All the Way to Summer Page 11

  The wedding cars appeared, decorated with ribbons. When the bride stepped out of the car, there was a ripple of surprise. She wasn’t wearing bridal white. Instead, she wore a sunflower-yellow satin dress and a wide-brimmed matching hat with a high stitched crown. She carried three lilies, casually, as if they had just been picked from a garden.

  Esme was enchanted at once. A performer, a woman of daring.

  Petra, an amused, almost mocking smile on her face, looked around, recognising faces, and lifted an ungloved hand. She looked sideways for a moment, turning her head to look straight at Esme. She could see her eyes were looking for some sign that she might know her, so Esme smiled and raised her hand, as if she were a friend. The young woman gave a half smile and took her father’s arm.

  Inside the church, the organ started to play ‘Here Comes the Bride’. The wedding party moved on into the dark church, with its stained-glass windows and the cream freesia favours that lined the pews.

  Esme slid into a pew at the back, not that there was much room for the uninvited. She knew Philip wouldn’t look past the radiant woman in yellow as she moved up the aisle. She saw him look towards Petra, his curly hair crisply cut, a flower in his buttonhole, his face creased with a wondering smile. Then he turned his back to the congregation and took Petra’s hand. Even at the back of the church, Esme could hear his responses, his voice cracking a little with emotion as their vows began.

  She wondered for a moment how Philip would manage. Was he up to this, a true golden girl? She felt herself bowled over, so that she had to press her hands tightly together on top of the shelf holding the hymn books. She didn’t want strangers to see her crying.

  Jim had been playing with the children when she came back from Pearl’s funeral. It was raining outside, a solid sleety rain that stung her face. He’d pulled blankets off the beds and draped them over the backs of the kitchen chairs so that they made tents. Neil and Janet were inside the tent with a dish of chopped apple between them. Only Philip stood apart, biting the knuckles of one hand. His eyes, when he looked up and saw her, were huge and incredulous with joy, as if he had never expected to see her again.

  ‘Mummy’s back, Mummy’s back,’ he cried.

  This was the moment when she might have lost her resolve. She looked at Jim, and his expression was cool and unfriendly. He had already read her face, and he knew.

  ‘We’re having an inside picnic,’ Neil said. ‘It’s good fun playing with Dad.’

  Jim said, ‘I won’t stop you taking the girl. But you’re not taking my boys.’

  Patient, enduring Jim. With his names on all the children’s birth certificates.

  ‘Philip,’ she began and stopped, seeing the expression in Jim’s eyes.

  ‘They’re my boys,’ he said.

  This was pretty much the last thing of any consequence that he said to her. His head wreathed in steam from the train’s engine as he walked back up the platform when she left again, a little bent over already, one of the boys’ hands in each of his own. Only the little boy, Philip, looking back and crying, wanting her to come back.

  Esme had been on her own for six years when Queenie died. Stick had already gone. It was at Queenie’s funeral that Esme met Kevin Pudney.

  The way she was living, she took Janet to different farms where she did housekeeping work in return for room and board. Janet, after a patchy, tearful start, was a child who accepted whatever was asked of her. She stayed obediently in farmhouse kitchens, drawing and playing with Plasticine and dolls while her mother worked. Esme had a couple of jobs in the King Country, which meant she got to see her family, and also Neil and Philip now and then. She would have liked to take the boys, but the way she lived there was never enough room for them in the farmhouses where she stayed. Since she left Jim, Esme had set about learning different skills, like making stuffed toys, decorating cakes and arranging flowers. Her employers liked the little unexpected gifts she made for them. A woman with a generous heart, wrote one of her employers. She met some men but, usually, if she dug around a bit, there was a woman somewhere in the background. These years were also taken up with the divorce papers that Jim had served on her, although his death spared her the day in court. It was like a final gift. There were some things she would rather not talk about.

