by Lily Hammond
Clemency’s eyes widened in shock. ‘I took her for a drive, Maxine. We had sanwiches and tea in the garden of my house.’ She paused. ‘Nothing happened.’
‘Nothing happened?’ Maxine repeated, making it a question. ‘She just kissed you!’
Clemency shook her head, temper flaring. ‘On the cheek! A peck to say thank you.’ She shook her head, breathed out. ‘Look, Max, what’s going on? What are you so upset about?’
Maxine closed her eyes, feeling the heat of the day on her skin, soaking in through her clothes. She sucked in a deep, calming breath. ‘Hold your temper,’ she said.
‘I’m doing so,’ Clemency shot back. ‘Look to your own.’
‘I’m trying, damn it all.’ Maxine sighed, a resigned puff of air. ‘Look, let’s talk this over, shall we?’
Clemency stood still beside the motor. For a long moment she was inclined to open the driver’s door again and get into the motor car and leave without another word. She lifted her gaze and looked at the house, at the sky reflected back from the window glass. Her shoulders slumped slightly.
‘Fine,’ she said. Because this was her best friend. Because this was Maxine and they’d known each other since they were barely able to walk.
And because she wanted to see Eliza again.
Maxine nodded. ‘Let’s go take a seat,’ she said.
But Clemency shook her head. ‘How about a stroll instead?’ she offered. She’d been sitting down the whole of the forty-five-minute trip back and wanted the chance to stretch her legs before making the return trip. ‘I need to get back,’ she added, although she didn’t. There was nothing pressing back at the house. All her hours were hers to while away as she pleased.
‘How’s the studio work going?’ Maxine asked, acquiescing without a word. ‘I thought you’d be working today.’
Clemency shrugged. ‘No appointments today. A full day tomorrow, though.’ She wrinkled her nose at the prospect. ‘I’ve had in in an advertisement for a photographer to take over the studio. It’s been running for a couple weeks.’ She checked her watch. It was late in the afternoon now and she hoped she would get a telephone call about the advertisement before the day was out. She had so many more things she wanted to do.
‘You shouldn’t have just run off with her, you know,’ Maxine said.
Clemency didn’t look at her as they walked slowly down the driveway. ‘I didn’t just run off with her.’
‘None of us knew where she was. We didn’t know what had happened to her.’ Maxine’s lips pulled down in dissatisfaction. ‘If one of the ladies hadn’t heard your motor come and go, we would never have been able to guess what happened to her. She’s terribly vulnerable.’
Clemency inclined her head in acknowledgement. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Perhaps that was a little irresponsible. I didn’t think.’
Maxine lifted her head and stared at Clemency. ‘No,’ she said, and her voice was sharp. ‘You didn’t think. And what on earth were you doing in the first place? She’s young – she can’t speak!’
Clemency stared back at Maxine. ‘She can communicate perfectly well,’ she said. ‘In fact, she seems hungry for experience.’
Maxine’s eyes widened. ‘Tell me you haven’t!’
‘Haven’t what?’ But Clemency knew.
Maxine just shook her head, not peeling her gaze from Clemency, pinning her in her sights, waiting for the question to be answered.
‘Of course I haven’t made love to her,’ Clemency answered. ‘What do you think of me?’ She looked away, down the street where the houses turned to slums, their paint peeling, rubbish in the gutters, windows cracked behind the spider webs.
‘How would I even?’ she asked with a little laugh. ‘I’ve never forced a woman in my life!’
Maxine shook her head, a little ashamed of the question. ‘Eliza is impressionable, is all. And eager to please.’
Clemency folded her arms across her chest, keeping her face turned studiously away from her friend.
‘Should I ever,’ she said, ‘make love to Eliza – and that is debatable as to whether it is ever likely to happen – then it will be with her full understanding and full participation.’ She turned and looked sharply at Maxine. ‘Do you understand?’
Maxine did, but she felt there were still things to be said. ‘But I know you,’ she said. ‘And you’re lonely and she’s pretty. You would never try to persuade her – I’m sorry I ever sounded like I was saying you would – but I don’t see anything good ahead, for either of you.’
