by Janet Frame
Not being a human being and not being practised in the art of verbal communication, Grace was used to experiencing moments of terror when her mind questioned or rearranged the established ritual; when commonplace certainties became, from her point of view, alarming uncertainties. Philip had been speaking to Anne. Yet Grace had been Anne. It was Grace whom Philip addressed now,
—Yes. As soon as these kids are old enough.
Anne smiled calmly, with no hint of having been threatened. She thinks he’s talking to her, Grace thought; then, with a sudden unclouding of her head, she returned thankfully to her own identity as Grace, and sat now, listening, listening, fearful of the threat to Anne who smiled again and laughed aloud.
Grace could have wept with relief. So it was all right then, everyone was safe. She stared hard at her plate, in order to pretend, now, that she hadn’t heard Philip’s words and Anne’s smiling reply,
—We’ll see about that.
It was a challenge.
Grace prayed to any God who might have been near, Let them not kill each other, please let them not kill each other. He is angry, she is afraid. He will kill her, and be hanged for murder, or strapped in the electric chair in Sing-Sing where they have their own song,‘It’s a song they sing at a sing-song in Sing-Sing.
We wish that we were sparrows that we could fly
away . . .’
Sparrows? Swallows? Cuckoos? The godwits flying ‘towards another summer’?
Let all the world be calm, Grace thought. Let Philip not murder Anne. This is my plate, my cheese on toast, this is my coffee in the yellow cup, and - oh my god! - Philip and Anne will kill each other. You see, they are my mother and father.
16
I remember now, Grace said to herself. It was this way:
Sores covered her body and because she could not resist the urge to scratch them they were always bleeding or covered with thin brown scabs; the calves of her legs and her upper arms were marked with great patches of red, and every few minutes as she went about her endless housework she would sit on the coal-bin in the corner by the fire, roll down her stockings, or roll up her sleeves, and begin to scratch; her sores were mapped red like the countries of the British Empire in the Atlas. She did not know the name of the disease that afflicted her. She hesitated to mention it to the doctor, that is, Dr Oliver who came to attend to our chickenpox and whooping cough; it was strange that he did not notice her sores. On hot days she wore no stockings and no sleeves. You could see her heavy upper arms that she had once revealed so proudly to us;—Look at my muscle, I could floor any man with that muscle, and we children would go amongst each other displaying our rabbit-giggles of little arms and saying, Look at my muscle, look at my muscle!
The aunt from Dunedin, and my father, and the neighbours who noticed the sores asked,
—Why don’t you have them seen to?
But my mother was afraid or proud, or perhaps she thought it might cost too much money, for there was no Social Security then, and doctors’ bills were so impossible that my father used to groan and sigh and then thrust them on the mantelpiece as ornaments and reminders, and soon their transparent windows were sealed with dust.
On the back page of Truth there was a weekly feature Truth’s Doctor Tells. Perhaps my mother wrote to him for advice. I don’t know. Or perhaps she sent to a mail order firm. A green ointment with an overpowering smell, like cabbage being cooked in petrol, began to arrive through the post and during the day my mother would sit down to rub the green ointment on her legs. But it was no use. The table in Mum-and-Dad’s room was littered with ointment tins, empty except for a smear of melting ointment at the base of the tin. I think that at that time I was as tall as the top of my mother’s legs. When I looked at her I could see scabs and running sores. It was like looking at the diseased trunks of two trees - there were such trees in the plantation, their bark rotten and soft with spotted toadstools growing from it and beetles devouring it.
It seemed that for years my mother walked about with her sores, unable to rid herself of them. She no longer ventured outside the gate; soon she did not go very far from the back door. Years afterwards, in her habitual way establishing the period as a crucial time in her life, to be compared with the flood, the time when her arm was ‘up for six weeks’ and the time when Tommy Lyles was killed, she used to talk of ‘When you were little and I didn’t go outside the gate for two years.’
