FICTION: read an extract from Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves

A Room Made of Leaves is Kate Grenville’s bold return to fiction. In her first novel in nearly a decade, the author of literary classic The Secret River reimagines colonial Australia through the adventures of Elizabeth Macarthur, the resourceful and resilient wife of wool baron John Macarthur.

Some time ago, during the renovation of an historic house in Sydney, a tin box, sealed with wax and wrapped in oiled canvas, was found wedged under a beam in a roof cavity. The house was Elizabeth Farm, where Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the notorious early settler John Macarthur, lived until her death in 1850. The box – jammed with hard-to-read old papers, cross-written to save space – was put away and forgotten until recently … The contents turned out to be her long-hidden memoirs … hot outpourings, pellets of memory lit by passionate feeling. This is her story…

The pains came on me as we were making our way to Chatham Barracks, from whence we would sail to Gibraltar. We did not get anywhere close to Chatham, though, before it was obvious that the child was on its way, and we fetched up in some disarray at a poor inn on the wrong side of Bath.

I had begun to weep when the pains started, because with the first sharp pang I was obliged to believe what I had until then not truly believed, that there was no going back. Started weeping and did not stop. All the years of squashing down the tears, of being cheerful and obliging, saying only what was unexceptional, and the strange months of being married to a husband I could not reach – all that pressed-down sorrow came up like a bolus into my throat.

Anne knew a little more than I did of childbirth, but she was only a girl, and as the pains began to come fast and strong, I saw she was as frightened as I was. There was no midwife to be had for a woman only that day arrived in the city, so the companion of my childbed was the innkeeper’s wife.

There was nothing gentle about her. Had no patience, she made clear, for a woman who had not taken care to plan what was upon her. But she knew what she was about, and was with me as I traversed a terrible landscape of pain and fear and chaos. Time was suspended, time did not pass, time could only be measured by the respites between the brutal grasping of some merciless fist in my body. The respite – six breaths between, then three, then one – were the times when I was given back myself, to feel air coming in and out of my chest, feel the water Anne offered me cool in my mouth, know that the world went on, time was passing in the usual way. But each reprieve was only to tease. The grip returned, distant at first and then roaring over me and through me and around me, sucking air and time away and flinging me into an eternity of the unbearable. Then the pains joined together end to end and there was no reprieve, only a flailing about in a black gnashing place that did not care a fig about me, wanted only to gripe and grip me until no person was left, no human, just a screaming animal.

The voice of the innkeeper’s wife was the rope that kept me bound to life, with me in the hard place I was grinding my way through, but she was not in the pain with me. That was a place a person had to travel through alone. I met there a cold indifferent truth: that every person – even a loved person, and I was not loved – was alone. On the whole globe, there was no one but myself, and I was shaken and torn down to the merest speck of being.

The child the woman put into my arms was nothing like the plump pink babes I had seen, sweet tidy parcels being handed around a room full of smiling people. He was a dreadful little monkey, with legs like twigs and purple hands and a big round belly. He seemed to be on the point of expiring, his mouth opening and closing but only the smallest whimper emerging.

The innkeeper’s wife took him away and I lay washed up on the bed as flat and limp as some dead thing fished out of the sea. It was I suppose the worst of all the hours of my life. That squalid inn, that sickly child, and Anne pushing water at me, crumbling bread in milk that I did not want. Poor girl, she meant kindly but she was no use to me, her face the face of a stranger. I knew that this was the world I was in now, a vile dirty place where I was alone, alone, alone. I wept again, storming and sobbing, it seemed the flood would never stop. Woe is me, oh poor me, woe is me.

The woman came back with the baby washed and wrapped, tucked him beside me and sat with her beefy arms crossed over her chest and her small shrewd eyes watching me with no great warmth. I saw that she knew what had happened to my life, knew the whole sad commonplace story without being told.

– Mrs Macarthur, she said at last over my sobs, and I thought she might lean towards me and take my hand, perhaps come out with a few cheering platitudes.

I felt myself get ready to cry harder, because I was sure my plight was beyond the reach of any platitudes. But her rock-like face did not soften and she did not offer any comfort.

– Only a fool could not see what you have got yourself into, Mrs Macarthur, she said.

