The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  There are some things, like death and the internet, that one can believe in but not comprehend. In church the next morning Jane finds it impossible to imagine that the coffin before the altar contains her mother, at present nearly as lifelike as a Madame Tussaud’s model and soon to be reduced to a transportable residue in an imeldific shoe-box sized casket. (A new synonym for ostentatious, Ruth had informed her in one email; it was the kind of obscure, esoteric information she’d loved to collect, God only knew from where.)

  Is this a sign of grief, Jane wonders, this butterfly flitting of thought? Or a new stage of menopause?

  ‘A courageous woman,’ the minister is saying, ‘not only in the demanding times of war, but in the demanding times of life, following her new husband to an unknown country in the days when travel was not the simple thing it is now, when international telephone calls were virtually unknown.’ He adds that although her death has caused logistical difficulties for her daughter, there was comfort in knowing that she’d died in the land of her birth, with someone who loved her. Jane wonders if he has understood her fears of her mother’s body lying undiscovered in the lonely farmhouse and the service loses its incongruity and becomes suddenly intimate.

  They don’t attempt the hymns, two thin voices in the echoing church, but listen as the organist begins ‘Amazing Grace’, which Jane thinks now was probably not one of Ruth’s favourites, though it is her own. The coffin leaves on its journey to Slough—Jane wishes irrelevantly that the town had a prettier name—and the crematorium, where that body which is still somehow her mother will be reduced to cinders.

  Cinderella, Jane thinks, and almost smiles. Ruth would have enjoyed the pun. For just a moment a glimmer of the end of pain shines through the unescapable realities as she sees the way that her mother will live on, separate from sad ashes and memorial stones.

  Ruth is feeding Jane in the window seat of her bedroom when Bill arrives home.

  The snow plough had finally reached the road to the farm the day before, Valentine’s Day, but snow had fallen again in the night and the road is once again impassable, so Bill has taken the train to Applevale, where his father met him in the sleigh. The road in fact has been cleared between the town and Evelyn’s Pond, but George couldn’t imagine waiting at the corner for some other relative to deliver his son home from the war.

  ‘He’s that impatient, I’m surprised he didn’t drive the sleigh right to Halifax,’ Myrtle had teased, as if she hadn’t lain awake with excitement herself, as if she hadn’t spent the last two days baking, cleaning and unable to sit still. Only constant movement can contain the welling of both love and grief, can assure that gratitude for one son’s deliverance outweighs bitterness for the other.

  Ruth has her own mixed feelings. Perspective from the upstairs window alters the driveway scene to a tableau: Son Welcomed Home from the War; sister hovering, stroking a shoulder in spite of herself; father, replete with the luxury of the last hour’s uninterrupted contact, beaming at the sight of a mother in her son’s arms. Addition of a third woman would be superfluous. The man is tall and fair, handsome in his air force greatcoat, but the incongruous home-knitted tuque pulled over his ears is a reminder that this will be the last time he’ll wear a uniform—she has only ever seen him in uniform or nude, never civvies. It could have been a worrying reminder of how little she knows him, except that she finds it impossible to worry while her milk is flowing as it is now, her daughter’s mouth tugging securely on her nipple. Feeding is the only time of her life that Ruth ever feels truly placid, and she can never decide whether or not she enjoys the sensation.

  Bill looks up to the window and the scene is a tableau no longer. He sees her framed through the cloudy glass, dark hair and a whiteness of breast obscured by pink-blanketed bundle, and he bolts from his mother’s arms to the door. And although Ruth had wanted, planned to meet him in the privacy of their own room, she jumps up now, disturbing Jane mid-suck, tucking leaking breast back into blouse, dropping the astonished baby back into her cradle, picking her up again at the roar of protest and running to the stairs as Bill reaches the top. He has kicked off his snowboots and pulled off the tuque on his way up the stairs but his overcoat is dripping. He holds the two of them wonderingly, longingly, and as Ruth’s blouse dampens with mingled milk and snow she understands that the strangeness of the environment is an illusion: this man’s familiarity is the only thing that matters.

