The Last Anniversary (10 page)

‘Veronika, your Aunt Rose phoned me today to ask if I was coming.’

There is silence, which is so unlike Veronika that Sophie thinks they must have been cut off. ‘Veronika?’

Her voice is strained. ‘I don’t believe you.’

Of course. The worst betrayal for Veronika is when she is left in the dark about something.

And now Sophie is back to feeling guilty because Veronika is right. She isn’t part of their family. She has a handful of memories about Aunt Connie when Veronika has a whole lifetime. It isn’t fair. Sophie has charmed an old lady into leaving her a house. It doesn’t matter that it wasn’t deliberate. It’s wrong.

‘I’m sorry, Veronika,’ she says.

Veronika’s voice is full of icy, righteous hurt. ‘I’m sorry I ever met you.’

‘D
o we tell Sophie the truth about Alice and Jack? Do you think that’s what Connie would have wanted?’

‘Yes, I think so, but not until she’s forty. Just like the others.’

‘How old do you think she is?’

‘I don’t know. They all look about twelve to me.’

D
id Alice and Jack Munro deliberately abandon their baby, knowing that Connie and Rose would stop by and that their family could give the baby a better start in life than them? Surely not. It was far too boring an explanation, and luckily it didn’t account for the boiling kettle, the marble cake or those satisfyingly mysterious blood stains on the kitchen floor. And why not opt for the simple baby-left-on-doorstep solution?

Did Jack kill Alice in a fit of rage because he hated marble cake, dump the body and leave the baby to die?
Or
did Alice kill Jack in a fit of rage because he said something derogatory about her marble cake, dump the body and leave the baby to die? Certainly the diary found in the Seventies would suggest something along those lines.

Did the
baby
kill Alice and Jack?

The last one was ten-year-old Veronika’s suggestion, made on the beach one day to Thomas and Grace, who fell about laughing, imagining the baby (their Grandma Enigma!) leaping out of its cot to strangle Alice and Jack with tiny hands.

It is the day before Aunt Connie’s funeral and Grace is bathing her baby and thinking about the mystery of her great-grandmother Alice Munro.

Grace hates bathing the baby. When he is dressed and wrapped tightly in a rug he is a solid, manageable football. But when he is naked he is all flimsy and breakable, skinny legs all bent up at angles like an uncooked chicken. The fragility of his tiny limbs makes her feel sick. He seems to know how horribly vulnerable he is when he is naked because the moment she starts undressing him he screams and screams, which does something to her brain like the shrieking scrape of nails across a blackboard. When she holds him in the bath, his legs and arms thrash. The possibility of drowning him seems more likely than not; it is as if the point of each bath is to save him. She feels that her nails, although she deliberately keeps them short and filed, will surely tear his purplish paper-thin skin.

Of course, Callum loves bathing Jake. Grace could let him do it every day but she has the feeling that she is on some sort of treacherous journey, and if she stops, even for a moment, then she might never get up again. It is better to just go doggedly on and on.

Grace wonders how Alice Munro had bathed her baby. It had been winter when they vanished, just like now. The island gets very cold. Alice didn’t have hot water or electricity or warm gas heating. No TV to blank out her mind while she was breastfeeding. No CDs to drown out the sounds of a silent house. No refrigerator. No washing machine. No dryer. No gleaming white-goods at all. They had been very short of money, like everyone. ‘You children have no idea,’ Aunt Connie used to say. ‘You think terrible things happened on the battlefields, but terrible things happened in ordinary suburban homes.’ Jack was unemployed. Seventy years later their combined savings of two shillings and sixpence are still sitting in the tin on the shelf above the sink. Guests on the Alice and Jack tour are allowed to peer in the tin as it is rattled under each nose by the tour guide. (‘No need to rattle quite so
loudly
, Veronika,’ Aunt Connie would say.)

Grace can’t imagine how her great-grandmother coped, although then again, in light of what happened, perhaps she hadn’t. She’d made a marble cake, though. That was indisputable. That indicated coping, didn’t it? Well, of course it didn’t. You can still bake a perfectly good cake while losing your mind. Grace remembers watching Aunt Margie in her kitchen efficiently grating lemon rind for a lemon meringue pie while she cried great wrenching sobs over her father’s cancer diagnosis. Aunt Margie had been closest to Grandpa out of any of them. Who knows what thoughts were going through Alice’s mind while she baked that marble cake. Did she know it was the last cake she’d ever bake?

