Living As a Moon

by Owen Marshall

  ‘We had some damn good trips together, Maggie, didn’t we? What’s the top place you’d most like to return to?’ He was in the clear time between the drowsiness of morphine and the preoccupation with pain. Margaret had talked of Croatia and Turkey, and he’d lain there, his eyes intent as he drew up images in his mind to match her reminiscence. His smile was wide, but in those last weeks a parody: the teeth seeming to have grown too large for his mouth, the skin and flesh retreating from the bone and cartilage of his face. ‘Yes, Ephesus was great, wasn’t it. To think it had been an ancient port and now miles from the sea. Marvellous place.’

  ‘So hot, though, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You were always rinsing our stuff out and hanging it overnight in the hotel bathrooms.’

  ‘And you were always working out the exchange rate.’

  And as they talked he fell asleep, leaving her looking down on his open mouth, the equine teeth quite strange to her.

  In her own country there was emotional challenge enough. Margaret had some difficulty finding the turn-off to Ladbrook after Roxburgh, and even when on the unsealed road, finding the farm wasn’t easy. She identified it finally from the green summerhill stone of the farmhouse, built by Peter’s parents, and the great, ramifying macrocarpa at the gate where Peter and his sister had waited for the school bus. There was little flat land, and the hills with occasional schist outcrops rose up more steeply than she remembered. There had been a group of assorted fruit trees close to the house, but no sign of them remained. Even country women had given up on bottling, she supposed. There was still the cluster of willows at the turn of the creek marking the one pond on the farm big enough to attract ducks. She and Peter had walked to it during a farm visit before their marriage. Lovemaking was difficult when staying with his parents, and Peter had urged her into the privacy of the maimai, and they had sex leaning against the unsteady side of the hide. Fenceposts, wire and light branches of broom and lupin woven in. Margaret’s strongest memory was the feeling of the resilient wire behind her thighs, the fragrance of foliage and the muscular smoothness of Peter’s neck. Youth.

  She didn’t want to go up to the house, to meet people with whom she had no connection, to witness all the changes that had been made since the place was Peter’s world. She stood distanced at the road gate, the pulsing sun above her, and thought of her husband as a boy and a young man. This was a place in which he had never been seriously sick, or weakened: a place of natural possession. Where she stood, he had waited as a school boy with his sister, a home-made lunch in his bag. He had ploughed the few flat paddocks for his father. He had mustered the hills, and carted hay to the barn still standing by the windbreak pines. He had shot mallards on the pond, and made love to her there against the wire and brush of the maimai. It was healing to stand in the hot sun and feel Peter’s presence. The place was very real, ordinary in the best sense, and the images it conjured for her stood against the memories of the pale hospice room and slowing time. As she drove back to the main road, Margaret sensed she wouldn’t go again to Ladbrook. There was no sadness in that.

  Alexandra had been her destination for the night, but she reached it by mid-afternoon and wasn’t tired. She drove on through the gorge to Cromwell and Lake Dunstan, and booked into a motel not far from the shopping centre and district high school. The woman in the small reception office was thin and wore blue shorts. Margaret judged her age to be mid-forties, but the sun of Central had been destructive for her skin. Lines fanned from her eyes when she smiled, and some parts of her tan had deepened to the colour of the age spots Margaret was aware of on her own hands.

  The woman was called Promise. The novelty of it would mean that she, and that Cromwell motel, would remain in Margaret’s memory always, although significant in no other way at all. Promise displayed that apparently sincere interest in others that some retain despite dealing with a constant stream of people in their working lives. Some of Margaret’s nursing colleagues possessed the same virtue, while she often tired of the press, the expectations, of those around her. ‘So where have you come from today then?’ Promise asked as Margaret filled out the accommodation form, and she went on to enquire about the weather experienced on the journey and the final destination.

  ‘I’m heading for Nelson,’ Margaret told her.

  ‘You live there?’ asked Promise.

  ‘No. An old friend of mine is celebrating her fortieth wedding anniversary.’

