Burdum House was becoming something of a village; in front of it and, so to speak, down a level, a row of cottages had appeared. Each stood in plenty of ground, was two-storied, had three bedrooms, a bathroom upstairs and a second toilet down, and its own garage. To Kitty it seemed a long-term project, since four cottages were in existence before the first tenant, Coates, was more than a wistful wish for a valet. Next to move in was Cynthia Norman—two down, two to go, thought Kitty.
Then, hard on Cynthia’s heels, came Dorcas Chandler. To live in one of these desirable residences would have suited Mrs. Mary Simmons, who was Kitty’s housekeeper, but when she had asked him for this favor well before Coates, Charles had said a firm no. The cottages were for his employees. Mrs. Simmons was dowered with a car to pick her up from her (rented) home and deposit her back there; that was quite generous enough. Had he only paused to set himself aside, Charles would have understood that decisions of this kind contributed greatly to his wife’s taking against him, for she saw them as actions aimed at demonstrating her inferior status. He was so rich! An Englishman, he also knew perfectly well that housekeepers lived in. So his valet lived in and his secretary lived in, but his housekeeper, who answered to his wife, lived out. His secretary had a car as Charlie’s gift; so, too, it turned out, did Miss Dorcas Chandler.
“You have to stop this, Kitty,” said the Reverend Latimer on a visit, and getting an earful of these domestic biases. “I approve of your working at the orphanage because it takes you out of yourself, but I do not approve of manufacturing ills where none should exist. Has Mrs. Simmons complained to you?”
“No,” said Kitty, bewildered, “but that doesn’t make Charlie’s discrimination more praiseworthy.”
“Rubbish! It’s you who feels discriminated against, not Mrs. Simmons. My child, there is no need for this! Whether you like it or not, Charles is at liberty to spend his income how he pleases. I find his actions sensible—he accommodates those he may need at a moment’s notice. Think, Kitty, think! Would you like to be so far in someone’s power? When you were a nurse, you lived in for the sake of the hospital, which could summon you back to work without searching the district for you. I suspect Mrs. Simmons is very happy with her present arrangement—she doesn’t live under her employer’s nose, but she does get driven to and from work, as there is no public transport.”
Because in all save Charlie she was a fair and just person, Kitty acknowledged the truth in her father’s words, and simmered down. She was also dying to meet the gangling horsey skeleton.
Miss Chandler had been given the best of the four cottages, she had already noticed; on the far end of the row, it alone had its own entrance off the street, and was hidden from its neighbor, still vacant, by a hedge of a fast-growing tree called a fiddle-wood. Its decor was blandly beige, but its furniture was better quality and its rainwater tank that collected from its roof was a ten-thousand gallon one, very generous for a sole occupant. It also had its own septic system, whereas the others were linked together. Hmmm . . . Miss Chandler was very definitely important to Charlie, no doubt about that, thought Kitty.
The proper thing to do, she decided, was to invite the new tenant of Burdum Row to morning tea on a date of her choosing, as Kitty’s graceful letter said when Miss Chandler picked it up off the hallway floor. An equally graceful reply named the day after moving in, as Dr. Burdum wouldn’t need her until noon.
Naturally Dorcas Chandler knew that her employer’s wife was commonly held one of the most beautiful women anywhere, but she hadn’t really been ready for Kitty’s striking coloring, the flaxen-blond hair too transparent to call gold, the icy brows and lashes, the chiselled bones, the dimples, the amazing eyes, the trim yet voluptuous body. Of course he had to have her! She contributed to his myth, and Charles Burdum was a man very busy constructing a history of himself that future chroniclers of Australia would turn into a myth. Beautifully dressed, too, in fine cotton suitable for the time of day, her hair cut shorter than the new fashion because gamine became her, no jewelry save a glorious diamond wedding pair—very interesting grist to Miss Chandler’s mill, after so many years of society events. The only thing wrong with Mrs. Burdum was her nature, inclined to domestic retirement, as was true of so many wives of men in politics. No, Mrs. Burdum wasn’t a perfect politician’s wife.
On Kitty’s part, she found herself liking Miss Chandler, who was far from an object of pity. This, Kitty divined, was a brilliant woman of driving ambition who was sensible enough not to kick at the restraints her sex made inevitable; knowing she herself could never be prime minister, she would work with mind, heart, and soul to be the power behind a prime minister. And in Charlie she had found the right man.
They had plenty to talk about.
“If I am to advise Charles properly,” Dorcas said once they had abandoned last names and pretenses, “then I must know about his family and personal connections within Corunda. It won’t be prurient interest, but it will be probing.”
“Probe away,” said Kitty blithely, offering pikelets, jam, and cream. “Eat up, we have to get some weight on you—not a lot, about the same as my sister Edda, who is very tall, slender, and graceful. Charlie hates dowdy women, but he’s probably told you that already.”
The slightly leathery skin went pink. “As a matter of fact, he has. It will be much easier on a good income.”
“You don’t make your own clothes?”
Dorcas looked blank. “No.”
“Edda always did, and magnificently, so she always looked wonderful.” Remembering the debate with Tufts as to whether this woman was being drained by a human leech, and anxious to help her, Kitty took a pad from a side table and wrote on it. “This is my dressmaker, Pauline O’Brien. She’s in Edda’s league, but her charges are quite modest—the Depression means she’s lost a lot of clients and is grateful for new ones. She’s good on style and she’ll shop for materials for you honestly. I used to buy all my clothes in Sydney, but since I married, Pauline is who I need.”
The wife’s intentions, thought Dorcas, are pristine; she wants to see me succeed in this job! Not a scrap of jealousy or self-interest—or is it that she sees herself negated by any public exposure? I can’t ask her about the miscarriages, but she has scars, and she was a children’s nurse. Now she’s a volunteer at the orphanage. I can make capital out of that, but she won’t like it. A private person, Kitty Burdum.
“I’d love to see Lady Schiller,” Dorcas said.
Kitty laughed. “No chance of that! She’s a medical student in Melbourne, and about as happy as any human being can be. Her gender denied her medicine, now she can have it thanks to Rawson.”
“You like him?”
“Very much. He’s made my sister happy. That’s all any of the Rector’s daughters asks, that her sisters be happy.”
“Would Grace mind talking to me? And Heather?”
“Grace would talk the leg off an iron pot. Tufts is harder to get on side, but she’ll do it for Charlie.”
“Tufts? Is that a nickname?”
“Yes, almost as old as we are.”
“How did she get it?” Dorcas asked.
“A nanny who was fascinated by our forwardness when we were about a year old. I think a part of the forwardness was due to Grace and Edda, only twenty months older than us. We worshipped them! But it was so hard to say Heather! Our infant tongues tripped on it constantly. Anyway, the Nanny had the bright idea of bringing in a kitten—Kitty from Katherine—and a sprig of heather. Trying to explain, she said that heather grew in tufts, and went on to describe what a tuft was. I found it much easier to say tufts than heather, and started calling Tufts Tufts. The next thing, everybody was calling her Tufts, even Daddy.”
