by Fiona Kidman
And collecting Pearl’s things from the hospital — not much, because she’d been taken there by ambulance in the night: just a nightdress and a gold-plated watch that looked new. Signing her name so that Pearl could be released for burial. She glimpsed Pearl at the undertaker’s and said yes, that was her. So she had to believe it was Pearl in the coffin. It is her, she told herself, it’s Pearl, it’s Pearl, that’s Pearl in there. At the boarding house, clothes to pack, dresses with skirts that would have been billowy in Wellington’s wind, and hair combs and make-up, and some bits of jewellery. Esme remembered the brooch then, the one her mother planned to give Pearl, and wondered what would happen to it now. Some packets of cigarettes that she gave to an American who came to the door looking for Pearl because he didn’t know she was dead. A few photographs, one of Queenie and Stick, and a couple of Pearl and Raymond taken at the Junction. There was one of them at a dance together, Pearl wearing a dress made of green and black dappled satin of which Esme knew every seam. She remembered how impatient Pearl had been for her to finish it, and that there was a gusset in the bodice where she’d made it too small because Pearl wouldn’t let her fit it on her properly, just kept jigging around and singing little bubbles of some song or another. The next day, Queenie and Stick arriving at Wellington Railway Station. Stick with vacant watery eyes, Queenie hobbling on a cane by this time, older and fatter and tired. Just a touch of gout, she said, nothing she wouldn’t get over when she was back in her own home again.
Later in the day Joe and his wife drove down in their big black Hudson from Taihape where they were sharemilking on a dairy farm. Joe had a shock of grey hair already. So there was family there at the cemetery in Karori. Joe stood close to her and she found herself moving away from him. He’d never been too well disposed towards Pearl. Her mother said, ‘Now stop it, you two.’
The minister who the woman from the boarding house had found said, ‘The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.’
‘I’m so sorry, Esme,’ said Queenie. ‘It shouldn’t have happened.’
‘It’s all right, Mum,’ said Esme, who’d done with crying the night before they all arrived. ‘It just wasn’t meant to be.’
‘She was just too good for this world,’ said Queenie. ‘Our magic girl.’
‘Yes,’ said Esme, ‘Magic.’ Perhaps Pearl really had been a trick of the light.
‘You’ve got to get on with things,’ Joe said. As brothers went, she supposed he was all right. A bit rough and ready, that was all. ‘It was probably for the best.’ For a moment Esme hated him.
The service was said and done in the space of half an hour; they went to James Smith’s afterwards and had a cup of tea and some sandwiches and a cake apiece.
‘I don’t get the connection,’ one of Esme’s daughters-in-law said to her once. ‘Is that why you left? Because Pearl died?’
‘I suppose so,’ said Esme. ‘Well, she had something to do with it.’
‘But you left the children.’
‘I sent for Janet.’
‘What about the boys, though? You left the boys.’
She was going to remind her daughter-in-law that the boys had their father, what a good father he was, but she could see that wouldn’t add up. Jim had died before they’d grown up and, after all, the boys did end up first with Queenie and Stick and then with Joe and his second wife Bunty who he married after the first one died of a thrombosis, then, after that, with Mary’s family because Bunty couldn’t manage another family. Backwards and forwards, no regular place to call home.
Why people leave. There are as many answers as there are people who go, dividing and uncoiling their lives from one another. Esme thought you could drive yourself crazy, thinking about things like this. She did feel things, though. Whatever people thought.
‘Yes, it was to do with Pearl,’ she told her daughter-in-law. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
3
Philip loved the way Petra looked, the strong eyes, the big tender mobile mouth. If he took her features apart one by one, he couldn’t have described any of them as gorgeous, except perhaps for that mouth. She wore her hair in a straight brown bob, her breasts were so small she looked flat-chested some ways she stood, but she had a vitality about her that made him feel at home with her, as if he was in the presence of someone he had always known. Every time he saw her he experienced a swoop of joy, one that never went away, even when they were older, and things turned to shit, as they did, for a long time, when the children were growing up, and they were busy making their marks in the world, and not paying a lot of attention to each other. He swore the joy would never go away, never leave them.