  ‘Meet your daughter,’ she says, and though she’s rehearsed this moment for twelve days, the reality is both less dramatic and more moving. She has also forgotten, with the intensity of motherhood training, just how frightening it was to hold the baby for the first time: Bill procrastinates, throwing his coat over the back of a chair, sitting on the side of the bed in preparation.

  ‘She’s so tiny—is everything really all right?’

  ‘She’s perfect,’ says Ruth, and as she lays the baby in his arms she watches his face change as he accepts the truth of this statement. Jane passively submits to his scrutiny for nearly a minute before her face puckers into a grimace that crescendoes alarmingly to a wail. Bill looks panicky and Ruth hides the reflexive twist of pain behind the smugness of experience.

  ‘Just hungry,’ she says, and although she wonders what the emotional tumult will do to her milk, she takes the baby and sits on the bed as well, legs outstretched and leaning against the headboard to unbutton her blouse. She is flushing slightly as she inserts the brown nipple into the baby’s mouth; the wail ends with a gulp and Ruth strokes the back of the fuzzy blonde head, watching till the sucking settles into its usual soothing rhythm before meeting Bill’s eyes. She wonders if she will repulse him in this bovinely milky state.

  ‘I’d forgotten how beautiful you are,’ says Bill. ‘Like a Christmas painting.’

  But he is not thinking of madonnas as she lays the replete and dozing baby back in the cradle, her blouse still open and the blue-veined breasts, swollen like a fertility goddess’s, falling free. ‘Lie down with me,’ he begs, opening his arms, and she tumbles on top of him with the kiss that had been impossible with the baby between them.

  ‘But the doctor . . .’ she murmurs, because much as she longs for him she is raw and sore and and shrinks from the thought of more pain.

  ‘Dad said. Six weeks he said, a month from now.’

  ‘Surely less,’ says Ruth and when Bill says, ‘Just let me look at you,’ she acquiesces, trusting as he undoes the rest of her blouse, her skirt and stockings, till she is naked and he can trace her outlines with eye and finger and tongue, tasting the warm breasts with the sweetness of his daughter’s milk, the rounded red-traced belly, long legs and the dark miracle between, still spilling salt traces of blood.

  ‘Is this a good idea?’ asks Ruth.

  ‘Probably not,’ Bill admits, ‘but I need to.’ Need to know you’re still there, need to understand what’s happened to you, what the changes are and how we go from here. And torturing myself like this is infinitely better than imagining the same thing in a bed on my own, especially the last week of a troopship full of men thinking of nothing but what it will be like to be home again, practising being civilised during the day with table manners and fines for swearing, and you know they’re all obsessed at night with how it’ll be being back with their wives, their girlfriends or whatever fantasy of a hooker they dream of. And all the family’s waiting downstairs with tea and cookies but I need to lie here a moment longer between my wife’s thighs and know that I’m home.

  He doesn’t say that, but Ruth strokes his head and wishes that birth wasn’t quite such a brutal process, and guesses as much as any human being ever can what another one is thinking.

  It’s a strange sort of honeymoon–courtship they enter on from here, as far removed from the actual day following their wedding as if in another life. It had been obvious the war would be ending soon when they’d organised leave and set the date of 8 May; a quiet ceremony with friends on both sides, a few relatives on hers but no
parents for either—and yet in the end it had been celebrated with delirium throughout the country, bell-ringing, bonfires and dancing in the street, so that Jane was not the only baby conceived that night of relief and joy. And then the tidying-up had begun: Bill transporting wounded, prisoners-of-war, even concentration-camp victims early on, which had left him waking in cold sweats from nightmares; Ruth still relaying planes to bases, the service winding down now but Ruth determined to fly as long she could keep her pregnancy discreet, and had done so until her final day in September, marching in the ATA closing parade as Japan surrendered, the war truly over at last. She had moved into digs near his base then, those last three months before her ship, so that nights together had been easier to arrange, but it was not a married life.

