The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  Today, however, I can’t stop wondering about my own mother, the woman who bore me. Did she feel like this when she looked at the infant that was me? How did this cord break, or did it break her heart to give me away? One would prefer to believe that she had died first, because it is simply unbearable to imagine the grief that she would have experienced if she had felt only one tenth—one one-hundredth!—of what I feel for Jane. Or am I descended from some unnatural strain of parent? The very thought of ever having to leave this dearest being in the care of anyone else fills me with despair. Perhaps Papa was correct; perhaps one couldn’t bear to know what extremes in life would lead a mother to abandon her child.

  Ironically, at the other end of those extremes of poverty (or brutality or madness—but I can’t think of those), I’m also unable to imagine surrendering her to a nanny. It may be just as well that I married a colonial with such strong ideas on the subject; if one had married Miles would one have gone on accepting without question that a nanny should rule in the nursery, with parental visits limited to courtesy? (I picture Nanny coming in to me now and lifting Jane away. ‘That’s quite enough of all this blither,’ she’d say at what I’ve just told you. ‘Never did anyone any good to sit around thinking about themselves!’ Would one submit? I’d like to think not, but it’s never easy to break the habit of a lifetime.)

  I’m picturing, of course, life returning to normal in Britain now that the war is over, but I wonder if that’s true. Will all those women who’ve worked as men for six years be willing to hand over even the care of their own children now we’re at peace? Did you not have the tiniest bit of regret, not for peace, but for the work and the life you were making for yourself?

  This is a very strange letter, Mary, but I don’t know what else to do with this tumbling of emotions. Dear as she is, I have not been able to bring myself to tell my mother-in-law my pathetic little history, and although she thinks this baby quite wonderful and is rather proud of her own role in bringing her into the world, I could not describe my feelings as I just have to you, with the benefit of paper and distance.

  I do so long for Bill to come home! I’m grateful that he was not around for the indignities of labour, but he’s missed three days of his daughter’s life already, and more than enough of his wife’s. I am so proud of having produced her; I’d like him to share that, and in the hours when I fear that I will never learn to be an adequate mother for her, I long for him still more, because in even the blackest mood I can only picture Bill as a loving father.

  It is clear, too, where he came by that solidity and strength. His father is quiet, shyer even than Bill, but with a sense of humour that catches one unaware. I had not expected him to have a French accent! Bill never mentioned it—perhaps he doesn’t hear it. It took me by surprise, but adds a certain charm to his speech, as that touch of French always does, even when, as in this case, the accent is markedly different from that of France. He claims that the French of the Acadians is the pure language, uncorrupted by time since its arrival in the seventeenth century. (Are there any parts of the world, I wonder, where people speak the English of Milton?) However, that is the only thing he’s told me of his background and he has apparently nothing to do with any of his relatives now that his father, the grandfather Bill adored, has died. What a waste, to have all those lines of family and no communication! I want my children to have all the family they can, all the ancestors and their stories, and cousins to play with, so they grow up secure in knowing who they are.

  The only member of the family I am not completely sure about is Bill’s sister Louise. One feels rather sorry for her, although she would prickle even more if she knew. She has spent six years working on the farm—I was going to say working like a man, but in deference to you I’ll not—and now that Bill is coming home it will be handed over to him. George and Myrtle have, most graciously—and wisely, I think, for much as I like them, the thought of living constantly under their supervision is quite terrifying—decided to retire to the town. Perhaps after the years of living with first Myrtle’s parents and then George’s father, they would also like to have a house unencumbered by in-laws. George has bought a feed shop (oats and animal feed, not human) and will take over its management when Bill returns, when they will also move into the house in Applevale that they are now in the process of buying. One assumes that we are to pay an equivalent amount for the farm, but it’s obviously not an issue they feel comfortable discussing with me. It seems to be presumed that Louise will go with them; I’m not sure what say she’s had in this but am certainly not about to ask!

