The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  I suppose it’s not pure anger. It’s more the feeling of going to infinite trouble to present the perfect gift and being slapped in the face for one’s pains. Rejection.

  The worst of expressing an emotion on paper is the way in which it exaggerates into melodrama. One feels quite ashamed. (Though not enough, I note, to cross it out.)

  Which will make Jane, sitting in her childhood bedroom another twenty years later, wonder whether her mother’s emails, written with the facility of delete keys, have always been as spontaneous as they’ve seemed.

  A yet more humiliating thought has just struck me. Is it possible that I’m simply experiencing the despondency all mothers feel when their children grow up and leave home? Perhaps I could take up reading women’s magazines on ‘How to Keep Cheerful in the Empty Nest’.

  I think I’d rather go on being cross.

  ‘Oh, Mom!’ Jane thinks despairingly. She doesn’t wonder, though, at Ruth sharing this with an unseen cousin rather than a husband. Her mother, who never enjoyed allowing sentiment to defeat logic, preferred Bill to see her in the light she had chosen to paint herself.

  In Ruth’s personal mythology, her first Canadian Christmas is not the one that occurred a few days after she arrived, a clumsily bulging parcel fussed over by strangers. She prefers to forget the nights of lying wide-eyed in the cold bedroom, her body with its restless passenger as alien as the husband on the other side of the world, as unknown as his friendly parents and embittered sister asleep just down the hall. She has remoulded the story, obliterating the loneliness that drove her to open the curtains on the night skies, braving the chill air for the familiarity of sidereal patterns and sometimes, during the baby’s quiet spells, losing herself in a projection of flight. There is nothing shamanic about Ruth’s imagination; she visualises a Spitfire on the runway, feels the weight of the cockpit cover as she lowers it over her head and the throbbing of the Merlin engines readying for takeoff. Once in the air, she dips and soars through the blackness, guided only by the constant stars.

  She will forget completely that on some nights, when the baby or other discomforts of pregnancy make her flight dream impossible, the stars seem a cold comfort and the absence of any friendly light below them makes her wonder if any place on earth is as isolated as this.

  She will deny that on Christmas Day itself the unaccustomed quantity and richness of the food leave her queasy and uncomfortable, and the strain of being merry with these intimate strangers, knowing that the unfamiliar routine is the one that will be hers for life, has her crying in her room before supper.

  She will simply count the first Christmas as the one that came twelve months later.

  The house at Evelyn’s Pond has been theirs since the spring; it is part of her now, its corners and gables as familiar as a childhood friend. She has blossomed into it; only her room at home (inspected by Nanny, even when she returned at the start of the war) and at St Hilda’s in the Oxford years have ever been her own. To place a chair in the parlour the way she wants it, to decide on the colour of the new paint for the kitchen, seems an extraordinary freedom.

  And her husband is hers. Oh so hers. And her body is her own—for although Ruth copes well with pregnancy she doesn’t enjoy it, and now the baby is weaned she is as strong, as fit as she’s ever been, sometimes as full with brimming life as that strange night in the soft Swiss snow. And Jane, who sleeps through the night and laughs more than she cries, who crawls strongly but is not yet into the roaming disaster-area of toddlerhood, is still hers, and melts her heart with joy and pride.

  The snow comes on the Saturday before Christmas, a gentle, solid fall, showing off for an English bride with its draping of barn roof, frosting of fir trees and mounding of fenceposts.

  ‘Should have cut the tree yesterday,’ says Bill, ‘so we wouldn’t have to tramp through all that snow.’ He has one eye on his wife as he says it—he’d promised her white Christmases, that first doodlebug June evening, and he knows how her eyes will spark at the thought of that adventure now. The day is so mild, sunny and bright that he feels almost smug, as if he’s arranged it specially—which he would have, if he could.

  George and Myrtle arrive; Myrtle has brought mince tarts and shortbread. ‘Leave Jane with me,’ she begs when she sees that Ruth is determined to tramp with the men, but—‘It’s her first Christmas!’ exclaims the baby’s mother. ‘She should start it properly.’

