Their names dropped musically like small fat bird-notes through the freckled sunlight of a young world: prophetically he brooded on the sweet lost bird-cries, knowing they never would return. Herrick, Crashaw, Carew, Suckling, Campion, Lovelace, Dekker. O sweet content, O sweet, O sweet content! He read a dozen of Scott and liked best of all Quentin Durward, because the descriptions of food were as bountiful and appetising as any he had ever read.
Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
‘I wonder by my troth …’ murmured Richard Burton into the drowsy ears of the upper sixth, ‘… what thou and I did till we lov’d?’ The Virginia creeper around the windows had shed its crimson leaves and gone to bare twig over winter. Now it burst into fistfuls of fresh green. Were we not wean’d till then? But suck’d on countrey pleasures, childishly? The record crackled slightly under the needle.
Exams arrived with the green leaf and the summer: end-of-year exams, then Schol. They were all sitting Schol, the biggest class ever to do so at the school. Caro and Angela and Maddie, Kate and half a dozen others, all of them except Virginia Craddock the daughters of parents who had not gone to university themselves.
These girls were specially blessed.
They had received The Opportunity.
It was engraved in capitals like the title of some Hollywood epic.
SPARTACUS
EXODUS
THE TEN COMMANDMENTS
THE OPPORTUNITY
Deprived of a university education by the Depression (another Hollywood word: THE DEPRESSION) and its twin, THE WAR, the parents of the girls in 6A were certain that this was what their offspring deserved, like free dental care, cheap medical treatment, crime-free streets, solid state-houses if required and a universal Family Benefit. The girls took the obligation entailed seriously. They finished all their essays more or less on time, they studied for their exams, sitting in the sun with their skirts rolled up to tan their legs while revising the causes of the First World War and bits of Pro Milone. Virginia Craddock kept a little notebook in which she recorded all their marks so that she could predict with absolute accuracy who would be Dux, who would get a Scholarship, who would win and who would lose at every stage of the competition that operated, unacknowledged, alongside the chat about movies and the school ball.
Kate’s father would have liked to go to university. If he had not had to leave school at fourteen, he would have read arts. He looked through the university calendar Kate brought home from school, deciding what he would have chosen. Philosophy, he thought, and history and literature, of course, and maybe this ‘anthropology’ — that looked interesting — and classics, an arts degree being The Only True Education.
‘The rest is just training,’ he said. ‘Medicine, law, all the rest of it. You can pick those up later if you want, after you’ve had a decent education.’
He would have read arts, if he had had The Opportunity. He was clever enough. He could answer all the questions on ‘King of Quiz’, pressing an invisible buzzer on the chair arm and beating the lot of them.
‘Ah, well,’ he said, laying the calendar aside, taking up his walking stick and setting out on the route march up the hall to the car and the carpark and the office at the Power Board. ‘Mahleesh.’
Kate’s mother would have gone too, had a shining roof not diverted her to her True Vocation, and then there was Uncle Tom, his career cut short by billions of besieging bacteria. But Kate was well and she was able and she had The Opportunity.
When she was studying for the first of the national exams, School Certificate, her mother had moved out of the back bedroom. She went down to Harris’s second-hand and bought a writing desk with a fold-down front and a bookshelf, and when Kate arrived home they were all set up in the back bedroom, her books arranged on the shelf, the desk against one wall with a kitchen chair and a cushion made from a sugar sack with lazy daisies embroidered on the top.
‘But where are you going to sleep?’ said Kate.
‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ said her mother. ‘You need to do your swot and you can’t do that in a shared room.’
Her mother slept instead on the foldout bed in the front room. By day it was stored in the hall cupboard and each night it was wheeled through and set up between the china cabinet and the piano.
‘I don’t want you sleeping in the front room,’ said Kate. ‘I’m fine sharing with Maura. Truly.’
She hated the guilt of displacement. She also hated the foldout bed and its hint of the temporary visit, as if their mother had landed only lightly in the house and could as readily pack up and go. As if she were merely visiting. And yet … And yet … It was so good to close the door on her own room. Here, she could sit on her own bed and listen to the Hit Parade, or write poems of loss and anguish for the school magazine:
I too have met the deer and know their ways.
Their breath has seared me. Their red eyes gaze
At me from darkened corners …
Or learn her lines. She played Madame de Correbas, the clever aristocrat who eluded the clutches of the vile mob by her talent for disguise in To Save the Queen!, the dramatic tale of Revolutionary France that was the school’s entry in that year’s British Drama League’s One-Act Play Festival. (‘A most promising young actress!’ wrote B.J., reviewing the triumph for the two-minute silence.) She was also Macbeth in a tartan skirt and picnic-blanket cloak, and she was Count Diego in Violetta, wearing her mother’s old nursing cloak and cardboard buckles tied to her school shoes.
