Page 5 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘There is nothing to be sorry for. But I don’t want you to lie awake worrying the way you do.’
‘How do you know I’m worrying?’ she says, trying to keep her voice light. ‘Perhaps I’m going over a Mozart piano concerto in my mind.’
‘That Austrian!’ Frederick teases. ‘I don’t believe it.’
It’s their ongoing joke: Mozart versus Beethoven, and why Mozart can never be considered superior because of his nationality.
‘Believe it,Liebling.’ Dorothy may have left her accent behind, but marriage to Frederick has brought her back to her mother tongue. She sighs, more heavily than she meant to.
Frederick’s hands still. ‘I know you’re worrying about whether or not you want to try again.’
‘Of course,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘No,’ he says firmly. ‘I want whatever you want.’
She knows that’s not true. Even before they married he’d talked about the children they would have, and always with excitement. He’s done well to hide how upset he’s been that he’s not yet a father, and she knows he’s done it to protect her. It would be better, though, if he were honest – because when she believes he’s hiding things from her, it’s just one more thing to worry about.
‘I believe you,’ she says, even though she doesn’t.
What she really wants, she supposes, is for the doctor to tell her whether she can or can’t have children. Telling her to stay hopeful, to keep trying, to not give up – these are all platitudes rather than useful statements. Dorothy can handle a concrete truth, if only she were given it. If only she could give it to herself.
Frederick pats her lightly. ‘Come. I will make you some lunch.’
Lunch at four o’clock is what they’re used to by now, because they can’t eat until all their customers no longer wish to.
‘Thank you,’ she says, picking up his hand and kissing it, before she pushes herself up from the chair.
CHAPTER FOUR
Tom pushes a ledger book across the table. ‘Do you mind taking a look at these, Mum?’
It’s the same kind of ledger book Grace Maud used, which wasn’t much updated from the kind her father used. Figures remain the same no matter where they’re written, so there was never a good reason to change the sort of stationery they used to record them.
The accounting books have always been kept in the old dresser that flanks one side of the dining room; Grace Maud’s grandfather commissioned the piece from a local furniture maker, and through four generations there has never been a reason to get rid of it. Aside from a few dents and scratches, it has trustily stood sentinel over the dining table, which is not the same piece Grace Maud grew up with. Once it became clear she was only going to have one child and no husband, there was no point keeping a table meant for a much larger family.
The sitting room, too, has changed its permutation of furniture to accommodate the ebb and flow of inhabitants in the house. Viv wanted to remove her daughters’ favourite chairs when they removed themselves to Brisbane but the girls protested. So they’re still clumped together next to an old couch covered in a damask material that has never been suitable for the climate but which Viv loved at first sight.
‘You know the business well enough by now to not need my help, surely?’ Grace Maud says as she peers at the ledger, her tone indicating that she’s gently teasing him.
‘Yeah, well …’ He scratches behind his left ear; he’s been doing that since he was a little boy when something concerns him. ‘You know I wasn’t that good at maths at school.’
She nods, although it isn’t true. She nods because he wants her to endorse the line he’s been telling himself all these years, and sometimes a mother has to do what makes her child happy instead of correcting misinformation. Besides, his lack of belief in his mathematical ability has never stopped him being interested in how the business of running the farm works, although Grace Maud knows that Viv helps him with the bookkeeping. Which means Viv should be sitting at this table instead of washing up the plates they used for lunch, as Grace Maud can hear her doing in the kitchen.
‘Vivien, would you like to join us?’ she calls. ‘You probably know more about these numbers than both of us put together.’
Tom looks tense.
‘Did I say the wrong thing?’ Grace Maud murmurs.
‘No – just … I didn’t want her to think I thought she’d made a mistake. Because I don’t.’ He screws up his face. ‘I just want to try to understand them a bit better.’
Grace Maud looks at him and remembers the boy who had trouble sorting out his Bs from his Ds and was rapped over the knuckles with a ruler by his teacher because of it. He got the cane when he couldn’t recite ‘The Man from Snowy River’ in the correct stanza order, and the belt when his third-form history essay was full of unfinished sentences. All of it without Grace Maud’s knowledge. Once she found out, each new incident led her to ring the headmaster to issue a rebuke for the punishment of her son for something he couldn’t change.
‘Thomas needs to work harder, Mrs Clifford,’ the headmaster would say each time, drawing out the ‘Mrs’ so she would know that he knew she was no longer a Mrs.
‘He does work hard,’ she would also say each time. ‘Very hard. And it doesn’t help.’
She remembered the nights they’d sat up when he was home from boarding school for the holidays, going over and over his homework – her bone-tired from a day in the cane, him exhausted and weeping because his brain simply wouldn’t work the way the school wanted it to. Nothing made him recognise that a B wasn’t a D, or that ‘dog’ wasn’t ‘god’. It still doesn’t. There was no point trying to make the headmaster or his teachers understand that, however. Combined with the fact that Tom was left-handed, they had decided he was incorrigible, and possibly cursed, and the only remedy was for him to work harder. Not that any of them would assist him in the endeavour.
