The Ladies of Missalonghi (13 page)

“Dear Neville,” the letter said,

“Thank you for referring Mrs. Anastasia Gilroy and Miss ? Wright, whose Christian name I am afraid I do not know, as everyone including yourself seems to add a ‘y’ to her marital status and leave it at that. I am sure you will not object if I send you my opinion about both patients in this one” –

And there it ended. Mrs. Anastasia Gilroy? After sifting through a few of the non-Hurlingford faces in Byron, she came up with a sickly-looking woman of about her own age who lived in a rundown cottage beside the bottling plant with a drunken husband and several small, neglected children.

Was the second clinical report about Mrs. Gilroy, then? Missy picked it up and tried to decipher the jargon and symbols which filled the top half of the sheet. Though the bottom half was clear enough, even to her.

It said, “I can offer no course of treatment able to change or modify this prognosis. The patient is suffering from an advanced form of multiple valvular disease of the heart. If no further cardiac deterioration takes place, I give her six months to one year of life. However, I can see no point in recommending bed rest, as I imagine this patient would simply ignore the directive, given her nature and home situation.”

Mrs. Gilroy? If only there was a name on it! But it would be hers, saved to put in with the letter to Dr. Hurlingford. There were no other reports amid the confusion. Oh, why wasn’t Missy Wright’s the bad report? Death, snatched from her, seemed suddenly very sweet and desirable. It wasn’t fair! Mrs. Gilroy had a family who needed her desperately. Where Missy Wright had no one to need her desperately.

Voices sounded on the other side of the door; Missy folded up the report still in her hand neatly and swiftly, and stuffed it into her purse.

“My dear Miss Wright, I am so sorry!” cried Dr. Parkinson, breezing in with sufficient flurry to send the papers on his desk flying in all directions. “You can go, you can go! Leave it a week before you go back to see Dr. Hurlingford, eh?”

Sydney was warmer and moister than the Blue Mountains, and the day was fine and clear. Emerging onto Macquarie Street with Una at her side, Missy blinked in the brightness.

“Nearly half past eleven,” said Una. “Shall we go and sell our share certificates first? The address is in Bridge Street, which is only round the corner from here.”

So they did that, and it was remarkably easy. However, the small office and its surly clerk offered no clue as to the identity of the mystery buyer; the most intriguing aspect of the sale was that they were paid in gold sovereigns rather than in paper money. And four hundred gold coins were very heavy, as Missy discovered once she had put them in her bag.

“We can’t walk far loaded down like this,” said Una, “so I suggest we lunch at the Hotel Metropole – we’re only a hop skip and jump away from it – then catch a tram back to Central and just go tamely home.”

In all her life Missy had never eaten in a restaurant, even her Aunt Julia’s tea room, nor had she ever been inside the Hurlingford Hotel. So the opulent vastness of the Metropole staggered her, with its crystal chandeliers and marble columns; it also reminded her of Aunt Aurelia’s house, because it was beautifully greened and silenced with potted Kentia palms. As for the food – Missy had never tasted anything as delicious as the crayfish salad Una ordered for her.

“I think I might be able to get fat, if I could eat food like this every day,” said Missy ecstatically.

Una smiled at her without pity, but with a great deal of understanding. “Poor Missy! Life has passed you by, hasn’t it? Now me, life ran over like a through train. Bang boom crash, and there’s our Una flat on her face in the water. But cheer up, darling, do! Life won’t always pass you by, I promise. You just hang onto the thought that every dog has its day, even the bitches. Only don’t let life run you over, either – that’s equally hard to deal with.”

Wanting to tell Una how very much she liked her, but too inhibited to do so, Missy sought around for an acceptable topic of conversation. “You haven’t asked me what the doctor said.”

Una’s bright blue eyes gleamed. “What did he say?”

Missy sighed. “My heart is as sound as a bell.”

“Are you sure?”

Knowing exactly what Una was implying, she smiled. “All right, yes, it is a bit affected. But not by a disease.”

“I think it’s the worst disease in the world!”

“Not in a doctor’s book.”

“If you like John Smith so terribly much, why don’t you show him you like him?”

“
Me?
”

“Yes, darling, you! You know, your real trouble is that you’ve been brought up – along with that whole town – to think that if you don’t look and act like Alicia Marshall, no man could ever be interested. But my dear, Alicia Marshall does not slay every man who meets her! There are many men with more taste and discrimination than that, and I happen to know that John Smith is one of them.” She smiled impishly. “In fact, I think you’d suit John Smith extremely well.”

