Page 88 of Thursdays at Orange Blossom House
‘The decision will be yours, Tom.’ She looks towards the horizon, across the scope of everything her family has worked on for years, and the land that existed for millennia before that, and knows how insignificant her time here has been. This place is her home, and her parents’ and grandparents’ home, but it was someone else’s home well before that – thousands of years before. It will be someone else’s home after she’s gone. So she doesn’t really know any more why she’s clinging on.
‘I don’t have any right to stop you doing what you want to do. This is your place now.’ She smiles so he knows this isn’t a decision she has made in defeat, but he seems perplexed.
‘I know this seems like a dramatic turnabout,’ she continues. ‘But when the fire happened … You were as upset as I was. That didn’t surprise me so much as remind me that just as I’ve been here since I was born, so have you. And what have I been working for all these years if not to give you the opportunity to look after this place the way I have?’
Tom gets a strange look on his face. ‘Are you sure?’ he says after a few moments have passed.
‘Have you ever known me to make an announcement when I’m not sure?’
His forehead relaxes. ‘No.’
She nods, satisfied, and glances down at the headstones bearing her parents’ and brothers’ names.
‘A person can cling onto the past for too long. This place was never meant to be mine forever. It was always ours. My parents’. Their parents’. And before that …’ She closes her eyes and shrugs. ‘It doesn’t belong to any of us really, does it? We took it. And we didn’t ask nicely. My father believed in terra nullius, but it never sat right with me. We’re here now, though. Although who knows? That Mabo decision could mean we’re not here for long.’
‘I’d fight it if anyone tried to take this place,’ Tom says fiercely.
‘You’d be fighting history. You may not win.’ Grace Maud pokes the earth with her foot. ‘I was upset, Tom, because you were treating me as if I was too old to matter any more.’
He opens his mouth, but she silences him with a look only a mother can give. ‘You may not have meant to, but the point is that you didn’t think about the consequences of your actions. You didn’t think about how it would sound to me. I haven’t made it this far in my life without having pride. Without working to maintain dignity. Some may say those things don’t matter, but they matter to me. They mattered to your grandparents. They will matter to you.’
As she stands with her feet rooted on her earth, she has the strangest sense of time shifting. The time before her; the time after. The time in between, when she had everyone she loved here on this earth; and the time when all but Tom had gone. That time is no longer now, because now she feels her capacity for love expanding in the same measure it contracted. There are new friends in her life, and all the tentacles of connection they bring with them. Her world is not small any more. Neither is her heart.
She sighs, letting go of any resentment that’s still lingering. ‘And I didn’t think about the consequences of my actions either. I reacted, and I continued to react. For too long I didn’t stop and think. So that’s why we’re here now.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ Tom says. ‘Honestly. I never meant to shut you out. I thought I was helping. Thought you’d be glad to be free of the place. I just didn’t …’ He shakes his head. ‘I really didn’t think. But I won’t make that mistake again.’
‘I know you won’t. Most of us do the best we can. Sometimes I just have to remind myself of that.’
Tom puts his hands on his hips. He looks tired. Probably she does too, but at her age it’s hard to tell.
‘I love you, Tom,’ she says. ‘That has never changed. It never will.’
‘I know, Mum.’
He smiles, but his face sort of collapses at the same time. That’s her cue, as a mother. She walks to him and puts her arms around his waist. He hugs her back.
It’s been years since they’ve held each other like this. It shouldn’t take a blow-up and a reconciliation for them to embrace. Maybe if they’d hugged each other more regularly they wouldn’t have blown up in the first place. Each would have felt more acknowledged by the other than they did.
She resolves to hug him more often. He may wonder why, or he may hug her back. It doesn’t matter. It’s her job, as his mother, to remind him that he is loved.
‘Shall we go?’ he says, putting his arm around her shoulder.
‘Yes. A glass of red at the pub wouldn’t go astray.’
‘My thought exactly.’
As they walk towards the car Grace Maud glances back at the graves.
‘Goodbye,’ she whispers, and she turns her face towards the future.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
‘Ifeel like a whale,’ Dorothy says, putting her hands on her rounded belly and squinting up into the sky. The winter light is soft but still harsh enough to remind her that every time she sits in the garden she should wear sunglasses.
It’s become an after-work ritual, this quiet time with Frederick in their garden, listening to the birds and insects around them. Even though they haven’t said so to each other, it’s almost as if they’re both acknowledging that once the baby arrives their life won’t be quiet any more, so they should enjoy this time while it lasts.
Dorothy’s seven months into the pregnancy and already the baby seems to have taken up all the room she can give it. It seems impossible that she’ll continue to grow larger. How can her skin expand that much? How can her uterus? She knows it’s normal – as normal as the gestating of a whole human being inside another can be – but it feels like it’s contrary to all the laws of science she ever half paid attention to in school.
