In the Company of Strangers

by Liz Byrski

  She’d hesitated then and he could see that she was bordering on tears.

  ‘Raising a family is exhausting and often frustrating but it has huge rewards. In a way seeing them leave and have successful lives of their own is part of that reward but it also … well, it left me feeling redundant. I was still busy but I wasn’t working towards anything, I was just treading water. Does any of this make sense?’

  He nodded. ‘Of course it does, complete sense.’

  ‘And then, quite suddenly, you were there, full on all the time, and I suppose I resented it. Just by being there you were demanding some sort of change. I felt I was being pushed to fit in with you again and I resented it, but at the same time I didn’t know what I wanted.’

  ‘Something to eat, sir?’ the flight attendant asks, bringing the trolley to a standstill alongside him, and leaning over to let down his table. Gordon returns his seat to the upright position, takes the tray of food and asks for a sparkling mineral water. As he unwraps his food he thinks how much easier everything would have been if they could have talked about it earlier.

  ‘I thought I was doing the right thing,’ he’d said, ‘retiring when I did. I thought you’d put up with the job for long enough, that you were waiting to do all those things we talked about when the kids were small.’

  She’d nodded then. ‘I know. The trouble was that we never revised that, did we? We talked about all that when we were younger, but we never thought that what we’d actually want might be something different. I want something totally different now and I think you do too.’

  Gordon picks at his meal and ends up eating just the dreary little salad and the bread roll and finally triumphs over the stubborn plastic that seems melded to the rectangle of cheese. He wonders about Bruce, down there in the cold dark of the hold. Taking him along had been a sign of how he too had changed. He wonders whether it had also been more than that, whether he had been testing Lesley, testing her willingness to compromise. This morning, as he came out of the shower, he had heard her talking to someone.

  ‘No,’ she was saying, ‘you’ve had the last one, but I could make you a piece of toast, would you like that?’

  Gordon, a towel around his waist, had walked to the kitchen door. Lesley was standing by the toaster and Bruce was looking up at her, head on one side. He gave one of his short little barks and wagged his tail.

  ‘Okay then,’ Lesley said, ‘toast it is.’ And then she’d seen Gordon standing in the doorway. ‘He’s eaten the last banana,’ she said. ‘Helped himself to it from the basket in the pantry.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Gordon had said, ‘he does have a weakness for bananas.’

  ‘So I’m making him some toast. Next time I’ll get proper dog biscuits.’

  Of all the good things that had happened over the weekend, this seems to Gordon to be particularly significant.

  don’t suppose I’ll be gone long,’ Declan says, getting up from the table and reaching in his pocket for the car keys. ‘So just sit tight, have another coffee and try not to worry.’

  Alice nods and forces a smile. Her insides seem to have turned to water, her legs are shaking and she wonders whether she will make it to the toilet in time if she needs to vomit.

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ Ruby says reassuringly. ‘You just go, and remember to pay attention to everything.’

  ‘Yes,’ Alice says. ‘How Jacinta looks, and Jodie, and the house, everything.’

  ‘I know,’ he says, putting a hand on her arm. ‘You’ve told me several times. I’ll do everything short of interviewing her and taking notes.’

  They have already driven twice past the end of the street but he drew the line at driving past the house. ‘Jacinta might see us, then when I go back and knock at the door it won’t look good. It’ll look as though you were spying on her.’

  ‘If only I could,’ Alice had said, ‘but okay, I see what you mean.’

  ‘Shall I order you more coffee?’ he asks.

  Ruby shakes her head. ‘You go,’ she says, ‘I’ll get the coffee.’

  ‘Thank you, Declan,’ Alice says, grasping his hand. ‘Thank you so much for doing this.’

  And he smiles and squeezes her hand and they watch as he walks away from the café, starts the car and drives off down the street in the direction of Jacinta’s home. The phone call had been simple and businesslike. Jacinta, Declan had said, was helpful when it came to fixing a date and time. There was a suitcase and several quite large boxes, she’d said, so when he arrived at the house he should reverse into the drive and they could lift everything into the boot.

