The Corunda Base Hospital Board didn’t fare nearly as well at Dr. Burdum’s hands as did the nurses or the four new sisters, though by the time he convened it a week into September, its members knew they were in for a marathon session and might even be made to feel a trifle—well, uncomfortable. That it would turn out to be (metaphorically, at any rate) bloodier and more exhausting than the Anzac attack on Gallipoli during the Great War was not to be credited—until after it was over, that is.
Said the Reverend Thomas Latimer, still gasping, to his wife, “The man stripped us of every last vestige of pride, honor, public approbation, and self-respect! Maude, we stood, shamefully and nakedly exposed, for all Corunda to see—the man insisted the meeting be thrown open to anyone who wanted to attend, so all the medical consultants Frank kept off the Board were there, old Tom Burdum was there—Monsignor O’Flaherty was there!”
As seventy-year-old Monsignor O’Flaherty of St. Anthony’s Catholic church always called the Hospital Board “Frank Campbell’s twelve weasels,” this last witness was bitterest of all; Catholics might be poorer, but in Corunda they had the numbers.
The Board was entirely Frank Campbell’s creation, that was inarguably true, despite its charter clearly saying that the Mayor, the Town Clerk, and the Church of England Rector must be members of it. If they commenced in a spirit of reform looking and sounding like lions, Frank hammered them into the properly flawless weasels he demanded. Had his daughters only known what went on at a Board meeting, they would have understood why Daddy was as big a weasel as the rest: no one defied Frank Campbell!
The only medical man it contained was Frank Campbell himself; then came the charter-stipulated Mayor, Town Clerk, and Rector, and after them, eight men as thoroughly weasel by nature as conditioning. They were all proprietors of local businesses—butcher, baker, grocer, draper, ironmonger, blacksmith/garageman, produce merchant, and “the egg man,” who batteried a shed full of White Orpington hens plus one tired rooster. Weasel reward was exclusively supplying Corunda Base with low cost, low quality goods, from the draper’s sheets to the egg man’s oldest poultry products. No one made his fortune supplying the hospital, but all the vendors had found the cheapest source, and knew to the last towel or egg what amount Frank would buy.
Examination of the books had convinced Charles Burdum that he could do far better by the hospital’s funds than simply letting a bank use them, but it wasn’t that which imbued him with an urgent, powerful zeal to wrest control away from the Board. With Dr. Campbell dead, four million pounds sat nakedly at the mercy of a rudderless bunch of weasels. At this moment they were still reeling from the shock of a death considered impossible; even God didn’t want Frank Campbell! But the shock would dissipate quickly from now on, and some bolder weasels be tempted to steal the funds. It wasn’t hard!
Therefore, Charles had to take the money away from the Board now, at once, before the weasels had even begun to think of rallying and joining together. The funds needed properly looking after, and that was not the duty of a board but of financial managers. No one on the old Board, including Frank Campbell, had honestly known what to do with four million pounds, which had simply sat in various savings banks earning pathetically low rates of interest.
What Charles intended to do was crying out to be done: invest the money in companies and institutions called “blue chip”—a way of saying that if such companies and institutions failed, the race of Man would be so blighted that even the wheel would have to be reinvented. Corunda Base’s money must be safe and must earn!
His primary task was obvious: to rebuild the hospital entirely, and equip it with the most modern diagnostic and maintenance apparatus, then staff it with the best people he could recruit. Despite the long traipses a shed/ramp design meant, it also meant no stairs, steps, or elevator/lifts. For Charles had seen enough hospitals to have learned their greatest lesson: no matter what their design, there was always a huge amount of walking to do.
