Page 8 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘They’re seventy-four years old! Of course they hurt. Yours are going to hurt when they’re that old.’
Now Cecilia makes a noise that sounds like grumbling.
Grace Maud narrows her eyes. ‘What are you doing here with an old thing like me?’ she says. ‘You’re young. You’re pretty. You should be running around with a beau rather than bothering with my aches and pains.’
‘This again?’ Cecilia rolls her eyes – another favourite thing to do.
They have their own little routine: Grace Maud tells Cecilia to get lost, and Cecilia sighs and flicks her hair or rolls her eyes and resists. It’s entertaining, in its own way. Something Grace Maud would have done with her daughter, if she’d had one. But she never did, and she’d stopped being sad about it decades ago. Or tried to stop.
After her sister left for good, she was desperate for another female presence in her life. She thought she’d have a daughter. Two. Three. Instead she has a son. A good one, but it’s not the same. Any mother would tell you. The boys distance themselves once they reach a certain age and they never close that gap. Girls stay close. Not in every case, obviously, but in most cases. They understand that their mothers need them – that they can’t ever really let them go.
Thankfully Cecilia puts up with Grace Maud being stroppy from time to time, and while she’s not a daughter she’s like a granddaughter in many ways.
‘I’m here, Mrs Clifford, because you pay me,’ Cecilia says. She turns back to the sink and keeps washing the dishes. ‘And because I like being here. Except when you refuse to do things that are good for you. Then I get cross.’ She sniffs in a schoolmarmish way.
‘I’ve never seen you cross in your life, Cecilia.’
‘If you keep refusing to do things that are good for you, you might.’
‘What would you have me do, then?’
Cecilia stops moving and looks out the window. It’s a nice view: in the garden Grace Maud has installed an array of suitably tropical plants – two hibiscus, some clivias and a banana palm that refuses to grow fruit – that she pays a young man to keep in check once a month. He’s a student at the university; a nice fellow whose parents Tom knows through the Lions Club. Jeremy, she thinks his name is, although she doesn’t really use it so she can’t be sure. She leaves cash out for him, so they rarely speak. The cash comes from Tom, as it does for Cecilia. Once Grace Maud decided to move from the farm into town, Tom insisted on paying for people to look after her, the house and garden – it’s a point of pride for him to do so.
‘I can’t get into town that often,’ he’d said when he suggested that she have some help in the garden. ‘And I don’t want you doing the mowing.’
She’d started to say that she had no intention of mowing, but he’d snorted and said, ‘Don’t even try to tell me that you won’t do the mowing, because you and I know that you will. It’s not that I think you’re not capable of it, Mum – I just think you deserve to, y’know,not work. You’ve been working all your life.’
That was a rationale she couldn’t contest, and she was, in truth, relieved not to have to worry about keeping the garden tidy. She was also relieved that Tom offered to pay because she doesn’t have that much cash; she never has. Everything has always been tied up in the farm. Any extra money that wasn’t spent on school fees for Tom went into improving the property and the business. And the school fees were necessary because in those days that’s just what you did with a country kid: off to boarding school as soon as the parents could afford it.
Tom also said that Grace Maud shouldn’t have to do housework any more, which is why Cecilia was hired, despite the fact that Grace Maud doesn’t believe she needs looking after. She enjoys Cecilia’s company, though – and it’s entirely possible that this is the function Tom hired her for in the first place.
Grace Maud doesn’t think Cecilia is admiring Jeremy’s handiwork as she stares into the garden, although she can’t tell if the girl’s annoyed or simply thinking about something.
‘There’s a class,’ Cecilia says slowly, half turning, hands still in the sink. ‘At a place down the road. My mother tells me it’s good for stretching.’
‘Your mother the former star ballet student?’ Grace Maud says disbelievingly.
Whatever Cecilia’s lissom dancer mother calls stretching is probably what Grace Maud calls Olympic-level gymnastics. Not that Grace Maud has never danced. She used to enjoy it, long ago. She met her husband at a dance. That was one of the things she’d liked about him: he was smooth and light on his feet, yet able to keep a firm hand on her back when they moved around the dance floor.
Cecilia makes a face. ‘She hasn’t danced for years. Not since she left Argentina. She needs a good stretch as much as you do.’
As improbable as that sounds to Grace Maud, she appreciates that Cecilia is trying to help. ‘And what happens in this class?’
‘Yoga,’ Cecilia says, giving the sink her full attention.
‘Yoga?’ Grace Maud searches her memory for anything she can associate with the word. ‘Don’t you have to be a vegetarian Hindu to do that? I don’t want to give up steak.’
Cecilia laughs. ‘I think you’ll find that my mother is still a Catholic who likes eating meat. She says the yoga helps keep her young.’
Grace Maud considers the idea of placing herself in the company of women like Cecilia’s mother and doesn’t like it. She will be so much older, she’s sure of it – wherever she goes she’s the oldest person there. And if the other people in the class are younger, trimmer, more flexible, she will feel old. And she has no interest in feeling old. That’s for old people. And she never intends to be one of them. So maybe this yoga business could be useful if it keeps her joints and muscles moving.
‘I’ll go with you,’ Cecilia says gamely.
‘No!’ Grace Maud doesn’t want a witness to her attempts to unfurl her body into odd shapes. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to say that so loudly,’ she adds after Cecilia turns and frowns. ‘I just … Well, you know me. I like to do things well. I don’t want you to see me not do this well.’
‘But I can drive you.’
Grace Maud stops herself from exclaiming again. She knows that Tom has told Cecilia to drive her around. He hasn’t been able to stop his mother driving to the farm, but he wants to stop her going other places. He says her eyesight is failing – and of course it is, because things wear out. But it’s only failing at activities like reading the newspaper, and she has glasses for that. She can see street signs and pedestrian crossings. She can see lights change from red to green to amber. She can still navigate herself around town without needing any kind of map. If Tom wanted to test her, he’d find she could drive to Sydney and back without a map, because she was brought up to store useful information in her head and to be resourceful.
