“I believe there is a tiny subsistence payment, but it’s far too small to make ends meet without working. What about having it and giving it up for adoption?”
“No, no, no! I’d rather kill it in embryo than give it away! To have it grow up thinking its natural mother didn’t want it? I would go through the whole thing like a starving baker shaping a loaf of bread for someone else to eat. No, an abortion is the only way out.” Her eyes filled again. “Oh, Harriet, it’s so hopeless! I’ll never be the same again. But what else can I do?”
“Ezra will help,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. “He hasn’t the money to help,” she said.
“Rubbish! He has a house big enough for a wife and seven kids, a flat in Glebe, and the income to buy illegal drugs,” I said. “Now get ready, Pappy, Ezra will be here in twenty-five minutes.”
He didn’t stay long. I heard the front door slam, and sat waiting for Pappy.
When she hadn’t come ten minutes later, I went to her.
“He’s gone!” she said in tones of wonder. “Gone for good?”
“Oh, yes, definitely for good. He can’t help me, Harriet, he just doesn’t have the money.”
“He had the money to get you into this mess,” I said tartly. The bastard! If he’d been anywhere within catching distance, I would have taken a nice sharp scalpel to his scrotum. The world-famous philosopher would have to change his career to singing in the Vienna Boys Choir.
Then the battle really began, and I lost it. Why do people’s feelings rule them to the exclusion of the smallest particle of commonsense? Pappy wants this baby, but she won’t hear of taking her precious Ezra to court, or even going to his wife and asking her to help. No, no, no, Ezra mustn’t suffer! Ezra’s career and position must be preserved at all and any cost! She kept talking about abortion being the only answer, kept saying the child was cursed because its father didn’t want it, kept insisting that she wouldn’t bring a child into the world whose father didn’t want it. And on, and on, and on. Finally she asked if she might borrow the cost of an abortion from me. Apparently she’d been helping dear Ezra buy those expensive illegal drugs, so she was skint.
Eventually I left her and went upstairs to see Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, who had to be told. This time I was the one broke down, cried and cried while Mrs.
Delvecchio Schwartz fussed and clucked with the brandy.
“But don’t you dare say it was in the cards!” I yelled when I could speak again. “If it was, you should have done something!”
“Bullshit, princess,” she said. “You can’t run other people’s lives for them, and if they don’t ask what’s in the cards, you can’t go runnin’ off to tell them.
The cards don’t work that way. Or the Glass, or Progressions.”
“For one thing, she’s almost twenty weeks,” I said, calming down. “For another, I know she wants this baby desperately, no matter how much she talks about abortion. Couldn’t we all chip in a bit each and help her keep the baby?”
“No, we can’t,” said the woman I had always thought so kind, so generous, so forgiving. “Think, Harriet Purcell, think! Yeah, we could do that for a while, but Toby’s movin’ out soon, Jim an’ Bob ain’t gunna want to divert what spare cash they got from women’s causes to Pappy and a baby, and what about you, eh? What happens if you decide on a life in the suburbs after all, and trot off too? You reckon I’ll be here to take the responsibility?”
She got up and walked around the table to stand over me and pin me on those terrible eyes. “D’youse really think I don’t know there’s somethin’ wrong with me?” she demanded. “I got a tumour in me brain, and it’s let me live an awful lot longer than anyone thought it would. I might live an awful lot longer still, but there’s no guarantee. I saw the great Gilbert Phillips himself, an’ he said I got a tumour in me brain. He
never made mistakes-if he said you got a brain tumour, you got a brain tumour. It ain’t malignant, but it’s there, an’ I suppose it grows a bit from time to time. Some fuckin’ Vinnie’s doctor put me on a newfangled hormone nearly five years ago, and bang! I had Flo. So I stopped takin’ the stuff. All I do is get on with livin’. That’s what we all gotta do. So you leave Pappy alone to make up her own mind, hear me, princess?”
I sat paralysed and stared at Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz as if I’d never seen her before.
