Someone's Wife

by Linda Burgess

  There’s the sound of cars, it’s the kids returning. Benedict has landed himself a job delivering pizzas. Gemma has chatted up the one friend with a business and perhaps is going to learn to make pasta. Full of charm and humour and good manners, they chat away to women who’ve known them since Play Centre. They’ve come home briefly to get my Eftpos card so they can go to the supermarket. Gemma has bought herself yet another skimpy top, an incredible bargain. I can pay her back.

  A moment of silence, deeply reflective. Four women who’ve all had offspring re-entering in the previous few days. Of course we’ve missed our kids enormously. Of course it’s wonderful to have them home. It’s just that no one is quite up to verbalising it.

  15.

  TREES

  In which I go over the top about trees

  The tree is in the Enchanted Woods. Children with retroussé noses and Milly-Molly-Mandy haircuts stand beneath it, then, enviably, climb it. Girls in frocks with bows at the neck, white ankle socks and those black shiny shoes with straps that girls in stories always have. With my feet requiring sturdy lace-ups until I’m at least seven, I long for shoes with straps or, even better, slip-ons. Boys in shorts, long socks and red ties. Hardly tree-climbing clothes.

  The Faraway Tree is perfect. For those of us not born able to clamber and swing like monkeys, it’s so wonderfully staid. Big, flat branches, first one close to the ground, then the next branch an easy step from the one below. After a few steps upwards, people start to emerge from their homes inside the tree. Not all real people, some fairy folk. Childish, but never mind. Dame Washalot, washing, washing, washing, then tipping the bucket of soapy water over you if you’re in the wrong place. Saucepan Man whose deafness is infuriating. Sexy little Silky.

  But they aren’t the point: infinity and chaos are the point. Any land can come to the top of the tree, benign or not. A land returns. Or not. And, such trepidation: what say they don’t get off in time?

  Enid Blyton has done what is now called capturing the imagination; the story she has created is far greater than the words on the page. Wisha wisha wisha. I can feel it now, its bark, velvety, thick and true, protective and strong. Branches wide enough to sleep on without fear of falling. And best of all, given that trees are harder to get down from than up, the slide down the centre of the trunk: the Slippery Slip. Just don’t forget to give your cushion to the squirrel at the bottom.

  Mum’s grandfather has come to New Zealand from Denmark in the 1870s, hoping to farm. But the land is covered in trees, the Seventy Mile Bush, and first he cuts trees down, then he buys a sawmill. Photos of early New Zealand often seem to depict prematurely aged people standing in front of trees stripped bare. Burnt until all that is left is a charred trunk. Or men with saws and axes standing by felled trunks so large that the men who’ve accomplished the feat of getting them down are dwarfed beside them. Trunks big enough to hold a Slippery Slip. Trees to be sent to other parts of the world to build ships and mansions.

  Pahīatua has a treed main street. We live a couple of blocks away; by the time trees get to us, they’re cut into pieces to fit our fireplace. Stacked by our garage, enough to last us the winter. Dad, bare-chested, chops the kindling: boxes that the apples have come in from Hawke’s Bay are best. Mum, when quite young, still at primary school, crouching beside her father while he chops, is struck on her knee by the axe, which slips and slices deeply into her knee. She can see the bone. She has the scar; we ask to see it; we touch it, awed by its still being there. Her father, son of the sawmill owner, pragmatic Dane, is irritated with her when she cries.

  When the wood is still in a towering pile we clamber to the top, racing against time, getting there before it tumbles down. Wētā that get into your gumboots, and lizards whose tails come off when you try to grab them. Slaters when you throw the log on the fire. But neither Pahīatua nor Waitara has anything like the Hundred Acre Wood that Christopher Robin (more Milly-Molly-Mandy hair, more gormless shorts and ankle socks) wanders in so freely.

  By Waitara, in Primer 1, I too am free to wander, so much less glamorously, disregarding the more ridiculous rules. Don’t go down by the river. Waitara River, at the end of our street, has trees of a sort, scrubby bushes with the odd willow, just densely planted enough to burrow into and hide. I find a den, the pleasing smell of organic decay, the pleasure of disobedience, and look through the tangled undergrowth at the turgid river, and it feels like Robin Hood. The Fletchers in the house behind us have a tree to climb. I get stuck up it and panic, and Dr Fletcher’s called from his surgery to talk me down, one foot at a time.

