The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  It’s the next night that she walks into his arms in front of number 40.

  Jane is an adult before she begins to understand that Ruth, safe in that clasp, hears the words as a sign from the fates and knows that if her past has been a lie, this man is the truth of her future.

  They don’t go to the West End after all. They walk through the misty evening, Ruth in her unsuitable shoes and Bill in air force boots; they huddle on a hard park bench and share a cigarette and warmth and secrets.

  ‘Just ask them,’ says Bill, secure in his own rich history of family feuds and saga, ‘and if they won’t say, there’ll be a cousin or an aunt who’ll be dying to tell you. There’s always someone.’

  But Ruth isn’t sure yet that she even wants to know.

  Instead she drinks in his life: the big whitewashed farmhouse at Evelyn’s Pond. ‘On the North Mountain—only it’s not so much a mountain,’ he admits, having now seen mountains that are, ‘as a ridge.’ The red barn of haylofts, of featherfetlocked Clydesdales, warm cow breath and the stink of pigs; woods and fields and apple orchards. And to add to the romance, he covers the land with a blanket of snow, deep and soft, straps on snow shoes ‘like tennis rackets,’ he says and jumps up from the bench to demonstrate the gait, wide-legged and rolling, ‘easy once you learn,’ to walk her through woods of frozen maple and frosted spruce. To spare her feelings he avoids peopling the land, but she is greedy for details of that interlocked web of kin—siblings and ancestors holding tight in a proof of existence.

  His story is interrupted by the wailing of an air-raid siren. They look up briefly and decide to ignore it. The night is cloudy, nearly moonless, and the risk of an enemy aircraft actually getting through is certainly not worth abandoning their privacy for a smelly, crowded bomb shelter.

  An unfamiliar, rasping thrum approaches overhead. Searchlights wave, and in the instant before the beams focus on their target, they see that the aircraft’s running lights are on.

  ‘How very odd!’ Ruth exclaims.

  ‘Pilot must be dead,’ says Bill, ‘he’s not trying to evade at all . . . but what the hell is it?’

  It’s very fast, very low, flying absolutely straight, and now that its odd cigar shape and the flame shooting from it are trapped in the great white light, they realise it’s unlike anything they’ve seen before. The ack-ack guns are thundering, blobs of red tracer shooting up at this strange, defiant raider, and in one move they realise their exposed position and tumble together under their park bench.

  His body is straddling hers and she can feel him trying to protect her from his weight but their bodies touch anyway, the bony points of her hips and the softness of her breasts, and she doesn’t want to be protected from his weight, or from the feel of him growing and hardening against her or from her own ache of longing to take him deep inside herself. She pulls him closer till she feels his tense shoulders relax, stroking his hair, his neck, his back. So this is it, she thinks. What a funny way to start our lives together. The thought is so bizarre that she shoves it quickly to the corner of her mind.

  The silence as the engine cuts out is more shocking than the noise. The strange craft plummets straight down, not spiralling out of control as a stalled kite should, and when the explosion comes Bill lifts his face from the curve of her neck. ‘His bombs were still on board,’ he says. ‘That’s a hell of a bang.’

  They stay where they are as they hear the wail of ambulance and fire engine. And as they are, impossible not to kiss, to hold and touch, but this is not kissing, not holding or touching as Ruth has ever known it, as if everything before has been felt through a veil and only now is she experiencing pure, naked sense. Naked is how she wants her body to be as well, clothes have never seemed so restricting, with this scent of summer grass, a pebble pressing sharply into her shoulder . . . ‘We should have gone to a hotel,’ she says.

  Bill has kept lust at bay all night, in deference to her distraught state and a fear that she might hate him when she recovers. He has also never had sex with a woman he thinks he could love. His sense of virtue evaporates—he feels cheated and confused, aching with cold, desire and fatigue.

