Bear Olsen had found himself a routine that kept him out of the way of his wife and sons as much as possible; after trying to eat two slices of toast for his breakfast, he put his hat on his head, shrugged himself into his jacket, and went out the front door, down the path through the front gate and onto the street. There he turned to walk down the slope of Trelawney Way to Wallace Road, crossed it, and kept on going until he came to George Street, the main thoroughfare that bisected all Corunda City.
Though Maboud’s general store sat on the corner, he went past it and trudged all the way down George Street to the main shopping center, where some windows were fragmented with brown-paper bands glued across the glass to indicate permanent closure. No matter; he stopped to peer into every shop, open for business or defunct, down the north side as far as the last store, then back up the south side. Finally he arrived again at Maboud’s, with its newspapers, comic-cuts, magazines, packets of tea and tins of baking powder, sugar and butter and flour, women’s and men’s and children’s clothing, teapots and kettles and mixing bowls. Bashir Maboud, who liked him, always attempted to strike up a conversation, to which Bear made little or no response; then eventually he would return up the slope of Trelawney Way and let himself into his front yard again, having walked ten miles and spent the best part of the day in doing it.
He had lost a great deal of weight, albeit he wasn’t yet emaciated; food didn’t interest him any more than his wife or sons did. From the moment he was back after his slow, clockwork progression, he sat in the garden on an old park bench Jack Thurlow had brought home in happier days, his hat on the slats beside him, his chin sunk onto his chest. Not knowing what significance this action might have, Grace had puzzled as to why, from the time he started sitting there, he had reversed the bench so he sat with his back to the house and his family.
After many fruitless attempts to get Bear interested in doing something—anything!—Jack had ceased to visit while Bear was at home; it was just too painful to see external events destroy such a good, decent, caring man. Jack visited while Bear walked.
What did the family live on? Teeth clenched, Grace accepted the bare minimum from Charles to let her family subsist. Beg though he did, Charles couldn’t persuade her to take more, and she made it clear that what she did accept was for the sake of her sons. In return she insisted on making things for Kitty’s larder that a French chef would despise, like Anzac bikkies, lemon-curd butter, and red, green, and orange jellies.
Bear’s mind was not a sluggish slough of self-pity; had it been, people like Grace, Edda, Jack, and Charles might have worked to cure it. But what went on in Bear’s mind had neither purpose nor logic nor agony of any kind; it was a literal jumble of idle thoughts, stray little snatches of songs or wireless jingles, all run down so badly that even Bear, the owner of the thoughts, had no concept what they meant, how they were relevant to his existence. His image of self—of his body, even—was in the throes of disintegration, so that when Grace, as terrified as exasperated, cried out things to him like “Pull yourself together!” he had no inkling what she meant or why she was so upset. The shop windows with their criss-crossed brown paper bands were something to look at, just as Bashir Maboud was someone who mouthed words; this last, vague, vestigial part of himself seemed a machine that had to be used up and worn out by walking and looking, walking and looking . . . When he sat, his back to the house, on his garden seat, he was so exhausted that of thoughts there were none at all.
Charles Burdum and the Latimer GP, Dr. Dave Harper, came to see Bear several times; each visit saw Grace hanging on their opinions desperately.
“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do,” Charles confessed to her. “However, his condition doesn’t seem to worsen. It’s three weeks since our last time here, but Bear is unchanged.”
“He abrogated his responsibilities as a man, a husband, and a father,” Grace said bitterly.
“Abrogated is just a word, Grace. Blaming him isn’t going to improve anything, you know that. My dear, you’re so brave, so staunch! No one can criticize you, even for railing about Bear occasionally.” Charles patted her arm. “Chin up, Grace!”
“We eat fish paste and homemade jam, but that’s a lot more than many families are eating, for which I thank you, Charlie,” said Grace, hating the faint patronization but understanding she had no right to say so. “I also know that if you had your way it would be ham and steak. Well, I won’t take them. I’m grateful that you pay Bashir Maboud’s bills, but if Bear were in his right mind, he’d deplore any charity. I’m no leech.”
“I admire your independence,” said Charles sincerely.
“Supercilious bastard,” Grace muttered to herself. “All the world suffers, but not Charlie Burdum, cock of the walk.” A sentiment she repeated to Edda, who slapped her down by reminding her that Charles had seen his son stillborn. “Yours mightn’t eat ham sandwiches, but they’re healthy as cart horses fed on the best mash, so pipe down, Grace.”
Edda was looking, thought the deeply unhappy and frustrated Grace, quite superb. They were twenty-five years old now, once considered past the peak of feminine attractiveness—but that was outmoded thinking. The longer, more shaped clothes of late 1930 suited Edda, whose height and suppleness carried them well: she was so—elegant! Red always became her, even the rather trying rust red she wore today, a dress of thin, clingy crepe. No petticoat either, yet she contrived not to give the slightest impression of trollop. And she was growing her thick black hair long—why was she doing that?
“Underneath his posturing Charlie’s all right,” she said to Grace, smoothing one silk-sheathed leg to make sure the seam of her stocking was straight. “He means well, it’s just that he can never overcome his Pommyness. To us, he patronizes, but he has no idea it seems that way. Look at what he’s doing for Tufts—you have to be glad over that, and it’s all his doing.”
