by Wendy Orr
In the absence of a churn, the ice cream was less successful, although Ian’s dog, in secret collusion, seemed well satisfied, but the chocolate and strawberry layers were very nearly homemade, their grated or crushed ingredients mixed into the bought vanilla ice cream by hand. Then ‘mould and freeze’ the instructions said blithely, not mentioning that it might take two days to successfully complete the manoeuvre; there seemed to be a very fine gap between the ice cream being soft enough to mould and firm enough not to slide down into the bottom of the bowl.
‘Why do you need the esky?’ Ian asked as they climbed into the ute after morning milking, showered, Sunday-dressed and gift-laden.
‘For the pudding.’
‘It’s not going to go off that quickly!’
‘It might,’ Jane said, and Ian realised that she was as excited as a kid about Christmas and her contribution to it, and smiled with only a trace of condescension at her northern fear of heat.
‘We’ll put it on now,’ said Dulcie when esky and present box had been brought in from the ute and Merry Christmas kisses exchanged. ‘Three hours to steam?’
Feeling like a conjurer, Jane pulled out her cassata. Years later, it would amaze her that she’d been so intent on this surprise and the forging of her own new traditions, that she’d never once thought of consulting anyone about how they felt about changing theirs.
The answer was obvious. The tableau was as frozen as the dessert.
‘Good thing we didn’t drop that in the pot!’ Dulcie said, recovering herself quickly and opening the freezer. ‘That would have been a mess.’
Ian surreptitiously checked the esky to see if his wife might have brought a proper pudding as well and worried about what his father might say. Jane had been uncharacteristically touchy the last few days; he had no idea why but suspected it wouldn’t take much for her to burst into tears. ‘I’ll be Father Christmas!’ he announced. ‘Who wants a present?’
That afternoon, when they had worked their way through roast chicken, lamb, beef and vegetables, and dessert had been salvaged by spooning cassata onto fruit cake and smothering it with custard and cream, Jane and Dulcie washed the dishes as the men dozed in preparation for afternoon tea. Hands busy in the soapy water, her mother-in-law asked the question that had been bothering her all day. ‘Do you have Christmas in Canada?’
Ruth and Bill’s first family Christmas, the Christmas of ’46, is also the start of Bill telling his sister, ‘Don’t ever say I didn’t bring you anything home from the war.’
Or so the family story goes. In fact Bill wouldn’t have said that on Christmas Day, because it would have been cruel, unlucky and destructive; but he did say it eventually, and even Louise smiles when he says it at her wedding, although she does not find it funny for nearly as long or as often as Bill and Hank do.
In fact the only hint of the future, when Louise and Hank meet on Christmas morning, is not Louise’s smiling or Hank’s gallantry but the baby. Jane is frightened at first and then, when he lets her reach and twist it, fascinated by Hank’s handlebar moustache; Hank clowns energetically and patiently, and Louise, who unless she thinks herself unobserved, normally treats Jane as if she were about as fascinating as a pet geranium, coos, peekaboos and even does a capable aunt act, whisking the baby off the visitor’s knee at the first whiff of trouble and returning her clean and fresh a few minutes later. Naturally she also listens and laughs at Hank’s stories, but there’s no particular surprise in that, because to listen to Bill and Hank, the war had been one long jolly boys’ own prank.
Ruth watches the others and wonders how much they believe. Not that the stories are untrue, not that Hank hadn’t lit a fire with the back of his sentry box one cold night of guard duty, breaking off a bit more and a bit more until there was nothing left but the frame, or that Bill hadn’t mastered the mess game of running up a wall and adding to the score of footprints on the ceiling, ‘long before I met Ruth, of course!’—but there is so much they can’t mention that these snippets give a lie to the whole.
‘Landing at Prestwick, you remember that? Fools that we were, we thought there’d be some r and r, a day anyways, my God, we’d flown right across the Atlantic and it wasn’t that long since you’d get a hero’s welcome and your name in the papers. But for us it was “Jump on the train, boys, and get going.” ’
‘Straight to Bournemouth.’
