by Fiona Kidman
They travelled on the night train. It was running late, so they had to sit on the platform in the cool darkness for a long time, waiting for it to come. The waiting room was closed until the train pulled in. Esme had told her family to go home to bed: there was no point in everyone being worn out. There didn’t seem a lot for her and Jim to say. She realised how little she knew him.
On the way north, he opened up, talking about his job and describing the train tablet system. He worked out of a hut, one of a series along the Main Trunk railway line. He travelled there on goods trains, and at the end of his shift he got picked up and taken home. The tablets were part of the spacing system that set the course of the trains and ensured that there were never two engines on the same stretch of line at once. The numbered tablets were picked up and carried from one section of the line to the other, and only when the tablet, or the ‘biscuit’ as the men called it, was safely under lock and key at the other end of the section was it safe for the train to proceed. That was when the green light beamed its semaphore message down the line, giving the all clear. With express trains and goods trains rattling past, there was no time for a lapse of attention, no failure of detail that could be allowed.
‘I see it’s a very important job,’ Esme said soberly. They were rushing through another small town. Dawn light was breaking. A deep wide river flowed past them on their left. Stained and grimy miners were gathered near a station, their day ending as others began. Esme felt like them.
‘I hold life in these hands,’ Jim said, holding out his splayed palms. She shivered, wondering if she were up to the task of supporting Jim in his work. He seemed to read the way she felt. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be a team. It’s going to make a big difference to me, having a wife and comfortable home to come back to at the end of my shift.’
‘I’ll do my best, Jim.’
‘I can teach you things.’
‘What sort of things?’ she asked, her voice faint. The train wheels beneath her said click click tschick click click tschik.
‘Wait and see.’
‘I left school when I was thirteen. Didn’t my father tell you that?’
‘Don’t worry about all of that right now,’ he said. ‘It’s just you I want.’ They still had to get to Auckland, to make love for the first time, to discover who each other really was. She was becoming frightened of him. Then she thought it was just because they were both exhausted and it was taking each of them in funny ways. She wondered if they would go straight to bed when they got to the hotel.
But that wasn’t the plan. Jim had arranged a day of sightseeing first, so that she was so tired she hardly remembered what came next.
When she sat at breakfast the next morning, she felt strangely untouched, recalling more of the clean white cotton sheets that had covered her than his body. She had turned to him first thing when she woke. Some mornings at home, Pearl climbed into bed beside her. They would go back to sleep; in cold weather Pearl warming her feet on the backs of Esme’s legs. So it was Pearl she looked for when she felt someone in the bed with her, but it was Jim. He kissed her forehead. ‘Good morning, Mrs Moffit,’ he said. She had felt a weightless sensation, as if she were not really there. Soon after, the housemaid had knocked on the door and delivered cups of tea.
‘Milk and sugar everyone?’ she’d called.
‘Jim, do you take sugar?’ Esme said.
‘Hush,’ he said, when they were on their own again. ‘She’ll know we’re just married.’
While they were waiting for their breakfast to be served, he pointed out the cutlery on the table. ‘Do you see how they set the knives and forks out?’ he said. This was how he liked things, everything exactly in place, the knife and fork straight beside the table mats and the bread and butter plates square on the right-hand side of the knife with the small knife pointed straight ahead. A quick learner like her would have no trouble at all.
2
In the morning, after Jim had gone, Esme walked to the window and looked at the mountain, or the place where the mountain should be if the rain was not falling and turning to sleet. Behind her, a thin fire spluttered, spitting sap from wet bark, emitting a smell like incense. It reminded her of the magician she and her mother had met up Taumarunui way when she was still a girl, of the strange soft scent in the air that somehow proclaimed that nothing is real, nothing you ever knew exists. There is only illusion. The whistle of a train sounded through the mist, a long exhalation, a breath, another one. There he goes, she thought, there goes Jim, up the line, the fate of travellers in his hands.
The house in Railway Row was one of twenty-four, twelve on either side of the straight street that ran exactly parallel to the railway lines a few feet away. Tough bush covered the slope above, while flax and toetoe bushes like soft calico flags shivered in the wind alongside the tracks.
Esme gathered up dishes from the table with a snap and a rattle. Jim’s irritation had started before breakfast. She knew she wasn’t functioning properly. Everything about her felt heavy and tired. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t slept; in fact, she’d slept so deeply that when the alarm clock went off she hadn’t known where she was.
‘Hurry up, will you,’ he’d said, razor in his hand as he came into the bedroom bare-chested, his braces hanging in loops over his thighs.
She wanted to say to him, how about you get your own breakfast for once, but she knew that wouldn’t do. Though it wasn’t as if she didn’t work too. On a good week, she could earn almost as much as Jim, not that she mentioned this because it made him angry in a way she couldn’t understand. Her dressmaking skills had followed her to Ohakune Junction.
When he did sit down to eat, breakfast didn’t please him. He looked as if he were going to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me.’
‘Perhaps you’re doing too much,’ he said.
‘I need something to fill the days,’ she said, surprised to hear herself answering back.
