Paddy's Puzzle Read online

  ‘Shall I write it down then?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘No? You’re mad,’ said Cora.

  ‘I trusted her,’ said Winnie. ‘Sounds crazy, but this woman, I did trust her.’

  ‘She’s a good woman,’ said Ellen. ‘In her way.’

  ‘I felt that. I hated going there, and she got angry. But I reckon she’d have done it if it was safe. Even though I couldn’t pay the full amount. But she wouldn’t. So maybe it is too risky. And I’ve got Jeannie to think of. It wouldn’t be fair.’

  She was watching Jeannie, and Clara thought, yes, it is Jeannie she thinks of, little pudgy Jeannie in her turned-over skirt, squatting on the pavement poking at a cat. She remembered that it was only this morning, although it was rapidly beginning to seem like something that she had known for a long time, maybe always, that she and Winnie had established that they were sisters and that Winnie couldn’t take charge of her as if she was her mother. Clara could see how true that really was. Winnie didn’t have a responsibility for her in the way she did for Jeannie and the new baby when it came.

  She moved away.

  She moved in other ways that day too, though not so much in the physical sense. That way, nothing really changed for years, her time continuing to be divided between Mumma and Winnie. But she did move away from the same intense feeling of thinking that she belonged to Winnie, and she looked at her in a different way, and she could see things that she had not seen before.

  Even on the night of that long day, Clara watched Winnie, for now she knew even more about her than Reg did.

  If there was something different about Winnie, there was about Reg too. It was so tangible that it could almost be smelled in the air the moment he walked in, but Winnie, immersed in her own thoughts, didn’t pick it. Reg was strange and nervous, but mixed with that there was a curious air of relief and suppressed excitement. It was as if he was, on the one hand, in a personal agony over something, on the other, as if he, too, had moved away from something, in the same way that Clara had moved away from Winnie.

  Winnie had cooked the last egg for him, and there was bread and the vegetables and a slice of bacon that Frank had brought from the farm. It was a funny mixture but substantial enough. Winnie was bright and edgy. Clara could see she was in the way so she retreated to Jeannie’s bedroom and began to read The Wind in the Willows to her. She didn’t know how many times she had read it to her before, and soon her niece got impatient and took over from her, because she could read it as well as Clara. There didn’t seem to be a place for her anywhere. She took her hot-water bottle to fill at the kitchen tap and found herself a corner by the stove. She began to draw pictures in her school pad; first, pictures of families with lots of children and the girls all had curly hair like hers and even the very small ones wore high heels. As if at a great distance Reg and Winnie’s voices murmured in the next room.

  ‘Please have half of it,’ Reg said.

  ‘I’ve eaten,’ she said. ‘I had soup today in the queue. They didn’t give you that out at the reclamation.’

  ‘I can’t keep having more than you. You’ve got to eat too.’

  ‘What’s half an egg?’ she said. ‘Go on, it’ll get cold.’

  When he’d finished she took his plate and scraped it, then she pushed it to one side of the table. Usually she picked things up and took them straight through to the kitchen and banged them in the sink.

  ‘How was it today then?’ Her voice continued its forced brightness.

  ‘The same.’ He was non-committal.

  ‘It might be drier tomorrow. I’m sure the weather’s going to clear.’

  ‘I’m not going tomorrow,’ he said carefully.

  There was a short silence between them. ‘They’ve stood you down again?’

  He grunted.

  ‘Well. Probably it’s just as well. You could do with a break.’

  ‘That’s the way I look at it.’

  ‘There’ll be some pay owing.’

  ‘A bit. You know where to pick it up.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘I’ll be around looking out for something won’t I? I can’t waste the time.’

  Clara, listening, thought there was something odd in this statement. Even she knew that if he’d been stood down it would have been the first thing he did, go and pick up his money, before he did anything else. Clara picked a note of panic in his voice. He needn’t have worried. Winnie was only half hearing him.

