‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I married Max.’ Well, near enough.
‘Gandie, you look so cross.’
‘No, no, sweetheart.’ I stretch my lips to show how unconcerned I am.
‘You sure you don’t mind me asking you about it?’
‘Heavens, no. It’s just — sweetheart, Sophie love — it’s such a long time ago, and I don’t know — I mean — why are you suddenly talking about these things?’
‘Mum told me about it,’ says Sophie, apparently losing interest and showing me what genuine unconcern looks like as she mooches off to glance at the newspaper, which is lying on the kitchen bench.
I will give Kate hell the next time I see her, I think, the old fury my daughter can always generate stirring deep and cold and snakelike inside me.
But then I think, later, she is twelve, after all, my Sophie. She will be adolescent, soon: to all intents and purposes, is already. She is of an age to take an interest in these things.
I suddenly wonder whether her periods have begun. Surely Kate would have told me? But I have noticed her little breast-buds under her white school T-shirts. A sliver of fear pricks my heart. It is at this point that your children start to change, to regard you with alien and uncommunicative eyes. It is when puberty kicks in, when hormones perk up, when the blistering new juices of life start to sizzle. Hello, you say. Hello? It’s me here. It is I, your loving mother. I haven’t changed. But they have.
I dread the day this happens to my Sophie, the day when she ceases to run to me with the fierce pressure of her kisses and her sharp, squeezing hugs. I dread her being caught up in the pitiless impassive tides of womanhood, the impersonal coercive rhythms, the bleeding and the desire and the pain.
We ought to have some kind of ritual to welcome our daughters into their maturity, into the sisterhood. There ought to be a ceremony, a thumbed cross of blood on the forehead, the musty perfume of incense, prophecies from the crones. Picking up a box of tampons from the supermarket shelf doesn’t rate.
Not that the sisterhood is up to much, though. On the whole, taken by and large, really one would sooner not be part of it.
The next time I was alone with Kate I mentioned Sophie’s new interest in Max. I didn’t shout; I wasn’t heated. I was quite mild about it, and there was no need for her to look sideways at me in that infuriating kicked-puppy way she has.
‘Sophie talked to me about Max,’ I say.
She glances at me, drops her eyes. ‘Yes?’ she says, politely.
‘You’ve been talking to her about Max.’
‘She asked me.’
‘She wouldn’t have asked if she hadn’t had some encouragement.’
‘Sophie’s quick to pick things up. She doesn’t need encouragement.’
‘She must have had some.’
‘Mum,’ says Kate, with a conspicuous effort at patience that irritates me. ‘Mum, Max will come back one day. What are we meant to say to Sophie? Here’s Max: he used to be married to Gandie, but we’ve never talked about him; we’ve never told you about him. What will she think then? Max was a fact in our lives, Mum. Is a fact. I know you and I don’t speak of him, but there he is, just the same. And a fact in Sophie’s life, too. We can’t hide him. We can’t pretend he never existed.’
‘He won’t come back.’
‘I think he will,’ says Kate, still not looking at me. Why will she never look at me when we speak? She never meets my eyes.
‘Have her periods started?’ I ask, abruptly.
Kate is startled. ‘Sophie?’
‘Who else?’
‘Not yet.’
‘She’s twelve.’
‘I know how old my daughter is, Mum.’
‘Well, then. I only wondered.’
‘Any day, I’d say. She’s growing up fast.’
‘I can see that,’ I snap. Why does she always state the obvious in those dulcet explanatory tones? She drops her eyes again, ducks her head in that exasperating way she has.
‘Mum, she is growing up. What I mean is, she’s started to be interested in different things.’
‘Do you mean sex?’
‘Not really sex, no. Well, not that she’s let on to me. But weddings, and babies, and that sort of thing. She’s asked me lots about when I was little. When was I born, what happened, what sorts of toys did I have. That sort of thing.’
It’s true. It isn’t long before Sophie nobbles me about Kate as a baby.
‘Mum was your first baby, wasn’t she, Gandie?’
