by Kim Kelly
Berylda
‘Give my regards to Lucifer,’ I say to him, and that is enough. Perhaps, if there is no God to have answered my ceaseless prayers for justice, there is no Devil to punish us either. There is no hell other than the flames of hatred we ignite and fan ourselves. I don’t know what justice, what retribution will come for me in time, but I want no more of this revenge now. It is done.
I stand and there is Ben, behind me, as he has been throughout this night. My witness. I say to him: ‘I should like to go home now.’
I am senseless with relief and hollowing with every step as hatred begins to drain from me, as Alec Howell ends. Straining for his final breath, unsated for all time, the everlasting vision in my mind. Hell enough. I am spent. It is twenty minutes to midnight. I don’t see Dr Weston or Buckley or anyone else as I leave the hospital. There is only Ben’s hand over mine, and an owl on a low branch over the drive, gold eyes caught in the swaying lamp of the buggy. The air is damp and cool and black.
And in the house, I am guided to my sister’s room along a hush of lavender sympathy: ‘My dear, dear girl. My poor dear girl. Greta is in her bed – go to her. Be with your sister, take comfort with each other now.’
Yes.
‘Ryldy?’ she asks me through the dark, and I curl around her.
I say to her only: ‘He is gone.’
She turns in my arms, her forehead pressed to mine. She says: ‘Good. I’m glad.’ I breathe in her sweet peppermint breath and she tells me: ‘I used to wish that he would be thrown off Jack and trampled by him; I used to wish that all the time. I’m happy he’s dead, Ryl. It’s wrong, but I’m happy. You don’t need to tell me another thing about it.’
A strange rushing in begins to fill me. My skin is raw and tender and yearning all over, my sister’s absolution encircling me.
Clean your heart, Ah Ling’s words come back and back to me. Clean your heart.
Vengeance has come. And so it must be made gone, too. Somehow.
‘All things pass.’ Greta kisses my forehead. ‘At least that’s Mrs Wheeler’s philosophy on life and death. And we’re all sinners – that’s my pennyworth, and it happens to be a fact. Ryldy, we’re sinners together, you and me.’
I look at my sister: she is silver with moonlight. I say to her: ‘You’ve never done anything sinful, Gret – ever.’
‘Haven’t I?’ She strokes my cheek and tells me: ‘My whatsits finally came, while you were out. I got something from Mrs Wheeler, yesterday, when you were out visiting that Ah Ling man; something to bring them on. A whole load of Bates’ Bitter Apple, it was – God, I was sick from those pills. I’m so sorry to have worried you like that. I didn’t want to tell you, not at all, but I think we both know what was wrong with me. Uncle Alec did it to me, and it’s all gone now. All of it. You don’t have to think about any of that any more.
‘Oh Ryl.’ She holds me tight. ‘I can tell you now, I was so happy when you said on New Year’s Eve that we’d be going to the Hill – didn’t you see my jaw drop? I could barely believe what you were saying. You see, I’d wanted to get help from Mrs Wheeler about this. I was going to ask you all along if we could go to Hill End while you were home. I’d overheard some gossip at Mrs Hatfield’s salon, when I was getting pinned up for my Christmas dress, that Clara Bidwell – you know, from church, the vet’s elder daughter? – had to go off to Mrs Wheeler, in September. She’d got into trouble with the fellow she was engaged to, Bradley Piper, who by that time had gone off to the war in Africa. Mrs Wheeler helps a lot of women and girls in the same sorts of predicaments, thank heavens. It cost a bit, though – one whole pound. And I stole that from Uncle Alec’s desk, when you were arguing with him on New Year’s morning, just before we left – that’s how I came to forget the jam, in all my sneaking about. So sinner I am, through and through.’
She kisses me again. ‘But really, fate was always going to come round to our side one day, so long as we kept wishing for the same thing. We did. We always have. And now we are free.’
So we are, for whatever freedom might be, for us. And now I begin to cry. I course and flood and burst with every unshed tear.
Returning
Now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Ben
Amazement slips into some kind of anaesthetised abeyance of everything I might have known, or thought I did, before this day. Too remote to respond to Mrs Weston’s insistence that Cos and I stay overnight here in this house, and too close to Berylda’s sobbing to hear it as anything but pain convulsing from the very heart of the world. The world is wounded, and I can’t move from the door. Her door. Closed once more.
