As the Earth Turns Silver (8 page)

Edie went to Mrs Newman's most days after school and practised the piano furiously.

‘Slow down. Control,' her teacher would tell her as she played the beginning of
Für Elise
.

‘But I don't like tinkly water music,' Edie complained. She liked the second part better. Not for her delightful minuets. She wanted grand music. Complicated music. She wanted to play Rachmaninov.

Sometimes Edie helped her mother with the filing or she'd curl up with books from the extensive library. Mrs Newman gave her
The White Ribbon
to read, Susie Mactier's
The Unequal Yoke: A New Zealand Story,
and
Mary Liddiard
by William Kingston.

But on the day her mother stopped wearing black, Edie did not go to Mrs Newman's. She ran home, desperate to get there before Robbie, who'd wandered off with his mates. She dropped her bag on the kitchen floor and went out to the backyard.

She'd watched her mother from her bedroom window. She'd seen her in the garden.

*

When Robbie came home, he didn't kick a ball down the hallway or try to annoy Edie. He went straight to his room, opened the dresser and took out his father's pocket-watch. He sat on his bed, fingering the gold chain, its greenstone amulets. Then propped a large hardcover book against his raised knees and pressed pen to paper.

‘Why don't you come after school too?' Edie asked, standing in the doorway.

‘That'll be the day! Bet you can't even come up with three good reasons.' He continued writing.

‘Mrs Newman has paintings just like in a museum, and she has books you can't get from the library.'

‘I said
good
reasons and anyway that was only two. Why would I want some stupid old lady telling me what to do? Mrs Newman says this. Mrs Newman says that. You're starting to sound just like her the way you talk.'

‘We have madeira cake and shortbread and cold lemonade.'

Robbie looked up. ‘Bring me back some. If you can hide Brussels sprouts in your pockets . . .'

‘I do not! You're the one who doesn't eat your vegetables.'

‘Who's the smart one now, eh?'

Edie bit her lip. ‘Who are you writing to?' she asked after a while.

‘None of your blinking business. Just because
you
don't have any friends. Blimey charley, if Dad could see you now . . .'

Edie's face flushed with tears.

Robbie looked down at his letter. He knew he was Dad's favourite; he didn't need to rub it in. But it was too late now. ‘Go to Mrs Newman's and eat your cake,' he said at last. ‘I don't care. And shut the blimmin' door!'

When Mrs McKechnie walked into the shop after work, Yung forgot to greet her. He had never seen her in anything but black and now, in the brightness of her blue dress, she seemed younger. More alive.

When he'd cut his hair and donned western garb, his brother had scowled and muttered under his breath, ‘You can't go back home now – the authorities could execute you.' Yung had smiled. To hell with the Dowager. He felt marvellously free.

Now he gazed at Mrs McKechnie and recognised a similar transformation. She held herself upright and had a new spring in her step, almost as if – if music started, if she let herself – she might dance across the shop floor. She smiled and he noticed her eyes. The colour of her dress made them seem very bright, more blue than green. They were strangely beautiful.

Yung did not know what to say. He'd had questions stored up – articles, photographs, illustrations from the newspaper, why this world was full of curiosities – but suddenly he could not remember.

It was she who started the conversation.

‘Where's the other man?' she asked. ‘I haven't seen him for weeks.'

‘My brother?' He flipped the bag of apples to twist and seal the corners. ‘He go home.'

‘When does he come back?'

‘A few month . . .' Yung bit his lip. ‘He come back with . . . wife.'

‘Oh . . . It must be lonely without family.'

He wrapped her cauliflower, tried to smile as he said good day, but did not look into her eyes. He watched her walk out the door, the copper of her hair bright against the blue of her dress.

He walked out the back, asked Cousin Gok-nam, who was washing carrots, to mind the shop. He walked up the stairs to his room, opened the sandalwood box on the dresser and took out the top letter. Read it slowly.

He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, listening to the trams and horse-carts as they passed by on the street below, watching light fade.

He rose and picked up a bamboo flute. He'd made it lovingly – the way his father taught him when he was a child, digging out the inner sections, cutting holes along its length, whittling a piece of cork to plug the open end. Sometimes on a Sunday, or at night after the shop closed, if his brother did not thump on the door and tell him to sleep, he'd sit on his bed and play. Sometimes the flute, sometimes the haunting notes of the
erh hu
, the Chinese violin. He'd play a song about love, or perhaps about leaving home, about travelling thousands of
lei
, about waking at night alone.

The letter lay open on the bed. He held the flute, light in his hands, felt the sadness of its thin body. Pressed it to his lips.

After his brother came back, whenever he was not needed in the shop, Yung went out. There was always someone to talk to, to be with, in
Tongyangai
.

He might visit a cook-shop with Fong-man and eat wontons or homemade noodles, or call into one of the gambling joints for heated debate or merely the latest gossip. He'd take the teapot from the padded basket by the door and pour himself a cup, then sit on the bench with the other men, back against the wall, sipping hot tea and watching
gweilo
and
Tongyan
alike come and go, buying and checking
pakapoo
tickets.

On warm summer evenings he'd join Cousin Gok-nam, whoever happened to be sitting outside their homes. They'd sit for hours on their haunches, smoking, bragging like
blowing bulls
, till all they could see was the bright orange glow of cigarettes in darkness, their disembodied voices calling to each other across the narrow street.

Sometimes he'd walk to Fong-man's shop in Cuba Street to play cards and discuss politics or poetry.

‘What's wrong?' Fong-man asked one night as he dealt their hands. ‘By now you should be telling me what your cousin Hung-seng's up to. Lecturing me on the latest from the
People's Newspaper
. Sun says this. Liang says that. You can be boring-to-death, but believe it or not I've got used to it.'

Yung ignored him. It was strangely quiet. Only the flick as cards hit the wooden table.

‘You sure you want to throw down that card? Definitely something wrong when you're letting me win . . .' Fong-man laid down his hand, looked Yung in the face. ‘Your brother's woman, I hear she's pretty . . .'

Yung threw down his cards and stood up.

The trams had stopped for the night, the streets peopled only by shadows. He walked past blind shop fronts towards water.

His own wife had been pretty too . . . But how did
gweilo
say?
More than pretty face
?

He gazed at the darkness of Kelburne and the western hills, over the oily blackness of the harbour and across to Oriental Bay.

What was the word Mrs McKechnie used? How had she described it? This emptiness, this hungry space about him. If only he could express it in a foreign tongue, perhaps it would no longer belong to him.

As Katherine walked into the shop she heard a young woman singing. Perhaps because of the woman's gusto and perhaps because of the tram that rattled past at the same moment, no one heard her steps on the linoleum. No one came through to serve her. Katherine stood in the middle of the shop, surrounded by stacks of copper-skinned onions, newly washed potatoes, cabbages, cauliflowers, carrots with feathery green foliage. She did not ring the bell on the counter; instead she listened. The voice was very high and thin, and the melody completely familiar, if a little off-key, but to Katherine's unpractised ear the words sounded like bubbles of music, popping one after the other. She listened, fascinated by the sound of a language she did not recognise and yet whose meaning she could understand. She felt like a child who has been sent to bed and yet who comes out again to hide behind the door listening. What songs had she heard in another tongue? She smiled. This was a weird and foreign language; it was
Jesus loves me this I know
, and then she couldn't stop singing
for the Bible tells me so
, and it was all in Chinese.

*

Mei-lin did not have any particular interest in Jesus-Son-of-God but she did like to sing. Mrs Mary Anne Wong, Annie for short, wife of the Chinese Missioner, came visiting every fortnight, and in a city where there were so few Chinese women, and nowhere to go and nothing to do except work and cook and clean and look after the children, a visit by any one of them was always welcome. That is, apart from Cousin Gok-nam's wife, who talked as relentlessly as a tram. Mei-lin never got a word in, even to say she needed to go, and so she learned to walk away and let her cousin follow, even outside and into the yard before closing the toilet door behind her.

