by Janet Frame
And so on and on. In the afternoon I have time to read. I am reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. It is the story of a woman and her drunkard husband, her suffering and terror in a world of squalor – that is what it says on the cover. I find the book absorbing, indeed I dare not put it down. What will Huntingdon do next, I ask myself, quivering, like his wife Helen, for fear and suspense. What a brute of a man to so treat a woman’s love. The scene where Huntingdon has a rendezvous in the shrubbery with his current mistress, and his wife, taking a solitary walk in the same area at nightfall, is mistaken by Huntingdon for the woman he has promised to meet, and therefore greeted passionately and fondled, until he discovers his error and exclaims in disgust and fear,
—My wife! Helen!
that scene abhors and disgusts me. I have read it carefully three times.
Sometimes in the afternoon I have visitors like the Baldwins, Benny and Ted, or the Smarts, Terry and Josie. Very often Benny and Josie call and we sit and talk babies and husbands and housework over a cup of tea and biscuits. I feel so ashamed that I never have tins full of my own cooking when visitors call – I have to undo the cellophane off packets of biscuits, chocolate and wafers, and pasties; and though Benny and Josie are too polite to make remarks, I feel their criticism, for they always have meringues or peanut brownies or those pinky marshmallow cakes, when I visit them. Benny’s father is a judge in the Supreme Court and her husband is high-up in the Civil Service. The Smarts have a new house over in one of the bays – a coming area, they say. They know the Bessicks, Dr Herbert and his wife Alison, and have promised us an introduction. Dr Bessick is a brilliant gynaecologist, just returned from studying overseas – his wife had an article in the social news about their life on the continent and the States. She is a bit of a shrew, they say, but dresses perfectly and is, they say, an entertaining hostess. Both the Baldwins and the Smarts, by the way, are in the local drama club. We have playreadings on Tuesdays.
Now how else shall I describe my day? In the evening after tea there is always the children’s bath and story, for Tim and I believe in the idea of putting children to bed after a story. Tim bought a book on child psychology, and we have studied it. Some of the ideas do not seem to work with Mark, he is so individual and temperamental. Tim reads the story while I fix the baby’s bottle. Children’s books are different now from when I was a child. I have enjoyed reading Jemima Puddleduck, by Beatrix Potter, I had never read it before, how the foxy gentleman kept his newspaper in his tail coat pocket and had a shed full of feathers for Jemima Puddleduck to lay her eggs in. What a cunning swindler was the foxy gentleman, and how gullible poor Jemima Puddleduck. It was almost like real life with its intrigue and near-murder.
By the way, Tim has bought me an electric cake mixer so that I can make a chocolate and walnut sponge for the weekend when we meet the Bessicks. It’ll be strange to meet a doctor socially, especially a gynaecologist, though I shall be too seasoned to blush if I remember what he must know about the insides of women. Ten years ago I should have fled. Just imagine.
It is late now and I am tired. Tim has just gone down to the gate with the milk bottles. Oh, the weather is so hot and humid, I don’t know how I can bear it sometimes. And the mosquitoes, there seems to be a plague of them this year – they say there have never been so many. I shall go to bed soon. Benny says she uses Wisteria Night Cream, that it is better than Gloria Haven. I have tried Gloria Haven before and I, too, feel there is something lacking in it. Today I bought a pot of Wisteria at the chemist’s, extravagance no doubt, but Tim does not mind, indeed he encourages me, and likes to see me taking an interest in my make-up. What a perfect husband. Where in all the world would I find a man more thoughtful or loving? And to think that years ago he was one of those dirty little boys who used to hang around my sister Francie at Waimaru, and I used to poke my tongue out at him. His father was a council man, and though Tim began his first year medical, he did not finish it, it was not suited to his talents. He is now high-up in selling, not a mere commercial traveller, but a high pressure executive with responsibility. His friend Howard Weston (the Westons have a sheep station in the country back of Waimaru) has fixed the sale of our new house at Waimaru. When I saw the pictures and plans of it, I thought it seemed strange that it should be built over the old rubbish dump where we used to play as children and where Francie was burned. The idea frightened me. Living where we used to sit amongst the toi-toi, tickling it down our backs and putting it in our hair for feathers; where we explored and found what we called treasure, old tyres and boots that we said were walked in at night by dead men and giants; and bits of motor cars, and books, and all the rubbish under the sun. And from morning to night, how long seemed the time, with the day taking chicken steps in the sky. Yes, when I live in our house there I shall feel afraid and strange; yet I feel it is the right place to live; the place with its promise of happiness and treasure in our future life and then its despair over Francie, I had a blue ribbon in my hair that day, and it kept coming undone and there was no one to tie it for me; it is like a kind of gap in my life.
