All Day at the Movies

by Fiona Kidman

  Nick said: ‘It’s got a lovely mondegreen in one of its titles.’ He was picking up on Belinda’s enthusiasm for the play. ‘“Gladly My Cross-Eyed Bear”. Remember? The third episode.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Belinda said. ‘Gladly my cross I’d bear. My mother-in-law thought that was sacrilegious. A mondegreen, is that what it’s called?’ She rolled it around in her mouth once or twice, like tasting wine, and Nick laughed. ‘You’re educating me,’ she told him.

  Belinda, Carla and Frances had met at the United Women’s Convention two years earlier. The day had been filled with the sound of pouring rain pounding on the iron roof, which all but drowned out the main speakers’ voices at times. Outside the ground had turned to mud as more and more women arrived. Belinda had expected just a handful of women, but two thousand turned up in the Winter Show buildings, a cavernous hall milling with ecstatic women telling each other the stories of their lives. Carla and Frances had arrived together, old friends from school days, both older than Belinda. They all got caught up in a group that was discussing the rights of mothers and children. Two lesbian women talked about being denied access to their children. So then Belinda told them her story, about how she nearly lost her baby but changed her mind and managed to get him back from the jaws of adoption and keep him. Suddenly they were all friends, each knowing someone who knew someone, putting their arms around each other in sisterhood. Belinda, they said, was incredibly brave.

  Carla had a job in the library, shelving books three days a week. She and Daniel had two teenagers. Carla sighed over them a lot. Frances was a teacher who was childless but had joined the discussion group anyway, because she worked with children. Really, she confided, she wanted to work in television. ‘Don’t do it,’ Carla told her. ‘I just can’t stand those men when they get together. They’re sexist pigs, worst kind.’

  Not so secretly, Belinda wanted to write screenplays, too, but she had her hands full, what with the children and university. She was coming up for air after studying honours in English literature. There were gaps in her education as the children grew: Play Centre groups, school trips, after-school music, activities her mother would never have imagined for her children. Some nights Belinda fell asleep with her work book propped in front of her. She wished she’d done political science because the world was changing, and literature was one thing but surely the dynamics of change were more important. It seemed to her that if she could write for the media she could alter the world because everyone had a television these days. She was sure she would never write a great novel or become a Mansfield scholar.

  At the other end of the table, Daniel was telling a story about the prime minister, Rob Muldoon. ‘I went to see him,’ he was saying. ‘Well, a group of us went to talk to him about funding for more drama. He was dancing up and down about how we needed more documentaries and he wasn’t going to have the government spending money on made-up rubbish. And we needed more advertising to pay for television anyway. So we said to him we thought the advertising content was too high as it was.’

  ‘And he said …’ said Carla, yawning. She’d heard the story before.

  ‘Oh, well, he said that he liked advertising because that was when he got up to make his cups of tea.’ Daniel flung his hands wide. ‘We’re done for.’

  ‘We need to change the government,’ Belinda said. She heard herself speak in another part of her brain and thought she might have had too much to drink. ‘I mean, essentially, ess-ensh-ally, wouldn’t you say, he’s fucking us over? That’s it, we need to change the government.’

  ‘And you’re going to do that single-handedly, are you, Belinda? Eh, babe?’ Letitia said in a languid drawl.

  ‘Well, laugh all you like, women can do anything. That’s what I’m going to raise my daughter to believe.’ Belinda was hell-bent on making her point.

  ‘I wasn’t saying they couldn’t, darling. I am a woman, in case you hadn’t noticed. I was merely pointing out that if you’re going to proclaim the equality of women, you have to get the language right. How many children do you actually have, little Belinda?’

  ‘Three.’ Belinda made her tone short. Or so she thought.

  ‘My God, you can’t be much more than a teenager, a child bride. Who’s minding the children now?’

