Paddy's Puzzle

by Fiona Kidman

  Would she? She had admired Robin from such distance, for so long, and here he was asking her to do something for him.

  And she looked at his mass of wavy fair hair and his almond-shaped eyes, his pimples, and his anxious overworked Adam’s apple, and couldn’t believe her luck.

  Nor could she when she found the pup cowering in Winnie’s woodshed, less than an hour later. She called out to Jeannie and told her she was taking the pup over to Doctor Mawson’s place. She was as offhanded as she could be, and when Jeannie wanted to go with her she rebuked her in a sharp grown-up way for thinking of leaving Caroline on her own. She was, she implied, committed to attending to the business of the moment without having to worry about nonsense like that. It was an old and useful trick with Jeannie and it nearly always worked.

  She met Robin in the street on the way to his house. When he saw the pup his face lit up. She thought then that that might be an end to it but he insisted (insisted? maybe she let him think he did) that she go back to his place so that his father, who had paid a great deal for the dog and was furious with him, according to Robin, could thank her, and she could see it fed, and so forth. There seemed to be a whole string of good reasons why he wanted her to go with him, but only one very good one why she should want to go, which was, quite simply, that she didn’t ever want to be anywhere for the rest of her life except walking along beside Robin Mawson; and if walking alongside of him took her into the huge white house with gables and pillars, set back from the street behind oak trees and fine silver birches, where Doctor and Mrs Mawson and their family lived, that was fine by her.

  When she thought back to that time, it was almost impossible to retell how she felt then, either to herself or anyone else. She fell in love with Robin and Robin fell in love with her. She entered that tender world of loving for the first time. There is never another time like it again in all the world, no matter what happens in the future. The mind changes. The body changes, not so much as at the beginning of womanhood, but with a blossoming as if there is a purpose for everything. She walked differently. And she dreamt, in a new way. She dreamt of marriage.

  So did he. They went to church in the cathedral where Robin had sung as a choirboy, and they thought of themselves as being already married. It was summer and they learned the languages of love beside the river and beneath the trees. Summer ripened everything.

  The butterflies hovered above and birds sang as they made their explorations. The pennyroyal bloomed profusely along the banks of the river and they crushed it so that strange tangy smell of it clung to their clothes afterwards; there were willow trees twisting everywhere, screening them from the world, the thistledown touched them as a reminder that they must be gentle with each other.

  If it could have stopped there. If a summer had been enough. Perhaps, quite simply, if they had been older. If at the end of it there had been no war. If his parents and hers had not been so different.

  If all of these things had been so, her life might have been different, she would think afterwards.

  For his parents did not approve. It was Winnie’s story all over again, only worse in a way. Some people in Hamilton tried to propagate the notion that there were no differences amongst them, that they were of one class. It was not so, and Clara, who moved from the Junction to that part of Hamilton where the Mawsons lived, knew that as well as anyone. And the gap between the Junction and the people who lived in the pas made an even greater nonsense of the idea of equality.

  Even within the one group there were differences. As the depression receded and became a memory, a lot of the people in Hamilton began to prosper; many of them became very rich. What made the difference was when, and how, they got rich. With the Hoggards, in their heyday, it had been commercial, with the Mawsons it was professional.

  Most of the children ended up at the same schools, often private ones in the cities, but the Mawsons had left it too late for Christ’s, and decided, as some of the quite notable families in town were being experimental and liberal about their children’s education, that they would try High. Later, when Clara entered Robin’s life and persisted in it, they tried desperately to get him into Collegiate or into King’s but it was too late, and he wouldn’t have gone anyway. He simply said he would fail his exams if they did, and he meant it.

  Certainly the families ended up at the same twenty-firsts and some of them did marry amongst the different groups, but it was definitely stepping up if you moved from commercial to professional. As for Clara, she was the worst sort of outsider. If it had been Jeannie and they had both been older it might just have been possible, but not Clara. She was the wrong side of the tracks, and the railway tracks at that. Robin could not have picked worse company to keep.

  Nor could his parents have handled it more badly. They did all they could to separate them, and the more they did the more inseparable they became.

  Clara turned fourteen in the January after they met, and on that same day she made love for the first time. Robin was fifteen, and although what they did was as new to him as it was to her it seemed as if they had been lovers for a long time. She often felt when she had been with him on the riverbank like a ripe melon that had been split with an axe. She was very happy.

  It was over a year before she became pregnant, and she missed the first fifth-form exams recovering from the abortion she had at Doctor Mawson’s house.

  Winnie thought the Mawsons must have taken leave of their senses when Clara was invited there to stay. They told her to tell Mumma that she wanted to study for the exams with Robin, and then, that she’d got the flu and couldn’t sit them, and all the time she was staying in their immaculate primrose spare bedroom and Mrs Mawson brought her cups of tea, snivelling, and not looking at her. Before she left to go home Doctor Mawson came in and sat on the edge of the bed in his most professional manner. He waited expectantly as if she was supposed to say something. When she didn’t he sighed and said in a tired voice, ‘I suppose you’ve got ideas about him?’