“Unusual,” said Dorcas.
“How extraordinary!” Kitty exclaimed with a sigh. “I had quite forgotten how Tufts became Tufts.”
“Nicknames usually point up some character trait in their subjects,” said Dorcas, veering into politics. “Bismarck was the Iron Chancellor, the Duke of Wellington was Old Hooky, Louis XIV was the Sun King, Queen Elizabeth was the Virgin Queen, and the Roman nobleman actually tacked his nickname onto his family name as a mark of distinction, even if it meant idiotic or crooked.”
The big violet-blue eyes were staring at her, slightly glazed. “You’re ideal for Charlie,” Kitty said. “He’d lap that up.” She looked suddenly urgent, intense. “Dorcas, you reported on fashion for newspapers, so you must know a lot about it. Promise me that you’ll smarten yourself up for Charlie, please!”
“A good income will make all the difference,” Dorcas repeated.
“Have you heavy drains on your purse?”
“My parents.”
“No one else?”
The voice sharpened. “What do you mean?”
“A jobless brother? A boyfriend?”
The cheeks were dull crimson. “That is my own business.”
“And I should mind mine? But don’t you understand, my dear, that in coming on to Charlie’s private staff, you’ve virtually made your business his? I know him, and I can tell you that he’s very possessive. The size of your salary and its perquisites should tell you that you’ve been bought. Charlie is a millionaire. Such men tend to view human beings as property bought and paid for. I’m not decrying his nobility of nature or the fineness of his character—even in 1932, with hundreds of thousands of men out of work, he’s managed to keep Corunda more prosperous than most places, and he throws all of himself, including a very big heart, into everything he does. But there is a tiny bit of Soames Forsyte in him for all that—he’s a man of property,” said Kitty.
To which Dorcas Chandler made no reply.
And that, thought Kitty, is as much as I can do for that poor woman, who does harbor a secret, a secret that costs her money. If she can’t confide it to Charlie, then it carries the seed of her destruction with it, and she knows that all too well. The contract clauses will have told her that he’s hedged himself against embarrassing disclosures, debts incurred without his consent or knowledge, a multitude of vague implications that, if not contractually tackled, might lead to things like blackmail. But she had signed the contract without a murmur. Poor woman!
Kitty’s own life had steadied down into a routine that saw her at the orphanage most days, but home in time to spend the evenings with Charles, who hadn’t asked to spend a night in her bed. Perhaps, she thought as Dorcas Chandler eased her way into his life, he too had given up the ghost of his marriage? Not that she thought him interested in Dorcas, bought and paid for; just that he was more comfortable conversing with Dorcas. Which, as 1932 pressed on, led to his asking Kitty if she minded Dorcas for dinner some nights.
“An excellent idea!” Kitty said at once. “Who knows? I might learn something, too. Children are a delight, but the level of conversation is pretty basic.”
Dorcas’s appearance was improving; the black outfits so old they had gone green had vanished, and she had either put on some weight, or the better clothes displayed her figure better. She was wearing face powder, lipstick, and a touch of rouge, and had gone to a salon to have her hair cut and marcelled in the French fashion. No Hollywood film studio would ever offer her a contract, but she now looked more smartly professional.
What amazed Kitty was the degree of Dorcas’s and Charlie’s passion for politics. Though Charlie had many duties that took him to the hospital or other Corunda destinations, he still managed to spend a lot of his days with Dorcas, yet the moment she arrived for pre-dinner drinks, he was into politics again, and wanted to talk about nothing else until Dorcas went back to Burdum Row; sometimes he was so immersed in a theory that he would escort her just to keep the discussion going.
Admittedly the times provoked political passion, with rival theories for economic recovery fuelling not only the parties, but factions within each party. After the landslide victory of Joe Lyons and the United Australia Party that Christmas of 1931, it might have been expected that the wrangling would cease, but not all U.A.P. parliamentarians were in favor of London’s insistence on retrenchment. Lyons and his ruling cadre were, so the misery went on. When Jack Lang refused a second time to pay interest on the state’s loans until times were better, Lyons and the federal government paid up. But this time Canberra insisted on being paid back. Jack Lang refused to pay up or permit his funds to be garnished. Feelings ran so high that the situation culminated in Lang’s attempting to barricade the New South Wales Treasury—it was states’ rights against central power with a vengeance.
On 13th May 1932, Lang’s world fell apart when the governor of New South Wales, Sir Philip Game, dismissed J.T. Lang and his party from office as incapable of governing responsibly. Fed up with the turmoil, New South Welshmen and women voted in a conservative government, and resistance to retrenchment perished, though its opponents still hated its every measure.
To this and much more Kitty was forced to listen each time Dorcas came to dinner, more and more often as Charles leaned on her opinions more heavily. It wasn’t that Kitty was indifferent, or unconcerned, or shallow; simply, that since her passions were not engaged, she heard the talk the way a sober person hears two drunks—it went around and around in the same eternal rut. If something new happened, she was galvanized, but something new didn’t even happen once a week; more likely, once a month, which meant twenty-nine or thirty days of repetition, repetition, repetition. By the end of Jack Lang, Kitty wondered how much more political conversation she could take without jumping up and screaming “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
And winter was here again, snow clouds over the Great Divide, the freezing Antarctic winds stripping deciduous trees bare, and a blue misery in Kitty’s heart that she couldn’t seem to blow an atom of warmth into. Her husband was happy despite his lack of conjugal pleasures because he was, withal, a man who didn’t live for those. He lived for politics, and there was no doubt that when the country next went to the federal election booths, he would be standing as an Independent. All he had really needed was a Dorcas.
June arrived, official winter. On its first cloudlessly sunny day Kitty took a car (why did Dorcas have her own, when Kitty had to hope for a spare?) and drove down to the river out Doobar way, where the land was at its lushest and fat lambs were still finding a market. Not everybody was starving—just the lower classes, which undoubtedly suited Sir Otto Niemeyer down to the ground.
Kitty left the car to walk along the river, suddenly free of everything Burdum, from House to Row to Charlie. So bitter a wind, yet such sweet air! Fascinating, the contradictions. This was where Edda used to ride, have her trysts with Jack Thurlow.
Since Grace had publicly spurned him, Jack had rather faded from sight in Corunda; gossip said he stuck to his property. He continued to do very well with his Arab horses, despite the hard times; in fact, he was more visible in Dubbo and Toowoomba, exhibiting his spectacularly pretty horses.
But here he was, riding down the bridle path toward her on a huge grey charger whose Roman nose said it had no Arab blood. Kitty scuttled off the path and stood well away, hoping he would canter past her without slowing down, let alone stopping.
Fat chance! He stopped, slid off the beast immediately.
“Well, starve the lizards, Kitty Latimer!” he said, smiling.
