‘Did you then get in touch with the boy’s father?’
‘Yes.’
‘And did Mr Logan Marriott come to Sydney at your request?’
‘Yes.’
‘And at your expense?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did you propose to Mr Marriott?’
‘I asked permission to take the child to England, away from this dangerous friction—at least during his formative years.’
‘What was Mr Marriott’s reaction?’
‘Well, unfortunately he was intoxicated. He was incapable of understanding the situation and I could get nowhere with him.’
‘He was too drunk to give a decision?’
‘Yes.’
‘But was there only one meeting? Didn’t you try again?’
‘He then refused to answer any of my telephone calls and suddenly left for Melbourne the following night.’
‘Did he communicate with the Respondent?’
‘I understand that my sister saw him off on the train.’
‘Mrs Baines saw him off?’ Mr Hood looked stunned. ‘Went with him to the station and saw him off on a train?’
‘Yes.’
‘The following night?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was it the following weekend, the very next weekend, that the boy was not returned to your house as usual?’
‘Yes, it was.’
‘Thank you, Miss Scott.’
The point seemed to hang in the air and glitter, the false image of Lila with gun in hand forcing Logan on to a train.
Silent applause followed Mr Hood’s leisurely walk back to his seat and died away as Mr Gentle got to his feet. His robe and cocky walk did nothing to disguise his youth and when he spoke, his voice was high and nasal. Vanessa regarded him with the gentle disdain of an archduchess being asked impertinent questions by the plumber.
‘You say Mr Marlowe was drunk?’
‘Who is Mr Marlowe?’ asked Vanessa.
‘Er—er—’ Mr Gentle was shuffling papers, grinning, as Mr Hood scraped a chair back and said, ‘Your honour—’
The judge said witheringly, ‘Is counsel referring to—’
‘Marriott. Mr Marriott. Sorry.’ Mr Gentle laughed. Mr Hood laughed. Vanessa smiled wryly.
Lila thought, If he can’t even get the names right!
‘Good-oh; sorry,’ said Mr Gentle. ‘Was Mr Marriott too drunk to discuss your taking the child away from his original foster parents or did he disagree?’
‘He was drunk.’
‘I see. In other words, you didn’t even have a discussion.’
‘We had a discussion.’
‘Was it a long discussion?’
‘Fairly long.’
‘How long’s that?’
‘Well, I don’t remember—an hour or so.’
‘An hour or so.’
‘Perhaps not quite as long as that.’ Vanessa twisted a little.
‘Even so, Mr Marriott couldn’t have been very drunk or you wouldn’t have spent that much time arguing.’
‘I was putting my case to him.’
‘Then he must have listened. He must have known what you were saying.’
Silence.
‘He must have understood you, known what you wanted. Did he understand what you wanted?’
Vanessa said sullenly, ‘Yes.’
‘Yes.’ Mr Gentle pounced on the word, ran gaily around with it, tossing it up in the air like a spaniel with a ball. ‘Yes! He knew what you wanted and yet you still didn’t get anywhere with him.’
‘He was emotional and intoxicated—’
‘But he never gave his permission for you to take the boy away from Mrs Baines, did he?’
After a second, Vanessa admitted defeat on this point. ‘No.’
‘No. Because he wanted his son to be with the aunt who had taken the little boy from his dead mother’s arms!’
Mr Hood sprang up. ‘Objection, your honour. That is assumption!’
‘Objection sustained.’
‘Just the same, he got it out,’ whispered Lila to George.
‘Miss Scott, you’ve implied that your nephew wished to return to you. Do you believe then that he was happy in your home?’
‘Most certainly.’
‘I see. Can you explain why on one occasion he locked himself in a bathroom for several hours?’
Vanessa smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’
‘You admit he fled into a bathroom and locked the door?’
‘Yes, and I blame myself entirely. I shouldn’t have let him see his father. The child somehow got the wrong impression that his father had come to take him away from me.’
‘Are you sure it wasn’t because you had threatened the boy and struck him?’
Mr Hood was objecting loudly and the judge, sustaining the objection, reminded Mr Gentle that he must have supportable evidence before trying to bully witnesses into confessions and that the witness was in court in the role of applicant. She was not on trial.
Mr Justice Hay-Piggott then wagged a long finger at Mr Gentle.
