by Gee, Maurice
‘Do you manage to sell any of your paintings?’
‘Oh, one here and there. For nothing much. May and Eric bought one.’
‘Yes, I know.’ I supposed that Rose and I should have one too, but we had no place to hang it where it would not be seen. ‘What about showing them? There are all sorts of group shows and exhibitions.’
‘I’ve got some watercolours accepted. I doubt very much … forget it, Sam. My sort of painting …’ She shrugged.
‘They’re not what people want, I know, but you can paint things that are more popular.’
She looked at me hard. I saw some nastiness — let me say essential nastiness — snap into being in her face, reflexively, like her hand going for the ball. ‘Did you enjoy doing your book of jokes? You wanted to write properly once, didn’t you?’
She turned and went into the house, and I thought, Well, damn her. How dare she? I wash my hands …
Chapter Two
Eric and I strolled down to the stream. The dappled shade and moving water put him in Shelley-quoting mood — he will trot out lines, drop them into any pause in the conversation, appropriately, inappropriately, it does not matter. He has a sweet tooth for Shelley and sucks these verbal confections like peppermints; he offers them round. When I described my talk with Charlie he intoned, ‘Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage, Pourest such music …’
‘Come off it, Eric, she paints, she doesn’t sing. James is the one in trouble.’ I told him about Oliver Joll contesting the nomination for James’s old seat. ‘Even if James doesn’t decide to try for it himself, he’ll never stand by and let Joll have it. And if his name goes forward and Joll beats him …’
Eric turned a wad of mown grass with his toe, then nudged it into the water. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be bothered with James. Everyone studies him too much, we bend like trees. He’s not the centre, Sam, he only thinks he is. It won’t fret me too much if he gets a bloody nose.’
‘James can’t stand up to Joll in a rough-house fight. When he gets beaten, what will happen here?’
‘He might just turn his face to the wall.’ Eric took a crooked step across the stream. He wobbled, almost tipping sideways. Impatient, I gave his back a shove, propelling him to the other side, then, teetering forward, had to jump across myself. He nipped my sleeve between finger and thumb and saved me from unbalancing into the shin-deep water. We had these semi-comic episodes, Eric and I, nearly always brought about by his impulsiveness, and although they ruffled me and turned me squawky as a rooster they also increased my fondness for this awkward gifted man, my brother-in-law; made me, for a moment, protective of him. He grinned at me.
‘A good part of James is facing there already,’ he said. ‘Charlie is the one we should worry about.’
‘Did she show you her painting?’
‘I nipped in and had a look when I parked the car. It’s got a kind of fault line, don’t you think? Everything’s done in her usual way except their faces. They look as if they’re painted on porcelain.’ He hacked his heel in the grass like a rugby player preparing to kick for goal — except that he was fretful not calculating. Eric’s easy acceptance, calm of mind, his animal contentment, made a rock in our family. We rested there in upheavals and steadied our feet again.
‘I don’t want to see that girl go under,’ he said, and it struck me from a tremulous note in his voice that there was more between Charlie and him than shared ideas. Had he gone further? He saw the question in my face and said, ‘I love her like a daughter, Sam, so don’t go shooting off.’
‘No.’
‘But maybe something more than that as well.’
I asked him what he meant, afraid some flaw would appear in Eric to change our lives — May’s and Rose’s and mine.
‘I want to underpin her, Sam. And send her on her way. But go with her as well. Do you see what I mean?’
‘No.’
‘She’s a practical woman. She’s matter-of-fact about her painting. Doing it is the thing. Putting on the paint. But I’d like to know what she sees before and after.’
‘Maybe not much. She’s swallowed the whole caboodle. Distortions and nature out of tune. Red hills and trees like mushrooms and clouds like stones.’
Eric laughed at me, then grew serious. ‘Unless she paints it’s a wasted life. She’s not a weekend dauber. It’s something she was born for. I’d like to know more about that. There’s James looking for us. From his home among the dead.’
