Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  Someone did, and it was sooner than anyone could have predicted. Mumma went home on the Saturday morning to water her plants, leaving Clara there ‘for company’ and to ‘play with Jeannie’. As Winnie and Jeannie and Clara all knew, each in their separate way, their needs had changed and it didn’t matter whether she stayed or not. Only none of them was ready to express these thoughts so directly, or maybe they didn’t even understand the change in so many words. It was just a different feeling in the air.

  The weather had lightened, and the month turned during that week. One of Winnie’s trees had developed a row of white buds like the rime of the all-too-familiar frost. In place of the constant soggy endurance test, that Saturday afternoon was a bright hard day with a brisk and promising breeze.

  Jeannie and Clara had washed the lunch dishes. There was extra food that week. As news of Reg’s departure spread, all sorts of people turned up with help. Perhaps Reg knew a thing or two, Winnie reflected, but it seemed a pity that a few of them hadn’t done something a bit sooner. She supposed that they did their best, those ladies in furs, with the shiny little cars packed with scones and things, and she supposed too, that there were just too many people like the Hoggards for them to be able to pick out who was the worst off. People like them were especially hard to recognise, she had to admit to herself, because they would be the last to own up to their need. Winnie was still like that, but Cora and Ellen were not, and she supposed they must have put the word around about how things were with her. All sorts of food arrived, and flour and sugar, so that Winnie started baking again. To Clara it was almost like the old days, with the kitchen full of cooking smells and warmth, and the bright day outside. Winnie, though, was pale and self-contained, with heavy eyes and not much to say for herself.

  That afternoon, around two o’clock, there was a knock on the back door.

  ‘Shall I get it?’ Clara called.

  Winnie came out of the dining-room.

  ‘Yes. If it’s food tell them thank you very much and say I’m lying down,’ she whispered.

  ‘Shall I take it?’

  She looked at Clara scornfully. ‘Of course.’

  ‘What if it’s not food?’

  ‘Oh … use your brains.’ She pushed Clara towards the door before disappearing back into the dining-room.

  It was Albie, standing uncertainly on one foot and then the other, as if he was about to give up and go away.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ Clara said, using her brightest social voice in a manner that she hoped would please Winnie. ‘Mr Tubbs, isn’t it? If it’s food, my sister says thank you very much and she’s not feeling so well.’

  He stared as if she was demented. ‘I came to see Reg,’ he said.

  ‘Oh.’ Clara looked over her shoulder for help, but none was forthcoming. What she was almost certain that Winnie had meant was that if it was anybody else she should tell them she wasn’t there or couldn’t see them. But then she knew that Reg and Winnie liked Albie. She seemed bound to make a mistake, whatever she did.

  ‘He’s gone away,’ she muttered.

  ‘Is he working today?’

  ‘No. He’s gone. Right away, to the goldfields.’

  ‘Is your sister in?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Clara miserably, wishing that she didn’t have to take responsibility for him.

  ‘I’ll get Mum,’ said Jeannie. ‘I expect she’ll want to see you.’

  Clara heard Winnie speak on a high sharp note to Jeannie. She appeared after what seemed like a long time.

  ‘Hello Albie,’ she said, without moving towards him. Clara thought that Jeannie was in for trouble this time, but it seemed that she knew better what was good for her mother. Albie came in without being invited and shut the door firmly behind him.

  ‘Now what’s this all about?’ he said.

  ‘He’s gone.’

  ‘So she said.’ He nodded in Clara’s direction and she wished that people would remember her name. She supposed that he didn’t really know her very well. At least it gave her a chance to study him properly while they talked. Apart from the ears, which didn’t seem so bad after all, perhaps because he hadn’t had a haircut for quite a while and his hair was bushy and wavy round them, and the glasses, which didn’t hide his nice eyes, he had a high forehead with rather less hair there than round his ears, and a full mouth above a jutting chin with a cleft. He had got rather stooped so that at first you didn’t realise how tall he was. Winnie had to look up to him which she didn’t with Reg, and Clara thought that he must be about six foot, maybe more, and he had a very tanned shiny skin, even though it was winter. It gave him the appearance of excellent health and considering that he worked inside, was in odd contrast to Reg and other men she had seen who worked on the swamp scheme. Despite the outdoor life their skins were often marked by a glassy pallor.

  ‘He didn’t tell me he was going,’ said Winnie.

  For a while the silence condensed around them. Winnie thought, he already knows. Everything there is to know about me. And it occurred to her then, for the last time before she dismissed the matter as not being important enough to consider further, that it was not he who had come to the door on the night Reg went away. Maybe Reg had seen him and suggested he call that day, but that was another matter, and whatever it implied, didn’t concern her now. What was clear was, that whatever Albie knew, they were not things he had been told. Like the old knowledge that lies in the air over excavations, it was a matter of simple knowing. She had not had this experience with anyone before.

  He said at last, ‘I expect he had to go. He wouldn’t have gone otherwise.’

  ‘That’s what I tell myself.’

  ‘Do you?’ He seemed surprised, pleased with her somehow.

  ‘I feel sorrier for him than I do for myself.’

