‘Okay then,’ she said, ‘did you ever love me?’
He hesitated and she sensed his quandary. She knew he had. Once. But he replied, ‘Probably not.’
‘Then how dare you marry me if you didn’t love me?’ she fired back, turning in circles as she spoke. ‘You know what? Do change your number. I never want to speak to you again either, and you know what else?’ She forced her voice calm, steely. She stopped, stood very still. ‘One day you’re going to go looking for the love of your life, and she is not going to return your phone calls.’ She hung up on him and walked very fast along the parade, her dress moving against her body, her long hair bouncing.
Waves shuffled to and fro on the beach down to her right. She had done all she could — travelled to the other side of the globe for love. She had proved to herself that she at least took love, loyalty and marriage seriously. She had fulfilled her role as wife as far as she had been permitted. And now she felt excused of all responsibility to her vows, and, for that matter, all responsibility to love. The nuptials had never been legal, such was the rush, but she had considered that it was pledging your bond in a ceremony that made it real, not the red tape. No one had been married in her family as far back as anybody knew. Nor had any boys been born. Men drifted in and out, telling the women how to use their bodies.
The adrenalin drained away and a peaceful lull took its place. She had only wanted him to want her. She realised she didn’t really want him.
Gilda sat on a bench facing the ocean.
An elderly gentleman sat down beside her, his hands propped on a walking stick. He had the grandfatherly air of a character in an Enid Blyton book, his moustache curled out past the edge of his nostrils in a waxed grey half moon. He wore a tweed waistcoat over an open-necked shirt, long shorts and sandals. His legs looked handsome.
Gilda gazed out at the long, pebbled beach, blue sky and sea and brilliant sunshine.
‘Turner painted this exact scene,’ the man said. ‘I’m Cecil Mills.’
‘Oh. Gilda.’
‘Are you a painter?’
‘Yes,’ she said wistfully, although she wasn’t. It was easier to just go along, and in a way as a photographer she was at least image-oriented.
‘Care to have tea with me?’
‘No thank you. I’m not very good company at the moment.’ She half smiled and the mole above her lip lifted and partly disappeared in the crease from nose to mouth.
‘A walk, then.’ He stood.
As they walked the promenade he told her of the great works of art he had seen, and asked her conversationally what museums and galleries she had visited on her journey, noting her Pacific accent.
‘I’m going through a tapestry phase,’ Cecil said. ‘The workmanship is a delight. There is a particular one in a private collection in Nice, on the French Riviera, of a mermaid reclined on a rock — my, but she is a sight.’ He felt her interest rise. ‘Are you fond of tapestries, dear?’
‘I don’t know much about them but I’ve always liked mermaids.’
‘Well, you must see this one,’ he said, and tucked her hand in his arm. Their eyes met and for some strange reason she experienced the sensation that sometimes precedes a fortuitous sequence of events, the insight that God might have prepared a plan for her. She had no faith in God — there was no plan, and God could go get stuffed — but her body sprouted goosebumps and she felt her sweat cool.
He noticed the change in her and let go of her hand. He coughed, and suddenly she felt terribly protective of him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I must learn not to touch — that’s what they say to me in galleries: “Please sir, don’t touch.”’
He chortled, and for a moment she saw what he must have looked like as a young man: earnest, cheerful.
She said nothing but linked her arm in his again and they strolled silently along the promenade, away from the marina. The walkway curved down to the beach. An old caravan in garish colours, rust-chipped, stood beside a small Ferris wheel with no children on it. It looked sad in its faded splendour. A few derelict old men were sunning themselves on the shore, white handkerchiefs tied in four knots on their heads. It was a peaceful scene. Gilda removed her boots, letting the pebbly sand mould around her feet. She had always hated her feet, but for once she let the world see. She felt peculiarly drained of pretence, like a peeled banana. She left the boots where they fell and smiled into the sun, gave a little sigh. Cecil, with just the briefest glance at her feet, squeezed her arm in his.
