Authors: Joy Dettman
‘I want to live with Uncle John and go to school with Pete.’
‘Your home is with us, poppet.’
L
IKE
R
IDING A
B
IKE
D
riving a car is a little like riding a bike. Once learned it is never forgotten. A skill becomes rusty when unused for twenty years. Only surface rust; it brushed off easily enough. The road rules had altered. Back when Laurie had taught Jenny to drive, she’d learnt two road rules. Don’t hit anything, and it’s a good idea to give way to the man on the right. Vroni, self-elected driving tutor, presented her with a book of rules. A hard taskmaster, Vroni.
Then another letter came from the Keatings’ solicitors, and on the same day the hospital rang. Margot’s baby was ready to go home.
On the Friday, two weeks into July, Vroni at her side, Jenny picked up Raelene from school then she drove all the way to Box Hill, where Florence couldn’t look her in the eye. No time to waste then, Vroni at the wheel, they continued on to the hospital.
‘Fifty per cent of Maisy’s grandkids have got pale purple eyes. She’ll know who that baby belongs to the minute she sees it,’ Jenny said.
‘Is the other grandmother still planning to raise her?’
‘I haven’t heard from her. I think she’s got her hands full with Margot.’
The baby’s eyes weren’t purple. It didn’t have the Macdonalds’ stumpy hands. It was bald. Margot had been bald until she was eighteen months old. Probably end up with her snow-white hair, Jenny thought, but something had to be done about it, so she did it. By five, Vroni was fighting her way through peak-hour traffic, home to Frankston, Jenny in the rear seat, the hospital-scented bundle in her arms.
The hospital had supplied them with a sample of baby formula. They bought a large tin of it at the chemist’s shop, bought two dozen napkins at a department store, three tiny singlets, three flannelette gowns, three bunny rugs.
‘Three enough?’ Vroni asked.
‘One on the baby, one on the clothes line, one sicked on,’ Jenny said, her arm aching beneath the small weight, her eye on a cane carry basket. They bought the basket too, and half-a-dozen feeding bottles.
Two women with a new toy, one of them childless and, according to her, barely knowing a baby’s backside from its elbow. The other’s motherhood skills a little rusty. They were still fussing with the baby when Jim arrived in a taxi at eight and Vroni left them to it.
He read the solicitor’s letter while the baby slept in her basket on the table. They went to bed in a room smelling of baby. And were shocked awake at five-thirty by a tremulous siren.
Saturday disappeared in the sterilising of bottles, the changing of that minute backside, the washing, the making up of bottles of formula and in the watching of baby lips sucking life from that teat.
The Keatings brought Raelene home on Sunday evening, and Florence, uncommunicative in Box Hill, wanted to hold the baby, to smell the scent of her, and to drip tears for the infants she couldn’t conceive, while Jenny told her a tale of a Woody Creek mother, and of a baby born early.
‘How many children has she got?’
‘Seven,’ Jenny said.
‘Some people have all the luck, don’t they. I’d sell my soul to have one. What did they name her?’
Elsie had named her Gertrude, though Jenny couldn’t bring herself to admit it, not to Florence.
‘Trudy,’ she said.
‘That’s pretty.’
It was a definite improvement on Gertrude.
Jim got a lift back to Box Hill with them. Raelene wouldn’t have a bar of him or the baby.
‘Why do you have to look after her?’
‘Because her mummy can’t look after her yet, like Florence couldn’t look after you when you were tiny.’
‘She can now, and I want to live at her house, not here.’
‘The baby will be going soon.’
‘And him too?’
‘No,’ Jenny said. ‘Not him.’
No driving lesson that day. No school, no work, and the sky threatening to rain on a clothes line full of napkins. Day gone before Jenny saw daylight, and Jim arriving with the rain.
‘On a Monday night?’
‘I don’t want him to come here again,’ Raelene said.
Jenny did. Tonight she needed him.
There’s something about grandchildren. They’re not yours, but they’re somehow connected into your bloodstream. Deny it you may, but they know. They see your face, and their silly little gummy mouths open in a gaping twisted smile. You know it is only wind, or your logic knows. Your heart doesn’t. It starts to melt.
Not by any stretch of the imagination could Trudy be called a pretty baby. Some were. Raelene was. She’d looked like a kewpie doll with her mob of black curls – Florence’s kewpie doll. Her behaviour that day, that night, was more demon than doll.
