“I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,”Anna said.
“Oh it is. Worse. You’ve never seen anything like it. I’m as forward thinking as the next woman, but the scandal of it, Mrs Winton. Really. They’ve even written up one actress because she screams so well when they murder her. Deafening it was.”
They laughed.
“It’s funny to think how delighted I am to hear that my son has disgraced himself. But with the war none of it seems that bad. Just as long as they stay clear of it.”
“I’m pleased we met, Mrs Winton. In normal circumstances I don’t think I’d be taking all of this so lightly. But I’m pleased we met.”
“Call me Anna.”
“All right then. Anna. You will write to Paul and urge him to do the proper thing by my daughter, won’t you?”
“Of course. I’m sure he will.”
In response to her careful questioning, Eleanor gradually gave out enough information for Anna to get a sense of what had happened. Paul’s play was popular with a certain class of people, but as war seemed inevitable Bressler thought they’d have a hard time keeping the crowds. And in Zurich they’d also be out of danger.
“That’s when Laura made her stand,” Eleanor said. “And I put my foot down. Of course, what chance did I have? She told me flatly that there was no use me being angry, because it was too late, if you know what I mean. So we all went to Zurich and I put up my white flag.”
The doorbell rang. Winton insisted on getting up, moving towards the door with the aid of his walking cane. He shooed Mrs Norris away and opened the door himself to find Les Collins standing before him.
Winton thought the man looked abysmal, though in fact the vagabond author looked at least as robust as the doctor. Collins was brown with the sun but his eyes were bloodshot and his teeth yellow. His smell, moreover, was intolerable, and when he opened his mouth Winton could see, alongside the golden, misshapen stubs, shockingly ulcerated gums, as if his entire mouth had rotted out.
“Sorry to bother you, Doc,” he said.
Winton’s blood boiled.
“Could have come a lot earlier, mind you. It’s a last resort.”
“I don’t suppose you’ve come to talk about the Bunurong?”Winton said.
“No.”
“You can’t come in.”
“How we gonna negotiate, then?”
“I’ll call the police,”Winton said.
“So will I,” Collins replied, grinding his teeth.”I remember that poor girl. I remember what you did to her.”
At that moment Winton cracked. Fighting off the confused memory of darkness, blood and the filthy brown water of the river, he struck Collins with his cane, sending the man stumbling back down the steps into the yard. Collins steadied himself, clutching his forehead just above his eye.
“Are we clear then?” Winton said, hobbling forward with his cane raised.
“You’ll fucking well regret that,” Collins sneered at him and took off down the street muttering recriminations.
Winton already was. It was a foolhardy thing to do. The man held his fate in his hands. How hard would it have been to pay him off, Winton asked himself. He cringed at the thought of the bleeding girl dumped in the river and the headlines trumpeting the resolution of the mystery thirty years later. In an age of sensationalism he’d be hung out to dry, if not hanged quite literally in Russell Street’s grim old gaol. He propped himself against the wall and caught his breath, wanting to crawl away to die like an old cat.
As he moved back down the hallway he could hear his wife’s joy as she soaked up the detail of her son’s fortunes and made the best of Laura Thomas’s transgressions. She was truly happy for the first time in months. The contrast with his own situation was intolerable. His hands shook and he pictured himself as one of the madhouse neurotics in the play that Eleanor Thomas had just described to them.
After struggling to compose himself, he resumed his position in the sitting room, declared it was a charity worker at the door, and politely pursued the details of Eleanor’s story. He sat stiffly, listening distractedly as they decided that when things settled down in Europe the two women would travel to Zurich to see their children.
“You’ve always wanted to go to Europe,” Winton said, holding his wife’s hand.
“And now we will.”
Eleanor Thomas sat there for an eternity, drinking her way through two pots of tea, describing one city after another and still finding plenty of time to lament her daughter’s lost innocence. When she was finally ready to leave Anna urged her to come again and then decided to walk her to the tram on Park Street, leaving Winton on the verandah searching the street for signs of Collins.
