The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  He had banged on the roof of the cab to make it stop, jumped down and pushed his way through the crowds to reach her, and her face was pale though the heat was crushing.

  He touched his hat and presented himself to her:

  ‘Madam, my name is Dunlevy. Forgive my intrusion, and my impertinence, but it seems clear to me that you are in some little distress and confusion. Please, allow me to offer whatever assistance it might be in my power to give.’ He gave a little bow and immediately felt absurd.

  She listened with her grave, pale face and—he saw now that he was standing before her—steady grey eyes and an unwavering gaze, a small and neatly shaped nose, a high forehead, a slightly jutting chin and a stillness. Yes, that was it: a stillness of expression and of body that told him nothing. And now he began to wonder if he had not been mistaken, for her very stillness, her calmness, her unwavering gaze, unnerved him. He fell silent, unable to gauge her response to his sudden presence. He was aware of the unceasing flow of men hurrying past and around them, oblivious, and it seemed extraordinary to him that they should fail to notice her. He wished very much to say something vital and heroic, for it seemed to him the moment demanded it, that he had it in him to deliver such an utterance.

  He said, ‘Let me take you for a cup of tea.’

  And she accepted, but in a way that made him feel, somehow, that she was gracing him by her acceptance.

  They found a teashop one street back from the quayside and ordered tea.

  ‘My name is Miss Trent,’ she said finally, as they awaited the tea. She looked down at her gloved hands. Poorly made gloves, cheap, not the gloves of a lady, but not a servant either.

  He waited. She had a story to tell and so he waited as a boy might wait for a bird to hop down from a branch to peck seeds from his hand.

  ‘I am stranded,’ she said—admitted—and it seemed that this might be all she would admit. But after a pause she went on: ‘I came here to New South Wales to join my fiancé, Mr John Brewster of London, who was offered a government post and who sailed out here three months ago and began his new post and then sent for me, but he caught a fever not long after, and before I even reached Cape Town I received word my fiancé was dead.’

  She paused again. Not, he felt, because her tale was tragic—though it undoubtedly was—and she sought his sympathy, but simply because the waitress placed the tea before them. When the girl was gone, she resumed her story:

  ‘I arrived in Sydney a few days ago, alone and friendless and with no means of support and no means of securing a passage home. My fiancé’s family are shopkeepers from a small town, you understand?’

  He did understand. The grieving parents had many sons and more daughters. They had packed their youngest son off to the New World with best wishes and, to be sure, they mourned his loss, but towards his fiancée (to whom their son was not, when all was said and done, actually wed) they felt no obligation.

  ‘After an initial telegram,’ she went on, ‘I have heard no more from them. I approached the government department where John was, briefly, employed and they were most sympathetic to my loss and solicitous, even, of my welfare. Indeed, I found they had paid for John’s funeral, though they were under no obligation to do so, and now I am arrived, John’s fiancée, and they have placed me temporarily in a small boarding house and consider their duties fulfilled. They cannot, it seems, provide me with the funds for a passage home.’

  Alasdair, who had listened in silence, now said, ‘And may one enquire, do you intend to remain here? Will you try to make your way or will you return home?’

  His question was simple enough, yet as he awaited her answer the sounds within the little teashop and the quay beyond faded and he heard only his own heart beating.

  ‘I can do neither,’ she replied, ‘for I have no money to pay for a passage and none with which to pay my board. I have no family to return to—my father died in the weeks leading up to my departure, his illness being the reason I did not journey here with my fiancé as had been my original intention—and I know no one in New South Wales. My situation is,’ she observed, ‘dire.’ And she might have been discussing the pot of tea—for it was a poor brew indeed—and not her own perilous circumstance.

