Bittersweet (38 page)

For Maude Latimer the news came too late. Three times she had boiled the kettle dry and set the Rectory kitchen on fire, the
last time badly. After a bitter struggle with himself, the Rector had been forced to put her in the old people’s hospice, a place she bumbled around, apparently happy, regaling everyone about her gloriously beautiful baby daughter, Kitty. Told of Edda’s marriage, it failed utterly to impinge. It was Kitty who would grow up to make a brilliant marriage.
Edda?
A nobody-nothing.

It appeared that Charles Burdum was never going to climb down from his high horse. True to his word, the Rector sent Kitty home two hours after she had left, but her nose was in the air and she wasn’t sure she could forgive him, though for her father’s sake she was prepared to try. But she discovered an icy husband who declined dinner, then slept in his dressing room, where he instructed Coates to set up a bed. Face impassive, the man did as he was told, but Kitty knew the tale would be all over Corunda tomorrow — Charlie’s valet was superb at his job
and
a born gossip. The pubs might be shut and most people asleep, but Coates would find a way. There had been times when Kitty had slept alone for “health reasons” but it had always been her to move out of the master’s bed. This was very different — the master had done the moving. Sensational news!

Kitty interpreted it as evidence that harlotry was contagious and she had caught it from Edda. In the air as well as in the blood. No doubt, thought the fulminating Kitty, Tufts and Grace also wore scarlet As on their foreheads. How dared Charlie carry on like a bourgeois evangelist! On which thought she fell fast asleep.

In the morning she woke to find she’d had the most peaceful sleep in many moons, and leaped out of bed vibrating with energy. She hurried to breakfast. To find no Charlie. He was already at the hospital, said her trusty domestic help, Mrs. Simmons.

“Splendid!” said Kitty cheerfully. “He and I have had the most ding-dong row, Mrs. Simmons, and I’m moving out of our bedroom. I’d appreciate it if you and Beatrix — oh, and Coates! — would put my stuff in the lilac suite. Charlie
hates
the lilac suite!”

Mrs. Simmons ostentatiously closed her mouth by putting her hand on her sagging lower jaw and shoving it upward. “Jeez, Kitty, that’s a bit drastic, ain’t it?” she asked, with a typical Corundite’s attitude toward her boss — no “ma’am”s for Mrs. Simmons!

Accepting Mrs. Simmons’s reaction as the norm, Kitty was unfazed. “Yes, it is drastic, but at least it isn’t boring,” she said. “Do you know what the little twirp did? Called my sister Edda a harlot for marrying a rich man with a knighthood!”

“Stiffen the snakes and use ’em as broom handles! The mauve rooms you mean, Kitty?”

“Yes, the mauve rooms.”

Leaving her removal in the capable hands of Mrs. Simmons, Kitty went to the orphanage and volunteered for nursing work there.

“Kitty, you’re manna from heaven,” said Matron Ida Dervish, the head of an institution that had mushroomed in just two years. “A trained children’s nurse! My dear, we can work you
nigh to death, but can you spare the time? Dr. Burdum must keep you busy.”

“Time,” said Kitty, “is something I have acres and acres of, and no wretched government will allow me to utilise my training by giving me a job because I’m married. Well, the latter is debatable. I have had a right royal bust-up with Dr. Charles Burdum, who finds me surplus to his requirements. One glance around as I came in here, Ida, said that here at least I’m really needed. Charlie can rot!”

“
Kitty!
” Matron Dervish exclaimed. “Say things like that, and it will be all over town in a second.”

“It already is. Coates, Ida, don’t forget Coates,” said the indignant wife with a grin. “Oh, he’s hurt me, and I’ll have his guts for garters!”

“Who,
Coates
?”

“No, idiot! Charlie. Have you anything I can wear until I can have some plain uniforms sent down from Sydney? A pity our local shops have closed their doors in such numbers.” She sighed, sobering, her mood beginning to slide. “At heart I’m very hurt, but I’d sooner die than let Charlie see that. Calling Edda, of all people, a harlot!”

“Is
that
what he did?”

“Yes.”

“The man’s touched in the head. Not to mention jealous.”

A judgement many Corundites made as the news flew around, but not a universal one by any means. Charles Burdum had devoted and faithful followers in all walks, and they had no trouble in seeing the justice behind Charles’s comment
about Edda Latimer, who might be a stuck-up bitch, but was definitely very shady when it came to morals. Though the cause of the Burdum quarrel was irrelevant; its piquancy lay in its participants, until now considered bound as closely as — well, twins.

