Paper Daisies (10 page)

I have shrunk from the conversation now. I stare into the sturdy girth of Mrs Weston's shoulder: it's almost the same circumference as Gret's entire head. Augusta Weston would make a fine surgeon. She could chop a bit of wood. She could chop down a tree. I glance over my own slight shoulder at the men. Yes, Augusta Weston could put an axe through the lot of them. These besuited apes who control Bathurst. Control the world. There is Reverend Liversidge stroking his cloven chin, as he stands shoulder to shoulder with Justice Victor Wardell, who would convict the working poor wholesale if it would more quickly earn him the Sydney posting he craves, and on the other side of him, lighting his cigar, is J.C. Dunning, proprietor of Magpie Flat copper mine and chief political puppeteer of the district – he'll be supreme master of Uncle Alec, should he achieve his ambitions in the new state parliament. Alec Howell, honourable member. God help New South Wales.

And God help me, please, for I am diabolical in my hatred of him.
You ungrateful little stain
,
I hear him and hear him
. What are you thinking now? You do not presume to tell me what you want. You are lucky I don't throw you into the street – under a train.
How often has he spewed his disgust at me? Sometimes without any reason at all. My face is warm with every sneer, every threat, and the more urgently I will my blood to cool now, the warmer it becomes. I stare hard into the piano case. The lights of the chandelier are reflecting off the gloss. Pretty orbs of light hovering in the piano case that I might still my mind around – until the wires beneath crash discordantly through me for what happened here, in this room, at this piano, only the night before last.
Play ‘Yeller Gal'
, he demanded of Greta with a clap of his hands:
Play ‘Yeller Gal'
for me
. He laughed, a little after dinner laugh, to ridicule her, privately, intimately, as he sang the words to this half-breed coon cartoon loud in her ear:
Oh! I'll gibs ya all mah money, won't ya be mah honey, my red-hot little orange yeller gaaaaal – faster, Greta, faster
, laughing at every stumble of her fingers at the keys. Sadist. How many nights does he make her sing that song? What other humiliations does he subject her to when I am not here? His evil pervades every corner of this room. Infects every speck of dust in this house.

See him now: so controlled, so aware of his audience, he is reptilian. He is peering over Justice Wardell's shoulder to see where Mr Dunning has got to. Ever on his toes; ever looking around himself, no matter whom he's speaking with, for there might be someone more useful along any moment. How shall I be useful? The answer creeps up my spine and across my scalp. If I am diabolical, let it be so. Let me act. Tonight, when all the guests are gone, I will let the gas run from this chandelier above us. I will close all the windows. I will wake Gret; we will scurry out into the night. I will strike a match as we leave. He will be gone. In a wild conflagration of my hate, looking around himself in desperation at the gathering flames.

A terrible accident, it will be. A terrible, terrible accident. That acetylene gas, such an innovation for the country home, installed at such vast expense, too. And so very dangerous. What a tragedy.

My pulse is racing now. I need air.

Breathe.

I need to get out of this room. Out to the verandah. Subdue this compulsion. This violence. Ice my blood. Before some wild conflagration bursts from me.

As I move to step past Gret, Mrs Wardell leans towards her, saying: ‘I once boasted an eighteen-inch waist, you know, but wore it out to twenty-two. Don't tell a soul.'

She runs a hand down the stiff busk of her straight-front and I want to scream.
Don't tell a soul? Don't tell a soul what lies in my sister there
. I am putrid with disgust at it. Shame. Hatred. Despair. Defiance. All sin. I am sin. But I force a smile upon my face as I say: ‘Excuse me, please.'

My smile is a shimmering steel blade as I step towards the drawing room doors, through the men.

To see the stranger beyond them. Mr Wilberry. Mr Wilberry has arrived to join us for dinner. I'd quite forgotten he was coming.

Ben

‘
G
ood evening, Mr Wilberry, and – excuse me.' The girl darts past us. Though she is small and sparrow-swift, her steps shake the boards; the roses on the table in the entrance hall tremble as she makes her way – right out the front door.

‘Er,' I reply as she disappears. This was not a good idea.

Cos belches under his breath beside me: ‘That the one?' Indifferent: ‘Little thing, isn't she.' Couldn't be less interested as he strides into the house, thumping his chest, sniffing the air. ‘I take it all back, Wilber – this place looks entertaining after all. A real rib-tickler, this'll be.'

‘Hm.' I look back out through the open door, after the girl, but there is only the night there.

