I have a standing invitation to attend Blunderer’s notable Sunday brunches: his wife rings most Saturdays to encourage my attendance. It’s not the same without me, she says.
I’m there today. On Blunderer’s patio, fringed with lavenders in giant, free-standing pots with a fiery glaze, I mingle with bankers, local politicians, an antique dealer minus a thumb on her left hand, and American expatriates. There is wine, a smiling Asian girl circulates with canapés, and the bright sun creates flashes like flying fish from the ripples on the swimming pool.
Blunderer’s wonderfully attractive wife has just introduced me to a futures dealer as the man who saved her husband’s life, and now draws me aside to talk privately. She says that her sister, recently widowed, is coming out from her estate in South Carolina to stay with them. ‘Camille is the beauty of the family,’ she says warmly, ‘and so looking forward to meeting you. We’ve told her everything, of course.’ There is not a cloud in the sky above Blunderer’s patio. His guests are intelligent and candid, his wife a treasure for the eye and mind, his sister-in-law mine for the taking, his generosity sincere, and even his academic discussion has a new bloom since his recovery. From a distance I hear him praising me to the futures dealer, saying how much I have changed, apparently not recognising the transformation in himself. Dear Blunderer.
MID-CANVAS FIGURES
It was late summer when I went to Mrs Cullum’s in response to her advertisement, and the sun was still able to reflect wanly on the windows of the small villa. I didn’t realise then that in winter it would disappear almost entirely, and the valley become an enclave of permafrost within the city. No husband was in residence, or ever mentioned by my landlady. Mrs Cullum was sole head of house and firm overseer of me and Mr Ancaster. In Britain we would have been called lodgers; here we were boarders.
Mrs Cullum was a woman who drew attention to herself by an excess of manufactured fragrance and bold mismatched clothes. When she passed, even outside amid the Wellington wind, there was an additional gust of perfume, and the house reeked like a leopard’s den. She retained something of a figure, but I don’t think she wore a bra, and was thus slung low, almost to the waist. Her legs were her best feature: long and still well contoured, although marbled with bluish veins, and she liked to sit with her legs crossed and the free foot oscillating. She was fifty, Mr Ancaster told me, which I thought then very old.
My guess was that Mr Ancaster was a little younger: certainly he was a little shorter. But he too took a pride in his appearance, although he was a boarder with only a bedroom for privacy, no evidence of family, and a small, ruptured car that refused to start in winter. The last was no great hindrance to him, for he was employed at the botanical gardens, within walking distance. I never saw him in work clothes, and his small hands were scrupulously clean: just a faint yellowing on the smoking fingers of his right hand. Mrs Cullum once told me he worked mainly in the hothouses. He wore gaberdine trousers with pronounced cuffs and a knife-edge crease, a green Harris tweed sports coat, and ox-blood brogues that shone like chestnuts after their evening buff on newspaper spread on the tiles before the unused fireplace.
Dressed in such retro fashion he could have stepped from the pages of a 1950s menswear catalogue. To be fair, I think he had two pairs of gaberdines, because after prolonged observation I detected a slight distinction in their light colouring. I’m sure he had no other good jacket, or shoes. When it rained, he wore to work a clear plastic, calf-length coat that made him appear like a man in a bottle.
Mr Ancaster had a thin, Hitlerish moustache, and often brought home most splendid blooms, which Mrs Cullum would display in a square vase covered with miniature, multi-coloured ceramic tiles. She would make reference to them at mealtimes, saying such things as, ‘I never seen such colour in local flowers, Mr Ancaster,’ or, ‘What heavy fragrance the hothouse brings out, doesn’t it,’ although her own perfumes always overcame it.
Mr Ancaster would give a small cough as a response to the compliments. This cough was his replacement for the phatic communication of others. It was a reduced, double cough generated in the upper throat, and nothing to do with being a smoker. He coughed as acknowledgement when addressed, as a response signalling concurrence in conversation, and as a prelude to speech. Yes, and his hair is another thing I remember well. He had a head of ash grey hair, short and upright, so that when close you could see the pale scalp beneath.
