by Joy Dettman
She dreamed. Dreamed she was a girl of twelve or thirteen, and she was digging a hole behind Myrtle’s washhouse, but the dirt kept falling back in. And she had to be careful where she put that shovel. There was a crop of babies down there, growing like potatoes in the dirt. She didn’t want any more but she couldn’t leave them down there. Kept pulling them out, miniature babies, dozens of them, covered in dirt.
She woke gasping for breath, relieved to wake, or relieved for a time. She moved Jimmy’s head, shook pins and needles from her arm, then carried him sleeping to the couch where she lay down with him, Myrtle’s velvet cushion for a pillow, her crocheted knee rug for a blanket.
When next she woke from a dream of dark lanes, the parlour was in darkness and Jimmy was gone. There was a slit of light creeping from beneath the kitchen door, but no sound from the kitchen. Jenny rose and crossed the passage to use the toilet, to peep into Myrtle’s room. Jimmy was in his little bed. Myrtle’s bed was empty.
Myrtle was in the kitchen, writing to Robert. She told him how she’d put Jenny and her little boy out on the street, told him how they’d come back, how they were now sleeping.
If only you were here to speak your good sense to me. How can a girl of twenty have two children older than Jimmy? He’ll turn three in December. I was a child at fifteen, a pampered school child, sharing these rooms with my parents and Richard, with maids to care for the house and a man to take care of the yard.
She has no family support and says she must give up the child. She has suggested we raise it, and of course it is impossible, but as the night hours pass, I find myself asking myself if it really is impossible, my darling, or was she sent to us by God . . .
My mind is a whirlwind, one moment spinning one way, then spinning back. I know you love Amberley, as I do, but we could sell it. We could. We could move to New Zealand with our baby, stay with Richard until we found a home of our own.
She blotted the page, dipped her pen and began filling a third page.
No use at all in pouring her heart out on paper. That letter could take weeks to reach him. His reply could take weeks to return.
Two months. Two months, or perhaps a little longer — if there was any truth in that girl’s tale of New Year’s Eve.
‘And I must not allow myself to think of this foolishness,’ she whispered.
She could think of nothing else. A beautiful girl, she would have a beautiful child. Perhaps a little boy like Jimmy —
Ridiculous. They’d leave in the morning. Almost morning now. A strangely silent predawn.
And her pen dipped.
JENNY EXPECTING STOP FAMILY SUPPORT NIL MUST RELINQUISH BABE FOR ADOPTION STOP WISHES TO RETAIN NUMBER FIVE UNTIL CONFINEMENT WHEN ACCOUNT WILL BE SETTLED IN FULL STOP PLEASE ADVISE RE MY AGREEMENT TO TERMS OF OCCUPANCY LOVE MYRTLE
She glanced towards the parlour, then as guilty as a child at the biscuit tin, she tore the page from the pad and stood, reading her words. By need the message was cryptic. What she was proposing was illegal. Her words would be transmitted by a stranger’s hand, read by strangers. She read it again, this time in a whisper.
Robert would understand.
GOD’S MASTER PLAN
Myrtle made porridge for breakfast; she served her guests but not herself. She had no appetite this morning but stood watching Jenny clean her plate, watching Jimmy plaster his face, her table and floor. She poured him a glass of milk, poured two cups of tea, and not a word spoken until Jenny rose to wipe Jimmy’s face, to wipe the table and lift Jimmy down to play with his cars.
‘You feel nothing for it?’ Myrtle stated.
‘I was pack raped, Myrt. What am I expected to feel for it?’
‘The miracle of life.’ Myrtle turned to her sink, her eyes filling. ‘I’d sell my soul if I could exchange places with you.’
‘I’m not asking for your soul, just number five, just until the end of September.’
‘They’ll place the baby in your arms and you won’t part with it.’
‘I would have parted with it months ago if I hadn’t recognised the doctor.’ Myrtle’s expression said she didn’t understand, or didn’t want to. ‘If there was a pill I could swallow this morning, I’d swallow ten,’ Jenny said. ‘I promise you I’ll walk away from it more easily than I’ll walk away from you and Amberley.’ She reached for a cigarette. ‘Two months. That’s all I’m asking for. At the most, ten more weeks.’
