The Mothers Read online

  Rod Jones’ first novel, Julia Paradise, won the fiction award at the 1988 Adelaide Festival, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award and was runner-up for the Prix Femina Étranger. It has been translated into ten languages. His four other novels, Prince of the Lilies, Billy Sunday, Nightpictures and Swan Bay, have all either won or been shortlisted for major literary awards. Rod Jones lives near Melbourne.

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  Copyright © Rod Jones 2015

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company 2015

  Cover and page design by Text

  Typeset by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Creator: Jones, Rod, 1953-author.

  Title: The mothers / by Rod Jones.

  ISBN: 9781922147226 (paperback)

  9781921961649 (ebook)

  Subjects: Mothers—Fiction.

  Motherhood—Fiction.

  Family secrets—Fiction.

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

  Contents

  Part One

  Alma,

  FOOTSCRAY 1917

  Molly,

  BRIGHTON 1925

  Molly,

  FOOTSCRAY 1928

  Part Two

  Anna,

  NORTH FITZROY 1952

  Part Three

  Molly,

  ESSENDON 1958

  Part Four

  Cathy,

  FITZROY 1975

  Part Five

  Anna,

  COCKATOO 1990

  To Maria

  What makes you read the contours of your body like lines on the palm of a hand

  so that I cannot see them otherwise than Fate?

  RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Alma

  FOOTSCRAY, 1917

  AT FIRST SHE thought it was a boy watching her. He stood, hands in pockets, hat pushed back on his head, bicycle propped against a tree. Had he stopped out of curiosity, or was he calculating some advantage to be gained? He was not tall—hence her impression that he was a boy—but he looked strong, with shirtsleeves rolled up over meaty arms, coatless on this winter afternoon. Although it was Saturday, there was no one else around. She was not afraid of him, but nor was she able to forget he was there.

  Alma had been sitting on the bench with her valise, in the new Footscray Park, for the greater part of the afternoon, watching her children run around the garden beds and play hide-and-seek among the trees. How long exactly? She couldn’t tell. Her husband, Frederick Fairweather, owned a timepiece; Alma did not. Already the trees cast long shadows across the lawns. Still the man watched.

  Her children, Edward, seven years old, and Olive, six, were hungry: with all the uproar at home, they had missed their midday meal. They were too young to comprehend the significance of what had taken place but they must have realised that this Saturday in May was different from any other day they had known.

  Alma had gone to her mother’s house for help. The wind was cold and the streets empty. She carried the valise, Teddy and Olive beside her, her plush hat pulled down over her blonde hair, her mouth grim. She was wearing a blue woollen coat, thick stockings, boots. Teddy and Olive both had their father’s black hair and dark eyes. Her mother wouldn’t even let them in the door. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ she told Alma, ‘now go and lie in it.’

  When Alma had married in 1909, a month after her sixteenth birthday, she was already pregnant. Frederick Fairweather was a great admirer of the playboy Edward VII, and she thought Frederick had even modelled himself on the former Prince of Wales, with his girth and his beard, his cigars and his whores. The King had produced bastard children, but Alma was determined that their child would be born in wedlock. Her son was born the following year and Frederick had insisted on naming him after the King. A few months later, on the 6th of May 1910, the King had died of heart disease.

  Her husband had been engaged in several occupations, none of which had lasted very long. He worked for Stan Hollibone, the undertaker, and Alma thought Frederick cut a dashing figure in his tail coat and striped trousers. But he had quarrelled with Hollibone over money. Then Frederick had an interest in one of the tourist launches operating on the Maribyrnong River; then he had been the manager of a dance orchestra, then a proxy for a publican who was wanted by police and had to make himself scarce for a while. Alma’s marriage had not been happy. Now this had happened. Her husband had turfed her out.

  Eventually the man in the park wheeled his bicycle over. ‘Why are you crying?’ he asked Alma. She noticed he was wearing a black armband. He had a mouth like a beak; his grey-blue eyes never left her.

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked. Alma was unsure whether she should speak to him at all.

  ‘I’m Alfred,’ he said.

  She told him why she was crying.

  ‘My mother will know what to do,’ he told her.

  Alfred hoisted the little girl onto his shoulders, insisted on carrying the valise as well as wheeling his bicycle, and the four of them set off like that down Ballarat Road. Before long Alma relieved him of the valise: she was afraid little Olive was going to fall. Alfred could wheel the bicycle with one hand and secure Olive’s legs with the other.

  They passed a horse and dray outside a house, loaded with somebody’s possessions. A man emerged from the front door carrying two wooden chairs and added them to the pile. People in Footscray were always moving in or moving out. Evictions were frequent. A stack of someone’s furniture in the street was a common sight, but this one finally focused Alma’s mind. Before nightfall, she would have to find somewhere for herself and the children to stay.

