by Lloyd Jones
All six Supreme Court judges dismiss Maud’s appeal. Judge Stout is especially damning:
Is there evidence in which the jury could reasonably have come to the conclusion that she had been guilty of cruelty to her husband? In my opinion the evidence was ample. I go further and say that if the jury had found her not guilty of cruelty that verdict would have been against the weight of evidence and a perverse verdict.
Maud never did come to the front door or appear in the window of her house to wonder about the mysterious car parked along the street.
Maud will never again marry or, as far I know, enter into another relationship. She will raise the two boys on her own. She begins a women’s clothing business, which struggles.
Mysteriously, when Mum is around the age of twelve or thirteen, she is plucked from the Fairleys and returned to Maud to live in the building in High Street where, years later, we would buy my school uniforms.
Why? If she knew, Mum never explained. It remains a mystery. Just as puzzling is why the Fairleys would agree.
It’s possible that my mother was proving a handful. She told my sisters that after she moved with Maud, Eric and Ken to a house on The Terrace in the city she was forever climbing out of windows at night and getting into trouble. What kind of trouble? It was never spelt out. Mum told her children different things.
From Barbara I learnt that Maud disapproved of Mum’s table manners—said she ate ‘like an animal’. I wonder if Maud’s objection conceals a more painful truth. The little girl she had loved and given away in order to secure her a loving home has turned into someone less loveable than the child she remembered.
In an attempt to escape the past Hester undoes the clasp that fastens the scarlet letter A around her neck and throws it to the ground. The burden of shame and anguish passes out of her. Feeling herself liberated she lets down her hair, her mouth softens, and a radiance returns to her eyes. ‘Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty came back from what men call the irrevocable past.’
Except, perversely and cruelly, in her newly liberated state she is no longer recognisable to her little girl. She has turned into someone else. For Pearl, the figure of motherly love is burdened and stigmatised, and so, aware of this sad fact, Hester has no choice but to reach down and reattach the scarlet letter.
Perhaps my mother and Maud had moved too far apart, and failed to recognise one another. Their reunion is unpicked and Mum is let go a second time and never again invited back into Maud’s life.
Both Maud’s sons go off to the Second World War. Ken is a naval officer. Eric returns from the disastrous Crete campaign with memories he will not speak of (and, on the few occasions we met late in his life, whenever I attempted to steer the conversation in that direction he would see it coming and with an evasive smile reach for his glass of gin). He farms land in the rugged central North Island King Country that has been broken in, cleared back to bare lumps of hillside dotted with sheep.
As Maud was a regular visitor, I wonder if the smells of one farm ever brought back memories of Taruna, and of Owen T. Evans, and of the child they had. Did she ever consider these gaps in her life—and reflect on what she had lost? Or had she absorbed the ability to forget?
To look ahead, one must forget. The rules of progress are written into the landscape.
In the 1960s, when she was still in her mid-twenties, my sister Pat knocked on Maud’s door. At the time Pat worked in the market-research department of the Wills tobacco factory in Petone. She was in charge of a team conducting a door-to-door survey, and when Maud’s name came up on the sheet of addresses my sister decided to take that one for herself.
She knocked on the door, and waited. She knocked again. She was about to give up when a woman in her seventies appeared from the side of the house. She had been gardening out the back. Finding the young researcher on her porch, Maud invited her inside. She made my sister a cup of tea and sat her down at the kitchen table.
Pat discovered Maud to be a polite and carefully spoken old English lady. Maud got out her photographs and proudly showed Pat her sons and grandchildren. Then she sat down and put on her glasses and answered the tobacco company’s questions without ever knowing that across the table from her sat her granddaughter.
The last Maud saw of my mother was when she told her never to show her face again. But Mum remained in Maud’s orbit right up to the end.
In 1977, Mum and my sister Barbara followed the cars leaving Maud’s funeral service to a house in the beach suburb of Waikanae on the Kapiti Coast. They parked out on the road, and sat there for a while. Mum, as usual, was riddled with self-doubt and old fears. At Barbara’s encouragement and insistence, eventually she made herself get out of the car, cross the road, and knock on the door.
