All the Way to Summer Read online

  She murmured to him, and he had to listen carefully to make sense of what she was saying. ‘The nice thing is, if we wanted to, we could, but we don’t have to because we can. Isn’t that so?’

  He knew she was talking of making love, and that although she had made no absolute decisions she had, nonetheless, made his for him. In an hour, maybe two, they would go their own ways, carrying their offerings from each other. There would always be baggage of some sort or another but, as you went along, some of it could be abandoned, replaced if necessary. Wives, too, though friends were harder.

  A Needle in the Heart

  1

  The weather was overcast the day Queenie McDavitt took off her bodice at the races. Queenie’s real name was Awhina, but her husband had long since renamed her so that people — white people, that is — would remember her name more easily. Her husband was known as Stick because he was a tall beanpole of a man, but it was also an alias for his given name, Robert. He had gone off to place a bet on Sparkling Heels for the next race. There was a queue, and, because the day was heavy and languid, the punters idled around, catching up on news from down the line. Stick wasn’t concerned about his wife being on her own at the races, she was a woman who could look after herself. Besides, she had half a dozen of their children and grandchildren in tow. She wouldn’t be going far.

  This was 1925. Times were hard, but things could only get better, people said. Of course, what they didn’t imagine was that things would only get worse and worse.

  ‘I reckon if we got a lucky break and paid the bills, we’d get ahead a bit,’ Stick said.

  ‘Perhaps if we just went without for a bit and saved some money,’ Queenie said, ‘maybe we wouldn’t be so darn hard up.’

  ‘What have we got to save anyway?’ Stick demanded. They never had anything over, and besides there had been an unexpected doctor’s bill this year. The couple lived with several of their children in a steep-roofed three-roomed cottage with a number of flat lean-tos added, not far from the Main Trunk Line that ran through Taumarunui. Stick got work on the maintenance gangs now and then, when his back wasn’t playing up.

  They ended up going to the races anyway, which Queenie knew they would from the moment he first suggested it. She dressed in her best dark skirt and a white blouse with a ruffle running lengthwise from the collar to the waist, and a maroon coat, covering it with a green plaid shawl that she pinned with a special brooch her father had given her after her mother died at an early age. Her father was a white man from pioneering stock. When he gave her the brooch, he told her, with a good many tears, that it should be hers. He had given it to her mother, even though they had never found a preacher to marry them.

  Then he had vanished; she heard he had gone to a sheep station down south. The brooch was oval in shape, made of fine filigree gold with an amethyst set in the centre. The back opened up to reveal a tiny shadowy portrait of her mother, a woman with long lustrous hair and strong bright eyes that burned through the faded image. To finish her outfit, Queenie added a wide-brimmed hat trimmed with fat green roses.

  ‘You’ll be too hot,’ Stick said.

  ‘You want me to come or not?’

  There was no question about that. She’d been up making bacon-and-egg pies and sandwiches half the night before.

  She watched Stick, pushing his way through the crowds, and sighed. He had a pound burning a hole in his pocket.

  ‘Give us another quid, old girl,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’ve run out,’ she said, although she had one left that she’d hidden in her shoe. Her son Joe tickled her ankle. I know what’s making you hobble, Ma. The devil, that boy, although he wasn’t a boy anymore, and one you couldn’t trust. He was her eldest, once a handsome child, though given to sulking, and now here he was, a married man. He followed his father to place the bet. She wouldn’t have bet on Sparkling Heels herself. She’d have gone for Fox Fire, but then who listened to her when it came to horses?

  On the blanket beside her, Pearl began to cry. Queenie glanced around, looking for Esme, who was supposed to be in charge of the baby. Her daughter was nowhere to be seen. Queenie pulled a face — she couldn’t trust Esme not to wander off for five minutes. She took in the scene as far as she could. The girl could be anywhere among the crowd, although the race track wasn’t very big. The ground had been flattened out of a moonscape of felled trees after the railway went through.

  Queenie’s eyes finally rested on Esme, sitting in the shade of one of the tents making a daisy chain. Like a little kid.

