The mirror on the wall seemed to own a touch of magic, for whoever it reflected, it lent a slight patina of beauty; adjusting her preposterous scarlet hat, Missy decided she looked very well. Her darkness was suddenly interesting, her thin body was suddenly merely slender as a young tree. Yes, very well! And certainly not spinsterish.
Once he recovered from the shock of that red, John Smith thought she looked very well too. “Now this is my sort of wedding! I look like a hayseed, and you look like a madam.” He tucked her arm through his gleefully. “Come on, woman, let’s get the deed over before I change my mind.”
They strolled into Katoomba Street, the cynosure of all eyes, and actually quite pleased with the sensation they were creating.
“That was easy,” said Missy after the deed was done and they were sitting together in John Smith’s cart. She held out her hand to see her ring. “I am now Mrs. John Smith. How nice it sounds!”
“I must say this time was a lot better than the last.”
“Was your first wedding a big affair, then?”
“It could have passed for a circus. Two hundred and fifty guests, the bride with a thirty-foot train that needed a whole regiment of runny-nosed little boys to lift it, twelve or fourteen bridesmaids, all of the men stuffed into tails, the archbishop of something presiding, a massed choir – God Jesus, at the time it was a nightmare! But compared to what followed, it was an idyll in paradise.” He looked sideways at her, one eyebrow raised. “Do you want to hear this?”
“I think I’d better. They say the second wife always has to contend with the ghost of the first, and that it’s a lot harder to fight a ghost than a living person.” She paused to gather her courage. “Was she – dear to you?”
“She may have been when I married her, I honestly can’t remember. I didn’t know her, you see. I only knew of her. She must have meant to have me, because I’m sure I didn’t do the proposing. I’m obviously the sort of bloke women propose to! Only I didn’t mind your way of proposing, at least it was honest and above-board. But her – one minute she was all over me like a rash, the next minute she was acting as if I had the plague. Blowing hot and cold, they call it. I think women think it’s expected of them, that if they don’t do it, they’re going to make life too easy for the bloke. Now that’s where I like you very much, Mrs. Smith. You don’t blow hot and cold at all.”
“I’m too grateful,” said Missy humbly. “Do go on! What happened after that?”
He shrugged. “Oh, she decided she was entitled to make all the decisions, that what she wanted was all that mattered. Once she’d landed her fish, the fish didn’t matter a bit. I was just there to prove she could catch a fish, to lend her respectability, to give her an escort here and there. She didn’t exactly have lovers, she had what she called cicisbeos, pansified twerps with gardenias in their buttonholes and a better shine on their hair than on their patent leather shoes. If anyone was ever branded by the company she kept, my first wife certainly was – her women friends were as hard as nails and as tough as old boots, and her men friends were as soft as butter and as limp as last week’s lettuce. She liked to mock me. In front of anyone, everyone. I was dull, I was stodgy. And she never kept our differences private, she’d get set on a quarrel no matter how public the place. In a nutshell, she held me in utter contempt.”
“And you? What light did you hold her in?”
“I loathed her.” Evidently he still did, for the feeling in his voice did not belong to an experience buried in the past.
“How long were you married?”
“About four or five years.”
“Were there any children?”
“Hell, no! She might have lost her figure. And of course that meant she was a great one for teasing, for kissing and cuddling, but to get my leg over her – it only happened when she got drunk, and afterwards she’d scream and howl and carry on in case anything came of it, then she’d pop out and visit the tame doctor they all patronised.”
“And she died?” asked Missy, scarcely able to credit that such a woman could have had so much consideration.
“We had a terrible fight one evening over – oh, I don’t know, something small and idiotic that actually didn’t matter a bit. We lived in a house that had a waterfrontage onto the Harbour, and apparently after I’d gone out she decided to go for a swim to cool her temper. They found her body a couple of weeks later, washed up on Balmoral Beach.”
“Oh, poor thing!”