  So Jane is well bundled, in snow suit and mitts, with her red tuque on top, and tied by a scarf onto the toboggan. The adults pull on boots, coats, hats and mitts; Bill gets the axe and they all head into the woods. It is not deep enough for snowshoes—‘You’ll get a chance yet!’ Bill assures his wife.

  The snow is just deep and sticky enough for the men’s feet to make neat holes, which the toboggan smudges before Ruth reprints them. There is a different atmosphere as they enter the woods, a primordial stillness, ‘lovely, dark and deep,’ thinks Ruth, though she is not yet familiar enough with American poetry to be sure where the line has sprung from.

  She breaks a fir twig and inhales the sharp scent, imagines herself as a tracker, partner to an intrepid courier du bois. Her face is fresh with cold, as invigorating as an elixir of youth. She scoops a snowball, clapping it firm between her mittens, but afraid that she might hit George or spatter Jane, changes her aim from Bill to a distant tree. A pheasant flies up in shock, showering snow behind him.

  They tramp on through the maples, skeletal storers of sweetness, and on to a patch of young firs. ‘You choose,’ says Bill, scooping Jane up from her toboggan.

  Ruth feels the two men enjoying her delight, the bond between them so close in this moment that it nearly glows, and she is stabbed by a sliver of pure happiness, framing this scene in her mind as one of those rare moments in life that can be taken out later like a snapshot to be cherished.

  The Christmas tree candidates are dwarfed by the parent trees; Ruth is surprised to find her first choice towering over her. ‘I wasn’t intending to cut a hole in the ceiling,’ says Bill, ‘but if that’s what you want!’

  She darts between smaller ones, not over ten feet; some have grown too close to their neighbours and are squashed on one side; one has a broken branch and several have bent heads, but finally she finds it, Jane’s first Christmas tree. It’s only nine feet tall, eight when it’s felled, perfectly symmetrical, and the tips of its branches are so fresh and surprising that she can hardly bear to have it cut, but Bill says it would have begun to crowd next year, and either it or its neighbours would have to go soon.

  She holds Jane, who is surprised by the thumps of the axe and amused by its swinging glint, and then they return home in triumphant procession. Like Peter and the Wolf, Ruth thinks, although the tree had not been not such a formidable opponent.

  This is the first year, too, that Bill, remembering six lonely Christmases, begins the tradition of posting an invitation on a bulletin board at Greenwood Air Force Base. He has only just reached the mess door when he meets Hank McBain coming out.

  Hank, first met in training for their pioneering flight in that cold Hudson over the North Atlantic, last heard of missing over France—which was not, it appears, the end of his story.

  They retire to the mess to fill in the gaps. It’s less than a year since Bill’s been in an officer’s mess; the atmosphere is familiar but he no longer belongs. But Hank is still in—‘I’d never have picked you for a mug who’d sign on again!’

  Hank hadn’t known what else to do; could no longer imagine civilian life. The girl he’d been engaged to had met someone else while he was recuperating from a broken ankle in a French barn; married while he was in Colditz. He’s glad he hadn’t known it at the time.

  He stares moodily into his beer; his story is not yet easy to tell. ‘I was on bombers—Lancs. Good crew; the pilot was as green as the rest of us, a lanky kid from Moose Jaw who looked like he should be cutting the corn or whatever they do in Moose Jaw, but he grew up fast. Top pilot; top
captain. The rest of the crew was English except for a South African rear gunner.

  ‘You know the saying about the first mission and the last being the most dangerous? I don’t know if it was that or not; sometimes your time is up. They’d changed the number of missions so often none of us really believed it was the last one. We thought we’d just go on flying till we died.’

  He laughs without humour. ‘We were right, too, except for me.

  ‘It was one of those big raids—a thousand planes to Berlin. You wouldn’t believe what it was like!’

  Bill realises that Hank didn’t see D-day or Arnhem, and is quiet.

