Ilona’s first impression was of light. Light glancing off the water, light sluicing the valley, light shaping the folds of the green hills that tumbled down to meet the sea. A golden light, for the sun was sinking fast. Surely the bus must soon arrive at Jingera. She and Zidra were the only passengers left after a sun-dried woman, wearing a floral dress and a miscellany of string bags, had alighted several miles back. Before long it would be dark but not before they saw the cottage, pray God not before then, for Ilona couldn’t bear to reach a new place after night had fallen.
There had been too many arrivals after dark. The first was in that cold Latvian winter at the concentration camp near Riga. And after the liberation, a series of displaced persons’ camps, and ultimately her arrival in England. Only in Sydney had she disembarked in daylight, this time with her husband Oleksii and small daughter Zidra, the three of them walking down the ship’s gangway, in the harsh morning light of a summer’s day.
But she would not dwell on the past when today’s journey was looking so promising; when the light was streaming down the valley and illuminating Zidra’s face, so that her sallow skin assumed an unusual radiance. Ilona examined her daughter: only nine years old but already she was striking with that combination of upturned nose, short upper lip and disproportionately high forehead. And the pretty dark curls that were just like those of poor dead Oleksii.
‘Look at the sign!’ Zidra pointed to a white sign at the side of the road. Welcome to Wilba Wilba Shire, and underneath, in smaller letters, Drive Carefully. This was ignored by the driver, who swerved the bus into the next bend in the road.
Ilona peered through the front windscreen, at the road snaking down in front of them. There at last was the town of Jingera, a haphazard collection of weatherboard cottages clinging to the hillside. It was smaller than she’d expected, although the McIntyres, her friends in Sydney whose Jingera cottage she had arranged to rent, had warned her that the place was a bit of a backwater. But full of such friendly people, they’d said, who are crying out for a piano teacher.
‘Just look at the sea, Mama!’
Below the town lay the river, widening into a lagoon that seemed to be connected by the thinnest thread of water to the ocean beyond. Ilona put an arm around Zidra’s shoulders. Her face was starting to acquire that pinched look it took on when she was tired.
‘Pickin’ up the key from the butcher’s shop?’ The bus driver twisted his head round to look at them and grinned. ‘Not a bad place, luv. Could be worse, there could be more people!’ He restored his glance to the road just in time to negotiate another of the hairpin bends. ‘Cadwallader shuts up at five sharp, so it’s lucky we’re on time, or youse might’ve bin campin’ under ‘is awning!’
Opening the bus window slightly, Ilona inhaled deeply. The air was fresh and salty and she felt her spirits lift. She had left Sydney behind, she had left Europe behind. Maybe it would be possible to forget the past and start a new life in Jingera, this sanctuary by the sea. Unclasping her handbag, she felt inside it for the reassuring shape of the Latvian–English dictionary. While it hadn’t been needed so far today, she did not know what linguistic challenges the evening would bring.
The bus turned sharply off the main road and into Jingera township. Past a white-painted hotel and a corrugated iron hall, around a war memorial in the centre of an open space ringed by buildings, and at last shuddering to a halt in front of a few shops sheltered by wide awnings. On the fascia of the middle shop was the name she was looking for: ‘Cadwallader’s Quality Meats’. They had arrived.
Only after alighting from the bus did she notice the middle-aged man standing on the pavement outside Cadwallader’s Quality Meats. Above his head, a large black and white cow, painted on the shopfront window, seemed to hover like a cloud over his thinning dark hair. When he stepped forward to shake her hand, she noticed his slight limp and the newspaper-wrapped package he was holding.
‘Welcome to Jingera,’ he said. ‘George Cadwallader’s the name.’ He clasped her long-fingered hand in his own – a butcher’s hand. His fingers were scrubbed and clean. ‘Let me take your suitcases. It’s just a short walk from here to the McIntyres.’ They asked me to show you how the stove works and the fuse box. And this must be your daughter,’ he added, smiling at Zidra. ‘I hope you had a good trip. Bus not too bumpy for you?’
‘It was terrible, especially from Burford,’ said Zidra, who was rarely at a loss for words. ‘The bus went really fast round all those zigzag bends. Poor Mama was so frightened!’
