The Promise (55 page)

Finally people began to file off the ship and they joined the queue. They had already been told their trunk and other luggage would be placed on the jetty after everyone had disembarked.

‘Belle, Mog!’ Vera yelled as she elbowed her way through people on the jetty. ‘Welcome to Russell!’

It was around four in the afternoon when they arrived in Russell and the remainder of the day passed as if they’d walked into a party where they knew no one but found they were the guests of honour. Vera and her mother, Mrs Reid, who immediately said she was to be called Peggy, took them home to the family bakery, where Mr Reid – Don, as he wanted to be called – was kneading a mountain of dough for the next morning’s bread. He broke off from this to plant a kiss on both Belle and Mog’s cheeks, apologized for his flour-covered hands and said they were to think of his home as theirs.

Peggy was the kind of woman who could do ten things at once and talk at the same time. While laying the kitchen table for tea, she shouted through the back door at a man to go and collect their belongings on a cart. She took a fantastic-looking tart with a latticed top out of the pantry, served up five large portions and added a dollop of custard to each. She asked about the trip from Auckland while making a pot of tea, and almost by sleight of hand the cups and saucers appeared on the table.

‘Right, sit down now,’ she said. ‘I won’t stand on ceremony with you as from what Vera’s told me about you I already think of you as family. This is just something to tide you over as there’s people coming to supper soon who are dying to meet you.’

Vera rolled her eyes, which Belle felt was a silent message that she knew her mother was a bit exhausting on first meeting, but she would ease up soon.

Don came in then, having washed the flour off his hands and taken off his apron, and his smile was as warm as his bakery. ‘Vera told us what a good time you gave her in London,’ he said. ‘She’s as pleased as punch you’ve come over here to live, but you’re going to find it very slow after London.’

‘We like slow,’ Mog said and took a spoonful of the tart. ‘Oh my goodness, this is lovely,’ she exclaimed.

‘We were happy to leave London,’ Belle said. ‘There’s nothing left there for us. It’s beautiful here, and we intend to make a go of it.’

‘Tomorrow I’ll show you all round,’ Peggy said. ‘That won’t exhaust you, it only takes half an hour. And that would be the long tour,’ she laughed, and her big bosom shook with it.

Belle laughed too. She had a feeling laughter was something that was in plentiful supply in this house.

They had barely drunk their tea and eaten the delicious tart when people started to arrive: first the couple that ran the post office, Frieda and Mike Lamb, who told them they had both been born in England but had come to New Zealand as small children with their parents. They were around their mid-forties and had met at school in Christchurch.

‘It’s good to have new people coming here to live,’ Frieda said as she plonked a plate of cooked sausages down on the table. ‘Our folks in Christchurch thought we were crazy coming here. They said it was all right for a holiday, but we’d be bored and fed up in no time. But we’ve been here ten years now and we haven’t got time to be bored.’

Women came in thick and fast after that, all bringing a dish of food. Vera said that was customary when there was a party or gathering. She also explained that their menfolk would be along after the ‘six o’clock slurp’. When Mog and Belle looked puzzled at this she explained that the pubs closed at six in the evening all over New Zealand, a law which was supposed to make men stay at home with their wives and families in the evenings. But as she laughingly explained, all it did was make the men drink as much as they could in the last hour, then go home to fall asleep.

Yet drunk though many of the men were, they still came, and Belle wondered how she would ever remember which man was which woman’s husband, or anyone’s name as there were so many of them. They all wanted to know what she and Mog intended to do here, and each one of them had a different idea about what sort of business was needed. Belle’s dress was admired by all the women, though to her it was drab, just grey cotton with a thin white stripe, a sensible, everyday dress which was ideal for travelling in, and made by Mog. But compared with the clothes worn by the women here it did look stylish because it fitted properly. Their dresses were shapeless, and she suspected they were either bought readymade or run up by someone with only rudimentary knowledge of dressmaking. She guessed that most of these women had no concept of fashion, and it crossed her mind that perhaps this could be an opening for her and Mog.