With all this and much else roiling inside his head, Charles went to battle against the Board, throwing the meeting open, including to the Corunda Post, a weekly newspaper not to be sneezed at, and the city’s consultant physicians and surgeons, not to mention Dr. Liam Finucan and Matron Newdigate. Among other mysterious trips to Sydney had been one that saw him take the Minister for Health out to dinner after a late afternoon discussion in the Minister’s parliamentary chambers. Thus Charles was empowered to fire the present Board and review the hospital’s charter; the Minister had been relative putty after he learned of Corunda Base’s wealth and was made to see that he couldn’t garnish its funds for his own department, in constant need of money. It did mean, however, that Corunda Base could be brought into being as a showcase hospital whose cost to the State would be minimal. A bargain was struck.
One other factor drove Charles to be quick about controlling the funds, but it wasn’t anything he could put his finger on; it was purely a feeling (shared by a few London colleagues) telling him that some financial evil was brewing worldwide. Its nature, he couldn’t for the life of him divine; but somewhere, in the tangled jungles of money markets and far too many investors, an unspeakable beast was grimly stalking anonymous prey—a shadow, a phantom—yet not, Charles was sure, a figment of his imagination. It was there and it was real, said some few colleagues too, which meant he had to have Corunda Base’s money safe in his care.
One metaphorical Gallipoli, and it was accomplished; faced with a knowledge of the financial world they couldn’t begin to rival, and understanding that, if necessary, Charles Burdum would take them through the courts all the way to the Privy Council, the Board crumbled in disorder. Eleven weasels found themselves dismissed, and none, including the Rector, was reappointed. It turned out, in an odd way, to benefit Corunda businesses far above expectation, as Charles Burdum informed the locals that he would call for tenders in all matters relating to hospital supply, and that in future supplies would be of good quality rather than the sweepings off the floor. Local firms were encouraged to tender.
There would be no Religious whatsoever on the Board, nor any prejudice, let alone bigotry, against any person on grounds of race, creed, or other. So, much to his astonishment, Bashir Maboud, who ran a general store in the Trelawneys, found himself the only retailer on the new Board, for all that he was a Catholic Lebanese; according to Charles, who (most undemocratically, in which he was just like Frank Campbell) chose the Board members, Bashir was an Australian by right of birth and education, and as a general storekeeper knew a great deal about the people of ordinary Corunda.
Dr. Erich Herzen, Dr. Ian Gordon, Dr. Dennis Faraday, and Dr. Ned Mason, all town medical practitioners, now joined the Board, as did Dr. Liam Finucan and Matron Gertrude Newdigate. The manager of the local branch of the Great Western Stores, the president of the Corunda Pastoralists’ Society, the most senior among the stock-and-station agents, and the head of the Corunda Historical Society formed the nonmedical minority, from which it might be deduced that no one on the Board would give the Chairman of the Board, Dr. Charles Burdum, any arguments about how to manage hospital moneys. Totalling twelve members, it was an absolutely local affair whose membership would be reviewed as necessary, at the Chairman’s say-so.
The formalities that handed Corunda Base’s funds over to this new Board were completed early in October of 1929; Charles Burdum sat back with a sigh of profound relief. The four million was now invested shrewdly, but with extreme conservatism, at the sole dictate of the Chairman, who retained all financial powers. Of his reasons or his reservations he spoke not one word, nor was his wisdom queried; Charles didn’t ride roughshod over other opinions; such was not his way. Instead, he explained every decision he made in minute detail, and encouraged a healthy debate he wasn’t usually offered. Trust and knowledge said he was right. Paid no membership fees, the new Board received its charter halfway through October.
In mid-October, Charles held a dinner for the medical men, Matron Newdigate and Bashir Maboud, though no spouses were asked. He hired a room of suitable size at the Grand Hotel, but had the meal catered by a firm from Sydney; only the size of the fee reconciled the Grand Hotel to this insult, but as its manager was a pragmatist, he had to admit his own cooks couldn’t hope to emulate the menu: Beluga caviar, a sorbet, poached flounder, and a pinkish Chateaubriand with the sauce of the same name that takes three days to make. Since it was high spring, the dessert was perfectly ripe strawberries, lightly whipped cream optional.
