The Beloved Read online

  About The Beloved

  ‘It came one morning with the milk, and it seemed – at first – almost as innocent . . .’

  When Roberta ‘Bertie’ Lightfoot is struck down with polio, her world collapses. But Mama doesn’t tolerate self-pity, and Bertie is nobody if not her mother’s daughter – until she sets her heart on becoming an artist. Through drawing, the gifted and perceptive Bertie gives form and voice to the reality of the people and the world around her. While her father is happy enough to indulge Bertie’s driving passion, her mother will not let art get in the way of the future she wishes for her only daughter.

  In 1955 the family moves to post-colonial Port Moresby, a sometimes violent frontier town, where Bertie, determined to be the master of her own life canvas, rebels against her mother’s strict control. In this tropical landscape, Bertie thrives amid the lush palette of colours and abundance, secretly learning the techniques of drawing and painting under the tutelage of her mother’s arch rival.

  But Roberta is not the only one deceiving her family. As secrets come to light, the domestic varnish starts to crack, and jealousy and passion threaten to forever mar the relationship between mother and daughter.

  Tender and witty, The Beloved is a vivid portrait of both the beauty and the burden of unconditional love.

  Contents

  Cover

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Acknowledgements

  About Annah Lee Faulkner

  Copyright page

  For

  my beloved

  Fay, Syd, Peter and Alec

  Chapter One

  Melbourne, January 1954

  Mama had eight arms. Like the Indian goddess Kali in my encyclopaedia, her arms were everywhere at once – stirring porridge, flipping toast, pouring milk and dealing butter, marmalade and Vegemite on the worn damask cloth faster than Dad dealt cards.

  Through the big kitchen window you could see gum and wattle trees shimmying in the wind. Fat roses, pansies

  and dahlias painted the fence red, yellow and gold and beyond them the Dandenong Ranges swelled purple against the sky. But it was Mama we watched – Dad, Tim and I. Her name was Lily May but Dad called her Bean, short for coffee-bean on account of her skin, though it looked more like toffee to me. Mama wore a blue gingham apron like you saw on ladies in fashion magazines who pulled trays of biscuits from their Early Kooka green enamel ovens. We had an Early Kooka with its Kookaburra on the front, but there weren’t many biscuits.

  ‘I cook because I have to,’ Mama said. ‘Darned if I’ll be a slave to it.’

  She tipped porridge into four bowls without slopping even a drop and pushed them across the table. Dad put aside his paper, twirled the imaginary ends of his moustache and sprinkled brown sugar over his bowl. ‘You’re a wonderful cook, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘A great housewife. You run a tight ship.’

  ‘I’m not a housewife, Ed. I’m your wife and this is not a ship, nor is it one of your ruddy aeroplanes.’

  We thought Dad was a dill to call aeroplanes ships but he said all air force pilots did. He flew during the war and

  still said Roger instead of Righto and Stand-by instead of Wait. Mama said it was time he acted less like Biggles and more like the accountant he was supposed to be.

  He was right about Mama’s kitchen, though. It was tight. Red canisters stood like soldiers against the white wall,

  glass mixing bowls disappeared into one another like ripples on a pond and over the stove five copper saucepans hung gleaming. You didn’t have to hunt for things in our house; everything had its place. Except for Mama’s apron. When she finished cooking she flung it behind her where it caught on a gas jet or a saucepan and stayed there until next time.

  ‘Bertie,’ she said, sliding pancakes across the table, ‘you’ll be six next week. What do you want for your birthday?’

  ‘Your locket.’

  ‘Uh-uh. I’ve told you before, not until you’re eight. That’s how old I was when my mama let me have it.’

  ‘Eight is a million years away.’

  ‘Two, in fact. What else might you want?’

  Nothing else. Just her tiny blue forget-me-not locket. When I first opened it and found it empty I was shocked. ‘Why hasn’t it got pictures of Daddy and Tim and me? Lockets are supposed to have pictures.’

  ‘My locket has dreams. There’s no room in it for pictures and dreams so I just keep the dreams.’