Jenny got Raelene settled sometime after ten, in the double bed. Jim would have to sleep in the kitchen.
They sat late then, Jenny balancing baby and bottle with one hand, drinking tea and eating toast with the other. There had been no time to cook a meal that night.
‘Not much of her,’ he said, watching her place the baby into her basket. ‘Doesn’t it scare the daylights out of you, handling her?’
‘I’ve handled a few.’
‘You look good together,’ he said.
‘It feels weird. She’s not mine. She’s a whole patchwork of genes accidentally come together. A smidgen of old black Wadi, a pinch of Harry, a sprinkle of Juliana Conti and Archie Foote – not too much Macdonald – and she feels like mine.’
‘A blending of nations,’ he said.
‘What would you say if I said I wanted us to raise her?’
‘That you were giving me a second chance to do something worthwhile,’ he said.
Margot’s bed was still there in the kitchen. Eighteen years ago, he’d picked Jenny up and carried her to his camp bed in Monk’s cellar. Joint will drew them to Margot’s. He’d grown accustomed to Jenny seeing him take that leg off, to sleeping with it beside the bed.
That was the night they made love, the night the butterflies flew again. That was the night Jenny’s world tilted, then righted itself, the night she kissed the tears from his face while Trudy slept on in her basket, on the table.
Dear Florence,
I’m not having Raelene taken away from me by some judge who hasn’t got a clue what he’s talking about, so if you are willing for us to work out our own arrangements, I’m willing to talk about it . . .
Dear Elsie and Harry,
Jim and I are going to raise Trudy. We know you love her and want to be in her life, and the only way we’ll manage that is if we move back there, which we are not going to do until Teddy and Margot sign the enclosed papers giving up all claims to her. Jim and I are going to adopt her, through the courts. I suggest you don’t tell Margot what it is she’s signing.
Jim has written to his Willama solicitors about Vern’s house. It’s been vacant for a while. They say it needs a bit of work . . .
Scott and Wilson, the Willama solicitors, replied by return mail, with a manila envelope containing a bulk of papers. Jim had been six years old when his mother died on an operating table. Vern Hooper was her second husband, Jim her only issue. Her first husband’s money had been placed into a trust fund for her son. Untouched for thirty-odd years, it had ballooned.
Scott and Wilson released money enough to buy a two-toned Ford Customline. Too big for Jenny, but it fitted Jim’s long legs. A Frankston solicitor was given the job of fixing up the paperwork which would give Raelene into the Keatings’ care.
Jenny took her driving test in August, in Vroni’s car. Jim left his job at the timber yards on 29 August, the day Florence and Clarrie drove to the solicitor’s office to sign the papers.
Happy Florence that day, bawling Florence as she hugged, kissed Jenny, hugged Jim who, not expecting it, almost lost his footing. Clarrie shook their hands.
Raelene, who didn’t like that baby and called Jim ‘Gimpy’, didn’t kiss or shake hands with anyone. Poked her tongue out at Gimpy, or Trudy, as the Keatings’ car drove away.
The Frankston solicitor was responsible for Jenny’s second registry-office wedding. He’d told them they were wasting their time thinking about adopting the baby unless they married.
Jenny’s ‘until death do us part’ vow sounded different the second time. No new ring necessary. The gold band she’d worn for sixteen years, though well worn, had worn well. It came off for two minutes while the words were read, then
Jen and Jim
,
1942
slid back to where it belonged.
W
OODY
C
REEK
G
OSSIP
C
harlie’s new tenant had mowed Vern Hooper’s lawns before vacating the big house on the corner. It took a while for a buffalo lawn to become a cow paddock. Vern’s lawns were long enough to qualify. Weeds, ostracised for years, denied their right to breed, had got their roots down and shed their million seeds. Birds bred beneath the abandoned veranda – as did a few of the bored town youth. Beer bottles, cigarette packets, a condom told its own tale.
The rosebush hedge, denied its winter pruning, reached out to grasp the attention of walkers and bike riders. Windblown newspapers snagged on rose thorns, waved to passers-by, while brown paper bags danced merrily along the verandas, sidestepping the splatter of birds who found perches at night in the rafters.
‘What a terrible waste of good living space,’ people said. ‘They’ve got six bedrooms in that house, two bathrooms, two sitting rooms.’
