The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Alice felt the utter horror of such a request. It struck the words from her mouth. For this was the one thing she could not do. Milli knew nothing of her life if she thought this was even a possibility.

  ‘Or do you not wish to help me? Your only sister?’

  Still Alice could not speak. The grip on her wrist tightened. Her arm was pulled sharply across the makeshift little table and would not be released.

  ‘Alice, you must help me! I cannot stay here and not just because of this.’ Milli stabbed a vicious finger at her swollen belly. ‘There are people after me, people who would kill me.’

  What she meant by this, and if it were even true, Alice did not know.

  ‘But how can I take you there?’ she cried. ‘You do not understand, Milli. You think because it is a big house you can go there and no one will notice you, but it ain’t so! There is no place where the mistress does not go, no cupboard or drawer she does not open. I cannot hide a mouse without she would find it. And then I would lose my position.’

  ‘And end up like me!’ said Milli.

  And for a time the bitterness of one and the dismay of the other rose and swirled about them and neither could speak.

  ‘I had the last baby in gaol,’ Milli announced, throwing back her head—in a challenge, it seemed. As though she had been holding back this piece of information and was casting it now into the space between them to see how it might fall.

  ‘Gaol?’ whispered Alice.

  Milli sneered. ‘What of it? I was drunk. A misdemeanour. Twenty-one days they give me. Just enough time to get the baby out. What? You think it is any worse than this?’ And when Alice made no reply, ‘Because it is not. Not really. You get medicine in gaol and a place to sleep, and tea and bread three times a day. They let me keep the baby with me. Until it died.’

  Milli turned to gaze through the doorway at the rain pouring steadily. She wore an old woollen shawl, which she pulled closer about her thin shoulders.

  ‘You think it wicked, don’t you?’ she said, thrusting her face close to her sister’s though Alice had said nothing. ‘That is what you think, ain’t it, Alice? That it is wicked? That I am wicked?’

  Wicked? Alice was baffled by the word. She had not heard it used since Father McCreadie had rescued her from this life and put her in another. It was a word, an idea, for priests. For rich people.

  Alice stared at her sister. Her lips moved but no words came. For a time neither spoke, then, ‘I have borrowed money, Alice,’ said Milli at last. ‘And I cannot repay it. If I stay here a day longer, they shall slit my throat.’ She stood up and at once sat down again. ‘Where am I safe if you will not help me? Tell me.’

  Alice could not speak. She remembered standing on the railway platform five years ago, waving goodbye. I just wanted you to take me with you, she thought. But Milli had left her behind. And now, for the first time, she realised just how lucky she had been.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE RUM HOSPITAL

  A line of carriages was drawn up in front of the colonnaded two-storey building on Macquarie Street that had once been the Chief Surgeon’s quarters of the Sydney Hospital next door, and was now Parliament House.

  Ninety years earlier the governor for whom the street was named had ordered Sydney’s first hospital built, had provided the convict labour to build it, and had pulled off a clever trick with rum duties to pay for it. The resulting building was so shoddily constructed it had been declared unfit for purpose before it was even completed. When the gentlemen of the Legislative Assembly had finally moved in, the chamber’s acoustics were so poor parliamentary sessions were routinely interrupted whenever troops from the nearby barracks used the Domain as a firing range. A competition to design a magnificent new Parliament House was held and a foundation stone for the new building laid amid great pomp and festivity, but afterwards, when someone actually sat down and calculated the cost of it all, the entire endeavour was quietly shelved, and a year or two later the foundation stone discreetly dug up and removed.

  Such an inauspicious start to its sovereignty might have hampered other dominions, but the colony of New South Wales wore its unorthodox beginnings as a badge of honour. And as the men who had filled its legislative chambers ever since had brokered cabinet posts as favours, and made fortunes rerouting railway lines across their own land and passing legislation that lined their own pockets, all in the name of the public good, perhaps it was fitting that the parliament start its life this way.

