A Needle in the Heart

by Fiona Kidman

  My mother said, contentedly, ‘You’re home.’ She could have been talking to either of us, but I knew her words were directed towards me. For the moment, we were together again, my mother and my father and me.

  We have different ways to describe things now. We would say that that baby had Down’s syndrome. We would say that the parents would find joy in their son, regardless. But that was then. Our family was momentarily counting its blessings, on a jewel bright day beneath a Delft blue sky, the gorse pods snapping in the heat. My mother, as you see her in this picture, is so pleased that I am home, and if she is puzzled by my father’s absences, she puts it down to the war, that restlessness men get, and she lets the matter lie.

  We moved north after the war. My father had served in the army as a signaller. He was an Englishman who couldn’t make sense of my mother’s relatives, or they didn’t understand him — you could take your pick. He dressed differently and spoke ‘posh’ as my relatives used to say.

  ‘I can’t stand it here,’ he said, when he came back, meaning the house where my mother and I lived with my grandparents. ‘We need a bit of an adventure.’

  ‘I don’t want an adventure,’ my mother said. ‘I’ve got money saved for a house of our own. Why don’t you just settle down and get a job like everyone else?’

  My father didn’t want that. He’d heard about this place up north. Some of his cobbers in the army had talked about it, and they couldn’t see themselves settling down in the suburbs.

  ‘We’ll live off the land,’ he told my mother, his voice passionate in its excitement. ‘You’ll see, this is no nine to five sinecure with nothing to live for except a pension.’

  He followed her around for weeks, pleading with her to listen to sense. Then he went away and when he came back, my mother said she’d go. She gave him her Post Office book with all her savings and told him add it to the rehab money from the army. ‘Just go ahead,’ she said, ‘buy a place. I’ll manage.’

  My father loved Alderton from the beginning. My mother loathed it. A lot of the people there had come out from China, remnants of the imperial army stationed round Shanghai and Tsientin, at the end of the twenties. They’d emigrated to New Zealand rather than going back to England because they had become used to warmer weather, and they hoped their lives might go on much as they had in China, while they planted fruit trees and lived off the land. There were some disappointments in store: the living was not as cheap as they expected and servants were almost impossible to come by. Some of the better-off settlers built big houses; others had to make do with rickety cottages, but they behaved as if they were palaces anyway. You could step through a crooked door frame into a room full of jade treasures; an ornate silk screen would divide the kitchen from the dining room. A bunch of weatherbeaten men and women, getting their hands dirty for the first time, holding parties on the wobbly wooden verandahs of their shacks in the evenings, jitterbugging and drinking gin. They were about as different as you could get anywhere, round then, at the end of the war. Men like my father and Kurt Pile, as unalike as they were, could be as fanciful or neurotic or sad as they wanted to be, and nobody really cared. The settlers had their own world and if you were not part of it you were invisible. My father thought he might be able to join it; my mother thought he was deluding himself.

  In the beginning, my parents raised poultry for quick cash but it took them years to get established. They milked a few cows, separating the cream through their hand rotated Alfa Laval, and fed the whey to pigs. Eventually, they planted citrus and tamarillo orchards, and filled their garden with cantaloupes, aubergines (or eggplants as they were called then) and capsicums, whatever was rare and exotic at the time, like pepinos, with smooth marbled skins and smoky flesh, dragon fruit without the seeds. The trouble was, everything had to be done every day. My mother could accept that, but my father didn’t always want to be there. He went away down south when he was supposed to be milking cows or weeding in the orchard while she found jobs to keep them going. He often spent days writing letters or just reading. He took to nostalgic books about the English countryside, where, it seemed, it was always May, and the larks never stopped singing.

  My mother took a job for a while, cooking for one of the army wives. The woman, who was called Gloria, wore silk scarves like headbands, the knot tied at the back, so the ends drifted down her back, and long beads. She held her tailor-mades in an ivory cigarette holder, or, when rations ran out, smoked fat rolled purple lasiandra buds that smelled like Egyptian tobacco as they burned. My mother reported for duty at seven each morning. The cookhouse was at the bottom of the garden of a big house. Gloria had a rope strung from the house to the cookhouse with a bell on my mother’s end. When she pulled once she wanted fresh tea and when the bell rang twice she needed hot toast.

