Blindsight

by Gee, Maurice

  But although we, the Ferrys, were in a way lost, we bounced like rubber balls on the ground of Father. He moved with certainty and lightness, as though making dance steps on a sprung floor like that one in the hall Gordon took me to on one of my visits to Wellington: the Majestic Cabaret – it’s not there now. In appearance Father was like the priest, Father Colvin: both of them big men with white faces and black hair. Father never tanned in the sun. When he mowed the lawns or worked in the garden he wore a straw hat and a long-sleeved shirt. He never wore shorts. Exercise turned his face bright red, as though with some huge embarrassment. He sat in the shade cooling off as Mother brought him lemonade or a glass of beer. Gradually, over an hour or two, his face returned to its milky white. I pictured a contest inside him – the chemicals for heat fizzing angrily while the ones for coolness worked in a patient way, returning him to 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, where he could be comfortable.

  It was not that Father wasn’t a physical man. He and Mother played tennis before the war. They were mixed doubles champions at the Holy Cross Club on the other side of the macrocarpa hedge behind our house. ‘We’re not holy and we don’t cross ourselves,’ Father said, ‘but your mother’s good-looking so they let us in.’ He was second on the men’s singles ladder. Earlier he played rugby for the Loomis team. In a photo I’ve just fetched from the shoebox in my wardrobe he wears a striped jersey with the collar turned up and holds a ball under his arm. What a handsome young man. What a natural smile. But he doesn’t look as if he’s ready to run and pass and tackle. There’s a leaning more to moderate solutions, to sorting things out with an easy word. Others would not see it in the photo. They need my eye. Father, young Earl Ferry, is ready to lead in benevolence and humility. He’s ready to show how we need each other, how everyone is special although no one must stand out.

  Where does it come from? His own father was a dour small-town chemist, a widower at forty, a lawn bowler, wanting no more than to roll weighted balls on the shaved grass and hear them click. Their kissing was the closeness he required; he needed no family intimacies. In human feeling Father had made a standing start. No line of continuity seemed to exist between the old man rolling balls on the unnatural lawn and the younger one, white-jacketed in his shop (our shop), smoothing Gordon’s cowlick, retying my bow, then thieving cough drops for us from the jar on the counter – he hummed a tune, looking at the ceiling – and sending us home with a kiss for Mother.

  We spied on Grandfather after school. We peeped on tiptoe over the square-topped hedge enclosing the Loomis Bowling Club. There was something forbidden about him, and a mystery in how the bowls slowed down but kept on rolling. They leaned at the cringing jack and took possession of it. When Grandfather turned his eyes in our direction we ducked out of sight and knelt on the gravel path, trying not to breathe.

  We had him once a year, for Christmas dinner. He and Father talked about the shop. It was easy to see he had no interest. We saw him animated only once: the town council had proposed digging up the bowling club greens and planting vegetables for the war effort. ‘I’ll shoot any bastard who comes through the gate with a spade,’ Grandfather said.

  ‘Language, please,’ Mother said.

  He leaned on her space like a weighted ball. ‘You’ve overcooked this mutton. I like mine with a bit of blood in it.’

  Father had done his apprenticeship in Grandfather’s shop. Later he completed a Bachelor’s degree in chemistry but came back to Ferry’s the Chemist in the Loomis main street after work-ing several years for a drug company. In 1940 he bought out Grandfather. He learned how to handle the old man by stepping back emotionally and refusing to be hurt by sarcasm and abuse. ‘Take it easy, Dad,’ he said in a voice weighted gently with understanding – used those words at the table on Christmas day before Mother could defend her cooking. Grandfather answered with an impatient grunt and stumped away as soon as pudding was over.

  ‘Poor old chap. It’s no fun living alone,’ Father said.

  He sent Gordon and me around to Grandfather’s house with the presents he had left behind: hankies and socks and pipe tobacco.

  ‘Leave them on the table,’ Grandfather said. He was listening to band music on his gramophone.

  I goose-stepped back down his path with my arms rigid at my sides. ‘Don’t,’ Gordon whispered, ‘he might see.’

