He had no idea what she was talking about and had little interest in finding out. The two of them rejoined the dirt path and followed it wordlessly back down to the wicket gate.
‘Are you going to follow me the entire way?’ he asked.
‘How is Louisa?’
‘She is . . .’ he began, intending to say that she was fine, but was unable to continue. He stopped, opened the gate and let the girl walk through. He followed.
‘I saw Flossie in town this morning,’ Josephine said. ‘She said she would teach me piano.’
‘Is that so?’
The slope had begun to level out. Soon the dirt path would widen into a dirt road dotted with letterboxes and long, stony driveways until it eventually became Regent Street.
‘Father says I am not allowed to go promenading on New Year’s Eve until I am ten,’ Josephine said, unable to hide her puffing as she tried to match his pace.
He did not respond.
‘I wish I could see your new display being switched on.’
‘It will be there in the morning.’
‘Yes, but that’s not the same, is it? Not when it’s New Year’s Eve tonight.’
The properties and paddocks to their left fell away and were replaced with dark green explosions of flax and beyond them a thin strip of sand the colour of camel’s hair that stretched to the rocky breakwater of the small harbour. A lone black-billed gull circled the beach in silence. To their right, the first business. Kemp feigned interest in the metalwork gate that read ‘J. C. Bannerman, Ironmonger’. It had just gone four in the afternoon and Bannerman had closed his shop for the day, no doubt preparing for a night of revelry.
An approaching buggy forced them out of the middle of the road.
‘Are you going to look at the window of Hercus & Barling?’ Josephine asked.
‘No.’
‘Oh, you should. You really should.’
They continued on past Bertie Bush’s hardware store, which was desperately in need of a new coat of paint, Padget the watchmaker’s narrow shop and the Criterion Hotel, standing proud on the corner of Regent and Albert streets.
‘Won’t your father be wondering where you are?’ Kemp asked as he looked left and right, preparing to cross the street to avoid the window of Hercus & Barling and the lesser evils of Mrs Alves’ sweet shop, Mr Borrie’s toys and games and the meat pies and coffee of McWatter’s cafe.
‘No, sir,’ Josephine replied.
Emboldened by the girl’s sudden bout of manners, he said, ‘If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll tell your father you’ve been larking about at the lighthouse.’ He stepped off the footpath.
‘Oh, he won’t care.’ She ran a few steps to catch him up and jumped over the ridge of horse leavings that had been swept into the centre of the road.
‘Well,’ Kemp said, ‘I’ll forbid Flossie to give you piano lessons.’
‘You wouldn’t!’
‘Do you have a piano in your house?’
Josephine turned back toward the lighthouse.
‘I didn’t think so,’ he continued. ‘I don’t intend to let annoying little girls into my home to use my piano.’
‘Flossie says it’s Louisa’s,’ she said, nearly shouting. They stood on the beach side of Regent Street now, both watching the still-circling gull.
‘You’re horrible,’ the girl said after some time. ‘I’m going to tell Louisa what a horrible husband she has and what a terrible father he will make.’
She made as if to leave. He grabbed her shoulder and crouched down.
‘Listen to me, Josephine. You must not step foot on my property. You will not step foot on my property. Do you understand me?’
He looked down at his hand, still clamped to her shoulder, then back at the girl’s face: her eyes downcast and blinking rapidly. He released her shoulder and continued down Regent Street, his head inclined a notch too high to seem natural.
Beyond the Albert Street intersection, shops reappeared on the left of the high street, though they too had closed for the day. He turned to look behind him. Josephine was a dozen paces behind, keeping her distance but still following. He stood with his hands on his hips and eventually she drew level with him again.
‘What do you think of these windows, Mr Kemp? Aren’t they dreary compared with the big stores?’
‘Dreary?’ he said. ‘That’s one word for it.’
They walked on, past Professor Healey’s store of smoker’s requisites and Mr Kriss’s bakery, which emitted the heavy tar smell of the black bread that he baked for holidays—his mother’s recipe—though no one else in town could stomach it.
‘Look at this,’ Kemp said, pointing at Sandy Chase’s window, stocked with ales, porters, wines and spirits. ‘The bottles are still wreathed in tinsel from Christmas. And the McNeils’ window . . . Well, a fine coat of dust hardly entices the potential buyer of a pair of boots, does it?’
Josephine thought hard before responding, ‘No.’
‘Now Mr Ikin, on the other hand,’ he said and turned square to the bookseller’s window, ‘I suspect he wears his dust with pride.’
He looked around and found Josephine in front of the bright white display of the next store over, which belonged to the town’s purveyor of pills and sundries, Mr Fricker.
‘Have any of these stores ever asked you to rig up a display for them, Mr Kemp?’
‘They’re above that sort of thing, or so they say. But let’s see how long they can hold out, eh? Let’s see how long till they’re boarding up their windows like the shops on Stirling Road and queuing for a job selling perfume or minding the books at Donaldson’s or that other store.’
‘You mean Hercus & Barling?’
‘I know what it’s called.’
The commerce on the beach side came to a halt once more at the grounds of St Paul’s, the tallest of the town’s three churches. He could smell the fishmonger’s shop on the other side of grounds. The reek seemed the final word on religion, no matter how much the vestments, stained glass and ceremony might appeal to the aesthete inside any window dresser.
He leant on the church’s wrought iron gate, another of Jolly Bannerman’s pieces, and looked across at Donaldson’s, square and tall, its black verandah of corrugated iron stretching out to the street. The masonry facade sought to announce quality, class, permanence. The tall windows of the upper floors were bound by Roman arches, each capped with a keystone bearing a white rosette. But he knew it was all for nought without a decent display in his windows, the only windows that counted.
He had started as a stock boy seven years earlier, back when it was Donaldson’s Drapers two doors further down Regent Street and old man Donaldson still ran the roost. As the store had grown, expanding the range of goods offered—millinery, gardening tools, sheet music—so too had Kemp’s role. He was responsible for all elements of display inside the store and had two stock boys beneath him when Charlie Begg came out from Nottingham in ’99 to oversee the move to the new premises. Four storeys, replete with Lamson tube system and twenty feet of plate glass either side of the main entrance. A proper department store, one to rival any in the South Island.
‘You say you’re responsible for display,’ Begg had said at their first meeting. ‘What exactly does this encompass?’
‘Putting the wares