by Fiona Kidman
They went back to Joe and Bunty’s place for the wake. There were sponge cakes and cups of tea and beer laid out on trestle tables under the trees.
‘Is it true you’re a lawyer?’ the relatives kept saying to Philip, in a kind of astonished wonder. ‘Well, we’ll know where to come next time we land a speeding ticket.’ They laughed awkwardly at their own jokes.
‘Aren’t you on the telly?’ Marlene asked Petra. ‘Where are your children? You haven’t left them at home, surely to goodness?’ Philip hadn’t wanted them to come; Jesse and Marigold were at home in Wellington with Debbie.
And then there was Esme, who came to the edge of the lawn and stood looking at the gathering and looked away.
‘Poor old Mum,’ said Marlene. ‘It’s been hard for her since Dad’s been gone.’
Petra could feel Philip stiffening. ‘D’you mean Kevin’s dead?’
Marlene looked at him with dislike. ‘My dad, what’s it to you?’
‘I’m going over to say hullo,’ Petra said to Philip. After a moment, he turned and followed her.
‘Hullo,’ Esme said. ‘I was just going.’
‘So are we,’ said Petra. ‘Can we walk with you?’
The three of them walked abreast, not saying much. ‘It’s sad about Joe,’ Petra said, as they stood by the cars, ready to leave.
Esme’s eyes narrowed. ‘I needed to see the back of him,’ she said.
On the way home, Philip cried, wiping his face with the back of one hand while he drove. ‘I don’t want to think about her,’ he said.
‘But you do,’ Petra said. ‘You never stop. You never have.’
Dear Petra, Esme wrote, I feel as if I have known you forever. I’m sure lots of people say this to you, because your face is so well known, but this is more than about you being on television. It is something that comes from inside me. It’s something that understands why he would have looked towards you for his wife. I was once touched by a magician when I was a girl, and it changed my life forever. There is good magic and bad magic and this man brought some of both kinds to me, but I was never the same afterwards. I know about spells and how they are cast. Some spells can’t be broken. I hope to hear from you sometime. Love from your mother-in-law, Esme.
‘I told you she was a liar,’ Philip said, ‘That’s an old yarn of my grandmother’s about the magician, it’s not her story at all. Something to do with my Aunty Pearl. The one who died. My grandmother told me she had my aunty after the magician came to town, even though she was old. A kind of miracle. You see, she takes everything as if it were her own.’
‘I see what you mean,’ Petra said. At the time she was working on another film. She meant to write back to Esme straight away, but it took her awhile to get around to it. When she did, she enclosed pictures of the children. Later, Esme sent her a brooch, a tangled old gold piece of jewellery that needed fixing.
Philip held it in his hand when he saw it, as if weighing it. ‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I never knew she had this. I remember my grandmother wearing it. Well, you are a hit. I’d have thought she’d have given it to Janet.’
‘I must write to her.’ She was due to go away again.
‘Leave it with me,’ he said. ‘I’ll fix it.’
Esme knew he would come. She knew if she waited long enough, lived long enough, that he would come to her. The girl (for that is how she thought of Petra) had her own life. She didn’t begrudge her that. She was pleased to get a postcard from her to thank her for the brooch. I’ll always treasure it, Petra wrote. The postcard had been sent from Australia where Petra was on tour. Petra was like her, but she’d got lucky: she’d married the right one at the beginning.
Esme’s apartment was in the second storey of a block of council flats. She had to climb stairs that were bare and had been pissed on, and she was afraid of some of the young people who hung around there after dark, but the view across rolling country hills was just what she liked, and she had no need to go out at night. Her name was on the waiting list for a ground-floor place, but she didn’t care if it didn’t happen. Anyone stepping inside her door quickly forgot the ascent through the graffiti in the stairwell. She had turned the flat into a colourful cave, the armchairs covered with peggy-square quilts, the shelves laden with bits and pieces she’d collected along the way, a ruby-red glass a farmer’s wife had given her, a blue-and-white ashet from a house where the wife died, a collection of shells that she and Janet and Marlene had collected one holiday at the Mount, pot plants and photographs galore.