For a week Charles ignored Kitty, the public nature of his dilemma, and the fact that his wife was now inhabiting an ugly suite of rooms at the far end of
his
house. The gauntlet he had thrown down so thoughtlessly she had picked up with indecent eagerness, and was busy whacking his face with it. Not helped by the fact that he was sporting two black eyes no one would believe were the result of walking into a door.

At the end of a week he was prepared to climb down a little, and seized his opportunity when he heard the front door shut at six in the evening: his wife had returned from her ridiculous job at the orphanage.

“May I have a word, Kitty?” he asked courteously, appearing in the doorway of the small sitting room adjacent to his study.

By rights she should be looking tired, for her work was no sinecure — hard, heavy, remorseless. His spy network had informed him that she was going through every head of hair for lice and nits, scrubbing every orifice mercilessly, all the jobs the understaffed and overcrowded orphanage staff hadn’t had time to do properly.

Yet she was blooming, more beautiful than she had been in many months; the lilac-blue eyes blazed with life, the exquisite mouth was set contentedly, and her skin absolutely glowed with good health. This woman, bear stillborn babies? Never!

“Certainly,” she said.

“A drink?”

“Cold beer would be lovely, thank you.”

Having served her and watched her settle in a chair, he sat. “This has got to stop,” he said.

“What’s got to stop?” she asked, sipping luxuriously.

“The shenanigans. Proclaiming that you and I have been rowing, that you’re bored, that you dislike my attitude to your family.”

“My goodness, what a litany of peccadilloes!” she said.

“They have to stop.”

“On your say-so, by your order?”

“Yes, of course. I’m your husband.”

“And what if I refuse to stop my shenanigans?”

“Then I should be compelled to take steps.”

“Steps … Do explain, please.”

“I can cut off your allowance, decline to honour your debts, use my influence to make it impossible for you to do any kind of unpaid work. You are my
wife
, Kitty,” Charles said, strongly and with unflinching authority.

If he had hoped to see her lose her temper, he was disappointed. Kitty stared at him as if he were a new, rather repulsive kind of insect. Then her upper lip curled. “Oh, Charlie, really!” she cried, exasperated but not angered. “Don’t be a bigger fool than God made you! Corunda is
my
home town, not yours. Try to beggar me in Corunda, and you’ll reap a whirlwind. I can ruin you in next to no time. Kitty Latimer, sister of that harlot Edda,
both
much beloved of the locals? It can’t happen. What’s more,
you know it can’t happen. This is all a bluff, your last-ditch stand to acquire an obedient and subordinate wife. Well, eat shit!”

“You have a harlot’s vocabulary,” he said, needing to say something yet having no comeback anywhere in the recesses of his mind. How much he loved her! Why were things going so wrong for him? Those wretched sisters of hers, always her sisters … It came hard to admit his jealousy, his possessiveness, for he had never experienced their like before Kitty entered his world, and now he realised that, loving her, he would never be free of the Latimer sisters.

“Yes, I was always the salty-tongued twin,” she said with a smile, liking the idea. “When one grows up from infancy being hailed as the most beautiful child in creation, it becomes very necessary to develop a quality that can shock, disillusion people. I make no apologies for it, and I have no intention of apologising to you, Charlie, for having to suffer an insufferable insult. My sister Edda is a woman of total integrity and strong character, always intelligent, always unswerving in her loyalties. You dislike her because you sense a quality in her that declines to be owned. It’s a quality I don’t have, unfortunately for me. But this much I do know: that Edda would never sell herself, even for the chance to be a doctor. Which means Rawson Schiller must have wanted something from Edda that cancelled out any element of a sale. It’s a union of equals, Charlie, whereas our poor effort gives me nothing.”

For a long while he made no answer, just sat and stared at his wife, whom he loved but couldn’t plumb. Finally he sighed. “Will you come back to my bed?” he asked.

“No, I don’t think so.”

A huge and empty pit engulfed his belly. “It’s
over
?”

