by Moir, Tanya
‘Best thing’s to keep working,’ Mary says. ‘You feel them worse when you stop.’ She surveys the hole in the ground. ‘We’re nearly finished.’
The spade handle tears at Hester’s hands, but Mary is right, and the old earth oven is soon redug. Mary squats, victorious, beside her reclaimed umu.
‘There. Quicker to dig a hole than clean an oven, eh? Now all we need is some stones.’
Hester cannot help herself. ‘What happens when it rains?’
Mary gives the old kanuka poles a slap. ‘We’ll get this whare fixed up in no time. Bit of raupo and she’ll be dry as a bean.’
There is such ugliness in her, writes Hester. It has
nothing to do with her face. It is in everything she does.
I wonder, sometimes, what crime grace has committed,
that she should disdain it so. And yet I also wonder, with
my list of tasks now so long, and Father’s patience so
short, how I should manage without her help. Even hair shirts,
it is to be supposed, must give some warmth when
one is freezing.
Four
Daniel watches his daughter fiddling with the stove. She has burnt herself again. While Hester struggles to boil water, Mary clears the table and scrubs the pots and brings him his cup of tea, and he wonders if anything at all would get done without her. Mary makes no fuss. She moves with a quiet economy, swift and sure, though she cannot be used to a kitchen this large, or a modern stove.
This train of thought makes Daniel uneasy; it leads him back to the Hallorans’ slab hut, and a closed door. He chooses, for Mary’s sake, not to follow it. Instead, he thinks that she has the knack of a good servant. She has perfected that skill of not drawing the eye, of performing her tasks beneath men’s notice. She makes herself invisible, part of the kitchen furniture, just as if she has always been here.
Her sturdy back, the efficient plait of her red hair, put him in mind of a good draught horse, and seem to speak of courage and endurance. It gives him no trouble at all to disconnect this Mary from the unseen body that slips into his bed at night, the secret warmth into which he eases himself until he regains his sleep.
Daniel feels no responsibility for these nightly encounters, which, when he wakes alone in the morning, have the unlikelihood of dreams. They are shaming, of course — mixed up as they often are with the tears, and the shaking — but he is certain he does nothing to invite them.
It is just that sometimes, when he wakes in the dark, off guard, he forgets the traitorous wife who has left him. Then, if he is not careful, he will begin to remember Lettie. Her sweet lower lip, and her little white hands. He will feel the shape of her beside him. He will run his hands across cold sheets to the empty moulds of shoulder and hip, press his fingers into absence. He will wonder if she felt fear during that long fall, if she might have changed her mind. He will think of her, falling, and hating him, and he will start to shake.
If he reaches out, in such a moment, to the warmth opening up beside him, if he bathes his wound in the salve of another human body, who will blame him? These small shames, these bleary moments of comfort and forgetting in the dark, known to no one, cause no harm.
Certainly Mary’s face, during the day, does not reproach him. Their eyes do not often meet. When she does look at him, Daniel sees nothing accusatory in her gaze. Indeed, there is gratitude, and a respect he had forgotten he could inspire. The beginnings, per haps, of a natural affection — one which it is only proper should grow between a good housekeeper and her employer, if he be just and kind.
He has offered Mary as much as he has means to, which is to say, her keep. He hopes that she will stay. They do not speak of the other thing.
Five
The board in the hallway creaks. Footsteps fall heavy in the pit of Hester’s stomach. Do they think they are unheard? Dear God! The stretcher Mary has made up for herself in the parlour fools no one. Hester stares at La Rochelle’s journal. She wishes they would speak, in the room below her. Words, any words, would fill the silence in which she must imagine their movements, noiseless, in the dark.
She reaches out a second candle from her drawer and lights it from the stump of the first, before the hard, short breaths of betrayal rise above the night.
Robbie calls out in the darkness. Hester waits, willing him back to sleep. She can hear his ragged breathing, the catch of panic, the sob and choke. Then a door, opening and closing. Footsteps, and a light in the hall. They enter Robbie’s room, and his breathing falls quiet.