  The morning of Queenie’s funeral, Esme saw her mother for the last time. The family had taken turns sitting beside her. Not all the family were there. Ned McDavitt had been killed early in the war and, later on, the youngest, Hunter, just before the war was over. One of the sisters lived in Australia. Mary had left Neil and Philip with her husband, who couldn’t take time off work to come to the funeral. It was still a big crowd.

  At the very last moment, some strangers turned up. They were Māori and, although they said that they knew Queenie had lived as a white woman most of her life, they were related to her and weren’t going to let her go without saying goodbye. Kevin, who was their boss, could see that he wasn’t going to get them to work for him that day, so he said that he’d drive them over. They were doing a bit of fencing on a hill near Taumarunui.

  Esme slipped back into the viewing room one more time, after the unexpected visitors had left to join the mourners heading for the church. She felt shaken by this visit, as if some other corner of her life had been turned over for inspection. There was something she wanted to say to her mother that she couldn’t seem to tell her while the others were there. But what she had come to say had dried in her throat. Instead, she let her fingers trail over her mother’s cheek. As she was taking her hand away, she felt it touch something hard at the base of Queenie’s throat. Leaning over, she looked into the coffin. She saw what she had missed before: the gold brooch with the amethyst glowing in its heart. Perhaps Joe, or Mary, or someone in the family had decided that’s where it belonged.

  ‘That was Pearl’s,’ she said, voicing her indignation in the empty room.

  A busy persistent blowfly circled the room.

  She reached in and unpinned the brooch and slipped it into her handbag. It felt like the right thing to do.

  The wake went on into the evening. The men had had a few drinks by then. Joe, swaggering drunk, kept following her around, wanting to talk to her, as if she wasn’t his sister but some loose woman out on her own. In order to get away from him, Esme got talking to Kevin. She explained then how she had three kids, one of them a teenager already.

  He said how hard he found it to believe that. He did know what it was like, getting left with a kiddie to raise after his wife died.

  ‘I’m a widow myself,’ she said. She hadn’t thought of herself like this, but it seemed more or less true, now that Jim had died. She touched the brooch in her pocket. There were some things one simply had to do. Kevin seemed like a gentleman.

  Kevin was a great father to Janet. She called him Dad, and she and Marlene were like real sisters. When the boys did come to stay for a bit, he turned out handier with his fists than Esme would have liked. Neil he could tolerate, at least he didn’t have ideas above himself. In his eyes, Philip was a cocky little prick, needed knocking into shape. Neil got a job farm labouring when he was fifteen and could leave school. Philip went back to Mary, his aunt. A teacher at the school she sent him to took a fancy to him, and the next thing he was off to boarding school on a scholarship.

  ‘Fancy,’ said Esme, ‘to think my boy’s got brains.’

  ‘They shouldn’t give him ideas,’ Kevin said. ‘Who does he think he is?’

  ‘I wonder where he got them from,’ Esme said dreamily, as if she hadn’t heard him.

  ‘You ought to know, he’s your kid.’

  ‘Yes. Well, so he is.’ Her face closed up, shutting him out. They were living in another farmhouse, out the back of beyond. She didn’t have to work the way she used to, though she still kept her hand in. There was never any trouble between them except when the subject of Philip came up. After the boy went off to boarding school, she sent ten pounds to Mary to give him every holid
ays.

  After a bit, Mary wrote to her and said she’d better send the money straight to the school because Philip was taking his holidays with his new friends. In the long summer holiday, he’d gone on a tour of the South Island and walked the Milford Track. In winter, he went skiing with a friend’s family. They were staying at a lodge at Ohakune Junction. Esme laughed out loud when she heard that. She didn’t mention it to Kevin because he wouldn’t have got the joke.

  She and Kevin and the two girls were happy enough on their own. They moved closer to town so the girls didn’t have to travel so far on the bus to school. Both of them did secretarial courses afterwards, and then went off on an overseas trip. They sent cards from Rome and Paris and London. Neil, who had grown into a thin-faced man with quiet ways, got married straight after his twenty-first birthday party; he had a son and a daughter, just eleven months between them, so that, before she knew it, Esme was a grandmother.

