The Trouble With Fire

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Kathleen cried. ‘Joy was desperate to come and see her. She’s a very good girl, my daughter.’

  WOMAN DISAPPEARS IN THE WAIKATO

  A woman has disappeared from the railway station at Ngaruawahia. The woman, Mrs Joy Mullens, aged 25, is a farmer’s wife, last seen in early May. The police have ruled out foul play, but anyone with information regarding her whereabouts is requested to report the matter to their nearest police station. Mrs Mullens has short brown hair and blue eyes, with a fair complexion. She was last seen wearing a green blouse, red cardigan, and black pleated skirt. She was believed to be carrying a small suitcase. It is possible that she embarked on a ship bound for England, under an assumed name.

  This piece of paper is one of the items that Ruth will discover among the possessions of Mamie Mullens, but this will happen far in the future.

  There was another clipping from Truth newspaper with a headline that said:

  WIFE KNOWN TO HAVE HAD A PAST

  MRS MULLENS, VANISHED WIFE OF WAIKATO FARMER, HAD A SECRET LOVE CHILD. MR LESLIE MULLENS SAYS IT WAS NOT THE FIRST TIME SHE HAD DISAPPEARED, OR THE FIRST FANCY MAN SHE HAD HAD, AND IT COULD HAVE HAPPENED AGAIN FOR ALL HE KNEW. MR MULLENS SAID HIS WIFE HAD ENTERTAINED A GENTLEMAN FROM LONDON IN THEIR FARMHOUSE. ‘I’M BLOWED IF I KNOW WHAT SHE GOT UP TO,’ HE TOLD OUR REPORTER.

  Underneath this was a blurred photograph of Joy, and it was on this yellowed page that Ruth first deciphered the outline of her mother’s face. Whatever other images of her there may have been, none existed any longer. And whatever story might have been the truth, she never learnt more, when she went to live up north where, soon after, she became Ruth Mullens. Her stepmother, Mamie, wasn’t really her stepmother because she and Les couldn’t get married until Joy had been gone without trace for seven years and could be properly pronounced dead. But Mamie, who was a widow, said it didn’t really matter, and to hell with what people thought because she wasn’t a conventional kind of woman, no sirree, she was the woman to turn things around on this farm. She had arrived on the farm as a land girl, during the war. Mamie was a tall powerful woman with bulging grey-green eyes and a mane of wavy reddish hair that swirled around her shoulders. Her first husband, she said, had died of tuberculosis during the depression. Galloping consumption, she called it. She had a daughter called Patricia, who was strong and tall, too, for her age, and already worked in the shed alongside Mamie and Les. Her eyes weren’t as prominent as her mother’s but still large and overly bright, and her hair sprang from a centre parting in the same startled way.

  ‘You can get your hands dirty, too,’ Mamie told Ruth, the first night she was there. ‘You’re old enough to do some jobs around the place. Just do what your big sister tells you.’ This was how she referred to Patricia. Her daughter had taken the name of Mullens, too. It took years for Ruth to figure out that Patricia wasn’t Les’s daughter, any more than she was. When Ruth was ten, Mamie had a child with Les, who was called Blanche Mullens, and all three of them, she and Patricia and Blanche, were described as sisters.

  ‘Make sure you keep your mind on your work, too,’ Mamie told Ruth. ‘From what I’ve heard, your mother never did a tap around the place. What could you expect? She had her mind on a man as it turns out. I hope you’re not going to be like her. You’re a milk and no cream girl, if I may say so. You need colour in your cheeks. And mind you stay put at school. We’ll have no running away tricks from you. You’re here to stay.’

  At first Ruth was frightened of the cows, the big ruminative animals with their patchwork flanks and pansy-like eyes, but she grew used to them. ‘I suppose that’s something to be thankful for,’ Les grumbled. He never spoke to her if he could help it.

