by Janet Frame
—I hope you’re not bringing in anything from outside! She understood, suddenly, the terror of ‘outside’, the battles waged against it, the comfort and deep bliss felt by those who slept the first night in the first cave; yet even then they had to contend with creatures and ‘things’ from outside; no wonder a man might become insane with the fear that his last harbour, his private thoughts and dreams, could offer him no shelter.
—Sarah, run upstairs and tell Daddy it’s a quarter to ten; tell him that Grace is waiting to have breakfast with him.
—Please don’t wake anybody just for me.
Grace said ‘anybody’ instead of Philip, for she was finding difficulty in addressing Philip and Anne by their Christian names, and until now she had solved the problem by referring to them as ‘you’, ‘he’ and ‘she’.
—No you won’t be disturbing him. Philip’s so fond of sleeping, but he’ll be angry if no one wakes him. Go on Sarah, wake Daddy.
Obediently Sarah ran upstairs and fifteen minutes later a sleepy Philip emerged, a lapsed Saturday look on his face.
—Hello. Did you sleep well?
—Yes thank you, Grace said primly.
He looked at her as if he expected her to provide details of her night’s sleep. Hastily she responded,
—The bed’s very comfortable.
—A polite guest, he said, smiling, waiting.
Under the persuasion of his glance she almost began,—Oh yes I slept very well thank you, I had some strange dreams, I dreamed-
—The bed was comfortable then?
—Yes thank you.
—When you come again, and Dad’s here, you’ll find the other room is more Spartan.
—Oh! Anne exclaimed suddenly, looking dismayed.—Oh! I hope you don’t mind having seed potatoes in your room.
(Does parenthood bring an increased fear of things ‘coming in from outside’, Grace wondered.)
—I showed her the potatoes, Philip said.
—I don’t mind them at all, Grace assured them - she was not so consistently inane that she added,—I like having seed potatoes in my room when I visit for the weekend, although she was surprised that she did not make an equally foolish remark.
Sarah and Noel had finished their breakfast. The adult gold-rush was in progress with Philip, Anne, Grace busily sifting and spooning sugar-puffs while between mouthfuls Philip was explaining that the seed potatoes were a new variety which he hoped to grow successfully.
—What is their particular characteristic? Grace asked, glowing with her manifestation of deep intelligence, remembering vaguely that when she bought potatoes she asked for ‘King Edwards please’, but there were other varieties, Arran Chief . . . they bred potatoes almost as they bred dogs for their particular qualities . . . didn’t they? She had never bothered to find why some were called King Edward; an interesting trick of fame to have given one’s name to a potato.
—I believe they taste like kumaras.
—Oh, Grace said.
Back to New Zealand. She remembered kumaras, creamy-golden and sweet, and the flax basket that old Jimmy had given their father, a special kumara basket; and their mother’s talk of kumaras, her irritating allusions to them as if they belonged to a world which only their mother knew and which her children could not share: the world of the Maoris, and the Maori pa, and the old whalers and sealers in the Straits. Grace knew that although her mother had been a generous woman who would never refuse to share her possessions, she placed such a special value upon her experiences that the more she talked of them and shared them, the more she seemed to hoard them within herself, like miser’s treasure, to turn them over and over, studying them, delighting in them, with her dreams curled selfishly around them.
—You’ve tasted kumaras?
—Oh yes, yes.
So he was going to plant a part of New Zealand in his Winchley garden. More homeland images rose in Grace’s mind; deftly she seized and submerged them. Taking a page of a morning newspaper from a chair beside her she pretended to read it but was unable to absorb the words or the meaning. Sarah with a small naked doll wrapped in a piece of towelling came up to her to explain that her doll was baby Jesus. Anne lifted Noel from his pot and began to dress him like a spaceman for his morning sleep in the pram on the lawn.
