by Maurice Gee
‘You tried, didn’t you?’
For a moment I thought she was going to cry. But she controlled it. Her features seemed to contract, became tight and dry, like Edgar Le Grice’s in the home, pulled closer, too close, by a drawstring. She nodded once, quickly, a sharp blow like a hammer on a nail.
‘What happened?’
‘I tried to get him to fuck me.’ She swallowed: tasting grief? humiliation? ‘Undid his fly. Fished him out.’
‘But?’ I said. I saw her like a surgeon, slicing open, pulling out; and that made it sad and horrible. ‘He didn’t want to?’
‘He wanted to all right. You should have seen. But he wouldn’t. He hated me. He would have killed me.’
I shivered for her. Saw her danger. ‘What did he do?’
‘Ran into the sea. Gave a yell. Like he was shot. Splashed around. Laughed at me. He was lifting water over his head. Smacking his hands on it. Then he started singing hymns.’
‘It sounds pagan.’
‘I don’t know what it was. He kept on calling, “Let Him into your heart, Kate. Give yourself to Him. Come with me”.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I went away.’
‘That was right.’
‘I parked somewhere and sat around and had a sleep. Then I came home.’
‘You couldn’t have stayed there. But if he’d come with you – ’ I didn’t finish. I meant he would have killed her, or himself in some slow way.
Kate, I’m glad. I’m glad he’s there. I’m more than glad you didn’t get him. You won’t like my saying that, you won’t agree, but you need my way of seeing things.
‘I’m glad too,’ Kate says.
49
There’s a curve in my tale, a narrowing. Some things are going and will not come back – some people gone. Others are shrinking in importance – people, events – and multitudes are going to be left out. Yet I see the importance of everything. Each thing has its weight. That is what concerned me in my work. A life though isn’t measured in that way. How is it measured, how does it move? That’s what I’m busy finding out. That’s what I’m not busy finding out.
I’m not any longer compelled. I’m easy in my choices and casual in picking up this or that. I sit here and think about things and choose not to write them down; or I forget. A morning on my sundeck passes like the turning of a wheel. Time present and time past, now and then, bring their motions into agreement and I know the joys of congruency.
Well, that’s a mood. I must not be too pleased with myself or some quantity unknown will come along and flatten me.
Here comes Kate with a cup of tea. Now, half an hour later, she’s gone. What a pleasant time. We looked at the river and looked at the mountains and took notice of the town in between. Nothing came up to unsettle us. Nothing came creeping out of our heads and there were no great flashes of light. Kate dunked her gingernut too long and half of it fell in her lap as she tried to rush it to her mouth. That was the worst thing that happened. She said nothing about Shane. The Shane in her no longer wants to make his presence felt. She has him fitted in place. That was quick, but she achieved it by symbolic action: packed his things in a tea-chest, nailed down the lid, painted his name on it and the commune’s name, called a carrier – retained only the bit of him she can use, the bit she can’t get rid of anyway. Well done, Kate. Now she’s at her typewriter, busy with Kitty Hughes.
‘You can’t leave Irene out,’ she says. I was not aware of it, but she claims that Irene isn’t properly done. It pleases me, amuses me, the bakehouse image. I see my father lifting out loaves on his paddle and dropping them one by one in a wicker basket. I won’t accept it though, people as loaves. I mean to leave Irene at her piano. That is my way of seeing her: Irene in mid-life, at her music. That is the measure of little Reen.
But I’ve been too sure of myself, too complacent, and things have gone out of kilter again. The quantity unknown was Royce Lomax. He’s a person easy to overlook but now and then you notice him standing by, wagging his tail. That was a kick aimed at Royce. Why do I want to kick him when the friendly thing, the thing he most longs for, is a pat?
He telephoned half an hour ago. Royce is getting ready for an exhibition of his work. He knows I won’t go to the opening so invites me to his house to see the paintings before he takes them to the gallery. ‘Some of them will interest you, I think.’ I can’t imagine what he means by that. Has he painted me spying at the window? Has he painted Irene scratching my face?
