Angel Read online

  Oh, God! He didn’t see what I meant because it hadn’t occurred to him that I don’t want to play Missus Doctor. That I couldn’t play Missus Doctor, even for him. Maybe if I loved him that little bit more, I could make the sacrifice. But the trouble is that I only love him in some ways, not in all ways.

  “Duncan, listen to me,” I said like steel. “I’m not ready to marry anyone, I’m not ready to settle down. Truthfully, I doubt that I’ll ever be ready to settle down, at least to the sort of life I would have had with David, that I would with you.”

  Jealousy, even at this moment! “Who is David?” he asked.

  “My ex-fiance-he’s nothing,” I said. “Go back to your wife, Duncan, or find a woman who wants to live in your world if you can’t face it with Cathy. But forget me. I don’t want affairs with married men, and I don’t want you to dream of me as the second Mrs. Forsythe. It’s over, and that’s as plain as I can say it.”

  “You don’t love me,” he said dully.

  “Yes, I do love you. But I don’t want to build any nests in the suburbs, and I don’t want to feel grubby.”

  “But children! You must want children!” he floundered. “I don’t deny that I’d like at least one child, but it has to be on my terms, and I’d rather do without a child if that means asking a man to assume responsibility for my fate. You’re no Ezra, Duncan, but you come from the same world, you expect the same commitments, you compartmentalise women identically. Some for fun, some for procreation. I take it as a great compliment that you’d rather I was your wife than your mistress, but I don’t want to be either.”

  “I don’t understand you,” he said, utterly bewildered. “No, sir, and you never will.” I went to the door and held it open. “Goodbye, sir. I mean it.”

  “Goodbye, then, my love,” he said, and left me.

  Oh, that was awful! I must love him, because I hurt terribly. But I’m so glad it’s over before it could get worse.

  Saturday September 24th, 1960

  Christine Leigh Hamilton became Mrs. Demetrios Papadopoulos today. It was a wonderful do, though a bit peculiar. I suspect that a great deal of diplomatic wrangling had gone on, conceding this custom to the bride, that custom to the groom, until both bride and groom reached conciliation. The groom’s relatives and friends were on one side of the church, and the bride’s on the other. His side was chocka, hers was about a third full of almost all spinsters, except for a few doctors and their wives. Dr. Michael Dobkins was there with his physio wife, which solved a mystery. She was the spitting image of Chris right down to the grand piano legs, except that, having money, she could afford to wear contact lenses. How do I know? She has that blind-as-abat-without-my-glasses look. No matter how well their optical aids allow them to see, they still have that muzzy myopic gaze.

  The last person I expected to see was Duncan, but there he was complete with the Missus. Of course, I realised, Chris must know him very well from her days in main X-ray-orthopods look at a lot of pictures of bones. I lurked in the back of the church with a pink lace hanky on my head because I refuse to wear a hat, even for Chris’s wedding. Until I set eyes on Mrs. Duncan Forsythe, I had been pleased with my slinky pink jersey dress. But the Missus-phew!

  Jacques Fath, if the draping of her clinging beige number was anything to go by. Beige kid gloves with seven buttons, beige kid shoes by Charles Jourdan, a beige hat nobody in the Royal Family would be seen dead in, it was so elegant.

  In amongst us over-dressed New and Old Australian peasants, she stuck out like dog’s balls, despite the fact that her hair, skin and eyes are as beige as her outfit was. She should have faded into the background, but she surely didn’t.

  Her jewellery consisted of pearls, too dingy and dull to be fake.

  Duncan looked awful, though the Missus had made sure he was perfectly clad for an occasion I’m positive she despised. Only one little week, and he’s faded. Not to her beige, but to various shades of grey. Grey skin and grey haircan so much grey appear in a week? I daresay it can, if hair can go silver overnight. To me, he seemed as if he was cooking a heart attack, but he’s too fit for that. No, Harriet Purcell, he’s plain suffering, and it’s all your fault, you flaming selfish bitch! Though I was glad to get a look at the Missus, probably never will again.