He broached the subject over the aperitif drinks, knowing it would carry them through all the leisurely courses and beyond to after-dinner drinks and coffee. As always, Gertie Newdigate thrived on being the only woman, too wise to thrust her sex under a man’s nose, but enjoying the chance to wear lipstick and a dress that didn’t creak from starch. Liam knew what was in the wind, no one else; they sat in comfortable chairs, eyes fixed on Charles.
“We’re going to rebuild the hospital,” he said, “and this dinner is my way of introducing all of you to what will be a great undertaking beneath the Board’s shield. Understand, however, that it will be a gradual process, not begun next week, perhaps even not next year. I’m bringing all of you in so early because I don’t want an architect’s idea of a hospital, I want a doctor’s. Bashir, you’re here because you represent a patient’s idea of the hospital. Is everybody with me?”
The exchanged glances and murmurs were joyous; every pair of eyes was shining.
“On the surface it won’t be much different—long, single-storied buildings with verandahs so a patient’s bed can be wheeled out for some sun, or fresh air, or a look at the gardens—joined by ramps that will be completely covered. The site is level, and we’ll always adhere to the rule of no steps. When the level does change, the ramp will slope gently over a long distance. Yes, it means those irritating trudges, but it’s healthy and I’m going to have little open cars powered by batteries for those who need transporting, including visitors.” He caught Liam’s eye. “Liam?”
“Wooden on stone piers, Charlie?”
“No, brick on whatever foundations are to hand—we won’t waste the limestone blocks. I want cavity-brick construction to make it easier to heat in winter and cool in summer, so the roofs will be terra-cotta tiles insulated with tar paper and good, well-ventilated attics. Unfortunately the nurses’ home is already on its way to completion, but at least Frank Campbell put it at the back of the grounds, and we’ll do what we can with it later.”
He spied the head waiter standing in the doorway, a signal that dinner was being served, and helped Matron from her chair. “We can continue in our little dining room,” he said, leading the way, the rest trooping behind.
“The important thing,” he said a long time later, over cognac or liqueurs, coffee or tea, “is to understand that as the building goes on, the hospital continues to function. Which means that it will all take place over time, and that should conserve our assets. Where possible, we’ll fund from interest rather than from capital. We shouldn’t forget either that we have State moneys as a public hospital, and I see from the hospital’s books that Frank Campbell was a ruthless collector of debt. The Almoner had a hard fight to get an impoverished patient cleared of his debts. That, candidly, is a disgrace. Were it not for the efforts of Corunda’s churches and private charities, people here would have been denied what I consider a basic right—hospital care. Oh, don’t think it doesn’t happen in Great Britain! It does.”
Listening, Liam Finucan sat grinning from ear to ear. Well done, Charlie! They were all with him, Bashir Maboud most of all.
At midnight, returning to the cottage on hospital grounds he now called home, Liam found Tufts waiting, eager to hear what had gone on, and determined that he wasn’t going to escape without today’s ration of having his hair brushed.
“How did you know a cuppa was what I needed to settle my belly after so much rich food?” he asked, blowing on his tea, which he took without milk or sugar, and very strong.
“What was the menu?”
“Russian caviar, bland fish, an incredibly delicious filet of beef with a tarragonny sauce, and strawberries.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” she said, attacking his black hair. “I ate hospital shepherd’s pie with watery cabbage.”
“Get away with you, Heather, you know Charlie’s doing wonders for this place. It was brilliant to drop the news about the new hospital on the medical segment of his Board over a dinner that must have cost him a fortune. St. Patrick and the snakes, how they did enjoy it! I thought Gertie was going to swoon over the beef.”
“Bully for Charlie,” Tufts said, brushing hard. Liam grabbed at the brush. “No more, Heather, please! My scalp must be lacerated.”
“Sook! Your scalp is perfect. What revived Gertie?”
“The strawberries. I do believe she’d die for Charlie. In fact, he has what I believe is called a fan club.”
