Page 2 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
Besides, her great-nephew, Luca, needs his own space – as Grace Maud is reminded when he ducks his head to walk in the side door and only takes a couple of strides to reach her. Ellie Maud’s husband was a giant and their grandson is six feet four.
‘GM,’ Luca says, bending in half to kiss her cheek. That’s what he’s always called her, partly because ‘Great Aunt’ doesn’t appeal to her – or ‘Aunt’, for that matter – because it has a hint of dowager about it and she’d like to think she’s not old enough for that, and also because he’s young and the young seem to enjoy adapting their elders’ names.
‘Luca, darling,’ she says. ‘Is Tom being nice to you?’ She glances at her son, who rolls his eyes.
‘Kid gloves, Mum. Like you told me.’
‘I did not!’ Grace Maud says, but her indignation is fake: she did ask Tom to go gently on Luca in his first weeks on the farm. He is helping them out, after all; it isn’t his dream to be a cane farmer. Just because university didn’t turn out to be right for him and he left after one semester, that doesn’t mean he’s going to stay with them forever. Luca has never spent more than a few days in a Far North Queensland summer, or spring, and once he realises what it’s like to live in humidity for months on end he might head for Cairns airport with nary a backwards glance.
‘It’s fine, GM,’ Luca says, grinning. His dark-brown curls fringe his face, and Grace Maud can see that his already olive skin has taken on that look of baked-in dirt that is the result of layers of suntan. ‘Uncle Tom hasn’t got me doing anything dangerous.’
‘Tom, mate,’ says Tom, who is not Luca’s uncle but his second cousin. ‘Just Tom.’
Luca nods. ‘Sorry. Forgot. Um, Tom, they’re asking for you. Something about the plough?’
‘Sure, mate. Mum, you staying for dinner?’
Grace Maud looks from her son’s expectant face to Viv’s. She knows they genuinely want her to stay, but being in this house that is no longer her home has made her more nostalgic than is good for her. It’s why she doesn’t visit often. She’s only here today because it’s the first day of burning and Tom insisted she come, as if it’s a ritual that she has to take part in every year. It’s nice that he still thinks of her as being part of the business. It’s her name on the title, so she supposes it remains her business too.
‘No, I think I’ll get back,’ she says. ‘While it’s still light.’
What she really means is:while it’s still light enough for you to not tell me that I’m too old to drive myself home.That’s been their one battleground lately: the fact she won’t give up her licence. Why should she? Not being able to drive would sentence her to a life stuck in her house, and she can’t bear the idea.
Tom looks disappointed and she’s caught off guard. She forgets, sometimes, that he loves her. It’s so easy to forget when it’s never said, even when she knows that he’s like her in that respect: they use actions, not words, to convey what they feel.
‘Thank you for having me,’ she says, pushing herself up from the chair with great effort. She sits too much these days and it’s made getting up more difficult than it should be. All those years of riding horses when she was younger have made for stiff hips now, and they complain as she half-waddles towards her handbag.
Tom, Viv and Luca follow her down the stairs to her car.
‘See you, Mum.’ Tom bends and kisses her on the cheek, then Viv does the same.
‘GM,’ Luca says as he wraps his long arms around her. She squeezes him briefly then turns and lowers herself into the driver’s seat.
The air is heavy with the cane smoke and she looks towards the fields that are on fire. No matter how many times she sees it, she wonders at the majesty and brutality of it: growing those verdant crops then setting them ablaze to prepare them for cutting.
She’s seen that pattern in her own life: allowing something to grow, then doing something dramatic to pare it back. Or to destroy it. Perhaps it suggests that she’s heartless. Or perhaps it’s all she knows. After a childhood spent observing the pattern, it’s in her blood and her marrow and the very gristle of her. She has known for a long time now that the way we grow up leaves an imprint on us that is both profound and invisible. Our own individual system of ley lines. And she has spent her lifetime wondering if all we do is follow those lines without knowing why, our course plotted before we are even conscious of it.
CHAPTER TWO
‘Pat, have you seen the sugar?’
Patricia winces as, yet again, Gordon calls her by the nickname she can’t stand.Patis something you do to a dog. Or something you call a boozy old bloke at the local pub who stopped being Patrick when he left school.
‘No, Gordon, I haven’t,’ she says, smiling with the bottom half of her face but not with her eyes. Never with her eyes if she’s smiling in Gordon’s direction. She’s learnt – as have all the other women who work here, from the cleaner to the secretary in the admin office to the French teacher, even a senior English teacher like Patricia – that he takes a real smile as an invitation to familiarity. But if they don’t smile, he tells them they’re stuck-up – and as he’s the school principal they can’t afford to not be on his good side. Which he knows.
‘I’m sure you used it at lunchtime,’ Gordon says, standing a little too close.
She takes a step sideways.
‘Lunchtime was a long time ago,’ she trills, wondering if he watches her making tea so that he knows when she has sugar. ‘I think I saw Dennis having a cuppa not long ago.’
She doesn’t want to dob in the PE teacher but she’s also desperate for Gordon to leave her alone so she can depart. Honestly, she has no idea why he keeps trying to crack onto her, apart from the fact that he tries to crack onto every human with XX chromosomes who looks within reasonable reach of legal age. He’s quite persistent with her, though, and has been ever since he started here a year ago.
The first day she met him he’d looked at her feet, shod in her favourite flat, brown work shoes, then at her face and said, ‘Please don’t tell me you’re awoman in sensible shoes. Because that’d be no fun.’ He’d winked slowly, as if she was supposed to know what he meant.
She didn’t, but she’s since found out: he wanted to know if she was a lesbian. Apparently that’s what ‘woman in sensible shoes’ was code for, although she’s never heard the phrase before or since.
At the time she had laughed nervously and said, ‘Well, Iamwearing sensible shoes, so …’ Which was her version of fighting fire with fire.
