Beyond the Bay

Isobel-2

They walked down Queen Street, away from the harbour, turning right when the road forked into Wellesley Road. Instinctively, Isobel kept them on the main routes. Rain had turned the less busy, unpaved roads into squelching, treacherous strips of mud. Boots could be sucked from feet. Isobel had seen a woman stumble and flail just that morning as she walked to the harbour, potatoes spilling from the woman’s basket as she waved her arms, trying not to fall over. It seemed very important to Isobel—though she hadn’t thought of it before—to make the walk from harbour to cottage as uneventful as possible. Roads branching off from the main routes threatened clutter and running sewers. The smaller roads had men shouting from windows as sliced pigs were dragged from cart to butchers’ shops.

Isobel led her sister along Wellesley Road, onto College Road where the grand post office loomed and then, when it was unavoidable, off the main stretch and onto a side street. A line of timber cottages edged onto the pitted road. A fellow further along had set up a makeshift shed against the side of his cottage and was repairing furniture under a wet bedsheet. He whacked wood with a hammer, cursed and spat. Someone else threw open a window and tossed out a handful of peelings and breadcrumbs onto the mud.

Then, unbelievably, they were outside the wooden house on George Street where Isobel and Brendan roomed. Isobel slowed as they approached, pretending Esther’s packing trunk was heavy; in actuality, she felt weighed down by a growing sense of mortification. The letters home, the letters she wrote to their mother every two months—they did not speak of a room at the end of a shabby, dirt-streaked road. Isobel paused at the front gate, gazing down at the ferns dying in the small garden. Dish water and cat urine had done for the plants months ago. A bitter stench rose now, even in the falling rain.

‘Is this the place?’ Esther asked. She stood in front of the house, mouth folded over as she bit the inside of her cheek. ‘Number 17, George Street?’

‘This is it. It sounds different on paper, doesn’t it?’

Esther wore her hair up in a bun now and, as Isobel finally pushed back the gate and opened the front door, Esther’s fingers trailed a loose hair, winding it tightly so that the flesh whitened. She said nothing but continued to spiral the strand of hair as Isobel led her inside.

‘Please, don’t say anything yet,’ Isobel said in a low voice, edging the trunk inside. ‘I couldn’t bear it. Brendan is away at the office. Take off your coat and sit down.’

A door banged and Sally, the neighbour, appeared around the doorframe. Her face was smeared with sleep and she sighed a welcome. ‘Need milk, Bella? Am going to the diary. They have yesterday’s supply going cheap. Ah, hello.’

Isobel waved a hand, hoping to repel Sally and urge Esther inside in one movement. She forced brightness into her voice. ‘I have some, thank you, Sal. This is my sister, Esther. We’re going to take tea. Are you … are you up for the day now?’

‘Unlikely. The old bag at the bakery wants us back at six tonight and I plan on sleeping until then. I might have a scrap of bread with me when I get home in the morning, if you’re interested. I’ll leave you now. There’s much to catch up on, I dare say.’

Sally made an odd, dreamy sort of bow and shuffled off. Esther, finally stepping fully into the room, watched the small girl head off along the street, picking her way through the dirt. Esther removed her gloves, shiny and delicately stitched, and placed them on the table.

‘Bella?’ she said. ‘No longer Isobel, then.’

Isobel blinked slowly. There was so much to say; words tumbled down with such force that it bent her neck. And there was that smell again, close against her now they were inside and not out on the wind-buffeted dock. She breathed in and pulled out a chair.

‘Sit down, Esther. Please. I’ll make us tea and we can talk.’

* * *

They waited for the kettle to boil on the stove and Isobel busied herself cutting one of Sally’s loaves brought home from her work at the bakery. A burnt but cheap husk. There was no butter but she found marmalade. Esther lowered herself onto a chair, looking around with pointed, bird-like glances. Both sisters studiously avoided looking at each other. An argument broke out on the street outside, and Isobel shook her head emphatically, relieved at the distraction.

She poured tea. ‘Mother’s rosebud set.’ Isobel nodded down at the cup and saucer. ‘I don’t know how I’ve kept them safe, but they’re all intact still. Not one broken piece.’

‘Clever of you,’ Esther said wanly, and sipped her tea. Her eyes closed momentarily, and Isobel wondered if there had been tea on the ship.

‘Do you need to rest?’ she asked. ‘It must have been an exhausting journey.’

‘That’s not necessary, thank you.’ A note of formality had crept into Esther’s voice. She looked at the sheet hanging from the ceiling. ‘Where …’

‘There’s a bed behind the sheet,’ Isobel said. And then it all came in a rush. ‘I know the place isn’t how I described it to Mother, but it will be, you’ll see! Bren is working now, so we can save again. It hasn’t been easy, you must understand that. Land is more expensive now and there isn’t so much to go around. Brendan never was much of a farmer, you remember that. He works better with paper.’