  Someone might hear, someone might see: two fears of his childhood. Yet he was not nervous or cringing, but sensitive. It’s a state almost guaranteeing unpopularity. Gordon avoided the danger by running fast. He ran, Father said, like a hare, and won the sprint races at the Loomis School sports and later at the Western Suburbs sports. The rugby coach put him on the wing, where he scooted around opposing players on his way to the try line. I never saw Gordon in those fights for the ball where feet and elbows flail and gouging gets done and people are left bleeding on the ground. They threw ‘the pill’ out wide to him and away he went. He did not have, the coach said, a football brain, and never knew exactly what he was meant to do but hesitated a moment after catching the ball. But when he had worked out where he was meant to go – sometimes his team-mates had to point – he took off. ‘Go, Gordy,’ the cry rang out. How lucky he was not to be punched and hair-pulled like the fat boy.

  Someone might see, and not be angry or vengeful but offended. Be hurt. That was his fear. It was Father’s lesson grafted on to him and flourishing. Concern plumped his organs. Pity sweated from his pores.

  Now I’m being vengeful and I order myself to turn about – to understand. Well, I do. I’ve put down that stuff about the Boyles, and I say one more time ‘well meant’. Yet Gordon had ways of serving himself. I tot them up and the sum is as openended as disappointment; but when I draw back to see the days passing, see him grow tall, hear his voice break, there’s just one: he served himself by feeling good about serving other people. I have proof of it but the time’s not now.

  If I step forward, it’s only as a way of stepping him back.

  I’ve spent the last few minutes holding hands, my two hands equal, left in right, right in left, with the thumbs crossed over. It’s a way of feeling human warmth. And a way of admitting that I lied above. I don’t hold Gordon in reserve. I put myself ahead of him out of interest.

  I am Alice Ferry. I have not always held hands with myself – although there’s nothing wrong with it, let me say. It gives better warmth than the friendships I retain, and intimate satisfactions and knowledge, deep knowledge, that cannot be shared. I’ve never been lonely, although I’ve wept and shivered a few times at being alone. It’s a way of finding myself.

  I’m an ordinary woman, with that ordinariness, a kind of homeliness, that becomes desirable when you recognise it. I’ve done good work and been honoured for it. My gifts have always pleased me but not lifted me above myself. What gifts are those? Intelligence, energy, persistence, intuition. More than enough for my two-stranded professional life.

  Father had been apprenticed to his father and I became apprenticed to mine. The shop was opposite the Loomis railway yards, between Hudson the Butcher and the billiard saloon, where the local boys swaggered in with fags in their mouths. None of them interested me. I could look up from serving at the counter – liniments, mouthwashes, suppositories – and watch steam engines take on water from the tall red-painted tank over the road from our door. The stoker hauled the pipe on its cord, flipped back the boiler lid, inserted the limp leather and it swelled to rigidity. The memory excites me even now. (I’m not silly, I know why.) Beyond the triple railtracks the blacksmith beat red-hot iron plates in his forge. These were men. The boys on the footpath, raucous for my attention, pimpled (poor things), hands deep in pockets, round-shouldered from choice, were foetus-like, not properly in the world. They had a narrow passage to force through and years to live before they could stand on the engine like the stoker or hammer iron glowing from the forge. I leaned sideways to watch those proper men, then stood upright to serve our customers. Q-tol. Dr Scholl’s Foot Cream.
And you say she’s teething, poor wee thing. Steedman’s Powders are the best for that.

  Why did those boys gather in front of our shop and boast in shouting voices about potting the black? They were worse than a sawmill and made our customers flinch, until Father angled his head from the dispensary: ‘Go out and send them away. But be polite, Alice.’

  ‘I’ll call the police,’ I told them.

  ‘It’s just old Banksie,’ they said. ‘He’s scared to go in. He wants some frenchies for tonight.’

  ‘I don’t, Alice. They’re lying,’ Banksie cried, flushing red up to the line of his Brylcreemed hair.

  ‘I’m phoning them.’

  ‘Alice, I don’t. I don’t want those.’

  Inside, I picked up the phone and they dispersed. They wanted me. I stood white-smocked in the cool shop like a lily in a garden nook. They wanted to pluck me, despoil me, and one or two love me perhaps. Was it my contempt that drew them, or my blue eyes and red lips and yellow hair?