  ‘I can’t see any dreams.’

  ‘They’re invisible.’

  The big old clock on the wall chimed seven thirty and the minute hand fell a trembling notch. The clock used to hang in Grandma’s front parlour. She gave it to Dad when he and Mama moved into their own house. ‘Time and tide waited for no man,’ she said.

  ‘Can I have anything else I want?’

  ‘Depends.’

  ‘All the Cherry Ripes in the world.’

  She snorted. ‘You’d be sick.’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Anyway, you promised.’

  ‘Actually, Bertie, I didn’t.’

  For my birthday she took me and Tim to the MacRobertson chocolate factory where I got to taste every flavour – caramel, raspberry, cherry and peppermint. In bed that night I clutched my tummy and tried not to look at the butter-coloured walls of my room. Normally I liked butter: I could push it into shapes – pigs, birds, faces – and when we visited Grandad and Grandma, Grandad made butter boats by dropping blobs onto hot porridge where they sailed across the dish and sank into golden puddles. When Mama painted my room I’d watched, wishing it was me holding that brush, imagining how it felt to make long golden streaks across the wall. But Mama said all my painting credits had been used up. She was still cranky about the time I stuck my fingers into a jar of Vegemite and painted a beautiful dark moth on the white kitchen cupboard.

  ‘Naughty.’ She’d whacked my hand.

  I’d wiped smarting Vegemite fingers on my pink romper suit.

  ‘Oh, Roberta, no . . .’

  The visit to the chocolate factory stopped me hankering after Cherry Ripes but not after the locket. When Mama was busy in the garden I tiptoed upstairs to her room to sneak a look. It was Dad’s room too, but somehow there wasn’t a lot of him in there. His two brushes lay beside hers, one for his shiny brown curls, the other for his city clothes. In the cupboard was a row of white shirts, two black suits, five ties and three pairs of shoes – everything shipshape – but it was Mama’s dresses that filled the room with the smell of ironing and musk. It was a tippy-toe room with quilts of filtered sunshine that lay over the carpet and the dusky pink bedspread. There was a slow-ticking clock that made time sound old and photos of Mama in tortoiseshell frames. One was taken on her eighth birthday. She had the locket around her neck and stared out at me as if she didn’t know who I was. She wore the locket in the other photo too, the one taken by a reporter for the Toronto Star, the day she and Dad got married.

  ‘I was a war bride,’ she said.

  War bride? It sounded terrible. I trie
d to imagine my beautiful mother, battered and bruised, dragging herself up the aisle in a torn and grubby wedding gown.

  She’d smiled her faraway smile. ‘It wasn’t like that. Not so you’d notice, anyway.’

  The photograph showed a perfect Canadian spring day with crocuses and snowdrops lifting their faces to the sun. Mama stood among them in a pearl-grey suit, her hair a black ruff beneath a little hat. She was holding a posy of sweet peas and smiling, but her eyes were somewhere else. War bride, she said, meant war brought people together and made them into husbands and wives, even if it shouldn’t have.

  I took the locket from the trinket box and opened it but Mama was right, her dreams were invisible. I put it back and pulled open the drawers that held her silky nighties and stiff brassieres and found a box, a pretty wooden box criss-crossed on the top with mother-of-pearl. And in the box, a picture of a smiling man with dark eyes and black hair who looked like . . .

  ‘What are you doing, Roberta?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Give me that.’

  ‘Who’s the man, Mama?’

  ‘None of your business – now go.’

  ‘Who—?’

  ‘Go, I said, and don’t ever touch that box again.’

  And I didn’t, because a few weeks later, I couldn’t climb the stairs. I couldn’t walk at all.

  Chapter Two

  It came one morning with the milk, and it seemed – at first – almost as innocent.

  Every night we put sixpence and two empty bottles on the porch and every morning full ones stood in their place.

  ‘One bottle at a time,’ Mama said, as I went outside. ‘Or you’ll break them.’

