Someone's Wife

  I assume it was different a few centuries ago when most people simply stayed put. In your village everyone knew not only you but also, by reputation, your ancestors. Just look at the Montagues and Capulets: their families had been fighting for so long that nobody could remember what actually caused the row.

  On one level, having no expectation of change must have made things easier. Kirstie and Phil would never have burst through your front door exuberantly insisting you decide whether to love or list your hovel. As you waited to die of plague, starvation, childbirth or burning at the stake, you’d have been unlikely to mull over how different things would’ve been if only you’d moved to the Home Counties. If you’re reading this, then you can take comfort, as everyone in the world can, that somehow your ancestors knew to stay put long enough to plant or receive a seed. Just think, if you can without getting dizzy, if smallpox had come just another house down the street, if there’d been one more Scot slaughtered at Culloden, another death from measles in Sāmoa, you wouldn’t be here now.

  As my family moved around provincial New Zealand, we tended to emotionally abandon the people we knew. Once or twice I bussed to a previous town to stay with a friend, but that was that. Christmas cards were big then, and the scores that arrived from mid-December (snow and robin red breasts on the front, births, deaths and marriages noted inside) were from people my family had left so ruthlessly behind. The cards were stored in a shoebox in Mum’s wardrobe to be retrieved the next year so Mum (never Dad) knew who to write to. Aunts (never uncles) sent bubble bath for birthdays. Our family was the six of us: others linked by blood didn’t live close enough to pop in for a cup of tea. Some of my friends had honorary aunts, friends who were close enough to feel like relations. Mum and Dad scorned this sort of thing: a friend was no more an aunt than a magazine was a book.

  One of the few consistencies in my life other than my family was the royal family. Later there were the characters from Coronation Street, but they didn’t arrive till my mid-teens. Ken Barlow, absent only for the time it took him to be found innocent of molesting teenage girls, has been in my life for a fair while now. Then there’s Rita, still going strong. And Danny Baldwin, who’s now on The Chase. But I don’t know them. Not like I know the royal family. Not since birth.

  Unlike our friends who we left behind, the royal family came with us when we moved, linked by all those things that attached us to them. There were sticker books for a start, scrapbooks, special coins when they visited, and my brother’s divine diorama bought around about the time of the coronation. You stood it up on its side and carefully slotted in horses, courtiers and gold coaches, all with little numbered tags that matched the number on the unfolded diorama. It’s 65 years old, has become much smaller, and my brother still has it. Michael is the sort of person Antiques Roadshow was designed for. When I was at his place two years ago, he brought it carefully out, wrapped in tissue paper, for me to look at. He wasn’t keen for me to play with it, remarking that his Lion Annuals would’ve been worth a small fortune now if I hadn’t coloured them in.

  The Queen was old enough to be my mother, but her girlhood hung around her far longer than my mother’s did. She was mythologised. As a wartime teenager more than a decade before she came into my life, she valiantly slipped on a uniform, tugged the belt tight and, fresh-face and true, drove trucks. That was enviable enough. But nothing impacted quite like the gift to Elizabeth and her sister Margaret Rose from the people of Wales. Something that every girl I knew wanted: a house, exactly like a real one but child-sized, compact perfection. When I read about it in my Christmas annual, I was helpless with envy. My envy for the Princesses’ cottage was tempered with respect, and a knowledge of our different places in the order of things. I knew even then the people of Wales were never going to pop by Pahīatua with a miniature house on the back of the farm truck.

  The Queen first entered my life in the real when she went past me, and thousands of other children, in a train. I was too short to see her, and was still wailing because the boy behind me had decapitated my flag by whacking it with his. Between me and the Queen was a consoling grown-up, completing the blocking of my view. One of today’s royals would’ve noted my misery and leapt from the train to tell me he too had suffered at an early age, but it was different back then. Not a backward glance.

