Someone's Wife

  One of Bernard’s great-aunts invites us to lunch. Bernard has told her about Toby, so there are no awkward questions.

  There will be so much kindness: no one can make it better, but people are desperate to try. Months earlier I taught the worst, the wildest 4th Form at Palmerston North Girls’ High. Now they send a card and they have carefully copied ‘with deepest sympathy’ from the front of it and every one of them has signed it. Our friends from home, so many with babies of their own, write letters burdened with guilt for their good fortune.

  But there will also be awkwardness. A friend of Robert’s mother sends her sympathy, but she has an aerogramme to fill and being averse to waste she spends two pages chatting on about bowls and their new carpet. The friend of a friend visits us in Lyon three months later and she’s into New Age and she says that sometimes babies just know they’ve been born into the wrong family, and they choose to die. A university friend comes to visit six weeks later, and as we walk through the streets of Lyon and I talk and talk about Toby, he says, quite kindly, ‘You’re obsessed.’ Years later, with children of his own, he’s full of remorse. And about the same time, as we wander aimlessly through spring into summer, we go to spend time with a couple from New Zealand, and he is playing rugby in the south of France and they take us out for the evening, and all night his Basque team-mates sing and dance and I feel that most amazing thing: happiness. And I say so in the car on the way home. I say, I feel happy. And I say, wonderingly, I feel guilty being happy. And he says, Jesus CHRIST woman, if you’re going to feel like THAT …

  I don’t want this. I don’t want sadness. I don’t want pity. I want normal. Please, normal. All the time, we look after each other. We respectfully balance the grief: my turn. Your turn. It is because of this, I think, that 45 years later we are still together.

  Bernard takes us to Biarritz with its wild sea shore and glamorous reputation and we meet his stylish great-aunt, the one who was married to a Parisian jeweller. Simultaneously gracious and distant, she is so careful with us and she takes us to a seafood restaurant with white table cloths and dark-red drapes and wine in a bucket and a spectacular view of the sea, and I have fish soup and it is unimaginably flavoursome.

  Cuddle me. Don’t touch me. Talk to me. Shush.

  It is Bernard’s mother, an old-fashioned home cook, round and practical, who somehow just knows what to do. Every day that week we have soup, and we have meat tender in its sauces. We have fowl and rabbit and lamb and beef. We have pasta and rice and potatoes. We have simple green salads. We have taste, we have texture, we have flavour. We have cheese. We have fruit, we have pudding. We sit at the top end of the table on either side of Bernard’s father and he pours us red wine and the grandmother comes soundlessly up and takes away our plates. Slowly, slowly, slowly, something inside me is a little less broken. Bernard’s mother feeds me. Feeds me. Feeds me.

  11.

  ST PETER’S

  COLLEGE

  In which I go back to work

  I contact Palmerston North’s five high schools. I say in my tidily typed letter that I would like a part-time job teaching English. Any level, but Senior preferred. I enclose my CV. The letter can only just have arrived on their desk when I get a phone call from the school I added almost as an afterthought: St Peter’s College, the Catholic high school in Milson, that newish suburb which is still waiting for its trees to grow.

  Today, they say, we’ve just realised we need to create an extra 6th Form. Could I come in for a chat?

  Sister de Porres is deputy principal and head of English. She has a steady, steely glance which I know would make any wayward 14-year-old sit up and shut up. She says they had only just realised they needed one extra class at 6th Form level and when my letter came, just at the right moment, they felt God had sent me.

  She might have simply been wanting to check my reaction. It feels like an inappropriate moment to start a discussion on faith. Anyway, I’m flattered: fancy God intervening in something so trivial. Choosing me! I shift from atheist to agnostic in one smooth movement.

  One class. Forty dollars a week. Which exactly pays our second mortgage. I have a job. I’m going to be allowed to talk about real things like literature. For the last four years I’ve been talking in foreign languages: for the first two French, and for the last two Infantilism. We’re philosophically opposed to birdies and ta, but that doesn’t stop us pleading for a mouth to open so an airplane can come in. The wheels on the bus never stop going round and round and the tiger has eaten it all and nonsense little boy and Mr Brown can moo so how bout chew? Need pottie?