“Yes, yes, I’m very happy for Tufts!”
Edda’s string bag thumped on the table. “You know bloody well I’m not patronizing you, sister, so use what’s in there without getting huffy. Some sliced ham, slices of devon sausage, lamb chops, and a piece of corned silverside. You have to eat better meat than sausages occasionally.”
Grace flushed, but held her temper. “Thank you, dear, most kind of you.” She fished in the bag and put the meat in her ice chest. “Fancy a woman as deputy super!”
“It might have been you if you’d stuck to nursing,” Edda said, a little cruelly. “Wrong sex or not, our Tufts will do very well. Charlie’s helping her get a degree in science and accountancy qualifications, so the Lords of Creation won’t be able to attack her on educational grounds.” She gurgled in the back of her throat. “And good luck to any man who fancies taking Tufts down a peg or two! He’ll wind up singing soprano.”
Grace giggled. “You’re right. But wouldn’t you have liked the deputy’s job, Edda?”
“Not if it were Bart’s or Guy’s. I want to travel.”
“So you keep saying, but when?”
“When I’m good and ready.”
On 25th October 1930 the state of New South Wales had gone to the polls to elect a new government. Its people voted Jack Lang in; New South Wales now had a Labour government whose Premier implicitly believed that Sir Otto Niemeyer’s drastic program of retrenchment was wrong, wrong, wrong. What Jack Lang wanted was to increase public spending and get as many men back in jobs as humanly possible. The Sydney Harbour Bridge and the underground railway system were suddenly going again, and Lang was adamantly opposed to paying back interest on the state’s City of London loans while so many Australians suffered because of those loan interest rates.
Even cranky Grace was lifted out of her perpetual troubles as she pored over the newspapers Bashir Maboud saved for her every day, talking, as had become her habit, to an unresponsive Bear as he sat on his bench after his walk.
“Jack Lang has to be right,” she said, waving a broadsheet at him coming on toward Christmas of 1930. “Look at Corunda!” she exclaimed. “Almost everybody has a job, so the Depression hasn’t made the inroads here that it has everywhere else. Thanks to the building of the new hospital! Dearest Bear, your misfortune was to have your skills in something first and hardest hit. And after that, you were too proud to take the dole because you can’t do the work it calls for. Well, lots take it anyway!”
He made no answer at all, but then he never did; or listened, or seemed to realize that she sat beside him rustling her newspapers and prattling on, forever talking, talking . . .
Done with the first two pages of the Corunda Post, a journal with grand pretensions, she turned to page three, more entertaining.
“Fancy that! Suicide rates in Corunda are increasing,” she said, her voice still light and breezy. “Why do people hang themselves? It must be an awful death, dangling at the end of a rope slowly choking, which is what people do who hang themselves. When the law hangs a criminal, the Post writer says here, he or she falls down a trapdoor and the sudden jerk when he or she stops literally breaks the neck. No, I wouldn’t choose to hang myself, and I hope I never do anything that sees the law hang me . . .”
Her voice faded to a murmur, then spontaneously rose again. “Women like to put their heads in the gas oven, but men don’t. I wonder why? Gas smells horrible, and it’s choking again, isn’t it? Taking poison isn’t popular, I suppose because one always dies in such a frightful mess, and it’s certainly not fair to those left behind to have to clean up the mess. No, it always comes back to men hanging themselves and women sticking their heads in the gas oven.” She got up, chortling. “Interesting, if macabre! Time for me to start cooking tea, too. Sausages again, I’m afraid, but I’ll curry them for a change. Edda brought me a bag of raisins.”
Busy in the kitchen chopping up some of the precious raisins finely to add a tinge of sweetness to the curry—very mild anyway, as the boys disliked too-spicy food—Grace boiled the salt out of the sausages before slicing them into thick coins and tipping them into a pot. She mixed melted lard, flour, and curry powder to a paste, worked it with water until it was a thin sauce, poured it over the sausages, and tipped in her shredded raisins. Simmer slowly. There! Brian and John would love it, and maybe even Bear would eat a little of it, especially if she fried some bread as a base to pile the curry on. Rice was horrible stuff if left savory, but stale bread, cut into doorsteps and fried on both sides, always went down well. The only way rice was edible was as pudding.
“Tea, chaps!” she bellowed out the back door to the boys.
Brian and John came at once, Brian half dragging his little brother, faces beaming because they were always starving and they loved everything their mother cooked. They even loved fish paste or Marmite sandwiches, bless them! Oh, for the days when she might have used butter instead of lard, and stock instead of water!
“Bear! Tea!” she yelled out a window on the plant verandah.
He was sitting bolt upright on his garden seat, his jacket pitched on the ground—unusual for Bear to be untidy, even in his state of mind. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and his hands apparently in his lap, for all she could see were his elbows—sharp, bony pyramids covered in callused skin.
“Bear! Tea!” she yelled again.
