The Mother-in-Law

by Sally Hepworth

  ‘I don’t like being the bad guy. You know that.’

  He shifts in his seat. His expression is resigned rather than annoyed. ‘I do know that.’

  As far as arguments between Tom and I go, this is as heated as they get. Once upon a time Tom had more fire to him, but now there’s only a handful of things that really make him fly off the handle. Traffic. People leaving lights on around the house. Racism. The important things. Today, despite our differing views, Tom and I respect where the other is coming from. Tom grew up in the outskirts of Melbourne where the suburbs meet the country, a low socioeconomic area even before he was orphaned and had to move further out to live with his grandparents. He was schooled in a rough area, and dropped out at fourteen to do an apprenticeship with a local plumber. Once qualified, he found himself a job on a residential development project, befriended the owners and suggested they try their hand at retirement communities, which was a suggestion so profitable he wound up a business partner in of one of the largest residential development companies in Australia.

  ‘I would have thought that you of all people would understand that you don’t have to be given a handout to succeed, Tom.’

  ‘But things are different now,’ he says. ‘Everyone is going to university, working for free to get experience, using their private school networks. It’s harder than in my day to make something out of nothing. These kids need help.’

  But of course this is just part of the waffle that private school parents tell each other to justify the exorbitant fees they pay. After Tom badgered me for years, I finally relented and allowed Ollie and Nettie to attend schools with term fees high enough to feed an entire Afghan village for a year. Years later, I’m still doubtful as to whether the schools were any better than the local ones. What I am sure about is that giving children handouts—no not children, adults!—after they have already been privately educated and given every advantage in life, simply to keep pushing them further ahead of those who are trying to make their way without assistance, is not the right thing to do for anyone involved.

  ‘It’s always been hard, Tom. You were hungrier for it than our kids are, that’s all.’

  Unlike Tom, I grew up in a middle-class family. We didn’t have the kind of wealth Tom and I live with now, but we were comfortable. The fact is, I wouldn’t have been hungry for it either if my circumstances hadn’t taken a drastic dive in my youth.

  ‘I think Ollie could do with being a little hungry. A little hunger is good for young people. It was the making of you.’

  Tom slides over and I sit beside him in the wingback chair, which is generous enough for two middle-aged bottoms. ‘Actually,’ Tom smiles, ‘it was the making of you.’

  1970 . . .

  Cynthia and I called it the summer of the Falcon, mostly because the rest of our friends were in Europe and we wanted to make it sound more exciting than it really was. The Falcon XR GT was a car, and it belonged to Cynthia’s boyfriend, Michael. I knew, of course, what happened in the back of the Falcon, what Michael and Cynth had done in the Falcon many times. I wasn’t desperately in love with David, though I liked him well enough. He was tall, and he was studying engineering at university, which seemed to be enough back then. Height and smarts. What else could a woman want?

  As it turned out, when I discovered I was pregnant, David’s smarts came in useful. ‘There’s a place in Broadmeadows,’ he said. ‘A home for unwed mothers. You go there, you have the baby, and then you come back. You can just tell everyone you went to Europe too.’

  I was glad he hadn’t suggested the other type of place you went as an unwed mother. An abortion clinic. I may not have been the most maternal of girls, but I’d always been a believer in taking responsibility for your actions. It wasn’t the poor baby’s fault that I’d got into the back of the Falcon with David, I didn’t see why it should have to pay the ultimate price for it. My mother agreed that David’s plan was wise and my father tended to agree with my mother when she thought something was wise. The idea that I would have to give my baby away before leaving the home was a thought so far off in the distance that I didn’t even bother to think about it. After all, when you’re drowning and someone offers you a life raft, you don’t check it for punctures before climbing aboard.

  ‘Are you feeling all right?’ David asked me the night before I left for Orchard House. He waved a hand vaguely in front of my midsection, which was visibly round now, indicating he was asking about the pregnancy.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  It was a warm evening and I was sitting on the brick steps of my parents’ bungalow with a bag of grapes in my lap. (I’d had morning sickness for nearly six months, and grapes were the only thing that staved it off.) I’d put off my secretarial course and told my friends I was spending a semester in Sicily. No one apart from my parents and David knew the truth. Not even Cynthia. Turned out that Catholic shame fell harder than I’d thought.

