The Trouble With Fire Page 16

  Later on, Hazel told Percy he should have known better than to go chasing after Les like that. A man like him. She didn’t actually say what kind of man Les was, but they both knew what she meant. He got het up over little things; it wasn’t as if he was hurt bad. At the time, the two men shook hands without words, and the next time they met it was put aside, except for Percy’s suggestion of a woman.

  ‘My house isn’t much.’ Les was speaking the truth here. His house was two rooms with a lean-to where he kept the copper and a tin bath he’d picked up second-hand. Percy’s house was a big comfortable place with a dining room large enough to hold a table for eight and a dresser, a sitting room, and a row of bedrooms that led off a passage. Les wasn’t sure how many bedrooms there were — it wasn’t one of those things you asked — but Percy and Hazel had four children, two boys, two girls, and he supposed that most of them had bedrooms of their own. There was a dark red carpet in the sitting room with a yellow Lion of Scotland, and curtains at the windows patterned with green daisies on a cream background, and a wind-up gramophone in the corner.

  ‘You’ll step up in no time,’ Percy said. ‘Once you’ve got a wife.’

  ‘I’ve got to find one first. She’d have to be desperate.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ Percy said, looking over his shoulder to see that nobody was listening to their conversation.

  KATHLEEN KEATS WAITED FOR THE phone call from Auckland. She had hardly ventured out of the house for a week. For months she had kept her own solitary company, walking downtown only now and then to buy necessities, and some days to have a cup of tea in H & J Smith, where she sat in the corner of the tearoom and watched passers-by in the wide Invercargill street. She liked the wild red roses that scrambled down the sides of a raised garden, first as they came into bud, small bright sparks of colour, as tantalising as happiness, unfolding into bloom, and beginning to fade as the season ended. It seemed odd to her that a town would plant wild roses at its heart. In England, where she and her sister Dorothy had spent their childhoods, she was used to town gardens that grew neat ordered rows of flowers. Now and then a car would pass by, as she sat with her eyes turned towards the window. She didn’t know anyone who owned a car, although her late husband had driven one, an Oldsmobile that belonged to the company. The country was hardly out of the sugarbag years, when people looked for handouts at best, or cigarette ends in the gutter. She saw herself as fortunate that she had her own little house, paid for before all her family’s trouble began, and there were the four of them, her and her husband, and their daughter Joy and son Ben. Ben was now God knows where, although the last she’d heard it was one of the mining towns in Australia — Kalgoorlie, she thought — and shuddered at the thought (Invercargill was a temperance town). Her daughter — her pride and Joy, she often said, and now for six months she had said, in the same breath, pride comes before a fall.

  Now the time was nearly upon her and the worst would soon be over. But was it upon her, or was it on Joy? As she sat in the department store and licked sweet crumbs from her lips, and wiped them for good measure with a napkin, she tried to convince herself, as she had all these past months, that she had nothing to reproach herself for, that the awfulness of what had happened couldn’t be laid at her door. But the wickedness of her daughter still scorched her with shame. And she, Joy’s mother, had told so many lies that no prayers said morning or night would take them away.

  ‘Where’s that lovely clever girl of yours?’ asked the woman behind the tearoom counter.

  ‘She’s gone north,’ she said. ‘Up to stay with my sister Dorothy in the North Island.’

  ‘Oh really? I’d like to go to the North Island,’ the woman said. ‘I’m hoping to get to Christchurch some day, but that would be a big step.’

  ‘It would,’ said Kathleen, willing the conversation over.

  ‘So where does your sister live? Will young Joy be able to get a job there?’

  ‘They’re travelling around together, exploring the countryside,’ said Kathleen. ‘It’s nice for my sister. She never married so it’s nice for her to have the company of a young person.’ Her hands shook so much when she sat down that her tea was tipping into her saucer. She sat up as straight as she could, a woman above average height, but neat in her bones, her faded floral dress ironed to perfection. Her husband had insurance when he died. He was a herd tester who had been kicked in the head by a cow, although the doctor who performed the autopsy said it was actually his heart that had given out. There was a little company payout all the same.

