‘The place I’m taking you to is called The Rocks,’ he said. ‘You’ll see why when we get there. It was where the first convicts settled, and most of the houses are tiny and very old. It’s become very smart to live there now, a bit like Chelsea or Hampstead in London. The hotel is called the Sirius, named after the first ship that came to Sydney. The upstairs rooms have lovely views of the bay. I asked Nancy, that’s the landlady, to give you a good one.’
They were there in no time at all, an area of narrow cobbled streets winding up through the huge grey rocky cliff. The taxi stopped at the bottom of some steps, and Rudolph picked up her case and led the way to the house at the top. Dulcie had caught glimpses of the harbour in several places on the route, but as she got to the top of the steps and turned to look, she gasped, for the entire harbour lay before her in one huge glorious sweep. Although it was chilly and windy, the sun was shining and the sea was as blue as the sky above. Sydney Harbour Bridge which she’d seen so often in pictures began right here on top of the rocks, overshadowing the back of the hotel.
‘That’s the famed Opera House.’ Rudolph pointed out a strange-looking half-completed structure further along the harbour. ‘It looks appalling now, and heaven only knows when it will be finished. But I’m of the opinion it will be very beautiful once it is. Before we go in and meet Nancy, I thought I’d better tell you she has met May on many occasions, and she knows something of our predicament. I hope you won’t be embarrassed by this, it was my hope you’d feel more secure in a strange city with English people who know May and myself.’
Dulcie thought then what a gentleman he was, and that May was a fool to walk out on him.
‘It’s very kind of you,’ she said. ‘And I’m not embarrassed. Thank you, Rudolph.’
He smiled and his eyes sparkled. ‘Call me Rudie, Rudolph is only good for Christmas parties. I can’t imagine why my parents saddled me with it.’
Two hours later they were still in the small dining-room at the front of the house overlooking the bay, on their second pot of tea. Dulcie’s room was delightful, on the top floor with a view that left her breathless. The whole hotel was very English and chintzy, she even had an eiderdown on her bed, the first she’d seen since she was a child. Nancy was a Londoner, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties with curly auburn hair and freckles.
But the hotel and the view had been forgotten as Dulcie listened to Rudie’s story about himself and May. He began by telling her how it all started, that he was still in the Old Australia Hotel when May turned up in the late afternoon, looking for him.
‘I was astounded,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘She’d made a big impression on me on the day of your wedding, but I hadn’t expected to see her ever again. She said she was off to Sydney too and we spent the evening together while waiting for the train. I had booked a first-class sleeper cabin on the train, so when I discovered May was intending to travel second-class, without even a couchette, I said she could share my cabin if she liked and I would pay the extra fare for her.’
‘And she agreed, just like that?’ Dulcie asked.
‘I kind of insisted,’ he said, looking faintly embarrassed. ‘You see, by then she had already started to make things up, and I felt sorry for her, she seemed shaky, upset and exhausted. I really couldn’t bear to think of her suffering the discomfort of second class.’
Rudie glossed over the rest of the journey, but Dulcie felt they must have become lovers on the way, because he said he took May straight to his house when they arrived in Sydney and said she could stay until she found herself a job.
Dulcie didn’t much care that it appeared May had coldbloodedly traded sex for a cabin on the train and a place to stay in Sydney. But she was shocked to the core by the magnitude of the lies she told Rudie to gain his sympathy.
‘Devilish strict, that’s how she described her parents back in England,’ he said. ‘She said they were furious when you left for Australia three years ago and they took it out on her. So when you wrote and begged her to come out and join you, and painted a blissful picture of golden beaches, parties and barbecues, she blew her last savings on a ticket and out she came too.’
‘We came in 1949!’ Dulcie exclaimed.
‘As long ago as that!’ He shook his head almost in disbelief. ‘Well, she said that you were already engaged to Ross then, and that his father, Bruce, had the biggest farm in the South West. According to May, you were the farm secretary, but the job was really beyond you, and you needed her help. But once she got to the farm, she found that she was expected not only to type the farm letters but to cook, clean the house, tend the vegetable garden and nurse Bruce’s terminally ill wife.’
