When Wes was shown in, the baby was on Beth’s breast.
‘Madeleine,’ she said. That was the agreed name for a girl.
Beth looked lovely, her face shining. ‘Wes darling, a baby girl. It’s a miracle. That’s how it feels. Like a miracle. Are you going to cry?’
He wasn’t. But his happiness was making his features wobble about as if he were about to bawl.
‘This is what I wanted.’ He was stroking the back of the baby’s neck as she suckled.
‘You are going to cry, aren’t you, you sook? God, wait till Dad gets here. He’ll be bawling for hours.’
When Madeleine was two months old, Beth took her along to the Hoskins mill up north to accept the handover of the forest concessions and the mills from Herby Crenshaw. Herby was tall and skinny and wore his hair in the Beatles’ fashion. Also pointy-toed Beatle shoes. He was forty-four. Beth met him in the mill manager’s office, which the manager had vacated to give them privacy. She was cradling the baby.
‘So which one are you, Herb? John, Paul, George or Ringo?’
‘It’s not a crime to like the Beatles, is it?’
‘No, but other things are. And Herb, every rotten deal you’ve made, I’ll find them and squash them, believe me. Every single one.’
‘You going to carry that baby with you to every site? And that big bag of stuff? What’s in it? Nappies?’
‘Yep.’
‘You’re breastfeeding, right? That’s why you have to bring the kid. The blokes, they don’t want to watch you breastfeeding. You know that?’
‘I’ll cope. And so will the men.’
Herb shrugged.
‘You’re the boss.’
She breastfed the baby at first, because it was easier than fooling around with bottles and formula. She shielded her breast from the men when she was feeding Madeleine. Not to save herself from embarrassment, but the workers. They became used to Beth turning up with the baby. A few asked to hold Maddy. They cleared spaces on the forest floor for her to lay out the blanket and change the baby; heated water for her to wash Madeleine while changing her. That she could keep it up for long, they doubted, but she persevered, until finally she had to admit she couldn’t bring the baby any longer.
She reduced her work to three days a week, and had to leave Madeleine and a container of expressed breast milk with Franny for five hours once a week; with Teddy’s wife Julia another day, and with Gus another day. Madeleine didn’t like the sound of the thirty-inch circular saws at the mills or the chainsaws at the felling sites. Apart from Madeleine’s distress, it was dangerous. It was a vast relief for Beth, and for the baby, when she was left behind.
Wes said: ‘Beth, do what you must to keep that union doing what it’s supposed to do.’
Yes, but every time she left Madeleine behind to be cared for by Gus or Julia or Franny, sometimes Maud, she felt sick with remorse. No thought of resigning; but still.
‘Wes,’ she said, ‘all this chopping and changing of Maddy from one woman to another, it can’t be doing her any good. I want to leave her with one woman for five days a week, six hours a day.’
Wes was clearing away plates from the dinner table. He said nothing for two or more minutes, as the sound came through the window of Francis and Esther outside in the waning daylight, catching crickets.
At last Beth said, ‘Let’s ask Nanny Hall.’
‘Nanny Hall. Dear God. Beth, she’s sixty-three.’
‘So what? She was terrific with Esther before Esther went to bubs. Wes, it was a wonder we even had Maddy. I should have been dead after Moscow. I hate to say this, but the union won’t work as it should without me. My heart aches when I plonk Maddy into the lap of a stand-in mum. But Nanny Hall is different. She’s—she’s nonchalant. And I think Maddy likes nonchalance.’
‘She likes nonchalance?’
‘She does, yes.’
‘You’re not going to regret it when you’re pining for her?’
‘Of course I will. But if I’m all that stands between all that bullshit and an honest union, then I have to stick at it. Do you see?’
‘I do see. But Nanny Hall. Nonchalant Nanny Hall. Have you thought this through?’
‘I’m not going to do the job forever, am I? But for now, yes.’
Wes sat down across the table from Beth. She took his hand.
