there. Then he came around the bulk of the Gaggia machine, gave me a smile of delighted pleasure, and held out my chair for me. The moment I

  was seated, he picked up my hand and kissed it, gazed at me with so much love in his eyes that I melted. He can do that to me every time. Oh, why is he such a victim of convent
ion?

  “It’s a pity,” I said, still fizzing over Flo and the Glass, “that a man can’t cut himself in half. The half of you that the Missus wants, I definitely don’t want, and the half of you that I want, the Missus definitely doesn’t want. But I’ve decided that that is the whole problem with men as far as women are concerned. We only ever want about half a man.”

  He wasn’t in the least offended. In fact, he grinned. “It’s wonderful to see you right back on form, my love,” he said tenderly. “If an eighth is all you want, then feel free to start dissecting immediately.”

  I squeezed his hand. “You know I can’t. I have to keep my nose clean to get custody of Flo.”

  Then we both realised that the waitress was standing patiently waiting to take our orders. Listening enthralled. “I beg your pardon, my dear,” he said to her, and ordered two cappuccinos. The girl shuffled away looking as if the Pope had granted her a private audience. Duncan’s good manners have the most extraordinary effect on women. Just goes to show we’re not used to being treated like delicate flowers.

  I told him all about Flo and Dr. John Prendergast, and he did listen as if it really mattered to him. It can’t, I know that, except that I know he feels a great deal for me, and I suppose, feeling a great deal, it can matter.