Swords and Crowns and Rings, page 41
She was nervous as she walked once more up the grubby, askew top-end of Elizabeth Street, full of sunshine and rumbling traffic. She went to the salon, where Claudie and Iris would be at this time of day, and was bewildered to find that it had vanished. In its place was a Chinese grocery shop.
She went across to the house. It seemed different. The minuscule garden was full of dead grass, garbage, and paper blown in from the street.
She knocked, the door cracked open, and she saw a pitiless dark eye, a downy yellow ear.
‘Is Mrs List still here?’ she asked. ‘Or Mrs Pauley?’
‘Gone away, gone away!’ shouted a furious voice and the door whacked shut abruptly. She stood a moment, thinking, both puzzled and at a loss, and a voice said, ‘Ay!’
She had never seen the man next door at close quarters, but he had recognised her at once. He was an elderly shiftworker, peevish and bleached.
‘’Ere,’ he said, ‘wasn’t you next door there for a bit some munce back?’
‘Yes,’ she admitted. ‘I haven’t been in touch. I...didn’t know Mrs List didn’t live here any more.’
His eyes glistened. ‘Then you don’t know what happened? Come in ’ere and sit on the gas-box and I’ll tell yer.’
Shrinking, Dorothy listened. He told the story of Virgie’s visiting three or four times, punctuating it with righteous cries of ‘Serve ’em right! Keep low company and you end up in the gutter—good place for’um, specially that vicious little madam. Nearly dragged me out the winder on me bonce, she did one night.’
It seemed that Claudie had become hysterical, Virgie had forced her way into the house; when Iris had tried to keep her out, Virgie had smashed a bottle on the step and attacked Iris with it.
‘Blood! Gawd! All over the veranda it was—turn a man up. And that big drunken hooer carrying on like a mad wrestler: Jack Dempsey wasn’t in it. Took four cops to get her in the wagon, and one of them took a jab in the shoulder. I tell yer I was glad I wasn’t on the night shift, I wouldn’ta missed it for ten quid.’
‘Was...was Mrs Pauley badly hurt?’ asked Dorothy.
‘I dunno. They took her to St Vincent’s. And the dumpy one, Mrs List, she come back a week later and took away her furniture and everything. Not a word to any of us, oh, no! Them in there now, they’re Assyrians, bloody cannibal lot. Killed a sheep in the backyard last Sunday. Ah, ugly!’
Dorothy excused herself and went away. She caught a tram down to the Nation office and looked the case up in the newspaper files. It was much as the neighbour had said. Virgie had been tried and sentenced to two years for assault with a deadly weapon. Iris’s injuries had been facial.
Dorothy was aghast. She felt that she was a catalyst, bringing changes and disaster. Wherever she went. But in time her good sense reasserted itself. Claudie’s reaction to her older sister was none of her fault, neither was Iris’s protective instinct towards Claudie. Yet Dorothy was bitterly aware of the deficiencies of her conduct while she was with the two women.
Some years later she was waiting for a tram at Circular Quay when she noticed Iris amongst the crowds pouring off the Manly ferry wharf.
Iris’s face was scarred and puckered across one cheek and down her neck. She wore an upturned hat, and seemed to make no effort to hide her face. She looked calm and pleasant, a little more matronly and heavy than when Dorothy had seen her last.
By the hand she held a plump fair-haired girl of three or four, dressed up like a doll. Dorothy was thunderstruck by the little one’s resemblance to herself. There was no doubt, this must be a child of Claudie’s. As she gazed, Iris lifted the little girl and, holding her most tenderly, hurried across to the tram stop.
Dorothy was at first shaken by this unexpected occurrence, but gradually pleasure filled her mind. She thought again and again of Iris’s protective gesture, the absorbed look on her marred face, the air of happiness that surrounded her.
She told Clara, and the old woman nodded sweetly, saying, ‘Perhaps they needed you to happen in their lives.’ But she was tipsy that day, and Dorothy smiled and paid no attention to her remark.
The self-disgust that Dorothy felt after she had visited Strawberry Hills did much to stiffen her resistance to her mother, who brought Olwyn to Sydney not long after Bede Moy’s death.
Clara fell to pieces as soon as she had Isobel’s telegram saying that she would spend a week with her mother on her way to London, where she was going to live with her brother Titus.
