by Gee, Maurice
I protested but laughed too, and felt a secret pleasure at being lumped in with Carlyle. Eric dropped ‘Caraway’ after that. His joke had run its course.
There was no talk of that sort as we walked up Wadestown hill. My mind was spiky with resentments.
‘I’m not going to let him take over,’ I said.
‘Don’t fret about him, Sam. He’ll create a bit of bother but he’s got a sort of largeness, don’t you think? That’s worth something. I don’t know whether he can fill all the space he wants, that’s all.’ Eric smiled. ‘I don’t mind him stepping on us a bit: young men should. They climb us like ladders.’
‘This fellow’s trying to take too many rungs.’
‘You’re crabby, Sam. You think this thing is not going to work?’
He had hit on a part of it. As for the other, it had to do with enjoyment. I had written my chapters in a doubling-back, side-stepping, potholes-in-the-road manner that I enjoyed thoroughly after the narrow path of journalism. I discovered a passion for metaphors (and did not always notice when they jumped tracks) and wanted to keep that new pleasure. Impossible to explain it to Eric. Instead I went on about the difficulty of my task as editor. How do you make twelve ways of writing cohere; make twelve villains, twelve heroes, twelve pretty girls fit into their single villain, hero, pretty girl mould? Subtleties of language would have to be discarded; contending epithets chosen between; styles raked flat. I would end with a barrel of compositor’s type.
‘Put young Moody on it. He’ll lick it into shape.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s my idea.’
‘Slow down, Sam.’ I thought he meant my walking. ‘We’re doing this to entertain ourselves. Isn’t that the first thing? After that, if it works it works; if it makes us famous and makes some money, that’s extra benefits, isn’t it? We agreed on that when we got together. If we start worrying, there’s no point.’
He held me by the arm to look at the moon. It made tracks on the water like mother of pearl, picked out sheds on the reclamation and drew the harbour wall in white crayon and black ink.
‘The old moon in the new moon’s arms.’
‘What causes that?’
‘Earthshine. Reflected light.’
‘We shine on them? Like they shine on us?’
‘I like your plurals. Come in for a nightcap, Sam. May’s still up.’
She was in the kitchen with Charlie, heating water for a pot of tea. Eric poured two whiskies in the living room.
‘What’s Charlie doing here? I thought James wouldn’t let her go.’
‘She needed a break. May went out and fetched her. You know May. The housekeeper’s got a sister who’s a nurse. She’s living in.’
‘How long?’
‘Oh, a week. Two weeks. We’ll see. Water in that? No? Good luck.’
I cannot pretend these conversations are exact but it’s better being direct than indirect; it puts me up against things, face to face — as when Charlie, letting her tea go cold, told us, ‘Mother can’t sleep except in snatches. She rings her bell three or four times every night. She’s frightened of the dark, even though we keep the night light burning all the time. She says she sees things moving in the corners of the room, but of course it’s on the inside of her head. Because she starts on people she’s known, girls at school who were nasty to her — and you as well, May. Rose as well. Not giving in to her makes everyone into monsters. Some little thing like squabbling over a brooch or not getting the part she wanted in the school play — and how could she have the best part? She can’t be anyone but herself because there’s nothing outside unless it’s pointing in at her somehow. Anyway, these things get claws, they fix on her like those little demons in early paintings. Is monsters in her mind saying too much?’
‘What’s the doctor doing? What medicine?’ Eric asked.
‘Tablets. Phosphorated iron. Which she won’t take. It’s nervous exhaustion, he says. And that’s supposed to cause some sort of capillary haemorrhaging. These things stop that. And they revive the brain. So he says.’
‘He means she’s anaemic,’ Eric said.
‘Which is bunkum,’ May said. ‘Your monsters were there right back when she was a girl. She was born with them.’
‘Well, she’s sick. That’s all I know,’ Charlie said.
‘We brought you over here so you could take a rest from Vi,’ Eric said.