  Her dark hair is rumpled and face pale in the grey of first dawn; her shoulders are bare, the wrap lost in the scramble for shelter. Narrow shoulders, very straight, with prominent, fragile collarbones. The fantasies that have flicked occasionally into his mind during the past four months and constantly in the last twenty-four hours are without warning transformed to a vision of waking with that face, this body, in a bed beside him. ‘Marry me,’ he says.

  His face is serious.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ says Ruth. ‘What a good idea.’

  They kiss with a new seriousness, hands straying possessively. Not to spite Mama and Papa, she thinks. Not because I need to belong somewhere and it’s no longer here. This is something that would have happened whenever we met. She is suddenly urgent with fear of a fate that might never have let them come together or could now casually remove him with a quick rake of anti-aircraft fire or faulty landing. (Or her, but Ruth has long since decided that her emulation of Amy Johnson stops well short of dying in the same way.)

  But the other reasons help. That, and the strong hands and blond-moustached lip, and the feeling that perhaps the poets weren’t wrong about sex after all and that there isn’t anything quite so urgent in life as finding out for sure. Except perhaps, with dawn definitely arriving, the sound of traffic and the realisation that there are some limits to the loss of dignity—and this morning, she’s got to face her parents.

  ‘One thing at a time,’ she says, stretching long legs, wriggling her toes in the flimsy shoes and doing nothing whatsoever for Bill’s self-control. ‘Surely we can organise another leave together soon, and next time we’ll find a better place to stay.’

  Bill is still in shock at hearing his own question and finds it harder still to believe her answer. ‘You’ll marry me—truly?’

  ‘I’ll marry you truly.’

  ‘You don’t really know me.’

  She drops the teasing tone. ‘I know I love you. I don’t see how I can know that any more than I do now.’

  ‘I’d better find out what we have to do about it—permission and all that. It’s not something I’d thought about.’

  ‘I’d never thought about emigrating!’ And at his worried face—‘I didn’t say I didn’t want to, it’s just something one doesn’t normally consider.’

  ‘But you won’t be an immigrant,’ he says. ‘You’ll be my wife.’

  Ruth begins to giggle, helplessly, uncharacteristically. In less than eight hours she’s been unquestioningly Ruth Townsend, had no name at all, and is now anticipating Mrs William Dubois. The whole question has become surreal.

  ‘Will I meet your parents this morning?’

  ‘After we’ve spent the night out together?’

  ‘I’ll tell them I intend to make an honest woman of you. They can’t be worse than my wing co.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’ She’s stiff and lightheaded, has gone right past sleep, and has no idea at all what she wants to say to her parents.

  ‘Tell them,’ Bill suggests, ‘that we’ll be spending many, many more nights together, but never again on a park bench. Or under it,’ and the kiss this time has such urgency that Ruth restrains herself only with the suspicion that he’s fallen in love partly with the image of her as an English lady, one whom he might expect to be rather more inhibited than she feels at the moment. (She is in fact wrong in this, not yet understanding the complex web of English-aristocrat-loathing history that has raised this man. He has fallen in love purely and simply with Ruth herself; her passion for reading the stories of people’s lives sometimes leads her to forget that, occasionally, a cigar is just a cigar.)

  They catch the first bus past, which has to detour around its regular route where emergency services are working feverishly in a blocked-off road. A three or four house gap is obvious in the line of roofs.

  Bill
feels Ruth growing remote as Savernake Street comes closer. ‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?’

  ‘One thing at a time,’ she repeats. ‘First I’ve got to find out exactly what they meant last night.’

  ‘You don’t think it was just a mistake—saying things in an argument they don’t really mean?’

  Ruth sees again the frozen parental tableau. ‘I don’t think so.’

  Bill can do nothing but walk her to the gate, belatedly exchange addresses and catch the tube back to his train station and base. It was easier when she was crying; he has no idea what to do for this self-possessed young woman who is looking so coolly at her loss of identity.

  ‘Just ask them,’ Bill said, but it’s not so simple.

