sharp creases with the flat of his hands.
The actress (a Miss Shelly Claudine who was shortly to appear in the front chorus at the Tivoli) returned at last, slightly grim of face, but with a newspaper-wrapped bottle in her handbag. This she thrust at Horace.
'Tell her,' she whispered hoarsely, 'that she must drink it in the morning when her husband has gone. It will hurt her, but she must not panic.' And then she kissed Horace on his astonished wine-wet mouth.
Horace became emotional. He took the actress's hand and shook his head. Tears welled in his eyes but words would not come.
'Go,' she said, 'for God's sake.'
'How can I thank you?'
'Write a poem for me,' the actress said, and kissed him again, this time on the forehead (he had never been kissed so many times in a day).
'To hell with the law,' Horace told Bernstein, 'the law is a monkey on a stick.'
'An ass,' said Bernstein.
'A billy goat's bum,' said Horace, the bottle tucked safely in his pocket, his handkerchief abandoned on the floor. He bowed formally to his benefactors and withdrew.
He threaded his cautious circuitous way to the Maribyrnong River, heading north as if he intended to visit Brunswick, then south as if the zoo had suddenly claimed his interest. He trotted out towards Haymarket along quiet streets and, when he considered himself safe, finally allowed Toddy to wander with his lolling head and stumbling hooves along the last two miles to Ballarat Road. They stopped for snapdragons and roses, delphiniums and geraniums. They stopped so Toddy could shit, or merely lift his tail and consider shitting. The horse, perhaps aware that the excitements of the day were not yet over, prudently threw a shoe four hundred yards from home.
69
The horse had its head at a pile of dung, purchased by Molly, intended for the garden. I saw it in my headlights and read the Rawleigh's sign on the panniers of the cart. My scalp prickled and my hands clenched. I knew that something was wrong. I am not inventing this, not confusing the before and after. I knew something was up before I heard my wife's voice, refracted, splintered, like the glass across a fallen water colour.
I ran towards the house. I found the kitchen empty. The bedroom was full of light and threw too many shadowed forms against the canvas walls. I ran up the two steps that had once led to the small stage of the hall and found the scene that follows: my wife lying on our bed, spewing green bile into a basin held by a stranger, my mother-in-law sitting on the end of the bed stroking her daughter's feet.
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
