Wakefield Press

The Heaven I Swallowed

Rachel Hennessy was born in Canberra, and has lived in Newcastle, Sydney, Brisbane, London and Adelaide. She resides now in Melbourne with her partner and two young daughters. In writing The Heaven I Swallowed, Rachel drew on the stories of her maternal grandmother, who was given up for adoption at a young age due to her Aboriginal ancestry, as well as the story of her paternal great-aunt, whose husband fought in World War II. She was motivated also by former Prime Minister John Howard’s statement that Aboriginal children were taken away from their families ‘for their own good’.

Rachel Hennessy’s first novel The Quakers won the Adelaide Festival Award for an Unpublished Manuscript and was launched at Writers’ Week in February 2008. The manuscript was also short-listed for the Varuna Writers’ Centre Manuscript Development program and won the ArtsSA prize for Creative Writing. The Heaven I Swallowed, Rachel Hennessy’s second novel, was runner-up in the Australian/Vogel Award.

Wakefield Press

1 The Parade West

Kent Town

South Australia 5067

www.wakefieldpress.com.au

First published 2013

This edition published 2013

Copyright © Rachel Hennessy 2013

All rights reserved. This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced without written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

Edited by Julia Beaven, Wakefield Press

Cover designed by Stacey Zass

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author:    Hennessy, Rachel.

Title:    The heaven I swallowed [electronic resource]: a novel / Rachel Hennessy.

ISBN:    978 1 74305 197 9 (ebook: epub).

Dewey Number:    A823.4

For my father, Lance

PART I

‘… you must e’en take it as a gift of God, though it’s as dark almost as if it came from the devil.’

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

1

When I was twelve the Virgin Mary visited me. In the convent’s small bed I lay between sleep and wakefulness creating visions of joy, of rescue. Too young to recognise the line between dream desire and the feelings awakening in my body, I conjured a boy to take my hand and lead me from the institution, into the darkness. It was then the Virgin appeared. She was not like the statues in the chapel, all pure of cheek and sweet-lipped; no painted beauty, but rather a shimmering, disturbing essence. And I was terrified.

The Loreto Sisters who gave me my home and education loved the Virgin Mary but I did not tell them about it. There were only two possible reactions to such a story: they would whip me for telling sacrilegious lies, or they would embrace me, turning Mary’s appearance into a sign of my calling to the nun-hood. This, I felt, was as frightening as any lashing.

So I kept the visitation to myself. As time went on, I realised the Virgin had not come to scare me but to remind me of the need to ignore certain pleasures. How much closer to God I would be if I resisted those half-dreams of longing and escape, and remembered, instead, the ethereal Virgin. He would be watching and He would approve of my restraint, of all that I would hold back now and in the years to come.

My brush with the Virgin was the reason I gave such importance to the name Mary. I took it as my Confirmation name, running it alongside the Grace and Teresa my dead mother had given me. Holy Mary, mother of God, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou amongst women. Grace Teresa Mary Johnston. I liked the thought of Mary being part of me, as much as I enjoyed Mass and the taste of the holy Eucharist slipping down my throat. These were signs of the goodness inside me, the heaven I swallowed.

I did not see the Virgin again throughout my childhood, although I did try. I would flicker open my eyes in the darkness of the dormitory and wish Her back. But She never came. Even if I thought I had caught a glimpse of Mary I knew, in my heart, it was only my own weak will, creating phantoms for company.

†

On the day the real Mary was to arrive, twenty-eight years after the Virgin’s visitation, I thought again of that night, of all I had given up. I was tightly wrapped, you might say, my strong hair, thinned by forty years of life, pulled back in a severe bun at the base of my neck. How proud the Loreto Sisters would have been to see the adept way I could now manipulate bobby pins to ensure not a stray wisp fell loose, nothing to ruin the composure of my face.

At the mirror of my dressing table I applied a thin layer of lipstick and dusted my cheeks with the faintest hint of pink, additions the nuns never would have approved of. But I enjoyed the moisture on my lips, liked to use the round, cream porcelain rouge-holder, painted with lilac bunches of grapes pouring down towards a bright-blue Kingfisher. Fred had sent this to me from Japan. It was part of a set—with a matching ring box—and hearing the gentle clink as the lid fitted back reminded me of perfect proportions, everything in its proper place.

The bevelled edges of the mirror doubled my shoulders and arms back at me, the navy cotton sleeves of my dress short enough for the heat, long enough for decency. This was not a dress I was fond of, bought more for its sombre colour than its style, and I tried to imagine how I would appear to the young girl travelling toward me.

Would her heart be pounding as mine was? Or would the insipidity of her race enable her to glide without concern to her destination, to my waiting, anxious arms?

I picked up my navy cotton gloves, cross-stitches running along the fingers, and walked down the entrance hallway. I wondered about wearing these gloves on the girl’s arrival, it would be nice to look a little more casual, to embrace the whiff of freedom that had begun to take over the country since the end of the war. But I knew it was not appropriate. Who else would be accompanying the girl, aside from Father Benjamin? He, surely, had known me long enough for such formality to be unnecessary, but there was bound to be a stranger too, someone from the Home who would scrutinise and examine me, and it was necessary to pass that test.

Ten minutes after they were due to arrive I stood waiting on the driveway, clutching my gloves. My legs in their stockings were damp with sweat and I continued to ignore the man at number 22 clipping his box hedges into rectangles, his way of protecting himself from the eyes of the street. He, no doubt, was curious about my reason for being there, but I was in no mood to indulge him.

From my vantage point I could see the memorial park at the end of the road, the statue on the corner of a young soldier with a bandaged head and a recently damaged bayonet. The local paper reported a storm had broken the bayonet, but I had my doubts. Two streets back from the harbour, Wayville Street—my street since marriage had delivered me here—was seemingly quiet, its residents getting on with life after war. It was rarely touched by the growing number of cars. Quiet and unassuming, my neighbours were unwilling to leave their own four walls to comfort one another; I had learnt that the hard way. Occasionally, though, the veneer would crack, and one night, I felt sure, someone had snapped the thin piece of metal off the bronze statue and stolen it away. I had never liked the statue, too realistic by half, and had secretly hoped its mutilation might result in it being taken down altogether.

Twenty minutes passed before a large black Ford pulled into the driveway. I stepped back onto the grass, pulled my gloves on, and folded my arms in an attempt to hold myself together, although it probably made me look stern and uninviting.

Father Benjamin turned off the engine of the car and pushed open his door. His thin face with ridiculous saucer-shaped ears, appeared, in contrast to my agitation, serene. I couldn’t see the girl. A red-haired woman barked, ‘Hurry up, get out of the car.’

Father Benjamin greeted me and I replied civilly, although my whole being was centred on the child as she pushed open her door and walked around the black metal to stand next to the front wheel.

Mary.

She looked to be about eight years of age, though I knew her to be twelve. Her hair was long and black and she held her arms in front of her, fingers knotted together. She wore scuffed brown leather Mary Janes much too big for her, and a frilled blue dress, pinching and stained, several sizes too small. It was a hand-me-down, used by one ward after another, sent out into the world and returned again when the inevitable happened. I knew such dresses.

The smallness of the dress showed off most of Mary’s skin and I was shocked to see how dark it truly was. When I asked—and I had asked—Father Benjamin had assured me the only ones deemed suitable were those who could pass for a white. What kind of white? Their white obviously was not the same as mine. My white was the white of sheets in sunlight or crisp blank pieces of paper not yet marked with the scribbles of my students. My white brought light into a room, not the sullen expression this girl wore. Her eyes were lowered, her head turned slightly to the side, as if checking for someone standing behind her.

I had imagined someone completely different. As a widow I could not be fussy—the adoption of a white child would have been almost impossible—and here was Father Benjamin handing me what I had longed for, with barely a piece of paper signed. Yet how could this be fulfilment?

‘She shouldn’t be a problem,’ Father Benjamin said, as if reading my hesitation. ‘It is wonderful to have someone like you involved in this.’

Ah, flattery. Father Benjamin knew where to catch at me. I tried to smile modestly but I was gratified. The red-haired woman now stood with her hands on her hips between Father Benjamin and the girl, turning the three of them into a grotesque family, and smiled back as if allowing me into a secret club. A little spark ran through me.

‘Shoulders back,’ the woman hissed into the girl’s ear and I saw Mary attempt to roll back her hunched self.

She was a mess. Stirrings of pity came to me, feelings I knew I would need to suppress. Soft mothering did no one any good. I had seen my fellow teachers taken down by girls who suspected weakness, and I could hear Sister Clare: Little vipers children are, they nip at your soul until you bleed.

‘Hello, Mary,’ I said, and unfolded my arms. ‘I’m Mrs Smith.’

She drew her head up.

‘Hello.’

It was the first time I saw her eyes. They seemed enormous, honey-brown rimmed with black, taking over her face. I had dreamt of those kinds of eyes, looking up at me from my arms, staring out from a bundle of soft, lamb’s wool blankets. Mary’s eyes made me forget the rest of her—the broad nose, the thin legs, the skin—and any thoughts of sending her back disappeared for the moment.

‘Get your things,’ I said and immediately she lowered her eyes again. Without her gaze, I had lost something. My voice turned hard. ‘Go inside.’

‘She doesn’t have any things, Mrs Smith.’ The woman, who Father Benjamin had failed to introduce, said this with a sneer and I could imagine a room full of confiscated possessions, picked over when the mood took. No one, after all, has nothing.

‘Well … off you go then,’ I repeated.

I watched as Mary walked up the driveway, struggling to keep her shoulders back, her feet sliding about in those cavernous shoes.

‘I will do my best with her,’ I said to Father Benjamin and he nodded. His companion already had the passenger door open, keen to get back to her other projects, more wards to distribute, more suitcases to plunder. Father Benjamin hovered in front of me, taking a covered hand in both of his in a gesture that reminded me of a blessing.

‘You are truly a good woman,’ he said, squeezing my fingers between his two palms. I could feel the hotness of his skin through the thin cotton of my glove and was relieved he was not touching my damp skin. ‘She … well, she is lucky.’

Father Benjamin dropped my hand and slipped back into the driver’s seat. The sound of the engine faded as he drove away and I became aware, once again, of the clipping at number 22. Had it continued through Mary’s arrival? I had lost track of other sounds. My neighbour had, presumably, eavesdropped on the arrival and would spread the news.

I stood for a moment, thinking of how Father Benjamin could have been more effusive, could have called me more than just a good woman. You are truly a saint, he might have said. You are truly blessed. This would have had a clearer sound to it, a bell ringing out into the ticking street, the hot summer sky blasted by my act of goodness.

†

Two months before, in late November, I had been reading the Sun Herald. The afternoon had turned grey after a week of temperatures in the nineties and I sat drinking tea in the front room (the ‘sun’ room Fred used to call it though I preferred ‘front’ because its position would never change, even if the weather did).

There had been no sun in the front room on that day, and the open window brought in a breeze, a south-westerly probably, although I have never been able to tell from where the wind is blowing. Fred would have declared this with assurance—‘Coming in from the east’ perhaps, his voice breaking the silence.

I read the paper and there was no Fred to declare the provenance of the air, my newspaper simply rustling between my fingertips. Perhaps it was a wind from God because I happened to notice an article with the headline: ‘Homes Are Sought For These Children’. Printed below the article was a photo of a group of young girls, each dressed in a lace-collared smock. The caption read: ‘These octoroons and quadroons have been rescued from shameful circumstances and generously taken into the homes of Christian families.’ The border of the photo cut off the tops of their heads and finished just below the hem of their garments so they looked incomplete. The one in the centre clutched a stuffed rabbit to her chest and the newsprint had washed out most of her blackness. She, and at least two of the other girls, looked as pale as me.

As I read on, my heart swelled with pride from the description of good work being done. My countrymen, the strong and the brave, having survived two major wars, were creating the ideal world. Here they were, far away now from European and Pacific death, helping those less fortunate to find their place in the new utopia. That such children existed, I had barely been aware. Yes, I knew of the displaced children; I heard them screeching in their foreign tongues at their impatient, foreign mothers who, I could only assume, wanted them home for supper. Thankfully not yet living in my street, they were close enough to see on my evening walk, to hear their high-pitched laughter. Once, I had encountered a swarm of them down near the bay entrance, their black-haired heads lined up along the metal fence, spitting into the harbour—not a competition to see who could reach the furthest, they were simply spitting their contempt into the water below.

I had no time for such children and no thought of rescue until I read the newspaper article. What was I doing, after all, to help the country move towards its enlightenment? What contribution was I making? There had been Fred. Yes, that had been a certain kind of sacrifice. But otherwise?

In the past it had been my voice making announcements over the school Tannoy, the sound of my footsteps stopping the girls giggling, my ticks and crosses on their tests leading them from ignorance to knowledge. I had taught and cajoled for nineteen years, until the unpleasantness.

I picked up a slice of lemon sponge, sitting on a plate next to my favourite teacup, delicate four-leaf clovers painted on its cream surface. I put the sponge in my mouth, a bridge of mock cream helping to counteract the crumbling of the cake. It was dry, too dry, and I suddenly felt sure the baker had chosen this inferior sponge for me because I no longer held the position of English mistress. He knew, as did the butcher and the milkman, that I was making no contribution at all to the rebuilding and, without a husband by my side, I could be fed inferior cakes, mediocre lamb shanks and past-its-prime milk, without protest. I washed the crumbs down with tea, tired from my small sips and chilled by the wind coming in from who knew where. The newspaper lay across my knees, the article offering an entrance into a place I had once been. That place where my gestures had made a difference, where young eyes watched closely the tension of my muscles, the weather of my moods.

†

I found Mary in the front hall. She had only taken a couple of steps inside before stopping opposite the hallway stand where an oval mirror hung below hat hooks. The mirror was too high to give her a full reflection, but it could have provided a glimpse. The girl wasn’t interested. Instead, she stared at my green plush carpet. I wondered at her lack of curiosity about herself.

‘We’ll have to get you better shoes,’ I said.

Her hands twitched.

‘Come into the kitchen.’

I walked past her, along the hall. I could not hear her moving behind me on the carpet, her clopping became evident only once we crossed onto the linoleum. I turned to see her standing just past the doorway, her arms hanging down by her sides as if too heavy for her, her gaze still fixed on the floor. I could think of nothing to say. Was a welcome too personal? Should I maintain formality? In the end, I focused on what she seemed so intent on.

‘There isn’t a scratch on my floor, do you see?’ I pointed to the yellow linoleum, patterned to look like tiles. Fred had never seen this flooring, there were still wooden boards when he went away and, although I had written to tell him, I was sure he never pictured the change.

‘I would like it to be kept scratch-less, do you understand? So you need to be careful with your chair.’ I demonstrated by picking up one of the kitchen chairs and moving it out from the table by lifting it, rather than dragging. Twice I repeated the action.

‘Do you understand, Mary?’

She gave a murmur. It reminded me of a mumble I had given the Sisters when they demanded proof of my obedience.

‘In this house, Mary, we reply “yes” or “no” when asked a question.’

This was what the Sisters would have said.

‘Yes.’

‘And we say the person’s name.’

‘Yes, Mrs Smith.’

I stood looking at the girl. Should Mary really call me this? I could neither think of having the girl call me ‘mother’ nor give her licence to gather up my first name and use it at will. But ‘Mrs Smith’? It sounded too distant.

‘I think you should call me Auntie Grace.’

There had been one auntie in my childhood, a woman not related to my parents but who tried to provide a few good memories for me. It seemed the best compromise.

‘Yes, Auntie Grace,’ Mary replied.

Her tone was flat. The words had the same feeling of dull repetition of a response in Mass from the unfaithful. This did not bother me. I had spent so many years insisting on the fervent passion of ‘Amen’ to Fred, I had little doubt I would succeed in doing the same with Mary. She was just a young child and I had the entire world to give her.

†

The next morning we went to buy new shoes, catching the tram into the city because I was still reluctant to drive Fred’s father’s Holden. I kept it sheltered in the carport, away from envious, disapproving eyes. Although petrol rationing was over, it was still seen by many in Wayville Street as an extravagance.

I was uncomfortable, too, with the threads the car held of my father-in-law, a small-town wool classer. He had come to the city on the insistence of his wife, was given a house by his wife’s over-friendly uncle—the house I now live in—and promptly sunk into the Depression and unemployment. The car had contained samples of dirty grey wool, covering the rear window shelf and the dash. Fred had laughed about it when he inherited the vehicle but I had seen it as rather pathetic, a man clinging to the remnants of a job he could no longer do. Yet neither of us had been willing to throw the wool away and so it stayed, giving the interior a greasy patina.

For once, I would have liked the cocoon of the car instead of the looks Mary and I received. The neighbourhood glances as we made our way to the tram had been bad enough, but walking down Elizabeth Street with her hand in mine it seemed the world was made of sideward glares, thin-lipped disapproval, openly hostile stares.

Mary wore the blue dress she had arrived in, the stains slightly less prominent from the sponging I had given it, but it still highlighted her dark limbs and there was no disguising her difference from the primly hatted children I saw following their mothers, all blonde curls and sweet eyes. How black Mary’s hand was next to my skin. It implied a certain kind of dirtiness, even though I had washed her myself in the bath the night before, scrubbing hard with the pumice stone to ensure no layers of the Girls’ Home remained. She had raised no objection, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, tipping her head back when told to, perhaps grateful for the chance to be truly clean. I would just have to keep her out of the sun, try to get her to fade a little.

As we walked, I worried we would run into someone I knew. Would Mr Roper materialise to add his look of disbelief to the strangers who marched past us? I kept my eyes down, mimicking Mary. I felt a burning in my cheeks. It had been a long time since I had received such attention.

I have never been the kind of woman who men look at, fall madly in love with, long for and cannot imagine living without. Not ugly, but not beautiful. Just a middling woman, sitting straight-backed in a chair on the edge of the dance floor while all the true beauties were escorted away by dashing, handsome men. At least I was not often left to last; some plump young man would eventually ask me, as clumsy with his words as he would prove to be in dancing. I offered an alternative to the fat girls or ones with glasses. My face was described by one of the Sisters as ‘angelic’, but I knew from an early age that angels would have ensured themselves more striking cheekbones, less insipid eyes and a nose smaller and straighter.

Fred had not been one of the boys who asked me to dance, though we met for the first time at a local ball not long after I came to the city to begin teaching at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope High School. Fred did not recall meeting me when, seven years later, he returned to the neighbourhood after attending Oxford. I saw him at church. I would like to tell a romantic story of us moving, our very first time, to the centre of the dance floor and knowing we would twirl together for the rest of our lives. The harsher fact was he had failed university and returned a bundle of disappointment and desperation. Perhaps he would not have looked twice at me if he had become a successful don. But I was what he needed: an acolyte who confirmed his superiority to the rest of mankind. And at twenty-eight, I was staring down the barrel of spinsterhood and adored him enough to help him reclaim his confidence. We needed one another to survive.

I held my head up again. How silly to be walking with Mary like a meek sheep. This tiny thing beside me, gripping my hand in terror at losing hold, was the epitome of my goodness, the difference I was making to the bustling boulevard, an affirmation of all that could be done, even without beauty. How dare these other women judge me? I had always been separate from them and I would remain so now. Not only would I buy Mary new shoes, I would buy her a new dress and show off my benevolence in something pink, ostentatious and lacy.

Inside the department store Mary forgot her timidity and gazed in amazement at the glass counters glistening with perfume bottles, the rows of polished heads displaying fashionable hats, the suited man at the grand piano playing ‘Greensleeves’. She stood uncertainly at the bottom of the escalator and I had to pull her hand to ensure she got on the moving wooden step.

How miraculous this escalator had seemed to me at first, to move without moving, like floating upward towards God. Sacrilegious, really, to think of one’s soul needing such man-made help but still, it appealed to me and I would have shared the thought with Mary except we were already at the top. I stepped confidently onto the solid floor and Mary jumped nervously off beside me, her hand breaking apart from mine. She did not attempt to regain my grip, following a short distance behind.

The shoe department smelt of leather, the vinyl floor dented with holes, the marks of heels strolling back and forth while customers tested comfort and size. Behind the counter a saleswoman with charcoal hair, pulled back in the same low-neck bun as mine, stared openly at Mary.

‘Can I help you?’ The woman’s voice had little help in it.

‘I need to buy my …’ How to describe what Mary was to me? ‘I need to buy her new shoes. You can see these ones are too big.’ I was trying to be friendly.

‘What size is she?’ the saleswoman asked, no longer looking at Mary.

‘What size are you, Mary?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know.’

‘What was that, Mary?’ I admonished.

‘Don’t know, Auntie Grace. Never had shoes bought for me.’

‘How can she not know?’ the saleswoman asked me, as if the girl was not there, as if she hadn’t heard Mary’s answer herself.

‘You’ll have to measure her,’ I insisted and the saleswoman looked at me sharply, eyes narrowed. I held her gaze.

‘Of course.’ Her tone spoke of her opposite inclination. ‘Mary-Janes?’

I nodded and she disappeared into a backroom without having gone anywhere near Mary’s feet. We waited. I felt hot and strangely conspicuous, as if our presence in the store was being reported via clandestine whispers. Mary moved over to stand near a large brown, box-shaped machine. Three long metal tubes stuck out of its top like tentacles.

‘What’s this, Auntie Grace?’

‘I don’t know, Mary.’

‘That,’ said the saleswoman, who had reappeared with two shoeboxes in her hand, ‘is the latest thing.’

Her enthusiasm for her job had returned with the shift to this ‘latest thing’. A fluoroscope, she explained, and all one had to do was place one’s foot inside to see whether the shoe fitted. I had no idea what she was talking about.

‘It takes an X-ray,’ the saleswoman continued in a patronising tone. This did not help. ‘Put on the shoes and place your foot in here.’ She pointed to a hole in the bottom of the box, which appeared to have a metal plate with a rubber imprint of a foot glued onto it. Mary did not move.

‘Do as she says,’ I told her. I was aware of an elderly couple not too far from us, shoulders hunched together, watching closely. Mary slipped off her old shoes, easy enough given their misfit, and put on the brown leather pair the woman had brought her. She placed her foot inside the machine and the saleswoman bent over the left of the three tubes.

‘Do you want to see?’ she asked, pointing to the right tube. The centre one was, I assumed, for the customer. Mary did not lower her head to look.

I bent over and, for a minute, saw only blackness. I shifted the position of my face and suddenly stared at the illuminated lines of Mary’s foot. Here were her bones, glowing a greenish white. I let out a soft ‘oh’. To see all the way through the skin seemed almost obscene. I lifted my head without checking whether the shoes did or did not fit.

‘Too small,’ the saleswoman declared and bustled over to one of the other shoeboxes.

We tried numerous pairs of shoes using this method. I did not look into the machine again, leaving the saleswoman to make the decisions, the glow of Mary’s foot imprinted on my mind’s eye.

I decided the new dress I’d planned to buy would have to wait. The shoe department had almost done me in, with its fancy gadget and tiresome saleswoman. I wanted a cup of tea but could only imagine the looks Mary would get in the cafeteria. Even without the girl, I had only ever gone there surrounded by the confident War Widows’ Group under the control and guidance of Marjorie Bishop, whose orders, sharp as a sergeant major’s, tended to make the snobbish waitresses cower and ensured our receipt of the best chocolate éclairs. Alone, I had no such power. We walked, instead, to Hyde Park.

We sat on one of the benches opposite the Archibald fountain. The sun was out and Mary swung her feet in their new, snug-fitting shoes. It had taken some time to convince Mary they were really hers, and I had not seen gratitude on her face, only suspicion. Now the trickling of the fountain’s water and the calls and laughter and cries of families having lunch were a relief after the struggles and muffled obsequiousness inside the store. Struck by the sweetness of the moment I dug into my purse to find a penny.

‘Here, Mary, go and make a wish in the fountain.’

She held the penny in the palm of her hand and frowned.

‘Make a wish, Auntie Grace?’

‘Yes, you throw it into the water and make a wish.’

‘Throw the money into the water, Auntie Grace?’

‘Yes.’

‘But why, Auntie Grace?’

The sweetness of the moment was leaking away.

‘Because I said you could.’

‘Wish for what, Auntie Grace?’

‘Anything you want.’

‘Anything, Auntie Grace?’

I repressed my sigh of exasperation, reminding myself that she would, of course, be ignorant of such matters.

‘Give the penny back to me if you don’t want it.’

Her palm closed and she walked toward the fountain. She stood at the lip of the six-sided pond with a statue of Apollo in its centre, turtles spurting water up to his face. Two young boys were throwing rocks, trying to hit the water arcs. Mary watched them for a moment. What would she wish for?

The night before Fred left I wished on a shooting star. I should not have—such beliefs could be blasphemous—but I clung to every superstition after Fred and I were married, the year the war began. I insisted he throw salt over his shoulder and leave his boots outside the house.

We had courted for two years and been married for four before he was posted overseas. It was not one of the fly-by-night marriages happening all around us, couples thrown together by their fear of death. We knew one another well, had found the crook in each other’s arms perfect for being held in bed. I’d got used to his coughing at night and the strong, masculine tobacco smell that clung to his skin; he smoked a packet of Country Life a day. He called me Gracie.

On our last night together, he fell asleep in the living room after promising we would stay up and dance until dawn. I stood on the back step, the sky alive with stars, and saw a streak, a tiny line of light. ‘Please let him come home,’ I wished. I could make myself believe there was an element of God in that falling piece of fire and I had sealed a deal. Naïve, like a little girl.

‘Mary! Come away from there now,’ I called.

She still stood next to the fountain, in full sunlight and with no hat to protect her, rays bouncing off the water straight into her face; surely she had already gone a shade darker.

She turned and walked towards me. Her head was tilted slightly to the left, her eyes averted. I followed her line of sight and saw, over on the grass, a group of drifters sitting cross-legged. Four of them, in grubby checked shirts and torn trousers, barefoot, grey blankets rolled into swags beside them. They were smoking, one with a pipe, and all were as black as the ace of spades.

‘Hurry up, Mary,’ I said, although she was already next to me. I gave her the box with her old pair of shoes inside. She held it against her chest, both arms wrapped around it. Her hands were wet.

‘What did you wish for?’

The words were out of my mouth before I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t ask, that she wouldn’t know not to tell me.

‘To stay with you, Auntie Grace,’ she replied.

We walked down the path towards the ANZAC memorial. The Hill’s figs along the avenue were not tall enough to block out the harsh midday sun and I pulled my hat down lower to protect myself from the light. I strode without acknowledging Mary beside me. I knew her reply about the wish was a lie, her inflection as false as the schoolgirls’ whispers about ‘female problems’ in order to escape morning callisthenics. ‘You understand don’t you, Mrs Smith?’ they had said, as if I wanted to share their monthly secrets.

We approached the granite cenotaph. I had come here often over the years, drawn to the memorial statue inside it. This bronze statue, depicting a fallen soldier lying on a shield held up by three women, had not a chance of being damaged. I would not take Mary to see him, though. The soldier was naked, and while I had grown used to the detailed flesh of the fallen youth, it was not suitable for a young girl, no matter what her upbringing might have been. Instead, I stopped outside the cenotaph at the corner of the rectangular memorial pool reflecting tree trunks and stone columns. No one had thrown coins into this water.

‘This is for the men who died in the war, Mary,’ I said.

She was staring at the steps leading up into the tomb, as if she knew there was something inside she should not see.

‘The poplar trees are grown from seeds brought all the way from France. To commemorate the soldiers who went off to fight. Men who died for their country.’

‘Died for their country’ had such force when spoken out loud. Was Mary able to feel the pride, the honour of their sacrifice? A six-year-old at the end of the war, how much could she really understand? I had taught older girls, knew how to inspire them.

‘The war awaits, as do I,’ I started to intone. ‘The fevered pitch, the savage cry, I stand upon the glorious brink, And try most vainly, not to think.’

The beginning of one of Fred’s poems. Out loud, the rhymes sounded clumsy and trite. Mary said nothing.

‘We should be heading home.’

The shoebox, wet from Mary’s hands, slipped through her arms and her old shoes fell with a loud thud onto the ground.

†

My dear Gracie,

I am finally able to send word, although I am not sure when this letter will get to you. The boat trip was, as expected, awful but I will not offend you with revolting details, my sweetness. I have arrived safely in Port Moresby, that is all you probably want to know and I cannot give you any particulars of the plans ahead. If I did, you would find your letter blackened with the censor’s pen. I am as well as I can be and I think of you often.

My time at Randwick has me used to all the waiting, the drills and the tedium of army life. I am not impatient to get to the real fighting. Some of the younger boys keep talking of the adventure ahead. I am not so naïve as to see it like that. I remember Dad’s tales of the Great War, they were enough to make me understand what battle will be really like and I am not sorry Dad passed away before this new threat, never hearing of the Japs on our doorstep. ‘We’ll show ’em’ the boys keep saying and make me feel like an alien. They are so sure of their bravery.

Often, I feel guilty about the years I sat on home soil, still able to see you, when now I am reminded that men were dying for the Empire every one of those moments. (I talk of guilt and wonder what really made me transfer to active duty? Not love of Empire, or the chance to defend my homeland, but the simple fact that I would not be able to look the church congregation in the eye, for fear they would see my cowardice. Perhaps we cowards will go to any lengths to prove we are not.)

I pass the time writing poems again like I did in England. I never showed you them because I was afraid of their mediocrity. Maybe I will send you some in the days ahead. I am terrified, of course, of the other men finding out. Already I have erased my university days from my history and have demoted myself from Bank Manager to Clerk for the sake of much needed camaraderie. Thankfully, I am not the only religious man here, besides the Chaplain, and I have a few men with whom to discuss the moral dilemma of taking life. Many times Private L. has quoted a headline from the Catholic Weekly at me: ‘Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.’ It has become somewhat of a personal mantra for him—to the point, I have to say, of driving me a little mad, but I suppose it gives him solace.

I have to believe the defence of my family is a Christian duty, though there are some here who would not agree with my leaving you in your condition. The boys tell stories of their brothers and uncles who have stayed at home for the sake of their expecting wives. They do not seem to be resentful. Sometimes they even appear to be grateful they can give themselves up to the war with the reassurance there is someone at home to continue their line. It is a comfort to me, also, to know if I do not return, I will leave my trace upon the earth. Coming from no family tradition yourself, Gracie, you might not understand how knowing my home will continue in the hands of my son, or daughter, means so much.

I think of my mother, embarking for London, still in her widow’s weeds with barely a word of farewell, and my brother not even telling me he had enlisted and now lost to me in the skies above France. (When I told the boys here that I have a brother in the air force they looked at me with new respect, although their admiration was followed, soon after, by suspicion as to why I had not been able to follow in his footsteps.) My immediate family have given me so little. You have become my family, Gracie, and, on my return, the three of us will make ourselves a haven.

When you think of me, then, do not imagine me in these foreign places. Remember me sitting in the shade of the jacaranda tree with you, talking of small things, like our plan to plant tubs of geraniums because they are strong and hardy and colourful. Remember a man who always arranged his books ‘just so’, with a pedantry that made you laugh. Remember a man who remains

Your Fred

2

On Mary’s first night, she had had to make do with sleeping on the lounge, as the single bed was yet to be delivered. I would be installing it, and Mary, in Fred’s study, a room that should have been the nursery. The bed was due at three o’clock and we returned from our shoe-buying expedition an hour before this.

When the two deliverymen arrived with the steel frame and wooden bedheads we discovered that, due to the narrowness of the room, the bed met up with the long edge of Fred’s roll-top desk, cutting off any side access to the mattress.

‘She will just have to get into bed at the end,’ I reasoned and the deliverymen eyed me strangely.

‘Didn’t ya think to measure it beforehand?’ one of them muttered.

‘Can’t ya move the desk some place else?’ the other added.

I could not explain I would not move Fred’s desk an inch, or that I was incapable of seeing the exact size of things. Time and time again it had happened to me. My new electric washing machine, for example, had seemed, from the beautiful sketch in Women’s Weekly, to be the ideal shape for my backyard laundry. It had turned out not to fit through the wooden doorway. Mr Roper had shaken his head at me when he came round to erect a makeshift tarpaulin to protect the machine from the elements, until the company could arrange for its removal. He never approved of my attempts to modernise, or my seeming unwillingness to measure out the possible consequences of my actions.

