Joan Makes History by Kate Grenville Page B

knew I would never again meet with a love like his.
    How could I tell him that I was in a foreign country under his arm and eyes, not close at all, but hemispheres apart from him? Even I, Joan, had never been able to watch myself as I slept, and I hoped that Duncan never had, for I had a suspicion that my face creased into discontent, and frowned at all the images of my sleep, all my anxieties at history not yet made, and all the unhappiness or boredom: because in the mornings I felt myself as cross and crumpled as paper, lying stiffly beside my husband.
    Deception ran deep in my nature like seepage, and it hardly crossed my mind that I could share my thoughts with Duncan. I could live in his country, and even sometimes love the way the leaves hung in bunches from their branches and the way the dappled shade in the glare of midday made everyone smile. But I could never belong to it in the way he did, although I had to pretend to: I could never shed my carapace of deception. I had to wait passively while another creature fed on my own blood, and had to fight myself not to be stifled by panic, the panic ofhaving had my destiny nipped in its bud, and of having had my history prematurely snatched away from me by this tiny thief within.
    I was a prisoner of the tadpole inside me. I tried to see this life as my destiny, this history as the one I would make, and to be pleased with being Duncan’s wife, and the mother of a tadpole. But I knew in my heart that I could not accept such a place, in the suburbs and far-flung colonies of history.
    There were times when I thought it must all be a mistake, in spite of the way my buttons would no longer do up: I could not believe in myself bringing forth a son or daughter I would have to learn to love, who would be attached to me then, by bonds of spirit, forever. I read the books that Father sent me, but did not believe that I would open asunder and force out that alien person from my body. As for all the rest, the fiddly paraphernalia of bootees and tiny garments and nappies; I spent my days in a stupor of refusing to think about such things, and when Mother and others sent such bits and pieces I put them in a drawer and did not look at them again. I did not hate the person within, but as far as my imagination could go, there was no such person.
    At other times it seemed terribly real, and I was panicked. Buttons and belts, and strange flutterings, and overweening cravings for fresh strawberries, told me that it was all in fact happening. I was overcome with confusion and wanted to exclaim Stop! It is all going too quick and I am not ready yet! and I had a mad feeling that if only I could step out of time and place for a short spell, and collect my thoughts, it would be all right, but I was being bundled headlong and all awkward and unready into this thing.
    Letters arrived sometimes: Father wrote regularly to tell mea few facts about cattle and what good prospects there were in them. How he loved the names of cows, never knowing or caring that, out here in what seemed desert, most of the fat-uddered milky beasts he read of would crumple and die within a day. Santa Gertrudis, he would write, his elaborate European writing making the names exotic. Aberdeen Angus, Belted Galloway, Blonde d’Aquitane. Pouring over the glossy coloured pictures in his books on cows, he would not have believed these skinny wild creatures, that did not amble over grassy fields as he imagined, but galloped, lean of shank, over acres of dust and a few desiccated drab bushes.
    Poor Mother did not often write, knowing as she did that, although my tongue remembered a few rusty phrases of her language, my eyes could make no sense of it on the page. It was grief to her, I knew, but only part of the larger grief of life, that she had somehow never been able to learn the ways of the new land, and had had to watch her daughter grow up a stranger to her. Mother sent me postcards, patriotic ones of ships flying the