I read a bit of Shelley myself, although I’m out of tune with his excesses and piling on, which are especially damaging in the poem Eric quoted from. Yet he had chosen aptly — poor James in his ‘home among the dead’ truly enough, with the ‘one chained friend’ with whom he must ‘the dreariest and the longest journey go’.
We jumped the stream and met James on the lawn and found him still contented from his tennis victory, which Eric had contributed little to. He walked with us back and forth, in manly promenade, expatiating on world events: Chancellor Hitler at his nation building, Mussolini plotting empire in a desert waste, and socialist evils everywhere, which would have brought us home to Wellington if Eric had not butted in: ‘Do you see what this man Goebbels says about Germans deserving the blessings of heaven? “Hitler is the faith with which we confront trustfully life’s asperities.” ’
‘That’s blasphemous,’ James said. ‘Nevertheless, one can’t blame Germany, the threats they face. I’m more concerned with our own back yard —’
‘Our gigantic cow yard,’ Eric said, quoting Massey.
James frowned. He had had no liking for Massey, who failed to promote him, and whom I believe he’d found repugnant: corpulent, farmer-faced, thick-limbed, thick-minded too (James did not say it in those words), a leader unworthy of his role.
‘We’re more than a cow yard, I think. Although, yes, the Empire’s outlying farm. But we won’t retain that function long if we allow these socialists their way. They’ll bleed the country white in no time, you’ll see. Print it and mint it, isn’t that their philosophy? Yes Eric, I’ve heard your arguments, but how you can, an educated man … They’ve never done a day’s work in their lives and yet they believe they can put the laws of the Universe at defiance.’
‘Well, as to the laws of the Universe,’ Eric began; but, ‘Such folly,’ James went on. ‘Bray a fool in a mortar and yet his foolishness will not depart from him.’
Time to head for cover when James argued from the Bible. He became so fine honed with rectitude he cut like a knife — all the slashes shallow and none directed with more than conceit, yet, with their little weight of authority, they could hurt. We might have been in for it, Eric and I, but were saved by an arrival unwelcome to James. With his sharp ears — all his senses, the primary ones, were sharp — he heard the motorcycle before we became aware of it. A spasm of annoyance crossed his face — the shiver, the puckering a sudden wind makes on a winter pond — and he said, ‘Now what does he want?’
The young man, grinning and goggled, who wobbled his vehicle along the path between the house and garage, then rode it across the lawn to meet us, was Freddie and Elsie’s son, Taylor Barr. He put down his legs, balanced the motorcycle, took off his gloves and goggles and leather helmet, showing bright eyes and brighter hair, and cried, ‘Happy New Year, uncles all.’
‘Take that contraption off my lawn,’ James said.
‘Aha. Careless of me,’ Taylor said. ‘We’ve had enough oil spills today, haven’t we Owen? Uncles, meet my friend, I’ve talked about him. Owen Moody.’
The young man on the pillion seat dismounted and offered his hand. ‘Sir,’ to James, ‘I’m honoured to meet you. We’re sorry to disrupt your peace and quiet. And intrude like this. Tay insisted, didn’t you Tay?’ He wore no helmet or goggles, which seemed to give him candour, perhaps from the nakedness of his face, the dry sweeping back of his hair and redness and wetness of his wind-stung eyes. I shook hands with him after James.
‘I’ve heard
of you, haven’t I?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not really known for anything.’ He smiled at James — self-deprecation there. ‘I have played a bit of cricket, sir. Only at club level. Don’t have the eye for it, I’m afraid’ — complimenting James. ‘Taylor, can I take this bike away?’ — this by way of instructing Taylor to move it, which he did, although no further than the kitchen yard, where he turned back.
‘Where’s my ma and pa, they said they’d be here.’
He went into the house and, the irritant removed (Taylor is Freddie and Elsie mixed, her commonness, his stupidity, with a voice that scares birds from distant trees and a conceit that makes it louder), James relaxed his frown.
