He would leave the house for meetings he didn’t attend, instead walking the streets or slinking into the bar to drink to memories of lost ideals. It was with profound disillusionment that he had embarked on his trip to Sydney and came across Dawn Brecht. He had thought that Dawn would enable him to get his children back, that he could start again and do better this time. But when Dawn entered his home she saw the portraits — the children around the Christmas tree, the older children laughing as Bob knelt over his present wildly pulling off the wrapping paper; the children lining up in their best attire ready for a trip to Katoomba, with William caught glancing sideways as though intent on travelling in an opposite direction; and Grigor’s last birthday gift to Elizabeth, a portrait with Thomas holding Bob, William with his hands on Patricia’s shoulders as she beams at the camera and Patricia cradling baby Danny. This photograph, the first of all her children together, had been the one Elizabeth liked the most. Dawn eyed the pictures carefully. Her new husband’s children were ’half-breeds’: she saw in the darker three the inferiority of savages and she felt disgust choking her.
“Where are they now?” she demanded.
“My two eldest boys went missing in the war. The eldest girl is in Sydney. But the youngest three, they are in an orphanage.” He added, after a careful pause, “Dawn, I would like to get them back.”
“When?”
“We could …” he began.
“We?” Dawn interrupted, “if you think I am taking on more children with this one not even bom yet, you are clearly trying to push me over the edge.” She began sobbing. “I came here to have this baby. I’m not ready for anything else.”
“Of course you must settle in first,” Grigor said. “We will talk about my children later.”
Every time he tried to bring the subject up, Dawn would cry, working herself into a fit. It was never the right time, and eventually, after Dawn gave birth to her second child, he stopped bringing up the subject altogether.
Grigor had thought that all women had maternal feelings, and it shocked him that Dawn didn’t feel anything but hostility towards his other children.
Dawn, Grigor discovered after their hasty wedding, suffered from bouts of hysteria — uncontrollable crying and shouting. At first he thought she was distressed about the pregnancy, but over their first months together he came to believe that she was damaged and unstable. He liked a woman with vulnerabilities who, with his help, could learn to bear up to hardship with determination and fortitude, as Elizabeth had done. Dawn’s problems seemed so complicated and deep, Grigor felt unable to ease them.
Grigor withdrew from family life, immersing himself in photography. Light meters and other technology had long ago replaced the materials he had begun his career with. He spent his time developing portraits of football teams and families, but he preferred his portraits of the miners, returning to the surface, blackened faces and widened eyes. For Grigor, they held more truth than the contrived pictures of parents and children dressed in Sunday best.
He resented Dawn for the way in which she had assumed his acceptance of her child, Dalia, though she had rejected his. He knew that she had thought less of him because his children and first wife were dark. “They are as white as you are,” he would lash back at her before he came to realise that her resultant hysterics were not worth the faint satisfaction of such a comment.
Dawn Brecht was already bitter when Grigor stopped to talk to her. Freddy had used her. He had refused to marry her. She had thought the pregnancy would change his mind. It didn’t. In fact, there was no disapproval from his family, no Charlotte Winter. Dawn had made that up because it was too hard to say that Freddy just did not want her and that her attempts to bend him to her will had failed.
She found it difficult to keep control of herself. There was always some trial that was hers to bear. Her first child was forever sick and crying. The second was even worse, the noise thundering in her ears, her space shrinking.
“I should have jumped,” she would sob, trying to remind him of the role he was to continue to play with her.
“I should have let you,” he would reply, showing her how far they had fallen away from each other.
Grigor was not what she would have settled for if life had been fairer to her. She set about making his home hers by erasing the belongings in it from his former life and imprinting her own taste on the décor. The pictures of his children and his first wife had shocked her, made her feel superior both to his first family and to Grigor himself. It released her from the debt she felt she owed him when he talked her out of jumping from the bridge, and gave her a sense of having saved him by giving him respectability and white children. Grigor’s inability to see what she offered hardened her against him. By the time he seemed to concede her position, she no longer felt enough affection for him to feel victorious.
As an old man, with nine children — only two of whom he had contact with — and two wives, one he mourned and one he detested, Grigor would concede that Patricia’s parting words had been right. He experienced their truth the day he had seen his son on a sunny afternoon in Strawberry Hills. During that encounter Elizabeth’s ghost seemed to be pointing an accusing finger at him.
Grigor looked at his young son, so full of youthful enterprise. He wanted to tell him about Marx, the nobility of the workers, the streets of Cologne, of exile, of Esmeralda, of Elizabeth crying at the train station. If he had some vocabulary or dialogue to build upon with the boy, some ability to express what he felt inside, he would, at that moment, have reached out to his son. But the silence was too thick to break.
When he closed his weary eyes for the final time, Grigor Brecht thought to himself that perhaps, at last, he would see his Elizabeth again, and this time she would rescue him.
26
1970
WHEN PASQUALE HAD ASKED Patricia to marry him she answered, “I want a big family. At least five children.”