  Discuss Shakespeare’s use of equivocation in King Lear. Discuss the importance of chance in Romeo and Juliet.

  What is the significance of setting in Wuthering Heights?

  Discuss the recurring motifs in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’.

  There’s only 14 of them. I do a sweep of the room for potential babysitters. Near the front is a pretty, friendly, competent-looking girl, black hair, fair skin, with one of those open Irish faces. I get each of them to introduce themselves, and I quickly realise that they’re all repeating 6th Form English. This doesn’t worry me, in fact it’s good. I’ve been around long enough to know that some of the best people, some of the best brains, especially the original mind, can fail exams. I tell them, this is wonderful: for the first time ever, I’ve got a whole class that will pass. Some of them look convinced.

  The competent-looking girl says she’s intending to study nursing. Double tick. Maryanne becomes one of our favourite babysitters ever.

  We spend the rest of the period discussing what they feel they need to learn.

  A boy is hovering, the last to leave. He says, ‘Was what we did today in the syllabus?’

  I have my arms defensively crossed. I’ve weaned Gemma to go back teaching: she’s a small child, and not particularly hirsute, and has got away with being breastfed for nearly two years. In my defence, it was the seventies, it was fashionable then. And it’s easy: life’s hard enough without having to sterilise bottles or find food. Round about the day I get the job, she points from one source of her comfort food to the other and says, ‘This one milk. This one coffee.’ It’s just her way of reminding me that this is ridiculous. But now, as I’m being challenged by the one person in the class who’s suffering from extreme anxiety, my milk is defiantly letting down.

  Sister Cecily, head of Junior English, is an interesting woman, simultaneously guileless and smart. I love her sense of humour. She never minds when I plead with her to be breathless with adoration. ‘Go on,’ I say, ‘you can do it! You don’t have to be on Westminster Bridge!’ She’s sharp and funny. Once, after a year or two, when I come grumbling out of an annoying 4th Form English class because they simply won’t listen, she mentions how useful it is being a nun. She says she walks past some particularly recalcitrant 4th Former in the corridor and as they draw level she murmurs, ‘You little shit.’

  He goes home. He says to his parents, ‘Sister Cecily called me a Little Shit.’

  And they say, ‘Sister Cecily? Sister Cecily would never have said that.’

  In class, one of the more annoying boys is eating something hidden away under his desk lid. Then he’s up the front, gesturing vaguely towards his throat, his eyes fixed pleadingly on me. ‘Can’t you breathe?’ I ask, and he’s shaking his head, and in an inexpert fashion I get behind him and give an approximation of the Heimlich manoeuvre. He gives a loud burp and brings up a sodden piece of something revolting.

  I’m impressed with myself and at interval go modestly into the staffroom and tell Sister Cecily that I’ve just saved this boy’s life.

  ‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘Why?’

  I’m in the library with my 6th Form. It’s 10.45 in the morning and at 11 our time two New Zealanders will be executed in Malaysia for dealing in drugs. The case has had substantial media attention. We’ve got to know them, two men who are somebody’s sons. We’ve watched them hope that the de
ath penalty will be reduced to decades spent in a foreign prison. We’ve seen them downcast when all hope is lost.

  I can’t bear knowing that now, while I’m in the comfortable library, on a pleasant day, with a class of cheerful 16-year-olds, halfway across the world two men right at this moment—the same moment, the very same moment, which is somehow impossible to comprehend—are being taken towards their death. A firing squad. I am afraid. I am afraid of the death penalty, the fact that, once done, there is no going back.

  I’m standing by the shelves where the books are for seniors, and I’m talking to a group who are choosing books and chattering among themselves, and to me, and I can’t stop myself. There’s a clock on the library wall and the hands simply will not stop moving, and I say to the group that all I can think about right now is that two men who at this moment are alive will, in just minutes, not be.

