Paper Daisies (35 page)

It's a boy from the hospital at the door, raced up on a pony, and jabbering at Mary: ‘It's Mr Howell – tell the Miss Joneses – he's been taken ill. He's got some stomach trouble and it's got him something bad. Tell the Miss Joneses! Them doctors said it was real bad.'

Time clatters and leaps against exclamations and assurances; of course Mrs Weston will wait with Greta here, and Mr Thompson will wait here too, while Mr Wilberry and I return to the hospital, and Greta says nothing of her thoughts. Only her eyes ask:
What have you done?
And I look away.

‘Oh my dear, my dear, what a day this is turning out to be for you.' Mrs Weston clasps my hand as we are leaving. ‘It never rains but it pours, doesn't it? My love goes with you,' she sighs us back out to the stables and into the gathering night.

Where Buckley is waiting with Sally and the buggy, as Ben has instructed him to do. But Buckley cannot look at me as I dash out towards him now. Let him condemn me. Let him be my judge. Let him be the only one.

Ben

‘
S
he! She! She!' he screams at her when we enter the room. ‘She poisons me!'

He is tied to the bed with leather belts, and thrashing against them, almost lifting the bed from the floor. He is livid and streaming sweat, eyes bloodshot and shaking in his head, a demon trapped.

‘It's the delirium,' Dr Weston says between us, and he takes Berylda's hand, cupping it in both of his to assure her. ‘Ignore the outbursts. Typhoid fever, of course – unmistakeable case. No rash as yet but the rest is self-evident. Possibly contracted from a patient, possibly before Christmas, there were a few cases out at Magpie early in December – you know how giving of his time he has always been with the troubles of the poor. Not so considerate of him.' Dr Weston exhales a gust of misplaced esteem, overlaying the stench of sickly dysenteric excrement with a sharp vapour of Scotch.

‘Was there no clue, no warning?' Berylda asks him, and her voice is small but assertive.

‘She murders me!' Howell screams again and writhes ever more violently.

Dr Weston flinches but otherwise ignores the accusation, answering Berylda: ‘Perhaps there was a hint. He has seemed weary, distracted the past few days, agitated, I suppose. But therein lies the benefit of hindsight, yes? I would hazard a guess that he has ignored the signs himself, as most men would, too busy to bother with being unwell, and now it's come on remarkably strong – and fast. Most awful.' Weston looks now to me, regretful: ‘You know his wife perished of the same infection. Almost exactly five years ago.' He pats Berylda's hand again. ‘But your uncle is physically fit, my dear, in his prime. They do not come fitter than Alec Howell, do they? He is fastidious in his health if ever anyone was. Typhoid takes only the weak.' He says that last as though he decides it.

But of course, Alec Howell does not have typhoid fever. And I am mesmerised by Berylda yet again and more. She knows so precisely what she does. Her recourse is not admirable, no. But she is. That she can stand here before this foulness without baulking. If I didn't have her to regard, I would have difficulty keeping my stomach where it belongs. She is a rock of will.

Dr Weston says to her: ‘This must be terribly distressing for you. Now you have seen him as you wished, it is best that you go – go up to his private room, make a cup of tea, I'll find you there. Leave us to tend him. All will be well if I have my way.'

‘No.' She will not be moved. ‘No thank you, Dr Weston. I will care for Uncle Alec. Please.'

‘Oh? Well.' The man is nonplussed, but perhaps his desire for another Scotch sways him, and he is quick to yield: ‘As you wish, my dear, I suppose. As you wish.'

As Weston leaves the room, leaving us alone with Howell, Berylda goes to the basin in the corner. She soaks a cloth there and places it in a bowl, takes it over to the night stand by the bed, and then she shifts a chair to sit beside the man who has robbed and defiled all that she loves. He is disgusting in every way. The teeth are bared, moiling to gouge her. But he can do nothing except dare her to draw nearer.

‘There, there, Alec darling …' She continues her deception and her truth, holding the cloth by him, as though waiting for him to settle for long enough that she might be able to wipe the bile from his mouth. But she does not touch him. She looks into his eyes, she holds him in her eyes, as he raves at her.

‘It's hell for you, slut! Hell, I say!'

He spits at her and she does not look away. He bawls at her, over and over, the longest notes of helpless anguish.

