by Fiona Kidman
Belinda looked back to the sea wall. Charm was standing there, in a red dress, a cardigan pulled over her low-slung breasts. There was no knowing how long she had been there.
But she had seen. Belinda knew that she knew.
3
Blue Monday
1970
THE WIND TORE THE SEA apart at the entrance to the Campbell Island harbour, turning it into wild loops of spume that spun across its surface. Young sea lions played in the kelp at the water’s edge while huge dark birds wheeled overhead. Seth Anderson loved the giant petrels. His blood soared when he looked skywards and saw them lifting their wings, their feathered capes. Some of the men called them stinkers, as if they couldn’t see the beauty of their flight, nor understood the tenderness with which they raised their young for months at a time. He watched when they laid their annual egg, just a single one, in a nest made of moss on bare ground.
It was several months since he’d come south to Campbell Island to work at the meteorological station. There were eight men on this remote outpost, hundreds of kilometres to the south of New Zealand. Their job was to measure the temperature of the upper air, its pressure and humidity, and report back to New Zealand by radio telephone. As well, they would make scientific observations of one kind or another about the environment. On the whole, the men were mates, although there were days when the weather got to them. At twenty‑three, he was the youngest, and it had taken him a while to get to know the men. Some had wives and children at home; they’d come away for a year for the money, not the adventure. They saw him as a kid, the clever brat who’d been foisted on them. His degree was in science. He’d done honours in physics and passed with distinction. When he went back to the mainland he would do a Master’s.
That didn’t make him practical, they said, and set traps for him, some of them small and silly. On one of the first nights, after they had moved into their timber huts at Beeman Cove on the island, they played a pointless game. The married men started counting the handkerchiefs their wives had put in their bags when they were making up their clothing kits. For those who’d been before, it was a standing joke — whose wife loved him the most. One guy called Mike had twenty and was declared the winner. ‘How many handkerchiefs have you got, Snot?’ he asked Seth, who had been silent during the exercise.
Seth did a mental calculation about what was expected of him. Half a dozen, he told them and the older men jeered. ‘You can use the back of your sleeve when you run out,’ Mike said. ‘You got a girlfriend?’
Seth hesitated. ‘Not really,’ he said.
‘Go on,’ Mike said. ‘You have. What’s her name?’
‘No, I don’t. Honest.’ He didn’t want to tell them that he liked quite a few girls, but he hadn’t picked any of them as special. Not yet. Most of these girls wore skirts that reached just beneath their bums, and pale make-up with heavy black eyeliner and lashes like a flock of mosquitoes. They twisted their little bodies before him, knew all the words to ‘Come and Get It’ and sang them at parties. All the parties.
And yet they were so clever, as dewy as freshly cut melons when they turned up for lectures, regarding exams as mere exercises that interrupted their real lives. He’d slept with several, and that was part of the problem. He didn’t think they should have let him — not if he was going to settle down with any of them. It wasn’t right that they were easy. He couldn’t visualise taking any of them home to meet his mother.
There was a young one who seemed different. She wasn’t a university girl; he would see her at old-fashioned dances in the local hall at Masterton when he was home on vacation. He’d met her a few times, a girl with pale skin and dark hair, a little soft around the chin but she had big brave eyes. She was about seventeen, perhaps, although he didn’t get round to asking how old she was.
‘Save the supper waltz for me,’ he’d murmur against her ear when he arrived. She had an odd way of looking as if she had been expecting him, and she always seemed ravenous.
‘Keep the last dance for me,’ he’d say, before they both moved off to find other partners. But as often as not, she sat the next dances out until it was time to go home. Seth would take her in his mother’s car to park up along near the public gardens, his fingers slipping into the top of her stockings and gently letting her suspenders go. When he touched her she would dissolve into a helpless needy creature. No, she would say, and no again, until one night she gave in.
At a certain junction in the street she would ask him to stop the car and let her out, so that he never knew where she lived. All he knew for certain was that she worked in a plant nursery and was applying to go to teachers’ training college next year. She had had good marks in English, she told him with a certain shy pride.
