As the Earth Turns Silver (5 page)

Katherine watched helplessly as Robbie lived and breathed Lionel Terry. His father talked through his reports even before he published. ‘What do you think, Robbie? Enough drama for you?'

Robbie wanted to sign the petition that ran throughout the country, but his father said, ‘When you're older, son, you'll have your turn.'

Donald tried to get Katherine to sign. It was the only time she remembered him swearing at her. She could feel every movement of her body, the heaviness of her arms, her legs, as she turned her back and walked out of the room. She could feel herself quivering, could feel his eyes burning at the back of her neck. The blackness of his rage, his stunned disbelief.

The petition collected thousands of names, but in the end it wasn't needed. The Government had already decided: Terry's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.

Father and son tracked Terry's progress from Wellington Gaol to Lyttelton, from Lyttelton Gaol to Sunnyside (mental hospital, indeed! – the papers didn't say lunatic asylum any more), from the madhouse to his escapes into the countryside. Donald and Robbie told each other stories, embellishing them more and more with each telling – why, you'd think he was some modern-day Robin Hood, the way people talked, the way they helped him.

‘Terry's adventures certainly add spice to the paper,' Donald said as he poured more whisky. ‘We could run a series of cartoons, Robbie. Terry swimming the Waimakariri. Terry in the abandoned hut at Burnt Hill eating raw vegetables and grasses . . .'

So they weren't Chinamen's vegetables, Katherine thought.

They were all sitting in the parlour, Edie reading a book, Katherine mending yet another hole in Robbie's sock. This one didn't deserve the name ‘sock'. More a mass of darning held together by wool scrap. Why couldn't Donald give her more money?

‘How about a cartoon of the man in Oxford giving him his handkerchief and check cap with the caption –
Good on you, Terry. Keep up the good work
. . .'

Damn.
Katherine sucked her finger where she'd pricked it with the needle.

‘We could have Terry lecturing about the alien problem before the crowd at Sheffield . . . Sure they caught him in the end, carted him back to Sunnyside, but you can't keep a good man down. I hear with his latest escape the Chinks throughout Canterbury locked up their shops and didn't even work their gardens. Now there's a good cartoon.'

Katherine sighed. Now she listened as Donald read aloud yet another letter:

My friend,
During my recent excursion I enjoyed a right royal time amongst the mountains and rivers, though the water was a little too cold and I had to indulge in a good run up hill to get what the silly little medicos call the ‘red blood corpuscles' smiling again. I cannot understand why people choose to live on the stagnant flat when they might as easily live at altitude where the air is pure and life is infinitely more wholesome . . .

The madhouse is thoroughly tiresome. I miss the conversation of intelligent companions, this being the primary motivation for my numerous excursions. Your continued encouragement and strong support are a great comfort to me. Please give my kind wishes to all our mutual friends.

I remain,

Yours as ever,

Lionel Terry.

‘We need to start a petition for Terry's release, Robbie,' Donald said. ‘The madhouse is no place for a man of his intellect. It would be enough to send a sane man mad.' He sat, hands steepled in concentration, Robbie beside him, a mirror image of his father.

As Katherine put away her sewing basket and went to cook dinner she noticed Edie, head raised from
The Story of the Earth
, quietly observing. Katherine did not need to tell her that women (and girls) of good breeding did not read Donald's newspaper. Katherine always banished any unattended copy to a pile near the fireplace. Stories of avaricious doctors, filthy foods in restaurants, fallen women all went up in flames.

Nevertheless, Katherine worried. Not only about Donald's influence but also about Edie's own eccentricities. Once, in the library, Katherine caught her up on the shelves, fingers wrapped around
Gray's Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical
. She was seven, for heaven's sake. All right, almost eight. Did she understand anything of what she read or did she just enjoy the illustrations, the challenge of impossible words? Thank goodness she hadn't dropped it. Katherine was in no mood for an argument with the librarian. Nor did she fancy having to explain to Donald why they were paying for an expensive damaged book. He'd put on his shirt that morning complaining that even a Chinaman could do a better job of the ironing. As she'd pulled Edie down from the shelf, as she scolded her and slapped her hand, Katherine could hear Donald's mother calling from the grave, her voice like a noose round her throat.
Such stubbornness in a girl
, she was saying,
such peculiarity! Beat it out of her now, Donald, before it's too late. What man will have her if you don't nip it in the bud? How can this not lead to unhappiness?

Alone in the kitchen, Katherine sliced the top from an onion, stared at its translucent creamy-green rings. She could see a tree stump – the end of life, all the rings of its history. She was throwing a stone, watching the ripples of water.

It was easier not to think. Or feel. Perhaps intelligence was not a blessing. More a test of character.

She saw her daughter's face, the long curls of red hair, a scattering of freckles over her upturned nose, her big hazel eyes. She sliced the bottom from the onion and her eyes watered. Once she'd looked like that too. Like her daughter.

She peeled the skin, held the naked onion in her hand. For a moment she saw a lopped-off globe with no continents or seas, a world that had lost its shape. And all its boundaries.

