by Kim Kelly
‘Save me.’ She smiles back, just, a subtle flutter of the lashes that seeks to assure, I’m all right, Ryl, as her words thump into me. Save her. Will anyone here help me? Anyone?
‘Mrs Weston!’ Gret straightens at a dash for the door, enlivened again. Mrs Weston is here. Thank God. She’ll at least save the evening.
‘Ah! There you are.’ Augusta Weston embraces my sister with her generous arms; her voice is warm, rich velvet. ‘It seems an age since I saw you last. Where have you been hiding, my sweet one?’
‘Only here.’ Gret smiles, indeed sweet at the small rescue she finds there inside this woman’s arms.
Augusta Weston surveys the room at a glance to find the more precise answer as to why Greta Jones is so rarely seen in town except to attend church or Mrs Hatfield’s salon on William Street for gowns and gloves at the change of season as propriety demands. ‘Good evening, Alec.’
He squirms a little under her gaze. ‘Mrs Weston, happy New Year.’
And I find this brief flash of discomfort in him immensely, disproportionately satisfying. Mrs Weston does not know what Uncle Alec does to us, to Gret, what he has done to her today, no one does, of course, but she knows she doesn’t care for him. She is the District MO’s wife and medically specialised in her own right, in the dark arts of midwifery, delivering half the population of this district while producing seven sons of her own – she doesn’t have to care for Alec Howell. She does not reply to his toast, either.
She turns to me, a blast of fresh, bright lavender air. ‘Berylda! Come here and let me look at you as well, dear.’ That enlivens me now too. ‘You are lovelier with each passing year – no, each minute. Both of you. Aren’t they, Anna?’ Mrs Weston turns to Mrs Gebhardt for agreement and all the women in the room are as figurines come to life, cleaving off from the men, making our own circle in this bow of the piano.
‘Oh!’ But Mrs Dunning appears horror-struck as she joins us, looking at me, and Gret too, peering round each of us one way and then the other. ‘Oh my dears, but where are your foundations?’
Our corsets. This is unreal. Honestly. No one in Sydney notices, too much else going on at any one time to pay attention to the underwear choices of others. But this is Bathurst where the tiniest anomaly must take on gargantuan significance. A city desperate for social relevance grasps at anything.
Mrs Dunning remains agog; scandalised: ‘What have you done with your corsets, girls?’
‘Chucked ’em in the dustbin,’ I tease her, and not very kindly. She’s a hypocrite, and particularly dimwitted about it. Yes, one can get along in a thoroughly modern motor carriage, extravagant as it is filthy and bought off the bent backs and poisoned lungs of those who work in your mines, but woe betide society should women want to get about corsetless. What in heaven’s name would you want to do that for anyway? Why would you want to be able to move your torso as you wish? Mrs Dunning is goggling at me uncomprehendingly right now.
‘Yes, the corsets are in the dustbin – where they belong,’ Anna Gebhardt pronounces, unashamed anomaly herself, and Mrs Weston, professional rescuer that she is, commences to steer the committee on it immediately: ‘Anna, I must say I am coming around to that idea myself. Well, halfway at least. I’ve been lately contemplating the establishment of a Young Women’s Physical Culture Society, for the promotion of natural health and wellbeing. If a corset must be worn in any way other than therapeutically or remedially, it must be worn safely, don’t you think? This fashion for tight lacing is not good. Not good at all, and never has been.’
‘Oh but I don’t know.’ Dulcie fondles the locket at her throat worriedly, as if we’re discussing the tragic plight of Boer orphans starving to death in Her Majesty’s concentration camps. Dulcie Wardell has lately returned from a sojourn in actual Paris, and Rome, and New York, touring with a maiden aunt, where clearly she’s thrown herself into her studies in vapidity. She’s ever been ace at it. And I shouldn’t be too jealous that she has travelled: it’s about all she’s got going for her. Plain as she is simple; as I am caustically mean tonight. Smile and listen respectfully, Berylda. God, am I even here? The twentieth century is dawning and I am here? With Dulcie Wardell sighing regretfully, moronically: ‘I don’t know that I would be able to stand upright without my scaffolding.’
‘And that is the very problem, my child.’ Mrs Weston blinks at Dulcie as if surprised that one might be so wilfully ignorant. ‘That is all your spider waist will do for you – limit oxygen to the brain.’