I pleaded sickness, feeble thing to do, but he asked for Kate and told her he’d found some photographs of Kitty and a note from her to Irene, nothing important. She could have them if she called and brought me too. Cheeky devil! Am I goods to be bargained for?
‘I won’t go, Kate.’
‘It’ll do you good to get out, Noel. You’ve been sitting in this house for almost a year.’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing, I guess.’ She ruffled my hair. ‘Do it for me.’
We’re going tomorrow. Kate has promised to make our visit short.
50
First we did some shopping. Kate parked the car in one of those asphalt yards bigger than two football fields together, with little boxes painted up and down. That place is a city square with its heart ripped out. We went into a building called City Centre, past toilets with graffiti spray-painted on their walls. The Grateful Dead, says one, very ancient. What does that mean? Is it a message? No Tour, says another. That could be a message too.
I bought slippers and pyjamas. All this is of no consequence. Several women stopped to say hello. How they love saying Sir. Good God, I thought, after I’d said goodbye, I acted with that one in Charley’s Aunt. We made love in my car after the party. Damned uncomfortable and I got cramps. She thought my cries of pain were cries of passion and tried to stop my mouth with her own. And today she very nearly bobs a curtsey and addresses me as Sir Noel. But all this is of no consequence.
A hawker was selling copper knick-knacks from a cart. Kate stopped and talked to him and bought a bangle. I started to enjoy my walk in the street. Buskers piped and fiddled outside the bank where the girl with the milk petition had been. I dropped a dollar note in their violin case; and further up the street I bought a raffle ticket for a trip for two to Disneyland. Kate says she’ll come with me; and then, I said, we’ll go on to New York and London and I’ll show you real buskers in Vienna and Copenhagen. But I was more than satisfied with our homegrown pair. The bishop strode by. He’s a new chap. I found his purple comic, though he wore it with more style than his predecessor. The young too were in coloured clothes; in coloured hair. I saw girls with yellow lipstick and silver nails and one with a black star on her cheek and one with a gold stud in her nose. Two young men strolled by, holding hands. How things change. But it’s not of much consequence. It’s fun to look at though. This city, Jessop, floats like a coloured jellyfish in the sea. It grows and it pulses and it throbs. I’m part of it, a cell; that, at least, is how it seems for a moment. And cells don’t think, so I won’t question it.
Now on we go to see Royce Lomax and his paintings.
I said to Kate, ‘You go in first and make sure he’s got his dog tied up.’
It’s possible I saved my life with that precaution. The animal came leaping from the porch. Kate held out her hand for him to sniff and I felt my own hand full of pains and felt teeth sink in my groin and hip. This is extreme, hysterical, but it’s a fact, so I put it down. The barking brought Royce round from the back yard. He led the dog away by its collar and Kate came back to the car for me. She leaned in the window and held my hand. ‘I’m sorry, Noel. I should have rung him up. Are you all right? Do you want to go home?’
‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I’m here now. Let’s go in. Is it tied up?’
We walked up the path through the weeds. I’ve seen gardens more neglected and houses in greater disrepair, but this neglect was personal and I had a sense of weeds growing in my skul
l, of parts of me rusting and rotting and dropping off. Perhaps my recent fear was keeping circuits open for I’m not a person to care about things or be sentimental – but I began to stutter with rage and when Royce opened the door I threw words at him like scoria. This, this, this, I cried, this was a disgrace. It was criminal neglect. Royce was a vandal. He didn’t deserve it, Irene’s house…letting it fall into this leprous state…and so on. He took it well, went pink, grinned like a rabbit. He made no excuses, but said, ‘Well, Noel, some things I see and some I don’t. I guess I’m blind. It is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?’ He looked around the porch and said vaguely, ‘It could do with a coat of paint.’
‘But you won’t do it.’
‘Noel, Noel,’ Kate said, and led me into the house. I blinded myself, I did not want to see, and was in the living-room, enveloped in a chair, before objects made themselves known. Then it was Irene’s piano I saw – and I calmed down. I calmed down as though she played me music for that purpose. I – but enough about me. Why should I parade my feelings in this way? They existed, went away, and what profit is there in poking at their corpses? They were yesterday, and located in my head, and where is that, of what significance? What a tiny thing, my head. What a tiny thing, yesterday. And Royce. And Kate. This looms as a discovery. I might as well write the tale of three pebbles on the river bed.
