by Wendy Orr
‘They kept offending the gods, and those gods didn’t give second chances.’
Whether it was the book or Bill’s visit or a combination of the two, over the next few years something opened, not a floodgate, but a trickle of memories that Fred was finally ready to share: snapshot snippets of an unimaginable life.
‘The night before the Japanese invaded Batavia,’ he’d say, ‘Jack and me were billeted in this native hut, made of bamboo. It was fairly pissing down outside, pardon the French, and we were sleeping in muddy straw and duck manure. Jack woke me up and said, “You know, Fred, I have a feeling we mightn’t get out of this.” Then he pulled out his whisky flask: “We’d better have a drink; it could be the last chance we get.” He was right, too; it was the last drink we had for a bloody long time. Which reminds me, how about a cold one?’
Washing dishes after one Sunday lunch, while the men watched football and Megan read upside down on the sofa, Dulcie confided that Fred rarely went to bed at all now, the pain of lying flat so great that he preferred to pace the night away and doze in the recliner when he could. ‘I thought about one of those hospital beds you see on the telly, that fold up and down, but he said a bloke would look like an invalid with something like that in the house.’
He died the following day, a bright autumn afternoon not long before his seventy-third birthday. He was digging out a camellia that hadn’t survived the summer heat; the heart attack was quick and thorough, and they were all more than ordinarily grateful that he’d been spared the pain and indignities of further illness.
Ian, however, continued to wish that he’d asked more: ‘Dad told us all he wanted,’ Dulcie said. ‘You can’t talk about something without remembering it, and those nightmares . . . fair enough if he didn’t want them in the day too.’
Which was little consolation to his son, now that no more questions could be answered. Over the next few years he threw himself into an orgy of war reading: biographies of Weary Dunlop to Montgomery; anything at all on prisoners of war, from Patsy Adam Smith’s massive volume of interviews—feeling oddly cheated not to find his father included—to meticulously prepared self-published diaries, often with heartrending drawings, and fiction, which sometimes, he felt, must be closer to the inner truth than the dryly factual accounts. But it was not until he read the Odyssey, reaching past enchanted pigs and supernatural tempests, that Ian felt he might have touched something of what his own father had survived in the alien jungle, pitting his wits and puny strength against its vengeful gods.
Dulcie had never got used to living at Kooring. She didn’t like the house, didn’t like looking out on dry, dusty paddocks, didn’t like being so far from a neighbour. She was a Victorian, and irritated that she had become a part of New South Wales simply by crossing a rickety bridge. When she started paying bills after Fred died, sorting out the intricacies of chequebooks and bank accounts with an ease that astounded her son, and discovered just how much extra her new side of the bridge cost in car registration, she put the farm on the market and found herself a neat new house in the centre of Narling.
It was 1988. Wool was singing a siren’s song of record prices; Dulcie auctioned off the Herefords Fred had spent nearly twenty years breeding, and sold the entire five hundred acres to a dairy farmer looking for sheep and an easier life.
‘She didn’t even ask me!’ Ian spluttered. ‘Just said she’d found a buyer and that was it. I might have wanted to try sheep too.’
‘She tried to discuss it with you,’ Jane protested mildly. ‘You said you’d spent too long building up your herd to sell it now.’
‘I thought that would make her stop and think about selling Dad’s! Anyway, that was a crazy idea, selling this farm to buy his. I could have used Kooring as an outpaddock and run sheep as well.’
Jane didn’t ask where, since it was only two years since they’d bought the farm next door, he’d find the money or the time. ‘She couldn’t stay there without your dad; she misses him too much.’
Privately she suspected that the true cause of Ian’s annoyance was that his mother didn’t seem to be missing Fred enough. Despite frequent tears and constant, emotional references to him, it was obvious that Dulcie had burst forth from her subservient, protected role into sudden competence. Ian’s memory didn’t stretch back to the time when his mother—possibly widowed, possibly deserted, she couldn’t know which—had combined raising a child with munitions factory work, boarding with her mother to save against an uncertain future. If it had, he might have guessed that Fred’s determination to insulate his wife against financial worries was an attempt to make up for those years, or maybe to regain some power and control in his own life. Jane didn’t think Dulcie had ever tried to tease out the reasons; it had been enough for her that Fred needed to be a benevolent dictator, and for over forty years she’d protected him from the knowledge that she’d never needed to be cocooned.