  Turns out that Chris has no close relatives, so Sister Agatha gave the bride away! The bride wore a Scarlett O’Hara crinoline of white tulle covered with millions of lace frills, its back cut to form an imposingly long train held up by two weeny Greek girls who staggered adorably, and everybody oohed and aahed when she came down the aisle on Sister Agatha’s arm. Sister Agatha wore pastel blue guipure lace and a hat the Queen Mother would have died fora punch-bowl of matching pastel blue straw embellished with stiff quiffs of mauve net and a couple of violent purple orchids the same as her corsage.

  Sister Cas-Marie O’Callaghan today, I suppose-was the only bridesmaid, in cream lace over daffodil yellow satin. The bride carried the sort of bouquet you only see in wedding photos from the 1920s and 1930s-trailing masses of white lilies and orchids. The bridesmaid carried another stunner made of creamy roses. As it’s the groom’s job to buy the flowers, I dipped me lid to Demetrios.

  The reception was held in a Greek restaurant at Kensington, and it was, in my view, brilliant. Demetrios’s parents were so proud of him! He’d managed to catch an Old Australian, the ten-quid trip out from Greece on some ghastly old cockroach of a ship was vindicated. The Papadopouloses have entered the Australian mainstream. The Forsythes, I saw, contented themselves with the church, shook hands with the groom and pecked the bride outside among the tons of confetti, then purred away in a huge black Rolls, no doubt to attend some more palatable occasion. I don’t think either of them noticed me because I hid behind a pillar in the church and skulked inside the vestibule until the Rolls had gone.

  So I could relax at the reception, danced with a dozen Greek blokes who all undressed me with their flashing eyes, threw plates with the best of them, and tried that Never on Sunday stuff, but decided it was more fun to sit back and watch the men do it the right way. They were graceful and passionate, the music was magic. I don’t think there was much enthusiasm for the food among the bride’s contingent, but I shovelled it in with gusto. Moussaka, dolmades, weeny meatballs, tabouli, spitted roast lamb, eggplants, olives, artichokes, octopus, squid. The rice pudding was out of this world, sweet creamy mush laced with brown ribbons of nutmeg and cinnamon. I made an absolute pig of myself.

  Despite the divine food and the admiring throng of men all asking me to dance or sleep with them, I found

  the time to observe the table on the dais. Chris and Demetrios sat in a daze and ate nothing, but Sister Cas and the best man, Constantin, gazed into each other’s eyes and fed each other coyly when they weren’t in fits of giggles from the Retsina. There is going to be another Cas wedding, mark my words! When it came time for Demetrios and Chris to leave and Chris summoned up her sandbag-enhanced strength to chuck that colossal bouquet at a screaming horde of desperate women, I did use my old basketball skills, just not in the way I’d threatened. I manoeuvred Sister Cas into the right spot, flipped my knuckles at the correct flower as the thing whizzed straight at me, and deflected it into Sister Cas’s delighted hands.

  Cupid strikes again.

  Sunday September 25th, 1960

  Neither Harold nor I saw Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz last Sunday because she had her most important client, Mrs. Desmond Thingummy-I always forget their names. It may be that she’d arranged that with malice aforethought, thanks to Pappy’s crisis. Incidentally, Pappy isn’t home yet. A real worry, but I’m sure if anything has gone wrong, the sanatorium knows how to contact us. Duncan wouldn’t do it any other way. Perhaps her general health is so run down that they had

  preferred to wait a few days before acting, and keep her a few extra days after acting.

  At least that’s what I told Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz today, and she’s sensible enough to agree with my the
ory. Of course she already knew that I had dismissed Duncan, though I did it very quietly, there was absolutely no one around, and last Sunday I didn’t see her. I told no one about Duncan, but she knew. It was in the cards. It’s always in the cards. Is it her tumour makes her prescient? They say that there are parts of our brains we don’t utilise, that there are powers we don’t know we have. Or can some people genuinely summon up the elements? Force events to go their way? See into the mists of time? I wish I knew, but I do not. All I know is that either Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz has the best espionage system in the world, or she actually can see what’s happening by spreading her cards.

