Today in my long daisy chain of time, I’ve been thinking a lot about independence. My mother has always said that if she could teach me one thing, that would be it. She wanted me not to need anyone or anything, including a father. She said fathers weren’t all they were cracked up to be, anyway. They were just another person who could fail you. The closer people were, the more they could let you down. Knots near the needle are harder to untie.
When she returned to Banville, Susannah decided that nobody was going to cross her threshold unless it was on her terms. Because she worked for herself, she answered to no-one, and no-one controlled her. By making people pay for something that she could have given them for free, she had the upper hand. But when she was passed out on the bathroom floor with an eye slowly dappling purple and yellow and a string of vomit hanging in a gossamer thread from the corner of her lips, when the phone was going to be cut off in the next twenty-four hours if payment was not received, when I had eaten Milo from the tin for breakfast and the ceiling in the bathroom was leaking so badly that the plaster dropped in sodden chunks into the bath and mould crept in a green rash down the lounge room walls, it was hard to see how she had the upper hand over anyone. If this was the independence she was always talking about, I couldn’t see much good in it.
I was born at the hospital in Welonga, healthy, plump and fair. Susannah brought me back to Banville on the bus, wrapped in the hospital-issued muslin. When she was home, Susannah let it be known that she was receiving visitors. Usually when a baby was born in Banville, the mother could have filled a swimming pool with the knitted booties, appliquéd romper suits and satin-edged blankets she received from all the stickybeaks, well-wishers and other mothers dropping by. But, thanks to Susannah’s aloofness since her return from the city, not many of them took her up on her invitation initially. Eventually a few members of the Christian Women’s Society came by, performing their neighbourly duties. They found Susannah to be not at all defiant, as they had expected, but perfectly hospitable, even warm towards them. The house was in good order and the baby a Lamb of God, wrapped up like a Christmas ham with only her sweet little face visible. Once they had reported the lack of hostility, others came, driven by curiosity, three abreast at the door bearing casseroles like admission tickets. Taking tea on the verandah, while Susannah nursed me at her modestly shrouded breast, some of the bolder among these callers even ventured so far as to inquire about the infant’s father. Susannah, ever the actress, summoned an impressive welling of tears into her eyes and set her lower lip trembling. She clutched me tighter to her chest. She looked into the middle distance (her eyes resting on the stream of bird shit currently being ejected into the sandpit in the park). And then she whispered a name.
With each visitor, the name that Susannah whispered changed. But each was the name of a prominent Banville resident, well-respected family men, married churchgoers and generally well-liked citizens. Many of them were associates of her father’s. Some of those names were customers of Susannah’s, and others were not. She mentioned, among others, Phillip Delaney, George Wilkinson and Alfred Darcy, the last name being whispered to Adelina Perutti, Annie Darcy’s neighbour and best friend. Adelina turned white like flour when she heard her dearest friend’s husband incriminated in such a manner. Then she burst into tears right there on Susannah’s verandah, staring at the child in shock. It was Alfred’s? How could he? How was she ever going to tell Annie? As if the poor woman didn’t have enough on her plate already. She would skin Alfred and hang him from the church spire by his privates, Adelina vowed. So help her, God, she would. The more she looked at the baby’s squashed dumpling face, the more she thought she could see Alfred’s features taking shape. And him with this Vale woman, barely more than a girl herself. As soon as the tears stopped, Adelina would picture Annie’s face when she told her of this and they would begin again. Susannah handed her a clean and pressed handkerchief from a stash beneath her chair, but Adelina flicked her hand away. Samson only succumbed to temptation because Delilah flaunted her wares so provocatively, she thought. She told Susannah to prepare her soul for the Hell that awaited her and left, with one last searching glance at the babe. Susannah finished Adelina’s delectable hummingbird cake and stretched her legs out on the chair her visitor had vacated. The threat didn’t frighten her. She couldn’t believe in a God who would see her back in this house, in this town, before she had even met her thirtieth birthday.
In fact, Susannah had known who the father of her child was the moment the infant was placed wailing onto her chest, but his name was not one of those she whispered. As she had anticipated, the word spread quickly. In church, in the supermarket, at kitchen tables and over back fences, rumours were propagated throughout Banville like grass seed carried in the wind, taking root and spawning anew with each telling.
Susannah understood from her time in Sydney that the power of suggestion was mighty. It was enough for someone to think you may be somehow guilty for them to treat you as though you absolutely were. And so they did. Some of the men publicly denied her claims; others tried to buy a retraction with the promise of a monthly stipend. Several of them pointed the finger at another man, only to find someone else pointing at them. Some tried flat-out denial, but Susannah countered with her knowledge of freckles in intimate places and appendectomy scars shaped like scythes. Others among the men just admitted defeat, staring in silence at the lithograph of lines on their palms while their families sat apart from them in church.
Eventually, the townspeople realised that Susannah had issued paternity to more than half a dozen men, and they couldn’t all be responsible. Clearly, all this drama was what she had intended to effect from the outset. But such was the cunningness of her plan – the damage to the people of Banville had already been done. By the time they realised what she was up to, it was too late. Suspicion had been cast and reputations forever sullied. Nobody knew who to trust, what to believe, who was lying and who was not. Wives circled their husbands warily and sniffed deeply at their collars for scents not their own. Families unravelled at the seams, stitch by stitch. The wives of Banville knew Susannah offered a certain service, as it were, and certainly there were a lot of transient labourers around who might partake of such a service . . . But their own husbands? Their fathers? Their sons, Lord have mercy? The fact remained, the child wasn’t the Immaculate Conception, someone had to be the father, and even if they weren’t, shame on them for visiting that house of ill repute at all. There was no coming back from this. It was as though Susannah had poked her finger into a tiny hole in the social fabric of Banville and wriggled and wriggled it until there was a great big rent. She had planted a seed of doubt and it had grown into a cloak of ivy.
In the grand old house by the park, Susannah heard of each sorry development from Graham. Her favourite was the news that Sandra Gordon, hearing her husband Vince’s name in the mix, had pushed him for the truth about his mysterious absences so insistently that he had broken down and confessed that he had, indeed, been having an affair – with John, the husband of Sandra’s tennis partner, Verity Ingren-Glass. Graham was pleased to see Susannah laughing, but he fretted that she had made a rod for her own back with this scheme.
‘You’d better not go into town for a bit, Suze,’ he cautioned her. ‘You won’t be welcomed, love.’
‘When have I ever been welcomed?’ Susannah said, but she heeded his advice, and kept to her home. Graham brought her movies and groceries, and the American shearers from a cattle station near Welonga brought her bourbon. She had everything she needed. It was in this way that Susannah settled into the pattern that she would keep to from that time onwards, spending her days at home with me and her nights at home with men. Sometimes, in the afternoon quiet, she would take me outside and let me play under the hose while she lay on a blanket under the mango tree. From that spot, she would look up at the kitchen window and imagine she saw her mother still there, bent over the sink, and she would raise her glass to her in a toast to justice served. Banville had paid the price for letting her mother suffer. Susannah had brought the town to its knees. The actress tried her hand at directing, and pulled off the greatest show of all. And its people would not forgive her for it – not then and, as it happened, not ever.