Paddy's Puzzle Read online

  In a strange old building referred to as Paddy’s Puzzle, Clara Bentley endures the fears of wartime and awaits the arrival of her lover, Ambrose. He’s an American Marine. And he’s black. Having grown up in suburban Hamilton, her move to Auckland marks an escape from the dreariness and restrictions of her childhood. In this building, full of an odd assortment of people, she waits, not just for Ambrose, but for the air-raid siren, for the culmination of her illness and for the sister to whom she dreads having to explain her new life in the Puzzle.

  First published in 1983, the re-issue of this internationally acclaimed classic is a tribute to its lasting appeal. Fiona Kidman is the author of nineteen books.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Part One Clara

  Part Two Hamilton Town

  Part Three The Puzzle

  Part Four Winnie

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Part One: Clara

  1

  Clara has been waiting for Ambrose all day, without really believing he will come. Sometimes it seems like a dream that he has ever been there at all, that he even exists. Yet the evidence of his dark presence is in the room, a vase of fat thick-petalled roses, the colours like clotted cream and red wine mixed together; milk and some eggs.

  How those Americans live, she thinks. They seem to have so much of everything. Clara has asked Ambrose where he gets things from, but he only laughs at her; and the warehouses, where all the supplies for the Americans stationed in Auckland are kept, are so close at hand that she supposes it is a silly question.

  Still, she said to him once, childishly, ‘I won’t eat what you’ve brought me if you don’t tell me.’

  He had looked at her lazily then and said, ‘Oh yes you will.’ But his eyes, protruding slightly against the blue-black skin, had studied her with care, as if to reassure himself that he was right. She knows that her illness is a weapon and is ashamed when she uses it, and knows at the same time, that she will continue to do so. Her contrariness frightens her. She thinks of herself sometimes as a wayward child and is angry at what she sees. She spends whole days practising self-discipline, of being, as she sees it, older and more sensible.

  So that she has reconciled herself to his not coming by the time evening approaches. As on other days she listens to the tap dripping and wonders whether it is worth the effort of getting up to turn it off, until at last, as if by magic, or the innate workings of the curious plumbing system in Paddy’s Puzzle, it turns itself off, justifying what she has chosen to describe as her laziness. Nobody’s perfect. She listens to the sound of her own breathing and wonders if it will turn itself off in the end, like the tap.

  But although the tap has been driving her mad, when it stops she does not hear it. It might have stopped for a minute or an hour before she notices. She wonders whether she will know when her own breath is simply going to stop functioning. A part of her hopes that she will not, because to know would be frightening; another part of her thinks that she would like to know so that she could give warning of the event. She would like to have her one last scene. She will want Ambrose to know, to have him summoned to her side.

  Who else? Janice perhaps. She will weep a lot. Mumma? No, not Mumma. She might weep too, and Clara does not want to see her crying, for Mumma’s tears are of the unshed and most painful variety. Ma Hollis from across the passage? Well so long as she doesn’t bring Billy. None of it will matter much though, as long as they bring Ambrose.

  She is dozing when he comes. There has hardly been time to detect his footstep outside before the key is slipped into the lock and the door opens. She is shocked at the suddenness of his coming when she least expects it, and overjoyed, and at the same time apprehensive. Until he walks in, she hasn’t realised just how apprehensive. Worried, yes; and more than that, scared. When he walks into the room, her fear overwhelms her.

  He stands looking at her, his green soldier’s uniform a shadow on the wall of Paddy’s Puzzle. Outside, the children of Cleveland Road scream ‘Choc-lit, Choc-lit’ beneath the windows of the chocolate factory.

  She wants to put it off, now that he has come, to play some little game with him. Soon she must tell him about the letter. In just a minute more she will tell him that her sister Winnie has written to say that tomorrow she will be coming there to stay. But it is so momentous, and although she has prepared herself all day, when it comes to the point she is still not ready to tell him.

  Part Two: Hamilton Town

  2

  Winnie was shocked when the child tried to suckle her. She was lying in bed with a stack of pillows behind her with her own baby at her breast and Clara tried to take her other breast in her mouth. She smacked the child with the side of her hand catching her a blow on her face.

  Clara slid off the bed whimpering and backed away from the bed. A red mark was starting to stain her pale skin.

  Winnie was shocked at herself then. The child was only three, and it wasn’t all that long, maybe a year, since Mumma had stopped breastfeeding her. Mumma always kept the babies on as long as she could; she believed that she wouldn’t have another baby as long as she was producing milk, she seemed to keep on believing it even though it had failed her more than once. But she’d been all right for three years now, maybe she’d kept Clara on her even longer than Winnie thought. Mumma didn’t tell her things like that, even though Winnie was grown up and had a baby of her own.

  ‘Clara,’ Winnie called to her sister. ‘I’m sorry. Come here.’

