by Maggie Joel
The anti-federalists were out too, and if they could not win by rational persuasion they would resort to scaremongering, and a cart was seen circling the busier city streets sporting a huge banner that showed a menacing swarm of Chinamen in northern Queensland surging, via a newly built federal railway, towards the white dominions of New South Wales and Victoria—for this would, surely, be the colony’s fate if it chose Federation. At some point during the afternoon the banner was set alight and onlookers cheered as they watched it burn.
The biggest crowds gathered at Castlereagh Street and Hunter Street, where platforms had been erected and the two leaders of the parties and those members of the Legislative Assembly and the Council not at their own constituencies congregated, some to urge the people to vote and others, like Charles Booker-Reid, who had not the least wish to visit his distant constituency, to enjoy the spectacle and, he trusted, the triumph. George Drummond-Smith, whose constituency was similarly remote, had also chosen to remain in the city during the whole of the campaign and was not about to leave now that victory was in sight. Henry Rothe, whose constituency was conveniently placed at Potts Point, welcomed his constituents personally with his wife at his side and enjoyed the harbour views with a glass of breakfast champagne and a jaunty wave to the occupants of the fleet of small craft that had taken to the water for the occasion. The Fraser Pykes were at Parramatta, having packed into two carriages before dawn and travelled to the west so that Fraser could urge on his own electors with the aid of his entire family, nurse and baby included. Ned Dempsey, being temporarily without an electorate, stood firmly with the anti-federalists at the busier city polling booths, offering warnings that were dire and, as the day wore on, increasingly fatalistic. His sister, who had decided she quite approved of the idea of Federation, stood beside her brother encouragingly while not actually agreeing with a single word he said. In an electorate even further west than Fraser Pyke’s the widower Everett Judd clasped the hand of each man who had come to vote, regardless of how he had voted, and thanked him and did not dwell on the fact that at every previous election his wife had stood by his side.
Alasdair Dunlevy was also at his constituency in the southwest, though his wife did not accompany him. Instead it was his secretary, Mr Greensmith, very neat today in a pinstriped suit and pale grey silk Ascot tie, who stood at his side. Volunteers from the local branch of the party had set up stages outside the largest polling stations and Mr Dunlevy was shuttled from one to the other throughout the day on a dray festooned with bunting and pulled by two horses donated by a local brewery. Spirits were high in the south-west, the public holiday and the cessation of the rain almost certainly being the cause of it, the prospect of a newly federated nation coming a distant third, and as Mr Dunlevy took to the stage some wag called out, ‘Will he speak or will he just stand there?’, for word had got around—thanks to the Herald report—that Mr Dunlevy had frozen at the Premier’s event at Bathurst. It was repeated throughout the day at each polling station he arrived at, and Mr Dunlevy suffered it with good grace, for what else could he do?
‘Don’t forget to say something! Only politician I ever heard of who could not speak!’
Mr Dunlevy ignored this fresh intervention, ignored the heckler, ignored them all. He turned instead to his secretary, Greensmith, who was witness to his humiliation but who stood, reassuringly, at the edge of the platform. A young man of ambition, and exceptionally well turned out, who had reworked the minister’s speech even as they had sat in the train together that morning and whose notes, written in blue ink in a workmanlike hand, filled the pages he now held before him.
And here Alasdair understood that the only person who could have intercepted a note he had written to his mistress, who could have opened the note, understood its contents and redirected the note to the one person to whom it could do the most damage, was his secretary. Was Greensmith.
He remembered the young man’s gallant taking of his wife’s arm at the Premier’s reception and again at Penrith, his dismay that morning on arriving at the house to learn Mrs Dunlevy would not be accompanying them. He saw that ambition formed only one small part in the man’s motivation. That the main reason was desire.
Alasdair delivered his speech. He did not need to refer to the notes. He was a parliamentarian of twenty years standing, he could exhort these men to their civic duty simply by opening his heart and his soul to them! For he had realised it could not touch him, this final betrayal, coming as it did so soon after other betrayals that had cut so much deeper and that would require so much more time to heal.
Afterwards men cheered, though he did not wait to hear their cheers. He left the stage, left the handwritten pages of his speech where they had dropped, abandoned, to the floor, and when his secretary stepped forward to shake his hand, the minister swept past him and went, alone, to his next engagement.
At the house in Elizabeth Bay Eleanor Dunlevy stood at her window. In the street below people came and went, some in carriages, some on foot, going to the polling booths and returning.
Eleanor did not accompany her husband, though it was a day they had both worked towards for a year. More than a year—for much of the last decade. This was the culmination of that endeavour, the long-awaited triumph after so many hours of toil, and she would not be there to see it nor to share in it. Indeed, she was no longer certain what it meant to share in her husband’s triumph, or in his failure. Both seemed remote to her.
She had gone to his room late the previous night, when they had managed to avoid one another for most of the day, and said, ‘I shall not accompany you tomorrow, Alasdair.’
And he had said, ‘As you wish,’ and that had been an end to it.
