The proofs for ‘Between Ourselves’ were back from the printers. Joan sat with her trusty blue pencil doing the final mark-ups for this afternoon’s deadline.
‘Any luck finding new accommodation, Miss Linderman?’ Mr Lofting had enquired as he passed by her desk that morning.
‘Yes, thank you, sir. Thanks in large part to your glowing character reference!’ Joan had replied, expertly preening his ego. Bernice had rung the office with the good news ten minutes previously.
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll be glad to move away from such … unpleasant memories.’
What, Joan wondered, would her owlish boss make of the fact that since he last saw her on Friday morning she had pulled off a blackmail in disguise at the Hotel Australia, interviewed a murdered woman’s mother, discovered her boyfriend was a communist double agent spying on the New Guard, danced at Theo’s with a stranger she’d shagged a week ago, visited her impecunious family and saved them with money extorted from their rich relatives, watched a performance of The Bacchae at a Greek amphitheatre in the bush, and outed her flatmate as a jealous lesbian lover but not, thankfully, a murderer? Not to mention having written another three chapters of her murder mystery crime novel. All of this would be so alien to Mr Lofting’s neat little world, he would simply not believe it.
And tonight, with the full moon keeping watch over the people of Sydney, pious and heathen alike, Joan and Bernice would go to Olympia and Gordon’s flat in Kingsmere at seven o’clock to draw back the veil on the Ladies’ Bacchus Club. Was it just a gathering of society ladies playing parlour games or did it have a more serious, possibly even sinister, intent?
As Joan sipped her morning tea and dunked her gingernut, she ruminated on the little she did know about her aunt’s club. For a start, she knew that Olympia had ‘colleagues’ (as she liked to call them) in the ‘sex reform’ movement, including one of the most vocal and persistent, Mrs Marion Piddington, aunt to that other aspiring young writer, Eleanor Dark. Now in her sixties, Marion had made quite a name for herself with her ideas about ‘saving the white race from degeneracy’. In 1916 she had introduced the public to her controversial scheme of artificial insemination for unmarried women because the war had deprived so many of a husband and the chance to have a child. She called it ‘Scientific Motherhood’ but struggled to find support and abandoned the campaign in 1921. An unapologetic eugenicist, Marion then turned her attention to birth control, the sterilisation of the unfit, and frank sex education for the young with her book Tell Them! She advocated eliminating male masturbation (boys’ trousers should have no pockets) so that as adult men they would avoid promiscuity, prostitution and the scourge of venereal disease. Last year Marion had set up her own birth control clinic (with financial help from Olympia) where she and supporter Jean Devanny ran sex education classes. Just last week Joan had read one of Marion’s columns in Smith’s Weekly arguing for the sterilisation of the feeble-minded and delinquent.
Joan knew that Aunt Olympia firmly believed that the future health and prosperity of Australia lay with its genetically fit women. It was one of her favourite dinner party topics, much to Gordon’s chagrin. Like Mrs Piddington, Olympia also believed in a woman’s right to sexual fulfilment within marriage. In fact, Olympia explained, happiness within marriage and sexual restraint without would guarantee genetic purity. At the dinner party at Kingsmere two years earlier, Olympia had told Joan that she’d founded her Ladies’ Bacchus Club on these principles: that women’s sexual desire must be nurtured, and that this would lead to a utopia in which women were both sexually satisfied and could fulfil their destiny as mothers of a robust nation.
Of course, the Ladies’ Bacchus Club drew its inspiration from another source: ancient Greece and, more specifically, the cult of Dionysus. Olympia was not alone in this regard. Following the cataclysm of the Great War and loss of faith in Christian civilisation, a generation of Australian artists hungered for a cultural renaissance rooted in the remote and pagan past. Norman Lindsay, his son Jack and the poet Ken Slessor had published their magazine Vision as a manifesto of sorts to reclaim the vigour and earthiness of the worship of Arcadia. Satyrs and fauns pranced lustily across its pages, while in one of Jack’s poems Aphrodite was reborn in Sydney Harbour and flew straight to Norman’s Olympian retreat in the Blue Mountains. Though she had little time for Jack, Bernice had been flattered when invited to contribute to the second issue of the magazine. Her pagan tale of elves, fauns and female centaurs, ‘Pan’s Feast’, was illustrated with naked women (wild-haired, busty, big-hipped) astride leaping dolphins or transformed into creatures half-mermaid, half-flying fish, drawn by the great Norman Lindsay himself.