He snorted. “Poor thing, nothing! The police tried in every way they knew to pin it on me, but luckily the minute she’d done shouting at me, I went out, and I met a friend not twenty yards down the road. He’d been kicked out of bed too, so we walked to where he’d been going, the flat of a mutual friend – a bachelor, the wily bastard. There we stayed until past noon of the following day, getting drunker and drunker. And since the servants had seen her alive and well more than half an hour after my friend and I arrived at our mutual friend’s flat, the police couldn’t touch me. Anyway, after the body turned up the post mortem revealed that she’d died of simple drowning, with no evidence of foul play. Not that that stopped a lot of people in Sydney reckoning I did kill her – I just got a name for being too smart to get caught, and my friends for being bought to alibi me.”
“When did all this happen?”
“About twenty years ago.”
“A long time! What have you done with yourself since, that it’s taken you so long to do what you’ve always wanted?”
“Well, I quit Australia as soon as the police let go. And I drifted round the world. Africa, the Klondike, China, Brazil, Texas. I had to live through almost twenty years of voluntary exile. Since I was born in London, I changed my name by deed-poll there, and when I did come back to Australia, I came as that bona-fide citizen of the world, John Smith, with all my money in gold and no past.”
“Why Byron?”
“Because of the valley. I knew it was coming up for sale, and I’ve always wanted to own a whole valley.”
Feeling she had probed enough, Missy changed the subject to the skulduggery going on at the Byron Bottle Company, and told her husband about the plight her mother and aunts were in because of it. John Smith listened most attentively, a smile playing round the corners of his mouth, and when she had ended her tale he put his arm around her, drew her across the seat against his side, and kept her there.
“Well, Mrs. Smith, I really didn’t want to marry you when you first brought the subject up, but I confess I’m growing more reconciled to it every time you open your mouth, not to mention your legs,” he said. “You’re a woman of sense, your heart’s in the right place, and you’re a Hurlingford of the Hurlingfords, which gives me a lot of power I didn’t expect to have,” he said. “Interesting, how things turn out.”
Missy rode the rest of the way home in blissful silence.
The next morning John Smith donned a suit, a collar, and a tie, all remarkably well cut and oddly smart.
“Whatever it is, it must be a lot more important than your wedding,” observed Missy without a trace of resentment.
“It is.”
“Are you going far afield?”
“Only to Byron.”
“Then if I’m quick about it, may I come as far as Mother’s with you, please?”
“Good idea, wife! Wait there for me until some time late this afternoon, and you can introduce me to my in-laws when I pick you up. I’ll probably have a lot to say to them.”
It’s going to be all right, thought Missy as she rode in her bright red dress and hat alongside her unfamiliarly elegant husband up to the top of the ridge. I don’t care if I got him by trickery and deceit. He likes me, he really does like me, and without even realising it himself, he’s already moved over a little to fit me in alongside him. When my year is up, I’ll be able to tell him the truth. Besides, if I’m lucky, I may well by then be the mother of his child. It hurt him badly when his first wife didn’t want any, and now he’s closer to fifty
than to forty, so children will be even more important to him. He will be an excellent father, because he can laugh.
Before they set out for Byron he had taken her across the clearing and round its bend to where he intended to build his house. The waterfall, she discovered, fell so far that on a windy day it never reached the valley floor, spinning away instead into nothingness, and filling the air with clouds of rainbows. Yet there was a huge pool below it, wide and calm until it poured through a narrow defile and became the cascade-tortured river, a pool the colour of a turquoise or of Egyptian faience, opaque as milk, dense as syrup. The source of all this water, he showed her, was a cave below the cliffs, out of which issued a very large underground stream.
“There’s an outcropping of limestone here,” he explained. “That’s why the pool is such a bizarre colour.”
“And this is really where we’re going to live, looking at so much loveliness?”
“Where I will live, anyway. I doubt you’ll be here to see it.” His face twisted. “Houses don’t get built in a day, Missy, especially when they’re built single-handed. I don’t want a horde of workmen down here, pissing in the pool and getting drunk on Saturdays and then telling any curious bystander what’s going on in my valley.”
