The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  She had barely had time to get used to the idea of her confinement, of motherhood, and it was over.

  Cecily Pyke had visited her, too, and one or two others—Cecily’s presence unsettling, her smugness at her own effortlessly expanding clutch of children. Though perhaps the smugness was only imagined.

  She had been in a fug of morphia for many days.

  Alasdair had returned home on one of those evenings to say the vote was lost. The Federation had failed. She had felt she must be to blame. The Federation lying dead inside her.

  Alasdair had moved into the second bedroom at around this time. It was unsafe to risk another pregnancy, the doctor had suggested. A hushed, one-sided conversation with more left unsaid than said, and Eleanor could not remember now if the doctor had spoken these words to her or to her husband. Alasdair had remained there in that second bedroom and something else had died—though, like the baby lying lifeless in her belly, she had not realised it at the time.

  The frightened horse had been freed from its harness and was being calmed by its owner and a group of men had organised themselves into a gang to raise the upended dray. They were in their element now, these men. Shouting orders at one another, putting things to rights, their faces red, their shirts damp with sweat.

  She flung open the door of the cab and jumped down, tossing a coin at the driver and stepping gingerly, skirts held off the ground. She set off on foot, avoiding the chaos of horse and men and wagons, heading north in the direction Alasdair’s cab had taken, though it was long gone by now.

  She kept on, but after a time her footsteps slowed. She looked about her. The villas here were a little less grand as she neared the docks; the space between each one had shrunk. She would have liked to sit down but there was nowhere. She had a sudden fear someone of her acquaintance would see her from a passing carriage or an upstairs window.

  A cab was now coming towards her pulled by an ageing grey, the driver a youngish man in a green bowler hat, and she saw it was the very cab Alasdair had caught, though empty now of its fare.

  She stepped out and flagged down the man. ‘The fare you just dropped off,’ she called up to him, ‘a gentleman in a top hat whom you picked up in Elizabeth Bay—I wish you to take me to the same address.’

  The driver nodded resignedly and barely waited for her to climb in before awkwardly turning the cab around and starting back the way he had come.

  For a some minutes this extraordinary stroke of luck took up all Eleanor’s concentration and she stared out of the window without seeing the rows of houses that flashed past, the docks that now came into view. Someone had left an umbrella in the bottom of the cab. It rolled against her foot. She pushed it away with her toe.

  But already the cab was slowing.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Eleanor. ‘Just wait.’

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE CLEVER LIE

  The world was a different place this morning and Alice Nimrod stopped at the top of Elizabeth Bay Road to raise her face to the day and feel the sunlight enter her skin and flood her body. A hatred of rain, of cold, ran deeply in her. She felt her body close in on itself during the three months of winter and open up again as the first hint of spring filled her air. The sun had brightened and warmed this day in a way that made Alice believe the words of priests, made her believe that the light that streamed through the stained-glass windows of the cathedral was a glimpse of Heaven. But to know that it was the second day of June, to know that winter had barely begun, was a weight that hung heavily, and she could no more ignore it than Man could ignore his own mortality, and so she was a little saddened.

  She set off again, walking briskly; the jubilation at her clever deception of Mrs Flynn was fading a little. Her plan was to find her sister. The sense of urgency that she felt could not easily be put into words but it caused her heart to beat too fast and her breath to come in short gasps as she hurried along Darlinghurst Road. And now the first doubts crept in: what if Mrs Dunlevy returned home and found her not there?

  What if she lost her position?

  Alice faltered. She wavered. The shadow of the black and bottomless pit out of which she had dragged herself was at her shoulder, but if she walked briskly she might outrun it. She was collecting the two missing loaves, was she not? There was no reason her clever lie should be discovered.

  Alice pressed on, comforted and enveloped in her lie, though each step was charged with dread.