Immensely tall; she had forgotten that, though Edda would have qualified it as “moderately” thanks to her own height. He was exactly six feet. What age was he now? Forty-odd sounded a little excessive. It was hard to tell the age of men on the land; they looked older when they were young and younger when they were old. His hair was still the corn-gold waves of a Burdum thatch, his skin richly tanned, his eyes very blue. Absolutely nothing of the two-faced Janus here! Handsome in a masculine way, and a beautiful smile.
He led her to a log, first checking that there was no bull-ant nest nearby, then sat her down and loomed over her.
“All bundled up in woollies like that, you look ten years old. Sensible, but,” he said. “How is Lady Schiller?”
“Thriving, to the best of my knowledge. Studying medicine in Melbourne. I like her husband.”
“I was just going home. Fancy a cuppa and a scone?”
“Please! I can tell you lots about Edda. I’ll drive, but where do I go?”
“First cattle-guard on the Doobar road. The homestead’s on top of a hill, you can’t miss it—too many horses.” He swung himself onto the grey gelding and trotted off. Someone different in my life! Not a new face, but it may as well be, for it was never a face filled my eyes before.
Corundoobar was a magnificent homestead, its house of stone, Georgian in simplicity, verandahs held up by Doric pillars all the way around. His flower garden must be a veritable chocolate box in spring and summer, she thought. The view was superb from its vantage point atop the hill and on the river. There was snow on the distant ranges.
It smelled wonderful inside, as a home should smell, Kitty thought: beeswax polish, dried herbs and flowers, clean linen, cologne water, fresh air. Its windows were floor-to-ceiling and could be used as doors, and one was open a crack to allow crosscurrents, while potbellied stoves and open fires kept the rooms warm.
The interior was scrupulously cared for, yet had no woman’s touch. Subtle lacks, rather than blatant ones.
“Who keeps house?” she asked, sitting at the kitchen table and watching him work cold butter through salted self-rising flour—he was making the scones himself, from scratch! An amazing man.
“I keep house,” he said, adding cold milk. “It’s a poor sort of creature can’t keep a house clean and tidy.”
“Or make a scone.”
“My hands are always cold, so I don’t melt the butter—the vital requirement for working butter through flour. After I add the milk, I mix with two knife blades—see?”
“I can’t boil water,” she said lightly.
“You’d soon learn if you had to.” He pressed his dough gently on a floured board, took a block of sweaty cheddar cheese and grated some over the top, then cut the slab into two-inch squares. These he transferred to a baking tray, and slid the tray into his wood-fired stove oven. Twenty minutes from starting, the scones were done—risen high, cheese melted, tops browned.
Kitty’s mouth was already watering as he piled the steaming scones onto a plate, set out cut glass dishes of butter and jam, and gave her a knife. Somewhere in the midst of this, he had made a pot of tea and produced two Aynsley cups, saucers, and plates.
“You have nice things,” she said, splitting her scone and buttering both sides. “Feather light!” she pronounced through a full mouth. “Fine food on fine china—you’re a treasure.”
He considered her through narrowed eyes. “I suspect you’re a treasure, too,” he said, “but your trouble is that no one wants your sort of gold. Everyone assumes it’s just tissue-thin plating.”
Her breath caught; she had to cough not to choke. “How very perceptive you are! People usually dismiss me as a gold digger, though I imagine Edda saw to it that didn’t happen.”
A slow smile lit his eyes. “Oh, Edda! Yes, thanks to her I do know a lot about the Latimer sisters. Especially you and your face. I wonder why so many people can’t seem to get past how other people look. Charlie Burdum wanted a showcase wife to flaunt and prove that very small men can walk off with the best women, then to cap it he fell for you like a ton of bricks. Oh, it was honest on his part, never think it wasn’t. He had to have you.”
“Edda really talked to you, didn’t she? I wish she had to me half so frankly. I might have decided differently.”
“She said as much as a sister dared. I was on the outside, it didn’t matter what I thought or how I reacted.”
“You’ve been around a long time, one way or another,” Kitty said, smiling at him. “I’m very glad your plans for Grace fell through, however. You had a lucky escape.”
His head went back, he laughed heartily. “Don’t think I don’t know it! But Corundoobar needs a wife and family as much as its owner does. I’ll be forty before I know it,” he said seriously.
“Someone will turn up, Jack,” she comforted.
“I know, everything in its due time.”
She gazed around. “I love this place. It’s a home.”
“That’s because at heart you’re a farm missus,” he said, his voice quite impersonal, “though you don’t know what a farm missus is. Well, she’s got half a dozen kiddies underfoot, her legs are bare in summer and she wears gumboots in winter, she doesn’t own a decent dress, her darning basket overflows with socks—I could go on, but that’s enough to give you the idea.”
The tears were threatening, but Kitty knew better than to shed them; Jack wasn’t saying these things to her, but to her kind of person. “Yes, I see what you mean,” she said brightly, with a smile. “Isn’t it odd, how our loves aren’t given where our natures dictate they should be?”
“The older I get, the odder it seems,” he said with an answering smile.
“Are you surviving the Depression?” she asked when he began to clear the morning tea away, wondering if this was his signal for her to take her leave.
But no. Table cleared, he pulled his Windsor chair out from it to sit, turned toward her, and leaned back at leisure.
“I’ve been lucky,” he said, smiling. “My fat lambs barely make a profit, whereas the Arab horses sell as fast as I can breed them. What money there is has risen to form a crust on top, so the wealthy are the only ones buying.”
As he spoke a grey animal streaked across the kitchen from what she guessed was the back door, rose effortlessly into the air and landed in Jack’s lap, not merely filling it, but overflowing it. An enormous cat! Jack finished speaking without paying any attention to it beyond shifting to enable the cat to lie with its head against his heart.
“Meet Bert,” Jack said then. “The minute I finish eating, he’s on my knee.”
“I didn’t think cats came that big,” she said, watching his hand cup the cat’s face and stroke it back to its ears; the sound of purring filled the room.
“He weighs twenty-one pounds,” Jack said proudly, “and he rules the roost—don’t you, Bert?”
Kitty reached out a tentative hand. “Hello, Bert.”
A pair of bright green eyes surveyed her shrewdly; this was no dumb beast!
“You’re in,” said Jack, grinning.
“How do you know?”
“He’s still here, hasn’t budged. If you were Edda, now—poof! He’d have gone.”
“Getting back to the Arab horses, I assume you mean that private school princesses still have daddies who gift them with whatever they want. Including mounts for the horse-mad.”
“Well, you were a private school princess.”
“But Edda was the horse-mad one. Horses frighten me.”
“I noticed, but cheer up. Nowadays cars are handier.”
