by Fiona Kidman
Esme glanced round, anxious in case Bunty had decided to come, but there was no sign of anyone she knew. It would have been too far to travel at this time of year when the farm was busy; besides Bunty wouldn’t have thought of Esme doing a crazy thing like this, coming on her own. If she’d seen her, Esme expected Bunty would pity her, and that would be worse than Kevin being wild with her.
The wedding cars appeared, decorated with ribbons, and when they had stopped, the bridesmaids, dressed in pale cinnamon-coloured gowns, alighted. When the bride stepped out of the third car, astonishment rippled around the onlookers. She wore a sunflower yellow satin dress and wide-brimmed matching hat with a crushed stitched crown. She carried three lilies, casually, as if they had just been picked from a garden.
Esme felt enchanted, at once. A performer, a woman of daring.
As she came close to the church, Esme was able to see Petra clearly. The sculptured features, shadowed by the hat, were composed in an amused, almost mocking expression. As she recognised faces, she lifted an ungloved hand.
Her father offered her his arm and she took it. Just at the church door, he paused for a moment, and spoke close to her ear. Petra hesitated longer than she needed to, as if a moment of indecision had overtaken her, while a bridesmaid straightened the back of the gown. She looked sideways, then turned her head to look straight at Esme.
Esme could see the way her eyes were looking for some sign that she might know her, so she smiled and lifted her hand, as if she were a friend. The young woman gave a half smile and turned back to her father.
Inside the church the organ started to play ‘Here Comes the Bride’. The wedding party moved on into the dark church, with its stained glass windows, and the cream freesia favours that lined the pews, on and up towards the altar, and the huge vasefuls of flowers.
Esme slid into a pew at the back, not that there was much room for the uninvited. She knew Philip wouldn’t look past the radiant woman in yellow as she moved up the aisle. There was just time enough for her to see him look towards Petra, his curly hair crisply cut, a flower in his buttonhole, his face creased with a wondering smile. Then he turned his back to the congregation and took Petra’s hand. Even at the back of the church she could hear his responses, his voice, cracking a little with emotion as he said, ‘I, Philip, take you, Petra Jean, to be my lawful wedded wife.’ She and Jim never did get round to giving him a second name.
She wondered for a moment how Philip would manage. Was he up to this, a true golden girl?
Then he said, ‘With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship’, according to the exact old order of service. When he said these words, about worshipping Petra with his body, she felt herself bowled over, so that she had to press her hands tightly together on top of the shelf holding the hymn books. She didn’t want strangers to see her crying.
Jim had been playing with the children when she came back from Pearl’s funeral. It was raining outside, a solid sleety rain that stung her face. He’d pulled blankets off the beds and draped them over the backs of the kitchen chairs so that they made tents. Neil and Janet were inside the tent with a dish of chopped apple between them. Only Philip stood apart, biting the knuckles of one hand, his eyes like saucers. His black hair sprouted in curls that no amount of brushing could subdue. His eyes, when he looked up and saw her, were huge and incredulous with joy, as if he had never expected to see her again.
‘Mummy’s back, Mummy’s back,’ he cried.
This was the moment when she might have lost her resolve. She looked at Jim and his expression was cool and unfriendly.
‘We’re having an inside picnic,’ Neil said. ‘It’s good fun playing with Dad.’
Jim said, ‘I won’t stop you taking the girl. I can see that she needs to be with her mother. But you’re not taking my boys.’
Patient enduring Jim. With his names on all the children’s birth certificates.
‘You’re not taking my boys.’
‘Philip,’ she began, and stopped, seeing the expression in Jim’s eyes.
‘They’re my boys,’ he said.
That was pretty much the last thing of any consequence that he said to her. His head wreathed in steam from the train’s engine as he walked back up the platform, a little bent over now, one of the boys’ hands in each of his own. Only the little boy, Philip, looking back and crying, and wanting her to come back.
Esme had been on her own for six years when Queenie died. Stick had already gone. It was at Queenie’s funeral that Esme met Kevin Pudney.
The way she lived, she took Janet to different farms where she did housekeeping work in return for room and board. Janet, after a patchy tearful start, was a child who accepted whatever was asked of her. She stayed obediently in farmhouse kitchens, drawing and playing with plasticine and her dolls while her mother worked. After she started school, things got easier all round. Esme had a couple of jobs in the King Country which meant she got to see her mother and Neil and Philip now and then. She couldn’t take the boys because the accommodation she got offered on the farms was always too small, although at one place she did rent some shearers’ quarters but the boys ran wild and got into some guns and ammunition belonging to the farmer and caused no end of trouble. When Queenie needed a rest, their Uncle Joe took them in, or they went up north to stay with Mary, Esme’s oldest sister.
Since she left Jim, Esme had gone on a self-improvement course, because now she chose to, and not because he said that she must. She read magazines about how to improve her dress sense, make stuffed toys, decorate cakes and arrange flowers. The people she worked for liked the way she left little unexpected gifts for them. A woman with a generous heart, one of employers wrote in a reference. She met some men but, usually, if you dug around a bit, you found there was a woman somewhere in the background. These years were also taken up with the divorce papers that Jim had served on her, although his death spared her the day in court. It was like a final gift. There were some things she’d rather not have had to talk about if she was cross examined. She wasn’t keen on the idea of it all being in Truth which reported on divorces, the messier the better.