Except for the murmuring of children there was silence. Grace thought, Perhaps I ought to comment on some news. Unfortunately Grace was one of those people who can become a bore and an irritation to others and an anguish to themselves because their lives are dominated by ‘ought’. ‘What ought I to do? Do you think I ought to-’ . . . They refuse to let a situation rest; they must tamper with it, adjust it, change it, impose upon it their immediate concern of ‘ought’.
—I’m afraid I’m not taking in a word of this newspaper, she said, meaning her remark as an apology.
—Sarah! Anne spoke sharply.—Come away. Don’t bother Grace, she wants to read the newspaper.
When Grace had said, ‘I’m taking nothing in’, Philip had looked at her with a small stirred expression of anxiety; she could see it in his eyes, as if some thought or feeling that lay asleep there had moved and flecks of an anxiety had risen around it, like dust.
Grace wished she had kept silent.
—I find it hard to concentrate too, Anne said enthusiastically.
—Newspapers are about all I can manage in the weekend, and then it’s a struggle, Philip said in a bolstering manner.
It was almost as if, in making her remark, she had collapsed, and Philip and Anne had rushed to help her, concerned for her, anxious to explain that they too were in the habit of collapsing.
I must be careful, Grace thought, not to make another such remark.
—Terrible things are happening in South Africa, she said cheerfully, pointing to a headline.
—What things? Philip asked.
Philip and Anne lay, eyes alert, head between paws, waiting to pounce upon her words. Panicstricken, her ideas and the words which would have supported them scuttled to the sheltering foliage of incoherence.
—Oh, the usual, she said foolishly, pointing to a newspaper paragraph.
Suddenly baby Jesus was lying on her lap. She took the doll, propping its head against the leg of the table; it had no eyes; they had been scooped out and their sockets chipped like tiny chalk quarries; its belly was plump, its belly-button (the proud and only immodesty admitted by doll-manufacturers who therefore make it a field-day of anatomy) was rimmed and deep like a tiny inflatable swimming-pool; it was unsexed, but Sarah assured Grace that it was baby Jesus, a girl.
Self-consciously Grace kept it propped against the table; resisting the frightening temptation to hold it in her arms, against her breast. As children do, with their sensitive antennae probing an adult’s emotions, Sarah realised Grace’s desire to possess her baby Jesus. She reached forward suddenly and claimed it, putting her arms protectively around it, folding the piece of towelling against its head.
She looked directly but kindly at Grace.
—It’s my baby Jesus, she said, gently challenging.
Grace looked around her with a furtive air.—I hope no one’s seen this, she thought. I hope no one’s reading my mind. I wish I were not so exposed; I wish it were time to sleep; it is not the night but the day that ‘has a thousand eyes’. I wish-
—Do you like rice?
Already Anne was considering the preparation of lunch.
—Oh yes, Grace said firmly. Anne might just as well have asked her if she liked poetry or the theatre or the country. Yes was Grace’s favourite word; it saved so much explaining; it was more often when you said No that people demanded explanations, waited for you to speak, argued with you to prove that your No should have been Yes.
—Dad’s funny, Anne said. She paused and looked at Philip, carefully giving him the responsibility of discussing her father’s whims.
—Yes. Philip laughed.—Rice is a pudding, Dad says. He won’t eat it with anything as a first course; si
mply refuses it. But he’ll eat the same rice the next day if it’s called pudding.
—Well he’s never been used to it as a first course, Anne said, defending her father now that he was being criticised.—He’s always thought of rice as a pudding.
She laughed gently, not complaining, merely stating in a surprised way—I have to cook special meals for Dad. He’s so finicky. What is it, Grace?
—Nothing, oh nothing.
Are they talking of Anne’s father? Grace said to herself. Or is it of Jimmy, my brother, and the day two years ago when he said to me,
—I can’t eat egg, I’ve never been able to eat egg, and I realised that for the thirty years or more that I had known him I had been unaware that he didn’t ‘eat egg’; it was not as simple a revelation as it seemed; for thirty years he must have had a secret pact with my mother, an arrangement for the cooking of special meals; why hadn’t he talked about it? People enjoy talking of their dislikes in food. Once, I achieved prestige and fame within the family by ‘hating pineapple’; everyone flocked for my share; until the day I decided to taste it and found I liked it and had to wage continual war against the tradition, so firmly established, that I disliked pineapple!