And she swotted, memorising the names of the Great Lakes, the four repercussions of the Treaty of Versailles and key speeches from Hamlet. Her mother popped in from time to time, hoping she was not interrupting and bearing tea and biscuits: peanut biscuits, because peanuts were ‘brain food’, like fish in parsley sauce and sweetbreads. They would ensure Kate’s brain was in tip-top condition when the exams came, just as years of sea-bathing and sleeping with the windows open had ensured her body could put up a fairly determined resistance to any infection considering a takeover. Kate ate her peanut biscuits and swotted and at the end of that year it all paid off: she passed her exams. She got a prize for English: the stories of Katherine Mansfield, bound in blue leather with the school crest — Dulcius ex arduis — stamped on the cover.
The first book she had ever read that mentioned mutton sandwiches.
And little girls grouped in the sliver-sharp hierarchies of the playground, the dawdle home between banks of dry grass, the two-storeyed house, the kids who lived beyond the boundary: the minute adjustments that signified class in the classless society, so much more subtle than a world where goodies dined at the club and went down to the country for the weekend and the baddies dropped their aiches. Kate recognised here an intricate and familiar world. She remembered the Creeches and Flying Fanny. She remembered tea at Virginia Craddock’s: the strange salad with oil instead of condensed-milk mayonnaise, the sour orange they called a grapefruit that arrived on her plate instead of the fruit she had anticipated, those expensive little purple berries she had tasted when she had had scarlet fever. She remembered the airy expertise with which Virginia and her brothers and sisters sliced their strange fruit. What is the capital of Germany? Who wrote A Tale of Two Cities?
Kate recognised the Kelveys. She recognised the Burnells. It was like coming upon her own reflection, unexpectedly, in a darkened room.
The one question was, ‘Have you seen Burnells’ doll’s house? Oh, ain’t it lovely!’ ‘Haven’t you seen it? Oh, I say!’
Even the dinner hour was given up to talking about it. The little girls sat under the pines eating their thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter. While always, as near as they could get, sat the Kelveys, our Else holding on to Lil, listening too, while they chewed their jam sandwiches out of newspaper soaked with large red blobs.
The Doll’s House by Katherine Mansfield
Kate had a job for the summer working at the Albert Residential Rest Home. The residents rested in rows in sunrooms overlooking Friendly Bay and the wide sweep of the sea. The women sat at one end of the building, the men at the other, with matron’s flat and the office in between, and a dark dining room where festive arrangements of silver pinecones replaced the usual plastic daffodils, and the smell of a century of mutton stews hung like a fog.
Matron walked about with the white wings of her veil spread and a dog, a wheezing pug called Moppet, at her side for the patients to pet. Her husband acted as handyman around the place. He was a balding, doughy Australian who spent most of his time working on his car, a white E-Type Jag, in the drive in front of their flat. The old women sat with afghans spread over their knees in red and purple and citrus green. They bowed low before the afternoon soap and the tinsel tree blinking on and off, on and off in the corner, while the old men smoked, perched about the rockery behind the laundry like so many elderly gnomes, for Matron had forbidden cigarettes in the building after Mr Posket fell asleep and set fire to his bed. They sat among the sempervivums rolling skinny twigs of Park Drive, then shuffled home to their cubicles.
The Home had originally had open wards, designed for the care of the indigent poor. Now each inhabitant lived behind a plywood dividing wall of cupboard and chest of drawers on which their children clustered in wedding dresses or graduation gowns or turned side on in the photographer’s studio as if they were smiling over their shoulders while walking out the door into the glow of a brighter future. The old women stood among them, not as they were now in their cardigans and slippers, but as they were before the children even existed, when the old women’s hair shone as if it emitted light itself and their lips were full and red. The old men stood stern in khaki or as one of the team, arms folded after a season playing on the wing for Old Boys, lean and running away from the pack. The photos had to be dusted.
‘You be careful with them pictures,’ said Mrs Oblowski as Kate flicked a duster lightly, for on Tuesdays all surfaces had to be dusted before morning tea and it was a rush when there were more beds than usual to change, sheets to strip quickly and the whole damp mess dumped in the linen basket. ‘Give it here.’ A skinny hand with fingers like twisted vine took firm hold of the duster. She wiped her photos carefully, taking her time over each one.
