‘I can see your soul too, Alice, and yours, mother,’ Reuben said. He looked at the maid. ‘I can see your soul too, Mary. I can see all your souls glimmering with flickering wings, ready to take flight. Only held back by your own fear.’ He looked back at the son he held awkwardly in his hands. ‘But his soul, his soul is fresh and true.’ He looked down at his chest. ‘But I can’t see my soul. Mine is gone.’
Alice couldn’t take his nonsense any more and she cried. Her husband ignoring her, her husband being unfaithful, these were things she could find a way to deal with, but her husband babbling about souls like a madman was incomprehensible and she was afraid. The birth of their son had made his brain ill and she cried out when Reuben fell to his knees on the floor beside her. He flopped down there with a jolt, the baby still in his arms, and she thought for a moment he was going to ask her forgiveness for his infidelities. His eyes were pleading, but he didn’t speak to her. Instead he said, ‘I am yours. You have spoken in a way I can hear.’
To Alice’s immense relief he stood up and handed their son back to her. He began to walk towards the door but stopped.
‘Don’t name him,’ Reuben ordered. Alice held the baby tight, worried Reuben might take him again. She wasn’t going to let Reuben have him. Not in this state. But Reuben dashed out of the room.
‘Well,’ said Lisbet, ‘what the hell’s got into him now?’
Thirty-Six
The Prince
Sunday, 8 May 1921, when everyone in Australia has been charmed.
He was twenty-six and a prince when he visited, and there really wasn’t a better age for a prince to be. Prince Edward had set foot on Australian soil on the second of April 1920 and spent fifty days in a shower of confetti, eating barbequed sausages wrapped in bread and dripping with tomato sauce that ran down between his fingers. He ate every barbequed sausage as though it was the first he had ever tasted, and he ate them in every corner of the country, sometimes a dozen in one day, and still he smiled like a prince. He drove around waving at millions of people for hours in glorious motor vehicles. The women were delighted with his good looks and English accent and they pushed and scrabbled just to touch him. The men were impressed when he went bush for a spot of kangaroo and emu hunting. In the crowds men reached over the women and whacked him on the head with rolled-up newspapers and even though the whacks were sometimes too hard and hurt his head, still the prince smiled. Sometimes he wore his uniform and sometimes he wore civilian clothes, a long coat and a boxer, but whichever outfit he wore, the women held their hearts and looked to the sky, thanking God for him.
‘He’s so tall and gloriously handsome,’ they sighed.
‘If only I could marry him,’ they wished.
‘He can only marry a royal, you twit, and a virgin to boot,’ laughed the men.
So the women contented themselves with being in his presence. If they were close enough to touch him with the tip of a finger they cried, ‘I touched him!’ and fainted, to be carried away by the medics.
When his railway carriage overturned in Western Australia the Prince emerged leisurely and unscathed from the tangled metal and wood, his cocktail shaker in one hand and the papers he was about to sign in the other. How much more princely could a prince be?
Gracie wondered if he was her brave Englishman and she was his Cinderella, but he smiled for the cameras, thanked the Australian people for their tremendous sacrifices in the Great War and hopped back on his boat and sailed back to his castle, bruised from all the prodding and red-eyed from all the confetti that had caught in his lashes.
But the Prince paved the way, he made a track in the ocean for British immigrants to follow. Australia said it needed Sons of the Empire to protect the country in case of another Great War — those bloody Huns could never be trusted. The British wanted a bit of time in some sun, away from constant drizzle, and so the situation suited everyone. The turbine-powered steam ship the Ormonde could bring immigrants from London to Melbourne in the record time of just forty days; when it arrived in port it threw down its gangplank and, like a dam wall breaking, it flooded the nation with eligible Englishmen, any one of whom could be Gracie’s hero. In the past year some of them had found their way to Ballarat and attended the Baptist church. Gracie would feel a tingle of secret excitement wondering if this one was hers with the unruly hair and the cheeky grin, or perhaps that one with the tall straight back as though he never put a foot wrong in life. But none of them were hers. She knew that because the moment she was introduced to them the excitement died like a match going out.
Gracie was getting dressed for church, and she was doing it quickly because it was chilly. She put on her one-piece silk camisole. She wanted a longline elasticised corset like Edie’s, but Edie said corsets were for older women like her and not for young girls of fifteen like Gracie. She pulled on her white Holeproof stockings that were anything but hole-proof; Edie said she should put her gloves on first and that way her nails wouldn’t tear her stockings but she never remembered to do it. She eased the stockings up over her legs carefully
