Fire (3 page)

Before Mrs Goodman could reply, Allie said, ‘I think beige can make a lady’s hands look bigger than they really are, as white sometimes does. What about trying navy, Mrs Goodman? Then your shoes, bag and gloves will all match.’

Mrs Goodman brightened. ‘Oh, that’s a good idea, isn’t it? Yes, I’ll try the navy.’

It took longer to wrestle the beige glove off than it had to get it on, and while Mrs Goodman was struggling, Simone readied a pair of navy suedes—in a bigger size. They went on no more snugly than they should have, and Mrs Goodman was pleased with the effect.

‘Very smart,’ she said, admiring her hands. ‘I’ll take
these.’ Then, glancing at Allie’s trim waist, flat stomach and pert bosom, she added, ‘And I might just treat myself to some new lingerie as well.’

Allie almost groaned. ‘Well, in that case,’ she said, ‘I really do recommend that you have one of our trained corsetières help you. I’ll take you up to lingerie, shall I?’

So up they went again in the lift to the first floor, where Allie was profoundly relieved to hand Mrs Goodman over to Louise. Back in her own territory, Allie resisted the urge to collapse dramatically across the counter.

Miss Willow looked amused.

‘Whew,’ Allie said, ‘I think I’ve really earned my pay this afternoon.’

‘You always earn your pay, Allie,’ Miss Willow replied. ‘And it
is
what we’re here for, after all, to give our customers the best shopping experience possible. I know that Mrs Goodman can be a…challenge, but she’s a very good customer. We can’t afford to have her disappointed.’

‘She wanted beige gloves, to go with jade and navy!’ Allie said in a horrified whisper.

Miss Willow pursed her lips. ‘That’s as may be, but we’re not here to cast judgement upon other people’s taste.’ She paused. ‘I hope you persuaded her to go with navy.’

Allie nodded.

‘Good girl. And at least she won’t glow like a beacon,’ Miss Willow said, recalling a startling cadmium-yellow coat Mrs Goodman had once purchased.

T
he rest of the afternoon passed in a busy blur, and by the time Allie caught the bus home to Coates Avenue in Orakei she was almost asleep on her feet: the last two- hundred-yard trudge to her front gate felt like miles. She followed the steep concrete path down past the hydrangeas around to the back of the house, felt the washing on the line to see if it was dry—not quite—then climbed the steps and subsided onto the nearest kitchen chair.

Her father, reading the paper at the table in his singlet and braces, barely looked up. ‘Rough day, love?’

‘Very,’ Allie agreed, easing her shoes off and wriggling her aching toes. ‘I’ve been rushed off my feet all day.’

‘Be thankful you’ve got a job to go to,’ her father responded in a flat tone that suggested he’d said the same thing a hundred times before, which indeed he had.

Allie glanced at her mother standing at the kitchen sink, and rolled her eyes. Sid Roberts had lost his job on the waterfront during the 1951 lockout, and never missed a chance to let anyone forget it. But these days, between the TAB, his bad leg, the pub and a bit of casual work, he didn’t really have the time to do a forty-hour week, although he
insisted that he most certainly would if something suitable came up.

Wordlessly, Colleen Roberts set a cup of tea in front of her husband.

He glanced at the dark brew. ‘Christ, Col, you could trot a mouse across that.’

Colleen ignored him: the tea was exactly the way Sid liked it, and he made the mouse comment at least once a day.

‘What about you, Dad?’ Allie asked. ‘What did you get up to today?’

Sid shook his paper. ‘Bit of this and a bit of that. Put in a new row of lettuces, went out with Bill and did a bit of painting on some old biddy’s house, had a few beers in the pub after lunch.’

Allie nodded. Bill was a mate of her father’s, also an exwatersider, but unlike Sid, Bill had done something about his unemployed status and set himself up in the house-painting business. He gave Sid as much work as he could, which amounted to about four half-days a week, but it wasn’t quite enough to pay the bills. Which was why Allie’s mother also went out to work from nine until two, four days a week, behind the counter at a tearoom near the beach at Mission Bay. Allie’s board helped, and she gave her mother extra money whenever she could, but they sometimes only just managed to pay the rent, her father’s battered Morris 8 had been parked outside the house for the past six months because there was no money to fix it, Allie’s younger sisters were continually demanding new clothes, and Colleen would kill for one of the new electric washing machines she’d seen at Farmers, instead of the copper she laboured over twice a week.

They’d moved into the state house in Coates Avenue three years ago, and it was much more comfortable than the old place but they didn’t own it, which quietly irked Colleen. Her dream was that she and Sid would have their own home before they retired—though it seemed that Sid had almost reached that point. Colleen hadn’t wanted to move into a state house at first, believing it would be nothing more than a glorified railwayman’s cottage—poky, in a row that were all the same—but she’d changed her mind after she’d been to see one. They’d put their names down straight away but had had to wait for over a year. Theirs was red brick with three bedrooms with built-in wardrobes, a separate lounge, a proper bathroom, a washhouse and a toilet off the back porch, and its own semi-underground bomb shelter that a previous tenant had built on the long back lawn.