  It was nearly dark when they arrived at the house in Empire Street. Alma knew this part of Footscray: her father had worked in the nearby quarry.

  ‘Now, Alfred,’ Mrs Lovett said when she looked up from her kitchen table and saw them at the back door. ‘What is it you’ve gone and done this time? Who are these people?’

  ‘I decided to nick off early from the drill hall. I rode down to Footscray Park and that’s where I found them. They have nowhere to go.’

  Alfred herded Alma and the children into the kitchen and introduced them to his mother. Mrs Lovett was a big woman with pink puffy hands. She smiled at Alma. ‘Bring the children over here beside the stove. They must be freezing.’

  Alma looked around. There was a high loaf on the breadboard, a tin of plum jam, a brown china teapot. On the stove, some potatoe
s were bubbling in an enamel pot. And there was a photograph on the mantelpiece, a soldier in uniform, a badge on the collar, wearing his cap. He looked so young.

  Teddy was eyeing the tin of jam. ‘Sit down and have a bite with us,’ Mrs Lovett told them.

  Teddy and Olive devoured the thick slices of bread and jam, then waited to be offered more.

  Mrs Lovett held her teacup with her little finger extended and Alma had to frown at the children to stop them laughing. Alma could hardly talk, she felt so nervous.

  ‘Did something happen at the drill hall?’ Mrs Lovett asked her son. ‘Did you rattle the sergeant’s nerves again?’

  ‘Jesus Christ! I have to work on Saturday mornings and I don’t see why I should have to give up my afternoon to march up and down inside that cold hall with those damned Citizen Forces, following orders in case the bloody empire needs me.’

  ‘Now, Alfred,’ his mother chided him. ‘No need for that kind of language.’

  Alma decided to speak up. She turned to Mrs Lovett and said, ‘You are very kind to have us in.’

  ‘It’s what our Pastor Goble preaches: charity begins at home.’

  ‘I’ve heard of him—Goble of Footscray.’

  Neither Alma’s father nor her mother had been churchgoing people, and she was largely indifferent to religion.

  ‘Mr Goble was a great comfort after the loss of my son,’ Mrs Lovett said.

  Alfred explained that his little brother, Archie, had enlisted in E Company of the 7th Battalion, the ‘Footscray Company’ it was called, its colours tan and red, the ‘Mud and Bloods’. ‘Archie finished his training at Broadmeadows and was due to leave for France last year, but he was struck by a car as he stepped off the running board of a tram in Mount Alexander Road. Killed instantly,’ said Alfred bitterly.

  ‘Only eighteen years old,’ added Mrs Lovett.

  As Alma discovered during tea that evening, Mrs Lovett was worried because Alfred had begun hanging around with one of the Footscray pushes—the Dingoes, they called themselves. He had already been in several fights with soldiers.

  ‘Well, I can tell you right here and now that I have no intention of joining up! Not E Company. Not the 7th Battalion. Not any of their other bloody companies or battalions,’ said Alfred. ‘Give me the company of the Dingoes, any day.’

  The Lovetts had moved from Tasmania three years earlier. The Huon Valley was all Alfred had ever known, but his mum didn’t want her boys working in the Mountain River sawmill that had claimed her husband. At present, Alfred worked for Mr Ward, a maker of harnesses and horse collars in Footscray, though he had also worked at an iron foundry in Seddon.

  After their meal, Alfred took a cigar from his pocket and put it in his beak of a mouth. The match flared and the tip of the cigar began to glow and the kitchen filled with the rich, sickly smoke. Alma discovered that night that she and Alfred were nearly the same age: she would be turning twenty-four in July, while his birthday was later, in November.

  The children were finding it hard to stay awake. Olive kept nodding off and waking every few minutes, and Teddy was rubbing his eyes.

  ‘How long have you been married to this husband of yours?’ Mrs Lovett asked.

  ‘Seven years,’ Alma said.

  ‘And he just kicks you out? No, my girl, there’s got to be a reason for a man to behave like that.’

  ‘He didn’t come home last night. Then he just turned up at eleven o’clock this morning, drunk, with a woman.’

  ‘With a woman? You mean a woman from the street?’

  Alma hesitated at this. She really didn’t know. All she knew was the way the woman smiled with embarrassment, her lips covering her teeth, and that she had worn a green hat, and Frederick had introduced her as Mrs Leicester. This is Mrs Leicester. She lost her husband in France, he’d said. Alma felt that Mrs Lovett didn’t really believe her.

  There was a sleep-out in the corner of the back verandah, with timber walls and louvre windows, where Mrs Lovett said they could stay for a few days, until things at home were put to rights. ‘A man has a duty to support his wife and children,’ she pointed out. She said she would mention their situation to Pastor Goble in the morning after church.

  Alma put the children down on stretcher beds. She covered Teddy with a rough grey blanket. He lay on his back, eyes staring up at her for a moment, before he closed them and kept them closed. His breathing was regular but Alma could not tell if he was asleep.