‘It will be fine, thank you,’ I told the men in a voice that held the authority I’d exercised in the schoolyard.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ they replied meekly, filing out past the awestruck Mary.

‘This is your room, Mary.’

I spread my arms out as much as I was able; admittedly the wardrobe behind the doorway did not leave a great deal of space to display the splendour. Once again, Mary hung back in the corridor. I wanted to grab and shake her into some kind of reaction. I did not, of course, watching as she slowly made her way into the room, edging past me, coming to stand near Fred’s desk. She drew in her nostrils, like she was sniffing the air. The two windows at the end of the room were closed and I could smell lavender, wafting up from the bathroom. Whatever it was she detected, it seemed to make her content, her shoulders relaxed. Unfortunate then, that at that moment, she placed her hand on the desk’s roller.

‘Stay away from the desk!’ I shouted. I could not help myself. The shutter was locked tight but still I had fears of anyone finding their way into it. I had allowed a layer of dust to cover the oak, to provide evidence of any prying fingers and the key to the desk sat inside the ring box on my dresser.

The girl remained ramrod still. I wanted to move over to the windows to draw the curtains against the evening but there was no room, I would have to stand on the bed. There seemed no path back to any kind of excitement.

I walked out to the kitchen to begin making dinner. Perhaps my absence would allow Mary to explore and enjoy her new bedroom.

What I wouldn’t have given, I thought, to have even that amount of space when I was a child. At the convent we had vistas of mountains from the dormitory windows but inside there was nothing to separate one bed from the next, nothing with which to distinguish one’s self from the other girls. One did not have one’s own room.

On the southern side of the convent house there was a plantation of arum lilies. Originally each white blossom had stood for one girl, perhaps some attempt to give us a sense of being individuals. The flowers quickly took germination into their own hands and the Sisters had to weed them back for fear they would take over the entire orchard. I had never liked the lilies, whenever I had been instructed to pick them they made my skin itch.

Mary would wake up in her room to a different kind of vista: the jacaranda tree dominating our back garden. The legend went that when Fred’s parents moved in this tree was almost dead, attacked by a botanical disease. It was Fred’s father who had saved it, a victory, counting as one of the few triumphs during his lacklustre life in the city. The jacaranda was magnificent. I looked forward to spring—‘the falling of the purple’, as Fred called it—when the grass was almost completely covered by the tree’s violet blossoms.

I did not want to think about what Mary would not see, which, of course, made me think of them: those tubs of geraniums. I grew them from cuttings, nurturing them in water-filled jam jars and spent autumn days transferring them to soil, lining the clay pots along the wall of the outhouse-cum-laundry, opposite the jacaranda, something like a waiting guard of honour. I was impatient for Fred’s return, anticipating his joy in each gaudy combination of pink and red and orange. Only later, after the war ended, did I have the energy to move them to the empty space at the side of the carport, out of immediate view.

†

The next day I took Mary down to the end of the street, past the broken bayonet, to the park and the tiny stretch of sand that an optimist might call a beach. At one end it was bordered by a private jetty, at the other the boating club Fred had once talked of joining. He had never found time, only ever fishing off the sandbar and watching other men venture into the harbour.

Whenever I came to the ‘beach’, I sat on the third bench along, set into the sandstone wall and surrounded by a rose bush with one yellow bloom that promised more to come. I would bring my knitting and keep my head down, only there for a change of scene, aware of the need for accompanying children or dogs to be truly valid in such a place. With Mary, it was different.

She broke away from me almost as soon as she saw the sand and sat down with a thud to pull off her shoes and socks. She moved as fast as the seagulls and, before I could tell her not to, she had her bare feet at the water’s edge and was running back and forth to the small lapping waves, daring them to catch her. I did not immediately move to my bench. For once, I was permitted to watch. Unfortunately, we were the only ones there and I had no one to show off to.

Mary picked up a scrap of seaweed and placed a fragment of it on her tongue.

‘Salty,’ she said simply.

Behind her, the boats bobbed and a dark, snake-necked bird—a cormorant?—traced itself along the edge of the shore, disappearing into the water and reappearing sporadically. Mary turned and watched the bird, her torso swelling. For a moment, I thought she was having difficulty breathing until I realised she was holding her breath to the timing of the submerged bird.

I moved up to my bench and sat. Mary stayed on the beach, hopscotching on the imprints of dog paws and webbed feet. I knitted, a ladybug rug I was making for the church fundraising stall, and her occasional looks toward me to ensure I was still there, made the afternoon a joy. I managed very few rows, losing the strict rhythm of knit one, purl one, so often caught up with watching Mary play. The same cormorant—if that is what it was—hung itself out to dry on the jetty, spreading its wings to catch the dusk sun while putrid smells of rotting fish wafted up from a boathouse. Mary dug a hole in the sand with her hands. As the sun set, I did not want to break the spell and she did not want to leave. Our movements were tied to one another, no possibility of loss. How sweet it was.

†

On Sunday, Mary and I went to church. I had always felt soothed in Saint Aloysius, every door an arch pointing to God. It was here I had laid eyes on Fred again. But as Mary and I walked up the path towards the red brick edifice, I knew this was not going to be a typical Sunday. Whispers began as soon as we were noticed walking down the centre aisle towards my usual pew. Heads turned, eyeballs swivelled. This time, unlike on the streets of the city, the atmosphere did not hold contempt, there was a buzz of awe, even excitement, and it was all I could do to stop myself from beaming. I kept my lips tightly pressed together, however, and gave the normal nods and brief smiles to the widows and others I knew. They nodded back, careful to keep their eyes from fixing too firmly on the treasure beside me, though careful not to ignore her either. Mr Mavis clucked at Mary, as if she were a bird, his own peculiar way of acknowledging her presence.

We took our place in the third pew from the front. Mary pressed herself up against the end of the row, seemingly attempting to make herself smaller, while next to me, young Ronny Thompson kept leaning forward to ‘cop a look’—as he would, no doubt, tell his friends later.

Mary started to cough. I could not tell if it was from the beginnings of a cold or the musty smell of the knee cushions’ cloth. I had never really noticed how much the cushions stank. Being there with the girl made me examine everything anew, trying to see it through her own, fresh eyes. She had been to church before, since it was Father Benjamin who helped her come into my care, but the institution’s church was probably some ratty old converted hall, not imbued with the ancient traditions of a place like Saint Aloysius. For fifty years this church had stood, soaking up the religiosity of at least two generations. The plaster of Paris statues of Jesus, Mary and Joseph standing around the altar still held their paints brightly enough to attract the childish eye, yet were worn enough to speak of wisdom.

‘There is the Virgin, your namesake,’ I whispered to Mary who seemed to be focusing on the people closely packed around us. I wanted her mind to be on the less tangible, the less physical. She turned her gaze towards the statue, the Holy mother in blue holding the baby Christ with a small angel on each of Her shoulders. Mary might have spoken but, at that moment, the organ started and we stood for the priest’s entrance.

The Mass was as it always was. Father Benjamin wore the gold cross on his vestments, echoing the real burden of Christ and leaning forward toward the altar as if under a weight, his arms spread like the wings of a bird. In contrast, the wooden back of the pew cut into my shoulderblades and I had to keep my arms pressed tightly into my sides to avoid contact with the children on either side of me. I tried not to be distracted by this discomfort and looked up to the depictions of the saints in stained glass. A stream of red light fell through the pane of Saint Bridget, catching at one of the altar boys. It made me think, once again, that all the decorations should be like the oak Stations of the Cross, dark brown carvings barely perceptible.

‘Are we going up, Auntie Grace?’ Mary whispered.

I blushed to realise how far my thoughts had gone away from the service. The whole row was waiting for me to stand and join the line for Communion.

‘Of course,’ I said.

I knelt before Father Benjamin. He placed the round thin host onto my tongue. ‘Corpus Domini nostri Jesu, Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam,’ he rattled off with his usual lack of enthusiasm. May the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ keep your soul unto life everlasting.

‘Amen,’ I replied loudly and clearly, with the distinct disadvantage of being lower than him. This was the converted essence of Jesus and I did believe and remember Him. I felt that old tingling as the wafer dissolved on my tongue. Maybe it was the renewal of feeling? Or was it another reminder to keep certain feelings, certain thrills, away? Push them under the surface. Only allowed in small doses. This was the problem. How did you distinguish between the joy of God’s love and less exulted sensations? There was so much talk of flesh. For this is my body. For this is my blood. My namesake, Saint Teresa, swooned from ecstasy as the angel plunged into her with an arrow of fire. What could one make of that? And Saint Bridget, up there in her harlot colours, embracing ugliness in order to avoid marriage only to be returned to physical glory, to beauty in the flesh, the moment she committed herself to God!

Beside me, Mary received her Communion bread and for the first time I saw her smile, at Father Benjamin. Not a big smile but a smile nonetheless.

We moved back to the pew and knelt again on the thin mouldy cushions. I could feel, with the bones of my knees, the narrow strip of wood under them. This new discomfort interrupted my prayers further—why had I never noticed before?—not to mention the memory of Mary’s smile.

†

‘She is such a beautiful child,’ I heard Mrs Thompson say, and I had to hide my surprise. Standing in the shadow of the church after the service I could only guess that she could not see Mary well enough. ‘Really, you wouldn’t even know she was … well …’ Mrs Thompson stopped, leaving the sentence in the air.

Her husband gurgled down at the girl as if she did not speak English.

‘We think you are very brave.’ Mrs and Mr Mavis nodded together as she spoke, grim worry-lines cut into their faces at almost the same points.

‘I think it is appalling,’ I heard someone whisper behind me. I turned quickly and only saw Father Benjamin. Disorientated, I lost hold of Mary’s hand.

‘Everything is going well?’ Father Benjamin asked me with an excessive smile.

I nodded, turning back to the group, aware of Mary’s shape moving away.

‘We were saying how brave it is,’ Mrs Mavis repeated and the Thompsons started nodding as well, their bright faces fixed on me.

‘But you are going well?’ Father Benjamin asked again. The focus on me was overwhelming.

‘Yes, yes,’ I heard myself saying and wondered how rude it sounded. The Mavises and Thompsons exchanged glances and found excuses to drift away. Father Benjamin was taken aside by a less confused parishioner.

I stood alone again, the conversations moved on around me.

‘But where is Mary?’ I asked no one in particular.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Smith?’ one of the ladies from the Widows’ Group spoke to me. I had completely forgotten her name.

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘I think you need to sit down.’

To my relief, this came from Mr Roper whose blonde head I had noted in the front row pew. He put his hand on the small of my back and guided me to the chairs put out on the grass for the elderly who wanted to participate in the after-service socialising but whose legs could not cope with the strain. One of the dear old men stood up for me.

‘Thank you.’

I was making a spectacle of myself and could just imagine the whisperings about how it was ‘all too much for her’. For years they had tiptoed around me, without knowing the real reason for my troubles.

‘I am fine,’ I said to Mr Roper. Unfortunately, he was no longer by my side and I remembered he had gone to fetch me a glass of water. He had muttered something about the heat getting to me, his excuse for any social oddness. Yet I was not going to faint. I had only become confused about what life I was leading today.

I spotted Mary in a group of children near the saint’s grotto: a half-egg stone construct with an effigy of what could be Saint Aloysius himself, although the plaster of his youthful face had been too eaten away for positive identification, only the lily he carried still survived. Mary was standing next to Ronny Thompson who seemed to be holding court over the other two girls and one boy in the cluster. The noise and distance made it impossible for me to hear what he was saying but when he stopped they all laughed, even Mary. I knew it was about me.

‘Here you are.’ Mr Roper handed me a glass of lukewarm water. The glass had love hearts etched into it.

‘Could you fetch Mary for me, Mr Roper?’ I asked.

‘Mary? That’s her name is it?’ He glanced over to the group of children with an interested expression. Once again, I thought of how much better his hair would look if he left it natural, instead of running a blonde dye through it so it shone, a harsh beacon in the sun. If anything, this vanity made him seem older than he was. What would a few grey hairs matter around such a face, almost free of wrinkles?

‘How long is the trial for?’ Mr Roper asked.

‘Trial?’

‘You haven’t agreed to have this … child … living in your house for good?’

‘The terms of her stay have not been formerly determined,’ I said to him in a voice from my working days, the same one that had tamed the deliverymen.

Unfortunately, Mr Roper was not a deliveryman. He replied with a grotesque snort and strode off to fetch Mary. The children scattered as he approached, leaving Mary to stand alone, crumbling saint behind her shoulder.

Again, I could not hear what was being said and now Mr Roper’s back blocked me from a view of Mary. For the last five days she had barely been out of my sight. Perhaps the church people were right. Maybe this was too much for me? Waiting for Mr Roper to come back with her, I thought how foolish I’d been, not thinking of the possible consequences, of the true size of things.

†

I would have named my baby Mary if I had been given the time. In the hospital they did not tell me whether it was a boy or a girl I had lost. Still, I knew, as surely as anyone could know, it had been a little Mary forming inside me, with my eyelashes and her father’s nose. She would have loved me as no one had ever bothered to love me before, with the fierceness only a child can have.

Five months too early I felt the pain. I remember a great deal of blood and one of the nurses whispering how sad it was my husband was not able to be there. I thought it was said with pity but in the week they made me stay in the hospital I saw that nurse again, a thin old woman with the stink of misery upon her and the well-meaning smile of the secretly bitter.

‘You are looking better,’ she said, touching the bulge of pillow beside my head. ‘You will be as good as new before you know it.’

I smiled back at her, as I was obliged to do, knowing I was never going to be ‘new’, no matter how hard I tried. I had never been ‘new’. For four years I had been trying to conceive and, at thirty-four, it now seemed an absurdity. Nothing about me was fresh or promising. Like Anne Elliot in Persuasion, my ‘bloom had vanished early’.

How false it was to pretend it was simply a matter of time. How could I know when, or if, the war would end? Time was my greatest enemy and, there Fred was, away from me for who knew how long. Everything shrivelling up inside me while he wrote poetry and turned into a man I did not know.

I wanted to leave the hospital as soon as possible but the doctor insisted on keeping me there day after day, for ‘recovery time’, as if I had lost a limb. I had no visible wound, though, and saw the frowns of other patients’ visitors wondering why I lay there amongst the truly ill, seemingly whole. All my tears were left for the night hours when none of these hard, cold faces were visible, when it was just the lost Mary and me. No flowers beside my bed to offer the consolation of their scent, I was grateful they put me far away enough from the maternity ward, I did not have to hear the crying, or see the suckling, of babies who wanted to stay.

Returning home empty was not the hardest part. It was the avoidance of the neighbours, their heads ducking out of sight as the taxi-cab pulled in, and the frozen silence of the church lot who acted as if I had been on a holiday, at a featureless destination, for a time unspecified.

‘Good to see you back,’ they said, ‘safe and sound.’

I did not receive one word of sympathy. Rationally, I could not blame them. A veil of stern silence was always drawn over such moments: when the Mavis boy was arrested for ‘indecent behaviour’ or the Thompson’s girl sent to Tasmania for her lonely nine months. The body was always in revolt; speaking of its rebellions only exposed you further to the filth.

But, then, could I really be blamed for the dreams that came to me? For all the rumours flying around you would’ve thought I had turned into one of those mad old women who shuffle along the footpaths muttering to themselves, singing invented, tuneless hymns, one step away from the loony farm. I hadn’t come close to that. Yes, I did not leave the house during the week, letting milk bottles accumulate on the front verandah and only finally taking them when the milkman hammered at my door as if it was doomsday. My appearance when I opened the door was quite dishevelled I’m sure (‘looking like the Wild Woman of Borneo’ I imagined the milkman’s wife saying at the next church gathering), but none of this—not the overgrown grass nor the accumulation of weeds, only obvious because my garden was normally so meticulous—added up to the ‘breakdown’ I was labelled with.

I would not have such rumours resurface now, to threaten the new Mary in my life.

‘Mrs Smith?’

Mr Roper had Mary’s hand in his and was looking to give it to me. Mary was, once again, directing her gaze somewhere else but this time I followed her line of sight towards nothing more threatening than a row of baby poplars next to the front brick fence, a mimic of the line at the ANZAC memorial. These were saplings, waiting to grow and become a shield between the church and the noisy, nosey streets beyond.

I stood and took Mary’s hand. Was it my imagination or did the colour of it seem less startling?

‘Time to go back home, Mary,’ I said in a louder voice than I intended. It felt like I had not spoken in so long, as if the church service and the subsequent dizzy spell had taken away my ability to communicate with the here and now.

I took a step towards the car. Mary’s hand tugged at me.

‘But why, Auntie Grace? What did I do wrong?’ Her voice was panicked and she was suddenly unwilling to move.

‘Come on, girl.’ I tried to keep my temper. I’d already had enough unwanted attention and could feel the threat of another hidden buzz waiting to rise up around me.

‘Please, Auntie Grace.’ To my astonishment, Mary had tears in her eyes, wells of water in the bottom lids. Her legs remained stiff, as surely as if she was made of rock.

‘Church is over, we have to go home, Mary,’ I hissed through my teeth.

‘Home?’

‘Of course, home.’

‘Your home, Auntie Grace?’

‘Yes, Mary.’

A wave of relief ran over her face and, as quickly as the tears had come, they retreated. She started to walk, her hand now pulling ahead of me. I picked up my pace to match her suddenly eager strides.

‘Goodbye, Mr Roper,’ I called over my shoulder. I caught a glimpse of his sombre face. Behind him stood my fellow parishioners, looking at us, sharing his disbelief and wonder. Or was it disapproval?

Mary thought I meant to send her back to the Girls’ Home, I realised during the return walk from church. She had misheard somehow or other and the word ‘home’ brought up very different connotations. What a place the institution must have been to elicit such a response from her! I should have guessed by the state of her on arrival. Such dread was a powerful weapon. I could hear Sister Clare: A child’s fear can be your greatest friend. There would, no doubt, be times in which the prospect of being sent back would have its effect.

‘Here we are,’ I said, as we arrived at the driveway. ‘Home.’

Mary ran to the front door to open it for me, though I had not asked her to do this.

‘Thank you, Mary.’ This was her way to ingratiate herself, I knew, not sincere. I was willing to let her do this, willing to pretend I didn’t know where this new-found courtesy came from. It would not last long. She was not the kind of girl to be cowed by phantom notions. Only when she believed I was sending her back there, in front of the gaping doors of Saint Aloysius, did she remember the past.

‘Do you want a cup of tea, Auntie Grace?’ she asked with such polite fervour it almost took my breath away. I nodded my yes.

In the living room I sat in the green velvet armchair once moulded by Fred and listened to the sounds of Mary lighting the stove, filling the kettle, feeding the pot. Had these sounds ever been made in this house except by me? It was unusual to hear them from a distance. I could not recall a time when Fred had made anything, not a drop of tea.

I contemplated his photo up on the mantelpiece, as I had so many times over the seven years since his departure. The glass of the picture frame was free of fingerprints. It had been a long while since I had picked it up; his dark eyes, black hair and meticulously trimmed moustache were preserved in a silver oval. The three-quarter profile in his uniform was so admired by the women of the Widows’ Group—Mrs Chilsom, of course, that was her name. I remembered her telling the story of her husband’s death at the battle of El Alamein, a handkerchief pressed up against her nose. The rest of the widows had fumbled into their handbags to bring out their own miniature flags of grief and I had had to excuse myself, retreating into my bedroom to give the necessary appearance of sorrow.

Mary placed the cup of tea quietly on the side table next to me, a column of steam rising. She was astute enough to know I did not want to be disturbed and sat down softly on the leather footrest she had adopted as her own.

‘What is your real name, Mary?’ I asked, the question sounding loudly into the thick ticking of the glass-domed timepiece sitting next to Fred’s photo. There had been no papers, no certificates, no signatures, no suitcase accompanying Mary’s arrival. She had come to me with only her name.

Mary did not look startled at my question. It seemed beyond my ability to surprise her.

‘I didn’t lie, Auntie Grace,’ she said with something like a smirk in her voice. ‘It really is Mary.’

‘I know you did not lie.’ She was irritating me again. ‘I meant your tribal name, or whatever it is you call it.’

Immediately she was wary.

‘I don’t know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, Auntie Grace.’

Ironically, she had reverted to the accent of her people in her very denial of them. Part of me should have been pleased. After all, she was going to have to take this stance in the future if she wanted to get anywhere. Take inside what was undeniable from the outside. Maintaining the illusion of a lie is easier when you forget it is a lie. Another part was a little sad, something about the allure of the exotic, another part of me which needed to be suppressed.

Sipping my newly made tea, still warm and mixed with just the right amount of milk, I felt strangely content, given the spectacle I had just made of myself at church. Would they be talking about me now, in their married homes, raising their eyebrows at lonely Mrs Smith and her sorry little ward? Would they remember those rumours and wonder if I had retreated into the same, half-mad state? Would they talk over their Sunday lunches about whether it was really fair to leave the child in the care of someone whose life had been so marked by tragedy?

‘I am the best one for her,’ I found myself saying out loud. Mary looked over at me. She could not know I was defending myself, and her, from all the do-gooders who never did any good, from those who talked piously but acted slovenly, from those who wanted to deny the problem, to forget the men in the park with their bare, dirt-encrusted feet or girls like Mary on their doorstep, a child of twelve who looked more like an eight year old with arms as thin as rope.

Not the done thing, to make them visible. It should have occurred to me when I read the newspaper article that their idea of the proper way to make a difference was to simply give more, to increase the weekly donation dropped into the padded green velvet of the church collection plate or continue with their afternoons at various charity shops. No one really wanted to see Mary there, to be reminded of a problem, which, if left well enough alone, would sort itself out. The Aborigines were dying off after all, or so they kept saying.

‘Do you want a piece of cake, Auntie Grace?’ Mary asked with a tone that reminded me of a healthy person talking to the sick.

She stayed on the footstool, poised for my answer. Though she was small, she had strength to her, only the incident after church had shown me the layer of fear underneath. I had read her people left their old behind when they moved on. Left them to die, apparently. Like all primitives, they had no room for the un-productive, for those who could not contribute to the tribe. But what was considered old in their world? Would I have been deemed useless, a forty year old with no progeny? Would they have said I had nothing to add to society? Would I have been left to wither under the desert sun? At least, now, I had made myself useful. I had rescued one of their half-caste babies, otherwise rejected, and smuggled her away to succour in secret.

I smiled.

Mary continued to watch me.

†

The next time at church, less attention was paid to us. I could not say there was a real acceptance of one black face amongst the congregation, only that the disapproval had become stale, a faint buzz under newer waves of gossip. Tongues wagged about more pressing news: Father Benjamin had some kind of tumour in an unspeakable place on his body and the Mavis boy had been missing for a week, leaving his mother to wring her hands in agitation while her husband stood by, looking faintly relieved.

It seemed no one told me of these events and yet I knew. If I had been asked to testify as to how the knowledge came my way, I would not have been able to say definitively, to point out the person who had first spoken of Father Benjamin’s ‘delicate problem’. I wondered if everyone else was thinking how his illness might have been caused by lack of use, though no one would talk out loud of celibacy as a cause for disease.

After the church service I let Mary again join the group of children who collected at the saint’s grotto. I kept an eye on her and could only guess at what they talked about. I saw the strawberry-haired Gibson twins place their arms up against Mary’s, their red freckles like angry flashes compared to the uniform darkness of Mary. It made me feel slightly sick, this comparison. The three girls seemed to find it funny. Their giggles made heads turn.

I tried to pretend this did not affect me. Yet after so many years of having to take responsibility for only myself, I found my chest constricting over these possible transgressions. What were the rules? How close was she allowed to get? I suspected there were mothers who had forbidden their sons or daughters from speaking to Mary. I saw these children sulking under the church eaves and heard their resentful whispers against the ‘abo’, ‘nigger’, or ‘darky’. It was strange to think Mary had created such exclusion.

†

One of the hardest things about Mary’s arrival was adjusting to the sounds of someone else in the house. On the first night, the thud of the back door pulling open and the creak of the screen door startled me from sleep and I jumped up to investigate. As I reached for the handle of my bedroom door I stopped, suddenly not sure if I had heard the noises or if I had dreamt them, as I used to do when I still believed Fred was coming home. The confusion of it made my head fuzzy and the shapes around me—the wardrobe, the dressing table—became larger than they were.

In the darkness, for just a moment, it seemed possible I could turn around and find Fred lying in our bed, his massive body in the middle of the mattress, leaving me only a sliver. In my thick cotton nightgown I stood, like Lot’s wife, trying hard not to turn around, to see the reality of a flat, featureless rectangle, trying hard not to crumble into the harsh space of abandonment. Even without turning, I knew. Caught by the smell again or, rather, the lack of smell, the absence of anything male; the strong odour that would come out of his body when he wanted me, as if desire itself had seeped through his skin. It was different from the hard saltiness of his spent desire. Even that was lost to me after the washing of our sheets. If I’d known, I would not have been so hasty to clean them, to find myself left only with the residues of my cheap perfumes.

Then I heard Mary cough, returning from the lavatory, and felt all the sadness, and relief, of knowing I was well past the time of Fred. It did not matter which way I faced, he was not in my bed, he was not out there, making his way up the side fence. How many times had I got out of bed to check in the past? Imagining the wind, a cat, an overturned garbage can, were his returning footsteps. I slipped back into bed and, despite the disturbance, was overwhelmingly grateful Mary was in the house, that the noises were, at the very least, real.

For the rest of that first week, I listened for the squeaks and opening of the screen and back door. The glory was that Mary, unlike Fred, did not want to leave. Her mother was dead and she had no alternative except the Home, a place without appeal. Father Benjamin had told me some of them disappeared with dubious relatives into the north, returning to their bush ways, but I was confident Mary would not be one of those. When Mary returned from the outhouse, I could always make out the sound of the mattress springs adjusting under her weight again.

She did not ask for a light for these night-time trips. I would not have admitted to her that I never went to the outhouse after dark. I made sure all my toiletries were done well before the sun went down. Hardly worth dwelling on why a girl should not be afraid when a grown woman was. Mary did not have my memories, after all. Or perhaps her blood led her to communion with the night? Either way, though it made me shiver to think of her outside in the darkness, tasting the natural world, I could not follow her. It was beyond me, to enter the echoing stillness again.

†

Dear Grace,

I have entered the region of Death and I don’t think I will ever come out of it. We’ve been marching for days and I write this without any expectation that it will find its way to you. All of the unit are desperately scrawling, as if we know this could be the only part of us left behind. The mud, the flies, the heat, these are beyond my description, but I accept them gratefully, knowing you are in the land of Life. You and my child are safe. I feel Death on my shoulder at every moment and I keep Him close, content in the knowledge that He cannot hurt you, so close is He to me. I hear Him breathing, wanting me. The other men, so many from the country, they seem to understand this landscape better than me. Their eyes are quicker, their hearing clearer, they smell the enemy, alert to the movements of birds and animals, they are able to talk to the natives. I blunder along with them and can only suppose my escape from Death is blind luck. A city man is useless here, no training could have prepared me for this. I have no belief that heaven is watching. Take all that you know of me, Gracie, and keep it close. If I stood on the threshold of Life, knowing what I now know, I think I would decline the offer to enter.

Out of the depths, I hear a cry,

Choked in a dry throat, as it begins to die.

My mind is struck blind, I do not want to hear,

I cannot conceive that God is near.

Fred

3

Toward the end of the third week after Mary’s arrival we visited the local school. It was a short walk from my house although I had never had reason to pass through the sandstone pillars of its gateway before. Father Benjamin had arranged the appointment for late morning, well after the children had been called inside, so Mary and I entered a silent playground, the main building directly in front an old convict’s cottage with narrow windows. Stamped into the sandstone were the words ‘Established in 1883’.

I held Mary’s hand again, aware of its lightness and maybe the trace of a tremble. She wore her new dress, yellow with white flowers, found for her by the eager women at St Vincent de Paul. I had taken her to the local charity shop, a more appropriate place for her to buy clothes after the exhaustion of the shoe expedition. The old ladies there, half of them half-blind, made it easy to buy several, less-than-perfect frocks. It did not matter if they were a little torn or frayed or splotched with dark, unidentifiable marks. Her new shoes, in contrast, were scuff-free and polished to an almost indecent shine.

‘Which way, Auntie Grace?’ Mary asked, not without a hint of impatience.

‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted and, at that moment, a small woman in a fawn dress appeared at the top of the steps of a building to our left. A sign above her declared it the Teacher’s Hut.

‘Mrs Smith?’ the woman enquired.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘And Mary?’

‘Yes.’

Her eyes, which matched her washed-out dress, raked over Mary, her mouth staying closed after our initial exchange. I could not read any change in her expression: she was better educated than the woman in the shoe department and, thus, better able to disguise either her approval or revulsion.

‘Come in,’ she said finally and I was grateful that, at the very least, we were not to be turned away at the doorstep.

She turned and I followed, Mary next to me, down a carpeted hall to a closed frosted-glass door with another sign ‘School Principal’ nailed to the cross beam. The fawn lady, to my surprise, knocked and I realised we had only passed the preliminary barrier. She did not wait for a response from within, opening the door and striding in with the confidence of a trusted employee.

Behind the desk sat a bald man in a dark suit. He did not stand on our entrance, only moving his head to stare at me with watery blue eyes.

‘Forgive me for not standing, Mrs Smith,’ he said and his gaze invited me to follow his to a walking stick sitting under the window. ‘I am having a particularly bad day.’

I sat in the chair opposite the desk and Mary stood behind me while the fawn woman stood behind the principal. We were uneven bookends, propping up the desk.

‘I’m Mr Robertson,’ he announced.

His office smelt of cod liver oil and as I took in this rheumatic man, all joints and bones, I felt not the slightest tinge of empathy between us. You can tell with certain strangers that there will never be a time when you will come to mean more to one another.

‘Father Benjamin has told me about the unfortunate girl,’ Mr Robertson continued. ‘And though I am inclined toward good deeds, I have to constantly watch out for the reputation …’

‘… of the school,’ the fawn lady finished for him.

‘I understand that, Mr Robertson,’ I said, although I did not really understand this aching man. How much pain was he in right now? How quickly did he want us gone so he could groan in private? ‘Mary is, I believe, a good girl. She could benefit from a good education.’

I felt Mary shift behind me, perhaps, I hoped, standing a little straighter.

‘Would you have her stand over there please?’ It was the fawn lady who was asking and I was yet to know who this woman was. The secretary? The head teacher? She seemed to have more self-assurance than I had encountered from my fellow female teachers. The brash young ones were soon beaten down by the stupefying effect of the classroom, the gradual realisation of how little difference you could make to most of your students. Unconsciously, I found myself listening for the school bell, as if I was back in the days of my own teaching when I would sit at the head of the room willing the minutes to pass more quickly.

Mary moved to the spot the woman had indicated, near the window through which the morning light poured. She was not smiling and I was reminded of the sullen expression she had worn on the day of her arrival. Already I had grown used to not seeing it there, I had become used to a blander face. She had not transformed into ‘happy’ but she had taken off the mantle of sulkiness, which did nothing for her dark features. To see it return, then, particularly in front of the people who could provide her with so much, was distressing. What could I say, however? ‘Brighten up’? I had already lectured her about the importance of education. It seemed she had not listened.

‘She really is quite …’ Mr Robertson began. His sentence trailed off. I knew what it contained.

‘I thought they were supposed to be half-castes, or even quadroons,’ the fawn woman said, and she walked over to stand beside Mary. She reached across to place her hand under the girl’s chin and raised her head as if to give Mr Robertson a better view. She appeared to be a moment away from asking Mary to open her mouth so they could inspect her teeth. Mary did not flinch at the woman’s touch but her eyes had gone dead. Mrs Thompson had said she was a beautiful child. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

There had been moments like these in my own childhood when prospective parents would come to inspect us, walking along rows of brightly scrubbed girls, scanning from top to bottom for flaws. Perhaps I wore the kind of expression that Mary now did, for I was almost entirely overlooked in the early years and the time came when I was too old to even be included in the rows. If it had not been for the kindly Auntie Iris I would never have had any trips outside the convent.

‘I really don’t think …’ Mr Robertson began and, again, trailed off. I wondered if he was capable of finishing a sentence.

‘I’m not sure she would be suitable.’ The fawn lady spoke for them both. Her hand dropped and she moved away from Mary, returning to stand next to Mr Robertson’s shoulder.

‘Although we don’t want you to think …’ said the principal.

