Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  The door opened, letting in a gust of cold air. The sun had slipped quite suddenly and Clara knew instinctively that their afternoon was over. Reg usually bustled, he was that kind of man, slightly overweight and not very tall, barely the same height as Winnie. The Hoggards tended to portliness in middle-age though Reg had a long way to go to that. They all had very fair hair which thinned early in the men, but there was something bluff and good looking about them too. Clara had seen them all together at family gatherings, not Winnie’s wedding, even she didn’t pretend to remember back that far, and anyway there hadn’t been many of the Bentleys at it. Mumma and Father had been there, but not all the brothers and sisters, because the Hoggards were all for small family weddings they said.

  ‘We don’t believe in big flashy affairs,’ Mrs Hoggard had been heard to say, about that time.

  What she really meant was that Reg hadn’t made a very good marriage, and the Frankton Junction Bentleys were something of an embarrassment to the Hamilton Hoggards, and they couldn’t think of any other way around introducing them to each other.

  But Winnie had had a wedding dress, Mumma saw to that, and the best flowers of any bride in Hamilton that year. Maybe the Hoggards appreciated that and Clara was sure that they were very nice to the Bentleys at the wedding. If they were patronising Mumma never said, and she kept the photos on the mantelpiece and tidied them as religiously as the contents of her glasshouse.

  Whatever the arrangements they probably suited Winnie too because she only had eyes for Reg. Clara came round to understanding that she didn’t know how to cope with the Hoggards any better than they did with her, at least not in the beginning, though she worked so hard to be a good wife and to live up to them that they soon appeared to forget. It might even have been, that in some mysterious way, they began to think of her as having been born a Hoggard herself. Whatever it was, it added up to sensible shoes, and lots of preserves and fishing up great-aunt Clara and pretending that the ‘It’ girl never happened.

  On that autumn afternoon when she was five, Clara hadn’t started trying to work out what made Winnie tick. She just felt the cold air as the door opened and waited for Reg to bounce in. But it bothered her straight away that he walked slowly.

  She had been on the point of offering to go in and play with Jeannie who was crying in the next room. She was two by then and if Clara made funny faces and tickled her gently, she laughed and squirmed and turned off her tears. Sometimes Clara thought she would rather pinch the baby but she knew that she could win over Winnie by entertaining her, and that meant she would probably be allowed to stay the night. She did not know why she stayed on in the kitchen but in the next room Jeannie quietened as suddenly as she had started her noise, and there was a tension in the room that held her.

  Winnie raised her face, flushed and happy. Although she was tired, she was satisfied with her afternoon’s work. She waited expectantly for Reg to kiss her.

  Instead he stood behind her and put his hands around her waist and rested his chin on her shoulder. He didn’t want to look at her.

  ‘Look at what I’ve done,’ she said.

  ‘Nice,’ he said.

  ‘You’re not looking,’ she said pulling away from him so that he could see her jars.

  ‘I said it was nice.’ He answered sharply.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Winnie, suddenly aware that there was something wrong.

  ‘Nothing. Why should anything be the matter?’

  ‘Reg?’

  ‘Nothing. I told you. God, can’t a man come in and touch his wife without being nagged?’

  ‘I wasn’t. Please Reg, I don’t know what the matter is.’ Beginning to shake and her face puckering. They hadn’t had rows before. Other people had rows, all her life Winnie had heard other people having rows round Frankton, but here, in Winnie’s town house, they didn’t. The Hoggards weren’t like that and now she was a Hoggard. They were polite and ate afternoon tea out of little fine cups and balanced plates on their knees and they didn’t go out on Sundays; Mrs Hoggard always wore gloves and a hat when she went up town on a Friday and stopped to talk to other ladies in hats and gloves, and Mr Hoggard wore a gold watch-chain across his waistcoat every day to the office of the stock‑and‑station place where he was managing director, and they never quarrelled; of that Winnie was positive, particularly as Mrs Hoggard had every single thing that anybody could ever want in their whole lives, including an electric stove, and a musical box that played ‘The Blue Danube’, and polished brass holders for the matchboxes, and a whole bedroom decorated in pink organdie, all to herself. Though this last item confused Winnie somewhat.