Ken Nash recognised her immediately. Fifty years had passed since he had last seen her. He invited her in, but remained formal, distant. Fortunately, Eric was more welcoming. He seemed to know what Mum was after, and to his great credit he willing gave it. He invited her to stay with him and his wife, Barbara, in Warkworth, north of Auckland. After half a lifetime spent apart, sister and brother resumed their relationship. Mum would drive up to Warkworth or else Eric and Barbara would drive down the island to stay with Mum. I remember them sitting on the couch holding hands and, whenever Eric’s warm and lovely teetotal wife’s back was turned, they would top up each other’s gin glass.
Towards the end, when neither one could travel, communication was difficult. Eric suffered from emphysema and could not breathe without the help of an oxygen tank. A series of strokes had cleaned Mum out of language. On one occasion my sister Pat stood in the kitchen passing phone messages back and forth. She had to make most of it up. Eric died a few months after Mum.
I looked in the hairdresser’s window once and saw her, wide-eyed beneath a dryer, like someone receiving shock treatment. My father used to say I’d send my mother to the loony bin if I carried on the way I did. I can’t remember what I did to cause offence. This recollection has no real role to play. But, it continues to exist, like a card fallen out of a pack, representative of other such moments that fail to add up to anything more. In this way a life sheds itself. It leaves skin on furniture, hair on the pillow. A life reduces to a couple of walk-on parts in other people’s recollections. And while some faces may fade, others remain stuck forever like an overbearing portrait glowering down from the walls.
The other day I saw a woman in her fifties get up from a cafe table and embrace a younger woman who appeared to be her daughter. Maud never knew her place in Mum’s life.
She might have thought to break the ice, perhaps say something nice. Offered a cup of tea instead of turning the young mother away from the door.
I was thirteen years old when Apollo 8 delivered a wider view of where we lived. How humbling to behold our blueness as never before seen and the extreme vanity of our undertakings and devotions, as well as our fears, of death, and of shame.
SIX
ON THE FIRST real day of summer I flew down to Christchurch, picked up a rental car from the airport and drove into the city. I parked in the shade of the trees above the Avon, then crossed the road to the Bridge of Remembrance and, out of habit, stood where I had in the winter, between the two imperial lions, beneath the inscriptions of old campaigns fought in Messines and Palestine and Mesopotamia.
I barely recognised Cashel Street from the ruins of my last visit. The barriers had been taken down, but I did not shift from the old position. City birds hopped over a vacant site where in June had stood a building I’d seen knocked witless by the swinging arm of a demolition crane. An office desk and chair had raced towards one another in a mad comic embrace before the floor on which both depended crashed to the street in a cloud of dust. The pink insulation of the building flopped out, like the false grin of the dead dog in Stellin Street all those years ago.
I remembered what others had said about the tremendous noise of glass bursting onto the street hours after the
earthquake. I thought of the young mothers I’d seen with their prams in a street near Eureka filling water bottles from a huge bladder parked on the side of the road, and of the shiny green human-waste disposal units and portaloos that popped up everywhere, and the new phrases people invented in their darkest moment of need—Stay away from the trees!—as a road rolled up like carpet. ‘It’s like living with a tyrannical old bitch,’ someone said. Did he mean the earthquake or the compassionless landscape? And the tree that stood on the periphery of the devastation, completely unmoved. Likewise the feckless skies. Heartbreak. There is no telling when or where it might strike. When my marriage ended I was amazed to discover, after years of conscientiously constructing it, just how pot-holed my life suddenly appeared. I thought of the small groups of stunned people I’d seen over that winter gathered at building sites—silence written all over their faces—at a time when there was still talk of rebuilding the city and no one dared say otherwise for fear of being singled out as a shit.