‘This way, sirs,' the maid is urging us to enter the drawing room ahead. ‘Please.' A note in it that says she'll be in trouble if we loiter too long at the threshold. So young, this maid; she is actually barely more than a child, cheeks plump and rosy, her hair is slipping from her cap. A weird house, this is. As pleasantly arranged inside as out, a perfect dollhouse set above its imitation Yorkshire dale, and yet – what is it? The pictures on the walls too straight? The parquetry too polished? Pretentious, I suppose, and adamantly so: silver card dish on the hall stand so buffed you could trim your beard by it. Which is why it looks entertaining to Cos. Who are they expecting might call here? And yet there is something else about this place. A feeling; an incongruity. Which is most probably just me, being incongruously me. I wonder where Mama's
elatum
have found themselves in this –

‘You're late!' Howell has his hand around mine before we're quite through the drawing room doors. ‘I'd just about given you up.'

‘Given us up?' For what? Is he dinkum? It's barely gone twenty past eight. ‘Late?'

‘Never mind.' Howell smiles, but there's a pained expression in it – we have put him out somehow. Have we? He is still gripping my hand, pulling me in with it, as Cos assures him: ‘We'll try not to mind. But you might in a while – you haven't tried to get rid of me yet now, have you.'

Howell laughs thinly, uncertainly. ‘You must be Mr Thompson?'

‘Yes. One and the same.' Cos offers Howell no hand – he's gone straight for the drinks tray, on a cabinet just inside the doors, as though he needs another one so soon, tossing back the last rum chaser getting into the cab.

I'm sure Howell would like to remark at my friend's fairly conspicuous lack of manners; perhaps he's thinking what rough Queenslanders we are and making the necessary allowances, but he does not comment. He has no doubt made a rough sum of our worth: we barbarians could probably buy out this room with change to spare. As we step fully into it, I look over at Cos, helping himself to a malt, and strike me once more but this house is very weird: all this show of splendour, of finely turned mahogany, of heavy gold drapes, of sparkling crystal, and I'll bet that whisky is the mellowest old Scotch – but there is no butler to serve it, just as there was no man at the door. Nothing wrong with serve-yourself, of course, I'm all for it, but it just seems … what is this uneasy feeling?

Howell has his hand on my arm, and he's leaning to his right, speaking to a man with his back to us: ‘J.C. – Mr Wilberry has arrived.' The man turns: a well-stuffed piece, the turgid flesh of his neck spilling over his collar and sweating lard. Howell introducing us now: ‘J.C. Dunning – meet Benjamin Wilberry. The cattleman.'

‘Botanist,' I correct him, futilely, I'm sure. I am no more cattleman than I am familiar with J.C. Dunning, but I won't be avoiding the charge of either in this place, it seems.

‘Mr Wilberry,' this Dunning bellows like a bull, and the male portion of the party turns to me as one. ‘Very pleased to meet you.' What for? In anticipation that Pater might gallop in behind me, stockwhip cracking? I can never quite guess what men like these are after, but if they wish to emulate Pater, whatever it is they want, it will never be enough. I press Dunning's fleshy hand just hard enough to be unpleasant. He smiles, exposing a blackened tooth, as though to say,
Go harder, feller.

I look behind me, back through the drawing room doors: nothing but the dimness of the entrance hall there. I look over at Cos, who's made himself butler to the ladies by the piano, convincing them that they all need a pre-dinner drop, too. ‘Oh go on, it's never too early to start. Not now I'm here – you'll need a drink in a minute, trust me.' The matrons are already hypnotised, one of the older ones going all girlish up to him: ‘Oh, I don't suppose one would hurt, would it?' No. I shall need little convincing myself.

‘To all here now and to the new year!' one of the gentlemen toasts.

‘I'll drink to that!' another answers – the elderly one in military dress, a caricature of stiff-legged brass, twirling a waxed moustache. ‘God save the Queen! Her Glorious Majesty!'

My collar bites into my throat. Claustrophobic: now
that
best describes the atmosphere of this house. Chokingly claustrophobic. The smell of roasting lamb seems to have been piped into the room, too, mingling stickily with some overly sweet potpourri, promising that dinner, like everything else here, will be of the finest quality, and as predictably inedible as it will be insufferable, for me. A dog barks somewhere outside, just audible under the hollow bleating of voices in here. It's that brindle staghound, Prince, I imagine. I would prefer his company and his conversation.

‘Don't you agree, Mr Wilberry?' Howell is asking.

Possibly not.

