The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  ‘Daisy’s quieter,’ Mary promises.

  Daisy is white and fluffy with beseeching brown eyes. ‘Poodle Pekinese, I think. I’m sure she would have gone to a good home, but something about that face . . . and I hoped she might calm Barney down.’

  Barney is dancing on hind legs, aiming kisses at faces. Mary bellows ‘Down!’ with the force of a sergeant major twice her size and half her age, and fills the kettle. The kitchen is clean and bright, so it must have been repainted and updated since she last saw it, but to Jane it looks exactly the same.

  ‘I’ll show you your room,’ says Mary, ‘and then you can have a cup of tea and a nap; your bed’s ready.’

  ‘Is it . . . ?’ She can’t finish the question.

  ‘I’ve put you in the double room,’ Mary continues tactfully, understanding that even after forty-one hours of travelling there are limits to where one wants to sleep, ‘where you and Ian stayed before you went to Australia. Your mother was in the other one—I thought she’d prefer the garden view.’

  Jane climbs the stairs; her suitcase, unladen with the usual gifts of international visiting, is not heavy. Kneeling to open it, she shakes out and hangs up her good dress, her three shirts and other pair of slacks, changes into a short-sleeved shirt and leaves the rest in the case; she won’t be here long enough to settle in. Should have pulled the curtains to change, living so long on the farm she’s forgotten the house across the street, upstairs windows facing directly into hers. She wonders if it’s still the same people there and hopes not, remembering the girl undressing for her new husband–lover, that afternoon when Mary was out, teasing, Ian reaching for her, caressing, tumbling onto the bed and only later, languidly redressing, seeing the shocked face staring out the window opposite.

  They wouldn’t recognise her anyway, a lifetime later. She can barely recognise herself, or remember that overwhelming urgency of youthful sex, the gut-twisting delirium that once dominated their lives. Sex is still good, she decides, but life is easier now that desire isn’t quite as imperative as it used to be.

  Daisy appears politely on the threshold, like a maid sent to tell her that tea is waiting, and Jane follows the shaggy white bottom back to the kitchen.

  ‘Would you like to phone Ian?’ asks Mary.

  At the fourth ring Jane hears her own voice requesting her to leave a message and even in her numbness has time to wonder if she really sounds like that. And then to wonder at her own shallowness.

  Ian calls back before the tea is drunk; all is well. One cow calved successfully while he was at the airport, another last night, and he is just in from helping a heifer deliver her first.

  ‘Three heifer calves!’ he says proudly, because in calving as in any other birth, the outcome of healthy mother and infant quickly obliterates the rest of the story: the straining and swearing, muck and blood, the wondering if it’s time to interfere.

  But in dairy cows as in other dynasties, the infant’s gender determines the extent of celebration. It just happens that as cows are valued for milk rather than aggression, it’s the females who are feted. Heifer calves are a return on investment, on money and time spent poring over bull catalogues and injecting expensive semen, and three together are a good omen for the season.

  Jane, remembering this as if it’s something she’s read, makes suitable noises to disguise her sense of dissociation. The noises are not entirely effective: Ian tells her to get some sleep; she says she has to see the coroner first and he says she won’t manage it without sleep. As she hangs up it strikes her that this is the epitome of middle age—bickering on a transatlantic line in the midst of funeral arrangements.

  Mary asks brightly if Ian is having any problems with snakes, a non sequitur that does nothing for Jane’s sense of reality. Ruth’s death must have affected Mary more than she’d realised. She explains that it’s the wrong time of year, or at least the right time of year for not meeting snakes. In midwinter, paddocks and long grass can be walked without fear.

  ‘I could never get over,’ says Mary, ‘your having venomous snakes in the house, although I suppose one becomes accustomed to anything with time.’