Australia said downrightly, ‘You can stay sober for a week. You must, Mother. That child Olwyn looks a stickybeak. Sharp as a tack, as well. Do you want Laetitia and Titus to know—about this?’ Clara had snivelled and wailed.
‘It’s not my fault, dear,’ she said tremulously to Australia. ‘I just can’t help it. It was different when your father was alive.’
‘We aren’t blaming you,’ said Australia; ‘but the London mob would be horrified.’ She commanded inexorably, ‘On the wagon while Isobel is here! I mean it, Mother.’
‘I’ll help you, Granny,’ said Dorothy. Clara leant on the girl’s breast and sobbed and wheezed. ‘I can feel my asthma coming on already,’ she whispered.
The truth was that Clara was frightened of Belle, frightened of raised voices, hurt feelings, emotional disturbance. And things turned out as badly as she had feared. The first night, for instance, the shrill voice of the monkey-faced Olwyn; barks, splutters; Mrs Marion up all night with the child’s inhalation tent; breakfast late in the morning; and then Isobel calmly announcing that she was going to take Dorothy to London.
Clara lit an asthma cigarette, holding it self-consciously with tiny golden tongs.
She said, ‘She’s happy here, dear. Why don’t you leave her? Her nerves...’
‘Oh, nonsense!’ said Isobel irritably. ‘Nerves indeed! She hasn’t a sensitive bone in her body. Don’t tell me she cared even about her poor father’s death.’
‘Did you?’ asked Clara sulkily, and then was so terrified at what she had said that she began to cough spasmodically. Isobel walked restlessly about the room, offended by the sight of her mother, stout, shuddering old wreck, with a doughy face that looked as if it had once belonged to someone with a larger skull. Clara’s vulgar bog origins were there to be read on that subsided face, and Isobel felt that in some way this was an impertinence.
Clara, in her turn, looked furtively at her youngest daughter, so striking in her mourning, courageous and iron-willed as ever. And her heart began to wallop sickeningly.
Isobel said, ‘Mama, I must take Dorothy with me. You must see that there are so many advantages for her in London.’
But Clara could not see anything except a future without Dorothy to lean on and laugh with. Her lips wobbled; she longed for brandy, sleep, oblivion. She felt uncontrollable panic. ‘I want her to stay, she’s all I’ve got now.’
Isobel, overcoming her impatience, stroked the thin flat coils of her mother’s granite-coloured hair. ‘Dearest, don’t you want to see Dorothy well and happily married?’
‘Not every girl wants to be married,’ muttered old Clara hopelessly. ‘Look at Australia. She’s very content as she is.’ And she burst out crying, for she had never thought that Australia was content at all.
‘Oh, dear Lord,’ she sobbed, ‘I’m selfish, that’s what I am. Just thinking of myself. You’ll have to leave it to Dorothy.’
Leave it to Dorothy? Isobel could have laughed at the old lady’s simplicity.
‘I’ve got myself all upset, dear,’ Clara said pathetically. ‘Would you ring for Mrs Marion?’
The housekeeper tenderly assisted the old woman from the room. ‘You need a rest, Madam dear,’ Isobel heard her say.
‘Oh, Mrs Marion,’ said Isobel, ‘please ask Miss Dorothy to come to the drawing-room, will you?’
As she went out the door, Clara turned and cried with infantile spleen: ‘And when her father died she cried for a week!’
Isobel waited. She thought how little she and her elder daughter had said to each other the previous evening, when Australia and Dorothy and a manservant had met the travellers at Central Station, fatigued and travel-stained in spite of their sleeping compartment. Olwyn had looked like a plucked sparrow, hideous in her black, Isobel had to admit. Her tall sister, on the other hand, had in six months changed from a gawky heron to a woman. The girl’s hair had ripened in colour; she moved with a touching grace.
On the way to Jackaman Court, sitting side by side as they were, Dorothy had scarcely uttered a word; but Isobel had caught the girl looking at her shyly, as though she were a stranger.
Now it was morning and time to get things straight. Dorothy entered the room, kissed her mother. Her head was not bent as it might have been a year before. She sat still, looking at her mother warily. Isobel smiled charmingly.
