The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  Megan is now travelling on her own, no mother to hold her hand on the trip of a lifetime, the Grand Tour Australian-style; but Megan being Megan, daughter of Jane, granddaughter of Ruth, is not in Europe or Asia, another Aussie abroad, but is the child of a migrant discovering her roots, just as Jane had done—different country, same exploration—twenty-nine years earlier.

  A got-here-safely phone call from Vancouver. No roots there, but Megan’s determined to see it all, from westernmost meridian to the east: her first and only pre-booked organisation for the entire trip a seaplane flight to the wild west coast of Vancouver Island. Words blurring with excitement, she’d called not from the gleaming new airport but the seaplane’s small wooden terminal, a brief and disconcertingly seatbeltless ride away but redolent with the scents of cedar and sea.

  ‘The plane’s coming in now. It looks like a toy. I wish you could see it!’

  The little-studied gene for love of aircraft can apparently skip a generation.

  The first letter ten days later is bursting with exuberance and descriptive supelatives, though the highlight so far, Megan says, has been almost spiritual.

  She’d spent a morning in a cedar gallery built in the style of a First Nations longhouse; an artist who had also come back to his roots, digging deep into his Tsimshian father’s culture. It was the first day of a two-month budget, not the time to spend significant money on a painting; she bought a calendar, a dozen cards. The art was stylised, stark and vibrant, always with a hidden legend, a story in the clouds—Raven in the new moon, Thunderbird, Orca. Megan wandered dreamily through the semi-darkness, focussed on the stories of the backlit lithographs: she did not know why they touched her so deeply, she said, and the artist smiled.

  The Visa card smiled too; she knew the one she wanted; there was no other purchase she could want as badly as this. It was, she decided, an auspicious beginning.

  Jane is not so sure. It’s sometimes difficult to remember that a daughter is an adult, to understand that it is no longer your responsibility to ensure that she can balance a budget or be trusted not to become stranded halfway across the country. Still a shock to find that she is not only living in Melbourne but has become a Melburnian; not even a student but a businesswoman, surprisingly successful—surprising to Jane and Ian not because of doubts about their daughter’s ability but sincere reservations about whether even in inner-city Carlton sufficient people would be willing to pay for the privilege of having the meridians of their bodies punctured by needles—small, disposable, but still needles and not always painless.

  Jane’s response to Winston’s desertion (she will cringe at this later; alter history with half-truths) was not to go to university at all. There was no point, she argued to her bitterly disappointed mother, if all she was going to do was teach at the end of it. She could do the same thing much more easily and quickly by going to teachers’ college. And it was ridiculous to say that she should be teaching high-school math or geography; how on earth could she ever control a class of grade 12s? Little children she could learn to manage, but she’d never be tall enough to have authority over senior students.

  Jane has no idea, Ruth wrote to Mary, how strong she is. She thinks that she wouldn’t be able to cope with the chance of seeing this boy on campus or in the town. I don’t scoff at this as puppy love; it was real and intense and perhaps I should be pleased, in view of her age, that it’s over. I don’t know how I feel about that, to be honest, not just because of the complications but because I’ve developed such a great respect for this young man’s mind and am genuinely fond of him. However my interest in him hardly compares to how I care for Jane, and one thing I do know is that her life is not about to end with the close of this affair. I told her the story of my romance with Miles and of my extraordinary luck in meeting her father, but as I suppose one should have predicted, she was not impressed—whether because of her mother’s fickleness or what she sees as the minuscule chance of her having the same luck, I’m not sure.

  Second chances in love are not the most tactful thing one could discuss with a spinster cousin, but this does not strike Ruth until after the letter is mailed. Mary’s line is that the advantage of being an old maid is that no one interferes with one’s pets, and Ruth has never probed more deeply.

