Towards Another Summer

by Janet Frame

  —Yes, Sarah repeated.—I want you to come here again.

  The conference was over. Gravely they went from the room, shutting the door carefully behind them and Sarah, running on ahead to the kitchen glanced back at Grace with that metallic abolishing look which children have when contact has been made, treaties signed.

  21

  Upstairs in the attic Grace wondered at the nature of those who allow others to enter a room where their deepest secrets lie.

  She sat before Philip’s huge desk, considering the drawers and pigeonholes crammed with papers and letters and the Imperial Portable typewriter on the desk with a sheet of paper thrust in it, naked for all the world to see! Somewhere in one of the drawers perhaps Philip’s novel lay typed and bound. How could he dare to give a stranger permission to enter this room! Or was this room not the repository of his secrets? Perhaps he himself had no access to his treasures; perhaps he hoarded them elsewhere without ever recognising them; perhaps he discarded them one by one without ever having known them?

  Telling herself that in spite of temptation it is not kind to explore the papers of another whether or not they are admitted secrets, Grace turned her attention to the window which was small, overlooking the golf course and the rigid death-posed trees that stood in their monumental anguish like the thorn trees that are the suicides in hell.

  The room, Grace decided, would be a perfect place to write in, although not because of the view, for in writing the studied landscape is not the Holly Road back garden, the Winchley golf course; nor the Old Brompton Road, the car salesroom, the jet cotton-trails in the sky; it is some mysterious place out of the world’s depths where the waves are penetrated by the faint gleam of the drowning sun and the last spurts of light escape like tiny sparkling fish into the dark folds and ceaselessly moving draperies of the water; it is the inner sea; you may look from every window - in Winchley, London, New Zealand, the World, and never find the Special View. Yet here, in the attic, Grace decided, little effort or encouragement would be needed to draw aside the curtains of the secret window, to smash the glass, enter the View; fearful, hopeful, lonely; disciplining one’s breath to meet the demands of the new element; facing again and again the mermaiden’s conflict - to go or stay; to return through the window whose one side is a mirror, or inhabit the blood-cave and slowly change from one who gazed at the view to one who is a part or whole of the view itself; and from there (for creation is movement) when all the mirror is a distorted image of oneself, bobbing in the dark waves with stripes of light like silver and gold bars imprisoning one’s face and body, to pass beyond the view, beyond oneself to - where? Not to the narrow source that a speck of dust, a full-stop, an insect’s foot can block for ever, but to some bountiful coastline with as many waves as beginning fish or sperm before the choice is made, the life decided, and the endowed drop of water shining with its power and pride perfects its lonely hazard under the threat of dust, full-stops, insects’ feet; only a multiplicity of wave provides a horizon, a coastline, a land; beyond the view, beyond the narrow vain chosen speck of life to the true source - the boundless billionaire coastline of eternity; from ceaseless rivalries and rhythms and patterns of beginning, to silence and stillness; no wind in the trees - no trees; no sky or people or buildings; to reach there one may need the extreme discipline of breathing: that is, death.

  A migratory bird may fly there, Grace thought, and felt herself immediately there with the touch of airless space upon her feathers; in the skyless world she felt neither leaden nor buoyant; where before in the world the wind curved and ruffled her feathers moulding them into subservience, separating their fronds into trembling fountain-shapes through which the sun, believing them to be the movements of water, hung rainbows; where before the wind guided her flight or sustained her motionless poise, now a surge of nothing enfolded her feathers, as if a cloud were being knitted to enclose her body; yet there were no boundaries; stone-falling, she would fall for ever; the land was for ever.

  She longed to return from the source, the speck, the View, to climb through the glass into the attic, and at once, as in dreaming, she was there, with the desk in front of her, the Imperial Portable typewriter (Mine’s an Olivetti, she thought. Philip likes Spaghetti Bolognaise; My brother has never been able to eat egg, for years he has never eaten egg), the golf course and trees through the window. She felt cold. She made a last observation of the room - noting in one corner the rucksacks, windjackets, boots waiting to be used for the Highland Holiday. She remembered Philip’s words about a visit to the Highlands soon after he and Anne returned to Great Britain.