  Jane has never met anyone who’s become accustomed to the presence of snakes: brown, black and tiger, all common, all deadly. Red-bellied black snakes the most timid, tigers outright aggressive—though there’s a theory that the mild-mannered red-bellies will drive tigers away from their territory and so should be encouraged, if one only knew how. And could bear it. It’s a matter of discussion amongst neighbours every spring, the first time one is seen coiled on a verandah, the first slim track across a driveway or dead body on the road, sinister even in death so that the children riding bikes home from buses swerve and fall and beg their mothers for a lift till the end of summer. The cats that survive with antivenene, the dogs that invariably die, the farm where a king brown took up residence in a round bale of hay one night and kissed twelve soft cow noses with the swipe of a deadly tongue. The fear always for babies and curious children . . . and she realises what Mary’s referring to.

  ‘Megan was two and still in a cot—she was supposed to be having an afternoon nap. Ian had killed a snake on the doorstep a few days before, and had shown her, telling her it was a bad bad thing and she must never touch it, but we had no idea what she’d take in.

  ‘I thought she was singing at first—she often sang to herself—and then I realised the chant was “make, make, make” and there she was, lying down with her arm through the bars, a few inches above a big brown snake. They can stand up, you know, when they want to strike—if it had noticed her and felt threatened, a few inches would have been nothing. I’d always thought I’d be terrified if I met a snake on my own, but there wasn’t room for emotion. I don’t even know how I crossed the room, but I grabbed her from the back of the crib.’

  Mary is intrigued by the switch to the Canadian word but doesn’t comment. Jane is flushed as if her heart is racing, reliving her story.

  ‘I shut the door behind me to trap him, locked Megan in our room and grabbed the shovel from the dairy. I remember shouting for Ian, but I didn’t know where he was and didn’t even slow down to see if he’d heard. Megan was bellowing by the time I got back, and I was terrified she’d find something to drag to the door and reach the handle before I’d got rid of the snake. He was still under the crib when I got there, and I chopped his head off—and then I chopped him into little pieces.’

  She’s half laughing, half crying, as she hasn’t, not yet, for her mother. ‘When Ian came in I was still standing in the bedroom in my gumboots in a big mess of chopped-up snake and linoleum. Completely wrecked the floor; we had to put carpet down.’

  ‘“The female of the species is more deadly than the male!” ’ quotes Mary, clearing away the teacups. ‘I’m glad it’s not a regular occurrence. Somehow, ever since your mother told me about it, I’d pictured it as a part of your daily life: milk the cows, kill the snakes . . .’

  Jane remembers something Ruth had said in the letter that arrived the morning before she died, describing incidents on the tour and peculiarities of her fellow literary tourists.

  Jane Austen was, as usual, exactly right when Mr Bennet told Lizzie that we are here purely for our neighbours’ entertainment. In the end we’re nothing but the stories that other people remember. I suppose the sad thing is that people often remember things we’ve forgotten ourselves, or at least would not have chosen as our memorial.

  A more appropriate word than Jane had realised on first reading.

  Compensating for the grinding boredom of grief, Ruth’s mind begins to invent further tragedies. Sometimes she is so sure that disaster is coming it seems only a matter of time before she’s notified, before a phone call comes from someone in the squadron—she’s not official next of kin, but Bill’s made arrangements, she knows, for her to be told. (As she has, but she is not yet able to see enough significance in her own life to believe that she could die.) Some days certainty is so absolute that the
only way she can go on is to attack each chore with a combination of magic ritual and pragmatism: ‘If I’ve combed my hair and brushed my teeth it’ll be easier to bear.’ ‘If I get to the duty office—check the met report—get to my plane—get back to base—before I find out.’ And by the end of the day: ‘If I can sleep all night then it’s another day he’s been alive.’

  It’s been such a long time since she was in love, although that hectic hero-worship she felt for Miles is so different from the aching longing, the deep surety and sense of homecoming she shares with Bill, that it’s difficult to call them by the same name. The men she dated in between were good friends or good fun but nothing more. Just once, with a scared young rear gunner, she’d agreed to sex from pity; although in the end, since he was either more drunk or his nerves more shot than she’d realised, the evening was no more comforting than it was romantic.