  So Winston went to Halifax and St Anne’s; Jane went to Truro and the college on Bible Hill, kilometres from where her father had also studied, although there’s not much in common between a classroom of elementary school children and a North Atlantic crossing—apart from the disadvantages of losing control, though Jane didn’t find this amusing when Bill suggested it. In fact, for most of that summer Jane was positively Queen Victoria-ish about any form of humour.

  She saw Winston in Zellers at Christmas, and they both froze so guiltily that if Applevale had run to store detectives they’d have been arrested immediately. Winston was the first to say hello and she thought that he would have chatted if she could have borne it. She couldn’t. For long after, even when accidents of distance made it impossible that it could be him, a glimpse of the back of a close-shorn black skull or the scent of starched cotton on young male sweat would twist a small dart inside her.

  Some first love stories could be shared, laid out and admired without losing their brilliance; some were best locked away to be trickled through fingers in private. One betrayal was too much, and she never again—no matter how many shared confidences or bottles—thrilled her sisters with that particular jewel.

  A real sister would be nice in times like this, Jane thinks now; not that there are many times like this. Her brothers are strangers, last seen at twenty-one and nineteen but younger still in her mind, stuck in the childhood when she covered up for Mike and cared for Rick. On rare phone calls, when she hears a middle-aged male voice saying, ‘Mom said,’ or ‘Dad did,’ she feels a sense of shock that they’re referring to the same Mom and Dad that she is. She might have kept in closer contact with a female sibling, but the closest she’s had is Sue. Neighbours for fifteen years, friends for not much less, there’s very little they don’t know about each other. You can’t hide much on dairy farms anyway, not in this soldier-settlement area where the farms are laid out neatly side by side, dairies and houses close to the road and the trees still too small for privacy. When Col and Sue’s cows trampled a fence to get to a newly sown paddock, Ian was the first to see them and leap to his motorbike to chase them off; Col has jumped the boundary fence to stick a knife into a greedy cow’s bloated belly and save her life. On mornings when the shouting from next door’s dairy is particularly prolonged or obscene, Jane knows that the phone is likely to ring during the morning: ‘You probably heard that dummy-spit . . . Is your kettle on?’

  ‘I don’t know how Sue puts up with it,’ she often confides to Ian, grateful that he isn’t abusive in the dairy, to her or the cows, although she knows that Sue is equally relieved at Col’s acquiescence about anything she wants to do outside it.

  ‘Just tell Ian you’re taking that job!’ says Sue. ‘What’s he got against your doing well?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jane defends. ‘He’s just afraid I’m taking on more than I can handle.’

  ‘Bull! He’s afraid you’ll find out how strong you are and start standing up for yourself. You know that’s why he talked you out of the principal’s job, and now he’s doing it all over again, and you really want to do this EcoFarm thing.’

  Jane could as easily suggest that Sue order Col to stop screaming at nervous heifers, but thinks it would be rude to say so.

  ‘What are the rules?’ she’d ask Sue now, if Qantas had a phone for their morning chat. Maybe there’s some kind of Emily Post on the etiquette for the loss of a parent. Does she feel too much or too little? How much of the grief is for Ruth and how much for herself?

  Then there’s the relief: relief that brings guilt, though a part of her can stand back further still and know that it shouldn’t because most of it is for Ruth, who at one stroke (Is that a dreadful pun?
Is there something wrong with her if it is?) has been spared the worst indignities of old age. Relief born of love, knowing that her mother would have hated—as who wouldn’t, but Ruth more than most—to lose faculties, to feel her sharp mind dim, would have much rather died than suffer being jollied in an institution or long-term hospital bed.

  ‘But you could have let me say goodbye!’ she tells God. ‘You could have let her live till I got there.’

  ‘With pain? With confusion?’ answers—probably not God, more likely the other part of her mind. ‘You’d put your mother through a few days of hell for your own satisfaction?’

  ‘That’s not what I mean!’ she snarls, because she and God both know perfectly well that what she’d wanted was a simple, classical deathbed scene without pain, confusion or bodily fluids.

