Bittersweet (37 page)

Even taking their reactions into account, Edda wanted Grace and Kitty and Tufts to be there at her wedding. That it could
not be, she understood. Grace would blab far and wide, Kitty would tell Charlie, who would blab far and wide, and Tufts — well, Tufts was Tufts, a hard act to follow.

Sir Rawson Schiller K.C. chose to issue an elegant press release upon the subject of his marriage timed to reach its recipients while their ship was on the high seas bound for California, and leaving some hundreds of staggered people with no one to talk to. The release included a black-and-white photograph of bride and groom, their first sight of Sister Edda Latimer for the majority. Intriguing, to say the least. The couple stood close together, he in a three-piece suit, she in afternoon clothes, looking not at each other, but directly into the camera. The best photograph colourist in Melbourne had hand-tinted matte sepia versions as per instructions, revealing that the bride had chosen to wear a dark red ensemble of incomparable smartness. Chic, right down to her dark red seven-button kid gloves. A severe beauty, slightly haughty, was the consensus of opinion; Lady Schiller looked to members of the Nationalist Party as if she would be an excellent consort for the man expected to be their future leader.

There was already a Lady Schiller, of course. Rawson’s father was a Knight Commander of the Order of St. Michael and St. George thanks to his business and pastoral career. Sir Martin and his Lady Schiller stared at their copy of the press release, softened by the inclusion of a personal letter from their middle son.

“She’s not socially brilliant, but she’s acceptable,” Lady Schiller said. “An exquisite outfit, though the colour is perhaps a
little adventurous for a bridal gown. Twenty-six years old — she’s not an eighteen-year-old bottle-blonde, at any rate, for which we must be thankful. Father a Church of England rector … Mother was an Adelaide Faulding — good family too, if it’s the one I’m taking it for. I doubt Rawson would marry beneath him.”

“She has lovely eyes,” said Sir Martin. “Very unusual.”

“According to Rawson’s letter, she’s a medical student — I don’t care for that,” said Rawson’s mother.

“Then she’s brainy,” said Rawson’s father, whose wife wasn’t.

“Brains should not be what a man looks for in a wife. Medicine is inappropriate, all that vulgar nudity and exposure to disease.”

Martin Junior, an amiable and obedient oldest son who had been designated to take over the Schiller business enterprises, declared himself delighted. “Time Rawson put Anne behind him,” he said. “Face it, Mother, he’s the Schiller who will shine the brightest, and his wife looks an ideal mate. Brains
and
brains.”

“I agree,” said Rolf, the youngest son, designated to manage the family’s pastoral empire. “Too unusual to be a raving beauty, but she rather frightens me.”

“She’s a designing harpy!” Gillian snapped. Martin Junior’s wife, she had turned forty, and knew she hadn’t done so gracefully. Four children and an extremely sweet tooth had ruined her figure, and Martin Junior had ruined her disposition.

“I’m with Gilly,” said Constance, who was Rolf’s wife. “She laid a trap for poor, silly Rawson, I know she did.”

The three men guffawed. Lady Schiller Senior smiled. The lines were drawn about where she had imagined they would be.
Neither Gilly nor Connie had a particle of dress sense, and dark red would make them look as if they had a terminal illness. Just as Rawson, the middle child of whom nothing much had been expected, had utterly eclipsed his brothers, the new and youthful second Lady Schiller was definitely going to cast her two sisters-in-law permanently into the shade. As for the first Lady Schiller, time would provide the right answer.

In Corunda, where the press release was softened by four letters from Edda to her father and her three sisters, the news caused a sensation. But to no one quite as profoundly as it did to Charles Burdum. When Kitty, waving her letter and the press release, told him upon his return to Burdum House that fateful evening in early December of 1931, Charles looked as if he were going to faint. Reeling to a chair, he sank into it awkwardly and held out a hand for the press release, pushing Edda’s letter away.

“
Edda?
Edda has married Rawson Schiller?”

Eyes round, Kitty took in his shock and poured him a drink. “Charlie, you look as if it were a disaster! Why, for heaven’s sake? It’s wonderful news! Look at her letter, do, please! In February she starts Medicine III in Melbourne — her greatest dream, the desire of her heart, and now she has it.”

“At what price?” he asked bitterly, angrily.

“That’s her affair, Charlie, not yours. How can either of us ever know? Except that Edda isn’t to be bought, and I take strong exception to your implication that she can.”

