Cyril Viebert died of dysentery in May 1941, in a camp twelve miles south of Cairo. He had recently turned nineteen. Norman remembered standing in the backyard looking at a pot with a burned-out bottom just after the news came through. His mother was off comforting Poor Gladys and Uncle Stewart had been trying to be useful in the kitchen. Norman was still wearing drill shorts and his knees were cold. In similar weather Cyril Viebert’s blond rugby thighs used to redden like sausages. After Norman sniffed the burned-out pot he trotted off to the front of the house. The yellow roses were all gone, but the purplish green feijoas were ripe upon the vine and Norman lobbed several at Rommel’s Afrikakorps on behalf of Cyril Viebert.
Mrs Viebert stopped coming to canasta parties. She became Poor Gladys, answering her front door with her hair in disarray and her eyes red and puffed out. While his mother visited Poor Gladys, Norman waited in the garden. He made Baby Viebert eat leaves off the pepper bush hedge, and the heat on her tongue made Baby’s eyes water, which was good, because she was Norman’s prisoner, and it was right that she should know it. Above them the cabbage tree leaves cut slots in the sky with their cold dense blades.
Not long after space men began to speak to Poor Gladys through the radiogram they came and took her away. Then Uncle Stewart began to say feeding flies for Tiny Freyberg. He said it with a pretend Texan accent that he had heard on the radio. Feedin’ flahs fer Tahny Frahberg. Sometimes Uncle Stewart could not stop saying things.
In 1951 General Freyberg became Baron Freyberg of Wellington and of Munstead in the County of Surrey. Nobody knew what became of Baby Viebert.
Norman found himself staring at the woman knitting. Orange and yellow, purple and flamingo, she had a hundred colours. One side of her knitting bristled with strands that looped and twisted and hung untrimmed. She dropped one strand, picked up another, twisted it in, and knitted on, frowning over her work. Her silver bird’s nest of hair was held up by the sunglasses and a crab-like pincer high up at the back of her head. In her orange shirt, loose green trousers, sandals and a long loop of shells she looked at home in the tropical night.
A flame-coloured ball of wool dropped from her lap, rolling out over the linoleum towards Norman’s foot. Without thinking he picked it up and wound it back towards her. The woman took the ball from him with a nod; her dense brown eyes studied him, without smiling. The humidity had made her hair start out in tendrils at her forehead. She finished her row and turned the knitting. Now he could see the hourglass pattern of inverted triangles forming and the diamonds in between.
They were paging Norman. This is what you get if you pay extra to fly first class to the other side of the world. They care that you are aboard, in your seat, reducing the odds. The knitting woman looked up at him again and there was energy in her glance. She made a movement with her mouth as if she were about to speak. Norman grimaced and looked away. He had made long preparations to escape this day. It was not a time for new acquaintances. He hurried away towards the gate, away from Monday, August 27th, towards Tuesday, August 28th. His shoes squeaked, resisting the linoleum.
About the time that the plane crossed the dateline, a sudden jolt of turbulence shook Norman out of his half-sleep. Norman sat up and looked at the digital plane on the screen in front of him. He had done it. He had managed to evade all but three hours of Monday, August 27th, 2001. He was not feedin’ flies. All he had seen was a couple kissing in a tropical crush, all he had done was wind up a woman’s ball of wool.
The lovers. The knitter. The figures collided in his head. All these years of waiting and he had failed to see what had been clear to Mrs Viebert both in her prime and in her grief. Now Norman struggled to reach Baby Viebert across the gap of sixty years, with her eyes so dark that the pupils were almost invisible, her hair long since turned to a mass of silvery tendrils like the pollen bearing innards of the roses that she used to pull apart. Had she not looked up when his name was paged? Baby Viebert had recognized him. No one forgets the person who first makes you eat the leaves of the pepper bush.
