The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Eleanor put the newspaper down. Who would do such a thing? There seemed nothing to be gained by it except destruction and, perhaps, death. Did men care so much about the referendum? No doubt, if you had a hand in your nation’s affairs, you did care. As a woman Eleanor had no hand in it. She did see that it had cast a wedge between them, she and Alasdair. For him the referendum, this idea of Federation, was everything. For her it was … a wedge.

  But that was to pretend it was Federation that had caused this situation between them.

  She took off her spectacles and sat for a time looking about the room. She had never sat at this end of the table before, had never seen the room from this angle. Everything was slightly different. It would be warmer at this end of the table, for the fireplace was at one’s back. One could no longer see the ormolu clock on the mantel or the candlesticks on either side of the clock or, above the fireplace, the William Strutt painting of terrified men and animals fleeing a bushfire. Instead, one faced the mahogany sideboard and the giant fern in its brass pot behind the doorway and the Charles Conder landscape of bathers enjoying Mentone Beach. The view from the window, too, was quite different. One could no longer see the road winding its way uphill or the frangipani tree outside the neighbouring house, but one could view the bay, distantly, and the sunlight twinkling on the water. It was quite different. And she preferred the Conder, she decided. Why should one always be staring at terrified men and animals and not at elegant ladies with parasols at a beach?

  The note still held tightly in her hand.

  Today then.

  The door opened and Alice, as though astonished at the sight of her mistress seated at the master’s end of the table, stood in the doorway, quite motionless.

  A hansom cab called at the house a short time later and from her window upstairs Eleanor stood and watched as Alasdair emerged from the house in top hat and morning coat with a fat leather portfolio. He carried a rolled umbrella. The sky showed no hint of cloud but the memory of the last five days of rain was still fresh. The lawn was quite waterlogged and he stuck closely to the path. A sandstone wall surrounded the house, and guarding its solid double gates were two winged lions, cast in stone mid-roar and about to pounce. But they never did roar, they never had pounced.

  They did not roar or pounce now as Alasdair passed between them, covering the short distance to the cab with that purposeful stride of his. It was a stride that had carried him all the way to the chamber of the Legislative Assembly and now looked set to carry him into a new nation and a new national parliament. It was a stride that brooked no possibility of failure, that allowed no place for hesitancy or doubt. She had admired that stride for it had carried her too, for a time.

  To be so sure and certain. What did that feel like?

  She watched him climb into the cab. The driver, a youngish man in a green bowler, startled the ageing grey horse with a flick of his whip and the cab set forward with a jerk.

  A very short time later Eleanor, too, left the house. She had donned a long cream and ivory winter coat, sheepskin-lined boots and a hat—not the ostrich feathers of the previous night but something wide-brimmed and bland, something functional—and she had her gloves and parasol in her hand. At the front door she paused and called, ‘I am going out, Alice,’ and gave no more explanation than that, though as Alice did not reply and was likely in another part of the house it was possible the girl did not hear.

  Eleanor had departed the house so soon after her husband that his cab was still visible as it climbed back up the hill to the main road, the bowler-hatted cab driver and his ancient horse making heavy weather of the incline. By the time it crested the hill Eleanor, moving swiftly on foot, had almost caught up to it. But now that they were on the level she could not hope to keep pace. She looked about her and, spying another cab stationary on the roadside ahead disgorging two elderly ladies, she signalled the driver and climbed nimbly inside. She held on tightly as they jerked forward, and only then did she pull up the little hatch in the roof and instruct the cabbie.

  ‘Driver, do you see that cab before us? I should like you to follow the same route.’

  And if the man thought this an odd request by a lady in a long cream and ivory winter coat and a bland and functional—though clearly expensive—hat, he gave no sign of it but sucked silently on his pipe and urged his own nag onwards, for the cab in front had suddenly picked up speed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ALWAYS DIFFERENT, ALWAYS THE SAME

  Alice Nimrod watched as first Mr Dunlevy then Mrs Dunlevy left the house. Mrs Dunlevy was on foot and this was unusual enough to be remarked upon, had there been someone to whom Alice might make such a remark. Not only did Mrs Dunlevy depart on foot, but she went bowling along the road at what might be described as a less than sedate pace. It might almost be described as a tearing hurry.

