A Needle in the Heart (3 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, pleating the edges of the tablecloth between her finger and thumb. ‘I don’t know what’s come over me.’

‘Perhaps you’re doing too much,’ he said.

‘I need something to fill the days,’ she said, surprised to hear herself answering back.

‘Yes, I suppose you do.’ He sighed and folded his napkin, leaving half his food on the plate. ‘You should get Pearl to help you more.’

‘Pearl? She’s only a little kid.’ Pearl was asleep in the spare room that was hers when she came for the holidays. It was the room put aside for babies.

‘She’s ten. Lots of girls her age have to do a bit around the house. Her mother spoils that girl and you’re just as bad.’

‘She’s going back in a couple of days.’

‘Oh well. I suppose we can manage for that long.’

She smiled at him, then, put her face up for him to kiss and he seemed restored to good humour, pinching her cheek and looking down fondly at her for a moment, before picking up his coat. He glanced out the window at the ugly weather.

‘The truth is I could do with a day in bed myself.’

‘That it’d be a good ’un. What would your boss have to say about that?’

‘He’d probably say what a lucky devil I was, spending the day under the blankets with a fine looking woman like you.’

‘Jim. He wouldn’t.’ She felt herself reddening.

‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the world,’ he said.

Now that he was out of it, she considered cutting a pattern right away instead of washing the dishes. Routine, Jim said, and she could feel him looking over her shoulder. It put her back in a bad mood, so that she clattered around the kitchen, banging dishes about. You couldn’t tell how things were going to turn out. She liked this house. In the front room there were crocheted lace curtains that had taken her months to make. Her mother had taught her how to crochet. The curtains were difficult, getting the tension right for such a big piece of work, so that they fell the right way. The room was furnished with three wooden-framed armchairs, with red slip covers on the cushions, and a stand-up gramophone. All the floors were covered in green linoleum with a mottled yellow and brown pattern, that Jim had let Esme choose for herself. But now, just when everything was finished, Jim was talking about going for promotion, trying to get a job closer to a city. She didn’t know how she would fit into a big place.

‘What’s the matter?’ Pearl stood in the doorway in her
nightgown
.

‘Oh, it’s you. Go and tell your mother she wants you.’ She was surprised at the sharpness of her voice.

‘Is it breakfast time? Have I missed?’

‘I’ve kept you some.’

‘I thought you were mad, all the noise you were making.’

‘I’m tired,’ Esme heard herself say. ‘I wouldn’t mind if you got dressed and washed the dishes for once.’

‘It’s just like home,’ Pearl muttered.

‘Well, you’d better get used to it. The holidays are nearly over.’

‘I could go to school here.’

‘No, you can’t.’

‘You are mad, aren’t you?’

Suddenly Esme wanted to cry. She hated Pearl going back to Queenie. She told herself that it was just that she liked having a kid around the place, one of the family. There were times when she missed everyone back at home, in spite of the nice life she had here, and the little business. But this morning she wanted to cut out her pattern by herself, in peace, with just the sound of the rain coming down.

No, she didn’t even want that. What she wanted was to sit and work out what was happening. There was something going on that she couldn’t figure out.

Pearl picked up a dishcloth and swiped it backwards and forwards as if she didn’t know what to do with it. Esme bit back a rebuke. Pearl was a sweet kid. My little sister, she said proudly, when she introduced her to folk at the Junction. She still had creamy skin and fair hair. Her teeth were prominent with one tooth much whiter than the others, giving her the appearance of a slightly lopsided rabbit when she smiled. Her talent was singing. She knew all the hymns and at Christmas she sang a verse of ‘Silent Night’ on her own at the church:

Round yon Virgin, Mother and Child,

Holy infant so tender and mild …

You could hear a ripple round the congregation: her high notes would make crystal shiver. Her singing was the one thing about Pearl that pleased Jim. He’d been brought up in the Church of England.

