Bittersweet (22 page)

Liam looked surprised. “Do I? I suppose it’s the name my mind thinks of when I think of her. It
was
a rich meal, though.”

Ned Mason nodded. “Disturbed your routines, did it, Liam? You and Tufts are two faces on the same clock.”

“Why are you here, Ned?”

“Winnie Joe skated on her water at about the time the strawbs were served, and of course Winnie Bert didn’t take any notice. But Winnie Jack did, and promptly developed angina pains,” Ned Mason said.

“Why are all the Johnston women named Winnie?” Liam asked.

Tufts grimaced. “Daddy says his mind slips into the same old sprocket whenever a girl is born — Silas Johnston, I mean. The name on the sprocket is Winifred. When each girl married, she tacked on her husband’s name to distinguish her, as childhood names didn’t work any more. Did you sort the Winnies out, Ned?”

“I hope so, given that there’s no midwife on duty in the Labour Ward tonight — some domestic disaster befell her. I left Winnie Joe there in a trainee’s terrified hands, put Winnie Jack in Casualty and sent Winnie Bert looking in the pubs for Joe.”

“I’m a midwife, Ned,” said Tufts, getting up. “It’s my night for a pedicure, but feet can wait. Babies don’t. If you need me, I am yours the minute you finish your tea.”

“Bless you, Tufts, I can certainly use you!” He drained his cup. “I feel better already. After Perkins Saline, nothing settles a tummy like hot, black tea. Coal-tar tea, Charlie calls it.”

The pair went out into the balmy night, leaving Liam to wash the teacups and put away his pedicure kit. Heather was right; feet waited, babies didn’t. Why
did
Charlie serve such rich meals?

One aspect of Hospital Board financial doings had forced Charles to postpone certain plans he cherished, and that was the time they gulped so greedily. Until things were properly tidied up, he had neglected Kitty disgracefully. When finally he leafed through his calendar, he was appalled to learn that he hadn’t really
seen
her in two weeks. What attentions he had paid her were hurried and perfunctory — a smile in passing, a few words on the hop, two better opportunities missed.

“Have dinner with me at my home, unchaperoned,” he said to her.

It came out of the blue, striking her as conceited, cocksure, conquering. “Certainly,” she said, a child across her left hip as she stood in the doorway of Children’s. “When?”

“Tonight?”

“Thank you, tonight suits me well.”

“Then I’ll call for you at your door at six tonight.”

“Thank you.” She turned away, smiling — for the child, not for Charlie.

This time she wore organdie printed in various shades of pink, with pink accessories, and actively displeased him. “You
look like fairground spun sugar,” he said, his nostrils pinched, his eyes rather dull.

She grimaced. “You’ve just echoed Edda on my appearance, only she was less polite. She says my mother influences me too much.”

“You could do with some of Edda’s style,” he said clinically.

“Slinkier, you mean?” she asked, unoffended.

“No, just more tailored. Short stature doesn’t lend itself to frills and excessive femininity.”

Little wonder she said nothing as they drove up Catholic Hill. Finally, and perhaps thinking the evening was getting off to a bad start, he said, “Why on earth is it called Catholic Hill, since St. Anthony’s is off the Trelawneys?”

“Because our English colonial overlords were violently anti-Catholic, and apportioned the first urban or municipal land grants,” said Kitty, glad she could display a little knowledge. “The Church of England always got the best land, and the Catholic Church the worst. But towns have a habit of growing, so the Church of England grants gradually became too small and too slummy, while the Catholic bits, usually on top of hills, grew more valuable. The idea had been to make the Catholics plod up hills to go to church, but what the overlords forgot is that with hills come incomparable views. The best illustration of the phenomenon,” she said, warming to her theme, “is in Sydney. St. Andrew’s Cathedral, home of the Church of England, cowers on a wee postage-stamp of land literally rubbing sandstone shoulders with the far more impressive Town Hall, plus the office towers and traffic, while St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral sits on a
glorious natural eminence surrounded by parks and gardens, has a superb view, and relative quiet. When the land was deeded, it was animal pasture and shanties on the outskirts of town.”

“A cautionary tale,” he said, laughing. “Interesting, how human prejudices can end in biting the bigot on the rear end.” He turned into the gates of Burdum House. “The name is Catholic Hill, but I gather the Catholic Church doesn’t own it.”