  I had to report on the wedding in every tiny detail, from the six crystal wine glasses I’d given the happy couple to how Sister Agatha danced the hours away on twinkling little feet. Who would have guessed it? Retsina is potent.

  Flo looked exhausted, yet her mother says she’s had no clients this weekend.

  When I came in Flo stared at me as if she knew just what I was going through, though I’ve tried to keep that from the whole world, haven’t even given my emotions any space in this book. Nobody’s business, including whoever broke the hair on my Tilsiter cupboard when they picked away the plasticine and stuck their head

  inside. My old books have been read, they aren’t how they should be, standing neatly upright. I found them lying down, and they hadn’t fallen either. Someone knows my business almost up to the present day, because I’m just starting a new book. It’s left a sour taste in my mouth, though I know who’s guilty. Harold. So I went one better when I drew all my curtains closed, stood on my bed and put the books in through the manhole in my ceiling. He’d need a ladder even if he thought of looking in the crawl space. I wish there was someone I could talk to about Harold. With Duncan gone, is he about to start his horrible little war against me all over again?

  But Flo knows or senses or feels some of what I’ve gone through, I swear she does. It’s in her eyes, my angel puss. She came to me the minute I sat down and climbed onto my lap, kissed my face all over, snuggled down and played with her fingers. Then her hand stole toward my brandy glass.

  “Not from mine, Flo darling,” I said. “If you want some, ask your mother.”

  “Oh, let her have a bit,” Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz rumbled. “I’ve finally got her off the breast, so she deserves something.”

  “What made you do that?” I asked, astonished.

  “Saw it in the cards, princess.” She reached over to take my right hand, turned it over to study the palm, then closed it into a fist and chuckled. “Youse’ll be all right, Harriet Purcell. This ain’t gunna keep you down. Sent him back to the missus, eh?”

  “Yes. He was getting more and more possessive, then told me he was going to ask his wife for a divorce so he could marry me and we could live respectably. But I couldn’t stomach so much as the thought of it.” I sighed. “I did try to let him down easily.”

  “Men got so much pride there’s no such thing as lettin’ ‘em down easy when it’s the woman doin’ the heave-ho. He’s a real fine bloke-a gentleman and a scholar, as they useta say. Youse’d be good together part-time, but permanent?

  It just ain’t in the cards. All that water and all that fire-sooner or later the pair of youse woulda gone up like a volcano meetin’ the sea.”

  “You did his horoscope?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yep. Solid Leo, Aries, Sagittarius. Looks and acts like a Virgo with a touch of Libra and Sagittarius, but underneath he’s on a permanent slow burn-there’s an afflicted square between Venus and Saturn, though he ain’t got the selfish streak of that-it hobbles him terrible, but. Pity I dunno what he rises in.”

  “How did you find out his birth date? Even I don’t know!”

  “Looked him up in Who’s Who in Australia,” she said smugly.

  “You went out to a library?”

  “Nah, princess! I got me own library.”

  If she does, it isn’t kept in this room. Her attitude helped me a lot-this will pass, the sea is chocka with fish, my Queen of Swords is well placed, I am unbreakable. Though Flo helped me more. She never 215

  budged from my lap until Harold arrived, when she bolted under the couch.

  He looks frightful. Ill, unkempt. He’s crumbling, his self-esteem is eroding badly. He used to be so immaculately groomed-a prissy, fussy little man in ancient three-piece suits with a gold watch and fob across the waistcoat. Now he reminds me of a derelict. His shirt collar is frayed, his trousers are rumpled, his thin grey hair is flaked with dandruff. Oh, Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, try to be kind to him!

  But that isn’t in her. She resents him, she wants to be rid of him, yet the cards say he has a job to do for The House, and she will never go against the cards. So she picks away at him like a crow at a carcass, the softest ,,and most vulnerable bits first.

  “You’re early,” she snarled.

  Even his voice has lost its edge, its pernickety genteel vowels more nasal, flatter, Australian. “It is precisely four o’clock by my watch,” he said, his eyes on me. Hate, hate, hate.

  “Bugger the time!” she roared. “You’re early, so piss off.”

  Harold actually rounded on her! “Shut up!” he screamed shrilly. “Shut up, shut up!”