I remember the cries of defiance, and the morale-boosting efforts of self-appointed angels who swept through neighbourhoods at night painting messages of hope on fences and the sides of buildings. Sentimentality, like weeds, is always first to flourish. But there could be no going back. At the time, my wife urged me not to be rash. Which was tantamount to asking me not to be myself. We were sitting in the car in Jackson Street, Petone. The world moved by in slow motion. People appeared and disappeared and shifted along like fish in an aquarium. We filled the car with our separate silences. One of the ongoing jolts is the daily reminder that what was once always with us is no longer. I spared a thought for the Japanese student buried in foreign rubble. The battery on her cell phone running low while she chose her last words to say to her loved ones in Tokyo. As a child I liked to stick my finger into the gap between my front teeth. The first morning I woke alone in the shoe factory I patted the bed beside me—just to be sure. It was shocking really. A shock—followed by calm afterwards, but only after. The finger probed the toothy gap. I remember I sank back to my side of the bed with a placid moon expression, amazed at the sudden redundancy of the expression ‘my side’. Whole buildings—now missing. Imagine it. And for days after, when there was just the echo of myself in the new place, I tiptoed about like a thief.
It was exhilarating to leave the bridge. It was like having freedom of movement back in a leg that has had the plaster removed. A sunny lightness extended all the way up Cashel Street to its colourful shops made out of shipping containers which were huddled around the old city retail establishment of Ballantynes.
Most of us were pretend shoppers, sticking our noses into the showroom, which accounts for me buying a Bavarian sausage in a roll that I didn’t really have an appetite for from a woman at a wurst stand.
While she turned the sausage on the grill we talked about the earthquake. She and her husband, a gymnastics coach, were from Hungary. They had arrived just before the September 2010 earthquake. I said something about bad timing, but she was quick to say how much they liked it here. The broken city was now their home, and in spite of everything they had found a way of accommodating the disaster in their lives.
I wandered back to the car, drove past the airport, and carried on north, past the roadside tree stumps brutally cut almost to ground level. Sun-split and weathered, they continued to launch themselves at the sky, held back by roots that carried on in the only way they knew how.
I was on my way to explore the world of O.T., Owen Tibbott Evans.
I have a photograph of a wheat field. It could be Russia or the south of England. In fact, the picture was taken by a photographer from the New Zealand Department of Tourism in 1917. Stooks of wheat surround a horse-drawn cart on which sits a man in a hat and a dark suit. Using a zoom I can bring up the white of his collar, but then the face of my mother’s father, the North Canterbury farmer, disappears into a haze.
I am his descendant, or more accurately, as I have come to think of it, I am a descendant of a moment of lust and desperate loneliness.
There is no reason to believe that the farmer’s other descendants know anything about my mother. Or whether they will welcome the information I bring. They have their own well-tended history to consider, their own family myths to respect. There was that sign I saw in Bexley, one of the areas worst affected by liquefaction—someone had painted on their fence ‘We still live here!’
No one likes to think of their life as spectacle.
On the other hand, fault lines do not think. They are indifferent to what has been built on the surface of the earth. Fault lines have their own history to consider. They are not random events, but contain their own inevitability.
It was just a matter of time before I would get in touch with the farmer’s family.
Maud may have held the stone but she never cast it, and so O.T.’s family never found out about Betty.
O.T.’s grandson, Wylie Evans, was gobsmacked when he heard about Betty from John Harper, a local historian whom I had taken into my confidence. Harper then got in touch with me to say that the Evans family would like to meet me.
I followed up with an email to Wylie, and one year after the earthquake I found myself retracing Maud’s footsteps from the scullery end of the original Evans homestead.
This is what happens to a house left on its own to fight the elements. The front roof hangs over the veranda like a bad toupee. Half the veranda has disappeared—into firewood, no doubt. Two huge lateral branches from a bordering macrocarpa lean on the roof with the weight of a drinker’s arm.
It is four o’clock at the tail-end of a lacklustre summer, and inside, the house is dark and dank. The tall windows with their old-fashioned pulleys cast just enough light. A torch would be handy because in the hall I have to balance myself on floor joists left exposed by missing floorboards. The floors in the other rooms are intact but covered in sheep shit and dirt. In each bedroom of peeling wallpaper is a fireplace.
