Unnatural Habits: A Phryne Fisher Mystery (Phryne Fisher Mysteries) (50 page)

Polly Kettle possessed herself of wig, hat, notes, addresses and letters and was shown out of the house. She ran for the bus, hugging her scoop to her bosom. Another woman on a mission.

Phryne was about to consider all her debts paid as she addressed a cheque to her sister Eliza’s educational centre for unfortunate women for half Mrs. Kettle’s reparation and another to Isobel Berners for her own work for the other half, when she remembered an outstanding obligation. Cursing, she went to the phone, sat down on the hallstand, and called Cecilia for a promised consultation about her wedding.

Cecilia was delighted to hear that Polly was home from a dangerous secret mission, but soon got on to more important matters. She and her mother had reached a deadlock over the table napkins. Cecilia wanted peach. Her mother insisted that white was the only canonical colour. Hair was being torn, pillows bedewed, doors slammed. Her father had taken Lance and gone to Portsea, ostensibly to fish. Matters had reached a crisis.

‘Simple,’ said Phryne. ‘I have attended many county weddings and one royal one. Colours are now considered proper. But not peach,’ she added. ‘If you want to walk down the aisle with a glad heart, you will take my advice. Scatter the table with frangipani blossoms. The tablecloth is white, but not bright white. It will be the same shade as the blossoms, a pale ivory. And the napkins shall be frangipani yellow. Not buttercup. Not orange blossom. That yellow with a squeeze of lemon juice in it. Your bouquet will be of frangipani and gardenias. It will look and smell divine. And that,’ she said, ‘is my last word on the subject. If your mother does not agree, tell her to ring me. I hope you will be very happy, Cecilia. Just as happy as you deserve to be.’

‘Oh, I shall,’ said a vastly relieved voice on the other end of the phone. ‘I shall!’

***

For the rest of the week Phryne did nothing but amuse herself. It was such a change. She went dancing with Lin Chung, dining on the strange but delicious fare of Little Bourke Street. She lunched with Dr. MacMillan in the buttery near the Queen Victoria Hospital. She visited the Adventuresses Club. She continued to breakfast on fresh fish, caught by Tinker. She read with interest the scandalous tale of the brave girl reporter who had got herself kidnapped for a story. Polly looked quite indescribable in that wig. The Magdalen Laundry was in the news. Dr. Mannix denounced the reporter.

‘The Magdalen Laundry turns out girls who are demure and meek, fitted for their station in life!’ he stated. ‘Anyone who prints these outrageous lies has allied themselves to the forces of darkness!’

Which must have made Mr. Bates very proud. Ever since the Somme, he and the forces of darkness had been close personal friends.

The party was going well. The jazz band was playing dance music. Felix Pettigrew had arrived with Clarissa. She was wearing a draped, Erté jade-green crêpe de Chine dress with just the suspicion of a train lined with steel and silver tints. She was loaded with diamonds: fingers, wrists, neck and a creditable crown.

‘Out of the tat box,’ she confided to Phryne. ‘They’re Titania’s jewels from the Dream. They’re good fakes, though. Zirconias, not rhinestones. Thanks for returning the wig. Elsie gets so cross if anything’s missing.’

Felix bowed. He was not only dressed in faultless evening costume, but wore a gold watch and chain and a quizzing glass on a velvet ribbon. He was perfect. There was something very eighteenth century about Felix.

‘Phryne, you look delightful,’ he said. ‘What happened to that…er…assailant?’

‘Still undiscovered,’ said Phryne.

He read her face, as he always did.

‘Very good,’ he replied, and led Clarissa out onto the floor.

Everyone was dancing. Hugh was dancing with Dot, Tinker with Ruth. Isobel Berners, in a leaf-green brocade gown patterned with apples, was dancing with Charles, Phryne’s friend from Mount Martha. Mr. Featherstonehaugh was dancing with Dr. MacMillan, both wearing well-tailored gentlemen’s evening dress. Bert was dancing with Eliza. Cec was dancing with his Alice.

Clarissa swept past in the arms of a scion of one of the Best Families. Phryne heard her say to the eager young man, ‘The prince gave them to me? Oh no, I can’t say they came from the prince. I promised his mama.’

Actresses.

Mr. Downey of the newspaper office danced with his intended. He did not seem too downcast at the loss of his promised scoop.

Madame Paris had brought her young ladies. They were a general hit. She was sitting at a small table, holding court with the ones who did not dance—Mr. Bates, Jane and Jack Robinson. They were getting on surprisingly well. Even though Madame seemed likely to lose Primrose, who was dancing cheek to cheek with Terence the delivery man. There would always be another Primrose.

Phryne had not invited the Kettle parents. Polly seemed to be enjoying a conversation with Peony and Poppy. That ought to ensure that her hair stayed curled. Herbert Grant was dancing with his Beggar Maid, Phoebe, and they seemed very comfortable together. After all, if she had been his housemaid, there was nothing she did not know about him. If she still loved him after that, then she really did love him. Herbert had the slightly dazed look of a man who has won a lottery for which he did not recall buying a ticket.

‘Pleased?’ asked Lin Chung, extending a hand.

‘Thinking about slavery,’ said Phryne. ‘All sorts of it. Marriage, whoredom, servitude.’

‘Stop thinking about it,’ advised Lin. ‘Tonight is for celebration. Have you decided what you are celebrating?’

‘Freedom,’ said Phryne, and took his hand.

Afterword

I found the poem ‘If No One Ever Marries Me’ in a children’s encyclopedia written by Miss Laurense (sic) Alma-Tadema (daughter of famous painter Alma-Tadema). No one ever married her, or perhaps it is better to say that she never married anyone. She seems pleased about that. She died in 1940 at an advanced age.