‘You smoke too much,’ Myrtle said.
‘Tell me I can have my room back and I’ll stop. We’ll stay out of your way, I promise you that, too.’
‘I have to go out for half an hour. Shall I take Jimmy with me?’
Jenny nodded. She followed them to the door and lit her cigarette, watched Jimmy climb into the stroller, eager to go.
‘I trust you with my most precious possession, but you don’t trust me enough to believe I was raped.’
‘I should be no more than half an hour,’ Myrtle said, and they left.
Jimmy’s voice faded in the distance. The cigarette grown too short to hold, Jenny buried it in the garden, then took her damp shoes inside to warm by the fire. Her coat was damp around the shoulders. She draped it over a chair, close to the heat. The world outside was bitterly cold. Myrtle’s business this morning must have been urgent to send her out in it.
But brief. They were back in twenty minutes.
‘If you don’t mind keeping your eye on him for an hour or so, I’ll get my things from Lila’s. The Salvos’ phone number is on the shelf beside the phone.’ She took the stroller to transport her load. Taxis cost money and money was her only security now.
Myrtle didn’t make the phone call. She prepared lunch for three, her mind not on her task, but with her telegram, perhaps already crossing the ocean. It would find him, as her letters found him.
Jimmy played at her feet, running his wooden car around the table’s legs, up chair legs. For him, life was back to normal.
‘There was a case recently,’ Myrtle greeted Jenny at the door. ‘It was in the papers — no more than a year ago — a child raised by her grandmother and claimed by the mother after seven years.’
They lifted the stroller into the passage, the napkins still in it, with the brown paper bags. They placed the red case beside it.
‘I won’t want to know about it,’ Jenny said. Her coat was shrugged off, hung, shoes off, then she walked ahead of Myrtle to the fire and stood with her back to it. ‘I’m going home when it’s over. That’s all I know.’ Silence then, the small fire crackling, feeding on new wood. Where did Sydney get its wood? ‘Are you thinking about taking it?’
‘I’m attempting to explain that what you are suggesting is impossible.’
‘Nothing is impossible.’
‘How would you suggest we . . . we manage the subterfuge?’
‘It sounds like a German submarine,’ Jenny said. ‘Sub-ter-fusen.’
‘It means —’
‘I knew what it meant when I was ten years old. And I don’t know anything right now.’ She shrugged. ‘I could give my name at the hospital as Myrtle Norris. No one up here knows who I am.’
‘Your condition is obvious. It may appear a little coincidental that you disappear, and I appear with a baby.’ She didn’t sound like Myrtle. Her eyes didn’t look like Myrtle’s. They were guarded today, not quite able to hold Jenny’s.
‘Then I’ll disappear now. I’ll sleep on your couch and you keep your private door locked,’ Jenny said. Hope growing in her heart, just a little hope.
‘And Jimmy?’
‘You’ve been looking after him anyway. Tell the lodgers I’m working out of town.’
‘The cleaning woman? Her daughter?’
‘I’ll clean in here. And you start wandering around with a pillow stuffed down your pinny.’
‘Let us not stoop to the ridiculous —’
‘The publican’s wife at home stuffed a pillow down her pinny so she could pass her daughter’s son off as her own,’ Je
nny said.
‘You may recall that Robert has been overseas since September of ’42.’
‘Who counts?’
‘Many people.’
‘Tell them Robert was flown home on some secret mission. If you told me he’d popped in on New Year’s Eve, I wouldn’t know if he had or not. People are only interested in their own lives. You were looking after Jimmy, that’s all I know about your New Year’s Eve.’
It was a parlour game, to Myrtle, a time filler. She played it alone that afternoon while scraping batter into a cake tin, and while the cake baked. She found herself continuing the game in bed that night, raising questions and finding, or not finding, her own answers. She played it in the laundry, at the kitchen sink.