“I didn’t exactly say that. Like the Tsarina Alexandra, I love my mauve boudoir. To have my own little realm within your palace is greatly to my liking, I’ve discovered. I’m happy to admit you to my bed for sex, Charlie, if you ask and you’ll come to me, but I won’t sleep with you. Nor do I want your touch on my realm. It’s
mine
. I’m twenty-four years old, and it’s high time I had some genuine privacy. I yearn to have children. But I insist on a life of my own, and that means — for the present, at any rate — that I continue at the orphanage.”

“You’re hard, very hard,” he muttered.

“All women are, when it comes down to it,” said Kitty, her composure undented. “Men force us to be. Do we have a pact?”

Not knowing whether he loved her more than he hated her, he nodded. “When I want sexual congress with you, I ask, but that does not include sleeping together. How much of living together does it permit?”

“As much or as little as you want. I will run your house, act as your hostess, eat meals with you, sit and talk with you of the day’s events or family doings, be a good mother to your children when God pleases to let them live. Have I missed anything, Charlie? If I have, do tell me,” said this new Kitty.

“Is there a chance that the magic can come back?”

Kitty laughed, a sound as brittle and sharp-edged as crystal. “For me, Charlie, I don’t think it was ever there. But you wanted it — or me — and you pushed until I crumbled. As for throwing my cap over the windmill — no! A harlot I was not.” A gleeful
look entered her face, she grinned. “You’d better hope, husband dear, that I continue not to be a harlot. According to you, it may well run in the family.”

And so much for indiscreet remarks, thought Charles Burdum, retiring to his solitary bed. Until he had married into Clan Latimer, he had never experienced the emotions of siblings, for he had none. How could an only child have known the strength and depth of the ties between sisters, especially twins?

And she had implied that he pushed her too hard — what had she said, that she
crumbled
? Ground down, eaten away, undermined. But that was ridiculous! To think like that was to demean herself, to have a low opinion of herself. Then, out of nowhere, memories of his talk with Edda when he had first arrived in Corunda came back to him. She had said Kitty had a poor opinion of herself, that the mother had all but ruined her. Why did confidences like that seem to have so little significance at the time of telling? He hadn’t taken it in as he ought — overwhelmed, probably, by the wealth of information Edda fed to him in one sitting.

No, be fair, Charles, he told himself now; you genuinely heard only what was grist to your mill, and that mill was intent upon winning Kitty. Nothing else. Kitty the perfect partner, whom Edda was trying to make you see — correctly — as imperfect.
No one
is perfect! Least of all you, Charles Henry Burdum. Now you’ve stuffed it up a treat. Your wife is damaged through no fault of her own, and you’re not the right person to cure her. In effect, she has closed the door on her marriage
without shirking its duties, but duties are all they can ever be to her. Is that why she miscarries?

It fell to Tufts and Liam Finucan to be the first Corundites who met Sir Rawson and Lady Schiller, docking in Sydney after sailing from San Francisco at the beginning of 1932. Liam had a conference to attend in Sydney and Tufts took leave to go with him; they had adjoining rooms at the Hotel Metropole not far from Circular Quay, spent their days apart, their evenings together, and their nights chastely separated by a hotel wall. Which suited them very well. Then on their very last day, Tufts received a telephone call from Edda.

“Rawson and I are at the Hotel Australia,” she said, “and we would dearly like you and Liam to have dinner with us tonight.”

“Wild horses wouldn’t keep us away!”

Since Liam’s unkempt days were in the past, he was clad in a good suit with a Guy’s Hospital tie, and tiny Tufts was beautiful in a dinner dress of amber chiffon. The couple waiting for them in the lounge, however, took all eyes; Tufts and Liam forgot their manners and stared. The man was impressive, if on the ugly side, but Edda was magnificent in emerald-green silk the exact colour of the ring on the third finger of her left hand, a big square emerald surrounded by small diamonds. Around her neck she wore a simple diamond choker, and in each ear lobe a large first-water diamond.

“Starve the lizards!” said Tufts, on tiptoe to kiss Edda’s cheek. “You look like a million dollars.”

“I nearly cost it,” said Edda, laughing.

Then Tufts met her new brother-in-law’s blue eyes and liked him, which was such a relief she almost buckled at the knees.

One wouldn’t think, Edda mused, listening to Rawson and Liam talk, that a lawyer and a pathologist would have much in common, and perhaps they didn’t, but they weren’t lost for words, which flowed back and forth in an easy comradeship that told Edda this folded-up, precise Irishman approved of her husband.