Paper Daisies (6 page)

Berylda

H
e licks his finger of the velout
é
, draws it out with a kiss: ‘Mary, that is perfection.'

The entree. Creamed chicken tartlets with truffles, it will be, and served at precisely eight forty-five.

Mary titters behind her hand like a girl, although she's hardly that. ‘Sir.'

I stand at the kitchen door, watching them. Watching his back, the expansion of his ribs at a breath as he says something else to Mary. And I want to kill him for what he has done. I am here for the wishbone, though, for Gret, at her behest. We are fond of a secret wishbone, my sister and I, small rituals of hope; and we need one now: she remains lying wretched on my bed, refusing to speak of what just occurred, except to say:
I'll be all right in a little while, Ryldy
. Because he has done this before and so you know how it goes? How many times? When did it begin? I think I might know, and the picture I am assembling in my mind is a horror worse than anything I could have imagined.
He's been odd in his temper since October – you know, with all the goings-on with the Liberal League.
With his election as treasurer of the Bathurst branch of the Free Trade Party; yes, I know: his self-admiration must have swelled with his success, and with it comes sharper cruelties: that's always been his way.
Don't worry, Ryldy. He'll soon go back to ignoring my existence, you know what he's like. He frightened me this time, that's all. I'm only so sore and moaning around now because my whatsits are so late, I'm all emotional and tender inside.
How long since your menses should have come?
Oh, three weeks, four …
I'm sure that she does not know what this might mean. And I'm not going to explain it to her. Yet.

The fowl carcass is sitting in a dish by the stove still. Good. I could step out from this threshold and snatch it. But I am transfixed by Uncle Alec. Leering at Mary. She's a gristly old boiler, our housekeeper, but not unattractive. He's a small neat man made large by his own vainglory and the like dimensions of this town. Purportedly handsome, in appearance and character. What a man he is to take such interest in the running of his household, what taste, what style; what a man he is to have such affable relations with his underlings. How very modern. How very liberal. Our Man for the New Age, the electioneering pamphlet will say. He smooths his moustache, leaning over a pot on the stove, peering down the muslin at Mary's décolletage as he does. Does he make connexion with her, too?

Don't worry, Ryldy, honestly. I'll be all right.
My sister's ability to disconnect from the facts is even more advanced than mine. What is this black dream we live inside? When will we wake?

Prince is barking incessantly outside, and has been since I left Gret a minute or two ago. It must be the fellow come with the fireworks, waiting at the gate. What a man Alec Howell is to treat his guests to the spectacle of a firework display for this most special of New Year's Eves. Twenty-eight sky rockets, no less, so the entire district cannot fail to know about it.

‘And what is for the main course?' he is asking Mary now, sampling the anchovy paste for the late supper canapés, continuing to flirt with her. He knows very well what is for the main: he instructed it down to the last crumb a week ago.

‘The lamb, Mr Howell.' She flutters her eyelashes. She makes my stomach turn. ‘With the 'aricots and my special roast parsnips and taties – and the minced tongue croquettes of course. All just as you like 'em, sir.'

‘I had better like them, Mary,' he teases and grins: a small, neat wolf. ‘Or I'll mince you.'

I'll mince
you.
There's a knife lying by the mutton tongues on the table behind them. I could pick it up and drive it into his back. Would I have the strength to get through? Possibly not.
You'll never be a surgeon, Berylda
, he reminds me at every opportunity, not merely to state the obvious that women are not permitted into that field, but to belittle me, gratuitously, because he can. I will never be a surgeon as he is. Slight of stature he may be, but he's strong as a rat trap, lost count of the femoral shafts he's sawn through, the skulls he's drilled into, along with the occasions upon which he's boasted of such skill. And I am slight as air beside him. No, I don't think I'm strong enough to push a blade through those muscles, through his ribs – through to his black fetid heart. Moreover, I am too cowardly to try.

And Prince is still going at whatever poor fellow he has bailed up out there. Uncle Alec appears deaf to it as Mary pretends to scold: ‘No, sir! You may not have any more of my anchovy paste! Get away with you and your naughty fingers.' She shoos him and then snaps out an order at the maid, little Lucy, who's just coming in from the laundry under the load of napery she's pressed for the event, but the master remains un-shooed, poking now through the chicken carcass by the stove.

That forces my hand. Don't you touch my chicken. I step through into the kitchen and take the dish from him, announcing as brightly as long practice will allow me: ‘Well, doesn't all this look and smell wonderful, Mary. We're in for a feast tonight, aren't we just.' I wriggle the breastbone free of the wing it's caught round and wrap it in my handkerchief, and so quick I am about it, I've already turned to leave before Mary can say: ‘A feast indeed, thank you, Miss Jones,' as Uncle Alec commands: ‘Ah Berylda – see who that is at the gate.'

