‘Why have they got string on the case, Arnie?’ asked Kit.
‘Ropework, boy, ropework.’
‘Did you do it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Neat eh.’
Rebecca ignored him. He took too long in the toilet and she couldn’t understand him anyway.
Sophie sat on the front steps with William’s blue envelope unopened in her hand. Bertha’s words had stayed with her. Her love for her children was fierce, self-excluding, die-for-them stuff. Living for them was trickier. But it was just a question of working things out. She stretched her legs to the sunlight, a green girl remembering. Even the first kiss had been memorable, a tentative brushing movement of the lips, an osculatory exploration, a beautiful build-up. Not just a damp clamp, though that happened later, before further exploration which continued, she remembered, for some time. It had not been a quick peck behind the Chapel of St Christopher. Quite the reverse.
He rang her every day. When the telephone rang, Sophie knew instantly, inevitably, and every time a coconut when it was Edward. They did not talk long. The times, usually during school hours, varied. They did not say much. Hullo, they said. Hullo. They didn’t talk about themselves. She didn’t know what they talked about. Sometimes he told her something he had discovered and vice versa. They had a code. When he first suggested it Sophie thought it was slightly, well, nuts. ‘Tap your fingernails on the mouthpiece,’ he said. ‘How many days?’ Now, tense with excitement, she signals the countdown. Fourteen.
She opened her letter. William’s last one had not filled her with longing. During a run ashore William and the other officers had timed the local hula ladies’ hip movements on their stopwatches. She saw the scene clearly, the strong brown knees of the men of the Royal New Zealand Navy visible between white shorts and long white or blue stockings and the ladies dancing so skilfully and smiling withal. Saw the coconut palms and the lapping surf. There were 140 hip movements per minute, wrote William, which is a lot of hip movements. ‘Much love, William.’
William’s writing was legible, crisp and clear, the stamp placed foursquare in the corner. A stamp placed upside down was an insult to the Queen, according to his great-aunt Una. Information which Sophie had found interesting at the time and smacking of graven images.
William wrote of the training programme at sea and how well his ship had done in the combined exercises especially the night trials, and how pleased William was and how the Old Man was also. William told her how the young sailors from Tamaki were shaping up on their first time at sea (good), about the outbreak of cockroaches in the galley (bad) and his dislike for the engineer who is a shit but don’t hand it on. I know what your hen parties are like. How are the kids? Much love to you all, William.
Last year before Christmas Sophie and her neighbour had made an abortive attempt to sell some of their old wedding presents. They had stood in the queue for the ferry gangway clutching Pusser’s Green suitcases, watching the water slapping the barnacle-encrusted piles beneath the wharf. A small child in gumboots swung whining on his mother’s hand. ‘Mum,’ he begged once more, ‘I want it, Mum.’
‘That’s your trouble,’ she snapped. ‘You want the lot, don’t you.’
But don’t we all, lady. Don’t we all. Trikes, bikes, chuddy, love. We all take our pleasures differently.
They were surrounded by grey-haired women in spectacles with pudding-basin haircuts. Four, five; too many for comfort. A man with a beard stood staring with his mouth open. It had been a relief to get off the boat.
Sophie answered William’s letter. She did not tell him that she had been unfaithful. Un-faith-ful. She did not tell him she had slept with another man. She did not tell him their marriage was over. She would tell him later. She would tell him when his ship came home. She sat at the battered table which he was going to restain as soon as he got round to it and sucked a yellow ballpoint. There was another cruise ship moored across the harbour. Passengers paid hundreds of US dollars a day and cruised for thirty. Arnie and Sophie had agreed the money should be redistributed. They had also agreed this was unlikely to happen.