  ‘What ideas?’ she said stupidly.

  ‘Marriage. Things like that. Young girls get ideas like that.’

  ‘We know we’re too young. I mean, that’s why …’ she blushed and trailed away. ‘That’s why we couldn’t have the baby,’ she finished lamely.

  ‘You and Robin can’t have babies — ever,’ he said.

  ‘But when we’re married, when we’re older …’

  ‘Exactly. That’s exactly what I mean. You girls get ideas.’

  She didn’t understand. Not altogether, though she had a horrible feeling that if she tried she could work it out. He looked as if he might try and explain it to her carefully but then changed his mind. He spoke sharply and with authority.

  ‘When Robin marries he’ll find a decent girl. He’s got a career ahead of him. She’ll be the right sort of person to help him.’

  ‘He won’t give me up.’ She was fierce too.

  ‘Oh don’t be silly. A few years at medical school, he’ll soon forget you.’

  ‘And if he doesn’t?’

  He was clearly astounded and angry as well. ‘You’ll have a long time to wait. He can’t marry anyone till he’s twenty-one without my consent. You don’t really think I’d allow it, do you?’

  He was a grey, suede-coloured man with fine soft grey hair, thinning above the long grey stripes in his face, and he held his papery grey hands in a tent with the tips of his fingers while he talked. She studied those hands and thought about what they had done to her.

  ‘If you love him as you say you do,’ he went on, his voice colourless and quiet again, ‘you’ll let him go. You don’t even do well at school. I’ve found out, you know.’ His voice rose a pitch higher again, as if to say that the very least she could do to earn the love of his son was to get good marks at school.

  In a way, he was right. A funny thing had happened to her since she met Robin. Before she’d been lazy, but it was true that she could have done better, as the teachers said. Then when she was wi
th him something changed. She didn’t want to do well under any circumstances. He was bright, very bright, but every now and then she would be a jump ahead of him about something, and she would see him look at her with a small, hurt, indignant look so that she shied off, scared of what she had done. She stopped being good in history and maths, stopped being good at anything except being Robin’s girlfriend.

  It was good enough in terms of popularity at school, but she got sick of the place. She wanted to leave and start getting her box together. It went without saying that when Robin left for medical school she intended going too, and that they were going to get married, in spite of what his father had said. It had become more important to get some sheets and pillowcases and towels and crockery than to stay on doing algebra and Tudor England. Besides she had come to hate the school itself. The corridors were like endless tunnels. The small windows were like the tight smiles of Hamilton’s matrons.

  She called in at Winnie’s after she left the Mawson’s. Winnie fussed over her pale appearance. She told her she was leaving school, that there was no point in going on because of the need to save in preparation for getting married to Robin. Winnie’s face darkened then. She could have been a Mawson herself.

  ‘You silly child,’ she said, and glanced over her shoulder to check that Jeannie couldn’t hear. ‘You can’t have the Mawsons, don’t you know?’

  ‘Why not? You had Reg.’

  She thought Winnie was going to smack her face then but she checked herself. ‘It was different.’

  ‘Why?’ Clara shouted at her. ‘Why are you always different? You were worse than I ever was. Our father was still alive when you married Reg. The Hoggards can’t have liked that very much.’

  Winnie shook then but she said, regaining her usual even way, ‘I was older. You must see that. And I’d made something of myself. And I’d got away. You must see that it was different.’

  ‘You think I should leave Mumma then? Where shall I go? Come and live with you and pretend you’re my mother? I could you know.’

  ‘Go home,’ she said tiredly. ‘Stop being stupid.’

  ‘I’m not too young to have a baby.’

  ‘I shall speak to Mumma about you if you go on talking dirty,’ she said.

  Clara laughed then. ‘What would she do?’

  ‘Then I’ll speak to Reg.’

  ‘Reg can’t stop me having a baby. He can go up to Doctor Mawson’s and fish mine out of the garden if he likes. That’s where he put it on Saturday afternoon.’

  She went very white then. ‘You didn’t?’

  ‘I did, and I’m having another one as soon as I’m sixteen and he’s not getting his dirty paws on me then, I’ll have it and they’ll have to let Robin marry me the way he wants to and I’ll go away to Dunedin with him. So there.’

  ‘Clara. Clara, go back to school. Please. Please stop this.’ Winnie was near to tears. Clara didn’t really understand why she hated her being with Robin so much, especially, as she pointed out to her, after she had gone off with Reg and upset the Hoggards all those years before. She thought she might have been a bit proud of her following in her footsteps now.

  When she thought about it later she could see why Winnie was frightened. She really had had more to offer than Clara did then, and even though the Hoggards had fallen on hard times, she had used her marriage — or most of it — to build up a careful life for her children, those two precious daughters, and if Clara created a scandal that the Mawsons couldn’t live down, her efforts would count for nothing.

  ‘What’s the matter Winnie? You’d have had an abortion if you could. Do you wish you could have had one like me?’

  Her face sagged.

