Page 7 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
CHAPTER FIVE
Yorkeys Knob is a strange name for any kind of place. Patricia has always thought so, even though she grew up here. Except she knows why it’s called that – there is, indeed, a knob of land with the calm Half Moon Bay on one side and the surf beach on the other. And there was a Yorkshireman, apparently, who inspired the Yorkeys part. Or maybe there wasn’t. No one has ever had persuasive proof.
Fishermen used to populate this place – if she counts her father, they still do. Although he hasn’t been to sea for many years now; he gave that up when Patricia was about to enter her teens, and her mother decided he should be settling down. So he bought the local newsagency and settled, all right. He hasn’t been on a boat since. Patricia knows he misses it. Sometimes he’ll be gone from the house and she’ll find him on the beach, staring out past the reef, towards the horizon.
Once he stopped fishing he started having dreams, her mother said. ‘He cries like he’s missing someone,’ she told Patricia once, looking perplexed. But Patricia knew what it was. She also thinks he misses the ocean so much that he can’t bear to go out again: there’s no guarantee that what happens in the present will match what happens in your memories. Living in the past can be safer. Less turbulent.
Patricia’s brothers never had designs on the sea. They knew what kind of life it was for fishermen; and besides, their adoring mother had encouraged them to believe that Earth was too small for the great talents she was sure they had. By the time their father bought the newsagency, John and Peter had gone away to university in Brisbane, and Annette was married and planning to move to New South Wales, leaving Patricia to deal with her mother alone.
Their relationship has never been good. Patricia was the ‘accident’ her mother didn’t quite get over, just as she didn’t quite recover from having to give up her job after the war finished. Nora had never wanted to stay at home and raise children. Her own mother had looked after the children while Nora was at work, but once the men started returning from overseas the working women soon discovered their jobs were gone and they’d have to go back to unpaid housework. Somewhere in that postwar time – in the middle of her mother’s rage – Patricia was conceived.
Her father never resented her arrival, but, then again, he wasn’t the one who had to look after her. Not when he was at sea so often.
Patricia has long tried to make sense of why her mother has disliked her for so long – Patricia, after all, having done everything she could to be the ‘good girl’ she was meant to be – but it wasn’t until her mother’s mind started to fail, until she really needed her daughter in a way she hadn’t before, that there was any kind of détente.
As Patricia turns around to head north on the beach, back towards the house, a breeze moves over her, carrying with it the scent of salt. Salty water, to be exact. What was it Isak Dinesen wrote once? The cure for everything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea. For Patricia the latter is always far more regularly the cure, which is why she’s down here every single day of the week, regardless of the weather.
She sees the knob ahead of her, with its densely packed trees and its few neat rows of houses. Between here and the main part of Cairns there is a lot of uninhabited land, a couple of beaches and the airport. When she was growing up this place seemed like it was cut off from everything. Now, with the planes coming in – with tourists from the rest of Australia and the rest of the world arriving to see Port Douglas and the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree Rainforest and Cape Tribulation, or go even further north to Cooktown and Cape York – she would like to have a little of that isolation back.
Mind you, she too should be wary of living in the past. She felt stuck here, as a kid. Her imagination was vast and wild; she read books and listened to her parents’ jazz records and the classical music her grandmother loved, and the Frank Sinatra her grandfather favoured, and she dreamed of being anywhere but here. She even moved away for a while to find out if elsewhere was better. It’s taken her over four decades to appreciate that here she is surrounded by beauty.
‘Good morning, Patricia!’ says the school’s retired headmistress, Mrs Dampier, as she marches past. Patricia never worked with her but certainly knew what it was like to be a student under her command.
‘Good morning, Mrs Dampier,’ she says. She knows the woman’s first name but would never dare use it.
‘Chilly this morning, isn’t it?’ Mrs Dampier calls, but it’s a rhetorical question because she’s going at such a pace that she won’t hear Patricia’s answer.
Itischilly for Cairns: eighteen degrees Celsius at this hour of the morning. Patricia almost pulled on a woollen jumper before leaving the house, then decided that would be an extreme gesture.
‘Pat,’ huffs Mr Dampier in acknowledgement as he passes her, trying to catch up to his wife, as he does every morning.
‘Mr D,’ she says cheerily. For some reason she never minds him shortening her name, probably because he lets her do it in return.
Patricia folds her arms against her chest to hold in some warmth as she moves up towards the soft sand. Every time she walks on the hard sand she thinks she’s being lazy. Soft sand is so much more difficult. So much better for developing strength in the lower legs. That’s what Dennis told her. Right before he told her that she was a bit of all right and perhaps she’d like to have dinner with him at the club.
It wasn’t really a question. Dennis is used to women wanting to have dinner with him, no doubt, and she was immensely flattered – and unnerved, just a little – but she’s sure she’s almost twice his age, so she told him she didn’t think it was appropriate for them to go to the club. Even though she has found him attractive since the day he started working at the school.
He’d smiled at her in a sphinx-like way. ‘Suit yourself,’ he’d said. ‘But I don’t care about your age.’
Since then, they’ve been fine at work – because they’re both adults and he didn’t take it as a rejection, so that was nice. Because it wasn’t a rejection. How could it have been when she’s daydreamed about it ever since? She was wanting a man to notice her, because they barely seemed to. Not that she has been giving them a reason to notice her, for years now. She has what she considers to be a nondescript face; what she knows to be lank, shapeless hair because she can’t be bothered styling it; functional clothes; sensible shoes. Yet there he was – handsome Dennis with his slightly too-big biceps – noticing her, and she’d panicked.
No, it wasn’t a rejection, it was a correction. Back to the natural order of things. Dennis should be asking the younger staff members to go to the club. Patricia’s polite refusal of his invitation would allow him to do just that.
She’s almost back to the part of the beach where she can peel off and head up a path to the house when she sees one of the neighbours, Mrs Kovacs. Mrs Kovacs likes to tell Patricia about her fertile daughters and the children they just can’t stop having, and she always ends by saying, ‘It is such a shame you didn’t have children, Patricia.’ Her head will tilt to the side and she’ll slowly blink. ‘So pretty. Such a waste.’
There’s never a good response to something like that, and Patricia doesn’t want to try to think of one today. She picks up her pace, as hard as that is in the softer sand, and makes for the track that will take her off the beach and onto the road. Behind her, the waves are softly crashing on the shore. In front of her lie all of her responsibilities.
She sets her face against the day and walks towards the house.
CHAPTER SIX
‘You know, Mrs Clifford, you really should do those exercises the doctor gave you.’ Cecilia follows her gentle admonishment with a gently raised eyebrow.
Grace Maud scowls. For a year Cecilia has been helping her out around the place and now she thinks she’s a nurse or something. If Grace Maud didn’t like her so much she’d be annoyed. Which won’t stop her pretending to be annoyed, because she has a façade to keep up. The farm workers all thought she was a tough old bird and that reputation did her no harm. It pays, she has found, to appear stern as a means of protecting a soft heart. Only Ellie Maud really knew what she was like; with her sole witness gone, Grace Maud can keep her tenderness to herself.
‘I don’t like them,’ she says with deliberate peevishness. ‘Their very existence suggests that I’m somehow decrepit. And we both know I’m not.’
Cecilia tsk-tsks, which she is quite fond of doing. ‘But if the doctor thinks they’re good for you, surely they’re worth doing? You said just the other day that your hips hurt.’