  Around about Standard 1, when I’m hopeless at Nature Study, can never get a tadpole to become a frog and only occasionally a chrysalis to become a monarch butterfly, and sort of resentful that I don’t quite get it, they take all of us to the corner of the school, and sit us (cross-legged) on the grass, and show us tiny helicopters. I can feel them in my hand now, almost as thin as the wings of a cicada. Two round bits which fit my thumbs. They tell us this is a sycamore tree. It has leaves like hands. They say trees have different ways of planting themselves, and this tree has these miniature helicopters and you can see, can’t you, that when trees let their seeds go, sometimes they fall straight under the tree, and sometimes birds eat them and fly away and later the seed is in their droppings. But this one, the sycamore—the seeds spin like helicopter blades and they can fly far enough from the tree so they land on open ground. And they are the beginning of a new tree. And I hold the little helicopter—wafer-thin yet so strong. One day it will be a tree.

  Arbor Day. We plant a tree for Paul Bullot who has died of tetanus in the school holidays. We crane silently forward to look at his brother, who cries.

  When we get a car in Waitara, often in the weekends we drive the 15 kilometres to New Plymouth. In summer Ngāmotu beach, but other times, best of all, Pukekura Park. Once I’m asked, what will I do when I turn 21, and I say, ‘Row in the boats in Pukekura Park.’ All day. The boats, and the lights in summer, are another story. It is the running free. Because as Mum and Dad stroll along the main paths, we take the paths less chosen. We run metres above our parents, Mum in a floral frock and Dad in a sports jacket. We could get lost. We could get abducted; we sometimes see strange, solitary men. We might find the Faraway Tree. We run along smoothed earthen tracks and take this turn then that and we are surrounded by bush, and other than Mum and Dad’s distant murmur we are totally, utterly alone.

  In Pātea, one large tree, on the edge of the lawn big enough to mark out as a tennis court, the nectarine tree, wonderful white-fleshed fruit, its branches spread wide enough to cast shadows to slide into when your skin gets to that important turning point: tomorrow it will peel off in fine white strips. Skin has to do that before it gets properly brown. Dead skin is strangely mouthwatering.

  Anne Frank looks out at trees from her attic. Imagine never being able to go outside. Always be quiet. Never scream at your sister. Only see trees through a window. From above. I feel a niggling sense of shame that I envy her living somewhere that you get to by going through a door hidden behind a bookcase.

  On the hill which stands between us and the cliffs where I go with my friend Alan to shoot rats, because all the town’s rubbish is dumped over those cliffs, there’s a house that Hitchcock could have used in Psycho, or, more likely, Peter Jackson in Bad Taste. Two-storeyed and tall and alone and freaky. We think a witch lives there. There are tall, dense trees: macrocarpa. They protect the house in the way the thorny hedge protected Sleeping Beauty’s. Macrocarpa are ugly trees, leaning away from the wind, uneven and messy, ink blots, dark as the blue-black ink I use to fill my Osmiroid fountain pen, dark as our bedroom on a moonless night.

  Streets here aren’t lined with trees. There are no leafy suburbs. The sea’s proximity means that anything green struggles to survive; if it does, it’s stunted. Though the Pulleys’ house, which has so many bedrooms that the Pulleys close off a whole wing in which Susan P, Susan S and I briefly ope
n our private library, is behind so many trees that you can’t see it from the road. They’re begging you to build a hut in them. Trees must have something to do with money and social class; that is, the trees that lose their leaves.

  Hunterville has trees. It could well be to do with farmers round here having sheep not cows in their paddocks. Our first house there, which we live in while they build our new one, even has an orchard. You come into the town from the south through trees, and between Marton and Hunterville there are substantial stands of bush. Some farmers have also planted deciduous forests. And just as you leave town heading north there’s a beautiful grove of exotic trees; in winter, after turning glorious colours, they lose their leaves. The Rangitīkei is all like this. As you drive towards Taihape, there’s trees to the right of you, trees to the left of you: trees brought from the other side of the world need cold winters to prosper. The Rangitīkei—last stop before the more barren central plateau, where Robert, during the long post-school break while he waited for university to start, was employed to plant hundreds of pine trees—is a natural home for deciduous ones. My father stands at the picture window of our new house, looks out over the misty valley in which the small town nestles, the turning leaves, and says, ‘You can say what you like about England being beautiful. You can’t beat this.’

