by Fiona Kidman
The theatre was empty, except for her and Lawrence, who came and sat with her once the film was running through the projection machine. He had to duck back to change the reels, but the rest of the time he sat leaning slightly towards her so that their shoulders touched.
‘You like that?’ Lawrence asked when it was over. They still sat in the dark.
‘I loved it,’ she sighed.
He leaned closer, breathing against her neck, like a hot gust of wind. When he ran his finger lightly up and down her bare arm, she didn’t stop him.
‘What’s this then?’ he said, his finger paused at a point beneath her elbow.
‘What’s what?’
He rubbed his thumb and finger together, ‘It’s something hard.’
‘It’s my needle,’ she said.
‘Your needle?’
She told him then about the way the needle had broken off and how it was still floating about inside her, how it didn’t really hurt, that mostly she’d forgotten all about it, even when she was in the hospital having the boys and should have mentioned it to the doctor. Just sometimes it surfaced in funny places. Perhaps she’d have it taken out if it ever caused any trouble.
‘You could be dead by then,’ Lawrence said.
‘Yes, well, thanks very much.’
‘I could show you my scar if you like.’
‘No doubt you will anyway,’ she said. She reached out and touched the raised red mark on his flat milky-white stomach. It reminded her of her children’s stomachs. When he guided her hand further down, beyond the scar, to his busy entertaining penis, she thought, why not? Well, why not? She liked being able to give something to someone. She’d had a nice afternoon.
At home, she looked in the mirror at her smudged face. ‘You fool,’ she said and couldn’t help laughing, the ridiculous position she’d put herself in, the awkwardness of seats in movie theatres, the way they sprang up behind you when you shifted.
I should leave, she told herself. It’s time to get out of here.
But not yet.
Her new baby slipped into the world with hardly a murmur, just a stretch and a wriggle when Esme was standing at the door saying goodbye to Joan Stott, who’d been to collect a dress, as if birth were a frivolous occasion, a good story to be told. Esme hardly had time to lie down on the sofa in the front room. Joan cut the umbilical cord with Esme’s pinking shears.
The new baby didn’t look like anyone in particular. She had wide eyes, which, when she was older, would assume a slightly startled look. Jim seemed pleased to have a daughter.
‘I’d like to call her Janet,’ she told Jim before he had a chance to ask. She’d thought about Esther, but it sounded too like her own name, so she settled for Janet.
Dear Esme, wrote Pearl,
I’m having a great time here in Wellington. There’s Americans everywhere and they are so good to us girls who are entertaining them. I just love the Marines. You should have seen me down Manners Street the other night wearing one of their caps. Laugh. Me and my friends laughed and laughed. I sing in a club. Give baby Janet a kiss, I’ll meet her some day and tell those little brothers of hers to be good boys and do their homework just like their aunty did (ha ha).
Love from your sister Pearl
For all her easy delivery, Janet cried a lot. Jim walked her up and down and stayed home some days to help look after the children. His pay was down, so Esme took in more work. She was always tired. Someone had threatened to burn the picture theatre down, and Lawrence had taken himself off because some of the servicemen home on leave were throwing rocks on his roof. Norma and her husband moved on, back up north, which was a relief to Esme. People shifted from this place all the time.
‘I’m sorry we didn’t get to move away from here,’ she said to Jim one evening. She was holding her daughter on her hip with one hand while she put his dinner on the table with the other. ‘I expect we should have gone anyway.’ She didn’t say ‘after the accident’, although that’s what she was thinking. Any number of accidents, if it came to that. It was hard to fathom how their lives had been so pulled apart. She didn’t feel exactly responsible. Something had started a long way back, before she could in any way decide for herself how things should have been. Back when she was young. Somewhere in the deep sleep of her early life, in a place she didn’t recognise.
‘I don’t want to leave here,’ Jim said, in a mild, alarmed voice. ‘This is where I live.’
Things had shifted between them. Before, she had been the one afraid to leave. Before the Depression was over, before the war started, before the movies. Now she wanted to go, but she couldn’t see how.