“Yes, he has a fan club.” She sighed. “I just wish my silly sister would either join it wholeheartedly, or cut him dead. Her vacillations are driving the rest of us around the bend.”
“Luckily she’s your problem, not mine.” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Now the skin’s stopped smarting, I must admit it’s wonderful not to be blinded by hair.”
“I rejoice for you, you stubborn old Ulsterman.”
The door opened on a knock and Dr. Ned Mason walked in. “I knew I could smell a pot of tea! Tufts, delight of my heart, does Liam have another cup to spare for a glutted and slightly nauseated old obstetrician?”
It appeared on the desk in front of him as he sat down. “I had a feeling Tufts would be brewing you a pot of tea. Why do you always call her Heather?”
Liam looked surprised. “Do I? I suppose it’s the name my mind thinks of when I think of her. It was a rich meal, though.”
Ned Mason nodded. “Disturbed your routines, did it, Liam? You and Tufts are two faces on the same clock.”
“Why are you here, Ned?”
“Winnie Joe skated on her water at about the time the strawbs were served, and of course Winnie Bert didn’t take any notice. But Winnie Jack did, and promptly developed angina pains,” Ned Mason said.
“Why are all the Johnston women named Winnie?” Liam asked.
Tufts grimaced. “Daddy says his mind slips into the same old sprocket whenever a girl is born—Silas Johnston, I mean. The name on the sprocket is Winifred. When each girl married, she tacked on her husband’s name to distinguish her, as childhood names didn’t work any more. Did you sort the Winnies out, Ned?”
“I hope so, given that there’s no midwife on duty in the Labor Ward tonight—some domestic disaster befell her. I left Winnie Joe there in a trainee’s terrified hands, put Winnie Jack in Casualty and sent Winnie Bert looking in the pubs for Joe.”
“I’m a midwife, Ned,” said Tufts, getting up. “It’s my night for a pedicure, but feet can wait. Babies don’t. If you need me, I am yours the minute you finish your tea.”
“Bless you, Tufts, I can certainly use you!” He drained his cup. “I feel better already. After Perkins Saline, nothing settles a tummy like hot, black tea. Coal-tar tea, Charlie calls it.”
The pair went out into the balmy night, leaving Liam to wash the teacups and put away his pedicure kit. Heather was right; feet waited, babies didn’t. Why did Charlie serve such rich meals?
One aspect of Hospital Board financial doings had forced Charles to postpone certain plans he cherished, and that was the time they gulped so greedily. Until things were properly tidied up, he had neglected Kitty disgracefully. When finally he leafed through his calendar, he was appalled to learn that he hadn’t really seen her in two weeks. What attentions he had paid her were hurried and perfunctory—a smile in passing, a few words on the hop, two better opportunities missed.
“Have dinner with me at my home, unchaperoned,” he said to her.
It came out of the blue, striking her as conceited, cocksure, conquering. “Certainly,” she said, a child across her left hip as she stood in the doorway of Children’s. “When?”
“Tonight?”
“Thank you, tonight suits me well.”
“Then I’ll call for you at your door at six tonight.”
“Thank you.” She turned away, smiling—for the child, not for Charlie.
This time she wore organdy printed in various shades of pink, with pink accessories, and actively displeased him. “You look like fairground spun sugar,” he said, his nostrils pinched, his eyes rather dull.
She grimaced. “You’ve just echoed Edda on my appearance, only she was less polite. She says my mother influences me too much.”
“You could do with some of Edda’s style,” he said clinically.
“Slinkier, you mean?” she asked, unoffended.
“No, just more tailored. Short stature doesn’t lend itself to frills and excessive femininity.”
Little wonder she said nothing as they drove up Catholic Hill. Finally, and perhaps thinking the evening was getting off to a bad start, he said, “Why on earth is it called Catholic Hill, since St. Anthony’s is off the Trelawneys?”