  Now, as Bill begins to pick up the work he’d left off five years earlier, and Myrtle tries to distil a lifetime of housekeeping lore into a few brief lessons before moving to Applevale, Ruth continues the more instinctive and important lessons of learning her daughter and her husband. She presumes that she’ll be able to grasp what’s needed in house and farm and by early March is becoming impatient to try, but this fortnight there’s an adolescent sense of holiday, of not yet bearing the final responsibility for anything except these two tasks. At night, with Jane in the cradle beside the bed, they fill in the gaps of life stories, of the times they’ve spent apart and unshared thoughts, so that Louise, who can hear the mumble of their voices through the wall, complains one breakfast time that they must have said everything there was to be said by now and hadn’t they thought of sleeping? Which makes them blush because speech is not the only use for tongues and they have been continuing the leisurely and erotic exploration of each other’s bodies long after their other conversation has stopped.

  On an afternoon free from work and sad chambermaids, Jane took a bus to the City and began to explore: impressions of dark pubs and Dickens, banking and business; associations of Mary Poppins’s ubiquitous employer and Jane’s own English grandfather tall and serious in bowler hat and umbrella (adding a mental note to ask Mary if she knew exactly where his office had been). She worked her way back to St Paul’s and on to Fleet Street; Fleet Street meant journalists and journalists meant Winston. She waited for the usual stab of misery to accompany his name, but there was nothing but a memory of the habit of pain, like a paler circle of skin where a long-picked scab has finally healed. She wanted to dance a celebration jig on the sidewalk: ‘I’m free of you, Winston,’ she told him, winging her thoughts towards the west and wishing he could hear, ‘and no man is ever going to make me doubt myself again!’

  She felt more than buoyant—she was invincible, stronger than she’d ever been. In three weeks of exploration, she’d bused or Tubed and walked her way around London, climbing so many stairs in search of views that a whole new group of muscles had appeared across her abdomen, and laying down a mental map until she could picture herself at any particular point on its grid. From Piccadilly she could work her way across the yellow and green Monopoly Board names: Oxford Street and Bond, Regent Street and Leicester Square. In Chelsea she’d found Savernake Street, the new houses in the middle where numbers 40 and 42 had stood, and window-shopped the length of the King’s Road down to World’s End, where the trendy boutiques ran out and two Australians in an antique shop invited her in to play with the lion cub lolling in the window. Somehow it had seemed no more surreal than the rest of the day.

  She strode on now till Fleet Street became the Strand and the way back to familiar Trafalgar Square and the joy of the National Gallery, the luxury of being able to step inside and study one painting or ten and know that she could come back another day, and the comforts of Canada House with its newspapers and familiar accents to assuage incipient homesickness. Passing Australia House on the way, the grim grey building at odds with her image of open spaces and dry red dust, she watched a man (young, tall, interesting rather than handsome) going up the steps and amused herself by imagining that he could also be searching for news from home, in the Darwin Herald or whatever the paper might be, surrounded by the familiarity of that strident accent.

  ‘So you knew!’ Megan would interrupt. ‘It was fate!’

  ‘It might have been fate,’ Jane would answer, ‘but I didn’t know.’ Although it’s strange how clearly she could picture him decades later, shaggy brown hair to just above his shoulders, long sideburns, purple T-shirt, flared jeans and shiny leather cowboy boots—‘Riding boots!’ Ian would say indignantly.

  A cavalcade of Volkswagen buses was parked along the next block, for sale signs in their windows and homesick owners, travelling done and restless now to be back in the sun, lounging in the open doors or squatting on the kerb. One man with long blond hair and a purple peace T-shirt leaned forward to catch her eye: ‘Never missed a beat, all the way to Morocco and back,’ he confided. ‘Buy it and you can have me free!’

  ‘Sounds like a bargain!’ she called without slowing, and wondered what made her so obviously a tourist, a colonial-type tourist at that, someone who might on a whim buy a van and head off into the wilderness. No one else—the miniskirted dolly-bird secretaries, the pale-faced delivery boys, the grave suits—had been approached and they mightn’t have been tempted if they had, but Jane imagined herself at the wheel, driving down French country lanes, exploring the Continent by car as thoroughly as she was doing London by foot. Her steps slowed; she detoured down a side street to play with the idea a moment longer. It was a dark and rather unappealing street, which seemed to have become a headquarters for shabby travel agents.

