Scornful Moon

by Gee, Maurice

  He seemed too glib — and I had got a sniff of more than acquaintanceship between them. He saw the look I gave: believing only half, demanding more.

  ‘I’ve been friends with her for fifty years. She was in my class at primary school. And later on she was my girlfriend for a while. She was my first. I mean that I ever made love to. And very nice too. Amazing in fact. Like finding a new comet. You don’t forget those things. Oh come on, Sam, get that look off your face.’

  ‘Were you her first?’

  ‘You wouldn’t ask a question like that about a respectable lady. The answer’s no. She had a liking for it, an aptitude. She’s honest, Sam. No humbug. I’ve said enough. If you don’t want to walk with me, say so. I’ll turn off here.’

  ‘How do you know her these days, when you’re married?’

  ‘I go and visit her. We talk about all sorts of things. Do you think some sort of moral pollution comes through the walls?’

  ‘Does May know you go there?’

  ‘I might knock you down in the gutter soon.’

  ‘Does she?’

  ‘No. Now shut up. You’re starting to remind me of James.’

  We went past Seddon’s grandiose memorial, past Harry Holland’s, gleaming white and showing too much buttock for my taste. I understood Mrs Maxey’s remark about Ganymede and felt a burning in my throat — had to spit. Anything but clean love — married love — between a man and a woman denies our humanity: I mean our status as creation’s recipient of a sense of right and good. I won’t go on. It has nothing to do with church religion, which Rose and I scarcely practise anyhow.

  Eric and I walked down the paths by ‘the dreaming graves’ and I grew calmer. He came some way to meet me after a while: ‘Have you heard of albedo?’

  ‘Something to do with light?’

  ‘The amount that gets reflected from a planet or a moon. Well, May reflects like Venus. That’s seventy per cent coming back. She keeps the rest. But with Lily Maxey almost nothing comes. It’s like Mercury, fourteen per cent. You understand that? She clever and she’s friendly but she sucks up light. Not her fault, it’s the way she is.’

  ‘Why do you go, then?’

  ‘Friendship, mainly. She’d be offended. All right, a little bit of excitement too. Not her any more, the girls through the wall. Can’t help thinking about it, Sam. But I don’t cross over. Ah, you’re going to spit again. Don’t say you don’t feel it sometimes. All the pretty girls in the street?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I don’t want to listen any more.’

  ‘Rightyho. But remember, May is the one with the light.’

  ‘And the other one is Mercury. You know what they used that for.’

  Eric laughed. I had not meant it as a joke but it pleased him enormously. My bit of science, I suppose.

  We walked down to Bowen Street, past the Alexander Turnbull Library, where old Johannes Andersen guards the books, and round to the front of Parliament. There was King Dick again, not mourned by Robed State now but belly out, arm upraised, dissembling in his own honest way. The three yellow lamps signalled that the House was sitting.

  We went through the corridors and met the Dominion reporter coming out.

  ‘Hello, Sam. There’s fireworks. The ladies are out in force. The Old Boys are looking hag-ridden.’

  ‘Who’s up now?’

  ‘Walter Nash. Time for me to have a smoke.’

  I could have gone into the Press Gallery. It would have got me away from Eric, whom I wanted to be distant from for a while, but that would mean explaining to Rose and I did not want the subject raised with her. I followed him into the Strangers. There was no room on the benches so we stood at the back. Over in the Women’s Gallery, Rose and May had seats among a group of women I took for housewives and working women — cleaners, shop assistants and the like. They leaned forward, all of them, as though to take a bite — although with Nash speaking it was more likely to get a breath of his socialist air.

  He gravelled and tack-spat through his time, thumped the desk, making water jump from his glass.

  ‘He’s on form,’ Eric said.

  ‘I’ve heard too much ranting in my time.’

  Nash sat down to cries of Hear, hear, good on you, Walter, from the women, and one or two men around us too. The debate was on unemployment. It roused strong passions, which surfaced as anger when Bodkin rose for the Government. He was a droning speaker. The tactic was to kill the argument with platitudes. ‘If you increase the relief pay, that raises the associated issue of a rise in unemployment tax.’