Six
Mary Halloran is nothing like his mother. Of this, Robbie is quite certain. It comforts him, this surety, this difference, in his struggle to hold onto Letitia. She slips through his hands like water. Her face, her hair, her touch. But at least he has this. What she was not.
‘Bad dream, lad, was it?’
Robbie nods.
‘Aye. My Mattie gets them, sometimes.’
The top two buttons of her nightgown are undone. He stares at the flesh of her neck. It is dappled like a pony’s coat; a coarse red plait sits neat against it, bound with a piece of rag. He swallows back thoughts of Old Halloran’s hands upon it, replaced now by his father’s. He does not ask what Matthew Halloran dreams of.
‘It’s hard, eh? Not having your mam.’
Mary puts her candle down and sits on the bed, tucking her bare feet up beneath her thighs. Portia stares at her, ears back.
‘I can’t remember,’ whispers Robbie, ‘what she looked like.’
‘Aye, you will do. You’re just trying too hard. Now, I only met her the once. She was dark and pale, was she not? A pretty wee thing.’ Mary sniffs. ‘Though handsome is as it does, don’t they say?’
‘I don’t understand. Why she had to go.’
‘More fool her.’
Mary shivers. She pulls the shawl tight across her breasts and folds her arms below them. It occurs to Robbie that beneath the cotton she is naked, nothing but rosy mottled skin.
‘Haunting you, is she?’
Robbie’s eyes snap back to her face. He shivers himself. He looks down, and nods slowly.
‘Aye, she will, for a bit. She’s sorry, you see. And so she should be.’
Mary looks around, at the corners of the darkness. Her red-lashed eyes are narrow, fearless. ‘But it’s too late now. She can’t come back. And don’t you be worrying.’ She pats his hand, a hot, dry touch. ‘Ain’t none but the living can hurt you.’
Robbie watches her leave. Through the wall, he hears Daniel stir and mutter. He pulls up the bedclothes.
Mary Halloran’s fingers feel nothing like his mother’s.
Seven
Delacroix’s wagon comes early on Sunday morning. From behind the attic curtains, Hester observes it cautiously. It is full of trees.
‘Hester!’ yells Daniel, some moments later. ‘Come down and give us a hand!’
Mary squats on the deck of the wagon. She thrusts two macrocarpa saplings at Hester’s chest, where their bare roots deposit a trail of thin clay. ‘Take them round to your dad.’
Behind the house, between the leafless vegetable patch and the clothesline, Daniel and Robbie are digging a trench.
Delacroix, a sapling in hand, examines their blinded kitchen window. ‘You should put the boards on the outside, not inside,’ he tells them.
Daniel ignores this. ‘Put one in every three feet,’ he orders Hester, ‘and fill the dirt in.’
By lunchtime the trees are planted. An easterly swirls in off the sea. They stand back, and watch the tiny conifers sway and wilt in the salt wind.
Between us and the cliffs, writes Hester that night, he has set a hedge, so that we shall not see the point where land and women end. Does he think to hide the Pacific itself? That in time, his conifers will grow to shield us from the blunt offence of such expansiveness, and the false promises of ill-named oceans?
Her back aches.
Elsewhere, such trees rise quick as beans
talks in this foreign soil; here, I cannot think that they will flourish.
The next morning, Mary digs up the sunny ground at the front of the house. Where Letitia had envisioned a scented drift of lavender and stocks, Mary puts down potatoes. A fantail follows her, flitting about her head and hands, its white tail spread.
To Hester’s surprise, the brisk work tosses up a number of bulbs. Some of these Mary aims at the bird. The rest she flings over her shoulder into the scrub, where they startle the rats. A weka struts out at the noise, ready to do battle.
Hester picks up one of the bulbs. She thinks it might be a daffodil, by its size; the smaller ones could be snowdrops. They are tipped with green, and are trailing white roots. Hester smiles a little. It is funny to think they were here all this time. Their flowers would have made a pretty beginning to the Petersons’ first spring on La Rochelle’s Road.
She waits until Mary is not looking. Then she pops the bulb back in the soil, beneath the bare-stemmed briar rose outside her mother’s window.