‘Yes, I suppose you do.’ He sighed and folded his napkin, leaving half his food on the plate. ‘You should get Pearl to help you more.’
‘Pearl? She’s only a little kid.’ Pearl was asleep in the spare room that was hers when she came for the holidays. It was the room put aside for babies.
‘She’s ten. Old enough to do a bit around the house. Her mother spoils that girl, and you’re just as bad.’
‘She’s going home in a couple of days.’
She smiled at him then, put her face up for him to kiss, and he seemed restored to good humour, pinching her cheek and looking down fondly at her for a moment before picking up his coat. He glanced out the window at the ugly weather.
‘The truth is I could do with a day in bed myself.’
‘What would the boss have to say about that?’
‘He’d probably say what a lucky devil I was, spending the day under the blankets with a fine-looking woman like you.’
‘Jim, he wouldn’t.’ She felt herself reddening.
‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,’ he said.
Once he had gone, she considered cutting a pattern right away instead of washing the dishes. Routine, Jim always said, and she could feel him looking over her shoulder. It put her back in a bad mood, so that she clattered around the kitchen, banging dishes about. You couldn’t tell how things were going to turn out. She liked this house. In the front room there were crocheted lace curtains that had taken her months to make. The room was furnished with three wooden-framed armchairs, with red slip covers on the cushions, and a stand-up gramophone. But now, just when everything was finished, Jim was talking about going for promotion, trying to get a job closer to the city. She didn’t know how she would fit into a big place.
‘What’s the matter?’ Pearl stood in the doorway in her nightgown.
‘Oh, it’s you. Go and tell your mother she wants you.’ She was surprised at the sharpness of her voice.
‘Have I missed breakfast?’
‘I’ve kept you some.’
‘I thought you were mad, all the noise you were making.’
‘I’m tired. I wouldn’t mind if you got dressed and washed the dishes.’
‘It’s just like home,’ Pearl muttered.
‘Well, you better get used to it. The holidays are nearly over.’
‘I could go to school here.’
‘No you can’t.’
‘You are mad, aren’t you?’
Suddenly Esme wanted to cry. She hated Pearl going back to Queenie. She told herself that it was just that she liked having a kid around the place, one of the family. But this morning she wanted to cut out her pattern by herself in peace, with just the sound of the rain coming down.
No, not even that. What she wanted was to sit and work out what was happening; something was going on that she couldn’t figure out.
Pearl picked up a dishcloth and swiped it around as if she didn’t know what to do with it. Esme bit back a rebuke. My little sister, she said proudly, when she introduced her to folk at the Junction. She still had creamy skin and fair hair. Her teeth were prominent with one tooth much whiter than the others, giving her the appearance of a slightly lopsided rabbit when she smiled. Her talent was singing. She knew all the hymns, and at Christmas she sang a verse of ‘Silent Night’ on her own at the church:
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild
You could hear a ripple around the congregation: her high notes would make crystal shiver. Her singing was the one thing about Pearl that pleased Jim.
When everything was cleared away and the tablecloth folded, Esme laid out the material for the dress she was about to begin, pink linen for the postmistress’s wife. Esme would have liked to tell Norma that the colour wouldn’t go with her red hair, but Norma was a woman who fancied her own taste. Besides, Norma paid her promptly and liked a chat. Esme laid the pattern on the table and considered it. She could see the sleeves were going to be troublesome; she might have to improvise a bit.
Her sewing machine was a treadle, which meant she could keep both hands free to guide the material while her feet pumped below, going really fast.
‘Look,’ said Pearl, ‘there’s a whole lot of men running down to the station.’
‘For goodness’ sake,’ said Esme, and it was at that minute, when emergency sirens were beginning to wail all over the town, that she ran her hand under the speeding needle; it snapped in two, the top shaft entering her thumb as it jerked free of the spindle that held it.
‘Oh,’ cried Esme, ‘oh, oh.’ Her hand was covered in a froth of bright blood.
Pearl was at the window, peering out. ‘There’s been an accident.’
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ All the same, she went to the door and opened it, dread in the pit of her stomach. Men in heavy coats were dashing towards a jigger. ‘What is it?’ she called, but nobody heard her, and in a minute they had disappeared down the line.
‘Shut the door and come inside,’ she said at last. Her hand still ached where it had been struck by the needle, but the bleeding had stopped. She was sure the needle had gone in, but as there was no sign of it she began to think she had imagined it. The sharp end of the needle was lying on the floor where it had landed. Perhaps the other half had flown across the room and landed in the wood box.
She set to work installing and threading a new needle. The pain in her hand persisted, but when she pressed her thumb, and then her whole hand, she couldn’t locate the source of the pain. It occurred to her that the needle might have floated away in her veins.
‘Perhaps I should see the doctor,’ she said to Pearl.
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It’s better now.’ Funny, but as soon as she thought about going to the doctor the pain stopped. She and Jim kept a guinea in a jar on the top shelf of the kitchen in case they needed the doctor; you didn’t want to get caught short for emergencies. There might be other needs, more urgent than a stray sewing-machine needle that she couldn’t see or find.
