One aspect of Hospital Board financial doings had forced Charles to postpone certain plans he cherished, and that was the time they gulped so greedily. Until things were properly tidied up, he had neglected Kitty disgracefully. When finally he leafed through his calendar, he was appalled to learn that he hadn’t really seen her in two weeks. What attentions he had paid her were hurried and perfunctory — a smile in passing, a few words on the hop, two better opportunities missed.
“Have dinner with me at my home, unchaperoned,” he said to her.
It came out of the blue, striking her as conceited, cocksure, conquering. “Certainly,” she said, a child across her left hip as she stood in the doorway of Children’s. “When?”
“Tonight?”
“Thank you, tonight suits me well.”
“Then I’ll call for you at your door at six tonight.”
“Thank you.” She turned away, smiling — for the child, not for Charlie.
This time she wore organdie printed in various shades of pink, with pink accessories, and actively displeased him. “You look like fairground spun sugar,” he said, his nostrils pinched, his eyes rather dull.
She grimaced. “You’ve just echoed Edda on my appearance, only she was less polite. She says my mother influences me too much.”
“You could do with some of Edda’s style,” he said clinically.
“Slinkier, you mean?” she asked, unoffended.
“No, just more tailored. Short stature doesn’t lend itself to frills and excessive femininity.”
Little wonder she said nothing as they drove up Catholic Hill. Finally, and perhaps thinking the evening was getting off to a bad start, he said, “Why on earth is it called Catholic Hill, since St. Anthony’s is off the Trelawneys?”
“Because our English colonial overlords were violently anti-Catholic, and apportioned the first urban or municipal land grants,” said Kitty, glad she could display a little knowledge. “The Church of England always got the best land, and the Catholic Church the worst. But towns have a habit of growing, so the Church of England grants gradually became too small and too slummy, while the Catholic bits, usually on top of hills, grew more valuable. The idea had been to make the Catholics plod up hills to go to church, but what the overlords forgot is that with hills come incomparable views. The best illustration of the phenomenon,” she said, warming to her theme, “is in Sydney. St. Andrew’s Cathedral, home of the Church of England, cowers on a wee postage-stamp of land literally rubbing sandstone shoulders with the far more impressive Town Hall, plus the office towers and traffic, while St. Mary’s Catholic Cathedral sits on a glorious natural eminence surrounded by parks and gardens, has a superb view, and relative quiet. When the land was deeded, it was animal pasture and shanties on the outskirts of town.”
“A cautionary tale,” he said, laughing. “Interesting, how human prejudices can end in biting the bigot on the rear end.” He turned into the gates of Burdum House. “The name is Catholic Hill, but I gather the Catholic Church doesn’t own it.”
“No, it provided the funds to build St. Anthony’s, a handsome and roomy edifice, as well as the two Catholic schools. Old Tom Burdum had leased the very top on the understanding that if the Church sold it, he’d have first refusal.”
“So you end in knowing more about my house than I do!”
On the imposing but plainly Doric portico Kitty now witnessed for the first time how cannily old Tom Burdum had chosen the site of a house he had, when he built it, looked forward to filling with the magical life children give their home. Oh, poor old man, to have had but one son and one daughter, neither, in his lights, a satisfactory child. The daughter, a wild harum-scarum, had run away with a handsome no-hoper before she turned nineteen, and stuck to him like a burr to a fleece. The son, years older than the girl, had vanished to parts unknown while the girl, Jack Thurlow’s mother, was still a toddler. The boy, Henry, had been the child of old Tom’s first wife; the girl, Mary, was Hannah’s child.
So the house, a Victorian Gothic monstrosity of round towers, huge windows and steeply sloping roofs, had never been a home. It stood in ten acres on the flat top of Catholic Hill’s six-hundred-foot bulk, and looked not toward the district of Corunda in its broad and fertile river valley. Instead, it looked north toward the mighty red-cliffed gorges and illimitable forests of the dissected plateau that hemmed Sydney around. Oh, how beautiful! thought Kitty: vast distances coated in thin blue mist, the wind-tossed leaves of a million-million trees a massive sigh from just one throat, the hint of impish mirth in white-water streams, and the groaning crimson weight of so much rock oozing bloodlike, everything delineated by the hand of a master.