What nonsense I talk.
Now I must stop writing in this diary for tonight. Tim is in the bath. He always runs it far too hot so that the place is all steam and his body like a cooked crayfish; and he even reads in the bath. Dear Tim! To think I have been married eight years. Now I must go to bed, and before I sleep, finish one more chapter of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
January 21st
I am excited over meeting the Bessicks. And afraid. It will be my first real experience of hostessing to people who really matter. I have asked them to come in the evening for I think it would be more convenient and less nerve-racking with the children asleep, though I had wanted to show off Sharon’s curly hair and dimples and that charming smile of hers, and the pink nylon frock, embroidered in Switzerland. Never mind. To fill in a little of the evening, if conversation lags, we have arranged to play Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony on the radiogram. I am quite safe with that for I have read about it and what it is meant to represent and know the different movements, and therefore should be able to make some intelligent remark about it. I believe the Bessicks are musical, and I feel quite safe with the Fifth Symphony. I can mention about fate knocking on the door and that kind of thing. I shall do out the sitting room in the afternoon so as to have it ready, and make the sponge in the morning. I have decided on coffee sponge instead of chocolate as coffee is more intellectual. I shall wear a simple tasteful frock of taffeta, with my new gipsy earrings, and my hair done as usual with the parting slightly higher. It ought to settle if I wash it the night before, Friday night, or perhaps two nights before, Thursday, and then it will be manageable.
You must forgive me for writing all this, but it absorbs me, you know. They say Herbert Bessick is unique.
January 22nd
Hot weather still. The children are running around bare. I had a letter from Daphne today, the first for a long time. What a strange world she must be living in! Her letter does not make sense, it is a wonder the doctor let it be posted – all about Christmas and a piece of moon and a mouse nibbling at a shroud of sun, it frightens me, I can never see her getting better and living a normal life like myself. Poor Daphne. And she sends back the letter I wrote her, and has written the words Help help help at the end of my letter. As if I had to be rescued from a terrible doom, as if fate (I think of the Fifth Symphony) knocked at my door. Poor Daphne. Naturally she means herself when she cries help help help.
January 23rd
Only three more days. I am as excited as a young girl going to her first party. I remember my first party, a sixth form one, at school, when the high school boys were invited and I had nothing decent to wear, while the other girls were dressed in the loveliest frocks, evening gowns or ones ballerina length, with satin slippers, and holding evening bags covered with sparkly beads. The party was held in the gymnasium, I remember, and I sat all night, ashamed of my plain print dress, an
d being afraid to talk to anyone. And when the dances were announced my heart beat so fast I was afraid it would choke me, like in a novel, and I would fall swooning to the ground. But who could ever swoon in a print frock and wearing walking shoes, lace-ups? I waited for someone to ask me to dance. The boy Tod came up and asked me if I was engaged for the next dance, a foxtrot, and I said in a rush —No, I’ll dance with you, and I grabbed him and pushed him onto the floor, and we danced; but I could not keep in time, and trod on his toes, and said Sorry, sorry, all the time, though I learned afterwards that a woman never says sorry – it is always the man’s fault. I did not know what to talk about while we danced, I was too busy trying to keep in step and show my partner what a good dancer I was, in the hope that he would ask me for supper. He was captain of the cricket eleven.
