The China Garden

by Kristina Olsson

  She listened: there was the sound she woke with. It was something beyond the slamming and crisping of the waves, a sound she knew was the belly of the sea, grinding, rolling, turning in on itself in the great spaces between continents. The deep. Always it had reminded her of her own place here: she was one grain of sand.

  Back at the house she glanced at the contents of the case, scattered on the parlour floor, and felt a wave of irritation again. She turned from them to the kitchen, where she seized cleaning cloths and an empty box and began to clear and clean the old kitchen cupboards. She worked without thinking, conscious only of the need to move, to change, to obliterate. Old cans of peas, rusting at the edges, cans of apricots and peaches, soup – pea and ham, chicken and corn. Worn-down candles, Sunlight soap, an almost-empty bottle of Worcestershire sauce. An ageing colander, aluminium saucepans, plastic containers yellow with use. Thick-lipped cups and unbreakable plates. She pulled them all out, consigning them quickly to the sink or the box. She was barely aware that her blood was pumping more furiously, her hands tipping and shoving and scrubbing.

  When the phone rang she pressed it to her ear with her shoulder and didn’t stop.

  Kate made small talk and Laura answered as she seized bottles and cans from shelves. What are you doing? What’s the noise? Kate asked.

  Cleaning, Laura said.

  Well, you’re going to break something. Stop banging.

  Laura looked down at the box full of cans and ugly crockery and paused. Dropped her cloth and leaned against the kitchen bench, feeling, suddenly, all the weight of the last few days in her arms and neck.

  Mum?

  Why didn’t she tell me? she said. Why didn’t I know?

  Neither Kate nor the miles of ocean between them had an answer.

  It makes me feel like I didn’t count.

  Of course you counted. Laura could visualise her daughter unwrapping her scarf as she came in the door after work, throwing it on a nearby couch: she imagined the gesture over and over; ordinary, comforting. She bent and plucked a teacup from the box, held its fine handle in her fingers. Remnants of gilt edging were just visible around the rim.

  That’s how it always was. That’s how I always felt, she said. She put the cup down. It’s hard for you to see. You’ve never had to plead with me to love you.

  No, Kate said. I haven’t. And I don’t know what it’s like to lose a baby. Down the phone line Laura could hear faint music playing. She tried to recognise it, and in the pause Kate said: Maybe she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it. Who knows. But whatever happened, surely it would have broken her heart.

  Laura gave up on the music and retrieved her cleaning cloth. She ran it idly over the bench where she stood. You’re assuming she had a heart. She smiled grimly.

  Kate hesitated. Then: I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt, she said.

  That night Cress told Kieran about the funeral. I didn’t know Angela well, she said as they finished dinner, but I’m going. I thought you might like to come with me. It’s on Monday. She put her knife and fork together on her empty plate, picked up her water glass. Kieran had never been to a funeral. He knew what it was though. The definition was there in his notebook: the ceremonial disposal of bodies. He’d written it down years before, when it was just an interesting word, not something he had to put together with a person. Just a word, not real.

  Sitting across from Cress, the remains of beef casserole on his plate, he tried to get his head to link them up – funeral and Angela. He stared at the leftover chunks of carrot, the smears of gravy. It was just carrot and gravy. It didn’t help. Cress seemed to be searching the plates for answers too. No, he said finally. No. I don’t think I’ll come.

  They sat at a table that looked over Broken Beach, over a sea that heaved and glittered in the silver light. They made small talk for a while and Laura decided she liked the way Fergus Martin looked, clear greenish eyes and wild hair combed back from his face. She ordered wine and when the waiter left she said, You know, I’d imagined you were some crusty old bohemian lawyer with egg yolk on his tie. Who took pity on painters and writers. She picked up her knife and fork and switched them around.

  You got it half right. He nodded towards the cutlery. You’re left-handed. They were watching each other.

