The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  A short time later Alice emerged and went off up the street, returning with a second cab. Eleanor came out of the house and this time she wore hat and gloves and coat and got into the cab.

  ‘The Sydney Hospital,’ she said to the driver, and the driver, who had just finished a morning cup of tea and had enjoyed a bit of a break, shook the reins of his horses and said, ‘Giddup,’ and thought nothing of it.

  They arrived at the hospital and Eleanor went to the ward she had gone to two days earlier. The same nurse or another one smiled at her as she passed. They smiled a great deal, these nurses, though all one could see of them, due to the nun-like wimples that covered their heads, was the smooth white oval of their faces. Eleanor felt she did not quite trust their smiles, that they hid something deep within themselves. She passed the nurse coldly and did not meet her eye.

  She walked a little way down the ward but she went no further than, perhaps, halfway. She could see her husband beside the bed at the far end, seated on the chair the nurse had bade she herself sit on, and she could see the figure prone on the bed, awake, now, and listening. Or not listening, she could not tell.

  She could not see her husband’s face, only his back, his shoulders, his hands, his head. Every part of him was turned towards the woman on the bed, every muscle and fibre of his body was taut as he cleaved to her.

  ‘All those things that mattered to me I no longer care for. They are like … dust,’ he said to her, as a man does who tears open his soul and offers it to another.

  A nurse spoke to Eleanor, came and stood beside her, calm and white and complacent, opening and closing her mouth. ‘Who is it you wish to visit?’ the nurse repeated.

  ‘I will find something else to do. With you at my side.’

  Said her husband. Eleanor watched him reach out and touch the face of the figure on the bed.

  And at the touch of his fingers on this woman’s face he rendered all the things that had mattered to him to dust. His wife, watching, was rendered to dust.

  Eleanor swung her gaze away from the scene at the bed and into the watching face of the nurse, who remained doggedly at her side. Whose hand gripped her arm at the elbow, whose hold prevented her, it seemed, from falling. Guided her towards a chair, her expression curious, kind, concerned, wishing nothing more than to assist.

  But it was not in her power to give the assistance Eleanor required. Eleanor shook the woman off. She walked towards the door.

  From the far end of the ward her husband’s words followed her: ‘Verity, there will be other children.’

  The ward had an easterly aspect and through the tall windows slivers of brilliant white light struck the ceiling far above. Cathedral-like, thought Alasdair, though he was not a religious man. If he had been he would not have compared a hospital ward to a cathedral, but he was in that place where men looked for, and saw, what they needed.

  ‘I do not want other children,’ said Verity.

  Alasdair lowered his gaze from the heavens to her face.

  ‘Perhaps not at first,’ he said.

  Alasdair stroked the back of her hand with his forefinger, noticing the delicate blue veins just below the skin, the way her fingers lay spread out on the sheet as though she pressed down on something but how one finger—the little finger—lifted off the bed involuntarily. His heart danced inside him and his ears rang.

  She pulled her hand away. ‘I do not wish to have a child. Why do you not take my meaning?’

  ‘Because I hope that you will come to change your mind.’ And it hurt him, unaccountably, that she had withdrawn her hand, though it was a small thing in itself.

  ‘You think you know my mind better than I do?’ And she turned to look at him, her eyes curious, intent.

  He smiled. ‘I think many young ladies do not know their own minds.’

  She turned away again. ‘That is what John used to say.’

  He did not anticipate that. ‘You mean this clerk fellow, John Brewster, your fiancé?’

  ‘John said, It will be better for you, Verity, if you stay in England whilst I go and make my fortune in the colonies. It will be better for you if you do not follow me. It will be better for you—and, of course, what he meant was, it would be better for him—if I gave up any idea of marriage altogether.’

  And again Alasdair was at a loss. What did it mean that she talked to him of this man, the dead clerk?

  ‘And, of course, I did know my own mind and John did not,’ she said, as though she had scored a victory, somehow, over her dead fiancé.