  Some weekends, Mamie’s sisters would come down from Auckland to visit. The sisters would sit in the front room that now had prints on the wall, and a tea trolley covered with china cups and an organdie throw in the corner, and talk loudly and laugh. They talked about ‘our boys overseas’ and knitted socks as they chatted. Or they discussed the war effort and the threat of the wharfies and the commies and how it was important to be vigilant, and never let a Catholic cross your door or you’re doomed. ‘Her mother wasn’t a Catholic, was she?’ one of the sisters asked, nodding in Ruth’s direction one afternoon. Mamie said no, she didn’t think so, a Pressbutton like them, but from what she’d heard she was such a drink of tap water she could have been anything, couldn’t she. Drip, drip.

  Perhaps they thought Ruth couldn’t hear, or perhaps they thought that with luck she would. She and Patricia had been sent out to ‘play’. ‘Playing’ with Patricia meant she had to do some menial task for the older girl, like making daisy chains for Patricia to wear as crowns. Other times she walked on her hands while Patricia held onto her feet, to make a wheelbarrow. ‘You’re ugly, you know,’ Patricia said, in a matter-of-fact way. Sometimes Patricia simply ignored her, and took herself off to the cream stand, where she sat on its deck, staring into space with a strange avid concentration, at odds with her usual liveliness, until a mouse scurried past. She would leap on it, catch it in her hands in one lightning motion, then calmly break its neck

  ‘Got one,’ she would shout to Les, whirling it by its tail, and he would wave and grin in acknowledgement. Patricia was always the child he liked best. As likely as not, he would be pottering in the vegetable gardens these Sunday afternoons, until afternoon tea was called, or watering the hydrangeas Mamie had planted. He seemed happier than in the past, although Ruth didn’t know what he had been like before, but that was what people said. In middle age, he was a thick-waisted barrel-chested man. He took his boots off at the door before going in to join the women.

  Ruth would long remember the sluggish Sunday afternoons, the weatherboard house surrounded by acrylic blue hydrangeas. Once, Patricia said, ‘You know your mother ran away.’

  ‘She died,’ Ruth said.

  Patricia snorted and laughed.

  HOW HAD ALL OF THIS come about? When Ruth thinks back, she remembers a time when Kathleen lay in bed for days at a time. ‘I’ve got a sick headache today,’ she would say. ‘Just move around quietly until it goes away, and I’ll get some dinner later.’ There were mornings when it was all she could do to get up and make Ruth’s school lunch for her, but she managed somehow, because it meant silence in the house. She couldn’t stand noise any more. Ruth stayed home from school once because her cold was so bad that Kathleen had no choice. A district nurse came in to change Kathleen’s sheets and give her an injection of morphine. The woman stood with her hands on her hips and looked at Ruth. ‘Kathleen Keats, you have to do something about that child. It’s time you went into the hospital.’

  ‘I’ve written to my sister and asked her to come. I worry, because she’s getting old.’

  ‘But not too old to make arrangements for the child?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sure she will be able to take care of her, for now.’

  ‘What about that son of yours?’

  Kathleen turned her face to the wall. ‘I haven’t heard from him in a year. I doubt he’d be much help. He was working in a mine last I heard from him.’

  ‘But he’ll inherit this property, won’t he?’

  ‘I’ve made it over to the child,’ Kathleen said.

  ‘Well, she can’t live in it by herself.’

  ‘Dorothy will take care of it,’ Kathleen said, her voice stubborn.

  Kathleen’s cancer had started with a melanoma which, by the time she saw a doctor, had spread to a dozen different places. Just so tired, she told him, so tired I can’t lift a finger. Surely not all this from a small spot of sun, she said when the doctor explained. I think it’s from my broken heart, perhaps.

  And the doctor thought that, yes, this might have had something to do with it, although he didn’t say so. Anyone as sick as Kathleen would surely have come to him sooner if she wasn’t so stricken with grief. My heart, my poor heart, she said then, holding her hands to her chest. I can’t leave th
e little girl. There is nobody at all, now that man up north has gone and killed her mother.

  This is what she believed, although the police had gone to see Les Mullens several times. They had looked on the riverbanks, searched the milking shed and other outhouses and found nothing at all. A detective was assigned briefly to the disappearance of Mrs Joy Mullens, married woman of Hang Dog Road. His name was Dave Rogers. He wore a hairy brown jacket, tweed pants and brogues. His heavy black-framed spectacles looked as if he had dipped them in his breakfast. First he made inquiries at the local dairy factories, to see if there had been a man from Tooley Street in the area at the time, but the managers shook their heads. The information had also been checked out in London, and the same answer came back.

