The Unforgiving City

by Maggie Joel

  Much applause greeted this announcement, not because Mr Dunlevy was to speak (as most did not know who he was) but because the mood was jubilant and the people of Bathurst had waited a long time to take centre stage.

  Mr Dunlevy, who was seated close to the Premier, now rose and approached the podium. He carried his speech notes and he placed these notes on the podium. He adjusted them. He lifted his head. The hall, and the twelve hundred people inside it, fell, for the most part, to a hushed quiet—though when the mood is jubilant hushed quiet is no easy thing and one or two cheers persisted and some irreverent comments shot back and forth from the galleries to the floor and back again and a ripple of laughter followed them. But eventually they fell away and the hall was silent.

  And the people waited.

  But the minister did not speak.

  The people shuffled, they became a little restless, one or two called out. A nervous laugh came, an insult from far to the back of the hall.

  But still the minister did not speak.

  Those on the platform exchanged looks, shifted in their seats. And down below the platform the people seated in the front rows could see the gleam of perspiration on the minister’s forehead and the grey pallor of his face. And they saw how his hand shook at his side.

  Stage fright, they said later.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  UNTETHERED

  Eleanor sat at her writing desk. Her journal lay unopened before her and she ran her fingers over the soft calfskin cover to anchor herself to this place, to this world, but she did not open the journal and as the room had settled into evening and was already in semidarkness she could not have read the words she had once written even had she wished to.

  The fire was not lit, the curtains were not drawn and the light from the street outside bathed the room in a not-unpleasant glow, enough to make out shapes and shadows well enough though not to read or write by.

  Outside there seemed to be no stars in the sky and she could not recall the last time she had searched for them. One night, she could not have been more than seven or eight, her father had come to the room in which she slept and had woken her in the darkness and taken her up to the roof where they had lain for an hour or more with blankets covering them, for it had been a cold, clear night, and watched a meteor shower overhead. Tiny points of light bursting into life and shooting across the sky then blinking out of existence, one after another in every part of the sky, so fleeting you caught them in the corner of your eye and they were gone. She remembered how it felt to share this secret with him, for it had seemed, at the time, like a secret.

  And then he had gone, and so long ago that his voice, his smile, his smell, was as fleeting as those shooting stars had once been. Her mother had gone three years later of a silly nagging cough that had seemed little enough at first but which worsened and in a fortnight had carried her off.

  They had been a safety net, her mother and father, she saw. A fixed point upon which to anchor oneself, and when they were gone that anchor point was gone too, and one drifted, untethered, with nothing beneath. And sometimes that was liberating and other times it was terrifying.

  Your husband becomes your safety net, that was what her mother had said. It was the sort of thing she might have said, at any rate. Though in her case both her husbands had, one after another and some years apart, and through no fault of their own one presumed, deserted her.

  But they had died. A different form of desertion. After which one might don widow’s weeds, accept condolences and, after an appropriate period, move on.

  Eleanor pondered the time, estimated it to be seven or perhaps eight o’clock. Certainly long after dusk and yet her fire was not lit and her curtains not drawn.

  Afterwards the two things seemed connected in her mind: her realisation about the fire and curtains, and a moment later, almost simultaneously it seemed, the sound of a baby crying upstairs. But it might not have happened like that; it may have been some little time between the first thing and the second. Afterwards, it was difficult to recall with any certainty.

  A baby was crying upstairs. It was such an unlikely sound that it took an absurdly long time for Eleanor’s brain to register and make sense of it. She got up. She left her room and stood on the landing, looking upwards.

  Could it be a baby? It must, surely, be a bat or a possum outside. She put a hand on the bannister and a step on the first stair, listening. For a moment there was silence, but then she heard it again and she went up the stairs, though it had been five years, perhaps, since she had last gone up to the maid’s room and then only briefly to ensure the maid who had departed had taken only what was hers. She reached the top of the winding wooden staircase and stood on the little landing just long enough to understand something was very wrong. She threw open the door.

  Inside the room the maid, Alice, stood wide-eyed and holding in her arms a baby. It was wrapped in a shawl of some description and its face—a tiny red, wrinkled face—was screwed up mid-scream. Its fists were clenched in fury, its limbs so diminutive they seemed little more than a doll’s. A newborn or, at most, a few days old.

  And Alice gaped at her in mute horror.

  Indeed, the horror seemed to rise up from the floor, it seeped out of the walls, it poured down on them from the ceiling. It drenched them and Eleanor reeled. The baby’s cries came to her from far away and the words that Alice spoke did not come to her at all. She had entered a quite different world, where the things that she had known—about herself, about the people around her—were quite false and other things were now shown to be true. She said to the maid: ‘This is my husband’s child.’

  Her words cut through the fog that surrounded them both and hung there, momentous and terrible. ‘This is Mr Dunlevy’s child, is it not? Tell me.’

  Alice took a step away from her, her mouth agape. And now something got through, the sound of Alice’s words, if not their actual meaning.