Pasquale had smiled at her and promised, “We will do whatever you want when you are my wife.” She could see the smile in the soft lines at the side of his eyes and was flushed with the pleasure of being adored, a new and overwhelming sensation.
She liked the way he spoke, with a soft and unassuming voice. He struggled with English, but she found his turn of phrase musical. She liked his solidness, the large muscles in his arms and his thick chest, the grey that lapped his curls and the rough skin on his hands. It felt honest to her. He would lift his chest high when she held his hand as they walked down the street and he would gently bring her hand to his lips and kiss it tenderly.
The attention that Pasquale showered on her was something Patricia had never expected. He was the first man to ask her out, the first who had ever touched her skin. That first time he ran his hand slowly down her arm as he looked into her eyes, she felt his touch sweep through her whole body, felt a part of her merge into him. She would have said ’yes’ to anything he asked.
When they moved into their own home, Patricia felt a renewed happiness with life. Not since the times when she had sat with her mother, fussing over her brothers and sisters, had she had such a feeling of tranquil completeness. All the disappointments and failures she had felt in the past seemed to evaporate. She scrubbed, painted, stitched and hammered to turn his shabby flat into a cosy home. Pasquale would marvel at the little changes she made and she could see the pride he had in her and their home. When he introduced her at the restaurant as his wife, he always paused slightly after he said the word ’wife’ as if to savour the sound of the word.
She was also able to help Pasquale at the restaurant, decorating the place to make it more attractive. The old regulars teased her husband, who grinned back sheepishly. To her own surprise, she also seemed to have a knack for making small improvements to the way Pasquale ran his business. She had watched Madelaine build her little business into a profitable one and had absorbed more than she realised. “Every penny you can squeeze out of the supplier is one for your pocket; every penny you c
an squeeze out of the buyer is one for your purse,” Madelaine had often said.
Patricia negotiated better prices from the grocers and told the regulars who ate on credit that if they paid half their debts Pasquale would erase the rest. This gave them the incentive to finally pay up, and Patricia used the money to buy new tables and chairs. She put plants in the window, made curtains and matching tablecloths and cushions for the chairs. It added to the charm of the restaurant and attracted more customers. She ensured that the regulars still felt welcome, aware that the tables of cantankerous old Italian men added to the atmosphere. In a short time, the success enabled them to move to a bigger house.
Patricia was pregnant with her first child when Daisy came to live with her. She was overjoyed when she opened the door and saw her sister standing before her. She had long imagined Daisy returning; she would be remorseful, tearful and apologetic for leaving the way she did, for not saying goodbye, for stealing those things she took. But Daisy was not contrite — she was defensive and guarded.
Patricia thought that Daisy’s defiance was masking wounds. She looked at her sister, so beautiful with her thick black hair, her high cheeks, and saw in her hazel eyes loneliness and despair. Daisy was turning to her for support and Patricia could not help but open her heart to her and let her into her home.
It seemed right that, at the moment in her life when she was starting her own family with Pasquale, her sister should come back. Although the table would not be crowded with the faces of her brothers and sisters as she had long imagined, now there would be her own children there, Pasquale, and Bob and Carole. And now Daisy as well.
It had been eleven years since Daisy left, and she never did explain where she had been. Although Patricia often wondered about the jade brooch Daisy had stolen from her that day she left, Patricia resisted her longing to ask if Daisy still had it and would never have asked for it to be returned. Patiently she waited for Daisy to talk when the time was right.
During his visits, Bob would chide her for her generosity in bringing Daisy into her house. “You don’t even know where she has been all these years, what she has been up to, what she has done, who she has been with,” he had said when he was alone with Patricia. She tried to explain to him that he was being too hard on Daisy, that he did not understand how for all her tough exterior, she was more fragile than she wanted anyone to know.
She thought Bob’s attitude towards Daisy and Carole were odd. With Daisy, he could never see past the question mark about her disappearance. As for Carole, Patricia could see that the way he treated her was killing something in his wife. “You should realise how lucky you are to have Carole,” she would say to him.
“I do,” he would reply sulkily. “I look after her and make sure that she doesn’t have to work. She has what every woman wants. There are plenty of women who would be very happy with an arrangement like that.”
At this, Patricia would laugh. “Bob, you are a man, and men are not best placed to know what every woman wants. In fact, your idea of what women really want is suspiciously like what men really want. Seriously, you shouldn’t worry so much about what other people think. It’s not worth hurting the people you love.” Patricia realised as Bob looked at her stonily, that she would not be able to change his attitude towards Carole. Her own life soon settled around the routine of child-rearing, first one child, then two and then three. When Thomas was born, as Patricia looked down at him nestled in her arms, she often thought of her mother and her words of advice — nothing is more important than family. She had lost her brothers, Thomas and William, long ago and now she had lost Danny too. As she looked down at her first child, perfect in his features, she could feel the pounding of her heart and knew that if anything happened to her child it would not continue beating.
