The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  This letter has gone on long enough, and there’ll be time for another quick one before I leave—in between a look at Blenheim Palace on Wednesday and an expedition to the two Globe Theatres (that is, the new and the remains of the original) on Friday. However, interesting as they will no doubt be, this trip has already fulfilled all that I could ask of it—and far more than I thought I had asked. If it ended tomorrow, it would be enough.

  On Trojan plains, where Hector slew Patroclus and was in turn vanquished and dishonoured by the grief-maddened Achilles, the second Magical Mystery Tour bus headbutted its leader.

  If it hadn’t been raining it would have been no more than a jolt: broken headlights on one and dented bumper on the other.

  What ifs, as every storyteller knows, are the makings of legend. Rain was the reason the second bus had skidded in the first place, bouncing sideways, sliding crabwise down the road, passengers tumbling off their seats, knocking teeth or foreheads along the way. The first bus, in which Jane and Ian dozed in the sated relaxation following predawn sex, spun in an awkward pirouette, slewed into the ditch and toppled gently into the mud.

  Ian grabbed for Jane as her head smashed hard against the window and she slid unconscious to the floor. Nothing in his life had ever been as desperate as the need to get her out of there to safety. He leapt onto the up-ended seat and began kicking out the window.

  Jane woke from a dream of a bull tossing their tent across a Venetian canal to a squeal of pain and torrent of abuse from her former tent-mate, who seemed to be accusing Ian of kicking her in the head, although the only word Jane could reliably decipher was ‘Merde!’

  ‘You got in the way,’ Ian grunted, and knocked the last of the jagged glass free of the frame.

  Jane was surprised to discover a window in the roof, though more intrigued by why Ian was so intent on smashing it.

  ‘If you go up first,’ said her father, which was another surprise, she was sure he wasn’t supposed to be here, ‘I’ll help from this end.’

  Ian pulled himself out of the window onto the bus’s side. ‘It’s alright,’ he called, ‘seems stable.’ The Canadian pilot—Bill had disappeared—pushed the Swiss girl out next, and then Jane. Dreamily fascinated by the shaking of her hands and knees, she sat on the side of the road as her companions scrambled out one by one and stared at the occupants of the other bus, streaming down the road to escape the operatic screams inside.

  Dear Mom and Dad

  Well, this is going to be a bit of a shock. No, I haven’t eloped or anything like that!, but I have just written to the school board and resigned. I’ve given it a lot of thought and it really is the best thing for me to do.

  The main reason is that we’re stuck in Turkey for maybe a few more weeks and I’m going to miss my flight home. Please don’t worry, but the buses had a minor accident. Nobody was seriously injured, I had a bit of a bump on the head and was a little vague yesterday but feel fine again today. In fact the most dramatic incident was a New Zealander on the other bus who was convinced that someone had stolen his cans of sardines in the confusion and insisted on searching everyone’s luggage before they got off the bus, and the fat girl had hysterics because she thought the suspicion must be aimed at her. Ian’s just glad she wasn’t on our bus because he was in charge of pulling people out the window, since the bus was lying on its right-hand side, which is the side with the door. It was all very heroic.

  However, the buses are both in terrible shape; ours doesn’t look as if it’ll ever go again but everyone thinks we should be able to get some parts from it to fix up the other one, though no one wants to say how long it’s going to take. We’ll all fit on one bus to get back to London when it’s done.

  There doesn’t seem any point in mentioning that several people, with jobs to go to or planes to catch, have hitchhiked back to Istanbul and the train station.

  The other reason is that there’s so much to see in Europe and who knows when I’ll get back again. It takes so long to save up the airfare that it makes more sense to stay longer. I know Mary would be happy for me to continue using her as a base—I don’t think she’s just being polite; she seems to quite enjoy a stray who can actually answer when spoken to! I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll try to get a teaching job or short-term work so I can travel every few weeks. Who knows, I’ve already made it to Asia, maybe I’ll decide to see the whole world while I’m at it!