  Right-handed. I eat left-handed. Which bit? The ‘bohemian’ or the ‘pity’? She smiled and sat back and crossed her arms, looking from his face to his shirt, a green and brown batik. He smiled but didn’t reply; picked up his empty wine glass, twisting its stem. So she turned the conversation to her mother’s small bequests, letting him talk about beneficiaries. Then he said, How are you going with it all? The house, the paperwork.

  The afternoon and all its uneasiness lodged in her head. Confused, she said, shrugging. All this stuff she’s left. Jewellery, documents. She frowned, imagining the typewritten words piled hastily in the school port. It could be anyone’s. There’s nothing there that makes me think: my mother.

  Fergus smiled an infuriating smile. Maybe that’s because she was someone else, as well being as your mother, he said.

  Laura fought off impatience. Yes, she said. But I’m looking for the person I knew – mother, whatever.

  Which documents are you talking about? Fergus leaned back in his chair and rubbed a spot on the back of his neck.

  There’s some clippings. Bits of stories from papers and magazines. Phrases, paragraphs, things like, ‘My grief created someone else’s joy’. Someone said that, at an inquiry or in an interview. Laura looked up from the table directly into Fergus’s eyes. I can tell you right now, she said, it wouldn’t have been Angela.

  He gave a low whistle. That’s a tough call, he said.

  She would never have used those words. Not the word ‘grief’. Not in my hearing, Laura said. Thinking: She would never have said it and would deny that she felt it, even as she painted it on canvas and played it on her record player. She called me a sook if I cried when I fell over or wasn’t asked to a girl’s birthday party. She’d say, ‘Don’t whinge, it won’t help. Toughen up.’ And after a while, I did. She played with the edge of her napkin. So it makes me a bit cynical, she said. Why did she leave me this stuff? Why didn’t she just tell me before?

  There was a pause as the wine arrived and they ordered plates of fish. Then:

  Do you know anything about adoption? he said.

  Laura filled their glasses. A tea-light candle struck chinks of light through the wine. Fergus tapped his glass against hers and didn’t wait for a reply. My mother’s sister got pregnant at seventeen to the local copper’s son. In 1949. His raised his eyebrows. You can imagine the reaction.

  Laura swallowed a bigger mouthful of wine than she’d intended. It was cold, very cold. She put a hand to her chest where the liquid burned momentarily. Fergus said: When I was a kid she was just this dotty aunt. Nerves, they called it then. She hardly spoke. She’d come and stay and just stare at the TV, or chain-smoke, sitting on the back stairs. I didn’t take much notice. Then just after I finished law school she jumped off a cliff in the national park behind Angourie.

  He took a swig of wine. Mum asked me to look after the legal stuff, to tidy up her affairs. There wasn’t a lot – she’d never married, but she’d left her jewellery and some cash to the child she’d given up. He grimaced. It was in an old suitcase at my grandmother’s house, tucked under Sylvie’s bed. The jewellery, the money, and some letters she’d written that had been returned. In amongst it there was this small moth-eaten teddy bear. Later, when I’d looked into the whole adoption thing, I wondered if she’d made it for him. Maybe even before he was born, imagining she might keep him.

  Laura looked up as the bistro filled and voices and laughter rocked like a tide around the room. What was that whole adoption thing? She was watchi
ng a young couple lean towards each other across a table, their faces open, undefended.

  An industry! He placed his palms flat on the table. Based on shame, on bad girls who had illegitimate babies. Girls who were told they’d be redeemed if they gave their babies up.

  Their food arrived and they fell quiet. Laura regarded her barramundi. She said: But for Angela? She chewed, thinking. My father stayed, after all.

  Fergus skewered a piece of snapper and began to eat. Then he stopped and said, She wasn’t married when the baby was born. He looked at her. There was a conversation I had with Angela. The day she brought the case for you. She wanted to clear up some legal things, and I asked her if she’d ever tried to contact the boy, if she’d ever lodged an application.

  Laura had been intent on her plate but now she laid down her fork.

  She said no. She said, that was part of the deal.