  Levin. The house has a fashionable tree called a silver dollar, it’s a gum tree, and not a real green, more a bluey grey, and the leaves are round. I can see it’s interesting but I don’t much like it. There’s also a path edged in a new kind of hybrid rose, bold, brash and showy, and my mother, who likes things that are all the rage, is in heaven. From the kitchen window she loves to look at the Tararuas.

  We are just married, we’re back in Palmerston North and we have found a cottage in the country to rent, thanks to my friend Sue’s sister who lives next door to it. A cottage in the country, it sounds so BBC, but it’s a miserly house really, made out of fibrolite, and the windows are all louvre. But it’s furnished with rather nice old furniture that turns our mothers’ stomachs, as they’ve finally been able to leave this sort of stuff behind and move on to curly legs and mahogany. There’s a roll-backed sofa covered in a curtain, and when we pull it off, it’s wondrous, with original dark-green velvet as thick as a dense crewcut. An oak bed, an oval oak table, and we bring in from the shed a kauri chest of drawers which even then is well over a hundred years old.

  Some girls I teach just happen to ride past on their ponies, so I invite them in for a glass of Raro and they stand gaping at our poster of Michelangelo’s David. The next day at school the whole class knows, and a girl asks me what Mr Burgess thinks about me having a photo of man with no clothes on, in our sitting room?

  And it has an orchard. Old-fashioned apples: a divinely crisp dark-red one which I never found a name for, and Robert’s favourite Golden Delicious, which we take to work for lunch. Plums, pears, peaches. A large neglected vegetable garden that we ignore until one day we wake to hear a rotary hoe, and Geoff, our neighbour, who can’t bear good land going to waste, is hard at it, turning it back into a garden.

  Each day we go to work, either in our Ford Prefect or, later, on our Honda 90, we drive along Fitzherbert Avenue under a canopy—a tunnel—of plane trees, Palmerston North’s most perfect trees. The calm this inspires is incalculable. The road is only two lanes wide. Twice a day, as we go out and then come back in, traffic moves slowly. I’m dropped at Girls’ High and Robert continues over the bridge, and where the road forks—left, Aokautere, right, Massey—two enormous golden elms have existed forever.

  Our trees, outside our bedroom, reward us with blossom and fruit, and we get another disrupted morning sleep when we hear voices murmuring outside and the sound of heavy clippers, and it’s Robert’s father Angus and a friend, Mr Van Kraayenoord, who are seeing to it that Angus’s hopeless son’s trees get a decent pruning. Years later, Angus will look at a young lemon tree in our Palmerston North garden, comment it’s not looking well, whip into the garage for a saw and cut it down almost at ground level before we even realise what’s going on. ‘Oh!’ he says in surprise, looking closely at the decapitated trunk, ‘it’s quite healthy!’

  In Lyon, 1974, Robert is home to pick up his camera. The boulevard around the corner is full of men pruning the towering trees; they are in the branches, and the avenue is a painting come alive. Hundreds of men move around the city in a vast team, pruning the plane trees, avenue by avenue. It’s impossible to believe that the pollarded trees will ever grow again, but by the next summer they sprout new branches which grow at an unbelievable rate. Underneath them old men, who seem to collect outdoors in a way New Zealand old men are disinclined to, play boules, the Lyonnais name for pétanque. Houses in France are designed for extreme climates, with shutters that keep out the summer sun and the winter cold. Trees that shade in summer and let in the light in winter.

  The war, which ended 30 years earlier, is still superimposed—watercolours on muslin—upon the landscape. Narrow, straight, tree-lined roads traverse the countryside. Refugees, trucks, cars, bikes, horses pulling carts piled high with earthly goods. People trudging beside them until planes come from nowhere to strafe them with bullets. Next to the ad for Coca-Cola there’s the pitted wall where the gallant Maquis met their deaths. The square where Nazi officers piled out of the shiny black car.