  ‘No,’ she told a neighbour who enquired, ‘Joy hasn’t decided whether it’ll be teaching or nursing at this stage.’ She thought she saw the neighbour’s sideways smile when she told her about Joy going up north. The neighbour was a younger woman with children at school. It was hard to know what the woman thought. She wasn’t to know that the neighbour told others that Kathleen seemed a bit touched in the head, but it was probably the change.

  Kathleen knew, in fact, that it wouldn’t be nursing, because Joy wrote piteous letters to say how afraid she was of the nurses, how the girls really disliked them, and how they threatened them with a good slap if they didn’t behave themselves when they went into labour and told them they could look ahead to their feet in stirrups for a few hours, and it served them right. Before Kathleen collected her bread and milk deliveries from the box, she had taken to checking that her neighbour was inside, so she wouldn’t have to speak to her. She should have been working in the garden — soon it would be time to plant out the bulbs — but she walked past the rows of red and pink phlox that she so enjoyed every summer, now smothered in weeds. Some days she would simply make breakfast, then sit with her cat in her lap and the newspaper in front of her until it would be eleven o’clock and she had no idea where the time had gone. Other days, she cleaned and rearranged the furniture, or picked up things that had belonged to Joy and Ben when they were children. Ben’s wooden trucks that his father had made him, Joy’s teddy bear that sat on the quilt of her bed, her clothes hanging in the wardrobe, dresses she had worn only the summer before. Or she inhaled deeply the cracked end of the apple soap that Joy used to wash her hair, now dried out on the bathroom ledge.

  Kathleen had rehearsed her response when the call came. She would stay calm, ask the necessary questions, make sure that her daughter was recovering well. She would be short and to the point: after all a toll call from Auckland was a great expense and the charges would be reversed. A collect call, Madam. Will you take it?

  And then. And then, she didn’t know. She saw herself replacing the telephone in its cradle and sitting down to make more tea. To work out what happened next. To wait for Joy to return. Joy, with the neat wavy bob of brown hair and serious blue eyes, the firm pointed little chin that Kathleen would cup in her hand when the child was small, the forehead she kissed. Goodnight princess, sweet dreams. She had let go of her anger. Joy would come back unchanged, as if nothing had happened. What she wanted more than anything was to hold her daughter and whisper to her, It will be all right. It’s over now. You don’t have to think of it again. She should never have let her go to the dances, but they were, after all, run by the Bible class, and it wasn’t what you expected when the church was involved. Nor, at seventeen, was Joy a child. The boy’s father had thrashed him for doing what he did and let it go at that. Kathleen hadn’t set foot in the church since Joy went away, although sometimes she dropped to her knees and prayed, because that is what she had done all her life. She prayed that Joy and Ben would come back soon, that the house would be full of their voices again. Bring back Joy, she prayed, and none of the old guilt about praying for her own ends entered her thoughts.

  But until the phone call came, she knew the pain for Joy still lay ahead, and in the night, she woke sweating, dreaming of pain, the way it had been for her, and she took rapid panting breaths. After these dreams, she was sure the phone would ring at dawn, but days passed beyond the expected time without a word
from the matron of the home.

  In the end, Kathleen rang. She put it off as long as she could. A letter a week will be quite enough, the matron had said firmly when Joy first went to the home; please don’t unsettle her. You must understand, Mrs Keats, that we are very busy here. We have all the new mothers and fathers coming to get their babies, and the children to feed and care for. We simply haven’t got time to talk about how these girls are on a daily basis. We’ll let you know when the time comes.

  She rang the handle of the phone and gave the number to the operator. She didn’t know the woman but it was said she listened in to calls. You could hear her breathing sometimes.

  When the call was answered in Auckland, it took a long time for the matron to come to the phone. Kathleen had almost given up hope when she heard the other woman’s brisk voice.

  ‘Yes, Mrs Keats? Is the girl home?’

