Paper Daisies (13 page)

But I can. And for the first time this evening clarity has me, at last, and with it comes an intuition. Whoever these strangers are, manic Mr Thompson and mild Mr Wilberry, they are our allies somehow. My plan coalesces with my courage. Now. My moment is now to make my demand. This chance for a little escape; and with it this chance for a little revenge. Quickly: turn the thought to words, and words to knives.

‘Uncle Alec,' I call over Mr Dunning's slow boiling outrage. ‘Speaking of chaperones, Buckley has agreed to hold off his holiday to take Greta and me out to Hill End tomorrow, out along the Bridle Track.'

‘What?' There's a fascinating outrage. I'd like it photographed and mounted above the mantel. I might give him a stroke tonight yet. ‘What is this?'

‘Oh Ryl!' Greta exclaims, appearing half-thrilled at the surprise and half-horrified by my new provocation. Don't you worry, sister, I will not let him come for you tonight, I will not have you pay for my sins with a beating, or worse; but I cannot tear my eyes from Alec Howell's to let her find my promise there.

‘Yes, remember?' I prod him further and twist the tip. ‘I mentioned it just this afternoon – before … Before you went to see Greta about … whatever it was you went to see Greta about, when she was in her room. Remember?'

I am bolder than I have ever been. So close to the truth. So close. Shall I announce to the table what you went to Greta for this afternoon, Alec Howell? Do I bluff or shall I dare? I am pinning him to the board like a rat for vivisection:
Do not deny me.

And yet he attempts to, of course. ‘Hill End?' he scoffs. ‘What would you want to go out there for, Berylda? To see a Chinaman about some snake oil perhaps?' He sneers under his smile.

‘Perhaps.' I shrug, smug: if only you knew. ‘He sounds like an interesting character, don't you think?'

‘No, I do not. That quackery of the Celestials is not medicine, girl, that is newspaper sensationalism combined with village idiocy, and you will not be going to Hill End. I must forbid it. Never mind that the track is in too dangerous a state of disrepair. Never mind that the town is a den of vice.' He ho-ho-ho's over me,
stupid girl, whatever is she talking about,
but none join him. I have his audience for my own.

‘Vice?' I laugh, savagely gay. My sister would be safer living in a brothel than here. ‘There is vice around every bend, isn't there, Uncle? Wherever we may go there are dangers – why, a young lady is molested at Redfern Station once a month, isn't she, and I brave its Western Mail platform several times a year. But Buckley will keep us safe on this journey – you know he would do anything for Greta and me, if he could, if he ever
knew
we were in the slightest trouble. And anyway, I hope to travel with even greater guardianship – I thought that it might be just the thing to invite Mr Wilberry and Mr Thompson to accompany us. No one would dare accost us with these strapping fellows in our midst, now would they?'

I don't give Alec Howell or our guests more than half a blink to digest it. I press on wildly: ‘Oh do say yes, Uncle. It's been so terribly long since Greta's been allowed
anywhere
,
never mind that I deserve a little reward for all my hard work this year
.
And Mr Wilberry. Mr Wilberry, if you come with us, you'll catch the display of black poppies along the Bridle Track – the old scenic road there. I'm sure they are in bloom this time of year, and they are a sight, those poppies, a botanical treat. Might you delay your plans for us? What do you say? It'll only be a few days – perhaps three?'

‘Black poppies?' Mr Wilberry looks completely boggled, as if I've slipped a drop of their opium into his glass, as Mr Thompson does exactly as one would expect of such a keen troublemaker, demanding of his friend: ‘I think you are required to say yes in this circumstance, Wilber.'

As Mrs Weston weighs in: ‘Those poppies truly are a glorious sight. It's all glorious out there. Down along the riverbanks – oh, you should plan a picnic for the journey, Berylda.'

‘I was thinking precisely that, Mrs Weston,' I say, and I turn my blade into the centre of Alec Howell's forehead. ‘I was thinking we should picnic at the Turon, where it crosses the Track, although Greta and I haven't been there for many years, of course. I have such happy memories of that place, our last excursion with Mother and Papa, that summer before …'

Hell descended.

And I have bested the devil at his own game. I win. He can't possibly object now, not without betraying himself as the vile bully that he is. He certainly can't deny our esteemed guests their black poppies, and he can't threaten to join us, either – as he must attend the official Federation celebrations here in Bathurst tomorrow, gritting his teeth through it all too, at being snubbed for any invitation to Sydney, to the Governor-General's swearing in and the choir of ten thousand singing ‘Australian sons, let us rejoice'.

