The Ladies of Missalonghi (21 page)

“Your parents have permitted you to enjoy the fruits of two to four extra years of education by keeping you at C.L.C. until you matriculate,” said she in the rounded tones of one educated at Oxford, “which you will do at the end of this Year of Our Lord 1924. By the time that you matriculate, your education will be superb — as far as education for women goes. You will have university-entrance grounding in English, mathematics, ancient and modern history, geography, basic science, Latin and Greek.” She paused significantly, then reached her conclusion. “However, the most desirable career available to you will be a suitable marriage. If you choose to remain single and must support yourself, there are two careers open to you: teaching in primary school and some few secondary schools, or secretarial work.”

To which speech Maude Latimer added a postscript over lunch at the Rectory on the next Sunday.

“What drivel!” said Maude with a snort. “Oh, not the suitable marriage! Naturally, girls, you will all achieve
that
. But no daughter of the Rector of St. Mark’s needs to soil her hands by working for a living. You will live at home and help me keep house until you marry.”

In September 1925, when Edda and Grace were nineteen and Tufts and Kitty eighteen, Kitty went to the Rectory stables and found a length of rope. Having fashioned a loop in one end and flung the rope over a beam, Kitty put her head through the loop and climbed onto an empty petrol drum. When Edda found her, she had already kicked the drum over and hung, pathetically quiescent, to rid herself of life. Never able to understand afterward where she found the strength, Edda got Kitty free of the choking rope before any real harm was done.

This time she didn’t take Kitty to the Rector at once. “Oh, dearest baby sister, you can’t, you can’t!” she cried, cheek on the silky mop of hair. “Nothing can be this bad!”

But when Kitty was able to croak answers, Edda knew it was even worse.

“I loathe being beautiful, Edda, I abominate it! If only Mama would shut up, give me some peace — ! But she doesn’t. To anyone who’ll listen, I’m Helen of Troy. And she — she won’t let me dress down, or not make up my face — Edda, if she could, I
swear
she’d marry me to the Prince of Wales!”

Edda tried being light-hearted. “Even Mama must have realised you’re not His Royal Highness’s type, Kits. He likes them married, and much older than you are.”

It did get a watery chuckle, but Edda had to talk for far longer and with every ounce of persuasion she owned before Kitty consented to take her problems to her father.

“Kitty, you’re not alone,” Edda argued. “Look at me! I’d sell my soul to the Devil — and I mean that! — for the chance to be a doctor. It’s all I’ve ever wanted, a degree in Medicine. But I can’t have it. For one thing, there isn’t the money, and there never will be the money. For another, Daddy doesn’t in his heart of hearts approve — oh, not because he’s against women in the professions, but because of the terrible time everyone gives women in Medicine. He doesn’t think it would make me happy. I know he’s wrong, but he refuses to be convinced.”

She took Kitty’s arm and squashed it between strong, slender fingers. “What makes you think you’re the only unhappy one, eh, tell me that? Don’t you think I haven’t considered hanging myself? Well, I have! Not once, but time and time again.”

So by the time that Edda broke the news to Thomas Latimer that Kitty had tried to hang herself, Kitty was malleable clay.

“Oh, my dear, my dear!” he whispered, tears running down his long, handsome face. “For the crime of self-murder, God has a special Hell — no pit of fire, no company in the suffering. Those who commit self-murder wander the vastnesses of eternity forever alone. They never see another face, hear another voice, taste agony
or
ecstasy! Swear to me, Katherine, that you will never again try to harm yourself in any way!”

She had sworn, and adhered to her oath, though all three of her sisters kept a special eye on Kitty.

And the attempted suicide turned out to have happened at exactly the proper time, thanks to the fact that the Rector of St. Mark’s was a member of the Corunda Base Hospital Board. The week after Kitty’s crisis, the Hospital Board met, and among its business was a mention of the fact that in 1926 the New South Wales Department of Health was introducing a new kind of nurse: a properly trained, educated,
registered
nurse. This, saw the Rector at once, was a career fit for a girl brought up as a lady. What imbued the Rector with greatest enthusiasm was that the new, properly trained nurses would be required to live in the hospital grounds so that they were on a moment’s call if needed. The pay after deducting board, uniforms and books was a pittance, but his girls each had a modest dowry of £500, and the pittance meant they wouldn’t need to touch it; Maude was already complaining that four extra mouths at the Rectory were too many to do the housework. Therefore, said the Rector to himself as he sped home in his Model T Ford, why not dangle a nursing career under the noses of his girls? Fit for a lady, living at the hospital, paid a pittance — and (though he was too loyal to voice it, even in his mind) freedom from Maude the Destroyer.

