Paper Daisies (11 page)

Ben

‘
H
ere she is!' the German shouts, pointing as though he might win a prize by finding her. ‘Miss Berylda! Alec, here she is.'

Berylda. I turn to see her. Yes. Here she is. Slipped in through the side door behind me. A piece of sky slipped into the room. A porcelain face making off with my mind. I am staring at her but I can't help it, and she doesn't notice anyway, doesn't notice me at all as she moves through the party. I notice everything about her. The tremor along the boards beneath her feet meeting mine. Her frown twitching as she speaks with her uncle, stepping away from him hurriedly as though they might have had a disagreement earlier. Perhaps that's why she charged out as we arrived. She glances away, back towards me, but still she doesn't seem to see me. Her eyes are cast downwards, frowning into the carpet as she walks through the room, and that line between her brows is an entire country I wish to explore. Why does she frown so severely? This beautiful country of porcelain sky.

A gong sounds from the dining room beyond, shaking me from my stupor a little, and more fully with the shout of, ‘Dinner, my friends!' that follows. Howell. That's quite a voice he has in him. The man is expansive now, arms stretched wide in invitation; he appears to have recovered his pride with his control of the house.

So that Cos must shout in return: ‘Bonzer!' Rubbing his hands together: ‘Lead us forth to the trough!'

And I groan again. He will have Howell for his sport tonight – effortlessly, teasing the cat with string. Dunning, whom I've gathered is some kind of industrialist, some kind of parochial big hat, is still wheezing and wiping tears from his eyes at Cos's call for a celebratory black-shoot. Cos will have this fat man for the first course, and that may well be worth waiting for too. But we can't possibly stay for dinner. What excuse might I make for our exit, though?

Howell attempts to counter: ‘Well, if you eat the way you drink, Mr Thomp –'

Cos doesn't give him a fraction of a moment: ‘Never mind, Mr Howell – or Doctor, what are you? In any event, never mind. Wilber will make it up for me. He eats nothing – bloody vegetarians.'

This silence is a dreadful one. The directness of Cos's assault on Howell is too much. Howell has stopped in midstride, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth. The hand forming a fist. I must remove Cos. Remove him before Howell does suggest some violence and Cos then takes out the man's front teeth with one lazy jab. Don't push this wallaby to it. He's not grogged up enough yet to miss.

My hand is an inch from grasping the back of his coat. ‘Cos. Enough.' And I mean it: he may well be immune to embarrassment but I am not.

‘What?' He turns to me, eyes huge with cherubic malevolence. ‘But you
are
a vegetarian.'

Yes, I am. And laughter again fills this room, this awkward void, but there is another sound inside it now. Some melody, or the sound that a star might make in shining; a shower of such stars. It is her; I know it is the girl who is laughing. I turn to her and she is leaning against her sister; they must be sisters, they are so alike. ‘Oh Gret.' She can barely stop her laughter to speak, bent over it, holding her middle as though she might burst. ‘Vegetarian. Oh dear, won't Mary be appalled.' And I hear now it is not one sound, but two. The sisters laughing: what a sound. Chimes entwining. Enchanting.

‘Doctor Howell.' Even Cos appears to be tamed a bit by it. He holds out his hand to our host. ‘I sincerely apologise. I go right over the line when it comes to a joke, spirits too high – enough is enough. I shall be a lamb for the rest of the evening. My word.' He holds left hand to heart: ‘I promise.'

He promises nothing of course, sniffing the air, already composing lamb jibes in his head, and Howell is still bristling. But he accepts the handshake, and with it he says: ‘It's Mr – Mr Howell. I am a surgeon.'

‘Are you
really
?' Cos will let him have his pride and his party back, for now. ‘I'm doubly sorry then. I had no idea you were a medical man, such a noble profession.' Such a liar, such a master at it, and the party moves off again towards the dining room.

‘Yes, a wonderful surgeon, Mr Howell is.' One of the matrons is certainly impressed by him. ‘A saver of so many lives and limbs.'

‘And he will be greatly missed at the hospital when he's called upon to take up a seat in the new state parliament next year, as he should be – our man for the New Age,' the Reverend fellow enlightens us, with that arch air of one who believes he owns some territory on the ear of God.