And then the lockout had happened, and for five very unpleasant months there had been no money at all and they’d had to live on handouts. When it finally ended, Sid, as a militant and now deregistered watersider, found himself unofficially barred from the waterfront, and any other industry run by ‘those fascist bastards’, the National Government. Then one afternoon, coming home from the pub, he’d been hit by a car and badly hurt, and couldn’t even walk for six months, never mind work, so when Allie got a job after she left school and then Colleen had found work as well everyone had been very pleased. Colleen had high hopes for her daughters, and Allie being taken on at Dunbar & Jones was a very good start because everyone knew that their salesgirls were a cut above the rest.

Allie sipped her own tea, noticing how quiet the house was. ‘Where’re Pauline and Donna?’

‘In the bomb shelter, I think,’ Colleen replied, reaching into one of the kitchen cupboards and sorting through a bag of potatoes for some that hadn’t sprouted. ‘Your nan’s coming for tea tonight.’

‘Is she?’ Allie was pleased; she was very fond of her grandmother—unlike her father. ‘That’ll be nice, won’t it, Dad?’

Sid grunted behind his paper and muttered, ‘Bloody harridan.’

Allie laughed. ‘What’ll it be tonight, do you think? No job, no money or no car?’

Her father turned a page and pretended he’d gone deaf.

‘No job, probably,’ Colleen said. ‘It was no money last week.’

It was no secret that Rose Murphy had never been keen on her son-in-law, and when he’d lost his job it had only proved what she’d been saying for years—even before he’d had his accident and regardless of his impressive war service—that he was good for nothing and certainly not equipped to take care of either her daughter or her granddaughters. When Colleen had come home twenty years ago at the age of nineteen and told her mother she was in trouble, Rose had hit the roof. But there was nothing that could be done about it; as Rose said to her husband Patrick, Colleen would have to marry Sidney Roberts or live the rest of her life with the stigma of being an unmarried mother. So they had galloped down the aisle and Allie had been born a scant six months later, surprisingly big and healthy for such a premature baby. Rose had never really forgiven Sid for making her daughter pregnant, but she’d long ago forgiven Colleen, whom she preferred to think had been bedazzled by Sid’s undeniable
good looks and charm. Not that there was much of either left now, in Rose’s opinion, though Colleen was always very loyal to Sid, and quick to defend him whenever things weren’t going well, which, as far as Rose could see, was nearly all of the time.

‘Take it with a grain of salt, Dad,’ Allie suggested. ‘She’s only trying to look out for us.’

‘She doesn’t need to,’ Sid said, looking up at Colleen. ‘We’re not doing too badly, are we, love?’

Colleen smiled at him with real affection. ‘No, love, we’re not.’

Allie felt a nice, round, warm feeling spread through her chest: she loved it when her parents were like this. Sometimes there were yelling matches and occasionally her mother threw the odd thing, and she knew she was the reason her parents had had to get married, because she’d sat down one day and worked out the dates, but she also knew that, no matter what went wrong, they really did love each other.

Loud bickering from the back porch announced the arrival of Allie’s younger sisters Donna and Pauline—fifteen and fourteen, respectively, and both going on twenty-five.

Donna came in first. Like her sisters, she had her mother’s pretty face and fair hair, matched by a set of brows that were currently almost touching in the middle, so deeply was she frowning.

‘Mum!’ she said as she threw her cardigan at a kitchen chair, taking no notice when it missed and landed on the floor, ‘Pauline says that sweater you’re knitting is for her!’

‘That’s right,’ Colleen said, rinsing a peeled potato
under the tap and dropping it into a pot on the stove. ‘It is. And it’s a jumper, not a sweater. Only Americans wear sweaters.’

‘Ha ha!’ Pauline taunted as she followed Donna inside. ‘I told you!’

‘But purple’s
my
favourite—it’s my signature colour!’ Donna complained.

Colleen stared out of the kitchen window at the lemon tree on the back lawn. She really must get out there with some copper one of these days and spray it—there were rust spots all over the leaves. She sighed. Donna and Pauline had been fair little madams since Allie had been bringing home stories about the models at Dunbar & Jones’s fashion shows. If they didn’t give it a rest soon she’d give them signature colours, all right.

‘Mum? It’s
my
favourite colour,’ Donna whined again.

‘I heard you the first time, love. But you got the last thing I knitted.’ Colleen turned away from the window. ‘And where is it, that jumper? I haven’t seen it for months.’

Donna went very quiet.

‘You’ve lost it, haven’t you?’ Colleen said. At the look on her daughter’s face, she exclaimed, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Donna, do we look like we’re made of money? That was expensive wool!’

Looking sheepish now, Donna muttered ‘Sorry, Mum’ and disappeared into the hall.

Allie stood up. ‘Is there anything I can help with?’