Norman thought of the hourglass of time that had funnelled him towards Baby Viebert, and the empty years fanning out ahead of him, away from her. Ignoring the illuminated seatbelt sign, he began his search in the sky at once, stumbling over the folk slumbering under their fleecy shrouds, pushing past their sleeping knees; he would seek her forever now. Headlong he rushed in his aeroplane through the freezing dark air, pulled onwards by the bright thread of the Pacific dawn. Surely fate could not be so easily evaded? Norman had only to live long enough to reach the second date. Surely there was one? Surely.
Neither Up Nor Down
THE WIND BLEW the palm fronds upwards and turned them into giant combs raking the mist. Penelope’s hair stuck to her forehead. She clutched at her shoulder bag while the water braided and swirled around her thighs. A walk along a Tahitian beach in search of a sea cave was one thing, but wading through the streams that poured off the land into the ocean was enough to challenge even the strongest determination to be a good sport. Close by, chestnut-coloured hermit crabs crept in and out of the piles of coconut shells banked up against the trees.
“Em. Dickinson appreciated Melville’s novels,” said Charles. “Lots of coconuts and breadfruit in Typee. Em. made a mean gingerbread. Maybe she liked coconuts too.”
“Did they cook much with coconut in the nineteenth century?”
“No idea.” Charles was off again. He hated a question that he could not answer. Back behind the palms, a pointed peak rose up with shrubs growing out of it at right angles. White birds fluttered in front of the greenery like handkerchiefs dropped from a great height. Penelope wanted to pull herself up the peak, clinging onto the stubby trees until, triumphant and alone, she could stand looking out at the wide grey Pacific.
“And when they were up they were up, and when they were down they were down, and when they were only halfway up they were neither up nor down,” she chanted.
“What?”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Penelope. Nothing she thought mattered. Thirty-five years ago they had been newly-weds touring Ireland with a rug and a volume of Yeats in the back seat of the car. Now, he was an irritating know-it-all, and she, she was a pudding.
Of course what Penelope thought did matter. Her former supervisor in food science, Howard McMurray, a mild man in a homespun sweater, had believed that Penelope’s research was of key importance to fried chicken manufacturers everywhere. He had complimented her on her careful approach. Penelope had met Charles at Howard McMurray’s annual Snowflake Do. Penelope had been charmed by the young professor with his careful way of dressing and his whimsical habit of embroidering the view with a sparkling quotation. Can you fall in love with a purple smoking jacket and a signet ring? Penelope had.
After his fourth gin and tonic Charles had pulled down some snowflake tinsel and draped it around Penelope’s neck, stroking her hair. After his fifth gin and tonic he leaned heavily against the door frame and revealed that as a little boy he liked to balance on one foot. He had been practising this very skill when his sisters came to tell him that their mother had hanged herself in the pear tree at the bottom of the garden. For many years he believed that if he could succeed in standing on one foot for a day and night, his mother might come back. As it happened, she had not died, but she had lingered, and that was worse. Charles did not like shadows in trees; he did not like to be alone. If Penelope did not already love him, she told herself that with time, she would. Upon finishing his sixth gin and tonic, Charles became rather ill, and Penelope took him home to her bed.
After their wedding, Penelope had concentrated on being a faculty wife because she imagined it was what she ought to do. In retrospect, her life had been governed by the sign of ought: I ought to be a better, thinner cook; I ought to have had more children; I ought to have found a job teaching adolescent girls how to roast chickens. Every Christmas she made plates of sugar cookies for Charles to take to the department party, she dropped off his la
te library books and searched for lost coffee mugs in his study. She had raised their son, a bookish child called Colin who had recently been granted tenure in the English department at Rook University. Colin claimed to be misunderstood, but in fact she knew him very well. He was a good boy, but in danger of becoming like his father. And what else did she do? When it came down to it she couldn’t think what she had been doing.
In the meantime, Charles turned the way they met into a dinner-party joke. It was her supervisor in food science who introduced us. You’re studying the Browning Reaction? I said. Yes, she said, you know, to heat. Oh, I said, Brownings in Italy. No, she said, browning in turkeys. She could see Charles now, snorting at his joke, tugging at his turtleneck. She should have stopped right there, at the Snowflake Do. But she had gone on with it, and the path had led here, to Tahiti, and this groping along the beach, looking for a sea cave where a long-dead writer might have had a rendezvous with a woman not his wife.