It was a long morning tea; they seemed to yarn about everything from Edda through Maude’s dementia all the way to the progress of the new hospital; Kitty felt as if they were two old friends meeting again after a decade spent far apart. Jack took her on a tour of the house and introduced her to his two blue cattle dogs, Alf and Daisy, who weren’t allowed indoors. He refused to let her wash the dishes.
“Come and have tea and scones again?” he asked, walking her to her car. “I won’t stink of horse if I know you’re coming, that’s a promise.”
“Is the same time next week too soon?”
“No, it’s good. Best stock up while we can—sometimes I’m away selling horses.”
“Next week it is, Jack. And—thank you.”
The moment she drove off he turned back into the house, Kitty noticed, and she felt a twinge of regret. Blighted she might be, but it would have done her heart good had he watched her disappear. Well, he hadn’t, and why should he?
Many new ideas had come to Kitty as she talked with Jack, who had been on the periphery of Rectory life since the days of Thumbelina, with a big sign pinned on his back: RESERVED FOR EDDA. But Edda hadn’t wanted him, she had simply needed him. At first because he gave her Fatima; then because he gave her physical satisfaction. What a fuss that had led to, when Grace wriggled into the situation! Grace hadn’t wanted him, either. Like Edda, she had needed him. Not for carnal pleasure, but to repair the chook run door or dig the potatoes. Oh, poor Jack! Mauled and mangled by the elder Latimer twins, neither of whom had any notion what they were doing to him.
We weren’t brought up to assume that men would fall in love with us, and that was especially true of Edda, who thought herself cold and would have been incredulous if told a man could love her. But Jack Thurlow had loved her—of course he had loved her! A Burdum, but of opposite sort from my Charlie. A man of the land, content with his lot, whereas Charlie will never be content.
Remembering, she heard Edda’s distant voice deploring Jack’s lack of ambition—an unavaricious person, how rare! Not knowing Jack loved her, Edda had gone elsewhere, burned for medicine. What Kitty saw, coming away from two hours in Jack Thurlow’s company, was a man who communed with the spirits of wind, water, earth, even fire. Afraid of nothing, but asking for nothing, either.
How strange! All my life, thought Kitty, I have been surrounded by people who wanted what they couldn’t have and struggled desperately to grab at it. Struck down, they hauled themselves up and started to struggle all over again. Whereas Jack Thurlow would never so demean himself.
Edda would say he was thick, meaning not very clever. Tufts would say he was a sterling character, meaning he had a sense of honor and of duty. Grace would say he was the essence of kindness, meaning he had offered himself on her altar. Daddy would say he was a fine man who didn’t go to church, meaning he was a candidate for a lesser heaven. And what would Charlie say of a cousin? At first he would look utterly blank, for he would genuinely have to cogitate before Jack’s face emerged from his morass. Then he’d say Jack was a sterling character, meaning he had not seen the politico-commercial light because he was content with life’s dreary backwaters, and therefore of no account.
I am feeling pain for him, Kitty thought, the kind of wringing, juiceless pangs that only come out of blind failure; for, like Edda and Grace, I, too, have passed by Jack Thurlow’s sorrows as if they didn’t exist. How he must have hoped as he waited out the long years from Edda’s seventeenth birthday to her marriage. And when he realized he’d probably never get Edda, he tried for her twin. But he didn’t complain, and his reaction to Grace’s public refusal looked to the world like stung pride. There are different varieties of pity; Jack chose one that Corunda saw as exactly right.
Today he filled my eyes, I seemed to be gifted with a sudden and utterly unexpected insight. Is it that my own troubles were shown up as something less than I imagined? He’s cured of Edda now, yet he hasn’t emerged from those nine years diminished, or soured, or emasculated. He’s what he always was, and always will be—a man wedded to the earth and its creatures.
Whenever he is in Corunda, I will have tea and scones in his kitchen on Wednesday mornings, say hello to Alf and Daisy on the back verandah, and propitiate Bert on his master’s knees. He’s an island of granite in a quicksand sea.
She stopped the car to gaze across the sullen, rounded mountains, whitewashed by snow against a bruised sky that hung heavy as a sheet of lead. Flakes of snow, fat and wet, idled by her in a random, carefree dance into the arms of an invisible oblivion. Beautiful!
When Charlie came in with Dorcas that evening, he behaved as he always did: gave her a little kiss on the cheek and asked her what she had done with her day. Tonight, unaware what she did, Kitty moved so that his kiss fell short, and did not answer him.
While he went to the sideboard to prepare their drinks, and after Dorcas had settled herself in “her” chair, Kitty spoke—to Dorcas alone. Those keen yet watery eyes had noticed everything, but the body hadn’t betrayed this; Dorcas was terrified of offending Charlie, who didn’t like her making deductions from Kitty’s behavior.
“You look lovely this evening, Dorcas,” Kitty said, pitying her.
“Thank you, Kitty!” Dorcas sounded artificial, for the remark had startled her—why was Kitty ignoring her husband?
“You’ve caught the nuances exactly,” Kitty went on with a warming smile for Dorcas. “An understated smartness that will surely go down very well in Melbourne, always the place I dreaded. I’m too frilly and fussy to suit Melbourne feminine tastes, but you’re perfect, Dorcas. I give it a twelve-month, and all the politicians will be clamoring for a lady assistant half so elegant, intelligent, and yet unobtrusive as Charles Burdum’s peerless Dorcas Chandler.”
A whole array of emotions had marched at flicker speed through those contradictory eyes as Kitty spoke, the mind under them racing faster than a meteor down the sky, and all the while the woman knew she didn’t dare look for guidance to her boss, stranded with his back turned—how to react, how to divine what Kitty was up to? And he was no help, refused to turn back in the women’s direction.
“You don’t think this blue is too dark?” Dorcas asked anxiously.
“No, it’s lovely—ultramarine rather than dour Prussian or martial navy,” said Kitty. “You may take it that I’m right—my poor taste is for myself alone. For others, I’m spot-on.”
Charles turned at last. “That’s absolutely true,” he said, giving Dorcas a sherry. “Yes, Dorcas, ultramarine is spot-on.”
Kitty took her sherry with a cool smile.
You bitch! he was thinking. What happened today, that your dislike of me is finally manifest before an audience? I think that tonight I might claim my conjugal rights.
But Kitty was ahead of him. Halfway through the main course she complained of a headache’s onset and went to bed. He was left with Dorcas on his hands.
“I wondered what was the matter with her,” he said after Kitty had gone. “Some headaches are prodromal before the aura arrives.”
“One forgets that your degree is in medicine,” said Dorcas composedly, putting her knife and fork together tidily. “No, truly, I’ve had sufficient. Sometimes I feel like a Strasbourg goose.”
“A very charming one,” he said, lifting his glass to her. “One fears their aggression—geese—but beneath it, they are first cousins to swans.”
Time to burn her boats; did she not, the Kitty situation would explode.
“You may slap me down, and I’ll deserve it, Charles, but I feel I must say that your wife is an unhappy woman,” she said, no note of apology in her voice. “In fact, very unhappy.”