‘Wes, Maddy will have us all her life. We give these three kids a good home, don’t we? They don’t miss out on anything. Maddy needs to be fed and changed and given love and affection. We don’t have a sacred obligation to her. Just love and affection and decent care.’
Esther came running into the kitchen with her hands clasped. ‘We caught one!’ she said. She opened her hands with their distorted fingers and let first Wes then Beth peep in at the cricket.
Francis wandered in. ‘She caught it herself,’ he said.
The baby in her cot began to make the demanding noises she’d mastered when she wanted a feed.
‘Yes, yes, coming!’ Beth called.
Chapter 37
BETH WAS on the back veranda with Madeleine and a book. A Saturday, one of the two days of the week on which she was with Maddy the whole twenty-four hours. Wes in town doing the shopping. The baby, on a blanket, wriggling her hands and feet in the air, gurgling contentedly, and when the fit took her, attempting to roll over on her belly. Eleven months old now. Francis on the banana lounge, reading his way through a stack of his own books, including The Last of the Mohicans, somehow. And a dictionary in which he conscientiously looked up words unfamiliar to him. Esther was playing with two lambs from the Hardy flock, rejected by their mothers and being raised in the backyard on bottled milk. The lambs chased Esther about, attempting to nuzzle against her. As far as the lambs were concerned, Esther was their mother. They never approached Francis, who had not the slightest interest in them.
Reading from Patty’s selected Auden, Beth came to her dead sister-in-law’s favourite, ‘September 1, 1939’.
We must love one another or die, she read, and she realised that she’d heard it quoted before, without paying much attention. Her immediate thought this time was, ‘It’s not true.’ Auden was saying either universal fraternity, or we wipe ourselves out? She had once loved all the people of the Soviet Union, the entire mass of them, or so she’d thought, and it had all been a lie in her soul. We could love those we could—in her case, maybe twenty people in the world. The rest of the members of the human race had her goodwill. Most of them.
Let people everywhere find some justice. Goodwill and justice. That should do it.
The screen door opened and Wes appeared, back from shopping. ‘Scrambled eggs with fried tomatoes for lunch,’ he said, bending to crouch beside Beth.
‘Wes, I was reading Patty’s selected Auden. I remembered at the cemetery this morning that she had a favourite poem she said I should read. “September 1, 1939”. It was written on the eve of the war. He calls the 1930s, “a low, dishonest decade”, as if there’s any other sort. There’s a famous line in it, “we must love one another or die”. Do you think that’s true?’
‘Of course.’
‘Really? Is that what Quakers believe?’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘But Wes, look at these three kids. Francis and Esther, Hiroshima almost destroyed them. And me, I was almost too dead to become a mother. They’re loved, that’s how come they’re here. Patty’s love and yours and mine, it left these kids alive. But it didn’t stop the Americans dropping those bombs, it didn’t stop those bastards in Moscow from almost kicking me to death. Do you really think we must love one another or die?’
‘I do, Beth. And another thing we Quakers say is don’t get into arguments about what you believe.’
Beth dribbled the last of the milk from the bottle onto Esther’s fingers; the lambs sucked madly.
Francis called to Wes and Beth, ‘The Mohicans, were they a real tribe?’
Wes said, ‘Yep, they were a real tribe. And some survived.
’
Francis said, ‘They’re not in my dictionary.’
‘Maybe you need a bigger dictionary.’
‘Love one another or die, hmm?’ said Beth. ‘I’ll think about it.’
She put the baby aside and kissed Wes.
‘Are you going to make lunch, Quaker man?’
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the invaluable editing of Mandy Brett, which made this a better book than it would otherwise have been.
ALSO BY ROBERT HILLMAN AND AVAILABLE FROM TEXT
Joyful
The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted
Robert Hillman has written a number of books, including his 2004 memoir The Boy in the Green Suit, which won the National Biography Award. He lives in Melbourne.
roberthillmanauthor.com
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Copyright © Robert Hillman, 2021
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Published by The Text Publishing Company, 2021
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ISBN: 9781922330666 (paperback)
ISBN: 9781925923780 (ebook)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.
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