Paper Daisies (9 page)

Berylda

‘
A
pair of sluts.' Uncle Alec flicks his eyes across us with disgust as the doorbell clangs, angry that we are not dressed to his satisfaction, and that we are late to the drawing room. Too late for him to order us back into our own rooms to make ourselves respectable: the Gebhardts are here, a good ten minutes early. Set your clock by them.

As he marches past us, I squeeze Greta's hand and whisper: ‘We will have some fun tonight.' Regardless, and despite him. We might as well attempt to. I make a face at his back, sticking out my tongue like a tiki carving, and Greta has to cover her mouth to keep the laugh in, keep her decorum as we stand here, waiting, in our place, by the piano.

He stands in the entrance hall as Lucy heaves the front door open, before she disappears into its shadow, a sliver of a shadow herself, barely there at all.

‘Good evening!' The master's arms are open wide to receive his guests. This festival of deceit has begun.

Mrs Gebhardt swooping in towards us, always a slightly threatening rustle of taffeta ahead of her pronouncements; this woman cannot speak in anything but pronouncements: ‘Good evening, girls.' Her hawk eyes slide over us and then settle on me, her tone almost accusatory. ‘Berylda, I have read in this morning's newspaper that you have come first in Biology. Congratulations to you. This is a good result.'

‘Thank you,' I reply with a smile as difficult as her manner. Mrs Gebhardt means well, and I am grateful to be congratulated by someone other than my sister and the distant professorial board. I look over at Uncle Alec: busy shaking Dr Gebhardt's hand as if he didn't hear; as if he didn't see Dr Gebhardt this morning on his rounds. He heard Mrs Gebhardt, I'm sure, and he's making a point of continuing to refuse to congratulate me, when normally he would be boasting of my academic successes as if they were his own, just as he did last year, with my matriculation results. I drill my hatred into the back of his head with a blunt-toothed and rusting trephine, as Mrs Gebhardt pronounces on: ‘I see you reform your dress also.' She looks Greta and I up and down again. ‘Both of you. This is unexpected and very good.'

Very good observation, barely thirty seconds in; won't the master be pleased. Greta looks down into the fawn mist at her breast, unsure for a moment, his words having struck there, staining her. I can feel what she is thinking:
Do I look like a slut, really?
But when she raises her eyes again, she has found something of a smile, too: ‘Thank you, Mrs Gebhardt.'

A thankyou overrun by Mrs Gebhardt's next pronouncements: ‘In Bavaria, I must tell you, young women are discouraged from wearing such cages of the lungs nowadays. The corset is detrimental to good posture, good breathing and muscular strength.' She really could lecture any learned professor under the table, given half a chance. ‘One third of young women, at least, will not wear this garment any longer. Not in Munich. Men will not marry a girl who wears one. The effect of the corset is provocative on the one hand, such a display of form and flesh, and
vanity
, while on the other it –'

‘Interferes with Fr
ä
ulein's capacity for chopping wood,' Dr Gebhardt adds behind her, chuckling at his own wit, Uncle Alec joining him. In open contempt. Ho ho ho. ‘The woman's place is in the yard doing all the hard work for us, ja!'

‘Ho ho ho.' I fling my own contempt lightly into the space between them, and I am ignored. Still ho-ho-hoing together, Uncle Alec has his hand on Dr Gebhardt's shoulder now in that way of masculine conviviality, but I know he is pointedly refusing to acknowledge me – us. He is so incensed by our disobedience, he is straining for jollity, too. I can see it in the clench of his jaw; the hint of perspiration on his forehead. Good. But my breath catches. For fear. And for my own disgust. I see them for what they are, these men: mutually repugnant; mutually parasitic, too. Uncle Alec despises Max Gebhardt, hates his foreignness, his German know-all-ness, and he hates his forthright wife most of all, but as dispenser at the hospital, Dr Gebhardt serves a purpose other than keeper of the keys to the medicine cabinet: he's an oily, sycophantic fool who possibly couldn't get a job mopping floors in a German hospital but thinks he might be district medical officer one day if he stays in with Alec Howell, for whom he would take strychnine if it would aid his own cause.

‘Aperitif, Max?'

