things up. One actress was in grease-paint, wearing a set of beach pyjamas in gold cloth and a turban. Her fingers dripped with jewels, and a leopard-cub on a strong chain sat at her feet. The Windsor took them all in its stride.
The soup was excellent; Phryne demolished it and her collation and three cups of tea, then returned to her room for a rest. She fell asleep, and didn’t wake up until the dressing-gong sounded for dinner.
While she had been asleep, her clothes had been unpacked, pressed, and hung up in the massive wooden wardrobe. The room was decorated in excellent, if subdued, taste, though she would have preferred a less aggressive pink for the lampshades and fewer statues of nymphs. Phryne had a grudge against nymphs. Her name, chosen by her father, had been Psyche. Regrettably, at her christening he had not been himself, due to a long evening at the club the night before. When called upon for her name, he had rummaged through the rags of a classical education and seized upon Phryne. So instead of Psyche the nymph, she was Phryne the courtesan.
After some investigation, Phryne had been comforted. The courtesan had certainly been a spirited young woman. In court, her case going badly, her Counsel had torn down the front of her robe and revealed her beautiful breasts to the Court. They had been so in awe of such perfection that they had acquitted her. And it had been Phryne who, having amassed a pile of ill-gotten gold, had offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes if she could have placed on them an inscription, ‘The walls of Thebes: ruined by time, rebuilt by Phryne the courtesan’. But the sober citizens of Thebes had preferred their ruins.
And serve them right, thought Phryne Fisher, donning silk undergarments and a peacock-blue gown by Patou. I hope that the Romans invaded them. Now, shall I wear the sapphires or the enamels?
She considered the long sparkling earrings, pulsing with blue fire, and hooked them through her ears. She swiftly tinted and arranged her face, brushed her hair vigorously, and threaded a fillet through the shining strands. Then she gathered a sea-green cloak and her purse, and went down to dinner.
She restored herself with a cocktail and an excellent lobster mayonnaise. Phryne was devoted to lobster mayonnaise, with cucumbers.
It was a fine night, and none of her companions looked to be in the least interesting, except for a humorous gentleman with a large party, who had smiled very pleasantly at her, in apparent admiration of the gown. He, however, was occupied and Phryne needed to think. She ascertained that the Block Arcade was still open, it being Saturday, and returned to her room to change into trousers and a silk pullover, stout shoes and a soft felt hat. In such garments, she was sufficiently epicene to attract no attention from the idle young men of the town but she could make her femininity felt if she wanted to.
Since she wanted to think and to walk, she donned her subfusc garb and went into the warm dusk.
Trams passed with a rush and a rumble; the city smelt of autumn leaves, smoke and dust. She walked, as the doorman had directed, straight down Collins Street. In case it turned cool, she had put on a reefer jacket, box- pleated, with pockets, and as she was unencumbered with a purse, her hands were unusually free. Forests of brass plaques decorated the sober buildings of Collins Street; it reminded her of Harley Street, and London, though the crowds were noisier here, and cleaner, and there were fewer beggars. Phryne felt the crackle of leaves under her shoes.
She passed the Presbyterian Church, the Manse, the Baptist Church, and paused on the other side of the road to stare at the Regent Theatre, a massive pile, decorated to within an inch of the stress-tolerances of concrete. It was so unashamedly vulgar that Phryne rather liked it.
A group of factory girls, all art-silk stockings and feathers, bright with red and blue and green shifts and plastered with a thick veneer of Mr Coles’s products, jostled past Phryne in the harsh street, shrilling like sparrows. Phryne resumed her even pace, passing through the crowd under the Town Hall eaves and across Swanston Street.
CHAPTER THREE
Tennyson ‘Mariana’
Cec cocked a thumb at a girl drooping in a tall man’s arms on the pavement in Lonsdale Street.
‘Tiddly,’ commented Bert as he came to a halt. ‘And only eleven in the morning. Cruel, innit?’
‘Yair, mate?’ he yelled to the man, who was hailing him, ‘where ya goin’?’