‘Funniest little trains you ever saw,’ Hank adds, forgetting that his hostess may have seen them, may not even consider them funny. ‘And it was the heck of a long way to sit up all night.’
‘You were lucky to get a seat!’ Ruth says tartly.
‘Lucky? Bill was the lucky one, that’s for sure. Lucky he ever got out of Bournemouth.’
‘And lucky to’ve had this delicious dinner tonight,’ says Bill gallantly—desperately, thinks Ruth—but Hank will not be detoured around Bournemouth.
‘The hotel I got sent to was okay, but Bill being an officer, his was really top class.’
‘Everyone went to Bournemouth when they got to England,’ Bill explains pedantically, ‘to wait for their posting. It would’ve been a pretty place if the beaches hadn’t been full of barbed wire. Then I went to Scotland.’
‘You’re so boring, Bill!’ snaps Louise. ‘Let Hank tell the story.’
Ruth pats her husband’s hand, raising an eyebrow at his sister, who doesn’t notice, having eyes only for the narrator.
‘Anyways, I saw Bill go off to his hotel and I went to mine. All you had to do was turn up for parade twice a day and if your name wasn’t called you went off again, played tennis, whatever you liked. So that first afternoon, I was back at the hotel playing pool with some of the fellows when we heard a Messerchmidt coming in low. We dived under a table but the plane was so close I could see its bomb bay open and it looked to me like it was right over Bill’s hotel. I saw that bomb drop and there was just nothing I could do except think this wasn’t supposed to happen, it was our first day and I don’t know if I thought the war would wait for us to settle in or what, but I couldn’t believe it. Then the bomb hit, and you had to believe it then. Thing is, Bill had said all he wanted to do that day was sleep, and I knew he’d have to be in his room.’
‘But I wasn’t,’ says Bill. ‘I’d just got unpacked, even took a picture of the garden from my window, which I guess would be the last picture anyone ever took from that hotel, when word came that Group Captain Somebody wanted five Canadian officers, and so me and four others were sent to his hotel, and five minutes later we heard the bang. Funny thing was I never did meet that group captain, which is a shame, because I’d sure have liked to shake his hand!’ He grins apologetically at his wife—this is not a story he’d intended to share with her—but Ruth is not going to allow herself to think about bombs and their consequences on Christmas Day. She is watching her sister-in-law, who is gazing at Hank with the sort of awe appropriate for a hero who has defused a bomb or shot down a raiding craft with his air pistol.
Louise, thinks Ruth, has no idea whatsoever of the randomness of fate, the tenuous nature of the threads that spin our lives. But you cannot protect yourself with intellectualism forever, and when Hank quotes Lord Haw-Haw’s broadcast from Berlin, ‘How did you like that, you Canadians? We’ll be back to see you again soon!’, Ruth feels venom rising in her like bile and is afraid of what could vomit out if she opens her mouth. She’s aware that of all the evil things that happened in the war, the supercilious sneers and misinformation of a traitor are not even on the list; she knew people at the time who could listen to him and laugh. However forgiveness is not high on Ruth’s list of virtues—she will never forget his broadcast on the night Miles died, and to think of his mocking Bill’s intended death as well is more than she can bear in polite company.
It may be, too, that when you have seen rescue workers picking their way through your childhood home and can do nothing but hope they don’t bring out any bits of your parents’ bodies while you’re watching, bomb sto
ries will never make for easy listening.
‘Time for Jane to be in bed,’ she announces, her voice surprisingly level. She can guess from the almost imperceptible way in which Louise is leaning towards her guest that Hank is about to hear of the bombing death of his hostess’s parents, and perhaps of her sister-in-law’s role as comforter. Which is fair enough, but is part of the reason why Louise will never hear all the layers of that tragedy. The loss of one set of parents is quite enough for an after-dinner story; two would be melodrama.
Myrtle heats the baby’s bottle in the kitchen, but Bill interrupts her at the stairs and follows his wife to what Ruth still calls the nursery. His mother is relieved; much as she loves Ruth, she has never met anyone so difficult to console, or even to know whether consolation is required.
