Paddy's Puzzle Page 4

  ‘We’ll get our coats and go now,’ she said with a burst of energy. ‘If we leave now we might get in at the head of the queue.’

  They didn’t though. There were at least fifty people there when they arrived and it was still only half-past ten. Women called out to Winnie. She settled in behind one called Cora and in front of another called Ellen. They shared an air of conspiracy with Winnie. The business of getting food was a serious one, it had brought them together. Cora was thin and brittle and fair with well-bitten fingernails. She wore an air of hectic vitality that looked as if it would dissolve into a vague and puzzled vulnerability if she was pushed. Ellen was stout and untidy, and like everyone else in the queue she looked tired, but she was intent on keeping the others’ spirits up. She produced marbles out of her pocket and offered them to Jeannie who accepted them and went to play with one of her children.

  ‘D’you want to play?’ Ellen asked Clara.

  She shook her head. ‘Later.’ Winnie looked vexed, but Clara stood her ground, ignoring them, trying to look as if she wasn’t interested in what they were saying, and she succeeded in so much as that they began to talk as if she wasn’t there after a while, or at least as if she couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  Cora said, ‘This the kid sister is it?’

  Winnie sighed and said that it was. Before that morning, and their fight in the kitchen, Clara might not have noticed the way she said it, but now she knew that inside she resented her, she could pick her tone. It didn’t really seem to matter all that much. In a way it made her more real, less predictable than when she was trying to show her nice side all the time, and therefore more interesting.

  ‘You got your appointment all right?’ asked Cora.

  ‘Yes.’ Winnie’s voice was small and tight. Clara glanced at her out of the corner of her eye. She looked more out of place here than most of the others. For those who had never had appearances to keep up in the first place, it was an easier step to take, coming to join the queue. Clara wondered in the back of her mind if it was Reg’s fault that Winnie was here. Then she thought of Mumma, and the enormous lie that her life was and decided that you couldn’t particularly blame one person or another for things that happened. It was beginning to be boring and she was on the point of moving away but the next time that Ellen spoke, there was something in her voice that stopped her, a premonition of movement in their shuffling stop-and-go existence in the queue.

  ‘What time?’ asked Ellen.

  ‘Twelve-thirty. I might just make it if they open on time here.’

  ‘Don’t bank on that,’ said Cora. ‘The bastards enjoy making us wait.’

  ‘I expect they need to get a good feed before they start work,’ said Ellen grimly. ‘I can see Mary Holmes up near the front. I reckon she’d change with you if I told her.’

  ‘No, don’t,’ said Winnie. ‘I’ve heard her husband’s bad with asthma. Besides,’ she added, ‘I don’t want to go telling everyone.’

  Up front, the doors were opened and the queue began to move but it was a slow procession with stops and starts while people at the head of the line argued for more, or children were rounded up from wandering away, so that they could get their soup. At twelve they were still shuffling forward with nearly twenty people ahead. Winnie was anxious and fidgety. Clara had relented and gone to play marbles with Jeannie, and then skipped up and down with her to keep their feet warm, and swung Ellen’s little boy round and round by his hands until her arms felt as if they were coming out of their sockets. Then the slide was closed down on the queue when they were only five away from a bowl of soup and a loaf of bread.

  ‘You’ll hold our place?’ said Winnie to Clara. Her face was closed and afraid.

  ‘Don’t worry about the kids,’ said Ellen. ‘They’ll be all right with us.’

  ‘Would you like me to come with you?’ said Cora impulsively.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Winnie, ‘You’d miss out too.’

  ‘There’s two kids here, one could hold each place.’

  Winnie wavered, then pulled herself together.

  ‘I’ll be all right. Honestly. If I need someone to hold my hand then I shouldn’t be going in the first place.’

  ‘Are you quite sure?’ said Ellen, speaking more soberly than she had all morning.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ Winnie said. ‘I just don’t know how to go on without doing it. I mean … look at us.’ She shrugged. ‘As sure as you can ever be.’

