Moving Among Strangers Read Free Page B

the mobile as I was getting into the car outside St Stephen’s Hall.
    â€˜She’s gone,’ he said.
    I called my daughter and was relieved when she didn’t answer. She would have a more peaceful night without knowing. Then I looked at my watch.
    It was twenty minutes past nine.

4
    19 APRIL 2009
    Dear Gabrielle,
    Thank you very much for your card. I was very sad to hear that Joan is so ill. We knew each other such a long time – I think since my age was in single figures, when she was nursing at Geraldton before she married Alex – and later on, when I was a schoolboy and undergraduate, her letters from London were like a window on the world. I can still tell you who her favourite ballerina was (Elaine Tyfield) and how she met Alex again (accidentally on a park bench). Do give her my fond regards.
    It seems appropriate for you to read ‘For One Dying’, as ‘Ap’ (my great-aunt, for whom it was written) knew Joan well and was fond of her.
    With all good wishes to you both,
    Mick Randolph Stow
    By the time this card arrived, my mother had been dead for four days. She had died in her own bed, which was her wish, but it had not been the ‘perfect end’ that Stow had wished for his aunt. I knew we’d done our best to relieve her suffering but my mother had not been granted a quiet night. And when one has accompanied a person through her dying, it is difficult not to spend the following days, months, years, wondering how one might have done it better.
    I gazed at Stow’s writing, the neatly inscribed sentences in black ink.
    â€¦ when I was a schoolboy and undergraduate, her letters from London were like a window on the world …
    Why did my mother correspond with a young man, an adolescent, thirteen years her junior, who wasn’t even a relation? And where were her letters now?
    I realised I had never known my mother to go to the ballet. She had not mentioned ballerinas even when I’d been to ballet lessons as a child. What was this life she had lived, when she had been such a ballet regular that she had developed a ‘favourite ballerina’? And who was Elaine Tyfield?
    Most mysteriously of all, however, were the words about my father, ‘and how she met Alex again (accidentally on a park bench ). ’ Again? Accidentally? On which park bench?
    Stow knew more about my mother, and perhaps my family, than I did. Writing back with our sad news, I enclosed the memorial bookmark we had designed for her funeral, printed with his poem ‘For One Dying’ and a copy of my book Waiting Room , which had been launched five days before she died.
    *
    My mother was extremely secretive and not a natural storyteller. Although she did occasionally tell stories about growing up on a vineyard in the Swan Valley of Western Australia, they were very few and, I see now, heavily edited. One of the rare stories she told and retold about Randolph Stow was from his days as a schoolboy at Guildford Grammar School, on the Swan River not far from ‘Oakover’, her home in Middle Swan.
    â€˜I’ll never forget,’ she’d say, ‘how he swam across the river one afternoon, holding his school clothes high in one hand.’ Apparently Stow had stripped down to his underwear and then paddled, one-handed, across the muddy water, so he could visit Joan and her family.
    I’ve never quite understood why he seemed to be such a regular visitor, or how the families were con-nected, but my mother gave me the impression that during his time as a boarder at Guildford, Stow was virtually adopted by the Fergusons. So I simply explained it to myself by imagining he must have felt very alone, being so far from his home in Geraldton, and that the Fergusons were somehow acquainted with the Stows in the way that all the old established families of Western Australia seemed to know each other. While Stow was still at high school, my mother left her home in the Swan