The Infinite Air (6 page)

What passed for a guarded friendship was developing between her and the gaunt Belle. One of Belle’s many tasks was to drive a rickety flat-bed truck to the sawmiller’s yard to collect wooden boxes in preparation for the fruit-picking season. Jean admired Belle’s ability
to guide the truck over potholes and narrow roads, and back into the yard, as skilful as any of the men in their pick-ups. She helped load and stack the boxes, her strength surprising both of them. On the way back to the farm, Belle would pull over at Verran’s store, and buy ice creams. As they sat on the truck’s running board, the flying boat Jean had seen earlier passed over head again, while the ice cream melted over their fingers in the warm morning air.

‘That’s the mail plane to Dargaville,’ Belle said.

‘I’ve been in one of those planes,’ Jean told her.

‘For a ride?’

‘No, but some day I’ll fly. I know I will.’

‘You’re going to be busy,’ Belle laughed. ‘Being a famous concert pianist, and flying planes. What else will you think of?’

As spring went by, and summer’s heat stroked the house, it became harder to recall her parents’ faces. Sometimes, just before the fast, sudden sleep that overtook her nowadays, she saw her mother’s eyes, like a cat’s, glowing in the dark. She tried not to see them. Whatever she did must now be directed towards being the best, somebody who stood out, not just lost among strangers.

The first harvest of strawberries was gathered. The fields were now filled with people bent over the mounds, their hands flying in incessant rhythm, their heads covered with straw hats as they picked. At the end of the day, when the main meal was cleared away, Belle placed bowls of the scarlet fruit in the centre of the table, still aromatic with the warmth of the sun, along with jugs of cream. The voluptuous scent of hot strawberry jam filled the house. Strawberry stew, Jean said, the first time Belle made it, and everyone laughed, even the brother and sister she so studiously ignored. Around the table in the evenings, talk was turning towards Christmas, causing Jean unease, as if the spell she was under was about to be broken. Christmas meant long summer holidays, and the children here at the house all the time. Jean thought, I should do something to save myself. She sat down that evening and wrote to her mother.

Not long after this, Nellie did come and take her away. Her appearance in Belle’s kitchen was regal, the Nellie of old. She wore a dark hat with a huge round brim swept back from her forehead, like a tricorne. The collar of her jacket was edged with fox fur, her grey dress with its sweeping skirt cut low over her bosom, amber beads at her throat. Her famous winged eyebrows swept upwards as she took in her surroundings. She clasped Jean to her. ‘I’ll never let you go again,’ she said.

She barely acknowledged Belle, as Jean’s belongings were gathered together, and turned down the offered cup of tea.

‘Your daughter has a talent for music,’ Belle said, her voice tentative.

‘But of course, she comes from a very musical family. My husband and I both play instruments. I’ve been on the stage a good deal myself, you know.’

‘It would be nice if she could have some lessons,’ Belle went on, determined to make her point.

‘Well of course she’ll have lessons,’ Nellie said, impatient now. ‘She’s enrolled at Ladies College in Remuera, starting next term. She’ll have the best of everything — music, dance, foreign languages, etiquette.’

They left with barely a goodbye to Belle, Nellie not wishing to prolong the conversation, a certain haughtiness in her demeanour, as if Belle had trespassed, while Jean, sensing the atmosphere, was unwilling to upset her mother so soon after their reunion. She would have liked to run back and given Belle a hug, not that they were in the habit of touching each other.

As they crossed the harbour, Jean said, ‘Did John get my letter?’ She hadn’t dared to ask about her father, although when Nellie had referred to Fred as her husband in the conversation with Belle, her hopes had soared.

‘Letter? Oh, I shouldn’t think so. John has gone.’

This was how Jean learned that John was no longer in Auckland. Harold had reappeared but had been vague about his whereabouts. He had been working down south, building bridges, he told his father, who at some stage had passed this information on to Nellie. No, of course he hadn’t been in Australia, and yes, he saw that stupid thing in the newspaper because the man he was working for had told him about it, and to be honest, he could have wished for any name except Batten. He’d taken to calling himself Fred; he might as well get some benefit from the connection. In fact, he was going to adopt that name for good, seeing that it was his first given name anyway. Of course, Nellie still referred to him as Harold, which, she imagined, the family always would.