‘It just seems a shame,’ Jane told Sue, ‘that she had to wait for Fred to die before she could be herself.’
‘How did she put up with it? I know he was a nice old bloke, but you wouldn’t catch me keeping quiet all that time!’
Jane didn’t find it particularly difficult to imagine, but the new Dulcie was a shock to her son. The haste with which she upgraded her weekly social bowls to competitive pennant, joined a Probus club where she learned to speak in public without more than average terror, and climbed onto widows’ bus tours of gardens and wineries (‘She’s never home!’ Ian complained) seemed positively indecent in the first year After Fred.
Within three years, when he’d become accustomed to Dulcie’s new persona, annoyance and dreams of sheep farming would both be obliterated from Ian’s memory. By then wool and lambs were equally worthless; hobby farmers were inundated with offers of lawn-mowing sheep, and family farms were going bankrupt. The new owner of Kooring would shoot his flock ram by ram and ewe by ewe, taking the government’s incentive a step further with the final addition of his own body to the freshly dug pit.
The wallpaper in Jane’s bedroom is Sears Victorian, a delicate blue-flowered pattern she chose in grade 11, a lifetime ago. In fact, apart from the addition of a folding bed in the corner for Mike’s visiting children, very little has changed at all. Except her.
She wonders if this is how her mother felt when she walked into the unchanged clubroom at the air base. Had she needed to look around at the clues—the changed fashions, the mobile phones, the digital watches—to convince herself that she hadn’t slipped back in a time warp?
It’s not long since your last visit, Jane tells herself sternly; four years from the last time she slept in this bed. There’s no particular excuse for this disorientation.
The day had started well enough: and though the morning seems a lifetime ago, now, it’s no more than the usual illusion caused by rapid geographical shift. There’d been a last long walk in Burnham Beeches with galumphing dogs, a last attempt at persuading Mary to visit Australia and knowing that she wouldn’t, not while the world had stray dogs and hedgehogs left to adopt. The packing wasn’t difficult—yesterday, when her cigarette rage had settled, she’d finally sorted through Ruth’s case: a cardigan to the smaller and stouter Mary, a blouse and a scarf for herself, the rest of the clothes to Oxfam. There was something irrevocable about bundling good clothes for an op shop, as if until then she hadn’t been quite sure whether Ruth might need them again.
The books were sorted similarly—battered bus trip Poldark and Barchester Towers to Oxfam; a new, beautifully dust-jacketed James Herriot an obvious and presumably intended gift for Mary. Britain from the Air and a few products of her mother’s literary tour, Jane packaged and sent to herself, sea mail. There will be enough, she thought, probing the thought for avarice, to carry when she eventually returns home. Her now home, the one where Ian is, in Australia. The word is not always exclusive.
She took the Poldark back out of the Oxfam sack for the flight, then repacked her things into her own shabby suitca
se and her mother’s new one, Ruth’s jewellery—the pearls from her twenty-first birthday, the cameo brooch from her thirtieth, wedding and engagement ring—safely in her handbag. The box of letters, still unread, fitted into her mother’s wheeled, stewardess-type bag. As did Ruth herself. Mother-in-a-handbag, Jane thought, as if she might suddenly be required to market it. Take her anywhere; travels free! Also the funeral director’s form, easily accessible for the more likely question of what’s in the box: heroin or heroine? (No one asked. She was almost disappointed, she’d rehearsed for so long.)
It was more difficult than she’d expected to say goodbye to Mary. She’s ashamed that it wasn’t until the last minute that she’d realised just how much Mary meant to her, in her own right, not simply as a repository of memories or a last link to her mother; humbled, too, to realise just how much she means to Mary. They hugged for a long moment, Jane reassured by the older woman’s solid bulk, though her cheek, when kissed, had the softness of age.