‘Mr Wilberry.’ Mrs Weston’s hand is on my shoulder now; firmly: ‘Please.’
I can’t stand here all night, her plea implies. Why shouldn’t I stand here all night, I could ask. Where else might I be? But as I turn, I see Mrs Weston is accompanied by the little dollhouse maid, who carries a tea tray, toast and cocoa on it, for the girls; and Cos is behind them, saying: ‘Come on, old matey. Let’s go for a ramble – you’re always up for that.’
Yes, that’s probably a good idea.
We leave via the rear door, and I hear the housekeeper whimpering softly in the kitchen as we step across the verandah. We walk in silence, towards the town, and I am spiritless, worn as a length of old rope. We pass the hospital, invisible now except for a gas lamp lit on the hill; the moon is an electric eye above us.
Did any of this happen? This day; these past three days – three weeks? Am I here, or am I still in Brisbane, drinking at the Swamp, avoiding Pater after Mama’s burial?
‘Hang on a sec.’ Cos stops to light up: some yellow devil’s face above the match.
I say, to probe reality: ‘She killed him.’
He drags in his smoke and says: ‘Yes. I assumed as much.’
I tell him: ‘She killed him so that it appears the death was from typhoid fever – no one suspects anything else. Weston declared it himself.’
‘Sensational,’ says Cos.
‘You don’t find that disturbing?’ Last time we walked this way he didn’t think much of her at all; why has he changed his mind so completely? Because what she has done is justified by what Howell did himself?
‘Yes, and no,’ Cos says now. ‘Most disturbing is that I could have been so wrong about her. All that she and Greta must have endured makes me … I don’t know. I can’t say anything about it except that I’m sorry. Head too far up my own arse, for a change.’ He laughs at himself. ‘I think she’s probably something of a Super Girl, as it turns out – one creature Nietzsche neglected to mention. A cut above the usual anyway; a cut above good and bad, yes and no, black and white. She’s certainly got some balls. Exemplary balls. Terrifying, to be honest.’
‘Yep.’ I nod. She has more courage than any man I know.
He says: ‘All balls considered, I should probably make an attempt to find my own pair, get home to Susan and the children. You’re right, I have been a bit of a bastard lately, or more so than usual. I’ll make arrangements in the morning, get out of your way, unless you want me to stay around with you and … Do you?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ I imagine him becoming drunk and bragging of murder to the local sergeant; I’m sure he wouldn’t, but trust is beaten a little thin between us right now. I let him know this as I add: ‘You wouldn’t want to stay around to watch me beg for scraps from her high table, now would you – because I’d say that’s just about all I’ll be doing until I know where I stand.’
‘Yes, well.’ He laughs again, but I can hear some deeper apology in it, and some regret for more than his misreading of her as he says: ‘You don’t need my assistance there. You never have needed me, you know.’
‘I need you,’ I tell him as we sight the town and the pub. ‘I need you to get quickly a
rseless with me – right now. I will always need that from time to time. But if you breathe one word about –’
‘Jesus, Ben,’ he cuts off the thought. ‘Believe me, please – she has my admiration, respect. My awe. I was only ever looking out for you, shit poor as I am at it. But things will work out between you, despite me, I’m sure. I understand it now – you and Kitty Cat are as well made for each other as Susie and I are. Two halves somehow.’
Are we? I don’t know about that. I don’t know that someone as extraordinary as Berylda Jones was made for anyone.
Berylda
‘You’ll get housemaid’s knee doing that,’ Greta chides me as she returns from town with supplies and the last of the mail.
‘Oh well.’ I shrug. I am scrubbing the boards in the study, as I have scrubbed the boards of every room of this house, taking the brush into every groove, ridding the timbers of every trace of him. All around the walls I’ve been, and into each corner of bookshelf, drawer, windowsill, skirting board. Some self-imposed punishment, I suppose, of me, and of him: by his total removal. Every last hair, sliver of fingernail, flake of skin, every ex-libris label torn out from every book and burned: gone. The monster is no longer here, unless I allow it. And I don’t. It’s taken me almost three weeks, I am being so fanatical about it, and why shouldn’t I be? It’s so very nearly done. I have stopped listening for his footsteps up the hall, the squeak of the boards, the snap of a command. Almost.