  These were some of the things Esme Pudney thought about while her son Philip was being married. She understood why she sat anonymously at the back of the church. She wished it wasn’t that way, but she didn’t see how else things could have worked out. Just as the service was ending, while the triumphant march from the church was forming, she tiptoed past the ushers at the back, out into the spring sunshine.

  5

  There was a wrap party the night Petra’s first movie finished filming. It had been a punishing schedule, up at five each morning, some nights going until ten. There never seemed to be enough time to eat and sleep, but all the time in the world to talk. Everyone was someone’s best friend, and sometimes their lover. People told each other outrageous things about themselves. They made dramas out of their own lives, which, whether they were true or not, they knew they would believe from then on. Now suddenly they were all having to say goodbye. Next there might be a stage play, or a television commercial, enough to pay for a few months out of work, Petra had done a couple of those.

  Philip, looking across the room at her, could see why they wanted Petra’s face. It had a wild vitality that at this moment seemed unbridled. He knew she didn’t really want him to be there and, at the same time, that she did, a kind of affirmation that he was part of her life, that he accepted what she did.

  At breakfast, the first they had shared since filming began, she had run it past him. ‘D’you think we could get the sitter in?’ she asked. She had big shadows under her eyes and a trace of make-up at her hairline.

  ‘We’ve had a lot of sitters lately.’ Some nights he needed to go back to his office for work.

  She had sat there, blowing the top of her coffee. ‘You said …’ she began.

  ‘Yes,’ he said because he didn’t want her to remind him of what he had said the previous time the subject of a last-night party at the theatre had come up. ‘Is there any way I can get caught up in your brilliant career?’ he had asked her, and she’d said, ‘Well, come to the fucking party, don’t say you weren’t asked.’ He’d finished up staying home and she hadn’t come home until morning.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘the kids are getting used to Debbie.’

  ‘Don’t start on me again.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. Debbie was the girl who sat for them. It wasn’t as if they were little children any more: a boy and a girl, Jesse and Marigold, twelve and ten.

  ‘I know you work hard, Philip,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said because it was true, and he wanted to agree with her and have her back to himself. His life was full of causes. He was a lawyer who believed in helping the poor and giving the underdog a chance. A lot of his clients couldn’t afford to pay him properly. He organised food parcels for their families when they were in jail and saw to it that their children went to school. His suits were often rumpled, and he didn’t care. In the lunch breaks from court, he and his friends gathered in a café over a bookshop and exchanged case stories. And he took on cases that seemed hopeless; people who were not particularly attractive but might be innocent. You don’t have to be good looking to be innocent, he said. As for the money, his father-in-law had paid for the house. It was their wedding present: the title to this house. The house was full of newly delivered furniture and there was a car in the garage.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ he said at the time. ‘I never asked for any of this.’

  ‘Send it back then,’ said Petra. ‘You can spend the rest of your life chasing lawsuits for the rich and famous and licking boots, or you can accept and do the things you really want to. It’s your life.’

  ‘I thought it was ours.’

  ‘I can’t change who I am. That’s my dowry. Anyone I married would have got the same.’

  It had taken some time for him to get over this, causing a bitterness that he later regretted. One day he’d woken up and thought how unfair to Petra he had been, how he needed to recover things before it was too late. He had set out to enjoy the freedom of unexpected wealth. We do our own thing, they told people, we make our own choices. Sometimes it worked and other times it was awful.

  At the party, he edged closer to Petra. Someone said, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a movie. It’s about a black alien in Harlem being chased by two white aliens.’

  ‘That’s such a gross idea,’ said Petra, stabbing the air with her cigarette.

  Then an actor called Mel wanted to tell them about the most gross experience of her life, which was about going to Indonesia and being felt up by a tame orangutan. ‘He knew I was a woman,’ she said. ‘Honestly, can you imagine having a large shaggy ape with his arms around you getting an erection?’