  Our roles are reversed, crazily so. They say, ‘They’re drug dealers. They’re the worst! They knew what they were getting into,’ they say. ‘They took a stupid risk,’ says one of them piously. ‘You shouldn’t feel sorry for them,’ they say. ‘They’re getting what they deserve.’

  Then it’s nearly 11 o’clock, and the students, all somebody’s kids, are lining up to get their books stamped because it’s morning tea soon, and they’re talking about what’s on later in the day and who’s just started going out with who and whether they’ll get away with not having done their biology homework.

  And the bell goes. And they say, ‘Seeya, Mrs Burgess. Seeya later!’

  I’m late for school. I have a good excuse.

  We rush in the mornings, especially if my class is first or second period. It’s not the calmest of households. There’s two kids to get up, dressed and fed, and Robert abandons me early, biking off to DSIR where they still—ludicrously—start at 8 a.m.

  Benedict wants to wear the jeans that he’s left on the floor of the bathroom the night before, and they feel cold and slightly clammy. The dryer is in the bathroom at floor level and the door’s open and there are a couple of things still in there but who cares, I chuck them in, slam the door shut and turn it on, just to take that moistness out of them. Clunk clunk, goes the dryer, the noise it makes when dealing with denim and zips.

  ‘Where are my jeans!’ yells Benedict, and I pull open the dryer and grab the nicely warmed jeans—they’ve had a good 10 minutes—and out of the dryer falls Minnie.

  Minnie is Gemma’s cat. She’s still young, just a year or two old, a sweet-natured tabby who’s useful for Gemma to bury her face in when Benedict’s driving her mad.

  ‘Oh shit,’ I say, ‘oh Minnie!’ Because Minnie’s staggering sideways and falling over and looking as if—well, as if she’s just had a full 10 minutes tumbling in a dryer.

  Gemma’s screaming ‘Minnie! You’ve killed her!’ And I’m saying, though not believing it, ‘No no, she’s fine, just get her some water.’ Benedict, pulling on his warm jeans, is quietly wondering if this is going to be blamed on him, too.

  Minnie’s having a lie-down now, on her side, legs out straight, and Gemma has a saucer of water and tenderly lifts Minnie’s head and tries to turn it round so that she can lap. She does her best. Lap. Lap. That’s all she can manage but at least it’s something.

  Gemma’s still crying. ‘We have to take her to the vet!’

  The vet that we use—well, we hardly use a vet, we’re not the types to be racing her off at the sight of the first slimy furball. But we’ve got friends who teach veterinary science at Massey, and there’s a clinic there, a good 15 minutes’ drive away. So Gemma sits in the back, tenderly cradling her cat, and we go to Massey.

  I say, ‘Sorry, but our cat’s been in the dryer.’

  The two vets who check her out can’t stop laughing, which seems to me to be inappropriate for people who have chosen a career caring for animals. But they touch her gently and move her legs around and look at her eyes and ears and mouth or whatever it is vets do when they’re checking out a traumatised freshly baked cat.

  They say she looks fine to them. I can reassure you that they did not misdiagnose; that she will spend another 15 or so years with Gemma’s face buried in her fur. She makes a full recovery: if anything, she has an even more gentle nature, slightly simple, but very decent as far as tabbies go.

  I drop Gemma at school, put Minnie in the bathroom (surely it’s best if she goes back as soon as possible to the room where she’s suffered), make sure she has water, then drive to St Peter’s. I’m 10 minutes late, but it’s the 7th Form after all, and they’re hardly likely to be having a food fight by now. The most unctuous one has just gone off to find the deputy principal to report my non-arrival but the rest of the class take their feet off their desks, and sit up straightish, and I say I’m sorry I’m late but we’ve had a bit of a family crisis.

  They’re at a church school and they’ve been taught about compassion, so their faces assume a kindly, caring look.

  I say, ‘I had to take the cat to the vet. She’s been tumbled in the dryer.’