‘She’s a little too old, really. Can she read or write?’ the woman asked, although this should have been her first question. It felt as if the entire room was coated in cod liver oil, as slippery as these two were. To find a different problem when it was clear what the problem was.

‘She knows her letters,’ I answered. I had already quizzed Mary on this and discovered the patchy learning she had gained during her two years at the Home. I had worried at the wisdom of giving her more education. Words had always given me such comfort but would they give her expectations beyond her abilities? She had come to me to be domestic so was there any point in introducing the academic? According to Mr Robertson and his pale companion, the answer was no.

There was silence as, no doubt, Mr Robertson was arranging the carefully chosen words of his rejection: ‘Not quite proper,’ or ‘We’re looking for something different,’ or ‘We’d like one much, much younger, with brighter eyes.’

I stood up. ‘I understand perfectly. Thank you for your time, Mr Robertson.’ The unexpected movement seemed to throw them, both mouthed ‘Oh’ like goldfish.

‘Come on, Mary.’

The girl moved out of the beam of sunlight she’d been forced to stand in and came to take my hand.

At the doorway, Mr Robertson called a soft ‘Good day, Mrs Smith’ to me. I did not turn back.

I had said I understood and, in many ways, I did. The shape of a schoolgirl was fixed in their minds: her long brown—or blonde—plaits, her well-rounded hips, a broad straw boater protecting her ivory face. There was nothing to be done about such preconception.

‘I’ll teach you to read, Mary,’ I said, as we passed through the stone pillars once more. On the top of each pillar I saw a lion with his paw holding a shield. The shields were carved with a cross and I had a brief image of a miniature Jesus sacrificed under the lion’s head.

Mary did not speak as we walked home.

†

With the sting of the school rejection still raw, I discovered the penny in the lining of Mary’s blue dress, the same penny she had supposedly thrown into the fountain. It had found its way from a hole in the pocket of the dress to the hem and I knew it was the same penny because I hadn’t given her any other money. I remembered her wet hands and wondered why I had not thought it odd at the time. Had she thrown the coin in the water and then retrieved it when I wasn’t looking? This seemed the only explanation.

I called to her. She was in the yard, standing on a wooden box, hanging the washing on the line. I watched through the window as she clambered down and made her way to me in the kitchen. I placed the penny on the table in front of her and she looked down at it.

‘Another one, Auntie Grace?’ she asked, as if I was going to magically produce a pond for her not to wish at, as if she didn’t know exactly where I’d found this one.

‘I don’t like liars, Mary.’ The iron of my voice had terrified troublemakers of the past and I saw Mary’s body go back into its shell. I had been too nice to her over these first few weeks and she had begun to relax, begun to believe she had the upper hand. Oh, what she would not do if she thought I actually cared about her. How much she would take advantage. Do not trust anyone, Auntie Iris had said, especially those you love.

I grabbed her upper arm, my hand circling it with overlapping fingers. Pulling her towards her bedroom, I had no vision of what I would do, what punishment to administer. I did not have the school’s boundaries, nor set procedures. I was free to do as I wished.

‘Auntie Grace,’ she said quietly, but nothing else. The tone had no reverence, just the flatness of the unbeliever.

‘Look what I have done for you,’ I said, still gripping the thin arm, shaking her a little.

The wardrobe door hung open and showed the crowd of outfits I had bought her, the two pairs of shoes: the ones from the Home she had stumbled in, scuffed, falling apart, and the shiny new ones, bright and full of promise. Where was her gratitude for this? Today she wore another pair of new sandals, the brown leather straps matching her blasted skin.

I let go of her arm and she stood at the end of the bed with her eyes down.

‘Don’t lie to me again, Mary.’

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’

‘Do you promise not to lie to me?’

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’

The blandness of her tone pushed me, my hand rising up before I could think. I slapped her across the face, a blunt, quick hit.

She was not shocked. She stood there, holding her cheek, as if she had expected it.

‘You will stay in this room all day.’ I kept my voice level and calm despite the anger I felt. ‘You will not sit down. I will know if you have.’

She did not protest. Had the Home handed out similar punishments? Not enough of them obviously. She had lied to me, pretended compliance, not even clever enough to conceal it properly. I never would have found the penny if she had hidden it under her bed or somewhere else in the house. Why go to the trouble of stealing and then not even carry the crime through?

I moved to the door, turning to look at her again before closing it. The remnant of my slap was there on her cheek, a slightly reddish tinge. I had used my right hand and there were no rings on those fingers, simply flesh on flesh, hardly enough to raise a bruise. With the mid-morning sun streaming in through the window, her black hair was lit, the acquired shine of my soapy ministrations. I would have to make her tie it back, with her hair loose and wild it was little wonder Mr Robertson had rejected her, she could be a Red Indian, a savage. I closed the door.

While Mary stood in her room, I sat shaking in the front room. My hand still stung from the slap. I had never hit the girls at my school in such a crude way. I used a cane, made for the purpose, across the palm of the hand mostly, only occasionally on the back of the thighs. It was always prepared and measured, the reason for the punishment calmly articulated before the strike. Most of the girls cried out on the first thump and would be weeping by the last, so much so that I rarely saw the same girl twice. I remember hearing one of the teachers muttering how I liked dishing out the cane too much, as if I enjoyed it. She was wrong. I had met even harsher conditions in my own schooling. The Sisters had a love of suffering, tore the skin of our hands and buttocks to shreds in emulation of the lashes laid on Jesus’s back. In contrast to the Sisters, I never punished without due cause.

When I was ten I had eaten an entire teacake during a visit to Auntie Iris’s and then lied about it, foolishly insisting it had not been me even though I was the only one in the house. Auntie Iris had made me stand in the front entrance for six hours, a cold hall with a spiral staircase leading to bedrooms I was never invited to stay in. Standing for those hours, my legs beginning to shake, I had ingested so much guilt I was sick with it.

In the front room, I took large, uneven breaths. I wanted a cup of tea and almost called out to Mary to make me one. No, she was not to be allowed out of her room, although it struck me this meant I would have to finish hanging out the washing and put the kettle on myself.

†

I entered Mary’s room after two hours and knew she had not sat down. The bed cover remained un-crumpled and Fred’s desk still had its pure layer of dust upon it. Not surprisingly, she stood with her legs crossed.

‘You can go to the bathroom,’ I said and she rushed out without even a thank you. I could have punished her for that as well but I felt weary, as if it had been me standing in this claustrophobic little room. Fred had often come in here to his books. He had taken the job at the bank and I wanted to believe he was content tallying up numbers, keeping the country balanced. Deep down, I knew he wanted more, that one day he hoped to return to the land of words, to retreat to this study and not come out for hours. Despite what he wrote in his letters, I suspected he had always been writing his poetry.

‘Do I have to keep standing, Auntie Grace?’ Mary was in the doorway, her tone stronger than I had heard it before, as if the punishment had had the opposite effect than my intention.

‘Why did I make you stand, Mary?’ I asked her, trying to get myself back on firmer ground.

‘Because I didn’t throw the penny in the water, Auntie Grace.’

‘And why didn’t you?’

She paused, obviously weighing up the best possible answer.

‘I didn’t want to wish.’

‘It was not up to you, Mary. I gave you the penny for that reason. Not for you to hide away. Not for you to lie to me about. Do you have anything to say to me?’

She was still standing in the doorway, her hands behind her back in a stance that should have been submissive. ‘I didn’t want to wish,’ she repeated.

I was stuck between anger and admiration. She held her shoulders back, aware this would give her credence.

‘Go and make me tea,’ I ordered her. I had already finished hanging out the clothes.

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’

She spun away and disappeared into the kitchen. A moment later, I heard the sound of her filling the kettle.

†

I dreamt that night I was a girl once more trying to find my way through the dark dormitory to the outhouse. I was no one’s pet, no older girl was taking my hand and shushing me, telling me not to be afraid, leading me through the darkness. There was only someone hissing at me to be quiet as the floorboards squeaked beneath my feet. I walked down the chilled corridor alone and when I found my way outside I was in the field of arum lilies, their flower heads taller than me, and their pollen making my skin itch. Instead of the path ahead, I saw Auntie Iris’s sandstone wall. I ran to it and began rubbing my palm against the wall as if it was Aladdin’s lamp, wishing it to take me down to the beach beyond, to the soft sand of Shelley’s beach where families would sit for hours on end, in the sun, laughing. I rubbed and rubbed and rubbed the wall and still no genie appeared.

†

‘Auntie Grace?’

I opened my eyes and found I was standing at the bottom of the back concrete steps with bare feet, shivering in my nightgown, my hands clenched in a ball, my fingers sore. I could not remember getting out of bed or walking through the house. My hair was loose, my hair net slipped off.

I turned around to see the girl in the doorway, holding open the screen door.

‘You’re cold,’ she said simply.

Her face seemed to have caught the moonlight, it streamed down on her, turning her eyes into tubs of knowing. But what did she know?

‘What are you, Mary?’ I asked, for perhaps I had conjured her up and this was still part of the dream.

‘Come inside,’ she said, as if I were the child.

I could not move and found myself staring at her, at her skin.

‘Corpus Domini nostri Jesu, Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam aeternam. May the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ keep your soul unto life everlasting.’

A pure, white body, hanging on the cross.

‘May Thy Body, O Lord, which I have received, and Thy Blood, which I have drunk, cleave to mine inmost parts: and do Thou grant that no stain of sin remain in me.’

She stood. An abo, a nigger, a darky.

‘Grant that no stain of skin remain in me.’

The girl seemed about to move towards me. I could not stand it.

‘Get away,’ I spoke softly. ‘Go back to bed.’

She let go of the screen door and it slammed shut, echoing in the quiet. For a moment I could only see her eyes, separate from the rest of her. They held something, something long lost to me. She dissolved into the darkness and I stood alone on the concrete, flexing my hands. Abo, nigger, darky. Abo, nigger, darky.

Did she know I had seen right through to her bones? Did she know what she had brought to me? This … darkness.

The next morning when I went to wake her, her blanket was lying crumpled on the floor, her old blue dress was missing and the front door was unlocked. She had gone.

4

I decided I would find Mary by myself. She could not have gone far, I reasoned, for she had no one to go to; she would be wandering out there, with no clear plan as to what to do. I didn’t want to involve Father Benjamin. He wouldn’t think I was such a good person if, after only three weeks, I had driven her away. Nor did I want the Church to bring in the police who would, no doubt, label her a fugitive and try to track her down.

I dressed quickly, in hat and gloves. It was hot out there, at the end of March, with strange mixed-up days, one clouded and windy, the next still and clear, as if God kept changing His mind. I thought about going in the car but decided it would be too conspicuous, a slow drive down the street would arouse more comments than a quick walk around the block. I would take my shopping basket for the excuse of a longer, more winding route. How hard would it be to look for her without looking as if I was looking? Had Mary’s presence been so noted they would wonder about my solitude?

Sure enough, as I walked past my neighbour at number 22, watering with the hose at a suggestive level of his hips, he called out, ‘Left the little darky at home today, have we?’

I replied with a nod and a smile and walked on, heading toward the park and the little beach. It was a Saturday so the children were out on bicycles and scooters. I spotted the Thompson boy playing marbles with a group of lads near the broken bayonet statue. On the corner, still with the street between us, I hesitated. Could I walk over and ask him if he had seen Mary, if he knew where she was? Such a question would spread the news of her disappearance, the whispers shooting off like a cat’s eyes or an oxblood. As I watched them play, a little girl trotted up with two ice-cream cones in her hands, a splash of white on her front. She licked one of the cones around the edges, holding the other out to avoid more drips. I saw her deliver the cone to one of the boys. She received no thanks. Her brother turned back to the game immediately, devouring the top half of the ice-cream in one gulp.

I strode on. Down at the beach Mary was nowhere to be seen so I took the path away from the water into the hilly, leafy suburbs. The houses I passed were on double blocks, sprawling with numerous possible hiding places, large empty back gardens with sheds, chicken coops and vegetable patches kept since the war. In my mind’s eye, Mary was so small she could lie under a pumpkin leaf and I would not spot her.

My head started to itch from the heat pounding down onto my hat. My feet, trapped in stockings and jammed into navy-blue pumps, felt as if they were on fire, flames in the arches and heels. How much I wanted to sit down and throw my shoes off. How weak I was to already feel this way, after less than an hour’s wandering.

I tried not to believe in Fate—it seems sacrilegious—but it did seem to be Fate when I realised I was outside Mr Roper’s house. The neat brown-brick fence with a green wire gate lower than my knees; an overwhelming smell of sweetness from the gardenia bushes lined along the path up to the door, their white petals only just beginning to brown and drop; the verandah front with a couple of wicker chairs I had not seen him use, detached ends of cane sticking out from their edges. All familiar enough from my occasional visits over the years, after-church lunches, with another couple of women invited along from the Widows’ Group to make it proper.

Knocking on the door aroused Will, Mr Roper’s cockatoo, kept in a cage in the back garden. The squawking overtook all other sounds so I could not hear whether Mr Roper was coming to the door or not. His abrupt appearance caught me off guard.

‘Well … Mrs Smith …’

He wore a pair of beige trousers with no belt, a white short-sleeved shirt and, most disconcerting of all, no shoes or socks. Who had he expected me to be? I had taken my hat off, could feel my hair flattened against my head. I still had the shopping basket in the crook of my arm, sticking out from my side like a third appendage.

‘Mr Roper, I need some help.’ I had rehearsed what I was going to say on the way up the front path. ‘Mary … the little girl … my ward … seems to have gone … missing … seems to have left the house … last night.’ This part of the narrative was not going quite as I had planned. How to describe the previous night? I certainly could not tell him of my transportation to the back steps, nor the words that flared up in my head at the sight of Mary. He was a gentle man, I was sure, his conscience clear of blame.

‘Come on in, Mrs Smith.’ He moved back to let me through into the corridor that ran all the way to the back of the house, the cream walls peppered with landscapes of snow-covered forests and icy ponds. I had never asked why he had such pictures. I did not ask him on this occasion either.

‘Perhaps a cup of tea?’ Mr Roper offered as we made our way to the kitchen.

‘I don’t know. I feel I should be searching.’ Even as I said this, I lowered myself into one of his kitchen chairs, feeling the relief of getting off my feet. I would have liked to slip off my shoes but Mr Roper’s own lack of footwear made the thought of it impossible.

‘I’ll just go and umm …’ he said after putting the kettle onto the stovetop and disappeared up the corridor again. While he was gone, I took my feet out of my shoes, wiggling my toes as if I was a baby discovering them for the first time. I put my elbows on the table, breathing out the fatigue in loud, unpleasant exhalations.

I could hear Mr Roper, now in shoes, returning and quickly made myself presentable again.

‘So, what is to be done?’ he asked. He had put on a black leather belt and a pair of black shoes, both looked harsh and blunt against the muted colours of his pants and shirt.

‘I was hoping you could help me look.’

‘But she could be anywhere. Gone on, what do they call it? “Walkabout”?’

‘Dear Lord.’

‘What did the police say?’

I hated the way he stared at me, as if he knew my answer would not be to his liking.

‘I didn’t think it was necessary to tell them, as yet.’

He turned away from me to check the kettle which had started a faint whistling, the beginning of the boil. I had expected him to show more exasperation, to berate me for my pride.

‘We can take my car,’ he said and it was settled.

‘So nice to not have petrol rations,’ I said and drank my tea without really tasting it.

†

Mr Roper’s FJ Holden smelt of the thin brown cigars, or cigarillos, I often saw him smoking after church. His house seemed to have avoided the stale stench and it had compensated by ingraining itself into the upholstery of the car. I tried not to let it remind me of Fred, concentrating on the solid chin of Mr Roper beside me.

We began driving slowly through the back streets, retreading ground I had already walked along although I did not point this out to Mr Roper. A man’s search needed to be self-directed and any comments from me would sound like nagging. The boys were still playing marbles near the statue although they had moved along the path to catch the shade cast by a hydrangea bush. I was struck by the absurdity of expecting Mary to be out here. She would be much further away by now. Could I really expect to see her strolling benignly past the sprinkler-dotted lawns, the rose beds, the concrete effigies of her tribesmen, those plaster savages who stood on one leg in front gardens for eternity?

‘That one is in good shape.’ Mr Roper nodded over to one of these blackman–gnomes as we crawled past. Its red loincloth was perfectly vermilion and even the tip of its spear was intact.

‘We could take him home,’ Mr Roper said. ‘I’m sure no one would notice the difference.’

He laughed at his joke. I could only manage to raise a smile.

†

At first I was not even aware my subtle directions were manipulating us towards Hyde Park. Perhaps there was also a part of Mr Roper that was naturally drawn to the city. I had often seen his face animated with descriptions of the centre—‘all that hustle and bustle’—his voice longing for a life he could not find in the suburbs.

Whatever it was, we soon found ourselves driving down William Street, following the tram down the hill. I felt the sensation of being completely out of control as we dipped and then rose again along the avenue, so much so that I wanted to grab at the wheel just to have something to hold onto. To prevent this, I clung to the inside door handle. I saw Mr Roper glance over and see my grip. He did not say anything, nor did he reduce his acceleration. I could not determine if his thin smile was one of amusement or annoyance. How little I knew about this man, our lives travelling next to each other these past five years without ever truly joining.

‘Where in the city, do you think?’ he asked, as if in reply to an unvoiced question. I told him to park on Elizabeth Street.

We walked along the footpath towards the southern entrance of the park. We did not hurry. Our pace was similar, we moved side by side. The ride in the car had revived my legs and feet, yet it was not just this that created the odd feeling of being there but somehow above it all. I was holding myself tall, at ease. At the kiosk families recovered from the heat with glasses of lemonade. With a strange awareness, I saw a slender mother leaning into a pram to check her baby’s temperature, knowing I would appear to be a wife too, out with my husband for an afternoon stroll. To have a man by my side again. That was it. What did it matter if he was not actually my spouse? What did it matter if this wasn’t the absolute truth?

We pushed on through the humidity. As we got closer to the ANZAC memorial I was tempted to take Mr Roper’s arm, to maintain the illusion for a little longer. By this point, however, there was no one around to see. The steps up to the cenotaph were deserted, their pink stone absorbing heat and throwing up an unwelcoming glare. I had to shade my eyes with my hand, negotiating the ascent through the slits of my fingers as Mr Roper barrelled on ahead of me. I had told him Mary might have wanted to see inside the memorial, see what I had not shown her. This was my only, rather weak, explanation for coming here.

A young couple stood in the circular Hall of Memory, both their heads tilted reverently downwards into the Well of Contemplation, a circle cut into the floor with a wreath-like, waist-high balustrade surrounding it. I knew what they would see below them. The statue of the spread-eagled figure of a fallen soldier lying on his shield and sword, an emaciated body with not a skerrick of clothing, not even the loincloth given to Christ on the cross. From this level you could see only the boy, not the women who carried him.

Mr Roper headed over to the winding stairs leading to the Hall of Silence below. I didn’t follow him. Down there he would see the figures of the mother, wife and sister draped in Romanesque clothing, as if to atone for their soldier’s nakedness. Around their feet, a burst sun spread out in brass waves across the floor.

I walked quietly over to the round balustrade, now wondering if I had brought Mr Roper to the wrong place. Surely, if a young girl were curled up beside the statue—for some reason I imagined her asleep on the sun—the couple would not be looking so placid. Yet if Mr Roper had found her, he would not be able to call out, unable to ignore the plea written in the floor entrance: ‘Let silent contemplation be your offering.’ In all my visits here, I had never heard a word spoken in the chamber below, nor many uttered in this hall. There was something that erased the ability to talk, the weight of death pushing down the air, making it difficult to breathe, let alone speak. I had often found myself staring at the domed ceiling above—120,000 stars spotted it, one for each WWI volunteer, crowding together so that in the middle it looked like a blanket—only to realise I was holding my breath. The eternal flame wafting gas throughout the edifice did not help either.

Re-entering had reminded me of the eerie quality of the place. Surely a twelve-year-old girl would not seek this? I loved the way the building was imbued with reverence, stateliness, the supremeness of the sacrifice. Taken up in glory. Here, in stone and bronze, lives made immortal and meaningful, the lives of their women transformed from the ordinary into the godly. Mary would not be able to see this. It was a magnificence some did not seek.

‘She’s not here,’ Mr Roper whispered into my ear. I had not heard him return.

‘We’ll look in the park,’ I whispered back. The young couple looked over at us disapprovingly as if we were talking sweet nothings to one another. To be silently reprimanded by them! It was almost more than I could bear. I turned away from Mr Roper, laying my hands on the top of the marble ledge. Mr Roper coughed to signal his impatience and strode away, disappearing down the stairs that lead to the park.

When I gazed down into the Well of Contemplation again, a shadow moved. A black shape scurried into the space under my feet, out of view. I heard a small hissing sound. Was it a rat? I crossed my arms tightly and leaned over further to catch another glimpse. Over to my right, I could feel the girl of the couple watching me. Had she seen it too? For a moment, leaning over the barrier, I was too scared to move, in case the creature scrambled up over the marble and found its way to me. I tried to breathe slowly, to listen for another sound. I stared now at the gold floor below, at the lines engraved in the flames, which appeared to be rippling. I held myself still, becoming one of the statues below—a wife, a sister or a mother? None of these.

The girl had left her partner and was standing next to me. She put her hand on my shoulder and gently pulled me back from the edge. I sighed.

‘You need to be careful,’ the girl said. Her boyfriend now hovered behind her shoulder, bouncing from foot to foot, not comfortable with this touching of a stranger.

‘Thank you.’ I spoke too loudly. Two red-breasted starlings flew out from the alcove holding the eternal flame. The three of us watched as the birds spiralled up into the dome for a moment then shot out the archway to join the ibises and seagulls on the reflection pool.

†

Dear Grace,

I am alive and that, in itself, is a miracle. How strange it feels to no longer be afraid, to sit in a chair on a verandah, and write to you, to be bathed in the sunset without always watching for those nasty little Nips coming to shoot us to hell.

Most of the men here are jumping on board ships to go home but I have chosen to stay. I have volunteered to be part of the Occupation Forces heading to Japan. Some of the boys think I am mad to want to go there but, then, there are enough volunteers to make up more than a couple of battalions for the Occupation Forces, so I guess madness must be contagious.

They’ll station us at a place not far from Hiroshima. You’ll have heard of it, the city that took the force of the American’s super bomb to ‘end’ the war. You would think we’d done nothing, our fighting meant nothing, the way the Yanks talk themselves up over here.

They speak of this place, this Hiroshima, with fear in their voices, the centre of a new world, an atomic world. Children turned to ashes in a blinding flash, human monsters created from something called radiation, fire that cannot be put out. A clearer vision of Hell I have never heard described. What a place to see in the flesh, then, what a place to be able to say I have walked. Maybe that’s what this war was about: bringing damnation to the Earth so we can fully appreciate how godless we truly are.

I will write with more news as soon as I have some,

Fred

5

I had heard about Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the radio and, on the day of the surrender, went out to find Wayville Street awash with the jubilation of victory. I stood in my front yard, smiling over the oleander bushes to my neighbours hugging each other and waving at me, laughing and crying. It was not a day to be inside and even if I had not forgiven them for their avoidance of me after the loss of my baby, I still wanted to be part of the joy, wanted to watch the children skipping about.

On that day, we tried to be oblivious to the deep grief. Every one of us knew someone who had been lost: Auntie Iris’s son taken by the Japanese, Fred’s brother buried in Europe somewhere. I held my hands in prayer although—and I would never have admitted this aloud—I had nothing to say to God. I should have been thanking Him for the end of it finally but I felt too tired, still too alone, to give Him gratitude.

If I had been able to I would have lain down on the grass and wept. As it was, I continued to stand, watching the late winter sky gradually darken. I could hear celebrations going on in houses all around, doors left open, lights spilling out as surely as the alcohol was. Radios blared in a way that never would have been acceptable on any other night; ABC voices mixed with ‘God Save the King’ competing with the raucous shouts of old men and shrill laughter from giddy girls, and too-young siblings fighting over a share of their mother’s attention so sharply focused elsewhere—mothers thinking of the ones who were not home yet, waiting to hold them.

I had been separate from all of them, though I could still imagine my future within such rooms: surrounded by my own children, hopefully untouched by war, but still basking in the glow of domestic assurance that can only come from knowing the world has been fought over and is safe. I had looked up at the night sky again, looking for the shooting star that would carry my Fred home, my still poetic-self believing I had control over fiery Fate.

†

I walked along the edge of the reflection pool, the strange shadow of the memorial still with me. Mr Roper had forged ahead, crossing Park Street without a glance back. The sun almost gone, I felt as if I had lost more time than I should have inside the Hall of Memory.

Ahead, yet another couple walked hand in hand. I watched their arms swinging back and forth and a little girl ducked under their joined hands, running in my direction. If the couple had been her parents, rather than strangers, it might have been a game and she would have turned back to run under their arms again and the pair would have laughed at her antics. She was not their child, however. The little girl kept running, brushing past my hip.

The woman ahead seemed to barely notice the girl ducking under her hands and, unlike her husband, did not turn her head to see where the child was going. He swivelled his head, like me, to watch the little girl run; her brown shoulder-length hair flying out above her pale-green dress and white ankle socks under sandals.

‘Mother!’ I heard her cry, and in the distance a woman turned in a daze as if she had forgotten her daughter existed.

I continued to the fountain. No longer ahead of me on the path, Mr Roper seemed to have plunged into the surrounding gardens, perhaps imagining himself an intrepid explorer fighting through the jungle to save the savage child.

The statue of Apollo in the fountain drew closer (more bronzed male flesh, every man hardened in this city, turned cold and distant). Mary was there, sitting on the grass. I felt a surge of relief. She had not seen me and I stopped for a moment; a strange deliciousness, to be able to watch her without her knowledge. Her gaze followed the water as it spurted from the turtles’ mouths, her sandals next to her on the ground, her bare legs crossed beneath her. People walked by and I saw they didn’t even look in her direction, as if she were invisible. She was a little girl, clearly on her own. Did they assume she had a mother waiting nearby whom she could call to when needed? Did her apparent calmness show them she was not lost or helpless? Or did a little black girl not deserve their attention?

I began to walk toward her, listening to the cascading water and the click of my heels against the stone. How slowly I seemed to be moving. ‘Mary!’ I called, as if to will myself to keep moving toward her.

She turned to me. I could read the hope, then fright and disappointment, running across her face as clearly as if she had written them down. Who was it she wanted?

‘Hello, Auntie Grace.’ She remained sitting, craning her neck up to me.

‘You’re in a great deal of trouble, young lady,’ my voice stern and hard, just as Sister Clare spoke after I had run away for the first time, in my attempt to get to Auntie Iris’s house. What punishment would I give Mary for her transgression? More than a simple slap, more than seclusion in her bedroom? I did not want to remember what Sister Clare had done.

Mary’s gaze went back to the fountain, staring through the leaping jets of water to some dream. She was looking at the spot where the black tramps had sat on our day buying shoes.

‘Your feet are filthy,’ I said.

‘Ah, so you’ve found her.’ Mr Roper appeared by my side, again without my hearing his approach. He had an earthy smell about him.

I focused on Mary, afraid she would disappear if I looked away. ‘Put your sandals on,’ I ordered. She uncrossed her legs and as she fiddled with putting on her sandals, her knees fell apart for a moment, her dress riding up enough to show a glimpse of her underwear.

‘Hurry up,’ I said, hoping Mr Roper would not see.

‘That’s good work,’ he said, sounding a little like Fred after he had gutted a fish or cut up a roast. I glanced at Mr Roper. He had a twig caught on the back rim of his trilby.

‘Thank you for your help,’ I replied.

‘My pleasure.’

It hadn’t been pleasurable. The heat had made it stuffy and awkward between us, the shadow in the memorial had made me doubt my place in the world, and Mr Roper’s white shirt was stained with dirt. And all of this was Mary’s fault.

‘Hurry up, you stupid girl.’ This was my own voice now, strong and forceful.

‘Stupid?’ Mr Roper said. ‘Not so sure of that.’ He was staring at the girl, as if seeing her for the first time.

I didn’t reply. Mary stood and I took her hand in mine, gripping it in my soaking glove. I had to keep pulling at her, to keep her at my pace as we walked to Mr Roper’s car. She kept glancing over her shoulder, toward the empty space left by her imagined kin.

I did not invite Mr Roper in when he dropped us at the house. I was sure he would have had enough of me for the day and was surprised when he seemed to hover in the driveway, the engine turning over like a conversation.

‘Keep an eye on her, Grace,’ he called out the side window. He rarely used my Christian name. We had always adopted the formality of the church group who insisted on ‘Mister’ and ‘Missus’, crying out our seemingly married state, even while so many of us lived alone. Did he really feel we had become closer? I turned and waved politely, a closed-hand, Queen-like wave, trying to convey a composure I did not feel.

Once inside the house I immediately peeled off my gloves. My hat came off with a strange sucking sound and I kicked off my heels, lowering my feet back to the ground with a sigh. Mary had already broken free of my hand and ran through the kitchen to the outhouse. She had probably been holding on all day. Though there would have to be punishment I was grateful I did not have to keep myself proper for Mary, even my most uncontrolled appearance was civilised compared to her. She had walked all that way … What had she seen? Tonight I would scrub her clean again.

The mirror in the hallway threw back my punctured face, hot and deflated. I had found Mary, I told myself, brought her back. I should be proud and exhilarated. What had my motivation been if not to save her? Pluck her from a life of darkness? Watch over her? A line from one of the Psalms came to me: I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the housetop.

‘Mary!’ I called, standing in the kitchen doorway. She must have been moving already, for she ran into me, her torso colliding with my stomach. She took a step back and her eyes, once again, stared up at me.

‘Sorry, Auntie Grace.’ She sounded genuine.

I held her by the shoulders, at arm’s length. I could feel her bones through the dress. She had washed her hands after using the lavatory, the lemon soap smell drifting up, almost taking away the stink of the night.

‘I am trying to help you, Mary. To save you from yourself. Do you understand?’ I tried to adopt a priestly lilt. ‘You must work with me in this, not against me. If you run away again, I will call the police and you will be taken back to the Home.’

I was amazed at how even I was able to keep my tone, how little anger seemed to be stirring inside me. Perhaps she could sense this because instead of the acceptance or even fear I had expected, she began to cry.

I continued to hold her shoulders as they shook, not willing to risk holding her any closer.

‘I want my mum,’ she said. I released her quickly as if she had caught fire.

‘You haven’t got a mother,’ I said. ‘There is no point yearning for her.’

‘I do, I do have a mum.’

‘No, Mary, she is dead.’

‘… not true,’ she mumbled.

‘Why do you think you were in the Home? Why do you think you are here with me?’

‘They took me. They took me away from her.’ She said it loudly, with the strength of a myth she had been cultivating, the fairytale of a perfect life to be found, just around the corner.

I remembered my own blindness to Fred’s change. I did not want to see his true form. To me, his decision to stay away longer was simply more evidence of his fervour, his commitment to the Empire. His letters contained no tales of promotion, nor fought-for honours or medals, yet I chose to see longevity of service as a sign of his courage, a covert promise of glories to come.

Here was Mary’s reliance on the dream of her mother, clinging hopelessly to someone who had long since ceased to exist. How hard it would be to make her see.

She continued to cry, making no effort to control her sobs. I wished I had removed my stockings before this confrontation. I was trapped inside the nylon as surely as I was trapped with Mary, the kitchen a whirling cauldron of emotion.

‘For heaven’s sake, girl,’ I said, though her lack of restraint did not really shock me. After all, she was a baser creature, closer to the primal than me, more connected to passion and hunger. It would take longer to turn her. The Sisters had had their work cut out with me when I was young and I was sure I had the blood of the pioneers flowing in me: strong, able-bodied men who slashed at the rugged terrain to make it their own, dynamited mountains as if they were foothills, dammed the rivers for more water than they could drink. Mary was a thousand steps behind such people, her marrow tainted by those who had simply wandered the country, never settling, never taking control of their destinies. Was it any wonder she had no heart to stop in one place and make the most of the opportunity I had given to her? How many times had I wanted to strike out and find a mythical family? Indeed, how many times had I wanted to go in search of Fred? I had even booked passage on a ship not long after leaving my teaching post, determined to bring him back.

I was not angry, my mind slipping into a barely contained tiredness. Without thinking, I knelt down and hugged Mary to me.