  Though this man had not, it now seemed, been her fiancé. The man, Brewster, had thrown her over. But she had come out after him. Pursued him. And again Alasdair did not know what it meant.

  ‘John was the reason I came to this place,’ she went on, ‘and now I wish to return home. If you believe that I am indebted to you, then you may cast an eye over my present circumstance and reconsider.’

  ‘Verity, if you wish to return to England, then I shall accompany you. I have already said so.’ And Alasdair was glad to be able to offer his sacrifice to her a second time.

  ‘I wish you to arrange my passage but I do not wish you to accompany me.’

  Some dim sense of her meaning now reached him and a fissure began to appear in the new world he had created for them both. Perhaps she sensed it, for she went on without awaiting his reply. ‘I do not wish to be your mistress. I do not wish to be any man’s mistress. It suited me, I believe, for a time, and perhaps I allowed you to convince me that it was in my best interests, or that it was, in fact, my only option. It is not. I can return home a free woman, unencumbered, and that is what I wish to do.’

  The fissure widened and a tiny trickle of his life blood spilled into it.

  ‘I love you, Verity,’ he said simply. ‘It is a love that consumes me. It has changed my life. Changed me. Do you not see it?’

  He had imagined, many times, saying these words to her, and in his imagination they came, always, as a triumphant culmination. They were not like this: an entreaty, a beseeching.

  Verity struggled to sit up, her face level with his, and her face was like that of another woman entirely.

  ‘I believe I have grown to despise you,’ she said. ‘I do not know how much more plain I can be. If I have deceived you in this, then I say you have deceived yourself. I despise the role you have created for me, second to your wife, whom you would desert in a moment but to whom you would remain married. And I despise this place.’

  She looked about her at the ward and the prostrate people in it, but her look stretched far beyond the hospital.

  ‘It is a savage and uncivilised place and its people strut about as though they have the most magnificent city in the world when most have never set foot in London or in any great capital. They think their city is paved with gold when it is thick with sheep and flies and the children of convicts. It is as wretched a place as ever I saw.’

  Each word struck its blow and Alasdair did not move. The words nailed him, without mercy, to the chair.

  They rained down on him and he was powerless to deflect them.

  She despised him, and this was as wretched a place as she ever saw. He did not know which revelation shook him the most. If she had told him night was day and the sun was the moon he might have been less astonished. Less destroyed.

  He rose from the chair. He nodded stiffly at her and turned away, and as he left the ward a nurse looked up and smiled at him hopefully but he did not see her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE BABY FARM

  ‘I warned you!’ Mrs Flynn had said unhelpfully, when Alice had come to her the morning after, still shaken and with a scratch on her throat where the man’s knife had nicked her. But she had sat the girl down and administered a nip of gin, watching silently as Alice swallowed it and choked a little.

  ‘You must go to the police,’ Mrs Flynn declared with a conviction admirable in someone who, not ten days earlier, had stood in this same kitchen and laughed
at the notion the law might protect them.

  ‘No!’ Alice cried, jumping up so that the chair crashed to the floor. ‘It is ’cause of the police that things have got to where they have.’

  Mrs Flynn gave her a look that suggested this was an interpretation of events to which she did not subscribe, but Mrs Flynn did not know all the facts. And Mrs Flynn had not known Milli. There would be no police.

  ‘Then what is to be done, Alice? What is to be done?’ And Mrs Flynn went off shaking her head.

  What was to be done? Alice did not know and she went through her day and into the next day believing the baby already dead, steeling herself to believe that this was the best thing—for the baby, for everyone. But it is a terrible thing to deaden your own heart and sometimes the heart will not be deadened.

  ‘I shall go back to the house. Perhaps it is not too late,’ she announced finally, on the Friday morning, and she stood in the middle of the kitchen in defiance of Mrs Flynn as though the older woman might try to prevent her, when in fact there was no one who cared enough about Alice Nimrod to prevent her walking into danger or to offer comfort when she did.

  But Mrs Flynn was concerned, for the household routine was threatened.