Soon they arrived at the edge of a garden where the trunk and limbs of a vast tree stretched along the ground like some great animal at leisure. Nailed to the tree was a sign in Tahitian. Tabu, the sign said, keep out, but not just in a trespassers will be prosecuted kind of a way. It was more sacred than that. Tabu was keep out or something will get you. Around about, thick banks of water fuchsia flourished unchecked in the humid air, the dark pattern of their leaves studded with scarlet flowers. Black crabs picked through the remnants of a balloon fish stuck on a fence post to dry, sidling sideways through a cloud of gnats. Penelope called ahead to Charles.
“I don’t think we should go any further.” She pointed at the post. “These crabs give me the creeps.”
“Do you like this garden, is it yours?” asked Charles.
“What?” she said.
“Lowry, Under the Volcano.”
“Oh, that. This looks like private property.”
“You’re a bit scared, aren’t you?” Charles tipped his hat back on his head. “Mistah Kurtz, he dead,” he said.
“Don’t mock me Charles.”
“Miss-tah Kurtz,” Charles said with more sibilance. Penelope turned her back.
“I heard you the first time,” she said.
“Where are you going, Penn? Look, we’ve passed the peak and here’s the end of the cove. This has to be the place that Stevenson refers to in the poem. The cave must be just around the corner.”
“Charles, we have a plane to catch.”
“Come on Penny, be a sport.”
“I’ll wait here for you.”
Penelope sat in the green gloom swiping at mosquitoes. Once they might have walked to Stevenson’s sea cave together. She would have laughed at Charles’s obvious discomfort at having his trousers rolled up, he would have quoted somebody, and she would have thrown a piece of seaweed at him or threatened him with a crab. Now Penelope was glad that she would never find the sea cave, so that she would not have to hear the quotation with which Charles would adorn the view. Charles’s mouth was a sea cave, with words rushing in and out of it, flecked with foam.
Charles hit the steering wheel with the flat of his hand, gleeful and shouting over the diesel engine.
“Magnificent, it was magnificent,” he cried. “There’s a hole in the cave roof, fringed with ferns. It’s a natural pantheon. I stood there and recited the whole poem. The words just boomed and rolled about. I’m more convinced than ever. No one in the world knows that Stevenson ever came here, except the two of us. Certainly not his precious Fanny. Hah!”
Penelope sat silently, submitting to the roar. Poor Fanny. She was tired and she wanted to get on the plane.
“Let’s see if there’s anywhere to cut across,” said Charles.
They drove up into a new subdivision where the houses sat on red earth blocks gouged out of the mountainside. One big rainfall and the houses could just slip off the side. Charles drove on the newly paved road with delight in his eyes. It was the look of being first. He had been first with Penelope too. Penelope had always assumed that she should comport herself as a married woman, a phrase that she always thought of in her grandmother’s voice. She looked demurely, or sideways, under her eyelids at men. Charles’s total freedom in this respect baffled her. When Charles was not reading he was talking about what he read with his female graduate students. And he would tell her about them too.
“Bit of a crush on that one,” he would say in a false and hearty voice, but she never knew why she had to be told that at all.
After the houses ran out the road became steeper. A barrier prevented them from going any further. Charles pulled out around it and kept driving.
“Are you sure we can take this road?” asked Penelope.
“Of course, it’s a brand new subdivision,” said Charles.
“I don’t think this is a good idea, Charles. Look at the creepers.”
They had arrived at a tight corner with a space to pull over at the side. Tiny heart-shaped leaves on runners stretched out over the tarmac like lines of liquid spilling out from an unseen source. Charles sighed and pulled over.
“Alright, you win, Penny. Perhaps it would be an idea to go and see what’s round the corner.”