Grace takes the baby from the bath and lays him on his back on the change table. At least he can’t roll over yet. When he learns to roll over he’ll be in even more danger. He’ll be like a slippery glass ball. Just thinking about it gives her a drilling sensation behind her eyes.

What did Alice think of her new baby girl? Was she besotted with her like a mother should be?

It’s strange really that she’s never thought much about the fact that she is Alice Munro’s great-granddaughter. It had been hard enough for Grace and her cousins to get their heads around the fact that grey-haired Grandma Enigma was the same person as the tiny abandoned baby who had smiled so sweetly at Aunt Connie and Aunt Rose. Alice Munro never seemed particularly real or even that interesting to Grace. It was Veronika who was forever coming up with new and more macabre solutions to the mystery.

She clicks together the press-studs on Jake’s pale green babygro suit, buttoning him back up into a standard, cared-for baby with a standard, caring mother.

She wonders if the something that held her great-grandmother together, the something that kept her neat and tidy and allowed her to get out of bed each day and bake marble cakes, had been loosening moment by moment, pulling and straining, until one day her husband said or did something quite innocuous and it snapped: the real snarling, biting, furious Alice was unleashed with terrible consequences. Grace wonders if that propensity to snap had been encapsulated in a gene that is now floating around in her own DNA. She wonders if perhaps it would be more sensible to take action
before
that gene has a chance to hurt anyone.

After his bath, Jake falls into a deep drugged sleep halfway through his feed. She puts him down and looks at him dispassionately. He is a very good, obedient baby. He is doing everything as per the books that Thomas’s wife Debbie has lent her.

Before Jake was born, Grace had visited Thomas, Debbie and baby Lily at their spotless West Ryde home. There were children riding bikes up and down the street and the smell of freshly mown grass. Debbie served them home-made Anzac biscuits. Thomas showed her their new pergola. There was a tangible sense of relief emanating from Thomas. It was as though all his life these achievements–home, wife, baby–had been weighing heavy on his mind, and now he’d finally checked them all off he could relax and benignly observe the rest of the world still flailing about trying to reach their own little islands of security. ‘Sophie is still single, you know,’ he told Grace sadly, without a trace of triumph, just ponderous concern. ‘The chances of having a Down Syndrome baby increase every year after the age of thirty-five. She really needs to hurry up.’

Debbie began a hefty percentage of her sentences with the phrase: ‘I’m the sort of person who…’ Debbie was the sort of person who could
instantly
and
accurately
judge a person’s character and she could tell that Grace was going to be a wonderful mother. Debbie was the sort of person who believed knowledge was power, that’s why she had bought so many books on good parenting. Debbie was the sort of person who didn’t mind at all lending her books to someone like Grace, who was family, but she was the sort of person who would like to get them back in good condition. Debbie was the sort of person who had a very high tolerance for pain, but when she was in labour it was like being torn in two and she screamed so loud that she burst a blood vessel in her eye. Debbie was the sort of person who didn’t really like kids but the moment she saw her daughter Lily she felt the most euphoric feeling, the most intense love she had ever felt.

‘I fell instantly in love with her,’ said Debbie. ‘I’m the sort of person who doesn’t exaggerate, and honestly, truly, it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I just adored her. I’d give my life for her. I’d throw myself in front of a semi-trailer for her. I just sobbed when she was born, didn’t I, Tommy? You’ll see! It will be the same for you. It happens to every mother.’

Three months later, at four in the morning, Grace saw her baby son for the first time. The midwife, a snappy skinny girl who Grace hated, put him on her stomach. Grace waited for the euphoria. Instead she felt the most intense sensation of
nothing
. She didn’t like or dislike this greasy creature. He was a stranger: nothing to do with her. All she could feel was relief that it was over, that it was out of her, that nobody was shouting instructions at her any more.

She has her own labour story now, but she can’t imagine cheerfully sharing it with anyone, like Debbie had done, in excruciating detail, over Anzac biscuits. It had been, quite simply, grotesque. She had lost all control of herself–her mind and her body–and she never wanted to again.

‘He’s so small!’ Callum was standing next to the bed in a white hospital gown, pale and red-eyed. There was some blood on his gown. He looked like a doctor on
ER.
Grace saw her husband’s face all scrunched and silly with joy. So,
he
was feeling it.

