It was true that the women needed help, especially when the men were away and now that my sisters and I had left home. And anyway, paid work was too difficult to find during those hard times. For Chappy it would have been impossible. Any effort on his part to find employment could have led to enquiries that would land him in trouble.

Chapter 8

Oriwia

‘I never knew all that before,’ my grandmother said with some indignation, coming into the tearoom kitchen just as I finished reading the new translation she had given me. She took up the kettle, filled the teapot amid a feathery pillow of steam, and dressed the pot with a scorched knitted beehive. She embraced it with her big hands, shifting it in circles, her mind elsewhere because of the information that hadn’t been shared with her all these years.

My grandmother had given me so much of her time already that I didn’t intend asking her any more questions that morning though there was one burning a hole in my tongue. I was there to help.

On the bench beside me was a tray of cream and raspberry doughnuts which she was about to carry through to the glass case at the shop front. Beside it was a marble cake ready to be iced. ‘He never told any of it.’

‘Any of …?’ I put the pages down so I could fill sugar bowls for the tables.

‘That stuff. About the bus ride, the fisherman, little Eric and Lani. His tooth and the fish.’

Oriwia went out with the doughnuts and returned with the empty tray.

‘Or that awful story about Lani’s father. I suppose he didn’t want us to know about that. So why tell it now?’ She was in a huff, sifting icing sugar and cocoa into a bowl. I noticed that she sometimes made pink icing for marble cake, but today it was to be chocolate. I poured tea for her from the beehive pot, wondering if she would have time to drink it. Pushing the cup towards her, and wanting to distract her from her present train of thought, I let the question out.

‘But what about –?’

‘What about what?’ With the bowl hugged against her, she whipped its contents, scowling down into it. With it almost time for the tearoom to open, Grandmother slapped icing over the cake and smoothed it, stopping every so often to take a mouthful of tea. When she’d finished, she went out front to unlock the door.

‘What about what?’ she asked again as she came back in.

‘The question. Great-grandfather’s question?’ I washed the bowl and baking tins and wiped down the bench.

‘Which question was that?’ she asked, filling little metal teapots with hot water to warm them, pouring milk into small jugs.

‘“Are you going to marry my daughter?”’