  It evolved gradually from Italy’s ‘One day I’ll get back to Siena at the right time and see the Palio’, to sighing over the missed opportunities of Bavaria and the Romantic Road: ‘Next time we’ll hire a car and go at our own pace.’ Jane-and-Ian (‘Ian-and-them’ his mother Dulcie would say) was a permanent phrase; marriage had become a question of when not if. Equally obvious was that they would settle in Australia, although nothing was discussed until the last week of September, as they drove through the flat canalled Netherlands. ‘If you take out the villages and windmills, it looks a lot like home,’ said Ian, the latter word presumably the trigger for adding, ‘It’d be easiest if we got married in London, as soon as we get back. We don’t want any hassles with immigration.’

  It wasn’t the proposal that Barbara Cartland readers dream of, but the essence of it was that Ian loved her, and Jane told herself that was all the romance she desired. A small wedding, she thought, maybe in Mary’s village church; nothing fancy.

  A registry office, said Ian, was the only practical thing; no mucking around with flowers and lace or ministers and churches. His best mate’s wedding had been endless fuss over cummerbunds, hired dinner suits and the engraving of place-setting cards; he couldn’t see what relevance that all had to what should be a private statement between two people in love.

  Jane thought of Patsy’s wedding and agreed. Despite some severe misgivings about Randy by the time the great day arrived, Patsy had been far too in love with her dress and the gala reception to think of changing her mind. Clean and simple was more honest, and if Ian’s idea of simple was more spartan than hers, it must necessarily be more honest as well.

  They would return to London, check into a hotel, and from there make the arrangements—registry office first and then Australia House.

  They convinced themselves that their parents would enjoy the fait-accompli surprise, which neatly skirted the probability of listening to reasons why one should not get married within seven weeks of meeting. It also ruled out having Mary as a witness, which not only gave them the exquisite pleasure of picturing her face when Jane introduced Ian as, ‘my husband’, but ensured that Jane couldn’t be expected to spend the night away from him before the wedding.

  She was weak-kneed at the thought.

  Dulcie’s letter was waiting at Australia House.

  Dad’s not feeling the greatest. This calving season’s knocked him around a fair bit and you know Dad, the world would end if he didn’t check them all every night. At least they’re finished now and he’s got a breather till the water starts. You’ll be glad to hear we had a good lot of heifers, you’ve had eleven out of yours, but you lost old Popeye. Wasn’t she the one you reared when you were still in school, before you started your apprenticeship? She must have been nearly twelve, a good innings and she calved alright (a little bull) but then she cast herself on the channel bank and was dead when Dad found her the next morning. So you’ve got nineteen cows and heifers, ten yearlings and eleven heifer calves. We got your letter saying you’ve decided to go farming when you come home, so that will give you a start.

  If you could send a telegram to answer this letter it would be good because Dad’s thinking of buying Robinsons’, you remember the place on the east side of the outpaddock, the one with the dam in front of the house. The old man died and it’s too much for her. It’s not a very big house but Dad thinks it will do. The toilet is inside the house; I’m not sure I like the idea but it might be good in the winter when we get older. It’s good country, three hundred and twenty acres so it’ll give him just over five hun
dred with the outpaddock. He wants to run beef cattle on it, Herefords probably. It’s not so far from here so we’ll still be able to meet up with all our old cobbers and Dad says when I’ve driven across the bridge a few times it won’t worry me.

  So if you want to come home on the farm, you could share-farm and buy the cows or, if you want to buy it Dad could guarantee the loan for you. He says you can work it out when you get home but he needs to know if you want to do it so he can put an offer on Robinsons’ before it goes on the market.

  There were several things Jane wanted to query, but the more important were difficult to frame. ‘What’s an outpaddock?’ she asked, and understood little more of her prospective in-laws with the knowledge that it was an unirrigated block of land some distance from the home farm.

  The first available seat to Halifax is not till the following Wednesday.

  ‘You can have a bit of a holiday,’ says Mary and so does Ian, trying his best to disguise disappointment: ‘You’ve already spent the money, might as well enjoy it.’

