CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

In London, for the first few days anxiety left me sleepless. If I woke, it was in a cold sweat. In the morning and in the late afternoon, I spent time in the bathroom vomiting until I was empty. I longed to see Bill and, at the same time, was terrified to tell him.

But there were no messages for me at the front desk of the YWCA. Was I being watched? Sometimes I thought so, but no one approached me. He hadn’t said he’d meet me in London, and yet I had to fly home via London. My mind invented reasons for his suggestion that I come here. Two men, who had spied for the Soviets—Englishmen named Maclean and Burgess—had disappeared from London. Maybe his plan was to defect to the Soviet Union. When he’d told me we were flying home, I thought it might have been some sort of code. He was the only person I had left.

The city still bore the scars of war: giant holes in the earth and derelict buildings around St. Paul’s. Every morning, when I descended into the lobby of the Y, I imagined him waiting for me, thin and drawn, but still young, as though the clock’s hands had slipped backwards and I was searching for the man I’d met right after the war.

For the three weeks I spent in London, a part of my mind was picking over scraps of conversation. I could not believe that Bill had been an informer of value, and yet Don Carmichael had spoken of Bill’s importance. It was incomprehensible that he had ever betrayed Frank and Suzy, but he had shown me those photos. I walked the curving streets in milky light. When the rain came down, I went into shops. The longer I spent there, the more lost I felt. If he wasn’t in London, then where was he? What should I do? I walked, because it gave me the illusion that I was travelling somewhere, and that I would not be in limbo, waiting forever.

A part of me hoped that a photo of him would appear in the newspaper, as a scientist who had committed treason, who had given away state secrets. This, for me, would demonstrate that he was loyal to some ideal, and the people I’d thought we loved.

After two weeks, a letter was waiting for me in the Poste Restante section of the London General Post Office. Back at the Y, I opened the envelope.

New York Metropolitan Jail, Women’s Section, October 15th,
1953
Answer my questions. Write me.
Bill told me he was coming to Canada on the way to London. He never showed. They extradited me for crimes under the Smith Act. I’ve heard he is witness for the prosecution. You got away. Why would Bill betray us? You were always straight with me. Please tell me what happened. Suzy

The letter was a series of blows to the brain. I paced my tiny room, picking up the paper, setting it down again on the windowsill. It lifted in the cold air that fingered its way through the seal around the window. So he believed in nothing. I had thought he must have a core, but now I wondered. Even if there was some essence to him, it was insubstantial, changing. There might be nothing inside him, nothing at all.

What about Suzy? What about her baby? She was in jail, and pregnant. Her own life was stopping while another life kept on. I started dozens of letters, trying to reconstruct what had happened. In the end, I wrote her a few lines, saying I couldn’t understand what Bill had done. I didn’t tell her that I was pregnant too.

The following afternoon, I bought another plane ticket. My body felt full of echoes: hollow. Maybe I was as empty as Bill.

In Melbourne, Essendon airport was a collection of sheds interspersed with expanses of concrete and surrounded by green fields. When I came down the stairs and stepped on to the tarmac, the light was blinding, a glare that seemed to strike me in the back of the eyes. The sky was bluer than any sky I had seen in my life. And not even the fumes could mask the stink of damp eucalypt, the odour of the bay. I swung my head around, looking for a city, a tall building on the horizon. There were sheds that looked like warehouses, and factories. No one was waiting for me, and yet I was grateful to stand in the sunshine, to be swallowed by this faraway place, because I was not in some New York prison. I was not under interrogation. And so I walked across the macadam, the plane’s propellers beating at my back, and found my way, feeling weak and insubstantial, to the bay.

Aunt Sammy’s gate was padlocked shut. I peered between the bars and saw the closed blinds, the garden sprouting weeds. She must be living somewhere else. I couldn’t countenance any other possibility. A woman carrying a shopping basket passed me. She held a little boy by the hand, whom I looked at curiously. Soon I would be holding a child’s hand. I asked if she’d heard about the old lady in the house. She said, ‘Had a stroke. The funeral was a fortnight ago.’

