Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  When I went back to suggest it I found her drawing tinily on another wall. (All her drawings were tiny, as though they were meant for a corner of the page.)

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘In the bush.’

  It was more. Everything was angled, twisted, swollen, torn, reversed. Everything was greedy and malevolent. Creepers strangled trees; they cut deep grooves in them. Fat branches pushed starving branches down. Roots split boulders, which crushed ferns. Toadstools grew aslant rotten logs. Toadstools? Fungus of a sort, squat and gross. Grubs poked out their heads, and centipedes lay bent and still, curved like scimitars. Water dripped. Gum congealed. Lichen crept. A little cowed animal, possibly a hedgehog, poked out its snout from a hollow under a log.

  The picture crept across half a wall – tiny acts of terror and greed; images of pain and desolation and defeat.

  All I could say was, ‘Hedgehogs don’t go in the bush.’

  ‘Yes they do. It mightn’t be a hedgehog anyway.’

  I went to the kitchen and made a cup of tea and put hers on the floor beside her. I went outside to see that the children were safe. That is the order. I tried to look after Harry first. I’ve said she saved me by putting me to work on the house. Perhaps I saved her too, with a cup of tea.

  When I went back late in the afternoon she had finished. Had enough. She had signed it ‘Edwards’, made – ironically? – with forget-me-nots. And gone on from there to draw isolated leaves and ladybirds. Clean and pretty. Washed with rain. Unreal perhaps beside her other world, but making a place for themselves by clarity and closeness and need.

  She smiled at me. ‘Your hair’s gone white.’ Attacked it with her hand and made a cloud of dust around us.

  ‘They’re nice,’ I said, touching a ladybird.

  ‘Aren’t they just.’

  I sneezed.

  ‘Bless you,’ she smiled.

  ‘I was thinking …’ I put my idea about the walls.

  ‘No, it doesn’t matter. I’ve finished now. Paper them over.’ She put her pencil in her pocket like an office girl.

  So we went on, and made our old house comfortable and clean; improved its value. We made it beautiful, as it had been before the time of yellow paint, partitions, lowered ceilings, and seventeen students crammed in. We restored the barge boards and the fretwork and raised new finials and all the while I felt that I restored our marriage and pulled off ugly bits I had tacked on. I thinned the trees and opened up the view. We looked across the city and Oriental Bay. We had the inner harbour on the left, and Somes Island, the eastern bays, the Orongorongos, the Tararuas. On the right, beyond the red-roofed flatlands leading to Island Bay, we had Cook Strait. Its colours ranged from white to black as fine days and stormy days passed through. I’ve seen it basalt-coloured, green, blue, yellow, I’ve seen the white ships shine like icebergs coming from the south, while over beyond the entrance, beyond the reefs, the shelves of Baring Head, planed as smooth as timber and shining like fields of wheat, lay in the sun, an untouched, warm, impossible new land.

  I can’t do lyricism and shouldn’t try, but the Central Terrace view moves me still, even though poles and insulators and sagging wires lie across the front of it.

  Harry admired but never came to love it. She watched the changes, recognized the moods, and would run to fetch me – ‘Look at this’ – but it never became more than a spectacle for her. These were not the right hills or this the right sea.

  The damage done was not repaired, not in those years or that easy way. She painted and she drew, she took extramural units from Massey; and raised the children – not only raised but broadened them – cured Jill of an obsessive hand-washing habit that I was responsible for in some way, I suppose, and worked through David’s reading difficulties with him, although she never managed to get him reading books.

  Now and then she had to go away. She had to have time by herself, with none of us. It happened only six or seven times and lasted from three days to more than a month. A month! Cards came or I would have called the police. She did not say where she was, simply that she was well and would be home soon and we mustn’t worry. I read the postmarks: National Park, Taumarunui. She took outdoor clothes, walking shoes, a sketch pad, nothing more. Was she climbing mountains? Was she drawing in the bush?