Fred did tell her, over tea and cakes when they had met for what she described as a ‘civilised conversation’, that he had been worried by Harold’s apparent envy of the plan to blow up ships. It was something he might have done if he’d thought about it, but anyway, it wasn’t all bad because there’d been plenty of explosives used on the jobs he did, blasting rocks along riverbanks in preparation for bridge building. Fred had said that, really, he had no idea if a word of it was the truth. Not long after Jean had left Auckland for Birkdale, Fred had presented both his sons with fifty gold sovereigns and told them to go and find their fortunes in Australia. There was, he said, so little work to be had in New Zealand, they might as well go. For Jean, Harold had lost his substance, turned into a shadowy figure who had come and gone for years now. His presence wasn’t one she thought she would miss. But the disappearance of John shook her.

‘Well,’ Nellie said, as she recounted all this to her daughter, ‘I said he wouldn’t be able to manage those boys. Now he knows what I had to put up with. At least John came and said goodbye.’

NELLIE AND JEAN HAD CHRISTMAS DINNER
at a hotel where they were staying, just the two of them eating roast poultry and plum pudding. Jean was overtaken with longing for her father, but knew better than to ask further. He had found himself quite a fancy flat, her mother said. Trust him to fall on his feet, he always did. But over dinner, Nellie seemed in high spirits. They would shortly be moving to a house in Remuera, then Jean would start at her new school. In the meantime, she declared gaily, they would go to the races together and have a flutter or two.

In the weekends that followed, they travelled often by train to the Ellerslie racecourse, where the crowds of people, mostly men, seemed immense. Nellie, in her finery, knew her way to the ticket window, a list of horses’ names and numbers clutched in her hand. She was familiar with foreign-sounding terms like quinellas and trifectas. It wasn’t clear how Nellie picked horses, but she often backed winners. A horse with a good eye and nice shoulders, she would say in passing. ‘A man I knew in Rotorua gave me some tips. Do you remember, Jean, the white horse we rode? Wasn’t it handsome?’ There were times when Jean was almost overcome, caught in a claustrophobic crush between the bodies of men leaning towards the fence in unison, their arms raised, voices hoarse, not seeing her, the rough tweed of their jackets against her face. They roared and waved their hats in the air, shouting and swearing as the horses thundered past. Nellie watched more quietly, but her cheeks were pink with excitement. Sometimes, when she was flushed with a win, she would hand Jean some money and tell her how to place a bet. On her first bet, Jean won ten shillings while her mother lost roughly the same. ‘You needn’t tell your father about this,’ she said.

This at least was news. It seemed she was going to see Fred again.

CHAPTER 6

FRED TURNED UP THE DAY JEAN STARTED
at Ladies College, to escort her and Nellie to the parent welcome. This new school for Jean stood in formal gardens with sweeping lawns as crisp as ironed sheets. The main building featured an elegant crenellated square tower.

‘There are only fifty girls enrolled at the school,’ Nellie said proudly, adding for Fred’s benefit, in case she hadn’t already explained, that there were seven teachers and eight visiting professors. Five of the professors specialised in music. The prospectus declared that the school catered for the new requirements of women, not just in home life, but in business and industries and the arts. Women had new privileges as citizens. Since women had won the right to vote, Nellie explained to Jean, it was easier to choose their own vocations, too. She sounded wistful.

Months had passed since Fred and Jean had seen each other. Nellie insisted that Fred was not fit company for his daughter. It had been him who had wrenched Jean from her arms and left her in her time of need. How could she trust him not to kidnap her again? Not that anyone observing them would have guessed this state of affairs, so convincingly did he play the role of devoted father, not to mention that of attentive husband. Dressed in his suit, a white handkerchief in his breast pocket and his gold watch chain over his chest, he ambled along the white-pebbled paths, Nellie on one arm and Jean on the other. The three of them posed together in the gardens for a photograph. Nellie spread a blanket for them on the grass in front of a stand of palm trees, edged with begonias. She and Jean sat down, while Fred stretched alongside, pipe in his mouth, his face level with
his daughter’s shoulder. He placed his trilby on the ground near Jean’s wide-brimmed Panama.

‘Perfect,’ the photographer announced, emerging from under the dark cloth over his tripod. ‘This is a picture for the record books.’

‘So, there we are,’ Nellie said, when the man had retreated. ‘That’s us, the perfect family.’ The sarcasm simmered close to the surface.

‘That’s not what you said when you took me to court,’ Fred said, without taking his pipe out of his mouth. Nellie put a finger to her lips.

‘Three pounds a week, Fred, it’s useful.’ Jean sank her head onto her knees, to hide her face from them, her hair escaping in tendrils from the ribbons holding it on either side of the straight,
pearl-white
centre parting. ‘Well,’ Nellie continued, briskly, ‘here comes the headmistress. Stand up, Jean.’