  Times have certainly changed—now we have a new prince-to-be who’s called Archie Harrison, both yummy mummy baby names, the first the sort of name that if called out in a playground could be answered to either by a child in designer clothing or a labradoodle. No other royal baby has ever had a second name which refers in a slyly witty but obvious way to his parentage. Harry’s mother could have saved herself a lot of grief if she’d thought to do just that.

  But back to Archie’s great-gran. I read about her in the Woman’s Weekly when she was a young mother: the tone, consistently respectful. I saw her in The Shorts at the Saturday matinee, coming right after the serial’s cliffhanger. Someone with bow lips tied by her wrists to the railway line; then a faraway figure in an unshowy hat and a frock that spread out below her trim waist. Above that trim waist was a fitting bodice and a hinting-at-off-the-collar neckline, slightly reminiscent of what film stars wore. There might not have been only the one frock, but there was only the one Hardy Amies. She was a piping posh voice through a static crackle. She was never filmed sucking anyone’s toes. No one ever wrote Mountbatten Lords it Over Lonely Lilibet! or Fickle Philip on the Hunt for Zipless F***!

  The Queen lost her position at the centre of my interest when I realised her son was pretty much my age: two weeks older, in fact. I was interested enough in kings and queens by then (taking a morbid interest in the ones who were beheaded) to be curious about a boy my own age who knew from the time he could think that one day he’d be King. What must this feel like, this knowledge? And how could you look forward to it knowing that, when it happened, your mother would have just died? I took comfort in what my apparently wise older sister had said to me when I confided to her that I was dreading our mother’s death. Airily she informed me that I’d be at least 30 by the time that happened, and by then I wouldn’t care. It was best to assume that this was also the case with Prince Charles.

  As children, we were encouraged by our somewhat cynical father to view Charles as what our family called a little drip. A little Pommie drip, what’s more, still wearing smocked shirts that New Zealand boys older than two wouldn’t be seen dead in. With his hair so carefully combed, he looked a real sissy. I felt quite disconcerted when, seeing a documentary about the royal family when Charles and I were about 15, I discovered that with his bashful eyes and his hand slipped into the pocket of his tweed jacket, he was unsettlingly sexy. In a Paul McCartney way: Paul had made it more than acceptable to have an innocent girly face and long lashes. Documentaries about the royal family changed everything: now we really knew them.

  They were filmed on a family picnic. We went on family picnics but our food was never in a wicker hamper, just in a tin that used to have biscuits in it, and which never quite lost that musty biscuity smell. We were photographed by my brother’s Box Brownie huddled together in the mist on Mount Messenger; they probably had Lord Lichfield with them. In our photos, Dad never stood slightly to the side, like the Duke, back to camera, hands linked behind, gazing wistfully at the distant hills. Longing for a stag at bay, or even a lost grouse. A gun. We did both have a handy blanket to perch on, but theirs was the family tartan, and ours was a grey one with a red stripe down the middle which Dad brought back from the war.

  When I was about 14, I began to find my mother was embarrassing: had Charles felt like that about his? Did the Queen tell people in shops things they neither knew nor cared about? Put on a telephone voice? Flirt with the butcher? My boyfriend from university came to stay—separate rooms, quite appropriately—and my mother put Oklahoma on the stereogram, did a flick of her hips as she lit a cigarette and poured herself a small sherry. Did the Queen like musicals? Embarra
ss Charles by smoking in front of his girlfriends? Did the Queen drink cream sherry, which had started life in a flagon, from a decanter with a silver chain around its neck?

  Surely it must have been wonderful to have a mother famous for not having opinions. She wouldn’t have said, Are you going out wearing that? Or, Your bedroom looks like a Chinese brothel. Also, the Queen was busy launching ships and opening hospitals, so wouldn’t have been waiting, lonely as hell in her isolated small community, her silhouette humiliatingly visible behind the venetian blinds, for her children to come home from school. There was never a glimpse of the Queen behind the blinds of Buckingham Palace, desperate for news of any kind.

