by Fiona Kidman
He was sent to Papakura for training and his going was a wound in itself. The night before he went away he stayed at the house in Frankton Junction and Mumma drank gin and never heard a thing. They lay with their arms wrapped around each other, talking all night, though it was hard to remember, even within days, what they had talked about. Trivial things, not plans for the future. She had planned a future for so long, yet now that one full of positive happenings and events was being handed to her, Clara was afraid. She wanted things to go on the way they were, for time to run its own course with them.
The months that followed were dream-like. Robin came and went, and the date for his embarkation was set for the end of October. They would be married quietly in the Cathedral on his final leave, in the third week of that month, with only their two families present. Clara would wear a pink silk dress and Miss Cresswell made her a hat swathed in silk tulle with a crown of feathers. Mumma was specially training orchids to be ready when the time came.
He had leave on a weekend in September. It was to be the last time she saw him before the wedding. After they had had lunch with his parents they walked up town, heading towards the riverbank. It was a curious still day, inclined to greyness with a temperamental sun appearing fitfully behind the clouds. Spring had begun and the neat gardens were rich with flowering bulbs, tidily banked with earth. As they passed Winnie’s place Clara saw that her peach tree was in flower too, abundant and beautiful. She could still remember it stringy and struggling for life with the hard little fruit that never properly ripened, when she was small. Now all that had changed. Like everything else in Hamilton, it flourished.
Victoria Street yawned empty before them as they walked towards the riverbank. There wasn’t a car to be seen and very little movement. They paused for a moment to look in Paul’s bookshop but it was just something to do. Robin said he would like a bit of reading material and she said she would try to get him some books or magazines when the shops were open and send them up. They admired the new post office, a big solid building, the most impressive in town. A couple walked by, pushing a pram. Clara kept thinking to herself, this is the last time, the very last time we will do this.
She told herself that there was no real reason for her to think this. Robin would come back, they would have their lives together before them. He might die of course. She had thought of him being killed, but it was just as likely that he wouldn’t be. The real thing was that it would never be like this again, whatever happened. They would never be a boy and girl just walking out again. She couldn’t put that thought aside.
‘They say the Jap thing’s serious,’ Robin said.
‘Yes. That’s what they’re saying. So I hear.’
‘You’ll pay attention to the drill, won’t you?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘I wish you’d think about living at my parents’ place,’ he said.
She stopped in the street and stared at him. ‘Why?’
It was an unspoken rule between them that they both simply tolerated his parents. Mumma both did and didn’t count. She was a strange lady, stranger than Robin, or anyone else except Clara, knew. She had never made any difference to or difficulty in their lives since they had been together, but at the same time her presence, and the house at Frankton Junction, had been a focus for them, a place to go when all else failed. She would be pleased to see them and at the same time unseeing. She demanded very little. Amongst her stuffed and crocheted doilies there was a different kind of order to the Mawsons’ opulence. She provided order out of long habit, not through any particular desire to impress. Once it had been a defence against a harsh and judging world. Nobody cared now, nor had cared for a very long time, whether Mumma was bats or not, though her reputation as being so had doubtless scared the Mawsons as much as anything. But she certainly made life easier than they did. Clara didn’t want to go and live with them or anyone else but Mumma, if she couldn’t live with Robin.
‘I think you’d be safer in an attack,’ Robin said. ‘They’d be more likely to go for the railway yards first. Cut off communications, you know.’ He sounded military already.
‘I’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘I know how to take care of myself.’
‘Not against bombs you don’t. Besides, my parents are building an air-raid shelter.’
‘Good on them. I’ll call if I need it.’
‘You’re being silly now,’ he said sharply.
‘Will we see the eclipse, d’you think?’
‘What eclipse?’
‘There’s an eclipse of the sun in the Caucasian mountains. It’s due today.’
‘Caucasia? That’s the other side of the world.’
‘So. We’ll see part of it.’ She was pleased to have diverted him, and to know something that he didn’t. ‘Think how black it will become. Think of the world going black in the middle of the day. That would be kind of like the end of the world.’
‘I suppose it would.’
‘Anyway, you’ll be on the other side of the world soon.’
His face lit up. ‘I know. It’s exciting isn’t it?’
‘It might be awful.’
‘D’you think I don’t realise that? That’s why I’m worried about you … it’ll be awful just not being certain whether you’re all right or not. But it’ll be something different, won’t it?’
She found herself thinking with some bitterness just how different it would be. It occurred to her that the reason she had been so certain that nothing would ever be the same again was because, the next time they walked up Victoria Street some Sunday afternoon, not only would they be a married couple, but he would have gone away and changed, while she stayed the same. He would have been to different places, and seen the hues of other skies, and the shapes and outlines of other countries, their hills and valleys, towns and cities, the splendid and the dreadful; and she would have seen nothing more than this. They had planned to change their lives together but now it was he who would be changing it on his own. She would still be making and selling hats, and walking up empty Victoria Street with the new post office to look forward to as the highlight of each day.