‘Oh is that right? And what party will you be running for?' Cos asks the entire room, because he's just put together why we've been invited – and tolerated. So have I. These sort of people are looking for the support of the biggest hats in the land, such as Pater; they're after a national union of conservatives, and possibly financial assistance as well. Of course. And not a chance on this earth. I almost laugh. As Pater might say:
I will eat my own next steaming turd before I'll put my hand in my pocket for some wet-head from Melbourne – the next two if the bastard is from Sydney.
He's only slightly less averse to those in Brisbane who dare to exercise their parliamentary rights to speak in his presence. Howell must be naïve – or mad.

‘Free Traders, of course,' Howell replies, pride fully restored, fully on the tips of his toes, and he is bang out of the solar system mad. Even if we were on speaking terms, Pater is a Protectionist, a farmer before he is even Minister of Agriculture, with a natural inclination to want to protect the price of his beef from grasping little tax-thieving nonentities such as this. Federation for him will be just another set of laws to be circumvented. ‘We'll be making a stand against the labour movement in this district, keep them well out, before they ruin the place,' Howell adds, as though that shared political aim might make a blind bit of difference to the pastoralists of Queensland. ‘We're all with the Liberal Reform League here.'

‘Hooray! Hear, hear!' We have a chorus, like a mass delusion. A coalition of farmers and industrialist free traders? These people are so much of a New Age they must be out of the millennium.

‘You don't say,' Cos drawls with such exaggeration I don't know how anyone could fail to hear the roguery in it.

The girl is still laughing, arm in arm with her sister. She catches my eye now as she passes ahead of me. She smiles at me, differently, somehow into me, with some faint and cryptic conspiracy, drawing me along. Still smiling, turning away again, she says: ‘We'll find you something suitable to eat, don't worry, Mr Wilberry.' Discarding the words behind her as so many crumbs.

I cannot find a reply. But I know I will wait a thousand years and more to see that smile, to have her smile at me again.

Berylda

G
reta winces as she sits at the table. Only slightly, there behind her eyes, but I see it. She chatters over the discomfort, settling next to Mrs Weston. ‘I'm so hungry tonight – I really am going to fly away if I don't eat something soon.'

‘Dear, I wish I could eat as you do,' Mrs Weston replies. ‘I only have to look at half a pea to grow this girth half a yard these days.' They chatter away about nothing; the happy chatter of playing at being featherheaded around a dining table.

As Uncle Alec's admonishment of me just now replays and replays:
You delay dinner for some more attention, do you? Be careful or I will give you the attention you deserve.
Pinching his thumb into the back of my hand, digging his nail between my bird bones there.

I glance at him now, ho-ho-hoing over himself, directing guests to chairs, and my reply burns through my glare:
Why don't you just die?
This minute.
Spontaneous expiration by vanity-induced cerebral haemorrhage. BANG. Give us all a proper thrill tonight.

‘What does a vegetarian eat?' Dulcie sends her own inquiry up this side of the table. One really wouldn't guess she'd travelled further afield than Mediocrity Flat, honestly.

I could begin laughing again. Mr Wilberry is to be seated at the foot of the table, the honoured guest. Great lump of gristle in Uncle Alec's teeth now. An unexpected vegetarian, and his flagrantly misbehaving friend. Most excellent. Greta could not have wished a more perfect stranger into our world.

Mr Wilberry smiles and clears his throat, tucking that unfashionably long hair behind his ears. Oddly nervous manner for such a large man; a strong man, lifting out the chair for Mrs Dunning beside him with one hand. Not so much choosing his words as discovering them and addressing some particular stripe in the wallpaper above the sideboard with his answer: ‘Oh, I eat anything, really. Just not those things which have a brain.'

‘Why's that?' Dulcie persists in her genuinely brainless way and her mother growls across the centrepiece: ‘Dulcie, each to their own.'

‘I'm not offended, please,' Mr Wilberry assures them both, and then to the wallpaper once more, he says: ‘The experience of farming cattle, I suppose, it can send one either way.'

How neatly put.

He adds, looking down at the table: ‘Very pretty menu card, though.'

It is. Gret made the cards this morning, fourteen of them, and two more no less pretty ones this evening just before the guests arrived; she lingered over those as we kept to my room, making ourselves late for muster. Mr Wilberry holds his menu card in his enormous hands, looking into it as if finding his focus there, and he is sincere in his appreciation of it, as anyone should be. Each one possessing a splash of New Year fireworks, they come from that mysteriously well-fortressed place of joy in my sister's heart, her paintbox place of refuge.