The laugh that bursts from me at this is so loud the sound bounces off the top of the piano and round the chandelier, shocking even me.
Mrs Wardell, Dulcie’s mother, is goggling now too, at a loss as to how she might respond, Mrs Dunning still open-mouthed beside her. Perhaps they’ll faint simultaneously; that’d be fun. As police magistrate’s wife and mine owner’s wife respectively, they are most unused to being put in their place, and by one so expert as Augusta Weston, who now tightens the circle to include them absolutely: ‘How are things out at Magpie Flat? I’ve heard there’s been no end of trouble with the miners – what are they after this time? Accident insurance or some such thing, is it?’
Who in heaven’s name would want that, either? Working a mile inside the irascible belly of the earth. What could go wrong? Why penalise the good and virtuous mine owners for their dirty workers’ inability to plan ahead? Should be damn grateful to have jobs at all. Should be damn grateful to have good and honest workers, I hear Papa say; and I am sitting outside the office at Hartley Shale, with Gret, playing knuckles, waiting for him to finish his business. I don’t know why we’re there; perhaps on our way to Gulgong. But I know he was a miner himself before he was a prospector. He was arguing with his partners about not putting wages down: Trade depressions don’t last forever. Nothing does. Please. What would Papa do if he were here? He’d shoot Alec Howell for what he has done. Shoot him dead with the pistol he kept in the drawer of his desk.
If Papa were here, we would not be forced to endure this at all. My sister would not be shrinking behind Mrs Weston right now so that the man who rapes her cannot see her across the room.
I have shrunk from the conversation now. I stare into the sturdy girth of Mrs Weston’s shoulder: it’s almost the same circumference as Gret’s entire head. Augusta Weston would make a fine surgeon. She could chop a bit of wood. She could chop down a tree. I glance over my own slight shoulder at the men. Yes, Augusta Weston could put an axe through the lot of them. These besuited apes who control Bathurst. Control the world. There is Reverend Liversidge stroking his cloven chin, as he stands shoulder to shoulder with Justice Victor Wardell, who would convict the working poor wholesale if it would more quickly earn him the Sydney posting he craves, and on the other side of him, lighting his cigar, is J.C. Dunning, proprietor of Magpie Flat copper mine and chief political puppeteer of the district – he’ll be supreme master of Uncle Alec, should he achieve his ambitions in the new state parliament. Alec Howell, honourable member. God help New South Wales.
And God help me, please, for I am diabolical in my hatred of him. You ungrateful little stain, I hear him and hear him. What are you thinking now? You do not presume to tell me what you want. You are lucky I don’t throw you into the street – under a train. How often has he spewed his disgust at me? Sometimes without any reason at all. My face is warm with every sneer, every threat, and the more urgently I will my blood to cool now, the warmer it becomes. I stare hard into the piano case. The lights of the chandelier are reflecting off the gloss. Pretty orbs of light hovering in the piano case that I might still my mind around – until the wires beneath crash discordantly through me for what happened here, in this room, at this piano, only the night before last. Play ‘Yeller Gal’, he demanded of Greta with a clap of his hands: Play ‘Yeller Gal’ for me. He laughed, a little after dinner laugh, to ridicule her, privately, intimately, as he sang the words to this half-breed coon ca
rtoon loud in her ear: Oh! I’ll gibs ya all mah money, won’t ya be mah honey, my red-hot little orange yeller gaaaaal – faster, Greta, faster, laughing at every stumble of her fingers at the keys. Sadist. How many nights does he make her sing that song? What other humiliations does he subject her to when I am not here? His evil pervades every corner of this room. Infects every speck of dust in this house.
See him now: so controlled, so aware of his audience, he is reptilian. He is peering over Justice Wardell’s shoulder to see where Mr Dunning has got to. Ever on his toes; ever looking around himself, no matter whom he’s speaking with, for there might be someone more useful along any moment. How shall I be useful? The answer creeps up my spine and across my scalp. If I am diabolical, let it be so. Let me act. Tonight, when all the guests are gone, I will let the gas run from this chandelier above us. I will close all the windows. I will wake Gret; we will scurry out into the night. I will strike a match as we leave. He will be gone. In a wild conflagration of my hate, looking around himself in desperation at the gathering flames.
