Someone's Wife

  I am in Wellington; we’re living close to town, yet from our bedroom window at a certain angle you would think we were in the country, so many trees to be seen. And we look out over Kelburn, a leafy suburb. There is an elm growing in our courtyard which shades us when we eat outdoors in summer; I have become cautiously fond of it. That doesn’t mean there’s not a hole in my heart where the walnut tree that we left behind still sits.

  It’s a year or two after we leave that the new owner of our Palmerston North house forwards us a letter of some sort or another. She’s jotted a note on the back of the envelope. I had to cut down the walnut tree. And she adds,

  16.

  LEONARD

  COHEN

  In which I’m captured forever by Cohen

  It’s 1971. Robert’s running 100 miles a week. He has set himself a serious fitness goal. I ride along beside him. When I finish ‘So long, Marianne’ I’m on to ‘Suzanne’, then we’re with ‘The sisters of Mercy’ … My voice is comparable with Cohen’s only in that the uncharitable could describe it as droning. With an LP, you can just reach over, lift the stylus and change the track. But when you’re running 100 miles a week, and the woman beside you is on a Honda 90, you can never run fast enough.

  It’s 1974 and we’re living in Lyon and I’m six months pregnant. As usual we have New Zealand friends staying, and somehow we learn that Leonard Cohen’s in town and there’s a concert at a small hall. There’s four of us genuine fans, plus three French friends who’ve called round and been encouraged to join us. Jean-Luc and Isabelle and whoever the third friend was have never heard of Cohen. They haven’t heard of anyone. French popular culture is absurdly dated. Johnny Hallyday is still big. They’re more likely to listen to Maurice Chevalier thanking heaven for little girls than Pink Floyd seeing us on the dark side of the moon. That’s why they need to come with us, so we can be there for their epiphany.

  Like all halls this one has finite space, but it’s marginally flexible in that everyone will be sitting on the floor. The French are used to people in queues cheating, so I inch towards the front, and am standing right by the man who is telling us, No more! Plein! I’m overtly pregnant and unscrupulously pleading. He could go either way, but he says to me, d’accord, you then, and all seven of us, in a tight scrum, push past him.

  We’re not far from the front. Nobody is far from the front. We squash down on the floor and I remember that I have a six-month-old foetus who’s not going to let me pull my knees up under my chin, or sit cross-legged. It’s not that he’s not used to music. He’s already been potentially deafened by The Rocky Horror Show in London. He’ll be born humming along to Bruce Springsteen.

  There’s a young man with a massive backpack sitting in front of me. It’s one of those grey canvas things with two rigorous backbones that labels its bearer a serious hiker. There’s a flag tidily sewn on the flap. Every time the young man moves, those seated all around him are in danger of being flattened. Finally he places the backpack next to him, taking up a space that could happily house another Canadian.

  Leonard Cohen comes out on the stage, carrying his guitar. I’m overawed by being so close to someone who has sung to me so often. He’s real. How can he be real? He looks as if he’s not sure either if he’s real, with a face that is an intriguing mix of melancholia and amazement, a look that in later years he goes on to perfect. It’s as if he’s just wandered through the door, and to his astonishment, hey! There we all are!

  The floor is hard. The foetus is bored and uncomfortable and kicks me to bring it to my attention. Cohen has sung all the songs I know, and a few that I don’t, and he’s recited some of his poetry. The audience could stay all night, though it’s clear our French friends, clapping slowly and bemusedly, might be starting to find him monotonous.

  It’s inching towards three hours. The two people sharing my body want him to stop. But Encore! shouts Cohen’s small and loyal group of Lyonnais fans, and with that self-deprecating, gracious way he has, he keeps on going.

  Now it’s December 2013 and we’re at the Vector Arena in Auckland. Leonard Cohen is back. Three years earlier we’ve failed to get tickets in Wellington. It turns out to be one of those things that matters. Significant friends discuss it as if they’ve been guests at the Second Coming. We go to dinner parties, and in spite of the fact that I’m vaguely proud of being a non-joiner, we have to sit and listen to the smug reminiscence of others, and yearn. Or worse, we find ourselves involuntarily placed in the Can’t Stand Leonard team, with the unbelievers.