Cadwallader laughed.
Taking Zidra’s hand, Ilona followed the butcher across the open area in front of the row of shops. Past the war memorial they went, an obelisk covered with a surprising number of names and elevated on a square plinth several steps high; past the post office at the lower corner of the square and into an unkerbed street leading down the hill to the lagoon. Zidra had now become quiet and was gripping Ilona’s hand tightly.
Weatherboard cottages lined each side of the road, some of them semi-concealed by hedges, others with no gardens at all so that it was possible to see into the front room without even trying. Please make it a house with a hedge, Ilona thought, for privacy.
The butcher stopped when he reached a gate several hundred yards down the hill. On each side of the gate was a dense glossy-leafed hedge and Ilona sighed with relief. The salty air was overlaid with a scent of something unknown, sweet but not sickly, that might have been from the small white flowers growing on the vine entangled in the hedge.
‘Such delectable flowers, Mr Cadwallader!’ But from his grin, she knew that delectable was not quite the word she was looking for. Later, she would look up its precise meaning. Perhaps she should have used that all-purpose word, nice.
‘Call me George,’ he said. ‘Don’t know what those flowers are. They grow like weeds around here.’ After struggling for a moment with the gate, he ushered them through the opening.
A brick path led up to the cottage, or what Ilona supposed was the cottage. It looked more like a support for the vines that tumbled over the verandah roof and fell like swags from the guttering; brilliant orange, trumpet-like flowers growing in bunches. Zidra jumped onto the verandah and bounced up and down on the splintered grey boards that squeaked under her weight. George now had the front door unlocked. Inside, the hallway reeked of stale air and dust and Ilona could hardly bear the smell after the loveliness of the garden.
‘No one’s lived here since the end of last summer,’ George explained, as if the neglect were his fault. ‘We don’t get too many holiday lets this time of the year, even though September’s a mild month here.’
The initial reservations she had melted away when Ilona looked up and saw the wooden fretwork forming an arch halfway down the hall, and the carved shelving running along each side at about picture-rail height. The floorboards, though scuffed and in need of polish, were warm red and of some timber that she had never seen before. She knew then that she could make this place into a home.
At the far end of the hall was the kitchen. A fuel stove occupied most of one wall, and an ice chest and pine dresser stood opposite. On the kitchen table, covered in red-and-white checked oilcloth, sat a black bakelite wireless set. She touched it lightly.
Catching sight of the view from the window next to the stove, she held her breath. There was so much space in front of her, so much space. George was saying something about the ice chest but she couldn’t speak, she couldn’t listen. Beyond the lagoon, now the colour of pewter, lay a strip of olive-green bushland and beyond that again was the dark blue of the ocean smudging into the paler washed-out blue of the late afternoon sky. It was this view of ocean and bush that lent the McIntyres’ cottage a sense of openness. Although the cottage wasn’t big, it didn’t seem cramped; she couldn’t abide confined rooms although that’s what she’d lived in for years. Even in Homebush, space had felt restricted. And right outside the kitchen door was another little verandah that overlooked a garden that would be perfect for Zidra to play in. Seated in that rickety-looking cane chair, Ilona would be able to watch the lagoon and the sky, and she and Zidra would be safe.
Collecting herself, she mumbled some response about the ice chest, and tried to concentrate very hard on what George was explaining; the workings of the wood stove in the kitchen and the location of the septic tank, and the fuse box and the kerosene lamp in case of emergencies, and the days on which the ice man came.
‘My piano will be arriving tomorrow,’ she said, once George had finished his instruction. ‘I shall need to find a piano tuner.’
‘There’s one in Burford. He fishes here sometimes. He’s a reasonable cove.’
‘I want to give piano lessons. I must advertise somehow.’
‘Cherry Bates might be interested. She said only the other day that she wanted to learn the piano.’ He bent down in front of the stove and made a slight adjustment to the kindling.
Ilona wondered who Cherry was. It was an unusual name and she knew of no Latvian equivalent. She was about to ask George about her when he continued, ‘She works in the pub. Married to the publican. You could put a notice in the post office window about the lessons. The town isn’t as small as it looks. There are more houses along North Road – that’s the road next to the pub – and there are some behind the headland. There are farms too, mainly dairy.’ At this point he became quite animated, talking at some length about cows and milking and cheese, and even the local abattoir. It would have been better not to hear about that, although she knew that meat was his job, if not his vocation.
