Hattie had owned a mini herself once. She still remembered with pleasure the cresting waves of mechanical sound between the gear changes and the flashing of the speckled tarmac in the road passing by through the holes in the floor.
“Of course. Do come in out of the rain.” She held the door open for them. They wiped their sandy shoes on the mat and came into the galley kitchen, glancing around at the low slanted ceiling, taking in the cracked enamelled sink and the leaking tap. There was sand on the backs of their necks from where they had been lying in the sea grass before it began to rain.
The boy dropped the wet jumper on the floor by the door.
“I’ll just leave these here.” The girl had picked up a bunch of sea tulips attached to a mussel shell. She placed them on top of the wet jumper where the sandy heads lolled back like pale chunks of meat.
“This way to the telephone,” said Hattie.
The students followed her up into the sitting room where the long windows on either side of the fireplace let in strips of light and a view of cabbage trees threshing the grey sky. The couple stood with their backs to the fire, rubbing their hands together and casting surreptitious glances around the room and into the studio beyond.
“It was only an eight-hundred-dollar car,” the girl said, “I hope they don’t have to tow us back into town. We were chased by a seal,” she said happily.
“That would be Victor the sea lion. He does get territorial,” said Hattie. She showed the boy where the phone was. He dialled and spoke. His voice sounded impatient as well as apologetic. She could see that he was a good boy, even if he did not take particular care over the jumper that his mother had knitted for him.
“We’ll be late for dinner,” he said, turning to look at the girl.
“With his mother,” said the girl, blushing. “Are you an artist? It’s so wonderful to be in the house of a real artist. I’m studying art history. I have to do an essay on someone contemporary and maybe I could come back one day and talk to you about your work, and your influences?” The words came hurrying out, ending in a raised squeak.
“I’m usually working at this time of day,” said Hattie. “I don’t have any influences. But feel free to look around.”
The girl blushed again. She stepped up into the studio where Hattie saw her taking in the shelf of maquettes, the notebooks recording the heights of the tides, the shells and the sea glass, the bones and the buoys, the driftwood and the comparative logs tracking the heights of the tides and the patterns of the seasons, all in the attempt to make sense of the anomaly that had overtaken the rhythm one summer afternoon.
“I’ll make tea,” she said.
She was annoyed to find her hands shaking as she filled the kettle. It bumped awkwardly against the tap as she filled it. The girl came back in. She seemed tall in the galley kitchen.
“I’m sorry if we have disturbed you. Is there anything I can do to help?” she asked.
“You can find the cups if you like,” said Hattie. “I like your necklace,” she added, trying to make up for not having any influences. Tied to a piece of twine, the fresh fan of nubbled sea beads lay at the girl’s neck like a damp hand. “You did a good job of tying it together. My daughter always used fishing tackle to attach the ones she made me, but they do tend to come apart after they dry up.”
“Thank you,” said the girl, laughing. “Kevin made it for me. We are in love,” she added shyly. “Gosh, I don’t know what made me say that. Is that your daughter?” She pointed at a discoloured snapshot of a little girl waving a large piece of seaweed.
Hattie nodded.
“She was one of three,” Hattie began, and she saw the girls smacking the water with the flat of their hands to make it spray up at each other, heard them shrieking. Over the years she had painted these children in so many different ways, descending among the sea tulips as water babies, naked except for fins, or bedecked in brassy oval leaves like weedy sea dragons. She had painted them as adolescent albatrosses that have left the cliffs, never to return to land. She had painted them as the girl guides they were, gifted at tying knots and at making cups of tea, but unable to solve the puzzle of the currents.
The sound of the rain on the tin roof slowed to a series of dull raps. The young man hurried in.
“They’ll be coming soon. We should wait by the car,” he said. The girl nodded.
She put down her barely sipped tea.
“She was one of three girls,” Hattie finished. They were not listening. We are in love, the girl had said. Why not, for once, leave it at that?
