“Scarlet would suit you beautifully,” she said. “Oh, what a pity! Still, never mind, never mind.” And she changed the subject. “I’ve saved another new novel for you – two pages into it, and I promise you won’t even remember your red dress. It’s all about a drab young woman who is utterly downtrodden by her family until the day she finds out she’s dying of heart trouble. There’s this chap she’s been in love with for years, only of course he’s engaged to someone else. So she takes the letter from the heart specialist telling her she’s going to die to this young man, and she begs him to marry her rather than the other girl, because she’s only got six months to live and after she’s dead he can marry the other girl anyway. He’s a bit of a wastrel, but he’s just waiting for someone to reform him, only he doesn’t know that, naturally. Anyway, he agrees to marry her. And they have six heavenly months together. He finds out that under her drab exterior she’s an entrancing person, and her love for him reforms him completely. Then one day when the sun is shining and the birds are singing, she dies in his arms – I love books where people die in each other’s arms, don’t you? – and his old fiancée comes round to see him after the funeral because she got a letter from his dead wife explaining why he jilted her. And his old fiancée says she forgives him and she’ll marry him the minute he’s out of mourning. But he jumps up, wild with grief, rushes to the river and throws himself in, calling out his dead wife’s name. And then his old fiancée throws herself in the river, calling out his name. Oh, Missy, it’s so sad! I cried for days.”
“I’ll take it,” said Missy instantly, paid up all her debts, which made her feel a lot better, and tucked The Troubled Heart into the bottom of one of her shopping bags.
“I’ll see you next Monday,” said Una, and went to the door to wave at her until she disappeared from sight.
As long as she walked it on her own, the five miles from Byron’s shops to Missalonghi never seemed half so much. For as she walked, she dreamed, fantasising herself into roles and events and characters far beyond her real ken. Until Una had come to the library these characters had all looked exactly like Alicia, and the antics they got up to revolved around hat shops or dress shops or tea rooms of awesome gentility, and the men in their lives were a composite Hurlingford beau ideal, Siegfrieds in boots, bowlers, and three-piece suits. Nowadays her imagination had better grist to work on, and whatever character she played through whatever adventure it might be bore far more resemblance to the latest novel Una had smuggled her than to any aspect of Byron life.
So for the first half of her walk home that Monday, Missy metamorphosised herself into a divinely beautiful strawberry blonde with amazing lime-green eyes; she had two men in love with her, a duke (fair and handsome), and an Indian prince (dark and handsome). In this guise she shot tigers down from the howdahs of richly caparisoned elephants without assistance, she led an army of her husband’s subjects against Muslim marauders without assistance, she built schools and hospitals and mothers’ institutes without assistance, while her two lovers drifted vaguely in the background rather like the little male spider consorts not permitted into the wife’s parlour.
But halfway home, where Gordon Road branched off from the long straggle of Noel Street, began her valley. At this point Missy always stopped daydreaming and looked about her instead. It was a beautiful day, as late winter days on the Blue Mountains can be when the wind takes time off to rest. Answering the lure of the valley, she crossed to the far side of Gordon Road and lifted her face to the kindly sky and swelled her nostrils to take in the heady tang of the bush.
No one had ever produced a name for the valley, though from now on it would in the way of Byron folk come to be known as John Smith’s Valley, no doubt. Compared to the Jamieson Valley or the Grose Valley or even the Megalong Valley it was not very big, but it was perfect, a bowl some fifteen hundred feet lower than the three thousand foot ridge upon which Byron and all the other towns of the Blue Mountains were built. In shape it was a symmetrical oval, one narrow curving end lying just beyond the place where Gordon Road petered out and the far end some five miles away to the east, where its otherwise uninterrupted wall was dramatically broken by a chasm through which flowed its nameless river on its way to join the Nepean-Hawkesbury system of the coastal plain. All the way round the margin was a stunning drop of dull orange sandstone cliff a thousand feet high, and below this sheer precipice a tree-covered skirt of fallen rock curved down to the course of the river which had made the valley aeons before. And the valley was, looking across it, stuffed with lush native forest, a blue ocean of gums that sighed and whispered ceaselessly.
On winter mornings the valley was filled with brilliant white cloud that sat like turning milk below the level of the cliff tops, and suddenly as the sun increased in warmth it would lift up in a moment and vanish. Sometimes the cloud would come down from above, fingers seeking out the tree tops far below until it succeeded in covering them from sight under a spectral blanket. And as sunset approached, winter and summer, the cliffs began to take on deeper, richer colour, glowering rose-red, then crimson, and finally the purple that faded into night’s mysterious indigo. Most wonderful of all was the rare snow, when all the crags and outcrops of the cliffs were picked out in white, and the moving leafy trees shook off their powdering of icy moisture as fast as it fell upon them, unwilling to accept a touch so alien.
The only way down to the valley’s floor was a terrifyingly steep track just wide enough for a large wagon, a track that emerged onto the top of the rim just beyond the end of Gordon Road. Fifty years earlier, someone had made the track in order to plunder the rainforest below of its massive cedars and turpentines, but after a whole team of eighty oxen, their driver, two loggers and a dray bearing a mighty tree trunk had gone over the edge, the plundering had ceased abruptly. There were easier forests to log. And gradually the track had been forgotten, as indeed had the valley; visitors preferred to go south to the Jamieson than north to this less awesome cousin, bereft as it was of kiosks and properly landscaped lookouts.
That wretched stitch came back just as Missy rounded the corner not far from Missalonghi, and ten seconds later the pain struck at her chest like a blow from an axe. She faltered and dropped her loaded shopping bags, her arms flying up to pluck at this terrifying agony; then she saw the neat hedge of Missalonghi through her terror, and ran for home. At precisely the same moment John Smith rounded the corner from its other side, striding along with his head down in thought.
Only ten yards short of the gate in the hedge, she pitched headlong. No one inside Missalonghi saw, for it was about five o’clock, and the rolling chords of Drusilla’s organ were erupting into the outside air like a suffocating fall of hot volcanic ash.
But John Smith saw, and came running. His first thought was that the odd little soul had tripped after bolting to escape meeting him, but when he knelt and turned her face upwards, one look at her grey skin and sweat-soaked hair told him differently. He half-sat her against his thigh, rubbing her back helplessly, wishing he knew of some way to force air into her lungs. That much knowledge he had, not to lie her flat on the ground, yet farther than that his knowledge did not extend. She put up her hands to clutch at his arm where it lay lightly across the front of her shoulders, supporting her; the whole of her body was heaving with the fight to breathe, and her eyes were turned up to his, silently beseeching him for an aid he was incapable of giving. Caught mesmerised, watching the extraordinary cavalcade of an inner horror and bewilderment and pain pass through those eyes, he began to think she was going to die.