Ruth herself isn’t sure what her emotions are. She’s been euphoric all day in her various Christmas roles, been briefly engulfed by the old rages and hatreds of the war, the desolation of loss and the relief of love. It’s a heady mix and when Bill slips his arms around her as she straightens up from the crib, she twists against him with the fierceness he’d fantasised about during their long separation, but never dreamed of tonight, putting their daughter to bed at the end of a long day. He finds Ruth beautiful naked or clothed, but never more exciting than in high heels, making her nearly as tall as he, and under her best dress the stockings ending in garters. His hands are already at her skirt when she pulls away—‘Your mother might want to say goodnight to Jane’—but he feels the slight quiver of her flesh as his hand slips upwards between her thighs.
Bill thinks of himself as enslaved by his passion for Ruth but the realisation of the power his touch holds for her is the most potent aphrodisiac he knows. ‘Mother thinks you’re upset. She’ll leave us alone.’ He kicks the laundry basket against the door just in case, and hears the shudder of her breath as his fingers tease through the parachute silk of her knickers to feel her warm and moist and opening to him.
And so, in whispered passion and later bemusement, against the wall and discreetly out of sight of the crib where Jane is falling asleep with her bottle against her lips, Michael is conceived.
Which is why even the Bournemouth bomb story is transformed in Ruth’s memory to a golden Christmas glow.
If Ruth sees stories, no matter how tangled their web, as essentially linear, and Megan understands the universe as an intricate dance of synchronicities past and future, Jane views the world in strata. History to her is associated with place; in one of the parallel universes her daughter talks about, perhaps she is an archaeologist, patiently sorting through layers of earth to discover the stories stacked in dust.
She had played with her brothers on the grass of Port Royal and stood with her husband on the sand of Gallipoli, but it came as an epiphany to her that each blade and grain of the world’s less bloodied corners holds as much history as those wept-over sites. When her EcoFarm group was asked to research the history of the Gundanna Lagoon, not five hundred metres from her own farm gate, she realised she’d found a new metier in life.
The lagoon was a small muddy waterhole straddling the riparian state forest and the old-money Chathams’ end paddock. (‘Isn’t it a billabong?’ Ruth asked, and though Jane explained the difference, her mother was not to be denied the use of such a unique word.) One bend was choked by a fallen river gum and in recent times it had often been scummed with blue-green algae in the summer, but when Megan was small it had been a favourite expedition for mother and daughter, close enough to walk, exotic enough for adventure, and peopled, in Megan’s mind at least, with shadowy presences: ‘They live there but we can’t see them,’ she explained. Jane and Ian added lagoon people to the list of their daughter’s imaginary friends, but as an adult Megan continued to feel the quiet ghosts. Not threatening or creepy, she said, just there, which Jane found creepy enough, and now wondered whether even this project was another affront to these spirits.
She didn’t have to believe in them to know who they were, but it shocked her to realise that after twenty-eight years in this country, she did not know one Aborigine with whom she could discuss their history. And although in the end she found phone numbers for two Koori community groups, neither was able to provide much information beyond a map with scattered dots showing the region’s former meeting places, shell middens and the startling granite domes that rose out of the plains like the backs of breaching whales, an evidently sacred place now quarried and abandoned. Gundanna Lagoon, where water from wet winters would have remained trapped and fertile until the height of summer evaporation, was not marked and the life of its earliest inhabitants remained conjecture. A first-hand lesson in the irrevocability of the loss of history.
The rest of the project proceeded more satisfactorily. Working for the best part of a year, Jane identified the encroaching noxious weeds and, with more difficulty, the true indigenous species, from cumbungi and knot weed to ubiquitous river red gum, recorded the vulnerable status of the Superb Parrot and other wildlife, and finally, in a satisfyingly thick, ring-backed publication, outlined management strategies for control, replanting and protection. The history was relegated to a page of anecdotes from older residents, some in nursing homes and some Ian’s contemporaries, who corroborated his memories of the days when muddy waters were clear enough to drink, when Murray cod could be caught in the bend, eagles soared overhead, goannas scurried underfoot and baby turtles hatched on the banks. If some of the stories were touched with childhood sunshine, the details remained too consistent for them not to be broadly true, and she included them as not only a record of the past, but a hope for the future.