  On this particular evening Parliament House was brilliantly lit and the line of carriages, one of which contained Eleanor Dunlevy, led all the way back to Hyde Park. As each carriage drew up in the driving rain it sent water cascading in great arcs and created great puddles through which the footmen dashed. Gentlemen in top hats and ladies in elegant gowns and extravagant headwear climbed hurriedly down, shielded beneath vast umbrellas, and chose, according to their affiliation, to enter the house via one flight of stairs or via a second, the one leading to the Legislative Assembly foyer, the other to the Legislative Council foyer. It did not seem to matter that beyond both foyers the rather modest building converged into a single lobby area, this demarcation must be, and was, observed by one and all. The clerks of the house understood it, so did the grooms and the footmen, and so did the wives who accompanied the gentlemen. And lest one should be in any doubt, the Council foyer was red (plush red carpet, red wallpaper, red upholstery) and the Assembly foyer was green (green-patterned carpet, green wallpaper, green upholstery). Where these two areas converged the carpet was red, the upholstery green, the columns papered half in red, half in green. It was enough to bring on a bilious attack, so it was as well that the hospital was right next door.

  This evening the Premier was hosting a reception. Mr George Reid, recently and triumphantly returned from a series of successful pro-Federation meetings at Maitland and Tamworth in the north, was in high spirits and the mood was celebratory. The divisions that usually separated men—this party or that, Council or Assembly, those born in the mother country and those born in the colony—counted for little tonight. It was all Federation and there was no talk of defeat.

  Eleanor Dunlevy entered the house via the Assembly stairs. Removing her coat and handing it to a footman, she joined a line of other rain-affected late arrivals and was swept, immediately, into the throng of ministers.

  A throng of ministers. Yes, she would put that in her journal.

  But the throng of ministers, though it might look droll on the page, was not so amusing in reality, and Eleanor, who had always arrived at such events on the arm of her husband, was jostled, her progress was impeded. One gentleman brushed up against her and a young lady stepped on her toe. Had it been possible, she might have turned about at this point and departed. It was not possible. She was swept into the throng.

  She found herself in one of the formal chambers, high-ceilinged and richly decorated in white and gold and peppered liberally with ferns and white marble busts (of which a surprising number appeared to be Mr William Wentworth). Smartly liveried footmen in white gloves darted about balancing silver trays. The Premier was here she saw, his prominent and portly figure hard to miss, and so, too, many of the members of the Legislative Assembly and a number of the Legislative Council, some accompanied by their wives. Those who supported Federation—and there were many who did not—and who had attended meetings that evening in the more easily accessible suburbs had got here early, despite the rain. Those travelling in from the more outlying suburbs or who had been the most hampered by the weather were only now arriving and, it appeared—for she overheard someone say it—had missed the Premier’s brief words of welcome and the Speaker’s toast to the Federation and the little flurry of excitement as a reporter from the Mail was identified and ejected from the chamber.

  She looked about her and saw, as well as the Premier, Mr Barton of the Opposition and his wife. She saw the Speaker, the Clerk, the Attorney-General (though she rather thought she had read that the
Attorney-General had resigned, but perhaps she had got that wrong?). She saw that the gentlemen swirled about the Premier, whose voice boomed and whose laughter was audible from one side of the chamber to the other, and their wives swirled about Mr Barton, whose voice did not carry above the little crowd that gathered about him but it did not need to. He was that sort of man. The Premier was another sort.

  The swell of members and members’ wives closed about her and their talk buzzed and eddied about her head:

  ‘We had upwards of two hundred at the meeting at Marrickville.’

  ‘The rain has been so bad in the west there is a real concern it will prevent those in remote locations getting to the polling stations.’

  ‘The Evening News covered my speech at the town hall two nights ago, but what they said about it in the Herald this morning was nothing short of scandalous.’

  ‘I understand Reid got a fifteen-minute ovation and a bunch of roses from the Young Women’s Institute.’

  ‘I heard he was assailed by a delegation of the Women’s Suffrage League and was fortunate to escape with his life.’

  Federation. Federation. Federation.