‘Richmond,’ replied the man, hauling the girl forward by the waist and packing her ungently into the cab next to Cec. ‘She’ll give you the address. Here’s the fare.’ He thrust a ten-shilling note into Bert’s face and slammed the door. ‘Keep the change,’ he added over his shoulder, and he hurried away, almost breaking into a run as he rounded the corner into Queen Street. The crowd swallowed him, and frantic honking and personal remarks from the traffic behind as to Bert’s parentage made him move on.
‘He was in a bloody hurry,’ Bert commented. ‘Beg pardon, Miss. What’s the address?’
The girl blinked and rubbed her eyes, licking cracked lips.
‘I can go home, now,’ she whispered. ‘I can go home.’
‘Yair, and the fare paid, too. Where’s home?’ asked Bert in a loud voice calculated to pierce an alcoholic fog. ‘Carm on, Miss, can’t you remember?’
The girl did not reply, but slid bonelessly sideways until she was leaning on Cec’s shoulder. He lifted her gently and said to Bert, ‘Something wrong, mate. I can’t smell no booze. She’s crook. Her skin’s hot as fire.’
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Bert as he rounded into Market Street and stopped to allow a dray-load of vegetables to totter past.
‘Dirty work,’ said Cec slowly. ‘She’s bleeding.’
‘Hospital, then,’ said Bert, avoiding a grocer’s lorry by inches. The overwrought driver threw a cabbage at the taxi, and missed.
‘The hospital for women,’ said Cec with ponderous emphasis. ‘The Queen Victoria Hospital.’ The girl stirred in Cec’s arms and croaked, ‘Where you taking me?’
‘To the hospital,’ said Cec quietly. ‘You’re crook.’
‘No!’ she struggled feebly and flailed for the door handle. ‘Everyone’ll know!’ Bert and Cec exchanged significant glances. Blood and foul-smelling matter were pooling in the lap of the blue, cheap-and-showy dress she had worn to her abortion. Cec grasped the hand firmly and pressed her back into the seat. She was panting with effort and her fingers seemed to brand his wrist. She was only a child, Cec realised, perhaps no more than seventeen. Haggard and fevered, her dark feathery hair escaped from its pins and stuck to her brow and neck. Her eyes were diamond bright with pain and fever.
‘No one’ll know,’ soothed Bert. ‘I know one of the doctors there — you remember, Cec, the old Scotch chook with all the books who came with the toffy lady? She won’t say nothing to no one. Just you sit back and relax, Miss. What’s your name?’
‘Alice,’ muttered the girl. ‘Alice Greenham.’
‘I’m Bert and that’s Cec,’ said Bert as he skidded along Exhibition Street, dragged the taxi into Collins Street and gunned the failing engine up the remains of the hill to Mint Place.
They dumped the cab outside the hospital, and without apparent effort Cec carried Alice Greenham up the steps to the front door. Bert hammered with clenched fist and pounded on the bell. Cec stepped inside as the door swung open, while Bert turned on the nurse who had admitted them and barked. ‘We got an emergency. Where’s the Scotch doctor?’ Nurses are constitutionally incapable of being daunted. The woman stared him in the eye and was silent.
Bert, at length, realised what she was waiting for.
‘Please,’ he snapped.
‘Dr MacMillan is in surgery,’ she announced. Bert drew a deep breath, and Cec spoke while offering the girl in his arms to the nurse.
‘She fainted in our cab,’ he explained. ‘We came for help,’ he added, in case he had not made his meaning clear. Cec did not talk much, finding in general that words conveyed nothing of what he wanted to say.
Alice Greenham moaned.
‘Bring her in here,’ the nurse relented, and they followed her into a bare examination-room, painted white. Cec laid her down on a stretcher bed.
‘I’ll fetch the doctor,’ said the nurse, and vanished. Bert knew that nurses did not run, but this one walked very fast. Bert and Cec looked at each other. Cec was striped with blood.