But Charlie could not; could no more be called away from her troubles at home than a dog from its dish of food. Am I saying they nourished her? No, they did not. Magnetism would be better: she was drawn to these things by a force, a fascination (by love?), but went reluctantly, jerkily, then in a rush, the way rusty screws and bent nails move when a magnet comes close.
‘She says her throat’s too narrow to swallow pills,’ Charlie said.
I’d had enough of Vi and asked how James was managing.
‘By not being there,’ Charlie said. ‘Even when he’s there.’
I’m irritated by cleverness. ‘Meaning what?’
‘Oh, come on, Sam, use your noggin,’ May said. ‘James sees what it suits him to see. He can close his eyes and stop his ears while he’s looking straight at you.’
‘It’s more than that,’ Charlie said, then looked about distractedly. ‘I feel as if I’m betraying them.’
Eric went to the sideboard and poured a glass of sherry. ‘Here, drink that.’
‘One for me,’ May said. ‘It’s no betrayal, Charlie. All we want to do is help.’
Charlie put the glass down by her cold cup of tea.
‘Sometimes when Mother’s bell goes, and I’m sitting with her, I hear him get up from his bedroom and go past the door. The floor creaks. Once he stood there for a while. I heard him breathing. Then he goes downstairs. It’s …’ she found her sherry, drank some ‘ … not just sometimes. Every night.’
‘That’s more than being not there,’ May said.
‘I’ve gone down a couple of times when Mother’s back asleep. He sits in his study, in his chair. I can see him by his cigarette. He’s got the curtains open, looking out. It’s as if he’s waiting for … nothing.’ She shrugged. ‘Not even the dawn.’
‘The night does funny things,’ May said briskly. ‘You need to see the sun shine, then they’ll go away.’
‘Does he say anything?’ Eric said.
‘He knows I’m there. Just once, he said, “Go back to bed, Charlotte. I’m all right.” At least he didn’t call me Girl.’
‘And in the morning he’s good old James again?’
‘Goes upstairs and washes. Comes down, reads the paper. The usual thing. He works in his study. Then his clerk comes in the car and drives him to work. It’s the same every day. The same forever.’
‘No breakfast?’ May said.
‘A cup of tea, that’s all. And another one with a round wine biscuit if he’s still home at morning tea.’
‘And no more said about going back into politics?’ Eric said.
‘Nothing. But he is, because — I think he can’t see anywhere else to go. It’s as if, when he was there, at least he knew who he was.’
‘I think you’re being too psychological,’ May said. ‘Politics is about being powerful, and James knows all about that. He wants to get back where he was. But it happens too slowly, so he sits waiting in the dark. As for the emptiness, that’s his marriage. You can’t do anything about it, so don’t try.’
But Charlie would try; and try equally hard to get away to her painting. The fracture in her mind must hurt like a broken bone. I thought, watching her, that her face had fined down, she was prettyish (I’m too fond of ‘ish’ as a qualifier). Likenesses to Vi and James were starting to show. I watched Eric too: his need to sit beside her and pat. May smiled at them — not sadly (she is never sad) but sympathetically and with a temporising slyness as well.
I finished my drink and said goodnight. Eric walked with me to the gate.
‘I suppose you know what you’re doing?’
I said.
‘Sorry, Sam?’
‘That girl is going to get a thing about you.’
‘She’s not a girl, she’s a woman, and one with a mind of her own. As for “thing”, she’s going to end up far away from me. I want to see she gets there, that’s all.’
‘Does May know that?’
‘You’re getting to be a busybody, Sam. Goodnight.’
I called him back and apologised.
He said, ‘You can only be honest with May. I don’t need explanations with her.’
‘Charlie might need them.’
Eric sighed and turned away. ‘She’s my daughter, can’t you see?’
I did, suddenly, and was ashamed. He loved May unbreakably and by habit. Childless, he loved Charlie too, with a kind of desperation because of her unhappiness.