Before leaving, he handed her the newspaper-wrapped parcel. ‘Just a few things you might need tonight. Nothing much really.’ As if embarrassed by his kindness, he avoided meeting her eye.
After he’d gone, Ilona opened all the windows of the cottage and unwrapped the parcel. It contained half a loaf of bread, butter, a twist of tea, and half-a-dozen sausages. How considerate he was; she hadn’t bought any meat when she purchased a few groceries in Bomaderry and she would cook the sausages for their supper.
Opening the door in the front of the stove, Ilona put a match to the kindling. The flames flared and soon the wood was blazing. Mesmerised by the flickering flames, she forgot for a moment where she was. Four months had passed since she’d last lit a fire. That was in the incinerator at the back of the flats where they’d lived in Sydney and several weeks after poor Oleksii’s death. She’d decided to burn the shabbiest of his old clothes, the ones that the opportunity shop wouldn’t take. For several days she’d agonised about whether or not she should enlist Zidra’s assistance with this. It might help her come to terms with her father’s death. She had seemed almost unaffected by it, so much so that Ilona had wondered if the girl might be finding it a relief to be without his oppressive presence in the evenings. She no longer withdrew to her little bedroom, as she used to when Oleksii came home from work, but stayed with Ilona in the kitchen, chattering as much to herself as her mother.
In the end Ilona had decided to burn Oleksii’s clothes by herself. Late one evening she’d put them into a cardboard box with some newspapers and crept out to the incinerator, a square brick construction a few feet high. A large red globe of a moon had bobbed up over the roofs of the houses behind the flats. Its jauntiness contrasted with the neglected look of the yard. After crumpling up sheets of newspaper, she’d fed them into the incinerator and piled the clothes on top. One garment she kept out though, a faded blue-and-white-striped shirt, frayed around the neck and cuffs. Raising it to her face, she sniffed: not even the faintest scent of Oleksii remained.
This was the end and her eyes started to fill with tears. Angrily she’d brushed them away and retrieved the matches from the cardboard box. Her hands trembled so much that striking the match proved difficult and it was only at the fourth attempt that the newspaper ignited. Small blue and orange flames licked and crackled around the edges of the paper, and were soon united in a golden plume of fire of such intensity that Oleksii’s clothes also began to burn. Onto the top of the pyre she’d flung the blue-and-white-striped shirt; there was no point in being sentimental over an old rag. The flames leapt up several feet into the air. In ten minutes it was all over and only the smouldering embers remained. Soon even these were reduced to a pile of ashes.
But that was all in the past and here she was in the kitchen of the McIntyres’ cottage in Jingera, with Zidra hungry and tired, just as she was herself. Picking up the poker, she prodded the burning wood. Surely the stove would soon be warm enough to cook on. She watched the flames flare up and then shut the stove door. After removing a dead fly from the frying pan, she rinsed it at the sink before starting to fry four sausages and then some tomatoes. The stove top was greasy. The place would require a thorough clean-out in the morning and tonight she should make a list of what to buy at the little general store.
After they had eaten, Zidra said, ‘Can’t I go outside now?’
‘Tomorrow, darling. It is already dark. And the garden could be full of spiders and even snakes and whatever else might be found in a neglected Australian garden.’
‘It’s not fair. We’ve got a garden here and you said I could play in it. You never used to let me play outside in Homebush.’
‘You can go outside tomorrow morning.’ But first Ilona would check the garden carefully, something she couldn’t face this evening, not when there were all those other things that needed doing. ‘Anyway, it’s late and you’re tired and you need a wash.’ Suppressing a sigh, she started to scrub at the inside of the bath. The brown marks appeared to be stains and would not come off. Harder and harder she rubbed while Zidra continued her litany. At last the bath was sufficiently clean, or at least none of the marks would come off with further rubbing, and she began to fill it with water.