“I thought we had a bargain, not to mention my condition? Anyway, you won’t be building single-handed, you’ll have my hands as well,” said Missy cheerfully. “I’m no stranger to hard work, and the cabin is so small it won’t keep me busy. From what the doctor said, it makes no difference whether I lie in a bed or work like a navvy – one day it will happen, that’s all.”
At which he took her in his arms and kissed her as if he enjoyed kissing her, and as if she was already a little precious to him. They finally set out for Byron somewhat later than originally intended, but neither of them minded.
Octavia and Drusilla were in the kitchen when Missy walked in unannounced. They stared at her in astonishment, trying to take in the full glory of that outlandish scarlet lace dress, not to mention the huge lopsided hat with its graceless plume of scarlet ostrich feathers.
She hadn’t turned into a beauty overnight, but there was certainly an eye-catching quality about her, and she held herself too proudly to be mistaken for a trollop. In fact, she looked a lot more like a sophisticated visitor from London than one of the inhabitants of Caroline Lamb Place. There was also no doubting that the colour suited her down to the ground.
“Oh, Missy, you look lovely!” squeaked Octavia, sitting down in a hurry.
Missy kissed her, and kissed her mother. “That’s nice to know, Auntie, because I admit I feel lovely.” She grinned at them triumphantly. “I came to tell you that I’m married,” she announced, waving her left hand under their noses.
“Who?” asked Drusilla, beaming.
“John Smith. We were married yesterday in Katoomba.”
Suddenly neither to Drusilla nor Octavia did it matter a scrap that the whole town of Byron called him a jailbird, or worse; he had rescued their Missy from the multiple horrors of spinsterhood, and he must therefore be loved for it with gratitude and respect and loyalty.
Octavia positively leaped up to put the kettle on, moving with more flexibility and ease than she had in years, though Drusilla didn’t notice; she was too busy looking at her girl’s convincingly massive wedding ring.
“Mrs. John Smith,” she said experimentally. “Why, bless my soul, Missy, it sounds quite distinguished!”
“Simplicity usually is distinguished.”
“Where is he? When is he coming to see us?” asked Octavia.
“He had some business or other in Byron, but he expects to be done later this afternoon, and he wants to meet you when he picks me up to take me home. I thought, Mother, that to fill in the day, you and I might walk into Byron. I have to buy groceries, and I want to go to Uncle Herbert’s to choose some materials for me to make into dresses. Because I am done forever with brown! I won’t even wear it to work in. I’m going to work in a man’s shirt and man’s trousers because they’re a great deal more comfortable and sensible, and who’s to see me?”
“Isn’t it lucky that you bought a Singer sewing machine, Drusilla?” asked Octavia from the stove, too happy at the way things had turned out to worry about the trousers.
But Drusilla had something so important on her mind that neither Singer sewing machines nor trousers could loom larger. “Can you afford it?” she asked anxiously. “I can make for you for nothing, but the materials at Herbert’s are so expensive, especially once one gets away from brown!”
“It seems I can indeed afford it. John told me last night that he was going to put a thousand pounds in the bank for me this morning. Because he said a wife shouldn’t have to ask her husband for every little penny she needs, nor account for every little penny she spends. All he asked was that I didn’t exceed the allowance he makes me – a thousand pounds every year! Can you imagine it? And the housekeeping is separate from that! He put a hundred pounds into an empty Bushell’s coffee jar and says he’ll keep it replenished, and doesn’t want to see the dockets. Oh, Mother, I’m still breathless!”
“A thousand pounds!” Octavia and Drusilla stared at Missy in thunderstruck respect.
“Then he must be a rich man,” said Drusilla, and did some rapid mental gymnastics in which she saw herself finally able to cock a snook at Aurelia and Augusta and Antonia. Hah! Not only had Missy beaten Alicia to the altar, but now it began to look as if she might also have made the better bargain.
“I imagine he’s comfortably off,” temporised Missy. “I know his generosity to me suggests real wealth, but I suspect it’s more that he’s a truly generous man. Certainly I shall never, never embarrass him by overspending. However, I do need a few decent clothes – not brown! – a couple of winter dresses and a couple of summer ones is all. Oh, Mother, it’s so beautiful down in the valley! I don’t have any desire to lead a social life, I just want to be alone with my John.”