  She sat very upright in her chair, her hands folded neatly before her on her lap, and her grey eyes gazing about her at everything that must be familiar to her—the tea in the teapot, the cups and saucers, the portrait of the Queen above the counter, the kind gentleman seated opposite her in his grey suit and waistcoat, in his patterned silk necktie with the tiny gold tiepin, the waitress in her black uniform and white cap weaving between the tables—but perceiving also how everything was utterly, utterly different: the heat rolling off the paving stones outside, the cries of the currawongs and the butcherbirds in the plane trees, the dishevelled ibis that had just wandered into the teashop, the tiny brown-and-black skink that skittered across the floor as they talked and was now motionless halfway up the wall. A frown furrowed her brow and, though she sat with lizard-like stillness, there was a despair about her, a sort of dismayed disbelief at this cruel trick God or fate had played on her.

  Or that was how Alasdair had seen it. And he had wanted to throw himself at her feet to beg her to allow him to help her.

  He had paid for the tea and escorted her to her tram stop. He had offered to make some enquiries on her behalf and they had arranged a meeting for the following day. He had bowed to her again and gone about his business.

  But his world had been turned on its head.

  He had made some enquiries. The fiancé, Mr John Brewster of London, had arrived on the Thermopylae on 1 November. He had spent two nights at a hotel on MacLeay Street then taken a room in a boarding house a few streets to the south in Kings Cross. He had taken up the position of clerk at the government department’s offices, but less than a fortnight into his new position had succumbed to a fever. Within a few days, his condition deteriorating rapidly and his landlady alarmed, he had been moved to St Vincent’s Hospital where he had died the following day, alone and unmourned and under the care of the Sisters of Charity. He had been buried three days later at the nearby Sacred Heart Catholic Church, though there was nothing to suggest Brewster was, or had ever been, a Catholic. Clearly expediency had prevailed: there had been no one to speak on Mr Brewster’s behalf, his family being in England and his fiancée being by this time halfway to Cape Town, so the Catholics had won the day—or they had opened their arms to a lost soul far from home, depending on how one viewed it.

  It struck Alasdair as more than a little feeble to journey halfway across the world only to succumb to a fever three weeks after arriving. Why, he had lived in Sydney his whole life—some forty-five years—and he had never succumbed to a fever once, fatal or otherwise. That this man had done so smacked of weakness, frailty, ineffectualness. It made one wonder what exactly Miss Trent had seen in the fellow. Surely she deserved better.

  A clerk! Worse—a dead clerk!

  However, he had done as he had promised and made enquiries. The superintendent of the government department within whose division Brewster had, albeit briefly, been employed granted Alasdair an interview and expressed surprise at the way Miss Trent—of whose existence he had not been made aware until this moment—had been treated. He left the room, spoke to one or two people, sent and received a telegram, and announced, with some satisfaction, that the Royal Mail steamer the Oriental was due to sail for London in seven days’ time and, if Miss Trent so desired it, passage could be reserved for her on it.

  Alasdair left the offices of the government department and walked the short distance to the quayside where he stood for a time watching the ships dock and listening to the cicadas. He had secured her passage home—indeed, it had proved a surprisingly simple matter to arrange—and his heart surged as he imagined her gratitude when he calmly announced the miracle he had thus performed.

  And yet when he met her at the same teashop that afternoon and reported his progress, he f
ailed utterly to mention the department’s generous offer. And when the Oriental sailed for London seven days later Miss Trent was not on board. Instead, Miss Trent was moved from the seamy Surry Hills boarding house in which she had found herself to a more suitable premises at Woolloomooloo, and if she had been encouraged to believe—initially, at least—that the government department of her late fiancé had somewhat tardily decided to offer recompense and were paying her board, four months later she was no longer labouring under any such misapprehensions.

  The cab creaked to a stop on the corner of a tree-lined avenue of once-grand three- and four-storey residences. Most were past their prime and slipping on their poorly laid foundations, peeling and splintered, and unrepaired but still with a genteel air of faded glory. The people who lived here had known better times, too, a generation or more ago, and had watched their fortunes decline as their street had declined. But they had clung on, subdividing and subdividing again, selling small parcels of themselves until what remained was two small rooms in the top storey of a house in which the roof leaked and one girl did the work that once a team of domestics would have done. But still that genteel air, still the tradesman sent to the back door and spoken to peremptorily.