He paused for a moment, half smiling at Dulcie’s horrified expression. ‘It all sounded so ghastly, yet utterly plausible,’ he went on. ‘She described Betty messing the bed, calling her at all hours of the night, working her fingers to the bone while you did nothing but swan off out to lunch with friends and neighbours. She cried about Betty, saying how much she suffered, and how she felt she couldn’t go off and leave her with you because you were so nasty to her. I swallowed it all, hook, line and sinker. That she was paid no wages, that she’d used up all her savings so she couldn’t even get to Perth to find the kind of secretarial job she’d been trained for. She even told me she’d been raped by one of the stockmen, and you knew but didn’t lift a finger.’
‘So how did she explain away her jollity at our wedding?’ Dulcie asked with a smirk. ‘Or why she had a more expensive outfit than me, and indeed how she came to escape my evil clutches?’
‘The jollity was put down to drink. She said it was your intention to marry her off to Bob, I think his name was. The smaller, weedy chap in your party with bad teeth. She said he had a big property down near you, which Ross and Bruce wanted to amalgamate with theirs, and you’d only bought her that outfit for her to impress him.
‘As for her escaping, she said that you and Ross had gone off on a honeymoon further down the coast, and as Bruce wasn’t taking too much notice of her, she helped herself to a few pounds you’d left for housekeeping, and she managed to get a lift down to the station with a delivery man, and got on the train before anyone knew she’d gone.’
Dulcie shook her head in despair. ‘But you saw me that day! Did I look capable of being that wicked?’
‘Well, of course I only heard all this several days after seeing you,’ he said. ‘By then I could only remember you vaguely, and we didn’t speak, did we? May said you’d always been jealous of her because she was prettier, your parents favoured her, and that part of the reason you turned so nasty was because you suspected Ross liked her better than you. The picture I got of you was of this neurotic, slightly demented English rose, who was manipulated first by severe parents, then by Ross and his father, whom May described as brutes. She said money and position was everything to you, you were so determined to have a life comparable with the one you’d had back in England that you’d set your cap at the first man with money who came along.’
Dulcie began to laugh then. It was just so far from the truth that all she could do was laugh.
‘She was a good storyteller.’ Rudie grinned sheepishly. ‘I’m glad you can laugh about it because she almost had me in tears when she told me. Her descriptions of Betty’s painful death, the clearing up, her grief at losing the old dear, it was all so real. Can you imagine how I felt when I read those letters of yours and found that it was you who was nursing Betty, and that she’d never even been to the farm at that time?’
‘Didn’t she ever slip up somewhere and make you wonder about her?’ Dulcie asked. ‘You said she was with you for a long time.’
‘No, never,’ Rudie said emphatically. ‘You see, she had this way about her. Always so well-groomed and poised. She laid the table just so, she knew about wines, the right glasses, how to entertain. Her accent was so English, it all fitted in with what she’d told me about her home in England and what I remember of “ladies” back there. Of course once I kn
ew she’d been a maid, trained by an Englishwoman, I knew where all that had come from.’
‘But surely you sometimes saw another side of her?’ Dulcie asked. ‘Right from a toddler May could charm, act so sweet, make people laugh. But there was always a darker side, and most people saw it before long.’
Rudie nodded. ‘Oh yes, I saw that, deep melancholy, insecurity, tantrums too, but that all fitted with your overbearing parents, the traumas she was supposed to have suffered in Esperance. She even had nightmares about the rape.’
He paused for a short while and lit a cigarette. ‘I think what convinced me most that it was all true was the way she wanted to put it behind her. Soon after she came to live with me she said, “I’m going to forget it all now, it’s happened and it was horrible, but I’ve got a new start now.” She didn’t like me to speak of it to anyone else, she would just make jokes about “There you go reminding me again” sort of thing. It seemed so plucky, so rational.’
