by Rod Jones
Her heart leapt in alarm. Not so quickly. Not so soon.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps in a little while,’ she said. ‘We will meet, I promise, but you have to give me more time. I must give myself time, too.’ She took a deep breath, then caved in. ‘Well, I suppose we could come to your reading. I am eager to meet you, don’t think I’m not. Of course, I’ve always wondered. There’s not a day that’s gone by when I haven’t thought of you.’
29th July, 1990
Dear David,
This letter is difficult to write as I keep bursting into tears. My love for you has never changed. I have four other children and, although I love them all dearly, my love for you and the torment I went through when I had to give you up have never left me. My thoughts were with you every birthday, even though I didn’t know where you were or even that you were alive.
I am very grateful to your adopted parents for giving you all the good things in life which I never could. I knew you were going to a good home because the clothes your parents brought in for you were beautiful. I had to dress you in them, take you downstairs and sign the papers. It was very difficult to dress you because I was so upset about our parting.
I have been through bushfires and other crises without being reduced to tears. I am normally someone others lean on for strength. I have learned to cope with every other problem in my life, except for you. The Haven was an experience I never got over. The very thought of you would always bring tears to my eyes.
I do not know whether to tell my parents about you. Please don’t get me wrong, my mother would throw her arms around you in welcome. It’s their age (they’re in their eighties) and Dad’s health problems which hold me back. When my mother told me someone had rung I knew that you were trying to make contact.
The same day you went to your new life, I went home. After a couple of days I got a position in the pay office at Holeproof in Brunswick. My parents gave me a 21st birthday party in May that year. Mainly relatives came as I hadn’t long left the Haven and had no friends—or, to be more precise, I had dodged my old friends. Anyhow, I made a reappearance, saying I had been in the country.
I met Eric in 1954 after I had picked up my life. It was at the Saturday night 50/50 dance at the Coburg Town Hall. Eric is a very good ballroom dancer. We were engaged in 1955 and married in December of that year. Eric is an actuary. He is very straight, he has his feet on the ground and he would never hurt me. I knew he would make a good father and husband. I have never regretted marrying Eric.
I kept working at Holeproof to pay off our house. It was meant to be for a short period only. I was devastated because I could not get pregnant. I went to see a specialist and, after treatment, I was able to have more children.
On our block here, we have a couple of cows, a flock of geese, a few chooks (the foxes depleted our stock), cockies, dogs, cats and fish. We have had sheep and a herd of goats.
I chose the name Kim because as a girl I loved Kipling. Also, the name was uncommon then and I was unlikely to hear someone else use the name. I wanted to avoid the agony of wondering if they were calling you. For years after I lost you, I would look into every pram on the faint chance it was you.
I would dearly love to know of your whole life, your wife and children. Eric agrees that at a later date (when I am more composed) you could meet our children as a friend, if you wanted to. If the children were married and leading their own lives it could be different. They’re not yet. I’m their mum too, they have put me on a pedestal. I don’t know if a couple of them could handle the shock.
I never dared hope that you would try and find me. The reason I had to give you up was not that I loved you so little, but that I was not wise or strong enough to know how to keep you. I knew in my heart that it was the right decision, but that knowledge didn’t ease the pain.
Eric will bring me to the reading.
Until we meet,
Your mother,
Anna
She remembered those grey days after she had left the Haven. She was not the same girl. There was no beauty in life. She felt lifeless. The weeks passed, then months. She waited for something to happen. After losing Kim, nothing seemed important. There was only sadness. In the end she found a way to stop herself feeling even that. A way to forget. She dug a well. She placed her baby in the well, the lid screwed on tightly, and she rarely allowed herself to visit him. It was a sacred site, that place deep in her heart where her baby still existed. There, he had never grown older by a single day.
But a baby is not something that can be sealed up and forgotten. When she heard the voice on the phone, she knew she would have to make one more visit to the well. She would have to set her baby free. The moment they met, her most precious treasure, buried inside her all these years, would disappear and be replaced by—what? A real person. No matter how glowing a character, no matter how golden and accomplished his life—no real human being could ever match the memory she had kept protected inside her for thirty-seven years. She would have to get to know this other person—this David.
After his disapproving comment on the phone, she worried that David might not find her and Eric interesting. He might think her life boring and conventional. But Anna was old enough to accept that she could not be anything other than herself. Nevertheless, she couldn’t bear the thought that David, with all his expectations, when he actually did meet her, would be disappointed. Even after they’d met, she realised, there would be a part of him that would remain incomplete.