  She and Reg were not angry people, and she stood there taken by surprise at what was happening to them. They glared at each other across the kitchen. Winnie wiped her hands carefully on her floral apron, and Reg backed off, looking awkward and silly in his blue serge suit, a good serviceable one which, with careful brushing, did for the insurance office he worked in, and walking out as well. His father wanted him to come into the stock and station with him but Reg had said he wanted to stand on his own feet first. Just lately his suit had been getting a bit thin and he was thinking about joining his father. As he put it to Winnie, he was ‘just about ready’.

  Winnie picked up a couple of jars and wiped them down, replacing them carefully on the bench as she did each one, not saying anything.

  In the next room, Jeannie whimpered again and, at the sound of her cries, Winnie began to cry too.

  Reg stood by, looking sullen and helpless. He had never seen her cry before, or not like this, heavy fat tears rolling noiselessly down her face, and her body heaving.

  ‘I try to do things right,’ said Winnie.

  ‘Stop crying will you.’ His voice was still irritable, but he didn’t want her to keep on, and his face was chalky and strained.

  Winnie flopped onto a chair at the table. ‘I’m sorry, I’ve really been hard at it this afternoon, and I’ve been telling myself I feel really well all day, and I believed it but now I know it’s not true, I’m getting it.’

  Reg stared at her, as if she was demented.

  ‘Getting what?’

  ‘My period. I thought it wasn’t coming but it is and I know you’ll be disappointed and I don’t know why we can’t get it right but I know it’ll happen soon. It took ages with Jeannie, didn’t it love, but we got her in the end. And it’s nice trying.’ She searched his face to see if she had offended him saying this, being so forward.

  He sat down beside her then and stroked her hand. Clara was very still and quiet and they had forgotten that she was there, and their baby had quietened again too. It was unreal in the room, like Hamilton itself. There are wide streets and long bridges over the river which divides the town, and over it all there is a sensation of slowness.

  In all the years that Clara lived there, she felt that if only she could have speeded things up somehow it would have been all right. Each morning she would wonder how to make her day go faster, not that the days were necessarily unhappy or bad or that she was waiting for something special to happen the next day, because she made quite sure her life wasn’t like that as she went along, giving it a momentum all of its own, but she couldn’t help wondering what it would be like if somehow it all went by a lot faster. It was especially bad on summer days when there was a build-up of clouds but no respite from the heat and the sky would appear to come down to meet the earth. Then all the space in the world, which is what they seemed to have on the wide Waikato plains, could not give them enough room to move.

  It was like that, then, in this room. There was width and space and bridges too, if you liked, but there was nowhere for either Winnie or Reg to go, in the long silence they were caught in.

  ‘They put off five men,’ Reg said at last. ‘They put off five men today.’

  She looked at him. ‘It’s true then? Times are getting worse?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Reg. ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘This
Wall Street thing, it really means something?’

  ‘That’s what they say. I think it’s been there longer than that. It’s just that everybody’s taking notice now, aren’t they?’

  ‘The poor salesmen. It must be awful for them.’

  ‘Salesmen?’

  ‘That got put off.’

  ‘They put the salesmen off a month ago,’ said Reg softly.

  She stared at him without comprehending. ‘Who then?’

  ‘Everyone who’d been there under ten years,’ he said.

  She started to cry again, only more gently this time, the tears covering her face that had had the colour bleached out of it.

  ‘You,’ she said, and he nodded.

  Jeannie started to scream properly in the other room, and Winnie stumbled to her feet.

  ‘Just as well old girl,’ said Reg, stroking her hand with clumsy jerking movements. ‘Just as well it came this time, eh? Things’ll be better when I get settled in with the old man. See what we can do then, eh?’