She told William about the parent-teacher evening and Rebecca and Kit’s satisfactory reports. She did not tell him the headmaster had said Kit would not set the world on fire because she did not believe it and how could you possibly know at seven. She was not concerned by this comment but William would be. She would tell him later. She told William that the Scarlet Runners had now withered completely and she would dig over the vegetable plot ready for planting. William was keen on his vegetable garden. He was more assiduous than she at disposing of excess. He strode along the road night after night in the peak season dispensing largesse and avoiding waste. Sophie was unfussed by rotting plenitude. Mouldering fruit and the sharp wasp-attracting tang of corruption were familiar as household words to her. Piles of green torpedo-shaped feijoas rotting beneath the tree on the front lawn and by the back steps worried her not at all. Waste was a fact of life. William fought it tooth and nail.
‘We have an old man called Arnie McNally staying with us for a week or two till he gets on his feet,’ she wrote. ‘He used to be on my Meals on Wheels run. Chester has been lost but is found again.’ The biro leaked purple, a thick oozing trail of demise.
‘Good to hear the exercises are going well, particularly the night ones,’ she wrote with a replacement from the bookcase.
‘Love from us all. Sophie.’
Arnie came in from his rest, his slippered feet soundless on the haircord. One of the slippers had split. Sophie was staring straight ahead. He watched her for a moment.
‘What is it, lass?’
She swung round. ‘Arnie,’ she said. ‘Oh, Arnie.’ Her eyes were huge. ‘The parents’ evening was awful,’ she said.
He lowered himself into a chair, a reverse levering process which took some time.
‘Last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It was …’ She couldn’t say boring. It hadn’t been. It had been, no, not alarming, how ridiculous. But something. Arnie, Rebecca and Kit had minded one another. She had been home by eight-thirty.
‘There are men, there are women and there are parents,’ the head told the mother in front of Sophie, who wanted her son put up a class because his teacher did nothing but play ‘Coming through the Rye’ all day on the recorder.
Gin a body kiss a body
Need a body cry?
Of course not. That is the thing about obsession. Everything is filtered through it. The Art Work papier-mâché policemen in Rebecca’s classroom leered at the maidens beside them whose sexpot lips and black-ringed eyes relayed the message back. The white mice were hot as monkeys, Sophie knew they were. She could hear their frenetic rustlings amongst the torn scraps of paper in their cage. White mice are too naked and too quick and pink as well.
The colour, the exuberance of the paintings in Kit’s room seduced her. When do they learn, these painters, that arms should match, that eyes should tally and lips must smile?
There were no problems with Rebecca, the head told her, but she knew this already. ‘As for Christopher—remember the school motto: “They who do their best do well.” He probably won’t set the Thames on fire, but he’s a nice lad.’
‘Why the Thames?’ snarled Sophie.
She walked home up Calliope Road through air which was too warm for winter.
The light was on in the Commodore’s study. Nothing stirred. She glanced up and down the road then walked with head high, up the curved path to the front door. She was on business bent. She rang the bell, kept her back to the road and sweated. Edward still had his pen in his hand. ‘Sophie!’ He pulled her in, shut the door, gaped at her. ‘My dear girl, you can’t come here.’
Arms splayed against the door like a forties film heroine, Sophie nodded. ‘I know.’
‘Tollerton’s just this minute left.’
‘I came on business.’
He smiled. ‘Na
vy League or Welfare?’
‘I haven’t thanked you in person for the flowers.’
‘Oh,’ he laughed at her breathless wit and welcomed her. ‘That’s all right, then,’ he said. ‘So long as it’s business.’
‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ he said later. ‘This old man? How’re you going to get rid of him? And anyway. I mean,
he’s there, isn’t he?’
‘I know what I’m doing,’ she said. ‘And yes, he is there.’
‘Come fishing, Sophie,’ said Bertha. ‘I want to talk to you.’
‘No thanks. Come and meet Arnie.’ The meeting was a success. Arnie had fished at the wharf till his legs gave out on him. They discussed bait, the vagaries of the tide, the seasons. Did Arnie think piper fish were worth the effort? ‘No.’
Bertha agreed. ‘Though they’re fun for kids when they’re running.’
‘When,’ said Arnie. He was dry, dry as parched riverbeds, the only hint of a joke the glint in his watery blue eye. His chuckle was a dry gurgle and worth waiting for.