  ‘Put up the tax of the people who’ve got all the loot. You can call it the fatties’ tax,’ cried the woman sitting next to May — a big-boned creature with rolled-up sleeves and meaty forearms and a red washerwoman’s face. An orderly pounced on her and although she looked as if she could have picked him up by the britches and dropped him over the rail she allowed him to lead her out.

  Bodkin started again but the shouters were primed for him, sitting not in a block but here and there, in both galleries, so the orderlies would not know where the next interjection would come from.

  ‘Women and children are starving in Wellington and this man spouts about shillings and pence. You should be damned well drowned on those benches.’ Out she went.

  ‘We’ll get what we want, wait and see. We’ll damned well take it.’ He followed.

  The Speaker heard threat as well as noise and adjourned the sitting. People crowded the rails as the members filed out. May leaned too, calling abuse. Rose sat still, my steady wife.

  ‘It’s bread for our children we’re asking for. Give us that.’

  ‘Hae you niver thought you hae your God to meet? You hae your maker? You’ll nae escape frae him.’

  I frowned at the silliness — that hunger, anger, pain should take such form. But Eric had a flushed face and a lively eye, and if there had been a place at the rail would have shouted too.

  We met our wives by Dick Seddon’s statue.

  ‘Blatherers. Liars,’ May said. She looked as if she might tear her clothes.

  ‘Both sides, May?’ Eric said, cooler now.

  She looked at him scornfully. ‘They need their watches and waistcoats stripped off. And someone to put them out in the bush digging a road. With their wives and children living off turnips at home.’

  ‘You should have said so. I was waiting for you.’

  ‘Those women have earned their right to speak. I haven’t.’

  He had his car parked in Molesworth Street, but I told him Rose and I would walk, enjoy the night — which turned out not to be a lie. It had an autumn smell and laid warm air on our cheeks. We did not talk about the scenes in Parliament. Rose knew I did not like her getting involved; and I that she would not apologise. She took my arm.

  All I allowed myself was to say at the gate: ‘May makes too much noise for me.’

  ‘Me too, sometimes. The trouble is, she’s usually right.’

  I said nothing about Eric.

  In May he gave the Donovan Lecture in the Concert Chamber. I had heard him there in 1931, when he talked about the moon and how new studies, in which he had been prominent, building on the work of Bickerton and Gifford, had proved that its craters were formed by meteor impact and not by volcanic activity, as had been thought. He thrilled us that night as much with his eminence, his role in world science, as with the moon itself.

  ‘Looking back to a period soon after the birth of the solar system,’ he began, ‘we see the Earth and moon as glowing masses of rotating vapour or of molten metals in a fiery liquid state.’

  He had me at once. Yes, I cried, with full conviction, knowing nothing. I sat entranced as he rolled on, demonstrating truth by his voice and presence.

  ‘In the case of the Earth nearly all the speed of a meteorite is destroyed while it passes through the air. On the moon, however, every meteorite strikes with its full velocity.’

  Eric, too, struck at full speed. I was first on to my feet in the stan
ding ovation he received.

  On the night of his Donovan Lecture I was less carried away. He warned that we must pay close attention; that the huge drama being enacted in the depths of space, thousands of light years away, which we might imagine as a contest between suns, came down in his studies, and those of his peers (and he was not a leader, he emphasised), to the severe and formal working out of celestial mechanics. He talked about Novae and Double and Variable stars, explaining them in ways that his audience could — but only just — understand.

  I sat in the front row with Rose and May and James and Vi and Charlie. Other things were on my mind. Politics at that time seemed more important than stars. The local body elections had just been held, generating a heat that would last, and steadily grow, until the national ones at the end of the year. Hislop had beaten Semple for the Wellington mayoralty and Citizens 9 had beaten Labour 6 for Council. Charlie reported that James had said (not cried), ‘Hooray.’ As for Dunedin, where Labour had taken control: ‘It’s nothing,’ he declared. ‘A sore big toe. We’ll soon put a bandage on that.’ He must have been feeling good to joke.

  And only a day or two before, the Reform and United Parties had announced their amalgamation — resisting, they said, the imminent challenge of the alien doctrines of socialism.

