by Janet Frame
Fay went from the room to put the kettle on for a cup of tea. She was singing,
Seven lonely days make one lonely week
la-di-la-la-la-la-la-di-da.
Ever since the day that you came along.
She’s happy, thought Toby. She has long hair like all the mill girls when the fashion is that way, done with a kind of bob thing at the back, some say it is false hair, that you may buy it in the hairdressers where plaster heads of women sit in the window with their gold and dark permed hair and the place is filled with the smell of burning as you pass the door. Perhaps, he thought, Fay wears false hair, and she will take it off at night and hang it on a nail in the corner of her bedroom. And Albert will not mind, for he wears a false heart; his other heart was eaten out by corrosive ink and typewritten upon like a form to be filled in.
And Fay, Toby thought, wears lipstick, to pretend there is blood in her pallor, that all her blood has not been drawn, year after year, into the neon sunlight of the mill that draws blood as the natural sunlight draws flowers. She ties her lips with red ribbon, in a bow, that Albert Crudge will undo, and both will find their empty strongbox of heart, and not know that the Social Security Department and the Woollen Mills have the key and will not part with it, ever. And if I had really loved Fay, and she loved me, and we married, I should have paid instalments of myself to the factory till I became bankrupt and a whirling spiritless machine that makes the same speech day after day till its life ends.
Toby looked at Fay as she entered the room and wondered if the brand of the mill girl was still on her shoulder where she had been whipped and led with the factory strap.
Was the mark of it there, as it had been that afternoon when she went with him to the beach and he threw her hair upon the water and shot her heart and plucked her bird-feathers?
Fay set the tea down beside him on the table.
—Don’t stare at me, Toby. I’m practising for when I’m a real hostess. Do you have milk and sugar? Weak or strong?
—Milk and sugar, Toby answered promptly. Please.
She regarded him, smiling and thinking, He certainly knows what he wants. They say his mother looks after him too well. I hope Albert remembers to treat me as his wife and not as his mother to be fetching and carrying for him.
As she poured Toby’s cup of tea she thought with excitement, Albert has strong tea with no milk. I shall remember that all my life. And he takes two teaspoons of sugar.
—Have a cake, Toby. I made them.
Toby listened while Fay gave the recipe for the cakes she had made.
—And you must weigh everything very carefully when you are cooking particularly the flour, and never let the baking powder get moist. Now don’t think I’m getting all domesticated just because I’m getting married. Don’t think it because it’s true.
She smiled at him once more. She felt sorry for Toby Withers, shingle short that he seemed to be, with his goofy look and his fits and his obsession with money, though that wasn’t anything to be sorry for, in fact admired. Albert had it. Oh Oh, she thought, I have got the right husband, I know. And the house will have the new type of venetian blind that you don’t have to dust, the latest of latest blinds. Poor Toby. He’s never had a girl that I know of.
—No, I never liked cooking before, Toby, but I do now, she said proudly.
—Do you like them?
Toby said he liked their flavour. He felt tired of being in the room; he believed he had been having a kind of fit, but could not be sure. But he wanted to leave Fay and go home and count his money to make sure of it all. He wanted to go home and take out the new Atlas he had bought, and read it through and through, the places with their names and the beautiful colours of the pastureland and cornlands and the pictures of the mountains with their tiny threepenny caps of snow. He wanted to sit alone in his room and trace his finger over the lands of the world. And read in the diagrams about gold and iron and steel, and see the compressed bundles of wheat and the various blue seas, his own Tasman and Pacific, and oceans further off and bluer, Indian, Antarctic, Adriatic.
But Fay said, —You must see my presents Toby.
And she led him to the front room that seemed full of blankets and sheets and towels and pots and pans and knives and forks and cups and saucers and clocks,
—And this is my dinner service from the Mortons.
And this is the teashower. Isn’t it lovely? I’m showing you all these because you say you are not coming to the wedding. I’m really having an evening to show off my presents. And look at all the handkerchiefs and salad servers.
She was overwhelmed and excited.
