by Maurice Gee
When he’d eaten they lay on the bed – not for sex. After her knee-jab he was probably out of order down there. I heard their voices through the rest of the morning. My guess is they were planning their future.
Shane climbed down the river after lunch and retrieved his brush from a willow nest. He finished the front wall and now he’s busy round the back.
29
They’ve made a new start. The other night was the rocky climb to a new plateau. There’s less absorption now in themselves and a good deal more awareness of each other. That’s an improvement. It improves our comfort as well.
Kate has stopped reading my notebooks. I feel the neglect; but think it’s just as well. The world I find back there is hardly plenum – it’s atom and void, a multitude of bodies rolling about and damaging each other when they come close. I’d like to encourage in her a sense of life’s fullness and help her continue in her belief that the solitary isn’t our natural state. If only for my own sake. She’s rough and cruel when she suspects the truth.
It’s clear to me Kate and Shane won’t stay together long.
30
You fly into Jessop over the hills. The city begins without the usual suburbs. You cross the river, following the line of the railway, and almost at once you’re over the port, where apple boats and woodchip boats are loading and the dredge is busy in the channel. Our main street runs south from the reclamation, past the rugby ground, over several bridges, and through the commercial heart – stomach is a better word – and ends at the concrete monster on the hill, our cathedral. In the beginning we were a city because we had a cathedral, but forty thousand people live here now, so we have the numbers. Jessop City. Sun-city, our PR men like to call it. The suburbs spread south along the plain. You see them, and our satellite town, Stallards, as your Friendship turns over the sea and approaches the runway. You come in across the shallows of the inlet, over the sand- and mud-flats, and pass at five hundred feet over Soddy’s Point.
I could have mentioned the Plowden Hills, lying south and east, and the apple orchards, and the sixty thousand hectares of pine forest, and the golden sand beaches out beyond Long Tom’s, and the maritime park, and the fishing fleet, and the kiwi fruit orchards, and deer farms, and berry farms, and pig farms; and the car assembly plant and the packhouse; and our two schools on the English model, one for girls, one for boys (Kitty a famous old pupil of one, I of the other); and the golf course and Town Beach; all those things. But I started this not for decoration or for civics but to bring myself to Soddy’s Point – so back I come.
Seen from the Port Hills or Town Beach, or from Stallards on the other side, it’s a lovely place. It curves like a sickle. In spring you can see the red and yellow rhododendron forest behind the main buildings. A clump of native trees grows at the base of the peninsula and reaches into the mainland. In summer I watch native pigeons take off from the wild plum trees by the river and head over town and I know they’re going to feast on karaka berries at Soddy’s Point. (It’s named after a settler, not the chemist, Soddy, who discovered isotopes.) The buildings are painted white and have red iron roofs. They look like a hotel or resort and visitors mistake them for that. But Soddy’s Point is Jessop’s mental hospital.
A lot of people say the Point is wasted. It’s ideal for a tourist hotel, businessmen say. Phil Dockery wanted to build a casino there. ‘With Bunny girls, Phil? And massage parlours?’ ‘That’s a damn sight better than wasting it on loonies.’ Then he remembered Rhona. It’s one of the few times I’ve seen him blush.
Rhona went there in 1938 and stayed for the rest of her life. That wasn’t long. I visited her on Saturday afternoons and put her arm in mine and we walked on the gravel paths in the rhododendrons and in the gardens on the seaward side. We sat on benches under the Phoenix palms and listened to the dry leaves talking in the wind. They were quarrelling with each other, she said, and she could endure it in trees. And in birds. Black-backed gulls squabbling over a fish head made her laugh. We stood on the low cliffs at the end of the Point and looked at Jessop. The sun shone on the faces of pink and white Mediterranean houses on the Drive, on wharf sheds and warehouses and ships and cranes, and yachts in the bay, the lighthouse on Needle Rock, and the railway bridge and cathedral and Settlers Hill, and the two-storeyed houses where our well-heeled citizens lived. Across the glittering sea Jessop was ethereal. It looks that way still, woven in lace, even with the cement silo and seven-storied DB hotel added. When the tide was out the mudflats gleamed like polished stone. In sunsets they turned pink. I’ve seen Rhona reach out to stroke them with her hand. Jessop, beyond, now and then in an afterglow, was not the place her previous life was lived in. I’m not sure she had a previous life. I’m not sure what Jessop was. But she faced it and smiled at it across those two sun-coloured miles.