He didn’t ask me for supper. Nobody did. I could have wept, and I knew it was all the fault of my funny clothes and not being able to afford dancing lessons. And I had to go to supper with the rest of the girls that were left over, and we sat together at a long table while the others with partners sat at tables for two, and talked and laughed in an intimate way, while we girls sat angry and silent or else looking haughty, pretending it did not matter – but it did matter.
But to return to the present time. I am really excited about Saturday. I love to think that I have some kind of social standing, enough for the Bessicks to want to meet Tim and me. I have finished The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and have begun Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë. I read it years ago when I was a schoolgirl and in search of some kind of romance. My reading of it now will be more mature and balanced.
Peter is full of the quaintest remarks. He said this morning —Mummy, what kind of a world is the world in the washing machine? And last night he asked about the moon. There’s something in it, he said. Like hills, and something that moves. He is in primer three at school, and anxious for the holidays to finish. I see myself as the mother of a Rhodes Scholar.
But it is night and I am very tired. The children seem to have been squabbling all day over toy ducks and guns and motor-cars until I am weary of the sound of their voices. And Sharon has diarrhoea, so I have to wash a million nappies. I thank heaven for a washing machine. Poor Sharon. I laugh now to think of Mark, and how I was scared of him at first, he was so tiny and slippery, and how carefully I washed his ears and mouth and nose with cotton wool and his body with olive oil, and crept in the room at night to see if he had stopped breathing or had smothered by putting his face in the pillow, the way you see it reported in the newspapers. Dear Mark. How terrible if any of them had been born blind or deformed or idiots that waved their heads around, like caterpillars, and never learned to speak.
Now I will finish this record for the night. I have told you I am tired.
I have just remembered that Herbert Bessick spent some time in France, and he speaks French well, they say. We learned French at school, a little, from a French tutor. How wonderful if I could speak French with him at the party.
Correction; it is not a party, just a quiet social evening.
January 24th
I had a strange dream last night, I dreamt I was sitting in the middle of the arena at a circus, nursing a little black panther that kept scratching at me and saying in a child’s voice with a foreign accent —I’ll scratch your eyes out. I’ll scratch your eyes out.
The spotlights of the circus played over me, and though I knew I was expected to perform in some way, I found that I could not remember my act. The audience in the big top cheered and stamped and whistled, waiting for me to begin. Suddenly I threw the panther away from me across the ring and began to cry, and I thought, This is only a dream, there is nothing to cry about, it is just a dream. Then the light in the circus faded and I found myself in Paris, walking by the Seine river. It was midnight. I heard a clock striking twelve, and I kept on walking looking down at my shadow cast in the water to make sure it was walking with me. Suddenly I felt tired and knew I must sleep, so I took off my black fur coat – thinking, how strange, I did not notice I wore a black fur coat – and spread it on the ground and fell asleep on it. When I awoke my fur coat had vanished, my shadow had vanished, I was standing staring in the river that swirled in a whirlpool of darkness.
Now isn’t that a weird dream? I asked Tim if he dreamt a dream last night, and he said no, except at one time he half dreamt he was climbing a mountain to find an orchid, but found only a handful of snow. Dreams are curious things. They say that dreams mean more than people think.
By the way, when I first began this diary I said I would give a record of my inner life. I begin to wonder if I have said anything about my inner life. What if I have no inner life? I am morbid today. I had a letter from my mother in Waimaru. She says the same thing over and over in her letters; that everything is well, that everybody is happy; and she says it like a chant of denial, so that you can’t help knowing that nothing is well, and nobody is happy. Sometimes I wonder if we should go south to live. I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Today and tomorrow and then the day of my little social gathering. I am beginning to wonder if I should make a coffee sponge after all, for we shall be having coffee to drink, and it may seem like too much of the same thing. I shall forget about it, let the idea stay in my unconscious mind, and decide tomorrow whether it shall be chocolate or coffee. If it were chocolate I could use real chocolate, plain or dark, melted, or cocoa. Tim has said something about drinks, a liqueur, benedictine, or tia maria, but I am not sure how to time drinks and I don’t want to disgrace myself by showing ignorance.