  ‘If I ring three times, it’s for an emergency,’ Gloria told her friends, with a tinkling laugh. ‘I know cook will rescue me.’

  My mother left for work right after she and my father milked the cows. It was supposed to be my father’s job to get me up and send me to school. He simply forgot some days, except to say stand up straight, girl. A part of him seemed to think he was still in the army, although you wouldn’t have thought so to look at him. On these mornings, his smart clothes were put away in the wardrobe; he dressed in baggy pants, held up by braces. He was a smoker too, wreaths of smoke curling round his head as he read on, regardless of anything but the book propped in front of him.

  He didn’t know how I watched this silent life of his. I discovered what a man’s body looked like when I spied him taking a bath. A curtained window divided the cottage from the lean-to containing a copper for heating water and washing clothes, and a tin bath. Usually we had baths one after another, using the same grey suds to save hot water. One morning, after he had been away for a time, he heated the copper and took an unexpected bath. I raised the curtain and he was rubbing himself dry in the dark room, lit only by a single bulb and the reflection of the flames from the copper fire. When I was a young woman, I saw Oliver Reed in Women in Love and I was reminded of my father, that same pale English flesh, the colour of potato flesh. He was long and spindly, his chest slightly concave, and yet in the flickering light I found him mysterious and oddly beautiful.

  I learned that my father had an army friend called Frank whom he often used to ring up after my mother left for work.

  ‘Tolls, please,’ he would say nervously after he had rung the exchange. And then, after a pause, ‘I want to make a collect call.’ He would give the operator a number down south. ‘Eight A, Hunterville.’ I can still hear him say it. Short long in Morse code. After a period of negotiation with someone at the other end, punctuated by silences, I would hear his voice, joyful and light, ‘Frank, my old mate, how are you? Just thought I’d ring for a natter.’

  At which point, he would suddenly check to see where I was. ‘Hold on a tick, old boy,’ he’d say, looking at me. ‘Shouldn’t you have gone to school?’ Eventually, I got bored with these mornings of idleness and started getting dressed and walking to school on my own although I was late so often that one of the teachers phoned home and, by chance, caught my mother.

  ‘Why?’ she asked my father, when she had put the phone down. ‘Why can’t you do what you say you will?’

  ‘Why do you nag?’ His voice had that pleading sound again.

  ‘How can I live with a man who calls me a nag? Why don’t you just say shrew and be done with it?’

  ‘Shrew,’ he said, testing the word on his tongue and laughing. She didn’t laugh with him.

  Then she said, ‘Look, I know it’s hard coming back from the war. I know things happened that I can’t understand. Why don’t we just have a rest today and we’ll do the chores together.’

  ‘What about your job?’

  ‘Oh that,’ she said airily. ‘I pulled the bell off the string yesterday and dropped it in the river.’

  ‘You did what? This is some kind of joke.’

  ‘
Not at all.’

  ‘What will they think of us?’ He put his hand to his forehead.

  ‘I’ve got no idea,’ she said, and laughed. ‘They asked for something special for afternoon tea, the other day, something sweet and light, chocolate but Oriental, something with a little ginger in it. “All of those things in one dish?” I said. “Well, cook, if you could rustle something up we’ll leave it to you,” said Madam Gloria. So I took everything I could find in the kitchen and mixed it all up together and iced it, and left it to cool, and when it looked right, I cut it into pieces and served it when their guests came. As I was pouring tea, they were all saying things like, isn’t this delicious, and where did you find the recipe, and is this the new cook’s doing. So then she said, “Oh, the woman’s very good at taking instructions, she can follow a recipe, I’ll give her that.”’

  ‘You’re making this up.’ My father was horrified and laughing all at once.

