The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  The crossing from Dover to Calais . . .

  ‘Travelogue, eh?’ Bill commented as Ruth read aloud. Always, over the years, Jane’s letters would be shared, and sometimes interrupted, this way. ‘I’m glad she noticed the Channel at any rate.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s a wartime bus, with blacked-out windows.’

  ‘That would explain it.’

  Ruth picked up the letter again. to read descriptions of campgrounds, Jane’s Swiss tent-mate, and a comparison of the excitement of Paris with the tranquillity of the Burgundian countryside:

  Ian says he’s beginning to feel quite sure he wasn’t meant to be a city person! I have to say I agree.

  ‘Does this fellow say anything she doesn’t agree with?’ Bill asked.

  ‘I doubt it,’ Ruth said glumly.

  The Magical Mystery Tour continued on its way; majestic mountains and limpid lakes; covered bridges with painted ceilings. From Switzerland into Italy—‘Oh, woman-country, wooed not wed, Loved all the more by earth’s male lands Laid to their hearts instead!’ quoted Ruth, which Bill suspected might be more apt than they wanted to know—life became a blur of early starts and long bus days, the scenery outside the window a backdrop to the story being lived within.

  Jane’s map of Europe would always be dotted with these milestones—the first touch, the first confidences; Venice the first quarrel. They were pooling their food money by then, comfortably enough when it was groceries, less so for restaurant meals, but in the city of romance, where they watched a beflowered gondola bear a white-veiled bride and her groom serenely down the Grand Canal, Ian was so furious at paying double the listed price for a midmorning Mont Blanc, eaten standing to avoid the table surcharge (‘You used our spoons!’ the cafe owner cried in explanation) that they skipped lunch, and that evening, weary from the sightseeing of basilicas and glass blowing, canals and bridges, trudged from cafe to still smaller cafe searching out the best value.

  ‘How many times in our lives are we going to come to Venice?’ Jane demanded, though they were both too irritated to notice the significant pronoun. ‘Does it matter if we get cheated once?’

  It did to Ian. Jane was too proud to tell him that she felt ill with hunger and too shy to explain that menstruating could make her faint, until she proved it in the final cafe and had to be given water and helped onto a chair by kind black-clad women who couldn’t believe that a rich tourist would be too stubborn to eat. Escaping into the fresh air—Jane embarrassed, weak and teary as always after fainting, Ian a complex muddle of emotions, angry at himself and at Jane for not standing up to him—they turned a corner into a Communist Party street festival.

  ‘Sit here,’ Ian ordered, finding a vacant doorstep, and returned with thick slabs of baked polenta, stodgily nourishing, which Jane would try to duplicate for years in her own kitchen until discovering that the appeal had lain more in context than taste. The most romantic image of a Venice evening remained for Jane, not dark gondolas on star-spangled canals, but her Australian country man returning with Communist bounty and saying, ‘Don’t ever do that again.’ First reconciliation.

  Into Yugoslavia, hugging the coast of a country uncharted by calendar pictures or familiar books—‘read Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,’ Ruth had ordered, but the letter arrived after they’d left and all either of them had was a muddled association with partisans and dark history; the clean white sands of the Dalmatian beaches were a revelation as if to first explorers. In Dubrovnic they walked the ramparts, gazing down at sixteenth century roofs and ocean, and feeling the sense of history Jane had expected and somehow missed in Rome. Years later they would watch its destruction on the nightly news, raging helplessly and guiltily aware of how trivial their link compared to the loss of lives and ancient history.

  Historic sites mean different things to different people. For Ian, Gallipoli was a complicated mixture of dutiful nationalism—‘I’m an Australian,’ he’d said when they’d voted on the route, ‘how could I miss Gallipoli?’—and inherited resentment that this site had captured his country’s imagination so much more thoroughly than the slimy trenches of Fromelles. Sand and sea are more romantic than mud, though his own father would have been equally bereft if Grandfather Ralston had died on a celebrated beach.