The party spilled out into the back yard, but it wasn’t until it grew dark and Peggy and Don began lighting oil lamps that Belle and Mog became aware there was no electricity in Russell. They didn’t remark on it, partly because they felt they ought to have known such a remote spot wouldn’t have it, but mostly because it really didn’t matter to them. They’d both grown up with oil lamps, and even back home they hadn’t progressed to buying an electric iron or a fire as so many people had. More worrying was finding there were only outside privies, one echo of the past they didn’t relish much.

Later candles were lit and placed in jam jars in the back yard, a gramophone was wound up, an Irish jig played and an old man entertained everyone with Irish dancing.

‘So how is Russell so far?’ Vera asked when she finally managed to get a moment alone with Belle out in the back yard. ‘Too much, too soon, I expect. I did suggest we held off on the party until you’d been here a day or two. But as you might have noticed, Ma does everything fast.’

‘We are touched by such a warm welcome,’ Belle said. ‘I like that it’s so informal too. Everyone is so nice.’

‘You might change your mind about that and decide they are just plain nosy soon,’ Vera said. ‘Don’t tell anyone apart from me anything you don’t want spread around Russell. My mother is one of the worst for that, so be warned.’

‘You haven’t told her about my past?’

‘Of course not,’ Vera cut her short. ‘Anything you told me in France stays with me alone. I told her Mog was the housekeeper in your mother’s guest house and she brought you up. I said too that you learned millinery in Paris. Trust me, Belle. I valued your confidences, I will never tell anyone about them.’

Belle thanked her and assured her she did trust her, then asked if there was any further news of her brothers.

‘Last time we heard they were waiting to go on a troop ship. As we’ve heard nothing more we think they must be on it now. We are so thankful they made it. Spud was wounded at Ypres but nothing serious, a bit of shrapnel in his arm. Tony said he’s got nothing worse than flea bites. So you’ll meet them soon, but for now you’ve got their room, which Ma has spent the last few weeks getting all smartened up for you.’

It was after midnight when they finally got to bed. Their room was large, with twin beds, each covered in a brightly coloured patchwork quilt. Like in the rest of the family house, the furniture was old and battered, but it had a very comfortable feel about it. The walls had recently been painted a pale green, there was an embroidered cloth over the small table by the window, and on it was a vase of white, daisy-like flowers.

Their trunk and other belongings had been put in the room and as Mog unpacked their nightdresses she looked across at Belle undressing and smiled.

‘We did the right thing, it already feels like home. But let’s find a place of our own really quickly, shall we?’

Belle knew exactly what she meant. Mog wanted her own things around her, to cook her own meals and have her own door which she could shut to be alone when she felt like it. Peggy and Don were the nicest of people but it was plain to see that they would become wearing.

‘You are such a nest builder,’ Belle said fondly. ‘Don’t worry, tomorrow we’ll make it clear that’s our first priority.’

The next day Peggy proudly showed them around. First to Christ Church, the oldest church in New Zealand, and the police station which was once the customs house but looked far too pretty a building to be used for either purpose. They saw the canning factory by the beach, and watched for a while as fishing boats came in with their catch. The Duke of Marlborough public house right on the shoreline was an impressive size for such a small town, and they dropped in to see Mr and Mrs Clow at their boarding house next to it. The piece of waste ground that lay between York Street where the Reids had their bakery and Church Street was still known as the swamp even though there were a couple of houses built on it and cows grazing. Peggy told them that in the old days when Russell had been known as the hell hole of the Pacific because of the wildness of the whalers who came and drank here, there had only been a few grog shops and shacks by the shore, then behind them nothing but mangrove swamp all the way back to the forested hills that surrounded the town.

There really wasn’t a great deal to see apart from the post office which sold a variety of goods, the Reids’ bakery, a general store, a butcher’s, a small hotel and various workshops. Peggy had waved her arm in the general direction of a few shacks at the back of the town and said, ‘Natives live there.’ Belle had seen quite a few brown-skinned people as they were walking around, some of whom had greeted Peggy, but she hadn’t introduced them. Belle was dying to know what the situation was between the Maoris and the settlers but she thought it best not to ask Peggy, thinking Vera would give her a more balanced view.

