by Fiona Kidman
Her father and brothers thought she should go up north, try Auckland, and see if there was anyone on offer up there. This was a time when marriage had fallen off. A lot of couples couldn’t afford to set up house together. Men were afraid they would make their wives pregnant straight away and it wasn’t worth the risk of more mouths to feed. Queenie said not to worry about it, a girl’s place was at home. She set her to some tasks that would occupy her time, skills of her own that she had learnt in the native school when she was a child. Esme surprised her. She sewed the straightest seam you ever saw. She could run up a dress in a day and a half, complete with cloth buttons and cuffs.
‘People would pay good money for that,’ Queenie told Stick.
‘Well, get them paying,’ he said. This was what Esme did. She charged modest prices because that was all women could pay, those who could afford anything at all. A dress cost four shillings, two shillings and sixpence for straight skirts, three shillings for blouses. Sometimes, people put it across her, but only once. She found she liked the business side of things and learned how to say no to people who underpaid her. There was the school-teacher’s wife, for instance, who thanked Esme for the dress she had made, and given her a tin of shortcake to take home.
Esme got on her bicycle without a word, and rode towards home, the wind whipping her hair which she still wore long and untamed. When she reached the railway line, she was still rehearsing in her head what she would say to the school-teacher’s wife the next time she came looking for a bargain. She got off the bike to wheel it over the tracks. Some girls were giggling wildly on the platform. A group of gangers were sitting smoking on an idling railway jigger pulled in on a loop. The girls called out, shouting their names after them. Esme pretended not to see any of this carry on, flicking her hair back from her face, her foot poised on a pedal, while a train from the south thundered through.
Jim Moffit was riding in the guard van that day, on his way to a job.
Esme never forgot the thrill of it, being singled out by Jim. Perhaps that’s what it was, the excitement of being chosen, when so often she had been passed over. He’d seen her standing there on the railway station at Taumarunui among the group of girls. Like them, but different. She didn’t know he’d seen her and wanted her for himself. ‘Who’s that girl?’ he asked the men in the van. He told her this later on.
‘And what did they say?’
‘Just your name. That’s Esme McDavitt, that’s what they said.’
‘Was that all?’
‘Well, it was enough, wasn’t it?’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Not that I can think of. I said, “Does she live there? Will a letter find her?”’
Jim Moffit wrote:
Dear Mr McDavitt
You do not know me although I have met some of your sons in the course of my work on the railways. I have something to ask you, but first I should tell you one or two things about myself. I am an Englishman who has been in this fair country of yours for some three years now. Times are very hard back home, in Birmingham, even worse than they are here. My mother, God rest her soul, was very keen for me to come to New Zealand to see whether I could make a better life for myself. I have been fortunate in finding work. I have a responsible job, I think because I was considered to have a quick brain as a child and got a reasonable education. I am one of the signallers who operate the train tablets. So my job is steady, more than most can say, even in these troubled times. I have an offer of a railway house if I should marry.
Which brings me to the point of this letter. I am very desirous of making a closer acquaintance with your daughter Esme, with a view to marriage. I do promise you, sir, that my intentions towards her are entirely honourable.
I am thirty-four years old but I do not see a dozen years making a great deal of difference as I am very healthy of body and mind. It’s a lonely life for a chap out here, despite the advantages, and I promise I would make her an excellent husband.
Yours very truly
James Moffit
His wild girl, snatched up from the side of the railway, his clever English head turned in an instant. A bachelor, reformed into a husband, all, it seemed, in the twinkling of a flashing eye.
Esme made herself a dusky pink wool dress for her wedding. It had a collar, and long sleeves, puffed at the top, and a bodice that was pointed at the waist. Before they walked over to the church, her mother pinned her gold filigree brooch on her shoulder. ‘Just for today,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll give it to Pearl.’
‘I thought you might give it to Mary,’ Esme said, surprised that her mother would overlook her oldest daughter.
‘Well, you know how it is,’ her mother said. ‘You know Pearl’s my special baby.’
At the last moment, Esme didn’t want to go with Jim after all. She hung on to Pearl, and cried, trying not to let Jim see her tears. ‘You be a good girl for your Ma,’ she said, and climbed on to the train.
Jim took her to a hotel in Auckland for her honeymoon. None of her family had ever had real honeymoons, and none of them had stayed in a hotel. Already, married life was conferring an unexpected grandness.
‘Make the most of it,’ Jim had said, laughing at her wonder. ‘It’ll be down to real life once we get home.’ Home would be at Ohakune Junction, down south of Taumarunui beneath the volcanic mountain. In a way she would have liked to go straight there to see the house they had been allocated in Railway Row, the street by the line, but Jim said plenty of time for that.
They travelled on the night train. It was running late, so they had to sit on the platform in the cool darkness for a long time, waiting for it to come. The waiting room had closed. Esme had told the family to go to bed: there was no point in everyone being worn out. There didn’t seem a lot for her and Jim to say, as they huddled there in their coats. She realised how little she knew him.