In the early hours of Monday morning – that time of the day and week when sleep is deepest and life is at its most vulnerable – Katherine woke, then, stretching across the cold white sheets, fell immediately back into sleep. Later that morning, as she heated the copper, a constable came to see her, told her Donald had been drunk when he fell into the water.

Katherine did not stop to cry. She thanked the constable and waved him away, sent the children to school with apples, a bagful of biscuits. She added two tablespoons of kerosene to the copper, let the bedclothes boil in yellow-soaped water.

All day she scrubbed the skin from her knuckles, pulling linen, frocks, seven white shirts through the mangle and into blued water. The rain came down as Katherine pegged the last of the wash on the line. Inside she watched the slanting cuts of water, five pairs of trousers – brown, blue, black – blown full of cold air.

Every evening he came home with the
Post
, devouring it with whisky and half a pack of cigarettes before dinner. A pack of wowsers, he'd say, as he mocked the Women's Christian Temperance Union or the three women who'd just crossed the Southern Alps by the Copland Pass. ‘If Misses Perkins and Barnicoat spent more time developing their womanly arts, then perhaps they'd find husbands. As for Mr Thomson—' Donald roared with laughter. ‘How the devil did he snare a wife like that?'

Katherine watched a column of ash fall from his shaking hand.
Let the house burn
, she thought, but she walked into curling white smoke and stubbed it out with her shoe.

Afterwards as he sat at the table, hands and the cuffs of his sleeves still smudged with ink from the paper, Donald expounded the victories of his day. The latest in a war of words. As Katherine served sago and stewed apple or banana, he smiled, gave Robbie a wink. Pulled a word he'd rehearsed out of the print of his mind. ‘Robbie, spell me:
enatant
.'

Robbie gazed up out of the corner of his eye, as if to catch the black letters as they swept by. ‘E,' he said, ‘E-N-A—'

Donald filled in the blanks, overwriting the incorrect letters. ‘So what does it mean, son?'

Robbie thought for a while, a flurry of questions creasing his brow. ‘Something that's very hard, Father.'

Donald laughed, praising his son for an excellent answer. Then looked at Edie.

Edie wrapped the white tablecloth round her fingers. Her lower lip quivered, her lips parted slightly, as if a word, or perhaps just an expectation of a word, might slip from her tongue and tumble into the unsuspecting hands of her father. And yet she said nothing, only looked into the face of her mother.

Katherine could not bear to see herself in her daughter. She gazed out the window at a small piece of sky – a piece of blue-grey fabric sewn over and over as if to cover a hole. She hesitated. Turned to see Donald laughing furiously. What had she said? What do you say over and over when no one hears you?

Now Katherine watched his empty clothes on the line. He was not coming home. She did not have to conjure up the meaning of words –
his
words; watch as he listened and laughed at her. Or tell anyone who asked that he was a newspaperman, neglecting to mention
Truth.
She did not have to find Robbie, on Saturday afternoons, reading the sex scandals passed down from the hands of his father. She gazed at Donald's chair, closed her eyes. What would she tell the children?

*

That night Katherine lay on the left side of the bed, feeling the space beside her. Robbie had stopped sobbing. Only the rattle of a tram as it slid down the tracks of Riddiford Street, the thud and wheel of a horse-cart, a drunk's thick call as he passed on his way from the Caledonian, the Tramways, some godforsaken hotel.

She woke sprawled across the double bed, filling Donald's absence with her own body. Breathing in the freshly starched sheets, two fat pillows squashed beneath her.
Nothing left of him, nothing conjugal.
She turned, her face brushing his pillow. Even now with its new white slip, a faintly familiar smell.
His
smell.

He would come with the closing of her eyes – a rough groping and thrusting of body parts. Rolling off into sleep, leaving her wet, suddenly cold with his sweat. The first night she'd lain in the dark, her face startled like a silent
oh
. Later she learned to press her mind into a thin black line. She'd tell him her period had come – two and a half weeks out of four. Or perhaps she was pregnant – surely he didn't want her to miscarry.

After two years of marriage her mother had said, ‘Katie, it's time you were getting on with the business of life. Doesn't Donald deserve a son?' She spoke quietly, as one who had borne nine children, five of whom had survived.

And so it was that Robbie was born. And within the year, Edie. Another pregnancy followed. Morning sickness. Excruciating pain. The rush to hospital in the back of a cart. The sweet, lingering dizziness of chloroform.

When she woke, the doctor said he had removed the embryo. Katherine blinked and looked away.

The doctor cleared his throat; told her there would be no more children.

Katherine bit her lip. Wasn't this what she wanted?

She vomited.

The doctor waited until she was finished, then said her tubes were blocked with scar tissue – not only the left side where the embryo had implanted. She'd had pelvic inflammation some time in the past. He paused; told her she should be careful. Gave her a look that made her blush.

‘I expect, Mrs McKechnie,' he said, ‘you do not want to be the subject of your husband's newspaper.'