‘I thought you’d settle down, now that you’ve got children.’
No more babies, she resolved. She’d take herself more seriously. Another letter had come. It said, like the song, I Wonder Who’s Kissing Her Now. She screwed it up and put it in the fire, but her cheeks burned at the memory of it.
She began to dream every night, bad dreams of wild engines, heaving and grunting like animals in flight. They would disappear, and she would be alone in a clearing. This abandonment was worse because now there was only silence. Cobwebs caught her clothes. When she woke up, she lay in bed panting, trying to brush the threads away from her face.
Later in the war, Esme got a phone call from a woman who ran a boarding house in Hawker Street in Wellington. It was about her sister Pearl, who had been living there. Pearl was in the hospital in Newtown and really sick. It would be as well if Esme could come and see her because the doctors weren’t that hopeful. Bad pneumonia, the woman said, in a sombre way.
‘I’d better take the train down tonight,’ Esme told Jim.
‘I should go. You don’t know anything about cities.’
‘I’ve been to Auckland. I’ll manage, she’s my sister.’
He shot her a look then, that later she would think of as pure dislike.
What she would remember were the flags down Cuba Street, like clothes on a washing line outside the People’s Palace where she stayed. And all the cars. She counted twenty-five in the street at one time. She looked in the Union Clothing Company for things to take home for Jim and the boys, but decided she could make them just as well. This was while she still thought she was going back. And there was the tram that took her out to Newtown to the big red-brick hospital with the endless corridors.
And collecting Pearl’s things from the hospital — not much, because she’d been taken there by ambulance in the night: just a night dress and a gold-plated watch that looked new. Signing her name so that Pearl could be released for burial. She glimpsed Pearl at the undertaker’s and said, yes, that was her. That surprising milk sheen of her skin. She had to believe it was Pearl in the coffin. It is her, she told herself, it’s Pearl, that’s Pearl in there. At the boarding house, clothes to pack, dresses with skirts that would have been billowy in Wellington’s winds, she had made some of them herself, and hair combs and make-up, and some bits of jewellery. Esme remembered the brooch then, the one her mother planned to give Pearl, and wondered what would happen to it now. Some packets of cigarettes that she gave to an American who came to the door looking for Pearl because he didn’t know she was dead. A few photographs, one of Queenie and Stick, and a couple of Pearl and Raymond taken at the Junction. The next day, Queenie and Stick arrived at Wellington Railway Station, Stick with vacant watery eyes, Queenie hobbling on a cane by this time, older and fatter and tired. Just a touch of gout, she said, nothing to worry about.
Later in the day, Joe and Bunty drove down in their big black Hudson from Taihape where they were share-milking. Joe had a shock of grey hair already. So, there was family there when they buried Pearl. Joe stood close to Esme, and she moved away from him.
The minister who the woman from the boarding house had found said, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’
‘I’m sorry, Esme,’ Queenie said. ‘It shouldn’t have happened to her.’
/> ‘It’s all right, Mum,’ said Esme, who’d done with crying the night before they all arrived. Something had shifted and hardened in her.
‘She was just too good for this world,’ said Queenie. ‘Our magic girl.’
‘Yes,’ said Esme. ‘Magic.’ Perhaps Pearl really had been a trick of the light.
‘You’ve got to get on with things,’ Joe said, which reminded Esme that she hated him.
‘I don’t get the connection,’ one of Esme’s daughters-in-law would say to her one day. ‘Is that why you left? Because Pearl died?’
‘I suppose so,’ Esme said. ‘Well, she had something to do with it.’
‘But you left the children.’
‘I sent for Janet.’
‘What about the boys, though? You left the boys.’
Why people leave. There are as many answers as there are people who go, dividing and uncoiling their lives from one another. Esme thought you could drive yourself crazy, thinking about things like this. She did feel things, whatever people thought.
