Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  He walks along the footpath reading the numbers and works out which house it must have been: bungalow, with a bow window, and a roof of decramastic tile out of keeping with the weather-boards. Georgy would not like it, possibly not even recognize it, if she were alive and came this way. Why does he think she had good taste? Is it the literary tone of her letter? She would know the Phoenix palm on the lawn. It must have been planted when the house was new.

  He reads the number. Sees the name. Too many shocks. ‘G. Feist’. He remembers the rexine-covered cheap editions rubberbanded in his father’s bag. Georgy then is G. Feist; and G. Feist is alive, in the house where she and his father made love. It is more than Jack can understand. He walks on, stops; walks on again. Another woman looks at him. ‘What’s up? Lost?’ she says.

  ‘I was looking for … Is there a Miss, or Mrs Feist?’

  ‘Yes. Georgina. Miss, it is. You’ve passed her place. The house with the palm tree. Name on the box.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Now he must turn back. Must go in. He does not want to. He feels that Georgy, whatever she is like – Edwardian, Georgian, decramastic – will press him as flat as paper and crumple him up.

  The woman is watching, bossy, bright, and he must go. He wants, of course, to look at Georgy, even if she strikes him throat and groin, even if she sucks the blood from him. (Jack makes up these feelings as he writes, although he’s not sure he didn’t feel them for too short a time to call back.) He walks up the path and knocks at the door. Does not press the worn bell his father must have pressed. A card thumb-tacked below it says ‘Bell out of order. Please knock’.

  Georgina Feist says, ‘Good afternoon.’ She is not liliaceous. She’s a forgotten apple in a bowl, with its skin wrinkled and its flesh spongy and dry. But no, she is not grotesque, she is simply old; she’s natural and full of years and knows how to smile. He is no longer afraid.

  ‘Miss Feist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My name is Jack – John, Skeat. I’m the son of Walter.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I wondered if I could come in and talk about him.’

  ‘Well …’

  He is used to strongmindedness in old ladies. ‘Walter Skeat. You knew him in 1947.’ He does not want to bully; he wants to get inside and hear her say what sort of man his father was. He wants to know if there was a child.

  ‘Yes, I did. I remember’ – Miss Feist swallows but seems more puzzled than afraid – ‘Walter Skeat. He was an accountant. He did my father’s books. But there’s nothing -’

  ‘Just a little while. I won’t take much of your time.’

  She allows him into the hall; opens a door, revealing a sitting-room, and a chair in which he may sit down. She does not smile but frowns at him, with concentration it seems.

  ‘He died, didn’t he, Walter Skeat, on a train?’

  ‘He fell getting off a train. In 1947.’

  ‘I’m afraid I didn’t know him very well. He seemed a very nice man. Very helpful.’

  ‘Miss Feist – ’

  ‘I think I might have met your mother too. On a tram. She had a small boy. That must have been you! Is she …?’

  ‘She’s still alive. She’s in an old people’s hospital.’ He understands her need to turn him aside. She has put it all away – has locked it up and starved it, probably to death. After more than forty years she has no wish to bring it back to life. He admires her smooth evasiveness.

  ‘My mother found out in the end. If she’d already met you she would have known Georgy was Georgina.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I’m not sure …’ She’s more alarmed than puzzled. Jack begins to feel alarm himself. He and Miss Feist are on different lines.

  ‘He called you – my father called you Georgy.’

  ‘Oh no.’ She is cross. ‘I never called myself that. Or let anyone … But I see …’ She smiles; smiles nicely; makes a sweet old lady of herself. ‘I never knew they’d met. Come along with me, Mr Skeat.’

  She takes him into the hall and opens another door. A man is watching cricket on the television, with a transistor radio held to his ear. He turns unseeing eyes on them.

  ‘Georgy, turn that off and say hallo to Mr Skeat.’

  Georgy Feist is not much older than Jack. Georgy has not locked it up, he remembers it all. He is loquacious and precise, he’s a happy man.

  Miss Feist brings them lemonade and cake. She knows her brother, it would seem, and is amused and incurious. She gives him a yellow hairpiece, hooked on her finger, and nods to show it’s straight as he puts it on. She pats Jack on the arm and goes away to the back of the house.

