The Old Balmain House

by Graham Wilson

  Chapter 10 - Alison comes home

  The following day the ship docked in Sydney. How Tom and Mary knew, she never understood, but there they were, waiting at the dock to meet her, looking suddenly old and frail.

  Tears pricked her eyes as she hugged them, and they held her. It felt so good to have come home. Never would she leave them again. The next day she moved back into her old house, Roisin. For lunch she sat on her front porch and breathed in the familiar fragrance of gum and garden, smiling as she admired the cascading pink and yellow roses.

  She knew Tom and Mary would love to have her stay on with them, but this was to be her new life in Balmain, now all grown up, and she had to do this on her own. Besides, not a day would go by that she did not come to see them both. They understood, the love was there, both ways, and that was all that mattered.

  In her mind she knew what she would do. Hannah was a dressmaker and had made beautiful things with her hands. She was not her mother and could not do as she did. But she could gather and sell beautiful things, crafted by others. It would make her happy to give happiness to the givers and receivers of the gifts.

  That afternoon, after she had settled in she went and told Tom and Mary about her idea. Whether she could support herself through it they did not know, however it was not really about money and anyway James had sent her one thousand pounds from her Dad’s estate at the foundry.

  Tom and Mary harnessed the sulky and together they drove around Balmain village, looking for the right place for her to set up. Just up from the new Presbyterian Church, on the hill, they found a small shop, with delicate square glass window frames, and a vacant sign on it. Inquiries revealed that the owner had returned to London to care for her mother and had left it in the care of her mother’s old friend Mrs Mills, now grey and well over 70.

  “I don’t think she’ll be wanting it again dearie, and she would be happy with a small rent as it’s empty now. In fact I could write to her. Perhaps she would sell it as I hear she is settled back in London,” she said, peering at Alison with rheumy eyes.

  “What did you say your name was again?’ she said, peering even harder. Her eyes lit up with recognition. “It’s you dear child, so long since I saw you last and then just a wee girl. When first I looked at you I did not see her, different hair, and features, but then you smiled at me, just the way Hannah used to, and my heart almost stopped.

  ‘Your mother was a most precious soul, taken too soon. It’s as if you have brought her back to me. Of course you shall have the shop; it could go to no other. Mrs Maher, who owns it, bought one of your mother’s first dresses. Last time I saw her, before she left, there she was wearing it, the silk shining and the dress just as bright and perfect as the day it was made.”

  In those first crowded, lonely weeks, there were times when Alison craved solitude, even though she knew that Tom and Mary would have loved to see her. She felt as if her intense work was helping her wounded soul to heal, but still she needed time to contemplate alone and come to her own place of stillness.

  Sometimes she would go and walk through the small graveyard and sit on a small wooden bench below it, to stare out across the dappled blue water, looking far out beyond the horizon. She found comfort in thinking that her Da and Mum and her small dead brothers and sister were somewhere out there, together.

  One day, as she walked down to this place, she saw a woman, a few years older, sitting on the bench. From behind she could see tresses of long black hair flowing over this woman’s shoulders and over a beautiful green blue dress, almost the colour of the sea, with delicate silver lace and brocade. A first she felt a flash of annoyance that another had taken her private place.

  Then there came a merging in her mind between the lovely dress and her own lovely perfume bottle. It was as if the two had been made together in the same die and casting.

  She felt a warm smile wash over her as the stranger turned and smiled. Before she had time to think she found herself sitting alongside her, and telling her how her dress so perfectly matched the little perfume bottle.

  With serious eyes the lady said, in a heavily accented voice, “When I am a little girl, in Manilla, my Papa, he had many beautiful things, like as with what you say. Sometime, could you show me please?”

  So Alison came again the next day, with the bottle in her pocket, and there was the lady again. She showed her and told her about her sadness and the happy memories of the bottle. The lady told her how she often came and looked out to sea in the hope of seeing her husband as he returned in his ship from across the ocean. After that they often both came and sat together in the evening stillness.

  In October Alison was working away in her shop when the small bell at the front door tinkled. In strode a man in his mid-thirties, broad shouldered, with a wolfish smile.

  “I heard ye was back in town and yet never came to see me. That first moment I heard I got in the boat and rowed across from the yard. I walked up here as fast as I could. James cabled me to say you were in town.”