  ‘Papa is sleeping,’ her mother whispers as Ruth enters the house. ‘Try not to wake him; there was a raid last night and he’s not long back.’

  ‘I heard it.’

  So that’s it, she thinks. Yesterday evening didn’t happen.

  This is her family’s usual response to emotion, but the emotions this time are too huge to be ignored. Mama had screamed that Ruth wasn’t her daughter; Ruth had spent the night out with a strange man . . . The man she was created for, she thinks, and for an instant glows again with that certainty before misery overtakes her. This is not the way life is supposed to be: she’s met the man she intends to marry—she ought to be able to tell her parents and they ought to be happy for her. But she can’t imagine telling them any of this, because she won’t be able to open her mouth without asking who she is.

  And it’s so impossible I’m not me, she decides, against a rising tide of nausea, that I can’t understand anything else.

  In her room she changes quickly into uniform for the trip back, mechanically shaking the grass from her evening dress, dusting off shoes, packing them quickly with nightdress and underwear into the holdall, The Screwtape Letters into her handbag for the train—CS Lewis’s devils would be shrieking for joy at this particular misery, she thinks, better than anything the Letters have devised. It’s too early to leave but she can’t face going downstairs. Maybe Mama will come up, she thinks, because cynical as she can be when cynicism is wittier than trust, Ruth will remain an optimist for the rest of her life.

  Mama doesn’t come up. Ruth continues to sit on the edge of the bed, her optimism deserting her, with a despairing feeling that this might be the last time she’ll ever sit here, in the room where she grew up. Ruth Townsend’s room. Yellow floral wallpaper, chintz curtains, Queen Anne dressing table and wardrobe, the two bookcases with wing-backed chair between, the two paintings that have always been here, and the Daily Mail’s print of Amy Johnson in front of her Jason, framed with Ruth’s own pocket money. She’s had this bed, as far she knows, since she grew out of a cot. As far as she knows—there’s the rub, as Shakespeare would say. How far does she know?

  Taking off from Jakarta, the Pavlovian association of excitement with the acceleration is for just an instant stronger than grief: Jane tries to imagine that she’s going on a holiday instead. (‘Visualisation,’ Megan often says, ‘is the first step to doing what you want.’ As Megan, since birth, has been rather good at doing what she wants, there may be something in it.) Not a trip to Canada, because Canada is family and what she doesn’t want to think about, but a proper luxurious, sightseeing holiday. Difficult to imagine why she’s going without Ian; maybe he’s too busy. Maybe it’s a working holiday, EcoFarm sending her on a European study tour; Australia is not the only country in the world battling the problems of salinity and erosion with tree planting and improved farm management.

  Funny how problems run through your mind, periodically lying low but refusing to die away. The whether-or-not-to-take-the-job dilemma, dormant since Mary’s phone call, has just sneakily resurfaced under the guise of a fantasy holiday. Not that EcoFarm is likely to send her to Europe, but if she takes—if she applies and is appointed to—this new Coordinator’s position, there will be occasional trips to Canberra, maybe even to Queensland and Western Australia as well as the closer States.

  To research and report, the job description said, on the land degradation problems in each region, the effect of EcoFarm on the ecology of these regions and the impact of change on the lives of farmers participating in the programs.

  ‘They need a sociologist for that,’ Ian had said, but Jane had been invited to apply, on the strength, she presumes, of the history she’d prepared of the Gundanna Lagoon, a similar project, though smaller in scale.

  Ian worries that this will be taking on more than she can cope with; he doesn’t want to see her hurt, by which he means fail. She is a primary school teacher, not a trained researcher or university lecturer; a room full of bureaucrats or hostile farmers is not, he’d pointed out, the same as a class of eight year olds.

  ‘Not as different as you think,’ retorted Jane, who’s seen more of both.

  And was she really going to be happy, he’d wanted to know, turning herself into a supercharged businesswoman, bustling off to Melbourne conferences or interstate flights? Which was more difficult to argue with. She suspects that a power suit and briefcase would simply make her look pretentious, like a child dressing up in her mother’s clothes: she’s just a woman who started planting trees because she was homesick on the flat bare lands, and happened to learn a little along the way.