“No, it provided the funds to build St. Anthony’s, a handsome and roomy edifice, as well as the two Catholic schools. Old Tom Burdum had leased the very top on the understanding that if the Church sold it, he’d have first refusal.”

“So you end in knowing more about my house than I do!”

On the imposing but plainly Doric portico Kitty now witnessed for the first time how cannily old Tom Burdum had chosen the site of a house he had, when he built it, looked forward to filling with the magical life children give their home. Oh, poor old man, to have had but one son and one daughter, neither, in his lights, a satisfactory child. The daughter, a wild harum-scarum, had run away with a handsome no-hoper before she turned nineteen, and stuck to him like a burr to a fleece. The son, years older than the girl, had vanished to parts unknown while the girl, Jack Thurlow’s mother, was still a toddler. The boy, Henry, had been the child of old Tom’s first wife; the girl, Mary, was Hannah’s child.

So the house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity of round towers, huge windows and steeply sloping roofs, had never been a home. It stood in ten acres on the flat top of Catholic Hill’s six-hundred-foot bulk, and looked not toward the district of
Corunda in its broad and fertile river valley. Instead, it looked north toward the mighty red-cliffed gorges and illimitable forests of the dissected plateau that hemmed Sydney around. Oh, how beautiful! thought Kitty: vast distances coated in thin blue mist, the wind-tossed leaves of a million-million trees a massive sigh from just one throat, the hint of impish mirth in white-water streams, and the groaning crimson weight of so much rock oozing bloodlike, everything delineated by the hand of a master.

“I wish I were a poet,” she said, soaking it in. “Now I know why you wanted me here so early. The light is perfect for my first glimpse of this incredible landscape.”

“It takes some beating,” he said in quiet satisfaction, “and I’ve done my share of travelling.”

Inside, the mansion’s Victorian roots showed glaringly, not a prospect that could cheer a home-maker up, she thought wryly.

“The place has to be gutted,” he said, leading her to a room he had made into a kind of sitting area, though the furniture was old and uncomfortable and, she suspected, the nearest toilet might be in the backyard. On that, he could cheer her.

“There wasn’t any sort of sewerage, so before I moved in, I had one of the new septic systems installed, and put in some good lavatories and bathrooms. There’s an oil-burning furnace coming by ship from San Francisco, and a second in case one isn’t enough — like the British, I notice that Australians don’t central heat, and I imagine that Corunda in winter is cold, from my brief taste of it.” Choosing to sit a little distance from her, where he could see her well, he sat with his Scotch of choice — a squirt of soda but no ice — and contrived to make his eyes
the same colour as his liquor. “I’m not going to batter you with my plans about what I intend to do after we’re married, except here and now to say that I would hope you’ll make the home of this place old Hannah never did. She’s not my grandmother, so much I know, but if you could tell me a little of my family in Corunda, I’d be grateful.”

Her dimples leaped into being. “Neatly evaded yet stated!” She settled into her chair. “You need good furniture, sir. As to old Hannah and old Tom — well, it’s said the Burdums have had no luck in making a home anywhere, but that’s just Corunda legend, a part of the myth. It was the rubies, really. Treadby found the first ones, about seventy-five years ago, and thought he’d inherited the world. The town gets its name from corundum, which is the mineral yields rubies and sapphires. Here, just rubies, and the very best — pigeon’s blood in colour, some of them starred, all remarkably free from inclusion bodies.” Her face changed. “But you know all this, I should stop.”

“Please don’t,” he said, refilling her sherry glass. “I like the sound of your voice, and you’re that rarity, an intelligent woman. There’s a whole evening to get through, and you surely can’t think I’m so insensitive that I don’t understand it’s awkward?”

“Women are quite as intelligent as men, but they’re reared to think it’s a fault, so they hide it. Daddy never did that to us.” She sighed. “Mama did, without success.”

“Rubies, Kitty,” Charles said gently.

“Oh! Oh, yes, rubies … Treadby’s mistake was the typical one of ignorance — having made a fortune from rubies, he didn’t bone up on them, diminish his ignorance. His rubies were the ones
lying about in rubble washed down from the gravel beds where they lurk — caves, stream beds, crevices. They lasted a long time. But old Tom Burdum did his homework, and set out to find the major deposits. When he did, he acquired title to the land. And, in the fullness of time, Treadby’s patches dwindled, ran dry. While Burdum rubies continue to be found in regulated quantities. Rumour says £100,000 a year, but you’d know for sure.”