My job was to talk to her. Her doctor thought there was a chance I’d reach her in that way. I told her about my work. I boasted to Rhona. I tried out jokes and anecdotes on her. I told her what was happening in Jessop and the world, confining it to good news of course. I described how Clive Meadows, also working on the apple problem, spied on me from behind the trees. He flitted there like a murderer or the ghost of someone shot, someone I’d shot. (Did I say that to Rhona? No, I did not, that wasn’t for her.) I told her about the Lomax Lecture, how the Dutch entomologist had put everyone to sleep and how his uppity wife had offended us by describing Jessop as a puddle. Puddle, she said. I told her how Irene’s German Shepherd had treed me – but not why. I gave her news of Kitty. I told her about movie stars and the two little princesses. But did not mention Hitler, Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain. And, later, did not say a war had started.
Sometimes her grip tightened on my arm. I tried to understand what had provoked it but could not find anything in my words. My silence, though, would make her look at me and sometimes she would shake my arm. I was the being that made the droning sound. When she spoke – perhaps once or twice in an afternoon – it was not to take up anything I’d said. The palms were quarrelling. The mudflats were a floor for dancing on.
I remembered poems to recite, and learned new ones. Lots of Tennyson, she seemed to like the music. The Bab Ballads. Anything with a rumpity-bump in the rhythm. Coles’ Thousand Best Poems was good for that. Sometimes I brought a book and read to her. I gave myself some pleasure in that way. I read her folk and fairy tales, avoiding Grimm ones. Now and then I sang a song or whistled a tune. And once she surprised me by singing herself:
Ev’ry morning, ev’ry evening,
Ain’t we got fun,
Not much money, oh, but honey,
Ain’t we got fun.
She let my arm go and made some lively dance steps on the gravel. Then she sighed and smiled and dreamed again.
When I said goodbye I pointed to Jessop and told her I was going ‘over there’. I released her hand and she put it in her cardigan pocket – to keep it warm? preserve my touch? – and turned away. I drove round the inlet to Jessop, where all sorts of things were going on.
One of them was Doris Clews. My mother-in-law was going on. I mean her endless treasure hunt. I did not try to stop her drinking, though it outraged many people to see me taking bottles home for her – and it cost me plenty. Some of them hinted I was trying to kill her. It crossed my mind. More than once. I’m not going to defend myself. But the fact is, I tried to strike a balance between keeping her contented and keeping her alive. So I watered her port. And I hid it about the house in half pint bottles. I hid it high and low, under and over, behind, in front (the purloined letter trick). I buried it in dirty clothes and buried it in the flour crock and put it in the waste-paper basket and under her mattress and in the cutlery drawer and in the coal scuttle. Think of a place. I put it there. On the curtain pelmet. Hanging from a coathook by a piece of twine, suicide. The idea was to exercise her, make a drinkless time, but let her get her treasure in the end. Treasure is wrong. She didn’t hoard it. But she made it last longer because of her great joy
in finding it. She swigged half a bottle on the spot but kept the rest about her and cackled over it a good long time.
I kept Doris (reasonably) happy, (just) alive, for more than a year. Then I was tired. I began to listen to arguments that she wasn’t my responsibility. The woman I’d hired as daily help quit. And I quit Doris. I gave up and put her in a home. But not before she asked me, told me, this: ‘How are we…How can we…Where…What is…Why is it? Nothing…Nothing can…I could never…Noel?’
She was marvellously lucid and exact. Among her other questions, she asked me if I knew who I was.
31
At work I had an answer that convinced me: Dr Papps. And looking back, I don’t feel too uncertain outside work. I was a man doing his best. Rhona was at the centre of things; and I’ll confess I loved her crazy more than I had ever loved her sane. I don’t find ‘crazy’ offensive. Imagine a body with the bones all snapped but its owner happy in his mind. Rhona had a place where she was happy in spite of all the broken things elsewhere, and she spent her time not looking out. She was whole. It doesn’t seem outrageous that I enjoyed loving her. I liked being useful too; and liked pity, liked my pain. Does this make me still a boy? It sounds that way. I was just someone doing his best, and managing to be useful in spite of his faults. But it’s always seemed to me I came to manhood in my marriage.
