by Wendy Orr
In the apple orchard again, her legs are jelly and not just from exercise. She finds brush and curry comb in the tack room and guiltily smooths away all traces of sweat and saddle marks; wipes saddle and bridle with a dish towel from the kitchen and shakes out the saddle blanket, all the while standing back, watching herself and wondering.
The horse belongs to Natalie Gillespie and they won something at the Halifax Royal last year—Jane doesn’t remember, may never have known exactly what—but she does most definitely know that this horse does not belong to her mother, was kept here because of the convenience of the good stable; a valuable, beloved horse that a deranged middle-aged woman had set at a great thick log which could have snapped one of its delicate legs. Or her own, because not falling off must have been a miracle after all this time, and if sorting out visas was not going to be much fun, doing it with a broken limb would have been a special kind of hell.
Twinges of pain are already creeping into her legs and bottom and even shoulders; when the muscles stop being jelly they will set stiff and sore. The puritan in her is glad, or would be if she didn’t have to face the Gillespies so soon. She needs a hot shower but the phone call is more urgent still.
‘Don’t let it be the answering machine,’ she prays, but it’s Ian at the first ring as if he’s been poised over the receiver, and then her own relief and a rush of love, overwhelming, reducing her jellied leg muscles to total surrender. Not that there isn’t also a flippant flicker of relief, now she knows the nightmare’s not true, at not having to sort out and pack up two farms in one week.
Ian’s voice is irritable with anxiety; if she hadn’t known better she’d have thought he was near tears. ‘Has the phone been out of order? Every time I try it’s engaged.’
It would be easier to say yes. ‘I took it off the hook.’
Ian doesn’t know that he’s just been reprieved. He’s still angry, but he does ask: ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m okay.’
‘You don’t sound it.’
Neither does he, but one thing at a time. ‘There’s a problem with my visa. I need a re-entry permit for Australia.’
He explodes, which isn’t like Ian, not on the phone. ‘Fucking dickheads!’
‘It’ll be just a formality.’
‘There shouldn’t be any bloody formality, for Christ’s sake! How long have you lived here? How many years have you paid taxes? And now you’ve got this new job; do they think just anyone could come along and do that?’
‘I’m taping this!’
Ian’s too angry to laugh.
‘I’m not legally Australian.’
‘But you’re my wife!’
‘It’ll be okay,’ she repeats. ‘I’ll start organising the visa and my ticket right away, and by the time I’ve sorted out the house with the boys it should be ready. Are you managing okay there?’
‘It’s not me; it’s Mum. She bought herself a puppy, and of course the bloody thing tripped her up when she was going to bed last night and broke her hip. A friend found her this morning when she didn’t turn up for some excursion. She’d been on the floor the whole night.’
Now he is crying. So’s Jane. She doesn’t want Dulcie to die, not now, not yet; it’s all too much.
‘Is she going to be alright?’
‘I don’t know; the doctor says so. She looks bloody awful. You want the good news?’
‘There is some?’
‘You’ve got a dog. Mum doesn’t want it put down—all she cared about when I got to the hospital was what was going to happen to the puppy, stupid thing, like a fluffy white rat.’
‘So who’s looking after it now?’
‘I am; he’s just gone to sleep on my lap. Little bugger was crying so much about being on the floor, you’d never have been able to hear me.’
Jane’s been married for a long time, she doesn’t laugh, though she might tease later. ‘Never mind, I’ll be home soon. He’ll probably settle once he gets into a routine.’
‘He better.’
‘Your mum’s going to want him back when she’s strong enough. But I’ve been thinking that I really want a dog of my own. This might be the best time to get one. They’ll be company for each other, and I’ll train them so hers will be well behaved enough for her to handle.’
An instant’s silence, barely more than the echo gap of the satellite connection. ‘A little dog, you mean, like this?’
‘Maybe a bit bigger. Something big enough to follow a horse and small enough to be in the house.’
Another instant’s gap. ‘It’s up to you. They’d keep you busy, but you might be right, they mightn’t whinge as much with two. And don’t forget to get rid of that email before your brothers get there.’
Winston’s? she wonders. The adoptees’?
‘The one I sent last night.’
‘I haven’t checked yet.’
‘Doesn’t matter. You don’t have to bother reading it.’
She nearly doesn’t. He sounds just embarrassed enough that she knows it will be description of some problem with machinery or cows, petty now compared to his mother’s real disaster. He’ll have told her to hurry up and get home, make sure her brothers do their fair share because he can’t run this farm on his own, which will also seem petty now that getting home has become so complicated. Right this moment she doesn’t want to know about farm dramas she can do nothing about, and she doesn’t want to feel irritated with Ian while she sorts out her own problems.