  I’d only seen David a couple of times since I’d been accepted into Orchard House. While I’d been lying low, David had apparently been working around the clock to help my father pay for the home. My father was impressed with David’s commitment to help. I’d once heard him tell my mother, he was glad ‘I’d been consorting with an honourable sort of boy, at least’. Once I’d peered round my bedroom door and seen my father shaking David’s hand and my mother thanking him profusely. In contrast, my father had barely looked at me in months and my mother had become consumed by keeping me hidden. In recent weeks I’d developed a habit of sweeping my fingertips over my belly every so often. When Mother saw it, she’d swat my hands away.

  ‘Stop it,’ she’d whisper. ‘What will people think?’

  ‘It will be okay,’ David said now, and I realised I was holding my belly, cradling it. But I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be okay at all. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again when you get out,’ he said.

  But we both knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.

  *

  My father drove us to Orchard House and waited in the car while Mother took me in.

  ‘It won’t be forever,’ she said at the front door and then she turned and left. I was startled that this was her goodbye but I forced myself not to call her back. I was humiliated enough as it was.

  I rang a gold bell and a pinched-looking woman in a navy pinafore came to the door. ‘You must be Diana.’

  I nodded and she opened the security door and surveyed me silently. ‘You’d better come inside.’

  Orchard House had the look and feel of a hospital. It was three storeys high, with wide halls and linoleum floors and vinyl furniture. The dining room was on the ground floor. Matron took me up the stairs to the second floor, which had a communal area in the centre and doors around the edges. Pregnant women in small clusters looked up when I entered, then quickly down again.

  ‘You’re among the oldest at Orchard House,’ Matron told me, leading me around the edge of the room. ‘The youngest is a girl named Pamela, who you’ll be sharing with. Pamela is just fourteen.’ Matron’s lips were pinched with disapproval. ‘We only exchange first names at Orchard House, and we don’t talk about the schools we went to, the people we know, or anything that can distinguish us to the outside world. It’s to protect your identities,’ she said.

  ‘Pamela is a little troubled,’ she told me, stopping just shy of a door which I assumed led to my room. ‘I thought it would be good to put you together so you can teach her how to behave properly.’ She stepped forward through the doorway and I saw a girl with greasy hair and a sour expression sitting on one of the single beds. ‘Ah,’ Matron said. ‘This is Pamela.’

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  Pamela looked resolutely at the floor.

  ‘You girls are lucky,’ Matron told me before she left the room. ‘Many homes work girls to the bone to cover their keep, but Orchard House is a paid home, paid for by your parents, and as such we have only light chores to complete. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable here.’
>
  Matron left me then, to ‘make myself at home’. As I sat on the narrow twin bed, opposite the strange, reticent girl, I felt the tears start to stack up in my eyes. But I brushed them away. After all, I was lucky.

  After dinner that night I went to the communal area. Most of the girls on my floor were in there, sitting around on brown vinyl couches. Most watched the television, a couple stared at novels. One girl sat at a table painting another girl’s nails a pretty pale pink that reminded me of Cynthia.

  ‘May I sit here?’ I asked a blonde girl sitting on the couch in her pyjamas and slippers, her hair pinned up in rollers. She was chatting to the girls on her right and she slid along without looking up.

  The couch was startlingly uncomfortable, but as I wasn’t sure I could physically stand again, I stayed where I was. All around the room, girls were pinned to their seats by their enormous watermelon-shaped bellies. I counted seventeen girls, seventeen watermelons that no one mentioned. Pamela was the only one who didn’t sit. She stood by the bookshelves to the right of the television, ostensibly choosing a book but mostly fidgeting. She was one of those types who couldn’t sit still, I’d noticed. She was jittery. It was distracting.