—And the girls at work gave me a pop-up toaster and toast racks, I had a presentation, and the manager gave a speech and said what a good worker I had always been. I don’t know, when you are getting married people treat you different all together. I used to get told off for lazing and then they say I was a good worker and they were sorry to lose me.
—What was it like working at the Mill?
—Oh, the same as anywhere, I suppose. Machines and noise, but morning and afternoon tea sharp. And ten per cent reduction, or more, on the woollen goods. I got the blankets for my box almost as soon as I started at the mill.
—And will you sleep in them, in your new house, and they won’t remind you?
—Don’t be silly, Toby. It’s not the blankets I’ll think of when I go to sleep.
Toby looked embarrassed. Then he asked seriously,
—Did you wear a leather strap?
—A what?
—A leather strap. Around your neck so that it made a mark. They used to say–
Fay interrupted, —Oh, that was an old story, surely you didn’t believe that. It was a child’s story, and not true.
—But child’s stories are always true.
—Giants and fairies as well? Toby Withers!
—Yes, giants and fairies, in different shapes. There’s a giant bomber and a giant loneliness.
Fay looked sympathetically at Toby. Poor man. To think he was thirty years old or over thirty. And believed about the strap and its mark.
Fay put on a mischievous air, —You can look if you like, about the strap, she said. Would you like to look and make sure?
—Don’t be silly. I just wondered.
—I dare you to look.
Fay was enjoying herself. She pulled down her jersey to reveal her shoulder and part of her breast. She wore a pink flimsy thing underneath, with lace. Toby could see through it. He stared horrified and fascinated while Fay smiled at him enticingly
—Toby Withers, haven’t you seen a bare shoulder in your life before? Don’t look so scared.
—I’m not scared, said Toby, blushing, and the more he thought of himself as not scared, the more he blushed.
I think, Fay Chalklin, that you’re a common woman to half undress in front of me when you’re nearly married.
—I’m sorry Toby, but you’re so raw. But thank you for the lovely presents and I’m sorry you can’t come to the wedding. Goodbye Toby, and I’m sorry I haven’t the mark on my shoulder.
Toby turned as he went outside the door, —But you have got the mark, Fay. I saw it there. We all carry some kind of mark like that because we are all branded in our lives, as I was. That is true. I don’t know much, not how to spell anyway, I shall never learn to spell and what to say to people like you, but I’ve got my books in my room, atlases that tell about the world and the seas and the first map of everywhere.
And he did not say goodbye but hurried down the path to his truck. He climbed in and drove away while Fay watched through the window. She was thinking, I’m frightened. In spite of the teashower done in blue and the plates and sheets and the silver apostle teaspoons. I’m frightened, because there’s something going to happen, and Toby Withers is so strange he makes me feel the mill has captured me and wound me up like a mummy. And she buttoned up her jersey and put her hand across her shoulder where the mark of the leather strap was said
to be; and then she burst into tears, and when her mother came home she found her there with all her presents and crying, and said,
—It’s wedding nerves, Fay. Not long now and you’ll be in that little home of your own, sweeping the doorstep and hanging out your washing on the new clothes-line.
And so it happened. Fay was married, a spring bride, and looking the social page of the newspaper said — radiant in white nylon over lace with an heirloom veil held in place by a tiny sprig of orange blossom.
And Albert’s cousin Gloria, who was in the church choir, sang The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. And after the wedding there was a breakfast, really a supper because it was an evening wedding, but they called it a breakfast, in the Brown’s Hall, which was twice as expensive to hire as the Cosy Nook restaurant; and there were three kinds of cream cakes, and plenty of fruit salad, no liquor of course, only soft drinks because the Chalklins and Crudges, the parents, did not approve; but returns of everything if you asked for them, even though the waitresses were working late, and tired out and crotchety. Oh it was a beautiful wedding, everybody said so, and the bride and bridegroom went away late that very night to the Lakes for their honeymoon.
And that night Toby sat in his room reading his Atlas. In the inside cover was a map written in old writing which said
A New Map of the Terraceous Globe according to The Ancient Discoveries and First General Divisions of it into Continents and Oceans.