Can't have the master opening his own gate, can you. He's not that modern. Why do any such thing when you can demean your niece by sending her instead? What am I compared to a kitchen maid?

Not halfway to the front door along the east hallway, it seems Prince has stopped his barking anyway. I stop to listen. Silence, except for the ticking of the mantel clock in the drawing room. Perhaps it was only someone going along the road on their way down to the river bend with a rod, taking the scenic route. I almost return directly to Gret, to my room, but I decide to take a moment to calm myself down first. I need to take a moment to release the violence in me. This compulsion to fly at him. Kill him. Make him gone. My steps pound out my hatred up the hall.

How can I make
us
gone?
Now.
Not some time in the future but today. Stop this hideous dream. This dream that has been unfolding and unfolding, shock upon shock, since we arrived here. I was almost fifteen; Gret seventeen. One moment we were on summer holiday at Bathurst, with Aunt Libby and Uncle Alec, here at Bellevue; they had just returned from their honeymoon, Aunt Libby still unsure how she would decorate the rooms in the gleaming new home he'd had built for her while they'd been away; it would be a jolly time of choosing fabrics and papers. A time not to be. A black curtain fell. It falls now. It falls and falls and I am breathless. Mother and Papa would not be joining us, we were told. Their carriage had come off the tracks in the mountains, the engine brakes having failed at the zigzag above Lithgow. A tragedy. No. It was preposterous, and remains so. A few months later, a few minutes later it seemed, Aunt Libby became ill and left us too: typhoid fever, we were told; a broken heart we knew. And our lives have been his to play with ever since.

Five years. How will Greta endure one day more of this? How can I possibly leave her to go back to university? How can I get us out of here now? The questions spin me round and round and round. He will not stop; he will never stop. He will only become more vicious.
What an excellent year 1901 will be, Berylda
, he clapped his hands at me this morning when my results arrived. Clapped them right at my face. No word of congratulation for me, but something else. A threat. Holding the threat under my nose, tight between his clasped palms. A threat that vibrates through this house; it always has: along the tightrope I dare to tread, to remain his favoured one. The one allowed to return to school when Greta was denied her final year. Allowed to attend university, while Greta is imprisoned here. Allowed to remain unmolested, while Greta is –

Damn him to the furthest pit. If there is a child growing in her now, this will ruin her, in every way. She doesn't have my will, my single-minded resolve, my ropeway to the outside world. He has blasted her will, addled her with his brutality, his relentless sneering, his insults, his dismissals –
stupid girl; cretinous thing; yellow mongrel; are you listening to me, you vacuous little bitch? Do you have a brain at all in there?
So that she is more child than I am, though she is the elder by more than two years. But what can my will do for her now? It seems I am watching a precious ornament fall from a shelf but I am too slow to prevent it smashing. Too slow inside this dream.

Wake up!

And then what? Kill him. Kill him tonight. How? Chloroform. Arsenic. Drench him in paraffin and set him alight.

And have Gret see me hanged. No.

What alternative is there but to keep to the plan we already have? No matter how bad things get, Greta will insist that I do. That I continue with my studies; that I become a doctor and –
You'll never be employed in a hospital, Berylda. No board will ever permit women to practise on the wards, you know that.

What do I know? That he will string me along with my studies, only to interfere with my prospects when I qualify? Make sure I will never be employed? I try to close my mind to him, to his threats, to his games, but they are everywhere here in his domain. I don't know if he will even allow me to return to Sydney. I will have to fight him so hard to get there: charm him, cajole him, perform for him, manipulate with games of my own. And even then, it will be five years, if I commit myself well, before I even complete the degree.

Five more years. No. Greta cannot be subject to this. Five more years at the barest minimum. Uncle Alec's interference aside, no woman passes the final in Materia Medica first go – the pharmacy examination – that professor is a notorious misogynist and has not let one woman straight through in the five years we've been allowed to sit for it at all. Five more years is impossible.

Impossible as us ever being able to wrest any of our parents' estate from Alec Howell, damn the blindness of that law – the one that says it was remiss of Aunt Libby to not die before our parents. I have asked the ‘hypothetical' of Flo inside half-a-dozen different guises, and the answer has come back from Hoddy and Old Mac the same. Everything that should be ours – Papa's share in Hartley Shale, our home at Katoomba, Mama and Libby's small but tidy fortune in old gold from their parents' prospect at Gulgong – it's all with Uncle Alec, our legal guardian. And isn't he doing such a wonderful job of looking after us, all society says; and now look, the younger is even off to medical school, they'll toast him tonight. What a man. The trap is tight-laced around us. We can't fight him on this issue, not at all. We will need not only women lawyers and women voters but women legislators to be able to do any such thing. And money: we are essentially penniless but for the scraps he throws us.