Hattie stood watching them go. At the end of the driveway they stopped and glanced back at the house. She ought to have turned away by now. But she could not take her eyes off the girl, the same age as her granddaughter might have been, and the boy, who might have been her boyfriend, and the jumper, which she might have knitted for him. To that girl, I am nothing but a tissue of influences, she thought. She took off her glasses. The rusty jumper and the eggshell blue tank top stood out against the dusty darkness of the macrocarpa hedge and the strip of grass beside the road. I will paint them, she thought, as a tartan rug for picnics, and lying under it, a sea lion.
Hattie collected the cups and turned the tap onto the dishes in the sink. The afternoon had cleared up nicely. Soon the students would be back in town, the sand rinsed off their feet. Perhaps the girl would say, we were chased by a seal, and the boy would correct her, it was a sea lion, and then mother would say, when I was young a rogue current pulled three girls out to sea there and they all drowned; it’s a pity you were late, the casserole has all dried out; and the boy would reply, taste’s fine to me, mum. Then the young ones would look at each other, already in a hurry to get back to their flat, to the sagging line of washing, to the bed propped up on beer crates.
Hattie was in the middle of lacing her boots when an earthquake shook the windowpanes. Annoyed, she moved to stand in the doorway while she listened to the sea glass and the bones rattle on the shelves. Go for higher ground, the civil defence page in the back of the phone book said. Don’t go down to the sea to watch. Hattie never paid any attention. Tsunami or not she would go down to sketch the dredge buckets before the light faded. Let any old tsunami take her; just let it roll her into the underwater fields. Wasn’t the better part of her there already?
Scottish Annie
ON SATURDAYS AT FIVE Archie McLean visits the retirement home to take requests at the piano. Each week the seniors try to trip him. “Robins and Roses,” they’ll say, naming some old tune that they used to dance to on the wind-up. They can’t catch Archie out. Archie knows them all and he sings in that old-fashioned radio way, leaning back on the piano stool, nodding to the ladies. At the end, he opens the piano lid right up and plays an extra fast bumblebee song. I’m usually out in the garden when Archie gets back after the tea and scones, and then he leans over the hedge to tell me about it.
“Well Ruby,” says Archie, “I think we wowed them today.” It always makes me laugh. You would think he was a whole orchestra the way he talks. Archie is a nice young man. Genteel, my mother would have said. We play Scrabble on Wednesday nights. He’s been my neighbour for nearly fifteen years now. Back in March, he celebrated his fiftieth birthday, and I made an eggless chocolate cake, because Archie doesn’t believe in exploiting the hens. He served me a slice and said, “so when’s your birthday, Ruby?”
“Get away with you,” I said, “a lady doesn’t admit to her age until she’s in for a telegram from the Queen. All I’m saying is I’m not old enough to be your mother. Have some more cake.”
Last week, when he had finished toting up the score for the word umbilical, Archie told me that he has to move, because his landlord wants to sell the house. I was very sorry to hear that. Archie has been a great friend to me.
After mother died, three years ago next February, Archie got me started volunteering at the retirement home. He said it was better than hiding in the potting shed. At the time, I said that I wasn’
t hiding and that I’d think about it. Now I take the seniors out on wee trips in the car. Archie is the piano man and I am the driving jukebox. They tell me where they want to go, and I take them, within four hours and within reason. Often they like to go back to where they were born, or where they’ve had picnics in the past. One afternoon I drove ninety-year-old Willy Callaghan to Oamaru. We idled outside a renovated villa on Vine Street while Mr. Callaghan wept for the loss of the corrugated iron sheets on the roof and the front room where he had been born. I said that a nice conservatory full of tomatoes was nothing to cry about. Still, I let him have a good old weep, and then we went for an ice cream and came home. It takes me a year to get through all the seniors, so some of the older ones don’t come more than once.
When I arrived up at the home last week, Mrs. Webster was waiting for me in the foyer, all wrapped up warm for her outing. She always wears mohair cardies that her niece from up Ranfurly way knits for her. The light catches in the hairs.
“You’re glowing, Mrs. Webster,” I said, and she was pleased. Mohair keeps your chest warm, but it’s not cheap, and it gets stringy. Better to mix it with a bit of wool.
