Illywhacker (15 page)

He was like a nice nun, not the sort that hit your knuckles with a ruler and talked of sin and hellfire, but the other sort. He had gentle Jesus eyes.

“Amazing,” Dr Grigson said turning in his chair to look through the window at the big white statue in the middle of Sturt Street. “The child,” he swung back to face Mrs Ester,
“must
have an electric invigorator. With it she will have a long and happy life.”

Molly multiplied 899 by 32 in her head. A small, light, happy calculation. It meant nothing. She multiplied in relief. A flood of numerals marched across her mind and swept away her misery. 7,676 by 296, she thought, marching down the stairs behind her brothers. The answer seemed almost as long as life itself.

The day that Molly strapped on the apparatus around her waist, hid the battery in the folds of her dress, and stood before the doctor smiling, was the happiest day she could remember of her childhood, better, by far, than her first communion or the birthday picnic out at Creswick. She walked the wintry streets of Ballarat as one invincible. She went into St Mary’s on the hill and prayed for an hour to the Blessed Virgin. She did some multiplications for God as well, presenting him, finally, with 5,895,323.

Ballarat stretched low and wide, from Battery Hill to the edges of the west. It was made from wood. Weatherboards and wide verandas lined wide streets that baked into claypans in summer, churned into mud in winter. They had planted oaks and bluegums in Sturt Street. They stocked Lake Wendouree with fish. They began to talk of Ballarat with civic pride, but it was Mrs Ester who showed real confidence in the future. She built the Crystal Palace Hotel from brick.

It stood high and solid, three storeys facing a Sturt Street that looked faint-hearted and pessimistic in comparison, as if the gold that had made the city rich might suddenly go away.

Mrs Ester did not worry about gold. The quartz crushers were already more important. The foundries were there. H. V. McKay was manufacturing harvesters which were sold all round the
country. She had no need of the custom of miners who drank themselves into oblivion down in the shanties of the east and frittered away their fortunes on chilblained prostitutes. It is true she had a public bar that spilled its dubious contents on to Sturt Street on summer evenings: and there were miners amongst the shearers, fettlers, foundry men, farm labourers, clerks and tricksters and passing thieves, but she had not built her business on anything so flimsy.

The Duke of Kent stayed at the Crystal Palace Hotel in 1873—that was the sort of hotel it was.

Molly had visited the Crystal Palace Hotel before her mother’s death made it her permanent residence. They had come once for Christmas dinner and once for a funeral, but they had come with tingling skin scrubbed hard by a mother who felt out of place amongst such finery. They had come with new shoelaces, their eyes downcast, told not to stare at the lady with the cherub’s lips and bulging eyes.

But now she could enter the Crystal Palace Hotel through the grand front entrance. She did not quite skip up the steps. She certainly did not laugh or giggle. But she could, whilst walking briskly, carrying the morning’s newspapers, smiling sweetly at the guests, feel that she was a part of the complicated mechanism of this important place.

Her father had taken a room in a boarding house close to the bakery. Sean had been sent up to Creswick to the Rourkes’ and Walter went to Ballarat South with the Kellys who wrote complaints about his bed-wetting. He had also been sent home from school with his underpants wrapped up in newspaper after soiling his pants in arithmetic class. And Molly had begun work as a housemaid for Mrs Ester. She was paid no money, but she was fed, given shelter, and she had her electric invigorator.

She worked hard and lost her fat. She rose at five and lit the fires. She toiled along the carpeted passages upstairs and the highly polished wooden ones downstairs. She could clean a room and leave it so that one would imagine it never slept in. She could clean a mirror so a guest might feel that no face had ever been reflected in it before. She collected squeezed lemons from the kitchen every Tuesday and went from brass doorknob to brass doorknob, rubbing them hard until the lemons fell to pieces in her hands and the brass gave up its grime to the sour sticky juice. She liked the hotel. She liked the quiet clink and rustle of breakfast in the dining room, the rumble of kegs being rolled down to the
cellar, the smell of brewery horses, the songs in the saloon bar late at night, and the sound of Mrs Ester’s high-heeled shoes and rattling key as she passed in the corridor on her way to bed.

