A Needle in the Heart Read Free Page A

his clever English head turned in an instant. A bachelor, reformed into a husband, all, it seemed, in the twinkling of a flashing eye.
    Esme made herself a dusky pink wool dress for her wedding. It had a collar, and long sleeves, puffed at the top, and a bodice that was pointed at the waist. Before they walked over to the church, her mother pinned her gold filigree brooch on her shoulder. ‘Just for today,’ she said. ‘One day I’ll give it to Pearl.’
    ‘I thought you might give it to Mary,’ Esme said, surprised that her mother would overlook her oldest daughter.
    ‘Well, you know how it is,’ her mother said. ‘You know Pearl’s my special baby.’
    At the last moment, Esme didn’t want to go with Jim after all. She hung on to Pearl, and cried, trying not to let Jim see her tears. ‘You be a good girl for your Ma,’ she said, and climbed on to the train.
     
    Jim took her to a hotel in Auckland for her honeymoon. None of her family had ever had real honeymoons, and none of them had stayed in a hotel. Already, married life was conferring an unexpected grandness.
    ‘Make the most of it,’ Jim had said, laughing at her wonder. ‘It’ll be down to real life once we get home.’ Home would be at Ohakune Junction, down south of Taumarunui beneath the volcanic mountain. In a way she would have liked to go straight there to see the house they had been allocated in Railway Row, the street by the line, but Jim said plenty of time for that.
    They travelled on the night train. It was running late, so they had to sit on the platform in the cool darkness for a long time, waiting for it to come. The waiting room had closed. Esme had told the family to go to bed: there was no point in everyone being worn out. There didn’t seem a lot for her and Jim to say, as they huddled there in their coats. She realised how little she knew him.
    On the way north, he opened up, talking about his job, and describing the train tablet system. He worked out of a hut, one of a series along the Main Trunk railway line. He travelled there on goodstrains, and at the end of his shift he got picked up and taken home. The tablets were part of the spacing system that set the course of the trains and ensured that there were never two on the same stretch of line at once. The numbered tablets were picked up and carried from one section of the line to the other, and only when the tablet, or the ‘biscuit’ as the men called it, was safely under lock and key at the other end of the section was it safe for the train to proceed. That was when the green light beamed its semaphore message down the line, giving the all clear. With express trains and timber trains and other goods trains rattling backwards and forwards there was no time for a lapse in attention, no failure of detail that could be admitted.
    ‘I see it’s a very important job,’ Esme said soberly. They were rushing through another small town. Dawn light was breaking. A deep wide river flowed past them on their left. Stained and grimy miners were gathered near a station, as if their day was ending as others began. Esme felt like them.
    ‘I hold life in these hands,’ Jim said, holding out his splayed palms for her to look at. She shivered, wondering if she was up to the task of supporting Jim in his work. He seemed to read the way she felt. ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be a team. It’s going to make a big difference to me, having a wife and comfortable home to come back to at the end of my shift.’
    ‘I’ll do my best, Jim.’
    ‘Think of it like a performance. Like Shakespeare,’ he said. ‘Pretend I’m a great actor who needs someone to change his cloak for him between scenes.’ He said this with a bit of a laugh, as if it was something he didn’t quite expect her to understand. There were a lot of things about his life that she wouldn’t know about. When she sat quite motionless, in the seat opposite from him, he said, ‘I can teach you things.’
    ‘What sort of