For a moment, her body was stiff as she held her breath. Then she relaxed, her head on my shoulder and, to her credit, she stopped crying, sniffing loudly next to my ear instead.

‘Your mother abandoned you, Mary.’ I spoke into the quietness. ‘Before she went off to kill herself with drink.’

This is what I had been told and I could not let Mary live in the fantasy of resurrection. It would only make things harder in the long run.

Mary did not push away from me, as I had half expected. She stayed in my embrace, her shoulders hunching every now and then as she continued to sniff.

‘You must know, Mary,’ I whispered, ‘I am your salvation.’

6

The next month passed with various lessons. In the midst of a heatwave that almost melted the city, I taught Mary to clean our clothes by hand in the copper, as I had not yet ordered a smaller electric washing machine to replace my first, too-large order. I taught her to scrub the kitchen floor with just the right amount of vigour to ensure no scratches were added to its surface. I taught her to run the Hoover over the carpets, although her arms lacked the power to really exercise the machine to its full potential. I taught her the proper way to dust and how you could use newspaper to clean the windows without leaving a streak, even if the ink came off on your fingers. Of course, with Mary this hardly mattered.

She had already mastered the art of making a good cup of tea so we went on to other tasks in the kitchen: how to cook a tasty lamb stew; create the waves of mash on a shepherd’s pie; build up the layers of a trifle. I could have sworn the quality of meat from the butcher was better when I had Mary by my side.

‘She needs fattening up,’ the butcher said as if she was being prepared for Abraham’s slaughter.

While Mary did eat a great deal, she did not ‘fatten up’, just became more sinewy. Even with the amount she ate we often had leftovers, stretching the Sunday meal across the week. My own stomach ballooned out with so much food though I had stopped worrying about my figure, settling into the matronly rotundity I saw around me, trying to pretend I too had rolls of fat left over from childbirth.

Once we had washed the dishes after dinner, we would sit in the front room and I would read to Mary, as a step towards her own learning. I chose Jane Eyre because I had always loved orphan stories. Mary seemed to listen, obedient and polite. I suspected, though, that the seed of hope for her mother was still within her. How often had I created a fantasy family as a child—the perfect mother and steady father, the gaggle of brothers and sisters who would laugh with me as we made daisy chains or surround me in bed on the morning of my birthday? Impossible to monitor the imagination. Even as she sat placidly on the leather footrest, she could be creating a whole other future for herself with a plethora of dark faces. I did not need to ask her why she had made her way to Hyde Park, nor did I have the desire to find out if the shadow in the war memorial had been her or not. Sometimes ignorance is a warmer place to inhabit.

Strangely enough, in this period of what should have been calm, I was on edge. I would jump at the postman’s whistle (always for next door, never for me). I would wake in the middle of the night with vague recollections of distressing dreams and feel their residue haunting me even in daylight hours. I found it difficult to keep my fingers from constantly knotting together into a tight ball.

Mr Roper, who had begun to drop in at regular intervals, always with the excuse of a basket of excess fruit from his backyard trees, noticed my unease and asked one afternoon if anything was upsetting me.

‘Is it the girl? Has she done something else?’

Seated at the kitchen table, he had the eagerness of the gossip in his question and I wondered how much of our conversation would end up in pieces around the church lawn. A great deal of my information came from this stoic man. At the same time, I knew almost nothing about him. I had only known him since the war, always as a widower, his wife having died over ten years beforehand.

One night I had walked past his house and seen his porch light burning. I remembered his dishevelment at his front door, his haste to find out who was knocking unexpectedly. I recognised the wildness of hope. But hoping for what exactly? Waiting for whose love to come home?

‘It is nothing to do with Mary,’ I lied.

Mr Roper bit into one of his brown apples. ‘Somethin’ else then?’ he spluttered through the juice coming from his mouth.

‘It’s nothing at all,’ I said, not even sounding convincing to myself. Mr Roper’s question was a little too close to an intimacy between us, an intimacy I couldn’t allow. Having Mary at my house meant his visits were not altogether inappropriate but they could still get church tongues wagging.

I saw regret in his face. He knew we would only ever have conversations about the state of the fruit or the unpredictable weather, safe, quiet discussions that did not intrude into the borders of our knowledge of each other. A part of me also regretted this. I would not learn for whom his porch light burned, nor the reasons behind the frosty landscapes running down his hallway.

These were small prices to pay to be left alone with my unease. To not have to explain how Mary’s arrival had churned me up, to the point where I no longer felt safe with myself. Me, who had managed to fool them all, sent into shivers of panic by a little black girl wearing shoes too big for her …

‘How much are you being paid for her?’ Mr Roper asked with an abruptness not helped by his choosing to throw the core of the apple down his throat directly after the question. A cold thing to enquire, perhaps he thought it was cold enough to be inoffensive.

‘One pound five a week,’ I answered.

‘You think it’s worth it?’

‘It helps.’

‘Makes up for what she … uh … is?’

‘She is a child of God.’

I became aware of Mary standing on the other side of the screen door. She had been out there, in her new Vinnies hat, digging up the bulbs. She could barely understand my instructions to coax them all out of the soil and rebury them in another part of the garden. ‘Why do they need to move, Auntie Grace?’ she had asked and I foresaw another conversation similar to our one about the penny. I’d told her to simply do as she was told.

I wondered how long she had been listening to my conversation with Mr Roper. Not that it should matter. Let her know the paltry sum I was given to cover her clothes and food and upkeep.

‘I’m done, Auntie Grace,’ she said through the wire.

‘“Finished” is the right word, Mary,’ I corrected.

‘Finished, Auntie Grace,’ she replied and her dropping of the pronoun made it also sound grammatically incorrect.

‘You can rake the leaves now.’

The rake was technically too big for her and it would take twice as long to complete the task than if I did it myself, a small punishment for her semantic cheek.

She disappeared from the doorway. A few moments later we heard the scraping of the rake across the grass, as consistent as a heartbeat. There were not many leaves yet and this made it harder, having to get the individual pieces without destroying the grass underneath, and she could take her revenge by tearing into the soil.

‘I see she does have her uses,’ Mr Roper said. There didn’t seem to be any snideness in his tone so I simply nodded in agreement.

We sat in silence. I couldn’t tell if his visit had been long enough yet for me to make moves towards his departure. Strange to think how much I would’ve appreciated his presence during those difficult times when the silence of the afternoon hours almost crushed me. Even recently I had longed to draw out the after-church lunches at Mr Roper’s house, always staying until the last of my fellow widows made to leave, regretting I had to go to ensure the group knew I was not alone with him. Now I had Mr Roper in my house, with only a twelve year old as a chaperone, and all I could think about was getting rid of him. What was it that made me so uneasy? Perhaps his presence simply reminded me of absence. Perhaps the chair was better left empty than filled with a poor substitute for Fred.

†

In the third month after Mary’s arrival a letter materialised, always a letter, to unsettle me further. Shown to me by Father Benjamin, irresponsibly I thought afterwards. He should have predicted the consequences.

When I first read the letter I found myself concentrating on the bad grammar and spelling mistakes instead of the content. Force of habit, I suppose. I could almost feel my right hand twitching with the desire to mark the paper with corrections.

The import of what the words meant took longer to register.

‘How is this possible?’ I finally asked Father Benjamin.

‘I am afraid that it just … is.’

A limp reply, given the circumstances. Perhaps I should not have expected anything better. I had always thought of Father Benjamin as a weak man and his frailty had only increased with his illness, his face now even thinner and paler. I tried not to be irritated that God’s supposed servant could not offer me comfort or, at least, reassurance. Father Benjamin handed over a teacup and looked neither apologetic nor horrified, his sickness having robbed him of the ability to react.

We were sitting in his living room, a small room with two hard lounge chairs facing the empty fire grate. A desk and chair sat under the one window and there was a tapestry rug on the floor. The only decoration on the walls was a large wooden crucifix above the mantle. I noticed the lack of photos, no family members in sight, not even a long-dead mother. This brought me back to the letter.

‘I would have thought these things would have been checked and verified before the arrangements were made.’

‘Well, yes.’

I took a sip of tea to stop myself biting back at him. He was my priest, after all, a man whom I had to address with some degree of respect. I was confused and angry, exactly as I had felt when Fred’s letter arrived. I had to control the anger, as I had done then, as I had always done.

‘What are we going to do?’ I asked. My hand trembled, putting the teacup back into its saucer.

‘I think the best thing to do would be to ignore it. The girl is much better off with you.’

These were the words I wanted to hear. Perhaps I had sold Father Benjamin short. Of course Mary was better off with me. The improvements I had wrought, even in such a short time, were visible to everyone. She walked with a completely different stride now, had begun to shed herself of the ugly hunch of her race. To let her know the truth would be to undo all of that. What good could it do? A mother, yes, a mother alive and searching for her, but a mother as black as the night, a mother with deficiencies running in her veins. She had been drunk and weak enough to let her child be taken from her. What hope did she have of looking after her? Of creating the calm and ordered home I had provided for Mary?

I looked at the letter in my lap, trying to ignore the appalling language. A miracle she was able to write at all—more than likely a relative or friend had written it for her. This consoled me. Mary’s mother probably had a brood of children around her, a tribe of kids crawling over her. She could live with one less.

‘Shall I keep the letter?’ Father Benjamin asked. He was watching me intently. He did not make a move to take the paper. Settled deep in his armchair, he appeared to have no energy to make such a gesture. He hadn’t drunk his tea.

‘No,’ I replied, glancing towards the fireplace. ‘I’ll look after it.’

‘Whatever you feel is right,’ he said and closed his eyes like a benediction.

†

Relations. Fathers, mothers, aunties, appearing then disappearing. I decided that my original abandonment was preferable—no conscious rejection, only the swift hand of Death snatching away my parents, and the shelter of the Sisters until I was eighteen. Wasn’t it easier having no one left to blame? To accept you are a creature of your own devices, without a blood tie to tether you to a grubby line of ancestors who, in all likelihood, would not want you?

How fortuitous it was for Jane Eyre when, after running away from Thornfield, she stumbled out of the rain into the shelter of a family who turn out to be her relatives. What an amazing chance! I can recall looking out the windows of the convent on wet days and wondering if I did the same, if I followed the wildness of my heart, would I also fall upon kindly strangers who would transform into my long-lost cousins? What I could never understand was Jane’s ability to forgive Mrs Reed on her deathbed, the woman who had sent her out into the world without a word of warmth.

†

I returned home. I had left Mary alone while visiting Father Benjamin, something I had not done since she ran away. It was a test and as I pulled the car into the drive I felt a turning in my stomach with the possibility she would not be there.

I switched off the engine and sat staring at my father-in-law’s wool, ratty and thin, against the front window. My hands on the steering wheel were bare; I’d forgotten my driving gloves and decided staining white dress-gloves with leather was not worth the few people who might see my skin, still free of age spots. I dreaded the day they would appear and brand me as truly old. For now, I still had beautiful, smooth hands. For a brief time, they had stroked the hard skin of a man, and had run through my freshly washed hair, the hair of a woman worth watching in the bathtub. Fred had insisted on invading my baths at night and, eventually, I had stopped protesting. After all, we were married and trying for a child. Even still, I worried about whether God would have approved, if He knew how strongly my heart was in it, how hard I found to be without it.

Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day. But she that liveth in pleasure is dead while she liveth.

A quote from the Bible read out at one of the widows’ lunches. All the women in black had nodded their heads in agreement as if they were more than willing to forgo everything, everything for these words of miserable consolation. How could this be enough? Supplication and prayers night and day? My hands gripped the steering wheel with the frustration of it. What I would give to be allowed to yell and shout my disappointment.

It was the letter from Mary’s mother that had brought this all back. Worlds created and torn apart by the words of careless people; people who never thought of what they were destroying, the hopes they were erasing.

I opened the front door, the letter inside my handbag. Mary would not look there and, even if she did, there was no reason for her to suspect the letter had anything to do with her. Despite this, I was strangely nervous to see her. The house was quiet and I knew immediately she was not there. I could not feel the presence which had become so familiar to me.

Holding back my panic I went to the back door and, with a feeling like ecstasy, heard splashes coming from the laundry outside. She was doing the washing in the tub, as I had asked her to, humming to herself what sounded like a hymn.

My shoes were loud on the cement path. By the time I stood in the laundry doorway, she had stopped singing and ceased scrubbing to face me.

‘I am almost finished, Auntie Grace,’ she said.

‘That’s good, Mary.’

I could tell she was unsure whether to go on, which would mean having her back to me, or to wait for me to tell her to continue. I felt the power and the sorrow of this. I turned and left her to it.

†

That night, I lay awake. I had snuck into Mary’s room while she was finishing the washing and added her mother’s letter to the pile of Fred’s letters under the locked roll top of his desk. It felt strange to be doing something clandestine in my own home and when I closed the desk I saw that my hands had disturbed the dust so it would be clear to Mary I had been inside.

I lay in bed trying to keep an image of Mary’s mother out of my head. When she did come, I tried to make her as ugly as possible, fat and yellow-eyed with missing teeth and sagging breasts. I did not really know what one of them would look like; I had only seen men in parks, and photos in the papers were of children or missionary girls, all in proper dress. It was hard to imagine how they would get along in normal life, how they would do their hair, what kind of house they would keep. This is what I had to keep in my mind: she could not be as good for Mary as I was. The clothes I could give her, the way of speaking, a chance to read and write, domestic knowledge, the reining in of her baser instincts.

But this was also the problem. While I could not see Mary’s mother, what I could easily picture was Mary herself, breaking open Fred’s desk and riffling through those letters. Would her basic reading lessons let her understand them? No, even though I had given her a children’s Bible and a Girls’ Own Annual, she merely flicked through them, looking at the pictures. She did not yet have control over words.

And what of the night on the back steps? Was all that forgotten? How long did the young hold onto things? Not as long as when you grew up, surely. I would hate for any child to have the recall I did: scenes, feelings, the colour of a dress, the exact criss-cross patterning of Fred’s newly grown moustache. In contrast, I had no image of the parents who raised me for two years, not even the barest flash, as if that dual beginning never existed. I had longed for stories of my family. Did Mary have such stories? What did she remember? What did she hold against me?

I got out of bed and went to my wardrobe to find my collection of holy cards. It was not a large pile, about twenty or so, kept tied with a ribbon on the top shelf, given to me as a child by Sister Gabrielle.

In contrast to the dreaded Sister Clare, I believe Sister Gabrielle liked me. I cannot say she loved me. An ancient woman with a growing hump from scoliosis, I have no memories of her caresses or physical affection. Her appearance—her deformity given more prominence by an ill-fitting habit—made many of the other girls afraid of her but I remember each month her handing me a holy card in the years after Auntie Iris moved north, taking away my only opportunity for excursions.

There are higher powers that love and judge us, Sister Gabrielle had said, giving me the miniature renditions of the Holy Family, the thinness of the cardboard a miracle in itself.

I riffled through to find my favourite: a triptych titled ‘How to Say the Rosary’. On the front panel, the sketched rosary beads had lines running off them at appropriate points with directives on the repetition of the Our Father and the Hail Mary and the Glory Be. They surrounded a white and blue robed Holy Mother incased in an oval of gold leaf, her head further encircled by a halo of stars. I unfolded the card. Each panel explained the Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious Mysteries, tying birth, death and resurrection to ten beads of polished rosewood. My Rosary beads sat on the dresser, next to the porcelain make-up set from Fred. They had not been a gift, I bought them myself as soon as I earned wages, replacing the flimsy set I had received at First Holy Communion. I did not pick them up. It had been a long time since I had said the Rosary and, as hard as I might try, I could not bring myself to say it now.

I replaced the ribbon around the holy cards, tying it into a pretty bow, and put them back inside the wardrobe, tokens of a better time.

†

The next day I found an opportunity to check Fred’s desk while Mary was in the bathroom. It had not been tampered with and I was pleased I had begun to let the girl wash herself; it gave me these moments to inspect her room, as well as allowing her to take responsibility for her own appearance. She seemed to relish it, so much so that I had lain down a time limit, not only for the sake of the hot water but to ensure I was not encouraging vanity. A fine line was always to be walked: to take her away from the disadvantages of what she was, while never actually letting her forget exactly what she was.

On the bedside table I noticed a pile of gum nuts and rust-coloured leaves. They did not seem to be laid out in any particular pattern and I could not tell what the attraction of the collection was. I would have swept them away as debris, mess that brought dirt into the house. Even the day before I may have done so.

‘I am finished, Auntie Grace.’ Mary stood at the door, her hair damp.

‘Good,’ I said, pulling myself tall to ensure she did not think I had to sneak around. I had every right to be in her room, every right to examine her possessions.

‘What are these, Mary?’ I asked, gesturing towards the table.

‘Just … bits I picked up,’ she replied, tentatively.

‘Well, clean them up. Put them in piles or rows or something. They look like rubbish.’

She moved towards the table and pushed the nuts into a heap, laid the leaves next to each other, one after the other. Tokens.

‘Like this, Auntie Grace?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I replied, gently.

The morning sun had found its way into the room and, once again, I noticed the gloss of Mary’s hair. She stood in a block of light spreading over her bed and the ageing quilt, and the dust motes in the room seemed to rise up and prance around her.

†

Dear Grace,

There is a matter I need to tell you about, though I don’t really want to. Once a coward, always a coward. My only excuse for what I have to tell you is that, after hearing your news, after hearing that all this time I have been loving an imaginary child, I had to find some way to console myself. Perhaps you will already have guessed. I will try to explain, the best I can.

Japan is a country like no other I have ever been to. I expected to find a way to release all my anger here, to revenge all the dead on the weakest men of all, the survivors. But it is hard to hate the defeated. There is no arrogance here, only shame. Though I do not think it is shame for what they have been party to, but rather shame for not having succeeded, it still makes them pitiful. For some of our boys, hatred towards them still bubbles away, but the day-to-day life here, in burnt-out cities, the hardship they face with quiet dignity, for me, this makes it almost impossible to maintain animosity. And, despite all that has happened here, there is beauty. They say that some people are born in the wrong land and can spend their whole lives looking for their rightful birthplace. Until I arrived here, I did not know that was me. Japan has begun to feel like a home in a way that my own country no longer does.

How can I explain, Grace, except to say that the reflection and quiet grace of the Japanese women stands in such contrast to the loud brashness of my countrymen? Despite our victory, I feel sorrier for our boys who cavort and carry on as if they have inherited the earth. This consoles me when I feel any guilt about my growing love. It often feels like a betrayal of all the boys who I saw killed (I think of Private L. who was sent home with severe wounds and died not long after, swearing to God that there was no glory). It is hard, though, to reconcile the madness of Jap soldiers with the elegance of Japanese civilians. I do not dream of the jungle days anymore, only months ago now but really a lifetime ago and I do not imagine being troubled by the past. The weeping trees here did not shoot my friends, the gardens and shrines that survived the bombings sing of peace, and the dark-eyed women reach out their gentle hands. Which brings me to the matter.

I must confess, at first, that their yellow skin was quite repulsive to me, with its look of foreignness and sickness. They are so small compared to us and littleness has not been attractive to me in the past. I tell you this, Gracie, because I want you to know that I did not go in search of her, nor did I want to feel the way I do about her. Fraternisation is not encouraged, of course, but I am certainly not the only one to find my way to such sources of solace. I will not offend you with the details. How separate our lives have become, with so many un-told stories, so many sentences blacked out. You did not even write at what time the baby was lost, or if you knew if it was a boy or a girl.

I can only apologise again and again for my inability to be the husband you deserve. How sorry I am cannot be conveyed in words. Still, I feel this is not only the best for me but, ultimately, the best for you. To return to you would be to engage in a falsehood I cannot countenance. Though your God would, no doubt, think it the right thing to do, I cannot see it as proper, or moral, or good.

I will continue to support you financially and I know that a legal divorce will not be an option for you. Our separation is, however, now official. I can only hope that your anger towards me will, eventually, be tempered by forgiveness and compassion.

Sincerely,

Fred

†

On my last day at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope High School there was a small ceremony to mark my departure. I was given a bunch of violets and a Complete Works of Shakespeare that smelt musty when I received it and has since become almost untouchable. I wondered if they had dragged it out of the library basement because I was not deemed worthy of the effort of purchasing a gift. For so many years I had worked at instilling enthusiasm for words into girls who had no desire to read, girls who fell in love with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights only because they dreamt of their own moody, silent man pledging life-time devotion (I had had to point out to them that the downfall of Heathcliff stemmed from his origins, or lack of them: the orphan forever tainted). I had worked hard, and thought I deserved more.

Nothing, of course, was said of the reason I was leaving; it was all ‘valuable contribution’, ‘sadly missed’ and ‘good luck in the future’, the speeches addressed to ‘Mrs Grace Smith’. In the early days, my special girls had called me ‘Mrs Rosie’ because of the rosewater scent I used to wear. What the other ones called me—the not-so special girls—I never knew. Gradually, I had evoked enough fear for them to be careful not to let any unfavourable nicknames slip out, though I don’t doubt they existed. The Physical Education teacher was known as ‘The Oak Tree’ and the mousy Maths instructor was ‘Mrs Squeak’. Gradually, my special girls had reduced in number.

The farewell was held in the teachers’ room with only the head girl there to represent the students. Mrs Gladwin, the librarian, had baked her traditional plate of lamingtons, presented on the same serving tray brought out when other teachers had left to get married or have children.

When I married Fred, there was a similar expectation I too would leave and, in hindsight, it would have been a much better time to go. Fred had wanted me to stay at work, though, the war already bringing the threat of his departure. He did not want me to be stuck alone in the house without him. He brought no replacement family and, like me, he had not managed to accumulate friends outside those who worked with him. This made it easier, of course, when it ultimately came to my decision to change the words of my own story, to change desertion to death.

You are dead to me, I wrote to him and tried desperately not to picture the slant-eyed woman who would receive the envelope. Always trying to keep the images out of my head. Always having to struggle with knowing the way he would look, the hurt inside him when he read of my plan to kill him off. That he agreed to it was a clear sign of his guilt, that the black-haired vixen did not have him completely in her power. He had gone to see the land that has caused us so much misery, to find out what would breed such fierce hate, and somehow the blossoms had softened him, the curving bridges had lead him to places I would not have thought possible. No matter how much I tried not to imagine, I could feel them arm in arm, hear her soft, broken English, see her kneeling at his feet with tea flavoured by spices that would turn my stomach.

Perhaps it was a kind of madness that overtook me then, determined to not look the fool, to be given some credit for my war effort. I had suffered through the possibility of death, hadn’t I? What difference would it make if the death was not a complete one? Once someone is gone from your life, they may as well have no body, nor soul, for nothing belongs to you anymore. They become dust, a swirl of memories and half-lost truths and imagined knowledge and dreamed futures. They are gone, taken by a wind you cannot name.

I did not think of the real, glorious dead. I took my lie and swallowed it, entering the school one day in black, telling the tragic news that my husband, formerly alive and well somewhere in the Pacific, was actually Missing in Action, presumed dead. Those who had been struggling with my bout of ‘problems’—the long, unexplained absences from classes when I simply could not stand the looks of expectation from the girls, wanting me to have all the answers when, after Fred’s letter, I could not explain anything—became suddenly sympathetic and the whispers I was drinking stopped.

I continued for a few weeks with the mantle of widowhood upon me. Mrs Squeak and the others tiptoed around me. There were still days when I could not leave the house and I would assume one of them would cover for me. It was on one of those housebound days that the head mistress came to the door and nudged me out of teaching.

‘With the men returning from the war, Grace, it seems a little unfair for a woman to take up a place that could help a veteran find his feet again,’ she said, sitting in my front room, taking a slice of a week-old sponge cake I had quickly cut up. ‘You will have your war-widow pension now, won’t you? Why work when you don’t need to?’

She had pushed the sponge cake around the plate. She was a fat woman and I was surprised to find her not willing to devour the food put in front of her.

‘You need a chance to recover, Grace, from your … loss.’ At the time, I thought her hesitation was out of respect. Looking back, perhaps it was suspicion. ‘You are looking a little thin these days.’ She did not mention the bags under my eyes nor the crookedness of my hair parting.

‘Perhaps it has all become too much for you,’ she said.

Consequently, it all became too little. Again, I was left alone in my time of trouble. My neighbours remained quiet upon hearing the news of Fred’s death. I was never sure why, perhaps I had created the illusion of a woman who had no need for condolence. It was spring then and I remember I stood under one of the trees at the end of Wayville Street watching thin, translucent pollen spores floating across the road, knowing none of them would find fertile ground in the dense park grass beyond.

†

The church congregation was a little kinder. Father Benjamin included Fred in the Prayers of the Faithful and there were generous squeezes of my hand. Mrs Parker invited me not only to join the Widows’ Group but also to call her Enid. And Mr Roper introduced himself to me for the first time.

After I joined the Widows’ Group I was asked to provide a photo for the memorial booklet they planned to put together, one page dedicated to information about each of our husbands (the booklet was never made due to the high cost of the printing). I did not choose the same photograph I had framed at home. Instead, I found a picture of Fred in his groom’s outfit, a too-large chrysanthemum sticking out of his buttonhole, his face rigid because, after all, it was not our wedding day, but a week later when the photography studio was free.

On the actual day of our marriage, Fred’s mother seemed determined for it to be a quiet and holy affair; too much joy was deemed frivolous given the recent death of Fred’s father, not to mention the general state of the world marching off to war. Our witnesses, a couple from Fred’s bank, were ill at ease, throwing a scattering of rice on the church steps that landed nowhere near me.

†

The secrets held in Fred’s desk could simply be added to the many secrets I had held, from my vision of the Virgin to the invented ghost of my husband. While I was still angry at the mistake over Mary’s mother, and wondered at the bureaucratic incompetence of the people in charge of distributing these children, I could live with another phantom—Mary’s mother; what would it matter to have another set of imagined eyes upon me? Let her join the long line of accusers, sitting smug and guilt free in their unquestioned lives, judging me.

Perhaps it would all work out, perhaps I could make Mary a respectable citizen, a young woman to be applauded and celebrated for overcoming the disadvantages of her birth. It was not outside the realms of possibility, my rosy vision of the future. I could have thought it probable except for the nagging in my head, the shadow of doubt I had, to some extent, lived with all my life. The conviction, if it can be named as solidly as that, that there was to be no golden age for me.

There had only been two people worthy of convincing me I could expect happiness: Auntie Iris and Fred. Auntie Iris had kept in contact with me, despite moving away, and I had contemplated settling in her hometown after leaving school. She had implied I was better off staying where I was.

As for my time with Fred, it might have been my golden age, but now it had become so soured I could no longer look back and see it without a bitter sting in my eyes, my teeth clenching. All of it seemed false and hollow, tainted by its ending. Yes, it was better to keep one’s expectations low, to believe that God was saving the best for much, much later.

7

During the week of Mary’s mother’s letter, Mass seemed laborious even before our sickly priest began to pause longer and longer between words, often losing his place and having to repeat them, so much so we could not say the last prayers with him, the third Hail Mary falling away to his whispered, solitary voice.

‘Ave Maria … Ave Maria … gratia plena, Dominus tecum …’ Father Benjamin stopped. I was grateful he had his back to us, I did not want to see the confusion on his face. I wondered if he had forgotten the prayer altogether. His shoulders sagged.

I saw some of the children glance at one another, holding in giggles. Mary was stony faced, showing neither pity nor ridicule. She had smiled at this man once, as if he were a friend, but now I could see no evidence of this trust and wondered if I had imagined it.

‘Benedicta tu in mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus,’ Father Benjamin spoke again, in a rush now, as if catching the words before they left him again. ‘Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.’

When we were finally released from the church, Mary ran off, as usual, to join the group of youngsters she was permitted to talk to. Standing on the lawn, Mrs Mavis gripped me by the arm and whispered that her son was back and being ‘attended to’ by her husband, which explained his absence from the service. I did not know this small, bird-like woman particularly well and could not understand her desire to tell me the fortunes of her unfortunate boy. She motioned in the direction of the children near the grotto.

‘I hear she has been quite a handful,’ Mrs Mavis said. ‘She actually ran away, I hear? It is a shame, a real shame.’

‘Yes it is,’ I replied, without really knowing what I was agreeing to. Whose shame? My shame, for not being able to control the girl? Mary’s shame, for being what she was? Our shared shame, for even attempting to exist together? How ridiculous, Mrs Mavis consoling herself by placing Mary and I higher in the scale of shameful behaviour than her prodigal son.

‘I feel for you,’ Mrs Mavis continued and her hand gripped tighter. I wanted to shrug her off and turned toward the poplar trees. The balsam scent was strong, wafting over from the pathway. I was determined to seem as normal as I could and started to talk with Mrs Mavis about the approach of the colder weather; the difficulty of airing clothes when the days were so damp. Mrs Bishop joined us, wearing a strange woollen hat, and talked loudly about the next widows’ lunch: whose turn it was to host, and whether she would make her infamously brittle ANZAC biscuits, regardless.

‘I know there are some women who don’t like anyone to bring food,’ she said in a low voice, the woman in question must have been nearby. ‘But I really don’t like to break tradition.’

Father Benjamin came out, still in his vestments, nodded at us three women and moved on to a gathering of men standing at the church corner, Mr Roper amongst them, leaning against the brick.

Gradually the crowd began to leave, couples tripping off with plans for the day or older ones limping away to endless cups of tea and empty afternoons. I stayed longer than usual because I did not want it to appear as if I had anything to run away from, certainly not the implications of Mrs Mavis.

I had my back to the grotto and had lost sight of Mary, although I had seen the Thompson boy leave with his parents and wondered who would now be holding court. I tried to focus on the words issuing from Mrs Bishop’s lips. She was one of those women who simply barrelled on, regardless of the obvious dislike emanating from others around her. My teeth were aching at the thought of her biscuits and, for the first time, I considered making an excuse to avoid the widows’ lunch. No one would notice my absence and if they did, it would be put down to the ‘handful’ or ‘shame’ that was Mary. This made me stop and pause. I would have to keep going to the lunches or else it would look like Mary had driven me away from them.

‘Well, I’m off,’ Mrs Mavis chirped, ‘Sunday roast to rustle up.’

‘I don’t know how she can keep a smile on her face,’ Mrs Bishop said after Mrs Mavis left. ‘Honestly, the sheer courage of it.’

She didn’t really think it was courage, she thought it was audacity. Mrs Mavis should be hanging her head, had no right to be there amongst us, with a son like that. It had become clear he had vandalised the statue’s bayonet, turning up in the middle of the night and threatening to kill ‘them all’ with the dull grey metal blade. I couldn’t imagine the broken bayonet would have been very sharp but the police were called and Mr Mavis had spent hours at the station trying to reassure them his son was harmless.

‘I’m very glad she still feels welcome here,’ Mrs Bishop continued.

I thought of the German couple who had been welcomed into the congregation after someone had whispered that they’d kept a Jewish family safe in their basement. We found out later this was just a silly story, spread by who knows who, and the German couple had, in fact, done nothing to save anyone, except themselves. Everyone was indignant and shunned them to the extent that they stopped coming to church and eventually moved away. I remember feeling sorry for them, given they had not made up the lie, they had no way of protecting themselves from the truth.

‘Wouldn’t anyone want to run away from that tiny weatherboard?’ Mrs Bishop asked and I had no idea to whom she was referring. Most of the church attendees had gone.

‘It all goes back to his grandfather’s love of gambling,’ Mrs Bishop went on and I was saved the embarrassment of having to admit I had not been listening. ‘Mr Mavis’s father lost the family home, you see, and the memory of that lost grandeur haunts them, stuck like a thorn in their side. Oh, and I suppose the war didn’t do the boy much good either.’

I hoped Mrs Bishop would stop talking at me very soon. My desire to be extra courteous meant I should not be the one to end the conversation. I managed to move around to see the grotto. Looking over Mrs Bishop’s shoulder I still could not spot Mary.

‘I really have to be off myself, Mrs Bishop,’ I addressed her slowly and deliberately, ‘please let me know where the next lunch is going to be.’

‘Well, I was meaning to say, we haven’t had it at your house for a while. Wouldn’t it be lovely for all of us to meet your little … girl properly?’