  Alice knows that he would have preferred to go to Mandurah alone, but her own need to be close to the house while he is there was too overwhelming for her to back down. ‘Please,’ she’d said. ‘I need to go with you, really I do. I’ll go insane waiting here till you get back.’

  ‘I’ll call you as soon as I leave the house,’ he’d said. ‘I’m not comfortable with you waiting around in Mandurah on your own, chewing your fingernails down to stumps.’

  ‘Why don’t I come too then?’ Ruby had suggested. ‘You can drop us off at a café somewhere nearby and then pick us up when you’ve seen Jacinta.’

  It’s the first time, with the exception of Paula’s funeral, that they have all been away from Benson’s at the same time. That day they had organised a small wake in the café and while a few of the staff had wanted to be at the funeral others had volunteered to stay behind and get everything organised for when the mourners arrived back. Alice thinks of it now as she sits alone at the café table while Ruby goes inside to order more coffee. It was, she thinks, a remembrance that Paula would have liked, though perhaps not as flashy as she would have wished. They had decorated the café with pink and white flowers and ribbons and Todd had mixed some of her favourite music to play continuously in the background. Even Paula’s parents had turned up on time and almost sober, presumably having realised that there was nothing to be gained by trying to apportion blame. The number of people who attended seemed to surprise everyone and conversations revealed the same themes: ‘I should have tried harder’, ‘We ought to have reached out to her’, ‘I feel so guilty’. Alice couldn’t help thinking that had it been her funeral the mourners could have been counted on the fingers of one hand, and there would be a complete absence of relatives. She wonders whether she will live long enough for that to change.

  ‘I’m so glad you came with us,’ Alice says when Ruby gets back to the table with fresh coffee. ‘Declan was right, it would have been awful to be waiting here alone.’

  They sit for some time, talking sporadically, looking out across the neat lawns and trees on the esplanade through to the water of the inlet sparkling in the winter sunshine. Alice feels each minute as though it were an hour.

  ‘It’s going to be hard to leave here,’ Ruby says eventually. ‘I didn’t want to come back to Australia – too many bad memories, too much sadness. Not just the stuff with Catherine and Harry, but all those years in the convent. But being here has given me back the good memories, the things that my bitterness had allowed me to forget.’

  ‘So what happened when you went back to England?’ Alice asks. ‘I mean, didn’t they tell a lot of the child migrants that they had no families or the families were dead?’

  Ruby nods, sipping her coffee. ‘A lot of us were told that. Catherine was and she believed it, but I never really knew why. She’d never talk about it, even as an adult. I was thinking about that as I went through her journals, but there’s no explanation there either. I wonder now if she had had a hard time at home and thought she was escaping it. But of course what we went to would have been worse. I always felt that my mother was alive. After the bombing, when I was dragged out of the rubble, I knew she was there but no one would listen. And I knew that my father was somewhere overseas. I never, ever, gave up believing that I would find them one day. And I was right. Well, partly right.’

  ‘So you did find them?’

  ‘I found
my mother. She’d remarried and changed her name, so it took some time, a lot of trawling through records. An awful lot of people were injured when that doodlebug fell, and a number of them died. Those with minor injuries, like me, were taken to a hospital further away, to lessen the load on the nearest one. It was just a terrible muddle, I suppose. Mum was quite badly injured. She was in a coma for several days. By the time she came to and started asking for me no one knew anything about it. You see, when it happened we weren’t close to home. Mum had taken me to visit a friend whose husband had been killed in action. We were right on the other side of London and we were on our way home. I suppose if we had been in our own street when the bomb fell someone might have recognised us, made a connection, but no one knew us there.’

  As she listens to Ruby’s story Alice is reminded, once again, of how obsessively she has focused on her own situation, the schism in her own family, her own sense of being detached, cut off from the people to whom she should be closest. Right now Declan is a couple of minutes’ drive away talking with her own daughter to whom she can’t speak, but he too comes from a family fractured by his mother’s early death and his father’s depression. They’re all aware now of Todd’s sense of abandonment and disconnection from his family. How strange, she thinks, that chance has brought the four of them together.