At Beeman Cove, in the long nights ahead, as the elements battered the huts, Seth often found her pale face swimming before him, her body’s hungry desire, her urgency, the bright, slightly startled expression in her dark eyes when she saw him across the dance hall.
He left without telling any of the girls he was seeing that he was off south. His mother cried about him leaving and said it was all very well having daughters, but he was her only boy and that he had to take care of himself. In fact, she had put twenty-five handkerchiefs into the kit she was making up for him to take south.
WHEN EIGHT MONTHS HAD PASSED since the men were put ashore at Beeman Cove the supply ship came and went. Some of the men eyed its departure in a covetous way, as if longing to be on it. It won’t be long now, they said to each other, glad for fresh food but yearning for meat of another kind, as they put it. Jacking off was all very well, but it wasn’t the real thing.
Seth was ready to leave, but he was determined not to show it. His father had told him before he left that where he was going was a job for hard bastards, and did he think he was up to it? Being a man, that was important to his father. He took Seth pig hunting in the ranges, and bivouacked in the snow, taught him how to build a camp fire — better than any boy scout, he boasted. When Seth looked in the mirror, he saw a man not unlike his father, just younger, with a thatch of fair straight hair and light blue eyes. There was Scandinavian heritage not far back. His father earned his living putting roofs on houses; he had a head for heights, could carry big weights, hammer nails straight. He was used to hard work, another of his proud claims. When Seth took up hockey, not rugby, his father sighed and rubbed his chin. That boy is full of surprises, he told his wife. He was pleased when he heard Seth was going south.
After the ship left, Seth decided to walk across the cliff tops to see how the baby petrels were doing. There was a hen that had injured her wing. He’d taken to going most days, carrying food scraps to where she was nesting with her chick. He had to advance carefully, in order, as best he could, not to frighten the other birds. At first, the mother of the chick tried to fly at him, but the bad wing failed her. It surprised him that she had survived for as long as she had. The other birds’ mates appeared to bring them food. He found himself worrying that the mother would be abandoned by her mate, the chick left to die. After he had been there a few times, the bird seemed to accept his presence. In an odd sort of way, she reminded him of the girl. He smiled to himself: his ‘bird’. Kneeling near the nest, he placed the food down, and walked away so he could watch her stretch her neck, peck and gather it towards her.
He wondered if this is what hard bastards should be doing, going out feeding scraps of meat from the mess to a bird, and feeling sentimental about them. As he straightened, pain stabbed him in the abdomen. Cramp and the cold, he decided.
Back at the huts, there was mail, an accumulation of real letters from home. His mother had written to him every week: about flower shows in Masterton, coffee mornings she had gone to with her friends, books she had read (she took six books from the library every fortnight, unlike his father, who read little more than the newspaper), what his sisters were doing. They were younger than him. The older girl, Emma, had gone to Auckland for her first year at university,
and Rebecca, a late baby, was still at school. He was struck by sudden inexplicable longing when he saw other men around him reading their letters, taken out of envelopes that had kisses on the back of them, or spilled pictures drawn by children.
Mike looked up. ‘No letter from your girlfriend, mate?’
‘I haven’t got one. I told you.’ Seth’s voice was more terse than he intended.
‘I reckon you have, Snot.’
‘We’re not going steady.’
‘Ah ha, so there is one. What happened? Did she ditch you before you went away? C’mon, what’s her name?’
‘Belinda,’ he blurted, before he could stop himself. ‘Her name’s Belinda.’
Mike lowered the letter he was reading. ‘Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. Tell me more about this Belinda.’
‘Nothing much to tell.’ Seth was furious with himself.
‘What’s her second name?’
Seth looked at him with a feeling of loathing. ‘That’s my business,’ he said. He had no idea what Belinda’s second name was.
In the night, he woke with the pain like a giant wound in his right side. He lay clutching his stomach, trying not to groan, until his room mate got up and called in the head officer on the station.
Appendicitis, the officer reckoned. Just as well the supply ship was still in range. With luck, and some calm weather, they could get Seth out of here in the morning. With even more luck, he’d last long enough to get to a doctor in time.