When he didn’t move, her mouth tightened; so he was about to pass into a new phase of his dry horrors, was he? Didn’t he understand the effect it had on the boys? She left the house through the back door and so came upon him in profile, hands loosely in his lap, where a great dark red stain had gathered, seeped into the wool of his trousers and the cotton of his shirt, then, saturated, dripped between his legs onto the rusty ground. His penknife was glued to his fingers by jellied blood and his face was serene, eyes three-quarters closed, mouth faintly smiling.
Grace didn’t scream. First she ventured close enough to see the deep gashes in his forearms, on their insides and running up from his wrists many inches. Yet for all his thoroughness, he had missed the arteries, at least while there was sufficient blood in them to spurt; his was a slow, steady, venous bleed, and it must have taken him the entire making of a curry to die.
Satisfied as to what had happened, she turned on her heel to walk back to the house. Inside, she went about the routine of feeding her sons their curried sausages. Only when they were eating did she go to the phone and ring the hospital.
“Put me through to Dr. Charles Burdum, and don’t you dare tell me he’s not there.”
“Yes?” came his impatient voice.
“This is Grace, Charlie. Please send an ambulance to my home. Bear has cut his wrists.”
“Is he alive?”
“No. But send someone for Brian and John.”
“Can you cope until help reaches you?”
“What a stupid question! If I couldn’t cope, someone else would be talking to you this minute. Don’t dither, Charlie. If Liam is there, send him—he’s the coroner, and it’s a suicide.” She hung up, leaving Charles winded.
For once there were no curtains drawn furtively back on Trelawney Way; people stood outside their houses to watch as the ambulance drew up quietly and was let into the Olsen yard. Charles followed it in his Packard with Edda and Tufts; Liam rode in the ambulance.
Tufts took over the children, getting them ready for bed. Who in the old days would ever have dreamed that Grace could be so sensible, so forward-thinking? The boys weren’t perturbed, she had behaved so normally, and they knew nothing of ambulances or inquisitive neighbors as they splashed their way through a bath and dived into their bed, a double one that they shared.
Liam Finucan and the two ambulance men cared reverently for Bear Olsen, one of them even going so far as to hose down the lawn and the garden seat so that it wouldn’t fall to Grace to remove her husband’s blood; the ambulance departed as quietly as it had arrived. Only busy vocal cords on the party line told various garbled versions far and wide of what had happened to the unfortunate, inoffensive Bear Olsen.
Charles and Edda inherited Grace, whose extraordinary spurt of practical good sense began to flag soon after the ambulance left and she could hear her boys chattering to Tufts from their bed. The worst was over.
“The worst is over,” she said.
“You did superbly well,” said Edda, holding Grace’s hands. “I’m so proud of you I could burst.”
“I was taken out of myself,” Grace said, face pinched, white, terrified. “How could I let my children see their father like that? Now they have no father, but at least they won’t have any nightmares. Having children changes everything, Edda.” Her eyes filled. “Oh, and we were having such an interesting tea for a change! Curried sausages flavored with your raisins. The boys ate every scrap, so I gave them Bear’s share as well, and they ate that. Which means I’m not keeping up with their growth or their appetites. I’ll have to keep on cooking Bear’s share.” An eerie chuckle sounded. “No food where he’s gone now!”
“Was there any warning?” Charles asked.
“None at all, though I did read him bits of the suicide article in today’s Post. But he doesn’t ever hear what I say, honestly!” she cried, a proffered handkerchief taken, used. “Did I give him the idea, Edda? I was only trying to get him interested in something, anything! I read him the papers every day, truly!”
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Grace,” Charles said strongly.
She turned her wide eyes upon him, their depths displaying wonder. “I don’t blame myself, Charlie. Why should I? Giving him the idea isn’t blaming myself. That’s like saying the only way not to get stung by a bee is not to wear perfume. Honestly, you Pommies are a weird mob! You read too much into things. No, the only one to blame is Bear. How much I love him! Even when his stupid pride made me want to cut his throat, I still loved him. Oh, the children! I need Daddy’s help with them.”
“Tomorrow, Grace, not tonight,” Charles said. “Thanks to your magnificent handling of things, they won’t suffer repercussions of the kind they might have, and they’re too far off school age to be tormented by other children.”
“The things you think of!” Edda exclaimed. “The important thing, Grace, is that they’ll grieve in a natural way for a daddy who isn’t here any more. You did that for your boys, no one else.”
“But how am I to live?” Grace asked. “I’m going to have to depend on charity.” That broke her as nothing else so far had; she bent over and wept desolately.
I hardly know my twin, Edda was thinking: the most bizarre mixture of hardheaded pragmatism and utter lack of foresight! While I have existed insulated from reality, my sister has coped with increasing reality. When life was easy, she was a selfish, empty-headed Little Miss Dainty. Since times grew hard, she’s become a downright heroine on a level with other women. The two Graces shift and slide within each other like warring men shut up together in the same cell. But it’s this new, tough Grace has won.
Charles opened his black bag, produced an ampoule and hypodermic equipment, and pushed a needle into Grace’s arm before she could object. “What you need most of all, Grace, is a dreamless sleep, and I’ve just ensured that. Edda, get her into bed.”
“That was sensible, Charlie,” Edda said, returning. “Tufts is reading the boys a story, she said to start without her.”
