Angel (28 page)

Then Pappy dropped her bombshell. Our night experience had filled her with a joy I hadn’t seen in her since the halcyon days of Ezra. She was sparkling.

“I’m not going to Stockton,” she said. We all stared at her.

“After Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz passed over,” she whispered, “she appeared to me. Not in a dream-while I was reading. She told me that I couldn’t desert The House. So I went to see the Sisters at Vinnie’s, and asked if I could train there as a nurse but live here. Nuns are so kind, so understanding!

They decided that at my age and with my experience of hospitals, I would make a better nurse if I lived out than in. I start at Vinnie’s with the next batch of probationers later this month.”

This was the first bit of good news since New Year’s Eve, and we all needed it desperately. Pappy is strange, very mystical. Yet even after hearing what she had to say, I refuse to believe that it was the real Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz I heard upstairs. I would rather think that emanations from my lost angel puss stole into our minds and deluded us.

Where are you, Flo? Are you all right? Do they understand? No, of course you’re not all right, and of course they don’t understand. With your mother gone, you belong to me, and I’ll shift heaven and earth before I’ll see you sent to an orphanage. If I can’t get you home, you’ll die. Your fate is in my hands because your mother put it there. Which is the greatest mystery of all.

A woman from the Child Welfare came today. I saw her standing on the verandah when I returned from the

shops, a dowdily dressed woman in her fifties with all the earmarks of spinsterhood, from the ringless left hand to the whiskers sprouting on her chin. Why don’t they ever pluck or shave them? You’d think that a pardonable vanity would push them to it, but at least half of them seem to prefer to wear the whiskers like a badge. It’s a good thing that the War freed up women like this to work, otherwise what would become of them? But then again, I suppose the War also cut down on the supply of husbands. Certainly there aren’t as many single around my age as there are in the Chris-Marie and upward age brackets. Mind you, Australian men are hard to catch and harder to hang onto.

As Chris and Marie have found out, New Australian men are a piece of (wedding) cake compared to the Old ones.

This spinster specimen introduced herself and I introduced myself. Miss Farfer or Arthur or Farfin, something that sounded like Arf-Arf in her squeezed-up voice. So I called her Miss Arf-Arf and she answered to it without seeming to notice. As I unlocked the door and she followed me inside, I couldn’t see her reaction to the scribbles, the neglected ugliness of The House’s public halls. Then, as luck would have it, we emerged into the side passage right at the moment Madame Fugue had chosen to roast Verity.

“You fuckin’ stupid fuckin’ bitch!” was the only audible bit, thank God, but I suspect it was more than enough.

“What is that house?” she asked as I opened my door.

“A private hotel,” I said, and ushered her into my nice pink flat. There she informed me that she had come to inspect Florence Schwartz’s past living arrangements. Past living arrangements.

“I have been every day since Tuesday, but there is never a soul home,” she said peevishly.

Oh, dear. We were off to a bad start and it only got worse. A notebook was produced and duly entered as I explained the nature of The House, its tenants, who we all were, what we did for a crust, how long we’d been here, how well we’d known Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and Flo, whom Miss Arf-Arf persisted in calling Florence. That she had already conferred with the pair who took Flo away was obvious from her questions. Did Flo ever wear shoes? Why wouldn’t Flo talk? What sort of hours had Flo kept? What did Flo’s mother feed her?

Thank God for Pappy’s presence of mind over the occult paraphernalia, because Miss Arf-Arf toured the place from top to bottom and left no coverlet unturned or drawer unopened. What would she say if she knew that until shortly before her mother’s death, Flo had still been on the breast? Like the soothsaying, our secret.

I refused to let her look in Jim and Bob’s flat or in Klaus’s room because they weren’t in. It didn’t please her to be denied, but she was a lot less pleased over Toby’s reaction to her request to come up and see him.

“Go to buggery!” he snarled, and slammed his trapdoor. I left the front room until last, hoping against hope, but of course Miss Arf-Arf wasn’t going to miss The

Scene of The Murder. Very disappointing, obviously. We’d cleaned it scrupulously, so much so that even the crayon scribbles on the walls were barely visible. Of any bloody fingerpainting, not a smear or a smudge.

