The Last Orchard – Chapter 2
Diner à deux
‘Snap!’
It was a fatuous thing to say.
It was really no remarkable coincidence, that there should be two such similar campervans next to each other on the ferry. There were at least two other Hiace Hi-tops on board. She’d spotted them in the queue. It was a common vehicle.
Unfortunately, she didn’t realise she was going to say it aloud – until she’d said it. She lived too much inside her own head sometimes.
And they were very similar, ex-Britz rentals of the same vintage, and probably converted by the same workshop from the standard delivery van.
But the poor man was trying to extricate himself from his van – his rather small van – and there wasn’t much room. He was a large man.
Which had a comical aspect.
She fought an impulse to scuttle off before he had time to turn round. Instead, she waited for him, pointed out the similarity. Even though she felt foolish now, to have bothered him.
He seemed a bit cross, was her first impression.
Then she realised that no, he was just bashful. He was actually blushing!
How sweet.
A great big bear of a man, over six foot, broad shouldered, quite handsome – if you ignored the unfortunate moustache – blushing like a teenage boy.
She decided she’d complicated the poor man’s life enough.
Saying goodbye, she made for the exit from the car deck. Praying that he wouldn’t catch up with her. Because then they’d have to prolong the awkward moment, instead of putting it behind them.
The stairwell was packed with slow-moving bodies, which all seemed to be carrying far too many bags. Had they not read the boarding instructions? She squeezed herself into the lift, almost getting her bag caught in the closing door.
Over the back, a woman started coughing! Oh for the love of God. She couldn’t afford to catch COVID now. Why in the world hadn’t she brought a mask? Do we forget so quickly?
She managed to hold her breath for the whole trip up to the eighth deck, where the recliner lounge was to be found. As the door finally slid open, she burst out with a loud gasp, startling an unsuspecting passenger waiting to go down.
The seats seemed quite big and comfy, though she wouldn’t have minded being a bit further from her neighbours on either side. And why had she not thought to book one in the front row, facing the huge panoramic windows, not the backs of reclining heads?
Ah, well. Lessons to learn for the return journey.
Having taken possession of her recliner, and left her shapeless beanie, her moth-eaten carpet bag and her threadbare donkey jacket on it, none of them particularly desirable items, she hoped, she headed off to explore the rest of the ship.
That task having been achieved, and in a disappointingly short time too, she wondered how to kill the hours until her stomach felt ready for dinner.
A pre-dinner drink, maybe? Find a cosy spot somewhere and settle down?
Ah, here was a free table – and only one chair, wedged into the corner behind a boisterous family. They seemed fully absorbed in their own affairs, and likely to leave her alone.
She had her book, a Robbie Arnott novel, to fend off unwanted conversation. It was a strange, sad tale of apple orchards and a beautiful sailing boat, with a fractured, complex timeline – and it spoke to her current situation.
Maybe she should immerse herself in the theme, and have a cider? As the de facto owner of an orchard, she could call it research.
The owner of an orchard!
Then she looked up, and there he was. He looked so much like a big puzzled bear, lost in a forest of humans. She had to smile.
He fussed around so, finding a chair and getting a drink. She thought wistfully of her lost peace and quiet.
But he’s a very nice man, Leigh, she told herself. Don’t be an uncharitable old baggage.
And then things got interesting.
He planned to restore and live aboard an old wooden crayfishing boat. How romantic, how whimsical!
‘It sounds a very big undertaking.’
‘It is.’
‘What … inspired you to take it on?’
Was ‘inspired’ the word she really meant?
‘I wanted to do something for me,’ he said simply. Then, as if he felt a justification were necessary:
‘The kids have finished uni and are making their own way in life. My marriage has run its course …’
Do marriages run a course, she pondered, like greyhounds on a track? Do children, grown-up children, really make their own way? Or are these just clichés we wheel out to explain our creeping alienation from those we claim to love, and who claim to love us?
Do we become more ourselves with the passing of the years, and in some way lose our readiness, even our capacity to adapt to, form relationships with others?
But he was still talking.
‘Dad was a cray fisherman. On the east coast, Bay of Fires.’
She had only a hazy concept of where that was. A remote area, wasn’t it? She was aware of a comedy drama by that name, about a community of misfits and criminals …
‘So you grew up around working boats and the sea. Wonderful, though I expect it was a hard life. And did you learn to handle a boat yourself, and fish for crays, at your father’s side?’
Then the whole sorry tale came tumbling out.
In seeking to protect her son from the fate of his older brother, the fate of so many young men in those reckless times, the mother had damaged him for life. Destroyed the husband she probably still loved. Poor man. Poor woman. Poor little boy.
