Bittersweet (23 page)

“If I gave you unleavened bread to eat and river water to drink, Kitty, it could be no worse than these — er, rare and costly foods, which I offer not to abash you or point up your lack of sophistication, but to show you how rare and costly you are to me.” He kept his voice reasonable and his body relaxed, his eyes telling him that she was still, as the evening neared its end, wary and mistrustful. “Why must you pick and scratch at me?”

She looked suddenly very tired. “I think, Charlie, that it must be my way of trying to get it through your head that I don’t want your attentions. You — you annoy me. I can’t think of another way to put it. You don’t revolt me, or depress me, or any of a thousand strong emotions. You just annoy me, like an eyelash caught and stuck underneath the lid, scratching away,” she said.

“If that be true, why did you come tonight?”

“One more attempt to get at the eyelash.”

“Would you like to go home?”

“Are you going to leave me alone?”

His hands flew out, a gesture pleading her to understand. “I can’t!” he cried. “Kitty, I can’t let it go while you dismiss me so lightly! What can I do to prove how much I love you, to prove that we were meant for each other? I don’t care if I sound silly to you, I love you desperately, I want you for my wife, my one true mate, and somehow I have to get that eyelash out, make both your eyes see I’m the right man for you —”

The hand on the table was a sharp, angry crack, the purple in those eyes flared up hard and hot. “Don’t say silly things to me! Take me home, please. Thank you for an educational meal.”

And that was that. In silence they quit the house, walked to the maroon Packard; he opened her door and settled her.

Down the hill, a stony and wordless waste between them; Kitty looked at what the headlights briefly illuminated — a huge tree trunk, a cluster of bushes, mailboxes toward the bottom, then the overhead lamps of George Street, Victoria Street, and, up ahead, the hospital at last.

This time he wasn’t quick enough; she was out and fleeing up the ramp away from him at the perfect nursing pace: neither a run nor a walk. No fire or haemorrhage, but elude Charles Burdum.

Who returned to Burdum House and sat amid the ruins of what he had planned as an evening of preliminary seduction, sure that no woman could resist the evidence he presented her of time, care, thought, and love. The most delicious food, the best wines, well-trained servants to inform her that when she was his wife, all the messy and irritating jobs would be done by someone else — even the sight of Burdum House’s disarray, crying out for her decorating attention, expense no object.

An annoyance! Someone not important enough to her to dislike —
an eyelash
! Why that, of all metaphors? Driving you crazy, until you finally washed it away or held it up triumphantly on the corner of a screw of gauze. Oh, thank God, the wretched thing is gone! To be dismissed so lightly, so tritely, so inanely …

Wounded to the core, Charles bled from what he assumed was his soul because he lacked the one kind of person in his life who might have disillusioned him — a best friend. The peculiarities of his childhood, isolated from an unstable father, deprived by death of a mother, had set him in stone before he was old enough to go to school. At Eton, at Balliol, at Guy’s, he formed a band of one — himself. His stature, always that of the smallest boy or man in his class, forbade any sort of intimacy; it also shaped a shell of arrogance, unshakable self-confidence, and iron determination to surpass all his bigger, taller peers. Hand in hand with growing maturity came a realisation of his ability to charm and dazzle; rather than a moody loner, the fully rounded Dr. Charles Burdum presented as a smooth, charismatic kind of man, of enviably ready wit atop a steel foundation. Such a pity he was so short! Knowing all who met him thought it, Charles hid his frustration and his anger.

He was very aware that a part of the intensity of his love for Kitty lay in her size; no one would laugh at them when seen as a couple, for they were short, yes, but not midgets, and Kitty was as beautiful as Helen of Troy, a universal love-object who could marry anyone she pleased of any height. And no Paris lurked within Corunda, so much was sure. If Kitty chose him, he was vindicated.

This wandering, illogical thought process healed, he found; and so it did tonight as he sat with a Scotch, sipping slowly. He was not drunk by any means, simply bitterly disappointed that his overtures of love were so scornfully spurned. Which led him out of the slough of Kitty’s despond, and into another that haunted him even more, since its solution didn’t lie in his hands.

There is some sort of disaster looming, I’ve known it for more than a year, and share it with a very few others. The Bank of England is unsettled, the City of London uneasy. But all of it boils down to rumours. Debt in government is too high and unemployment keeps increasing — in Australia, very much so. The country is economically troubled, and I lay much of that at the door of governmental inexperience. The Commonwealth of Australia is less than thirty years old, and its governments are green as grass.