  Alma hugged Olive, making soothing sounds, no words, just the cooing that reassured the child when she was upset. A series of long sobs shuddered through the girl’s body, then she grew heavy in Alma’s arms and in another minute she was asleep. Alma lowered her onto the stretcher, pulled the blanket over her, and she was surprised to notice several individual drops fall on the sleeping girl’s face. It was as if someone else were crying. Alma rose impassively and moved away, wiping her tears with her sleeve.

  The single bulb was dim but she could make out her own face in the hexagonal mirror set into the door of the cedar wardrobe. Her hair had escaped from its pins and wisps clung to her broad forehead. Her tired blue eyes stared back at her. ‘What’s wrong with me?’ she thought. ‘I can’t even keep my husband.’

  When she opened the wardrobe door, there were some trousers and shirts hanging inside: she guessed that Mrs Lovett hadn’t been able to bring herself to give them away. The sleep-out must have been Archie’s room.

  In spite of her exhaustion, Alma could not get to sleep. The day would not die. She kept thinking of the things Frederick had said to her, and how her own mother had turned her away. She dreaded the days to come. One of the children would break something. Or she would inadvertently cause offence. The soft heart of Mrs Lovett would grow hard and she and the children would be back on the street.

  She rolled onto her side and heard the canvas of the stretcher creak in the dark. She missed her own bed. The woman in the green hat was probably warm in that big, comfortable bed, which had been Alma’s wedding bed, where she had given birth to her two babies and slept every night for seven years. Now she had no bed to call her own.

  A door opened, then quietly closed. A cautious footstep on the bare boards beside the sleep-out. Someone was standing there, listening in the dark. Then she heard the crunching of boots on the cinder path down to the outhouse by the back fence. She knew, without knowing, that it was Alfred.

  Alma’s father had been a powder monkey in Mr Eldridge’s quarry. He drilled a hole in the cliff face, planted the charge and rolled out the fuse wire. Some of the men were missing fingers but Papa kept all his. When Papa came home, he used to sit in a wide green armchair in the parlour, with a smoker’s stand, and Alma on his knee. She liked to bury her face in his vest and shirt where she could smell the curiously comforting traces of gunpowder.

  Her father had died not from gunpowder or dynamite, but simply from walking up the cart track to get his midday dinner—the horses reared and broke their harness and the powder wagon had run him over. Even so, whenever she heard a charge go off at the quarry, her heart skipped a beat.

  This part of Footscray was known as ‘The Settlement’. At one end of Empire Street was the Colonial Ammunition factory, at the other Kinnears Ropes. Behind Eldridge Street there was a lane—grassy and muddy in winter, covered in daisies in springtime—which ran along the edge of the
cliff. Sometimes mobs of sheep were driven down the lane on their way to Angliss’s Meatworks. From the lane there was the sudden drop down to the quarry.

  Since March the quarrymen had been on strike for an increase to the minimum wage. Now Mr Eldridge had paid them off, and there were four hundred and fifty men out of work.

  The next morning after breakfast, Alma and the children accompanied Mrs Lovett to the Baptist church. Alfred refused to go. He said he had some jobs to do, but, as Mrs Lovett told her on the way, Alfred hadn’t been inside a church since the day of Archie’s funeral.

  It was a long walk to Paisley Street. All Alma’s feelings of panic from the previous afternoon returned. ‘What am I going to say to a minister?’ she thought, as she walked along Gordon Street with Mrs Lovett. ‘How do I know that he will believe me?’ Her head spun as the future unfolded in her mind.

  She called, ‘Teddy! Olive! You go on ahead!’ Then to Teddy alone: ‘You hold your sister’s hand, mind!’ When they were out of earshot she told Mrs Lovett what was tormenting her. ‘The minister will tell me to go back to my husband,’ Alma said. ‘He will tell me to get down on my knees and to beg him to take me back!’

  ‘I can’t believe what I’m hearing. Mr Goble would never say a thing like that. Never! Everyone is equal in his eyes. I’m sure he will do everything that might be done to bring comfort to an abandoned wife and her children.’

  ‘What’s so awful is that Frederick was able to change everything so suddenly, as if on a whim! He just tore everything down and threw it away in a moment, everything that up until yesterday had been sacred—our family, our home. How can I ever love him after what happened yesterday? Now I feel nothing but hatred for him.’

  ‘Oh, hatred,’ said Mrs Lovett disapprovingly. She looked ahead to make sure the children could not hear this kind of talk.

  ‘We scarcely know each other, since we met only yesterday through your kindness, for which I shall remain eternally grateful. But let me tell you a little thing about me, which might be right or might be wrong—I cannot be other than I am. Once I turn against someone, if someone does me a wrong, then it is impossible for me to have anything to do with them again. Yes, it is true, I am a great hater.’