  Belinda didn’t answer this. It didn’t seem like any of the bossy woman’s business. But it reminded her how late it was, and that her mother-in-law might be worrying about her. Seth was away at a scientific conference in Auckland, and Maisie and Don were minding the children at their place in Masterton. Belinda remembered, through a haze of red wine, that she was supposed to have caught the last train of the night to the Wairarapa.

  IT WAS MAISIE WHO FIRST believed the girl when her son brought her home and said that she had given birth to his baby. She looked like a scarecrow, even though she was dressed in tidy, shabby clothes, the cotton blouse stained slightly in front. Maisie could see that her breast milk hadn’t completely dried up. Her dark hair was lank, not because it was dirty, but because she seemed unhealthy. Those slanted dark eyes had shadows beneath them that looked like bruises. Don Anderson wouldn’t come round easily to the idea that his son Seth had fathered what he termed a bastard.

  ‘How does he know it’s his?’ he muttered in the privacy of their bedroom that night. ‘She could have been with anyone.’

  ‘Hush,’ Maisie said. ‘Walls have ears.’

  The girl was in the next room. It was too soon to let her sleep in the same room as Seth. There were still so many things to be settled. Maisie was sure the walls were too thick for Don to be overheard, although they’d had to make love as quietly as they could when the children were small because Emma, next door, sometimes came in and asked if there was something wrong and were they arguing, when in fact they were joyous and enthusiastic. They were quieter these days. A happy couple. People said you never knew what went on behind the closed doors of a marriage, but theirs was a strong one. Maisie told Don that night, in their whispered talk, to trust her; she had a feeling this was Seth’s child, but they would get to the bottom of it.

  This hadn’t stop her quizzing Seth in the kitchen when she was dishing up dinner, scalloped veal with a light cream sauce and new potatoes, a salad in a big wooden bowl. He came prowling in behind her, and scooped a little sauce on his finger from the pan.

  ‘You’ll burn yourself,’ she said, swatting his hand with her wooden spatula. She knew he was waiting for her to say something.

  ‘When?’ she said.

  There was a silence from her son. The copper-bottomed pots on the shelf above the stove gleamed in this place where she presided. Blue and white cups hung on hooks from a shelf on the dresser at the end of the room above her mother’s willow-patterned ashets, or assiettes as she sometimes called them when she was exercising her French. The house had belonged to her parents. Maisie knew every groove in the wood, the tread of the stairs that led from downstairs up to the bedrooms. Every colour, every curtain were those she had chosen over the years, as old ones bleached and faded and were replaced. There had always been certainty in her life. She knew which butcher sold the best meat, when the apples would be ripe on the trees and how to give birth without causing anxiety. It had all come to her as naturally as growing up in this house. This certainty had stood her in good stead when she decided to marry Don. Her parents hadn’t wanted her to marry into trade, but she’d proved them wrong. This old house wouldn’t be standing now if Don hadn’t been as skilled as he was.

  Seth said, at last, ‘The month before I left to go to the met station.’

  Maisie had been coddling him since his operation, trying to build him up to be the strong young man he had always been. He and the girl had both been so pale when they stood in the front room and announced the birth of the girl’s baby. A boy.

  After it had been said, and Maisie had understood that her life was being altered, that nothing would ever be the same again, and, blindingly, that she might well be a grandmother, the girl
had dissolved into sobs. There was no point in pressing for detail. Seth’s younger sister, Rebecca, the only one at home, looked stunned and retreated to her room, and hadn’t come out since.

  ‘So this little boy must be …?’ She held up the fingers of one hand, counting, as she stirred the sauce with the other.

  ‘Ten weeks. He’s just ten weeks old.’

  ‘So where is he now?’

  ‘He’s been adopted out.’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. Then, recovering herself, ‘Well, of course, what else would she do? Hasn’t she got any family?’

  ‘Belinda lived with her aunt. Agnes Rattray. She kicked her out.’

