“You’re as blind as a fucking bat, Harriet,” he interrupted. “I can understand why you fell for Forsythe the big important bone specialist, but I can’t understand why you fell for Flo.”

“Oh, this is awful!” I cried.

“Why, because you don’t love me?” he demanded. “I’m used to that, I can live with it.”

“No, that you’re telling me this with no love,” I tried to explain. “This ought to be said in a mood I can respond to, but instead you’re pounding my head about a kind of love which has nothing to do with any grown man! I can’t explain Flo, Toby, I looked at her and loved her, that’s all.”

“And I looked at you and loved you that day you whopped David a beauty on the verandah,” he said, grinning. “And no doubt the big important bone specialist looked at you and loved you the first time he saw you.”

“He says so. It was on a ramp at Queens. So we all looked and loved. But it hasn’t got us very far, has it? The only one of us prepared to make the total commitment is me, but not to you and not to Duncan.” I got up. “It’s very mysterious, don’t you think?” I walked over to him, kissed the tips of my fingers and put them on his forehead. “Maybe one day we’ll manage to sort it out, ace, hur-hur-hur.”

Wednesday,

March 15th, 1961

Two and a half months since Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz died, and nothing has been resolved. According to Mr. Hush, they will soon decide that she died intestate. The whole thing is going to have to go to some sort of child court, because Mr. Schwartz doesn’t exist and nor, officially, does Flo. Who continues to stay in the Queens Psych Pavilion being subjected to every kind of test there is from EEGs to batteries of neuropsychological investigations. None of which has told Prendergast and his professor a thing. The EEGs are normal, have a beautiful, high-amplitude, properly modulated alpha rhythm that appears when Flo closes her eyes. They’ve had fun inventing IQ tests a mute but intelligent and hearing child can answer, except that she won’t. The only people she’s happy to see are visitors from The House. Though every nurse and psychiatrist and therapist knows her very well by now, Flo refuses to chum up with anyone who isn’t from The House.

“Why are you continuing to keep her here?” I asked Prendergast today when I paid my call as soon as work was finished.

“Because she’s better off here than in a shelter,” he answered, frowning. “At least here she can have her visitors without a fuss. Though the real reason is that Prof Llewllyn and I think we may be looking at a case of what used to be called juvenile schizophrenia, but now is beginning to be called autism. She’s not the classical syndrome by any means, but there are characteristic signs. It isn’t often that we have a chance to keep a child as young as Flo for so long—parents are always anxious to have them home, no matter how difficult they can be to handle. So Flo is a godsend to us.” He looked wistful. “We’d like to give her angiograms, put some air into her brain to see whether she has a lesion in the word areas or some cortical atrophy, but the risks are too great.”

“You’d better keep on thinking that!” I snapped. “Try using her as a guinea pig, and I’ll go to the newspapers!”

“Peace, peace!” he cried, palms up. “We simply observe.”

I feel permanently tired, impotent, despondent. My work hasn’t suffered because I won’t let it suffer, but the truth is that I am fed up with hospitals. The discipline, the rituals, the constant battle with the women in authority. If you want to fart, you have to get permission. And Sister Agatha keeps a vigilant eye on me thanks to Harold and his letter. No one has ever unearthed a shred of evidence to confirm the rumoured affair between Duncan and me, but they’re dying to. For what purpose, I have no idea. I can’t be sacked for it, and Duncan can’t be made suffer for it. What the place needs is a new scandal with some meat to it, but so far Queens is being unusually well-behaved on the scandal front.

Sister Cas and Constantin are engaged, though they’re not planning on marrying before the end of the year. Something to do with Constantin’s opening a restaurant in Parramatta, where it can have a decent parking area and offer a menu suitable for the Parramatta populace, a pretty steak-and-chippy lot. Nice.

Naturally the whole place knows that I visit a child in the Psych Pavilion every day, though no one has managed to find out quite why. Gossip is rife among the sisters, including those in psych nursing, but no one’s got wind of my custody application.

Which is going nowhere very fast. I have a weekly chat on the phone with Mr. Hush, who keeps warning me that even after all the hearings about Flo are over and she’s slipped into an official pigeonhole, I can’t expect to get custody. I’m punting on Dr. John Prendergast’s report, but Mr. Hush doesn’t think it will have the weight with Child Welfare that I want it to. If Flo ends up diagnosed as a juvenile schizophrenic, they may send her to—of all places!—Stockton. This, despite the fact that her psychiatric history has rendered her unadoptable or fosterable! You’d think they’d grab at my offer, but no. I’m too young, too poor and too unmarried. It just isn’t fair.

“Harriet,” Mr. Hush said to me this afternoon, “you have to understand the official mind. To decide in your favour in the matter of Florence Schwartz would require a kind of wisdom and courage that official bodies don’t dare possess. It all boils down to the art of keeping the nose clean. They’re too aware that if someone having an axe to grind got hold of such an unorthodox adoption or fostering, there could be a terrific stink, and they’d be blamed. So they will not run the risk, my dear. They simply won’t.”

Ducky. Just ducky. She’s sitting there in her heavy duty restriction harness living from visit to visit, and there’s nothing I can do to get her out. Oh, but there have been some wild schemes chasing through my head! The first was to propose marriage to Toby, but that didn’t last much longer than the lightbulb flashing on. If Toby condoned a child, the child would have to be his and only his. And a son, not a daughter. I love the man in so many ways—he’s straight as an arrow, brilliant, going places, great fun to be with, and very attractive. Part-time, terrific. Full-time, a pain in the arse. Then I had another brainwave which I’m still mulling over. I could kidnap Flo and skip the state, eventually skip the country. Australia is a very big place. If the pair of us headed for Alice Springs or the Katherine and I worked as a domestic in some Outback motel, no one would question Flo. She’d simply spend her time playing in the dust with the Abo kids, who wouldn’t mind her muteness in the least—would probably read her thoughts the way her mother had. She’d be a part of a spiritual commune, and when I was off duty, she’d be with me. The scheme has its points.

I have the tarot pack off by heart, though I still haven’t tried a spread. That’s just an idle remark intended to branch me away from what I’m now going to say. That my hands aren’t quite steady, that my eyes are scratchy, that I feel as if the machinery of my body is wearing out or running down. Ridiculous, I know. It’s a mood, it will pass. Oh, if only something would happen!

I still gaze into the Glass every night after Mrs. Delvecchio Schwartz wakes me up at ten past three. It was a lovely theory I had when Duncan found Flo, but events haven’t confirmed it. So I must assume that Duncan’s finding Flo that day was a coincidence.

Friday,

March 24th, 1961

Something odd happened this evening. When the door bell rang shortly after six, I went to answer it because none of the men were home. And there on the verandah stood Madame Fugue from 17d. Oh, dear! What is her proper name?