“Well, the only thing we have to discuss is Grace,” Charles said with a sigh that became a wince. “I have to tell Kitty—she’ll be a cot-case! And I have to tell your father.”
“I can’t stop your telling Kitty, but I will tell Daddy,” Edda said, lip lifting in a snarl. “Nor should you tell Kitty on your own. She’ll need Tufts.”
Even at this time he could feel anger; Charles rounded on Edda fiercely. “Sisters be damned! Kitty does not need a sister there! She is my wife, a mature woman, in no need of sisters!”
The back door banged, and Jack Thurlow walked in. “Is what I heard true?” he demanded. “The party lines are buzzing with it.”
Saved by an outsider from a gargantuan fight with that selfish little dictator Charlie Burdum! Edda thought, making a pot of tea while Charles explained—emphasizing his own importance, of course.
But Jack’s patience was thinner than Edda’s, nor was he prepared to take a back seat of no importance or relevance. His fist thumped the table. “Grace has no need to worry you, Charlie. I intend to look after her and her boys. As soon as they can pack, I’m moving them in with me at Corundoobar. Oh, I’m going to marry her, but not to please the old chooks who run Corunda’s morals—she needs a husband right now, or she’ll never handle those growing boys. My own silly mother ruined our lives when our dad died, and she a Burdum and all! The minister was one of those real God-botherers, not a bit like Tom Latimer. And he bullied and badgered her into living for what other people were saying. Since when should flapping tongues dictate how a lone woman with children lives her life? So Grace comes to me now, you hear? I won’t see her go wanting a minute longer! And I’ll educate Bear’s boys, word of a Thurlow on that. My dad mightn’t have been the husband old Tom Burdum wanted for his daughter, but he was a good husband and a good dad. I’ll board this place up until times are better, then Grace can sell it to have her own bit of money—”
He gave a great sob and stopped, aghast at his own spate of words, as if the man speaking them were someone he didn’t know. His eyes went suddenly to Charles, then flew to Edda; both his shoulders hunched up as if he took an actual weight on them.
Charles was so staggered he simply stood and stared.
Things crawled through Edda’s jaws and cheeks, a wormy army on the move: is this the real Jack Thurlow, the man for whose sake I have delayed leaving this town for years? If it were me in Grace’s shoes, would he have come rushing to my rescue like Sir Galahad with the Grail in his sights? Jack doesn’t love me or Grace, he’s in love with duty, and at this moment he sees his duty as if God had written it in flaming letters across the sky. For months he’s been yearning to take up Bear’s burdens and tend Bear’s responsibilities as if they belonged to him. He’s grabbing at Grace like a madman after the moon’s reflection in a pool.
“My dear chap,” Charles was saying, rattled into Pommyness, “is all this really necessary right now? I assure you that I am very happy to fund Grace and her children. It is my duty to do so, Jack, not yours.”
“Bear and I were mates, good mates,” Jack answered in hard tones. “You seem to have taken responsibility for all of Corunda—isn’t that enough? I have time and room for Grace.”
Tufts found a spluttering, confounded Charles Burdum when she entered the kitchen; Edda was wrapped in making the tea, as if her segment of the kitchen were on a different continent.
“Sit down, Edda, I’ll finish that,” Tufts said.
“Jack says he’s taking Grace and the boys to Corundoobar.”
“Interesting. Sit, Edda, sit! I’ll come with you to break the news to Kitty, Charlie,” Tufts said. “Edda, I presume you’ll tell Daddy? Good! And shut your mouth, Charlie, you’re catching a fine crop of flies. They carry germs, you know.”
There were other cases of suicide in Corunda, too; things weren’t getting better, they were steadily worsening Australia-wide, and that went for Corunda as a part of the nation. As 1930 slipped away, ever-increasing unemployment combined with lower and lower wages for those who did have work. If bank directors and chairmen of boards somehow managed not to suffer from retrenchment, that was simply the way of the world, whose governments everywhere protected the fat cats, even Stalin’s U.S.S.R. Though it had held out well early on, Corunda’s prosperity was rapidly disintegrating, despite the new hospital. The spectre of retrenchment grew more visible as all the factors creating good economic health occupied more and more space in newspapers and magazines; terms a working man would never have known before 29th October 1929 were now bandied about in pubs and soup kitchens as the Great Depression ground on—and on.
Having connections to the Burdums and the Treadbys, Bear Olsen’s death provided a more public forum in which to air a growing problem, even in Corunda: the burial of suicides in consecrated ground. A vocal minority of Corundites wanted to carry the curse of suicide physically into the grave by denying suicides a funeral blessing or hallowed soil. Old Monsignor O’Flaherty could be expected to oppose, argue though his curates did for a kinder interpretation of God’s laws, but he was by no means the only Christian minister of religion so inclined. Some Protestant ministers were equally intransigent on the subject. The arguments were heated and nasty, and produced a new array of cracks in Christian institutions: two Corrigan suicides in the West End saw a huge exodus from Catholic St. Anthony’s when the Reverend Thomas Latimer offered the Corrigans assurance that the God of Henry VIII was not as inflexible as the Vatican about the state of grace of the dead, though one of the Rector’s own curates felt quite as strongly as Monsignor O’Flaherty that self-murder was the only crime God would not forgive. A formidable force in Corunda, Thomas Latimer was generally felt to be in the right of it when he thundered from his pulpit in a memorable sermon that no man or woman or child who took their own life under such conditions as these prevailing at the present time could be deemed sound of mind: madness, too, was in God’s gift, and carried self-murder with it as part of the package. His learned yet intensely emotional opinion seemed reasonable, logical, and, as 1931 loomed closer, one people could live with, if not wholeheartedly accept.