Poor Sammy. I might’ve deserved to be alone, but she did not. She should not have been left here. I wished I knew her state of mind when she passed away. I hoped that in her last months she’d been happy.

I sent my mum a telegram, telling her I was coming. I bought a ticket to Goulburn. If I could occupy my mind with practicalities, I wouldn’t need to think too much about Aunt Sammy or Bill or Suzy. Goulburn was where I’d stay the night, then I’d change for the train south, for Lake George. At the station, I sat in the cafeteria drinking black tea. A magazine lay on the table and I leafed through it. The pages were full of women with curls arranged around their faces, wearing flower-covered swing skirts, in imitation of the Americans. The more I stared at the pictures of young women, the less real they all appeared, as though they had been airlifted in from elsewhere and were aliens like me.

I found a seat on the train and watched the suburbs pass by. There were more houses now, all brick boxes, followed by market gardens. Everything was built low, as in parts of Queens. An hour later, the train passed through lumpy fields on the outskirts of Seymour. The country was brown-skinned and parched, and the sky was huge, bounded by low hills, an intense blue. The landscape was as unreal to me as the photographs in magazines. It was beautiful. It was rugged. It belonged in National Geographic. I’d been away only seven years, but I’d given this place up.

As people got off the train there was more space in the compartment, and I lay down across leather seats to ease my nausea. Here, there were no precipices of buildings, no flanks of houses to peer between, just ungainly-looking trees and dun-coloured fields. Over hours, my eyes grew used to the landscape. By the time I reached Goulburn, it felt almost normal to me.

It was dusk when the train stopped. There was the chiming of birds and the smell of crushed grass. Men stepped down from the train and walked like ants along a path to the road. Only the young ones appeared untouched by the Australian sun. Many of them, although they didn’t wear winter coats, turned up the collars of their jackets when they stepped onto the platform. Carrying my suitcase and handbag, I followed these men—I saw no women get off in Goulburn—through the grass to the Railway Hotel. There, the publican’s wife was suspicious of me, a woman travelling on her own, wearing clothes that weren’t warm enough for the hotel’s chilly rooms. That night it was hard to sleep. The temperature dropped, and even under the hotel’s blankets I shivered. My body was mixed up about what time of day it was. I lay on my back and listened to some creature—it must’ve been a possum—scratching itself in the wall cavity.

The following afternoon, I arrived at Lake George station. My mum waited under the eaves. I squeezed her tight, then drew back and took in her face, which was thick with powder. Despite all of her efforts, she looked old. Underneath her pink cashmere cardigan, her back was hunched. Her liver-spotted chest showed beneath her loop of pearls.

‘Come on,’ she said. Her grasp was firm as she led me down the stairs, as if she would never let me go again.

I said, ‘I didn’t know about Aunt Sammy.’

‘I sent you a letter. You and the letter must’ve crossed paths.’

‘I wish I’d been here for the funeral.’

‘A good many people from the hospital came—that place where she used to go, to read to veterans. She would’ve loved the hymns.’

‘Sorry I wasn’t there. Or for Dad.’

In the car, again I hugged her. Her cardigan felt doe-soft in my arms, although underneath I knew she was still made of wire. And then we drove home through familiar hills, past briars and the lake lying silver in its hollow.

We walked up the steps and into the house. Through distant, numbed eyes, I saw that she had bought new curtains, which hung red over the windows of the living room, and she’d had the armchairs re-covered in grey wool, as if she were entertaining from time to time. There were cats, which previously had been kept out of the house, sitting on what looked like a new settee, and on two of the chairs. To my pregnant nose, the place reeked of them. I didn’t blame my mum for letting them inside. I’d always known, even when I was young, that the isolated house would drive me mad with loneliness.

Within a few minutes, the smell of cat became overwhelming. I put my hand over my mouth and ran for the bathroom. Mum followed me and stood in the doorway. I was still rinsing my mouth in the basin when she said, ‘You’re pregnant.’ She threw back her head and laughed. ‘A grandchild! I’d forgotten I might ever have one.’

‘I have to eat something.’

In the kitchen, I found some bread in the bread bin. I spread it with ancient Vegemite. The Vegemite tasted salty, delicious. My nausea ebbed. She lifted down the teapot and placed the kettle on the stove.

