by Maggie Joel
But she had not assumed it. Eleanor had denied it with a vehemence and a simplicity that had shaken him. He had long ago abandoned the possibility of her guiltlessness. Now—
He pressed his hands into his eyes to scour out the image. This new burden. A groan escaped his lips, to be whipped away by the wind.
It could not end well and this extended train jaunt into the interior was merely putting off what seemed inevitable: there could be no happiness for any of them.
He was stunned for a time at this revelation: that what he sought was happiness, a thing so intangible, so elusive, he had hardly believed in its existence before. Now he sought it with all his being but in the bitter knowledge it was denied him.
He opened his eyes to utter darkness, no light showed. If there were settlements out there no lights burned, and the cloud cover meant no moon and no stars. A perfect void. The rattle and hiss of the steam engine and the straining of the wheels and the couplings as the train negotiated an incline filled his head, the smoke filled his nose and his eyes. He slammed the window shut and sat on his bed.
He knew he would not sleep.
Their train was due in to Junee at two in the morning. They would be met at the station, have an early breakfast and go directly to their first engagement. It seemed monstrous, this two am arrival. If one was arriving somewhere at two in the morning one at least wished it to be Berlin or Vienna or Geneva, not this unknown place, this Junee.
He lay down on the bed and turned down the lamp. It was not possible to clear one’s mind of all troubling thoughts. No matter how many miles a man travelled he brought such thoughts with him.
There was smoke in his eyes and though the lamp emitted a faint glow he could not see.
He was awoken by a jolt that almost threw him from his bunk and onto the floor. It was only by flinging out an arm to the wall that he saved himself from this indignity.
The carriage juddered and shook, a second jolt followed the first, and his trunk slid from the luggage rack and crashed to the floor. The train had come to a dead halt and Alasdair heard a rush of steam and the screech and grind of metal on metal, then silence.
He lay quite still in the bunk and his heart thudded so loudly it filled his head and his chest ached and strained.
‘It is a great log laid across the tracks,’ cried Greensmith, bursting into the compartment—
But Greensmith did not burst into the compartment. No one did. There was no sound, no voices, no panicked shouting up or down the train. And a moment later the couplings strained and went taut, the wheels engaged and the train moved off once more.
Alasdair found himself standing up, though he had no memory of leaving his bunk. He stood for a moment before dropping back down onto the bed. The train had braked suddenly and that was all, a kangaroo or a steer on the line. There was no log on the line, the train was not wrecked. But his body was damp with perspiration.
The compartment had a small sink in one corner and beside it a little cupboard containing a jug of water. He got up and lurched across the small space and got the jug and drank down a quantity of the water and splashed the remainder on his face. He stood for a time breathing slowly. The Premier’s snores continued from the neighbouring compartment. It was doubtful the man had even woken. Alasdair opened the window again and stood letting the cold air calm him. He dimly made out a flurry of movement in the darkness. A mob of kangaroos startled by the train. In a second they were gone.
But his hands shook.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
INDISPOSED
‘We heard you were indisposed, Eleanor. Are you unwell?’
Cecily Pyke had called and she had brought her eldest daughter, a tall girl called Marguerite who was of the age where girls wished to emulate their mothers and also despised them. They had arranged themselves, mother and daughter, on the settee and Alice had been dispatched to the kitchen.
Was Eleanor indisposed?
For four days she had made no calls and she had received no calls, and not because Alasdair had forbidden it, or not directly. It was simply this: the words they had spoken to each other, she and Alasdair, on Friday night and again early on Saturday morning would not let her alone. They could not be unsaid; they could not be bidden away. They had lodged somewhere very deep. They prevented Eleanor from leaving the house, sometimes even from venturing out of her room. They had made her turn callers away. It was an agony to be alone with those words echoing unceasingly inside her head but the agony of being in society seemed infinitely worse. So she drank tea alone, she read the newspaper, she organised the household accounts, she scrutinised the tradesmen’s bills. She wore her spectacles almost all the time. She undertook all manner of everyday chores but the words remained. They would not be dislodged.
