Something for the Birds

by Fahey, Jacqueline

  So much for my pose as that sensitive outsider.

  But my painting for finals was actually very good, especially my portrait of Flan. I couldn’t expect to get top marks – there was my dilettante past to consider – but I was happy to have done reasonably well. After that I slipped away from Christchurch quietly, in the night, and have almost never been back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Messing Up in Timaru

  I am pretty sure Mum only said it once, just something about how all her daughters had married scholarship boys. Sometimes, however, an idle remark sticks, and we started calling Mum Mrs Bennet. The truth is she wasn’t anything like Mrs Bennet, and we four daughters all marrying scholarship doctors had more to do with the times we lived in than my mother’s intentions. But then maybe, inadvertently, she did have something to do with it. The way, for instance, she would talk about Jane Austen, from whose Pride and Prejudice she got her nickname, and especially the Brontës as if they were members of our family. How did she know that Heathcliff’s barbarous tongue was Gaelic, that those girls on the Yorkshire Moors derived from an Irish Catholic heritage? That their father had been studying for the priesthood when his name was Pronty? Was that gossip from her grandmother, from her mother, from Ireland itself? Don’t misunderstand: she was equally well read in all the nineteenth- century classics – Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope and Scott. The emphasis is on Austen and the Brontës here not only because they were women but because they very possibly did influence our marriage choices.

  Medicine was at that time the elite career for the brightest and the best. Entry into medical school was more precious than gold. Among the more intellectual of that group were those who went to chamber music concerts, read Sartre and Marx, and put on plays by Beckett, by Shakespeare and Molière. They took possession of the moral high ground, became the priests of the new post-war society in New Zealand. We could not, like the Brontës, marry curates: our Irish Catholic background made that too fraught an enterprise. But a young doctor? That was a distinct possibility. We could be part of the making of this new world; life would have meaning, married to that sort of a young doctor.

  When I say we couldn’t marry the local priest, that’s not what Miss Oakley thought. Miss Oakley was the headmistress of Craighead, the Anglican private school in Timaru where my mother taught during the war years. Now, in 1951, I was teaching there. Miss Oakley was also a patient of my father’s. This meant that as a friend of the family, after Dad had tortured her in his rooms, he would bring her through to the house for a drink. Mum did this well. Fresh asparagus rolls and delicate cucumber sandwiches from Shrouder’s. And that day she had something to celebrate. My sister Barbara was engaged to Bill Glass, a young doctor and, of course, a scholarship boy. She was just wild to tell someone.

  Miss Oakley’s reaction stunned her. Pale and trembling, Miss Oakley announced, ‘This cannot be. It is quite impossible. She must give him up for his own sake. How could you allow that this engagement could happen?’

  Mum, having gulped a pre-drinks gin, simply lost it. According to her report, and of course in defence of her own darling daughter, Mum apparently demolished Miss Oakley. She explained to her that she was a presumptuous woman of extraordinarily bad manners. That if her daughter wished to marry outside the church she had her parents’ full support. Bill was in fact a Presbyterian, but my mother could not, for the life of her, imagine what business that could be of Miss Oakley’s. She said, ‘You must leave. This is intolerable.’

  Miss Oakley was a tall, rangy woman, handsome, impressive in a shabby tweed suit and some dim pearls. My mother would have been glowing in a glamorous fashion – a presentation uncommon in Timaru. They were well matched. Miss Oakley would have secretly despised my mother’s clear red lipstick, and my mother would have despised Miss Oakley’s lack of presentation.

  Miss Oakley rose, took a countrywoman’s swig at her drink and persisted. ‘Mrs Fahey, the Anglican Church would never accept Jacqueline as the wife of a priest of that church. You must know that. I am not surprised. They have hardly been discreet about what they are up to. Jacqueline must realise how badly it reflects on my school.’

