A Needle in the Heart (13 page)

‘My husband.’

‘Yes, but what’s my name?’

‘Lester,’ said Kaye.

‘Yee-hah,’ cried Patricia. ‘Kaye loves Lester.’

‘No, I do not,’ said Kaye, struggling to get out of the dress. ‘I do not, I do not.’

Ramparts is a town that’s off the beaten track, well off State Highway One. It’s a place that gets deeply cold in winter. There is a town square and a clock that fell into disrepair but has been restored by a group of enthusiasts. The gardens that edge the square are filled with
head-tossing
poppies in the spring, a mix of dahlias and snapdragons in late summer. A cenotaph stands by the war memorial hall and beyond that there is a grove of trees that turn deep crimson in autumn. The motto on the war memorial reads, ‘Lest We Forget’. There are two hotels in the main street, an antique shop, most of the main banks, a post office, some pavement cafés and the back entrance to the supermarket car park. The population is two and a half thousand. It is much the same now as it was when Patricia and Kaye were children, although some places have closed down. There used to be a car and tractor sales place near the end of the street but people buy cars in the cities now, and the farmers, too, get their farm equipment from bigger centres. It closed down after Selwyn Swanson sold up in a hurry. There was
some shaking of heads over that; the Swansons were big noises in Ramparts for a few years.

Wilma Swanson was a bank teller in Wellington when she first met her husband, so from the very beginning she knew exactly how much money he had in each of his accounts. In that early life of hers, she was required to be well groomed every day and she never lost the habit. She always wore eye shadow and a discreet touch of rouge and never missed using moisturising cream at night before she went to bed. Selwyn had been surprised on the first night of their honeymoon at her slightly waxy appearance when they went to bed, she in her apricot peau de soie nightdress, he in his blue shortie pyjamas his mother had bought him for the occasion. She had been concerned that he was marrying a girl with a background in what she called commerce, the retail trade as it were, although he had said that it wasn’t quite like working on the front counter of Woolworths. He and his brothers had been left money by their father, a doctor who’d been making money in a city practice for a long time; in a way, it was like one of those fairytale quests where three brothers are each given a sack of gold and told to turn it into ten sacks. Selwyn was already working in the secondhand car dealer business and he could see opportunities. He just had to find the right little town without major competition, and he could live the sweet life forever.

Wilma had been disappointed with her fate when he spelled it out. She had envisaged a house up in Kelburn, somewhere near the cable car, perhaps even Talavera Terrace, where she could invite the girls she went to school with at Wellington East for lunches and cocktail parties. Selwyn said that it would be just for a little while and she could help with the books, and then there would be no end to the things they could do: private schools for their children, and travel to all parts of the globe, and dresses from Paris.

Kaye was the couple’s only child, and after her birth, which Wilma described as an unpleasant experience, she gave up on trying. That is, she stopped sex and all that ‘funny stuff’, pretty soon afterwards,
except for once a week because Selwyn said he did have his rights. Tuesday was the night set aside for it. Wilma joined the choral society and took charge of flower arrangements at St Peter’s, and pretty soon she was asked to be treasurer, which, as she pointed out to Selwyn, didn’t leave much time for working in his airless little office, and they did have a position to maintain in the town. At first, she thought he could do just fine without her. It meant that she didn’t have to deal with rough men in singlets who came to pay their monthly hire purchase instalments at the office window. Over time, she believed he had come to recognise she was right about this, that a certain fastidiousness set them apart, brought him more respect.

The showroom was Selwyn’s domain. A long white-walled interior with cool concrete floors painted grey, it was shaped like a warehouse, only with big plate glass windows facing the street. A dozen or more tractors stood in gleaming rows, four abreast on the showroom floor, as sleek as new cars and several times as powerful. Selwyn Swanson was a tall suave man with velvet grey skin pinched round the nose, cool eyes that out stared the distance, and a livery pink mouth. He wore made-to-measure suits that he ordered on trips to Wellington. Some thought he was above himself, a man who owned a tractor sales and service, wearing suits like that in a town like Ramparts, but in fact he never got his hands dirty. He had sales reps in hairy tweed jackets, and mechanics in overalls, who could do all of that.