Eight
Nine
A bank of sea fog rises above the horizon, white and sunlit, like spray over a great falls. Before it, the water is still and thick as glass. The woman is up to her knees in it, moving slowly. Robbie can feel it in his mind, the water, parting, taking the shape of her calves, flowing back against her skin. It is the first time he has seen a woman’s legs like this — in the flesh, close up, and naked.
The spade is idle in his hand. He has forgotten what he is doing, and so, it would seem, has Hine. They are entirely taken up in this moment, wading, watching. The stirring of blood and sand.
Robbie thinks he could stay like this. The gulls fly slow and silent.
She does not drop her skirt when she sees him. The sun is behind her. She walks, gilt-edged, out of the sea. The light sketches the lines of her, bare feet long and narrow on the sand, slight bones of ankles, slim arc of calf and thigh. Wet cotton, bunched and dripping, which she tucks under one arm, and with the other brushes the salt water from her legs, which are not plump and dimpled, like the postcard models’, but slender, taut, long-muscled as a dancer’s.
She comes towards him, and for a moment, Robbie thinks she will pass, again, without a word. But this time she looks at him. A long, sad look. It should be enough, but is not.
‘E, awhina,’ she says. Her fingers, fleeting, light as salt-spray, brush his cheek.
Robbie knows something has ended, and begun. The sea is empty where she stood. He sees, for the first time, that there are mountains out there, rising from the fog, the white peaks of the hinterland that he has not yet seen.
At the other end of the beach, Tommy waves, impatient, and Portia runs to greet him.
Ten
Frank sits down to Sunday dinner. His sleeves are rolled above the elbow, his shirt open at the neck. His skin is damp and pink from his wash; the hair escaping from under his shirt still carries beads of moisture. He has left his boots at the door. Beside her, beneath the table, Hester can see his socks, grey and felted, and through a hole in the left, his big red toe. As he cuts his meat, whiffs of the morning’s sweat drift out and mingle with the smoky scent of the pork from Mary’s oven. It is not a bad smell, Hester thinks.
‘Potatoes, Hester?’
He holds the bowl for her. Like everything else from the umu, they are sour and dense. She is getting used to their taste.
‘You felling this year?’ asks Mary.
Franks nods, chews faster, swallows. ‘Soon as it dries out, McLean’s taking out the timber.’
Daniel looks up. ‘Good price?’
‘Not bad.’ After a time, Frank adds, ‘Might start building myself a place, once he’s done.’ He keeps his eyes on his plate. ‘There’s a spot just up the creek from the hut. Gets the best of the sun, I reckon.’
‘Where that big kowhai is?’ asks Mary.
Hester notices Frank’s neck turn a deep, hot crimson. ‘Yeah.’
‘You’ll get the easterly.’
‘Yeah. Maybe. S’pose I will.’
‘Not badly, though,’ says Robbie kindly. ‘Not like here.’
‘No!’ laughs Frank. ‘Not like here.’
‘You could keep some bush around,’ suggests Hester, ‘for shelter.’
He smiles at her. ‘I might do that.’
‘What sort of house will you build?’ she asks.
‘Aye, Frank,’ says Mary, amused. ‘How many bedrooms?’
He blushes again. ‘Dunno. Usual number, I s’pose.’
‘Make it three, if you can,’ says Daniel. ‘You’ll be thankful when the children come.’
‘First things first, eh, Frank?’ says Mary.
Frank ignores this. ‘Looks like the weather’s going to turn.’ He watches Hester take his plate. ‘What do you reckon, Dan?’
Daniel sighs. ‘Better get out there while we can.’
‘That’s good land Frank’s got,’ says Mary to Hester, as they wash the dishes. ‘And no harm in him. You could do worse.’
Eleven
Hester pauses, listening, conscious suddenly of her own heartbeat. She and La Rochelle’s house breathe in and out with the night. All else is quiet. She turns the page. The next, she sees, has been ripped out and folded. A name, Gerald Hartington, is written across it, with an address in Portland Square. The letter is dated April 30th, 1852.