On the way north, he opened up, talking about his job, and describing the train tablet system. He worked out of a hut, one of a series along the Main Trunk railway line. He travelled there on goods trains, and at the end of his shift he got picked up and taken home. The tablets were part of the spacing system that set the course of the trains and ensured that there were never two on the same stretch of line at once. The numbered tablets were picked up and carried from one section of the line to the other, and only when the tablet, or the ‘biscuit’ as the men called it, was safely under lock and key at the other end of the section was it safe for the train to proceed. That was when the green light beamed its semaphore message down the line, giving the all clear. With express trains and timber trains and other goods trains rattling backwards and forwards there was no time for a lapse in attention, no failure of detail that could be admitted.
‘I see it’s a very important job,’ Esme said soberly. They were rushing through another small town. Dawn light was breaking. A deep wide river flowed past them on their left. Stained and grimy miners were gathered near a station, as if their day was ending as others began. Esme felt like them.
‘I hold life in these hands,’ Jim said, holding out his splayed palms for her to look at. She shivered, wondering if she was up to the task of supporting Jim in his work. He seemed to read the way she felt. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be a team. It’s going to make a big difference to me, having a wife and comfortable home to come back to at the end of my shift.’
‘I’ll do my best, Jim.’
‘Think of it like a performance. Like Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘Pretend I’m a great actor who needs someone to change his cloak for him between scenes.’ He said this with a bit of a laugh, as if it was something he didn’t quite expect her to understand. There were a lot of things about his life that she wouldn’t know about. When she sat quite motionless, in the seat opposite from him, he said, ‘I can teach you things.’
‘What sort of things?’ she asked faintly. The train wheels beneath her said click click tschick click click tschik.
‘Wait and see.’
‘I
left school when I was thirteen. Didn’t my father tell you that?’
‘It’s got nothing to do with how clever you are.’
‘I wasn’t very clever,’ she said, not looking at him.
‘Don’t worry about all of that right now,’ he said. ‘It’s just you I want.’ They still had to get to Auckland, to make love for the first time, to discover who each other really was. She thought that they were both talking a great lot of nonsense, or he was anyway, and she was becoming frightened of him. Then she thought it was just because they were both exhausted and it was taking each of them in funny ways. She wondered if they would go straight to bed when they got to the hotel.
But that wasn’t the plan. After they checked their bags into the hotel, and collected the key to their room, Jim had organised a day of sight-seeing for her. She remembered walking round looking at lions and polar bears and monkeys, and then, later, in a daze, admiring the talking parrot in Farmers’ tearooms.
When she sat at breakfast the next morning, she felt strangely untouched, recalling more of the clean white cotton sheets that had covered her than his body. She had turned to him first thing when she woke. Some mornings at home, Pearl climbed into bed beside her. They would go back to sleep; in cold weather Pearl warmed her feet on the backs of Esme’s legs. So it was Pearl she looked for, when she felt someone in the bed with her, but it was Jim. He looked as if hadn’t slept well, but he leaned over and kissed her forehead. ‘Good morning, Mrs McDavitt,’ he said. She thought then that this was what her whole life would be, and she had felt a weightless sensation, as if she was not really there. Soon after, the housemaid had knocked on their door and delivered cups of tea.
‘Milk and sugar everyone?’ she’d called.
‘Jim, do you take sugar?’ Esme said.
‘Hush,’ he said, when they were on their own again. ‘She’ll know we’re just married.’
While they were waiting for their breakfast to be served, he pointed out the cutlery on the table. ‘Do you see how they set the knives and forks out?’ he said. This was how he liked things, everything exactly in place, the knife and fork straight beside the table mats and the bread and butter plates square on the right-hand side of the knife with the small knife pointed straight ahead. A quick learner like her would have no trouble at all.
2
In the morning, after Jim had gone, Esme walked to the window and looked at the mountain, or the place where the mountain should be if the rain was not falling so heavily and turning to sleet. Behind her a thin fire spluttered, spitting sap from wet bark, emitting a smell like incense. It reminded her of the magician she had met up Taumarunui way when she was still a girl, of the strange soft scent in the air that somehow proclaimed that nothing is real, nothing you ever knew exists. There is only illusion. The whistle of a train sounded through the mist, a long exhalation, a breath, another one. There he goes, she thought, there goes Jim, up the line, the fate of travellers in his hands.
The house in Railway Row was one of twenty-four, twelve on either side of the straight street that ran exactly parallel to the railway lines, just a few feet away. The houses stood face to face, one row with its back to the mountain, one looking towards the railway lines and the station itself, glimmering still with dim lights. Esme and Jim’s house was one of these. Although there were one or two larger ones, most of the houses were exactly the same: a porch, a kitchen, a square front room, a passage, two bedrooms and a bathroom you could just turn around in. Rough bush covered the slope above, while flax and toetoe bushes like soft calico flags shivered in the wind alongside the tracks.
Esme gathered up dishes from the table with a snap and a rattle. His irritation with her had started before breakfast. She had got it all wrong and she knew she wasn’t functioning properly. Her limbs wouldn’t work. Everything about her felt heavy and tired. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t slept; in fact, she’d slept so deeply that when the alarm clock went off she hadn’t known where she was.