He chuckles with Justice Wardell, feigning indulgence: ‘Young and wilful – what can one do?'

We'll find out after the guests leave, won't we; and whatever evil retribution you devise, I will stop you. But you can't stop Gret and me from going to the Hill. Not now.

‘Oh
dear
,
but
who
will chaperone you?' No one is more confounded than Mrs Wardell. ‘
All
of you on
excursion
–
together
?
A few
days
?
In
mixed
company? But what if the road is very bad and it's more than a few days –
nights
– out
there –
oh
dear.
'

‘Oh Ettie,' Mrs Dunning chides her to confound me. ‘This is the twentieth century. Have a bit of faith in the youngsters to make the appropriate arrangements. They're hardly going to Peru. What a marvellous little adventure it will be, though – makes me wish I were young again.' What makes her turn so rapidly modern? She bats eyelashes across the table at Mr Thompson now. Oh, I see, and how very revolting. Never mind your reputation so long as you've got a good franchise-free foundation garment on.

And Mrs Wardell is clucking ever on: ‘Well, I can't allow Dulcie to be part of such an escapade.'

Good, I smile sweetly, because she's not invited.

I look to Mr Wilberry again:
Say yes, you must say yes.

He says, as if answering some other presence at the table: ‘Hm. Well. I suppose Manildra can wait a few days, can't it?'

Ben

‘
W
hat is it you must do at Manildra, Mr Wilberry?' she asks me.

Mama's elusive bloom unfolds its red raylets in my mind. I look over my shoulder: it's as though she remains with me somehow. As though she is just in the next room, pressing petals, the child with his chin on the edge of the table, at her side, watching; she's saying something to him that I can't quite hear.

‘The specimen?' The girl's frown is impatient for my response. ‘You said you were going to look for a . . .'

‘Yes,' I say. ‘An
Helichrysum –
a daisy, everlasting. Like the flower – ah, that grows by your dam here, and not quite like it.
Or possibly not of that species at all – another perhaps. I'm not really sure what I'm going to Manildra for, actually. A promise I made, to find . . .'

She squints at me below the frown, impatient and now possibly disturbed by all my stumbling about with these words. She must be wondering how it is I manage to conduct lectures at the university, much less negotiate my way through the conversations necessary to getting about in the world; I sometimes wonder that myself.

‘Find what?' she says abruptly:
C
ome on, come on.
She rubs the back of her neck, as though I might be giving her a pain there, or a shiver of disdain.

Come on, come on
,
Mama demands too, right at my ear now
.

‘A flower,' I say, looking down at the gilt lace border of the bowl set before me. ‘One my mother remembered from when she was a girl, from her home, at Mandagery Creek, before she married. A native. Hm. She is no longer with us.'

‘Oh?' I look up again at the sound, the softness of the chime. The frown has vanished to porcelain once more; her face so close, her eyes hold worlds of blue kaleidoscope jewels laced through with rays of hazel stars. ‘A recent loss?' she asks.

‘Yes.' God but it is, so freshly cut. ‘Only a few weeks . . .' What? Her perfume mists over what's left of my mind, sweet and yet . . . what is it? Rosemary and new boot leather? And something lovely . . .

‘So. You're going to look for a paper daisy for your late mother?' she asks, and I am held by those eyes, the shape of the lids, petal-like and porcelain also.

‘Yes.' I attempt a smile, for this beauty, this beauty I am sure I must pursue even as it is eluding me. What is this enchantment? ‘I am searching for a bloom my mother once loved and I'm not even sure precisely what bloom it is, or exactly where it is. I'm likely only to find some good examples of lignum swamp or some other predictable thing. That is a bit mad, isn't it?'

‘No. I don't think so,' she says, her expression unreadable. She turns away from me to say something to her sister over the table, something about picnics and a carnival calliope.

I don't absorb much else for a while. I couldn't say what was in the soup.

I will travel with Berylda Jones to Hill End tomorrow. Extraordinary. The most extraordinary thing that has ever occurred, to me. Even Cos behaves himself for the balance of the meal; even when the talk turns dangerously towards religion, something about getting around the Papists that have hold of this town, he says nothing, makes no interjection that God is dead and we shot him too. He only eats his dinner. Extraordinary. He must see that this is important to me, whatever this might be. This wanting to know Berylda Jones. He'll let me have a go without further ructions. I hope. He'd bloody well better. I've never wanted to have a go quite like this before. A go at conversation. With a girl.