  We visit Aix-en-Provence where some genius centuries ago planted three rows of plane trees along the avenues: one each side, one in the middle. Traffic goes safely under the leafy canopy in two directions. We sit on the pavement, wide enough for a café to spread outdoors, and the street is full of classical music, piped from above through the trees.

  In our back garden, the first time we are in a house we own ourselves, we plant trees with scant regard for positioning. But we also destroy. We are choosy. We have inherited two enormous trees, both gums which grow so quickly: a blue gum and a silver dollar. In a strong wind they can break and fall. We attach a swing—a tyre on its side—to the gum, and one day I look out the kitchen window, and Gemma, 18 months old, sits quietly on the tyre, and Benedict, two and a half, is carefully cutting her fringe.

  Robert rings up Frank Oliver, All Black number 750, who he’s played with in Southland, and who does this sort of thing for a living, and he comes round and cuts down the tree. Robert and a friend take on the silver dollar, starting at the top.

  On Arbor Day Gemma brings home a kōwhai seedling from school; it grows strongly by our sitting-room window. We plant fruit trees; by the time we leave there are more than 20, from apricot to fig to plum and apple. A tree grows from the stone of a Golden Queen peach that I’ve casually chucked through the back door. It’s basically growing out of the side of the drive. It has no fruit, except one year when, as if it knows it’s the star of a parable of sorts, it has a mass of wondrous fruit. Then dies.

  Our friend John Barnes on Number One Line grows trees. Robert brings back a walnut that is like our tabby cat Minnie: perfect, of its type. This walnut’s pale trunk is divided at waist level and it meanders quietly in two directions.

  Robert is still biking along the road to Massey. It is decided to widen the road, and for this to happen the trees must come down. Slowly the rumour is spread, a possible misinformation campaign: the trees are diseased, they have just a short life ahead of them; it will be a kindness, a euthanasia of sorts, to remove them. There are people, Palmerston North’s Maquis, who are prepared to tie themselves to the trees to save them. You can’t stop progress. It doesn’t seem to occur to those making the decision that perhaps people should be encouraged to accept instead the wheeled equivalent of a stroll to work. Or to offer an option in the form of a tram or even frequent buses. Those prepared to tie themselves to trees are shown high above the ground on the front page of the paper, but it is inexorable: the trees will come down. They will be replaced with new trees, pretty enough, but a taller, straighter variety, and never close enough together, never the right shape to lean lazily towards ea
ch other and make a cool green dappled tunnel to drive through to Palmerston North’s own ivory towers. I never learn to love them.

  Our beautiful walnut. Too close to the house, it seems: we build our conservatory after it’s planted. As it grows taller its branches grow over the glass roof. The ruthless summer sun can’t get through. We get up on a ladder and brush the fallen leaves off the glass and out of the guttering, and the sun comes smugly inside, just when we need it to. At some times of the year it’s dirty. The nuts when they fall are encased in a coating which rots blackly and messes the ground, and the children have to be reminded not to bring in the black skins on their gumboots and tread them into the carpet.

  My mother moves to Palmerston North, to spend her last three years near us. I take her walking out at Massey. The two elms where the road forks to Aokautere have quietly disappeared, first one, then the other. But the campus is full of wondrously tall trees—the avenue along the driveway to the university up which I biked decades earlier, the vast deciduous trees surrounded by lawns. It’s a beautiful campus. Mum’s in the grip of dementia and becomes anxious. So many trees! How could anyone ever sweep up all those leaves? The thought of the pressure on whoever it is who’s responsible for the task gnaws at her.

  We are moving to Wellington. We have loved our house, into which we have poured our hearts; it’s one of the city’s prettiest Californian bungalows. I leave it knowing we have done our best by it: we have left it better than we have found it. That unique conservatory. The polished floors. The leadlight windows. And the walnut tree. As we go, I force myself to say goodbye to it, with its sturdy branches spreading so reliably outwards. Strong and kind, welcoming: after 20 years, the place in its divided trunk is now broadened into a seat for a child to sit.