When the women were out of sight he went back inside, leaving the door open. He slowly climbed the staircase and dragged himself into his study, where he sat down at his writing desk and took a small revolver from the bottom drawer. As he stared at the gun he very deliberately thought the whole thing over, balancing his wife’s horror against the pale face of the girl as her life bled away; his vision of her limp body hauled out of the river; Les Collins’s rotted mouth accusing him and, lastly, his public humiliation in front of the woman he loved and depended upon. Sixty-six, he told himself, an old man with a young wife. He had already transferred some capital to Anna, and most of what remained was willed to her and the children. All his affairs were in order. Yes, he had done well by them. Nobody could complain about him. He had done well. All in order. As he put the barrel of the revolver into his mouth and slowly squeezed the trigger he wondered how Albert Walters could have plunged into the river with his house in such a state of disarray. But the man was mad, he told himself.
Charles Winton was buried with the terrible secret of his past. Everything else he could live down, but the thought of that one revelation was something he could not endure. The unsolved mystery of his suicide left Anna inconsolable. Its impenetrability was worse to her than anything she could imagine accounting for it. She remembered Sid Packard once said that the doctor reminded him of someone. Or was it that he recognised him from somewhere? The implication, the sense of the unknown, sapped her of her strength. She worked over everything she knew about Charles, and found no decisive answer, though behind the secure, scientific assumptions of social hygiene and sexual pathology, she glimpsed a dark form moving in and out of view, without betraying any of its detail.
During the war people in the area talked from time to time about poor, pale Anna and her two dead husbands. What had she done to them? There was something not right about it. Even Robert Walters stayed clear of St Vincent Place. The house developed a sickly, funereal calm, as if it were a mausoleum. Only Ondine came back, and after Ralph left for the fighting in France, the two women lived there like nuns attending the cult of their solitude.
O
ndine could never quite imagine the war in Europe. She was conscious of this as a failure. Years after it was all over she’d lie awake at night and try to picture it. Trenches propped up with bodies, entrails spilling over the mud. She wanted to understand what had happened to Ralph and how he had died, but her need to evoke the horror went beyond that. She wanted to see if she was still capable of feeling.
The war had seemed unreal right from the start. The images of bitter, inveterate enemies, so prevalent in home–front propaganda as the conflict unfolded, bore no direct relationship to her own experience of people. She wondered if ordinary men, once they became soldiers, really felt that hatred, or whether they were simply and mechanically obeying their orders, running blindly out of the trenches at the command of something more remote than their own sense of injustice. They said it was the first war in history in which death had been thoroughly depersonalised. Did that mean that soldiers fought with no sense of themselves or that they were killed by machines? What had happened to the actuality of death? She couldn’t imagine any of it. What had the war been but a vast puppet show in which individuals performed their roles in a largely unconscious fashion, with no sense of their own being realised in the terrible killing? There was no greater travesty, she thought, than to deprive men of their sense of self as they were killed, to turn them into automatons. It was as bad as leaving bodies unburied or desecrating graves in order to show that a man is simply the crude sum of his parts.
When she saw Ralph in his khaki Light Horse uniform before training camp in Broadmeadows, the foolery of military dress struck her as a sign of the impersonal death awaiting him. She’d been expecting it for weeks. It was as if the living soul of her husband had already been smothered under the khaki, the brown leather, the glistening gold buttons and insignia.
Eighteen months later Ralph was killed, along with almost two thousand other young Australians, in an overnight battle on a piece of French farmland. Not a single British soldier fell. The Australians were the front line. Dawn broke and the commanding officer surveyed the mess of broken bodies on the battlefield. Death, on such a scale, had already become routine, and the war was to drag on for another two years.