  The irritation, or the bonus, is that there is absolutely nothing Jane can do about all the chores and decisions that await her once she reaches Evelyn’s Pond. She phones Mike and Rick, and then has no choice but to take the advice and relax.

  Walking in Burnham Beeches, the leaves still green on the trees, she longs suddenly for a full-blooded Canadian fall, thinking how much more attention she would have paid to the bright dying leaves of ’68 if she’d known they were the last she’d see, and then wonders how long it is since she’d simply gone for a walk without checking tree guards or irrigation or calving cows.

  ‘What I’d really like to do,’ she tells Mary, ‘is some of the things you and Mom did which meant a lot to her.’

  She fits in, naturally, the places that mean the most to her: a walk down the Strand past Australia House, though she has no urge to enter; the street where the Magical Mystery Tour met, through Trafalgar Square and into Canada House, where she feels like an impostor—the newspapers are meaningless and she knows that if she speaks she won’t be recognised as Canadian. In Bayswater she saunters past the hotel where she’d worked, cleaner now than then, takes Mary for coffee in a cafe that could even be the same one where she’d sat with poor sad Maggie, and strolls in Hyde Park.

  She nearly doesn’t go to White Waltham. It was the last place Ruth visited, a day she’d described as the pinnacle of her trip, but the aircraft will mean nothing to Jane and she doesn’t want to meet the kind man who took her mother flying: ‘It’s too complicated—he might think I blame him.’

  ‘Why mention your mother at all?’ Mary asks. ‘There must be other reasons people without planes visit airfields.’

  It is not, of course, the first lie Jane has ever told, but it is the first elaborate fiction she’s embroidered. ‘I’m doing a thesis,’ she claims, ‘on women in wartime.’

  Needless to say, no one questions this story. Jane does not look like any sort of saboteur and it’s not a military installation with secrets to hide. She’s directed to the clubroom with gift shop and photo wall, where she’s able to spot Ruth amongst the assembled crews; it doesn’t take long and no one offers to take her flying, but it feels indecent to leave too quickly. Buying a copy of the Blue Book, the ring-backed instruction manual her mother would have taped to her knee each time she flew an unfamiliar aircraft, she orders a drink and, with the alien details of throttle and trim before her, envisages Ruth sitting perhaps in this same chair, writing to Bill as she waits for fog to lift, or squinting into the afternoon sun to watch her friends land just as these small pretty planes are doing now.

  It strikes her that this is the first drink she’s bought since she met Ian, which is just about forever. She wonders if this gin and tonic is significant in some way, and whether a woman should be able to buy a drink without feeling awkward, and how much easier she would feel if it were tea instead of alcohol—and whether anyone who can waste this much energy worrying about sitting alone in a peaceful club has the right to even consider a responsible public relations kind of job.

  The 5 October 1969 dawned a bright autumn morning, or so Jane always remembers, although the photographs showed a greyer sky, as if some brightness had been lost in the developing. She wore for the first time the heavy cotton dress she’d bought in Yugoslavia (something new and as old as their history went). Shapeless and indecisively midcalf, it was the least flattering dress she owned, but it was white and the silvery discs on the red trim jingled festively. When she used it as a maternity smock a few years later, she would imagine unborn Megan listening to the music of her mother’s movements.

  Pressed close to Ian’s side on the top front seat of the double-decker bus, a heady, contradictory combination of moral certainty, vulnerability, Christmas-morning butterflies and sexual excitement threatened to explode into giggles. The same feelings were reflected in Ian’s face—grinning like a Cheshire cat, her mother would have said—and Jane looked up at him, aiming at sexiness and looking, Ian thought, exactly as she must have at twelve, on the way to buy her horse.

  Jane imagined the other passengers wondering at their glow of happiness. Would they add it up with Ian’s dark purple suit, her jingly white dress? Would they be part of someone’s story tonight, ‘Never seen two people more in love than that couple on the bus!’? She was torn between fantasies of bursting out with their glorious secret and laughing because no one else knew what an extraordinary day it was.