  ‘Oh, my God.’ This was an expression Maisie rarely used. She had been brought up Anglican and still went to church. Every fourth week, when it was her turn, she and the Ladies’ Group arranged the flowers in the church on Saturday afternoons, in preparation for the next day’s service. ‘I know who you mean. A bit of an old biddy.’ A picture of Agnes came to mind, a woman she saw often at the grocer’s shop, a harsh-looking woman with a strong Scots burr in her voice, a set expression. She remembered the grocer telling Agnes she was a saint, taking in a wayward girl at her age. ‘So Belinda, that’s her, the girl that lived with old Agnes?’

  ‘Belinda went to school with Rebecca.’

  Maisie had seen the way Rebecca had taken off when all of this began unfolding in the front room, as if embarrassed by the whole thing.

  Maisie took a long deep breath. The cream sauce had begun to curdle. ‘She’s a very clever girl, isn’t she? Alice said she won the English prize.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Seth said. ‘Perhaps. We didn’t talk much.’

  His mother turned her gaze on him, and saw him blushing. ‘Then you’d better find out, hadn’t you?’ she said.

  When Don was finally asleep, Maisie lay awake. The night was very still. As she burrowed into Don’s broad back, she closed her eyes. Only her thoughts kept churning on. She couldn’t stop herself from trying to piece together what might be the truth. She remembered lending Seth her car on Saturday nights. Presumably the back seat of that car was where this child had been conceived. Like Don, she had yet to be convinced. Seth hadn’t seen the baby, this child who lived with strangers. He barely knew the girl, whether she was clever or dim or just promiscuous. It wasn’t even clear how they’d come to meet each other that day, some story about running into each other in a toy shop. But what was Seth doing in toy shops? At what point, she asked herself, had the decision been made to come home and shatter the calm of the household with an announcement like this? None of it made sense. In the silence, she heard a muffled noise. Through the timbers of the old house, she detected the noise of serious weeping.

  As softly as she could, she climbed out of bed and reached for her dressing gown. In the hall she stopped at Belinda’s closed door, undecided as to whether she should knock or just go in. This is my house, she thought. She eased the door open and saw, in the light of the bedside lamp, the girl sitting with her knees pulled up to her chin. Her shoulders were shaking. No, it was more than that, her whole body was convulsing.

  Maisie sat down on the side of the bed and put out a tentative hand. ‘It’ll do no good,’ she said. ‘You’re making yourself ill. You didn’t eat anything at dinner.’

  The girl lapsed into sullen hiccupping sobs. After a few minutes, she began to speak in a low monotone. ‘They took him straight away. I wasn’t allowed to go and look at him. I know he had fair hair, I do know that much. They said he was eight pounds when he was born, a good weight, and that he was very healthy. He should be a good listener, I talked to him the whole time I was carrying him. I stayed on a horrible farm. If I talked to him it meant I wasn’t hearing the old bitch whose house I stayed in. And when there was nobody around I sang to him. I remembered some songs my mother used to sing to me.’

  She paused and Maisie rushed to fill the silence. ‘What did she sing?’

  ‘She liked the old hits. Wartime stuff. “Auf Wiedersehen, Sweetheart.” You know, “We’ll Meet Again” and all that shit.’

  ‘I take it your mother’s dead, Belinda?’

  Belinda nodded, running her fingers through her hair in a distressed motion.

  ‘You were the oldest?’ Maisie was trying to find a way in, to reach the girl.

  ‘Second. I wasn’t the golden girl.’ Belinda hesitated, mulling over what she had said. ‘Jessie’s my half-sister. She was born just after the war. My mother always looked out for her. I guess she liked Jessie’s father. She didn’t like mine and I don’t blame her. I saw Mum when she was dying. I wanted to sing something to her then, but I knew it would seem stupid in a hospital so I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have been stupid,’ Maisie said softly. ‘But you weren’t to know that. How old were you?’

  ‘Eleven and I’d never seen anyone sick like that. Nobody told me she’d die. Then I got a stepmother. Her name was Charm. I hated her. I did everything I could to make her mad. I tried to kill her.’ Belinda’s voice had taken on an almost hypnotic quality.