Nymphs, sirens, fauns, maenads, centaurs, gods and goddesses romped and roared through paintings, sculptures, poetry and plays all through the twenties. The Black Magician of the Order of the Evil Itchy, Frank Bennett, a self-styled mystic, had once sought Bernice’s help to summon the great god Pan. He wanted her to lie naked on an open-air altar he had built outside his Middle Harbour shack so that he could sacrifice a goat over her with a sword. Bernie had declined the opportunity (‘Out of pity for the goat’). What soon became clear to most female bohemians, however, was that this vision of an antipodean Arcadia recruited women in mostly supine roles as bare-breasted nymphs endlessly available for male pleasure and as muses for their creativity. What intrigued Joan about the Ladies’ Bacchus Club was that it was for women only, focused exclusively on female pleasure and, possibly, creativity.
While Joan was consumed with curiosity about her aunt’s club, she was also terribly daunted. What on earth happened behind those closed doors? She hardly dared imagine. Could it be any more lurid than the Elizabeth Bay House parties with their drunken and drug-addled fumblings? Or was there something more bizarre and esoteric involved?
Of course, the other source of her nervousness was her determination to find a material link between Ellie and Gordon somewhere in the flat. A love letter perhaps? A photo? A trinket? A perfumed glove? Men could become such sentimental idiots when they thought they were in love. Ruby seemed to think Ellie’s secret lover was a benign patron rather than a sugar daddy. Joan did not know her uncle well enough to imagine which was more probable. Nor was she prepared to completely abandon her theory that Ellie might be a victim of Aunt Olympia’s displeasure. Had Ellie demanded blackmail money from the Goddess Club? Or had Olympia found out about her husband’s grubby infidelity and decided to punish him? As far as Joan could see, the Fielding-Joneses were both ruthless, cold-blooded creatures when their peace and happiness was threatened.
She dunked the last fragment of gingernut in her tea and let it crumble wetly in her mouth. Back to work! Mr Lofting would want to look over her corrections one more time before all the copy went downstairs. She checked the clock on the wall. Two and a half hours to go. She lifted her pencil. But one more thing niggled at the back of Joan’s brain, distracting her.
When she had sat down at the Corona that morning at six, she had noticed that her river-stone paperweight was sitting on top of her manuscript as usual. But upside down. Yes, upside down. She always placed it right side up. So how could this have happened? As if her mind was now alerted to oddities, she’d also had the unsettling sensation that her desk drawer was sticking. Had someone tampered with the lock?
‘You didn’t touch anything on my desk last night, did you?’ Joan had asked Bernice.
‘No, of course not.’ Bernice knew better than to interfere with another writer’s space.
‘It’s just that things look a bit different.’
‘I know what you mean. The postcards on my vanity. They’re slightly off kilter.’
Joan remembered what Mrs Moxham had said last night in the lobby. Coppers were back here today. Snooping all over the joint. I’d be watching your step if I was you!
‘I think we’ve been paid a visit by the police. Bet you anything Mrs Moxham was happy to let them in with her key.’ It looked as if Sergeant Armfield or a male colleague had come back and gone through their things. Did they have a search warrant? And did this mean that Joan and Bernice were now suspects? The idea made Joan feel a lot more uncomfortable than she cared to admit. When Bernice popped out to the toilet, Joan quickly checked the crack behind the kitchen tile to see if the nearly five hundred pounds remaining in her blackmail stash was still there. It was.
While the events of the last week or so had pitched Joan headfirst into the role of undercover detective, for the next two and a half hours she was still Joan, subeditor for the Mirror. With an effort of will, she picked up her pencil and turned her attention to the lady contributors of ‘Between Ourselves’.
What to wear to a meeting of the Ladies Goddess Club? wondered Joan as she and Bernice perused the contents of their shared wardrobe. ‘Who knows what she’ll ask us to wear as bacchantes,’ mused Bernice. ‘But I think we should dress up as if Olympia were hosting one of her fancy cocktail parties.’
The evening was cool with a light breeze stirring the plane trees on Macleay Street as the two women approached the stately fortress of Kingsmere. But the chill that Joan felt across the nape of her neck, the dimpling of her skin and shivers up her spine had more to do with her persistent sense of dread than with the weather. The concierge waved them through the heavy front doors into the atrium, where they stepped into one of the automatic lifts.
Alighting on the top floor, they were greeted by Joan’s aunt.