‘Big news today,’ Greta drops the Bathurst Free Press on the floor in front of me. ‘Queen Victoria is dead.’
‘Oh?’ I sit back on my heels and stare at the newsprint.
‘Black armbands all around town. Mrs Wardell and Mrs Hatfield standing on the street dabbing hankies. I’m not sure what that sort of mourning is all about,’ says Gret. ‘Bit of a show, isn’t it? All that public weeping. I mean, she was eighty-one, wasn’t she? What do people expect? That she’d really turn into a thousand statues and live forever?’
‘Probably ten thousand statues. The end of an era,’ I say vaguely, still staring at the paper. An old queen has passed peacefully away in her bed, a million lives from here, taking nothing with her but her soul, if such things as souls exist. Just another human, when it’s all said and done. Oh well. But when I look up at Gret again, she is positively vibrant: her soul fills every scrubbed clean space around me. My sister has returned to me and she is never disappearing again. She’s so alive, so here, she’s even thrown out all of her old paint tubes and pencil stubs – drawers and boxes full of them, I never knew she hoarded so many, stuffed into her chiffonier, as if each one held a wish that couldn’t be discarded, until now.
‘Mr McLean up at the grocers was funny,’ she chatters on. ‘He said we can get on with being Australians now without feeling guilty, you know, about Federation. Isn’t that a strange thing to say? But Buckley was even funnier in his reply – he said now, when our boys win Olympic championship medals for swimming, they’ll be ours and not belong to Britain. He said that’s all Federation is about for the man on the street.’ She imitates his gravel rasp: ‘Wavin’ flags.’
For boys winning medals, and boys going off to war. That’s right: they are all Australians now, under the one flag – when the squabbling has ceased as to what flag that’ll be. We don’t seem old enough to be a country somehow, grown up enough; but then I remember Mrs Wheeler’s story of the French and German miners wrecking her front saloon over Alsace in the seventies, and wonder what country ever is grown up. The postcard I received from Clive last week, hoping my holidays are going well as he rides out from Cape Town, says they are all just boys. I feel so old; older than nations. I close my eyes for a moment and see Clive galloping across the veld, and I pray that he is surviving all the bullets and camp-life diseases and everything else that pursuing Boers for a dead queen has to offer. I pray that he comes home safely, not too scarred by murder, to find a nice girl, as if my prayers mean anything much.
‘Oh, and Flo sent a telegram – see.’ Gret flashes the crumpled telegram at me from under an armful of parcels from Milford’s stationers in town, and I smile at her and the telegram both. My sister is buying up enough paint and paper and card to last us through some sort of Armageddon, replacing one form of hoarding with another, and not sparing any expense. We will need the proceeds from this house to pay for it all. Or some substantial royalty from the illustrations she has been asked to complete for a serial collection of bush fairytales. That incorrigible Cosmo Thompson came through, after all, with a recommendation to an editor, someone called Felix Craft, somehow associated with The Worker magazine out of Brisbane. The only monsters she’ll ever have to consider now will be the bunyips she will create in pen and ink – fabulous.
I take the telegram from her and some glimpse of my own happiness flits through me with the words:
Arrive on morning train. Get to Katoomba 10.45 FRI 25 JAN.
That’s the day after tomorrow. This is our last night in this house, this hated house, Bellevue. Tomorrow we’re going home, to Echo Point. For all Alec Howell’s meticulousness, he never amended his will on Libby’s death, and so, as wills go, it remained in favour of wife, Elisabeth Flora Pemberton Howell, and after her her heirs, in order of the eldest male child first, and so on down the line to me and to Gret. An oversight or perhaps there simply was no one else to leave it all to? Whatever the case, while the estate is being examined for probate, the solicitor has found no bar to us moving back into our mountain home. Tomorrow. And I couldn’t think of a better person to share our first new full day there with than Flo McFee. I’m so glad she’s been able to get away, to spend some holiday time with me, to meet my sister. But fear follows any sense of joy, for what Flo might see in me, for what I have done. Do I wear some mark of it on me somehow? How can I go about in the world as the murderer I am?