  ‘What was it like,’ she asks, ‘finding your mother, seeing her for the first time after all those years?’

  ‘It was shocking at first and then, well, perfectly wonderful. I’d always imagined Mum the way she was when I last saw her. I suppose I had some sort of filmic vision of us, not exactly running towards each other through fields of waving corn, but something beautiful. But by the time we met she had just turned seventy and was widowed for the second time. She had very low bone density and had had a number of falls and although she could walk a bit it was very painful and she spent most of her time in a wheelchair, and never ventured far on foot and never outside. She was in a residential care home, quite nice but a home none the less. In my mind I had never allowed her to grow old – I always expected to see her as she had looked that night, so it was a shock. We didn’t know what to say to each other at first, but then she just took my hands in hers and she said …’ Ruby hesitates and her eyes fill with tears. ‘She said, “I was waiting impatiently to die, so that I could see you again, but now I want to live forever.”’ She stops briefly, catching the crack in her voice, swallows and goes on. ‘We took her to live with us, Owen and I, and she lived another eight years and every one of them seemed like an incredible gift.’

  ‘And your father?’ Alice asks.

  ‘He was killed. I thought he was in the army, but he was actually in the air force – Bomber Command. The plane was limping home with engine trouble after a raid but didn’t make it.’

  Alice stares out across the water, imagining Ruby’s mother losing first her daughter, and then her husband. How, she wonders, does a person cope with such loss and still carry on? Did she feel rage when she discovered the truth about her daughter, or was it enough just to get her back after all those years?

  They wait on in silence once more, each lost in her own thoughts, and Alice thinks it is rare to be able to share such silence without tension, without feeling the need to fill it with words. She studies Ruby’s hand lying close to her own on the table. There are about ten years between them but Alice’s own skin is comparatively firm, whereas Ruby’s seems thinned and is scattered with age spots. Do you see that happening? she wonders, or do you just wake up one morning and find that your skin has changed, that veins are more prominent, the knuckles slightly enlarged? How will it feel to grow old with no one around to share the pleasures or the fears? Ruby seems to be managing it, but then she’s that sort of person – one who takes things in her stride. Alice wonders if she can become that sort of old woman – self-contained, competent, always clambering back onto her feet ready to start again.

  Ruby clears her throat. ‘Declan’s back,’ she says, ‘look – there, pulling into that parking space.’

  Alice’s heart leaps. Listening to Ruby had distracted her for a while but now her earlier anxiety returns, multiplied several times, and as Declan pauses to wait for the traffic to clear before crossing the street and then runs up the steps to join them, she feels weak enough to faint.

  ‘All done,’ he says, flopping into a chair beside her. ‘I collected everything and it’s all in the car.’

  ‘And … and what else?’ she asks, frantic now for more, for even the slightest fragment of information.

  ‘Well, Jacinta was very pleasant,’ he says. ‘Nervous, I think, but definitely not hostile. She was curious about you, why you were at Benson’s, why you went there in the first place, what you do there. She seemed concerned about … well, about your welfare, I suppose.’

  ‘And you told her … ?’

  ‘I told her exactly what we agreed, about us being friends, my offering you the job, what you’ve done with the café, all that.’

  ‘And Jodie?’

  He smiles. ‘Jodie is an absolute sweetheart – it’s easy to see she’s your granddaughter. She was friendly and very curious about you. I had to tell her what sort of dishes you make in the café. And she asked if I had a picture of you.’

  ‘I never thought about that,’ Alice says. ‘It never even occurred to me – I never imagined they would want a picture.’