I wondered if there were many more important things about my brother which I did not know. I remember the dismay I felt when he said it.—I don’t eat egg . . . The rebellion, jealousy; the emptiness, as if something had escaped me through my own carelessness.
—I’m sorry I missed seeing your father.
—You’ll have to come again to discuss liver fluke and pulpy kidney, Philip said, smiling at Grace. She felt embarrassed, remembering the vivid note about sheep diseases which she had written to Philip in response to his invitation. Ah, if only she lived for ever in a world of correspondence, writing (she thought) daring, imaginative, witty letters that revealed nothing of her social stupidity!
—Yes, she said inadequately.—Yes, I must come again. I like it here.
Oh God.
She looked vaguely around the kitchen.
—A cigarette?
—No thank you, I don’t usually smoke. Well, I will have one, thank you. I don’t smoke except in company.
When she sensed that the moments, once forming a perimeter of no escape, were gradually breaking into characteristic Saturday mid-morning hyphens, she slipped out between a gap in two moments, murmured excuses, and escaped to her room. She had made her bed. She had unpacked what she needed from her bag. She had brought far too much, having deceived herself by dreams of—Have a sherry, This is my wife, Anne. Anne, this is Grace Cleave.
I saw too many films when I was a child, Grace thought. She knew that she could never escape from the influence of Saturday ‘pictures’ when she and her three sisters and brother straggled along to their ‘shouted’ treat at the Majestic or Opera House. All the wives in the ‘pictures’ drank sherry. Mae West drank it too. In Grace’s family the invitation—Have a sherry, was an invitation to take part in moral depravity.
Grace smiled to herself; her imaginative naiveté was incredible. All journalists are sophisticated, blasé, their wives cuckold them and drink sherry; their houses are American dreams; they climb - no, sink - into fast red or white cars and whizz round the country roads splashing the natives with mud, tooting their horns in the narrow lanes . . .
Grace zipped her bag shut. She was ashamed that she had spent so long in trying to decide what to wear during the weekend. She had been away for the weekend only once or twice before in her life, and the last time had been an ordeal and a revelation, and Grace came home obsessed with her latest piece of knowledge about human beings - if you were a woman away for the weekend you carried a handbag with your handkerchief in it, and when you wanted to blow your nose you snipped open your bag and withdrew your handkerchief.
And Grace had never known! She always tucked her handkerchief in her sleeve and she had never carried a handbag up and down inside a house; it would look as if she did not trust anyone.
It was taking so long to get used to the ways of the world; Grace did not think she would ever learn.
She inspected the jersey and skirt that she had hung over the back of a chair. It’s true, she said. I look like an unemployed housemaid. She had worked as a housemaid and found it a successful disguise, but now when she wanted to shed her disguise she found it had grown to be a part of her. She was so used to it that only a few days before her journey to Winchley she had been walking along Earls Court Road, and a middle-aged woman of whom she asked the way had said
—It’s along here, I’m going there myself, and in the hundred yards of their walk together the woman advised Grace, judging from her appearance, that she ought to visit a certain agency in Kensington High Street if she wanted a really good domestic job; they paid you four shillings an hour and fares, you had a modern place among rich people who, if you worked well for them, would bring you fresh eggs and cream from their weekend cottage in the country.
—You pay for the eggs and cream of course, the woman said. —But they’re fresh. You take my advice and go straight to that agency in Kensington High Street.
—Thank you. I will, Grace promised.
12
Grace was feeling increasing panic at the thought of going downstairs to join the family. The longer she stayed in her room, the more afraid she became. She decided that by going for a walk she would avoid the embarrassments of trying to be sociable. Putting on her coat and headscarf, taking her gloves and her small purse, she went boldly downstairs to the kitchen.