  We’ve failed again this time, after the Wellington show sells out within minutes. Then it’s announced there’s to be an extra show in Auckland and my friend Raewyn, who keeps her eye on the ball, phones from Auckland to say, now! I’m on the computer, we’re both on our computers, and we manage to get seats beside each other and done. Tickets.

  Aucklanders are 10 years younger than Wellingtonians and more stylishly dressed. It’s disconcerting being among hundreds of people and not knowing any of them. Other than the odd newsreader and weather girl: my face flickers into a smile of recognition and clamps closed as soon as I realise that this is a one-sided relationship. We are with Raewyn and Tim, and above us looking down and waving madly are William and Robyn. We are all ex-Palmerstonians, but the other four are Aucklanders now. I feel like I used to feel when my family came to Wellington together for the day: as if I’m wearing the wrong clothes. Overdressed, the country bumpkins come to town. Back then it always felt as if there were too many of us to walk together: if we’re in a line across the pavement, we enrage the locals who have to navigate around us; if we walk in three lots of two, we’re on a march. And there’s the other burden: you have to simultaneously be with your parents and somehow look as though you just happen to be walking behind some strangers.

  Now we four who are in the stalls edge our way past those newsreaders and weather girls, people who do Fair Go sort of programmes, actors you’ve seen in something or other—Shortland Street?—and people with supremely self-assured, unlined faces yelling confidently across a few rows to their chums. They all know each other. They’ve come from Devonport and Waiheke Island, Mt Eden and Remuera. The Vector Arena is an advertisement for wherever it is that women in late middle age go to buy their clothes and their jewellery—not the sort that John Lennon requested be rattled, but the slightly quirky stuff that is bought from the label that a friend of their daughter’s has just started, from galleries in Kingsland. Some of it, even the expensive stuff, is ironic. The tribute fedoras dotted around the room may be ironic, though more likely paying genuine homage.

  There is no one with a big grey backpack with a flag sewn on to it by the bearer’s mother.

  But then it’s starting and the hum rises and falls, and on he comes. He has perfected that look of abject amazement that I remember from Lyon 40 years ago, but there’s something else added now, 40 years of things not always going right, of long-lost lovers, of Scientology and Buddhism, and of being let down by those he trusts. Being ripped off by his manager, his pension fund gone. He’s been forced to go back on the road, but there’s a good side to that. And it’s all there on his face, that he’s resigned to it, he’s amused by it, he’s shrugged his shoulders at it, and it’s possible that at his age he does feel genuine amazement that after all these decades singing many of the same songs, he can still walk into a venue anywhere in the world and find it is packed to the walls. That he can sing about sex without a ripple of embarrassed laughter. That in any talent show or on any street or square, or at any railway station where buskers gather, there’ll be someone singing ‘Hallelujah’.

  And you never feel as if he’s having a laugh at your expense, or that he’d rather be anywhere else than here, which we feel when we see Sting at the Mission Vineyard in Napier. Nor do you feel the slightest bit sorry for him, nor awkwardly hold your breath for him, as I did for Elton John when he so gamely went down on his knee the time before last that he was in Wellington, and I cou
ldn’t help worrying that someone was going to have to lend him a courtly arm to get up again. And you don’t have to worry that he’s going to treat his microphone as a dildo, thrust his pelvis at you, or purse his massive lips at you, make you forget his ravaged skin as he high-knee minces across the stage towards you, like Mick Jagger did—You’re not at church. You’re at a fucking rock concert. Oh, when old men tour.

  Cohen’s looking at the audience; his eyes sweep around the assembled thousands, and surely he’s thinking, I go all around the world and wherever I am I’m always singing to the same people. If anything reminds me of getting older, he thinks, it’s the age of my audience. And he’s doing a vague sum in his head, adding up how much more he needs to get that $5 million back, and also thinking he’s not going to need so much now that he’s nearly 80.

  And he’s thinking, well I guess this is my tribe now, then. So much for the Chelsea Hotel, and he can’t see Janis Joplin out there or anyone who even looks vaguely like her. And I don’t even care, he thinks. Bless my tribe. Bless them.

