All the Nice Girls Page 4

  Good pickers are difficult to keep and gentle-fingered packers rare. A rough one can ruin tray after tray of quality dessert peaches with his or her bruising incompetence. Their mother was an expert packer. Immensely fast, sure fingered and gentle, she could select, wrap and stow a tray of peaches then top with a sharp-leafed spray in seconds.

  She was, as their father said, pretty to watch. Sophie was hopeless, Mary not much better.

  It is their legs Sophie remembers most. Her father’s, tanned like hide above sockless work boots, her mother’s a lighter brown, the left one mapped with a wandering knobbled vein which disappeared beneath the hem of her stained and splashed tub-frock.

  Later the girls joined the workers; picked, made apple boxes when it rained, kept out of Erin’s way and loved the place. Smokos stay with them; the yarners arguing around the long dusty table or slumped in silence if exhausted, the occasional bursts of laughter from the group of characters who came year after year and assured them their Mum was OK really, which they already knew. They were an odd bunch. Esther who was asthmatic and chewed her nails, tearing at them like a small fierce rodent, oblivious of them all in her concentration, lost in a world of chew and tear as she waited for her enamel mug from the vast pot-bellied teapot wielded by their mother with strength and accuracy. Peace Treadgold who was endlessly cross. Ted Butler who nodded off the moment he sat down. The lean and the portly, the frisky and the sad. The pickers were stable features of Sophie and Mary’s lives. They were their extended family and the Driscolls a family in need of extension.

  Their mother left the shed at five with the pickers. ‘I knock off work to carry bricks,’ she told them each night as they revved their ancient cars or pedalled off on upright bikes, one or two of which still had skirt guards. Erin’s strong square shape strode across the gravel by the dahlia bed, ignoring Sophie’s tepid offers of help because she was as useless as a piece of fixed furniture or occasionally a bandicoot. Sophie retreated with relief to read behind the apple boxes. Keith Driscoll never revealed her hiding place. He had his own cache of thrillers and The Times crossword puzzle books up the other end behind the grader. It would have been better if they had acknowledged their joint deceit. It would have been better if her father had said, ‘Go and help your mother, Sophie. Now!’

  ‘But Dad, I said I would and she said …’

  ‘Off you go! Now.’

  It would have been better but it never happened. Like secret drinkers, father and daughter ignored each other’s lapses in exchange for toleration of their own. They said nothing; their silence rode shotgun for them, keeping their paths safe from the forceful and the enraged.

  ‘Tell us the funnies, Mary,’ said Erin each night and Mary would perform. She learned to save up the funny bits from Primary, Secondary and the flicks on Saturdays. Anything which would make her mother laugh. Mary walked on her hands, she stood on her head, she practised her pratfalls. She was, as her mother said, a born comic.

  ‘What would I do without you,’ cried Erin.

  ‘Mum,’ said Sophie standing at the doorway in her pink before the sixth form social, ‘Do I look all right, Mum?’

  Her mother stared at her, gave her daughter both time and attention. ‘Turn round. Of course you look all right,’ she said finally, ‘you’ve got two arms, two legs, a nose.’

  Mary was bright, very bright and a lovely little worker. ‘She’s going to do science down south. Mad, I know, but she insists,’ Erin told Esther. ‘I’ll have to sell the bracket clock. He won’t notice.’ Esther said nothing, her pale eyes stared above torn nails as she chewed.

  Erin sold it for a large sum. She was right. He didn’t notice; or not till later. ‘What’s happened to the clock?’ he said.

  ‘There are eight carriages round the corner,’ roared the loudspeaker as Mary made her break for freedom the next February, squeezing down the ferry gangway in Christchurch, cheek by cheek and jowl by jowl with the rest of the herd heading South.

  ‘Eight carriages round the corner!’

  She had made it. Encumbered by bags, clutching her suitcase, Mary surged on.

  Eight, a whole eight. Tons of carriages. Plenty of room. The wonder of her life hit her, escape knocked her breathless. A man trod on her heel. ‘Watch it, girlie,’ he said.

