The House at Evelyn's Pond
Page 22
‘People think kookaburras are the sound of Australia,’ she tells Mary, ‘but it’s the magpies I’d miss if I ever left. Not that I’m planning to.’
In the dairy she opens and shuts gates, installs clean filter liners, puts hoses in place, switches on the vat’s cooling system and the radio’s Classic FM. By the time Ian locks the yard gate behind the stragglers, Jane has the first thirty-two cows in place, has pulled the lever to deliver their portions of grain, and is slipping the pulsating cups onto the second row of bulging, leaking udders. There is a satisfying tug as each teat is enclosed in its steel mouth, mechanical reproduction of a hungry baby’s mouth on a mother’s nipple.
It’s the crises that are memorable—breakdowns of machinery or animal—but most milkings are busily uneventful: disjointed conversation, a shared look of exasperation or amusement at a particular cow, sips of rapidly cooling coffee. Unlike the heated voices from next door, it’s rarely necessary to ask what the other is doing or to explain their own actions, reading body language as much as habit to anticipate needs. There’s a sigh of relief as the last row of cows is released to the paddock, and they each swing into their own routines again for cleaning up, Ian finishing off the last of the hosing as Jane starts home to shower and make breakfast, with coffee that has a chance of being finished hot. If she does take this job, they’ll have to find some way to replace that morning companionship, the half-finished sentences and shared thoughts as they plan their day.
The immigration interviews were, logically enough, conducted at Australia House, where Jane had first glimpsed her future.
The surprise was that she’d not only be allowed into the country, but the Australian government would pay most of her fare.
‘Provided you stay for two full years!’ the immigration officer snapped. He was a harassed looking man, sweating unseasonably in an outgrown suit. ‘What’ll you do if you don’t like it?’
‘I’m married!’ exclaimed Jane, bride of two weeks. ‘I’m not going to leave my husband because I don’t like the scenery.’
‘It’s been done.’
‘Not by me!’ Her face was flushed and there was a set to her jaw that Ian hadn’t seen before. ‘When I said I’d marry Ian, I meant for life. I’m not going to walk out!’
The officer admitted defeat and changed tack. ‘You’ll find things are different in Australia. It’s not all proper and formal the way it is in England.’ Warming to his theme, he wrenched his too-tight jacket off his shoulders. ‘Australians are very relaxed!’
Jane suspected that laughing aloud would not improve her chances, but ‘I’m Canadian,’ she reminded him.
‘Right,’ he said, nonplussed. The rest of the interview continued more calmly.
And so, after an excursion to Harley Street for a medical and chest X-ray, Jane Ralston, née Dubois, became an assisted passage migrant to Australia. She was allowed extra baggage allowance on the plane as well as a trunk to be sent by sea.
Mary, who had already provided a wedding gift of ten pounds ‘for the theatre or a weekend away; nothing practical’, as well as a Royal Doulton milk jug, crazed with age and chosen from pride of place on her own mantelpiece, threw herself into the task of filling the newlyweds’ trunk. Subtlety was not Mary’s strong point and she thought that the family had not treated Ruth as well as they ought; revenge was implied in the afternoon tea party, a wedding reception in all but name, to which all living relatives were invited. Jane and Ian weren’t sure whether this was also some form of vengeance on them for not having had a proper wedding: Mary’s reaction, when they’d arrived on her doorstep the afternoon of their marriage, had been more shock than delight.
‘Good Lord!’ she’d exclaimed. ‘Are you sure?’
Jane extended her left hand in reply.
‘Good Lord!’ Mary repeated. ‘Does your mother know?’
‘I hinted in the last letter. They won’t be surprised.’
Mary, shooing the dogs away from Ian, suspected differently. ‘Sherry?’ she asked brightly, and they were sipping Harvey’s Bristol Cream and recounting their story—laughing, words and hands entwining—when the telegram arrived.
Congratulations. Stop. Wish had known. Stop. Much love and happiness. Stop. Mom, Dad.
