The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  He calculates it twice more in the next few hours, until the point has been passed. No matter what the emergency, their only option is to go on. If his calculations are correct, the headwind has added the equivalent of an extra two hundred miles to the flight; they will land safely but there is little margin for error. If his calculations are wrong, if they have strayed off course . . . It does not bear thinking about.

  Next morning Ray descends low enough through the clearing cloud that they can shed the unwieldy, rank rubber masks and Bill, lying on his belly, can see the whitecaps of the waves through the eyepiece of the drift recorder and calculate the wind’s direction. Drift, dead reckoning, air plot . . . Ireland appears exactly when and where he expects it and he takes a triumphant photograph to send home to his parents. It is followed quickly by Scotland, and the triumph by fear as their fuel gauges read empty. They land at Prestwick’s grass airfield without circuiting or permission, with less than fifteen gallons of fuel to spare.

  Jane’s worst moment so far has been the immigration forms handed out at the Qantas desk, green cards to tick and fill in. Purpose of trip? Visiting relatives, Jane chooses, because it isn’t business and certainly doesn’t feel like a holiday, and the form doesn’t inquire whether the family to be listed is alive or dead.

  It’s the type of dilemma that would have intrigued Ruth, and for a fraction of a second before she remembers, Jane sees herself offering, her mother considering.

  The habits of a lifetime die hard; the habits of love, it seems, can outlive their recipients.

  Albert’s memorial service is held on his twenty-second birthday in the tiny Presbyterian church at Evelyn’s Pond. It’s a grey November morning in 1942, a biting norwesterly blowing in over the Bay of Fundy, but there’s no reason to spend time in the churchyard as there’s no body to commit to a grave. Bert’s body is in the North Atlantic, testimony of another U-Boat success against the merchant marine.

  The irony, the bitter irony, is that on arriving in England, Bill had been posted straight to Coastal Command. Daily, in foul weather or very occasionally fair, he’s navigated an enormous clumsy tank of a flying boat out of Oban in an invisible grid across the North Atlantic to search for enemy submarines. In ten months of flying over waters so hopelessly cold and lonely that the crews are not even issued with parachutes, they have survived two battles with the Luftwaffe and rescued a dinghy full of torpedoed sailors but have never seen a submarine.

  Bill reads the letter in a comfortable chair by the fire in the mess. There’d been no premonition as he picked up the envelope and the news sinks in reluctantly against the tide of shock and bewilderment—surely there’s been a mistake, Bert’s been picked up and is still at sea, captive or amnesic. But it’s the angry guilt of failure that overwhelms all other emotion, and the dark shadow of betraying his brother’s safety will linger for the rest of his life.

  It’s Louise who’s written; Mother and Dad are too distressed to write. They barely speak, she adds, frozen in their grief; she doesn’t describe her own but it leaks through on every blotched page, the haphazard memories mingling with painstaking repetition of official detail. Underlying it, on a later rereading, Bill thinks he sees the fear, too selfish not only to say but even to admit to herself: ‘Take care, my only surviving brother, come home to set me free. I don’t want to die an old maid looking after invalid parents.’

  Bill doesn’t see it as selfish. It’s all part of the shock that a torpedo can thoughtlessly tear its way through steel and wood to finish the world that is one man, his own unique range of laughter, of wit and dedication, and the hopes and stories woven round him by the others in his life. It’s the ending of innocence and the firm conviction despite all evidence to the contrary that this can’t happen to me and mine. It’s the realisation that their lives are not and may never be the way they thought life was supposed to be.

  Firmly rooted in the security of real parents, solid grandparents and lineage stretching firm and documented through the ages, Ruth never expects her private dreams of mysterious adventurous forebears to touch reality: a child’s suspicion is not a woman’s knowledge.

  Reality arrives abruptly on a mild June evening of 1944. Its appearance is more than brutal; it is negating, annihilating, shearing past from present. Her mother’s shriek of rage—rage at nothing, or at everything, at fifty-seven months that have changed the world, at the whippet’s death and Nanny’s, at a way of life disappeared with the daily, the cook and the gardener, all swallowed up by the demands of factories and the machinery of death—but worse than all that is the fear for her daughter, doing a man’s work, taking a man’s risks, and when it’s over, how will this clever, elegant girl ever be a lady again and settle down to a normal life?