  —We walked everywhere in those days. Remember our first trip up there? You were carrying Sarah at the time, though you didn’t know it.

  While Philip was speaking Grace had a sensation of walking upon golden stones beneath slow elephantine shapes of cloud trumpeting their light; then suddenly the vast Highland skies had become close, domestic, confined, blue as the best china plate, and Grace felt a movement inside her: Sarah.

  In the centre of the attic, piled high, were months and years of literary weeklies and other magazines already brown at the edges, with brown stains on the covers as if Damp (here they talk of him with dread: Damp has got into the house) had come to life and leaned his wet hand upon the paper.

  —Now I know where literary weeklies go, Grace thought, with the interest of someone who has solved the problem of flies in winter, pins from a packet, and other such mysteries. A bookshelf near the magazines held Anne’s Training College and University books and miscellaneous books belonging to Philip. In this house books had no boundaries; they overflowed, flooded; you had to stand on the roof waving for help, thinking regretfully of your best cherished furniture already ruined by the rising, seeping ideas . . .

  —Are you up there, Grace? There’s coffee.

  —Oh yes, thank you. Coming!

  In the tradition of someone leaving a room Grace gave a ‘last lingering look’ about her; there was an envelope addressed to Philip; typewritten letters, handwritten letters; suddenly she was aware of his life, his activities, letters coming for him, his reading and answering them. I’m not there, she thought. I’m not there. I’m nowhere. She felt the world go dark with sudden exclusion and she was beating her wings against the door of the dark but no one opened the door; indeed, no one heard.

  22

  Wait. It was this way, she said. I remember it was this way.

  So we were shifting to Oamaru and the shift entailed a longer journey than we had ever known, far more than a few station-puffs in the train, a daylong journey across an endless number of rivers through tussock and cabbage-tree country, moonscape of rabbit warrens overhung with clouds of white dust; railway houses, railway huts, clothes-lines, level crossings in a jangle of warning; sheep, crops; and near Dunedin the dark terrifying lake described to me by Isy as ‘bottomless’. We looked out of the window at it; we shuddered, knowing that if we should fall in (how fragile the bridges were across all rivers) we should disappear for ever.

  —The Taieri Flats, my mother said, and her voice sounded like doom. A waste of grey mud heaving with buried mammoths which kept moving, surging with life-currents over hundreds and millions of years, as easily as small insects and animals flicker with seconds of life after their heart has stopped beating.

  Dunedin, and our direction changed, the train seemed to move backwards, we seemed to be travelling the wrong way, going home again to Wyndham. I was sick and I lay with my face against the leather smoke-smelling seat and they covered me with a coat.

  —We’re going due north now, my mother said, and again her voice sounded like doom. Why, by saying due north instead of north could my mother give the impression that the end of the world was near?

  Due north. I breathed slowly and deeply at the appalling inescapable reality of it.

  —See, kiddies, the Southern Alps!

  We looked at the snowy peaks set in an almost unbroken line along the horizon like foam along
a sky-sea, and they followed us all the way to Oamaru where they stayed, unmoving now, against the sky beyond Waimate, Weston, Waiareka, and the other places whose names were new to us.

  In a week we learned to say it, chiefly as a protection against the many strange neighbouring children. It wasn’t Ferry Street Wyndham Southland any longer, it was Fifty-six Eden Street, Oamaru, North Otago, our house having a number because there were so many other houses in the street, more than I had ever seen in my life, and rumour said that the street was one of the longest in the town, starting at the seafront, cutting through the main street, gently sloping to our house, past our house, sloping more sharply around the corner to the right, still climbing higher until it reached the Town Belt.