He disappeared around the edge of the cliff and Penelope was left alone with the gush of water in the bank beside her. The engine ticked as it cooled. The urge to drive away tugged at her like the currents pouring off the land into the sea. She saw the road empty, and Charles returning to find nothing but creepers fanning out over the centre line. Penelope climbed over into the driver’s seat. Her shorts caught on the gear stick and ripped. She started the car.
At the airport, Penelope returned the rental car and lumbered along with both of their bags in a trolley. She found a seat between a pillar and a bank of tropical plants. After an hour had passed she thought, he knows now, he knows that I have gone. She thought of the puffer fish on the post and its empty eye sockets. I have snapped, she thought. Like a sugar snap pea. I have no idea what I am doing. The young couple next to her moved off to resume their kissing beside the bank machine. Several leis were draped around the girl’s neck and her boyfriend rested his big hands on her shoulders, leaving brown creases in the waxy flowers. Once she had been kissed like that, with intent, on a hot hillside in Ireland, while the wind flicked through the pages of Yeats, discarded along with the empty wine bottle. Penelope had left her own lei in the hotel refrigerator.
“Penelope Pilchard, it’s Penelope isn’t it?”
She lifted her head out of her hands. Two puffy faces floated into her field of vision. It was Bevan and May Calder from Brockville in their matching sweatsuits.
“Penelope, dear,” said May, “fancy finding you here. But where’s Charles?”
They looked around, as if he might be hiding behind the tropical plants. Bevan and May’s cultivated innocence belied their thirst for gossip. They pecked about like hens in the dust, looking for titbits of news to relay to their travel club and their Bible-study group.
“He’s dealing with the rental car. You know what it’s like,” said Penelope. Bevan and May did indeed know. They launched into a story about sitting in the plane near some man who later pushed his wife down a crevasse.
“Can you imagine that?” said May. “We saw it on the news. And I said to Bevan that’s the glacier man isn’t it? And on the plane he accused Bevan of taking his pillow.”
“He was an impolite what-have-you, if you’ll pardon my French, Penelope,” said Bevan.
May nodded. “I said to Bevan he ought to tell the police what he knew, about the pillow.”
“Well they got him, didn’t they?” said Bevan, “and that’s the main thing. Time to move on through, love. Wouldn’t want to miss the flight. Are you on this one Penelope or later?”
“Three AM,” Penelope replied.
“You’ve got a long time to wait.” May pursed her lips and made a sucking noise in the air beside Penelope’s cheek. “Tell Charles that we said hello.”
Watching t
he matching bottoms of Bevan and May recede into the crowd, Penelope realized that she was no better than their glacier man. Her actions were not private, they belonged in the tabloids and the Calders would make sure of it. If she were going to leave Charles, she had to leave him somewhere altogether more ordinary, on the way to having her hair done or in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket. In the meantime she ought to find him and make a renewed effort to bring him back into her, into their life. He could not live forever in the literary room next door.
It was well after midnight by the time her taxi arrived at the barrier at the top of the deserted road.
“My husband, là-bas,” said Penelope, pointing, trying to make the driver understand where she wanted to go to. “Mon mari,” and finally, “mon amour est là.” But the driver refused to go beyond the barrier, so she asked him to wait before she got out of the car.
Darkness covered the cliffs. The moon had risen and transformed the sky over the sea into a luminous upturned bowl. Penelope’s stomach retracted in fear that Charles might have been murdered, that crabs could even now be picking over his eyes. Surely he would be there, sitting on a log in the half-light, crossing and re-crossing his legs, twirling his hat around on his clenched fist, reading the Times Literary Supplement that he kept in his pocket, or stroking his beard into a sharp point. Penelope recalled the things he had once said to her, that she was the good solid earth beneath his feet, the sky over his head, the sun that kept the shadows under the leaves at bay. She thought of the way his mouth curled up at the edges, so that it looked like he was smiling when he was not. She hurried and her sandals went clack-clack upon the road.
All the Voices Cry Page 8