‘Yes, honey.’
‘Were you very excited?’
‘Well, of course.’
‘Did you have a nursery all ready for her?’
‘I certainly did,’ I say, brightly.
‘And toys and things?’
‘Yep.’
‘Cuddly toys?’
‘You bet.’
‘Mum says her favourite toy was a blue bunny called Thumper.’
I think I do remember a moth-eaten ugly old rabbit. Kate used to take it everywhere with her and fall into despair when she lost it, which happened frequently. It drove me mad.
‘Mum says Thumper was blue because you really wanted a boy and you got all blue things. Mum says you didn’t really want a daughter.’
Sophie is munching a walnut brownie (I make them especially for her) and her enunciation is a little unclear, but there is no doubt she has just said this. She has presented it to me without animus, without any accusatory quality to the statement, in a matter-of-fact tone. It distresses me: it isn’t true; and I’ve certainly never given Kate any reason to think it is.
‘That’s not the way it was,’ I say. ‘Of course I wanted your mum.’
‘She says you didn’t. Mum says you only ever wanted boys. Mum says you weren’t happy till you had Dominic.’
‘Well, darling, Mum’s wrong.’
‘Okay. But why did you have all blue things?’
‘I didn’t have all blue things. I had lots of different coloured things. In those days you didn’t know what sex your baby was going to be, so I had some blue things and some pink.’
‘And some yellow?’
‘Probably.’
‘And some white?’
‘I suppose so. Sophie, it was a long time ago and I can’t possibly remember what colour things I bought for your mum.’
‘Okay. That’s cool, Gandie.’ She is pacific as ever once her stubbornness has borne fruit.
Why does Kate tell her these things? Why does she do it? Is it to get back at me, to awaken old guilts, old sadnesses? It wasn’t my fault, anyway. And I never talked about it with her, so how can she be so sure she knows anyway?
Why is it a woman’s fault, if she expects one sort of baby and another eventuates? Disappointment isn’t a feeling you ask for, and it isn’t something you can control. And I got over it pretty damn quick. I couldn’t help it; I couldn’t help feeling the thud when the bundle of hopes was dropped down the chute, the loss when someone who was confidently expected to turn up decided not to. I still remember it so well.
I am lying there in a sweat of pure relief, trying to understand that the pain, the racking pain, has gone, that my flesh is no longer bursting and I am not split in two up the middle after all, that I am still alive, that it is over, over, over. I am drifting, rather: I am just conscious enough for a sleepy voice in the back of my mind to be wondering if they gave me only pethidine — and, if they did, wow, what great stuff pethidine turns out to be.
I am aware that Steve is somewhat in awe of me, of what I have just accomplished, more or less single-handed. He is sitting beside me with his head down, overcome with emotion, stroking my hand. Normally I don’t like this sort of contact from him, but right at the moment the stroking, which it seems to me
betokens respect and admiration and wonderment, is perfectly appropriate and in fact rather soothing.
And I hear a voice — a woman’s voice — saying: ‘A lovely little girl!’ And this is odd, because the voice sounds like the doctor’s voice, and here is the doctor’s head swimming moonlike in the air above me, and she is smiling and nodding. ‘A girl,’ she repeats. But surely I am the only woman in the room to have just given birth, and therefore surely the only baby in the room is mine? I glance sideways, to see if perhaps there is another bed beside me. There is not.
And a baby is being placed on me, on my breasts, and the doctor is still smiling and nodding and repeating: ‘A girl, a lovely little girl.’
A girl? A girl? How can it be a girl?
The baby makes an angry, snuffling sound and moves its head. It is almost the colour of beetroot — a dark, bright, pink-purple colour, and it is slick with some sort of grease. What have they smeared on it, for Christ’s sake?
‘Hold your baby, dear,’ says the midwife, bustling around and helping me move one of my limp arms up around the creature. ‘It’s a dear little girl. You put your arms around her and give her a cuddle, now.’
A girl.