Right from the beginning, the way she dressed made him proud of her when they were out. They were students when they met. She wore straight plaid skirts with dark sweaters, black stockings and flat-heeled lace-up shoes. When she came towards him on the street she would have pulled a beret over her hair, pouched towards the back, and a long scarf would be trailing behind her. The year that he became engaged to her, Petra was rehearsing As You Like It with the university. She was Rosalind. Of course. He was helping to build sets in his spare time, not that he had much of that, but he made it anyway.
‘My parents will drive you crazy,’ she told him when they had chosen the ring at Stewart Dawson’s, the big jeweller’s shop on the corner of Lambton Quay and Willis Street. ‘This is a very tasteful ring,’ the attendant had murmured, as she showed them the diamond on a bed of velvet.
He had been surprised by her insistence that they do things properly. This was a time when young women like Petra were throwing convention out the window. She was a banner waver like him, a ranter and a raver, hurling herself into causes like ban the bomb and trade unions, and the polemics of poetry; she believed it was all right for her to tell him when she was hot for him. All that stuff. She’d read The Second Sex.
‘They’re rich. We’ll have to have a big wedding. D’you mind?’ (I do really love them, she said, as a little parenthesis she used from time to time when she spoke about her parents. Like an apology. She was their only child.)
‘Just as long as you’re there,’ he’d said. Trying to sound resolute.
‘They’ll want your guest list before you can blow the fire out,’ she said.
‘I won’t have one. It’s simple.’
‘What d’you mean, you won’t have one?’
‘Well, just that. Your friends and mine. The rest’s up to you.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. Your family and all that.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any family to ask.’
The Blue Rose China shop was in a long elegant room with timber panelling. Margaret Ellis and her husband Nicholas, who was a dentist, owned the whole building. Nicholas had his rooms upstairs and her shop was on the lower level facing one of the main avenues in Tauranga. It got good afternoon sun which made the glass and silverware sparkle. She kept a set of rapier fire irons and the Peerage brass plaques down the front to give extra brightness in the winter.
Each day Margaret and Nicholas had their lunch together in the stockroom at the back of the shop. They considered themselves a convivial mix of commerce and the professions, or that’s what Margaret said. Margaret, or Mrs Ellis as she preferred to be called by her customers, was a trim woman, invariably dressed in smooth straight black dresses when she was in the shop, her blonde French roll immaculate and lacquered into place, never a speck on her dark upright shoulders.
One lunch hour, their conversation concerned their daughter Petra who had just become engaged. Striking the right tone for the newspaper notice was giving both her and Nicholas long pause for thought. ‘What on earth are we going to put about Philip’s parents?’ she said in a strained voice.
Even Nicholas, who was used to pain and blood and people looking their most unattractive, or shouting for mercy, pointed his scrubbed pink-nailed fingers together and hesitated. ‘Perhaps son of the late Mr and Mr
s Moffit.’
‘But I understand that Mrs Moffit is still alive.’
‘But she’s not Mrs Moffit any more, is she?’
‘So I believe, but we can’t just kill her off.’ She knew her husband was trying to be reasonable, in a humorous kind of way, but she felt a surge of panic overtaking her. If only she hadn’t arranged for the couple’s photograph to be taken for the fortnightly Photo News as well.
‘Son of the late Mr Moffit then. Just because she exists doesn’t mean to say she has to be in the notice.’
‘Everyone will know there’s something fishy if we say he’s the late and there’s no mention of her.’
Nicholas looked as if he had just come across a particularly unpleasant mouthful of decay. He was a tall man with beautiful iron-grey hair. Because of his height he suffered back pain in his profession which often made him look slightly tight-lipped. She had to remember this insidious discomfort when he looked like this. ‘What is the mother’s name then?’
‘I don’t know. Well, Petra muttered something about her being a Mrs Pudney.’
