As the Earth Turns Silver (18 page)

Edie did not want Dr Bennett to leave. They stood on the wharf as the wind blew salt into their faces, as gulls screeched their ugly goodbyes.

‘We can't stay still, Edie,' Dr Bennett said, touching her arm. ‘We must pursue every opportunity. Create it for ourselves. The New Zealand Army may not welcome women but the Croix Rouge does.'

Edie wanted to cry. What if she never came back?

Dr Bennett gave her a robust hug. ‘Have you read
The Merchant of Venice
?' she asked. ‘Bassanio chooses the leaden casket over the silver or gold. Do you know what is inside?'

Edie nodded. ‘
Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.
'

Dr Bennett smiled. ‘Yes.' She held Edie by the shoulders, looked at her intently. ‘Never forget that, Edie. You must have the courage to give and hazard all. You must be prepared to withstand the deepest disappointment, frustration, exasperation . . .

‘Oh, Edie, it's not as excruciating as it sounds. Not all the time!' She laughed. ‘You are allowed fun too, you know, but,' and now she was very serious, ‘intelligence of the brain is not enough. If you want to fulfil your dreams, you will have to work relentlessly. At least twice as hard as any man. You must find within yourself the necessary determination, the will and the wisdom. And you must also cultivate intelligence of the heart.

‘Write to me, my dear, and I'll do my best to write back – though you must realise that mail at the Front can be unreliable.'

Dr Bennett gave Edie another hug. She held her, stroked her back. ‘My mother died when I was very young, Edie. I felt so alone. But you have Mrs Newman. You still have your mother.'

Edie watched the ship slip its moorings and slowly move out into the harbour. From Sydney, Dr Bennett would sail through the Suez Canal and on to the Middle East. To who knows what? Who knows where?

How could she be so certain? So unafraid?

Edie watched the ship disappear. She remembered the caskets.

Robbie breathed in the dust that flew up as carts, trams, motorcars made their way along Taranaki Street. Men were heading for pubs, thinking about beer and whisky; men and women were walking home, thinking of Irish stew and roast dinners.

He smiled. He could see the huge double-storey brick building up ahead on the corner. He'd trained as a cadet in the firing ranges underneath, stood with the crowd on the night war was declared – Buckle Street one dense lane of boys, men, people cheering. It had been seventeen months since he'd been turned away, but now his training had yielded results. He'd grown three inches, gained fifteen pounds and sculpted his slender body till he could feel the hard contours of muscle through his dark blue uniform. He ran his hand over his jaw. He hadn't shaved for more than two days.

He paused just inside the vast hall, admired the steel trusses supporting the roof, remembered how as a boy he'd wagged school and watched the horses with block and tackle struggle to lift them into place. Late afternoon light fell through the skylights. Officers sat behind desks, filling out forms; men in suits, dungarees, workmen's clothes sat in front, rag-tag queues of one man here, two there.

Robbie studied the faces. If anyone recognised him, knew his age, he'd go elsewhere. There were drill halls up and down the country. He could take the train to Petone and sign up there. He could go further afield. He'd find an officer to take him.

When he sat down, the recruiting officer looked him over. But this was no longer 1914. Now there was a new vocabulary: Gallipoli, Anzac, Chunuk Bair. Each morning mothers, wives, fiancées opened the newspaper and turned immediately to the Roll of Honour, scanning the names under Killed in Action, Died of Wounds, Wounded Admitted to Hospital.
Evans, Rflmn, Harold William. Next-of-kin Mrs R. Evans, 126 Riddiford Street, Newtown (mother). Right foot and cheek.

The officer studied Robbie's uniform. How many kids under twenty would even get a look-in on a job like that? He asked the questions and filled out the form: name – Robert Donald McKechnie; place of birth – Wellington; British subject – yes; date of birth . . . Robbie had rehearsed it over and over, until now even he almost believed it. The same birth date, just two years older.

The officer smiled. ‘Happy birthday,' he said, and he passed Robbie the form to sign, then took him through the oath, sincerely promising and swearing to be faithful, to observe and obey, so help me God.

The doctor measured his height and weight, his chest both fully expanded and empty. He checked his vision, hearing, heart and lungs, the condition of his teeth. (Had he brushed them this morning?) The doctor made him turn his ankles and wrists in circles, bend and extend his arms and legs. He made him stand, legs apart, his hands on the white cotton sheet of the bed. This is what he'd heard of. What all the boys talked about. He held his breath as the doctor parted his buttocks and then reached between his legs and grasped his balls. ‘That's fine,' the doctor said, then added, ‘Now, what was your religion?' What's religion got to do with a medical? Robbie thought.

