(1968)
C.K. Stead, ‘A Fitting Tribute’
I don’t ask you to believe me when I say I knew Julian Harp, but I ask you to give me a hearing because in every detail the story I’m going to tell is gospel true. I’ve tried to tell it before. After Julian’s flight I even got a reporter along to the house and he wrote me up as ‘just another hysterical young woman claiming to have known the National Hero’. That was a year or more ago and I haven’t mentioned Julian Harp since.
What reason can a person have for telling a story that she knows won’t be believed? I have two: a cross-grained magistrate and a statue. You might have heard about the case in Auckland in which a woman, a shopkeeper in court for trading without a licence, happened to say in evidence that Julian Harp had once come into her shop and bought one of those periscopes short people use for seeing over the heads of a crowd. The magistrate asked her to please keep calm and stick to the truth. Then he called for a psychiatrist’s report because he said she was obviously a born liar. Next day, which happened to be the anniversary of Julian’s flight, he sentenced her to a month in jail and the Herald published an editorial saying No one knew Julian Harp. Julian Harp knew no one. A privileged few watched his moment of glory; but he died as he had lived, a Man Alone ….
Of course if the woman hadn’t mentioned Julian Harp she might have got away with a fine. But she insisted she remembered his name because he asked her to keep the periscope aside until he had money to pay for it. And she said he wore his hair down around his shoulders. That was unthinkable!
When I read about that case I knew what no one else could know, that the woman was telling the truth. But it was the statue that really persuaded me it was time I tried to write down the facts. I was walking in the Domain pushing my baby Christopher in his pram. Some workmen were digging on the slope among those trees between the main gates and the pavilion and what pulled me up was that they were working right on the spot where Julian first got the idea for his wings. Then a truck arrived with a winch and a great slab of polished granite and in no time all the workmen were round it swearing at one another and pulling and pushing at the chains until the stone was lowered into the hole. I thought why do they want a great ugly slab of graveyard stone there of all places? I didn’t know I had asked it aloud, but one of the workmen turned and said it was for the new statue. The statue was to go on top of it. What new statue? The statue of Julian Harp of course. The one donated by the Bank of New Zealand. The statue of Julian Harp! You can imagine how I felt. I sat down on a bench and took Christopher out of his pram and rocked him backwards and forwards and thought how extraordinary! Miraculous! That after all the arguments in the newspapers about a site, not to mention the wrangling about whether the statue should be modern or old fashioned, they had at last landed it by accident plonk on the spot where Julian thought of his solution to the problem of engineless flight.
I sat there rocking my baby while he held on to my nose with one hand and hit me around the head with the other, and all the time I was thinking, I might even have been saying it aloud, what have I got to lose? I must tell someone. If they laugh at me, too bad. At least I will have tried. And besides, I owe it to Christopher to let everyone know the solemn truth that he is the son of Julian Harp. By the time I had wheeled the pram back through the Domain I was ready to start by telling Vega but when I saw her there in the kitchen cutting up beans for dinner and looking all straggly and cross I knew I oughtn’t to tell anyone until I had the whole story sorted out in my head and perhaps written down.
I should explain before I go any further that Vega is a sort of awful necessity in my life. Before Christopher was born I had to give up work and I didn’t know how I was going to pay the rent. I wanted to stay on in the house I lived in with Julian, because although everyone says he is dead no one knows for certain that he is. I wasn’t planning to sit around expecting him, but I had to keep in mind that if he did come back the house would be the only place he would know to look for me. The house and Gomeo’s coffee bar. So when someone advertised in the Auckland Star that she was a respectable middle-aged female clerk wanting board, I took her in; and now there are the three of us, Christopher and Vega and me, sharing the little two-storeyed wooden house with three rooms upstairs and two down that sits a yard from the footpath in Kendall Road on the eastern edge of the Domain. Vega isn’t a great companion or anything. She hasn’t much to say—except in her sleep; and then although she goes on for hours at a time it isn’t in English or any other language. But when I was ready to start work again at Gomeo’s I discovered I had been lucky to find her. I needed someone in the house at night to watch over Christopher, and when I mentioned it to Vega she said in her flat voice I could stop worrying about it because hadn’t I noticed she never went out at night. She was afraid of the dark! Then she told me she was named after a star we don’t often see in the Southern Hemisphere; and she made a noise that sounded like a laugh and said had I ever heard of a star going out at night.
All the time I was feeding Christopher that evening after seeing the workmen in the Domain I kept thinking about the statue and how wrong it would be if no one ever knew that Julian had a son. So when Christopher was asleep and I was helping Vega serve the dinner I asked her whether she thought Julian Harp might have had a family. She said no. I asked her what she thought would happen if someone claimed to be the mother of Julian’s child. She said she didn’t know, but she did know there was a good deal too much money being spent on a statue that made him look like nothing she’d ever seen and that kind of sculpture was a pretty disgusting way to honour a man who had given his life. I said but leaving aside the statue what would she think if a girl in Auckland claimed to be the mother of his child? Vega said she thought some of the little minxes had claimed that already, out for all they could get, but she didn’t think Julian Harp would have been the marrying kind. She said she imagined him like Lawrence of Arabia, married to an idea. When I said I hadn’t mentioned marriage but only paternity she said there was no need to be obscene.
I gave up at that and I didn’t have time to think about Julian for the rest of the evening until it was quite late and something happened at the coffee bar that made me remember my first meeting with him. I was bending over one of the tables when Gomeo came out of the kitchen and put his hand on my buttocks and said in a sort of stage whisper you could hear all over the shop that tonight he’d gotta have me or that’s the end. The sack. Finish. I said nothing and went to wipe down another table but he followed me and said in the same whisper well was it yes or no. So I swung round and said no, no, no—and each time I said it I pushed the wet cloth in his face until he had backed all the way into the kitchen. By now the people in the shop were waiting to hear me get the sack but Gomeo only said one day I would really make him mad and my God that would be the finish of us both.
You might wonder why that should remind me of Julian. It’s because Gomeo threatens to sack me and for the same reason nearly every time there’s a full moon and it was after one of his more spectacular performances I first talked to Julian. Julian was in the shop and like everyone else he took it all seriously and thought I had lost my job. So when I had finished pushing Gomeo back into the kitchen where he belongs Julian asked could he help me find a new job and he said he would even be willing to hit Gomeo for me if I thought it would help. I had to explain that Gomeo isn’t quite one hundred per cent and he doesn’t mean what he says. But you have to pretend he means it and fight him off.
The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature Page 79