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Christmas eve, I967

They were plump, meaty birds, Rosemarie admitted grudgingly, as she shoved in handfuls of stuffing. The rich creamy-yellow colour of the plucked skin was testament to their short but happy lives, in a generous yard with good food and plenty of it, and they would be succulent and tender. Her mother would've given her eye teeth to have two chickens like these – fowls, she'd have called them – to roast for Christmas dinner. But the few feathers her husband had missed revolted Rosemarie. Lips curled back, she tried to pull out one of the nubby white shafts but the skin lifted towards her, resisting, and she gave up. Oh, she wished she could give up on the whole damn thing, just go and lie down on her bed with the curtains drawn and a wet flannel on her forehead.

Why, for heaven's sake, must he call them 'chooks'? And why must she turn the oven on tomorrow morning and heat the whole place up when the temperature was like an oven outside anyway? Cooking a baked dinner made perfect sense back home. On Christmas Day in England the sun barely peeked above the horizon, and both the cooking of the meal and the eating were so welcomely warming, like a red coat in a crowd of grey. Feasting and cheer to keep the dark and the cold at bay. Here, where the sun was still glaring onto the patio at seven o' clock in the evening, slicing at her eyes like a bayonet when she glanced out, a meal like this was just . . . stupid. More stupid work for her.

The back door opened and closed again. She heard Alex toeing his gardening boots off, thud-thud, and washing his hands at the laundry trough. Singing, he was! That moronic 'Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer' .

'That's not even a proper carol!' she shouted, but he only called back, 'What's that, love?' over the sound of running water. From further back in the house she heard Meredith's wail start up, piercing as an air-raid siren, and Deborah's ringing tones of command.

The door from the kitchen to the laundry swung open. Her husband's thinning hair was plastered flat to his head where he'd damped it carelessly as he washed; he was beaming.

'Sweetheart!' he cried, though she was only an arm's length from him. 'There's just enough of the new beans for Christmas dinner tomorrow! First thing in the morning I'll get out there and pick' em. While the dew's still on 'em!'

She snorted. 'As if there'll be any dew, in this weather.'

'Metaphorically speaking.' Alex leaned in to kiss her cheek; he smelled of earth and plants and sweat, and she didn't like it one bit. And he was stubbly, it prickled her and he knew she hated that. She turned to admonish him, eyes fixed on his chin, but his face was lit by a shaft of flowering light and she saw for the first time that his reddish beard now had patches of white. His jaw seemed huge, suddenly, and the white stubble stuck out of his skin like the shafts of the fowls' feathers. She stared in dismay. Oh, what have I done? Why am I here with this old man and his grey beard?

Alex was staring fIxedly, too, at her hands, the chickens, the almost empty bowl.

'You're stuffing the chooks.'

'Yes, I am stuffing the chooks,' she said, facing him square on with dropped shoulders and an expression that she hoped said, Talk about state the bleeding obvious!

'The night before?'

'Yes, Alex, it is the night before. The night before Christmas. That's right.'

'You should never stuff a chook till just before you put it in the oven.'

'Why not? Why bloody not?' Her voice had risen; she sounded like a child, petulant and protesting. He heard it, too, and looked at her with cautious pity, and she hated that even more.

'That's what my mother always said.'

'Well, your mother's not here to get woken up at six in the morning and watch the kids squabble over their presents and then slave away in a boiling hot kitchen for the rest of the day, is she? And if I want to stuff the chickens now I'll jolly well stuff them now! My mother always stuffed the chickens the night before.' Actually, Rosemarie couldn't remember ever having chicken for Christmas dinner at home; it had usually been a joint of rather tough mutton, and never quite enough of it. But Alex wasn't to know that, was he?

'The kids won't squabble, love. Not when they see what we've got them.'

'Oh, won't they! They've started already, can't you hear them?'

And Alex could, now that she mentioned it, going at it hammer and tongs, the two eldest shouting at each other and the little one bawling again, poor poppet.

'I tell you what,' he said, backing away a little from his wife. 'How about I settle those ratbags down and have a quick shower, and then I'll take a couple of' em with me and go and buy fish and chips for tea. What do you think? Sweet girl?'

He bent a little, placatingly, to look into her lowered face. She nodded fiercely.

'Yes,' she said. 'No! I'll sort the children out, you have your shower. Quicker.'

Because he would jolly them into a good humour and that would take half an hour, whereas she —

'I've got the wooden spoon!' Rosemarie yelled, thwacking the closed door of the girls' bedroom with the flat of her hand. On the door was a neatly hand-lettered sign: PRIVATE. SECRET NO PARENTS. Inside, the arguing and crying suddenly stopped.

'Don't come in!You can't come in!'

'I am so coming in! I'm counting to five: one, two, three . . .'

