The Bower Bird

by Ann Kelley

  ‘He’s a very nice gentleman, dear.’

  I knew it, I was right, it’s a man. But what does he do?

  ‘What does he do, Mrs Lorn, for a living?’

  ‘He’s retired my love, I suppose, he don’t do any work as far I can see.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t know what it was he did when he worked?’

  ‘No dear, I don’t pry into other people’s business. I do his cleaning and he pays me, that’s all I know.’

  ‘Mrs Lorn?’

  ‘Gussie dear, what is it?’ She is struggling with the hoover hose, which has a mind of its own and won’t be tamed.

  ‘Is there a gull still on the roof at Peregrine Point?’

  ‘Gull? Gulls are everywhere, gulls are, my cheel’. Can’t get away from them.’

  It’s quite cold and the sea looks wintry and dangerous as if it bears a terrible grudge and has a temper only just under control.

  I spend the day indoors reading and trying to write poems, feeling strangely sad and melancholy and looking out of the windows of my room. It’s easier to write poetry in this mood. Writing about happiness is much harder.

  On days like today when everything seems like shit in my life, the day stares in at me with its sparkling sea and salty air, and shouts – look at me, aren’t I beautiful?

  Late on, the sun appears only to be immediately swallowed by the sea, and lives on shining upwards through the sticky surface. It reminds me of something that Bridget said: ‘Silver is a secret, white is sorrow, green is a forest that takes sorrow away, and gold is a glimmer of hope.’ That child is a natural poet. I just don’t think in that way. I am prosaic – Ha! I’ve used my word of the day. The Poem of the Day is ‘The Heavenly City’ by Stevie Smith. The note at the bottom of the page is a quote from Stevie Smith: ‘I can’t make up my mind if God is good, impotent or unkind.’

  If there is a God, an invisible to us, omnipotent power, what are we supposed to be for? Why were we created? What’s the reason for life? Are we here on Earth for a purpose? More than simply carrying on our genes? Perhaps we are here to record the wonders of creation: a field of daisies, a lion’s roar, a butterfly wing, the scent of apples. But at the same time we’d have to mention the horrors of life on Earth – we can’t ignore earthquakes that kills thousands, floods and mud slides that bury whole towns, hurricanes, volcanoes, drought that kills painfully slowly. We might as well be tiny insects in a termite hill, God an elephant stomping on us.

  Mum and I have more or less stopped listening to news programmes on the radio or on telly. It’s too depressing. We heard that a little boy who has recently had a heart and lung transplant has died. It’s strange how sad we feel. We didn’t know him. But we had been following his progress.

  When did I first know about death? As a thing that happens to us all? I think it was when I was about ten and I saw a programme about the Second World War. A bulldozer shovelling naked corpses into a heap. I’ll never forget it. My brain couldn’t take it in straight away. They looked like a tangled pile of Pick-Up Sticks. I felt physically sick. And when I asked Grandma if she and Grandpop were going to die she said of course not, she had no intention of dying.

  But she was wrong. She was wrong.

  Or it could have been when I was really quite small and in hospital. A five-year-old in the next bed – he had no hair – died in the night and I heard his mother and father sobbing behind the curtain.

  And somehow I became aware that I would in all likelihood die before I reach adulthood, like children in third world countries who die of measles and AIDS and TB.

  But as Grandpop said about Grandma’s meagre harvest of courgettes – ‘Never mind the quantity, taste the quality.’

  I truly believe that if the world around you is beautiful then you will feel that life is worth living, but if you are surrounded by ugliness it is hard to be contented. Looking out the window at the town’s higgledy skyline, the orange roofs, the little streets and hills of St Ives, the breathing bay beyond, with the grey cloak of the sky, I am glad to be alive, glad of soaring gulls, glad of the scent of salt air, the reassuring whoosh of waves, glad of my cats’ arching backs and curling tails, glad my heart is still beating.