‘This is your first appearance before me in this court and while admiring your zeal on behalf of your client, I must remind you that this is a Supreme Court in Equity and I will allow of no police-court pyrotechnics here. If you’re in doubt as to the proper procedure, I suggest you approach me first.’
‘Yes, your honour,’ said Mr Gentle, smiling, admonished.
‘Have you any further questions to ask the witness?’
‘No, your honour.’
Vanessa stepped down from the witness stand and the judge recessed the court until two fifteen.
Lila, forcing down some half-cold mincemeat in the Kosy Korner, said, ‘I’m afraid the judge doesn’t like Mr Gentle.’
George said, ‘Oh, you can’t tell with these legal blokes. They all sing out to each other in court and get together in the evening for a drink at Tattersall’s Club.’
‘How would you know that?’
Her snide rebuke made Lila instantly ashamed. She felt further humiliated when, guiding her through the traffic, George took her hand and led her back to the court like a child.
In the dirty corridor, busy with bobbing grey wigs and black gowns, they came face to face with Vanessa, talking in undertones to Mr Hood, and for a moment the sisters glanced at each other like strangers in a bus. Then separately they made their way into the assembling courtroom.
Cousin Ettie Bult’s affidavit added nothing of importance except to laud Vanessa’s unselfishness, loving kindness, self-sacrifice and good taste. While Mr Hood was reading it, Lila looked over at Ettie and the old lady’s returning smile said, ‘Well, she is all that and you also are a dear lamb so couldn’t you and Vanessa make up and let me take you all for a charming expensive dinner somewhere.’
Mr Hood (wisely, thought Lila) made no attempt to question Mrs Bult but hurried on to the affidavit of Miss Charlotte Pile, who described the select advantages of her private school and under direct examination went on to say that Miss Scott’s little nephew was showing great advancement. When he had first come to her, she said in plum-coloured tones, the boy had been unable to spell the simplest words but had, during the week before he had been unfortunately taken out of her school, completed a short composition entitled ‘What I Saw in the Gar-den.’ (Offered as exhibit, one child’s exercise book.)
In closing, Miss Pile noted that the boy’s Australian accent was at first so bad that the other children had had difficulty understanding him but that this had been corrected.
Mr Gentle bobbed up to ask Miss Pile what, in her opinion, was wrong with an Australian accent? In his own richly mutated vowels, Mr Gentle asked:
‘Wouldn’t you say that our Prime Minister speaks with an Australian accent?’
Miss Pile gave a tinkling laugh. ‘Aim’ afreed he does.’
The judge smiled at this and did nothing to admonish the laugh that rippled through the courtroom.
Miss Claire Colden
, of the London College of Music, said under examination that her pupil had been showing advancement, had quickly accomplished a piece entitled ‘The Emu’s Tea Party’. Miss Colden then waxed so enthusiastic over Vanessa that even Mr Hood looked embarrassed. After an unsatisfactory exchange with Mr Gentle over the advisability of beginning music lessons at six and a half, Miss Colden, on being dismissed, turned to the judge and said in ringing tones, ‘Your honour, may I just say that Miss Scott is the finest, most charming, most loving, marvellous woman who has ever employed me and I’m proud to speak in her behalf.’
Ellen Glossop, cook and domestic, stated that she had been employed by the applicant for the last seven months and that the house was luxurious and ‘run beautiful’. Yes, the little boy often had come and chatted with her in the kitchen; he was bright and happy. In fact, in Ellen’s opinion, if anything, he was spoiled. Too many expensive toys and fussed over too much, waited on hand and foot, if you asked her opinion. Mr Hood, pleased as punch, reminded Ellen that opinions stood for nothing, only facts counted. Ellen, lemon-mouthed, nodded and took a handkerchief from a handbag that Lila, squinting to see, felt sure had once belonged to Vanessa.
Mr Gentle jumped up.
‘Miss Glossop, why was the housemaid Diana Huggens recently discharged?’
‘Search me.’
‘You must have some idea.’
‘No, I don’t. They said she was no good.’
‘Was that the only reason?’
‘Far as I know.’
‘Think carefully now. Are you sure it wasn’t because the maid, Diana, had witnessed ill treatment of the child?’
Ellen fumbled with her bag. ‘Not that I know of.’ Then, looking Mr Gentle in the eye, she added, ‘I stick to my job in the kitchen and I don’t gossip about what goes on in the house.’