A terrible accident, it will be. A terrible, terrible accident. That acetylene gas, such an innovation for the country home, installed at such vast expense, too. And so very dangerous. What a tragedy.
My pulse is racing now. I need air.
Breathe.
I need to get out of this room. Out to the verandah. Subdue this compulsion. This violence. Ice my blood. Before some wild conflagration bursts from me.
As I move to step past Gret, Mrs Wardell leans towards her, saying: ‘I once boasted an eighteen-inch waist, you know, but wore it out to twenty-two. Don’t tell a soul.’
She runs a hand down the stiff busk of her straight-front and I want to scream. Don’t tell a soul? Don’t tell a soul what lies in my sister there. I am putrid with disgust at it. Shame. Hatred. Despair. Defiance. All sin. I am sin. But I force a smile upon my face as I say: ‘Excuse me, please.’
My smile is a shimmering steel blade as I step towards the drawing room doors, through the men.
To see the stranger beyond them. Mr Wilberry. Mr Wilberry has arrived to join us for dinner. I’d quite forgotten he was coming.
Ben
‘Good evening, Mr Wilberry, and – excuse me.’ The girl darts past us. Though she is small and sparrow-swift, her steps shake the boards; the roses on the table in the entrance hall tremble as she makes her way – right out the front door.
‘Er,’ I reply as she disappears. This was not a good idea.
Cos belches under his breath beside me: ‘That the one?’ Indifferent: ‘Little thing, isn’t she.’ Couldn’t be less interested as he strides into the house, thumping his chest, sniffing the air. ‘I take it all back, Wilber – this place looks entertaining after all. A real rib-tickler, this’ll be.’
‘Hm.’ I look back out through the open door, after the girl, but there is only the night there.
‘This way, sirs,’ the maid is urging us to enter the drawing room ahead. ‘Please.’ A note in it that says she’ll be in trouble if we loiter too long at the threshold. So young, this maid; she is actually barely more than a child, cheeks plump and rosy, her hair is slipping from her cap. A weird house, this is. As pleasantly arranged inside as out, a perfect dollhouse set above its imitation Yorkshire dale, and yet – what is it? The pictures on the walls too straight? The parquetry too polished? Pretentious, I suppose, and adamantly so: silver card dish on the hall stand so buffed you could trim your beard by it. Which is why it looks entertaining to Cos. Who are they expecting might call here? And yet there is something else about this place. A feeling; an incongruity. Which is most probably just me, being incongruously me. I wonder where Mama’s elatum have found themselves in this –
‘You’re late!’ Howell has his hand around mine before we’re quite through the drawing room doors. ‘I’d just about given you up.’
‘Given us up?’ For what? Is he dinkum? It’s barely gone twenty past eight. ‘Late?’
‘Never mind.’ Howell smiles, but there’s a pained expression in it – we have put him out somehow. Have we? He is still gripping my hand, pulling me in with it, as Cos assures him: ‘We’ll try not to mind. But you might in a while – you haven’t tried to get rid of me yet now, have you.’
Howell laughs thinly, uncertainly. ‘You must be Mr Thompson?’
‘Yes. One and the same.’ Cos offers Howell no hand – he’s gone straight for the drinks tray, on a cabinet just inside the doors, as though he needs another one so soon, tossing back the last rum chaser getting into the cab.
I’m sure Howell would like to remark at my friend’s fairly conspicuous lack of manners; perhaps he’s thinking what rough Queenslanders we are and making the necessary allowances, but he does not comment. He has no doubt made a rough sum of our worth: we barbarians could probably buy out this room with change to spare. As we step fully into it, I look over at Cos, helping himself to a malt, and strike me once more but this house is very weird: all this show of splendour, of finely turned mahogany, of heavy gold drapes, of sparkling crystal, and I’ll bet that whisky is the mellowest old Scotch – but there is no butler to serve it, just as there was no man at the door. Nothing wrong with serve-yourself, of course, I’m all for it, but it just seems … what is this uneasy feeling?
Howell has his hand on my arm, and he’s leaning to his right, speaking to a man with his back to us: ‘J.C. – Mr Wilberry has arrived.’ The man turns: a well-stuffed piece, the turgid flesh of his neck spilling over his collar and sweating lard. Howell introducing us now: ‘J.C. Dunning – meet Benjamin Wilberry. The cattleman.’