  Number Fifty-six was unlike any other house we had ever lived in. It had a bathroom with a bath, a shower, a basin, taps for hot and cold water. It had a lavatory between the wash-house and the coal-shed - a little wooden house with spiders in the corners and a shelf spattered with candle-grease. The electricity which we had never known before provided my father with a new complaining exclamation,

  —All the lights in the house blazing! You can see this place all the way down Thames Street; who do you think we are, all the lights in the house blazing?

  Thames Street became my father’s landmark. If we shouted we could be heard ‘at the foot of Thames Street’; if anything seemingly impossible were demanded the reply came,

  —You expect me to traipse down Thames Street!

  My father pronounced Thames to rhyme with lame. I marvelled at the way he refused, against all opposition, to change it to rhyme with hem . . .

  So. A house, a garden with a rose arch, a banksia rose summer house where we could act Hugh Idle and Mr Toil, two japonica bushes, one Japanese, one red; a plum tree with half the branches hanging over the neighbour’s fence; a pear tree with two kinds of pears, honey and winter; apple trees, cookers and Irish peaches; a peach tree which never bore fruit; a fowl-house; a cow-byre; at the back, beyond the garden, the bull paddock, the hill with its caves and fossils, the pine plantations extending for miles; and everywhere, to the left, to the right, across the street, along Glen Street to the gully, so many neighbours and their children . . . the rich people whose children were not allowed to play with any small child who rapped at the door, ‘Please c’n Mary come over to play at our place’, and the poorer parents who didn’t mind where anybody played and who, in the evenings when bedtime was near, stood at the open front doors up and down the street, calling in loud voices, Joh-nny, Joh-nny, the last syllable rising an octave, the word scouring every corner of the insistently sleepless twilight. Our mother, with five names to call, was one of the best callers in the street, with bush Coo-ees added to strengthen her commands which began with the eldest, descending in order of age to the youngest, Isy, Jimm-y, Gra-ace, Dott-ums, Chickabidee! With so many names called there was little likelihood that no one heard, although we tried to establish that only one name had been called,

  —Isy, you’re wanted.

  —Jimmy, you’re wanted.

  Or, more threatening,

  —Dad wants you!

  In the end we gave in, wound up our game, said see-you-tomorrow, and trooped home to where our father, tucking into his dinner, would say, with more discrimination than my mother who did not mind (or said she did not mind) who were our playmates as all children of whatever wealth, race, creed should play together,

  —I hope you haven’t been playing with the Petersen children . . . Don’t let me catch you with Billy Walker.

  These admonitions thrilled us with pleasure, enabling us the next day to boast, as a condescending prelude to playing with the Petersens or Billy Walker,

  —We’re not allowed to play with you.

  Our piece said, we would enjoy our game, relishing the extra spice of danger provided by associating with forbidden friends. Associating. That was the grim word—Don’t you let me see you associating with Ted McLeod. Associating was a more grave crime than playing with.

  That was Oamaru; everything and everybody swiftly made clear with names and nicknames, nicknames for the admired and friendly, nicknames for the mad, passing slipper-slopper at the end of the street, shaking fists and cursing. The new world was so full of fearful and pleasurable excitements that the movement of them overflowed in me. I blinked, made funny faces, and my mother and father, looking me up in the green-covered ‘Doctor’s Book’ said,

  —St Vitus Dance.

  —Stop making those faces, my father said.—You’ve got St Vitus Dance.

  —St Vitus Dance, St Vitus Dance!

  It was something to tease me with, and teasing-points were so powerful that we quickly seized them for use one against the other. My nose wobbled like a rabbit’s nose.

  —I’ll put you out in a burrow with the rabbits if you don’t stop making those faces. Look at her, just look at her.

  My shoulders and arms jerked up and down like pump-handles.