  How did they rearrange themselves after that fiasco? After Mum had realised Miss Oakley was talking about the wrong daughter? I have no recollection of that. The story in our family, as it developed and expanded, became a sort of New Zealand equivalent of Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Elizabeth Bennet, except of course that Elizabeth Bennet is transposed into Margaret Fahey. Did I ever tell the priest in question, the gorgeous Orburn Purchase, anything about the comedy involving Mum and Miss Oakley? Again I can’t remember. We did keep on seeing each other right up until I made a break for it. When I had an interview with Miss Oakley to inform her that I was leaving the school, she told me she would see to it that I would never get another teaching job in New Zealand. She then continued examining stuff on her desk and eventually I wandered awkwardly out of the room. The headmistress of the high school, Miss Dickey, said that Miss Oakley put it about that she had been obliged to sack me. No doubt for fornicating with Anglican priests.

  Even at the time, however, I did feel some sympathy for Miss Oakley. Considering her mentality, she was quite brave to have appointed me in the first place – though perhaps that was intended as more of a compliment to my parents than to me. From her point of view, I had let her down.

  When Orburn and I met up again in Timaru, he as a curate and I as school teacher, we were like a comforting memory to each other of our university days. Of our glorious youth that we thought would last forever, of private dances and cocktail parties and burning glances across a room. All this had evaporated in the stark reality of the provinces. There, over the Christmas holidays, my sister Barbara and I had somehow assembled, quite spontaneously, a diverse society around us. Barbara had just finished a degree in philosophy and music, and I was all into George Orwell and Huxley. In our sitting room in Sophia Street this group took more positive shape. Barbara and I, fallen-over Catholics (I preferred this to lapsed – lapsed sounded equivocal, confused), were the atheists. Bruce Don, son of the Timaru haberdasher, had recovered somewhat from his conversion and didn’t go around praying for people any more. He was now the Presbyterian curate. There were also two Mormons, who were renting rooms from Dr Fraser’s widow next door; odd assortments of young Catholic priests and two monks; a Tony McVeagh, a sort of relation who worked with Mr Ian Donnelly at the Herald; and of course Orb Purchase. We all raved on about religion, and Barbie in all innocence corrupted the sweet Mormon – not, of course, the shit Mormon. The shit Mormon informed on the sweet Mormon, and he was gone overnight. Fumbling to declare his love on the evening before, magicked away overnight, gone in the morning.

  Every now and then Mum and Dad had Sunday morning parties. They gave the Mass a miss, but adhered to the family tradition of Sundays at eleven as celebration. Drinks, a large roast dinner and then siesta – all lavishness and innocence. Enlightened thinking and a certainty that bigotry was dead flourished. Ian Donnelly was always there, of course; Miss Dickey, the headmistress of the girls’ high school; Ainsley Manson, resident artist, and Shirley his lovely dreaming wife. Most elegant were Sally and Otto Richards, reminders of the glamour days of the high life of Timaru before the war. Then there were Peter and Mary Beaven, Mary doing a lot of thinking and Peter being the architect. Peter had a young assistant, and he liked to come along too. I could not, unfortunately, let myself enjoy what was going on because I imagined myself in love with a guy in Christchurch. I say I imagined because years later, after Fraser died, he wrote to me. Four or five letters, and then he died. People at my age have a way of dying. How I wished he hadn’t written. I was obliged to have to understand from his letters that he was not and had never been in any way exceptional; he was a very conventional guy. I understood then why my mother called me Scarlett O’Hara. I had invented that lover just as Scarlett invented Ashley.

  In the meantime Orb and I went to the pict
ures. Strolled down the main drag in Timaru, holding hands. We had a sensual ease with each other, our affinity strengthened by the fact that Orb’s grandfather had been an Irish Catholic priest. Did we kiss? Of course we did. There wasn’t anything spiritual going on between us, as you might have imagined with a priest. When I was with Orb, the meaning of life didn’t seem to matter very much; it was all a lovely physical attraction. We knew it wasn’t going anywhere, that each of us would marry someone else. Orb didn’t need Miss Oakley to tell him how unsuitable I was. For heaven’s sake, I wasn’t even a Christian and I would certainly never become an Anglican. I still fancied landed-gentry boys, anyway. I liked their clothes and they had the best parties in town. I was about as ready to get married as I was to spy for Russia or to learn to cook.