“I wish I were a poet,” she said, soaking it in. “Now I know why you wanted me here so early. The light is perfect for my first glimpse of this incredible landscape.”
“It takes some beating,” he said in quiet satisfaction, “and I’ve done my share of travelling.”
Inside, the mansion’s Victorian roots showed glaringly, not a prospect that could cheer a home-maker up, she thought wryly.
“The place has to be gutted,” he said, leading her to a room he had made into a kind of sitting area, though the furniture was old and uncomfortable and, she suspected, the nearest toilet might be in the backyard. On that, he could cheer her.
“There wasn’t any sort of sewerage, so before I moved in, I had one of the new septic systems installed, and put in some good lavatories and bathrooms. There’s an oil-burning furnace coming by ship from San Francisco, and a second in case one isn’t enough — like the British, I notice that Australians don’t central heat, and I imagine that Corunda in winter is cold, from my brief taste of it.” Choosing to sit a little distance from her, where he could see her well, he sat with his Scotch of choice — a squirt of soda but no ice — and contrived to make his eyes the same colour as his liquor. “I’m not going to batter you with my plans about what I intend to do after we’re married, except here and now to say that I would hope you’ll make the home of this place old Hannah never did. She’s not my grandmother, so much I know, but if you could tell me a little of my family in Corunda, I’d be grateful.”
Her dimples leaped into being. “Neatly evaded yet stated!” She settled into her chair. “You need good furniture, sir. As to old Hannah and old Tom — well, it’s said the Burdums have had no luck in making a home anywhere, but that’s just Corunda legend, a part of the myth. It was the rubies, really. Treadby found the first ones, about seventy-five years ago, and thought he’d inherited the world. The town gets its name from corundum, which is the mineral yields rubies and sapphires. Here, just rubies, and the very best — pigeon’s blood in colour, some of them starred, all remarkably free from inclusion bodies.” Her face changed. “But you know all this, I should stop.”
“Please don’t,” he said, refilling her sherry glass. “I like the sound of your voice, and you’re that rarity, an intelligent woman. There’s a whole evening to get through, and you surely can’t think I’m so insensitive that I don’t understand it’s awkward?”
“Women are quite as intelligent as men, but they’re reared to think it’s a fault, so they hide it. Daddy never did that to us.” She sighed. “Mama did, without success.”
“Rubies, Kitty,” Charles said gently.
“Oh! Oh, yes, rubies… Treadby’s mistake was the typical one of ignorance — having made a fortune from rubies, he didn’t bone up on them, diminish his ignorance. His rubies were the ones lying about in rubble washed down from the gravel beds where they lurk — caves, stream beds, crevices. They lasted a long time. But old Tom Burdum did his homework, and set out to find the major deposits. When he did, he acquired title to the land. And, in the fullness of time, Treadby’s patches dwindled, ran dry. While Burdum rubies continue to be found in regulated quantities. Rumour says £100,000 a year, but you’d know for sure.”
“Do you want to know for sure?” he asked, smiling.
“No,” she said, sur
prised that he’d ask. “Money is only worth what it can buy you. I can’t conceive of spending a half of that.”
They went to the dining room, where the butler hovered and a maidservant whose face Kitty didn’t know did the actual serving. Lobster quenelles were followed by a sorbet, then roast veal. The presence of staff inhibited Kitty, who enthused about the lobster, then looked at the veal in horror.
“I’m sorry,” she said, staring at her plate, “I can’t eat that.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I can’t eat it. It’s oozing blood.”
“It’s veal,” he said blankly.
“It’s bloody,” she said, pushing her plate away.
“Veal has to be eaten under-done.”
“Not by me, it hasn’t.” She smiled bewitchingly. “Have them take it back to the kitchen, shove it in a frying pan, and cook it — please, Charlie. Otherwise I’d sick it up at once.”
“My dear child, I couldn’t do that! My chef would quit!”
“Then may I have a crispy bacon sandwich instead?”