  I was not saving myself for Mr Right. Nothing as silly as that. I simply enjoyed my coolness, my interests, my work and the contents of my mind. I had a sufficiency of good things and no curiosities of the flesh those unfinished boys could satisfy.

  I was in the Pharmaceutical Journal’s February list, 1949: Successful Students. Section C. Biographical Notes. Miss A. M. Ferry: Is nineteen years of age. She attended Epsom Girls’ Grammar School, Auckland, passing matriculation in 1945 and gaining her Higher Leaving Certificate the following year. She was keen on debating and was in the school tennis and hockey teams. Miss Ferry enjoys camping and the open-air life and has climbed to the top of Mt Ngauruhoe. She was apprenticed to her father, E. J. Ferry of Loomis, in 1947 and passed ‘B’ the same year. She hopes to begin a BSc degree this year. Miss Ferry is interested in the study of native flora.

  It seemed more ladylike to say flora than fungi. I did not wish to be thought unfeminine or odd. Hockey, climbing mountains, the open-air life sounded thick-ankled and hairy-legged. Nor did I wish to share. Fungi remained my secret, although Father and Mother knew, and Gordon of course.

  It began with prettiness and sweetness: violets spreading under our hedge. I lay with my face in them, drinking in the scent. I picked posies for Mother and carried bunches tied with ribbon to my teacher at school. Honeysuckle spilled down the bank by the creek. I climbed into it and lay as though on a sofa, nipping flower stems between my finger and thumbnail, taking sips of nectar fit for a bee.

  I became flower monitor in Standard Four. Mother taught me arranging from a little book she found on a bring-and-buy stall. We planted pansies by the back door and rows of marigolds and Livingstone daisies by the path. Bedding in seedlings and poking bulbs into the soil turned me away from the girliness of colour and scent, from ‘ooh’ and ‘aah’ and ‘heavenly’ and the fussiness of arranging. I discovered growth. I don’t mean by revelation, I mean interest. I saw what happened next, and how, and why.

  Science is knowing. Completion as much as anything attracts me. I don’t place this weight on the shoulders of a child. I did not know what I was getting into but absorbed through my eyes and fingertips and kept each new thing in a memory box. Each was as natural as freckles on my wrists or hairs on my head.

  I’ve been meticulous in my scientific life. I’m close and steady in picking up and putting down, in looking and acquiring, but sometimes I almost faint with joy in reaching the end. I’m delirious with completion but remain milky-faced, uninflected, and don’t celebrate until I’m alone: a glass of wine, a cigarette, Tchaikovsky at full bore on the record player, and later on a pizza ordered in and a tot of whisky before bed. I can be sure of sleeping well.

  But I’m getting ahead. When did the mycologist begin her growth in the child?

  It’s hard to say. Mushrooms in the paddocks? Toadstools under the pines? The brown smoke of spores from a puffball trodden on? I don’t think so. Blight on potato leaves? That was a fungus too. Perenospora infestens, Father said. His degree was in chemistry but he had studied botany as well. He told me other names. The mushrooms were a family, Agaricus campestris. Toadstools were Agarics too. But although naming pleased me – and the difference between genus and species, which he explained, and the deadly danger of eating the wrong thing – it was the idea of growing in secret places, in the dark, that attracted me. Unlike flowers, fungi did not open to the sun. They were, Father said, parasites. They did not live by photosynthesis, which he claimed (wrongly) was more natural, but by breaking down other living things, making them decay and feeding on the dead. He meant to make me shiver. Instead he turned me into a mycologist.

  It sounds unhealthy. But no, it was a stepping out. It was passing through a narrow door into an ill-lit room and finding a worm-eaten chest in the corner, opening it and finding diamonds, emeralds, gold dubloons, crowns inlaid with rubies and amethysts, and a suit of armour made to ward off each sword blow and lance thrust. Why shouldn’t I be lyrical about the study that has filled my life? Fungi are my treasure. Fungi are my burden of work. I’ve battled throughout my career, taken blows, returned them, but always been armoured in the knowledge: this is mine, this is what I do. And now, retired, I walk in my garden among the flowers, slide my eye down the fall of oak and pine and native to the sea, and enjoy it all, enjoy the beauty of chlorophyll and photosynthesis, while whispering to my secret workers busy in the dark: I know you’re there.

