Read Online My Candlelight Novel by Joanne Horniman - Free Book Online Page B

the end of the street (which later became our bridge, mine and Hetty’s, on our regular morning walks). I removed the horrid licorice shoes that I’d worn the night I met Marcus and tossed them down into the water. I heard them fall in. Plop. Plop.
    Then I walked home barefoot.

C HAPTER N INE
    W HEN I W AS pregnant with Hetty, I never thought beyond that time. I didn’t imagine that I would have another life afterwards that would mean sometimes leaving her behind.
    â€˜Live your life,’ Lil had always urged us. So on the first day of university, I slung two bags over my shoulder (one each for Hetty and me), hefted her onto my hip, and went to go out the door. But beset by sudden fear and indecision, I turned back to Lil, who’d been standing there seeing us off.
    Her face stoic, she reached out and plucked a piece of fluff from my cardigan (a symbolic gesture if ever there was one, as there were many bits of fluff and stray hairs forever about my person), and spat on the corner of a handkerchief to wipe a smear of Vegemite from Hetty’s cheek.
    You’ll do.
    This time she didn’t need to say the words aloud. It was what she’d always told us as she prepared Kate and me for each small step out into the world. ‘ You’ll do.’ And we had always believed that we would.
    As I’d feared, when I left Hetty at the university childcare centre she howled, with great roars of rage and sorrow. She was in the arms of a carer named Jill, tossing herself about like a ship in a storm. I hesitated, tugged back by guilt and pity. ‘Just go,’ said Jill. ‘She’ll be fine. You’d be amazed how quickly she’ll get used to it. These tears will be gone in a few minutes.’
    I made my way across the campus, blocking out the memory of her screams by thinking of Kate at Sydney University. She had described ancient weathered sandstone, dim old corridors and azalea-filled courtyards. I thought how that would suit me far more than all this brick and concrete, linked by expanses of lawn with gum trees full of screeching parrots.
    I was anxious about becoming a student again. Since leaving school, the only new thing I’d learnt had been how to write shorthand. I’d taught myself from an old textbook I’d found at Samarkand. I enjoyed the way shorthand was a kind of code, known only to the initiated. I felt I was part of a secret society, of sorts. Now, at least, it might come in handy for taking notes.
    In the lecture theatre I took a seat close to the back; I’d been so anxious to be on time that I was early. As I watched the other students make their way in groups into the tiered theatre I realised that because it was mid-year most of them would already know each other.
    People trickled in, and I noticed how informal everyone was, leaning across casually to cadge pens or paper from friends; they weren’t looking at everyone, or wondering whether people were looking at them. (But of course, no one was observing me. I was invisible because I was of no interest to anyone; why should anyone bother to notice a new student, a part-timer at that?)
    I opened my lecture pad, and with the flat of my hand caressed the beautiful blank page. So I used to smooth my workbooks at school when I was a child, writing with my face almost on the page, watching the words spool magically away from my pen.
    The lecturer spoke of the revolution in thought that took place in the nineteenth century, and how that influenced the way we think today. She talked about Mary Wollstonecraft, and the rights of women, and the influence of that on the Brontë sisters and George Eliot. She asked us to consider how might Wollstonecraft’s thinking have influenced Jane Eyre , and why Pride and Prejudice still had such a wide readership.
    Looking back at my notes from that day, I find things like: Marxist-Feminist analysis of the text!! What does this mean?
    The lecturer spoke of Freud,