There was a desperate 'Wait! WAIT!' on five and then Robert opened the door, eyes darting first to check her hands. No wooden spoon. Deborah and James were standing side by side, guarding the secrecy of whatever was under a very lumpy bedspread.The rolls of wrapping paper, the scissors and ribbon and sticky tape, were all heaped in disarray on the second bed. Meredith, the youngest, came forward to stand beside Robert, her plump six-year-old cheeks flushed and wet with tears. Rosemarie raised one hand like a traffic policeman.

'I don't want to know what you were fighting about, I just want you all to stop.'

'I wasn't fighting, Mummy,' said James mildly.

'I know, James.' He never did.

There they were, aligned as always like two opposing sets of salt and pepper shakers. These two pairs, odds and evens: the first-born with the third child, the second-born with the fourth. Deborah the eldest, almost thirteen now and almost not a child, watchful and well organised, and her dreamy, tractable brother James, four years younger. Both with their mother's willowy build, her glossy jet hair and olive skin, though only James had Rosemarie's blue eyes. Deborah's were her father's odd streaky mix of green and brown. And the other two: Robert, such a middle child, doomed to be forever stuck between the eldest and the most likable, ever protesting, That's not fair! as Deborah bossed them all around, and little thumb-sucking Meredith his self­appointed charge, like a chick under the hen's wing. This pair looked alike too, with tawny red-brown hair and hazel eyes and scatterings of light brown freckles. It was the foxy Scottish colouring you saw in Alex's extended family.

These parts should go together to form a neat whole: two times two equals four — her children. But Rosemarie had never felt quite convinced that they were really hers. Yes, yes, of course she knew that they were, she could remember being pregnant and waking up after their births, those strange groggy meetings — though she had been awake for the last birth and that was hardly an improvement. And she'd been with them every unremitting moment since; could describe (if, god forbid, she ever had to) every single unremarkable day of each of their lives.

But . . . how could that be? When she still felt just a girl herself? And that was how she looked, too: the mirror confirmed that she was still more dewy maid than thick-waisted matron. Though turning thirty a few months ago had been an awful jolt.

When other mothers — real mothers — discussed their babies and their growing children, their voices, even in complaint, seemed full of a passionate engagement that made Rosemarie feel like someone from another planet. An imposter. Often she felt she was hardly relevant to her own children's lives — well, except as a house­keeper, and anyone could do that. What really engrossed them was this never-ending sibling business. The gothic melodramas over an extra Weet-bix or who sat next to whom on a five-minute trip to the shops.

The all-consuming skirmishes that constantly broke out between them, and their stalwart alliances, so unshakeable, left her baffled and exasperated. She had grown up with two brothers so vastly older than herself — benignly disinterested young giants who came and went their own way — that she was virtually an only child. Why did her kids have to make things so difficult? It was ridiculous! Here it was Christmas Eve, and the atmosphere in this suburban bedroom was like Wuthering Heights, turbulent with all their seething rivalries — ah, except for that serenely rosy space surrounding James, like a tiny private cloud on which he floated. James, who always chose the easy path, while the others clambered over rocks and fell into ditches.

Right on cue, Meredith drew a huge sobbing breath. 'Debbie said —'

Rosemarie and her older daughter exchanged a quick, tense glance. The girl was nearly as tall as her mother, and their expressions as they faced each other were remarkably alike. Will we do battle over this one? each was asking. If you start, I'll meet you there! Rosemarie looked away, back to little whining Meredith.

'I don't care what Debbie said! I said I didn't want to know!'

'Debbie said you would hate my present!' the child burst out, and started sobbing again.Almost imperceptibly, Robert moved sideways so that the edge of his shoulder nudged his little sister comfortingly.

And I dare say I will. It's awfully hard to like the cheap little things you've all saved up to buy me. But she sighed in a long-suffering way and said, 'Meredith, whatever you give me, I will love it, because you gave it to me. The same goes for all of you.You know that. And the very best present you could give me is a day with no fighting. Starting right now!'

'Yes, Mummy.'

'All right, Mum.' There were smiles all round. They could tell they were out of danger; they'd got off lightly.

'Now, who wants to go with Daddy to get fish and chips for supper?'

'Me! Me!'

As she went past the bathroom she heard Alex in the shower, not even singing really, just yelling out a wordless accompaniment to some unidentifiable melody in his head. In the kitchen, he'd turned the radio on and tuned it to the ABC. Some Australian with a plummy voice was speculating about what might be in Her Majesty's Christmas Day message tomorrow. Rosemarie's face screwed up. This ghastly fawning! That awful old England of headscarves and stiff upper lips and rigid class divisions was dead now, didn't they know that? No one cared any more — except here, in stupid Australia, the lapdog of two masters, slobbering over the English queen while sending its sons off to fight for the Americans in this horrible war in Vietnam. Savagely she twisted the dial to 3AK ('Where no wrinklies fly !') and turned up the volume to drown out the sounds of the children's bickering, which had broken out again as they prepared to depart. The Who was 'talkin' 'bout my GENeration', suggesting in a mighty sneer to the older one, 'Why don't you all just fffffade away?' Rosemarie danced along with it, jerking her shoulders from side to side. Yes, she thought, good idea! Why don't you all just do that? Fiffff . . . something, anyway!

