The House at Evelyn's Pond

by Wendy Orr

  Then they have baths, separately because it’s a small tub and they are really extraordinarily grimy and their hair is greasy but stiff with salt. Adam orders Thai takeaway because even noodles seem too much effort to cook, but by the time the delivery boy comes they have thought of something much more urgent than food, and the gang dang and the phad Thai phuk have to wait to be microwaved for breakfast the next morning. And making love in a bed in an apartment is not the same as loving in a small tent with the waves breaking on the beach, but there is something to be said for a good mattress and fresh sheets, so that sometimes it is much, much nicer.

  There is also the feeling of waking with the body of someone you love still wrapped close around you, and lazy morning loving. ‘Whatever we do today,’ says Adam, smug at having used up their entire supply of condoms, ‘I’ll have to get to a drugstore,’ which Megan says sounds as if he needs a quick hit of heroin; but making love to her, Adam says, is more addictive than any drug. None of which is terribly original, but is part of the process of laying down their own private mythology, as well making them both feel infinitely desirable and sexy, which isn’t such a bad thing either.

  They’re still languidly replete from this last fix when she asks, ‘What are we going to do?’

  Because it’s now obvious that the magic is not just to do with holiday hedonism and is everything to do with life that goes on and is beginning to seem as if it cannot go on without the other. And they both know that Megan means after the holiday but Adam believes in plans and logic and is not quite ready to speak the future out loud, when it will become real. When you stop to think about love, it seems amazing that anyone could do it, could take the risk, could say no to a life which is spinning along quite nicely on its own and jump headfirst into someone else’s, as if the writer had changed the plot midway through the story.

  ‘You’ll phone your grandmother,’ he says, procrastinating, ‘while I make some coffee. And when you hear that she’s fine we’ll decide.’

  There is, of course, no answer. ‘Out shopping?’ Adam suggests, and Megan tries again, after coffee, after breakfast, after shower, until finally it’s late enough for her mother to be awake in Australia.

  Her mother is not in either. ‘She must be in the dairy already,’ says Megan, but is not convinced and this time she leaves Adam’s number. Her father phones back: ‘I’m afraid Nan died last week. Your mother’s gone to England to get her.’

  Megan had forgotten about her grandmother’s bus tour, which was to have been over long before her own arrival at the farm; and although she’d thought she was sure Ruth was dead, she realises now that she hadn’t been, not at all. She feels surprisingly lost before anxiety about her own mother overtakes her. The bleakness of the trip is not easy to imagine.

  ‘Bloody awful,’ Ian agrees. ‘But she’s having a few days with Mary before she takes the ashes back to Evelyn’s Pond. Your uncles are flying out to meet her there.’

  Adam holds Megan close as she hangs up and the back of her mind thinks how nice it is to be held like this, just for comfort, and maybe that’s why men were made bigger and stronger, for feeling safe in times of need. Even strong women are allowed to think like this when tragedy falls hard on the heels of love.

  ‘Poor Mum,’ she says at last. Her own trip is thrown into confusion too, but she doesn’t mind that, any more than she sees the shadow of exiled daughters and mothers over her own life. She phones Mary’s. ‘I’m okay,’ Jane says. ‘But you know the boys’—forgetting that Megan doesn’t—‘they’re getting there Saturday morning and they’ll go home again Sunday night. We’re not going to be able to organise everything in one weekend. And I can’t leave your father for too long this time of year!’

  She finishes by telling her daughter not to worry; she feels better for having a whinge; the important thing is that Megan should have this holiday she’s planned for so long.

  ‘I think I should meet her there,’ Megan says, staring at the phone and wondering whether it’s possible to become addicted to being held comfortingly. ‘She sounds like she’s going to need some help.’

  ‘I’ll drive you,’ says Adam quixotically. Which would be a sensible idea if Canada were the size of Luxembourg, or if trains, planes and Greyhound buses were all on strike. Or if he were in love, that song of poets now reduced by treacherous Italian scientists to a chemical imbalance with the properties of an obsessive-compulsive disorder. Luckily Megan and Adam have not yet read this research, so they consider the idea as if it were the product of a rational mind.