  One suspects, though, that it’s not the farm itself she would like, but a little gratitude. It seems that the family’s grief for Bill’s brother and anxiety for Bill have overshadowed life until now, when we have not only the anticipation of his return, but a grandchild to celebrate. I’ve often wondered how the hard-working brother of the prodigal son felt on being asked to kill the fatted calf—I suspect Louise would be able to tell me.

  Interestingly enough, her mother had a similar story: working the farm with her parents while her brothers were away at war. The difference was that although she lost two brothers, she gained a husband. I imagine Louise finds me a poor exchange.

  In case the length of this letter has you picturing me lying here in complete leisure, I must hasten to add that it has been written over two days and interrupted by many sessions of baby-feeding, resultant napkin changes, and a bit of adoration on bended knee from various family members.

  We shall have photographs taken very soon, but for now you will have to be satisfied with this word-portrait of my new home and your new—I’m not sure exactly sure, and perhaps given Mama’s revelations the exact relationship is quite irrelevant, so shall we just settle for niece?

  The funny thing is that Ruth, with her straight hips and restless temperament, has babies as easily and calmly, well, not as a cow in a field, but as easily and calmly as any western woman is likely to: Jane at twenty seven, Michael following twenty months later, and Richard a neat two years after that. A five-hour labour, four then three; the babies all cooperating by greeting the world the right way around, face down and healthy.

  It’s her placid daughter, grown to generous-hipped woman, who can’t get it right. Megan, a child who a few years later will announce that she prefers reading standing on her head because the words look more interesting that way, starts as she means to continue by trying to slide out of the womb feet first. It doesn’t work. To be fair to Megan, it appears that Jane’s childbearing hips are a sham, as narrow on the inside as they are wide on the outer, and no large-headed child will fit through the gap. In the end, after a twelve-hour trial of labour, sentence is passed and Megan is born like Caesar—so Ruth points out, though Jane does not find this particularly comforting.

  Although she’d have been glad, overjoyed, eternally grateful, to have had the next pregnancies by caesarean, if they’d only stayed around long enough for the privilege. The third miscarriage is too much: there’s a limit to how much hope and heartbreak you can put yourself through, how much anticipation and despair, when everyone you know is having babies, popping them out effortlessly, big-bellied women everywhere in the streets, at playgroup, at the kindergarten and school, flaunting their fortunate fecundity, and haven’t you thought of having another one, Megan’s a good age now—she’s two—she’s three—she’s five—you don’t want to leave it too long. There’s a limit to how many times you can fail before the only sensible thing to do is quit. A few months after Jane came out of hospital from the last sad tidy and scrape, she returned for a tubal ligation and, at thirty-one, the end of this particular hope.

  This period, with its constantly hovering black cloud of depression, she sees as framed by her first trip back to Canada and her mother’s later visit after the surgical confirmation of failure—there is never any doubt in Jane’s mind that she has failed an essential test of womanhood. Ruth hadn’t seen it that way and neither had Ian. They
were both genuinely bewildered at why she should feel such despair when the one child she had produced was so demonstrably perfect, and Jane was unable to explain it to them. Because her mother had three babies, forming the standard Jane expected; because she feared that the traces of selfishness she saw in Ian stemmed from never having to share with siblings; because she simply ached for another baby, for the cocoon of contentment that enfolds newborn and mother, the suction of a small grasping mouth on her nipple, the prickle of letting-down milk and miraculous knowledge that she could supply all its needs. She would have liked to feel that satisfaction, that success again.