—Grace-Cleave’s going for a walk, she said, adopting Sarah’s way of speaking about her.
—Do you still walk around London? Philip asked.
At her interview in London when he asked,—How do you spend your time when you’re not writing, she had answered, —I walk in the streets. I walk and walk.
—Yes, I still walk.
—Very far?
—Oh, she said daringly, remembering that she had walked so far only during the bus strike,—I walk, say, from Kentish Town to Camberwell.
—Kentish Town to Camberwell!
—Oh yes.
As if it were an almost daily walk.
—Usually (she modified her boast), I walk only two or three miles.
—Dad likes walking, doesn’t he Philip?
—Yes. Dad walks miles every afternoon. He’s not been used to it though.
—Oh yes he has, on the farm, there’s quite a bit of walking to do.
—Didn’t he ride?
—Yes, but walking to inspect fences, look for sheep . . .
—But they do most of that on horseback don’t they love?
—Yes. I suppose they do.
Philip gave a great guffaw.
—Dad walks chiefly for his bowels.
—Yes he does. He’s so bashful about it isn’t he Phil.
—I think he likes to walk, but he’s thinking most of the time about his bowels.
—It gives him an interest though, Phil, doesn’t it?
—Yes love.
Grace moved towards the door. Her head was dizzy with undercurrents.
In a guest-ridden tone she said,
—I’ll be away a couple of hours.
Anne, now preparing to do the weekly washing, busy at the washing machine, leaned down and extracted a small wet shoe.
—Oh Phil, here’s Noel’s shoe. Do you think it will dry?
She turned to Grace.
—We’d thought of going into Winchley this afternoon to show you a few of the sights and change Sarah’s library book. You’d like to come?
—Oh yes!
—It’s a nice bright day.
—We’ll be having dinner about one, Philip said, host-ridden, as Grace went out the back door. He came with her.
—Would you like a map?
—Oh yes!
He found her a map.
—Thank you very much.
He marked their street.
—You’re here. The v
illage is along there. There’s the golf course.
They walked in the garden. He pointed among the shocked frosted plants to a small aged grey rosemary bush.
—We’re hoping the rosemary has survived. We’re rather lucky to have been able to grow it up here.
—Yes, Grace said.
He showed her the back gate and the path she would take to reach the village.
—Goodbye.
—Goodbye. Be seeing you.
Alone, outside the gate, Grace breathed relief and freedom.
13
At once she was conscious of the deceit of the weather. From inside the house, with Philip and Anne and Noel and Sarah in the kitchen, human and alive, whenever Grace had looked from the window it had seemed to her that the day would be sunny. Anne too had been deceived, for swept close in family warmth she had said,—It’s such a bright promising day.
The first garish light of morning had the appearance of being softened by the wintry sun - that is, from inside the Thirkettle kitchen.
Now, alone, trying to walk on the layers of ice on the track through the park Grace looked about her at a landscape from which all life had been wrung; sodden grass; small heaps of black snow; slush; the trees standing stripped and grey as if the snowstorm, passing by like a plague of locusts, had devoured their life. Grace stamped her feet to get rid of their numbness. She walked carefully, her arms spread slightly, like wings. Up here in the north there seemed to be a draught from somewhere in the sky, as if the northern door leading to the homes of the Gods had been left open; they were the relentless Gods - Thunder, War, Revenge, Night; the wind blowing from their sky caverns was so penetrating and paralysing with its chill that Grace wanted to sink on her knees into the ice and beg for mercy. She walked on and on, shivering, her flesh demanding in vain a little charity from the weather, her mind yet revelling in the drama of this foreign hemisphere where North was a word full of menace and South promised sun and warmth. The traditional phrases of her own country - up north, down south, had no meaning in this part of the world. The combination of the two phrases - up north here, up north there, cancelled both meanings in such a way that Grace felt herself to be lost in a desert or snow-plain of reference; her mind grew chilled; yes-yes murdered no-no; day and night together were effaced . . .