Bittersweet (33 page)

“I hear you, Lena,” Tufts said. “I’m the sister who visits her at home the most, and she’s always immersed in some sort of Trelawney doings. Well, bully for Grace!”

“Nor were her sixteen months of nursing wasted,” said Kitty thoughtfully. “A Trelawney woman with a sick child goes first to Grace, and only after that, to the doctor. Times are hard, and the doctor costs ready money. Grace is usually all they need.”

“How do you know that, Kits?” Edda asked, surprised.

“Even on top of Catholic Hill there’s gossip.”

Edda’s mind drifted. “Poor Jack!” The words said, she got up and walked to where Charles had abandoned the rejected swain.

“Cheer up,” she said in a level voice. “It may not seem so at the moment, but Grace’s decision has actually spared you a life of considerable pain. You and she aren’t suited in any way, Jack. I don’t mean to sound facetious, but I swear that fat and pampered cat of yours would have left home the minute Grace arrived, and before long you’d be itching to follow its example. Grace isn’t weak and helpless. She’s made of hardened steel. Corunda will decide that your impulse to take Grace and her boys on was
splendid. It’s Grace would have incurred the spite and contempt. No one has ever admired anybody poor for marrying someone rich. As it is, Grace’s instincts for survival are magnificent, so she did what she had to — refuse your gesture right out in the open.”

“Thereby turning me into a fool.”

“Rubbish! You look like a knight in shining armour. No one thinks the worse of you for making the offer, and now nobody thinks the worse of Grace either. You both smell like roses.”

His body twisted, a painful looking movement. “The thing is, Edda, that I was looking forward to settling down with Grace. I’ve got
Corundoobar
, I’ll weather the Depression, and I’d like to have some heirs. Brian and John would have loved the life.”

“Then take the same path, just more slowly,” Edda said, at a cost to herself she preferred not to think about. “Court her as a widow must be courted. Her attempts to keep you at a distance won’t last a moment longer than it takes for the chook run door to fall off, or the earwigs to hit the potato patch. Grace is already accustomed to turning to you, Jack. Make sure she always can.”

His mouth went thin, his eyes flashed fire. “Not in a bloody fit!” he snapped. “As far as I’m concerned, Grace’s chook run door can splinter to bits and she can feed her boys on solid mashed earwigs! She made a fool of me!”

“I’m disappointed in you,” said Edda.

“Oh, sisters ganging up, eh?”

“Yes, always.” The wolf’s eyes mocked him. “You’ve been a mystery to me for years, Jack Thurlow, but no longer. Beneath
all that landsman’s swagger is a man of straw. No brains, no stomach for life, and absolutely no bloody backbone.”

Turning, she stalked back to the group of women, her chest heaving as if she’d run ten miles pursued by a killer.

“Bye-bye, Jack?” Kitty asked.

“I’d sooner sleep with a scarecrow! There’s more to it.”

T
he beginning of 1931 brought one dire lesson with it: that economic ills of this intensity would drag the people down for years to come. The ideological splits in the federal Labor government were made worse by James Scullin’s junket overseas; when he finally returned to Australia in January 1931, the populace had learned enough about his caretaker, Joe Lyons, to like him increasingly better than Scullin.

For Charles’s sake Kitty tried to sustain fascination in the names — and the personalities owning the names — but politics, time was teaching her, lay far from her heart. Those politicians she met she found uninspiring, no different from most men. Generally, she judged, they didn’t take special care of their appearance or display beautiful manners; between the dandruff, the blubbery paunches, the bad teeth, the combed-over baldness, the noses empurpled with grog-blossoms, and the soup stains on their ties, they were a dreary lot.

“If only wireless sets had a moving picture attached!” she said to Charles, “politicians would have to smarten up their act because the people who vote for them would actually see them
in action, how they look and behave. After setting eyes on them, I wouldn’t vote for more than a handful of them — don’t their wives see it?”

“
I
don’t let you down,” Charles said, a trifle complacently.

“True, but outside Corunda, how many voters know that?”

Alas, unanswerable.

He was very aware that since the loss of their child she had changed in her attitude toward him; the business of learning to drive — a genuine oversight on his part — was one symptom of it. Knowing himself unreasonable, still he blamed her sisters, much and all as he liked each one of them, even Grace. Just not as sisters-in-law.

Hardest of all for him to understand was Kitty’s reaction to his natural protectiveness — why did it irk her so, and more and more as time went on? By the end of 1930 she had been begging to fall pregnant again, but when he refused, saying it wasn’t a long enough rest, she wouldn’t accept his reasons as valid. Instead, she began to sneak into his temporary bed, where of course his traitorous body welcomed her, starved for her. She rejoiced, he feared.

“Charlie, I want children!” she said to him fiercely. “I want my own family, I want a reason for living! And don’t say you’re my reason for living, because you’re not! You live for politics, the hospital, and me, in that order. But where are my politics, where is my hospital? I’m shut up in an empty mausoleum on top of a hill, and I want a home filled with children! Not this showcase showplace but a home — hear me?
A home!
”

“It will happen, Kitty, it will happen! But wait, please, I beg of you, wait!”