Who was to know Jenny was here, if she were to remain within these rooms? How many came to these rooms? The minister, but only when invited. Robert’s sister-in-law visited once or twice a year, but she always phoned before she came. The lodgers were not invited into her private rooms — however, certain among them would remember when Robert left.
Give them all a month’s notice. Tell them the house was being sold to a private family. And put it on the market? Her house, though full, had been empty to her — before that girl and Jimmy.
Robert’s family would need to be told the truth — a partial truth. They’d known for years that she and Robert had applied to adopt. Her brother knew they’d planned to adopt.
Sell up, go with her adopted child to New Zealand, stay with Richard until Robert came home . . .
The timing was the problem. Were children placed with couples when one parent was overseas fighting?
Doubtful.
But there were more fatherless babes around now than there had ever been, and if she didn’t know the legalities of adoption placements, then others would not know.
How long would it take to sell the house? It was hers to sell, the deeds transferred from her father’s name to her own when they’d borrowed to pay out her brother’s share.
‘When exactly is the baby due?’
‘Nine months from New Year’s Eve — if it comes out clutching a calendar. It could be weeks before. Jimmy and my first came early.’
‘Have you seen a doctor?’
‘Only from a distance.’
‘Your other children’s births would have been registered while you were in hospital?’
‘Jimmy’s was. The others were born at home. Granny registered them. She’s the town midwife.’
Jenny’s belongings remained in the passage through Wednesday, through Thursday. The Salvation Army’s phone number remained on the telephone stand. Myrtle didn’t make the call.
She was waiting for something, and Jenny knew it. Her actions, her manner, her obsession with the postman spoke volumes. On the Friday morning she walked to the parlour’s large window ten times in one hour to stand and stare out at the street. She was there when the telegram boy leaned his bike against the front fence. Myrtle had her front door open before he blew his whistle.
No fear of his envelope that day. She ripped it open.
GOD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS STOP ALL SUPPORT MUST BE GIVEN STOP TRUST YOUR GOOD INSTINCTS STOP LOVE YOU ROBERT
‘We will find a way, Jenny. I will do whatever I must. We want your baby.’
BILLY-BOB
In August Paris was liberated, and Myrtle spoke of the beautiful city she’d seen as a twelve-year-old. Jenny told her that she knew what it must have been like for the French, living under German occupation, having Hitler dictate whether they were allowed to smoke, whether they were allowed to set foot outside the door.
‘Heil Hitler,’ she said each time Myrtle issued a decree.
‘I don’t find that humorous, Jenny.’
‘I don’t find living under occupation humorous either.’
You can’t live day in, day out with another and keep up a well-mannered pretence. You can’t share every meal and not put your elbows on the table.
They got to know each other during those months. Sat together by the fire in the evening, knitting tiny white garments or leafing through the infant section of Myrtle’s Home Doctor book while Myrtle spoke of travelling to Melbourne so the child could be born there, in a private hospital, under Myrtle’s name. They would then go their separate ways, Myrtle and her newborn on a boat bound for New Zealand, Jenny and Jimmy to board the train for Woody Creek.
‘Melbourne is too close to home, Myrt. I know girls who work as nurses in Melbourne. We’d be letting the outside world in.’
They argued about Melbourne, about how and where the baby should be born, how and where they’d make the swap, about cigarettes.
‘I gave you money to buy me two large packets and you couldn’t even buy me a little packet.’
‘Read that article on the effect of nicotine on the unborn.’
‘I read too much and so do you.’
Accustomed to her freedom, accustomed to walking for miles, Jenny was forced to fill her days with reading, with stitching. She unpicked a skirt Myrtle had placed in the Red Cross bag. She was losing weight. Jenny made it into two small skirts for her girls. She unravelled Miss Robertson’s navy blue cardigan, found in the same bag, and with the reclaimed wool knitted two small sweaters. She altered a maroon frock Myrtle deemed too old, and offered it to the landlady as a maternity smock.
‘You are being ridiculous.’
‘You’ll look ridiculous when you try to pass off a baby as your own if you don’t give the lodgers something to believe.’