Walking behind Grace and her sons, a black-clad Edda turned her head to assess the size of the crowd following the coffin out of St. Mark’s and into the small cemetery next door, where families of the rectors were buried alongside Burdums and Treadbys. Black, black, black, a bobbing flow of black. No one in this trying time lacked black clothes for funerals.
Far more people are dying than being born, for the life force is flickering low, and if people don’t know of any other way to avoid conceiving a child than to avoid the sexual act entirely, then that is what they do. Who would wish this world on a child? Things just go from bad to worse.
What is happening to us Latimer sisters? What must still happen?
That fool, Jack Thurlow! Thanks to Jack’s indiscreet, oft-repeated vows to shelter Grace, people are already gossiping that my twin sister has her next husband picked out before she’s seen this one put into his grave. How cruel a weapon, the tongue! Look at her, you stupid people! She’s devastated by her loss! No one can help her, not even bloody Jack Thurlow! A man without a purpose who thinks he’s found one. But unless we three can stiffen her backbone, she’ll knuckle under to Jack and do as he says. She’s a submissive woman who knows no other way to live than lean on someone. Death in life, fear in love, solace in belonging.
We are a legion of black crows. Kitty has come. I knew she would. I drive in the spike, Kitty lops off the head. Each of us is necessary, with Tufts to provide the earth and Grace the water.
It’s hard to get Kitty on her own since she married Charlie Burdum—a very possessive man. But then, all men are possessive; it is the nature of the beast. Her isolation atop Catholic Hill is deliberate. Without a car, a difficult place to reach, and I for one can’t afford a car. Nor has he taught Kitty to drive. How much marriage changes things! An unknown man enters the equation and the four sisters are fragmented—I miss Kitty!
Poor little Brian. Two years old. This plod is about as far as his tiny legs can carry him—trousers hemmed to knee-length because they’re turned up to the crutch, coat buttoned to keep it on, it’s so big, tie knotted. Black armband, Edda, black armband! His left sock has fallen down, there’s a juicy chunk of snot in his right nostril that he’s itching to pick out, and his silvery hair is sticking up in a cocky’s comb on his crown. Oh, adorable! A bit of their blood is me, I am in Brian and John, even if I have no children of my own. The smell of stocks and carnations! Bittersweet. I will always link the perfume of stocks and carnations with this awful funeral.
Though wakes were deemed Papist, the Reverend Thomas Latimer had been moved by an instinct he didn’t quite understand to hold a reception after the graveside ceremony was over; about a hundred people gathered inside St. Mark’s Parish Hall to partake of the tipple of their choice as well as plenty of finger food. Charles Burdum had insisted on footing the bill.
Tufts got the job of buttonholing Charles while Edda pounced on Kitty and smuggled her to a little room only those from the Rectory knew. Bear’s death had blighted Kitty, but not with crushing impact despite the relative recency of her own loss; she would not sink any lower because of it, Edda saw in profound relief. Physically she looked very well.
“Your dress sense has improved, Kits,” Edda said, choosing a chair opposite her sister’s. “The hat is delicious—where did you find it?”
“I didn’t,” said Kitty’s low, honeyed voice. “Charlie enjoys prowling the better shops looking for things he’d like to see me wear.” The voice dropped even lower. “He’s a woman’s sort of shopper, Edda, and his taste is much better than mine. I have too much frilly Maude in me.” She sighed, giggled a true Kitty giggle—how wonderful to hear it! “He’s possessive, so much so that he finds it hard to accept the love I feel for my sisters.” She shrugged. “Well, how could he comprehend it? He’s an only child, and while he was brought up in a family environment, he knew neither mother nor father. The result is that he tends to think my love for my sisters shortchanges my love for him, and I can’t seem to get it through his head that they’re two different kinds of love, in two separate compartments. How I hate being on top of that wretched hill! With the Depression worsening, there are no more taxis in Corunda. I have to offer someone with a car a sum of money that’s actually an illegal transaction.”
“I’m sorry,” Edda said, careful not to speak through her teeth. The bastard, the bastard! “You have several motor cars.”
“But I can’t drive.”
“I know, but you can learn, and you are going to learn—why? Because every Wednesday you’re coming to lunch with Tufts and me at the hospital.” The uncomfortable eyes bored into Kitty hard. “You’re surely not afraid of Charlie, are you?”
“No, no!” Kitty cried, flushing. “It’s more that he has fixed ideas about me, and one of those concerns the place his wife must have in his life. He polices me! This is too taxing for me, that isn’t worth my doing, and sisters should be packed away with the rest of childhood. Just as if I had made such a colossal step upward in marrying him that nothing before I did the deed has any importance any more! One thing I’ve learned for certain, Edda—Charlie won’t let me live in my sisters’ pockets.”