‘What’s going on here?’ said Audrey, who was head cleaner, popping her head around the partition. ‘What are you up to, dear?’ She called all the old people ‘dear’ except for Mr Depree in the men’s wing who you had to keep an eye on. ‘Don’t turn your back on him ever,’ she said. ‘He’ll be onto you quick as a flash, even though he’s pushing ninety.’ She called him ‘you randy old bugger’, but quietly, so that Matron could not hear. Not that Matron was much better off, with a husband who tried it on with anybody. He’d had a go at Pania who did the cooking, called her a black bitch when he’d bailed her up one night in the pantry and she wouldn’t come across. They discussed it in the staffroom over buttered scones at morning tea. Should they say something to Matron? Should they let it pass? ‘Let it pass,’ Audrey counselled. No point stirring up trouble.
Mrs Oblowski dabbed ineffectually at a photo of a man holding up a six-foot marlin. Dab dab dab.
‘You’ll be all day, dear,’ said Audrey. ‘Why don’t you let Kate here do it?’
Mrs Oblowski kept firm hold of the duster. Dab dab dab.
‘That’s what she’s paid for,’ said Audrey.
Dab dab dab.
‘Now you just give that duster to me, dear,’ said Audrey. ‘And you have a nice rest.’
‘I’ve had a rest,’ said Mrs Oblowski. ‘Plenty of time to rest. I like to be useful.’
She got up at night sometimes and laid the tables in the dining room: all of them, with all the cutlery, if you weren’t on the lookout.
‘The boys’ll be in soon,’ she’d say. ‘They’ll be wanting their dinners. They’ve been gone a long time.’
Audrey shrugged.
‘Suit yourself, then,’ she said. ‘If you want to dust, there’s fifteen more to do down the corridor.’ When Kate returned that afternoon with the tea trays, Mrs Oblowski lay on her bed, eyes closed, arms folded across her chest, and clutched in one hand, the pink and white check of her duster.
Six pound a week, triple time on Christmas and New Year. Kate bought a fawn duffel-coat, a fawn ribbed turtleneck, a suede miniskirt and a pair of brown Mary Janes. She tried them all on.
‘So, let’s have a look at you,’ said her father. He surveyed her with satisfaction. ‘Now, don’t you look the student!’ he said.
‘Is that what they’re wearing these days?’ said her mother, regarding the miniskirt. It ended several inches above the knee.
‘Yes, it is,’ said Kate, though to be honest she had doubts herself about her thighs. All the biking to and from school in all weathers had left her with muscles of iron and legs that would not have looked out of place in a scrum.
Her mother’s doubts were becoming irritating. Now that The Opportunity was here, she seemed to be regretting its arrival.
‘You are sure you want to go?’ she said. Beside her on the kitchen table lay another shoebox stuffed with cards: she was doing her mother’s side. Falconer, Alice. b. Kenmore, 1884. McGregor, Isobel. b. Dunedin 1859. Grant, Jane. b. Cromdale, Sctld, 1832.
‘Of course,’ said Kate. Though to be honest if the others — Caro, Maddie and the rest — had not been going, she would not have gone either. She would have liked, ideally, to become an actress, after her success as Madame de Correbas and Macbeth. But that would have involved going to London, she supposed, like the girls in those Noel Streatfield books she had read when she was a child. Dunedin seemed altogether simpler. It was where everyone was going.
‘Because you don’t have to leave Oamaru,’ said her mother. She stuck a little label onto the back of a photograph. A sepia print of a wedding couple, both bride and groom clearly mightily impressed with the seriousness of what they were about to do: the begetting of ancestors. The bride stood by the chair, one hand on the groom’s shoulder. The groom stared at the camera, jaw clenched beneath a thick moustache, as if something furry had died on his top lip. ‘You could just stay here, and get a job, like Heather McFadden.’
‘I don’t want a job like Heather McFadden,’ said Kate. Heather worked for the BNZ, seated behind a desk in the echoing hall of one of the Doric temples on Thames Street. Kate had been in to see her to say goodbye.
‘With you in a minute,’ Heather had mouthed, expertly dealing fistfuls of twenty-dollar bills. Her hair was permed, a poodle frizz replacing the page-boy bob she’d had when they used to bike home together, on the lookout for the Weston bus. Her make-up was china doll.
‘Thank you, sir,’ she said at last, with a quick professional smile. She slid from her high stool and nodded briefly at the supervisor. The supervisor looked significantly at the clock. Forty-five minutes, the look said, and NO LONGER. Heather’s sandals clicked across the polished floor.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Quick. Before they decide we’re too busy for lunch breaks.’
