… takes down the photo. The one where she is seated with her family on a rug on the lawn, as if they are having a picnic, except Prince Philip is wearing a suit which seems a little formal for a picnic. Prince Charles is sitting beside them but they are both looking at Anne, who is crawling off the rug towards a border of flowers. The flowers are tall and pale: lilies perhaps, or gladioli.
The queen was fond of gladioli. They had been one of the flowers chosen to decorate the city in preparation for her visit over the summer. The entire floor of the army barracks in the centre of the city had been covered in gladioli and gypsophila, marguerites and roses as Christchurch strove to Say It With Flowers. To say Welcome to the Garden City, to the city that is more English than England, the city that, if you did not know was actually midway down an island in a Polynesian archipelago, might be confused with Salisbury or Cheltenham!
The call had gone out for flowers of patriotic red, white and blue, or in her Her Majesty’s favourite colours, which were pink and pale aqua.
Sybil had picked armfuls of lilies and daisies and roses from the garden and every single gladiolus, gathering them in the earliest morning when they were fresh and packing them carefully into an applebox on the carrier of her bike. Gladioli are her favourite flower: tall stems of orange and pink and crimson, frilled and generous. Each year she divides the corms, peeling away the papery husk and poking them back into the soil, and each year they re-emerge in spring: green tips that in summer explode into flower. She cycled across the city to the barracks where a brisk, distracted woman said, ‘Oh, how lovely. Just pop them over there,’ waving a pair of secateurs towards a mountain of flowers growing by the minute against the wall with its gilded honour roll. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a moment,’ she added, clipping the stems from marguerites, ‘but Lois could do with a hand with the arch.’ She was bossy, but someone had to be bossy. It mattered that it was done correctly. The floral arch would be the first thing their majesties would see as they alighted from the royal train and stepped forth from the railway station, which had been scrubbed up for the occasion, onto the streets of the city.
Sybil had watched her arrive, one in a throng of fluttering paper Union Jacks, a citizen among thousands, notable and otherwise, Girl Guides and Boy Scouts and school children lined up in white panama hats, gold commemorative medals pinned to their uniforms, the whole rising at her emergence to one communal roar of approbation, not a hurrah exactly but a vast exhalation of joy.
All over the city, gardens had said it with flowers. They were decked out with blue lobelia and red begonia and white alyssum.
‘Lot of nonsense,’ said her mother, who had no intention of putting on hat and gloves and joining the joyful throng. ‘I don’t know why you bother, Sybil.’ She was angry because there had been letters to the paper protesting about the state of the old houses in Sydenham, her grandmother’s girlhood home among them. They were too dingy to give a good impression of the city as the queen drove past on her way to view the manufacture of sports shirts and underwear at the Lane Walker Rudkin factory.
Personally, Sybil could think of nothing worse than a morning spent viewing machinery. The queen seemed to have spent a lot of time on her visit looking at car engines and assembly lines between brief spells at the races and the occasional garden party.
‘The thing is she always manages to look interested, doesn’t she?’ she said. ‘It’s one of her great skills.’
Her mother had been unimpressed. There was her cousin, daft old Eugene Mulcahy, who had a house near the factory and had stayed up, according to an article in The Press, until 1 a.m. doing his best to cheer the place up with crepe paper and sixty-four balloons he could probably ill afford. But at least they had not demolished the houses the way they did up in Auckland where they set fire to Maori houses deemed unsightly along the royal route. There was a photo in the Weekly News: shadowy figures standing by watching as their homes went up in flames. At least they had avoided flame in the Garden City.
Sybil stood waving her paper flag, then followed the crowd up Colombo Street where the shops were hung with flowerboxes trailing carnations and gypsophila. In the Square the tram shelters had been cloaked in golden marigolds. She stood among the throng, chanting, ‘We want the queen. We want the queen,’ until she stepped forth onto the balcony of the Clarendon Hotel, waving that special thumb-in-palm wave that only royal personages can wave.
