The Orchard Thieves by Elizabeth Jolley

Never let fear come into your life, someone had said to her when she was still a schoolgirl. She had never forgotten this, and here she was, a threatened and frightened woman after being fearless all her life, simply because a daughter, the middle one, without warning and without explanation, had come home seeking sanctuary. When she thought about it, there was no safe place in her house if someone should come, the hunter or the huntress, after the middle sister. Nothing closed properly in the house, the windows were loose in their frames, any keys which still remained would not turn in the locks. She never tried to lock up the house. At night the household was especially vulnerable with three women and three small children and one unborn child sleeping there. She had to understand that she had been afraid for almost four weeks, ever since the arrival of the middle sister.

The woman at the center of Elizabeth Jolley's The Orchard Thieves is known simply as "the grandmother." The other characters, too, are reduced to their familial roles: "the youngest daughter," "the grandsons," "the aunt"--that is, the eldest and childless sister. Into this web arrives the middle daughter, known as, you guessed it, "the middle daughter," returning to Australia from England with her daughter ("the cousin") in tow and a baby in the oven. The middle daughter has experienced something harrowing, perhaps related to a lover, perhaps the father of the baby, although it's also hinted at that she has relationships with women. What it is, the grandmother is never permitted to know; her role is to provide sanctuary without question, and the reader is never permitted to know either. But the grandmother's anxiety is ignited: how can she protect her middle daughter if she doesn't know where the threat lies?

In the above passage, the grandmother claims to have been "fearless all her life" until this moment, but we can see that this is not true. Until the arrival of the middle daughter, her primary concern is for her three grandsons, who act in the story as a unit, and who are always up to some mischief or peskiness. A bowl of fruit, sitting in the kitchen, is too beautifully arranged for anyone to take from it in the daylight, but at night the grandsons sneak in to steal apples and grapes, one by one--the orchard thieves of the title. The grandmother is entirely aware of this, and fascinatingly, her fear for her grandsons centers on the knowledge that they will be, at some time in their life, the thief, rather than the victim. But the "Orchard Thieves" also refers to the adult children, including the youngest daughter's husband, who seize on the opportunity to discuss despoiling the grandmother of her home. Does the grandmother see this greed in them, too, as she sees it in the young children? Does she excuse it, even nurture it, also? Is it cruelty, or a natural way of things that must be endured?

Jolley is always such a cryptic writer. In a way, The Orchard Thieves is the most straightforward of her novels, which always feel like they either have a piece missing, or perhaps one added in. Here, it's what has happened to the middle daughter--keeping that information back is, I think, a remarkable kind of authorial restraint. But the story from the narrow perspective of the grandmother is not cryptic at all, though its narrowness is a kind of limitation of the kind that Jolley seems to like. The reduction of the characters to their family roles turns it into a kind of fable or parable about aging and motherhood. One's reminded of those spiders who offer their bodies as refuge for the eggs of parasitical wasps, only to be eaten up after they hatch, piece by piece.