by Janet Frame
She found a wet cloth and wiped the windowsill. At least her neighbours could never say she was not a good housekeeper. Her house had always been shining like a pin and like a pin it had pierced her thoughts constantly. At times Charlie had said, half-joking, half-complaining, when she mopped up a molecule of tea or rubbed away a dot of fly dirt,
‘I could take my tucker and eat off the back step.’
This pleased rather than insulted Sadie. It was good. Was not the true test of cleanliness passed if you could eat your dinner, as Charlie said, off the back doorstep, the kitchen linoleum or the swept front path?
The day was clear, cold. Down in the town the prunus blossoms were showing like snowflakes with blue winter light shining mistily through each flake. In a few weeks the apple blossoms would be out, yet the air was still cold, with surfaces like marble to the touch and a chill curtain every few yards that admitted you and tried to imprison you; there were more such curtains when you were old, and then, too, your blood was a reluctant servant, and old dry bones at every patch of all-day frost on the damp side of the street said quick-snap quick-snap with every careful footstep.
The taxi would be coming in ten minutes. In half an hour Sadie would be on her southern journey in Car E seat 48, smoker. Six hours. Crossing brown rivers by green land clumped with flax, tussock, and darkly shadowed macrocarpa. Then Gore, and Molly at the station. Then the newspaper bus to the small country town, and Charlie, waiting. He’d be there now, the wreaths and sprays would be there, the telegrams too (messages to 46 Stone Street) and Sadie would be the last person to arrive. And then on Sunday they would go to the cemetery on the hill and bury Charlie while the plump pampered ewes, nestled by the first pink-white lambs, turned to stare, their slit eyes like minus signs unknowingly foretelling all, even their own savagely simple arithmetic.
There was a sound of gravel on the roadway fronting the gate. The taxi. Honking its horn. Bert Brown, Sadie told herself. His is the only car with a horn like that. If it were Bert he would come to help with the suitcase. She stood a moment, undecided. Then suddenly, her fingers working as desperately as when she had tatted, crocheted, knitted, she unstrapped and unlocked her case, and hurrying to the medicine cupboard and jerking it open she seized the atomiser. Then she packed it, almost lovingly, in her suitcase, between her toilet bag and her blue winceyette nightie. Even for the sake of the friend who had given it to Charlie, should she not keep it? After all, neither she nor Charlie had scorned to keep, year after year, the clutter of knickknacks and the weathervanes that in spite of their role had never shown the power of prediction, decision and command held by the atomiser.
‘Oh I’m mad, I’m mad to take it south with me,’ Sadie said angrily as she strapped her suitcase. In olden days would it not have been buried with him as perhaps it should have been now? Then, there’d be no indecision about it. Yet it was important, it had to be included, it was more than it seemed, and though it was horrible, horrible, it could not be left behind.
She answered the knock on the door. She saw Bert Brown’s sympathetic face, purposely serious.
‘Sorry to hear,’ he said, ‘of Charlie. A release though, wasn’t it?’
He knew Charlie had been suffering.
Sadie closed her eyes and gulped.
‘He’ll be having one hell of a laugh at us,’ she said bleakly.
‘Maybe he would, maybe he would. All the old ones are dying off,’ Bert reminded her, as he could afford to do for he was not yet an ‘old’ one.
‘Steep hill this. They were blasting at the quarry again yesterday. It’s all right now but if we get a nor’wester the town’ll be covered with dust.’
‘But they’re not blasting today?’
‘Not a sign. But next week — fallout from an atom bomb, you might say.’
‘Those atoms,’ Sadie said, sharply condemning.
She felt suddenly the repulsiveness of the atomiser lying in her suitcase. Why, anyone seeing her snatch it from the bathroom cupboard might have thought she were robbing a safe of diamonds! What heavenly or earthly use was the thing now? If the truth were known it hadn’t kept Charlie alive at all. It was he who had given it life and prestige, endowed it with friendship, made it a temporary privileged member of himself, and who, with his enjoyment of living and his desperation to breathe, had even conferred nobility upon it! He had found pleasure in it, too, but the pleasure had originated from him, not from the atomiser. Without him it was harmless, useless. It was Charlie who had the upper hand now, who had robbed this toy of the glory he had bestowed upon it; and that was the role it should play now: a useless toy.