  ‘What did you do today?’ he asked her.

  ‘Oh … nothing. Nothing really. I was in the queue for a long time. Terrible you know. You’ll be standing there, after you’ve waited and waited, and they’ll close down for lunch, just like that, in your face. For their lunch would you believe.’

  ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘Cora. Ellen. The usual.’ It was turning out harder than she had expected. She couldn’t think of the right lines to give him. ‘What about you? You see anyone?’

  ‘I called in on my mother on the way home.’

  ‘Oh, her. I thought you were late.’ Winnie remembered that she was being nice to Reg and bit back the sarcasm which crept into her voice whenever they discussed old Mrs Hoggard. ‘How is she then?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Doesn’t she get sick of rattling round in that big old house by herself?’ It was a contentious point but with an effort Winnie made it sound solicitous.

  ‘She’s taken in three boarders.’

  ‘She hasn’t!’

  ‘She has you know.’

  ‘She must be better then.’

  ‘I’d say she was. One of them’s going to fix up her vegetable garden.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s … got herself together then.’ She had been going to say ‘pulled’ herself together. They were skating on thin ice. ‘We could do with a bit of fixing up in our own. If you turned it over I could get some seedlings from Mama. If you’re going to be off work that’d be as good as anything you could do.’

  ‘I’ll only be stood down for a day or so,’ said Reg evasively. ‘But I will when I can,’ he added, anxious again and not wanting to draw her attention to his refusal. He went on, ‘It’s a bit early yet. The earth’ll still be cold.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you’re right.’

  They were hedging. Reg yawned and belched.

  ‘At least I’ll be able to get your boots dry. Shall I put them in the oven now?’ She moved to get up. Her voice was heavy.

  ‘I had to hand them in today. They’re short of them.’

  ‘That’s silly, they’ll just be wet when they give them to someone else.’

  ‘Well they did.’

  ‘You are going back?’ she said sharply.

  ‘You’re really keen on me going out there?’ he said.

  There was an argument in the air, one of those manufactured arguments that people have when they are trying to hide something important, but whatever happens it is the argument that can be blamed. They still hardly ever argued, not in words at any rate, but Winnie could feel it coming on them, settling in the room like river fog. The odd thing was, she couldn’t decide which of them was actually picking the argument. She knew she had plenty to hide from him, and yet she had this strange feeling that it was he who wanted her to be angry, and shout at him.

  ‘No. No, I’m not Reg. You know I don’t like you going out there.’ She said it quietly, trying to still them both. ‘You’re tired. Why don’t you come to bed? I’ll put the dishes in the sink and come with you. We could have an early night.’

  ‘Well … soon.’

  ‘We could … I do love you Reg.’ She was clumsy with love and there was real longing in her voice. There didn’t seem much point in pursuing whatever it was she had had to tell him. Not tonight. She thought that perhaps if they could be kind to each other he would know without her having to tell him.

  ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Y
ou know why not. I can’t bear lying beside you and not being able to. It’s been months since … I was so scared after. I can’t put a kid up you. I want you so much,’ he said harshly.

  So, she thought, it seems I will tell him after all, and as she opened her mouth to say what she must, there was a knock on the door, like bad movie, right on cue. She could have laughed if it hadn’t been so bad for them.

  Reg pushed his chair back hard. ‘I’ll get it.’ He was padding down the hallway already. Winnie got to her feet and collected the plates.

  In the kitchen, Clara heard her coming, and slipped like a speck of dust through a crack out of the room, to the bed she shared with Jeannie. She was asleep, her arms flung up above her head, her soft mouth open slightly. She breathed through her mouth when she slept. Clara put on her nightdress and got in beside her.

  Winnie had started washing the plates when Reg came back up the hall.

  ‘I’ll dry,’ he said.

  ‘Who was it?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh … just Albie Tubbs. He might call by at the weekend.’

  ‘Albie? Why didn’t he come in then?’