  ‘It’s a credit to her,’ said Promise emphatically as she took a pottle of green top milk from the fridge and set off across the forecourt to usher Margaret to Unit 8. ‘There’s so many marriages hit trouble these days, aren’t there. Mind you, I have to say I’m separated myself, but we stuck it out until the kids were safely gone.’

  ‘So often the way.’ Margaret chose not to detail her own situation, despite travelling alone.

  ‘Come over if there’s anything you want to know,’ said Promise. ‘Ring the bell if I’m not around.’ Her shorts were a narrow cut, but still loose on her thin, brown legs. She moved briskly as if to deny anxiety the time to settle. There were things Margaret wanted to know, but they would be beyond Promise, despite her invitation.

  The shopping centre had the uniform architecture of recent creation — stained wood and feature stone walls, full-length windows. Margaret could remember the old Cromwell before the lake was formed, but you had to fight against the impulse to make comparisons, didn’t you. It was a sign of age to set Punch past to every Judy of the present. She would curb that tendency in herself.

  She ate pan-fried fish and a salad, neither as appetising as those she could make, but that was another comparison she rebuked in herself. She didn’t want to become one of those dried-up old women for whom criticism was the only way to gain attention. Like Mrs Ellington one down from them, who gave abrupt and gratuitous gardening advice whenever in other people’s sections. She once told Margaret her roses needed dead-heading. Peter called her a bossy old bitch, but not to her face. ‘Don’t shut up shop, Maggie,’ he’d said towards the end. ‘And don’t spend all your time running after the kids either. You’ll get over all this business, and I want you to go on and, well, I mean you’ve been so supportive of me, and there’s time for you to do all sorts of things.’ The business he talked about was his dying. ‘Don’t live in the past,’ Peter said. But overall it had been a past worth living in.

  Margaret wasn’t accustomed to eating alone. It made her slightly self-conscious, and more aware of other diners. The talk, the demeanour, of other people drew her attention when she lacked the absorption of a conversation of her own. Two men at a nearby table discussed difficulties they were having in getting building permission for a lakeside subdivision. Although they responded in conversation, she was surprised how little attention they paid each other. One man, athletic and bald, seemed absorbed in burrowing into his plate, and the other stared through the window as he spoke, watching passers-by in the still bright evening sun. Margaret noticed how his gaze followed women rather than men. When women talked to each other the words were accompanied by eye contact, by emotional exchange of one sort or another: men seemed content to rely on simple meanings. ‘If I’d realised there was going to be such a bloody rigmarole, I would’ve got onto it earlier. The lawyers will lap it up, of course,’ said the window watcher. He glanced at Margaret with a mere passing flicker of interest. She would get used to it in time. A fifty-seven-year-old woman by herself, after so long with a husband, so long with a social position established by a partner.

  Even the return to the motel was a reminder of that. Everything just as she had left it, everything her own feminine possession. No one present with whom to share her reservations concerning the meal, or her observations of the conversation of men. She rang Greta, and after a lengthy talk asked for the boys to be put on. How similar their voices were, how cheerfully off-hand, and how preoccupied their attention with a forthcoming school concert in which they were goblins in brown leather suits.
‘They sound happy, in great form,’ Margaret said when talking again to her daughter.

  ‘Kids are so resilient,’ Greta said. ‘They miss Dad, though. I can tell that. They’re missing you even more, so don’t stay away too long. They wanted to show you their costumes tonight. What’s it like there?’

  ‘It’s still hot.’

  ‘Drive carefully tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m looking forward to seeing the old bach. If it’s still there, of course.’

  ‘Be careful driving into Christchurch,’ said Greta. Admonitions, assurances, warnings given to your children are all returned in time as the roles reverse.

  In the morning Promise gave her advice on the weather and clothing. ‘Stinking hot later,’ she said. ‘That car of yours got air-conditioning I suppose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cotton, or linen, that’s the only thing,’ she said. ‘I drive a lot with bare feet myself. Your feet are great regulators of body heat I read somewhere. It’s restful somehow in the heat.’ She didn’t say anything about sunscreen, or dark glasses, or a hat. Margaret imagined her in twenty years: even thinner, even darker, like a teak hat-stand. ‘Why don’t you call in on your way back?’ Promise asked, as if extending private hospitality.

