I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little hand-portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all alone. I am afraid — sore afraid — that this purpose originated in my sense of the contrast there would be between me and Joe, if we went to the coach together.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Kate went back to the Albert Home for the summer. The matron had changed. The old one had been pushed over the cliff by her husband, the bald Australian. Audrey told her all about it as they cleaned the windows in the men’s wing.
‘I knew he was a bad lot, that one,’ she said. ‘But I never ever thought he’d be capable of murder.’
He had waited for a foggy winter’s night, then he had followed Matron as she went out to take Moppet for a walk, just as it was getting dark. He’d pushed her, over there, beyond the fence, and she’d fallen a hundred metres straight down. She’d have died, no doubt about it, said Audrey, except that the wet weather had brought down a slip, so she landed on a whole heap of soft clay. She had broken her shoulder but she still managed to crawl to the road, where a worker for the port company had found her on his way home and rescued her. It was lucky, because there weren’t many people about. (Kate had seen that for herself: the bay was a less populous place than it had been in the days of Friendly Bay and the beachfront promenade. Oil silos occupied the land where the merry-go-round had stood, the kiosk had been demolished, the swings were broken and a grey slick like a scum of mutton fat floated on the water.) Matron had survived to lay charges and now her husband was in jail. Turned out he’d been having it off with the new cook, silly cow, never did take to her, said Audrey. Seems they’d planned the whole thing — meant to make it look like Matron tripped and fell. So the cook was in jail too.
‘Best place for ’em too,’ said Audrey, polishing vigorously. ‘I mean to say, it’s like a book, like on TV, but you never think the things you read about really happen, do you? Not here, not to people you know.’ She straightened and surveyed their handiwork. The sea glittered behind clear glass, the little town was rubbed up to a brilliant sheen. ‘It just goes to show,’ she said. ‘It just goes to show …’
‘So what’s varsity like?’ said Maura. She was cutting out a dress: the pattern pieces for bodice, skirt and sleeves were pinned to a length of blue floral fabric. She still had a year of school before she took up The Opportunity.
Kate picked a piece of cotton from the floor and wound it around her little finger.
‘All right,’ she said.
By August, Gaylene had been pregnant to one of the boys from the Cook. She didn’t know which one, nor did she appear to care much. The wages of sin had not been pain, in her case, nor agony nor leprous sores. On the contrary, her skin had cleared up overnight to a peachy bloom, her hair was a glossy fall, her breasts swelled impressively to a 36D and she never had a moment’s morning sickness. She spent the final term — because the administration permitted her to stay to sit finals and she had paid her rent in advance — with her feet up on the sofa, knitting tiny white matinee jackets, her Child Development notes spread on her belly and one eye on the TV. Her parents seemed equally unperturbed. She was going back to live with them until the baby came and maybe her Timaru boyfriend would still be around, maybe not — she wasn’t much bothered either way.
Philippa was twitching and wild-eyed and sobbed in her room. Di had joined a jug band and spent hours rehearsing in the cavernous cat reek of a deserted cinema in South Dunedin. Sandra’s boyfriend, the aggie at Lincoln, had stopped returning her calls in August and for weeks she pounced on anyone passing her door to talk it over. She came and perched on the end of Kate’s bed, repeating for the fiftieth time that he had said he loved her and they had been going to get engaged on her twenty-first birthday and their parents knew and everything — it was practically official — and she’d actually looked out this dress in a magazine, a white sheath in off-white Thai silk, and his sister was going to be the bridesmaid in pink, and why would he change his mind, just like that, when everything was organised? Maryeve had decided to chuck it all in and become an air hostess. That way she could fly around the world and meet people who weren’t boring like the people in New Zealand but had some style.
Maura carefully cut out a neck facing. Scrunch scrunch scrunch.
‘Is that all?’ she said. ‘It’s just “all right”?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kate. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
Her mother had not asked. She had simply made a quick scrutiny of Kate as she walked in the door and said she was looking peaky and had she been overdoing it? She made chicken for tea: Sunday food, Christmas food, as a special token to mark her return.
Her father had thumbed through all her books, except for the Dickens. He couldn’t stand Dickens.
‘But Great Expectations is a classic,’ said Kate. ‘You’d like it if you tried.’