I am sorry about that. Depression sometimes knocks me over like a medicine ball. It was that regiment of ‘I’s marching on the page. That’s an explanation. Lead soldiers in red coats pretending with all their might to be alive.
It was old age. Another explanation. Suddenly your energy, all of your life, runs out. You’re as dead as lead. You float away like ashes from a fire.
Making contradictions works as a cure.
Now. Royce gave Kate a wicker box of photographs and went to the kitchen to make tea. She read the letter first and smiled to herself.
‘Interesting?’
‘Mm. Perhaps.’
‘Can I see?’
It was written on paper with a ministerial letter-head.
Dear Reen,
I shouldn’t have troubled you with my nonsense. The rain was coming down and maybe there were ghosties that night, and maybe there are ghosties in my head. Who knows what I saw or what I did? Forget it, there’s a pet, and that’s an order. Eyes front. There’s plenty up ahead to keep us busy.
Love,
Kitty.
‘Doesn’t make sense.’ It can’t make sense to us, that’s what I mean. But Kate just gives a nod and a secret smile. She’s playing the expert on Kitty Hughes and I don’t mind letting her have the role if it makes her happy. She put the letter in her bag and started going through the photographs. Royce must have taken them. His talents don’t extend to photography. They were mostly of Irene and he’d tried to do portraits with a snapshot camera. She was dark and blurred, shadows smudged her. In several her head seemed to bulge and be lopsided. He’d made the dislocation in her face extreme – and now that I say that, I wonder if he meant to? Perhaps his photographs came out just as he intended.
Kate threw those ones in the box and kept out half a dozen of Kitty and Irene.
‘Not much good. Except for this.’
It showed them standing by Kitty’s little car. Kitty had her hands on her hips and her bosom on attack. Irene, fingers folded at her waist, looked sideways up at her with a sly expression. Though one was large, one small, though one looked out, one in, they were equals in the photograph. I would have liked to keep it for myself.
‘Find anything?’ Royce came in with a tray.
‘I’ll keep this one,’ Kate said. ‘And the letter.’
‘Yes, of course. You can take one of Irene, Noel, if you like. Take the lot. They’re heading for the incinerator.’
I did not like that. But I need no photographs of her. I have her in my head. Kitty and Irene together I do not have. I told him I’d share the photograph Kate was taking.
She said, ‘Did Irene give you any idea what this letter meant?’
‘I’ve never seen it before. It’s Dutch to me. Milk in your tea?’
The room was swept and dusted and though the piano was closed it had a glossy cared-for look. I discovered that Royce had a five-roomed house scattered in the mansion – kitchen, living-room, bedroom, bathroom, studio if that’s the word – and he kept it neatly. All the rest was dusty, threadbare, peeling, tumbling down. When we’d had our tea he took us to see his paintings. His studio is the big room in the north corner of the house where I’d seen him doing pencil sketches of an apple. Now where has he got to? I don’t know. It’s a strange place and he’s been so alone on the journey that now and then I’m afflicted with an image of this dumpy little man standing like a stone monolith on a moor. It’s disturbing, it’s bleak and cold, he’s bleak and cold – and yet he’s such an ineffectual fellow.
‘There,’ he said, ‘these around the wall are the ones for the exhibition.’
I’ve said I don’t like his paintings. I still don’t like them. But does the word ‘like’ have relevance when one is faced with things of this sort? And is the Royce who waits so diffidently, is that Royce? Where does the darkness come from? What are these shapes? What is that light? Who is he?
I said, ‘Good God.’
Kate said, ‘Crikey,’ under her breath. One of Kitty’s words.
‘These ones here are new. Since I called to see you, Noel.’