And now, here he was, at the age of, what – sixty? Trying to claw back something of his lost life, his lost birthright, in this foolish, this foolhardy venture, in which he had few of the prerequisites for success, other than time and a lack of other demands upon it.
Trying to become, on the threshold of old age, the man he ought to have been in his youth.
The parallels with her own situation, well, they were discomfiting. But she’d spent her life tilting at windmills and he, at least, had brought up a family.
Now, she too had a chance to ‘do something for me’. But what?
What does a fifty-six-year-old environmental scientist do with an apple orchard?
‘Burn it,’ she announced.
They’d moved from pre-dinner drinks to the main event. The first time she’d had dinner à deux with a charming, attentive, single man for, ooh, rather a long time.
Mind you, the setting was hardly conducive to romance: trays of fatty food on a melamine tabletop and the loud, nasal banter of two young tradies at the next table, only partially muffled by the flake and chips they chomped away at. The fishiness wafted across in warm gusts, spiced by beer fumes.
Though the bright lights of the servery did flicker prettily, reflected in the glass of the spray-wet window, against the Stygian blackness of Bass Strait.
‘Bit drastic, isn’t it?’
‘It may be,’ she conceded. ‘I’ll need to get on site and do a proper survey. But a good, hot burn is one way to allow nature to reclaim the property, to rewild it. So I’m keeping it in mind, as a possibility.’
‘Do you think that’s what your uncle expected, when he left it to you?’
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she had to admit. ‘The last time I saw him, he was in his thirties. He died at the age of eighty-eight.’
‘Wow. Yet he remembered you, all that time. You must’ve made a hell of an impression, Leigh.’
‘I haven’t the faintest idea why.’
He tilted his head, as if considering. Said nothing.
As compliments go, it was low key. Yet unmistakeable.
She found herself yawning.
‘I’m so sorry. I’m going to have to go to bed, Jamie.’
‘No worries. Thanks for the chat. Sweet dreams.’
‘Likewise.’
The lighting in the Ocean Recliner Lounge was dim now, and conversation muted, though not quite as absent as it might have been, at eleven o’clock at night. There was the glow of individual reading lights, and tinny sound bleed from a neighbour’s headphones. Someone was snoring – a loud, juddering roar like a truck applying its exhaust brakes.
Her fucking recliner wouldn’t.
Recline, that is.
She sat in it and pushed back with her shoulders, forward with her buttocks. Waggled the lever. No response.
‘You have to pull the footrest up. By hand,’ explained a helpful neighbour.
She pulled the footrest as instructed, wrestled the back of the chair to an angle less rigidly vertical. Half threw herself into the chair around the bulky, now horizontal footrest, tucked the supplied blanket around herself and put her feet up.
The footrest sagged slowly to the floor.
The snorer changed gear.
It was half-past one when she finally gave up the attempt to wrest a ragged sleep from the Ocean Recliner Lounge.
The bar shutters were down, and though the lights were scarcely dimmer than before, the big screens were mercifully blank and silent. Passengers had ignored the injunctions not to sleep in the public areas of the ship, and had stretched out on benches and between chairs, wrapped in blankets and jackets.
Jamie was still there. Or there again.
‘Leigh! Couldn’t sleep either?’
‘I tried. Believe me, I tried. Oh, how I tried. I’ve discovered why the recliners are free.’
He chuckled.
‘Well, believe me, the cabins aren’t free. Mine cost an arm and a leg. But I still can’t bloody sleep.’
‘Shame.’
He looked at her thoughtfully, started to say something, then stopped. The ruddy glow crept above his collar again.
‘What?’
‘It’s a twin cabin. Two beds. Nice clean white sheets and pillows. A private ensuite. A porthole.’
It dawned on her – what he was saying. What he was inviting. Her face must have been a picture.
‘And no funny business, Leigh.’
She found herself yawning. It was the most ginormous yawn: it felt as if the top of her head was going to fall right off.
‘I’m far too tired for funny business. Take me to your cabin. Immediately.’
Following his broad back down the corridor, she pondered her unspoken implication.
Funny business with Jamie would have been quite acceptable, under other circumstances.
Coming up:
Next Tuesday in Audrey Liza: Jamie has plenty of time on the drive down to Hobart to reflect on the night before – and the challenge he’s taking on.
Next Friday in The Last Orchard: Uncle Vern’s farm is not as Leigh remembers it from her childhood. Not at all.
Author’s note:
The protagonists of Audrey Liza (Jamie) and The Last Orchard (Leigh) feature occasionally in each other’s story. The stories can be read separately, and will make perfectly good sense that way. However, reading them together will add depth and contrast to the reading experience.
To give you all a feeling for how this will work, I’m sending the first three chapters of The Last Orchard free to all subscribers.
What a great start! Love your two stories.