“Because our English colonial overlords were violently anti-Catholic, and apportioned the first urban or municipal land grants,” said Kitty, glad she could display a little knowledge. “The Church of England always got the best land, and the Catholic Church the worst. But towns have a habit of growing, so the Church of England grants gradually became too small and too slummy, while the Catholic bits, usually on top of hills, grew more valuable. The idea had been to make the Catholics plod up hills to go to church, but what the overlords forgot is that with hills come incomparable views. The best illustration of the phenomenon,” she said, warming to her theme, “is in Sydney. St. Andrew’s Cathedral, home of the Church of England, cowers on a wee postage stamp of land literally rubbing sandstone shoulders with the far more impressive Town Hall, plus the office towers and traffic, while St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral sits on a glorious natural eminence surrounded by parks and gardens, has a superb view, and relative quiet. When the land was deeded, it was animal pasture and shanties on the outskirts of town.”
“A cautionary tale,” he said, laughing. “Interesting, how human prejudices can end in biting the bigot on the rear end.” He turned into the gates of Burdum House. “The name is Catholic Hill, but I gather the Catholic Church doesn’t own it.”
“No, it provided the funds to build St. Anthony’s, a handsome and roomy edifice, as well as the two Catholic schools. Old Tom Burdum had leased the very top on the understanding that if the Church sold it, he’d have first refusal.”
“So you end in knowing more about my house than I do!”
On the imposing but plainly Doric portico Kitty now witnessed for the first time how cannily old Tom Burdum had chosen the site of a house he had, when he built it, looked forward to filling with the magical life children give their home. Oh, poor old man, to have had but one son and one daughter, neither, in his lights, a satisfactory child. The daughter, a wild harum-scarum, had run away with a handsome no-hoper before she turned nineteen, and stuck to him like a burr to a fleece. The son, years older than the girl, had vanished to parts unknown while the girl, Jack Thurlow’s mother, was still a toddler. The boy, Henry, had been the child of old Tom’s first wife; the girl, Mary, was Hannah’s child.
So the house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity of round towers, huge windows and steeply sloping roofs, had never been a home. It stood in ten acres on the flat top of Catholic Hill’s six-hundred-foot bulk, and looked not toward the district of Corunda in its broad and fertile river valley. Instead, it looked north toward the mighty red-cliffed gorges and illimitable forests of the dissected plateau that hemmed Sydney around. Oh, how beautiful! thought Kitty: vast distances coated in thin blue mist, the wind-tossed leaves of a million-million trees a massive sigh from just one throat, the hint of impish mirth in white-water streams, and the groaning crimson weight of so much rock oozing bloodlike, everything delineated by the hand of a master.
“I wish I were a poet,” she said, soaking it in. “Now I know why you wanted me here so early. The light is perfect for my first glimpse of this incredible landscape.”
“It takes some beating,” he said in quiet satisfaction, “and I’ve done my share of travelling.”
Inside, the mansion’s Victorian roots showed glaringly, not a prospect that could cheer a homemaker up, she thought wryly.
“The place has to be gutted,” he said, leading her to a room he had made into a kind of sitting area, though the furniture was old and uncomfortable and, she suspected, the nearest toilet might be in the backyard. On that, he could cheer her.
“There wasn’t any sort of sewerage, so before I moved in, I had one of the new septic systems installed, and put in some good lavatories and bathrooms. There’s an oil-burning furnace coming by ship from San Francisco, and a second in case one isn’t enough—like the British, I notice that Australians don’t central heat, and I imagine that Corunda in winter is cold, from my brief taste of it.” Choosing to sit a little distance from her, where he could see her well, he sat with his Scotch of choice—a squirt of soda but no ice—and contrived to make his eyes the same color as his liquor. “I’m not going to batter you with my plans about what I intend to do after we’re married, except here and now to say that I would hope you’ll make the home of this place old Hannah never did. She’s not my grandmother, so much I know, but if you could tell me a little of my family in Corunda, I’d be grateful.”