  That year, 1929, the world closed itself like a fist around them. There was no job at the stock and station. A year later it closed down and Reg’s father jumped off the curved bridge over the Waikato River and drowned, just like the Wall Street brokers, only by comparison it was peanuts, as Ambrose would say. Whereas they jumped for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions for all Clara knew, though money had never been plentiful enough for her to imagine past a hundred pounds, Reg’s father went down for maybe a couple of thousand. It was all pitiful and pointless but as someone nasty over at the Junction said, it made a big splash, right across the front page of the local paper and for a day or two everyone had something to say about it.

  Clara followed her mother in and out of Winnie’s house while the family was getting ready for the funeral. Reg’s mother let everyone make the arrangements for her. She had no idea of what to do, and it was clear she had never had to do a thing for herself in her life. She was the sort of person who sat back and imagined that any woman who had to look after herself must have married a bad lot. Mumma said to Rita, in one of their rare exchanges, that the woman would probably die of shame as much as grief which were harder words than Mumma spoke about people as a rule. Some of the inertia washed over onto Reg and his sister Nola and they sat staring out the windows and getting up to walk around every now and then. It didn’t seem to matter what Clara or Jeannie did, they were in people’s way. Nobody could help noticing though, that it was Winnie who was in charge.

  She had changed overnight, very grave and sad, but managing in a new way. Once or twice Reg looked at her, and it was almost as if he was scared of her, and she would look at him in an odd sort of way, resigned and grown up, in a manner that was new, too.

  Of course Winnie had always acted grown up, as long as Clara could remember, and it seemed a silly thing to think now. Perhaps that was the key. Before she had been acting and now it was real.

  On the day before the funeral, the undertaker called round to the house to ask Mrs Hoggard which hymns she had chosen for the service, and if she had decided how she would like her husband to be dressed in his coffin.

  Winnie went up the stairs of her mother-in-law’s house, in search of her. At the door of the bedroom, the pink organdie room, she heard voices. She stopped, respectfully waiting so as not to interrupt whatever family conference was taking place. The door was open. In front of the mirror, Reg paraded like a dummy under his mother and sister’s watchful eyes. He was wearing one of his father’s suits. Its length was right, but it was three sizes too large on his frame.

  ‘Will it do?’ said Mrs Hoggard, to Nola. ‘I just can’t visualise him in it any more.’

  ‘Perhaps we should get something new,’ said Nola.

  ‘It does seem a little bit of a waste, doesn’t it?’ ventured Reg. ‘I mean no one will see it for long.’

  Both women rounded on him. ‘We can’t do it badly,’ hissed Nola through her teeth. ‘It’s bad enough already.’

  ‘I must say it’s good cloth though,’ said Mrs Hoggard, stroking Reg’s thigh. ‘Perhaps it will do.’

  ‘What about his watch and chain? Do you think we should put it on him?’ Nola said.

  ‘Shouldn’t it stay in the family?’ said Mrs Hoggard, with the first edge of doubt in her voice.

  ‘I would like it, you know,’ said Reg.

  ‘Oh no, he’d have wanted it kept in the family. And I mean, I already have a son, Reg,’ Nola said.

  ‘Perhaps … do you think … his nightshirt, after all? Reg?’

  At the possible vision of her husband dressed in his father’s nightshirt, Winnie fled.

  She told the undertaker that Mr Hoggard would be wearing his best suit, which he had conveniently not worn to drown himself in, and his gold watch, and that the family wished to have ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ sung at the funeral.

  Afterwards, she went upstairs, where everyone was sitting, just as they had done before the dress rehearsal, and advised them of the undertaker’s requirements. Nobody demurred.

  Mrs Hoggard said, only, ‘You will see that the sandwiches are thin, won’t you Winifred? Really thin.’

