Call of the Kiwi (31 page)

And then there was a face. A round, youthful face with hair damp from sweat.

“Sergeant McKenzie.”

“Just Jack,” he whispered. He tasted blood and felt like he had to cough. And then he felt nothing more.

A Long Road

G
REYMOUTH
, C
ANTERBURY
P
LAINS
,
AND
A
UCKLAND

1915–1918

1

T
imothy and Elaine Lambert had no talent as prison guards. Tim had initially insisted that Lilian’s disappearance be punished with house arrest. After all, she had acted against his express orders by “seducing” Ben into that stroll through the fern forest. But after she had served her sentence, Tim forgave his daughter, and Lilian again enjoyed all the freedoms her parents usually allowed her.

Ben, however, was a different story. Florence Biller assembled all her forces to keep her son away from Lilian. His house arrest lasted for months, and she hardly let him out of her sight. In the morning he rode to the mine with her in the car and completed his office work under her watchful eye. At home he was under constant observation.

One day Ben tried to sneak a letter to Lilian out with the mine’s mail, but it was immediately discovered by his mother.

“What rubbish. The girl must be an idiot to fall for this,” Florence said after scanning the poem that Ben had written.
“ ‘
My heart flows to you with the raindrops.’ Raindrops don’t flow, Ben, they fall. And hearts don’t flow either. Now get to work on these receipts. Balance them with the delivery orders, please, and enter them into the purchase journal. Without any flourishes or rhymes.” Florence crumpled up the poem and its envelope and tossed them out the window.

The young wife of an office messenger who had stopped in to bring her husband lunch heard Florence’s outburst from the anteroom and was moved by the boy’s art. When she left, she picked up the letter, smoothed it out, put it back in its envelope, and threw it in the next mailbox she passed—albeit without putting a stamp on it first. Thus it fell into Elaine’s hands when the letter carrier asked for payment.

Elaine was torn about what to do. Tim would have undoubtedly destroyed the letter, but Elaine could not bring herself to do that. She finally decided to read the letter herself, and then, if it were harmless, she would pass it on to Lilian.

Lilian was outraged when she finally received the opened, crumpled missive.

“Haven’t you ever heard of privacy?” she hissed at her mother. “You didn’t remove anything?”

Elaine shook her head. “I swear,” she replied, laughing. “Besides, it was already crumpled and not properly sealed when it arrived. By the way, reading that made my hair stand on end. If you’re thinking of living off Ben’s writing someday, I don’t see a bright future.”

“The poems are only for me, you know,” Lilian said. “You couldn’t understand them.”

“And then she disappeared into her room for three hours with Ben’s melting hearts,” Elaine later informed her husband, who was just back from a business trip to Westport.

Tim frowned. He was exhausted after the journey over the largely unpaved roads.

“Lainie, this isn’t funny. We had agreed not to support this nonsense. How could you give her the letter?”

Elaine guided Tim to an armchair, helped him to put up his legs, and began to gently massage his shoulders. “This isn’t a prison, Tim. People have the right to read their own mail. I shouldn’t even have opened the letter, but I was trying to be responsible. You know how I feel about this: puppy love is harmless. If we make a production out of it, it will only get worse.”

Tim snorted. “I, for one, am going to watch her more closely in the future. She can be my chauffeur now that Roly’s gone. It’ll keep her busy, and I’ll be able to keep an eye on her. Please just forbid her from writing back to the boy. If Florence finds out, she’ll be on the telephone in a flash.”

Lilian did not reply to Ben’s letter right away, as she knew her answer would land on his mother’s desk. Besides, she was busy for several days learning to drive a car, which she found enormously fun.

But Lilian continued to dream of Ben, whose poems she kept beneath her pillow. She came up with one idea after another to make contact with the boy and finally landed on a plan. She bribed her youngest brother, Billy, with three licorice rolls in exchange for inconspicuously bumping into Ben Biller on Sunday before church service. Pretending to play a game of tag, Billy ran into Ben, almost causing him to fall, and clung fast to him to keep his balance.

“Hollow of the beech tree, cemetery,” Billy whispered importantly. “Where the branches cross to the right, head height.” Billy then winked and peeled off.

Toward the end of the service, Ben stood up and left the church. Florence initially looked upset, but when she spied Lilian with her parents, she seemed reassured. Ben only had to find the paper now. Lilian prayed with genuine enthusiasm for the first time that morning.

She later saw a conspicuously happy Ben in front of the church. The boy was so radiant that Lilian feared his mother might ask questions. However, Florence was chatting with the reverend and did not even notice that Lilian winked at her son. The hollow in the beech tree was a turning point in their relationship.