  The deal?

  The moral equation. That’s what she meant. What she said. The trade. You lose the baby, but the baby gets a good life. Fergus shifted around in his seat, pushed his sleeves up. The candlelight caught the auburn hairs on his forearms, turning them gold. She said, ‘He’ll be better off.’ But that’s what they told them, then. That’s what they told Sylvie. You’re young, you’ve got nothing. There are married couples with homes and jobs who can give your baby everything.

  Then he leaned towards her. She thought she could smell lemons, or limes, or both. These girls didn’t want to give up their babies, Laura. They were bribed. Told it would all be for the best.

  Laura blinked. Considered. Then said: But why didn’t she try to find the boy aferwards?

  I think she had to believe the bargain worked, at least for him, he said, and shrugged. It seemed to be the only way for her to survive. In her mind he went to a rich and happy family, and had a good life, a wonderful life. She imagined him happy, surrounded by things, well educated. She didn’t want to intrude on that, she said. And – he paused again, then: I can’t remember the exact words – but she stood up, I thought she was ready to leave – and she said something like, ‘He wouldn’t have wanted to see me. I was the one who gave him up.’ That’s what my aunt believed too. That she’d given away her goodness along with the baby. That she was no longer worthy of anything.

  Her goodness. Laura turned to look at the sea. Images of her own daughter rolled in and out of her vision as the water heaved and fell. Kate’s tiny, perfect face in the moments after birth. The way she looked in sleep. And her own triumph and pride in having done this thing, growing, birthing this perfect being. Her goodness.

  She turned back to Fergus. I just can’t buy all that, she said flatly. You’re assuming it was the same for everyone, that Angela was just like Sylvie. But there’s no teddy bear in my school case, Fergus. I can only go on my own experience, the mother I grew up with. If she had nerves, they were made of steel.

  Cress watched her grandson’s face, set, unknowable, as he cleared the dinner table. He slid the dinner plates together, gathered the cutlery and hesitated over the pepper grinder and the salt. I’ll bring them, she said, pushing back her chair. You go off now, I’ll wash up tonight. He grinned widely at her and put everything down again. Go on, she said as he kissed her cheek.

  He stepped away and then stopped. But it’s ‘The Bill’, he said, it’s Thursday.

  Cress was already on her way to the kitchen. She waved over her shoulder. Not tonight, she said. Before long she could hear Emmy Lou singing something that sounded like a lament: We lift up our prayer against the odds/And fear the silence is the voice of God. She listened to the song as she ran water into the sink and pushed a cloth over benches and stovetop. How many times had she heard this song, this album? Somehow it had embedded itself in her memory, and she found herself anticipating the next lyric, and the next. We are ageing soldiers in an ancient war...

  She ran a brush around the dishes, her thoughts lost in its circular motion and the fluorescent shine of the suds. Was it the song that filled her eyes – ridiculously, unexpectedly – with hot, unfamiliar tears? She blinked them away, her hand continuing its circle around the edge of the plates. It had never made her cry before. The thought prompted action: she flicked her fingers free of suds and picked up a tea towel to dry them. But she found herself inside the same circle of sadness as she dried the plates, around and around and around.

  Half an hour later, polishing the kettle and toaster and shuffling the canisters into a tidy line, she heard the music stop, and then the sound of the shower. The song, she knew, only added to a feeling that descended as soon as Kieran decided he wouldn’t go with her to the funeral. Right up until then she’d felt a kind of calm about the day, had seen herself, composed, dignified, approaching the grave with her grandson at her side. She folded the polishing cloths and returned them to the cupboard, filled the kettle for tea.

  By the time the tea had drawn and she was pouring two cups and stirring sugar into one, she knew that Kieran had buffered her from this all along. That, for longer than she had ever admitted, Kieran had protected her.