‘I'll say it is a pretty card,' Mr Thompson agrees, brandishing his in the air.

‘My sister's doing,' I say. ‘She got all the artistic talent.' My words are keen, as I always am, to push to the light Greta's gifts that so few ever have the opportunity to see, but my voice is squashed tight by my myriad conflicting feelings this night. I sound dismissive, superior; I don't mean to.

‘Miss Jones.' Mr Thompson overlooks me anyway, just about diving across the table at my sister: ‘I want mine framed. You'll let me keep it, won't you?'

‘Oh? But of course you can keep your card.' Greta is shy and uncertain at his compliment, edging yet a little further behind Mrs Weston's sleeve, but I see the sweet pleasure in the corners of her smile as she looks away.

‘Even though I am lying,' the man says now, and the table holds its collective breath at what dreadful thing he might say next. I blaze a glare at him:
Don't you dare embarrass my sister
. But he doesn't take his eyes from Greta's card; he declares: ‘It's not a very pretty card at all, Miss Jones. It's very clever, is what it really is.' And he is not as drunk as he seems; he is sincere, assuring her, respectfully: ‘It is no easy thing to do, effectively – fireworks. Making light from dark from nothing on the page. And in watercolour. Bonzer stuff.' He raises his glass: ‘To Miss Jones's exceedingly clever cards.'

And her face colours exceedingly beautifully as everyone else toasts her too: ‘Clever Greta!' and ‘Magnificent menu cards!' She is the centrepiece, a rare moment for her, and she shimmers with it even as her wounds would rather send her into the sideboard to hide. At least, from where she sits, she can't see Uncle Alec using his card to blot the bottom of the decanter, having poured J.C. Dunning another drink, ignoring this small celebration of her altogether – and there's nothing unusual in that. He would never praise Greta. Not if his position in the Liberal League depended on it. Never.

Fury threatens, more urgently still, and I stand abruptly: ‘Speaking of menus, I should go and horrify the housekeeper with our brainless vegetarian changes to it.'

I sound rude and horrible and leave as abruptly, my own face flushing through one hundred degrees of rage and shame. I am appalled at myself. I am appalled at what this house does to me, shrivelling my own spirit, making me mean, not just this evening, not just for this new low Alec Howell brings us to, but always, and I promise Mary silently as I make my way to the kitchen that I will not be rude and horrible to her too. I will not be like
him.
She will be upset enough as it is at our surprise culinary problem. There's nothing on the menu apart from dessert that isn't full of brained things, even the soup – beef.

But still my tone is jagged, clipped and rushed as I descend upon the kitchen: ‘Mary. We have a problem. Mr Wilberry eats no meat.'

She gasps: ‘What? No meat?'

‘Yes. Have you spare rounds for the canap
é
s?' I ask as gently and helpfully as I can, but she whimpers in response.

‘Rounds?' She looks over at her hors d'oeuvres, her regiments of anchovy rosettes, identical sprigs of dill topping each. Lucy, about to carry a tray of them out to the table, stops statue still with dread panic. Mary cries: ‘There's no meat in there, it's only anchovies, and Mr Howell said –'

‘It's all meat to a vegetarian,' I snap. Impatience takes over me at her dithering, her terrible need to please her master. She adores him and I hate her so very much for it. I'll make the wretched canapé myself. I find the little pile of Mary's discarded, not quite perfectly circular toasted rounds by the piping bag on the table between us. I slice a tomato from the bowl at the window end. Sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Garnish it with a sprig of parsley from the jug by the cutting board. Not quite as elegant as Mary's own efforts but: ‘There's your vegetarian canapé.' I push the plate across the table at her. ‘Make a mushroom soup au lait for Mr Wilberry, and a potato gratin for entree. It's not hard, Mary. I'm sure he won't mistake the lamb for pumpkin with the main, and I'll warn him there's tongue in your croquets.'

‘But –'

‘Just do it, or Mr Howell will be most displeased.' I wipe the knife and stab it back into the block.

‘Yes, Miss Jones.' She is duly cowed.

