She opened her eyes and looked at him.
‘I was just going to the office,’ he said, ‘but I can stay here with you.’
‘What about Edie’s beau?’
‘He can come down to the office. I’ll only be sending him back to Edie anyway. If he’s serious he won’t resent a little running around for our daughter.’
‘Well go on then, I’m only going to sleep anyway. You go, dear,’ Lucy said, but he didn’t move.
‘I don’t want to leave you.’
She tried to laugh but only a small wheeze came out. ‘I’m not going anywhere in this condition. Going to church has done me in for the day.’
‘I would have thought Edie would have worn you out for the day. If I’d noticed she was going to church practically showing her undergarments I would have locked her up. But all I’ve been thinking about is you.’ He walked over and put his hand on her forehead. Dear God! She was burning up. Paul lay down beside her and put his head on her belly. Her clothes, damp with her sweat, wetted his cheek. The growing baby inside, feeling the presence of its father, somersaulted in its wet cocoon. He remembered reading once about the underground houses the opal miners built in the middle of the desert to stay cool in the searing heat. Lucy felt the heat so badly and the summer was coming. He wished he could give her one of those houses.
He stood and bent to kiss her cheek, taking in the sweet smell of her perfume and the warmth of her neck. She turned her head towards him and her soft black hair, speckled with grey and released from its usual bun, fell momentarily across his cheek. He was reminded of the first time he had loosened it with trembling fingers, pulling each clip out slowly as if pulling out fragments of her soul. When her hair was free he’d buried his face in it.
The first time he saw her she had been wearing a white summer dress and a wide-brimmed hat with a pale blue ribbon that lifted gently in the breeze. She was holding her baby sister in her arms and singing to her, and her voice was tender like whispers on the wind. The hat cast a shadow over her, as if she and the baby were in a separate world created by her song, and he wanted desperately to enter that world. His own was full of rules and precedents, claims and litigation; he knew he needed her quietness, her voice to lull him to a place of gentleness.
She was sixteen when they met, eighteen when they married, and they had hoped for so many children. But till now only Edie had come.
He kissed her cheek again and said, ‘I can stay,’ but she shook her head and said, ‘Go, go.’ So reluctantly he left her room.
‘I’ll be back by five,’ he said, but she was sleeping again. Every time he left her it felt as if it would be the last, and it was like a kick in the gut.
‘I’m off now, Edith,’ he called and closed the front door behind him.
He stepped out into the afternoon sun, looked up and swore at it. ‘You’re a bloody problem you are!’ The sun smirked and grew hotter, and the hotter it got the more he could feel Lucy slipping away from him. It was as though she was melting away to nothing.
Last year the summer heat spawned bushfires that ate up farms and took jagged bites at the edges of the town. The heat and smoke from the fires filled everyone’s lungs. Women dissolved in their skirts and corsets, and men put on brave faces. Lucy had wilted like a plucked wild daisy. Watching her, Paul’s heart had seared and stung. Then winter had come and she had picked up for a while, but now it was warming up again and she was dwindling away. There seemed to be nothing he could do to help her. He jabbed his umbrella at the sun seven times and then sighed and set off.
It was a comfortable stroll to the office. He always said to his clerks that it was important for a man to be on his own between work and home to make the transition from the duty of work to the duty of home. A man’s life is a matter of keeping these two responsibilities in equal balance so that neither is neglected nor put upon by the other. That’s what he told his men and what he lived by. His walk was his space, and he banged his umbrella along the fence posts making a racket the way schoolboys do with sticks. By the time people looked out their windows he was gone, so they ran to their front gates and shook their fists at the boys who were kicking tin cans down the street. He got to Drummond Street and decided to cross the main road and walk down Dana Street. It was steeper but it was downhill and his office was right on the corner of Dana and Armstrong in the centre of town, just a block from the Town Hall. The Town Hall clock sounded as loudly in his office as if he was standing under it.
His mind turned back to Lucy. He might have a son this time. Not that he cared, as long as Lucy was all right. He hadn’t missed having a son; he always told people that ‘You don’t pine for what you’ve never had.’ But thinking about it as he walked, his umbrella now tapping on the road, he thought it might be nice to have a son, someone to leave the business to. But his bones ached with worry and his chest refused to take in a decent amount of air. If Lucy didn’t survive the coming summer there might not be
