by Gee, Maurice
Ellie realised how badly Mrs Prime had insulted her. For the rest of the morning she kept stopping suddenly and exclaiming until her mother asked what was bothering her.
‘Nothing.’
‘Well, calm down, you’re making me nervous … It’s not George is it, Ellie?’
‘No, it’s not. I like George. He’s better than some people I know.’
They went for a drive up the coast after lunch. The taxi smelled better, which was Mrs Crowther’s doing. Ellie enjoyed the way the hills came down so steeply and almost tipped the road into the sea. They walked on Paekakariki beach, George and Mrs Crowther holding hands. It embarrassed Ellie and she ran ahead, swerving to keep clear of waves sliding up the sand. When she looked back, her mother and George seemed like a girl and boy, except for the sun on his bald head. The happy couple, she thought. She wanted her mother to be happy and wished that George was better-looking so he could make sure of it. It was impossible to believe they were in love.
Mrs Crowther waved her back. The wind was too cold for them. They drove to Brooklyn, where George showed Ellie his house. It dismayed her – so small and dark. She had wanted a bungalow on the side of the hill, looking at the mountains across the harbour, but this was in a gully where the sun was gone at three o’clock and other houses stared from across the street. Brown little rooms with lino floors. George had lived here with his mother, who had died two years ago but left embroidered proverbs and biblical texts hanging on the walls – everywhere, every room – and a glassed-in sideboard full of crockery that looked as if she had thought it was the Crown Jewels. The bedroom Ellie would have was only eight feet wide – she measured with her arms when no one else was in the room – and had a mouldy smell in the walls like toadstools growing.
George made tea. Ellie was surprised her mother let him do woman’s work, but it turned out she wanted to talk.
‘I know it doesn’t look much, Ellie, but George is going to do it up. He’s taking two days a week off, starting tomorrow. He’s going to paint it cream with yellow windowsills and do the whole inside with new paper and put some carpets down. And next summer we’ll build a sunroom on, and maybe you can have it as a bedroom, I don’t know. He’ll do it all himself, Ellie. He’s a handyman.’
‘A jack of all trades,’ George said, rolling a tea trolley in. He looked so friendly and so keen and Mrs Crowther smiled so nervously that Ellie understood how much she could hurt them. It came in a surge, like a wave: she could overturn their happiness. Already she had done it with her mother a little bit, put her off balance by the stillness she had kept on her face; and she knew she must not give in to a kind of greed she felt to do it more. Yet she did not want the job of making them happy; it was not up to her – to pretend and lie. She did not like the house. She hated it. And George was too ordinary, too simple, too plain.
‘We’ve decided to get married in August,’ Mrs Crowther said. ‘The house will be done up by then, won’t it, George?’
‘Just you watch me,’ he said.
‘So you can do the whole term at Willowbank. That’s what you want, isn’t it, Ellie?’
‘Yes,’ she said. Then she could not help herself, she started to sob.
‘Ellie. Oh, Ellie,’ Mrs Crowther said.
‘It’s not you. It’s not what you think.’
‘Tell me, love. Let me help.’
‘It’s Angela’s mother. It’s Mrs Prime.’ And suddenly it was, by a simple transfer. Disappointment turned into anger and poured out: Dolores and Hollis Prime (not herself and Hollis), Angela’s blabbing, Mrs Prime’s snobbery, and worst of all the Mazengarb Report.
‘She thinks I’m some sort of goodtime girl just because I talked to her son. She thinks Dolores is chasing him and she’s no good because she’s Catholic. And because she lives in the Woburn Hostels.’
‘What’s wrong with the hostels?’
‘I don’t know. They’re lower class.’
‘They’re good girls there. They’re Christian girls. I’m going to go and see her. She can’t say things like that. What did she mean, the Mazengarb Report?’
‘I don’t know. She thinks I’m like Dolores, I suppose.’
‘Wait till I get her.’
‘No Mum, don’t. I shouldn’t have told you.’
‘You should let people like that stew in their ignorance,’ George said.