Jane hasn’t returned to the sorting of Ruth’s room since the shock of the dream-presaged photograph, but it must be done, time will run short and there’s no point in putting it off. Etc. However, she continues to procrastinate until the day before she is due to fly, when the piles of belongings can no longer be ignored, and it’s then that she finds the packet of cigarettes under the Poldark on the bedside table. Not deliberately hidden, simply laid down as a heavy smoker might, in easy reach for next morning’s succouring drag, the book dropped haphazardly on top when the lamp was turned off for the night.
This time Jane does not wait to compose herself before facing Mary, marching down the stairs as enraged as if the endangered respiratory system belonged to an adolescent daughter rather than a dead mother.
‘Didn’t you know she’d started again? She was so lonely after your father died; she said a cigarette in the evenings gave her a sense of companionship.’ (A false sense, Ruth had said, but Mary modifies. There is enough hysteria in the air already.)
Lonely. A widow with nothing but a cigarette as companion. Jane knows she should feel guilty, knows she is overreacting, but bad daughter Jane is furious, as if her mother had wilfully, spitefully, clogged up those arteries to avoid saying goodbye. How much longer would she have had without tar and nicotine? Another month, a year, a decade, a day? Nonsmokers die too, even of strokes and even at times inconvenient to their offspring, but at the moment Jane doesn’t believe it. Besides, she’s still stuck on the end of Mary’s first sentence.
‘Again? Mom didn’t used to smoke.’
‘Like the proverbial chimney before she went to Canada! She stopped on the ship. I don’t know if she was seasick herself, but one of the women in her cabin was so ill she vomited whenever your mother lit up. She said after a few days the smell invaded the taste until she couldn’t bear it.’
This is not at all how Ruth had described the war brides’ ship to her daughter. White bread and orange juice, the awesome expanse of ocean, neat anecdotes of her mothercraft lessons.
‘She smoked the whole time she was pregnant with me!’
A more satisfying, self-righteous focus of rage, stripped of guilt though not of futility; no wonder she never grew tall like Mommy. No wonder she, unlike her later-born, nicotine-free brothers, is a direct throwback to the short and stocky Dubois, without a modifying
inch from mother or father.
On the bumpy bus back to civilisation Megan’s mind is split between fear for her grandmother and the more selfish but immediate desolation of leaving Adam. What will be will be, but there comes a time when being takes acting and the thought of being without him is so grey that she cannot see through it. The bodies that had touched so gingerly, so apparently haphazardly, on the outgoing bus, seven days, a lifetime ago, now rub companionably, tenderly, though with some apprehension; legs waiting to walk away touch differently than legs anticipating the continuance of leisurely entwining.
They have talked about everything but this. Everything except what happens now. Distant futures, maybe futures, but not the right here and now of what we’ll do when we get off the ferry in Tsawwassen and is it over, this week that seemed like love, like something that could never end, was it just the sea air and the ancient trees and the sense of freedom? And if one of us doesn’t say something soon, thinks Megan, then the ferry will be bumping against the dock and we’ll be strapping on backpacks and am I crazy thinking he wants me in his everyday life. So I’ll simply say it, ‘Can I stay at your place tonight?’
But she doesn’t, because Adam is saying why doesn’t she call her grandmother as soon as they get home, he’s sure that everything will be alright but it will put her mind at ease, and it stabs her to see how she would have hurt him with that moment’s doubt. The future can be delayed till morning; till she leaves Vancouver.
It’s too late to phone Nova Scotia when they get home; Megan has a feeling that Ruth may be a late-night person, but she also knows that old people go to bed early and Ruth, after all, is old. ‘Phone your parents,’ says Adam, but no one is home. ‘I’ll call back,’ Megan tells the machine, because parents are parents no matter how old you are and they mightn’t understand about her staying with Adam. Or they might understand too well.