by Cowley, Joy
‘It was a lovely dinner, though.’
‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘That’s the last time we heard her play. I wanted her to do the Appassionata but she couldn’t because of her hands. What was that? Carpel tunnel? Cartilage? A bit of arthritis?’
‘Just age, I think.’ I sip the wine which has the texture of velvet. In the glass, in my mouth. Under my skin. ‘Two days later she was dead.’
‘I think about it a lot,’ she says. ‘The doctors said it was instant, but then they do, don’t they? She could have been in pain for several minutes. Calling for help. He was in the garage with his machines running. He wouldn’t have heard.’
‘He was sharpening his shovel and spade on the grinder.’ Now I’m spilling the wine, but only on the chair. ‘You know what Father O’Donnell believes? He’s putting it in his homily. He said on her way out to get the mail. Now listen to this. She went into the garage to tell Dad she loved him.’
‘That’s not right.’
‘I know. Dad thought he caused her heart attack.’
She holds her glass up, looks into it. ‘He told us both, didn’t he? He was in the garden and the spade was blunt. He didn’t take off his gumboots. Just went muddy-duddy into the kitchen to get the garage key, muddy-duddy on her nice clean floor.’
‘And she went out to the garage to read the riot act. I remember him saying. She was so mad, she switched off his grinder.’
‘Just a few hours before my flight.’ She turns her glass by the stem. ‘I was paged at Auckland airport. I thought it was a mistake.’
‘Well, you’re going to hear it tomorrow. Her last words to him were, I love you. Poor old Father O’Donnell. I don’t know where he got that. Not Dad.’
‘Hell no!’ she says. ‘He showed us the muddy footprints under the key rack. If she’d collapsed in the garage. Who knows? Maybe he could have done something. I guess she was thinking about the mail. Just as well he followed her down there. She could have been lying by the gate for hours.’
‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I tell her. ‘He went back to the kitchen to clean up and she wasn’t in the house. He called and called. He thought she must have gone for the mail.’
‘I don’t think he went back to the house,’ she says.
‘Yes. He did.’
‘If he’d gone back to the house, he’d have cleaned up the mud. It’d be the first thing he’d have done.’
‘Not if she wasn’t there. Not if he was worried.’
‘You think about it,’ she says.
‘Look,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t need to think about it. He told me he went back to the house.’
She shakes her head. ‘It was nearly six years ago.’
‘So whose memory’s at fault? Mine or yours?’
She doesn’t answer.
‘He-went-back-to-the-house!’
She almost smiles as she looks away.
I put down my glass. ‘You can be so bloody condescending. You know that? You don’t argue from your intellect. You argue from your ego. You’ve always done it. Putting people down. Pushing people away.’
‘Let’s not start,’ she says.
‘We should start.’ I do not even raise my voice. ‘We should finish it. Just for once, let’s look at the facts.’
‘I have never put you down,’ she says.
‘Ha bloody ha!’
She waves a hand at me. ‘You cannot make me responsible for your poor self-image. Yes, you heard correctly. Poor self-image. I admit that when we were kids, I did try to get away from you. You were a limpit, goddammit. This little clingy limpet that never gave me a minute’s peace. Always wanting, always whining. It was like the old man and the sea. I had you on my back forever. Don’t you remember that?’
‘You were very cruel,’ I tell her. ‘I don’t think you realise how extremely sadistic. You were my big sister. You meant so much to me. I’d give you things and you’d throw them away. You’d rip them up.’
‘I would not.’
‘What about the snapdragons? Remember? Antirrhinums? You squeeze the flowers. The little mouths open like dragons. A whole bunch of snapdragons with pansies and a paper doily around the outside. I was only seven or eight. I thought they were so beautiful. I put them on your bed.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You threw them on the floor. You didn’t stamp on them. You jumped. Jump, jump! Like murder. You told me to get out and then you threw those squashed-up flowers after me.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘Oh yes, you did. I was heartbroken. I was only about seven.’