“However, I have seen the police photographs,” she said smugly.

I was dying to tell her to go to buggery too, but I didn’t dare. With Flo’s fate undecided, what I said to anybody from the Child Welfare had to be friendly, candid, sane and balanced. So I ended the tour with the offer of a cup of tea.

Miss Arf-Arf accepted.

“Considering the insalubrious location of these premises and the state of Florence’s mother’s personal accommodations, my dear Miss Purcell, you’ve made a very pleasant corner for yourself,” she said, munching one of my Anzac bikkies. No dunking for her!

I told her that I was going to apply for custody of Flo. “Oh, that would never do!” she said.

I asked her what she meant, and she explained that Florence was being well cared for where she was (no mention of a place-it might have been in Melbourne or Timbuctoo from the way she spoke), so custody wouldn’t become an option until after everybody decided that no will or relative existed.

“Which may take many months,” she ended.

I looked into her watery blue eyes and understood that if I started to plead eloquently with all the emotional stops out, tried to tell her that Flo would die unless she

came home very soon, my chances of ever getting Flo would diminish immediately.

“It’s not that they’re inhuman, or even inhumane,” I said to Toby later up in his airy attic, “it’s just that they go by the rules, that individual circumstances are dismissed.”

“Of course,” he grunted, scrubbing away at a hotel type picture of a blue gum in a clearing. “They’re public servants, Harriet, and public servants don’t rock the boat. Everything is decided by the grey ghosts on some committee.

Miss Arf-Arf’s report will go into Flo’s file along with all the other reports, and when the file measures two inches thick, it will go Upstairs for a decision.”

“She’ll be dead by then,” I said, winking away my tears.

He put down his brushes and came across to sit facing me on a hard chair drawn up very close, then he leaned forward and pushed a flopping bit of hair off my forehead. “Why do you love her so?” he asked. “I mean, she’s a nice little kid, even if she is a bit strange, but anyone would think that she’s your own, the way you talk. You call me obsessed, but Flo is a much greater obsession with you than anything I can drum up.”

What kind of answer would make him see the specialness of Flo?

“It’s hard for anyone on the outside of affairs of the heart to understand, but the truth is that I just looked at her and loved her,” I said.

“No, it’s not hard,” he said, and shrugged. “It’s easy 15m not on the outside.” He gave me a lovely smile and tucked my hair up again. “If you must, Harriet, then go for it with all that spectacular energy and enthusiasm you manage to summon up, even at times like this. But do me a favour, think about your life. If you get Flo, you’ll never be free again.”

That’s true. But there’s no contest, which is what Toby will not see. Flo is worth everything to me, even the loss of freedom. I wouldn’t walk on coals of fire for Duncan Forsythe or any other man, but Flo? She’s my angel puss. My child.

I arrived at Messrs. Partington, Pilkington, Purblind and Hush’s chambers in Bridge Street exactly one minute before my appointment with Mr. Hush, who, from what his incredibly snooty secretary said, ordinarily does not see clients as late as four o’clock. I apologised for inconveniencing Mr. Hushwhat a wonderful thing it is to be hospital trained! If the garbageman lectured me about a dent in the lid of my can, I would put my hands behind my back, stand to attention and apologise. It’s so much easier than attempting things like justification or excuse. The incredibly snooty secretary was delighted at my

response, gave me a cat’s anus sort of smile, all puckered up, and told me to sit and wait. Law firms, I realised, are in the amateur league compared to hospitals. If I had half an hour to play with, I could have Miss Hoojar jumping through hoops. Interesting that law firms run on spinsters too.

Where would the professional world be without them? And what’s going to happen when my generation, so much more married, takes over? There’ll be private secretaries and department heads trying to cope with sick kids and defaulting husbands as well as the work. Ooooooaa!

Mr. Hush looks like a butcher. Big and beefy, with purple grog blossoms all over his nose. Right, I decided after one look, cut every scrap of fat out of the meat, skin off the tendons, and give him nothing but good red muscle. I launched into my story without a single unnecessary word, stripped it of all its colour and flavour, and ended by saying, “I want custody of Flo, Mr. Hush.”

He was terrifically impressed by all this crisp logicdon’t tell me I can’t handle men!