  ‘Well, I did think about it,’ Declan says, ‘and I didn’t mention it to you, but I took along one of the photos from Todd’s birthday dinner – you with Todd and Ruby. When Jodie asked I didn’t know quite what to do but Jacinta just nodded and sort of shrugged and so I gave it to her. Jodie couldn’t stop looking at it. She wanted to know who the other people were, how old Todd was, all that. Jacinta was looking at it too, but then she seemed to get a bit uncomfortable, so I stood up to go, and Jodie asked if she could keep the photo and I said she could. And then I left. But as I was going, Jacinta gave me this.’

  He reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and hands her a stiff white envelope with her name on it: ‘Alice’, not ‘Mum’ or ‘Nan’, just ‘Alice’, and Alice feels sick again at the thought that her daughter can’t bear to acknowledge their relationship.

  ‘What is it?’

  Declan shrugs. ‘I’m just the delivery boy.’

  Alice looks at him and then at Ruby. She is paralysed by the prospect of what it might contain. Her body is tense as steel, her heartbeats drumming through her head. She fumbles with the envelope, tears it open and pulls out the contents. And suddenly she is looking at them, Jacinta and Jodie, side by side, and behind them, Alan. A coloured photograph in a cream cardboard mount, and in that moment Alice feels she holding the world in her hands.

  It’s a very quiet Friday at Benson’s and for Lesley, being left in sole charge of the shop and café is not much of a challenge. The trickle of customers into the café is easily dealt with by the staff – all she has to do is keep an eye on things – and the shop is even quieter. An easy day, but it feels like an important one. Whatever happens over the ownership of the place in the next few months, it’s obvious that both Ruby and Declan want to see it grow. She and Fleur are to expand the retail side by refitting the shop, diversifying the range of merchandise and increasing the volume of the lavender products to service an online business. Fleur will train Todd in production and he will also learn to manage the online accounts, and deal with the postage and packing, until he can enrol in the sound engineering course next year. As she sits at the computer in the shop searching for local crafts people whose work might enhance the range of merchandise, Lesley relishes the fact that she has a significant role in how Benson’s will develop.

  ‘I can’t see how it can fail,’ Gordon had said. She’d shown him around when she knew Declan had taken Todd to a football match in Busselton. ‘I can see why you’re so excited about it, but won’t it bother you to be away from the kids and particularly the twins?’

  �
�I’ve already been away a lot this year,’ she’d said. ‘Karen’s still a bit prickly with me but everyone else seems fine. They’re managing perfectly well without me, which, while being a bit of a blow to my ego, is probably a very good thing. Besides, it’s only three hours to Perth and I’ve explained to Declan and Ruby that I’ll need to go back and forth.

  ‘Then you should sign the contract and stay,’ he’d said. ‘You might even be able to get a long rental on this house. You seem to like it here.’

  ‘I can have it for twelve months,’ she’d told him. ‘It’s what I want to do, but I need to know what you want.’

  He’d explained to her then about the work he was doing in the Kimberley. ‘It will take another year at least,’ he said, ‘and I’d really like to stick with it. But I don’t have to be there all the time. I could come here for breaks, long weekends, a couple of weeks, sometimes a bit more when there’s a lot of paperwork to do. So how would you feel about that?’

  ‘I want us to stay together but I’d like to try some time living alone and doing my own thing,’ she’d said. ‘I could visit you in Broome – I’ve never been there.’

  They were in the kitchen where she was making soup and Gordon, who had just opened a bottle of wine, set it down on the table and came over to hug her.

  It was the first real physical contact since he arrived the previous afternoon, and that in itself was a relief. Lesley had been unsure about the sleeping arrangements and she had assumed Gordon would also feel cautious after so much time apart, so she had made up the bed in the spare room. But he had assumed that they would sleep together and she had decided not to challenge that. The night was awkward; the familiarity of decades had been ruptured and Lesley had kept as close as possible to her side of the bed, lying there tense and anxious about what might happen and how she would handle it. But it didn’t take long for her to realise that on his side of the bed Gordon was doing exactly the same thing. She had relaxed after that and fallen asleep. When she woke she was still firmly on her own side, the space between them as wide as physically possible in a queen size bed. But this had been a good day, and Gordon’s hug cut through the physical barriers.