Page 120 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘You’ve never been on a big trip before, love,’ he said. ‘Please – let me.’
He’d even accompanied her to the airport in Cairns and waved as she went through the security checkpoint. This from the man who didn’t say goodbye when she moved to Sydney.
Grace Maud said that yoga has taught her that old dogs can learn new tricks, but Patricia’s father has learnt them all on his own. She will miss him, and she’ll come back to him.
Her father’s behaviour was quite at odds with that of her sister; given Annette’s fondness for overseas travel Patricia had hoped she would be interested, at the very least, in the trip, but when Patricia called to tell her, and to ask her to call their father every couple of days, she was met with a lukewarm response.
‘India?’ Annette said. ‘Why would you want to go there? It’s not very relaxing. There are people everywhere. And cows.’
‘I’m not going to relax, necessarily,’ Patricia said. ‘I’m going to do some yoga.’
‘Yoga?’ Annette sniffed. ‘You’ll break something. You’re not very flexible, Patricia, remember? You weren’t very good at ballet.’
At that moment Patricia was tempted to extend her trip indefinitely, but she has found that, somewhat paradoxically, there’s a lot of freedom in knowing she’s travelling with an ending in mind. She’d feel far more pressure if she were simply taking off with no idea of when she might return. This way she has a date and a plan, and therefore she can immerse herself in what’s to come with no expectation that it’s to propel her onto something greater or further. The karma yoga of travel, perhaps.
‘There you are.’ Dennis smiles as she approaches him, then kisses her before she can reply.
It’s the sort of kiss she might once have felt self-conscious about when performed in public, but that’s the other thing about liberating herself from expectations: she’s also liberated from caring about what other people think.
After Dennis had changed his flights to match hers he’d tried to book into the same hotel as her, without luck. So they’d met for dinner last night, and at the end of it he’d taken her back to her hotel and walked her to the foyer. That’s where he’d taken her hand and kissed her.
‘I figure if we’re travelling together that might be allowed,’ he’d said.
‘It is,’ she’d breathed, and he’d kissed her again.
As he kisses her in the airport now, she no longer notices the swirl of people around him. Not until the kiss ends and he takes the handle of her trolley.
‘Come on, let’s get checked in,’ he says, then grabs her around the waist and kisses her cheek.
She expected him to be in shorts, as he usually is; instead he’s wearing long pants and a shirt with the sleeves buttoned up.
‘I like your outfit,’ she says.
‘I could hardly take you away looking like a beach bum.’
His hand is still on her waist and she has to admit to herself that she likes it. May even love it.
‘You deserve more than that,’ he says. ‘Love your dress.’
He pinches some of the material of the broderie anglaise number she bought at Grace Brothers yesterday.
‘Thank you.’ She rests her head on his shoulder as they come to a stop in the queue. There are a couple of dozen people ahead of them, but plenty of time before their flight.
‘I’m glad you changed your mind,’ he murmurs into her hair.
‘So am I,’ she says. ‘About a lot of things.’
Patricia lets herself relax into Dennis’s side, closes her eyes and daydreams about tomorrow and the day after and all the days after that.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
Although it’s been decades since Grace Maud had a baby to look after, she finds Nicholas to be considerably easier than Tom – perhaps because she raised Tom while also helping to run the farm. Her days started before dawn after a night of little sleep, and she hauled Tom around in a bassinet wherever she needed to go. He was a good baby – content to go along with her and interested in everything happening around him – so it didn’t seem too onerous at the time. But she looks back now and wonders how on earth she coped. It wasn’t just youth – it was the lack of option to do anything else.
She doesn’t want that situation for Dorothy, which is why she has Nicholas in a pram in her kitchen and a bottle of expressed breast milk warming in a saucepan.
Dorothy drops off Nicholas on the way to work in the early morning and returns mid-afternoon. By then Grace Maud is usually spent but content, although with the intensity of her new activities her life has changed in a way she sometimes finds hard to believe.
Those new activities include a puppy that Tom insisted she must have because he thought she might be lonely without Cecilia living with her. Cecilia had been gone for several weeks by the time the idea occurred to him.
