Illywhacker

Phoebe wore a woollen nightgown. She twisted, stretched, jack-knifed, clasped her stomach and repeated the fractured moan that had chilled me at the front door. Her hair was wet and plastered on her forehead. My pocket bulged with commissioned photographs of "my house", "my home", "my family".

"What in the name of God is happening?"

Molly would not look at me. The man with the basin could not hold my eyes.

"Phoebe," I said.

"Poisoned," she said, and tried to laugh.

My first and strongest inclination in the face of these conspirators was to hit someone, to bend a nose, crack a tooth, bang a head against a floor.

"What poison?" I shouted and even Molly would not look up. She stared at her daughter's cold white feet. "What poison?" I asked the fat head. I gripped the iron bed with hands on which I had written the price of a limited slip differential.

Phoebe opened her mouth to answer, then changed her mind, moaned, and leant towards the stranger's basin into which she discharged a long stream of green liquid.

"I am your husband," I said, rocking the bed.

The man I later knew as Horace Dunlop opened his child's mouth and then closed it.

Phoebe pulled herself half up and leant on her elbow. "I am pregnant", she said, "and I have taken poison."

I pushed my way round to the head of the bed, my eyes half closed, my brows hooded. I would have unchaired the poet and trampled on him if he had not been wise enough to vacate his position swiftly.

I held the basin.

"No baby," Phoebe said wearily.

I shook my head.

"No baby," she said and tried to smile. "No nothing. No Phoebe either. Poor Herbert."

"Get a doctor," I said to the poet who was hovering at the doorway, "whoever you are."

"No doctor," Phoebe said, and took my hand.

"They'll charge her," the poet said. "She won't die. Don't call a doctor."

"Who is this man?" I demanded. "Why is he here? Did he give you this poison?"

"No, no," Phoebe said. "Only the Rawleigh's man."

"She won't die," Horace said, taking a tentative step back into the room. "She is losing the foetus."

"How dare you," I roared, standing up and spilling bile down my trouser leg. "How dare you call my child a foetus."

"It is the name…"

"It is not the name of my child you scoundrel and she will lose no child while I am here."

"It is the scientific name of the unborn child."

"And unborn it will stay, until its time. You mark my words Mr Man-or-Beast, she will lose no child. She will lose nothing."

"Poor Herbert," Phoebe moaned.

"It is a criminal offence," Horace said, plucking miserably at his cravat.

"There has been no poison here," I said. "There is nothing in the house. My wife is ill. She will not lose anything." And if you had been there, had you seen me, you would not have doubted that I would keep the foetus clinging to the placenta by the sheer force of my will.

"You get a doctor," I told the Rawleigh's man. "Now, get your horse out of the dungheap and go."

"It is lame," said Horace. "It threw a shoe."

"Then drive my car, man. This is 1921. Only a fool rides a horse."

"I can't drive," he stammered. He had the look you see in public bars when a man knows he is about to get a beating.

"I'll drive," Molly said.

"You can't drive," I said, "you don't know how."

"I can", she said simply, standing and patting her daughter on the knee, "and I will. Come, Horace," she said, "you come with me."

And she took Horace by the sleeve and led him from the room.

70

It was still twelve years before Molly McGrath would come to public notice by refusing to sell her three electrical utilities, those of Ballarat, Geelong and Bendigo, to the newly formed State Electricity Commission. In 1921, however, we had no inkling of Molly's abilities. I did not doubt her passions. One had only to see her gazing at the electrically illuminated cross she had donated to the Catholic Church at Moonee Ponds – her eyes shone with that ecstatic light one sees portrayed in pictures of all the female saints – to see that she had as much enthusiasm for the electricity as she had for God himself.

But we thought her silly. She encouraged us to think her silly. She was the half-mad wife of Jack McGrath, and had I known she was spending her days with realestate agents examining the books of businesses for sale, I would have done everything I could to protect her. As for driving a car, I would have judged her totally incapable. However I was not there to stop her.

She had looked at the Hispano Suiza for a long time before she finally approached it.

"It's my car," she said at last, and having gone for a pee and put some lipstick on, she rushed up to the vehicle and climbed in behind the wheel. She taught herself (noisily) the principles of clutch and gears; Phoebe came running from the distant Morris Farman to discover the driver of the car that circled round and round the bumpy tussocked ground was none other than her mother.

When Phoebe recovered from her disapproval, she begged to be taught as well.