by Fiona Kidman
5
When the results came out in January Robin’s name simply wasn’t there. At first they thought there had been a mistake and his parents were positive that this was so.
His father rang the Education Department in Wellington. They brushed him off and told him to wait for the results to arrive in the mail. They came the next day and it was there in black and white, forty-five percent for Chemistry and forty for English. Doctor Mawson sent for a recount and rang every two days to hurry it along because it was important to his son who was going to be a doctor. Only of course he wasn’t going to be, not that year. In retrospect Clara knew that she had accepted the inevitability of that fact from the moment they had opened the newspaper and his name had been missing. She could see how impossible it was to build a world on such assumptions of order. They believed in themselves too much. They had taken things for granted.
On the riverbank that summer, she saw things she had not seen before. The water rippled like heavy brown metal. She saw the thick mud where the ducks swam. She smelt them on the hot still air. There were crowds of arum lilies in flower casting a sickly sweetness. They had been on the coffin at her father’s long‑ago and almost forgotten funeral. There was convulvulus, dense and clinging.
She had never loved him so much. So she believed.
It was decided that Robin would return to school. It was a humiliating and awful decision but there was nothing else for it. His father re-opened the subject of him going away to school. He refused point-blank. He would not go back to school at all and they could forget about him being a doctor if they pursued it. He was big enough for his father to take him seriously.
In some ways their lives were surprisingly improved in the year that followed. The Mawsons stopped fighting Clara so much. She was invited back to the house again, first for a still and silent meal and then from time to time she would go there on a Sunday afternoon. Robin was given an allowance which wasn’t substantial but it allowed him to go out without depending on Clara. As well, his father provided him with contraceptives and for the time being she shelved the idea of having babies.
This new approach to the problem of their son had its drawbacks as well. There was some elaborate devising of social events at their home which Robin was required to attend in exchange for the new concessions, and from which Clara was excluded.
The socialising was in the form of parties which included everybody they knew who had daughters of a suitable age to be friendly with Robin. They were unsuccessful in their attempts. In the first place Robin was only interested in Clara, and in the second, most of the girls had left school by that time, and none of these sophisticated young ladies with their lipstick and first cigarettes were interested in a schoolboy, however big and handsome he might have looked out of school uniform. If they were going to go for a uniform it would be khaki, or with luck, blue.
About the only person who was even remotely interested in him was Sally Carver, a rather oddly shaped girl, and barely suitable by the Mawsons’ standards. Her father was a dentist in Frankton, and new to the district. His profession made him at least worth cultivating; his choice of location showed him for what he was, new to the game despite his age.
He may have appealed to the Mawsons in another respect. He had taken up his profession when he was older, qualifying after the depression. It was not a bad example for Robin, that you could get somewhere if you wanted to enough, even if you had had a bit of misfortune along the way.
But Sally had unfortunate teeth, despite her father’s ministrations, and a horse laugh, and she didn’t always keep very good company. Robin and Clara could have told the Mawsons this but Sally didn’t seem important enough to embarrass. Though it did annoy Clara, if she stopped long enough to think about it, that Sally gave Robin sidelong glances as they were coming out of the pictures, as if she knew him really well. And she had stayed on at school after everyone else had left, because in spite of her unpleasing appearance she was clever, and younger than the other girls who were being sent his way. She and Clara had briefly been in the same class at school. But Robin saw her only as a target for peanuts on a Saturday afternoon. To Clara who felt she had put childhood far behind her, he still seemed a schoolboy in some ways and she the older of the two.
His mother and she had taken to having stilted conversations on Sundays and she was starting to handle them in a way she could not have done before.
‘It’s very important that Robin passes, you know Clara. He must. You do understand that, don’t you?’ she said one afternoon.
‘Of course I do,’ she replied. She could not understand why anyone should feel the need to make such an obvious statement.
‘His grandfather was a doctor too. It will make it three generations in a row.’
She had large moist eyes; surprising, because her face was angular and bony and her mouth as thin as her husband’s. She turned them on Clara with a very intense gaze.
‘If it’s what Robin wants you can count on me.’ It sounded silly and Girl Guide-ish, but Clara couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘But of course it’s what Robin wants.’ She was quite certain of herself.
‘Of course,’ said Clara too, and wondered why it was so necessary to convince her all of a sudden. She had never doubted that Robin would be a doctor, even if it was going to be later rather than sooner.
She left their place, walking with Robin. His dog Chip snuffled along at their heels. They skirted round the end of the street where Winnie and Reg lived, as they had been doing for the past year, but as they passed the corner they suddenly came face to face with Winnie carrying a billy of milk. She had missed the milkman at the gate and caught up with him down the road. They all stopped, said hullo in small awkward voices, and stopped again.
‘You’d better come in,’ she said at last.
They tied Chip up at the gate and followed her inside. Reg was sitting at the kitchen table with his shirt sleeves rolled up, smoking, with a morose expression on his face and reading the ‘8 O’Clock’. He seemed surprised and at the same time pleased to see them.