‘My dear, we screamed,’ reported Bertha inaccurately.
‘Where’s Arnie?’ yelled Kit each afternoon before he ditched his school bag.
‘Here, boy, here.’ Behind jigging the cushion of his chair sideways in excitement, Arnie waited on the verandah.
‘Did that tanker go out?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Good.’
They watched a Chinese junk sail up the harbour, remote and mysterious as someone else’s dream. They put down their binoculars, turned to each other and smiled.
‘Any good?’
‘Aye.’
Arnie’s presence acted as a buffer, a shield. He defused gossip. When Celia or Liz appeared, he heaved himself upright on stiff knees, bowed his head in greeting and departed to his room. They came less often. Celia appeared to have lost her grip on who was fucking whom. Gossip is not confrontation. You don’t have to see them at it.
‘Celia’s stopped coming,’ she told Edward. ‘And Liz.’
‘Good.’
‘Is Celia happy, do you think?’
He paused. ‘How many days?’
‘Twelve.’
They had forgotten about Sufism.
They made plans.
‘Arnie?’
‘Yes?’ He was mending his slipper, restowing the extruded horsehair with an awl and sail-maker’s palm collected from his ditty-bag in the dead fernery.
‘Will you go and stay with Mary and her friend Ben for Queen’s birthday?’
‘I’ll go home.’
‘No! Not till you’ve been assessed. Dr Pleasance said.’
He stared at her above his glasses. ‘How many days?’
She moved her head, momentarily punch-drunk, momentarily defeated by the phrase.
‘Three.’
‘Three it is. There’s the phone.’
Mrs Slater from Holy Trinity Brass was in a panic. Eunice Glover had come down with a lurgy and she knew it was short notice but could Sophie slip down?
Bit of a problem there, Mrs Slater. I have sinned and am no more worthy, see. ‘Now?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘All right. If you’re stuck.’
The Vicar was confiding his love of chokos to two polishing heads. Chokos were his favourites. Mrs Webster and Mrs Slater glanced at each other above their blackened rags. Their lips were pursed. They found chokos tasteless and bland. Sophie could see it in their shared rejection, their dismissive twitchings, their head shakings. They took Mr Farrell’s divergence re chokos personally. They themselves scarcely bothered to pick the chunky green pendants from the vines which tumbled over their respective woodsheds each summer in evidence of the bounty of the Lord.
‘Perhaps,’ murmured Mr Farrell deprecatingly, having caught their drift, ‘they are an acquired taste.’ He thanked them all and slipped away. Mrs Webster gave Sophie some clean rags. Did Sophie know that the right hand of a pair of rubber gloves usually wears out first if you’re right-handed and the thing to do when this occurs is to turn one inside out? They left soon afterwards. They had done their bit.
Sophie restowed the cleaned vases in the dusty room beside the vestry and washed her hands. The shadowy reflection in the mirror was dislocated and out of place, a face glimpsed below water. She shut one eye at herself.
She sat in the back pew of the church, her eyes on the small red light at the end of the nave. The brass gleamed. The Adoration of the Magi window was hectic: blue, carmine and livid green. There was a memorial to the fallen.
Old Mr Farrell lurched from the vestry, still in his rusty black cassock. His movements were fast but the mechanism was faulty. He crashed up the wide chancel steps to the altar and flung himself on arthritic knees, his arms stretched wide as he prostrated himself before his risen Lord on Wednesday morning in the empty church of the Holy Trinity, Devonport.
Mr Farrell had not glanced anywhere but straight in front of him. All his attention had been fixed on getting to the altar so he could give thanks with an extravagant rapture which Sophie had never seen Freddy Farrell (William) display before his congregation. A theatrical Wise Man’s gesture; Melchior, or more likely Balthazar, at the satisfactory conclusion of the search. Mr Farrell had kept his faith alive, steely and strong as the bridge. Its brightness had remained undimmed through vestry squabbles, doctrinal difficulties, badminton every Thursday and the succes-sional problem in the Mothers’ Union. Mr Farrell knew that his Redeemer lived, like Padre Bell but more so.