“Is he married?”

“He was at one time, but he’s respectably single now – his wife died.”

“Oh! Was she – was she nice?”

Una thought about that. “Well, at any rate
I
liked her. There were plenty who didn’t.”

“Did he like her?”

“I think he probably liked her well enough in the beginning, but not nearly well enough in the end.”

“Oh.”

Una commandeered the bill and would hear none of Missy’s protests. “Darling, your transactions this morning have been quite without personal reward, where mine have netted me one hundred wonderful pounds that I intend to fritter away like a king’s mistress. Lunch is therefore  my treat.”

A very exclusive-looking dress shop occupied the corner where they waited for the tram, but to Missy’s surprise, Una displayed no interest.

“First of all, darling, a hundred pounds wouldn’t buy the smell of an oil rag in there,” she explained. “Besides which, their clothes are as deplorably dull as their prices are deplorably expensive. No red dresses! It’s far too respectable a shop.”

“One day I shall have my scarlet lace dress and hat,” said Missy, “no matter how unrespectable I look.”

“So I don’t have heart trouble at all,” said Missy to her mother and aunt. “In fact, my heart is perfect.” Both the big pale faces turned anxiously to Missy fell instantly into repose.

“Oh, that is good news!” said Octavia.

“What is the matter, then?” asked Drusilla.

“I have a pinched nerve in my spine.”

“Good heavens! Does that mean there’s no cure?”

“No, Dr. Parkinson thinks he may already have cured me. He almost screwed my head off, there was a horrible sort of crunch, and I should be quite well from now on. He referred to what he did as a manipulation, I think. But if I do get more attacks, I have to get you to tie two bricks to each of my feet, and I have to hang in the air with my chin resting on a bar!” She grinned. “The mere thought is enough to cure any complaint!” Only with a hefty swing did she manage to deposit her handbag on the table. “Here’s something a lot more important – look!” And she withdrew four neatly wrapped cylinders. “One hundred pounds for you, Mother, all in gold. And the same for Aunt Octavia, Aunt Cornelia, and Aunt Julia.”

“It’s a miracle,” said Drusilla.

“No, it’s a little tardy justice,” contradicted Missy. “You will buy that Singer sewing machine now, won’t you?”

Prudence warred with desire in Drusilla’s breast until she declared a temporary truce with the outcome undecided. “I said I would think about it, and I will.”

When bedtime came around Missy found herself sleepless, despite the day’s novel exertions; she lay contentedly in the dark and thought about John Smith. So he had been married, but his wife was dead. There could surely have been no children, or he would surely have them with him for at least part of the time. That was sad, so too was Una’s opinion of the union, that he had not liked his wife nearly well enough in the end. Sydney society, decided Missy, was not conducive to happy marriages, what with Una and her Wallace, and John Smith and his dead wife. Still, Mrs. John Smith had not had to suffer the stigma of divorce; at which point, Missy wondered for the first time in her convention-hedged life whether the stigma of divorce might not be preferable to the finality of death.

By midnight her plan was all worked out, and her mind was made up. She would do it, and she would do it tomorrow. After all, what did she have to lose? If her scheme did not bear fruit, she would simply have to continue for the next thirty-three years as she had gone on for the last thirty-three years. Certainly it was worth a try.

Somewhere in her suddenly sleepy brain a little thought was spared for John Smith, the unsuspecting victim. Was it fair? Yes, came the answer. Missy turned over and went to sleep with no further misgivings.

Drusilla elected to bear the four hundred pounds into Byron without assistance, and set off the next morning at nine o’clock, the heavy burden of her bag seeming as a feather. She was very happy, not only for herself, but for her sisters also. In the last few weeks more good fortune had come her way than in the last almost four decades, and she was beginning to dare to hope that the good fortune was a trickle building into a rivulet rather than a splash draining into the sand. But it cannot be for me alone, she vowed. Somehow I must ensure it embraces
all
of us.

While Octavia pottered happily in the kitchen, Missy quietly packed her scant clothing into the battered carpetbag which served all the ladies of Missalonghi on the rare occasions a bag was needed. On the top cover of her bed she left a note for her mother, then she let herself out of the front door, walked down the path to the gate, and turned left, not right.