  The blonde girl—Laurel, I found out—talked quietly to the two girls on her right. As I eavesdropped, I discovered this was her second time at Orchard House. She’d been here two years earlier, when she was sixteen. Rather than people finding this startling and horrifying as I did, she seemed to be treated as a celebrity of sorts, and regarded as the fountain of all knowledge about Orchard House.

  As I listened in, conversation in Laurel’s circle drifted to Pamela, who unsurprisingly everyone thought was strange. Apparently she refused to do chores and she had a habit of screaming out swear words if anything took her by surprise. I also found out that Matron had a crush on Philip, the gardener, and everyone thought it was disgusting, including, they suspected, Philip. I wasn’t actually included in the conversation at any point, but the banter reminded me of my own friends and made me feel lonely and comforted in equal parts.

  At ten minutes to ten, Matron appeared. ‘Ten minutes until lights out, girls!’ Matron had a shrill voice that pierced the air and knocked any sense of normality out of the room. ‘Come on, now. Don’t dillydally.’

  She disappeared and the girls all shuffled their hips to the edge of the couch, ready to hoist themselves to standing. I found out, via the girls’ grumbling, that the lights did indeed go out at 10 pm, and if you weren’t in your room, you had to find your way back there in pitch darkness.

  ‘Ten minutes until lights out,’ Matron said again. ‘Don’t dillydally.’

  We all glanced at the door again, but Matron wasn’t there.

  ‘If you dillydally I won’t be able to dillydally with Philip after lights out.’

  A slow giggle broke out across the room. It was Matron’s voice, but she was nowhere to be seen. Everyone glanced around. I noticed Pamela’s back was to us.

  ‘Pamela?’ someone asked. ‘Was that you?’

  She bent over, fiddling with the spine of a book, pretending not to hear us.

  ‘Oh, Philip, stop that!’ came Matron’s voice again. ‘Oh, go on then. Keep going.’

  The giggles became fever-pitched laughter. Pamela’s impersonation was spot on.

  ‘Just take me into your shed and I’ll . . . I’ll . . .’

  ‘What are you girls still doing in here?’ a voice came suddenly. Our heads swung toward the doorway where Matron—actual Matron—stood, hands on hips. Her lips were thin and irritated. ‘Didn’t I tell you not to dillydally?’

  ‘Right away, Matron,’ Pamela said and she was the first one to exit the room.

  Our bellies grew. We weren’t told much about what was coming. We guessed when our babies were due by the size of our bellies. In public we talked about our pregnancies insofar as they affected our bodies—‘My bladder is the size of a walnut’, ‘I can hardly walk up this flight of stairs’—but we didn’t talk about the babies. No one told us not to, we just didn’t . . . a natural form of self-protection perhaps. I didn’t develop many friendships, it was hard when you couldn’t talk about who you were and where you came from. Anyway, I’d never been good at small talk.

  During the day Pamela didn’t talk to me at all. I tried to teach her things, as Matron had asked. How to use cutlery properly, how to speak nicely. She just stared at me or rolled her eyes. One time, she picked up a fork and threw it across the room. The problem, I realised, was that Pamela was damaged. I wasn’t sure how to teach her not to be damaged.

  Pamela’s impersonations became a nightly ritual. She could do almost anyone—Dr Humbert, the obstetrician with the bushy moustache who came by once a week to take our blood pressure; Philip, the gardener; any of the girls. She was the master of finding people’s quirks, the tiniest detail that brought the impersonation to life. Every evening she stood by the bookshelves and we waited. It was my solace, these few minutes of laughter each day. It didn’t occur to me until later that it might be a comfort for her too. A few minutes of being someone else.

  One night she impersonated me.

  ‘Oh, yes, I’m Diana, I know how to use cutlery and talk posh.’

  Everyone giggled. Even me. Perhaps it was her tone that made it funny rather than mean-spirited. Or maybe it was because it was the first time she’d acknowledged me at all. A part of me was glad to realise that someone in here knew I existed.

  One night, as we gathered in the communal area, we realised Mary wasn’t with us.

  ‘Where’s Mary?’ someone asked.

  ‘She went into labour last night,’ Laurel said.