She thought perhaps the euphoria was running late and it would eventually hit her. One day she’d look at her son and fall in love with him like a proper mother. But Jake has been in the world now for three weeks and Grace is beginning to wonder, with a sort of tired inevitability, if she will never feel anything except the enormous responsibility of keeping his tiny heart beating, his tiny lungs breathing. It seems she might have to fake it for the rest of her life. She imagines him taking his first steps, dressed for his first day of school, playing his first soccer game, standing up, all awkward and gangly, to do a speech at his eighteenth birthday party, and all the while there would be Grace, his fraudulent mum, becoming greyer and wrinklier and
still not feeling it
.

She watches Jake sleeping and says out loud, ‘Well, Debbie, guess what? I’m the sort of person who can’t love her own child.’

As Grace is walking back down to the kitchen she begins to cry. She feels somehow separate from her crying, as if her body is experiencing a series of involuntary symptoms–a salty discharge from her eyes, a convulsing chest. It continues on and on until she is mildly astonished; she didn’t know it was possible to cry for so long.

Eventually she decides it isn’t necessary to stop functioning just because she is crying. She should just get on with what she needs to do.

She sobs as she does a load of washing and wails into the cold wind as she puts the washing on the line. She fries mince for Callum’s favourite meal, lasagne, and lets the tears slide off the edge of her chin and into the sizzling meat.

‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ she thinks. ‘That’s enough now.’

She doesn’t want to be all puffy and red-nosed when Callum comes home. She wants dinner in the oven, a CD on the stereo, a sleeping buttoned-up baby in his crib and a nice bottle of red wine already opened. She wants everything calmly in place, like the way she imagined it would be before the baby was born.

She wants to be good at this. Being a mother is just like any other new skill, like driving a car or playing tennis. At first it seems impossibly difficult, but then, by gritting your teeth and trying again and again, you get your head around it. She just has to get her head, her stupid aching head, around this new skill.

When Callum had got home after his first day back at work he’d found Grace deeply asleep on the couch. He’d touched her arm and she had apparently said, without opening her eyes, ‘Look! All you need to do is add two eggs! It’s not rocket science!’ before rolling over and going back to sleep again. Callum had found this very amusing. She had heard him telling his mother about it on the phone, sounding very loving and husbandly. ‘Very tired, of course,’ she heard him say. ‘But no, she’s fine.’

Stop talking about me as if I’m a retarded child
, she wanted to scream. His mother was so nice!
He
was so nice! He’d cooked dinner (microwaved some leftovers and made a salad with a great deal of stirring and clattering and leaping around the kitchen as if he was cooking a three-course meal, but still) and even packed the dishwasher and wiped bench tops without being asked while she breastfed the baby. It had all made Grace feel unreasonably aggravated. He seemed so happy, he was doing everything right and he hadn’t even been the one who particularly wanted children! It was Grace who had pushed for the baby.

Why had she done that? It seemed to be more to do with the fact that she didn’t see herself as the sort of person who would choose not to have children than the fact that she actually wanted to be a mother herself. She didn’t identify with those people who talked about not having children as a ‘lifestyle choice’. There was something suspicious about people who seemed so proud of going against convention. Grace saw nothing wrong with convention. That’s why when she turned thirty-three she decided it was about time she and Callum had children.

Not the best reason for having a child, she thinks now. Surely a reprehensible reason, to have a child just because you didn’t want to be the sort of person who didn’t have one.

Oh, her head, her poor papier-mâché head.

The meat spatters oil on the white tiles behind the cook top and Grace immediately wipes them clean with a paper towel, as though her mother isn’t thousands of miles away on the other side of the world (Turkey, according to the typed fifteen-page itinerary hanging on the cork noticeboard next to the fridge) but could walk back into the room at any moment.

She wipes her eyes with the paper towel and thinks how repulsed her mother would be by this excessive crying. ‘Don’t be a drama queen, Grace,’ her mother used to say when she cried as a child.

She goes to the pantry for the spices and stops to look out the window with watery eyes. Her mother’s house, like all the houses on the island, is built up high on a block of land sloping gently to the waterfront. All the windows along the front of the house have views of the river. It is twilight and the sunset is turning the river bronze. All their friends turn into real-estate agents the first time they see this view: ‘Stunning.’ ‘Panoramic.’ ‘Breathtaking.’