‘If I did, I’m sorry. Okay? I’m sorry. I didn’t know you’d be holding a grudge for forty-eight flipping years. I don’t remember the flowers. I do remember that you would not leave me alone. When I got away to Auckland. Even there. You would call me three or four times a week. Delia, it’s your kid sister again. You couldn’t do your homework without a flipping phone call.’ She is shaking.
I’m shaking too. ‘I missed you,’ I say.
She wipes her mouth, jerky movements. Scrunches up her knees to her chin. After a while, she says, ‘I don’t know how we got onto this.’
‘Mum’s death.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I reckon he went back to the house. You said he didn’t.’
‘God,’ she says. She sips and sips. ‘Remember how we used to argue? I did not. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did. After a while it got to be yes, yes, yes, no, no, no, and then we really shortened it. One of us would go around making this long n sound, like a high-pitched hum. The other would keep up an eternal hissing, s for yes. Mum and Dad must have thought we were nuts.’
‘I don’t think they ever noticed.’
‘Maybe not,’ she says.
‘They didn’t talk much to their children. Time for school. Have you brushed your teeth?’
‘They didn’t talk much, period. At a social gathering they’d sit like a couple of statues in a park.’
I pick up the edge of my blouse and wipe my face. ‘You may not realise how lonely it was for me.’
She looks at me and away again, tucks her dressing gown around her feet. I think she’s going to say something but she drains her wineglass instead.
‘Especially when you had gone,’ I tell her.
‘The children of lovers are orphans,’ she says. ‘I think it was much worse after that – that business. They were very careful with each other. Shall we open another bottle?’
‘We’ll never get through it.’
‘Just a drop. It’s really a brilliant sauvignon blanc.’
‘That’s because it’s a chardonnay.’
She laughs and picks up the empty bottle to read the label. ‘So that’s the secret. The best New Zealand sauvignon blanc is a chardonnay. We have another bottle of it in the bag? Where’d I put the whatsit? You know, whirly thing?’
‘The corkscrew’s in the cork.’
‘Righty! Just a little splash before we go to bed. A toast to Mum and Dad. Seriously, I think it was a stroke of genius to play him that music. I wouldn’t have thought of it.’ She grunts as she levers the cork from the bottle. ‘It’s warm. We didn’t put it in the fridge.’
I hold out my glass. ‘Be that as it may, he waited until I was out of the room. I came back from the cafeteria. There was a difference, you know. It wasn’t just that his breathing. The feeling in the room. He really had gone. What was left wasn’t him. It wasn’t Dad.’
‘Have you ever thought,’ she says, pouring. And it’s not a little splash. My glass is full again. ‘I have, and the more I think about it, the more I believe. He waited for a reason. The reason was not you. It was her. Maybe she came to get him. Does that sound too wild? We don’t know these things, do we? It had to be when you were out of the room. It had to be just him and her in the old Romeo and Juliet thing, flitting off together on the next stage of their journey. Heck, I’m sorry this wine is so warm. It’s still good, though. Isn’t it goddam br
illiant? Well, cheers.’ She settles back on the couch, her glass high in her hand.
‘If that’s right,’ I say, ‘what happened in New York? That experience in your office. Were there two of them?’
‘Maybe so. Who knows? He could have been going there to meet her. For the six years she’s been performing at the Lincoln Centre, the ghost of Avery Fisher Hall.’ She raises her glass again. ‘She was good. She was very good. She could have done recitals if she hadn’t been so goddam shy.’
‘She did at home.’
‘I mean public.’
‘What about the organ at church?’
‘Hymns.’ She conducts with her glass and sings, ‘Faith of our fathers –’ Then she turns to me and says, ‘I’m proud of you for playing those tapes. The passage of music, “Orpheus and the Underworld”. It was brilliant. It was profound.’
‘Underworld.’ I think about that. ‘Underworld and undertaker. Do you suppose there is a connection between those two words?’
‘What?’
‘Undertaker. Underworld. Are they from the same? Word, word. Family. Language. Same source?’
‘Oh goodness, Bea. How would I know? Look, I’m sorry about not going tonight.’
‘Forget it.’
‘No, I need to explain. We’re different. You say blue. I say green. You say apples. I say peaches. I respect your beliefs, Bea. I admire you for them. I most fervently admire the way you’ve kept your faith. But I’m green. I’m flipping peaches, aren’t I?’