Toby read the words over and over and then he turned the pages to the South and North Poles and the rest of the world that was not ice, all in pale colour of seashells. Gulf of Guinea. Morocco. Asia. He touched the gold piles of wheat and the swamp grass and the monsoon forests and the salt flats, plantless rock deserts and the terrible tiny mass of black that meant a million people crouched on a world of yellow sunlight. And he crossed the seas, Tasman, Pacific, Adriatic, Antarctic, and the continent, unnamed, on the last page, that was burned through with the mark of a leather storm; he crossed the seas with one stroke of his dirty red hand. How simple to travel, and on a night like this too, a spring night with the air outside so thick with hawthorn and plum and powdered catkin that it had to be elbowed and brushed aside before it could be breathed.
The willows down on the banks of the creek were showing their tenderest green, and the pear trees too, and the oaks, mother-wide, by the old pig sty, and wondering with every sprout of infant leaf, Who will eat our acorns when they grow? Years ago the people before the Withers had kept pigs that used to snuffle among the dead oak leaves and swallow the coffin-polished acorns that rained down, like death, and were trodden in the earth and squashed, until some shot up like little green periscopes, and
—Little by little,
Amy Withers would say, who remembered and liked to quote verse,
—Little by little the acorn said.
If you looked outside on this spring night you would think there would never be any winter or blot of death, only tonight and tonight, and people getting married and having their photos taken to put in the paper or keep on their mantelpiece for the first ten years, and then put away in the drawer; and having rice thrown at them, and the keys of their suitcase stolen for fun; and for ever after, perplexed young-old men of thirty-two sitting alone in their bedroom and travelling across blue-bag seas to fields of paper corn; only tonight and tonight and mothers and fathers sitting in their kitchen, half asleep, half listening to the radio talking to them of soap and floor-polish and Ceylon tea; and then drinking their own cups of tea and eating shortbread with the holes pricked for it to breathe; and all the Chicks living up north, far away and grown-up, but writing down from beside their spaceheaters that breathed a dragon-warmth, —We are coming south to live. Tim has bought a house there. Excuse the letter-card.
And all the Daphnes sitting somewhere in a mad hospital, in a small room with a shut window and a bed of straw and singing; and all the Francies being burned for ever in a toi-toi hollow of mind.
You would think this night that the world sated with blossom and love and death would finish and there would be no memory of it anywhere, save perhaps on a cave wall of new time, where the posturing figures dance unseen their stillness of clay or chalk or stone.
You would think all this on a spring night.
Except the thinking is not real.
22
A week later Toby received through the post a small silver tin of wedding cake from Mr and Mrs Albert Crudge. It was in a nest made of pink and blue threads of coloured paper. He was about to eat it, or at least taste it, when his mother said,
—Toby, Toby, you sleep with it under your pillow and you dream of the person you will marry. No, no – she corrected. That’s only for a girl. If you sleep with it under your pillow you will dream of your future, and it brings good luck. Not that I believe in good luck, it is all the Lord’s will. It’s just a quaint superstition of putting the cake under your pillow.
Toby said he was sure he would not sleep with cake under his pillow.
And his mother said, —Well, we’ll send it to Daphne, then, poor soul, I wonder how she is. They never seem to tell us, and she never seems to write and we can’t visit her. I’m sure she would like a piece of wedding cake.
So it was arranged to send the cake to Daphne, and Toby put it on his dressing-table to remember to post it the next day. But that night as he got into bed he thought, well, I’ve seen Dad asleep with cake under his pillow; cake, wedding and Christmas, as well as those Cornish elves he sends for, dipped in magic water, that will grant every wish. It might bring me luck. I need luck to pull down the Peterkin Hotel and make money. It’s a silly superstition but there’s no harm in trying.