  For Jane, Gallipoli was where she first realised she would marry Ian.

  Not that her body hadn’t been insisting on some kind of union. Not that she hadn’t felt tremulous every morning when he appeared from his tent, or wondered at her extraordinary luck in meeting someone amongst this oddly assorted crowd whom she could talk to day after day without boredom or irritation. Not that she hadn’t understood, incredible as it seemed, that he not only enjoyed her company, he desired her too, and that unless disasters in the form of death or curvaceous blondes intervened, the questions now were reduced to time and place. Duration she hadn’t allowed herself to consider.

  Walking hand in hand down from the windswept hill to the beach as Ian related the Anzac history, she had an image of his passing the same story on to children, embellished by this act of walking on the very grains of sand that had soaked up the young warriors’ blood. Our children, she thought—and banished the image quickly, flushing with the fear that he might be somehow able to read it.

  ‘You’d like my parents,’ she said, ‘they’re both into history, but Mom especially.’ And immediately regretted the implication that she thought history was something relegated to parents, but Ian seemed gratified, and in the tidying of memory for storage, those twin images of Ian with family past and future were crystallised into the decision that this was the man with whom she’d live out her life.

  Ian would say that for him there was no blinding light, simply the gradual realisation that he wouldn’t be ready to say goodbye when the Magical Mystery Tour came to an end, and that some sort of commitment would have to be made to prevent it. ‘It was the only logical thing to do,’ he said when Jane asked later, ‘if I didn’t want to live without you.’ Ian is never embarrassed by talking about love, but sees no reason to mystify it.

  Nevertheless, as the bus left Gallipoli the almost overwhelming urge to pull Jane down into the sheltering dunes and let the tour explore Istanbul without them had been sublimated, for the next few hours at least, into explaining the family he came from and his father’s obsession with stories of war.

  ‘He says the worst thing about being a POW was that you never knew what was going on in the rest of the world. He felt like a fool at the end of the war when he hadn’t heard of D-day or the Kokoda Trail, and he was going to make up for it; same with the first war—never got to meet his father, so he at least wanted to learn something about what he went through.

  ‘That’s why I voted for Troy, too, to get some photos for Dad. He didn’t get very far in school and he doesn’t read much, but what he doesn’t know about the Iliad and the Odyssey wouldn’t be worth knowing.’ He hurried on in case Jane happened to know more than the names, which was as much as Ian had absorbed himself. ‘They wouldn’t have had a book in the house when he was a kid; from what he says they did it tough even after his mum married again.’

  The bus swayed; his arm tightened around her shoulders and Jane leaned into him. We’re comfortable together, she thought, and although she was in that stage of infatuation where diagrams of electrical circuitry would have been fascinating if they were what Ian had wanted to tell her, for a moment comfortable seemed more important even than the history Fred had carried into his son’s life.

  Fred, younger than Ian was now, torn between duty to country and wife, the appearance of valour versus grimmer reality, was determined not to leave a child fatherless as he had been left; if his wife was to be a widow, he’d told adult Ian, she should have a chance to live again. Dulcie—Ian was unsure of his mother’s age now or then, but certainly no older than Jane—may have been equally determined that if her husband was killed she’d have something to remember him by. She never told her side of the story, at
least not to her son, but what is certain is that Ian was conceived on Fred’s last leave. Or it could have been simple unbridled passion, but parents and passion are never easy concepts to put in conjunction.

  Ian and Jane’s own lives were dwarfed momentarily by the magnitude of these decisions, the dramas of an era normally too close to their own for interest or empathy and quite outside their own experience. By the time conscription started for Vietnam, Ian and his friends had been too old to worry about the lottery no one wanted to win and too distant from the cities and universities to listen to rebellious peaceniks; Ian’s support of his government’s actions had been untroubled by personal consequence. Unimaginable, the dilemma of going off to face death, of leaving a girl—a wife—either with seed implanted or free to love another, luckier, man. (Ian’s mind said girl, but the face was Jane’s and the body too, and leaving was a startlingly clear image of her sated in a rumpled white bed—because of course it was themselves they were discussing, obliquely parrying the question of how their futures would be shaped, and whether those shapes would be entwined.)