  Except that she’s not completely sure Ruth would have wanted to die holding someone’s, even her daughter’s, hand. Given the choice she probably would have chosen privacy.

  Maybe she did choose. If so, Jane’s grief is for herself, the abandoned child: now no one stands between her and her own mortality. ‘I’m an orphan,’ she tries, but it doesn’t work: at some age one becomes too old to be an orphan.

  Alone in Singapore airport, Jane wanders. Six hours: the length of a school day—with planning she could have taken a city-sights bus tour, but the thought of asking and arranging drains her with unutterable weariness. She has to remind herself of her continuing ticket, a destination, and feels too lost to believe in it. This, she thinks, is how a refugee must feel—and is immediately ashamed, because there is no similarity whatsoever and no reason, in this affluent gleam of duty-free, for refugees to come to mind at all.

  Except that, midway in this spiderweb of adopted and birthplaces (from her adopted country to that of her mother’s birth, from mother’s birthplace to adopted—refuge?—which is of course Jane’s own home and native land) tangible assets seem suddenly less important. Like any refugee, she is not sure which home is hers.

  Tangible assets—the great tourist shopping spree—are, however, much in evidence. A more glamorous woman, or a woman who loved glamour more, might have been distracted even from grief by the arrays of jewellery, make-up, leather goods and perfume. She does nearly buy a book, fingering Anne Tyler’s Ladder of Years until the voice of logic points out that she has not only spent a vast amount of money on this journey, but that she is so exhausted anything she reads now will be utterly wasted.

  You’ll have worked out by now, Bill writes, wondering exactly what to say to the stranger who’s agreed to marry him, because he certainly can’t put into words the thoughts that have obsessed him since that night, that the plane we heard crash was Hitler’s new surprise—and I’d have to say a plane without a pilot is some surprise. I thought it was a joke at first. A guy from Chicago says they’re nonunion planes—‘trying to put us all out of a job.’

  PS, he adds next morning, I’m sorry I joked about those buzz bombs. I just heard that one of our ground crew, a bright young kid from Rhodesia, was killed last night in London. Doesn’t seem right, somehow, to come all this way and be killed on a week’s leave.

  ‘If there’s anything you’d like to discuss, Ruth,’ the CO says quietly.

  Ruth thinks quickly over her last few days’ work: a broken Oxford, which she’d limped with some difficulty to its final role of target practice for student bomb-aimers. She’d been quite proud of the fact that despite its official Essentially Non Airworthy status she’d managed to land without adding to its long list of damage—there couldn’t have been any complaints there. A beautiful factory-fresh Spitfire to a fighter base, and a return trip with one to the factory for servicing; a horrible Walrus seaplane which had given her a bump on the forehead when climbing in but no other problems; two more Spitfires and a Mosquito. Nothing had bounced or broken and she’d been too overwhelmed by the rollercoaster of her personal life to attempt any unauthorised aeronautics.

  ‘You haven’t looked well the last few weeks,’ the CO prompts.

  ‘Oh, I’m perfectly well, thank you,’ but she can feel herself flushing, she hasn’t blushed like this since—no, never like this, not this burning heat of throat, even ears, but then she’s never before felt shame like this. It’s bad enough that she should wake at night wondering who she is and where she’s come from, worse that the doubts intrude on her dreams of Bill and the future, but worst of all would be to discuss this humiliation in public.

  ‘Perhaps a little tired, as we all are.’

  ‘That’s true. Well, just let me know in good time if you’re going to need . . . if there’s anything you need to discuss.’

  Pity, that’s the expression, concern. But how could Margot have guessed the truth? Compared to the strained waiting of those with husbands fighting or missing in action, her own drama is petty, sordid and hardly the most likely thing to come to mind. Ruth Townsend looking a little under the weather? It’s only natural, she’s a bastard, an abandoned baby, no one knows who her parents are. For a person as private as she, it’s a bitter twist simply to know that she’s been unguarded enough to leave someone else contemplating what her problem could be. Sometimes she is still amazed that she told Bill, sobbing in his arms—she is neither a sobber nor a blurter of secrets, which leads her back to the beginning: perhaps she’s not any of the things she’d always thought she was. How do I know I love you? she’d written last night, after a day in which falling in love seemed just another impossible thing to believe. Because some atavistic part of me believes that in handing my story to you I’ve delivered my soul to your keeping. I’ve never been sure what I believe about the soul, but the joining, the recognition of ours, seems the only way to explain what has happened between us.