‘I can get you somewhere better,’ Philip said when he came to visit. He had turned up unexpectedly with Jesse and Marigold.
‘I wish you’d given me some warning,’ she said. ‘I’d like to have got food in for them.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘we’ve sussed out the fish-and-chip shop. They’re going down the road to get some lunch, aren’t you kids?’
So they were alone in the flat together.
‘They’re beautiful,’ she said, ‘so handsome and tall for their age. So full of self-confidence.’
‘They take after their mother.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘I can afford to get you another place.’
‘I don’t need another place. I like it here.’
‘You can’t.’ He gestured helplessly.
‘What’s wrong with this?’ She looked around the room, and her eyes travelled on to the hills beyond the window. It was spring, bare trees in the distance were flushed with sweet unfolding buds. ‘Pretty as a picture.’
‘Did you ever care for my father?’ he said, his back to her, as if contemplating what she saw outside. She could tell he knew that he sounded banal, even silly. That he couldn’t help himself asking the question, and didn’t know a better way of putting it. ‘You know, did you love him?’
‘Of course,’ she said quickly. Too quickly, perhaps. She steadied herself. ‘He tried to look after me. It just didn’t work out.’
‘Look after you?’
‘Protect me.’
‘From what?’
‘It’s hard to explain. He was a good man.’
He passed his hand over his head. His hair was trimmed neatly, in the centre of his forehead a triangle of hair grew down to a point, his scalp gleaming on either side.
‘About Pearl.’
‘Well, that was a long time ago,’ she said, holding his gaze. ‘A sister.’ Not my sister, or your sister. That old needle, jostling away with distant pain. She wondered if he would understand. About the old days, about the magic that wasn’t so mysterious after all, and about her little Pearl who had come into her life when she was still a child herself, and her bad brother Joe and what he had done to her. And how nothing had ever healed that — and the way her mother tried to make things all right, but they never could be fixed.
‘What about her?’ he said. ‘You left when Pearl died.’
‘Do you remember her?’ Not answering him.
‘Not really.’
‘Never mind. Look, that’s her in the photograph with her first boyfriend. I think he was killed in the war.’
‘She was pretty.’
‘Pretty enough. A bit flighty. She could sing. You wouldn’t believe how long she could hold a high note.’ She might have added something about the way she had tried to look after her, and how when that failed she didn’t believe she could look after any of her children. But she stayed silent.
‘I see,’ he said at last, and from the way he spoke, she wondered what he knew, what he had already worked out for himself, the truth of what she was telling him and not telling him. There was a stamping of feet on the stairs leading up to the apartment as his children returned.
After they had all gone, she lay down on the bed, overtaken by a kind of dizziness. It wasn’t new to her. It amazed her that so far she had survived death’s steady rhythm, that she had outlived so many people. She heard a car start below. Somewhere in her old aching, bitten heart, she thought, there h
e goes, my clever boy. He had come to her.
What happened now was not important. She had seen him, and an old remembered happiness stirred within.
3
Awry
Fragrance Rising
Swimming
The prime minister’s towel is green with a narrow pink stripe at either end, a towel chosen by a woman. It lies where he’s tossed it aside before stepping into the swimming bath. In his woollen bathing suit, straps taut over his shoulders, he is a black seal slicing through the water, powerful arms plunging, shoulders rearing up and down and up again in a perfect butterfly stroke. Despite all the speed and energy, this is his time for reflecting, a place where there are no secretaries, or bells calling him to the chamber, or papers that can be pushed beneath his nose. This is the place where, in his head at least, he cannot be joined by others.