‘They know when Robert left —’
‘Yes, but he was flown home on a secret mission, wasn’t he?’
She stitched shoulder and waist tapes to a small round cushion and modelled it with the smock. Such laughter. Myrtle couldn’t recall such laughter in these rooms. She conceded a little by discarding her corset. She attempted to walk more slowly up the stairs, more carefully down.
‘Hold your stomach when you walk down, as if you’re trying to stop the baby shaking around.’
In late August, Robert wrote, expressing his concern at the proposed sale of Amberley. Myrtle had spoken to an agent. She didn’t want to sell her childhood home, nor to be a guest in her brother’s house. It was a way out, that’s all.
‘It may be better if the baby is born at the Salvation Army home, Jenny, and we make the transfer in the city. I will let the family know that I am expecting to adopt.’
‘His birth certificate will have my name on it, Myrt.’
Myrtle needed her name to be on her baby’s papers. That would be her only security — should Jenny change her mind . . .
‘We’ll take the train up to Brisbane.’
‘Start wearing your smock and cushion and I’ll have it here and you can pretend you’ve had it.’
‘Alone?’
‘I had my first alone.’
‘I won’t consider it. I’m booking seats on the train. I’ll book you into a hospital as my daughter, Myrtle.’
‘And I’ll probably have it on the train and we’ll end up on the front page of the newspaper. You start wearing your cushion and I’ll have it here.’
‘Wilful girl.’
‘You’re supposed to be eight months forward, Hitler.’
Myrtle wore her maroon smock in August. It appeared to go unnoticed until Miss Robertson walked off to church alone, until Mrs Collins asked her if there was to be a blessed event.
Myrtle, her face a match for her maroon smock, came to the bedroom where Jenny hid when the hatch was open.
‘I lied,’ Myrtle said. ‘To Mrs Collins. Lord help me. I told that woman a bare-faced lie.’
That was the night she agreed that the baby would be born at home.
Through August, Myrtle gathered necessary items under Jenny’s instruction: tins of condensed milk, baby’s bottles, old towels, sharp scissors, sterile tape to tie the cord. She bought cigarettes from time to time, but rationed them like a prison warder. She played the wireless day and night, in case of
laughter. There was laughter. In case of raised voices. In September Jenny raised her voice.
Myrtle was stressed, Jenny stressed by her, and Jimmy stressed by both of his women; he wouldn’t stay in bed.
The argument began over him. Every time he got out of bed, Myrtle gave him what he wanted.
‘Will you butt out, Myrt? I told him to get back into his bed. Stop going against me.’
It was after nine before he went down and stayed down, and Jenny needed a cigarette.
‘You’ve had five already today.’
‘Then I’ll have six.’
‘I’ll make a cup of tea.’
They were sitting in the kitchen, drinking tea and eating oatmeal biscuits, when Myrtle started the war.
‘What do you know about the father?’ she said.
‘I didn’t ask their mothers’ maiden names. One of them said, Party time, babe. He didn’t sound well educated —’
‘I meant only —’
‘You asked me who I’d been playing around with, and that’s what you meant.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant to imply.’
‘It’s what you think. Admit it — you think I was playing around and I got caught.’
‘Please keep your voice down.’
‘Admit it, Myrt.’
‘You’re a pretty girl. I —’
The parlour couch was Jenny’s bed; her case lived beneath the parlour table. She dragged it out, opened it and rummaged through clothing which no longer fitted, among the letters, Jim’s bunch tied together with navy blue wool, Granny’s and Maisy’s scattered. She found Billy-Bob’s watch beneath the letters and took it to the kitchen where she slid it down the length of the table.
‘That’s all I know about the father. It’s got a name on it, and a date that’s probably his birthday. You might be able to track him down through the navy, ask him how far he went in school — though I can’t guarantee the baby is his. It could be Hank’s. He was a big, ugly, sweat-stinking mongrel and he sounded as if he’d been raised by hogs in the bogs.’
‘Please keep your voice down.’