  ‘No, madam, indeed it is not!’ she cried. ‘It is my sister’s child. She has died suddenly and I have saved her child. I am sorry, madam, for I know I should not—’

  ‘It is my husband’s child. And you have hidden this from me, the two of you.’

  ‘No, madam, I swear on the child’s life—’

  Eleanor put her hands over her ears and turned away from the girl’s denials. She was going to fall, or to faint, she did not know which. She put her hand on the doorknob and held very tightly onto it and the girl’s denials went on and on.

  ‘She went into labour because of the sentence, madam. Three years’ hard labour, it was, and I could not save her, and before I could visit her in the prison she had done away with herself, though it is a wicked mortal sin and the baby would surely perish—’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  Alice was quiet. The words froze in the space between them.

  ‘You will leave this house. Now. This minute. Before my husband returns. I will not have you in this house one more minute.’

  ‘Madam!’

  The clock on the landing below struck the quarter hour and Eleanor flung the door open wide and stood with her back to the room and to the horror of that scene.

  ‘You shall leave this house before the clock strikes the hour or I shall telephone the police.’

  Eleanor went back downstairs and her hands shook on the bannister and she stumbled once but righted herself. She went all the way down to the drawing room.

  It was later than she had thought; the clock had chimed a quarter before nine o’clock. So be it. The girl and the child would be gone by nine. She sat and waited.

  And it is a long time to wait, a quarter of an hour, when broken down into each component minute and second and beat of the heart. Eleanor sat and she waited. She thought of very little and she thought of everything. She understood, at last, what sort of a man was her husband, that he would kneel at the bed of one woman to profess his love and at the same time impregnate a servant girl—as Leon Jellicoe had done, or worse! Were all men such, then?
Their baseness and treachery indistinguishable from one another? That he would accuse her of an affair so that he might hide his own transgressions. And she understood, too, the deceit of the servant who colluded with the master of the house to hide her sinful state. She saw that it was in the nature of such people to beget a child through deception and duplicity, to hide a pregnancy, to bear a bastard child in shameful secrecy in an attic room.

  It was astonishing how clearly she now saw the world.

  So Eleanor sat and she waited.

  She heard every sound. A carriage rattled up to the house and she feared it was her husband returned. But it could not be, as he was with the Premier at Bathurst. And sure enough the carriage soon passed and was gone. A wind rustled the leaves of the giant fig and caused the branches of the frangipani to tap against a windowpane. The house creaked and groaned and resettled on its foundations like a very old man in a chair who has seen all that life has and wishes to see no more.

  But even the slowest quarter hour must submit eventually, and she heard footsteps on the stairs. Her hands closed slowly around the arm of her chair. She stared straight ahead.

  She heard a sob outside the door.

  ‘Please, Madam, I beg you not to do this. I have no place to go, and there is the baby, it is so small and I have nothing to give it.’

  Eleanor sat and waited.

  ‘Madam.’

  After a time she heard the front door open and then close. A moment or two after that the clock on the landing above chimed the hour, followed a few seconds later by the other clocks in the house.

  Then there was silence.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  WATERLOO

  Alasdair returned early from the Tour of the West at the Premier’s suggestion. Was it a suggestion or more a request, an order? The words ‘complete rest’ and ‘exhaustion’ hung over him as he stood at the window of his room at the hotel and watched the porter pack his clothes, as the man stepped into the street and hailed a carriage to take him to the station, as he boarded the train, alone, and the rest of the party continued on to Wellington.

  ‘No Wellington for you, Dunlevy; more a Waterloo, I would think,’ the Premier had said, and he had laughed at this most excellent joke.

  And his minister suffered the ignominy of the train journey with every station he passed through. At Katoomba only market-goers and early sightseers waited on the platform. The excited crowds of the day before were just a paragraph in the newspaper today. The descent of the train through the winding ridges and gullies was made at a great speed when the day before the train had strained at every incline. Every now and then he glimpsed the smoke haze of the city floating distantly on the horizon. He did not wish to reach his destination.

  How would he explain himself? And to whom?

  The clouds, rolling in from the west, overtook him at Penrith and the distant city vanished in a hail of new rain. It was a Saturday morning. At each station the people jostled on the platforms with crates and livestock, which they loaded into the third-class carriages, dashing from place to place beneath rapidly retrieved umbrellas. A crate overturned and a host of small yellow chicks ran in all directions. After a delay the train set off once more.

  The referendum was in three days but the people loaded livestock onto trains and ran in all directions after escaping yellow chicks. He wondered what was the truth: the vote or the people going to market?

  He arrived at Sydney Terminal Station at the same time as the Premier’s party was due to arrive in Wellington. He got a cab and rode through the streets feeling he had been absent a great many days and not just overnight.

  He went straight home. He did not linger very long on the thought that a little to the north, at the hospital, Verity lay. He did not think about that at all.

  The cook, Mrs Flynn, opened the door to him. She had a pinched look about her, as though she had leaned too close to the stove and her face had become flushed from the flames. But as she habitually spent her time in the kitchen and he was very rarely in her presence, he presumed this to be her natural state.