  For the colony was new. It was sparsely populated, it clung to the fringes of a great empire, eternally gazing beyond its own shores, taken up with momentous events happening elsewhere, its nose pressed forever against the windowpane of Global Affairs. But tonight these gentlemen—her husband and these others—had their own momentous event right here in this very city, in this very room. No wonder they were excited. No wonder they talked of nothing else.

  Federation. Federation. Federation.

  Relentless as a bee beating itself against a closed window, a branch tapping the bedroom window all night long. As relentless as a wife awaiting her husband’s return for the length of a long, cold June night. For she blamed the Federation. It had caused this situation with her husband. Or if not caused it, had allowed it. She saw that. She saw also that a referendum was merely an event and nationhood was an idea and neither could, in themselves, come between a husband and wife. Only a husband and wife could do that.

  It was possible to hold two mutually incompatible ideas in one’s head simultaneously. It was what made one Human.

  As she thought this, a gentleman behind her said loudly, ‘I just saw Jellicoe. No, he certainly was not coming in. Looked like he was emptying his office and preparing to depart.’

  Eleanor turned but could not make out who spoke nor to whom—so many bearded gentlemen all talking at once. She looked past them to the doorway of the chamber and beyond to the foyer where it seemed she must see Jellicoe in his flight. But she saw only the tall hats of a dozen jostling members and the fluffy haze of ostrich feathers from the hats of a dozen overdressed wives.

  She did not wish to see Leon Jellicoe. She did not wish to see him fleeing.

  It had not always been so. He had been a frequent visitor to their house once, the Solicitor-General. Former Solicitor-General now. His wife, Adaline, a close acquaintance with whom Eleanor had sat on a number of committees, was soon to be his former wife. Their case had been reported in the most graphic detail in that morning’s Divorce Court column. Eleanor had read it in her room after Alasdair had gone out: Jellicoe v. Jellicoe. Mr Tancredi appeared for the petitioner, Adaline Florence Jellicoe, who applied for a divorce from her husband, Leon Peter Jellicoe, on the grounds of his adultery with one Dora Hyatt. It had turned her a little cold and she had thrust the paper aside. Leon Jellicoe’s adultery laid bare to the world, his political career over—he had been spoken of as a future premier—and his wife’s very public humiliation complete. Now their beautiful Potts Point home was on the market and Adaline Jellicoe was to sail for England. Or so Eleanor had heard, for she had not called on her former friend for many weeks. Probably no one had. Dora Hyatt, one understood, had been the housekeeper.

  But it was no business of hers.

  Eleanor looked about her for a friendly face. A footman slid past proffering jellied quinces and quails and plover eggs which the members plucked from his tray and popped into their mouths, one after another after another so that whole flocks of quails disappeared and whole generations of plovers were decimated, or so it seemed to Eleanor.

  She could not see Alasdair. He was, of course, but one black-coated gentleman in a room full of black-coated gentlemen and so difficult to spot. Indeed, aside from the few ladies dressed, like herself, in white and dove grey and pearl and ivory, the only relief from the unrelenting black were the liveried footmen who darted about like exotic reef fish in a pond full of ageing somnambulant trouts. But still she could not see him.

  She did see a great number of gentlemen of her acquaintance: Fraser Pyke, the tall lay preacher from Penrith whose wife was perpetually in confinement and whose family, consequently, practically outnumbered his constituents, and Charles Booker-Reid, a man of enormous girth and very little hair whose electorate was so far west of the Blue Mountains it was rumoured he had never actually been there. Behind him was Ned Dempsey, an incongruous anti-billite in a roomful of pro-billers and until quite recently Secretary for Lands (or possibly Minister for Industry; it was hard, sometimes, to remember), and his sister, Miss Marian Dempsey, he a fussy little man and she the unmarried sister who kept house for him and who probably would have made the better minister. With them was the banker Henry Rothe, who owned properties across the city and for whom politics was no more than an amusing sideline, and George Drummond-Smith, who had switched parties a number of times over the years and who puffed away complacently on a huge cigar, surveying the roomful of members with a sardonic eye.