My focus shifted back to Mrs Bishop, a pendulum swinging back to its centre. The thought of it—them—scrutinising Mary, scrutinising me. Bad enough the first time when I had still been new at the widow charade, afraid my gestures were not right, terrified they would see right through me to the deserted wife, the Japanese mistress, the self-satisfied husband sitting cross-legged in the land of the Emperor. I had survived it, yes, all their fluttering and reminiscences, their heavily worn perfume, their retreat to the wonders of widowhood. In the last few years, I had held enough lunches that I was almost immune. But could I do it now, with Mary there?

‘Of course, of course,’ I said. There was nothing else to be said. ‘I would be delighted.’

I moved past Mrs Bishop’s victorious smile. Perhaps she had planned it all along, that was why she went on about making her biscuits, knowing I was one of the women who never raised a murmur about others bringing additional food, too afraid to make a fuss.

I neared the statue of Aloysius, his mouth green with scratched moss where someone had tried to scrub him. They had let him get into such a state, it was unlikely he could be restored. From behind the grotto, among the tangle of oleander bushes in the corner of the churchyard, I heard voices. A few stepping-stones had been laid to the left of the grotto but they stopped after only three slabs. I stood on the second stone and watched Mr Roper talking to Mary. He was on one knee, which explained why I had not seen him immediately, hidden as he was among the shadows. How close they were, how far away they seemed, like a vision, receding into the distance. The voices I thought I’d heard were only his.

‘You’re just … just … You remind me so much …’

The breaks between each sentence made it sound like a conversation. They were both still unaware of my presence.

‘It will be good. You come find me. I’ll be waiting.’

Mary said nothing, just stood still with an expression on her face I had previously seen. I had called it ‘blank’. Now I looked at her and saw so many things: how could one girl hold so much?

‘Mary!’ I called.

They jumped with surprise.

‘Ah, there you are, Mrs Smith,’ Mr Roper said. ‘I was just rounding up Mary for you.’

He pushed up from his one knee with an ease I could not fathom.

‘Bit of a slow service today, eh?’ he continued in the same jovial way. He rubbed his hands on the top of his thighs.

Mary made her way over to me. She took my hand. I could not decide what to do, what to say to Mr Roper. What had he meant by ‘I’ll be waiting’? What exactly was he offering Mary? He stood now amongst the threatening branches with his ridiculously blond hair buffeted by the wind. The front of it stuck up at an odd angle and I suspected, for the first time, it might be a toupee.

‘Thank you, Mr Roper,’ I said. I felt Mary’s hand go slack inside my own, no longer gripping me. Yes, yes, she expected more. She could not understand the quiet I had to inhabit, the fear that kept me silent. It would not do to stir anything up.

‘I will see you next Sunday, Mr Roper.’ I turned my back on him.

‘Or maybe sooner?’ he called, desperation in his voice.

†

Grateful to have driven to church for once, I drove Mary home in silence. I always maintained this quiet because I believed it helped to instil the joy of Mass inside her, hoping she would gain the sense of peace I had once been able to extract from the service. It used to be my solace, the Latin words murmuring over my tongue, following the priest’s back as the congregation directed itself towards the great crucifix. The words did not need to be translated, their underlying meaning clear to the right mind. In fact, I preferred to ignore the English lines running alongside the missal, letting the language of the ancients wash over me. The ritual of church was like a balm: soothing, unchanging. There was a time when I went every day, my heart leaping into my prayers, a direct link to God and all His love. I would return home and say the Rosary over and over again.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.

On this trip home, my mind was far from God’s love. I thought, instead, of Mr Roper’s visits, the times he may have been alone with Mary. I could not recall any such moments. There were only piles of pears, lemons, limes, and apples, too many in my mind’s eye to have ever been delivered, let alone eaten. I had made pies and flans, the sweetness of the homegrown crop combining with sugar and pastry to create indulgent desserts. Mary had never shown a disinclination to eat them.

Mary sat in the passenger seat, the faint odour of earth coming off her. Her shoes were muddy and she seemed to have shrunk, becoming small again when, so recently, I had been proud of the fact she had finally begun to appear her twelve years of age. I drove the car into the driveway. My pots of geraniums sat along the side of the carport, as they always did, their pink and purple flowers adding a splash of colour to the grey pebbles, struts and galvanised iron; a small show of the artistic care I had once put into the house. It reminded me of other efforts, the landscapes I had seen lined along Mr Roper’s hallway. I realised those paintings all contained children: urchins playing in the snow, boys skating on ice, a little girl wandering in a white forest.

†

Preparations for the widows’ lunch began immediately. Every room had to be dusted from top to bottom and I took over the hoovering, driving the machine with all its force into the corners. Mary followed me with a rag, wiping the top of the skirting boards, although the small amount of grime removed by these ministrations was testimony to our good housekeeping.

The cleaning was but a fraction of what needed to be done. Most important was the food. Some women had large enough dining tables to cater for the seven or so attendees, preparing a meal that would have them scurrying back and forth to the kitchen with harassed, hot faces. I couldn’t understand why any single woman would have such over-sized furniture, a constant sign of her aloneness with its empty chairs and un-marked surface. I only had the kitchen table, which comfortably sat four. At the previous lunches, I had served sandwiches in the living room, moving the two wicker chairs from the sunroom, in addition to the lounge and two armchairs. It was cramped, to say the least.

My discussion of the weather with Mrs Mavis had raised the possibility of holding this lunch outdoors. The days were still warm and the coolness in the air, if anything, made it more pleasant. Stored in the back of the carport was a patio setting. Fred and I had bought it not long after we were married, in expectation of summer afternoons with our children. The white, cast-iron table had six chairs to accompany it.

Mary and I had to lift each heavy chair together, cobwebs clinging to every space of the filigree. By the time we had moved the six, we were smudged and sticky. All that remained was the table itself.

‘I don’t think we are going to be able to lift it, Mary,’ I said. ‘It’s too big.’

We stood in front of the oval structure. I had moved the car further down the driveway to allow for manoeuvring. Even so, I could not see how we could lift this monstrosity on our own.

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘we will have to wait for … for … Yes, perhaps we will.’ Stupidly, I could not say his name. Mary knew I was referring to Mr Roper, the man I turned to for household chores beyond me.

She moved to the table and with her thin, but now strong arms, she began to pull at it. For a moment, it looked as if it would not be dragged, standing firm on the gravelled ground. Then, with a sound like a wave breaking, the legs inched from their eternal spot, throwing up a splash of gravel. The surprise of it threw Mary’s torso forward over the table and everything was still again.

Lying halfway across the setting, Mary turned her face towards me with a grin I had not seen before.

‘See? We can do it, Auntie Grace,’ she said.

I walked to the other end of the table and started to push. Indeed, the initial movement seemed to have freed it up and we pushed and pulled it across the stones and onto the cement, to stand under the back garden awning. We had to stop every now and then to rest and it took us a good fifteen minutes. Mary was very excited by our achievement and carefully extracted the dead flies clustered in the ‘v’ of each of the table’s legs.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she said.

‘It cost a fortune,’ I replied. ‘I should have spent the money on something useful.’

Mary continued to clean, making no further comment. I could see that underneath the dirt, the patio setting was indeed beautiful. What good did this do me? To show it off to widowed women, women who seemed content to have their lives defined by loss. What was it that God wanted if all He knew how to do was take? Was I going to have Mary taken away from me by her mother or, even worse, the sympathetic Mr Roper?

‘I think I got ’em all, Auntie Grace.’

Mary re-appeared from beneath the table, her cloth a tangle of dismembered insects and fragments of web.

‘Well done,’ I said.

She looked up from the filthy rag, surprised. I was not prone to praise.

‘Thank you, Auntie Grace,’ she answered in a quiet voice. The table setting shone.

†

The day of the lunch arrived with blue skies topped by swiftly moving clouds and only the hint of a chill in the air. Both Mary and I were up early, acutely aware of the many tasks to be performed prior to the women’s arrival at half past twelve. My stomach churned with nervous anticipation and, for once, I could not eat breakfast. Watching Mary gulp down her boiled egg, I thought how angry the Sisters would have been to see me waste my bacon, the toast sliding into the bin with a reproachful thud. I had never had so little appetite; usually I meet crisis with the need to eat, smoothing out the edges with hot food, warm drinks.

In my head, I went through the possible progression of the day, trying to think of interesting opening gambits to ensure the conversation flowed: un-complicated issues such as the rising cost of bread or where to get the best lamb shanks. I imagined the words turning towards war stories and me having to steer them away, like driving a snake back with a broom. In truth, it had been more than a year since the lunches went in that direction. We had heard all the tales of sacrifice and valour, there were only so many times one could weep for other people’s husbands. I had talked only once of Fred’s letters, how they all arrived in a bundle, compressing his war years into a single afternoon of reading and crying, how he had told me so little in them in order to protect me, how lost he felt to me even before the news of his death. This last, at least, was partly true.

There had been a suggestion recently that the Widows’ Group take up some activity, such as crochet or knitting, to give us another reason to come together. Thus far, it remained an idea. I suspected most of the women were too tired to take up the needle. Most of them did their charity work and enjoyed the fact that the widows’ lunches, for the most part, asked nothing of them except banal chatter.

Mary continued to dig away at the insides of her egg. She had a habit of kneeling on the chair to enable her to see right down to the bottom of the shell, to ensure she did not miss one morsel of the congealed white. I had under-cooked the egg, the yolk liquid for the toast soldiers to be dipped into, then extracted with yellow goo over their bodies. Mary always watched with fascination as the eggs bobbed around in my glass saucepan, the bubbles sending them on a carefully timed dance.

In the living room, I started straightening the cushions on the lounge. The women would have to be kept comfortable in here prior to moving outside and I knew there would be an examination of every nook and cranny of the house, remembering my own curiosity when entering the other women’s homes. At Enid Parker’s house, the wildness of her garden had been commented upon, as well as the lack of roses and the presence of ugly, colourless natives. She had made up for it with a delicious homemade pavlova. Mrs Joyce, Mrs Bishop’s ‘best friend’, like me, had an outdoor privy, although hers was not also a laundry, and there was general admiration of her ability to keep it smelling fresh. Possibly the worst incident of any of the lunches was the time when, at Mrs Bishop’s, in search of the bathroom, I had stumbled into a nursery, its walls painted blue. The dusty cot made me feel sick, I had never thought of Mrs Bishop as maternal. She, like nearly all of us in the Widows’ Group, was childless. Luckily, I proceeded on without disturbing anything that would have betrayed my discovery and I had never spoken to her about it.

The smallness of my house would ensure no such incidents. In fact, I would put Mary on duty, to follow their movements. For once I was grateful for having my outside loo (even if its concrete floors made it difficult to keep it smelling like Mrs Joyce’s) because once lunch was served at the setting, there would be no reason for them to re-enter the house. No reason to go anywhere near Mary’s room.

‘Have you finished your breakfast?’ I called to her, hitting my tapestry cushion, trying to restore plumpness to the chaste shepherdess and the lamb she carried.

‘Almost, Auntie Grace,’ she called back and I heard her carrying the plates to the sink.

‘Leave those, Mary!’ I shouted, still standing in the living room. ‘Go and get washed!’

I saw the blur of her as she dashed off to the bathroom. We had to have enough time to plait her hair. There would be nothing wild about her today.

†

Enid Parker arrived first. At thirty years of age she was the youngest of the group; when she was twenty-three her husband had been killed in Libya, a place she had never heard of until the telegram came. If I had been a real widow I think we might have been real friends. As it was, I smiled and handed her a cup of newly made tea and hoped the other women would come to fill the silence. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Joyce soon arrived together, probably congregating on the front lawn before making the journey up to my door. I could imagine their gossip of expectation, wondering how the little girl would conduct herself, if her scrubbed and civil appearance at church could be carried through an entire afternoon of close contact. Mrs Chilsom and Mrs Jackson came not long after, also seeming to brim with anticipation of the possible disasters ahead.

Mrs Bishop was her usual loud self, immediately attempting to take over.

‘Mrs Jackson, do you think you should sit there?’ she demanded. ‘I’m not sure your leg will cope with the getting out again!’

A guffaw added by Mrs Joyce completed Mrs Jackson’s humiliation. She had broken her ankle playing an ill-considered game of tennis and resented enormously the subsequent limp she would have for the rest of her life. Mrs Bishop seemed to enjoy reminding her of it.

‘The lounge does not sink quite that low,’ I said. ‘I am sure she’ll be able to get up again.’

I kept my voice light and Mrs Jackson muttered in appreciation as she lowered herself into the armchair. I had tactfully removed the footrest into my bedroom, aware of how difficult it would be for any of the older women to use it with grace.

We were still waiting for Mrs Andrews, always late from having to manage two young boys with only an unsympathetic mother-in-law for help. Aside from Mrs Jackson, the women stood in the cramped room, holding their teacups.

I would have liked to usher them outside straight away but the natural instinct was to huddle together and I did not want to be as officious as Mrs Bishop.

‘Would you like an appetiser, ma’am?’

Mary had a tray of crackers and cheese cubes and was offering them to Mrs Chilsom. Mrs Chilsom took one and Mary moved over to the other women with confidence. I saw them watching her curiously. It did not last long, for it was clear she was not going to drop anything or perform some outrageous, exotic act. They went back to their talk, which spread without my prepared opening gambits.

‘Father Benjamin really does look very ill,’ Mrs Jackson remarked. Her carefully coiffured hair could not move for its stiffness so her eyebrows appeared especially animated.

‘He’ll be returning to God before long,’ the sanctimonious Mrs Chilsom answered and the two of them paused, as if to allow the priest’s soul to fly past them.

‘Sorry I’m late!’ Mrs Andrews cried out, coming in the open front door without knocking. She pulled off her hat and revealed her frizzy hair, pins askew. Of course, she would be forgiven, having the watertight excuse of having children.

I announced that it was time to move out to the back garden.

‘What a novel idea!’ Mrs Bishop exclaimed, exchanging a subtle look with Mrs Joyce that spoke of her ambivalence towards me; her tolerance only extended to the degree to which I kowtowed to her, how much she remained the ultimate measure by which I judged myself. Another person in my life whose function it was to keep me in check, as if the ‘dead’ weren’t enough.

The overlapping comments that came at the sight of the table—‘oh, how lovely’, ‘what a treat’, ‘so tasteful’—convinced me Mary’s floral centrepiece of yellow roses in a cut-crystal vase was not too ostentatious. Everyone took a seat, guided by Mrs Bishop. Unfortunately, being stationary unsettled us, and a quiet descended.

‘Mary arranged these,’ I said loudly of the flowers in my desperation to break the silence, and all six of the women simultaneously turned towards Mary. She stood on the back steps, still with the tray in her hand, although most of the crackers and cheese were gone, revealing the bright red tartan pattern beneath.

‘She really isn’t too bad,’ Mrs Bishop declared first. ‘Certainly not as dark as they can be.’

‘You have been keeping her out of the sun?’ Mrs Joyce asked.

‘Yes, of course,’ I replied.

‘But can she … well, does she really have the brains to be useful to you?’ Mrs Andrews’ question went up an octave at the end.

‘I believe they can be saved,’ Mrs Chilsom answered before I could respond. ‘As long as you get them young. Mrs Smith is to be applauded.’

‘I just do not see how you can trust them,’ Mrs Andrews shuddered. ‘In your own home …’

‘She’s just a little girl,’ Enid Parker said quietly, not brave enough to really stand against the flow of the conversation.

‘As a parent,’ Mrs Andrews continued as if she hadn’t heard, ‘I would never be able to have one in my house, to put my children at such risk.’

Mary continued to stand on the step, her face covered with the look I had grown accustomed to. I recognised the wall she put between herself and the words being spoken, between the hard slap of a hand and the real hurt inside. I had done it so often myself it amazed me I had not seen it immediately. There were thoughts and angers and hopes and hurts I knew nothing of, little balls of pain she hid as well as I did. Mary’s eyes, which had seemed to be focused on nothing, flickered towards me, perhaps asking, perhaps pleading, perhaps doing nothing more than wandering.

‘I trust her,’ I said, surprising even myself.

Mary moved from the step to the ground and walked directly to Mrs Andrews. She put the tray in front of the woman, not with a thrust or any kind of challenge, just as she had offered the tray earlier, polite and meek. There was a moment when it seemed she would be refused; I could almost hear Mrs Chilsom’s breath being held. After what was, in reality, only a short pause, Mrs Andrews dutifully took a cracker and a piece of cheese. The whole table moved their attention away from Mary and chatter began again.

‘Did you see the state of the pews last week? It really is time to replace Mr Burrows.’

‘The wood looks as if he has used his spit for polish.’

The conversation now centred around Mr Burrows’ ineptitude as the church cleaner, although the complaints were muted. After all, he was yet another soldier who had come back from the war changed and no one wanted to mention the strange monologues he sometimes addressed to himself in a loud, erratic manner. Instead, they talked of masculine inability to ‘do things properly’, to really wipe the pews clean. Mr Burrows could not be specifically to blame, it was simply not in his poor, male body.

How absurd these women were, clinging to their superior knowledge of cleaning; as if they were not stuck in their fortresses pretending they could not do anything more than bake. These women who had run the country while the men were away, now claiming to be content with lunches and charity work. I was not fooled.

‘I just cannot get my gardenias to bloom,’ Enid Parker selflessly declared, in yet another attempt to turn the conversation away from character assassination.

I indicated to Mary the tray was well and truly done with, waving her off into the kitchen where she would begin to assemble individual plates with cold ham, steamed runner beans and my renowned potato salad. I had instructed her to use the best china plates—pale blue with a gold trim—and her hands would be nervous laying out the precious pieces. I had bought the set not long after declaring myself a widow, perhaps anticipating these social occasions where the more established you looked as a couple, the more sympathy you evoked.

Excusing myself, I joined Mary in the kitchen. The table was covered with half prepared plates. All already had their ham; she had done well.

She had the bowl of potato salad in the crook of her arm and was moving from one plate to the next, smacking a pile of white cubes onto each. She did not look up.

‘I’ll do the beans,’ I said.

I took the saucepan full of drained beans and began to ladle them out. I moved in the opposite direction from Mary, to ensure we would not collide. Through the open door came the merry voices of the women, now in the full flight of gossip and recrimination. I listened for any further mention of Mary or myself but, as far as I could tell, we did not come up. Of course, there were crossed conversations so it was not always clear what was being said, exactly who was being criticised.

‘That’s all of ’em, Auntie Grace,’ Mary said, putting the empty bowl on the bench.

‘Them,’ I corrected.

‘Them,’ she repeated.

‘You can take them out in twos,’ I instructed, picking up two plates myself. I moved to the back door.

‘Two by two they went,’ I joked.

Mary looked at me blankly.

‘As in, the ark … the animals went in two by two …’

She frowned. She still did not understand.

‘Hurry up then,’ I said, realising she did not want to understand.

The widows ‘oohed’ and ‘aahed’ over the meal, complimenting me on the ham’s honey glaze, the homemade mayonnaise of the potato salad, the non-stringiness of the beans. I took the praise graciously, making sure to mention Mary’s help with the preparation. She would hear from her place in the kitchen, eating her own portion. She could also have the leftovers. I would not be finishing my meal, my appetite had not yet returned.

Mrs Bishop’s ANZAC biscuits were produced at the end. False smiles appeared at the sight of them, everyone eager to remain on her good side. The crunching threatened to overtake us. I could barely hear Mrs Andrews’ question.

‘And when will she be going back?’

She had taken a biscuit from the same tray Mary had used for the cheese and crackers and her question went straight into Mary’s face.

Again, I felt the abrupt quietness, the way in which all the mouths stopped chewing.

‘She does not have to go back,’ I said, ‘as long as I choose to keep her.’

‘Does she have family?’ Mrs Joyce asked, although the words seemed to be directed at Mrs Bishop. It briefly occurred to me that Father Benjamin might have mentioned something to them and this was a trap to catch me in a lie. Still, there was nothing else for it.

‘No. No, she doesn’t.’

I waited for the explosion, the dramatic production of a copy of Mary’s mother’s letter out of a handbag, the waving of it in my face with accompanying accusations.

What about her mother? I could hear them demanding, Isn’t she family? It was time for it to come to me, this accusation.

Nothing happened. Mrs Bishop took another large bite of her ANZAC while Mrs Joyce took a sip of her tea and surreptitiously lay down the uneaten half of her biscuit on the saucer. Mrs Andrews pursed her lips, continuing to follow Mary’s movements as if confirmation of her lack of relatives merely proved whatever point she had been trying to make. Mrs Chilsom started on about the state of one of her cats, Enid Parker leant in to smell the roses on the table and Mrs Jackson reached for the sugar bowl.

†

Mary cleared away after lunch. The widows sat sipping sweet sherry and I could hear her quietly washing the china at the kitchen sink, placing the plates in neat stacks on the table before transferring them to the cabinet in the living room, as I had ordered.

Once the house was empty again, I found her in the sunroom, sitting on the edge of the cane chair, ensuring the last of the afternoon light was catching her legs. She had her head down and Jane Eyre open on her palms. She was sucking on the end of her plait and appeared to be reading. Of course, this was impossible. Her lessons with me had been sporadic over the last weeks, conflicted as I was whether it was a good idea to teach her or not. There was no chance she had progressed far enough to comprehend Brontë. Still, there she seemed to be, her eyes trailing across the page like she knew what each word meant.

She must have been aware of my presence. Though I had moved quietly, there was surely enough of my scent, my essence, for her to notice?

‘Mary?’

She looked up and slammed the book shut at the same time. Her face held that defiance I had seen so often recently, a defiance which stopped me asking her any questions.

‘There’s still more to be done,’ I said. ‘We need to sweep outside.’

She jumped up immediately, the plait whipped out of her mouth.

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’ She moved past me, silent and sure, placing the book on the side table as she went.

I picked up the book, balancing the hard spine on my own palm, waiting for it to fall open at whatever random place it chose. I remembered doing this with my Bible as a child, taking whatever words appeared as a sign from above. Jane Eyre creaked apart and I read:

How dare I, Mrs Reed? How dare I? Because it is the truth. You think I have no feelings, and that I can do without one bit of love or kindness; but I cannot live so: and you have no pity. I shall remember how you thrust me back—roughly and violently thrust me back—into the red-room, and locked me up there, to my dying day, though I was in agony, though I cried out, while suffocating with distress, ‘Have mercy! Have mercy, Aunt Reed!’ And that punishment you made me suffer because your wicked boy struck me—knocked me down for nothing. I will tell anybody who asks me questions this exact tale. People think you are a good woman, but you are bad, hard-hearted. You are deceitful!

I shut the book. I could hear the awkward rhythm of the broom, too big for Mary, just like the rake. It would be best for me to take over the clean-up.

†

That night I could not sleep, too much inside my head to crawl into the tunnel of slumber. Every time I was almost there, drifting, bumping into innocuous images and words, Mary would reappear, sitting there in the sunroom reading of the evil aunt, a woman whom Jane Eyre would not forgive until she lay dying in her bed.

Could Mary really read? If so, she had lied to me. A bigger lie than the penny.

I had denied sharing Mrs Andrews’s fear of Mary, yet I was afraid. Afraid of what? Not the girl herself, surely? How could I be fearful of such a small creature? But, then, it is not the height or the weight or the mass, or even, I realised with a start, the colour of a thing, it is only the way you see it. I had arrived at the point where I was unable to see around her. She had become my centre.

I got out of bed and made my way to the living room. It was early morning, the grey shadows of the furniture waiting in expectation. I went to the china hutch and opened the cutlery drawer. It made its usual clatter, the drawer sticking halfway out so I had to pull at it to release it completely. I carried the drawer into the kitchen, only pausing for a moment to glance down the corridor at Mary’s open bedroom door and listen for her breathing. There it was, and I could move on, quietly finding the bottle of polish and rag.

I sat at the table and, until sunrise, rubbed at every knife, fork and spoon I owned. In the bowls of the spoons I saw my own upside-down face, ageing with every passing moment, and wondered if the signs of my love for Mary were at all visible.

8

My lunch was a success by all accounts. The next week at church Mrs Bishop loudly announced how I kept my beautiful home ‘impeccable’. This did not seem enough reward for so many hours of preparation—I had no real memory of enjoying myself at the actual time either—and most of the praise was a dig at married women such as Mrs Mavis who, despite having a husband, could not exactly claim domestic felicity. I found it difficult to revel in this false triumph, Mr Mavis’s sunken cheekbones speaking of nights as long as mine.

Surprisingly, Mr Roper came and stood next to Mary and me after the service. I had not seen him all week, but caught up in preparations for the lunch, I hadn’t really noticed. He thread the brim of his hand through his fingers nervously and I thought again of the moment in the grotto.

‘How are you, Mrs Smith?’ he asked in a formal voice I had not heard for a long time, not since the day he introduced himself to me.

‘Very well, thank you,’ I answered. I felt Mary tense beside me. ‘The gardenia cuttings you gave me are coming along well.’

‘Good to hear,’ he said.

There was silence among all three of us.

‘I want you to know …’ he began.

I could not encourage him to keep going, to provide explanations within shot of every listening ear. There were conversations going on around, yet I knew the skill: the ability to appear to be concentrating intently on those right in front of you while scooping up every word of your neighbour’s.

‘I know everything will turn out for the best,’ I said, without a clear sense of what I was referring to.

‘I know today is a very hard day for you.’ Mr Roper was speaking to my feet and I wondered what had turned him into such a weakling.

‘Today?’ I had no idea what he was referring to.

‘The anniversary? Of your husband’s death?’

I felt the blood drain from my head. God, how could I have forgotten? Mary looked up at me, confused.

‘Yes, yes,’ I managed to say. ‘Of course it is a difficult day.’

The lie of it seemed to spread across the entire churchyard, shaking the baby poplars to their roots.

Mr Roper gave me a little nod, a respectful nod like the ones you receive from people in the street during afternoon walks.

‘I thought Father Benjamin would include him in the Prayers of the Faithful, but I suppose, with his health the way it is …’

‘I didn’t want to bother him,’ I said, too loudly, and knew my face was moving from white to red, the stress now creating a pulse in my forehead. Pathetic, showing all the telltale signs of falsehood, forgetting all I had learnt in my years of deception: never make excuses; let silences speak for themselves; always ensure the other feels so awkward they will eagerly move onto another subject.

‘I’m sorry, Auntie Grace,’ Mary said, and squeezed my hand.

‘You look a little peaky, Mrs Smith.’ Mrs Bishop joined us.

‘Are you unwell?’ Mrs Joyce, as always, tagged behind Mrs Bishop and the two of them now stood on either side of Mr Roper, examining me.

‘Not at all, I’m perfectly fine.’ I answered in what I hoped was a strong enough tone to put further inquiries aside, did not want this attention, did not want Mr Roper to remind them of my false anniversary, did not want any of it.

Funny to imagine how they would all look if I told the truth about myself: how my sleep, when it came, was full of the Virgin Mary’s face scarred with criss-crossing lines like a painting attacked with a knife; how my stomach turned whenever I could not see Mary so that, for the last week, I had almost tethered her to my side (today she had been forbidden from joining the other children or going into the saint’s grotto—poor, rotting Aloysius would have to do without her); how I had checked Fred’s desk every morning, inspecting the surface for telltale marks, always wondering why I did not just take the letters and burn them, save myself from the possibility of discovery. Always answering I could not destroy them, not for any peace of mind. The tokens had to be kept in their place.

†

To Grace,

I had never imagined your anger would be so great as to formulate such a plan as you detailed in your last letter. Nor that your desire for respectability would out-weigh any affection or respect you once had for me.

However, since the news of my brother’s death in Europe, my ties to home now seem well and truly severed. While it hurts me to agree to your plan, I cannot pretend it will affect my new life over here. So, I consent to becoming your dearly departed husband. I will post a regular money order to you, at the post office requested (I hope you will not have too far to travel) but will have no further contact with you.

I hope this sacrifice is sufficient for you, at last, Gracie. I had never longed for a glorious life, only a happy one. You are welcome to my glorious death,

Fred

†

I had never before forgotten the date of Fred’s death. For the last four years I had gently reminded Father Benjamin of the need for his name to be sounded out into the quiet space of the church, collected into the thoughts of those gathered, polished a little with prayer and sent up into the heavens.

‘Off home already, Mrs Smith?’ Father Benjamin asked as I made my farewells. His question had a tinge of desperation in it, as if he himself would like to escape, though knowing he could not leave before his congregation had dispersed.

‘Yes, yes. Must be getting on,’ I replied, still aware of Mr Roper’s gaze, not to mention Mary who was staring into the distance, her forehead a mass of concentration lines. A few drops of rain had begun to fall. I longed to be inside, in quiet warmth.

We arrived home and my appetite limply returned. I had some crackers, sucking their salt on my tongue before biting into them. I sat in the sunroom with a book on my knees—for the moment I had put Jane Eyre aside, trying to find a happier orphan in Great Expectations—though I found myself checking on Mary too often to hold the narrative.

She was installed in the living room, carefully polishing the rest of my silverware, the idea occurring to me after doing the cutlery. She knelt on the floor in front of the newspaper-covered coffee table lined with the gravy boat, the candlesticks, the butter and cake splades, in fact, the entire contents of two cupboards at risk of going green without an application of polish. If Mary was anything like me, she would enjoy watching the clear liquid harden on the silver to a brown white, then delight in rubbing to reveal the new, shiny surface beneath. It was a task I had done for the Sisters, making the crucifixes glisten.

‘The candelabra are the trickiest,’ I said as she started on a holder with vine-shaped crevices. ‘You have to be careful you don’t let the liquid dry where you can’t rub it off.’

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’

She did not stop to address me, just went on as before.

‘I’m sorry about your husband, Auntie Grace,’ she said, continuing to focus on her polishing.

I had turned on the living-room light because of the overcast sky and a ray caught the silver of Mary’s candelabrum and shot over to Fred’s photo on the mantelpiece, a coin-shaped patch of light hopping from one point on the glass to another.

‘Thank you, Mary,’ I said.

‘You must miss him?’

It was a question, not a statement. The rain started up outside, pattering against the window awning.

‘Of course I miss him.’

My answer held too much anger. I should have been weeping by now, clutching the oval-shaped frame to my broken heart. Mary had stopped polishing and, across the room, she watched me. I had Great Expectations open on my lap, the pages flickering over, past my place, driven by the winds coming through the many gaps under the windowpanes.

‘He was a good man?’ she asked.

‘Good?’

I had never been asked this question, having had no father to check on the character of my fiancé, nor a mother to worry over my future. Funny to think I had never even asked it myself. There comes a point when it feels almost irrelevant.

‘He was kind enough to marry me,’ I replied.

I could not hold Mary’s gaze any longer and returned to the lucky Pip. He was being told of his transformed fortunes, plucked away from Joe and the grime of the blacksmith’s fire, offered great prospects for wealth and happiness.

I tried to concentrate on the sentences waving before me but my eyes blurred with tears. Real tears, threatening to tumble over my lids. I could feel Mary was still looking at me, her hand not moving, no stink of fresh polish in the air. I did not know what to do. My head ached from the pressure of trying to maintain composure. Perhaps I could bark at her to get back to work and she would not see the drops about to run down my cheeks. Perhaps I could smile weakly and whisper of the need to ‘continue on in the face of lost love’, turning this into another performance of my widowhood. Or, maybe, I could speak the truth to her.

I heard the glug as Mary tipped the bottle of polish upside down onto the rag and saw, in the corner of my eye, the movement as she began again to apply the liquid to the long thin arms of the candelabrum.

It was no longer clear to me what my expectations were. When you hope for something, or dread something, it may be that you will it into your life. It’d been my experience that nothing you anticipate—whether an occasion of joy or of misery—could ever live up to the feelings you had marked out for the event. I had always been let down or, worse still, had experienced the moment as if I was outside of myself, detached and only half there, noticing foolish details, like the wedding rice on the steps or the ocean light behind Fred as he stood on the dock. Silly, small things which did not help me to feel what I was supposed to feel, did not give me the rush or the pit, the love or the sorrow. How to even pretend to show such emotions after imagining so much more, after looking forward to unfiltered delight or unbridled pain? On the day of Fred’s leaving shouldn’t I have had more than just a muffled goodbye, being jostled and bumped by all those mothers and sisters, wives and grandmas around us, going through their own separation? More than simply standing there, dry-eyed, waving with my gloved hand, too late aware how my chaste hug had ensured our skins were barely in contact with one another at the end?

