I arrived at Messrs. Partington, Pilkington, Purblind and Hush’s chambers in Bridge Street exactly one minute before my appointment with Mr. Hush, who, from what his incredibly snooty secretary said, ordinarily does not see clients as late as four o’clock. I apologised for inconveniencing Mr. Hush—what a wonderful thing it is to be hospital trained! If the garbageman lectured me about a dent in the lid of my can, I would put my hands behind my back, stand to attention and apologise. It’s so much easier than attempting things like justification or excuse. The incredibly snooty secretary was delighted at my response, gave me a cat’s anus sort of smile, all puckered up, and told me to sit and wait. Law firms, I realised, are in the amateur league compared to hospitals. If I had half an hour to play with, I could have Miss Hoojar jumping through hoops. Interesting that law firms run on spinsters too. Where would the professional world be without them? And what’s going to happen when my generation, so much more married, takes over? There’ll be private secretaries and department heads trying to cope with sick kids and defaulting husbands as well as the work. Oooooo-aa!
Mr. Hush looks like a butcher. Big and beefy, with purple grog blossoms all over his nose. Right, I decided after one look, cut every scrap of fat out of the meat, skin off the tendons, and give him nothing but good red muscle. I launched into my story without a single unnecessary word, stripped it of all its colour and flavour, and ended by saying, “I want custody of Flo, Mr. Hush.”
He was terrifically impressed by all this crisp logic—don’t tell me I can’t handle men!
“Some personal particulars first, Miss Purcell. You are of age? You work?”
“I’m twenty-two and I’m a qualified X-ray technician.”
“Can you afford what might be an expensive exercise?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So you have private means.”
“No, sir. I have enough saved to meet the legal costs.”
“Your answer indicates that you have no source of income other than your job of work. Is that correct?”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered, deflating rapidly.
“Are you married? Engaged to be married?”
“No, sir,” I whispered. I knew where he was going.
“Hmmmm.” He tapped his teeth with a pencil.
He then proceeded to tell me that there were three kinds of custody—adoption, guardianship, and the offer of a foster home. “Frankly, Miss Purcell, you would not qualify for any of the three alternatives,” he said, wielding his cleaver impersonally. “In this state, considerable research has not revealed one instance of custody of a child being awarded to an unmarried, working woman with no blood kinship. Your youth also predicates against custody. Perhaps it would be wiser to abandon your quest right now.”
Fresh iron entered my soul, I glared at him fiercely. “No, I will not!” I snapped. “Flo belongs to me, it’s what her mother would have wanted. I don’t care what I have to do to get Flo back, and that’s honest. But I will get her back! I will, I will!”
He leaped up from behind his desk, came around it and bent to kiss my hand! “Oh, what a bonny battler you are, Miss Purcell!” he cried. “This is going to be tremendous fun! I do like shaking the foundations of institutions! Now tell me the rest, because there is a lot more, isn’t there?”
I told him as much of the rest as I thought prudent. Yes, I liked him, but not enough to hand over information about soothsaying and breastfeeding. Just about the bank books, the deeds to what seemed the whole of 17 Victoria Street, the lack of documents of any kind from wedding certificates to birth certificates to taxation returns. He loved it so much that he turned even more butcherish. I could see his mind working out a new recipe for sausage made of Child Welfare officials.
So we left it that Mr. Hush would take a personal interest in items like the search for a will, the effort to trace relatives, the Public Trustee, and any or all parties who might come sniffing around on the trail of truffles like a rather large and possibly illicit fortune.
Thus went my first brush with a law firm, if not with the Law. Between Willie’s withdrawal syndrome, Norm, Merv and detectives investigating murder, I must have considerably more experience of the Law than most girls my age who aren’t on the game.
It hadn’t occurred to me that the people with power over Flo would consider me an unsuitable custodian. That my age, my need to work to live and my unmarried state completely overrode abstracts like love. Which just goes to show how dense I am. The clues were all there in those women from the Child Welfare, more concerned with shoes than love. No, that’s wrong. Equating shoes with love.
All I know is that if I don’t get Flo home, she’ll die. Fade away, leaving those with power over her wondering what on earth had happened. Because they genuinely wouldn’t know.