Jane was twenty-three, in love, and had been married for six hours. She had taken the wording at face value, and it was not until the morning of the Great Afternoon Tea, as she and Ian referred to it, that it struck her just how much ‘wish had known’ might cover. Maybe even a wish that they’d been given a chance to see their daughter’s wedding.
‘Mary,’ she asked, ‘may I use your phone?’
There was more to say than three minutes could hold. ‘I can’t believe you told Mary before your own parents!’ Ruth exclaimed, all the last weeks’ hurt spilling over in that one cry.
The fun and surprise were suddenly a feeble excuse, although she added the expediency, the happiness and: ‘I wish you and Dad could have been here,’ allowing herself to realise it for the first time.
‘So do we,’ said Ruth. ‘How soon do you leave for Australia?’
But Jane didn’t know, Ruth was too hurt and proud to rush to England on the gamble of meeting her son-in-law and saying goodbye to her daughter—and their time was up. Jane hung up, tearful with the first complicated intimations of being an immigrant wife and emigrant daughter.
Ian was more concerned with her using Mary’s phone for a transatlantic call. ‘But I’ll pay for it!’ Jane insisted, and their guests arrived before she could discover whether he was worried about an abuse of hospitality or expenditure from their now joint finances.
The guests’ arrival was in fact more than enough to put petty irritations out of mind. Jane had no idea that her mother had so many relatives, but there were elderly aunts and younger cousins, twice and thrice removed, a smaller clan than the Dubois, but an ample gathering in Mary’s small house and a confusing whirl to meet at once.
‘I remember meeting your father, the day your grandparents died—terrible thing, that,’ said one elderly but still pukka great-uncle. ‘Good chap, I thought.’
‘And your mother, such a spirited girl, and so clever. I wouldn’t have ever imagined her living in the country,’ added a great-aunt. ‘Does she get up to town often?’
‘Is Ruth still alive?’ asked an even older aunt. ‘Didn’t they all die in a buzz bomb?’
‘It was a rocket,’ said her daughter, ‘and remember, Ruth was away flying.’ She made it sound vaguely disreputable, but it could have been the accent, so similar to Ruth’s irritated voice.
Afterwards, however, Jane and Ian were equally bemused by their horde of gifts. ‘So that’s why people have weddings!’ Jane cried flippantly, confirming her husband’s prejudice against the ceremony as they sorted through fondue pots, antique vases, fragile glassware and practical sheets. ‘Look at these pillowslips, Ian—aren’t they pretty?’
Ian was studying a framed print of The Rape of the Sabine Women and wondering whether Great-uncle Adrian had intended some obscure warning or could simply no longer bear it on his own wall. ‘Where do you suppose we go to buy a trunk?’
The streets of Chelsea are still pleasant to stroll through, and it does not take a great stretch of the imagination to picture a nanny and pinafored child in the locked gardens or behind the upstairs windows. The distance her mother had travelled in life is more obvious to Jane than ever before; the time, however, is now so remote that it does not do a great deal to bring her closer.
On the high street, not far from where the younger Jane had met the lion-owning Australians in a bizarre presentiment of her future, she and Mary pass an antique shop and are irresistibly drawn to gaze in the window.
‘Your mother saw a tea service here that reminded her of your grandmother’s. It gave her quite a jolt, she said, and she asked to see it just so that she could handle it again. Of course she had no intention of buying it . . . not very materialistic, was she, your mother?’
‘Perhaps . . . although even when she went away to school she gave me her favourite doll because she thought it would be better off with someone younger.’ It strikes them both that Ruth had sprung from a mother who was the very epitome of nonmaterialism, having given her own child away.
Jane, however, has not been given away, has not seen her family or home bombed, and she knows herself to be extremely materialistic. This is quite plainly a shop which will have absolutely nothing that would suit her, as she’d been told once long ago, but she wants to see what had captivated her mother.
