“Mabel phoned,” said Rose placing morning tea on the table.

     “What did the ear-basher want today?” asked Gordon, carefully lowering himself into the armchair. He was stiff with joint pain.

     “Wants to help with the renovation,” said Rose. “She’s good at handiwork.”

     “Listen, lass, I can manage on my own.”

     “But your knee...”

     “I’ll manage, and that’s final, no ear-bashers in the house while there’s work going on.” He picked up the newspaper. “Or ever,” he mumbled.         

     Now that Gordon had retired, they were renovating the house, room by room. He sand-papered and painted; she renewed cushion covers and curtains, albeit with some effort due to her arthritic fingers. Theirs was a charming nineteenth-century home, one of the few still standing in Albury.

     “Did you see the headlines? A youth hostel burnt down.”

     “In Melbourne?” asked Rose.

     “No, Sydney. Full of backpackers. Six died. They suspect arson.”

     “Arson? That’s terrible. How could anyone do such a wicked thing?”

     “The victims were European, three from the UK.”

     “Dying young, and so far from home, that’s... that’s horrible.”

     “Plenty died young far from home fifty years ago,” said Gordon.

     Rose knew better than to challenge him on that head. She peeked into the pot, deemed the tea sufficiently brewed, gripped the handle as best she could and poured. Everybody used mugs nowadays, but she served in their bone china Wedgwood tea set, a wedding gift from an English aunt long dead. The set was surprisingly still intact. Perhaps unsurprisingly seeing they were childless.

 

***

 

A dance hall in Goulburn had brought them together. There, of a Saturday evening, the descendants of convicts and pioneers – the McCulloughs and the Byrnes and the Murrays – gathered to jig and reel and do Highland flings. Too shy to dance, lanky Gordon leant against a wooden pillar and watched an auburn-haired girl paired in a quadrille. When accordions and banjos were set aside, musicians armed with saxophones and clarinets took to the stage, and youngsters flocked to the floor in numbers. The hot notes of boogie-woogie and swing bounced off the tin roof electrifying the hall. The girl with auburn hair girl twisted and twirled sinuously to the notes of Sing, Sing, Sing. Gordon watched her mesmerized. He was a second lieutenant in the army and the following years, in battle, he proved fearless and bold, yet that evening he had lacked the courage to invite the pretty lass even for an old-fashioned country-dance. The girl, however, had nerve and she brashly confronted the dashing young officer whose grey eyes had keenly watched her every time she took to the floor.

     “Hello, I’m Rose,” she said. “Would you care to dance?”

     “Me? I... ahm... I can’t boogie-woogie,” said the officer.

     “But they’re not playing boogie-woogie now.” Her green eyes twinkled cheekily. “Anyone can dance to this. Come on.” She caught his hand and tugged him towards the centre of the floor. And so it was that the notes of Moonlight Serenade assisted Rose in harnessing the officer. Five months later, in August 1939, they married. He was twenty-two, she eighteen.

     Gordon stood awestruck when the bride stepped out of her father’s posh, burgundy Plymouth Sedan (the only one in town). She was wearing an ivory-coloured, long-sleeved satin dress trimmed with mother-of-pearl studs running down the front of the bodice (studs that in the evening Gordon unfastened with trembling hands). A headband of pale pink flowers adorned her long, wavy hair.

     “You are, Miss Rose,” he breathed in her ear, “and forever will be my Dante Rossetti lass.” After the ceremony, they said good-bye to their families and they hopped into his old Ford and sped to Canberra’s Hyatt hotel for their one-night honeymoon. In the morning, they headed for their new home in Albury. The house was close to the barracks of Wodonga where Gordon was stationed.

     The halcyon days of sexual fulfilment and peaceful domesticity, however, soon came to an abrupt end. War broke out. They dispatched Gordon to the Mediterranean and his young bride, fraught with fear, was left behind. Rose refused to relocate to the family dwelling in Goulburn preferring, instead, their home in Albury that had been privy to such wholesome happiness. She grew a vegetable garden, planted fruit trees in the small orchard, tended to the large house, arranged the curtains, set up a nursery for the future, and prepared marmalade and jams. During the lonely afternoons, she read books, mostly novels.

     After two years in North Africa, Gordon’s brigade was deployed to Greece where he was captured and detained until the end of the war. After five years’ absence, he returned to Australia worn and thin and changed. He’d become more reticent and withdrawn. Rose’s nature had altered, too – she’d lost her playfulness, the mischievous twinkle in her eyes had vanished.