They went for cappuccinos at the Rendezvous, for old times’ sake, though they skipped the corn rolls. Heather was on a diet.
‘I’ve got this dress put aside at Mamselles,’ she said. ‘It’s gorgeous. Halter neck, white. It looks stunning but it shows every ounce.’ She was going to a wedding in February: her boyfriend Gary’s brother was getting married at Duntroon and it was going to be her introduction to the family. She wanted to make a good impression.
‘You have a corn roll, though,’ she said. And Kate said no, she could do with losing a few pounds. They settled into the booth nearest the street.
‘So, what are you going to do in Dunedin?’ said Heather.
‘English,’ said Kate. ‘And History and French and Anthropology.’
‘What’s that?’ said Heather. ‘Anthro-wotsit?’
‘Not sure,’ said Kate. ‘The study of people.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Heather. ‘Like social studies?’
Kate picked a bogey of candle wax from the wine bottle on the table.
‘I think so,’ she said. ‘The set texts are about Mexico and Samoa.’
‘Sooner you than me,’ said Heather. ‘I hated that stuff: lamb exports and steel and the Glasgow–Paisley thingummy. Why are you doing that?’
‘I just thought it looked interesting,’ said Kate.
‘Is that right?’ said Heather. She was going out that evening with Gary to Dalgety’s end-of-year barbecue. She had a pair of white matador pants and a red top with a boat neck. She’d seen just the shoes too, in Tremewans: white sandals with a flower on the strap across the toes.
‘And it’ll come in handy for teaching,’ said Kate.
Or maybe the black slingbacks? Heather looked at her watch. Half an hour before the supervisor went bananas. She reapplied a slick of Frosted Peach, pursing and straightening her lips in the mirror of her compact.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Help me choose.’
They went next door to Tremewans and spent the half-hour among slingbacks and t-straps. Heather surveyed her neat ankles in the floor mirror and walked up and down saying, ‘What do you think?’ in a pleasant agony of indecision while Kate stood by saying, ‘Those make your legs look longer,’ and ‘Not the ankle strap,’ while wondering if she did indeed want to spend a lifetime in the company of lamb exports and the Glasgow–Paisley thingummy.
She had no idea what she was going to be doing in Dunedin. In Seventeen magazine there were pictures of beautiful girls heading off to college with complete sets of matching luggage in madras checks, but that was America and therefore probably irrelevant. University in Dunedin would be more likely to be common rooms where brilliant chaps discussed the ultimate imponderables of human thought or delivered lectures to rooms stuffed with brainy Quiz Kids. But she could not be sure.
So when her mother suddenly offered this other opportunity, the one that required no particular effort to imagine, that would simply be an extension of the life she had lived so far, it infuriated her. How tempting to take a job at the BNZ, to go out with someone from Dalgety’s, to go to barbecues and a wedding at Duntroon in a new dress. But what, then, had been the point of all the swot, of the foldout bed in the front room, of the fish that had to be eaten because it was brain food? What had been the point of the peanut biscuits? Crumbs lay like silt along the binding edge of every volume.
‘Heather seems very happy,’ said her mother, landing as usual with absolute precision, like a bird with needle-sharp claws, on just that spot where Kate was tender, voicing exactly that uncertainty squirming beneath the skin. It made Kate furious. It forced her to be sure.
‘Of course I want to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want some stupid job in this stupid town.’
‘It doesn’t have to be a stupid job,’ said her mother. ‘There are plenty of opportunities here for a clever girl.’
‘Not for me,’ said Kate. She could hardly breathe in this room, in this house, in this street, in this town. ‘I’m not staying here. I’m not going to have a horrible marriage and settle to some hideous dead-end job.’
I’m not going to be like you hung in the air between them, sharp and shimmering as the onset of a migraine.
Her mother slid the wedding photograph into the shoebox where it belonged. Stuart, John. m. Falconer, Alice. Feb 22, 1901. Her forehead wrinkled with concern.
‘You won’t go and overdo it, will you?’ she says.
‘No,’ said Kate. ‘I won’t overdo it.’
‘You won’t swot too hard?’ said her mother.
‘No,’ said Kate, knowing what came next.
‘Because remember what happened to Tom.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Kate. ‘Just fine.’
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ said her mother.
‘YES!’ said Kate. ‘YES YES YES, I’m sure!’
And she slammed the door on the kitchen and went to her room where she slammed the door on the house, on the whole shoebox stuffed full of family.