The period that followed proved an exceptionally exciting one for the young lovers. True, they only saw each other in church, but they kept up a lively written correspondence. Lilian especially was always coming up with new hiding places where she would leave notes or small presents for Ben. Ben was less suited to conspiracy, but followed suit, exchanging her homemade cookies for bouquets of dried flowers, and her lavishly decorated letters—complete with hand-drawn vines in bloom, little hearts, and angels—for new odes to her beauty and intelligence.

Lilian occasionally included quotes from a poetry anthology, but she mostly reported on her daily life—her horse, the car she loved, and of course her burning desire to see Ben again face-to-face.

“Couldn’t you sneak out at night? Do you have a tree outside your window or something like that?” she asked.

Ben had never considered slipping out of his house at night, but he was so enchanted by the idea that he immediately wrote a poem about how Lilian’s hair must shine in the moonlight.

Lilian found that charming, but she was disappointed. In his poems Ben could go on for hours about the heroic deeds he would perform and the dangers he would face to earn a kiss from Lilian’s lips. But in reality he did nothing. Finally the girl decided to act.

“Thursday night, 11:30 in the stables of the Lucky Horse,” she wrote. That meeting place sent blood to Ben’s face: the Lucky Horse was not only a pub but Madame Clarisse’s brothel. He spent several sleepless nights brooding over how his beautiful, innocent Lily could fall into such a den of sin and whether his conscience could condone such a plan. Lilian had no such qualms about it. As always she was thinking practically. The Lucky Horse was a convenient spot because her father met his friends for drinks there every Thursday, and she chauffeured him there and back. Though she was supposed to park in the light of the streetlamp and stay in the car, Lilian knew the area around the Lucky Horse well. When Lilian was little, Elaine had often taken her when she visited Madame Clarisse, and she had played nearby. If Lilian parked in the back after dropping off her father, there was hardly any chance of attracting attention.

Lilian’s heart thumped heavily as she slipped into the pub’s stables under cover of darkness. Only one horse was munching hay, and Ben was already there. Lilian almost screamed when he pulled her to him like a character in some film and kissed her.

“You’re crushing me,” she said. “Is the coast clear? Did anyone suspect anything?”

Ben shook his head. “They don’t think I’m capable of such a thing,” he said proudly.

The pair spent the next half hour exchanging caresses, lovers’ oaths, and complaints about the state of their lives.

“I’m simply no good at office work. And I don’t care at all for mining. I even had to go down in the mines.”

“And?” Lilian asked, riveted. “What was it like?”

“Dark,” Ben responded before it dawned on him that this was a rather weak description for a poet. “Dark as the grave,” he added.

Lilian frowned. “But don’t you have those modern mine lamps? Uncle Matt says the mines are lit up like a dance hall.”

“For me it was dark as hell.”

Lilian resisted the urge to remark that hell was probably rather well lit too.

“And I’m no good at all that balance-sheet work either. Recently I was off by almost a thousand dollars. My mother was livid.”

Lilian did not find that totally incomprehensible. Nevertheless she stroked her boyfriend’s cheeks comfortingly. “But surely they’re sending you back to university, aren’t they? After all, mining engineering is something that requires study. Oh, Ben, but then you’ll be even further away.”

As Lilian curled up against him, he dared to pull her down onto a pile of hay. She held still as he kissed her face—and then her neck and her cleavage. Lilian pushed her hands under his shirt and gently caressed his muscular chest and back.

“Next Thursday then?” she asked breathlessly when they finally parted.

Ben nodded. He felt very heroic.

Since their first meeting in the pub’s stables, Lilian’s happiness knew no bounds. She savored their secret love as well as the work for her father. The war demanded constant expansions of the mine’s production capacities, and Tim was always meeting with other mining engineers, railroad men, and businesspeople. Lilian even accompanied him to business meals and events from time to time, and Elaine observed with pleasure that Lilian flirted and danced at these. Though she suspected that her daughter still carried a torch for Ben Biller, she knew nothing about their secret meetings.

Florence Biller had even less of an idea, though she found plenty of other reasons to get upset about her eldest son. Ben’s obvious lack of interest in the mine and his inability to complete even the simplest tasks drove her to distraction. As Ben’s hopes of attending the University of Otago in Dunedin dwindled, his despair grew. Though his father pleaded that he be permitted to study a few semesters of mining engineering or economics, his pleas fell on Florence’s deaf ears.