     But such is war, it wreaks havoc.

 

***

 

“Still keen on going to the pictures this afternoon?” asked Gordon, looking up from the newspaper.

     “Oh, yes, Gordon, please. There’s Dead Poets Society at Regent’s or Always, a remake of A Guy Named Joe at United.”

     “A Guy Named Joe? That was a war film, wasn’t it?”

     “Yes, but Audrey Hepburn’s in this one.”

     “Well, lass, you can go with Mabel to see that one. I've had my fair share of war.”

     The bleeding wounds, the gutted intestines, the torn limbs, the pleading eyes of mates and enemies alike still haunted him.

     Shortly after his return to Australia, Gordon had resigned from the army. He set up a small cabinet-making firm. He liked the smell, the texture, the pliability of wood. For the greater part, he made simple, sturdy kitchen cabinets, but sometimes people ordered glazed bookcases, inlaid tables, writing desks and painted screens that gratified his artistic inclination. To their sorrow the nursery remained empty, Rose never got pregnant. Apparently accepting her lot, she moved on and devoted more and more time to the vegetable garden. The arrival of migrants from continental Europe soon after the war brought a wider variety of seeds and the vegetable garden bloomed with yellow zucchini flowers, red chillies, purple eggplants, and dark green broccoli – produce that she sold to the local fruit shop.

     “Pizza at Angelo’s after the pictures?” asked Rose.

     “Bit noisy there of a Friday evening,” said Gordon.

     “Maggie’s Tea Room then, would that be better? It stays open till late on Fridays.”

     “Yes, much better.” He set aside the newspaper. “Lass, have you decided on the colour for the rooms upstairs?”

     “Actually, Mabel suggested wallpaper. More tea?” A dog barked. “There’s Billy, the post’s here.” Billy, their next-door neighbour’s dog, let everyone know when the postman hit the street.

     “I’ll get it,” said Gordon, rising stiffly. “Oh, and no more tea, thanks.” He bent over and kissed her forehead. “And no more talk of wallpaper, either, too grinding.”

     Rose smiled, poured herself another cup and picked up her new library book. Rose had drifted in troubled waters with the last one she’d read, Anna Karenina; with the Barbara Pym novel in her hands she hoped to float in an unruffled bay. After making herself comfortable, she leafed to page one. Rose had aged well – bar the arthritic fingers. Although sixty-eight, her slim figure and short pixie hair threaded with only a few strands of grey, gave her a youthful air.

     Gordon entered with the mail. “Three for you, lass, and a bill for me.” Rose grasped the letters: one was from her sister, Agnes, who lived in Adelaide, one from a niece living in England, and another came without a sender name or address. She opened it first. The brief missive said:  I think I am your son. I would like to meet you. Robert. A telephone number followed.

 

***

 

Rose sat on a bench at Albury’s nineteenth-century railway station. She wore a dainty, bucket hat trimmed with a bow, white cotton gloves and a new pale-blue dress with delicate floral design. Somewhat girlish she’d thought when she bought it – better, though, than somewhat “gran-ish”. The soft fabric ruffled in the breeze as she waited for the Melbourne-bound train. – You look pretty, lass. – Gordon had said when she left for the station. The first willing words he had spoken to Rose since hearing about her short-lived affair with the owner of the bookshop.

     Shocked by the revelation, Gordon had stuttered, “What? Mark is ... Mark was homosexual, he died of this new disease, didn’t he?”

     “Yes,” said Rose, “I think he was homosexual. But you didn’t talk about those things then.”

     Years of guilt, and the ever-present burning for her son, had secretly consumed Rose. Yet when the deception had finally surfaced, she felt an eerie numbness. She was almost pleased – a weight had been lifted.

     “We were lonely, Gordon, and desperate. Mark’s... um… his friend was killed at El Alamein and you went missing for eight months, eight long, agonising months. I believed you were dead. I’m sorry, it... it happened. And when I realised I was... that I was …” Tears erupted.

     Gordon delved into his pocket, handed over his handkerchief and waited for her to continue.

     “Sorry,” she whispered. “When I realised that I was pregnant I went to Melbourne. I told everyone that I’d volunteered to help out with the wounded soldiers repatriated. Instead, I stayed in a convent. The nuns treated me as if I was the devil’s whore, but when the time came a caring, young sister allowed me a long embrace with my child before carrying him off for adoption. Mother, father, Agnes, not even Mark, no one ever found out about the pregnancy.”