“If I’d known she hankered after a medical degree that much,
I
would have paid to put her through!” he snapped.

“Bullshit!” Kitty exploded, losing patience and tolerance. “You’ve always known, and Lord knows you have the money, but Edda isn’t one of your favourite people, I am aware of that. She tells you what she thinks, from petty things like my not having a mode of transport from the top of this hill, all the way to how you’re building the hospital. You’ve enjoyed knowing Edda can’t have what she wants, and don’t bother trying to deny it. With you, Charlie, it all goes on underneath consciousness so that you can tell yourself what a super chappie you are! Charles Burdum, the rock upon which Corunda stands. Feeding Edda scraps like the promise of her own operating theatre when you know perfectly well one is enough, and it belongs to Dot Marshall. Well, she was applying to some hospital in Melbourne to run an operating theatre there, she says, when she met Rawson Schiller.”

The alcohol was having an effect; Charles sat up straighter. “Oh, yes! She met Rawson Schiller through
my
agency, no one else’s! Since you, madam, won’t come to Melbourne, I took your sister to the Lord Mayor’s charity dinner. It cost me a hundred pounds to buy her a plate at that dinner, and this is the thanks I get — she up and marries an ultra-conservative bigot who’d see working men on subsistence wages, the Chinese deported, Melanesians back in the sugar fields, and women barred from all employment. If your precious sister has married a man like Rawson Schiller, then she is no better than a common harlot!”

Whack! Whack!
Kitty’s blows, one to either side of his face, happened faster than lightning. At one moment she was sitting
in her chair arguing with him — oh, fiercely, maybe, but in a civilised manner — and the next his ears were ringing, his head hammered. Eyes blazing magenta fire, she stood over him and kept on whacking his ears, eyes, cheekbones, jaw.

“Don’t you dare call my sister a harlot, you puffed-up, piggy, pompous, pox-doctor’s clerk! You’re a gutless, nutless eunuch!”

Fending her off, he managed to wriggle out of the chair and move to the door. “Harlot! Whore! Strumpet! And you, madam, go wash out your mouth with lye soap! Such disgusting vulgarity!”

“Go to hell!” she shrieked. “You don’t care about working men, all you really care about is yourself. It was you deserted Edda at that dinner, left her alone at a table full of strangers — she told me! Rawson Schiller
rescued
her. And guess what? He’s tall! No one can ever call
him
a Napoleon, eh, Boney?”

Then she pushed past him, ran to the back door, and out. Came the sound of a flivver starting up: afterward, silence.

Charles went first to the sideboard, then returned to his chair, where he sat and shook so badly that it was five minutes before he could lift the glass to his mouth without spilling the drink. It had been so sudden, so convulsive, so spontaneous. No time to think and no time to draw back from voicing aloud what he should have kept to himself. Edda
was
a harlot, but no sister could stomach such a candid insult. The rage still possessed him, fuelled now by the additional uncaged beast of anger at his wife, whose love for him was always marred and diminished by what she felt for those wretched sisters of hers. Kitty was his wife —
legally, emotionally,
totally
his! Yet she always held some part of her back to lavish on her sisters. It wasn’t right!

Edda was a harlot — an easy, loose woman who gave her sexual favours to men outside of marriage, men like Jack Thurlow. And Kitty
knew
! How could she possibly condone it without admitting Edda was a harlot? Did it mean Kitty was only a virgin by accident when she married? Was she practised in all sex short of the ultimate act?

Twenty minutes later the Rector rang: Kitty was with him and would be home later, no need to worry.

“I won’t go back!” she cried to her father. “Daddy, he called Edda a harlot for marrying Rawson Schiller! As if she’d concocted a plot!”

“Yes, yes, my dear, and quite unfounded, I know. But from what Charlie said when he came back from Melbourne, I gathered that on meeting Schiller he behaved like a small and aggressive dog setting eyes on a large and particularly complacent cat. Think about it, Kitty dear. Under the skin they’re so alike, despite the political differences — and those can be assumed or discarded in a trice — we see examples every day. Politics has to be played like a game, and those who throw themselves into it wholeheartedly are bound to be cruelly disillusioned. For it isn’t a fair or a clean game. It’s a tissue of lies — deceptions — personal ambitions — false hopes. It’s devoid of ethics or morality and designed to give victory to the unprincipled. A man with true aspirations to serve Mankind will be in social
work or medicine or something with visible positive gains.” He gulped and looked confused. “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! I’m supposed to be pointing out their likenesses, aren’t I? Take it from an old man, they are veritable brothers poles apart.”

