The Art of Preserving Love

at Lake Wendouree and Lake Wendouree is a marsh that humans with shovels turned into a lake, but it refuses to cooperate. In blistering summers, it regularly drains itself when people need its cool wetness the most. The wealthy rowers who live in the houses around the lake curse and fuss when it dries up because they can’t hold their regattas, and a dried-out lake will devalue their properties. The poor miners who live a good mile’s walk away laugh because the lake’s cratered dusty bed has become an eyesore that the wealthy are forced to look at — and that has to be a good joke on them. But the town is proud of the lake they created from a mosquito-ridden swamp. When it has water, musk ducks bicker in its shallows and swans chase children for their picnic lunches — or the children terrorise the swans back into the water. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons the town’s population comes out to walk around the lake whether it is dry or full. They walk with umbrellas to protect them from the sun’s harsh glare when it is warm and with umbrellas to protect them from the icy wind and rain when it is chilly.

The lake was full when Edie was walking the baby around it in a pram, though the town’s engineers were saying the way the weather was going it would be dry by March. At first the baby had been a quiet peaceful soul and Edie wouldn’t even have known it was in the house if it hadn’t killed her mother. But now, at five weeks old, Gracie fretted, whimpered and squirmed and she got worse as it got hotter. Nothing would console her. She knew the sun had evil intentions and she was frightened. Paul had said a walk in the pram might settle her and Edie had replied that she had things to do. Paul had raised his eyebrows knowing full well that Edie didn’t have anything she had to do — which Edie thought was another issue in itself. She didn’t have anything to do, no occupation and no Theo. Theo, who hadn’t come around to ask her father, and for this she could only blame the baby. This baby had ruined everything.

‘Edie, I must ask that you get Gracie out in the fresh air before it becomes too hot,’ Paul persisted.

‘Beth can do it,’ said Edie. She could hear her father’s demanding tone and was purposefully ignoring it. She didn’t want anything to do with the baby if she could help it. If she had her way it would be where it belonged: in the orphanage. Beth was folding a pile of nappies on the kitchen table.

‘Because Beth doesn’t have enough to do already,’ said Beth, holding out her hands.

‘Edie, I’m asking you to do it. Beth has enough on her plate now there are nappies to wash and bottles to be boiled, not to mention her regular work.’

‘I suppose I could drown it while I’m down there,’ said Edie.

She saw Beth and Paul look at each other.

‘Oh, I didn’t mean it,’ said Edie, and laughed a fake, empty laugh. But she did mean it. And now she was walking around the lake having to put up with people stopping to coo at the baby. Oh, isn’t she beautiful? they said, pushing their heads into the pram. Oh it’s such a shame her moth— Oh, she’s a mixed blessing, isn’t she? And they would stop short and pop their heads up like a jack-in-a-box and look at Edie, waiting for her to forgive their tactlessness.

Well, Edie wasn’t giving out forgiveness for carelessness, not today, and she said goodbye to the baby cooers and said she must get on before it got too hot to be out, and deliberately pushed the pram close enough to brush their clothes and make them stand back.

Edie pushed the pram to the area of the lake called Fairy Land, where the platypus sometimes came out to play and where there were tall native grasses that could hide all sorts of sins. Edie looked in on the baby. It was grizzling and squirming. She looked up at the sun, which was working its way up into a fiery frenzy that would send everyone inside in the afternoon. The baby looked at Edie and Edie picked it up and she stepped through the tall marsh grasses towards the murky deeper water, not minding the mud getting all over her boots and her dress. She held the baby out over the water.

‘It’s so easy,’ she said to the baby, ‘just to be done with you here. After all, you are a murderer, and it’s a fitting punishment for your crime.’

Beth thought if it was hot outside it must be fifty degrees hotter in the kitchen with the wood-burning stove. There was no choice but to have the fire going, they had to have sterilised bottles for the baby and warm milk and bathwater and Beth didn’t really mind doing anything if it was for Gracie. There was something about the baby that soothed Beth. When she held Gracie in her arms the world seemed a better place; when she sang to her, the baby seemed to sing along in sweet tuneful whispers. And when Beth held Gracie close to her chest, her heart was open.

So Beth couldn’t understand why Edie seemed so uninterested in Gracie. Sometimes Beth even thought Edie seemed to hate the baby, like this morning when she said she could drown it. Beth thought Paul looked like he was going to have a heart attack when Edie said that, as though he thought Edie might really do it. She never expected such venom from Edie, who was normally so kind and guileless. Beth was making chamomile tea for Gracie, which she would feed her in tiny teaspoons like an injured bird so that she didn’t choke. In the evenings when it had cooled a bit