When I got my breath back I embarked on a last-ditch stand, said I could afford to support Pappy. But what, she asked, would my husband have to say about that when I got married? And so on.
“All right,” I said, beaten. “I’ll leave the decisions to Pappy. Except that I know she’d keep the baby if she could only wait long enough to regain her senses. At almost twenty weeks, she can’t, of course. But who would do such a late abortion?”
“Ask your Dr. Forsythe,” she said.
I can’t write any more, I’m stonkered. How many shocks can a person sustain in one day without going mad? I feel as if the whole world has shifted under my feet so mightily that I’m standing in an alien land, lost and alone.
But if that’s how I feel, how must poor Pappy feel? And that giant upstairs with the little kernel growing inside her brain?
Tuesday September 13th, 1960
Duncan and I have arranged a system whereby I can let him know if I need to see him urgently, and he can let me know on his side. So he picked me up at the Cleveland Street lights shortly after eight, and drove me home passing the time in idle chat. I like that about him. He’s so unruffled, so considerate, so aware what are the right circumstances and time for serious talk.
Poor chap, I hit him squarely in the solar plexus with it by asking as soon as we got inside, “Duncan, do you know anyone who would be willing to perform an abortion at about twenty weeks?”
“Why?” he asked, calmly but warily. “For Pappy,” I said.
“I take it that the po-faced Prof has done a bunk?” he asked, going to the cupboard where the brandy lives. The rest of my story came out in a rush, including the bit about Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz and her brain tumour.
“I am very sorry for Pappy,” he said, giving me a full glass. “Hasn’t she thought about having the baby and then giving it up for adoption? That’s the usual solution.” “She flew at me like a harpy when I suggested that.”
He took a mouthful of his own brandy and shuddered. “I think I must be getting used to this cat-pee. Speaking of cats, where is the magnificent Marceline?”
For several minutes he occupied himself making love to her-she’s putty in his hands, the trollop. Then he
said, “If the late Gilbert Phillips diagnosed a brain tumour, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz must have one. He must have found an unambiguous calcification on a plain X-ray of the skull.”
My teeth chattered against the rim of the glass. “Oh, Duncan, what would happen to Flo if she-if she did die? The ruin of The House. I can’t bear the thought.”
He put Marceline down and sat on the arm of my chair. “That is for the future, Harriet, and the presence of a tumour doesn’t say she won’t live out her threescore years and ten, maybe more. Our present problem is Pappy, not Mrs.
Delvecchio Schwartz. Would Pappy consider having the baby and keeping it?”
“I think she’d love to, but she can’t afford to. If she can’t work, she can’t eat or pay rent. Dammit, Duncan, why does this Fallen Woman myth persist into the last half of the twentieth century? Are we never going to be rational? God made pregnancy, not marriage! Marriage was invented to help men ensure that their offspring are theirs-it makes women second-class citizens!”
“Stop sounding like the po-faced Prof, Harriet. Let’s talk brutal reality,” he said, looking into my face sternly. “She wants an abortion, and I can’t talk her out of it.” “And you want me to refer her to an appropriate person,” he said, very seriously. “Do you understand that you’re asking me to break the law?”
I snorted. “Don’t be silly, Duncan! I’m not asking you to do it yourself,
I just want to know someone who will. Give me a name, just give me a name! I’ll do the rest.”
“I doubt the Ethics Committee or the Disciplinary Board are so inclined to split hairs, Harriet. The moment I give you a name, I’m culpable too.”
Yes, of course he is! “But what else can I do?” I demanded. “The alternative is someone in a back alley with a knitting needle-if they’d touch someone so far gone. I suppose I could ask one of the Mesdames next door, but I imagine any little mistakes that happen there are dealt with at six weeks by ergotamine.”
“It’s all right, my darling,” he said, kissing me. “I’ve got you where I want you at last. Every gift I’ve offered you since we’ve been together has been rejected. Now I can finally give you something you’ll accept. There’s a very nice and secluded sanatorium in the country which specialises in cases like Pappy’s. The surgery is first class, so are the medicine and the nursing. I’ll give the man a ring on your phone and arrange for her to be admitted first thing in the morning.” He got to his feet. “But first, I want to talk to Pappy myself, on our own.”
