Angel (12 page)

“I’m surprised you haven’t walloped me the way you did David,” he said, and looked at me sharply. “I don’t get on with women.”

“Unless they’re Lezes.”

“Lezes don’t weigh a bloke up on the marriage scales. No, I reckon I don’t get on with women because I say what I think.” He sighed and stretched, let his eyes roam over me. “You’ll be a lovely, lanky old lady one day, and I still think you’ve got a terrific pair of breasts.”

Time to change the subject. “What do you think of Harold?”

Toby lifted his lip. “I don’t. Why?” “He hates me.”

“That’s a bit strong, Harriet.”

“It’s true!” I insisted. “I’ve encountered him quite a few times now, and he scares me witless. The hate in his eyes for me! Even worse, I can’t work out what I’ve done to him.”

“Wormed your way into Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz’s affections, is my guess,” he said, getting up. “But don’t worry about him-he’s on the skids. The old girl’s fed up with his shenanigans.”

I walked to the door with him, where he balked on the step.

“Would you mind hopping down onto the path?” he asked.

I obliged. It put him slightly above me.

“That’s better. I need all the altitude I can get.” His hands gripped my shoulders firmly but gently. “Goodnight, princess,” he said, and kissed me.

I thought, after the traumatic evening he’d had, that he was fishing for a warm and beautiful salute of consolation. But it wasn’t like that at all. He slid his hands under my arms and across my back, pulled me against him, and kissed me properly. My eyes flew open in shock as a quiver of some highly emotional sensation crept along my jaws until it got to my lips. Then I closed my eyes and got into the mood. Oh, it was wonderful! After David and Norm, I couldn’t believe what I was feeling. I know his hands on my back never moved, but I fancied that they burned their way into my very bones. It was all for me; he just cruised along at my pace, and when I needed to come up for air he pushed his face into the side of my neck and kissed it hard. Ooooooo-aa! That provoked all sorts of reactions! Come on, Toby, I was thinking, cop a feel of those terrific breasts!

The bastard let me go! I opened my eyes indignantly to see his glowing at me impishly.

“Goodnight,” I said, struggling for the upper hand. His eyes danced with unholy laughter, he flicked me carelessly on the cheek and went off up the path without a backward glance.

“April fool!” he called.

I leaped inside and slammed the door, ground my teeth for a minute, then simmered down. April fool or not, I’d just had my first decent kiss, and I loved it. Finally I have an inkling of the pleasure being with a man might be. My blood is dancing.

Pappy came home for long enough to have coffee with me before she left for work, even though this meant she dragged me out of bed two hours earlier than necessary. I was so anxious to find out what was going on that I didn’t care about the two lost hours of sleep. She was radiant-so beautiful!

“Where did you go?” I asked.

She explained that he keeps a weeny flat in Glebe, near Sydney University.

“We went there, bolted the door, took the telephone off the hook, and never moved outside until six this morning. Oh, Harriet, he’s wonderful, perfect-a king, a god! Nothing like it has ever happened to me before! Would you believe that we lay naked together and played with each other for six hours before he took me the first time?” Her eyes glazed at the memory. “We tormented each other-licked and sucked until we nearly came, then stopped, then started all over again-our climax was simultaneous, isn’t that incredible? At one and the same moment! And then we plunged into a sadness so deep and full that we both wept.”

These confidences were so embarrassing that I begged her to keep the gory details to herself, but Pappy lacks inhibitions, she really does.

“You’re embarrassing yourself, Harriet,” she said in tones of disapproval.

“It’s high time you came to terms with your body.”

I stuck my chin up. “There’s no one I fancy,” I lied. Toby, Toby, Toby.

“You’re afraid.”

“Of getting pregnant, for sure.”

“Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz says that if a woman doesn’t want a baby all the way through to her soul, she won’t conceive.”

I snorted. “Thank you, I have no intention of testing the Delvecchio Schwartz Theory, Pappy, and that’s that. So you had a jolly time with the Prof.

Was it all sex, or did you talk too?”

“We talked endlessly! We smoked a little hashish, lay in each other’s arms, inhaled a little cocaine-I never realised how some substances can heighten one’s pleasure almost unbearably!”

