Beyond the Bay

Isobel-3

Isobel wanted to open the trunk. She wanted to plunge her hands into her sister’s clothes—clothes that had been touched by their mother, maybe even mended on their mother’s knee. And maybe there would be more of that smell again, the smell of home.

The trunk was locked, but Esther had left a small bag on the table; the key would be in there and Isobel could find it if she wanted.

The bag was surprisingly empty—a small book of poems by someone Isobel hadn’t heard of, and two keys, attached together with a piece of string. Isobel bounced them gently in her hand, considering. The larger key would be to open the trunk, she was sure, but she could see nothing the smaller key would open. She felt the cool metal on her skin. Smooth, firm, determinedly present, the keys seemed to chide her. To open her sister’s trunk and look through her possessions, what would that make her? Isobel looked over at the box again, unsure.

The key turned easily. It clicked satisfyingly, like dentures on wood, the lock springing open. Isobel smoothed her hands over the frame, noting the newness of the trunk and its sturdiness and strength. It must have been an expensive purchase, and Isobel felt a pang of anger again toward her mother.

A small gap appeared between the lid and the base and Isobel, sliding her fingers into the space, listened again for Esther’s breathing, and pushed the lid back.

A pair of soft leather slippers. A cotton nightdress. Four pairs of woollen stockings, two pairs of thick socks. A long grey skirt that surprised Isobel with its weight when she lifted it up. Three blouses, another skirt. A velvet dress—when did Esther expect to wear that? Isobel smiled sadly. Bloomers, cotton vests. A packet of white material and several spools of cotton. A precious packet of needles. Something of Isobel’s advice, then, sent in letters to her mother, had seeped through. Needles were expensive in Auckland.

Isobel looked at the clothes, laid out over her bed. They were new. She could see nothing of home, of the Esther she remembered, in the threads and folds of shop-bought fabric. She touched the leather slippers, thinking how much they would cost in Auckland. Esther would find them robbed from her feet if she tried to walk in them among the houses here, Isobel thought. Perhaps she was being unkind.

Esther’s coat, the one she wore to step off the ship, looked as though it cost more than six months’ rent on the room on George Street, and the clothes in the trunk must surely have cost more. Isobel’s hands strayed to her own worn dress, patched around the hem and shiny with age. She had not replaced the coat she emigrated with. Fear stung her—fear that Esther would, somehow, remember and judge her for it.

She moved the clothes, seeking something. Plaid. Esther had loved plaid as a child, checks of any colour as long as there was a clash of blocks and shapes on her clothes. Their mother, in the steely, hunger-soaked days before money, scrimped and sewed a little dress for Esther, taking offcuts from the draper’s shop whenever plaid material was left over. Surprisingly the girl loved it. She loved the boldness of it. But there was nothing plaid in the garments laid out on Isobel’s bed. Not one thing—not even the edging on a cuff or collar.

Esther rose and sighed, and settled again. Isobel held herself rigidly, waiting for the curtain to be pulled back and for Esther to cry out. Just what exactly was she doing, looking through the trunk, anyway? Isobel turned the smaller key over in her palm, the unused key that seemed to have no home.

Other things lay in the trunk. A brown shawl. Isobel drew it out, rough wool scratching her fingers, and then the smell was unmistakable. She smelled her mother. A dry, fervent smell, like burnt dust. Isobel wadded it under her nose and breathed in. She saw a tall woman, a wearer of sharp boots. Yellow frizzed hair springing angrily from whatever bonnet or hat it was forced under. Quick and sharp with her hands, ridges instead of folds. An index finger permanently hooked and poked. That was her mother.

There were more clothes, washcloths and towels, caps, soap, and two books. Isobel drew them from the trunk, fingers catching on the frayed bindings. Jules Verne. Emily Bronte. The lettering on the spines had worn away but Isobel felt a rush of remembrance as she flicked through the pages. Illustrations she knew, sketchings in the margins. These were books from home, from their father’s library. She could not believe their mother had given them to Esther; she’d not allowed Isobel to take a thing of her father’s when she’d left, save for a glass snow dome that smashed in the crossing.

She remembered the afternoon she departed, the last hour before taking the coach down to Gravesend. Brendan waited in the kitchen—Mother would not allow him further into the house. He’d sat in front of the fire with Esther, the girl filling a box with straw. Isobel talked to her mother in her father’s old study.

‘This is the last time I’ll see you,’ Isobel had said, her mother’s back a flinty strip of bark, rigid against the desk. The desk upon which Isobel’s father had signed promissory notes and dropped the family into poverty.

Her mother had clicked her tongue. ‘You always were dramatic, Isobel. You’ll be back. I give you a year before he makes a mess of things and you come sailing home.’

‘It wasn’t Bren’s fault about the job.’ Isobel struggled to keep her face together. Her mouth felt as twisted as the ceiling beams above them. She wondered if her mother’s heart was as tough and splintery as her body, a body that invited no caress or embrace. She found herself imagining her father, hoisting his soft, unruly form on top of the wooden woman. What must it have felt like to lie with someone who could send darts into your eyes?