  As she made her way southwards the stream of elegant carriages and sleek horses became draymen’s carts and coalmen’s carts, and men with nothing better to do than lounge on the meanest of street corners and outside gin houses stared at her and called out. One stepped into her path and would have waylaid her but she shoved him roughly aside. She approached the Hollow cautiously, as she had the night before, and in the sickly yellow semi-daylight of a smoke-filled Surry Hills morning all the nameless and unseen terrors of the place seemed no less terrible. Indeed, they were worse, for now a person could see them more clearly: the angry-hungry eyes of men who watched her, keeping one hand inside their coats on the blade of a razor; the vacant faces of women selling themselves for a shot of gin. A young mother too weak to stand, huddled in a doorway with her children clustered about her and with barely the strength to hold out a hand to beg for help.

  Alice hurried past. She had escaped this and they had never, she and Mum and Milli, not ever sunk as low as this. Alice had her dignity, though it would have surprised her to realise it.

  She slowed her pace to descend the stone steps as she had done the night before and the woman who had lain dead on the lower steps was gone and Alice was glad. She stepped carefully because the mud, which elsewhere had dried out, was ankle deep here, and she lifted her skirt rather than soil her clothes.

  ‘Milli?’

  She had found her way back to the shack and someone had pulled the plank away from the entrance, perhaps to let the sunlight in, though little enough light of any sort penetrated this dismal place even on the longest day of the year. But someone had removed the plank. A flicker of fear flared inside Alice’s head and ran the length of her spine. She stepped inside and the place was deserted. There was not a stick of furniture: not the makeshift table nor the rescued chairs nor the wooden pallet bed; all of it was gone. And no sign of Milli. For a moment Alice stood peering into the gloomy interior, disbelieving. Then she ran outside and called out, ‘Milli! Milli!’

  A head appeared above her in the doorway of the shack that was balanced, precariously, on top of this one.

  ‘Yer too late,’ said this neighbour, Mrs Renfrew, dully, as though such calamities—if such this should prove to be—were to be expected. Her head shrunk back inside.

  ‘Too late?’ Alice felt her heart fluttering. ‘Please, where is Milli?’ The head reappeared, a weary face, a face so ground down it did not seem capable of words.

  ‘You’re her sister,’ said Mrs Renfrew at last, as though the thought cost her a great deal. One of the rescued chairs from Milli’s shack was balanced perilously on the ledge on which Mrs Renfrew stood. The makeshift table was wedged in beside it.

  Mrs Renfrew frowned as a second thought now occurred to her. ‘She ain’t long gone. Perhaps you will catch her?’

  ‘I seen her, missus,’ said a child, one of the Renfrew brood, its small head appearing suddenly beside its mother. The child held in his hand a small, hard potato at which he had been gnawing. ‘I seen her,’ the child said, ‘goan up Crown Street.’

  Crown Street is just the other side of Riley Street, a busy thoroughfare connecting Cleveland Street to the south and Oxford Street in the north, gateway to prosperity or poverty, depending on which direction the traveller chooses to go. On that June morning Alice Nimrod turned south towards Cleveland Street and Redfern and the crumbling tenements and warehouses and railway works that lay beyond.

  She hurried, as much as any servant might hurry in a uniform that reached to her ankles and was made of some unyielding material that
resisted movement, and in a pair of lace-up boots that had uneven heels and thin soles. But the notion that this was the moment when she might save her sister drove her on, it filled her heart with both fear and courage so that she could not catch whatever breath the obstinate and constricting uniform might allow her to take. And so Alice ran, this way and that, the length of Crown Street all the way to the junction with Cleveland Street and back up the other side, passing the pub and the brewery stables and weaving between the drays and carts that crowded the street.

  When it seemed to Alice that she was too late, and the hope that had sprung up inside her and allowed her to imagine a future where she, alone, might be her sister’s salvation had begun to fade, she saw her.

  Milli stood on the corner huddled in her woollen shawl and clutching a single bag of belongings in one hand. She stood quite still, heavy with the child she carried, and the busy and diverse populace of Crown Street surged and swarmed about her.

