In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  ‘And all things flourish, and all things flourish,

  Where e’re you turn your eyes.’

  She put all her effort into the accompaniment, feeling a deep surge of love for her husband as he sang on. Was there something wrong with him? Was it linked to the episode in the car on the road out of Te Kuiti? Or was she just being silly? She’d asked him, after the party, after all the guests had gone home, but he’d brushed it off.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ he’d said. ‘My leg’s fine now. Must have pinched a nerve.’

  The song finished and she looked up at George, who’d picked up the music sheet and closed it.

  He smiled reassuringly. ‘There’s no need to worry Rose. I’m just fine.’

  Chapter 4.

  Christchurch. 1987

  Rose heard the front door slam; the string of attached cowbells clanged in Swiss arpeggios.

  ‘Where are you?’ Kate called.

  ‘In here.’ Rose’s back was sore from holding George. She’d parked herself on the floor behind him, propping him from the waist up to prevent his head from jamming against the bedside cabinet. He’d fallen at an awkward angle so she’d lifted his upper torso to keep him upright while dialling Kate’s number on the phone.

  ‘He’s come down again,’ she’d said when Kate answered.

  ‘That’s okay Mum, I’ll be there in ten minutes.’

  Rose thought she heard the trace of a sigh. ‘Sorry to get you out in the middle of the night.’

  ‘It’s no problem. I hadn’t gone to bed yet anyway. I’m a night-owl like you, remember?’

  It had been more like twenty minutes, actually, but Rose was used to being patient.

  ‘Sorry, Kate,’ she said again as her daughter entered the bedroom.

  ‘It’s my fault,’ George said. ‘Sorry, Katie. You’re a treasure.’

  ‘Don’t apologise, you two. It’s no problem.’

  Kate held her father while Rose stood up, then the two women manoeuvred George up off the floor, using the fireman’s lift Rose had taught her daughter years earlier. His falls usually happened when Rose was helping him out of his chair and into bed or, less often, when transferring him from his armchair into the wheelchair, and Rose was aware her calls for help were becoming more frequent.

  Sometimes, to save Kate coming out, or when Kate was at work, she’d called the police and two constables had arrived – usually after a long wait – to scoop George off the floor. She couldn’t believe the speed and apparent effortlessness with which they hoisted him up on the bed, shaking his hand, patting him on the back, and departing with a sympathetic smile for Rose.

  ‘I bet you were a front-row prop,’ George would tease them – even once when it was a policewoman. She’d taken it well, but Rose had told him afterwards he’d have to think of something new to say in future.

  Up into the chair he went, then across into bed, his thin, powerless legs dangling uselessly as they transferred him.

  ‘Thank you, Katie,’ he said while Rose fussed with the bedcovers and pillows. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

  ‘That’s all right, Dad. Just don’t get any heavier, okay?’

  Rose knew there was no chance of that. George had developed what he called ‘a soul above food’ and, though appreciative of her cooking, rarely asked for food to be brought to him. Often she would come home after being at work or out on one of her day-long tramping trips to find his sandwiches untouched. At most he’d drink the tea out of the thermos and eat a piece of sultana cake she’d left beside his chair; when she commented, he genuinely didn’t seem to have noticed.

  ‘I’ve been busy talking to Charlie,’ he’d say of one of his old bank colleagues from up north who’d moved to Christchurch and often visited, or ‘I was so engrossed in the crossword.’

  Mostly, she knew, he would have been sound asleep, nodding off in his chair, waking, watching a bit of television, nodding off again, answering the phone, nodding off again. His days were measured by the ticking of the mantelpiece clock and the flickering of the midday television news, sending him into a somnambulant reverie that was interrupted only by interventions from Rose, from friends and the weekly home help.

  ‘Can I get you a cup of tea, Dad?’

  ‘No thanks Katie. I’ve got to watch my waterworks.’ He smiled and pointed at his tummy hidden under the floral chintz bedspread. ‘No fluids after eight p.m. Your mother keeps a close eye on me.’ He patted the covers. ‘Here, sit beside me for a minute and tell me about yourself.’

  ‘George, it’s eleven o’clock at night.’

  ‘I know, I know, Rose. But it’ll only take a minute. Won’t it Katie?’ He smiled hopefully at his daughter. She never said no.

  Kate plumped herself down on the side of her mother’s single bed and tucked her feet up on her father’s bed opposite. Rose ignored her black boots.

  Kate started to tell her father about work and being given weekend shifts, which made child-care easier because her husband David was at home.

  Rose still disapproved of her daughter going to work so soon after having her baby. Little Amelia was only one when Kate had started back as a reporter for Radio New Zealand.

  ‘It’s only part-time, Mum,’ she’d reasoned. ‘We need the money. Besides, I don’t want to drop my career. I’ve spent all these years getting a name for myself in journalism, I don’t want to throw it away.’