  ‘What happened?’ someone whispered. We knew that girls went to have their babies, but we were starved of actual details.

  ‘It was pretty tough. She waited as long as she could before she called Matron. She didn’t want to go to the hospital.’

  Mary had been one of the braver girls. She’d been saying for weeks she couldn’t wait to get this baby out, that when it was all over she was going to buy a pair of hip-hugging flares and a bottle of whisky.

  ‘Why didn’t she want to go?’ someone asked.

  Sixteen pairs of eyes stared at Laurel. Finally she shrugged.

  ‘You go into the hospital one person,’ she said. ‘You leave as another person entirely.’

  Later, when Matron came to announce lights out, we were all animated.

  ‘Did Mary have her baby, Matron?’ Laurel asked.

  A strange energy pierced the room. No one had used the word ‘baby’ since I’d come to Orchard House. Matron never used the word. Even Dr Humbert managed to avoid it.

  Matron looked guarded. ‘She did,’ she said eventually.

  I stole a glance at Pamela. She was standing, as usual, by the bookshelves, but for once she was standing so still I doubted she was even breathing.

  ‘What did she have?’ Laurel asked. ‘A boy or a girl?’

  ‘The baby was healthy,’ Matron said, and that was the last time I heard her say the word ‘baby’ at Orchard House.

  After news of Mary’s birth, the impersonations stopped. It was as though we’d forgotten what we were doing there and suddenly we’d all remembered. Pamela became quiet again, rarely speaking at all. At least, she rarely spoke during the day. At night, when we lay in bed, she sometimes said a few words. Something vulnerable happened to you at night, I’d come to realise in my few weeks at Orchard House. You took off your clothes, you took off your armour.

  ‘I think I’m having a girl,’ she whispered one night as we lay in bed. ‘What do you think you’re having?’

  I stared at her, making out the faint outline of her head against the stark white bed linen. ‘I . . . It doesn’t matter, I suppose. It won’t be my baby.’

  ‘But what would you call it?’ she insisted. ‘If you were keeping it?’

  I blinked into the darkness. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’d call my girl Jane,’ she said. ‘Jane Pam
ela. It’s pretty, don’t you think?’

  A streak of moonlight crossed her bed, and for a moment I saw the hope in her face. A lump filled my throat, preventing me from responding. All at once I felt pinned by the weight of what was coming. It stole my breath.

  ‘Diana?’ Pamela said after a moment.

  ‘Mmm?’ I managed.

  ‘My friends call me Pammy.’

  I inhaled sharply, swallowed hard.

  ‘Diana? Did you hear me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I heard you, Pammy.’

  As our due dates drew closer, Pammy shared a few details about her life. Her mother was a housekeeper at a big house in Kew. Her dad was a roof tiler who fell off a ladder and died when she was two. She had three older brothers and she was the youngest, the only girl.

  The father of her baby, she said, was a wealthy man name Christopher, a doctor. He had paid for her to come to Orchard House because he didn’t want her to have to lift a finger while she was with child, that’s how much he loved her, Pammy said. She told me that Christopher had a wife but she was just obsessed with his money. Money ruined people, Pammy said. It fractured families and made people mean. It made Christopher’s wife mean, she told me.

  I wondered if it was money that made Christopher mean.

  After that, my story about David and the Falcon felt very uninteresting. The truth was, I had no wish for a future with David. But I was surprised by the feelings I had for my baby. Apparently we wouldn’t be allowed to hold our babies after they were born, and yet my urge to hold my baby was overwhelming. At night, when I felt it kick and move, I cradled it and talked to it inside my head.

  At night, when we spoke, Pammy started referring to her baby as Jane.

  ‘I wonder if Jane will look like me or Christopher.’

  ‘I bet Jane will be smart, like Christopher. Smarter than me anyway.’

  ‘Oh look, Jane is kicking me. She’s a feisty one!’

  ‘I do have a name,’ I told Pammy, one night. ‘For a boy, that is. Oliver.’

  ‘What a lovely posh name,’ Pammy said approvingly. ‘Lovely and posh, like you.’