‘Just forget it, Diddy.’
‘No, no. I need to apologise but no one should be sorry for being honest. So you see? That’s the paradox. Vive la différence.’
The wine is warm and fragrant. I don’t know why we ever chill it. Smells like fresh grass. Like a plate of strawberries left out in the rain. Like a man’s shoulders. Lovely.
‘So I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Because I have no faith.’
‘Belief is not faith,’ I tell her. ‘Faith is not belief.’
She nods. ‘Peaches are not apples.’
‘Everybody changes, Diddy. I change. You change. The words don’t matter so much. It’s where they take. It’s mystery, you know.’
‘Oh Bea,’ she says. ‘I do believe in something. I do, I do. Not any religion, though. Not Catholic or Buddhist or Humpty Dumpty. I just – do.’
‘We probably feel the same. Different words, Diddy. A matter of semantics. Two apples. One, two. But one apple is called a peach. Not really a peach. A little red apple. You know, when you start putting different words. It messes things up.’
‘Yes, it really does. Music is where I’m at, Bea. Music is it. Music and –’
‘Apples,’ I say.
‘Apples,’ she agrees. ‘No words.’
‘No. Definitely no words.’ Then it comes up like a bubble, a burp. Laughter. ‘Diddy! Singing with Sister Helena. Remember the choir? Open your mouths, girls. I can’t hear the words.’
Diddy throws her head back. ‘Oh God! Yes! Yes! I loved Sister Helena. I loved that choir. Enunciate, girls! Enunciate! The festival at the town hall. Feast of the Enunciation. Oh yes! She had to teach us, some different. Not hymns –’
‘Secular songs.’ I choke on my wine.
‘Secular but safe. Not too worldly. Remember that girl -’
‘Barbara Vaughan.’
‘You have a brilliant memory, Bea! Barbara Vaughan. We sang “My Grandfather’s Clock”. Articulate, girls. Articulate. And she, Barbara, oh God, she had us leave out. We sang cock. Oh, Bea, I forgot about that. I clean forgot. The town hall was full of people.’
I catch my breath, and start singing, ‘My grandfather’s cock was too tall for the shelf, so it stood ninety years on the floor.’
Diddy waves her glass. ‘It was taller by half than the old man himself, though it weighed not a pennyweight more. It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born and was always his pleasure and pride. But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died.’
We stand up, falling into each other. My wine glass goes, I don’t know where. We link arms and dance around the room, colliding with the table, laughing. Diddy stamps her bare feet and turns her head like someone doing the tango. The town hall. In front of the parents, in front of everybody. Dear Sister Helena. Enunciate, girls, enunciate!
‘Ninety years without stumbling. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. His life seconds numbering. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. But it stopped, short, never to go again, when the old man died.’
6
1953
Uncle Jack said he called her Buzzy Bea because she was his little honey but he didn’t take her up in his aeroplane. Beatrice thought Uncle Jack was so clever that he could be the big boss of them all and tell Mum he was taking his little honey for a ride because Diddy had been and that was only fair, so there. It didn’t happen. She asked and asked but Uncle Jack just laughed and said, ‘When the lady tells you yes.’
Beatrice remembered her longing to be in the beautiful yellow aeroplane which had danced in the sky for her sister, but she couldn’t recall many of her feelings of that summer. There was Uncle Jack, of course. Her heart still leapt like a trout when she thought of him. There was Mr and Mrs Rawiri and the new baby who would one day own the farm. She recalled the softness inside her which corresponded with the softness of baby Erueti in his pram but that became confused with her later memories of Erueti when they swam together naked in the river. Her feelings for her sister were a permanent fixture and not particularly related to that summer. It was like a chronic illness, the ache in her legs and chest as she strove to keep up with Diddy. But for the rest of it, she didn’t know how she had felt. Her recollection of people and events was precise and vivid but she saw the nine-year-old Beatrice only in other people’s reactions to her. It was as though she had been a movie camera rather than a child with self-awareness.