I turn to her, trying to think of something not too idiotic to say, but she is turned away from me again, deep in conversation with Dr Weston beside her.
They share a joke over of some text she read before Christmas, having pinched it from the medical library, keeping ahead of her studies in the New Year. ‘I'll be struck off for breaking rules before I even begin!' She laughs and I'm sure that I can hear a trace of Mama's laughter through it too; a girl running down a hall, a hat disappearing around a door. She and Dr Weston talk on, discussing the subjects she will take next year: a course of further, cellular biology, medical physics, anatomy, organic and inorganic chemistry . . . I am lost in the licorice darkness of her hair; near black, not quite. What is this chemistry?

What have I done, agreeing to travel with this girl? I am mad. I help myself to another drink and think of poppies.

I have seen plenty of poppies in my time, of course.
Papaver orientale
across thousands of gardens; and
fields of
somniferum
,
grown for their latex, for their morphia soporific. Mama left me on a cloud of that stuff. North and south down the eastern seaboard, I've seen them: trails of pink along the hillsides northwest of Brisbane, and like tracts of summer snow from Bendigo to Ballarat. Only the day before yesterday I came across an interesting specimen at Leura, near Katoomba, pale orange petals and pollen of a deep indigo, randomly sewn amidst the dandelions between the railway tracks and the village. But in all my travels I've not seen a black one. I know they exist, as I know they are not black except in the rarest instances. They are generally a brownish purple; translucent plum cups. They are the colour of my wine.

Berylda

T
he bells of All Saints will be into their grim ringing by now, calling the faithful and the lonely to the watch-night Mass, the Catholic Cathedral of St Michael and St John answering in endless competition over the merry fiddles and drums thumping out of every other establishment in the town. I watch the clock on the sideboard here, willing time away as we scrape empty our dessert bowls. It is 10.32 p.m.
Tick. Tick. Tick.

‘So, what about these nasty cases of bubonic plague we've been hearing about up north then?' Dr Weston is asking Mr Wilberry across me, referring to the outbreak that has struck in tropical Townsville these past months.

‘I'm afraid I don't know much about it,' Mr Wilberry replies, unceasingly apologetic. ‘I'm in Melbourne for most of the year, and in Brisbane, lately I … hm. I was a bit preoccupied with other things …' A dying mother, I suppose, and he sounds as weary of this evening as I feel. He drains his glass. I yawn.

Time yawns and yawns but I am increasingly restless. For tomorrow. It cannot come soon enough, as if freedom might truly lie there at dawn, somewhere beyond Duramana at the head of the Track. I can hardly hold anything else in my thoughts.

Reverend Liversidge stands and gently taps the side of his glass for quiet. ‘May we all be joined here now in prayer. Let us give thanks for this our bounteous …'

He blabbers away and I pray for our freedom. I pray for absolution from whatever I will do in these days to come. I pray that I am not to blame, for whatever I will do. Must do. To keep Greta from further pain. I pray there is another way; I pray that this whisper of a child is taken from her tonight by some other will, slipping from her, never to be. That happens all the time, doesn't it? I pray that tomorrow, at dawn, I will by some other miracle have the power and the means to simply leave this place. To take my sister and leave. Leave to live our lives in peace, to live as our parents intended us to. I pray as if there is a God that listens to me. I pray as if the smear of custard in the bottom of my bowl is God: Hear me, hear my prayer.

‘Thank you, Reverend.' Uncle Alec is standing now. ‘Might I follow those elegant words of gratitude and hope with one toast that may match it?' He raises his glass and waits for all to stand with him, before he pours fourth: ‘To my dear nieces, Berylda and Greta. In gratitude of the beauty and light that you bring to my world, and in hope that it may ever be thus.'

‘Berylda and Greta,' fills the air; my throat fills with bile, acrid over sickly saccharine. And a lump of deeper shame: how many times over the years have I allowed these moments of praise to fool me, just for a second: make me believe that if I were good enough, if I worked hard enough, some love might come. Some change.

‘Wonderful girls,' Mrs Weston's rich velvet reaches towards me but is as quickly lost. As Mrs Dunning calls shrill above all glasses raised: ‘And here's to you, Alec. Such a wonderful man you are, taking the girls to your heart as you have. Sacrificing your own needs for theirs. And with such admirable, laudable results.'

‘Hear, hear!' All hearty cheers.

Alec Howell is smiling his wolf smile amidst them. This congratulation society bestows upon him, in spades. Alec Howell is such a wonderful man, never remarrying, so devoted to his nieces is he, and they aren't even blood relations. Who has ever heard of such selfless charity?

