Remembering Babylon by David Malouf Page A

left – perhaps because she had none at all for her youth. She lived in the demands of the moment, in the girls, in Lachlan, and was too high-spirited, too independent, to care whether other women approved of her.
    They came in the afternoon with their bits of darning. As the needles went in, they lowered their eyes and put their questions, all barbed concern.
    Gemmy, it was always Gemmy. What had they talked of, she wondered, before Gemmy arrived to give that breathless urgency to their talk and to darken the air in the close little hut to a point where she wondered, sometimes, how even by screwing their eyes up they could find the hole to thread a needle, the room was so dense with the shadows they called up to terrify themselves and one another.
    Didn’t she find it hard sometimes to sit at the same table with him? Considering that he might be happier running about naked – goodness, remember that first day! – than in the shirts she washed for him. Oh and the trousers, of course! And eating grubs – imagine! – than potatoes and cold mutton. That is, if it wasn’t something worse. Their own grandfathers, so they say. And wasn’t she scared, just a little – well they knew she wasn’t but they would be, it was a wonder really how calm she was – of the time he spent with the children. The little girls, for instance. And Lachlan, who was so lively and impressionable? Wasn’t she worried sometimes about the influence the fellow might be having? And did shereally let him chop wood for her? Actually let him loose with an axe ?
    The word assumed substance, took shape, and you heard the swish of its blade through the stilled air in the suspension of their breath. Gracie Corcoran, who was a Roman, crossed herself.
    They were forgetting, she told them frostily. Gemmy was white.
    She despised these attempts to undermine her. What especially enraged her was the suggestion that she might not have her children’s safety at heart. She would not let them see how they had unsettled her. Calm. Is that what they thought?
    They were in a place where there were no sureties of any kind. Of course she wasn’t calm! And of course there were times when she was not just scared but petrified, though for the most part she was not, and these weaker moments she kept to herself.
    You took slow, shallow mouthfuls of air till the fear drew off.
    You took it for granted that life would stay normal, and if you believed that hard enough, it did. Three meals on the table, plates drying on the rack, a wash on the line, shirts, children’s things, empty for now but ready to be drawn over your head and stepped into, and hooked and buttoned and soiled and sweat-stained in the time to come.
    But there were nights, lying stiffly in the dark, hands clenched at her side, heart thumping, when she did not feel sure.
    She was aware of the three children breathing in the dark, two of them her own, the third a sacred trust; the notes of their breathing as different, as distinct one from the other, as their voices, or their bright, quick bodies. What would become of them? What sort of life could they have up here?
    She had wanted to give Lachlan a better chance than he might have got at home, but he was wayward, he could go any way at all in this country that was all fits and changes, one thing one minute, another the next. There was no way of telling. Was Gemmy really an influence on him?
    It was now, in this loose state at the edge of sleep, or, worsestill, of despairing sleeplessness, that her neighbours’ doubts took possession of her.
    Her mind strayed to where he was sleeping, curled up under a red blanket in his lean-to against the side of the hut; just inches away, the other side of the wall.
    Occasionally, in the deep hours, a cry would come from him. Jock would start awake, his hand already feeling for the shotgun; one of the children, stirring, might speak as if in answer, then a second.
    She would lay her hand to her husband’s arm. He would