There are glaring signs. That miners’ lock-out on the northern coalfields — a fifteen-year-old shot dead! And the federal government passes too much responsibility to the states, which do not have the power to tax income and are given federal moneys for reasons more political than fair.

Are these actually symptoms of Melbourne’s stranglehold on the nation? Twenty-five years of federal government in Melbourne, with the biggest, most taxable state, New South Wales, playing host to a Canberra only just beginning to function now? This place is the same size as the United States of America, and equally divided, but not equally populated — its people are squeezed into half a dozen vast cities, and rural areas as densely populated as Corunda are rare. I do not understand! But do Australians understand? Their schools seem to teach more British than Australian history, and I don’t know where to go. Corunda is as isolated from central government as Scotland is from London!

A gust of wind blew down the chimney with a roar: Charles jumped, shivered.

How long have I been here, three months? But already Corunda people are looking at me as at a local leader. I have blood links and investments in the area, which is why I chose to come here when I decided on a new world. I wanted to preserve my Englishness, which negated anywhere in North America. The Americans left the Empire in 1776, and the Canadians are plagued by a loud French voice. In South Africa, it’s a Dutch voice. Here in Australia I can carve out a political career, and be Prime Minister.

After all, it’s only a two-hour drive from Corunda to Canberra. But how do I go about the distance inside my head?

And first, marry Kitty.

The second task will be harder, and hurt far more: abandon my Englishness. To keep it will retard me.

O
n 30th October the Sydney newspapers reported that on the 29th the New York Stock Exchange, sixteen hours behind in time, had crashed from a record high to a record low, accompanied by lemming-like suicides as men plummeted out of Wall Street skyscrapers. A juicy story! Yet New York was so far away, and the American financial structure something without the power to influence events in Australia the way British and European financial structures did. America was genuinely foreign, its affairs its own business, its politics severely isolationist when it came to the globe.

Charles Burdum saw 29th October in its true light, breathing a sigh of resigned relief. Yes, it had happened, but his funds as well as the hospital’s were safe. And better the reality than more months waiting for the unknown axe to fall. In the glare of reality a man could act. Nor would everything occur overnight. As to what its symptoms would be below the level of theoretical abstractions, Charles couldn’t in honesty know, beyond the fact that more and more men would be out of work, and that those who kept their jobs would be forced to accept
reduced rates of pay. More property would be offered for sale, but fewer Americans would be buying. For no one, it seemed, had yet divined that what happened to the American financial market had the power to shatter every market in the world.

Dinner at the Rectory with Grace Olsen as his companion completed the Latimer jigsaw puzzle for Charles; Grace was the only twin he hadn’t until now encountered. Privately he decided that all she actually did was further obscure the picture’s meaning. The same height and build as Edda, she was utterly unlike Edda from face to character. Beautiful but sad grey eyes, a mouth that had a tendency to quiver and turned down at its corners, a stylish dress of mottled grey diagonal stripes, and a propensity for feverish chatter that revealed her lack of interest in anything beyond husband, sons, sisters, father — and Jack Thurlow. When she spoke of Jack, her rather mournful face lit up, but Charles noted that from his first mention, the Rector and Maude were not at all perturbed by Jack’s presence in Grace’s life.

“Bear would have loved to be here,” Grace said to Charles on meeting, “but he’s in Wagga and not due home for another month. He’s a Perkins Man,” she added, as if that explained everything.

“He sells ointments, lotions and the like from door to door,” said Maude, simpering slightly.

Grace flushed. “He’s Perkins’s top salesman,” she said sharply, “and he’s a very good provider.”

“I have no doubt of that,” Charles said, giving her his most charming smile. Poor young woman! Very much in love with her commercial traveller, and in constant need of him. Jack Thurlow doesn’t keep Bear’s side of her bed warm, he simply chops the wood and makes sure she doesn’t kill herself or a child in some zany domestic accident. Grace is the helpless type.

There was no harm in her, but the same couldn’t be said for Maude: a downright, outright bitch with no time for either of the Rector’s older twins, and scant time for her own Tufts. A shiver of apprehension rippled down his spine when he beheld her tiny form. Very pretty even at her age, she was a fussily frilly dresser who spent a lot of time and money on appearances. And how kind of the Rector to limit this first dinner to the four of them — he had the time and few enough demands on his attention to get the most out of meeting Grace and Maude.

He could see the germ of Kitty in this sickly-sweet apology for a mother, but only as far as externals went. Their natures, he concluded, were poles apart. More interesting to Charles was the discovery that the Rector controlled Maude, not the other way around. How had he achieved that?