  Tonight, when she’s presumed Ruth will spend the last night of her leave cosily in the drawing room—wireless, reading and attempt at normality—the girl appears in evening wear, bare shoulders, silver gown and a glow of excitement. The explosion point is reached: ‘You’ll end up like your mother!’

  The world stops.

  A wall of glass surrounds Ruth, distancing sounds and images: her father turning white, freezing in a half-kneel with a scoop of coal in his hand; her mother—her not mother?—draining from red to grey, sinking into a chair with hand to forehead and what would be melodrama if it were not so horribly real.

  Herself understanding nothing, except that if this is a slip, it is a slip of truth not of the tongue. No one appears about to laugh and explain that it was her aunt, her grandmother, her second cousin twice removed whom Ruth will end up like.

  So many questions, and she doesn’t ask them. Why and who and when? But now a blank, a white void, and her parents part of it, and she puts on her wrap because the night will be cool by the time she comes back and she will have to come back because where else can she go, and sometime, somehow, when she can find the words, she’ll have to ask those questions, but the immediate question is escape.

  Detached, icily calm and not recognising this as shock, she watches herself step carefully along the street. It’s barely twilight in the long June evening and yet she seems to be walking in the dark, skirting newly familiar obstacles—crumpled concrete where number 40’s fence was pulled up for its iron railings; the lilac four doors further, untrimmed since the grief of Dunkirk, drooping over the pavement. At the corner she crashes heavily into a man, also newly familiar—the scratch of uniform against her cheek, the smell of wool, of soap and him as his arms go around her.

  ‘Ruth!’ he exclaims. ‘You wouldn’t be running away from me, would you?’

  As she doesn’t answer, as he realises that she is crying and can’t guess why, he tightens his grip and rocks, slightly, comfortingly. ‘Are you okay there?’ he asks, attempting humour. ‘Because I’m never going to let you go.’

  Later, Jane and her brothers will laugh and roll their eyes at this story. ‘Mom!’ they’ll shriek. ‘You married a man you bumped into because he said he’d never let you go!’

  ‘He was coming to meet me,’ Ruth will say primly, eyes laughing, because it’s not the time for remembering that maelstrom of emotions, or even the earlier dilemma of allowing him to come to the house, knowing already that this man will be part of her life and preferring to delay her parents’ inevitably caustic judgement. ‘It was our first date—but we’d met months before.’

  When they are quite small the first story, the story of how their parents met, strikes them as even more ludicrous. In fact much of their mother’s previous life is as magical to them as Peter Pan or Mary Poppins, stories that they frequently muddle with the anecdotes she tells them. Ruth herself, from her vantage point of Nova Scotian farm wife, sometimes wonders if her own early memories can be accurate: did her father really take his favourite umbrella back to the umbrella shop to be washed and ironed, or was that one of Nanny’s threats when Ruth had been caught playing with its silky blackness, tracing the knot in the curved wooden handle with a moistened index finger
? No wonder that her children find it difficult to believe in her growing up in a city bigger than they can imagine, bigger than Halifax and Dartmouth put together, playing in a park that locked with a key and usually with a nanny (no, not her grandmother and not a goat or a dog, but a lady whose job was to look after that one little girl), going to a school in the mountains to learn how to pour tea and have polite conversation (a rash of ribald tea parties follow this particular revelation) and then, hardly more wonderfully, had become an aeroplane pilot.

  But it’s their father who tells this part of the story. In June 1943 he’d been lucky enough, he says, omitting his bitterness at the loss of a chance to avenge his brother, to be transferred to a base in Oxfordshire, navigating heavy land planes to deliver vital supplies or sometimes passengers to where they were urgently needed.

  ‘Crossing the aerodrome with a little Cockney wireless operator and we saw a Spitfire coming in. Of course we stopped to watch, since we didn’t have much use for fighter planes on a transport base, and this looked like some show-off fighter ace—he swooped down, beat up the aerodrome and then taxied down the runway in as neat a landing as I’ve seen.

