Norman named the infant Jennifer Carolyn, for the initials on the handkerchief, and through the remainder of that long hot summer, Amber kept her clean, comfortable and well fed. Gertrude visited once or twice a week, ate lunch with her family on Fridays.
All seemed well until the tombstones were erected and on a Sunday afternoon in early March the little family walked out to the cemetery with flowers to place on old Cecelia’s grave. Her stone, of white granite, had three angels perched on it, at each side and on top. It looked very fine indeed, was one of the finest stones in the cemetery. She would have been pleased with it, and with her name cut deep.
No mention of the stillborn boy they’d buried with her in that grave.
‘It’s as if I’d never carried him,’ Amber said. ‘It is as if you expect me to forget him. You had no right to put him in with her anyway.’
She was expected to forget him, as Norman hoped others would forget him. Jennifer Carolyn had been registered in his place.
‘It was considered . . . considered expedient at the time, my dear.’
‘You should have opened up his brother’s grave.’
‘Charles suggested —’
‘To hell with Charles, and all of your Duckworth relatives. He was our son and I carried him, and I’ll never put her in his place.’
‘He will never be forgotten by us —’
‘Then why didn’t you put his name on your mother’s stone!’
‘We did not name him, Amber.’
She walked away from his ornate stone, left him there with the children, the pram pointed in the wrong direction. He manoeuvred the thing around, set its wheels back on the gravelled path and pointed it towards home. He lifted the stocky Cecelia to her feet, pointed her in the direction of her mother.
‘Walk,’ he said. ‘Amber! Will you come back and get this child? Amber?’
She waited and took the bawling girl’s hand. Norman pushed the pram home.
The subject of tombstone and name on tombstone was not raised over dinner. He hoped it was buried. She got the children settled while he read the paper. All seemed well.
But all was not well.
‘You and your Reverend Charles Duckworth didn’t give me time to name him, did you? You let that praying old swine rip him from my arms —’
‘Enough, Mrs Morrison. You are upsetting yourself.’
‘I was upset when you wanted to name my daughter for your mother, when you wanted to name my boy Clarence Arthur. Why didn’t you name this one for your family?’
‘Jennifer?’ He glanced towards the nursery. ‘She is not . . . is not of the . . . line.’
‘Lucky Jennifer,’ Amber said, swiping his newspaper from the table.
He picked it up, sorted the pages. She went to bed, with Cecelia.
He went to her later, kissed her, hoping to make the peace. ‘Your place is in my bed. This has continued too long.’
‘I told you I wasn’t going through that again, and I meant it.’
He sighed and his lower regions sighed. No doubt her mood would pass. He hoped it would be soon. It was not natural for a man of his years to be denied the comfort of his wife. His sleep was disturbed.
She disturbed it again before dawn. He heard her in the kitchen and, when he crept out, caught her pouring a glass of brandy. He reached for it. She was a determined girl. The table between them, she drank it down like water.
‘You will turn the babe into a tippler,’ he said.
‘I can’t sleep.’
‘Nor I. Come to my bed. Perhaps we can comfort each other.’
‘Go to hell,’ she said. And she poured more brandy.
‘You must not, Mrs Morrison. It is not fitting for a woman to drink hard spirits!’
‘It’s your fault that he died anyway,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t brought every relative you own up here then expected me to run around after them, I would have carried him to term. They killed him, and you let them do it, then you let that cold-blooded old parson bury him in with her. Did you even ask me what I wanted?’
‘You were in no fit state!’
‘Then you should have waited until I was in a fit state. Did you ask me if I wanted to raise Jennifer?’
‘You screamed for her, my dear, dear Amber.’
‘I was out of my mind. You could have stopped me.’
‘You are difficult to stop.’
She’d emptied the glass and was reaching again for the bottle.
‘No more. What you put into your mouth makes its way to the child.’
