Chapter 23 #2
He made a choking sound and stood up. Yep, the sand was definitely hurting his eyes. She jumped up. ‘Do you want my handkerchief?’
He smiled through his tears. ‘That’s kind of you.’
She held it out to him. Ngaire’s name was embroidered in the corner. To her surprise he pressed his lips to it. She regretted the impulse and didn’t think she wanted it back now. ‘You can keep it if you like.’
‘Thank you. I’d like that.’
He was a puzzling man.
‘And thank you for showing me…’ His eyes strayed back to the house, as people arrived and the back door opened. ‘Everything.’
She assumed he meant her beautiful marae she’d made. She glanced down at it.
‘I’d best go now. But please can you do something for me?’
She nodded.
‘Could you go up to the house and tell your grandmother Ngaire that Johnnie called by to see her, but that he’d got the timing wrong as usual. And that… I’ll be in the café for a little while… just in case she...’ He shrugged, but didn’t continue.
‘OK.’ Though she was already wondering if she’d remember all that.
‘Goodbye then.’
She suddenly felt sad, because she liked that this adult spent time talking to her and didn’t just go up to the house and talk to the grown-ups. ‘Are you coming back? Because I could show you the wharenui when it’s finished, if you like.’
He shook his head. His hand trembled as he rested it on his knee. She hadn’t noticed that before.
‘Sadly, no,’ he said, and there was a wistfulness in his voice that had puzzled her at the time. ‘I’m just passing through. I don’t want to disrupt anything. And I won’t be here long anyway.’ His words were even more confusing.
She stood up and watched him walk carefully down the path, through the dunes, glancing once up the beach before carrying along a little way until he reached a footpath which would take him up to the road.
Kate turned to the house. The light was on now in the kitchen and she could see her grandmother talking to someone.
Kate knew she should do what the stranger had asked her and deliver the message.
But the details of the message were already receding when the wind caught one of her dolls and rolled her away, down the sand dunes.
Kate chased the doll down the dunes, where she was distracted by a cluster of shells which someone had left behind.
Her imagination was sparked into a story.
And it was only much later that she heard her mother call.
This time she realised she was very hungry, and so she ran inside.
It wasn’t until later again, when Ngaire was seated with a cup of tea on the window seat, leafing through a recipe book, and Kate was sitting on the floor, raking through the treasures of a button box, that she spotted one of Ngaire’s handkerchiefs and remembered.
‘A man was here before,’ Kate said, frowning as she tried to remember the message. ‘He said to tell you he got the timing wrong again. Something like that.’
The moment she saw Ngaire freeze, her shoulders tense and her hands unmoving, Kate knew that something important had happened.
With glacial slowness, Ngaire turned to look out towards the darkened beach, now empty of light and life.
But Kate couldn’t figure out why Ngaire had reacted like this.
And she didn’t want to know. In her experience it usually meant she’d done something wrong and was likely going to have to stay in her room for reasons she didn’t understand.
So she edged towards the kitchen door, figuring a quiet retreat to her bedroom might be easier for everyone.
‘When was this?’ Ngaire’s voice wasn’t her usual forceful, clear tones, but lowered and fractured.
Kate remembered that the man had told her to pass the message on straight away and she instinctively knew she’d done something wrong. She didn’t want her beloved grandmother to be angry with her.
So she shrugged. ‘Oh… ages ago. He’s gone now.’
‘Oh.’
Kate had felt suddenly awkward.
‘Did he say anything to you?’
Kate frowned as she fingered the different buttons. ‘Yes.’
‘What did he say?’ Ngaire’s voice had an intensity to it which Kate instinctively knew required an answer.
‘He asked me what you were singing and I told him. He said I was good at speaking Māori.’
‘You are. Anything else?’
‘I told him that you had to bake a really big cake for mum’s birthday to put all twenty candles on it.’
‘And did he say anything?’
Kate suddenly remembered a detail. Hopefully that would be enough to satisfy her grandmother.
‘He said Hope was his sister’s name but she’d died in the war.’
Apparently it was enough because Ngaire looked away and didn’t look back at her. So when her mother called, Kate was only too happy to run off.
Later still — when Ngaire didn’t come in for supper, when she sat alone on the bench in the dark night — Kate hadn’t thought it was anything to do with the stranger. She’d only heard Hope wondering aloud why her mother was sitting in the cold.
Kate blinked as the memory released her.
The wind tugged at her shawl. She swallowed hard.
Yes. Johnnie Kowalski had been to MacLeod’s Cove three times.
Twice that history recorded. And once that only she remembered.
Strangely, Kate remembered the date because the reason she’d been in the garden was because she was keeping out of sight of the rest of her family who were crying and grieving over the death of a relative.
And she felt slightly put out because it was Christmas Eve.
But she’d received her doll’s house because she was five years old and wouldn’t destroy it.
Which meant that Johnnie Kowalski had stood in her grandmother’s garden on Christmas Eve, 1966.
When she recalled his words now—I won’t be here long—and the trembling of his hand, she understood what had once confused her.
John Kowalski had died in 1967; Augi had given her a copy of the death certificate. He’d had Parkinson’s disease.
He had come to say goodbye to Ngaire and, in the end, he hadn’t been able to.
He’d heard Ngaire singing happily, and Kate had told him how happy Ngaire was. Kate guessed that he’d known he had nothing to offer her except memories, disruption and sorrow. And none of these tipped the balance.
But he had gone away with something which had changed things. Knowledge that, in the brief visit early in 1946, he and Ngaire had made a baby. A daughter, who’d just turned 20 when he last visited.
And he’d returned to the US and changed his will, amending it so that, after Ngaire passed, the house would be inherited by his ‘closest relative’, knowing that he had a little grand-daughter on the other side of the world who would one day live and love in that house.
But he couldn’t state her name or relationship because it would destroy Ngaire’s carefully constructed, happy life.
What Kate hated most was that she’d never passed on his full message to Ngaire because she’d forgotten. But she hadn’t forgotten completely. The words had lodged somewhere in her, not understood, until now. And now she understood all too well.
She turned away, pulling her shawl tightly around her as the air temperature dropped. The leaves were starting to fall.
But one thing she couldn’t forget. She’d met her grandfather. He’d known it. But she hadn’t. Until now.