A recent story she’d wanted to cheerily discuss with Brian was a case of thallium poisoning on the North Shore. On discovering her husband Keith’s extramarital affairs, Thelma Teasdale, in the Telegraph’s words “a respectable Roseville housewife and a regular finalist in the Royal Easter Show’s cake-baking competition,” had put rat poison in his breakfast cup of tea.
As the paper’s science reporter, Warren Baxter, a lugubrious fellow known in the newsroom as the “Undertaker,” wrote in a rider to the Teasdale murder trial, “Known to the police as ‘inheritance powder,’ ‘wives’ revenge,’ and ‘the poisoner’s poison,’ one gram of odorless and tasteless Thallium sulfate in cakes or scones, or mixed in hot drinks, can slowly and subtly kill an unsuspecting victim.”
The Undertaker added helpfully: “Thall-Rat, the brand favored by Thelma Teasdale for poisoning her husband, is freely sold in hardware stores nationwide.”
Thelma Teasdale’s crime was only discovered because her husband’s brother Raymond was a chemist. Keith’s dizziness, stomach pain, and nausea were at first put down to Christmas and New Year’s overindulgence. But when followed a few days later by pains in the hands and feet, agonizing leg cramps, and complete hair loss, Raymond looked up his old pharmacology textbooks. When Keith died at only forty-two, Raymond declined Thelma’s offer of tea and cake at his brother’s wake and went to the police.
It was the sort of juicy crime news Brian usually enjoyed. But he showed no interest in the Thelma Teasdale story so Judy didn’t pursue it.
However, when she arrived home from her next shift, she called his attention to another news story, waking him with tearful ferocity at one o’clock. Bursting into the bedroom, she smacked a first-edition Telegraph on the bed and pushed the offending page, smelling of fresh ink and still warm from the presses, into his sleepy face.
With the copytakers’ room envious of Judy’s marriage to a handsome swimming champion, an older unmarried colleague, Cynthia Jackson, had hastened to point out the story to her. “Look at these bitches cuddling up to your hubby!” Cynthia said, frowning sympathetically. “He doesn’t look too upset about it, though.”
The photograph and accompanying caption in the sports pages showed three grinning female swimmers, slippery as seals in their wet racing costumes, stroking Brian’s muscular bare chest and shoulders. Brian was flexing his right bicep and beaming back at them.
Super-smooth Olympic 1,500-meter hopeful Brian Tasker proves popular with the girls as he displays his new shaved-down physique at North Sydney Olympic Pool.
Coach Don Wilmott is recommending this innovative trend from America for his entire male swim squad. “For extra speed, even a fraction of a second, my boys will be shaving down before big events,” Wilmott says. And distance specialist Tasker looks enthusiastic. “I’ll try anything to give me an edge,” he says.
The girls (from left) — backstroker Rowena Flynn, 18; breaststroker Maxine Vanderhaag, 19; and up-and-coming freestyler Carole Sinnott, 17 — certainly endorse Brian’s sleek new look!
Dazed and defensive, Brian sat up in bed. “It was a posed picture, a setup by the photographer,” he protested. But his heart was racing. He didn’t recognize Judy’s fierce tortured face, the bared teeth and projectile tears. “Just a bit of fun. Some girls in the squad fooling about for the camera.”
“You’re a married man,” she sobbed. “It’s awful and too intimate. And I suppose you’re sleeping with them?”
It was his turn to be indignant. “Don’t be ridiculous!”
She ran out of the room, crying, “I never want to see this disgusting sort of thing again,” and slept on the couch downstairs.
When Brian returned from his early-morning training at seven, Judy was sitting with Dulcie at the kitchen table with the offending sports page in front of them. Both women were smoking cigarettes and drinking tea, and they fell silent and glowered at him as he entered.
“You’re up early, love,” he ventured to Judy. He was exhausted from exercise, sleeplessness, and emotion. “What about your sleep?”
She drew on her cigarette, said nothing, and stared at him with tragic possum eyes.
“Popular with the girls,” Dulcie quoted. She gave the newspaper a disdainful backhand slap. “Surely you can’t expect your poor wife to be able to sleep after that?” Her eyes were glistening.
That afternoon at training, the swim squad passed around the paper, laughing and teasing each other over smooth Brian and his “fans,” and the girls all complaining, ridiculously, that they looked fat in the photo. Shortly after, Brian’s next 1,500-meter time trial did not go well. He’d lost another 6.08 seconds.
Don frowned and looked anxious. “What’s the matter, son?” he wanted to know. “You look buggered. Everything alright at home?”
“Sure.”
“Well, take ten minutes to rest, you bloody slowcoach, then I want another 800 at 90 percent effort.” And Don stamped off.
Dusk was falling and dozens of nesting swallows flitted about the pool’s cornices and skimmed over the water’s surface. On one side of the pool, commuter trains rumbled home over the Harbour Bridge; on the other, the eyes, teeth, and lips of Old King Cole, the giant grinning face at Luna Park’s entrance, suddenly lit up, scaring the swallows perched on King Cole’s eyelashes. Little ferries steamed back and forth across Lavender Bay.
At twilight the ornate art deco fixtures of the stands, gyms, and changing rooms, built when the North Sydney Olympic Pool proudly hosted the 1938 Empire Games events, seemed more gloomily ornamental to the swim squad than they did to their sleepy eyes at dawn training.
Ever since Don had moved his team from the Drummoyne pool to North Sydney’s superior facilities two years before, Brian had been a little in awe of this place, the venue for an extraordinary eighty-six world record — breaking swims. As he recovered his breath, his eyes followed a flight of swallows to their nests above the topmost stands. Sitting in the back row was Dulcie, staring down at him.
When he arrived home an hour later, she met him at the door. Oddly, for this hour, and the evening temperature, and indoors, she was wearing her satiny blue strapless swimsuit.
She pulled him toward the stairs. She had applied fresh makeup and her body was shiny with perfumed lotion. He noticed her eyes had that eerie gleam.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Not anymore. Why were you spying on me?”
“In order to check on you with your young girlfriends, you cruel bastard. You’d better come with me so I can punish you.”
He was speechless. Her urgent tugging released the now-familiar warm scent of womanly flesh, and the satiny fabric of the blue swimsuit brushed against his face with its own erotic smell, and his anger, bewilderment, and weakened resolve had no resistance.
Afterward, thanks to her wild fingernails, his back was scratched even more painfully than usual.
When Dulcie greeted him at the door the next evening, he managed to avoid her embrace. That she was wearing her swimsuit, he found alarming.
“I saw you watching me at the pool again,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore. Seriously, it has to end now.”
She smiled coquettishly. “I have to make sure Johnny Weissmuller is behaving.”