All the Way to Summer Read online

  Still, it was she who saw him first. One of the things she liked was that this time she chose him. When he looked down, she had already said yes.

  ‘Could you look after Neil for an hour?’ she asked Norma the next day, as if nothing untoward had happened the day before. She knew what time his train came in. She knew that if she waited on the station he would follow her.

  Just like that.

  Not, is this all right? Are you sure about this? Nothing of that. Just the two of them on her and Jim’s bed. Her hair falling down around her face, her glasses left behind on the kitchen bench, him carrying her through the house, holding her legs around his waist until he could put her down and they could do their business. He had a sweet, oily smell on his skin that she wore all that day.

  His hands reached up for her cone-shaped breasts when she swung them above him. She felt him hesitate a moment.

  ‘Steady on,’ he said.

  ‘I’m still feeding the baby. I can’t get pregnant.’

  His mouth then, everywhere.

  His chest and arms bulged with muscles. On the ascents when the trains climbed from Waiouru to Tangiwai, through the Junction and on to Raurimu and the great Central Plateau of the island, from Taumarunui up to Frankton Junction, he threw three, perhaps four tons of coal through the fire hole, placing the fuel from corner to corner along the near end of the grate. His wrists were swivelling steel. The arms that held her were like a high fence around her body.

  She thought, fleetingly, of the needle that wandered within her. Somewhere, drifting among her blood, the thick red soup of herself, the needle had moved, perhaps entered her heart.

  Norma said she’d have Neil at the same time the day after that, but Esme could see that she looked at her oddly. She thought, I look different already.

  All through the summer, the geraniums were in a red hot heat around the house, and he kept coming to see her. After the first few days, she stopped asking Norma to mind Neil. She put him to bed in his cot, and hoped he wouldn’t wake up. In moments when she tried to behave like a normal person — a person who wasn’t frantic with love, a person who mashed potatoes and made gravy and said here you are, here’s your tea, dear, and hung out the washing and snapped the napkins when they were dry — she thought that her son would wake and know what she did.

  She stopped going to the post office, didn’t see Norma anymore.

  Queenie sent word that Pearl was coming to stay. She’d seen Jim at the Taumarunui station when he’d gone there on a relieving job, and told him to pass on the message to Esme.

  ‘She can’t come now,’ Esme cried.

  ‘I thought you liked having her.’

  ‘It’s not that I don’t want her to come, of course,’ Esme said carefully. ‘It’s just that, well, you know, I’m busy with Neil.’

  ‘One baby’s not that much work.’

  ‘Oh, what do you know about housework?’ This was what love did to her, it made her bold and reckless in the way she spoke.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ Jim said. For an instant, she expected to be hit. And yet, she thought, he couldn’t do that, not Jim from Birmingham with his good manners and his kindness. Because, even though he wasn’t always happy in himself and he complained about little things, he never did her any harm. Something about his look silenced her. She thought he must be able to sense the permanent swollen ache between her legs that he only made worse when he touched her.

  ‘I guess Pearl could come for a few days.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt,’ he said.

  The day before Pearl arrived, she wrapped her legs tightly around Conrad’s waist. ‘I love you,’ she said, running her tongue in the inside of her ear.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I know that all right.’ He pulled her closer to him so that she didn’t know where he began and she left off.

  Pearl was nearly thirteen. She had grown bosoms and was a head taller since Esme last saw her. She was rounded, and her fair hair spun into ringlets that surrounded her face. She’d sung in the end-of-year concert at school.

  ‘Would you like me to sing my solo?’ she asked on the first afternoon of her visit.

  ‘Yes, please,’ Esme said, ‘of course.’ It was twelve-thirty. The train was due in at one.

  Early one morning, Pearl sang,

  just as the sun was rising

  I heard a maid sing in the valley below.

  Oh, don’t deceive me

  Oh, never leave me …

  At any other time, such pure clarity would have wrung Esme’s heart, but before Pearl had finished singing, she said, absently, ‘Could you mind Neil for me, d’you think? Just for half an hour.’