‘Have you ever seen Mrs Bult the worse for wear for drink?’
Ellen replied that sometimes both Mrs Bult and Miss Scott had a sherry before dinner.
‘I asked you if you’d ever seen Mrs Bult intoxicated?’
‘Not me.’
‘Are you telling the truth?’
‘Yes, I am. I know what the oath means.’
‘I hope you do,’ said Mr Gentle.
Mr Hood objected to the line of questioning and its implication.
The judge coughed and said, ‘Well, if the implication is that a sherry before dinner constitutes excessive drinking, we may all be found guilty indeed’ and the courtroom laughed obediently at the judge’s first real joke; the judge appeared pleased, wiped dry lips, asking Mr Hood if there were any further affidavits. On being told there were none, Mr Justice Hay-Piggott adjourned the proceedings until the following morning at ten thirty.
Mr Gentle, rushing off to catch a beer before the six-o’clock-closing-time crowd, said, ‘Now, Mrs Baines, tomorrow’s our turn and they’re going to get it where the chicken got the axe.’
PS, running into the front hall, hurling himself on Lila’s stomach, said, ‘Did we win?’
‘It’s not over yet, pet. Gracious, what a dirty face.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, they have to ask a lot more questions yet.’
‘Will it be over tomorrow?’
‘I don’t think tomorrow, precious. Pet, don’t hold on to me; I have to get George’s tea or he’ll be late for work.’
She heard George’s cry of anguish from the kitchen, hurried in; saw his album of newspaper clippings on the linoleum floor, the mess of crayons, the sprawling paintbox and the cup of multi-coloured water; the little boy Alan stretched on his stomach looking up surprised at George’s angry face.
‘Lila, look what they’ve been doing.’
‘Oh, my God. PS, where did you get—’
PS, trailing behind her, said, ‘We didn’t have anything to colour.’
Lila bent and picked up the album, saw the yellowing newspaper headline: ‘G. M. BAINES WINS ELECTORAL NOMINATION FOR LABOUR. CANDIDATE WILL CAMPAIGN FOR STATE ELECTION,’ and George’s face crayoned out of recognition.
‘He’s defaced every picture in the book.’
‘PS!’
‘We couldn’t find anything to colour.’
‘This is George’s precious book. You’ve been told never to touch—’
‘We didn’t have—’
‘That’s enough.’ George’s explosion shook the room. ‘Don’t do any more to me. That’s enough.’
‘George!’
‘Enough is enough!’
The air quivered and lay still. In the silence they heard Agnes from her glassed-in porch singing:
‘I am going, I am going to the Land,
I am going with His lantern in my hand.’
George’s head turned in the direction of the little crooked voice and his mouth hardened further. Lila touched the stone man. Is it all my fault? Yes, said the stranger, looking back at her. Your family, said the stranger, and Lila recognised him as George Baines, standing on that turn in the road of days before he met her, baffled a little at himself and by the extraordinary possibility of what might lie ahead, alone as yet and untouched by her. But she had waved her hand to him and he had turned and come down the road towards her. Love, she had said, will accomplish everything for us, and believing, he had followed down her road in search of the ever vanishing miracle until now they stood in the kitchen at the decimal point of twenty-nine minutes past five on Tuesday, the fourteenth of August, nineteen hundred and thirty-four and looked at the mutilated book of his life.
‘PS is sorry,’ said Lila, meaning I am sorry. I am truly sorry. I meant for us at this moment to be on our way to London where you were to receive your knighthood and consult with the Prime Minister. But instead we had to give Mater a home, then Sinden, then PS and Agnes, who chose this ill-begotten moment to remind you of where you turned off the road. But is it so far gone? Does it take only crayons and a hymn to end the journey now? What can I say to you? What will you say to me?
‘Cup of tea,’ said George at last, and Lila went gratefully to the safety of the gas stove as he turned and went outside.
Why?
‘Come here, you good thing.’
George felt the hot sun; put down something. A spade? Came, spitting on his hands to stop the blisters, up through the shaking paspalum grass to where she was sitting under the pepper tree at a little card table. She was wearing bright blue sailor-cloth pants and an old pink shirt of Logan’s. She put a stone on the pile of typescript and as George came up, covered the page in her typewriter.
‘Don’t look.’
‘How’s it going, Sin?’
‘Bloody. I’ve just found out the girl in this is like me. She realises everything too late.’