Edda hadn’t really known what Kitty was going to say, or how she would react to the news of Grace’s threatened change of fate, but not for a moment had she suspected Kitty harbored so much conscious resentment of her husband that thus far Grace hadn’t come up. So when Tufts sidled around the door, Edda welcomed her feverishly.
Kitty simply carried on with the same theme once the hugs and kisses were over. “Oh, if you knew how much I hate that house on top of the hill!”
“I seem to remember,” said Edda dryly, “that you had a wonderful time tricking it out, because I was with you on your excursions.”
“Yes, I had something to do then! Now, how could either of you understand? You’re so busy, you do admirable work and you do it well and you get praised and noticed.”
“Oh, Kits!” Tufts cried, feeling more tears, but for a far different reason than Grace and two little boys. “Don’t tell me that you’re not in love with Charlie, please!”
“I must be, because I put up with things. I mean, I don’t dream of walking out on him, and I’m not afraid to walk out on him—” She stopped, shivered. “No, I’m not afraid the way many of the women we’ve seen are—that they might be killed, or so bashed up they’ll never be the same again—it isn’t like that, honestly. All the same, Charlie expects me to be there for him in a second, at the lift of a finger, and if I’m with a sister, he—he sulks so! It’s as if I’m not entitled to have any kind of pleasure in other people if he sees that I love them. He’d never lay a hand on me in anger, but he makes me suffer all the same. Daddy’s not involved because Daddy means Maude, and Charlie is nobody’s fool—he knows how Maude affects me. My sisters—oh, very different!”
Tufts kissed her full twin very tenderly. “Dearest Kitty, Charlie is plain jealous. Some people are, and there’s nothing can be done about it, it’s an innate character trait. You have to put up with it, but you also can’t give in to it. Start as you intend to go on, and that means you must see as much of Edda, Grace, and me as you want or need. When Charlie whinges, tell him that it’s hard cack, you’ll see us no matter how he feels. Come on, you can do that!”
And how much of this, Tufts was wondering, lies in the tragedy of a stillborn child? No one knows why it happened, but ignorance is the worst of all private dilemmas. So I suspect he wants to blame her, and she most definitely wants to blame him. Charlie, Charlie, why didn’t you show your grief to her? If you had, she wouldn’t be busy piling up grudges. And he, of course, thinks she is obtaining all her comfort from her sisters. What a pickle!
Suddenly Kitty’s mood changed. The lilac-blue eyes took on a furtive gleam, her face became conspiratorial. “Girls, tell me what’s going on under today’s surface calm. Something is! Jack Thurlow is involved, and Charlie is acting like a prude with an inexpressible secret. I am too unwell, blah, I mustn’t be upset, blah, blah, I can have no interest in vulgar gossip, blah, blah, blah. Tell me, I demand to know!”
Edda’s response was to spring catlike to her feet, descend on Kitty, and hug her, kiss her. “Jack Thurlow is the crux of the matter, and I don’t know how else to describe it than to say that I think he must be off his head. The man’s an alienist’s dream come true, riddled with complexes and primal urges, blah, blah—”
They chorused it together: “—blah, blah!”
“Stop laughing, Kitty! Oh, but it’s good to hear you roar! So good!” Edda cried, wiping tears of mirth and sorrow away. “Men are possessive, we’ve just been through that on the subject of Charlie, and the main reason why I shall never marry. I refuse to be owned. Our Jack is a sheep in wolf’s clothing, and a snail in a racing car, and an elephant hiding behind a grain of sand. All that you see is contradictions. I should know, we’ve been lovers for years. Jack walks through a self-made fog.”
In the instant that Edda spoke the last sentence, Kitty’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s it! A fog! Charlie walks around in a self-made fog, too. But Jack’s safe because you won’t marry him. He gets rid of his dirty water without putting a ring through his nose.”
“Lovely metaphors, girls,” said Tufts, gurgling.
“What is Jack about to do that has Charlie convinced will sweep me into a seething snakepit of misery and despair?” Kitty asked, finding a thrill of warmth in her for these beloved women, who could even lift the terrible grief inspired by the dead.
“He’s moving Grace and the boys out to Corundoobar tomorrow and marrying Grace as quickly as he possibly can,” Tufts said as she gave Kitty a saucer of sparkling wine. “Drink up, Kits.”
“Not bad,” said Kitty, sipping, “though I suspect that today I’d probably find urine drinkable.”
“Oh, Kitty, I love you!” from Edda.
“Of course you do,” said Kitty on a purr. “Edda, Jack Thurlow has been your excuse for lingering in Corunda since we were in our teens. Do you think that Grace, Tufts, and I don’t know he’s just an excuse? What really keeps you here is the mystery of the four Latimer twins, not any outsider like a man. Until you go—and you will go!—you enrich our lives, which is what Charlie, being a man, can’t see. Whether Charlie likes it or not, I’m going to learn to drive, and see as much of my sisters as I choose.”
“All well and good,” said Tufts practically, “but none of it answers the riddle of Jack Thurlow. What do you think?”
“What do you think?” Kitty riposted.
“That it’s insanity. Poor Grace!”
“I agree” from Edda.