  They muttered good luck to her but none of them looked at her or each other, as they did.

  When she had gone Clara pretended to be concerned about Jeannie, and she was too, in a way, because she knew then that there was something really odd about Winnie that tied in with the way she had cracked up at her, and her gaunt look, and selling the dresser, the whole lot.

  Ellen said, ‘I couldn’t go through with it myself.’

  ‘It suits some,’ said Cora. Her face was hard and angry. For a moment they were on the verge of quarrelling. ‘You heard what she said. Look at us. I couldn’t take another kid, I can bloody tell you.’

  ‘All right, I know,’ Ellen said. ‘I wouldn’t have given her the address if it wasn’t for knowing that she couldn’t take a kid. I know.’

  Their voices murmured on above Clara, soothing and reassuring each other, but she had stopped taking notice of them. She knew what it was about. Winnie was having a baby. A baby she didn’t want. And somehow, though she didn’t understand how, these women were trying to make her stop having the baby. That was something her friends at school hadn’t told her about. Winnie with a baby inside her. It didn’t make sense when she had wanted so much for there to be another one.

  But then there was this morning. Things had changed. And there was this queue. She hoped Winnie would come back without the baby.

  Winnie wasn’t sure what she had expected the house to look like. She had come to it the long way round, pausing to look over fences, wondering how the people inside were managing, listening for the voices of children and trying to see them, to see whether they looked as if they were getting enough to eat or not. She had taken the route over the bridge and when she was halfway across she looked down at the dark river and wondered if Mr Hoggard had time to find the water cold before it closed over his head. She wasn’t tempted to jump herself, though it did occur to her that it would be so very much easier than what she was proposing to do, and probably cheaper for Reg. Although on second thoughts, if they fished her out, and they always did seem to find bodies in the Waikato sooner or later, hooked up in the twisted willows, there would be the cost of burying her. Besides, she hadn’t admired what Mr Hoggard had done. It seemed short-sighted and foolish and they would almost certainly have been better off if he had hung on and been patient about things. Sensible, was how she had been described when she was a schoolgirl. No nonsense about Winnie Bentley. Well, there wouldn’t be any nonsense about her now.

  Yet her knees would hardly hold her up when she stood at the gate of the address she had been given. It wasn’t a mansion, one possibility she had considered. The person she was going to see could have made a fortune out of her trade. On the other hand she more than half-expected it to be a tumbledown filthy shack. But it was an ordinary-looking weatherboard house, the paintwork a bit the worse for wear to be true, but quite unexceptional. Although maybe the trees and shrubs had been allowed to grow rather close around the doorway.

  She knocked once, twice, three times, slowly, as she had been told to, and waited. Nothing seemed to move. In a panic she started to beat at the door. It flew open while she was in the middle of pounding, and revealed a woman’s face, round and slightly whiskery around the chin.

  ‘Come in,’ she said sharply.

  The door shut behind them. The dark-stained wood panelling enclosed them in shadow.

  ‘Why did you do that?’

  ‘I thought …’

  ‘You didn’t. You knew what to do. Panicky?’

  �
��Perhaps. Wouldn’t you, if you were me?’ Winnie was surprised at her own voice. It was cooler, she was more articulate than she had expected of herself.

  The woman looked her over carefully, and made a small ‘hnnnh’ noise between her teeth. ‘Mrs Hoggard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re late.’

  ‘I got held up in the relief queue.’

  ‘All right then. I just don’t like my visitors hanging round on the doorstep. It makes me nervous.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Come on then, through here.’ She was a cumbersome woman, yet oddly light on her feet. She led Winnie through the house into a large kitchen, with a scrubbed pine table running down the length of it. Winnie stopped at the door. She had heard about kitchen table jobs. Everybody had heard of them, but she didn’t really believe in them.

  ‘Is this where you’re going to … examine me?’ She thought she would faint, and promised herself that she wouldn’t. She needed her feet to run.