  He nodded. ‘I’d say that was fair.’

  It seemed a funny thing for him to say at the time.

  ‘If I’d known …’ Winnie trailed away, tried again. ‘I could have stopped him.’

  ‘Could you?’ Albie’s eyes were searching.

  ‘Oh yes.’ She said this with quiet certainty. Without thinking she placed her hand on her stomach. Albie saw. Again Winnie had the feeling that he knew exactly what she was talking about and she glanced up at him as if his height was an irresistible force that she had not confronted before. Their eyes met and she coloured, but she didn’t look away.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, though he had said nothing.

  ‘Would you have?’ he asked.

  ‘Stopped him?’ She hesitated. ‘Of course. That night I would have. That would have been the natural thing to do wouldn’t it?’

  ‘And now?’

  She gestured with her hands, partly a shrug, partly an acceptance of what had happened.

  ‘I expect not. I couldn’t have seen it then could I? Though I’m not glad, if that’s what you mean.’

  He smiled slightly. ‘Of course not. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘We’ll manage. I won’t try and have him brought back.’

  He stood looking at her. ‘Get your coat on,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re going for a walk. It’ll be cold by the lake, you’ll need something warm.’

  Winnie looked at the two girls.

  ‘Jeannie’ll be all right with Clara,’ he said. Clara smiled, pleased he had remembered her name. The way he handled it there was no question of her and Jeannie going with them.

  Winnie looked as if she was going to protest but when she looked up at Albie again it was clear that she must go with him.

  They often walked by the lake through the spring and the summer that followed, though it got harder for Winnie to get around as the months passed. At first they walked rather stiffly, side by side, being careful not to touch, but as her pregnancy advanced it was more natural for her to take his arm, and lean towards him.

  Clara never heard what people thought about this state of affairs. In Hamilton, when a man stopped
to talk to a woman it was usually because they were related to each other or about to become so. It wasn’t done to stand around talking to men in public unless there was some immediate connection with each other, and married women didn’t stop to talk with other men even if they were their husband’s best friends. In fact, that was probably the worst person to be seen talking to. And yet Winnie and Albie slipped into an easy pattern of being seen together, and seemed somehow careless about what they were doing. It had to be because of some difference in Albie, for on her own, Winnie would never have dreamed of behaving like that. Yet with him, it was almost as if she followed in a trance; certainly, in those months when she was waiting for the baby to be born, as though in some mysterious way he had taken charge of her life.

  Mumma appeared to accept it as a quite natural turn of events. Perhaps the uncharitable could say that she was relieved, but then again, it was not so much unkind as a simple truth. Albie released her, maybe not in the practical sense, for there was still plenty to be done to help keep the Hoggard household going, but in that Winnie stopped relying on her. She did not have to concern herself whether Winnie was happy or unhappy, whether she might be confronted by her tears or not, and whether she would have to exert her own inner life to meet her daughter’s needs. It was all taken care of. Winnie would rather be with Albie. It was as straightforward as that.

  If neighbours talked, Winnie seemed unaware, and if the family gossiped they did not do so in front of Clara. It had happened so easily, the transition from Reg to Albie, that in a way nobody noticed. Or so it seemed to Clara, when she thought back to that time. And for a brief period there was a difference about many people, too, as if for the moment judgement was all but suspended. They were most preoccupied with what happened to themselves. Maybe what Winnie did with her life was less important than it might have been in more ordinary times.

  There was one thing though, and Clara and Winnie in their own ways both noticed the fact, that the good ladies with the food stopped coming. Presumably they thought that Winnie had someone to look after her so they didn’t need to any more.

  When Winnie did think about it, that was how she would like to have seen it, but she knew that really those particular ladies in Hamilton were not quite like that. They were funny about the bishop too, who had recently married his housekeeper. It was said that the Cathedral was often half-empty.

  Gradually the need for food stopped being so desperate anyway. Reg started sending money home once a month. He had got in on the gold scheme down south, subsidised mining as it was called, and in some ways it was just about as miserable as the swamps but he wrote that at least you were your own boss and you could make a bit of money. He was quite hopeful about things.

  After a while the letters stopped coming, or certainly did not come often, but there was money deposited for Winnie every month and he never missed, so that after a while she came to take it for granted that she had a small regular income. Albie helped with the garden at weekends and he and his father had more vegetables round at their place than the two of them could use, and enough space for a hen run, so there were eggs too.

  Sometimes they spoke to each other as a man and his wife might do, with the ease and familiarity of two people who understood each other’s old habits, and tolerated silences as if they were actually communications. Yet Clara did not think of them like that, for Albie never stayed at the house, except later, when the baby was ill (which, admittedly, turned out to be often) but then he would sit up all night in front of the stove with the oven door open to keep him warm, and often with the cot alongside of him so he could reach out when the child cried. This way Winnie got to have a rest.

  And although they touched each other, they did not embrace, and Winnie always referred to him as Mr Tubbs when she was speaking of him to Jeannie and Clara, and that was what they called him. Yet it was he who chose the name of Caroline for the baby when it came, a more colourful and ambitious name than Winnie might have chosen for her, having for so long put aside the manner in which Clara had come to be named. Mumma asked her once if Reg liked the baby’s name.