They moved closer to the water’s edge and sat down. He asked her where she was from and she replied, ‘Riverton, New Zealand. I’m going home.’
‘Ah yes, now wasn’t that once Jacob’s River, a whaling port?’
‘Yes,’ she said, mildly surprised that he might know of such a remote place. She only recalled its former name herself when he mentioned it. History wasn’t her strong point. Like most colonial countries, hers had a recorded history that went back only so far. In the early days there were few records kept and she had no idea how her family had arrived in New Zealand. But they must have come from somewhere else because everyone did. It was one reason she had wanted to visit England — she thought her ancestry might stir in her. But it hadn’t.
Why Jacob’s River had changed its name was a mystery to Gilda, but she recalled the fat river that ran through the settlement and into the inlet.
‘Hungry?’ Cecil asked, and when she nodded he ambled, leaning on his cane, to the caravan and bought a pottle of chips smothered in vinegar and one of baby octopus. He returned to her with small wooden forks like the spoons she used to eat tubs of Tip Top ice-cream with. They sat and ate the brine and salt of the meal. The octopus flesh squeaked as she chewed, and he told her about his retirement from the family ship-building firm, here in Ramsgate; how his interests were now more in art. He told her his son was smart and single and, with a lovely glint in his eye, he spoke of his faithful wife, may she rest in peace, and how they used to walk along this beach.
He looked so content with merely the memory of his beloved that Gilda smiled sadly and told him he was lucky. To which Cecil replied, ‘You are lucky, my dear. Love will find you.’
Then Cecil asked her to wait there. He had something to show her; he would be back soon. He half walked, half ran up to the road. But Gilda did not wait. She squeezed her thumb and forefinger together to ease a headache that was increasing in pressure. She hadn’t dreamed for a while — too long — and if a drought went on too long she would be overwhelmed with an orgy of dreaming. She would faint wherever, and not wake up until all the dreams had spooled, like a film from a projector, and if a blackout was close, even an ordinary environment could become frightening. She wanted to be alone, to get somewhere safe. She was so hot she worried maybe she had a fever. She walked the few short streets to the village centre and saw an Oxfam shop about to close.
She quickly selected an old peach petticoat, changed into it, sliding her hands over her waist and hips where the garment hugged her frame, and left her other clothes, symbolically, on the floor of the changing room, like a shed skin.
She made her way back to the station, the paving stones warm and smooth under her bare feet, her boots abandoned on the beach. In her mind she worked out what time she would be back in London and hoped she could make it before one of her turns. She hadn’t had one since she had been abroad and she found herself welcoming it, the way an injury can make one feel special. She admonished herself. Think like a victim, live like a victim.
A black cab pulled up beside her and she recognised the driver’s hairy face. He was grinning at her and she laughed. In that moment she realised her old laugh had returned, and with it the beginnings of a spiralling feeling, like water down a drain. She felt almost drunk.
‘Hop in, love,’ the driver said, and she climbed in the back. Black cabs are so roomy and lush, she thought, and fancied she was on a before-and-after TV show and had rounded the partition to show her transformatio
n.
She was pushed back in the seat with the movement of the cab.
‘I came all the way from New Zealand to Ramsgate to meet a man I thought I loved and he didn’t turn up.’
The driver glanced at her in the mirror. He knew everyone in the village and most everyone got in his cab and just talked. He nodded, as he always did, as if to say, ‘Aye, life’s queer, many strange turns and full of shitty surprises.’ And somehow his nod also conveyed that all was perfect, and that all she needed was trust. But he was shocked. She was so gorgeous.
‘What?’ he said, turning around in his seat, taking his eyes off the road. ‘But what’s wrong with him? Don’t know what’s good for ‘em, do they? Got heads like logs. Well, I’m sorry for you, dear, but he just wasn’t the one.’ He turned back to the road, then back to her and back to the road, shaking his head in disbelief. ‘I’ll let you in on a wee secret, dear. Love will find you.’
‘So I hear,’ she said. ‘So I hear.’