  Sophie married William on her nineteenth birthday.

  THREE

  William is now First Lieutenant of one of the frigates and loves his job; it has a lot of sea time, which is what you join the navy for after all. His ship is taking part in the Island Cruise, a training exercise in the South Pacific undertaken each winter by one of the ships of the Royal New Zealand Navy. This is a stressful time for him as promotion to full Commander is dependent on merit and might hang upon his performance in this ship. This is his promotion job. His chance. Sophie was proud of him and his job. The Royal New Zealand Navy is second to none, as has been demonstrated time after time in action and always on naval exercises with Australia and the United States and, whenever possible, the Royal Navy. The latter is now giving cause for concern. There have been persistent rumours that the Brits might pull out east of Suez in the seventies, albeit slowly.

  William has always said that the Jimmy, the First Lieutenant, should be the most hated man on board because he must crack the whip. William is happy with this situation. Everyone on board, he tells Sophie, should admire the Captain and hate the Jimmy, though this varies according to the Old Man as no one can fool sailors. They have a sixth sense when it comes to spotting a phoney, especially an officer.

  Some naval wives never got used to the life and worked upon their husbands to resign. This manipulation by disgruntled females was frowned upon. Especially by the other wives, which puzzled Sophie. It was regarded as letting the side down. Whose side? And why? Sophie had in the past not given much thought to her life as a naval wife. It was just what had happened. The structured enclosed life had not worried her; she liked to know where she was. And she could cope. Now she was thinking a lot about the subject, was puzzled by contrasts of total charge while William was at sea and head-patting indulgence when he returned. She was no longer at ease, though she knew she should be happy as a large white clam. There was no requirement (William) for her to feel otherwise. Sophie told herself so.

  The breeze on the harbour below her kitchen freshened. Two keelers near the shore rocked in stately calm. A few smaller more skittish yachts raced about the harbour, gybing and luffing and going about as they headed up harbour towards the bridge.

  Look how lucky they were renting a house in Calliope Road, for example. Naval houses in the road were usually allocated to senior officers and no one could call a Lieutenant Commander senior but there had been a temporary lack of senior applicants at the time and William had been a flipper to the front. The verandah faced south to the same view as that from the Wardroom of HMNZS Philomel. William and Sophie agreed that a cool verandah was preferable in Auckland as the butter did not melt when they ate meals there. It was one of the things they discussed quite often. Sophie was grateful to William for being a flipper to the front and enabling them to live with such a view, though she was conscious that she was a very junior wife in Calliope Road. No one said anything but she knew. How could she not.

  People were friendly however, especially the Captain’s wife, Celia Pickett, that large rangy Englishwoman with big feet. Celia didn’t give a damn about anything, least of all the Royal New Zealand Navy to which her husband belonged.

  This, Sophie suspected, was because of Celia’s private means. It was a well-known fact said Liz Kelson, who also lived in the road, that the whole of Harold Pickett’s pay just covered Celia’s income tax. It was not the money which impressed Sophie but the fact that Celia had it. Sophie was reminded of other sports of nature, such as stick insects, where the female is much larger and more impressive than the male. Some insects eat their mates after copulation or is that only spiders?

  Sophie was grateful for Celia’s friendliness to a junio
r officer’s wife but she wished the Captain’s wife had more to do. Independent means plus inbuilt ineptitude had resulted in cleaning ladies and ironing ladies and a gardening man, all of whom left Celia free to drift along Calliope Road on her coffee run, as she called it, to mount her rump each morning on Sophie’s kitchen table, to edge the cereal packet to the left, smile her lopsided smile and begin her day. ‘Well, Soph. What’s the dirt?’

  Sometimes before Sophie had got the washing out.

  This morning Celia draped herself over the kitchen table, cushioned her bosom on her golden arms and smiled, her face inviting as an espaliered peach from Mother’s walled garden in Hampshire.