He put the tin under his pillow and turned over to sleep. He thought first of Fay Chalklin – no, Fay Crudge, and her husband, with factories and ledgers locked in them, and he wondered what Fay was doing at this time, and how she liked being married, and whether she would look any different when he saw her next time. Would she be having a baby? What would it be like to have a son or daughter? And a wife, having a wife, what would that be like?
And then Toby thought of the world, of Barcelona and Berlin and London, and some words that kept in his mind,
—Say this city has ten million souls.
And he thought of the short grass, tall grass, bunch grass, mountain grassland, swamp grass, mangroves. Of desert savanna and salt flats. Of pack ice and mean annual precipitation. Of all continents, scarred and burned by wind and rain. And his nose was itchy, and he picked a little ball out of it and rolled it round between his thumb and forefinger, and wiped it on his pillow. Then he curled himself up warm as an embryo and went to sleep, floating without breath on an Adriatic sea, a Gulf Stream of grey water.
And he dreamed.
And in his dream he sat in a cold apple orchard on a corner of the moon. He sat in a circle of toi-toi that hung with apples of ice. He would have picked one and eaten it, for he liked apples, but three witches danced about him, singing the same words that Daphne had told him they sang, three witches, on the heath with Hecate, in thunder and lightning.
—He shall live a man forbid, they sang.
Then they stopped singing and sat down, cross-legged, with their long skirts over their knees, and they rocked three cradles that were made, each one, of a corner of the moon; and Toby wondered where the fourth corner lay, and he felt afraid until he remembered he was sitting on it in an ice-cold apple orchard. But where is the world, he thought? I need a tiny telescope, even a toy one made of a stick of toffee that I could eat afterwards, only I need a telescope, a toy one cheap and plastic from Woolworths, yet stronger for my needs than the walking stick of Albert Crudge; and I will not spend much money on my telescope; only to look that I may know the world and see my life and my mother and father and three sisters on their island with the fire at the centre and the sea with its green web of forgetting; and across it, Fay Chalklin, the mill girl, and her Albert, the Social Security man, inhabiting whe
re I shall never sail; and he has taken his wife, I know he has taken her, and sliced her in pale coloured slices like a seashell to be thrown back, day by day to the water; and pressed her like a flower between the pages of a large black book of judgement that has written on the outside, in frilly silver writing like a wedding invitation,
A New Map of the Terraceous Globe according to the Ancient Discoveries and First General Divisions of it into Continents and Oceans.
Then in his dream Toby began to cry because he was alone and took fits and the middle witch left off rocking the cradle and came up to him, and said,
—Don’t cry, Toby, have an apple. We are safe here. No one will know it has been stolen.
She gave him an apple of ice that melted green and red in his warm hand, the green changing to sea, the red into blood, and both flowing in salt streams across the corner of the moon. He washed his face and hands in the two streams, trying to take the black away from under his fingernails, and the nicotine from his fingers; while the three witches that were called Francie, Daphne and Chicks, rocked the cradles that held themselves as children, dreaming, with sticky warm faces, like kittens set down to suckle furry mother sleep.
—But where am I, thought Toby. There is no place for me. Where is my cradle?
—Why don’t you rock me, he asked the three witches. And one or all of them answered,
—We are afraid of you, Toby. You will take a fit.
And then he wondered again, Where is the world? He thought, perhaps I should ask the witches where the world can be, for I need money and food and clothing and some kind of social position. I shall be arrested here as a tramp and thrown in the sea or burned when morning comes and the old fires are relit in the circle of toi-toi.
He beckoned to Francie.
—Francie, you are the eldest and can tell me. Where can I find some money to have for treasure?
Francie laughed and shook her long skirt. He saw that her eyebrows had been plucked and she wore lipstick.
—Toby, don’t you know this is our treasure place right here, you know, the books and valuable writings and things that we find, and we sit here, and the sky rolls round and round like a blue and white and grey milky marble. Oh Toby, don’t you know? And the pine tree with the needles that fall and sew up our crying. She twirled her skirt again and frowned like a real witch and said, in a superior way, Don’t believe me, then, if you don’t want to. But ask Daphne or Chicks. Go on, ask them. Or I’ll tell.