‘The child,’ she said. ‘As if I give a damn about the child. She’s not mine. I feel nothing for her, Norman.’
He claimed the bottle. ‘What is one expected to feel for an incontinent infant?’
‘You tell me. You tell me what I’m supposed to feel. I spend my life trying to feel what I’m supposed to feel, and I feel nothing.’
‘Surely love for a child grows, as it does between man and wife?’
She laughed then, tried to get by him, but he caught her arm, pulled her to him, desperate to hold her, to prove his love for her in the only way he knew how. She stamped on his bare foot and got away, opened the back door and went out to the verandah.
‘Come to bed,’ he said.
‘Do you know what I really feel, Norman? I feel sick in the stomach every time you touch me. I can’t stand you or your bed, and if you don’t know that by now, then you’re more fool than you look — and that’s saying a mouthful.’
‘Mrs Morrison!’
But she was gone, in her nightgown, gone out the back door, down the verandah and out the side gate.
He did not pursue her. This business of the tombstone had upset her. Perhaps placing the dead infant in with his grandmother had been poorly done, though a practical solution at the time. Three funerals in five days, the heat excessive, the earth bone dry, and that boy had not gone to term, had not breathed, had not been baptised. It was Charles who had suggested he be placed with his grandmother. Moe Kelly had seconded the motion and the grave diggers had applauded with blistered hands — earth newly broken being more easily removed.
And at the time, Norman had not been himself. Still traumatised by his mother’s passing, and now his so-wanted son’s, he had left the arrangements to Charles. Later, as things had evolved, he had come to believe it was God’s will that his son be forgotten and Jennifer Carolyn raised in his place. However, for Amber’s peace of mind, a name, if not a date would be added to his mother’s stone. Archibald Gerald perhaps, for her father. She had been fond of her father.
He raised the subject the following night when she poured her glass of brandy early. He poured himself a small drink — only to empty the bottle.
‘I have been thinking we should name him for your father, my dear.’
‘Don’t try to crawl around me, Norman. I meant what I said last night.’
Two more days, the brandy not replaced, he found her pouring cooking sherry. He claimed the bottle, emptied it onto a shrub growing beside his back verandah.
For three days his meals were flung at him, his bed remained cold, and tiny Jennifer, rarely heard, now screamed for the breast.
‘We will make other arrangements for her,’ he said. ‘I will take her to Melbourne at the weekend, deliver her to the authorities and confess my guilt. Until then, she must be fed, Amber.’
‘And what will people think of me then?’ she snapped.
‘It is of no consequence what people think of you, or of me. We must have peace in this house.’
‘I have to live in this filthy town!’
‘Then tell me, tell me, please, what it is you want me to do, my dear, dear Amber, and I will do it, only feed that child.’
She knew what she wanted him to do: to get out of her life, or to give her the money to get out of his. Couldn’t say it. She bared her breast and fed the baby.
Exhaustion tumbled Amber into sleep each night and nightmares flung her back into wakefulness. Each was different, but each the same. Her son’s cry led her into dark forests, through graveyards where she wandered between gaping holes searching for him. She found him too, and in terrible places — in the creek, hung from a hook in the butcher’s shop, floating face down in the green sludge of her mother-in-law’s grave. She found him in cartons of groceries, under the bridge. Always dead.
Maisy saw her despair. She took both children to her house each afternoon while Amber slept, her nightmares fewer by daylight. Gertrude spent too many of her days in town caring for her grandchildren while watching weariness strip the little flesh from Amber’s fine bones. But on many a day when Maisy couldn’t come, when Gertrude stayed at home, Norman came from work to find his wife locked in her room and the two children screaming.
‘Amber. The children need you. Amber!’
His voice dragged her from dream. She’d found her son in her mother’s old trunks, underneath the verandah, found him crumbling, but had placed him to her breast. And woke heart racing, her arms empty.