  ‘I wanted my baby, Winnie, but they wouldn’t let me have it. That’s really why you’re mad, isn’t it?’

  Winnie smacked her then, and it was too late for either of them to have regrets, although they both did.

  Clara left school and she stopped seeing Winnie. She didn’t go near her for nearly a year. Mumma didn’t seem to care whether she went to school or not and she liked the idea of being paid board. As for her teachers, they visibly sighed with relief. She worried a little about Robin still being a schoolboy and her being at work but by that time he looked so grown up that it wasn’t really important. If it hadn’t been for his huge hairy legs sticking out of his short pants he could have been a member of the staff.

  Things had been decided for her anyway, because a week or so after the trip to the Mawsons she did get ’flu and it settled on her chest. She was ill for three weeks and Mumma nursed her, as tender and attentive as the most careful mother in the world. She rang Doctor Mawson who wouldn’t come. She was puzzled because she told Clara he had questioned her a great deal about her illness and then refused point-blank to come because he wasn’t their doctor, and he had told her to get one in Frankton. Clara was relieved. She hadn’t known Mumma was going to ring him.

  It wasn’t easy to get a doctor in Frankton either because the Bentleys’ previous one had left to go to the war and they were getting scarce in the area. In the end one did come, by which time Clara had pneumonia. Mumma and Robin took turns sitting up with her for several nights in a row and eventually she recovered, though she was weak. She supposed that she should have been in hospital. Her chest was always weak afterwards.

  She liked that time with Mumma, though Mumma herself was angry and uncomprehending that Winnie didn’t come to see Clara, or help. Clara understood, but she was angry too.

  From then on, Robin lived in clear defiance of his parents, and continued to see Clara.

  But the two of them also lived with tensions that had not been there before. Because she had been so ill, her job in a millinery shop left her exhausted at the end of each day when he was waiting to pick her up at the shop, still in his school uniform with his bag of books slung over his shoulder. She was learning with painful slowness to make hats but she wasn’t good at it. She would be bad-tempered and irritable with him, often when he was skipping a meal to see her, and she couldn’t understand herself, why she was like that. Then she could see, sometimes by about Sunday night when she had started to recover, just what she was doing to him, and so they started spending some of her wages on meals in town. They bought big plates of fish and chips and bread and butter and a cup of tea for four shillings when she was only earning two pounds. It didn’t go far. Her savings suffered. Clara had to pay for him to get into the pictures as well.

  The other thing that bothered them was the war. Neither of them could take it seriously, and yet slowly they were starting to realise that they might have to.

  ‘If I’m at medical school I mightn’t get called up. At least not straight away,’ Robin said one evening. They were sitting in the caf.

  ‘It can’t go on that long,’ she said. ‘You won’t be eighteen for ages.’

  ‘That’s what they said when it started, that it wouldn’t go on for long.’

  ‘Are you really worried?’

  ‘You know how long the last war went on.’

  ‘It can’t,’ she said stubbornly. Only she guessed it could.

  After they had eaten at the caf he would walk her home and then catch a bus back across town, or take the long walk around the lakeside, to start his study again. Some nights she thought he shouldn’t come and she would say this, then tremble with anxiety in case he agreed. He never did. Their lives were beginning to revolve around the Junction. Around the Roxy on Saturday afternoons. It was easy to blot out what was happening beyond themselves in that thick little pit of darkness. They saw ‘Gone With the Wind’ three times, and laughed themselves sick at the Marx Brothers and the Keystone Cops. But disconcertingly, the world beyond would creep in some afternoons. The first war commentaries were coming through in the shorts.

  Usually they didn’t talk about them afterwards. It was better not to. Or if they did mention them they would say firmly that it was a long way off. It couldn’t happen to them. And Robin would go off again to h
is school books.

  She wasn’t really worried about his work. He had always done well. He had left her far behind and the school saw him as a shining hope. He was one of their top scholars. Everything he did seemed easy. His mind glided effortlessly round mathematical problems which by then her own mind could only dimly comprehend. Occasionally she would make a comment, put in a word, get excited by something he saw when he talked about it, and that was enough for him. His face would shine eagerly as he rushed on, outlining a problem, talking it out to its logical conclusion, not noticing whether she could see it through to the end with him or not. Her mind would wander off on a tangent, concerned with the technicalities of blocking the new season’s hats and not much liking the prospect. Every now and then, if she attended to him, she might pick up a flaw in his argument, but she never said so. She had abdicated, just like King Edward. Of course she understood. It seemed natural to give up everything for love.

  So she counted off the days until they would go away together.

  She looked forward to the summer when at least they would have the riverbanks to return to in the weekends. Their lives had been restricted as far as their lovemaking was concerned. Sometimes when Mumma was out in her glasshouse they would snatch a furtive and too quick encounter in Clara’s bedroom. It did little for either of them and they comforted themselves that it would not be for much longer. Soon they would have a place of their own, in another and distant town.

  Neither of them were prepared for what happened next. It was more unbelievable and more devastating than the war. At the end of the year Robin failed his exams.