This morning, a Wednesday, Cecily Pyke had come to the door, an emissary from the outside world, and Eleanor had let her—and her daughter—in. She could not say why today particularly when every other day she had refused callers. She felt as though she had been away a long time though it had only been four days.
She had greeted her visitors cordially, she had seated them and herself, and now she poured tea with a steady hand.
‘I am quite well, thank you, Mrs Pyke,’ she said.
She had worn ivory and grey and oyster for four days, but this morning she wore a gown of the richest ultramarine Indian silk and she sat in her drawing room among the giant ferns. ‘Like an exotic bird!’ the daughter, Marguerite, had exclaimed, as though she had previously considered all her mother’s cronies rather dull. And then she had coloured.
Eleanor smiled at the daughter from her place among the ferns. The ultramarine gown rustled faintly as Eleanor poured the tea, drawing attention to itself as a well-made garment should, with delicacy and subtlety. It was certainly not a gown of someone indisposed.
‘Well. This is good news indeed,’ said Mrs Pyke after a moment or two, when it became clear her host did not intend to expand upon her answer and the mystery of her alleged indisposition must remain just that: a mystery.
But can you not see it? cried Eleanor across the void that separated her chair from theirs. Can you not feel it? And all that she held tightly within herself was so great at that moment it threatened to spill out unchecked.
But, no, they could not see it.
‘We have been reading of Mr Dunlevy’s endeavours,’ said Mrs Pyke. ‘He is with the Premier, is he not, on the south coast?’
‘So I am led to believe.’
‘You do not accompany him?’
‘No.’
‘Fraser is at Waterloo this evening,’ Mrs Pyke said, leaning forward a little as if this were classified information, though it had been reported in the newspaper that morning. ‘He was with the Premier at Newcastle on Saturday night, of course, where they had upwards of six thousand, I understand.’
‘He is not concerned?’ Eleanor enquired. ‘Waterloo is very near to Darlington, where they set fire to an effigy of the Premier and the police were obliged to put it out.’
‘Was the Premier burned?’ asked Marguerite, glancing up fascinated.
‘No, dear,’ said her mother. ‘The Premier was not burned, thank the Good Lord, an effigy of the Premier was burned. It is quite a separate thing.’
Marguerite looked disappointed. ‘Then what is it for?’
‘To frighten people,’ said Eleanor. ‘Though I am sure no one was frightened. It was a very stupid thing to do. We had our own fright on our journey to Penrith. A log was thrown across the tracks and but for the quick thinking of the train driver we should have been quite derailed or worse.’
‘Goodness!’ said Mrs Pyke.
Marguerite adopted a considered expression, as though she were weighing up the probability of such an incident genuinely resulting in major calamity. ‘Goodness,’ she murmured at last, echoing her mother. She took up her mother’s hand and began absent-mindedly to twist the rings on her mother’s fingers.
‘Were you frightened?
’ asked Mrs Pyke.
‘I was a little. Not at first, but afterwards.’
Mrs Pyke nodded. ‘That is how it is sometimes,’ she said, as though she had experienced many such incidents in her time.
Alice came in. She deposited tea and a plate of Mrs Flynn’s scones, and Marguerite observed her for she was of that age where all things were curious to her and none more so than herself so, when she observed the Dunlevy’s servant, it was to see how the maid might view herself. But Alice left and so her impressions of Marguerite, if indeed she had any, remained undetermined.
‘Oh! Mrs Flynn’s scones! There is nothing like them,’ declared Mrs Pyke. ‘But, Marguerite, you must watch your figure—you are quite tall enough.’
‘I like being tall,’ said Marguerite, selecting the largest and most perfectly buttery and floury scone on the plate.