  Mum is in a bad way. If it’s not her back it’s her hormones. She’s getting hot flushes and she is bleeding heavily between periods. I would have thought she was too old for periods but apparently not. She’s gone to see her doctor – not Alistair. I’m mooching with the cats. It’s murky and cold and I don’t want to go out. I see in the local paper there’s a place called Arts and Artists in town and they have books about local artists and potters and writers. Maybe I can find out more about great-grandfather Amos Hartley Stevens. Not today though. Unless I phone.

  ‘Hello, this is Augusta Stevens. I wonder if you have any books about a man called Amos Hartley Stevens, my great-grandfather, actually. Oh, yes I could come round. What about tomorrow? Oh, okay, next week, yes, thanks, thank you, I’ll see you then.’

  Strewth, it’s so easy, doing research. Perhaps I’ll be a historian.

  Mum phones the vet and he tells her the puppy has found a good home.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  I’VE DUG OUT a few of Mum’s antique clothes – lace and silk petticoats and flimsy muslin dresses that she wore when she was young (she was into old things even then as she was a hippie) and she’s too fond of them to throw them away, and I’m hanging them up by windows and taking photographs of them. With a window open and morning light flowing through them they look alive, or as if ghosts are wearing them.

  There’s a creamy Japanese embroidered jacket with flared sleeves, a large bird of paradise embroidered on the front, and flowers and gold threads running through the blues and pinks and beiges. I wonder who it was made for originally. Did an empress wear it? Or a geisha?

  That’s the charm of old clothes and furniture and china, the fact that they have a past, a history, mysterious and unknown. We have all these ghosts surrounding us, with us every day.

  I like to think that Grandpop and Grandma are keeping watch over us. Mum especially at the moment. She needs looking after: a good enough reason for me to find my Cornish family here. Okay, they aren’t actually her family, only by marriage, but they would be better than nothing. She’ll be alone in the world one day and it makes me unhappy to think of her with no one to care for her. Who knows where Alistair will be? He might go off her, like Daddy did and find a younger woman. Why does she choose younger men all the time – well, twice? Why can’t she find a man her own age? I suppose they’re already married, or if they’re divorced there must be something wrong with them, or they’re gay.

  I hope Alistair will be around to comfort her when I die.

  I dream about a bird of paradise and other exotic birds coming in my window and playing games, hunting treasure buried under the duvet. They are all brightly coloured and highly intelligent. A lyrebird struts and displays. The bird of paradise walks right up to my face as I lie in bed and lets me stroke his yellow head and push my fingers deep into his chest feathers so I feel his flesh. He looks me in the eye and touches his black beak to my lips. I wake with the strange feeling of the packed quills against my fingertips.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  HAYLEY IS HERE with loads of her books and we have had a fantastic morning talking about poetry and novels. She loves books and knows many poems by heart. She and I each choose a poem and talk about it. She chooses a poem by an American called Raymond Carver. He died aged fifty after cancer. He was an alcoholic for many years before he met his second wife, ten years before he died. And he was very aware of his own mortality. Hayley says he wrote some of his best work in his last years. He wrote short stories too and always made them out of his own experiences, writing about fishing and being drunk and rows with his family. In his poem ‘Cherish’ he talks about his wife gathering roses given for their late wedding. He calls her ‘wife’ while he can, because he knows he hasn’t long to live.

&nbs
p; I wish I could make something as beautiful as his poem before I die.

  I choose Sharon Olds’ poem ‘I Go back to May 1937’, one of Ruth Padel’s choice of Sunday Poems in the Independent newspaper. It’s all about a photograph of Sharon Olds’ parents before they were married and before she was born. The poet says she wants to go to them and say ‘don’t marry each other. You are going to make yourselves very unhappy.’ But she doesn’t because she wants to have been born. She wants to live.

  Yes, I go along with that; I want to live, I… I… I…

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  ARTS AND ARTISTS has shelves of specialist books on local art and artists and a small gallery area for exhibitions of paintings. The man has heard of my great-grandfather, and looks him up on the internet. Ohmygod, it’s wonderful. I want a computer.