‘Presbyterian?' the doctor asked, before he signed the certificate.

When Robbie came home and told his mother, she screamed at him. How dare he put her through this? Hadn't he seen the casualty lists in the newspapers each day? Mrs Dunn's son was killed at Gallipoli. Mrs Shirley's survived, but without a leg. ‘You're only—'

‘Eighteen today,' he said calmly. Defiantly. He could smell roast lamb, could tell his mother had gone to some trouble to cook his favourites. For a moment he felt a pang of guilt, and yet he could not help himself. ‘Dad would have backed me up all the way,' he said.

‘I don't give a damn about your father! He's been dead . . . nine years.
Nine
years, you hear me – and you're still bringing him up like a bad dinner!'

Tears rose suddenly at the back of Robbie's eyes. He shoved past her, stormed out the door. Slammed it behind him.

As Katherine and Edie ate, looking at Robbie's empty chair, Katherine knew that if she tried to stop him he could just as easily run away. He could join up in Napier or Wanganui or even Christchurch or Dunedin. He could join up under a false name. And all she would have left would be absence. Silence. A tomb she might search and search for and never find because it bore another boy's name.

Anticipation made Edie flush with excitement. She'd never shown much interest in the usual womanly preoccupations, shopping included, but this was all part of the process of leaving, of making a life of her own. She needed woollen combinations, a navy woollen skirt, a new coat. A girl had to be prepared for snow – why, the modern woman had to be prepared for any eventuality.

As they came back up Adelaide Road, laden with bags and parcels, her mother said, ‘We need vegetables for dinner.'

‘Oh Mum, can't you get them tomorrow?' Edie couldn't wait to get home. She wanted to lay out her purchases, to organise her trunk.

‘We used up all the cabbage last night; there're only two potatoes, one carrot and no onions.'

Edie groaned but followed her mother into the shop. She couldn't leave her to lug everything home.

Mr Wong came out and broke into a smile. ‘Been shopping?'

‘Yes!' Edie's mother grinned. ‘Edie is going to Medical School in Dunedin.' She looked so proud that Edie squirmed, but Mr Wong seemed pleased.

‘This is good,' he said. ‘Helping people.' He cut a pear and gave each of them a generous slice.

‘Mum, this is so sweet. Let's get some.'

Mr Wong handed Edie a brown paper bag. ‘No, not that one,' he said. ‘Too ripe. This one better. No bruise.'

He weighed the pears and added one more. Medicine was good, he was saying, but – he smiled sheepishly – Chinese medicine was better. He twisted the bag and handed it to Edie, talked about pulses – at least that's what she gathered from the way he demonstrated, pressing his fingers on the inside of his wrist. He talked about the healing power of food and Chinese herbal medicine. Something about hot and cold. She didn't understand.

‘More pear?' he said, pointing at the knife, the cut fruit. ‘Help yourself.'

Edie noticed his straight white teeth, the easy warmth of his smile.

‘Sun Yat-sen,' he was saying, ‘he is father of modern China. He studied medicine.'

Edie didn't know anything about China, but she understood the compliment.

Her mother beamed. ‘We need vegetables,' she said.

He smiled and recommended the beans, silver beet, the new potatoes. And the plums were very good. Try one.

‘Very cold in Dunedin,' he said. ‘My cousin live there. Buy warm clothes. Don't want to go to hospital.'

Edie's mother laughed. ‘That's what we've been doing. Anyway, she's going to be a doctor. Of course, she'll end up in a hospital!'

Mr Wong's eyes twinkled. ‘Chinese people say you go to hospital, you die in hospital. Work in hospital good. Die in hospital no good.'

Edie looked at the brightness of her mother's face, at Mr Wong's impish grin. She blushed. She had never seen her mother like that with anyone.

Mr Wong asked them to wait, then disappeared out the back of the shop. When he returned, he was carrying two large soapstone ornaments.

‘Lions,' he said. ‘This is man lion,' he said, holding out the one with an ornamental ball under his left paw. ‘And this is lady lion,' he said of the one with what looked like a cub under her right paw.

Edie had never seen anything like them. They had bulbous, mythical faces. In truth, they looked nothing like the lion at Wellington Zoo.

‘In Dunedin,' Mr Wong said, ‘you put man lion on right side of door and lady lion on left side. They will protect you. All right?'

Edie didn't know what to say. They were cumbersome, heavy, exactly not what she needed in her trunk. But she didn't want to be rude, especially not in front of her mother.