  I was six years old, in Standard One at the North School, and it was such a long way to go to school, not a simple ‘down the road, across the railway line and around the corner’, but through and up and down many streets with choices of this or that street according to time, mood and company. To get home for dinner and back to school in time we had to run and run, jog-trotting with frequent glances at the always visible Town Clock; not to reach the Eden Street corner by a quarter to one meant that all was in vain, we would be late. Most of the pupils living up Eden Street had to run at dinner-time and often as I was jog-trotting along, perhaps with the stitch (Oh, I’ve got the stitch), a big boy with bare knees and hairy legs would catch up with me and hiss in my ear as he passed me,

  —I’m after you!

  And when I sat down to my dinner of mince and potatoes I would say proudly,

  —Willy Collins is after me!

  Sometimes I put fear in my voice, if I felt the occasion demanded.

  —Oh, I can’t go down to get the meat and the paper, Willy Collins is after me!

  My mother would reply,

  —Those big boys have no upbringing.

  My mother often talked of ‘upbringing’. Whatever it was, we had it.

  —I’ve got upbringing, I said to the girl at school sitting next to me in the single desk. All desks in Standard One were singles, an advance on the primers with their chairs and tables that made you feel you were being put in a doll’s house, but how my heart beat fast when I walked by Standard Two’s room and saw the double desks which the children talked of as ‘jewl’ desks. How I longed to sit in a ‘jewl’ desk! How I longed to be asked to fill the inkwells on Monday mornings! To put the flowers in water and be able to stand, dawdling, alone, out by the taps, listening to the mixed murmur of tables or the singing of Come Oh Maidens ‘Come Oh Maidens welcome here

  you in all the world so dear

  come oh maidens welcome here

  come oh maidens come,

  Gaily our canoe shall glide

  row her o’er the flowing tide,

  twirling pois shall aid beside

  till we reach our home.’

  For the teacher to ask me to stay behind to help him after school! To give out the exercise books in the morning!

  And how I longed to be able to skip ‘Double Dutch’ and French skipping alone instead of being ‘All in together this fine weather’ when the powerful and important children whose mothers gave them whole clothes-lines for skipping-ropes would invite the rabble (including me) to crowd into the skip ‘for good measure’! Oh the stifling feeling of wonder and admiration when I looked upon the one or two pupils who each season brought skipping ‘in’. One day there were no ropes in the playground, the next day a few spun by powerful pioneers; on the third day the excited shout, ‘Skipping’s in! Skipping’s in!’

  The days were filled with longings, excitements, discoveries. I discovered geraniums. For days I lived in a dream of geraniums, their name, their colour, the way they spread wild on the ban
ks by the houses in Glen Street. I picked them, touched the petals, crushed the stalks; the juice ran in the cracks of my fingers and hands where my life-line showed, and my heart-line, and my long line of deceit, and, crooked in my little finger, the seven lines which told me the number of children I would have - all my life and my heart and my deceit and my children were drenched with the smell and juice of geraniums!

  I skipped to Standard Two, by the window, still not in a ‘jewl’ desk. The teacher was a young woman who said ‘Come out here’, and strapped hard, especially on Friday afternoons when we had Silent Reading. One day she looked out of the window and said,‘Where the shy-eyed delicate deer come down in a troop to

  drink

  When the stars are mellow and large at the coming on of

  the night’

  and I sat so still, without making any faces or twitching my shoulders, while the deer were drinking; drink; the brink; link; that was water, lapping, and a quick escape into the forest; the ‘mellow’ stars; petals, butter.

  —Pay attention!

  Pay!

  —Take out your Dominion Song Books!

  ‘God of Nay-shons at Thy Feet,

  in the bonds of love we meet,

  Hear our praises we en-treat,

  God defen Dour Free-land.

  Guard Pacifixtrip-lestar

  from the bondsof hate an war

  maker praises heardafar,

  God defen New Zealand!’

  Now Come Oh Maidens. Sing up, open your mouths! One, two. Now Like to the Tide.

  ‘Like to the tide moaning in grief by the shore,

  mourn I for friends captured and warriors slain,

  here let me weep . . .’