  You could do that then, before the sexual revolution – be invited out by any number of guys, so long as you didn’t go the whole hog. Until that happened you were no one’s exclusive property. On the other hand, you could become what was delicately called a town bike, and Timaru was just about the right size for that. That is, if you believed the guys who said, ‘Trust me, I know what I’m doing.’ I knew that guys whose feelings had been hurt because you were playing the field would pretend anything, but other guys knew that too. I could keep on playing the field so long as I could carry it off with confidence. The sexual revolution fucked all that up, and I don’t use that word ‘fucked’ idly. It became as if it was making unfair judgements if you didn’t do it on demand. I mean, he could say, ‘What’s wrong with you? It’s no big deal, don’t you like me?’ The answer of course should be ‘No, not much,’ but going with the flow sometimes seemed like the right option to young women just taking on the world in the early sixties. In the early fifties at least I had plenty of time to decide just how to dispense with my virginity.

  The first time I tried was for love, eternal love. Unfortunately, he obviously needed help and I didn’t know how to give it. I don’t mean that being for the first time naked and intimate wasn’t rather lovely, although I kept worrying about bad breath and BO. He tried, I tried, something was arrived at, but it was not intercourse. Having spent seven years limiting intimacy, I didn’t know how to go about the complete act, and obviously neither did he. The love of my life was leaving the next morning for England and the night ended in a furious fight.

  Having despaired of what was in fact a deluded love, a change began to take place in my attitude to society. I felt resentment towards society’s strictures and the implication that my virginity was a trade-in. That men controlled my view of myself. That I could only see what they saw, so in doing so restricted my own development. I felt I must choose, take charge of my life. I could not do this while I was burdened with my own naivety. I felt I needed to start with my virginity or, more correctly, finish with my own virginity. Pity I hadn’t read Schopenhauer who could have enlightened me about the true nature of sex. That the urge to recreate was driving me, not any intellectual process. That my hormones were infecting my brain in order to achieve their purpose.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Falling in Love

  After Timaru and Craighead I went to Wellington, and there I was prepared to do anything to avoid my vocation. I was really looking for a good time. Although I still hankered after the guy who went to England, the fact that I imagined I loved him freed me up to be pretty careless with other men. There was no particular reason why I shouldn’t go out with any man who took my fancy, and my major occupation became juggling those men around. Trying to fit them all in. The week was too short.

  How I lasted a year in the Navy office before they unloaded me I have no idea. I suppose they thought that with time I might improve. When I left I was informed that I had lost more men than were lost during the war. What they had done, you see, was put me on a new filing system, and I simply lost sailors’ identification cards. They disappeared forever.

  It went like this. James Smith, born 1929 or whatever, six feet four inches, hair brown, eyes blue, scar on left arm, etcetera. Lost forever. Surely this poor sailor could escape and never have to pay back time now that I had lost him? I should have let those poor guys know, warned them. When their anxious little faces popped up in the window in front of our desk I tried to warn them. I sang to them, ‘How much is that doggy in the window? Woof, Woof. I do hope that doggy’s for sale, Woof, Woof’ – something like that. I hoped they would catch on that I was telling them they were up for grabs. How disruptive singing in the Navy office. Captain Bloodworthy, that was his real name, had to make a complaint.

  Now the truth is that one tires of a good time – the cabarets, the balls, the parties. It was different now and I had to move on. Fortuitously, I met up with Yvonne Rust. Yvonne had been around Christchurch when I was going through one of my ‘nearly getting thrown out of art school’ episodes, and had made me somehow feel good about it, as if it were just part of the process of being at art school. Now was a good time to meet up with her again. Having done the social butterfly thing, I was now ready for bohemia. We would live in a condemned house we found; we would spend the evenings when I should have been partying doing cleaning-up jobs around town. The best part of the day we would devote to our work, to our creativity. The time had come. Yvonne was tall, large, with an ancient face out of the Stone Age. She exuded a benevolent, generous power, a rugged sense of adventure. I let her down.