  That she was leaving was as clear as the child she carried in her swollen belly, and for a moment the utter dismay of her sister’s betrayal took the breath from Alice’s lungs and she could not find her voice.

  ‘Milli?’

  ‘Go away, Alice!’ shouted Milli, seeing her sister, and she turned and began to hasten away.

  But Milli was large with her child so Alice, despite her clothing, soon caught her up.

  ‘What are you doing? Are you leaving again? Is that it? You would leave me—’

  ‘Do not try to stop me, Alice, for I have made up my mind.’

  Alice tried to think. She did not know how to stop her sister leaving her again.

  ‘But you have no plan. You have no place to go, you said so—’

  ‘And perhaps I have made a plan, Alice. Perhaps I have found a place.’

  Alice was confounded by these words. There was no comfort in them. She saw, finally, that in Milli’s other hand she held a brick. An old broken brick probably manufactured at the brick-works right here and fallen from some wretched hovel in this very suburb. But why would you carry a brick?

  ‘What if Father McCreadie saw you now?’ said Alice, though she hardly knew what she meant by this.

  And Milli laughed, an ugly laugh, a laugh that was entirely at home in Crown Street and among the people who inhabited it. ‘What do I care if Father McCreadie sees me? I want him to see! Priests and nuns—what do they know? They do not live in our world, yet they tell us how to live our lives!’

  Alice had no reply, for what reply was there in the face of such an undeniable truth?

  ‘What if Mum saw you?’ she said finally.

  ‘Mum is dead these five years,’ said Milli, strangely flat and listless now, as though this fact no longer conveyed much to her, and the fire that had flared briefly in her seemed extinguished. She did not look at her sister or at the street on which they stood; her gaze was turned towards the smoking rooftops and beyond, to the spires of the distant university. If she would only look at Alice now, if she would only meet her sister’s gaze and reveal her soul, she might be saved. But Milli did not look. She did not reveal her soul. Instead, she started forward, sudden purpose in her step. A police constable was approaching on the other side of the street.

  Alice watched with a helplessness and an inevitability that the poverty of her youth had instilled in her as Milli dived across the street, all but falling beneath the hooves of a startled ironmonger’s horse, and hurled her brick at the plate-glass window of an unfortunate butcher.

  The astonished constable did not react at once, seeming unprepared for a hugely pregnant female to arrive at his feet and hurl a brick through a shop window. But he recovered himself and seized her. And Milli did not attempt to flee nor to resist arrest but submitted quietly enough to the cell that awaited her.

  Instead it was her sister, Alice, who cried and wrung her hands.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  A PLACE I CAN NEITHER SPELL NOR PRONOUNCE

  Alasdair rapped on the door of Miss Trent’s apartment and waited. He was aware of the silently closed doors of the other four apartments on this floor, aware of the potential for any one of those doors to open and an enquiring face to appear and questions to follow. But the doors remained silently closed. The questions he feared were not asked.

  Yet some person was abroad for, as he stood there waiting, the newly installed lift jerked into life and rattled wheezily upwards, passing him and going on to the top floor. Its doors clanged open then shut again, and the lift wheezed and rattled its laborious way down once more. The lift clattered to a halt on the ground floor and at the same moment the door before which he stood opened.

  Verity was not expecting him.

  This was clear to him the moment she opened the door and stood in the doorway in her pastel green skirt and her little matching jacket, her hat already pinned into place on her head, her hair neatly arranged. Behind her on the console table lay her gloves and her reticule. And even if her apparel had not told him this, her face did. A look part confusion, part consternation crossed her face, her lips parted then at once closed again. The confusion, the consternation was quickly gone. She met his eyes and then she looked away. She was quite pale.

