Page 25 of The Mother-in-Law

As it turned out, when I discovered I was pregnant, David’s smarts came in useful. ‘There’s a place in Broadmeadows,’ he said. ‘A home for unwed mothers. You go there, you have the baby, and then you come back. You can just tell everyone you went to Europe too.’

I was glad he hadn’t suggested the other type of place you went as an unwed mother. An abortion clinic. I may not have been the most maternal of girls, but I’d always been a believer in taking responsibility for your actions. It wasn’t the poor baby’s fault that I’d got into the back of the Falcon with David, I didn’t see why it should have to pay the ultimate price for it. My mother agreed that David’s plan was wise and my father tended to agree with my mother when she thought something was wise. The idea that I would have to give my baby away before leaving the home was a thought so far off in the distance that I didn’t even bother to think about it. After all, when you’re drowning and someone offers you a life raft, you don’t check it for punctures before climbing aboard.

‘Are you feeling all right?’ David asked me the night before I left for Orchard House. He waved a hand vaguely in front of my midsection, which was visibly round now, indicating he was asking about the pregnancy.

‘I’m fine,’ I said.

It was a warm evening and I was sitting on the brick steps of my parents’ bungalow with a bag of grapes in my lap. (I’d had morning sickness for nearly six months, and grapes were the only thing that staved it off.) I’d put off my secretarial course and told my friends I was spending a semester in Sicily. No one apart from my parents and David knew the truth. Not even Cynthia. Turned out that Catholic shame fell harder than I’d thought.

I’d only seen David a couple of times since I’d been accepted into Orchard House. While I’d been lying low, David had apparently been working around the clock to help my father pay for the home. My father was impressed with David’s commitment to help. I’d once heard him tell my mother, he was glad ‘I’d been consorting with an honourable sort of boy, at least’. Once I’d peered round my bedroom door and seen my father shaking David’s hand and my mother thanking him profusely. In contrast, my father had barely looked at me in months and my mother had become consumed by keeping me hidden. In recent weeks I’d developed a habit of sweeping my fingertips over my belly every so often. When Mother saw it, she’d swat my hands away.

‘Stop it,’ she’d whisper. ‘What will people think?’

‘It will be okay,’ David said now, and I realised I was holding my belly, cradling it. But I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be okay at all. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again when you get out,’ he said.

But we both knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.

*

My father drove us to Orchard House and waited in the car while Mother took me in.

‘It won’t be forever,’ she said at the front door and then she turned and left. I was startled that this was her goodbye but I forced myself not to call her back. I was humiliated enough as it was.

I rang a gold bell and a pinched-looking woman in a navy pinafore came to the door. ‘You must be Diana.’

I nodded and she opened the security door and surveyed me silently. ‘You’d better come inside.’

Orchard House had the look and feel of a hospital. It was three storeys high, with wide halls and linoleum floors and vinyl furniture. The dining room was on the ground floor. Matron took me up the stairs to the second floor, which had a communal area in the centre and doors around the edges. Pregnant women in small clusters looked up when I entered, then quickly down again.

‘You’re among the oldest at Orchard House,’ Matron told me, leading me around the edge of the room. ‘The youngest is a girl named Pamela, who you’ll be sharing with. Pamela is just fourteen.’ Matron’s lips were pinched with disapproval. ‘We only exchange first names at Orchard House, and we don’t talk about the schools we went to, the people we know, or anything that can distinguish us to the outside world. It’s to protect your identities,’ she said.

‘Pamela is a little troubled,’ she told me, stopping just shy of a door which I assumed led to my room. ‘I thought it would be good to put you together so you can teach her how to behave properly.’ She stepped forward through the doorway and I saw a girl with greasy hair and a sour expression sitting on one of the single beds. ‘Ah,’ Matron said. ‘This is Pamela.’

‘Hello,’ I said.

Pamela looked resolutely at the floor.

‘You girls are lucky,’ Matron told me before she left the room. ‘Many homes work girls to the bone to cover their keep, but Orchard House is a paid home, paid for by your parents, and as such we have only light chores to complete. I’m sure you’ll be very comfortable here.’

Matron left me then, to ‘make myself at home’. As I sat on the narrow twin bed, opposite the strange, reticent girl, I felt the tears start to stack up in my eyes. But I brushed them away. After all, I was lucky.

After dinner that night I went to the communal area. Most of the girls on my floor were in there, sitting around on brown vinyl couches. Most watched the television, a couple stared at novels. One girl sat at a table painting another girl’s nails a pretty pale pink that reminded me of Cynthia.

‘May I sit here?’ I asked a blonde girl sitting on the couch in her pyjamas and slippers, her hair pinned up in rollers. She was chatting to the girls on her right and she slid along without looking up.

The couch was startlingly uncomfortable, but as I wasn’t sure I could physically stand again, I stayed where I was. All around the room, girls were pinned to their seats by their enormous watermelon-shaped bellies. I counted seventeen girls, seventeen watermelons that no one mentioned. Pamela was the only one who didn’t sit. She stood by the bookshelves to the right of the television, ostensibly choosing a book but mostly fidgeting. She was one of those types who couldn’t sit still, I’d noticed. She was jittery. It was distracting.

The blonde girl—Laurel, I found out—talked quietly to the two girls on her right. As I eavesdropped, I discovered this was her second time at Orchard House. She’d been here two years earlier, when she was sixteen. Rather than people finding this startling and horrifying as I did, she seemed to be treated as a celebrity of sorts, and regarded as the fountain of all knowledge about Orchard House.

As I listened in, conversation in Laurel’s circle drifted to Pamela, who unsurprisingly everyone thought was strange. Apparently she refused to do chores and she had a habit of screaming out swear words if anything took her by surprise. I also found out that Matron had a crush on Philip, the gardener, and everyone thought it was disgusting, including, they suspected, Philip. I wasn’t actually included in the conversation at any point, but the banter reminded me of my own friends and made me feel lonely and comforted in equal parts.

At ten minutes to ten, Matron appeared. ‘Ten minutes until lights out, girls!’ Matron had a shrill voice that pierced the air and knocked any sense of normality out of the room. ‘Come on, now. Don’t dillydally.’

She disappeared and the girls all shuffled their hips to the edge of the couch, ready to hoist themselves to standing. I found out, via the girls’ grumbling, that the lights did indeed go out at 10 pm, and if you weren’t in your room, you had to find your way back there in pitch darkness.

‘Ten minutes until lights out,’ Matron said again. ‘Don’t dillydally.’

We all glanced at the door again, but Matron wasn’t there.