‘For either of us?’ Clemency raised one eyebrow.
‘She’s too young for you. And she can’t speak – what stimulation would she be able to bring you?’ Maxine winced. ‘Apart from the obvious, which dims quickly when your mind is not also engaged. I’ve seen it in you before – tiring of someone because they can’t keep up with you up here.’ She tapped a temple.
‘Nonetheless,’ Clemency said. ‘I enjoyed her company today. She is expressive in her own way, and it was a joy to see the way she looks with such fascinated interest at everything.’ She thought about how it was to watch her poring over the photographs. ‘She renews my own interest in things.’ Clemency turned away from the warren of streets that made up the Devil’s Half Acre, notorious for their meanness and poverty. She looked at Maxine.
‘I can enjoy her company without it going anywhere,’ she said, her voice low.
Maxine shook her head. ‘It’s never that easy, and I can tell you find her attractive.’
Clemency shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter if I do. Attraction doesn’t have to be acted upon.’
Maxine tried a different tack. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘I just have an uneasy feeling about this, all right? You’re showing her things she’ll never have, and you’re playing with your own feelings in a way I think might be dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’ This time both eyebrows raised in surprise.
‘You’ve not been happy for a long time now,’ Maxine said, pressing her point. ‘I’ve known it, you’ve known it, we have all seen it. Being on your own has started eating away at you.’
Clemency looked away again, out to sea this time. The slice of ocean was blue under the clear sky, a clean wash of azure. She pursed her lips but said nothing.
‘I don’t want you getting hurt,’ Maxine said, shoving her hands deep in her pockets again.
‘I’m not going to get hurt.’
‘I’ve been telling you to find someone, but Eliza, she’s not the right one.’
‘Then tell me who is!’ Clemency exploded, whirling around to look at her friend. ‘Tell me, for the love of all that’s good and holy – who is? Because I can’t find anyone.’
Maxine shook her head. ‘There has to be someone,’ she said.
‘We know every woman of our own inclination.’
‘What if you went to Christchurch for a while? Regina and Hetty would introduce you around.’ She nodded at Clemency. ‘You could take your camera; there are things to photograph there as well.’ She lifted a hand to her head and raked her fingers through her hair. ‘You could go anywhere, for that matter,’ she said. ‘You’ve the means, and if you get a reply to your advertisement, you’ll have the time.’
‘A suitable reply,’ Clemency amended.
Maxine shrugged and Clemency turned to walk back to the house and her motor car.
‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
Maxine nodded again. ‘Good. That makes me happy.’
Clemency just sighed. ‘But I’d like to take some photographs of Eliza, if she would be willing.’ Clemency glanced at Maxine. ‘And if you’ll allow her.’
Maxine rolled her head with a hand on her neck as though it was sore. She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t really be able to stop her now, would I? I’m not her guardian, and she is twenty-two years old.’
‘Old enough to decide for herself,’ Clemency said and turned back into the driveway. ‘I’ll be busy for the next few days, however, so it won’t be immediately
.’
She opened the door to the Ford and looked at Maxine. ‘Are we all right?’ she asked.
Maxine looked at her for a moment, then nodded. ‘Of course,’ she said.
Clemency smiled then and got into the motor car and started the engine, already figuring when she could come back.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Eliza stood back from the fire she’d started under the wash house boiling copper with only a vague satisfaction. The sticks of wood caught, and she squatted down to flame them higher for a moment before feeding a larger piece to the growing fire and drawing in a sigh and standing again. The deep copper bowl built over the fire was already full of water and all she needed to do was wait for it to heat before tipping the baskets of clothes in to stir. She’d do the sheets and linens first, she decided. Then empty the water and begin over with the ladies’ dresses and trousers.
The sun slanted in through the doorway to the yard and clotheslines, as though looking for Eliza, and she went to stand in it, closing her eyes and lifting her face to the light, watching how it turned the inside of her eyelids to tangerine and saffron sunbursts. She rubbed at her arms, dissatisfied again, although she didn’t know why, or what over, and it made her frown up at the sunlight, and sigh again, heaving air up from the depths of her lungs.