‘I saw Ben in Durham Street, too, on his way to the bank. He said he’d come and take Jack when he was finished there. I said that would be all right.’
Gret clomps away across the entrance hall with her parcels, leaving me to my thoughts of Ben, the fear and joy I find in him. I stand up and face the daisies, his daisies that Greta placed in the brass vase on the plinth by the drawing room doors for all to see as they called to pay their respects, though for all I remember of those two days between death and burial it might only have been Mrs Weston who came to the house, holding me under her wing. And Ben, always somewhere beside me. And these daisies, my one answered prayer: Please help us, I asked them in the night; my desperate prayer to the shadow of a stranger, the small half of a wishbone held tight. Twenty-four days ago. Their drabness is crisp-dried now, their flowers sepia-scorched, and they only grow more lovely to me. They are dead but alive, these Helichrysum elatum, and I will carry them with me always, work them firmly into the hole where my hatred used to lie. I touch their feathery petals now, or rays as I have learned they are properly called, and they are papery indeed, fragile but strong, and I cherish them as I have cherished nothing else. They don’t call them everlastings for nothing, do they?
I turn and look out of the open front door now, to look for him, but I see only the northern hills, and the smoke cloud smudged above them from this summer’s bushfires. The blazes have cut a path of destruction across Tambaroora from the west this year, heading for Sofala, taking tobacco plantations and joss houses and poppies with them. And Tiger Sam, too, who stayed at the farm to try to protect his crop. Dr Ah Ling and his young niece escaped along the Mudgee Road towards Hargraves, and Buckley heard they’ve since got on a boat back to Shanghai. I see them out on the waves of the blue hills somewhere, a little lacquer-haired girl quietly playing peg dolls beneath paper sails. I am cleaning my heart, I tell the hills, I tell her, I tell Ah Ling, I am cleaning my heart. I am reconstructing it with paper daisies, and with gratitude. And I will succeed. Eventually.
I touch the pendant at my neck: my mother’s pendant of beryl, which my fat
her had made for her from his prospect at Ophir, wishing for me. I look at it in my hand: it is home, there in my hand. The rough-cut stone barely polished, the inferior rose gold – it’s not as beautiful as I remembered it. It’s far, far more beautiful. It looks like Papa had a go at making the piece himself, it is so amateurishly wrought, the loops of the scalloped edge uneven and the casing oddly bowed down one side. Absolutely worthless but to us, to me. I clutch it to my throat with the reverberating shock that it was ever denied us. Why? Why did you take it from me, Alec Howell? Why did he shut it up in a safe deposit box at the Australasia Bank? All of Mother’s and Aunt Libby’s trinkets – hair combs, paste jewels, a string of pearls with a broken clasp – kept from us. The questions I will never escape no matter how many other things I might stuff into my mind to ward them off.
How is such a monster made? How is a monster measured? Such questions might drive me perhaps to consider investigating psychiatry one day as an area of study. When he is far enough away. When he is merely bones and the headstone is so overgrown I cannot read his name. But the mind surely is a strange beast, isn’t it? Mine as strange as anyone’s. Not least that I mourned without pretence at his funeral. I overheard Justice Wardell and J.C. Dunning discussing him outside in the churchyard, the one telling the other that there was no chance the Free Traders would have chosen him as their candidate anyway. He’d made quite a terrible hash of his Federation speech, saying some pompous thing about fixed grain and wool prices being part of a socialist plot to destroy the Commonwealth economy, insulting every farmer there, hardening their resolve to vote for the Protectionists – who are indeed now in bed with the Labor Party on the issues. God forbid. The sadness of it overwhelmed me; the pointlessness: to work so hard and for it to come to nothing. To be so endlessly, insatiably in want. And ultimately unwanted. Hated. The response to the Notice of Death cable sent to Barnstaple via London, to the father’s address, was swift and brief, a reply from, presumably, a brother: With regret, we inform you that we have no interest in this matter. As if he had ceased to be long ago. Even at the hospital his absence has barely been felt. A locum has come out from Sydney to take over as surgeon until a permanent replacement is found. While my sister appears to have tossed him out with a box of old paint tubes. Life goes on. Life goes round and round.