Twelve
Frank’s mouth tastes of tea, and the apple he has just eaten. Hester is surprised by the wetness of it, the thick and slippery tongue. She had imagined a kiss to be something precise, and tidy. But Frank seems pleased with it; a little groan makes its way from the top of his throat and flutters in Hester’s stomach. She is left with an urge to wipe her mouth, but all in all, it is not unpleasant.
A slow, sticky silence follows. They lower their heads, and return to cutting scrub.
‘There’s a dance,’ he says, not looking at her, as they walk back to the house that evening. ‘Saturday night, down at Scott’s Bay.’
Hester is silent. The sun has dipped below the ridgeline; the hills are a fierce flat black. She thinks of Lucy, in white dress and satin slippers, stepping out with her beau down a curved stone stair.
‘You want to go?’
Hester feels slightly sick. She knows she must make a reply. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says, and means it.
‘Your dad don’t mind. I asked him.’
It surprises her again, the lubricating press of Frank’s intentions. She tries to imagine him framing the question, the look on her father’s face as he replies. She cannot. The scene, like the question, is outlandish. Frank waits.
‘All right.’ It is, she sees, the answer he expected.
He nods. ‘I’ll come and get you. Around five o’clock.’
Hester is feeling sicker and sicker. She is relieved when Frank says his goodbyes at the kitchen door, and does not stay to tea. Mary watches her shed her boots and laughs.
‘Christ, just look at you. Get this on you, quickly.’
‘It’s not cold in here.’ Robbie stares at the shawl around Hester’s shoulders. ‘You haven’t caught something, I hope?’
Mary snorts. ‘Aye, she has, I reckon.’
It is not until Hester takes off her dress that night that she sees the red clay prints of two large hands on its back, just below the shoulders.
Frank arrives promptly on Saturday. Hester wears walking boots beneath a pink crinoline, and carries her slippers in a sack. It is the first time she has unpacked them. When she unwrapped the tissue paper, she found the shoes shrunken and stiff, all points and edges. Her feet in them seemed divorced from the rest of her body, exotic and irrelevant, like butterflies in a jar.
Beside her, Robbie stumbles over a loose rock and curses, softly, the collar that prevents him looking down at La Rochelle’s Road. He, too, carries dancing pumps in a bag. They are Daniel’s, and slightly large for him, but a better fit, now, than his own.
Frank is not carrying any shoes. The dust of
the road slides on the toes of his freshly blacked boots and settles in his trouser cuffs. There is something different about his face this evening, Hester thinks. It seems softer, the ruddy skin scraped pink and shining. He has not yet met her eye.
The ruffles of her sleeves, jammed into Letitia’s coat, are cutting off Hester’s circulation; inside the sugar bag, the slender heels bang against the hoops of her skirt. By the time they reach Scott’s seed shed, her arms are numb from holding her hem above the dust.
Inside, someone is sawing a jig, a sailor’s shanty. The notes of the fiddle swoop and screech. It has been so long since she has heard music. It shocks her, the richness of the sound.
To the side of the shed, a little cherry tree is blossoming, soft and pink against the shadowed hills. The evening sun is catching its flowers, and Hester stares at all the ruffled petals, tissue thin and quivering in the breeze. It seems so brave, and so far from home. It makes her want to cry.
Robbie helps her out of her boots. Over his shoulder, Frank stares at her ankles in their white stockings. Somewhere in the back of Hester’s head, a voice (Letitia’s) reminds her that this is far from seemly; but it is not as if he hasn’t seen them before, albeit muddy and booted. She keeps her weight on the balls of her feet, not trusting the heels of the slippers on the soft, uneven ground. The Bénichou girls run past her, laughing, their stockings dirty and their frocks up around their knees.
Inside, Hester’s hem sweeps the floor of the seed shed, gathering the husks and dust of last year’s cocksfoot. She can see Mrs Sutherland, straight backed and massive, fat shoulders swelling like puffballs above the lace of her dress. Flanking her are two young ladies, whiter skinned than most, who, with that cast to their eye and jaw, must surely be the Misses Sutherland, out from Edinburgh at last to join the family.