  ‘You weren’t listening,’ Pearl cried.

  ‘Yes, yes I was. Did you get that song off the radio?’

  ‘I hate you. It’s true what they say about you, isn’t it?’

  Esme snatched her wrist and held onto it. ‘What do they say about me? What? You just tell me who says what about me. You hear me.’

  ‘Nothing,’ Pearl said in a sullen voice. Esme let her arm drop. There was an angry mark where she had twisted Pearl’s delicate flesh. ‘All right then, I’ll look after your rotten baby.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Esme said and walked out. She shivered as she hurried to the railway station, wishing she had brought her cardigan. It was autumn now, and all week there had been a hint of frost in the morning. In the blue shadow of the mountain, the cold started early. She stood at the station as she had that first time, only now she felt that people on the platform looked sideways at her, wondering what to expect next.

  In fact, nothing much happened. The train came, and Conrad wasn’t on it, and as soon as she saw that, she understood what she had already sensed; he wouldn’t be there. She would never see him again. There was no real way of knowing this, just the feeling that things had gone too far and something had to change. She glimpsed her reflection in the murky painted window of the station waiting room, in disarray, clutching her arms around herself.

  Blindly, she turned and walked away from the station and through the town. Past the butcher’s shop, where she should be going to buy some liver and bacon for Jim’s tea, and perhaps a sausage for Pearl who wouldn’t eat liver. On past the greengrocer’s shop, where a quiet patient Chinese woman put apples and spinach in the front window. On beyond the tobacconist’s shop, where a group of men glanced at her as she hurried on by.

  Nobody greeted her. So it was true then. They knew about her, knew why she stood so brazenly in full sight of everyone, waiting for him.

  She set off at a run, along the track beside the Mangawhero, where she used to walk before all this madness began. Further along the stream bed, there was a rocky incline that dropped to a pool. She wanted to lie down in the water and let it freeze her, until she dropped like a stone to the bottom. Would Jim think to look for her there? He might, but she hoped that if he did he would simply leave her there. As winter closed in, perhaps she would float to the surface and be rolled by boulders and glacial ice further down, out to sea or to one of the great lakes, wherever it was the river went. She really didn’t care. To love in such an extreme way was to lose her sense and her senses.

  Nothing like that’s ever going to happen again, she said to herself, and it felt as if she had had an amputation of some kind. She found herself looking at her body as if she could see something missing. She thought about Neil, home alone with Pearl, and how, after a while, the boy would cry for her. Her breasts were leaking milk; she touched herself where her dress was wet and saw herself alone in the bush, a crazy woman with streaming hair, falling blindly across tree stumps and the dried-up grasses of summer. The river bubbled over the stones, shining where the water and the falling light touched them. She saw clouds and bodies floating, waving arms and the star faces of babies in them. Perhaps Pearl could look after her baby; she would soon get into the way of keeping house, the way Esme had. Then she thought that, if that happened, Pearl would be with Jim, and that w
ouldn’t be right.

  She turned and walked back towards the town. The sun had dropped away, blood red, followed by the amber light before dusk beneath the mountain top. She began to be afraid of what she would find, and how she would have to face up to Jim’s anger if he discovered she’d left Neil with Pearl. I went for a walk and got lost was the first story that sprang to mind. If he wasn’t home already, might she not gather up Pearl and Neil and catch the train home to Taumarunui? Only the train wasn’t due for hours, and he would find them all on the station.

  Then she told herself that she had imagined everything. That nobody knew. Conrad had had a day off sick, or his roster had been changed. He’d be on the train the next day. By the time she got to the house, she found herself believing this.

  Inside, the kerosene lamp had been lit. Pearl was stoking the fire under Norma’s instructions. Norma sat at the table with Neil in her lap, trying to get him to eat some food she’d mashed up for him. There was no sign of Jim.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Esme said to both of them.

  ‘I didn’t know where you were,’ Pearl said, her tone sour.