  The Christmas that Megan was eighteen months, gleefully waddling through the rustle of wrapping paper, Ruth and Bill’s present to Jane had been a small white envelope with a postal order and handwritten voucher: This entitles the bearer to a return air ticket from Melbourne to Halifax. If Ian wanted to come, a note added, this could be thought of as a half ticket for each of them; Megan, who would travel virtually free until her second birthday, would be easily covered by the amount. Jane saw a flash of disappointment cross Ian’s face but was not sure whether it was because he’d have liked a ticket too, or he wished he could have afforded to give her such a gift himself or because the envelope had engendered hopes of a smaller but stringless cheque. Milk prices were low that season and the outlook worse. (Preparing to leave the following May, Jane was surprised by sharpness from acquaintances: ‘Some people are managing alright!’ and found herself constantly prefacing her trip with the defensive: ‘My parents sent me the ticket,’ as if this good fortune was somehow shameful.)

  It was nearly six years since she’d left home and the strength of her emotions shouldn’t have but did take her by surprise: a snug contentment at the sound of Canadian voices on the flight from Los Angeles, a sense of homecoming in simply standing in the line at Halifax airport with the other Canadian passport-bearers, no longer migrant or alien. Despite photographs demonstrating that there’d been little change in Ruth or Bill, she felt a small undercurrent of fear that she wouldn’t at first recognise them, that they would have aged—as they had, in the barely perceptible way of healthy people moving from their early to late fifties. She spotted them a fraction of an instant before they could see her, the anticipation on their faces mirroring hers, and was so overwhelmed by love and relief that all she could do was scoop Megan up to see: ‘There’s Nana, Megan, and Grandad!’ Her daughter, who had been practising these names against the photos for weeks, stared at the strangers and hid her face.

  ‘People kept saying,’ Ruth said that evening, when Megan had finally collapsed from the excitement and been put to bed, ‘“Won’t you be pleased to see your grand-daughter!” and I said, “Yes, but I’m more excited about seeing my daughter,” ’ and Jane was inordinately gratified by this because the same thing had been said to her. ‘Your parents will be looking forward to seeing Megan!’ and she’d been unable to quell the thought, But I’m the one they know!

  They’d discussed then the foibles of grandchild-doting neighbours who appeared to believe that the infants had sprung from some other line than their disappointing son and loathed daughter-in-law, direct perhaps from their own forehead like Athene from Zeus.

  ‘That’s some little girl you’ve got there,’ said Bill, coming in from the kitchen with cups of tea and unable to understand their laughter when he added, ‘and doesn’t she look like her grandmother!’

  It was true, though; she looked more like Ruth than she did Jane, and Jane was surprised when Ruth denied it, saying that from the pictures she’d seen there was a lot of Ian and a fair bit of Jane too.

  May and June are apple blossom time, when the Dubois farm and the Valley generally are sprayed with pinky-white blooms; a season of festivals and Apple Blossom Queens—Patsy the year they were in grade 12, though it was hard to believe it now, her generous curves flabby and her conversation soured with complaints about Randy, his mother and the children. She was curious about what sort of house Jane had and what sort of income Ian made but the old intimacy was gone, as if the girls who’d lain side by side on sleepover nights, whispering delicious wicked secrets, were entirely differently people from the young matrons they found themselves now.

  But Patsy was the only homecoming disappointment. Ruth’s horse Lochinvar was still spry at twenty, and Jane took him over all the back roads, up to her favourite mountain lookout and through the fields and forests she’d covered on bony Bold Brennan.

  ‘I feel like a kid again,’ she told her father, jumping down with her hair tangled and eyes shining.

  ‘Look like one too,’ said Bill. ‘Why don’t you get yourself a horse in Australia? Surely you’ve got enough land to support one spare pony.’

  It wasn’t a year for luxuries, Jane explained, and who would mind Megan while she rode? Easier to simply enjoy it while she was here.