But it’s impossible to delete without reading.
I’ve been trying to phone you but it’s always engaged. I got your message so I know you got there okay, but call me right away, even if it wakes me up, because I know you’re alone out there and I hope everything’s alright.
It’s lonely here without you. Standing at the airport window watching your plane leave was such a lonely feeling I didn’t think it could get worse, but tonight it has. It’s strange to think that even though you’ve left England you’re still not on your way home.
Sue asked me over for tea tonight but I didn’t go; one of the heifers broke a feeder in the dairy, and by the time I fixed that I didn’t feel like talking to anyone except you, so I stayed home in case your phone started working again and you called. It’s nearly midnight now and I’m absolutely dead but I can’t sleep. I miss you even more than the last time you went away, or maybe I’ve forgotten how bad that was too. You’ll think I’m a sentimental old fool but I got out the photograph album of the bus trip. It was a long time ago but you haven’t changed that much. I was thinking about the first day, and seeing you there at the bus stop in that blue blouse just the same colour as your eyes, and when you smiled at me I knew the bus trip was going to be alright, and I wanted to get to know you. That’s what I’ve always told you but what I really wanted was to sleep with you and it was all I could think about the whole time we were in Paris and everywhere until it finally happened.
Tonight when I couldn’t sleep and the bed was so cold and empty without you curled up beside me, I started thinking about it, which probably wasn’t a great idea but for some reason I thought of how awkward it was getting undressed in that little tent, and that started me remembering that night in Gallipoli when I first saw you naked, and it was too dark to see much but I could imagine the rest and in the morning it was just as good as I thought. I think I can remember everything we did that night, every touch and taste and how it felt, and then I thought about other times that have been special, like when you came home from Canada when Megan was a baby and I thought you’d be too tired to have sex but you weren’t, and last month the first day the cows went out and we stayed in bed all morning. And I thought about how lucky we are to still have that. That’s why I was writing to you except I wasn’t going to say all that about sex, but I thought maybe you were lonely too in your mum’s house and I wanted to tell you how much I miss you, and not just in bed and not just in the dairy but just talking and being together. I really love you, Jane.
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br /> She would have called the Australian High Commission anyway; thinks now that she’s always known, somewhere deep at the back of her mind, what her decision would be. Certainly since she heard his voice on the phone. But the letter makes a difference; such a difference between uncertainty and clarity, between duty and desire.
The call will be lengthy, complicated and undoubtedly frustrating; she goes first to her purse for the other kind of Visa and the card from the antique shop in Chelsea.
‘That Royal Worcester tea setting—I’d like it shipped to Australia.’
She is at the window seat of her parents’ bedroom with a pile of photograph albums, small black and white pictures subtitled in her mother’s handwriting. A young Ruth in this same window seat with newborn babe: Jane at two days, says the caption, and the next: Bill’s first day home, both her parents standing at the fireplace in the parlour, her father holding the bundled baby. They are gazing at each other over the baby’s head, as if they could not bear to glance away even for the photographer, but it’s the way they lean into each other, an indefinable intimacy, that makes Jane’s eyes mist until she has to blink and look away.
A car is coming down the road, slowing and turning into the driveway; it’s smaller than she’d expect farming neighbours to own and dustier than the rental car her brothers will arrive in. Jane puts the album down without the feeling of panic she might have had yesterday: she’s had some sleep and she’s ready for whoever it might be. The perspective from her window transforms the scene to a tableau of homecoming, and is perhaps also the reason for the strong sensation of déjà vu. A young man gets out, stretching with arms extended while a young woman steps from the passenger seat, her face obscured as she gazes over the fields and orchard, until she turns to put her hand on the young man’s arm in the same gesture Ruth has in the photograph, and her face in that moment is Ruth’s as well.
And Jane is completely and utterly disoriented, because she knows that Ruth is dead, and knows that even if it were some other woman’s ashes sitting in the box on the bed, the Ruth outside the window is half a century younger than the Ruth that was Jane’s mother—and yet her heart leaps in recognition to say, Look! It’s all right. Here she is after all. There is no thought that this could be a ghost, because even through the window the woman’s corporeal state—and the man’s and the dusty little blue car’s—are all too plain, but it seems quite feasible that time has become confused so that past and present and very possibly future have all been seamlessly blended. Which might become distressing if dwelt on for long, but in this frozen moment is a deeply satisfying realisation.