‘Oh, Cushie,’ she said, ‘we’ve had our troubles, you and I. We’ve been estranged perhaps. I’ve said harsh things, I know, but you’ll never understand a mother’s distress when such things happen. But there—the bad times are behind us now. Let us be friends, darling.’
‘Of course we are friends, Mama.’
Isobel patted her hand lovingly. She began to speak of London’s pleasures and sights, balls at Aunt Laetitia’s gorgeous house, trips to the Continent, the Alps, down the Rhine.
‘Isn’t it exciting? You will be such a success, Cushie, for I must admit you have turned into what poor dear Daddy would have called a peach.’ She sighed mournfully, and in that second of near-silence Dorothy said, ‘I’m staying here, Mama.’
‘No, darling. We’re sailing on the twenty-second.’
‘I hope you and Olwyn do go Home, Mama. It will be lovely for you. But I’m not going.’
‘Don’t be absurd, dear. You belong with me and your sister.’
Dorothy shook her head.
A bright rose stained Isobel’s cheeks. ‘My dear, may I point out that you are only nineteen. I still have authority over you—and your income.’
‘I don’t care, Mother...’
Isobel flew into an imperious rage. ‘How dare you defy me? Haven’t I suffered enough because of you? And now you want to bury yourself here with an old woman. Grandmother will become feeble, will be bedridden, you’ll have no social life, you’ll be an old maid!’
‘Oh, Mother, I don’t mind any of those things. I love Granny. I feel that this is my home.’
Isobel straightened her back. ‘You are coming to London, Dorothy.’
‘How will you make me, Mother?’
For some time Iosbel felt profoundly diminished by her defeat. She did not let her feelings show on her face. She carried it off well, smiling, saying, ‘She’s such a sentimental little ninny, you know, Adela. Adores her Grandmamma. You should have seen her face when I suggested she stay, just till Olwyn and I get settled in London! Silly little thing! So happy. I felt that it might be for the best...she’s highly strung, you know.’
‘She looks as strong as an ox to me,’ observed Adela, in her magisterial tone. She still thought she was speaking to natives, though she and her husband were now home in Sydney for good.
Not Adela, nor Anna, that venomous mosquito of an elder sister, guessed Isobel’s real feelings. Her face remained serene, her voice sweet, but she bled. She knew that Cushie understood that she was fighting for her life, the life she would have had if she had not married Bede Moy and borne his unsatisfactory children. That was the secret affront, that this daughter of Bede’s understood and pitied her because she had wasted her life.
Cushie had gone beyond her reach. An inexplicable pang went through her. For a moment she thought she must be ill, she was so cold. But looking about her she saw that it was a bright warm day. It was just that the years before her appeared like the frigid slopes of an unknown mountain, its peak cloud-hidden.
For Dorothy her love for her mother had changed. It was no longer demanding. Once she had felt that she would wither, die, because her love was not reciprocated as she needed it to be. She knew now that to love was the significant thing.
When the Moys sailed on the twenty-second, it was Olwyn whom Dorothy regretted, the tart little creature whose affection she had never done anything to deserve.
‘You’re doing the right thing, Cushie,’ she had said, ‘I must say I have my doubts about Uncle Titus. Something rather disagreeable there. However, I shall outgrow him. But London’s for me, I think.’
Already, by the time they left Sydney, Isobel was referring to the sophisticated child as une belle laide, born to be chic, one of those girls who set the style, become the rage. But Dorothy could see that Olwyn had thought of this long before her mother did.
That had been in 1925. And now it was 1931, and Dorothy was sitting beside the fire in what had become her own drawing-room, opposite her grandmother’s unoccupied chair. Mrs Marion came in quietly, said, ‘Time you went to bed, Miss Dorothy. You’ll be going out early in the morning again?’
‘Why, yes, Mrs Marion. There’ve never been so many people waiting as there are now.’
Her bedroom was now the French room. It was piercingly chill up there on the roof; the cold struck through the windows like lances. There was a hot-water bottle in her bed, but she could not sleep.
She had put delicate French furniture into the room, buying it cheaply at an auction room full of treasures from bankrupt estates. She wondered who had owned it, or if Ottilie had had similar furnishings. Ottilie, too, had lived here during a great Slump which almost destroyed the young colonies. Joey Jackaman would have ruthlessly cut staff, turned his older domestic servants into the street, told the others that the same fate awaited them if they didn’t work longer and harder. Joey was an opportunist; he would have turned the eighties slump to his own advantage. Probably he had made Ottilie do without her carriage, chopped her dress allowance in half.
