Going West

by Gee, Maurice

  ‘There’s our boarding call for Wellington. Margot, when I come up again, can I come and see you?’

  ‘If you like. But you don’t have to.’

  ‘I will. Next time I come. Oh Margot – where …?’

  ‘On the property. We scattered them here.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Alice wanted them. She came up to me and demanded them. Before he was even burned. She said she had the right.’ (The Elf did not put that in his book.)

  ‘What did you do?’ Harry pulled my arm. ‘Margot, I’m sorry, I’ve got to go. Next time I come up we’ll talk.’

  I telephoned Rita when I got home and she told me that Margot had simply turned her back. She and her daughter had climbed into their car – Rex’s old big-banger with the roof-rack where the dinghy had been roped – and had driven away. Rita said she felt like applauding. A party, wake, for Rex was held at Alice’s house but not many people went along. Perhaps John Dobbie had too much to drink and counted double.

  I took retirement at sixty although my contract allowed me to stay until sixty-five. Harry was eager to be away. She could not settle down again after Europe. All those other places had told her that Auckland was her place. Part of Wellington is part of Harry, but her buried part, her deepest clay, is Auckland clay, and I had promised we would go. I wanted it. With Rex dead there was a space up there, call it Loomis, call it what you will, waiting for me to remember and occupy.

  The Monday before we left we walked from Johnston’s hill to Mt. Kaukau. We wore our little Fjallraven packs but she carried our water and our parkas. In mine I had a French loaf folded in two, some smoked salmon, olives, Esrom, brie, and a bottle of white wine, which was warmed by my back when I took it out. That did not spoil it for us; or the need to anchor our cloth with stones on the grass. We would have felt cheated if the wind had not come along. We lunched on a hilltop, with the city on one side and the strait on the other. The South Island darkened all its mountains seductively but Harry and I were heading the other way. Our eyes followed the Horowhenua coast, which seemed to climb. We thought we glimpsed Mt. Taranaki in a cloud. Mist lowered and streamed around us and we were like stones fixed on the hill. It was emphatic. Wellington made its play for us. But we stood up and folded our cloth and went on our way. We crossed the hill below the ghostly mast. It’s been nice to know you, we said; and meant it too. Wellington had roughened our skins and damaged our eyes and slanted us; taught us up and down and hidden treasure, and ‘danger’ and ‘impossible’ and ‘stupid’ and ‘brave’. We loved and hated it and were glad to be leaving. The mist slid away towards the strait, exposing Khandallah on its shelf, with ice-blue swimming pool and shining roads and busy cars, and women playing tennis and men up ladders painting walls. Two steps into the harbour, so it seemed; toy ships, containers stacked like blocks; downtown Wellington standing tall on land that once had been the sea; and a whisper jet, lower than us, sinking towards the runway by the golf course at Miramar.

  Harry took a photo. I’ll say this for myself, I don’t need photos. We walked down, knee-jolted down, to Simla Crescent and took the unit into town, and had our last cable car ride home.

  On the Quay Harry bought a street map of Auckland.

  Notebook: 15

  It is more now than filling in, it is finding out. Remembering has run its course but Rex’s life isn’t finished yet. I don’t know which voice to use.

  I have been in Auckland for a year. My promise to visit Margot is broken. I can claim of course that I’ve waited until the time is right. I brought her Rex when she was a child, at a time when she needed him, even though it was by accident. I can’t remind her of it but I’ll tell her there is something I must know and she’ll understand I need him now.

  I’m not knitted into one garment, seamed up tight. I haven’t earned the rest and comfort of the past tense. There are things still left to do – Alice, Margot. But ‘I’ want to go. I’ll insist on it. I don’t want to stand off and call myself Jack Skeat. That has been a curious evasion.

  Alice summons me in her grandest style.

  ‘Jack, I need to see you. I’m free this afternoon if you’ll drop by.’

  I don’t resist. Going to see Alice is required if I am to keep the balance right. So I leave Harry planting seeds and step outside; which changes to a stepping in as I drive away. Down the motorway to the bridge; along past the wharves and the railway yards; through that interleaving of land and sea where the joggers run; and up into Mercedes land. Here’s regal Alice on her patio. Is she Alice Wilkey or Petley today? I must wait until she declares herself.