We must be made free now. Gret must be freed. Please. How?

If anyone will do it, Ryl, you will do it
, she said to me when I left for college at the beginning of the year
. It will be all right. Don't worry about me. You'll be a doctor one day and we will leave. We can return to Echo Point.
Simple as that.

I stop at the front door, touch my forehead to the cool timber. Breathe
…

Prince barks again, just the once, chasing a bird, perhaps. A happy enough sound that returns me to myself somewhat, and turns the handle in my hand. I must find Buckley before I think or do another thing, have him chain Prince at the stables. I don't particularly like the Gebhardts or Reverend Liversidge or, for that matter, the majority of those invited to the festivities this evening, but neither would I see any of them torn to pieces. I open the front door.

Prince looks up at me from the gate at the bottom of the garden path. Tail wagging. Tongue lolling. The late sun dancing across his brindle coat, he is as beautiful as he is savage.

And there's a man patting his head. How very odd. It's no man I've ever seen before, here or anywhere, though there is something curiously familiar about him. Long flaxen hair like a travelling minstrel, tweed breeches and haversack, he's travelled off the pages of some great strapping Walter Scott adventure and up to our yard. And he appears to remain in possession of both hands, unmolested by Prince.

The man straightens and smiles, a heartbeat of déjà vu. ‘I beg your pardon, young miss.' He points towards the orchard. ‘My apologies for the intrusion, but I was hoping I might take a look at a shrub, ah. The daisies, over by the …'

Ben

I
lose my way in the words as I look back at the girl again and see that she is not a child at all but a young woman, compactly made. She is wearing a blue dress, a gown of pale blue; she is a piece of sky drifted down onto this chocolate-box verandah. A displeased one. Not surprising, I suppose: I just addressed her as
young miss.

‘You would like to look at what, where?' Her frown is severe, her hand raised against the sun.

‘The daisies …' I look again down the lee, into the heavy boughs of the cherries, searching for something appropriate to say in such a circumstance as this – incidental conversation with the fairer sex, of which I am generally – no, absolutely – lacking. ‘I am a botanist …' I offer and then, unable to think of anything else to say, I determine to make my departure swift and immediate. ‘I beg your pardon. Miss. Ah … I do apologise. I am sorry to have disturbed you.'

‘Ha!' The girl waves me away for a nuisance. ‘Disturb me? Prince finds you a good enough fellow. Go and look at your daisies.'

She turns and walks quickly away, around the western side of the verandah, stopping briefly to speak to a workman who is approaching the rear of the house with a barrow of wood. Then she disappears into the shade of the awning; a door creaks open and then closed again.

I look back down at the dog. Prince. Good name for him – a proud beast. And a distrustful one: I thought he might actually jump the fence for me. Teeth bared and snarling. Intimidating, and I am not easily intimidated, not by animals at least. And then he just as suddenly stopped. Sniffed the air, propped his paws up on the fence, as though in welcome, then bounded up towards the gate here, as though asking me to follow, and I did.

The dog licks the back of my hand now as I reach down to raise the latch. Funny creature. I must have confused him somehow; some smell about me. There might be a fair smell about me, too, or a foul one – I realise that I haven't had these strides properly laundered since I left Melbourne. Perhaps the girl caught a whiff of me as well. That's almost a month's worth of whiff, and more. Strike me, but it suddenly seems I've been on the road a long while. Wandering. Years, not weeks.

I look behind me as I open the gate and see Cos there where I left him, down by the verge of the road, still drawing on his pipe, book open on his chest. I assure him mentally that I shan't be long, but as I do a sense of uncertainty slips through my mind. Shan't be long.

Ahead, I look to the white blooms, under the good care of the old melaleuca by the dam there –
linariifolia
,
just like Mama's, its broad canopy in full flower, too, as though dusted with frost. Are these Mama's
elatum
beneath its shelter? They are exquisite, whatever they might be, floating on this gentle breeze, as though over the surface of the water, against slow ripples of molten bronze.

I really have no idea how long I shall be.

As long as this farewell takes me, I suppose. My chest tightens at it: Farewell, Mama.
Where is she now? Wandering pleasantly through some celestial garden, I hope; a small child capering along beside her, asking her the names of the flowers.

I am that small boy still. I shall always be.

Just as these are indeed her white everlastings here, so improbably, on this hillside in Bathurst.

Yes, it is
elatum
. Joy blunders through me. Here they are. The fineness of the leaves, the tall, elegant hands, each stem topped with their inflorescence of bell-shaped bracts, with their multiple rows of snowy rays, holding deep golden discoid flowerheads swelling at their centres. And they are profuse; thriving. I look into the sky as though I might see the way this piece of my childhood garden floated down six hundred miles to find me here. The dog beside me barks once in concord. Yes, it might well appear I am not mad.