Melting moments by Anna Goldsworthy

Black Inc, 2020. ISBN: 9781863959988. 224pp.
(Age: Adult) Recommended. A young woman and a young man tentatively try to consummate their marriage just ahead of him being shipped out to New Guinea, during the second world war. When he returns, they have to rediscover each other, relearn how to be together. It is their shared future, they are in it together - it is the time of staying out marriages, managing it somehow. Forget the other dreams.
Goldsworthy captures that sense of fate, of a path that is carved out, with many women who marry the man who becomes the husband and father, but who still remember the other man, the one who was special, who if things had been different, could have been a different partner, a different life. So it is for Ruby, she marries Arthur, the man who proposed to her before being shipped out, a man she respects and cares for, but she always remembers Bill, the one who made her heart leap.
Goldsworthy beautifully creates her characters - we know them, they are us: the husband and wife managing their lives, and the tension between mother and daughter - the mother who followed the expected path and the daughter who has wider more liberated aspirations. But as they mature, the mother and daughter draw closer together, and Arthur, the husband and father is the person for whom they both manage the care.
It is a heart warming story. Ruby remains the good wife, but in old age there is the rediscovery of romance and true love. It is a reminder that life continues, the joys and the sorrows, and the connections that become more meaningful and rewarding as time passes.
Themes: Love, Marriage, Romance, Women's roles, Old age.
Helen Eddy