The Auckland University Press Anthology of New Zealand Literature

by Jane Stafford

  But it’s time I came to the point—after all, I have mentioned a crisis.

  It would be on a day like this (by far the best of our summer holiday), that our youngsters should come up beach at low tide, and bring with them the finger they had found in one of their favourite rock pools.

  Mummy, look! That was our boy, Happy. The pair of them had been disagreeing over who was to carry their find, which was cupped by Glad in her two hands. To me, it was as though I had never seen a finger so astonishingly large despite the wrinkles. The nail was intact and all had been washed white and clean. As an object composed of alabaster or translucent wax it could have been attractive—but there was no mistaking what it was.

  As usual Pam was quicker than I was, and her technique within its own limitations couldn’t be faulted. While she whipped out a handkerchief she agreed with the young ’uns that they had found something very precious (Why! of all things! a new kind of shell—a finger-shell! Well!), and at the same time quite desperately fragile. Mummy would keep it for them. And now please would they go and find Mummy another of those pretty red and green stones—but wait a minute …. And as the handkerchief-draped horror went into the picnic bag, out came the transparent packet of chocolate biscuits.

  In the meantime I had been trying very hard to rid myself of the impression that what our children had found was somebody’s severed phallus; and I recovered my speech only to say a thing which to Pam would be irritating and silly, and which in the circumstances she was quite right to ignore.

  For God’s sake, Pam, I said, why ever in the name of heaven and earth did you insist they be called Happy and Glad?

  The children had obligingly trotted off as suggested, and now Pam remarked that we must stroll casually about the rock pool area, just to be satisfied about any more human remains. And after that I must take the car to the nearest phone box and ring the police. We must hand over our gruesome relic and free ourselves of all responsiblity. But there you are—my wife had used two words which belong to the stock in trade of one branch of the higher education. And in any case, once our children were beyond hearing I had groaned aloud.

  Pam, I said, so long as we are at large in human society responsibility is our fate. No, I added, our doom!

  My wife’s sharp look at me was familiar—also her decision. All right, she said, I’ll go. Jellyfish. She said too that I might try to make my conversation a shade more coherent—that sort of thing could be the sign of a mental break-down.

  I haven’t mentioned that I met Pam during the time of our joint exposure to the higher education. She had begun with the fine arts, but changed to social studies—hence perhaps her flair (very evident during the time of our first encounters), for reconciling general theory and particular instance. Born myself to fumble any practical job in hand when it is unfamiliar, I was quick to admire and be grateful.

  While I’m gone, she went on, I will trust you to be responsible for our children.

  I was not in the mood for arguing. When the children showed signs of disquiet over the sound of the car I shouted that Daddy would be with them soon, and to dispose of the jellyfish allegation I joined them by way of a circuitous route past the rock pool. There were no human remains so far as I could observe—as I told myself of course there wouldn’t be. Despite what actually turns up, it’s always bits and pieces I expect to come in my direction.

  When we were through with the police sergeant and his offsider, who turned up after the youngsters were in bed (being Pam, Pam had arranged for our children be ‘spared’), we had a row—the kind of rumpus which I foresee will be an annual event guaranteed to coincide with our annual holiday. And although there was no mistaking what grim finger had reached for the push button on this occasion, that is not to say any couple wanting a thorough-going occasion will ever lack a watertight excuse. Nevetheless, common stuff—I mean when the pair of us could be in no doubt what we were up to, yet found ourselves compulsively impelled to demonstrate how damnably ordinary we are. Pam is my own age exactly—which means she has come on right to the top of her form according to Kinsey. As for me, well, according to the same authority, senility of that kind begins in males after sixteen. Not that I’m not the man to meet his marriage account as often as the wife likes to send in her bill—it’s just that I am not always bright enough to conceal my surprise that paytime has come round again so soon. (I owe to my historical reading the discovery that according to Roman law a husband might discharge or withhold payment of the debt according to inclination. An Athenian husband on the contrary was by Solon’s law required to make three payments a month. It was the Jewish people however, who had rules for special cases: a daily settlement of the debt was required from an idle but vigorous young husband, but twice a week from an ordinary citizen sufficed; once a week from a peasant, once in thirty days from a camel-driver, and once in six months from a seaman. But a student or doctor might resist all demands; and no wife who was in receipt of a weekly sustenance could sue for a divorce. I believe too that among the Jewish people polygamy would divide, without multiplying, the duties of the husband—and polygamy regulated in that way is something of which I could thoroughly approve. After all, it is not unreasonable for any man to wish for a number of wives sufficient to ensure there remains always one on duty.)

  From my general reading I have gathered that back at the beginning of the century a wife would sometimes rebel against a husband to whom she was, according to her own view, ‘just a plaything’. But from my experience I would think that modern times have tended to reverse that situation. Also, I will admit to irritating my wife by my failure to adopt what she considers the right attitude to our annual holiday—for her an extension of the child’s experience of a beach holiday; that is to say golden days of sun sand and sea, in more exact words a daily round of fun and games but with the lid taken right off. And no regrets and no guilty conscience. And of course she’s right in the pattern—you have only to check up on the statistics for spring births (‘plum duff babies’ is I believe the description bestowed by the nursing-home sisterhood).