  The Valley was smaller than she’d remembered and the farms poorer. The countryside, the beaches and ocean, wharves at sunset with the delicate tracery of masts and spars etched black against the pink, all overwhelmed her with remembered belonging. Megan, who knew hills only as something where Jack and Jill tumbled and broke crowns, was frightened by them until her grandfather showed her how to run up a small slope and roll safely down. Introduced to dulse, purple-brown and richly salty, Megan delighted her grandmother who could not abide it, and her mother who had craved it since leaving, by asking for more. There were afternoons with George and Myrtle, not yet frail but definitely old and moved almost to tears by the sight of their great-grand-daughter; visits to other kin from St Mary’s Bay to Cape Breton, two days with chain-smoking Aunt Louise, the younger cousins now surprisingly adults, one of them engaged to a girl whose family still spoke Gaelic and busy learning it himself, Louise unsure whether to admire her son’s industry or mock a language she couldn’t share.

  By the end of the three weeks, despite the pure, contented warmth of talking to her father, discussing books with her mother, playing Scrabble in the evening when the news had been watched and the TV turned off, of seeing her daughter explore the house that formed her prototype for the word, she was ready to return. She’d missed Ian from the beginning, in the sense of wishing he could share her pleasure, wanting him to see Megan being read to by her grandmother or riding bedecked in apple blossom through the orchard on her grandfather’s shoulders, and always feeling the bed incomplete at night without him beside her. Letters took too long—although she wrote and he answered, it was hardly worthwhile and they’d never had a reason to write before, so there was no habit or history to continue. The longing intensified. The days were incomplete without being shared and at night she missed him so much, so blatantly and in such shameless dreams that she didn’t know whether he’d be more flattered or shocked if she told him. It wasn’t surprising that she became pregnant in June, the first week she was home.

  She felt surprisingly well, in contrast to the nausea she’d experienced with Megan, which made it all the more devastating when her body gushed sad bright blood in August. Spontaneous abortion, the doctor called it, an ugly word which did not improve the verdict. ‘But don’t worry,’ he said, ‘one miscarriage is common; you’ve proved you can carry a healthy baby to term, this one just wasn’t meant to be’—and Jane tried to believe him.

  That was the year prices slipped so low that calves could not be sold. Stopping on the way to the sale yards, Ian came out to find five extra calves loaded onto his trailer. It would have been funny if he hadn’t ended up with a loss after paying the yard fees. Dairy wives who depended on their calf-rearing money for spending throughout the year were distraught; Jane, reminded of life’s priorities, risked social isolation by trying to avoid the doomsday conversations. In January she was pregnant again, telling herself that the unremitting morning sickness was a good sign, although within the first trimester that had proved a lie.

  By now the state of the industry was desperate. The price of milk continued to plunge as butter f
actories closed, while between drought and plummeting beef values, cow prices had dropped so low that there was nothing to do with barren beasts but collect the government’s two dollars and shoot them into pits. Only in debt and interest bills did farming show rampant, luxurious growth. Financial reward from work seemed to be something reserved for other people, city people on a wage. Ian, feeling cheated by life as well as government, turned his anger to something that could be fought, joining angry rallies in Yarralong and a march, 6000 angry dairy farmers strong, through the streets of Melbourne. Hard times hadn’t mattered when it was just the two of them—they could make do, look to the future—but Megan was their future and they didn’t want her to grow up deprived of what other children would take for granted—siblings and material goods, lessons for ballet and tennis, Brownies and Guides.

  The doctor ordered Jane’s body a rest and it was nine months before she became pregnant again, a year almost exactly when she miscarried for the last time. The letter from her mother arrived the day of the tubal ligation, Ian presenting it as a consolation prize when he visited that evening. Photographs are all very well, but it’s time I saw your new home for myself. Your father and I have decided I should fly out in July, in time for Megan’s fifth birthday.

  In a Through the Looking Glass version of Jane’s homecoming trip, Ruth was introduced to her daughter’s new life: Ian’s parents—she and Dulcie had nothing in common except Megan, but that sufficed—the peaceful winter river where she heard kookaburras and saw kangaroos, and the farm itself, admiring Jane’s oasis and Ian’s dairy, taking rolls of photographs for Bill. The resemblance between her and her grand-daughter was stronger now, and although she continued to deny this, her delight in the child was palpable.