  She stood a china Punch and Judy salt and pepper on their heads while she waited. Sophie righted them. They were a present from Kit, brought home in triumph from a school White Elephant. ‘Any news?’ asked Celia.

  ‘They’re blocked,’ said Sophie. ‘I must get at them with a pin.’

  No one can help being vague and there is such a thing, as Celia had told Liz Kelson the other day, as being too sharp. However, vagueness does limit Sophie’s value as a source of who’s-fucking-whom talk. Celia swears like a Chief Stoker (William). Though no one actually stokes now. Knobs are turned.

  Sophie sat thinking about authority. About men and women and duty and life. She wished to go through the rubble of her mind, to tidy the clutter and think. Blind acceptance of authority, corpse-like obedience to the views of others, she decided as Celia played with the sugar, was not enough.

  Of course people must obey rules for their own good, belong to a disciplined force if any, must cross on the green and stay put on the red. But what about the leakage, the downward seep of power, the Pooh-Bah in the home. Who says? Who’s Boss? Who knows? There are things Sophie must get to grips with. Including a job. Independence as every fool knows needs money. She stared at the golden hairs on Celia’s arm and remembered Mary’s reaction.

  ‘I’m going to get a job nurse aiding,’ she told her, ‘and train later.’

  ‘You did eighteen months sixteen years ago. Do something interesting, for God’s sake.’

  Mary had been a marine biologist with a special interest in molluscs until she threw it all away. The ocean floor was a whole new world she told her sister. It was time Sophie got herself educated. Why not now? It is never too late. ‘No,’ said Sophie flinging aside the night-class brochure. ‘It’s people I want, not the Ocean Floor, or Estuaries, or the Hub of Life on the Continental Shelf.’ She stood, large white and serious in front of the sister who was rearranging her life for her own good.

  ‘And what about you?’ she said. ‘You’ve dumped all that.’

  ‘Ah, me.’ Mary smiled. ‘Don’t you worry about me.’

  ‘How’re you getting on without William?’ asked Celia, accepting a mug with a black cat washing a leg in the air.

  ‘All right, thanks,’ said Sophie turning her back. Just for a second, a micron of a mini second, she had forgotten William was at sea, that he would not come skidding up the vinyl-squared hall that evening to tell her about the air conditioning in the Ops Room and who’d won the inter-ship pulling and what about a beer. That he was in fact far away, buried inside the steel cocoon of his ship as she thrust her proud way through the thrust her proud way through the coral-rich waters of the South Pacific. She knew how important the Island Cruise was, what a chance it was for William to show how good he was at the different aspects of his demanding job in the finest of Her Majesty’s New Zealand Ships. Her momentary amnesia appalled her, her palms sweated.

  She had tried to discuss their shaky finances before the ship sailed. William told her you couldn’t get blood from a stone and they made love. They always made love the night before the ship sailed. Carnal frolics at the last moment, however tender and loving, however connubial, are traditional, indeed expected, before a ship sails. It is not only natural, it is also desirable to keep the men going while they are away. To top up, as it were, at the last moment. And the women of course.

  ‘Anything packed up yet?’ said Celia. Sophie, nervous as well as guilty, shook her head.

  Celia’s voice was gentle. ‘How’s the Commodore? Have you seen him lately?’

  ‘No. But I’m going with him to Captain and Mrs Featherston’s tomorrow night for a meal.’

  Celia’s lips parted. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘So you’re his lady now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Edward always has a partner on the arm. The last was Fiona Banks. But of course Graeme’s back now.’ The Captain of Philomel’s wife, kind to grass widows and strays of any kind, nodded. ‘Last week,’ she said.

  ‘Have you seen my sister’s Burmese?’ said Sophie. ‘Chester?’

  ‘No.’ Celia flicked a finger beneath her nose. ‘But Burmese do wander.’

  Oh shut up you silly old bat. ‘Perhaps you could keep an eye out for him, seeing you’re going along the road.’

  Celia was an amiable woman. She drained her mug and left.