  Just prior to meeting up with Yvonne again, the aunts, Eileah, Doozie and Viz, moved me into a suitable flat. Well, it was actually a superb house in Kelburn. Three lovely Catholic girls were in residence. For the aunts, a lovely Catholic girl was of course good-looking, had perfect Reverend Mother manners, and practised her religion with faith and discretion. I occupied the maid’s old room, which had the advantage of a separate entrance accessed by the back garden. This turned out to be a real advantage after I met Fraser.

  These young women were perfect hostesses and had organised a housewarming party. The guy I was involved with at this time was handsome, charming, and deserved a whole lot better than a girl – a woman? – like me. The lovely Catholic girls had asked two doctors at the Wellington Hospital, and of course they all had their eye on the lovely Catholic boy. The Protestant guy was fair game but the warning lights were flashing around the lovely young Catholic doctor. Years later Fraser and I would laugh wildly over Portnoy’s Complaint and the Jewish joke about the Jewish mother. When her son falls into the river she cries, ‘Help, help, the doctor, my son is drowning.’ Apart from the fact that this could easily have been Fraser’s mother, it applied here. It was the doctor, not the man, that these young women were interested in.

  As usual I got it wrong. To my way of thinking, Fraser McDonald was a Protestant name; Crawford – the name of Fraser’s colleague from the hospital – could be a Catholic name. It serves those women right anyway: they had been telling those guys stuff about me. Not only was I a scarlet woman but I was pretentious intellectually. Crawford and Fraser had been set up to expose me as a social con artist.

  Joyce Cary’s The Horse’s Mouth was a contentious novel at that time, and Fraser and Crawford had read it very carefully. They decided it was good choice for an exposé. It was, in fact, a bad choice for them, a good choice for me. After all, the west of Ireland was a sort of hobbyhorse of mine and Joyce Cary came from there. Another thing: my degree was a painting degree and the book was about a painter. However, I was not aware at the time that this was a contest. I just thought they were two guys hoping to have an interesting conversation. As I was no doubt rather drunk I began to find holes in their arguments pretty early on, and told them that they had got it all wrong. It ended up with Fraser and Crawford arguing with each other about whether I was right or wrong and they just about came to blows. The party broke up late, and at different times during that evening I agreed to go out the next night with Fraser, Crawford and my current partner. And all apparently to the same party.

  As usual I didn’t try to solve the problem. I just a
llowed the whole mess to evolve. What of course I should have done is not gone out at all, just jumped into bed early with a good book and some aspirin. Don’t judge me, though: my hormones dictated my actions, and drove me out into the jungle again.

  When the women in the flat said, ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ I said, putting a good face on it, ‘I will go with whoever gets here first.’

  Whoever got there first was Fraser. He was so wholesome-looking. He wore fine cotton shirts, army drill pants and polished English brogues. His hair was nearly red, and curly; his eyes were blue; and he possessed a very fine profile. He was of medium height, not short, not tall, and his proportions were perfect. In other words, he was good-looking. I hadn’t really noticed the night before, but I did notice then.

  Talking about clothes, I remember what I wore that night. This is important because young intellectuals now think we would have been wearing what was in the magazines of the times, the early fifties. What I wore that night you wouldn’t have found in any magazine. I wore very tight-fitting pants of bright green corduroy, and an off-the-shoulder black fitting top. Fitting is the operative word here. I wore a pair of coloured pumps, I don’t remember what colour, and large hooped silver earrings. My hair was tied up at the crown of my head in a piggy tail. I had a mask of white make-up and bright red lipstick, and I believed that was about as good as it got. I didn’t know it at the time, but my appearance wasn’t at all what Fraser has been used to.