The dinner was an excellent one, somewhere between his own chef’s Parisian delicacies and the Parthenon menu — smoked salmon with thin brown slices of bread-and-butter, followed by tasty and tender roast turkey, and ending with a cheese board and seedless white table grapes.

“Maude is so clever!” Grace gushed over coffee in the lounge. “She buys baby turkeys and roasts two. I love her stuffing — she puts tart fruit in it and makes a relish as well.”

Maude swelled a little at the praise; no doubt Grace had been issued orders to say it. Who whispered that I like my red meats rare? Maude solved the problem by serving turkey.

He heard all about Grace’s delightful house as well as far too much about her sons, one eighteen months, the other five months.

“Who is minding the children tonight?” Charles asked politely.

Whatever Grace might have answered was never said; Maude gave a sniff and rushed into speech. “Grace’s sister, Edda. I can’t say strongly enough and often enough, Grace, that you shouldn’t let Edda near your children! She’s not a good influence.”

Not only Grace, but Thomas Latimer also stiffened in outrage, and Charles couldn’t even begin to guess what had provoked Maude into airing a private difference of opinion to a stranger.

“Edda is a Medusa!” Maude said with a spit and a hiss.

The Rector laughed easily, his eyes, grey like Grace’s, twinkling. “Medusa the Gorgon! It’s a name Edda has borne for many years now, Charlie. She earned it on the day Maude and I gave the four girls an afternoon tea to celebrate their starting nurse-training. Calm as you please, without alarming a single soul, Edda drove her chair leg through the head of a seven-foot red-bellied black snake, and kept it there until Kitty managed to hack its head off with the fireplace tomahawk. Edda was covered in shocking bruises as from a man’s fist where the snake had crashed into her during its death throes. Maude,” the Rector added in the same tone, “was in strong hysterics and occupying all of my attention.”

“Was it a lethal snake?” Charles asked, curious.

“Very, especially at that size.”

“Then Edda was valiant.” Charles smiled at Grace. “A great example for your sons.”

“So I think,” said Grace.

“And so too does Maude. Sometimes, however, she gets her own daughters confused with her maidservants over the years,” Thomas Latimer said, frowning in genuine concern.

“Kitty was involved with the snake too?”

“Yes. The fireplace tools were on the wrong side, which was why Edda had used her chair leg. Kitty was closest to the tools, and was there very quickly to help.”

“While I,” said Grace mournfully, “emulated Maude and cried.”

“And there’s nothing to be ashamed of in that,” Charles said warmly. “Tears are a natural reaction. Not, it seems, for either Edda or Kitty. Your girls are brave, Rector.”

“Indeed they are,” said the Rector proudly.

“I intend to marry Kitty,” Charles said, tone conversational, “but I’m having some difficulty persuading her that I’ll be a good husband.” Downcast one moment, his face blazed into its film star good looks the next. “But I’ll win her, never fear!”

His announcement came as a shock — he expected that — but Charles found it illuminating to see what followed the shock. In Grace, a genuine joy that said she was nothing but glad; in Maude, a huge flare of triumph, a final vindication of her policy since the beauty of Kitty emerged, and which he knew about from Edda and that frank dinner some time ago now; and in the
Rector, a wary delight that told Charles this was only good news if it was what Kitty wanted — and needed. He wasn’t convinced, he had reservations.

“Grace, take your mama over there and chat for a while,” the Reverend Latimer ordered. “Charlie and I need privacy.” He proffered the decanter. “Another port?”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Why won’t Kitty have you? You’re very eligible.”

“As best I can work it out, she doesn’t trust me. Or herself, I think. By the way, I know of her difficulties as a child. Edda told me, and at some length as well as honestly.”

“That’s a rare compliment. How old are you?”

“Thirty-three, to Kitty’s twenty-two.”

“A man should be older than his wife, otherwise women’s natural maturity gives them an unfair advantage in a marriage,” said the spiritual adviser of a large flock with quiet conviction. “The more traditional customs are flouted, the harder it becomes for a home to maintain its stability. Were you Kitty’s age, I would oppose the marriage as demanding too much of an indulged young man — you would be tempted to abandon your responsibilities as husband and father, to the detriment of your children above all. As it is, your extra eleven years endow you with an authority your wife can respect.” The rector sipped his port reflectively. “I must approve of your suit in many ways, but it perturbs me that Kitty doesn’t
trust
you. In what way?”

“If I knew that, I could break it down,” Charles said.

“Not fear that there will be other women?”