“Some personal particulars first, Miss Purcell. You are of age? You work?”

“I’m twentytwo and I’m a qualified X-ray technician.” “Can you afford what might be an expensive exercise?”

“Yes, sir.”

“So you have private means.”

“No, sir. I have enough saved to meet the legal costs.”

“Your answer indicates that you have no source of income other than your job of work. Is that correct?” “Yes, sir,” I whispered, deflating rapidly.

“Are you married? Engaged to be married?”

“No, sir,” I whispered. I knew where he was going. “Hmmmm.” He tapped his teeth with a pencil.

He then proceeded to tell me that there were three kinds of custodyadoption, guardianship, and the offer of a foster home. “Frankly, Miss Purcell, you would not qualify for any of the three alternatives,” he said, wielding his cleaver impersonally. “In this state, considerable research has not revealed one instance of custody of a child being awarded to an unmarried, working woman with no blood kinship. Your youth also predicates against custody. Perhaps it would be wiser to abandon your quest right now.”

Fresh iron entered my soul, I glared at him fiercely. “No, I will not!” I snapped. “Flo belongs to me, it’s what her mother would have wanted. I don’t care what I have to do to get Flo back, and that’s honest. But I will get her back! I will, I will!”

He leaped up from behind his desk, came around it and bent to kiss my hand! “Oh, what a bonny battler you are, Miss Purcell!” he cried. “This is going to be tremendous fun! I do like shaking the foundations of institutions! Now tell me the rest, because there is a lot more, isn’t there?”

I told him as much of the rest as I thought prudent. Yes, I liked him, but not enough to hand over

information about soothsaying and breastfeeding. Just about the bank books, the deeds to what seemed the whole of 17 Victoria Street, the lack of documents of any kind from wedding certificates to birth certificates to taxation returns. He loved it so much that he turned even more butcherish. I could see his mind working out a new recipe for sausage made of Child Welfare officials.

So we left it that Mr. Hush would take a personal interest in items like the search for a will, the effort to trace relatives, the Public Trustee, and any or all parties who might come sniffing around on the trail of truffles like a rather large and possibly illicit fortune.

Thus went my first brush with a law firm, if not with the Law. Between Willie’s withdrawal syndrome, Norm, Merv and detectives investigating murder, I must have considerably more experience of the Law than most girls my age who aren’t on the game.

It hadn’t occurred to me that the people with power over Flo would consider me an unsuitable custodian. That my age, my need to work to live and my unmarried state completely overrode abstracts like love. Which just goes to show how dense I am. The clues were all there in those women from the Child Welfare, more concerned with shoes than love. No, that’s wrong. Equating shoes with love.

All I know is that if I don’t get Flo home, she’ll die. Fade away, leaving those with power over her wondering what on earth had happened. Because they genuinely wouldn’t know.

Wednesday, January 11th, 1961 The inquest took place this morning. A nothing. All of us were called to testify. I’d worked from six until nine, raced into town in a taxi, then raced back to Queens in another taxi as soon as it was over. The tale I concocted for Sister Agatha was a police enquiry about anonymous letters, which she accepted without comment.

No, we hadn’t noticed any particular tension between Mr. Warner and his paramour, Mrs. ? Delvecchio Schwartz. Even Pappy couldn’t supply a first name. No, none of us had heard a thing. The absence of Chikker and Marge was duly noted, but the police were of the opinion that they weren’t involved.

Verdict: murder and suicide. Case closed. We could have Mrs. ? Delvecchio Schwartz’s body for burial. No cremation! Was that so they could dig her up again if fresh evidence came to light? Or some new investigative test? Yes, we decided.

Someone, possibly through the Missus, had got wind of the affair between Duncan and me, because Sister Cas had a few snide little pots at me. I played dumber than dumb. Let them fish to their hearts’ content, they have no hard evidence.

My credibility with Sister Agatha took another pounding when I had to tell her that I wouldn’t be in to work at all on Friday. A death in the family, I explained. I don’t think she believed me.

Battling to get someone buried on a Friday the Thirteenth told me why Sister Agatha didn’t believe me. The undertaker threw up his hands in horror at the very thought, but Toby and I, deputed to be the organisers, refused to budge.