  Cohen was never into leaping, bounding, strutting. He’s quiet within. A gentle man; a gentleman. He knows the power of a slow, still smile. He goes down on his knees but there’s only a tiny creak in his fluidity; he looks like he’s done years of yoga and it’s hard not to be impressed with his flexibility. He’s so generous, giving all those accompanying him a special tip of that signature hat, a deeply respectful personal accolade for each accompanying musician. They look back at him with love that seems completely real. I wonder briefly how many of them he’s slept with.

  ‘Tonight, and especially tonight,’ he says, ‘we’re going to give you everything we’ve got.’ He knows the power of making everyone in the room feel as if they’re there with him alone. He’s mastered it. He calls us friends and we have no reason to disbelieve it. He may well be thinking, I see she’s had her baby. He sings to us as if it’s the first time he’s ever done this concert, as if there’s not even a microphone between his mouth and our ear. We’re all Marianne again. All Suzanne. All sisters of mercy. We’re all back on that Honda 90.

  My grandson Max, 15, a mad musician, has been to his first jazz concert. I ask him how long it was, and he says, ‘Probably two hours but it felt like half an hour.’ And his dad grins, and says, ‘It was three.’

  And that night, the night, as it turns out, that Cohen gives his last ever concert, he isn’t going to need to bolster his Super fund; his encores are literally his last. The last ferry to Waiheke is a compelling reason, the only reason, for quite a few people to leave. All over the Vector Arena sorry sorry oops sorry is making a tiny chip in the spell. Just like in Lyon, his encores go on and on. But this time I never want them to end.

  17.

  AFTER ENID

  In which I’m self-indulgent about my idea for a TV series

  To be accepted into the scriptwriting course at Victoria University’s IIML, I have to have a proposal for a film, a play, or a television series. This will force me to start work on something I’ve been writing in my head for years. What has become of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five? What is it for them to have been famous when young—I’m particularly interested in this because it has happened to Robert—and how will it have affected what they are as adults? They’ve been created with limited opportunities: Julian always sensible in a leaderly way, George the cross-dressing rebel, Anne the domesticated goodie-good, and Dick—well, who is he again?

  I have no desire to parody them: who can ever do it as well as Dawn French and co. in the Comic Strip series? I want to imagine them as believable adults. I want to take them totally seriously. By the time I apply for the IIML, I also have something more complex to struggle with. These are people created by Blyton; as such, she is their creator. In two ways she has abandoned them: once, when she leaves them somewhere in their early teens and simply stops writing about them. She’s over them. After all, they’ve never got discernibly older, they’ve stayed pimple-free, lust-free teenagers, and the point has come when they’re past being useful. They’re old-fashioned, dated. They’ve had 21 adventures, and each time they’ve defeated some sort of villain. Their characters are going nowhere: Blyton, reputed to have completed each book in a matter of weeks, is never going to waste semiprecious words sending them off to university or getting them pregnant after drinking too many cocktails. They’re not going to work their way up the professional ladder like Sue Barton. They’re certainly never going to enter into marriage like Anne of Green Gables.

  She abandons them the second time round by dying: God is dead. They’re doomed to be stuck forever in shorts and sandals, gazing wistfully across at Kirrin Island in the hope that a smuggler is over there getting up to mischief.

  I apply; I want to write a TV series. Ken Duncum, who teaches the course, likes the idea. He calls me in. He tells me I’m near the top of his list. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘actually, you’re the top of my list.’ I immediately fall in love with him, in a platonic sort of a way. ‘But,’ he says, ‘you’re the only … um … older … student. It’s unusual,’ he says. ‘We usually get at least a couple of the—you know—ummm … middle-aged. I’m sorry. But this year the top applicants are all in their twenties.’

  He knows a lot about drama, and Blue Sky Boys, his play based around a trip to New Zealand by the Everly Brothers, remains one of my favourite plays; I tell him I can’t even think of flying somewhere without ‘Ebony Eyes’ as an accompanying ear worm. But he knows stuff-all about Blyton. He does his best, but within minutes he’s mentioned Timmy as if he’s a person and George as if she’s a sibling to the others. Oh dear oh dear. So I’m alone, then.