  ‘Oh, sir!’ she said, and again he assumed this to be a natural thing she might utter. At any rate her hand went to her mouth and she stood back to let him enter, offering no further utterance. She seemed dismayed by his umbrella, by his dripping coat.

  ‘Mrs Dunlevy is here?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes, sir. Upstairs, sir. In her room.’

  Mrs Flynn had a way of opening her mouth as though intending to say one thing and then saying quite another thing altogether.

  He left her contemplating his bags in the hallway and wondered where the maid was and what the implications were for lunch if the cook was playing at housemaid today.

  Or had he missed lunch?

  He went to the drawing room and sat down heavily on the first chair he reached and put his head in his hands. He had thought he was done with maids and lunches and cooks, with everything connected to this life. He had given it up; though his sacrifice, in the end, had come to nothing. Had been thrown back in his face. But to have come to that decision, to have reached that place, and now to find oneself exactly back in the spot one thought one had left forever was—

  Beyond anything.

  To lose her was—

  But there was nothing, he realised, to compare it to.

  After a time he lowered his hands from his face and sat calmly. And he did feel calm. For there was the present to deal with. There was Eleanor upstairs in her room and he would explain things to her. Explain some things, at least. Not all.

  But he sat calmly and did not move.

  The door opened and Eleanor came in.

  Alasdair turned and looked up at her with his new calmness. He did not smile or offer a greeting but he did look up, he was calm. And now, at any rate, he could explain things to her.

  But it was she who spoke first, and he remembered thinking afterwards that Eleanor did not once ask the reason for his early arrival home. But it was possible he had never shared his schedule with her or given her a date for his expected return. Yes, very likely that was it. Possibly it was no concern to her when her husband returned or even if he did. That was likely too.

  But Eleanor spoke: ‘You are leaving then?’ she said.

  And he saw that his explanation to her was going to be no easy thing.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  And, in that one word, all that had happened was explained. He would not be leaving. He look a long breath. He wished she would sit down. Or go, now that things were clear again between them. Instead she stood before him, she loomed over him.

  She was speaking again and it seemed at first inconsequential, talk of the servants, but after a long moment her words penetrated.

  ‘I have sent Alice away. Her and the child.’

  He looked up at her. ‘Child? What child?’

  She did not answer at once, then, ‘Do you deny all knowledge of it?’

  ‘My dear, I have not the slightest idea as to what you are referring.’

  At his words, she turned away. Whatever passed over her face in that moment she did not wish him to see. And when she turned back there was a coldness to her, a bitterness.

  ‘First this woman, this Miss Trent,’ she said, ‘who must break the law in the most appalling way to rid herself of your bastard child, and now the maid—the maid, Alasdair!—who presumably had no option but to expel the wretched thing, and right here under our very roof for all I know, though the idea of it is quite repellent. Well, now she is gone and the child too.’

  He could not speak. And this was as well for she had not finished.

  ‘The hypocrisy of it! That you should accuse me of infidelity—’ She stopped herself. Took a deep breath. ‘I believe you should go, Alasdair. I do not wish us to continue as we are.’

  He struggled to his feet. How could she know all this about Verity? As for the rest of it!

  ‘But you are deluded, Eleanor. I do not deny this …’ He paused. He could
not find the word. When he did find a word, he closed that part of himself that shrank in shame. ‘… this incident with Miss Trent. Indeed, I am come here today to discuss it frankly with you and to beg your forgiveness. But this other accusation about myself and the maid—the maid, Eleanor, good God!—and a child, it is preposterous. Deranged.’

  But she stood before him, resolute. And he saw that it was not her strength or her resolution that kept her standing there, it was her dismay, and the slightest movement of the breeze would see her crumble into powder before him. But still she stood before him, resolute, despite him. Despite herself.

  ‘Eleanor, what child, for God’s sake? Look about you. There is no child. There never has been a child.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  THE TRANSIENCE OF ALL THINGS

  A short time later a carriage drew up outside the house, a dark green brougham pulled by two perfectly matched bay cobs and carrying Mrs Henry Rothe.

  Mrs Rothe, whose husband kept his own carriage and stabled his own horses, sat and waited, staring straight ahead and pulling at the fingers of her new gloves, for they had been made a little tight. After a time, and as no one came out to her, she sent her groom to the house. The groom, too, was in dark green. Mrs Rothe, who laughed a great deal at the world but who suffered the same insecurities all people did, pulled at the fingers of her new gloves and so did not observe the confused exchange between her groom and the Dunlevys’ cook. For Mrs Flynn, after a lengthy delay, had heard the man at the front door and had come to see who it was and what it was they wanted.

  The groom returned and, after a not-inconsiderable time, Mrs Dunlevy herself emerged from her house and the groom jumped down and went to open the door and lower the step so that she might enter the carriage. The two ladies greeted one another and no mention was made of Mrs Dunlevy’s tardiness or her high colour or her distraction as the carriage made its way the short distance to the town hall at Paddington and Mrs Rothe understood that some crisis had occurred.