‘Why don’t you go to teachers’ training college?’ I suggested to Bruce one morning when I came in from biking all over the town. He was making porridge and the girls were still in their pyjamas. He nodded and said nothing, and I wrote away for the application form.
Jeannie called with an address north of Wellington and a phone number. Pamela’s father Fred and Betty, his second wife. ‘They’d like to hear from you,’ she said. ‘But be gentle, he’s heartbroken at the loss of his daughter.’
I felt the familiar tug of unfairness. Pamela was his daughter and she was the mother of ‘those poor girls’, my half-sisters, and the wife of ‘that poor man’. She did not belong to me in any way. I was an interloper. To know my mother was not a right. It was a favour.
I was beset with nerves. Apart from my girls, I’d not met a blood relative. I called and spoke to Betty.
‘Come for a night,’ she said. ‘We have a spare room.’
The following week, I caught the bus from Greymouth to Picton. Ruth was still breastfeeding, so I took her along.
We boarded the ferry to Wellington. From the shore near Runanga, the sea smells of all the unmoored things that wash up. Dead fish, bloated seaweed, degrading plastic bottles. A rotted ham sandwich knotted inside a plastic bread bag. I held Ruth at the ferry railing, happy for the simple smells of salt and sun. A pod of dolphins joined us. They swam in mesmerising formation, the babies in the centre, surrounded by the adults.
In Wellington, we caught the train up the coast. The carriage was full of business types. There were women my age in smart skirts and jackets. I wore a cardigan I’d knitted myself. The pride I’d had in my tidy stitches disappeared.
Betty, a stout Scottish woman in a pleated wool skirt and a blouse buttoned tight, was waiting on the platform. My first impression was of a nun on day leave. I’d come all this way and had completely forgotten to bring a car seat for Ruth. We sat in the back seat while Betty spoke over her shoulder, explaining in detail how to grow a bumper crop of tomatoes.
‘Fred’s not himself,’ she said when we pulled up outside their small Summit stone unit. ‘You go in first.’
I knocked, and he opened the door right away. A tall thin man, he tilted forward, a stalk in the wind. I wanted to reach out and steady him. He peered at me and began to cry. I’d never seen a man cry before. At first, they were quiet tears sliding down his cheeks. Then he sat in a worn La-Z-Boy and put his head in his hands and wept.
Betty patted his back. ‘Cup of tea, dear, coming up,’ she said.
In the kitchen, she got out some pots and pans for Ruth to play with.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it’s you looking so much like her. And the baby. He gets a little confused. I imagine he thought it was her coming home with you.’ She gazed out her kitchen window to the glasshouse where fat tomatoes hung on wilted vines. ‘He regrets everything, you know. Lost it all.’
I took him his tea. He gulped at it and pointed to an old photo album beside the chair. We’d still not spoken. I opened the album. There were photos of my sisters with their ponies and pet dogs. In one they were in swimsuits at a competition watched over by the King and Queen of Spain. There was a trip to Thailand with tame snakes draped over their shoulders. I could see the echo of my children in their faces. But their lives were nothing like ours. There were snaps of a house with floor-to-ceiling curtains and a maid in the background. And there was my mother, a blanket over her knees, as she surveyed the views from a gondola in Venice. Her life after the false start of me.
I could not see myself in her.
Fred put his fingers to my face. I thought he would cry again, but instead he began to speak in a musical voice full of regret and pain. His accent was pure Manchester.
He condensed the facts into a simple story. After the war and incarceration in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, he’d become a painter and paperhanger. A New Zealand government-approved skill that got his family a ship’s passage and a house in the new suburb of Tawa. ‘A fresh start,’ he said, then looked away. ‘Ian, your uncle, hated it out here. He turned around and went right back.’
I tried to imagine my teenage mother on the ship, arriving from London into the deep green isolation of Wellington in 1959. She was already in her unthinkable ‘state’.
He took out another album and pointed to a photo of Jessie, my grandmother, taken in a London pub. ‘Dressed to the nines, she was, that night,’ he said. There were photos of Pamela as a child in a garden surrounded by brick-edged lawns. In another, she was a young teenager standing next to Ian, her older brother, on the marble steps of a grand building. There was a picture of their house in Tawa, the bush-clad hills close enough to touch. Her life before me.
I understood I had divided them. Before me, they were an average family. I was the
