Authors: Rosemary McLoughlin
During the six months while Waldron was resisting any attempts by Cormac to change his rigid ideas about art, Charlotte painted conscientiously. Cormac dropped by every
afternoon to follow her progress and tell her how terrific she was. “You’re on your own now,” he told her. “There’s nothing more I can teach you. When I come back to
check on you in a few years’ time, I expect to be even more dazzled by your singular vision than I already am.”
After Cormac finally left the townhouse for Paris Charlotte was gripped by a sudden and terrible loneliness. Deprived of his exuberance and support, she slid into a state of
inertia. Her old sense of worthlessness returned as if it had never left. Week by week, the walls of the safe Dublin world that Cormac had created around her began to crumble and fall and she felt
as if she was trapped in a basement, cut off from all sources of light. The speed of her loss filled her with the same sense of helplessness and fear she had felt as a child when Nurse Dixon was in
authority over her.
Along with the desolation there was a perverse sense of comfort in reverting to a state that was familiar to her. She had lived in a dark basement for a long time in the past and was now
returning to it. It was as simple as that. Cormac’s good opinion of her that had buoyed her up for six years had been fuelled by his own optimistic outlook and bore no relation to what she
knew to be her own lack of value.
Victoria, her face contorted with pain, appeared in a dream, holding out her hands in an appeal for help. Charlotte tried to run to save her but her legs wouldn’t function, and she could
only look on while Nurse Dixon seized Victoria and slammed her against the nursery wall to punish her for being such a cry-baby. Charlotte woke, disorientated with sick disgust at not being able to
protect her little sister.
After staying hidden for so long, Charlotte asked, why have you chosen to show yourself now, Victoria, when I haven’t the strength to help you?
Charlotte stood in front of a finished painting and was suffused with a hatred for it and for all her work. Cormac had told her not to waste her life on trivia, but what could
be more trivial than this useless object when one compared it to the actuality of a lost sister? Daubs of colour on a canvas, arranged this way and that and then framed and hung on a wall,
achieving nothing. Decoration. Nothing but decoration. How could she take herself seriously? Two of her favourite brushes lay on the easel ledge, hardened by paint she had forgotten to rinse out
with turpentine and she didn’t care. All those various shades of grey were pathetic in their lifelessness. She took up a tube of vermilion, squeezed it on to the canvas and spread it around
with the palm of her hand, but felt no release of frustration.
If she didn’t get a stretch of sleep soon she would become ill, if she wasn’t already ill. Victoria’s supplicating hands hovered on the borders of consciousness, not even
waiting until Charlotte had sunk into a deep slumber before reaching out to ask for help.
“I’ll make a deal with you, Victoria,” Charlotte wept, sitting upright in her chair, trying to avoid sleep to escape her nightmares, her neck sore from
snapping each time she nodded off. “It won’t make up for the past, but it’s the only thing I can think of to try to make amends.”
She would not dedicate her life to art, as she had promised Cormac. Instead she would take her year in the Paris finishing school seriously, so that she would emerge polished and ladylike, ready
to marry the first man who asked her. She would have a baby immediately, and she would dedicate her life to it and make sure it never came to any harm, looking after it herself with no nanny to
help, not following the aristocrats’ tradition of using boarding schools to gain social advantage, and sending it to day school instead so she could study its face at the end of each day and
discern if there was anything troubling it, and if there were she would find out what it was and would fix it. That was her objective – to replace Victoria with a child, preferably a
daughter, who would, due to unstinting vigilance, survive fearless and happy into adulthood.
Victoria must have accepted the deal as she didn’t intrude on Charlotte’s dreams again for years.
Sydney
1925
Two years after the Waratah was refurbished, Norma Rossiter, encouraged by her husband, had thought she’d better start a family before she ran out of time – no
point in working all the hours God sent to build an empire if there were no little Rossiters to inherit. Mrs Sinclair had then left the Waratah to help her daughter in the house, confident that
Elizabeth Dixon, now Head Receptionist and Head Bookkeeper, had learnt everything she could teach her.