  ‘Home? You must be thinking of someone else. I’m Joy’s mother.’

  ‘I sent you a letter. I’d have thought you’d have got it by now. And the girl should be arriving any time now.’

  A letter. It hadn’t occurred to her that the matron wouldn’t have contacted her straight away. ‘I don’t understand,’ she stammered.

  ‘Mrs Keats, listen. Joy had a girl, a nice little baby with a good weight. She had no trouble with the delivery, but she certainly made plenty for everybody afterwards. She knew she couldn’t see her baby but she kept on screaming and crying. She was upsetting all the girls. Really, I didn’t have time to make a telephone call — we had our hands full with that naughty girl of yours. We told her and told her that the child has gone to a good home but she wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘When was this? The birth.’

  ‘All of six days ago now.’

  ‘Perhaps if I could talk to Joy.’

  ‘But Mrs Keats, this is what I’m trying to tell you. Joy isn’t here. She was in good health. When she said she wanted to go home I deemed her fit to travel. She caught the train south yesterday. Well, she should be home tomorrow, I expect. I know it’s a long journey. Now go out to your letterbox, I’m sure you’ll find my letter there. The postal service is very efficient.’

  The letter was delivered that day, but Joy didn’t arrive. After another three days of waiting, Kathleen rang the matron again. ‘I’ll call the police,’ she said.

  The matron’s voice hardened. ‘That doesn’t sound wise, Mrs Keats. What would you tell them?’

  ‘That my daughter was sent to your care and is now a missing person. How do I know my daughter’s even alive? What are you trying to cover up? Yes, that’s what I’ll tell them, that you’re hiding something from me.’

  ‘I’ll get someone to look into it,’ the matron said, after a difficult silence. Kathleen thought she heard breathing on the line, but she supposed it was the matron’s, and anyway, she didn’t care who knew her business any more. She felt a terrible rising panic beneath her breastbone.

  When she put the phone down, she sat for a moment before making a second call, this time to her sister Dorothy, who really did live in Auckland, and telling her what had happened, about Joy’s disgrace, about her missing child. Her missing children. Her missing granddaughter. For now she had begun to comprehend the whole story, the one she had refused to acknowledge until now. She was a grandmother without a grandchild.

  Dorothy clicked her tongue behind her teeth. ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’ll let you know.’

  Kathleen packed a small suitcase in preparation for a journey, although as yet she had no idea where it would take her. What she knew for certain was that she had to travel north to find Joy. During that evening the phone did ring. It was Joy.

  Her daughter’s voice had a bruised husky quality to it, not like the girl’s voice she knew. She remembered that the matron had mentioned a great deal of yelling and screaming.

  ‘I’m in a hotel in Ngaruawahia,’ Joy said. She repeated the name slowly for her mother. ‘It’s by a river, to the south of Auckland. There are farms all around here. I’ve met a farmer who’s asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Where did you meet a farmer?’ she whispered, clinging to the back of a chair.

  ‘At the train station in Auckland.’

  ‘You talked to a man in the train station?’

  ‘He arrived just after I did. He said he’d seen me with the nurse from the home. Oh, he didn’t know where I’d been, at least I don’t think so. His name’s Les Mullens, Mum.’

  ‘You can’t marry a stranger. Come home this instant, Joy.’

  ‘I have to have your permission to get married. It seems the best thing. He’s got land near here. What else can I do?’

  ‘I’m not angry any more,’ Kathleen said. ‘Dear.’

  ‘It’s for the best,’ Joy said.

  ‘I’m leaving in the morning. You’re to stay where you are. Do you hear me, Joy? I’ll see you in Ngaruawahia.’ She edged out the strange vowels of the place name, a town she couldn’t imagine.

  This was the first time that Joy disappeared.