This time she didn’t timidly explore the start of the descent into John Smith’s valley; she walked down it with decision and purpose, using a strong stick and the carpetbag to keep her balance on the treacherous rubble. At the bottom of the landslide the going became easier as the road plunged into the forested flanks below the cliffs. It was not nearly as cold as she imagined it might be, for the ramparts far above took the brunt of the wind; down on the valley floor, all was still and calm.

Four miles from the commencement of the descent the more open woodland of the sloping flanks turned into a kind of jungle, thick with vines and creepers and tree-ferns, even several varieties of palm. There were bellbirds everywhere, though try as she would, she couldn’t see them; but their calls filled the air with the most delicate silvery chimes, thin and clear and elfin, utterly unbirdlike. And other birdsongs wove through the chimes, long carols from magpies, joyous trills from tiny fantails which fluttered only inches from her face and seemed to be welcoming her into their home.

That third hour of walking was very damp, the sun hardly showing through the canopy of leaves above, the track slippery from moss and mud and decaying forest detritus. When the first leech dropped on her and immediately attached its skinny slimy wriggling body to her hand, Missy’s impulse was to screech and run in demented circles, especially after all her frantic efforts to dislodge it proved vain. But she made herself stand absolutely still and absolutely silent until the hair on her neck and arms subsided, then she gave herself a severe lecture; if these disgusting things lived in John Smith’s forest, then she must cope with them in a way that would not brand her in his eyes as a silly woman. The leech had begun to swell up plumply, and, as she discovered when she began to feel areas of exposed skin on neck and face, had been joined by several equally vampirish brothers. Wretched things! They wouldn’t let go! So she moved on in the hope that she would encounter fewer leeches moving than standing in one spot, a hope that was right. Replete, the first one to land detached itself without fuss and flopped to the ground, as did its brothers. She then learned that staunch the wounds as she would, they kept on bleeding away. What a sight she must look! Covered in blood. Lesson number one about dreams versus reality.

Shortly afterwards the sound of the river began to fill the distance, and Missy’s courage started to bleed away as rapidly as her leech wounds; it took more resolution and strength to walk those last few hundred yards than to mount the whole expedition.

There it was, just around the next bend. A low small cabin built of wattle-and-daub, with a roof of wooden shingles and a lean-to off to one side that looked to be of more recent construction. However, the cabin had a sandstone chimney, and a thin blur of smoke smudged the perfect blue of the sky. He was home, then!

Since it was no part of her plan to pounce on him unaware, Missy stopped at the edge of the clearing and called his name several times in her loudest voice. Two horses grazing in a fenced-off yard lifted their heads to gaze at her curiously before going back to the endless business of feeding, but of John Smith there was no sign. He must be off somewhere, then. She sat down on a convenient tree stump to wait.

The wait wasn’t long, for she arrived a little before one o’clock, and he came merrily whistling back to the cabin to get himself some lunch. Even after he entered the clearing he didn’t see her; she was sitting in line with the horses, where he struck off towards the river flowing in noisy cascades behind the cabin.

“Mr. Smith!” she called.

He stopped in his tracks, did not move for a moment, then turned. “Oh, bloody hell!” he said.

When he reached her, he scowled at her horribly, not a scrap of welcome in his eyes.

“What are you doing here?”

Missy gulped in a big breath of much-needed air; it was now or never. “Will you marry me, Mr. Smith?” she asked, enunciating very distinctly.

His anger fled at once, replaced by unconcealed mirth. “It’s a long walk down, so you’d better come in and have a cup of tea, Miss Wright,” he said, eyes dancing. A finger flicked at the blood on her face. “Leeches, eh? I’m surprised you lasted the distance.”

His hand went under her elbow and he walked her at a sedate pace across the clearing without saying another word, just muffling his laughter. The cabin had no verandah, unusual in that part of the world, and, as Missy saw when she entered its dimness, the floor was of packed earth, the fittings spartan. However, for a bachelor establishment it looked remarkably neat and clean, no dirty dishes, no untidiness. A new cast-iron cooking range filled half the chimney, an open fireplace the other half; there was a wooden bench for his washing-up dish, as well as a long rough-hewn table and two straight kitchen chairs. He had made his bed from timber slabs, piled what looked like at least three mattresses on top, and a feather quilt that ought to keep him warm in any weather. Some cow hide stretched across a chunky wooden frame served him as an easy-chair, and his clothing hung on wooden pegs hammered into the wall next to his bed. There were no curtains on the one window, which looked as if it had been recently glazed.