I remember that when I lifted my head to look up at her face I would see her crying. If my father had come home and was speaking sharply about the bills and money, I could see that my mother was afraid; or it seemed so; but perhaps it was I who was afraid, but there was my mother with her Godfrey chin and her face like the Archbishop of Canterbury, all in a tremble of tears, and my father saying,
—As soon as these kids are old enough-
—I bring home the money in this house. As soon as these kids are old enough-
Please God let them not kill each other, I said. Let my father not kill my mother because the bills are high and she has sores and the world is full of green ointment, even the green leaves on the pear tree and the plum tree are smelling like green ointment. What will happen when I am old enough? Old enough for what? The cow had a calf and when it was a few weeks old a man came to look at it; he said It’s not old enough yet. I said What for? My father said—Don’t poke your nose into what doesn’t concern you, but the man, unthinking, said,—The freezing works.
Did it snow at the freezing works?
—You know what he’s doing, don’t you love?
That was Philip speaking. Grace was overwhelmed with relief.
Certainly it was Philip speaking. And there was Anne, Sarah, Noel-
Grunt grunt from Noel.
—Yes. Anne smiled.—I guessed as much.
—You’re not nice to know, son.
Anne washed and changed the suddenly undesirable and stinking Noel.
—Shall I get the talc, love?
—No thanks. I never use it now.
Philip looked admiringly at Anne, as if by relinquishing powder she had made a kind of sacrifice which he would never have dared to consider. How brave she was! He’d always thought talcum powder was so necessary, as much a part of infancy as nappies. Anne was unhurried, calm, dextrous. Philip’s face asked the unspoken question addressed more to the human race than to Noel - Does it have to be like this?
He turned apologetically to Grace, almost divining that not being a human being she might seek an explanation.
—Sorry about this. Just one of those things.
—Yes, Anne said looking towards Grace,—we’re awfully sorry. They’ve done nothing but crawl around you since you came and now this has to happen.
—Oh I don’t mind, it’s quite all right.
—But there’s a limit, Anne said.—They don’t usually hang around visitors in this way.
Grace felt flattered until she realised that there was no peculiar virtue in herself which had made Sarah want to talk to her and Noel crawl over the table to reach her. They behaved thus because they were used to human beings as visitors - people who spoke to them, who perhaps played games with them, who knew what to say, what to do, who did not sit like trees or stones waiting for an invisible power to shift them or speak for them.
—Oh it’s quite all right, Grace repeated.
And now there was Noel, the little beggar-boy in the nightshirt, ready to be taken up to bed, and Grace felt a fleeting loneliness as she saw him borne away to his infant Styx and Underworld surrounded by the farewell embraces of his family. He had not asked to kiss Grace. Nor did Sarah plead to climb on her knee; she merely said Goodnight, calmly, and followed Anne and Noel upstairs, while Grace, watching them, smiled to herself, remembering that when one is a child and visitors come to stay the first night is for exploration, the second night is for judgment. She remembered the first night’s attractive jumble of bags and coats and talkative aunts and uncles, and wanting to stay up to take part
in it, to listen, to explore; then on the second night the ordinary calm slightly disillusioned glance about the room at the visitors, seen now in daylight and all day, and the unprotesting journey to bed.
On the third day interest sometimes revived. The pros and cons had been weighed with awful honesty; the balance was known.
Philip gave a sigh of relief.
—Well that’s over.
Grace smiled the understanding smile of the privileged spinster as Philip got up, shook the day from him, went into the sitting room, and sank into the sympathetically embracing armchair by the fire. Grace sat opposite, and comforted by the presence and nearness of books she turned to study the titles. Ah, there was the Book of New Zealand Verse!
‘O not the self-important celebration
Or most painstaking history, can release
The current of a discoverer’s elation
And silence the voices saying,
“Here is the world’s end where wonders cease.”
Only by a more faithful memory, laying
On him the half-light of a diffident glory,
The Sailor lives, and stands beside us, paying
Out into our time’s wave
The stain of blood that writes an island story.’