“Anyway,” I said, “where are we off to today?” Mrs. Webster wanted to go to the nursery at Blueskin Bay, to buy a miniature rose for her bedroom. She had a coupon from the paper. They do love coupons. So off we went, out through Pine Hill and over the motorway to the nursery. She got a wee apricot rose to match her curtains. I almost got one too, but then I thought it was silly to get over-excited about plants that don’t survive the winter.
Mrs. Webster was sitting in the car looking at the rose bush on her lap. Then she looked at me quite shyly.
“Do you think we could take the road along the coast, through Seacliff?” she asked.
“Of course we can, Mrs. Webster,” I said. “My wish is your command.” So away we went, winding along above the sea, past the rabbit holes in the yellow clay banks and the twisted macrocarpa trees along the fence lines.
“Seacliff always makes me sad,” I said, just to make conversation. It’s the kind of thing that people say when they drive through Seacliff. The paddocks there fall so steeply towards the sea that it’s hard to tell how a sheep might hold on in the wind, let alone a farmer on a bike. And you think you might hear some ghost from the asylum wailing away in the breeze. It was a grand old place, the asylum at Seacliff, majestic and crenellated. They had proper lunatics in those days.
“Just here, Ruby dear, drive me up here,” said Mrs. Webster, “up towards the asylum, to those trees at the top of the road.” We stopped by a gate where there was nothing to see, just an old car with no headlights, buried in the bushes, and a pile of bricks to show where a house once stood.
“I was born here,” said Mrs. Webster. “The back door faced the asylum, and the verandah ran all around the house. And up the hill under the eucalyptus trees there were passion fruit vines with purple flowers, all fringed with blue. Every year Mum would take us up to look at the flowers, and she would say, See kids, even in Seacliff. And we would say, even in Seacliff what, Mum? And she always replied, even in Seacliff we can be on a tropical island. She had a lovely laugh, our Mum.”
“Shall we walk up and have a look Mrs. Webster?” I said. “Would you like that?” I helped her out of the car and into her coat, found her stick, took her arm. The wind was fierce. Together we took granny steps up the paddock towards the gum trees at the top.
“My mother was known as Scottish Annie,” said Mrs. Webster. “She had that kind of bone-china skin that reddens in the southerly wind. She used to stand on the porch shading her eyes with her hand, looking out at the sea, while she sent my sister Milly to get the washing in, quicksticks, before the rain comes. It was a deal of work to keep the five of us washed and mended I can tell you. She did the washing on a Saturday, which was considered quite unusual, but that way the boys could help. Johnnie stirred the copper with a big stick. Our Mum didn’t do things quite like other people.”
Mrs. Webster was looking way out across the ocean. I could tell that she had a story to tell so I let her run. So many of the older ones only have fragments left, but that afternoon Mrs. Webster could still put her hand on the whole thing.
“Our Dad was killed by a coal dray coming down Stafford Street,” said Mrs Webster. “Dad rolled right out of the pub and into the road and then the dray came clattering down the hill, and that was that. You might think that the coal merchant would have had the decency to send a load out to the widow, but he didn’t.
“Mum let out the paddocks to Mr. Currie to run his cows on. The cows used to come up and look at us through the window. Then our Mum got a job serving hot dinner up at the asylum, but that still wasn’t enough, so we got a lodger. His name was Mr. Reginald Hooper. Mr. Hooper was a clean-cut medical resident, neat as a pin, with round spectacles that he polished with a handkerchief that came out of his pocket, and such nice clean nails. He must have wondered what had happened to him, coming into our house with five kids roaring about. But he never said anything and he was as polite as you please, and out of the house early and not back until teatime. We had our tea first, and then Mum would give the lodger his stew and tell us to go away and let the man have his dinner in peace, because he worked in the madhouse all day and he didn’t have to live in one too. We called him Mr. Hooper, but Johnnie sometimes called him Dr. Whooping Cough. We thought that was terribly funny.
“Mr. Hooper did his best to be handy about the house, even though Mum would never have asked him to lift a finger. A couple of the big eucalyptus trees up the back had been cut down and when Mr. Hooper came home in the evening he would chop his heart out with his sleeves rolled up and his dark hair flopping about. The first woodpile he made came down in the night. How we laughed. Mr. Hooper bit his lip and went out in the dark to stack it again. He liked to bring in a load and put it by the stove ready to use, and our Mum didn’t have the heart to tell him that it would take six months to get the wood half-dry enough for burning.