  ‘The girl came and got me,’ said Norma. ‘Thank goodness she’s got more brains than I gave her credit.’

  ‘Has Jim been in?’ Esme asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t be surprised if he was having a drink or two with his mates.’

  ‘Jim doesn’t go drinking.’ Which was true. Jim wasn’t a drinking man: it was one of those things that had recommended him to Queenie.

  ‘Happen he might be now,’ Norma said. She stood up, patting the creases in her skirt. ‘You know, Esme, it doesn’t pay to get your meat where you get your bread.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘There was a letter came for you. Seeing you hadn’t been in for the mail lately, I brought it over when Pearl called me in. My husband said, take it to her, it might be urgent.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Esme again, glancing at the envelope. She didn’t recognise the big block letters that spelled her name on the envelope, but she saw the soft glue that held the flap of the envelope in place. She guessed it had been opened.

  ‘Aren’t you going to open it?’ Norma asked.

  Esme crumpled the letter in her hand as if it wasn’t important. ‘Probably a bill. That’s all the mail that ever comes, isn’t it?’ She opened the door and held it ajar, so that Norma had to walk through.

  The letter said:

  Dear Esme

  You don’t know who I am but I think you ought to know a certain man has been told he will be killed soon unless he takes some action to stop it happening to him he might have an engine run over him it will look like an accident I can promise you but it will happen he has said he will do what he must or rather he must not. Yours, a well wisher.

  When Esme’s next boy was born, she nearly died. The doctor and the nurses at the cottage hospital gave her so much chloroform that if the baby hadn’t killed her coming out sideways, the dose almost did.

  Esme held her baby close. Already she could tell he was not a placid boy, but every limb seemed so perfect and unblemished she thought he couldn’t be real. And this baby had a smell she understood.

  ‘What would you like to call him?’ Jim asked.

  ‘What about Philip?’ she said tentatively. This was the name of Jim’s father, although of course she had never met them. Jim’s parents had both died that year, the announcement of their deaths coming by sea mail, in letters edged with black.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jim, ‘that’s a nice idea. You go ahead and call him that.’ He stroked the baby’s cheek with his forefinger. ‘He’s a throwback this one,’ he said, ‘A right little darkie.’ Philip had black curls and olive skin.

  ‘One for Mum,’ Esme said.

  Jim smiled and tickled the baby. It wasn’t like Norma had said. He’d never come home drunk. He’d never had a word to say about anything that happened. If anything, he seemed calmer, less willing to find fault with her than he had before.

  The year the world went to war, Jim Moffitt said, ‘I wish I could go.’ He couldn’t because he was too old, and he was needed for essential services anyway. Ned, the fifth of Queenie and Stick McDavitt’s eight children, said, ‘I’m going,’ and learned the Māori Battalion song. And Lawrence Tyree, the film projectionist, said, ‘I’m glad I can stay here.’

  Lawrence had had a hernia operation, which he reckoned would keep him out of the war. He had blond hair and very smooth skin, so much like velvet you’d think he had no beard except for a stain of mottled shadow that appeared at the end of the day. He’d come up to the Junction to live just before the war started and ran the picture theatre on Wednesday and Sunday nights.

  ‘You a shirker?’ asked Ned, on his visit to say goodbye before he left for the war. It was half-time at the pictures on Saturday night.

  ‘I’ll show you my operation scar if you like.’

  ‘All right,’ said Ned, ‘I’ll put two bob on it there’s no scar.’

  Everyone squeezed into the foyer to buy lemonade, stood watching as Lawrence began to unbuckle his belt. Someone in the crowd reminded them that there were women and children present.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Ned, ‘we don’t really want to see it, mate.’

  Lawrence shrugged and laughed, as if it were their loss, and caught the florin Ned threw him. After that, there was no more trouble.

  ‘I wish he had shown us,’ Pearl said to Esme afterwards.

  ‘You don’t want to talk like that,’ Esme said. ‘People should keep their private parts to themselves.’

  So then Pearl asked her, was it true that their mum had shown people her boobs at the races.