  It’s true: none of the others have a clue either. Enid Blyton has been out of fashion for ages—even when I was young, as a burgeoning literary snob, I quickly grew past her on my way to Noel Streatfeild, Pamela Brown, L.M. Montgomery, the Pullein-Thompsons and Louisa May Alcott. The school inspector comes in Standard 4 and asks what we like reading, and the others say adventures and he asks what sort, and they chorus Enid Blyton. Oh my God. Humiliating.

  When asked to name their favourite movie ever, most of my IIML class say Princess Bride. Although reassuring—I have heard of it, I remember my daughter loving it—I feel an outsider when I name Cinema Paradiso. I mention, as a TV series, The Edge of Darkness. They say South Park; at least I can counter with Outnumbered. When I tell them my idea for a TV drama, they listen politely, but I may as well be saying I’m setting the Old Testament to music.

  After two weeks I tell Ken I’m pulling out. Does anyone else want my place? After all, only 10 of us have been accepted, and one heck of a lot more than that have applied. Stay, he says, convincingly but not needily. It’s not as if my place will be taken by someone else. It will leave him with an uneven number. ‘You do add balance,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ I say. Sort of ungraciously. But the thing is, it’s a nice 20-minute walk from my house in Northland to the Kelburn campus. And I do like having to be somewhere by a certain time. The others might be kids, but they’re lovely, and they’re very inclusive. I widen my horizons: I meet Rina, who’s doing the non-fiction course, who’s friends with lots of my friends. I stay.

  So: where are the Kirrin cousins now? This is what has captured me. I decide to make them in their late seventies: old. But with—one exception—wits intact. It’s terrifically good fun, thinking of what their lives have been like; and, as drama demands giving each of them a problem that needs resolution, I have to work out what theirs are.

  How will I structure it? The good thing is that I doubt a series will ever be made, therefore I can be as madcap as I want. Actors are already queueing up in my imagination: Jim Broadbent perhaps for Julian? Or Hugh Bonneville, with a few added wrinkles? Jim Carter—you know him, he’s the hard-done-by butler in Downton Abbey—can he be padded out to be a Dick, who has run to fat. Angela Thorne is exactly the right combination of English rose and vulnerability to be Anne. And Eileen Atkins is suf
ficiently acerbic to be the bolshie George. Then I think of Posy Simmonds and her wonderful graphic novels and how beautiful my imagined script would be if it were drawn rather than acted. Lovely maps with an animated car bouncing along them. Hedgerows. My actors of choice will then simply have to sit around a table in a recording studio in London and read their bits. Or perhaps there can be a combination: a graphic film can morph into real. Then back, when necessary. When you’re fantasising, anything’s possible.

  Julian wakes. The room is dark, and it feels foreign, and the bed’s not his. He reaches out his arm to see if Flossie’s there. She’s not there. Of course she’s not there. How many years is it now since she went back to Lakeport? No babies, and there’s no knowing whose fault that is. She’d wanted twins. She’d expected—oh, cruel word—twins. The Bobbseys always had twins.

  She was American. Too American. He remembers how humiliated he felt when she said hello to strangers on the Tube.

  Once bitten. No more wives.

  Where is he? School? Surely, now, he’s not back at school. It feels like school. A prefect’s bedroom, not a dorm. Space for a fag.

  School with Dick. George and Anne went to that other one. Where you could take your ponies.

  Is it the club? The Diogenes Club? Founded by Sherlock Holmes’s brother. You have to be silent. A jolly good idea.

  It’s not the club.

  Remember, Julian. Remember. A retirement village. That’s where he is. Not school. Not the mansion flat. Not the club. He’s had to move there. Can’t be at home alone in Hampstead. Boiling the kettle dry. Locking himself out. Eating biscuits with that white stuff on them. Setting off for the club, then ending up outside Lord’s. Without a cricket match to be seen. Winter.

  Forgetting which line Twickenham is on. Wimple-something. Wimbledon.