Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘Oh shut up, Jack. Go and take a walk somewhere. Go and climb a tree.’

  I did that. I climbed a tree in the botanical gardens. I went up high and sat in the branches and watched people walking on the paths; and enjoyed it, removed from family and love and right and wrong. Leaves on my face, wind up my trouser legs, darkness filling the sky. I hugged the trunk and felt the life in it, and felt the life in the moving air. I let tears blow slanting on my cheeks; then climbed down and went on with my marriage.

  Harry and Beth met in town now and then. They talked about writing another book but never started. I don’t know what else they talked about. Perhaps the Values Party. Beth was TV spokesperson in the elections of 1972 and 1975. She was quick and positive but never blinked her eyes. ‘Relax,’ I told her on the screen. She stood for parliament in 1975 and managed not to lose her deposit.

  In later years I passed her several times on Lambton Quay and said hallo. She gave a stern little nod.

  Where is Beth now? I must ask Harry.

  Fiona is easier to face. I’ve only selfish regrets about saying no. Beth takes place in interiors. Fiona is in the open air, even though we sat in my car.

  It seems as though it happened the next day. In fact more than six years went by and in that time Harry and I settled down again. For a short time, at our beginning, we had stood face to face and touched nakedly; then, like figures set on clockwork pedestals, had turned away from each other – not had eye contact any more, or contact much of any sort. House and children and Beth, in her way, kept us together; kept us, rather, in proximity. Harry drew, she straightened and broadened David and Jill, and went away on her trips, while I slowly untangled, unknotted myself, partly in apology and partly to survive. After Beth we turned, with a creaking of machinery, a squeaking of wooden parts, to face, almost face, each other again. Not quite. We were slightly askew, but could make our eyes meet without rolling them too painfully.

  The metaphor works, almost works. I need it for then. I don’t need metaphors now, for Harry and me. That is marvellous progress – and I’d like to come up here, into this time, but must stay back. All these extras push into the centre – I push – but Rex is my subject in the end. Fiona’s importance, when she came, is that she told me about Rex.

  ‘Someone called Fiona Petley on the phone,’ David said.

  She was staying with a friend of her mother’s in Seatoun Heights and her father had told her to call and say hallo.

  ‘Just hallo?’

  ‘You know Dad.’

  ‘Yes, I do. How long are you here? Can you come over?’

  ‘I’d love to,’ lowering her voice in a way that told me she was having a difficult time with her mother’s friend.

  I picked her up and drove her back to our place round the bays. Wellington was in shades of grey and I wanted to impress her, but she said, ‘I’ve had enough of views. Sadie’ – Alice’s friend – ‘keeps going on about it, how it “enlarges her soul”. And then she talks about the Wahine on the reef. “Those poor creatures dying out there, while we watched from our picture windows. So sad.” She never thought of going down to help.’

  ‘There wasn’t very much she could have done.’

  ‘You can always do something.’ An affirming and a cancelling mind. If I disagreed she would cancel me. People like that are hard to entertain. Harry and I tried but Harry went to bed when the clock said ten.

  ‘I’m sorry, have I upset your wife?’

  ‘She’s got a headache, from eyestrain. She does all this very fine drawing, botanical stuff – ’

  ‘I keep on judging all the time. I know it makes people mad at me.’

  ‘Why do you do it?’

  ‘Because I want them to be -1 don’t know, just reasonable.’

  ‘Is your father?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What about Alice?’

  ‘No, she’s hopeless. Everyone is.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘Me especially.’

  David came in from badminton. He was sweating in his whites, and a bit too red, but not bad-looking – better-looking than I had ever been. I’d been hoping he would come and that I could put them together – but he was hopeless too, I saw from her glance, and I gave up for that night and said I would drive her home.

  ‘I always do that,’ she said in the car, ‘turn people off.’

  ‘I’m not turned off.’

  ‘You don’t like me though.’

  ‘Yes I do. I remember you at Loomis, sliding in the mud.’

  ‘You’re like Dad, you always want to talk about then. What’s wrong with now?’

  ‘I like you now.’