From somewhere close by a motor car rumbled, and Eliza opened her eyes, blinked in the bright light and peered hopefully around the yard.
But the motor drove on up the road, its engine griping at the steepening hill, and Eliza subsided back into the wash house to check the temperature of the water, drawing the back of her hand across her forehead, against her furrowed brow.
She didn’t want to be here, she realised. She wanted to be out with Clemency, in her motor car, or at Clemency’s house, looking around at all the beautiful things. The thought made the hair stand up on her arms as though she was cold, and she shivered. A sensation stirred restlessly behind her ribs and she stood still listening to it, recognising it finally as excitement. She placed a hand flat across her chest and breathed deeply but the sensation only grew.
The water in the copper steamed gently into the coolness of the wash house and Eliza dropped her hand from the heat of her own skin and picked up the first armful of sheets, pushing them under the hot water with a wooden paddle. She swirled them around, her face growing damp with perspiration and steam.
Time wandered off as she did the chore by rote, so familiar with the job her muscles worked by memory and she was not even aware of what she was doing any longer. Instead, she dreamed.
In her dream, she walked up the steps into Clemency’s house again and she could hear Clemency’s voice in her ear, low and lovely, as she wandered back into the sitting room, where the light turned the air to burnished gold, and the roses in the vase dropped delicate petals in slow motion. There was a picture on the table by the vase in her imagination, and she picked it up, looking at Clemency’s photograph of herself, caught unawares in the street, staring at the woman who had placed a hot hand under her arm and scooped her up off the road as though she were light like a leaf.
The clothes basket was heavy with damp sheets when she heaved it onto her hip and walked outside to the lines strung up across the back of the yard. The basket landed with a thud when Eliza dropped it and she stretched, coming back to the world, thirsty, hungry, as though she’d been away a very long time.
Ruth and Maxine were in the kitchen and Eliza stopped in the shadows of the door, their low voices warning her from walking in, and she tilted her head, unable to make out the words being spoken, knowing only with a frown that their tone was intimate, warm, loving. Eliza looked around the door and saw them in there, Ruth and Maxine, and they were standing in an embrace, hip to hip, arms clasping each other to themselves, and their lips murmured to each other from only an inch apart. Eliza blinked, and every nerve ending woke up, clamouring excited, insistent with sudden, blinding knowledge. Ruth and Maxine stopped their murmuring and their lips met in a kiss. Not the sort of kiss, Eliza saw, that a friend gives another, or a mother plants on her child’s cheek, but a kiss between husband and wife, between lovers.
Eliza gasped with her new knowledge, her head spinning. Friends could kiss each other like this? Ladies could feel this way about each other, want to stand close to each other so that their hearts touched, so that their souls met each other and fell in love? This was possible? She put a hand to her mouth, the realisation sinking in through her eyes, her mind, her skin.
Ruth heard the gasp and spun out of Maxine’s arms, chastising herself for having been in them – and in the kitchen of all places. Where anyone could walk in, one of the children, for heaven’s sakes. Or, as it turned out, Eliza Sparrow, who stared now at the both of them with eyes wide with shock, a hand covering her open mouth.
Maxine shook her head. ‘I think our Eliza has just had something of a revelation,’ she whispered.
Eliza dropped her hand and straightened, the knowledge now sunk bone-deep inside her. She walked over to Ruth and Maxine and could feel the gleam of her own eyes, the flush on her skin. She pressed fingers to a cheekbone and felt the warmth there.
She shook her head, wordless. Spread her hands.
Ruth swallowed, patted Maxine on the arm, feeling the tension there. ‘I’ll take care of this, if you like,’ she said, and the taut muscle of Maxine’s arm relaxed a fraction.
‘Are you sure?’ Maxine asked.
Ruth nodded, swallowing a sigh, looking at the girl’s face.