‘You said you had a townhouse. Away from the city.’ Esther was smooth lines and control. Her chin seemed impossibly sharp and high, exposing the shape of her long, swan neck. Isobel thought of her dream, of her sister running through the meadows to water, how the child had thrown off the chiding hand of her older sister.

Isobel leaned over and gripped Esther’s hand tightly, urgently. ‘My dear, I’m so happy to see you. So happy. Isn’t the most important thing that we’re together again?’

They talked, a little, as they drank tea. Isobel felt delirious with longing—she wanted Esther to spill all the news in one vomiting burst, so she could claw through it for morsels. ‘Look!’ she wanted to say, ‘here’s a piece of my mother! And here’s a memory of my father—do you think he loved me?’

But Esther held her stories back and let them slide across to her sister in coy, slithering words. She wanted to break out with the news from home, Isobel could tell, but it was as though a glass vase had come down upon her and she could only push out a small bud at a time.

‘Mother’s cousin, Verity, do you remember her? She died two years ago. Her share of the mining stock passed to Mother.’

Isobel thought of the letters from her mother. ‘I didn’t know.’

Esther shrugged. ‘An uncle died, too. Not sure on which side, you know how many there are. But Mother became wealthy. We no longer need to sell land. She’s started building an extra wing, near where our bedrooms used to be.’

Isobel resisted the urge to look around her, at the wasted room. The bed frame had been bought with the last of the family silver, gifted by their grandmother. Even Brendan had sold trinkets to pay rent. The blue heat of embarrassment, felt so viscerally since Esther docked, became fluid and boiled in her chest; how could her mother not have told her about her fortune? Why did she not send something out to her eldest daughter?

‘Mother must be doing well, if she’s adding rooms to the house.’ It was impossible to keep the bite from her voice and Esther looked at her over the top of her cup.

‘We thought you were doing well, also,’ she said. ‘Your letters—you told us Brendan had been taken on as a clerk at the Customs House, and that you lived in a little house somewhere in the hills.’ Esther stood up and walked to the dirty windowpane. ‘Can you even see the hills from here?’

Isobel stared at the teapot, faded pink flowers strung around the base. The handle was chipped—it was true that she hadn’t broken a piece from the set but she’d poured tea carefully, afraid the pot would crack and spill scalding water over them both.

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rest, Esther? What a long journey you’ve had. Was the crossing rough?’

‘Not especially.’ Esther hung by the window, looking up at the grey sky. ‘An old man died, that was the only thing of note. Steerage passenger, I believe.’ She spoke oddly, a rueful tone. ‘His family wanted him buried at sea—didn’t want the trouble of finding him a grave when they landed, I suppose. What a thing that would be! Imagine, a first task upon reaching the other side of the world—arranging a burial!’

Isobel heard the waver to her sister’s voice. ‘Is everything all right, Esther?’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’ Esther did not turn round. ‘One of the sailors also fell overboard near the Cape, but the water was like a millpond that day. Almost milky. He was pulled out easily and the captain said he’d had a baptism. He’d been baptised on a new journey. Quite poetic, don’t you think? I almost wished I could do the same. But to die en route and be buried in a land you have no connection with … Some of the first-class crowd thought the old man’s family were taking the cheap option by letting the captain put him in a shroud and push him over the side, but I think I’d want to be left in the water, just like him.’

Isobel stood up. ‘I think you need to lie down, Esther, I really do. It’s the shock of being on land, I expect. Come, rest a while.’

She cupped her sister’s elbow and turned her around, almost expecting Esther to resist, just as she did when they were children. But Esther turned to face her. Her smile was lopsided.

‘Always the mother, weren’t you, Isobel? Well, where have you been for the last ten years? No, no, I’m not angry. You’re probably right, I must be tired. Now, show me this bed of mine. Aren’t you clever, to use packing boxes in such a way?’

She wondered if Esther would sleep, but her sister did, soon after lying down on the lumpy mattress. She had allowed Isobel to help her remove her boots, leaning back on her hands and reading the newspaper strips lining the walls as Isobel untied the lacings and eased the leather away. Isobel had handled the boots enviously—what she wouldn’t give for a pair like that, with thick leather and steel toes! Her own boots had been re-heeled so many times it was impossible to remember their original colour, and they still let in water, offering no protection against the rivers of rain that poured down the streets on some days. Auckland’s rain had shocked Isobel in the first years, with its warmth and ferocity.

Esther was wearing a pair of woollen stockings, smooth-heeled, and Isobel offered to help her undress, but Esther curled herself under the coverlet instead, weariness seeming to press down on her with a flat, unforgiving palm. Her breath was steady and low as Isobel pulled back the sheet to give her sister privacy. By the time Isobel had cleared away the tea and breadcrumbs, Esther was fully asleep.

Esther’s trunk, a heavy mahogany item bound in brass, stood where Isobel had left it, beside the bed she shared with Brendan. She wiped her hands on a dishcloth, frowning at it. She hadn’t thought of giving Esther a set of drawers or a little cabinet in which she could store her things. She would have to keep them in the trunk for now.