Opened the door, saw him, the living baby screaming in his awkward arms, Cecelia bellowing at his knees. Put the infant to suck, and its sucking made the emptiness within her grow. Its sucking opened gaping hollows in her heart.
Nothing inside her now.
Empty now.
Hollows have a way of filling with whatever the wind blows in. Amber’s hollows filled with a rage she had to contain. She was an inferno of unreleased rage. It glowed in the dark, lit her way when she walked in the night. Lit up the darkest corners of her mind, showing her what she should not see, showing her the beast she’d wed for his railway house and for his mother’s fine bone china tea set. Showing her the beast’s child, ugly, clumsy.
And showing her the infant’s finer bones, her well-defined features, her big blue eyes. Loved her beauty. Loved that tiny nose, that little chin. Hated her own daughter’s flat, fat face, her thick Duckworth feet, her coarse dark hair.
Hate and love became confused. Had to hate the child of that stranger and love her own. Must love her own. She’d carried her. Did love her. Did. Did. Hadn’t she rejoiced at the moment of her birth?
Ruby she’d thought to name her, Ruby Rose, a pretty name for a pretty child. Ruby and Amber, she’d thought, mother and daughter. And I will be the perfect mother to my perfect child. I will make a perfect home. I will cleanse myself in my child.
His mother had scoffed at her choice of name. For two weeks her beautiful baby had remained nameless, and at the end of those two weeks there was no beautiful Ruby Rose, only Cecelia Louise, flat-faced, hook-nosed, infant replica of the old Cecelia.
Hated the sight of her.
Had to love her.
How could anyone love that pig-eyed, sullen, wilful, screaming, resentful . . .
Resentful of Jennifer.
And why shouldn’t she resent Jennifer? Amber resented her beauty.
And she smelled wrong.
Cecelia smelled right.
In the dark, Cecelia smelled beautiful. Smelled like home.
Home?
Wanted to go home.
Where was home?
Not her mother’s hut. She hadn’t been down there since she’d left the place. Norman’s house was home, his mother’s fine furniture, her velvet rug big enough to near cover the parlour floor, her peacock feathers in their expensive vase, her heavy drapes.
This house was home.
Not Norman. Couldn’t stand him. Couldn’t stand the smell of him. Always hovering over her. Always watching, trying to touch her. Couldn’t stand the thought of his thick hands on her.
Cecelia had his hands. She had his feet. But in the dark, in bed, when she couldn’t see her, when she held her close, she could feel love for her.
Did love her. Not him. Loathed him.
‘You are my wife, Mrs Morrison. You swore your vows before God —’
‘Take your God and shove him, Norman. And take that baby with you.’
In an era when God sat assuredly in heaven, when man, made in God’s image, sat a few degrees to his left, when wives loved, honoured and obeyed their husbands — whether they did or not — Amber was severely out of step.
She had been raised by an independent woman to believe that man’s reward was gained on earth by hard labour, that Sundays could be better occupied in digging post holes than in praying. In a good woman of sound mind, wrongful attitudes can be forgivable.
Amber’s mind was not sound.
It happened in mid-March. She’d nursed Jennifer at ten at night, then crawled back into Cecelia’s bed where she’d slept soundly until dawn. She’d dozed thereafter, waiting for Jennifer’s call, but for the first time the baby had taken it into her head to sleep through the night. Amber’s breasts were full. Perhaps the low neck of her gown released a leaking breast, or dreaming again of her crumbling son, had she bared her breast so he might suck. The how of it was of no concern, just the awakening to bright light and to the pure and perfect peace of her own girl’s mouth at her breast, and to the sweet relief of a full breast emptying, and the blissful relief as love for her girl filled the gaping hollows within her soul.
‘Mummy’s precious girl,’ she whispered as she kissed the sweet-smelling hair, buried her nose in the scent of it. ‘You’re Mummy’s own very precious girl, aren’t you? Take it all, my beautiful,’ she said. ‘Empty me.’