‘Don’t mention Clemency,’ Maxine hissed her parting words as she slipped gracelessly out the back door.
Eliza watched her go, saw the high spots of colour on her cheeks and understood Maxine was sorry she’d seen them. But why? Eliza wondered, alight inside with her new understanding. She looked back at Ruth.
Ruth stood awkwardly for a moment, then sighed again, and touched Eliza’s arm.
‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said. Her mother had always taken her for a walk when there was news to impart or truths to teach. She’d said it was better to be moving, and alongside each other when there were difficult conversations to be had. And so it had been how Ruth herself had learnt the very basics of intimate relationships, of how a man lies with a woman when he loves her.
She’d never lain with a man, and her mother could have saved her breath when she’d assured Ruth that one day she would do so, but the conversation had come about for much the same reasons as Eliza was now staring at her. Ruth had walked in on her mother and father one late summer afternoon, not knowing her father was home so early in the day, not knowing that they would be naked together on the bed.
Eliza nodded and they stepped out into the sun together, the light pouring onto the crown of Eliza’s head and she drew it into her until every secret part of her body seemed filled with light and she was buoyant with it, floating along beside Ruth as they rounded the house and walked slowly, steadily down the driveway.
‘I’m sorry you had to see that,’ Ruth said, stumbling over the words. ‘We are not usually so careless.’ In the kitchen, she added to herself. Of all places. It had been because of the sadness that was always between she and Maxine now. The desire that was hers and which she could not shake, for her own child.
Eliza shook her head. She stopped walking, took hold of Ruth’s arm and shook her head again, the tendrils of hair around her face, still damp from the wash house and the steaming copper, sticking to her skin.
No, she said with her shaking head. Don’t take it back. Don’t make it so that I did not see it.
Ruth glanced at her, saw how the girl’s face shone, and felt a trembling begin deep in her bones. She peered sideways at Eliza.
‘Have you loved someone before?’ she asked, the words sandpaper against her dry throat.
Eliza shook her head. She had not, but now she knew why. Now she knew the cause and reason of the strange stirrings her body had suffered when she had looked upon certain things. The pale, ar
ched neck of Maggie, one of the other girls who had worked at the hospital laundry, the soft curve of her breast against the fabric of her dress when Maggie had taken off her pinny at the end of the day and stretched to pull on her coat. Eliza closed her eyes, knowing now why she had not been able to look away from such sights. She clasped her hands in front of her chest and thought she would burst with joy.
Ruth watched her, the disquiet growing. What, she wondered, was Maxine going to say about this? And what would it mean when Clemency came back around? Ruth knew Clemency would. She would come back around to the house, looking for Eliza, and she would take the girl out in her motor car again and gaze at her with that expression of dazzled pain. Ruth looked away, over the street and down towards the harbour where the water swam between the two green hills that flanked the city, sluggish with the low tide.
If Eliza looked at Clemency with the face she was wearing now, there was no way that Clemency would not understand it. And she would want what it offered. Try as Clemency did to hide it, Ruth had seen the way she looked at Eliza, as though she were a starving woman in a warm, fragrant bakery.
She wondered if that could be a good thing, or if it be a very bad thing. Maxine would say it would lead nowhere good.
‘I’m not sure,’ Ruth said, her voice coming out rusty and far away, ‘but I think you recognise the way Maxine and I feel about each other?’
Eliza stared at her, then nodded slowly, up and down, up and down. Yes, she said inside her head. I feel that sort of love too. An image of Clemency rose in her mind and she wanted to claw at Ruth with the question – did Clemency feel this way also? Did she feel this sort of love? Eliza sucked in a deep breath, hot, dizzy, her head afire with the possibility.
‘Okay,’ Ruth said slowly, and put a steadying hand on the younger woman. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ They stood on the path overlooking the harbour, and Ruth made no move to walk on. She didn’t know if Eliza could manage a step.
Eliza shook her head. She knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only sensations, half-formed, inarticulate. Her eyes wide, she looked avidly at Ruth. She wanted to know what there was to know. She wanted to know everything.