‘Listen to me!' he begs me blindly. ‘Listen to me, please.'

I feel only the need of a pistol, and the chill that compulsion brings.

He rails and spews for almost two hours before the bile turns to blood and Weston is in the room again, grave now, declaring the infection fatal. ‘I am so sorry, my dear. It would seem there is nothing to be done, after all. The sepsis has its way. It will be finished soon, however. There will be mercy soon. You need not –'

‘Thank you, Dr Weston, but I shall stay.' She is stoic; hers is the face made perfect with reflected venom. She is the rare and solitary trigger flower that lashes and consumes the bee. Immaculate.

Howell soon lapses into a shivering silence. The reverend is called for. Drs Weston and Gebhardt bicker in the hall, the German adamant about hand-washing and the spread of germs or some other trivial thing. And Berylda chooses her moment now to lean close to Howell and whisper in his ear.

Berylda

‘
G
ive my regards to Lucifer,' I say to him, and that is enough. Perhaps, if there is no God to have answered my ceaseless prayers for justice, there is no Devil to punish us either. There is no hell other than the flames of hatred we ignite and fan ourselves. I don't know what justice, what retribution will come for me in time, but I want no more of this revenge now. It is done.

I stand and there is Ben, behind me, as he has been throughout this night. My witness. I say to him: ‘I should like to go home now.'

I am senseless with relief and hollowing with every step as hatred begins to drain from me, as Alec Howell ends. Straining for his final breath, unsated for all time, the everlasting vision in my mind. Hell enough. I am spent. It is twenty minutes to midnight. I don't see Dr Weston or Buckley or anyone else as I leave the hospital. There is only Ben's hand over mine, and an owl on a low branch over the drive, gold eyes caught in the swaying lamp of the buggy. The air is damp and cool and black.

And in the house, I am guided to my sister's room along a hush of lavender sympathy: ‘My dear, dear girl. My poor dear girl. Greta is in her bed – go to her. Be with your sister, take comfort with each other now.'

Yes.

‘Ryldy?' she asks me through the dark, and I curl around her.

I say to her only: ‘He is gone.'

She turns in my arms, her forehead pressed to mine. She says: ‘Good. I'm glad.' I breathe in her sweet peppermint breath and she tells me: ‘I used to wish that he would be thrown off Jack and trampled by him; I used to wish that all the time. I'm happy he's dead, Ryl. It's wrong, but I'm happy. You don't need to tell me another thing about it.'

A strange rushing in begins to fill me. My skin is raw and tender and yearning all over, my sister's absolution encircling me.

Clean your heart
, Ah Ling's words come back and back to me.
Clean your heart.

Vengeance has come. And so it must be made gone, too. Somehow.

‘All things pass.' Greta kisses my forehead. ‘At least that's Mrs Wheeler's philosophy on life and death. And we're all sinners – that's my pennyworth, and it happens to be a fact. Ryldy, we're sinners together, you and me.'

I look at my sister: she is silver with moonlight. I say to her: ‘You've never done anything sinful, Gret – ever.'

‘Haven't I?' She strokes my cheek and tells me: ‘My whatsits finally came, while you were out. I got something from Mrs Wheeler, yesterday, when you were out visiting that Ah Ling man; something to bring them on. A whole load of Bates' Bitter Apple, it was – God, I was sick from those pills. I'm so sorry to have worried you like that. I didn't want to tell you, not at all, but I think we both know what was wrong with me. Uncle Alec did it to me, and it's all gone now. All of it. You don't have to think about any of that any more.

‘Oh Ryl.' She holds me tight. ‘I can tell you now, I was so happy when you said on New Year's Eve that we'd be going to the Hill – didn't you see my jaw drop? I could barely believe what you were saying. You see, I'd wanted to get help from Mrs Wheeler about this. I was going to ask you all along if we could go to Hill End while you were home. I'd overheard some gossip at Mrs Hatfield's salon, when I was getting pinned up for my Christmas dress, that Clara Bidwell – you know, from church, the vet's elder daughter? – had to go off to Mrs Wheeler, in September. She'd got into trouble with the fellow she was engaged to, Bradley Piper, who by that time had gone off to the war in Africa. Mrs Wheeler helps a lot of women and girls in the same sorts of predicaments, thank heavens. It cost a bit, though – one whole pound. And I stole that from Uncle Alec's desk, when you were arguing with him on New Year's morning, just before we left – that's how I came to forget the jam, in all my sneaking about. So sinner I am, through and through.'