Jean looked up. Mrs Sarah Jones, handsome in a way that was almost a match for Nellie, stood looking at the group as they scrambled to their feet. ‘All well, Mr and Mrs Batten?’

As he shook hands, Fred said, ‘Our Jean has a delicate constitution.’

‘Not at all,’ Nellie said. ‘She’s a very strong girl for her age. You’ve seen her reports. What Jean lacks in size, she makes up for in her natural abilities.’

Sarah Jones looked from one to the other, her eyebrows slightly raised. ‘I’m sure Miss Batten will fit in very well with our young ladies,’ she said, after a short silence. She clapped her hands at two girls who had strayed onto the smooth green. ‘Ladies,’ she called, ‘paths are where we walk, not on the grass.’ Turning to the Battens, she said, ‘We always address our students as ladies, you see. Ladies are ladies and gentlemen are gentlemen. Not that they will meet any young gentlemen while in my care. Miss Batten has brothers, I believe?’

‘John,’ Nellie said swiftly.

‘Frederick,’ Fred said in the same breath.

Sarah Jones’s eyebrows flickered again, as if she had remembered something.

‘Two brothers then? John and Frederick?’

‘Both Jean’s brothers are overseas,’ Nellie said.

‘Yes, I see. Well, there are great opportunities for young men abroad. So there are the two?’

‘One of them is studying for the theatre,’ Fred said, with unexpected authority. ‘Our other boy is trying his hand at farming in Australia. We’re proud of all our children.’

‘Of course.’ The principal’s face was smooth. She looked Jean over again with a calculating eye. ‘Young Jean has the figure of a dancer. We will make something of her, I promise.’

Afterwards, Fred returned to his flat, Jean and Nellie to their newly rented home. It was a basement flat in the house of a milliner, not far from the school, but it was a good address. Then, out of the blue, Fred bought Jean a piano, brand-new and stylish with square plain pillars and a very good tone. Jean could practise in earnest and Nellie could play again. She and the milliner had become instant friends. Nellie was an ideal model for her landlady to experiment on; already her hats were more varied and flamboyant.

Nellie decided that, after all, there was no harm in Jean spending some Saturday afternoons with Fred. These were the days when she dressed with particular care and, carrying the heavy purse over her arm, set off on private expeditions. Some evenings she would come home looking elated, and other times she could barely conceal her despondency, screwing up tote tickets with thinly disguised rage. But she had other preoccupations, too; several evenings a week she went off to work. There were a dozen or more picture theatres in the city, and all of them were crying out for accompanists.

‘There,’ she exclaimed with satisfaction, one afternoon, when Jean came home from school. ‘Thank goodness I kept something up my sleeve. You can see the value of learning the piano. I have a real job.’

Jean’s piano did double duty for them both, for while Jean was at school Nellie improvised and practised a repertoire that suited the dramatic needs of the movies she would accompany. While some of the films came with their own scores, which Nellie was obliged to learn, she was taking an interest in Wagnerian music, understanding
the value of leitmotif, recurring melodies that could be associated with a certain character in the film, or a place, or an emotion, subtle hints to audiences following the comic twists and turns of Charlie Chaplin or Rudolph Valentino’s burning loves and hates. Some evenings, Jean would stay home alone and study; on other nights, she watched a film while her mother played. She studied stars like Lilian Gish in
Broken Blossoms
, and the new Swedish actress Greta Garbo, admiring their poise, the
look
of them, clear-eyed and delicate, the smoothness of their complexions, the way they carried themselves, the tilt of their heads. In Garbo, she sensed some extra quality, a reserve that suggested more than was at first apparent on the screen, an intensity that shimmered beneath the surface, something that might have passed for pain.

On Sundays, Nellie had still another interest. She began to play the piano at Golden Lights, the little spiritualist church in McKelvie Street, where she hoped to find the voice of her baby who had died. So far she had not heard from him, but she believed it might still happen. Somewhere, Nellie thought, her child might have continued to develop a mind beyond this life. It was, she explained to Jean, not so far removed from Christianity, just a little more free in its expression. And what she liked, in particular, was that women got to stand up and speak. ‘We do believe in God, the Infinite Intelligence,’ she said. ‘But we know that God listens to the voices of women as well as those of men.’

She didn’t invite Jean to the church, and Jean guessed that if she did and was found out, Fred’s three pounds a week might quickly be withdrawn. It was, Nellie said, a simple plain little place, not showy like the big churches, but perhaps for the moment Jean should focus on her religious curriculum at school. ‘You don’t need to tell your teachers about this,’ she said. ‘Or about the movies.’