Annie Wong, on the other hand, Mei-lin adored. She liked Annie's soft eyes and face, the way she listened and laughed and helped her with anything. Down Frederick Street, at the Anglican Mission, Annie was upheld as a shining example of Christian womanhood, but all Chinese knew she was a very good Confucian. Annie knew how to live in barbarian lands – she was born in Australia. She spoke fluent Australian and she could read and write. And because she was coming to marry the Missioner, she was counted as clergy and didn't have to pay the poll tax. Annie showed Mei-lin where to buy the essentials that men never dreamed nor thought of; she translated documents and signs; she even taught Mei-lin some English; and on the rare occasion when Mei-lin got sick and Chinese herbs or the Haining Street doctor could do nothing, Annie took her to see Dr Bennett, a
gweilo
doctor, but nevertheless a kind one – and a woman.

Mei-lin would always make some delicacy in anticipation of Annie's visit:
siat kei ma
, fried noodles coated in syrup, and pressed and cut into squares;
bak dan gou
, steamed white sponge decorated with a cochineal design; or fried egg doughnuts rolled in sugar. They would sit down at the back of the shop while Mei-lin felt the child grow within her, while she watched through the doorway and listened for footsteps in the shop, for the bell on the counter to ring. They'd drink cups of Oolong tea and eat
little hearts
of sweet or savoury snacks. They'd talk and laugh and talk again, rubbing crumbs and oil or sticky sweetness from between their fingers. And while Annie helped Mei-lin with the ironing or the mending or scrubbing the floor, she'd teach her to sing.

And that's how Mei-lin learned so many new and fantastical songs, songs like
Stand Up, Stand Up For Jesus
and
Onward Christian Soldiers
that sounded majestic and bold and strong, the way Mei-lin felt inside (and not like a woman), or songs with catchy tunes that talked about Jesus and Jesus-love.

When Katherine arrived at work, Mrs Newman was seething. For a moment Katherine wondered whether she was late. Perhaps she'd made a mistake with the typing. But then her employer thrust the
Dominion
into her hands.

‘Have you seen this?' she demanded, stabbing at the page.

If Mrs Newman hadn't been so angry, Katherine might have laughed out loud. Why waste a penny on a newspaper? Mrs Newman always told her anything of importance. Instead she read addresses given in Dunedin by Drs Ferdinand Batchelor and Truby King.

According to Dr Batchelor, from puberty, girls' education should be ‘chiefly directed to domestic management, domestic economy, physiology and hygiene'.

‘They're supposed to be pillars of the State, defenders of women and helpless babies, and look at what they do. He's an obstetrician, Katherine. Batchelor's
the
obstetrician. They teach at the medical school.'

Mrs Newman grabbed the paper. ‘The average male, even the below-average male, becomes “useful and successful” while the brilliant female is lucky to attain mediocrity! Well, I wonder why. With men like him and King standing in the way, refusing women a foot in the door, what does he expect?

‘Look at this. Look at what
Doctor
King says.' She almost spat the word out of her mouth, as if an insect had flown in and had to be expelled.

Katherine nearly stepped back – sometimes Mrs Newman was like a single-handed military operation – but she didn't want to seem rude.

‘He says educating girls on similar lines to boys is “one of the most preposterous farces ever perpetuated”. My sakes! They think educating girls is a defiance of nature!' She threw the newspaper down on the desk. ‘And all the while they've got the churches and the House of Representatives and the medical establishment applauding. We've got to prepare a reply, Katherine, we need to get it in tomorrow's paper.'

Katherine watched a pencil knocked from the desktop fall towards the square of carpet. She watched Mrs Newman pacing the room, scratching at her wrist, at her forehead above her right eye. She always scratched when she was agitated. And where she scratched, the skin flared brown-red and turned dry and scaly.