‘You scored a hundred, didn’t you, for varsity?’ he said.
‘Ah, well, yes. I got dropped on twelve,’ Owen said.
‘It takes a good player to go on.’
‘Now I’ve got you placed,’ I said. ‘You write poetry.’
‘Verses, yes. In Art in New Zealand. I hope to do better ones than that. Professor Clifton —’ turning to Eric — ‘I’m a real fan of your articles. I read them religiously.’
James was frowning again, perhaps at poetry, which he had no time for, perhaps at ‘fan’ (I can’t say I liked the word myself); and the boy, understanding whom he must please, said, ‘As soon as Taylor has kissed them for New Year we’ll be on our way. But can I say —’ he looked uncertain, and I thought, This fellow can act — ‘perhaps I’m talking out of turn, can I say how much I hope we’ll have you back again, sir?’
Too many ‘sirs’, yet I was not certain Owen Moody was insincere. There was a charge of feeling in what he said. James felt it too, and although he sent a chilling glance at Owen, merely replied, ‘That’s not a matter I wish to talk about.’
‘No, of course. I understand.’
‘I don’t want anything getting out. I suppose it was Taylor?’
‘He mentioned something, yes.’
‘And Freddie told him. You see —’ turning to Eric and me — ‘how can I be expected … ?’
‘It’ll be common knowledge soon enough,’ I said.
But James must control things and punish when punishment was due. ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’ll have a word with those two.’ He went into the house.
Owen Moody’s eyes were wet, either from the motorcycle ride or mortification.
‘I seem to have put my foot in it.’
‘Everyone does with James sooner or later,’ Eric said. ‘What was that about an oil leak? Is that machine playing up?’ He had an appetite for mechanical trouble.
‘Oh no, he only meant — we’ve been swimming at Oriental Bay. Oil gets spilled from ships over at the wharves and I came up under a patch of it. I had a kind of grey-brown halo on my head. We had to go up to my flat and wash it out. It took a whole hour and used up just about a bar of soap. It’s why he’s so late wishing his parents Happy New Year.’
He had an alert sensitivity, signalled in his eagerness to please, and signalled physically by a lightness in his movements that a hard, almost heavy musculature could not weigh down. His face held an uneasy mixture of the coarse and fine — I hesitate to say of the brutish and well bred, both words too blunt at the edge, yet they come to mind. Perhaps if I make an inventory: bony forehead, indented, thumb-dented at the temples; blue eyes, girlish perhaps in their overlong blond lashes; interested, interesting eyes, intelligent, humorous, even when sore with wind and salt, and probably soap, as on that day; but nose, then, thickened at the bridge and fat about the nostril wings — and this, of course, becomes absurd, I’ll go no further. How would Eric emerge from this sort of noting down? How would I?
What I knew then and what I know now — how am I to keep them from their adversarial stance?
Owen Moody was pleasant; he was pleasing, let me say. I talked with him about his versifying, persuaded him to drop that classification (quickly done, his modesty was false) and found that he valued his poems more highly than I. He thought of himself as a poet, in fact, not as a clerk — no harm in that — and was armed with a sense of his own worth that would prickle and inflate if given the chance, like one of those rare fish from deep in the sea — porcupine fish, I think they are called.
‘Tay mentioned to me — but maybe it’s another thing I shouldn’t know?’
I asked what — was meant to ask, he managed things.
‘He told me about your book. You too, sir,’ to Eric. ‘The detective story you’re writing with your friends.’
‘He’s got a loose mouth, our nephew,’ I said.
Our literary game was something the new men — Glover and his kind — would ridicule us for, and the thought of Taylor hooting it about among his friends filled me with anger and consternation. He presented us as jolly uncles, quaint old uncles, I supposed.
‘We’re not a subject for conversation any more than James.’
‘I’m terribly — I had no idea,’ Owen said.