‘Welcome, my dears! Come in, come in.’ Olympia ushered her two guests into the lobby of the penthouse flat. Joan’s eyes hungrily devoured the luxurious decor. The lovely mahogany and walnut tessellated floor. The semi-translucent Art Nouveau lamps in niches with their frosted-glass screens etched with hounds and stags. Every surface polished and gleaming.
Olympia guided her guests through the living room (geometric light fittings, a claret-coloured sofa, mirrored cocktail cabinet, burnished copper coffee table, plush foot stools, armchairs with scalloped backs) onto the balcony facing the ocean.
‘The view!’ exclaimed Bernice. The whole peninsula on which the Cross sat was laid out beneath them with its colourful mishmash of villas, mansions, hotels, shops and rows of Victorian terraces, punctuated by the glossy canopy of trees, and with the harbour beyond turning gold and crimson in the gathering dusk. Joan felt that same strange emotion she had experienced last time she stood on this balcony: both a childish joy and a sobering humility at seeing the setting for so much human drama rendered so small, no more than a clutter of nursery doll’s houses.
‘There are only ten of us here tonight, including your good selves,’ said Olympia. ‘But please don’t be nervous. They are lovely women, kind and wise, some of them younger than you both, others as old and grizzled as myself.’ She laughed throatily, throwing her head back. ‘And Joan, my dear, can I say how delighted I am to have you here. My own niece a bacchante, who would have thought? You have grown into such a beautiful free spirit, my dear!’
‘Thank you, Aunty.’ Joan smiled nervously. Little did her aunt suspect how free!
‘You will discover new depths within yourselves, I promise,’ Olympia assured them. ‘And because I want you both to feel utterly at ease tonight—especially you, Joan, my dear—I have chosen not to be present in the final stages of our sacred rites. You will be able to completely relax and enter into the spirit of your transformation.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Joan, not fully understanding what this all meant but grateful nonetheless.
‘By the way, have you eaten?’ asked Olympia.
Joan and Bernice both shook their heads. ‘No.’
‘Good! To help you enter the atmosphere of tonight’s ritual, you will drink a cup of our special wine. It’s much better taken on an empty stomach. When it’s all over, we will have a feast to celebrate! Are you ready?’
They nodded in unison.
‘Very well, follow me.’
The pair followed their hostess through a succession of rooms until they came to a door carved with a motif of snakes. ‘Beyond this door is the initiation chamber. Take off all your clothes and put on the initiates’ robes. You will be summoned. Do not be afraid for the priestesses will guide you.’
Bernice and Joan barely looked at each other as they undressed in the small antechamber behind the door. Olympia had explained that the series of rooms they would pass through had been created by dividing up the penthouse’s original ballroom. Each chamber was painted with copies of frescoes found in the Villa of Dionysian Mysteries in Pompeii, showing scene by scene the initiatory passage of a young woman. On the vivid crimson walls of this first antechamber was the figure of a woman barefoot and draped in a long, deep purple robe and several diaphanous shawls that covered her head and shoulders as well as a soft fawnskin cloak, buff-coloured with tiny flecks of white. Stripped naked, Bernie and Joan used the example of the illustration to clothe themselves with the vestments hanging on pegs close by. A cloud of pungent smoke drifting from a small brass censer suspended overhead whirled about their faces and tickled their nostrils with its bracing astringency; already, Joan felt light-headed, aware of a buzzing in her ears and a sharpening of her vision. She had the sensation that time was playing tricks, stretching into an eternal present …
A shrill note sounds and the doors on the far side of the antechamber open. In the next room can be heard the high reedy notes of a panpipe. An older woman, masked and dressed in a purple gown draped over one shoulder, is seated upon a gilded chair.
‘Drink the blood of the vine, the grape that is sacred to our god,’ she intones, offering a large double-handed cup first to Bernice, who takes a deep draught of its dark purple contents, and then to Joan. Joan can tell this is no ordinary wine for it tastes of something much stronger, herbs and barley perhaps, warming her palate and then her skull with the seductive rush of liquor. Joan’s earlier resolve to sip only a little of the wine in order to keep her head clear melts away like snow when she realises she will never make it through this ceremony without shedding her self-consciousness.
‘Remove the first layer of your selfhood,’ intones the priestess and snatches the diaphanous shawl from Bernie’s shoulders, throwing it into the air, where it seems to float for some time. Joan follows her example, casting aside her own shawl.
A second priestess, also masked, hands them a shallow basket of pastries. ‘Honey cakes as sweet as the mysteries, an offering for the god.’
Finger bells begin chinging brightly in time with the panpipe’s tune as the women follow the two initiates into the third room.