She ate her meals with Mrs Ester in the dining room where there was always food in plenty—meat every day, even Fridays—and almost nobody, it seemed, could eat what they were given and the black-uniformed waitresses were always carrying back plates that had not been scraped clean. The hens in the hotel yard ate better food than Molly had been used to.

She had her friends: an old yardman who told her stories and showed her his odd socks sticking up above his boots and Patchy the barman who gave her pennies when he was drunk, and even Mrs Ester, on three occasions, read her stories from a book about India which, although she did not quite understand them, were appreciated all the same. However, it was not until Jennifer Grillet arrived that she had someone of her own age to talk to. Jennifer was a distant relation of Mrs Ester’s. She had red hair that sat on either side of her head like a spaniel’s ears and she was very thin. Jennifer arrived with a proper suitcase just after Molly’s sixteenth birthday and when the door was shut in their small room above the stables, Molly began to talk.

“My,” said Jennifer Grillet, “you are a chatterbox,” but she listened just the same and showed Molly the birthmark on her shoulder.

Their friendship was not to last long. Before a month was out Jennifer had begged Mrs Ester for a room of her own because Molly kept her awake all night talking, but by then the real damage had been done and Molly had told her everything, how Walter pooed his pants, her father banged his head, her mother hanged herself. She had made no secret of her electric belt. She explained its purpose. She let Jennifer try it on and thought she was secretly envious, not only of the exotic apparatus but of Molly’s figure which had become, by that sixteenth birthday, decidedly womanly.

“A real hourglass,” she told herself proudly, standing before the mirror in petticoats and electric belt.

There were others who thought so too, and Mrs Ester was not slow in realizing the girl’s potential behind the bar.

The bar Mrs Ester had in mind was not the public bar where Patchy ruled, sometimes ruthlessly. The bar she had in mind was called the “Commercial Room”. It was not downstairs, it was upstairs. There were no tiled walls in the Commercial Room. You
did not clean it as Patchy cleaned the public bar, with a hose and water. It had a woollen carpet on the floor and several leather chairs and low tables.

The Commercial Room was a meeting place for mutton-chopped merchants and frock-coated doctors, chalky-skinned solicitors and the moustached graduates of the School of Mines. Visiting gentlemen and their crinolined ladies could sit in comfort, drink champagne if they wished, and only occasionally be reminded of the realities of Ballarat when a fight erupted on the footpath below or fire swept through the wooden cottages on Battery Hill, and even these events could be comfortably observed from a balcony above the street.

It was quite clearly understood by everyone concerned, in particular by Molly and Mrs Ester, that this bar would, sooner or later, furnish an excellent husband. Certainly they did not hope for a dentist or a barrister, but a successful farmer or a stock and station agent would not be out of the question, provided Molly abandoned her habit of running along corridors and, when walking, shortened her stride, and swung her arms a little less enthusiastically. In conversation she should think more carefully about what she intended to say and when she said it, say it slowly, not breathlessly.

With these instructions firmly in her mind Molly stood stiffly behind the bar while Mrs Ester conducted her final examination.

“Two Scotch whiskies, one pink gin, one rum and cloves,” said Mrs Ester.

“Four and sixpence,” said Molly.

“One ladies’ beer, two pints Ballarat Bitter, one
crème de menthe.”

“Six and sixpence ha’penny,” said Molly.

“Do you have a decent burgundy, dear lady?” said deep-voiced Mrs Ester.

“Yes, sir, Chambertin and Côte du Rhone.”

“And what is the price?”

“The Côte du Rhone is ten shillings and the Chambertin twelve and sixpence ha’penny.”

“Very good.”

“What is three hundred and five multiplied by eight-six, Mrs Ester?”

“Heaven knows,” said Mrs Ester.

“Twenty thousand, six hundred and fifty-three,” said Molly. “Oh Mrs Ester, I’m so excited.”

When Mrs Ester had removed the pencil from behind her ear and checked this calculation she took Molly to her office where she examined her in arithmetic. She discovered that the girl could add up columns of figures in her head. She did not even move her lips.

“Now, my girl,” Mrs Ester said, “you listen to me. You will not throw yourself at the first man who comes along.”

“No, Mrs Ester.”

“You are a decided commercial asset, you mark my words.”