That, Grace said to herself, a migratory bird instantly in her New Zealand world, was written to commemorate the sailor-explorer Abel Tasman. Perhaps the sailor who helped most to put a stain of blood into our island story was, after all, not Abel Janszoon Tasman, sixteen forty-two sailing the ocean blue, but the American Marine who came during the War to Wellington; that was a time of lust and blood and history when the hearts of all the women came from the wool-sheds and the rabbiters’ huts to adventure on the streets of Wellington. I was a school-girl at the time, but I remember we had our fifth-form jokes about the American Marines; and after the War, when they returned to that illusory place ‘their own country’ (as illusory as a piece of writing which claims to express ‘in my own words’ - whose words?), the stain of blood showed in all the rivers from the Waikato and Wanganui down to the Clutha; even the mudfilled Mataura had its share of blood mixed with the snow. Now there was an effortless Tasman for you, commemorated by no named day or sea!
Philip’s eyes were closed. He was recovering from the day; languishing, convalescent.
—Change chairs, so that you can study the books on this side of the room. And tomorrow night you can sit in that corner, studying the books there.
He laughed. They exchanged their seats just as Anne entered with a housewifely glance that yet contained the sinister northern exultation of the Macbeth family ‘I’ve done the deed!’
—I’ve put the children to bed.
—Good.
(‘A sorry sight. A foolish thought to say a sorry sight . . .’)
—Grace and I have changed places so that she can see the books on this side of the room; tomorrow night she’s going to sit in that corner.
Philip seemed amused by his plan. Anne, sitting facing the fire, found her place in Ulysses and began to read. Philip opened his book on New Zealand External Affairs. Grace, unable to select one item from the sudden luxury of reading, studied the titles on the shelves: Architecture; Church Architecture. New Zealand Novels.
—The more I read about him, the more I believe that Peter Fraser was New Zealand’s outstanding Prime Minister.
Both Grace and Anne looked up swiftly, defensively. Grace saw in her mind the pathetic cross-eyed bespectacled Prime Minister of whom she knew little and had not cared to know or if she knew she had forgotten. She remembered the attitude towards him which she had absorbed unthinking, sponge-like, from the free-floating stain of public opinion. For the first time she tried to understand her dislike of him; she was appalled to realise that in a ‘young’ country of ‘young’ people, sun, beaches, sport, physical health as the ideal perfection, the fact that their Prime Minister had been cross-eyed, had worn spectacles, had seemed unforgivable! He had been regarded as a ‘bad’ Prime Minister because he wore spectacles.
Grace could have wept with shame. As the poet had commanded, she laid ‘a more faithful memory’ upon the scene of her country, omitting for once the spellbinding outward landscape, the tourist glaciers, mountains, rivers, plains, bush, so often referred to as if they had been planned glories of a human workshop; concentrating on the personal scenery, the truly human constructions of habit, opinion, prejudice. She watched the smooth golden people with their clear sight, perfect limbs, brains bouncing with sanity and conformity; it seemed they were Life-Guard angels marching from tiny Waipapa beach in the south (‘Like to the tide moaning in grief by the shore . . .’) to the Northland coast burning with pohutukawas; while the massed bands played - the brass band with the Invercargill March, Colonel Bogey; the pipe band with the Cock o’ the North, Speed Bonny Boat; and the sun shone, the day surged with light, while offshore the tidal wave, restrained for the moment or day or year, bided its drowning time, played its blue patience of wave overlapping numbered wave. Grace observed, with terror, the fanatical innocence of the march, the acceptance of it, the reverence towards it - why, there was her mother, ordinarily a gentle peaceful woman, proclaiming in her confusion of Civil War, God, Country,‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of
wrath are stored.’
Vintage?
The Life-Guards were trampling sand. Why their sudden movements of irritation, the spasmodic threshing of their arms in the air? The sandflies. Of course, they were killing the sandflies, those tiny black insects which pursued biting, stinging, raising red lumps on the skin; unsightly lumps on the bronzed beautiful skin.