  It was at that time, too, that Clara became aware, in a real day-to-day sense, that she was Winnie’s baby sister, another responsibility in a life which was quickly assuming too many burdens. She still wanted to be near her, but she had a new instinct that she should be careful. It occurred to her, on those days before the funeral, that Winnie resented her in some quite positive way. She would try to have adult conversations with Mumma, asking her advice, even though she was making all the arrangements herself, but Mumma wasn’t much help. She kept cuddling Clara on her lap and twining her hair round and round her fingers, saying how she had to get home to get Clara’s and their father’s tea. Clara could see Winnie looking at her then, and she kept trying to wriggle away from Mumma so that Winnie wouldn’t be angry and Mumma kept getting her back, until in the end they left, but at least Mumma took Jeannie off her hands, so that she stayed for two nights. Clara was told to look after her.

  If Winnie thought she had worries it was nothing to what she would have had if she could have seen the two children, Jeannie trailing behind Clara round Frankton Junction. Clara took her up on top of the railway bridge, the one with four arches across it, where the steam belched up through the boards and between your feet, from the engines’ stacks. While they were up there she thought about pushing Jeannie off the bridge, like grandfather Hoggard. When she had considered the matter, she decided it wouldn’t do her much good and that it wouldn’t help her with Winnie at all, so instead she scared Jeannie with a fearsome tale of what would happen to her if she slipped and fell. When she was crying long and hard she took her down, like some saintly saviour, holding her hand. Jeannie insisted on sleeping in her bed that night, and became both an asset and a liability. Clara found that she could manipulate Winnie through Jeannie, but on the other hand, she was always getting stuck with her.

  There was insurance money to collect after Reg’s father died. Winnie supposed that he saw that as the point of dying, even though she would have called it pointless. A man like that couldn’t have lived with the shame of not leaving his family provided for, and maybe he wanted to get out while there was still time, still some money left to do it properly.

  As it turned out, it wasn’t enough to do it properly, or if it was, nobody had the experience of a depression to know how to manage what there was. Reg took his five hundred pounds and paid off his and Winnie’s little house. If he had kept some of it back maybe things would have been easier for them. It was just that nobody seemed to know. Nobody really did the right things. They had to have some place to live so maybe it was best that they kept it.

  But the trouble was, when they had paid for it, they had no money left at all. Reg had had an easy life, and because his life was mapped out for him, or so he thought, he had never really trained for anything, in spite of his talk about standing on his own feet. He
was going to push a pen around for a while and then be a manager. As it turned out, there was nothing to manage and the death had a backlash on him that his father probably hadn’t thought of when he made what he believed was his providential plunge. People said that the Hoggards couldn’t stand up to things, that they cracked under strain. It didn’t matter that people everywhere were cracking up in different ways but at least they were alive, that was the difference. If there had been any of the kinds of job that Reg was cut out for, nobody would trust a Hoggard with them. If. It didn’t cut much ice that there weren’t any.

  He started knocking on doors offering to rake up leaves, clean windows, mend front fences, for a shilling a time. He got harder looking and lost the weight around his middle.

  Winnie and Clara’s father was killed in an accident on the railways soon afterwards and Mumma got a small pension. She used to give Winnie a few shillings for ‘minding Clara’, or that’s what she said, and Brian and Frank were working on farms out of town. They brought in fruit and vegetables and the odd piece of meat. Clara started noticing one or another piece of furniture gone when she went to Winnie’s.

  ‘At least we have the house,’ Reg would say, more and more often, in a despairing kind of way.

  ‘Yes,’ Winnie would say, and if they were outside she would turn and look at it, one of a procession of houses squatting across the plains in the flat heavy air of Hamilton, which sometimes turned to searing heat, and then again, in the winter, to a numbing blanket of river fog. Clara could see by the look in Winnie’s eyes that it failed now to have meaning for her, that the precious house was just wood and iron nailed together, like all the other houses. True, it had a verandah, which was more than some of the houses had, though for what purpose it was hard to tell, for nobody ever sat on the verandah (which faced away from the sun anyway) and it appeared to be useful for nothing except collecting dead leaves at the end of each summer, blown in from the poplar tree which stood near the gate. As she got older, Clara’s job of sweeping the leaves from the verandah replaced chasing the magpies. She had become what Winnie had come to describe in complaining tones to Mumma, ‘a fidgety child’.