  ‘You tell that Esme to get over here real quick,’ she told Lucy, who was ten and one of Mary’s children. Mary was second in the family after Joe. ‘Tell her I’ll give her a clip if she doesn’t hurry up.’

  ‘You’re supposed to be looking after Pearl,’ Queenie said, when Esme came dawdling over. By now she was holding the baby over her shoulder, the practised palm of her hand gently rubbing the baby’s back to bring up her wind, but Pearl kept on crying.

  Esme took the baby, and Pearl stopped crying almost straight away.

  ‘Just don’t go running off and leaving her like that.’

  ‘You were here,’ Esme said. She had rippling wavy hair that reminded Queenie of her own mother’s, and her eyes were black like Queenie’s. Freckles dusted her nose. Esme and Joe, the best looking of the bunch.

  ‘I don’t want you hanging around where there’s fellas,’ said Queenie. ‘You keep yourself to yourself. Pearl’s your job for the day. D’you know, anything can happen to a baby when it’s lying on the ground? I know a baby having a bit of a kick on the grass, and next thing his mother hears him yelling. Well, this kid yells and yells until he’s dead, and after he’s died a big centipede comes walking out of his ear. You just don’t know how quick one of those centipedes can go walking up inside a baby’s ear and chew its brains all out.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Esme said. Her eyes filled with quick tears.

  Over at the track, the punters were shouting themselves hoarse, and the beating of hooves was shaking the ground where they stood. ‘Oh, my God,’ yelled a man’s voice — there’s Fox Fire, she’s down,’ and then the cry went up that Sparkling Heels was out by a nose, and, would you believe it, that pony had won.

  ‘That’ll be the last we see of your father,’ Queenie said gloomily, ‘now he’s got money in his pocket.’ Already she could see him in the queue, getting ready for the next race. Esme had put the baby down in her lap, where she lay grizzling again. Queenie took her back. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with you,’ she said. ‘You don’t seem able to do the simplest thing.’

  It made Queenie unhappy, the way Esme was. She was such a beautiful girl, but you couldn’t say anything without her taking offence. Esme stretched out, face down on the ground beside her mother and Pearl. Joe came back and said he’d lost ten bob on Fox Fire but the old man had made five pounds. He’d heard some man had lost a tenner each way on the fallen horse.

  ‘Did your father give back the quid I gave him?’

  ‘He reckons he can turn it into twenty-five.’

  ‘You tell him right now, before he gets to the counter. Go on, do as you’re told.’

  Joe hesitated but, seeing the look on his mother’s face, decided to pursue his father. A shot rang out as Fox Fire was put down, and when that excitement was over a huddle of people began drifting their way, men who were skint like Joe.

  ‘Get some food into you,’ Queenie said, holding out a tomato sandwich to Esme with her free hand. ‘Come on, you got to eat something.’ Esme pulled her hair right down around the sides of her face so that it spread in one dark pool on the blanket. Queenie sighed and touched the living silk of it. The sun was beginning to emerge; Queenie had taken off her shawl, carefully pocketing her brooch, and now she wriggled out of her coat. Joe’s wife, Bunty, who’d turned up to join them, held Pearl while she took it off.

  A man called Dave Murphy stopped beside the family’s picnic, a big man with his stoma
ch tumbling over his belt and a large moustache. He wore a yellow and black suit and his shoes glittered in the dull sunlight. He owned one of the new timber mills in the district. From the mean look on his face and the amount of money he usually jingled in his pockets, Queenie guessed he might be the man who’d lost a tenner each way.

  ‘You’re a bit past that sort of caper,’ he said.

  When Queenie didn’t answer, he said, ‘I’d have thought you were a bit old for babies. Old Stick still sticking it to you, eh? Still making babies in an old lady?’ He laughed loudly at his own wit, at the same time nudging Esme on the ground with his foot.

  Queenie said, ‘That’s enough. This little Pearl is my miracle baby.’ The baby had gone to sleep in her arms, and she touched the pale cheek with the back of her finger. They could have as easily called her Lily, but Pearl was what they chose because her paleness and her prettiness had a sheen that made her glow. Queenie had never held a baby this fair in her arms before. Pearl’s eyebrows were like silvery smudges, her eyes milky blue, the fine down round her fontanelle white like kitten’s fur.