  ‘Do we have to go through the tunnel? I can’t stand tunnels.’

  So I drove round the Basin Reserve and past the hospital to Island Bay.

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘Cook Strait. You look right down the side of the South Island and then there’s nothing till Antarctica. Ice and snow.’

  ‘I suppose that enlarges your soul?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can we stop?’

  I parked on the shore front and we looked past the island and the fishing boats into the dark. The moon was in the clouds, invisible; no stars.

  ‘What was that music when we left your place?’

  ‘An old man three doors up. He plays his flute in the garden.’

  ‘It sounded like dogs.’

  ‘He has to be feeling pretty bad to go out on a night like this. He’s calling his wife. She went away with another man.’

  ‘You’re putting me on.’

  The first time I had heard that phrase. ‘On what?’

  ‘You’re making fun of me.’

  ‘Not very much. I’m cheering you up.’ I wondered if it would amuse her to know that both her father and I had been bedmates of the runaway wife. (She hadn’t run far, just to Brooklyn, the next hill. It’s possible Barton really thought his flute would carry there.)

  ‘Is that why you haven’t asked about Mum and Dad?’

  ‘Aren’t they a cheerful subject? Is something wrong?’

  She told me – and remember, this is second-hand.

  He had left his job as a proof reader after more than ten years. He had bought a piece of scrubland out by Muriwai and put a bach on it and was living there, trying to farm.

  ‘Mum goes out each weekend to see if he’s ready to come home.’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘He’s never coming. She doesn’t know.’

  ‘If you do, she must.’

  ‘No. It’s changed. She’s always let him do whatever he wanted’ – not true, but I did not argue – ‘because she knew he’d always come back. She doesn’t believe any man could run away from her, whether it’s Dad or not.’

  ‘Are you saying she’s had other men?’

  ‘No. Just friends. They don’t get far. It’s only Dad she wants. But this time he’s gone and she can’t see.’ Her eyes were wet but she wiped her mouth, coarse and hard. ‘I’d better tell her to buy a flute.’

  ‘Why are you so sure? Have you talked with Rex?’

  ‘I don’t have to talk, I can see. There’s a woman out there with him. It’s joint title. She lives in another bach but I know what they are.’

  ‘Your mother must know.’

  ‘She thinks it’s just girlfriends. She’s never been scared of them. But she’s the wife now and Mum’s not. It’s more than sex.’

  ‘What sort of farming do they do?’

  ‘Crops and things. Berries and green peppers. There’s grape vines too. He’s trying to start a vineyard, he’s gone crazy.’

  I asked if Rex had had many other girlfriends.

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose. Mum says what they really like is his finger, they think it’s sexy. She always tried to make him wear a finger-stall on it.’

  I didn’t like this freedom – have never cared for the way young people talk about sex – and I was relieved when she got out of the car and walked down the beach.
I wasn’t sure she wanted me to follow so I stood by the open door and watched her fade into the dark. Her pale clothing moved back and forth at the edge of the sea. Then she paddled. But the waves, even here, inside the island …1 ran down. How would I tell Rex his daughter was drowned? To make things even worse, it started to rain.

  ‘Fiona.’

  She was up to her thighs, and had not bothered to lift her skirt.

  ‘Fiona.’

  She came in, and saw at once the way her wildness affected me – sodden skirt, wet sandals, hair glued to her face. She ran to the car and I followed, and how did she make it seem that I was chasing her? At the door she took off her skirt and wrung it out and threw it on the floor; climbed into her seat.

  I got in mine. Started the engine. ‘I’m taking you home.’

  ‘I’m not ready.’

  I wasn’t going to be bossed by an eighteen-year-old. I saw that I must get her off my hands.

  ‘No. Turn on the heater, I want to get dry. I’ll go in like this, without my skirt.’

  So I did as I was told, and wrapped us in warm air.

  ‘Tell me some more about Rex.’ How erotic that was, by chance, for both of us. She pushed her seat back with her legs and dragged her wet hair forward and parted it to let her eyes look out. She told me about growing up with Rex and Alice.