  Margaret enjoyed the drive over the Lindis Pass and into the Mackenzie Country. Until his illness Peter had done most of the open road driving, destination always the priority. Margaret was more leisurely, letting the big car loaf along a little under the speed limit. Traffic was light, and most vehicles went past, disappeared and left her at peace to enjoy the landscape and her thoughts. She and Peter had never developed the habit of listening to the radio, or a CD, while driving, and even though without his company, she preferred not to have that distraction. He had been a good talker and receptive listener. Some of her friends complained their partners never listened, never paid them attention. Her marriage had had its stress points, of course, its deficiencies, but consideration and engagement were habitual. Neither of them had sulked, neither of them took pleasure in inflicting pain. Peter was socially adept, and his talk stimulating and well informed, in contrast to the banal exchanges of many people they knew. He said that one of the things he noticed overseas was the higher level of conversation among professional people: the energy put into it as a tribute to those with whom you talked. It was one of the things she missed, having her own opinions and experience tempered, but not overwhelmed, by his incisive intelligence. Only about feelings had he not a lot to say.

  The dun landscape was considered barren by some, but Margaret felt at home there. Flat country with little evidence of stock, or people. Some wilding pines, nothing that reached up far, and so the great, blue arch of the sky seemed to take up more of the space of the world. Most of her life had been set in Christchurch and then Invercargill, but her father’s family had owned a fishing bach at Lake Alexandrina, where she had often spent holiday time before she left home. As she headed there again, turning off just before Tekapo village, and driving at the foot of Mount John, she experienced a strong sense of return. Not much seemed to have changed — the road was still unsealed and the land unimproved — but her response arose from more than that. Since Peter’s death she had felt a compulsion to revisit her past, emotionally as well as physically. It was a natural and healthy part of grieving, she told herself, and would pass.

  The car swayed on the rutted dirt track to the cluster of baches and trees at the south end. She remembered her father and grandfather joining with others occasionally to make ad hoc repairs on especially rough sections of the road. She remembered wintertimes with snow lying over the bare country like a pelt, and water pipes frozen in the bach, but mostly it had been as now: summer heat and the burnished rose hips like gems in the scattered wild briar.

  Margaret put on her peaked suncap, and walked to the lake edge. There were more willows on the shoreline than she recalled, but little change otherwise. On the still water she could see two dinghies, one close enough for fishing rods to be visible. No power boats were allowed on Alexandrina: that was one of the things her grandparents had loved about it. It was a quiet place and what sound there was carried a long way — the slap of oars, a voice from the baches, perhaps a car starting, or the discordant call of ducks, perhaps the percussion of a man clouting shoes together to dislodge dirt from the treads. Often no sound at all except that occasioned by the movement of the air.

  And the smell of landscape and lake, not town, compounded of rocks and soil, plants, insects, and damp margins under sun, wind and rain, but always in keeping with the season it accompanied.

  Their bach was in the second row, and little changed. Originally an army hut with a corrugated iron extension. It had been repainted, but in a shade of blue that would in time be bleached to the colour she remembered. A man of about her own age was pottering about a boat and trailer close by. Boundaries were indeterminate and the small buildings clustered on open ground. The man asked if he could help, and Margaret told him the blue bach had once belonged to her family. ‘John and Georgina Simmons own it now,’ he said. ‘They’re not here much, because he has his own electronics business in Christchurch.’

  ‘The Wallace family had your place when I used to come for holidays.’

  ‘I bought it from them fourteen years ago. She died while they were travelling overseas, and he’s got past the fishing. He comes up just occasionally for old times’ sake. A decent old bloke, and full of tales about the lake. My name’s Philip, by the way.’

  ‘Margaret,’ she said. They didn’t shake hands. ‘Nothing much seems to have changed.’

  ‘It’s the regulations. No new places are allowed to be built because of the lack of a sewage system. They’re tough as hell on making any renovations and there’s still no electricity. It’s a bit different at the outlet. Things are more upmarket there.’ He was a tall man with an office face, and spoke well. He wore jeans and a light grey jersey with no shirt underneath. An accountant, or a dentist, she supposed, maybe a polytech lecturer. ‘Is this your first time back for a long time?’ he asked.