What a business! Flabbergasted, Charles sat wondering how he could have dismissed all those signals semaphored at him since he arrived, including, now he thought about it, the disgracefully over-done Chateaubriand. While he apologised profusely for its pinkness as evidence of overcooking, he understood now his guests had assumed he was apologising for undercooking! He knew from many meals in Sydney that this issue of cooked meat was far more civilised in Sydney; but these were rural people, and they knew too much about everything from liver flukes to tapeworms.
He beckoned the butler, a Sydney import. “Darkes, ask the chef to make Sister Treadby a dish of bacon and eggs.”
“Make sure the yolks are rock-hard!” she said.
“Name me your favourite meal, or food, Kitty.”
“Crisp bacon on a crunchy fresh white bread roll. Fried sausages and chips. Fish and chips. Lamb cutlets all brown and crunchy on the outside. Roast pork with crackling and roast spuds. And Mama’s butterfly cream cakes,” said Kitty without hesitation. Her eyes shot lavender sparks, she chuckled. “Oh, poor Charlie! Such grand ideas for a marriage, but how can you keep a chef and a wife? Never the twain shall meet!”
“On that diet, you’d be a balloon before you were thirty.”
“Codswallop! I work my arse off, Charles Burdum. It’s not the food that matters, it’s how much of what you eat that you burn up.”
“Why do I love you?” he asked the ugly old chandelier.
“Because, Dr. Burdum, I don’t piss in your pocket like all the other women. You’ve too high an opinion of yourself.”
“Some self-opinions are genuinely earned, and a high one, if based in deeds done and things achieved, is not to be sneered at. You have a low opinion of yourself, the result of too few years on this earth and boundaries far too constricted. In America, they’d call you a home-town girl.”
“In America, they’d call you Little Caesar.”
The eggs and bacon came, but the yolks of her two eggs were runny; she sent it back, with instructions to break the yolks and make sure the whites had browned exteriors. Dismayed and at a loss, Charles witnessed his evening deteriorate into a disaster.
However, she approved of the coffee, taken in the sitting area and without hovering servants.
“You made every mistake possible tonight,” Kitty said then in a friendly voice, “and it’s part of why, I think, Pommies are so disliked. You never consulted me or did any research into my food preferences because you deemed me a provincial ignoramus in sore need of instruction as to the right things to eat in the proper environment. I was supposed to come, be suitably awed, utterly overwhelmed, and pathetically grateful for this evening’s lessons. Your gastronomic judgement was purely financial: if it’s rare and/or costly, it must be better in every way. A bacon roll is so pedestrian: Q.E.D., it cannot compare with a lobster quenelle. I agree, it cannot. It’s far tastier. As for your under-done meats, I see enough blood in the course of my work, I don’t need to see my food bleeding too. The rarer the meat, the more fat it contains. One of the reasons Man started cooking his meat was to melt away the fat and make the gristle more detectable.” She shrugged. “At least so I learned in nursing school. Do doctors learn different?”
His face had twisted into its gargoyle image, but the thoughts that fed its expression were not of offended pride or pricked conceit; Charles Burdum was wondering if there were anything in the world he could possibly do to make this glorious, peerless woman see him for what he was: a man eminently worthy to be her husband.
“If I gave you unleavened bread to eat and river water to drink, Kitty, it could be no worse than these — er, rare and costly foods, which I offer not to abash you or point up your lack of sophistication, but to show you how rare and costly you are to me.” He kept his voice reasonable and his body relaxed, his eyes telling him that she was still, as the evening neared its end, wary and mistrustful. “Why must you pick and scratch at me?”
She looked suddenly very tired. “I think, Charlie, that it must be my way of trying to get it through your head that I don’t want your attentions. You — you annoy me. I can’t think of another way to put it. You don’t revolt me, or depress me, or any of a thousand strong emotions. You just annoy me, like an eyelash caught and stuck underneath the lid, scratching away,” she said.
“If that be true, why did you come tonight?”
“One more attempt to get at the eyelash.”
“Would you like to go home?”
“Are you going to leave me alone?”