She spent many hours in the woolshed, partly because of the Rawiris and their baby but mostly because Uncle Jack was helping with the shearing and always there was the hope that he would put on his flying jacket, scoop her up with a ‘How about it, Buzzy Bea?’ and take her off in the plane without Mum finding out. He never did. He wore a white singlet stained grey and yellow and both he and Dad had thin cigarettes stuck on their lower lips as they wrestled the big sheep out of the pens. Mr Rawiri didn’t smoke. He wore shirts with the sleeves cut out and khaki army pants. The men’s arms bulged and rippled as they turned the sheep over on their backs and ran the cutters through the wool, each man’s arms different. Uncle Jack’s were freckled with ginger hairs and knobbly bones on the elbows and wrists. Dad’s arms were covered with black hairs, fluffy as a cat, and he had big hands that wanted to stay open. When he closed them on the cutters, they looked uncomfortable as though the fingers wanted to spring apart. Mr Rawiri had brown smooth arms, knotted with muscle and up near his left shoulder there was a blue tattoo of a dragon cut half away by a deep scar. Once Bea had asked about the scar and Mr Rawiri had said it was shrapnel in the Maori Battalion. Beatrice had thought that Maori Battalion was the name of the dragon.
She watched the way the shears slid all the way down the back of the sheep from the neck to the tail, releasing a flow of wool that fell, creamy white side up, onto the floor. Sweat dripped from the men’s heads, from the wet hairs under their arms and fell on the sheep. Beatrice could have caught the drops. She could have poked her finger in their arms in the hollows below the bulges and felt the softness next to the hardness. She could have helped them to shear the sheep but they kept telling her to stand back. She noticed that Dad and Uncle Jack hardly ever lit their cigarettes. The air was full of dust and noise and it was impossible to separate the smell of men and the smell of sheep.
Mrs Rawiri was Italian. Mr Rawiri had met her during the war and brought her back to New Zealand to a poultry farm six miles down the road. She had a big bottom like a cushion and big titties to feed the baby. She talked funny as though she was half singing. Bea asked her questions t
o hear her talk but Mrs Rawiri didn’t always understand. It was her job to throw the sheep’s wool onto a table, fold it, roll it up and put it in the sack that hung in the wool press. Bits dropped on the floor. Mrs Rawiri gave Beatrice a broom to sweep all the bits into a heap in the corner. Sweeping was the most important job. If it wasn’t done, the men could slip in the greasy wool and fall down and there could be an accident.
When she wasn’t sweeping wool bits, Beatrice was out in the smoko room, by Baby Erueti’s pram, pulling aside the muslin cover that kept out dust and flies, leaning over, putting her finger inside the little hand. Mostly he was asleep but sometimes he would wake up and look at her with eyes that shone like coal and then his mouth would open and stretch and he would laugh, waving the hand still hooked on her finger. The rest of the smoko room was boring, the old electric jug and teapot, stained cups, milk bottle sitting in a saucepan of water to keep it cool, spare blades and belts for the shearing machines, a packet of tobacco and some cigarette papers, a tin of biscuits, some sheep drench, dead flies in a dirty window ringed with cobwebs.
They would always come over to the house for lunch, Dad, Uncle Jack, Mr Rawiri pushing the pram and Mrs Rawiri walking behind them. While they scrubbed up in the washhouse, Mum would put cold ginger beer and lemonade on the table, bacon and egg pie, salad, plates of pikelets with jam and cream, little cakes in paper cases with pink icing and a cherry on top. Lunches at shearing time were special and the table was always pretty with a cloth and flowers on it but Mum never sat down with them.
Uncle Jack tried to be friendly. One day he brought her some paper music but she just left it lying on top of the piano. It was Diddy who tried to play it, only she couldn’t because it was too hard. Lunchtimes, Mum walked around the table seeing that everyone had enough to eat and when the meal was over and the men were outside in the smoking place, she sat in the lounge with Mrs Rawiri while the baby was being fed. Then the men would stir. Uncle Jack would stretch his arms above his head and say, ‘This isn’t doing much for the economy,’ and they’d all go back to the woolshed, Mr Rawiri pushing the pram.