“How much will it cost?” I asked, enormously grateful. “I have a thousand pounds in my bank book.” “Professional favours don’t cost anything, Harriet.”
He was with Pappy for over half an hour, returned looking very sad. “May I use your phone to ring the man?” he asked.
I followed him into the bedroom, took off my clothes and crawled into bed, which startled him. I don’t think he had expected me to offer him physical consolation on this terrible evening, but I like to pay my debts. Odd, I thought, watching him undress-we’re usually throwing our clothes away together, so I never have a chance to look at him properly. For forty-two, he’s an asset to his tailor, not a liability.
“You have an absolutely beautiful body,” I said to him.
That floored him. He caught his breath and stood immobile. Do women never pay a man compliments? Obviously his wife didn’t, and I knew enough now to know that when he married her, his sexual experience consisted of a few drunken encounters half-remembered.
Wednesday, September 14th, 1960
I was woken at six o’clock by someone pounding on my door in a way that suggested it wasn’t going to stop until I answered.
Toby pushed inside and stood looking at me grimly. “Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz sent me down,” he said. “I wanted to know about Pappy, but she wouldn’t tell me, and Pappy’s not home.”
I went to make coffee, scowling at him.
“Here, let me do it,” he said, shoving me out of the way. “I want to know what’s the matter with Pappy, you concentrate on that.”
So I told him. He listened painfully, grinding his teeth and beating his fist on the counter.
“I’m going to find that bastard and wallop him to death!”
“Before you do, you’d better listen to Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz on the subject,” I said, hiding my face in my mug. “Pappy doesn’t want a single hair on Ezra’s head harmed, she’s determined to protect him at all costs, including her baby. She refuses to sue him for child support, or inform his wife-anything that might upset the Marsupial apple cart! And Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz will rub salt into that wound by telling you that you’re not Pappy’s husband, father, brother, uncle or cousin, so you have absolutely no right to say or do a thing.”
“Isn’t love a good enough excuse?” he asked. “Pappy has no one of her own blood left. If we don’t look after her, who will?”
“We are looking after her, Toby, in the way she wants us to,” I said quietly.
“The damage is done, and thank God for Duncan Forsythe. If she’s not next door, then she’s already gone to the sanatorium-and no, I don’t know its name or where it is, because Duncan wouldn’t tell me. Nor can you breathe a word about this to anyone, so mind your temper! And if you yap to Harold Warner as you meet on the way in-even thinking to throw dust in his eyes-I swear, Toby Evans, that I’ll castrate you! That evil little man is nobody’s fool, and he’s dangerous.”
But I doubt he heard a word I said, he was so upset. And he bitterly resented the fact that Duncan could help more than he could. I felt for him terribly.
What he must
have gone through over Pappy and Ezra is something I find hard to think about.
The second mug of coffee calmed him down a bit, he recovered enough to look me up and down withcontempt?
“You look very satisfied,” he said harshly. “Satisfied? What do you mean?”
“Pappy’s plight notwithstanding, you look as if, once the big surgeon had tidied Pappy’s future up, you and he had a fine old time of it,” he sneered.
I whacked him with my open hand so hard that he staggered. “Don’t you dare come the judge of me!” I whispered. “Don’t you damned well dare! Or come the judge of Duncan Forsythe either, for that matter! Your whole trouble is that you resent other people being able to do more for Pappy than you can yourself! Well, that’s too bloody bad! Live with it, don’t take it out on me! “
He was so white that the mark of my hand stood out on his skin like a naevus. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly. “You’re right. Don’t worry, I’ll live with it.”
I put my arm across his shoulders and gave him a quick hug. He returned it, slid out from under my arm, grinned at me and was gone.
Not a good start to the day. I had to go to Sister Agatha’s office and explain that Pappy would be away for two weeks.
“This is most irregular, Miss Purcell!” she said. “Why did Nurse Sutama not report to sick bay?”