  ‘No ground crew around so I jumped up to open the canopy—and looked straight into a beautiful face with soft brown hair poking out from under the flying helmet. “You’re a girl!” I said, being a bright young man in those days.

  ‘“Where will I park?” she asked.

  ‘“Anywhere you bloody well please, love,” the Cockney shouted, since I didn’t seem to be able to say anything much at all. “So long as the CO don’t see you. It ain’t for us.” ’

  ‘When my mother met my father,’ Jane will tell enthralled school friends, ‘she beat up a whole airport!’

  ‘That’s not quite the way it happened,’ Ruth objects. ‘The cold front came in faster and lower than the Met Office predicted, leaving me stuck up above the clouds looking for a hole to see my way through to land. I couldn’t believe my luck when I poked my nose through right above an aerodrome! I came in low over the runway, hoping it was the base that was waiting for my Spittie. By the time I realised it wasn’t the visibility was so bad I had to land anyway.’

  ‘And it stayed bad,’ Bill continues, because he knows her story is truer, although he prefers his because he’d realised that day how very close she’d been to being stuck above that thick cloud, becoming more and more desperate and closer to the chance of trying a gap that would turn out to be a hill; even now he hates thinking about the conditions Ruth flew in without radio or instruments. ‘Nothing could take off for the next four hours, not even your mom!

  ‘By this time I’d got my wits together, so I took her off to the mess to get warm—her lips were as blue as her eyes, she was that cold. Got her hot coffee and a horrible spam sandwich and tried to keep her out of sight of the other fellows because they’d have been swarming all over making a nuisance of themselves.’

  And they’d talked. That’s what they don’t share with the children: they’d simply talked for those hours, casual flirting leaping quite suddenly to the intimate conversation of strangers on trains. Then at about three the unkind clouds had lifted and she’d rushed back to her charge to deliver it before dark.

  ‘So I found out where she wanted to go, which of course was the big Fighter Command base ten miles south-east of us. Drew her a little map so she wouldn’t be mistaken again; down went the hatch and off she went down the runway, straight out of my life, or so I thought. She was in the air before I realised I’d never even got her name.’

  Jane, however, even when she understands the whole story, is stuck with that first image: a beautiful girl with soft brown hair and flying fists, taking on the world.

  Fifty-three years later Jane and Ian were invited to dinner by the neighbours whose boundary ran along the river’s State forest, bordering the Gundanna Lagoon. The couple had inherited the remnant of a huge grazing property bought up by the government for the soldiers-settlers of the Second World War. They still felt a certain sense of superiority over those hundred-acre dairy farmers and their descendants, and Jane and Ian were unsure what they had done to have suddenly attained dinner-party status. However, the wife, a forceful woman with a bust like the prow of a battleship, explained that she was in charge of finding this month’s guest speaker for Ladies Probus. It was not an easy task in this community, she added bluntly, but perhaps Jane would consider a speech on how she had come to set up a local branch of EcoFarm, a community-based government-supported organisation devoted to combating salinity and re-establishing indigenous plants.

  Jane consented, though her stomach churned at the thought—it would still be some time before she became a confident, though never flamboyant, public speaker. Flushing, but slightly disappointed to find that this commitment was the extent of the woman’s interest in her work, she shrank back into her chair. The two men on either side of her immediately resumed the conversation their hostess had interrupted. They were Ian’s age, maybe a little younger, undoubtedly considerably wealthier, and both amateur pilots. The one on her left had just bought a scale model of a Spitfire.

  ‘You’re mad,’ the other insisted. ‘They were terrible things to fly.’

  ‘Fighter pilots loved them: you read any of the books . . .’

  ‘Once they got used to them—the visibility was terrible and it was completely impossible to do a three-point landing.’

  ‘My mother always did three-point landings,’ said Jane. ‘It was an ATA rule. She flew mostly Spitfires.’

  The silence was brief but deafening: she felt like a child who’d shouted ‘Bum!’ at her mother’s tea guests. The conversation reverted quickly to farming.

  ‘Did I make that up?’ she emailed the next morning. ‘I was sure I remembered you and Dad discussing three-point landings, but the more I think about it the less sure I am. And since our family mythology seems to be based around Dad’s Spitfire story, I don’t think I even want to know if I’m wrong about that!’