They were not hung with the rest but propped against the wall – paintings five or six feet tall and four feet wide. (That’s one thing I can be sure about.) They were done on board and the paint was acrylic. (We talked about the chemistry of it later.) They were of my river, my hill. I did not have to be told, although the likeness was poor and the colours taken from outside nature. My green hill was grey or black. My river was black or white. Sometimes it was a black river under a black hill, defined only by strokes of the brush. But black or not, it was a river of light as well as water. There was no sky. How then did I know the black or grey in the top of the picture was the hill? I knew by a shape within the mass. He has always been good at things lying underneath; shapes within; shadows under surfaces. The river never varied in its line. It came in half way up the right hand side, plunged at the hill and was turned aside, perhaps thrown back; flowed out of frame at the bottom edge.
The hill crushed me, the river kept life within my body.
He offered me a painting as a gift. I said they were very nice but I did not want one, they were too big for my walls. Besides, I had real river and real hill.
‘There is one painting I’d like if you’ve still got it. It used to hang in Irene’s room.’
He was disappointed. He was crushed. That happens to artists I suppose. They must bounce back because they always seem to keep on going, and keep on going in their own way too. Royce’s pain was quickly gone. He’s a tough little egg. There’s a shape within his shape. We left Kate in the studio and went up to Irene’s room.
Terror at closed doors about to open, doors of those we love or seem to love. It ran through me like electricity, making my cheeks jump and eyeballs fizz and my heart bang in triple time – then was gone. I had felt there, for a moment, I was going to know Irene at last and make her mine. It was gone. I put my hand on the wall and stared at the dust in the mouldings. Sanctum? No. It was nothing really, no name fits. Royce opened up and led me in. He tugged the curtains, making golden dust, a swarm of gnats. I thought it was pretty and supplied a tinkly tune, yet had little sense of Irene’s presence. Pink roses on the wallpaper, frills on the satin coverlet. Not Irene. She was tougher, twistier, crueller than this. Her being was too large and complicated for this room.
‘That’s it,’ I said to Royce, pointing at the picture. He took it down and blew dust off and wiped it with his sleeve. We sat on Irene’s bed and looked at it. He was puzzled and intrigued.
‘I’m not sure I know what it means.’
I touched the black shape ove
r the sea. ‘That’s Irene. If you turn it round you’ll see her face.’ I was quite sure. I saw her face looking away from me. ‘That’s her too.’ I touched the shadow in the sea and it seemed to move off slantwise and settle in a new place, deeper down.
Royce said nothing for a while. Then he agreed. ‘I suppose you’re right. I spent most of my life painting Irene.’ He touched the black shape himself. ‘I can’t remember why she’s there. I finished it, then I put her in. It’s a rather messy picture though.’
‘It’s the one I want.’
‘That’s what she said. She said it was my first real painting.’
He told me that all his paintings, the ones he was famous for, the slitted caves and phallic trees, the hills wrenched askew, the hills that arched their backs like beasts breaking the crust of the land, the clouds like fists, the rivers that tore hills apart, were paintings of Irene, of himself, the inside of his head and of her head; and the shape, the outside, of her head. He used feng-shui, Chinese geomancy, as an aid, a kind of starter, but lately was getting by without intermediate forms. His painting had little to do now with symbols and metaphors. It owed less to the Viennese chappie too, Dr Fraud (Irene’s name for him). It still owed quite a lot to phrenology. He and Irene had spent hours feeling the shape of each other’s heads.
And I. Not hours. Just once. She was ill. It may have been the last time I saw her. She was in that room where Royce and I sat on the bed.
Irene wore a blue bed-jacket embroidered with lilies. She seemed near shedding her crinkled skin. She was only in her sixties but had no bitterness and no surprise about her death.
We talked about Tup Ogier and I asked if I could feel her bump of harmony. She took my hand and placed the fingers just above and forward of her ear, by the temple. So I touched Irene at last.
‘What do you feel, any magnetism?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘A kind of tingling.’
‘Harmony is very strong in me. I’ve got a good bump. Now. Back here.’ She shifted my fingers. ‘Destructiveness. Very close. That’s interesting, isn’t it? Feel anything?’ A kind of oiliness and inkiness, something cold, malevolent. But I’m suggestible at times – and this was a ‘time’. ‘Nothing,’ I said, and moved my hand along.