Her dimples leaped into being. “Neatly evaded yet stated!” She settled into her chair. “You need good furniture, sir. As to old Hannah and old Tom—well, it’s said the Burdums have had no luck in making a home anywhere, but that’s just Corunda legend, a part of the myth. It was the rubies, really. Treadby found the first ones, about seventy-five years ago, and thought he’d inherited the world. The town gets its name from corundum, which is the mineral that yields rubies and sapphires. Here, just rubies, and the very best—pigeon’s blood in color, some of them starred, all remarkably free from inclusion bodies.” Her face changed. “But you know all this, I should stop.”
“Please don’t,” he said, refilling her sherry glass. “I like the sound of your voice, and you’re that rarity, an intelligent woman. There’s a whole evening to get through, and you surely can’t think I’m so insensitive that I don’t understand it’s awkward?”
“Women are quite as intelligent as men, but they’re reared to think it’s a fault, so they hide it. Daddy never did that to us.” She sighed. “Mama did, without success.”
“Rubies, Kitty,” Charles said gently.
“Oh! Oh, yes, rubies . . . Treadby’s mistake was the typical one of ignorance—having made a fortune from rubies, he didn’t bone up on them, diminish his ignorance. His rubies were the ones lying about in rubble washed down from the gravel beds where they lurk—caves, stream beds, crevices. They lasted a long time. But old Tom Burdum did his homework, and set out to find the major deposits. When he did, he acquired title to the land. And, in the fullness of time, Treadby’s patches dwindled, ran dry, while Burdum rubies continue to be found in regulated quantities. Rumor says £100,000 a year, but you’d know for sure.”
“Do you want to know for sure?” he asked, smiling.
“No,” she said, surprised that he’d ask. “Money is only worth what it can buy you. I can’t conceive of spending a half of that.”
They went to the dining room, where the butler hovered and a maidservant whose face Kitty didn’t know did the actual serving. Lobster quenelles were followed by a sorbet, then roast veal. The presence of staff inhibited Kitty, who enthused about the lobster, then looked at the veal in horror.
“I’m sorry,” she said, staring at her plate, “I can’t eat that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I can’t eat it. It’s oozing blood.”
“It’s veal,” he said blankly.
“It’s bloody,” she said, pushing her plate away.
“Veal has to be eaten underdone.”
“Not by me, it hasn’t.” She smiled bewitchingly. “Have them take it back to the kitchen, shove it in a frying pan, and cook it—please, Charlie. Otherwise I’d sick it up at once.”
“My dear child, I couldn’t do that! My chef would quit!”
“Then may I have a crispy bacon sandwich instead?”
What a business! Flabbergasted, Charles sat wondering how he could have dismissed all those signals semaphored at him since he arrived, including, now he thought about it, the disgracefully overdone Chateaubriand. While he apologized profusely for its pinkness as evidence of overcooking, he understood now his guests had assumed he was apologizing for undercooking! He knew from many meals in Sydney that this issue of cooked meat was far more civilized in Sydney; but these were rural people, and they knew too much about everything from liver flukes to tapeworms.
He beckoned the butler, a Sydney import. “Darkes, ask the chef to make Sister Treadby a dish of bacon and eggs.”
“Make sure the yolks are rock-hard!” she said.
“Name me your favorite meal, or food, Kitty.”
“Crisp bacon on a crunchy fresh white bread roll. Fried sausages and chips. Fish and chips. Lamb cutlets all brown and crunchy on the outside. Roast pork with crackling and roast spuds. And Mama’s butterfly cream cakes,” said Kitty without hesitation. Her eyes shot lavender sparks; she chuckled. “Oh, poor Charlie! Such grand ideas for a marriage, but how can you keep a chef and a wife? Never the twain shall meet!”
“On that diet, you’d be a balloon before you were thirty.”
“Codswallop! I work my arse off, Charles Burdum. It’s not the food that matters, it’s how much of what you eat that you burn up.”