  As he spoke she realised, it was Charles Buller, James’ playmate from their childhood. Sometimes Tom had taken him sailing with James when they had lived in Balmain all those years ago. She had last seen Charles when she was nine and he was fourteen, a lifetime ago.

  Back then, she thought him incredibly grown up and handsome, in her little girl eyes. Now, no longer a little girl, she felt suddenly shy and blushed.

  He laughed, “I thought you cute then; now I find you all grown up and so, so beautiful” he said, with a courtly bow. “Then a duckling, now a swan.”

  Before she could blush again, he continued. “Actually, I come bearing an invitation. My mother is holding a dinner for friends, to celebrate Dad turning 60 tomorrow. When she heard you had returned she insisted I come straight over and invite you, to represent my Dad’s oldest and best friend, who we all miss. You will come, won’t you, it is tomorrow night.”

  So Alison found herself there, escorted on Charles arm. Sitting beside her at the table he kept her amused with anecdotes of people he knew and life in Sydney. His younger brother, Richard, mostly ran the yard, working alongside his Dad. Charles, instead, had taken a sailor’s life, wanting to see the world; trips to the Middle East, Africa, Asia, London and New York. It seemed so exotic and exciting.

  But, last time he returned to port, a few months ago, he had realised that it was good to be home. The restless urge was gone and he found he wanted to be with his Mum and Dad in their older years. He also had five young nieces and nephews from his brother and sister and, each time he came back, it seemed they had grown so much. He knew he wanted a part of that life.

  As the night continued it was as if someone had drawn an invisible link between them, two people who had lived so much of their life alone; two souls connecting in a way neither could begin to understand.

  Finally it was just the two of them, talking slowly and quietly together, as the last embers of a fire spluttered in the hearth. Charles took her hand, “I have never talked this way to anyone before. I don’t want to stop seeing you or have you leave me, even for a night.”

  Alison took his face in her hands. “Nor me” she said. “I know your Mum has a bed made for me in the spare room, but I want you to bring me back to my house and stay with me.”

  So it was, as the first light of dawn was touching the eastern sky far out beyond the harbour; that they rowed across to her house. Holding hands, to savour the moment, they slowly climbed the hill. At the crest they stood together, arms entwined, watching, as the dawn flushed the sky with rosy light. Then she took his hand and brought him to her room. They stood next to her bed, with its quilt pale in the early light.

  Delicately he took the ribbon from her hair. As it cascaded over her shoulders she unclipped the catches from her dress, and let it slide to the floor, revealing her milky white body. Then she slid her undergarments to the floor, standing totally naked before him.

  He gazed at her, mesmerised, “So beautiful, so,
so beautiful. I think I have loved you since you were a nine year old girl who gazed at me with those beautiful sad eyes”

  “Hold me”, she said, “hold me and hold me and love me and love me and never let me go or leave me. I have lost too many people. I could not bear to lose you too.”

  So he picked her up and carried her to the bed, where he laid her naked body on the quilt. He loved her with wild joy as the early morning sun rose in a pale blue sky. She cried a little when he first came inside her but she held him even tighter, wrapping herself around him until she felt him explode and pour out into her, their bodies and juices mingled.

  All morning they stayed together, bodies joining and un-joining, as waves of passion swept over them. In the late morning they slept, in total satiation, knowing what they had begun was all good, and would go on and on.

  That afternoon they walked, hand in hand, to see Tom and Mary and told them about their new life together, and how they would be guests of honour at their wedding as soon as it could be arranged.

  Alison knew she had conceived on that first night. By the time they were married a month later she could feel the changes, her nipples and her body softening as this tiny creature grew within her. Two weeks after the wedding, when she was totally sure, she told Charles. He said, I think I felt it too that morning, something that powerful had to create a new life.

  In June the next year a new boy baby came. They called him John after her first lost brother and Charles’ father. He looked like both her mother and father, and something of both Charles and his parents, a fusion of all that was good in all of them. There was quiet completeness in Alison’s soul, replacing old with new life, potential waiting to be realised.

  A year later Alison felt her body swell again. She knew with certainty this would be a daughter, a continuation in that cycle that passed from woman to woman across generations. So it was that Heather was born. She was a dark child, with the darkness of Charles’ mother, Millicent, and her own father, clear, strong and determined. This would be one to be reckoned with, one making her own path in the world.