The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (reprint Senate, London, 1997) bears as much relation to a real convent as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion bears to Judaism. It was passed hand to hand by Protestant schoolgirls (including my grandmother) in the 1920s, along with Havelock Ellis, Married Love by Marie Stopes and
Psychopathia Sexualis
by Krafft-Ebing, which at least made them practise their Latin translating the rude bits. Oh, well, I suppose it could be worse. It generally wasn’t De Sade or Walter’s My Secret Life. That was reprinted when I was at school…

For conditions in the Magdalen Laundry I have read the sisters’ view in the book,
Pitch Your Tents on Distant Shores,
and the view of their inmates, on their websites and several essays. The laundry supported the good works of the convent, and it was the hardest labour required of prisoners since the law gave up the treadmill—and they weren’t even prisoners. It was unconscionable, by the standards of the day, and by any standards. Women working in outside laundries had their hours, conditions and breaks fixed by legislation. The convent was exempt by an act of Parliament. They got everything from water to labour for free. I have the highest respect for nuns—some of whom are related to me—but those laundries were unforgivable.

This isn’t to say that the convent didn’t do good works. Their charity was exemplary, their orphans well fed, their old ladies well tended. Except for the Magdalen Laundry. The children were told never even to look at the inmates.

Besides, I walked past the only window in that laundry one night, now that the Abbotsford Convent has writers’ festivals. I didn’t know that was what I was passing, then. I was thinking about the panel I was about to be on. I have never been afraid of the dark. And I walked into the most dreadful concentrated suicidal despair I have ever felt. Someone had stood at that window and really wanted to die. I ran. I later found that I had skirted the Magdalen Laundry. It’s not evidence. But it felt very real. Email [email protected] for the inmates’ stories.

Once I found out that the Collins Street establishment that used to be Madame Brussels’ was run by a Madame Paris in 1920, I wondered about that statement that the top end of Collins Street was ‘the Paris end,’ as it does not greatly resemble Paris. I suspect it was one of those sly in-jokes of which Melbourne is so fond. Like the assessment of someone’s chance of success as zero being ‘Buckley’s and None,’ referring to the department store Buckley and Nunn and the stalwart survivor, the convict William Buckley (no relation). Information about brothels is hard to find, unless they are the basic ones that are raided by the police. Madame Paris and indeed the Blue Cat never were. I have had to extrapolate a little about them. But they existed.

Gay history is even more subterranean. I have read the available archives and done the best I could, knowing a bit about the subculture as a foundation member of GaySoc at Melbourne University in my youth, when we thought—as my friend Dennis Pryor noted—that we had invented sex. Such was not the case.

Isobel Berners is the eponymous heroine of a novel by that strange gypsy-loving polyglot George Borrow. My copy is Hodder & Stoughton, London, probably about 1925. She is a marvellous character, especially for her time. She travels alone and engages in serious fisticuffs with anyone unwise enough to attack her. ‘I loved to hear her anecdotes of people (on the road) some of whom I found had occasionally laid hands upon her person or effects, and had invariably been humbled by her without the assistance of either justice or constable’. If you have never read Borrow I do recommend him. A true eccentric.

Bibliography

Abrahams, Gerald, The Chess Mind, Penguin Books, London, 1960.

Bacchus Marsh Historical Society, Bacchus Marsh Heritage Guide, Bacchus Marsh, 2007.

Borrows, George.
Isopel Brenners: The History of Certain Doings at Staffordshire Dingle
, July, 1825. Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1901. Available online at Project Gutenberg.

Camm, George (compiler), Bacchus Marsh: An Anecdotal History, Shire of Bacchus Marsh with Hargreen Publishing Company, Melbourne, 1986.

Craig, Elizabeth, New Standard Cookery, Odhams Press, London, 1933.

Ebbut, Blanche, Don’ts For Wives, AC Black, London, 1913.

Farrell, Frank, International Socialism and Australian Labour, Hale and Iremonger, Sydney, 1981.

Kollontai, Alexandra (ed. Alix Holt), Selected Writings, Haymarket Books, London, 1980.

Kovesi, Catherine, Pitch Your Tents on Distant Shores, Playwright Publishing, Caringbah NSW, 2006.

Li, Yu (trans. Patrick Hanan), The Carnal Prayer Mat, Arrow Books, London, 1990.

Monk, Joanne, Cleansing Their Souls: Laundries in Institutions for Fallen Women, Lilith Collective, Fitzroy Vic., 1996.

Nin, Anaïs, A Spy in the House of Love, Penguin Books, London, 1954.

Pescott, Mrs. N (compiler), Early Settlers’ Household Lore, Raphael Press, Richmond SA, 1977.

Spry, Constance and Hume, Rosemary, A Constance Spry Cookery Book, Pan Books, London, 1951.

Terrington, William, Cooling Cups and Dainty Drinks (Woodfall & Kinder, London, 1869) is worth downloading from the website www.cocktails.com. I cannot find an extant copy.

Willett, Graham and Arnold, John Queen City of the South: Gay and Lesbian Melbourne, Latrobe Journal, no. 87, State Library of Victoria Foundation, Melbourne, 2011.

Willet, Graham, Murdoch, Wayne and Marshall, Daniel (eds) Secret Histories of Queer Melbourne, Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, Parkville, Vic, 2011.

More from this Author

For other books, upcoming author events, or more information please go to:

www.poisonedpenpress.com/Kerry-Greenwood

Contact Us

To receive a free catalog of Poisoned Pen Press titles,

please contact us in one of the following ways: