Bittersweet (34 page)

“Go to hell, Charlie!”

In the middle of that same night, Kitty miscarried.

It was the bitterest, the most devastating torment of her life, made more so by what had gone before it; she had flouted medical advice to achieve it, including from a doctor-husband who hadn’t bothered to hide his opposition.

“Unwise,” he had said.

When the cramps woke her, her first thought was to thank God that Charlie had imbibed so freely of the Scotch that he had dossed down on the sofa. Only then did she realise that she was bleeding, and why. Her mouth opened on a silent scream — no, no, no!

“Oh, please God, please not that!” she babbled, over and over. The tears engulfed her, torrents of them turning her face to a running sheet of total despair — my baby, my poor little baby!

Later on, when she was sane again, she could find no reason of any kind, even the flimsiest, to account for what happened in the seconds after it dawned on her that she had miscarried; she panicked, the terrible, guilty panic of a child caught out in a sin too dreadful to contemplate. No one must know! What would they do to her for disobeying, for getting pregnant when it was forbidden?

Oh, I’ll be in such trouble if Charlie finds out!

Scrambling from the bed, she ran for towels, rags, a bucket, cold water, ether soap, all the things she’d need to clean up the mess before anyone discovered what a terrible thing she’d done — a sin, a crime, an
awful
disobedience!

The buckets, made of galvanised metal, were stacked one inside each other; they fell clanging and ringing fit to wake the dead. They woke Charles too.

He found her, bloody and blundering, shrinking from him as if she thought he’d murder her, when all he wanted to do was take her in his arms and heal her pain. But until Ned Mason and Edda got there, the most he could do for his frantic, gibbering wife was to give her an injection that knocked her out.

“I suppose by rights I should have sent for Tufts,” Charles said to Edda after Kitty was tucked up in a different bed, still asleep but not in any danger. Ned Mason had gone home, shaking his head at the stubbornness of women, but not unduly alarmed by what had happened; he continued to maintain that physically Kitty was healthy and ought to bear living children in the future.

“No, I’m the sister of things like this,” said Edda. “I’m cheese graters and hangman’s ropes, all Kitty’s sorrows. Tufts is too young to have the memories, so you did the right thing.”

He had been weeping, free to do so now the crisis was over. “Why did she look at me as if she genuinely thought I’d be angry with her?” he asked now. “I swear to you on my mother’s grave, Edda, that I have never, by word or look, let alone deed, given my wife any reason to fear me!”

And, looking into his eyes, Edda believed him.

When Kitty woke with the morning she was worn out and worn down, but fully aware what had happened, and apparently understood why it had happened.

“I was greedy,” she said to Edda. “I wouldn’t wait for things to settle and heal properly. It won’t happen again.”

Vastly relieved, Charles saw for himself that by the end of the week following her miscarriage, Kitty had returned to normal. The anger and aggression were gone, so too her tendency to blame him for all her woes.

“Patience, my darling,” he counselled her. “Wait out a full six months, then we’ll try again.”

W
hen an unexpected opportunity to meet Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. presented itself, Charles leaped at it. For a mere forty-year-old, Schiller had gone very far very fast, including earning himself a knighthood at the amazingly early age of thirty-seven after a series of stunning legal victories in the High Court of Australia and the British Privy Council in the service of commerce and finance. He was possessed of life’s advantages — birth, wealth, education, an impressive colonial family history; on his father’s side he was Prussian
junker
, on his mother’s side English gentleman; the “von” had been dropped long since as inappropriate in a society like Australia, where the family owned a lot of Queensland, the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. As pasture much of it was so poor it grazed only one steer per hundred acres, but some was extremely arable or pastoral, and the mineral wealth was, in places, incredible, including places that only the Schillers yet knew about. No rattle of a convict’s leg-iron had ever marred the Schiller or the Rawson families: free settler all the way.

Sir Rawson lived and worked in Melbourne, where the Schiller moneys were concentrated; little surprise, then, that his charitable activities were usually confined to Melbourne, including a Lord Mayor’s dinner at £50 per plate to benefit spastic children. The moment he heard, Charles bought two plates at the Speaker’s Table (they cost £100 each), for Sir Rawson was the guest speaker and star attraction of the evening, which also boasted a famous dance band for those with the stamina to stay up until dawn.

It was to be a glittering affair: white-tie-and-tails for the men, ball gowns for the women, and since Kitty loathed Melbourne, Charles took Edda in her place. By chance Edda had been attending a theatre nursing seminar in Melbourne that week, so when Charles offered her a hotel room-and-bath for her entire visit if she would accompany him to the dinner, Edda leaped to say yes. Her cup overflowed as he gave her a hundred pounds to spend on a ball dress for the Lord Mayor’s charity dinner. Because she made all her own clothes, Edda was able to use the money to buy eleven lengths of different fabrics to make eleven different outfits. Not even the fashion journalists who prowled the periphery of these functions suspected that her deceptively simple robe of black-shot burgundy silk was home-made; they were too busy gushing over its obviously Parisian origins. Her only touch of ostentation was a pair of diamond earrings Kitty had lent her.

She went with Charles in a hired Rolls, as always consumed by admiration for his nonchalance — how, for instance, he passed off their disparity in height as if it were the natural order
of things. The blue flare of exploding flash bulbs on press cameras he tolerated well; Edda’s acute hearing noted that his male press secretary was calling her “
Sister
Edda Latimer” whenever he gave her name. I like it! thought Edda, inwardly gratified, outwardly indifferent. Charlie is telling the world that I am a professional woman, not a gilded society lily or an upper-class trollop, and I thank him for his consideration. Oh, if only my title were “Doctor!” But, for all his liberality, Charlie would never put me through Medicine, for the same reason Daddy didn’t years ago — it isn’t a suitable career for a woman. How I long to be a doctor!

“It should be Kitty here tonight,” Charles said as they trod up the staircase. “It’s damned awkward having to explain that you’re my sister-in-law, not my wife.”

So that’s why he’s in a bad mood! Nothing but complaints and surly looks since we set out. Oh, Kitty! It wouldn’t have killed you to make this little sacrifice for your husband — why wouldn’t you? All your dreams and energies have turned in one direction, and one direction only — a house full of children. In which case, you have the wrong life’s partner. Charlie doesn’t mind children, but he’ll never live for them. He lives for public activities.

By some quirk of fate, neither Charles nor Edda saw the guest speaker during the forty minutes they spent beforehand sipping sherry and mingling in anterooms; by another quirk of fate they were among the first through the doors into the ballroom where the banquet was to take place. Edda’s memory was of walking through a vast room of big round tables toward the focal one on the fringe of a large dance floor and beneath the speaker’s
podium. The area was deserted save for a man standing behind his chair at the table.

“Stop grizzling, Charlie!” she growled
sotto voce
, her gaze on — Sir Rawson Schiller King’s Counsel?

Yes, this had to be Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. Unforgettable. A Charlie over six feet tall? No, that was to compare a diamond with an emerald or a da Vinci with a Velasquez. There was no sort of comparison possible. Not that Edda fell in love: she didn’t. It was more that she seemed to recognise the one person who had always been missing from her life, and for the fleeting second during which his eyes met hers, she had a conviction that he was thinking the same thought. Then he looked elsewhere, and the moment and the conviction were both over.

A slim and whippy man, two inches over six feet, narrow-framed, but with a huge, bulbous head whose cranium housed a lot of brain. Striking yet not handsome: iron-grey hair in thick waves brushed straight back from his massive forehead, high cheekbones, a fine mouth, black brows and lashes, but vividly blue eyes. His nose was large and beaked, his lower jaw and chin big too.

She and Charles were halfway around the table from him, and no handshakes were exchanged; just smiles and nods. Only a team of wild horses could have dragged Charlie close enough to have to look so far upward, Edda knew as she sat down and assessed the table’s population, eleven in number: Sir Rawson had come without a companion.

“But he always does,” said her nearest feminine neighbour in a long-suffering voice.

“Why?” Edda asked.

“He’s working tonight, pet.”

Never having been called a pet before, Edda lapsed into silence. Oh, she thought, exasperated, why will important Australian men insist upon marrying under-educated, domestically inclined women? At this table, the men did all the talking, the women confining their chat among themselves. And Charlie was growing more discontented by the minute, probably because he knew no one and the gargoyle had obliterated the film star out of existence. No one was usually more charming, but when the gargoyle ruled alone, he was horrible. The effect of Sir Rawson Schiller, of course. For once in his career, Charlie felt utterly eclipsed.

A mood Sir Rawson’s hour-long speech only served to enhance. His subject — could it be anything else? — was the Depression, and it took Edda’s breath away many times, for Sir Rawson had that incomparable gift of an eloquence so perfectly honed from voice to phraseology that one moment tears poured down every face, and the next, every face was crumpled in laughter. Privately Edda thought a large number of people who heard him would always remember what he said and how he said it.

It came after a generous portion of first course; after the main course the speaker answered questions from the podium for half an hour. A hard evening’s work; he threw everything he had into making his audience feel that £50 was a bargain.

One member of the audience at least felt that he hadn’t got his money’s worth: Charles Burdum. Who, with a muttered something in Edda’s ear, left his chair as the dessert came in.
Everybody at the table assumed he had gone to relieve himself, but Edda knew he wouldn’t be back, and began explaining to her companions that urgent business had called him away.

More than two-thirds of his fellow diners were dancing when Sir Rawson got up and usurped Charlie’s chair, turning it to Edda.

“And you are?” he asked, smiling.

“Sister Edda Latimer. I came with Charles Burdum.”

“
Sister
Latimer, but no nun.”

“By profession I’m an operating theatre nurse.”

“Could they spare you, Edda? May I call you that?”

“Of course, Sir Rawson.”

“Tit for tat. Call me Rawson. Can they spare you?”

“Easily. In fact, I’m so surplus to requirements that I’m toying with the idea of finding a job in Melbourne. I’m extremely well trained and experienced, so even in the Depression I should be able to find work. I’ve made some contacts here at a seminar.”

“I’d hoped to converse with Charles Burdum. Has he gone?”

“Called away by something that wouldn’t wait.”

“Leaving you to fend for yourself?”

“Oh, he’s family, married to my sister. He didn’t think.” The sunken, hooded eyes gleamed. “Are you married?” she asked.

The baldness of the question startled him into answering.

“Seventeen years ago, a youthful business. We divorced.”

“Were you white as snow, or the culpable party?”

“You ask naked personal questions as if you were an American. I was as unsullied as the driven snow.”

“The perfect colour for a politician.”

“The
only
colour,” he said meaningfully.

“A pity, that. You don’t feel it asks too much of a man?”

“Politicians, would-be or otherwise, should never deal in feelings. Only in realities. And realities can be bleak.”

“You’re Nationalist Party — a Tory?”

“A die-hard Tory, though how much longer there will be a Nationalist Party is on the lap of the gods. Labor is inclining more and more to the right, but not as far right as I.”

“When are you planning to enter — federal? — parliament?”

“Definitely federal. The party has a blue-ribbon seat picked out for me in Melbourne that means I don’t have to change my place of abode.” He grimaced. “Awful business, relocating.”

“Especially for something as ephemeral as votes,” she said.

Interest piqued, he leaned forward. “You’re an unusual woman, Sister Latimer. Well read and well educated, I suspect. You may juggle sharpened steel in a chamber of anaesthetised torment, but that is not what you wanted to do, nor did your life start there. In fact, you think it has ended there.”

“I am everything an ultra-conservative man deplores in a woman, Counsellor,” she said levelly, eyes glowing at his uncanny insight. “I hold myself the equal of any man — I should have been allowed to do Medicine and choose to specialise in whatever I wanted — and I will never marry. To marry is to subordinate myself at law to my husband as my superior.”

“Oh, bravo!” he exclaimed, smiling and leaning back. “I knew I liked you enormously! So you wanted to be a doctor.”

Suddenly Edda’s own problems vanished; all kinds of ideas were chasing through her brain — a muddle of mobile brows,
facial expressions, something lurking just beyond vision, delicate and supple fingers, a certain wry crease to the fine mouth. Tangled visions that slid and slipped into place to form a certain male entity … She caught his blue gaze and held it sternly, pinning him as only her strange eyes could. And he, discomfited, oddly afraid, waited.

“You’re homosexual,” Edda said softly.

“That’s a baseless nonsense could see you in court,” he said, managing to control every part of himself save his breathing.

“I have no intention of disseminating the fact. Why on earth should I? So my brother-in-law could crow? He has enough to crow about already.”

“Who told you? Who
knows
?” he asked, quite calmly.

“No one told me. In fact, you hide your secret extremely well. But when I first saw you, you stunned me — it was a little like — oh, coming home. And I was endowed with special perceptions about you. It must be that way,” she said, smiling at him tenderly.

Capacity for denial gone, he stared at her like an exhausted boxer told he must fight on just one more round, with no idea in him as to how he could. “How much do you want?” he asked tiredly.

“
Blackmail?
” Edda laughed. “No, there is no possibility of blackmail, ever. I can only imagine what you must have gone through over the years — it’s a terrible secret, the worst secret a man with public ambitions can have. I want to be your friend, is all. When our eyes met,
that
was what I knew — that I was, and am, your best friend ever.” She swallowed. “I don’t expect you
to understand, though I had rather hoped you would, because I thought the feeling was reciprocated.”

The dance band was blaring, its brass drowning out the sweeter sounds of strings and woodwinds, and this table was taking the full brunt of the noise as determined couples capered only feet away.

A saxophone wowed and wailed; he winced. “Would you come home with me for a quiet drink and a talk?” he asked.

She rose at once. “The sooner, the better.”

“Burdum?”

“He deserted me first.”

Home for Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. was the entire top floor of one of Melbourne’s tallest buildings at fifteen storeys, and came with a spacious roof garden shielded from traffic noise and voyeurs by a tall, dense hedge. The interior of twelve rooms, all generous in size, had been furnished and decorated by a prominent design firm, and no doubt reflected the owner’s tastes: conservative, comfortable, richly autumnal in colouring, understated.

“What would you care to drink?” Rawson asked, seating her in his library, obviously the room he inhabited the most.

“Since I notice the unobtrusive presence of servants, a cup of really good coffee would please me best, but, failing that, a cup of what Charles Burdum calls ‘coal-tar tea’ will do nicely,” she said, settling into a chair upholstered in amber crushed velvet. “I’m glad you didn’t choose leather. Sweaty for bare skin.”

“Leather can be a sweaty horror for a man too, when it’s in his own home,” he said. “Coffee it shall be.”

His eyes took her in, a leisurely pleasure. Such an elegant, sophisticated creature! Pure bones, flawless skin, lovely features, and hands to die for, graceful and speaking despite their shortcut nails. Only her eyes told of a brilliant mind handicapped by her sex, a thirst for interest, a hunger for bigger things to do that was always denied. And such eyes! A white wolf, offputting and eerie, framed by long, thick lashes.

They made casual conversation until the coffee was removed.