  Strange that two mortal enemies should join, but too late to stem the rising tide, Savage retorted.

  ‘Red, tide, red tide,’ James said. ‘They’ll bleed the country dry, suck out the blood’ — getting himself in soapbox mode, worrying about his language less.

  But still he had not said that he would go for the nomination. Joll was making it no secret that he would try. The selection meeting was only three weeks away.

  ‘I won’t let some Johnny-come-lately set my timetable,’ James said.

  He seemed calm. Yet an inner tension worked in him. Forces met, pushing in opposite ways. One looked for hairline fractures in his face. Perhaps this is hindsight — or perhaps a consequence of the porcelain mask Charlie had painted on him in her picture. I could not forget.

  Vi gave a little moan beside me. ‘I don’t understand what he’s talking about.’

  ‘It’s over soon. Just a few more minutes.’

  She alarmed me. The last time I had seen her I had thought her ill with frustrated selfishness. Now she seemed threatened by something outside herself, as if she had poked some sleeping creature with a stick and it had risen to its feet and was looking at her. Vi was afraid. Her cheeks were hollowed, with a bluish tinge; her bones were showing. One expected, if one listened, as with James, to hear the crackle of tiny fractures taking place inside.

  He should not have brought her to the lecture but must have thought the time was right to have her at his side: James Tinling and his wife on show.

  Oliver Joll sat two rows behind with Mrs Joll, who seemed to understand what Eric was talking about. Joll laughed at his jokes — no matter what the subject, Eric would have one or two — and spread his presence around him like the odour of manliness and success.

  Eric crescendoed. He can be phoney at times. Applause burst like a continuation.

  We made our way to the foyer, where Freddie and Elsie latched on to us.

  ‘Oh, he’s too clever,’ Elsie cried. ‘I believe he just pretends that stuff.’

  ‘How can he know, if everything’s so far away?’ Freddie said.

  There’s never any need to answer them. James, with his hand locking Vi’s on his forearm, moved aside to talk to Dunning, a member of the committee that would choose the new party’s Melling candidate. (Reform, United, what would the party name itself, and would it formalise its union or keep it only for the election?) I expected Joll too would have Dunning in his sights, but he seemed content with nonentities. Beyond him, Mrs Maxey, the brothel woman, settled her thin fur about her shoulders and went alone into the night.

  ‘Sam,’ Joll said, stepping close, ‘Clifton’s your brother-in-law, isn’t he? I’d like to meet him.’

  ‘He should be here in a moment,’ I said. ‘This is Mrs Clifton.’ I introduced Rose as well, and, perforce, Elsie and Freddie. Charlie had moved away to speak with the painter Frank Siers, her teacher before she left New Zealand. Joll beckoned his wife and we made an uneasy group, exclaiming at Eric’s brilliance and talking platitudes. I noticed Taylor Barr and Owen Moody edging close, but turned my shoulder; after a moment they drifted off, Moody looking resentful, which pleased me. He had not earned his right to force his way into conversations.

  ‘Eric,’ I said, when he steamed up, ‘I’d like you to meet Mr and Mrs Joll. Oliver Joll.’

  We told him how brilliantly he had talked — no exaggeration. Eric performs like a showman, dragging his audience along, keeping them on a forward slant and breathless at the mystery about to be revealed. He’s Houdini playing tricks with chains and padlocks, and Faraday laying down new facts for all to see.

  ‘It’s not an easy subject,’ Joll said, ‘but I think I grasp some of it now. But how can we — humans, I mean, tiny specks of matter in the universe — how can we translate those distances and speeds into words and figures we can understand? Put them on a human scale?’

  ‘By visceral means,’ Eric boomed. ‘If you try to send your understanding out, you’ll get nowhere. Send out your eye, send out your heartbeat if you like, then you’ll get an image coming back, and you might hear the throb of the universe too.’

  He was drunk with completion. Any old words would do him now.

  Rose and I were putting on a supper and I made signs that we should move on. Mrs Joll had taken issue with her husband’s ‘specks of matter’:

  ‘We’re animated by spirit, surely, even if we don’t believe in souls.’