  The screen flickers green and white and takes Georgy’s eye frequently. He watches for boundaries and dismissals while he tells Jack who his father was. Politely, he has switched the radio off. ‘I watch on there and listen here. It’s a better commentary on the radio. Are you interested in cricket?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Walt used to be. It was more than just the lads in their whites. We went to Eden Park and saw Bert Sutcliffe hit a hundred. And he was always going on about Doctor Grace. In fact so much we started calling him that.’

  ‘Who is we?’

  ‘Oh, everyone at Herne Bay. There was a man, his house was a place where we could meet. It wasn’t easy then, you know, in fact it was dangerous. You could go to prison for a very long time. Anyway, he kept us off the streets, all us boys, and older men like Walt used to go. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bordello. But there was something just a little bit – sordid, shall we say? It got like that.’ Georgy laughs and lets his memory slip somewhere else.

  ‘The first time I went there I saw Walt, and all I wanted to do was run away. He’d been at our house a couple of times, looking after Dad’s stuff – Dad had a biscuit factory, it’s been bought out now, but Gina and I have got enough. Well, just enough. Anyway – oh he’s gone, a yorker, middle stump. Walt didn’t like that one, he called it the Geordie ball. Am I upsetting you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where was I? Yes, we met. At Herne Bay. I was terrified. I thought my father had found out and sent him to get me, but he just said, “Well met, Georgy.” He was expecting me, in a way. You can’t keep it secret, not from an older man. Are you sure you want to know about all this?’

  Jack isn’t sure. But he can’t not listen and can’t not know.

  ‘We only came back here one time. And that night he was dead. You’re not inclined to see a judgement in that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘My father would have. Divine wrath. This fellow will stonewall all day. And your mother, of course. I’ve always been curious about her. She must have known – I don’t mean me – but she must have known.’

  ‘She thought Georgy meant Georgina.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Georgy looks at him with speculation, but doesn’t say what is in his mind.

  ‘He ruined her life. He – devastated it. But she always thought you were a woman.’

  Georgy looks away. ‘Ho,’ he says.

  ‘I didn’t come to talk about her. What was he like?’

  ‘He was – it doesn’t bother me if you disapprove.’

  Jack shakes his head. Disapproval is way out of it – in another country somewhere.

  ‘Well,’ Georgy says, ‘he was – gay.’ Laughs. ‘In the old sense. A happy man, man who was alive. He had a wonderful sense of fun. He made me laugh. He was – well, he was Doctor Grace. There was a kind of light on him. I don’t mean that in a blasphemous way. He had a moral light in his countenance.’ Georgy avoids saying ‘face’. And Jack sees that his father has become a fiction. He decides not to criticize; or hear any more of it; and puts away that ‘moral light’ to look at later on. He wants the facts.

  ‘Was he both ways? Was he bisexual?’

  ‘Well, he must have been. Early on. But he made his choice. It isn’t really a choice though. There’s an imperative.’ Georgy smiles.

  ‘What did you do, together, here?
Did you go all the way?’ Jack knows some crude words and will use them if he must. Not to nail his father. He’s not ready for his father yet. But he wants to fend Georgy off.

  ‘I don’t know that I’m prepared to talk about that.’

  ‘At the house in Herne Bay, what was he like?’

  ‘You mean, did he go with anyone? No, he didn’t. Walt mainly went to relax. To be where he didn’t have to pretend.’

  ‘So you were the first?’

  ‘I was the only one from there.’ Georgy is fierce. And seeing this rag of passion, Jack smiles. He feels at ease, and out of Georgy’s range; although not out of Walter Skeat’s.

  ‘Going home from here he fell over and killed himself.’

  ‘There, I knew you’d blame me.’

  ‘There’s no blame. He had some books of yours. I’m sorry I can’t return them, I think they’re lost.’

  ‘I don’t recall …’

  ‘Sapper and John Buchan.’

  ‘Ah. I’d grown out of those. He took them for you. Extraordinary memory.’ He taps his brow. ‘Forty years.’

  ‘I’d grown out of them too. Does a man’ – it is more than curiosity now – ‘doing what he did, still think of his family?’