‘Remove the second layer,’ instructs the priestess behind them and tears the flimsy shawl from Joan’s head, tossing it aside.
A third priestess, young and very pretty, pours warm water from a silver urn into a wide platter. She then kneels before Bernie and Joan, gently washing their feet.
The sound of a harp now joins the flute and bells as a fourth priestess, a much older woman with long braided white hair, steps forward and presents Bernie and Joan with garlands of ivy and decorated batons. ‘This is your thyrsus, the sacred wand of the maenad, worshipper of Bacchus.’
Now Joan’s head begins to peel open like petals falling from a flower and a cascade of colours gushes from the top of her skull; the drugged wine is working its spell.
‘Cast off the next layer,’ sings the priestess and the fawnskin cloak falls away, leaving only the purple robes loosely draped around the initiates’ naked bodies.
The music grows more frantic and the four priestesses begin to dance, their bare feet slapping rhythmically on the tiled floor, their arms high over their heads, each waving their thyrsus in time to the music.
The fourth room reeks of hot animal odours but there is a grassy incense perfuming the air as well. Each thyrsus seems to ooze honey and milk and blood which trickles down the women’s pale arms and drips onto their upturned faces. Joan becomes aware of the presence of snakes, gorgeous bright green and creamy yellow diamond pythons, tongues flickering, bodies undulating, coiling across the floor and draped across the shoulders and about the necks of the dancing priestesses. Joan is normally wary of snakes, but now she feels only a wondrous fascination and something akin to love for these creatures.
The movements of the women grow wilder and more disjointed; they jump in the air and yelp and yowl, their hands become claws. Joan feels herself transported by the music and the drugged wine as she and Bernice join in the savage dance. Time has melted to a viscous syrupy slowness: hours seem to pass, allowing every lovely individual detail to be gorged on.
Now the whooping, leaping, caterwauling mob of women approach the fifth room. But on the threshold, some of them scream and cower as if too terrified to enter. All the women, including Joan and Bernice, put on masks bearing the faces of animals: foxes, wolves, snakes. Three priestesses on the far side, also masked, come forward and coax the two initiates to enter. Within, a beautiful young man lies sprawled on a gilded lounge, his body muscled and golden, as perfectly proportioned as a classical statue. His face is covered with a horned mask which leers at them lasciviously and he is draped in a robe. This is Bacchus. The priestesses caress his naked body and kiss him greedily on the mouth but he appears languid and half asleep.
Joan and Bernice fall at his feet and make their offering of honey cakes, which he accepts with a slight nod of his head. Now the initiates’ robes are peeled back to reveal their naked buttocks. They feel no shame, no reservation. Everything that happens now seems natural, inevitable. The head priestess brandishes a small whip and flicks it playfully at their exposed flesh. The other priestesses are partly disrobed as well, a naked breast here, a flash of hip there, and they cavort about the supine figure of Bacchus. The flicks of the whip grow more assertive, Joan and Bernice moaning at each sting but not in protest. Their moans are answered by the moaning of the female chorus around them. Red welts appear and then their flesh is marked with a trickle of blood. ‘You will carry this ritual in your flesh forever,’ announces the priestess. ‘Now the god will receive you.’
The god is aroused now and the robe slips from his loins. With the assistance of the younger priestesses, Bernie is lifted onto the lounge where, naked, she sits astride the golden body and together they rock in increasingly violent rhythms until her back arches and she cries out in ecstasy.
Prickles of bright light are dancing before Joan’s eyes, her body is aflame with lust, her skin seems alive to every sensation in the room: the music, the smells, the other women’s desire. She is borne up in the arms of the young priestesses and climbs onto the young god. Why does she feel no shame? The woman around her are laughing, sighing, writhing in delight; it seems they are pleasuring themselves in celebration, cheering on her coupling with Bacchus.
Her nerve endings unfurl beneath her skin like tree roots snaking through soil, like tendrils unfolding into air and light, sparking with the electric flow of sap; she is a dryad, a tree spirit anchored in the earth, thrust into the sky, in union with the whole forest. And then her blood, her nerves, her hair surge upwards with a great gush, her skin and bones dissolving into a shower of windblown sparks, her eyes seeing all the night sky at once, the black dome glistening with stars horizon to horizon over her, under her, inside her and she is, for one brief moment, a goddess. At last, her body stiffens, every muscle rigid in anticipation, and she is flooded with never-ending oblivious sweetness.
The god smiles and closes his eyes.