It captivates her too. Not replaced in the window since Ruth handled it, it reposes on a gate-legged mahogany table as if simply waiting for tea and the ladies to drink it, deep blue Royal Worcester cups and plates, achingly beautiful. Maybe it’s Mary’s mention of a doll that makes her think she hasn’t wanted an inanimate object this badly since the golden-haired bride doll with blue blinking eyes in the 1957 Eatons Christmas catalogue.
She realises suddenly that both Mary and the shop assistant think purchase is a serious possibility, an idea that would normally make her panic but today, as if imbued with her mother’s spirit, lets her enter into the game of being a woman of independent means and inclination, a woman who could decide to spend hundreds of pounds on an item that was not necessary and would rarely be used. Better yet, this mythical woman would use her china, for book group and similar ladies’ gatherings, would nonchalantly pass precious cups or cake plates without wincing. Jane’s friends, after all, had not yet broken Woolworths’ own; they were unlikely to mistake the Worcester for frisbees.
She doesn’t see until later that the main attraction of this alternative universe Jane is in the decision, not the china or use of.
‘We ship anywhere in the world,’ the sales assistant is saying, which means that it’s time to end the story, but it’s not easy, it’s surprisingly difficult, to get out of it before the Visa card flies from her wallet. But credit cards, says Ian, are for emergencies and it’s probably an exaggeration to say, as she might have at sixteen, that she will die without this china. (Ruth had died without it, but Jane has to admit that it was probably not a causal link.)
‘You might as well,’ says Mary.
‘I’d have to ask Ian,’ says Jane, which raises Mary’s eyebrows ever so slightly. They both know that Jane will not ask Ian because she knows what he’s going to say and doesn’t want to hear it. The only difference of opinion is on how much what he says should matter.
Jane celebrated her twenty-fourth birthday by arriving in Australia. Not even the Qantas welcome of greasy rewarmed sausages and meat that Ian identified as lamb chops or the ritual spraying of insecticide before disembarkation were enough to darken the omen.
Sydney airport a sealed, air-conditioned daze of confusion and frustration, her new country so near behind the glass; the flight to Melbourne passing not far from the farm, Ian said, but too high to see more than a blur of greens and browns. Gently rolling hills as they descended to Melbourne’s new airport, summer-dry and barren; another airport maze but this time real with the urgency of arrival; suitcases and knapsacks safely off the carousel, through customs and immigration, the red spot on her jacket bringing her a welcome from an immigration officer—‘I can see you’re alright,’ the woman said, nodding at Ian, and disappeared to search for more forlorn migrants.
Jane recognised Fred and Dulcie on the other side of the barriers not so much from their photograph but the intensity of their gaze and Ian’s own look of strained expectancy on his father’s face. Ruth’s story of meeting Bill’s parents floated through her head like déjà vu as she was hugged and exclaimed over; the main difference apart from her not being about to give birth being that Ian was with her to share it: ‘You’re so pale!’ his mother complained. And so was Jane. Had they been crook?
‘It’s just from winter,’ Jane explained, and stepped out into summer.
It was hot, even by Australian standards, a hundred and two in the scale they were used to, but like Ruth facing her first snowstorm, Jane had no means of knowing whether this was the norm. The heat hit as if she’d bent into an open oven; it rolled shimmering off tarmac and car roofs, and when they got inside the car the oven simile became still more uncomfortably apt.
Dear Mom and Dad
The first day in my new home! It’s all a bit hard to believe.
Ian’s parents met us at the airport, and they do seem very nice. They want me to call them Mum and Dad, but it doesn’t seem natural for people I hadn’t met till yesterday. So far I’ve just avoided calling them anything, but I guess I can’t do that forever. (Although in the end that was precisely what she did until she could begin calling them Gran and Poppy on her daughter’s behalf, and continued on her own.)