Jean had no intention of doing so. She knew that her teachers would have disapproved of the way she and her mother spent their time. If anything, this double life inspired her to work harder at school. Literature was easy. From the beginning she was in thrall
to the poets.
Glory be to God for dappled things
… Gerard Manley Hopkins.
The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold / And his cohorts were gleaming in silver and gold
… Lord Byron. She hugged that one to her heart. Not bad choices, her teacher said, although, of course, Hopkins was a Roman Catholic and Byron a hedonist, but she should judge the text, not the man.

As Sarah Jones had predicted, Jean was learning to dance, as well as to play the piano, and also to speak like any English lady. Her elocution lessons were going so well that she was frequently asked to do the daily reading at school assembly. When she read a psalm, she felt her mouth releasing a volley of perfect vowels. Her music teacher said she had the making of a great concert pianist; the dance teacher wondered aloud if Jean should consider going to England to train at the Royal School of Ballet. The shorthand and typing teacher, a young man with a thin moustache, said she would make an excellent secretary for any man, and reddened when she said that women might require secretaries in the future, too. Her coach in speech and drama told her mother that Jean not only had an excellent accent, stripped of any unpleasant New Zealand vowels, but a remarkable beauty which should stand her in good stead, should she decide to go on the stage, not that that was quite what was expected of the pupils of Ladies College, but of course times were changing.

Her prizes accumulated: top in scripture, English literature, history and botany, and special prizes in music. Half the girls in Jean’s class were in love with the young curate who taught scripture, but it was in Jean that he seemed to find the most spiritual qualities. This was the way he put it. He gazed at her like a man who needed meat. He feels very spiritual about you, someone said at lunch, and laughed, which made Jean blanch. She thought her mother’s activities were a secret, but it had been a joke, not freighted with meaning. Life, on the whole, had a glittering quality. It seemed she could do anything she wanted. On days when parents were invited to the school, Jean’s classmates waited for Nellie to arrive, eager to see what she was wearing, always something more vibrant and interesting than the other mothers, a
frill tucked into some unexpected place, an impossibly large ostrich feather on her hat. Jean didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or pleased. Nellie was the only mother who wore lipstick. Fred didn’t appear at school again.

Once or twice, Nellie said glumly that there was talk of films getting sound, and characters talking. Of course, she added, she was only playing for pin money, their clothing allowance. She didn’t know what they would do if the money ran out. Go around looking like gypsies, she supposed. Meanwhile, she sat, magisterial, before pianos in darkened theatres, dressed in dramatic dark skirts, a fur stole around her shoulders. Women in the audiences who had taken to slim-lined dresses with revers and box-pleated skirts, long beads and cloche hats looked at her with curious gazes.

While Nellie worried about the death of silent movies, Jean began to wonder how much more Ladies College could offer. There were glimpses of the future: a debutantes’ presentation ball, marriage to the right kind of man. But who would present her and, more than that, who would marry her? If anyone suitable turned up, he need only peel the first layer off the onion to see what lay inside the Batten family’s lives.

And, although for a time she had friends, they were not friends she invited home. There was no real home for them to visit. Nellie had fallen out with the milliner and they had moved on, to another, cheaper place. It took four men to shift the piano. Jean visited girls whose parents had houses with gardens and tennis courts, and maids who served dinner in covered dishes made of silver. When the invitations were not returned, the friendships began to drift away.

Fred seemed to guess this, even though he stayed away from the school. He surprised Jean, the year she turned fifteen, by offering outings to the beaches for Jean and the girls whose friendships had survived. That summer, the last before she left Ladies College, she could invite the Hermiones and Winifreds, the Annabels and Doras, on excursions. Fred’s sister and her husband, who had come to live nearby, had a yacht, and at weekends Fred and his brother-in-law
sailed them all across the shining harbour, stopping at small secluded bays to sunbathe and eat and drink. The sun blazed down. While the men smoked and drank beer from heavy brown bottles, the girls rubbed Helena Rubinstein’s Sunbathing Oil on each other, swam and larked about, building sandcastles like children, although most of their talk as they burrowed and tunnelled was about boys they knew, about kisses snatched at the end of gardens during their parents’ weekend parties, about what it must be like to lie in bed with a man. Fred, bare-chested in his swimming trunks, made jokes, talked to the girls as if they were grown-ups. Jean had never loved him more nor hated him so much.