Should she tell Mum and Dad what had happened? Like her, they had always known there was a possibility of him one day coming to look for her. But there were others, friends and family, who had not known of her disgrace. To her children—her other children—she was the perfect mum; the discovery of this secret in her past might pull their world apart.
She never heard about her friends from the old days now—it was another life. When it had happened, she had allowed them to drift away. Sometimes she saw a death notice of an old friend or acquaintance in the Sun. That’s all. And sometimes she saw members of Neil’s family around Cockatoo, but either they didn’t see her or perhaps they sensed that Anna didn’t want them to recognise her. She’d never seen Neil again.
She knew that, when Mum and Dad still had their weekender, they used to see Neil’s family from time to time. The Glass family were good, simple people: they didn’t hold it against Mum and Dad that once upon a time their daughter had given Neil a close shave. They hadn’t snubbed them, the way lots of people would. People of Mum and Dad’s generation seemed to have an extra acre of feeling in their hearts. She supposed it came from living through the Depression, then the war. The mystery was why she and Eric, in deciding to quit the city, had come to live, as if by fate, here at Cockatoo. She was held by this place. Even when their house had burned down in the bushfires, they had rebuilt here.
David probably believed he was ready to love her, but what exactly was it that he was ready to love? An ideal, an image. Nothing to do with the real life of Anna Ruhlman, with her husband and grown-up family. It was she who loved him, had always loved him. But she loved the little baby in the well—not the vo
ice on the phone.
Her love for her other children was simple, or as simple as love can be, with its fierce needs. The love she felt for Kim had been honed by sacrifice and great pain. Suddenly Anna felt a chill pass through her. She was back in the Haven, being judged, being found inadequate, not living up to the world’s expectations. She was confident of her other children’s regard. But how would David feel about her? Would there be resentment? That was not his motive for making contact with her, of course; but was there a resentment so deep that he wasn’t aware of it? The prospect of meeting him terrified her.
Right up until the Thursday of the reading, Eric had continued to express doubts. He always resisted anything out of his usual routine. Still, he was trying for her sake. ‘We might even end up in one of his books,’ Eric had joked.
Anna didn’t know what to wear. David had told her the place was sophisticated. Eric wore a tie and jumper. He had just one suit, weddings and funerals only. In the end, Anna decided on the loose green velvet dress. It was quite old now, but she still liked it. The dress didn’t so much cover her shape as drape it, she liked to think.
They found a park in Exhibition Street and walked to Alfred Place, the Paris end of Collins Street. It was a stately nineteenth century building that had once housed the Naval and Military Club. They lingered on the footpath while Anna admired the facade. Inside, the decor was at once elegant and bohemian. They passed through the spacious hall into a large dining room, which was furnished in a way Anna imagined a grand mansion might have been, with red velvet sofas, marble tables, chandeliers. At the front, a microphone and lectern had already been set up.
A waitress in a white shirt and black bow tie appeared and showed them to their table. They were nearly an hour early and there were only a few others there. She asked if she could get them something to drink. Anna asked for a lemon squash. Eric looked uncomfortable, out of place. Anna felt that somehow, irrationally, Eric blamed her for David getting in contact. This business had disturbed Eric more than he let on. At last he decided on a beer.
The room slowly filled. The noise of conversation grew louder. There must have been more than a hundred people, Anna reckoned. All the tables were reserved.
Eventually, two men and a woman appeared and sat at a table on the low stage. The woman was dressed in black, with a short haircut. The older man wore a jacket without a tie, the younger man jeans and a striped blue T-shirt. The younger man, with his curly hair, his narrow blue eyes—Anna might have been looking at a version of herself. He seemed shy, self-consciously not scanning faces in the audience, even though he must have known she was there.
The three people on the stage poured each other glasses of water, chatting and smiling. They seemed determined to pretend that the audience did not exist.
After a few minutes, the woman introduced David and he rose to his feet. He was as tall as Neil, the same broad shoulders. He walked to the lectern with his papers. He looked briefly around the audience. His stern expression did not change; his tone of voice was serious. ‘Tonight I have decided not to read from my novel, but instead to read to you an unpublished story.’
At the tables around her, people glanced at each other: this must have been something out of the usual.
That severe look of his—was it disapproval of the audience in general? Or did it come from a store of private emotion connected with Anna in particular? She had no way of knowing. But it seemed to her as if that clipped diction and excessive formality might have masked some underlying rage.
Anna knew from the moment David got up and walked to the microphone, before he’d even said a word, that she wasn’t going to be spared.