Finally the car pulled out of the driveway. Robert came sidling in, stopping just inside the kitchen door, testing the air.

'The others have all gone with Dad.' His mother nodded. Robert advanced, cautious yet purposeful, edging around the kitchen table until at last he settled there with his box of Derwents and a large spiral-bound project book.

'I'll tidy this up the minute they get back,' he offered.

His mother couldn't help a small smile. 'As if you'd make a mess!' This nervy, neat boy who never even let a pencil touch the table: each was slotted back into its colour-coded place the moment its work on the page was done. She started chopping up the vegetables for tomorrow; they could sit in a basin of cold water in the ice-box overnight. The fridge. Even if Alex's mother wouldn't have.

A Beatles song came on. It was a few years old now.What wouldn't she have given to see the Beatles when they'd come to Melbourne! She'd said that to a woman who seemed friendly at the school Mother's Club as they stood side by side making sandwiches for the children's lunch orders, but the woman looked at her as though she were mad. 'What, with all those screaming girls?' she asked, curling her upper lip. But Rosemarie could have been one of those screaming girls, oh, how easily! Screaming and sobbing ecstatically . . .

'Listen . . .' sang the warm male voice, tender and confident. Who was that: Paul? Maybe George . . . 'Do you want to know a secret?'

No! she thought emphatically. And I don't want anyone to know mine! She leaned her weight on the big kitchen knife with blind efficiency, slicing through a huge piece of home grown pumpkin. Beads of moisture formed on the slabs of freshly cut flesh. No one wanted to know the real secrets, anyway, not the really big ones. That getting married was like slamming a great big door and living forever in just one tiny room. That babies tore you from the bliss of unbroken sleep as ruthlessly as any torturer and you never got back to that lovely place again. That raising children and running a household was mostly tedious donkey work. That the man you'd once found so thrilling became, over the years, so eye-wateringly boring you could hardly bear for him to lay a hand on you in bed . . .

The Beatles song had finished. Advertisers were yapping now and she turned the radio down. Robert glanced up at her with a tentative smile.

'What is it you're doing there, anyway?' she asked, determinedly putting a note of interest into her voice. The vegetables were all chopped now and she set them in their bowl of water to one side.

'I'm working on a project. "Christmas in Other Lands." Or, Mum? Do you think "Christmas in Foreign Lands" sounds better?'

'Why on earth are you doing a project now? The holidays have barely started, you won't be back at school for weeks.' Weeks of bickering kids all day. And flies. And mosquitoes at night. Never being able to get cool, not for more than a moment.

'It's not for school. It's for me.' Robert's head was bent over the page, colouring in a heading with meticulous care. 'Or for you, if you'd like it.'

'For me? What would I want with a project about Christmas? I've got Christmas coming out of my ears, Robert.'

His head sank lower, his nose now barely an inch from the page. 'Christmas in Other Lands. Because you miss England, Mum.' There was no reply. He looked sideways over at his mother, but she was just staring at the empty chopping board. 'Don't you, Mum? Miss Christmas in England?'

'Oh, in some ways. There was never much of a Christmas to be had when I was little. During the war.' She looked up, talking to him properly now. 'And when I was your age, ten, the war had only been over for two years and the rationing made things even worse. It was pretty grim, really, that England. And it stayed grim for a long time. It was still grim when I left.'

'But the snow was nice, wasn't it? And singing carols in the snow, with the lanterns and everything. A white Christmas,' the boy said swooningly.

'Yes. The snow was nice.' Rosemarie started opening cupboards and getting out tomato sauce and pickled onions and vinegar. 'We'll eat the fish and chips outside, shall we? On the patio.' She got some plates out, and leant on the kitchen bench with her hands on either side of the stack, elbows locked, staring again. Her son watched her.

'When I left it was grey and dirty and poor, it really was. And now it's changed, and I'm not there. That's what I miss: England now.'

'But, Mum . . . if it's changed . . .' Robert hesitated, looking puzzled, trying to get this right. With a rush of conviction he went on, 'I think you can only miss what you used to have and it's gone, can't you? Isn't that what "missing" something means? Like, you know, "Oh, I used to have a really good pocketknife and now I've lost it. I really miss that pocketknife." '

'No, Robert. Oh no. You can miss something you've never had, too. Something you could've had, and should've had, but then you find you haven't got it after all.'