‘Who’s this boy Dolores is going with? Is he the one in the pink car?’ Mrs Crowther said.
‘Yes.’
‘She’s not doing anything bad with him, I hope.’
‘No, she’s not.’ Ellie was not sure of it – or if what her mother supposed they were doing was bad.
‘I think it’s time I moved you out from her. She’s too sophisticated for you,’ Mrs Crowther said.
‘No she’s not, she just likes make-up. Mum, I’m all right now. Don’t do anything, please. We’ve only got three months and then we can go.’
Mrs Crowther’s face was still pale. ‘How dare the woman?’
‘She’s wrong, Mum. I’m not like that, I promise you. Mum –’ she saw a way of being finished – ‘can I choose the colours for my room? Can I, George?’ It was the first time she had called him that. ‘I want to paint the ceiling orange, as if the sun’s up there.’
‘You can’t have an orange ceiling,’ Mrs Crowther said.
‘And I want some of the walls blue and the others green.’
‘Like the sky and hills,’ George said.
‘Yes, exactly. I don’t want a carpet on the floor, just plain floorboards. And a mat.’
‘Purple,’ George said.
‘No.’ Ellie laughed. ‘Brown, I think. I’ll help with the painting. I’d love to help. I can take some time off school.’
‘Not in your School Certificate year,’ Mrs Crowther said.
‘But if she came on weekends?’ George said. ‘You can both come. I’ll need as much labour as I can get.’
‘Well, we’ll see,’ Mrs Crowther said. Ellie could tell how pleased she was. A flush had come on her cheeks, replacing the white, and she grinned at George, who grinned back. Ellie wondered if she should go for a walk in Brooklyn and leave them alone.
Instead they drank tea, then drove to Woburn. Most of the nurses were doing prep in their rooms, but Dolores had left a note on Ellie’s bed: I won’t be in for tea. Tell your ma I’ll beat the curfew.
‘By ten seconds,’ Ellie said.
She ate her meal at the matrons’ table and mimicked the elocution teacher at school demonstrating vowels. It made Mrs McDermott laugh, but several of the others frowned at her cheekiness. Mrs Crowther had to say, ‘That’s enough, Ellie,’ looking pleased.
Dolores came in at half past nine.
‘How was it?’ Ellie said.
‘I’ve got a bone to pick with you.’
‘Yes?’
‘What’s the idea of talking about me with his sister?’
‘What happened?’
‘His la-de-da mum thinks I’ll get him in trouble. So he told her he was leaving. And he will. He’s packing up.’
‘Will you go with him?’
‘I’ve got a course to do, remember? What did you tell her?’
‘Nothing much. Just your lipstick and that. And shaving your legs. And your dresses.’
‘That’s not all.’
‘I told her some of the stuff you said about boys.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like – well – she thinks to get a baby the boy has got to leave his thing inside the girl all night. So I told her what you said about spunk and stuff.’
‘Just because I know doesn’t mean I do it.’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘She’s one of those little bitches who tells their mother everything. So mummy’s bossing Hollis to stop him seeing me. Calling a halt is what she says: “It’s time you called this whole mistaken episode to a halt.”’ Dolores smiled savagely, flashing her teeth. ‘That’s when he told her he was leaving
.’
‘Well, he should. He’s old enough.’
‘Don’t get smart. I’m not pleased with you.’
She was pleased with something, Ellie saw.
‘Did she say about being a Catholic?’
Dolores frowned. ‘That’s got nothing to do with them. Why don’t you go to bed, Ellie? I don’t want to talk to you.’
‘OK.’
‘You don’t know how nice he can be.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Drop dead.’
Ellie changed and got into bed. She turned her back because Dolores, in spite of being angry, still wanted to be watched. She’s like an apple, Ellie thought, ripe and red on one side and black spot on the other. Not black spot for sin, of course, or anything like that, but for vanity and temper. Dolores was perfect in her way.