“Mr. Hooper was nice to us kids too, and he didn’t have to be. He brought in gum nuts and put them in a box for the baby to shake. And once, when he saw us watching him put his boots on, he turned his sock into a snake that spoke in a funny voice, and another time he did a shadow show on the wall with his hands—you know, the dove, the old woman, the Turk—all those shapes he could do.
“After dinner Mr. Hooper studied his medical books at the kitchen table. Our Mum sat in the cane chair with the sock basket on her knees, darning and watching him work. She made him a pot of tea, but she wouldn’t take a cup herself. She was so proud to have Dr. Whooping Cough and his white coat staying at our house. She put him to sleep in the parlour! How people talked. It was cold in the front parlour. That’s why Mr. Hooper studied his books in the kitchen.
“The four older kids, Frankie, Millie, Johnnie, and Meggie, went to school, but at the beginning, the baby went down the road to Mrs. Wren’s. Then Mrs. Wren’s back got bad and baby couldn’t go there any more. So in the mornings, our Mum would put the baby in the pen containing the vegetable garden, plump down on its bottom among the cabbages. Every so often she would nip outside to shake out a rag and sing out tra-la-loo, just to check that the baby was alright. She must have been shaking out the rags every two minutes.
“One morning, while the older kids were at school and the baby was in the pen in the backyard, the kitchen chimney caught fire. All that resin from the green wood had built up in the dog-leg of the flue. Well, that’s what Mr. Currie said later. He had warned our Mum, but the flue caught fire. It smouldered for a long time and then it got roaring hot. Our Mum had left her apron hung over the fire guard in the kitchen and the gum nuts in the pockets cracked open in the heat.
“Mr. Currie was on his way up the hill to look at Dolores who had hoof rot. He smelt the smoke and ran to the house. I saw the fire too, because I was that baby, you know. It’s one of my earliest memories, poking a stick at a piece of wood where the paint
has swelled up into lovely soft bubbles. Mr. Currie ran into the burning house and he found our Mum and the lodger passed out on the bed. Entwined they were. At noon. And her not even wearing a wrapper. Mr. Currie had to get it off the hook on the back of the door. First he brought our Mum out, and then Mr. Currie, such a brave man, went back in for Mr. Hooper. After that there was nothing that could be done to save the house. Dry as tinder it was under the rafters. You must have been able to see the flames far out at sea.
“Mr. Currie laid Mum and Mr. Hooper side-by-side on the cold grass and covered them with a blanket. And the hill beside the house there is so steep that the bodies were almost standing up. Carbon monoxide had come creeping up on them. Well. They came round eventually. No harm done, and everyone said that it was a miracle. Even Mr. Currie said that, because if they had both died, who would have looked after all us kids?
“Well, Mr. Hooper did the decent thing, and he married our Mum, took her on with the five kids and even had another one. That’s my younger brother Neil. He’s up in the Ross Home now. And Mr. Hooper’s parents, they also did the decent thing and they disowned him. And you can be sure that no one at Seacliff was going to let Scottish Annie have her cake and eat it too, dandling her young man in the bedroom while the house burned down and the baby sat in the backyard with The Lord Knows What in its mouth. So our Mum sold the paddocks and we all moved to Caversham, to a wee house in the shade of the hill. Mr. Hooper got work filling orders in a chemist’s shop. But he would not let our Mum go to work, no he would not. She was his queen. Queen of the washboard, more like, but in those days, men were proud and they didn’t want their women to work.
“For a long time, we had nothing at all, except swedes, boiled and mashed and roasted. My stepfather was a good man. I never saw his belt buckle coming my way and that’s a lot more than the older ones could say for our Dad. Mr. Hooper was the only Dad I ever knew. So, it’s not just sorrow that comes out of Seacliff. It was good for us kids, at any rate until the war came. But that wasn’t just us. That was everybody.”
All the Voices Cry Page 11