When it was over the soldiers who had survived returned to Melbourne and marched through the streets to the frantic cheers of the crowd. The city was festive and Ondine hoped the jubilation would begin to dissolve the impersonality of the war, as soldiers marched together, then one by one shed their uniforms and resumed their roles as people with homes and families, with loyalties and animosities so much more real than the obscure motivations and fantastic chimeras that had flung them out across the battlefields. She wondered what it meant to talk about “a national triumph” in that light. That’s what the newspapers and politicians called it. What would triumph now was something far smaller and more intimate than the nation, which was nothing but a vast image-making machine, a magic lantern throwing up shadowy images on a wall, generating a hypnotic trance that could have millions of men going to meet their deaths as if they were zombies. She hated the nation, hated its cold, murderous malice. Its collective dream was the nightmare of modern times, and she had lain awake through it, eyes fixed on the darkness, while others around her restlessly tossed and turned at its bidding.
But in another sense her refusal to be drawn into the collective hysteria of the home-front also had something dreamlike about it. After Winton’s death, before the war had even really caught on, her mother sank into a mild state of catalepsy. She continued with her routine of rose pruning and her sedate walks through the gardens, but now this domestic rhythm had the quality of a kind of ghost-seeing, serving not to distract her from her sorrow, but to bring her closer to it.
Early in 1915 Ondine tried to convince her mother to accompany her to the Matthews’s property in New South Wales, but Anna was reluctant to leave and eventually Ondine gave up. After Ralph had left for the war, she moved back into the St Vincent Place house where she assumed the responsibility her mother had relinquished. Pruning the roses became more important than regular meals for Anna and her walks through the gardens continued even through torrential rain, such that she was frequently fighting off chills and fevers while her daughter fretted over her neglected and increasingly bedraggled appearance.
In this state of virtual isolation the two women were like a couple of ascetics inhabiting the still centre of a maelstrom. All around them the world swelled and burnt in constant, tumultuous anger. Whenever Ondine opened a paper she was confronted with it. The leaders had gotten suddenly bigger and threatened to outgrow the size of the broadsheet, and photographs of light and shadow and fire occupied entire pages. Her mother would sit down, glance negligently at the front page and then cast the paper aside, as if she were tired of reading or unconvinced of the reality. Ondine felt as if they were both being bleached by the lethargy of this static existence.
“You’re white, Mother, white as a ghost,” she said one day as they were reading on the upstairs verandah.
“Am I, dear?” Anna said vaguely.
It was too much for Ondine, the resigned indifference, the inane formalities of their conversation, the sense of slowly wasting away. She dropped her book on the bench beside her and went back inside, determined to assert herself against this vacuum of loneliness and protracted grief.
When the news of Ralph’s death finally reached her, months after the battle of Fromelles, it was as if he had been dead since the beginning of the war. She chided herself for this lack of feeling. What had happened to her? The moments, years earlier, when she was so in love with him and felt her heart beating faster at the thought of meeting him at the opera, were like scenes coloured by the giddy lightness of childhood. Now her body had shut down. She saw her mother already existing in this almost vegetative state and, fearful of the same numbness, dreamt of flailing herself open to the world, letting her body be hacked at until the nerves tingled anew.
In 1916 the city was already full of casualties from the early years of the conflict. In the pubs, hotels, arcades and markets, one could see men with canes, crutches, prosthetic limbs or empty sleeves and trouser legs limping through their tragedy in various degrees of drunkenness and stupefaction. The first time Ondine walked through the city after Ralph’s death she was struck by the motley collection of war veterans shuffling about the city.
She had walked towards the Yarra and over Princes Bridge with the vague intent of reanimating something in her, of escaping the moribund atmosphere of St Vincent Place. But the city was not made for a single woman out on her own. It was a grey, drizzling day in October, the kind of day when winter rain and summer humidity seem indistinguishable and the city sinks into its own foul atmosphere of sweat and steam. Shop interiors had fogged up and beads of condensation ran down the insides of the windows. Stepping into the Block Arcade Ondine felt as if she were entering a hothouse. Her blouse was wet, whether from rain or her own body she couldn’t tell. Some women in Red Cross uniforms were sitting in the window of the Hopetoun Tea Rooms. There was a poster for the All British League on the wall. A walrus–moustached officer gazed at her approvingly as he leant back smoking a cigar. For a moment she felt affronted by the frankness of his stare, but quickly collected herself and walked off towards Block Place.