‘Keep in touch,’ Mary said, eyes welling, and neither needed to finish the sentence, ‘now that Ruth’s no longer an intermediary.’ Jane wondered if last night’s dinner was an adequate thank you for all Mary had done, and knew that nothing could be. ‘I’ll phone every month or so,’ she said.
In the departure lounge she wiped away tears that hadn’t fallen on that nightmare trip ten days earlier; settled herself by checking that passport and ticket were safely stowed, boarding pass bookmarking the unstarted Poldark. The seat number was surprisingly low: Jane had always been convinced, on no particular evidence except the general rule of life, that only attractive women get flight upgrades, but found herself ridiculously excited with hope. And although she claims not to be superstitious, when the flight attendant did in fact wave her to a plush seat in front of the curtains, she couldn’t help seeing it as a sort of omen: the gods were smiling.
If they were, it was cynicism rather than kindliness. Spacious seat, freer air and flowers in the bathroom notwithstanding, it’s still a long time to sit in one place, and although Halifax Airport seemed a friendly, manageable size after Heathrow, the conversation about her passport had taken a little time and a lot of emotional energy, so that it was well after eight, or well after two a.m. in London, by the time she’d retrieved her mother’s car from the long-term carpark. It might have been more sensible to have gone to a motel for the night, but she was quite unable to visualise finding one and sleeping there alone. She could picture herself driving, so that’s what she did.
It had been such a long, special-occasions-only drive when she was young, nearly ninety miles from the farm to Halifax, but in the world she lives in now, a hundred and fifty kilometres had shrunk. Except for tonight. Tonight, driving an unfamiliar car on what was now the wrong side of the road, windscreen wipers waving to signal every turn, the farm with its empty house kept receding into the distance, further than the longest childhood drive.
The eventual turn-offs were, however, faithfully familiar: Applevale and then Evelyn’s Pond, the road to the farm and there was the house, appropriately ghostly in the headlights. She parked in the shed and sat long enough that the sensor light, new since her last visit, switched itself off and she had to get out and stumble towards the boot before she could see. The suitcases weren’t heavy but combined with the hand-luggage to be momentarily a burden too great to bear. The wheels jerked on the unevenness of the shed’s wooden floor. She thought this was probably the first time she’d ever unlocked the kitchen door herself, and the first time she’d ever been entirely alone in the house—without people occasionally but never without a dog or a cat to share the echoes.
Through the house quickly, pulling curtains shut in every room against the odd chance of neighbours or a passing car spotting the light. Only local cars would pass and locals would know that Ruth had been away. Jane is not ready for visitors. She leaves her unchanged, unsettling bedroom and returns to the kitchen where the thin, dulling layer of dust suits her mood. She badly needs a cup of coffee. Chamomile tea, Megan would have said, or chrysanthemum to calm the nerves, but Jane wants coffee and wouldn’t mind it laced. Switching on the kettle, she drags the suitcases up the stairs and down the hall to her room, places her mother’s casket on her mother’s bed, makes the coffee and takes it to the armchair by the kitchen phone. There’s a chance Ian will be having coffee too, breakfast type.
‘I’m here,’ she tells her disembodied voice. ‘Call me in the morning; I’m going to bed now.’ She can’t tell him on the answering machine, would avoid telling him at all if it were avoidable.
She takes her coffee to bed but can’t sleep. ‘Not surprising!’ Megan would say.
The immigration official had seemed so casual as she flicked through the passport, pointing out that Jane hadn’t filled out the permanent address details.
‘Sorry,’ Jane said. ‘I live in Australia.’ As if to prove that she did have some sort of permanent abode, even if she hadn’t thought it worth registering. The woman flicked further to discover there was no Australian visa.
‘But I live there,’ Jane repeated, not panicking yet, ‘I don’t need one.’
‘You do,’ said the woman, and Jane remembered at the same instant that it was true. She’s always had a passport, organised against future emergencies and wholly justified by the present one; but the previous re-entry visas had been organised at the same time as tickets.