  ‘That just goes to show what a liar that man is,’ Kathleen said. ‘He knows as well as I do there was no man round her who shouldn’t have been.’

  The detective went around the farms and asked questions of the neighbours. If anything, they seemed ill-disposed towards Mrs Mullens, who kept herself to herself. She was said to keep a good house, but she never lifted a finger to help Les in the shed, even though she didn’t have children to see to. As if she was better than the rest of us, some said, although now they knew she’d had a kid before she married poor Les, you’d have to wonder.

  Percy George, at the end of the road, scratched his head and shrugged. His eyes were rheumy, and the lower lids drooped so that you saw his flaming red eyeballs. These days he didn’t shave. ‘I told her mother all I knew when she rang me up that time. Joy was a nice enough girl,’ he said. ‘My Hazel liked the look of her, first time she set eyes on her. Reckon she’d have run off sooner if it hadn’t been for Hazel.’

  ‘You think she’s run off then?’

  ‘Well, she must have, mustn’t she? I mean what else could have happened to her?’

  ‘That’s what we’d like to know.’

  ‘I blame myself, you know,’ Percy said, his voice quavering. ‘Why’s that, Mr George?’

  ‘Oh nothing. Nothing. I’m sorry, I don’t know much about it. My Hazel up and died, you know. Perhaps that’s why she left. Nobody much to talk to. You’d see Joy out there talking to the pukekos in the swamp half the time. Just so long as the cows didn’t come after her. Folk round here, they thought she was a bit queer in the head. But anyone who tells you Joy didn’t keep the house good is a liar. She was a good cook, I know that for a fact.’

  ‘So tell me, man to man,’ said Dave Rogers, ‘did Mr Mullens mind his wife talking to the birds?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. Well, he would tell her to shut up, now and then.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘Men do that. Some men. Hazel didn’t like the way he talked to Joy. He’d say, “Just shut up, for Christ’s sake will you, woman.” Well, women can talk all right.’

  ‘But you said she was quiet.’

  ‘Ah, come on now, you’re just trying to tie me up in knots. It’s what you say, isn’t it? I grant you, Joy never seemed to utter a damn word that pleased Les Mullens. It’s a good thing Les has a woman who pleases him these days. It’s not as if he’s a young joker any more.’

  ‘So why did he tell her to shut up? Exactly? Was it about the birds?’

  ‘I tell you, it was my wife who overheard that, and as I’ve told you, she’s gone to her rest.’ He clenched and unclenched his fist, although his thumb barely closed over the tops of fingers that had once held strainer posts in place. His shoulders shook. ‘Ah Hazel,’ he said.

  ‘Take your time,’ the detective said.

  ‘Nothing. Nothing to say. Les let little things get to him. In the past. That’s how he used to be, but I’d say he’s all right now. That’s all there is to it.’

  To Kathleen’s sister, Dorothy, Dave Rogers said, ‘Do you think Joy is alive?’

  ‘No,’ said Dorothy, ‘I don’t think she is.’

  ‘Do you think Mr Mullens killed her?’

  ‘No, I’m sure he didn’t,’ said Dorothy. ‘I think there’s been far too much loose talk.’

  ‘How do you think she might have died then?’

  ‘Drowned. I believe my niece went to the river and drowned. Not that I’d tell my poor sister that.’

  ‘But Mr Mullens said he took her to the station that morning.’

  ‘That river is everywhere,’ Dorothy said. ‘It’s a very big river.’

  ‘You think the police looked in the wrong place?’

  ‘Swept out to sea long ago. Long before anyone went looking for her.’

  ‘It’s an interesting theory.’

  ‘I knew my niece,’ Dorothy said. She was sure she did.

  ‘And what did you know about her?’ the detective persisted.

  ‘That she was an innocent.’

  Dave Rogers took a handkerchief out of his pocket and used it to clean his glasses, taking his time. ‘Innocent? That’s a strange thing to say. Given all the circumstances.’

  ‘Innocent of the world,’ Dorothy said, with impatience. ‘Don’t you understand plain language?’