Towards Easter, she went to see her father and poured out her troubles to him.

“I can’t go to my sisters,” she said, walking with him in the Rectory garden, a summer glory, “because I need to talk to someone older, wiser, yet still of my blood. Daddy, you’ve seen everything in your time, it has to be you.”

They paced between masses of flowers, roses and fairylike ferny daisies, asters and begonias, while the elderly man tried to plumb the depths of his most pain-filled daughter — oh, what might have been were Maude a different kind of mother! Or her child less beautiful?

“I’m here for you, Kitty,” he said. “Tell me.”

“I’ve got an idea in my head that I can’t dislodge, Daddy, and I
know
it’s a wrong idea, but that doesn’t stop me thinking it.” Her eyes brimmed with tears that didn’t fall. “I shouldn’t have married Charlie. Oh, I love him, it isn’t that. But I have this idea that Charlie is the reason for my infertility. That Charlie and I can’t make babies.”

Thomas Latimer led her to a seat and ensconced both of them upon it, then turned toward his daughter, her hands in his.

“Did Maude put this idea in your head, Kitty?” he asked.

“No! Honestly, Daddy, no. I haven’t really talked with her since I married, even when she drives up to see me. Her thinking is muddled, haven’t you noticed?”

“Yes, dear child, I have noticed.”

“No, it’s my own idea,” Kitty said. “Charlie and I can’t make babies together.”

“The idea is insidious but false, Kitty,” the Rector said sternly, “and you must eradicate it. Your husband is a perfectly made man eminently suited to you as the father of your children. Whatever happened to little Henry Burdum is a mystery, but not one that can be solved by invalid conclusion like yours — how unfair! Come, Kitty, you know it is unfair. It’s groundless, baseless. Has any doctor suggested it?”

“No,” she said miserably.

“Because it has no validity, my daughter, none at all. The act of conceiving a child isn’t carpentry, where two boards mightn’t quite dovetail, or a jigsaw puzzle with a missing piece. It is God-given. And what God gives, only God can take away. The Almighty may use human vectors to work His deeds, but they remain His, and His alone. You’re seeking for a victim, Kitty, but to find one in your husband is utterly wrong.”

Kitty listened, the tears liberated to roll down her cheeks. “Yes, Daddy, I hear you,” she whispered. “But what if I keep on losing them?”

“Then it is God’s will, but I fail to see why you should.” He took his handkerchief out, patted it over her face, then gave it to her. “Here, blow your nose, silly child.”

Chastened yet oddly comforted, Kitty blew her nose, dried the last of her tears, and looked at her father with love. He’s getting old, she thought, and something is bothering him. Not me.

“What’s the matter with you, Daddy?” she asked.

“It’s your mother. She’s not just muddled, her mind is going,” he said.

Kitty jumped. “Oh, Daddy!”

His working lips found speech; the Rector took his handkerchief back and used it. “She suffers memory lapses that are growing more frequent and more noticeable. She forgets where she’s put things, especially money, which I think she tries to hide on the premise that I don’t give her any.” His voice wavered, he strove to discipline it. “The worst of it is obvious — I can no longer trust her with money, and dare not give it to her beyond a few shillings if she goes out.”

What to say, what to do? “Then let’s go to the Rectory and have a cup of tea with her,” Kitty said with decision. “I want to see her for myself.”

How well she had concealed her dementia during Bear Olsen’s funeral! Though Kitty’s nursing had mainly been with children, she had seen enough pre-senile dementias to know how cunning they could be at hiding their disorder from the world, and in this, Maude was no different. She was obviously gorging on food; her face had ballooned, and the corseted bulk of her body needed a larger dress size than the one she was wearing, its underarm seams gaping, its placket far apart, its frills stretched. Over three months since Bear died? She had plummeted.

“Darling Kitty!” she cried, turning as if to face a room full of people. “Isn’t my daughter the loveliest child you’ve ever seen?” she shrilled. “That face! Mauve eyes! Helen of Troy! My gorgeous, gorgeous Kitty!”

“A little long in the tooth now for that description, Mama,” Kitty said through a constriction in her throat.

“No, never! Not my Kitty!”

And on, and on, until Kitty managed to get herself away, leaving the Rector to deal with his wife, still rhapsodising about her gorgeous, gorgeous daughter.

It was Tufts whom Kitty found first, looking competently busy in an office lined with books and behind a desk piled high with neat stacks of paper. She wore a uniform of her own design, a simple, severely cut tobacco-brown dress, and had loosely piled her dark gold hair into a bun on the back of her head. The result was as pretty as professional, no mean feat.

“Did you know that Mama’s mind is going?” Kitty demanded.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Four months.”

“Why wasn’t I told?”

“Charlie forbade it. The baby, et cetera.”

Kitty emitted a thin squeal. “Well, Tufts, no more of that, do you hear? I am not a child! I am not mentally deficient! I am not Charlie Burdum’s property mind, body and soul! To think that for three months I’ve had lunch every Wednesday with Edda and you, and never known! I could spit chips! How dared Charlie do this to me? Maude is my
mother
!”