  I tell her that she is looking well; and it’s the truth. Good health prolongs her beauty; keeps Alice porcelain and fine. Will she come to stringiness and desiccation soon? That’s the usual end of the long-throated, thin-handed beauty she cultivates. The open weave of her sun-hat brim drops flakes of gold on her cheeks.

  ‘You’re punctual, Jack.’ She gestures at the tea on the iron table and sits down. ‘Fiona said not to make it until you arrived but I said you always came on time.’ She makes it sound common and I nearly apologize.

  ‘Is Fiona here?’

  ‘That’s her swimming.’ Up and down. I had thought it was a granddaughter under the mermaid cap.

  ‘Is she … are they …?’

  ‘Yes. Do you have any influence with her, Jack?’

  ‘No. None. I’ve no way of knowing what would be right for her.’

  ‘There’s only one right thing and that’s going back. Families mustn’t be broken up.’

  One might disagree, in a case or two. Jack doesn’t – I don’t bother. I sit where Alice directs me and take milk not lemon to show her that I don’t mind being common in the least – indeed, that I choose commonness. I watch Fiona through the wrought-iron railing. There’s something defeated in her stroke. She does not reach far enough on the water.

  ‘How are the children? Is it three they’ve got?’

  ‘Three. They’re fine. Tom’s moved a new woman in. Men don’t take long.’

  ‘Can’t she – can’t Fiona get custody?’

  ‘They’re too old to be fought over. In any case, they want Tom and Fiona back together. They’ll soon get this other woman out.’

  ‘Is that what they’re doing? Getting her out?’

  ‘Why not? They’re sensible children. They know who their real parents are.’ There is some bravado in that.

  ‘Are you frightened Fiona mightn’t want to go?’

  Alice pours tea. It gives her time. ‘Fiona has got some sorting out to do. I hoped that you … You’d better not say anything foolish to her, Jack.’

  ‘I won’t say anything at all.’

  Alice spoons the slice of lemon from her cup. She puts it in her mouth and chews, but seems to get no pleasure. She shivers like my mother sipping sherry (New Year’s Eve, her annual glass).

  ‘Fiona has some of Rex’s’ – she swallows – ‘lack of courage.’

  So, she is Petley today. It’s not her daughter she wants to talk about. I turn away from her and watch Fiona; who climbs the silver ladder from the pool, peels off her cap and shakes her hair, drags on her towelling robe with long-limbed grace. I can’t believe ‘lack of courage’. There’s nothing defeated in her now – unless the soap-opera gloss of foam-white bathing suit and tanned legs and strawberry hair, with the sparkling pool and the gulf behind, is a retreat into unreality. It goes with the dialogue Alice and I have just completed. I turn the other way and find Leon Pittaway gargoyling at me through glass. A woman – hired nurse? – moves him back, sits him in a chair, wipes his chin, then stands with her face framed in the window, staring like a prisoner at the day.

  ‘Hallo, Jack,’ Fiona says, and sits down hard on an iron chair. ‘Chlorine. What a foul taste.’ She takes a slice of lemon and clamps it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth; extracts the juice, flings the slice into the barbecue pit. She asks how Harry is and how I’m functioning.


  ‘Very well.’

  ‘I hope my plumbing never packs up.’

  ‘You seem fit enough. How many lengths?’

  ‘I don’t count. In either sense.’ How quick she is. Unhappiness makes her crackle and spit.

  ‘Sugar?’ Alice says, ignoring her.

  ‘Thank you.’ The cups are so delicate there’s nowhere for my fingers to go. I say how sensible the Russians are to drink their tea from glasses; but Alice isn’t having pointless talk. Or pessimistic. Stops Fiona with a nail-tap on her hand.

  ‘Jack, I’ve been thinking about this idea of yours.’

  ‘Idea?’

  ‘It seems to me you could well be right.’

  I understand what she is talking about; but sip my tea. The Rex I am completing has nothing to do with Alice’s Rex.

  ‘He was careless about all sorts of things, but not about the sea.’

  ‘It could have been a gamble, a sort of Russian roulette,’ Fiona says.