She would give it to the children, Sadie decided briskly. She did not care, she did not care, she would give it to the children and they could fill it with scent or hair-set or talcum powder or dust, and if they learned, as Charlie had done, to work the little bulb that had helped him to survive, they might even use their toy to spray a film of dust over all the surfaces of the world; but they would need to be more than skilful housekeepers to remove it!
The Painter
When someone suggested that Robert take up painting, he laughed at the idea. Where would he find the time? His only free time in the weekend was spent gardening, mowing, doing maintenance jobs around the house while Pete, his son, cleaned the garden aviary, fed the birds, and loaded the trailer for the Saturday morning visit to the tip; and Ailsa, his wife, and Gwen, his daughter, did the washing, cooking, mending, cleaning. A busy household with no time. And then there were the children’s high school exams, Ailsa’s committees where they relied on her to do the paperwork, Robert’s Rotary and, as relaxation, they watched TV in the evenings; and, in the summer, they drove up to the bach on the coast for Sundays and weekends and there, apart from a change of scene, swims, and cockles for tea, the routine was the usual mowing, repairing, gardening to get the Christmas and New Year potatoes ready. They’d never had a year without new potatoes, not even in that bad drought when the tanks were empty and the ground was like stone, and Robert had to chip away for hours before he could plant the potatoes, only a handful, enough for one helping each at Christmas dinner. The rest of the garden yielded nothing.
And with all that work he was being urged to take up painting! His wife’s brother who lived near had always been the painter of the family. One was enough. Some of Robert’s friends were painters. At work and in the lunch break they would talk about their paints, the colours, bases, brushes, rollers, sprays. Painters could do anything they liked these days. Anything.
‘Why don’t you take it up, Robert?’
After resisting for so long, Robert surprised himself and everyone else by giving in, and one Friday evening towards the end of winter on the way home from work, he bought a stock of paints and brushes and cleaners from the hardware store in the shopping centre, and that evening he broke the news to the family.
‘I’m taking up painting,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a supply in the workshop.’
Gwen was excited. ‘Oh, Dad!’
Pete said nothing. He was a quiet boy; the whole family was quiet.
Some families are forever discussing, announcing (I’m going to do the washing now, I’m going out to the car), or calling to each other, like birds, if they are in different rooms or out in the garden. A small movement apart creates a ravine of distance that has to be bridged at once or all is lost. Others disconnect their tongues and beings for long periods and appear to give a kind of suspense to their life as if they quietly waited for something important to happen, and this feeling is intensified if their outward life is as busy as that of Robert and his family.
‘I’m glad you’re taking up painting,’ Ailsa said. Then, as an afterthought, ‘You don’t mean painting?’
Robert refused to be trapped in the other-times, other-opportunities web which Ailsa was inclined to spin, now and again, not often, in the evening.
‘Of course I mean painting.’
Everyone sat as if waiting. Perhaps it is at s
uch moments that angels visit, because they know there’ll be no conversational fuss, just a quiet looking, everyone at everyone else, waiting for the angel to speak or to leave, not trying to entice it with promises and performances to stay.
‘Yes, painting. It will be a change from getting brother Bert around every time we want anything done. I’m going to paint the house, starting in the weekend. Tomorrow morning.’
As it happened, Robert did not organise his work until Sunday. Saturday was a strange day, with the household gripped by a mood of dissatisfaction and restlessness which, Ailsa and Robert supposed, could be blamed on the approaching spring. Ailsa suddenly decided she ought to take a course of ‘something creative’ at the local Tech. Pete said that whenever he went out anywhere he was tired of trying to change his face to fit what people were saying: he was a big boy with a large pale face, and he tired easily. Gwen complained that departing ambassadors were right: the country and its people were dull, plain dull.