In the following weekends she helped George and her mother with the house, which meant she could not play for the Willowbank hockey team. The gym mistress lectured her on school spirit, but Mrs Nimmo, passing, winked at her. Ellie kept away from Angela Prime, who was suddenly growing tall like her mother and making actressy gestures with her hands. ‘Quelle surprise,’ Angela kept saying, and, ‘C’est magnifique.’ ‘Isn’t England the most important, Mrs Nimmo?’ she asked. ‘Why do we have to learn what Hindus eat?’
George took down his mother’s embroidered texts and the matching photographs of his parents in black oval frames over the fireplace. He bought a painting from a furniture shop – a thatched cottage in a valley, smoke from the chimney, cows in a meadow, a workman trudging home, his wife and child waiting to greet him in the door. Ellie kept quiet. She helped him hang it.
‘Up a tiny bit on the left.’
‘I never thought I’d get married,’ George said.
‘Why not?’
‘You get into a way of thinking, It won’t happen to me. Mum kept on saying, “Why don’t you bring home a girl?” I never could with her living in the house.’
‘You should have gone to live somewhere else.’
‘It’s funny how you don’t. How you get scared. And people make you do things without trying to. You can’t bear to make them unhappy.’
It sounded pathetic to Ellie, and she said, ‘I’ll paint you a better picture than this one day.’
‘Don’t you like it?’
‘It’s too pretty.’
‘I thought pretty was good.’
‘Too pretty, I said. How did you meet Mum?’
‘She got one of her migraines at work and I’d just dropped a fare off there, so I got the job of taking her home. It was luck.’
‘A migraine’s not luck.’
‘Luck for me. I helped her inside and made her a cup of tea, and then I started coming back and we got friends. All I want to do is make her happy.’
‘Don’t you want to be happy yourself?’
‘I will be. I am.’
Mrs Crowther came in. ‘What are you two gabbing about while I work? Oh, George.’
‘Like it?’
‘It’s beautiful.’
And goodbye mum and dad, Ellie thought, looking at the oval frames face down on a chair. ‘Beautiful’ annoyed her. Her mother only used it because she was happy and thought it was the sort of thing you said about a painting. She had no artistic sense; but she was trying, like George. Ellie hoped neither of them would try too hard. It would be interesting to see who ended up boss with each determined to put the other first.
She went back to the bedroom, where she was stripping the wallpaper, a job she enjoyed. It came off in heavy strips – I’m done for, it seemed to say – and Ellie felt cruel and satisfied. She imagined the new colours she would blot out the past with – this brown old dusty past where people grew scared and lived in oval frames and said what they believed with embroidery. George’s idea of a purple mat might not be bad.
A southerly brought rain day after day. Crossing the overbridge, Ellie saw the wet suburbs stretching away: red slick roofs, brown tiled roofs, bare trees, black evergreens. The three-storeyed buildings of Lower Hutt appeared and disappeared in shifting curtains of rain.
The river overflowed and flooded a street of low-lying houses. Drains blocked and made a lake outside House 4. The nurses had to take off their shoes and stockings and hitch up their skirts and wade to the station.
Ellie went to Wellington after school to buy winter shoes. She hated walking around Kirkcaldies in her Willowbank uniform, and was sure the saleswoman was putting on an upper-crusty voice and giving little smiles of secret understanding. What was it they were both supposed to know that girls in different uniforms did not? I should tell her I’m leaving to be a waitress, Ellie thought. ‘Ah oui, très intéressant,’ she said, inspecting shoes. The saleswoman did not understand French.
At the station Dolores was not with the nurses getting on the unit, so Ellie waited for the next. Hollis Prime’s pink car drove past the taxi rank to the parking lot. Ellie watched from the station steps. Dolores and Hollis were either telling jokes or quarrelling, the way they moved their heads, the way Dolores worked her hands. Telling jokes, Ellie hoped. She was in favour of happiness, and of anything that would upset Mrs Prime.
Dolores got out and slammed the door. A quarrel. She stalked into the station, stern and cold in her belted coat – sophisticated – and Ellie edged with small steps round a pillar to avoid being seen. She followed Dolores on to the platform.