  ‘You’ll see more that way; we can stop where we like.’

  ‘Do you still have that much leave? Don’t you have any plans?’

  ‘I was just going to visit my parents. They won’t mind.’

  Maybe they won’t. They might be thrilled to hear that their son has been overwhelmed by love and will welcome Megan with open arms if they meet her one day. Or this could be the first step of a long-held grudge, a bitter family story about the time Adam promised to help them fix up the cottage or go down to the time-share in Mexico, and dropped them at a moment’s notice. Either way, it won’t make any difference to Megan and Adam’s decision now.

  And so practical, pragmatic Adam finds himself packing again; they pick up Megan’s suitcase from the Y, picnic supplies from the supermarket, maps and accommodation guides from the British Columbia Autoclub. Two hours later they are on the road out of Vancouver, heading towards the Rockies, and ultimately, a continent later, the Annapolis Valley.

  There’s something comforting about maps, Jane thinks. Maps are defined, with clear starting points, routes and destinations; north is north no matter where you are in the world, even in upside-down hemispheres where cold is unaccountably to the south (except that it is not unaccountable at all, logic being the other pure pleasure of geography).

  She’s never worried that the possession of a sense of direction seems to be considered unfeminine by some psychologists and a majority of men—Ian is not one of them, and neither was her father. And she is impatient with the theory that women are inherently unable to navigate, oestrogen defeating spatial skills on the challenge of heading south without turning a map upside-down. This atavistic line never explains why cave women, wandering further than usual in a quest for berries or straying child, would not have needed to find their way home, or why stories handed on from one generation of gatherers to the next wouldn’t have included some useful geographical data: the clear-water spring on the sunrise side of the hill; the magic mushrooms on the cold side of the fallen tree.

  In any case, whether her forebears had or not, Jane finds navigation, real or virtual, a reassuring activity.

  She just sometimes wishes that life could be as easily followed. If only destinations were known; if missed turn-offs and wrong ways were quickly obvious. Not that she’s sure what fresh starts she’d make, but that’s the point: with a map she’d know.

  If navigation is something that comes naturally to Jane, she is intrigued on the other hand by the amount of housekeeping lore that Sue, that most women of her generation, know as self-evident truth but that she must discover by trial and error. A pinch of salt to stop colours running in the wash, pegging clothes on the line inside out to prevent fading—this is not the type of knowledge that interested Ruth, and no matter how frustrated Jane becomes when she learns that her sheets might not have pilled so badly if she hadn’t washed them with the towels, she’s always been slightly smug about a mother who’d sooner discuss Lawrence than laundry. Which is perhaps why, when Megan left home and Jane passed on her own few Heloise hints, she felt as diffident as if attempting some last-minute birds-and-bees session.

  The role of housewife sits lightly on Ruth, as if it’s one she’s trying on for size and is likely to discard at any moment. It has nothing to do with loving Bill, or her happiness at choosing this life, or how much a part of her the house, the farm and the region have come to be. She often says that she doesn’t know how her M
ama could have shared her house for so many years with the cook and the daily, or the garden with the gardener, let alone accepted the strictly limited role Nanny had allowed in childcare. In fact she is surprisingly good at what she does, determinedly learning everything that a good farm wife needs to know. Myrtle is fond of telling anyone who will listen that, although her daughter-in-law arrived with barely the nous to boil water for tea, after a year she could have won prizes in the exhibition, if only she could have been persuaded to enter.

  Myrtle exaggerates slightly on both ends. Ruth becomes a competent everyday cook, working her way through her war brides’ recipe book, but the hands that could throttle back a twin-engined fighter plane produce heavy pastry and chewy cakes, and she quickly loses interest in this particular skill. And her love–hate relationship with the wood stove lasts for ten years, until the day that Simpson Sears delivers a glossy white electric stove, with elements regulated by precise dials and an oven that not only goes from cold to hot in twenty minutes but stays there without a constant vigil. The monster itself, relegated to baking potatoes or simmering soups as it warms the winter kitchen, becomes purely traditional and once again lovable.