The weather was dull, too: the sky sagged in the middle, there didn’t seem to be enough head-room; the smoke from the neighbour’s bonfire swirled through the house; and out in the garden the narcissi, newly in bloom, had a curdled look. Good riddance, Saturday, everyone said when the day ended.
Early on Sunday while the rest of the family were still in bed asleep, Robert set up his ladder around the front of the house and began to strip the paint from the wall outside the sitting room. At first, worried by the unusual silence of the world, or rather of Peach Street, Auckland, he wished he had brought out the transistor to listen to some music, or the news. Or something. Then as he began to get into the rhythm of the work he felt more comfortable. There’s an agitation at the root of the tongue which, even when one is not speaking, persists while the surrounding world is filled with the stirring of people and machines. Now, however, there was a feeling of complete rest.
Two sparrows landed on the lawn. Robert glanced sideways at them as they pecked for seeds or worms. Or something.
Three dogs in assorted sizes ran by, unleashed, any two steered by the impulse of the other.
Dogs at large, running wild, Robert thought, in the language of the local paper, but he felt no anger towards them, nor towards the empty street which Ailsa referred to as ‘a deathtrap with all those trucks’. And as he worked, swishing the brush to spread the undercoat on the area he had already stripped, he felt and saw the sun come up out by Rangitoto which they couldn’t see from their place anymore, because of the townhouses, and the house over the road that was lifted on its haunches and packed underneath with concrete to make a double garage and rumpus, and now it was advertised for sale with all its parts named, and only the neighbours knew of the surgery that had transformed it from a mere fibrolite bach.
Now the sun was shining on Robert, like a big warm hand spread on his skin. He took off his shirt and draped it over the ladder. The two sparrows, ignoring him, still pecked about on the lawn. Ah the lawn. It deserved a pat on the head for not having grown these winter months though now there was new green coming through and before it got a hold he’d have to deal with it. He knew what lawns were. He’d be finished if the lawn managed to get a hold.
A light wind began to blow, scattering the sunlight into moving shadows. Robert found himself spreading undercoat on his own shadow which moved with him as if to evade him, and his shadow arm made a regular waving motion such as a child gives, waving hello and goodbye to passing cars and trains where strangers stare from the window. Beside his shadow the shadow of the seven-foot specimen tree moved against the wall with the bumps of the new buds just visible on the shadow branches. The tree cost thirty-nine dollars, three years ago, bought and planted for his wife’s birthday, the same year she had bought him the aviary. A romantic gift, surely. He had planted a passionfruit vine to cover the roof of the aviary but the prevailing wind had blown it next door where it flourished, apparently disowning its roots. This year, though, there were signs of withering and it had borne no fruit.
Robert closed his eyes dreamily. How warm the sun was! In another month or two it would be unendurable.
Absentmindedly he painted over an ant. So the ants were out already. They’d have to be watched. Another year of watching, controlling, trimming. Christmas at the bach again. They were due for a medium summer. They were on the lookout for a bigger boat this summer, though now he’d taken up painting would he have time to sail?
Suddenly he was aware that the traffic had begun — cars and boat-trailers on their way up the coast; the Sunday morning motorcyclists on their flash four-strokes with automatic everything.
Yes everything.
Dead by afternoon.
The quiet was gone.
Robert looked at his painting. Two, three more weekends and it would be finished. He was one of the painters now. When people asked him, Do you paint, he’d say, Yes, when I get the time. If he painted the bach next, he’d have five, perhaps six Sunday mornings to look forward to.
Yet, he thought, it wasn’t as if he had done anything.
That night, after the first deep sleep, he woke in the silence and stillness. He heard a morepork calling from the Domain. He felt a tiredness in his right arm as he remembered the sweeping motion with the paintbrush. He remembered the morning — quickly, because it was work tomorrow and he hadn’t time to stay awake in the middle of the night — but quickly he remembered the quiet, the sparrows, the dogs, the sun, the shadows, the ant, the traffic, but mostly just himself and his shadow, painting. He sighed happily.
Ailsa moved.
‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ he said, falling asleep. ‘Nothing.’
The People of the Summer Valley
‘Summer at last. About time.’