  ‘What d’you expect? All modern conveniences? This isn’t a doctor’s surgery.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude, Mrs …’

  The woman looked at her. ‘Don’t ask. I don’t have a name. Look, if you want to go, go. All right. If you want to stay, it’s clean. I’m not stupid. I don’t want trouble any more than you do.’ Then, softly, as if reading her mind, ‘It has to be in the kitchen. There’s running water, don’t you see, and the bathroom’s not big enough to take a table. So it’s just like you’ve heard. Right? Right. So if you want to leave … it’s over to you really, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ said Winnie. ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Then take off your coat and get up on the table, pants off too, I’ll see what we can feel.’

  Winnie took off her coat very slowly, trying to prolong the moment until she climbed on the kitchen chair and up onto the table. The woman washed her hands at the kitchen sink, and Winnie noticed that she had a pile of freshly laundered towels in the hot-water cupboard. She took one out and dried her hands methodically.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as she completed the careful process, ‘I’m clean. But poor, like everybody.’

  ‘The depression’s hit most of us,’ said Winnie, stretching herself out on the table. The wood was very smooth and cool but it warmed to her body’s touch.

  ‘I can’t afford luxuries. Some people think I’d be able to but it’s not like that.’ On the stove a pot of water boiled. The woman took out a pair of rubber gloves from a drawer, and with a pair of tongs, dipped them one after the other into the water. ‘I tell you, I’ve done it for nothing, there’s some people that down on their luck at present.’

  This was the moment of truth that Winnie had been waiting for. ‘How much — does it cost?’ she managed to whisper.

  There was a pause. ‘You say you’re on relief?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How long since your husband worked? You’ve got a husband I take it?’

  ‘Well of course I have. I mean I’m —’

  ‘Pregnant,’ interposed the woman. ‘So what?’

  ‘He’s in the swamps. That’s all he’s had for a year.’

  ‘How many others? Kids?’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Just one.’ Again the slow‑drawn out ‘hnnnh’. ‘Ten pounds.’

  ‘Ten pounds?’ The room seemed cold, and there was a cobweb on the ceiling. ‘You said … if people were down on their luck …’

  ‘Luck? Think if you had six. That’s what I mean about luck.’

  ‘I haven’t … I don’t think I could get it. I sold something this morning. I thought I’d get more. An oak dresser. It was a beautiful piece. I’d been hanging onto it, because it was so nice. I mean, there was nothing else, but I kept on hanging onto this dresser. Silly. I mean if I’d sold it before, I’d have done better. But I sold it. For this, you see.’ She could hear her voice as if from a great distance, and it seemed to be going on and on and she didn’t know how to stop it. ‘Well, I got a pound for it,’ she finished lamely.

  The other woman sighed. ‘I take risks in this business. It’s a lot of worry.’

  ‘I know. I mean I can understand that, it’s just …’

  ‘Seven pounds ten. I can’t offer you any better.’

  ‘All right,’ said Winnie, and closed her eyes, as the woman’s hands descended onto and into her body. They were firm and confident, and not entirely unpleasant as they moved in their search for her baby.

  ‘Two months did you say?’

  ‘Yes.’ She exclaimed as she was hit by a small sharp pain and had an odd desire to ask the woman to be careful. ‘When would you be able to do it?’

  The woman was breathing more heavily; she pushed Winnie further onto her side, then straightened up suddenly and walked over to the bench. She pulled the gloves off and started to wash again.

  ‘Not at all. Sorry,’ she said.

  ‘But you said,’ Winnie began, only she didn’t finish, because she knew what the woman would say.

  ‘You said you were two months.’

  ‘I could have been a little bit out on my dates,’ Winnie whispered.

  ‘A little bit! You’re nearer to four.’

  ‘Not that far. I’m sure I’m not.’ And I’m not, she told herself fiercely. Well, not that she could recall. A bit afraid maybe, but that shouldn’t make her misjudge.