  I stood on the porch, blinking. Everything was covered in mist. The horse in the paddock next door blurred grey and the milkman seemed to have left four bottles instead of two. When I bent to pick them up pain rushed between my ears. I stepped carefully back to the kitchen with the bottles but my arms ached so much I couldn’t hold them and I dropped them on the floor.

  Mama snatched up a mop. ‘Damn it, Roberta. Why can’t you be told? Next time you’ll feel the back of my hairbrush.’

  I sank onto a chair, tears leaking.

  Dad’s blue eyes appeared over his newspaper. ‘No use crying over spilt milk,’ he said, winking at me. ‘Thanks, little CP, I’ve waited all my life to say that.’

  CP was Dad’s nickname for me, short for Co-Pilot. Tim was his navigator.

  ‘I feel sick.’

  My brother gazed at me through his Coke-bottle glasses. ‘Too many chocolates.’

  Mama pressed her hand against my forehead. ‘Jesus, Bertie, you’re burning up.’

  I burned like a sausage on a campfire. My bones roasted. Flames danced through my legs and goblins with long knives chased me through blazing forests, their feet sizzling on the ground as they came closer and closer and their claws tore my skin and I opened my mouth to scream and—

  ‘Hush now, Bertie.’ Mama pressed a cloth dipped in eau de cologne against my forehead. ‘Hush now, sugar.’

  I opened my eyes. Her face was a dark blob. I slept, woke, slept again, and when I woke the third time Mama was propped in a chair beside my bed, asleep. I pulled myself up. My right leg felt heavy and strange.

  ‘Mama.’

  She stirred. I dropped my feet to the floor but when I tried to stand I fell in a heap. Mama sprang up and hauled me back onto the bed, my leg trailing like a soggy towel. As she pulled the covers over me, my foot began to buckle, right there in front of our eyes, heel up, toes down.

  ‘Mama, stop it! Fix it!’

  She looked at me with her treacle-dark eyes. ‘I’ll fix it, Bertie. But it might take a long time.’

  A doctor came and filled my primrose-coloured bedroom with stinging smells and the sound of clanging metal. Down my throat he went, in my ears, pressing his hands on my tummy and then against my leg; pushing, pulling, hurting. Lift it. Bend your knee. Wriggle your toes. Not one bit of my leg would move. Mama watched him like a lizard watching a fly. Before she met Dad, Mama lived in Canada and had gone to university to learn how to be a doctor. But then she married Dad and came to Australia and had kids instead. The doctor stood up at last, packed away his instruments, left his bill on my dressing table and a word dangling in the air worse than any swearword.

  Polio.

  ‘Get her to hospital for a spinal tap.’

  Mama wilted. ‘Oh, God.’

  Dad turned to look at something out the window.

  ‘Just like Bill,’ Mama whispered to the air.

  Bill was her brother. There were photos of him on our mantelpiece. One was taken when he was a kid, leaning on a stick. The other was Bill grown-up, still leaning on a stick. He was very handsome, with blond hair and sparkling eyes.

  Dad laid me in the back seat of the Vauxhall, with my head on Mama’s lap and my arms around Moose, the floppy golden bear with the bent ear Uncle Bill had sent me from Canada. Mama had named him Moose from the label on his leg. Through the window I could see the sun slipping below the horizon. In its place a dark haze rose up; the veil of darkness, Dad called it. The veil of darkness rose until it filled the sky. I sighed. Mama stroked my forehead. ‘It’s okay, darling. It’ll be all right. I promise.’

  I was wheeled on a trolley into a room of whirring machines where a man named Orderly put me on my side on a table with my knees up. It hurt so much I yelled out but Orderly held me still while someone else stuck a needle in my back that made me forget about the pain in my leg.

  Then I was back on the trolley, trundling down a corridor, Mama and Dad hurrying alongside.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘A bug, sweetheart. Polio.’

  ‘Can we go home now?’

  Mama looked at Dad. ‘No, you might spread the bug to Tim.’

  How? Like Vegemite? ‘I won’t. I promise.’