Not that he is without his spectators. There are people who enjoy the sense of being close to power, who can say that they have seen Mr Gordon Coates himself in his swimming trunks. So near I could almost have touched him, they will say when they return home, for most of them are from the country come to town to take in the sights. And they love him because he is one of them, a country boy who made good. Not an educated man, they will continue, someone like us who didn’t stay long at school, but look at the way we get by — like him, we don’t need fancy letters after our names, and he has risen right to the top. He has worn a braided jacket and white breeches and shoes with buckles when he went to meet the king. These viewers, who have come to watch the prime minister take his daily constitutional, huddle on the lower path near the water rather than the sheltered gallery, so that when he has finished his swim he must pass them. The Thorndon Baths have a square tower above the dressing rooms and two domed ornamental roofs. Winter is close; there is menace in the wind. You would think that would deter the prime minister, but it seems he swims wet or fine or even when Wellington’s southerly is whipping the harbour into a frenzy. The watching men wear trousers that are a little baggy and shiny at the knees, their Sunday best, and high collars beneath their jackets, scarves billowing about them. The women clutch their wraps, legs quivering with cold beneath the new short skirts of the day, woollen cloche hats pulled around their ears.
He lifts his head from the water and, on this fresh morning in late May, he smells a whiff of wood smoke curling from the houses nearby. All of a sudden, there is an ache at the back of his throat and he sees not the blue floor of the swimming pool but the heavy green light that glances through the ebb and flow of the Arapaoa, the slow salt tide between mangrove banks. He catches the fragrance rising from log fires in open paddocks, a fallen macrocarpa perhaps, or old apple trees from the orchards. Beyond the sky-high flames stands a house built close to the ground with low-slung verandahs and creepers winding around the pillars. Across the green lie of land, there is laughter and song on the quiet still air of the Kaipara, telling him his Māori neighbours have risen to begin their day. He stops to listen.
In that moment when he lifts his head, he sees the child, a little girl with eyes as dark as a zoo panther’s hide, although her complexion is pale sepia. She is perhaps five or six years of age, shivering in a ragged yellow cotton frock. She doesn’t appear to know where she is. The prime minister is aware that poor children live in this area, but as a rule they stay close to their homes along Sydney and Ascot streets, where the workers’ cottages huddle side by side, close enough for the children to hold hands with each other if they reach out the windows. This child looks lost.
There is something wrong here. For a moment, he thinks It can’t be, it isn’t her, one of them. How could she have found him? And then he thinks Of course not, the child is too young. He pulls himself up on the edge of the pool, his taste for swimming over, and stands, abruptly shaking water from himself, his moustache showering tiny arcs of dew over his chest as he grabs the towel to wipe his eyes clear. A man steps out, pointing his Box Brownie at the prime minister’s large frame.
‘No,’ he says, holding the towel up and shielding his face. ‘Not today.’ He recognises the man’s peaked cap, worn back to front with a journalist’s flamboyance. He has seen the fellow more often than he likes, and it wouldn’t surprise him if he were a plant for the Liberals. The pictures he takes of the prime minister have been snapped at the oddest moments, such as when he is dancing in the most gentlemanly fashion with the wife of one his cabinet ministers, the kind of duty he undertakes out of the goodness of his heart, or when he is dining in a restaurant and stops for a cigar between his meat and potatoes and the arrival of dessert. There is a suspicion in his mind that the man wants to make something of a clown of him at least, or a womaniser at worst.
‘Mr Coates,’ calls out an admirer, holding out a scrap of paper and a pen, ‘your autograph, sir.’ He brushes past without a second glance. ‘Brusque, a man who can be a bit short,’ they will say later on. ‘He has much on his mind. The economy, it’s not in good shape. It’s us he will have been thinking of. He just didn’t see us that day.’
In the dressing room, he breathes deeply and evenly, trying to recover his composure. He dries himself with care, lifting his balls above his groin as delicately as a girl’s dress, dusting the folds with talcum powder. When he is fully dressed, he stands in front of a mirror, adjusting his spotted tie, buttoning his waistcoat, checking the white handkerchief in his pocket, then flicks a tailor-made from the packet in his inside pocket and inhales.