‘Wilber?' Cos holds up a decanter to me, and as I nod I almost startle. Is that the girl there by him? No. It is not her. Very like her, but not her. A softer line to the jaw, a rounder face, and something else. Her gown is not blue but the colour of ripe sorghum, a pale rust, of some softer line too. Must be her sister. She is staring off into some place above the noise, as though pondering a question, and then, as though sensing my own stare, she glances at me, no more than a blink, before stepping away, out of view, behind a tall, broad-backed woman.

‘This Federation of ours, our
nation's
big day tomorrow.' Howell has me by the arm again. ‘You are not in favour of our Commonwealth?

Couldn't care a fig, personally, if truth be known; my position is decidedly New Zealandish: distant and wary.

‘Commonwealth?' Cos pricks up across the room at the very idea, though. ‘Did someone say
Commonwealth
?' And now in spluttering impersonation of his famously belligerent sugar baron grandfather he announces to the party: ‘You bloody Southerners wanting our Kanakas out is what your Commonwealth is all about! Who's going to cut the bloody cane now?'

The room falls silent but for my groan.

And Cos, holding glass aloft in one hand and decanter in the other, like some crazed messiah, shouting: ‘Joke!' He explains to the stunned: ‘Just a little
joke
.' Then he grins, before stunning them again: ‘Shoot the Kanakas! That's what I meant to say. Shoot the blacks! Shoot them all! For Federation Day! We're all one big family now!'

The fat man, Dunning, is the first to respond, erupting – enthusiastically: ‘Aha! Now there is a toast
I
might drink to!'

All the men are falling about laughing; all the women are horrified. And we haven't been here five minutes.

Cos has conquered the room; he almost bows: ‘
Joke
, ladies – my ladies, that was a little joke too.'

‘I'd say you're a little drunk, sir,' the tall matron observes, and not too unkindly. She is rousing on a naughty boy.

Cos is not that drunk, yet, though; and Howell is not at all amused – he is most put out now, and not unjustifiably so. ‘A joke is a joke, sir, but there will be no obscenities uttered in this house,' he warns, referring, I'm sure, to Cos's use of the bloody
bloody
adjective rather than his call for the slaughter of blacks.

‘My ap –' I begin.

‘Oh, have another drink yourself, Alec,' Dunning cuts me off, and Cos's opening insult to our host is in every way complete.

I look behind me again. If the girl has not joined the party within the next five minutes, we shall be leaving, too.

Berylda

‘
Y
ou right there, Miss Berylda?' Buckley's voice rolls under the cicada hum, rough as brick dust, scouring through the confusion in my mind. Buckley is a good man. A true man. Such things do exist. ‘Miss Berylda?' he asks again, my name gentle on his gravel rasp. He calls me Miss Berylda still, for the child I was when we first met, a girl just turned fifteen. He is a kind man. A kind of comrade in this awful dream.

‘I'm all right,' I reply. ‘Only taking some air.' My voice is like some ragged wraith of a thing dragged up from a dungeon. ‘Stuffy in there.'

‘Take your word for it,' he says. I can hear his crooked smile of sympathy.

And that's all he has, my word, as he's not allowed past the kitchen. Wouldn't want a manservant sniffing round your chattels indoors now, would you. Alec Howell says in hushed tones and often that Roo Buckley is not to be trusted, the gardener has ‘a past'. Some kind of felon once upon a time, is the suggestion. Does old Buckley a favour keeping him on, so thoroughly modern is Alec Howell, so liberal, so Christian. What a saint. As if he doesn't keep Buckley on because he's cheap. As if Alec Howell is not the real criminal here.

Buckley says: ‘You've been out here a while, miss – sure you're right?'

‘I'm sure. Thank you.' With my forehead pressed to the verandah post for who knows how long, I'm sure he presumes that I am ill. I am, I suppose. I see him now as I raise my head from the post: he's at the edge of the garden bed a few feet below me, here at the back of the house. He is the colour of brick dust too, in the day; in the night he is near invisible.

‘Where the devil has she got to?' We hear Alec Howell now, harassing Mary in the kitchen, looking for me. His demand, carrying through the window behind me, is a full brick hurled into my back.

‘I don't know, sir – she hasn't been in here.' Mary's sigh contains a little whimper, the exasperation of too many pots on the stove.

‘Ten minutes for service,' he warns her, and taunts her as he leaves: ‘Those tarts – hm, very pretty indeed.'

‘Oh, Mr Howell – sir!' Set your clock by that too.