  Amos Hartley Stevens, born in St Ives, 1880. Studied at Plymouth 1896; Royal College of Art 1899. Married Mary Menzies of London in 1900. Returned to St Ives 1893. AHS was a plein air painter for a while, combined painting with photography; opened a photographic studio on Tregenna Place. They had four children: Hartley, Menzies, John and Fay. So, my grandfather Hartley Stevens had three siblings. I wonder what happened to them?

  There’s no record of their lives at Arts and Artists. There are some marvellous books here though, and I take the opportunity to look at some.

  Bernard Leach the potter lived here. His pots look rather stodgy to me, brown and dark and treacly. But they fetch loads of money in auctions. Mum told me that. She thought she had found a large plate of his at a car boot sale, but it wasn’t his or any of his students, and she didn’t like it so she gave it to the cats. They appreciate the gravy coloured glaze, licking it clean every day. She has learnt her lesson and now only buys things she really likes and can live with.

  I like the paintings of John Anthony Park. Morning Tide, one of the books here, is about his life. He was born in 1878 and died 1962. He painted landscapes and seascapes and actually lived for a while at 3 Bowling Green, that’s next door but one to where we live. That was in 1923. How exciting, a famous painter in our terrace. I wonder why there isn’t a blue plaque on the wall? Where we lived in London there were blue plaques all over the place, as so many famous people have lived in Camden.

  Oh, what’s this? A large book with a photograph of a chair on the front cover, and it looks very like one of the beautiful chairs at the Darlings’ house.

  ‘I have to close now, my dear,’ says the man. ‘I’m sorry to have to throw you out, but we are setting up a new exhibition. Have you found what you are looking for?’

  ‘I would like to come back and do some more research please.’

  ‘We’re open again next Thursday, 11–4.’

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE WORD OF the day is entrepreneur: one who undertakes an enterprise esp. a commercial one, often at personal financial risk.

  I have been cutting out Ruth Padel’s columns. She explains the quality of modern poems, internal rhymes as opposed to end of line rhymes, half rhymes that echo through the work. She makes poetry so much more interesting and accessible. I hope there will be a book of the collected articles.

  It’s Hallowe’en. There have been huge pumpkins for sale in the shops. Mum doesn’t believe in Hallowe’en, but when three small children appear at the back door in witch and wizard costumes, their Mum lurking in the background, and ask ‘Trick or treat?’ she gives them apples from our tree. They don’t look terribly grateful for the ‘treat’, but Mum shuts the door before they can play a trick on us.

  There will be a firework display on the harbour beach on Guy Fawkes’ Day and she says we can go to it if the weather is okay. If not, we can watch from my window. The cats hate fireworks and I might have to stay and comfort them instead of going to the beach. One year in London I made a terrific guy, with Mum’s help, and sat at the corner of our street collecting money. It was a great success, and I raised five pounds in two days.

  I think I’d be a good entrepreneur.

  I have posted Daddy’s birthday present and card. I wonder what he will be doing on his birthday? Sometimes we used to go out to have dinner together in a Greek café in Camden Town. It was his favourite place to eat because they knew him there and made a big fuss of him. He had used the café as a location in a short film he’d made. It never got shown though. But they treated him as if he was a famous film director, and naturally he liked that. Maybe he’ll go there on his own? Poor Daddy, he must be so lonely without us.

  I phone him and wish him Happy Birthday. He loves the Filmgoer’s Annual, and the card. He’s off to a party with someone called Luk, a girl from Thailand. She’s nineteen. Why did he have to tell me her age? I don’t care who he’s taking out or how old she is. I certainly won’t tell Mum. He acts like having a young girl friend is some kind of trophy he’s won for being Mr Wonderful. And he isn’t, is he? He’s left us, he hasn’t kept his marriage promises and he’s a stupid vain waste of space.

  Bonfire Day is a washout. I hope the weather will be good for the New Year’s Eve celebrations. St Ives is The Place to be at New Year.

  The long tube hose of the carpet cleaner won’t slide up and down without falling out, and Mrs Lorn can’t find the missing part. Mum and I are going to Penzance to get it mended and do some shopping. It’s pouring with rain, foggy, and the roads are flooded.