  Despite this, his senses intensified at sight of her, his being soared, and the fear that lived permanently in his soul that other men would see in her what he saw flared agonisingly. He had a curious feeling that many lives had been lived by him and by her until their fates had, finally, in this life, collided. It was curious because he did not, in any way, believe in such things, yet still he felt it.

  ‘You were expecting me? You received my note?’

  She shook her head. ‘I received no note. If you recall,’ she went on, ‘I told you I have an appointment this morning.’

  Indeed, she had told him this and he had quite forgotten, or had chosen to forget. But he had sent her a note three days ago. It unsettled him that she had not received it. That his plans had been spoiled.

  He nodded and said, ‘Yes, of course,’ because no man wishes to look foolish.

  She had given him no explanation of the appointment and seemed disinclined to provide one now, and Alasdair would not demand one of her, though he rather thought he deserved one, that it was his due.

  He was a gentleman, even if she was not, quite, a lady.

  She had told him her father had been a watchmaker with a shop in Tunbridge Wells—though he could just as well have been a publican or a tailor or a cobbler. The family had lived above the shop and done quite nicely; there had been a servant who did the manual work. But the family’s fortunes had declined as the father had aged and was finally forced to give up the business, so that they had found themselves in lodgings in a not so pleasant part of town. The servant had been let go. They had sunk and then they had sunk lower. Alasdair had seen all this in the moments after he had first gone to her assistance and he had been relieved (he did not wish her to be a lady, for this would make their arrangement impossible), but the specifics—the father who was a watchmaker, the servant who did all the work—these things he had learned later and they made very little difference.

  She was not a lady, yet there was something about her that lifted her above the common class. For Miss Trent had that rare ability to adapt. Was this it, then, the thing that had attracted him? She could look about her at the ladies strolling with their parasols in the botanic gardens, seated with their straight backs and shoulders high, and she did the same. She listened to their phrases, she heard the words they used, and she used them too. It was a skill that was beguiling, for he could not decide if it were deliberate or instinctive, if it were a mask or a parody.

  ‘I had thought to see you before your appointment,’ he said.

  Miss Trent, standing in the doorway and dressed for an imminent departure, hesitated and her lips moved silently then became still and she looked at him then looked away. She had pale grey eyes that occasionally offered him glimpses of who she was but for the most part remained obscure a
nd closed from him. It left him often floundering in her presence. He raised his chin, consolidating his position in her doorway.

  ‘Come in, of course,’ she said, as she must, and she stood aside to let him enter.

  He glanced at her gloves on the console table, at the satin and pearl reticule he had bought her a month or so ago and that she had been pleased with, or had appeared to be. She glanced at them too as she preceded him, and he stood aside and followed her into the little drawing room. The apartment—the one he had found and now paid the rent on—consisted of this little hallway and two rooms beyond: a large drawing room, high-ceilinged and looking out through wide French doors and a tiny wrought-iron balcony to an overgrown garden below; and a bedroom, smaller, and similarly overlooking the garden from a pleasant little bay window. The apartment came furnished with a collection of stuffed upright chairs, one or two writing tables and sewing tables and occasional tables, a faded chintz settee, an array of brass-potted ferns, an oversized sideboard and an even larger dresser. This, combined with the striped crimson-and-white wallpaper and the faded Turkish carpet, all added to the sense of a place twenty years past it prime.

  Alasdair seated himself on the settee. He was already dissatisfied with how the visit was going. Her welcome was less than he had hoped for, less than was his due. Really, it was hardly a welcome at all, and he felt himself harden a little against her. He wondered how he might punish her, but all the ways in which he might do so struck him as petty and ridiculous. He decided not to punish her.

  Verity remained standing. She was distracted, he saw. She walked over to the French doors and looked out, and Alasdair remembered the very first time he had visited her here, a day or so after he had found the place, tucked away in Woolloomooloo, and he remembered how nervous he had been and how serene she had appeared when it ought to have been the other way about. Detached was perhaps a better word for how she had seemed that day.