  She was right, Ruth replied, about both.

  Jane vowed that one day she’d ask what a three-point landing actually was.

  Ruth remembers the big blond navigator with a rich Canadian voice and, though she says she’s not looking for romance, saves the quickly sketched map in her hatbox of letters. There’s nothing that’s not on the usual charts, except a story of competence and her own sudden fierce determination that this young man must not die—not a premonition of any disaster that she can somehow avert, but simply a feeling that, despite the horrors of the war, all will not be quite lost if a man like this survives.

  Sometimes, knitting in the mess waiting for clouds to lift, or daydreaming in the taxi plane home from the last delivery of the day, she remembers the instant he leaned towards her to light her cigarette. A kiss had hovered in the air between them, unacknowledged, unthinkable, and as tangible as if he’d actually touched her lips. Sometimes, lying in bed in her room at the yacht club, she wishes he had.

  Four months later, on a forty-eight hour leave in London, she walks into the Covent Garden Ballroom with a friend. Bill is the first person she sees. Ruth knows him instantly, but it takes him longer to reconcile this elegant, bare-shouldered young woman with the girl in bulky flying suit and helmet.

  They are both tired and overdue for leave. In the weeks leading up to D-day Ruth has delivered a steady stream of aircraft and, like everyone else in southern England, waited tensely for what is so obviously imminent. The best military intelligence can’t hide the huge weight of men, tanks and other weapons of destruction assembled near Southampton; so huge, the saying goes, that only the barrage balloons are keeping Britain afloat. On her last delivery the day before, Ruth saw her Spitfire’s wings painted with distinctive invasion stripes before she’d even left the airfield, and later, from her Hamble riverside room, watched the men in open landing craft sailing out, hour after hour, into the darkness. It had been a sombre, unsettling sight, and even as the first optimistic reports were r
ead the next day, impossible not to wonder how many of the men she’d watched were still alive.

  Bill, like many other men, is beginning the task of trying to forget what he’s seen. He tells Ruth of flying in formation through the stormy night of 5 June, a Dakota loaded with paratroopers, and of the conscientious objector medics they’d dropped into Normandy the following day: ‘The bravest men I’ve ever seen: trained just like the paratroopers, but no weapons, just their first-aid kits.’ Much later he’ll tell her about the flight he’s just returned from, the same aircraft converted now into a flying ambulance for the boys whose war is over, and the half-crazed paratrooper who met each incoming crew, searching for the bastards who dropped him in the wrong place: ‘It wasn’t us,’ he’ll add hastily. But he never tells her of the smell that engulfed them as they stepped out onto that Norman landing strip, because that’s what he most wants to forget and never does, and although he’s a farmer and has smelled his fair share of dead animals and rotting meat, his mind never allows him to identify this particular stink.

  They’re ready to pretend that this is not the world they live in.

  ‘We danced,’ is all Ruth will tell her children. ‘Your father won’t tell me where he learned to waltz, but he swept me off my feet that night.’ And the children will laugh, trying to imagine their parents in this disguise, waltzing to the Hungarian Rhapsody under the shining ball and high ceilings of the ballroom.

  Which is, in fact, the exact truth. But as Jane and her brothers will discover in their own time, superficially honest answers about human contact are often the least truthful.

  Bill does dance well; hands and step are light and sure, and he’s considerably taller than she is; Ruth, at nearly five foot ten, finds this novelty attractive in itself. Their bodies fit well together, move well together; impossible not to notice how right it feels. Fair, thick hair; straight nose and square jaw; she’s met men who were more attractive but is sure, tonight, that she’s never been so attracted. Voices through the tangle of music and crowded conversation, the peculiar pitch and rhythm of their own speech, the subtleties of scent amidst the fumes of alcohol, tobacco and other dancers. An air of quiet strength—does she truly notice this as they dance, or is it added in later?—as if one would be safe with him, find peace in crisis. But no safer than she would want to be: his eyes, hazel green, are lit with laughter and desire, with something deeper; and she feels herself reflected: desirable, beautiful. Seductive.