Honorary cousins.

There were cousins and second cousins and uncles and aunts and so on. Grandparents. Distant relatives who came down from the country, the farm outside Corowa, and went home again, fitting in a quick visit secondary to attending the grand final or the Boxing Day test or once-a-year shopping at Myer. 

But there was an aunt who was not related. She went to school - 1940s - with my mother, and they were friends for life. She was a fawn-gabardine-coated, hatted, husky-voiced woman with a round face and tight light brown curls and red lipstick; dressed and made up as if she’d just walked out of the war years. Her three children, honorary cousins because their mother was an honorary aunt, had grown up a couple of suburbs away on a sun-filled north-south street like ours, and their simple post-war timber house like ours faced east as ours did, so that entering it was like walking into a familiar but transplanted environment. The honorary cousins had 1950s Christian names (Maree, Thomas, Margaret) and no father. He was the unmentioned: a hole in the air at the dinner table, an unsolvable equation. All that existed of him was some kind of reflection of light in the children’s emerald eyes.

The youngest had a butter blonde bob over a pale face that put fire in her green eyes. She had fire in her temper as well. We took the train to their house, clicking up the Fawkner line that seemed to have some kind of branch line cadence and clacked back home again hours later, changing at the station in the air at Flemington bridge for the tram around to Essendon. Sometimes they came to our place and we gazed out the louvred windows into the long back yard on days full of teeming rain. I suppose we just hung around while our mothers talked about the war and what went right  - and wrong - in the years since. The children grew up, and they married, and when the youngest one - butter blonde - did, I recall some strange feeling of time passing; could have been regret or something approaching tristesse (there is no word in English that quite conveys that French meaning); not jealousy but something like when someone close leaves and you know they are not coming back. 

That was decades ago. The grandmother died sometime in the 1990s.

On one of my recent twenty-minute drives to the house where I grew up to check on my mother, I found her entertaining a visitor. 

Same blonde bob. Same pale skin. Same green eyes: the daughter’s daughter. After all these years. They’d never forgotten. 

I still haven’t seen some of my real cousins for years, after sporadic attempts. You kind of give up after a while.