  Esme sat up when she felt herself poked in the ribs. She sat staring down between her knees while Dave Murphy looked them all over. Queenie guessed he knew Stick had made a few quid. Dave smelled as if he’d had a few whiskies. He had a way of getting around the liquor ban that was in force in the King Country in those days. Some said he had his own whisky still out in the hills; others said it was amazing what fell off the back of a goods train wagon. Queenie made her voice slow and reasonable, not wanting to aggravate him.

  ‘This little girl is an old woman’s magic baby,’ she said. ‘You remember Magic Man came to town, about a year or so back, and set up in the hall and did his tricks?’

  ‘I heard about him, can’t say I saw him.’

  ‘Yes you did. I saw you there, Mister Dave Murphy.’

  ‘Oh, maybe, a busy man like me can’t remember everything. Now you mention it, I went down there to haul one of my men back to work. We had to get some timber wagons ready for the night train. Maybe I was there a half-hour.’

  ‘And more. Remember, he did all those handkerchief tricks? Made the handkerchief stretch and tied it up in knots without letting go of the ends. That was pretty clever. And he cut the lady in half. You saw that, didn’t you?’

  ‘They do all that stuff with mirrors.’

  ‘There weren’t any mirrors there, I walked up and had a look myself. There were no mirrors.’

  ‘Mum, stop it,’ said Esme.

  ‘Then, remember, at the end, Magic Man puts the curtain down, and you think the show’s all over. Then it comes up again, and he’s standing there without a head. His head is sitting on the table beside him. That’s a miracle.’

  ‘Hmm. Yes, remarkable, now you come to mention it.’

  ‘A miracle. So, at the end, I went up to him and said, ‘Mister Magic Man, I want a new baby because all my babies are pretty well grown up now.’

  ‘Oh, so it was Magic Man who put it there?’

  ‘Now I think you better talk to Stick about that. Nobody puts anything near me except Stick, I tell you. No, I just said to Magic Man, put a spell over me so I can have another baby, and that’s what he did. I got what I asked for, my own little jewel.’

  ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’ Dave stared around angrily, not liking to be taken for a fool. ‘What do you make of it, young lady?’ he said to Esme.

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she muttered, the flood of her hair washing over her face.

  ‘Your mother here’s a dried-up old lady, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Nothing dried up about me,’ Queenie said.

  ‘Let me see your titties then.’

  ‘You want to see my titties now?’ Queenie passed Pearl back to Esme to hold, even though she resisted taking her. Esme held her as if she were a ticking bomb. ‘Don’t Mum,’ she pleaded. Her mother’s hands were at the throat of her blouse. She freed one button after another until they were all undone. Dave Murphy stared at the mountain of brown flesh being revealed. The tops of her breasts rippled above the corset that held them in place, hummocks of round honey-gold flesh being revealed.

  A group of men was collecting around Dave Murphy. They nudged each other, with sharply indrawn breaths. You could tell they were astonished at their own nerve, standing here and watching. But it was like a spell was cast over them, their eyes riveted on Queenie’s cleavage. She slid the blouse off her shoulders and her hands moved to the hooks holding the corset in place.

  ‘No,’ shrieked Esme. ‘No, no, no.’ Mary’s girl had gone to fetch Stick and Joe, but Esme was mesmerised and screaming, unable to do anything except sit there clutching Pearl.

  The first hook popped undone, the second one.

  ‘Magic,’ said Queenie. ‘That’s what it was.’

  Then Joe leapt through a gap between the men, scattering them in all directions, his arms flailing, and Stick, following behind, threw his coat over Queenie just as her sleek breasts tumbled free, covering her long purple nipples an instant before they were seen by the men.

  Joe smacked Esme on the side of her face with his open hand. ‘You never ought to have let her do that,’ he said.

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ said Queenie. ‘Here, get up.’ She tried to yank her daughter to her feet, seeing the blue bruise already forming on her face.