  ‘He was off to some meeting or other. The Labour Party.’

  ‘Oh that. Don’t tell me he goes along to them?’

  ‘Lots do. Anyway, he just thought he’d see if I’d be here at the weekend.’ His voice was hesitant and Winnie had the sudden quick feeling that he was lying, but Reg didn’t lie. At least she had never known him to. Or maybe he did, and it just didn’t occur to her. She didn’t understand lies. It must be her own body, making her think things like that about him. Besides, she did tell lies now, she remembered. Something new, something she’d never done. It was all inside her.

  ‘He’s still in work then?’

  ‘Most school teachers are.’

  ‘He was a funny boy, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. You always said his ears stuck out.’

  ‘They weren’t that bad really. Remember the picnic when he fell in the river?’

  ‘That’s because he was so short-sighted.’

  ‘But he made it funny. That’s what I liked about him. He always made you laugh at him but it was a nice kind of a joke.’ She laughed, remembering. ‘They were good times, weren’t they?’

  ‘You were so shy, I never knew for sure whether you were enjoying yourself.’

  ‘It was your family. I was scared of them.’

  ‘I know. But you were lovely. They knew you were lovely. They knew I’d be lucky to get you.’

  ‘I never thought that. About them. I thought it was the other way round. They thought I was lucky to get you.’

  ‘What’s it matter love? Either way it’s been all right, eh?’

  ‘Been?’

  ‘Is, then. Why don’t you go and get into bed and I’ll be there in a minute eh? I’ll come and hold you, just hold you, we both need a rest.’

  ‘You’ll come soon?’ said Winnie.

  ‘As soon as I’ve locked up and tucked up the girl. Go along, I’ll be there in a minute.’

  He went through into Jeannie’s bedroom. Clara shut her eyes as if she was asleep, with the blankets pulled up around her face. She could just see his shape by the light from the kitchen. He stood by the bed and stared down at Jeannie, and after a moment he leaned down and kissed her gently on the forehead, making a small muffled sound in his throat. As he was passing, he hesitated and touched Clara’s face with his finger. Then he went out into the kitchen, and she heard him tearing paper from her pad. Clara blushed in the dark, thinking he would see her drawings. He took a pencil out of her box, and there was rustling for a few moments, then he moved on to the bedroom, and the bed that he and Winnie shared. The house was still, and yet it was not still, as if it moved with their breaths.

  In the dark, she took him in his arms, and moved her body towards his, but he held himself still and very careful, and said in a quiet lost voice, ‘You’re good, you’re such a good girl Winnie,’ and she didn’t know whether it was a reproach for being so forward to him, or a compliment, but she didn’t dare ask him, and when he began to stroke her hair she was reassured. They wrapped together in the tight dark, and the movement of his hand on the back of her head went quietly on, until she slept.

  When they woke in the morning he was gone.

  It was Jeannie, paddling barefoot through the freezing house to the lavatory, who found his note on the kitchen table. Clara heard their cries, and went out to find out what the matter was. Jeannie, like a mother herself, was cradling Winnie in her arms.

  Reg had left at daybreak for the goldfields in the South Island. He could not bear what was happening to them all, he said in his note, and he was sure that he would be able to send them more money from down there, maybe make a little, and it would be one less mouth to feed.

  Clara was excluded from their grief and went back to her room. Everything had changed all right, more than she had bargained for, even Jeannie, who was not a baby any more. That afternoon Clara went back to Mumma.

  She went across town on her own, and as she left she looked back up the street and Jeannie was sweeping the verandah, not that there were any leaves on that harsh late winter day. Maybe it needed sweeping. Anyway, Jeannie was doing it.

  Clara and Mumma looked to Winnie over the months till Caroline was born, but it was Jeannie she turned to.

  Jeannie, that is, and Albie Tubbs.