With her second son, William, and her first daughter, Elizabeth, Patricia felt the strings that tied her heart together tightening, strengthened by the way that Thomas would play with his little green soldiers, William draw pictures for her to stick on the fridge and her little Elizabeth arrange flowers in a vase with such earnest concentration. Elizabeth’s birth had been difficult and Patricia had almost died. This, she thought, made her daughter even more precious.
She had to juggle the demands of child care and was less able to assist Pasquale in the restaurant. She could barely find time to design clothes for Madelaine. But she was happy, and when Bob and Carole had their two she would often have all five children playing through her house.
With the arrival of her niece and nephew coming along, Patricia began to long for another child. The restaurant was going well and, with Daisy so eager to help, she was rarely needed. But when she said to Pasquale that she thought it was time for them to have another child, Pasquale asked her to wait a while.
“Why? The restaurant is making more money than ever and I am ready for another child. When Candice and Kingsley are here and there are five little ones, I feel the place is emptier when they go.”
“I hardly see you any more. You are never in the restaurant. Always here with the children.”
“But you see me here. I don’t understand. I thought we agreed that we would have five. You told me when we got married that if I was your wife I could have anything I wanted. This is what I want. Five children. Nothing is as important as this.”
“You are more important than this. You know what the doctor told you after Elizabeth was bom. He said you shouldn’t have more — it’s too dangerous.”
“He said it might be dangerous. And it is a risk worth taking.”
Pasquale remained silent. He could never argue with her when she wanted something. She had considered his complaint about seeing less of her, and it was true that they were really together only when he came home from the restaurant, late at night when she was exhausted. The feel of his hand sliding slowly down her arm still stirred her, but she was less and less able to summon the energy to respond to him. But her yearning for another child was taunting her and it was with delight that she confirmed with her doctor that she was pregnant again. His concern that her heart was weak did not dampen her spirits.
At first she headed for home but, enjoying the sunshine dancing on her skin, her feeling of elation drew her towards the restaurant to share the news with Pasquale. She would promise him that she would make sure she spent more time with him; she even thought, with all the money the restaurant was making, that perhaps he could hire someone to manage the place. Daisy seemed to know how the place ran and, although Pasquale would insist there needed to be a man in charge, Patricia was confident that her sister could ensure that everything ran smoothly. In fact, she thought, it would be good to give Daisy the extra responsibility. And Pasquale would see that she was right about having another child. He loved her. Even now, he would cradle her in his arms through the night as they slept.
As she walked in the back door of the restaurant, into the kitchen, she noticed Pasquale stepping back from Daisy, turning to look at her. She saw the shock on their faces at her unexpected visit.
Patricia laughed, “I know you think I don’t come here often enough, Pasquale, but you don’t need to look so surprised.”
“What are you doing here?” he sputtered.
“I have some good news and I thought I would come straight here and tell you. I’m glad you’re here too, Daisy. I’ve just come from the doctor’s, and guess what?” Patricia looked at Pasquale’s still surprised face. “I’m pregnant,” she said with a smile.
Pasquale and Daisy continued to stare at her.
“I know you said you weren’t sure whether the time was right, but it looks like God decided for us.”
Patricia began to feel confused about the silence. When she had told him she was pregnant with Thomas, Pasquale had grabbed her up in his arms and danced her around the room with glee.
“Tell her,” Daisy said as she took a step back towards Pasquale.
Pasquale still looked at Patricia, unable to say anything.
“
Tell her,” Daisy repeated as she placed her hand on Pasquale’s arm.
In response to Pasquale’s continued silence, Daisy said coldly, “I’m pregnant, too.”
As she saw the look of fear cross Pasquale’s face, Patricia realised the truth. She suddenly felt dizzy, as though time had slipped into some other hour. She turned and walked out, heading towards her home, where her children were and where everything made sense.
She entered her house and sat down in the armchair where she would sit to sew. With the children at school, the house was empty. She kept thinking that she had to go to pick the children up. She thought of Thomas, and the image of her brother and her son seemed to interchange. She was trying to catch her breath, to ease the sharp pain running down her arm. The pain heralded a thick wall of blackness.
Daisy could never see the self-satisfied way that Patricia would pat her pregnant stomach without being reminded of Marcel. When she began living in the apartment he had rented for her, she thought that this would be a stepping-stone to a better life. As her life began to revolve around Marcel, she felt herself becoming more deeply attached to him, waiting to hear the click of his key in the lock, sitting close to the phone expecting his call. She would run to him when he opened the door, then cling to him, kissing his face and neck, drawing him close.
“Cherie,” he would laugh, “I was here but yesterday.”
The more she longed for Marcel to be with her and dreaded his going, the more she wished that instead of being his mistress she could be his wife. “I would love to be married to you,” she said to him shyly one day as she lay naked across his trouser-clad lap. The sun was streaming through the window, dancing on Daisy’s light brown skin.
“If we were married, you would not be so pleased to see me when I came to visit,” he said, playfully slapping her thigh.
For five years he had dismissed her hints as light-hearted teasing. He would, Daisy thought, take her demands more seriously if she fell pregnant, if she could give him the child that Madelaine had never managed to.
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