     “And neither did I,” Gordon said, tersely.

     “You would have left me.”

     “What?”

     “The thought terrified me, Gordon, that’s why I gave him up. My child, my baby.”

     “I would have what?” Gordon screamed. “You didn’t trust me! We’ve lived together, shared everything, what, for fifty years now and all without trust?” Then he had stormed out of the house.

     Tears swelled as Rose recalled his stinging rebuke. Since then he had kept to himself and slept in the nursery stripped long ago of Peter Rabbit decorations and children’s furniture. She leant against the back of the bench and closed her eyes. A husband lost, she thought, but a son found. Perhaps.

     “Can we meet?” Her son had asked on the phone. A bit too curtly, she fancied.

     “Why, yes, of course.”

     “And where would it suit you?”

     “I... I would like to avoid Albury, for now, I mean. Could it be half way, maybe at Seymour station?” Would he have sandy hair and dark brown eyes like his father, she had wondered as they spoke. “Um... how will we, you know, recognise each other?”

     “Let’s linger on the platform,” Robert had said. “People will soon disperse.”

     And now, when they’d meet in just over two hours, would they kiss, or embrace, or awkwardly shake hands, or would they merely ...

     “Jingoes! Where are you off to all scrubbed up?” said a familiar voice.

     Rose’s eyes flicked open. “Mabel! Oh, Mabel, how come you’re going to Seymour?” she asked, panicking.

     “Seymour? What makes you think I’m going to Seymour? Getting off at Wangaratta, I am. Going to Jenny’s, like I do every Saturday.” With that she plonked herself down on the bench and put the shopper she was carrying between them.

     “Of course, Saturday,” said Rose, “your night with the grandchildren, I forgot.” Her nose dripped.

     “Rosie, are you all right, luv?” Mabel gave her a tissue.

     “Yes, just feeling a little... I don’t know... the glare maybe... making my eyes water.”

     “Right little number you’re wearing, Rosie. Crikey, is this silk?” She fingered the material. “Carla’s boutique, I s’ppose. Pricey, she is! Mind you, I prefer the Emporium with their good old tweed skirts and comfy cardigans and sensible summer frocks with deep pockets. Strewth, not half as...” And off she went on a long babble about shops and the mall that was under construction and how life in their town wasn’t the same anymore. Gordon always grumbled about Mabel’s nattering and discreetly left the room whenever she was around. Nonetheless, Mabel was a good friend to Rose, yet right now she wished they had never met.

     “Long distance train for Melbourne arriving at platform 2,” blared the loudspeaker. “Stops at Wodonga, Chiltern, Springhurst, Wangaratta, Benalla, Violet Town, Euroa, Avenel, Seymour...”

     People shuffled, collecting their belongings, kissing and waving goodbye. Mabel picked up the shopper that was full to the brim and shot to her feet. “Rag dolls I got here for the girls and a teddy bear for the tot. Baked some bikkies, too, 'cause Jenny never gets...” She rambled on.

     Rose stood up, her heart raced and her head pounded, she felt dizzy. As they walked towards the platform, Rose watched the thundering train snake its way into the historic station. The engine advancing ominously, the station's long line of cast-iron flute columns, the awning bordered with ornate decorations suddenly evoked in Rose's disturbed mind the figure of Anna Karenina, angry and desperate, aimlessly roaming the platform at Moscow’s Obiralovka station. She saw Anna descend steps, stagger alongside the railway tracks, then stop, set aside the little red bag she carried, crouch down and thrust her head on the tracks. She saw Anna hesitate a fraction too long, before wrenching back just as the clangouring goods train struck hard on her head. Rose shuddered. Like Anna, she had sacrificed her child for the man she loved. Ironically, though, her man was a husband, not a lover like Anna Karenina’s, she reflected. The story’s final denouement had irked Rose – too extreme, too unreal, she had thought. Now, instead, she grasped Anna’s plight, her desperation, and the final irrevocable deed.

     It was a way out. An escape from the pain of living.

     Mabel nudged her friend’s arm, “Did ya hear what I was telling ya?”

     “Sorry, no, it’s just… I’m feeling a little faint,” said Rose.

     “Here, luv, have a bikkie, the tin’s full to the brim.”

     “No, thanks, Mabel, I’m all right, really.” But she wasn’t.