  The following night his crew made it back to England for an emergency landing after the rear turret with the young gunner inside had been shot right off. Ruth had already vowed that if she never fell in love again, she’d never have sex again—the former seemed likely, and the latter not much of a hardship. On hearing the news she amended the decision—she would simply not care for anyone until the war was over. It was an easy enough vow to keep until she met Bill.

  Now she’s starting to wonder if breaking it has been a wise decision, if love for her, whether romantic or parental, may carry a curse. She cares too much for Bill not to be superstitious: love is such a tenuous, inexplicable miracle, not far removed from magic. And if white magic exists, why not black?

  Certainly black magic seems to be dogging their plans. With her annual fortnight’s leave not due till May, and forty-eight hour passes consistently knocked out of kilter, she is beginning to despair that they may never get closer than their midnight longings and increasingly urgent letters.

  I know that I’m the luckiest man in the world, his latest note finishes, or will be when we can finally have some time together. Ruth darling, there are some things a man can’t say to a woman in a letter, no matter how much he loves her. I need to hold you in my arms to know this is real.

  The next day, unexpectedly off duty, he manages to track down the last missing part of his damaged motorcycle, scrounges petrol and arrives at White Waltham just as she steps out of the taxi Anson from the afternoon’s last delivery. She puts her hand to his cold face: she can’t hold him, not yet; it’s too much to believe that he’s here and if she puts her arms around him she will never let him go.

  ‘Twenty-four hours,’ he whispers. ‘I’ve found a hotel.’

  Pillion on the bike, no choice now but to hold him, her face against his shoulder, chest against his back and arms around the firmness of his stomach. Her legs are shaking when they dismount. He’s chosen the hotel carefully, a location away from likely acquaintances, without bomb damage or sordidness, but alone in the room she is suddenly paralysed by fear. Too much emotion, built up for too long.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ she whispers, white-faced, and his questing hands drop from her shoulders. If he’d been more sophisticated, more worldly, she might have left it there: better the hurt of rejection than death—and Jane’s story and therefore Megan’s story would never have happened—but Bill’s face, which in the transition from country boy to battleworn man has learned to guard against betraying fear and cold despair, cannot hope to disguise a wound dealt by the woman he loves.

  ‘I’m so afraid of bringing you bad luck!’

  Bill begins to unbutton her tunic. ‘And I thought you were smart! I’ll tell you what would be bad luck—to love each other and be too afraid to do anything about it!’ He works as slowly, as gently, as the most experienced seducer, or perhaps more accurately, as a stockman gentling a nervous horse, and by the time Ruth helps him peel off the regulation black stockings—ugly things, she thinks, but they nearly bring Bill undone—she feels herself melting into his hands. For the first time she understands that making love is not simply a favour from a woman to a man.

  When Ruth tells Jane this story, slightly edited and not till the visit just before Bill died, she adds, ‘It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been paralysed by an irrational fear. But you’ll be pleased to know your father wasn’t.’

  Jane, slightly shocked to discover that her generation had not invented sex before marriage and not quite ready even at nearly fifty to hear about her parents’ participation in it, is glad to be spared further details.

  The night together reasserts Ruth’s natural optimism. Her sense of smell, mysteriously absent since her parents’ death, returns with the fresh smell of linen in their room, the faint scent of Bill’s sweat as she rolls into his arms in the morning and the peculiar heady smell of aviation fuel and engines when she arrives on base. She begins to believe that the shock of her mother’s revelation and her grief over their deaths will ease with time, and although she thought she’d been sure before, she now knows with absolute certainty that just given the chance of survival, she and Bill can share a life. The shape and context of that life is less clear: it’s difficult to visualise Nova Scotia as a real place where real people, let alone Ruth Townsend, live.

  Tell me more, her letters beg, about your family, your farm, your country. Canada floats constantly on the periphery of her vision; from books and scraps of conversation she constructs it, like the elephant described by three blind men. There’s Beryl Markham’s crashlanding in a Cape Breton marsh and Bill’s stories of maple trees in spring, the warming snow soft-balling and time to tap for syrup. Canadian airmen, from Red Deer and Saskatoon, Victoria and St Johns, from Niagara to Cold Lake; men from the prairies, the mountains, the Arctic, the southern cities, have their stories drawn out like threads from a spider to weave a picture of Ruth’s future, a tax on the delivery of their freshly serviced plane.