I don’t know if I have told you that Terry and Josie cannot come on Saturday because of their children’s chicken-pox. We shall have to entertain the Bessicks alone. What a frightening prospect. I am relying on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony to break the ice.
January 25th
I am afraid for tomorrow night.
Sunday
Well, it is over now and I can look at it calmly and with indifference. Shall I describe last night? Well, before they came I had the children put to bed and the baby given her bottle, and the sitting room arranged cosily and, I hope, tastefully, with the chairs and couches (our furniture is Swedish make) placed at what Tim and I consider the correct angle so as to make conversation easier and more intimate. I dusted the radiogram and blew the fluff from the long-playing needle, and left the Fifth Symphony lying upon the cabinet. I could not help leaving a few of our more intellectual books lying around, carelessly, as if we used them every day, some of them half-open, or open at pages of difficult words; also a collection of Van Gogh prints, and an isolated Picasso, which I propped up on the top shelf of the bookcase. It was one of Picasso’s that I cannot make head or tail of, yet it gives a certain impression and surely no visitor, I thought, would be boorish enough to ask me to explain the meaning of it.
Tim had decided that we wouldn’t have any drinks, only coffee, and that the cake had better be chocolate, with walnuts, for variety. I prepared to make a number of narrow slices of toast with a sardine, or a slice of tomato, lying upon each. Above all I wanted our evening to be a natural one, with none of the artificialities one finds – everyone at ease and happy.
They came at eight o’clock. I was aflutter when I heard their car – one of the latest, with engine in the back. I dashed to the bathroom for a final powdering and a new touch of lipstick and whipped open the cupboard door to make sure the plates and coffee cups were ready, and as a last minute thought, I put the Picasso, face downward, upon the card table. I was afraid suddenly that Dr Herbert would say, outright —What is your interpretation of this picture, Mrs Harlow? (later, I thought, when we become friends, we shall of course be Tim and Teresa and Herbert and Alison). Then I answered the knock at the door, quite coolly, though my voice shook, and I was forced to clear my throat.
They are such nice people. We were Tim and Teresa and Herbert and Alison right from the very first, though I do not remember actually addressing the doctor b
y his christian name in case it sounded familiar, though he has travelled overseas and does not worry about such things. He called me Teresa. His voice is very soft, almost like fur, and he is dark, slightly bald, with brown eyes, almost black at times; and his wife is the opposite, very thin, with fair hair and large grey eyes, nondescript except for their size. She has a protruding upper lip, something to do with her teeth, which gives her a horsey expression. Admittedly she is good-looking in other ways, her eyes for example, but I can see what Josie means when she describes her as a shrew. The expression is latent. She kept referring to her husband as Doctor. I could see she is conceited about being a doctor’s wife. Yet I enjoyed the evening. We played the Fifth Symphony, and Herbert said, instantly —Fate knocks on the door.
And he (Herbert I mean, not Fate) gave me quite a special sort of smile. Herbert (forgive me if it sounds familiar) tapped with his hand upon the side of the chair and nodded his head to the music, with an understanding look in his eye, while his wife sat with a slight smile on her face and her eyes in a kind of dream which I must confess made them rather ethereal. I had prepared to nod my head and tap too, to show my familiarity with the piece, but I had to devise some other means of keeping time. I swayed backward and forward with, I hope, an intelligent expression on my face. Tim said afterwards that I looked like a charmed snake. Dear Tim, what a tease he is!
After the music Dr Bessick (I have decided that the name Herbert sounds too familiar) exclaimed that the Fifth Symphony was one of his first loves, and repeated the words —Fate knocks at the door, again glancing at me with a special look in his eye.