Bittersweet

  Charles called at the cottage to collect Kitty, and found her alone; Tufts and Edda had already gone.

  He kissed her tenderly and took her right hand, wrapped it around a small leather box. “Merry Christmas, my darling,” he said, “and wear this for me. The battle’s over, I declare a lifelong truce. There can be neither victory nor defeat.”

  Even knowing what was inside, Kitty in the Pandora tradition opened the box. It seemed to throw wide a door to the sun, the diamond blazing fiery prisms of every colour as it moved in the light. “Ohh!” Kitty breathed, transfixed.

  “It’s only two carats,” he was babbling, “but it’s absolutely flawless, of the very first water. I couldn’t find another stone half as good, even in Amsterdam.”

  The indecision rolled away; Kitty held out her left hand. “Put it on, Charlie,” she said.

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Am I forgiven for the hubris of choosing your ring alone?”

  “Yes, of course. It’s your ring that you give to me.”

  The wedding took place with suitable pomp in St. Mark’s at the end of January of 1930. Charles had made a decision that endeared him to all the male participants; Maude had demanded morning suits or white tie and tails, both of which would have had to be hired from Sydney, but Charles said firmly that three-piece suits were more practical. What a relief!

  Kitty wore white satin to the floor and sweeping into a fan-shaped train so cunningly cut that no one needed to carry it; it was trimmed with seed pearls and much plainer than Maude had craved. Kitty had elected to put herself in Edda’s hands.

  The three bridesmaids wore plummy pink and carried bouquets of pink orchids; Maude had to wear fussy frills, of course, but no one else did, which rather put a dampener on her day.

  Corunda packed the church and overflowed outside amid eddies and swirls of multicoloured confetti that would linger until winter gales finally blew the last of the paper discs away. Since the Rector couldn’t afford a huge reception and refused to let Charles contribute, the actual ceremony was all Corunda managed to see. Yet another disappointment for Maude, whose pink organdie frills should, she felt, have received a better airing.

  Due to the hard times, the bridal couple didn’t take a honeymoon; they went straight from the small reception at St. Mark’s Rectory to Burdum House, there to begin married life.

  15

  At first, ordinary people who didn’t dabble in stocks and shares thought that the economic disaster had to be a temporary affair, a matter of months at the outside. This attitude was particularly prevalent in Corunda, whose inhabitants were slow to suffer the full onslaught. In Corunda, jobs at first didn’t fall like autumn leaves brought down in a violent wind, for all that the newspapers kept saying this was true in cities like Sydney and Melbourne. Protected from the early depredations of the Great Depression by Charles Burdum’s liberal use of his own fortune and the hospital, Corundites kept their jobs or else found new ones.

  Charles decided to start rebuilding the hospital at once, and at an accelerated pace; it never occurred to him that anyone would see the solution in any other light than of creating new jobs and getting men back into work as quickly as possible, though he should have known better: he was City of London nurtured. Only later did he pause to think that the formal theories of economics dictated otherwise.

  Corunda was plentifully endowed with carpenters, plumbers, cabinet-makers, brick-layers, electricians, plasterers, skilled labourers and gardeners in a town famous for its gardens. When Jack Thurlow told Charles about a deposit of brick clay out at Corbi, he seized on the information eagerly; it meant that the town could furnish the main building material, bricks, from within itself rather than have to import. Extra jobs too!

  Many, especially on the hospital staff, objected strenuously to the old design’s being used with so little modification — what griped about it, of course, was walking the same old ramps. Since he had gone to the expense of commissioning a first-class model of the hospital from a Sydney firm that made nothing else, Charles could point to a three-dimensional example and show his various grievance groups how splendid the new ramps would be; but nothing converted those who hated the ramps or the old sheddy design. They wanted a modern multistorey block hospital. And at this point a great many inhabitants of Corunda discovered that Charles Burdum was as tough a Burdum as any in history, and had a suavely savage side.