  ‘I don’t know what it did; should have smashed the bejesus out of Berlin and got us on the road to winning the war. I sure as hell hope so because we took some flak when we were nearly out of Germany; the gunner . . .’ He pauses again, swallows. ‘Poor bastard didn’t have a chance. And the navigator had a big hole in his thigh. We put a tourniquet on, but—. I spent too long with the gunner, that’s the thing. If I’d got the tourniquet on West first, he might have made it.’

  Bill is silent. That night, lying snug against Ruth, he will think of the things he could have said, and though he knows they wouldn’t have made any difference, feels a sense of failure in his silence.

  ‘Moose gave us the order to evacuate. I heard the copilot arguing for him to get out too, but he wanted to hold her steady for us. In the end the copilot didn’t get out in time either; I was the last to jump and by the time I’d opened my parachute the Lanc had gone into a spin. You feel sick when you see any plane crash and burn, but when it’s your own crew . . .’

  He gulps the rest of his beer, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. Bill will not be able to think of anything he could have said to that.

  ‘I landed not far from Westie, but it was no good; he must have come down on the bad leg—I had a lot of time to think it out later—and twisted it so badly the tourniquet had come off. Funny thing was, I didn’t realise I’d broken my own ankle till I saw that the poor bastard was dead, but when I looked down then my foot was sitting at a funny kind of angle and swelling like a football inside my flying boot. Hurt like hell once I noticed. We’d landed on the edge of a wood—I heard later that the flight engineer landed in a tree. The official line on him was shot trying to evade capture; I always wondered if he ever got out of the tree.

  ‘Anyways, I was in a field, and it was light enough by then I could see a haystack, so I got myself there quick as I could and buried my parachute in the bottom. Still didn’t know if I was in Germany or France, but I figured that the best I could do was turn my back to the sunrise and keep on going. Problem was, even with a stick I was bloody slow. After two days a French girl saw me creeping out from my next haystack. I thought I’d had it, but she was more worried about getting me out of there—I was still way too close to where the Lanc had come down. She set my ankle and her brother drove me past a patrol in a load of manure to a Resistance safe house till I was fit to travel. I got nearly to Marseilles before I was arrested. Didn’t like prison much; I kept getting out and they kept putting me back and finally they sent me to Colditz. Bloody awful way to sit out the war. But that’s enough of me, how’ve you been?’

  ‘Come out home for Christmas,’ says Bill.

  By Jane’s first Australian Christmas, ten months after stepping onto the hot tarmac of Tullamarine, she was starting to believe that home could be the Goulburn, not the Annapolis, Valley. Winter had been a shock; no snow, she discovered, did not mean warm and in a dark and draughty house the heat of the wood stove did not reach the clammy bedroom.

  But as the temperatures began to climb she felt herself thrive: Think of me sunbaking on Christmas Day, she wrote to Patsy and Gail, while you shovel snow!

  That was late October, last sea mail before Christmas, but it stayed true all the way to the day she went Christmas shopping. She didn’t have much on her list—the glossy This is Australia had left for Evelyn’s Pond long ago; a classical record for Ian and something for his parents’ new house, pottery coffee mugs maybe—but it would still be Christmas shopping. Still the anticipation of pleasure, the buzz of excitement in the tinselled stores, the old ladies in queues who smile approvingly at some gift intended for mother or father.

  It was a hot day, furnace hot. Maybe that’s all it was. Maybe it was just that stepping out of oven heat into the shops’ chilly blast is not as comforting as coming into overheated buildings from outside frigidity. The Christmas lights were dim against the glare of the sun, the Santa Clauses sweltered in their fur-trimmed suits, the pine trees stacked outside the greengrocers drooped limp and pathetic, and the canned carols of dark winter evenings sang surreal and alien. Relentlessly the day continued to point out that some customs are not transplantable, and if not customs, why people?

  Maybe it was just that childhood Christmases can never be regained, or that a latent xenophobia makes our earliest traditions the one true standard against which all else will be compared. Whatever it was, when the woman ahead of her in the queue at the music shop said conspiratorially, ‘Won’t you be glad when it’s over?’ Jane was mortifyingly afraid that she was going to burst into tears.