‘And last but never least, to my dear Libby.' He charges his glass now even higher to even heartier cheers. ‘You are never forgotten, my dearest.'

Oh let's drink a cup of kindness for his poor dearest departed wife, shall we? Poor, poor Libby. Libby Pemberton, such a dear little thing she was, fine and fragile, the fever swept her up and away like a leaf, taking his heart with it forever. Look at her portrait there, smiling over Mr Wilberry's shoulder, on the wall opposite her husband's chair. Those dark eyes and all that lush raven hair, what a divine woman she was. You could easily mistake her for a Spanish señora with those looks; the eyes of a Welsh pirate princess stole him away, he says to any who ask of her origins, her uncommon features. How Alec Howell must miss her. Too young, she was, too swiftly lost, and yet she gazes at him every evening still and lovingly; and why wouldn't she? The man is a rock, a martyr, a model of moral responsibility and rectitude. He is superb. Browning should have written a poetic monologue for him.

And he is now smiling that wolf smile directly at me. The promise of retribution never more positively conveyed. Something is coming for us when the guests leave, be in no doubt, that smile is saying. Perhaps he will beat me; he will certainly need to when I bar his way to Greta with everything I have. He hasn't taken his hand to me for what seems ages; not since I returned home for the winter break and he'd discovered through a colleague that I had been seen too often unchaperoned walking across University Park, and once noted laughing raucously on King Street in Newtown –
cavorting
was the charge. He slapped me in a perfunctory way, at the end of the remonstrance; nothing out of the usual. If only he knew what else I get up to off the chain: consorting with socialists at suffrage demonstrations and drinking gin-slipped punch at St Paul's – before walking across the lawn alone in the dark. I return his smile now, raise my glass to him:
Cheers dearest Uncle, and may the new year bring you some charge of
malpractice that will see you sent away to be surgeon at Townsville Plague Hospital.
But whatever you do, whatever you plan, you will not stop us from going to the Hill. Not now. You can't. You don't want our gallant strangers to see what you really are. Beat me – go on – but be careful about it. I gulp down the remains of my wine in anticipation. Was that my third glass? I really wouldn't know.

‘And now, ladies, if you will please excuse us.' He gives us our command to leave the men to take smoke in one end and break wind out of the other for an hour – or, rather, fifty-five minutes it'll have to be, since we're running so recklessly over schedule.

I glance over at Mr Thompson as I turn to file out with the ewes, will him to do something upsetting, but he doesn't; he is busy stuffing a pipe.

And Mrs Weston is taking my arm as the door closes behind us, her voice low, keeping me to her side. ‘A word with you, dear – about Greta. Perhaps it's time to start thinking about a suitable fellow?'

‘Time for what?' I can barely conceal my shock, or my revulsion, at the suggestion: a suitable fellow? Greta, exchange one gaoler for another? And in this predicament? No.

‘Yes, time to consider marriage, perhaps?' Mrs Weston persists. ‘Is there a reason she's not in favour of the idea?'

‘Reason?' If ever I might tell you. My sister is in no state to be married. I look around the drawing room for her, but she is not with us; taken the opportunity to sneak off to the closet, most probably.

‘She seemed to avoid the topic with me,' Mrs Weston continues and I feel as if I might choke for all I want to say. For all I
must
say. But …

‘Did she?' is all I can say. I pretend it's none of my affair. ‘Greta knows her own mind about such things, I'm sure.'

My own mind turns inside out. Has Mrs Weston of her own accord guessed that something is wrong in this house? Is she
inviting
me to say?

She squeezes my arm affectionately, pats my hand in hers. ‘I only mean to be of use, that's all, not meddlesome, dear. Greta is isolated here, or so I perceive, and she is too much a treasure to be shut away. While that uncle of yours seems rarely to notice any need other than his own, as is the way of most males. Hm?'

‘Hm.' Can I dare hint at the truth of his ways?

‘I suppose he is too busy to care,' she says, with sympathy. But does that sympathy extend to him, too? I can't take that risk. That she will not believe me; not support us, if she knew. He rapes my sister. Would she think it a regrettable right of men to do this? A burden to be borne with a sigh; quietly.

I pretend that I am distracted elsewhere, breaking from Mrs Weston to hunt through the music in the piano seat. ‘Where is that song?' The lines and dots of the sheets swirl around before my eyes. What am I looking for? Where are our answers? I might crawl under the piano and stay there, if that were ever an option. I scrunch back the corner of some piece or other under my hand, a grasp of desperation, and it reveals some sort of reply: Elgar and Rossetti's ‘Song of Flight' sitting there beneath it. A promise in it that we will fly, somehow, yes we will. Beginning with tomorrow, to the Hill. One step at a time.