  Clara crouched down on the floor near the wall, still whimpering in the back of her throat. ‘It’s all right,’ Winnie said. Her milk had stopped flowing, and the baby was grizzling. She felt a fresh flash of anger. Why wasn’t Mumma looking after the child, now she had her hands full? She’d been looking after Clara on and off ever since the child was born. So maybe Mumma hadn’t fed her after all. She’d never really thought about it until then. It was disgusting the kid trying to nibble at her, it was like an animal, having your own sister trying to chew away at you. Jeanna, the baby, started to wail. Clara looked as if she was going to flee, and Winnie remembered that the front door was open and tried to remember if she had latched the gate.

  ‘Clara, it’s all right,’ she said again, only more urgently. ‘Look, it’s just that you’re such a big girl now, and Jeanna such a little baby. I was afraid you might squash her. Come on, you can come back and sit on the bed if you’re careful. There’s a good girl.’

  Clara inched towards the bed, and climbed back on to the edge. Winnie watched her, wondering if she would try anything with her again, but the child only looked back with thoughtful eyes. Or so it seemed to Winnie, though she dismissed the idea then as fanciful. Clara was too young to think about anything yet. And she would soon forget. Her breast filled with a painful but delightful tingling, the milk coming back and flooding down towards the nipple. She settled Jeanna back to her suckling and the room was peaceful again. Clara put her thumb in her mouth and remained, watching.

  As Winnie had expected, Clara did forget. Yet she supposed that there was some time in her life when being with Winnie had changed. It was strange, because she spent more time with Winnie, yet Mumma loved her more. She never understood it when she was small, and she often wondered to whom she really belonged.

  She had even her name to thank Winnie for, though as she grew older, it seemed increasingly unlikely that the story she was told when she was small could really have been true. It was hard to reconcile with the Winnie she knew as she grew older. But Mumma had told her and she supposed it must be so, even though Mumma was strange and wild in a way that the world beyond their small railway house could not see. Her story was that when she was born Winnie was just nineteen and every Saturday night
until she met Reg she went to the movies with her girlfriends, and the film star that everyone loved was Clara Bow, the ‘It’ girl, the mad flapper of the twenties; and the ‘It’ that she had, so the older ones said in shocked tones, was supposed to be s-e-x — Mumma could never bring herself to say the whole word, she always had to spell it. Winnie was crazy about her, just like all the other girls, and she begged Mumma to call the new baby Clara. She argued that whatever ‘It’ was suppose to stand for, it didn’t really matter because everyone knew Clara Bow was really well behaved, because it was written into her contract that she would get more money if she was good.

  The trouble was, that by the time Clara heard the story, Winnie had changed a lot, and Clara Bow had broken her contract and it was said that she’d lost a lot of money. That meant she was badly behaved after all, and Winnie flatly denied that she had had anything to do with the naming of Clara at all. ‘It was a funny story we told you when you were little to amuse you,’ she would say. ‘Nobody really meant it.’

  Not that Clara believed her. She went to see ‘It’ and ‘No Limit’, years later, sitting in the back seat of the Embassy with Robin whom she believed she loved in those days, when they were having a revival of Clara Bow’s old films. It gave her goose pimples sitting there and watching this blonde woman flapping round and making the audience laugh, and cry a bit too, and thinking that Winnie had had a vision of her becoming like the woman on the screen. She wondered then, what it was that had made Winnie so want to call her Clara, as if, in understanding that, she might somehow know more about Winnie herself. Some dream of a life which, even then, she knew was impossible for her, but which she still imagined might be possible for Clara? But she didn’t really think so. Just the sort of madness that takes people over when they get an idol. For herself, she would rather be one.

  Whatever it was, Winnie got over it quickly. Three years after Clara was born, Winnie was a respectable married lady and she had Jeanna who came to be called Jeannie, and later Caroline, and Clara supposed that they were her idols. And after a while, the story about her name had changed completely. Winnie said it was ‘a good solid old name’ and dug out that Mumma had a great aunt called Clara, and said that she had been named after her. Clara didn’t really believe her and she didn’t really care.

  If she cared about anything, she supposed that it was the way people change, that people who laughed and had fun and once had dreams, could change so much that they had to cover up who they really were. Or had been. It was to do with Hamilton she guessed, and being stifled. It was about having two faces, one for your real self and one for the rest of the world, and in the end not knowing which one to believe. It was the reason for escape.

  Winnie standing in light.

  Clara remembered things which happened to her very early in her life, even if she didn’t remember exactly that first time that Winnie hit her. But there was a starting point, maybe it was that event, from which time onwards she began to remember things very clearly. Robin would tell her that this was not true, that people only believe they remember things, when in fact they have been told them so often that they come to believe that it is they who recall the event. Because he was right about so many things, she examined this idea carefully, and decided that this was not true of her. Nobody would have told her the things she recalled. They were small things, tiny details, that the people to whom they had happened would be less likely to remember than the person watching, or things so intimate that, in Winnie’s case at any rate, they would not have been repeated.