  And did, when she got home to find the red candles in her cleverly adapted bottlebrush arrangement on the windowsill melted into sad, recumbent curves, which was not supposed to happen at Christmas, because Christmas was supposed to be in the winter. Christmas was the butterfly anticipation of hanging stockings on the mantelpiece and the four a.m. waking to wiggle toes to the end of the bed and feel for that same stuffed stocking with the lumps and bumps all the way down to the tangerine in the toe, and going downstairs to the magic of the lit tree and the presents heaped under it, and only crumbs and a rimmed glass left from Santa’s milk and cookies and the carrot for his reindeer gone too.

  The memory of that part of Christmas is subsumed with the loss of childhood and reborn with the advent of children, and Jane was at that stage in between where the magic had been lost and not yet rediscovered. But that part was not all. If she closed her eyes and said ‘Christmas,’ she could smell the freshness of fir and feel the cold on her red cheeks and the comforting warmth of a kitchen; Christmas was darkness and houses outlined with lights; it was looking out her window to the smoothness of snow and moonlight on the white; it was neighbours stopping by for eggnog and stamping snow off boots and buttoning coats up warmly to go back out to the cold. Christmas was so enmeshed with winter that if she went back far enough into childhood she could taste the wool of her scarf wrapped over her face and the texture of ice chewed from frozen mittens and feel the rhythm of Ruth sweeping snow off her snow suit before the unwrapping in the kitchen. It was church, like the houses, redolent with pine and fir; it was breath frosting in the air when they came out afterwards and the silence of the night at the welcoming lit house. It was watching her grandfather and then her father harnessing a horse to the sleigh that went for the doctor the night she was born, and the sound of the sleigh bells, and the whoosh of the sleigh in the night. It was the playing of Ruth’s carol records, the taste of tourtiere and turkey and cranberries; the primitive contrast of warmth and cold, darkness and light, and over it all was the red glow of inner happiness and knowing that everyone in her world shared that joy and that knowledge.

  For the first time Jane understood that, same language and loving husband notwithstanding, she was a migrant, and if she was going to survive in a foreign country she would have to bend, lose parts of her identity and heritage. Understood that no matter how much she grew to love gum trees and wattles, she would never quite lose the longing for spruce trees and maples; that a part of her heart might always turn over at the sound of a soft, flat accent that was not quite American and the distinctive Canadian sound of house and about. That sometimes there would be a physical ache of loneliness for someone who could understand the references of her childhood—although luckily, having not yet experienced either childbirth or parents’ aging, she
didn’t realise just how searing that particular longing could be.

  So Jane decided that the way to combat homesickness was to make new traditions, something that belonged fresh to Ian and herself. That they would have dinner, at noon, with Ian’s parents, was understood, though Jane did not realise at the time that even at fifty, when she will be cooking turkeys at home and transporting them, she will not be allowed to host the meal herself. There were several things in which Fred and Dulcie’s sense of rightness was immutable, and responsibilities of the older generation were the mainstay.

  ‘You can bring the pudding,’ Dulcie said, that first Christmas. ‘Do you need a recipe?’

  With a flash of inspiration, Jane saw the answer for a perfect meld of tradition and place, and could have hugged herself, childlike, with the secret of surprise. ‘I’ve got one,’ she said, which was true: Ruth, love of tradition overcoming dislike of cooking, had sent a starting-your-new-life in-Australia gift of a looseleaf binder with family recipes copied out in her most formal script. Some were from her war brides’ cookbook, some were Acadian—most of which Jane had no recollection of Ruth ever making—and there was Mrs Beeton’s plum pudding. But that was not the one she intended to use.

  Something old, something new—though she should have remembered that was for weddings—glacéd fruit and liqueur for tradition, ice cream for the climate, the recipe cut from a review of a new Italian restaurant in the food section of the Age.

  ‘If you can’t find focaccia, sponge cake will do . . .’ As it would be twenty years before she could find the former, Jane attempted the latter. ‘ . . . Preferably, a rather dense sponge’—which was still the way most of hers turned out, luckily enough.