In a rival bank, a block away from the one Mrs Sinclair introduced her to, where she lodged the hotel’s daily takings, Dixon had opened a second account under the name of ‘Beth
Hall’ to avoid confusion.
The Rossiters had gone on to have three children during which time Dixon received thirty-six proposals of marriage: ten from drunks, seven from octogenarian widowers, five from married men whose
wives didn’t understand them, six from lonely men who recanted the following day, six from simpletons and two from underage boys. A desirable eligible man near her age with all his parts
intact was such a rarity she hadn’t seen one, and even if she had she wouldn’t have accepted him because he wouldn’t be able to hold a candle to her memory of the divine
Manus.
Her dislike of other people’s children was reinforced every first Sunday of the month when she visited the Rossiters and was repulsed by their brats who grew worse as they grew older,
hanging on to their mother, making demands and interrupting the conversation. If she could have them on her own for a week she’d be able to straighten them out. It was all she could do to
restrain herself from leaning over to give them a good slap when their mother wasn’t looking. They even pestered Mrs Sinclair while Norma, red-faced and breathless, being made a fool of by
the middle one, was tending to their needs in the kitchen. Mrs Sinclair was as bad as her daughter in spoiling them, wearing herself out when she wasn’t really up to it any more. It was
obvious her health was failing but the children didn’t take account of that. Why didn’t they pay someone to look after the brats? It wasn’t as if they were short of money.
She held the youngest child’s sticky hand away from her to prevent it touching her new frock and hoped it would go away before she lost patience and bent back the little fingers with more
force than was necessary to teach it a lesson.
Some days, after Dixon returned from the Rossiter home, she would think how lucky she was to be treated as one of the family by people she admired so much, and how lucky she was to be able to
walk away from all that noise and confusion when it got too much for her, returning to her organised office in the Waratah. On other days she would race to her bedroom and howl into her pillow at
the injustice of Norma having a lovely mother, an admirable husband (though not as admirable as Manus), and three children (who would be of a superior mould if they were hers), and a beautiful
house, whereas she had no one and nothing except a growing bank account. Was the pain she was feeling the pain that old Lily East and middle-aged Teresa Kelly had suffered? Was this the child
hunger that she had been so scornful of when she had been young and in love with Manus?
Paris
1927
In the finishing school in her eighteenth year Charlotte was in a class with fourteen other aristocratic girls who all knew each other and were socially confident. She tried to
take an interest in flower arranging, etiquette, table settings, personal grooming, fashion, deportment, curtseying, dancing, sketching, the use of watercolours and spoken French, skills that would
help catch an aristocratic husband provided there was money to go with them. During all these classes she kept seeing Cormac’s mocking smile, especially when she was painting botanical
specimens in a constrained, ladylike way, and could hear his voice urging “Don’t hold back. Let fly. Get stuck in,” and knew how unacceptable those words would be in this
establishment. The girls were resentful when they heard how fluent her French was, so she became hesitant in her delivery and used incorrect words at intervals to appease them.
She became isolated and unhappy and took larger portions of food to console herself. Her cheekbones and jaw line began to lose their definition again. All this she could bear as she knew the
year would soon be over and it was necessary for her plan, but what she couldn’t bear was how she had unwisely confided in her roommate and suffered the consequences. Having read in books
that confiding was an essential ingredient in friendship and, never having had a friend to know if this were true or not, she took the theory on trust and told her roommate that she intended to
marry the first man who asked her so that she could have a baby as soon as possible to replace her lost sister to please her mother whom she was responsible for crippling. Instead of praising her
altruistic ambitions, the girl screamed that she couldn’t stay around a person who was cursed with such bad luck, called her a freak, and picked up her things and went off demanding to be
allotted another room.
While her former roommate was socialising with the other girls after dinner she lay on her bed, looking at the ceiling, imagining how much louder the girl’s screaming would have been if
she had told her the full story.