  The garden holds her longer. Myrtle’s interest in flowers had not extended beyond a narrow bed of peonies and columbines beside the front porch, and Ruth will leave it like this for years, until her children leaving home throws her into a new frenzy of creativity and planting: pansies, petunias, crocuses, daffodils and roses to throw bright colours against darkly manured beds. However, from the very beginning she finds something innately satisfying about nourishing her family with vegetables she’s grown and fruit she’s picked, so that Myrtle’s vegetable garden is continued and expanded as soon as the snow thaws in Ruth’s first Canadian spring.

  As a teenager Jane will ride her bike in the summers down the hill, past Evelyn’s Pond to the corner of the road to Applevale, where she will board an old pick-up truck to Gordie Grimard’s strawberry farm. It’s standing room only by the time she joins, clinging to the jolting wooden cage while the bravest take turns waving at passing cars from the back bumper. She will never earn as much as she hopes, never as much as the Chase twins, who were born with strawberry-seeking fingers that turn their summers to gold, but enough to buy a new bridle, a heavy German snaffle bit to go in it, and mascara from Zellers. She will enjoy, for the first mornings at least, the sense of camaraderie and honest exchange of hard labour for earnings, and by the afternoons she will lose any doubt that her mother is right about school leading to university rather than work. And although the berries will regain their sweetness with time, the smell of hot strawberry leaves will nauseate her for the rest of her life.

  Ruth’s picking is not on a similar scale. Her berries ripen in short rows, at first barely enough for dessert—‘pudding’, Ruth calls it, even when it’s fresh fruit with cream; carrots wave feathery tops, begging to be pulled; beans dangle from their vines; tomatoes plump and redden. Eventually there is more than enough for a meal, for a week of meals, and Ruth discovers the one household task that will bring her a true sense of satisfaction.

  It’s not just the food, though after the long rationed war years, when even if one rarely went truly hungry, appetite was seldom tempted and rarely sated, food will never be underrated again. It’s not just because it requires one intense, though prolonged, burst of energy or because it’s a clear-cut, slightly technical job at which she quickly feels competent. It’s all of these, haloed with a ring of tradition and continuity which she is never able to feel when icing brownies or ironing Bill’s good shirt.

  She cans tomatoes and beans, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, plums, pears and peaches; makes apple sauce, pickles (both dill and bread and butter), tomato ketchup and relish, and jams and jellies from anything that could possibly be smeared on bread. ‘Don’t stand still in the kitchen,’ Bill tells the children every summer, ‘or you’ll wind up in a bottle and be served up for Christmas.’ In the weeks beforehand she rewashes bottles, inspects for chips and cracks, replenishes her supply of lids and sealing wax. For a month the big canning kettle is never off the stove; the compost bucket overflows with kernels, pips and peels, and the kitchen could be mistaken for a peculiarly redolent sauna. From an up-ended chair on the corner bench, a linen udder drips apple juice into a bowl; boxes of fruit wait their turn along the walls, there is a constant rapping of bottles on counters to knock out spoiling air. Boiled jars are stacked in precise pyramids to cool, jellies catching the light like cathedral windows, the jams deeply red or warmly apricot, and the peaches golden and perfect.

  Finally the kettle is moved back to the shed to collect dust and spiders for another year, and the bottles are moved to the pantry: satisfyingly generous, orderly rows of bounty, and sometimes surprising Ruth during the dark days of winter with their promise that spring will come again.

  Of all the jams, the jellies and preserves, the blueberries remain her favourite. She doesn’t particularly like their taste, but she loves the picking. It is an excuse to ramble away from the house in the sun on the cow path down to the low pasture, or if the midday heat has risen past pleasure, detouring through the woods; the secret joy of stumbling across the first ripe clusters, the powdery sheen of their deep blue against the green.

  One year, when the children are in school and Ruth is still on her Acadian study quest, quizzing Marie-Josette on folklore, she begins collecting herbs and wild plants, dandelions for salad, teaberry and tansy for tea. It is essentially similar to what she might have learned from any British countrywoman but, as Bill points out, it would not have been so interesting in her own language and environment.