Fred is quiet, a bit shorter than Ian or Dad, wiry and balding; Dulcie chatters a lot and I get the feeling that her life revolves totally around her husband and son, though it might be just the way she talks—‘I’d better get their dinner now,’ or ‘They’ll need their morning tea,’ as if she wasn’t going to eat too. The language is surprisingly different. Lucky I’ve got Ian to translate for me or I might never have figured out what happened when his ‘two cobbers had a bit of a barney’, though apparently it wasn’t a ‘real blue’, which would have been worse (ie his friends had a fight)!
The countryside is very flat with the irrigation channels branching through the district and smaller ditches through the farms. There’s hardly a tree in sight except for a few weeping willows along the channel banks, branches all evenly trimmed, which I thought was an amazing effort till Ian explained that it was the cows, not the farmers, who’d shaped them so neatly. The other funny sight as we came onto their (their crossed out and replaced by our) farm, was that one field, or paddock, was full of black and white Friesian cows, and the next one with black and white ibis, looking equally domesticated and fenced in! Apparently Fred floods the paddocks one by one, so each in turn becomes a smorgasbord for wading birds.
The house was built just after the war when this area was divided into farms for returned servicemen. The bathroom—or at least the toilet—is in the garden, but I guess we won’t ever have to shovel snow to make a path to it! Ian warned me about red-back spiders, which sound like black widows; he says they like to live under the toilet seat but I’m not sure whether he was joking or not.
The stove is wood and the hot water runs off it, so you can’t decide not to light it just because it’s a hundred degrees outside. (When Ian came in from the dairy this morning, I was certainly in favour of his having a hot soapy shower!) It must be easier to use than our old one, though, because when we got here yesterday, Dulcie bustled around and made scones for afternoon tea before milking.
There does seem a lot to learn! (crossed out)
I had a ‘lie-in’ this morning while the two men milked, but I’ll start helping tomorrow so I can learn how. The women here do a lot more of the active farming work than they do in the Valley, but I’m looking forward to it. Fred and Dulcie will move to their new place, about twelve miles away, over the next few days, and then the farm will be ours. I don’t know the financial details but I guess it’ll be sorted out eventually.
The letters over the next few months follow the same pattern. The weekly news is interspersed with snippets that had caught her eye or ear: the old ladies of Yarralong strolling in the sun with their umbrellas, the first time she heard someone say, ‘Fair dinkum!’
Ruth is intrigued by the novelties but fascinated by this mirroring of mother’s and daughter’s stories. She is thrown back into her own days of discovery: the wooden houses, the big barrels of salt pork and dill pickles in the grocery store; the fishing boats tied to a wharf forty feet above, waiting for the great Fundy tide.
Bill finds himself acutely aware of the repeated Ian says, and w
onders what lies behind Jane’s bright and breezy tone. When they read, Ian says that women in Australia don’t work after they’re married. Teachers have been allowed to for the last few years, but it’s not really done, half a world’s distance is not enough to fool either of them. Bill shovels out the barn’s manure stack three months early and Ruth, who hasn’t cried for ten years, not since she found her dog dying in a porcupine trap, weeps angry, despairing tears.
The battle had dominated the first few weeks of her Australian life.
Babies were what Jane had pictured terminating her career, angelic bundles in the distant future, but this was the man she loved handing down an arbitrary edict: from now on she would be a dependent housewife, married to home and farm as much as man. She’d been alternately furious and devastated, and overwhelmingly betrayed that he hadn’t brought up something so important until now. Ian had been equally angry that she was so determined to work and equally hurt that she’d never mentioned it. Neither had completely understood the other’s assumptions, which was why it had been so terrifying: Ian was more than her husband, he was the only person she knew in this whole vast country, and if she couldn’t communicate with him she would be as lonely as any explorer in an uncharted desert. The immigration officer’s words and her own self-confident retort returned to haunt her—what if this marriage was a terrible mistake, and no matter how much she loved Ian she never fitted in to his country and his way of thinking?
The first major rift in their understanding and it had seemed irreconcilable.