As she and Vince walked down the aisle she ducked her head, feeling like a physical blow once more the absence of her own mother, who should have been sitting there in the first row, elegant legs crossed at the ankles, wearing a skirt suit in pale pink or apricot. Perhaps a tiny pillbox hat in the same fabric, with a wisp of veil, the colour contrasting beautifully with her dark wavy hair, which Ellis believed she had inherited.
She would not cry, she could not cry, but she felt like it, especially when they got past the porch to see Mrs Wood waiting outside.
‘You came after all,’ Ellis said, when she could control her voice.
Mrs Wood had been invited – Ellis had hand-delivered the invitation – but they had not heard a word.
Mrs Wood said nothing until after she embraced Ellis, then whispered in her ear. ‘I didn’t want to. But I realised I had to.’ She removed her sunglasses briefly, adjusted her hat, then held out a gloved hand to Vince. ‘And this must be the lucky man.’
They went for lunch afterwards, just a dozen of them, at the local workers’ club in Ashfield, where Mr Rose talked about feeling like a father towards Vince, but how Vince’s father George had been a fine man who would have been proud today, while Mrs Curry clutched her handkerchief and Harry looked into his lap. Billy, the eldest of the Rose boys, who had done engineering at university, proposed the toast. Vince’s friend Mack made a speech with all the right jokes, and his wife Betty took her aside in the ladies’ before the cake was cut and asked her in a quiet voice if there was anything she needed to know, Ellis not having had a mother. They had only just met, she said, but Ellis was welcome to ask her anything and Betty would explain, having been married for years by now. ‘Thank you, Betty,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be right.’
Ellis had made the cake, a single tier of simple design decorated with real baby roses, which stood on a table of its own. Aside from that there was no suggestion this was a wedding celebration. If they had had a private party, they could not have served alcohol with Mrs Curry there, and if they’d gone to a proper reception house Ellis would have found the formality and the lack of guests unbearable. Her father had suggested the club, which had a private room and a balcony, and where the drinkers could nip out and buy themselves a beer at the bar if they liked. Harry Curry barely said a word and Mrs Curry, who never invited Ellis to call her Muriel or Mum, stared around her, when she was not staring at Ellis’s stomach. They left as soon as the speeches were over, before the cake was handed around.
The new couple spent the night at the Great Southern Hotel, so they could catch the early train to the south coast the next morning. While Vince was cleaning his teeth in the bathroom down the hall Ellis sat on the bed and wondered what to say to him.
‘Happy?’ he said, coming back to the room.
‘Yes. Of course I am.’
He gathered her close and they lay there, he in his boxer shorts and white singlet, she in her nightie. He kissed her on the brow first, then her nose, then her lips.
She was happy. Or at least content. She would owe him so much.
In the end she said nothing and while he kissed her throat, leaned over to turn out the bedside light before helping him slip her nightie off. If he thought anything was amiss then perhaps he put it down to his own inexperience.
Afterwards, Ellis lay awake for a long time, watching the moon and the streetlights slanting through the room, listening to the whistles and sirens and occasional call from the footpath below.
16
The next part of the story, she already knew, involved Charlie, since the pregnancy occurred soon after Ellis and Vince married. But Dove had run out of ideas. When the baby was born, she had a fair idea, but exactly where, and how, resisted her imagination. Doubtless because she had no experience in this respect, she could not bring herself to visualise a pregnancy and the birth of a baby. She knew that this was nonsense, if she were to call herself a writer of fiction, and that she needed to do something about this, even if it simply meant googling the subject. After that, she should hang around the post-natal ward of the nearby hospital. She knew that when the story stalled like this the best thing was always to get moving. Aside from this, the more reasons to get her out of the house the better, since she’d become so ridiculously isolated. Yet she found herself curiously unwilling to get out and about.
Nevertheless she made the effort one morning and walked through the back streets from her home and across Missenden Road to the main part of the hospital. She passed a cluster of white-gowned patients chatting furtively under a huge moody fig. They looked to Dove like they were trading medications. Three ibis flapped around on the overfull rubbish bin, pulling at a tomato sauce-stained white wrapper before screeching and flying up to perch in the fig tree. Outside the emergency ward two women in tracksuits were smoking over a child who seemed far too old to be in a stroller. One of the women pushed the stroller back and forth in time with rapid desperate draws on her cigarette. Dove waited for an ambulance to enter and park, and then another that followed straight away as if there were some major accident nearby. Partly from interest, she stopped and sat on the low brick fence outside the McCafé and watched as each ambulance reverse parked and opened their doors to disgorge their contents. On a high gurney all that was visible was the cloud of white hair of a patient covered in a blanket. From another emerged a young man, staggering and resisting the ambo who followed him, holding up a plastic saline pack that led to his bandaged arm. Why wasn’t he strapped to a gurney, she wondered. The man’s good arm waved about aggressively causing the ambo to duck while she was trying to keep the saline line intact. Within minutes the ambulance bay was crowded with blue uniforms.