‘Well then, son of the late Mr Moffit and Mrs Pudney. We’ll just have to accept that.’
‘Petra says Philip won’t hear of it. He hasn’t spoken to his mother in years.’
‘He didn’t mention this when he spoke to me about Petra. I thought, a budding young lawyer. I wish you’d told me earlier, Margaret. We’ve given our word.’
‘She’ll marry him whatever we say. We should never have let her get into the theatre.’ Margaret Ellis groped for breath. ‘She’s so radical.’
‘Oh no,’ said her husband. ‘Not that.’
In the end, the notice that went in the paper said: ‘Mr and Mrs Nicholas Ellis are delighted to announce the forthcoming marriage of their daughter Petra Jean to Philip Moffit of Wellington.’
Margaret remembered this conversation one afternoon not long afterwards. She was on the phone ordering in a meat platter for a special customer, a superior sort of person who demanded attention. Not someone she could hurry. She spotted a woman turning the Denby Chevron mugs over and pursing her lips at the prices. An older woman, a bit rough round the edges. Hair crimped in a fraying ginger perm and bulging bunions. She had a way of flicking her head backwards as if to see whether someone was watching.
‘Can I help you?’ Margaret enquired, replacing the phone in its cradle at last. ‘Something for yourself, or a gift? A wedding in the offing, perhaps?’
‘No,’ said the woman, putting a mug down harder than was necessary. ‘But I hear you’ve got one coming up, Mrs Ellis.’
‘Yes,’ said Margaret, letting the distance in her voice lengthen. ‘I imagine you’ve been reading the newspapers.’
The woman introduced herself. She was a widow. Her husband used to be in the post office but he’d passed on a few years back. They’d had hard times in the old days but she’d learnt to count her blessings. She had daughters and they’d married well enough. She went to stay with both of them for two weeks each year so that helped pass the time. Her conversation was more of a continuous monologue than an exchange. She paused when Margaret glanced at her wristwatch. ‘You reckon that boy Moffit’s from Wellington?’
Margaret steadied herself on the edge of the counter as if she’d been caught off balance. ‘Our daughter’s fiancé?’
‘I reckon I know that face. Or one pretty like it. Family came from Ohakune way, didn’t they?’
‘Philip hasn’t mentioned that. We haven’t spent a lot of time with him yet. The two young people are studying, you see. Philip’s nearly finished his law degree.’
‘The law. Young Philip’s in the law. Well, my oh my. There’s a few things I could tell you about that young man’s family that I’ll bet you don’t know.’
‘I’d love to have let her have her say,’ Margaret told Nicholas that evening. ‘Perhaps I should have.’
‘It was probably lies.’
‘She said she was the postmaster’s wife. It sounded pretty convincing.’
‘It’s too late now,’ he said with real regret. They looked at each other, knowing it wouldn’t have done for Margaret to let the woman go any further. As if hearing it would make it true. Whatever it was.
‘She said he was a surly looking young bugger. That’s what she said. From his picture.’
‘He looks serious,’ said her husband.
‘She said, “I suppose he’s had plenty to be sorry for himself over. Tell you about his dad, did he? Whoever he was.” I asked her to leave then. I told her I was shutting while I went down to the bank. So she left.’
‘You did the right thing.’
‘You don’t think,’ Margaret said carefully, ‘that there’s a touch of, well, darkness there? If you know what I mean?’
‘Spanish, I think,’ Nicholas said vaguely. There couldn’t be any going back with this marriage. You knew when the horse had bolted. As it were.
‘Oh, that’s all right then.’ She still sounded doubtful. Her husband knew how hard all of this must have been for her.
He said, ‘I think you have to put this behind you.’
‘Darling,’ Petra said, one evening, soon after this. She and Philip were walking up the hill towards Kelburn where they shared a flat with four other students. ‘Darling, what about the invitation list?’