I understood why the visions of the saints were so important to the Church. In Saint Teresa’s flight of ecstasy there was hope for a heaven on earth, a moment of forsaking longing, a moment of feeling all that one should and showing it to the world, her eyes rolling back into her head, her hands limp and open, her lips parted. As if she was drinking in every minute of the moment, unafraid of the fall. I had never known such a moment.

†

Four days passed and I exhausted myself keeping a close watch on Mary. Night after night I woke up at exactly five minutes past three, sure I had heard movement in her room. Each time, my trip to investigate found her dark shape asleep in bed. From the hallway—I had forbidden her to close the door or to go to the outhouse during the night—her breathing always sounded regular, with no evidence she had recently exerted herself jumping back into bed on hearing me. Still, I woke.

During the day, aside from her taking over nearly all the housework, I began to teach her knitting, to keep her stationary and indoors, and to take her away from the threat of reading. She did not take to knitting as I would have liked, using the needles clumsily and often dropping the balls so they would unravel across the floor. Not only this, but she persisted on constantly asking about our afternoon walks.

‘It’s not very cold today, Auntie Grace,’ she hinted, after I had used that excuse for not going out the day before. ‘Pretty sunny.’

She was right. It was a mild, still day. We also needed eggs. I had every reason to leave the house.

‘Finish ten more rows and we will see.’

‘Ten?’ she muttered and went back to her knitting.

In the hour Mary slowly worked, the weather turned. An afternoon storm rolled in, a blanket of white cloud covering the sky and providing the perfect cover for staying put. Sheet lightning flashed through the curtains I had drawn against the weather. This sudden change was certainly not my fault. Mary’s needles clicked and clacked under the thunderous wind.

†

On the fifth day she defeated me. I had been forced into making a promise of volunteering at the St Vincent de Paul shop. Mrs Bishop had, as usual, bullied me into saying yes before I was even aware of what I was agreeing to. I had planned to have Mary come with me but, when I appeared at her door, curious as to why she was not already up and preparing breakfast, she was lying on her bed, her knees clenched up to her body, her arms locked tight around her stomach.

‘I don’t feel good, Auntie Grace,’ she whined. I had never heard her complain before. Her quilt was lying on the floor, the sheets bunched at the bottom of the bed. ‘Too hot,’ she whimpered when I tried to pull them out and replace them on her.

I put the back of my hand on her forehead. She was slightly hot though not, as far as I could tell, feverish. The room itself was stuffy, the windows closed and locked.

‘All right, then, you can stay in bed for the moment,’ I said. ‘I’ll bring you some water and dry toast.’

‘Not hungry.’

‘You have to eat something or you won’t get better.’

I stood at the toaster waiting to turn the bread—I had a habit of forgetting the toast inside the metal drawer, burning one side only to be extra diligent on the other and removing it too soon. I wondered whether I was being too trusting. Mary had been watching me closely, testing my answers to questions, as if to catch me out. The other evening it had been about the jacaranda tree. Sometime, I had told her the story of my father-in-law nursing it back to health.

‘How do you nurse a tree, Auntie Grace?’ she asked, as we folded the sheets, her stick-like arms spread wide as she walked the ends towards me. We were in the backyard, making the most of the last of the light and the extra space. We had worked almost completely in silence up until that point. On the final sheet, she asked about the tree, up on tiptoes as she handed me the corners of the double sheet before dropping her heels back down to take the nearly created ends.

‘You wrap it up, I suppose,’ I said and had an absurd vision of the jacaranda in bandages, tightly bound like a swaddled baby.

‘Did it have a broken leg?’ Mary asked, with a smile in her voice.

‘Maybe some kind of broken limb,’ I replied.

‘A broken arm?’

She was playing with me.

‘A broken toe, Auntie Grace. A broken finger?’

‘Maybe all those things,’ I said, keeping my voice light, going along with this game.

‘Or maybe it was sick on the inside?’

Mary had stopped folding the sheet. It hung over my arms and we both stood looking at the tree.

‘You can’t use bandages for the inside can you, Auntie Grace?’

She no longer sounded young and innocent, no longer a child asking for adult knowledge.

‘He saved it, Mary, that’s all that matters.’

I had picked up the rest of the sheets and moved off to the linen press.

‘Here you are,’ I said, delivering two golden-brown slices to the bed-ridden Mary, for once having managed to get the toasting right. I placed a glass of water on her bedside table.

‘Thank you, Auntie Grace,’ she whispered, keeping her eyes closed. She had not moved since I left.

‘Can’t you sit up?’

‘It hurts,’ she said, and I felt the dropping of my name, as if she truly couldn’t make the effort.

‘Well, I have to go. Mrs Bishop can’t be put off.’ I looked down at her curled body, so small. ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t go?’

The girl stayed silent.

‘Are you really sick, Mary?’

She opened her eyes, the whites had a red tinge in them.

‘Yes, Auntie Grace.’

‘Shall I leave you?’

I held my breath.

‘If you have to, Auntie Grace.’

I locked the front door behind me. I told myself it was for Mary’s safety—though I rarely bothered to use the deadbolt normally—to stop the wrong people from getting to her. Really, though, it was to keep her in and, although the lock could be easily opened from the inside, I hoped it might, at the very least, make her think twice.

†

For two hours, amidst the smell of mothballs and lavender, I sorted a box of jumbled shoes donated to the shop over the past month. As the shoes came in they were simply thrown into this box, with no sense of order, so the pairs were all mixed up, sandal straps snagging on heels, disintegrating laces breaking when I tried to pull them from the tangle. I worked and sorted them, laying them out in rows that began to take over the back room, sweating from the closeness of the air. I could not understand why they were not simply put out immediately, instead of being left in this complicated mess.

‘Oh, but there’s never enough room,’ Mrs Joyce replied when I enquired. ‘You have to select the very best of them to display. Didn’t I tell you that?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

I had struggled with the idea of having to sort out the entire box, but had been reluctant to voice any sense of being daunted by what was being asked of me.

‘No wonder it’s taken you so long!’ Mrs Joyce laughed.

The shop bell rang and we were assaulted by the booming voice of Mrs Bishop.

‘Thought I’d drop in and see how you ladies were getting on!’

‘Mrs Smith has sorted all of the shoes!’

Mrs Joyce waved her hand over to the back room behind the counter, lined with pair after pair of matching men’s, women’s and children’s shoes. Now I looked closely and could see that the majority of them were un-sellable, too scuffed, too flattened, missing heels. I had not noticed in my zeal. The children’s shoes were in the best condition and dominated the display already out on the shop floor.

‘Isn’t she a wonder?’ Mrs Bishop said, her voice tainted with disapproval at the extravagance of my service. Why did I manage to always get it wrong? How had I succeeded in being too helpful? My action spoke of excess, and there was nothing the widows disliked more than drawing attention to one’s self. We were to be shadows, beetling away in the background, content in our peripheral roles.

‘I didn’t understand,’ I said apologetically.

‘You can throw most of them back in the box,’ Mrs Bishop replied. ‘Awful what some people will donate. As if the poor don’t need their feet properly covered. I mean, look at them!’

The three of us moved to the doorway of the back room, staring in at the shabbiness. Stale foot odour wafted up.

‘Most of them are from deceased estates,’ Mrs Bishop continued pragmatically. ‘People just clear out entire houses.’

‘I don’t know how they can do that,’ I whispered, afraid of my own voice.

‘Sometimes, it’s for the best,’ Mrs Bishop conceded.

‘I still have everything,’ I went on, unable to stop. ‘Even an old shirt he wore painting the house, torn and all … paint-splattered. It stinks of turpentine but still I have to keep it, it seems such a precious thing …’

‘Are you feeling all right, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked. Too many times I had been asked that question. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Joyce were looking at me, their faces touched with understanding.

The shop bell rang again and two old ladies entered. Mrs Bishop and Mrs Joyce readjusted their expressions, becoming, once again, the hard masks I was accustomed to.

‘Good afternoon!’ Mrs Bishop exclaimed at the customers, making the frail little things jump. ‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ The day was anything but beautiful. Still, the two women nodded in agreement, smiling at the unexpected attention.

‘Perhaps you want to put out the shoes now, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked while Mrs Bishop continued her small talk with the ladies. I wondered if this was a way to get me out of sight—did I not look presentable for them now?

In the back room, the rows of shoes seemed almost grotesque. I thought of the people who had once filled them. Those pale-lemon heels taking slender legs with stocking seams painted down their backs across a dance floor, trying hard to keep in time; those boots marching stolid, hairy legs off to war, never wanting to fall out of step; those sandals skipping a child home after a day of playing stuck-in-the-mud, ‘you’re it, you’re it, you’re it’, and those flats dragging stretch-marked thighs wearily to church, afraid of being forgotten. The one-step, the two-step, the every-day step. All that spinning and kneeling and crossing and dancing.

I picked up a pair of children’s shoes. They were brown soft leather lace-ups with teardrop-shaped holes cut into the toes. Not a mark on them and, as I turned them over, I saw the soles were not worn down at all. Did the child dislike them and refuse to wear them? Or had her feet grown so quickly that her ‘best’ shoes only lasted one wedding or a Christening or funeral, forever associated with adult events that meant they had to be hidden away in a box, their power only unleashed when her mother allowed? Or had this little girl’s feet never grown at all, a child taken to God before there was even time to fill this pathetically small amount of space? I did not know what had happened. I would never know.

†

I arrived home at three o’clock. Despite my failings, Mrs Joyce could not do without me once Mrs Bishop had gone on her merry, interfering way. The suits had to be re-assembled after a young man—‘down on his luck’ as Mrs Joyce referred to him—came in and tried on nearly all of them, creating piles of ‘trousers too long’ or ‘jackets with shiny elbows’ or, worst of all, ‘smells like old man’. He was not a pleasant young man, his cheeks covered in small vicious hairs, the beginnings of an untended beard, and he ended up buying the cheapest suit he found.

‘After all that effort,’ Mrs Joyce complained and went to put the kettle on, leaving me to clear up the mess.

My arms ached from lifting the heavy materials of the suits. Tired, I turned the key in my front door. I went to push it and realised I had locked it inadvertently. This meant it had been unlocked since I had left this morning. Perhaps Mary had ducked out to collect the post from the box (although I rarely had letters). Perhaps she needed air (although the back garden was surely the best sanctuary for a girl who was supposedly sick).

I re-turned the key and pushed open the door. The long, green corridor was, as to be expected, empty.

‘Mary?’ I called out, standing in the doorway. It seemed too hard to cross the threshold.

The house answered with silence. I wanted to hear some kind of creak or murmur, something to indicate she was here. The windows were rattling, as usual, the wood and glass moved by the winds to make tiny bangs and sighs. I took a step onto the carpet, recalling the moment when I had found Mary almost at this exact spot, waiting for me. In the mirror of the hall table, I could glimpse my reflection, just a section of myself, my pale face.

My legs moved down the corridor, these legs, and these shoes, which I knew so well. I turned the handle of Mary’s bedroom door and heard no stirring from within.

Mary’s bed was empty and the roll-top of Fred’s desk was open. The lock had been jimmied with a screwdriver. Mary had left it sitting there, making no attempt to cover her tracks. The screwdriver belonged to Mr Roper. He had left it behind during one of his many handyman visits.

The pile of letters was gone.

Though I had imagined this, dreaded it, expected it, perhaps since the day Mary had arrived, the actual reality of seeing it—this violation, this loss—was shocking. Numb, I turned from the gaping desk to sit upon the bed, only to discover on the sheets a round, half-wet stain of what looked like blood. The outsides of the pool had dried, clotting into a brown edge, the middle still a fresh dark red.

What my mind would have liked—a kidnapping by faceless strangers or an enforced departure by nasty relatives or even a secret escape with Mr Roper—could not hold with the fact of Mary’s first blood on the sheets. Her stomach pains had been genuine, then, not a ploy. Yet here was the torn-open desk, the missing letters, her unmistakable absence.

What could I imagine? The pain and shock of her first monthly, her lying curled on the bed, wondering what was happening to her. Did she know anything of women’s secrets or did she think, as I had, she was seriously ill, her area down below suddenly revolting against her and turning from a source of pleasure to a flow of disgust? Would she have known, initiated by a sister or her mother years ago, before she was taken from them? Or would she have been crying, afraid of the mess on the sheets, afraid of me? Getting up—the pain from her back lessening now it had begun—and moving to the bathroom, taking a rag from the drawer and washing herself with a flannel, seeing herself in the mirror finally—staring at the face she had previously been un-curious about—and wondering why she wasn’t allowed into Fred’s desk. All those hours, lying in pain, directly across from the forbidden.

Had I left the screwdriver somewhere in plain view? I could not remember. If Mary had experienced her first monthly visit, I had missed the signs of her moving towards womanhood and there were, no doubt, other signs I had failed to see.

I moved away from the blood and made my way through the kitchen. For a minute I held to the hope she would be out in the garden. Reading my lies, yes, but nonetheless present.

Standing on the backyard steps, it was clear she’d gone for good this time. Each one of my letters from Fred was pegged on the clothesline. They had been hung in order of date, each held on with a single peg, the paper crushed and mutilated, the wind smacking at them, threatening to whip them off completely or rip them apart.

I un-pegged them slowly, holding each against my stomach in an attempt to smooth them out, to perhaps repair the damage. Even as I took down the last of them—the one in which Fred gave me his death—I continued to believe I would find the letter from Mary’s mother, the letter that would have definitively turned her against me. Of course, it was the only one Mary had taken with her.

†

‘I no longer want her to be my responsibility,’ I said to Father Benjamin that evening. I’d reported her missing to the police and driven straight to the presbytery. ‘If she is found, you’ll have to return her to the Home.’

Father Benjamin nodded, resigned. He did not seem to have the strength left to argue. He had lost any remaining fat off his bones, his face turned skeletal.

‘I tried my best,’ I continued. ‘You couldn’t expect more of me.’

‘No,’ he said quietly. I felt some kind of judgment hanging between us and needed to tip the scales away from his damnation of me.

‘I wish you all the best with the scheme, Father Benjamin. Perhaps there are some of them who can be saved … from themselves. But you will have to get them younger.’

‘Younger?’ he asked.

‘Yes. Before the … corruption sets in.’

Father Benjamin stared at me. I returned his gaze, though I desperately wanted to look away. I had a sip of tea. I felt the liquid flowing down my throat, trying to warm me.

‘Perhaps you’ve done your best, Mrs Smith,’ Father Benjamin said ethereally, one foot in another world already. ‘I don’t know if I have yet. God can only know that. Only God can know the true nature of our souls.’

‘Yes, Father Benjamin,’ I said.

We both glanced at the crucifix sitting alone upon his wall.

I no longer wanted Mary’s black face to belong to me. What was left of Father Benjamin understood and I could be free of any further thought of her.

†

When I woke the next morning, the light coming through my window had a different feel to it. Winter had begun to sap the sun of its warmth; we were finally heading to the cold.

I dressed and went into Mary’s room. It had a dullness about it which I was willing to concede came from her absence. But there was nothing to be done about that.

I pulled the sheets from the sagging mattress and took them to the laundry tub. I washed them in the same hurry I had washed Fred’s, only realising after I had scrubbed for an hour that the dried bloodstain was unlikely to come out without a long soak. Even then, I would still be able to see the outline: a round spot like a coin. The sheets would have to be thrown away.

I had left Fred’s letters on the kitchen table so I took them back to the desk. The roll-top stood open, with its broken lock. I noticed Mary’s window was smudged with fingerprints, the glass wanting a thorough wipe. And I had tracked in dirt when I came in from the garden yesterday. I needed to vacuum.

‘Not Mary’s window anymore,’ I said out loud, listening to the words in the emptied house.

†

It was easy, really, to move along. I worried about what I would be asked at church, who would inevitably pry into the details of Mary’s departure. I had momentarily forgotten about the hushed lines of communication, how everyone knew about Mary running away before Mass even began, how this erased the need for direct enquiry. None of them had any facts, I was sure, only Father Benjamin’s reassurance I had done my very best under difficult circumstances.

‘How well you are looking, Mrs Smith,’ Mrs Andrews said.

‘The colour is back in your cheeks,’ Mrs Bishop declared.

‘Thank you,’ I replied. ‘Aren’t the poplars growing well?’

The group turned towards the line of trees against the church fence. The poplars were still too short to provide a proper barricade but they were heading towards height and protection. I wasn’t sure if this was an appropriate thing to point out and was reassured by the nodding of heads and murmurs of assent.

‘Yes, they are growing very well,’ Enid Parker said quietly.

The sky above the trees was a blanket grey.

PART II

‘I sincerely, deeply, fervently longed to do what was right; and only that. “Show me, show me the path!” I entreated of Heaven.’

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

9

Many years later, I had a dream all the streets of the city were emptied of children and the crowds who had celebrated the end of the war wandered around in black veils, weeping for their lost babies. In my dream, I did not belong in such a world—the women pushed me away—and I had to run back to my mother’s house, a house I did not remember but which, in my dream, was a larger version of the home I had shared with Fred and then with Mary, its rooms vast, emptied of furniture and smelling, overwhelmingly, of varnish. I stood on the back step again, and the laundry tub was overflowing, its sudsy water running up to my bare feet, stopped only by the force of my dream-will from drowning me. In the distance, further away than it should have been, the jacaranda tree was burnt black.

†

I haven’t lived in that house for four years now. It seemed sensible, when I finally accepted there would be no further additions to my household, to move into a flat.

Mind you, I had not been hasty. The poplars at the church grew tall and I smiled and simpered to Mrs Bishop and the widows, maintaining the illusion as I always had. Only gradually did I become desperate to flee, particularly after my final encounter with Father Benjamin. I kept my plans well hidden. The surprise from the church group when the For Sale sign sprung up in my front garden was testimony to how well I’d looked on the outside.

‘You will still be coming to services here, of course, Mrs Smith?’ Mrs Joyce asked, unable to comprehend my wish to attend a closer congregation.

‘Yes,’ I lied and wondered at the amount of attention my leaving was eliciting. Surely these women did not really like me? I reasoned there was probably a dearth of gossip; the mouths needed new material to chew on. The Mavis boy had killed himself months before, but the speculation surrounding his demise—a sad follow-on from Father Benjamin’s more expected, but just as talked-about, departure—had begun to grow weary, not helped by the failure of Mr and Mrs Mavis to appear and receive their condolence.

‘Everything is changing,’ Enid Parker said mournfully. She had tried to reach out to me after Mary was gone, but I had rejected her pity.

She was right, though, everything was changing. Father Benjamin had been replaced by a young ginger-haired gentleman whose healthy smile seemed a mockery of his predecessor. Father Richards would stand on the church steps positively beaming, frightening the old people with his enthusiasm. The loss of the Mavises had been felt as well, their quiet dignity a sorry absence, and with the growth of the poplars, even the feel of the churchyard had changed, now secluded and un-inviting.

Leaving Wayville Street and the house I had believed would one day sing with my family life was a deafeningly quiet time. I labelled the trunks meticulously, making lists of what was going into each of them, worrying about losing sight of the smaller ornaments. I wrapped the best china in layers of butcher’s paper and had to make disconcerting decisions on what was to be sacrificed, moving as I was into a smaller place, with less space for furniture and plants.

When I first arrived at the two-bedroom flat it smelt of mothballs and I learnt from my neighbour that a Jewish lady had lived and died there. I aired it as much as was possible, letting the breezes in through the fly-screens. Whenever I returned from an errand, though, I found myself on the same carpet track as the previous owner: down the corridor, past the bathroom on the right, straight to the main bedroom and the built-in wardrobe to hang up my coat, out to the tiny laundry where the hat hooks were, nestled next to the living room that swept onto the dining area and then immediately to the kitchenette, decked in canary yellow, for a well-earned cup of tea. I was following in the footsteps of the dead and try as I might, it was hard to find another route.

In the second bedroom a glassed-in alcove held Fred’s desk.

The smallness of my new flat was a comfort. I had escaped the creaks and groans of an old house settling and found instead the hum of new cement walls and the distant pound of the sea. The lowness of the ceiling was the most difficult change to cope with—whether it was really lower I could not tell, perhaps everything felt diminished because the space itself was so much smaller. To make up for it, the balcony gave me a view, through the figs, of a strip of seemingly flat blue ocean and I began a ritual of sitting out there at sunset, drinking a gin and tonic, lady’s tears providing just enough blur to allow me to sleep. I watched the sun sliding away behind the distant horizon, a flat white disc, and thought of the Holy Communion. A wafer converted to Christ’s body, coming into me, swallowing God and all He was supposed to contain. How I had tried to hold Him close, to keep Him always part of my flesh.

I’d never been particularly attracted to the seaside but I would occasionally take an afternoon walk down to the ocean. I did not attend church, or hold lunches, or help at a charity. I tried my best not to think of that last scene with Mr Roper or the other moments that had contributed to my departure. Though I had not moved far away, in terms of physical distance, I had stepped outside of their hermetic world and felt it was enough to cook myself a meal every night and wait for the hours to pass.

†

I had visited Father Benjamin only once during his decline. He had gone to a religious hospice and received me, not lying in a bed as I had dreaded, but sitting in a wheelchair. His room was as sparsely decorated as his house had been and, if not for the careful tread of the staff down the corridors, we could have been as alone as when I had visited him at the presbytery. Father Benjamin looked as drained as a person could be without already being a cadaver, his hair in patches, and I was not surprised when he didn’t rise in greeting or offer refreshment. He simply sat, a blanket over his knees, and stared at me, trying desperately to hold to the strings of the conversation.

‘Are they looking after you well?’ I asked.

‘Yes, Mrs Smith. The good as well as the damned.’

I chose to ignore the second part of this. Mrs Bishop had warned his sentences did not always fit together.

‘I am glad to hear it. It is a beautiful place.’ I immediately regretted saying this for Father Benjamin began to look around, as though in search of beauty and, although the sky showing through the window was mid-summer blue and the grounds outside relatively well tended, I saw the walls themselves were an ugly cream, thickly applied, hairs and spots of dirt stuck in the paint.

‘Mrs Smith.’ Father Benjamin spoke my name, as if to remind himself of who I was.

‘Yes, Mrs Smith.’ I took a breath and smoothed out my skirt. ‘I took in Mary, do you remember?’

‘Mary.’ The word spoken in his mouth could have conjured the girl out of thin air as, in truth, he had once done.

‘I wanted to know …’ I asked. ‘I was wondering if they ever found her? After she ran away?’

In the time watching the poplars grow, I had never been able to ask him this question. Surrounded at church, as he always was, by the ears of the congregation, it had become a subject unspoken, like the hardness of Mrs Bishop’s ANZAC biscuits, capable of breaking one’s teeth. While I had planned many visits to his presbytery, to find the privacy to enquire, they had never eventuated, my courage petering out behind the steering wheel, forcing me to scurry back inside the house to easier ignorance. Once a coward, always a coward.

‘Mary?’ Father Benjamin repeated.

‘Yes.’ I nodded eagerly, trying to will him into memory.

The door of the room opened and a nurse stuck her head in. ‘Everything fine in here?’ she asked loudly, not bothering to step into the room. Her face, closeted by a tight white headdress, was young and pink, her cheeks flushed. I wondered if she had dropped in from some other hospital where breathless exertion was still worth the effort.

‘Yes, thank you,’ I replied. Her eyes were on Father Benjamin whose head bobbed, only just under his control.

‘Good. Let me know if you need anything. Tea?’

I worried this interruption would make it even more difficult to keep Father Benjamin on track.

‘No, thank you.’

The nurse stayed for another moment, still using the door as her shield against complete immersion into the room. I had the distinct impression she did not want to leave us alone.

‘Well, too-da-loo then.’

She closed the door quietly. Her footsteps were barely discernible but I sat, my head inclined towards the corridor, and waited until there was no chance she could still be within hearing.

I turned to the priest again and discovered he had his eyes closed.

‘Father Benjamin?’

His lids opened and I saw a strange milkiness in his eyes, as if a film had formed between the world and the supposed windows to his soul.

‘Mrs Grace Smith?’

‘Yes, Father Benjamin?’

‘You have not changed.’ Father Benjamin’s voice had the solemnity of a godly judgment.

I felt myself move physically away, pushing my body into the back of my chair.

‘I simply wanted to …’ I began.

‘There is nothing simple about you, Mrs Grace Smith.’ He said my entire name like a punishment. ‘You came here to pick at me.’

‘No.’

‘You came here to pick at me and pick at me. To throw her in my face once more. But I tell you, and will I tell you this only once, a healthy tree does not bear bad fruit, nor does a poor tree bear good fruit.’

His voice had become gravelly and his fingers twitched on the arms of the wheelchair.

‘For every tree is known by the fruit it bears; you do not pick figs from thorn bushes or gather grapes from bramble bushes! Do you, Mrs Grace Smith? A good person brings good out of the treasure of good things in his heart; a bad person brings bad out of his treasure of bad things. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.’

Spit dribbled down the sides of his mouth. I wanted now for the nurse to return. Surely the sound of the priest’s ramblings would be carrying to someone?

‘I only came here to see you in your convalescence, Father Benjamin.’

I stood up. I had used the wrong word, ‘convalescence’ implied there was recovery around the corner. Father Benjamin did not follow the movement of my standing, his head still turned to the level of my waist. Perhaps he could not see me at all, his mind transported to another time and place?

‘Can you tell me anything of Mary?’ I asked again, in as soft a tone as I could manage, pushing my irritation away as best I could.

‘For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of,’ he mumbled.

‘Goodbye, Father. I think you need to rest.’

I walked to the door, hearing a strange sound behind me and only understood when I turned to say my farewell that Father Benjamin had wheeled the chair after me in a fit of energetic derangement. His hands lay on the tyres, shaking wildly. The chair was so close I could not open the door. The smell of stale urine drifted up from his hospital tunic.

‘They never found her,’ he whispered, his voice had a completely different quality to it, the timbre of frightening sanity returned.

‘Mary?’ Though I knew he could not be talking of anyone else.

‘They searched and searched for her.’ His eyes were wide now, cleared of all whiteness. ‘Her mother, you see, Mrs Smith, found me. She begged to be allowed to see her daughter. She thought I was lying when I said Mary had disappeared. She stood on my doorstep and wailed. She said I had an evil spirit in me and that I would be punished. She would not believe a word I spoke to her. My word! I gave her my word.’

I could barely breathe.

‘My word,’ he said again finally and slumped back down into himself, the film back across his eyes. ‘What good is my word?’ He slurred the last, so it might have been ‘world’.

‘I was trying to help her. Her mother—God, but how she wailed!’

He closed his eyes once again, his chin slumping down onto his chest. He seemed to be breathing heavily, I did not want to think he was crying.

I leant over and rolled the wheelchair back, far enough away from me so I could open the door and leave him. I found the nurse who had stuck her head in earlier and told her Father Benjamin was ‘distressed’.

‘Why would he be distressed?’ she asked, with an accusatory frown.

‘I don’t know,’ I lied and scrambled from the hospice with an image of Mary’s mother on the presbytery steps, cursing Father Benjamin to Hell.

†

Father Peter Benjamin passed away three weeks later. Peter, named for the rock of the Church. The funeral was well attended for a man with no family, although the formality of the homily from one of his fellow priests betrayed his separation from common order life. It was his parishioners who seemed to really weep for him, recalling his home visits and their sitting-room confessions, mournful and, perhaps, just a little relieved his knowledge of their sins was being buried forever.

I watched the coffin descend into the ground and, rather than praying, I found myself trying to recall if Mary’s mother’s letter had been given to me in an envelope or if Father Benjamin had simply handed over the pages on their own. If there had been an envelope, surely I would have noticed some kind of address on the back, or the ink stamp over the Queen’s face, a pointer to its place of origin? Even the briefest of glimpses would surely have stayed with me? If ‘the word’ was good for anything, it was for this: creating a permanency for fleeting thoughts otherwise lost. At the very least, I had remembered the surname.

Mrs Chilsom had patted me on the arm by the graveside. The groups had already begun to form after the end of the service, the clusters of quiet comments beginning. The Catholic clergy section of Rookwood was a rectangle, bordered by oaks.

‘At last he has rest,’ Mrs Chilsom said, her usual piousness pervading.

‘Yes,’ I replied uncertainly. I could not say if Father Benjamin really had peace.

‘And you?’ Mrs Chilsom asked. ‘How are you, dear?’

Mrs Chilsom was only a few years older than me yet she spoke as if addressing a child. She wanted to measure the state of her own completion compared to my own losses. The loss of Mary was a visible marker of my inability to cope.

‘I am smashing, thank you,’ I answered, using a Hollywood film term. It stood out oddly amongst the evergreens of the cemetery, but I needed a touch of glamour.

I didn’t attend the wake, already feeling the need to let go of this set of people and their view of me, standing on high, looking down.

†

Like Father Benjamin, I only saw Mr Roper once, alone, before I moved. He had dropped by with a new offering of fruit, as if nothing had changed, and I bustled on with packing up the kitchen around him, unwilling to leave any space for intimate talk. I had already put away the kettle so I could not offer tea and felt vaguely resentful he had, rather foolishly, brought a fruit basket to me which would just require another box.

The table and chairs were stacked to one side of the kitchen so Mr Roper had to stand, running his hands through his still-dyed blonde hair. I apologised over and over about the state of everything, hoping he would get the hint to go but, instead, he asked after Mary without the slightest embarrassment. With my back to him, I paused in nesting the saucepans together and the suspicions that had grown since Mary’s departure rose up before me: his screwdriver used to open the desktop, his supplication to her in the grotto, the long line of his corridor salted with paintings of children.

‘There is no news of her so far,’ I replied, now digging into the back corner cupboard to get the last of the cooking pots.

‘You should have called on me, like you did the other time.’

‘I didn’t want to find her myself, Mr Roper.’

‘Why not?’

My impulse was to tell him to mind his own business. It seemed as if a stranger was lurking in my kitchen, a man whom I had once sought to know, who had chosen, instead, to try and take away my little girl. I longed to be told exactly what his relationship with Mary had been, at the same time as I was terrified of it.

‘I am tired, Mr Roper.’

‘You have never called me John,’ he said quietly.

The stale smell of his cigarillo breath was closer; sometime in my busy-ness he had found his way across the linoleum. He placed his hands on my hips, my back against his torso, our height almost the same. I looked out to the garden, the curtains taken down and the absence of knick-knacks on the sill created a large, open vista of the jacaranda Fred had once sat under. I wondered if on the other side of the world he might be staring at a similar tree. I could barely feel Mr Roper’s hands on my hips, my mind distant from my body, all too aware his hands had been placed on me, not from true desire, but because of the freedom granted by my departure. For so many years, opportunities had arisen for more than this between us: the time when Mrs Mavis had left Mr Roper’s Sunday dinner unexpectedly, called away to the beginning of the end of her son, and I was the only other guest; the moments, even, on cleaning days—organised to save Mr Burrows from a humiliating dismissal—when we’d been left alone in the dusty recesses of the church. But afraid of public censure Mr Roper had never, in those private times, taken a step toward me.

I was not flattered by his touch. I found the stink of tobacco revolting, his breath quickening with this new found passion. In the window’s reflection I could see the top of his head and watched as it moved to my neck to kiss the bare skin exposed under my bun.

It would not be the truth to say I continued to feel nothing, for the wet touch of lips couldn’t be ignored as easily as the light brush of fingers. In the minute of his kiss, I was able to compare the sensation to all I had felt before. All, I say, as though there was a plethora of experiences, not one long-ago boy who farewelled my cheek after a church picnic, and the many-flavoured kisses of Fred. He had often tasted of cigarettes and yet I could not recall revulsion or wishing for it to end.

In the glass panel opposite, Mr Roper’s lips moved up my neck; insensitive to my aversion he blundered on, having been given no signal to stop. I didn’t move, taken to so many conflicting memories the present hardly seemed worth the effort.

Perhaps it was this confusion that made me see the flash of a black head over the far back fence.

Mary.

‘Oh my God!’ I yelled and pulling away from Mr Roper threw open the screen door and ran out into the yard. I stumbled over the flowerbeds, my heels sinking into the dirt, and down to the far end of the long block, throwing myself at the fence and peering down into the scruffy lane behind it.

‘Mary?’

Weeds and cracked dirt met my entreaty. The laneway was empty, only the withered dandelions appeared to sway as if someone had recently brushed past. Which way would she have gone? How could she have disappeared so quickly?