  “You can whinge and whine and whimper until Hell freezes over,” he said to two hundred indignant anti-ramp protesters in the Town Hall, “but it won’t make a scrap of difference to me or the new hospital. Corunda Base Hospital goes up as the model shows. I’ll not put my patients at risk of lifts or elevators or whatever you want to call them — this is not Sydney! And if you don’t care to exercise voluntarily, I’ll oblige you! Construction of a new hospital in this form keeps jobs here rather than see much of the materials imported, even from abroad! Corunda will cut its precious cloth of jobs and prosperity to suit its status and its needs! Whether you like it or not, ladies and gentlemen, I, Charles Burdum, am the guiding light and prime mover of this enterprise! There are many schemes in my head to make this kind of hospital design more tolerable than it seems to those who hate to walk a foot more than they must, but I have no intention of enlightening you today — or tomorrow! You don’t deserve it. Be thankful that there are jobs to be had! Now go away!”

  “That,” said Kitty, tucking her arm through his, “was not very politic, Charlie.” She grinned, kissed his cheek. “Oh, but I did enjoy it! Some people are never satisfied.”

  “Your father will be, when he learns that I’m using some of the hospital’s money to set up a ward and clinic at the orphanage.”

  “Oh, Charlie, that’s wonderful! And becoming very needed.”

  Once a Hospital Board weasel, the Reverend Thomas Latimer had turned into a rabid lion over the orphanage. A late Victorian pile not unlike Burdum House, it had originally been foisted on Corunda as part of a movement that flourished around the 1890s and very early 1900s; orphaned children should be accommodated in rural circumstances where they could learn to farm, produce some of what they ate, and breathe sweet, unsmoky air. As a result, it drew its intake state-wide, the fate of a particular orphan decided by clerks in Sydney. Most such institutions were charities run by religious denominations, but Corunda’s wasn’t. Now, with the axe of retrenchment reducing everything governmental to kindling, the orphanage was in dire straits. Almost every day saw some new child put on the train in Sydney and sent off to live at Corunda orphanage, groaning at the seams.

  Thomas Latimer made it his main concern, as he did so displaying a rare talent for interdenominational — could it be called politics? Whatever Corundites liked to call it, by March of 1930 the Rector had managed to see the Salvation Army reign supreme in the matter of soup kitchens and other traditional Sally areas, get every single minister, pastor and priest working on the same team for the benefit of the orphanage, deserted mothers, indigent aged, and any others needful of help. Monsignor O’Flaherty possessed one curate, Father Bogan, who had a genius for organisation; thanks to the Rector, Father Bogan took over as master-controller of all charitable efforts, thereby saving needless duplication and avoiding religious power-plays that would have wasted time.

  Maude Latimer found herself put on a far smaller, strictly regulated income, and also found that her complaints fell on deaf ears.

  “Cease your grizzling, Maude,” the Rector told her firmly. “You want for very little, while these children, through no fault of their own, want for everything. And yes, Billy Marsyk is to practise on the Rectory piano. The lad has a great talent.”

  “Great talent, humbug!” cried Maude to Tufts, who paid her a duty call the next day. “The dirty little beast wee’d in my cut-glass lily vase!”

  “Well, Mama, at least he didn’t wee on the carpet,” Tufts said with twitching lips. “I think it shows Billy has finer feelings.”

/>   “Oh, you’re as bad as your father!”

  “Come, Mama, after all these years you should know Daddy far better than you obviously do. Daddy scrapes to find the money to buy his orphans shoes for winter. They can’t go barefoot in a Corunda winter. Don’t grizzle, Mama.”

  Maude drew herself up. “I never grizzle!” She gave vent to a sudden, rather eerie giggle. “Have you seen my baby Kitty lately? Isn’t she the most beautiful child in the world?”

  Caught unaware, Tufts gaped, then strove to look ordinary, terrified her mother might see her reaction. Relieved, Tufts saw that Maude hadn’t noticed a thing. What made her say that?

  On her way out she encountered her father outside the garage. “Daddy,” she said when the greetings were over, “is Mama quite all there in the head? I’ve noticed other things, but just now —!”