  ‘That’s possible too.’

  ‘Take me if you’re ready. If not I’ll turn round and go home.’

  ‘Possibly.’

  1 am reluctant to enter this. I feel as if I might be sick, which is a reaction too extreme.

  ‘It was your idea, Jack, not mine,’ Alice says. ‘It seemed odd that you should start a rumour of that sort -’

  ‘I didn’t -’

  ‘– but then I remembered how well you knew him.’

  ‘I didn’t start a rumour. I just felt …’

  She waits.

  ‘I felt that something wasn’t right.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘But I don’t want to go on with it. There’s no point.’

  ‘I disagree.’

  ‘Rex’s death is Rex’s death.’ And Margot’s. And mine. I don’t want her fitting it into the Alice story. ‘There are all sorts of things we’ll never know. His whole life with Margot, for one thing. And I’m not’ – I stop Alice with a raised finger, the first time I’ve ever accomplished it – ‘I’m not going out there asking questions. They kept themselves private and no one else was invited in.’

  Alice sits upright and still. A breeze lifts the fine hair by her ear, which is as white and delicate as my cup. She pats either side of her nose with a folded hankie. Alice can be angry or she can seduce. Fiona too watches to see which she will choose; and we’re both surprised. It is seduction by good sense.

  ‘Why did his poetry stop, Jack?’ Soft and calm. ‘I’m not the only one who wants to know. He had a habit of speaking, didn’t he, in verse? He worked hard – like a tenor improving his voice. It’s not all gift. I’m the only one who knows how hard he worked. And how important getting that perfect tone and meaning was – and how happy he was when he managed it. It was the most important thing in his whole life. Not me. I came second. Writing poems. It was his life. He couldn’t just suddenly stop.’ She makes us wait. Alice is brilliant. Timing superb. ‘Unless …’

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘Unless something died in him. Something withered up.’

  ‘How do you know he didn’t keep on writing?’ – but I’m unconvincing, even to myself. ‘There might be whole piles of …’ I’ll trap myself into being sent to investigate.

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘You tried yourself, didn’t you Jack? To be a poet. And I tried. So we both know – publication is part of it. It’s part of the process. There’s writing and there’s reading.’ She touches her hand and eye. ‘And one can’t exist without the other. You don’t know how eager Rex was for his poems in print. He felt they didn’t have a real existence until then. It was just shouting in the wind.’ She hears the effectiveness of that and lets it work. Then she lays her hand on my arm. ‘There’s no lost poetry, Jack. There’s nothing to go and see Margot Stiles for. What we’ve got to work out is what she did to him, why the poet died.’

  ‘Alice – ’

  ‘There’s no mystery about why Rex killed himself.’

  ‘You can’t’ – and she waits now – ‘you can’t say Margot Stiles. She was his wife as much as you.’

  ‘No.’ Gives a patient smile. ‘1 told you once that he never married. Remember? I meant he was married to poetry. So anyone, even me, turned into an enemy at times. But your Margot must have been his enemy all the time. Jack, you mightn’t believe me, but I was something more. I didn’t only have my domestic face. I turned about and I became a source of poetry.’

  Fiona – we’ve forgotten her – makes a little splutter. Appallingly rude. Alice tells her to get dressed or she’ll catch cold.

  ‘She’s not,’ I say, ‘my Margot. I hardly know her. And Rex knew her much longer than you realize. For most of his life.’

  She thinks I’m telling her that Margot was the woman from his adolescent dream, taking flesh. An ugly red spoils her cheeks. Her tea-cup rattles in the saucer. I can’t break Alice up like this. So I tell her about young Margot Stiles and Wells and ‘Porridge’; but leaving Sidgy out cripples the story. I’ve got a plain fat girl in a cruddy bed-sit, whingeing and bumptious by turns, and a bored Rex amusing himself. It’s wrong and only murder can make it right. I try sentiment instead: Margot the sad child, unloved by her mother, and Rex Petley being kind to her. Alice, very still, turns that over; accepts. She is not pleased, but can stand outside and not be hurt. She’ll modify Rex and leave his essential parts untouched.

  ‘Does anyone else know about this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t tell anyone. It’s exactly the sort of new thing John needs for our book.’