‘She’s a painter,’ he went on. ‘You don’t agree with that. But these shapes and colours she makes, they don’t have to be things you come across every day. They’re meant to pick us up and fly with us.’
‘I don’t know where.’
‘You don’t need to. She’s not telling us something we already know.’
‘We know who James and Vi are in that one she did of them.’
He sighed more heavily and seemed to deflate. ‘That’s a different thing. But it tells us a bit more than we’ve seen for ourselves. Anyway, I stopped her from burning it.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Out in her studio. Take it easy — James never goes in. Can’t bring himself. I’ve told her I’ll buy it when she’s ready to let it go.’
‘She’d better not put it in an exhibition.’
I said goodnight and walked home. Rose was in bed, dozing off. ‘Cold,’ she complained, snuggling down in her own warmth.
Night and stillness worked on me. Eric might see the painting as beautiful, and neutral somehow because of that, but the dying rose, the plant with its fingers cut off, and the china faces, made for me a particular, and a cruel and hideous, truth. It held James and Violet screwed in a vise, with crying mouths.
I hoped that Charlie had hidden it deep down, underneath her other paintings, against the wall. There are truths that even daughters should not reveal — especially, I thought, drifting, sliding, when they’re daughters who think they are painters when they’re not. She should give up daubing, that Girl. Run away from those crippled beings out there, be a teacher, be a nurse, find a useful occupation, and leave them to their broken lives, which they have learned to endure, their china plate lives … Violet on her chaise longue, sliding away, and James, who would be Minister of what? The little Department of James Tinling? He would find plenty there to keep him busy. Plenty of — hadn’t Charlie said it? — rooms to open doors to and march in. Let him turn the key and not come out — rule the little empire of himself.
Rose sighed and murmured, ‘Stop thinking. Go to sleep,’ and I obeyed.
Sleeping and dreaming, though, are different states.
James has always had a life in my dreams.
Chapter Four
The genius loci of our little pocket of Wellington is politics. The hum of decision-making fills the air, which nevertheless lies still with hidden intentions. There’s a quietness in politicians behind their noise. You learn, when you work close to them, if it fills a large place or a small, and also if it’s red or black. A mixture of those colours exists in some. They’re the difficult ones to understand; they always beat you, like Dick Seddon. He kept a huge quiet place behind his noise. I could never believe it contained anything meant to do us good. Massey was easier — a pinkish uncomplicated man, prone to geniality and unconvincing tempers, with no more than a muttering of uncertainty back there.
I could do them all — Coates and Forbes and Ward and Harry Holland — but they’re not my story, which, in politics, is James Tinling and Oliver Joll. It’s hard to fit them in a single frame, although they stood together at the end.
I lunched with James at his club, a place that confuses me with relief at not belonging and a wishing to belong. James fits in, how he fits, with his fineness matching the club’s understatedness and his importance its leathered opulence. I ate cold beef, he steamed fish. He wanted nothing from me, none of my insider’s knowledge — I still had some — but was fulfilling his six-monthly duty to his brother-in-law. Eric had had his lunch the previous week. We’re placed alphabetically in James’s calendar.
We took a modest table beside the wall. He asked me if that morning’s Dominion leader had been mine. (I wrote a guest editorial once a fortnight and a feature article now and then, nothing too political, although I’d done a series on unemployment the previous year.) He nodded approval when I said yes. It had been sensible, he said, one must keep hammering away at these socialists. I had thought I was attacking communism: the way it used people as building blocks for its ‘people’s state’, with no notice paid to what an individual might want for himself. Stalin’s henchmen had just detained the physicist Peter Kapitza, Rutherford’s colleague, on a visit to his homeland. He must be used to build Soviet science, they said. I found this chilling in its absolutism, and said so at some length, but was concerned to find James crediting me with attacking Savage and Semple and Nash.