A silence fell; they sipped their saucered wine.
“Maude has rather faded from our lives, Kitty. Or at least from mine,” Edda said suddenly.
“Oh, having the use of Daddy’s car, she flits in and out of Burdum House,” Kitty said lightly, setting her glass down with a thud. “The trouble is that Mama lost her joy in living when I married Charlie, who snatched her role from her. They’re both Napoleons, but he has the penis to go with the conceit.”
“Keep up the salt, Kits! Penis indeed! It isn’t a dirty word, but people react as if it were,” Edda said, a laugh in her voice. “How do you feel about Maude these days, little one?”
Kitty grimaced. “Oh, Maude! Our Clytemnestra, or do I mean Hecuba? I lost my terror of her as soon as I went nursing, but you know that. After my marriage she vanished into thin air, a part of the insubstantial pageant faded. Sometimes Shakespeare says things so perfectly there can never be another way to say them. Daddy had her to rights all along—she’s just—there. A part of the Rectory furniture.”
A golden head poked around the door, its mobile face impish. “There you are!” Charles flung the door wide. “What is this, a secret confab? Secrets from me? I can’t have that, girls!”
“Chook secrets,” said Edda, rising, “and therefore beneath your notice, Charlie. However, take heed! Kitty is coming to lunch in our hospital cottage every Wednesday, and you are not invited, even to poke your face around the door.” She strolled across to tower over him, and punctuated her next speech with an occasional prod of her right index finger in the middle of his chest. “Since you moved her to the top of Catholic Hill, I see hardly anything of my little sister, and that”—poke—“is going to change. You”—poke—“haven’t even organized any driving lessons for her, and that”—poke—“is going to change, too.”
Charles flushed, lips tightening. “A mere oversight,” he said stiffly. “I’ll start teaching her tomorrow.”
“Oh no, never the husband as instructor!” Edda said quickly. “Bert the ambulance man is Corunda’s best driving teacher.”
“Then Bert it shall be,” Charles said, outmaneuvered. “It’s time to join the others, ladies.”
The reception was at its height, the participants sufficiently soaked in the liquors circulating faster than the food to be on the downward spiral to a soft muzziness that would permit the closing of Bear Olsen’s door forever. Maude had taken Brian and John to the Rectory, where Grace was staying, and the widow, freed from them, seemed to become more visible as a person than she had while tied to her sons.
When it happened, she was standing with the Rector, Dr. Liam Finucan, Dr. Charles Burdum, old Tom Burdum, Jack Thurlow, and Mayor Nicholas Middlewore; her three sisters were some yards off in a clump that included Matron Newdigate, Sister Meg Moulton, Sister Marjorie Bainbridge, and Matron Lena Corrigan. Nurses all.
Grace looks every inch the widow, thought Liam Finucan, from the slight wispiness that had ill become her until now, to the enormous, exhausted eyes, gone near as pale as Edda’s.
Her hands, ungloved, were clamped around a glass of white wine, a picture of stilled function; the line of her jaw as she turned her head to follow the conversation sharp, pure. And, Liam noted, intrigued, all of a sudden every one of the hundred people in the hall had decided to stare at her as if at an actress on a stage. Grace, he sensed, was about to step into her starring role.
“Jack!” The word came out like the crack of a whip.
He had been gazing at her anyway, but her tone startled him; he blinked, smiled at her tenderly. “Yes, Grace?”
When she spoke it was in a loud, carrying voice with vowels rounded, sibilants bitten off and consonants crisply enunciated, a voice that told its pricking audience that she had thought about what to say before saying it. “There are wild rumors spreading all over Corunda, Jack, and I’ve racked my brains as to the best way to scotch them. It’s being said that today, with the soil not settled on my beloved husband’s grave, I already have his successor picked out and ready to go. But I have done nothing to cause these rumors, so now, here in public on my beloved husband’s funeral day, I intend to lay the rumors to rest as well.”
“Grace, please,” said Jack, bewildered, “I don’t know what’s troubling you, but here and now isn’t the right time to speak.”
“I beg to differ,” she said, and moved away from the group to stand alone, feet planted sturdily; her wine glass was given to Nick Middlemore as if he were a handy waiter. “This is exactly the right forum to make my feelings known, and once they are known, there can be no mistaken ideas about my future, or the future of my two children.”
Divining what was coming, her sisters stood tensely, yet made no move to go to her; this was one thing Grace had to do herself, unsupported. “Though plans for my future were made with the best of intentions, they were not made with my knowledge or consent.” She pinned an utterly confused Jack on a fiery stare, then smiled at him. “You are very kind, Jack, and I honor you for it, but I am not alone in my present troubles. I have a family, I have many friends, I have very loyal and helpful neighbors. I loved my husband with every part of me, and it will be a long time—if ever—before I can so much as think of any other man. I am a decent woman. My father is the Rector of St. Mark’s. How could I fly in the face of convention for the sake of a material comfort I haven’t known in years? I would be branded a common trollop—and rightly so!” One long, floating hand went out. “Come, Jack, let us be friends. Simple, ordinary friends. I thank you most sincerely, but let there be no more rumors that I am moving out to Corundoobar. My home is on Trelawney Way.”