  3

  Albie’s ears did stick out slightly, and he had thick lenses in his glasses, but if these minor imperfections were ignored, he was actually rather nice-looking.

  He and Reg had been in the same class together at Hamilton High, or at least until Albie moved ahead into a higher group than Reg. Reg had always been smart enough, but Albie was better than smart, he was clever. He went away to university, and Reg and Winnie used to talk about how he came back in the holidays dressed in rather extraordinary, but quite elegant clothes, and out to entertain them all by acting the part of the bungling young intellectual. His family were the ultimate of anyone’s social aspirations in Hamilton. His father was a lawyer with a reputation for never losing a case, and it was generally understood that Albie would follow in his footsteps and join the family firm.

  There were marvellous parties in the summer at the Tubbs’ house, which was right on the bank of the wide river which flows through the town. Their place was hidden by willows and the young people used to go there in droves over the weekends, dressed in blazers and straw hats. Winnie had photographs of them, and they were the last thing she remembered to save out of the drawer of the oak dresser the day it went. She had pulled the drawer open and looked at them and nearly closed it again, but even on that awful day, she had decided to save them. It was a whole new world for her at the Tubbs’, and when it began she knew that she wanted to be part of it forever. The Tubbs, despite their unfortunate name, had a magic that Winnie had never encountered before, or was likely to anywhere else within the confines of Hamilton.

  Then something happened. None of them ever knew much about it, and what they did hear was filtered through in little snippets, so that even Reg, who was Albie’s friend, was excluded.

  But they did hear that Albie had fallen in love with a girl in Auckland whom his family thought was unsuitable. They fought to prevent him marrying her and stopped his allowance. They were certain that this would achieve their purpose because they believed the girl was only out for his money. Then they discovered that she was having a baby and they rushed to Auckland in a panic in order to make good what had happened. But when they got there the girl had married an old boyfriend who was prepared to take her on with the child. She died when her baby was born, and Albie cut himself off from his family.

  His mother died without them being reconciled, and his father’s practice dropped away. He became a dusty small-town lawyer mouldering away in his big empty offices. One day, out of the blue, Albie came back and moved in with his father to a smaller house. It seemed to those who knew them that the two
men had just about forgotten what the quarrel was all about.

  Albie went to teach at Tech, which was in itself a small act of defiance against the establishment and his own background, but as the school was gradually becoming respectable it could hardly be seen as a revolution. Besides, as the years passed and the depression took over, it was something just to have a job. Albie and Reg had almost been social equals; now, despite the fact that neither had money nor status, Albie, with his comic name and big ears, kept the edge simply by being employed.

  Reg had been scandalised by Albie’s downfall and it had taken them a long time to pick up with each other. When they did, they must both have recognised the changes. They started a friendship again.

  The weekend after Reg went away Albie did come to see Winnie.

  During the week Mumma had gone backwards and forwards to Winnie’s, doling out what comfort she could, though every now and then Winnie would catch her looking at her in a way which made her wonder if she didn’t really believe that she would be better off without Reg. But then, as Winnie knew, Mumma had some jaundiced ideas about men. Maybe with good reason, though who was to know, except Mumma herself. And sometimes Winnie thought that Clara might have seen more than she let on with her too careful and too sharp big eyes. Maybe.

  Winnie sensed, too, that Mumma was anxious for her to settle down as quickly as possible to her changed style of life, to get on with things, and not fret about her missing husband. She thought bitterly that it would let her mother be free to get back to her cyclamens and orchids. Not that people bought them any more, but Winnie suspected that she might really like that, to have the fragile waxy flowers to herself, much as some women wanted to have their children to themselves without a father round to interfere with the running of things or to distract attention from their place at the centre.

  Of course there was the problem of the baby. Even Mumma, batty old Mumma, couldn’t overlook that Winnie had been left to have a baby on her own. She did take that part quite seriously, Winnie supposed, but there was the feeling there that she really hoped that something, or someone, would turn up to take her off her hands.