Bittersweet (19 page)

He got to his feet and came around the desk, smiling at her in a way that left her feeling breathless, for the smile reached inside his eyes, an extraordinary rusty-khaki colour that, she suspected, could dissolve and change the way a chameleon lizard changed the colour of its skin. The shock of such an unexpected meeting with this woman who had haunted him, waking and sleeping, ever since he boarded that train weeks ago was profound; every
vestige of good sense in Charles Burdum ceased to exist. All he could do was extend his hand and smile fatuously, love-struck.

“Sister Treadby, then, if such be your name,” he said, and inched too close to her. “There is only one position I’d offer you — that of my wife. From the moment you snubbed me on that train, I’ve thought of nothing and no one else! I mean, look at us!” he cried, carving up the air with his left hand. “You’re the right size for me, you divine creature, and no word of Marion Davies will e’er pass my lips e’er again, I vow it on Guinevere’s grave! I adore you! I worship the ground you float above! I am your slave, your prisoner of love!”

Transfixed, Kitty stood listening in utter disbelief until he finished, when he too stood apparently transfixed, though by very different emotions. Her lips twitched, trembled; she fought to keep control of herself, but without success — it was the look on his face, which reminded her of Francis X. Bushman trying to convey undying passion in silence, waiting for the blackboard to appear on the film and tell his audience the words Dr. Charles Burdum was actually speaking.

She burst into peals of joyous laughter. “Go on, sport, pull the other one! I’ve never heard such a heap of tripe in all my born days — don’t tell me that Pommy women actually fall for that stuff! It’s so syrupy I want to puke!”

Mortification dyed his face a purplish-crimson; for a few heart-pounding seconds he was literally powerless, had no idea what to do. He could reel off the names of a dozen women who’d melted into compliant puddles when he said such things to them — they were sincerely meant! And he had even proposed
marriage
! But this young woman derided him for being — being what? She was a woman, and women loved lavish compliments!

He retreated, but not unintelligently; finding a laugh in him somewhere, he gave it, stepped back in an easy way, and took hold of a chair. “Sit down, Sister,” he said. “Having crushed me so savagely, it’s the least you can do.”

“All right,” she said, and sat.

“To what did you object in my declaration?” he asked, his rump perched on the edge of his desk, which had been lowered, she noted. Oh, poor chap! The colonies aren’t doing well by you.

“Your question is a good example — so grammatically prim and proper! To an Australian ear it sounds stilted, false. Like the poetical declaration of love. It sounded hysterically funny to me.”

“Barbaric,” he muttered.

“Probably an apt description. Australia must be a shock.”

“How does one speak of love in Corunda, then?”

“Noah may have waxed lyrical around the time of the Ark, but not since in Corunda. You could experiment on a Toorak girl, she might nibble at your romantic bait, but few Australian women would. I mean, not out of the blue, sir! In a staff interview? It makes you look a dinkum ratbag! There’s not a woman born on the face of the globe doesn’t know that all men consider themselves her superior in every way, so when a man mouths syrupy, pukey rubbish to a woman, his sincerity is of the moment. Give him what he wants, and he’ll revert to his superior status immediately,” said Kitty coolly. “You might get away with carnations and chocolates, but Tennyson and tripe?
Not in a fit! A local man would probably tell me I’m a grouse-looking sheila, and leave the rest to — er — cosier circumstances. You, Dr. Burdum, dislike being laughed at as a figure of fun, so abandon the poetic imagery and silly waffle. Your ideas for the hospital are extra-grouse, sir, so you have a lot of local people on your side. But if they begin to see you as a two-bob Lothario, down you’ll come with a crash.”

The hideous humiliation was fading. Charles Burdum was big enough spiritually to forgive Kitty the dealing out of that shame; yet in a minute corner of his brain it was filed away with many other slights, injuries and insults, some done in all innocence, though he didn’t interpret them that way, for he was the slighted, injured, insulted one. He had a failing he knew nothing of: the tendency to cherish grudges for a lifetime, their number inexorably increasing. For Charles Burdum was abnormally thin-skinned, and even the smallest of wounds festered.