  She had known these gentlemen so many years and yet she knew them not at all. Mrs Pyke, who was a little way off in white brocaded satin and diamonds, gave her a cheery wave. Eleanor knew Cecily Pyke at least. They were friends—but were they? Could one be friends with a woman who had so many daughters when one had no daughters at all, and no sons either? Eleanor lifted her hand to return the wave but her hand dropped to her side. And now they were all watching her, Pyke, Drummond-Smith, Dempsey and Miss Dempsey, Rothe and Charles Booker-Reid through the smoke of his foul cigar.

  Where was Alasdair? It occurred to her he was not going to come to the reception at all, that he had an appointment elsewhere.

  She smiled, as it was her habit to stare dismay in the face, but there was no one to whom she might offer the smile, and as smiles went it was a pretty dismal affair. Her face was as stiff and tight as sunburned skin. The smile froze on her face. It knew it had no right to be there.

  From across the chamber Cecily Pyke attempted a second wave. But perhaps it was not a wave, perhaps she was pointing, and now the ladies who stood with Mrs Pyke turned and looked her way. The gentlemen who buzzed about the Premier glanced over their shoulders at her; even the footmen with their trays of glasses stopped and stared.

  Did they all know, then?

  They could see her, of course, standing here in the room without her husband. A space had appeared all around her as it might for a pariah. A leper. She imagined herself to be Adaline Jellicoe, who must stand like this now, the outcast, wherever she went. But she was not Adaline Jellicoe and it was not her life laid bare in the morning newspaper.

  Still she could not shake the thought: which of them—out of compassion or out of spite—had sent her the note intended for her husband’s mistress?

  She saw Everett Judd, the octogenarian, one of the few remaining original members of the ’56 Assembly and wearing, it appeared, the same suit he had worn to that first Assembly almost half a century earlier. Judd’s electorate, a large one on the shores of Botany Bay, bordered on its western edges Alasdair’s own electorate and they were close, he and Alasdair, or as close as any two members of an Assembly could be.

  Everett saw her and fought his way over. He placed a hand on her arm. ‘My dear Mrs Dunlevy,’ he said, as though he knew she was to be pitied.

  And she was glad to have someone upon whom she might rest her g
aze, even if it was such an ancient and tired face—but distinguished still, if a little dried up and greyish and all but obscured by his long white whiskers, and she smiled, though her instinct was to pull away. Judd’s wife, a kind, quiet woman who had stood at her husband’s side for forty years, had died quite suddenly only a month or so ago of a fever or a seizure, and now Everett was like a man out of step with time, constantly looking about him for the thing he had lost.

  ‘Dear Everett,’ she said, peering into his ravaged face. It was he who should be pitied, yet the tears that now pricked Eleanor’s eyes were for herself and not for him. She placed her hand over his where it lay on her arm, and for a moment they were quite alone in the crowded chamber.

  This illusion was abruptly shattered by George Drummond-Smith, who hailed them, pushing his way through the crowd and clasping Eleanor’s hand.

  ‘Dear Mrs Dunlevy. How delightful. But I do not see your husband. Is he not joining us?’

  Drummond-Smith ignored Judd and retained hold of Eleanor’s hand for longer than was necessary. He was not a tall man but tightly packed with a massive skull and forehead and eyes that fixed you and, like his hands, did not let go. There was a Mrs Drummond-Smith, a slight woman whose people had land in South Australia, but she was rarely seen and never accompanied her husband to official engagements, an arrangement that seemed to suit Drummond-Smith very well.

  ‘Alasdair is not yet returned from his meeting,’ Eleanor replied, extricating her hand and taking a small step back. Her voice was quite normal, she observed. Was it not her habit to stare dismay in the face?

  ‘Of course. He was at Newtown, was he not? And were you at the meeting at Newtown with your husband?’ Drummond-Smith might have relinquished her hand but he still stood closer than politeness seemed to warrant. ‘Odd, but I could not make you out …’