I realise now that Mrs Cullum’s meals were peculiar indeed, but what is customary soon becomes accepted, and the three of us might sit down without comment in the Aro Valley to a dinner of beetroot sandwiches and chips, the bread beneath the heaped potatoes bright with the suffusion of the beetroot’s blood. Maybe boiled sausages in chicken and onion packet soup, Yorkshire pudding with hundreds and thousands perhaps, or chickpeas and pears. I had not one day of illness in the two years I spent there, though I did have a scare concerning a communicable disease and a fat girl doing economics.
Mrs Cullum told me on different occasions that she had been a teacher of modern dance, a franchise holder for a portfolio of toiletries sold door to door, the charge hand at Lefroy’s Baby Woollens, and an usher at the Regent Theatre in Cairney Street.
It’s easy now to be selective in retrospect so as to make her appear almost a Dickensian figure, and myself an amused observer, but she was the confident presence in her own home, and Mr Ancaster and I obedient minions.
Gin was the spirit of choice in the Aro Valley. When I returned from lectures to the late afternoon darkness of Mrs Cullum’s kitchen, there was often a bottle of Gordon’s Special London Dry Gin on the table between her and Mr Ancaster. It occurs to me that I’ve never lived with any group of people who weren’t drinkers. Mr Ancaster took his gin neat, and our landlady favoured a modest addition of tonic water. My arrival was usually the signal for the tête-à-tête to break up. ‘Such a day — these few minutes are all I’ve had. Absolutely flat out,’ Mrs Cullum might say, or, ‘No rest for the wicked, I’ve got things to do,’ and she would take the bottle and bustle away. Mr Ancaster would cough, but stay at the table because the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. He would toy with a dark, bakelite ashtray, and smoke self-rolled cigarettes with intense concentration, turning them often in his fingers for inspection, as if their appearance there was a perennial surprise to him.
There were rare times when I was invited to have a gin, and although it’s not a favourite of mine, I never refused, and the three of us would sit on the wooden chairs that had faded, flat cushions attached to their backs with tapes. These were the times I think when Mrs Cullum and Mr Ancaster had been drinking at the table long enough to feel expansive. Mrs Cullum would tell us of the significant events in the world — the neighbour’s cat spraying on her washing, her certainty that someone glimpsed on the television was a former dancing colleague, the tragedy that a barely opened jar of strawberry jam had grown a mould thick as frog porridge. Mrs Cullum’s perfumes were powerful enough to cover the faint fumes of gin, but the taint of various liquors clung often enough to my fellow boarder, and through the thin wall that separated our bedrooms I heard often the clink of bottle to glass, and Mr Ancaster’s preparatory cough.
I saw her only twice after I left, years later when I was back from Europe and had a non-tenured position at the university. On the first occasion she was looking down at me through a bus window as I waited outside at a city stop. I had forgotten that her face was rather like that of a pike, her lips far forward and very bright with lipstick. I waved to her, and she glanced further back in the bus to see whose attention I wished to attract.
The second time was in a florist’s shop where I was buying roses for Vicky to celebrate our daughter’s first birthday. Mrs Cullum was a customer also, but didn’t recognise me. I introduced myself, and she seemed pleased to remember my time as her boarder. ‘Of course, you were an agreeable boy,’ she said, ‘despite the untidiness, but my God, one of the biggest eaters I ever had.’ I would have eate
n more had it been available. She was wearing high-heeled shoes to flatter her legs, had a yellow scarf over her shoulders, and fly-away hair dyed fire engine red. Mutton dressed up as lamb, my mother would have said. Some deep lines on her face gave her a set expression of mild affront, and her heavy scent overwhelmed all others in the florist’s. I should have realised that, since she was buying flowers, Mr Ancaster was no longer in her house, but he was the only topic I could think of with which to continue the conversation.