  ‘Dad chased one of her friends down the street. He was having a drink with her, in the living-room, and Dad came home. There was nothing wrong, Stephen’s just someone for company. He jerks away, you know, and gives a little yelp if he touches her. Anyway Dad, he stood there in the door and showed his teeth and growled like a dog. He made a step at Stephen, and the hair would have stood up on his neck if he could have done it. Stephen spilled his drink and tried to get behind his chair. Dad was only having fun, I think he’d had a bit too much to drink. He kept on stepping after Stephen growling, and Stephen kept on jumping back, and Mum was saying, ‘Stop it Rex, leave him alone’, but you could see how excited she was. Anyway, Stephen ran out the door and down the steps and Dad chased him all the way down the street. Stephen didn’t even have time to get in his car. But I’ve never seen Dad grinning so much as when he came back. “I needed a bit of exercise,” he said. And Mum just said, “Oh Rex,” and kind of flopped in his arms. They locked themselves in the bedroom. But I don’t know, it wasn’t Dad, it just wasn’t him. It was like he was doing it with just his eyes and mouth. All the big important bit was gone away somewhere. He left soon after that anyway, with his new lady. I hope they are having fun. I hope they are. Fun’s what we need, isn’t it?’

  Her gaiety was sadder than her sadness had been. So I patted, then I stroked, and then I kissed. And touch made me recognize the Petley in her. I had not seen it. The squareness in her head, which I had seen as round. Her nose and her jaw and her long mouth. I stopped and drew away from him – Rex in her face. There was nothing erotic any more.

  ‘What’s the matter. I’ve done it plenty of times.’

  That did not encourage me either. I drove Fiona back to Seatoun Heights. She struggled into her skirt on the way.

  ‘Has this girlfriend of your father’s got a name?’

  ‘Margot,’ she sulked. ‘Margot Stiles.’

  Notebook: 13

  After Sidgy, all those years before, it has to be seen as another cute meet. (Dangerous too. Remember that I’m an accessory.)

  He was loafing in the sun in Albert Park on a seat by the Moreton Bay fig trees where he and I had read our early verses to each other when a woman eating sandwiches on the grass stood up and approached him with her lunch box and her greaseproof paper bundled in her arms.

  ‘You’re Rex Petley, aren’t you?’

  He said yes. He hated it when strangers told him that they liked his poems.

  ‘Can I sit down?’

  ‘It’s a free country.’ He was often clichéd when he was off balance.

  She put her book and lunch box between them. ‘I’m Margot Stiles.’

  He knew before she said it. He beat her by – didn’t say a heartbeat, wasn’t as clichéd as that, but it must have thumped him in that sort of way. ‘Her freckles, that was one thing.’ But a complex of things: her directness, her adult voice in which there was a child, her breadth of face, the openness of her eyes …

  People almost always say, ‘Do you remember,’ even when there’s no way to forget. Not Margot. They talked about where they’d been for twenty-five years and what they’d done; then, after a silence, she said, ‘Wasn’t there any other way to stop him?’

  ‘I couldn’t think of one,’ Rex said.

  He told me that in a way it was like coming home. In that half hour on the bench he knew that he would never let her go. Cliché again, but I believe it. He spoke as if he’d hunted long and hard and found exactly the right words.

  Her mother went to Napier and found the wrong man again. This one was a self-deceiving drunk who turned self-pitying when he couldn’t fool himself any longer. Margot grew up with his decline. She liked him in some ways and stopped her mother scalding him with words when she could. The man began to use her as safe place, which she had to stop; and did it by leaving home when she was seventeen. She trained as a physiotherapist in Christchurch; worked in hospitals everywhere. She had seen enough of marriage and wouldn’t be trapped, but she had the usual boyfriends: plenty of good times and a fright or two. When Rex met her again she had reached the end of that and had been alone for several years.