  Charles came to New Zealand on his own the year I was at teachers’ college in Christchurch. Two people from each class were selected to meet him at a garden party at Mona Vale. I was too proud to beg, and stood silently by while our two class captains—yes, we had class captains, though perhaps they were called representatives—were deemed to be the most appropriate. When Judy came back, she was glowing. She’d met him and shaken his hand and oh my God he was gorgeous.

  But another change was coming. Like most of my friends I got married at a ludicrously early age, and had kids, while Charles lingered on, an interminable teenager, still mad on the Goons, still going out with pretty girls and not finding Miss Right. Then he did, marrying Diana just days after protesters went on to the field at Hamilton and stopped the game against the Springboks, and it went from bad to worse. What was once so innocent, a discreet camera following his family on a picnic, was now any indiscretion made public.

  Let’s leave him here. Just at the point that he so percipiently says, ‘Whatever love is.’ Before his tragic young wife says, ‘There were three of us in that marriage.’ Before he professes a wish to be a tampon. Let’s leave him while I can still stick up for him. When I can point out the things about which I agree with him. Organic vegetables. Free-range hens. Gardens. Communities. Buildings with some dignity that don’t leak.

  Let’s leave him, or both of us—let’s leave both of us—before everything is known by everybody. When friends are people you bike out into the country with in the hope you’ll see that boy from boarding school who you fancy, going further than your mother permits. When friends are those who send you Christmas cards, not faceless strangers who link to you on Facebook. When small towns still have banks and dentists, doctors and high schools, libraries and picture theatres. When royals—who’ve never in some way had any point at all—still give us something to think about, to ponder. A myth. A story. A fairy tale. Let’s leave us there. I’m happy with that. And so, I’m prepared to guess, is Charles.

  14.

  RE-ENTERING

  In which my children go to university … and then come home

  We have a perfectly good university, acknowledged for the beauty of its campus, in our own town, but it’s simply out of the question. So while students from Dunedin and Wellington and Auckland implore their parents to let them come to Massey, our kids convince us that it’s best if they go elsewhere.

  In 1993 Benedict, who likes nooks and crannies and ideas, and talking into the night in smoke-filled cafés, packs a suitcase and goes to Victoria to do English and political science.

  The next year Gemma, who loves warmth and all things Polynesian, takes our other decent suitcase and goes to Auckland to do psychology, Māori and Pacific studies.

  Our house thrums with emptiness. We learn we have a cat. We turn the television back to TV One, the radio back to the National Programme, remove Call Waiting from the telephone, eat our dinner on our knees, which we have sworn we will never do, wonder if we’re turning into our parents, and find that we still enjoy each other’s company.

  We discover that although we have no suitcases, we have two cars which are always there when we want them. There’s no more lying awake at 3 a.m. waiting for them to come home. If the fridge has half a tomato, a slice of bacon and a knob of parmesan cheese in it, there’s dinner. There’s no one to peer into a cupboard groaning with food only to ask why there’s never any food in this house. There are no visiting teenagers to casually empty a three-litre bottle of orange juice and a bowl of fruit. If we want to go to the movies, visit friends, go for a walk, we can do it without telling anyone. Deciding to see this freedom as a learning opportunity, we make a valiant attempt to grasp the programming of the video. We miss them dreadfully.

  We long for their return, and not just because we may have to take out an extra mortgage to pay our phone bill. I long for letters, but instead we talk by phone as if they live a block away. The kids have a secret code to ring us from the hostel: ring once and hang up. We’re meant to phone straight back, and I’m left hunting frantically for the piece of paper where I’ve jotted down their numbers. I can never quite learn them by heart. Telecom send us a Christmas card: their way of saying thank you. There’s even a $5 phone card enclosed. It’s the least they can do: several of the directors are putting their children through university on us.

  Distant pitiful voices tell us that hostel food is unbearable. There are no extras. Grandma bakes her special bread and her chocolate chip biscuits. I pick the best feijoas from the ground. I look for all their favourite things in the supermarket: avocados, and crunchy peanut butter. It all fits nicely into one of the post office’s larger red and white boxes. The woman behind the counter weighs them and notices the addresses. ‘More of these,’ she says. ‘We call them Red Cross parcels.’