“Calm down, Kits, I’m on your side,” Tufts said calmly. “You know Charlie — an autocrat. We kept silent, but unwillingly.”

“The trouble is that in one way or another, Charlie holds all of us in his power,” Kitty said, subsiding into a chair. “You
and Edda suffer him as your boss, Grace suffers him as his pensioner. And I, alas, am his wife. Well, it goes against the grain that we Latimers of Corunda are at the mercy of a Pommy Burdum.”

“Don’t do anything rash, Kitty, please.”

“Rash? Certainly not. I merely intend to beard the lion in his den tonight in a reasonably civilised manner.”

“That doesn’t sound very reassuring. Do please make proper allowances,” Tufts said.

“I will. Daddy has made me see that what God gives, only God can take away.” Kitty swept a hand in the direction of the bookshelves. “Learning lots?”

“I’ve started university — interesting, if repetitious. The thing I enjoy most is running the ship.”

“And to think that once upon a time I hoped you and Liam would make a go of it,” Kitty said, dimples showing.

“Liam and I? Not in a thousand years,” said Tufts, snorting. “We’re best friends, not lovers.”

“Can’t you be both?”

“Some, perhaps, but not us.”

“And why introduce a new flavour into the mixture if it has a superb taste already? You’re absolutely right, Tufty.”

Charles Burdum was tired. His political career was going nowhere, though the exercise books were filling. Despite his convictions as to how to cure the Depression, he had nothing else in common with Jack Lang, for he deplored Lang’s refusal
to pay back the due interest on foreign loans — street urchin tactics, immature and irresponsible.

When he married Kitty he had been positive he could turn her into the close political colleague and helper he so desperately needed; politics was a
vocal
medium, its exponents near invisible. It depended upon how seductively a man could
talk
to the public. And, the exercise books had informed him with their well-knit, disciplined thought, a man with political aspirations had to start by assembling his inner sanctum. Only after that could he hope for colleagues and the public arena. Yet with 1931 well arrived, he, Charles Burdum, had no inner sanctum. He didn’t even have a politically informed or inclined wife. What he had been inflicted with was a woman who hungered for babies. Oh, children were all well and good, a man had to have them for many reasons, but how many masculine hearts deemed children the top priority in life? Precious few, Charles calculated, being of that kind himself. Oh, for someone at home with whom to talk politics!

So terribly, terribly tired … What he really felt like doing, Charles reflected as he left the Packard in the driveway and plodded up the steps to the portico, was to down a couple of stiff Scotches and then go straight to bed, wifeless, dinnerless, a hibernation. Not a Kitty evening, much as he loved her.

One look at her scowling face was enough to dispel that ambition as futile. Charles drew in a breath and mentally girded himself for war. What on earth had he done?

“Today,” said Kitty, following him to the sideboard on top of which the decanters lived, “I found out that my mother has
been mentally deranged for months, and that you forbade people to tell me. What gave you that right, Charlie?”

He poured a very stiff Scotch and gave it a spurt of soda from the siphon. Until the first gulp had gone down he didn’t answer, then, feeling a little energy steal into his aching frame, he frowned. “The right of a husband to spare his wife,” he said, and took another gulp.

“You have no right to decide what I can be told and cannot be told, whether to spare me or not,” she said through her teeth. “An unconscionable insult! I am a grown woman and make my own decisions, especially when they concern my blood family.”

He was feeling better, and refilled his glass. “Actually, my dear, once you’re married what you say isn’t quite true any more.” He sat down, the image of composure. “To some extent, at law you are my chattel. Your money automatically becomes mine, and you need my written consent to incur debt or engage in any sort of business dealings. As my wife, I can compel you to live with me and cohabit with me.”

Her skin had lost its colour and the eyes were sheened with purple, as of stone; one hand, trembling, went up to press against her mouth. “I see. You’re Soames Forsyte,” she said.

“I trust not,” he said, sipping. “A man who rapes his wife is a contemptible bounder ought to be shot.” He leaned forward. “For heaven’s sake, Kitty, grow up! As if I would ever behave tyrannically to you, of all people! I love you with every part of my being. If that sometimes means I tend to become highhanded, it’s at least excusable. It was solely to spare you fruitless worry that I asked people not to tell you about Maude. What
could you have done except torment yourself over something as inevitable as dementia? Once it’s a clinical fact, you can’t control it, or alter its course. Believe me, not one member of your family made any objection to my asking for silence.”

“That still gives you no right to decide for me!” she cried. “I am my own person, I belong to myself. You can witter on about wives being chattels until the cows come home, Charlie, but you’ll not make a chattel out of me!”

The well-being was invading every bit of him; Charles put his head back against the squabs of his wing chair and smiled at Kitty with a slightly muzzy rush of adoration. “I always think of Scotch as a warm tartan rug thrown over the bare bony knees of a man’s mind,” he said, too tired to be angry.

“I’m not going to get any sense out of you.”

“Afraid so.”

“I’m having another baby,” she said.

His eyes snapped open. “Oh, Kitty! That was unwise.”

“Grace’s second one was closer to her first than this one is to my first attempt.”

His eyes closed again, but on tears she didn’t see. “Unwise.”