  Alasdair paid the driver and stood on the pavement until the cab had turned the corner. The leather portfolio was under his arm and it felt a little ridiculous here in this street; he might be a bailiff or an inspector of some kind. He wished he had not brought it. He realised he had left his umbrella in the cab and started forward, but the cab was gone and he was not about to run after it. He did not need an umbrella; the sky was a clear, brilliant, dazzling blue. To have an umbrella was to make oneself more ridiculous.

  He turned into the avenue and walked nearly its entire length and the houses that he passed had names—Tintern, Derwent, Braemar—that irked him, for they spoke of a homesickness for places long ago left behind but somehow still yearned for when the new century was only months away. It seemed to him that a man’s thoughts should be of the new nation, of a future freed from the mother country. But his thoughts were not of the future. His thoughts were on the house almost at the end of the street, an imposing three-storey villa with many shuttered windows and the final vestiges of pale pink paint on its rendered walls. Outside sprouted a huge banksia dotted with spiky yellow blooms that defied the season and attracted the winter lorikeets that nestled in its foliage in a noisy blaze of blue, green and orange. Against this riot of colour the house behind appeared dull, worn. Yet here was a finely carved set of steps leading up to the entrance and wrought-iron railings, the paint gently flaking off; here was a front door with leadlight in its window and above it a delicately ornate lantern hanging in a gabled porch so that an air of quiet elegance was, somehow, maintained.

  The butler who might have opened this door fifty years ago was long gone, the overworked maid with a soiled uniform and unkempt hair who may have answered the door with bad grace five or ten or fifteen years ago was similarly departed. Now the names of the residents were listed on a little wooden board nailed to the porch and the residents opened their own front doors.

  Alasdair went up to the house. He observed for a moment his right hand where it rested on the flaking paint of the railing. The usual thrust of his chin, the squareness of his shoulders was gone. But every man has his secrets; it was part of what made him a man.

  Or so Alasdair told himself. He pushed open the door and let himself in.

  Here was a quiet that offered respite from the noisy bustle of the wharves and the glare of the brilliant sky. A coolness, too, for the sun never ventured into the dimly lit hallway. It was a grand space, or had been. One or two anonymously closed doors suggested formal drawing rooms and reception rooms now partitioned into private apartments. A magnificent staircase fashioned from Australian cedar swept upwards to a half-landing then swung back on itself to arrive at the first floor. And beside the staircase, a triumph of wrought iron and hydraulics, was an elevator cage and shaft, recently installed.

  There was no one about. There was, aside from the inevitable groans and creaks of the old house, silence.

  Alasdair took the stairs, his footsteps deadened by the gradually unravelling crimson Turkish carpet that must have looked impressive in an English drawing room in 1880 but here was merely oppressive. He had used the elevator just the once and its clanking and rattling had made such a terrific noise he had expected every moment that doors would fly open and every pair of eyes would gaze upon him, though none had. Since then he had used the stairs. And he rarely saw anyone. The residents—widows existing on small annuities, retired military men who had never married, men of business whose investments had not performed quite as well as hoped—had few callers. When he had happened to meet someone—an elderly lady in pince-nez; a young woman in a great hurry—they had been as speechless as he. He had tipped his hat and continued on his way. If asked he would say he was Miss Trent’s brother, her business adviser, her lawyer. Not her uncle, not that. But no one had ever asked.

  On the first floor a large fern in a cracked terracotta pot and one or two badly executed watercolours on the walls provided the only relief from an otherwise empty corridor and more anonymous doors. Alasdair walked the length of the corridor and paused outside the last door at the rear of the house.

