Of all the varieties and acts of love on Isonville, there was this: the children’s mother clamping their heads between the palms of her hands and saying: I love you, my darlings. Do you believe me? When she leaned forward to touch noses with them, their small, ear-sized hands flew up and smacked damply, ecstatically against the sides of her head. They knew she loved them. She was always saying it. Anna loved her father. He was on the road by breakfast time, and coming back from some far-flung saleyard when it was time for bed, and because she so rarely saw him, each time was a new time. She loves her dad, people said. She loved certain dolls, an invisible friend, Kip with grass seeds in his thumping tail, and, for a short time at primary school, an orphan boy who had jet-black hair and the face of a ravaged angel. Her love for him was a pure, straightforward yearning, as much to look like him as to stand near him. Then the weight of district opinion wore her down: The Floods are poor, shifty, smelly. What she got out of it was an interest in romantic love: Tell me about the man you wanted to elope with. Did he love you? We loved each other through and through, Great Aunt Beulah replied. We were meant for each other but my cruel father drove him off. Aunt Beulah was creased and rouged and talcumed with age, yet she wept like a heartbroken slip of a girl. Anna imagined how her parents might have wooed. She stared her way into old photographs the size of playing cards and watched her parents kiss and canoodle. Her father wore his slouch hat and cigarette at cocky angles, a knowing grin bending the narrow planes of his handsome face. Beside him her mother tipped back her head to laugh, revealing her throat, her hands on her thighs, fighting down the gritty wind on a city street. Who took the photos? Dad’s army mate. Anna’s love for her friend Maxine lasted until they were both fifteen, when things went unaccountably wrong. Anna would spin around on the spot, saying: I want to be a wild, free, erotic perfect lover for my lover, failing to notice how earnest and chaste her friend had become. They grew further apart and Anna found herself branded slack, a moll. It was an undeserved reputation, but who would listen to her? So she grew into it, becoming flippant, arbitrary, careless, callous, qualities that intensified as the small-school whispers intensified. She was a fixed target in the moral landscape. Then she blinked, saw Lockie Kelly, and at once grew still and restful. She was a lover, now—all the other acts had been acts of grief, greed and hate. She made tender declarations to Lockie and the hateful whispers faded to nothing around her. But if she thought that love and a lover were solutions to life, she was wrong. Life had a way of insinuating itself. First, she left Lockie behind to study in the city, then she began to think about things outside of love. Ideas have consequences, some of them unpleasant. When it was clear that Lockie was going unquestioningly away to war, she took a lover to hurt him. And hurt herself, for the lover was egocentric and manipulative. She longed for him, was ecstatic when she made love to him, frustrated when she couldn’t be with him. Yet he was no one to write home about—dry skin, age-lines, a hint of desperation at the passing of the years. He would present himself to Anna as a man with an inner pain, and she would see herself as the solution to his pain, the place where he might come to rest. A day, a fuck later, he would be austere and withholding again. Anna’s head spun. She was poised to start her life after her childhood in the bush: surely he would start it for her? Everything in her that was lovely, unknowable, unclaimable and full of drama was waiting to be released. When eventually the ecstasy faded, the pain remained. Then one day she woke up: the boys from home were falling in a foreign war. A few years later, Anna met Sam Jaeger. He was three years older, someone she’d scarcely noticed at school. She scarcely noticed him now, so sunburnt was he, so anxious, so desirous of settling down. But: I’m tired, Anna told herself. He’s a decent man and I can rest in him. I won’t tell him that I don’t love him. Perhaps he senses that anyway. Perhaps love and companionship will grow. Sam seemed to adore her. He adored the kids in a thousand little ways. At bedtime, the CB radio crackled into life on the kitchen wall as he wished Michael, then Rebecca, goodnight, the tractor engine rumbling in the background, the tractor’s headlights crawling along the valley floor if the children cared to look for it from their bedroom window. Anna wondered if women sought a woman friend in the men they married. They were unlikely to find it. For example, if Anna wanted commiseration from Maxine, she got commiseration. From Sam she got advice and bolstering and a jollying-along that left her exhausted. She wondered if Michael and Rebecca saw love behind the inflexibility and harsh propriety of their grandparents in the house below. Sometimes they came back up the hill from the Jaegers to their mother, the sinner, full of love for the Saviour. Mum, have you found God? These days Anna tries to make allowances. She doubts that many relationships can withstand very much scrutiny. Old man Jaeger is dead, Mrs Jaeger is dying, and if they were not united by love then at least they were united by faith. Of her own situation, Anna has told herself that you may find ways to resolve the loss of a true love but not the loss of a child. Any love interrupted is devastating, but the lost love of a child is the only one that can’t be mended. It tends to blunt and mute you. That’s how she sees it now and she hopes that Rebecca understands. Anna will take out her manuscript from time to time and read what a mother in Berkshire had written to her only surviving son, leaseholder of pastoral land near Pandowie, in the colony of South Australia, in the year 1854:
It wouldst afford us great comfort if thou couldst find it in thy heart or thy day to write to us oftener than heretofore, my dear one, but, if thou art so occupied as to be unable to do so, might thou engage thy good wife to address a few lines in thy stead? All unite in love to thee, from thy affectionate Mother, Rebecca Ison.
Anna will close her eyes and feel affection for the intensity of every one of her younger selves, all that pain and love.