“Yes, Mrs Ester.”

“You are only sixteen. There is no need to rush off and marry in a hurry.”

“No, Mrs Ester.”

“Would you like to learn about the business, how to pay the staff and the brewery and add up figures? I will pay you a pound a week.”

“Thank you, Mrs Ester.”

“You will not spend the pound, Molly. (Do
not
fidget.) You will put it in the bank every week as long as you work for me, and when you get married you will not tell your husband about it, is that clear?”

“Yes, Mrs Ester.”

“Do you swear?”

“I cross my heart, Mrs Ester.”

“How much is a glass of best stout?”

“Three pence.”

“You are a good girl, Molly,” said Mrs Ester taking the girl’s two hands in hers in a rare, grabbing, embarrassed gesture of affection. “You will be a credit to the Crystal Palace Hotel.”

And, had it not been for Henry Lightfoot, she would have been right.

Walter and Sean had not been given electric belts, and they were not happy. It was only Molly who was happy and she knew she had no right to it. No one could say that she was not a good daughter or a loving sister. Indeed she was, when she could be, a perfect Little Mother. When the remains of the family assembled on Sundays she brought a needle and thread for Walter’s
trousers, a newly knitted balaclava for Sean, wool and darning needles for her father’s socks.

Walter was dark and silent and hit at the trunks of trees with stick or boot and Sean clung to her side while she darned their sleeping father’s socks. Beside the weed-choked waters of Lake Wendouree their mother’s death lay over them. Sean tugged insistently at her skirt. The men in their rowing sculls could not move freely through the water.

She hid the pleasures of the Commercial Room from her family. She did not tell them about Henry Lightfoot. She did not confess her hopes for the Hospital Auxiliary Ball. She fled these Sunday afternoons earlier than she should have, and was punished by guilty dreams because of it.

Henry Lightfoot had a property at Bunningyong and did not come to Ballarat as often as he would have liked, but when he did come he always wore nice suits, and although he was a big man his body did not fight against the constrictions of his suit and his neck did not bulge against his Oxford collar.

“Do you like to dance, Miss Rourke?” he had asked her. He had a warm sweet smell, like straw.

“Oh, yes, Mr Lightfoot,” she said.

He had fair hair and dark black eyebrows. Apart from a slightly beakish nose he was decidedly handsome. He was going to ask her to the ball but she saw him frown, lose courage, and order a pint of bitter instead. She liked him better for his loss of courage.

Tonight, she knew, he would come again, because there had been sales in Ballarat and Henry Lightfoot had sold fifty fattened beasts for a record price. The little Scot from Elders Smith had already given her the details of the sale. He said it was a great day for Henry Lightfoot.

Her heart was beating too fast. It fought to free itself from the magnetic restrictions of her belt. It wanted to go wild, on its own loud boastful erratic dance.

Henry Lightfoot entered the Commercial Room. He was aptly named. He walked on the balls of his feet, and she saw that he was already a little drunk. It was not like him to be drunk, but she was pleased he was drunk. She hoped he was drunk enough to ask her to the ball.

He smiled at her; he did not come to the bar immediately but joined the ruddy pipe-smoking Scot from Elders and the round-shouldered man from the
Courier Mail
. His mind did not
appear to be on the conversation he was having. He rocked back and forwards on his shining black shoes which showed only the faintest smear of sale-yard mud.

When he came, at last, to the bar, he was carrying his companions’ empty glasses. He was smiling, but she was too excited to look closely at his smile.

She blushed.

Had she not been so intent on trying to stop the blush she might have looked more closely at his face and she might have detected a malice in the smile which the men who had dealings with Henry Lightfoot knew to be part of his character. He was both handsome and charming, but he was also a bully with a keen nose for weakness.

He stood at the bar, jingling the loose change in his pocket, swaying gently. His smile was moist, his handsome mouth a little slack.

Molly’s red hair was piled handsomely high, and although it accentuated a tendency towards jowliness, it also showed the soft white skin of her neck. There was nothing to hide her blush.

“You’ve been keeping a secret from me, Miss Rourke,” said Henry Lightfoot.

“No,” she said, “I promise you,” but blushed even deeper, because she had confessed her hopes about the ball to Jenny Grillet.