The morning of Queenie’s funeral, Esme saw her mother for the last time. The family had taken turns sitting beside her at the undertaker’s. Not all of the family were there. Ned McDavitt had been killed in the war and later on the youngest McDavitt boy, Hunter, died at the very end, just days before it was all over. One of the sisters lived in Australia. Mary had left Neil and Philip up north with her husband who couldn’t take the time off work to come down for the funeral. It was still a big crowd.
At the very last moment some strangers turned up. They were Maori and although they said that they knew Queenie had lived as a white woman most of her life, they were related to her and weren’t going to let her go without saying goodbye. Kevin, who was their boss, could see that he wasn’t going to get them to work for him that day, so he said he’d drive them over. They were doing a bit of fencing on a hill farm near Taumarunui.
Esme slipped back into the viewing room one more time, after the unexpected visitors had left to join the mourners heading for the church. She felt shaken by this visit, as if some corner of her life had been turned over for inspection. There was something she wanted to say to her mother that she couldn’t seem to tell her while the others were there. By that time Queenie had been dead for four days and her skin had taken on that blue-ish waxen tinge that means it really is time to close things down and say goodbye. Her face felt like ice when Esme touched it. She was going to kiss her once more but she couldn’t bring herself to do that, the flesh so shrunken and pulled in that the bones were showing. What she had come to say had dried up in her throat. Instead, she let her fingers trail over her mother’s cheek. As she was taking her hand away, she felt it touch something hard at the base of Queenie’s throat. Leaning over, she looked into the coffin. She saw what she hadn’t seen before: the gold brooch with the amethyst glowing in its heart. Perhaps Joe, or Mar
y, or someone in the family had decided that that was where it belonged.
‘That was Pearl’s,’ she said, voicing her indignation in the empty room.
A busy persistent blowfly circled the room.
She reached in and unpinned the brooch and slipped it into her handbag. It felt like the right thing to do.
The wake went on into the evening. The men had had a few drinks by then. Joe, swaggering drunk, kept following her around, wanting to talk to her, as if she wasn’t his sister but some loose woman on her own. In order to get away from him, Esme got talking to Kevin. She explained then how she had these three kids, one of them a teenager already.
He said how hard he found it to believe that. He did know what it was like, getting left with a kiddie to raise, after his wife died.
‘I’m a widow myself,’ she said. She hadn’t thought of herself like this, but it seemed more or less true. She touched the brooch in her pocket. There were some things one simply had to do. Kevin seemed like a gentleman.
Kevin was a great father to Janet. She called him Dad and she and Marlene were like real sisters. He turned out handier with his fists on the boys than Esme would have liked. Neil he could tolerate. A lazy little bastard, but he didn’t have ideas above himself. Not like the other boy. In his eyes Philip was a cocky little prick, needed knocking in to shape. Neil got a job farm labouring when he was fifteen and could leave school. Philip went back to Joe’s for a while and, when that didn’t work out, back up to Mary’s. A teacher at the school she sent him to (it was his twelfth school) took a fancy to him and the next thing he was off to boarding school on a scholarship.
‘Fancy,’ said Esme, ‘to think my boy’s got brains.’
‘They shouldn’t give him ideas. He’s probably a queer,’ Kevin said.
‘I wonder where he got them from,’ Esme said dreamily, as if she hadn’t heard him.
‘You ought to know, he’s your kid.’
‘Yes. Well. So he is.’ Her face closed up, shutting him out. They were living in another farmhouse, out the back of beyond. She didn’t have to work the way she used to, though she still kept her hand in. There was never any trouble between them, except when the subject of Philip came up. After the boy went off to boarding school she sent ten pounds to Mary to give to him every holidays.
After a bit, Mary wrote and said she’d better send the money straight to the school because Philip was taking his holidays with his new friends. In the long summer holiday he’d gone on a tour of the South Island and walked the Milford Track. In winter, he went skiing with a friend’s family. They were staying in a lodge at Ohakune Junction. Esme laughed out loud when she read that. She didn’t mention it to Kevin, because he wouldn’t have understood about the Junction, and the irony of it all.
He and Esme and the two girls were happy on their own. They moved closer to town so the girls didn’t have to travel so far on the bus to school. Both of them did secretarial courses afterwards, and then went off on an overseas trip. They sent cards from Rome and Paris and London. Neil, who had grown into a thin-faced man with quiet ways, got married to a girl called Leonie straight after his twenty-first birthday party; they had a son and a daughter, just eleven months between them, so that, before she knew it, Esme was a grandmother.
These were some of the things Esme Pudney thought about while her son was being married. She understood why she sat anonymously at the back of the church. She wished it wasn’t that way, but she didn’t see how else things could have worked out. Just as the service was ending, while the triumphant march from the church was forming, she tiptoed past the ushers at the back, out into the spring sunshine.
