Illywhacker

Somehow they never got around to telling me, but the two women spent less time in the house than I had imagined. They were forever touring here and there – fast, unlicensed, but only sometimes reckless. It was this that gave Molly the idea about the taxi business, but that comes later on.

My mother-in-law did not drive well on the night of Phoebe's poisoning. She stalled three times and lurched across a garden bed. She left huge wheel ruts in excess of anything her late husband could have managed. She could not understand why Phoebe would wish to kill her child. This writhing daughter was a stranger to her. She prayed to the Blessed Virgin who claimed more of her attention than the car she carelessly controlled. She prayed her daughter would not die. She prayed the child would survive.

"I cannot understand her," she said to Horace as they crashed across on to the track to Newmarket. "Why would she ever contemplate such a thing?"

Guilty Horace did not answer. He sank miserably into the big leather seats of the Hispano Suiza, too unhappy to be afraid of the consequences of such erratic driving.

"She loves him," Molly told the poet. "She is infatuated with him. She worships him. Why would she do such a thing? What did she imagine would come ofall that business?"

The poet did not ask what all that business might be, although he guessed that aeroplane wings would do little to muffle the creaks of the marital bed.

"She is a poet," he said (as they rattled over cobblestones towards Footscray in search of a doctor's light), but it seemed a poor defence in the face of the evil bile the victim spilled forth from her once pretty mouth.

"I don't understand. He is so good to her. Poor Herbert," she said. "Poor man. She's broken his heart."

She would never understand, although perhaps she should have. If they had taken three hours to find Dr Henderson's light the conversation would have continued its circular course, like an early-morning dream where the same problem spins on the edge of an off-centre black disc.

71

I sat by the head of the bed and wiped her brow with a water-wet handkerchief. I wiped it to soothe, to erase, wiped slowly, sadly, as I willed my child to remain exactly where he was.

My wife wept and explained, argued, told the truth, lied and apologized while the spasms wracked her and I held her head above the basin.

"The doctor will come," I said, "the doctor will come. He's coming now." I manufactured that damn doctor in my mind. I built his car and gave him road. I turned on his headlights and drew him towards me. Sweat ran from my forehead and caught in the creases of my eyes and coursed down my cheeks in imitation of the tears I could never easily shed.

There were sounds locked tightly in my throat, sounds barely human, steel springs of misery which once released would have filled the room, speared the walls, and lacerated the smooth white skin of my bride and wife. I screwed them down with a lock nut and pierced the shaft with a cotter pin. I wiped.

"Why?" I whispered. "Why?"

Phoebe was stunned by the question.

"Why?"

"No good," she said. "Can't have children."

I soaked the handkerchief and wrung it out. I sponged her arms. "Doctor's coming," I said.

"Can't do it," she said and gripped my hand as another spasm wrenched her womb.

"Can't do what, my darling?"

"Can't fly. Can't do it. Can't poetry."

"We will," I said.

"Did you want a baby?" she asked, very clearly. She raised herself up and stared at me in surprise. I straightened the sheet. I tucked it in.

"Yes," I said, and began to wash the perspiration from her clumsy hands, wiping each finger, one at a time.

"Why?"

I could not look at her. She forced my chin up with her hand so she could see my face.

"I love you," I said. I dragged the words up from the dangerous part of my throat, dragged it out and slammed the door shut behind it.

"Don't cry," she said.

"I'm not crying."

She sat up and held me. I put my arms around her and embraced her so hard she gasped for air. And I would give anything, now, to repeat that clean moment in the middle of such muddy pain.

Phoebe was astonished. She had not understood me. She had never thought me fatherly. She had not imagined me with children. They seemed trivial, beneath me.

"How could we fly? How could I write?"

"You will," I said. "You will do both. You will have the child. I promise you."

Now Phoebe, even in her remorse and pain, was not without calculation.

"Do you really promise?" she said.

"Yes."

"Promise you won't stop me, ever."

"Have the child", I begged, "and, God help me, the aeroplane is yours."

"Will you write it down," she said, before the next spasm struck her and the bile she brought up changed from green to yellow.

"Yes," I said. "I'll write it down."

She knew me better than I knew myself and I do not blame her for it.

"Better not die then," she said, and smiled.