All the Way to Summer

by Fiona Kidman

  ‘What are you going to call the baby?’ Alice asked, hoping to engage her attention.

  ‘I can’t decide,’ said Noelene. ‘Do you like Pamela for a girl and Todd for a boy?’

  ‘Awful,’ said Alice.

  ‘Charmaine?’

  ‘Blah,’ said Alice, preparing to show off. ‘How about you call it Homer if it’s a boy?’

  Noelene looked long-suffering. ‘Would you like to hold the ring over my stomach?’

  ‘What for?’ said Alice, backing off.

  ‘To find out whether it’s going to be a girl or a boy. The last time Tilly did it the ring said it was going to be a girl, but I reckon it’s moved too low for that. I’m sure it’s a boy.’ She was slipping her wedding ring off as she spoke. She picked up a reel of cotton and snapped off a thread, tying it to the ring.

  ‘What do I do?’ Alice asked, as Noelene lay down on the sofa.

  ‘Well, you hold it over my stomach and see which way the ring goes. If it turns around it’s a girl, up and down it’s a boy. Didn’t you know that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And if it stops in the middle it’s a disaster.’ Noelene shivered, pulling up her maternity smock to reveal the vast expanse of her stomach. As she lay there, it looked smooth, white and mountainous, then suddenly an oyster-shaped bulge sprouted on its side.

  ‘See, it’s the baby’s hand,’ said Noelene.

  Alice felt sick.

  ‘Go on, be quick.’

  As Alice picked up the ring, a shadow fell across the door. It was Douglas, Noelene’s brother-in-law.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how’s the son and heir?’ There was something odd in his voice.

  ‘It’s a girl,’ said Alice, ‘and Noelene’s going to call her Guinevere.’

  There was a brief pause. ‘And slowly answered Arthur from the barge,’ Douglas said. In her surprise, Alice nearly dropped the ring.

  ‘It’s a load of shit,’ said Douglas, turning away. Alice didn’t know whether he meant the baby, the ring, or the poem he was quoting from. But once, she realised, he would have gone to Fish Rock High.

  ‘I could have had any of them, you know,’ said Noelene when he had gone. She meant the McNaught brothers.

  When Alice didn’t say anything, Noelene said, ‘I have to have a boy before the others catch up. You see?’

  ‘Douglas loves dancing, he goes every fortnight,’ said Tilly through a mouthful of pins. She had taken pity on Alice, who was trying to make a dress from some material sent by her aunt. Alice’s mother was so busy on the farm, she didn’t have time to help.

  ‘Where does he dance?’ Alice asked. Public dances were held in the hall, but they were few and far between. Most of the girls from school went; they started at fourteen, so tantalisingly close to maturity by Fish Rock standards. Alice’s parents wouldn’t hear of her going without them. She had been once with her mother and father and felt like a baby.

  ‘Don’t you know about the square dances?’ said Tilly. ‘The club meets in the hall, it’s not an open dance, just about thirty or forty go.’ As soon as she had said it, Alice could see Tilly wished she hadn’t. She gave Alice a sideways look as if something had just dawned on her.

  ‘You’re a big girl,’ she said, ‘you’re growing a helluva big girl. You started a box yet?’

  When the Buick next pulled up at the McNaughts’ gate, with Douglas at the wheel, Alice was lying in wait. She shot out from behind the cream stand and offered to open the gate for him.

  ‘What brings this on?’ he asked, leaning out the car window after she had pulled the gate shut.

  ‘Please, could you give me a lift to the square dancing?’

  He sighed, looked out the other window. ‘Sure,’ he said finally. ‘If your parents’ll let you.’

  That was when Alice began to keep company, of a kind, with Douglas McNaught. He was nearly twice her age. It astonishes her now to think that her parents would let her go with him, but she can see also how it was. They weren’t looking at them as two people who might fall in love; they were looking at a kindly, trusted grown up and a child. Nor, for a long time, did Alice think of Douglas as anything other than a means to get her out of the house and down the road. Looking back, she sees herself as truly innocent, despite her brashness. What did he think? Who did he see? These are questions Alice has asked herself since.

  Clover, who had several respectable older brothers, was sometimes allowed to go to the dances too. This may have been one of the reasons Alice was permitted to go with Douglas.