An astonished Kitty stared at her father. “Daddy, you’re a cynic! I had no idea.”

The Rector bridled. “I am not a cynic, I’m a realist!”

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry.”

“Kitty, our brain is the most remarkable instrument God ever gifted on living creatures. It flowers to greatest glory in human beings, and we are supposed to
use
it, not suffocate it in frivolities and rubbish. So think! Charlie and my new son-in-law have few real differences compared to what they have in common. My instincts say that Charlie isn’t as left as Rawson believes, and Rawson isn’t as right as Charlie believes. But there is
one
difference.”

“And I have another, more important difference,” said Kitty, calming down. “Rawson is nearly a foot taller than Charlie.” She sighed. “His inferiority over his height will ruin Charlie.”

“Get him into parliament. It’s an ideal career for short men.”

“Nothing can excuse his attitude to Edda,” Kitty muttered.

“Oh, Kitty, it was said to hurt
you
, not Edda! He doesn’t think her a trollop, even when he spoke his feelings aloud.” Thomas Latimer put the kettle on for a pot of tea. “Have a cuppa.”

She stifled a giggle. “I fear I’ve blackened both his eyes.”

“My goodness! Someone
was
annoyed! I’m very happy that my girls have so much love and loyalty for each other, but
you must remember that your first love and loyalty is to your husband.”

The back screen door banged, and Grace erupted into the old kitchen, clutching her letter and press release.

“Oh, Kitty, you beat me here!” The Queen of the Trelawneys sat down. “A cuppa would be lovely, Daddy. What a shock, eh? My twin sister is now Lady Schiller.”

“Miffed, Grace?” Kitty asked, lips twitching.

“
Miffed?
Why ever would I be miffed?” Grace asked, astonished. “I can quite see why they did it secretly, though — imagine trying to plan a wedding that size! Half of upper-crust Melbourne would have to be invited, and Daddy could never afford the expense. It’s such poor form if the groom has to pay, I always think. Lady Schiller! Good for Edda!
And
she’s going to do Medicine at last!”

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” Kitty said warmly. “I’m very happy.”

“I bet Charlie isn’t,” Grace said shrewdly. “Cast in the shade.”

“If you can’t say something pleasant, Grace, kindly do not say anything at all,” the Rector said sternly.

“Oh, pooh, Daddy! He
is
miffed, Kits, isn’t he?”

“Not exactly miffed, Grace, just a little sad that Edda will be moving out of Corunda’s ken.” The two faces looking at Kitty fell.

“Oh, I hadn’t stopped to realise that,” said Grace.

“Nor I,” said the Rector.

But Tufts had, as she confided to Liam Finucan over morning tea in her office the next day.

“One can’t replace Edda, that’s the saddest part. So steady and logical, so — oh, I don’t know,
straight
. I understand why
she’s married him, it means a medical degree, and she must like him a great deal as well.”

“You imply that love isn’t in the equation?” Liam asked.

“Oh, yes. I don’t think Edda
can
love. At least not in the way Kitty and Grace do. She’s a scientist, not a romantic.”

“That’s pretty sweeping. What about him, Heather?”

She frowned. “Good question, you old wet-blanket. I daresay he must love her tremendously, to marry her. After all, he’s a man of forty, far wealthier than Charlie, significantly taller than Edda, and famous within the British Empire. Oh, how much I hope it works out! I pray it does! Because she didn’t marry him to be Lady Schiller or a social butterfly. Edda is Edda, a law unto herself. I must meet him, Liam! I’ll not rest until I do.”

The Rector’s feelings were akin to Tufts’s, though they did not discuss the matter between themselves. All through Kitty’s stormy childhood it had been Edda spotted the warning signs, Edda rescued the hapless girl from her mother’s idiocies, Edda provided the strength; and all that said Edda was extremely perceptive, sensitive, loving and protective. But how would she cope with a Rawson Schiller? Why had she tied herself to his star in such an irrevocable way? Naturally Mr. Latimer knew about Jack Thurlow; he wasn’t blind, and he certainly wasn’t deaf to gossip. Contrary to God’s precepts it might be, but to Mr. Latimer the relationship was far preferable to an unhappy marriage, not to be broken asunder. Now here she was, a ladyship, and one day to be a doctor. And try though he did, he couldn’t smother his misgivings.