Sinden thumbed her nose at the typewriter. ‘Bugger you, Myra; why couldn’t you have found that out a hundred pages back and saved me all this revision? Has the postman come?’
‘Yes, but he comes again this arvo.’
‘Bearing a letter from my five-minute husband and then I’ll be off!’
‘Off where?’
‘Over the rainbow to find the pot of gold. To wherever this ridiculous place is. I’ll be living in a tent and boiling billies of hot tea for great, sweating, hairy prospectors washing out their gold by the river, and at night, sitting round the campfire making damper and singing all the old songs to the moon and the night insects, so damn far away from Sydney where there’s always a need to do something that should be needless like making money.’
A rainbird flew out of the pepper tree and squawked a mocking ‘Weee—awwk’ at her.
‘Damn you, I don’t want rain!’ She screwed her face up at the sun, and looking for something lost in the sky, her hand guarding her eyes, she asked, ‘George, does anyone find gold?’
‘I s’pose they still do—occasionally. But not like Ballarat in eighteen fifty-one. He might find tin, though.’
‘No, it’s got to be gold. That’s all he believes in. I don’t mean like some rotten old money
bags, but to fulfil himself. A little gold would be enough. Then we’d buy a bakery in Bacchus Marsh. I’d love that—writing and baking bread—and I think it would satisfy him, to have done it himself. I’d be more easily satisfied. I just want two things apart from him. I want a book published in the United States and a son. Neither of them need be very successful. Just mine. But for Logan it’s got to be gold.’
She looked down suddenly and a drop of water fell from the cloudless sky on to her page of untidy typing.
George put his hand down on the pink shirt and she turned without a word, burying her face into his chest, her arms tight around him.
George said, ‘I love you, Sin,’ and taking her chin, lifted her protesting face and kissed her.
‘I know.’
‘But I love you,’ he said, feeling the truth explode in his throat, feeling sharp pain between his eyes and no longer hearing the fat locusts croak in the tree but only cries of something in himself.
‘I know you do,’ she said, and suddenly twisting away, she stood up, small and with her face disarranged, looking at him. ‘Well, I know you do, dearest George. And I love you.’
Like a stopped film, they froze into absurd attitudes for a moment; then resumed the projection of their lives at normal speed; he to slap at a fly on his bare arm, she to brush a leaf out of her hair.
‘George, don’t tell Lila yet. I haven’t even told Vere, but I’m getting one of my wishes. I’m going to have a baby.’
A window flew up urgently, a blind rattled and light streamed into the dark, cold garden.
Lila called, ‘George? Are you in the WC? Come and have your tea. You’ll be late for work. George, do you hear me?’
Do you hear me, Sin? I love you.
That’s why everything. And Sin, I’m easily satisfied too. All I want is—What? Sleep.
Vanessa studied her nails, listening to Mr Gentle reading Lila’s affidavit. Really! That distressing accent. Not only that but the embarrassing, really embarrassing sentimentality of it all. The boy’s ‘little’ mother wanted this and that. The boy’s ‘little’ mother wrote her last letter from the hospital where she was dying, begging the good kind Baineses to take her child. Why not ‘short but wiry’, just for a change. The ‘short but wiry’ mother wrote a letter. The Baineses’ house was ‘modest but full of love’. Does that excuse an outside toilet? Near to a ‘convenient public school which his playmates attended and good enough for the son of a shire councillor’. To obtain votes, no doubt. ‘A boy needs a father’s guidance.’ Poor old George, half asleep over there. Couldn’t guide a horse. Time for the mud to fly. Into this life of suburban bliss came the Deponent. ‘Autocratic, aggressive, sly, demanding and living on the endowments of a well-to-do elderly relative.’ Inference: coercion and blackmail. (‘Ettie, I’m going to have that child by hook or by crook and you’d better finance the undertaking or else!’) Right from the start ‘Deponent had gradually encroached’ on Lila’s time and influence and had been impossible to deal with, even giving orders that Lila was not to launder the child’s shirts. As time went by this monster had regulated the boy’s every waking hour, adding needless lessons in the afternoons, allowing no time for recreation and play, locking up toys and so regimenting him that it was no wonder the poor little boy became more and more reluctant to return to the Deponent on Sunday nights and more and more persuasion was necessary by good, kind, motherly Mrs Baines to induce him to go back. He had often become hysterical; he—
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