Dorothy was twenty-five and in the family was already regarded as an old maid. Only that day at luncheon Aunt Adela’s ridiculous pot of a husband, retired from the Indian civil service, had bumbled at her, ‘Don’t expect you to remain long in maiden blessedness, m’dear! The news will soon get around about the Mater’s will.’
Aunt Adela had stabbed him with a look like a needle, and Dorothy replied neutrally, ‘Nothing can be done about Granny’s will until Uncle Titus arrives from England.’
‘Oh, quite, quite,’ muttered Aunt Adela’s husband, and went on to talk portentously about the new firebrand in Germany, the leader of the National Socialists who, in the Reichstag elections of September 1930, had emerged as a major party, with 107 seats as against their previous dozen.
‘That Austrian blackguard will topple Hindenburg yet,’ he pronounced. ‘At least the old man is an aristocrat; he has the right to the Von, you know.’
‘Say what you will about Herr Hitler,’ cried Aunt Anna in her uncommonly bitter tone. ‘But what about this beast in our own State, this Lang, this Bolshevik, who has had the gall to repudiate!’
‘Interest on British bonds!’ buzzed Anna.
Anna’s military husband, who could turn his face red at will, turned it red: ‘And announces that he is going to do it again, the scoundrel!’
There was a hush at the blasphemy, broken only by the agitated tinkle of a Waterford wine-glass against Aunt Adela’s gold tooth.
Dorothy, who had been abstracted and bored through the meal, looked at them closely. People of straw. She could almost see it sticking out through the nostrils of Aunt Adela’s husband, as if he’d been a mummy.
She could just imagine Jackie Hanna taking him off, his bogus English accent, carefully acquired in some inferior Calcutta club, the lip, the nostrils constantly on the move as if the straw itched.
She asked, ‘Why not?’
‘Why not? Why not repudiate bondholders’ interest?’
Aunt Anna’s husband outdid himself, turning ruby. The air was full of agitated talk, to each other, themselves, scarcely to the girl at all. Dishonour. Mother Country. All we owe. Hardly hold my head up. Bounder. Foundation of whole monetary system. Only young woman. Can’t expect. We’ll all be ruined. If this goes on. The newspaper. The Shop. Australia so foolish. So obstinate. Bonds. Shares. Terrible times.
‘Yes,’ said Dorothy. ‘But Mr Lang is not repudiating interest payment. He is postponing it because of the slump.’
‘You know nothing about it!’ snapped Aunt Adela.
‘Yes, I do,’ replied her niece. ‘I read. I go to meetings. I listen.’
‘Dishonourable behaviour—shocking,’ said Aunt Anna’s husband. ‘The nation’s name will be mud.’
‘But, Uncle Austen,’ protested his niece, ‘England’s name wasn’t mud when she accepted Mr Hoover’s moratorium on war debts. And it wasn’t mud when the American government gave her reduced interest rates on her own war debts. Surely in bad times like these everyone requires negotiation? And that’s what Mr Lang has asked for.’
The clatter broke out again, drowning her. Only young woman. Can’t expect. Mother Country. Bounder. All be ruined. The newspaper. The Shop. Bonds. Shares. Terrible.
Aunt Anna’s husband, now pale, shouted, ‘The fellow’s a communist.’
‘But he isn’t,’ cried Dorothy. ‘The communists hate him. They say so.’
‘He’s a National Socialist then, like that blighter Hitler!’
The man looked as if he were about to have a seizure, so Dorothy subsided into silence.
Aunt Adela’s husband commented disparagingly on the cricket season, and gradually Uncle Austen came back on the rails. But once, in the middle of the other man’s anecdote about Cartwright’s rotten show in Bombay, actually when the Viceroy was present, Uncle Austen said to his wife in a hoarse whisper, ‘It’s the principle of the thing, the principle!’
After that he regained his normal colour, leaning back and gazing around the table complacently. He had defended the god.
They departed immediately after luncheon, Aunt Adela skewering Dorothy with a stare hitherto reserved for sweepers.
‘Live and learn, my dear,’ she uttered. ‘Dear Titus will straighten out some of your modern ideas.’