  ‘You don’t want to listen to gossip,’ Esme said. ‘There’s some people have evil tongues, and if Jim ever heard you say a thing like that he’d make you wash your mouth out with carbolic soap and water.’

  ‘Jim can’t make me do anything,’ Pearl said, laughing at her. She laughed a lot these days, her lips a big oval around the pushed-out teeth, her tongue darting in the pink cavern of her mouth.

  Pearl often stayed at the Junction now. The afternoon Esme had gone away and left her to look after Neil seemed forgotten. Neil was due to start school the following year. Philip was a more challenging child, constantly on the go, a child who said No! when he was told to go to bed, and Why? when asked to pick up his toys: a wooden truck Queenie had given him for Christmas and two guns from his father. Bang bang, you’re dead, Philip said, especially to Neil. Esme had her hands full and was pleased to have Pearl around. At fifteen, Pearl had become helpful and willing. She was seeing a boy called Raymond, who was a guard on the railways. He had deep-set eyes and eyelashes like a girl’s.

  ‘She’s too young to be seeing a boy of eighteen,’ Esme said. She had electricity and the phone installed now. People rang through with their sewing orders.

  Queenie just sighed on the other end of the line. ‘What the heck, he’ll be called up any day.’

  ‘I wish she was still in school,’ Esme said.

  ‘Oh, school. The authorities are rounding up everyone and making them stay in schools these days. What’s the point of it? Look at you, you’re doing all right.’

  In the evenings, Esme did Pearl’s fair hair up in rags for her. She liked running her fingers through it, her time to relax. She was busier than ever with sewing orders. All the girls were getting married before their sweethearts went away. She wished she felt happier, but at least it was easier to pretend life were normal.

  It gave her a shock one night when Jim said, ‘I wish I could take you back to the Old Dart.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Home. To England. I could show you the place where I come from.’ They were lying in bed, Jim smoking, with an empty tobacco tin perched on his stomach for an ashtray.

  ‘For a holiday? Jim, there’s a war on.’

  ‘Well, I know that. But some day I’d like us to go back and live there. Things would be bett
er.’

  ‘What things?’ She had thought him settled, even though the hoped-for promotion had never come. It flashed through her mind that Conrad might be back, that he might be trying to see her, and Jim knew about it. ‘Don’t be silly, Jim. We’ve got our home here.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t suppose you’d want to leave,’ he said, with a trace of bitterness.

  For a day or two, she found herself afraid and hopeful all over again about Conrad. There was no way of asking anyone, and no sign of him. On his days off, Jim went around in his braces, with grey stubble on his chin. So that was it, England was the pay-off, the price of Philip, and she wasn’t going to give him that.

  One morning she met Lawrence at the butcher’s shop on the corner of Thames Street when she was choosing calf brains. She had the children with her. Pearl had left again. First she had gone home to see Queenie, who said she could go down to Wellington to be near Raymond while he was training at Trentham, and now she’d gone south. Esme was so angry that Queenie had agreed to this that, for the first time in her life, she and her mother were not speaking.

  ‘I’m going to run the next movie through this afternoon,’ Lawrence said. ‘It’s called A Star is Born. Why don’t you come over for a preview?’

  Esme laughed. ‘You’d soon get sick of my kids.’

  ‘I’ll take them for you if you like,’ the butcher’s wife said. ‘I’ll have finished the accounts by lunchtime.’ Joan Stott was a tiny, lively woman who used a cigarette holder. Esme had whipped up some dresses for Joan at short notice when she was going on holiday.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure.’

  ‘You could do with a break,’ said Joan. ‘Your eyes are falling out of your head.’

  The movie starred Janet Gaynor; it was about a girl called Esther Blodgett who arrives in Hollywood from the sticks, and learns different ways of walking and talking and making herself up, and gets a new name and becomes a star. A big title came up that showed her destination as being ‘the beckoning El Dorado, Metropolis of Make Believe in the California Hills’. Esme didn’t know why, but it made her think of Pearl, and she wanted to cry.