  And David, who’s in the school debating team, third speaker, a quick wit, says, over the laughter, ‘And tomorrow, if she’s really good, she can have a turn in the food processor.’

  There’s Sister Mercy, known in the privacy of my own home as Sister Merciless. She’s a retired nun and she’s spending her retirement helping out at St Peter’s. She goes to the cooking room every day round 10 and I try to make sure I’m at school for morning tea because at 10.30 she emerges with perfect hot scones on plates with tea towels over them. She also assists the wonderful Cath in the office. Sometimes students suffering from scarlet fever and late-onset infantile paralysis hobble towards the office to ask to make a phone call home. Realising that it’s Sister Mercy and not Cath who they have to explain their situation to, they are known to experience one of Jesus’ useful miracles and are healed on the spot. I feel equally trepidatious when I approach her when she’s on photocopying duty and cravenly plead for 20 copies of the class’s assignment.

  She wears what may well be lisle stockings, and shoes which are an interesting blend of shoes and sandals, in that they’re sturdy lace-ups with the fronts cut off to allow toes room to move. I suspect these are made to a design approved by the Vatican to encourage celibacy. I do have the opportunity to see her soften, though. I take the children with me sometimes, out of desperation. I’m just there for an hour at a time and the school is very gracious about allowing them to draw pictures in the staffroom, or, in Gemma’s case, to sit quietly playing at Cath’s feet under the desk.

  I return to the staffroom to see that Benedict is holding a bunch of nuns in his thrall. He’s in full flight, jumping from chair to chair in an unrelenting voyage around the room. He’s just four, only recently understanding that the whole world is not his for the asking. As he jumps, he’s talking to Sister Mercy, and her face is warm and doting as I’ve never seen it before, and I enter the room to hear him saying, ‘Do you (jump) know what (jump) my mother says to me (jump) when I’m naughty?’

  I stand and wait for the worst to come.

  ‘She says (jump) that if I’m not good (jump) she’s going to send me to (jump, jump) boarding school.’

  Lord of the Flies. Mrs Burgess, it’s too long. Just give us notes. Other teachers give us more notes.

  Will this help me get a job?

  It’s not my job to influence how they think, but it is my job to get them to think. So I bring out the tired old, Life’s not all about jobs. It’s good to know about the world. If you read books, you know about how other people think. That’s good for you. Walk in another man’s shoes.

  Yeah—but how will reading this book help me get a job?

  Bor-ing …

  It’s not boring. You’re bored, but that’s not the book’s fault.

  My 6th Form English class. Most of the time, St Peter’s being a church school is neither here nor there; the main difference from state secondary schools is that every now and then class is
cancelled for the whole school to disappear off to some significant Mass. Sometimes I go too, sitting marginally bewildered at the back, watching what feels like a foreign movie, an opera. Yet it’s oddly real, far more like ‘religion’ than it ever felt sitting listening to an ascetic Scot reminding me that if I abideth not in Jesus I’d be cast forth as a withered branch and burnt. I enjoy it; then, when I realise that no one notices if I’m there or not, I decide I’ve seen enough swinging incense and I skive off.

  I quickly learn that having an All Black husband is useful to me as a teacher. At Girls’ High, the first parents’ interview at school after his selection resulted in my having a long line of fathers snaking as far as the door of the assembly hall. Everyone else had just a few mothers. Five years have passed—five summers with the length of five long winters—and it’s five years since Robert stopped being an All Black. It seems to me, 29 now, as if he’s played in the olden days. But as soon as the more sporty boys learn who I’m married to, I get a little more respect: I must have something going for me if an All Black has married me. This year, 1981, now eight years since he abandoned the silver fern to play in France, they know that as far as ex-All Blacks go, he’s a bit of an enigma, giving up the chance to wear the black jersey if he doesn’t approve of who they’re playing. A bit of a killjoy. Not one of the boys.

  Every class has its own dynamic, often established by just a smattering of strong personalities, and with this one I’ve had to work harder than usual to get them on-side: significantly more boys than girls is an issue. And this year domestic upheaval has made it even harder.