When everything was finally cleared away, and the tablecloth folded, Esme laid out the material for the dress she was about to begin, pink linen for the postmistress’s wife. Esme would have liked to tell Norma that the colour wouldn’t go with her red hair, but Norma was a woman who fancied her own taste. All the same, they got on well enough. Norma paid her promptly and liked a chat. Esme put the pattern on the oilskin cloth that permanently covered the table and considered it. She could see the sleeves were going to be
troublesome
; she might have to improvise a bit.

Her sewing machine was a treadle, which meant she could keep both hands free to guide the material, while her feet pumped backwards and forwards down below, going really fast.

‘Look,’ said Pearl, ‘there’s a whole lot of men running down to the station.’

‘For goodness sake,’ said Esme, and it was at that minute, when emergency sirens were beginning to wail all over the town, that she ran her hand under the speeding needle; it snapped in two, the top shaft entering her thumb as it jerked free of the spindle that held it.

‘Oh,’ cried Esme, ‘oh, oh.’ Her hand was covered in a froth of bright blood.

Pearl was at the window, peering out. ‘There’s been an accident.’

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do about it.’ All the same, she went to the door and opened it, with dread in the pit of her stomach. Men in heavy coats were dashing towards a jigger. ‘What is it?’ she called, but nobody heard her, and in a minute they had disappeared down the line.

‘Shut the door and come inside,’ she said at last. Her hand still ached where it had been struck by the needle. She was sure it had gone in, but as there was no sign of it she began to think she’d imagined it. The sharp end of the needle was lying on the floor where it had landed. Perhaps the other half had flown across the room, and landed in the wood box.

She set to work installing and threading a new needle. The pain in her hand persisted but when she pressed her thumb, and then her whole hand, she couldn’t locate the source of the pain. It occurred to her that the needle might have floated away in her veins.

‘Perhaps I should see the doctor,’ she said to Pearl.

‘Does it hurt?’

‘It’s better now.’ Funny, but as soon as she thought about going to the doctor it stopped. She and Jim kept a guinea in a jar on the top shelf in the kitchen in case they needed the doctor, because that was what it cost, money up front, and you didn’t want to get caught short for emergencies. There might be other needs, more urgent than a stray sewing machine needle that she couldn’t see or find.

And now, some new knowledge entered her, a mysterious unravelling of something so obvious, so already known that she didn’t see how she hadn’t worked it out already.

‘How would you like to be an auntie?’ she said to Pearl.

Pearl screwed up her pale short little nose. ‘I am an auntie. I’m a great-auntie.’ Which was true. The children from both Joe’s and Mary’s families had already started on children of their own.

‘Well, you’re going to be one again.’

‘Are you and Jim having a baby?’

‘Yes, that’s right, we are too.’

‘I thought you couldn’t have babies.’

‘Who said that?’

‘My Mum told her friend. She said maybe Esme and Jim won’t have any kids.’

‘Well, you can tell her she’s doesn’t know much.’

‘Is Jim pleased?’

‘He doesn’t know yet.’

‘You mean you’ve told me first?’

‘Yes, it looks like it. Don’t tell him I told you.’

Pearl seemed more pleased about being an aunt then. She said she’d come down in the holidays and help Esme bath the baby and change its clothes.

‘I reckon you’ll be good at that,’ Esme said. ‘I’d like it if you did that.’

When they had had lunch, or rather Pearl had some sardines on toast, because Esme suddenly found she couldn’t eat a thing, they thought they would go over to the station and see if they could get some news of what was happening along the line. It would be just the worst thing if Jim had had an accident, the very day she’d found out about the baby, but she didn’t think this was a serious
possibility
. A tablet controller’s job was safe compared with most. Besides, someone would surely have come by now and told her if anything had happened to Jim.

The rain was clearing and the hooded mountain began to reveal itself, pointing its ice fingers through the clouds. Just looking at its snow-clad slopes made her shiver. A big knot of people was gathered on the platform, the women emptied out of the houses, waiting. Esme felt guilty that she hadn’t come over sooner.

The stationmaster, Alec Grimes, said yes, there’d been a
collision
on the line, a couple of goods trains. A man had been killed. The Daylight Limited pulled in and wasn’t allowed to go any further north, so that now passengers joined with locals, looking helpless and shaken, while the steam engines panted and hissed on the track.