     Brakes screeched as the train slowed down and came to a noisy halt, while Mabel's yammering resumed, “... Jenny said, and I said, Jenny, I said, the bloke’s a bloody boozer. What can you expect from a right whacka? And she says...”

People bustled along, some heaving suitcases, others clutching bags and packages, eager to hop on and secure a good seat. Queues formed in semicircles beneath carriage doors as travellers waited for passengers to alight. The throng, her friend’s incessant talk, the train coming in on her, the disturbing image of Anna Karenina that it had conjured, her son’s coldness on the phone ringing in her ears, Gordon’s love shattered, it all battered down on her like an unrelenting hailstorm. Caught in a whirlwind of unsettling emotions, she cracked. She decided to phone Robert, call off the meeting. She spied the station’s two telephone booths, surely one would have a functioning phone. Or was it too late, she fretted, he said he’d get to Seymour early. Well then, she’d ring this evening, tell her son that she was sorry… that she missed the train, that she was ill. And she was. Ill.

     “Listen, Mabel, I’m going to make …”

     “Hey, is that Gordon?” A tall man with grey hair, dressed in suit and tie, limping slightly, was striding towards them.

     “Gordon?” murmured Rose.

     “G’day, Mr Gorgeous!” Mabel called. “Just in time to catch your train. Poor Rosie here is none too good. If you ask me, it’s the weather. Snappy yesterday, muggy today. So where are you two off to all spruced up and dressed to the nines?”

     Gordon looked at his wife’s pale, drawn face. He caught her arm.

     “She didn’t tell you? We’re meeting our son,” he said, quietly.

     Rose’s heart raced, the veins round her temples pulsed. Did he say... our son? What did he mean by… what the…? Then it struck her like an explosive thunderbolt during a summer storm: surrendering her son had been a meaningless sacrifice. It was horrifyingly clear now, she should have known, of course she should have known. All those years ago Gordon would have reached out to her and accepted the child. She turned to her friend who stood there open-mouthed.           “Yes, we’re... we’re meeting our son,” she said, lips quivering.

     “Blimey,” said Mabel, “that’s a whack on the head, innit?”

 

***

 

On the train Rose softly, and ruefully, told her tale. Mabel’s whispered gee whizzes and holy dooleys and gasps and crikeys and you don’t says and sighs and fancy thats accompanied them all the way to Wangaratta.

     Gordon interrupted the tête-à-tête, “Mabel, it’s your stop.”

     “What?” she said.

     “Wangaratta, we’re at Wangaratta.”

     “Already? Oh no, pity that! Well, I’m off then. Come to think of it I could hop out at the next...?”

     “The kiddies,” said Rose.

     “Yeah, the kiddies. Right!” She grabbed the shopper and fled through the carriage door just as the station-master blew his whistle.

     “Flaming alone at last!” said Gordon.

     “Mabel’s a good person, Gordon, she’s tolerant and charitable,” said Rose.

     “And wacky! Are you all right, lass?”

     “I’ve a headache.” The train jolted then moved slowly forward. “Thank you, Gordon, for… for everything,” she murmured.

     He took her hand. “Why gloves in the heat, Rose?”

     “Oh, you know...”

     “The fashion is it?”

     “It’s, you know, to cover up. For Robert. I’ve the hands of a witch.” Mortified, she turned away and looked out the window.

     In the distance a troop of kangaroos lazed under a grove of gum trees, a few hopped idly about. The train gained speed and the peaceful image fell away. She checked her watch. Her son would be there by now, waiting to meet the mother who had abandoned him. On the phone, he’d asked about his father. She’d told him that Mark had died five years earlier, but withheld the cause. Why? As if Robert would be harmed by the nasty gossip that had swept the town like a bush fire when people had learned that the quiet, gentle man from the bookshop had died of Aids, the scandalous disease. She did tell him, though, that Mark had been unaware that he had a son.

     “Unaware?” he’d said, icily.

     “No one knew, Robert, I told no one, not even your father, I’m … I’m sorry.”

     And there’d be more questions to answer. Should she tell him that Mark was homosexual? What if Robert is … is homosexual, would it matter? Well, no, of course not, why would it matter? Thought upon thought came and fled like the stations coming and going, drawing her closer and closer to her son. What had she done with her life, accomplished what? A husband betrayed, a child abandoned, Mark denied the comfort of a son, a friend deceived. She had pained, hurt the very people that she…

     “We’re pulling into Seymour,” said Gordon.