When he walked up and down among the giant machines, he would stop and let his fingers trail lovingly across the rims of tyres, or the bonnets that clad the engines, and for a moment a flicker of happiness would illuminate his face.

The young woman sitting behind the glass reception window kept her head down whenever he glanced her way. She wrote columns of figures in a ledger book, and from time to time opened a cash box and counted out money.

It was at moments like these that Selwyn was most likely to appear at her side, arriving on noiseless soles. ‘Didn’t they teach you to count at school?’ He pointed down the ledger, jabbing at each ink
splotched entry. ‘There, that should be one thousand two hundred pounds and four shillings.’

Ethel Floyd was one of several young women he had employed in the office, and she was the third from a family of sisters he employed successively until each one of them got married. He expected to employ Floyd girls for years to come. They were even-tempered, he told his wife, and good at figures. Until Ethel came along, and things started to fall apart. He thought Ethel had trouble counting to ten; addition and subtraction could cause hours of heavy sighs and rubbing out of figures.

‘Yes, Mr Swanson.’

‘What should it be?’

‘One thousand two hundred pounds and four shillings.’

‘And what have you got there?’

‘One thousand one hundred pounds. And four shillings.’

‘That’s one hundred pounds less than Os Cooper owes me. I don’t know why I keep you on. Do you?’

Ethel Floyd raised lazy brown-black eyes towards him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Actually, I do.’ She smiled at him. Her teeth were small and neat and very even. She wore a short skirt that just skimmed the hem of her panties when she stood up and knee-high white boots. When she went out to do her shopping at lunchtime she put on a brown leather cap pulled over one eye. In the town of Ramparts, she was a rare sight, the kind who drew wolf whistles from carpenters working on the building of the new supermarket.

‘Mr Swanson,’ she said, ‘you’re old enough to be my father.’

The year after Lester left the farm for good was the one when Neil Armstrong and two other astronauts first set foot on the moon. Everyone sat glued to their television sets in the daytime, watching the three men bounce around the barren moonscape, looking like panda bears inside their space suits. Patricia remembers the miracle of it, how the thought of men so far out in space, so beyond the reach of everything earthly, had transformed people, as if their wildest
imaginations
had new horizons. She can see herself looking out at the night
sky and wondering where Lester was, and whether he was as inspired to dream of the impossible, the way she was. The difference between them was that he had succeeded, whereas she would go on doing the same things as others because a sense of order made her happier than most people of her age. Lester had achieved, in that year, a romantic status in her imagination. Her mother had had a couple of letters from which she read out bits, but Patricia noticed she put them away carefully afterwards. The strongest thing she read out was: ‘Why didn’t anyone tell me about the things that are going on in the world?’ And, ‘We are mobilising up here, I can tell you. We don’t want no shitty war.’ She wished she knew what he was making of the moon landing, but she hoped he, too, would be excited and moved.

There had been other changes since Lester’s accident and
departure
, imperceptible at first, but there all the same. Kaye was less keen to come out to the farm. Patricia knew that it was not just because Lester had gone, but something to do with Wilma’s sense of propriety, as if she had finally tumbled to the fact that the Coopers and the Swansons were different. Vonnie had hinted at this, because she didn’t want Patricia to think this was something she had done. ‘She manages to turn other people’s misfortune into a scandal,’ she said with a touch more acid in her voice than was usual for her. Still, Kaye asked her over from time to time, but the invitations were increasingly spaced out. Patricia didn’t mind that side of it so much. She didn’t like going to the Swansons much either. There was something about their house that made her uncomfortable. It was hard to describe, but it was a sense of hesitation while meals were eaten in her presence, a silence between the scraping of a fork on a plate and the delivery of food to the mouth. She noticed it most in Mr Swanson, who seemed paralysed by the prospect of chewing, but also in Kaye’s mother. Her throat appeared to swell when she swallowed, and sometimes her eyes watered.