*

Katherine opened her eyes. The relief of waking in half-light, the slow roll towards summer. She almost pulled herself out from under the bedclothes. And then she remembered. She lay back again, watching night fade, sunlight slip through the blinds, leaving, unexpectedly, a window of brightness over the bed. This, she decided, was pleasure. A luxury to be grasped. To be hoarded greedily.

Every morning she had risen at 5.30, leaving Donald to sleep another hour. She would empty cold ashes onto a copy of
Truth
. Blacklead the grate and polish the hearth. Strike a Vesta – burn its red head into a new day's fire.

Today she would burn the Bible. Not the Lord's Authorised Version but
Mrs Beeton's Everyday Cookery and Housekeeping Book
. The one Donald's mother had sent upon news of their betrothal.

Before work each day, as if he'd learned Mrs Beeton's precepts by heart, Donald would inspect his collar and the cuffs of his sleeves and God forbid if he found even the merest hint of uncleanness; he only gave out five shillings at a time, expecting her to account for every penny, and when he came home he ran his hand over the furniture and if he found dust, admonished her.

As sunlight crept slowly up the bed, up to her face, into her mind, Katherine remembered the dictionary – the one with gilt-edged pages, the one that had passed from McKechnie father to son, the instrument he had fashioned against her. She wanted to burn it in the brown-edged lap of Mrs Beeton – and yet she was afraid.

Katherine sat in the front row of the church wondering which of the women Donald had slept with. Plump Mrs Paterson, the baker's wife, who had fussed so effusively? ‘Poor, poor thing,' she kept saying. ‘Such a loss, such a terrible, terrible loss.' Geraldine McCorkindale, the eighteen-year-old with pouty lips from the office? Or perhaps the pretty brunette sitting at the back, slender hands clutching a wet kerchief over her growing belly?

Katherine closed her eyes. The fragrance of lily of the valley bloomed in her mind. She listened to Donald's friends pay homage – to a dedicated family man; passionate wordsmith and newspaperman; avid cricketer (who hadn't seen him down at the Basin on a Saturday afternoon with his son?); good ole mate, always in for a drink and many a fine tale.

She needed to hear people speak of his life, his tragic, untimely death. To give his absence form. Solidity. She gazed at his casket, its profusion of flowers. Which has more colour, she wondered. A man's life? Or his death? Draped in black, she sat quite upright, willing herself, unwilling herself, silently to believe.

Afterwards – after the endless cups of tea and polite farewells – Katherine returned home with her children, Edie dry eyed and utterly silent, Robbie tearful and clutching his father's pocket-watch, stopped at 3.05, the exact time he had hit the water.

Since his death, every window had remained covered, like Donald's dead eyes; each day darkened like water closing over. Yet even as Katherine raised each blind, her spirit did not lighten. After her initial delight, lying in bed luxuriating in a tumult of wicked thoughts, she had been suitably morose, relief giving way to a rising fear.

She took in laundry and sewing and a succession of distasteful boarders. Edie learned even better how to cook and sew and wash and iron. Robbie got a job selling newspapers, which Katherine disliked intensely, but how else could they get by? When the boarders didn't work out, Katherine had to find somewhere smaller, shabbier: a rundown two-bedroom villa on Adelaide Road with no bathroom or hot water. Edie shared a room with her mother.

They'd received a little money from Donald's colleagues at the paper and from Mr
Truth
himself, John Norton, but this did not last long, not after funeral expenses. They received a couple of shillings each week from the charitable aid board, but Katherine hated the way the inspector wiped his fingers on the door frame and across the grate, the way he checked that she bought nothing extravagant like butter or oranges, the way he inquired with the neighbours about any unsuitable men who might come calling.

Sometimes Katherine had hated Donald for living; now when the bills arrived she could hate him for dying.
I'm so, so sorry
, she would write after she'd deliberately sent an empty envelope and then received a polite but firm reply.
It is the shock of it all. I do not know how I shall recover from my poor husband's sudden passing. Please find the cheque enclosed
.

The first time she visited the neighbourhood fruit and vegetable shop, the Chinaman added free unblemished fruit to her bag of cheap, speckled ones. She felt the heat rise in her face and left quickly. Afterwards she didn't even know if she'd given the courtesy of a thank you.

Sometimes they went to the soup kitchen, and again Katherine felt ashamed. What would the neighbours think? What would her mother? Yet the children needed to be fed, and Mother Mary Aubert and the sisters were kind – there was never a hint of condescension.

Robbie got a job as a butcher's boy after school, something he was far too young for, but as a favour from Mac Mackenzie, who'd enjoyed a beer with Donald in his time. Mac taught Robbie how to sling the basket of meat over one arm and urge on his mount with the other. It was a job Robbie loved, especially racing the boys from Kuch's and Preston's; and they got the odd free mutton bone, knuckle or kidney, and some money to help pay the rent.

They ate bread and dripping or bread and jam, broken biscuits, turnips and carrots and cabbage, marked-down apples or the occasional overripe banana, the good fruit the Chinaman gave them, and meat once or sometimes twice a week. Katherine quietly despaired, searching the newspaper's
Wanted
columns, inquiring at offices, factories, shop counters, even knocking door to door, seeking work.