  DOROTHY ARRIVED IN TIME TO take care of Ruth in the last weeks of Kathleen’s life. But it was as Kathleen said: Dorothy was old now, her hands too frail to whisk an egg beater, her arms not strong enough to lift a heavy load of washing. After the funeral, she and Ruth travelled back up to Auckland. In time, Invercargill would become some other place Ruth had known, a place that returned only in dreams. She would not forget Kathleen, although, eventually, the presence of Mamie would fill her life so completely, the need to be obedient to her, and to please her when she could, that she came to think of her as a mother of sorts. Not the sort she would have wanted, and not the one who had given birth to her, as she would discover, but a mother who at least provided for her welfare. Her last memory of Kathleen was seeing her lying in a white satin bed with deep wooden sides, and touching her cold face. Kathleen wore an expression of grief that she was taking to eternity. ‘She has gone to Joy,’ said Dorothy. Ruth dimly understood that she wouldn’t see Kathleen again.

  The train going north was full of soldiers. It was the second year of the war and excited young men were still leaving for overseas. Dorothy sat up, never taking her eyes off the child for all of the three days it took to get to Auckland. Ruth woke in a hazy fuddle now and then to hear laughter and strange voices, and to see her aunt weeping. She remembered that.

  When the child was put to bed in her stuffy little house, Dorothy took up a pen and wrote to Les: Dear Mr Mullens. You married my niece, Joy Keats, at my home. I write to inform you that Joy’s mother died last week. I have heard the story of Joy’s disappearance. It is hard for me to know what to believe. I suppose anything is possible.

  I have Joy’s daughter Ruth with me, now a child of seven, quiet and obedient, but then her mother was too. I have made some enquiries and I understand you have a very good housekeeper, with a child of her own. I would consider it a great service if you would take Ruth in. I know this is not a request that will rest easily with you, but all I can do for this child is to place her somewhere that she will get care and, if her mother ever did come back, she might yet be reunited with her. I hasten to say that Ruth is a child with means. Her grandmother left her a house of considerable value, as well as money in the bank. True, much of the estate will be left in a trust with her lawyer, and a small portion of it is for her son, should he ever turn up. But there is money available now that can be used for all Ruth’s requirements.

  I will leave my own modest estate for the care of the child. Who knows the hour of their death, but I do not think I have long to live. I will make arrangements for the money to be available for the child’s education.

  ‘Money,’ said Mamie, her eyes gleaming. Les had thrown the letter down in disgust when he opened it, but Mamie snatched it back from the table. ‘Money, Les. We can go up to Auckland after the milking and be back in time for the evening shift.’

  Dorothy wrote another letter, for Ruth to open when she was older. This, to
o, Ruth found in Mamie’s possessions, along with the newspaper clippings. My dear great-niece, Dorothy had written, much trouble has visited your life at an early age. I want you to know that Joy, your true mother, did love you even though she only heard your cry without ever laying eyes upon you. There are many stories about where she was going when she went to catch that train, but it seems she was taken by a stranger, or met with some accident, on her way to see you. She wanted to see you so much. She had a way with words when she was a girl and wrote a good letter. You must try your hardest at whatever you do.

  WHEN BLANCHE WAS BORN, RUTH watched over her. She had taken an instant liking to the baby when Mamie brought her home. Patricia had no time for the infant. A baby, she said in a tone of scorn. Our mother should be ashamed of herself. Bang bang bang, you can hear Les at it all night with her, and now look what she’s got. Noise, bloody noise. Patricia was twelve and had learnt to swear. Mamie didn’t seem to care. She was bigger and bossier than ever and proud of having delivered a late baby. Nothing to it, she said, although that wasn’t wholly true. After the birth she had stayed in hospital for three weeks, ‘getting her strength back’. Patricia and Ruth ran the house for Les, as well as mucking out in the cowshed.

  Blanche was a tiny child, just over five pounds at birth, and smooth all over, not like Ruth with her neck stained with the strawberry mark. ‘As if someone had strangled her,’ Mamie once remarked.

  ‘You shouldn’t talk like that,’ Les said, asserting himself for once in her presence.