She ordered a coffee, waiting in the queue for a ridiculous length of time given there was only one other customer, while the staff behind the counter bickered or ignored each other. After the first sip she wondered why she had even thought a McCafé flat white would satisfy her. No, she didn’t need to wonder: for some reason she was delaying her task. She threw the coffee away and walked back into the hospital and took the lift to the post-natal ward. Staring through the double glass doors that led to the main ward, she could see several women wheeling babies in clear plastic cots down the hall. She pushed through the doors and followed them down the hall herself. Rooms to her right and left held single beds, about half of them occupied. Only a few had curtains around the beds, and most of them had the plastic cot parked next to them. At a bend there was a nurses’ station, with two staff with their backs to her peering at computer monitors. Farther along was a sitting room where a woman and her baby were surrounded by family. Past the bend were more rooms, most with their doors ajar. She peeked into one to find the patient asleep, her baby beside her.
At the end of the ward was a lounge room where several women were feeding their babies and chatting. Smiling, as if she belonged here, was maybe just lost on her way to visit a sister or friend, Dove turned and walked back. Strangely there was hardly any noise. If she had imagined anything before she arrived, it would have been the swollen collective sound of babies crying at the top of their lungs. Instead, a few faint kittenish wails broke the silence now and then. She paused to let a midwife bustle past with an armload of folders. Another approached glued to a phone and hauling a blood pressure monitor along with her. She smiled again and paused at a room that held two women and babies, all four of them asleep.
There appeared to be few other visitors. As this was a public hospital no one would challenge her. There were signs about strict visiting hours but no evidence of security, and she could probably walk in and out all day before a nurse thought to question her. Perhaps never. In a room back near the entrance to the ward, the bed was empty and the bathroom next to it occupied. Beside the bed in its plastic cot the small white mound looked like it was all parcelled up and ready to post off somewhere. She was mere feet from the baby. The sound of a shower running came from the bathroom.
>
A weird but urgent thought struck her. She – anyone – could just reach out and take this baby and head off. How long before one of those preoccupied nurses would notice and buzz for security? When the mother awoke or emerged from the shower, how many minutes would a baby thief have to get away with her spoils? It would take all of a minute to walk out of the ward, run down the stairs and out the door. The hospital was close to the university, and there was a connecting path. She could disappear in there within minutes. Or she could be bold and walk straight up the road and hail a taxi, where they were all lined up just past the McCafé. It would be almost no time before she would be speeding off to any destination.
Why was she thinking like this? She had not the remotest desire for a baby, and yet she had to stop herself from creeping forward. Another step or two and she could place her hand on it. Feeling foolish and even guilty, she quickly walked back down the hall and out the doors to the lift. A persistent image stuck in her mind: a baby wrapped up just like that one, like a parcel, being borne along by some woman who was not its mother.
She walked back home the long way, all the way up to King Street, to have a proper coffee with Martin and tell herself there was nothing wrong. When she explained the strange compulsion to him he shrugged and said, ‘Must be what it’s like, being a fiction writer. Lucky you’re not writing about a murder or something.’
Dove spluttered over her coffee. ‘God. Don’t make it worse for me.’
Back home, writing up her notes actually helped. She realised that back in Ellis’s day hospitals were more controlled and authoritarian, and new mothers were especially regimented. Ellis of course would resist much of that. Her independence was by now very clear. Even when they announced they were expecting, it was a casual moment. Ellis had merely dropped in to visit her mother-in-law one afternoon on her way home from work. She travelled to Rose’s Automotives with Vince but got the bus home, leaving at lunchtime. Mr Rose had never made her position full time and now she was glad only to be working mornings.
When she told her mother-in-law, she could see her mind rapidly calculating behind her glasses, and she couldn’t help feeling a stab of satisfaction that Mrs Curry’s suspicions had been unfounded. By the time Charlie was born – a definite eleven months after the wedding – Mrs Curry had softened enough to get out her knitting needles and old pattern books, discreetly tucking them away whenever Vince and Ellis visited.
The birth was at Crown Street Women’s Hospital, Dove decided. She still could not get her head around the specifics of the event, and she couldn’t even get into Ellis’s head to experience it from her point of view, but she knew it went smoothly enough, considering it was her first. Anyway, she was efficient at everything she did, so would be at this. Plus she deserved it, a straightforward birth.
Vince was not allowed in. He walked up and down Crown Street, ducking inside and up the stairs, pacing the waiting room, sharing cigarettes with two other new fathers. Five hours later, just before midnight, the baby arrived. Vince tossed his umpteenth cigarette into the sand box before a nurse appeared for him at the door.
‘A lovely healthy boy, Mr Linton.’
He followed her down to the delivery ward where he was draped in a gown and given a mask. Ellis looked pale and her lips were redder than normal, her eyes deeper blue and dark with fatigue. He kissed her, then the damp top of the head of his new son.
‘Can we call him Charles?’ They’d not seriously discussed names, deciding to wait to find out if it was a girl or a boy, but Vince had mentioned an older brother who had died when he was a baby. Sometimes whenever Muriel was difficult, which had been often when he was young, he thought of how much this had affected her. In an instant, holding the baby that Ellis now held out to him, he knew beyond a doubt: of course it had, of course.