  Too hard to think about now. Go back to the fantasy holiday. Why couldn’t it be Canada? She can’t cut herself off completely just because her parents are dead; it simply gives her the freedom to see more of the country, as Megan’s doing now, to visit scattered relatives and friends. Not that she has contact with many of the latter: Gail’s in Vancouver, sending a yearly chatty newsletter, but she lost touch with Patsy years ago. Winston, naturally, she’s never heard from at all.

  ‘My first lover was black.’

  Jane’s offering to the reunion of teachers’ college friends in the cheap wine induced haze of sisterhood, loss of virginity the theme this last night of summer school 1968, before they all go back to being prim young teachers.

  She said first as if others had followed; lover as if sex was something they’d been in the habit of. But it was black that was the betrayal.

  Her friends saw themselves as liberal, liberated young women who, while not burning their bras, had occasionally gone without, who believed in love not war, in racial equality, and—absolutely and implicitly—in their own freedom from the shadow of prejudice.

  The one word freed them to write their own versions of her story—radical heroine; free-loving hippie ahead of her time; lucky bitch coupling with a big black stud. It was in what they didn’t ask as much as what they did. They didn’t need to know what he was like, his thoughts or what he wanted out of life, because they knew all that mattered: gleaming skin and rippling pectorals, feline grace and sinuous rhythm. But what they most wanted to know they didn’t dare ask, and Jane never told them.

  She wasn’t sure that she could. They’d only made love once, and it hadn’t been very successful.

  His father was a blacksmith (Jane was an adolescent before she realised that the word didn’t refer to his skin). They must have been about eight when they first met, because it was Grandpa’s old horse being shod and he’d died the following winter, and difficult as it would be to believe it later, Winston had needed to be coaxed out of the pick-up while his father unloaded anvil and tools. Ruth set up a milk and cookies picnic on the bales in the barn, and Winston had explained the procedure to Jane (a memory that was easier to imagine) while Mike climbed on the hay.

  It was grade 10 before they spoke again, the first day at Applevale Regional High, when the commercial stream and tech school had syphoned off aspiring typists and mechanics, leaving a smaller group than had jostled through the various elementary schools and junior high. Winston sat behind her in Latin. She could not believe he was the same solemn boy she’d played with in the sweet smelling, prickly hay.

  ‘Why are you her
e?’ he challenged. ‘Don’t you know it’s a dead language?’

  Jane panicked. She was never good at this. She would watch the girls who could throw little balls of conversation into the air, juggling words that meant nothing, that meant everything, teasing, promising, denying. And because life is unfair and laughs at losers, this gift of sparkling was given to the girls with curves—curves of waved hair, curves of Playtex breasts, curves of waist and hip—girls who didn’t need to juggle words to feel a boy’s hot hungry eyes follow her or hear his breathless whisper on the phone begging for a date.

  ‘Why’re you?’ she snapped.

  ‘You need it for law,’ said Winston, leaning back in his chair as if the answer should have been obvious even to a numbskull like herself. ‘I’m going to be a lawyer.’

  Jane had never had a proper boyfriend, but she knew what he would look like: tall, tanned, lean and athletic, a strongly chiselled face and several years older than she would have been allowed to date. Winston was short and stocky, the same body shape as her grandfather and herself, the tight curls of his hair cropped short to his skull. (If we ever have children, she thought once, when the possibility did not seem remote, they’ll come out square! At the same time realising this would be the least of the children’s problems.)

  The six grade 10 students who hadn’t realised that Latin was a dead language quickly developed a clique of their own. A Latin word in the middle of a sentence—in the halls, the lunch room, in other subjects—would convulse the six of them into peals of only slightly artificial laughter. For the first time Jane was part of an exclusive group and it didn’t matter that no one else particularly wanted to be included.