Outside, a sleety rain has begun to fall. The crowd has dispersed. Only the child is standing there, looking at him. Or perhaps just at the space before her, as if trying to discover where she is supposed to be.
‘What is it, child?’ he asks her. He has daughters of his own. Still she does not speak. On an impulse, he kneels before her.
‘You’ve just come here to live, eh?’
She nods.
‘How many days?’ He holds up one hand, the fingers splayed, counting them aloud, curling his thumb in his palm then the others, one by one. When he comes to two, the child puts out a hand and clasps them in his.
‘Two days, eh? Just two days. Where are you from?’
She shakes her head dumbly.
‘What is your name?’
‘Janie,’ she whispers.
‘Janie who?’
‘Janie McCaw.’ He catches the slight burr in her voice.
‘Do you know where you live now, Miss Janie McCaw?’
Again she shakes her head, but he has decided. The name has told him as much as he probably needs to know. There are few Māori here nowadays, although once they had pā sites all over the town.
The child will live in one of the workers’ cottages, probably along Ascot Street. There will be a Māori mother, a Scotsman for a father. If her father were Māori, he wouldn’t have been given a place to rent. I have a wife and a child, the man will have said, and nobody the wiser about the wife until they moved in. Janie will have set off for school, on this, her second day, and now she has lost her way. Mr Coates has worked all this out as he stands and takes Janie firmly by the hand. There is a cabinet meeting in half an hour, but if he moves quickly he will just have time to return Janie McCaw to her mother. His towel is damp, not soaking, and he wraps it around the child to protect her from the wind. In truth, his curiosity is sparked. He wants to see this mother of whom he already has a picture in his head. Hand in hand now, the two of them walk briskly, or rather Janie trots as she tries to keep up with her protector, back along Tinakori Road. He picks up his pace as he passes his own house, preferring not to be seen. They pass shops and the Shepherd’s Arms, where a few men are taking the first drop of the day: a refreshment after work, possibly on the night-cart, which collects the buckets of human faeces. Or perhaps they are bakers who have made the morning’s first batch of bread, or railway men. You can’t tell one from the other when they are tired and unwashed and banging their fists for a pint, except for the bakers, dusty white with drifting flour. In response to a
shouted greeting, Mr Coates touches his hat without a further glance, intent on the task he has set himself. The pair make a sharp left turn, and they have entered Ascot Street.
‘Is it here, Janie? D’you think you live in this street?’
The child nods and points. The houses are small and shabby, paint peeling and bubbling in Wellington’s salt-laden air, but there is an atmosphere of respectability here as well, lines of washing flapping in the damp air, rows of winter vegetables, cabbages and carrots, the soil dark with recent tilling. Only the house that Janie is pulling the prime minister towards is forlorn and neglected, a blind hanging askew in the window, weeds flourishing in the wasteland of what was once a garden. The family has just arrived, Mr Coates thinks to himself. Soon they will have this place shipshape.
The little girl releases herself from his grip and darts along the path. Before he knows it, she has disappeared into a lean-to washing shed to one side of the building, and next thing a door bangs and she is gone.
This is not good enough. He gives a peremptory knock on what passes for a front door.
Over the fence a woman’s head appears. ‘Why, Prime Minister, to what do we owe the honour of this visit?’
‘I found the child wandering,’ he says stiffly, feeling as caught out as if his own wife had appeared out of Premier House these few minutes past. ‘Where is the mother?’
‘Ah,’ says the woman, ‘there’s no mother there. Just a man called Jock turned up with the kid last week. Dead, he reckons the mother is, taken with flu in the epidemic.’
‘I thought the child younger than that.’
‘Oh, who can tell, that’s his story. She looks after herself. Which way did you walk, your honour? Past the Shepherd’s Arms? I’m surprised you didn’t see her old man, or perhaps he’s passed out already. Someone will bring him home round dinnertime.’
The prime minister fumbles in his trouser pocket. ‘I’d be obliged if you’d keep an eye on her for me.’ He presses a pound note into her hand.