  What the reason for this might be Alice could hardly imagine and did not care to try. The ways of her employers often made her wonder. If she did attempt to reason why something was one way or another, why they did this or did that, her reasoning faltered and she found herself all at odds with the world for a time, and sometimes at odds with God, too, so now she no longer tried to make sense of it.

  She was satisfied simply in the knowledge that it was Friday. Of this, happily, there could be little dispute. The coalman had made his weekly delivery in the chill of a pre-dawn hour, stomping down the passage, the great sack on his shoulder, puffing and grunting and sweating. He was not quite human with his massive bulk, his coal-blackened face, his white staring eyes, more a thing arisen from the depths, and the black void of the coal hole led straight to Hell.

  This was foolish but there it was. Alice could not shake the feeling. She always waited in the kitchen while the man came, deposited his devil’s load and departed. After he and his horse and cart had gone a coating of coal dust lay over everything. She tasted it at the back of her throat.

  And so Alice cleaned the gas stove and set the water boiling before Mrs Flynn arrived to start breakfast. She left the kitchen then for it was Mrs Flynn’s domain. She beat the rugs. There was a carpet sweeper with a long handle and a roller that flew over the carpet and left a smart straight line in its wake, but really all it did was pick up threads and fluff and crumbs. All the real dust and dirt was still there and stayed there unless you did what people had always done and picked up the rug and went at it with a carpet beater. And so Alice beat the carpets. The grocer’s boy came on his overloaded bicycle, and the baker’s boy, and finally the butcher’s lad, and she met each one at the kitchen door and made a show of checking the order was right and the butcher’s lad ogled her and made a grab for her breast though he was barely thirteen, but he was already as tall as her and he leered when she took a swipe at him and left with a backward glance that said, In a year I shall be stronger than you.

  Alice cleaned all the shoes which, after the days of rain, were thick with mud and almost spoiled. Not spoiled in a Surry Hills way (for in Crown Street these shoes would fetch a pretty penny and go through half a dozen new owners, some of whom would die with them on their feet before they finally disintegrated) but spoiled in an Elizabeth Bay way, which meant they might be worn a handful of times then discarded. And that was something Alice had learned: that things—clothes, objects, people—had different lives in one place compared to another.

  She observed that Mr Dunlevy’s newest pair of shoes—soft brown Italian leather—looked as though he had waded through a muddy river in them, though she considered it unlikely he had done so. She put them to one side. The laundry items got parcelled up each week and taken away by a Chinaman and done someplace else. They had been returned the previous day and had not yet been unpacked, aired or folded away, though no one had so far commented on it. And now it was Friday: the windows needed to be cleaned, the silver polished. Alice had begun the dusting, had made some real progress, but had stopped to observe first Mr Dunlevy then Mrs Dunlevy leave the house.

  She sat
down at Mrs Dunlevy’s writing desk. It was not something she usually did, but Mrs Dunlevy hurrying out like that had unsettled her. It had set her thinking. And so she sat.

  The desk was cleared but for a single ivory-handled paper knife. All else was put away into a locked drawer. Mrs Dunlevy kept a notebook in the drawer in which she wrote most nights and some mornings. It was a mystery to Alice what she wrote in the notebook but it must be important or why would it be kept locked up like that?

  ‘They are not like us,’ Maeve Gorman had warned her five years ago, taking the fourteen-year-old Alice in hand during her first topsy-turvy weeks in the house. ‘Do not even try to understand their ways of being.’