‘Tried him,’ he said. ‘He’s overrated. Calling a book a classic is just a way of selling it to people who don’t know what they like for themselves.’ He seemed disappointed in the university for not being more adventurous, for not constantly re-evaluating the canon. He reached over to the table beside his chair, wincing with the effort. ‘Now this,’ he said, fumbling the top volume from the pile, ‘is a great book. Have you read this? The Tin Drum? I’d take this any day over your Dickens.’
He became animated when he talked in the day, but at night they heard the muttered argument conducted without ceasing with whatever it was that had him pinned down there in the front bedroom.
The house seemed smaller, darker than she remembered. There were those faded patches on the hall, worn from years of leaks and buckets. They depressed her more than she could say, and the loose handle on the fridge still jammed your fingers if you weren’t paying proper attention, and the back door rattled mightily then flew open in a southerly as if something had entered unannounced, unless a knife had been shoved into the jamb to keep it shut. On Mondays the washing machine went chunka chunka chunka and the iron went thump hiss thump hiss every Tuesday and there were still fish and chips every Friday, though it was no longer strictly necessary post-Vatican Two. Kate stayed out as long as she could, worked every shift available, and when she had to be home she vanished between the covers of whatever books lay around.
‘Mm-hmm,’ she’d answer if her mother said she was just popping out to post a letter and could Kate keep an eye on the potatoes. ‘Mmhmm,’ but not really hearing, not really there. Miles away, with her head in a book. When she did emerge she was irritable. ‘What? Why didn’t you say? No, I didn’t hear you.’ The potatoes burnt black, gone to cinders in a ruined pot. She wanted the irritation, the argument, the raised voices and slammed doors. She invited them in. They made her feel separate.
Their mother insisted upon a holiday before Kate returned to Dunedin. One last holiday together as a family.
‘A what?’ said Kate.
But their mother was determined. They would go on holiday — and not just to the Power Board’s crib at Hakataramea. No. They would go to Takaka, where she had spent a holiday once before the war with her friend Rita McIvor from Public. They’d been about the age Kate was now. They had saved all their money and gone by train. They had stayed at Takaka with some cousins, connections on the Stuart side, who had a marble bath in which a Duke of Gloucester had washed his royal body on some visit to the dominion. Rita was so impressed! They’d had baths every night, just to say they’d done it. And they had visited a spring, she said, with water so pure they could dive down and from under the water they had looked up and could see every star. It was the purest water in the world. And there was an old lady, she said, who fed eels with a silver spoon. Oh, she said. It was just wonderful. Takaka was just wonderful. They had to see it for themselves. She would drive, so Pat would be comfortable in the front seat.
So there they were, for definitely, absolutely the last time, crammed in with bags and bedding and cake tins filled with bacon-and-egg pie and afghans ‘for the trip’ in the back of the new Triumph Herald, which had been specially adapted so that Pat could drive it the mile or so to the office. With interminable slowness they chugged up the Main North Road past Timaru (Look, look, there’s Caroline Bay), through Christchurch (Aren’t the gardens lovely? It’s called the Garden City, of course. When Rita and I were here, the daffodils were out, and you should have seen them: all along the banks of the Avon. It was such a picture …) Along the road past Kaikoura. (Keep an eye out for seals. We saw three seals here, right there, on that corner, just lying there like a lot of old dogs … oh, there’s one. No … No … that’s just a rock, but it could easily be a seal.) To Blenheim. (My mother’s second cousins lived in Blenheim before they went off to Rhodesia. They were Grants and none of the children married, wasn’t that strange? Not one …) To Takaka. (Thank goodness the road’s tarsealed, such an improvement, though these curves are still terrible, aren’t they? You all right in the back? Not feeling sick? I’ve got some barley sugars. Go on, have a barley sugar …)
Paddock and beach edged past, slowly, slowly. Their father sat with a book open on his lap, hardly speaking at all. Maura had the window permanently wound down so that everything flapped and blew about, but she would otherwise be sick. She was never sick in the Holden when Bazza or Crooksey skidded out to Kakanui, but here, knees jammed between sleeping bags and boxes, the temperature edging toward the mid-thirties, she was overwhelmed with nausea. Kate’s elbow strayed over the centre line drawn invisibly between them.