  Ian dragged his mind back to his father, a safer image for a crowded bus than the texture of Jane’s inner thighs, firm and hidden today in yellow jeans—‘I’m not wearing a skirt again till we’re back in the west,’ she’d said yesterday after a particularly forceful grab to the crotch—but creamily bare in his mind’s eye, infinitely strokable; there was a pang of envy in his anger at the anonymous, rough-knuckled hand that had thrust between their softness. (Later in the tour, under cover of maps or jackets, he would slide stealthy fingers under a jean’s zipper or upwards through the leg of her shorts, stroking till Jane’s eyes glazed helplessly and she moaned softly against his shoulder, the thrill of this unexpected power worth his own discomfort.)

  ‘I don’t know how long Dad’s going to be able to go on dairying. It’s hard work, and he has trouble with his ankles and knees; back too, sometimes, from playing football during the war. Cold mornings he can hardly walk.’

  Ian was twenty-seven and the story was older than he was, a joke almost, his father coming through the war with nothing but sporting injuries to bother him. It was only now, hearing himself tell it for the first time, that he doubted. Of the myriad football accidents he’d witnessed, he could not think of any combination that would injure two ankles, knees and spine. ‘I was three and a half the first time I saw my dad. Went off to meet the ship, excited as anything—and then I chucked a wobbly because Mum was hugging this strange man. Poor bloke—what a welcome after all those years in Changi Prison and the Burma Railway—you know, the film The Bridge on the River Kwai. That’s the most he’s ever said about it all—reckoned the film was a load of bull, with the bloke working to help the Japs. But I don’t think he ever saw it.’

  ‘My dad couldn’t watch A Bridge Too Far, the one about the English losing a big battle in Holland,’ said Jane, ‘though the only war stories he ever told us were funny, like when he thought he’d had his toe shot off, but when he took his boot off the bullet rolled out and the toe was fine.’

  ‘Dad’s story was that he took his boot off and the toe rolled out!’

  Jane laughed in shock and felt ashamed.

  ‘He reckoned it was so cold when he was working in the Japanese mines that when he dropped a rock on his foot, the toe broke off, but he didn’t notice till he took off his boot that night . . . Poor bloke must have wondered what was going to drop off next.’

  In this first, overwhelming stage of love, they felt no compunction at carving family history into succulent shock-and-share morsels, or at viewing coincidences as omens, as if the universe had been unable to resist these small parallel connections en route to the inevitable entanglement of their lives.

  ‘Do you think he got those other injuries when he was there?’ Jane asked. ‘But why wouldn’t he say?’

  ‘Doesn’t want to upset us, I reckon.’

  ‘My mother,’ Jane offered, ‘never told us, until a few years ago, that she was adopted.’ (She didn’t add, ‘and even then she told my boyfriend first, to win an argument,’ because that still hurt.) ‘She acts as if she’s ashamed of it, which is stupid, because it wasn’t anything she did.’

  ‘My dad acts like he’s ashamed of being a POW,’ Ian said slowly, ‘and he didn’t have much more say in that than your mum did about being adopted. He said once that his war ended in 1942, as if he’d packed up and gone home for a spell. I didn’t know even know about Java and Changi and all that till I was thirteen. Then this car just pulled up in the driveway one day, a bloke he’d been through the war with; drove down from Queensland to see him, didn’t think to tell us he was coming—that’s one good thing about a dairy farm, you’re not going to be far away.’

  ‘Not for long,’ Jane agreed. Unlike her mother, she knew what it would mean to fall in love with a farmer.