“Why do I love you?” he asked the ugly old chandelier.
“Because, Dr. Burdum, I don’t piss in your pocket like all the other women. You’ve too high an opinion of yourself.”
“Some self-opinions are genuinely earned, and a high one, if based in deeds done and things achieved, is not to be sneered at. You have a low opinion of yourself, the result of too few years on this earth and boundaries far too constricted. In America, they’d call you a hometown girl.”
“In America, they’d call you Little Caesar.”
The eggs and bacon came, but the yolks of her two eggs were runny; she sent it back, with instructions to break the yolks and make sure the whites had browned exteriors. Dismayed and at a loss, Charles witnessed his evening deteriorate into a disaster.
However, she approved of the coffee, taken in the sitting area and without hovering servants.
“You made every mistake possible tonight,” Kitty said then in a friendly voice, “and it’s part of why, I think, Pommies are so disliked. You never consulted me or did any research into my food preferences because you deemed me a provincial ignoramus in sore need of instruction as to the right things to eat in the proper environment. I was supposed to come, be suitably awed, utterly overwhelmed, and pathetically grateful for this evening’s lessons. Your gastronomic judgment was purely financial: if it’s rare and/or costly, it must be better in every way. A bacon roll is so pedestrian: Q.E.D., it cannot compare with a lobster quenelle. I agree, it cannot. It’s far tastier. As for your underdone meats, I see enough blood in the course of my work, I don’t need to see my food bleeding, too. The rarer the meat, the more fat it contains. One of the reasons Man started cooking his meat was to melt away the fat and make the gristle more detectable.” She shrugged. “At least so I learned in nursing school. Do doctors learn different?”
His face had twisted into its gargoyle image, but the thoughts that fed its expression were not of offended pride or pricked conceit; Charles Burdum was wondering if there were anything in the world he could possibly do to make this glorious, peerless woman see him for what he was: a man eminently worthy to be her husband.
“If I gave you unleavened bread to eat and river water to drink, Kitty, it could be no worse than these—er, rare and costly foods, which I offer not to abash you or point up your lack of sophistication, but to show you how rare and costly you are to me.” He kept his voice reasonable and his body relaxed, his eyes telling him that she was still, as the evening neared its end, wary and mistrustful. “Why must you pick and scratch at me?”
She looked suddenly very tired. “I think, Charlie, that it must be my way of trying to get it through your head that I don’t want your attentions. You—you annoy me. I can’t think of another way to put it. You don’t revolt me, or depress me, or any of a thousand strong emotions. You just annoy me, like an eyelash caught and stuck underneath the lid, scratching away,” she said.
“If that be true, why did you come tonight?”
“One more attempt to get at the eyelash.”
“Would you like to go home?”
“Are you going to leave me alone?”
His hands flew out, a gesture pleading her to understand. “I can’t!” he cried. “Kitty, I can’t let it go while you dismiss me so lightly! What can I do to prove how much I love you, to prove that we were meant for each other? I don’t care if I sound silly to you, I love you desperately, I want you for my wife, my one true mate, and somehow I have to get that eyelash out, make both your eyes see I’m the right man for you—”
The hand on the table was a sharp, angry crack, the purple in those eyes flared up hard and hot. “Don’t say silly things to me! Take me home, please. Thank you for an educational meal.”
And that was that. In silence they quit the house, walked to the maroon Packard; he opened her door and settled her.
Down the hill, a stony and wordless waste between them; Kitty looked at what the headlights briefly illuminated—a huge tree trunk, a cluster of bushes, mailboxes toward the bottom, then the overhead lamps of George Street, Victoria Street, and, up ahead, the hospital at last.
This time he wasn’t quick enough; she was out and fleeing up the ramp away from him at the perfect nursing pace: neither a run nor a walk. No fire or hemorrhage, but elude Charles Burdum.