Where is my patrician Leo, my cub, my small king, he of Steve’s blue eyes and my crisp, dark curls (so unnecessary on me, so attractive on him)? Where is the QC with a taste for Mozart and Tolstoy, the neurosurgeon with the exquisite collection of minor Heidelberg artists? What happened to the first Australian Prime Minister to be also a poet, a musician, a philosopher? Where is he, this son of mine with his rueful smile and his charming manner and his sensitive fingers? My cellist, my Nobel Prize winner, my Test cricket captain? My Wimbledon champion, my Astronomer Royal? My dark chevalier? Where is my son, who over the last few months has become realer than real to me, brighter than bright, my companion and saviour and pride and triumph? Goddamn it, where has Leo gone?
Wherever it is, it’s not here. He’s padded off on his ghostly paws to some celestial jungle, some vine-draped lonely clearing where he lifts up his head and roars in the moonlight, piteous and small and solitary. He’s there for good: he’s never coming back. And here’s this peculiar, misshapen creature, this girl, glistening purple-crimson under the labour-ward lights, making off-putting noises while it tries to crawl beetlelike up my body.
It wasn’t my fault. Emotions are not amenable to schooling. We cannot pretend to feel something we do not feel. I mean, to ourselves. Of course we can pretend whatever we like to the world, and if we’re clever enough the world is deceived. I deceived the world, I think.
Once, early on, I started to explain to my mother how I felt about my first-born, but her clear gaze was so horrified that I stopped. She told me I was tired, I didn’t know what I was saying, everything would be all right. And I suppose it was, in a manner of speaking.
I’ve read a lot about that kind of thing since then. These days, people would be sympathetic and call me a victim of post-parturition stress disorder or some such thing, and I’d get lots of counselling and support. But it wasn’t like that, then. You loved your child; you struggled on. Count your blessings, people said.
And of course I did love Kate, and so forth. I do love her. But it was hard. I’ve never been able to forget how hard it was.
I waited five years before deciding to have Dominic: I was so terrified he would be another girl, another blond, chubby, docile little girl who played with dolls and sat around amiably and enjoyed fiddling with frilly doll-sized clothes. The son I had expected Kate to be still dawdled in the shadows of my imagination, witty and satirical, elegant and sleek and quick, my dark prince, my soul’s companion. So long as I delayed his birth, the safer he was from the ravages of reality.
Well, I got him. As soon as I saw him, I knew I’d got him. Dominic slid out of me with a minimum of fuss: he glanced around him, took stock of his new world, and determined his course. A baby of remarkable self-possession and clarity of vision; a child who knew what he wanted.
‘He’s not a cuddly baby, is he?’ said the infant-welfare sister one day, thoughtfully. She picked Dominic off the scales, gave him a hug. He resisted, pushing against her. Dominic always resisted.
‘I thought all babies were supposed to be cuddly,’ I said.
‘Good heavens, no.’
‘My first was cuddly. My first wanted to be cuddled all the damn time.’
‘Mmmm.’ She glanced at me sidelong.
‘I thought I was doing something wrong. With this one, I mean.’
‘No,’ she said, decisively. I still bless that woman when I think of her. I can’t remember her name, but I loved her: I loved her for telling me Dominic’s hostility wasn’t my fault, that his unlovingness was not to be laid at my door.
She had a square jaw, steady eyes, large hands, a no-nonsense look about her. ‘No, see how he pushes away from me. He doesn’t like it: he doesn’t want to be held. All babies are different. They’re just people, you know. We forget that. It’s so obvious, but we forget it. Babies are just small people. Not all people are cuddly. I shouldn’t think you’re a cuddly person, are you?’
‘No,’ I said, reluctantly, wondering why she asserted this with such confidence.
‘Well, then. It doesn’t mean he’s not affectionate. He just doesn’t like close physical contact. Not at this stage of his life, anyway.’
Such a relief! I had spent the first few months of Dominic’s life being pushed away from him. I spent the next several years of Dominic’s life in the same manner, but at least I knew now it was nothing to worry about. Satirical, composed, distant, critical, even disdainful, he resisted intimacy from infancy.