And now, some new knowledge entered her, a mysterious unravelling of something so obvious, so already known, that she didn’t see how she hadn’t worked it out already.
‘How would you like to be an aunty?’ she said to Pearl.
‘Are you and Jim having a baby?’
‘Yes, that’s right, we are too.’
‘I thought you and Jim couldn’t have babies.’
‘Who said that?’
‘I think Mum just wondered. Is Jim pleased?’
‘He doesn’t know yet.’
‘You mean, you told me first?’
‘Looks like it, don’t tell him I told you.’
Pearl said she’d come down in the holidays and help Esme bath the baby and change its clothes.
‘I’d like that,’ Esme said.
The rain was clearing, and the hooded mountain began to reveal itself, pointing its ice fingers through the cloud. Just looking at its snow-clad slopes made her shiver. A big knot of people had gathered on the platform, the women emptied out of their houses.
The station master, Alec Grimes, said yes, there’d been a collision on the line, a couple of goods trains. A man had been killed. The Daylight Limited pulled in and wasn’t allowed to go any further north, so that now passengers joined with the locals, looking helpless and shaken, while the steam engines panted and hissed on the track.
That evening, very late, Jim came in, white around the mouth. There was a new man in the control hut, a man who was supposed to have finished his training. He was a Māori chap. Probably couldn’t read, if you knew the truth of the matter. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Jim said, ‘even if I was in charge. You can’t have eyes in the back of your head. They shouldn’t have let that Māori loose. He should never have been allowed the key to the tablets.’
Afterwards, he admitted he shouldn’t have said that.
Jim didn’t lose his job, although the managers said it was touch and go. He was known as a good worker, perhaps the whole mistake couldn’t be laid at his feet. But his chances of promotion had gone for the time being.
When Esme and Jim’s son Neil was two years old, she saw Conrad Larsen and fell in love, for the first and only time in her life. All the rest were things, things that just happened, accommodations good and bad, but not love. He was leaning out of a locomotive window as it came into the station, his red cheeks alight from the glow of the firebox he’d been stoking, his navy-blue cap pushed back on his head. Later, she discovered the bald dome beneath the cap, saw the way his head shone in the sunlight. His big gleaming teeth sparkled against the soot where he’d wiped his hand across his mouth.
It happened on a day when she’d had what amounted to a quarrel with her friend Norma. Norma had blue eyes and reddish hair that she wore in tight curls. Esme thought she was a lonely woman. Her daughters had already left home. But since Neil was born, she and Norma had gone past a business relationship and visited each other in their homes, although mostly Esme visited Norma, in her big house with its verandah and trim on the other side of the railway tracks. Neil was at that stage when he was into everything and opening cupboards. She had to watch out for him. Norma liked looking after Neil now and then, and it suited Esme. Jim wasn’t sure she should leave him with someone else, even for a little while, but what harm could it do while she walked down to the shops for their meat and a few groceries. She didn’t tell Jim about the times when she just went for walks along the paths that led towards the mountain or along the banks of the stream that led to the waterfall. Some days she wondered if she was cut out for motherhood.
It was high summer, and the mountain was stripped of all but its crown of snow and surrounded by a blue haze, the day Esme fell out with Norma. The heat inside the houses had been building since the sun came up.
Norma stood at her bench mincing leftovers from the previous night’s roast to make into rissoles. Her eyes were on Neil, seated at the table eating a biscuit.
He was a quiet child with a narrow face and slender, curved eyebrows. ‘If you like, you could go down and see your mother for the day. Take the morning train down and back on the night train. We’d like that, wouldn’t we, little man?’
‘I couldn’t do that, he’d miss his feed.’
Norma stopped what she was doing. ‘You haven’t still got that kid on the tit, have you?’
‘Just a couple of times a day.’
‘That’s disgusting,’ Norma said, dusting flour off her hands. ‘A big boy like that. What does your husband think of that?’
‘We’ll go and meet your dad,’ Esme said, lifting Neil down from the chair, not looking at Norma.
‘Not that it’s any of my business.’
‘No,’ said Esme, ‘not really.’ She fled from the house, gathering up Neil and his toys, as if she had been caught out. Her breasts felt heavy and ripe and shameful. The image of her mother’s exposed flesh flashed before her.
‘You’ll be back,’ Norma said, as she paused to open the door. Esme knew then that Norma saw into her, understood that Esme was not really happy in her life, yearned for some kind of freedom that, in some small measure, she offered her.
It was too early for Jim to come home, but she and Neil waited on the platform all the same. Esme heard a goods train’s warning whistle and, as it arrived, the sound she loved: the steam belching up while the brakes of the massive machines ground to a halt, the big engine straining like a horse in its stall.
Jim wasn’t on the train, but Conrad was.
When she remembers, she thinks how unlikely it was that he would look at her twice. Already she had adopted the ways of an older woman, wearing her hair up in a bun and cheap glasses because she couldn’t thread a needle without them.