Bereft by Chris Womersley Page B

He had been a voracious reader, had books sent out from London, journals and the like. This is right after I was married, and Robert had left for England. Your father and I had moved to Bathurst, and I was dreadfully lonely. And I recall picking a book at random from one of the crates and starting to read, and before I knew it the afternoon had darkened and my weeping had been kept at bay for several hours.”
    Mary took another sip of water. “ A Thousand and One Nights ,” she said with relish. “Even now I think of the City of Brass, the dead queen with quicksilver eyes. Magic carpets. I read them to you. An old book it was, with purple and gold pictures. My goodness. Full of genies and bearded men and giant eagles, a magnetic mountain that sucked the nails from the hull of a ship. Those stories were better than dreams. They transported me, Quinn. Not even the Bible had managed that. Your father was quite alarmed, not helped by the foolish legend going around that anyone who finished all the stories would die. He thought it unnatural for a woman to read so much. I credit those crates of books for—well, not quite saving my life, of course, but something close to it. A good story is like medicine, in my opinion.”
    His mother had become more animated, but now she closed her eyes, as if the effort of speech had exhausted her. Quinn traced the lumpy scar at his mouth. The bed squeaked under him when he shifted his weight.
    â€œAnd do you remember all those other stories I told you?” she asked.
    Of course he remembered. His mother’s storytelling abilities were renowned. On winter nights all five of them would assemble in front of the fire—Nathaniel sucking on his pipe, William huddled with arms folded about his knees, Sarah resting against Quinn’s shoulder—as their mother’s voice, pitching and growling, altering with each character, swirled around the darkness. She told them of Tom the chimney sweep and his encounter with the water babies, of Peter Rabbit, of Gulliver’s travels to the land of the savage and frightening Yahoos. She didn’t even need a book. If called upon to manufacture something from thin air, she could stitch together a tale from all she had heard over the years, even adding a few creations of her own: a race of tiny folk who lived in the garden on old tea leaves, an insect with the face of a dog. She could make even the moral verses from the Boy’s Own Paper exciting.
    â€œHow I have missed my children,” she continued. “A cavern inside me. And I have ventured there often searching for you, but it is always empty. I want to ask you more but I am unsure if I even want to know. I have resisted hearing too much about that day. It is enough that it happened. More than enough. I would often sit in your old room, the room you all shared, and an entire day would pass. Your brother was unable to sleep in there after what happened and left soon afterwards, in any case. He slept in the hallway or on the veranda until he went north. You all left, but the room is the same.
    â€œYou remember Sarah’s little cigar box of things she collected? Her lucky things? She had a feather in there and I went through a period when I would clutch it—you will think me mad on this—in my right hand and hold it to my forehead and pray. Later I developed a peculiar certainty that by doing so and saying a part of some Byron poem she might return to me, or perhaps I to her. That you all would, because it was only after that day that so much went wrong. Her … her death was at the heart of everything.”
    Mary paused again. “I did the same sort of thing with your cigarette cards, William’s soldiers. Incantations they were, I suppose. Blasphemous, probably. Your father hates that I go in there. Says I’m being maudlin. Perhaps he is right but now he leaves me to my own devices. He almost never spoke of her death. Said he