‘Absolutely no idea. None whatsoever,’ she answered my query. ‘I believe there was some incident with a member of the public in one of the hothouses. I gave him his marching orders.’ Her pronounced lips tightened in indignation at the thought of Mr Ancaster’s disgrace. ‘I’ve boarders of an excellent calibre now,’ she said. ‘Of course property values in the valley have soared, absolutely soared.’ And she began to tell me of the prices obtained by various neighbours, and of the lives of those neighbours, although I had no recollection of them, or their increasingly valuable homes. Only after I left the shop did I realise that not once during the conversation had Mrs Cullum asked any question at all about me. At least in the small space I had in her memory, I would remain an agreeable boy, rather than a drunk.
I never saw Mrs Cullum again, but drink united me with Mr Ancaster, in a sense. Drink is a convivial thing, according to conventional wisdom. Let’s have a drink together and unwind, people say. But only the first few drinks are interested in community, and then the possessive demon takes control. In the end booze isolates you from people, even those you love, those to whom you have a duty, those who love you. It’s a narrowing focus until there’s just alcohol and you — then finally booze is you in some hapless symbiosis. The smell of it even, becomes intolerably provocative, as the scent of a woman to her besotted lover. The physicality of it, even: how the liquid weight of it surges from the bottle, the fluidity of it against the tongue and mouth, its mobile resistance to compression. The varied sounds and colours of it, even. The absolute necessity of it that no logic, or advice, can stand against.
So it was the aftermath of addiction in which I met Mr Ancaster again. In the Mather rehab centre, which was a long way from both the Aro Valley and the university. It was the practice at the centre for inmates to help in some way with the running of the place; voluntarily, of course, though not to do so marked you out as someone not in accord with the ethos of situ, as Dr Bigg liked to express it. The ethos of the place was never formally set out, but obviously included a collegial and cheerful willingness to reduce the overheads.
I was mailman during part of my stay at the Mather. Letters and parcels were left at reception, and some vetting was done by Trevor Staples the counsellor. A few people were not permitted to have parcels given to them, and had to open them in Trevor’s presence. I would take the mail and go through the rooms and distribute it upon the beds. The bedspreads were of cotton, and all ivory, or pale green, except Greta Wallop’s patchwork cover, which she brought from home because it had been made by her handicapped son. Some beds received mail regularly, and some never. Some received a variety of envelopes with the address handwritten, and some just the occasional stale, official window envelope. Mail distribution was a manifest sign of life outside the place — of the steadfastness of support, or indifference.
After some weeks there was a reallocation of jobs. I lost the position of mailman, and agreed to help in the laundry. There were murmurings about bribery and corruption in connection with the changes, but there always are in such places. I didn’t mind the laundry. It was warm in winter, machines did most of the labour, and my stint was just three hours twice a week. It was there, in the vaporous atmosphere and revolving noises of the laundry rooms, that one of those things you usually hope to avoid in rehab happened — I met someone who knew me. I was taking a second load of sheets to the drying room when I noticed a slim man sitting on an upturned blue, plastic bucket just outside the door, and smoking, with great concentration on the act. His grey hair was as stiff as a scrubbing brush, and he wore gaberdine trousers.
‘Mr Ancaster?’ I said. Sooner or later we were bound to meet. ‘Gareth Siddup,’ I said. ‘I boarded with you at Mrs Cullum’s for a couple of years when I was at varsity.’ Mr Ancaster gave his signature cough.
‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ he replied reflectively, as if confirmation, even authentication, was expected of him. He’d got thinner, as alcoholics often do, and his skin had darkened with the nicotine and the drink. He had accordion creases below his eyes, and the apathetic passivity that those unfamiliar with the disease mistake for serenity. ‘I’m supposed to be knocking off,’ he said. ‘They’re down on it here, aren’t they.’ He meant the cigarettes. It went without saying that drink was out.
Mr Ancaster hadn’t long been admitted, and had aged a great deal. Originally all we’d had in common was Aro Valley and Mrs Cullum, but at Mather we had the additional connection of being alcoholics. We began to talk sometimes, especially on those visiting afternoons when I knew Vivienne wouldn’t be coming; Mr Ancaster never had any callers. We complained of our fellow patients and the staff who tended us, but also we talked of our boarding days. Neither of us wished to say much about the subsequent and sometimes despairing lives that had followed. There was a north-facing window at the end of the second-floor corridor in Kotuku Block, and a form there on which we’d sit together when there was winter sun. Mr Ancaster would have a crafty fag, and drop the butts into the green agapanthus below.