  Meeting a man? I did not ask, but when I said, ‘By yourself? You did all that alone?’ she knew what the question was, and was pleased by it and kind to me.

  ‘I did a canoe trip down the Wanganui.’

  ‘Not by yourself?’

  ‘In a group run by a Latvian man. There was a doctor and his wife and a bus driver and an electrician. And two secretaries. And some students. Democratic. Seven days.’

  ‘I would have liked to do that.’

  ‘Poor Jack.’ She patted my hand. ‘Next time.’ But next time was a week in a bach on the Mahia peninsula and she didn’t take me.

  ‘Who did you meet?’

  ‘No one, Jack. I was all alone. I never spoke to anyone the whole of the time.’ Her cheeks went pink from pleasure not from guilt. Her eyes shone at the memory.

  ‘I caught crayfish in the rocks, with my hands. And let them go. There was a man’ – so there had been a man – ‘who left me snapper in a sack at the gate. He was sixty, Jack. Poor Jack. He was old.’ Less pleased with me this time, giving some needle. She did not like me spoiling her time away.

  Her sketch pads were always full and when I looked secretly at them – so bright, so private, so exact -1 knew there were no affairs, no secret meetings and couplings in motel rooms, and knew that she met only herself when she went away, and that I held her by letting her go. So her escapes became a part of our status quo and her strangeness to me one of the things that kept us together. I had to enlarge myself in order to accept it. Small concerns began to drop away.

  Neither of us had an easy time. And surely I deserved some payment for my understanding. I did not want a turn at going away – was filled with alarm at the thought: I would go mad – but wanted something guilty, something to hide. (And something to blame on her as well.) I wanted a woman. Unaware that I would please Harry by cheating, I went about it secretly; but I’d forgotten how, I’d forgotten the moves. The only women I came close to being unfaithful with were Beth Simmonds and Fiona Petley.

  Poor Beth. Weeping woman. That’s specific. She came into our lives with tears and went out with tears. Our sitting-room overlooked the neighbours’ front garden. On the night of one of their dinner parties Harry suddenly crossed the room and turned out our light. ‘Come here,’ she said as I began to protest. ‘Someone in the corner. Past the bird-path, by the hedge.’

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Yes. I thought it was a man at first, having a pee.’

  ‘What’s she doing?’ A car went by in the street and showed a gleam of tears on her cheek. ‘Is she hurt?’

  We watched for five minutes and she stood without moving, although she wiped her cheeks with her hands.

  ‘I’m going down,’ Harry said.

  ‘Don’t interfere.’

  But she was gone: down our path and out the front gate. The woman in the shadows slid into an angle of the hedge. I thought that she might be a man after all, dressed in a skirt, she was big enough, and I threw the window up. But her movements as she stepped away from me, and from Harry advancing on the neighbours’ lawn, were fugitive and panic-stricken.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Harry told her, ‘don’t be frightened.’ She tunnelled a whisper at me: ‘Go away.’ They stood close together in the dark. I could not see or hear, and returned to my chair, hoping Harry would deal with it down there and not bring her into our house. But like so many of my hopes …

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘In the bathroom.’

  ‘What’s wrong with her?’

  ‘She’s terrified, Jack. She’s supposed to be at dinner with the Perretts but she can’t go in. It’s some sort of social phobia.’

  ‘Is she… Hadn’t
we better …’

  ‘She’s quite safe.’ Contemptuous. ‘But I’ll go and get her. You can put the kettle on.’

  So Beth, big and shrinking – mouse-bereted, gabardine-coated, square-shoed – Beth with washed red cheeks and weeping eyes, came into our lives; and we helped her and she helped us, for a time.

  She was twenty-two, a kindergarten teacher, and she could talk to children but couldn’t get a word off her tongue with adults – although she poured her life out to Harry and me that night. The Perretts’ daughter, trying to help, had invited her, but terror struck inside the gate, with lighted windows shining down, and she scuttled into the dark beyond the bird-bath, where blindness, paralysis, suspension of breath …

  ‘It’s all right now,’ Harry said.