  He told me about Margot, walking up Muriwai Beach and walking back. He had never said so much before. This was a new, open Rex. I’m tempted to say he was happy but the word has too absolute a sound. He was easier, more contented, than I had known him before, but it was conditional on Margot. He seemed to feel he did not know her yet although they’d been together for two years. He seemed to be saying that Margot was unknowable. His happiness was full but never still and never safe. It trembled on its surface like liquid in a bucket that vibrates. Margot was a current, was vibration, all the time. I’m straining for a meaning I can’t find – and I wonder if I’m simply saying that the loved person can never be possessed and that Rex was finding it out. Indeed, that finding out he could not have her made him happy in some way? One can take pleasure, even delight, from knowing that the person one loves is free.

  Five miles up and five miles back was enough for that. In fact, what I’ve written down wasn’t always said. We talked about many things. I told him I had telephoned Fiona and she had picked me up at my hotel – my mother’s unit had no room for me – and driven me to Alice in Mt. Eden, where, I said, I had had an interesting time.

  ‘Dad wants a divorce,’ Fiona told me. ‘He wants to be the guilty party though. Mum got the letter last week.’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She sat down,’ an ugly grin from Fiona, ‘and readjusted.’

  I wasn’t sure what she meant.

  ‘Mum’s – I don’t know – she’s kind of huge. She cranked herself round and now she’s facing in a new direction. I think she decided he was finished. He’s kind of – dead.’

  ‘As a poet?’

  ‘All ways. A man who walks out on Mum has got to be a zombie. Anyway, when his letter came that was it. Dad was done for. She’s got it postmarked on the envelope, the time when Rex Petley ceased to be. She’ll keep him up to that time though. No one’s going to get away with the poetry he wrote married to her.’

  I knew Alice well enough not to argue with that.

  She offered me a cheek to kiss. Alice was being gentle and removed, but she could not hide her steeliness.

  ‘Have you met this woman, Jack?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘She was always there, working away in the garden, when I went out. Sometimes she didn’t wear a top. I’m not against that necessarily … but nakedness should be aesthetic, I believe. She hasn’t the …’

  ‘Her boobs are too big,’ Fiona explained.

  ‘Did you ever speak to her?’
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  ‘Rex introduced us. It seems to me there’s a kind of coarseness – coarse-mindedness. Of course, Rex could be that way himself. But there’s a whole substratum of fineness too and that’s where he needs to go if he’s to write. He doesn’t have access without me. I don’t believe he’ll write any more.’

  She did not want him to write any more. That’s understandable; and, in a way, she’s had her wish. He published only two more poems in what was left of his life, and they are ones he began while he was with her. ‘Fragments I & 2.’ Interesting. Elegiac. He said goodbye to her in style.

  ‘Will you stay here, in this house?’

  ‘No. Too many …’ Almost said memories. ‘Fortunately, I’m able …’

  ‘Dad only took enough to freehold the property,’ Fiona said.

  ‘I don’t see that our finances are any concern of Jack’s.’

  ‘Margot wasn’t after his money. It’s part of their thing to live off the land. Money in the bank is kind of cheating.’

  ‘Besides which, Rex earned very little in that job. And almost nothing from his poetry.’ Any cash around, she meant, was Pittaway cash.

  She sent Fiona to the kitchen to make tea. ‘Jack, I’m glad you came. There’s something you can advise me on but I need your promise that you won’t tell anyone, especially Rex.’

  ‘Well …’ I did not like this. ‘As long as it’s … as long as it doesn’t …’

  ‘It won’t damage him, trust me for that. I’m not vindictive. It will even serve him in the end. The fact is, I’ve got his manuscripts, I’ve got his papers. It’s mostly drafts – and poems through all their stages. And notebooks. And corrected proofs. One or two talks he gave. That sort of thing. Some little prose pieces he did for me once.’

  ‘Letters?’

  ‘Rex never wrote letters very much.’

  ‘I mean from other people. Other writers.’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘Memoirs?’

  ‘No, Rex kept his memories in his head. Or put them in poems. But what I need to know, who owns it all?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘He would have saved nothing, Jack. He used to throw stuff in the rubbish tin. I took it out and he just laughed. He said if I wanted I could have it. That constitutes ownership, doesn’t it?’