“She went to her local practitioner,” I lied. “I expect he refers his patients to places like Vinnie’s and private hospitals in the Eastern Suburbs.” Oh, why does everybody have to make it so complicated?
“That is immaterial, Miss Purcell. Nurse Sutama is Staff and therefore entitled to a Queens bed no matter who her physician is. She would simply have been transferred to the care of one of our own Honorarieswho, as I am sure I do not need to remind you-are the very best.”
I persevered. “Sister Toppingham, truly I cannot give you any more information. All I know is that Nurse Sutama preferred to remain under the care of her own practitioner.”
“Most, most irregular!” Sister Agatha clucked, giving me a horribly shrewd glance from those pale blue eyes. She smells a rat, I’m sure of it. A starchy old biddy she might be, but you can’t be in command of a small army of young women for thirty years without realising that sometimes one and one add up to a total of three.
“I apologise, Sister,” I said, giving the standard answer.
“Quite all right, Miss Purcell, quite all right.” She bent to look at the papers on her desk. “You may go.”
I walked into another catastrophe, though of a routine kind. Disorientated patient, Harriet Purcell’s soothing skills required.
Luckily things died down about an hour later, and we sat to have a cup of tea. Sister Cas joined us-the
wedding draws ever closer. But Chris had a bone to pick with me first.
“Why were you late?” she demanded:
“I had to report to Sister Agatha. Pappy’s still sick.” “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing much, but her local doctor’s put her into hospital.”
“Poor little beggar! Which hospital is she in, Vinnie’s or Sydney? Marie and I will call in on our way home.”
“You can’t. She’s in a sanatorium in the country.” Chris and Marie exchanged a glance of complete comprehension and changed the subject to the wedding.
Thank God that Pappy isn’t involved with someone on the staff! Chris and Sister Cas were all right, but the news of Pappy’s sudden illness will go on the grapevine for sure. Everybody knows her, she’s been a fixture in X-ray for thirteen years. Chris and Sister Cas gave me a fit of the willies, I can tell you.
It’s one thing to think vaguely about the prospect of discovery, even to decide you don’t care about discovery, but when suddenly discovery stares you in the face becaus
e a beloved friend’s business is going to become public property-oh, that puts the world in perspective!
What i f Mum and Dad found out? God in heaven, I’d die if Mum and Dad thought their daughter was a homewrecker! Because if Cathy E finds out, that’s what I’ll be branded. A homewrecker.
Saturday September 17th, 1960
When Duncan arrived at noon today, I broke it off.
“I just can’t bear the suspense,” I tried to explain without going into details like the hospital grapevine and walloping Toby for making nasty remarks. “I know I’ve picked a great moment, right on the tail of your wonderful care of Pappy-how ungrateful I must seem! But it’s Mum and Dad, don’t you see?
Duncan, what I do with myself and my life is my business, but not if it involves a married man. Then it’s everyone’s business. How could I face Mum and Dad?
If we continue, it’s bound to come out. So it stops.”
His face! His eyes! The poor man looked as if I had killed him. “You’re right, of course,” he said, voice shaking. “But I have a different solution.
Harriet, I can’t live without you, I honestly can’t. What you say is inarguable, my love. The last thing I ever want is to make you feel that you can’t even look at your mother and father. So it’s best that I ask Cathy for a divorce immediately. Once the divorce is through, we can marry.”
Oh, dear God! That was the one response I hadn’t counted on, and the last I wanted to hear. “No, no, no!” I shouted, and beat my hands in a frenzy. “No, not that-never that!”
“The scandal, you mean,” he said, still ashen. “But I will keep you out of it, Harriet. I’ll hire a woman to pose as the co-respondent, and we won’t see each other again
until I’m free. Let Cathy trumpet her injuries to the yellow press, let the yellow press do its worst! As long as you’re not involved, it doesn’t matter how sordid things get.” He took my hands in his, chafed them. “My love, Cathy can have whatever she wants, but that doesn’t mean you will want. There’s money enough, believe me.