  To her family’s relief, the canning season brings her back to more conventional foods, and that August Myrtle, having nagged for years about the exhibition, slyly enters a gift bottle of blueberry preserve. It comes home with a blue rosette. ‘What did I tell you?’ asks Myrtle, and Ruth, though mocking her own reaction, is amazed at how pleased she is to have tangible proof of being a proper farm wife.

  Not that Bill, who considers blueberry preserves the least of them, has ever doubted her wifely attributes. He has never got over his wonder that she should be his, this lovely, clever woman who turns to him in the night with her eyes soft, placing his hand warmly between her legs or tracing her fingers across him when he’s on the verge of sleep. He wonders if this is how it is in all marriages, but he looks at his friends’ wives, seeing them homely and plain beside Ruth, and cannot imagine it. Then flushes with painful, shameful rage at the thought of any of his friends wondering the same of her.

  He can’t imagine what his life would have been like with any of the girls he knew before the war, with the women his friends have married. That is, he can see exactly what his life would have been like, but can’t picture himself in the scene. It’s easy enough to imagine the porch better swept and a bedside table clear of books; what is beyond understanding is that there could ever be that leap of desire at watching another woman undressing each night, or the pure pleasure at her wit and conversation.

  The neighbours are not all equally convinced, although—except for the ones who have entered blueberry preserves themselves—the little victory doesn’t hurt. Many of the older members of the community and some of the younger will die without ever being sure what to make of Ruth. Her accent and bearing immediately labelled her as stuck-up, but opinion is later divided; she’s not lazy, though her house is not as apple-pie as some people would like; she is generous at bake sales and browses happily for white elephants. But she doesn’t fit in; even her friends admit that. She quotes poetry, confusingly and unselfconsciously; ask her if she misses England and she’s more likely to reply, ‘And is there honey still for tea?’ than answer the question. At a time when women rarely drive at all, she drives fast and far, insists on learning to use the tractor—and the rumour persists that she was a pilot during the war. Yet she remains the most elegant woman this side of Wolfville.

 
It’s the reading, the gossips decide. Can’t be good for anyone, all that book-reading.

  If you drop in for a cup of tea, there’ll be a book open on the kitchen table, if you stay too long her eyes will stray back to it; in fact the books in that house seem to wander unaided from their proper place in the parlour bookcase to chairs, windowsills or wherever Ruth happens to be. They continue to roam even when the storage problem is solved shortly after her thirtieth birthday, when her inheritance begins to trickle through. There is a surprising amount of it, although she can’t have it all at once.

  ‘Do you want a trip back to England?’ Bill suggests.

  But Ruth knows exactly what she wants, and it’s not a long trip with two tiny children, back to a country where her friends are scattered and Cousin Mary the only relative not dead or estranged. Practicalities first: a proper bathroom, with a good deep bath, sink and matching toilet, is built into the laundry off the kitchen. That takes most of the first instalment, but what’s more important is that she now has an allowance. Her own money.

  Ruth had known it would be difficult to give up flying, but it’s a shock to find how much she misses the pay. She hadn’t realised she was so acquisitive. It takes another generation’s perspective to see that the money itself is not the point. It doesn’t matter how generous, how trusting Bill is, the habit of financial independence proves a difficult one to break. And no matter how grateful she is for the selection of English magazines, newspapers and books that Mary sends twice a year, it’s not the same as choosing herself. Now she writes to Foyles, and when it’s confirmed that books can be shipped direct from Charing Cross Road to her door, spends a week of dreamy evenings compiling her list.

  Two months later the crate arrives: a complete set of Jane Austen, most of Dickens (Bill already has Great Expectations and David Copperfield); Kim and Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rupert Brooke’s Poems 1911, and two newer books: Nancy Mitford’s Pursuit of Love and Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (both of which she enjoys, but far from making her homesick, they make her new life more real in comparison). For Jane and Mike she’s chosen a thick selection of nursery rhymes, Tom Kitten, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, The Tailor of Gloucester and a picture book of Jack and Jill whose drawings seem disappointingly twee compared to the ones of her memory.