Page 34 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘Now, why don’t you tell me what’s happened?’ Grace Maud says as gently as she can.
She’s never been a person given to eliciting confessions from people. As a teenager she didn’t sit around with other girls and gossip; she had Ellie Maud, so she’d had no need for anyone else. She didn’t have a daughter to practise on, and her granddaughters were never interested in spending time with her – probably because they lived with her and certainly because they thought she was part of the furniture.
Grace Maud used to think about telling Tom that he was spoiling his children and that they would never learn to appreciate the value of the hard work their parents put into things. But she thinks they know it now, living in Brisbane and constantly calling and asking for money that Tom has finally stopped giving them.
‘You can live for free here,’ Grace Maud heard him say once, when he was on the receiving end of one of those calls. ‘Right. Well, you’ve made your choices, Edwina. I can’t keep paying for them.’
Grace Maud thought at the time that Edwina was lucky it wasn’t her on the phone, otherwise she’d have given her unsolicited opinion of both girls. She also wanted to tell Tom that it was too late to turn off the tap when he’d kept the rivers of cash flowing all his daughters’ lives. He’d trained them to depend on him; he shouldn’t have been surprised that they continued to do so.
Cecilia, on the other hand, is a resourceful young woman who is managing her studies alongside her work for Grace Maud, and never complains about anything. Although today she has clearly blown a gasket, as Grace Maud’s father might have said.
‘It’s my mother,’ Cecilia says, still sniffing.
Grace Maud looks around for a tissue, then remembers she has a clean one in her pants pocket and hands it over. ‘Is she all right?’ she asks, thinking something terrible must have happened to prompt these tears.
‘Yes!’ Cecilia says exasperatedly. ‘She’s fine! But I’m not!’ She dabs at her eyes.
Grace Maud sits and waits for her to go on. Cecilia needs her to listen more than speak.
‘She said I need to stop going to university.’
Cecilia looks at Grace Maud expectantly. Clearly she wants some kind of response.
‘Why?’ Grace Maud obliges.
‘Because I won’t find a husband if I have a degree. She says men don’t like educated women. And anyway, I won’t need a degree because I’ll be a housewife and there’s no degree in that. How can she say that? How!’ Cecilia starts crying again.
‘I know this may not be what you want to hear, but it’s not necessarily her fault,’ Grace Maud says.
Cecilia frowns and looks, briefly, furious.
‘Your mother’s generation – mine – quite a few of us, really, were told that. Or it was made clear in other ways.’
Grace Maud stops, not sure how much she should reveal of her own life. Cecilia isn’t her friend, even if both of them know that the real reason Tom hired her was to keep Grace Maud company.
She recalls going to the shops one day before Cecilia arrived, and returning just in time for Cecilia to see her carrying several heavy bags into the house.
‘You don’t really need my help, do you?’ Cecilia had said, nonetheless trying to take one of the bags.
‘I think we both know that,’ Grace Maud had said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate you being here.’
They’d stood in the kitchen staring at each other.
‘I don’t want to do things you’d rather do yourself,’ Cecilia had said at last, tentatively.
‘I can assure you that I have no burning desire to clean the house,’ Grace Maud told her. ‘I’m thrilled you’re doing it. And I enjoy having you here.’
For a second Cecilia had looked as if she might cry, so Grace Maud had clucked her tongue and said, ‘Now you’re here, you can help me unpack the groceries.’
After that they hadn’t exactly started exchanging confidences but had relaxed around each other more. So while it isn’t a friendship – yet – Grace Maud feels affection for the young woman. And she also feels the responsibility of having lived a long time and being able to offer some insight that Cecilia lacks simply because she hasn’t been alive as long. If Grace Maud had known an older woman who could have given her the right advice, she might have made different decisions and saved herself a lot of mess.
‘I got married because I thought I should,’ she says now, ‘not because I really wanted to. I had my son, and I’m happy to have him. But I wish I’d known I could manage very well without a husband.’
‘So you were married a long time?’
‘No. I asked him to leave. And it cost me a lot of pain and my parents a lot of money. I would rather have done without both.’
Cecilia looks mildly shocked.