They lay down on the bank together, the first time that spring. It was still squelchy and damp beneath the undergrowth and Robin laid his khaki jacket inside out on the ground before he covered her. The sky began to turn a strange yellow before they were done. From beneath his shoulder she could see a cloud move from the sun’s face and a black edge cutting across the light. It hurt her eyes to look at it and yet it was impossible not to try. She buried her head against Robin’s shoulder. O lover, lover, cover me for one last time.
They drew apart. The strange colour of the world engulfed them, this odd yellow light, as if the invasion had actually begun. It grew colder, and they drew together again, shivering. The birds gave disbelieving little chirps and squawks, then lapsed into frightened silence. Still. Cold. Half-dark. It only lasted a few minutes and then the sun emerged again as rapidly as it had faded. Robin and Clara turned to each other, their hands gripping as if they were afraid the other might suddenly slip out of sight, out of reach.
So much for love. Why should it suddenly stop? She tried to answer that question in her head over and over again in the week that followed. For when Robin boarded the bus back to Papakura that evening, she didn’t love him any more. It was not for any reason that she knew, and at first she thought she must be mistaken. But the next morning she woke up and it was still true.
Later, she came to believe that she learned things from the awful time that followed. She learned that ceasing to love does not alter the fact of having loved. But love can stop.
She supposed, too, that it must be true that being in love for the first time, really in love, is special and it hardly ever lasts. Perhaps everyone knew that. Everyone, that is, who has been there, and who it has happened to. Nobody can know it is true while it is still happening.
She told a friend about it afterwards, and the friend did not take it v
ery seriously at first, not until she told her about the wedding that nearly happened, and the difficulty it caused for so many people. Then Janice, her friend, said that it was the war, and that it would never have happened, that none of it would ever have gone so far, if there had not been that to contend with. Clara thought she was probably right.
That and the differences between them. Maybe they had thrived on those too much, as a kind of excitement. Her especially. She had always had a quiet passion for the dramatic. Sometimes she thought she was angry with Robin because he did not change her life in the way that she had hoped, first by failing his exams when they both believed the time was right for them to go away and leave Hamilton behind them, then by deciding not to go to medical school at all, and finally, whether of his own choosing or not (and who would really choose a war?) by making the change without her.
But she thought eventually, that she had been too hard on herself. She thought that it was simply the end of love. Maybe they had delayed its end, but who could be that wise when there was still so much to learn?
She went to see Winnie the next Saturday morning. Reg was sitting at the kitchen table, smoking and silent behind a newspaper, as he almost always was these days. Winnie chattered around him, making pikelets, a shade too hearty. Clara tried to tell her but couldn’t. She wanted Winnie to tell her what she should do, because at that stage it seemed unthinkable that she should cancel the wedding.
It was impossible to talk to her with Reg sitting there. Once or twice she caught him looking at her and for some reason she couldn’t look back at him.
But she could look at them together, and she was appalled by what she saw. Love did die. Just being married wasn’t enough and she hadn’t even got that far.
She left Winnie’s and walked on round to the Mawsons’. She believed she owed them something, though afterwards she reflected that in this she could have been mistaken.
Mrs Mawson was turning out cupboards of Robin’s and his younger brother Peter’s clothes, to make up for Red Cross parcels. Chip barked a welcome to her. He had a lean disgruntled look about him these days. She wondered if it would help him if she lived at the Mawsons’ but she guessed Peter would take him over in time. Once Robin had gone overseas, and he didn’t see him on occasional weekends like he did then, she was sure he would start believing he was Peter’s dog.
And there was no way she was going to live at the Mawsons’. That was the only thing she was sure about when she walked into the house. At least she thought it was until she started talking to Mrs Mawson.
Then she heard herself telling her that she didn’t want to marry Robin. At least not for a while yet. It was too soon for them, she heard her own stranger’s voice saying. That was how she tried to explain it. If they wrote to each other while he was away, then they would be more sure when he came back. She was babbling and making excuses, anything to fill the silence that seemed to be going on and on.
Mrs Mawson called her a whore then. Only she said it ‘whoo-er’ the way the children did at school, or over at the Junction. She said Clara was ‘a dirty little whoo-er’, the same as in a swearword, with her lips pulled back over her teeth, the way Clara had seen her before. She knew then that her once-beloved Robin’s mother was no better and no different really from her or Mumma or any of a lot of other people she knew. Somehow that made it easier.
One more thing happened. She went back through town, intending to catch a bus over to Frankton. She had just missed one and she thought of going to the pictures but the Strand was full and they were showing ‘Gone With the Wind’ yet again at the Theatre Royal and she thought that she couldn’t stand all that renunciation and parting and stuff that afternoon so she headed down to the riverbank. She wondered if maybe she should fling herself off a bridge or something like that, like in the remote and hushed-up story of old man Hoggard, but she knew that wasn’t what she really wanted. She needed some time to think out something. It was only an idea that was beginning in the back of her head, but give it time and it might take shape.