‘Yes,’ Colleen said, ‘you can shake some sense into that girl’s head. Pauline, bring the washing in, please. And then take your sister and go and wait at the bus-stop for your nan.’

‘I’ll do that if you like,’ Allie offered, looking in her
handbag for her cigarettes—she’d have one while she was waiting. There was something she wanted to ask Nan before they got back to the house.

At the bus-stop Allie sat down on a low wall and lit up. It wasn’t very ladylike, she knew, smoking on the street, but too bad. She shifted slightly, trying to find a more comfortable spot on the sharp scoria and settled down to wait, inhaling the smoke deeply and blowing it languorously out through her nose in the manner of the movie stars she’d seen at the pictures. She liked it here: she could smell the saltiness of the sea and knew that if she stood on the wall she’d be able to glimpse the sparkling blue Waitemata Harbour itself.

By the time the bus was approaching she’d finished the cigarette and flicked the butt into the garden behind her. She could see Nan standing just inside the door, swaying gently as the bus rattled to a halt. Then the door flapped open and out she stepped, looking as regal as ever despite her height, which was only five foot two. She always said she didn’t know how Colleen had managed to grow to be five foot six, because neither she nor Patrick had come from tall stock.

As she almost always did, Rose Murphy was wearing a dark dress belted at the waist, a black cloth coat despite the warm weather, sturdy lace-up shoes and a dusty black cloche hat from the 1930s, which her granddaughters always referred to as ‘Nan’s po’. An umbrella poked out of her large crocodile carry-all, alongside a bunch of something green and leafy.

Allie gave Rose a kiss on the cheek, loving the smell of the lily-of-the-valley talcum powder that seemed always to surround her.

‘Hello, Nan, you look nice today.’

‘Thank you, Allison dear,’ Rose said. ‘And so do you. Are they treating you well?’

Allie knew she meant at Dunbar & Jones, for whom her grandmother had always had a great respect, even if she did do a fair bit of her shopping at Farmers now because she was only on a pension.

‘Yes, they are. Very busy, though.’

‘Christmas shopping or the royal tour?’

‘Both.’ Allie took Rose’s bag. ‘Is this spinach?”

‘Fresh from my garden.’

‘Yum,’ Allie said, even though she hated the way spinach always seemed to get stuck in your teeth.

They walked in silence for a moment, then Rose asked in a confidential tone, ‘How’s your mother?’

‘She’s good. Busy, too, at the tearooms.’

Rose hmmphed. ‘And your father?’

‘He’s been out painting nearly every day.’

Rose made a face that suggested she found that hard to believe. ‘And Pauline and Donna?’

‘Same as always.’

‘Oh, well,’ Rose said.

They walked on, dawdling as they passed a garden vibrant with summer flowers.

Rose closed her eyes and breathed in though her nose. ‘Stock always reminds me of your grandfather. He used to give me lovely great bunches of it.’

‘It’s pretty, isn’t it?’ Allie said. She waited a second, then asked, ‘Nan?’

‘Mmm?’

‘I’ve got a bit of a problem. Well, it’s not a problem really. But it might be.’

Rose kept walking, but inclined her head to show she was listening.

‘There’s a boy at work and he’s asked me out, to the pictures on Wednesday night.’

‘Well, that sounds nice, dear.’

‘Yes. But he’s…’ Allie struggled to find the right words. ‘Well, his name’s Sonny, Sonny Manaia.’

‘Ah. A Maori boy?’

Allie nodded. ‘And I was wondering, what do you think Mum and Dad would say? If I went out with him.’

Rose stopped, withdrew a spotlessly clean handkerchief from her sleeve, removed her glasses and started polishing them. ‘Are you keen on him?’

‘Yes,’ Allie said, startling herself by how emphatic she sounded.

‘Well, you know how narrow-minded your father is.’

‘But not always, Nan. And he used to work with plenty of Maoris on the wharves and he often said what good blokes they were.’

‘That’s not the same as letting your daughter go out with one, though, is it?’

‘I suppose.’ Allie felt herself growing more and more uncomfortable, talking about Maori people as though they were…well, not like everyone else.

Rose put her glasses back on. ‘Does he come from around here?’

‘I don’t know, I haven’t asked.’

‘Because they’ve had a lot of trouble lately, you know, those people from the pa, and they’re not at all happy about it.’

Allie did know—vaguely—but Sonny hadn’t seemed…like that.

‘If he is local,’ Rose went on, ‘I’m surprised he would want to step out with a European girl, given everything that’s gone on.’ She blew her nose daintily and tucked her handkerchief back into her sleeve. ‘Still, if he asked you to go out with him, I suppose that means he does.’

Allie nodded, though she still hadn’t had her question answered. ‘But what do you think Mum and Dad will say?’

Rose started walking again. ‘The only way you’ll find that out is by telling them, isn’t it?’

Allie stifled a sigh of both frustration and resignation, because she’d suspected Nan was going to say that. ‘Well, what do
you
think? Should I go?’

‘I’m probably not the best person to ask, dear. I married an Irishman.’