The next day one of the other girls came up to her and said, “I know who you are. I thought I’d heard the name before. Everyone knows about the lost Blackshaw, but they didn’t
make the connection. You’re her sister, aren’t you? And it was you who was expelled from school in England for attacking a girl and putting her into hospital.”
For taunting me. For accusing me of crippling my mother and being such a bad rider that my horse had to be shot. That pupil deserved what she got, Charlotte believed, staring dumbly back at her
accuser.
“We don’t want your sort around here. Why don’t you go back to the bogs where you belong?” the girl concluded before returning to join her group.
To avoid the risk of repeating her past behaviour, Charlotte packed her bags and returned home, telling her mother the course bored her and she had no intention of returning. Edwina knew from
experience that there was no point in trying to force her to change her mind.
Charlotte learnt her lesson. From now on she would never again confide in anyone. She would block the past from her mind and keep her old secrets hidden so deeply that even she wouldn’t be
able to gain access to them.
When her turn came to be launched into society at the traditional ball she didn’t know how to behave around men. The joking informality that she used in her conversations
with Cormac caused them to look askance at her, so she switched to speaking in the clipped cadences favoured by her mother. Before she had time to gauge if that yielded more success, she noticed
three girls from her finishing school mingling easily with the established crowd and knew any chance she had of finding a husband in this company was now gone. She saw the girls looking towards her
as they whispered, and noticed the horrified looks on the faces of those who listened to them. After she wasn’t asked for a single dance during the length of the ball, she admitted defeat and
retired from the social scene.
Dublin
1934
When Charlotte turned twenty-five she came into the fortune left to her by her paternal grandmother, the Dowager. She wished the old lady had had the sense to specify eighteen
rather than twenty-five as the age to inherit, to give her marriage prospects some chance before she had become a joke. By now she was the only girl of her rank and age still unmarried.
Washington Square
, whose plot had been related to Charlotte by Aunt Verity as a cautionary tale, became Charlotte’s guide. The heroine in that novel would have been better off
taking a chance and marrying the fortune-hunter she loved, Aunt Verity believed, rather than settling for the colourless, dreary life of a spinster, filling her life with dutiful tasks and
second-hand experiences under the eye of a sneering parent. All one had to do was look at the inconsequential life of poor Aunt Verity to agree with that conclusion.
Any suitor who approached Charlotte now that she was rich would, by definition, be a fortune-hunter. When such a man presented himself, she planned to accept him. All she had to do was wait for
the news of her vast wealth to reach the receptive ears of the appropriate man.
She didn’t have long to wait.
Peregrine Poolstaff, with his lack of purpose and wit, had reached the age of thirty-eight unhampered by a wife. If the large bulge on his forehead had been filled with brains he would have been
a genius, but since it evidently wasn’t, it was regarded instead as an example of nature’s propensity for irony. His estate in County Donegal was much in need of funds – if
nothing was done soon he would have to sell off more land and art treasures and eventually be left with only the house, and even that was in jeopardy. His younger, married friends convinced him
that marriage needn’t alter his way of life – he could still lead the life of a bachelor, just as they did. Meanwhile, they would coach him in the finer points of courtship and induct
him into the secrets of what made a man irresistible to a woman. He was no oil painting, but then neither was Charlotte in her present blown-up state.
Everything went according to their plan. Peregrine became a frequent and welcome caller to the townhouse. Charlotte wondered why everyone had been so dismissive of him when, after she got to
know him, she could see he was entertaining and insightful. He even charmed Edwina who said looks weren’t everything and beggars couldn’t be choosers. Waldron was impressed by his
family lineage.
An engagement seemed imminent, and the night of the Hunt Ball at the RDS an ideal place to announce it.
The pair agreed to arrive separately and meet there. Charlotte was accompanied by her cousins up from Cork and her brother Harcourt, seventeen years old, six feet tall and strongly built.