She thought she should be feeling something for Robin and their past but there was nothing. It was clean and new inside her as if it had never happened. She realised uneasily that she still had to tell him. With the zeal of the convert she thought perhaps she was doing him a good turn. She decided to write to him that night, after she’d washed her hair.
Reg found her there. He could have followed her, but she didn’t think that this was so. Rather, that he knew he would find her there. Suddenly the willows in their new season’s green didn’t seem as safe and protective as they had always done. When he sat down beside her she knew at once, without him saying so, that he had seen her there before.
‘Hullo,’ he said.
‘Hullo.’
‘Cigarette?’ She took one and he lit it for her. She noticed that his blunt fingers shook slightly.
‘Thanks.’
‘Come here often?’
‘You know I do.’ Within minutes suspicion had become fact. He sat watching the smoke curl in the air. ‘Clara. You all right?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Takes one to know one.’
‘What?’
‘Problems. You’ve got them too.’
She grunted through her nose. ‘Not now. I did.’
He looked sideways at her. ‘You going to marry him?’
She shook her head. ‘You going to the war?’ she asked.
‘I dunno. I honestly don’t know kid.’
He was bulging under his fly. She reached over and started to unbutton him. He grabbed her hand and held it.
‘You don’t want to do that Clara,’ he said thickly.
‘You want me to though, don’t you?’ she said.
His thin sandy hair was sticking out unbrushed from his head, and his blue eyes were wet and despairing. He made ‘mmm’ noises in the back of his throat as he fumbled to help her and his cock, dark and plum-coloured at the end, stood up in the spring afternoon.
‘They can see us, people can see us,’ he whimpered as he pushed inside her. It flashed through her mind what excellent sport Robin and she had provided for goodness knows how long, there in that same place, and then that it was time the watchers were given some variety amongst the players. Reg came very quickly and tried unsuccessfully to pull out of her. He wanted to cover himself straight away but he was still erect and she knew she could bring him again. It was a revelation that neither of them had expected. This time he murmured, ‘Nice, nice,’ repeating it on and on, like an incantation against her ear. She knew then that it was possible after all, to make love to other people in other places; in the long slow afternoon she shouted and tore at the grass beside her, as he stroked steadily inside her.
When it was over she lay smiling up at him as he scrambled to his feet, pulling his trousers up over his knees.
‘Get up Clara,’ he said urgently.
‘Soon.’ She felt very relaxed.
‘You have to get up.’
You might. I don’t.’
‘Cover it. Please cover it,’ he said, pulling at her skirt which was riding round her thighs. To please him, for he had pleased her so much, she straightened her clothes and lay back again in the sun.
‘You worry too much. It was good wasn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking down at her grimly. Then more softly, and half to himself, he added, ‘It was lovely.’
‘Next time I’ll bring a blanket,’ she said, reaching out and picking grass from his trouser cuff.
He nodded. ‘Yes. Do that, Clara.’
There was no next time. Reg joined up on the Monday morning. She saw him only once more on his final leave, and then it was like talking to a stranger. She often saw Winnie, who was an odd mixture of being partly relieved that he had made up his mind at last, partly sad for herself and the girls, but overall, proud that he was doing his ‘duty’.
His joining up took the heat out of her decision not to marry Robin as far as he
r own family was concerned. Jeannie and Caroline, the latter particularly, missed their father and it pleased them to have Clara around. Mumma said she was glad she had got the material for the wedding dress before Clara changed her mind, or she would have had to go without, and it was a shame for her not to have such a pretty dress. She wanted Clara to have something nice.
Mumma looked very old the day Clara left Hamilton a few months later. It was a day of the river fog rolling over the plains, the onset of another winter and the bleak cold settling in. For all the sun does shine there, it was perhaps because of that day that she remembered it from then on as a bleak place of bitter cold. She took the pink silk dress with her. She was sure that she would have plenty of use for it in her new life in Auckland. The idea that had begun, months before, on the riverbank, had become an exciting venture, full of promise.
When they asked her what she would do, she said war work. When she got a job in the Nestle’s factory instead, she wrote and told them that she was in a factory doing war work in Parnell. She was sure then, that she would get into Mason’s next door before long. It was war work as far as she was concerned, but people got funny ideas about luxury goods these days, even if they were going to the troops. She kept meaning to tell them what she was doing when it became obvious that she was going to stay on in the chocolate factory. There was nothing wrong with it, and all the talk about the black market wasn’t worth listening to as far as she was concerned. Only she was no letter writer and it got harder to put down on paper and then, bit by bit, things started to come apart, and nothing she wrote would do, because later it was so full of half-truths, it wasn’t worth telling. Besides, after Reg was killed, only a month out in the Western Desert, she didn’t want to write to them much more anyway.