‘From year to year we never remember it came and what it was like.’
‘It never comes. Spitting, drizzling. Fog. Wind. We never see the sun from one year to the next.’
‘Except now.’
‘Yes now.’
‘Listen. Bumblebees in the purple clover.’
‘Bumblebees? Aren’t they humblebees? I’ve always said humblebees.’
‘I’ve always said bumble. The world won’t come to an end because we differ.’
‘It may.’
‘Do they sting?’
‘Some do. They’re a race apart. Drones.’
‘Drones?’
‘No. Drones are the other kind of bee, the honeybee that is a layabout.’
‘The humble honeybee. Listen. Humming, droning, all those winged insects. The murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves. Is it their wings that hum?’
‘It’s the friction of their wings in the air.’
‘Or isn’t it, sometimes, anger? Wasps trapped inside. Bluebottles that find their square of daylight hurts when they fly into it. Bluebottles that panic.’
‘Wasps will sting then. You can die of a wasp sting.’
‘When a bee stings you must pluck out the sting. Doesn’t the bee die?’
‘I shall be suntanned all over when the sun goes down.’
‘Oh what is that humming, droning, buzzing? Listen. Aren’t there more flies than usual?’
‘I’m glad we found this valley. No one has ever lived here. We have the place to ourselves.’
‘Aren’t there more than usual? Those big blue-suited ones?’
‘Blue-suited? Did you learn to say that in speech training? I muse that the immune blue-suited few who abuse the curlew are due to induce the truth too soon.’
‘Seriously, though, there are more than usual.’
‘There’s a kind of bird that hums and drones and buzzes. The blue-suited few are more than usually abusive.’
‘It comes from that clump of bushes over there. The rambler rose, flax, elderberry.’
‘I will ruminate on a clue.’
‘It frightens me. I have never heard such frantic buzzing, droning, humming. It is beginning to fill the valley. I think it is flie
s.’
‘The blue-suited crew?’
‘It is flies, I tell you, swarms of them. Yes, bluebottles. Look at the clouds of them rising, rising from the bushes. They are filling the valley. They are blocking the sun.’
‘Don’t look.’
‘See, they are crawling across the sun’s face as if it were a dead planet, and over the sky and on the leaves of the trees; there’s a thin line of them moving over the brow of the hill. In their dark swarms they seem to dance.’
‘Don’t look. This is the summer valley. This is our place.’
‘Something is dead, then, in the bushes.’
‘But nobody lives here or has ever lived here except us. This valley belongs to us alone.’
‘Something is dead.’
‘Don’t look. We are the people of the summer valley. We are alive.’
‘It is a man. He is dead. Do I know him?’
‘And a dead woman. There’s no doubt who they are.’
‘They are the people of the summer valley.’
The Spider
At the party, she looked like a beautiful spider. Her short black velvet dress was starred with some kind of dust that shone in points of light, and her blonde hair hanging below her shoulders shimmered like a multitude of strands of fine sunlit web. Her face and lips were pale, her eyes big and bright, her legs long, shadowy in black stockings. When she spoke her voice was soft with a hint of breathlessness. She and the young man had spent all day together and had dined in the evening with the fashionable lawyer and his literary wife and they had promised to come to the party and they kept their promise. The young man was handsome with a shirt the same colour as the autumn leaves in the woods and a dark-eyed gaze that used to be described in romantic novels as ‘smouldering’. A fine word!
Shortly after arriving at the party the two had separated to meet and talk to the other guests. She sat curled up in an armchair, not looking at him for ages, playing the role of being absorbed in conversation, questioning her companion, a composer, about his work and listening intently to his replies; while he, with the air of paying attention to no one else in the world, ever, took a seat by the three older women one of whom was the sculptor, the guest of the evening, and talked to them, laughed with them, flattered them with such animation that neither the guest of honour nor the ageing writer whose unmentionable birthday it was, nor the third woman, a widow, with snow-white hair and used skin, could resist his charm. They found themselves flirting with him and they grew warm-cheeked and bright-eyed under his glance.