Her moment was shrewdly chosen; his shoulders slumped. “Yes, I’m well aware of it. She’s a woman lives for children and desperate for her own, but she suffers miscarriages.”
“Ah! The orphanage.”
“And a trained children’s nurse, don’t forget.”
“She’s still a young woman.”
“The obstetricians can find nothing wrong. Nor can I. Worst of all is that she blames me.” There! It was out, he’d said it.
Dorcas kept her face smooth and impassive, though her eyes had a suspiciously moist sparkle. “I can’t pretend to wisdom, Charles, as I’ve never been married, but common sense says that time heals all wounds, even the mental ones. She’s a sensible woman at heart.”
“Yes, I hope to see her mend, but there are cures and cures. Kitty is a homebody, whereas I’m drawn to public life—I revel in it! That’s a situation will worsen with time, not improve.”
“Then don’t worry about it,” Dorcas said comfortably. “Haven’t you noticed that in Australian politics wives have little or nothing to say? Even very often are unseen, too? You can have politics and she Burdum House. Her importance in political circles is negligible. When, two or three times a year, you are obliged to produce a wife, then yours will stun everybody except Sir Rawson Schiller, who married her half sister. It’s a legend in the making, Charles, you must never forget that! The Latimer double twins will have their part in Australian myth, between Lady Schiller, the future Lady Burdum—you’ll be knighted, Charles, nothing surer—hospital superintendent Latimer, and Depression widow Olsen. I’ll write it myself when they’re older. In the meantime, don’t fret about Kitty. She has her orphanage, her sisters, her father, and Corunda. Your own horizons are far wider, you know that without my needing to tell you.”
He sat galvanized, his eyes gone to the color of a lion’s; she must remember to make sure his barber never thinned the leonine mane of his hair or slimed it with brilliantine—he must have his image. Secretly smiling, she thought of Prime Minister Joe Lyons; another fine head of hair not slicked down to patent leather as the fashion dictated. Or, for that matter, Jimmy Scullin. Women loved a fine head of hair! What repelled them were bad teeth, paunches, and baldness.
“Dorcas,” he almost sang, “what would I do without you?”
Sink like a stone, she answered silently, into the abyss.
Dorcas noticed it first, but felt she could say nothing, so it was Grace who spoke to Charles just after 1933 began. Even then, such had not been her purpose when she sought a formal audience with him: she was there for her boys.
They came with her. Quite old for their years, Charles saw immediately, especially Brian, doomed to wear the mantle of man of the house. Of course she’d done that to him! Oh, not through weepy helplessness and constant verbal reminders that he was The Man Nowadays—Grace was too clever for sledgehammer tactics. Simply, she hadn’t concealed her widow’s plight from him, either. Some would have called that sensible; others, like Charles, deemed it unnecessary at their ages. Brian would shortly turn five; John would turn four on May’s last day. Very alike. They would keep their blond coloring from lashes to thatches, the Scandinavian cast of their facial bones. They made Charles think there was more Teuton and Viking in the Latimers than there was Briton or Celt, for clearly their mother’s inheritance was closely allied to their father’s. The difference lay in their eyes. Both pairs were the blue of the sky, no hint of the sea’s greys or the forest’s greens. Ah, but the minds that burned behind each pair were very different! Brian’s gaze was unflinching and hard to meet—the thinking warrior. John’s gaze was otherworldly, a little sad—the seeker after truth. Poor John, he’d have it stony.
I should own two sons of this age, Charles thought, though if they were mine, they’d be as Carrara marble alongside the Parian of this pair. Here all is flawlessly white, no fascinating veins and swirls of myriad colors. Still, what use in complaining? My lot has been two miscarriages, one so late that I buried a child.
“How may I help you, Grace?” he asked, concealing his edgy apprehension; she never meant joy, did Grace.
“Here’s the potato with all its eyes dug out and whiskers scrubbed off, Charlie. I want to move to Sydney,” Grace announced.
Then he looked at her for the first time, made aware that his mind and gaze had devoured her sons alone. The Madonna of the Rocks! flew through the archives of his brain—beautiful, remote, above all earthly pleasures, the granite and adamant encompassing her now an integral part of her, every atom of life concentrated in her offspring. Verily they were extraordinary, the four Latimer sisters!
“A huge upheaval,” he said noncommittally, and waited.
“Now is the right moment. Brian will start at school next month. But not here.” Her voice altered, became more honeyed, a ploy she knew he’d see through in a second, but wanted to use to reinforce her position as his abject supplicant. “I thought of going to Rawson Schiller, another brother-in-law, but he’s a Melbourne man, and as far as I’m concerned, Edda is welcome to Melbourne. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter. No, it’s Sydney for me.” Her voice thinned from warm honey to cold water. “You’re so rich, Charlie, that I have no compunction in asking you for a little gold to grease my machinery. Bear’s sons cannot be reared in a place where everyone knows their history, or go to school with the children of people who witnessed their father’s dementia and suicide.”
His eyes went back instinctively to the little boys, one at each of their mother’s knees, like the lions guarding some statue of Magna Mater—how could she speak of such things in front of them? Brian was looking straight ahead, John into a dream.
And her voice was flowing on, inexorable. “You can easily afford to set me up in a decent house in Bellevue Hill, with a car and an income appropriate for a respectable widow who has no intention of making a social splash. I want my sons educated in private schools, though not the same one. Scots will suit Brian, whereas John will do better at Sydney Grammar. You can see that I’ve thought it all out and made my own enquiries.”
“Admirably thought out,” he said, not grudging her a penny of the considerable sum she was about to cost him. With Grace at least, he’d beaten Rawson Schiller to the prize. “You won’t be lonely, moving to a place where you have no friends or contacts?”
“I’ll soon make friends and establish contacts,” she said, smiling. “That’s what school parent associations are for. One day the Depression will be over, and I want my boys prepared to seize the fruits of its harvest. The best schools, university, a little influence when it comes time to apply for jobs. They’ll have no nest egg of capital if they’re inclined toward business, but they’ll have the status and education to obtain it.”
“Time to go out and play, boys,” Charles said lightly. A look to their mother, a nod from her, and they left. “You’ve brought them up beautifully, Grace.”
“As far as I can, in Corunda. They’ll be day pupils during their prep school years, but at twelve I want them boarding at school—a more expensive affair, but they have no man at home, and they will need greater exposure to a man’s world. A woman is no guide for a boy going through puberty and adolescence, I would flounder in an unknown sea. Daddy’s children were all girls.”
“You perpetually amaze me,” Charles said hollowly.