‘Yes, dear, but your husband might not,’ said her mother, patting her knee.
‘Then I shall marry a tall husband. Or I shall find a short husband who does not mind his wife being taller than he.’
‘I doubt there is such a husband,’ said Eleanor, observing curiously, as she always did, the communication between mother and daughter. It was more curious to her now that her friends’ daughters had reached this age where they accompanied their mothers on calls and where they came to picnics in pretty white dresses and sat under trees and no longer ran about underfoot as they had only a year or so earlier.
Eleanor smiled at the child and offered her another scone. Marguerite was only a few years Miss Trent’s junior. In a year or two her husband, any of their husbands, would look at the girl quite differently. The girl’s obliviousness as she sat playing with her mother’s rings, her utter guilelessness, now appeared disingenuous and so Eleanor smiled at the child. She offered another scone.
‘Marguerite, why not go and thank Mrs Flynn for the most excellent scones she has baked for us?’ said Cecily to her daughter, which was a curious thing for her to suggest—certainly her daughter appeared to think so, for she looked blankly at her mother but was persuaded, finally, on this mission and departed.
No sooner had she quit the room than Cecily shot forward and asked breathlessly, ‘You have seen the newspaper?’
She fired off her question so suddenly Eleanor was taken aback, and the look that accompanied it was pregnant with meaning, though what that meaning was Eleanor could not begin to guess. Unless …
Miss Trent. The arrest, the abortion, the police constables, the hospital, the doctor, her own husband—all of it swam before her eyes in large black bold letters on page five or perhaps page six of the Sydney Morning Herald.
‘Poor Adaline!’ said Cecily. ‘There were all manner of lurid and sensational details about the divorce in this morning’s paper—you must have seen it?’
Eleanor had seen it but could not, for the moment, speak.
And so Cecily went on, ‘The housekeeper was revealed to have had a child! Can you imagine? Its paternity is not definitively stated—for lawsuits are pending—but the inference was clear. Adaline’s children, or at least the two little girls, have been shipped already to grandparents in England and further lawsuits are anticipated … though one wonders who there is left to sue.’
She paused, and seemed at once to regret her gushy relaying of the events. Colouring a little, she sat back and arranged her hands on her lap, the pastoralist’s wife once more.
‘It is … dreadful,’ said Eleanor, and she could think of nothing further to add. Their friend’s downfall, terrible and spectacular and seemingly unstoppable, hung in the room between them.
‘I called on Adaline,’ said Cecily, after a little pause. ‘It seemed the charitable thing. And she was so kind and gracious and made no reference at all to any of it. It was really rather sad.’
Eleanor moved her arm and heard her blue gown rustle noisily. She lowered her arm and sat perfectly still.
To be pitied. The horror of it took her breath away.
Marguerite returned from the kitchen, sullen and complaining from her encounter with Mrs Flynn, and her mother, skipping briskly from the Jellicoe divorce said, ‘We read of you, too, in the newspaper, Eleanor, attending the Women’s Suffrage League meeting against the bill. I rather expected to see you at the town hall with the Federal League, and instead there you were throwing in your lot with the opposition! I confess I was quite thrilled that you had done such a thing, and that Mr Dunlevy had allowed it.’
And so this was the purpose of the visit. But Cecily Pyke was not an unkind person; she suffered occasionally for the poor and the less fortunate. If she had called on her friend it was as much to see that all was well as it was to uncover secrets. But of all the preoccupations that smouldered within the heart of her silent and silk-clad host at this moment and that might, at some distant time, be revealed, it was humiliation and shame that burned the most fiercely and that would never, could never, be brought out into the daylight. And so Eleanor said, ‘My attendance was at the behest of Miss Dempsey to support her as she supported her brother, and so Alasdair had no cause to say anything about it.’
Mrs Pyke was silent for a moment, and if she did not believe this or was disappointed by it, or if she was merely considering a third scone, was not clear.
‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘I do think it very high-minded of Mr Dunlevy to agree to it. I am not certain Fraser would have, and he is a very high-minded man.’
And beside her Marguerite sighed and looked bored by the idea of her father being very high-minded.
People were gathered outside Parliament House—for no very good reason that Eleanor could see, though it was certain to be connected in some way to the Federation. The crowd was small and, despite the rain, appeared to be settled in for the day.
But what can be achieved? thought Eleanor, whose patience with it all had run its course.
She had defied her husband, and she had defied herself. She had refused to remain at home another day and had come out. The visit from Cecily Pyke had shattered but also to some degree mended her. There was unfinished business and so she had come to Macquarie Street.
And almost immediately she saw her husband’s secretary, James Greensmith. He emerged from the crowd, buttoning up a coat, papers under his arm and with a sense of purpose in his stride, but when he saw her—which he did, though she had done nothing to attract his attention—he stopped dead so that a man walked into him.
The crowd surged and swelled, and in another moment Mr Greensmith was gone from sight and Eleanor, who was not going that way at all, but who was instead going into the hospital next door, and who had come out in defiance of her husband, was uneasy.
For did Mr Greensmith, too, believe her to be indisposed? The thought unsettled her and she hurried a little with her head down. She did not know how much her husband’s secretary might know of his employer’s personal affairs, how much the young man might report back to him. She did not know very much at all about Mr Greensmith, she supposed. He played things very close to his chest, though he was always extremely well turned out and she suspected him of harbouring some very great ambitions, politically.
And then she dismissed Mr Greensmith from her thoughts, though the nagging doubt remained that he had seen her.
‘My dear Mrs Dunlevy, this is a delightful surprise. Please do sit. Allow me to offer you some tea.’
‘Ambrose. You are too kind.’
Eleanor allowed herself to be ushered to a seat and for tea with lemon to be administered to her and almost at once she began to feel better, for there is nothing like being administered to, especially by a wealthy, much older gentleman, and Ambrose Winks was undoubtedly both of these.
Winks had been, in some distant past, deputy superintendent of the hospital, though now he filled his time as chairman of its Benevolence Committee, a committee on which Eleanor had, for many years and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, served. He was an octogenarian, almost as old as the original hospital, and a man who dress
ed as though frockcoats, stovetop hats and untamed white beards had never gone out of fashion. His manners, too, had something of the arcane about them: when he spoke of Her Majesty, which he did often, it was as if she were eternally the girl of seventeen just ascended to the throne and he seemed frozen at that point, somewhere mid-century. But he was a dear man, and he always had time for Eleanor. For any lady, really.
‘You are looking radiant,’ he declared, which was perhaps something one said to a younger lady, not one just past her fortieth year, but from Winks’s great age the difference between twenty and forty must seem very slight. ‘I have been reading of your husband’s endeavours,’ he went on. ‘He is with our dear Premier on this Tour of the South?’
And when she nodded,
‘You do not accompany him?’
One never knew with Ambrose if a simple enquiry was just that, or if there was something more to it.
‘He will have his hands full managing the Premier,’ said Eleanor, keeping her eyes level with his. ‘He does not need the added burden of a wife in tow.’
‘I am sure you could never be a burden, Mrs Dunlevy.’
She smiled. ‘You take gallantry to a higher elevation, Ambrose.’
But she basked in it, a little.
‘I try to, dear lady, I try to. Now, what may I do for you?’
‘Intelligence. No, do not pretend you are not the repository of all that is, was and ever will be in this hospital, for I will not believe it.’
‘Now you flatter me.’ But his eyes sparkled.
‘I speak no more than the truth.’
And now came the moment when pleasantries ended and the purpose of her visit must be revealed. And how extraordinarily hard it was to bridge that moment—for to reveal the purpose of her visit risked revealing herself. Her mouth had gone dry but she did not take up her teacup again, fearing her hand would shake.