‘Well.' Mrs Gebhardt rustles away indignantly, back towards the entrance hall, and breath returns to me, with force, at her shrill call: ‘My shawl, girl – where is the girl?' She swoops off to startle Lucy out of her wits with a demand for the shawl to be redeemed from the closet.

‘It is a little chilly now,' says Gret. She stares into the ebony gloss of the piano case, her aloneness palpable to me. ‘The sun has gone right down. Hm.' She is fading with it.

And the evening is already unbearable. Fun? Vain promise, that was. We are lilies on the dustbin of time here, Gret and I. Saying desultory good evenings to our guests as they arrive: Reverend Liversidge next, who is always faintly appalled at seeing us, as if we might have stolen one of his ribs;
and then come the Wardells, a mutually torpid howdy-do to and from Dulcie for the year it's been since we last saw one another; and then the Dunnings arrive, heralded by the commotion of their motor vehicle up the stable drive, which sets off Prince chained in the yard out there and a debate over the contraption in here.

‘I'm not yet convinced of its efficiency. Seems faddish to me,' says Uncle Alec.

‘It will be no passing fashion,' Dr Gebhardt assures as only a supreme know-it-all can. ‘The Kaiser commissions engineers for its adaption as warhorse now.'

‘Did someone mention the war?' Major Harrington struts in, lately back from his turn in the Transvaal, full of the swagger of winning. ‘I tell you what, them German Mausers are a good gun. I'll say, they are a topnotch machine. I'll drink to the Kaiser!' The major pats Dr Gebhardt on the back, as if these German guns aren't being used by the Boers and their rabble of mercenary militias to shoot at the New South Wales Corps right now – and as if the British and German Empires aren't just a little bit suspicious of each other generally. It's all just a boys' adventure, a game: shooting at each other.

‘To Mausers then!' Uncle Alec shoves a glass into the major's hand and I wish there were a way to force him to go off to this African war. Have the marauding Boer guerillas murder Alec Howell: hang him from a tree and leave him for the crows. He holds the rank of captain in the Corps, after all: he should take his turn and go. But Dr Weston, the District Medical Officer, will not allow it. Alec Howell is too indispensable here, it is said. Alec Howell is too cowardly to go, more likely. He might tear a fingernail. Look at his hands: more meticulously kept than mine.

Where are the Westons? I ask the mantel clock. It is ten past eight. They are late. Several eternities pass. Gret leans into the bow of the piano, slumping a little in her unbound state, the noise of the party rising around her, but she is not here amongst us, and I am racked with a worse fear: she is leaving, without me. The facts are before my eyes: if I don't find a way to free her from this prison now, soon, she will break loose in her own way. She will simply break.
Smash.
Wake up.
I take a step towards her and whisper: ‘Watch out, duckie, you're slouching – smudge the polish with an elbow next and there'll be trouble for you.'

‘Save me.' She smiles back, just, a subtle flutter of the lashes that seeks to assure,
I'm all right, Ryl
, as her words thump into me. Save her. Will anyone here help me? Anyone?

‘Mrs Weston!' Gret straightens at a dash for the door, enlivened again. Mrs Weston is here. Thank God. She'll at least save the evening.

‘Ah! There you are.' Augusta Weston embraces my sister with her generous arms; her voice is warm, rich velvet. ‘It seems an age since I saw you last. Where have you been hiding, my sweet one?'

‘Only here.' Gret smiles, indeed sweet at the small rescue she finds there inside this woman's arms.

Augusta Weston surveys the room at a glance to find the more precise answer as to why Greta Jones is so rarely seen in town except to attend church or Mrs Hatfield's salon on William Street for gowns and gloves at the change of season as propriety demands. ‘Good evening, Alec.'

He squirms a little under her gaze. ‘Mrs Weston, happy New Year.'

And I find this brief flash of discomfort in him immensely, disproportionately satisfying. Mrs Weston does not know what Uncle Alec does to us, to Gret, what he has done to her today, no one does, of course, but she knows she doesn't care for him. She is the District MO's wife and medically specialised in her own right, in the dark arts of midwifery, delivering half the population of this district while producing seven sons of her own – she doesn't have to care for Alec Howell. She does not reply to his toast, either.