In the little bedroom that was to be Zidra’s, she made up the bed. Straightening up, she caught sight of her reflection in the flawed glass of the mirror: a slender woman of medium height with a drawn face and usually exuberant fair hair now badly in need of a wash. It was undeniably the case, she decided, that she looked far older than thirty-seven years. She gave the mirror a quick wipe with her handkerchief but unfortunately this did nothing for her appearance.
‘There’s a spider behind the toilet!’ Zidra called from the bathroom. ‘Quick!’
But she wasn’t quick enough and the spider had gone. ‘It was there,’ Zidra pointed behind the pan. ‘You were too slow.’
Ignoring the scowl, Ilona looked instead at the dark smudges under her daughter’s eyes that were from fatigue rather than the dust that lay everywhere. Tears could not now be far off. After the long day it was no wonder that she was becoming a little excitable and in a way Ilona was glad of it after her calmness in recent months. ‘There is nothing here,’ she said gently. ‘Only a few old spider webs.’ She contemplated the high toilet cistern that was connected to the wall by metal brackets and skeins of dusty webs. ‘In the morning I’ll brush all those down, but not now. I’m too tired and so are you.’ She pulled the chain and water gushed into the pan and swirled away. ‘That will frighten away any insects,’ she said more confidently than she felt. ‘And now you must have your bath.’
When Zidra had at last fallen asleep in her narrow bed, Ilona put on a warm jacket and took a cup of tea out on to the rickety verandah. The dark shapes of overgrown shrubs defined the lower boundary of the backyard and, below this, the smooth water of the lagoon palely reflected the new moon. Although she couldn’t see the breakers, she could hear their regular pounding. Perhaps one day that sound might become an irritation, or maybe it would always be as soothing as it was now, when she was able at last to leave behind the anxiety of yet another journey that had ended. It was a far easier ending to the journey this time. Everything had seemed less difficult once she had seen the inside of the cottage and its outlook, and observed Zidra’s joy at the prospect of the garden.
She would wait a few days before advertising piano lessons. After retrieving her notebook, she stared at the figures written in it: one hundred and sixty pounds, three shillings and ninepence was all that was left. Provided she was frugal, this was probably sufficient to live on for a while. It had come from her piano teaching. There had been none of Oleksii’s money left after the funeral expenses had been paid.
She remembered how affronted Oleksii had initially been by her decision to give piano lessons after they’d settled in Homebush. Before the war she’d done nothing but practise the piano and take exams, for her father hadn’t wanted her to earn a living either, but those days were long gone. Oleksii had clearly forgotten that she’d worked in Bradford when they’d first met. Eventually she’d persuaded him that she would be unhappy if she didn’t teach but it hadn’t been easy. On no account was the money she earned to be used to supplement his meagre earnings at the biscuit factory, he’d said, insisting she open a bank account in her own name.
Until she’d started teaching the piano in that dreary western Sydney suburb in which there was hardly a tree to be seen, she’d felt lonely and alienated. It was because her English was so poor and she had so little to do. In Bradford she’d mainly spoken Latvian, surrounded as she was by other refugees, and she seemed always to be working or caring for Zidra or sleeping, with no time left for music or for improving her English. It was their hope, when she and Oleksii left England five years ago, that they would have more spare time in Sydney. And for her there had been more time. Too much time, until Oleksii had bought the second-hand upright piano.
After beginning to play again, she’d been surprised to discover that little had been forgotten, although her fingers were clumsy and stiff, and a part of her that she’d thought was dead began to send forth tender new shoots. That was when she’d hit upon the idea of teaching the piano. Once Oleksii was persuaded, she’d begun to teach and her English began to improve too. Oleksii’s death had changed this fragile equilibrium. Soon afterwards she’d decided that Zidra should grow up somewhere else, somewhere sheltered, a small town rather than a big city. When the McIntyres had mentioned their vacant cottage, she’d jumped at the opportunity.
Welcome to Wilba Wilba Shire. That sign outside Jingera was surely a portent. But before she could start teaching the piano again, there was a lot to organise, not least enrolling Zidra in the local school and taking delivery of the piano and arranging for the piano tuner to come.
She began to make a list of things to do the following day. She always made lists, had done so ever since being released from that last camp. They helped her impose order on her days, helped maintain a fiction of sorts that she had some control over the future.