They were going back to the bakery when Mog noticed a small house on Robertson Street that looked abandoned and neglected and she asked Peggy about it.

‘Jack Phillips, a shoemaker, lived there,’ she said. ‘He died two years ago.’

‘So is it for sale or to rent?’ Mog asked.

‘Henderson the solicitor would know,’ Peggy said.

As Peggy had to get back to the bakery and relieve Vera who had been working with her father since early that morning, Belle said they would go and see Mr Henderson straight away if she would direct them where to find him.

‘No time like the present,’ Mog said cheerily as Peggy pointed out his house.

‘She wasn’t very enthusiastic,’ Belle said as Peggy left them to go home. ‘I wonder why?’

‘You can ask Vera later,’ Mog said. ‘But my guess is that she’s the kind that loves lots of people around her and is just a bit disappointed that we are already talking about a home of our own the second day here.’

Within twenty minutes Mog and Belle had the key to the empty house and were letting themselves in. Like all the buildings here it was wooden, the outside very plain and desperately in need of some replacement clapboards and painting. The steps up to the front door were rotting away and as they opened the door a musty smell made them both wrinkle their noses. A small square hall had four doors going off it and a narrow staircase. The room to the left had been the shoemaker’s workroom and was still littered with scraps of leather, cobbler’s lasts and a long work bench. But it had two windows, as did all the downstairs rooms, one at the front and one to the side, which would make it very light once the windows had been cleaned. The room to the right of the hall was a parlour crammed with very old, worn-out furniture. At the back to the left was a bedroom, again so full of old furniture they could barely get into the room. To the right was an antiquated and filthy kitchen. But there was a door leading from it to a garden. It looked as if it had been well cared for until Mr Phillips’ death, as there were flowering shrubs, rose bushes and what looked like a vegetable garden, all overgrown with long grass and weeds.

Upstairs there was just one big room, the windows set into the roof at either end. Apart from an old iron bed with a stained mattress there was nothing else up there, and they assumed the owner had lived downstairs for many years.

‘I can live with the outside privy,’ Mog said, though she wrinkled her nose. ‘But I can’t be doing with getting water from a pump outside. All the furniture needs burning too. But it is light and bright. And the floorboards seem sound.’ She jumped up and down to illustrate this.

‘I suppose we could build a bathroom on to the back or the side and a plumber would be able to pipe water into the kitchen too,’ Belle said thoughtfully. ‘We could get a veranda built along the front of the house. Put up one of those white picket fences. It could be lovely. And we could use the workroom: you do dressmaking, I’ll make hats and we could sell haberdashery too.’

They were looking at each other speculatively when they heard Vera call out.

‘Come on up,’ Belle yelled.

Vera came running up the stairs. ‘I used to come here quite a lot when I was a kid, Mr Phillips made us all shoes,’ she said breathlessly. ‘His wife was nice, she used to make a fuss of us because they didn’t have any kids of their own. She died before the war. It’s a real mess now though.’

‘But it’s got possibilities,’ Mog said, her small face alight with enthusiasm. ‘Mr Henderson said he’d just got notification from the nephew who inherited it that he would get whatever he could for it as he needs money now. I have to make an offer.’

‘Well, nobody else will want it. Everyone is down in the dumps over the war and the flu, and no one’s got any money.’

It was the first time in Mog’s life she’d had money, a great deal more than she ever dreamed of. But just the same, she didn’t intend to be reckless with it.

‘How hard will it be to get someone to fix it up?’ she asked. ‘We’d need a bathroom and a range in the kitchen to give us hot water. Then all the outside and the roof needs to be made weatherproof.’

‘There will be men queuing at the door to do the work,’ Vera said. ‘But what you need to think about is whether you are sure you want to stay here in Russell. You haven’t been here long enough yet to really know that.’

‘I knew I wanted to stay here the minute I stepped off the boat,’ Mog said. ‘It feels right for me. But I don’t know about Belle. You young people need to be somewhere with a bit more going on.’

Vera looked questioningly at Belle. ‘Do you feel that?’