That evening, very late, Jim came in, white round the mouth. There was a new man in the control hut, a man who was supposed to have finished his training. He hadn’t read the tablet right, taken out the wrong one. He was a Maori chap. Probably couldn’t read, if you wanted to get to the truth of it. ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ Jim said, ‘even if I was in charge. You can’t have eyes in the back of your head. They shouldn’t have let that Maori loose. He should never have been allowed the key to the tablets.’

Afterwards, he said he shouldn’t have said that.

She could see how he might have said it and not meant it. Or how he could have meant it and wished that he didn’t.

Jim didn’t lose his job, although the managers said it was touch and go. He was known as a good worker; perhaps the whole mistake couldn’t be laid at his feet. But his chances of promotion had gone for the time being. What irked him most was that the other man didn’t lose his job either.

When Esme and Jim’s son Neil was two years old, she saw Conrad Larsen and fell in love, for the first and only time in her life. All the rest were things, things that just happened, accommodations good and bad, but not love. He was leaning out of a locomotive window as it came into the station, his red cheeks alight from the glow of the firebox he’d been stoking, his navy blue cap pushed back on his head. Later she discovered the bald dome beneath the cap, saw the way his head shone in sunlight. His big gleaming teeth sparkled against the soot where he’d wiped his hand across his mouth.

It happened on a day when she’d had what amounted to a quarrel with her friend Norma. Since Neil was born, she and Norma had gone past a business relationship and visited each other in their homes, although mostly Esme visited Norma, in her big house with
its verandah and trim, on the other side of the railway tracks. Neil was just at that stage when he was into things and opening cupboards. She had to watch out for him, because Norma had cream and green Irish Belleek china that you could almost see through, and fancy figurines in her cabinet. Norma had blue eyes and reddish hair that she wore in tight curls, and a way of flicking her head back over her shoulder when she spoke, as if there was somebody behind her. At first Esme thought that Norma was afraid someone was following her but then she decided that it was a nervous tic, something she couldn’t help. Norma seemed like a lonely woman. Her daughters had already left home. She liked looking after Neil, and it suited Esme. Jim wasn’t sure she should leave him with someone else, even for a little while, but what harm could it do, while she walked down to the shops for their meat and a few groceries. She didn’t tell him about the times when she just went for walks along the paths that led towards the mountain or along the banks of the stream that led to the waterfall. Some days she wondered whether she was cut out for motherhood.

It was high summer and the mountain was stripped of all but its crown of snow and surrounded by a blue haze, the day Esme fell out with Norma. The heat inside the houses had been building since the sun came up.

When they’d had a cup of tea, Norma said not to go, that she felt like company. She stood at her bench mincing leftovers from the night before’s roast to make into rissoles. Her eyes were on Neil, seated at the table eating a biscuit. He was a quiet child with a narrow face and slender curved eyebrows. ‘If you like, you could go down and see your mother for the day. Take the morning train down and back on the night train. We’d like that, wouldn’t we, little man?’

‘I couldn’t do that, he’d miss his feed.’

Norma stopped what she was doing. ‘You haven’t still got that kid on the tit, have you?’

‘Just a couple of times a day.’

‘That’s disgusting,’ Norma said, dusting flour off her hands. ‘A big boy like that. What does your husband think of that?’

‘We’ll go and meet your dad,’ Esme said, lifting Neil down from
the chair, not looking at Norma. ‘It’ll do us both good, a breath of fresh air.’

‘Not that it’s any of my business.’

‘No,’ said Esme, ‘not really.’ She fled from the house, gathering up Neil and his toys, as if she had been caught out. Her breasts felt heavy and ripe and shameful. The image of her mother’s exposed flesh flashed before her.

‘You’ll be back,’ Norma said, as she paused to open the door. Esme knew, then, that Norma saw into her, understood that Esme was not really happy in her life, yearned for some kind of freedom that, in a small measure, she offered her.

It was too early for Jim to come home but she and Neil waited on the platform all the same. Esme heard a train’s warning whistle and, as it arrived, the sound she loved — the steam belching up while the brakes of the massive machines ground to a halt, the big engine straining like a horse in its stall.