At this moment, his mortification shrinking because he knew she hadn’t really meant her laughter spitefully, Charles gazed past his own lacerated hide to see that Kitty was far from indifferent to him: that she had protected herself from his magnetism with a shield of mirth. And she was so right! How could he have brought personal matters up during a professional interview? No, what he felt was far from one-sided, and what he had to do now was work to establish their relationship on a professional level — no intimate undercurrents! Wooing her would have to be postponed. She had to like him, but not as the wrong Charlie: he was Charles Burdum, not Charlie Chaplin.

Seating himself behind his desk, he regarded her with as much detachment as he could summon, given that he was absolutely mad about her, and always would be. Sybil? A very young chardonnay. Kitty was a vintage champagne, above all rivals. Even with that white-blonde hair hidden, the frosty brows and lashes against the dark skin were striking, and on the train he hadn’t been able to look into her eyes long enough to see that their piercing blue was shot with lavender, a tiny touch of oriental cat. In fact, the name ‘Kitty’ suited her, between the domed brow and the wide eyes, the permanent hint of smile on her exquisite lips. In all his life he had never seen one so fair with skin so dark. Nor, he suddenly realised, had he ever seen eyes so
angry
. But that was ridiculous! What could such a beautiful woman have suffered, to be so angry at a compliment? Not an emotion he had expected to find, certainly. If anything, his fantasies had dwelled on how to satisfy what was bound to be a colossal conceit, queen of all she surveyed. Well, he had seen humour, rage, a scorpion’s sting, but no evidence whatsoever of conceit. What
are
you, Kitty?

“Have you a preference for one kind of nursing, Sister?”

“Yes, sir. Children’s.”

He tapped her file folder. “Yes, I’ve already noticed that your three years of nurse training have been heavily weighted in paediatrics. Sister Moulton speaks highly of you.”

“I can speak highly of her.”

“Would you like to continue nursing children?”

“Yes, sir, I would.”

“Matron recommends you for the charge position on the two to ten shift in Children’s. Would that suit you?”

“Yes, sir.”

The film star smile showed; she did not respond.

“Then the position is yours, Sister Treadby.”

“Thank you,” she said, got up, and left. Outside beyond Cynthia Norman’s office she leaned against the wall and sagged in mingled joy and sorrow. Joy, that she had a charge job on Children’s; sorrow, that things had gotten off to such a bad start with the new Superintendent.

Throughout the interview she had watched him, hawklike, her initial reaction to that ludicrous display of his peacock’s tail stored inside a separate box, its lid firmly closed until she had the leisure to open it and examine it free from other considerations. Somehow she sensed that he was a blend of sincerity and chicanery, though she had no idea what proportions they occupied in his make-up. So enormously attractive! And not too short for her; in high heels he would still top her by an inch or so. But terribly short children if they married! Virtual midgets.

Kitty was very confused, and every word he said only made her state worse. What was he like underneath the words? Intelligent, worldly, experienced. She had become conscious of a furious anger as the interview went on its brief way — because of her wretched face, he had automatically assumed that she was stuck-up, proud! Oh, how dared he do that to her? Another collector of art, it seemed, panting to display her beauty as his property by marriage. No, don’t open that box!

But how can I not? He has offered me all the traditional temptations of wealth, power, lifelong comfort —
on no other evidence than my face
! I loathe my face! He waffled on about love,
but what can a man who judges a woman by her face possibly know of love? It says he’s superficial, a cool man at the core. Cool, not cold; he’s not indifferent to the suffering of others, just cool in that he never suffers wholeheartedly himself. A chilly analyst.

Kitty lifted her shoulders off the wall and found out that she could walk. But the contents of this morning’s interview she would keep to herself. If Edda and Tufts knew —!

In the meantime, Charles Burdum was coming to grips with the fact that Kitty and Heather — Tufts — were identical save for their colouring. Tufts had diminished the likeness, near-absolute when it came to physique and facial features. The obvious lack was at least one dimple, but the colouring was more than mere difference: it had an essence of the soul about it. Looking at Tufts, any perceptive person understood how profoundly a practical, orderly and sweet disposition affected the dynamics of attraction. In Kitty the dynamo roared: in Tufts, the dynamo hummed. Never having been exposed to twins, Charles was fascinated. There was the other pair as well, Edda and Grace, who rumour said were more identical than Tufts and Kitty.