He tackled Edda first, and of course she was madly, wildly enthusiastic; so even Grace, the most reluctant, was relatively easy to enlist. If the thought of being free of Maude worked more powerfully with Grace and Kitty than the prospect of the work itself, did that really matter?

Far harder for the Rector was the single-handed battle he fought on the Hospital Board to persuade his twelve fellow members that Corunda Base should be among the pioneer New Nurse hospitals. Somewhere inside Thomas Latimer’s gracefully gangling gazelle of a body there lurked, so forgotten it was positively moth-eaten, a lion. And for the first time in Corunda’s memory, the lion roared. Teeth bared, claws unsheathed, the lion was a manifestation of the Reverend Latimer that people like Frank Campbell, the Corunda Base Hospital Superintendent, didn’t know how to deal with. So that, highly delighted at what leonine aggression could do, the Reverend Latimer found himself victor on the field.

Sated if not quite glutted, the four Latimer twins looked at each other in quiet triumph. The drawing room was deserted and what tea was left in the pots was stewed, but in each young breast there beat a happy heart.

“Next Monday, no more Maude,” said Kitty.

“Kitty! You can’t call her that, she’s your genuine mother,” said Grace, scandalised.

“I can so too if I want.”

“Shut up, Grace, she’s only celebrating her emancipation,” Edda said, grinning.

Tufts, who was the practical one, stared at the corpse of the snake. “The party’s over,” she said getting up. “Clean-up time, girls.”

Eyes encountering the snake, now surrounded by blood, Grace shuddered. “I don’t mind getting the tea leaves out of the pots, but I am not cleaning
that
up!”

“Since all you did when the snake arrived was screech and snivel, Grace, you most certainly are cleaning it up,” said Edda.

Tufts chuckled. “Think that’s a mess, Grace? Wait until you’re on the hospital wards!”

Generous mouth turned down ungenerously, Grace folded her arms and glared at her sisters. “I’ll start when I have to, not a minute before,” she said. “Kitty, you created all that blood by chopping off its head, so you do it.” Her mood changed, she giggled. “Oh, girls, fancy! Our days as unpaid housemaids are over! Corunda Base Hospital, here we come!”

“Messes and all,” said Edda.

2

The Reverend Thomas Latimer, who had some Treadby blood but was not a native of Corunda, had been appointed the Rector of St. Mark’s Church of England in Corunda twenty-two years earlier. It was that dash of Treadby had made him acceptable to the largely Church of England populace despite his youth and his relative lack of experience; neither of these latter qualities was felt to be a major handicap, as Corunda liked shaping raw clay to its own ends. His wife, Adelaide, was from a good family and was very well liked, which was more than most could say about the Rectory housekeeper, Maude Treadby Scobie, a childless widow with the right blood and an insufferable idea of her own importance.

Thomas and Adelaide settled down to become increasingly loved, for the Rector, extremely handsome in a scholarly way, was a gentle and trusting soul, and Adelaide even more so. Pregnancy followed after a decent interval, and on 13th November 1905, Adelaide gave birth to twin girls, Edda and Grace. A horrific bleed drained her; Adelaide died.

With the efficient Maude Scobie already well versed in all Rectory matters, the Governors of St. Mark’s thought that the broken-hearted Thomas Latimer should retain Mrs. Scobie’s services, especially given the presence of newborn babies. Maude was six years older than the Rector and on the wrong side of thirty into the bargain. Awesomely genteel and remarkably pretty, she was delighted to continue as housekeeper. Her job was not a sinecure, but it was a comfortable one; the Governors were happy to fund nurserymaids as well as scrub women.

The entire congregation understood when, a year after his first wife’s death, the Rector took a second wife, Maude Scobie. Who fell pregnant immediately and bore slightly premature twin girls on 1st August 1907. They were christened Heather and Katherine, but later became known as Tufts and Kitty.