  Oh, Flo, you shouldn’t be listening to this, but you are from under the couch! I shrank in my chair and prayed a silent babble that the cards released Flo’s mother from this hideous, self-inflicted bondage.

  Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz simply laughed at him.

  “Garn, Harold, you ain’t even a danger to all them little boys at school!” she said contemptuously. “You don’t impress me one little bit with your shut ups.

  Or with your trouser snake, ace.” She winked broadly at me, but made sure that he could see her do it. “Truth of the matter is, princess, that if it was half an inch shorter, it’d be a hole.”

  “Shut up, shut up!” he screamed again. Suddenly he turned on me, the hate flaring up in his eyes like a fire doused in petrol. “It’s your fault, Harriet Purcell! It’s all your fault! Things have changed around here since you arrived!”

  If I could have answered, she would have cut me short. “Lay off Harriet!”

  she thundered. “What’s Harriet ever done to you?”

  “She’s changed things! She’s changed things!” “Bullshit!” she scoffed. “The House needs Harriet.” That set him off around the room, wringing his hands, screwing his head down into his shoulders, shaking and shuddering. Dear God, I thought, he’s genuinely demented! “The house, the house, the wretched house!” he cried. “Do you know what I think, Delvecchio? I think you have an unhealthy attachment to this-this female! Harriet wants, Harriet gets. There’s no difference between you and that filthy pair upstairs! Oh, why are you so cruel?”

  “Bugger off, Harold,” she said with dangerous quietness. “Go bugger off.

  The cards may say I gotta keep youse here, but you just done your dash in the 217

  nooky department, ace. From now on you can masturbate. Fuck off!”

  One more scorching look at me, and he went.

  “Sorry about that, princess,” she said to me, then, to the couch, “Youse can come out, angel puss, Harold ain’t ever comin’ back into this room.”

  “Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz, there’s something seriously wrong with Harold’s mental processes,” I said with all the authority I could summon. “If you insist on keeping him in The House, please, I beg of you, treat him more kindly!

  He’s deteriorating, surely you can see that! And he stalks me-or at least he did until Duncan came. Now that Duncan’s gone, he might go back to stalking.”

  Oh, how can she be so intelligent and wise, yet so thick? Her response was to blow me a derisive raspberry. “Don’t youse worry none about Harold, princess,” she said. “The cards say you ain’t in any danger from a little wart like Harold.”

  The cards, the cards, the bloody cards!

  Still, I got Flo to myself for two hours, w
hich delighted me. That scene between the two unlikely lovers had been awful to endure, but even in the midst of it, my heart had turned to lead at the thought that the breach between them would mean no more Flo on late Sunday afternoons. I think Flo was feeling the same as she huddled under the couch, because when her mother handed her to me, she lit up so vividly that I melted the way I used to when Duncan smiled at me. Used to. Past

  tense, Harriet, past tense. Oh, I miss him! Thank God I don’t have to miss my angel puss too.

  She loves the other angel puss, Marceline. If only Flo would put on weight the way Marceline has! My fivepound cat is now ten pounds, and still expanding. The pleasure in watching the pair of them roll around the floor! But I have made up my mind that Flo must start playing with the alphabet building blocks. I’ve tried sending my thoughts at her, but they don’t get through. So if I teach her to read and write, then we’ll be able to communicate.

  She listened intently while I showed her A and B and C and T and a few others, seemed to comprehend completely when I built CAT and DOG. Yet when I give the bricks to her, what comes out is CTB or DAC. She can’t even hand me A or B. Meaningless to her. The reading centre in her brain must be damaged or nonexistent. Oh, Flo!

  Monday September 26th, 1960

  Pappy must have returned very late last night, while Marceline and I were asleep. Yet there must be some sort of supernatural force in The House, because I woke two hours early and I knew that she was home. When I came around the corner to her room with the coffee percolator in my hand, her door was wide open.

  She was sitting at the table, looked up at me and smiled. Oh, so much better than she had looked when she went away! I hugged her and kissed her, poured both of us coffee, sat down. There were sheets of paper spread on the table, some blank, some with a few words written on them in purple ink.