‘There’s a fast-tracking system for tourist visas, because of the Olympics. But you want to stay there?’
Jane did.
And still does, but lies in the darkness besieged by monster stories; one of them an elusive clue, a tale so terrible that the only thing not blocked from her memory is a feeling that she ought to have paid attention, like the realisation as one is sucked down into the waters that a half-glimpsed sign had read Dangerous Rip. She does remember, however, the Australian war brides who’d wanted to return from the States when their husbands died, ten years or so ago, and found that they were no longer Australian and no longer welcome. Then there was the old man who’d emigrated as a boy, fought for Australia in two wars, and made the mistake of returning to the old country once before he died: a quick visit indefinitely extended by his lack of re-entry visa. Who wants an eighty year old migrant? the government had asked, or so the current affairs programs reported.
The problem with news stories is that you don’t always hear the ending. And if you don’t hear, you’re free to make up your own, depending on your state of mind at the moment.
‘Phone the Australian High Commission in the morning,’ the official had said, in a soothing tone that suggested Jane’s face was more distressed than her brain had registered. ‘It should just be a formality.’
‘Phone the Australian High Commission in the morning,’ Jane repeats to herself now, as if this is something she is likely to forget. It sounds Gilbert and Sullivanish, or was that the Lord High Executioner? It also sounds like the start of a list: go through papers; notify social security, insurance, lawyer, the myriad of relatives, whoever else she’s supposed to notify; find the will; talk to Gillespies next door.
On the scale of jobs she does not want to, which the list is composed of exclusively, visiting Gillespies is only one step down from telling Ian she doesn’t have a re-entry permit. No matter how much they liked her mother, the neighbours have been leasing the farm since before Bill died and their primary interest will be details of property sale or lease—decisions, legalities and more indications of the irrevocability of death and the end of a family farm. Seventeen eighty-seven when Richard Leighton had been granted the land, a generation later when his youngest son Timothy had built this house on his quarter inheritance. Our genes all stretch back equal distances into history, but there’s something intriguing about knowing that the bearers of those genes walked the same fields, climbed the same stairs to bed, that you do. Their stories won’t change if Jane no longer has the right to walk these fields or climb these stairs, but hers will.
>
However, it’s not just her history, it’s Mike’s and Rick’s too, so meeting Gillespies can be legitimately shelved until they’re here and the will’s read. Which still leaves plenty on her list.
So much, in fact, that she gives up the attempt to sleep and gets out of bed to pull on socks and the dressing gown from the wardrobe. It’s her own, the baby-blue cosy one she’d bought in her first year of teaching, and as familiar against her skin as if it had only been slipped off for this morning’s shower.
Down the hall to the old trunk room, Ruth’s little library. She’s forgotten that it’s been altered since she was last saw it; the tiny alcove at the entrance is now a powder room, just enough space for a toilet, the smallest handbasin and a sliding door. Luxury, thinks Jane, who has often spent an hour debating how badly she needs to leave the warmth of the house in the middle of the night.
The library itself, except for the addition of computer and printer, is unchanged from her childhood: bookcases from Austen to Woolf, flowered yellow wallpaper on the fraction of bare walls, wooden desk in front of the bubbled lead-glass window. If the ghost of Ruth is anywhere, it should be here, rising from the old maple armchair.
Envy for the comfort of an inside toilet is swamped by a much stronger, almost primeval longing for a room of her own. I’d give anything, Jane thinks, though she knows that’s an exaggeration, for a room that is hers as this room is Ruth’s. A place that expresses her own personality—because although it’s difficult to believe at the moment, when it’s not the middle of the night after a transatlantic flight she does have some idea of who she is—but it’s not the decorating, not the paint colour or the furniture, it’s the freedom to choose whatever she might desire without worrying what anyone else would want or think.
‘But you use Megan’s room,’ Ian would say if he could hear her thoughts, which he can’t; it’s one of life’s lessons Jane needs to learn, that he can’t hear her unless she speaks.