  Canada is big, they brag, you English can’t understand how big it is. You can see forever across the prairies, drive fifty, a hundred miles before you hit another town—a man can make something of himself, it’s what you do with your life, not what you’re born into. Bears can be a problem in Prince Rupert; hang a deer in your garage overnight and find a black bear in there as well next morning. They’re okay though, not like the grizzlies, you want to be careful of them. The cabin by the lake where I learned to canoe in the summer—that’s Canada, those Ontario lakes. At Portage-La-Prairie, an Australian adds, the snow was so deep that we skied right over the top of the hangar.

  ‘Not many bears in Nova Scotia,’ Bill replies. ‘No prairies or rattlesnakes; it’s gentler country. Settlers from the lowlands of Scotland thought it looked like home, and before that it was Acadia—Paradise.’

  Ruth narrows her search, quizzing men who’ve learned about the province in elementary school history and geography and not thought of it again until it hit their lives as the end of a troop train and the start of an Atlantic convoy. ‘Fish and fog,’ they tell her. ‘Halifax harbour; never seen so many men loading onto so many ships; and of course there was the explosion in the last war, munition ship blew up and took half the town with it—a hell of a bang that must have been, you can still see where a man was blown through the stained-glass window in the church. Some places around there speak Gaelic, I heard, and French too.’

  A kaleidoscope of impressions, few of the fragments coinciding with Bill’s images of apple orchards and oxen. In the library she finds Barometer Rising and Longfellow’s Evangeline: Nova Scotia the home of explosions and expelled lovers. A bookshop in Reading produces the slim Autobiography of Oliver Goldsmith’s eponymous grandnephew, but his life in the capital a hundred years ago yields little insight into what hers will be in the country now. City girl, she writes to Cousin Mary: How will I ever learn to be a farmer’s wife?

  Mary sends back vivid tales of gassing rats, killing pigs, and the WAAFs refusal to share a table with land girls in the mess. They say it’s because we stink, she boasts gleefully, which is true. But the real reason
is that they’re jealous because we can wear dresses instead of uniform to go out at night and the men remember we’re women. Which is amusing, but not much help.

  Living on a farm is the same as living anywhere else, Bill writes naively, except for more fresh air and freedom. There’s nothing to learn. The only thing that matters is that we’ll be together; I love you and you’ll be my wife. One night, my dear, is not enough; I want to spend every night of a million nights with you. I want you to have my children and I want our children to grow up in peace and never have to understand what we’ve been through. The Germans must realise soon that they’ve lost the war and when they do, everything else will be simple.

  Ruth agrees about the nights, but is less confident about the simple. She has never cooked a meal, cleaned a house or done any of the myriad jobs she suspects farmers’ wives around the world carry out daily: feeding hens, milking cows and most daunting of all, the whole sequence of food preparation: peeling, coring, preserving, boiling, stewing, baking, roasting, icing, whipping; pastry, bread, cakes, jam, jellies, conserves—solid food for hard-working men and hordes of hungry children.

  The coroner is politely sympathetic and human enough to be intrigued at a daughter arriving from Australia to take an English-born mother’s ashes back to Canada.

  ‘She had an interesting life,’ Jane says wryly, and hears herself prattling her mother’s birth history: the date can’t be confirmed, the place is a guess, the maiden name assumed.

  Shortly before Jane left Canada on the holiday that became emigration, Ruth had discovered that she was not, as she’d always presumed, a citizen. She’d been as furious as if threatened with deportation. It was nothing to do with keeping her previous identity—Jane’s reason for having stuck so obstinately to her first nationality—Ruth had long believed herself to be Canadian. The rage had been at the insult of proving it and the difficulty of doing so, although it’s only now that Jane, as she recounts her mother’s humiliatingly scant details to officialdom, understands what she had not even attempted to empathise with at the time.