  He had chosen this apartment. He paid the rent on it. But he paused. After a moment he tapped on the door.

  The road ahead was blocked. A line of drays, carts and carriages queued the length of Victoria Road all the way back to the junction with Darlinghurst Road.

  What had caused the blockage was not immediately apparent, but as Eleanor leaned out of the window of her cab she saw a dray on its side minus a wheel and a terrified plunging mare that several excited young men were now attempting to calm and others to cut free from its harness. She looked down. The road was slick with a sticky brown liquid that flowed steadily down the centre of the road and into the gutters. By its odour it had clearly come straight from the brewery via the pile of spilled and split barrels that now lay scattered across the street. Already small boys and one or two of the more disreputable local inhabitants had run onto the street with caps and cups and their bare hands and were scooping up the amber liquid and pouring it down their throats. A great many men were shouting and gesticulating and a great many more were standing around, pushing their caps to the back of their heads and thoroughly enjoying the spectacle.

  ‘Driver! Get us out of this!’ Eleanor called up.

  ‘Ain’t goan nowhere,’ replied the man, not even bothering to look down at her. He spat a mouthful of tobacco from the side of his mouth into the quagmire of ale below.

  Eleanor leaned back in her seat. She closed her eyes. She had readied herself for action. Had steeled herself. Now this. The delay was intolerable to her. The cab they followed, the cab that contained her husband, was gone.

  The shouts of the men and the frightened snorting of the horse had become distant but they came back now, louder, and she opened her eyes. They were on Victoria Street, which was a longish street stretching from Darlinghurst all the way down to Potts Point. She saw they had stopped directly outside the Jellicoes’ house.

  The irony of it made her smile. Made her despair.

  The house, a cream-coloured two-storey villa in the Greek Revivalist style popular half a century earlier was fronted by an expanse of lawn, a gravelled drive and tall gates. It was one of a number of such dwellings in this area and Eleanor had swept through the gates on many occasions. She had handed her hat and gloves to the Jellicoes’ curtsying maid. She had stood in the marble-tiled hallway with Alasdair at her side. She had allowed Adaline Jellicoe to come to her across that tiled hallway with a smile and outstretched hands.

  The house was shut up and silent now. The gates closed. Though it was entirely possible Adaline or Leon—not both, surely?—were still inside. Overseeing arrangements, writing instructions. Hiding. Yes, thought Eleanor, I would hide. I would shut up the house
. I would send the servants away.

  Dora Hyatt—the housekeeper! She tried to picture the woman but could conjure up merely a silent presence, plain-featured and ordinary. She shuddered. This betrayal by the servant struck her as worse than that of the husband.

  But, no, the house was not entirely shut up, she saw. A figure was visible at an upstairs window and Eleanor pressed herself back in her seat, though it was absurd to imagine anyone could see her, down here in the cab. Or perhaps she was mistaken about the figure in the window, for there was no further movement and it seemed likely now it was only a shadow, a trick of the light. One’s imagination run wild.

  Adaline had sat with her a year ago. Eleanor remembered how the curtains in her bedroom had been half closed against the daylight and the room had smelled, oddly, of lavender, a smell she abhorred, but someone had brought something—a handkerchief or a potpourri—and placed it in her room. The doctor had come and gone again. She had lain in a fug of morphia and Adaline Jellicoe had come and had sat for a time at her bedside. Adaline had not talked but she had reached out and taken Eleanor’s hand. That had struck Eleanor at the time, Adaline taking her hand. It was not something she would normally do, one felt. But Eleanor had a great wound newly stitched across her abdomen and somewhere a baby—the doctor had not said boy or girl—lay blue and lifeless and bloodied and wrapped in a cloth. She had not seen it and they had not offered it to her. It had nestled, this dead thing, in her womb for some days before they had cut it out of her. The horror of it—a dead thing inside her—had eclipsed, at the time, her horror of her first, her only, child’s death.