It’s beside the point though, old man’s game; a bit of cerebration, nothing more.
The Lomax lecture came round again. It brought me two encounters of some moment in my life – for this stuffiness there’s a cause, I’ll come to it. Our lecturer was the Dutch entomologist, Verryt. He was a most distinguished fellow. Doctor, professor, honorary this, visiting that. Seven feet of him – well, six – with pointed nose and pointed jaw and a yellow sunkenness in his face suggesting deep thought and midnight toil. All this for insects, I thought, and, jealous of his fame, considered him an insect himself, tea-tree jack. With insect wife, a little grub discovered in an apple. Verryt had two lectures for his tour. One, the better no doubt, was ‘The bee in human history’. I’m told he was severe with Maeterlinck. We got the dull one – ‘Entomological science in the service of mankind’. How it went on. One thing will eat another, I knew that. Tup had told me all I needed to know. I yawned and played a tune with my fingertips on my teeth. I winked at Irene, lovely sharp Miss Lomax, silken-hatted, down the row.
The little wife, the grub, saw me wink.
She was sitting between Manifold and the Bishop, leaning forward, hands on knees; and, indeed, was forward in her seat so that her toes might reach the floor. Her head was cocked on one side as she listened and my leaning forward must have shown in her eye. My wink ran like a bead on a wire, straight to her. I’m victim of the instantaneous blush. I had not the wit to turn away, or pick the gnat out of my eye; or even close my fallen mouth. Her stare was as bulbous as a frog’s, yet had the quality of voraciousness. This woman was about to gulp me down. No more than two or three seconds passed, yet it seemed she munched on me. I find, now, the image of the mantis and the fly. Then she winked. There was no mistake. Behind the inch-thick lenses of her specs one huge eye was eaten by its lid. Then, because I had trouble understanding, she poked her tongue out. It appeared like a pink grub dead centre in her lips – she had a mouth like a blood-red fruit, Satsuma plum – as though it had wriggled out to see, and then popped back. But still her magnified eyes kept their stare and I could not mistake the message. Mrs Verryt was inviting me.
The Bishop saw. He blinked. I found my wits and sat back in my chair. I pressed myself as deep as I could go. I was horrified and terrified equally.
Verryt went on – a curious kind of honking and droning that provides the ground for my memories of his wife. Applause, in which, grinning, I joined; which I prolonged, determined to put any sequel off. I willed the Bishop into more and more orotundities – but his thanks were done and there was no safety but in numbers.
‘Irene, stay close.’
‘What’s the matter, Noel? You’ve gone pale.’
‘That woman’s after me. Mrs Verryt.’
‘What for?’ Then she cackled so loudly everyone looked at us. ‘Oh, Noel.’ I thought she was going to choke. Verryt looked angry. His wife tapped her cheek. And Manifold beckoned me over. I couldn’t refuse. ‘Stay with me, for God’s sake,’ I whispered.
‘Dr Papps,’ Manifold said, ‘is our brightest star. He’s just about got corky pit whacked. Tell ’em, Noel.’
‘It’s a matter of deficiency,’ I gabbled. ‘Composition of the soil not right. God not on the job that day. Sorry, Bishop. But whose fault is it, do you think?’
‘Ah, Dr Papps, just your very question is a start. I’ve hopes for you.’
‘But this soil,’ Mrs Verryt said, ‘surely it is good for something else? Must you grow apples?’
‘It’s too late to change. The land was promoted as apple land by a company, and the sections were sold, and the orchards planted, and now we’ve got to make them work.’
‘Make good apples from bad?’
‘You could say that.’
‘You see,’ she said to her husband, ‘they are not immune.’
‘To what?’ I asked.
‘Greed and foolishness. My husband likes your country. He thought you might be – what is it, Piet, some sort of nature’s children, eh? It is not so. This Jessop is a puddle, but nevertheless you are a part of history. That is something, eh? Part of the story of mistake and fixing up – which is further mistake. So it goes on, with little puddle Jessop part of it.’