  ‘You did? What did you do?’

  ‘Oh, nothing much. I didn’t attack her or anything. We kids made an effigy of her and destroyed it. You know, like burning a scarecrow on Guy Fawkes, only this was different — she was supposed to dissolve into the sea. She caught us.’

  ‘Is that why you went to live with Agnes?’

  ‘Yes. Agnes is all right. It’s not her fault, you know, that I got pregnant. I just wanted Seth.’ She closed her eyes, her face sensual. ‘Being with him was like eating the icing off the Christmas cake. He’s sweet, you know. He was like something unbelievable. Yeah, I wanted him.’

  Maisie’s whole body tingled. ‘You wrote to him when he was on the island?’

  ‘No, not at all. I didn’t know where he was.’

  ‘How did you know he’d come back from the island?’ Maisie asked, her voice faltering. The night felt strange, the quietness of it, the two of them sitting on the bed together, sharing an intimacy too close for comfort. Belinda’s nipples had started to leak again inside Rebecca’s nightgown, which Maisie had lent her, as if talking about Seth like this had aroused her milk supply. This girl, or this young woman as she should consider her, had been closer to her own son than she had. And wasn’t there something they could give mothers to stop them lactating sooner than this? Sage tea, she thought, but where on earth could she get some?

  Belinda seemed puzzled. ‘I didn’t know he’d come back from the island. I didn’t even know he’d gone there.’

  ‘But you found him?’

  Belinda sat up straight, and looked Maisie straight in the eye, a rebellious expression on her face. ‘I didn’t find him. He found me.’

  In the morning, when they were all seated at the breakfast table, Maisie said, ‘It mightn’t be too late to retrieve my grandson.’

  SO THE STORY THAT BELINDA told her friends at the convention had had a modicum of truth about it. But, had it not been for Maisie, she doubted that she would have had the strength to go through the whole business of getting back her son, who, it turned out, was called Peter. There was a meeting with the frosty-faced social worker who had arranged his placement and now had to tell the new parents that they couldn’t have him after all. There was paperwork and a brief court appearance for the adoption to be cancelled. Most important, as far as social services were concerned, there was a wedding, after grudging permission had been extracted from Belinda’s father. He had to be asked because she was too young to marry without his consent.

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing someone’s taking her on, I suppose,’ he said on the telephone. ‘I don’t want her back, that’s for sure. I hope she doesn’t go messing you around, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m sure she won’t,’ Maisie said. It was really Don’s place to phone him, but she didn’t think he was ready for that yet. Now she wished she’d insisted.

  ‘She’s always been a handful, you know. I don
’t think you know what you’re letting yourselves in for.’

  ‘Mr Pawson, would you like to come to the wedding?’ Maisie had asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, his voice hardening, ‘just send me the paperwork and I’ll see to it.’ A transaction like trading cattle, Maisie thought.

  There was just Seth’s family in the church, and afterwards at the house, but Maisie made sure Belinda had a nice dress to wear, a short cream lace frock, and there were flowers and a cake with hers and Seth’s names written on it in blue icing.

  When Belinda said ‘I do’ in the wedding ceremony, Seth looked so happy she couldn’t believe it. He wanted her. Plain, clever Seth Anderson, promising to love and cherish her for the rest of her life.

  ‘Do you want to change his name?’ Seth asked, when the baby was brought to them by the social worker.

  ‘Peter will do,’ she said, although it wasn’t her first choice.

  ‘He’s so like his daddy,’ Maisie said, wanting to hold him first, but knowing this was the moment for Seth.

  Belinda was pregnant within a month but still started university. Maisie looked after Peter. ‘You can’t waste a brain like yours,’ she told her. Belinda named this baby Dylan, because she’d been reading Dylan Thomas’s poems and she liked the melody of his voice on the page, and on the radio, and also because she considered him rebellious, although Seth said wasn’t he just a drunk? It didn’t matter, they both liked the name. They liked everything the other liked.