  The kitchen of Winnie’s house was at the back, with windows looking over a small patch of lawn. There was little to see for it is flat land round Hamilton, miles and miles of plains, first houses, then paddocks and cows. It might be said that Winnie’s house had a view, by comparison with much of the town, for in the distance there was the blue line of Mount Pirongia. Closer to hand there was a struggling peach tree and a small plot of cultivated vegetables. Magpies, rude and incessant in their clamour, landed regularly amongst the rhubarb, and Clara was sent to chase them. She never knew whether it was intended as a diversion to occupy her, for she was a restless child always unloading pot cupboards and filling baths that nobody wanted and doing all the active annoying things that drove Mumma and Winnie to distraction; or whether she was actually being useful by chasing the birds.

  Once when she was visiting, Mumma stood at the bench beside Winnie, her eldest daughter, swaying slightly on her knotted veiny legs and recited:

  One for sorrow

  Two for joy

  Three for a girl

  and four for a boy.

  It impressed Clara and she thought that it was intended that the rhyming lines must go together and boys be a joy and girls be sorrow, and it worried her that their houses seemed to have more women in them than men, so that she was always relieved by the sight of men, and vaguely ashamed that she was not a boy, and sorry for Winnie that Jeannie had not been one either. She knew that Mumma had had some boys though and hoped for Winnie’s sake that she would have them too. She was always meaning to be especially good for them because she was a sorrowful girl. In the end she gave up.

  Winnie’s bench was very white. She had scrubbed the wood every day for as long as Clara could remember. There was a day in autumn that Clara remembered particularly. The sun made bright patches on the bench and the linoleum but it would not last for long. There were nasturtiums in a jam jar on the window sill. Winnie stood at the sink, her feet planted squarely in flat sensible shoes on the floor. Her clothes were all plain and sensible, and the first cold that bites the plains must have begun already for Winnie was wearing a grey hand-knitted cardigan which made her twenty-four-year-old shoulders look more square and solid than they might otherwise have done. Her brown hair was cut in a neat blunt line around the nape of her neck and her clear skin looked as if it had been lightly polished along the cheekbones. On the open-faced shelves of the kitchen stood jars filled with ripe tomatoes and Golden Queen peaches in syrup, relishes and chutney. Today she had added crab-apple jelly and mint preserve. She had been storing up for winter. In the next room her baby slept. Clara had been very still all afternoon, unusually still for her, for the room was full of colour and pleasant smells, and she wanted to stay there with Winnie and not be sent home to Mumma who mostly sat and sighed in the little house at Frankton Junction, the suburb of Hamilton where the trains went, and which was not considered such a nice place to live, because of the soot and the railwaymen, who were working men, and not as prosperous as the people who lived on this side of the town. Mumma had resigned herself to Life but found it difficult to live it. Sometimes it seemed to have passed her by, and yet at other times she seemed determined to endure it in some strange and secret way which she demanded that Clara should share, and then the child would be afraid.

  Mumma had tried though, in years gone by, to be that other person she would have liked to be. It had been her idea that the children called her Mama, and it was Clara, more than any of the others, who had corrupted it to Mumma. As over most things, she had stopped protesting, and Winnie and the older members of the family, of whom there were several, still called her Mama, especially in front of other people, but in conversation between themselves it had become Mumma. She was always neat and spent endless time ironing her clothes and rubbing at tiny spots, sewing incongruous little bows at the necklines of her blouses, peering at her needles through her thick glasses with her half‑blind batty eyes. Mumma was careful of herself and she could pass for all right if you didn’t know the truth about the Bentleys. She was proud of Winnie who had done well. Winnie had left Frankton Junction and moved to Hamilton. It didn’t seem to matter that it was as far as she would ever go.

  Not only that, Winnie was useful, particularly in the matter of looking after Clara. It meant that Mumma could still convince herself that her youngest and best-loved child was well cared for, while at the same time she could attend to the great passion in her life which was to
grow potted cyclamen in a little glasshouse and sell them to people who had nice houses to keep them in. She had half a dozen orchids as well which were not for sale, except maybe very occasionally she would part with a flower for a special bridal bouquet. It made her sought after by the good (meaning rich) people of Hamilton. It was her stake in the world.

  Winnie didn’t really want to know why Mumma courted her so much. She liked to believe that it was still because she was the first-born, the best. Perhaps Mumma had encouraged her to believe that, for there was a certain wiliness about her. As for the other children, they had made their own way, those that were left. Two had died, both before Clara was born. It was hard for Clara to believe, when she grew older, that they had inhabited the same territory inside Mumma as she had, that that was as near as she would ever come to them. After Winnie there was Rita, who Mumma tolerated but regretted; she had married into the Junction. Then there were the two boys on farms, both hoping to be sharemilkers; Brian, and Frank, the younger and the next one up from Clara, and that still made him twelve years older than she was.

  *

  What Clara particularly remembered that afternoon was Reg coming in. It had been so warm and close in the kitchen and Winnie had sung a little to herself as she set by her provisions and she hadn’t been cross or sent Clara outside to chase the birds once that afternoon. She didn’t talk to her much, but occasionally she would pop something into her mouth, some morsel of food which conveyed approval, acceptance of her. Considering that they could have been mother and daughter, and would certainly have appeared that way to the casual onlooker, but were in fact two sisters sharing a kitchen, it seemed important to both of them that they liked being together.