BELINDA WAS LIVING in a farmhouse with a huge kitchen bordered by long wooden benches. The floor was polished linoleum. The men who milked the cows on the farm came in after early morning milking and ate enormous breakfasts of fried bacon and eggs, usually with a steak thrown in, and mountains of toast washed down with tea. The teapot was so large and heavy Belinda could hardly lift it when it was full, or not when she first arrived, although she had become used to it. The men took off their gumboots when they came into the kitchen, padding around in thick woollen socks that bulged where they had been darned and redarned. They had large chafed hands. For the most part, they didn’t look at Belinda, although the youngest, a farm cadet not much older than her, stole sideways glances now and then. The older men were brothers, who had farmed together since they were young. They talked to each other in low voices, occasionally interrupted by bursts of mirth. When they addressed Belinda it was in a series of grunts. This house belonged to the oldest brother and his wife.
One of Belinda’s jobs was to clean up after the meal, before scrubbing the benches and the floor. The smell of bacon fat and egg yolk still made her feel sick. When that work was done she would cut up beef and onions, in readiness for the farmer’s wife to make stew for the evening meal. Her name was Marie, a small woman with tightly permed hair, and cool blue-grey eyes. Belinda had imagined that a farmer’s wife would be buxom and cheerful, not this quick sharp creature. She moved deftly in the kitchen, preparing food and organising the household, but she didn’t do cleaning. Belinda soon understood that she was one of a long line of girls in predicaments like hers who had worked on this farm. Every Friday, Marie went shopping in Palmerston North, usually bringing back a new dress or skirt, or shoes, once a pair of golfing shoes. Her golf handicap, and her breasts which were still pert, gave her great satisfaction.
‘You’ll get your figure back eventually,’ she said. ‘It takes time, although I always kept myself fit when I was carrying. You spend too much time moping around. If you’re wondering who the father is, you’ve left it a bit late for that, my girl.’
She had tried to extract the information from Belinda several times, usually when she was inspecting the benches with a critical eye and declaring them not clean enough. ‘Look, can’t you see the blood stains there in the cracks? We’ll all get food poisoning if you’re not careful.’ It was the same when Belinda was making a bed. ‘Didn’t anybody ever teach you how to make a bed properly?’ she would ask. ‘You fit the corner under the mattress, just so. You do know it would help the social worker place this baby of yours in a better home if you came clean? People don’t want just any old pig in a poke.’
Belinda had looked away.
‘It wasn’t your father? Something like that?’
‘I haven’t seen my father in years,’ Belinda said, sullen, on her hands and knees scrubbing the red and brown squared linoleum.
‘There’s nothing wrong with sex,’ Marie remarked one morning. ‘I mean, it’s a changing world, isn’t it? Bruce and I have our little flings on the side, things we wouldn’t have thought of ten years ago.’ She was smoking a cigarette, watching Belinda out of the corner of her eye. ‘I’ve had a bit of fun in my time, I can tell you. Does that shock you? Surely not? You’re a girl of the times. You just got caught.’
‘I don’t care what you do,’ Belinda said. It was the nearest she’d come to rebellion.
‘Oh, very high and mighty,’ Marie said. ‘I reckon this guy was a darkie. One of the shearing gangs when they’ve come to town. You’re going to have a tar baby, is that it?’
‘He’s white,’ Belinda shouted. ‘He goes to university.’
‘Well, you don’t say? Really?’
The silence thickened around them.
‘You could say, Miss, that we’re getting somewhere. So he dumped you?’
‘He doesn’t know.’
‘Why ever not? A one-night stand, perhaps?’
‘I don’t know where he is,’ Belinda said miserably.
‘SO YOU DON’T KNOW who the father is?’ the social worker asked Agnes Rattray. Agnes had put out her best fine china, the Shelley tea set given to her on the occasion of her long-ago marriage: she had been a widow for thirty years. Her white hair surrounded her face in short frizzy waves. She and the social worker sat opposite each other in chairs with curved wooden arms, the seats covered with moquette fabric that had seen better days. The woodwork in her sitting room wore dark varnish.