Ruins such as this are commonplace on farms where the need to occupy the same site as the original dwelling is not as pressing as it is in the city or on a suburban street where one footprint must be instantly filled by another. So a house is abandoned to the status of an old tree stump or rusting car wreck.
I’m surprised and delighted at how much remains. School exercise books dating back to the 1920s that belonged to Gwendoline, daughter of O.T. and Maggie, lie on the floor. I brush the dirt off a small card from The Book Society, 13 Grosvenor Place, Hyde Park Corner, London SW1. There are books by the score, disintegrating in boxes, some scattered over the floors. I pick up King Solomon’s Mines by H. Rider Haggard. Inside the cover I find it inscribed: ‘To Owen Tibbott Evans, Christmas 1896, from Father.’ I hold in my hand a book once held by O.T., and his father, and feel an unexpected rush of pleasure.
In a dark cupboard I find three pharmacy bottles dispensed by E.P. Shier, Amberley, in 1923. The bottles have a milky residue, like milk of magnesia, with a labelled instruction to take four times daily. Milk of magnesia is excellent for heartburn, dilutes the fire. I know this from personal experience.
Then I pick up The Boarding School Girl and find inside the name of O.T., this six-foot-something, broad-shouldered stockman and stud master.
On a wire spike I find a year’s worth of invoices for 1938. I peel off each one, hoping to find something private scribbled in the margins, or a letter that somehow has become muddled up with the bills. But the wire turns up only invoices. Still, something of the man and how he lived is revealed in what he’s paid for in the course of the year: bills from Meat and Wool in Marion Street, which is the street abutting Ghuznee with the music store on the corner across the road from the shoe factory, an invoice from the Little Company of Mary Hospital in Bealey Avenue, Christchurch ‘for Miss Evans, Rm 23’, an invoice from Blackburn Motors in Christchurch, distributors for Buick, for an oil and grease and a pint of shock absorber oil, a receipt for £10 from the New Zealand National Party (to be expected), fees to th
e Canterbury Park Trotting Club, the Timaru Trotting Club, the Oamaru Trotting Club, invoices for the transport of horses to these meetings (I’ve since learnt that O.T. won the New Brighton Cup with a horse called Beckleigh). I pull another fistful of invoices off the wire. There’s one from Whitcombe & Tombs booksellers, and, devastating for any father to receive, an invoice from Shaw and Sons in Rangiora to cover the funeral expenses for his daughter, Gwendoline, which is unceremoniously followed up with bills from baling and chaff-cutting contractors, hardware merchants, ironmongers, regular invoices from a florist in Christchurch and D.H. Fisher ‘Terms Monthly Storekeeper Hawarden’, often for the same items: sixteen eggs, cheese, matches, twine.
I wonder which room Maud slept in. Very likely the one nearest the scullery. But perhaps not—I have just learnt about the existence of fourteen-year-old illegitimate May sent ‘into service’ at Taruna at the same time that Maud lived here. May’s bedroom would have been the one nearest the service end of the house, in which case, I decide, Maud must have taken the bedroom directly behind O.T.’s. Great swathes of peeling wallpaper hang down like bats’ wings from a pink-flower frieze. Its delicacy has survived the general dereliction of the room.
Hawthorne invoked an onion to describe seduction as a kind of unravelling.
You may strip off the outer ones without doing much mischief perhaps none at all; but you keep taking one after another, in expectation of coming to the inner nucleus…It proves however, there is no nucleus, that chastity is diffused through a whole series of coats, is lessened with the removal of each, and vanishes with the final one which you supposed would introduce you to the hidden pearl.
Add to that the creaking silence of the house, and a gathering sense that the world has forgotten Maud and O.T. And the casual thought that comes and goes, first as a shameful surprise, and then not at all, but familiar, and then a wish, and then a frustration, and then a need that cannot be suppressed any longer.