He used to remind me of that bit in Twelfth Night where Olivia is rhapsodising about Cesario/Viola: ‘O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful / In the contempt and anger of his lip!’ (I know that bit because I once played Olivia in a school production. I wanted to be Viola, and wear emerald satin capri pants, but it was Olivia or nothing.)
From the age of approximately three (which I believe was when he decided he was too old to hold my hand), Dominic did a great curled lip. It’s the look aspired to by those surly male models in fashion magazines: it came naturally to him. And she was right, that large-handed infant-welfare lady: it didn’t mean he was unaffectionate. He was a fervent child, but selectively fervent: he didn’t bestow his love on just anyone, in the indiscriminate way Kate had.
Sophie is a cross between them, I suppose. Less obsessively fastidious than Dominic, more judicious than Kate. Readier with her embraces than her uncle, not as clingy as her mother. ‘Love you, Gandie’, Sophie will say, hugging me goodbye with her rapid firm touch. ‘I love you too, sweetness,’ I will say, but she’s so quick, I’m often saying it to an empty room, a closing door.
The next time Sophie asked me about what she so insouciantly calls the olden days, I was ready for her. She wanted to know about our wedding, mine and Steve’s. She’d want to know about my second wedding, too, one of these days, I knew, but sufficient unto the day and so on.
I’d gone through the old case under the bed and I’d pulled out the wedding album. I don’t know why I have it and Steve doesn’t, but that’s how it is. I’d even spent a bit of time going through it on my own, turning the pages with amazement, with sorrow.
There Steve and I are, captured forever with imprudent smiles on our faces, foolish hopes in our hearts. We stand awkwardly, trying to follow the photographer’s directions, both too self-conscious, too young, lacking in composure or the sense of the theatrical that permeates good photographs of big occasions, landmarks, milestones in one’s life. I remember him telling Steve to stand on an angle, his feet just so: Steve simply couldn’t manage it. His feet were like clown’s feet, flopping over the ground in awkward dispositions. He turned too far, anxiously, then not far enough, shuffling, his face splitting into his daft grin.
I remember it as a black day, a disastrous day, the day of my greatest mistake. Yet we all look as happy-go-lucky as kids on a picnic. No prevision dulled our spirits; no disquiet fingered us with its bleak chill touch.
We look so innocent: that’s what I can’t quite fathom. I don’t mean sexually innocent: Steve and I had slept together — not often, but a few times. I suppose there was a political and moral dimension to our innocence. We simply had no idea that such good intentions might take one on so shadowy and truncated a route, no idea of the sharp, mashing teeth of the traps that would jump from the dark corners of the path to cripple our feet and confuse our confident, stupid steps.
But Sophie is pleased with the photographs, and with the album itself, still in reasonably good condition, its ivory satiny cover not much discoloured, the photographs themselves still miraculously crisp and glossy behind their protective tissue. I suspect she is amused by certain details — my hair, for instance, starched and curled like some extravagant origami project, and the bridesmaids’ dresses. These things date, after all. But she is satisfied with my dress, which was classic and elegant. Stylish, that was the word my mother used of it. At least I avoided the meringue syndrome.
‘You were so slim, Gandie,’ she says, reverently. ‘And so beautiful.’
What she actually means is, I was so young. I am not plump even now, when slender has metamorphosed into bony and slight given way to lean; but I was svelte then, and lissom, and young. And, yes, beautiful, damn it. I am nearly as impressed as Sophie is by my willowy waist, my high breasts, my graceful arms.
She wants to know who everybody in the photos is: she recognises Zoë as bridesmaid, and my mother, and Steve’s parents. It takes ages, as we go through it all: she wants to know what the cake was made of, and what sort of shoes I wore, and what the menu was. The menu? No, I can’t for the life of me remember the menu. Didn’t I keep a copy? No, I didn’t. Or, if I did, it’s long since gone, vanished down the obliterating slippery slide of discarded keepsakes.
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