“I doubt it, Tom, given that I’ve offered not one scrap of evidence of a weakness for philandering. She is my employee, she knows me on a day-to-day basis.” He hunched his shoulders and spoke the words. “She deems me conceited and arrogant, and I daresay I am, but not without justification. It seems to me that she would rather I was falsely modest than truthful about my talents and abilities. Whatever I am, I’ve been honest about it.”

“Are you a God-fearing man?”

“I believe in a properly Church of England God, though I’m not a bigot of any sort,” Charles declared. “I think it important that any man in the public eye should be seen to attend church on a regular basis, so I will be in the Burdum pew on Sundays.” He paused, then asked in a different voice, “Is the Corunda Church of England prosperous, Rector?”

Thomas Latimer blinked. “As a matter of fact, yes. Corunda is wealthier than most districts because it’s not very drought-prone, and its more affluent people support their churches. But why ask me that, Charlie?”

“Because times are going to get hard, Tom. I gather that the nation depends heavily on exports for prosperity — wheat and wool in the main. Neither is a Corunda crop. The huge demand for uniforms and blankets during the Great War gave the Australian governments, federal and state, a false sense of export optimism. Well, the Great War has been over for a decade, and now no one wants or needs so much wool. Added to that, drought has greatly reduced the amount of export wheat,” Charles said unhappily. “The governments borrowed heavily against what were seen as continued exports. But any financial
man can see what’s coming, given the American stock market crash. The loans have to be repaid, and where is the money going to come from?”

“The hospital funds? Your own money?”

“Oh, they’re safe, though the hospital money will suffer if the Australian pound is devalued, of course. But that’s a loss can be absorbed. My own money is based in England.” Suddenly Charles laughed, looked wry. “I may be alarming you for nothing, Tom, it’s too early to tell how far the cracks in the structure will spread.” He sighed. “Yet somehow I feel it’s going to be bad.”

“I respect your instincts, Charlie, but let us return to my daughter. Do you want me to talk to her?”

“Thank you, no. Except that I would like your blessing.”

“My dear chap, you have it, you have it!”

“Now all I have to do,” said Charles, “is to persuade Kitty.”

Maude had had enough of exile, came sidling back in time to hear this. “Kitty doesn’t dislike you, Charles,” she said, the only one to accord him his proper name. “If she did, she would have told you — most impolitely! — where to go. Instead, she accepted a dinner invitation. Her defences will weaken, truly. And when they do — strike!”

He didn’t say it sounded rather snaky.

While ever the long-term conservative federal government of Stanley Bruce was in power, its business, by and large, was conducted from Melbourne; a quarter of a century after the Commonwealth of Australia came into being, the national capital of Canberra was
spiritually still in the wilderness. Then, a few days before the Wall Street crash, a newly elected Labor federal government under Prime Minister James Scullin decided, amid a big splash of publicity, to sit
permanently
in Canberra. A government of fumbling beginners inherited the aftermath of Wall Street.

Following the horrors of the Great War and the two consecutive outbreaks of influenza that killed even more people than the War, it was perhaps inevitable that the fledgling Commonwealth of Australia would embark upon a spree of public works. Most such public works were undertaken by the state governments for the most obvious of reasons: each state had existed as a separate British colony, and how did one tiny, utterly untutored central government administer three million square miles of mostly desert? Its Constitution had nothing to say about the people who comprised its entity, nor gave them a bill of rights; it was a document about the judiciary, the parliaments, the states, the Commonwealth, taxes and tariffs and trade. So between 1901 and the late 1920s, while the new federal government stumbled along in Melbourne, each state, maintaining a government, did the things its people wanted and/or needed — schools, roads, hospitals, railways, bridges, dams, grain elevators. There was also a massive soldier-settlement scheme to put returned soldiers on the land as primary producers, this being the perceived source of the nation’s wealth.

Each of the states raised its own loans, chiefly with the capital markets of the City of London, at hefty rates of interest, and the sums borrowed were staggering. Tumbling international prices for Australian grains and wool forced huge cutbacks in industry
and agriculture; employment declined and — far worse for the various state governments — revenues fell sharply. Suddenly, right at the moment when the Wall Street crash happened, Australia’s state governments realised that they couldn’t pay the interest on their City of London loans.

The general consensus of opinion among economists, civil servants and politicians was that the cure for this disaster lay in stringent control of money, achieved by not spending it. Every penny that could be scraped up must go to pay those foreign debts. Prime Minister Scullin announced that the federal government would cease to spend on public works and reduce its workforce. The only voice that cried against them belonged to Jack Lang, a New South Wales Labor leader, who wanted more money spent, not less, and more men employed, not fewer.