“Do you want to know for sure?” he asked, smiling.

“No,” she said, surprised that he’d ask. “Money is only worth what it can buy you. I can’t conceive of spending a half of that.”

They went to the dining room, where the butler hovered and a maidservant whose face Kitty didn’t know did the actual serving. Lobster quenelles were followed by a sorbet, then roast veal. The presence of staff inhibited Kitty, who enthused about the lobster, then looked at the veal in horror.

“I’m sorry,” she said, staring at her plate, “I can’t eat that.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can’t eat it. It’s oozing
blood
.”

“It’s veal,” he said blankly.

“It’s bloody,” she said, pushing her plate away.

“Veal has to be eaten under-done.”

“Not by me, it hasn’t.” She smiled bewitchingly. “Have them take it back to the kitchen, shove it in a frying pan, and
cook
it — please, Charlie. Otherwise I’d sick it up at once.”

“My dear child, I couldn’t do that! My chef would quit!”

“Then may I have a crispy bacon sandwich instead?”

What a business! Flabbergasted, Charles sat wondering how he could have dismissed all those signals semaphored at him since
he arrived, including, now he thought about it, the disgracefully over-done Chateaubriand. While he apologised profusely for its pinkness as evidence of overcooking, he understood now his guests had assumed he was apologising for undercooking! He knew from many meals in Sydney that this issue of cooked meat was far more civilised in Sydney; but these were rural people, and they knew too much about everything from liver flukes to tapeworms.

He beckoned the butler, a Sydney import. “Darkes, ask the chef to make Sister Treadby a dish of bacon and eggs.”

“Make sure the yolks are rock-hard!” she said.

“Name me your favourite meal, or food, Kitty.”

“Crisp bacon on a crunchy fresh white bread roll. Fried sausages and chips. Fish and chips. Lamb cutlets all brown and crunchy on the outside. Roast pork with crackling and roast spuds. And Mama’s butterfly cream cakes,” said Kitty without hesitation. Her eyes shot lavender sparks, she chuckled. “Oh, poor Charlie! Such grand ideas for a marriage, but how can you keep a chef
and
a wife? Never the twain shall meet!”

“On that diet, you’d be a balloon before you were thirty.”

“Codswallop! I work my arse off, Charles Burdum. It’s not the food that matters, it’s how much of what you eat that you burn up.”

“Why do I love you?” he asked the ugly old chandelier.

“Because, Dr. Burdum, I don’t piss in your pocket like all the other women. You’ve too high an opinion of yourself.”

“Some self-opinions are genuinely earned, and a high one, if based in deeds done and things achieved, is not to be sneered
at. You have a low opinion of yourself, the result of too few years on this earth and boundaries far too constricted. In America, they’d call you a home-town girl.”

“In America, they’d call you Little Caesar.”

The eggs and bacon came, but the yolks of her two eggs were runny; she sent it back, with instructions to break the yolks and make sure the whites had browned exteriors. Dismayed and at a loss, Charles witnessed his evening deteriorate into a disaster.

However, she approved of the coffee, taken in the sitting area and without hovering servants.

“You made every mistake possible tonight,” Kitty said then in a friendly voice, “and it’s part of why, I think, Pommies are so disliked. You never consulted me or did any research into my food preferences because you deemed me a provincial ignoramus in sore need of instruction as to the right things to eat in the proper environment. I was supposed to come, be suitably awed, utterly overwhelmed, and pathetically grateful for this evening’s lessons. Your gastronomic judgement was purely financial: if it’s rare and/or costly, it must be better in every way. A bacon roll is
so
pedestrian: Q.E.D., it cannot compare with a lobster quenelle. I agree, it cannot. It’s far tastier. As for your under-done meats, I see enough blood in the course of my work, I don’t need to see my food bleeding too. The rarer the meat, the more fat it contains. One of the reasons Man started cooking his meat was to melt away the fat and make the gristle more detectable.” She shrugged. “At least so I learned in nursing school. Do doctors learn different?”

His face had twisted into its gargoyle image, but the thoughts that fed its expression were not of offended pride or pricked
conceit; Charles Burdum was wondering if there were anything in the world he could possibly do to make this glorious, peerless woman see him for what he was: a man eminently worthy to be her husband.