Page 52 of The Mother-in-Law

I nod. ‘Listen, I’m sorry about Christmas. I shouldn’t have said what I said. I know how much you want a baby, darling.’

Her eyes fill up with tears. ‘It feels like we’ve been trying forever. And I’m nearly forty, Mum. Our time is running out, at least mine is. Patrick has all the time in the world. It’s not fair.’

I put a hand on her back and pat gently. ‘Howiseverything with Patrick?’ I ask casually.

She sniffs. ‘Fine.’

I wonder, yet again, if I should tell her what I know about Patrick. Or, at least, what I’veheardabout Patrick. I can tell her to do her own investigations and see if there is any truth to it. I can just be the messenger, and stand true to the fact that it’s none of my business. I can tell her that whatever she decides to do about it is fine by me. But I don’t. Perhaps it’s the fact that I know if I tell Nettie what I’ve heard . . . I’ll lose her. She is proud, my daughter. I’ve already lost a lot of her—to adulthood, to Patrick. I want to hold on to the little bit I have left.

‘Have you ever had a miscarriage, Mum?’ she asks me.

‘No,’ I admit. ‘I never have. But I understand that it must be—’

Nettie presses her hands into her face and lets out a sob. ‘No you don’t understand. You haveno ideawhat it’s like to have a baby inside you, to pray and beg and bargain that one day you will get to hold it and love it and raise it and be its mother.’

It’s funny what the younger generation assumes we don’t know. They assume we can’t possibly understand the agony of heartbreak, or the pressure of buying a house. We can’t understand infertility or depression or the fight for equality. If wehaveexperienced any of these things, they are milder, softer versions, played out in sepia, not experiences that can compare to theirs.You have no idea what I know, I want to tell her. Instead I open my arms and let her lie against my shoulder and cry.

30

DIANA

The past . . .

‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’ Ghezala asks me. She’s nursing her baby girl while her serious little boy Aarash wanders around my house, looking at everything with wonderment but touching nothing. Ghezala pops by from time to time now, with kahwa or biscuits or cakes, and I enjoy her visits immensely.

‘Go ahead,’ I say.

‘Why do you help pregnant women? I see that you do not need to work.’

Usually when someone asks me this I tell them I do it to keep myself busy, or that I like to give something back to the community. But Ghezala and I have been through too much for me to give her the standard response. The funny thing is, sometimes I find myself telling her things that I don’t tell anyone . . . my friends, Nettie, even Tom.

‘Because I was young and pregnant once, with no money and no one to help me. I was twenty years old, unmarried. My parents sent me away.’

‘I am sorry.’ Ghezala sits forward and places her hand over my own. ‘Where did they send you?’

I shake my head. ‘Oh, it wasn’t that far away, even if it did feel like another planet. I went to a home for unmarried pregnant girls, where you went to live until your baby was born.’

Ghezala keeps her hand on mine. Understanding comes to her eyes. ‘And what happened to your baby after it was born?’

I’m not sure why, but I decide to tell her the truth.

1970 . . .

When I turned up on my father’s cousin’s doorstep after escaping from Orchard House, she wasn’t overjoyed to see me. I still remember Meredith giving me the once-over from the doorway. Her gaze lingered for a long time on my belly.

‘So,’ she said finally, ‘you’ve been exiled too.’

I almost didn’t recognise her. In a previous life, whenever I’d seen Meredith, her shoulder-length hair was teased and full, her clothes freshly pressed. Now her hair was cut stylelessly short and her clothes were rumpled, shapeless and practical.

‘Well,’ she said after a world-weary sigh. ‘I suppose you’d better come in.’

As it turned out, Meredith didn’t just look different, shewasdifferent. As I watched her whizz about the tiny house—making me a fried egg on toast, getting out towels and sheets—I wondered if she was the same woman. The Meredith I knew was easily overwhelmed by guests when she lived at her magnificent home in Hawthorn, and I recall Mother saying she often had totake to her bedto recover from even a small afternoon tea at her house. In contrast, now she seemed more than capable. She made me up a bed in what amounted to a shed in the backyard of her rental. The main house wasn’t much more than a shed itself: four rooms—a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and living room.

‘You can stay until you’ve had the baby and you’re back on your feet,’ she said. ‘After that, you’ll have to be on your way, I’m afraid. I can’t afford to feed two more mouths.’

I spent the next two weeks doing what I could to earn my keep—scrubbing Meredith’s floors, fetching groceries from the store, doing the laundry. I made my way through a large pile of Meredith’s clothes that needed mending, sewing on buttons or fixing hems. I organised her pantry, I mowed the lawn. If Meredith noticed any of it, she never commented. But at least it kept me busy and kept my mind off what was coming.

I still had no idea what to expect in terms of the birth, although the moans I’d heard in the hallways of Orchard House from girls in early labour did nothing to reassure me. In another life, a life in which I was married and had friends who were married, I could have asked my friends about it. A lot of the friends who had been away would be returning from Europe around now, perhaps wondering where I was. I imagined getting in touch with them, but I didn’t need anyone to tell me that wouldn’t end well. Even Cynthia, my dearest friend, would not have been able to find a place for me in her life under these circumstances. We came from a tight-knit Catholic neighbourhood. It was problematic to give up your baby and return to your old life, but to return to itwithyour baby wasn’t an option.