Read Online Gracious Living by Andrea Goldsmith - Free Book Online Page A

towered over the houses and clogged the guttering. In this suburb, the people and the trees were on the move. Upwards.
    The Roscoes appeared to be typical inhabitants. The house had been painted cream with chocolate trim, the fence was high and swarming green, and the blue gum, already at guttering height, suggested an occupancy of three to four years. Prevailing taste would judge it an attractive house, one that, in the words of the realtors, combined modern convenience with old-world charm. And yet who could know whether current fashion and eager realtors were right? Who has the vision to see their own times? Not Penelope and Andrew Roscoe, and certainly not the younger Elizabeth Dadswell. Elizabeth liked the house, liked it very much: the blue gum, the high fence, the cream and chocolate paint all met with her approval. She and Adrian had looked at many such houses prior to their marriage, but in the end her parents, who were paying for the property after all, had the final say, and Elizabeth had been forced to forfeit the picturesque and atmospheric for pragmatics: a large, Edwardian-style family home a brisk ten-minute walk from the Bainbridges. Adrian was delighted: the house was an excellent pulley for his ambitions.
    Ginnie stirred in the carry-cot. Elizabeth pleaded with her not to wake and moved smoothly down the path to the front door. ‘I ask nothing of you,’ she murmured to the child in a lullaby voice, ‘only sleep, just this once, for a few hours. Let me have this time.’
    It was not that she believed her life would be changed by the meeting, rather she longed for the solace of knowing others like her. She wanted to feel less alone and less guilty. She wanted, too, to feel less of a failure, but the experts said that would only occur if she were to have another child. And she wanted to talk, talk once, twice, a hundred times and ask a thousand questions about the child and the future and getting through each day. Even the brief phone call with Penelope Roscoe had made her feel better. Penelope had telephoned three days ago, Monday, and suggested morning tea for the Thursday. ‘I think there’ll be four of us,’ she had said, ‘a good number. Any more and I think we’d drown in a flood of words.’
    Since Monday, as if she knew Elizabeth could take no more, the child had withdrawn her claws. Meals had been eaten in less than an hour, the crying was less shrill and less frequent, the pretty smiles were more numerous and she seemed to be holding her head up a little better. For the first time since the diagnosis Elizabeth was able to leave her with Mrs Cox for an entire afternoon while she shopped for a new outfit to wear at the morning tea. She had needed new clothes for some time but, apart from the family and close friends like Lydia, she saw no one. Not that she had stopped her small dinner parties, but she tended to restrict the guest list to those who knew about Ginnie. As for invitations from others, they were increasingly rare. People telephoned but never visited. Fear of intruding, Susie Warby explained, everyone realised how very busy Elizabeth must be. No one ever articulated why she was so busy, no one wanted to utter the awful truth. But Elizabeth knew that intrusion had nothing to do with it, only fear and distaste.
    The baby was sleeping when Elizabeth left to go shopping. She stepped outside and stood for a moment in the sun, face to the sky, eyes closed. She experienced a novel assuagement, intensely physical. So this is liberation, she thought. But behind the joy wasa black boiling pain, and she decided as she walked to the car that it was temporary relief with its seams of desperation that she was feeling, nothing as permanent as freedom. There was no disappointment. You learn to take what you can.
    Elizabeth had gone straight to Liliana’s and there had chosen a casual ensemble – a cotton shirt-dress in a blue stripe with a blue linen jacket. She looked in the mirror and saw her old