‘I’ll get you something else,’ she said. ‘Some tea?’

‘Please.’

‘How long are you here? Until he comes back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When will he be back?’

‘I don’t think I can speak of him.’

‘I told you not to marry him.’ She busied herself opening and closing drawers. Then she brought out a small white card and handed it to me. It reminded me of the cards the Red Cross had given prisoners of war, on which to write to their families. Bill’s note took up a tiny space on the left-hand side of the card.

345 East 76th Street
New York, NY 10003
October 1st, 1953

Dear Annabel,
By now you must be enjoying your new life. Forgive me. In the end, I had to make an arrangement so that you could walk free.
What happens now doesn’t matter.
Bill

The card made it look as though he had no choice. And yet his address—East 76th Street—meant he wasn’t in jail. Of course he was witness for the prosecution. After all, that was what Suzy’s letter had said. He had made a deal: I will testify if I can escape jail. And if my wife is allowed to leave the country. I imagined he felt noble, trading his integrity for my freedom.

What happens now doesn’t matter. It mattered more than anything to Suzy and those other people who were locked up.

I dropped the card on the table. Mum was sitting at the other end, watching me. She put something on a plate, and set it in front of me on top of Bill’s card. I looked down. It was two pieces of shortbread.

‘It’s shearing next week,’ she said. ‘Did you know?’

I didn’t know.

‘Could you be cook?’

I shrugged.

‘Don’t shrug,’ she said. ‘It looks American. You can do mashed potatoes and sausages, lamb chops, can’t you?’

‘Of course.’

‘If you cook, I won’t have to pay for one, and I can keep an eye on things. Can you do the shopping too?’

‘Sure.’ The way I spoke sounded half-American.

Her expression was sympathetic. ‘You must be tired.’

She carried my suitcase herself and we went into my old room, where she’d fitted clean sheets on the bed. There was a cat in there. She chased it out.

‘You’ll be all right,’ she said.

After she had closed the door behind her, I sat on my bed in my old room. I surveyed handprints—mine—on the white wall. When I placed my hands on top of these old prints, I could see that my palms and fingers had barely grown.

I took out the card. Then I lay down. I’m walking free? I asked, aloud. I lifted the blind and gazed out at the ring of hills. And you’re free, too? I imagined a courtroom. I saw him sitting there, his eyebrows thick, his chin folded into his neck. How could he stand to be in the same room as Suzy, after what he’d done? Was our so-called freedom worth this?

I thought, he wants me to write back. He’d like me to absolve him. To say, Thank you.

If you knew me, I whispered, you would know that I never would’ve wanted this.

I woke when it was dark. The house was quiet. I crept out as though I was still seventeen. I walked over lumps of hardened clay to the edge of the lake. There were no stars, only thick clouds. Far off, I heard an owl say mopoke. I slipped off my shoes. The lake slid its icy fingers around my ankles. I felt my bones grow numb as I began to walk out into the middle.

Here, I was nowhere. I was in a lake in a place that no one had heard of. For years, I had longed to be at the centre of things, and for a time I had been there, men looking down microscopes at my cells. Now, I was a thousand miles from anywhere.

The water was at my neck: it was very cold. I was gasping. The lake was hard up against my ribs. It pulled at my clothes. I was willing myself to immerse my head. What I felt beneath the skin of my abdomen could not have been anything—it was too early to feel the baby—but my mind must’ve invented a strange and fluttering sensation. At the same time, I thought: who are you, Annabel? I stood for a moment, feeling how the cold mud filled the spaces between my toes.

I wondered again whose baby I carried, and what kind of creature it would be when it emerged. It might have Frank’s cunning eyes, or Bill’s hair and brows. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to tell whose child it was. It might look like me. I suspected it was Frank’s baby, the one he thought he’d never have.

When I could bear it no longer, when my teeth began to knock against each other, I made for the shore. My body was shaking. I walked up the hill, laughing and stumbling over rocks and roots of casuarinas, until I stood in the light of my room again, until I came to my senses and saw that I was back home, and I had to stand it. To learn this place and live here.