  ‘What a dreadful question.’

  It is. Jack sees it. He has gone too far. But Georgy, somehow, is pleased.

  ‘Walt reminded me of Richard Hannay. Very British.’

  ‘Did your sister know about you?’

  ‘Me, yes. Walt, no. She made up her mind to be outside.’ He wags his finger high. ‘Not above. Gina was before her time. I was a bit – sickly, so I didn’t have a job. That’s why – Friday afternoons. Gina worked. She never found out about Walt until now, with you poking in. And she’s still outside. Good old girl. How did you discover it?’

  ‘You wrote a letter. Someone at his office must have given it to my mother.’

  ‘And she thought I was a girl, you say? I wonder.’ He slips his finger under his hairpiece and scratches his scalp.

  ‘What’s your real name? George?’

  ‘Good heavens no, not with Georgina. I’m a Gerald. I’d be Gerry. But I was a plump little boy before I got sick. Roly-poly. So – Georgy, from Georgy Porgy pudding and pie, and it stuck. Even when I grew up and got – willowy. I’m six foot two.’ He stands up from his chair. ‘I towered over Walt.’

  Like a lily, Jack thinks.

  ‘It’s handy for theatricals. I did a bit of that.’ He juts his crooked arms and hooks his head. ‘Vulture bird.’ He shrinks and creeps. ‘Poisoner. I could do the male lead too. Nice and straight and manly. Gerald Feist.’

  ‘Georgy Porgy pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.’

  Georgy laughs. ‘I beat you to that one years ago. I didn’t run away though, when the boys came out.’ Behind him the stonewalling batsman is caught in the slips but Jack does not mention it. Gives himself a little more command. He’s on a plateau of satisfaction. His father makes sense. His mother makes sense – although if what Georgy has hinted at is true: that she had known who her husband was … But he’ll tip backwards if he thinks of that. Jack stands up and is almost a head shorter than Georgy. Lilies wither though and turn brown; they shake hands like men of sixty-five.

  ‘I hope all this hasn’t turned you too much upside down.’

  ‘No. It hasn’t.’

  ‘Your father was a good man. He was a lovely man.’

  Jack will decide that for himself. He points Georgy back at the cricket. ‘There was someone caught a moment ago.’ Lets himself into the hall, doesn’t disturb Georgina. But Georgy opens a window and puts his yellow head into the sun.

  ‘Walt said we should call ourselves Valentine and Proteus.’

  Jack is blank.

  ‘The two gentlemen of Verona.’

  ‘Ah. Yes.’

  Until now he would not have been sure that his father even knew who Hamlet and Horatio were, or Lear and the fool.

  He takes a bus to Symonds Street and walks to the station. He would like to tell Harry, and hear what she has to say, but knows he won’t because he will complain. His father never took him to see Bert Sutcliffe make a hundred. (Buchan and Sapper don’t make up for that.) But especially for lying all his life, with pipe and precepts and manliness. Worse than complain, Jack will hate. Even though – he stops on the footpath – Walter Skeat might have been steering his son into paths different from his own. There might have been love in his behaviour. (Surely he could see I’m not like that, Jack complains.)

  There had been no love for his wife. No mercy.

  Already Walter Skeat is an interesting man.

  Moral light? No. But a light of some sort Jack is willing to concede. The light of being natural at last? ‘Never do more than take your share, Johnnyboy, but decide as quick as you can what it is and then insist on having it.’ When he took his own share it turned out to be a Feist. (There’s a pun Walter Skeat might have allowed.)

  Jack gets into his car. Surely he should feel more than this. Perhaps he is in shock. The whole thing is, after all, rather like a car crash. He’s trapped in the wreckage and twisted out of shape, but soon they’ll lift him out and he’ll start to scream.

  No, he decides, no melodrama. He is confident he can handle it. Most of all he has a new father to get to know. And already Walter Skeat makes good sense. Doctor Grace. As for his mother – that’s not easy. Jack should complain, he should do some hating, for her devastation, for her ruined life.

  Georgy is right. She must have known. She was a clever woman, very sharp, and all those years with him, those years of Herne Bay, and of other places probably … Why hadn’t she simply gone away? Taken herself and her son away?