‘We were at it, of course, Sheila Cullum and me,’ he told me as the sun came and went in a cloudy sky. There was a quiet pride in his voice, as if he needed that opportunity to inform someone that although he was an ageing and nondescript alcoholic who had shamed himself in a municipal hothouse, yet he’d once been his landlady’s lover: he’d been the object of affection. I was surprised, because he’d always seemed so much an auxiliary in the house, and I’d never witnessed any affection from Mrs Cullum towards him, apart from her admiration of the flowers he provided from his workplace. ‘It wasn’t open slather,’ Mr Ancaster admitted. ‘Sheila was very careful about it all. She knew your lecture times to a tee, and we never went to each other’s rooms in the night. But if my luck was in then before lunch sometimes. She didn’t like to do it on a full stomach. Of course I wasn’t on the sauce the same then.’
He’d taken care of his appearance then too, whereas in the Mather Centre his trousers were pouched at the knees, grimy at the pockets, and instead of polished brogues he had schoolboy shoes with thick, rubber soles. A scurf of dried skin particles would gather on the folds of his dark socks.
During another talk he told me that he’d paid the rates for Mrs Cullum, always supplied the gin, and helped her out with legal fees when her neighbour took her to court over spraying the boundary hedge with weedkiller. ‘I could’ve done with the money for the car too,’ he said. If he was telling the truth then I’d quite misread the household when I lived there, but that’s so often the case. You think you know how the circumstances were in a certain time and place, and then someone recounts experience from a different angle and all the pieces change.
‘It was the prostrate that ruined it,’ Mr Ancaster finally confided to me. We were both sitting on bucket bottoms outside the laundry door, and lifting our faces to a welcome sun. ‘I couldn’t piss so they gave me the operation, and after the operation I couldn’t get it up.’ I expected him to tell me that after his prostate had been removed, Mrs Cullum had dumped him and sought a capable sexual partner elsewhere. We judge women to be as self-serving as ourselves, and she had seemed to me a decidedly unplatonic woman. She had shown understanding, however, and it was Mr Ancaster’s own injured pride that had caused difficulties. ‘I didn’t like her touching me when nothing could come of it,’ was how he put it.
I enjoyed the winter sun on my face and felt the bucket beneath me vibrate because of the laundry machines not far away. I postulated that Mr Ancaster had indirectly become
a soak because of the swelling of his prostate. There are innumerable things that can trigger alcoholism. I could tell you about it. ‘I still liked to talk to other women,’ he said. I didn’t let on I knew there had been some incident in the hothouse garden that had led to his disgrace. It was the final irony that his need to give an impression of manliness had led to his being accused of something beyond his capability.
‘Somehow the booze got the better of me once I left Sheila’s,’ he said. This is how the alcoholic feels: the victim of a masterful force rather than personal decision. ‘Remember the strange tucker she used to drum up for us. Jesus. One awful bloody night we had a carrot and blackcurrant pie. But she was a fine-looking woman, mind you. You have to say that.’
‘She had good legs for her age.’
‘She told me she used to be a dancer. She said too that she used to have her own business once, selling women’s stuff.’
‘Cosmetics.’ I could imagine Mrs Cullum scouting business by inviting a small coterie of Aro Valley women to her house, and painting their mouths and faces boldly to advertise her wares, her own fish forward lips vividly glossed. ‘Did she ever say anything about a husband?’ I asked.
‘Never a bloody word.’
‘And nothing about children, I suppose?’
‘Never a word,’ said Mr Ancaster, ‘but just once some sister of hers came, and they had a stand-up row at the door about family money. The sister kept on saying, “But who tended them at the end, tell me that then.” I think maybe she called herself Mrs because it wasn’t good to be single and have men boarders.’
Living As a Moon Page 22