  But perhaps I can put the matter on a somewhat more refined level, if I say that for Pam our annual holiday is what the whole of life could be if we never aged (I mean beyond our maturity), and could always reckon on a large credit account at the Bank with never a moment’s worry about its maintenance. There is something very pro-American about my wife, but money and consumer goods are not what I mean. What you buy with money is the happiness which you never for a moment doubt is what you deserve, and may expect without any argument to the contrary. If you are disappointed in your expectations, then some two-legged scapegoat must be sought for immediately and made to take the blame. Tonight, before my wife slammed the bedroom door (leaving me to write this kind of last will and testament), I bitched back at her with the declaration that a more accurate view of our situation on this planet was held by the Greeks, for whom life was damned awful apart from a few happy moments for which they were no doubt profoundly grateful. And apart from her retort (Ancient Greeks! I’d give the whole damn lot for one decent American any day), she remarked that she hoped I had considered the status of women and practices such as the exposure of infants—and that wasn’t to mention slavery and what went on at stag parties. What did I think I knew about the ancient Greeks anyhow? Ha ha!

  Now I expect I might have tried to patch matters up making some kind of jest—perhaps by referring her to Kinsey, and Nature’s cruel jest in throwing us into each other’s arms at identical ages, when it would have been more satisfactory if her thirty years had been complemented by a mere sixteen years on my part (and ha ha to you). And no matter how vehement my wife’s verbal reactions might have been, she would nonetheless have understood. But for me, to say any such thing would be merely to conceal the truth. To catch the interest of the parlour psychiatrist in her, encouraged by her social studies, I might perhaps have said that I could not rid myself of my first impression that it was some poor devil’s seve
red member our youngsters had come up the beach to present us with. But what in the name of all that’s sub specie aeternitatis would she have made of me if I had confessed the simple shocking truth—that even from her and my closest friends I conceal the melancholy which is induced in me by the afternoon slope of the summer sun? And that sex, Kinsey, and what have you are all the easiest kind of stuff to take compared to that horror?

  Well, that’s it. If these pages ever have a reader I would expect them either to ring a bell, or not to. It occurs to me that what our kids found on the beach might well represent somebody’s drastic attempt at a solution (and it would make me very very angry to be reminded that what was found was a finger). Each man to his taste and his solution—and Pam by the sound of things behind the bedroom door has reached the limits of her patience. For that matter, so have I.

  (1965)

  Fleur Adcock, ‘Wife to Husband’

  From anger into the pit of sleep

  You go with a sudden skid. On me

  Stillness falls gradually, a soft

  Snowfall, a light cover to keep

  Numb for a time the twitching nerves.

  Your head on the pillow is turned away;

  My face is hidden. But under snow

  Shoots uncurl, the green thread curves

  Instinctively upwards. Do not doubt

  That sense of purpose in mindless flesh:

  Between our bodies a warmth grows;

  Under the blankets hands move out,

  Your back touches my breast, our thighs

  Turn to find their accustomed place.

  Your mouth is moving over my face:

  Do we dare, now, to open our eyes?

  (1964)

  James K. Baxter, ‘On the Death of Her Body’

  It is a thought breaking the granite heart

  Time has given me, that my one treasure,

  Your limbs, those passion-vines, that bamboo body

  Should age and slacken, rot

  Some day in a ghastly clay-stopped hole.

  They led me to the mountains beyond pleasure

  Where each is not gross body or blank soul

  But a strong harp the wind of genesis

  Makes music in, such resonant music

  That I was Adam, loosened by your kiss

  From time’s hard bond, and you,

  My love, in the world’s first summer stood

  Plucking the flowers of the abyss.

  (1961)

  Maurice Duggan, ‘Along Rideout Road That Summer’

  I’d walked the length of Rideout Road the night before, following the noise of the river in the darkness, tumbling over ruts and stones, my progress, if you’d call it that, challenged by farmers’ dogs and observed by the faintly luminous eyes of wandering stock, steers, cows, stud-bulls or milk-white unicorns or, better, a full quartet of apocalyptic horses browsing the marge. In time and darkness I found Puti Hohepa’s farmhouse and lugged my fibre suitcase up to the verandah, after nearly breaking my leg in a cattlestop. A journey fruitful of one decision—to flog a torch from somewhere. And of course I didn’t. And now my feet hurt; but it was daylight and, from memory, I’d say I was almost happy. Almost. Fortunately I am endowed both by nature and later conditioning with a highly developed sense of the absurd; knowing that you can imagine the pleasure I took in this abrupt translation from shop-counter to tractor seat, from town pavements to back-country farm, with all those miles of river-bottom darkness to mark the transition. In fact, and unfortunately there have to be some facts, even fictional ones, I’d removed myself a mere dozen miles from the parental home. In darkness, as I’ve said, and with a certain stealth. I didn’t consult dad about it, and, needless to say, I didn’t tell mum. The moment wasn’t propitious; dad was asleep with the Financial Gazette threatening to suffocate him and mum was off somewhere moving, as she so often did, that this meeting make public its whole-hearted support for the introduction of flogging and public castration for all sex offenders and hanging, drawing and quartering, for almost everyone else, and as for delinquents (my boy !) …. Well, put yourself in my shoes, there’s no need to go on. Yes, almost happy, though my feet were so tender I winced every time I tripped the clutch.