‘Long time no see,’ he said, folding the newspaper. He looked appraisingly at Clara and she felt herself go hot. She hadn’t seen him since the time of her abortion the previous year. She guessed he would have heard about it.
Jeannie had her mid-term report and Clara asked to see it. It was hard to believe that she was in High now too. She had forgotten that, although Robin had mentioned seeing her there. It broke the ice and they started to talk, almost like old times. Clara knew they had been getting by all right because Mumma had been seeing Winnie again, but not when she was around. She didn’t know whether she still thought about the way Winnie had avoided her. It was hard to fathom what Mumma thought.
When they were leaving, Winnie followed them to the gate.
‘It was good for him, seeing you,’ she said.
‘Reg?’ Clara had never thought Reg cared much one way or another whether she was around.
‘You can see what he’s like.’
Clara had to admit that if she had noticed anything, it hadn’t really registered, though now Winnie mentioned it she supposed he hadn’t looked so good when they went in. She said that perhaps he was looking a bit older.
‘That’s exactly it,’ Winnie said, pouncing on this as if it was a really important observation. ‘He’s too old and he won’t accept it.’
‘Too old for what?’
‘The war, of course.’
‘You mean he wants to go?’
‘He says he does but he doesn’t really, you know.’
‘How d’you know? I mean, he might.’
She turned tired cloudy eyes towards Clara. ‘He says it would make something happen.’
After that both Robin and Clara started seeing Winnie again from time to time, dropping in as often as not on a Sunday afternoon. She seemed pleased now that the Mawsons entertained Clara and, like them, she seemed to have accepted that she and Robi
n were together.
Robin worked very hard as the exams approached again and they missed whole days of seeing each other. It made their times together even more important. Clara was still making hats, but Miss Cresswell who she worked for would sigh and shake her head over some of her efforts. She was better at selling them than making them, and this kept her in a job. She had let her hair grow below her shoulders and she washed it twice a week, staying up late to let it dry, so that it was always glossy and her curls sprung around her face. When she modelled hats for customers they could fancy they would look like her, and they almost invariably bought what she showed them. She moved quite a lot of Miss Cresswell’s old stock that way.
Just before the exams Wirth’s circus came to town and set up their tents at the showgrounds. Clara bought two tickets and showed them to Robin. He said he couldn’t possibly go, didn’t she know that he had to study? She said it was the best thing he could do, have a night out like that. He had studied till it was coming out of his ears and now he should switch off it for a few hours, give himself a rest. In the end he agreed.
They loved every moment of it, each, as it turned out, in their different ways. For Clara, in that tent, could see herself up there. Clara Bentley, cavorting on tightropes, swinging through the air by her teeth from spinning hoops, dancing, pirouetting. If it was she who was under that spotlight, she decided she would choose to wear tights covered in emerald-green sequins. How beautiful, how powerful, a solitary figure, shining, glittering as she turned under that light.
After, they went to the caf and had their usual meal of fish and chips. They had been going there for so long now that they got a double quantity of bread and two cups of tea for no extra charge. Robin poured tomato sauce over his meal and she could see him thinking. He was so deep in thought that the chips starting floating in the red liquid. She pulled the bottle out of his hand and sat it on the table.
‘Penny for them?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Not really.’
‘Yes you do. Tell me.’
He smiled cagily at her. She loved his smile. Women might be cat-like, but so are some men, and it is an attractive thing. In time, there would be Ambrose, and she though of him as cat-like too, or of the cat family. A panther perhaps. It was the one thing, perhaps, that these two men would have in common. With Robin it was something about the eyes, long and narrow and curving up ever so slightly at the corners. If she looked at him alongside his parents, she could see that he had inherited the best of both of them and nothing, that she could see, of their less attractive characteristics. Come to that, neither of them were particularly attractive, but if you took certain features and put them together in a package the result was rather good. Despite his size there was a great delicacy about his features, from his mother’s fine bone structure she supposed, and he had his father’s excellent hands. She studied those hands now, as they played with the salt and pepper. The fingers had rather large joints but they tapered elegantly, and he had strong thumbs. The hands of a surgeon, she thought as she looked at them.
‘I was thinking,’ he said after a while, ‘that if you wanted to walk on that tightrope you would first of all need to know how to get off it.’
She didn’t understand. She asked him which clown he liked the best. He said, ‘You.’ They left it at that.
He passed his exams with brilliant results. It had all been for the best, everyone kept saying. He had been too young the first time. He could never have got marks as good as that. Now he had topped the whole of the country in chemistry. It was a miracle. The failure was behind him.
His family threw a party and everyone was invited, even Winnie and Reg and Clara. Mrs Mawson asked Clara nervously if she thought Mumma would like to come and she said no. She didn’t tell Mumma about the invitation. Afterwards she was sorry.
It was a good party and everyone behaved well. Sally Carver had passed her exams too. She was off to train as a dental nurse in February. Only talk of war subdued the party, but never for long.