  ‘Easily,’ Petra said, and everyone laughed.

  ‘So what’s your weird story, Petra?’ asked Mel.

  ‘Um.’ Petra took a draw on her cigarette and pondered. Somebody had produced a bottle of Cognac, which was being passed around. A fire had been lit in the grate using bleu de Bresse tubs for kindling. Philip felt his stomach turning over as he waited.

  ‘Philip’s mother has a needle floating around in her body that you can actually feel when it gets into her arm.’

  ‘Oh, yuck. How could that be possible? She’d be dead.’

  ‘Apparently it can happen,’ Petra said. ‘I checked it out when Philip told me about it. It’s like bits of shrapnel that soldiers who’ve been shot at might carry inside them. If it’s blunt and hasn’t gone into a vein a piece of metal can float around in someone’s body for their whole life. It usually builds up a bit of fibroid tissue around it over time.’

  ‘Couldn’t it go through your heart?’

  ‘It could, but it wouldn’t necessarily kill you — it might just pass through it. Could stuff up your lung though. You can feel it in her arm, can’t you, Philip? You can wriggle it around.’

  Philip stood up; he felt his face burning with shame.

  ‘Haven’t you actually seen it?’ asked Mel.

  ‘No, I’ve never met her.’

  ‘What? Philip, is this true?’

  Petra looked up and saw the space where he’d been standing. ‘I’d better go,’ she said.

  Their bed had a big crocheted quilt over it, made with very fine yarn. It had come in the mail after their wedding. Philip said it was old-fashioned, that it wouldn’t fit in with their new furniture and the modern décor. Petra left it in a cupboard for a few years and then brought it out. ‘I like it,’ she said, ‘I want to use it.’

  ‘That was my mother you were talking about last night,’ Philip said. They were lying under the quilt, around ten o’clock in the morning. The children had made themselves breakfast and switched on the television.

  ‘So what? I mean, really, so what? I’ve asked you about her often enough, and you just turn your back on it.’

  ‘I did tell you that about her. And look what you made of it, a big drama, a joke.’

  ‘It’s not fair to our kids, not knowing anything.’

  ‘Fairness doesn’t come into it,’ he said and reached out, pulling her close. ‘
I never knew anything that was fair until I met you.’

  ‘Help me, Philip. I’m over things.’

  ‘What are you over?’ He was stifling the panic in his voice.

  ‘Being directed, told what to do.’

  ‘Your work? You could stop.’

  ‘But I don’t want to. Sometimes I just don’t know what you want, that’s all.’

  ‘I want you to stay with me,’ he said. Simple as that. That was all he wanted.

  ‘Oh,’ Petra said. ‘That. Well, of course.’

  When Uncle Joe died, his son, one of Philip’s first cousins, rang to tell him.

  ‘Do you want to come to the funeral with me?’ he asked Petra.

  ‘You mean you’ll go?’ There had been other calls like this over the years, which he had ignored.

  ‘Time I went. We can drive up tonight, stay with your folks.’ He’d come to like her family well enough, had forgiven them for buying him. It could have been worse. ‘So will you come?’

  ‘Of course. Will she be there?’

  ‘My mother? I don’t know, perhaps.’

  ‘Did you like your Uncle Joe?’ she asked on the drive north.

  Philip shrugged. ‘He was a rough bastard but most of them were. I’m told my mother was against me staying there, but it was hardly her choice.’

  Petra saw her first, at the other side of the cemetery. ‘Who is that woman? I know her face.’ She was looking at a plump woman with pink-framed glasses and tinted hair.

  ‘That’s her. That’s my mother.’

  ‘She was at our wedding.’

  ‘Of course she wasn’t.’

  ‘She was. I saw her outside the church.’ Petra stood firm.

  Everyone was there. Neil and his wife, Janet and her husband, Marlene, who introduced herself icily to Petra as her sister-in-law, well, sort of. There were children everywhere.