What was Kitty’s nature? There were mysteries, some of vital importance, but to whom could he turn for solutions?

The image of Edda rose up in Charles’s mind. Yes, Edda knew everything, she was the quartet’s natural leader according to the gossip grapevine. To Edda he must go, but he had learned from Kitty’s lesson. How do I approach Medusa? Never look into her eyes, they’ll turn you to stone! She wouldn’t like him, either,
though that wasn’t as important as what she decided he meant to baby sister Kitty. Edda wasn’t selfish, she’d put Kitty’s wants and needs ahead of her own. Yes, he would have to go to Edda.

I am the victim of my time and my nationality, he thought. I am an Englishman, a bona fide member of the nation that rules the largest empire the world has ever known. Turn the globe of the world in any direction and the land on it blazes with the ruddy pink that is a geographer’s code for British Empire possessions. Only Antartica is without areas of pink, many of them huge, and in the case of the Australian continent, pink in entirety. But these people resent the pink; they would rather be the green of total autonomy, like the USA. I have to forget to be English, just as being English tends to make one forget Scotland, Wales and Ireland, nominally a part of the ruling Great Britain. Except that everybody secretly has to admit the actual rulers and owners are the English.

He buzzed for his secretary. “Miss Norman, the three Latimer sisters. Do they live in?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How do I contact one of them?”

“Usually by letter, sir, which you would give to me to put in the appropriate pigeonhole in the Sisters’ Office. If it is urgent, there is the telephone, though undoubtedly Matron would send a porter to fetch whoever is wanted.”

“I’ll write a letter. Thank you.”

He drew notepaper forward, frowning. Flimsy stuff of the cheapest kind. New stationery was on order from W.C. Penfold in Sydney, but until it arrived, he was limited to this — this
— lavatory paper. Next week he was summoning the Hospital Board to its first meeting since he had taken over — what a circus that was going to be!

Edda found her letter when she returned to the cottage from her usual ride with Jack Thurlow, physically sated but more restless than she had been in a long time. Oh, what she felt for Jack still had the power to keep her tied to Corunda, but there could be no denying that his idiotic devotion to Grace and Bear annoyed her, even before the quarrel — he
had
been her exclusive friend, no matter what Grace alleged on that memorable day. Edda hadn’t spoken of it to Tufts or Kitty, thanking her lucky stars that their shifts hadn’t let her tell them what was happening to Grace in her Trelawney isolation — fancy imagining that her fellow housewives thought Jack was her lover! To Edda, so ludicrous it was laughable. Grace didn’t live in a vacuum; there were always nosy neighbours calling in to see her while Jack and Edda were working in the garden, and there could be no mistaking which twin was Jack’s inamorata, since they arrived and left in the same car and looked into each other’s eyes in a certain way. What Edda hadn’t begun to understand was the effect two babies and a largely absent husband had had upon her sister, who saw Edda’s glamour, clothes, free lifestyle and easy cameraderie with men as proof that all those qualities of Edda’s had been utterly stripped from her, Grace. A sore jealousy had rubbed her so raw that a part of her began to hate the breezy, carefree,
available
Edda.

The fantasy of a Jack–Grace affair had broken on Edda as just that, a fantasy, but to discover that Grace firmly believed it existed in gossiping minds had first amazed Edda, then, after she pondered it, an attack of irritated pity had provoked her into taking the easiest way out — broadcast her affair with Jack for all to know. Jack hadn’t minded; Grace could relax, her Trelawney reputation pristine. That
was
how I saw it, ran Edda’s thoughts when she had a moment to let them dwell on Grace.

The quarrel itself could never have been foreseen by anyone with logic and good sense — no, that was wrong! It could not have been foreseen by anyone with the tiniest scrap of intelligence, let alone good sense. Wielding the hammer savagely, Grace had brought it down on Edda’s head blindly, destructively; the blaze in her eyes hungered to kill as does a mob, without reason. And after her own rage died, Edda found her concept of her sister so shattered that, if she could have found a way, she never wanted to see Grace again. Her fund of logic told her that whatever was wrong with Grace had very little, if anything, to do with her as a sister or even a mere human being, but her anger was so strong, so implacable, that she couldn’t forget or forgive. The injustice of Grace’s charges corroded and eroded her love to a point where it didn’t exist any more.