Drusilla looked suddenly troubled. “Missy, there’s so little we can give you for a wedding present. But I think, Octavia, that we could spare the Jersey heifer, don’t you?”
“We can certainly spare the heifer,” said Octavia.
“Now that,” said Missy, “is what I call a handsome wedding present! We would love the heifer.”
“We ought to send her to Percival’s bull first,” said Octavia. “She’s due to come on any time now, so you won’t have to wait long for her, and with any luck she’ll give you a calf next year too.”
Drusilla consulted the clock on the kitchen wall. “If you want to go to Herbert’s as well as to Maxwell’s, Missy, I suggest we make a start. Then we might be able to fit in a bit of lunch with Julia in her tea room, and tell her the news. My word, she’ll be surprised!”
Octavia twitched herself gently, and experienced no pain. “I’m coming too,” she announced firmly. “You’re not going without me today of all days. If I have to crawl on hands and knees, I’m coming too.”
Thus in the late morning Drusilla strolled through the shopping centre with her daughter on one arm, and her sister on the other.
It was Octavia who spied Mrs. Cecil Hurlingford on the opposite side of the road; Mrs. Cecil was the wife of the Reverend Dr. Cecil Hurlingford, Byron’s Church of England minister, and everyone went in fear and trembling of her tongue. “Dying of curiosity, aren’t you, you old besom?” muttered Octavia through her teeth, smiling and bowing so frostily that Mrs. Cecil thought the better of crossing the road to see what was what with the Missalonghi gaggle.
Then Drusilla completed the routing of Mrs. Cecil by suddenly shouting with laughter and pointing one shaking finger in Mrs. Cecil’s direction. “Oh, Octavia, Mrs. Cecil hasn’t recognised Missy! I do believe she thinks we’ve got one of the Caroline Lamb Place women in tow!”
All three of the ladies of Missalonghi dissolved into laughter, and Mrs. Cecil Hurlingford tottered into Julia’s tea room to get away from so much unseemly mirth, all app
arently directed at her.
“What an uproar!” crowed Octavia.
“The bigger the better,” said Missy, entering Herbert Hurlingford’s clothing emporium.
That whole experience was a terrific tonic, between Uncle Herbert’s flabbergasted imitation of a codfish when Missy proceeded to buy men’s shirts and trousers for herself, and James’s tongue-tied terror when she proceeded to buy lengths of lavender-blue taffeta, apricot silk, amber velvet, and cyclamen wool. Recovering somewhat after Missy left him to go to James, Herbert debated as to whether he should relieve his feelings by ordering the hussy from his premises; then when she paid for her purchases in gold, he changed his mind and humbly rang up the sale. Staggering as Missy’s visit was, he really only had half a mind to pay to it and her, for the other half was occupied in wondering what was going on up at the bottling plant, where the extraordinary meeting of shareholders was taking place. The shopkeeping Hurlingfords had despatched Maxwell as their representative, acknowledging that Maxwell had the best and bitterest tongue, and understanding that he would fight as hard for them as for himself. Business must go on as usual, after all, and if the bottling plant and its corollary activities like the baths and the hotel and the spas was going to go west, then the shops became more important than ever to their respective owners.
“You may deliver these to Missalonghi this afternoon, James,” said Missy grandly, and slapped a gold sovereign down on the counter. “Here, this is for your trouble. And while you’re about it, you can go into Uncle Maxwell’s and pick up my grocery order as well. Come, Mother, Aunt Octavia! Let us go to Aunt Julia’s for lunch.”
The three ladies of Missalonghi swept out of the shop more royally than they had swept in.
“Oh, this is such fun!” chuckled Octavia, whose walk was just about normal. “I have never enjoyed myself so much!”
Missy was enjoying herself too, but less simply. It had been a shock to find the promised thousand pounds had actually been deposited for her, and even more of a shock to be treated with great civility by Quintus Hurlingford, the bank manager; John Smith had instructed him to pay Missy’s withdrawals in gold, since the deposit had been in gold. A thousand pounds!