‘Hurry up, will you,’ he’d said, razor in his hand as he came into the bedroom bare-chested, with his braces hanging in loops over his thighs. He still had soap on his face. He hadn’t parted and oiled his hair yet, so that it stuck up in spiky bristles. ‘Can’t you see I’ll have to go without my breakfast if you don’t get moving.’
She wanted to say to him, how about you get your own breakfast for once, but she knew that wouldn’t do. It wasn’t as if she didn’t work too. On a good week she could earn almost as much as Jim, not that she mentioned this because it made him angry in a way she couldn’t understand. Her dressmaking skills had followed her to Ohakune Junction.
When he did sit down to eat, breakfast didn’t please him. He liked his eggs on the right side of the plate, bacon to the left, and it just looked like a mess, something that had been thrown at him, and the bacon was only half cooked. He looked as if he was going to cry.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pleating the edges of the tablecloth between her finger and thumb. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me.’
‘Perhaps you’re doing too much,’ he said.
‘I need something to fill the days,’ she said, surprised to hear herself answering back.
‘Yes, I suppose you do.’ He sighed and folded his napkin, leaving half his food on the plate. ‘You should get Pearl to help you more.’
‘Pearl? She’s only a little kid.’ Pearl was asleep in the spare room that was hers when she came for the holidays. It was the room put aside for babies.
‘She’s ten. Lots of girls her age have to do a bit around the house. Her mother spoils that girl and you’re just as bad.’
‘She’s going back in a couple of days.’
‘Oh well. I suppose we can manage for that long.’
She smiled at him, then, put her face up for him to kiss and he seemed restored to good humour, pinching her cheek and looking down fondly at her for a moment, before picking up his coat. He glanced out the window at the ugly weather.
‘The truth is I could do with a day in bed myself.’
‘That it’d be a good ’un. What would your boss have to say about that?’
‘He’d probably say what a lucky devil I was, spending the day under the blankets with a fine looking woman like you.’
‘Jim. He wouldn’t.’ She felt herself reddening.
‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,’ he said.
Now that he was out of it, she considered cutting a pattern right away instead of washing the dishes. Routine, Jim said, and she could feel him looking over her shoulder. It put her back in a bad mood, so that she clattered around the kitchen, banging dishes about. You couldn’t tell how things were going to turn out. She liked this house. In the front room there were crocheted lace curtains that had taken her months to make. Her mother had taught her how to crochet. The curtains were difficult, getting the tension right for such a big piece of work, so that they fell the right way. The room was furnished with three wooden-framed armchairs, with red slip covers on the cushions, and a stand-up gramophone. All the floors were covered in green linoleum with a mottled yellow and brown pattern, that Jim had let Esme choose for herself. But now, just when everything was finished, Jim was talking about going for promotion, trying to get a job closer to a city. She didn’t know how she would fit into a big place.
‘What’s the matter?’ Pearl stood in the doorway in her nightgown.
‘Oh, it’s you. Go and tell your mother she wants you.’ She was surprised at the sharpness of her voice.
‘Is it breakfast time? Have I missed?’
‘I’ve kept you some.’
‘I thought you were mad, all the noise you were making.’
‘I’m tired,’ Esme heard herself say. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you got dressed and washed the dishes for once.’
‘It’s just like home,’ Pearl muttered.
‘Well, you’d better get used to it. The holidays are nearly over.’
‘I could go to school here.’
/> ‘No, you can’t.’
‘You are mad, aren’t you?’
Suddenly Esme wanted to cry. She hated Pearl going back to Queenie. She told herself that it was just that she liked having a kid around the place, one of the family. There were times when she missed everyone back at home, in spite of the nice life she had here, and the little business. But this morning she wanted to cut out her pattern by herself, in peace, with just the sound of the rain coming down.
No, she didn’t even want that. What she wanted was to sit and work out what was happening. There was something going on that she couldn’t figure out.
Pearl picked up a dishcloth and swiped it backwards and forwards as if she didn’t know what to do with it. Esme bit back a rebuke. Pearl was a sweet kid. My little sister, she said proudly, when she introduced her to folk at the Junction. She still had creamy skin and fair hair. Her teeth were prominent with one tooth much whiter than the others, giving her the appearance of a slightly lopsided rabbit when she smiled. Her talent was singing. She knew all the hymns and at Christmas she sang a verse of ‘Silent Night’ on her own at the church:
Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child,
Holy infant so tender and mild …
You could hear a ripple round the congregation: her high notes would make crystal shiver. Her singing was the one thing about Pearl that pleased Jim. He’d been brought up in the Church of England.
When everything was finally cleared away, and the tablecloth folded, Esme laid out the material for the dress she was about to begin, pink linen for the postmistress’s wife. Esme would have liked to tell Norma that the colour wouldn’t go with her red hair, but Norma was a woman who fancied her own taste. All the same, they got on well enough. Norma paid her promptly and liked a chat. Esme put the pattern on the oilskin cloth that permanently covered the table and considered it. She could see the sleeves were going to be troublesome; she might have to improvise a bit.