  ‘Now?’ she said, astonished. It was the middle of the day. She had never heard of such a thing. But Mrs Flynn, perhaps remembering the revolutionary corsets and seeing that the world was no longer a place she knew, sighed. ‘Go then. If the mistress asks where you are I shall think of something to tell her.’

  And so Alice had gone.

  And in the daylight she hardly recognised the place. She picked her way along the narrow and cluttered lane through the refuse of a dozen households and the rats did not scurry away at her approach and a dog, rabid and diseased, worried at her heels.

  But selecting one dilapidated gate from the many such gates hanging limply from their broken hinges in a wall of crumbling brickwork was no simple matter.

  She decided at last on one and eased the gate open. Yes, here was the yard, seen now in daylight, squalid and strewn with rubbish. From a fence post a brace of dead rabbits hung by their feet swinging gently in the breeze and festering with maggots. The yard backed onto a squat and crumbling single-storey cottage built of disintegrating sandstone and dating from the earliest decades of the settlement and unlikely to make it into the new century. It was a building as unlovely and unloved as any in the colony. The sort of place folk gratefully left behind in their overcrowded and wretched cities in the old country and then, inexplicably, set about re-creating in this new land. It had a solitary window which was boarded up. The back door, its timbers rotting, was approached by a step that was all but crumbled away. Above, a precariously leaning chimney, from which no smoke came, poked uneasily from its roof.

  This was surely the place, though the cottage next door or the one beyond that could just as easily be it too, for the uneven rows of houses went on and on, and the people who lived in them went on and on, and the horror Alice Nimrod felt was the horror of someone who had escaped.

  But the cottage was strangely silent.

  And that was odd, for all about the laneways teemed. Not with life, exactly, but with the half-living that passed for life here—the drunk and the insensible and the destitute and the dead all piled one on top of another, some in silence and others in an ecstasy of commotion, enough to pierce the ears and bring the crumbling buildings crashing about their inadequate foundations.

  But this cottage was silent.

  Alice went up to the door and listened. She pulled the door and it creaked, opening perhaps halfway before becoming stuck in its ill-fitting frame. The smell, too, was different this time. No smoke or cooking or the stale odour of unwashed bodies, just a foetid, rotting stench of decay and human waste and the mustiness of rodents. Alice waited. She listened for the slightest sound that might indicate someone lurked within. But nothing stirred.

  Except for a scratching and a rustling. And so Alice forced her body through the gap and half-a-dozen rats scurried into the shadows.

  Light spilled in behind her and she saw that she stood in a mean little kitchen or scullery, now abandoned. Some previous occupant had installed shelves, a lop-sided cupboard and a three-legged table. Piles of rubbish—food scrapings, old newspapers, spilled wax, straw—covered the floor and the one or two surfaces, but nothing of value had been left behind. She stepped cautiously in the half-light, going through to a second room at the front of the cottage. This was a larger space, she sensed, and similarly abandoned, but it was in darkness, the window boarded up, the door onto the street shut.

  She heard again a scurrying of rats startled by her presence.

  She plunged into this second, larger room and thrust out both hands into the blackness making for the door, feeling for a handle or a knob or a latch, finally just grabbing the wood and pulling and pushing, and eventually it dislodged enough to swing open and a shaft of daylight pierced the room behind her. She turned about, fearful of what she might see, but this room was empty, a floor covered with loose boards, some scraps of matting strewn with rat droppings, a crudely constructed and empty fireplace and bare, stone walls.

  But Alice had seen something in the corner of the room that stilled her heart.

  It must be a piece of rubbish. Yes, surely that was it. But she knew it was not. She walked over, not quite touching the floor, not touching anything, separate from the world around her. She stopped two feet away.

  It was an arm. A tiny newborn’s limb, bloodied and dead and showing the gnaw marks of the rats that had taken it.

  She spun away, stumbling and blinded, and when she had reached a wall against which she might throw out a shaking hand, she vomited. When she had retched herself hoarse and the rats had begun to circle, she stood up, shouting at them and kicking until they scurried away once more.