  ‘Dad cried,’ Ian said, still wondering. ‘You know what kids are like at that age—my father and this other man hugging each other, tears in their eyes—I couldn’t stand it; I took off. All I can remember about the visit is sitting down for tea. Dad asked if rice would do. The bloke looked crook for a second: “Are you dinkum, mate?” Dad said, “Not bloody likely,”—and they both burst out laughing. It was one of those things that sticks in your mind because you haven’t got a clue what’s going on. Dad saying bloody at the table and talking about rice—we always had meat and three veg; it was like a religion with Mum. I never even tasted rice till I left home. I never thought it might be because of Dad being a POW.’

  He stopped, wondering if she thought he was an idiot.

  Jane lifted her face from his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of friendship, nothing more. We’re too old, she thought, to neck on a bus like a couple of teenagers; but when he reached for her lips—hungrily, a romance novel would have said, and Jane could not think of a better description when she replayed it in her mind—there didn’t seem any alternative.

  That night, after a bit of bargaining and a sniggering paying-up of bets between the hooligans, the tent placements were rearranged. Four years later, lying in her hospital bed the night after Megan’s birth, Jane would realise that this was the first night since Gallipoli she’d spent a night without Ian.

  At five and a half, Megan would stand at the end of the driveway, a dangerous intermission between the bull paddock and the channel, to wait for her school bus. Jane was gradually banished from holding-hand position to watching the slight, blue-checked figure from the house.

  Was it in year 1 or 2 that she released a piece of paper—something important, a permission slip for an outing perhaps—which flew over the barbed fence and into the small bare paddock. The lesser of two evils, Jane thought later, because Megan, though long schooled in the dangers of both channels and bulls, didn’t hesitate. Crawling under the fence, she snatched the precious paper from under the bull’s nose, and was promptly thrown by that same ringed nose a good three metres back over the fence to the road.

  The whole thing took less than a minute. Jane, sure that she’d barely looked away, noticed that there was something odd about the way Megan was standing as the bus pulled up, and thought no more about it until the principal phoned to say Megan had stepped off the bus saying, ‘I was flying!’ and then fainted with the pain of her broken arm.

  It became the school’s favourite ‘we breed them tough in the country’ story, but although Jane and Ian shared sleepless nights conjecturing about what might have happened had the paper gone into that fast swirling channel or the bull tossed her to his own side of the fence, and Jane never ever lost the guilt of negligence, it was flying that Megan remembered and would return to in dreams.

  Dreams to Megan were not easily forgotten night fantasies or fears; as a young child she described vivid, intense adventures as real to her as her daytime life. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t understand the difference between dream and reality, she simply saw them as equally significant.

  Jane
and Ian, lovers of maps and traceable tales, found this uncomfortable. When they lived through incidents, insignificant in themselves, that Megan had described in a dream weeks earlier, they would justify, doubt their memory of her wording, criticise their own perceptions as unduly influenced by their daughter’s words.

  ‘And Megan dreams so much,’ Jane pointed out, ‘that statistically some things she’s dreamed of must be bound to happen,’ though she was not sure how this statistic would work.

  For a brief spell in Megan’s early adolescence Jane even transcribed the recounted dreams into a notebook, as if that would prove the victory of coincidence over mystery. It was during this period that Megan had her cat dream, so it was there, recorded and dated in Jane’s notebook, and after that Jane and Ian accepted that the stories in their daughter’s life came from more amorphous sources than their own.

  There was no action, simply the image of a large orange cat with nails sticking out of his head, but Megan insisted that it wasn’t a nightmare; the cat was quite happy. When Jane opened the Weekly Times three months later she understood why, because there he was, in black and white rather than orange, a cartoon illustrating acupuncture for animals.

  To Jane’s credit, she showed Megan. Partly in a vain hope that Megan would sigh with full adolescent scorn, ‘No, Mum, that’s nothing like the cat I told you about!’. Still, she didn’t feel as shaken at Megan’s recognition as she would have once; after all, her daughter had been training her for thirteen years.

  ‘So that’s what I’ll be,’ Megan announced. ‘An acupuncturist!’

  It was only a word, vague and oriental, none of them had any real idea what it meant.