  ‘I haven’t got round to mentioning it,’ said Winnie shortly.

  Mumma looked at her then. ‘The baby or her name?’ she asked. By Winnie’s silence it was clear that she meant both. Even Mumma seemed shocked for a moment, but she didn’t ask again.

  Sometimes Winnie thought about the gap that there was in her and Albie’s lives, for it was true that she had come to think of him as a husband, except in one vital respect. She wondered whether it was fair that they were not lovers, and supposed that if she had a conscience about the matter it worked in reverse to what it should, because she seemed to take so much from him and to give so little in return. She wondered why he kept coming to her and if he was waiting for her to let it begin. She thought that if she had not been having the baby when he first came to her that it would have happened, but then it had not seemed proper, she was sure as much to him as to her. Until at last there was no point where it could begin. Or so it seemed. The time for it had slipped past them. Besides, there was Caroline, the sick grumpy little girl, and after a while it seemed that Albie found it enough just to take care of them all. Some days, standing at her window, looking down at the peach tree and the magpies, and the fresh silverbeet sprouting in the newly hoed earth, she would wonder what to do about it, and how he felt, but she did not know how to begin in this respect and had no way of accounting for what he thought about it. It occurred to her, on other days, that looking after them was a means of atoning for his own past.

  Yet they were lovers. In a way. And in a way they both knew it.

  Later, when Winnie turned self-righteous and matronly, Clara would remember that. The way they looked at each other. The turn of their heads. The secret containment of glancing touches. The way they laughed.

  By the summer of 1934 Albie was persuading Winnie to go on outings with him, so Clara was much in demand again to stay with the two girls. Albie had to be clever to get Winnie to accept things, because she wouldn’t take money from him and so he had to invent gifts of the things she needed — and sometimes didn’t need but gave her pleasure. He had got her to take a wireless as a Christmas present, even though she was shocked by its extravagance, but he said that if she would accept a Christmas present at all (and as she had got one for him there was really no argument) then it was only extravagant if he couldn’t afford it. They listened to ‘Scrim’ and after some initial resistance from her, they would talk about the Labour Party, and she went to some meetings with him.

  That was the beginning. After that it was the races. That did surprise the family, because she wasn’t the type and he didn’t seem to be either. Clara, looking back on that too, thought they were probably right about this because she herself was crazy about the races and when she first knew Ambrose they would go as often as possible; she knew that neither she nor any of the friends they went with were like Winnie and Albie.

  But it seemed that this slightly stooped, rather eccentric (for that was how some saw him) school teacher of Winnie’s was a racehorse fan and knew how to study form. It was from him that Clara first learnt how bets were placed. Later he talked Winnie into going to the Summer Show at Claudelands with him, and Clara, who would normally have expected to go herself, had to stay home with the girls. Mumma said that Winnie didn’t get many outings and it was the least she could do for her. Secretly Clara thought that Winnie was doing rather well for herself. She and Mumma didn’t have a wireless.

  She wasn’t old enough to make herself heard, and it was still a couple of years off the Show being the major event of the year to meet boys, or nothing in the world would have made her look after Winnie’s kids for her. She did as she was told.

  She was expecting them back round lunchtime but they didn’t come. She heated some soup and spoonfed Caroline who never seemed to like anything, and tried to get Jeannie to help her but Jeannie showed a great reluctance where the baby was concerned a
nd Clara was just about in tears by the time Winnie and Albie turned up after four in the afternoon.

  They burst into the kitchen where she was mixing up cocoa in a fresh attempt to tempt Caroline, and Winnie’s face was shining in a way it hadn’t done for years.

  ‘Hello there,’ she cried, with a sweeping theatrical gesture which wasn’t like her at all.

  ‘Where have you been?’ Clara said angrily.

  ‘Where have we been? Where have we been?’ she cried to Albie.

  Looking at her face it was easy to forget that she was wearing a shapeless old coat with patches in the sleeves and down-at-heel mended-over shoes.

  ‘We went to the races,’ said Albie with an air of triumph.

  Clara stared at them. Caroline started to cry again, and Clara picked her up and thrust her at Winnie. ‘Perhaps you could race some food into her then,’ she said. ‘It might shut her up.’

  For once Winnie took notice. Clara had tears in her eyes, and she felt stupid for being so angry, and unkind because she was out to spoil their pleasure. For all that, there was a passing satisfaction that Winnie had stopped and seen her when she said, ‘You poor thing. I’ll see to her.’ She took Caroline and the little girl stopped crying at once.

  Winnie said, ‘I’ll give you five shillings for looking after her all day, it’s the least I can do.’

  She sort of tossed this off as if she did it all the time, or rather she tried to, but it came out in a rather stilted and awkward way. Albie looked at her sideways.

  She said, ‘Yes Albie that’s fair. Clara’s always looking after the kids for me and I can afford it you know.’

  ‘But you can’t,’ said Clara.

  ‘Yes I can, because Albie made me place a bet today and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so guilty about anything in my life, but he made me, didn’t you, tell her you made me,’ she implored, turning to Albie.