Alice must have wondered how it was possible to travel halfway around the world only to end up in the same place as she’d started. Da capo. She might as well have been back in Mrs Rankin’s haberdashery among the inane chatter of dagger-mouthed women. She abandoned performance for accompanying. At the piano she could see everything yet remain invisible.
‘I don’t recall Mum singing at home,’ Charlotte said when we talked about her childhood. ‘She never sang with me. She wasn’t very interested in girls. I had a hearing impediment that wasn’t diagnosed until I was fourteen. But I do remember her spending a lot of time with Jimmy, trying to get him to sit up.’
James Lloyd, born in 1925, made few sounds and couldn’t sit up by himself. At what point does a parent suspect something is not quite as it should be with their child? There are too many unanswerable questions here. Did Alice know there was a problem and George refuse to acknowledge it, or was it the other way around? As James grew from chubby baby to toddler, they must have sought doctors’ opinions for their little boy, who remained floppy as a ragdoll. Whether it was through a local doctor or Nance, George and Alice learned of the Stockton Mental Hospital, on a peninsula across the Hunter River from Newcastle. Opened in 1917, Stockton catered to adults and children with intellectual disabilities. From the very little public information available about this facility, it appears that patients of all ages were housed together. Not until 1937 was there a call for tenders to build a dedicated children’s wing.58
I’m trying to imagine the agonising journey to Newcastle, George staring straight ahead, his lips tightly drawn, his bony hands gripping the wheel of their green kerosene-powered truck. They left Charlotte, now three, with Nance and Richard. Alice, clutching a sleeping Jimmy to her chest, was most likely relieved that Charlotte wouldn’t witness them leaving her brother in the care of strangers.
From what Charlotte remembers, Alice regarded her daughter with a detachment she could not shake. I wonder if she felt Charlotte belonged to George in some way that she did not belong to her, and whether she thought it was due to their relentlessly positive outlook on life.
There would have been a chain of correspondence with Stockton, containing no end of assurances about the quality of care they provided, the expertise, the years of experience helping other children with the same condition as Jimmy. ‘We’ve done all we can for him at home, love,’ I can hear George saying. ‘They’ll know how to help him.’ How could Alice argue with the truth?
Even so, the most practical of mothers would feel anguish handing the care of her child to an institution full of strangers—all well-meaning, but none of them his mother. Was Alice tearful or tight-lipped? Weeping or stoic? Did she suffer catastrophic visions of Jimmy alone, cold, crying out for the comfort only a mother provides a toddler? Had she lain awake at night as the date approached, seeing flashes of Jimmy screaming for help, sick with the feeling that she shouldn’t be leaving him no matter how qualified the Stockton people presented themselves to be? I am convinced that even after so many years, Alice would still have found it impossible to trust anyone. But there was no logical reason why Jimmy would be better off staying on the farm. And so George and Alice Lloyd committed their little boy into the care of the Stockton Mental Hospital.
Less than one year later, Jimmy contracted dysentery and died there, under the supervision of those who had been charged with his care. He was two and a half.
‘When Jimmy died they were stripping the wheat,’ my aunt Charlotte recalled, close to ninety years after her brother’s death. ‘And the wheat could not wait for grief.’
The wheat, the seasons, the dawn and the sunset—life ruthlessly continues, and to those struggling with loss of one kind or another it can feel pretty isolating, if not downright insulting, for time to keep ticking over while your world has collapsed.
I can imagine that stripping the wheat, or any of the seasonal activities of a farming life, might have provided ritual comfort to Alice, even if she felt as empty as the cloudless Yeoval sky. But she wasn’t close to her daughter, and she and George must have nearly broken from having to bury their son.
Did she fantasise about returning to Glasgow, or dream of making another fresh start? I doubt it. Alice Lloyd was nothing if not practical. She would have rolled up her sleeves and got on with whatever jobs needed doing, even if she felt dead inside.
32
A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER my husband died, I moved to New York. I was thirty-six. I wanted a break with everything that was familiar to me, in a place that had always been my beacon. I had a green card, and I knew three people who lived there: a married couple, and an ex-boyfriend. It was a start.
But four years later, I had reluctantly started to think about returning to live in Australia. Though it’s a big place, New York is also a small town, and freelance writer-editors without a strong network of contacts are as common as muck. Skype had become my professional lifeline because most of my work came from Australia. I had enough—just—but it felt tenuous. Outside work, I went on dates generated by algorithms that, in person, had no rhythm of their own. Inevitably I would have to tell my story and, for most suitors, widow was a curiosity killer. I had no piano in my apartment, but I carried my metaphorical piano stool like Schroeder did his toy piano. It didn’t seem to matter where I was; I kept men at a manageable distance. Which is to say that I kept