  One day, Clover took her aside with a look of shock. ‘I’ve heard another word for sex,’ she said. Her cousins had told her the word (her brothers would never have said this to her, they were that kind of family, protective towards the women). Rooting. That was the word.

  They gazed at each other in horror. Pigs rooted in the bush. The connotations were impossibly vulgar, and violent. They knew that sex was a red-hot poker, but they couldn’t imagine how they would be burned or blinded. If that was sex, they didn’t want it. That week, a girl called Marie, who had left school the year before, said she was dating two men at once and went to the cemetery with one or the other on alternate nights: she was still trying to decide which of them had what she described as the better equipment. This story got around and filtered back to school. Clover and Alice were open-mouthed with astonishment, while at the same time doubting that it could be true. Over at the McNaughts’, Noelene had given birth to a daughter, who she said was just the cutest wee thing, and she’d be trying for another just as soon as her stitches had healed.

  When Alice went to the dances, she pitched into the routines, snatching a hand, spinning from the waist, moving onto the next partner: older men with red-veined faces, or Douglas, or one of Clover’s older brothers, whoever. They were accompanied by a pianist and a man with an accordion. The caller had slicked-back fair hair and wore a plaid shirt with a neckerchief. He clapped his hands and stamped his foot in time to ‘Red River Valley’: Oh we’re off to the next in the valley / and you circle to your left and to your right / and you choose your girl from the valley / oh you choose your Red River girl.

  On the way there and back, Douglas hardly said a word. Alice didn’t mind, though occasionally she spoke to him. One night, as they drove home between the grassy hills, the moon seemed to float and stop and start, trickling along the sky.

  ‘The moon is a ghostly galleon,’ Alice said.

  ‘Jesus. Shit,’ he said, his fists bunching around the steering wheel. He was not prepared to lose himself to poetry a second time, she figured.

  Each time they got to the McNaughts’ gate, opposite the Emerys’ farm, Alice jumped out of the car and opened the gate for him; he swept through without an acknowledgement, and she closed it behind him, watching the car’s progress over the dewy dust of the track. A kind of happiness had descended on her and the weeks and months that lay between her and the end of school.

  That is, until Rhoda Aukett turned up. One square-dance evening, Alice got dressed as usual and went to wait at the mail box. Douglas didn’t arrive. She went back inside and rang his house. In her head, she could hear the phone’s Morse code signal ringing in the McNaughts’ kitchen. Three shorts for an S. Tilly answered after what seemed a long time. ‘Didn’t he tell you he’d be going straight to the village after milking?’ she said, but Alice could tell that she was not surprised.

  When she reported that, no, he hadn’t told her, Tilly just said, ‘He must have forgotten, eh?’

  ‘Won’t he be coming back to pick me up?’

  Tilly couldn’t put it off any longer. ‘He’s gone to pick up Rhoda. She’s staying at the hotel. You know about Rhoda, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, sure, I know about Rhoda.’

  ‘Well, there, that’s all right then.’ Tilly sounded relieved.

  Alice’s mother wandered into the room.

  ‘Douglas running late?’

  ‘A bit. He has to pick up someone called R
hoda.’

  ‘Oh, yes, Rhoda,’ she said vaguely, ‘I’ve heard about Rhoda.’ It seemed that everyone had heard about Rhoda.

  ‘I’m to wait along the road,’ Alice lied. ‘He’ll be in a hurry when he comes.’ She rushed out the door before her mother could ask any more questions.

  It was a two-mile walk to Fish Rock. Alice, full of rage, arrived at the dance when it was already nine o’clock and the dance in full swing. She hurried along the darkened main street, passing the drapery where she would soon be working. The women who made the tea sat gossiping in the far corner of the hall. They never danced. Their breasts were encased in shiny satin blouses, and they wore full skirts, but they were not there to dance. The supper plates had been arranged near the slide that separated the kitchen from the dance hall. The zip was coming to the boil. Alice turned it off and filled the urn. At the end of the round, she threw up the shutter and called, in her loudest voice: ‘Come and get it’, just the way the women did.

  There was a flurry in the corner and a ripple of surprise amongst the dancers. Alice stood still and smiled a broad, careful grin.

  ‘Well,’ said one of the older women, ‘isn’t she ever just the little helper?’ She said it quite nicely, although it was clear that neither she nor her friends cared for what Alice had done.