  ‘Not at all. So then she said, “I’ll get cook to write it down for you”, without giving me so much as a look. All right, I thought, all right. And I went back down the path and waited for the bell to ring, and when it did I pulled it so hard it came off in my hand. So I threw it away.’

  ‘In the river?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then did you go?’ I could see he was working out whether the whole situation might still be redeemed.

  ‘No. I waited for her to turn up, trotting down the path in her tatty old silk dress, looking hot and bothered, and she said, “Where’s the tea?” and I told her what I thought about her job. I said, “It’s much harder to find a cook than to keep one”, and I handed her my apron. “You might need this,” I said.’

  My father looked at her as if he’d seen her for the first time.

  ‘My God,’ he said, ‘you’re a fine woman.’ He was laughing so hard he could hardly stop. ‘We can sell a few more eggs.’

  ‘They’ll probably think I poisoned them,’ my mother said darkly.

  She bought nuts and spices and made the recipe for my father and me. She continued to make it every year, at Christmas time and at birthdays, her wicked ginger treat.

  One winter, my father’s friend Frank came to stay, not exactly with us, although he took all his meals at our house. Frank was a much younger man than my father. He had fresh full cheeks and a raspberry-coloured mouth and thick eyelashes. In later life he would turn plump. You could see the beginning of it now in the softness under his chin. His checked jacket exuded a grassy smell mixed with cigarette smoke, and bananas, his favourite food. He spent his first few nights at the Homestead, a kind of planters’ hotel in the village with ramshackle accommodation and the only bar in twenty miles. You had to be a house guest to use it. He bought several rounds of gin and tonics for my father and they sat on the verandah and looked down the shimmering stand of blue gum trees in the valley beyond.

  ‘My cobber bought me a couple of drinks,’ my father said the first night after Frank came north. He giggled and sang. My cobber. My mate. These lapses into vernacular, his way of saying he was a bloke’s bloke, one of the people, sat uneasily inside his posh English voice, and it irritated my mother. As the ritual at the Homestead persisted over a week or two, it became more than the way he talked that annoyed her, it was something else I didn’t understand. She became increasingly silent.

  ‘His money’ll run out,’ she said.

  ‘He’s got a job,’ my father said, with triumph.

  ‘Picking oranges?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you could get one too,’ she said.

  My father looked alarmed. ‘My back would never stand it,’ he said.

  ‘Well then, perhaps I could get a job picking,’ she said.

  ‘You’d never reach above the bottom branches,’ my father said, but he looked at her with interest.

  Frank came to dinner one evening soon after this. He’d moved into a packing shed on a neighbouring orchard, sleeping on a camp stretcher my father had found him. The gin and tonics had run out.

  The room in which we ate was narrow, not more than six feet across by about fifteen long, a bench at one end and a coal range on one wall, our gate-legged dining table, oval when it was folded out, creating a barrier between our kitchen and the other end of the room, where a wooden-backed sofa stood. Seeing it like this, it is not a beautiful room, ugly in fact, its cream walls stained with smoke, red congoleum on the floor. But consider our table, laid with an Irish linen cloth, heavy silver cutlery, the knives bone-handled, the plates willow pattern. This was my mother’s dowry, the remnants of some other life. The men wore their jackets with ties, my mother a short-sleeved satin sheath dress in wide horizontal navy blue and scarlet stripes with a scooped neckline. I wore a cotton print dress sprinkled with mauve flowers, a gift from my grandmother; it had a Peter Pan collar and short puffed sleeves that ended in bands above my elbows. We were eating the last of a broiler chicken, which my mother cooked in a slow casserole. But they drank wine, which Frank had brought, out of crystal glasses. Dally plonk, my father said, grinning. Sly grog, my mother retorted, looking at Frank from the corner of her eye.

  ‘I’ve come north,’ Frank said, obviously for her benefit, because he must have said all this already to my father, ‘because I’m thinking about what to do now that the war’s over. I don’t really want to be a farmer for the rest of my life. My family took it for granted I’d just settle back into Hunterville. But you know, once you’ve been away and seen a bit of the world, you can’t just accept everything the way it was before.’