The Sunday after the party Robin and Clara were down at the riverbank. They had taken a bag of sandwiches and cakes left over from the night before to feed to the ducks. Clara had a fleeting idea that her whole life had been spent feeding ducks, that she could qualify as the great gamekeeper of them all, even if she wasn’t much good at making hats. Nobody came by their place. They were longtime squatters on that bank. It was almost as if they owned it. Clara often sat on in the sun with her blouse off after they had made love, Robin stroking her without looking over his shoulder to see if they were being watched. The willows formed a curtain and they never worried that they might be seen.
Robin heaved bread well out into the river and a large bossy drake dived quickly and deeply, beating off rivals with his wings as he did.
As it surfaced Robin cried ‘Eureka!’ They often did that, both of them. It was more than Archimedes’ Principle, though water was bound to provoke it. To them it signified a private mystery. Once, on a summer day, they had borrowed bikes and ridden into the country. It was an undisturbed landscape yet Clara had felt a fretting unease in it. The morning, which had started with a sky like a great uncut sapphire, had turned sombre. They both fell quiet as they pedalled, stopped calling to each other. Clara thought of death in quiet places; that people might quietly kill each other without changing the appearance of things. As they passed through the countryside, they might be dying before their eyes, absorbed into the earth, or simply fading behind the shaded windows.
The rain began to fall and they would have been soaked except that they came to the small settlement of Eureka, and they shouted the name together, laughed and, relieved, took shelter.
‘I wonder why it’s called that,’ said Robin.
They never found out. They often asked people if they knew, just to see the dumb looks on their faces. Somebody ought to know, but nobody did. It was what Hamilton was like.
But, ‘What about?’ she asked on this occasion, blowing cigarette smoke into the lazy air and watching it spiral away.
‘I have it this time,’ he said.
‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’
‘I’m not going to med school,’ he announced cheerfully, and stood up dusting his pants.
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Clara, throwing more bread out to the ducks. The big drake got it again.
‘I’m not. I mean it.’
She looked up at him then and saw that he did.
‘What d’you mean?’ she said. She knew she sounded stupid because already he had said all that needed saying.
He sat down beside her again, resting his hands loosely against his knees.
‘I don’t think I was ever going to go,’ he said gently. ‘It’s not me.’
‘What’ll you do then?’ She felt she should be shouting at him, making a scene, or asking him to explain himself better. Instead it felt like a very old movie where you know what is going to happen, and why, and you don’t know whether to laugh or cry or if, simply by doing neither, you can stop it from happening. Only you know you can’t.
‘I don’t know. I honestly don’t. Well yes, I suppose I do in a way, in the short term anyway. I mean, they’ll call me up in April, and then they’ll send me off. I should think we ought to get married then, shouldn’t you?’
She stared at him dumbly.
He went on. ‘After it’s all over … I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t mind being a vet. I wouldn’t mind that. It makes more sense to me. But if I couldn’t … I don’t mind too much. Accountancy maybe. I’m good at figures. You can’t look that far ahead. Not when there’s a war on.’
It had happened at last. He had grown up too. She had been the adult, or so she had thought. She thought too, that she knew him. Now it was all back to front. Looking at him then, she thought with a sudden fierce bitterness, that he had known this all along, or at least, for a long time. Then she thought that perhaps she had been meant to know and failed him.
She hardly saw hi
m that week, or not for more than half an hour or so at a time. On the Sunday she went round, at his bidding, to his place. They had scones and tea with his mother and afterwards he left them together while he walked Chip. Clara had had one of her increasingly frequent colds during the week and he told her to stay in.
When he was gone his mother turned to her and hissed, ‘You did this, didn’t you?’
Her moist eyes glistened and she drew her thin lips back over her teeth.
‘No. I didn’t want him to do it,’ said Clara.
She looked at her then and Clara could feel her contempt and fury washing over her. ‘You can have him now. You must be pleased about that.’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Clara didn’t move but in her head she was frantically devising ways of escape from the chintz room with its Wedgwood ornaments.
Mrs Mawson scooped up the tea things from between them. ‘He might as well get married. He says he wants to. He does whatever he wants. He always has. It makes no difference now.’
Clara saw Winnie the next day. She was seventeen and it seemed that she was about to have her heart’s desire. Night and day since she was thirteen she had thought that some day she would marry Robin Mawson and now she was to be allowed to, because there was a war on. It didn’t make sense.
‘I’m only seventeen,’ she said to Winnie.
‘Yes, well that can’t be helped,’ Winnie said, the way she might say it if Clara had spilled something on the bench or dropped a cup. Nothing important.
Only of course it was.
‘He’s only just left school,’ Clara said.
Winnie gave her a funny look then. ‘Yes, that’s true,’ was all she said.
But it was for that reason, as much as anything, that the marriage was delayed until his embarkation. For the sake of appearances. Not that it was said like that, but that was what it was. That was Hamilton too. Even if there was a war on.