‘She was always an actress even as a little girl,’ Dulcie said. ‘What I don’t understand though is why if you wanted to marry her, she didn’t take you up on it? I mean, if she’d only used you to get to Sydney, and didn’t really care about you, surely she’d have been off immediately?’
He smiled ruefully. ‘That was the biggest puzzle when she first left. But now I know the truth about her, it strikes me she realized it would all come out in a wedding ceremony. You have to show documents, birth certificate, etc. I was talking too of taking her to Siam for a honeymoon, how could she explain that she didn’t have a passport?’
‘So you think she panicked?’
‘Well, I did keep pressing her, I thought she was twenty-one you, see, so she wouldn’t need her parents’ permission.’
Dulcie thought on this for a bit. ‘I can understand her running off because she didn’t want to be found to be a liar, or because she found someone she liked better. But why go if she was expecting a baby? That’s a time when any woman would want the security of a man who loves her. You’d think she’d have hung on at least until it was born, stringing you along about getting married.’
‘That’s the part I still can’t figure out,’ he said woefully. ‘Let’s go for a walk round, have some lunch, and it might come to us.’
Dulcie was entranced by Sydney. She thought it had everything, the beautiful harbour, glorious parks, fantastic shops, the hustle and bustle of London yet with clean air and sunshine. Perth was so new and flat that even if it was clean and admirable in almost every way, it was dull compared with Sydney. The city butted right on to the Circular Quay and there were winding, quite steep hills to take you away from the water front. The Botanical Gardens rivalled even Greenwich Park back home for its formal flowerbeds and exquisite trees and shrubs. Here at last there was history, maybe less than a couple of hundred years of it, and much of that very shameful, but it was astounding to think that a city of such beauty had been built by prisoners.
Rudie clearly loved it too, for he pointed out the marvels of engineering in the bridge, the volume of ships coming into the harbour, the many trees, the new tall buildings which he said would probably rival New York’s skyscrapers in time. He showed her pretty Victorian terraces with delicate lacy iron balconies, and spoke of the splendid museum, art gallery and theatres he hoped her could take her to while she was here.
Dulcie already liked Rudie. He was easy to be with, conversation flowed between them effortlessly. She thought maybe it was his artistic temperament which made him so different to other men she had met, he liked women’s company, he spoke of them affectionately, as equals. Yet one of the nicest things about him was his lack of ego. It was obvious from his clothes, quiet confidence and bearing that he was as successful as Jennifer Alcott had said, but he called himself a painter, rather than an artist, and referred to his work disparagingly as daubs. She had also learnt from Nancy that he intended to pay the entire hotel bill for as long as it was necessary for her to stay here. Though she felt a little embarrassed by such generosity, it was something of a relief for she’d been worried about the cost.
It was while they walked in the Botanical Gardens after lunch that he rather abruptly said he must talk now about what he knew of May’s present circumstances.
‘I didn’t want to launch into it as soon as you got here,’ he said with a big sigh. ‘I wanted to give you time to acclimatize and for us to get to know one another first. But I can see now it’s not going to get any easier through waiting.’
‘I’d rather know everything now,’ she said, thinking she felt so utterly at ease with him, nothing he could say would shock or embarrass her. ‘So fire away.’
‘It’s not too good,’ he said warningly. ‘You see, when I wrote to you, all I knew then was roughly where May was, and though I had some thoughts on how she was supporting herself, there was no proof. But I have tracked her down now and got that proof.’
‘Go on,’ Dulcie insisted. ‘Just spit it out.’
‘She’s working as a prostitute.’
Dulcie blanched, looking up at him in horror. It had been at the back of her mind, but she had dismissed it as over-active imagination. ‘How could she do that?’ she said in little more than a whisper. ‘Are you absolutely sure?’
He nodded. ‘She’s not working the streets,’ he said quickly. ‘My source told me she’s at the top end of the market, calling on men in hotels. But in a way that makes it worse, because she’s undoubtedly got a pimp.’