‘I can’t give you anything,’ Mother said. ‘There’s no money, you know that. I might have to sell land now Brendan can’t help us.’

‘I don’t want anything. Only, well, your blessing, if you’ll give it.’

Mother laughed then and spoke in a voice so arid Isobel imagined she could see smoke on her tongue. ‘You have my blessing, Isobel, to follow that foolish husband of yours to the bottom of the world. And you have my blessing to stay there, if you can make life work for you.’

Isobel had stumbled out, unable to speak. She passed by Brendan in the kitchen, who rose immediately. He stood with her in the passageway, waiting.

‘She’ll never change,’ Isobel had said, meaning her mother. Then she looked back at her sister. The girl was still intent on the box and the curious task of packing it with straw. ‘What is she doing?’

‘It’s for Misty. Her cat.’ Brendan’s eyebrows were high on his head. ‘It’s a coffin.’

‘What happened to Misty?’

‘Nothing. Yet.’

* * *

It really hadn’t been Brendan’s fault that he’d lost his employment before they struck out for New Zealand—not that time, anyway. Mr Briggs, the bank manager, had been apologetic, Brendan said, but there was little he could do. Simply not enough for his wages, and Brendan had shrugged in that nonchalant way of his that, at that early point in their marriage, did not make Isobel want to lift his dinner and throw it in his face. But his cousin had written about opportunities overseas in New Zealand—quite a break, quite a stretch over the water, but he wanted to talk it through with Isobel. Would she be willing?

They’d been in Auckland for ten years. Isobel sat on the bed in their little room, glaring round at the newspaper wall, that feeling of being caught between two worlds sliding over her again. Sometimes, when she read and reread letters from home—from cousins or friends who still remembered her—she felt like she was back in England. She was walking through the village, the smell of the hedgerows bright and spicy in her nose, the soft fall of the river nearby. And yet, when she lifted her eyes from the paper, she was back in New Zealand. She was back among the shout and crackle of young Auckland, blinking against the glare of rough settler life.

New Zealand was nothing like Brendan had said. There was no gang of employers waiting on the quayside, hollering out for educated, numerate men like him. No pick of cheap, comfortable lodgings and platefuls of mutton. Instead, a grey sky weighed down on the emigrants’ shoulders as they stepped off the boat, and the air seemed close and suffocating. Isobel remembered panting as she disembarked; not, this time, because of the ever-present eternal sea sickness, but because of the heat. Even with rain, Auckland seemed a closed bubble and, stepping onto new soil, she thought of the kiln her father took her to as a child, in the Derbyshire Dales. He’d wanted her to see how men with rough, callused fingers made beautiful pottery. The heat in the studios and near the kiln had sent six-year-old Isobel into a scratching, twitching frenzy, and she’d screamed to be let out.

No screaming would get her out of this one, she saw immediately, watching Brendan wrestle their luggage down onto the dockside. Instead, eight weeks went by before he found employment, weeks during which they lived on their tiny savings. Isobel sold every trinket from home she had.

She wondered, again, what Brendan’s cousin had written, what he had said to convince Brendan to give up everything they knew and jump into the deep. Brendan had never told her and, when Isobel pushed, said he had lost the letters.

Isobel smoothed her hand over her mother’s shawl, stretching the wool. It made an odd crackle. She paused, rolled her hand over the shawl again, and heard the same sound. She opened up the shawl—a letter fell out. A white envelope, folded inside the shawl.

Isobel picked it up, realising when she turned it over in her palm that she’d been holding her breath. She recognised the handwriting; a pile of letters addressed to her, written in the same hand, were in a little box under the bed. It was her mother’s writing. The envelope was sealed. On the front was written: ‘Esther—open in September.’

That was just over four months from now. Somehow Isobel knew her mother’s letter would not be a greeting to her daughter, or a bundle of good wishes for her daughter’s new life. Their mother would never write such things.

She wondered if Esther even knew about the letter. When Isobel left with Brendan, she found a letter of her own, from her mother, tucked inside her trunk. She’d discovered it when unpacking clothes in their married quarters on board the emigrant ship—a piece of paper, folded up into a small packet and sealed together. She had wept a little upon finding it as the boat lurched from side to side, hoping her mother’s bold writing spoke of forgiveness and, maybe, a little love. The letter only contained the address of a family friend who had emigrated some years earlier and whom Isobel’s mother wanted her to meet. Isobel had torn the paper to pieces.

A moan came from the other side of the curtain, and Isobel almost put the letter back in the trunk. Then a sigh from her sister, full of such weariness that Isobel felt her mouth fill with tears. She could not see her sister’s form through the curtain, but imagined her as small and thin, red hair spilling over a plaid nightdress.

Carefully, taking time so that Esther would not be woken by the sound of unfolding paper, Isobel opened the envelope, took out the single sheet, and began to read.