Who returned to Burdum House and sat amid the ruins of what he had planned as an evening of preliminary seduction, sure that no woman could resist the evidence he presented her of time, care, thought, and love. The most delicious food, the best wines, well-trained servants to inform her that when she was his wife, all the messy and irritating jobs would be done by someone else—even the sight of Burdum House’s disarray, crying out for her decorating attention, expense no object.
An annoyance! Someone not important enough to her to dislike—an eyelash! Why that, of all metaphors? Driving you crazy, until you finally washed it away or held it up triumphantly on the corner of a screw of gauze. Oh, thank God, the wretched thing is gone! To be dismissed so lightly, so tritely, so inanely . . .
Wounded to the core, Charles bled from what he assumed was his soul because he lacked the one kind of person in his life who might have disillusioned him—a best friend. The peculiarities of his childhood, isolated from an unstable father, deprived by death of a mother, had set him in stone before he was old enough to go to school. At Eton, at Balliol, at Guy’s, he formed a band of one—himself. His stature, always that of the smallest boy or man in his class, forbade any sort of intimacy; it also shaped a shell of arrogance, unshakable self-confidence, and iron determination to surpass all his bigger, taller peers. Hand in hand with growing maturity came a realization of his ability to charm and dazzle; rather than a moody loner, the fully rounded Dr. Charles Burdum presented as a smooth, charismatic kind of man, of enviably ready wit atop a steel foundation. Such a pity he was so short! Knowing all who met him thought it, Charles hid his frustration and his anger.
He was very aware that a part of the intensity of his love for Kitty lay in her size; no one would laugh at them when seen as a couple, for they were short, yes, but not midgets, and Kitty was as beautiful as Helen of Troy, a universal love object who could marry anyone she pleased of any height. And no Paris lurked within Corunda, so much was sure. If Kitty chose him, he was vindicated.
This wandering, illogical thought process healed, he found; and so it did tonight as he sat with a Scotch, sipping slowly. He was not drunk by any means, simply bitterly disappointed that his overtures of love were so scornfully spurned. Which led him out of the slough of Kitty’s despond, and into another that haunted him even more, since its solution didn’t lie in his hands.
There is some sort of disaster looming, I’ve known it for more than a year, and share it with a very few others. The Bank of England is unsettled, the City of London uneasy. But all of it boils down to rumors. Debt in government is too high and unemployment keeps increasing—in Australia, very much so. The country is economically troubled, and I lay much of that at the door of governmental inexperience. The Commonwealth of Australia is less than thirty years old, and its governments are green as grass.
There are glaring signs. That miners’ lockout on the northern coalfields—a fifteen-year-old shot dead! And the federal government passes too much responsibility to the states, which do not have the power to tax income and are given federal moneys for reasons more political than fair.
Are these actually symptoms of Melbourne’s stranglehold on the nation? Twenty-five years of federal government in Melbourne, with the biggest, most taxable state, New South Wales, playing host to a Canberra only just beginning to function now? This place is the same size as the United States of America, and equally divided, but not equally populated—its people are squeezed into half a dozen vast cities, and rural areas as densely populated as Corunda are rare. I do not understand! But do Australians understand? Their schools seem to teach more British than Australian history, and I don’t know where to go. Corunda is as isolated from central government as Scotland is from London!
A gust of wind blew down the chimney with a roar: Charles jumped, shivered.
How long have I been here, three months? But already Corunda people are looking at me as at a local leader. I have blood links and investments in the area, which is why I chose to come here when I decided on a new world. I wanted to preserve my Englishness, which negated anywhere in North America. The Americans left the Empire in 1776, and the Canadians are plagued by a loud French voice. In South Africa, it’s a Dutch voice. Here in Australia I can carve out a political career, and be Prime Minister.
After all, it’s only a two-hour drive from Corunda to Canberra. But how do I go about the distance inside my head?
And first, marry Kitty.
The second task will be harder, and hurt far more: abandon my Englishness. To keep it will retard me.