She kisses me again. ‘But really, fate was always going to come round to our side one day, so long as we kept wishing for the same thing. We did. We always have. And now we are free.'

So we are, for whatever freedom might be, for us. And now I begin to cry. I course and flood and burst with every unshed tear.

Returning

Now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me.

Thus Spake Zarathustra

Ben

A
mazement slips into some kind of anaesthetised abeyance of everything I might have known, or thought I did, before this day. Too remote to respond to Mrs Weston's insistence that Cos and I stay overnight here in this house, and too close to Berylda's sobbing to hear it as anything but pain convulsing from the very heart of the world. The world is wounded, and I can't move from the door. Her door. Closed once more.

‘Mr Wilberry.' Mrs Weston's hand is on my shoulder now; firmly: ‘Please.'

I can't stand here all night, her plea implies. Why shouldn't I stand here all night, I could ask. Where else might I be? But as I turn, I see Mrs Weston is accompanied by the little dollhouse maid, who carries a tea tray, toast and cocoa on it, for the girls; and Cos is behind them, saying: ‘Come on, old matey. Let's go for a ramble – you're always up for that.'

Yes, that's probably a good idea.

We leave via the rear door, and I hear the housekeeper whimpering softly in the kitchen as we step across the verandah. We walk in silence, towards the town, and I am spiritless, worn as a length of old rope. We pass the hospital, invisible now except for a gas lamp lit on the hill; the moon is an electric eye above us.

Did any of this happen? This day; these past three days – three weeks? Am I here, or am I still in Brisbane, drinking at the Swamp, avoiding Pater after Mama's burial?

‘Hang on a sec.' Cos stops to light up: some yellow devil's face above the match.

I say, to probe reality: ‘She killed him.'

He drags in his smoke and says: ‘Yes. I assumed as much.'

I tell him: ‘She killed him so that it appears the death was from typhoid fever – no one suspects anything else. Weston declared it himself.'

‘Sensational,' says Cos.

‘You don't find that disturbing?' Last time we walked this way he didn't think much of her at all; why has he changed his mind so completely? Because what she has done is justified by what Howell did himself?

‘Yes, and no,' Cos says now. ‘Most disturbing is that I could have been so wrong about her. All that she and Greta must have endured makes me … I don't know. I can't say anything about it except that I'm sorry. Head too far up my own arse, for a change.' He laughs at himself. ‘I think she's probably something of a Super Girl, as it turns out – one creature Nietzsche neglected to mention. A cut above the usual anyway; a cut above good and bad, yes and no, black and white. She's certainly got some balls. Exemplary balls. Terrifying, to be honest.'

‘Yep.' I nod. She has more courage than any man I know.

He says: ‘All balls considered, I should probably make an attempt to find my own pair, get home to Susan and the children. You're right, I have been a bit of a bastard lately, or more so than usual. I'll make arrangements in the morning, get out of your way, unless you want me to stay around with you and … Do you?'

‘No, I don't think so.' I imagine him becoming drunk and bragging of murder to the local sergeant; I'm sure he wouldn't, but trust is beaten a little thin between us right now. I let him know this as I add: ‘You wouldn't want to stay around to watch me beg for scraps from her high table, now would you – because I'd say that's just about all I'll be doing until I know where I stand.'

‘Yes, well.' He laughs again, but I can hear some deeper apology in it, and some regret for more than his misreading of her as he says: ‘You don't need my assistance there. You never have needed me, you know.'

‘I need you,' I tell him as we sight the town and the pub. ‘I need you to get quickly arseless with me – right now. I will always need that from time to time. But if you breathe one word about –'

‘Jesus, Ben,' he cuts off the thought. ‘Believe me, please – she has my admiration, respect. My awe. I was only ever looking out for you, shit poor as I am at it. But things will work out between you, despite me, I'm sure. I understand it now – you and Kitty Cat are as well made for each other as Susie and I are. Two halves somehow.'

Are we? I don't know about that. I don't know that someone as extraordinary as Berylda Jones was made for anyone.