Behind me, Mr Roper thumped his way across the grass. I didn’t know if he had heard my call or not, if he knew why I had so abruptly left his embrace. I did not care. I tried to see how I could get over the fence, cursed the fact that there was no gate.

‘She’s not likely to come back now, Mrs Smith,’ Mr Roper said loudly, revealing his knowledge. Despite my resolution of only a minute before, I hated the fact he had witnessed this, and my brief hope deflated. My heart pounded from the exertion of the run and I panted loudly to regain my breath, still staring at the fence. If I had not been so acutely aware of Mr Roper’s presence, I might have cried.

‘She needs to be caught,’ I replied, addressing the weathered wood as coldly as I could. ‘For her own good.’

I pictured her among children of her own colour, smiles beaming. I poked my head over the fence again, just to be sure she had not materialised, and saw the dandelions, unmoving, the spores of their globed heads intact.

‘I wish she’d come to me,’ Mr Roper said behind me and I held my breath, waiting for more. ‘She looked just like my little girl.’

‘Your little girl?’ I was talking to the fence, too weak to turn.

‘Mary was a reincarnation of her, only darker.’ I faced him. He smiled a small, sad smile. ‘My wife and daughter went missing in the Blue Mountains. Before I moved here.’

The lost children on his walls.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘You never mentioned …’

‘You never asked.’

As we walked to the house, Mr Roper made no further comments, nor renewed his attempt to seduce me. The tan leather of my shoes was ruined and I tracked mud into the kitchen without concern. If Mr Roper regretted his advance had been rudely interrupted, he didn’t show it. He picked an orange from the basket he’d delivered and threw it into the air. The whoosh of the orange flying, the smack of it caught in his fingers. From love to fruit. As swiftly as it had come, the time of his touch, his kiss, had passed. I was sure Mary looked nothing like his daughter, his attempt at finding a replacement as foolish as mine.

I moved to the cupboards and asked Mr Roper to help me lift the cast-iron baking ware Fred’s mother had sent by sea all the way from England as a wedding gift, arriving so long after the day I had always associated it with Fred joining the militia rather than with our marriage.

‘Still clean as a whistle,’ Mr Roper noted of the bake ware, with admiration, mistaking the cleanliness of their surfaces as a result of meticulous care, instead of lack of use.

‘Yes,’ I replied and packed it away.

†

To his credit, Mr Roper did send me formal invitations to a few of his lunches after I moved. Handwritten notes posted, not hand-delivered and signed ‘John’ with a flourishing ‘J’. They spoke of ‘pleasure’ and ‘company’ and ‘good friends’ and on the first few occasions I replied with carefully worded letters of thanks, my own ‘regret’ and ‘disappointment’ and ‘prior engagements’. Refusals which could not really offend except in their speciousness. Gradually, the months between the invitations extended, and I took longer and longer to write back. I was struck by the farce of writing to say no to a lunch long since baked and eaten and, finally, I left the next card from Mr John Roper unopened.

10

On certain afternoons, living in the flat, I would make my way down to the beach to watch the seagulls and the young people who had begun to loiter in groups on the promenade. Boys and girls who, after school, found the chance to escape their parents’ chores and whisper to one another across the great divide between the sexes. This had become more common than it ever was in my day though I could see the familiar face of girls in my office awaiting the strap, now leaning against the pillars of the pavilion, cigarette in hand, hair pulled back in ponytails or, even more astounding, shorn short. They did not see me, as invisible as the ‘old’ are to youth, so I could watch them closely enough as I walked by. I could see the doubt in their stance: these femme fatales who still wanted to go steady and get flowers from their rebel boys, who weren’t quite sure what they were rebelling against. I would catch the smell of tobacco in the air and hear astounding assertions, like ‘My mother says I am going to hell’.

I would try to hold myself tall, my skirt now loose around my waist and my blouse blown by the sea wind. I followed a regular track: down to the end of the promenade and onward to the post office to pick up my payment.

I had not written to Fred of my move. Given that I had always travelled here to collect his money orders, there seemed no need to alert him to the change. We had long since ceased personal correspondence. The crumpled remains of his letters were once again locked in the desk, now repaired. I had paid a locksmith to come to the house, rather than engage Mr Roper, and the evidence of Mary’s break-in had been erased.

The lady behind the post-office counter knew me from my years of collecting the envelopes. She was married to one of the postmen—I had seen him leaning across the desk for a quick farewell kiss before rounds—and she wore floral dresses that had become brighter as the war receded. She would see me in the queue and smile, happy with a familiar face and task. I had never asked her name, preferring for us both to remain within the one exchange: I would say ‘good morning’, she would say ‘good morning, Mrs Smith’, then move to the pile of registered post and hand me the envelope to receive my ‘thank you’. The thin paper of the envelope spoke of rice paddies, peasants in triangle hats and a mountain called Fuji—romantic landscapes conjured by prints I had seen in Women’s Weekly. Others had moved past hatred and derision and entered fascination: the exotic East rising from the ashes.

‘Good morning,’ I said one afternoon, in my customary flat tone.

‘Good morning, Mrs Smith,’ the post office woman replied. Her voice had a slight trepidation in it I attributed to nervousness at the number of people waiting. She bent down and seemed, as usual, to be locating the shelf that held my post. When she straightened, empty-handed, I knew she had known there was nothing for me.

‘Um, nothing for you, Mrs Smith.’ Though she had never known the contents of the envelope, she had felt my reliance on its arrival.

‘Can you check again?’

She obliged, though her repeated movement had no tinge of hope in it. There were no Japanese stamps on the envelopes, their temples and oriental plum trees standing out against our kangaroos.

‘I am sorry, Mrs Smith.’ She spoke as if someone had died. The violets on her skirt seemed suddenly darker, like patches of mildew.

†

I faced up to the post office one more time, a month later, hoping for a double delivery, the delay a consequence of some tidal change or shifting winds. The postal lady visibly blanched when she saw me enter and as I joined the line of waiting customers she loudly declared to her co-worker that it was time for her break and disappeared out the back through the swinging wooden door with a portal window like a ship. The young girl who served me asked for my full name and wanted to look at my identity card, giving me hope.

‘Oh.’ She stopped, squinting at the tiny writing. ‘I don’t really need this unless there is something for you.’

She giggled and flicked her way through the pile under ‘S’.

‘No, nothing,’ she said flippantly.

I could not see through the frosted circular window of the post office’s back room, yet I swear I could feel the other lady watching, waiting for me to leave.

†

Strangely, I did not believe Fred was dead. Perhaps because I had been the one controlling his death before, I couldn’t fathom him stepping off this earthly realm without my permission. Or maybe because his particular way of recovering from the war had seemed to promise such long life—finding, as he had, his own Shangri-La—I could not imagine it being cut short.

I wrote to the most recent address I had, in Kyoto. The letter came back to me, unopened, with black characters scrawled across the front of it, strange, spider-like strokes which I could only assume were the equivalent of ‘return to sender’. There was no way of knowing if they had been written by her or by some even more foreign hand, the new occupants of Fred’s vacated house?

My situation was not immediately desperate. I had money in the bank to keep me in groceries for another year and I owned my flat, although much of the money left over from the sale of the house had been eaten up by the cost of moving. There was no fear in me I would end up on the streets, as such. The tremor came from losing a regular top-up to my savings. Without anything new being added, the pile would begin to diminish quickly and there was no escaping the fact I had to re-enter the world of work.

When I had time to think, I found myself angry. How dare Fred let me down again? What sort of man was he to leave me to the pity of postal workers? To make me go out there again? What could have possibly happened on his cherry-blossom island to justify this new level of selfishness?

†

Dear Gracie,

Do you remember the fruit bats in the gardens at twilight? Do you remember we used to pass under them when you would come to meet me after my working day at the bank? Their squeaks like budgies, their wings expanding like prehistoric yawns, hanging from the trees like trumpet flowers (too many similes you would tell me, I know). Packets of fur and black skin, ugly things up close, we used to laugh at them together. The fruit bats come to me now. It is as if I hear their chattering everywhere.

I have tried to understand but I cannot really help her. I look into her face and I do not see what I once did. The Nips stick their noses into our pram and say ‘how the daughter holds the sins of the fathers’. I tell her not to care but she is ashamed.

I have the blackest dreams. The war days have returned and it is all I can do to struggle towards the light. If I let myself go I do not know if I will ever come out of it. You stand alone under a shooting star. You told me you had wished for me to come home and when you told me—you are not supposed to tell!—I knew it could not come true. You would have known, my superstitious Gracie. I imagine you looking at me with the cold clear eyes of the righteous. Is there a home left for me?

The fruit bats are hanging in the trees and I try to claw into the light. The fragrance in the dark stinks of rotten fruit. In the light, it is jasmine. Where it is clear of all scent I do not know,

Fred

[Letter returned: no longer at this address]

11

Once again, I found myself sitting in the morning sun looking through the newspaper, drinking tea. The breeze through the open balcony door was a clear easterly, tasting of salt. I scanned column after column of ‘Positions Vacant—Women and Girls’ and knew the world had awoken to prosperity. Fred had forced me to do the same.

The position I obtained was in the administration wing of a hospital. It was far less responsibility than I could have had—I could not face the prospect of teaching again—but I was happy to succumb to the excuse of leaving higher employment for the returned men.

‘The younger girls, well, they leave us when the babies start arriving.’ The chief administrator, Mr Anderson, a man whose thick moustache was matched by his bushy eyebrows, frowned at me during the interview. ‘I have lost many a good female clerk to the natural way of things.’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said and adjusted myself in the leather chair to avoid the beam of mote-filled light falling across my hands.

‘But we will not have that problem with you.’ He smiled, as if he had paid me a compliment. I would learn later that Mr Anderson’s wife had six children, her skin turned to crushed paper by the weight of them.

My office was a small room next to Mr Anderson’s. It had one window looking down to a courtyard with a flame tree at its centre, where the doctors and nurses gathered for irregularly timed lunch hours, to smoke and flirt. I watched as the women chanced their arm and the doctors, aware of both their appeal and their scarcity, left them to dangle under the fiery flowers for another day. I did not join this outside theatre. I ate lunch at my tiny desk and days could pass without me hearing a single voice except Mr Anderson’s on the telephone next door, either loudly conveying instructions to his employees or murmuring words of reassurance to his over-run wife.

I read the stories of the patients whose files I retrieved and replaced inside the steel filing cabinets lining the walls of my room. I saw files grow and grow, the sick whose papers were extracted to add another page to the saga, detailing diseases and maladies: polio, rubella and eczema, tinea, cancers and the occasional mention of ‘war neurosis’. I was pleased to feel little sympathy for most of the cases—I was still hard enough to cope with the horror, a necessary coating to keep me going—and I only felt the slightest shiver when the list came in, at the end of every fortnight, of those files to be moved into the ‘closed’ cabinets in the basement of the building. Thankfully, it was not my job to carry the files of the recently deceased down below. I placed them in a tray on my desk every second Friday and by Monday they would be gone.

If I were honest, I would admit I read patient files with an eye to the past. Father Benjamin was dead and Mr Roper out of my life, and I felt Mary was lost to me. I could only foolishly search for her in the patient files, knowing the city held many hospitals and the chance of her crossing my path was small. Still, they were known to be often ill, their weakness for alcohol increasing the possibility of a visit to these wards. My heart would skip a beat when the words ‘octoroon’ or ‘half-caste’ popped up and I would look away, just glimpsing the surname out of the corner of my eye so as not to be confronted head-on with the name. Mary Rose Fraser. When it did not appear my trepidation dissolved, only to rise again with the opening of the next file. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.

†

The tree in the courtyard dropped its flowers and one of the nurses announced her engagement to a senior doctor, the one I had deemed the ugliest. A party was organised, which I did not attend, and the ‘closed’ list appeared to be longer that Friday, as if diligence had slackened in the face of a new future embarked upon.

That night I felt a presence in my bed, almost the same I had felt as a child when the Virgin visited, except the essence of the arrival was, unmistakably, male. It was not as simple as the spirit of the Mother of Christ. This wandering, unnamed spirit scared me just as much as the spectral Mary. I could feel his need, the burning beside me. I lay, repeating to myself I no longer believed in such things—surprised to find this was the truth I harboured—but I could not shake the sense a soul had entered the room. I did not turn my head toward him and, eventually, I fell back to sleep.

I would not have convinced anyone, had I had anyone to tell of my nighttime experience, yet I remained certain there had been a visitation. I had only to discover who he was.

†

The next Sunday afternoon I caught the tram into the city, wanting the bustle of strangers, their expressions of indifference. I alighted at St James with the help of the conductor—‘Mind your step, Missus,’—and, with some intention, I stood near the Archibald fountain, the spray pushed by the winter wind towards my face, fine droplets sticking to the back of my gloves. I tried not to look as if I was searching, casually strolling around the edge of the pool, reading the bronze plaque. I wore a black dress, one of the few dresses I had, the smallness of my waist now allowing me a full skirt, one I thought reasonably fashionable, although my straw, wide-brimmed hat was from ten years ago. I should have been wearing a tight fitting cloche but they seemed, to me, to provide no modesty at all. There were many women now who didn’t bother with such things. Two such twenty-year-old creatures sat on one of the park benches in pencil-line skirts, chatting loudly, swinging their shiny, curled hair around as if they were at a dance.

To resist the pull of the War Memorial I headed toward the harbour. In the Domain, the huge expanse of open lawn holding out against the city’s encroachment, cricketers in white called to one another, hastening to finish their game before the sun drained from the grass bowl. There was a crowd at Speaker’s Corner. Bordered by Moreton Bay figs and their leaf litter, groups of firebrands declaimed against whomever or whatsoever they thought hadn’t brought them joy. Prosperity had not spread everywhere, pockets of malcontents remained. They stood on stepladders, perched high enough to proclaim their answers to the world’s problems. I had caught some of their ranting on previous Sundays, as I skirted past them, following the path down to the Point.

I intended to do the same this day but as I walked I found my gaze drawn to a small crowd focused on a man standing precariously on a fruit box. He was silhouetted against the pale-blue afternoon sky, a glimpse of the Harbour Bridge just above his head.

‘We were sent to the other side of the world,’ the man spoke. ‘Sent to kill, to maim, to starve, to die, all to maintain the Empire and what did the Empire give us in return? She betrayed us. How many died because the Brits were more concerned with themselves than with us? Abandoned us like we were nothing more than rats. And, so the Yanks came in with their super-bombs and did … and did … and did … what they did. And then Korea.’

I knew the voice. Perhaps I had known from the first. He was, essentially, the same man, his moustache, his lean shape, his hair sleekly black. He raised his hands to encompass the crowd and—here was the difference—his fingers were quivering.

‘Should we really go into all these wars without question?’

I heard the murmur of ‘pacifist’, spoken with clear disapproval.

‘No, sir, I am not a pacifist. I simply ask the question: when does it end? When does … when does … when does the light return?’

I was still some distance back and could only just make out his shiny brown suit. It’d once been a fine suit but the pin stripes were faded, an outfit from St Vincent de Paul. His hat had also lost its firmness, joining his shoulders in a slow sloping towards the ground. I stood behind rows of similarly garbed men, mustiness rising off them. A few glanced in my direction, clearly surprised to see a woman.

‘Surely we have a duty to God, to our fellow man, to question the need for all this … this … blood … shed?’

I could not follow the train of his thought, though I could hear the weakness in his voice and the men around me could hear it too.

‘Catholic,’ I heard someone else murmur and the group began to move away towards another speaker calling out passionately about the rights of the workers.

I remained still while he climbed off the rickety box. He stood looking down at it, as if it was to blame for his deserting audience. Fred. I thought of those I had wanted to return—my mother, my father, Auntie Iris, Mary—and could barely believe it was my never-dead husband who had, instead, come home. Had his spirit visited me the other night, as a calling card for his imminent arrival? I had enjoyed my mourning. At some point along the way, the loss had become embedded and I did not need, or want, to lose it. This ghastly figure beside the box was inconvenient enough to cause flight.

He had not yet noticed me; I could walk away, let the shadow remain a shadow.

‘Fred?’ I said.

He seemed to take a long moment before raising his head, the Domain suddenly quiet, only marked by the sound of my breathing.

‘Gracie.’ He said it simply and raised both his hands to remove his hat. The distance between us was the same. I had not moved from my position at the back of the vanished crowd. He looked to the ground and I foolishly followed his gaze to the grass, thinking I had missed something important.

‘Gracie,’ he repeated, his head coming up now to find the point over my shoulder.

‘Hello, Fred.’

‘I wondered … I thought you would find me, some way.’

‘I haven’t been looking for you,’ I answered. I needed him to know this, for there to be no misguided perception of weakness in me.

‘But you have found me.’ He smiled meekly, a mere joining of the lips, and took a step towards me. ‘Gracie …’

I wanted him to stop saying my name. With his frame hunched forward, his hat pathetic in his hands, he could have been a tramp about to ask for spare change.

‘Where are you living?’ I asked.

My coldness seemed to stop him.

‘Here and there.’

I could not imagine how his Oriental woman had agreed to living ‘here and there’. They were Here, after all, no longer There, where they belonged.

On closer inspection, Fred’s moustache was ragged and patches of grey hairs were littered all over his scalp. The quivering in his hands was not, as I had hoped, just a sign of his emotion while orating, it was a constant shake that reminded me, horribly, of Father Benjamin. He kept licking his lips though the moisture he gave them seemed to disappear again immediately and his skin had a haggard pall. He had aged, as I had, the traces of his distress/despair/pain plainly visible, lost dreams dragging him down. Only his eyes held the same come-and-go spark.

†

We sat not far from the cricket, Fred producing a grey blanket from an old suitcase and laying it out like a picnic rug. I tried not to look at the stains and holes in it or to imagine why he would have such an item with him. I tucked my legs up under myself, hoping to appear as a curious spectator watching the wickets fall with her aged beau beside her. Fred sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, his shoes, like everything about him, scuffed and un-polished.

‘Did you get my letter?’ he asked.

‘Yes, I got your letters,’ I replied shortly, wondering why he would want to dive right into the painful past.

‘And you didn’t want to help me?’ His voice accusing.

‘Help you?’

‘I was in despair, Gracie. As a Christian woman, I would have thought …’

‘In despair? You?’

‘I would have thought …’

He ran his middle finger along the hairs of his moustache, his head tipped up to watch the clouds hurrying across the sun.

I did not want to hear of his despair. None of his feelings could compare with mine. All the words I couldn’t speak to him. How could he talk to me of those letters with their joy of new-found happiness when I had no one to replace his withdrawn love?

‘I sold the house, Fred.’ A simple statement of fact seemed the easiest option.

‘The house?’ He turned his gaze back to me. ‘The house?’ He repeated, as if only just remembering there had ever been such a place.

‘I got a good price for it and I bought a flat. The difference has been keeping me going since your money orders stopped arriving. And I work. At a hospital.’ I felt proud of this announcement and was frustrated by Fred returning his attention to his hat, sitting there beside his feet. He picked it up and I had a sudden fear he meant to put it on and walk away.

‘I like the work, Fred,’ trying to soften my voice. ‘I file.’

‘You file?’ He was asking his hat, rather than me.

‘Yes, I file.’

We had come to a dead end.

‘Do you do good, Gracie?’ Looking up at me, he had a smirk on his face and I supposed he was making fun of me.

‘I do what I must to live.’

‘Yes, we all do what we must to live.’

He glanced at the suitcase closed on the grass beside us. I had seen briefly what was inside when he opened it to retrieve the blanket: a razor, pair of trousers, and crushed shirt, one thick pair of socks and a brown-paper bag twisted around a bottle. This, I suddenly realised, was Fred’s life. Any trace of her, the woman he had abandoned me for, was no longer evident. I could not decide if I was elated or sickened.

Evening was falling, dusk making it difficult for the batsman to see the cricket ball. One of the fielders called ‘Time? Time?’

†

On the tram, I tried to recall asking Fred to come home with me. Perhaps it was assumed between us, that he would pack up the blanket and bring his worldly possessions along with him. As we rode I anticipated his entry into my flat with trepidation, acutely aware of letting this erstwhile stranger into the sanctity of my isolation. What items remained of our time together? I felt shy of pieces that might indicate any kind of shrine to what had been and wished I could snatch some time before he entered, to have things arranged properly. I was not a slovenly person—the dishes had been washed and put away—but I knew the cushions were scattered on the lounge and the smell of last night’s meatloaf still hung in the kitchen.

I opened the front door hoping I had shut the curtains to the alcove where his desk stood. I felt Fred hang back, standing behind me in the short corridor with his suitcase clutched in his hand.

‘It is lovely,’ he said, before he had really seen it, words he had been practising on the tram ride. I continued into the kitchen, using the bustle of making tea to cover the tremble within me.

I heard him move into the living room and, filling the kettle, knew him to be examining the pictures and ornaments. Would he sit in his old armchair, one of the many pieces I had, in my weakness, kept for his mere memory? At the very least, he would not find his photograph. Without the widows’ visits I had no need for such display and had stored it in a cupboard. Now I knew it would’ve been safer to throw it away.

Fred stood in the doorframe watching me as I placed the teacups on the tray on the kitchen bench. A waft of his decay overcame the remnants of my awful cooking and it was only the Kelvinator hum that filled the silence. Of course, there were other sounds outside: the rosellas fighting over fruit; the murmur of my next door neighbour’s wireless permanently, it seemed, tuned to the latest vulgar serial; the steady hum of traffic getting louder and angrier every day. Inside, though, I felt only the quiet between Fred and me. Not a comfortable abstinence from words, the sweet fellowship seen between old couples such as Mr and Mrs Mavis, where a mere touch of the fingers forgave trespasses, placed every misunderstanding within the boundaries of acceptance. No, Fred and I didn’t have that kind of bond. The best the years had done for us was open holes into which neither of us wanted to fall. I carried the tea tray out to the balcony and Fred moved away from the kitchen entrance awkwardly, my arm brushing against his torso.

We waited for the tea to brew, my husband squirming on the wrought-iron chair, not able, it seemed, to get comfortable. Once he would have teased me about purchasing such an instrument of torture, now he didn’t dare to. This lack of ease made me angry again, irritated as much with his distant politeness as with his earlier advanced familiarity. As my revenge, I pretended not to remember how he took his tea.

‘Milk? Sugar?’

‘Come on, Gracie,’ he admonished, and I felt myself blushing. He had seen through me. I poured the tea black, as he had always had it.

After we had finished our tea in silence, I showed Fred his room. I’d set up Mary’s old bed in the second room of the flat. Why I’d done this, I didn’t think about at the time. The re-appearance of Fred made the move seem strangely sensible. After turning on the light I stood in the corner, waiting for his exploration of what would now be ‘his’ room. It was dominated by a chest of drawers, but in this bedroom, bigger than the one at the old house, there was no need for squeezing past a cumbersome desk.

Fred, once again, hung in the doorway. He did not move to open the curtains lining the opposite wall. He either had no curiosity or felt the fine balance hanging between us. Behind the velvet curtains he would have found two panels of glass, ceiling high, with a door-less entrance between them leading to a rectangular room and his desk, the floor covered in brown tiles, a small high window in the wall opposite the entrance. I could only assume it had been designed for a baby, although the tiles gave it little warmth and the inability to close off the area made me wonder at the point of creating a room to sequester a child, without a door to block it out altogether.

‘This is sweet,’ Fred said. He moved into the room and ran his shaking hand along the pink, patchwork quilt lying on the bed. The headstand was gold, a new addition since Mary’s departure, and a picture of a young girl with bunny rabbits spilling from her arms hung above it, framed in dark bronze.

‘Leftovers,’ I replied, aware of what he must be thinking. ‘I threw them in here because there was nowhere else.’

‘You couldn’t leave them behind?’ he asked.

My stomach dropped and I had to stare hard at the hardwood knob of one of the drawers to prevent tears. This was not how to react, this was giving him ammunition against me. Where was the steel I needed? I had been so strong over the years; I could barely fathom how one chance meeting seemed to have changed everything.

‘Leave them behind? No one wants a house full of stranger’s furniture and I didn’t have anyone to help me,’ I muttered. ‘I had to do everything myself and there wasn’t any possibility of storing things. I had to get rid of all your clothes. I should’ve thrown more things away but even the charity shops have their limits, Fred.’

The longer I talked the more indignation I could muster. By the end of my speech, his name came out like a slap. He seemed to feel it.

‘Can I use the chest of drawers?’ he asked timidly.

‘Of course.’

I refrained from pointing out he had few possessions to stow away. He placed his suitcase on the bed and clicked open the one lock that still held the lid on. Perhaps because he was aware I had seen it all before, he showed no shame and, as steadily as he was now able, took out his ragged shirt and moved to the dresser. I stood in his way and we did the embarrassing dance of trying to find a path around each other without touching. And this was the man I had married.

I didn’t stay to see Fred settled in the room. I wanted to show how busy I was and took to dusting. Tomorrow I could proudly head off to work, leaving him to whatever manner of activity he occupied himself with. On a Sunday night, however, I would normally have had a gin and a plate of biscuits and cheese, my appetite content with the meagre, easy offerings at the back of the pantry. I was thrown by the need to provide dinner for another. Leftover meatloaf was all I could offer.

Fred ate as if I had produced the food of the century, worthy of being exhibited at the show. He had changed into his other pair of trousers and the shirt, mildly cleaner than the one I had first seen him in, and although there was no mistaking the man who had raved on his soapbox in a foolish suit, the mantle of newer clothes gave him an air of freshness.

The tears that had threatened before were replaced with a little too much pleasure as I watched him wolf down his meal. I had to struggle to preserve the appearance of indifference to his compliments.

‘Is it possible, do you think, Grace, for me to have a bath?’

He spoke with the same timidity as before and I noted the change in his naming of me. I had never called him anything but his proper name, never used endearments such as ‘dearest’ or ‘sweetheart’ or a secret nickname known only to the two of us.

‘Yes, Fred,’ I replied and tasted its hardness.

Fred remained in the bathroom while the water for the bath ran, monitoring its heat and depth. After washing the dishes and stealing for a moment into the spare room, I sat in the lounge and turned back to the adventures of Tom Jones, trying to ignore the roar of the pipes carrying around the walls, trying not to wait for the moment when the noise would stop and I would know Fred was undressing.

I forced myself to return to Tom, another illegitimate foundling, condemned by birth to wander from one fist to the next, cast out of his benefactor’s house in disgrace because of his base appetites. I had already begun to skim over the chapters in which Fielding gave his interpretations of morality, preferring the action of the love story: Sophia’s determination to run away rather than marry Blifil, Tom’s letter claiming eternal fidelity to her even as he made his perfidious escape.

The flat became quiet and I heard the small splash as my one-time husband stepped into the bath. I felt nervous. For fourteen years I had been without male company—if you did not count Mr Roper—and I would have assumed all such feelings were dead. I didn’t think it was jealousy that had made it almost impossible for me to watch and appreciate courtship; I had surely surrendered the possibility of such twists in my own Fate. I knew the falsity of ‘happily ever after’, preferred the steady assurance of heart-less days. Why, then, did I jump like a schoolgirl at the sound of Fred’s voice?

‘Gracie!’ His call came to me from another time. ‘How about some music?’

I put my book down and moved to the Bakelite radio Fred had received on his departure from work after enlisting, a tarnished plaque attached to its front with the words ‘For Mr F. Smith from the Commonwealth Banking Corporation, with appreciation, 1941’ smoothly engraved in it. I rarely used it and when I did, had tried not to compare this item to Complete Works of Shakespeare, the mildewed gift given to me.

Switching the radio on, a Frankie Vaughan tune jumped into the room. Immediately, Fred began to sing along, his baritone echoing from the bathroom.

When you walk in the garden

In the Garden of Eden

With a beautiful woman

And you know how you care

And the voice in the garden

In the Garden of Eden

Tells you she is forbidden

Can you leave her there?

Fred, a weak rabbit, one moment hopping stupidly around me and in the next, bellowing like a bull with no obvious concern for what my neighbours might think.

When you’re yearning for lovin’

And she touches your hand

And your heart starts a-poundin’

And you’re feelin’ so grand.

Can you leave her to heaven?

And obey the command?

Can you walk from the Garden

Does your heart understand?

‘Are you swingin’, Gracie?’ he shouted out, his inability to see me giving him courage. ‘Swingin’ in the Garden of Eden!’

This could be the night before he went away, when we stayed up for as long as he could, dancing, until he had fallen asleep on the lounge, so exhausted from all his conflicting thoughts, and I had crept out to wish on the stars.

I wanted to call ‘yes’ to him, to pick myself up and swing, but my legs were leaden, my toes crushed inside my pumps. With no one here I would have taken them off. But with Fred here, like with Mr Roper, I couldn’t be barefoot.

I swayed a little, moving myself to a rhythm I couldn’t forget, my shoulders rocking, letting the music fall into me. How easy it would be to go back. The trick was deciding exactly where to take yourself back to.

Fred’s voice again joined Frankie’s crescendo.

Can you leave her there?

Can you leave her there?

Can you leave her there!

The bathroom door opened. I had not heard Fred stepping from the bath, the sound of the water drowned out by song. I looked involuntarily, saw Fred with only a towel wrapped around his waist, and quickly tripped back to the lounge chair, picking up Tom Jones and returning to the place held by my bookmark.

His dripping shape moved to the spare bedroom and he closed the door behind him with a soft click.

While he was in the bath I had taken a pair of pyjamas and laid them on his bed. I had lied to him when I said I’d given away all his things because I did not want him to think I was, in any way, waiting for him. An entire half-wardrobe still housed his clothes. I could pretend the pyjamas were a one-off, accidentally kept in the chaos of the move and tried to imagine myself saying this without betraying the truth. Since leaving the widows I had not had to practise deceit—unless one included the various excuses created to avoid return visits to the church and Mr Roper—and I worried Fred would see right through me, to the clinging wife who hadn’t been able to discard his possessions.

It was ten o’clock, later than I would normally sit up, quieter than I was used to. I had formed a habit of getting to bed sooner than my neighbours so that I could hear their movements above and below me, a strange type of lullaby, reassuring in the same way strangers on the tram remind you of the continuation of other lives when your own seems stationary.

‘Staying up?’ Fred asked, standing by the lounge chair. His hands hung by his side, the sleeves of the brown and cream striped pyjamas hanging lower than his knuckles, longer than I remembered.

‘Yes, I think I will,’ I replied. In truth, I couldn’t imagine sleeping. How to put aside this day of a ghost’s return and settle into slumber? To free the tightness in my shoulders caused by the strict need to show nothing when feeling everything?

‘Is it alright if I sleep?’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘Goodnight, Grace.’

He turned and disappeared into the spare room, closing the door quietly behind him.

I lay the book aside, knowing I had no concentration for it. If I had ever imagined having Fred in my life again, it had never been like this. When I had imagined him, he was something like the statues on the outside of the War Memorial: solid stone, fixed stare, a strong sense of his place in the world. I would never have put him with the emaciated bronze soldier inside, the defeated martyr, the figure I had hidden, through modesty, from Mary. Young Mary. What would she have made of this man, now asleep in her former bed, raised from the dead and already snoring loud enough to chase away demons? Would she smile?

†

In bed, I shut my eyes, my arms pinned to my side, trying to block out Fred’s noise by pressing one ear into the pillow and draping my hair over the other. How had I ever gotten used to this noise? I had no memories of frustrating nights, of needing to creep to the lounge room, no resort to the separate rooms other wives hinted at.

Spots of colour swam on the back of my eyelids. I had barely touched the meatloaf, my stomach reminding me of its emptiness. There was no point in getting up; my supply of biscuits eaten by Fred, his appetite making up for days, perhaps months, of subsistence living. He hadn’t been explicit about when he had returned from Japan and begun his street existence. I could only guess by the state of him.

The snoring abruptly stopped. He had, more than likely, woken himself up. I waited to hear the recommencement of the steady breath that would rise and rise, the cycle of nervous waking, light sleep, deep slumber and return to dreams. I wanted him asleep; too much to think of us both awake, marooned in our beds. Was he still thinking of her? Had it been only the war that had made him bitter, or were there other angers? I had mine still; all I had to do was remind myself of his abandonment, of that letter. I could not be taken in by his trembling hands and my softly spoken name.

I had no idea what time it was. Still Fred’s room remained silent, aside from the occasional squeak of his mattress as he tossed. My mattress did not squeak because I did not move, rigid on my back, willing Fred to sleep.