The story was about a reclusive boy of fifteen who developed a duodenal ulcer. Anna understood that the boy was a version of David himself. Through the story she was given a glimpse of a devoted mother and father.
He was still reading in the same monotonous voice, devoid of emotion or warmth, as though with distaste for the events he was describing, as though the events had not the remotest connection with himself. She recognised that he was speaking a secret language. There were more than a hundred people in the elegant room, but his words were meant for Anna alone. Behind this story about memory and loss, there were things which could not be spoken. The pain of separation was incurable. Of all the people looking up at him, listening to the story, only she knew what was really going on.
He had been given many advantages in life, but also, invisibly, unmistakably, something of the Haven had stayed with him and coloured his mind. The story took place in his safe childhood home, but she was convinced that it had its real origins in the dark corridors of the Haven. Without his even knowing it, David had carried with him all his life the oppressive atmosphere, the smell of those rooms, puzzling, as if he couldn’t quite place it, couldn’t quite remember; but he carried its stain around with him, an enigma, part of the mystery of himself.
Then it struck her: this wasn’t blame or attack. It was his way of calling to her in this room full of strangers. He was making public his most private and intimate feelings about being lost in life. He had put on a mask, armour to do it. But he was calling to her. He was calling to his mother.
Over the years, Anna had been able to forget the green-painted corridors with their smell of boiled beef and cabbage. Now, listening to this man reading his story, she was back there again, unwrapping the brown paper and string, seeing the fine baby clothes they had brought in for him.
Anna heard the squishy beat of blood in her ears. The man on the stage grew blurry; the people around her grew blurry; her eyes filled with tears.
When the reading was over, David lingered at the front of the room for a long time. People kept going up to talk to him—his fans, Anna supposed. People congratulating him on his story, or wanting to talk to him about his novel. A woman joined him, tall, attractive, long hair, probably his wife. Their children were with them.
Finally, he came to find her. David walked straight up to her table, his family behind him. He must have known all the time where Anna was sitting. ‘Hello,’ he said, and no more. He had a penetrating gaze. He made no move to put her at her ease, no embrace, no handshake.
She kept waiting for the surge of emotion that refused to arrive. It was like waking from a dream, her real life empty, drained of meaning.
He introduced her in a matter-of-fact way to his wife and children. Anna smiled at Cathy, and at the children, those faces she was connected to by blood, her grandchildren. One of the boys was about fifteen, the other little boy and girl much younger. They looked at her politely, well behaved, curious. David must have told them about her.
‘David, sit here next to me,’ she said, taking his hand and holding it. Is that what he wanted? For her to make the first move? ‘Eric, let David sit here next to me, please. He’s the guest of honour, after all.’
But David remained standing, still holding her hand, and said gently, ‘There’s another guest of honour tonight—my mother, Molly.’
She had been standing there all the time at the back of the group, a diffident woman of about seventy, with dyed blonde hair, wearing a suit of shiny grey fabric. Molly smiled and nodded. She seemed lost for words. Perhaps she was overcome. But Anna also saw immediately that Molly feared her. That was to be expected, of course. Now that David had found his birth mother, Molly must have been terrified that the bond between her and David might
be weakened. Anna now saw that the older woman was crying, like herself. David reached for her with his other hand.
Molly said, ‘He was always such a good boy. I knew his mum must have been a good person.’
Anna stood, took a step towards Molly, and they embraced. The woman who had kept her son safe all these years.
They talked about where each of them had lived, where they had done their shopping. Molly was surprised that Anna and Eric had lived in the next suburb in the 1950s. ‘Just fancy that,’ Molly said. ‘You shopped in Puckle Street, too!’
Anna told her how she used to look into every pram in Puckle Street, hoping.
‘When he was little, he used to refuse to let me dress him, or even to tie up his shoelaces,’ Molly said. ‘He always had an independent way about him. David was always different from other children.’
Anna envied Molly. When Anna had been spending her days in the drowsy pay office at Holeproof, Molly had had him all to herself. It was she who had been with him on his first day at school, on every birthday.
‘They grow up too fast, don’t they?’ Molly said.
‘Oh, yes, they sure do!’ Anna told her about her own grown-up children—allowing Molly to retain full possession of David, for the moment.
Molly told her about David’s childhood, his achievements, what his father had been like. Percy’s illness and death, how ghastly it had been. Anna could see that, for the last twenty years, Molly had never been able to get over losing her husband. She was still stuck back in 1969, where the solid road of her family life had come to a sudden end. How can anyone ever get over something like that, she thought, as she hugged Molly again.