‘Get off,’ said Maura.
‘Get off yourself,’ said Kate. So much for maturity.
They tried to find the house with the Duke of Gloucester’s bath, driving down one winding gravel road after another.
‘I’m sure it was around here,’ said their mother, peering hopefully through some scrappy macrocarpas.
‘Why don’t you ring?’ said Kate. ‘Won’t they be in the phone book?’
‘I don’t want to be a nuisance,’ said their mother. ‘They’ll be old now. Leonard would be … what … in his eighties? They’ll just go to a lot of trouble if we ring in advance, making afternoon tea and whatnot. They were very hospitable people. We’ll just drive past and if they’re home, maybe we’ll drop in and say hello. It’ll be here somewhere. Let’s just have another look at that map …’
A farmer approached them on a bike, dogs surfing the switchbacks with their ears folded back by the wind on the rear carrier.
‘You people looking for someone?’ he said from a cloud of white dust.
‘The Stuarts,’ said their mother. ‘Their house is around here somewhere, isn’t it?’
The dogs had leapt from the bike and were sniffing at the strangers.
‘Lenny’s place?’ said the farmer.
‘That’s right,’ said their mother. ‘Leonard.’
‘Had a stroke,’ said the farmer. ‘Years ago now. Gettouttathat, Blue. Went up to Masterton to his daughter. Don’t know if he’s still alive.’
‘And the house?’ said their mother.
‘Burnt,’ said the farmer. ‘To the ground.’
They found it finally. A rim of blackened stone foundation blocks, a couple of chimney stacks standing like exclamation points at the end of an overgrown drive of tangled monkeypuzzle trees. They wandered about kicking at bits of brick, some twisted metal. By the fence an old bath stood under a tangle of rusted wire and dry grass. Their mother dragged at the mess.
‘This might be it,’ she said. ‘Yes. I’m practically sure …’
‘I thought you said it was a marble bath,’ said Kate. She was hot. Thistles scratched at her bare legs. ‘That’s not marble. It’s porcelain.’ Her mother straightened up. She looked around at the bare foundations, the gargle of magpies overhead.
‘Such a shame,’ she said. ‘Such a shame.’
There was a sign at the spring where the purest water in the world burst from a crevice in the earth. It forbade swimming, along with fires, dogs and camping. There was a track instead leading to a viewing platform and a special place where you could stand and look through a glass partition at the pond life, all identified in silhouette for the information of visitors.
They watched the bubbles of perfect water rise in shining columns to burst on the surface above waving tendrils of pond weed.
‘But you can’t see the stars any more,’ said their mother. An eel unfurled from right to left like a grey pennant waving. Its eye passed them by. A steel stud.
‘Oh, what a shame,’ she said. ‘I wanted you to see the stars.’
And there was a sign on the gate where the lady fed the tame eels, saying that for Personal Reasons, a Family Bereavement, the feeding of the eels was cancelled that week. Kate shrugged. It was raining, a sudden drenching cloudburst that flooded the road and left the car stuffy with condensation.
‘I wouldn’t want to get soaked just to look at a whole lot of fish anyway,’ she said.
Her mother turned to her a bright, desperate face.
‘But it is so wonderful,’ she said. ‘Like something from a fairy-tale. The lady sits by the river and the eels lie across her feet. She feeds them cat meat and blancmange. You can hear the scraping of their teeth on the spoon.’
It did sound interesting, but Kate pushed the momentary flicker of regret to one side. She wiped a clear space in the fog and looked moodily out the window. She wanted this holiday to be a disaster. She wanted it to be completely and totally awful. She wanted shops to be shut and roads to be impassable and camping grounds to be noisy. She wanted it to be so bad that no one could ever say she should go on such a holiday again.
And finally it was over. The holiday was at an end and Kate could climb onto the train at the beginning of a new term. She could sit alone looking out the window like the mysterious woman on some enigmatic mission on the Oriental Express. She could view the waves at Katiki and think how beautiful they were without prompting, while strangers glanced at her and wondered if she harboured some deep and secret sorrow. She could thunder through the tunnels around Purakanui and burst at last into the harbour where the clock on the church at Port Chalmers pointed the time north, south, east and west.