  She went back to the dead thing, her hand clamped firmly to her mouth. But this was just a single arm when there were two babies here, at least. Milli’s and the other girl’s. Where was the rest of this poor infant, and where was the other baby?

  In the far corner of the room a floorboard had been dislodged. She went over and crouched down, pulling at the boards and finding beneath them a hollowed-out place and two bundles, one bloodied and butchered, and she cried as with a shaking finger she pulled the torn rags away and saw the remains of the thing that a day or so earlier the terrified girl had handed over, in her innocence, to a murderer. She flung the rags back over the horrid thing to cover it. She turned to the second bundle, but now her fingers shook so much she could not grip the cloth that covered it. Steeling herself, she poked it and it did not stir.

  It did not stir.

  She took hold of the cloth and pulled it, finding inside the bundle a baby, a tiny, unspoiled baby boy, quite still.

  She let out a sob and scooped up the dead thing.

  And when she felt the tiniest beat of a tiny heart, still fighting despite all that the world had done to stop it, she gasped and could not see for the tears that ran down her face and fell onto the baby’s forehead.

  A baptism, almost.

  When she was able, she got to her feet and fled.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  STAGE FRIGHT

  The Premier’s train left mid-morning heading westwards. The mood in the carriage was jocular—the job was almost done, the prize was almost theirs. But as the train crossed the Nepean River at Emu Plains, leaving the scattered outposts of the city behind and beginning its ascent, the mood changed. From the window they saw blue gum-covered crests and gullies that rose and plummeted in a breathless infinity. Those who had never before made the journey over the mountains fell silent; those who travelled this way regularly felt a pride in their country that they would have blushed to express in words. The most hardened parliamentary soul was stirred by the sight.

  At Katoomba the train stopped briefly so that the people could cheer and the officials from the local Federal Executive could greet the Premier,
and so that the members of the party could exit the train briefly to stamp their feet on the frozen ground, slap their hands briskly together and watch their breath turn to vapour before their eyes.

  And now the train began its slow and winding descent to the plains below, arriving into Bathurst in the late afternoon. Here more crowds awaited them, another mayor, yet more aldermen, and both the district and the city bands played a triumphal welcome. The procession to the town hall was led by the fine strong men of the Bathurst Fire Brigade and behind the official party the people followed on foot, counting in their hundreds. At the town hall there was champagne enough for a great many worthy persons’ health to be toasted, after which the party dined at a local hotel. The culmination of the day was the address that evening to be held at the School of Arts, where upwards of twelve hundred persons awaited and where every prominent citizen and his wife was soon gathered on a platform that creaked beneath their combined weight.

  The hall was festooned: ribbons and bunting and flags hung from every place that it was possible to hang something, and pretty young ladies wore Federation ribbons pinned to their breasts and the mayor and his many aldermen fairly swelled with civic pride.

  The Premier was in fine spirits, shaking every hand and slapping every back and kissing every lady’s hand. He exchanged hearty words with the massed gentlemen of the press and he posed for a photograph.

  ‘Gentlemen, please take your seats,’ cried an official who wore a large watch on a chain and being the only gentleman in the room who did not smile and make jocular declarations for his job it was—and a thankless job too—to keep the address to time. There was another train to catch, if not tonight then early on the morrow. ‘Gentlemen, please!’ he urged.

  And the platform creaked as the Premier took his chair.

  The mayor spoke first—it was his town, after all—to give the official welcome and thanks. This was a Federation town, he declared, and if it should, one day, become the nation’s capital then it would be as well for the nation! The people cheered (perhaps unaware their town was now officially only ninety-eight miles from Sydney and therefore no longer eligible). They were honoured this evening, the mayor said, not only with the Premier’s presence but with that of a number of his ministers too, the first of whom, the Secretary for Public Monies, the Honourable Mr Alasdair Dunlevy MLA, he was pleased to invite to the podium now to address them.