  And what did I say? ‘No one can get you here.’

  Beth became our baby-sitter and our weekend friend. She made hours of free time for Harry and me and learned to talk without getting ready or thinking our concentration was fixed on her. She learned that other people were central to themselves – and, working on from there, found them self-serving, even in their love. I could not argue her out of that conclusion.

  ‘Who are you trying to convince?’ she grinned at me. She was likeable when she wasn’t afraid.

  When Harry went off on her ‘sabbaticals’ Beth came to look after the children; and looked after me as well, with washing and ironing and cooking and cleaning. She was better than Harry at being that sort of wife. She sat by the fire in Harry’s chair and held her breath in case the spell should break. I was a grumpy husband, but she remained, in all domestic things, a perfect helpmeet. I told her so, using that old word. She failed to hear my sourness and blushed.

  I left possession to David and Jillian. They bullied her; demanded drinks and cookies in the night; woke and called and made her sit shivering on the bed while they drifted back to sleep, even when they were too old for that sort of thing. She took them to the pictures and the Easter Show and brought them home dazed with food and pleasure. I suspended rules while Harry was away. I punished her by letting Beth unfix our children, it served her right. I wished that they would stay unmanageable, bad.

  ‘Which one was that?’ when she came back to the sitting-room.

  ‘Jill. She had a dream.’

  ‘All she needs is the door closed and the light out.’ Unconvincing.

  ‘Well,’ hearing it, ‘she got a story instead.’

  ‘One of yours?’

  She went red.

  ‘Tell it to me.’

  ‘No, it’s silly.’

  ‘Come on.’

  So she told me, and I thought it silly and still do; but I said, ‘That’s good. You should get Harry to do some drawings for that. She’s good at hedgehogs.’

  I had her tell Harry when she came back; and put in a recommendation: ‘Don’t have him smiling all the time.’

  The pictures are better than the words. See the book. Amazingly, it’s still in print. And there would have been others if Harry had not gone away south. This time she put the strait between us.

  ‘I thought you’d finished with all this running away.’

  ‘It’s not running. It’s a break.’ She frowned at the inadequate word. ‘Beth will come. You won’t have to manage on your own.’

  All right, I said, you asked for it. I think she heard, although I did not say it aloud. Harry is as much to blame as me. (I’ve learned not to blame but I’ll leave it in.) We put Beth in the wife’s chair one more time; and things had to turn out differently. David and Jill were thirteen and eleven and did not need her any more. Who needed Beth? Was she here for her own need? None of us fully understood.

  It was not a cold night but I made a fire. We sat with our chairs right-angled to each other – or perhaps a few degrees more closed -and read and conversed.

  ‘Cold?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll put some more wood on anyway.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I like fires.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘There, that’s better.’

  She made a cup of tea. Nine o’clock. Ten o’clock. Half past. The children were asleep. As a rule, Beth was in bed by ten. I heard her breathing – big-woman breathing, deep and even, through her nose. It should have been a calm sound but was not. There was a pent-up stillness in her, like the tea-tree jack. Beth had loved her situation with us. When had she discovered she loved me? It must have been when, by my own stillness, I signalled that I would take everything from her. What sort of battle did she fight? Or was she mine in a flash?

  Eleven o’clock. At that close angle she started it. Must have waited for me and when I put it off, watched the hand until it reached the hour…

  She stood up and went to the fire – embers, ash – and knelt in front of it on the mat. She put a block of wood on, carefully. Then she turned a look on me of such beseechingness that it forced me back in my chair; and, elastic, drew me to her side, kneeling on the mat. I kissed her softly, once, then long and deep. She had never kissed. Unpractised, bold, submissive, demanding, innocent – a kiss so complicated I don’t know what to think. But I knew then. I must go ahead. For both of us. And I must be careful.