     Rose's heart thumped.

     “Oh, Gordon, how do I look? My hat? Is it straight?”

     “Too straight.” He tilted it slightly. “There, you look fine, lass, if only you’d smile.”

     The carriage doors opened, the ageing couple descended and they stood to one side while they waited for people to reach the exit and clear the platform. Some walked briskly; others dawdled. She scoured each man that walked by, but no one seemed to be searching, scrutinising faces as she was doing. Heedless of her aching fingers, Rose snapped and unsnapped the magnetic clasp of her handbag. Then she stopped abruptly.

     “What if he’s not here?” she said.

     “What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Gordon.

     “What if he got cold feet and decided not to come?”

     “After all the trouble he went through to find you?”

     “Of course, what a silly thought.” She eyed the station clock then observed a man with peppery hair dressed in light brown cotton trousers and a green polo: he ambled in their direction. She attempted a smile.

     “What colour hair did he have… Robert... when he was born?” asked Gordon, who had noticed the same man.

     “He was bald.” She laughed and started fidgeting with the clasp again. “But his lashes were fair.”

      The man strolled by without a glance and walked further down the platform. Rose sighed. People had dispersed now, but others were arriving. A few boys mucked about, two giggling girls looked on, a mother cautioned her children to stay away from the track’s border, and then a group of teenagers stormed the station and colourful language vibrated along the platform. Still there was no trace of an edgy man in his forties on the lookout for an elderly woman. Rose watched the hand of the station clock jerk forward as another minute passed relentlessly. The loudspeaker announced the arrival of the Shepparton train and people stirred.

     “He’s not coming,” she said.

     “Stop it, lass. He might have missed the train,” said Gordon.

     “He’s not coming.”

     “Maybe he decided to drive and got bottled in the traffic, or he ...”

     “I want to go home, Gordon.”

     “… or he had a car break.”

     “Please, Gordon, let’s go.”

     “Listen, I’ll go check when the next train from Melbourne is due, and when it arrives either we hop on it and go home, or we wait to see if he gets off. You choose which.”

     She watched Gordon limp off. It was useless, Robert was not coming his intention now clear. The chilling voice, the business-like manner. All along he aimed at retribution: she was to taste abandonment. The train from Shepparton pulled in. People boarded noisily.

     “I’m thirsty, Mummy.”

     “… so back off, will ya?”

     “Hey, that’s cool…”

     “Daddy, does a captain drive the choo-choo?”

     “You moron, didn’t you know that she’s…”

     “Five blinking chapters the bitch gave us…”

     “… bloody screamer Macca took.”

     The commotion dimmed, the train chugged off. Rose looked up and down the deserted platform. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she grasped the predicament. Her head exploded with pain, the strain too much to bear. She leant against the wall. Robert was punishing her, a payback that she deserved. In the heat, she started to shiver uncontrollably.

     “Hurry up, Daddy!” said a little girl.

     The clamour in the station was returning. Rose shut her eyes to the men, women, and children crowding the platform again. If only she could rewind the reel of her life, she thought, rewind right back to the frame where she had surrendered her baby. Call, Action, and live the scene all over again. They do that in films. They shoot until the actors get it right. Take 1, Take 2, Take 3... Whatever it takes to get it right. But life only grants One Take, there’s just the single shot to get it right, and if you blunder that one as she had done all those years ago ... Someone tapped her arm. Gordon was back, they could finally go home now, although home promised no way out, no escape from the mess of her life. She snivelled, straightened up and opened her eyes.

     Oh! It wasn’t Gordon.

     A little girl in a straw bonnet and yellow frock trimmed with a blue sash round the waist stood in front of her. A damp stain smeared the bodice.

     “Hello,” said the child. “I’m Eloise.”

     Rose brushed aside a tear. “Eloise? That’s a lovely name. And where are you off to, Eloise, in such a pretty dress?”

     “Nowhere ‘cos I’m here already. Here with my daddy.”

     “Sorry,” said a man who walked up behind her. “She tripped, grazed her knee, and smudged ice-cream all over her new dress. We had to clean up.” He smiled. “Um, hello, I’m Robert, and Eloise here is your grand-daughter.”

     Rose’s throat tightened, a muscle on her right temple twitched.

     He frowned.

     “You are Rose, aren’t you?” Robert said, tilting his head.

     “Yes, I am,” she told her son.

     And after forty-five years, Rose's eyes twinkled again.