I knew if I started to remonstrate with her about that, we’d quarrel, so instead I asked if the Prof was married. “Yes,” she said quite happily, “to a sad, dreary woman he detests. They have seven children.”

“He can’t detest her that much, then. Where do they live?”

“Somewhere out near the Blue Mountains. He drives out there occasionally for the sake of the children, but he and his wife sleep in separate bedrooms.”

“That’s one method of birth control,” I said, a bit waspishly.

“Ezra told me that he fell in love with me the moment he set eyes on me.

He says I’ve brought him joy no other woman ever has.”

“Does Ezra mean that your weekend parade of men is a thing of the past?” I asked.

Pappy looked genuinely shocked. “Of course it does, Harriet! My search is over, I’ve found Ezra. Other men are meaningless.”

Well, I honestly don’t know how much of all that I ought to believe. Pappy believes, so for her sake I hope my own doubts are without foundation.

Hashish and cocaine. The Prof certainly knows how to indulge in ultimate pleasures. Married, too. Lots of men do have unhappy marriages, no reason to think that Ezra Marsupial-what is his name?-isn’t one of them. Oh, but what truly does set my teeth on edge is the way darling Ezra chooses to live his life.

He keeps his wife and seven kids far enough away from his place of work to negate them, and he keeps this weeny flat in the Glebe. Very handy, a weeny flat right next door to a bottomless supply of nubile young maidens. For the life of me I can’t see why the wretched man is so attractive to those idiotic girls, but obviously he’s got something, though I doubt that his dingus is as long as Dad’s garden hose. It’s the hashish and cocaine, I reckon.

He’s just using Pappy, I know it in my bones. But why did he pick her, with all those others gazing at him with their tongues hanging out? Why, for that matter, is Pappy so desirable to so many men? When sex is uppermost on a man’s mind, the beauty of a woman’s nature isn’t what draws them. There’s a mystery here that I have to solve. I love Pappy, and I think she’s the prettiest creature in the world. But there’s more to it than that.

Harriet Purcell, you’re a novice in the love department, what gives you the right to speculate? Hurry up, King of Pentacles number one! I need a basis of reference.

Thursday, April 7th, 1960 Ooooo-ah! That dolt Chris Hamilton made a right mess of our busy but placid little world today. I wish the hell she’d give Demetrios a proper look-over instead of snapping at the poor chap every time he pushes a patient in.

We nearly had a death on our hands this morning, and that is the most awful thing that can happen. A suspected fracture of the skull decided to develop acute swelling of the brain while we were Xraying him. I found myself pushed aside by an unknown registrar, who acted very promptly and had the patient off to neurosurgery theatre in a trice. But ten minutes later he was back to look at Chris and me more coldly than Matron can.

“You bloody bitches, why didn’t you see what was happening?” he snarled.

“That man coned because you left it too late to call for help! You stupid bloody bitches!”

Chris put the cassettes she was holding into my hands and stalked to the door. “Kindly accompany me to Sister Toppingham’s office, Doctor,” she said in freezing tones. “I would be grateful if you repeated your remarks to her.”

Sister Cas rushed in a minute later, eyes out on stalks. “I heard!” she cried.

“Oh, he’s a bastard, Doctor Michael Dobkins!”

The junior had flown off to neurosurgery theatre with the X-rays and I had no patient on my hands, so I stared at her with a few ideas germinating in my head. “They know each other, don’t they?” I asked. “Chris and Dr. Dobkins, I mean.” Since she and Chris shared digs, I figured she’d be privy to the dirt.

“They certainly do,” she said grimly. “Eight years ago, when Dobkins was a junior resident, he and Chris were so wrapped in each other that Chris rather took it for granted they were engaged. Then he dumped her, no explanation.

Six months later he married a physio with a company director father and a mother on the Black and White Committee. As she was still virgo intacta, Chris couldn’t even threaten to sue him for breach of promise.”

Well, that would do it, all right.

Chris came back with Sister Agatha and Dr. Michael Dobkins and I had to give my version of the incident, which tallied with Chris’s. As a result of my testimony, the Super, the Clinical Super and Matron appeared in that order, and I had to retell the story to three very

disapproving faces. Chris had charged Dobkins with unprofessional conduct, namely hurling unpardonable epithets at female staff. Surgeons do it in the operating theatre all the time, but surgeons have to be allowed their little foibles. Dr. Dobkins, a mere senior registrar, is supposed to sit on his feelings.