  There are jokes I’ll not repeat about women mycologists. I’ve put up with smirks and sneers, and at other times hidden my primary trade behind my secondary, limnology. Lakes and creeks sound healthy. You can even tack on swamps without making the ignorant and prejudiced step away as though you smell bad. But, essentially, I could not be touched. Whether working with smut or rust in a Petri dish or collecting green algae in waterways, I was armoured in, not enthusiasm or belief, but interest. It’s a necessary condition. You can glow, you can sparkle with interest, while keeping your attention firm and your countenance still.

  I was not understood. I was not liked. It does not matter.

  Back to the chemist shop.

  Passing ‘B’ and ‘C’ gave me no trouble, although the examiners complained that the overall standard was poor, especially in practical work. Oral and written pharmacy were no problem. I wrote a five-page essay on the sulphonamides, where apparently most candidates wrote five or six lines of vague therapeutics. But in practical dispensing I really excelled. We were asked to prepare calcium bromide, which requires a calculation to neutralise the hydrobromic acid, but oh, the thick deposits most of the other candidates were left with in their bottles! It bewildered me. How could they get such an easy thing wrong? And neutralising Spts Aeth. Nit. – it’s not a set amount, it depends on the sample. I complained to Father that these people might soon be dispensing. Some of them did not even know how to sterilise a procaine solution. They were helpless without an autoclave. And as I complained I began to boast, began to like myself very well.

  Father said, ‘They haven’t had the advantage of someone really teaching them.’ He was not praising himself but gently deflating me and turning my eyes outwards to other people. I would not look at them except to pour scorn. It was my first significant rebellion. I wanted my achievements seen, I wanted them praised. I was not going to spend my life as a small-town chemist like Father. He saw the thought move across my eyes, and gave a little smile and a nod.

  ‘I’m pleased you’ve done so well, Alice. I’ll phone your mother, shall I? We’ll have a special dinner tonight.’

  Oyster soup, lamb chops, a date roll for pudding? My cleverness, my brilliance, deserved more. Gordon read my concealed pout (our knowing of each other had ease and quickness and intensity): ‘We should go to the pictures, eh? There’s a good one at the Delta.’

  Mother and Father agreed, so we drove to New Lynn, where the film was Quartet, four Somerset Maugham stories. I found two of them silly but the one about the woman poet whose husband fails to understand her made me wi
pe my eye; and the other, called, I think, ‘The Alien Corn’, wove its situation into mine and left me soft with pity, melting with it, and shrill with the horror of anticipated failure, and hard with determination, which won out. A young man (Dirk Bogarde, I remember), ambitious to be a concert performer, persuades a famous pianist to hear him play. She listens and says, ‘No, you are an amateur. Your playing is square.’ Relief from the young man’s girlfriend and parents, who want him to be a country gentleman. The woman pianist, invited, takes off her rings and plays. The difference between amateur and professional is clear. Even I, unmusical, can hear it. The young man hears. The moment is dreadful as he understands. But there is room only for the truth. His parents thank the pianist and she leaves. They sigh and smile, preparing for the future. The young man says he’s getting ready too – for shooting pheasants, or is it grouse? How could they not have understood? A gunshot sounds …

  Anything even roughly parallel would have done. This seemed exact. I would not follow my grandfather and father. I would not spend my days in the dispensary, with gargles and mouthwashes and kidney mixture, or chat at the counter, selling friar’s balsam, lint and cottonwool, or, with a little nod and averted eyes, slip one of those brown-paper packets from under the counter – Durex or Wife’s Friend pessaries. The pianist took off her heavy rings and put her naked hands on the keys. She was no longer foreign – Hungarian, was she, Russian? – but suddenly herself, and all the others – the mother and father, the girlfriend, the young man too – were pushed back to the perimeter of her life. I overlooked that my family placed no pressure on me, that their hopes were only for my happiness. I needed to be resentful. I was breaking out from Father’s way of widening his gaze to everyone.

  I cared no more that Dirk Bogarde had shot himself. ‘I’m never going to wear rings on my hands,’ I declared. I’ve kept to that.