  Magical Mystery Tour, screamed one poster. London to Turkey return! See it all—travel by bus! Campgrounds selected by our experienced guides! SEE US NOW!

  So she did. Jane Dubois, equivocator extraordinaire over life’s most minor dilemmas, walked into the shop, picked up the brochure—which said little more than the screaming poster except to list the countries en route with the added enticement: Flexible itinerary: you come, you vote—signed up for the tour and changed her life.

  At six a.m. on 15 July, in front of the same little shop where she’d bought her ticket, the other travellers assembled around her, trepidation began to outweigh anticipation.

  A few years later there would be a variety of companies running slickly organised camping tours with trained couriers, well-planned routes and age limits in the hope of some sort of compatibility. The Magical Mystery Tour, all flower power, free-thinking, idealistic muddle, would have scoffed at their uptight timetables and routine vehicle maintenance. Part of the experience of travelling, or so their theory went, was the freedom of changing a route when a better idea came up or, more frequently, when a search for a mechanic gave a meaningful insight into the daily life of wherever the bus had happened to break down.

  The majority of Jane’s fellow travellers were her age or slightly older; she amused herself by guessing nationalities—South African for two girls who reminded her of the physios; three American boys, another lone girl who might be Canadian and two who looked Welsh. She was uniformly wrong. Slightly younger were a group of four English boys, rowdy, crude and at first indistinguishable from each other—‘the hooligans’ Jane named them, and for the rest of her life their image would spring to mind at the word ‘soccer’. The more surprising members were an elderly, rather frail looking Yorkshire couple who turned out to be trainspotters; a New Zealander retired colonel and his strident wife; a Canadian ex-air force pilot with a magnificent waxed handlebar moustache, whom Jane kept well away from in some vague fear that he might want to be her buddy; and an American woman of indeterminate age and indeterminable weight, so vast that the rest of the bus would have to be balanced against her bulk.

  It was ridiculous not to have realised there’d be so many people, but if Jane hadn’t burned quite so many bridges and spent quite so much money, she might have slipped away from the group and walked on down the street and back to adventure on her own.

  ‘Feels like we’re off to school
camp!’

  It was the young man she’d seen going up the steps to Australia House. She changed her mind about running away, muttered something inane and, in an effort to sound more sensible, asked what they were waiting for.

  ‘The teacher, I reckon!’

  ‘That would be me then.’

  Dear Mom and Dad

  As promised, here’s the first instalment of travelogue through Europe.

  A slightly inauspicious beginning, as unfortunately our driver couldn’t work out why the bus wouldn’t start (there are two fifty-seater buses travelling together, with twenty-five people on each—the theory being that we can all fit if one bus dies en route?) Luckily Ian, an Australian guy who grew up on a farm, figured out that the problem was simply dirty battery terminals and once he’d cleaned them up, we were off, only about an hour behind schedule, and it was such a beautiful morning it was hard to mind about anything—one of those days when you just have to feel happy.

  Ian’s an electrician, he’s always wanted to farm but his parents’ place isn’t big enough to support two incomes, so he’s trying to decide whether he’s going to start up his own electrician’s business now or go out sharefarming. Apparently instead of buying his own farm right away he could build up a herd of cows while he farmed someone else’s land, and then they’d share the income. What’s interesting is that his part of Australia is not only known as the Goulburn Valley, but sounds so similar to our Valley, all dairy farms and orchards. I can’t quite picture it, because I thought Australia was very hot and dry. He says yes, it is hot, often over 100°F—can you imagine?—and would be dry if it weren’t for the irrigation, which comes via channels or canals from the Murray River. It sounds beautiful: wild parrots, koalas and of course kangaroos! Though he says the latter are only down by the river, where there are still lots of trees, as the farms have been heavily cleared.