  We stopped in front of an enormous door. ‘Time to say ta-ta,’ said Orderly. He took Moose from me and gave him to Mama.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Toys get lost inside,’ he said.

  Mama kissed my forehead. I grabbed her around the neck and hung on. ‘Come on now, sugar.’ Gently, she prised me off.

  Dad tickled my cheek with his soft moustache. ‘Be brave, my little CP.’

  Orderly pushed me through the door into a room with kids in beds and slid me between sheets as stiff as cardboard.

  ‘Welcome to Isolation, kiddie.’

  Across the room Mama and Dad gazed at me through a small window. Mama made kiss-crosses with her finger, Dad gave a small salute and then they were gone. I stared at the window until my eyes ached, not daring to blink in case they came back and I missed them.

  Food came on a tray, something sloppy and white. I pushed it away.

  A lady with a big bosom marched over. ‘Eat your tea, missy. It’ll make you strong.’

  ‘I’m not hungry. I want to go home.’

  ‘You can’t go home until you’re well, and you won’t get well if you don’t eat.’ She picked up a spoon and handed it to me. ‘Come on.’

  I turned my head away.

  ‘Listen, girlie. I’m matron of this ward and when I say eat, you eat.’

  I shut my eyes. I didn’t care if she was God, I only wanted my mama.

  Sometime during the night I woke. The ward was dim, everything looked strange and I shouted for Mama.

  A nurse hurried in. ‘Whoa,’ she whispered. ‘Did you have a bad dream?’ She felt in her pocket. ‘Here, have a Mintie to chase it away. I’m Molly and I sit over there by the door. I’ll keep an eye out for you so you can go back to sleep. All right?’ She squeezed my hand.

  The girl in the bed next to me stirred and a yellow-brown mist came from her body. I often saw mists and colours around people. Mama didn’t believe me when I told her. She said it was my imagination, but it wasn’t. The mist around the girl was dirty and sticky and trembled as if someone was stomping through it. I watched, sucking my Minti
e, until the mist went still, then I fell asleep.

  In the morning I woke to see Nurse Molly and Matron stripping the girl’s bed.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Gone,’ said Matron, pulling a sheet drum-tight over the bed. ‘Count yourself lucky.’

  ‘Can I go home now?’

  ‘No. I told you; not until you’re better. Not until you’ve had your treatments and eaten your food and your leg is working properly.’ She looked at me and scowled. ‘That hair of yours is going to be a nuisance. See to it, Nurse.’ She smacked the pillow and marched out.

  Molly brought a comb and began to tease it through my knots. ‘Goodness, Bertie, it is a tangle.’

  Matron banged through the door a few minutes later. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Her hair,’ said Molly, ‘you told me—’

  ‘Fifteen minutes ago! You can’t spend an entire day on one child’s hair. Telephone the mother and get permission to cut it.’

  ‘No!’ I pulled my hair over my shoulder and began to make a plait. ‘You can’t.’

  ‘Now, Nurse,’ said Matron.

  After a breakfast of salty porridge with no cream and no butter boats Matron came back with a pair of scissors. I clamped my arms over my head.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, child, it’s not murder. Now lean forward.’

  ‘No! No! You can’t! You can’t.’ Where were my legs? Where was Mama? I pushed against Matron’s chest.

  ‘Orderly!’ she shouted.

  Orderly dropped a stack of sheets and hurried over. He pinned my arms against my sides, mashing my nose into Matron’s starched shoulder.

  She began to cut. Ccc-rrr-unch . . . Ccc-rrr-unch. ‘What a mess! Black as tar and strong as rope.’

  I wrenched back my head.

  ‘Stop it!’ Ccc-rrr-unch . . . Snip!

  ‘There.’ Matron held up my plait like a dead ferret. ‘All done. Didn’t hurt a bit.’

  Nurse Molly pulled the tatty ends of my hair into a tuft on top of my head. ‘I’ll get a ribbon, Bertie – blue to match your eyes – and you’ll look lovely. Don’t worry, it’ll grow back.’

  I reached for my plait but Matron whisked it away. ‘Dirty. Germs.’