  Douglas walked towards her, a woman holding onto his arm. She wore a powder-blue crushed-velvet dress. Alice knew at once that he loved this dark and creamy-skinned creature.

  ‘Hi, kid,’ he said, ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’

  That was when she knew he had never really seen her.

  He introduced her to Rhoda Aukett, who flashed a dazzling smile. Rhoda didn’t appear to mind when Alice climbed into the back of the car to catch a ride home, though Douglas gave a deep scowl in her direction.

  Alice later learned that Douglas had met Rhoda in town at the races, where she was a ticket seller on the tote. She had thrown in her job and come to work as a housemaid at the pub in order to be near him. Little by little, Alice got to know her. She would stay out at the farm some weekends, and Tilly would send her over to borrow a cup of sugar or a packet of cigarettes, just the way Alice’s parents borrowed from them. Rhoda didn’t stay every weekend, and seemed to vanish from sight now and then. Her mother guessed Rhoda was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Quite a while to be on the shelf, she said to her husband. Rhoda carried a spicy fragrance about her as if her skin were impregnated with flower petals. Her breasts were heavy ovals cupped above her tiny waist.

  Rhoda did most of the talking, in a soft purring rush, a steady stream of comments about herself, Douglas, the McNaughts. Milking was a painful price for being Douglas’s girlfriend, but she had done it when she was a girl, and she supposed she would have to get used to it again when the time came. Men’s and cow’s shit, it was much the same. Alice would be surprised at what she saw at the pub. Alice didn’t know what men were like, oh, you’ll never know, you’ll never know, she said, and Alice thought, with sudden chilling fear, that she might not and that not knowing might be worse than knowing. The couple who ran the pub were mean with hot water, Rhoda said. Inhaling the spontaneous perfume that surrounded her, Alice wouldn’t have thought so, but Rhoda had three baths a day at the weekends, even though it meant saving the water for Douglas when he came in from the shed. Rhoda Aukett, she fluttered on, was kind of hard to say, not that it would bother her for long, not when she became Rhoda McNaught. She supposed Alice would be getting married some day too. How did she get along with Noelene? She wasn’t too sure that Noelene liked her, but there, she was going to get her nose out of joint a bit, having another woman on the property, Noelene had called her little girl Lorraine, and what did Alice think of that for a name? ‘She’s probably afraid I’ll have the first boy,’ Rhoda said. Then she bit her lip as if she had said the wrong thing and something was bothering her. Did Alice want babies when she grew up? Rhoda had asked, changing the subject.

  Almost as suddenly as she had arrived, Rhoda Aukett disappeared. At first Alice didn’t notice she had gone, for she no longer visited the McNaughts unless asked to go on a message. One weekend, though, Douglas came over to use the Emerys’ phone because theirs was out of order, or that was what he said. Alice wondered why he hadn’t gone to Malcolm and Noelene’s. Alice heard him tell her father that he would pay for a toll call.

  ‘It’s all right, son,’ her father said, ‘you go right ahead, make as many calls as you want. I know you’ll pay me.’

  Douglas closed the door and talked for a long time. Alice heard his voice raised, and she leaned her head against the door. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Rhoda, I can’t,’ he said, and she could hear him crying. It grieved her that Rhoda could be so unforgiving. She couldn’t imagine anything bad enough for Rhoda to react like this. It took Alice a while to realise that Rhoda hadn’t been to the farm for some weeks, much longer than the usual intervals between calls. Clearly this was no flash point, the quarrel was well established by the time she had got to hear about it.

  ‘She won’t be back,’ Alice’s mother said cryptically. She and her husband looked at each other in a meaningful way.

  Soon after that, Douglas came to the house with an odd, almost sly, gleeful look about him, like a boy who has built a tree house that he is sure nobody will find. Could he have a letter sent here?

  He and Alice’s father went outside and talked. Her father ran his hand through his thinning hair in an anxious way and shook his head once or twice. In the end, she saw him reluctantly agree.

  Douglas came in the evenings after milking to check on the arrival of the mail. Alice looked out for a letter from Rhoda, She imagined her handwriting as flowing with untidy loops and an exaggerated incline, like a head held in the hand, a playful smile.

  But when the letter came, it was not from Rhoda at all. Alice was there when Douglas picked it up, an official typed envelope sent from Wellington.

  ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said to her father. Her father stood awkwardly; it was clear that he wanted to know the contents nearly as much as Douglas. Alice can still see them, the two men standing together, Douglas almost like a son. He turned the letter over in his hands and, for her father’s sake, opened it there and then. He took a deep breath and handed it over, his eyes alight. They looked at each other with a mixture of excitement and awe.

  ‘They’ve taken you,’ her father said. ‘Oh, good man, I knew they would.’

  ‘I’d better tell the old man,’ said Douglas, and he bit his lip in an uncharacteristic boyish gesture. He took out a cigarette and placed it in his mouth without the usual flick.

  A week or so later, Douglas appeared, wearing a uniform. Of course, she had learned his secret by then. He had been accepted to join the crack Special Air Service unit as a paratrooper, bound for Malaya to fight the Communists. His uniform was olive-green with a browny-green shirt and tie. On his head, he wore a maroon beret with a winged dagger and the motto ‘Who Dares Wins’.

  Alice couldn’t imagine what the jungle would be like, although now she can. She has stood in the renamed Malaysian jungle and felt the breath of giant butterfly wings against her face, amidst the mingled smells of nutmeg oil and orchids and the lavatory stench of cut durian. The fruit, she was told, can kill a man if it is eaten with alcohol. She has seen a python and a flying frog and spiders that eat birds. Deadly and dangerous and seductive. And, as she has stood there, she has thought of Douglas McNaught.

  He had several leaves from the training camp at Waiouru before he embarked. During the last of these, the ailing square dance club held one of its now erratic meetings. Alice had not attended for at least six months, not since Rhoda Aukett first came on the scene. Douglas appeared unexpectedly at the Emerys’ doorstep. His official farewell had already taken place, a formal affair with speeches and a special supper on laden trestle tables set out on the hall. Alice’s father, with tears in his eyes, had given him a Waterman pen, which he could ill afford. Now here Douglas was, resple
ndent in his uniform, on the doorstep.

  ‘Feel like a couple of turns, kid?’ he asked.

  Alice’s mother looked up from the bench where she was working, as if she might, for the first time, say something to stop Alice going, then changed her mind. Instead she pressed her lips together.

  Farewell was in the air. Even though the club was going into recess, there was a bigger turnout than usual. People came up to say goodbye all over again. Old men, wearing baggy greys and tartan shirts, turned up with the helpers and sat against the wall, just watching. At suppertime, they pumped Douglas’s hand, their eyes shining, holding on longer than they needed.

  ‘You gotta knock the bastards out of them trees, son, little devils, knock ’em out,’ Alice heard one of them say.

  ‘Give you a tenner for that hat, boy,’ said another. Douglas just smiled; it was clear that in his head he had already moved on. He danced with all the women, young and old, bringing the helpers out of their corner. They sang ‘Red River Valley’ — from this valley they say you are going / we will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile …

  The air outside was cool as they headed for home. The moon was new, and Alice couldn’t avoid looking at it through the glass. She turned her money over in her pocket and moved closer to Douglas. When he didn’t appear to notice, she moved right up beside him. He shifted slightly in his uniform. A short way up the road, he pulled the Buick over and placed his hand on hers.

  What does one say to his daughter now, Alice wonders, remembering. Nothing much. A kiss is a kiss. That is what they did, not much more. When he pressed her against the seat, she whispered, although there was nobody at all in the wide moonlit paddocks who would see or hear them: ‘Are you going to root me now?’

  ‘No,’ he said and didn’t stop kissing her. ‘It’s all right, I’m not going to give you a baby yet. I’m going to look after you.’ He drew her tongue into his mouth, coaxing it with the tip of his, that flickering, darting tongue she had watched, hotter and sweeter than she had imagined, clean of cigarettes since his training had begun. He kissed her throat, down the length of her arm to her fingertips, turned her hands over and kissed the palms and back up into the crooks of her elbows. He slid her blouse down over her shoulders and drew circles round her nipples with his tongue, and all the time he breathed deeply as if drawing the scent of her body into his. She felt as Rhoda Aukett must have felt. She could smell something familiar, flowery and delicate: her body, like Rhoda’s must have done, blooming under his touch. He parted her legs and momentarily rested his hand between them.