  Almost happy, shouting Kubla Khan, a bookish lad, from the seat of the clattering old Ferguson tractor, doing a steady five miles an hour in a cloud of seagulls, getting to the bit about the damsel with the dulcimer and looking up to see the reputedly wild Hohepa girl perched on the gate, feet hooked in the bars, ribbons fluttering from her ukulele. A perfect moment of recognition, daring rider, in spite of the belch of carbon monoxide from the tin-can exhaust up front on the bonnet. Don’t, however, misunderstand me: I’d not have you think we are here embarked on the trashy clamour of boy meeting girl. No, the problem, you are to understand, was one of connexion. How connect the dulcimer with the ukulele, if you follow. For a boy of my bents this problem of how to cope with the shock of the recognition of a certain discrepancy between the real and the written was rather like watching mum with a shoehorn wedging nines into sevens and suffering merry hell. I’m not blaming old STC for everything, of course. After all, some other imports went wild too; and I’ve spent too long at the handle of a mattock, a critical function, not to know that. The stench of the exhaust, that’s to say, held no redolence of that old hophead’s pipe. Let us then be clear and don’t for a moment, gentlemen, imagine that I venture the gross unfairness, the patent absurdity, the rank injustice (your turn) of blaming him for spoiling the pasture or fouling the native air. It’s just that there was this problem in my mind, this profound, cultural problem affecting dramatically the very nature of my inheritance, nines into sevens in this lovely smiling land. His was the genius as his was the expression which the vast educational brouhaha invited me to praise and emulate, tranquillisers ingested in maturity, the voice of the ring-dove, look up though your feet be in the clay. And read on.

  Of course I understood immediately that these were not matters I was destined to debate with Fanny Hohepa. Frankly, I could see that she didn’t give a damn; it was part of her attraction. She thought I was singing. She smiled and waved, I waved and smiled, turned, ploughed back through gull-white and coffee loam and fell into a train of thought not entirely free of Fanny and her instrument, pausing to wonder, now and then, what might be the symptoms, the early symptoms, of carbon monoxide poisoning. Drowsiness? Check. Dilation of the pupils? Can’t check. Extra cutaneous sensation? My feet. Trembling hands? Vibrato. Down and back, down and back, turning again, Dick and his Ferguson, Fanny from her perch seeming to gather about her the background of green paternal acres, fold on fold. I bore down upon her in all the eager erubescence of youth, with my hair slicked back. She trembled, wavered, fragmented and re-formed in the pungent vapour through which I viewed her. (Oh for an open-air job, eh mate?) She plucked, very picture in jeans and summer shirt of youth and suspicion, and seemed to sing. I couldn’t of course hear a note. Behind me the dog-leg furrows and the bright ploughshares. Certainly she looked at her ease and, even through the gassed-up atmosphere between us, too deliciously substantial to be creature down on a visit from Mount Abora. I was glad I’d combed my hair. Back, down and back. Considering the size of the paddock this could have gone on for a week. I promptly admitted to myself that her present position, disposition or posture, involving as it did some provocative tautness of cloth, suited me right down to the ground. I mean to hell with the idea of having her stand knee-deep in the thistle thwanging her dulcimer and plaintively chirruping about a pipedream mountain. In fact she was natively engaged in expressing the most profound distillations of her local experience, the gleanings of a life lived in rich contact with a richly understood and native environment: A Slow Boat To China, if memory serves. While I, racked and shaken, composed words for the plaque which would one day stand here to commemorate our deep rapport: Here played the black lady her dulcimer. Here wept she full miseries. Here rode the knight Fergus’ son to her deliveranc
e. Here put he about her ebon and naked shoulders his courtly garment of leather, black, full curiously emblazoned—Hell’s Angel.

  When she looked as though my looking were about to make her leave I stopped the machine and pulled out the old tobacco and rolled a smoke, holding the steering wheel in my teeth, though on a good day I could roll with one hand, twist and lick, draw, shoot the head off a pin at a mile and a half, spin, blow down the barrel before you could say:

  Gooday. How are yuh?

  All right.

  I’m Buster O’Leary.

  I’m Fanny Hohepa.

  Yair, I know.

  It’s hot.

  It’s hot right enough.

  You can have a swim when you’re through.

  Mightn’t be a bad idea at that.

  Over there by the trees.

  Yair, I seen it. Like, why don’t you join me, eh?

  I might.

  Go on, you’d love it.

  I might.

  Goodoh then, see yuh.

  A genuine crumpy conversation if ever I heard one, darkly reflective of the Socratic method, rich with echoes of the Kantian imperative, its universal mate, summoning sharply to the minds of each the history of the first trystings of all immortal lovers, the tragic and tangled tale, indeed, of all star-crossed moonings, mum and dad, mister and missus unotoo and all. Enough? I should bloody well hope so.