  ‘You know I’d be happy to take her more often.

  ‘You’ve got more than enough to do.’

  And Kate had snorted when Rose had pointed out that she stayed home with her.

  ‘That’s what women did in those days. But not any more,’ she’d said.

  ‘But I was out of the workforce all those years and I was still able to get back in, no trouble. Just a bit of retraining …’

  ‘But that was nursing. Nursing isn’t the same as journalism. You stay out of it for a few years, nobody’s heard of you any more. And the technology’s changing so fast. I can’t just stay at home. I’ve got to keep up or I’ll be unemployable. I’m doing some freelance writing in my spare time just to keep my name out there.’

  ‘You don’t have any spare time.’ Rose had often noticed how tired her daughter looked.

  ‘At night when Amelia’s asleep, I can type up stories. That new magazine, North and South, you know, the one I did the cover story for their first edition. . .’

  ‘Yes.’ Rose remembered the cover when it came out the previous year with her daughter’s name on it and how proud she’d felt at the time.

  ‘They’ve asked me to be their South Island writer. They’re commissioning me to do a lot more.’

  Rose plumped George’s pillow then sat down beside him facing Kate. ‘I heard you reading the news on Sunday morning,’ she said. ‘You sounded very chirpy for that time of the day.’

  ‘I’m enjoying it. But I’m going to have to brush up on my Maori. My pronunciation’s letting me down. They’re putting me on a training course – so that must mean they want to keep me on.’

  ‘You’ve got a great voice for the news.’ Kate was so unlike her. She couldn’t imagine ever having the courage to talk into a microphone knowing the whole country was listening.

  ‘I’m getting used to five o’clock starts. Amelia had me well trained when she was little.’

  ‘And how is little Amelia?’ George’s eyes lit up.

  ‘She’s all go. I took her to Sumner today with her friend Sophie and they played in the shallows and made sandcastles while David and I just lay on the blanket and read our books. It was bliss.’

  George beamed. ‘I remember we used to take you to Sumner when you were little. You used to make the best sandcastles of them all.’ He turned to Rose. ‘It was always much warmer there than further up along the coast. I’d like to go again one day. Rose – do you think we could?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But we wouldn’t be able to go much further than the promenade with the wheelchair.’

 
; ‘I don’t think even you could get him across the sand, Mum,’ Kate said.

  ‘Never under-estimate your mother, Katie,’ he said. ‘She can move mountains … and quite possibly sand dunes too.’

  ‘We’d better let Kate go home now,’ Rose said, aware of the time. ‘We’ve kept her up long enough.’

  Kate stood and gave her father a kiss. ‘Good night, Dad.’

  ‘Good night, Katie.’

  Rose followed her daughter outside to the front door and stood in the hallway, her fingers touching the door handle. ‘Thank you.’

  Kate picked up her jacket off the hallstand and started shrugging it on. ‘I worry about you, Mum. He’s getting too much for you.’

  ‘I’ll manage. He’s no trouble.’ She let go the door handle and stepped further back into the hallway.

  ‘But he’s getting harder to move around. He used to be able to stand and balance on his frame, but now he can’t even do that.’

  ‘Some days are better than others.’

  Kate stopped fiddling with her buttons and touched her mother’s arm. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Oh, I’m fine.’ Rose patted her daughter’s hand. ‘I’m hardly ever home, it seems, but George never complains.’

  ‘It’s not Dad I’m worried about. You’ll wear yourself out.’ Kate dropped her hand and faced Rose front on.

  ‘I’m fine.’ There was no other choice. She wouldn’t let them put George in a home. She fingered the photos on top of the carved camphor chest, which contained the family treasures – Kate’s baby clothes; Brownie Talbot, Kate’s favourite soft toy, straw protruding from his paws; her grandmother’s intricately embroidered linen; and her own wedding dress – not the white one she’d always wanted, had designed, but the blue, fitted dress she’d had to substitute quickly when war and George’s injury had intervened. It was still wrapped in newspaper from their wedding day in January 1940.

  ‘It must be getting time for you to take it a bit easier, that’s all. Perhaps you should give up nursing all those old people at Woodchester?’

  ‘I have thought of it, but I enjoy it. It’s only weekends.’

  ‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit much for you? I mean, Dad takes up such a lot of your time, and you have to do everything around here.’

  ‘Nurse Maude gives me Mrs Chisholm once a week to clean the house.’

  ‘But she spends more time talking to Dad than cleaning.’

  ‘She’s a good cleaner. And you know your father. He does like to talk.’ Rose grinned. ‘He had the Mormons this morning. They started looking desperate after half an hour. They hadn’t managed to get a word in edgeways the whole time.’

  Kate laughed. ‘That’ll teach them to come knocking. You’d think he didn’t have anyone to talk to the way he goes on.’ She rested her hand on the door handle.