‘Fancy meeting you,’ she said.
‘Go away.’
‘I’ve been buying shoes. Want to see?’
‘No, I don’t. And I want to sit alone if you don’t mind.’
‘OK.’
But in the carriage she took a seat beside Dolores. ‘It’s crowded,’ she explained.
‘Just keep quiet,’ Dolores said.
The unit ran along the edge of the harbour on the earthquake fault line that always made Ellie imagine a tingling from pressures underground running up her spine. The unit could be swallowed in an instant. Dolores looked as if it would not bother her.
‘How’s Hollis?’ Ellie said.
‘Mind your own business.’
‘He hasn’t shifted out from home, has he?’
Dolores made an ugly sound, metallic, in her throat. In a moment she said, ‘Flats are too expensive, if you must know.’
‘I thought you said he was packing up.’
‘Well, he’s unpacked. All right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is that enough information? Do you want some more?’
‘No.’
‘Just as well. Now leave me in peace.’
Hollis’s car appeared in Oxford Terrace as the unit pulled in. He had driven fast.
‘Dolores,’ Ellie said, nudging her.
‘I’m not blind.’ She strode up the ramp but turned left instead of right.
Ellie looked back at Hollis Prime by his car. He was hunched and crumpled in the rain: miserable, monkey-like. She shrugged at him to let him know she sympathised, but wasn’t sure he’d seen. She would have liked to go down and push him back into his car out of the wet, ask him what the trouble was, tell him it was childish to stay home with his parents, no matter how much it cost to rent a flat.
Dolores went into House 4 and into their bedroom. She took off her coat and shoes and lay face down on her bed.
‘Can’t you go somewhere? Just for once I’d like to be alone.’
‘What’s the matter, Dolores? I thought we were friends.’
‘I haven’t got any friends.’
‘You’ve got me.’ Ellie sat on the bed. She put her hand on Dolores’ shoulder and stroked it for a moment, then slid her fingers under her hair on to her neck. Dolores shivered.
‘Don’t. It’s cold.’
‘I’m sorry you’ve had a quarrel.’
Dolores was quiet: a long moment that grew round and thick, coiling like a snake. ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said.
Ellie took her hand away. ‘Yes. I suppose you’re p
regnant.’
Dolores turned her head deeper into the pillow.
‘How long?’
‘Only two weeks.’ She rolled on to her side and looked at Ellie, her face tear stained. ‘But I’m never late. I’ve never been late in my life.’
‘Wait till next month,’ Ellie said. ‘Mum says you can miss two or three times in a row.’
‘Not me. I thought it was safe. We only did it when it was safe. Or I made him stop.’
Ellie stood up.
‘Don’t go all prissy on me,’ Dolores said.
‘I’m not. Have you told him?’
‘That’s what we were talking about. He doesn’t know what to do. He just says wait, like you.’
‘Get married,’ Ellie said. It sounded like an order. She softened it. ‘When you’re sure.’
‘I’m sure. It’s like I’ve got something stuck inside me.’
‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ Ellie said. I didn’t, she added to herself. She was moving between cruel and satisfied one minute and wanting to take Dolores in her arms the next. Left and right – she couldn’t stop turning.
‘Get married,’ she said again.
Dolores turned her face into the pillow. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever marry me.’
‘But he’s got to,’ Ellie said.
‘You tell him. Tell his mother.’
‘What’s she got to do with it?’
Dolores sat up. ‘I sometimes think him and me, we’re only about her.’
‘But she hates him, because of his leg.’
‘Who told you that?’ Dolores crossed her arms, making her shoulders small. ‘I know what she’ll try and make me do.’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Just go away, Ellie, and leave me alone.’
‘Are you coming to tea?’
‘Do you think I can eat when I’m like this?’
Ellie went to her mother’s room and showed her the shoes. She spoke carefully, enunciating, in case information should slip out. Dolores would be expelled, in a hurry too, if anyone found out she might be pregnant.
