by Gee, Maurice
One thing is sure, Alice and John will never make suicide stick.
It wasn’t suicide anyway. Rex wanted to come back. He meant to come. Going out there was a thing he could not avoid. He could not, finally, keep Tod locked outside. As proprietor of his ‘world’ he took responsibility. So out he went, like his mother’s Plasticine knight, to face – what? What did he find there? I don’t know, although I could guess. But he was swimming westwards in the end; swimming back to Margot, and possibly to Loomis as well. The whole thing has the arrogance of his best poems, which never fail.
Tod does not invalidate the poems.
I’m going to make copies for John Dobbie. He’ll have a problem. He’s going to have to decide between Alice and the truth. I’ll give him whatever help I can. But no Tod (and no Sidgy). Those parts of the truth he cannot have. I’ll leave them in my notebooks, which will have an embargo of – fifty years? Someone else can finish Rex’s life, if there’s any interest in him left.
I brought the poems home and read them half the night. ‘Have a look at these when you’ve got time,’ I said to Harry. She is part of me and I of her; and Rex of us both. She liked some of them quite well. She liked them better than the hospital poems. Her favourite is the one that starts: ‘Jack wants to talk about the Fun Doctor. I say no.’ Later on he does talk about him – a line or two. I wish he had made it clear that ‘crinkled Auden face’ is my phrase, not his.
I’ve asked Harry to read my notebooks too, when I get them from Margot. (I took them out next day. Tod was still at work in the vines. The Ridgebacks kept watch in the yard.) I’ll give Harry the Warwick ones as well, interleaving them, so to speak, with the Olympic. I hope I’m not making a mistake. But I feel there’s a cure in what I’ve written and I want Harry to know about my health. Now and then fold into each other like the fingers of two hands.
I don’t sneeze so much any more. I don’t get a rash on my chest and my short-term memory is holding on. Perhaps I won’t need to go to Duppa this decade. Last night, watching a foolish thing on television, I saw a man gagged and locked in a cupboard and I didn’t have to get up and leave the room.
Harry is contented. She is doing a set of botanical posters for schools. Harry needs to work. When the weather is fine we walk on Takapuna Beach. If it rains – it rains a lot in Auckland but the wind doesn’t blow like Wellington’s – we run for our car, holding hands. We bring home Chinese take-aways and eat watching the news (which isn’t good). I’m beginning to see how Rex’s poems should be arranged.
Morning tea time. I’ll take a cup to Harry, with a scone, and she’ll tap her finger on the desk to show me where to put it. I’m out of my hole under the stairs and do my own work at a desk in the sitting-room. I watch liners and container ships going in and out. Past Rangitoto is the Coromandel. The little yachts stand upright on the sea.
I’ve let my eye look inside and back. It’s good to be able now to turn another way.
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First published by Faber and Faber, 1992
This edition published by Penguin Group (NZ), 2010
Copyright © Maurice Gee, 1992
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ISBN: 978-1-74-228794-2