  ‘Longer than I care to say.’

  ‘There aren’t many quiet lakes now. That’s the thing we like about Alex. The power boaters, water skiers and tourists all hang out at Tekapo, and we’re pretty much left alone.’

  ‘What’s the fishing like now?’ Margaret asked.

  ‘You still get some good rainbow. Great eating. The old guys say brown trout were a lot more numerous years ago, but now rainbow seem to do better.’

  ‘I’m just going to walk round the place. That okay?’ she said.

  ‘Absolutely fine,’ said Philip, exercising neighbourly authority. ‘Nice to meet you,’ and he turned back to the boat and trailer. During their conversation they had remained a full twenty metres apart, but that seemed quite natural.

  Margaret walked round the building. The rough tussock grass still grew to the sides, worn back only in tracks to the door. The long-drop outhouse was gone, no doubt replaced with a chemical toilet. Little else external had changed. The wooden door of the bach, large and with ribbed panels, always seemed too grandiose for the place, and had been bought from a wrecker’s yard by Margaret’s grandfather. There was a tin lean-to at the door, and on the enclosed side hung, or leant, the typical paraphernalia of the place — oars, rowlocks, thigh-length waders, rods and tackle bags at head height, kids’ toys, parkas, a cane basket, faded sunhats with set creases, a small wooden box that had once held tea and in which messages, or oddments, could be left, and three rusted horse-shoes nailed high for luck.

  The smell of the place was just the same: the smell of implacable sun on wood, tin and fabric, of a place closed up for much of the time, of the trees and grass surrounding it, and faintly of fish and stale food. She didn’t press her face to the window, not because it might seem intrusive, but because she didn’t want to see any change there that might conflict with what she’d known. Inside for ever would be the old sofa, the two crowded bunk-rooms wi
th faded quilts, the stone fireplace and the wooden table with tatty, yellow contact on its surface. Her father reading by the window, his glasses well down his nose: her mother giving some implausible description of a stranger met on her lake walk, or wondering aloud what simple meal she could concoct. And Margaret with them, but having at times the strange feeling that she was already looking back, already being silently swept past them into her own life.

  Philip gave a wave as she walked from the bach back towards her car. She imagined him mentioning their meeting to his wife. Strangers were rare. He would say he met a woman whose family had owned the Simmons place, and who had known the Wallaces, and his wife would ask her name, what she looked like, say he should have found out the surname. All more to pass the time than any true curiosity. Philip’s description would make no mention of clothes, apart from the sunhat perhaps. Men make a physical inventory, not all of which is passed on: assessment of age, figure, sex potential. His wife would be fashionable perhaps, as befitted the spouse of a professional man, and tolerating the solitude and remoteness of Alexandrina because she knew he needed the break. Margaret found herself speculating more about the partnerships of others since Peter died.

  Tekapo village had altered more radically, though she was familiar with that from occasionally passing through. She had lunch there, saw the new buildings that increased popularity had encouraged, and watched the Asian tourists swarm out from the buses for their photo opportunity by the lakeside chapel. She checked a slight disdain. It was no different from her own overseas bus tours: traipsing in a temporary congregation behind the guide to see the tower at Pisa, the Cappadocian caves, or the Greek monastery on a rock, and being more vitally concerned with food and lavatories, the petty vendettas within the party, than the postcard views. The things that remain most vividly in mind are those trivial revelations and incidents not mentioned in the brochures at all. Like the young American who propositioned her at the Gare de Lyon, in Paris. She had been waiting by the cases while Peter went to find their platform. The American must have been twenty years younger. Tall, well built, but with a face rather devoid of character. He put his backpack close to his feet as he sat down. ‘A madhouse,’ he said, and Margaret agreed. Maybe he was Canadian: she wasn’t good with accents. ‘Would you like to fuck?’ he said. Whenever she thought about it, she was sure he said only the one thing before that, but perhaps the impact of the question blotted out a few inconsequential comments. He must have been on something surely. ‘I was told every French woman fucked, and I haven’t scored in a month,’ he said.