  These were wise words and Maeve, who had been in the Dunlevys’ house for three years as maid-of-all-work and then lady’s maid, had been full of wise words, or so they had seemed to Alice, who had been plucked from the world she knew and dropped into a foreign place where all was new and different and incomprehensible. And when Alice had wept for her home and her mother and her sister, Maeve had said, ‘This is your salvation, Alice Nimrod,’ sounding like Father McCreadie. Alice had thought she meant Jesus and the Holy Spirit and the Trinity and the Virgin Mother, but what Maeve had meant was you, Alice Nimrod, have been dragged out of the slum and shown another view of the world, you have been given a chance to have a better life. And when Maeve had given her notice and left to marry a man who sold gentlemen’s suits at Mark Foys department store and who wore nice clothes and had a bit of money, Alice understood. For Maeve had come from the same place she had, once. They had even lived in the same streets, though not at the same time.

  ‘My mum made hats,’ Alice had said, when she had found out. It was the first thing she had ever said about her mum, about her old life. And Maeve had nodded. Maeve had understood, though she had offered nothing in return.

  Mrs Nimrod had made hats. There was no factory so she had done piecework at home, and once Alice was old enough to wield a pin without taking her own eye out, she had made hats too, day after day, dawn until dark, until midnight sometimes, affixing ribbons and decoration to straw hats and felt hats and cloth hats and silk hats, every kind of hat delivered in huge boxes at the start of each week by a boy and taken away at the end of the week by a man who studied each item and handed over a pile of coins and took some back for each defective or spoiled item. The room in which they lived, in which Alice grew up, was strewn with straw and bits of silk and hatpins and ribbons and feathers and lace and tiny little fruit and flowers made from hand-painted plaster, and clouds of tissue paper and boxes and boxes and boxes.

  They had lived in a room, she and Mum and Milli. Not the same room, far from it. They had moved often and at short notice, though it might as well have been the same room for they all had the same sour smell, the same bugs in the beds and in the nooks and crannies, the walls were always damp, the roof always leaked and the window—if there was a window—never shut properly or was sealed shut and could not be opened even in the swelter of summer. The room was always in a house that was dilapidated and ramshackle, two storeys, three storeys, sometimes four storeys high, where four or six or eight families lived, with one standpipe in the street outside that sometimes produced water and that sometimes the council closed off because the water was bad and might kill you, and outside was a huge iron tub and a ringer where you did your laundry, and in the corner a dunny over a foul-smelling pit. The house was in Commonwealth Street and Wexford Street and Campbell Street and Riley Street and then back to Commonwealth Street. Always different, always the same.

  Mrs Nimrod’s husband, Bert Nimrod, was a cooper who made barrels for the brewery, which was skilled work, and folk would always need barrels, wouldn’t they, Mrs Nimrod had said, but when Alice was four there had been an accident and Bert Nimrod had been crushed to death by his own barrels. That was the time from which the moving from room to room and house to house and street to street had begun. Or so Milli had told her, for her sister was five years older and could remember their dad. Or said she could.

  Mr Purley had arrived when Alice was eight. He appeared one Sunday afternoon, a large man in big boots and an oily cap with thinning hair and a strange smell. Mr Purley slept in the bed with the widowed Mrs Nimrod and in the daytime he sat in the public bar of the Brickfields Hotel. Often when he returned late from the Brickfields Hotel he shouted at everyone for no very good reason and occasionally he took a swing at Mrs Nimrod and once he knocked her down the stairs and they all thought she was dead.

  It was soon after this that Milli had left.

  Milli was fourteen. The night she left she had woken the sleeping Alice and explained her plan—which was no plan at all really—just to leave at once and go someplace else. When he notices you, Milli had warned, meaning Mr Purley, you must leave too, Alice. And Alice, who had been nine at the time, had not understood.

  After Milli had gone things got much worse. The only times Mr Purley had not been angry was when he was asleep, and Mrs Nimrod had bruises and cuts that never quite disappeared.

  Sometimes Alice hid under the stairs. ‘I will not let him hurt you, Alice, I will not!’ Milli had used to say when she found Alice there. But Milli had gone and now when Alice hid under the stairs no one came to find her.

  One night when Mr Purley returned from the pub her mother had picked up the iron and swung at him with it. The iron had got him squarely on the forehead and they had both watched as Mr Purley reeled away then stumbled off down the stairs. The next morning they found him, stone dead, in the hallway, in a little pool of dried blood and a cut on his head. The constables had come and taken him away, and that was the last they saw or heard of Mr Purley. They had gone back up to their room and her mother had closed the door behind her and dusted off her hands just as though she had disposed of a particularly large cockroach.