“Bravo, Grace,” said Edda under her breath, eyes meeting those of Tufts and Kitty. Somewhere, deep down, they had all known.
Jack Thurlow stood stunned. He had taken Grace’s hand quite automatically, a look in his fine eyes that Liam Finucan thought reminiscent of the awareness that comes a split second ahead of the poleaxe. His mouth worked, quivered; then he shook his head. “I—” he managed, then could manage no more.
Oh, you poor man! thought Kitty, seeing Jack Thurlow for the first time as someone other than Edda’s tamed tiger. It isn’t the grief of thwarted love, because you don’t love Grace; it’s the bitter humiliation of public rejection when you haven’t deserved such treatment. How to explain that you brought it on yourself?
Charles stepped into the breach easily. “Yes, Jack, so very kind of you, especially when gossip turned one thing into another far different from what was meant, eh?” He put a hand on Jack’s arm and guided him away.
“Did we all know she’d refuse?” Matron Newdigate asked.
“To accept wouldn’t have been in character,” Meg Moulton said. “Grace likes a fairly hard life, it gives her legitimate grounds for complaint.”
“Living the life of Lady Muck out at Corundoobar and sending her boys to board at King’s wouldn’t suit Grace,” said Tufts. “She likes the Trelawneys.”
“Why wouldn’t she?” Lena Corrigan asked, laughing. “Grace is the Queen of the Trelawneys—Way, Road, Street, Lane, Circle, and all the rest—and she’s not about to abdicate. It’s taken her the years of her marriage to be crowned, but like Victoria, with widowhood she’s entrenched.”
Edda’s brows rose. “Isn’t that to exaggerate, Lena?”
“In a pig’s eye! You don’t see it because you’re Grace’s twin, but Grace has a gift for the common touch. I mean, because she didn’t last as a nurse, you tend to dismiss her as a useless ignoramus, but to the women of the Trelawneys she’s a person of superior education and knowledge—she matriculated from C.L.C., so she can reel off history, geography, literature, classical allusions, algebra, you name it. Yet she never, never, never rubs anybody else’s nose in their far poorer educations. She has pride in her taste, is a brilliant housekeeper, and never cocks a snook at her neighbors. That’s miraculous! The women of the Trelawneys aren’t a rough lot like us West Enders, but they don’t belong on Catholic Hill, either. And Grace is their queen.”
“I hear you, Lena,” Tufts said. “I’m the sister who visits her at home the most, and she’s always immersed in some sort of Trelawney doings. Well, bully for Grace!”
“Nor were her sixteen months of nursing wasted,” said Kitty thoughtfully. “A Trelawney woman with a sick child goes first to Grace, and only after that, to the doctor. Times are hard, and the doctor costs ready money. Grace is usually all they need.”
“How do you know that, Kits?” Edda asked, surprised.
“Even on top of Catholic Hill there’s gossip.”
Edda’s mind drifted. “Poor Jack!” The words said, she got up and walked to where Charles had abandoned the rejected swain.
“Cheer up,” she said in a level voice. “It may not seem so at the moment, but Grace’s decision has actually spared you a life of considerable pain. You and she aren’t suited in any way, Jack. I don’t mean to sound facetious, but I swear that fat and pampered cat of yours would have left home the minute Grace arrived, and before long you’d be itching to follow its example. Grace isn’t weak and helpless. She’s made of hardened steel. Corunda will decide that your impulse to take Grace and her boys on was splendid. It’s Grace would have incurred the spite and contempt. No one has ever admired anybody poor for marrying someone rich. As it is, Grace’s instincts for survival are magnificent, so she did what she had to—refuse your gesture right out in the open.”
“Thereby turning me into a fool.”
“Rubbish! You look like a knight in shining armor. No one thinks the worse of you for making the offer, and now nobody thinks the worse of Grace, either. You both smell like roses.”
His body twisted, a painful-looking movement. “The thing is, Edda, that I was looking forward to settling down with Grace. I’ve got Corundoobar, I’ll weather the Depression, and I’d like to have some heirs. Brian and John would have loved the life.”
“Then take the same path, just more slowly,” Edda said, at a cost to herself she preferred not to think about. “Court her as a widow must be courted. Her attempts to keep you at a distance won’t last a moment longer than it takes for the chook run door to fall off, or the earwigs to hit the potato patch. Grace is already accustomed to turning to you, Jack. Make sure she always can.”
His mouth went thin, his eyes flashed fire. “Not in a bloody fit!” he snapped. “As far as I’m concerned, Grace’s chook run door can splinter to bits and she can feed her boys on solid mashed earwigs! She made a fool of me!”
“I’m disappointed in you,” said Edda.
“Oh, sisters ganging up, eh?”
“Yes, always.” The wolf’s eyes mocked him. “You’ve been a mystery to me for years, Jack Thurlow, but no longer. Beneath all that landsman’s swagger is a man of straw. No brains, no stomach for life, and absolutely no bloody backbone.”
Turning, she stalked back to the group of women, her chest heaving as if she’d run ten miles pursued by a killer.
“Bye-bye, Jack?” Kitty asked.
“I’d sooner sleep with a scarecrow! There’s more to it.”