CHAPTER 23

So that is the answer to my beautiful Alice’s inevitable question. That is where she came from. I am sorry it is not all good news: that her dadda is not her real father; that I thought I knew what I wanted, and I was wrong, and I did not find that out until it was almost too late.

Of course she is not old enough for me to tell her the whole story. Indeed, I cannot open my mouth and tell her anything yet, and probably there are things I can never tell her. I’m sure she will understand she was once Thomas, but how can she forgive me for the fact that she was once Belly and, before that, a burden I wished were gone? In my mind now I have to say goodbye to all those stages of her that were her and yet were not her, that I never even thought about, that Dr Foote’s manual assures me really did exist, though I never saw them, though they sound like the transformations of a fairy tale.

I want to say goodbye to the tiny knot of matter, and then the little fish, and then the thing like a curled-up comma, and then a being like a water-child with sealed-shut eyes and ears and throat, floating, connected to me by a magic tube that snaked into my own flesh and blood. It is a way of saying goodbye to parts of myself too. Who is to say where I stopped and she began?

And I want to say goodbye to how she made me feel: all the aches and pains and bloating and heartburn and crawling skin and insistent bladder and lumbering heaviness and flat feet and fatigue, and the moments when all my insides rose in revolt and splashed over the ground or across my needlework.

It is good for me to remember my story, as honestly as I can, and then I can decide how much to tell her in reality.

Nobody but Mr B knows about her. He has kept our secret. He also kept Erasmus, the Australian cockatoo, when Dr Musgrave with his pirate eye-patch went to prison for a long time. Mr B writes from New York to tell us how Erasmus is doing. The bird can still say only ‘Bye-bye’, but Mr B tells us that is enough. Erasmus is his guardian angel, he says. It was Erasmus who screeched ‘Bye-bye’ at him when he left Isis House in Sydney, not knowing it was Dr Musgrave’s house, after he had seen me sleeping and thought my child was dead. At first he did not realise what he had heard. Later, when his dyspepsia plagued him, the cry came back to him, and he knew black deeds were afoot and the child must be rescued and restored to the General. But when he saw me with Alice, all bedraggled from Iranistan, I reminded him of his wife when she was young, and still to be blessed.

So in the end, as the police inspector waited and waited for the answer to his question, ‘This is the child, is it not?’ Mr B took out his handkerchief and blew his nose and then said: ‘No, I made a mistake. I’m sorry I wasted your time. I know this child. It’s not the General’s.’ And he held out a lanky arm towards us: ‘It belongs to Mr and Mrs Nutt here.’

And so he rescued us. Actually it was Alice’s dadda who rescued me, but he always says that, in the end, I rescued myself. I certainly rescued Alice.

I’ve just sponged her all over with her favourite sponge, and dried and dressed her, and she smells like honey flowers. She’s galloping her wooden horses on the floor as I sit by a good fire, sip my tea and look at her.

So how did we come to England from the Antipodes? Mr Bleeker kindly paid for our passage from the show’s handsome takings in Australia, and Alice’s dadda and I were married on the ship, my first real marriage, for my wedding to Franz was nothing but a sham, and the so-called priest nothing but an undertaker’s assistant. When we got here, my husband set himself up first as a groom, and then as a cabbie, and then as the owner of a delivery business, on Hampstead Hill. Now we often walk past a house with horse-chestnut trees leaning over the wall, and Alice demands to see the tall white flowers, so I lift her up and she tries to grab them above my head. One day I will tell her that was her grandparents’ rectory, and whenever we walk by, I remember happy times before the cholera. Another family is there now.

One day we hope to pay Mr Bleeker back, and my husband hopes to write to his brother, and I hope to write to Mrs Bleeker, but not yet.

Charlie and Lavinia still believe my child was stillborn. Mr B says they were very sad for a while, but then an extraordinary change came over them, particularly Charlie. All his old vim and vigour returned and redoubled, and on his last night in Melbourne, when he shared a box with Mr B at the Theatre Royal, he jumped up on the stage as the Marching Amazons formed a guard of honour and he ran between the lady warriors’ legs, his white opera scarf streaming. I don’t know what happened to make him so perky, but I am glad to think that he and Lavinia are not suffering.

Our time in Dr Musgrave’s Iranistan has marked us. I’m sure Alice doesn’t remember it. And yet she screamed the first and only time I put her in a bath, she can’t bear even a bowl of water to touch her skin; all I can do is sponge her. Iranistan is why she won’t splash in puddles. Iranistan is why she won’t let me walk near the pond on the heath, why the sight of its glitter makes her grow pale and whimper and pull back. I still have a white tracery of scars on my arms from all that glass. And then there are my nightmares, though I don’t remember them when I wake, only the feeling, and my husband has to hold me until I stop trembling. We will just have to wait, Alice and I, and hope that in the end the dark current will cease flowing.

How her horses tap-tap across the floor, whinnying and snorting, but in a moment she will clamour to be in my lap. The grey cat watches her warily, in case she pulls its tail again. I have to keep separating those two.

Soon my husband will be home from work. He will stable Zep, give him a rub-down, feed him and Ludo and Emmy and the other horses. Alice will ride Emmy when she’s older; Emmy is the more gentle of the little ponies. I can’t wait for him to come through the door, sweep Alice up in his arms and kiss her on the nose, then embrace me, his springy curls at my shoulder, so different from Franz’s russet locks or the tightly shorn bristles on the head of Matilda’s papa.

‘How are you, dear goose? What’ve you been up to?’ he’ll ask me, sitting down to bounce Alice in his lap. ‘God’s teeth, bonny bab, you’re so heavy. I won’t be lifting you much longer. You’ll tower over us.’

Long tall Alice. I wonder how she will like her brother, or is it a sister? That’s one thing I have not told her dadda about yet, but of course I will.

When she is much older, I hope I can be brave enough to show her my heart.

I showed her dadda my heart before we even thought of leaving for England, when he first proposed marriage to me as I sat nursing Alice. At that moment I remembered the day in Green Ponds, Tasmania, when he had reached out to me, and I thought he would seize me, crush me to his leather vest in a wrestler’s or a lover’s embrace, and I shook with something I had not felt when Franz had put his manicured hands over mine at the piano.

After the proposal I shook again, but it was not fear I felt, and I longed to embrace him, but some scruple stopped me cold. Fate had thrown us together, but I did not want him to feel obliged to support me and my child, and was determined he should know the worst of me. If he then decided our ways should part, I would accept it, though something stabbed me deep at the thought of him walking away.

So first I asked if he was still in love with Emmeline, and he said he honoured her memory, but as for the rest, he thought it circus dazzlement. Then I said I had been dazzled too, and not just by Franz, and I told him that Mr Carroll never existed, that I had made him up. He did not even pretend to be surprised. So then I told him about Matilda’s papa and the house with the canary in the cage. When I finished telling him, his face was red and his fists clenching. Did he think me wicked? No, he said, he was angry at those who’d used me ill; there was no wickedness in me, only in the world, which feeds itself by making the virtuous feel wicked. But I was not so good neither, he said, for I wasn’t tractable. And he smiled at me when he said it and clicked his tongue, and the thing inside me stabbed me again, but this time it was a good pain of longing, and I thought to myself that I never wanted to look up to a man again.

THE END