  JOY KEATS, WHO WAS SHORTLY to become Joy Mullens, sat in the dining room of the old hotel and waited for her mother. She sat by a window picking cracked varnish from a sill with her fingernail. The smell of cigars and brandy was heavy on the air, from gentlemen taking their leisure the night before. She watched the huge river that flowed through the town, beneath the railway bridge. From where she sat, the water looked green and as thick as sauce. The day was hot for the time of year, and very humid. ‘It’s the Waikato climate,’ the woman at reception told her, when she asked for a fan. She was a woman of perhaps fifty, with tightly permed hair and bright lipstick. ‘It’s either very hot or so cold the clothes will freeze in the tub if you leave them overnight. Just you wait,’ she said. ‘Black frosts. Well, you might get to see them.’

  She looked at Joy with undisguised curiosity, as if she had seen it all. As if she knew that Joy was here for a reason, that she was thinking of staying but might not. Since she had agreed to Les’s proposal, Joy had changed her mind several times. The thought of fleeing crossed her mind often. Only it was difficult to go far, because her Aunt Dorothy had arrived on a Road Services bus the morning after she rang her mother. She liked her aunt and it was suddenly comforting to have someone she knew close by. Dorothy, understatedly elegant in dusky pink linen and pearls, was older than her sister. And Kathleen hadn’t been young when Joy was born. Yet, although Dorothy seemed elderly to Joy, she had been surprisingly kind. When she saw her niece she embraced her. Over afternoon tea, she leant forward and placed her thin veined hand on her knee. ‘I was young once,’ she said in a conspiratorial way. So that Joy wondered what secret her aunt harboured and whether her mother knew, and guessed that she probably didn’t.

  As soon as she had placed her suitcase in her room and removed her coat, Dorothy went to the hotel desk and placed a call, holding out a piece of paper with a number written on it for the receptionist. She spoke in a curt voice to the matron of the home, advising her that Joy was safe, and of their whereabouts, and giving her home number in Auckland as well. She banged the receiver down unnecessarily hard, and said something under her breath that Joy didn’t quite catch. She had been taught that swearing was wicked.

  ‘My mother told people I was travelling around the north with you,’ Joy remarked. ‘Perhaps we could do that.’

  ‘Not just at present,’ her aunt replied. ‘I think you’re still very tired.’ They had been for a walk through the small town, past a row of graceful old houses, built for military men and their families, housed at the time of the wars seventy years or so before. ‘The natives, you know,’ Dorothy murmered. They saw children clustered near the river, diving into the water and surfacing, their white teeth flashing against their dark complexions. Joy, from Invercargill, could not remember seeing Maori before. Her aunt told her that she would see plenty more of them if she was going to live in the Waikato, although they kept to themselve
s in their own pas. When they came close to the railway bridge, Joy looked at the languid river and shivered in the bright hot air.

  ‘You’re not feverish?’ Dorothy asked anxiously.

  ‘I don’t think so. It looks so far down, doesn’t it? Such deep water.’

  ‘You’re tired,’ her aunt repeated.

  ‘I am tired,’ Joy admitted, when they reached the hotel again. While she slept she didn’t think of her baby for whole hours at a time. A girl. She was told it was a girl, and she had heard her cry, a few tiny whimpers as she was whisked out of the delivery room. As if the baby was calling out to her: never leave me, never abandon me. And she had.

  ‘Do you have much bleeding?’

  ‘Not as much as I expected.’

  ‘Does Mr Mullens know your circumstances?’

  Joy reddened. ‘I think so.’

  ‘He’ll have to respect you for a time,’ Dorothy said in a tactful voice. ‘It might be better if you came and stayed with me for a while before the marriage takes place.’

  But Joy’s mother was already on her way north. Her train was due that evening. In the morning the three of them, Joy, her aunt and her mother, would meet Les Mullens.

  A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE Percy George had suggested that Les find himself a wife. At first, Les had considered hastening to Auckland the very next week to wait outside the home as the unmarried mothers were discharged in the mornings. You could tell them by their suitcases, as they came out the gates, Percy said, or so he’d been told.

  Percy persuaded him to wait a while. ‘You need to fix yourself up a little bit. Even girls as hard up as that lot might take fright at a scarecrow like you.’