‘Ah, here we have it.' I straighten just as Greta returns to the room, and I hold out the sheet to her. ‘And there you are – in time to entertain us.'

‘Oh all right then, shall I?' She smiles, taking it from me, smiling again at the music I have chosen for her; of course she would love to play it but she hesitates for one moment to doubt herself. The question that has crept into her soul:
Do you really wish me to play?
Her gaoler's mark. She was not always this way, I would tell the room if I could. There was no sound Papa loved more, once:
Play Gretty, play – play the cares of the world away.
And she would, so sure of her skill she made me pout in envy. I want my sister back. I will have my sister returned to me. Whole.

‘Yes, dear, please,' Mrs Weston insists. ‘Play for us – you must.'

Greta sits down at the keys, clever hands dancing across the melody, free at last inside this song. I posted it home to her only in September but the sheet is imprinted on her heart, her eyes closed as her soprano soars, a summer breeze:

‘While we slumber and sleep

The sun leaps up from the deep.

Daylight born at the leap!

Rapid, dominant, free,

A thirst to bathe in the uttermost sea.

While we linger at play,

If the year would stand at May!

Winds are up and away

Over land, over sea,

To their goal wherever their goal may be.

It is time to arise

To race for the promised prize,

The Sun flies, the Wind flies.

We are strong, we are free,

And home lies beyond the stars and the sea …'

We are strong. We are free.
I give myself over to this promise above all others. We will prevail. We will arise. We will fly to our rightful, natural home, one day. This is a race of endurance, not of speed.

‘Ah,' Mrs Weston's sigh of delight carries over the final chords, and above the small applause. ‘Ah,' she repeats the sound, because there is nothing more that can be said of excellence.

I close my eyes to stay with it a while. Stay a good distance away from Dulcie's turn at the piano now, her mother boasting, ‘So many pretty songs she brought home from abroad, I can't keep up.' She clumsily gets on with some dreadful ditty, strangling a lyric about hearts and flowers ‘a picture of what love should beeeeeee …' Perhaps Mrs Weston is right about spider waists depriving the brain of oxygen. Dear God. ‘… a candy-coated fantaseeeeee …' Shut up, shut up
.
‘… but in your soul I've found the one my soul can seeeeeee …' Who writes this nonsense? Honestleeeeee.

A lovers' fantasy all right. I look up into the folds of the drapes; Aunt Libby's joyful golden drapes. And I hear our aunt screaming through this house, a handful of moments after her honeymoon, screaming this house down. Screaming, and screaming, and screaming as she did at the end:
No! Alec, no! Help me! Help me! Please, help me!
Her intestines rupturing, her mind fracturing in the fever, until it finally let her go. And she was gone. So cold she was as we kissed her goodbye that final time. That final debt of nature paid. There is nothing that love can ever do to bargain it back. Nothing. The bridge that love cannot cross. But if it could, I would ask our wonderful, funny, cherished Libby if there is such a place as hell, just so that I might know he will one day go there.

Dulcie can sing him into the fire. On and on she whines, until the music stops again abruptly.

I snap into the present once more as the dining room doors open again at my back, with a rumble of footsteps and Uncle Alec toasting himself: ‘Sir Henry, I must admit, I am not. I mean what is the good of universal public education? What good does it do for those with little aptitude? Greta, for instance – should she have the same education as Berylda? Of course not. It would not have made a difference good or ill for Greta to never have attended school at all – apart from the expense to her parents, rest their souls. Why should we foot the bill then for those dull-minded types of the working classes and the racially impure? It is best for them to be made to be manually useful as early as possible – is it not best for the spirit to be useful at what one is best at?'

Manually useful.
Is that what my sister is? I do not hear the replies of the men, some general hubbub of agreement as thin and as offensive as their cigar fug. I hear only that Alec's words are deliberately chosen. Spiteful: meant and timed for me and my sister to hear.

I do not turn around. I cannot believe he stoops to this public humiliation any more than I can believe that no one speaks against it. This is the point, of course: a reminder of who is in charge. If he stood over her right now, smacked his hands together in her face and demanded she play ‘Yeller Gal', just as he did in this very spot the night before last, would anyone speak against him? Would anyone care? Perhaps privately. But none will speak against him. And I cannot turn around, for if I do I might well scream. I cannot meet my sister's eye for fear of the same; for the rush of desire in me: to kill him. Right here. Right now. I hold my breath. My vision dims and the room begins to disappear around me.