They had not spoken again of the maid or the baby. Eleanor had not said, I accept now that the child was not yours, I was wrong to accuse you, for the baby’s paternity no longer seemed important. And he had not asked her, Where is she now, the maid, Alice? If he had, she would have said, There is nothing we can do for her, we cannot possibly have a maid with a baby. But Alasdair had not asked. And Alice had not been found.
Eleanor no longer knew why she had gone out and searched for the girl—if her purpose had been to give her money, or to provide the address of the asylum, she had failed to do either. But girls like that knew where the asylum was. And there was no question of taking Alice back, with or without the baby, not after what had been said.
Eleanor would go into the agency tomorrow. She would find a new maid. Still, she had a sense she had not done all that she might. Though what else she could have done she did not know. She saw that the hoped-for salvation—of the girl, the baby, of herself—had not occurred.
She thought, Alice should have come to me for help. And this put the blame squarely on the girl’s shoulders. All that had followed lay at her door.
But would I have helped? Eleanor wondered.
The government had decreed the day a holiday but not everyone was enjoying the holiday and not every place was closed. The telephone rang in the hallway of the Dunlevys’ house in the middle of the afternoon, which it did rarely enough even on a normal day, for the number of subscribers was small still and so there were very few whom one might telephone and very few who might telephone one. But today the telephone rang.
Eleanor waited for a time to see if the telephone would cease to ring of its own accord, and when it did not she went downstairs and picked up the telephone receiver. She held the instrument close her ear and said, clearly and distinctly, ‘This is the Dunlevy residency. Who is calling, please?’ because there was no maid to answer the call and Mrs Flynn had not come in today so that they were, effectively, on their own.
‘I am afraid I do not understand you. Who is calling, please?’ She did not recognise the voice, a man’s, and rather muffled and faint, as if he called from a great distance, though in fact the man who telephoned was less than a mile away.
At Sydney Hospital, which was less than a mile from Elizabeth Bay as the southerl
y blows, though rather more than that if one is required to follow the circuitous route taken by the meandering roads, Miss Verity Trent dressed herself, a little painfully, stopping once or twice to catch her breath.
Her time at the hospital was at an end, her place soon to be taken by another. Someone more deserving, certain of the nursing staff thought privately and some not so privately; the reason for Miss Trent’s illness was generally known and those among them who believed in Sin and Wickedness did not bother to hide their judgement as they tended to her, and those who believed in Charity and Forgiveness did not judge at all and offered kindness with their ministrations and, oddly, both factions read the same Book and considered themselves of the same faith. Fortunately, their faith was broad enough to encompass both schools of thought.
Miss Trent’s time on the ward, her time in the colony, had not been a pleasant one. She was relieved to be going. She dressed herself painfully but she did not ask for help and none was offered.
The government had decreed the day a holiday and the city’s cab drivers had included themselves within the spirit of this decree so that Eleanor had a great deal of trouble finding a hansom to take her to Macquarie Street. When she did locate one the driver was garrulous and full of opinions that he was inclined to share with her, though mercifully a stiff breeze off the water whipped his words away as soon as he uttered them and Eleanor was spared.
Was she spared?
The cab drew up now before the front steps of the hospital and Eleanor climbed down, needing the man’s hand as she descended but dismissing him at once when she no longer had need of him.
She did not go up the steps. Instead, she made her way around to the rear where the hospital buildings merged with the great and sweeping expanse of the Domain. Here the romantic whimsy of the place, which elsewhere was held in check, erupted with unrestrained abandon in the form of a delightful if incongruous three-storey turret better suited to a medieval castle than a colonial hospital. This piece of architectural caprice housed the hospital’s modern and new operating theatre on its uppermost floor, the elegantly proportioned Chapel of St Luke in its middle floor, and at ground level, accessed by a small and insignificant green door, the morgue.
‘Please mind your head!’ cried a young clerk starting up in alarm as Eleanor appeared in the doorway.
It was a cramped and low-ceilinged place, squeezed awkwardly into a circular interior that defied rooms and corridors or anything really that demanded corners and right angles as their foundation. Some attempt had been made to compartmentalise the place, and Eleanor was led along a short and dimly lit passage by the young orderly, who walked on tiptoe and who ducked his head and twitched his hands, and whether the man’s chronic and unceasing nervousness was due to an unease of the dead or of the living, or by the cramped conditions in which he worked, could only be guessed.
‘This is Mr Erasmus,’ said the orderly, handing her over and darting gratefully away.
Mr Erasmus, who appeared to have been awaiting her arrival, stood by a closed door, his hand on the doorhandle. All that Eleanor understood of this man was the old-fashioned mutton-chop whiskers he sported and the waistcoat he wore. It had mother-of-pearl buttons on it. He did not speak and so she was forced to look into his face. It was the face of a man much younger than his whiskers suggested. His face showed no expression and she could not guess at his intent, though his silence, the lack of an expression in his eyes, somehow implied a great deal if one could but grasp it.