  Stick was more interested in getting Queenie out of it. Making sure his coat was tightly wrapped around her, he began pulling her towards one of the tents to get dressed.

  ‘What about that quid I lent you?’ Queenie said, making out she didn’t care about all the agitation.

  ‘Forget it,’ Stick said. ‘Just forget it.’

  Joe went to the horses and hitched up their wagon. ‘You get that baby out of here,’ he said to Esme.

  When Esme McDavitt grew up, she had no offers of marriage for a long time. She was made various offers of one kind or another, but she knew none of them would do her any good. Some nights, under the tin roof of the cottage, she ached, wanting things she couldn’t have.

  Her father and brothers thought she should go up north, try Auckland and see if there was anyone available up there. But Queenie said not to worry about it, a girl’s place was at home. She set Esme to some tasks to occupy her time, skills of her own that she had learned in native school when she was a child. Esme surprised her. She sewed the straightest seam you ever saw. It took her only a day and a half to run up a dress, complete with cloth buttons and cuffs.

  ‘People would pay good money for that,’ Queenie told Stick.

  ‘Well, let them pay,’ he said. ‘Get started.’ This is what Esme did. She charged modest prices, all that women could pay. A dress cost four shillings, two shillings and sixpence for straight skirts, three shilling for blouses. Sometimes people tried to put it across her, but only got away with it once. She found she liked the business side of things. The money meant she could help her mother out with things Pearl needed for school when she started.

  She was riding her bicycle home after delivering a dress, the wind whipping her hair, which she still wore long and untamed. When she reached the railway line, she got off the bike to wheel it over. A group of gangers were sitting smoking on an idling railway jigger pulled in on a loop. Esme pretended not to see them, her foot poised on a pedal, while a train from the south thundered through.

  Jim Moffit was riding in the guard van that day, on his way to a job.

  Esme never forgot the thrill of it, being singled out by Jim. Perhaps that’s what it was, the excitement of being chosen, when so often she had been passed over. He’d seen her standing there beside the tracks. ‘Who’s that girl?’ he asked the men in the van. He told her this later on.

  ‘And what did they say?’

  ‘Just your name. “That’s Esme McDavitt,” that’s what they said.’

  ‘Was that all?’

  ‘Well, it was enough, wasn’t it? They knew who you were.’
<
br />   ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. I said, “Does she live there? Will a letter find her?”’

  Jim Moffit wrote:

  Dear Mr McDavitt,

  I am an Englishman who has been here some three years now. I have a reasonable education, but times are very bad back home, even worse than here. I am one of the signallers who operate the train tablets. I have an offer of a railway house if I should marry. I am very desirous of making a closer acquaintance with your daughter Esme, with a view to marriage. I am thirty-four years old, but I don’t see a dozen or so years making a great deal of difference as I am healthy of body and mind. I would make her a kind husband.

  Yours,

  James Moffit.

  His untamed girl, snatched up from the side of the railway, his clever English head turned in an instant. A bachelor reformed into a husband, all, it seemed, in the twinkling of an eye.

  Esme made herself a dusky pink wool dress for her wedding. Before they walked over to the church, her mother pinned her gold filigree brooch on her shoulder. ‘Just for today,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll give it to Pearl.’

  ‘I thought you might give it to Mary,’ Esme said, surprised that her mother would overlook her eldest daughter.

  ‘Well, you know how it is,’ her mother said. ‘You know Pearl’s our special baby.’

  At the last minute, Esme didn’t want to go with Jim after all. She hung onto Pearl and cried, trying not to let Jim see her tears. ‘You be a good girl for your Ma,’ she said.

  Jim took her to a hotel in Auckland for their honeymoon. Already, married life was conferring an unexpected grandness.

  ‘Make the most of it,’ Jim had said, laughing at her wonder. ‘It’ll be down to real life once we get home.’ Home would be at Ohakune Junction, down south of Taumarunui beneath the volcanic mountain. In a way, she would have liked to go straight there to see the house they had been allocated in Railway Row, the street by the line, but Jim said plenty of time for that.