“Because I can see what my children need ahead of what I need myself?” Grace laughed. “Oh, come, Charlie! It’s a poor mother isn’t capable of that. Things happen, and we never know why. I certainly don’t. As the mother of Bear’s children, I want them to surpass him, which is what he would have wanted, too. He was never an envious or bitter person. Just give me enough money to live the kind of life my sons’ friends and their parents will expect to see—good food if I am obliged to entertain, plenty of good clothes for them—I can make my own, it’s something to do with my time, since I won’t be able to work in Sydney, either. I have my own furniture, but I want to be able to buy books to stock a little library—it will be useful for the boys.”
Pad under his hand, he started writing busily. “House in Bellevue Hill, looking down to Rose Bay—yes, I think you ought to have a view, it’s a poor house in that part of Sydney doesn’t have one—and in your name, though I’ll pay the rates and taxes. A nice car, easy to have repaired—in—your—name. Good! I’ll have my solicitors add the necessary codicils to my will to protect you in the event of my death—I wouldn’t want Rawson stepping in there! Twenty pounds a week income, free and clear—raise it with the cost of living. School fees, uniforms, books, and educational et ceteras in a separate account, I think. And a nest egg of capital, properly invested—twenty thousand is about right—not to be touched unless in direst emergency.” The pen went down; he screwed its cap on and looked at her. “Is that all, Grace? Have I forgotten anything?”
“Nothing. Thank you, Charles, from the bottom of my heart.” Came a dazzling smile. “I will never call you Charlie again.”
“That’s reward enough.”
“I suppose Kitty’s at the orphanage?”
His face went immediately to gargoyle. “Where else? Can’t seem to have any herself, buries her heartbreak in the children other people have all too freely.”
“Oh, don’t be bitter, Charles, please! She feels it so! In fact, she’s sliding downhill.”
He stiffened. “She’s what?”
“Sliding downhill. You must have noticed.”
“I—I haven’t seen very much of her lately.”
Yes, you’re too busy huddled with Horsey Dorcas, Grace said to herself grimly. Aloud she said, “She doesn’t change her dress every day, or even every second or third day. Her hair’s a mess and she’s stopped wearing lipstick. I had a go at her, but I got nowhere. According to Kitty, the children don’t mind what she has on, and they hate lipstick because it comes between them and her kisses. Charles, Kitty’s sliding downhill, and as a doctor, you should know what I mean.”
“That she’s in tune with the times, depressed.”
“Exactly.”
But never on Wednesdays. That was the key piece of the jigsaw, the one piece Grace had no opportunity to see.
Of course Grace misinterpreted a large part of what she saw, given her own, very different personality; what she did was to resurrect Kitty’s childhood depression, attach it to her present situation, and come up with the conclusion that Kitty would shortly be joining Maude at the old-age home. Whereas the truth was far from a mid-twenties attack of the dumps. Her work at the orphanage, she had soon discovered, was hampered by any kind of uniform, and ordinary clothes had to look at least a little like the dresses these children’s mothers might have worn. So Kitty “broke in” her garb on a non-orphanage day, and if it survived one day fairly well at the orphanage, she wore it again the next day. After all, no one could say that her loss of elegance made her look like a farm missus! Simply, it was more practical, as well as cheaper to maintain. Why wear silk stockings at ten shillings a pair only to see them laddered within minutes of arriving at the orphanage?
Tufts understood; Grace didn’t, nor did Dorcas Chandler.
How she looked was the last thing on Kitty’s mind, which found itself strangely liberated to run not in its old circles but in straight lines that forked in ways easy to follow, and led back to the branching point lit up like Christmas trees. Her life, illuminated and emblazoned, finally made sense. How terrible, to gaze back across the years and see them shaped and sustained by one overmastering quality—appearance. Her sisters had always understood, but they too were limited by what each was at her core. And oh, how time had splintered them!
Jack Thurlow floated, a disembodied thought, in the back of Kitty’s mind, all through that winter and spring, reinforced on the Wednesday mornings when he was at home by two hours of tea and scones and conversation. Never as an intruder, and never unwelcome. She could tell him anything that his man’s intellect and emotions would accept, and so skilled was he at setting the boundaries that she had no trouble stopping before she said too much. About the pieces of her heart broken by miscarriages and a possessive husband Jack didn’t want to hear, and out of her newfound wisdom she understood why. There were men’s things and women’s things; they led on from the manifest differences of anatomy into the realms of the intangible soul.
Without ever saying a word, he taught her what Charlie was incapable of knowing: that she had been right to cling to the love of her sisters and her father, right to struggle for babies of her own. They were so delicate, so fragile, the parameters of the relationship he crafted between them, and she could only wonder at Edda’s density in not seeing what Jack had offered her—strength, safety, peace, a properly masculine love suffused with passion. Poor Edda! Always burning for other things.
Therefore Kitty couldn’t tell herself that Jack stepped into her life and instructed her how to fix it; his refusal to do so was implicit in their every meeting. No, this was her battle; she had to sort things out for herself. In her own way. In her own time. A mighty conflict for a very small warrior.
But she wasn’t alone. Somehow, without a word, or a look, or a gesture, he gave her to understand that he was on her side. That he loved her, loved her far more than ever he had loved her sister. If she closed her eyes, Kitty could feel that love enfolding her like a feathery, blissfully warm blanket, neither suffocating nor devoid of sensitivity.
“Listen to me, Kits,” said Grace briskly the day before she and the boys left Corunda for their new life in Sydney.
“I’m listening,” Kitty said dutifully.
“With Edda and me both gone, you’re more alone than I like. If Charles had the sense he was born with—but he doesn’t—he would look after you better, but Horsey Dorcas and the politics just obsess him. There’ll be a by-election later this year, and Charles is preparing for it already—you must be aware he’s leased a shop and is using it as his headquarters. Oh, Kitty! You haven’t noticed? What is the matter with you? George Ingersoll is dying of cancer, and once he’s shoving up daisies, his seat will become vacant. Hear me?”
“Yes, I hear,” Kitty said tiredly.
“With Charles in Canberra, things will change. Luckily he won’t need to buy a house there, it’s only a two-hour drive, but he’ll spend most of his time in Canberra. If you want to try for another baby, do it now. Once he’s an M.P., he’ll be too worn out.” Amid rustling skirts and billows from a scarf, she descended on Kitty and hugged her, kissed her. “Oh, Kits, I fear for you! So would Edda, if she knew what’s going on. There’s a spare bedroom in my Bellevue Hill house, and you must promise me that you’ll come to me if you’ve no one in Corunda to turn to!”
The lilac flared up in Kitty’s eyes. “No one in Corunda?”
“Or go to Edda. Rawson’s a gentleman, at least.”
Kitty giggled. “Honestly, Grace, you are the dizzy limit! I am perfectly all right, I’m in no danger.”
“Just remember the spare bedroom,” said Grace.
George Ingersoll’s cancer was diagnosed in January of 1933, when he already looked so awful he was given a month at most to live. But George came of exquisitely stubborn stock, and hadn’t beaten off all political rivals for forty years just to curl up his toes and die at the bidding of a parcel of doctors, said he; this was merely a temporary setback—and no, he wouldn’t be resigning from federal parliament, either. What did kill him late in October was a massive heart attack, apparently unrelated to his thwarted cancer. At his death he was still the sitting member for Corunda in the federal parliament, which meant Corunda voters held a by-election at the end of November.