  ‘Spirit is continuous,’ Eric cried. ‘Perhaps we’ll travel through space in that way. Instantaneously.’ He seemed to hear himself and grinned shamefacedly. ‘A drop of the other sort of spirits would go down.’

  ‘Yes, we’ll make a move,’ I said.

  Joll drew me aside. ‘Sam, do you know what James is doing yet?’

  ‘Playing cagey. Don’t ask me. It’s three weeks, Ollie. You can hang on.’

  ‘Can he?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He doesn’t look well. Is that his wife? Nor does she.’

  He was out of order, and recognised it, yet could not prevent himself from saying, ‘I wish I knew what game he’s playing.’ He was less of a politician than I’d thought; should not have let me see his worry. I patted his arm and told him I had enjoyed meeting his wife.

  ‘And I’m delighted to meet the Professor,’ he said. ‘That’s a privilege. It’s remarkable the people he attracts.’ He was nodding at Taylor and Owen Moody, who, I saw, had broken into James’s talk with his committee man. Yet the pair looked at ease, while James was wearing one of his less wintry smiles.

  ‘The one who’s grinning is my nephew. The other’s a hanger-on.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen him.’

  ‘Owen Moody. Aspires to be a poet.’

  ‘Ha!’ Ollie said. ‘Well, we’ll let you get away. A fascinating evening, Sam.’

  I drove home and put the car in the garage while Rose ran inside to turn on the lights and take the muslin cloths off the food she had prepared. Eric and May arrived, bringing Elsie and Freddie; and there, puttering on his motorcycle, playing obedient son, was Taylor Barr, with Owen Moody, goggled and leather-coated, on the pillion seat. I felt a squirt of rage: was there no way to be rid of the fellow?

  He smiled like George Formby: ‘I won’t eat much, Mr Holloway.’

  ‘Where’s James?’ I said to Eric.

  ‘Coming along. I told Charlie she could bring her painter friend. They’re planning an exhibition.’

  ‘The more the merrier,’ I said sourly.

  The painter, Siers, was a florid fellow — whisky cheeks, veined nose, snow-white hair; florid in his speech too, full of loose adjectives. It was as well he made a lot of noise, for Eric seemed to have r
un out of steam and we stood without a centre. Rose had taken Vi to a bedroom to lie down. James sat in my chair, sipping tea. May, smiling privately, moved close to Eric and leaned on him, privately too, and it seemed amorously, which was misplaced for the occasion. Handing him beer, I could smell him: sweaty from the work of lecturing.

  I made a little speech, thanking Eric for an informative and stimulating evening, then proposed a toast to him.

  ‘I’m out of words,’ he replied. ‘The stars are out there still, shall we go and look?’

  The street lights and house lights were too strong and we were half-hearted, so we trooped back inside, where James, who had not shifted from his chair, said, ‘See if your mother’s ready, Girl. I’d like to go.’

  Charlie went to the bedroom, and in a moment Rose came out and beckoned May.

  Siers, the painter, saw his chance. ‘Mr Tinling,’ he said, ‘Charlotte and I are planning an exhibition together. It will be in my studio. Pupil and teacher — we’ll see a line of continuity perhaps. The torch handed on. Although she’s emerging, the butterfly breaks from the chrysalis. Those Parisians she’s been following will turn out not to be important now she’s home. She’s seeing our light again, our glorious light. And yet holding literal truth at arm’s length, in her way. Her vision is remarkably pure, don’t you think?’ He laughed. ‘And mine’s not bad. What I’d like to ask — I’d be honoured if you would open it.’

  ‘I know nothing about art,’ James said. ‘I can’t oblige. Taylor, will you tell my man to bring the car. He’s parked along the street somewhere.’

  ‘Mr Tinling,’ Siers said, ‘your own daughter —’

  ‘I don’t see eye to eye with Charlotte about her painting. You’ll have to get someone else.’ He stubbed out his cigarette and stood up. ‘Thank you for a pleasant evening, Sam. Eric, you too. An interesting subject. Are the women ready yet?’

  They were not. Rose came in. ‘James, Vi is going to stay the night. I’ve put her in bed. She’s —’ saw the listeners — ‘feeling a wee bit off colour. Do you want to go in and see her?’