‘Botanist,’ I correct him, futilely, I’m sure. I am no more cattleman than I am familiar with J.C. Dunning, but I won’t be avoiding the charge of either in this place, it seems.
‘Mr Wilberry,’ this Dunning bellows like a bull, and the male portion of the party turns to me as one. ‘Very pleased to meet you.’ What for? In anticipation that Pater might gallop in behind me, stockwhip cracking? I can never quite guess what men like these are after, but if they wish to emulate Pater, whatever it is they want, it will never be enough. I press Dunning’s fleshy hand just hard enough to be unpleasant. He smiles, exposing a blackened tooth, as though to say, Go harder, feller.
I look behind me, back through the drawing room doors: nothing but the dimness of the entrance hall there. I look over at Cos, who’s made himself butler to the ladies by the piano, convincing them that they all need a pre-dinner drop, too. ‘Oh go on, it’s never too early to start. Not now I’m here – you’ll need a drink in a minute, trust me.’ The matrons are already hypnotised, one of the older ones going all girlish up to him: ‘Oh, I don’t suppose one would hurt, would it?’ No. I shall need little convincing myself.
‘To all here now and to the new year!’ one of the gentlemen toasts.
‘I’ll drink to that!’ another answers – the elderly one in military dress, a caricature of stiff-legged brass, twirling a waxed moustache. ‘God save the Queen! Her Glorious Majesty!’
My collar bites into my throat. Claustrophobic: now that best describes the atmosphere of this house. Chokingly claustrophobic. The smell of roasting lamb seems to have been piped into the room, too, mingling stickily with some overly sweet potpourri, promising that dinner, like everything else here, will be of the finest quality, and as predictably inedible as it will be insufferable, for me. A dog barks somewhere outside, just audible under the hollow bleating of voices in here. It’s that brindle staghound, Prince, I imagine. I would prefer his company and his conversation.
‘Don’t you agree, Mr Wilberry?’ Howell is asking.
Possibly not.
‘Wilber?’ Cos holds up a decanter to me, and as I nod I almost startle. Is that the girl there by him? No. It is not her. Very like her, but not her. A softer line to the jaw, a rounder face, and something else. Her gown is not blue but the colour of ripe sorghum, a pale rust,
of some softer line too. Must be her sister. She is staring off into some place above the noise, as though pondering a question, and then, as though sensing my own stare, she glances at me, no more than a blink, before stepping away, out of view, behind a tall, broad-backed woman.
‘This Federation of ours, our nation’s big day tomorrow.’ Howell has me by the arm again. ‘You are not in favour of our Commonwealth?
Couldn’t care a fig, personally, if truth be known; my position is decidedly New Zealandish: distant and wary.
‘Commonwealth?’ Cos pricks up across the room at the very idea, though. ‘Did someone say Commonwealth?’ And now in spluttering impersonation of his famously belligerent sugar baron grandfather he announces to the party: ‘You bloody Southerners wanting our Kanakas out is what your Commonwealth is all about! Who’s going to cut the bloody cane now?’
The room falls silent but for my groan.
And Cos, holding glass aloft in one hand and decanter in the other, like some crazed messiah, shouting: ‘Joke!’ He explains to the stunned: ‘Just a little joke.’ Then he grins, before stunning them again: ‘Shoot the Kanakas! That’s what I meant to say. Shoot the blacks! Shoot them all! For Federation Day! We’re all one big family now!’
The fat man, Dunning, is the first to respond, erupting – enthusiastically: ‘Aha! Now there is a toast I might drink to!’
All the men are falling about laughing; all the women are horrified. And we haven’t been here five minutes.
Cos has conquered the room; he almost bows: ‘Joke, ladies – my ladies, that was a little joke too.’
‘I’d say you’re a little drunk, sir,’ the tall matron observes, and not too unkindly. She is rousing on a naughty boy.
Cos is not that drunk, yet, though; and Howell is not at all amused – he is most put out now, and not unjustifiably so. ‘A joke is a joke, sir, but there will be no obscenities uttered in this house,’ he warns, referring, I’m sure, to Cos’s use of the bloody bloody adjective rather than his call for the slaughter of blacks.