  From time to time, during the year, they come home. They always seem to have an extremely important essay due in the day before they’re scheduled to go back. Although I’m trying to make a new career as a writer, my computer gives in and becomes theirs. I’m called in yet again to help with the intricacies of essay writing. I’ve met English writer Barbara Trapido; she tells me her daughter’s completing her fourth year at Oxford, and Barbara’s wondering when she will be no longer required to help her with her essays. Meanwhile, back in Palmerston North, the essay is finished at 4 p.m. on the due day and we race out to Robert’s work to fax it. Yes, fax. My neck and shoulder muscles are pinging like an elderly tennis racquet. I’ve forgotten how to deal with stress.

  But they seem very happy. We meet some of the new friends, as likeable and appealing as their old friends. Money is mentioned occasionally to remind us of our biggest failing: we, like nearly all of our friends, are not rich enough to put them through university without student loans. Funding changes have come to our generation, to our children, out of the blue. We’ve had no time to prepare for this. Not rich enough to pay all their expenses, and not poor enough for them to get one cent in help from the government. They mention friends in the hostels whose fathers own farms and businesses and who can claim they earn almost nothing. It’s not like this for scientists and teachers. We wistfully remember our own student days, when waitressing or shearing in the holidays, a tiny away-from-home allowance and the government paying 90 per cent of our modest fees meant we never had to ask our parents for more than the odd pair of shoes.

  And in due course they come home for the Christmas break.

  We blame the hostels. We have a clear memory of teaching Benedict to eat with a knife and fork when he’s quite small. Yet here he is, with a courageous beard, leaning on the table, shovelling food with his bare hands into his Neanderthal mouth. He pauses only to make hilarious jokes based on bodily functions. We have always enjoyed his wit and humour. So where has it gone? The change in our daughter the next year is only slightly less marked. While retaining the concept of eating with cutlery, Gemma treats her house as if it were staffed by a horde of menials. Somewhere along the way she has got used to putting her own plate on a bench and simply walking away. Our previously tidy girl spends the summer in a tumbling sea of clothes, in the middle of which is her bed.

  All this we can cope with. What’s harder are the comments to do with us. ‘How do you live in this ugly town?’ says our son as he drives back home with us. You
can see he’s uncomfortable sitting in the back seat. He walks into the house wondering aloud why there’s never any food in it. He needs a job, he says. We’re reminded that our friends, who tend to be academics, are hopeless when it comes to offering holiday employment. Why don’t we have friends who own businesses? Better still, why don’t we own one ourselves? The next day he takes the better of the two cars and the trailer and goes back to Wellington. He’s moving into a flat next year and needs it. He’ll be back—well, sometime. He’s taken a couple of Grandma’s chairs, a chest of drawers, his desk, the spare double feather duvet and the spare double bed. If we have guests they’ll have to sleep on the floor.

  Our daughter gets off the plane asking, ‘Has anyone phoned?’ She gets out of the car, calls Telecom to reinstate Call Waiting, reclaims the cat who’s got quite fond of us in the interim, cuts Kim Hill mid-word and puts the radio back on a station where all the music sounds like someone’s chanting choom ba ba choom ba ba choom, complains that the better car is unavailable, takes the other car and disappears to visit her friends. She’s looking coolly at me in the rear-vision mirror. I’ve just asked her what the parents of one of her new friends ‘do’. It’s as if my own mother is nestling inside me, waiting to burst out like in Alien. I can’t believe I’m asking it. Our daughter has looked at me witheringly. ‘I’ve learnt a lot about your values while I’ve been away,’ she says through the wound-down window as she backs out of the drive in my car.

  I go inside and cancel Call Waiting. It’s a petty gesture, but it feels wonderful.

  I sit in the sun with friends, all of whom have children who’ve gone to study in distant corners of New Zealand rather than stay in the cheapness and comfort of their own rooms. All of our kids have returned for the holidays and are spending up to three minutes at least two days a week at Student Job Search.