She turns to me, a blast of fresh, bright lavender air. ‘Berylda! Come here and let me look at you as well, dear.' That enlivens me now too. ‘You are lovelier with each passing year – no, each minute. Both of you. Aren't they, Anna?' Mrs Weston turns to Mrs Gebhardt for agreement and all the women in the room are as figurines come to life, cleaving off from the men, making our own circle in this bow of the piano.

‘Oh!' But Mrs Dunning appears horror-struck as she joins us, looking at me, and Gret too, peering round each of us one way and then the other. ‘Oh my dears, but where are your foundations?'

Our corsets. This is unreal. Honestly. No one in Sydney notices, too much else going on at any one time to pay attention to the underwear choices of others. But this is Bathurst where the tiniest anomaly must take on gargantuan significance. A city desperate for social relevance grasps at anything.

Mrs Dunning remains agog; scandalised: ‘What have you done with your corsets, girls?'

‘Chucked 'em in the dustbin,' I tease her, and not very kindly. She's a hypocrite, and particularly dimwitted about it. Yes, one can get along in a thoroughly modern motor carriage, extravagant as it is filthy and bought off the bent backs and poisoned lungs of those who work in your mines, but woe betide society should women want to get about corsetless. What in heaven's name would you want to do that for anyway? Why would you want to be able to move your torso as you wish? Mrs Dunning is goggling at me uncomprehendingly right now.

‘Yes, the corsets are in the dustbin – where they belong,' Anna Gebhardt pronounces, unashamed anomaly herself, and Mrs Weston, professional rescuer that she is, commences to steer the committee on it immediately: ‘Anna, I must say I am coming around to that idea myself. Well, halfway at least. I've been lately contemplating the establishment of a Young Women's Physical Culture Society, for the promotion of natural health and wellbeing. If a corset must be worn in any way other than therapeutically or remedially, it must be worn
safely
, don't you think? This fashion for tight lacing is not good. Not good at all, and never has been.'

‘Oh but I don't know.' Dulcie fondles the locket at her throat worriedly, as if we're discussing the tragic plight of Boer orphans starving to death in Her Majesty's concentration camps. Dulcie Wardell has lately returned from a sojourn in actual Paris, and Rome, and New York, touring with a maiden aunt, where clearly she's thrown herself into her studies in vapidity. She's ever been ace at it. And I shouldn't be too jealous that she has travelled: it's about all she's got going for her. Plain as she is simple; as I am caustically mean tonight. Smile and listen respectfully, Berylda. God, am I even here? The twentieth century is dawning and I am
here
? With Dulcie Wardell sighing regretfully, moronically: ‘I don't know that I would be able to stand upright without my scaffolding.'

‘And
that
is the very problem, my child.' Mrs Weston blinks at Dulcie as if surprised that one might be so wilfully ignorant. ‘That is all your spider waist will do for you – limit oxygen to the brain.'

The laugh that bursts from me at this is so loud the sound bounces off the top of the piano and round the chandelier, shocking even me.

Mrs Wardell, Dulcie's mother, is goggling now too, at a loss as to how she might respond, Mrs Dunning still open-mouthed beside her. Perhaps they'll faint simultaneously; that'd be fun. As police magistrate's wife and mine owner's wife respectively, they are most unused to being put in their place, and by one so expert as Augusta Weston, who now tightens the circle to include them absolutely: ‘How are things out at Magpie Flat? I've heard there's been no end of trouble with the miners – what are they after this time? Accident insurance or some such thing, is it?'

Who in heaven's name would want that, either? Working a mile inside the irascible belly of the earth. What could go wrong? Why penalise the good and virtuous mine owners for their dirty workers' inability to plan ahead? Should be damn grateful to have jobs at all.
Should be damn grateful to have good and honest workers
,
I hear Papa say; and I am sitting outside the office at Hartley Shale, with Gret, playing knuckles, waiting for him to finish his business. I don't know why we're there; perhaps on our way to Gulgong. But I know he was a miner himself before he was a prospector. He was arguing with his partners about not putting wages down:
Trade depressions don't last forever
. Nothing does. Please. What would Papa do if he were here? He'd shoot Alec Howell for what he has done. Shoot him dead with the pistol he kept in the drawer of his desk.

If Papa were here, we would not be forced to endure this at all. My sister would not be shrinking behind Mrs Weston right now so that the man who rapes her cannot see her across the room.