  The long and handsome face, so reminiscent of Edda, shut in on itself, grey eyes — wary? “Your mama is all right, dear.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive. I take it she said something about Kitty? Yes, I thought as much. Kitty’s marriage hit her hard.”

  “But she always wanted a rich man for Kitty!”

  “Wishes are evanescent, Tufts. Reality is a different thing.”

  “Daddy, to all intents and purposes Kitty has been gone from the Rectory since April of 1926.” Tufts put her hand on her father’s arm. “Mama’s mind is slipping slightly, and I think you know it.”

  Australian journalists had only one way to estimate unemployment figures, for no one in government kept statistics on things that were seen as insignificant. One group of men with jobs did keep records, however; these were the trade unions, to whom it was important to know employment figures. At first each union wasn’t too interested in how many members of a different union were employed, but very quickly in the wake of federation the unions understood how important an overall impression of the unionised was. The central body kept figures released as percentages, and on this slender foundation the jobless in Australia were estimated.

  Someone decided that unionised working men comprised half the total workforce, as many with jobs either felt no need to belong to a union, or disliked paying union dues, or had no union to cater for their kind of work. So newspapers and news magazines, devoid of any other alternative, applied a rule of thumb: the total jobless were double the union jobless.

  At the end of 1929, perhaps fifteen in every hundred men in jobs no longer had a job.

  The unemployment was accompanied by horrific hardship as people were evicted from their homes nationwide. Whole towns of shanties came into being on the fringes of big towns and all cities to shelter the wives and children of jobless men. A jobless man rolled a tiny assortment of essentials in a blanket, called this cylindrical bundle a “swag” and set off on foot to walk sometimes thousands of miles in search of the thing Australia could not give him — work.

  According to government and financial men, the key to overcoming all this misery was something known as retrenchment. It meant that no public body at least — and most private bodies followed suit — could spend money on anything from wages to works: no new infrastructure to be built, no new jobs, drastic paring of existing jobs, and big reductions in pay. One or two voices cried in the wilderness that to cure the Great Depression meant public bodies should spend money on new infrastructure, but in 1930 no one was prepared to listen.

  Employment, not retrenchment, was the answer, said the renegade New South Wales Labor man, Jack Lang, who also advocated that no Australian government should repay its foreign loans until Australians themselves had more to live for. No one of any social stratum wanted to understand that governments hungry to modernise and expand had done so using foreign money, and in the process incurred massive debt the times suddenly rendered unpayable; in effect, they had mortgaged their people rather than real estate.

  Ordinary housewives like Grace Olsen weren’t sure enough of their facts to judge financial turmoil, and among the Latimer sisters she was the most isolated from informed opinion. In her exquisitely furnished house on Trelawney Way she was gradually acquiring a social status thanks to a combination of qualities not usually seen in the Trelawneys: she knew about women’s and children’s health, she could write letters or fill in forms aggressively or tenderly or other, she knew about councils and utility bodies, and she wasn’t a snob.

  Toward the end of December of 1929, Bear had severely limited Grace’s spending in ways she couldn’t evade; sounding wretched, he had told her that he must put something away against the future, and to do so meant he would have to cut her housekeeping allowance. No new clothes, no new curtains, no expensive cuts of meat, and buy Brian’s clothes far too big — John could wear them when outgrown. Caught completely off-guard, Grace had responded meekly.

  What Bear didn’t have the heart to tell her was that his income had fallen drastically; people weren’t buying Perkins Products save those they couldn’t live without, like the liniment, ointment and corning mixture.

  Half of the sales force had been dispensed with, which for Bear meant a circuit so huge it took weeks to travel; his living allowance had been reduced to subsistence level, so he slept in his car for six nights, with one in seven nights at a hotel to wash his person and his clothes properly.

  Something in his eyes silenced Grace’s protests. They looked hunted, even a little exhausted, and the merriment that had always lurked in them had vanished. Obviously times were hard for him; she just didn’t know how hard, and judged his plight too lightly.