The worst of it is that it ought never to have happened. If Chris had kept her head and kept the tempest local-maybe hauled Dobkins into a private corner and chewed his arse off for bad manners-then Upstairs would never have got into the act. As it is, she switched on a million-watt searchlight that has hampered our work and called our integrity into question.

By the end of the afternoon, it was Dobkins on the carpet, not us. The patient had coned-his brain had suddenly swollen until its vital centres in the brain stem were squashed against the surrounding bony ridges-but a gigantic subdural haematoma had been successfully aspirated in neurosurgery theatre and the patient had survived intact thanks to the proximity of Cas and resuscitation equipment. The judgement delivered from Upstairs and relayed to us by Sister Agatha was that we had not been derelict in our duty.

Chris knocked off looking like Joan of Arc at the stake, left me to finish what was a rather awful day.

It was nearly nine o’clock when I searched South Dowling Street for a taxi.

Not a one. So I walked. At the Cleveland Street lights, a sleek black Jaguar slid into the

kerb beside me, the passenger’s door opened and Mr. Forsythe said, “You look very tired, Harriet. Would you like a lift home?”

I threw caution to the winds and hopped in. “Sir, you’re a godsend!” I said, snuggling into the leather seat. He flashed me a smile, but said nothing.

However, at the next big junction he automatically turned into Flinders Street, and I realised that he had no idea where I lived. So I had to apologise and tell him that I lived at the Potts Point end of Victoria Street. Shame on you, Harriet Purcell! What’s happened to Kings Cross? He apologised for not asking me where I lived, drove down to William Street and backtracked.

As we purred into that visual cacophony of neons I said, “Um, I really live at Kings Cross. The Royal Australian Navy owns Potts Point whole and entire.”

His brows rose, he grinned. “I wouldn’t have picked you as living at Kings Cross,” he said.

“And just what sort of person does live at the Cross?” I growled.

That startled him! He took his eyes off the road for long enough to see that I looked militant, and tried to mend his fences. “I really don’t know,” he said pacifically. “I suppose I suffer all the misconceptions of those whose only acquaintance with the Cross is via the yellow press.”

“Well, the postie did tell me that the whores next door have their mail addressed to Potts Point, but as far as I’m concerned, sir, Victoria Street is Kings Cross from end to end!”

Why was I so angry? It was me who mentioned Potts Point first! But he must be very well house-trained, because he didn’t try to justify himself, he just fell silent and drove to my directions.

He pulled into the section the parking police keep reserved for august clients of 17b and 17d; the caduceus on the jag’s back bumper is protection from parking tickets absolutely anywhere.

Then he was out and around to open my door before I could find the right handle. “Thank you for the ride,” I muttered, dying to get away as quickly as I could.

But he stood looking as if he had no intention of moving. “Do you live here?” he asked, waving at our cul-de-sac.

“The middle house. I have a flat.”

“It’s charming,” he said, waving that hand about again.

I stood beside him desperately trying to think of something to say that would tell him I appreciated his kindness but was not going to ask him in. But what came out was “Would you like a cup of coffee, sir?” “Thank you, I would.”

Oh, Shit! Praying that no one was about, I pushed the front door open and headed down the hall, hideously conscious of him behind me taking in the scribbled walls, the tatty lino, the fly-poop on the naked lightbulbs. Things were in full swing at 17d next door as we hit the open air; the faint sounds of whores working hard were quite as audible as Madame Fugue having a screaming fight with

Prudence in the kitchen, her subject a graphic description of what a girl had to do to please a gentleman with rather peculiar tastes.

“Don’t fuckin’ piss before you go in when they want to be pissed on, and drink a gallon of fuckin’ water!” was the crux of the matter.

“An interesting altercation,” he said, as I wrestled with the old mortice lock.

“It’s a very high-class brothel, and so’s the one on the other side of us,” I said, flinging the door open. “Patronised by Sydney’s highest and finest.”

He confined his next remarks to my flat, which he called pretty, charming, homey.

“Sit down,” I said, a little ungraciously. “How do you take your coffee?”