Mr Erasmus indicated then with a movement of his hand that she should follow. It was a gesture both perfunctory and kindly: a man who dealt daily with tragedy. Or that was how Eleanor interpreted it. Perhaps it was just a gesture.
He opened the door and a smell seeped out. It had been there in a more subtle form from the instant she had crossed the threshold, though she had barely acknowledged it. Now it shouted its presence. A sweet, cloying odour not at all what one thought death must smell like, not decaying or foetid or rank at all. And unforgettable, though she did not understand this until later.
The room was tiled on floor and walls like a bathroom in a good hotel and yet it was nothing at all like a good hotel. The air was markedly cooler than the outside temperature. In the centre of the room was a table upon which a body was laid, covered by a sheet.
The man, Mr Erasmus, stood unmoving beside Eleanor. He waited for a moment then pulled the sheet aside with a tight little flourish as might a sombre magician who has tired a little of his profession but has no other means by which to make a living.
‘This is her?’ he said after a time, and when he had waited long enough for Eleanor to speak.
‘Yes. Alice Nimrod. Our maid.’
But how different she looked. And perhaps that was death. It wiped away all disappointments and triumphs. The girl’s face was a blank, it said nothing about how she had got here, it offered no excuses and no recriminations. It was strange to gaze so long upon the face of a maid; it was not the correct way of things. What colour eyes had the girl had? Eleanor wondered. But she did not know. And now the girl’s eyes were closed.
A mother should be standing here, thought Eleanor; instead it is an employer. A former employer, though she did not say this to the man, Mr Erasmus. She had claimed Alice as her maid and denied the dismissal as though she could deny her own part in this death.
I believe I may be in some way responsible for this girl’s death.
But she could no more say these words than Alice could sit up now and accuse her. Alice did not need to accuse her. Eleanor pitched forward and put out her hands to the table edge to steady herself and Mr Erasmus leaped forward to take her arm, alarmed, she sensed, surprised—it was a maid, after all. But she wanted his pity, Eleanor realised, she yearned for his solace, his sympathy. The man must have it in him.
But it was only a maid.
She turned away and the man replaced the sheet over Alice’s face. And something about the way he had shown her only the girl’s face, not an inch more, troubled her.
‘I wish to know—can you tell me what happened to her?’
‘Her throat was cut.’
The period of time—a handful of seconds, no more—after which he said this did not exist. Eleanor found herself outside in the corridor.
He had come outside with her, this Mr Erasmus, he had closed the door behind him. He regarded her and his face, too, showed no excuses, no recriminations.
‘She was your maid,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
But it had not been a question. He had in his hand—crumpled, five years old now but still with its original envelope—the letter from the agency with the Dunlevys’ address on. Why keep such a thing? Had Alice had it with her when she died? Had she had all that she owned with her when she was killed?
They stood in silence.
‘When was she brought in?’ said Eleanor.
‘First thing this morning. Probably it happened last night.’
‘But—’ and Eleanor turned and looked directly at him ‘—there was a baby.’
At six o’clock the polling stations across the colony closed to loud cheers, and in the city the people began to gather in great numbers outside the offices of the Herald. The first results came in at six thirty, and as each new telegram arrived an employee of the newspaper hurried out and posted Yes or No on a board outside and a cheer went up, no matter the outcome; the people just wished to cheer, they did not discriminate. And it was no certain thing as, for a time, the No’s came in thick and fast only a little behind the Yes’s. But by eight o’clock it began to appear that a win in favour of the Federation was likely. At ten o’clock the result was all but confirmed and a win declared, and the cheering in the streets was long and hearty, after which the crowd dispersed, for tomorrow was another day.
Eleanor got home long before her husband for her journey was shorter than his. But it was dark as her cab drew up outside the house and it took her a moment or two to disengage herself from
its interior and negotiate the door and the step. And then she must find some coins for the fare and all the while balance this bundle that she held.
The cab dispatched with, she walked up to the front door and the baby in her arms made no sound and it was Eleanor herself who cried a little as she went into the house.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
FEDERATION
It had been a mild winter after all, though it had not seemed so at the time—and, really, how cold could it get, in Sydney?—and then a whole month early, in the second week of October, the jacarandas exploded into bloom across the city, and if one was fortunate enough to be alive on such a day it was impossible not to feel the joy of it. When a southerly struck, late one afternoon towards the end of the month, the whole lot was gone in a moment, blown off the trees for another year and, for a few glorious days, the streets of the city were paved in mauve blossom in the same way that, as children, we had believed the streets of London to be paved with gold, though we had learned as we had got older, that this was not true.
The Federation vote had been a success, though many towns and suburbs had voted against it. But the majority had been secured and the first federal election was to be held in two years’ time. And somewhere along the line, in the few short weeks since the referendum, the Premier’s government had been swept aside and Mr Lyne—about whom no one had heard very much at all during the referendum—was the new Premier, though how this had occurred, or why, most people in the colony could not say. For there had been no election, yet a number of important men in parliament now sat in different seats to those they had occupied in June, and a number held quite different offices and some held no office at all. Such was the life of the politician.