  But now, at last, she escapes. Georgy can be Georgina now. Her mind is working for her (what is left of it) and giving her a place to go.

  She would have forgiven Walter Skeat if it had been women he liked.

  So Jack speculates as he drives home; up and over the harbour bridge, along to Castor Bay. He will never love his parents, it isn’t possible, but maybe he will come to understand them.

  Harry runs out to the garage. ‘The police rang up. They’ve found Jo. She crashed her car.’

  ‘Where? Is she all right?’

  ‘She’s dead. She’s been dead for more than a week.’

  Her car ran off the road on the way to Whatipu. It lay crushed in a creek, out of sight, with Jo inside, equally crushed. Oil leaked into the water and when someone traced it back, there was the Deux Chevaux lying on its roof, with Jo’s arm reaching out as though to pluck a fern frond from the bank.

  She loved the road to Whatipu. Harry had sometimes gone out there with her. She followed Jo down gullies and up and down creeks – up that same creek where Jo had died – and had come home with new knowledge (botanical) and a happy glow on her face.

  ‘Jo was a careful driver.’

  ‘Yes, she was.’

  ‘She wouldn’t have run off the road if she hadn’t been unhappy.’

  Harry is close to blaming herself but good sense stops her. She knows it was impossible for her to make Jo happy. Jack could have, should have, given Beth Simmonds one happy night but there’s nothing Harry could have done for Jo.

  Was there nothing Walter Skeat could have done for his wife?

  Notebook: 14

  I can know only small parts of Auckland. What can I know of Otara and the populations there? The conurbation out west, where Loomis, Massey, Swanson, Te Atatu used to be – I drive through and watch strangers from my car window. It is partly a matter of race and class. (All of us are New Zealanders, it’s said, but anyone can see that we are two nations; three.) And it is partly fear; I’m still afraid. I fear my white face, my incomprehension; and, less justifiably, the burglar and the gag. Modesty of temperament also plays a part. I’m not a gatherer of all things.

  I’ll move about in my middle class suburbs. I’ll stroll on Takapuna beach. And I’ll visit Loomis in my head. It is o
ld Loomis, under this same sky, that makes me feel I have come home after the long adventure of Wellington.

  When David and Jillian left home we sold the house in Central Terrace and moved to a smaller place in Boundary Road. It’s hard to shift from a house you’ve made with your own hands – where Harry has drawn pictures on the walls and you have lain on the roof, holding on with one hand and painting with the other; and leave rooms you’ve kept secrets in and spoken lies. You try a new start – tell, admit – but you can’t change the story of a house. Deception, secrecy, are for ever a part of you.

  I told her, in Boundary Road, that I knew about her and Rex. We were sitting in the garden enjoying the view – we’d not lost the view.

  Harry said, ‘I know you know.’

  I had been angry, I’d been suicidal, at my failure to be devastated. I took it as proof of my inability to love. At times I had wanted to destroy (not kill, I never wanted to kill) Harry as the object of my failure. But the impulse went away, as these things do in people whose temperature is low. It went away fairly soon. My climate won’t produce a lasting storm but makes long spells of grey cold weather. Those too come to an end. But Harry discovers what they mean. My secrets are not secret from her, even though she never lets them out. And when I do we don’t talk about them for long, we just let them go away.

  We readjust with a few words of confession, a smile or two. It’s a way that seems to work for us.

  Perhaps it would not have worked if I had not known they meant no harm – that they helped each other, and helped me (although that can’t have been their intention).

  ‘Have you ever been close to going away for good?’

  ‘Once or twice. Rex stopped me from that.’

  ‘Deliberately? The pair of you talked about it?’

  ‘No, Jack. But we talked. He loves you, in some peculiar way. You’re next after – whatever matters most. And after his new wife now, I suppose.’

  ‘He knew you were going to stay?’

  ‘He knew.’

  That is almost all we said. She did not apologize. I gave her only one short-arm jab. ‘Did you want our adulteries to be simultaneous?’ Harry grinned. ‘I was thinking more of Beth than you and me.’ Seeing I had pleased her, I shut up.