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AS SHE WAS scattering pink talcum powder on the brown
bottom of her adopted child, after changing diapers,
still in doubt whether the mixed smells of real baby
shit and artificial roses was a curse or a blessing, she said, very softly, in
her velvety wrap-around voice, to Fred, her husband: “Fred, have you
ever loved someone? —I love you, said Fred. —You got the question
wrong, I don’t want you to tell me you love me, or we are going to have
an R.D. Laing style argument! I meant: somebody else in the past... the
kind of love you could never suppress, however hard you tried?” Fred
was puzzled. It sounded to him like a Mills and Boon romance or the
Brontes revisited. When she was in that mood, he would sometimes jokingly
call her Catherine Linton Senior. Not a simple-minded guy, but he
sometimes hated complications to the point of rejecting complexities.
He preferred to take it on the comic side, exaggerating his favourite
blue collar mannerisms, learnt from his grandfather who had been a
foundry worker at Port Kembla in the twenties. “D’you mean, Carol,
you loved someone this way? It’s your bloody right. Me, I don’t think
I ever did, I am sort of reasonable, you should know, old girl, you’re
always mocking me for it!”
The baby did not cry. She was very quiet. So was life in general
these days, after the stormy early 70’s, the silence and solitude of the
next ten years, and the turmoil of the mid 80’s. When Matilda had
had to leave her house in Avalon and even change her name, because
her mother, crazy like all the women in the family for generations, was
making her life impossible, interfering with her every move, threatening
her, she had thought that everything was finished for her. Even Robert,
alias Youssef, had left her for a younger chick, a plump Italian secretary
from the office; Jacques was light years away, and it was too late in any
case; she was not going to turn to him, now that she was completely
lonely and unhappy, now that he had another life as a scholar who lectured
all over the world —some Sydney alumni had told her—and had
presumably married a successful European artist. After she had sworn
that she would never accept to be emotionally dependent. Fred was a
tall, well-built man in his early fifties, his sparse hair just greying, with
a Beckett-like vivid gaze in his clear bespectacled eyes. And a good,
sincere man. Intelligent and cultured. And he loved her dearly, in his
slow, unassuming fashion. She could rely on him.
The baby girl, back on her back, clean and dry, was pedalling
with her little legs (was she going to be short-legged? I hope not), babbling
and chuckling with her beautiful wide smile. They had got her
from Kalgoorlie, the daughter of a child prostitute at the other end of
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