‘We’ve been through that. You ask who you like.’ He’d explained to her already how his mother had gone off with a man called Kevin Pudney and left him and his brother with his father. How none of it had worked out, not for him anyway, and how he’d left all of that behind. The going off with Kevin Pudney part was an elaboration, not exactly true, but Kevin had been there when his mother next surfaced in his life.
‘They just can’t seem to get it through their heads that you’re not going to ask anyone from your family to the wedding. Couldn’t you put up with your mother just for a day?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I couldn’t. My mother was a destructive bitch. My father went to pieces after she left.’
‘There might have been two sides to it.’
‘Don’t you believe it. My father was a saint. It killed him, I reckon. Her leaving him.’
‘You said he had cancer.’
‘Well, she gave it to him.’
‘Oh don’t be silly, Philip,’ she said. ‘People don’t catch cancer. It’s something that grows inside them.’
He walked out of the café then, knowing she would follow him. They would say they were sorry to each other, her, then him, in that order.
4
The day of her son’s wedding, in the spring of 1964, Esme Pudney got dressed in the small boarding house near the bus station where she was staying in Tauranga. The air was fragrant, scented with citrus blossoms; the gardens were full of daffodils and forget-me-nots. She put on a blue silk dress with a hint of pale silver flowers in the weave, liking the way it fell in a soft swathe of colour from the pleats at her hips. She dabbed lavender water between her breasts, powdered her sun freckles. She and Kevin took long summer holidays in caravans, staying in camping grounds or just on the edge of the wilderness, near lakes and streams. This was after Kevin retired from contract fencing. He was older than her by twelve years, but then she had often settled for older men. Their children were grown-up, the two they called their children: Esme’s daughter Janet, and his girl Marlene, who were pretty much of an age. Marlene had been his youngest, as Janet was hers. He’d been left with Marlene after his wife died. They didn’t have a fortune but, when they were chatting over a beer to the new friends they made along the way, they liked to say they had enough to get by on. Enough for a bit of fun. A beer and a few laughs and the wide open spaces. Now wasn’t that what life was all about.
The day before, she’d prepared a casserole that would last for two days and put it in the fridge for Kevin. She left a note for him to say she’d be back on the bus on Sunday evening. It wasn’t as if she was afraid of him, it was just that he would have thought her a fool. He c
ouldn’t see why she bothered with those sons of hers, especially the second one. He’d given him the rounds of the kitchen more than once. It wasn’t that Philip didn’t deserve it, impudent kid that he was, but she did wish Kevin had tried to talk things over with the boy before he let fly. But that was Kevin, a man of action. Like Philip’s father, perhaps, although when she remembered Conrad now, there wasn’t much she could tell you about him. Where he came from. Who he really was. Not even how old he was. She hadn’t asked. If she was honest, it was Jim she really admired. His goodness and the way that he’d stuck to the boys for as long as he could. The way he’d gone on till the end without asking her to say she was sorry though, Lord knows, she was.
A crowd of well-wishers had gathered outside the Church of the Holy Trinity, the way people did in those days when a wedding was the best show in town on a Saturday afternoon. Especially a wedding like this.
Esme stood at the back of the crowd, but slightly to one side so she could still get a good view. She’d learnt about the wedding from Joe’s second wife Bunty, who’d seen the engagement the year before in the local paper. She and Joe were sharemilking on another farm out near Katikati; it would be their last. Esme got on with Bunty, who Joe had insisted on bringing to visit with her and Kevin. She turned out to be an interesting woman who belonged to a library and read books, and kept up with the news. She called Joe the old bugger, and didn’t let him get away with much. Privately, Esme thought she was wasted on Joe. When Joe heard about the wedding, he told his wife to let it go, Philip had moved on from the family long ago. He said this with a sense of injury in his voice. But of course Bunty couldn’t do that. She felt a bit guilty about Philip, the way she’d sent him off to Mary’s to live, but he’d been such a handful, that kid. It was the least she could do to let his mother know about the impending marriage. She promised to let Esme know if she heard when the wedding was, and sure enough a friend of hers heard the banns being read in church, and told her.