I got him off his hobby-horse — half dismounted him — by asking about his political plans. He held up his finger. ‘You’re privy to something I don’t want talked about. When the time comes I’ll make my intentions clear. Until then …’
‘Button my lip? But you know what I think about it, don’t you? Eric and I, and Rose and May. You’ve done enough. You’ve had a career most men would be proud of.’
He ate some fish — chewed it longer than its softness required. He was damping down his impatience, his anger perhaps, at my compliment.
‘If experienced people don’t work to control these immoralists, they’ll take over.’ Then his face darkened with blood. He laid down his knife and fork.
I turned in my chair to see who had come in. The noise should have told me: Oliver Joll. With his barking-dog laugh, he was too loud for the room, and too highly coloured (his colour inside as much as out) for its muted shades, its white-linen table cloths and pale waiters. He entered with a cohort, business friends and Council members, and although engaged in jollity (opponents labelled it Jollity), found James straight off with his pushing eyes. He saluted flamboyantly, then acknowledged me: ‘Sam, good to see you,’ and passed by to his table in the centre of the room.
James patted his lips with his napkin — small quick movements, showing control — yet I saw his hands trembling as he picked up his knife and fork. He pronounces commination in a cold and minimal way; anathema more strongly, in warmer language, with now and then a swear word that strikes like a spear, coming from him.
That day all he said was, ‘I must finish this and go. I can’t sit in the same room as that man.’
‘Why on earth not? You’ve sat with worse. You’re a politician.’
‘Can you do without pudding?’
‘No, I can’t. I’ll stay. I’m surprised you let him drive you out.’
My gibe struck home. But Joll could bring blood to his face; I merely whitened it. ‘Are you on my side or his?’
‘Neither. I thought it was the socialists you hated. Joll is in your party, whatever you think of him.’
‘Not the party I helped build. The man is a liar and a cheat.’
There had been rumours years before of a business falling-out, but I had thought it done with; that their antipathy resulted from opposing styles and tastes and their different grasp on life, and different beginnings (Joll was, he boasted, an engine driver’s son), and the south pole and equator temperatures at which they lived. Liar and cheat meant something new.
‘You’d better be careful what you say,’ I said.
He had control of himself again. ‘I’ll ask you to stay neutral, at least.’
‘Of course I will. Good God. But can’t you see you’re riding for a fall?’
‘Nothing’s certain. You’ve been around politics long enough to know. And remember please, I haven’t said I’m a candidate.’
‘Nor has Ollie.’
The name angered him. ‘No doubt with your newspaper friends you call me Jimmie.’
‘No, I don’t. Calm down …’
But he had done his trick of shifting in the blink of an eye — knife and fork down, chair back, a lengthening of his legs elastically, tree-insect style — although he did not forget his duty as host: ‘I’ll tell the waiter you’re staying on. Enjoy your pudding.’
Out he went, neither fast nor slow; had his word, took his hat, was helped on with his coat; and he was gone, leaving a nervous silence, broken by Ollie Joll’s laugh — a rich production, greedy now. It put me, suddenly, on James’s side.
I’m in a family, I thought sourly, but was excited in my newsman’s part by the preliminary dance, the soft-shoe shuffle, I had witnessed in the Jolly Ollie/James Tinkling Show (a name coined by Dudley Aimer, who was saving it for a cartoon as soon as those two came out in the open).
I finished my meal — rice pudding, which I scarcely tasted — thinking of the sad figure James made in Charlie’s account, sitting in his study in the dark. She had said he looked at nothing, but I did not believe it. He turned over his unlived life: that’s to say, his life in private with Violet Barr. As for his public life, which exercised my curiosity more than my feelings, his wish to start it up again came from desperation. James would leap into the light of day and practise there the certainties he knew, renew himself, while holding at arm’s length and making invisible, even to himself, the demons that tormented him at home. I added his ambition (never mentioned) for a knighthood (he already had his MBE). A second term as minister of the crown might earn him that.