They walked out of the shop carrying a lion each, bags of clothes, the pears. ‘He can be so impractical,' her mother said, and smiled.

Only when they got home did they realise they hadn't bought any vegetables. They hadn't even paid for the pears.

‘Oh well,' her mother said, laughing like a young girl. ‘I'll go in again tomorrow. We couldn't have carried any more anyway.'

Edie considered trying to smash the lions. She still couldn't believe it. No wonder Robbie had been so distraught. Her mother was not unattractive. Couldn't she find a respectable man?

And yet, when had she ever seen her mother like that?

Never with her father.

She studied the lions carefully. They were not unlike her insect collections – so ugly they were actually quite impressive. At the last moment she packed them.

All the way to Dunedin – to the boat, the railway station and eventually to St Margaret's – she struggled with her trunk and cursed him, had to accept the assistance of both kind and overbearing men – a skinny young one who seemed barely able to carry his own frame but whose pride would not allow him to accept defeat; a rather corpulent banker whose face broke out in a sweat and turned red as a post box; a stevedore who lifted its weight as if it were half empty.

All the girls at the hostel commented on them. She told them about the crazy Chinaman who gave them to her. Surely a bookmark, something light and compact, would have been more suitable, she said. They laughed. Over time she developed all number of tales about their exotic origins, their myriad magic powers.

Katherine wandered about the empty house. She walked into the children's rooms, ran her fingers over their pillows, smelled their sheets.

She would keep everything the same – Robbie's model trains dusted on the dresser, the aeroplanes he'd made from balsa wood, paper and string suspended from the ceiling, his boxing gloves hanging from the hook behind the door. He'd come back on leave, after all, at least for the few months before he sailed.

In Edie's room, Katherine examined the collections of bones and insects, classified in their trays; flicked through the scrapbooks filled with newspaper cuttings of disasters and drawings of body parts; fingered the mother-of-pearl cartouche on the rosewood jewellery box. Donald had given it to Katherine before they married, and after he died she had given it to Edie. Inside was a ring with a piece of cut glass stuck to it like a jewel, an amethyst brooch from Donald's mother, and two necklaces.

Katherine touched the blue velvet lining. Years ago, she had kept letters, postcards, special trinkets in the hidden side drawer. She lifted the pin . . . and gasped. Inside lay the
Doxocopa cherubina
, the iridescent blue of its torn wings brought out by the velvet lining.

Katherine did not go back into Edie's room except to wash the sheets and remake the bed, to let in air and dust the furniture. She did not open the drawers or any of Edie's things.

She wandered about the other rooms, considered rearrangements so that the house would seem different, perhaps not so empty. But after she'd moved the dining table from the middle of the room to under the window, she felt as if she had walked into a stranger's house and sat down in his still-warm chair to eat an abandoned dinner. When she looked in the pantry and meat safe, suddenly it seemed pointless to cook for one.

Yet she was grateful. Mrs Newman's brisk demands filled her day and kept her mind busy.
The devil finds work for idle hands
, her mother had said. And when she stopped by the fruit shop on her way home, when Yung's fingers brushed her hand as he gave her apples, Katherine realised she no longer had to rouse herself from his bed at one or two in the morning. She waited until Mrs Paterson had left with her carrots, then for the first time invited him to her home.

*

If he saw anyone on the street, Yung walked past her house and around the block. Only when he was sure no one saw him did he open the serviceman's gate. He quickly slipped off his shoes and, watching the neighbour's upstairs blinds, carried them silently down the side of the house to the backyard. He walked up the wooden steps, left his shoes in the porch and entered quietly, without knocking.

She offered him cake or a small sweet biscuit, and tea, which he drank weak and black. He watched her add milk and sugar to her cup and wondered if the paleness of her skin came from the milk she drank, her small sips.

He waited.

The first few times he waited for her to lead him to her room, because this was her house and if she did not take him there, then he would drink his tea and gaze at her face, the way she looked back at him, a gentleness about the eyes, and if she said nothing, did nothing, then after a couple of hours he would leave again without having touched her. Yet always she took him out of the kitchen, along the hall and up the stairs. And he was always aware of the light and any shadows that might move across the blinds as he took her in his arms, as he came down on her.

After a while, after he understood the look in her eyes as he opened her door, sometimes he would not wait for tea or for any invitation. He would take her before she could speak. Wherever she was, he would take her – on the kitchen table, on the floor in the hall, walking her backwards or carrying her into the parlour, onto the sofa or up the stairs to her bed.

Sometimes she cried out,
I love you.
The words entered his skin. He breathed them in.

Like incense.