I drove into the driveway of my parent's house. My mother must have heard the sound of my arrival because even before I was out of the car she was at the front door waiting for me. I had barely visited the old home over the past year, and it was a sorrowful letter from mother that had given rise to my present visit. As we approached each other I could see the dark stains under mother's eyes, and neglected appearance of her clothing.
The letter had arrived some three weeks before, and it contained the news that my father had left mother. I felt the anguish in almost every line of the letter and decided that I must go home, even if only for a few days.
My parent's house was a thousand kilometres from where I now lived and worked. Following my father's example, I worked for a firm of architects and had been with them for almost a year. I had not taken any leave, so I approached the senior partner and explained the situation. He was very understanding, and after rearranging some work schedules, he suggested that I should take three weeks leave.
I rang my mother and told her I was coming home to spend time with her, but she put an alternative suggestion, we should go to "The Cabin." This was a place my parents had built a few years after they were married and was situated in the hills about two hours drive from the suburb where they lived. It was in a very isolated spot, and I was not sure if it was a good idea to go there at this time, but mother was very insistent.
As we met in the driveway she clung fiercely to me for a couple of minutes, just repeating, "Oh, David. Oh David." Once released from her embrace we stowed her gear in the car and after locking the house, we left for the hills. I had made a half way stop overnight in a motel on the journey over, so I was reasonably fresh and capable of driving without falling asleep at the wheel.
As we approached the hills, I noticed that clouds were beginning to pile up on the horizon. "It'll be a wet night," I thought. About four kilometres into the hills I turned off onto a side road cutting through a forest, and after a further fifteen minutes we came to the dirt track that led to The Cabin. We bumped along this for a while, then, crossing a ford over a stream and climbing up a low hill, we arrived.
The Cabin was built as one of those "get away from it all" places. It was of generous proportions and had been built when the "open plan" space was all the rage for homes and offices. Initially it consisted of one very large room with separate combined shower room and toilet. For sewage, this was connected to a septic tank.
The open plan had not stayed like that for long. Fairly soon a screen wall with a door was put up, and this became my parent's bedroom. I assume that they wished to perform their more intimate acts unobserved. There were three other beds, each with the foot pointing to the centre of the room. These too had been slightly de-open planned, and now had mobile screens beside them to give some degree of privacy.
There was no gas or electricity, and cooking and heating was done via a wood burning stove. Lighting was achieved by the use of pump up kerosene lamps, hurricane lamps or candles. The system usually was that the pump up lamps were used until everyone was in bed, then this was turned off and the hurricane lamp lit and left to burn all night. This enabled anyone who needed to get up to move about without tripping over things.
We unloaded our gear and supplies from the car and carried them in to the cabin. I had expected mother to use the separate bedroom, but she opted for a bed in the main room. When I questioned this she said, "I couldn't sleep in there."
I lit the wood stove and mother set about preparing a meal. I made a tour of inspection seeing if any possums or other small animals had managed to get in, and carried in more wood for the stove. The place had not been used for nearly a year, and I noted that undergrowth and a few saplings had started to appear round the cabin. This is a dangerous bush fire area, and all foliage needs to be cleared away from buildings. I listed this as a job to be done while I was there.
After our meal mother and I sat, talking by the stove while soft music played on the old radio (no television). It was a strange sort of recital by my mother, in that it was so unemotional. She simply set out what she saw as the facts.
My father ran his own architectural consultancy business and employed a few people. About a year ago, he had employed a new girl to serve as receptionist. Not long after this girl started father began to ring home with "working late at the office" messages. These got increasingly frequent until the day he came home and baldly announced, "I'm leaving you, Mary. It's no use making a fuss because I'm going now and there's nothing you can do to stop me."
Mother was numb with shock, and simply stood and watched him as he packed a few things, then saying, "I'll send for the rest of my stuff," he walked out. It seems that he had found the "deep and meaningful" love of his life in the new girl, who was barely eighteen to his fifty-three.
By the time mother had finished telling the story it was time for bed. The threatened rain had arrived, together with strong gusts of wind that shook the cabin, flinging rain like pebbles against the windows. I banked up the fire with wood for the night, lit the hurricane lamp and hung it from a hook suspended from the ceiling, and extinguished the pump lamp. In the dim light mother and I went to what I suppose might be called "our booths."
The room was warm from the heat of the stove, so I did not veer from my practice of sleeping naked. I assumed without particularly thinking about it, that mother did the same, as I knew it was her habit to sleep nude as well.
I did not sleep immediately, but lay there listening to the rain beating on the roof and trying to batter its way in through the windows and the wind soughing through the treetops in the nearby forest. My thoughts went to mother and the curiously unemotional way she related the story of my father's departure. Knowing her devotion to him, and seeing the strained look on her face suggested that she had not told the full story.
I heard mother moving restlessly on the other side of the screen and a vision of her lying there, naked and restless, entered my thoughts. "He must have been mad to leave a woman like her. Loving, devoted, she had always been there to support him, and to fulfil his needs. He must be going through a late mid-life crisis to clear off with a girl almost young enough to be his grand daughter."
Mother was ten years younger than father. "He must like them young," I thought facetiously. I began to consider mother's looks. Oddly, this was not as easy as it sounds. I loved her with that love a son can have for his mother that has nothing to do with her looks. As a child I used to say to her, "You're beautiful, mummy," but the beauty I saw in her was her caring, her loving, and not simply face and figure.
I tried to focus my thoughts on her physical appearance. I had always rejoiced in the way she carried herself – so slim, straight and tall, not like some of my friends mothers, many of whom were fat or scraggily thin, walking with ponderous step or back bowed, slouching along. I was always proud to be seen with her when she occasionally met me after school, or on other occasions when we were out together.
Her hair is ash blonde and cut to shoulder length. Her eyes a fathomless dark brown that always gave me the feeling she was thinking thoughts beyond my reach. Her nose has a little bump in it about halfway down, and her mouth was wide with fairly full lips.
One of her features I had never actually seen properly were her breasts. I had some idea about them because she always wore a two piece swimming costume when swimming They were large without being obscenely big, and the thing that struck me about them was what seemed to be their unusual firmness. Often she would wear a dress or shirt with no support for her breasts underneath, and you could see that they needed no support. She put on bras, as she said, "When I'm being respectable."
Slender without being thin, she was supported on long legs with finely defined thigh and calf muscles. I thought again, "My fool of a father left all that when scores of men would have prized her." I later learned that a week after my father departed and the word got around, her next door neighbour called and informed her that they could have "a meaningful relationship." Mother sent him scurrying back to his wife and three children.
In the midst of thinking about mother and the situation, I drifted off to sleep. I awoke some time in the night. As I came to, I tried to focus on what might have awakened me. Perhaps an extra blast from the storm still raging outside? Some falling limb in the forest? Then as my eyes focused, I saw in the dim light of the hurricane lamp, mother standing by the window staring out into the blackness and storm. She was very still, and rather than invade her reverie, I remained silent. She stood for what seemed to be a long time and I lay watching her profile in the faint light.
Eventually she moved to sit on the couch still looking out at the night, then she made her first audible sound. It was a gasping shuddering intake of breath that foreshadowed the sobs that followed. I knew the moment had come for me to intervene. This was the pent up emotion she had blocked off as she told me earlier of father's leaving.