Eric, sorry for him, said, ‘There’s no harm done. It’s Sam’s pigeon really and he wants it kept quiet.’
‘It’s only a game,’ I said, then baulked at the lie. It was something I had the highest hopes for, as several of the others had: Euan Poynter, Theo Mead, Tom Gow especially. Eric too, an optimist in everything he took part in, believed we were on our way to competing with the ladies — he meant Christie and Sayers and the new girl, Marsh.
‘I’ll ask you not to spread it,’ I said. ‘I’ve no doubt Taylor treats it as a huge joke. How did he find out?’ I turned to Eric.
‘From me, I suppose. I was telling Freddie —’
‘Eric, didn’t we make it clear when we had the meeting … ?’
I turned away angrily and heard Owen Moody say, ‘I seem to cause trouble.’
‘No, no,’ Eric said. ‘I’ve got a whole collection of dog boxes, this is one more. Let’s not have one of your tantrums, Sam. These mistakes get made. I’ll sit on Freddie and Taylor, I’ll shut them up. And I’m sure this young fellow … ?’
‘Yes. I promise. Mr Holloway, I’m positive you think it’s more than a game. I mean, I don’t think you and Professor Clifton and the others —’
‘Did Taylor tell you their names?’
‘Some of them. But I’ll forget them if you want me to. Look, I know you and the Professor wouldn’t waste your time. I’m sure you want to write a good book.’
‘You are, are you?’
‘And what I thought — I know it’s presumptuous of me — but I have published bits of prose as well as verse, you see. I’m not unknown.’
Eric laughed, and I gave a crow of amazement. The fellow was asking if he could join.
‘I’m young, I realise. But Thomas Gow is hardly more than thirty and his stuff is mainly verse, isn’t it? I can do as well, I know I can. I took the liberty — I realise it’s a liberty, but good writing breaks the conventions, doesn’t it? — I brought along two or three pages I’ve written, just to show … It’s atmospheric. The sort of thing you want when a murder’s getting done — dark streets and rain and wet shrubs and all that —’
‘The murder’s been committed,’ I said.
‘Windows with broken glass and a door creaking on its hinges —’
‘The murder’s done.’ By me, and thoroughly.
‘Yes, Sam, but there’s more coming up,’ Eric said. ‘I’m not sure Theo’s got enough ghoul in him for his. Let’s see what Owen’s written. It can’t do any harm.’
Owen had already taken an envelope from his pocket. I refused to accept it. The boy’s effrontery had an insulting edge. I sensed in him something watching, adjusting too, behind an ingenuousness that had to be bogus.
‘How old are you?’ I said, and wondered if he could redden at will.
‘Twenty-eight.’
So, no boy. That was bogus too. I wondered what he was doing running about on motorcycles with Taylor, his junior by nine years.
Eric snared the envelope as neatly as he had snared my sleeve
. ‘We’ll have a look. You know, Sam, I’m no writer either, not of fiction, but you took me on and I’ve done a good chapter, you’ve admitted as much. All right, too much scientific stuff, but I’ll weed that out. And you know Marcus Waller’s going to throw in his hand —’
‘Is Marcus Waller in? He can’t write,’ Owen cried.
‘Is that your opinion?’ I said.
‘Sam, come on, put a lid on it,’ Eric said. ‘Marcus is no novelist. Half of us are not. We’ll read your piece,’ he said to Owen. ‘But mum’s the word from now on, all right?’
‘Yes, of course. I’ll be really quiet.’
So Eric arranged things while I stood silent. Yet oddly enough, when Taylor and Owen had ridden away, his judgement on the newcomer was as uncertain as mine.
‘We’ll have to keep our eye on that one,’ he said.
Mrs Hearn finished at 6.30 so Charlie and Rose and May served the meal. Vi did not come down but had a tray in her room — the tenderest piece of lamb in bite-sized pieces, the smallest potato, and no gravy because just the sight of it made her ill. She tinkled her bell three times during the meal, calling Charlie.