  Memory is complicated too. I can be hard or tender; kind or cruel; coarse or fine. In each of those I can replace ‘or’ with ‘and’. What shall I do? Not try too hard and let it find its way? That is best. Don’t tell lies and don’t be ‘honest’, Jack.

  She wore a blouse buttoned down the front. I unbuttoned it and reached around and unhooked her bra while she watched as though she could not fully understand. It seemed to me that she forgot to breathe. I can’t make the sound on paper that she made when I touched her breasts. (I make it, soft-throated, in my hole under the stairs, and Harry, passing, raps the door: ‘Are you all right in there?’ Yes, I’m all right, up to a point. It’s just that I don’t want to say how I behaved.)

  ‘Lie down,’ I said, and she obeyed as though no split-second must be lost. Smooth and full. Not just her body but her face. So plain, her face. She moves me with her beauty. I touched and kissed and played little games while she held me through my trouser-cloth. Then – calculation and excitement both – I unzipped her skirt and slid my hand beneath her clothes and touched her with more knowledge than she understood. She held me harder then. And with just my touch she came, crushing, devouring, my hand in her thighs.

  It amazes me. So much readiness. So much need. I can be warm with happiness, thinking of the pleasure I gave, if I don’t go on.

  Beth’s mistake was to want things properly done, and done with propriety too. She did not want the mat in front of the fire, and did not want Harry’s marriage bed; but a bed was necessary, and we must go to her room and make ourselves safe in that narrow cell, in the narrow bed, with the door locked so the children would never know, and the Skeat house would never know. She gave me time to think of tomorrow and next week. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘you go. I’ll just make the fire safe and lock up. I won’t be long,’ and that is what I intended – but after the fire-screen and the front door I went to the bathroom and washed my hands. I felt a grating in my wrist where her thighs had crushed me (a nasty swelling the next day) and her passion frightened me. I did not understand the truth, which was, it’s very plain, one night was all she was going to ask. She would have gone away, and not come back; given up the Skeats for her night of love. She had made a bargain. But I became frightened for my children, and for Harry, and myself. On the mat, it should have been, and nothing would have been lost – the big hungry woman, the doggy little man. And nothing would have been lost in her room. Her instinct to go there and make a cell of it was perfectly sound – but she did not know me and our pause was her mistake.

  Fear and, of course, morality. I called on that. When Beth came tapping on my bedroom door – she must have realized by then; the courage of her walk along the hall – I opened it an inch or two and said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m married, Beth.�
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  The desolation in her eyes as she saw me through the opening I allowed – I need not have spoken any words. ‘Yes,’ she said, and went away.

  I lay all night wanting her. I even slid across the room and opened the door, opened it wide, hoping she would find it and come to my bed. But as I slept in the dawn she passed by and closed it. I heard the click. I heard her in the kitchen making tea, but it was only for herself.

  She told the children breakfast was on the table. Then she left.

  ‘Beth’s gone,’ they said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Gone home. She said you’re looking after us until Mum comes home.’

  ‘She was crying. Her nose was running.’

  ‘I’m glad she’s gone. I hate fat people,’ Jill said.

  ‘Me too,’ David said.

  I made them apologize – which they did easily, by rote. Apologizing had become like yawning to my children.

  Harry telephoned Beth when she came home. She put down the phone and turned to me. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Something must have happened.’

  ‘No, she left. The children don’t need her now. I guess they let her see.’

  Harry can look at me as though I’m a bug. She takes in my left side and my right as though getting me with a line or two. ‘Don’t use the children.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Couldn’t you even do that right?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You must have known what you owed her, Jack.’

  I do now, and might have understood it then if Harry had not let me see that she had arranged it. Beth, though, knew nothing about that. Harry had recognized her, recognized her time … There’s no point in going on. I don’t object any more. I wish we could try again, all three, and do it right.

  I raged a bit. Said I wasn’t hers to give away. Didn’t fuck fat ladies for charity.