‘They say it’s sold. Marylyn was saying that there was a car parked in the drive for two hours on Wednesday. She didn’t recognise the driver, but he had a key.’
‘Another Melbourne retiree. The town is getting overrun by Melbourne retirees.’
‘She said he looked too young to be one of them.’
The chap came again, left again. The rains came and left. The rosebush hedge had begun to shake off its spiny mood when they came in force, an army of small trucks, utes, sedans, to park in Vern’s drive, on his cow-paddock lawns. One came with paint cans and ladder, one with rolls of carpet. One was Percival Scott, a Willama solicitor.
Maisy Macdonald heard about Percival Scott from Nelly Dobson, who had been employed by the Hooper family for years. Together they came up with a possible answer. Scott and Wilson had been Vern Hooper’s solicitors, back before the war. They decided that one of the Hoopers was moving back to town.
Vern Hopper, dead since ’52, had produced three offspring. All three were still living. Jim, the only son, had spent two years in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp. He’d lost half of one leg, some said his sight, and a few still believed he’d lost his mind over there. It was generally agreed that he wouldn’t be the one moving back to town.
Lorna, unwed, heading for fifty, had made her views on Woody Creek society very clear during her years in the town She wouldn’t come back. Which left Margaret.
‘It will be Margaret. She was on the Red Cross committee for years,’ Maisy said.
‘She got married, you know. She brought her husband up here that time to their manager’s funeral. What age would she be now?’
‘Well into her forties. When my Rachel was nineteen, Margaret was twenty-six,’ Maisy said, doing her sums on her fingers. She’d produced eight daughters before presenting her husband, George, with twin sons. ‘She’d have to be forty-eight, or close to it,’ Maisy said.
Vern’s roses were sprouting leaves, even buds, when the furniture van arrived. Two chaps unloaded a large refrigerator, a washing machine, a bed, table and chairs – and a baby’s cot.
It warranted a phone call from the nearest neighbour to her mother. ‘Someone is moving in. They just unloaded a cot. One of those polished wooden ones.’ The nearest neighbour had a fine view of Vern Hooper’s driveway from her eastern window.
Dawn Macdonald worked at the telephone exchange. She passed the news on to her mother. Maisy passed it on to umpteen more, and before that day was done, the town had Margaret Hooper breeding up a change-of-life family.
‘She was always a gentle dithery little thing. She’d probably make a good mother.’
*
They came on a Thursday in late September, in a showroom-new, two-toned green Ford Customline, and for minutes the telephone exchange ran hot.
‘It’s Jenny Morrison. She’s standing on Vern Hooper’s veranda, Mum, and she’s had another one. It’s in one of those baby baskets, and there’s a tall grey-headed bloke with her who has to be Jim Hooper.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Jenny Morrison. She’s got a baby and the bloke with her is unlocking Vern’s front door.’
‘No.’
‘I’m telling you she is, and that bloke is definitely Jim Hooper. He just took his glasses off.’
‘The last I heard, he was in an insane asylum.’
‘She never was too fussy. Wasn’t she on with him years ago?’
‘She had a boy to him. Her husband is hardly cold in his grave! How old is the baby?’
‘How can I see that from where I am? It doesn’t look heavy. They’ve gone inside. He’s limping badly.’
‘That’s how she ran him down.’
‘I thought he was supposed to be half-blind?’
‘He was wearing dark glasses at Vern’s funeral and didn’t seem to recognise me when I spoke to him.’
‘They’ve got a car, a big classy-looking two-toned green thing.’
There were more walkers about that afternoon, a few stopping to look at Vern’s overgrown roses. At midday, smoke was seen coming from Vern’s kitchen chimney. At one-thirty Jenny Morrison was sighted hanging napkins on the clothes line, and again the telephone exchange ran hot.
Two o’clock and Elsie Hall, who never walked into town, walked in alone, or walked as far as Hooper’s corner. She went inside and didn’t come out. At four-thirty, Josie, Elsie’s youngest, jumped off the school bus and made a beeline for Hooper’s.
‘Darkies wandering in and out of his house, Vern must be rolling over in his grave. She didn’t bring that retarded boy back with her?’
‘I heard that she put him in a home a few days after his father was killed.’
‘What about that dark-headed girl who was supposed to be Ray King’s?’