  ‘I told you, I take risks,’ the woman was saying. ‘But I told you something else too, didn’t I? Do you remember what it was? No, well I’ll tell you. I said I wasn’t stupid. So that means I weigh up the risks. Seven pound ten. It’s not much return when I’ve got a dead woman on my hands. You know where your seven pounds’d take me? Straight to the lock-up. You know you think you’re hard up, but I can tell from your ways, you’ve done all right, somewhere along the way. You think you’re lowering yourself coming here. Oh yes, I can tell. But I can tell you too, you don’t know anything.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’ Winnie had started to cry and she didn’t want to be weeping and ridiculous on this woman’s kitchen table but she couldn’t stop herself. She struggled to get herself upright and to find her clothes.

  ‘If you can find seven pound ten for me, you can find seven pound ten to look after your baby. I’d get on with having it if I was you.’

  ‘I’ll find someone,’ said Winnie.

  ‘Not in this town you won’t, there’s nobody who’d touch you. Here’s your coat.’

  Winnie felt vainly in the pocket for a handkerchief and was reduced to wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve. The woman was watching her, and she said more gently, ‘Look, times’ll get better, they’ve got to. But you mightn’t. Who’d look after your other kid if anything happened to you?’

  ‘You mean that?’

  ‘Yes.’ The woman looked tired and less hostile, as if she had been through all of this many times and had no answers. ‘You know, you’ve got a husband, it’s more than a lot have got these days. You try and sort something out with him, eh?’

  Winnie nodded. She didn’t say it but she thought how much easier said than done that was, as she reflected on the yawning gulf between her and the stranger Reg had become in her life, these last months.

  ‘How much do I owe you for now?’ She felt the pound note crinkling in her coat pocket and thought that it was sad that this was what her oak dresser had bought her in the end, just a chance to be told that nothing could be done to help her.

  ‘Forget it.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘But nothing. Forget it and forget you ever saw me. All right?’

  And the door closed behind her, as she faced the dank afternoon again and turned the pound over in her pocket.

  Back at the queue the others had been served. Cora and Ellen had seen to Jeannie and Clara getting their meal, and they had looked after the children until Winnie came back. They were quiet when they saw her face, and waited for her to say something first.

  ‘I’m
too far gone,’ said Winnie.

  ‘Ahhh.’ Their voices like wind in the grass.

  They set off walking together, along towards Garden Place hill. It was a chill sour day, August, harsh still with winter but a feeling of change in the air too. Things were greening up and there was blossom glittering along the bare branches of a tree. Clara’s heart was skipping. Winnie was going to have a baby. The world was going to change, all right. The prospect of change, any change, excited her. The turning of the year assumed a greater significance.

  ‘When will you tell him?’ Cora asked.

  ‘Reg? Oh … I don’t know. I’ll see how he is tonight. I don’t know, he’s having such a time of it, and I don’t make it any easier for him, not lately; I’ve been a fair cow. I reckon I ought to try to cheer him up a bit.’

  It was strange to hear Winnie talking like this and Clara thought that maybe this was how Winnie had been, talking with friends, when she had been much younger. Perhaps the way she was now, was how Clara might be herself one day. Only something told her she would never be quite like Winnie.

  ‘Are you feeling better about it then?’ Ellen was asking her.

  ‘It looks as if I’ll have to be, won’t I? I mean there’s nothing I can do about it, is there?’

  Cora looked at Ellen. ‘Go on, tell her,’ she urged.

  Ellen looked uncomfortable and turned away.

  ‘I told you, it’s all right for some,’ said Cora, and there was that sharp edge in her voice again. ‘Especially cows like you that make milk like Jersey heifers. You don’t notice the feeding. What if her milk doesn’t come in.’

  Winnie was looking from one to the other in bewilderment.

  ‘All right then,’ said Ellen. ‘Mind you I don’t believe in it. But there’s one up in Ngaruawahia, Winnie. He might see you right. How far on are you?’

  ‘Three and a half months. Or thereabouts. I think.’

  ‘He might. I’m not saying he would, but he might.’

  Winnie walked along quietly with them. ‘Thanks,’ she said after a while.