She spoke in a mild way, like a person explaining to another how you might get from Bridgerule to the

Red Post Inn. Paused for a good look at me, hair wet with tears bedraggled all over my cheeks. The horrible clinging hair was part of the misery that I wanted to drown in. I let it cling rather than push it away.

– How it strikes you, yes, that’s as plain as a pikestaff, she said. And I will not say what another

“She knew what had happened to my life ... without being told.”

might, but at least you have your sweet boy, because he is a sad little scrap. Could as well die as live, to be frank. I wondered if she was the Devil come to taunt me. – You are a stranger to me so I can speak plain, she said. I will say this, as one who has laid out many a corpse. Here in this pickle is where you are and there is no one on this earth can help you out of it.

I braced myself for some pious thing about God’s mysterious ways.

– And no one not on this earth either, to my mind, she said. She knew what I was thinking. No matter a body wear out their knees trying.

When she laughed it was a startling thing. Her face broke into its separate features, nose, big coarse cheeks, mouth.

– As for you, lass, you have a parcel of years to go, she said. Spend them wallowing with sorrow if you please, as you are now, waiting for a better thing that will never come. There is no one in this wide world to stop you, if that is the choice you make.

She stood, rolled down her sleeves, buttoned them as if finished with me.

– There is just this, though, lass, that I can tell you, she said. Which is, life is long. It has more corners than you can count. A woman can do many things, but she has to bide her time.

When she was gone, taking Anne with her, I wept harder at her hard words, and the way she had not tried to comfort me. I lay with my misery, the greedy tears pouring out of my eyes, dripping from my chin. Nothing changed, no one came. Only the quiet room, the child silent against me, and myself listening to my own gulps and gasps.

I could have gone on crying for ever, might have died in the extravagance of so much despair, but after a time there were simply no more tears. One last great dry sob turned into a hiccough. Then it was over.

The child stirred feebly, let out a faint mew, turned his head towards me, jerked his tiny fist. We were in this, both of us, together. Here was this sad ugly scrap of life, that could do nothing but let out that thin cry, twitch that fist no bigger than a walnut, turn his head blindly: and something in me went out to him. I picked him up, his vague eyes seemed to meet mine, his mouth made a movement, and I understood that, if he were to live, it could only be because I made it so. Poor feeble unlovely creature as he was, I could do no other than love him.

By the time that stranger my husband came back to the room, smelling of cigar and rum, I was sitting up against the pillows with the child in my arms. Anne had brought water and a cloth and a clean nightdress, had gently washed my face and tied back my hair.

– My dear, he said, and for once the endearment seemed to have feeling.

But he could not meet my eye. Was in some way afraid of me, I understood. I had come through pain and fear, had like every woman in childbed been within a hand’s brush of death. I had proved myself stronger than life had ever asked him to be. Had come back knowing something that would never be known to him. It was secret knowledge, secret because it could not be told, only lived through.

He looked at the child, pushed back the wrapper to see his face.

– Well, he said, and it was easy to hear that, like me, he had expected a chubby rosy cherub, not this wizened creature. Put a finger to the child’s pale cheek as if to check he was alive. The baby’s head turned, the blue-veined eyelids flickered.

– My son, he said, uncertain, but doing his best to match the little thing in front of him with the proud words. Glanced at me for an instant, as if at a bright light.

– Edward, perhaps, he said. Edward Macarthur, that has a fine ring, do you not agree?

He was finding his way back to his familiar world, where he could take circumstances by the bridle and lead them where he wished.

Before the birth I had given some consideration to names. If a girl, she would be Jane, in honour of good Mrs Kingdon, and if a boy I wanted

Richard for my father, or perhaps John for my grandfather.

– I thought Richard, I said. For my father.

So perhaps Edward Richard.

I spoke gently, kindly. I had been sunk in terror and returned safe. I had met myself and hoped not to lose myself again. I could be magnanimous towards this man who had not been given those privileges.

I had long ago folded myself up small and put myself away. That had served me well enough.

But then I had unfolded too wildly, too recklessly, in the wrong place and at the wrong time and with the wrong person. But between a person folded up small and a person too quick to believe herself safe in unfolding, there was the speck that was what was left when you took everything else away.

She was here with me now, would always be with me. She would not turn to the wall and waste her life groaning at her fate. She would carry that precious speck of self on into the future. AWW

This is an edited extract from A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville (Text Publishing). On sale July 2.

“I wondered if she was the Devil come to taunt me.”