  ‘That’s what everyone thinks. But no matter how many visitors he gets, he never runs out of something to say.’

  ‘Now you’re changing the subject again, Mum. Look, I know it’s good for you to get out of the house for a bit and have a break from Dad, but Woodchester isn’t much of a break is it? I mean, you’re looking after frail old people there too.’

  ‘Your father isn’t old.’

  ‘Well he’s not young.’ Kate fiddled with the cowbells attached to the door handle, clanging one of them against the door. ‘You’re going to have to, sooner or later.’

  ‘I know.’ Rose sighed and picked up the framed photo of her mother and father on their wedding day from among the other family photos on the camphor chest. She stroked the top of it absent-mindedly. ‘I’ll have to give it up soon. I’m surprised they haven’t said something already.’

  She’d feared the subject might come up last month at Woodchester after she’d tried to change the seating arrangements at dinner time. In the four years she’d been there, it had seemed so silly that all the men sat together at one end of the dining room and all the women at the other. Last month, she’d decided to mix them up. She’d drawn up a carefully constructed seating plan – the slow eaters could sit at one table, the deaf at another, the politically affiliated at another. The women had loved it. But the men had thrown her dark looks and had muttered unhappily. The following night, the men rebelled and had effectively gone on strike, refusing to come into the dining room and asking for dinner in their rooms. Word would have got through to Matron for sure. But she hadn’t said anything and Rose had certainly not mentioned it to her.

  She often thought back to her days as a pinkie at Public, when she’d told her fellow pinkies that one day she would be Matron. And now, here she was, Matron of a residential hospital and nursing home – at least Relieving Matron at weekends, which was almost the same. It might have come at the end of her career, when she was around retirement age and after a long break from the workforce, but she was happy to have achieved her goal at last. She knew she’d have to give it up soon, that she couldn’t keep going much after seventy – but she didn’t feel old.

  Rose put down the photo and grinned at her daughter. ‘There’s plenty of life in the old girl yet. It’s the tramping keeps me young. Only three weeks to go and I’m off on the Queen Charlotte Walkway.’

  ‘I don’t know where you find the energy.’

  ‘Joan says I’ve got an extra battery.’

  ‘Well she’s right. All my friends say you’re a role model. Now, I really must go.’ Kate turned the door handle then stopped. ‘Where did I leave my keys?’

  ‘You’re always losing your keys.’

  ‘I’ll try the bedroom. That’s the first place I went when I arrived.’

  ‘Careful George doesn’t trap you again.’

  Kate turned back, smiling as she disappeared into the bedroom.

  Looking after George had formed a bond between Rose and her daughter, intensifying the close relationship that had developed gradually, tentatively as Kate emerged from her tempestuous teenage years. The arguments, the name-calling, the intense loathing in her eyes when she looked at Rose, it had been so bad she and George had sent Kate to a psychologist. There must surely be something wrong for her to be so angry, to hate her mother so much, to make her life so miserable. But the psychologist had explained it wasn’t unusual behaviour for the teenage years, especially for an adopted child. ‘Children of this age are obsessed with their identity and ego,’ he’d said.

  Meanwhile, Kate had raged against the psychologist, against being made to see him against her will. She was even more distant and wilful.

  Kate was fifteen – rebellious, rude, feisty fifteen. Rows with her mother became increasingly frequent.

  Rose would never have spoken to her mother the way Kate spoke to her. Her father would have got out the cane if she had, the threat of it being sufficient deterrent alone. But Kate didn’t care what she said or how hurtful it was, and the language she used was execrable – Rose never thought she’d hear such words uttered in her home.

  George remained silent while the battles raged around him. Sitting in his armchair in front of the flickering new black-and-white television, he must have heard everything but he never took part.

  Rose could only guess at the awfulness of his years in the Pacific training heavy artillery at Japanese planes, years that he never discussed with her, nor with anybody. Those years must have taught him hard lessons about fighting wars: ever since, he’d been a peacemaker, he refused to take sides.

  Fifteen years in a house with two women, particularly two women at the opposite ends of the hormonal spectrum, easily persuaded him the best course of action for as peaceful an existence as possible was to retreat to the sidelines while Rose was left to fight her battles alone. His refusal to take sides used to infuriate her.

  It was during the worst row she and Kate ever had that his impartiality brought her to breaking point.

  ‘I can’t stand this any longer.’ She stood in the doorway to his study, arms folded, her voice raised higher with each word. ‘You just sit there and don’t
say anything. The least you could do is stick up for me when she’s screaming at me like that.’

  ‘But Rose, she doesn’t really mean it. She’s . . .’

  ‘Did you hear what she called me?’

  ‘Well, I . . .’

  ‘A dried up old bag. That’s what she called me. And you just sat there and agreed with her.’

  ‘I didn’t agree. I didn’t say . . .’