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the air. There was a whiff too of the fecal, of something raw and unsanitary, and of cloths and sponges turning in the heavy wet atmosphere to mould. He wondered what he had seen in her, those days in the Cambridge teashop, when he suddenly decided, there and then, to take a bride. He wondered how he could have believed in any prospect together.
    These days it would be named – post-natal depression – but then Vera Trevor simply noted that Stella was ‘down’, that she showed no interest in her baby and was uncommunicative. Stella spent hours of each day remaining in bed, detached into a feeble, drifting state, futureless and sad. She heard her irrefutable baby wail with hunger, but could not be persuaded to offer her breast. She felt absent, inessential. Birthing had scooped her out.
    When Mrs Trevor asked how she felt, an innocent enough enquiry, Stella replied: ‘ You do me wrong to take me out o’ the grave … ’
    She sounded plumb crazy, Vera Trevor said later. Mad as a cut snake; mad as a blimmen meat-axe.
    Mrs Trevor found a wet nurse among the station blacks, and had her sleep with her own infant, a boy, on the floor of the shack; meanwhile Sal and Daff were assigned mothering duties between them. In her lonesome state, wrecked by her own body, Stella was aware of the little community constituted around her; the three women (the wet nurse was Jukuna, a Walmajarri woman from the desert) and two babies, one black and one white, and the circulation of soft voices in a language she did not understand. Sometimes, in a haze of delirium, she thought it sounded Shakespearean, so full was it of convolution, evocation and rhyme. Something that might have been an ampersand, if it had a sound, repeated again and again, so that what she heard were connections and collusions affirmed: a bracelet of propositions, perhaps, or an extra logic of meanings, from which she was excluded. In words – she knew it – there were these revealed affiliations, these sensible families. In words, body-forgetting, there could be intelligible experience, not this crude engulfment and drowsy clouds of unknowing.
    It was two weeks before Stella was moved to give the baby a name. ‘Perdita,’ she called it, without even hesitating. Vera Trevor said politely it was a pretty name, but she had never heard of it and thought perhaps it was posh English, or an obscure, archaic family inheritance. Stella was questioned, later on, when she had returned from the land of her illness, and explained that Perdita was the daughter of a dead woman, that Perdita was a character, a princess, from a famous English play.
    Mrs Trevor had arranged for Stella Keene to be sent to the hospital in Broome, ‘for a rest’, she said. The baby meanwhile flourished in black arms, which found and embraced her. Perdita grew chubby, contented and well.

    I do not remember when my mother first told me this story. I was perhaps five or six, already aware of the estrangement between my parents and of some sullen accommodation that enabled them to stay together. Small children intuit, heretically, the most hidden understandings. In the involving machine of parents’ behaviour, their words and their silence, their actions and inactions, the child learns what is valued, and what counts for nothing. They didn’t count to each other, my parents. And they barely counted me. I was a foreign coin they possessed, a worthless shape.
    Stella told me that in the Shakespearean play called The Winter’s Tale , there was a king, Leontes of Sicilia, as powerful as he was unjust. In a jealous rage he accused his pregnant wife, Hermione, of dreadful crimes, and though she, and everyone else, attested her innocence, the king would not listen and had her imprisoned. In prison Hermione gave birth to a daughter, Perdita, and the king ordered his courtier, Antigonus, to dispose of the infant. But Antigonus was good-hearted and abandoned the