Then the young woman turns to face the house and Jane sees that her heart’s recognition had not been mistaken, only her head’s, and the blending of past and future not as bizarre as it had at first seemed, because it is now clear that the woman is Megan and that the young man is her lover. They are united by the same, though still indefinable, link she’s just observed in the photograph—she recognises the way they turn to each other as the way Ruth and Bill did, as the way she and Ian do, an intimate reassurance before facing outsiders. She sees, too, as Megan tucks her hair behind her ears in what Jane knows is her own mannerism, that although Megan is not a reincarnation of Ruth, parts of Ruth will live on in her, as they do in Jane, and that Jane herself will live on in Megan and in any children Megan may have.
In the end we’re nothing but the stories that other people remember, her mother had written not very long ago, but Jane sees now that the truth is more, and greater. The line extends back further than we can remember, and is less of a line than a web as genes overlap with myth and memory. Ruth’s unknown parents will continue to exhibit their secret heritage in colour of eye, wave of hair and quirk of wit, but the Townsends who loved and raised her will also live on, in the passion for books and learning that their great-grand-daughter shares, and in the heritage that will be passed on, story by story, until Megan’s own great-grand-daughter may not know exactly who it was that learned to fly or moved to Australia, but understand that these snippets are part of the past that make her who she is.
Jane sees, too, that the same web gives strength to the present, and is the reason that she will be strong enough to live at the opposite end of the world from her daughter if she must, just as she has from her mother, because the links that bind them are as intangible and as real as the earth’s meridians that divide them.
Then Megan glances up, sees her and waves, laughing with excitement, and the scene is no longer a tableau of new generations reflecting the past or a potential of new histories—it is her own dear daughter and perhaps a new son, who have driven right across Canada to be with her, and Jane runs down the stairs to meet them.
NOTES ON SOURCES
Chapter 1
GIRL FLIER’S FIGHT FOR LIFE; SIX FEET ABOVE SHARK-INFESTED SEAS: ‘Highlights of the Century: 1930–1932’ Knowledge, no. 201, vol. 17, Purnell & Sons Lit, Paulton, Nr Bristol, 1964, p. 3217.
‘poor little typist’: Grey, Elizabeth 1966 Winged Victory: The Story of Amy Johnson, Constable Young Books, London.
‘The hand that rocks the cradle wrecks the kite’: Fahie, Michael 1995 A Harvest of Memories: The Life of Pauline Gower MBE, GMS Enterprises, Petersborough, UK.
Chapter 2
‘He was in logic a great critic
Profoundly skilled in analytic
He could distinguish, and divide
A hair ’twixt south and south-west side’: Butler, Samuel ‘Hudibras’, quoted in the Literary Calendar of 8.2.2000, edited by Timothy Ervin of Yasuda Women’s University, Hiroshima, Japan, http://litcal.yasuda-u.ac.jp
Chapter 3
‘My ebb is come, his life was my spring tide’: Dyer, Edward 1593 ‘Elegy on the Death of Sir Philip Sidney’, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fifth Edition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, p. 286.
‘the moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow’: Moore, Clement C 1823 ‘A Visit From St Nicholas’, Random House Book of Poetry for Children, 1983, Random House, New York, p. 50.
Chapter 4
‘The female of the species is more deadly than the male’: Kipling, Rudyard, 1911, ‘The Female of the Species’, Kipling: A Selection of his Stories and Poems, vol. II, Doubleday & Co, Garden City New York, 1956, p. 453.
Chapter 6
‘You blocks, you stones, you worse then senseless things!
Oh you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome, knew you not Pompey?’: Shakespeare, William 1599 Julius Caesar, in Tragedies, Everyman’s Library, vol. 155, 1906, J M Dent & Sons, London.
Chapter 7
‘Oh woman-country, wooed not wed,
Loved all the more by earth’s male lands
Laid to their hearts instead!’: Browning, Robert, ‘By the Fireside’, Sean Miller’s Book Page, http//denmead.cc/books/browning_fireside.htm
‘green and pleasant land’; ‘dark satanic mills’: Blake, William, 1804–10 Milton (Preface), Shambala Publications, 1978, Boulder, Colorado, in association with Random House, New York, p. 62.
Chapter 9
‘lovely, dark and deep’: Robert Frost, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, Frost, Robert 1923 Selected Poems, 1973, Penguin, London, p. 130.
Chapter 10
‘And is there honey still for tea?’: Brooke, Rupert 1912 ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, 1914 and Other Poems, 1999, Penguin, London, p. 53.
Chapter 11
‘When Robert Frost was asked why he didn’t write free verse, he replied, “I’d just as soon play tennis with the net down.” ’: Newsweek, 30.1.56, quoted in the Literary Calendar, edited by P. Timothy Ervin, Yasuda Women’s University Hiroshima, Japan, http://litcal.yasuda-u.ac.jp
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