The Vicar dragged himself upright from the altar and turned to begin his heave down the nave.
‘Sophie, my dear,’ he called, ‘is that you?’
She had forgotten about their shared long sight. They had joked about it. Wondered to what useful purpose they might put this useless gift.
‘Yes.’
They met mid-nave and held hands. Mr Farrell’s face, old, tanned and hooked about the nose, was anxious. ‘Are you all right, Sophie?’
Sophie blinked. The thing is Mr Farrell I desire a man other than my husband. I lust after this man Mr Farrell. And what’s more I’m going to keep doing so.
Mr Farrell was waiting. He had had a good war, Mr Farrell, had won gongs and been ordained later. This old man had known it all, had known the brutality and the valour, the scream and stench of war.
‘There’s a fly somewhere,’ said Sophie.
The lean carved face was puzzled. Their hands still held. ‘Fly?’
‘Can’t you hear it? A blowfly buzzing.’
‘A spider perhaps? He’s caught it, I mean.’ The Vicar stared up into the dark timbered roof in search of spiders.
‘Possibly.’ The moment had passed. She had avoided confession.
She would not burden Mr Farrell with her lewd thoughts, her gross desires. She had never had any intention of doing so. They were not his part of ship.
The combined exercises with the Yanks and the Aussies had gone extremely well. There is a buzz, wrote William, that we may be given a pierhead jump to Hawaii instead of coming straight home. For further in-depth exercises with the Yanks. The situation in Asia, well, never mind. William would like to give Sophie a big hug and kiss. Only a few more weeks now with any luck. Fondest love. William. PS. Hey you kids, I hope you are helping Mum. If we make it to Hawaii, I’ll bring you a pineapple apiece. Pineapple Poll, eh Becca? Much love, Dad.
‘What’s a Pineapple Poll?’ said Rebecca straightening the knives and forks Sophie had flung on the table.
‘A dance, isn’t it?’
‘Tap?’
‘No.’
‘Oh.’
When Rebecca was little and William was at sea for months, she and Sophie had had a nightly ritual. Rebecca had kissed her father goodnight. Cherub lips made aquarium kissing motions against the cold glass behind which William smiled in cap and doeskin. It didn’t work though. Rebecca became confused when the tall dark stranger returned. Sophie found her alone in her room in he
r pink pyjamas with feet, kissing the glass Daddy. Sophie hid the photograph beneath outgrown baby clothes in the small white chest of drawers painted by William before Rebecca’s birth. He had left the wooden knob handles till later so he would know whether he should paint them pink or blue. He was glad it was pink.
SIX
Edward made the booking at the motel. Sophie would take their car which was anonymous, or more so than the Commodore’s Renault. William was proud of his new Holden. It was the first new car he had owned—an automatic with good road-holding capabilities which handled well and had plenty under the bonnet.
There remained the rendezvous.
‘The bakery in Belmont?’
This was no time for jokes. ‘Try harder,’ she said.
‘I like the yeasty smell. I worked in one after school. Ed Sand the baker’s hand.’
‘Try harder.’
Lane’s Bakery was not a good meeting-place. It was too exposed, too populated, too like the rendezvous it turned out to be as wives and mariners joined the queue for their Viennas, their half barracoutas, their occasional Sally Lunns.
Rebecca and Kit stood dancing and waving farewell beside Lou who had mapped out a programme. It was full of delights and did not include Church Parade.
Sophie stood beside Outsize Books in the Takapuna Library and waited for her lover. She was relaxed. ‘Nobody’s going to look at you,’ her mother had said when Sophie panicked before school socials. A useful memory.
He came through the door smiling, his Pusser’s canvas grip an exact replica of William’s.
‘Hullo.’
‘Hullo.’ Joy, pure flagrant joy descended, enriched, socked it to her. She kept her head. ‘I’ll go out first, give me a few minutes.’
All the Nice Girls Page 9