  ‘Margot mightn’t want -’

  ‘John can see her. It explains …’ Alice calculates. She can’t decide what it explains but will find something in the end. Margot then will be made to fit with Margot later; and suicide will round things off. ‘Did he meet her again, after that?’

  ‘Not that I know of.’

  ‘No. You were in Wellington. It’s up here that counts. Jack’ – business now – ‘there’s something you can do for me.’

  ‘I’m not going out to Margot’s. I’m not fishing round for anyone.’

  This is lèse-majesté. Alice closes her eyes to show how patient she can be. ‘I’m not suggesting it. It’s not your place, it’s for John Dobbie. He’ll have to make her understand … What I’d like you to do’ – a tiny rattle on her saucer again – ’is go and see John and let me know how he’s getting on.’

  ‘Why, is he sick?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But I’m having trouble –’

  ‘He’s got some woman out there,’ Fiona says, ‘and every time Mum rings up she says he’s not at home.’

  ‘It might be his wife. What happened to his wife?’

  ‘I tried once.’ Fiona. ‘She just said “Out” and slammed down the phone. She sounds like a female wrestler.’

  ‘I’ve no idea what happened to his wife,’ Alice says. ‘After a while she simply wasn’t there. I always assumed they’d separated. Wives’ – a flash of bitterness – ‘get put out of the picture.’

  ‘She could be a housekeeper,’ I say.

  ‘Possibly. But I’ve got to keep in contact, Jack. At this stage it’s important. He was coming over here to work on some papers.’

  I agree to go and have a look. I’ll do this for Alice; and not come back. I’m tired of being used. I’ll wind her tame biographer up and get him jerking along; then I’ll do something for myself. I’ll carry on with my Rex and leave them with theirs. I’ll warn Margot what she might be in for.

  ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘In Mt. Albert. Fiona, can you get the address? She was, anyway, unsuitable for John. She was just a big girl off a farm.’

  I don’t want to go to Mt. Albert. For a moment Alice, speckled with yellow sun, and Georgy Feist in his golden hairpiece, become one. They do not allow me to be myself. Then I shrug them off. I really have quite a hard, well-shaped self these days. It’s not in danger. I don’t have to drive around the edg
es of Mt. Albert.

  Fiona comes back. She has changed into a skirt and sandals and brushed her hair.

  ‘I’m coming with you. I need to get out.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’ I’m pleased to have the company of this woman I might have loved. Perhaps, I think, I can cheer her up. I am willing to help Alice too. I see how tired she is; and how much will goes into the making of an Alice for the world to see. She should rest but she can’t for years. She has a senile father and an unhappy daughter, and shouldn’t have the extra job of getting an ex-husband into shape.

  I lift her hand and pat it, surprising us both. Fiona gives a twisted smile at what she takes to be another victory for her mother. We drive away in my car, heading for a street on the other side of Mt. Albert from Verona Avenue, not that it matters. As we zip high and easy over Broadway I make Fiona laugh with Newmarket tunnel.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘Less than a minute.’

  ‘If you’re young and keen enough,’ she says.

  I ask her – she smells of chlorine still – if she’ll ever go back to her husband.

  ‘I want to but I can’t. I want to for the kids. But I saw Tom and we had a talk. It’s just – I don’t like him any more. It’s very simple.’

  ‘Have you tried – you know?’ It would be indecent to say.

  ‘Marriage guidance? That’s the other thing that’s gone down the tubes. How could I have been so simple, Jack?’

  I remember that I’m cheering her up and I tell her about Rex arriving, hypothermic in the southerly, and spoiling my night of love with Brenda Littlejohn.

  ‘That’s sad,’ she cries. ‘That makes me want to cry. We need …’

  Does she mean every night of love that we can get? She is open to desperation.

  ‘I wasn’t upset. I was always pleased to see Rex.’ I mean that I loved him too, and giving him my bed was an act of love – but she doesn’t hear it.

  ‘Where did that girl go? Did you …?’

  ‘It never happened again. God these hills, look at them will you. We’ve got the cheek to say Mt. Eden and Mt. Albert. They’re like pudding basins upside down.’