‘She’s not with them, or if she is, I haven’t sighted her. When did Ray King die, Mum?’
‘July of ’58. During the floods. Why?’
‘I was just working out if that baby could be his. I wonder how long she’s been on with Jim Hooper.’
‘She broke up her sister’s wedding by getting pregnant to him, I can tell you that. He was engaged at one time to Sissy Morrison.’
‘Hang on. She’s just come out with the two Halls. They’re walking towards the car. Jesus! She has come up in the world! She just got into the driver’s seat. I’m hanging up, Mum. Jim’s out, looking at the roses. I’m going to pop in and welcome him home while she’s not around. Call me back in fifteen minutes.’
Jen and Jim’s every move was reported that day. Robert Fulton, who had played cricket with Jim before the war, knocked on Vern’s door at six, after he’d closed his shop. He didn’t drive away until seven. The town would get nothing out of him. The Fultons were a close-mouthed lot, as was John McPherson and Amy, his schoolteacher wife, who were invited inside at seven-thirty and didn’t leave until after ten.
For days Jenny Morrison and Jim Hooper were discussed beneath the butcher’s veranda, in the newspaper shop, on telephones, over fences, though not in Charlie’s shop. Women eyed Georgie when they popped in for a pound of sugar, a few working so hard on questions they could legitimately ask that they forgot what they’d come in to buy.
Thank God for Maisy Macdonald. She called on the couple with one of her lemon meringue pies and came away full of information.
Trudy Juliana Hooper had been born on 11 April. She’d arrived two months early, and spent her first two months of life in hospital, a lot of that time in an oxygen crib. Maisy told the town that Jenny and Jim Hooper had been together since the night of the Magpies and the Demons grand final, twelve months ago.
‘Allowing for it to have been born two months early, she had her pants off that same night,’ the people said.
*
Trudy could have been Jim’s. She had Teddy’s brown eyes, his long legs, no hair yet, or not enough to say if it would be dark or fair.
Margot wore the scar of her caesarean birth, though no one, other than the Hall family, Georgie, Jack Thompson, Jenny, Jim, Vroni Andrews, her doctor partner, the medical staff at the Frankston hospital and a Frankston solicitor knew it – more than enough without Maisy, great-grandmother to that baby, knowing. She hadn’t been told, wouldn’t be told. According to Elsie, Margot had suffered a nervous breakdown. On her return to town, Margot had explained her illness to Maisy as indigestion and constipation.
She never looked at that scar, never touched it, never stood naked when there was light enough to see it.
There was a second scar on her belly, to the side, smaller, shaped like an eye, where she’d pushed the three-inch blade of Jenny’s vegetable knife in deep enough to let the air out of her belly. It had worked too. They’d put her to sleep at the hospital and when she’d woken up her indigestion had gone.
For a long time, Elsie convinced herself that Margot would come around, that she’d agree to marry Teddy and raise her own baby. A born mother, Elsie, a mother since Joey’s birth when she was twelve or thirteen years old, a mother to her nephew and niece and to five more of her own and Harry’s – and to Margot. Elsie never mentioned the scars, to Trudy or Margot. She’d wanted to raise her granddaughter, but for Margot’s sake had delayed bringing the baby home. Jenny and Jim had saved her making the choice between Margot and Trudy.
At forty-eight, Elsie’s hair was a salt and pepper grey. Her lighter hair colouring darkened her complexion, making her touch of colour more obvious. She still raised a few stares when she came into town, which she did, daily now.
It was assumed by most she’d been given the job of nursemaid. Vern Hooper had always employed someone to do his dirty work. It was generally agreed that Jenny Morrison thought she was someone, living in Vern Hooper’s house, driving her latest husband around in a brand-new car.
‘Have you found out what happened to her dark-headed girl?’
‘Her mother claimed her.’
‘Mother? Jenny had her to that Vinnie dago bloke, didn’t she?’
‘I’ve told you before. Ray brought those two kids with him when he came back. It’s turned out that he stole them from their mother while she was in hospital, or so Maisy says.’
‘I never did like the look of that man. You remember how his mother died?’
Give a kid a new toy and in days the novelty will wear off and he’ll swap it or leave it out in the weather. The novelty wore off Jenny, Jim and their baby. Within two weeks Jenny could back that fancy car out and turn it towards Forest Road or Willama, and not a curtain would lift nor a phone ring.