  After that Milli had come back. She had been away two years, she never said where. Father McCreadie had shaken his head over her, for she had not been to mass in all that time, but he had helped her to get a job at the dairy, and for the next three years they had moved only once. Then Milli met Seamus, and when Seamus said he was returning to Melbourne, Milli had announced she was going too, to be his wife. She had been happy that day, making her announcement. It was a day or so before Mrs Nimrod had come down with the summer fever, and within three days their mother was dead. But Milli had gone anyway, to be Seamus’s wife, and Alice had stood on the platform at Sydney Terminal and waved her sister goodbye.

  It was Father McCreadie who had come to the rescue once more. ‘I have found you a position, Alice Nimrod,’ he had said. ‘You will go to be a maid in a big house.’

  Alice ran her hand along the soft leather that covered Mrs Dunlevy’s writing desk. It was a smooth dark grey speckled with lighter flecks. Like marble, she thought. She liked the feel of nice things—soft bedding and plush curtains, rich carpets and smooth silk dresses, gloves made from fine kid leather. She had been starved of nice things for her first fourteen years and now she was surrounded by them, though they belonged to someone else. Still her fingers were drawn to them, her fingers craved their feel. It reminded her of her salvation.

  But today it reminded her that Milli had had no salvation.

  She withdrew her hands. There was, inside her, a dull ball of knotted and confused feelings that all the dusting and shoe cleaning and rug beating masked for a time but did not quell. The fact of Milli was at the heart of this ball. Alice’s own place in Milli’s misery was unclear to her: if she had indeed played a part in it and was in some way to blame, or if she could be her sister’s salvation, she did not know. Could Milli come here? But she doubted she could hide a cat in her room without it being discovered, and as for a position, it was unthinkable: the Dunlevys would never employ an untrained maid of Milli’s age, let alone one who was an unwed mother with a newborn.

  Could it be, then, that there was a point beyond which salvation was no longer a possibility, that a person could not be s
aved—or not saved in this world, at least? Alice could not believe such a thing, for it suggested an inevitability that seemed to deny God, and yet it seemed to her that Milli was at this point. Perhaps a man, some man with a position and a bit of money put by, would want to marry Milli and take on another man’s child …

  But Alice had lived in too many damp, bug-infested rooms to believe in this fantasy. She had seen too many Mr Purleys. And the time when some man—any man—might want to marry Milli was gone.

  Alice sat at Mrs Dunlevy’s desk. For a time she did not stir.

  She thought what a fine thing it was to sit at a fine desk. She thought: Mrs Dunlevy goes to committees and sits on boards (though what a committee was and what it meant to sit on a board Alice had only the vaguest notion). She knew that one of those committees was the asylum at Pitt Street where the unmarried mothers went. Why then, she thought, should Mrs Dunlevy not wish to help an unmarried mother here, in her own home?

  Alice knew she would not. She thought of Mrs Dunlevy, whose bathwater she drew, whose dirty linen she gathered up and disposed of, whose near-naked form she had helped to dress, whose frustrations and passions she occasionally witnessed, in the same way she might view a priest or the Governor-General’s wife, which was to say as someone who was not quite like other mortals, whose commands you followed unquestioningly and whose infallibility was absolute.

  She stood up, dusting each place her fingers had touched, and returned to the window. Mrs Dunlevy had long disappeared from sight. Mrs Dunlevy went to committee meetings and she paid visits to other ladies and she went to her dressmaker. That was what she did. But that was not what she was doing this morning, Alice was certain, though she was not sure how she knew it.

  She pulled off her cap and her apron and went down to the kitchen to Mrs Flynn. She prepared to tell a lie. ‘Mrs Flynn, the baker has left off half our order,’ Alice announced on entering the kitchen. ‘We are short two loaves. I cannot think how it happened but I shall go out now and fetch them myself.’ And she reached for her coat, pulling it on.