The boys had gone to live with Queenie and Stick for a while because Jim had died before they’d grown up. Then they went to Mary, Esme’s older sister, and from there they had gone on to Joe and Bunty’s, though nobody mentioned this to Esme at the time. Back and forth, no regular place to call home.
‘Yes, it was to do with Pearl,’ she said to her daughter-inlaw. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
3
Philip loved the way Petra looked, the strong eyes, her tender, mobile mouth. She wore her hair in a straight, brown bob, her breasts were so small she looked flat-chested some ways she stood, but she had a vitality about her that made him feel at home, as if he were in the presence of someone he had always known. Every time he saw her, he experienced a swoop of joy, one that never went away, even when they were older and things turned to shit now and then, as they were busy making their marks in the world.
They were students when they met. She wore tight skirts with dark sweaters, black stockings and flat-heeled lace-up shoes. When she came towards him in the street, she would have pulled a beret over her hair, a long scarf trailing behind. The year he became engaged to her, Petra was rehearsing As You Like It with the university drama school. She was Rosalind. Of course. He was helping to build sets in his spare time.
‘My parents will drive you crazy,’ she told him when they had chosen the engagement ring. ‘I do love them,’ she added, a little parenthesis she used from time to time when she spoke of her mother and father. Like an apology. She was an only child. This was a time when young women like Petra were throwing convention out the window. She was a banner-waver like him, a ranter and a raver, hurling herself into causes like ban the bomb and trade unions, and the polemics of poetry; she believed it was all right for her to tell him when she was hot for him.
All the same, she was embarrassed when she said, ‘We’ll have to have a big wedding. D’you mind?’
‘Just as long as you’re there,’ he’d said, trying to sound resolute.
‘They’ll want your guest list.’
‘I won’t have one, just your friends and mine. The rest’s up to you.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. Your family and all that.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t have any family to ask.’
The Blue Rose China Shop was in a long, elegant room with timber panelling. Margaret Ellis and her husband, Nicholas, a dentist, owned the whole building. Margaret, or Mrs Ellis as she preferred to be called in the shop, was on the phone ordering a dinner set for a special customer, not someone she could hurry, when she spotted a woman turning the Denby Chevron mugs over and pursing her lips at the prices. An older woman, a bit rough around the edges. Her hair was crimped in a fraying ginger perm, and her feet bulged in their shoes.
‘Can I help you?’ Margaret asked, putting the phone down at last. ‘Something for yourself, or a gift? A wedding in the offing, perhaps?’
‘My girls are long married,’ said the woman, putting a mug down harder than was necessary. ‘But I hear you’ve got one coming up, Mrs Ellis?’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, letting the distance in her voice lengthen.
‘I saw the engagement in the paper.’ The notice in the paper had said: Mr and Mrs Nicholas Ellis are delighted to announce the forthcoming marriage of their daughter Petra Jean to Philip Moffit of Wellington. Nothing about Philip’s parents.
The woman introduced herself. She was a widow. Her husband used to be in the post office, but he’d passed on a few years back. They’d had hard times in the old days, but she’d learned to count her blessings. Her conversation was more of a continuous monologue than an exchange. She paused when Margaret looked at her wrist watch. ‘You reckon that boy Moffit’s from Wellington?’
Margaret steadied herself on the edge of the counter as if she’d been caught off balance. ‘Our daughter’s fiancé?’
‘Well, there might be any number of Philip Moffits. But I know that name. Family came from Ohakune way, didn’t they?’
‘I don’t remember Philip mentioning that.’ Only she couldn’t look the woman in the eye. Petra had told her some brief sketch of his history that he’d given her. The fact was she had no idea. ‘We haven’t spent a lot of time with him yet. The two young people are studying, you see. Philip’s nearly finished his law degree.’
‘The law. Young Philip’s in the law. Well, my oh my. There’s a few things I could tell you about that young man’s family I’ll bet you don’t know. I put a lot of time into his mother, not that Esme gave me thanks, oh no.’