My senses snap back into me. I can do nothing against him here, now. I can do nothing for justice for my sister tonight. But I can play him. At some point this evening there will be a toast to me, for my success this year at university. It's unavoidable. Alec Howell will be forced to raise his glass to me, because it will be
unseemly
not to. He won't be able to resist the opportunity to congratulate himself for my results; his vanity will break him at some point. And when it does, I will make my appeal to him to let Greta and I take that excursion to the Hill. This small escape will be ours. It must be. I begin to make my plans for it now as if this might ensure my success.

‘Buckley?' I ask.

‘Aye, Miss Berylda?'

‘Could I ask you a terribly big favour?'

‘Course, miss – whatever you wish.'

‘Would you forgo your holiday tomorrow to take my sister and me for an excursion?'

‘Nothin' I'd rather do, miss,' he chuckles. He's an old man and alone in the world: there's possibly nothing else he has to do apart from weeding the beans. And he is our friend, however distant he is from our lives, our predicament. ‘Where you thinking of going?'

I smile. ‘Out to Hill End,' I say to him. ‘Stopping at Wheeler's Hotel. Perhaps over two nights?'

‘Now that's an excursion.' Buckley chuckles again. ‘Wild Wheeler's at the Hill – you sure about that?'

Uncle Alec will say no to it, is what Buckley is sure of. I am too. He will find every reasonable objection to the idea. Hill End is too rough a town now the big money is gone and the rest ever ebbs away, now that the gold gets scarcer there, too expensive to extract. Too many strangers; drifters. Desperate escapees. Not a place for ladies, or corsetless sluts, as we are. But I will make him say yes. Somehow. I will find my moment, my ploy, just as I did to be allowed to attend university in the first place:
But it will be such a reflection of all your good care of me – I will work so very hard, Uncle Alec. I will make you so very proud
. I'm going to make him say yes
.
In front of his audience. I will accept no rebuff or compromise; I will shame him into it, and I will enjoy it.
Poor Greta hasn't been anywhere interesting for months
,
I shall say.
Not even out for an afternoon's drive in the buggy, you've been so very busy, Uncle, haven't you?

And should he threaten us in return, I will threaten him back. I will threaten to tell Mrs Weston. And I
will
tell Mrs Weston what he has done. I will tell her what he has done to Gret, what he has put in her. I will tell Mrs Weston tonight. I will.

I must.

And I can't do any such thing. For Gret's sake, I can't tell anyone – not when she refuses even to tell me. I can't entirely trust that Mrs Weston would believe us anyway, or even if she did, that she would back us. Would Mrs Weston put her reputation on the line for ours? No woman can trust another woman to do that. Can she? The whole town will say he does not molest Greta; the whole town will say how difficult it has been for him since his wife died, since he took on the care of two ungrateful orphans. Gret will be called a harlot; and me with her. Sluts.
I will lose my place at the university. On a word, his word, my future, our future, will be snatched from us forever. I have been around this circle of reason a thousand times before; that he increases in his degeneracy makes no difference to our situation. I can trust no one with this, not in this town.

But tomorrow, I can take Gret to Hill End, and I will. There I will find the Chinese doctor, Ah Ling, and I will ask him for a purgative, something to expel a child, if one exists in her.
Some concoction of oil of pennyroyal or tansy or bitter apple to induce convulsions of the uterus, any of which might be bought from any chemist, any of which I would give to her myself, except that I don't know what dosage might be safe – they don't write instructions for abortion on the packets of these pills. A Chinese herbalist will know, though, and when the convulsions come, I want my sister to lose this pain in a whirl of merry-go-round calliope tunes, remembering Mother and Papa, too, and fizzing with too much ginger beer, merely her whatsits come and gone. And, brief though our journey will be, it will afford me precious time, precious clarity, away from him, to think. To plan more and thoroughly: to move our future forward. Quickly. Perhaps a telegraphed message to Flo, some kind of SOS to compel her to come to us straightaway. And then what? What would Flo make of all this? Would she understand? I love Flo so dearly, I so want to tell her everything, but I cannot be sure. It's one thing to trumpet for justice, another to take a personal risk to see it done. I'm not sure that she has seen anything of darkness but her own bright and happy sleep. With Flo or without her, I must find a way to make Gret safe from him.

However I manage it, Uncle Alec will say yes.

‘Yes,' I reply to Buckley. ‘Yes, I'm quite sure. We'll set out at dawn and along the way we'll picnic, at that place where the Turon meets the Track. You know it?'

‘Aye, miss. Aye, I do.'