In her London flat — with most of the fence taken away during the war to make bullets — she waited for the blackout, like a knock on the door by a rascally child, but it never came. This annoyed her because she needed relief, and now the looming threat/promise of it would be with her until who knew when. She might faint tomorrow or not for weeks.
She gave notice in her job as a photographer’s assistant. Packed her bags with treasures she’d found, said goodbye to her Polish flatmates, sculled vodka with grass in it. She was loath to leave London and the pocket of reprieve she had found in the streets where no one knew her. She loved the freedom, the clash of cultures, the markets and jazz clubs, the museums — she loved that everything was new and ancient at once. She didn’t want to go, but she had to. It was like a magnetic pull.
Still, it was another few months before she boarded a bus and a train and then an aeroplane that flew her homeward, and Gilda felt she were being banished from the world at large. A map was projected on the screen of the aeroplane bulkhead: a tiny red plane over the vast land of Europe, slowly, slowly, slowly making its way across zillions of miles.
Over Eastern Europe, over Asia, over Australia to the most far-flung, forgotten, godforsaken islands in the boondocks and backwaters of the world: New Zealand. And to the smallest town at the very bottom of the country: Riverton, née Jacob’s River.
8.
Fishing: Dreaming
Gilda:
Eve comes out of the sea towards me, fishes and lobster and sea fruit of all kinds all over her, the way natives wear feathers and bone as ornamentation. What a glorious sight. She walks towards me, water streaming off her body, sparkling droplets that twinkle in the sun like sequins. The way she moves is as though she has been strolling on the ocean floor simply picking the fish like apples off trees, and she is serene, enchanting and powerful and her presence washes over me like a blessing. The scene is always so natural and ordinary.
A little girl in a white petticoat, barefoot, runs to her and takes the fish off in layers, like unwrapping a kimono, with Eve turning a little to help her unwind a long piece of kelp all tangled like necklaces. Layer by layer, she removes snapper and every fish you can think of and great clusters of mussels in their hairy husks, and oysters with their flawed pearls. The little girl prises these open with a fruit-knife and sucks them from the shells, lets them slip down her throat. I often wake from this dream with the briny slick of oyster juice in my mouth as if I’ve swallowed the whole sea.
A fire burns, the flames orange and sparking. Fish, guts and all, go in the flames, as the woman and child huddle for intimacy rather than warmth, faces oily and slick from fish juice. They’re covered in sand but they don’t mind; you get used to eating bits of grit, just the same as soil on a carrot pulled fresh from the ground. Eve is there but she is absent, too, and in her eyes there is nothing. They’re empty like a baby’s, except she is not waiting to be filled up, but rather she has been drained, and even though I want to be close to her, to know her, I want also for her to go away.
9.
The Tower
Wood smoke from chimneys settled a bluish cloud over the cribs, and through it shone the last shards of the sun that her mother used to call the fingers of God.
Nothing had changed.
Gilda slowed; the shingle snagged at the tyres, forcing the car to follow the ruts. She wound down the window and dinner smells from the village tugged at her, made her feel lonely and homely at once. She took in the ship-building yard and the ruin of the whaling station — in its cavernous depths she had snogged more than her fair share of boys in a race to grow up, to be the first to fall in love, and to dig for it in all the wrong places, in all the wrong pants.
What — scared you’ll get pregnant or are you a lezzo? Boys who were different in shape and shade and yet indistinguishable from one another, as if made by a cookie cutter. The same lust and the same puckered expression when relieved. She, elated at her own power, spread-legged and bountiful but all too fleeting.
She gave a wry smile, for it all seemed so long ago, and as she continued driving, her gaze went to the fishing boats lilting in the harbour, as pretty as books on a shelf. The inlet, where the fat river teeming with eels met the ripple of Foveaux Strait, a sheet of blue out to the horizon. It was exactly the same as it had always been, and there was solace and annoyance in that.