And cruelty's chain drags as I return to the dining room. Mary is an exemplary servant, really, when even a tolerable one is not easy to come by, even in Sydney, and she is an extremely fine cook. I have never acknowledged it. The best I can give her is this contempt. Cruelty passed down the chain from her beloved master and through me. Or it is simply me? Am I the one who is wrong here after all? Am I the cold, ungrateful jade he says I am? Does he in fact have a right to behave as he does? Is there a right order to things that I am resisting because I am – Oh God, no, stop – not that wrong thought. No. I am not wrong. I can't be. Can I? My questions, my confusions, run round and round.

And stop suddenly at the dining room door, at the sight of Mr Wilberry's back, filling the space before me, suspending the bedlam inside me, and eclipsing Uncle Alec altogether. In fact, Mr Wilberry eclipses almost the entire party from this view, for me. I am used to being quite a bit smaller than others but Mr Wilberry is quite a bit larger than most – as tall as I am when he's seated. I move around to my place between him, at the foot of the table, and Dr Weston on my right, and as I do I see Mr Wilberry is speaking to Reverend Liversidge, up from Mrs Dunning at his left. ‘Ah no, I'm not a professor, no, nothing like that as yet. Merely a lecturer, in structural and physiological botany, mostly, with a research interest in native classification. But really I earn my keep with the study of the various suitabilities and unsuitabilities of cropping for stock feed, across various terrain. There's a push on at Melbourne now to bring agriculture into the School of Natural Sciences as a –'

Mr Thompson leans across the table from the other side of the Reverend. ‘He teaches the hothoused youth of the shallow south that apples do in reality grow on trees. Gets them out in the field with gumboots, secateurs and all that. Extraordinary stuff. They grow beans on the campus too, apparently.'

‘Thank you, Cos, yes we do.' Mr Wilberry indulges him, in that way of being both fond and irritated. A mismatched pair, Mr Thompson as darkly chaotic as Mr Wilberry appears fair and mild; they must be old friends. ‘Thank you,' Mr Wilberry says to Lucy as she offers him the tomato rounds. ‘That looks delicious.' And back to Reverend Liversidge: ‘I am presently on a … somewhat of a break, undertaking a study of a particular species of –'

‘Oh don't go on about plants, Wilber. Save us.' Mr Thompson is wonderfully awful, a crude and bearded Oscar Wilde exhumed for a tour of the Antipodes.

Reverend Liversidge is certainly not interested in botany, asking Mr Wilberry now: ‘You did your undergraduate study at Oxford or Cambridge?'

‘Neither – no,' says Mr Wilberry, with that nervous clearing of the throat. ‘I went straight down to Melbourne. Biology and –'

‘Melbourne?' Reverend Liversidge is shocked, as if Mr Wilberry said he'd gone straight down to hell; shocked in that way so many of the previous generation are: How is it possible one might be entirely educated in Australia? He's a Cambridge man himself; don't we all here know his wife died after a diabetic coma rather than be subject to another lecture upon his St John's College glory days.

Dr Weston, opposite, is Oxford, but rather broader of mind; body too. He takes four canapés onto his plate and says to Mr Wilberry: ‘You home-grown brains, it's you who will change this ragbag of colonies into a nation once the ink is dry.' Through a mouthful of anchovy paste he says to me: ‘That's you too, Berylda. Haven't congratulated you on your results yet, have I?'

Mr Wilberry turns to me and Dr Weston, his eyes asking over his own mouthful of tomato: ‘Hm? Congratulated?'

‘This young lady is for the School of Medicine in the New Year, at Sydney.' Dr Weston tilts his glass in my direction and then swigs to the novelty, merrily remaining deaf, dumb and blind to the injustice that he and every other DMO in this rag bag of colonies will conspire against me should I dare to apply for a job on the wards once I qualify. ‘Came top in Biology, too – name in the
Bathurst Free Press
this morning, and a prize to come from the board. Perhaps a scholarship.' A wink across the table to Uncle Alex: ‘Such a credit to you.'

And here, thank you, Dr Weston, is my chance, my turn in the light, to strike for the one thing I might achieve tonight: to make Alec Howell agree to allow us to take that excursion to the Hill. I glance over at Gret, who's pretending fascination at whatever Mrs Gebhardt is pronouncing upon now, and my anticipation gleams: she will so love this surprise. Please, fate be kind and give it to us.

But before I open my mouth, Mr Wilberry, it appears, is clearing his throat again to speak, and by habit I hesitate. To find that, no, he's not clearing his throat at all. He's coughing. No – now he gulps. A strangled sound.

What in heaven's name?

The man is choking on his tomato canapé.