  They walked to the car park, looking up at stars shuffling around the southern sky. Fergus asked her about her work, and the orchard, and she suddenly wished only to be there, in those brown Umbrian hills, the night air thick with light over the trees. She wanted the life she had before this new knowledge, without it. Despite the constant financial fight to keep the orchard alive, the pleas to governments and councils, that life seemed incredibly simple now, innocent.

  It’s in Umbria, she said. That’s where I live for most of the year. Trying to salvage old trees, old varieties of fruit. Apples, pears.

  Like an outdoor museum.

  Exactly like that.

  So you’re an archaeologist. A botanical one.

  They reached her car. She reached into her backpack for keys and said, Did you know that pear trees can live for a hundred and fifty years? More.

  He dug his hands into his pockets and looked at her, serious. No, he said, I didn’t.

  Laura drove home with weariness seeping beneath her skin. She was thinking that she would call Alvaro over the next couple of days, not to check on him but to feel for a moment or two the shrinking of distance that telephones provided, to feel, even to pretend, that she could walk out the door and into the loamy field among all her trees, bend to their leaves and their individual odours, dip her hands in that soil.

  Back at Angela’s house she leaned against the car in the darkness, trying to see beyond it to the shapes of the trees next door, where it all began. Where, as a child, she’d retreated from the painful roses, from the house, from the shed with its windows and silences too easily broken, to big-limbed trees that offered, she saw now, a rough and masculine kind of comfort. Clambering around the reaching branches of mango and mulberry, she’d felt her own imagination arch and weave, felt for the first time the limitless spread of the possible. The glossy beauty of her own potential.

  That, she thought as she climbed the front stairs, desperate for bed, was what she would like to have said to Fergus. It was nothing about archaeology, really, it was about being a beneficiary. Those old trees, she would have told him, make us more human. We owe them. She began to undress as she felt her way through the dark, hands blindly on tabletops, railings, doorways, peeling off shoes, jeans, shirt so that when her hands found sheets and mattress she simply folded herself into them. As she fell into sleep she had an image of the original Fiorentina, limbs extended over the valley and the shoulders of all the generations she had sheltered.

  Friday

  At first, Cress did not recognise the woman standing next to the tall sideboard at the front of the shop. But there was something about her that made Cress pause and squint, something about the way she stood. The woman’s face was turned away, but even from there Cress could tell she was mesmerised, or lost in though
t, her whole body still. Except her fingers, which felt their way along the polished silky oak sideboard as if she was blind.

  Cress went back to her shelf, to the endless ordering of discarded china. Who would ever want all these ugly cups? All these plates that seemed immune to breakage. She pushed them into rough order and looked up at what was left on the shelf. A shadow loomed on her right: the woman was standing halfway up the aisle. Their eyes locked; a wave of anxiety rolled around her belly. Before she could turn away, pretending, ignoring, the woman moved towards her. Laura, she heard the woman say, or perhaps that was her own voice, unsummoned. Laura.

  *

  Kieran was making a sandwich. Two pieces of brown bread, buttered right to the edges. Right up to the crusts, he hated it if they were dry. He took a lot of care, the butter knife was a paintbrush in his hand, precise. The same with the peanut butter. It was more fun, really, because of its texture. He swirled it on, flourished the knife, concentrating. It had to be right. He pressed one slice on top of the other. Used the butter knife to cut the sandwich into four. Nursery squares, his mother called them. She laughed when he made them, nudging him in the ribs. But she always wanted hers done the same way.

  He put the sandwich on a plate and dropped the knife in the sink, vaguely acknowledging it was one of Cress’s special ones. That lodged in his thoughts, and instead of returning to ‘Whiz Kids’, he wandered with his plate into the hallway, his eyes casual, searching out all the other special things. He chewed and nodded at them, one by one, ordinary and innocent on the hall shelf: a silver spoon, an old chipped cup, a doily. On a table at the end of the hall, a little tin soldier, scratched. He was there to guard the door to Cress’s room, but today the door was open, so Kieran kept wandering, eating his sandwich. There was the glass dish on Cress’s dresser, the Virgin Mary on the wall.