‘I’d love to have let her have her say,’ Margaret told Nicholas that evening. ‘Perhaps I should have.’
‘It was probably lies. Gossip.’
‘She said she was the postmaster’s wife. It sounded pretty convincing. She said, “I suppose he would keep things to himself. Tell you about his dad, did he? Whoever he was?” I asked her to leave then. I told her I was shutting while I went to the bank. So she left.’
‘You did the right thing.’ All the same, her husband looked as if he had just come across a particularly unpleasant mouthful of decay.
‘What’s she doing, marrying this boy? We know nothing.’
‘It’s too late now,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to make the best of it.’
‘Darling,’ Petra said one evening, soon after this. She and Philip were walking up the hill towards Kelburn, where they shared a flat with four other students. ‘Darling, couldn’t you come up with an invitation list?’
‘We’ve been through this, ask who you like.’ He’d explained already how his mother had gone off with a man called Kevin Pudney and left him and his brother with his father. How none of it had worked out, not for him anyway, until he managed to put it behind him and make it on his own. The going off with Kevin Pudney part was an elaboration, not exactly true, but Kevin had been there when his mother next surfaced in his life.
‘My parents just don’t understand that you’re not going to ask anyone at all. Couldn’t you put up with your mother, just for a day?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I couldn’t. My mother wrecked everything. My father went to pieces after she left.’
‘There might have been two sides to it.’
‘Don’t you believe that. My father was a saint. It killed him, her leaving him.’
‘You said he had cancer.’
‘Well, she gave it to him.’
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Philip,’ Petra said. ‘People don’t catch cancer. It’s something that grows inside them.’
He walked off ahead of her then, knowing she would follow him. They would say they were sorry to each other, her, then him, in that order.
4
The day of her son’s wedding, in the spring of 1964, Esme Pudney got dressed in the small boarding house near the bus station where she was staying in Tauranga. The air was fragrant, scented with citrus blossoms; the gardens full of daffodils and forget-me-nots. She put on a blue silk dress with a h
int of pale silver in the weave, liking the way it felt in the soft swathe of colour from the pleats at her hips. She dabbed lavender water between her breasts, powdered her sun freckles. She and Kevin took long summer holidays in their caravan, staying in camping grounds or just near the edge of wildernesses, near lakes and streams. This was after Kevin retired from contract fencing. He was older than her by twelve years. The children were grown up, the two they called their children: Esme’s daughter Janet and his girl Marlene, who were pretty much the same age. Marlene had been his youngest, as Janet was hers. He’d been left with Marlene after his wife died. They didn’t have much money to come and go on, but when they were chatting to new friends over a barbie, they liked to say they had enough to get by.
Esme left a note for Kevin to say she’d be back on the bus on Sunday evening. It wasn’t as if she were afraid of him, it was just that he would have thought her a fool. He couldn’t see why she bothered herself about those sons of hers, especially the second one. They’d had them to live for a while, but it was an experiment that didn’t work out. He’d given Philip the rounds of the kitchen sink more than once. It wasn’t that Philip didn’t deserve it, impudent kid that he was, but she did wish Kevin had tried to talk things over with the kid before he let fly. But that was Kevin, a man of action. Like Philip’s father, perhaps, although when she remembered Conrad now, there wasn’t much she could have told you about him. Where he came from. Who he really was. Not even how old he was. She hadn’t asked. If she were honest, it was Jim she really admired. His goodness and the way that he’d stuck to the boys for as long as he could. The way he’d gone on until the end without asking her to say sorry, though, Lord knows, she was.
A crowd of well-wishers had gathered outside the church, the way people did on Saturday afternoons. Esme stood at the back of the crowd, but slightly to one side so she could still get a good view. She’d learned about the wedding from Joe’s wife. Bunty called Joe the old bugger and didn’t let him get away with much. When Joe heard about the wedding, and how they hadn’t been asked, he told his wife to let it go, Philip had moved on from the family long ago. He said this with injury in his voice. How did she think his sister Esme felt, now that was the real rub.