‘He doesn’t look like a Charles,’ Ellis said. ‘But he could be a Charlie.’
Vince went to the pay phone on the ground floor to ring Edgar and then the neighbour next door to his mother, as she had never had the phone connected.
The next evening after work, he arrived with a tissue-wrapped parcel from his mother which Ellis opened to reveal a perfect baby’s layette: bonnet, booties and jacket, all in the best quality Paton’s cream wool, knitted in delicate moss stitch with satin ribbons for fastening.
Ellis was sitting up in a chair, dressed in normal clothes – loose slacks and one of Vince’s old pullovers – under her dressing gown.
‘Could you fetch him for us?’
‘Are they meant to be taken from the nursery?’ he said, looking around the ward which held five other new mothers but no babies. He had passed them all in the nursery on his way through, a dozen of them wrapped and quiet in their identical cribs, like a clutch of new eggs, the matron in her white peaked hat keeping guard.
‘But my arms are empty, Vince. Look.’ She held them up, and indeed her whole body propped in the chair looked shrunken.
‘When is he due for feeding?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Come on, let’s take him home.’
17
Ellis, Dove knew, had experienced nightmares on a regular basis. One of these involved her in an operating theatre on a hospital gurney, having been to all intents placed under an anaesthetic. Except she was fully conscious. Her limbs were trapped beside her, her entire body remained inert and not even her lips or eyelids were able to move to indicate she was not ill, not suffering, and did not require this operation. It pained Dove to know that there was nothing Ellis, or she, could do to indicate her terror. Each time she experienced it, the nightmare took her a little further into the story, but never to an end where she would wake up while still in the dream, to explain to the waiting doctors and nurses that she was perfectly all right, and that this operation, whatever it was for, was unnecessary. Each time she woke while the dream still had her trapped, mute and helpless, and each time she was in a fever of fear, believing that something was about to go wrong in this operation and that she would die while still anaesthetised, and no one would ever know what happened. After several seconds of gasping and looking about her bedroom in the dark, with her sweaty nightclothes pushed off her, Ellis would calm down and lie back on her pillow, her eyes wide and unblinking. It would be ages before she fell asleep again.
And each time Dove looked on as helpless as ever.
When she first pictured that scene she had no idea why Ellis would have such a nightmare – which then became her nightmare – but now, many months later, she thought she began to understand why. The worst instance of this nightmare was of course real, when Ellis had been at the abortionist’s, as a frightened sixteen year old. After that the nightmares waned, but returned when she was pregnant, and again when she was giving birth.
Vince, waiting down the hall, or pacing Crown Street, could have no understanding of the ordeal, not just the physical pain, but the pain she felt deep in her heart when she recalled the girl she was not so many years ago who’d endured that operation. During the birth they had approached her with ether for the pain and she had screamed in terror. Thinking it was the pain of labour they had held her down and tried more firmly to apply the ether, but she had thrashed her head viciously and yelled at them to get away. Later that night, after Charlie had arrived, pink and robust, and innocent of the ordeal that had brought him into the world, and Vince had left, glowing with love, she had fallen into a light doze and dreamed the dream yet again, the one that was more like a waking nightmare. She was desperate to get away from this hospital, with its lights and its smells and its lino that reminded her of that evening a few years before.
But after they went home she continued to dream this hideous dream during all the months she was learning to be Charlie’s mother. Sometimes it came with variations. For instance, she was still pregnant with him, and it was as if he were to be harmed by the mysterious operation that was about to take place entirely agai
nst her will.
She had again dreamed this the night they returned from the Denmans’ anniversary barbecue. She had gone to bed exhausted with the effort of maintaining herself all night when she had known since earlier in the evening, from the moment she and Vince had set out in the car, with Charlie in his basket beside the platter of asparagus rolls on the back seat, that the marriage could not continue. After settling Charlie into his cot and changing into her nightie she left Vince sitting on the back step having a final cigarette and went to bed where she lay in the dark looking at the ceiling.
She should have slapped Les hard on the face, there in Betty’s kitchen, rather than being so forgiving. She should have screamed at him or fetched his wife or told Vince, who might have taken him out the front and thumped him one; just done something rather than let him get away with that violation. And on Betty’s wedding anniversary, poor Betty Denman who longed more than anything for a child.
Dove watched her turn over and face away from the door. Exhausted from the confrontation with herself, with accepting that being Vince’s wife, or anyone’s, was not possible for her, she was unable to sleep. When she finally did, hours after Vince came and murmured into her hair, she slipped into the uneasy dozing of the insomniac, where dreams merged into real life. Charlie’s cries penetrated one of these dreams, and she panicked at not being able to reach him. That was when the operating theatre nightmare took her one step further, where she looked down on her gowned stomach and realised she was carrying him, about six or seven months. At the same time she could hear him crying. There was no logic, but then there never was, in such a dream.
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