‘I wouldn’t have a clue. Don’t think I didn’t ask her,’ Agnes said, her fingers fretting in her lap. ‘I did try, you know. I’m her aunt, I took her in when she and her stepmother didn’t get on. They said she was a wild girl, but I thought I could straighten her out. The neighbours said I was a saint taking her in. I thought, Well, I never had children, it wouldn’t hurt me. Oh dear, I’m so ashamed.’ Her voice faded into silence.
‘It’s not your fault, Mrs Rattray,’ the social worker said. She had introduced herself as Kaye Borrell, a slim woman in late middle-age. Her bobbed hair was flecked with grey that matched the padded shoulders of her suit. A purple silk scarf was settled around her throat, as if to announce a soft side to her business-like approach. ‘You’d be surprised how many girls from good families get into trouble.’
‘I should have picked it sooner. I thought she had a problem with her weight — she was always a solid girl for her height. I gave her plenty of vegetables, no cakes, I thought she’d be better off without that stuff. I didn’t notice.’
‘You did a wonderful job, Mrs Rattray. Before long she’ll be back and nobody any the wiser. You haven’t told the neighbours?’
‘Of course not. I don’t look stupid, do I?’ Agnes sat up straighter in her chair, holding her cup between two fingers. ‘But I’m not having her back.’
‘I see.’
‘I mean, who’s to say she won’t start breeding like a rabbit again?’ Agnes’s face contorted with disgust. ‘She started getting airs and graces, you know. They made too much of her at school. She wanted to stay on until the seventh form, or whatever it is, but I said, “Look, I let you stay past turning fifteen. My family came out from Scotland where you were lucky to stay until you were twelve years of age, aye.” You can have too much of a good thing. I’m a pensioner now, even if I do have my own little house. I said to her, “You need to get out there and work for a year, find out what the real world’s all about.”’ Spittle had begun to fly from the corners of Agnes’s mouth. ‘She let me down. I was only charging her ten do
llars a week in board while she got a start at the plant place when they took her on. She’ll be paying a lot more than that when she finds somewhere to live. I hope to God it won’t be in this town. Can you let her know that?’
The social worker leaned forward, her manner confidential. ‘I understand, Mrs Rattray. I shouldn’t really be asking you this, but if you could just help me out with who the father might be, it would be a great help. People have preferences about the babies they choose. Little boys and girls with fair complexions are very much in demand.’
‘Oh, who knows what colour it’ll turn out. Her father’s got red hair, and her brother and sister are a bit gingery.’
‘Well, that’s a help.’ The social worker made a note. ‘I might just have a match there.’
Agnes sighed, her face clouding over again, as if unconvinced by what she’d just said. ‘It could be dark for all I know. She’s turned out quite dark herself. Too much of her mother in her, that girl.’
‘Something in the family?’
‘No,’ Agnes said, her voice faltering. ‘No, of course not. Forget it. Belinda could have been with anyone, for all I know. Black, brown or yellow.’
‘But she’s told the lady where she stays that it was a boy of European descent who goes to university.’
‘Has she now? Well, I don’t know where she’d meet someone like that.’
‘Someone at the plant nursery, perhaps? Working on vacation?’
‘I can’t tell you. I’m sorry. All I can say, plain and simple, I’m pleased to see the back of her.’
Miss Borrell sighed and put her notebook back in her satchel.
THE COUPLE KAYE BORRELL HAD IN MIND were called Sheila and Monty.
‘We’ve started going to church again,’ Sheila told her, when she came to visit. ‘You know, if we’re going to adopt a baby we promise it’ll be brought up right.’ It wasn’t that they weren’t God-fearing, but they’d slipped up a bit lately, just so much on at work, but Sheila would stay home if they had a baby. Sheila had been brought up Methodist, and Monty’s family were Baptists. Sheila found the Baptists a bit hot on God, a bit much for her, although she did respect his family’s values. They got married in her church all the same, because the couple’s families both agreed it was respectful to acknowledge the slight differences in interpreting the Bible in favour of the bride. Sheila had worn a white dress with lace panels, and a veil over her face. She told the social worker all this in a great rush, as if they had written a list of their virtues in order to present their case.