‘Mrs Bloody Windsor,’ said her mother, wheezing as she pushed her custard aside. ‘And that chinless bloody wonder she married. You’re a fool like your father, Sybil.’ Her hands were thin and white, webbed with blue veins.
‘Are you not going to eat that?’ said Sybil.
‘It’s got lumps,’ said her mother. ‘I can’t swallow lumps, you know that.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ said Sybil. ‘I sieved it. There are no lumps.’
‘Just a cup of tea,’ said her mother.
‘You’ve eaten nothing all day,’ said Sybil. ‘You can’t live on tea.’
‘Yes, I can,’ said her mother and she turned up the wireless.
‘I don’t know how you stand it,’ Margaret had said at Easter when she visited, smart in woollen coat and fine kid gloves. Her first visit in twenty years and she couldn’t even bear to remove her coat, so eager to leave. ‘Why don’t you put her in a home?’
‘I heard that,’ wheezed Violet from the sunporch on the back verandah where she was wiping the worst of the grime from the windows with crumpled newspaper.
‘We get along all right,’ said Sybil. ‘We manage.’
The place stank of cats and oil paints and old food and one of the dogs, a degenerate terrier, was clearly on heat. Margaret shuddered. She couldn’t wait to get back on the ferry, head back to Whangarei and the warm sweet order of brick and roughcast, built to a pattern selected from the Parade of Homes, the logical next step when Jock retired and their sons took over the running of the farm. She stood in this hideous kitchen where nothing much seemed to have changed in twenty years, other than mess and clutter and strangers occupying rooms that had once been their own. She longed desperately for her Formica bench, for the view of the sea, for the ladies gathered in her lounge for bridge and dainty club sandwiches.
Sybil was unbothered by mess. She and her mother got along. They managed.
In the summer when the queen visited New Zealand, newly crowned, Violet resolutely looked the other way while Sybil clipped photos from the Weekly News and pinned them to her bedroom wall. The photo of the queen and her sister as princesses with curled hair, seated at the microphone preparing to give hope to the victims of the Luftwaffe in the East End. The queen in her wedding gown, the queen carrying orb and sceptre, her head holding up that heavy crown. The queen waving from the royal train. The queen standing sombrely to commemorate the people who had been on that other train, the one that tumbled down into the churning river. The passengers had been seated in their carriages, their Christmas shopping stowed in the rack, and then the lurch, and fall, the mud and water, the choking and darkness. The queen had been present in the country to give her blessing to their terrible end. And then she had been driven to Waitomo where she had been taken in a little boat on the underground river to look up at the lights sprinkling the roof of the immense cavern. A great galaxy of stars, though each star was really a worm. A worm trailing a kind of mucus, lit up so that another worm with its mucus could find its way toward it in the dark.
Sybil pinned up the photo of the queen and her sister seated on a wall with corgis and the old queen and the old king, the shy one who had had to take over when his brother was a cad. She liked looking at them through the winter, pinned to the blue floral wallpaper in her room. She liked the calm reassurance of their distant lives.
By spring, however, they had become yellowed and wrinkled and today she is taking them down. There are other photos in the news now, but she does not think she will pin them in the queen’s place. These are photos of the two girls, sixteen-year-olds in school uniforms. The pretty aloof one and the dark intense one, both of them condemned, unsmiling. Their hands are stained with the dark girl’s mother’s blood, the woman who ran the fish shop, a plain woman smelling of cod and flounder. They invited her to walk on the hills overlooking the city, to walk along the little gravel paths, to admire the view. And then they hit her with a brick. The thud of it on the mother’s skull. How could they? How could they?
But then there was the orchard. Those green aisles of apple, pear and cherry, petal-strewn. The way her mother had simply handed it over, without warning or discussion, until only the plum tree remained, its trunk hard against their new boundary fence. Violet had given it away, and seemed delighted to have done so, pleased with her own generosity.
Sometimes, thinking of the orchard, watching those fretful skinny hands prod at soup or custard, there is a brick.
Sybil would never.
Of course.
She would never.
But just for a second.
The phantom weight, heavy in her hand …