A Needle in the Heart Read Free Page B

things?’ she asked faintly. The train wheels beneath her said click click tschick click click tschik .
    ‘Wait and see.’
    ‘I left school when I was thirteen. Didn’t my father tell you that?’
    ‘It’s got nothing to do with how clever you are.’
    ‘I wasn’t very clever,’ she said, not looking at him.
    ‘Don’t worry about all of that right now,’ he said. ‘It’s just you I want.’ They still had to get to Auckland, to make love for the first time, to discover who each other really was. She thought that they were both talking a great lot of nonsense, or he was anyway, and she was becoming frightened of him. Then she thought it was just because they were both exhausted and it was taking each of them in funny ways. She wondered if they would go straight to bed when they got to the hotel.
    But that wasn’t the plan. After they checked their bags into the hotel, and collected the key to their room, Jim had organised a day of sight-seeing for her. She remembered walking round looking at lions and polar bears and monkeys, and then, later, in a daze, admiring the talking parrot in Farmers’ tearooms.
    When she sat at breakfast the next morning, she felt strangely untouched, recalling more of the clean white cotton sheets that had covered her than his body. She had turned to him first thing when she woke. Some mornings at home, Pearl climbed into bed beside her. They would go back to sleep; in cold weather Pearl warmed her feet on the backs of Esme’s legs. So it was Pearl she looked for, when she felt someone in the bed with her, but it was Jim. He looked as if hadn’t slept well, but he leaned over and kissed her forehead. ‘Good morning, Mrs McDavitt,’ he said. She thought then that this was what her whole life would be, and she had felt a weightless sensation, as if she was not really there. Soon after, the housemaid had knocked on their door and delivered cups of tea.
    ‘Milk and sugar everyone?’ she’d called.
    ‘Jim, do you take sugar?’ Esme said.
    ‘Hush,’ he said, when they were on their own again. ‘She’ll know we’re just married.’
    While they were waiting for their breakfast to be served, he pointed out the cutlery on the table. ‘Do you see how they set the knives and forks out?’ he said. This was how he liked things, everything exactly in place, the knife and fork straight beside the table matsand the bread and butter plates square on the right-hand side of the knife with the small knife pointed straight ahead. A quick learner like her would have no trouble at all.
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    In the morning, after Jim had gone, Esme walked to the window and looked at the mountain, or the place where the mountain should be if the rain was not falling so heavily and turning to sleet. Behind her a thin fire spluttered, spitting sap from wet bark, emitting a smell like incense. It reminded her of the magician she had met up Taumarunui way when she was still a girl, of the strange soft scent in the air that somehow proclaimed that nothing is real, nothing you ever knew exists. There is only illusion. The whistle of a train sounded through the mist, a long exhalation, a breath, another one. There he goes, she thought, there goes Jim, up the line, the fate of travellers in his hands.
    The house in Railway Row was one of twenty-four, twelve on either side of the straight street that ran exactly parallel to the railway lines, just a few feet away. The houses stood face to face, one row with its back to the mountain, one looking towards the railway lines and the station itself, glimmering still with dim lights. Esme and Jim’s house was one of these. Although there were one or two larger ones, most of the houses were exactly the same: a porch, a kitchen, a square front room, a passage, two bedrooms and a bathroom you could just turn around in. Rough bush covered the slope above, while flax and toetoe bushes like soft calico flags shivered in the wind alongside the tracks.
    Esme gathered up dishes from the