We did not care to have women talk in this way. But our battery of eyes seemed to stimulate her. ‘A little puddle full of croaking frogs. I thought New Zealand would amuse me. But it is boring.’
‘I, unlike my wife,’ Verryt began.
‘You have buildings made of wriggly tin and when it rains you cannot hear yourself. And a cathedral I would not go to black mass in. Do you not know your buildings speak for you?’
‘Unlike my wife –’
‘And where can I buy some cheese I can eat? Pixie cheese, you have. It is soap. And pixie men. How frightened they all are, unless they golp all this beer down. Then they reach for you with their fingers in the street. Pixilated.’
‘On these matters we do not agree –’
‘And why do you not open your mouths when you speak? Why do you make the air go up here, into your nose? Such ugly sounds it makes. I speak your English better than you and I am Dutch. I find your country like a little toy shop full of toys.’
‘But I –’
‘He, on the other hand, is bowled over. Is that how you say it? He finds it a corner of paradise.’ She made a face at the Bishop. ‘You do not look like angels to me.’
‘I’m interested,’ the Bishop said, ‘in your view of history. Surely your husband’s talk tonight gives more hope than that.’
‘My husband amuses himself. He plays his games.’
‘Now that’s not fair, madam.’
‘He finds an insect parasite to eat a vegetable one. And then must find a parasite to eat his parasite. He will find perhaps something to eat Herr Hitler and his Nazis?’
‘England and France will deal with Mr Hitler. We must trust our statesmen, Mrs Verryt. They have the problem well in hand.’
Mrs Verryt gave an ugly laugh. ‘And if they fail God will help, perhaps?’
‘Much of our trust must be in God. Yes.’
‘Ah, you fools, you do not know. Here in your warm puddle you do not know.’
‘We read our newspapers like anyone else,’ I cried.
She looked at me with her huge unhuman eyes. ‘Give up reading papers, Dr Papps. You must try to make your apples grow. That is sufficient work for a pixie.’
How could I have thought she wanted me? She winked, she poked her tongue out, I insisted, driving Irene home. But it must have been from malice. My God, what a woman! Poor Verryt. What a ghastly woman. And still I use that word, finding a residual nee
d to put distance between us. But –
‘I like her,’ Irene said. ‘She’s marvellous. I wish we could have had a proper talk.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘I’m not. She had the whole lot of you going backwards. You know she’s a writer? She’s almost as well known as Doctor Verryt.’
‘What sort of writer?’
‘Historian.’
‘I’m glad I don’t have to read her books.’
I walked Irene to her door. She asked me in for a drink.
‘What about Queenie?’ – her German Shepherd bitch, who sniffed my fear, and wanted to tear my throat out. Heights and dogs, my two phobias: and when my aching joints make me dream, it’s a Dobermann grinding knee or elbow; and sometimes I’m hanging on a cliff-face, holding on with fingernails that tear, and Queenie comes stepping on a ledge, with her tongue dripping like a tap, and sinks her teeth into my ribs. I had a bladder infection once and Queenie chewed my private parts.
‘I’ll put her in the kitchen.’ Which she did, and called me down the hall. I heard Queenie, homicidal, behind the door.
‘I don’t think you should keep a dog like that.’
‘She’s useful, Noel. We have prowlers.’ Irene smiled. I blushed. But in the living room we fell into our roles and laughed at the Bishop and admired Mrs Verryt – I admired her as a monster – and Irene fetched her dictionary and looked up pixilated.
‘It’s pixie-led. Wait, it’s slang for drunk. Isn’t she clever?’
‘Too damn clever.’
‘If you were pixie-led do you think you’d like her?’
She gave me whisky and poured sherry for herself. Then she sat and watched me, head on one side. She asked about the Lomax and I told the stories I’d tried out on Rhona. With my second glass I talked about Rhona too and Irene asked what would happen to her. I said she’d probably live a good long life, then deleted ‘good’. ‘Long life,’ I said. ‘She’s well. She’s fit. She’s even getting fat. They say she eats everything she’s served. I take out chocolates for her and she eats them, like this, until they’re gone. And she’s got no worries.’