  When we get out of the car in the car park Mum removes the hose out the boot and wraps it around her. I hold the brolly. The hose comes off her shoulders and wriggles onto the ground like an unruly python, and she drags it behind her to the shop. We are laughing hysterically. The man says he can’t mend it without the missing part, but he agrees to replace the hose. But he doesn’t want the hose taking up room in his workshop, so we have to go through the whole ridiculous procedure again – out into the monsoon rain with the python trying to escape and back to the car. We are so wet we can’t face shopping so we drive home slowly, on the back road, keeping to the middle of the road where there is less water. Mum’s fun to be with sometimes. No peacocks today.

  I remind her of when we were in Thailand one winter, driving through terrible weather, after a scary boat trip in thunder and lightning; the road had totally disappeared under water, and it was much more difficult to stay on the track. There were no windscreen wipers, and one of our carload of children had to lean out the front passenger window and wipe the screen with her hand so Mum could see where she was going. We were up to the axle, but we got through. The water buffaloes looked happy.

  I often think of the times we spent in hot countries each winter. I used to chase hedgehogs around the outside of the house in the dark – that was in Africa – and in Thailand I had several American friends who lived in the same compound as us. We had night-time barbecues, toasting marshmallows over the fire.

  I’m sending a Christmas card to Sergeant Ginnie Witherspoon, the wildlife warden I met, and to Mr Writer. I do love Christmas.

  Over every shop in Fore Street men have fixed real Christmas trees. They all have white lights on them (the trees not the men) and after dark the town is lit up like a fairy tale. From my window I can see more fairy lights swaying in the wind on Smeaton’s Pier.

  Bridget and her Mum have invited me to go with them to the parish church on Christmas Eve for the early evening service, which is especially for children. I hope Siobhan won’t be there. No, of course she won’t.

  I’m not sure I have the guts to go in the church again. Are liars allowed? If we were Catholics, I could confess my sins and be forgiven, but we’re not.

  We have covered our little cherry tree in the front garden in lights.

  Father Christmas will appear at a local fête. Obviously I no longer believe in Father Christmas, but I can pretend, for appearances’ sake – that’s pretending, not lying, there’s a huge difference. And I hope to buy some presents there. I wonder if Gabriel believes, and Bridget?

  The big question is
what to get Daddy. I got him nail clippers last year, which he really appreciated, but unfortunately they are still working so I can’t get him any more.

  Why are men so difficult to buy presents for? Women and girls are easy. We like pretty things, usually, things we wouldn’t buy for ourselves, like bracelets and necklaces and hair slides and T-shirts and cuddly toys. I, of course would prefer book tokens to any of those, but I know Mum likes to get perfume and clothes and glittery stuff.

  Grandma always wanted silk scarves. She had loads of them. Never wore them as far as I remember, just kept them in a drawer and let me play with them. I would unfold them carefully from their tissue paper, wrap them around my waist or head and pretend to be a pirate or a highwayman, or if the scarf pattern was tiger skin or a leopard or zebra, I would be Tarzan.

  Dad had a thing about old Tarzan films. So did I. I would leap from chair to chair and table to stool at Grandma’s shouting ‘Aah Eeh Aah!’

  As Grandma used to say, ‘Those were the days,’ as if anything that happened a long time ago was necessarily better than what was happening in the present.

  ‘Mum.’

  ‘Yes?’ She puts down her magazine and peers at me over her glasses, which she only wears at home, as she hates herself in them. She keeps one pair in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, and one in the bedroom for reading in bed and one in her bag. That’s the theory anyway. In practice the cases are in place but the glasses could be anywhere at all: under piles of magazines, in with the laundry, in the garden. One day we were out together and she couldn’t find her car keys in her bag, so she emptied it and out came nine pairs of specs – nine! Several were old spares that didn’t really work any more and that she said she was going to take to be recycled at the opticians.

  ‘What is it, Gussie, stop staring at me as if I’m a Martian.’

  ‘Sorry. Mum did you know your grandparents?’