  Sophie stretched her arms to the ceiling and let them flop. Rupert Brooke surfaced from the sixth form.

  Fish say they have their Stream and Pond

  But is there anything Beyond?

  This life cannot be All, they swear

  For how unpleasant if it were.

  It was not the afterlife of fish which interested her. Sophie, troubled and confused with no requirement to be either, moved about her cleaning tasks with slow competence. ‘No requirement, no requirement, no requirement,’ thumped the washing machine. The shelf above shuddered, preserving jars rattled, a nail brush clanged into the empty tub. She closed the door on the lot, picked up a magazine abandoned in Celia’s haste, and flicked through high-gloss pages of pouting women and smouldering men, looking for Travel. It featured a luxury resort in Bermuda. Silver bays were fringed with tropical palms. Individual cabins had a staff of two. There were photographs. A white man and woman lounged in cushioned cane chairs and were offered drinks from silver trays by two black men in white clothes who smiled broadly. The guests also smiled, but faintly. More from politeness. This way of life was no surprise to them.

  Sophie checked the facilities available; the golf links, the tennis courts, the water skiing and, of course, the dancing nightly to the steel band in the main concourse. On the golf course there were little motorised buggies called Eisenhowers to carry the players and their golf clubs so they would not have to walk between hits. There were both double and single Eisenhowers available. Sophie read on as if it was imperative for her to find out how things were arranged at this place, as if she would go there. Not in a bull’s roar nor would want to, so why read about it.

  She read on.

  The Eisenhowers, she discovered, did not have to be hired at the desk. They were freely available on request at the links. Which must mean there were a lot of Eisenhowers. Prices were given both for the air fare and the daily rate at the hotel. Astronomic. Mr McNally on her Meals on Wheels run had discussed world economics with her, his hands trembling in his insistence that Holyoake had got it wrong. That something would have to be done. That when he thought back to 1935 when politicians were committed to the good of the country and the betterment of the poor he could weep and what did Mrs Flynn think? Yes, and did Mr McNally think the Black Budget had been the burial of Labour hopes? Yes he did and what about this lot and their ‘fair shares for all’. They have to get in first, don’t they?

  The telephone rang, echoing down the black-and-white vinyl tiles laid diagonally by William on his last leave. The pseudo-marble effect looked well but the space echoed and the skid marks showed.

  ‘Hullo,’ said Sophie, still visualising serried rows of Eisenhowers at the links. They would go rusty too. The moving parts.

  ‘Mrs Flynn? This is Kate Calder speaking, Captain of Philomel’s office. Hold the line, would you. The Captain would like to speak to you.’

  Sophie sat down on the same black chest as the telephone. The voice was warm, a dark rich baritone.
‘That you, Sophie?’ said Harold Pickett.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s something I’d like to ask you to do for me. A favour. Rather an intimate one perhaps. Could you pop along for a minute? By any chance?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘If it suits you.’

  Sophie’s eyes focused on the skid marks.

  ‘All right. I’ll walk down the hill.’

  ‘Thank you so much. Come straight to my office. We’ll let the guard know. Ten minutes?’

  Sophie brushed her hair, smiled briefly at herself. Women should not do this, she had read recently. Something to do with vanity and politics of the harem. She turned off the washing machine and headed down the hill.

  Kate, pin trim and smiling, showed her into the Captain of Philomel’s office.

  The Captain leaped to his feet before subsiding again behind a large flat-topped desk. ‘Sophie, my dear,’ he cried. ‘Please sit down. Thank you, Kate.’ The door closed gently.

  Sophie sat in a small navy blue chair in front of his desk with her feet together.

  The Captain of Philomel’s office was not far from the Memorial Chapel of St Christopher. Three copies of the Royal New Zealand Navy List lay beside undefinable volumes in a small bookcase near the desk. Several ships’ badges mounted on wooden plaques hung on the wall beside a large framed print depicting a bygone Spithead Review. A scale model of an old warship sat in a glass case.