†

The next morning I crept around the flat, preparing for work. I could not remember falling asleep but I must have had a few hours. Fred’s snores continued in the spare room and I didn’t want to wake him so I didn’t boil the kettle—satisfying myself with a glass of orange juice—nor wash my face for fear of the noisy pipes.

I left my house keys on the dining table with a note telling Fred I would be back by six o’clock. I had never had a spare key cut—who would I give it to?—and had to trust Fred would stay for at least a day, even if it were just for some decent food.

On my arrival at work, Mr Anderson gave me a curious look. ‘Everything all right, Mrs Smith?’ he asked.

I suppose it was my untidy hair.

‘Yes, Mr Anderson, just running a little late this morning.’

‘That’s not like you.’

‘Well, we all have our bad mornings.’

I had meant to sound cheery but it sounded almost snappish.

‘Chin up, Mrs Smith, a bad morning does not have to mean a bad day.’

I grimaced and made my way to my office.

The day, despite Mr Anderson’s prediction, had an odd edge to it. When the phone rang next door I kept expecting Mr Anderson to appear, bearing some message of disaster from home. I did not know what I thought would happen to Fred in my flat, I just found it difficult to think of him there, alone, free to roam. I could not imagine him prying into my belongings, nor could I see him simply sitting quietly. It was strange to have another’s movements so closely tied to mine again and by the afternoon I could stay no longer in the confines of the filing cabinets.

‘Just popping out for a walk,’ I informed Mr Anderson.

He paused in his writing and frowned.

‘I didn’t have a lunch hour,’ I added, in case there was a perception of wasting time.

‘That’s fine,’ he replied, continuing to watch me walk across the office.

I had not walked in the wards since my arrival at the hospital. I didn’t feel it was appropriate, given how much I knew about some of the patient’s ills, and had also felt a barrier between myself and the assured medical staff, their knowledge of the inner workings of the body making my own literary knowledge pale into insignificance.

I stood uncertainly in the courtyard, red flowers withered to brown on the grass. Doctors and nurses were striding confidently past, their destinations clear. I suspected Mr Anderson was observing me from his office window, trying to determine how ‘fine’ I was. To escape him, I started towards South Wing. I was nervous. Some of these wards would contain replicas of the Mavis boy, embodiments of the words ‘battle stress’ scribbled on their files without further explanation.

The long, thin corridor I stepped into had open doors at regular intervals and as I clicked along the floorboards I saw all of these entrances lead to a continuous room on either side, filled with single beds in rows under the huge, wide windows. The hospital had once been a colonial residence. This, then, was the converted ballroom, split down the middle, no longer fragranced with home-wrought perfumes or eucalyptus oil rubbed into wood. Now formaldehyde masked the odours of the sick.

I pattered along, determined to keep moving so as not to draw attention to myself. I had only a vague impression of the occupied beds with figures lying restless, more than I had expected were empty, although their sheets were crumpled, suggesting only temporary absence.

I passed the final door and heard a young man’s voice calling, ‘Sister? Sister?’ I couldn’t understand how he could mistake me, in my dark clothes, for the radiance of the nursing staff.

‘I am sorry, young man,’ I said from the doorway. ‘I’m not a nurse.’

He was in the last bed of the ward, the closest, perhaps, to recovery—or to a more final destination? His skin, from the sunken hollows of his cheeks to the long, thin arms lying over the blankets, was an awful yellow. Would I receive him soon, in the form of a file to be deposited into the cavern below the hospital?

‘I need to go,’ he said.

‘Go where?’

‘To the …’

The blush that spread over his face showed me my mistake, the scarlet jumping out vividly.

‘I’ll see if I can find someone.’

He nodded his head and I turned to leave, unsure if I had the confidence to accost anyone and demand attention for the boy.

Across the hall a nurse worked with her back to me, tucking in the sheets of an empty bed. Her uniform, a pinafore belted at the waist and a headscarf reminiscent of a nun’s veil, was white and she appeared luminous in the sunlight coming in from the window. Her manoeuvres were studied and efficient. I walked quietly across the corridor to stand under the door arch and held my breath as she used the palm of her hand to fold the linen under the mattress, creating a perfect, tight corner.

‘Nurse Mary?’ an older, female voice called from out of my sight and the nurse looked up, her profile perfectly revealed, the same curled eyelashes, the same dark hue brought to stark attention by her face wrapped in white. I drew in a quick gasp of air. She may have turned to investigate the noise but I did not stay to see. Hurrying away down the floorboards on the soles of my feet, ensuring the tap of my heels did not echo out behind me, I hoped somebody else would help the young yellow man who needed to relieve himself.

But almost before I reached the end of the corridor I had begun to doubt myself. Had Fred’s return created phantoms, tricks of the mind? Mary would have grown up, I was not foolish enough to keep her a twelve year old. Five years had passed and she had every chance of entering the workforce. But for her to be here? I had looked for her in patient files, never imagining her a nurse. Or was this just another vision? Could she really have been standing there, against the light, with her hair perfectly contained? Was Nurse Mary really my Mary?

12

I knocked on the door of my flat that evening without really feeling the rap against my knuckles. I had not left work earlier than usual, determined as I was to allay Mr Anderson’s concerns about my pale-faced appearance after my walk, and it was already past six o’clock when I arrived home. In this way I had also given Fred more time to prepare for my return, for I had vague fears.

He answered almost immediately, unlocking the metal door that protected the front door with ease, suggesting he had been in and out sometime during the day.

‘Welcome home,’ he said and I was surprised by the unmistakable smell of a meal in preparation coming from the kitchen. He was dressed in one of his old suits, grey, from his banking days, so I knew he had found the half of the closet that still belonged to him. I didn’t say anything. The past had completely melded with the present and all secrets were now under scrutiny.

‘Good day?’ he asked, reaching to take my handbag from my shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s good.’

He hummed, placing the bag on the side-table and disappearing into the kitchen to turn off the insistently whistling kettle.

I sat in the armchair feeling like a visitor, waiting for the host to determine the next move. I waited, listening to Fred make tea, his humming continuing under the boil of saucepan water and the twang of the oven’s metal shelves as they adjusted to the heat. I could not guess what he was cooking, or perhaps it was that my memory had no point of reference. The Fred I had known did not hum in the kitchen like a woman, nor place a cup and saucer tentatively on the armrest, ensuring it sat exactly on the middle circle of the lace doily.

‘Are you not having tea?’ I asked.

‘I’ve been drinking tea all day.’ He smiled and sat on the end of the lounge. He did not have the waft of alcohol around him I had registered yesterday though he still stunk of tobacco and I saw through the balcony door a large pile of cigarette ends sticking out of an old bowl I’d once used to wash cleaning rags in.

‘Been keeping busy, Fred?’ I sounded caustic even to myself and knew, somewhere inside of me, it was not fair to take out the confusion of my afternoon on Fred.

‘I went walking.’

He said this as if it was an achievement and I supposed in comparison to what he might have been doing, it was.

‘I walked along the coast, Grace. The wind was up but I managed to hold onto my hat, as they say.’ He laughed and turned his body towards me like a little boy willing you to focus on his story. ‘The sea was wild. I’d forgotten how wild the sea can be and I found myself just walking and walking without any clear sense of where I was going, or when I should stop. I could walk forever, I thought, and I felt so … so … so tired, at that thought, the thought I could keep on walking and no one would care. That is how I have been spending my days, because no one did care, not even me, about how, or where I walked, where I ended up, where I spent the night. I rant and rave and … and no one listens. The darkness … and then, Grace, I thought of you. How you needed me to be at home, even just because of the key and how … and Grace, I was so happy when I remembered that, that I had to be back here, at a certain time, for … a real … reason. God, Grace, how glad I was.’

He was willing me to raise my gaze from the teacup, the hint of tears in his voice.

‘I’m happy for you,’ I said, staring into the liquid. I stood up and took the half-empty cup to the kitchen sink.

†

The meal—a dish of chicken cooked in spices I had never purchased and that I could only assume had come back with Fred from his foreign lands—was eaten in almost complete silence. I could not really compliment the food because it left my tongue burning mildly but I ate every last piece as a sign of my appreciation, sipping water all the while to take away the sting.

The quiet had a softness to it, different from the harsh silences of the previous night and I marvelled to think we might already be settling into one another. A large part of me fought such a conclusion—I was tired, after all, from the illusions of the day and it was dangerous to read the mood in such times—and another part of me welcomed the idea that I might, once again, enter the world of the loved, and loving. Would Mary let this happen? Could I slip past my guilt into such a place?

We went through the rituals of preparation for sleep with murmured enquiries of each other’s needs, the brasher call of my neighbour to her children—‘Get to bloody bed before I come in there and wallop you!’—ringing out against our solemnity.

Fred whispered ‘good night’ and, once again, closed the spare bedroom door gently. Did his words have a question in them or had I imagined he was asking permission for a continuation of our time together, for comfort I had not had for such a long time? We were beyond flirting and I had not given him doe-eyed encouragement to believe we could go there once more. My only sign, my only answer to a possibly un-asked question, was to leave my bedroom door wide open.

†

The presence in my room was real this time. I had turned off my bedside lamp after pretending to read for a while, hearing Fred pace next door. I could not will him to know the invitation was there, only hope he would understand.

I heard him draw a breath. He was standing at the end of my bed, possibly feeling the edges to get his bearings in the almost complete darkness. I kept my eyes shut, trying to keep my breathing even, to feign sleep even as I suspected he knew I was awake. So much pretence, still. I could not reach out to him, in case he drew away from me. He may have only been here to confirm his lack of desire for me, to draw the contours of my form in comparison to his other lover and pull back in revulsion from my different body.

I felt him trace out the mounds of my feet and carefully sit on the end of the bed. I could smell saltiness. I waited for him to speak, to ask if I was awake. I opened my eyes and waited as the blackness dissolved into varying shapes of grey: the dresser against the wall, the outline of the door, Fred sitting, hunched over, his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling between his legs. A great distance from me, a larger shadow than he really was. I closed my eyes again. The night ticked on and I wondered if I would hear birds awakening before either of us moved, if we would watch again for the dawn together, a vigil of waiting. These thoughts changed my breathing and I could not hope to stop the small sighs leaking out of my mouth, the deep inhalations as I imagined his hands on me.

For this is my body, for this is my blood. If I could have willed the Virgin Mary back to me, to remind me of the icy film I had adopted in my youth, I would not have done it. The heat in me was like nothing I had felt before, not even in the days of our marriage when Fred had urged me to forget the watching eyes, to embrace him fully. I had never really done so, though the desire had been there. I had never held him, and only him, to my deepest heart.

My fingers twitched. All I needed was to lift myself and place my burning hand on his leg, to risk his scalding. Before I could do this, he stood up. My eyes snapped open, his shadow had grown tall. He would leave now and in my head I shouted, No! pleading, stay with me, stay with me, repeating the words with a pathos that almost made me nauseous. In my head, the desperation could be spoken, my mouth could not whisper a word.

Fred did not leave. Instead, he walked slowly to the empty side of the bed. He pulled at the tightly tucked sheets and blanket, opening up a wide space for his entrance, and lay himself down beside me. Not close enough for our bodies to touch, but close enough to feel his heat. He lay on his back, like me, and, gradually, our breathing began to match one another. I did not turn my head to look at him and I sensed if his eyes were open they were looking at the dark mass of the ceiling. We lay, as two corpses laid out for their funerals, with enough warmth in the air to enable cremation.

I did not sleep. Much sooner than I expected Fred’s snores entered the confused night and all thoughts were punctured by his snorts and grumbles. My irritation brought down my longing and I tried to reason with myself it was age that had magnified the strength of his night-noises. I waited, with further itchiness, for the flinging out of his arms, the eventual taking over of the mattress that had once characterised our nights together. I didn’t know if I would tolerate such selfishness now, if my meek days of being satisfied with only the very edge of comfort were over.

I thought of Mary on her first day, standing in my driveway—and the meek shall inherit the earth. What was there for her to do but lower her eyes and pretend to be content? How much the child is in our power, holding all that we want, all that we have lost somewhere along the way. Little wonder I had clung to her, little wonder she had slipped away. In the greyness of approaching morning, I saw she had never been meek, her face a prophecy of every sin I would commit against her.

Fred’s snores stopped. His eyes opened and he turned to face me.

‘Grace?’

‘Yes?’

‘Perhaps …’

‘Yes, Fred?’

‘Perhaps we could go for a walk sometime?’ His voice was quiet and it did not seem a strange thing to say. ‘Like old times. We could take a walk down to the fruit bat colony, hey?’

In the dawn light, I could see his eyes were on me, intent, as if trying to read something in my response.

‘Yes, that would be nice,’ I replied quietly.

Fred breathed out loudly. ‘Did you get that letter, Grace?’

‘Which letter, Fred?’

‘The fruit bats …’

I thought back over the collection of Fred’s letters, so secure inside his desk, wind whipped on the clothesline, now re-wrapped in ribbon. I couldn’t remember a mention of fruit bats. My puzzled expression seemed enough.

He turned his head away and closed his eyes.

‘I’m glad,’ he whispered. I didn’t ask what he was referring to.

The test of my meekness didn’t come in the night for Fred continued to stay within the confines of his half of the bed and, by morning, he had returned to his bedroom.

13

For the next few weeks, the rhythm of my life became quite different. Every night, Fred came to lie beside me, slipping under the covers with the same quietness, and every morning I awoke alone.

At work, Mr Anderson enquired about my health when I arrived in the mornings. I tried hard to make my tired face presentable—my sleep came in the small hours of the night when I was finally sure Fred was not going to move toward me—and was rarely able to muster the energy to arrange my hair properly, wearing it loose more often than not. Though I tried to inject as much enthusiasm as possible into my replies to Mr Anderson, it did not prevent him from sticking his head into my office throughout the day to check if I needed anything. He was obviously afraid my weary appearance was a sign of some discontent, and he might lose one of his best ‘drones’—as he referred to me—labouring the image of the hospital as a thriving beehive where we all made the ‘honey of health and well-being’.

I would wait as patiently as I could for the beginning of my lunch hour. In general there were no appearances in the courtyard until noon, but the comings and going could continue past two o’clock. There was no possibility of watching closely that long so I dedicated only the middle hour—from half past twelve to half past one—to standing at the window, carefully hidden by a bank of curtains, checking the nurses’ faces for the telltale shade of skin. I was no longer able to sneer at the love dances of the couples being played out below. I felt as trapped in my office as I did lying in bed next to Fred and I could not bring myself to go for another walk in the wards, Mr Anderson watching too closely.

†

One afternoon, perhaps three weeks after Fred’s return, I stared down at the file of a typhoid patient lying open on my desk. A succession of doctors’ hands had written notes beside dates from the last month, until the final entry: ‘Died 9.47 pm’. It wasn’t necessary for me to read the clinical list of the man’s final days. I knew where the file needed to go, knew where the end lay, for his record, at least. Nevertheless, I found myself reading over the scrawls of symptoms and attempted treatment, over the timetable of decline, chronicling his fever and pain, the rose-like spots on his chest, the green soup of his excrement. One entry, ‘A turn for the worse’, seemed the grossest understatement while some of the entries were indecipherable, as if the doctor had barely had time to catch up with Death.

How quick it seemed on the page, just a few scrawled strokes—ink in a different pattern from the characters on the envelope that came to me from Japan but holding the same power to change lives—and yet how many hours had it been for the dying man? How he would have clung, even in his pain, to those vanishing minutes. I wished, more than anything, Fred would reach for me across the bed.

I declared my intention of going for a walk to Mr Anderson and he watched me depart. I planned to return to South Wing, to check on the young yellow boy, to confirm my vision had been an aberration, the arrival of Fred into my life having simply created associations. Their Nurse Mary could not be my Mary. It was too much to hope for—or dread.

The corridor was busy, two nurses re-organising a trolley of supplies and an elderly couple—had I seen them someplace before?—hovering, perhaps waiting for their patient to be presentable. The woman, dressed in a long tweed overcoat, clung to a brown-paper bag full of grapes and, as I passed, she whispered something to her husband.

I walked on with the growing sense I was shrinking, becoming smaller each step I travelled away from the entrance. I glanced into the wards as I passed, afraid of—and praying for—a glimpse of black skin. Would I rush to her? Could I stop myself from turning away as I had done before? It had only been surprise, surely, that pushed me away? This time I would confront her, spectre or not.

I came to the final entrance and saw that the last bed, the home of the young man, was empty. The sheets were turned back but the mattress still contained the imprint of a body. I moved to the bed and felt the hammer of panic combining with the smell of my sweat. Where had the boy gone? On the bedside cabinet sat a glass and a large jug of water. Oliver Twist was lying facedown, its spine bent open to hold the place.

‘Can I help you?’

I turned to see her. She had an arm around the boy and was helping him to sit onto the bed.

‘Hello,’ I said.

The girl’s eyes were fixed on her charge. Moving around the other side of the bed, she let him lean the weight of his back onto her hands and slowly lifted his legs. I waited as he gently tilted back into the pillows, a suspension bridge controlled by her hands. The boy sighed.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

The nurse straightened and, with the bed and the young man’s pain between us, directed honey-brown eyes at me.

‘Yes?’ she asked.

I couldn’t hold her gaze. I glanced down at the patient.

‘You came back,’ the boy said, and smiled.

‘You’re a relative of Luke’s?’ I shook my head, unable to speak. ‘A friend?’

I nodded.

‘It’s lovely of you to visit,’ she said.

She spoke simply, without a trace of surprise in her voice, and I was warmed to think I was still incapable of disconcerting her. She continued to scan down the other beds, as if poised to attend to a patient.

‘Luke is doing well,’ she reported. Leaning down, she smoothed out his blanket. ‘He’s told you about it?’

I did not know how to explain I had no connection to the sallow boy. He had closed his eyes, removing himself from us.

‘Maybe we should go for a walk?’ she suggested, perhaps worried that we might be keeping him from sleep. ‘I can explain it all to you.’

I tried hard to keep myself composed even as I itched to put my hand on her, to claim some possession of this extraordinary being. She led the way down the corridor and I followed her thin legs, so neatly planted inside brown leather shoes. The afternoon was almost over, the last of the light falling on the grass around the flame tree. She did not hesitate to stand in it, rubbing at her arms to rid them of goose pimples. I felt too hot and remained in the shade.

‘Luke is past the worst of it, now we have the dysentery under control,’ she said. ‘The doctors say the jaundice is only a result of that, so they should be able to get him back to his normal colour soon.’

Normal? I resisted looking at her skin.

‘You’re doing a good job, I’m sure,’ I said, a statement of fact that could not be misinterpreted.

‘I hope so.’ She interlaced her fingers, hanging her hands below her waist. Her shoulders dropped, as if, out here, she could let go of her vigilance.

‘A wonderful thing,’ I added.

‘Thank you.’

She looked past me, over my shoulder, perhaps to a younger me, the one she had known.

‘You work here?’ she asked.

‘Yes, as a clerk.’

‘Under the dreaded Mr Anderson?’

‘Under the dreaded Mr Anderson.’

We laughed. I felt a pang of guilt that I was willing to collude in this assessment of Mr Anderson, never having been on the end of his rages. I had heard his storms against the incompetence of the medical staff, knew of the gulf between the administration and those ‘on the ground’. I wondered what he would be thinking, seeing me down here, in plain view, talking to the enemy.

I could find no direction in the discussion that might make us at ease with one another. We stood in silence.

‘I should probably get back,’ she said and now her looking past me was a longing to return to that place beyond me, to her future.

‘Can I see … Luke again?’ I asked without meaning to, finding myself saying, as I had always done with her, things I could not control. Asking if I could see her again would have sounded too desperate, too sad.

‘Yes.’ This time she did sound surprised and she stared at me, a small crease between her eyebrows. ‘He will be here still, for quite some time.’

She smiled a polite smile. Her fingers unlaced and for a moment I thought she would reach out and place her hand on my shoulder. Instead, her hands dropped to her side and she walked past me, arms softly swaying, a confident take-leave without a hint of looking back.

†

I lingered in my office, constantly at the window hoping to catch sight of her. Mr Anderson was also working late, possibly delaying his descent into domestic chaos, and our movements sounded out of the quietening building. Across the way, the dimmed wards still showed signs of life, darkness not resting there.

Eventually, Mr Anderson came in to tell me he was locking up. Although I had a set of keys, I did not trust myself as final gatekeeper and followed him out through the large oak door.

Once we had said good night, I pretended to walk with a purpose towards my car though, in honesty, I could not stand the thought of driving it. To be enclosed inside my head was enough, let alone behind my father-in-law’s greasy steering wheel.

I kept walking, returning my keys to my handbag and plunging on into the back streets. I was not wearing the best shoes for such an undertaking—an old pair of T-strap sandals too small for me—and I soon felt an ache in my ankles and cracked soles. I walked, alone and untethered. From behind the fence of Centennial Park, hidden among the oleanders and thistles, came murmurs and laughter; men who had forgotten their names, women who never thought to ask. They seemed to be the only people out, if you could truly call it that. It was too late now for the evening strollers with dogs and prams, all had retreated into their living rooms. Street lamps beamed their light into the sky, and I hated having to walk through the black patches of pavement, always afraid of the dark, scared even of making my way to the outhouse.

I headed to Oxford Street, a street without a hint of England. How ineptly labelled this city was, as if no one had put thought into it, forgetting the importance of names. Auntie Iris. Auntie Grace. Mr John Roper. Peter Benjamin, Rock of the Church. Frederick Smith, Private. Mary, Mother of God.

On Oxford Street were the people who did not have living-room barricades with which to protect themselves. Cancers of men outside bars, reeling in the aftermath of their inebriation; prostitutes leaning against doorways, barely able to keep themselves upright; children sitting in the gutter staring at their blue feet. I lowered my head, the brim of my hat a shield to catch no one’s eye, to raise no one’s ire. I moved through the glow, imagining the church crowd gasping in horror to see me here, flinching at the catcalls and jeers. The slope made the journey easier and, though my ankles throbbed, there was still enough left in me for the final destination.

The rustles in Hyde Park told me of more dirty liaisons in the bushes, the figs held sleeping ibis whose wings shifted in the moonlight, the fountain in the distance trickled on. At the reflection pool I stood and looked up at the edifice I had not visited since chasing Mary here. A single fruit bat flew down and skimmed the surface of the pond, drinking.

This was the night-time Mary had experienced when she ran away. Had she lain on the grass near the cold water, or been drawn, like I was, toward the Memorial’s steps, stone still warm from the day’s sun? A bat swooped behind me. I tried to picture a dog taking its fill, not wanting to think of the bat’s leathery wings and the pig-like face Fred had once drawn my attention to.

At the top of the stairs, the Memorial stood open, its metal doors pulled back on either side. In the week leading up to ANZAC Day, the building remained accessible for all, in honour of that first vigil at the cenotaph in Martin Place, a widow kept company by a group of veterans stumbling home after sharing a drink.

The Hall of Memory appeared empty. It was too dark to make out the stars in the dome above, only the light cast by the eternal flame flickering in various corners. The firelight did not touch the hole in the centre of the floor and I hesitated to approach the circle of blackness. I trembled. I tried to think of waking up next to Fred and the heat I had felt from having him near. Shivering, I wrapped my arms around myself, walked to the carved balustrade, and lowered my head to stare into the Well of Contemplation, expecting only shadows, listening for the hiss.

The bronze sun surrounding the statue was alight. For a moment I thought there were people down there, Mary’s people, burning torches at every side. I blinked and saw it was the full moon hitting the polished gold with all its force, the light a trail that ran, I realised, along the reflection pool and up to this point, dropping down into the Well like a waterfall, a quirk that happened every month. For once, I was in the right place. In the cradle of this beauty the emaciated soldier was a burnt, magnificent skeleton.

The sobs came; I heard them, as if from far away, explode into the silence. I folded my arms, struggling to control the weeping, but it was no use. I cried and cried. I had not let myself do this since … No, I could not remember a time when I had let myself do this.

†

‘Where have you been?’ Fred asked. The flat smelt of lamb and rosemary.

There was a ready lie on my lips, one I had thought of during the drive home. I hadn’t walked all the way back to the hospital, preferring to hail a cab, the driver of which assumed I was visiting a sick friend and was silently respectful. My red eyes and sniffles hinted at something terminal.

I removed my hat and gloves without answering Fred, sat down and, for the first time, took off my shoes and stockings in front of him. The buckles of the sandal straps were stiff and, as I rolled the nylon down over my ankles, I saw they had imprinted an ugly red cross into my skin. My toes were swollen and pulsing. I sat up to find Fred staring, his hands in his pockets, his upper body swaying slightly as if caught in a breeze.

‘You look beat,’ he said. ‘Let me run you a bath.’

I nodded in agreement and he left me. I went into the kitchen and took out the faintly charred lamb from the oven. Fred had already eaten his share. I cut a slice and placed it on a plate, then moved out to the balcony to sit at the wrought-iron table. It was past ten o’clock, later than I had ever had a meal in my life. The chewing felt unnatural, the echo of the sea an unlikely dinner partner.

Fred returned and sat down to smoke opposite me. The weight of his presence hung on me, even as I tried to muster gratitude for his acts of kindness. I had been so long alone that the smallest gestures of care unsettled me. After my day, perhaps I would have been happier to come back to solitude, to the probable collapse into further weeping. Perhaps I would always hold myself back.

He stubbed out his cigarette into the ashtray he had created.

I had barely managed to swallow three pieces of the lamb, the cold strings catching in my throat. ‘Fred,’ I began.

He lit another cigarette, striking the match on the side of the box with an experienced flick. I wanted to tell him everything.

‘Gracie?’ he answered and the use of my old name sent me back again, to that shining pit of light. I began to cry then and, without knowing all the moments or movements, I was in Fred’s arms, held fast against his chest. He locked me tight against him and I disappeared into his shoulder. If there were stars above us, I didn’t know, only aware of his whispered reassurance.

‘I am here, I am here, I am here,’ he murmured over and over and, finally, I forgot the time when he was not.

†

Fred’s pale torso rose and fell under my arm. He had fallen asleep almost immediately afterwards and I was left in the quiet of the ongoing night, his snores the closest they had ever been. His mouth gaped open beneath the moustache that had tingled my lips an hour before.

I pulled at my nightdress as discreetly as I could, trying to untangle the bunching above my waist. Fred claimed I was as beautiful as ever but I suspected there were limits to such talk. He would not want to see my varicose veins in the morning. I rolled onto my side and felt dampness run down my thigh.

May Thy Body, O Lord, which I have received, and Thy Blood which I have drunk cleave to mine inmost parts: and do Thou grant that no stain of sin remain in me.

I did not want those words yet there they were, reminding me of all that did not remain inside me, of the lost chance of Mary, of everything I must regret.

Fred slept on. His dreams were not, as I had dreaded, of a paradise lost. His plea to me as he made his way to pleasure held no echo of her. He had gripped me as if his life depended on it and shouted only ‘Gracie, Gracie, Gracie!’ reaching his height much sooner than I could. I had expected nothing more and wanted nothing more than his body beside me, flowing with the blood not spilt on the battlefield, nor drained in a prisoner-of-war camp, the flesh not worthy of medals of honour, nor glory. The rhythm of his breathing was enough.

†

Mary stood under the flame tree, her face in shadow, talking to another nurse. From the window I could only see the woman’s back. In my arms I held a stack of closed files Mr Anderson had asked me to take down to the basement, but I found myself transfixed by the ease of Mary’s hand gestures, the confidence in her shared laughter, the strength of her black skin against her uniform. There was no hint of a whisper around her, the other staff stood in their own engrossing conversations. Her head turned at one point to acknowledge a passing doctor. She was one of them, then, and, from behind the glass, I knew her thoughts were not on me. If I registered at all on her consciousness, I was a blurred figure, glimpsed from the corner of her eye.

I watched for a little longer, aware Mr Anderson would return any minute and catch me neglecting my duties, again lacking the focused diligence he had hired me for.

‘Are you all right, Mrs Smith?’ It was Mr Anderson, reappearing at the moment I had predicted he would. I was about to turn to him when I saw Mary had seen me, her head lifted in my direction. She raised her hand in greeting. I left Mr Anderson waiting behind me. It was not a wave, the girl just raised her palm and spread her fingers as if making a print in the air.

I raised my own hand, letting the fingertips rest lightly on the pane. In the time it took for the glass to lose its chill, the girl’s arm had dropped to her side. She spoke to her friend—words I could not interpret—and then spun away, walking the path to South Wing.

‘Mrs Smith?’

Mr Anderson still waited but I could not bring myself to address him. I had to follow her every move, to witness her disappearance into the converted ballroom where she would dance her life.

‘Mrs Smith!’

I lowered my hand, resting it on the top folder in the crook of my arm.

‘Yes, Mr Anderson?’

‘Do you need something?’

‘Need something, Mr Anderson?’

‘You seem … distracted, Mrs Smith.’

‘Not at all.’

I turned towards him. The coloured spots on my vision from looking at the light hung in front of his face for a moment before clearing away to reveal his forehead, so furrowed his brows were one long line of wiry hair. He was not concerned for me, simply for the work, the efficiency of every hour.

‘Do you know that girl?’ He gestured to the courtyard below, the wave encompassing any one of the still milling nurses.

‘No,’ I replied. ‘She’s just like a girl I once knew.’

‘Off to the basement then.’

Rarely did Mr Anderson issue orders to me. To move from here, to abandon the spot on which the girl and I had joined hands, if only in the intangible firmament, was a harsh punishment for a few weeks of less-than-perfect work in his service.

I turned back to the window, ignoring Mr Anderson, closed my eyes and lowered my head. The branches of the flame tree silhouetted on the back of my eyelids, like an X-ray, and for the first time in—I did not know how long—I said a prayer for someone else.

Author’s note

The content of Fred’s wartime letters draws on material in We Were There: Australian Soldiers of World War II Tell Their Stories (ed. John Barrett, Victoria: Penguin, 1987). Fred’s poem on page 42 is adapted from David Gascoyne’s ‘De Profundis’ in Poetry of the World Wars (ed. Michael Foss, London: Michael O’Mara, 1990). Father Benjamin’s Bible quotes on page 134 are from Luke 6:43–45. The song lyrics on pages 159–161 are from Frankie Vaughan’s ‘Garden of Eden’, 1957 (copyright expired).

Thank you Nicholas Jose for convincing me to give Grace and Mary their very own novel; Jan Harrow for all her ongoing support and editorial advice; Chelsea Avard for, once again, reading one half of the manuscript and, with unflagging enthusiasm, convincing me the other half was worth it; Amy Matthews for too many discussions about the exegesis (sorry!); Rachel Hennick for introducing me to the work of Joyce Carol Oates; and to Stephanie Hester for mentioning the idea of the moonlight falling into the War Memorial, some time drinking Cibo coffee. Thank you to the ‘Wordsmitties’: Katherine Doube, Carol Lefevre, Anna Solding, Heather Taylor Johnson and Bernadette Smith for their enormous generosity in reading the entire manuscript and convincing me to enter it in the Vogel. A special mention to Bern for her Gothic insights, not to mention introducing me to the Cap’n and to the subsequent wonderful outcomes from that meeting.

Thank you to the University of Adelaide for providing me with a postgraduate scholarship and to the Creative Writing program in the Department of English. Thank you to Wakefield Press for continuing to support my writing, particularly to Michael Bollen for being so approachable. Thank you to Julia Beaven for an inspired, and inspiring, edit.

On the family side, thanks to both my parents—Dr Gail Hennessy and Lance Hennessy—for reading the novel and picking up on historical errors, plus giving their blessing to use family stories. As always, my siblings have been there along the way—Gina, Ralph, Mark and Ruth—giving support in various forms, from visits to phone calls, from memories to jokes. A special mention to my sister-in-law, Lucy, for many fantastic meals during the Adelaide years.

This work owes a great deal to the memory of two women: my maternal grandmother, Jean Kearns, and my paternal great-aunt Noreen McAllister. I knew neither of them very well but I hope they might have been flattered by the attention.

Finally, this work is dedicated to my father: eternal optimist, pillar of strength and general bringer of joy. Never let the turkeys get you down.

Wakefield Press is an independent publishing and distribution company based in Adelaide, South Australia.

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Table of Contents

About the author

Title page

Imprint

Dedication

PART I

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

PART II

9

10

11

12

13

Author’s note

Wakefield Press