Charles Burdum had realized very quickly one aspect of political life: subtlety was wasted. So after the news got out of George’s cancer, Charles rented an abandoned shop in George Street and opened his campaign headquarters. There he installed Dorcas Chandler, several eager young Burdum partisans, all the fixings for cups of tea and hard bikkies, and excerpts from his exercise books that outlined his policies. Everything about the operation proclaimed clearly that when he entered the parliament, it would be as an Independent, that he had no truck with tired old party platforms.
The long drawn out nature of George’s death had had repercussions. First and foremost, everyone took it for granted that when the Unhappy Event did occur, George’s replacement was bound to be Dr. Charles Burdum. So the Country Party, which had owned the seat since its inception, decided not to waste its funds by putting up a candidate at all. Had it not been for a Labour candidate out of the railway workshops, Charles would have been unopposed; as it was, most of Labor’s votes would go to this impertinent but undeniably important Burdum.
Kitty hadn’t suffered any increased attention from Charles as the months went by; indeed, she wondered if he remembered her existence, between his growing excitement at the vision of Canberra looming, and his ever-accelerating campaign in conjunction with his faithful helper Dorcas. Left in a limbo of his neglect, Kitty drifted, her mind on Jack Thurlow and the impossibility of her own situation, the legal property of the wrong man. How to extricate herself? What was the answer? Yet she wasn’t miserably unhappy. Somewhere beneath her skin of impotence lay a tensile strap of confidence that reinforced her strength, a confidence that everything did have an answer.
Of course Charles was aware that his wife had lost interest in his activities, but while George Ingersoll lived, Kitty wasn’t worth the expenditure of precious energies. Like her, Charles drifted in a limbo, though his was of building an Australia Party.
George’s death galvanized him. Overnight he saw Canberra a mere two hours away, and threw off his private inertia. Time to deal with Kitty, who looked as if she belonged in the Trelawneys: not quite a dowd, but definitely a frump. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, but where was he to find the time? Bother the woman! Too busy at the orphanage to hold morning teas and woo wives, was her trouble. Where to find the time to do battle? Then he had a bright idea—let Dorcas tell Kitty! Yes, let Dorcas do it!
“Tell Kitty to smarten herself up,” he instructed. “Compared to Kitty, Enid Lyons is as plain as a pikestaff, but I want that fact glaringly obvious from the moment Canberra sets eyes on her. My wife must be a nonpareil. Go on, Dorcas, do as you’re told.”
“I can’t do that, Charles!” Dorcas said on a gasp, plunged into an icy bath of terror. “Kitty is your wife! Whatever needs to be said, only you can say. I’m a virtual stranger, not even her chosen friend! Please, Charles, no! I’m an employee!”
For all the good her protests did, he may as well have been carved from granite. Cold and gold, he stared at her with, she fancied, thunderbolts emanating like an aura, and she knew without being told that if she didn’t follow his orders, he would find a new political adviser.
Somehow Kitty sensed what was coming. When Dorcas asked to see her for a cup of tea and a chat that Wednesday morning, Kitty shook her head. “No, not today,” she said. “Tomorrow. Wednesday mornings I have a cuppa with Jack Thurlow, and I’ll not break that appointment for Charlie or you or anybody else.”
The pale blue eyes bored into her and found neither guilt nor disobedience: it was a statement of simple fact.
Jack Thurlow? Who was he? Not a friend of Charles’s, nor a man who mattered politically or in civic terms. Memories stirred in Dorcas, who dredged up an old story about the fellow who used to be old Tom Burdum’s heir before Charles arrived. A boyfriend of Kitty’s half sister Edda—yes, of course! Therefore a man Charles’s wife must have known long before she met Charles. An old and treasured friend, Dorcas divined, in no way, shape, or form a lover. So, preparing to have a cup of tea with Kitty on Thursday morning, Dorcas found her task unchanged by Wednesday trysts.
But she had lain in wait to see an immaculately turned out Kitty set off for her appointment with Jack Thurlow. A lavender-blue dress whose silky elegance was set off by touches of apricot reflected in shoes, bag, a gorgeous cartwheel hat, face delicately made up, hair artlessly tumbled. Oh, what a beautiful woman!
The pain chewed at Dorcas like an old, broken-toothed dog on a festering bone: I could be queen of the world if I looked like that. And she—she doesn’t care. If Charles’s stories are true, her face drove her to a cheese grater and a hangman’s rope because she loathed it, yet on Wednesday mornings she draws aside the veil of cloud and lets her sun shine for a cup of tea with a man who spells the past, and was her sister’s years-long lover.
It hadn’t taken more than a week in Charles Burdum’s employ to lift Dorcas Chandler out of her emotional desert and set her down in the midst not of an oasis but the oasis, the one Alexander the Great had entered as a man and left as a god. Inside and under the incongruities of gangling skinny height and equine face there existed a woman like all others: longing for love, needing a man’s strength, hungering to be wrapped up in a warmth that would never go away. To Dorcas Chandler, Charles Burdum represented all she yearned for, yet knew she couldn’t have. Owning nothing else to give him than advice and knowledge of an activity she understood down to its roots, she gave with heartfelt sincerity because her heart was in the task. Dorcas loved Charles Burdum, though he would never know it. The old dog, the stinking bone—but better that, than no bone at all.
She had pride, never forgetting that creatures as unblessed as she were not supposed to own pride; so she went to tea with Kitty burdened by conflicting feelings. The ugly employee ordered to tell the beautiful wife that she wasn’t pulling her weight, the proud woman determined to keep her love a secret, thereby safeguarding her self-esteem.
Kitty cut through everything at the very beginning.
“Dorcas, don’t sit there with a metaphorical axe poised on the back of your neck,” she said, pouring tea. “Have an Anzac bikkie, they dunk a treat in hot tea, never fall apart. There’s nothing worse than having to fish bits of soggy bikkie out of a teacup—it just can’t be done with elegance.”
“I—er—have never dunked a biscuit,” said Dorcas stiffly.
“Oh, you poor thing! The fun you’ve missed! I brought my Anzac recipe from the Rectory—made on golden syrup, not sugar, or it isn’t a proper Anzac. You have no sisters, otherwise you’d dunk.”
“I have no sisters and I do not dunk, but that’s a syllogism.”
“Like all cats are grey in the dark? But they aren’t.”
“You know what a syllogism is,” Dorcas said. “Few do.”