5
There was a wrap party the night Petra’s first movie finished filming. It had been a punishing schedule, up at five each morning, some nights going on until ten. There never seemed enough time to eat and sleep, but all the time in the world to talk. Everyone was someone’s best friend, and sometimes their lover. People told each other outrageous things about themselves that they’d never told anyone else. They made dramas out of their own lives which, whether they were true or not, they knew they would believe from then on. Now suddenly they were all having to say goodbye. Not that it would be truly goodbye because there were only so many movie sets and so many jobs to go round in Wellington. And if there wasn’t a movie there would be a stage play, or a stretch of radio drama, though that was never more than a week’s work at a time. Or a television commercial if you got lucky because that was enough to pay for a few months out of work. Petra had done a couple of those.
Philip, looking across the room at her, could see why they wanted Petra’s face. It had a wild vitality that at this moment seemed unbridled. He had only seen her for a few hours here and there over the previous month because a lot of filming had been taking place out of town. He knew she didn’t want him to be there and, at the same time, that she did, a kind of affirmation that he was part of her life, that he accepted what she did.
At breakfast, the first they had shared since filming began, she had run it past him. ‘D’you think we could get a sitter in?’ she asked, her coffee balanced between the fingers of both hands, elbows on the table. She had big shadows under her eyes and a trace of make-up at her hairline.
‘We’ve had sitters in about three times a week for the past month. I’ve still got a life to lead, you know.’
‘Okay.’
She had sat there in silence, blowing the top of her coffee.
‘You said …’ she began.
‘Yes,’ he said. Because he didn’t want her to remind him of what he had said, the last time the subject of a wrap party at the theatre had come up. ‘Is there any way I can get caught up in your brilliant orbit?’ he had asked her, and she’d said, ‘Well, come to the fucking party, if that’s what you want.’ He’d finished up staying home, and she hadn’t come back until morning. When things like this happened, he was aware of a queer electricity in the air, something that repelled him and yet attracted him to her, the way it always had. He thought she’d been with other people: it might be a man or a woman. She said on nights when they got drunk together that she wouldn’t mind either, not that she’d do it of course.
‘You’ll come then?’
‘The kids are used to Debbie.’
‘Don’t start on me again.’
‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘They really like her.’ Debbie was the girl who had been sitting for them for the past year. It wasn’t as if they were little children any more, twelve and ten, a boy and a girl.
‘You work as hard at doing good as I do at acting,’ she said then.
‘Yes,’ he said, because it was true, and he wanted to agree with her and have him back to himself. His life was full of causes. In those days, young lawyers like himself (he still thought of himself as young) jokingly called themselves storefront lawyers. They believed in helping the poor and giving the underdog a chance. A lot of his clients couldn’t afford to pay him properly. He organised food parcels for their families when they were in jail and saw to it that their children went to school, even if it meant calling round to their houses and banging on the doors until the mothers got out of bed (it was usually the husbands who were in jail) and dressed the kids while he waited. His luxuriant hair was thinning a little but he still wore it round his collar. He wore suits that were rumpled and he didn’t care. In the lunch breaks from court he and his friends gathered in a café over a bookshop and exchanged case stories.
‘I have to work,’ Petra told her friends. ‘Philip might be a lawyer, but he doesn’t give a damn about money.’
It wasn’t true about needing to work, but it was a fact that he took on cases which seemed unwinnable; that he had an affinity with people who were not particularly attractive but might be innocent. You don’t have to be good looking to be innocent, he said. He suspected that there was a raffish charm to this that she had still not fathomed; it kept them together when other things failed. As for the mon
ey, his father-in-law had paid for the house they lived in. They had looked at it just as a fun thing, and dreamed about how they could scratch a deposit together for it. Of course Petra had told her parents when they were up visiting for one of the wedding rehearsals, and that was their present: the title to the house. The house was full of newly delivered furniture and there was a car in the garage. There were things Philip didn’t want, wouldn’t have chosen.
‘I don’t want it,’ he said at the time. ‘I never asked for any of this.’
‘We’ll send it back them,’ said Petra, ‘and you can spend the rest of your life chasing lawsuits for the rich and famous and licking boots. I don’t care, it’s your life.’
‘I thought it was ours,’ he’d said.
‘I can’t change who I am,’ Petra said, ‘any more than you can. That’s my dowry. Anyone who got me would get the same.’
It had taken him some time to get over this, caused a bitterness that he later regretted. One day he’d woken up and thought how unfair he’d been to Petra, how he needed to recover things before it was too late. He had enjoyed the freedom of unexpected wealth. We do our own thing, they told people, we make our own choices. Sometimes it worked and other times it was awful.
He had been nursing a drink for half an hour without speaking to anyone. ‘For God’s sake, you’re not doing your Heathcliff act, are you,’ she’d said, the last time she went past him to the bathroom. ‘There are heaps of people here for you to talk to.’ He edged closer to the group she was in. Someone said, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a movie. It’s about a black alien in Harlem being chased by two white aliens. It’s a really fantastic idea.’