All the same, she and Kaye had been friends for such a long time, and she believed it wasn’t Kaye’s fault, whatever they thought about her and her family. And Kaye was excited as she was about the moon walk. Her own father, though, was not impressed by the space drama that was taking place, right this very minute. He wore the habitual
frown he had had since Lester’s accident. ‘It’s rubbish,’ he said.

‘It’s not rubbish,’ Patricia cried, ‘it’s amazing.’

‘I tell you, it’s not true. They’re feeding you a bunch of baloney. There’s no little men walking about on the moon.’

‘But you can see it, they’re taking pictures and sending them back to earth while it’s happening.’

He made a noise of disgust. ‘Anybody could take pictures like that. I could dress up in funny suits and dance around the paddock in the middle of the night with a flashlight on and it’d look just the same.’

‘Dad,’ pleaded Patricia, ‘you can’t say things like that. There
are
men on the moon.’

Word got out that Os Cooper didn’t believe in the moon walk. He must have gone to town and sounded off. Most people said it just showed he’d got a bit touched in the head after the trouble he’d had in his family. He probably thought the moon was made of green cheese, too, even though the astronauts had brought samples of the moon’s dust back with them. A few said, well, you know, he’s always been a down-to-earth kind of man. Perhaps there’s something in it.

Patricia said, when asked, that it was her father’s idea of a joke. Kaye Swanson told some of her other friends that it was simply hysterical, the things that man said. Poor Pattie, she said. By that time she and Patricia really had drifted apart. These things are hard to stop once they begin, like polar ice cracking under the strain.

‘Is that girl pulling her weight?’ Wilma asked Selwyn anxiously, now and then. ‘You seem to be spending a lot of time over at the shop.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he would say reassuringly. Wilma had been asking more and more when they would be shifting. He had no answers to this. The drought was a problem in Ramparts, and the farmers were taking a more conservative approach to stocking up with machinery now that Britain was going the way of the Common Market. Even he was beginning to feel the narrowness in his wallet.

There was a particular morning that made him more uneasy than usual.

Wilma had put his breakfast in front of him: grilled tomatoes, one poached egg and two slices of toast with pale milkless tea. She looked ethereal, her blonde hair styled in a perfectly shaped bouffant, her skin translucent even when she wasn’t wearing her ivory pancake foundation. She said, ‘Selwyn, I’ve been thinking.’

It was on the tip of his tongue to make the kind of coarse remark that his customers might make, like, take an aspirin for it. Instead, he said carefully, ‘What have you been thinking?’ Because he knew from the portentous way she spoke that he might not like what was coming.

‘I’ve been thinking, perhaps I should come back and help you in the office. It would be a saving for you.’

‘I don’t think you need to do that,’ he said, after what he hoped was a long enough pause to seem like careful reflection. He scraped a little more butter on his toast with the edge of his knife, and cut it carefully in two. ‘I appreciate how busy you are.’

‘I don’t believe that girl Ethel’s doing her job. I think she’s pulling the wool over your eyes.’

She looked down at her own plate of sliced oranges so that he could only see two almond-shaped slivers of silver frost covering her eyes. Her eyes were considered her best feature, large, luminous and blue. It was Thursday, and he had forgotten about Tuesday night.

‘I’m a bit tired,’ he said. ‘I think I need a course of vitamins.’

Wilma raised her beautiful eyes, and he saw the glint of tears. She blinked rapidly. ‘I’ll see to it,’ she said.

Their daughter came into the room then. Her mother was always telling Kaye to stand up straight, because it was great to have height — all the best models were tall. She was fourteen now. Often, Kaye didn’t seem to be listening, as if he and her mother were irrelevant. She spent a lot of time studying these days.

‘What are you up to?’ Selwyn asked quickly, which was all he could think of by way of conversation with his daughter.

‘Nothing much,’ she said. She had new friends now and hardly went near Patricia Cooper. Her mother was pleased in a way, although it had been handy that Kaye had somewhere to visit.

‘There’s a place come up in the choir,’ Wilma said brightly. ‘How about you join? You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’