There, right on the beach, the homestead was circled by a veranda that offered shade or sun any time of day. It was a mongrel of amateur extensions, like something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. It always seemed to Gilda to be a house of secrets about to topple. A turreted tower, round and white, hogged half the roof and overlooked the sea. This was her bedroom.
She sighed. Why had she come home to stale memories and the watertight reputation of being unlucky in love?
Gilda sat, eating marmalade on toast, sweet and runny over the butter, while her aunt made coffee. Outside, the dew had frosted on the sculptures in the garden: sun and moon entwined, lovers embracing, faces half trapped in rough stone. Overhead the mist was being blown out to sea. The open fire glowed warm and bright. Cousin Martha’s footfalls sounded through the ceiling, moving about as she ran water in the claw-foot bath.
Aunt Maggie, permanently covered in a film of sculptor’s dust, brought the coffee to the table and put a generous spoonful of sugar in Gilda’s cup. ‘Sugar and spice and all things nice,’ she said, and slid into the chair opposite. She held her cup in her hands the way people do settling in for a long conversation when they have something on their mind. A long grey plait hung over her shoulder.
Gilda leant forward. ‘Go on, then. Spit it out.’
‘All right, I will. I want to know if you have been having your hallucinations.’
‘Hallucinations — is that what we’re calling them now?’ Gilda laughed but without mirth and shifted in her seat, her face flushing defensively.
‘Please don’t be prickly. I’m just asking if you have had any more of your episodes — any recent blackouts.’
Silence.
‘Ginger, honey, I don’t have a standpoint on what they are, really I don’t. I’m on your side — if there could possibly be any other side. I’m curious, not concerned. What are you now — thirty? Surely we’ve moved on from asylums and can talk about this rationally? It’s accepted that you experience things.’
It sounded odd said out loud, and Aunt Maggie curled her mouth in a comic face, a face that had always made the child Gilda laugh, so she smiled obediently but said, begrudgingly, ‘Is it crazy to act crazy in a crazy situation?’
‘It’s perfectly normal.’ Maggie slapped the table in agreement.
‘I have a question. Where do all the hysterical women go now that they’ve closed the institutions and invented happy pills? Now there are no funny farms to go to to be looked after, no electric shocks like cattle-prods for the masses. I couldn’t even go to rehab without an addiction, unless unrequited love is an addiction, but that’s irre
levant now anyway.’
Tirade over. And she half meant it as a distraction technique, to turn her aunt from enquiring about the dreams that had tormented and yet soothed her for as long as she could recall.
‘I guess they just marry farmers and go barmy in the wopwops.’ At the word marriage Maggie looked up sheepishly.
‘It’s fine. It’s over,’ said Gilda. ‘I’ve lived it out. I can’t believe the fuss now.’ She sighed and softened.
‘Oh, I am pleased to hear it. Wet rag, that one. And you know, the episode really wasn’t about him, honey. He was just a reflection.’
Gilda rolled her eyes. Could her aunt be any more Mother Earth if she tried? She said testily, ‘I worked that out. It was like he lit a fuse inside me to a bomb of melancholy that was always there. He was the spark and so I blamed him, but I have always felt bereft, as if I’ve misplaced something important — a person or a thing or just a way of being.’
‘You wouldn’t be the first to use a romance to fill a void, Ginger. God, it’s a trait of the Page women, like a gypsy curse, and whatever he was, it was amazing you even managed to wed, to actually have a wedding! We were all so astonished — it was like you’d cracked a code. You know you come from a long line of unwed mothers in this clan. Seven generations,’ said her aunt, remembering the legend passed on from mother to daughter.
‘Spinsters and soiled women and proud of it!’ said Gilda. They clinked their coffee cups in a toast and sighed.
It wasn’t that the Page women could not get men. They most certainly could, and did. Droves of them, like fleas stupid with lust. Coats, jerseys, socks and gumboots, fishing rods and even old vehicles lived on at the house long after the men had rolled on. Whenever there was a half-hearted spring-clean these items always managed to be kept. Some of the suitors were mourned, others forgotten as if they had never existed. But none of the women could claim to have secured love.
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