However, Maude had no intention of dying; her intention was to outlive the Rector and, if possible, even her own children. Now she was the Rector’s wife she became far better known within the community, which — with some exceptions — loathed her as pushy, shallow and social-climbing. Corunda decided that Thomas Latimer had been tricked into marrying a designing harpy. A verdict that ought to have crushed Maude, but didn’t even dent her conceit. For Maude was the sort of person whose self-satisfaction is so great, so ingrained, that she had no idea whatsoever that she was detested. Sarcasm and irony rolled off her like water off feathers, and snubs were things she administered to other people. With all this came an incomparable luck: disillusioned very early in their marriage, her husband regarded matrimony as a sacred and lifelong contract never to be broken or sullied. No matter how unsuitable a wife Maude was, Thomas Latimer hewed to her. So he dealt with her patiently, humoured her in some things and manoeuvred her out of others, bore her tantrums and megrims, and never once contemplated even the mental breaking of his vows to her. And if, sometimes, a tiny wisp of a thought popped into his mind that it would be wonderful if Maude fell in love with someone else, he banished the thought even as it formed, horrified.

Neither pair of twins was quite identical, which led to fierce debates as to what exactly constituted “identical” in twins. Edda and Grace had their mother’s height and slenderness as well as their father’s ability to move beautifully. Both lovely to look at, their facial features, hands and feet were identical; each had hair so dark it was called black, highly arched brows, long thick lashes, and pale grey eyes. Yet there were differences. Grace’s eyes were widely opened and held a natural sadness she exploited, whereas Edda’s were deeper set, hooded by sleepy lids, and held an element of strangeness. Time demonstrated that Edda was highly intelligent, self-willed and a little inflexible, while Grace was neither a reader nor a seeker after knowledge, and irritated everybody by her tendency to complain — and, worse, to moan. With the result that by the time they started to train as nurses, most people didn’t see how like each other Grace and Edda were; their dispositions had stamped their faces with quite different expressions, and their eyes looked at dissimilar things.

Maude had never really liked them, but hid her antipathy with subtle cunning. On the surface, all four girls were kept equally neat and clean, clothed with equal expense, and disciplined fairly. If somehow the colours she chose for her own twins were more flattering than those bestowed on Adelaide’s — well… It couldn’t — and didn’t — last any longer than mid-teens, when the girls appealed to Daddy to choose their own styles and colours. Lucky for Edda and Grace, then, that after this adolescent fashion revolution was over, Maude’s selective deafness allowed her to ignore the general opinion that Edda and Grace had far better taste in clothes than Maude did.

Tufts and Kitty (Tufts was born first) were simultaneously more and less identical than the senior set. They took after their mother, a pocket Venus of a woman: short, with plump and shapely breasts, tiny waists, swelling hips and excellent legs. Owning the perfect kind of beauty for girl children, they were genuinely ravishing almost from time of birth, and it thrilled people to realise that in the case of Tufts and Kitty Latimer, God had used the mould twice. Dimples, curls, enchanting smiles and enormous round eyes gave them the bewitching, melting charm of a kitten, complete to domed forehead, pointed chin and a faintly Mona Lisa curve of the lips. They had the same thin, short, straight noses, the same full-lipped mouths, the same high cheekbones and delicately arched brows.

What Tufts and Kitty didn’t share was colouring, and that was the difference between Kitty’s sun and Tufts’s dim moon. Tufts was honey-hued from the amber-gold of her hair to the peach glow of her skin, and had calm, dispassionate, yellow eyes; she toned in a series of the same basic colour, like an artist with a severely limited palette. Ah, but Kitty! Where Tufts blended, she contrasted. Most remarkable was her skin, a rich pale brown some called “
café au lait
” and others, less charitably inclined, whispered that it showed Maude’s family had a touch of the tar-brush somewhere. Her hair, brows and lashes were crystal-fair, a flaxen blonde with hardly any warmth in it; against the dark skin they were spectacular; only time scotched the rumours that Maude bleached Kitty’s hair with hydrogen peroxide. To cap Kitty’s uniqueness, her eyes were a vivid blue shot with lavender stripes that came and went according to her mood. When she thought no one was watching her, Kitty gazed on her world with none of her twin’s tranquillity; the light in her eyes was bewildered, even a little terrified, and when things got beyond her ability to reason or control, she turned the light off and retreated into a private world she spoke of to no one, and only her three sisters understood existed.