Grace was so surely on the beach at that moment that when a drowsy, lazily-observing sunbathing couple turned to her and said,
—Isn’t it wonderful, a great little country, sun, beach, everyone so healthy?
Grace agreed,
—It’s wonderful, the best place in the world to bring up children; sun, opportunity, health, happiness.
—And soon they’ll be getting that stuff to kill off all the sandflies. Then, it will be even better. It stands to reason that the sandflies are a nuisance.
—Yes, it stands to reason.
What do you expect, then, when the mad, the crippled, the unconforming, try to get a place on the beach?
And when a Prime Minister appears, with cross-eyes, spectacles, can’t you be expected to dislike him, as you dislike a sandfly which spoils the parade by making an unsightly red lump on your perfect skin?
—I didn’t know much about Peter Fraser, Anne said to Philip.
—I didn’t either, Grace said.—I always think of Mickey Savage as the great New Zealand Prime Minister.
She remembered the huge photograph of Mickey Savage which had covered one wall of their kitchen at home; his gentle face smiling, unscribbled upon, because even as children they had revered him - they could never forget the moments of pure happiness when the notice came from the Health Department that medical and hospital attention were to be free, free, and their father had collected all the unpaid hospital and doctors’ bills, brushed the dust from their windows, opened them, smoothed them, read them aloud, shuffled them into a pile, and with a shout of joy, pokered the ring from the stove and thrust them into the fire. Grace remembered that their mother’s excitement had been tempered with a slight fear that the chimney might be set alight while the hospital bills burned.
—They charge five shillings for a chimney fire!
—Yes, Grace said, unconsciously quoting from her parents,
—Mickey Savage was the one!
(He’s the one, her mother would say.—After old Forbes-and-Coates and the Coalition, he’s the one! Grace never had a clear understanding of whether Forbes-and-Coates were one or two people or if they were people at all; her image of them was a childish one of coats, black, going green with age, tattered with moth-holes, hanging in a wardrobe; w
hile the word ‘Coalition’ which she had seen printed made a sound like the shovelling of ‘slack’, and like slack it seemed something undesirable - the woman next door used to stand in her backyard and call to her son,—Bill, get on more coal, give me no slack!)
—He was the one, Grace murmured.
—Oh yes, Anne agreed.
Grace and Anne exchanged smiles, aware of their sudden bond of sympathy, their New Zealand background and experience overwhelming them with traditional attitudes and statements, their lips set firmly - they would show any Pommie who tried to tell them what they didn’t know about their own country!
The moment was gone in a flash but both Grace and Anne had realised it, their bristling in defence against ‘foreigners’ (especially ‘Pommies’). Grace quoted to herself,‘There through her aquid glass
Circumambient Regina, turning slowly from the pane,
Is seen imperiously to mouth “Albert, my dear,
How do we pronounce Waitangi?”’
Foreigners were dangerous, especially in a ‘young’ country. Queers too, outsiders, intellectuals, any doubtful group who might spoil the pleasure of the golden Life-Guards parading the golden beach.
—Certainly, Philip admitted.—Savage introduced Social Security. But it was Peter Fraser who moulded the San Francisco Conference. Almost in opposition to his country it was he who gave New Zealand a voice in World Affairs, who made her look beyond herself for a change; he helped New Zealand in a stage of growing-up.
Oh it’s so hard, Grace thought, to care for what one man contributes, invisibly, to the peace of the world, when there’s a vivid memory of another who brought peace, for a time at least, into our home set, strangely, in the street of innocence and experience - Fifty-six Eden Street Oamaru South Island New Zealand Southern Hemisphere the World. The world comes so far at the end of the statement; it is so easy to forget it. If I put my list of places to the test by holding them (as they say of the guinea pig) ‘upside down by the tail’ - Fifty-six Eden Street, Oamaru, South Island, New Zealand, Southern Hemisphere, the World, - it is the world, like the guinea pig’s eyes, that would drop out; only places, like guinea pigs, have no tail; they are one; and nothing drops out, ever.