  ‘So you just up and left?’ asked my mother.

  He shrugged, opening his hands expressively, a surprising gesture, as if his time in Europe had altered him from the farm boy who had set off for the war. ‘The cows are dry. It seemed like a good time to get away and sort things out and make a bit of extra money at the same time.’

  ‘You’ve got your rehab surely?’ This was a sore point with my mother. The rehabilitation money for the men who served in the war had got eaten up in this place when it might have gone into something more to her liking.

  ‘I needed someone to talk to,’ said Frank, looking at my father, ‘someone who understood. I might go to university, one of the agricultural colleges, something like that.’

  ‘Good idea,’ my father said. ‘While you’re not tied down.’ And I thought he looked wistful.

  ‘Perhaps you wouldn’t be too tied down to find something for the pot for tomorrow,’ my mother said. She was serving up pancakes drizzled with golden syrup for dessert.

  ‘Kill another chook,’ said my father.

  ‘We’ve only got four left. Don’t you want eggs for breakfast?’

  My father looked alarmed.

  ‘I’ll pay some board next week,’ said Frank.

  ‘But you’re not boarding with us,’ said my mother. ‘You’re a guest.’

  ‘Well, if you don’t mind me coming on over in the evenings, perhaps I could pay for my meals, a regular arrangement.’

  ‘Capital,’ said my father. It was clear that this conversation had been rehearsed.

  My mother was a sensible woman. She knew that if he paid her a little on a regular basis she could make it stretch further than my father imagined. ‘Ten shillings a week.’

  My father looked taken aback and was clearly going to argue for less when she quelled him with a look so sharp it would have cut glass.

  ‘First instalment next Friday all right then?’ said Frank.

  When they had finished dinner my father said, ‘I’ll walk Frank home.’

  ‘Surely he can find his way by now?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a nice night for a couple of fellas to have a walk and a smoke.’ And so it was, one of those starry nights in the north when, even in winter, it’s mild and the air holds the tang of citrus leaves and ripe oranges, and there is a great silence over the shallow hills and valleys. I saw their cigarettes glowing in the dark as they walked off down the road.

&nb
sp; This arrangement was all very well, but Friday was still some days away, and so the paying guest had to be fed. A time would come when food was abundant, although never meat.

  In the morning, my father said to me, ‘We’re going hunting, Mattie. Get your shoes on, you may need a coat as well.’ I think my mother must have had a word because he’d hardly spoken to me in weeks, not since Frank came. It was not, on the whole, an unfriendly silence but he thought I should be a girl who sang and danced around. When he did notice me, he wanted to teach me songs, but I was not a singer and a dancer, I was a watcher.

  The invitation to go shooting was really a command. We set off across the paddocks (why did I think of them as fields?), him carrying a shotgun, me tagging along behind. It was still quite early in the morning, the spider webs spotted with dew, light fragmenting and bouncing off them as the sun rose.

  ‘I miss the old Dart,’ my father said suddenly, as I trailed along. ‘You know there are a lot of people over there, don’t you? You wouldn’t imagine it, all the people, the streets full of all sorts of people. Merchant bankers, barrow boys, tradesmen, butchers — my goodness, so much meat — and birds in cages hanging in the doorways of houses. We wouldn’t have to be up at crack of dawn over there, someone would have done the job for us. Booksellers, artists, writers … I’m reading a book called The Purple Plain right now — its by a man called Bates. Perhaps you’re too young to be reading stuff like this, you’ll have to ask your mother. Music-hall dancers, poets — oh my God, oh to be in England now.’

  ‘What’s wrong with here?’

  ‘Nothing dammit, nothing. Don’t you listen to a word I say?’

  ‘Well if there’s nothing wrong with here, why do you want to be in England now?’

  ‘It’s a line of a poem,’ he said, almost sullenly. ‘And the nothing, that’s what’s wrong — the nothing of everything. The way people look at you because there’s nothing else to look at.’