  One of the many letters that she doesn’t send, crumpled into a tight ball, it sits in the rubbish basket as she begins today’s.

  Dearest Bill

  I had the strangest talk with our CO tonight, and laughs aloud as she finally recalls the recent notice about pregnancy, pilots and the forbidding of. Margot’s worrying about offspring, not ancestors.

  The letter joins last night’s and instead she constructs a funny story about her trials in taking the Oxford to its final resting-place—It’s a shame they couldn’t have just bombed the silly thing where it was! She doesn’t know Bill well enough to joke about conception.

  A letter a day, a testament of faith, the beginning of the web of letters that will over Ruth’s lifetime stretch across continents. He replies almost as often: scraps of words, an alien medium for a man whose life has been lived with other men for four years now, his own world seen in the lines of charts, the meridians of the earth’s body.

  His letters to her are at first indistinguishable from those to his parents, following the army as it clears its way across France: details of rolled metal landing strips, red wine in a village cafe, the carefully imprecise geography—somewhere in Europe—belying his constant knowledge of the exact coordinates of wherever he is.

  But inexorably, letter by letter, defences are stripped away.

  12 July 1944

  Dearest Bill

  I had breakfast in a Bomber Command mess, and if I weren’t a bit thin at the moment—She hesitates over this admission—does he like bony women?—I think next time I’d prefer to wait and hope for a chance of lunch. It’s not simply the way everyone avoids looking at those empty places—and there were so many of them this morning—or that all ears are straining for the sound of another aircraft coming in long after time. It’s those haunted, hunted faces themselves; one wonders how they’ll ever return to a normal life when this nightmare is over. Yet I know that if one saw them a few hours later the look would tell an entirely different story, and they’ll be ready to go again by the time it’s dark tonight.

  What particularly wrung my heart, however, was a young WAAF who literally collapsed, sobbing at her table. A friend went to her and I presume took her back to the Waaferie where she could grieve in priv
ate, but as I left I heard a pilot say, ‘She’s a regular chop girl, that one—that’s her third. If I see anyone in my crew with her . . .’

  So now this poor girl, who has obviously just lost her lover, will be ostracised by the rest of the squadron.

  The very worst of it is that as superstitious and illogical as it is, I know exactly how they feel. This war is not making any of us better people.

  I don’t think it’s making me a better person, Bill agrees. The more I see of France and what’s been done to the people, the angrier I get. Does he hesitate here, too, wondering if he’s describing a desirable husband? We took a bit of flak as we landed the ambulance Dakota this morning, so I had a look at the town while we were waiting for emergency repairs. The people are so grateful; two girls gave me flowers as if I’d been one of their liberators instead of just doing the tidying up afterwards, and one woman gave me a glass of wine with some bread and sausage. I didn’t feel good taking it, she looked right skinny herself (Are you truly getting thin? Please take care of yourself.) but it seemed awfully important to her, so I felt like it would be better if I ate. Then she told me that the Germans had shot her husband as they left, no particular reason as far as I could understand except I guess he was there, and maybe when you’re retreating from a place you thought you’d won, that’s all the excuse you need.

  The funny thing was she called the snack a ‘gouter’, and I always thought that was a word my Grandpère made up, a sort of baby talk, because I never heard anyone else say it. So hearing it now, it did make me think of him, and how if history had been different maybe he would have been living here now in one of these villages that I’ve just seen. But then I wouldn’t have been born, and I wouldn’t have met you, so I’m glad that history turned out the way it did.