His hands flew out, a gesture pleading her to understand. “I can’t!” he cried. “Kitty, I can’t let it go while you dismiss me so lightly! What can I do to prove how much I love you, to prove that we were meant for each other? I don’t care if I sound silly to you, I love you desperately, I want you for my wife, my one true mate, and somehow I have to get that eyelash out, make both your eyes see I’m the right man for you —”
The hand on the table was a sharp, angry crack, the purple in those eyes flared up hard and hot. “Don’t say silly things to me! Take me home, please. Thank you for an educational meal.”
And that was that. In silence they quit the house, walked to the maroon Packard; he opened her door and settled her.
Down the hill, a stony and wordless waste between them; Kitty looked at what the headlights briefly illuminated — a huge tree trunk, a cluster of bushes, mailboxes toward the bottom, then the overhead lamps of George Street, Victoria Street, and, up ahead, the hospital at last.
This time he wasn’t quick enough; she was out and fleeing up the ramp away from him at the perfect nursing pace: neither a run nor a walk. No fire or haemorrhage, but elude Charles Burdum.
Who returned to Burdum House and sat amid the ruins of what he had planned as an evening of preliminary seduction, sure that no woman could resist the evidence he presented her of time, care, thought, and love. The most delicious food, the best wines, well-trained servants to inform her that when she was his wife, all the messy and irritating jobs would be done by someone else — even the sight of Burdum House’s disarray, crying out for her decorating attention, expense no object.
An annoyance! Someone not important enough to her to dislike — an eyelash! Why that, of all metaphors? Driving you crazy, until you finally washed it away or held it up triumphantly on the corner of a screw of gauze. Oh, thank God, the wretched thing is gone! To be dismissed so lightly, so tritely, so inanely…
Wounded to the core, Charles bled from what he assumed was his soul because he lacked the one kind of person in his life who might have disillusioned him — a best friend. The peculiarities of his childhood, isolated from an unstable father, deprived by death of a mother, had set him in stone before he was old enough to go to school. At Eton, at Balliol, at Guy’s, he formed a band of one — himself. His stature, always that of the smallest boy or man in his class, forbade any sort of intimacy; it also shaped a shell of ar
rogance, unshakable self-confidence, and iron determination to surpass all his bigger, taller peers. Hand in hand with growing maturity came a realisation of his ability to charm and dazzle; rather than a moody loner, the fully rounded Dr. Charles Burdum presented as a smooth, charismatic kind of man, of enviably ready wit atop a steel foundation. Such a pity he was so short! Knowing all who met him thought it, Charles hid his frustration and his anger.
He was very aware that a part of the intensity of his love for Kitty lay in her size; no one would laugh at them when seen as a couple, for they were short, yes, but not midgets, and Kitty was as beautiful as Helen of Troy, a universal love-object who could marry anyone she pleased of any height. And no Paris lurked within Corunda, so much was sure. If Kitty chose him, he was vindicated.
This wandering, illogical thought process healed, he found; and so it did tonight as he sat with a Scotch, sipping slowly. He was not drunk by any means, simply bitterly disappointed that his overtures of love were so scornfully spurned. Which led him out of the slough of Kitty’s despond, and into another that haunted him even more, since its solution didn’t lie in his hands.
There is some sort of disaster looming, I’ve known it for more than a year, and share it with a very few others. The Bank of England is unsettled, the City of London uneasy. But all of it boils down to rumours. Debt in government is too high and unemployment keeps increasing — in Australia, very much so. The country is economically troubled, and I lay much of that at the door of governmental inexperience. The Commonwealth of Australia is less than thirty years old, and its governments are green as grass.
There are glaring signs. That miners’ lock-out on the northern coalfields — a fifteen-year-old shot dead! And the federal government passes too much responsibility to the states, which do not have the power to tax income and are given federal moneys for reasons more political than fair.
Are these actually symptoms of Melbourne’s stranglehold on the nation? Twenty-five years of federal government in Melbourne, with the biggest, most taxable state, New South Wales, playing host to a Canberra only just beginning to function now? This place is the same size as the United States of America, and equally divided, but not equally populated — its people are squeezed into half a dozen vast cities, and rural areas as densely populated as Corunda are rare. I do not understand! But do Australians understand? Their schools seem to teach more British than Australian history, and I don’t know where to go. Corunda is as isolated from central government as Scotland is from London!