‘What’s that?’ Dulcie asked.
‘A thug who looks after her, arranges it all and takes a huge part of her earnings,’ he said. ‘He controls her.’
‘I can’t imagine May letting anyone do that,’ Dulcie said.
‘I don’t suppose she’s got much choice. Girls don’t usually seek them out, they muscle in, they are dingoes, just about as low as you get. Often they run a whole mob of girls.’
A cold chill went down Dulcie’s spine. ‘What about the baby? Is he there with her? Have you found out his name and if he’s well cared for?’
‘She registered him as Noël Mark Taylor, father unknown. She was staying at an address in Surry Hills at the time of his birth. I went round there and asked about her. A neighbour said she had moved in around Christmastime with an older man, but they moved out around six weeks after the baby was born. The baby is still with her, but I have no way of discovering if she is looking after him properly.’
They continued to walk silently, Dulcie’s mind churning over what Rudie had told her. She was utterly appalled that her sister could stoop so low, yet she knew she must find her for the baby’s sake. He was her nephew after all.
‘Noël,’ Dulcie mused. ‘I wonder why she called him that, it’s usually a name for boys born at Christmas.’
‘My first thought was that it was the closest she could come to Rudolph without giving the game away,’ he said with a humourless laugh. ‘But maybe that’s wishful thinking.’
Dulcie counted back. ‘So he would have been conceived around August last year. How were things between you then?’
‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘I can’t see how she got up to anything then, I had a big exhibition on at that time, here in the city just around the corner from her office. She used to join me there as soon as she got out of work, she was excited by how many paintings I was selling, and all the stuff about me in the press. I might be a blind fool, but I really can’t believe she was two-timing me then. Later, yes, in October she became very moody and withdrawn, and just before she went in November she was impossible. But not then. She was the most loving in our whole time together.’
Dulcie heard the crack in his voice. ‘You still love her, don’t you?’
‘I don’t think you can love someone you never really knew,’ he said glumly. ‘All day today I’ve been so conscious of how I felt about her, because you are so alike physically. Your hair, eyes, even your voices have the same tone. But when you talk, and listen, I see the real difference. You only speak when y
ou have something that needs saying, I think you prefer to listen. May chattered constantly, she was bright, breezy, often very funny too, but there was no depth to what she said. She didn’t ever listen, she was just waiting for a chance to give her views. Of course I didn’t see that at first, I suppose she cast a spell over me.’
Dulcie could understand that. For months after May left Esperance men were still asking after her, she’d made her mark there too.
‘Tell me where she lives now,’ she asked.
‘On the edge of King’s Cross in Darlinghurst. King’s Cross has the reputation of being the red light district, but in fact the real action takes place in Darlinghurst. In reality King’s Cross is a very bohemian community, a rich mixture of artists of all kinds, single people in flats and bed-sits, families and old people. It’s because of the bars, the strip clubs and night-clubs that it’s got a tawdry image. All the visitors to Sydney and the young people charge up there over the weekend, it does get a bit wild.’
‘So she’s between the two?’ Dulcie raised an eyebrow.
‘She’s got a flat in one of the big old terraced houses. All the girls living there are on the game. But I don’t think she’s lived there ever since she left Surry Hills. My guess is that she lived somewhere smarter for a while, perhaps still with the same older man, then he left her, so she had to find somewhere cheaper. Maybe she was forced into prostitution because I still can’t believe she’d choose such a life.’
Dulcie was touched that he still cared enough to find excuses for May. She remembered too how Sergeant Collins had spoken of young girls being lured into that way of life. ‘I’ll go there tonight,’ she said impulsively.
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Rudie said quickly, looking alarmed. ‘It’s no place to go at night. I think morning, around nine, would be the best time, you’d catch her unawares, when the other girls are sleeping.’
‘Tomorrow then?’
Rudie sighed. ‘I was going to suggest that you came to visit me. It’s only a ferry ride from the circular quay. I thought it would be best if you got used to Sydney before steaming in there.’