  Eight years passed without further children. Both Alison and Charles were content, God’s gift to them of them of love and two children was more than enough.

  Charles discovered a passion for engineering, but with engines rather than shipbuilding and ironwork. He constructed steam engines to use on farms and in factories and was tinkering with many other sorts of motors, but electricity most fascinated him. Motors to drive things, using electricity, following the inventions of Edison and Bell, were his greatest passion.

  Charles also continued his sailing, first encouraging Tom to sail with him, then little John, when he could swim and hold the tiller, came with him.

  Alison flatly refused to let John go out until he could swim across the channel from the wharf to the rocks, more than 20 yards. As Charles could see the sense of this he coached his son’s swimming. By the age of four John could swim like a fish, allowing him to go out. James had also maintained his love for sailing. Now he was a successful Newcastle business man, he was often in Sydney, and would stay with Tom and Mary, and the men would all go sailing together; Tom, the old sea dog, barking the orders while the two big men ran to his directions.

  Alison’s Balmain shop had become known far and wide. People came, both by boat and carriage, to seek out her treasures. She and Charles were well off and could have easily afforded a large shop or a move to Sydney town that would bring extra custom.

  But she said. “I have this shop because I chose it, and it is in Balmain because this is where I want to be. Others can be richer and more famous, but my life is rich and I know when I have enough.”

  Then, in her tenth year of marriage, Charles finally persuaded her to go with him to New York and London while he looked at the new electric power stations and other electric machines. It was a holiday for the whole family and both children found the long steamship passage across the Pacific and then Atlantic Oceans to be strangely enjoyable.

  Time to sit, to read, to talk and play games. Alison felt her life slow and the bond with Charles and her children forge new links. When they came to London, they caught the steam train to Edinburgh and found a carriage to take them to the small villages of her parents and grandparents in County Fife. Her aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews all welcomed her.

  Her own grandmother, Alison, was now frail and her other grandparents all dead. She sat with her grandmother for a long time, two kindred souls, as they both soaked in this link, sharing memories of Hannah, long lost daughter and mother.

  Then they both walked to the small graveyard, down the side of the hill. Here Alison stood and gazed at the tiny grave of her long lost brother, and beyond to the still waters of the loch. A feeling of great peace washed over her. It felt like a closing of the loop, the final shreds of pain fell away after all those early hard years. Now there was rest and contentment in her soul.

  That night she and Charles loved each other with new passion and tenderness, and she knew that they had created another life. She felt a longing to be home.

  Three months later they stepped ashore at Balmain on a clear winter’s day, with clear sharp light. The water sparkled in the fresh wind. Alison tasted the rich smell of gum and ocean and felt the solid rock hill beneath her feet.

  Tom and Mary did not know to expect them, and she wanted to surprise them. She shushed the children and Charles and they all quietly climbed the path to the top.

  There was their dear little house, roses straggling over it, now with two extra rooms joining the side, a bedroom for Heather and office for Charles. She loved it with all her soul, and it beckoned her to stay awhile, but no time to stop now.

  Instead they tiptoed up the path to where the old sandstone house of Tom and Mary stood; its bulk solid against the sky. She took the door knocker in her hand and gave it three firm raps. A shuffling of feet in the passage, and a voice called out “Who is it?” She knocked again, did she hear annoyance in the old man’s voice as he opened the door.

  With a squeal of pure delight she pulled the old man to her and hugged him. And there was Mary, silver white hair but those sharp eyes that missed nothing. “Oh my child, my child,” she said gathering Alison to her. “How we have missed you all, and you, John and Heather, how big you are grown, and Charles, Welcome, welcome, welcome. You should have telegraphed; then we would have something ready to welcome you with.”

  Suddenly, amongst all this chatter, Mary drew back, looking intently at Alison. “I know you, you have your own special news,” she said, gazing directly into her eyes and putting a hand to her belly. “My old bones can feel new life. What a blessing is this. Oh, Charles and Ally, what better gift could you have brought me today.”

  In the full heat of summer the new baby came. She truly was of Alison, the brown hair and those steady green-hazel eyes, and that wise loving soul. They called her Maria, their gift from God.