  So she turned to Jack Thurlow, as constant as the sun.

  “Do you know what’s happened to Bear?” she asked him.

  Long experience with Grace counselled him to keep his wariness on the inside, not let her see a trace of it. He looked mildly enquiring. “I’m not sure what you mean, Grace.”

  A shrug. “He’s changed. Or do I mean that he’s lost his sense of humour? Bear was always laughing, now he never does. He says things are hard — well, they must be, he’s cut my housekeeping — but he won’t talk about things.”

  “You should take that as a compliment,” he said with an easy smile. “Bear’s firm is feeling the pinch, it’s that simple.”

  “But he told me to buy clothes for Brian that are far too big — does he want our son to look like a West Ender, with his trouser bottoms turned up to his crutch and his coat sleeves turned up to his armpits? Darning the darns on his socks?”

  “That’s how I was brought up, and my parents were well off. Handsome is as handsome does, Grace,” Jack said in a no-nonsense voice. “Brian is a good-looking little chap. Whatever he wears can’t change that, and you know Brian himself won’t give a tuppenny-bumper about turned-up clothes.”

  Baulked, Grace asked no more questions, but, she said to Edda when Edda paid her a visit, “It goes against the grain to have to squeeze every ha’penny so hard that the copper melts. Brian looks like a West Ender — scandalous! Little John permanently in hand-me-downs! What will people say?”

  “In the Trelawneys, that your sons are like everyone else’s, I imagine. You sound like Maude,” said Edda unsympathetically. “It could be much worse, can’t you see that? Bear’s got a job as long as Perkins is in business, but he’s on a commission as well as a flat wage, and his earnings are down.” She took a breath. “Make some tea, Grace. I brought some of the Rectory Anzacs.”

  “And isn’t that a sign of the time?” Grace heaved a sigh. “No more pikelets with jam and cream, just Anzac biscuits.” She brightened. “They dunk beautifully, never fall apart.”

  “Why else do you think I chose them? Brian and John can share the dunking.”

  Once the tea and Anzacs were consumed and two little frost-fair faces washed, Grace returned to her plaint, lack of money. “How long do you think it’s going to be before Bear is back to earning well?” she asked, polishing the kitchen table.

  “I’ll give you this, Grace, you may be the world’s greatest moaner, b
ut you keep an immaculate house without any help at all, which is more than Maude can do.”

  “To have my scrub woman back would be heaven, but even I can see those days are over!” Grace answered tartly; she never liked being reminded that she was a moaner. “How long will it be hard?”

  “Charlie Burdum says years.”

  “Huh! He’s still swimming in money!”

  “True, but he employs many, and Kitty employs too. You know the rate of deserted wives in the West End, Grace. Everyone forgets women — just as if we didn’t exist, or give birth to the masters. In this whole benighted country, there is only one pension for women under sixty — the New South Wales Government’s widow’s pension, and it’s a pittance. All the other governments deride New South Wales for giving it. It’s the state that owes the most money to London, but if it got its fair share of the federal money it wouldn’t have needed to borrow so much. Victoria and Western Australia always get proportionally more than they should.” Edda leaned forward and shook her sister savagely. “Get that glazed look off your face! This is important! It may even be personally important to you one day, so listen! Don’t switch the light off!”

  Edda’s frustration at Grace’s apathy and density hadn’t entirely evaporated when she met Jack Thurlow for a gallop along the river, though by the time they entered his bedroom at Corundoobar the cobwebs were sufficiently blown away to let her enjoy his love-making. After a long liaison his body was as familiar to her as her own, but it still delighted her. So, apparently, did she delight him.

  “Why do you keep coming back to me?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s easy,” he said, relishing his cigarette. “You are a fastidious, highly desirable woman who condones a sexual encounter without demanding that it be legitimised by marriage. It’s heaven to have a mistress of class and respectability. Most men have to settle for a whore, and if you had a hundred lovers, Edda, you’d still not be a whore.”

  “Why?” she asked, stretching her naked body.