“And I’m not about to be diverted, Dorcas. Charlie has sent you to instruct me not to dress and act like a farm missus now he’s declared his political ambitions publicly. How silly men are! Until Grace told him, I don’t think he even noticed my metamorphosis.” She chuckled, sighed. “Well, that’s Grace, and she’s been gone ten months. You can tell Charlie that you obeyed orders, but that I made no comment one way or another. I will talk to him in my own good time, and when I do, he’ll understand. No, better to say, he’ll hear me and comprehend. He’ll never really understand, it’s not in him. Today, I want to talk about you.”
The eyes went wide. “Me?”
“You. I want to know your terrible secret, the one that blights this wonderful dream of a job. You’re terrified of losing it.”
No answer came; Dorcas sipped her tea and nibbled an Anzac.
Kitty watched her, in complete control. Dorcas was wearing a two-piece suit of rusty tweed speckled in black, and sported a smart, snap-brimmed black felt hat tilted to the left side of her head; her bronze-brown hair was well cut and had been marcelled, and she had improved the way she made up her face, especially around the eyes. Shrewd but vulnerable eyes.
“Come, Dorcas, of course you have a terrible secret,” Kitty said, smiling at her with genuine kindness and sympathy. “I want to help you, but I can’t until you trust me enough to realize that I am both friend and ally. So let me tell you what I think you hide.”
“Mrs. Burdum, whatever you say will be pure imagination.”
“Oh, no, pokering up won’t wash with me! Formality is simply another fence to cower behind.” Kitty’s voice added real tenderness to its warmth. “When you were a very immature, ignorant girl of about fifteen, some man took cruel and cynical advantage of you. I suspected you have no sisters because sisters would have cared for you in ways mothers never do. Whatever their motives, mothers can be hideously destructive, and about their daughters—so blind!”
“You’ve said nothing to impress me thus far, Kitty.”
“There was a baby—a son, I think, whom you love very much. But the real drain on your money is his father, who blackmails you.”
The fight went out of Dorcas with almost explosive force, leaving her defenseless. Awful to witness, but how much harder to endure?
“Today the slimy leech goes,” Kitty said strongly. “No, he goes! The basis for his blackmail won’t exist, because you’re telling Charlie all about him. Dorcas, don’t do a Grace and start crying! Do the new Grace, who grew a backbone overnight when the wolf started ripping down her door. Did your parents disown you? Surely not!”
“No, they took Andrew so that I could continue my journalism. I was twenty when it happened, not fifteen, but I was so ignorant! Andrew’s father cut a swath through the lower Blue Mountains villages—handsome, charming, a dazzling preacher full of evangelical spirit! We gave him every penny we had—religious believers are such easy targets. I even gave him my body—I was so grateful to him, that he found me attractive, but all his son means to him is more money.”
“How many children did he father?”
“That’s the oddest thing,” said Dorcas, musing. “Just Andrew.”
“How old is Andrew now?”
“Fourteen. He goes to the public school in Katoomba.”
“So nearly all your fat salary goes to your parents, son, and a blackmailing turd. My dressmaker must have saved your bacon.”
Dorcas licked her lips. “How did you know?”
The laugh was victorious, merry. “Darling, you walk like a woman who has borne a child, and you’re too worldly to be a virgin. That your secret was an illegitimate child was manifest. What else could so blight the job of a lifetime?” The violet died out of Kitty’s eyes. “It’s not too late to rescue Andrew. Bring him to live with you in Corunda at once—it’s not December yet, and when school starts in February, he’ll go to Corunda Grammar for a private education. By the time he matriculates, he’ll be a part of Corunda, well polished and cozily tucked under Charlie’s wing.”
A trembling Dorcas stared at her, aghast. “I can’t possibly tell Charles!” she cried. “He’d sack me in an instant—the scandal!”
Kitty blew a rude noise. “Rubbish! You silly woman, how could you work so long and closely with Charlie, yet know him so little? This is meat and drink to him! Charlie, the champion of lost causes, unmoved by your plight? The father of your son a putrid parasite feeding off the boy’s mother, draining her dry for fourteen years? My husband both esteems and likes you—it’s his answer! Is Andrew an attractive boy?”
“He’s handsome, but he has something better—character.”
“Tell Charlie!” Kitty urged. “Tell him right now—today, this minute. He’s down at the other end of this great echoing cathedral, a few yards away. Get up, get up! Get up, woman! Go and tell him just as you’ve told me, and ask him to rid you of Andrew’s father. Oh, he’ll love that! It’s been so long since Charlie donned his armor that the shine has worn off, and his warhorse is creaking in every joint. This will put the spring back in his step! Go, go!”
Intimidated by Kitty’s bullying, Dorcas fled to bare her sins.
Kitty went to put a trunk-line call through to Lady Schiller II in Melbourne. Christmas of 1933, she had resolved, would be a reunion in Corunda for all four Latimer sisters. Ten days, Christmas through to New Year . . . The only affairs left unsettled were her own.
That thought glowing like blown-on coals, coming on sunset Kitty drove to Corundoobar to find Jack in from the paddocks. She knew because his petrol-drum mailbox by the cattle-guard was empty. Leaving her car at the bottom of the hill, she strolled up through the blooming gardens, pausing to admire a single glorious rose, a bush of weeping Geraldton wax, sweet peas rioting across a trellis. Where does he find the time? Yes, he was in; Alf and Daisy came to greet her, a business of grins and tail wags—Jack’s dogs were too well-behaved to leap and lick. Then he came out onto the front verandah, hair still damp from the shower, and waited for her.
On the top step, now reduced to smallness by his height, she tilted her chin to look up.
“I’m moving in with you,” she said, “right this minute.”
“Not before time,” he said gravely. “I won’t say I was fed up with waiting, but I have grown a few grey hairs on moonless nights.” His hand described a wide circle in the air. “Here we are, Kitty. All yours, from me to mine.”
“I’ll be your mistress, but I can’t be your wife. Charlie would never consent to a divorce.”
“We live to please ourselves on Corundoobar. We’ll take you on any terms with nary a shadow of regret.”
No scrap of doubt assailed her, even now the moment was a reality. The embraces, the kisses, the lovemaking would come, but for some little while Kitty felt in no need of them, too exalted by the surge of peace and comfort invading her spirit.
And, understanding what she felt, he stood with her to watch the crimsoned sun swallowed by the messengers of night.
Then he slipped an arm about her and turned her to the door.
“Come inside, it’s chilly.”
“I have a suitcase in the car, but the car has to be returned to Charlie,” she said, one nagging barb. “I want nothing from him, nothing!”
“I know. Don’t worry yourself, and don’t talk of him.”
Bert the cat, filling Jack’s chair, was tipped off it so quickly that he landed, half-asleep and hugely indignant, in a heap on the floor. Jack sat down with Kitty on his lap.
When she leaned against him she could feel the steady rhythm of Jack’s heart, and nothing else mattered. Would ever matter. Oh, dear God, grant him the gift of a long life! The only fear that will dog me now is the thought of existing without him. Her head went down on his shoulder, her eyes closed on wet lashes. I have come home at last.