  The remnants of the Magical Mystery Tour were waiting outside the registry office: their driver, the Swiss tent-mate, the Yorkshire trainspotters and one of the hooligans. They filed through the labyrinthine building, past sombre offices to the chilly august room where the registrar waited, a red-faced stout man in a foul temper who seemed convinced that their only conceivable reason for being there was to irritate him.

  ‘Marriage is a solemn sacrament!’ he warned, scowling at their overwhelming joy at being so lucky, so clever and blessed, in having found somebody to love. ‘This is not something to enter into lightly. What you do here today will affect the rest of your lives.’

  The rest of our lives! Jane thought ecstatically. Ian’s rather bony face was handsome in profile; a muscle twitched as if he might tell the officer to get on with it, but when he turned to look down at her he was still beaming, as if dazed by his own good fortune. She squeezed his hand and the ceremony began, ending so soon after that she wondered whether something had been left out and how they could really be more married now than they’d been three minutes earlier. However, she was wearing a ring, a plain gold band but wide to make up for the lack of engagement diamond; had signed her new name, Jane Ralston; and marvelled briefly at how Jane Dubois had been wiped from life, as if her entire existence up to this point had been merely preparation for marrying Ian.

  The furious registrar shook their hands; the trainspotting wife, despite the absence of overt sentiment or ceremony, wiped her eyes neatly with a hanky; the hooligan gave Jane a smacking kiss on the lips and they trooped back through the dark offices to the street.

  Jane and Ian hadn’t thought further than this, at least as far as public celebrations were concerned, but the sense of anticlimax was palpable until the driver remembered a pub around the corner.

  ‘The registrar could do his next lecture on timing weddings around opening time!’ Jane suggested.

  ‘Oh, he was sour!’ the trainspotting wife exclaimed. ‘But don’t you mind him.’

  ‘Cranky old git,’ agreed the hooligan.

  Jane and Ian laughed; they couldn’t have explained that a cranky old git only highlighted their happiness, as if they had faced their first adversity together and prevailed against the odds.

  In the pub (‘We should have had champagne!’ Ian said later, but at the time Heineken beer, in honour of the tour’s afternoon at the Amsterdam factory, had seemed appropriate) the Swiss girl and the trainspotter both pulled gifts from their handbags. Jane hadn’t considered presents. ‘I
t’s your wedding, isn’t it!’ the older woman scolded, loudly enough that several other drinkers turned to stare, and one or two to smile.

  Reddening self-consciously, they performed the first joint action of their married life, unwrapping the gold-embossed leather address book from Florence—either bought with amazing prescience or originally intended for the Swiss girl’s parents—and a small china teapot painted with a steam engine.

  ‘Talyllyn, the world’s first preserved steam railway,’ the trainspotting husband explained, which led him to a discussion on the Puffing Billy, Australia’s first preserved steam railway which they hoped one day to ride too.

  ‘Stay with us!’ Jane offered, more to practise saying us and picturing a home into which they could invite guests than any desire to have them visit.

  From the pub farewells they went straight to the post office to send their respective telegrams.

  Will buy farm. Stop. Married today. Stop. Home soon. Stop. Ian, Jane.

  Married Ian today. Stop. Very happy. Stop. Letter follows. Stop. Love, Jane, Ian

  ‘Ian will be just getting up now,’ Jane says as she fills the teapot and Mary butters currant buns for afternoon tea.

  ‘Five o’clock? I wouldn’t fancy that.’

  ‘You get used to it.’ And, in fact, although she enjoys the luxury of sleeping till seven as much as anyone, and is beginning to feel that it’s about time their days of constant and heavy work came to an end, she’s also aware that at some level she’ll miss that early morning routine. The sleepy stillness of the house as Ian leaves, whistling to his dog to drive the cows down the lane while he takes the motorbike to open gates and move electric fences for the day’s grazing. Jane dresses more slowly, boils the kettle before heading for the dairy with thermos and mugs in hand. In anything except midwinter or driving rain it’s the best time of day, magpies carolling their extraordinary liquid joy and mist rising off the grass, a peace rarely repeated even in evening.