How many times had Katherine fumed herself – at Donald, his mother, even her own mother? Their attitudes were only a window onto this greater world. She stared at the angry patches on Mrs Newman's skin. Even when the heart and mind were hidden, there were leakages – thoughts, feelings, desires seeping, erupting – within the sealed body.

‘Well, what are you waiting for, Katherine? We've got a letter to write.'

Katherine quickly picked up the pencil. She folded the newspaper, sat down at her desk and pulled several sheets of paper from the drawer. ‘
SIR
–' Mrs Newman began, ‘
I am appalled
. . . yes . . .
I am appalled at the addresses delivered yesterday by Drs Ferdinand Batchelor and Truby King
. . .

‘
Who has the arrogance to declare, what Nature intends for Man and Woman? Once humankind believed
. . . What did we believe? Mmm . . .
Once we believed the earth and Man were the centre of the universe. But history and our evolution did not stop in the Dark Ages. The enlightened soul looks forward to a day when Man and Woman are accorded equal opportunity and value.

‘Is a child's intellectual capacity frozen at puberty? Why should it be the case for girls and not for boys?

‘Surely if we value our families and our children, an intelligent woman who is the equal of her husband, and who can educate her children, is something to be prized. Is Man so insecure that his only pride is to have Woman by his side with the intellect of a vegetable?

‘As our knowledge increases are we not to progress with it? An intelligent woman with an empty mind and little to do is an unhappy woman, driven to melancholy and despair. Yet a woman who is educated and stimulated by a fulfilling profession is interested and active in life, an asset to family and society
. . . What do you think, Katherine? Read it out to me . . .

‘Yes, that's good. Did you use capitals for Man and Woman? Like Nature. Yes, I think that will do. That will do well enough.'

Katherine took from the drawer thick cream paper monogrammed with the family crest and a sheet of plain white paper. She fed them into the typewriter with carbon in between, listening to the rollers turn, suddenly remembering a visit to the countryside she'd made with Mrs Newman only the week before – her first ride in a motorcar. Sitting with the wind blowing out her hair, she'd thought of Mr Wong, his lovely, ridiculous grin, and as the motorcar slowed and crossed the railway line, wheels rattling over the wooden bars of the cattlestop, she heard the sound of keys, the smooth black ovals with their white lettering, the feel of metal beneath her fingers, the rhythmic swish and clatter, the little bell, and the satisfaction of pulling the carriage across for the beginning of the next line.

As Katherine typed she did not think of pompous men in Dunedin – she was
so
tired of pompous men. She thought of the thrill of driving a motorcar; she thought of horses clipping the road, trams starting and stopping, trains clattering all the way to the beach at Plimmerton . . .

‘Is it done, Katherine?' she heard Mrs Newman say. ‘I'm going to take it down to the
Dominion
myself. Hand it to Mr Earle personally. Oh Katherine, before I go . . . please sit down.' She gestured to the chesterfield, sat down in the easy chair opposite.

And that was when she made Katherine promise that she wouldn't stand in her daughter's way.
But why would she? And even if she wanted to, how could she possibly stand before Mrs Newman's onslaught?

‘Do you realise how exceptional your daughter is?' Mrs Newman was saying. ‘Over the years I have taken a number of girls under my wing and I can assure you, Katherine, that I have never come across a child as unusually curious or intelligent as Edie. She'll receive a university scholarship of course – that goes without saying. But that will only pay her fees and a small allowance, not enough to live on. Never mind, I'll provide an additional allowance. Edie will never be happy as a wife and mother, dedicated only to domestic duty . . . Well, were you happy, Katherine?'

What a question. And who could afford to think of it? Certainly not the unhappy. And those who were happy never needed to think of it.

No, Mrs Newman continued, Edie would follow in the footsteps of Emily Siedeberg or Dr Agnes Bennett. She'd prove that Batchelor and King were wrong. She'd have the chance to choose her own destiny.